Witchcraft in Early Modern England

James Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000053777
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Witchcraft in Early Modern England provides a fascinating introduction to the history of witches and witchcraft in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Witchcraft was a crime punishable by death in England during this period and this book charts the witch panics and legal persecution of witches that followed, exploring topics such as elite attitudes to witchcraft in England, the role of pressures and tensions within the community in accusations of witchcraft, the way in which the legal system dealt with witchcraft cases, and the complex decline of belief in witchcraft. Revised and updated, this new edition explores the modern historiographical debate surrounding this subject and incorporates recent findings and interpretations of historians in the field, bringing it right up-to-date and in particular offering an extended treatment of the difficult issues surrounding gender and witchcraft.

Supported by a range of compelling primary documents, this book is essential reading for all students of the history of witchcraft.

Part I

Witchcraft in early modern England

1 Introduction

Witchcraft and witch-hunting in early modern Europe are among the most written about, yet most elusive, of historical topics. Even before the last witches were burnt (as far as is known, the last legal execution came at Glarus in Switzerland in 1782), educated Europeans were trying to explain why the witch-hunts had happened. This intellectual quest has continued, for the era of the witch persecutions has never ceased to exercise a fascination for later generations. For the general reader, the witch-hunts retain two main characteristics. There is much about them that is bizarre, even laughable: one thinks of the belief in night-flying to the sabbat, of tales of sexual liaisons between witches and incubi and succubi, of stories about the talking demonic animals, which were the witches’ familiars. The knowledge that people in the past believed in such phenomena reassures us moderns as we attempt to maintain the notion that we live in a more rational age than did many of our forebears. Conversely, the fate of some of those accused of witchcraft was harrowing. Here, perhaps, one thinks of the letter that Johannes Junius wrote to his daughter as he faced execution for witchcraft at Bamberg in 1628, explaining that he had confessed to witchcraft only after being tortured so severely that even his gaoler begged him to admit to his non-existent offence to end his suffering (66 p. 129). Or one could bring to mind the elderly and confused Janet Horne, the last witch to be executed in Scotland, warming herself beside the fire she was to be burnt on, thinking it had been lit for her comfort (67 p. 78). Whether regarded as trivial and odd, or horrifying and inhuman, witch-hunting and the beliefs that underpinned it can all too easily be employed to create a possibly spurious cultural distancing between the past and the present. Indeed, the way in which belief in witchcraft continues to be regarded as a metaphor for backwardness creates a massive barrier to the proper understanding of the phenomenon.

The European witch-hunts: the main contours

Continuing research is constantly modifying our knowledge of the subject, but the main lines of what we might for convenience call the European witch-hunts can be sketched with some certainty (63, 69). Ideas about witchcraft and magic had long been present in European culture, but it seems that it was some trials in Switzerland and adjacent territories around 1400, which established the belief that witches were magical practitioners who owed their powers, which they used to do evil, to a pact they had made with the Devil. This idea developed and became more complex as the fifteenth century progressed, not least because it became enmeshed with impulses for reform within the Catholic church, perhaps best exemplified in the writings of the Dominican Johannes Nider. Thus, it became accepted knowledge among theologians that witches were not isolated individuals dabbling in the occult, but rather members of a demonic, anti-Christian heretical sect. This formative period of the witch-hunt was symbolised by the publication in 1487 of what is, to the general reader, probably the best-known witchcraft tract, the Malleus Maleficarum, written by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, with Kramer in the leading role. But the publication of the Malleus was followed by a slump in witch-hunting, this being reversed in the years after 1560, when heightened concerns over religious conformity helped renew official interest in what were considered to be the Devil’s agents. Levels of trials and executions rose in many parts of Europe from the 1580s, and from then on there were serious outbreaks of witch-hunting, notably in Calvinist Scotland in 1590–97 (67) and in some of the German Catholic episcopal states in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century (72). By around 1630, however, scepticism about witchcraft was already manifesting itself in educated circles, and over much of western Europe trials and executions were heavily in decline by the second half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, there were, still some major outbreaks of witch-hunting, albeit in more geographically peripheral areas: Sweden experienced its one big witch-hunt in the 1670s, for example, and large-scale burnings continued in Poland well into the eighteenth century. But by that date witchcraft was becoming an increasingly marginalised phenomenon among Europe’s educated elites.

Explaining the witch-hunts, as we have hinted, has been of considerable interest to later commentators. The earliest interpretation, and that which is perhaps still the most widespread among modern Europeans and North Americans, is that the witch-hunts were the result of the ignorance, bigotry, and general stupidity of people in the past, and, more specifically, of the clergy and judges who were seen as the most active proponents of witch-hunting. The importance of Christianity in creating the witch-craze, already central to fifteenth-century developments, was re-emphasised by interpretations which stressed the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation over the sixteenth century, while the role of judges has been expanded into arguments about the relationship between witch-hunting and state formation. Other interpretations have centred on the rise of capitalism and the break-up of the traditional village community, and on witch-hunting as a by-product of patriarchy, misogyny, and the oppression of women. Rather less sustainable explanations of the craze have attributed it to the effects of ergot poisoning caused by the eating of mouldy rye bread by the peasantry, taking hallucinogenic drugs, or to the psychological impact of the arrival of syphilis as an epidemic disease. Moreover, concepts from other academic disciplines, notably social anthropology and psychiatry, have been borrowed to help interpret the historical phenomenon of witchcraft.

These theories and approaches owed much to non-specialist writers who usually formed their interpretations, which ranged from the incisive to the plain daft, on an imperfect grasp of the subject. Meanwhile, academic historians, with a somewhat more sceptical attitude towards big explanations, were pursuing detailed and painstaking research on relevant source materials, attracted consciously or unconsciously to the premise that trying to get a better view on what happened might well be a useful preliminary to trying to explain why it happened. Obviously, these historians, working as they have on different regions, on different printed materials and court archives, and within different historiographical traditions, have achieved varying emphases in their findings (e.g., 51, 53, 54). Yet in sum their researches have demonstrated that witchcraft and witch-hunting in early modern Europe were more complex phenomena than has generally been imagined, and that the most important consequence of this complexity is that no monocausal explanation for those phenomena is acceptable. The witch-craze is not reducible to the impact of a more aggressive Christianity, or of state formation, or of misogyny, or of the break-up of the village community, but rather of the interplay of these and other factors, with the nature of this interplay varying in different chronological and regional contexts. Moreover, and perhaps surprisingly, most of this research has tended to diminish the statistical significance of witch-hunting. Certainly, most previous estimates of the number of persons executed as witches have apparently been exaggerated, the once much-quoted figure of nine million ludicrously so. The current consensus is that between 40,000 and 50,000 people were executed as witches between about 1450 and 1750, a large proportion of them in the period of relatively intense witch-hunting, which fell roughly between 1580 and 1660. It is almost beginning to seem that the problem, given the pervasiveness of the factors which are normally adduced as having caused the craze, is to work out why there were so few witch-burnings.

Some key interpretations

Figure 1.1 Witchcraft was located within a context of the ongoing war between God and the Devil. Here the title page of a late Elizabethan pamphlet of 1597, dealing with a case of supposed witchcraft in Derbyshire, conveys a strong theological message in its depiction of the ungodly, among them a Roman Catholic friar, being tormented by demons in Hell (Lambeth Palace Library, shelfmark [ZZ]1597.15.01)

If most academic historians would now reject monocausal explanations of the witch-craze, it remains clear that there are a number of explanatory perspectives that are generally acknowledged to be valuable: these must now be outlined and contextualised. As we have noted, since the Enlightenment, considerable emphasis has been laid on the contribution of the Christian church to the witch-hunts. There are certainly solid grounds for this. Most known cultures have accepted the existence of witchcraft or phenomena very like it (65), but it was the late medieval Christian church that created a specific image of the witch as a servant of Satan, as an enemy of God, as a being who had willingly joined the Devil’s side in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Modern reinterpretations of the history of Christianity in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries have taken a rather more nuanced view. The nineteenth-century rationalist’s view of witch-hunting as the outcome of the activities of a bigoted, ignorant and persecuting church has now given way to one that stresses the cultural impact of both Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism (e.g., 63, 67). A higher level of Christian knowledge and Christian conduct, a more engaged, active, and informed Christianity, were now demanded of the individual Christian. As the twentieth century demonstrated so vividly, this type of official stress on ideological conformity and higher behavioural standards helps create deviants. The witch-hunts, which set in from the late sixteenth century can be interpreted partly as a by-product of those processes of Christianisation that followed the Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation, processes which, as the writing of Kramer and Sprenger demonstrate, were already stirring in the later fifteenth century.

The impact of these processes was made weightier by the arrival of what English political commentators of the period would have described as the godly Commonwealth, and what modern historians have called the confessional or sacral state. Whatever else state formation in early modern Europe involved, the emergence of divine right monarchy and confessional absolutism meant that rulers began to take a heightened interest in matters religious, and that the good citizen became more closely identified with the good Christian (the type of Christianity in question was, of course, usually that prescribed by the relevant secular ruler). The connections were spelled out with some cogency by that important historian of Scottish witchcraft, Christina Larner:

If there was one idea which dominated all others in seventeenth-century Scotland, it was that of the godly state in which it was the duty of the secular arm to impose the will of God upon the people … the new regime asserted its legitimacy by redefining conformity and orthodoxy, and by providing a machinery for the enforcement of orthodoxy and the pursuit of deviance.

(67 pp. 5, 41)

In 1590–91 the king of Scotland, James VI, took a leading role in Scotland’s first large-scale witch-hunt. In a pamphlet describing this episode, some of the alleged witches involved were portrayed asking the Devil ‘why he did beare such hatred to the king’. The Devil answered, ‘by reason the king was the greatest enemie he hath in the world’ (35 p. 15). Faced with such statements, rulers, like James, with an enhanced regard for divine right monarchy would develop a very clear notion of where witches fitted into the broader scheme of things, and what ought to be done about them.

Relating witch-hunting to the activities of the Christian church or of the early modern state essentially presents a view of witchcraft ‘from above’, and is based on analysis of official attitudes as presented in the law code or the demonological tract. This was once the dominant approach to the subject, with little attention being devoted to popular beliefs about witches: indeed, one of the last scholars to write about the witch-hunts in the traditional post-Enlightenment mode, Hugh Trevor-Roper, declared that he was not concerned with what he described as ‘mere witch-beliefs: with those elementary village credulities which anthropologists discover in all times and at all places’ (80 p. 9). From the mid-nineteenth century, however, the tradition grew that late medieval and early modern witchcraft was in fact a pre-Christian pagan religion, adhered to by the peasantry but attacked by the Christian church and the secular authorities. This notion was first formulated clearly by the French radical Jules Michelet in 1862 (71), but it was re-stated powerfully by Margaret Murray in her The Witch-cult in Western Europe of 1921. It was Murray’s theories, reinforced by Gerald B. Gardner’s Witchcraft Today of 1954, which laid the foundations of the currently fashionable view of witchcraft in the late middle ages and early modern periods as a coherent, pre-Christian religion. This idea, which is of central importance to modern Wiccans and pagans, has been largely discredited among academic historians, and any claims that the witchcraft of the period of the witch-hunts might have been an organised and structured religion remain completely unsubstantiated (64).

A much more fruitful approach to the history of witchcraft ‘from below’ was established by two British historians, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas, in the early 1970s (111, 125). Macfarlane was the author of an important book on witchcraft in Essex, his work being distinguished by an exhaustive and imaginative use of court archives and the application of insights on early modern witchcraft accusations derived from twentieth-century social anthropology. Macfarlane’s regional study, like Thomas’s more general work, demonstrated that in England witchcraft accusations were not generally set in motion by judges or clergymen, but were rather the result of interpersonal tensions between villagers. These tensions, on this model often brought to a head by the refusal of charity demanded by the supposed witch, were the outcome of broader socio-economic changes. Under the pressure of population increase, splits between poorer and richer villagers were becoming more marked, not least because the richer ones were adopting a more commercially oriented ethic that challenged older views of communal solidarity. What might be described as a social history approach to the history of the witch-craze had been constructed, and was lodged in a familiar and well-documented model of socio-economic development.

This model, perhaps most neatly labelled as the Macfarlane–Thomas paradigm, will be discussed at length later in this book. What needs to be emphasised here is the importance of the work of these two historians in creating a major shift in scholarly interpretations of witchcraft as a historical phenomenon. Historians working on witchcraft throughout Europe, as well as on witchcraft in England’s North American colonies, began to reinterpret their subject, and search demonological tracts and court archives anew in search of evidence of the popular pressures behind witch-hunting. And, of course, such evidence was found to be widespread, which challenged Macfarlane and Thomas’s assumption that the nature of witch persecution in England was unique, but enriched our understanding of the phenomenon in many other areas. Moreover, historians also began to investigate that other important phenomenon whose importance had been clearly established for the first time by Macfarlane and Thomas, the existence of practitioners of ‘good’ witchcraft, known in England most frequently as cunning (that is, skilled or knowledgeable) men or women. These cunning folk were important in the popular beliefs of the period, and, indeed, it is possible in many areas to find as much evidence of their activities as those of the bad witches who allegedly used occult means to harm or kill humans or their farm animals, to raise storms or to blight the crops.

Another major area of interest among recent historians of witchcraft is the connection between witchcraft and gender, or, more specifically, the reason why something like 80 per cent of those accused and executed for witchcraft during the European witch-craze were women. The question had not been much considered by earlier historians of witchcraft, but it entered the agenda very strongly in the mid-1970s. The crucial development here was the rise of the Women’s Movement in the United States and Europe. Women were at that point consciously struggling to improve their political, economic, and social position and sought to construct a history of oppression, which would help inform their consciousness in their ongoing struggle. The women accused and burnt as witches seemed to provide powerful evidence for man’s inhumanity to woman: thus we find the authors of one work describing the witch-hunts as ‘a ruling class campaign of terror against the female peasant population’ (59 p. 6), and the author of another to describe the hunts as a ‘specifically Western and Christian manipulation of the androtic state of atrocity’, which was ‘closely intertwined with phallocentric obsessions with purity’ (175 pp. 179, 190).

It should be noted that the authors making such claims rarely had much by way of a track record as researchers into the history of witchcraft, while their insistence on the witch-craze as the outcome of oppression and bigotry made them, ironically, among the last proponents of the Enlightenment, rationalist view of the hunts (118). Yet there is no denying that they focused attention on an issue of vital importance that had previously been neglected. Although its exact significance remains unresolved, few of those now researching into the history of witchcraft would deny the importance of the gender element. Conversely, while acknowledging that it was men who wrote the theological tracts decrying witches, passed the laws against them, and ran the courts that tried them, few serious historians would interpret the issue in terms of a simplistic emphasis upon the male oppression of women. Rather more sophisticated approaches have been opened up by the realisation that not only most of the witches, but also a high proportion of those accusing them or giving evidence against them, were also women. On a popular level, witchcraft, for reasons that we shall explore later, was frequently seen as something that operated within the female social and cultural spheres, or, at least, as a specifically female form of power. But this contention must recognise that even i...