The European Witch-Hunt (U01082)

? Credit Points : 40 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : HCL-4-EWH

The age of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the age in which many people throughout Europe, Catholic and Protestant, became convinced that society was threatened by conspiracies of witches. Thousands of people, mostly lower-class women, were executed. The course delves into intellectual, cultural and social history to explain how this happened, and why.

The two central sections of the course are 'Why believe in witches?' and 'Why hunt witches?'. Witch-belief was an essential precondition of witch-hunting and has to be explained; yet witch-hunting had its own dynamics, for plenty of people believed in witches but did not hunt them. The course incorporates a regional survey of how patterns of witch-hunting varied from country to country, including not only Europe but European colonies in America. There is a more detailed case-study of one fairly typical country-Scotland. The final section discusses how witch-hunting came to an end, and what happened to witch-beliefs afterwards.

Entry Requirements

? This course is not available to visting students.

? Pre-requisites : A pass in a third level historical course or equivalent.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Scottish History, (School of History and Classics, Schedule E)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 4th year

? Delivery Period : Not being delivered

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 22 weeks

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Tuesday	11:10	13:00	Central

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

- demonstrate a grasp of historical causation
- engage at high level with scholarly debate
- evaluate arguments critically
- express their ideas on the above in oral and written form.

More specifically, they should be able to:

- understand the role of witch-beliefs in the culture of early modern Europe
- understand the social processes that led to witch-hunting
- balance the distinctive regional patterns of witch-hunting against the common experience of Europe as a whole
- understand the legal, political, religious and intellectual developments that led witch-hunting first to grow and then to decline.