Images of witches and witchcraft offer a glimpse into the fears and superstitions of the past. Many an innocent child, since the release of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, has tromped and sung along to the munchkins’ jubilant “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead”, as the legs of Wicked Witch of the East shrivelled[…]
Witch trials most often targeted a persecuted minority: women. Introduction “Witch hunt” – it’s a refrain used to deride everything from impeachment inquiries and sexual assault investigations to allegations of corruption. When powerful men cry witch, they’re generally not talking about green-faced women wearing pointy hats. They are, presumably, referring to the Salem witch trials,[…]
Witch hunts in the New World began in Virginia, though Virginia’s alleged witches were imprisoned rather than executed. When I decided to write Poison in the Colony, a historical novel about the Jamestown colony, I was up against a problem. It was 2014 and young readers had made their desires clear: if a book didn’t contain[…]
How Romans overcame their fear of witches by finding them funny. Introduction For centuries, when people thought of witches, they were evil or possessed by evil demons: think of the Salem witch trials or the 16th and 17th-century woodcuts depicting sinister women conjuring demons or flying on broomsticks. These were the sort of women who morphed in[…]