HIST 333: Witches from Roman Times to Harry Potter
Final Project Overview (May 2020)
STEP ONE
For your final project in HIST 333, choose one of the following options:
- A topic related to the representation of witches in the ancient, medieval, or early modern period. If you chose this option, your project will be based on historical ideas about witches from any of these periods. For example, you could examine ideas about witches in a particular geographical area or explore specific attributes associated with witches (such as the use of familiars, or the connection to the Devil, or different types of maleficia or beneficia). Perhaps start with one of the primary sources in our textbook for ideas!
- A topic that explores a modern representation of witches and analyzes its connection to ancient and/or medieval and/or early modern conceptions of witches and witchcraft. You can choose a modern representation from film, television, novels or short stories, comic books, video games, songs, poetry or art. Your focus here is not on critiquing the historical authenticity of the portrayal but rather thinking about how historical ideas about witches and witchcraft have influenced modern representations and then how such modern representations have then influenced our understanding of the historical witch figure.
STEP TWO
After you have decided which type of topic you would like to explore, then choose the format of your project:
- Research Essay (approximately 2000-2500 words).
- Artistic Representation (painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, mixed media) plus a 1000-1250 word explanatory essay.
- Teaching tool aimed at any age group from elementary to post-secondary. This tool can be a lesson plan, a video or podcast designed to explain certain aspects of the history of witches and witchcraft, or a “wikipedia-type” encyclopedia entry. The length requirements will vary depending on format.
For more information on each possible format, please see the Part 3 handouts.
OVERVIEW
For all projects, there are three steps:
- Step One: Choosing and Analyzing a Source due May 11th
- For this step you will choose a primary source or a modern representation of witches and analyze it in a question and answer format. Please see the specific handout for this step for more details.
- Step Two: Proposal due May 15th
- For this step, you will put together a proposal of your intended project and a brief annotated bibliography of potential sources. The goal of this step is to help you develop your ideas and find resources. Please see the specific handout for this step for more details.
- Step Three: Final Project due June 8th
- Final projects will be submitted on our course website, using a tool which easily formats your submissions. You can also upload photographs or other media. For details on what these final projects should look like and how to access the web tool, please see the individual handouts for each option.
RESOURCES
Although the physical building of the library is closed, we are fortunate that many publishers, databases, and digital resources have opened up access to their materials because of the pandemic. The UNBC library has also purchased some ebooks related to the history of witches and witchcraft for our course.
Below is a list of available resources that I have found through the UNBC website. They are all available electronically through the UNBC library. If you would like to use other sources not listed below (especially websites), please make sure to clear them with me first. Unfortunately, there is a lot of material online related to this topic that is misinformed.
Primary Sources
Our textbooks has a wealth of primary sources, but if you would like some other options that focus on specific historical periods or geographic spaces, or provide longer and more details primary sources, see:
Martha Rampton ed. European Magic and Witchcraft: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2018).
Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2002).
The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of a Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663 (University of Toronto Press, 2017). *This book is a complete record of a witchcraft trial in 17th century Germany.
Marion Gibson ed. Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (Routledge, 2000)* This book focuses specifically on pamphlet sources from English witch trials.
Secondary Sources
PROJECT MUSE
Through Project Muse, the UNBC library has gained access to thousands of books that it does not normally have in its catalogue. This includes hundreds of books related to the history of the witch hunts.
Access is available here: https://muse-jhu-edu.prxy.lib.unbc.ca/search
You must be signed into your UNBC library account. If you search by “witch” or “witchcraft”, you will find a very long list of books published by various academic publishers related to our topic. You can read the books online or download parts of them as PDFs.
Note that access to these resources is available until May 31st or June 30th, depending on the publisher.
Project Muse also has access to thousands of journal articles, so use the various search tools to find articles related to witches and witchcraft.
OTHER EBOOKS
David J. Collins S.J ed. The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West (Cambridge, 2015). Available here until May 31st:
Alison Rowlands ed. Witchcraft and Masculinity in early modern Europe (Palgrave, 2009).
Edward Bever, THe Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in early modern Europe (Palgrave. 2008).
Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender, and Society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007).
Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester, 2004).
Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652 (Manchester 2003).
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400-1800 (Basingstoke, 2001).
Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of early English Witches (Routledge, 1999).
Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in early modern Poland (Oxford, 2011).
Ivan Bunn and Gilbert Geis, A Trial of Witches: A 17th century Witchcraft Prosecution (Routledge, 1999).
Julian Goodare, The European Witch Hunt (Routledge, 2016).
Heidi Breuer, Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in medieval and early modern England (Routledge, 2009).
Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in central Europe (Palgrave, 2009).
Gary Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525-1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2007).
Lara Apps, Male Witches in early modern Europe (Manchester, 2003).
Robert Poole ed. The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester, 2002).
Bengt Ankerloo ed. The Period of the Witch Trials (Athlone, 2002).
Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early modern and 20th century Representations (Routledge, 1996).
Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in 17th century Russia (Cornell, 2013).
Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo, Writing Witch Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm (Brill, 2014).
Liv Helen Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Brill, 2013).
SPECIFIC JOURNALS
Magic, Witchcraft, and Ritual
*As the name implies, this journal is focused specifically on the history of magic and witchcraft. Published since 2006, it contains hundreds of articles on these topics. Available through the UNBC library.
Articles on witches and witchcraft are also available in many other journals. Please use the UNBC library search engine to find them.
WEBSITES
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/
*Put together by a team of scholars at the University of Edinburgh, this website is a database of Scottish witchcraft trials (searchable by various means). It also has an excellent bibliography.
Cornell University Witchcraft Collection https://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/w/witch/
This is a digital collection of primary sources in English related to the English and new England witch hunts in the early modern period. Searchable by a variety of means.