Masatake Kurokawa (1970–) is a Japanese historian and professor in the Faculty of Human Studies at Taisei Gakuin University. Specializing in medieval and early modern European history, he examines witchcraft beliefs, witch hunts, monsters, and natural disasters to explore how Europeans understood extraordinary phenomena and incorporated them into systems of knowledge and social order. In “Majo-gari: Seio no mittsu no kindaika” (Witch Hunts and the Three Modernizations of Western Europe), he interprets witch persecution not simply as a survival of medieval superstition, but as a phenomenon shaped by the development of state justice, religious discipline during the Reformation, and the intellectual construction of demonology.
