What is a 'witch-bottle'? Assembling the textual evidence from early modern England1.

Abstract

Sometime around 1670, a ballad entitled A miraculous cure for witchcraft, or, Strange news from the Blew-Boar in Holburn was anonymously printed. It told the story of a girl bewitched not far from London, who was ‘vext in Body, and perplex in mind’.2 After trying countless remedies, the girl and her friends finally found a ‘chymist’, well-known for his art and skill. He told them to take the bewitched girl's urine, put it in a bottle with some other ‘ingredients’, and then bury it in a dung-hill, not to be touched or meddled with at all; this would cut the witch’s charms. Sure enough, after following these instructions and waiting eagerly by the hill all night, the witch appeared looking ‘swell'd’, and demanding the bottle. The girl and her friends refused this request, the witch left and died, and the bewitched girl immediately began to recover.3 In this ballad, a chymical physician instructed the girl how to make a ‘witch-bottle’ to cure her bewitchment, though he did not label it as such. This curative procedure was written about by various contemporary authors, including elite, educated men, but its existence in ballad form shows how it was also known about by a broad spectrum of society.4 Extant texts and objects help us understand this cure more fully. Thirteen known primary accounts discuss this remedy, and around 100 bottles with ingredients inside have survived to the present day. This article focuses on the contemporary literature. These texts demonstrate that a variety of people understood this practice as a treatment for bewitchment, and used it from the around the mid-seventeenth-century to at least 1705. This cure followed a variable but mostly standard format, in which urine, from either the afflicted person or an animal, was put in an (often stoneware) vessel, usually with other ingredients that included pins, nails and human hair. This bottled mixture was then boiled and/or buried into the ground, walls or floors. The process would cause significant pain or torment to the witch, either forcing them to break the vexatious spell or resulting in their death, thereby curing the bewitched victim. Recognised today as ‘witch-bottles’, the objects used in this cure are a well-known but understudied part of early modern English healing. A reliance on material evidence and the omission of a thorough textual analysis has meant that researchers have often analysed these bottles and the cure in which they were involved in a misleading and inaccurate way.5 Not only do scholars often identify them as part of a superstitious, prophylactic ritual that began in the sixteenth-century (a temporal claim for which known evidence does not exist), but also the term ‘witch-bottle’ is not contemporary, only arising in the nineteenth century.6 The language used to describe these bottles and their associated practice in both academic and non-academic literature often perpetuates these misleading interpretations, and has prevented these objects from being fully recognised as the curative items contemporaries believed them to be. In a departure from typical scholarly trends, this article does not use ‘witch-bottles’ as evidence for ongoing witchcraft beliefs, nor as part of the archaeology of ritual and magic.7 Rather than offering a replacement narrative of ‘witch-bottles’, it addresses issues regarding interpretation and function. The known textual evidence for this cure situates it between c.1660 and 1705, but variations of this process, differing in method, form or function, existed both within and outside of this period. Other texts, especially towards the end of this period, refer to the process of bottling then burning urine as solely a revelatory or vexatious practice, whereby the stated motive was to reveal or kill the witch.8 While curing the bewitched victim may have been an intentional or unintentional facet of practices mentioned in later textual records, its role as a cure was often not explicitly noted, whereas its function as a remedy was central to earlier understandings of the practice.9 It is therefore important to note that not all objects classed as ‘witch-bottles’ are the same, and that the material record does not always reveal which practice(s) extant bottles would have been used for. This study however considers vessels that were filled with ingredients, heated and sometimes also buried or built into walls and floors, to cure bewitchment in early modern England and New England. Within these geographical and temporal limitations, a significant and overlooked function of these objects is evident. This was not a prophylactic or defensive act, but a remedy for specific cases of witchcraft, in which the spell was reversed and the patient cured. This article is the first of two parts to examine ‘witch-bottles’ as a facet of early modern healing, and is the first study to examine this practice as a cure. Whereas this analysis focuses on what we can learn from textual evidence, the second article examines the material record. To begin, this article assesses the research on ‘witch-bottles’, examining how previous scholarship has contributed to our current knowledge of these objects, and how this has led to their omission from histories of healing. After discussing the context of witchcraft and healing in early modern England, we will examine how contemporary authors explained the workings of this cure in medical and scientific contexts. Analysis of primary texts will show how this remedy was situated within medical and religious politics, and what kind of practitioners or laypeople may have administered it. This article is the first to bring together all known surviving textual evidence for this practice as a remedy, and in doing so, relocates the ‘witch-bottle’ within the history of early modern health and illness.