| @quot;Evil People@quot;: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons. Narrowing his focus to two specific regions--Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier--he provides a nuanced explanation of how the tensions between state power and communalism determined the course of witch hunts that claimed over 1,300 lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Dillinger finds that, far from representing the centralizing aggression of emerging early states against local cultures, witch hunts were almost always driven by members of the middling and lower classes in cities and villages, and they were stopped only when early modern states acquired the power to control their localities.
In the original German, "Evil People" won the Friedrich Spee Award as an outstanding contribution to the history of witchcraft. Johannes Dillinger is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England. Laura Stokes is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. |