Witches, Devils, and Demons, Oh My! Exploring Witchcraft and Demonology in the College Classroom

Between 1450 and 1750, at least 100,000 individuals, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft in Europe and North America. Of these, roughly half met their demise at the stake or in the noose. Lurking behind this fascinating phenomenon was the widely-held belief in a polarized world, in which an ever active Satan sought to overthrow the Kingdom of Christ through the actions of witches, demons, and other earthly adversaries. Yet this was also the era of Renaissance humanism, the advances of the Scientific Revolution, and beginnings of the “modern” world. This paper will examine the challenges of conveying to students the tragedy of witch-hunting and the deep and varied convictions that informed this tragedy, while also explaining how and why belief in the actions of witches and the devil were rational in the context of early modernity. The larger question addressed will be how do we, as educators, deal with maintaining some degree of cultural relativism in approaching the beliefs of the past while simultaneously encouraging our students to approach these beliefs (along with their own assumptions about the world) with a critical eye. This presentation will suggest that, in order to convey both the seriousness and relativity of witchcraft and demonology, questions of rationality or historical and psychological reality should be secondary to an in-depth, multilayered analysis of the beliefs and structures that produced an environment ripe for witch-hunting.