This book provides a history of witchcraft in the territories that compose contemporary Romania, with a focus on the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first part presents aspects of earthly justice, religious and secular, analysing the codes of law, trials and verdicts, and underlining the differences between Transylvania on one hand, and Moldavia and Wallachia on the other. The second part is concerned with divine justice, describing apocalyptic texts that talk about the pains of witches in hell, but also the ensembles of religious painting where, in vast compositions of the Last Judgment, various punishments for the sin of witchcraft are imagined.
Author(s): Ioan Pop-Curşeu, Ștefana Pop-Curșeu
Series: Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 339
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: Who Are the Romanians and How to Study Witchcraft in Romania?
Bibliography
Part I: Trials in Earthly Life
Chapter 2: Witchcraft Acts: Condemnation of Sorcery in the Codes of Law
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Trials, Persecutions, Executions (the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries)
Transylvania and the Banat
Moldavia, 1761
Wallachia, 1586–1859
Synthetic Analysis and Parallel Risk-Management Models
The Perceived Risk of Witchcraft at an Institutional Level
The Perceived Risk of Witchcraft at the Community Level
The Perceived Risk of Witchcraft at an Intrapersonal Level
Bibliography
Chapter 4: New Elites, New Paradigms of Rationality (Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries): Against the Superstitions of the Romanians
Bibliography
Part II: Trials in the Afterlife
Chapter 5: Canonical Versus Apocryphal: Religious Texts Condemning Witchcraft
Celestial Tollbooths
Apocalyptic Texts
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Doomsday and Hellfire: Iconographic Representations of Witchcraft in Last Judgment Compositions
Geographical, Historical and Linguistic Remarks
Iconographic Types
The Witch in the River or the Sea of Fire
Satanic Ridings: The Devil on the Witch and Vice Versa
The Manna Thief, the Milk Witch, the Enchantress and Their Buckets
The Manna Thief with a Bucket on Her Head: The Defecating Devils
Variations of This Type: How Does the Witch Hold the Bucket?
The Woman with the Goblet of (Healing) Potions
Practitioners of Magic Are Legion
Other (Archaic) Representations
The Woman Who “worships” the Devil
The Woman with the Mirror
Between Tradition and Innovation: Modern Representations of Magical Agents
Diversity of Punishments: Imagining or Practicing Torture?
The Woman Beaten by the Devil
The Woman with Her Tongue Pulled Out by the Devil
The Woman Whose Face Is Bitten by Snakes
Punishments by Iron and Fire
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Conclusions
Bibliography
General Bibliography
Index of Persons and Places
Subject Index
