Sacrificing Josephus to save Philo: Cesare Baronio and the Jewish origins of Christian monasticism

A first version of this note was delivered at the Reception of Josephus seminar in the spring of 2014. The author would like to thank all those present for their questions and suggestions, as well as Anthony Grafton and the convenors, Joanna Weinberg and Martin Goodman, for their invaluable comments on later versions of this text

On the confessional uses and history of witchcraft: Thomas Stapleton's 1594 witchcraft oration

Thomas Stapleton’s influential 1594 oration “Why Has Magic Grown Today Together with Heresy?” delivered to an audience of Catholic theologians at the University of Leuven is well known to historians of the early modern witch-hunt, particularly for the confessional purposes to which it put early modern demonology. The oration offered no fewer than twelve reasons why witchcraft and heresy grew in strength together and situated the witch-hunt within a larger historical framework of continued demonic assault on mankind that spanned millennia. This annotated translation makes this text available to a wider audience for the first time. An introduction draws attention to three features of the text: the newfound urgency of the threat of witchcraft in the 1580s and 1590s, its partial reception of earlier demonological writings, and the way it co-opts the threat and severe punishment of witchcraft to foreground the much greater threat posed by heresy

When a female Pope meets a biconfessional town: Protestantism, Catholicism, and popular polemics in the 1630s

The early modern afterlife of Pope Joan has been remarkably little studied, perhaps because its contours have seemed familiar: Joan’s existence was embraced by Protestants for its challenge to the apostolic succession of the papacy and rejected by Catholics for the same reason. This role reversal, which cast Protestants as defenders of monastic chronicles and Catholics as their critics, offers ostensible proof for the mercenary use of history in confessional polemics. This article uses an overlooked 1635 defence of the popess, the longest ever written, as a case study to argue the opposite: debates over Pope Joan could be vehicles for popular confessional grievances and identities, and they can teach us much about the difficulties facing the Catholic and Reformed churches in the 1620s and 1630s. Written in Dutch by a German minister of the Church of England, this lengthy treatise possesses a significance well beyond the local conditions – a public disputation in a small biconfessional town in the Duchy of Cleves – that gave rise to its publication

When a Female Pope Meets a Biconfessional Town: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Popular Polemics in the 1630s

The early modern afterlife of Pope Joan has been remarkably little studied, perhaps because its contours have seemed familiar: Joan’s existence was embraced by Protestants for its challenge to the apostolic succession of the papacy and rejected by Catholics for the same reason. This role reversal, which cast Protestants as defenders of monastic chronicles and Catholics as their critics, offers ostensible proof for the mercenary use of history in confessional polemics. This article uses an overlooked 1635 defence of the popess, the longest ever written, as a case study to argue the opposite: debates over Pope Joan could be vehicles for popular confessional grievances and identities, and they can teach us much about the difficulties facing the Catholic and Reformed churches in the 1620s and 1630s. Written in Dutch by a German minister of the Church of England, this lengthy treatise possesses a significance well beyond the local conditions – a public disputation in a small biconfessional town in the Duchy of Cleves – that gave rise to its publication

When a Female Pope Meets a Biconfessional Town: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Popular Polemics in the 1630s

The early modern afterlife of Pope Joan has been remarkably little studied, perhaps because its contours have seemed familiar: Joan’s existence was embraced by Protestants for its challenge to the apostolic succession of the papacy and rejected by Catholics for the same reason. This role reversal, which cast Protestants as defenders of monastic chronicles and Catholics as their critics, offers ostensible proof for the mercenary use of history in confessional polemics. This article uses an overlooked 1635 defence of the popess, the longest ever written, as a case study to argue the opposite: debates over Pope Joan could be vehicles for popular confessional grievances and identities, and they can teach us much about the difficulties facing the Catholic and Reformed churches in the 1620s and 1630s. Written in Dutch by a German minister of the Church of England, this lengthy treatise possesses a significance well beyond the local conditions – a public disputation in a small biconfessional town in the Duchy of Cleves – that gave rise to its publication

The Mythmaker of the Sabbat: Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau des mauvais anges et demons (1612)

The witch-hunt De Lancre conducted, together with his colleague Jean d’Espaignet (1564–after 1643), during the summer and autumn of 1609 in the Pays de Labourd, a Basque-speaking territory on France’s border with Spain, is justly ranked among the most famous and notorious of the early modern period. De Lancre's sensationalist 1612 account of his experiences one historian has described it as a work of 'scholarly pornography' includes the most detailed description of the witches' sabbat of the early modern period. The Tableau offered perhaps the most detailed and explicit account of the sabbat in early modern literature, and was one of the very first printed works to describe the sabbat in such detail as a Black Mass that is, as a systematic inversion and parody of the Catholic Mass. De Lancre also devoted an entire chapter to the 'incestuous' Spanish dances that were performed with 'even more liberty and insolence' at the sabbat

The war on witchcraft: Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr, and the origins of witchcraft historiography

Historians of the early modern witch-hunt often begin histories of their field with the theories propounded by Margaret Murray and Montague Summers in the 1920s. They overlook the lasting impact of nineteenth-century scholarship, in particular the contributions by two American historians, Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) and George Lincoln Burr (1857–1938). Study of their work and scholarly personae contributes to our understanding of the deeply embedded popular understanding of the witch-hunt as representing an irrational past in opposition to an enlightened present. Yet the men's relationship with each other, and with witchcraft sceptics – the heroes of their studies – also demonstrates how their writings were part of a larger war against 'unreason'. This Element thus lays bare the ways scholarly masculinity helped shape witchcraft historiography, a field of study often seen as dominated by feminist scholarship. Such meditation on past practice may foster reflection on contemporary models of history writing