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THE PURSUIT OF REALITY: RECENT RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2008

MALCOLM GASKILL
MALCOLM GASKILL*
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
*
School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJm.gaskill@uea.ac.uk
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Abstract

In recent years the outpouring of historical work on witchcraft has been prodigious. Twenty-first-century studies encompass every conceivable chronological and geographical area, from antiquity to the present, Massachusetts to Muscovy. Approaches have been varied, with witchcraft explored as an intellectual, legal, political, social, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. Of particular interest – and difficulty – is the ‘reality’ of witchcraft: how historians might recover contemporary meanings, beyond the meanings imposed by rationalists, romantics, and social scientists. This article examines nine books from the last five years to assess the state of the field, and to offer some suggestions for research in the future.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 1069 - 1088
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Stuart Clark and Willem de Blécourt for their insightful comments on a draft of this article, and members of Birkbeck Early Modern Society, University of London, to whom it was delivered as a paper in February 2008.

References

1 Christian Thomasius, De crimine magiae (Halle, 1701); Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse aus dem Quellen dargestellt (Stuttgart, 1843). The early English contribution was not anti-clerical but did disparage Catholicism: Francis Hutchinson, An historical essay concerning witchcraft (London, 1718).

2 Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprozessen im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung (Munich, 1900); Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a history of witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland (3 vols., Philadelphia, PA, 1939); George Lincoln Burr, ed., Narratives of the witchcraft cases, 1648–1706 (New York, NY, 1914).

3 Jacob Grimm, Teutonic mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (4 vols., 1880–8; London, 1999), esp. i, ch. 16, and iii, ch. 34; Jules Michelet, Satanism and witchcraft: a study in medieval superstition, trans. A. R. Allinson (New York, NY, 1968). For a summary, see Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Jacob Grimm (1785–1863)’, in Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of witchcraft: the western tradition (4 vols., Santa Barbara, CA, 2006), ii, pp. 460–2.

4 Sir Walter Scott, Letters on demonology and witchcraft, ed. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (London, 2001); William Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire witches: a romance of Pendle forest (3 vols., London, 1849). See also: Coleman O. Parsons, Witchcraft and demonology in Scott's fiction (Edinburgh, 1964), esp. pp. 134–51; Jeffrey Richards, ‘The “Lancashire novelist”: and the Lancashire witches’, in Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire witches: histories and stories (Manchester, 2002), pp. 166–87.

5 Sir James George Frazer, The golden bough: a study in myth and religion (London, 1922); Margaret Murray, The witch-cult in western Europe: a study in anthropology (Oxford, 1921). C. L'Estrange Ewen was a remarkable archival scholar who dismissed Murray's ideas, see Witchcraft and demonianism (London, 1933), pp. 24–5, 59–60.

6 Norman Cohn, Europe's inner demons: an enquiry inspired by the great witch-hunt (2nd edn, London, 1993), ch. 8; Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft today (London, 1954), esp. chs. 2–4, 10; Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism (Boston, MA, 1978). More recent feminist work includes: Marianne Hester, Lewd women and wicked witches: a study of the dynamics of male domination (London, 1992); Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: a new history of the European witch hunts (London, 1995).

7 Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study (2nd edn, London, 1999); Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (London, 1971); Erik Midelfort, H. C., ‘Recent witch hunting research, or where do we go from here?’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 62 (1968), pp. 373–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (Stanford, CA, 1972); Monter, William P., ‘The historiography of European witchcraft: progress and prospects, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971–2), pp. 435–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: the borderlands during the Reformation (London, 1976).

8 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (London, 1969), p. 9. This had appeared two years earlier in Trevor-Roper's own volume, Religion, the Reformation and social change (London, 1967).

9 See Ronald Hutton, ‘Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft: potential for a new collaboration?’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 413–34. Cf. Keith Thomas, ‘The relevance of social anthropology to the historical study of English witchcraft’, in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft confessions and accusations (London, 1970), pp. 47–81. Thomas and Macfarlane had been influenced by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937).

10 For a brief discussion, see Christina Larner, Witchcraft and religion: the politics of popular belief (Oxford, 1984), pp. 49–55.

11 Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early modern European witchcraft: centres and peripheries (Oxford, 1990).

12 A volume of essays, dedicated to Keith Thomas, was edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, and published as Witchcraft in early modern Europe: studies in culture and belief (Cambridge, 1996). See esp. Robin Briggs, ‘“Many reasons why”: witchcraft and the problem of multiple causation’, pp. 49–63.

13 James Sharpe, Instruments of darkness: witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London, 1996); Robin Briggs, Witches and neighbours: the social and cultural context of European witchcraft (London, 1996).

14 Keith Thomas, ‘An anthropology of religion and magic, II’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), pp. 91–109, quotation at p. 100. Cf. Ashplant, T. G. and Wilson, Adrian, ‘Present-centred history and the problem of historical knowledge’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), pp. 253–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London, 1994); Deborah Willis, Malevolent nurture: witch-hunting and maternal power in early modern England (London, 1995); Diane Purkiss, The witch in history: early modern and twentieth-century representations (London, 1996); Marion Gibson, Reading witchcraft: stories of early English witches (London, 1999).

16 Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford, 1997); idem, ed., Languages of witchcraft: narrative, ideology and meaning in early modern culture (Basingstoke, 2001).

17 A proposed edition of proceedings, to be edited by Wolfgang Behringer and James Sharpe and published by Manchester University Press, has yet to appear.

18 Peter Burke, ‘The comparative approach to European witchcraft’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, eds., Early modern European witchcraft, p. 435.

19 Concise surveys include: Levack, Brian P., ‘Themes of recent witchcraft research’, ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 62 (2006), pp. 7–31Google Scholar; Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Historiography’, in Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of witchcraft, ii, pp. 492–7.

20 Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, ‘Introduction’, in idem and idem, eds., Palgrave advances in witchcraft historiography (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 1–10, quotation at p. 1.

21 Peter Maxwell-Stuart, ‘The contemporary historical debate, 1400–1750’, in ibid., pp. 11–22, quotation at p. 27.

22 Christina Larner, Enemies of God: the witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981).

23 Peter Elmer, ‘Science, medicine and witchcraft’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 33–51.

24 Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus, ac veneficiis (Basel, 1563); Gregory Zilboorg, The medical man and the witch during the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1935), ch. 3; Michaela Valente, ‘Johann Weyer (1515–1588)’, in Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of witchcraft, iv, pp. 1193–4.

25 Elmer, ‘Science, medicine and witchcraft’, p. 41.

26 Clark, Thinking with demons, chs. 10–19.

27 Christa Tuczay, ‘The nineteenth century: medievalism and witchcraft’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 53–68.

28 Juliette Wood, ‘The reality of witch-cults reassessed: fertility and satanism’, in ibid., pp. 69–89. Summers criticized the American scholar Wallace Notestein for having ‘completely ignored the immodesty of the witch-cult and thus extenuated its evil’: The history of witchcraft and demonology (London, 1926), p. xiii.

29 Marko Nenonen, ‘Culture wars: state, religion and popular cultures in Europe, 1400–1800’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 108–24; Brian P. Levack, ‘Crime and the law’, in ibid., pp. 146–63; Marion Gibson, ‘Thinking witchcraft: language, literature and intellectual history’, in ibid., pp. 164–81, quotation at p. 168.

30 Katharine Hodgkin, ‘Gender, mind and body: feminism and psychoanalysis’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 182–202. This revival has also sparked interest in male witchcraft, see: Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male witches in early modern Europe (Manchester, 2003); Kent, E. J., ‘Masculinity and male witches in old and New England, 1593–1680’, History Workshop Journal, 60 (2005), pp. 69–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alison Rowlands and Jenni Grundy, eds., Witchcraft and masculinities in early modern Europe (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008–9).

31 Hodgkin, ‘Gender, mind and body’, p. 183.

32 See Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., The Athlone history of witchcraft and magic in Europe (6 vols., London, 1999–2002), written by leading figures, including Levack, and spanning pre-Christianity and the twentieth century. Other syntheses worth mentioning include: Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 2001); Robert W. Thurston, Witch, wicce, Mother Goose: the rise and fall of the witch-hunts in Europe and North America (Harlow, 2001); Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander, A new history of witchcraft: sorcerers, heretics and pagans (2nd edn, London, 2007).

33 Brian P. Levack, The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (3rd edn, Harlow, 2006), pp. 163–4.

34 Gary K. Waite, Heresy, magic, and witchcraft in early modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003). Waite's latest book examines how a fusing of demonological and heretical concepts fuelled the persecution of sixteenth-century Anabaptists: Eradicating the devil's minions: Anabaptists and witches in Reformation Europe, 1535–1600 (Toronto, 2007).

35 Waite, Heresy, magic, and witchcraft, p. 133.

36 To grasp the full intellectual context of the Malleus, see: Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus maleficarum and the construction of witchcraft: theology and popular belief (Manchester, 2003); Lyndal Roper, ‘Witchcraft and the western imagination’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 16 (2006), pp. 117–41, esp. 122–8.

37 Waite, Heresy, magic, and witchcraft, p. 216.

38 In general, see: Janet Oppenheim, The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985); Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British society between the wars (Manchester, 2000); Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: last of Britain's witches (London, 2001).

39 For an introduction to this question, see: Christina Larner, ‘Crimen exceptum? The crime of witchcraft in Europe’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Crime and the law: the social history of crime in western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), pp. 49–75; Barbara Shapiro, ‘Religion and the law: evidence, proof and “matter of fact”, 1660–1700’, in Norma Landau, ed., Law, crime and English society, 1660–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 185–207; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and evidence in early modern England’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), pp. 33–70.

40 The classic, controversial text is Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: deciphering the witches’ sabbath (London, 1990). For an excellent commentary and critique, see Willem de Blécourt, ‘The return of the sabbat: mental archaeologies, conjectural histories or political mythologies?’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 125–45.

41 P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft: a history (3rd edn, Stroud, 2004), chs. 1–2. On the imagery of the sabbat as a justification for wider religious persecution, see Waite, Eradicating the devil's minions, ch. 5.

42 For pioneering work in this area, see: Charles Zika, Exorcising our demons: magic, witchcraft and visual culture in early modern Europe (Leiden, 2003); Lyndal Roper, Witch craze: terror and fantasy in baroque Germany (New Haven, CT, 2004), esp. chs. 6–7.

43 A point made in: Bob Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), pp. 183–4; Briggs, Witches and neighbours, pp. 22–4.

44 Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft, p. 165. Scot has also been seen as an advocate of evangelical Protestant medicine as a defence against Catholic healing, even as a member of a radical sect: Bartram, Claire, ‘“Melancholic imaginations”: witchcraft and the politics of melancholia in Elizabethan Kent’, Journal of European Studies, 33 (2003), pp. 203–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/the Family of Love’, in Clark, ed., Languages of witchcraft, pp. 119–38.

45 Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft, p. 7.

46 Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and witch-hunts: a global history (Cambridge, 2004).

47 Ibid., pp. 6–7; Peter Geschiere, The modernity of witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA, 1997).

48 Behringer, Witches and witch-hunts, p. 83.

49 See: Hildred Geertz, ‘An anthropology of religion and magic, I’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), pp. 71–89; Jonathan Barry, ‘Keith Thomas and the problem of witchcraft’, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in early modern Europe, pp. 1–45; Richard Jenkins, ‘Continuity and change: social science perspectives on European witchcraft’, in Barry and Davies, eds., Witchcraft historiography, pp. 203–24.

50 Hutton, ‘Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft’, p. 432.

51 ‘Some will say, you swome some of them … I answer, that hath been used’: John Stearne, A confirmation and discovery of witch-craft (London, 1648), p. 18 (my italic). In Germany, of course, it was sometimes called ‘the bath’: das Hexenbad.

52 Behringer, Witches and witch-hunts, p. 132; Stearne, Confirmation, p. 11.

53 It is unhelpful to dismiss Matthew Hopkins as ‘a clearly deranged personality’, as Michael D. Bailey does in his recent Magic and superstition in Europe: a concise history from antiquity to the present (Lanham, MD, 2007), p. 166.

54 The contextualization of this work, upon which its value depends, varies greatly: Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire witch-craze: Jennet Preston and the Lancashire witches, 1612 (2nd edn, Lancaster, 1995); Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn, A trial of witches: a seventeenth-century witchcraft prosecution (London, 1997); James Sharpe, The bewitching of Anne Gunter: a horrible and true story of football, witchcraft, murder, and the king of England (London, 1999); Philip C. Almond, The witches of Warboys: an extraordinary story of sorcery, sadism and satanic possession (London, 2008); Michael Honeybone, Wicked practise & sorcerye: the Belvoir witchcraft case of 1619 (Buckingham, 2008).

55 For a sample, see: Julian Goodare, ed., The Scottish witch-hunt in context (Manchester, 2002); Stuart Macdonald, The witches of Fife: witch-hunting in a Scottish shire, 1560–1710 (East Linton, 2002); P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, An abundance of witches: the great Scottish witch-hunt (Stroud, 2005). A historiographical overview is provided by Macdonald, Stuart, ‘Enemies of God revisited: recent publications on Scottish witch-hunting’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 23 (2003), pp. 65–84Google Scholar.

56 Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller, eds., Witchcraft and belief in early modern Scotland (Basingstoke, 2008); Brian P. Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland: law, politics and religion (New York and Abingdon, 2008).

57 Julian Goodare, ‘Scottish witchcraft in its European context’, in Goodare, Martin, and Miller, eds., Witchcraft and belief, pp. 26–50.

58 Joyce Miller, ‘Men in black: appearances of the devil in early modern Scottish witchcraft discourse’, in ibid., pp. 144–65, quotation at p. 154; Owen Davies, ‘A comparative perspective on Scottish cunning-folk and charmers’, in ibid., pp. 185–205, quotation at p. 202. In recent years, Davies has made a major contribution to our understanding of British witchcraft and cunning magic, mainly in the post-trial period, see his: Witchcraft, magic and culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1991); A people bewitched: witchcraft and magic in nineteenth-century Somerset (Bruton, 1999); Cunning folk: popular magic in English history (London, 2003). Davies has also edited two volumes of essays with Willem de Blécourt: Beyond the witch-trials: witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004); Witchcraft continued: popular magic in modern Europe (Manchester, 2004).

59 Hugh Cheape, ‘“Charms against witchcraft”: magic and mischief in museum collections’, in ibid., pp. 227–48, quotation at p. 239.

60 Edward J. Cowan, ‘Witch persecution and folk belief in lowland Scotland’, in ibid., pp. 71–94; Lizanne Henderson, ‘Witch hunting and witch belief in the Gàidhealtachd’, in ibid., pp. 95–118; Michael Wasser, ‘The mechanical world-view and the decline of witch-beliefs in Scotland’, in ibid., pp. 206–26.

61 For some pointers in this area, see: Larner, Witchcraft and religion, ch. 4; James Sharpe, ‘Witch-hunting and witch historiography: some Anglo-Scottish comparisons’, in Goodare, ed., Scottish witch-hunt, pp. 182–97.

62 Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland, ch. 4; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: a seventeenth-century English tragedy (London, 2005). It is a dimension also ignored in: R. Trevor Davies, Four centuries of witch-beliefs, with special reference to the Great Rebellion (London, 1947); Frederick Valletta, Witchcraft, magic and superstition in England, 1640–70 (Aldershot, 2000); Nathan Johnstone, The devil and demonism in early modern England (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 7 (on satanic politics during the civil wars).

63 Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland, pp. 29, 75; Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 35–6.

64 Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (Manchester, 2003). On the severe purges in Würzburg, Eichstätt, Mainz, and Bamberg, see Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft persecutions in Bavaria: popular magic, religious zealotry and reason of state in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 224–9.

65 James Sharpe, ‘Witchcraft in the early modern Isle of Man’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), pp. 11–28, quotation at p. 23.

66 Rowlands, Witchcraft narratives, p. 59.

67 Peter Elmer, ‘“Saints or sorcerers”: Quakerism, demonology and the decline of witchcraft in seventeenth-century England’, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in early modern Europe, pp. 145–79; idem, ‘Towards a politics of witchcraft in early modern England’, in Clark, ed., Languages of witchcraft, pp. 101–18; Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its transformations, c. 1650–c. 1750 (Oxford, 1996).

68 Rowlands, Witchcraft narratives, ch. 3. Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis’, in James Strachey et al., eds., The standard edition of the complete psychological works (24 vols., London, 1953–74), xix, pp. 697–105.

69 Ibid., p. 9. Another recent work on an early modern German city (Eichstätt, 1590–1631) displays the variety of social contexts in which witchcraft found meaning: Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Leiden, 2007).

70 Ibid., ‘Appendix: trials for witchcraft in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 1549–1709’.

71 Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland, ch. 8, quotation at pp. 132, 142.

72 Emma Wilby, Cunning folk and familiar spirits: shamanistic visionary traditions in early modern British witchcraft and magic (Brighton, 2005), p. 126. Cf. Lizanne Henderson, ‘The road to Elfland: fairy belief and the Child ballads’, in Edward J. Cowan, ed., The ballad in Scottish history (East Lothian, 2000), pp. 54–72; Angela Bourke, ‘The virtual reality of Irish fairy legend’, in Claire Connolly, ed., Theorizing Ireland (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 27–40.

73 Wilby, Cunning folk, p. 189; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and power in early modern England: the case of Margaret Moore’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds., Women, crime and the courts in early modern England (London, 1994), pp. 125–45.

74 Wilby, Cunning folk, pp. 14–25, quotation at p. 15.

75 Ibid., pp. 67, 82, 104; Gregory, Annabel, ‘Witchcraft, politics and “good neighbourhood” in early seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), pp. 31–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Wilby, Cunning folk, p. 217; William Perkins, A discourse of the damned art of witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608).

77 Gibson, ‘Thinking witchcraft’, pp. 169–71.

78 David Harley, ‘Explaining Salem: Calvinist psychology and the diagnosis of possession’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), pp. 307–33, quotation at p. 310.

79 Stanislav Andreski, Syphilis, puritanism and witch hunts: historical explanations in the light of medicine and psychoanalysis with a forecast about Aids (Basingstoke, 1989); Laurie Winn Carlson, A fever in Salem: a new interpretation of the New England witch trials (Chicago, IL, 1999); H. Sidky, Witchcraft, lycanthropy, drugs and disease: an anthropological study of the European witch-hunts (New York, NY, 1997); Matossian, Mary K., ‘Bewitched or intoxicated? The etiology of witch persecution in early modern England’, Medizinhistorisches Journal, 18 (1983), pp. 33–42Google ScholarPubMed; Marvin Harris, Cows, pigs, wars, and witches: the riddles of culture (New York, NY, 1974), chs. 9–11.

80 Tuczay, ‘Medievalism and witchcraft’, pp. 61–2.

81 Terry Deary, Witches: a horrible history (London, 2007), p. 6. For some shrewd insights into the cultural buoyancy of witchcraft in modern times, see Marion Gibson, Witchcraft myths in American culture (New York, NY, 2007).

82 Tom Armitage, ‘Switzerland urged to pardon Anna Göldi, Europe's last witch’, Independent, 2 Aug. 2007, p. 20; Severin Carrell, ‘Campaign to pardon the last witch jailed as a threat to Britain at war’, Guardian, 13 Jan. 2007, p. 9.

83 Hutton, ‘Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft’, p. 432.

84 See Monter's, Williamremarks about Glanvill and Scot in ‘Re-contextualizing British witchcraft’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35 (2004), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Mary Beth Norton, In the devil's snare: the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 (New York, NY, 2002); Robin Briggs, The witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007), p. 6. Briggs's book will be reviewed separately by me in the European History Quarterly.

86 Hall, David D., ‘Witchcraft and the limits of interpretation’, New England Quarterly, 58 (1985), pp. 253–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: witchcraft and the culture of early New England (Oxford, 1982). Further light may be shed in this dark corner by Edward Bever's The realities of witchcraft and popular magic in early modern Europe: culture, cognition, and everyday life (Basingstoke, 2008), not yet published at the time of writing.

87 See Behringer, Witches and witch-hunts, ch. 6.

88 Levack, ‘Themes of recent witchcraft research’, p. 24.