Feeling with Demons: An Emotional History of Witchcraft in the English Atlantic c. 1560-1730 (Routledge Studies in the History of Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic)

Feeling with Demons offers a renewed approach to early modern witchcraft through the lens of the history of emotions.It examines the intellectual, judicial, and emotional frameworks that shaped witch-hunting in Old and New England, as well as the personal and communal tensions that fuelled accusations, their connections to demonic possession, and the arguments advanced by those who challenged the trials. Drawing on demonological treatises, sermons, witchcraft pamphlets, and trial records, the book investigates the emotional worlds of accused witches, victims, witnesses, and judicial and religious authorities.It asks which feelings demonologists encouraged or condemned; which emotions contemporaries associated with witchcraft; how alleged victims understood their affective experiences; how the accused were expected to respond before judges and juries; and what it meant, emotionally, to undergo demonic possession.By examining what people feared, hated, envied, despised, or raged against,