Modern culture shows that we remain both haunted and fascinated by ideas about witchcraft and the supernatural that we have inherited from previous centuries. Heidi Breuer's chapter in this Free book selection (Chapter 5) demonstrates this eloquently.
Her starting-point is the Renaissance, mainly in England, and the idea of the ?Renaissance hag?? an old, ugly woman, contrasting sharply with masculine ideals of womanhood, and possessing the power of wicked magic. Where did the idea of such a woman originate, and why does she still disturb us?
This is a selection of chapters from five different books by four different authors. Don't expect a single plan, or a single coherent argument. Instead, you should often expect loose ends and trains of thought that lead off the page.
This is especially so with my own chapter in this selection (Chapter 1),which is the introduction to my book on the European witch-hunt. It often refers to topics ?that we shall examine in
Chapter 9?,and so on. Still, this introductory chapter does introduce the concept of witchcraft ? a core concept for our purposes.
Indeed it argues that there were four related concepts of witchcraft in early modern Europe: the demonic witch, the village witch, the folkloric witch and the envisioned witch.
The demonic witch was in league with the Devil; the village witch worked harmful magic on neighbor's; the folkloric witch was the subject of stories; and the envisioned witch was experienced through dreams, nightmares and fantasies, which were then elaborated into folkloric motifs with cultural meanings.
