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Titled "The Book of Magical Charms," "Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft" and "The Commonplace Book," each of these three texts is handwritten in archaic Latin and English and currently are ...
The modern spelling witch with the medial 't' first appears in the 16th century. Old English had both masculine (wicca) and feminine (wicce) forms of the word, [1] but the masculine meaning became less common in Standard English, being replaced by words like "warlock" and "wizard".
The Malleus Maleficarum, [a] usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, [3] [b] is the best known treatise about witchcraft. [6] [7] It was written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institor) and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1486.
According to the Smithsonian, the Newberry Library in Chicago is crowdsourcing translations for three 1 century manuscripts dealing with charms, spirits and other manners of magical practice.
During the 20th century, interest in witchcraft rose in English-speaking and European countries. From the 1920s, Margaret Murray popularized the 'witch-cult hypothesis': the idea that those persecuted as 'witches' in early modern Europe were followers of a benevolent pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. This has been ...
A 17th-century depiction of the medieval writer Isidore of Seville, who provided a list of activities he regarded as magical For early Christian writers like Augustine of Hippo , magic did not merely constitute fraudulent and unsanctioned ritual practices, but was the very opposite of religion because it relied upon cooperation from demons ...
Prior to the 16th century, Witchcraft-- i.e. any magical or supernatural practices made by mankind -- was often seen as a healing art, performed by people referred to as the cunning folk. It was later believed to be Satanic in origin [ 1 ] and thus sparked a series of laws being passed and trials being conducted, with it becoming a capital ...
After the early 17th century, popular sentiment began to turn against the practice. In 1682, King Louis XIV prohibited further witch-trials in France. In 1687, Louis XIV issued an edict against witchcraft that was rather moderate compared to former ones; it ignored black cats and other lurid fantasies of the witch mania.