An Abundance of Witches: The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Abundance of Witches: The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt Lawrence Normand An Abundance of Witches: The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt. By P.G. Maxwell-Stuart. Pp. 254. ISBN 0 7524 3329 6. Stroud: Tempus Publishing. 2005. £17.99. This is the second of P.G. Maxwell-Stuart's volumes on the history of Scottish witchcraft. The first dealt with the sixteenth century, and this with the seventeenth, or rather one short period of six years between 1657 and 1662. The book's subtitle, The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt, indicates why those years have been chosen; implying that witch-prosecutions in that period may have been either the most numerous, or most serious, or most characteristic of witch-hunting in Scotland in the entire early modern period. The precise meaning of 'great' in the sub-title is a question that stays with the reader as he or she reads. The book is published by Tempus whose aim is 'Revealing History', that is, presumably, producing intellectually sound, accessible accounts of history for educated general readers and students rather than specialist scholars of witchcraft. Of course such worthwhile aims fashion the form of this book, which draws material from a wide range of primary sources and presents them as narrative and description rather than interpretation or theory. The author makes his intentions clear when he writes that he wishes 'to place new material in coherent fashion before the reader so that he or she may have a more detailed basis upon which to formulate future interpretation of this episode in Scottish history' (p.7). This makes for a fascinating read as the author weaves together material from a wide range of sources into coherent stories; and such is the detail that may emerge by using this method that a novelistic sense of particular lives is sometimes produced. However, at the same time it also produces frustrations, for the detail sometimes overwhelms a sense of the overall picture. The 'Introduction' sets out the political and religious context of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland in which witchcraft accusations and trials took place, as well as the arguments that Maxwell-Stuart follows in the rest of the book. Scotland was occupied by an English army from 1651, and subject to attempts to anglicise the justice system; at the same time as the kirk, a possible source of national cohesion, and still maintaining its presbyterian system of governance and social discipline, was riven by disagreements about how it should respond to occupation. Just as important as the material conditions of occupation and church governance were contemporary mentalities that may strike the modern reader as bizarre or irrational, especially a magical view of the world that saw it as being infused with magical affinities and powers. Magical practices were ubiquitous throughout society, including charming for various purposes [End Page 340] and with different intentions, and witchcraft was difficult to identify amidst such complexity. Maxwell-Stuart insists on the importance of trying to see witchcraft prosecutions through early modern eyes, and warns repeatedly against what he sees as the dangers and distortions of interpreting seventeenth-century witchcraft through twenty-first-century intellectual prejudices. The dominant empirical method he chooses is calculated to avoid these dangers, for he turns immediately to the records of kirk and presbytery sessions, and of the court of justiciary, to detail what emerges from these records in terms of narratives of particular accused persons. The narratives that emerge also demonstrate another of the book's themes, namely the centrality to witchcraft prosecutions of the procedures of kirk and courts. A witch's story is constituted by her involvement with neighbours, and the institutions of religious and legal authority, as much as, if not more than, her magical activities. Even when accusations were being made at an increasing rate the authorities attempted, usually successfully, to use their procedures fairly in order to discover the truth of the accusations. Truth in this case, Maxwell-Stuart insists, is truth relative to the historical and ideological context; but what emerges from his tracing of particular witchcraft accusations are, on one hand, the dutiful persistence and procedural propriety of the authorities in pursuing their investigations over sometimes months and years...