potions

‘The witches are carried sometimes in their bodies and clothes, at other times without, and the examiner thinks their bodies are sometimes left behind. Even when their spirits only are present, yet they know one another.’ -Witch trial record from Taunton, England, 1664. In his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, Carlo Ginzburg attempted to revise what had been to that date, the orthodox assumptions made by historians about the witches’ sabbath during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. These assumptions were based mostly on the documentation of witch trials throughout Europe, which have survived, in various forms, in relatively large numbers. Ginzburg points out that previous to his study, historians had been (with a few exceptions) exclusively