Witchcraft in Poland
Outside the imagination, witches don’t exist – but in early modern Poland, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. Professor Michael Ostling of Arizona State University reveals the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes.
Having studied many accusations and confessions while researching his book Between the Devil and the Host, Ostling will also discuss how witches viewed themselves and their own religious lives. The accusations they faced of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us the deeply pious Catholic culture of Poland at the time. With it came a complex folklore of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptised babies.
Through the dark glass of witchcraft, Ostling will explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.
Bio
Michael Ostling is a religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft. His published works include a general history of witchcraft in early modern Poland, an edited volume on Christian understandings of goblins and fairies globally, and work in the history of emotions, the ethnobotany of witchcraft, the demonization of Jews and witches, and the millenarian roots of religious toleration.
He also writes on theories of religion, often by way of pop culture studies, with work on Harry Potter (and secularization theory) and the Wizard of Oz (and theories of myth).
Ostling’s current work is taking him in a new direction: critical pedagogy, with an emphasis on the educational philosophy of the 20th-century Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń.
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