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BOOK REVIEWS Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.), Early Modern European Witchcraft. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, 422 pp. $89.00 (cloth). "The theme of witchcraft, formerly considered marginal and even frivolous, has in the last fifteen year become a subject of international discussion among historians." Certainly such a conclusion is fully supported by these intensely researched monographs representing primarily the countries of northern Europe during the witch crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. New realization emerges that the phenomenon goes well beyond the principles of religion into such realms as folklore, ethnology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and social history. Three universal characteristics mark the phenomenon: apostasy, the witches' sab- bath, and malefice. Witch hunters assumed that witches functioned only with divine permission, that they harbored human ill will, and that they were inspired with demonic potency. Public identification of the work of witches, however, extended beyond fear of the creation or the perpetration of evil: not only could witches cause a blight upon crops, bring death to cattle, or indeed have responsibility for the entire range of human misfortune, but they used "magical techniques" to assure good health or to promote human healing, a strange manifestation of the proof
International Journal of Comparative Sociology (in 2002 continued as Comparative Sociology) – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1993
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