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dc.contributor.authorMaddox, Trace M.
dc.date.accessioned2025-01-17T17:12:20Z
dc.date.available2025-01-17T17:12:20Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.identifier.citationTrace M Maddox, The Lawyer, the Witch, and the Witness: Proving Witchcraft in the English Courts, 35 YALE JL & HUMAN. 666 (2024).en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/18497
dc.descriptionVol. 35:4en_US
dc.description.abstractIn the sixteenth century, a new crime arrived on the scene of the secular courts: witchcraft. Over the following two hundred years, tens of thousands of individuals across Europe and its colonies would be tried and convicted of this offense. In England alone, hundreds of men and women were executed for covenanting with the Devil or using harmful magic against their neighbors. Almost universally, this "age of credulity and injustice"5 has provoked a kind of retrospective horror that "rational, highly educated men 'could have been so bigoted as to put people to death for ... patently impossible acts' ." In popular thought, convictions for witchcraft must have been miscarriages of justice: because witchcraft does not exist, witchcraft prosecutions are, almost by definition, sham trials. And certainly, many aspects of the witch trials seem barbaric by modem standards. In particular, much of the evidence relied upon seems nonsensical. The criminal justice systems of early modem Europe lacked many of the evidentiary rules that, today, seem most fundamental - and contemporary commentators clamored for the suspension of those that did exist. Because witchcraft was "an extraordinary matter," the argument ran, it required "extraordinary dealing."en_US
dc.publisherYale Journal of Law & the Humanitiesen_US
dc.subjectEnglish legal history; Witchcraft; Early Modern Europeen_US
dc.titleThe Lawyer, the Witch, and the Witness: Proving Witchcraft in the English Courtsen_US
rioxxterms.versionNAen_US
rioxxterms.typeJournal Article/Reviewen_US
refterms.dateFOA2025-01-17T17:12:21Z
refterms.dateFirstOnline2025


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