Pax Britannica: A History of the British Empire

02.46 - Witch Hunters on Trial

04.24.2022 - By Samuel HumePlay

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Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, faces humiliation on multiple fronts. His critics are uniting, his prosecutions are falling, and the ruinous cost of hiring him suddenly seems less worthwhile.

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This episode primarily makes use of the following texts:

- Gaskill, Malcolm, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy, (2005)

- Levack, Brian, ‘State-Building and Witch-Hunting’, in Oldridge, Darren (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 2002

- Purkiss, DIane, The English Civil War: A People's History, (2007)

- Jackson, Louise, ‘Witches, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women’s Confessions in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Oldridge, Darren (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 2002

- Peter Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

- Gaskill, Malcolm, ‘Witchcraft Trials in England’, in Levack, Brian (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, (2016)

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