Valerie Kivelson

In early modern Europe, thousands of women were burned as witches during the period of the witch hunts. From the court records of seventeenth-century Russia a very different picture emerges. The great majority of those accused of witchcraft were men. Broadly comparative, Desperate Magic by Valerie Kivelson is the first sustained study of seventeenth-century Russian witch trials. The book uses trial evidence to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history. The routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions raises methodological and moral questions with continuing resonance in the world today. A major finding of this book is that witchcraft was not a marginal practice in early modern Russia. It was practiced by all ranks of society, from serf to tsaritsa at the same time that it was severely condemned and punished. Testimony from these cases lets us see into the emotional lives of illiterate women and men of the Russian past. This analysis shows how the State and relations of power were inscribed into everyday practices, and magic was used as a defense by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world.

Picturing Russian Empire offers a new way to approach the history of Russia as an empire and as a state located in a world characterized by a churning, dynamic exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history. Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.

In early modern Europe, thousands of women were burned as witches during the period of the witch hunts. From the court records of seventeenth-century Russia a very different picture emerges. The great majority of those accused of witchcraft were men. Broadly comparative, Desperate Magic by Valerie Kivelson is the first sustained study of seventeenth-century Russian witch trials. The book uses trial evidence to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history. The routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions raises methodological and moral questions with continuing resonance in the world today. A major finding of this book is that witchcraft was not a marginal practice in early modern Russia. It was practiced by all ranks of society, from serf to tsaritsa at the same time that it was severely condemned and punished. Testimony from these cases lets us see into the emotional lives of illiterate women and men of the Russian past. This analysis shows how the State and relations of power were inscribed into everyday practices, and magic was used as a defense by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world.