Dr. Rob Schneider: Which Witch? Explaining the Great Witchcraft Prosecutions in Early Modern Europe
Friday, October 17, 2014
12pm, Lean Lecture Room
The campaign against so-called witches and the practices associated with witchcraft in Europe was not a Medieval phenomenon. It occurred during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, suggesting a set of questions historians still debate. How is that that a period of intellectual progress and scientific discovery also witnessed such a demonstration of such irrationality? What explains the consensus between elites and ordinary people alike that the devil was actively recruiting legions of witches to conspire against good Christian people? And why, by the end of the seventeenth century, did this campaign of witch-hunting mostly come to an end? Professor Schneider’s lecture will attempt to address these and other relevant questions.
Rob Schneider is Professor of History at Indiana University and the Editor of the American Historical Review. He is the author of Public Life in Toulouse, 1463-1789 (Cornell, 1989), The Ceremonial City (Princeton, 1995), and many articles and chapters on early modern French history.
This event made possible by a grant from the Hewlett-Mellon Fund For Institutional Renewal for “Workshops in Interdisciplinary History.”