This book looks at aspects of the continuation of witchcraft and magic in Europe from the last of the secular and ecclesiastical trials during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through to the nineteenth century. It provides a brief outline of witch trials in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Finland. By the second half of the seventeenth century, as the witch trials reached their climax in Sweden, belief in the interventionist powers of the Devil had become a major preoccupation of the educated classes. Having acknowledged the slight possibility of real possession by the Devil, Benito Feijoo threw himself wholeheartedly into his real objective: to expose the falseness of the majority of the possessed. The book is concerned with accusations of magic, which were formalised as denunciations heard by the Inquisition of the Archdiocese of Capua, a city twelve miles north of Naples, during the first half of the eighteenth century. One aspect of the study of witchcraft and magic, which has not yet been absorbed into the main stream of literature on the subject, is the archaeological record of the subject. As a part of the increasing interest in 'popular' culture, historians have become more conscious of the presence of witchcraft after the witch trials. The aftermath of the major witch trials in Dalarna, Sweden, demonstrates how the authorities began the awkward process of divorcing themselves from popular concerns and beliefs regarding witchcraft.

Table of Contents:
List of contributors; Introduction: Beyond the witch-trials - Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt; 1. Marking (dis)order: Witchcraft and the symbolics of hierarchy in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Finland - Raisa Maria Toivo; 2. Pro exoneratione sua propria coscientia: Magic, witchcraft and Church in early eighteenth-century Capua - Augusto Ferraluolo; 3. From illusion to disenchantment: Feijoo versus the 'falsely possessed' in eighteenth-century Spain - Maria Tausiet; 4. Responses to witchcraft in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden Marie Lenners and: The aftermath of the witch-hunt in Dalarna Linda Oja: The superstitious other; 5. Witchcraft and magic in eighteenth-century Scotland - Peter Maxwell-Stuart; 6. The Devil's pact: A male strategy - Soili-Maria Olli; 7. Public infidelity and private belief?: The discourse of spirits in Enlightenment Bristol - Jonathan Barry; 8. 'Evil people': A late eighteenth-century Dutch witch doctor and his clients - Willem de Blecourt; 9. The archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic - Brian Hoggard; 10. The dissemination of magical knowledge in Enlightenment Germany Sabine Doering-Manteuffel: The supernatural and the development of print culture; Stephan Bachter: Grimoires and the transmission of magical knowledge; Index