Week 4: Witches in Popular Culture
Inversion, Misrule, and Witchcraft

I. Introduction: The Feast of Fools

II. Understanding Popular Culture
A) Traditions “Great” and “Little”
B) Cultures in Common?
1. The Cycle of Seasons and the Liturgical Round 
2. A Case in Point: Sacramentals 

Map: Sixteenth-Century Friuli
Chart: Cases of "Magical Arts" Tried before the Friulian Inquisition (1596-1785)
Map: The Italian Inquisition (1706)

Image: The Ritual Calendar
Graph: The Gray Zone between Official and Popular Religion


Image: Details from Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent” (1559). To the left is the gluttonous Prince Carnival, who sits astride a beer barrel and whose lance impales a pig's head, a chicken, and sausage; instead of a crown, Prince Carnival wears a corw-meat pie. To the right is abstemious Dame Lent—dour, half-starved, sitting on a bare wooden chair; her lance is a long-handled paddle that carries two meager fish, at her feet are a miserably thin pretzel and a loaf of unleavened bread.

Seasons, Magic, and Witches

Map: Switzerland in the Early Modern Period
Map: Processions of the Dead: Nomenclature

I. The Tenor of Late Medieval Popular Religion
A) The Assertive Villages of Tirol
B) A Golden Age of Popular Religion?
C) An Era of Decay?

Image: Master of the Dominican Effigies (Florentine, active 1336-1345), The Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds (detail, c. 1340), miniature on vellum, 36.5 x 27.1 cm. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, 1949.5.87. Image source: National Gallery of Art.
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