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Discursive (re)construction of “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as an identity in the eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trial records

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Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Issue number2
Volume18
Number of pages21
Pages (from-to)214-234
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper provides a qualitative historical (socio)pragmatic analysis of records of three eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trials using a socio-cognitive model of discursive community and identity construction. I aim to describe how the general social and legal context of witchcraft became situated and interpreted in the actual witchcraft trial records from the delegated officials’ perspective. I argue that in the analysed records, the officials did not simply apply a codified definition of “witchcraft”, but they discursively (re)constructed “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as the defendants’ identity. Thus, from the officials’ perspective, discursive community and identity construction established a relationship between the general context of witchcraft and the actual witchcraft trials. In order to reconstruct this process, I investigate the linguistic constructs by which the delegated officials actively created “witchcraft” and the defendants’ “witch” identity as mental constructs.