The following popped up in a search on JSTOR:
“Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 40, No. 2, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Autumn, 2009), pp. 263-293.
One does wonder, however, why the search algorithm gave me article in a search on “corporatism.”
The abstract actually sounds kind of interesting, as the study looks at the decline of prosecutions over witchcraft: “The trials ended because the elite’s skepticism about the magnitude of the threat posed by witchcraft gave way to disbelief in the power of magic altogether.”
Which makes sense: as people started to believe less and less in magic, then witches go from threats to just kooks from a societal POV.
