MICHAEL OSTLING. Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland.

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In this book, Michael Ostling offers a reassessment of the history of witchcraft in Poland, a region often treated as peripheral to the early modern witch hunts. Ostling argues that witchcraft in Poland can illuminate one of the fundamental questions of witchcraft scholarship: the relationship between indigenous and international concepts of the supernatural. Although witchcraft scholars often discuss the constructed nature of witchcraft, we frequently fall short of a subtle and comprehensive analysis of that construction. Ostling, by contrast, has succeeded admirably in doing just that. He maintains that Christianity and elite demonology are also constructions and follows this insight with a rigorous investigation of witchcraft in Poland in which he privileges neither folk nor elite culture with definitional authority. The result is an excellent monograph that faithfully reflects a regional history while offering important insights to the field as a whole. In his introduction, Ostling opens the discussion that runs as a red thread throughout the whole work: the relationships between elite and indigenous ideas. The monograph is divided into three parts: history, religion, and demonology. In the first of these, he does an excellent job of sketching the background of Polish history. The reader is thus quickly oriented to the particular social landscape of the Polish villages and small towns, where powerful rural landlords sometimes acted as a brake on persecutions and sometimes as the initiators of witch trials. Ostling argues that we should place witch trials in their context with other criminal trials. He collapses the artificial distance between the two with the crucial observation that all crimes had a religious, sinful nature, but his analysis stays focused entirely on witch trials. In discussing the charges that arose in witch trials, he emphasizes the ambiguity of forms and of practice. This ambiguity meant that identical actions could be classified as natural or magical, as religion or as witchcraft.