ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some skepticism about current theories of ideology. It summarizes the main facts and trends and explanations that historians have come up with. The chapter shows how these facts and explanations create difficulties to some current theories of ideology. It outlines a rational choice view of belief and ideology and accounts for the witchcraze in rational choice terms. The chapter also summarizes the vast historical scholarship on the european witchcraze of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries topic in the last twenty years by historians of the Renaissance and Reformation, historians of religion, anthropologists, legal scholars, and many others. The information system that culture is encoded in and where meanings are assigned is the human brain and its varied extensions: language, books, songs, ritual, rules, roles, stereotypes, mathematical theorems. It is vulnerable to the depreciation and destruction of its carriers. Meanings are communicated with metaphor and simile, the stuff of folk tales, proverbs, poems, familiar images.
