Fittingly, a new exhibition on witchcraft opened on Halloween at Cornell University. Pulled from the university’s Witchcraft Collection, The World Bewitch’d spans five hundred years of witch-related material: trial documents, religious texts, spells, and even confessions explore a group of people, often women, marginalized and ostracized from society, with the core of the material hailing from Germany and France. The highlight of the show includes the first book on witchcraft ever printed, as well as handwritten transcripts from European witchcraft trials. Throughout history, witches were often portrayed as either ugly old hags or as alluring seductresses, and the show explores how that view has changed–or not–with the passage of time.  Read more on the Fine Books Blog.