Dr Aaron Larsen

I am a historian of space, place, and landscape in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on the German lands.

Research Interests

My interests centre on how people understood and interacted with the world around them, and have applied this lens to explore early modern fantasies in witchcraft through my graduate studies. In my Master's thesis (University of Northern British Columbia, 2021), I centred my focus on a microhistory of the 1737 to 1738 witch trial in Zug, Switzerland, and discovered through GIS mapping that the witchcraft narratives presented by common women closely followed Switzerland's eighteenth-century religious boundaries. In my DPhil (St. Hilda's College, 2025), I examined the landscapes associated with the witches' sabbath in early modern Europe, tracing these beliefs that spanned the continent. In my thesis, I argued that these landscapes were an amalgam of common early modern anxieties and specific localized fears through case studies in Switzerland, France, Germany, and beyond.

My new project, Cartography for the Commons: Economics, Environment, Resources, and Power in Everyday Early Modern Maps, explores the amateurly-sketched maps found across Germany between 1500 and 1700 to understand how common people interacted with the world around them, and how these interactions made their way into maps. Part of this work involves developing an online, interactive GIS database of early modern maps, which is currently under development.