Male Witches in Early Modern Europe

This book critiques historians’ assumptions about witch-hunting as well as their explanations for this complex and perplexing phenomenon. It shows that large numbers of men were accused of witchcraft in their own right, in some regions, more men were accused than women. The authors insist on the centrality of gender, tradition, and ideas about witches in the construction of the witch as a dangerous figure. They challenge the marginalization of male witches by feminist and other historians.
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 hundreds of modern works on witches, scarcely any have addressed the single necessary precondition for the prosecution, torture and execution of witches: the certainty, to those who did the hunting, that witches existed.