Why read Imagining the Witch?

Book cover of Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany

Book description

Imagining the Witch explores emotions, gender, and selfhood through the lens of witch-trials in early modern Germany. Witch-trials were clearly a gendered phenomenon, but witchcraft was not a uniquely female crime. While women constituted approximately three quarters of those tried for witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, a significant minority…

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European history

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Imagining the Witch as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Lu Ann Homza

Author

For the last twenty-five years, historians have been convinced that witch suspects drew on their personal histories as they confessed to being the Devil’s disciples.

Kounine flips that presumption on its head by asking how the processes of interrogations and torture might actually create a self-identity of being a witch, a category that was more flexible and nuanced than we might have expected.

From Lu's list on The best books about the trauma of European witch-hunting.

Ulinka Rublack

Author

Kounine closely looks at accusations of men and of women in order to better understand what made each of them vulnerable. A great writer, she engages with the emotional worlds that are revealed and tell us so much about ordinary Lutheran communities and their values.

From Ulinka's list on The best books about the Witchcraze.