Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16Th and 17Th Centuries | OCR A-Level History A (H505)

Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16Th and 17Th Centuries

140 questions
14 subtopics
Thematic study and historical interpretations, one of twenty-one
Y301 to Y321

Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries is unit Y312 of OCR History A, one of the twenty-one options in unit group 3, the thematic study and historical interpretations; a student sits one of them.

Its four key topics and three depth studies are popular culture, the main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches, the persecuted, responses of the authorities to witchcraft, the Witchcraze in Southern Germany c.1590–1630, Hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647, the Salem witch trials. 140 recall questions across 14 subtopics.

Sample questions from Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16Th and 17Th Centuries

Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.

Popular culture: popular and elite culture, their definitions

Explain what is meant by the withdrawal of the elite.

Show the answer
It is the argument that before about 1500 the elite shared in the festivals, tales and games of everyone else, and that by about 1800 they had abandoned them as vulgar and superstitious, leaving popular culture to the poor.
Popular culture: public humiliation, role of magic in society and social control

What connection did contemporaries make between the alehouse and disorder?

Show the answer
Magistrates saw alehouses as breeding idleness, drunkenness, illicit sex and sedition among the poor, and licensing was used repeatedly to suppress or control them.
The main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches: war, plague, scepticism and decline

Was persecution driven from above or from below?

Show the answer
Both, and the distinction matters: villagers usually supplied the original accusations of harm, while learned judges and rulers supplied the demonological framework and the torture that turned single cases into mass panics.
The persecuted: geography of the Witchcraze in Europe

What was distinctive about the Swedish panic of the later 1660s?

Show the answer
It spread on the testimony of children who claimed to have been carried to a witches' gathering at Blåkulla, and hundreds of adults were condemned largely on what children said.
Responses of the authorities to witchcraft: Legal developments

What was the Carolina of 1532?

Show the answer
It was the imperial criminal code that regulated procedure in the German lands, requiring grounds of suspicion before torture and treating harmful witchcraft as a capital offence.
Responses of the authorities to witchcraft: English methods, the Inquisitions and the end of prosecution

State what the English Act of 1736 changed.

Show the answer
It abolished the crime of witchcraft altogether and made it an offence instead to pretend to exercise magical powers, so the law now punished the fraudulent cunning man rather than the supposed witch.
Depth study: The Witchcraze in Southern Germany c.1590–1630 — belief, crisis, the course of the hunts and their checking

What was the relationship between the Thirty Years War and the peak of the hunts?

Show the answer
The hunts of 1626 to 1631 coincided with the war's devastation of Franconia, and the arrival of Swedish armies in 1631 ended them by destroying the authority of the prince-bishops who ran them.
Depth study: Hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647 — the hunt, Hopkins’s methods and why it happened

What is a familiar, and why is it distinctive?

Show the answer
It is an imp in animal form, such as a cat, toad or mouse, believed to be suckled by the witch on a special teat, and it is a feature of English witchcraft largely absent from continental demonology.

The 14 subtopics

One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.

Subtopic	What it covers	Questions
Popular culture: popular and elite culture, their definitions	Recall questions on popular and elite culture, their definitions, participation in popular culture and the withdrawal of the elite, the significance of ritual, the role of pageants and the festivals of misrule.	8
Popular culture: public humiliation, role of magic in society and social control	Recall questions on public humiliation, moral regulation, the role of magic in society, religious change, political change, economic change and social control.	12
The main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches: demonology, confessional strife and village tensions	Recall questions on the papal bull of 1484, the Malleus Maleficarum, printing, the cumulative concept and crimen exceptum, confessional strife, the mini Ice Age and weather trials, and charity refused and village divisions.	10
The main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches: war, plague, scepticism and decline	Recall questions on midwives, war and plague, persecution from above or below, Salazar’s findings, sceptical writers, new ideas of nature and medicine, the English statutes and the numbers tried and executed.	10
The persecuted: geography of the Witchcraze in Europe	Recall questions on the geography of the Witchcraze in Europe and North America.	9
The persecuted: town and country, religion, gender, age and status	Recall questions on urban and rural accusations, towns that resisted, Catholic and Protestant persecution, the proportion of women accused and its explanations, regions of male witches, age, children, social position and occupations.	11
Responses of the authorities to witchcraft: Legal developments	Recall questions on legal developments including the Inquisitorial system of criminal procedure and campaigns against medieval superstition.	8
Responses of the authorities to witchcraft: English methods, the Inquisitions and the end of prosecution	Recall questions on burning in England, swimming and pricking, the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, the Reformation and protective ritual, appellate courts, confessions, the Act of 1736 and the legacy for legal procedure.	12
Depth study: The Witchcraze in Southern Germany c.1590–1630 — the great hunts and their prince-bishops	Recall questions on the fragmented political map, the territories of the largest hunts, Ellwangen, Würzburg, Bamberg and the Junius case, the Trier hunt and its opponents, and the religious divide in the region.	9
Depth study: The Witchcraze in Southern Germany c.1590–1630 — belief, crisis, the course of the hunts and their checking	Recall questions on popular belief, economic pressure and weather, the Thirty Years War, the fee system, the speed of the hunts, children, the most powerful contemporary attack on the trials, their checking from above and explanations of their intensity.	11
Depth study: Hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647 — the hunt, Hopkins’s methods and why it happened	Recall questions on Matthew Hopkins, the start and spread of the hunt, numbers accused and executed, Chelmsford, the clergyman executed in Suffolk, the methods of Hopkins and Stearne, familiars and the conditions that made 1645 possible.	10
Depth study: Hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647 — context, critics and the end of the hunt	Recall questions on the collapse of the church courts, religious and economic pressures, how the witchfinders were paid, contemporary criticism and Hopkins’s reply, the judges’ questions, his end and historians’ explanations.	10
Depth study: The Salem witch trials — the crisis of 1692 and the accusations	Recall questions on the setting of Salem, the political and legal crisis, the colony’s charter, religious anxiety, Samuel Parris, frontier war, the first accusations, Tituba’s confession, the spread of accusation and spectral evidence.	11
Depth study: The Salem witch trials — executions, interpretations and the end of the trials	Recall questions on the numbers imprisoned and dead, George Burroughs, the incentive to confess, the Salem Possessed and ergot interpretations, gender and property, the end of the trials, later acknowledgement and lasting impact.	9

Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16Th and 17Th Centuries is 140 of the 6,240 questions in the guide.Get the guide, £8

How the guide is worked

Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.

Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
Step 2 · Open book
Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.
Step 3 · Closed book again
Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.