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During the 70's and 80's, a flood of new information on historical witchcraft became available. Levack's book is the best survey of this new data, which has revolutionized our understanding of the Great Hunt. It's not a very "daring" book; it sticks to the facts, to the things we're sure about. There isn't a lot of speculation in it. But it's a great antidote to the badly researched books, like Anne Barstow's _Witchcraze_, which flood the popular market.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Finally, a scholarly treatment of the issue unimpeded by an emotional attachment to the forgery Etienne Leon de Lamothe-Langon's Histoire de l'Inquisition en France, written in 1829 (even though the forgery was uncovered in 1975)or any strong desire to hammer a square peg into a round hole to promulgate a writer's own personal crusade.
The result is an evidence based and thoughtful historical treatment of the Witch Hunting tragedy with reasonable conclusions.
If you are sick of unrealistic oversimplifications that reflect the pet interest/s of the author more than the historical evidence or sick of books where the author has not taken the time to keep 'up to date' with historical developments (35 years ago) and believes that the Witch Hunt is a purely medieval phenomenon rather than peaking between 1550 and 1650 this is the book to read.
Given the strengths of the book I would recommend it to anyone from budding historians to general public with an interest in a historically accurate take on the Witch Hunts. I acknowledge that Catholics might find slight discomfort in the author's apparent prejudice against Catholicism. He writes of reformation greats being Luther and Calvin and seems to downplay their contribution by contextualising that they didn't make much direct comment on the topic even though one of them insisted that witches need to be killed or something and they were highly influential. That is not to say that he fails to acknowledge that they contributed just a slight reluctance to give their contribution as much weight as someone who doesn't consider reformists to be great might. This is a very subtle issue that does not significantly detract from this first rate book.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Pulling together the vast amount of information that Levack does had to be a truly daunting task. He does it well, with easily followed organization and summaries, tables and charts, and copious references to specific witch-hunt episodes. This all makes it a good reference for people who might want to know more about the social and religious settings of the hunts. (I'm reading it for a graduate literature class on mythology and heresy.) However, he refers to specific hunts as if expecting readers to know a good deal about their causes, effects and events. Except for the Salem, MA, hunt (which is frequently referenced, though technically not in Europe at all), none of the many hunts were at all familiar to me. What, for instance, WAS the 1610-1611 "dream epidemic" in Basque country? It sounds fascinating, but Levack never gives us any details about it. Perhaps this sort of information is beyond the scope of Levack's interest, but its omission does make for dry reading of numbers and dates, as opposed to the more human stories that lie behind them.
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14 of 20 people found the following review helpful
This is a thorough and objective examination of the witch hunts. There are no sensational distortions presented here, just the facts. It's well organized and easy to read.
People who were accused of witchcraft were mostly old women that often took care of children or were out begging for money, which annoyed others or made them feel guilty. If a child died and she had cared for it, there was always a chance that she would be accused of killing the child by witchcraft. People believed that misfortune was often caused by the devil and witchcraft in early modern Europe. So if the crops failed, if you or a loved one fell ill, or if a child died, blaming a witch was a convenient thing to do. Not only peasants but the educated believed in witchcraft. They often bolstered their fantasies with elaborate demonological theories. Amusingly, they had this idea that people would ride off into the air to some remote place to bend over backwards and kiss the devil's bum and give themselves over to Satan.
Witchcraft accusations often grow in times when people feel uneasy about radical changes in society, morality, religion, and the economy. If wages are getting lower, prices are getting higher, and there's rebellion against the old order, the devil must be on the loose. Witch hunts often happened more in societies that had provincial, local governments that had no oversight from central governments. Germany with its many small provinces was a hot spot for witch hunts and executions. Thousands of people were executed in early modern Europe, not millions, as some claim. Even white witchcraft could be prosecuted because people thought that if one had the ability to heal, you also had the ability to kill.Read more ›
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