ABSTRACT
From the nineteenth century onwards there were many educated European voices claiming that the belief in witchcraft was a relic of the past, and that only the peasantry and uneducated people in remote and backward areas of the countryside feared witches. Historians of early modern witchcraft accusations rely on criminal records and pamphlets that provide details of witch trials. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, inspired in part by the French and German ethnographic studies, some historians began to reflect more seriously on piecing together the history of witchcraft between the days of the trials and the contemporary evidence. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries German-American immigrants also made good use of the American courts to counter witchcraft slander. When the folklorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries went collecting examples of supposedly archaic beliefs and traditions they found that belief in the existence of witches was still widespread in rural communities.
