* 1612 – The " Samlesbury witches ", three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused for practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in English history.

* 1692 – Salem witch trials: in Salem, Massachusetts, Province of Massachusetts Bay, five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.

Sir William Phips, governor of the newly chartered Province of Massachusetts Bay, appointed his lieutenant governor, William Stoughton, as head of a special witchcraft tribunal and then as chief justice of the colonial courts, where he presided over the witch trials.

Mather's most fatal influence over the trials was in composing the answer to the question of whether or not to allow Spectral evidence, that is, allowing the afflicted girls to claim that some invisible ghost of the defendant was tormenting them, and for this to be considered evidence of witchcraft by the defendant, even if the defendant denied it and professed their own strongly held Christian beliefs.

Calef's book was inspired by the fear that Mather would succeed in once again stirring up new witchcraft trials, and the need to bear witness to the horrible experiences of New Englanders in 1692.

However, amongst much of Europe, belief in magic and witchcraft persisted, as did the witch trials in certain areas.

* 1653 – Sarah Good, American woman accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials ( d. 1692 )

It was likely because few experts in the witch trials actually bothered to counter her arguments that many Britons, including several historians not familiar with the witch trials, simply assumed that Murray's view was the consensus as to the nature of European witchcraft, and included her ideas in their own works.

* July 16 – The city of Würzburg is taken by Gustav Adolf of Sweden, putting an end to the Würzburg witch trials, but not before an estimated 900 people from the city and its environs had been burned at the stake for witchcraft.

* March 1 – The Salem witch trials begin in Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, with the charging of 3 women with witchcraft.

The 17th century saw the gradual rise of the " age of reason ", while belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and consequently the irrational surge of Early Modern witch trials, receded, a process only completed at the end of the Baroque period circa 1730.

* Liu Ju, crown prince of the Han Dynasty, revolts against his father, Emperor Wu, and his witchcraft trials.

A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials.

In the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland, over 70 people were accused of witchcraft on account of bad weather when James VI of Scotland, who shared the Danish king's interest in witch trials, sailed to Denmark in 1590 to meet his betrothed Anne of Denmark.

In 1645, 46 years before the Salem witch trials, Springfield, Massachusetts experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife, Hugh and Mary Parsons, accused each other of witchcraft.

This special interest of the king also resulted in the North Berwick witch trials with caused over seventy people to be accused of witchcraft in Scotland on account of bad weather when James VI of Scotland ( later James I of England ), who shared the Danish king ’ s interest in witch trials, in 1590 sailed to Denmark to meet his betrothed Anne of Denmark.

In 1662, he was involved in " one of the most notorious of the seventeenth century English witchcraft trials ", where he sentenced two women ( Amy Duny and Rose Callender ) to death for witchcraft, sorcery and " unnatural love ".

The Inquisition had conducted trials against supposed witches in the 13th century, but these trials were to punish heresy, of which belief in witchcraft was merely one variety.

Tombalbaye arrested major PPT leaders, including Malloum, for allegedly using witchcraft to overthrow him in what was known as the " Black Sheep Plot ," for the animals they allegedly sacrificed.

* 16th century: Catherine de ' Medici, the Queen of France, was said by Jean Bodin to have performed a Black Mass, based on a story in his book on witchcraft.

In essence, these stem from the belief in both White Magic and Black Magic, where the former is seen to be beneficial and seeks to bring about positive outcomes, and the latter being essentially malicious, sinister, and all-around evil ( sometimes also called witchcraft ).

* Prior to the dissolution it was said that the last abbess practiced witchcraft in a room to the south of the church which is now called ' The Black Hag's Cell '.

Black Moon is a reference to witchcraft which bears no significance to astronomy.

Black magic, trickery, witchcraft, sorcery, and the demons and devils will be thrown into fire.

In 1442, after an ecclesiastical court ( which included King Henry VI of England, Henry Beaufort and John Kemp ) found Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, guilty of witchcraft and banished her to the Isle of Man, a statute was enacted granting peeresses the right of trial by peers.

: the subtitle of this book should really be ' a history of modern pagan witchcraft in South Britain ( England, Wales, Cornwall and Man ), with some reference to it in the rest of the British Isles, Continental Europe and North America '.

On 8 November 1576, midwife Bessie Dunlop, resident in Dalry, Scotland, was accused of sorcery and witchcraft.

The last event in Cotton Mather's involvement with witchcraft was his attempt to cure Mercy Short and Margaret Rule.

Before she was executed, Mather tried to convert the Catholic Goodwife Glover, accused of practicing witchcraft on the Goodwin children.

Most interesting was Mather ’ s decision not to tell the community of the others whom Goodwife Clover claimed practiced witchcraft.

The saga of Hrolf Kraki adds that since Skuld was half-elven, she was very skilled in witchcraft ( seiðr ), and this to the point that she was almost invincible in battle.

In Christendom there also began to develop a widespread fear of witchcraft, which was believed to be Satanic in nature, and the subsequent hysteria, known as the Witch Hunt caused the death of around 40, 000 people, most of whom were women.

The group into which Gardner claimed to be initiated, known as the New Forest coven, was small and utterly secret as claiming to be a witch was illegal in Britain since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 made claiming to predict the future, conjure spirits, or cast spells a crime, and likewise made an accusation of witchcraft a criminal offense ).

By now, the king was convinced that his marriage was hexed, and having already found a new queen, Jane Seymour, he put Anne in the Tower of London on charges of witchcraft.

In addition to traditional, religious subjects, Baldung was concerned during these years with the profane theme of the imminence of death and with scenes of sorcery and witchcraft.

He often depicted witches, also a local interest: Strasbourg's humanists studied witchcraft and its bishop was charged with ferreting out witches.

Valiente offers another explanation for the negative reaction of some neopagans ; that the identification of Lucifer as the god of the witches in Aradia was " too strong meat " for Wiccans who were used to the gentler, romantic paganism of Gerald Gardner and were especially quick to reject any relationship between witchcraft and Satanism.

His mother Katharina Guldenmann, an inn-keeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist who was later tried for witchcraft.

" A popular medieval saying was, " The better the witch ; the better the midwife "; to guard against witchcraft, the Church required midwives to be licensed by a bishop and swear an oath not to use magic when assisting women through labour.

During the First World War, the Egyptology department was out of action and so Murray turned her attention to another subject, the history of witchcraft in Europe.

In 1929, she was commissioned to write the entry on " witchcraft " for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.