Witchcraft Gender And Society In Early Modern Germany Jonathan B Durrant by Jonathan B. Durrant 9789004160934, 9004160930 instant download after payment.

One of the problems of much witchcraft historiography, especially that available in English, is the tendency to concentrate on individual trials and small-scale witch panics rather than systematically examining large-scale witch-hunts. By large-scale hunts, I do not mean episodes of prosecution involving the rather low figure of ten or more arrests popularized by Brian Levack. If one compares supposed local witch sects to other marginalized groups persecuted by early modern authorities—recusants, gypsies or vagrants, for example—this figure appears small in scale. In 1582, the year in which the Essex magistrate Brian Darcy conducted his witch-hunt in St Osyth and its neighbouring villages, sixty-two other inhabitants of the county were presented at just one of the many quarter sessions for non-attendance at church, many of them known recusants with strong connections to one another. This figure dwarfs the total number of suspected witch-felons (just ten, most arrested on Darcy's authority) tried at both Essex assizes of that year. I mean, rather, the hunts in Cologne and Westphalia, Würzburg, Bamberg, Ellwangen or Eichstätt in which hundreds of people found themselves arrested and executed for witchcraft over a short span of time.