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The pamphlet contains virtually the only contemporary illustrations of Scottish witchcraft [2] and was the earliest Scottish or English printed document dedicated to only covering witchcraft in Scotland. [5] It provided the first descriptions of the osculum infame, also known as the kiss of shame or the obscene kiss, to the English population. [6]
Witch trials and witch related accusations were at a high during the early modern period in Britain, a time that spanned from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. 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 ...
Religious tensions in England during the 16th and 17th centuries resulted in the introduction of serious penalties for witchcraft. Henry VIII's Witchcraft Act 1541 [1] (33 Hen. 8. c. 8) was the first to define witchcraft as a felony, a crime punishable by death and the forfeiture of goods and chattels. [2] It was forbidden to:
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.
These legendary accounts first appeared in the late 16th century. Several late 16th- to early 17th-century works are attributed to Flamel. Basil Valentine (pseudonym for one or more 16th-century authors) known especially for The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (1599). Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636) Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639)
In the first part of the 20th century, the English Egyptologist and anthropologist Margaret Murray (1863–1963) had published several papers and books propagating a variation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, through which she claimed that the Early Modern witch trials had been an attempt by the Christian authorities to wipe out a pre-existing ...
His work on witchcraft was The Discoverie of Witchcraft, wherein the Lewde dealing of Witches and Witchmongers is notablie detected, in sixteen books … whereunto is added a Treatise upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils, 1584. Scot enumerates 212 authors whose works in Latin he had consulted, and twenty-three authors who wrote ...
The first historian to study the benandanti tradition was the Italian Carlo Ginzburg, who began an examination of the surviving trial records from the period in the early 1960s, culminating in the publication of his book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966, English translation 1983).