Reading Witchcraft

ISBN-13: 9780415206464 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 256 str.

Marion Gibson

Opis

Exploring the stories told by and about witches and their victims, this text questions what can be recovered from their trial records, early news books, pamphlets and personal accounts. In her wide-ranging selection of original sources, Marion Gibson seeks to discover the truthfulness of stories of witchcraft. Who told them and why? How were they recorded? And how might they have been distorted or stereotyped? This book looks closely at these legal documents and printed pamphlets and shows that their representations of witchcraft are far from straightforward. Even the simplest story can mask a complex creative process which sometimes led to the deaths of innocent people. We are left with a record of the power of the human imagination.

Spis treści

Introduction; Part 1 Records; Chapter 1 Ghost-writers—dialogue, interrogation and the production of the records of witchcraft; Chapter 2 Witchcraft trials and a methodology for reading them; Chapter 3 Deconstructing generic stories; Part 2 Pamphlets; Chapter 4 ‘Necessary’ and ‘triviall’ pamphlets; Chapter 5 Prefaces; Chapter 6 An Open Conclusion, or ‘Where do we go from here?’;

O autorze

Marion Gibson is Lecturer at the University of Exeter