Margaret earned her Masters in History from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She specialized in European History with an emphasis on pre-Modern Europe. She was nominated by the Department of History at the University of Missouri St. Louis for her outstanding thesis “Witch Frenzy: The Reformation and The Escalation of Witch-Hunting.” She received a special commendation from the Dean of the Graduate School for the 2007 Missouri Association of Graduate Schools’ thesis competition.

She will be hosting two seminars at the 2009 Romancing the Rockies Conference.

1. “Witch Frenzy: The Reformation and The Escalation of Witch-Hunting”

Despite the vast interest in the witch hunts in Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the most ignored question posed about the witch hunts was why the rate of accusations suddenly saw such a dramatic increase? The overall picture of the witch hunts has changed so much in the academic field that the surplus has created an overlooked gap within the framework of research. This study recovers some of the tale of how, out of the Protestant Reformation, Europe experienced a frenzied panic over witches that would send thousands to their death. This study required an analysis of original documents from witch hunters, lawyers, intellectuals and sporadic accounts of accused witches. The implications of these findings will serve to solidify the gap between witch-hunting in its earliest forms to the terror that engulfed Europe for a century.