Digital Witchcraft Collection

About this collection

This digital collection features 102 items selected from the Cornell Witchcraft Collection held by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

The 102 Cornell titles were selected and scanned by Primary Source media in 1998, working from a set of microfilm titled Witchcraft in Europe and America, created in 1983 and published by Research Publications, Inc.

The digital collection features only a small portion of Cornell’s Witchcraft Collection, which contains over 3,000 items documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe, from the 15th through the 18th centuries.

Historical context

The majority of the Witchcraft Collection was acquired in the 1880s through the collaborative efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first President, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr. The collection documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. The collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy.

Significant in the collection are a small and extremely rare number of works by theologians who opposed the Inquisition, such as those of Cornelius Loos, the first theologian in Germany to write against the witch hunts. The most important materials in the Witchcraft collection, however, are the court records of the trials of witches, including original manuscript depositions taken from the victims. These documents, in both original manuscript and in print, reveal the harsh outcome of the more remote doctrinal disputes. Perhaps the most significant of all manuscripts in the Witchcraft collection is the minutes of the witchcraft trial of Dietrich Flade, a sixteenth-century city judge and rector who spoke out against the cruelty and injustice of the persecutions in the 1580s. These and other trial documents are listed in the collection’s finding aid.

Using the collection

The 102 titles in the digital collection are made freely available to the public by Cornell University Library. The digital collection can be searched by title, author, year, or keyword. The entire physical Witchcraft Collection is available for in-person research at Cornell University Library’s Rare and Manuscript Division.

For more information about the collection, please contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward

Katherine Reagan, Ernest Stern Curator, Rare Books & Manuscripts

Metadata creation

Cornell University Library

Funding

Cornell University Library, 1998

Credits

This collection overview was last reviewed in 2025.

Collection sources

• Individually cataloged items
• Witchcraft collection, unbound manuscripts

Exhibits featuring items from this collection

• Anne Kenney and Kornelia Tancheva. The World Bewitch’d: Visions of Witchcraft from the Cornell Collections. October 31, 2017 - August 31, 2018. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library Hirshland Gallery.