Resources for Witchcraft

Let’s say you want to study witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Where would you look for resources?

Step 1: Find synonyms from Oxford Reference Online (it contains a bunch of thesauruses).

witchcraft noun
sorcery , (black) magic , witching , witchery , wizardry , thaumaturgy , spells , incantations ; Wicca ; Irish pishogue .
(From The Oxford Paperback Thesaurus in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

witchcraft noun
witchery , sorcery , black art/magic , magic , necromancy , wizardry , occultism , the occult , sortilege , thaumaturgy , wonder-working.
(From The Oxford American Thesaurus of Current English in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

Step 2: Databases

Academic Search Premier—can use this for most things

Historical Abstracts/America: History and Life—search these two databases together to pick up the Salem stuff of 1692

Wilson OmniFile—includes lots of important content, especially for the popular and scholarly literature between 1900 and 1950

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—use this biographical source to search for individuals who in some way were connected to witchcraft, its study, practice, or prosecution. Amazing source of info on British history

International Medieval Bibliography—main source for medieval history

JSTOR—will find plenty here

Gale Virtual Reference Library--for encyclopedia articles, New Catholic Encyclopedia might be interesting, also Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia of European Social History, Europe: 1450-1789, Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World

Oxford Reference Online—all kinds of good stuff here

Diamond: Library Catalog—find books at Temple

WorldCat—find books outside of Temple

Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)—most of the books printed in Britain during the eighteenth century, all online, hard to believe something like this exists

Project Muse

Like most things regarding research, there’s a ton of other stuff, but the above sources would at least get you started

---Fred Rowland