Art of the Witch Trials

Project Description

In the modern age, we know witches as cartoonish, ghoulish, elderly women in pointy black hats, but for Europeans during the 14th through 18th century, the collective perception of witches was far different. The fear of witches was real, pervasive, and primal. Witches served as an explanation for the unexplainable, with unnatural happenings and poor fortune attributed to predominantly lower income elderly women of rural communities. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, just over 100,000 trials for witchcraft took place in Europe, with roughly 60,000 ending in execution.

This collection features drawings, paintings, woodcuts, engravings and lithographs depicting witches, bewitchment, and punishments from University of Oxford’s Digital Bodleian Library, Internet Archive, Karlsruhe State Art Gallery, Rijks Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery, Welcome Collection, and Zurich Central Library. These works helped create and uphold systemic and societal fear of and belief in witchcraft across many countries and hundreds of years.

This collection will speak to someone who wants to connect with the fear and uncertainty European citizens lived with during the era of witch hunts and trials, ones who are hoping to understand the culture that went hand-in-hand with religious and political persecution to result in a deadly and prejudiced belief system.

Featured Image

The featured image displays the first known artistic depiction of a witch, found in the 1451 manuscript Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies)