HISTORICAL DICTIONARY of WITCHCRAFT [2003/Michael D. Bailey/PDF]

HISTORICAL
DICTIONARY
of
WITCHCRAFT

Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, No. 47

Author: Michael D. Bailey
Format: PDF
Source: Hardcover: 248 pages
Publisher The Scarecrow Press, Inc. (October 28, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0810848600
ISBN-13: 978-0810848603

The only single-volume, scholarly reference work available on this subject, this dictionary provides reliable information on magic and witchcraft for the entire span of western history, from classical antiquity to modern Wicca. Particular attention is paid to the history of witchcraft in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, the era of the great witch-hunts.

About the Author
Michael D. Bailey is visiting assistant professor in the department of history at Iowa State University. He is the author of Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages. He has held academic positions at Bethany College, Kansas, at the University of Cincinnati, at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, and at Saint Louis University.

Editor’s Foreword

Quote:

A book on witchcraft at the dawn of the new century? Most definitely so. Without a good knowledge of the subject, one cannot understand earlier periods in Europe and European overseas colonies when there was widespread concern with witches, so intense that it culminated in witch-hunts and burnings. Nor can one understand the situation in many other ancient or “primitive” cultures well beyond Europe, indeed, almost worldwide, where a belief in creatures resembling witches was—and sometimes still is—very strong. Nor can one even understand the present (and doubtless future) with the emergence of modern witchcraft, also known as Wicca. This book, fortunately, takes a broader view, looking back, looking beyond Western civilization, and looking into the present (bordering on the future).

Obviously, most of this Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft concentrates on witchcraft in the older, more traditional sense. It therefore includes entries on persons who strongly influenced the mood of the times, who wrote about witches and how to find them, who brought them to trial and sometimes had them burned, or who defended them and gradually convinced broader society that perhaps those punished were not actually witches, maybe there was no such thing. This amidst other entries on how to ascertain if someone was a witch, how to extract a confession from such a person, what the punishment could be,
and also why so many witches were women. But the most intriguing entries are often about the appearance of similar phenomena in other cultures and especially the return of witchcraft in the West, long after it seemed to be disappearing, and in surprising new forms. The trajectory is easier to follow (thanks to a brief chronology), easier to understand (thanks to a general introduction), and easier to read (thanks to a
substantial bibliography).

This book was written by an academic, and not a practicing witch, as is increasingly the custom. So he views the subject of witchcraft from without and not within, which is a better vantage point for most of us and helps us grasp the many twists and turns of an endlessly intriguing subject. Michael D. Bailey has been interested in European witchcraft ever since he was a student at Northwestern University, writing his dissertation and later his first book on the rise of witchcraft in latemedieval Europe and on one of the preeminent early authorities to write about witchcraft, the German Dominican Johannes Nider. He also studied medieval history in countries where the witch-hunts were most virulent, Germany and Switzerland. Since then, Dr. Bailey has taught at Bethany College, the University of Cincinnati, Saint Louis University, and currently at Iowa State University, where he continues to write on various aspects of the medieval period, sorcery, and witchcraft. For this historical dictionary, he has expanded his horizons substantially to bring in the wider world and the current period, which make the whole matter considerably more interesting and in some ways more comprehensible, or less, depending on one’s intellectual position.

Jon Woronoff
Series Editor