New from Palgrave Macmillan in the Palgrave Advances series is Witchcraft Historiography, edited by Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies. It includes essays by such noted scholars as Willem de Blecourt and Brian P. Levack. Among the pieces included are Peter Maxwell-Stuart's The Contemporary Historical Debate, 1400-1750, Marion Gibson's Thinking Witchcraft: Language, Literature, and Intellectual History, and Jo Pearson's Writing Witchcraft: The Historians' History, The Practitioners' Past. Of particular interest is Professor Levack's essay on Crime and the Law.
Levack surveys the history of writing about witchcraft and the law, which he divides into four traditions. "The first and oldest...is primarily concerned with the law as an agent of repression or coercion....The second...focuses on the way in which lawyers brought witch hunts to an end...The third...studies witchcraft prosecutions in the larger context of the history of crime...The fourth and most recent historiographical approach to witchcraft and the law deals with the connection between state formation and witch hunting." (p. 146-147).
Another interesting essay is Raisa Maria Toivo's The Witch-Craze as Holocaust: The Rise of Persecuting Societies, a survey of interpretations of the various waves of witchcraft trials. What explained them? Mass fear of the "other"? A desire to eliminate minorities?
Each essay has a useful bibliography and notes. This volume is a helpful addition to the law and magic bookshelf.
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