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| America Bewitched : The Story of Witchcraft after Salem
ISBN: 9780191625145
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Philosophy;
Historian Davies (Magic: A Very Short Introduction) makes a strong case for the inefficacy of corporeal punishment in this tedious cultural history-despite the judges' intentions, the 1692 executions in Salem, Mass., of 19 individuals accused of witchcraft did little to inhibit its development and evolution. Drawing upon stories from colonial times to today, Davies explores a number of topics related to wizardry-such as how communities identified, dealt with, and legislated the supposed practice of sorcery-and he offers up an intriguing social taxonomy of witches: "outsider witches," he explains, were pegged as such because of "where they lived, how they lived, and what they looked like"; "long-term personal feuds and unresolved tensions" led to scurrilous accusations of witchery and what Davies terms "conflict witches"; and the "accidental" type were "simply in the wrong place at the wrong time... or did or said something completely innocently but which subsequent misfortune rendered suspicious with hindsight." Over the years, the stigma surrounding witchcraft has dissipated: in the 19th century, many people placed horseshoes above the threshold of their houses to ward off evil, but today, proponents of Wicca are regarded as "benign and sympathetic" pagans. It has some compelling moments, but Davies's wearying survey adds little to the study of occultism in America. 20 illus. Agent: Andrew Lownie, the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine, including The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (2007), Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009), Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and Magic: A Very Short Introduction (2012). He is also the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. |
