Volume 32, Number 3 · February 28, 1985
Good Witches
By Peter Burke
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John Tedeschi, by Anne Tedeschi
Johns Hopkins University Press, 209 pp., $18.50
La sorcière de Jasmin
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Editions du Seuil, 282 pp., fr79
When, in 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper published a lively essay on what he called 'The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,' he can hardly have guessed that he was summarizing and synthesizing the conventional historical wisdom on the subject at the very time that this conventional view was being undermined. Trevor-Roper emphasized his concern with the views of educated men and his lack of interest in what he called 'those elementary village credulities which anthropologists discover in all times and at all places.'
Review, 3032 words
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