Trevor-Roper And Kivelson's Theoretical Analysis

As exemplars of two significantly different historiographical approaches, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Valerie Kivelson display some of the core differences between the Rationalist and Social Scientific lenses, respectively, and each of these writings works to highlight the specific benefits and limits of their particular approaches. In his Rationalist approach, Trevor-Roper asserts that the societal facts and laws of life that were deemed rational in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries were manufactured by elites taking advantage of cultural tensions and popular discontent. Because of this, he asserts, it is fair to say that the contemporary accusers and hunters of witches were acting with as much rationale as they possibly could have in their …show more content…
While he frames the church as the active institution behind the “witch craze,” Trevor-Roper certainly does not absolve the society they dominated. Rather, he describes them as the source of discontent that allows for the church to paint targets (such as the Jews and Witches) and subsequently shape reality. He posits that social incompatibility is what sparks this popular discontent, which is then incorporated into contemporary understandings of social threats, such as originally framing witches under the label of heretics. Furthermore, he describes how torture and social coercion were used by the church in order to extract the desired social reaction. Regardless of the what the common of society felt on an individual basis, eventually they all fell under the laws of the reality created by the elites and acted accordingly, carrying on the formerly contested designs of the church. Kivelson frames the relationship between society and perceived witches/ outsiders as one defined more by material threats than ideological fears. She says that Muscovites genuinely believed in witches and feared how they could materially negatively impact their lives. Kivelson primarily focuses on the relationships between gender and class in Muscovite society, and from this she analyzes the social roles that accused witches tended to play in that context. Her conclusion is that men tended to be more often accused becuase they would more often inhabit the roles that economically and socially threatened the established order of Muscovite society. Compared to the Rationalist approach, her Social Scientific approach looks at society more as a network than as a passive or active actor in broader historical