Great News from the West of England: Witchcraft and Strange Vomiting in a Somerset Village

Abstract

This article looks the vomiting of pins, nails and other sharp metallic objects brought up in connection with English witchcraft trials, focusing on a particularly well-documented case in Selwood forest in the late seventeenth century. The strange vomiting is not an isolated behavior, however, or peculiar to the Selwood Forest case. At least twenty separate cases involving one or more victims of strange vomiting for the period up to 1689 survive in the English record and at least six more span the following three decades. At first sight these look like they might be seventeenth-century invention, but this article argues that they may not be. Through the juxtaposition of similar contemporary cases concerning the cause and character of the eating disorder commonly called “pica,” in particular in its manifestion as acuphagia, or the ingestion of sharp objects, it considers the possibility that at least some of the witchcraft cases involved deliberate ingestion of sharp metallic objects.