The Cornell College Witchcraft Assortment: Dwelling
Balthasar Bekker. The World Bewitch’d. London, 1695.
A part of Cornell College Library’s Division of Uncommon and Manuscript Collections, Cornell’s Witchcraft Assortment comprises over 3,000 titles documenting the historical past of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe.
The vast majority of the Witchcraft Assortment was acquired within the Eighteen Eighties by means of the collaborative efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first President, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr. The gathering paperwork the earliest and the most recent manifestations of the idea in witchcraft in addition to its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this historical past with works on canon regulation, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. The gathering focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, however as theology and as spiritual heresy.
It options many early texts from the interval when the idea of the heresy of witchcraft was being formulated, together with fourteen Latin editions of the Malleus maleficarum, which codified church dogma on heresy. 4 of those Latin editions had been printed within the fifteenth-century, most notably the scarce first version printed earlier than April 14, 1487. The gathering additionally comprises different defining texts of the doctrinal dialogue of demonology, similar to Jean Bodin’s De la Demonmanie des sorciers (1580), Nicolas Remi’s Daemonlatreiae (1595), Henri Boguet’s Discours des sorciers(1602) and Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de I’inconstance des mauvais anges (1612).
Transcript of Trial of Maria Renata Sänger von Mossau, 1749. Open to her Inquisition sentencing.
Important within the assortment are a small and intensely uncommon variety of works by theologians who opposed the Inquisition, similar to these of Cornelius Loos, the primary theologian in Germany to jot down in opposition to the witch hunts. Crucial supplies within the Witchcraft assortment, nonetheless, are the courtroom data of the trials of witches, together with authentic manuscript depositions taken from the victims. These paperwork, in each authentic manuscript and in print, reveal the cruel consequence of the extra distant doctrinal disputes. Maybe probably the most vital of all manuscripts within the Witchcraft assortment is the minutes of the witchcraft trial of Dietrich Flade, a sixteenth-century metropolis choose and rector who spoke out in opposition to the cruelty and injustice of the persecutions within the 1580s. These and different trial paperwork are listed within the assortment’s finding aid.
Within the twenty first century, curators started constructing on AD White’s witchcraft assortment by buying fashionable supplies similar to posters and publicity for films featuring witches or sorcery, and newsletters on the actions of latest Wiccan and Pagan communities.
Search/Browse Digitized Witchcraft Books in English
Whereas your entire bodily Witchcraft Assortment is on the market for in-person analysis in Cornell Library’s Uncommon and Manuscript Division, 104 English language books from the gathering could be learn on-line within the Digital Witchcraft Assortment. These titles had been digitally scanned from microfilm by Main Supply Media in 1998. The ensuing full textual content scans had been later made out there to Cornell College Library to allow free public entry.