HIST 237: Geographies of Witchcraft and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (HC): Background Information

This extensive reference work on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era provides background on significant people, places, beliefs, and events.

The essays in this handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials. Witchcraft was defined as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and tens of thousands of women and men were prosecuted. The trials resulted in as many as fifty thousand executions. These essays study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. They also relate these prosecutions to the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the introduction of new forms of criminal procedure, medical and scientific thought, the process of state-building, profound social and economic change, early modern patterns of gender relations, and the wave of demonic possessions that occurred in Europe at the same time.

The database contains all people known to have been accused of witchcraft in early modern Scotland—nearly 4,000 of them. There is information on where and when they were accused, how they were tried, what their fate was, and on a wide range of themes relating to social and cultural history. You can use the database to conduct all sorts of searches. For instance, you can find all known cases involving neighborhood quarrels, or demonic possession, or fairies. You can find all the male or female witches. You can create graphs or maps showing how witchcraft cases were distributed; this is important because prosecutions tended to come in short bursts in particular localities.

WEME is a digital exploration of the nano-histories: a way to study the history of early English witching. Using WEME’s resources, you can use a time line, map, search box, or filter to explore almost three thousand individual multi-dimensional nano-histories of and align them, using digital technologies, to create a composite of the true and terrible stories of the early English witches.

These histories provide information on publishing, reading, and the book trade. Vol. 3 1400-1557 and Vol. 4 1557-1695.

Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the later seventeenth, governments, institutions and individuals learned to use inexpensively-produced printed texts to inform, entertain, and persuade. Cheap print quickly became rooted in British and Irish culture, both elite and popular. This substantial and authoritative collection of essays - the first of its kind - examines the developing role of popular printed texts in the first two centuries of print in Britain and Ireland. Its forty-five chapters (with sixty-six illustrations) look at a broad range of historical and social contexts, at comparisons with other European countries, at the variety of content and themes in cheap printed texts, the forms and genres that developed with and were used by cheap print, and concludes with a series of case studies exploring the role of print in particular years.

Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining the print culture of the time, and especially the developing entanglement between technology and capitalism. Combining close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney and others with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology, The Marketplace of Print is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.
Also available as an ebook.

This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, "old wives' tales" and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumour-mongering. Adam Fox argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this semi-literate society,it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the expansion of literacy together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the product of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.

By the end of the seventeenth century the most effective means of persuasion and communication was the pamphlet, which created influential moral and political communities of readers, and thus formed a 'public sphere' of popular, political opinion. This book is a unique history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain and traces its rise as an imaginative and often eloquent literary form. Using a long-term perspective and a broad range of historical, bibliographical and textual evidence, the book sketches a complex definition of a 'pamphlet', showing the coherence of the literary form, the diversity of genres and imaginative devices employed by pamphleteers; and it explores readers' relationship with pamphlets and how both influenced politics. Individual chapters examine topics such as Elizabethan religious controversy, the book trade, the distribution of books and pamphlets, pamphleteering in the English Civil War, women and gender, and print in the Restoration.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women's lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. Also available as an ebook.

This encyclopedia spans the period from the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.

Online subject encyclopedia for early modern Europe with an emphasis on cultural history. The bibliographies at the ends of articles are good places to find more information.

80 scholars come together to offer an original and far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature and culture. Note in particular "The Debate on Witchcraft," p. 513-522. Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literary and cultural territories, the Companion offers new readings of both literary and non-literary texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing, the history of the body. Orients the beginning student, while providing advanced students with new directions for their research. Includes recommendations for further reading.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information. Volume II covers Cultures and Power with such essays as "Authority and Popular Resistance" and "Europe's Enlightenment." See in particular the sections on religion, printing, and "Belief and Its Limits."

Note in particular this chapter: "Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft." In general the handbook is a comprehensive guide to early modern English prose. Contains essays by outstanding scholars. Analytical treatment of religion, politics, rhetoric, news, humor, and other relevant subjects.

In this new edition, the author incorporates the latest research in multiple languages to offer a new view of this period. Kamen sets the notorious Christian tribunal into the broader context of Islamic and Jewish culture in the Mediterranean.