witchcraft Reference library
The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance
...50,000 people, overwhelmingly women, were executed for witchcraft. The literature of witchcraft included Johann Weier's De praestigiis daemonum ( 1563 ) and Reginald Scot 's Discovery of Witchcraft ( 1584 ). B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen (eds.), Häxornas Europa, 1400–1700 , English trans. Early Modern Witchcraft (1990); B. P. Levack , The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987); G. Scarre , Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (1987); A. Macfarlane , Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970); Keith Thomas , ...
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Dictionary of the Social Sciences
... Much of the pioneering anthropological work on witchcraft was done in Africa by British social anthropologists. These scholars tended to follow E. E. Evans-Pritchard 's 1937 distinction between witchcraft and sorcery —the former a hereditary power to cause injury, the latter a set of learned skills put to the same purpose. This distinction has proved to be widespread in human society but not universal. It did, however, give a strong functionalist stamp to the study of witchcraft, which credited it with a range of nonoccult social functions, from...
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A Dictionary of Public Health (2 ed.)
...witchcraft Occult practices such as black magic that have existed for millennia in traditional societies and persist today in some strata and subcultures of even sophisticated and well-educated modern industrial societies. Generally witchcraft is harmless, but occasionally its practices can harm health. There is a connection between witchcraft and traditional folk remedies, some of which are efficacious and many of which have not yet been evaluated. ...
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The Oxford Dictionary of Local and Family History
... . In the Middle Ages prosecutions were few and punishments light. Witchcraft became a felony in 1563 . The death penalty was carried out on those who were found guilty of causing death by witchcraft, and lesser offenders were imprisoned. Serious cases were tried at the assizes , minor offences at the ecclesiastical courts . Prosecutions rose from 1563 to a peak during the last two decades of the 16th century. They fell away markedly during the 17th century, except for the craze that affected East Anglia and south-eastern England in 1645–7...
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The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...witchcraft, sorcery, and enchantment punishable by death, but this was repealed five years later. Witchcraft became a felony again in 1563 , after the return of Marian exiles imbued with Continental ideas of witchcraft. The death penalty was carried out on those who were found guilty of causing death by witchcraft, and lesser offenders were imprisoned. Serious cases were tried at the assizes , minor offences at the ecclesiastical courts . Prosecutions rose from 1563 to a peak during the last two decades of the 16th century. They fell away markedly during...
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Jonathan Pearl
The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
... . In the second half of the 17th century, when witchcraft beliefs and trials were prevalent in Europe, New France was a small frontier community. The settlers brought with them traditional folkloric culture, in which the devil, magic, and supernatural occurrences played a strong role. While witchcraft beliefs thrived, few trials for witchcraft occurred. Three cases are documented. The accused were all men, charged for using demonic spells against their former sweethearts. In 1658 , René Besnard cast a spell by knotting a string, which caused a newly...
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A Dictionary of African Politics
...witchcraft The belief in an invisible spiritual realm—existing in parallel to the visible world and able to act upon it—and the actions of those believed capable of wielding occult power. The widespread belief in some form of witchcraft in many African countries means that witchcraft accusations are a potent political weapon. For example, following the rise of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde ( PAIGC ) in Guinea-Bissau, female party activists frustrated at the monopolization of key positions by men used witchcraft...
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J. A. Sharpe
The Oxford Companion to British History (2 ed.)
...when trying witches. The difficulty of proving witchcraft provoked a more general questioning, while there was also a powerful cultural shift. Many educated people, while unable to deny the theoretical possibility of witchcraft, felt uncomfortable with what they increasingly regarded as something symptomatic not of a satanic sect, but of popular superstitions. Belief in witchcraft was retained among the populace at large, and when folklorists began to collect materials in the 19th cent. they found witchcraft beliefs flourishing everywhere from Cornwall to...
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World Encyclopedia
... Exercise of supernatural occult powers, usually due to some inherent power rather than to an acquired skill, such as sorcery. In Europe, it originated in pagan cults and in mystical philosophies such as gnosticism , which believed in the potency of both good and evil in the universe. In some societies, the belief in spirits is associated with attempts to control them through witchcraft for harmful or beneficial...
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A Dictionary of World History (3 ed.)
...of witches, as did the unrest stirred up by the religious wars. The last trials for witchcraft in England were in 1712 , and on the Continent (in Prussia) in 1793 . In America the belief in witchcraft was rife but the Salem witch trials ( 1692 ) caused a general revulsion. In the 17th century better education led to rejection of belief in witchcraft, but popular superstition survived much longer. In the 20th century, in Europe and the USA, a new kind of witchcraft, claiming to be a revival of pre‐Christian pagan religion, has been practised by a small...
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A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion
... The key biblical verse on the subject of witchcraft: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus 22: 17) was understood by the Talmudic Rabbis to mean that a witch had to be executed. It is important to appreciate, however, that when this view was put forward it was purely academic, since no court in Talmudic times was empowered to impose capital punishment (and see SANHEDRIN ). Although the Hebrew uses the feminine form, the Rabbis observe that this is only because women were especially addicted to witchcraft. A wizard is as culpable as a...
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The Oxford Companion to the Body
...and witchcraft remains largely unexplored. Perhaps the key to placing witchcraft within the history of the body will be provided by the investigation of two sets of problems. The first of these is the question of the source of the power of the witch and where it was thought to reside; the second is the rather better documented phenomenon of the physical sufferings supposedly undergone by victims of witchcraft and, more particularly, of witchcraft-induced demonic possession. Certainly, the research carried out by anthropologists on witchcraft has provided...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought
... The terms witchcraft and witch have many different meanings. In African thinking the term witchcraft is best used to describe a complex system of beliefs in an evil power vested in certain persons that enables them to work harm against others, mystically, with no need for magical materials and without spiritual assistance. There are some minor features of the belief that are uniquely African, but it has long been recognized that what was earlier called “African witchcraft” is nearly identical to witch beliefs in late medieval Europe and in the...
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The Oxford Companion to Irish History (2 ed.)
... can take many forms. Anthropologists distinguish between ‘sorcery’, the manipulation of spells and potions, and ‘witchcraft’, supernatural aggression based on an innate power. There is also a distinction between the belief in an ability to do harm by magic , universal in European popular culture, and the more specific concept, developed into an elaborate mythology by church and state, of the witch whose power derived from a pact with Satan. Ireland provides, in the Kyteler case, a particularly well‐documented early example of a legal trial for...
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Spencer Weinreich
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (4 ed.)
...Europe (Oxford, 1997). A. Macfarlane , Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (2nd edn, London, 1999). R. Hutton , The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 1999). J. Demos , Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 2004). L. Roper , Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, 2004). Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (2006–). B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America ...
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A Dictionary of the Bible (2 ed.)
... Forbidden in the * Deuteronomist Code (Deut. 18: 10–11) but licensed by * Manasseh (2 Kgs. 21: 6). A woman who practises witchcraft is condemned to death (Exod. 22: 18) in the ancient Book of the Covenant; this verse was until 1722 cited by English lawyers as authority for burning witches. The ‘witch’ of Endor*(1 Sam. 28) was a medium who indulged in necromancy, and was able to call up * Samuel from the dead, even though her practice was officially banned; but the condemnation of the * prophets (Jer. 27: 9; Mal. 3: 5) shows that sorcerers and...
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The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3 ed.)
... . The alleged exercise of magical powers through the gift of supernatural beings other than God and His angels. The narrative of the witch of Endor (1 Sam. 28: 7–25) and the condemnations of witchcraft in the OT (Exod. 22: 18) and NT (Gal. 5: 20) have sometimes been adduced as proofs of its existence. Before 1100 witchcraft in W. Europe consisted chiefly in the performance of pagan rituals divorced from their religious context. In the 12th cent. learned, ritual magic, derived from Hellenistic and Arabic sources, reached the W.; the Church viewed this...
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Ann Kibbey
The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
...of supernatural mass culture shifted dramatically from witchcraft to Christian revivals, beginning in the colonies with the Great Awakening of 1720 . Both the great century of persecution in Reformation Europe and the witchcraft trials at Salem were marked first and foremost by the widespread executions for witchcraft through the mechanism of the legal process of the state. After all, people had believed in witchcraft for centuries, and private citizens had made informal accusations of witchcraft and punished witches for just as long. What was new in early...
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The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (2 ed.)
... . Appeals to invisible powers took many forms in the ancient Near East. Divination, soothsaying, enchantment, charms, and consultation with ghosts and the dead were all common practice in the local religions of Israel and its neighbors ( Dt. 18.10–11). Proper Israelite practice might not look very different in content from the sorts of behaviors that were deemed to be witchcraft in the Bible. The distinction lay in the biblical focus on God alone, as opposed to an appeal to other powers or divinities ( Dt. 18.13). Thus, the command, “You shall not...
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Ed Benson
The Oxford Encyclopedia Women in World History
...cures for witchcraft in, respectively, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Egypt in the late twentieth and the early twenty‐first centuries—significantly, in these studies an insistence on ascribing the origins of witchcraft to outsiders survives into modern times—and these scholars report no diminution of the importance of religion in these cultures. They see the distinction between religion and witchcraft as less clearly delineated than religious and intellectual leaders around the North Atlantic have tended to believe, and they see witchcraft, and the cures...
