Witch Craze
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Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany
Lyndal Roper
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Format: PaperPrice: $25.00
A powerful account of witches, crones, and the societies that make them
From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches—of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops—and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond.
Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families, and tribulations. She also explores the psychology of witch-hunting, explaining why it was mostly older women that were the victims of witch crazes, why they confessed to crimes, and how the depiction of witches in art and literature has influenced the characterization of elderly women in our own culture.
Lyndal Roper is lecturer in history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Balliol College.
"Where history meets psychology . . . Lyndal Roper is pre-eminent. This ambitious and subtle book is testament not only to Roper's skill in excavating stories from the German archives, but also to her imagination and determination in reading between the lines of examinations and confessions, venturing where historians fear to tread. . . . It is vital and irresistible to try to make windows on the souls of our ancestors, and in this compelling, courageous and inspirational work Lyndal Roper leads the way."—Malcolm Gaskill, Journal of the Historical Association
"In this brilliant piece of investigative history [and] . . . thanks to Roper’s patient and sophisticated work . . . we finally have a joined up history of the witch."—The Guardian
"Witch Craze presents a story of the ways in which mythologies of evil forces can lead people to carry out unspeakable acts that seems both very foreign and very familiar."—Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Victorian Studies
"[A] fine book. . . . A major contribution to an already remarkable body of academic work. . . . [Roper] presents much well-grounded evidence to support her conclusions."—John Demos, New York Review of Books
"This is a major work that pushes the history of witchcraft in new directions and offers remarkable and sometimes startling new insights. Lyndal Roper breaks new ground in her remarkable, subtle analysis of the interpersonal relations among those caught up in fantasies of witchcraft."—H. C. Erik Midelfort, author of A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany
Publication Date: October 31, 2006
70 b/w illus.
