Heyman Center For The Humanities At Columbia University Podcasts

In the final episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights TStaging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters. This book shows that judges and accusers turned to performance, staging to create doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt.