Academic folklore and witchcraft studies

George Lyman Kittredge

1860 – 1941

George Lyman Kittredge was Harvard's Gurney Professor of English Literature and one of the foremost American scholars of Shakespeare and Chaucer, whose Witchcraft in Old and New England (1929) remains a foundational scholarly study demonstrating that the Salem witch trials were a direct extension of deep-rooted British and European witch belief. His meticulous historical documentation of witchcraft accusations, witch-cake rituals, cunning folk, and malefic magic across English sources provided the standard academic framework for understanding early modern Anglo-American witchcraft. His scholarship legitimized witchcraft as a serious subject of historical and folkloric inquiry for subsequent generations.