Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama, 1538–1681

Eric Pudney

• Publisher: Lund University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789198376869
• eBook ISBN: 9789198376883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2019 Warburg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for an outstanding work of literary history This is a study of the representation of witches in early modern English drama, organised around the themes of scepticism and belief. It covers the entire early modern period, including the Restoration, and pays particular attention to three plays in which witchcraft is central: The Witch of Edmonton (1621), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and The Lancashire Witches (1681). Always a controversial issue, witchcraft has traditionally been seen in terms of a debate between 'sceptics' and 'believers'. This book argues instead that, while the concepts of scepticism and belief are central to an understanding of early modern witchcraft, they are more fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the witchcraft debate, but as rhetorical tools used by both sides.

1
Scepticism in the Renaissance

Scepticism has long been acknowledged to be a vital feature of Renaissance thought, and one which has been said to distinguish the period from the Middle Ages. Conventionally, Renaissance scepticism has been seen as part of what puts the ‘modern’ into ‘early modern’: the questioning of old certainties which ultimately helped to usher in the Enlightenment. This view understates the importance of sceptical attitudes within the medieval period; as early as the fifth or sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius was emphasising the unknowability of God and the severe limitations of human reason, a sceptical tradition brought into Western Europe in the ninth century by John Scottus Eriugena.¹ William of Ockham and other nominalist thinkers provide further evidence of sceptical thought within medieval theology.² Nonetheless, the rediscovery of a wide range of ancient thought during the Renaissance, including the sceptical writings of Cicero but especially those of the Greek Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus, was part of what brought about the ‘sceptical crisis’ of the period.³ Philosophical scepticism played a significant role in undermining the certainties offered by the philosophy of the later medieval period, which was dominated by Aristotelian scholasticism (Aristotle's dominance was such that he was frequently known simply as ‘the philosopher’). In doing so, scepticism left a mark on the work of many of the period's most famous thinkers, eventually making a significant contribution to the development of scientific method, as Richard Popkin's history of the phenomenon shows. Even those who did not embrace scepticism were forced to take account of these ideas.

The most obvious role for this newly sceptical mentality in relation to witchcraft would seemingly be to encourage people to deny the possibility of such a thing. Modern assumptions about witchcraft tend to treat it as the product of blind credulity, so a modicum of scepticism would seem to be fatal to witchcraft belief – and this appears to have been the dominant view of most historians of witchcraft in the early twentieth century. Support for such a view is not entirely lacking: the Aristotelian natural philosophy that was gradually eroded by sceptical thought has frequently been linked to witchcraft belief,⁴ and Thomas Aquinas was a vital authority for later witchcraft theorists.⁵ Furthermore, some writers on witchcraft explicitly rejected epistemological scepticism as part of their argument in favour of witchcraft persecution, among them Jean Bodin and John Cotta.⁶ But despite its intuitive appeal and some superficial support, a straightforward correlation between philosophical scepticism and scepticism about witchcraft does not hold up.

The most obvious problem is one of chronology. During the blindly credulous medieval period of popular caricature, witches were not persecuted in great numbers. Orthodox opinion, as represented in the ecclesiastical law recorded in the Canon Episcopi, held that the stories told by self-proclaimed witches were delusions, and that believing them to be true was heretical.⁷ Meanwhile, in the sceptical and questioning Renaissance, witchcraft was widely proclaimed to be real, and executions for it reached levels never seen before, or since, anywhere in the world. The rise of witchcraft belief, therefore, seems to have coincided with the rise of scepticism, rather than being ended by it. Nor does this appear to be a coincidence. As Stephens points out, one of the earliest sceptics was also a persecutor of witches:

Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (d. 1533) was the first modern philosopher to quote the arguments of the ancient Pyrrhonian sceptic Sextus Empiricus (d. CE 210) extensively. At the same time, Pico was a major theorist of witchcraft, and vehemently defended the prosecution of witches. This apparent paradox, the exploitation of radically sceptical arguments in order to defend the reality of witchcraft rather than to attack it, is essential to understanding the context and complexities of scepticism about witchcraft.⁸

Clearly, the impact of scepticism was not a straightforward matter. Part of the reason for this was that scepticism in early modern argument was frequently used not for its own sake but in a rhetorical manner. In other words, scepticism was frequently used in order to argue not for the suspension of judgement, but in support of a particular conclusion.

To illustrate this point, it is worth briefly considering the role played by scepticism in related areas of early modern intellectual life – perhaps the most fundamental being that of religious controversy. One of the reasons identified by Popkin for the rise in importance of sceptical ideas during this period was the Protestant Reformation. Scepticism was used by both sides in the debates between Catholics and Protestants. The Protestant reformers challenged the authority of popes and councils, which the Catholic Church insisted was beyond question. Catholic writers responded by pointing out that reliance on personal revelation or an individual interpretation of scripture required relying on one's own, necessarily fallible, reasoning and intuition. Any such reliance on individual conscience, it was argued, led inevitably to relativism and, therefore, complete uncertainty. As a result, ‘it became a stock claim of the Counter-Reformers to assert that the Reformers were just sceptics in disguise’.⁹ But while they depicted Protestants (unflatteringly) as sceptics, these anti-Protestant arguments themselves incorporated scepticism, as they were founded upon an insistence on human fallibility. If, in the absence of certain knowledge, one should rely on faith and trust in the established church rather than trying to reach a truth that is inaccessible to human beings, then that faith is based on highly sceptical intellectual premises.

A sceptical argument can therefore be used to provide certainty, or at least a semblance of certainty. The most illustrious example of the philosophical use of scepticism is found in the work of René Descartes. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes doubted all the evidence of his senses, stripping away all knowledge that could conceivably be doubted in an attempt to arrive at indubitable knowledge.¹⁰ This project resulted in the famous proposition cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Descartes’ use of scepticism does not treat it as an end point; instead, Descartes is actually in quest of certainty. Cogito ergo sum is the first step in that it establishes the outer limit of doubt, but by itself it is not very helpful, since nothing else directly follows from it. Descartes could only move beyond the cogito by proving the existence of God, which he proceeded to do in more or less the same way as Thomas Aquinas had before him. Descartes is not a doubter but a striver after certainty, much like the scholastic philosophers with whom he is usually contrasted. His use of scepticism is never more than a thought experiment; his doubts are put forward in order that they can be defeated. The cases of Cartesian method and the arguments of the Reformation show that scepticism is in practice more flexible than a ‘pure’ sceptic might wish it to be. The apparent paradox of scepticism used to reinforce belief in witchcraft dissolves when it becomes clear that scepticism is frequently used in this way.

The notion that scepticism, rather than merely opposing belief, could actually support and even form an important part of it, has as its corollary the idea that excessive credulity ultimately undermines belief. The alleged tendency of ‘simple people’ to believe virtually anything about witches could lead to dangerous incredulity in others, according to the seventeenth-century scholar Meric Casaubon.¹¹ And while credulity could lead to incredulity, Casaubon held that the reverse was also true. Part of what made the divine mystery so powerful and compelling was precisely the fact that it was difficult to believe:

the more we are apprehensive of Gods Greatness and Omnipotency, which makes other miracles, probable; doth make this, or seem to make it, the more improbable, and incredible. To say therefore the more credible, because incredible; and that such things become God best; that may seem most incredible to men.¹²

Casaubon claims that God's existence is the greatest of miracles, and its incredible nature makes other miracles (which include everything in nature, he argues, since everything proceeds from God) seem probable by comparison. But, he continues, God's existence is credible precisely because it is so incredible, so remarkable: the sheer vastness of the idea is what convinces people of the existence of a vast creator.¹³ A properly controlled sense of incredulity – one that only makes itself felt occasionally, and without...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on references and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Scepticism in the Renaissance
• 2 Witchcraft in Elizabethan drama
• 3 Witchcraft in Jacobean drama
• 4 The Witch of Edmonton
• 5 The Late Lancashire Witches
• 6 Witchcraft in the Restoration
• 7 The Lancashire Witches
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index