Time: 3 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

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Join Professor Ronald Hutton to find out why the notorious medieval and early modern European witch-hunts took place. Discover what made them different from witch-hunts elsewhere in the world, why they stopped and the impact have they had on witchcraft beliefs and human rights in the present world.

The story of witch-hunting takes us on a journey through the civilizations of the ancient world and early Christianity to a change in mood in late medieval European Christian times. This is when people stopped perceiving witchcraft as a minor problem affecting individuals and started seeing it as a satanic conspiracy directed against the whole of society.

Europe is unique in making this transition and viewing witchcraft as a demonic form of religion. It is also unique in moving from a profound fear of witchcraft to a disbelief in it, officially at least.

How this change came about and how far that fear still presents a problem to the modern world, will be the central issues of this lecture.

Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.

Viktor Wynd is an artist, author, lecturer, and impresario. He operates The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History as part of The Last Tuesday Society, which hosts London’s longest-running independent literary salon and has hosted over 500 lectures since 2005, from household names to unpublished obsessives.