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Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft is an exploration of witchcraft in the literature of Britain and America from the 16th and 17th centuries through to the present day. As well as the themes of history and literature (politics and war, genre and intertextuality), the book considers issues of national identity, gender and sexuality, race and empire, and more. The complex fascination with witchcraft through the ages is investigated, and the importance of witches in the real world and in fiction is analysed. The book begins with a chapter dedicated to the stories and records of witchcraft in the Renaissance and up until the English Civil War, such as the North Berwick witches and the work of the ‘Witch Finder Generall’ Matthew Hopkins. The significance of these accounts in shaping future literature is then presented through the examination of extracts from key texts, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton’s The Witch, among others. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts to a consideration of the Romantic rediscovery of Renaissance witchcraft in the eighteenth century, and its further reinvention and continued presence throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the establishment of witchcraft studies as a subject in its own right, the impact of the First World War and end of the British Empire on witchcraft fiction, the legacy of the North Berwick, Hopkins and Salem witch trials, and the position of witchcraft in culture, including filmic and televisual culture, today. Equipped with an extensive list of primary and secondary sources, Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft is essential reading for all students of witchcraft in modern British and American culture and early modern history and literature.
Maxwell-Stuart charts the progress of witch hunters
This book explores the relationships between ancient witchcraft and its modern incarnation, and by doing so fills an important gap in the historiography. It is often noted that stories of witchcraft circulated in Greek and Latin classical texts, and that treatises dealing with witch-beliefs referenced them. Still, the role of humanistic culture and classical revival in the developing of the witch-hunts has not yet been fully researched. Marina Montesano examines Greek and Latin literature, revealing how particular features of ancient striges were carried into the Late Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and into the fifteenth century, when early Italian trials recall the myth of the strix common in ancient Latin sources and in popular memory. The final chapter also serves as a conclusion, to show how in Renaissance Italy and beyond, classical accounts of witchcraft ceased to be just stories, as they had formerly been, and were instead used to attest to the reality of witches’ powers.
Publications Of Institute Of The History Of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University, Third Series, V2.
This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. This project explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation, seeking an answer to the question, 'why did the witch become wicked?' Heidi Breuer traverses both the medieval and early modern periods and considers the way in which the representation of literary witches interacted with the culture at large, ultimately arguing that a series of economic crises in the fourteenth century created a labour shortage met by women. As women moved into the previously male-dominated economy, literary backlash came in the form of the witch, and social backlash followed soon after in the form of Renaissance witch-hunting. The witch figure serves a similar function in modern American culture because late-industrial capitalism challenges gender conventions in similar ways as the economic crises of the medieval period.
A thoroughly revised, greatly expanded edition of the most important documentary history of European witchcraft ever published.
Why does an entire society believe that there are witches who must be burned? What roles did the emerging 'state', the professions of clerics and jurists, and the public involved play in each case? And how could this project be completed? From a sociological point of view, the findings of recent international research on witches provide a model of a more general, highly ambivalent, 'pastoral' attitude, according to which a shepherd has to care for the welfare of his flock as well as for its erring sheep. The first main part describes the clerical initial situation, which developed the 'Dominican' demonological model of witchcraft on the basis of the still dominant magico-religious mentality in the 15th century. A model, according to the second part of the book, which then in the course of the 16th century in Western Europe increasingly fell into the hands of the not so innocent jurists. From there it developed into a legal witch persecution that realized the early European witch model from the village witch to the mass persecutions to the late child witches. The third part describes how witch persecutions slowly became less important towards the end of the 17th century as a general witchcraft 'politics' game in the transition from a confessional state to a (court) 'civil service' state.
Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage and identifies the way the same 'magical thinking' informed documents we much more readily associate with extreme forms of cultural paranoia.
Witchcraft: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the scholarly study of witchcraft, exploring the phenomenon of witchcraft from its earliest definitions in the Middle Ages through to its resonances in the modern world. Through the use of two case studies, this book delves into the emergence of the witch as a harmful figure within western thought and traces the representation of witchcraft throughout history, analysing the roles of culture, religion, politics, gender and more in the evolution and enduring role of witchcraft. Key topics discussed within the book include: The role of language in creating and shaping the concept of witchcraft The laws and treatises written against witchcraft The representation of witchcraft in early modern literature The representation of witchcraft in recent literature, TV and film Scholarly approaches to witchcraft through time The relationship between witchcraft and paganism With an extensive further reading list, summaries and questions to consider at the end of each chapter, Witchcraft: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone wishing to learn more about this controversial issue in human culture, which is still very much alive today.
An anthology of essays that deal with Witchcraft and the figure of the Witch, as they have been presented in motion pictures, television, and popular culture, in order to understand how, why, and when the common anti-Witchcraft/ anti-Witch attitude evolved. Mainstream tales of Witchcraft, including modern movies, novels, TV series, and other examples of our popular culture, more often than not express the traditional notion of a Witch as a wild, dangerous, untamable, “nasty” woman, obsessed with a desire for power to control all around her, in most narratives such a hunger presented as a negative. In truth, The Witch is a symbol of 'threatening evil' only to those men and women who accept a conservative sensibility. For members of either gender who do not, The Witch is perceived as hero and role model. This collection begins with the Biblical figure of Lilith, followed by Morgan le Fey from Arthurian legend/ myth in literature as well as in popular culture, followed by the more contemporary depictions of the Witch that start to appear in the 1960s; for example, in the Bewitched sitcom, the Star Wars franchise, Harry Potter, and even the television show Scooby-Doo. International depictions of the Witch are discussed, including Italy's Dario Argento's films, Suspiria and Inferno. The final section of this collection focuses on the most iconic depictions of the Witch produced during the 21st century, including A Discovery of Witches, Penny Dreadful, Game of Thrones and the history of the Witch in films by the Walt Disney studio, from its origins more than a century ago to the latest releases, arguing that here, if perhaps surprisingly, we discover the most fair and balanced portraits of Witches in the history of film and TV.