Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
1970
First Published
3.65
Average Rating
368
Number of Pages
Witchcraft in 16th- and 17th-century England! Witchcraft beliefs and accusations flourished as never before in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This study of some of the least-explored regions of post-Reformation society investigates the categories of persons that were believed to be witches and considers the motives of their accusers. The author, a highly regarded anthropologist-historian, examines the extent to which witchcraft accusations reflected basic tensions in the structure of pre- industrial thought and society, and directs light on such issues as contemporary attitudes to misfortune and pain, to methods of resolving interpersonal conflicts, to the treatment of social deviants.
Avg Rating
3.65
Number of Ratings
48
5 STARS
17%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
35%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Alan Macfarlane
Author · 11 books
Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.
