Witchcraft continued

Front Cover
Willem De Blecourt, Owen Davies
Manchester University Press, Jul 30, 2018 - History - 232 pages
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The study of witchcraft accusations in Europe during the period after the end of the witch trials is still in its infancy. Witches were scratched in England, swum in Germany, beaten in the Netherlands and shot in France. The continued widespread belief in witchcraft and magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France has received considerable academic attention. The book discusses the extent and nature of witchcraft accusations in the period and provides a general survey of the published work on the subject for an English audience. It explores the presence of magical elements in everyday life during the modern period in Spain. The book provides a general overview of vernacular magical beliefs and practices in Italy from the time of unification to the present, with particular attention to how these traditions have been studied. By functioning as mechanisms of social ethos and control, narratives of magical harm were assured a place at the very heart of rural Finnish social dynamics into the twentieth century. The book draws upon over 300 narratives recorded in rural Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provide information concerning the social relations, tensions and strategies that framed sorcery and the counter-magic employed against it. It is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania.
 

Contents

witchcraft continued
1
A case of witchcraft assault in early nineteenthcentury England as ostensive action
14
Witchcraft witch doctors and the fight against superstition in nineteenthcentury Germany
29
midVictorian stories and beliefs
46
Narrative and the social dynamics of magical harm in late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury Finland
69
witchcraft in the western Netherlands 18501925
89
Witchcraft accusations in France 18501990
107
medical pluralism and the search for hegemony
133
Witchcraft healing and vernacular magic in Italy
151
witchcraft on the borderline of religion and magic
174
black magic and bogeymen in Northern Ireland 197374
191
Index
213
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About the author (2018)

Willem de Blécourt is an historical anthropologist and independent researcher, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam

Owen Davies is a cultural historian who has published widely on the subject of witchcraft and magic.

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