Symposium

The international symposium took place on Friday 18 January 2019 and was held in the Terrace Room, Bramber House at the University of Sussex.The event included keynotes by Thomas Dixon, Ute Frevert, Tim Hitchcock, Claire Langhamer, William Reddy, Lyndal Roper, Rhodri Hayward, and Penny Summerfield.

After the conference there was a wine reception to celebrate the recent publication of Dr Laura Kounine’s book Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern German (Oxford University Press, 2018):

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. Witchcraft was also a crime of unbridled passion: it centred on the notion that one person’s emotions could have tangible and deadly physical consequences. Yet it is also true that not all suspicions of witchcraft led to a formal accusation, and not all witch-trials led to the stake. Through an examination of case studies of witch-trials that took place in the early modern Lutheran duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Laura Kounine examines how the community, church, and the agents of the law sought to identify the witch, and how ordinary men and women fought for their lives in an attempt to avoid the stake. The study further explores the visual and intellectual imagination of witchcraft in this period in order to piece together why witchcraft could be aligned with such strong female stereotypes, but also be imagined as a crime that could be committed by any human, whether young or old, male or female. By moving beyond stereotypes of the witch, Imagining the Witch argues that understandings of what constituted witchcraft and the ‘witch’ appear far more contested and unstable than has previously been suggested. It also suggests new ways of thinking about early modern selfhood which moves beyond teleological arguments about the development of the ‘modern’ self. Indeed, the trial process itself created the conditions for a diverse range of people to give meaning to emotions, gender, and the self in early modern Lutheran Germany.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Symposium keynote recordings:

 

 

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