Abel Alves
BB 232
Office Hours: Tu W 1:30-2:30
Also by appointment.
Spring Semester, 2008
www.bsu.edu/web/00aaalves
285-8729
aalves@bsu.edu
HISTORY 468
WITCHCRAFT, MAGIC, AND SCIENCE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD 1492-1859
M 6:30-9:10, BB 106
This course intends to explore the quest for applicable knowledge in the early modern European world (i.e., broadly
defined). We will explore learned elite culture as it abandoned the practices of natural magic for the real successes
found in science. In doing this, we will see how this elite culture was part of a broader, popular perspective (e.g.,
practicality in the crafts), but also how it tried to break free of that world view in the pursuit of power-granting
knowledge. Conflicts often enough arose with the views of the less learned on the same general issues of applicable
knowledge and power. Witchcraft will be studied as the reaction of the masses to natural trials and material needs.
The extent to which this mostly oral tradition came into conflict with learned traditions will be explored through the
works of Ruggiero, Lewis, and others. In short, the class will not only study the birth of modern science; it will also
study the gender, class and ethnic battles that ensued between learned men and lay subcultures, with a special focus
on the women subordinated by patriarchy and their resistance to systems of male dominance. Indeed, in dealing
with patriarchal dominance, woman scientists would have to deal with issues already confronted by women serving
as traditional healers or “witches.” Those who were accused of witchcraft for their assertiveness or “otherness” (i.e.,
the majority of those accused) will also be studied.
Your grade will be based on a midterm take-home exam (25%), a written paper proposal with bibliography (10%), a
final research project (40%), and two brief review essays based on two of the book-length readings (20%). The
remainder of your grade will be determined by class participation, as I do always hope for lively discussion (5%).
The final research paper must be based on primary sources, and it is encouraged that you use the assigned readings
and lectures as aids in determining your topic. A twelve- to fifteen-page paper using proper research methods (i.e.,
notes and bibliography) is expected. It might be a comparative analysis of court proceedings at the trial of Alice
Kyteler and the trials of the Salem witches. It might study Native American or African cultural traditions’ survival
in the practices of curanderas or voodoo priestesses respectively. It might review the portrayal of witches in the art
of Goya. It might analyze the writings of Galileo or Darwin; the difficulties faced by women scientists like
Clémence Royer or Laura Bassi, or the attempts to blend spirituality and science in the writings of Alfred Russel
Wallace. The choice is yours. In advance, you may volunteer to present the paper orally using PowerPoint.
Presentations will last some 15 to 20 minutes and occur during the last week of class and the final exam period. All
will be given this opportunity if they so choose it. My lecture time will be curtailed if necessary. A well done
PowerPoint presentation will be credited toward 15% of your research project grade.
If you have any special needs or challenges that should be dealt with to enhance your learning experience, please do
not hesitate to tell me. I will accommodate you. Laptops are permitted for note-taking purposes, but cell phones
should be turned off before entering class.
Required Readings To Be Purchased
Steven Shapin. The Scientific Revolution.
Bernard Lightman, editor. Victorian Science in Context.
Darren Oldridge, editor. The Witchcraft Reader.
Guido Ruggiero. Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance.
Laura A. Lewis. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico.
Mary Beth Norton. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.
Martha Ward. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau.
1
Syllabus
WEEK I (1/7):
The Organic Cosmos: Linkages between Witchcraft Magic and Science
Required Reading (Handouts):
 “The Trial of Dame Alice Kyteler,” in The Witchcraft Sourcebook, ed. Brian P.
Levack (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 39-42.
 Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus
Copernicus (New York: Penguin, 2004), 50-53.
 Pope John Paul II, ‘‘Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996),’’ in
Darwin, 3rd ed., ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 2001), 527 – 528
WEEK II (1/14):
Elite Control, Male Control
Required Reading: The Witchcraft Reader, 1-86; 120-179; 201-225; 267-321.
Recommended:
 Brian P. Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (New York:
Longman, 2006).
 Jonathan Barry & Owen Davies, editors, Witchcraft Historiography (Hampshire
UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
 The University of Pennsylvania Press has produced a multivolume history
entitled Witchcraft and Magic in Europe under the editorial direction of Bengt
Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. Every volume is extremely useful.
WEEK III (1/28):
Venetian Women Resist
Reading: Ruggiero, Binding Passions, all..
Recommended:
 Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New
York: Penguin Books, 1985).
 Gregory Hanlon, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
WEEK IV (2/4):
Afro-Latinas and Native American Women Resist
Reading: Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, all.
Recommended:
 Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Wtiches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca
and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
 Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in
New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
WEEK V (2/11):
Salem Possessed
Reading: Norton, Devil’s Snare, all; Witchcraft Reader, 353-366
Recommended:
 Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum, The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
 John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early
New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
 Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial
New England (New York, 1987).
 Jane Kamensky, “Female Speech and Other Demons: Witchcraft and Wordcraft
in Early New England,” in Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America, ed.
Elizabeth Reis (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998), 25-51.
FIRST BOOK REVIEW DUE.
2
WEEK VI (2/18):
Natural Magic and Science in an Organic Cosmos
Reading: Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, all
Recommended:
 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1987).
 Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, rev. ed. (New
York: Free Press, 1965).
 David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reappraisals of the Scientific
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
 I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics, rev. ed. (New York: Norton,
1985).
 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990).
 Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire
and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).
 Abel Alves, “Complicated Cosmos: Astrology and Anti-Machiavellianism in
Saavedra’s Empresas políticas,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 25:1 (Spring
1994): 67-84.
 James A. Connor, Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order
Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother
(New York: Harper Collins, 2004).
 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE has started publication and is
currently still being published. It promises to be an excellent secondary source
that I am currently ordering for the library.
WEEK VII (2/25):
Women in a Mechanical Universe
Reading: Gabriella Berti Logan, “The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth-Century
Italian Woman of Science” The American Historical Review 99:3 (June 1994): 785 ff.
(28p.). AVAILABLE ONLINE AT JSTOR.
Recommended:
 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the
Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).
 Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, rev. ed. (New York:
Dover, 1988).
 Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts & Fictions
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
 Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996).
 Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the
Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005).
 Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
WEEK VIII (3/3):
Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow
TAKE-HOME MIDTERM DUE
WEEK IX (3/10):
SPRING BREAK
3
WEEK X (3/17):
Darwin’s Tangled Bank: Victorian Science in Context
Reading: Alfred Russel Wallace, “Note on the Theory of Permanent and Geographical
Varieties,” www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S039.htm; Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the
Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type,”
www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S043.htm; Victorian Science in Context, 24-50; 94-175;
236-255.
Recommended:
 Ernst Mayer, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 12-39, 188264.
 Philip Appleman, ed., Darwin, 3rd ed., ed. (New York: Norton, 2001).
 Thomas H. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of
Michigan Press, 1959),
 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Norton, 1991).
 Joy Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and
Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers
University Press, 1997).
PAPER PROPOSAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE.
WEEK XI (3/24):
The Problem of Alfred Russel Wallace
Reading: Alfred Russel Wallace, “Spiritualism and Science,”
www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S219.htm; Alfred Russel Wallace, “Notes on the
Growth of Opinion as to Obscure Psychical Phenomenon During the Last Fifty Years,”
www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S478.htm; Victorian Science in Context, 290-333; 354377.
Recommended:
 Alfred Russel Wallace, InfiniteTropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, ed.
Andrew Berry (London: Verso, 2002).
 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Alfred Russel Wallace Reader, ed. Jane R. Camerini
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins, 2002), 185.

Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel
Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Martin Fichman, An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
 Richard Milner, ‘‘Charles Darwin and Associates, Ghostbusters,’’
ScientificAmerican, vol. 275, no. 4 (1996): 96 – 101.
WEEK XII (3/31):
Voodoo as African Cultural Resistance
Reading: Ward, Voodoo Queen, all.
Recommended:
 Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Schocken
Books, 1972).
 Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
(Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
 Sandra T. Barnes, Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, 2nd ed. (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).
 David C. Estes, “Hoodoo? God Do: African American Women and Contested
Spirituality in the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans,” in Spellbound: Women
and Witchcraft in America, ed. Elizabeth Reis (Wilmington, DE: SR Books,
1998), 157-182.
 John Thornton, “African Religions and Christianity in the Atlantic World,” in
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
4
WEEK XIII (4/7):
Victorians and the Supernatural: The Case of Bridget Cleary
GUEST LECTURER: Rachael D. Smith, M.A.
Reading: Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 59-87; Victorian Science in Context, 378-408.
Recommended:
 Rachael D. Smith, Contemporary Paganism in America: The Role of
Heterosexual and Homosexual Males in a Female Oriented Religion (Muncie,
IN: Ball State University Unpublished Master’s Thesis, 2006).
 Louis S. Warren, “Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker,
and the Frontiers of Racial Decay,” The American Historical Review 107:4
(October 2002): 1124-1157. Available on JSTOR.
SECOND BOOK REVIEW DUE.
WEEK XIV (4/14):
Amazing Adventures and Weird Tales: Into the Twentieth Century
Reading: Abel Alves, “Humanity’s Place in Nature, 1863 – 1928: Horror,
Curiosity and the Expeditions of Huxley, Wallace, Blavatsky and Lovecraft,” Theology
and Science 6: 1 (February 2008): 73-88; Victorian Science in Context, 256-280;
Witchcraft Reader, 413-436.
Recommended:
 Dan Burton and David Grandy, Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in
Western Civilization (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 2004).
 David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (Vancouver: Regent,
1984).
 Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific
Proof of Life After Death (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
 Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1921).
 John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body
and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
WEEK XV (4/21):
Presentations
N.B.
Our scheduled final slot is Monday, April 28 from 7 to 9 PM. Presentations Continue.
FINAL RESEARCH PAPER DUE.
5