Rumor, hearsay, tittle-tattle, scuttlebutt, scandal, dirt. From mid-to-late 1600s colonial Virginia churchyards and New England courthouses to the early-twentieth-first-century blogosphere—and in many places and times in between—gossip has been called many things. It is one of the most common—and often…
Tag: witchcraft
‘The Devil’s Milkmaid’: The Witch as a Woman in
In 1532, four years before Denmark officially became Lutheran, a woman suspected of witchcraft was brought to the manor court of Øster Horne in Jutland. The woman on trial was called Karen Hanskone, her name indicating that she was the…