CONN 376 | Witchcraft and Witch-hunting in Europe to 1700

The 'witchcraze' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the executions of tens of thousands of people, a large majority of them women, and threw communities across Europe into turmoil. This course approaches the witch-hunts through multiple disciplinary perspectives, considering how traditional beliefs about the supernatural combined with the crises and institutional changes of the late Middle Ages to create an atmosphere of heightened anxiety about witchcraft, before moving on to ask why certain individuals were especially vulnerable to these accusations, and finally assessing the decline of judicial witch-hunting, even as belief in witchcraft persisted. In the process, we engage a range of primary source evidence, bring together insights from history, anthropology, cognitive science, and material culture, and grapple with transhistorical questions about the stresses of communal life, the power of conspiracy theories, and mechanisms of scapegoating.