Witchcraft in Romania

This book provides a history of witchcraft in the territories that compose contemporary Romania, with a focus on the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first part presents aspects of earthly justice, religious and secular, analysing the codes of law, trials and verdicts, and underlining the differences between Transylvania on one hand, and Moldavia and Wallachia on the other. The second part is concerned with divine justice, describing apocalyptic texts that talk about the pains of witches in hell, but also the ensembles of religious painting where, in vast compositions of the Last Judgment, various punishments for the sin of witchcraft are imagined.

Proposes the first historical survey of witchcraft in the ancient provinces that compose contemporary Romania Places Romanian witchcraft in the vast network of European magic culture, through a careful comparative approach Analyses a seminal iconography related to witchcraft, gathered during long years of field research

Auteur
Ioan Pop-Curseu is Professor at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania.
tefana Pop-Cur eu is Associate Professor at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania.

Contenu
Chapter 1: Introduction: Who Are the Romanians and How to Study Witchcraft in Romania?.- Part I: Trials in Earthly Life.- Chapter 2: Witchcraft Acts: Condemnation of Sorcery in the Codes of Law.- Chapter 3: Trials, Persecutions, Executions (the SixteenthNineteenth Centuries).- Chapter 4: New Elites, New Paradigms of Rationality (EighteenthNineteenth Centuries): Against the Superstitions of the Romanians.- Part II: Trials in the Afterlife.- Chapter 5: Canonical Versus Apocryphal: Religious Texts Condemning Witchcraft.- Chapter 6: Doomsday and Hellfire: Iconographic Representations of Witchcraft in Last Judgment Compositions.- Chapter 7: Conclusions.