Witches and Neighbours 2e: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft

Robin Briggs is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford where he has worked since his election as Prize Fellow in 1964. He was educated at Felsted School and Balliol College, Oxford and he is the author of The Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1970), Early Modern France (2nd Edition 1998), and Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (1989).

Title: Witches and Neighbours 2e: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft

Author: Briggs, Robin

ISBN: 9780631233268

Binding:

Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Publication Date: 2002-02-25

Number of Pages: 420

Weight: 0.6624 kg

In this learned and meticulously researched book, Robin Briggs lays to rest many of the modern myths about the witch craze, without in any way diminishing its horror... Briggs skilfully shows how the myths of witchcraft were linked with fundamental human experiences of pain and anxiety... Lucid and important. Karen Armstrong, The Times Briggs provides a fascinating psychological insight into the ideological system that produced the trials. To understand them within their own historical context, he argues, is to realize that a belief in the witches' power was neither irrational nor absurd... the evidence from this compelling book suggests that human actions are far more determined by irrational fears than our social selves are willing to accept. Julia Wheelwright, New Statesman I salute [Briggs's] rigorous and thoughtful scholarship. James Morrow, The Guardian