Women come to the fore in witchcraft trials as accused persons or as witnesses, and this book is a study of women’s voices in these trials in eight countries around the North Sea: Spanish Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. From each country, three trials are chosen for close reading of courtroom discourse and the narratological approach enables various individuals to speak. Throughout the study, a choir of 24 voices of accused women are heard which reveal valuable insight into the field of mentalities and display both the individual experience of witchcraft accusation and the development of the trial. Particular attention is drawn to the accused women’s confessions, which are interpreted as enforced narratives. The analyses of individual trials are also contextualized nationally and internationally by a frame of historical elements, and a systematic comparison between the countries shows strong similarities regarding the impact of specific ideas about witchcraft, use of pressure and torture, the turning point of the trial, and the verdict and sentence. This volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of witchcraft, witchcraft trials, transnationality, cultural exchanges, and gender in early modern Northern Europe.

Most of the women who ever lived left no trace of their existence on the record of history. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women of the middling and lower levels of society left no letters or diaries in which they expressed what they felt or thought. Criminal courts and magistrates kept few records of their testimonies, and no ecclesiastical court records are known to survive for the French Roman Catholic Church between 1540 and 1667. For the most part, we cannot hear the voices of ordinary French women - but this study allows us to do so. Based on the evidence of 1,200 cases brought before the consistories - or moral courts - of the Huguenot church of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615, The Voices of Nîmes allows us to access ordinary women's everyday lives: their speech, behaviour, and attitudes relating to love, faith, and marriage, as well as friendship and sex. Women appeared frequently before the consistory because one of the chief functions of moral discipline was the regulation of sexuality, and women were thought to be primarily responsible for sexual sin. This means that the registers include over a thousand testimonies by and about women, most of whom left no other record to posterity. Women also featured so prominently before the consistories because of an ironic, unintended consequence of the consistorial system: it empowered women. Women quickly learnt how to use the consistory: they denounced those who abused them, they deployed the consistory to force men to honour their promises, and they started rumours they knew would be followed up by the elders. The registers therefore offer unrivalled evidence of women's agency, in this intensely patriarchal society, in a range of different contexts, such as their enjoyment of their sexuality, choice of marriage partners, or idiosyncratic spiritual engagement. The consistorial registers, therefore, let us see how independent, self-determining, and vocal women could be in an age when they had limited legal rights, little official power, and few prospects. As a result, this book suggests we need to reconceptualize female power: women's power was not just hidden, manipulative, and devious, but also far more public than historians have previously recognized.

Birgitta's religious authority considered, with regard to her prophetic mission and her authenticity as a medium of divine revelation in 14c Europe. This book examines the religious authority of St Birgitta of Sweden, the charismatic moral reformer and controversial female visionary of the fourteenth century, emphasising both representations of her prophetic mission and debates about her authenticity as a medium of divine revelation. It illuminates Birgitta's view of herself as a prophet of moral reform by explaining how her Revelations depict her religious mission and place in salvation history, goingon to reconstruct interactions between Birgitta and her contemporaries, including the significance of her prophetic authority vis-a-vis the priestly authority of her male clerical associates. Finally, it analyses arguments aboutwomen's suitability for mediating the divine word in posthumous attacks and defences of her claims to prophesy. Through a close examination of Birgitta's lengthy Revelations, canonization documents, and texts by her posthumous defenders and detractors, this study demonstrates that members of her audience perceived her to be both a vibrant source of supernatural power and a dangerous transgressor of conventional boundaries. Informed by sociological studies of prophetic authority, it contributes to our knowledge of Birgitta herself as well as to our understanding of the dynamics of women's spiritual authority. Professor CLAIRE SAHLIN teaches at Texas Woman's University.

A mix of thematic essays, reference entries, and primary source documents covering the role of religion in American history and life from the colonial era to the present. Often controversial, religion has been an important force in shaping American culture. Religious convictions strongly influenced colonial and state governments as well as the United States as a new republic. Religious teachings, values, and practices deeply affected political structures and policies, economic ideology and practice, educational institutions and instruction, social norms and customs, marriage, and family life. By analyzing religion's interaction with American culture and prominent religious leaders and ideologies, this reference helps readers to better understand many fascinating, often controversial, religious leaders, ideas, events, and topics. The work is organized in three volumes devoted to particular periods. Volume one includes a chronology highlighting key events related to religion in American history and an introduction that overviews religion in America during the period covered by the volume, and roughly 10 essays that explore significant themes. These essays are followed by approximately 120 alphabetically arranged reference entries providing objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion in America. Each volume presents nearly 50 primary source documents, each introduced by a contextualizing headnote. A selected, general bibliography closes volume three.

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 in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of women and men for this offence. 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 essays survey the current state of knowledge in the field, explore the academic controversies that have arisen regarding witch beliefs and witch trials, propose new ways of studying the subject, and identify areas for future research.

Witches of the North. Scotland and Finnmark is a comparative study of witchcraft persecution in Scotland and Finnmark, Norway. A wide range of quantitative and qualitative analyses based mainly on legal documents shed light on the witch-hunts in the two regions during the seventeenth century. Statistical analyses give information about tendencies in the source material in total. The qualitative chapters contain close-readings of trial documents, wherein the various voices heard during a trial are analysed: the voice of the scribe, the voice of the law, the voice of the accused person and the voices of the witnesses. The analyses combined provide a broad view of the historical phenomenon in question as well as in-depth studies of individual witchcraft cases.

Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.

In response to systemic racism and institutions’ implications in histories of colonialism, nationalism, and exclusion, museum curators have embraced new ways of storytelling to face entangled memories and histories. Critical museum practices have consciously sought to unsettle established forms of representation, break with linear narratives of progress, and experiment with new modes of multivocal, multimedia, and subjective storytelling. The volume features analyses of narratives and narration in museums and heritage institutions today, as well as visions for future museum practices on a local, regional, national, transnational, and global scale. It is divided into three sections: Narrative Theory and Temporality, Ruptures and Repair, and Difficult Memories and Histories. Essays from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences examine museum practices in history, memorial, anthropological, and art museums across six continents. They develop narratological categories, reflect on immersive and virtual narratives, challenge colonial violence and hegemonic forms of representation, query the performance of heritage, parse exhibition design, and unearth techniques to express narratives of social justice.

Witchcraft and magic are topics of enduring interest for many reasons. The main one lies in their extraordinary interdisciplinarity: anthropologists, folklorists, historians, and more have contributed to build a body of work of extreme variety and consistence. Of course, this also means that the subjects themselves are not easy to assess. In a very general way, we can define witchcraft as a supernatural means to cause harm, death, or misfortune, while magic also belongs to the field of supernatural, or at least esoteric knowledge, but can be used to less dangerous effects (e.g., divination and astrology). In Western civilization, however, the witch hunt has set a very peculiar perspective in which diabolical witchcraft, the invention of the Sabbat, the persecution of many thousands of (mostly) female and (sometimes) male presumed witches gave way to a phenomenon that is fundamentally different from traditional witchcraft. This Special Issue of Religions dedicated to Witchcraft, Demonology, and Magic features nine articles that deal with four different regions of Europe (England, Germany, Hungary, and Italy) between Late Medieval and Modern times in different contexts and social milieus. Far from pretending to offer a complete picture, they focus on some topics that are central to the research in those fields and fit well in the current “cumulative concept of Western witchcraft” that rules out all mono-causality theories, investigating a plurality of causes.

Edwin Ardener - a new expanded edition of the collected works of one of the most important social anthroplogists in Britian of his time. Ardener worked on social, economic, demographic and political problems, and was particularly influential in his sustained effort to bring together social anthropology and linguistics in a highly original attempt to reconcile scientific and humanistic approaches to the study of society. This volume offers a theoretically and conceptually coherent body of work by this innovative and profound thinker, which will continue to excite and stimulate new generations of students and researchers as it has in the past.