ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century the judicial prosecution ofwitches, which had reached its most intense point in the closing years of the sixteenth century and in the early years of the seventeenth century, had finally come to an end. Either witchcraft had been formally decriminalized by the repeal of the laws authorizing the trials, or courts had simply stopped conducting trials. Nevertheless, witch-hunts did not disappear but continued in a variety of different forms. First, communities often took justice in their own hands by lynching or otherwise persecuting the people who had been accused of witchcraft. Secondly, judicial authorities in Europe and America pursued and prosecuted marginal or dissident groups using similar tactics to those that had been employed against witches, thus giving rise to a new, broader definition of the term ‘witch-hunt’. Thirdly, in late twentiethcentury America and Britain a number of individuals have been prosecuted for satanic ritual abuse, an alleged crime that resembles in many respects the crime of witches in the early modern period. Finally, witch-finding movements have flourished in many African countries since the cessation of colonial rule in the twentieth century.
