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The Holy Roman Empire was the heartland of the witch craze, with around 23,000 witches executed in the early modern period. In this book, Laura Kounine uses case studies of witch trials in early modern W¿rttemberg to examine how people sought to identify witches, and the ways in which ordinary men and women fought for their life to avoid the stake.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Being on Trial: Interrogating Mind and Body
- 2: Languages of Defence
- 3: Confession, Conscience, and Selfhood on Trial
- 4: Gender and Emotions in the Visual and Intellectual Imagination
- Conclusion
- Appendix
About the author
Laura Kounine is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex, and was previously a research fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She is the co-editor of Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (2015), and Emotions in the History of Witchcraft (2016).
Summary
The Holy Roman Empire was the heartland of the witch craze, with around 23,000 witches executed in the early modern period. In this book, Laura Kounine uses case studies of witch trials in early modern Württemberg to examine how people sought to identify witches, and the ways in which ordinary men and women fought for their life to avoid the stake.
Additional text
In these connections lie the book's main significance, not just as a piece of exemplary scholarship in its own right, but as a contribution to several overlapping fields simultaneously: predominantly, and most obviously, the history of witchcraft and history of emotions, but at least three other areas are also illuminated: first, enquiries into selfhood, subjectivity, and phenomenology; secondly, the history of gender and the body; and thirdly, literary and cultural historical investigation of criminal legal records... Laura amplifies the voices of her subjects, and adapts them for our ears, but she doesn't ventriloquize them to suit her purposes. At the same time, she never hesitates or equivocates, and so inspires absolute confidence as a writer. This is intrepid stuff. It's the sort of book that makes the reader wonder whether anyone else could have written such a book in the same nuanced, sophisticated way.
