Men as witches have received very little attention in the voluminous literature on demonology, witchcraft and witch persecutions in the early modern European world. This volume seeks to remedy that situation. Schulte examines the trial records and popular beliefs of several locales. Schulte shows through a quantitative analysis of trial documents that as many at 25% of those prosecuted for witchcraft in Western Europe were in fact male! Besides his heavy uses of statistics to give shape to the story of the male witch, Schulte analyzes legal texts (i.e. the jurist Bodin) to show that male witches were often tied to lycanthropy (becoming wolves) and that as the 17th century waxed, a feminization of the witch occurred-- focusing more attention on women as potential servants of the devil rather than men. Schulte shows through careful statistical charting that it was Protestants, rather than Catholics, that drove this gendered trend.
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