Historians know a lot about accusations and prosecutions of witches from the 16th and 17th centuries, but little about the lives witchcraft practitioners.This is how Barbara Becker-Cantarino, an Ohio State professor of Germanic languages and literature, feels about the way witchcraft is understood by society.Cantarino presented pictures as historical reference of women making hail and thunder, stirring brew and embracing the devil to represent the early ‘witch’ at a lecture in the Wexner Center Monday night. Cantarino, this year’s distinguished lecturer, discussed pictorial and literary representations of the witch in the 16th and 17th centuries. She was nominated by the President’s and Provost’s Advisory Committee as the second OSU Distinguished Lecturer and received $5,000 in support of an academic program or project. Cantarino is donating her award to support a multimedia project in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.Pictures of women from Goethe, an author of western literature, and his play, ‘Faust’ were used as examples to illustrate early witchcraft.There are more than 400 pictures of witches since the 18th century, most created by men, she said. Women were mostly represented as witches during the peak of the printing revolution, she said. More than 100,000 women accused of being a witch were killed during witch hunts between the 14th and 17th centuries, she said. “The majority were burned but many were also men and children,” she said.Cantarino said the ‘witch hunt craze’ that began in the 1400’s was partially caused by the spread of syphilis. “The most astonishing thing about these crimes is the lack of concrete evidence,” said Cantarino.The Distinguished Lectureship is OSU’s highest honor for a senior faculty member and is given in recognition of outstanding academic achievement in research, scholarship or creativity.In 1991, Cantarino received OSU’s Distinguished Scholar Award. She lectures at universities around the United States, Germany and central Europe. An author of five books, Cantarino’s teaching focuses on literature, culture and the history of early modern Germany from the period of the Reformation through the Age of Goethe.