What do you think?
Rate this book
Godly zeal and furious rage: The witch in early modern Europe
Book by Quaife, G. R
235 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1987
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 22, 2020
As the only review of this book, I feel obligated to give a hearty review.
(Generously) rounding up to 4 stars for a few reasons. It was a personal 3 for me, but then again, who reads a textbook style book for fun? Apparently, I do. As a reference book, it was a 5. If you're looking to get the down low on European witches from ~1300-1700, this is your book. Full of statistics and citations, the information presented was thorough and relatively easy to digest.
If you want the short synopsis it's this: if you were a woman and a bad neighbor in Early Modern Europe, you could for sure have been accused of being a witch. So either the Godly Zeal of the political elite was saying "The witches are causing ALL your problems so we must find them and kill them!!!" or the Furious Rage of the plebeians were like "My neighbor is kind of weird and also an asshole so she must be a witch!".
The most interesting aspects of the book were the references to drug use, sexual deviance, and divergence from standard beliefs of the time and how those were contributing factors but not necessarily the drivers of the increase in witch hunts at the time.
(Generously) rounding up to 4 stars for a few reasons. It was a personal 3 for me, but then again, who reads a textbook style book for fun? Apparently, I do. As a reference book, it was a 5. If you're looking to get the down low on European witches from ~1300-1700, this is your book. Full of statistics and citations, the information presented was thorough and relatively easy to digest.
If you want the short synopsis it's this: if you were a woman and a bad neighbor in Early Modern Europe, you could for sure have been accused of being a witch. So either the Godly Zeal of the political elite was saying "The witches are causing ALL your problems so we must find them and kill them!!!" or the Furious Rage of the plebeians were like "My neighbor is kind of weird and also an asshole so she must be a witch!".
The most interesting aspects of the book were the references to drug use, sexual deviance, and divergence from standard beliefs of the time and how those were contributing factors but not necessarily the drivers of the increase in witch hunts at the time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review