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A Trial of Witches
In 1662, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender were accused of witchcraft, and, in one of the most important of such cases in England, stood trial and were hanged in Bury St Edmunds. A Trial of Witches is a complete account of this sensational trial and an analysis of the court procedures, and the larger social, cultural and political concerns of the period. In a critique of the official process, the book details how the erroneous conclusions of the trial were achieved. The authors consider the key participants in the case, including the judge and medical witness, their institutional importance, their part in the fate of the women and their future careers. Through detailed research of primary sources, the authors explore the important implications of this case for the understanding of hysteria, group mentality, social forces and the witchcraft phenomenon as a whole.
Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars
Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars exposes writers' reliance on conservative language during one of the most radical periods of English history. In case studies of both familiar genres (country house poem, love lyric, epic) and understudied ones (emblem book, prose romance), it shows how the conservative language of "constancy" was used to justify opposing positions in the period's most pressing controversies, including monarchical rule, ecclesiastical order, Catholicism, and England's relationship to the wider world. At the same time, writers like John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert, and others establish the virtue's importance to literary tradition, as they use "constancy" to retain, yet reimagine inherited formal structures and strategies. This book thus uses women's writing and non-canonical texts to highlight cross-factional conservatism and international investment in what scholars often describe as the "English Revolution".
Marks of an Absolute Witch
This work explores the social foundation of evidence law in a specific historical social and cultural context - the debate concerning the proof of the crime of witchcraft in early modern England. In this period the question of how to prove the crime of witchcraft was the centre of a public debate and even those who strongly believed in the reality of witchcraft had considerable concerns regarding its proof. In a typical witchcraft crime there were no eyewitnesses, and since torture was not a standard measure in English criminal trials, confessions could not be easily obtained. The scarcity of evidence left the fact-finders with a pressing dilemma. On the one hand, using the standard evidenti...
Criminal Conversations
"The essays in this book set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race of sexual orientation. It also explores how threats from within "normal" society were depicted and the panic that issues like "baby-farming" caused." "Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior which they saw as new or unique to their period - but which were not new then and which, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today. What is striking about the essays in this collection are the ways in which they echo contemporary concerns about crime and bad behavior, including panics about "new" types of crime. This has implications for modern understandings of how society needs to understand crime, demonstrating that while there are changes over time, there are also important continuities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Medieval Lowestoft
Appendix 2 Suffolk's top 25 townships (1524-5 Lay Subsidy) -- Appendix 3 The Lowestoft manorial chief tenements -- Appendix 4 Sixteenth-century merchant fleet details -- Appendix 5 Fairs and markets in Lothingland and Lowestoft -- Appendix 6 Local place-name derivation -- Glossary of medieval terms -- Bibliography -- Index of people -- Index of places -- Index of subjects
The Path of the Devil
The Path of the Devil is organized around three fundamental theories: witch hunts as functional sacrificial ceremonies, realistic conflict and strategic persecution, and scapegoat phenomena. All conjectures point to the role of epidemic disease, war, and climactic and economic hardships as considerable factors. However, such crises have to be differentiated: when war is measured as a quantitative characteristic it is found to inhibit witch hunts, while epidemic disease and economic hardship encourages them. The book integrates the sociologies of collective behavior, contentious conflict, and deviance with cross-disciplinary theory and research. The final chapters examine the Salem witch trials as 'a perfect storm,' and illustrate the general patterns found for early modern witch hunts and 'modern witch hunts,' which exhibit similarities that are found to be more than metaphorical.
Crimen Exceptum
As the author notes, ‘The early-modern European witch-hunts were neither orchestrated massacres nor spontaneous pogroms. Alleged witches were not rounded up at night and summarily killed extra-judicially or lynched as the victims of mob justice. They were executed after trial and conviction with full legal process’. In this concise but highly-informed account of the persecution of witches Gregory Durston demonstrates what a largely ordered process was the singling-out or hunting-down of perceived offenders. How a mix of superstition, fear, belief and ready explanations for ailments, misfortune or disasters caused law, politics and religion to indulge in criminalisation and the appearance...
The Witches of Selwood Forest
The ancient forest of Selwood straddles the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire and terminates in the south where these counties meet Dorset. Until now, a comprehensive study of its exceptionally rich history of demonological beliefs and witchcraft persecution in the early modern period has not been attempted. This book explores the connections between important theological texts written in the region, notably Richard Bernard’s Guide to the Grand-Jury Men (1627) and Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), influential local families such as the Hunts and the Hills, and the extraordinary witchcraft episodes associated with Shepton Mallet, Brewham, Stoke Trister, and elsewhere. In particular, it focuses on a little-known case in the village of Beckington in 1689, and shows how this was not a late, isolated episode, but an integral part of the wider Selwood Forest witchcraft story.
Demonic Possession on Trial
Demonic Possession on Trial demonstrates that the phenomenon of demonic possession reflects a society's cultural characteristics, intellectual perceptions, religious concerns, and popular beliefs. In this work, William Coventry analyzes seven legal cases of alleged demonic possession from England and colonial America during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These examples reveal the political and religious rivalries, medical controversies, and inter-communal conflicts that influenced the development and prosecution of the cases. The book also sheds light on the Salem proceedings, which many times have been viewed only in their distinctive and radical sense. The Massachusetts colonists brought their opinions, memories, traditions, and laws over from England, so these earlier cases almost certainly affected the mindset at Salem. After describing and comparing these case studies, the author draws some interesting conclusions. Though possession cases all shared certain commonalities, the fascinating interplay of diverse influences and issues created vastly different outcomes, culminating with the executions during the Salem witchcraft trials.
Saltwater
Death is easy to locate in the archives of early America. Grief is not so easily pinned down. Yet it was a near constant companion for the men and women that settled in what is now New England. Their lives were a kaleidoscope of small-scale tragedies that suffused and colored everyday experiences. This pervasive suffering was exacerbated by unfamiliar environments and exposure to the anguish of Indigenous and Black Americans, unsettling well-worn frameworks to produce new dimensions of everyday grief. Mary Eyring traces these fleeting, often mundane, glimpses of grief in the archives—a note about a sailor maimed during a whaling voyage, the hint of a miscarriage in a court record, the suggestion of domestic violence within a tract on witchcraft, a house sent up in flames at the opening of a captivity narrative—to show how the cumulative weight of grief created a persistent mood that influenced public and private affairs in sweeping ways largely unexamined by previous scholars. With piercing insights and evocative prose, Eyring follows grief across generations and oceans to reveal a language of suffering understood and shared across diverse early American communities.
