The cover story on the latest edition of Distillations, the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s excellent magazine, traces the history of truth serums and related efforts to compel people to tell a truth they might want to keep secret. The section on hypnosis, “the first modern method for coaxing out buried truths,” includes these images. The top […]
Tag: Witchcraft
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pamphlets became an important vehicle for disseminating information and reporting on contemporary issues, especially during periods of crisis and instability. Unsurprisingly, tales of witchcraft and demonic possession turned up in these pamphlets. I spent some time today surveying witchcraft and possession pamphlets published in England.[1] Here are a few […]
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Witchcraft and Digital Humanities
Digital humanities is a term that risks losing all useful meaning as scholars apply it to an ever increasing range of projects. Many of these projects are “digital” only insofar as they put material online, often without providing any tools that facilitate the study of that material. A collection of on-line texts, for example, is […]