The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World - Softcover

Demos, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670019992 ISBN 13: 9780670019991

Publisher: Viking Books, 2008

Synopsis

With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prize?winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world?women and men who were targeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrific crimes by supernatural means?and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, and purging. A unique and fascinating book, it illumines the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of perceived evil, no matter what the human cost.

About this title

About the Author

John Demos is Samuel Knight Professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of several histories of early America, including Entertaining Satan, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Unredeemed Captive, which received the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington prizes in American history and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

From Booklist

For each of four instances of witch-hunting in Europe, early America, Salem (Massachusetts), and contemporary America, Demos provides the stories of two persons affected by it and an excellent overview of what historians know about each incidence and how they interpret documentary and other evidence. He presents several theories about witch-hunting, but as the title implies, he believes witch-hunting is a way of purging from within, specifically aimed at women and only collaterally at men connected to the targeted women. A witch-hunt, by Demos’ definition, finds women who represent something unsettling to society and punishes or kills them to “cleanse” the society. That witch-hunting is a form of misogyny is central to Demos’ argument, and when he examines recent “witch-hunting” episodes, he finds the term applicable only as a metaphor. Controversially, he argues that persecution of female day-care operators in the 1980s for alleged Satanism was witch-hunting, since at the time women needed day care because they were entering the workforce in numbers that constituted a socially destabilizing movement. Compelling, impressively researched history and argumentation. --Patricia Monaghan

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0670019992
• ISBN 13: 9780670019991
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318