Week 10: "Witchcraft, Magic & Culture: 1736-1951" by Davies

Davies brackets his study of the topic between the passing of two important laws the Witchcraft Act of 1736 (which wiped out the legality of witch prosecution) and the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951(which spelled out the official belief that no such thing as a medium exists). In this 215 year stretch Davies looks at how magic and witchcraft survived and even flourished in British popular culture and in the textual, visual and folkloric imagination of people of all classes. Besides using legal, theological and scientific documents, Davies also examines how discourses about magic and the supernatural in general moved between"high culture" and "low culture"- mutually influencing one another. Despite the fact that elites moved away from belief in witches in the 19th century, the subject of witchcraft and magic became more popular than ever thanks to new forms of urban media, growing literacy and the modern yearning to "re-enchant" the world and reconnect to lost folkways. Case studies of alternative practices of healing, popular and elite forums for astrology (both commoners and aristocrats, clergy and even some natural philosophers restarted to it) and the Victorian obsession with fairies round out this excellent study.

Reviews of "Witchcraft, Magic and Culture: 1736-1951"

1. Review by David Elton Gay
2. Review by Jacqueline Simpson
3. Review by H. C. Erik Midelfort

Week 9: "Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Vol. 5: 18th & 19th Centuries"

Volume 5 in a 6 volume series on the subject of witchcraft, magic and the occult in Europe from ancient times to the 20th century, the main criticism leveled at this book may be its lack of deep socio-cultural analysis. What one gets is a very rich bibliography as well as descriptive overview of a number of different geographic regions. Legal history and the history of elite beliefs dominate here, with all three authors showing that a wide-variety of factors played into the lessening of witch-persecutions in the eighteenth century. The final section focuses mostly on literary and philosophical documents. Not only the new sciences of observation and experiment, but general trends in the abandonment of judicial torture, conspired to end mass witch-hunting and almost completely wipe out belief in witchcraft among elites in the late 18th century. 

Reviews of "The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 5"

1. Review by T. O. Beidelman
2. Review included in "The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft" by   Malcolm Gaskill

Week 8: "The Devil Within" by Levack

Levack has written a broad and deeply researched history of possession since the first demonological writings of the early church fathers. Greco-Roman and Levantine concepts of disembodied entities were transformed by Christians into malevolent demons, all enemies of God and the Christian flock. Focusing on the concept of "perfomativity, Levack explores how demoniacs and exorcists behaved in ways that conformed to their contemporaries expectations. He is mostly interested in using this concept as a key to understanding the limits not only of the demoniacs actions, but also the remedies prescribed by the Church. Historical development of the idea of mental illness and insanity in conjunction with that of possession is examined across time, as well as the changing role of the caregiver.  The books ends by comparing the early modern forms of demon possession with that of mostly non-Western (though often Christian-inflected) cases reported in the late 20th century.

Reviews for "The Devil Within"

1. Review by Ronald Hutton
2. Review by David Brakke

Week 7: "Man as Witch" by Schulte

Men as witches have received very little attention in the voluminous literature on demonology, witchcraft and witch persecutions in the early modern European world. This volume seeks to remedy that situation. Schulte examines the trial records and popular beliefs of several locales. Schulte shows through a quantitative analysis of trial documents that as many at 25% of those prosecuted for witchcraft in Western Europe were in fact male! Besides his heavy uses of statistics to give shape to the story of the male witch, Schulte analyzes legal texts (i.e. the jurist Bodin) to show that male witches were often tied to lycanthropy (becoming wolves) and that as the 17th century waxed, a feminization of the witch occurred-- focusing more attention on women as potential servants of the devil rather than men. Schulte shows through careful statistical charting that it was Protestants, rather than Catholics, that drove this gendered trend.

Reviews for "Man as Witch"

1. Review by Lara Apps
2. Review by E. J. Kent
3. Review by Helmut Puff

Week 6: "Damned Women" by Reis

Reis's micro history of the Salem witches adds some wonderful new insights into the sociology and cultural discourses of early American gender to our understanding of the end of witch-hunting. Of particular interest is her reading of Salem leaders'  religious writings- especially sermons-- which act as indices of concepts such as responsibility, spiritual intelligence and moral strength. Reis shows that the differing aptitudes and moral capabilities of the genders impacted their direct relationship to both God and also their susceptibility to Satanic influences.


Reviews of Damned Women

1. Review by Elaine G. Breslaw
2. Review by Mark A. Peterson
3. Review by Amanda Porterfield
4. Review by Michael D. Ryan
5. Review by Bernard Rosenthal
6. Review by Bruce C. Daniels

Week 5: "Witch Craze" by Roper

Roper, well known for her early book on early modern witches Oedipus and the Devil and The Witch in the Western Imagination continues with a much deeper analysis of specific issues relating the witch-craze to family, gender roles at the village level, the history of childhood and the psychology of  torture from both the interogrator's and the interogated's points of view.  She divides the book into four topical sections by which to analyze her sources: "persecution": looking at witchcraft from the socio-political and cultural landscape of the counter-reformation and moving into the specific practices and legal narratives of judicial torture); "fantasy": deconstructing three key tropes that were essentially invented in this period and are deeply connected to larger problems of early modern epistemic shifts: cannibalism, sex with Satan and the witch's sabbath); "womanhood": diving into the importance of female fertility (the luscious young witch) and the fear sterility and barrenness (the withered crone) and the dyad that these  two archetypes create in the visual and literary imagination of the time; finally, "the witch": three chapters that look at cases illustrating motivations - or the changes in motivations in direct relation to changing ideas of witches as the early modern becomes the age of Enlightenment. As in her earlier work Roper employs a range of methods and theories drawn from psychoanalysis, gender theory, visual culture studies and concerns with the history of the family and women's changing roles in the family structure.

Reviews of "Witch Craze"

1. Review by Jeffrey Burton Russell
2. Review by Richard E. Schade
3. Review by Merry Wiesener-Hanks
4. Review by Lizanne Henderson
5. Review by William Monitor

Week 4: "Witches and Neighbors" by Briggs

Briggs achievement is in creating a very rich, broad overview of the witch-craze in the sixteenth century, supplementing his own deep primary source research with specific cases in and around Lorraine, with other studies of the witch persecution. This is also the book's major weakness as the author moves back and forth between localities so often, the reader is often left confused as to the possible connections (if any) between diverse cases spread out across the continent. Marketed as a popular history (and it certainly will satisfy those intelligent lay readers eager to learn more about the history of early modern witchcraft) it never-the-less may have been better as two books: one a general history of the topic and two, a monograph of the specifics of the witch prosecutions in Lorraine. The book also suffers from an unclear organizational strategy- topicality vs. locality which often lead him to repeat himself.

Reviews of "Witches and Neighbors"

1. Review by Jane P. Davidson
2. Review by T. O. Beidleman
3. Review by Deborah Willis