3 - Witches in society and culture, 1680-1750
from Part I - Witchcraft
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
Summary
I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witch-craft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it.
Addison, The Spectator (14 July 1711), pp. 133-6After the Restoration, and more so after the Glorious Revolution, the flow of witchcraft prosecutions in England was reduced to a trickle. Yet witchcraft persisted: occasional trials continued to excite the credulous and curious into the early eighteenth century, the law did not change until 1736, and witch-beliefs remained current long after that. Nor were these beliefs confined to folklore and old wives' tales once scepticism had come to dominate the thinking of men in authority and the trickle of prosecutions had dried up altogether. Eighteenth-century mentalities cannot be compartmentalized so neatly, however much assumptions about intellectual development during the Enlightenment may have caused rationalist historians - and to some degree their functionalist successors - to wish witchcraft away from educated thinking in this period. Perhaps, then, a different approach is required. Instead of searching for the decline of witchcraft, it may be more profitable to seek contexts of communication - including that of criminal justice - in which witchcraft remained live as a subject, but one undergoing various transformations in meaning. This chapter will examine witchcraft in terms of its persistence as an idea and, more importantly, the reinvention of that idea after 1680, rather than as an issue ebbing away from the shores of English cultural life and consciousness after the last execution had taken place. One feels that witchcraft, like the little man upon the stairs, wasn't there but wouldn't go away.
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- Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England , pp. 79 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000