Witchfinders

Witchfinders

Witch Hunters

This book details the strange cultural phenomenon were witchhunters. Witchhunters occupied a celebrity status of sorts that involved a volatile combination of mob rule and vigilante justice. While our understanding of witch trials is often a legalistic one (note the word 'trial'), many of these court cases were improvised, had very little modern understanding of due process, and always involved some form of strange trial process such as tying women to chairs and submerging them in water. At their center was a self proclaimed 'witchhunter' who would go from town to town looking for witches and riling up the local populace enough to join in an ever-increasing mob of scared and angry villagers.
The book provides several images of some of the more famous of these witchhunters, all men and all of whom had some form of religious conviction that sustained their belief that women should stay entirely in a cloistered, domestic sphere. It's important to understand these trails as something as both devoid of any semblance of logic and as a complete bastardization of a legal process.

Malcolm Gaskill

Harvard University Press

2005