Witchcraft in Europe and America

In the late nineteenth century, when American industrialists were buying up European art treasures, Cornell University amassed books on the history of European witchcraft. Two pioneering scholars, Andrew Dickson White and George Lincoln Burr, established a world-famous collection of works on witchcraft, the Inquisition, canon law and related subjects. A second, equally remarkable, collection, which was assembled by Henry Charles Lea, is now in the University of Pennsylvania. These collections mostly concerned Europe, though America’s own early witches also received full attention. Now, these two collections, together with some other works, have been digitised and are accessible online, as a subscription service from Cengage Learning. There appear to be 914 items altogether in the database, from full-length books to one-page letters or printed broadsides. The database can be searched by language, which produces the following statistics: Latin, 225 items, English 214, German 211, Italian 107, French 91, Dutch 47, Spanish 17, Portuguese 7, Danish 3, Frisian 1, Romanian 1, and Swedish 1. In fact, these figures contain numerous errors. The ‘Romanian’ work is actually in Latin, and the ‘Swedish’ one is in French. Works in Latin seem particularly prone to being assigned to some other language. Puzzlingly, the language totals above add up to 925, while the figure of 914 comes from searching on ‘All languages’. Perhaps some works are assigned to more than one language

Archaeology · Art history · Danish · George (robot · German · Linguistics · Portuguese · Romanian · Classics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History