In the last quarter of the twentieth century, dozens of books and articles on witches and witchcraft were published, amounting to a sort of second witch craze. These publications addressed the topic in general and in specific times and places, witchcraft, witch-hunting, images of witches, witches in art, literature, popular culture, new religious movements, witches in the past and the present, and witches in almost every imaginable connection,with the single exception of the one topic that is most foreign and most absurd to modern readers, students and scholars alike: ideas and knowledge about witches. Of the many dozens or hundred...

Between roughly 1450 and 1750, secular, Inquisitorial, and ecclesiastical courts across continental Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies tried approximately 110,000 people for the crime of witchcraft, executing around 60,000.¹ All historiography dealing with early modern witchcraft is concerned, on some level, with explaining why this happened. There is no shortage of interpretations: the last thirty years have seen the historical study of witchcraft transformed ‘from an esoteric byway into a regular concern of social, religious and intellectual historians’ who have carried out intensive, often interdisciplinary research in the archives of continental Europe, the British Isles, and the...

As the previous chapter showed, the prevailing view in witchcraft studies is that male witches were rare exceptions to the rule and are less important and interesting, as historical subjects, than female witches. There is a kind of conventional historiographical wisdom about male witches, which may be summarised as follows: male witches were a) accused in small numbers; b) accused primarily because they were related to female witches; c) accused primarily in large witch-hunts, in which panic broke down the stereotype of the female witch; d) not accused of diabolic witchcraft, especially the sexual aspects; e) accused in larger numbers...

One of the central issues of current research, especially of feminist research into early modern witchcraft, is the question of (female) agency. The stereotype of female passivity in the face of male oppression has been contested, and we have now a far more sophisticated understanding of women and their varied means of expressing agency and resistance than was possible in a system of reference based on victimhood. Witchcraft trials, perhaps paradoxically, have proven to be fruitful sites for finding evidence of women’s resistance and agency.Women accused of witchcraft resisted in various ways, including the recantation of confessions made under torturew...

The previous chapters presented challenges to generalisations about male witches. The next two chapters follow a similar approach to conventional perspectives on the demonological treatment of witchcraft and gender. Through the examination of witchcraft theorists’ descriptions of male witches, we aim to show that, just as with the ‘real life’ cases, modern scholars’ views do not take sufficient account of the complexity of early modern learned theories about witches.

The sources for this discussion are demonological treatises published in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The body of witchcraft literature is much too large to permit a complete survey; there...

So far, we have concentrated on constructing the male witch as a valid historical subject. In this final chapter, we wish to change gear and attempt to answer the question of how early modern Europeans, specifically witchcraft theorists, made sense of male witches. Given that they generally associated witchcraft more strongly with women than with men, it seems at first rather odd that early modern authors did not address explicitly the (to us) apparent anomaly of the male witch. However, as we have suggested so far, the nonchalance with which early modern Europeans approached the concept of the male witch...

Very few practising scholars today, except for a thin crust of aged historians in certain senior common rooms, in retirement-optional American universities, and a few young fogies in very old-fashioned departments, mourn the demise of ‘great-man’ history of the sort that concentrated on public figures (usually, but not exclusively, men - one must imagine Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa as ‘great men’),assuming them to have been the proper objects of historical study due not merely to their position and influence,but due to their supposed status as the very motors of History. Whatever the manifold problems –...