Joseph Klaits

2025 Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunter, by Joseph Klaits (read 11 Oct 1986) I suspect this is the best book around on the matter of witch hunts. It is a 1985 book by an associate professor of history at Oakland Universality which considers the general course and significance of the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. My interest in witch trials is basically due to my knowledge of my nine-times-great-grandmother's experience in the late 1500's. This book tries to determine why the witch trials happened and why they ceased. It is an excellent book. In the introduction the author says: "The bleak terrain of the witch trials is both forbidding and depressing. Their vast scale must daunt any writer who hopes to explain the dynamics and significance of witch hunting, while the story of the trials also is bound to provoke discouraging conclusions about the human potential for inhumanity. Yet the witch craze's prominence in the history of the period necessitates the broadest possible treatment, not only chronologically and spatially but also conceptually. Our current knowledge of political institutions, social structure, and patterns of thought should be brought to bear when placing witch hunts in their historical context." The book succeeds admirably in carrying out the announced aim.… (más)