Study Of Witchcraft Research Articles

Racist accusations in contemporary South Africa: lessons from studies of witchcraft

By international consensus, racism features as one of the major evils of our time. Unsurprisingly, therefore, no one wants to be branded a racist. There currently seems to be an epidemic of accusations of racism in South Africa, not altogether unlike the witch ‘craze’ of 16th and 17th century Europe. This paper draws on anthropological literature on witchcraft to shed light on racist accusations in contemporary South Africa. Referring to examples from the printed media, it argues that, like witchcraft, racism can, at least in certain senses, be viewed as the ‘personification of evil’, and is invoked as an ‘explanation of misfortune’. Rather than operating as a ‘mechanism for social control’, racist accusations both reflect and exacerbate existing conflicts and tensions. Finally, the paper emphasises that ‘racism’, like ‘race’ is a social construct and proposes further avenues for anthropological research on the topic.

Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (review)

Reviewed by: Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland P. G. Maxwell-Stuart Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller, EDS. Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. xiii + 264. For a considerable time, Scottish witchcraft studies have been dominated by Christina Larner's work, which, groundbreaking though it was and invaluable though it still is, based its conclusions on a relatively limited number of cases drawn largely from the seventeenth century. In recent years, however, historians have returned to the subject and have begun to open fresh perspectives, mainly by discovering and commenting on the remarkable wealth of information that has hitherto lain unexplored in Scottish national and local archives, and now the researcher has an online source, The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563–1736 (www.shc.ed.ac.uk/witches), which has built on and vastly increased the material contained in Larner, Lee, and MacLachlan's Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977). The essay collection reviewed here has benefited considerably from the new online survey—indeed, it reads in places rather like an extended advertisement for it—and so the reader is introduced to a wider and more varied range of material than that generally used before. The book consists of an introduction and ten essays, some of which are extended versions of papers delivered at a conference held in Edinburgh in 2003, and their content reflects some of the disparate facets of witchcraft and magic to be found in the online resource that provides the common thread in what is otherwise a varied collection without a connective theme. Five essays are concerned directly with witchcraft and five with related topics such as other forms of magic and demonic possession. The introduction by Good-are and Miller immediately asks an important question. When we talk of people believing in magic and witchcraft, what does "belief " mean in that context? One answer provided defines popular beliefs as "an amalgamation of traditions, customs and practices that have evolved over generations" (p. 9), a definition that actually glides away from the question and enters the [End Page 231] realm of atheistic, or at best agnostic, presuppositions. Little better, unfortunately, is Lauren Martin's proposition that "witchcraft beliefs emerged from specific concrete material and social contexts and actions" (p. 120), which also evades legitimate questions about any specific relationship between religion and magic. To be fair, however, it is clear that the book's focus is actually directed elsewhere, so it may be asking too much to wish that the topic of "belief," having been raised, should have been dealt with here. But it remains an important question and deserves to be taken up. Goodare also contributes an essay putting Scottish witchcraft into its European context, drawing on studies on fairies in particular to indicate the importance of encounters between humans and nonhuman entities of this kind to any discussion of the claims some witches made to have derived their magical knowledge or powers from fairy sources. Fairies make their appearance again in one of the most interesting contributions to this collection, Owen Davies's essay on Scottish cunning folk and charmers. As one significant source of preternatural power for healers and charmers, he suggests, the fairy tradition lost importance among men especially as a result of the Protestant Reformation's emphasis on literacy and the consequent spread of the published word that increasingly formed the basis of practiced magic. Davies also draws a distinction between the Scottish use of the word "charmer" and "witch," noting that the former generally refers to healers (as opposed to "cunning folk"), although the Scottish Witchcraft Act, inspired to an extent by reformist anti-Catholicism, lumped together all practitioners of magic and their clients as worthy of the severest punishment since they were all equally offensive to God and equally stumbling-blocks to the establishment of a presbyterian state. Edward Cowan pursues a related topic in his discussion of the persecution of magic and witchcraft in Lowland Scotland during the last decade of the sixteenth century in particular, and describes a large number of magical acts, both hostile and benevolent, which reinforce the realisation that magic was ubiquitous and...

Witchcraft Studies from the Perspective of Women’s and Gender History: A Report on Recent Research

This essay examines how the rise of women's studies and women's history in academia since the 1970s has influenced research on witchcraft and witch hunting. It also examines how more recent developments in gender history, including serious attention to the historical construction of masculinity, has affected scholarship on witchcraft.

Witchcraft Historiography (review)

Reviewed by: Witchcraft Historiography Michael D. Bailey Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, eds. Witchcraft Historiography. Hound-mills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. x + 248. This important collection should be of interest to almost all readers of this journal. There have been countless book-length studies, and no few general surveys, of the history of European witchcraft and witch-hunting from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. The historiography of witchcraft, however, has received much less attention, and always in journal or encyclopedia articles, or as sections within books. This is hardly unusual. Book-length historiographies are rare. Yet the historiography of witchcraft is exceptionally fascinating. As the editors note, few other topics have engaged so directly with so many different methods and approaches to doing history. Especially given that much of the work in witchcraft studies is relatively recent (the field really came alive in the 1970s), the number of major methodological problems confronted (and contested) is impressive. The essays in this volume begin long before the 1970s, however, for many of the problems historians face when working on witchcraft stem from the way this phenomenon was conceived and constructed in the past. The first article, by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, focuses on the era of the trials themselves, and examines how early modern authorities and prosecutors of witchcraft placed the object of their attention in time. His point is that early modern authorities did not generally regard witchcraft as a historical phenomenon, but rather as a manifestation of perennial demonic hostility toward humanity. Although most treatises against witches were very much products of their time, deriving from reformist energies or being spurred by anxieties concerning confessional conflict or wars of religion, their authors did not conceive of witchcraft as a product of any particular age, and so simply did not discuss it in such terms. Maxwell-Stuart's piece is followed by an essay by Peter Elmer focusing on the relation between ideas of witchcraft and the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Elmer notes that ever since the Enlightenment, a standard interpretation of the historical decline of witchcraft, or at least of witch trials, has been that progressive developments in science and medicine alleviated the anxieties that fed fear of witches, and ultimately undermined belief [End Page 81] in a supernaturally infected universe. Starting in the 1960s, however, and especially since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly rejected the notion that early modern science was incompatible with belief in witchcraft. Whatever finally pushed fear of witches out of mainstream Western consciousness, it was not some inherently progressive quality of Western intellectual culture. After these two chapters focusing on how ideas of witchcraft interacted with other intellectual currents in the past, the volume begins to move more or less chronologically through post-Enlightenment historiographical developments. Christa Tuczay outlines the mainstream nineteenth-century "liberal rationalist" tradition that regarded early modern witch-beliefs as remnants of "medieval" superstition and the prosecution of supposed witches as an example of irrational religiosity run amok. She associates this tradition above all with Germany and the United States (e.g., Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan and Joseph Hansen, George Lincoln Burr and Henry Charles Lea). She also notes a countervailing tradition based in Romanticism that regarded witches (potentially) as bearers of ancient and laudable folk beliefs. While she sees the earliest appearance of such ideas in Germany (with Jakob Grimm), she associates it mostly with England and France (Walter Scott and Jules Michelet). In the early twentieth century, strains of the Romantic tradition were responsible for giving rise to the fanciful notion that an actual cult of witches existed in medieval and early modern Europe, either as a functioning ancient fertility cult (Margaret Murray) or, in a quite different vein, as a real diabolical cult (Montague Summers). These developments, and these two personalities, are discussed in the subsequent essay by Juliette Wood. In the second half of the twentieth century, most work on witchcraft continued to follow the "liberal-rationalist" view that elite fears of supposed diabolical conspiracies drove witch-hunting, and that witch trials represented a horrible example of the persecution of innocents. Scholars drew back from declaring such fears or their consequences to be "irrational," however...

Dramatizing Deviance: Sociological Theory and <i>The Witch of Edmonton</i>

Dramatizing Deviance:Sociological Theory and The Witch of Edmonton Julia M. Garrett [A] community's decision to bring deviant sanctions against one of its members is not a simple act of censure. It is an intricate rite of transition, at once moving the individual out of his ordinary place in society and transferring him to a special deviant position. The ceremonies which mark this change of status, generally, have a number of related phases. They supply a formal stage on which the deviant and his community can confront one another (as in the criminal trial); they make an announcement about the nature of his deviancy (a verdict or diagnosis, for example); and they place him in a particular role which is thought to neutralize the harmful effects of his misconduct (like the role of prisoner or patient). These commitment ceremonies tend to be occasions of wide public interest and ordinarily take place in a highly dramatic setting. —Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance The 1621 witch trial of Edmonton resident Elizabeth Sawyer is in many respects an unremarkable case. In fact, as I will explain in greater detail below, her trial might serve as a paradigm for the study of witch trials in early modern England. This particular trial, however, stands out in relief from the historical record in part because Sawyer's fate was taken up by a trio of London playwrights—Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and Thomas Rowley—and immediately translated to the stage in a 1621 play titled The Witch of Edmonton. While these dramatists were not alone in recognizing the commercial appeal of witch trials for theatrical adaptation, the play's compassionate depiction of Sawyer—largely Dekker's handiwork—is singular on a number of counts.1 Although hardly an exonerating portrait of the accused woman, the play nonetheless strives to inspire some sympathy for women like Sawyer who had been accused of witchcraft. Rather than focusing solely on the crimes attributed to such women, the [End Page 327] playwrights draw our attention to the circumstances of social alienation or even abuse toward suspects that often laid the foundation for suspicions of criminal conduct. This sympathy in itself is noteworthy, given the censorious climate for any form of skepticism about witch crimes, especially during the reign of King James I. What is particularly compelling about this play, however, is not simply the nature of its dissenting sentiments but the complexity of the social interactions it rehearses—the ways in which, as I will argue, it appears to be theorizing those social relations as much as representing them. This basic proposition, that a seventeenth-century play might serve as an early manifestation of sociological discourse, follows from a strong tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship in witchcraft studies. During the early 1970s Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic and Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England imported interpretive methodologies from social anthropology into historical study and fundamentally transformed academic approaches to the study of witchcraft.2 Sociological historian Christina Larner, author of the most important studies on Scottish witch trials, further enhanced interdisciplinary insights about witchcraft through her nuanced analysis of the core gender questions raised by such trials. Larner's work is also important for its critique of the "bottom-up" theories about English witchcraft as represented in the work of historians such as Thomas and Macfarlane.3 More recent cultural studies scholars of early modern witchcraft (Frances E. Dolan, Gail Kern Paster, Diane Purkiss, Deborah Willis) have brought greater attention to literary representations and contemporary critical theory, formulating interpretations about witchcraft discourse through various theories of subjectivity, including feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist.4 Reflecting a broader shift in historical studies from macro-level to micro-level analyses of witch trials, these latter scholars have focused their attention on increasingly local and confined spaces—examining the social interactions of village communities, relations between neighbors, and the dynamics of the household. This narrower frame of social and cultural analysis is one that has clearly benefited from the hybrid interpretive methodologies of anthropology, sociology, history, and literary theory. However, an important dimension of sociological thought has yet to...

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa James R. Brennan Adam Ashforth. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xx + 396. Interest in witchcraft among researchers in African Studies has grown notably since the 1990s. This has been due in part to the field’s turn toward cultural studies and abandonment of modernization paradigms, wherein witchcraft beliefs served mainly as a measure of tradition’s tight grip. This shift has freed academics to address and explain witchcraft’s ubiquity in much of contemporary African life, from high politics to village households to seemingly everywhere in between. In the torrent of subsequent research, the significance of contemporary witchcraft beliefs has been interpreted alternately as a mode of engagement with modernity, a critique of colonial and postcolonial exploitation, and a means of negotiating status and obligation within extended families and among neighbors. It is within this richly developing field that Adam Ashforth offers Witchcraft, Violence, and Modernity in South Africa, a first-rate study of contemporary urban witchcraft that was co-awarded the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Award for best scholarly book on Africa in the English language in 2006. This project stands as a wider-ranging sequel to his earlier book Madumo, a Man Bewitched (2000), a case study of one ordinary South African’s quest to cure his own bewitchment by consulting local healers and diviners. Ashforth states at the outset that this new effort is “an attempt by an outsider to think about the connection between living in a world without justice and living in a world with witches and how these two features of life might affect the cause of democracy” (p. xiv). While the end result remains largely speculative on the question of democracy, Ashforth demonstrates that the meaning and uses of witchcraft in contemporary Africa can be best understood by posing the question of what justice means in a spiritually insecure world. The spiritually insecure world in question is that of Soweto, an acronym for South Western Township, a segregated African urban neighborhood of Johannesburg initially settled by industrial workers and made famous for its antiapartheid riots in the 1970s. Densely populated, multiethnic, and poor, Soweto holds a central place in the imagination of South Africans and outsiders alike as a prototypically harsh urban environment that forged many key [End Page 199] grassroots activists in the struggle against apartheid. Here as throughout the book, Ashforth is at once sensitive to popular perceptions yet also willing to confront awkward facts and received wisdoms. Soweto is indeed poor, but not nearly as poor as several other African urban areas in South Africa, let alone rural ones. It is also a place that has witnessed community breakdown since the end of apartheid, where increasing social differentiation has led better-off households to construct high walls around their homes for protection from the ubiquitous crime and violence that go unchecked by police. People rely on family and neighborhood reciprocity to survive in this marginal urban economy afflicted with massive unemployment, but such relations often create dependencies and resentment that fuel witchcraft fears. In this insecure environment, inyanga and sangoma (traditional healers and diviners) do a big business by diagnosing and treating those manmade afflictions that are immune to Western medical treatment. Sowetan customers combine a healthy skepticism about the abilities of particular inyanga and sangoma with a deep faith in their general necessity to mediate between the visible and invisible worlds. This multiethnic urban setting also offers an important shift in perspective from the villages more typical of earlier witchcraft studies, for Ashforth has recourse to neither ethnic generalizations (e.g., witchcraft practices among the Azande) nor tidy political structures on which to ground the spiritual world he describes. The Soweto of eroded ancestral influence and Pentecostal entrepreneurship reflects well the emerging urban milieu of contemporary Africa. Ashforth posits the existence of witchcraft not as a belief particular to a group’s identity, but as a reaction to spiritual insecurity, a sort of insecurity that he—a self-confessed secular humanist and witchcraft nonbeliever—has never had to confront. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are few if...

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition H. C. Erik Midelfort Richard Golden . Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition. 4 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2006. Pp. xxxvi + 1238. The world of scholarship has been eagerly awaiting this ambitious encyclopedia for several years. Its most comprehensive predecessor has long been The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959, with 227 entries), by the medieval English literary scholar Rossell Hope Robbins. Recent smaller entries into this field have not been an adequate substitute for a thorough reassessment of the state of this burgeoning area of historical research.1 Robbins’s work summarized much of what was known and thought before scholars began their systematic assault upon the archival records of witchcraft trials, and so it is not surprising that his entries on many individual demonologists have stood the test of time better than his attempts to survey the history of [End Page 87] actual witchcraft trials. In fact, Richard Golden’s four volumes with 758 entries, co-edited by six other prominent scholars and written by an international team of 170 experts (29% of them women) from 29 countries, combine such a wealth of knowledge from so many countries and cover so many aspects of the history of witchcraft, that they can serve as a means to assess the health, progress, and maturity of various subfields. In this review I will confine myself to the main emphases of the editors and of the authors they recruited. One should note at the outset that although the subtitle of the Encyclopedia is “The Western Tradition,” the vast majority of articles deal with European witchcraft between the years 1400 and 1750, that is, the years of the so-called great European witch hunt. A dozen learned articles treat ancient Greek and Roman witchcraft (e.g., “Homer,” “Medea,” “Greek Magical Papyri,” “Horace,” “Defixiones,” “Laws on Witchcraft—Ancient,” “Apuleius of Madaura”), and there are a few essential entries on the Bible (e.g., “Bible,” “Moses,” “Exodus 22:18,” “the witch of Endor”). Similarly, key medieval thinkers (e.g., Gratian, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Pope John XXII) and key medieval documents (e.g., the Canon Episcopi, “Laws on Witchcraft—Medieval”) attract a small bouquet of usefully learned articles. But these entries pale in comparison with the huge number of often overlapping articles treating the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The reason is not far to seek. The fundamental subject of Golden’s Encyclopedia is not so much the broad topic of witchcraft, demonology, or magic (as a belief or a practice) but the escalating series of witchcraft prosecutions that plagued much of Europe in the three centuries after 1420. So overwhelming is the emphasis on witchcraft trials that one can say that these volumes are now not only the single best place to begin the study of European witchcraft but actually also the best introduction to the comparative history of early modern European criminal procedure. E. William Monter has contributed sharply focused articles on “Accusations,” “Acquittals,” “Appeals,” “Confessions” (with Jonathan Durrant), “Confiscations,” and a more general survey entitled “Geography of the Witch Hunts,” while Edward Kern has provided articles on “Courts—Ecclesiastical,” “Courts—Inquisitorial,” and “Courts—Secular.” Vincinzo Lavenia treats some of the same topics, however, under “Episcopal Justice,” while Peter Dinzelbacher goes over some of this material again in “Inquisition—Medieval.” In addition, there are separate articles on the Portuguese, Roman, Spanish, and Venetian Inquisitions, as well as a general entry on “Inquisitorial Procedure” by Brian Levack, who has also contributed a substantial piece on “Torture.” There is even a separate entry on “Trials.” Along these same lines, Wolfgang Behringer has contributed a substantial [End Page 88] article on “Laws on Witchcraft—Early Modern,” Robert Thurston has contributed “Proof, Problem of,” while Robin Briggs has offered another article dealing with the “Parlement of Paris.” Near the end of the Encyclopedia, Rita Voltmer wraps up much of this material in an effective summary entitled “Witch Hunts,” but this summary does not by any means exhaust the list of legally focused entries. The upshot of so much information on trials and procedure is that we can now understand the varying intensity of the...

Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi

This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small‐scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to theorize how in this imagination witches mediate sociality as the unrecognized third parties who give rise to recognized social relationships of varying scale. The ethnography of witchcraft discourses in radio broadcasting and an impoverished peri‐urban area demonstrates not only their relevance to apparently disparate contexts but also their potential to exceed the impact of the mass media. The case of a violent conflict involving Pentecostal Christians, South Asian entrepreneurs, Muslims, and members of a secret society provides an example of how arguments about witchcraft had a greater impact on the popular imagination than a mass‐mediated report of the same conflict. The article concludes by arguing that witchcraft discourses should be accorded weight equal to the mass media in theorizing the imagination.

Natural and Supernatural: Intersections Between the Spiritual and Natural Worlds in African Witchcraft and Healing with Reference to Southern Africa

For generations, African beliefs and practices regarding witchcraft and traditional healing have been located at the intersection between the natural world and the supernatural world. Despite the impact of both colonialism and, in the contemporary context, modernization, the complex interplay between these worlds has not been reduced. The interaction between nature and religion, as a facet of culture, has long been a subject of inquiry in anthropology, and nowhere is this more evident than in the study of African witchcraft and traditional healing. A distinct relationship exists between witchcraft beliefs and traditional healing methods. This relationship brings these two aspects of African culture together in such a complex manner that it is difficult to attempt to understand the dynamics of African witchcraft without referring to traditional healing methods, and vice versa. In this paper, the authors outline the various ways in which African witchcraft beliefs and practices, as well as traditional healing beliefs and practices, interact within the nature/culture domain. This interaction will be conceptualised in a Merleau-Pontian sense, focusing on the indeterminacy of the natural and supernatural worlds. In its presentation of an essentially anthropological case study focused on southern Africa, the paper draws on various ethnographic examples of African communities in the southern African context.

The Poison in the Ink Bottle: Poison Cases and the Moral Economy of Knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan

Poison cases – in which people are accused of deliberately administering a toxic substance in food or drink or by touch – have long posed a problem for the government judicial system in Central Equatoria. Although poisoning is potentially provable in court on the basis of a material substance, it also transgresses the boundary between occult practice and ‘real’ criminality. The recent revival in the study of African witchcraft has circumvented the question of ‘reality’ to argue that occult discourse is a sophisticated discussion of modernity and its economic inequalities. This approach risks ignoring the longer history of occult thought and practice and its place in prior economies. This article uses colonial records of mass trials of suspected poisoners and a detailed account of a specific accusation, all in 1930s Kajo Kaji, to demonstrate that poison existed as or derived from physical substances with a history of acquisition and utilisation, and embodied historically dynamic social, economic, and gender relations. The argument is that both the longer-term histories and the individual specificities and local realities of occult expressions can be understood in less isolation if approached through the idea of a moral economy of knowledge. Occult discourse and practice was fundamentally connected to the differentiated introduction or possession of foreign or specialist kinds of knowledge. The article looks at the sources and exchanges of knowledge and materials that formed the deeper historical context for the practice or belief in poison in Kajo Kaji, before turning to the actual cases of the 1930s. The latter reveal how claims and accusations could be wielded as tools of resistance and contestation, as changes in local authority and socio-economic relations were being worked out.

Encyclopedia of witchcraft: the Western tradition

The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430-1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama-witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages. Over 750 A-Z signed entries More than 170 contributors include the most distinguished scholars working in the field of witchcraft studies Illustrations and artwork, including prints, drawings, paintings, and maps Extensive end-of-entry references

Godbeer, Escaping Salem - The Other Witch Hunt Of 1962

Richard God beer, author of The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England and Sexual Revolution in Early America, makes a wonderful contribution to the field of early American witchcraft studies with Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. While most students are likely familiar with the more famous witch hunt that took place in Salem that same year, and as a result might well bring their own preconceptions to the topic, the lesser known scare in Stamford, Connecticut, might provide a better instructional opportunity.

Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch Hunting

AbstractWitchcraft and witch hunting formed a social and intellectual tradition in early modern Europe. Arguments persist as to what extent that tradition was invented. This article reviews the schools of thought and directions within the study of European witchcraft in the period between 1450 and 1750. The contributions of modern scholars from the nineteenth century up to the present are reviewed. Key arguments, important publications, and representative research, together with teaching resources are covered. This historiographical review focuses on three issues: the understanding and exercise of power across the social, political, and religious cultures of early modern Europe; the prevailing problem of inconsistency hindering the development of a single explanatory model; and thus the advantage of micro‐history.

:Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

Lyndal Roper's Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994) redirected the study of early modern sexuality and witchcraft. It brilliantly criticized dominant approaches to subjectivity, claiming that historians still reduced individuals to specimens of historical mentalités defined by intellectual history and politics. Gender, reduced to linguistic or ritual constructs, could only help write the history of discourse about the body. True historiography of the body required respecting its preconscious “givenness” (p. 17). Roper approached early modern corporeality through two then-controversial methods, Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis and the study of accused witches' confessions. Despite torture, these stereotypical narratives expressed individuals' “own condensations of shared cultural preoccupations” (p. 20). Oedipus and the Devil examined witch persecution as one aspect of gender history. This new book fulfills Roper's implied promise to study German witchcraft ca. 1560–1760 through “a detailed compilation of social factors, and an exploration of the relation between judicial process and political power” (p. 26). It is written for both witchcraft scholars and non-specialists. Roper expands her trials database and research on individuals and localities to produce a fascinating study “deeply influenced by psychoanalytic ideas” yet constituting “a historical, not a psychoanalytic study” (p. x). As previously, Roper contends that core anxieties behind witch persecution “turned on motherhood, the bodies of ageing women, and fertility” (p. 7). The book has four sections: “Persecution,” “Fantasy,” “Womanhood,” and “The Witch.” “Persecution” and “Fantasy” examine familiar themes such as interrogation and torture, cannibalism, and witches' sabbaths in largely conventional terms. “Womanhood” and “The Witch” develop Roper's own theses: reproduction and infantile fixation on the mother as core anxieties; menopausal women as stereotypical witches; shifting anxiety after 1650, from fertility and maternity to sexuality and childhood, paralleling the decline in persecution.

Women in Early Modern Polish Society, Against the European Background (review)

Reviewed by: Women in Early Modern Polish Society, Against the European Background Sally Parkin Bogucka, Maria, Women in Early Modern Polish Society, Against the European Background, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004; cloth; pp. xxxiii, 192; 28 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 0754632415. Building on her initial 1988 general study of Polish women, Dr. Bogucka's latest work is a translation into English of that publication as well as an expansion of that work. Polish women's history has thus become widely available to historians and specialists in the areas of women/gender studies of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The work is interesting, informative and written in a style that makes it highly accessible, a very welcome addition to the study of Early Modern history and is highly recommendable for all Early Modern scholars. The Introduction provides a precise overview of the rise of women's studies in the European field, citing the move from the Annales School to the influence of feminist writers and groundbreaking work in theoretical, methodological, and methodical reflections on women's history. Stressing the importance of remembering that women's historical experiences have been varied and dependent to a large extent on the social status of each individual woman, Bogucka traces the expansion of the discipline into gender. From the Polish perspective of Early Modern women's studies, Bogucka sees the development of gender study as a social, historico-cultural and political category, the introduction of which is of enormous methodological importance in the historiographical context. Within Polish studies, she cites the necessity of developing standard concepts and terminology, and the requirement of theoretical reflections, particularly studies [End Page 196] which devise terminology. Such a framework is needed in order to promote further research on gender in Poland. Sources are raised as a key problem area. Bogucka implies that research in Poland has so far tended to concentrate on a narrow use of available resources and reiterates the need to expand beyond this. Practising what she preaches throughout the book, Bogucka uses a wide variety of documents and resources. Her study of the phases of women's lives from birth to womanhood, then as married and widowed women, explores women's familial position and position within society throughout the social changes experienced from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The chapter on women and economic life presents the urban and rural experience for women through the dimension of social status and levels of education. Religious life, as elsewhere, offered women pathways that were not bound by the home, and the discussion of the impact of the Reformation on Polish women provides an informative view of women and religion. The great debate about women in Polish society examines the impact of humanist publications and the views of theologians and lawyers on the nature of women. Medical debates, discussions through literary mediums such as satires, poems and ballads, as well as the contributions from women writers on the subject, are shown to have had little impact in Poland. Indeed, statements in favour of women were made at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Poland and, although there were detractors, misogynistic publications were few. The chapter concludes with an overview of Polish witchcraft studies as an aspect of the Early Modern discussion about women, the emphasis on archival research being paramount in what Bogucka regards as a fledgling but highly significant aspect of Polish women's studies. The chapter on patterns of female behaviour cites the mainly positive literature on views of the perfect Polish woman, but makes the point that the literary ideal and the social reality presented a very different picture. Women in Old Poland 'were frequently temperamental persons of an impetuous, vehement, sometimes even adventurous, character.' Learned rather than folk mass culture is the topic of the women and culture chapter, mainly because folk mass culture has undergone very little research in Poland. The education of women in Poland was dependent on social status but no real progress in the education of women was achieved until the end of the sixteenth century. The decline in male education amongst the nobility from the second half of the seventeenth century enabled women to play a greater...

Why Were the Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and the Safety of the Roman State

Why were the Vestals virgins? An explanation drawing on anthropological studies of witchcraft and the work of Giovannini, Girard, and Douglas allows a partial solution to this and three other puzzles: 1) their unique legal status; 2) their murder at moments of political crisis; 3) the odd details of those murders. The untouched body of the Vestal Virgin is a metonymy for the untouched city of Rome. Her unique legal status frees her from all family ties so that she can incarnate the collective. Thus, in times of crisis, she serves as a pharmakos/pharmakon. Equally, Roman society reveals a deep fear of witchcraft directed at its own matrons. Danger to the urbs is warded off by the punishment of women, both Vestals and wives, and the foundation of public cults of chastity with admonitory and apotropaic functions. A series of incidents over a thousand-year span reveals a world view deeply rooted in sympathetic magic, where the women embody the state and their inviolability is objectified as the inviolability of the community.

The Malleus maleficarum and the construction of witchcraft: theology and popular belief

What was witchcraft? Were witches real? How should witches be identified? How should they be judged? Towards the end of the Middle Ages these were serious and important questions - and completely new. Between 1430 and 1500, a number of learned witch-theorists attempted to provide the answers to such questions and of these perhaps the most famous are the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, the authors of the Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). The Malleus is widely recognized as an important medieval text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet as a source the Malleus presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context and cannot be said to be representative of late medieval learned thinking in general. This study of the original text provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual world of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and sebsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. Ultimately, this text argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic tex, with a view of witches very different form that of competing authors, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for 15th-century witchcraft theory. This text should be of value to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.

Re-contextualizing British Witchcraft

Since the seminal study of English witchcraft c. 1970, such developments as England's entry into the European Community and the revival of witchhunting episodes in postcolonial Africa have blurred parts of the picture. Recent publications present an opportunity to make revisions to the classic view of British witchcraft, setting the subject within its proper European context while pointing out some of its distinctive features.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO WITCHCRAFT: POTENTIAL FOR A NEW COLLABORATION?

In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit.

Werewolves, witches, and wandering spirits: traditional belief & folklore in early modern Europe

Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia, this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of course, witchcraft. These traditional religious belief and practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded within notarial and trial records are accounts that reveal the integration of folkloric and theological elements in early modern spirituality. Drawing from extensive archival research, the contributors argue for the integration of such beliefs into our understanding of late medieval and early modern Europe.