Leslie Tuttle is an associate professor of history at LSU. Her research in European religious history has led her to teach several popular history classes, including one course focusing on witchcraft.
Tuttle is originally from Kansas City, Missouri, where she said her family has lived since the 1850s. She attended Tulane University for her undergraduate degree, where she earned a bachelor’s in history and graduated summa cum laude.
A Francophile, she wanted to go to Tulane because of its connection to New Orleans, a city teeming with French-influenced architecture and indelibly shaped by French culture.
Her trajectory as a student changed after participating in a study abroad program in Paris during her junior year.
“That [opportunity] changed my life,” Tuttle said. “Not only did my French language skills get better … but it made me decide that I wanted to study the history of France.”
After completing her undergraduate studies at Tulane, Tuttle attended Princeton University in New Jersey. At Princeton, she attained her doctoral degree in European History, studying under the tutelage of well-renowned professors with her classmates, some of the best historians in the world, she said.
After earning her doctorate, Tuttle taught at the University of Kansas for almost four years. However, in 2014, she moved to Baton Rouge when her husband, Jonathan Earle, landed his position as dean of LSU’s Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College.
Tuttle has taught dozens of history courses at LSU. This semester, she is teaching HIST 3118: Magic and Witchcraft in Europe.
Tuttle became interested in the phenomenon of witchcraft because of its significance throughout Christian European culture and history.
She said public scandals involving witches are directly tied to fundamental religious questions about good and evil, leading to changes in religious doctrine through the Protestant Reformation. In fact, Tuttle went as far as to say that witchcraft played a significant role in the formation of European nation-states.
Additionally, because witch hunts in Western Europe tended to target women more than men, witch scandals also impacted public perceptions of women and sexuality. Tuttle noted that, in other cultures, like Islamic cultures in the Middle East, did not have a gender gap in practitioners of sihir, or sorcery.
Tuttle also acknowledged that witchcraft is interesting for more intangible reasons.
“I think the most fundamental part of it for me, and for a lot of other students and scholars, is that we’re really interested in a world where magic is real,” she said.
Through teaching this class, Tuttle became more interested in the history of dreams. Like magic, others cannot observe dreams, and different cultures attach different levels of importance to dreams.
In 16th-century Europe, however, it was a taboo to talk about dreams because religious authorities worried people would interpret their individual subjective experiences as messages from God. In fact, Tuttle said that talking about your dreams in Inquisitional Spain could lead to an investigation by the Church.
According to Tuttle, the way people talked about dreams, magic or witchcraft shaped cultural expectations of etiquette and civility, forming the basis of modern concepts of professionalism and ethics. The Church even created handbooks for civil behavior, long before European nation-states developed formal written laws.
“You’re not going to talk about your dreams in public, and the person who does is ruthlessly made fun of in the 17th century,” Tuttle said.
However, other cultures had different ideas of dreams, Tuttle said. She said some tribespeople believed that a dream was an opportunity to see beyond the everyday world. The tribe believed that dreams would also offer knowledge useful to one’s survival.
“For example, let’s say they would dream about a way to heal a particular illness, or they would dream about where to find caribou to hunt for their survival during winter,” Tuttle explained. “Those were practical kinds of knowledge that they believed would come to them best in their dreams.”
Tuttle likes to study dreams because of their subjective nature: There is no right or wrong answer to what dreams can mean for the individual.
“One of the things that makes dreams really fun to work on is that we still disagree about what, if anything, they may mean,” Tuttle said. “Some scientists think dreams are fairly random images that occur while sleeping, and they’re part of neurons firing, but you can find others who think dreams play some important role in learning and emotional processing.”
