Everyday magic and witch hunts in history, art and the history of ideas. Reviews and reflections from a curating museum director Cover Image

Alltagsmagie und Hexenverfolgungen in Geschichte, Kunst und Ideengeschichte. Rückblicke und Reflexionen einer kuratierenden Museumsleiterin
Everyday magic and witch hunts in history, art and the history of ideas. Reviews and reflections from a curating museum director

Author(s): Andrea Rudolph
Subject(s): History, Cultural history, History of ideas
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: the little magic of everyday life; witch hunts; Mecklenburg; Museum Burg Penzlin; exhibition concept

Summary/Abstract: It is a challenging task to translate a complex interdisciplinary cultural-scientific topic like the witch hunt, its historical reality like its ideologisation and fictionalisation into an exhibition. The dispute about the witch hunts, about the ambivalence of interpretations, which in the 1970s and 1980s was still the focus of a sharp dispute between women’s initiatives and mostly male experts at the time, has settled. This dispute resulted in a clear shift in attention from the image of the victim viewed as female to social, political and legal-historical contexts. But the challenge of a cultural history specialist museum today is to connect the exhibition of history to current problems and issues without making the mistake of offering a walk-in academic textbook on the one hand or being devoured by marketing strategies on the other.

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 107
  • Page Range: 199-221
  • Page Count: 23
  • Language: German