Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

A powerful account of witches, crones, and the societies that make them

From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches—of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops—and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond.

Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families, and tribulations. She also explores the psychology of witch-hunting, explaining why it was mostly older women that were the victims of witch crazes, why they confessed to crimes, and how the depiction of witches in art and literature has influenced the characterization of elderly women in our own culture.

• Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial
• The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
• The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West
• Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
• Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History)
• A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Critical Issues in World and International History)
• The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
• Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (Middle Ages Series)
• The Return of Martin Guerre
• The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World