Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia

Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia

pretty self explanatory

A book that details the act of witchhunting. Where Witchfinders focuses on the people that sparked these trials, this book describes the reality of what a trial often entailed. Images attached include 'trials' that involved torture and, most famously to our modern understanding, 'dunking'. Dunking is often incorrectly seen as a test in which a woman is thrown into a river to see if she floats. The actual test, however, was even worse than our modern understanding. Women accused of being witches were tied to a chair and slowly lowered into a river, drowning to death in the slowest, most agonizing way possible.
The book also details many of the images that were created during and right after these witchhunts. Here we see the once against the over-sexualization of the witch and the direct threat that she (and he) posed to early American Christian values and domestic roles in largely extremist, Puritanical villages.

William E. Burns

Greenwood Press

2003