Brutish Babies: witchcraft
David Wootton, 11 November 1999
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.’‘