Claire B. Post 7: The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection

The Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection is a digital sampling of titles from the Cornell University Library's collection of materials on Witchcraft. According to Cornell, the collection documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft across a range geographies, with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives.

Collection Principles

The majority of the Witchcraft Collection was acquired in the 1880s through the efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first President and an active scholar and book buyer, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr.
The collection contains early texts from the period when the theory of the heresy of witchcraft was being formulated, including fourteen Latin editions of one of the more sinister works on demonology, the Malleus maleficarum, which codified church dogma on heresy. Four of these Latin editions were printed in the fifteenth-century, most notably the scarce first edition printed before April 14, 1487.

The collection also contains other texts of the doctrinal discussion of demonology, as well as the works of theologians who opposed the Inquisition, for example Cornelius Loos, the first theologian in Germany to write against the witch hunts. The project's claim to fame is its court records of the trials of witches, including original manuscript depositions taken from the victims in the torture chamber. One example is the minutes of the witchcraft trial of Dietrich Flade, a sixteenth-century city judge and rector who spoke out against the persecutions in the 1580s. The manuscript was discovered in Germany and acquired by Andrew Dickson White in 1883.

Object Characteristics

The current digital collection contains 104 monographs (23,220 pages of material). Pages are viewed as GIF images, or as long formatted pages of the text taken from the pages with a manual delineation of pages. You can save or print images, and also add them to your "bookbag" where your searches are saved. Once saving in the bookbag, viewers can email the links of the items of interest to themselves or others.

Metadata

The volumes are viewable as "body of text" (scanned pages) or viewers have the option of "view entire text" which shows a long page of all text from all pages together. Any item that is available is available in its entirety, so it takes a while to load some of the enormous volumes. Then you can do a text search, or copy and paste text as needed. Metadata includes author (if known), title, publication information. Browsing is available by author or title. This can be challenging if you do not read Latin.

Intended Audience

The Witchcraft Collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. The site's documentation page claims that the collection "focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy," but I imagine that folklorists or anthropologists, as well as literary scholars, would still find some interesting materials here.