Profs and Pints Online presents: “Witches and Witch Hunts,” with Mikki Brock, associate professor of history at Washington and Lee University and scholar of demonology, witchcraft, and early modern Scotland.

Mikki Brock, one of the most popular speakers to take the Profs and Pints stage, returns with an online version of the talk that first gained her a loyal following: a discussion of the history of witch hunts, both real and rhetorical.

Over the past three years, Donald Trump has attempted to cast both the Mueller investigation and his impeachment as “the greatest witch hunt in American political history.” Critics of the #MeToo movement have warned of a “Salem atmosphere” in Hollywood and beyond. But what does it really mean when men in positions of power claim to be victims of a “witch hunt”? And what about the real history of the witch trials, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of women in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe?

Come explore such questions with Professor Brock, who teaches a class on witch-hunts at Washington and Lee. Prepare for an evening of both horror and humor, as she describes waves of rampant anxiety and appalling persecution as well as seemingly bizarre premodern beliefs about demon sex and penis trees.

As the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700 and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition, Professor Brock knows both tales of the supernatural and accounts of bizarre human beliefs and behavior that will send a chill up your spine. Her talk just might leave you spellbound. (This talk remains available in recorded form.)

Profs & Pints Online: Witches and Witch Hunts