ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what ordinary early modern people, common villagers and townsfolk, understood witchcraft to be, why they suspected certain people were witches, and how these suspicions fed into the witch hunts. The demonology only played a limited role in ordinary peoples’ understanding of witchcraft. Witchcraft and witch accusations alike were not aberrations from but extensions of neighborly conflict. The misfortunes ordinary early moderns saw as possible consequences of witchcraft varied widely. Interpersonal conflict was at the core of witchcraft, both actual, in the sense of rituals conducted and injuries inflicted, and suspected. While the everyday witch fears and activities of villagers and townspeople fed into the early modern hunts, the hunts fed back into everyday life. Magical beliefs, practices, and effects were a pervasive part of everyday life everywhere in Europe, but their specific forms varied enormously from place to place.
