011 - Mountaintop Madness

The History of Witchcraft

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6+ y ago 42:11

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John Calvin's role in the history of Geneva is hotly debated to this day, and the city gained a reputation for cruel and excessive witchtrials. We discover exactly how terrible these trials were, and whether or not Calvin deserves the blame for Geneva's attitude towards witchcraft. We also consider the events to the east of the republic, where the greedy motivations of a tyrannical lord resulted in a catastrophic witch hunt which eventually led to the creation of a modern European state.

This episode primarily makes use of the following texts:

Kieckhefer, R. ‘Witch Trials in Medieval Europe’, in Oldridge D., (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, (London, 2002)

William Monter, E. ‘The Sociology of Jura Witchcraft’, in Oldridge D., (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, (London, 2002)

Ankerloo, B. and Clark, S. (eds.) Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials, (London, 2002)William Monter, E., Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Cornell, 1976)

Robisheaux, T. 'The German Witch Trials', in Levack, B. P. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, (Oxford, 2013)

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