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

  • 14 subtopics
  • 40 things to know
  • Unit group 3
  • Thematic study and interpretations, one unit of twenty-one

What Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries covers

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. 398 recall questions across 14 subtopics.

Where it is assessed

Unit group 3

Thematic study and historical interpretations, one unit of twenty-one.

Check the OCR specification ↗

The 14 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Key term

What role did magic play in ordinary life?

Process

Explain the charity refused model of accusation.

Key term

Describe the typical age profile of the accused.

Key term

What was the usual social position of the accused?

Evaluation

Why did the existence of a strong appellate court matter more than the ruler's religion?

Who and when

What role did frontier warfare play?

Who and when

How did gender and property feature in the accusations?

Key term

If English witches were hanged, why were some women burned in England?

Numbers

What happened to those who opposed the Trier trials?

Process

Why was 1645 to 1647 the moment such a hunt became possible?

Evaluation

Who was the most effective contemporary critic of Hopkins?

Numbers

How did Massachusetts eventually acknowledge the injustice?

Key term

What distinguished elite culture from popular culture?

Key term

Give three features of rural popular culture.

Key term

Name three punishments designed to humiliate an offender in public.

Who and when

How did confessional strife encourage persecution?

Key term

Were midwives especially likely to be accused of witchcraft?

Key term

Was persecution driven from above or from below?

Key term

Contrast the scale of persecution in England and Scotland.

Numbers

Name two Scottish periods of intense witch-hunting.

Process

Why did inquisitorial procedure make torture almost inevitable in witchcraft cases?

Key term

Name three instruments or methods of judicial torture used in witchcraft cases.

Key term

Name the territories responsible for the largest German hunts of this period.

Who and when

What forms did popular belief take in the region?

Key term

Which economic pressures preceded the great Franconian hunts?

Key term

State how many people were accused and how many were executed.

Who and when

What difference did the collapse of the church courts make?

Who and when

How did Samuel Parris contribute to the crisis?

Who and when

How did urban popular culture differ from rural?

Key term

Which institutions carried out moral regulation?

Evaluation

What is the argument linking the mini Ice Age to the witch hunts?

Numbers

Name three sceptical works that undermined the case for prosecution.

Key term

Were witch accusations an urban or a rural phenomenon?

Key term

State what searchers and prickers were looking for.

Key term

What happened at Ellwangen between 1611 and 1618?

Who and when

How did the weather feature directly in accusations?

Key term

What happened at the Chelmsford assize of July 1645?

Who and when

How did the religious climate of the 1640s shape the hunt?

Who and when

At what point did the pattern of accusation break down?

Numbers

How did the trials end?

Take Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries further

The same content, four other ways.

Commonly confused

Pairs that lose marks when they are blurred together.

  • Charivari vs Cumulative concept of witchcraft

    Charivari: the noisy public shaming of those who broke the community's rules of marriage and conduct. Cumulative concept of witchcraft: the fusion of harmful magic with the pact, the sabbat and flight into a single crime.

  • Swimming the witch vs Watching

    Swimming the witch: the ordeal of casting a suspect into water to see whether she floated. Watching: the deprivation of sleep used to obtain a confession.

  • Familiar vs Carolina

    Familiar: the animal spirit believed to serve an English witch and to suckle from her body. Carolina: the imperial criminal code of 1532 which regulated the use of torture and evidence.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define popular culture as historians use the term for this period.

    Model answer

    It is the shared culture of the great majority who were not part of the educated elite, transmitted largely by speech, custom and performance rather than by books.

  2. 2

    What distinguished elite culture from popular culture?

    Model answer

    Elite culture was literate, learned in Latin and the classics, acquired through formal education and increasingly practised in private among people of similar rank.

  3. 3

    Explain what is meant by the withdrawal of the elite.

    Model 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.

  4. 4

    Give three features of rural popular culture.

    Model answer

    The festive calendar of the farming year such as harvest home, parish gatherings including church ales and saints' days, and the alehouse as the centre of village sociability.

  5. 5

    How did urban popular culture differ from rural?

    Model answer

    Towns added craft guilds, civic processions and drama, a denser market in cheap print such as ballads and chapbooks, and a much larger and more mobile population of servants and apprentices.

  6. 6

    Why did ritual matter so much in this society?

    Model answer

    Ritual marked the passage of the year and of life, from baptism and churching to weddings and wakes, and it publicly confirmed who belonged to the community and on what terms.

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Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries revision questions

What does Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries cover in OCR A-Level History A?
14 subtopics: popular culture: popular and elite culture, their definitions, popular culture: public humiliation, role of magic in society and social control, the main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches: demonology, confessional strife and village tensions, the main reasons for the growth and decline in the persecution of witches: war, plague, scepticism and decline, the persecuted: geography of the witchcraze in europe, the persecuted: town and country, religion, gender, age and status, responses of the authorities to witchcraft: legal developments, responses of the authorities to witchcraft: english methods, the inquisitions and the end of prosecution, depth study: the witchcraze in southern germany c.1590–1630 — the great hunts and their prince-bishops, depth study: the witchcraze in southern germany c.1590–1630 — belief, crisis, the course of the hunts and their checking, depth study: hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647 — the hunt, hopkins’s methods and why it happened, depth study: hopkins and the witch hunt of 1645–1647 — context, critics and the end of the hunt, depth study: the salem witch trials — the crisis of 1692 and the accusations and depth study: the salem witch trials — executions, interpretations and the end of the trials. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.
How is Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries organised?
By the OCR H505 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.

Every question in Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries, on a schedule.

Attempt a question from memory, write the correct version, then attempt it again. Levo records the jump between your first attempt and your last, and brings each question back on the day you are due to forget it.

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