< Back

Lea, Henry Charles (ed.); Howland, Arthur C. (ed). [Hugh Trevor-Roper's copy, with his annotations].
Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft.
Publisher: Thomas Yoseloff, New York & London;
Date of Publication: 1957
Stock Code: 15235
Reprint after the first edition of 1939. Octavos, three volumes complete, paginated continuously pp., xliv, 1548. Publisher’s maroon cloth; titled in white within black frames to spine. Hugh Trevor-Ropers bookplate to front paste-down of each volume and with his signature in blue ink dated 1959 to front free end-paper of each volume. Occasional verbal annotations in blue ink by Trevor-Roper to each volume, extensive non-verbal annotations (on almost every page) by the same in pencil. Spines faded; mottling to cloth; shelf-wear to foot of text-block; top edges a little dusty; bindings otherwise strong and square. Internally in good order. A solid set. A substantive source-book for historians of witchcraft, owned and annotated by one of the most significant modern historians of the European witch-craze. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s (1914-2003) The European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1967) was a ‘watershed in modern scholarship’ (Gaskill, 1). In this influential essay, Trevor-Roper ‘banished the earlier twentieth-century idea that real witches had been targeted, either justly as a dangerous satanic sect or unjustly as an ancient fertility cult’ (Gaskill, 1). Trevor-Roper’s essay on the witch-craze inspired a generation of historians of witchcraft, and has since been challenged. This three-volume set includes many of the textual sources Trevor-Roper drew upon in his work. ‘Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft’ is the first book Trevor-Roper cites in his essay, and is a book he frequently refers to throughout. A scholar’s copy worthy of further investigation. £225.00