Malcolm Gaskill
Auteur van Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
Over de Auteur
Malcolm Gaskill is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, where he is Director of Studies in History
Werken van Malcolm Gaskill
The Ruin of Witches 2 exemplaren
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Geboortedatum
- 1967
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- UK
- Land (voor op de kaart)
- England, UK
- Geboorteplaats
- England, UK
- Agent
- Natasha Fairweather (Rogers, Coleridge & White)
Leden
Besprekingen
Prijzen
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Statistieken
- Werken
- 10
- Leden
- 878
- Populariteit
- #29,161
- Waardering
- 3.6
- Besprekingen
- 12
- ISBNs
- 42
- Talen
- 3
All of which prompts the question: How different are we from our 17th century ancestors? A question that becomes more taxing if 17th century ancestors is replaced with "fellow human beings in Africe and India". The truth that many find unpalatable is that in ideas, instincts and emotions we are not very different at all. Without peace and prosperity, liberty and welfare and the political and economic atability that those things depend on the thinking of the next generation in the West might swerve off in an altogether more mystical and malevolent direction. The bloodletting in the developing World is too startlingly similar to that which occurred in England during the civil war for this not to be so. Then, as now, witch-hunts involved not just savage persecutors tormenting innocent scapegoats, but ordinary neighbours with a close affinity to one another who also happened to believe in witchcraft powerfully enough to act out their most violent fantasies. This was as true of people who believed themselves to
witches as it was of those who pointed the finger. As a consequence the seventeenth-century tragedy of the witchfinders is only partialy that of Matthew Hopkins, the flawed protagonist, and of the harrowing deaths of his victims. It is at least as much a tale about feeling anxious and vulnerable in an indifferent world - a sensation of
humanity?
I am rather more hopeful than the author was here since the author notes than within a generation Hopkins was being mocked and while fear of witches continued trials and executions disappeared almost entirely.… (meer)