Witches Witchcraft

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This seminar investigates the phenomenon of witchcraft in premodern Europe, especially the witch persecutions of the seventeenth century. To what extent was “witchcraft” the projection of societal anxieties and stereotypes? Even today, after many decades of scholarly research and analysis, perhaps the only point of universal agreement is that no single explanation fully grasps the phenomena of European witch belief and persecution in all their multifaceted diversity. This course is designed to familiarize students with the main contours of witch belief, magical practice, and the prosecution of malefice as they evolved on the European continent from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. It is organized around both themes (including gender, sexuality, psychology, and religion) and geography (mainly central Europe, where the majority of the witch hunts occurred). As we will see, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century persecutions of witchcraft reflected a series of changes in European society, culture, and politics—including changes in relationships between “popular” and “learned” religion; the formation of the modern state and the rise of “social discipline”; changes in assumptions about the nature of gender and the formation of modern patriarchy; and so on.