Historical Dictionary Of Witchcraft

This book was written by an academic, and not a practicing witch, as is increasingly the custom. So he views the subject of witchcraft from without and not within, which is a better vantage point for most of us and helps us grasp the many twists and turns of an endlessly intriguing subject. Michael D. Bailey has been interested in European witchcraft ever since he was a student at Northwestern University, writing his dissertation and later his first book on the rise of witchcraft in latemedieval Europe and on one of the preeminent early authorities to write about witchcraft, the German Dominican Johannes Nider. He also studied medieval history in countries where the witch-hunts were most virulent,

Germany and Switzerland. Since then, Dr. Bailey has taught at Bethany College, the University of Cincinnati, Saint Louis University, and currently at Iowa State University, where he continues to write on various aspects of the medieval period, sorcery, and witchcraft. For this historical dictionary, he has expanded his horizons substantially to bring in the wider world and the current period, which make the whole matter considerably more interesting and in some ways more comprehensible, or less, depending on one's intellectual position. Jon Woronoff Series Editor

About the author

Michael D. Bailey received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he specialized in medieval European history. He also studied medieval history at the University of Basel and the Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universitat in Munich. He has held academic positions at Bethany College, Kansas, at the University of Cincinnati, at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, and at Saint Louis University. He is currently an assistant professor of history at Iowa State University and a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. His principal research interests focus on the history of magic, witchcraft, and superstition in Europe. Among his publications are Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, and several articles on magic and witchcraft in the medieval period.