Volume 38, Number 11 · June 13, 1991
Witch Hunting
By Robert Bartlett
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Raymond Rosenthal
Pantheon, 339 pp., $25.00
Over 50,000 people were executed as witches between the years 1500 and 1700 and a similar number underwent trial on the charge of witchcraft but were acquitted or died before sentence. This happened not during the Dark Ages or the supposedly superstitious medieval centuries, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. There is a naturally dramatic and spectacular side to the subject, and films like The Devils and plays like The Crucible have made the images and dynamics of the early modern witch hunt familiar to a wide audience.
Review, 3065 words
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