The Witch Trials

Double, double toil, and trouble… During the witch craze, around 100,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe alone, and as many as 60,000 of them were executed. But almost everything you know about witch hunts is wrong. Come learn why belief in the supernatural and belief in science were twinned together, how Monty Python got it wrong, and just what was so weird about Salem. And see how taking these witch hunts seriously can make us understand our world–and the foundations of modern American science, religion, culture, literature, and politics–much more clearly. Something wicked this way comes.

Lucy Kaufman is the Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama, where she focuses on the social history of the fast-changing world of Elizabethan England. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge, Lucy taught at the University of Oxford before coming to Alabama. Her first book, A People’s Reformation, explores the foundations of the Church of England and the everyday people who built it.