The conception of witchcraft and its persecution according to Norman Cohn and Margaret Murray: a metahistory

The purpose of this work is to provide a detailed analysis of two different conceptions of witchcraft and its persecution presented in the works The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1933) and The God of the Witches (1933) by Margaret Murray and Europe's Inner Demons (1975) by Norman Cohn. I have used a metahistorical approach for my analysis, an approach which was first presented and used by Hayden White (1973). This approach enabled the conception of these works as stories, analysis of their key features by tools usually used for fictional stories and comparison. The aim of this analysis has been to reconstruct the way in which Norman Cohn and Margaret Murray configured their stories and to understand the reasons for the persuasiveness of their stories of witchcraft in the academic and non-academic background on the level of their narrative construction. In addition, I have tried briefly to outline the shift in the theories and arguments of Margaret Murray in her aforementioned works which were published with more than a decade between them.