Brutish Babies
David Wootton
- Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night by Wolfgang Behringer, translated by H.C.Erik Midelfort
Virginia, 203 pp, £14.50, September 1998, ISBN 0 8139 1853 7
- Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe by Stuart Clark
Oxford, 845 pp, £25.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 19 820001 3
- Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England by Alan Macfarlane
Routledge, 368 pp, £55.00, April 1999, ISBN 4 15 119611 0
- The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England by James Sharpe
Profile, 256 pp, £16.99, November 1999, ISBN 1 86197 048 X
There are people who believe themselves to be witches. One can find them without difficulty on the Internet, and on a recent canal trip I was surprised to pass a whole series of narrow-boats (Black Cat, Sorceress) apparently inhabited by practising witches. The modern scholarly literature on the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the great witch-hunt. Even Deborah Willis, who reads the confessions of English witches with close attention, maintains only that ‘they suggest, if not a shared set of practices, at least a shared fantasy life.’
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Other books referred to in the writing of this piece:
Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England by Deborah Willis (Cornell, 264 pp., £13.50, 1995, 0 8014 8194 5)
The Witch in History by Diane Purkiss (Routledge, 296 pp., £15.99, 1996, 0 415 08762 7)
Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650-c.1750 by Ian Bostridge (Oxford, 274 pp., £40, 1997, 0 19 820653 4)
A Trial of Witches: A 17th-Century Witchcraft Prosecution, edited by Gilbert Reis and Ivan Bunn (Routledge, 276 pp., £14.99, 1997, 0 415 17109 1)
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge, 368 pp., £40 and £15.95, 1996, 0 521 55224 9)
Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft of England 1550-1750 by James Sharpe (Penguin, 384 pp., £9.99, 1997, 0 14 013065 9)
Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft by Robin Briggs (Fontana, 457 pp., £8.99, 1997, 0 00 686209 8)
Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria by Wolgang Behringer, translated by J.C. Grayson and David Lederer (Cambridge, 476 pp., £50, 1997, 0 521 48258 5)
Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England by Elizabeth Reis (Cornell, 212 pp., £32.50, 1997, 0 8014 2834 3)
Letters
Vol. 21 No. 23 · 25 November 1999
From Ruth Evans
David Wootton berates English historians (LRB, 11 November) for assuming that witchcraft was the same the world over ' an 'elementary misconception', as he sees it. But what of the elementary misconception that witchcraft somehow sprang fully formed out of the head of the early modern period? Was there no pre-modern cultural formation from which the witch emerged? Missing from Wootton's almost exhaustive bibliography is Dyan Elliott's Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages, published earlier this year, which explores a set of connections that make the materialisation of the witch in the early modern period, in Elliott's closing words, 'virtually irresistible'. It traces a structure of thinking in which are knotted together the clerical quest for an impossible ritual purity, anxieties over supernatural miscegenation, the repression of clerical wives, the elevation of the Virgin Mary, the preoccupation with the material presence signified by transubstantiation, the reconceptualisation of demons as disembodied, and the subsequent embodied return of the repressed clerical wife in the figure of the witch. Structures of thinking do not come out of nowhere.
Ruth Evans
Cardiff University
Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000
From David Wootton
I would like to thank Ruth Evans (Letters, 25 November 1999) for sending me off to read Dyan Elliott's Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages (1999). I sense that Evans was giving voice to the frustration that medievalists often feel at the reluctance of early modernists to look backwards in time (often attributable to their inability to read Latin). On the other hand, I was more than a little perplexed by Elliott's claim that attacks on clerical marriage in the 11th century gave rise to a new theory of the witch in the 15th century, as language which had begun as metaphor came to be accepted as a representation of reality. There are several problems here. First, why on earth did this new paradigm (unlike the other ones discussed by Elliott, such as a new insistence that the Virgin Mary was without sin from the moment of her conception) wait four centuries before it even began to make its appearance? Second, if witch beliefs are somehow linked to the psychic costs of clerical celibacy, why did they not disappear with the Reformation, when priests took wives and the monasteries and nunneries were closed? Third, is Elliott's claim that the 16th-century witch-hunt was a natural outcome of the 11th-century preoccupation with clerical celibacy not at odds with her recognition that the ways in which demons were conceived altered significantly during the course of the Middle Ages for reasons that had little or nothing to do with clerical celibacy?
Evans is right that 'structures of thinking do not come out of nowhere' – this is why I find the familiars, the demonic cats and toads of Elizabethan England, so puzzling. Wherever they came from, it was not from clerical abstinence or scholastic debate, or we would find them all over Europe.
David Wootton
Queen Mary and Westfield College<br />London E1
