HIST 024B. Witchcraft, Heresy, and Demonic Possession in Seventeenth Century Europe

Witch-hunting is often associated with a medievalism that modern science, capitalism and reason are meant to have vanquished, but in fact it was not until the seventeenth century that the Europe "witch-craze" peaked. This course will explore the work of scholars who have linked the rise of witch-hunting and the intertwined histories of heresy and possession to ostensibly modern processes of state-building, science, capitalism, legal rationalism, psychiatry, global fiscal-military crisis, environmental mass destruction, imperial violence and bureaucratic expansion. We will look at how Marxist, feminist, quantitative, literary, psychoanalytic, psycholinguistic, and traditionally historicist interpretive frameworks have continually sharpened the picture that appears in the archives, resulting in a body of scholarship that continually surprises, elucidates and unsettles our conception of power. 
Concentration: Gender and Sexuality
Prerequisite: Previous history or humanities course, or AP credit.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Fall 2022. Azfar.
Catalog chapter: History


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