Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany by Lyndal Roper (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 294 The fourth chapter, “The Relevance of Early Christian Literature to Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico,” relies heavily on the previously mentioned “constructivist” approach to understand the possible similarities between early Christian and Jesuit texts. Reff also argues that “the lives of the Jesuit missionaries, including their political/institutional context, resembled the lives of early Christian martyrs and saints” (207). He concludes that Jesuits looked to early Christian literature to defend and promote their mission enterprise by equating their missionary project with a long line of martyrs and saints dating from the early Christian period. They not only used hagiography as models, but drew on early church rhetoric to selectively align themselves with the missionary experiences of monks and clerics in the late antique period. Reff’s brief conclusion recaps the vast array of information presented in this book, and emphasizes the clear parallels between sacred narratives and the rise of Christianity in the “Old” World and the “New.” While there is a nine-page index, one particular asset of this book is the remarkable thirty-four page bibliography, separated into primary and secondary sources. Daniel Reff’s book is an important contribution to Latin American and Religious Studies and a paradigm for research. LAUREN GRACE KILROY, Art History, UCLA Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press 2004) xiv + 362 pp., ill. To many Anglophone audiences, the first recollection of witchcraft in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is of the weird sisters in Macbeth. Representatives (and representations) of contemporary popular belief, these witches offer all of the commonly held tools of their craft in the boiling caldron and sing of all of the commonly held mischief in gallops across stage. Perhaps some audiences will also recall Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, the dramatists who broadened such folkloric antics to a tragedy of the more visible players of witchcraft and its persecutors and victims. The Witch of Edmonton features the old woman, lurking in the shadows of social festivities, her seduction and consultations with her familiar, the nuisances they inflict on neighboring farmers (e.g., animals that cannot produce milk, butter churns that cannot work to desired ends), and the eventual domestic murder among lovers, prompted by jealously and demonic insinuation. A remarkable aspect of witchcraft as practiced and punished from the later fifteenth century onwards is that these elements, so often beginning with the isolated and suspicious old woman, appear in case studies from across Europe. If the Anglophone audience remembers as well that the proliferation of witchcraft plays in seventeenth-century England was due, in some part, to the investigation of witchcraft by James VI of Scotland. Although he had largely neglected this interest by the time he became James I of England, his reputation as a witch-hunter was already solidified. Yet James’ predilection for witch trials was based, as it was for so many individuals of the period, on two influences , intimate contact with Continental knowledge and prosecution of witches and personal experience (the supposed attempts to shipwreck the Scottish king and his new bride on their voyage home). The starting point and hub of the search for knowledge of witchcraft is Europe, although a good deal of the ele- REVIEWS 295 ments that one encounters are culturally universal, once they had sprung form a Continental source. Such, then, are the benefits and challenges facing Lyndal Roper in her book, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany: the information for scholarship on witchcraft is abundantly present, but how to find where in Europe is not only a starting point but a place that offers a self-contained narrative , as it were, not overly influenced by previous dealings with witchcraft? How then to find an angle of interpretation that will allow the researcher to sort out and explain such a wealth of records, both reliable and unreliable, informed by cultural prejudices and the testimonies of the accused? Roper answers the first question by setting her study in Germany, where the startlingly long period of ca. 1485 up to the Age of Enlightenment witnessed an evolving understanding of the persecution, though persecution nonetheless, of supposed witches. Yet within...