Blood the Witch, Swim the Wizard

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-37
Author(s):  
Thomas Waters
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Masses

This chapter shows that in early 1800s Britain, witchcraft was widely believed in. Magical traditions, traceable to the period of the witch trials and before, were strong. Villagers and townsfolk ducked, mobbed, attacked, and bullied witches. Privately, many sophisticated and wealthy people sympathised. Not with victims of superstitious violence, but with the perpetrators. Indeed, witchcraft troubled many well-to-do folk during the early 1800s. This chapter explores a remarkable area of common ground between the masses, the upper classes, and those in the middle. More often than one might expect, they agreed with each other: sorcery was real, and witches deserved to be punished.

A Literary Link between Thomas Shadwell and Christian Felix Weisse

PMLA ◽  
1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 808-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sort It ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
The Witch

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

scholarly journals “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”: Witches, Familiars, and Human-Animal Interactions in the English Witch Trials

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

This article explores the role played by the relationship between witch and familiar in the early modern witch trials. It positions animal familiars at the intersection of early modern belief in witchcraft and magic, examining demonologies, legal and trial records, and print pamphlets. Read together, these sources present a compelling account of human-animal interactions during the period of the witch trials, and shed light upon the complex beliefs that created the environment in which the image of the witch and her familiar took root. The animal familiar is positioned and discussed at the intersection of writing in history, anthropology, folklore, gender, engaging with the challenge articulated in this special issue to move away from mono-causal theories and explore connections between witchcraft, magic, and religion.

The ‘U’ and ‘V’ Alternation in the History of English

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
Peter J. Grund ◽  
Matti Peikola ◽  
Johanna Rastas ◽  
Wen Xin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Constrained System ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Phonetic Value ◽  
Consonant Sounds ◽  
Mixed Systems

In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters <u> and <v> went through a change from a positionally constrained system (initial <v>, medial <u>) to a system based on phonetic value, with <u> marking vowel and <v> consonant sounds. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a dataset of ca. 4,000 examples from over 100 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, MA, in 1692–1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the <u> and <v> usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between <u> and <v>, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.

Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692

1996 ◽  
Vol 109 (432) ◽  
pp. 209
Author(s):  
Moria Smith ◽  
Bernard Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Story Reading ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The Witch

Daemons in the pocket: Contract, commodities and witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Ian Green
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Mobile Capital ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Witch

New England in 1692 was a community grappling with the cosmic meaning of capitalism in an age during which the market came to define life in the Atlantic world. Binding contracts, mobile capital and commodity exchange offered both philosophical proof and significant peril for a community rooted in a firm belief in the sacredness of contract covenants and in the reality of spectral forces intervening into the material world. As a result, the legal documents produced during the bloody witchcraft crisis that swept Massachusetts in those terrible years articulate a widespread anxiety about the potentially accursed nature of commodities that travel through and index social connections, the morally ambiguous incursions of invisible economic forces into everyday life, the compelling experience of contracts given divine or diabolical aegis and the cultural syncretism of a constellated culture bound together through market interrelations. As tales of witchcraft have taken root firmly as American narrative touchstones, those anxieties have remained central to representations of the witch trials in popular imagination. The novels, plays and films that return to the crisis’ collection of legal documents, economic contracts and oral performances, position contested issues of obliterative commodification, troubled economic social contact and cultural and racial insecurity at the heart of American folklore. This reading re-centres both primary sources and subsequent popular depictions of the witch crisis around the stories told through contracts and around the commodities and commodity exchanges that remained persistent features of Massachusetts Bay’s imbricated modes of storytelling. It reads these documents as evidence for the emergence of Atlantic market capitalism as a cosmic force, an obscure but interventionist God made powerful through market logic, and it argues that this force continues to define America’s central bloody myth of self.

Hofjudentum und Martyrium

Aschkenas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Otto Horch
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The One

AbstractThis contribution dwells on Jewish aspects in Alfred Döblin’s novel »Wallenstein«, which was written between 1916 and 1920. It refers, on the one hand, to the close financial connection between the Prague merchant and »court Jew« Jacob Bassevi and Wallenstein and the novel’s real protagonist, Emperor Ferdinand II, and, on the other hand, to a scene that stretches over several pages, depicting in a hyper-naturalistic manner the torture and burning of a Jewish couple. Similar to the witch trials, the scene documents the total cultural decline at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. Döblin’s historical novel is also a plea against the barbarism of World War I and against wars in general.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document