Study Of Witchcraft Research Articles

Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic from 16th and 17th Century Wales by Richard Suggett

Reviewed by: Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic from 16th and 17th Century Wales by Richard Suggett Lisa Tallis Wales, Welsh witchcraft, witchcraft, witchcraft prosecutions, witchcraft trials, primary source, witchcraft accusations, soothsaying, charms, 1500-1700 richard suggett. Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic from 16th and 17th Century Wales. N.p.: Atramentous Press, 2018. Pp. 253. Welsh witchcraft might seem a bit of a paradox to some. Wales's experience of witchcraft, in terms of trials at least, was negligible. The so-called "witch craze"—not necessarily a useful term in any context—was non-existent in Wales, it simply did not happen. And yet, witchcraft was intrinsic to Welsh life in the early modern period, raising the ultimate question so perceptively posed by Geraint H. Jenkins back in 1977: why was the "belief in witchcraft woven into the normal fabric of life whereas witchcraft trials and accusations were not"?1 There's possibly no fuller answer than Richard Suggett's most recent publication on the topic: Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic from 16th and 17th Century Wales, published by Atramentous Press. Suggett has already done much to highlight the dynamics of witchcraft and the history of magic in Wales, a neglected region in witchcraft historiography, and it is to the author's credit that he has again produced a highly readable and comprehensive study of Wales's unique witchcraft prosecutions. These were unique in the sense that, as in other non-English speaking parts of Britain, there were so few in comparison with England or lowland Scotland; these trials were "exceptional events" (14) both in the history of the courts and in the history of Welsh witchcraft generally. For the first time, the pre-trial documents relating to formal accusations of witchcraft in Wales between 1570–1699 are published in full, making this a crucial sourcebook for any scholar, or anyone interested in the history of witchcraft trials. For someone who is a little woolly on the intricacies of the early modern legal system, Suggett does an excellent job of contextualizing these trials and their significance to witchcraft studies in his introduction, paving the way for a smooth engagement with these depositions. And engaging they certainly are! The book is organised into four parts, each dealing with a key feature of the narratives included. The first provides a thorough account of "Witchcraft in Wales" throughout the period in question. The accusations at the Court of Great Sessions are set in their legal context with a table clearly highlighting the number of persons indicted for witchcraft in the four circuits— Chester, Carmarthen, North Wales, and Brecknock. The figures are visibly low, and the Welsh trials are compared in the wider context of prosecutions in [End Page 301] England, where similarities such as the prominence of women as witnesses are also revealed. One of the interesting things our attention is drawn to is how accusations of witchcraft also shed light on other aspects of Welsh social life at this time, namely the spread of news and information, or "gossip," and the giving and lending culture that was central to women's economy at this time. Witchcraft cases are a window onto much more than just witchcraft. Slander cases are also utilized in a shrewd move to bolster the small number of indictments in order to gain a fuller profile of accused witches. As Suggett demonstrates, actions for slander between the 1550s and 1730s rely upon some of the attributes of the witch-figure, highlighting the historiographic potential of these sources (which are fully documented in Chapter 6) especially in areas where prosecutions were low. This section also considers the relationship between witches and their accusers, the significance of "words and deeds" or ritualized cursing and blessing, which has been shown to be a fundamental characteristic of witchcraft in Wales. We also encounter other key figures in the diverse expanse of Welsh witchcraft—charmers, soothsayers, and the fairies, or "y Tylwyth Teg" (the Fair Family) as they were commonly termed. Such figures were integral to witchcraft and magical beliefs, and their significance to our understanding of such beliefs is aptly demonstrated. Part II concentrates on the case of...

Being Bewitched: A True Tale of Madness, Witchcraft, and Property Development Gone Wrong

Being Bewitched: A True Tale of Madness, Witchcraft, and Property Development Gone Wrong

An Expository Study of Witchcraft among the Basoga of Uganda

An Expository Study of Witchcraft among the Basoga of Uganda

WITCHCRAFT, THE PRESS, AND CRIME IN IRELAND, 1822–1922

AbstractDrawing on witchcraft cases reported in newspapers and coming before Ireland's courts, this article argues that witch belief remained part of Protestant and Catholic popular culture throughout the long nineteenth century. It is shown that witchcraft belief followed patterns established in the late eighteenth century and occasioned accusations that arose from interpersonal tensions rather than sectarian conflict. From this article, a complex picture emerges of the Irish witches and their ‘victims’, who are respectively seen to have fought accusation and bewitchment using legal, magical, physical, and verbal means. In doing so, the contexts are revealed in which witchcraft was linked to other crimes such as assault, slander, theft, and fraud in an era of expansion of courts and policing. This illustrates how Irish people adapted to legal changes while maintaining traditional beliefs, and suggests that witchcraft is an overlooked context in which interpersonal violence was exerted and petty crime committed. Finally, popular and elite cultural divides are explored through the attitudes of the press and legal authorities to witchcraft allegations, and an important point of comparison for studies of witchcraft and magic in modern Europe is established.

Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic ed. by Ronald Hutton

Reviewed by: Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic ed. by Ronald Hutton Debora Moretti KEY WORDS Debora Moretti, Ronald Hutton, Physical Evidence, Ritual Acts, Sorcery, Witchcraft, Christian Britain, Evidence of Sorcery, Evidence of Witchcraft, Late Medieval, Early Modern, Matthew Champion, Timothy Easton, June Swann, Brian Hoggard, Dinah Eastop, Deliberately Concealed Garments, DCGP, Tabitha Cadbury, Owen Davies, Chris Manning, Ian Evans, Archaeology ronald hutton, ed. Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic. Basingstoke UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xiv + 261. The study of magic and witchcraft, usually the domain of historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists, has had for at least the past fifty years a love-hate relationship with archaeology. Since the late 1980s, however, this troubled relationship has evolved together with the general interest in the materiality of magic and witchcraft which belongs to a wider recent material-cultural turn. The first and foremost complete contribution to the development of the archaeological study of magic and witchcraft came from Ralph Merrifield who, in 1987, published a survey of material objects indicating the existence of ritualistic and magical behavior in ancient pagan contexts and also in Christian medieval and early modern contexts in Britain. Ronald Hutton’s edited volume, Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain, published in 2016, not only wants to pay respect to Merrifield and his outstanding work, but also addresses and further analyzes the issue thoroughly, confirming two important points discussed by Merrifield: the general misinterpretation of deposits indicating magical or ritual activity in archaeological contexts; and the longevity of the reluctance of archaeologists and historians to approach material evidence of magic in Christian contexts. It also gives evidence of a general—if somewhat slow—and welcome change of attitude toward this topic, which has risen on the back of the widespread academic interest in the history of magic and witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe. This edited volume presents the [End Page 141] reader not only with an updated bibliography of the major studies related to the material evidence of magic and witchcraft, but is itself a fundamental part of this new wave of research, focusing as it does on the study of a set of British material objects and of architectural markings “revealed by casual discovery or collected from owners” (6) related to magic ritual practices showing continuity in medieval and modern Christian Britain. The volume is divided into four main sections, preceded by an introductory chapter where Professor Ronald Hutton gives a brief but exhaustive overview of the historiography of this study of material culture which “is now becoming a recognized sub-discipline of history” (5) and where he brilliantly discusses the importance of this new approach to the understanding of the perception of magic and witchcraft. The first part of the volume focuses on the evidence of marks and symbols which indicate an apotropaic nature. Matthew Champion opens this section with a detailed study of the recent large scale surveys of graffiti inscriptions found in medieval churches in England. While a good part of these graffiti have a well-defined spiritual or devotional character and sit within the orthodox liturgy, many others “appear to have been created in non-traditional forms” (15). These inscriptions fall under the category of “apotropaic symbols, or ritual protection marks—sometimes misleadingly referred to as ‘Witch marks’ ” (17). They seem to be a constant element in medieval churches across Europe and perhaps are indicative of a direct connection between the individual and the divine. From apotropaic marks and symbols found in churches, the next chapter, written by Timothy Easton, summarizes apotropaic marks and symbols in domestic buildings, which seem to derive from the ones found in churches. Particular attention is placed in the discussion of “assembly marks” made by carpenters; Marian letters which survived the reformation; candle burn marks and the practice of applying biblical texts and homilies around the internal walls of houses which became popular during the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth-century. Easton concludes his survey of apotropaic markings and symbols with a reminder of...

Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England by Charlotte-Rose Millar

Reviewed by: Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England by Charlotte-Rose Millar James Sharpe KEY WORDS James Sharpe, Charlotte-Rose Millar, Early modern England, witchcraft, witchcraft studies, Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, maleficium, satanism, English witchcraft, the Devil, Nathan Johnstone, Darren Oldridge, witch trials, emotional aspects of witchcraft, witchcraft and sexuality charlotte-rose millar. Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England. Routledge: London and New York, 2017, Pp. xii +230. Charlotte-Rose Millar has published a number of articles and essays that have established her as a growing presence in early modern English witchcraft studies. In this book she develops her ideas and interpretations into a full-blown monograph which offers an original and in most respects effective reappraisal of early modern English witchcraft, derived mainly from her exhaustive study of witch trial pamphlets. Other scholars (notably Barbara Rosen and Marion Gibson) have worked on these materials, but their focus has largely been on the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Millar covers the full chronological range covered by the sixty-six witch trial pamphlets which survive from early modern England, ranging from 1566 to 1712. The main objective of her arguments is to develop and confirm a tendency, originating on a scholarly level from the 1990s, which questions the well established idea, expressed by Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, and earlier writers, that the central issue in English witchcraft was maleficium, and that the satanic elements that were identified as being typical of “continental” witchcraft were largely absent in England. Millar’s close reading of the pamphlets that are her main source allows her to attain this objective admirably. After an introduction which raises the possibility of rethinking English witchcraft, Millar approaches her topic through five chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of her project. In the first, she examines the role of and images of the Devil in early modern England, engaging in particular with the work of Nathan Johnstone and Darren Oldridge. Overall, Millar finds varying concepts of the Devil emerging from the pamphlets. There are strong elements of the post–Reformation recasting of the Devil, admirably set out by Johnstone, as an omnipresent force for evil and an avid tempter of the unwary Christian, although likewise there are elements of the Devil’s older image of a trickster who can be thwarted. Nevertheless, one must agree with Millar’s overall conclusion that there was a strong and continuing belief in the Devil which survived into the eighteenth century even as the number of witch trials declined. Likewise, the chapter on the witch’s familiar, on one level a small, personal devil, has perforce to encounter considerable complexities. Millar’s main objective, however, is to offer a systematic examination of the familiar’s demonic characteristics, and this is accomplished very effectively, with Millar also noting that the concept of the familiar remained basically stable over the century and a half covered by the witch trials. In common with all other historians who have approached the topic, Millar is unable to pin down the origins of [End Page 503] the English familiar, although her argument that the concept emerged from popular beliefs rather than those of theologians is one that needs to be taken seriously. The three following chapters explore more uncharted topics. Millar has been involved with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and deploys this experience to good effect in her third chapter, “Anger, Malice and Emotional Control.” She analyses how emotions “work” in the context of witchcraft pamphlets, focussing on how the roles of witches, victims, witnesses, and, indeed, the pamphleteers themselves were combined to create a literary genre which presented witchcraft as a crime very much enmeshed with strong emotions. Thus through these pamphlets we can achieve an understanding of the various emotional motors which were believed to drive interactions between witches and their accusers and supposed victims, and also between the witch as presented in the pamphlet and the pamphlet’s reader. The following chapter, entitled a little coyly “Sleeping with Devils” (much of the activity described took place outside the bedroom), is concerned with an issue which has so far received little attention from historians of...

L’insaisissable légèreté du sorcier

In a recent issue of Politique africaine, Jean-Pierre Warnier interrogated what he called the “Magritte effect” in the study of witchcraft (J.-P. Warnier, « Ceci n’est pas un sorcier. De l’effet Magritte en sorcellerie », Politique africaine, n °146, 2017, p. 125-141). Looking back on his 45-year long experience in and with Cameroon, he wondered why he was experiencing a feeling of “cognitive dissonance” with regards to witchcraft. On the one hand, he noted, there has been a flood of publications on the topic over the past thirty years, many of them arguing that witchcraft is a sort of “coat lining” for any human activity. This contrasted starkly with the fact that, on the other hand, he only directly witnessed three “witchcraft crises” over the past four decades. Based on this, he called for a “sociology of witchcraft crises” that would allow to distinguish “the map from the territory, the image of a pipe from the pipe, the narrative from the object, the rumor from the actual crisis”. We invited six researchers to engage with Jean-Pierre Warnier’s propositions.

Witchcraft beyond RepressionRealizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. By Richard Baxtrom and Todd Meyers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Witchcraft beyond Repression<i>Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible</i>. By Richard Baxtrom and Todd Meyers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland by Andrew Sneddon

Reviewed by: Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland by Andrew Sneddon Maeve Callan KEYWORDS Maeve Callan, Andrew Sneddon, witchcraft, Irish Magic, Irish religion, Celtic magic, Irish witchcraft, medieval magic andrew sneddon. Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 221. Ireland looms large in modern witchcraft traditions, but has received little scholarly attention in witchcraft studies, in part because it saw relatively few trials. Andrew Sneddon's Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland fills in some important gaps in our understanding of witchcraft beliefs and trials since the sixteenth century. Its most important contributions lie in its careful consideration of varying attitudes towards witchcraft and its prosecution among Ireland's three main religious denominations, Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian. Sneddon here builds on his previous studies of Bishop Francis Hutchinson, "the only eighteenth-century English witchcraft sceptic living in Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s," and the 1711 Islandmagee trial, which his 2013 book title proclaims "Ireland's only Mass Witchcraft Trial" (106). He skillfully argues that English and Scottish settlers brought their home countries' witchcraft beliefs with them to Ireland and deeply feared malefic witchcraft until the mid-eighteenth century, by which time Protestants had come to regard themselves as "polite, rational, and enlightened" and witchcraft allegations as "self-evidently irrational and ridiculous" (123), something they imputed more to ignorant and superstitious Catholics. Yet, as Sneddon and others note, Ireland's Catholics were far less likely to accuse people of witchcraft than were its Protestants. Sneddon explains this as arising from Irish Catholics' "more benign, culturally-specific witch figure [who] was not threatening enough to warrant legal proceedings" (146). They saw witches primarily as butter-thieves who "were easily combatted by religious, magical, or ritualistic means, and consequently they posed a minimal economic and social threat to their communities" (54). In addition, fairy beliefs offered Irish Catholics a more compelling explanation for mysterious misfortune than did witchcraft allegations. Both Catholics and Protestants, however, continued to believe in the power of "cunning-folk," magical practitioners who could heal and help counter supernatural afflictions of people and property, especially crops and animals, and Sneddon ably integrates attitudes toward and allegations against such individuals into his analysis. He also diligently considers scholarship on witchcraft in Ireland since the sixteenth century, especially works by St. John Seymour, Raymond Gillespie, Ronald Hutton, and Elwyn Lapoint, and carefully contextualizes Irish developments with those occurring in England and Scotland. Yet, while Sneddon's Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland fills some significant gaps, it also creates new ones, especially if it becomes the standard study of [End Page 254] the subject, as it has the potential to do. His title should include the qualifier, "from the sixteenth to the twentieth century." His discussion of medieval evidence is preliminary at best, and all of his chapter titles rightly specify that they explore either early modern or modern Ireland. His treatment of the 1324 Kilkenny trial of Alice Kyteler and her alleged accomplices is breathtaking in its brevity, consisting mainly of four sentences, two of which contain inaccuracies (Alice had eleven, not ten, alleged accomplices, and we know only that she escaped from Kilkenny, not that she fled to England, as Sneddon asserts) (16). Tried by the English-born, French-trained, Franciscan bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede, who was handpicked out of obscurity for the office by Pope John XXII, the case plays a pivotal role in European prosecution of witchcraft, marking the dawn of the devil-worshipping witch. Consequently, it regularly features in general studies of European witch trials, yet Sneddon, who focuses specifically on witchcraft in Ireland, scarcely considers it. He briefly mentions it at two other points, once to note that Seymour included it in his 1913 Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (71), and again to note that in 1781 Hibernian Magazine proclaimed it "a frightful picture of the effects of superstition and ecclesiastical tyranny" (112). Sneddon's index omits the Kyteler case in its references to Irish witch trials (221), and his overall neglect of the case results in significant misrepresentations, such as claiming William Sellor as "the only male formally prosecuted for witchcraft in Ireland" (90), though four of Alice...

SCOTTISH WITCHCRAFT ACTS IN 1563-1736

The article traces the evolution of legislative norms which had been ordering Scottish witchcraft in 1563-1736. The study of Scottish witchcraft acts raises the question of how great was the need for criminal prosecution of witchcraft in the middle of the 16th century. The statistics of witch-hunt shows that witchcraft wasn’t the urgent social problem that required legislative regulation. However, legislation makes a dual impact on the dynamics of prosecutions. On the one hand, it fixes an actual practice, on the other, it initiates and intensifies certain components of justice. An analysis of Scottish witchcraft acts points its ideological genesis, the crucial influence of debate between Catholics and Protestants, and between church and secular institutions. The witchcraft acts of the period under investigation not only defined the boundaries and values of the pious majority, but identified and crowed out the enemies of society as enemies of God. In Scotland, the adoption of the Witchcraft acts took place during the periods of the rise of the Protestant church. Its leaders, having gained power and influence, sought to regulate the whole public life on the basis of the strictest Calvinistic morality. The laws of the witch-hunting period reflect the specifics of the Scottish statehood, the central and the local judicial courts and the balance of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. The article explores the dualism of Early Modern Scottish society, where national law was formulated on the basis of morality proclaiming and providing by church institutions.

Surveying Early Modern Witchcraft: Levack's Oxford Handbook

The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack. New York, Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv, 630 pp. $199.50 US (cloth), $63.00 US (paper). In both the scholarly and popular imaginations, European witchcraft once fit into a narrative of darkness and enlightenment. Witchcraft beliefs and the trials of the craze were (or so the story went) the product of the Middle Ages, and much of the blame for the hunts could be placed squarely on the Catholic Church. The trials finally came to an end when the backward and superstitious belief in witchcraft succumbed to the rising forces of secularism and modern science. Scholarship on witchcraft has proliferated over the last fifty years, challenging many aspects of this account. Archival research has redrawn the chronology of the witch-hunts, which did not begin in earnest until the Renaissance and peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Scholars have explored the possibility that particular features of the early modern social and political landscape (such as the rise of the nation state) may have encouraged witch-hunting. Others have pointed out that many rationalist philosophers and empirical scientists maintained a belief in witchcraft, and studies of Catholic demonology have been supplemented with careful consideration of popular witchcraft beliefs. A multitude of regional studies has demonstrated that the hunts were, in fact, an agglomeration of a great many local, highly distinctive trials. This explosion of research makes the subject of early modern witchcraft ripe for inclusion in the Oxford Handbook series. As editor Brian Levack notes in his introduction, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, like other books in the series, has three purposes: to summarize current knowledge in the field, to identify and discuss the most important literature on and approaches to the subject, and to propose new avenues for research. Levack's volume runs to an impressive 630 pages and includes thirty-two essays by both established and up-and-coming researchers. Reflecting the field of witchcraft studies, the Oxford Handbook is thoroughly interdisciplinary. Levack says that he has made effort to enforce uniformity of approach, (10) and the authors look at witchcraft through an array of theoretical lenses. While there are inevitable conflicts of interpretation, many contributors agree that no one approach is sufficient to capture the complexities of witchcraft beliefs and the hunts. The essays also consider a variety of source material, including (among others) demonological treatises, folklore, pamphlets, and trial records. Furthermore, the Handbook includes essays on the representation of witchcraft in the less-studied genres of literature and the visual arts. Given the importance of visual culture in both shaping and reflecting early modern notions of witchcraft, it is unfortunate that the volume is not illustrated. The Oxford Handbook is divided into three parts: the first focuses on beliefs, especially as they developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The section as a whole challenges the notion that there was any stable or universally shared understanding of the identity or activities of witches. Many essays explore the interaction between popular and learned discourses on witchcraft, resisting historiographical traditions that maintain their separation. Another common theme is the need to reconsider the cumulative concept, which has served as an important paradigm in witchcraft studies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German archivist and historian Joseph Hansen proposed that the early modern concept of witchcraft emerged from a fusion of pre-existing ideas about magic and heresy. According to Hansen, a witch became someone who not only practiced maleficium (or magic used for harmful ends), but also made a pact with the devil, attended nocturnal Sabbaths, and was capable of flight. …

Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Nostalgia.A Review Essay

The study of witchcraft seems to be globalizing in many respects. Not only are witches themselves supposedly globalizing, but the people who try to study them are also adopting a more global outlook. Moreover, witchcraft as a topic is no longer tied to specific areas of the world, but seems to crop up everywhere. For this essay I purposely chose three recent studies, out of a wide array of possible books, which come from very different parts of the world. Reading them comparatively can highlight key trends in this field, and also important differences.

The Family Toxic: Triaging Obligation in Post-Welfare Chicago

This essay examines anxieties concerning interpersonal obligations that gathered within and around low-income households of a redeveloping Chicago public housing project in the years following comprehensive public housing and welfare reform. These households navigated competing demands. Leaseholders continued to feel beholden to expectations that they distribute any resources to which they had access, such as shelter. At the same time, increased monitoring of dwindling resources resulted in gossip and suspicion that made such expectations difficult to manage. Drawing on anthropological studies of witchcraft, I argue that what was at stake in the expression and management of resource anxieties was not households' “dysfunction” or “cooperation,” but something far more explosive: the constant triaging of obligations in relation to the risks they could pose at any moment.

Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform : early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 / Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch : evidentiary Dilemmas in early modern England

Research and publication on witchcraft in late medieval and early modern Europe continues apace, much of it relevant to historians of crime more generally. The two works under review here, although very different in the chronological and geographical areas they cover, and in their focus, demonstrate this point admirably. Laura Stokes’ Demons of Urban Reform is of special interest in that it deals with fifteenth – century developments, a still relatively uncharted area in witchcraft studies, b...

Writing witch-hunt histories: challenging the paradigm

Writing witch-hunt histories: challenging the paradigm

Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England

Recent scholarship in witchcraft studies has drawn greater attention to the constitutive role of sexual discourse in witch trials throughout early modern Europe—even in England, whose trials have generally been regarded as less lurid and sensationalist than those that took place in other European countries. This essay complements existing scholarship by proposing that we should likewise recognize that witchcraft discourse occupies a vital place within the history of sexuality. Examining a range of archival materials—witchcraft treatises, demonologies, trial depositions, popular pamphlets, and dramatic literature—reveals that beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft were the site of a complex discourse about sexuality, particularly regarding female erotic pleasure and women’s sexual anatomy. The essay analyzes in detail the distinctively English juridical concern with searching a suspect’s body for a witch’s mark or supernumerary teat, and proposes that standard judicial procedures provided a permissive, even urgent context for investigating women’s bodies and interrogating them about their erotic experiences. More broadly, the article argues that witchcraft discourse promoted the pursuit of sexual knowledge with regard to both sexes, legitimizing such inquiry through its affiliations with legal authority. Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi. . . . Such devils hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls. Pope Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (1484) If it is asked why the Devil is permitted to practice acts of sorcery in and concerning the sexual act rather than concerning other human acts, it is said that . . . the power of the demon [lies in the privy parts of men]. For in all contests the harder battles are those in which the fighting is continuous and victory rare. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum (1486) Knowledge of sexual function and sexual pleasure during the early modern period is generally mediated and ancillary. Sexual behaviors, sensations, and phenomena do not constitute an autonomous category of knowledge that, perhaps like botany or geography, might be investigated in their own terms, for the pleasure and challenge of mapping sex as a recognized domain of knowledge. Scholars who investigate early modern sexuality have thus found that in order to access such information, they must work through an enveloping discourse, one that may serve as a vehicle for sexual discourse but also subordinates such knowledge to its own priorities. One of the most lasting of these has been the law, which claims sex in order to regulate it and to organize specific sexual acts within the framework of criminality. Religious discourses likewise exhibit an overriding interest in drawing boundaries between licit and illicit sexual behaviors, while midwiving and gynecological manuals investigate sexual matters in order to remedy women’s physical ailments and ensure successful reproduction. More comprehensive anatomical or medical treatises may have comparatively greater latitude to describe the sexual body and address questions of pleasure and eroticism without the constraints imposed by moral and disciplinary considerations, although conception is still a controlling concern. In other words, sexual knowledge during the early modern period takes up residence in a variety of discursive domains. It has consequently been one of the primary challenges of writing histories of sexuality to survey the components of sexual discourse present in those various domains in order to piece together an intelligible account of sexual knowledge for a given period or culture. Indeed, an awareness of several discourses that pertain to sexuality, even if they contradict one another, is to be preferred. Taken in isolation, any one of these discourses may be misleading; legal statutes regarding sexual misconduct, for example, may remain on the books long after they have ceased to reflect any kind of social consensus regarding such behaviors.

Current Trends in Historical Witchcraft Studies

Current Trends in Historical Witchcraft Studies

Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700 (review)

Reviewed by: Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700 Gary K. Waite Keywords Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft, Moriscos, Valencia, Barcelona, superstition, Muslim magic, demonology Gunnar W. Knutsen . Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Pp. xviii + 227. In converting his dissertation into this book, Gunnar W. Knutsen has wisely maintained the narrow focus and goals of his original project. The result is a tightly argued and solidly referenced contribution to the fields of inquisition and witchcraft studies that raises a number of important questions deserving of further attention. His primary goal is to explain the significant variation between northern and southern Spain in the inquisition's persecution of witchcraft, a feature made clear in Gustav Henningsen's 1993 map of witchcraft trials on which Knutsen overlays a map of the geographical distribution of Moriscos—Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity—noting their dominance in the witch-trial-free south and virtual absence in the north, where witch persecution was frequent. Decades ago this coincidence had led Hugh Trevor-Roper to posit that since Moriscos remained the dominant scapegoat, inquisitors were too busy to prosecute witches. Knutsen reveals the answer to be far more interesting. With thousands of surviving trial records, Knutsen sanely restricts his gaze to inquisitorial records for Valencia and Barcelona (Catalonia). Of these eastern maritime neighbors, Valencia fit into the southern pattern of trials for superstition and magic but without the collective sabbat and devil worship of the north, which were prominent features of Barcelona's trials. In 1526, Spain's Inquisitor General had convened a group of theologians who decided [End Page 104] that witches really went to the sabbat and worshipped the devil. However, apart from the abortive 1610-14 Basque witch panic, this affirmation of the demonic witch stereotype did not lead to major witch persecution in Spain's other inquisitorial tribunals. What explains this anomaly? Knutsen presents several possible factors, including the inquisitors' insistence on the rules of evidence, their reluctance to use torture to extract confessions, and the care they took to ensure the accused were provided sufficient opportunity to defend themselves. Yet, such procedural caution was "mediated" by the particular contexts in which the inquisitors worked, illustrated by the frustrating battles with local authorities that severely restricted the ability of Barcelona's inquisitors to act definitively. The difference in judicial behavior is clearest in the treatment of witchfinders: in Catalonia's secular courts they were major figures in convicting witches, whereas Valencia's inquisitors tried such agents for superstition. In Chapter 2, Knutsen overviews Morisco and Old Christian interaction in Valencia. Against Trevor-Roper, Knutsen posits a cultural influence of Moriscos on popular attitudes toward magic and demons. Muslim magic emphasized the control and even sale of lesser demons, hence in Valencia, popular culture rejected the demonologists' insistence that demons were ultimately in control and that all magic worked through a pact with the devil. Valencian denunciators did not accuse neighbors of diabolism, while suspects refused to acknowledge membership in a diabolical sect. Even after the Morisco expulsion of 1609-14, Old Christian "superstitions" continued to resemble Moriscos versions, and Knutsen logically posits an enduring Muslim influence. Knutsen then presents a statistical comparison of the two tribunals, noting that all ten Moriscos tried for superstition by Valencia's inquisitors were indeed charged with invoking demons, a speciality of Muslim magic. Knutsen resolves the north-south differentiation by concluding, "the Christian areas [Catalonia] were infected with Satan's servants while the mixed Christian-Muslim areas were infested with masters of demons" (p. 81). Knutsen's Part 2 deals with the inquisitorial records of Barcelona, where French influence and professional witchfinders played a major role in encouraging witch persecution and the region's secular jurists faced a veritable "plague of witches." The height of witch-hunting occurred around 1620, and Knutsen draws from the Inquisition's relaciones de causas—summaries of the trials—a list of fifty-two accused witches (forty-six of them women). He discovers that their confessions accorded with the demonological stereotype, including...

Ethnographic Sorcery (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnographic Sorcery James R. Brennan Harry G. West. Ethnographic Sorcery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 132. Harry West has written a short reflective follow-up to his 2005 study Kupilikula, an important ethnography of sorcery practices in the Mueda plateau of northern Mozambique during its postsocialist liberalization period in the [End Page 145] 1990s and early 2000s. Kupilikula, a Makonde-language verb meaning roughly "to invert," refers to the transcendent maneuvers of both destructive and constructive sorcerers of the Mueda plateau who create phantasms such as man-eating lions and make magical medicines in a never-ending game of one-upmanship. Where the eponymous monograph investigated kupilikula through the lens of contemporary local politics, Ethnographic Sorcery juxtaposes Muedan sorcery with the very ethnography that West himself carried out in Mozambique. Using Jose Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" as his prologue—a story where the protagonist realized he was "a mere simulacrum … a projection of another man's dreams"—West argues that the ethnographer also participated in never-ending transcendent maneuvers by attempting to gain an interpretive ascendancy over a confusing and hostile environment, only to become himself an object of the sorcerer's practice. This potentially glib proposition serves, fortunately, as a useful frame to speculate on the meanings of sorcery and participatory ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to consider the limits of symbolic anthropology. Ethnographic Sorcery addresses several vital themes of contemporary Africanist witchcraft studies and has already attracted much scholarly attention, including a published roundtable discussion (in African Studies Review 51.3 [2008], 135–47). It is a short book comprised of very short chapters that trace the arc of one ethnographer's assumptions, experiences, and epiphanies. Having given up on a preliminary project to study Muedan conceptions of the future, West began to investigate sorcery practices in the 1990s by first seeking classical sociological patterns of accusations. Yet this strategy, itself representative of an earlier anthropological literature (a classic text being Middleton and Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa [1963]), yielded no discernible patterns, leading the author to embrace a symbolic approach to gain his own "interpretive ascendancy" over the subject—an interpretive strategy that remains the prevailing approach in Africanist witchcraft studies. Speaking at a conference in Mozambique, West suggested that phantasmic man-eating lions were symbols of social predation but also of nobility and power, only to be corrected by a Muedan who objected, "they aren't symbols—they're real" (p. 5). The book's great strength lies in its honest and thoughtful reckoning with this objection. West challenges anthropological strategies that interpret sorcery as metaphors for something else by countering, "whose metaphor is it?" Does the metaphor belong to the riddle-solving anthropologist who stands above the confusion and false consciousness of witchcraft believers by discerning internally coherent but objectively "wrong" social facts, or limning discursive structures otherwise invisible to Muedans who "mistook allegories [End Page 146] for identities" (p. 38)? Uncomfortable with this conceit, West instead offers an analysis of metaphor by calling on the insights of anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers. He comes to endorse the perspective of phenomenologists, who assert that reality exists "only through its apperception" (p. 46), resulting in a "life-world" made out of the meanings people give to it. From this unconventional and often revealing discussion of metaphor, West invokes the conventional and quite durable ontology of coexisting visible and invisible realms, which he argues comprise the key dimensions of the Muedan "lifeworld." The interpretive shift from symbolic anthropology to a phenomenological approach coincides in the text with a serious illness West suffers during his fieldwork, after which his recovery comes to be understood by both himself and others "in Muedan terms." The adoption of this phenomenological approach—heralded by the frequent use of expressions such as "made world," "life-world," and "(re)making of the Muedan world"—has the advantage of taking seriously the experienced reality of sorcery discourse, but at the cost of dulling the riddle-solving impulse to offer up interpretations that risk being right or wrong. What can West or his Muedan interlocutors possibly get wrong interpretively if Muedan sorcery is to be...

Eradicating the Devil's Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525-1600

It is perhaps surprising, given the popular status of witchcraft studies, that the relationship between witches and Anabaptists has remained largely unexplored, when we consider some of the structural and ideological similarities between the types of crimes attributed to both groups. Gary K. Waite's new book addresses the connections between the judicial treatment of Anabaptist heretics and individuals accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth century, and argues that the harsh persecution of Anabaptism laid the groundwork for the vicious witch-hunts, by giving credence to widespread claims that the agents of the Devil were omnipresent, and encouraging the authorities to become accustomed to persecuting the Devil's minions. Nocturnal, secret gatherings, pacts with the Devil, perversion of the sacraments and magical offences were features of both Anabaptist and witchcraft prosecutions, and Waite argues that the demonising rhetoric which was deployed against Anabaptists meant that, as heresy trials came to an end, the transition to prosecuting witches as diabolical servants was relatively straightforward. Although the two groups were kept distinct in the minds of the authorities, fears intersected to create the image of a widespread demonic threat.