A Cultural History of Witchcraft GA ´ BOR KLANICZAY Central European University for Peter Burke It was Peter Burke who got me into the ‘‘witchcraft business’’ more than a quarter of a century ago, and this overview of research on witchcraft, the first version of which was prepared for a conference celebrating his seventieth birthday in 2007, is dedicated to him. Let me begin this historiographic over- view with a few personal remarks recalling our cooperation. I first met Peter Burke in 1982 at an Economic History congress in Budapest. I was a research assistant at the time, developing an interest in various aspects of ‘‘popular religion,’’ such as heresy, sainthood, and shamanism, 1 and I was eager to hear his theoretically based insights into the history of ‘‘popular culture.’’ 2 He invited me to a large-scale comparative conference on the history of Euro- pean witchcraft in Stockholm, which he was organizing with Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen in coordination with the Olin Foundation in 1984. He encouraged me to broaden my interest from Hungarian shamanism to an overall examination of Hungarian witch trials (a historical topic that at the time had not been made the subject of much scholarly study). It was the first international conference to which I had been invited as a speaker. 3 To cope with the challenging task posed by this invitation, the preparation of a new and conclusive historical overview of the witch trial documents in early-modern Hungary, I entered into cooperation with a group of Hungar- 1. Ga ´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Le culte des saints dans la Hongrie me ´die ´vale: Proble `mes de recherche,’’ Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 57–77; idem, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft,’’ in Shamanism in Eurasia, ed. Miha ´ly Hoppa ´l (Go ¨ttingen, 1983), 404–22. 2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1977; 2nd ed. Aldershot, 1994). 3. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990). Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2010) Copyright  2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.