The Social Background of Witchcraft Accusations in Early Modern Debrecen and Bihar County

Kristóf, Ildikó Sz.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54756-5_2

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…It is also clear from documents from witchcraft trials that the city council made every effort to protect the privileges and scope of authority of the representatives of official, legal medicine during the epidemic. When so-called "uneducated", "wise women", and midwives were accused of "illegitimate healing" and/or witchcraft, it was the interests of the city's doctors and barbers that were being safeguarded (Kristóf 1990b, Kristóf 1991-1992, 2017.…”

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confidence: 99%

“His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Kristóf

2020

Religions

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This is a historical anthropological study of a period of social and religious tensions in a Calvinist city in the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the 18th century. The last and greatest plague epidemic to devastate Hungary and Transylvania between cca. 1738 and 1743 led to a clash of different opinions and beliefs on the origin of the plague and ways of fighting it. Situated on the Great Hungarian Plain, the city of Debrecen saw not only frequent violations of the imposed lockdown measures among its inhabitants but also a major uprising in 1739. The author examines the historical sources (handwritten city records, written and printed regulations, criminal proceedings, and other documents) to be found in the Debrecen city archives, as well as the writings of the local Calvinist pastors published in the same town. The purpose of the study is to outline the main directions of interpretation concerning the plague and manifest in the urban uprising. According to the findings of the author, there was a stricter and chronologically earlier direction, more in keeping with local Puritanism in the second half of the 17th century, and there was also a more moderate and later one, more in line with the assumptions and expectations of late 18th-century medical science. While the former set of interpretations seems to have been founded especially on a so-called “internal” cure (i.e., religious piety and repentance), the latter proposed mostly “external” means (i.e., quarantine measures and herbal medicine) to avoid the plague and be rid of it. There seems to have existed, however, a third set of interpretations: that of folk beliefs and practices, i.e., sorcery and magic. According to the files, a number of so-called “wise women” also attempted to cure the plague-stricken by magical means. The third set of interpretations and their implied practices were not tolerated by either of the other two. The author provides a detailed micro-historical analysis of local events and the social and religious discourses into which they were embedded.

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confidence: 99%

“His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Kristóf

2020

Religions

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Trials, Persecutions, Executions (the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

Pop-Curşeu

Pop-Curșeu

2022

Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic

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Dilemmas of Corpus Construction beyond Folklore Collections: Threat as a Speech Act in Early Modern Witchcraft Trials

Ilyefalvi

2019

AETHN

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During the corpus-building operation of the Digital Database of Hungarian Verbal Charms we tried to augment the available material by the inclusion of witness statements of witch trials conducted in early modern Bihar County and the town of Debrecen. My paper explores the kinds of dilemmas and issues we were faced with concentrating especially on generic questions of verbal charms. As regards the exploration of early modern written sources of vernacular language use the most relevant recent approaches came from historical speech act research. Therefore, in the context of the corpus building project I shall also discuss to which extends the results of historical pragmatics, historical speech act research can offer any help (and if so, what kind of help) in solving the generic problems and questions of verbal magic.1

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The Social Background of Witchcraft Accusations in Early Modern Debrecen and Bihar County

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

“His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

“His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Trials, Persecutions, Executions (the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

Dilemmas of Corpus Construction beyond Folklore Collections: Threat as a Speech Act in Early Modern Witchcraft Trials

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