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< | The Community's Peace: Witchcraft, Popular Culture, and the Law during the Early Modern Period | >
> | The Community's Peace: Witchcraft, Popular Culture, and the Law during the Early Modern Period | | | “[I]n the case of Witch-Craft many things are very difficult, hidden, and infolded in mists and clouds, over-shadowing our reason and best understanding.”
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< | INTRODUCTION | >
> | INTRODUCTION | | | William Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins, not with the play’s namesake, but with a meeting of three witches at night. Under the cloak of darkness, the “weird sisters” gather to plan out their encounter with Macbeth. The play, written and performed around the turn of the 17th century, is one of the longest-lasting and most popular depictions of witchcraft. Though not main characters themselves (their names are but “First Witch,” “Second Witch,” and “Third Witch”), they are central to the unraveling of the plot. Marion Gibson notes that “with their economical, rhythmic and riddling speeches,” the weird sisters “create in a few short scenes an oppressive atmosphere of evil and mystery which blights the whole play.” Gibson at 112. | | | On some level, a basic one perhaps, witchcraft helped explain the reason why events, many of them tragic or unfortunate, occurred—why bad things happened to the supposed good people of the community. Though Trevor-Roper has called witchcraft persecution “[t]he rubbish of the human mind,” and he, in certain respects, is not wrong, it is also worth exploring the socio-cultural beliefs that made a belief in witchcraft real. Trevor-Roper at 97. As Carlo Ginzburg explores in Ecstasies, witchcraft persecution, with the witches’ sabbath at the center, emerges from a history of scapegoating in continental Europe. In this vein, common beliefs and imaginations were critical to the prosecution of witchcraft. Gaskill suggests that “no social, economic, religious or cultural facts shaped the history of English witchcraft more.” Gaskill, Witchcraft and Evidence, at 39. For a conviction of witchcraft to stand—that is, for the evidence to prove successful it had to convince the people of the community; it had to make sense of their lives. | |
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< | SETTING THE STAGE | >
> | SETTING THE STAGE | | |
The prosecution of witches in England materialized during the early modern period. By the sixteenth century, the belief in the existence of witchcraft was a common one and the belief in dark magic was regarded as “the logical corollary of the equally widespread possibility in the belief of beneficent magic.” Thomas at 437. Though the beliefs in dark magic “were as old as human history, and in no sense peculiarly English,” during the late Middle Ages, Christianity began to distinguish this type of magic from the unharmful kind. Thomas at 438. Among the intellectual class, what resulted was demonology, which constructed a new way of seeing the world from the old beliefs. Trevor-Roper at 91. As such, though witchcraft was ascribed to “virtually every kind of magical activity or ritual operation that worked by occult methods,” Thomas, in Douglas, at 48, it came to be regarded as the “supernatural activity, believed to be the result of power given by the Devil, and causing physical damage….” McFarlane? , in Douglas, at 82. | |
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< | In practice, the ways in which witchcraft mattered to English society differed between the learned classes and the rest of society. Whereas theologians and others who studied witchcraft were concerned with Devil-worshipping, a heretical practice, the “uneducated populace” was more concerned with the damage that these evil creatures caused to persons and property within the community—those experiences which they could feel and to which they fell victim at times. See Thomas, in Douglas, at 48-49; Sparke. | >
> | In practice, the ways in which witchcraft mattered to English society differed between the learned classes and the rest of society. Whereas theologians and others who studied witchcraft were concerned with Devil-worshipping, a heretical practice, the “uneducated populace” was more concerned with the damage that these evil creatures caused to persons and property within the community—those experiences which they could feel and to which they fell victim at times. See Thomas, in Douglas, at 48-49; Sharpe. | | | Witchcraft rarely occurred among family members (except perhaps in cases of bewitched husbands or magical acts to induce marriage) and, as a result, was treated as more of a communal problem. Macfarlane at 87. As such, witches of the bad sort were really those who “afflict[ed] their neighbours and others with misfortune, sickness, and death, and who also practise[d] a range of ungodly magical rites in the community.” Marion, Intro at x. From these definitions, we can gather that witches accused of wrongdoing did not practice their craft silently. Rather, she was one who exposed her community to the evils which she possessed and with which she disturbed the community’s peace.
| | | As indicated, little remains of the thoughts and beliefs of those accusers, but far less remains of the unmitigated thoughts and beliefs of those accused of witchcraft. Though much is speculated about the minds of the accusers, far less is known about the accused. Gaskill notes, if merely in passing, “Most suspects were marginal women whose confessions reflected the misery of hardship, anxiety of moral guilt, and fear of damnation.” Gaskill at 53. Though the outcome of these cases largely turned on what the accused confessed to, we can discern far less about what they thought, even from their supposed own words. As Geertz has remarked, “Men, of course, can lie, and, especially in the presence of judges, often do....” Geertz at 189. | |
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< | PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN | >
> | PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN | | | | |
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> | What is perhaps most readily striking in the prosecution of witchcraft is the process of law in the making: its effort to find and form some sort of relation—whether of alignment or power over or something else—with the community and its values. This is perhaps part of what Geertz meant when he wrote that “the ‘law’ side of things is not a bounded set of norms, rules, principles, values, or whatever from which jural responses to distilled events can be drawn, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Geertz at xxxx (Local Knowledge). Through witchcraft, the beliefs from above—whether intellectual, divinely ordered, or both—merged with the lived experiences and beliefs of those below. In this, we see a process that is not neat or orderly but constantly in flux and struggling to make sense of relations between the people in the community and their systems. | | | | |
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> | Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have both offered valuable insight into the function of witchcraft in early modern society. In The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft, Thomas suggests that witch accusations helped alleviate the pressures—whether of social, moral, and/or religious guilt—that afflicted community members as English society moved away from reliance on private charity for care of the poor to [governmental and individualistic ideas of self-help]. Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex offers a similar argument. In it, he suggests that witchcraft was the means through which neighbors, in a society founded on Christian communal values, transitioned to publicly dealing with conflict. In this worldview, a witch would inflict harm on her victim for his “unneighbourly behavior”—for example, denying her the sale of a pig or refusing her a loan. Macfarlane at 92.
Though neither of their account is implausible, and perhaps it helps account for some of the accusations, it is difficult to imagine such a widespread phenomenon, at its most basic level, driven on unaired social tensions. In a way, these accounts undermine the fantastic fervor, whether real or imagined, with which witchcraft manifested:
Year after year inflammatory books and sermons warned the Christian public of the danger, urged the Christian magistrate to greater vigilance, greater persecution. Confessors and judges were supplied with manuals incorporating all the latest information, village hatreds were exploited in order to ensure exposure, torture was used to extract and expand confessions, and lenient judges were denounced as enemies of the people of God, drowsy guardians of the beleaguered citadel. Trevor-Roper at 96.
Though, of course, we ought to question such accounts of social life in early modern England, Trevor-Roper’s incredible description helps shed light on the complexity of the circumstance.
Although Thomas and Macfarlane’s analyses arguing that deteriorating social relations between the community’s well-to-do and the poor precipitated accusations of witchcraft are persuasive, these evaluations create a not insignificant ideological vacuum. Perhaps these tensions laid the foundation, but what else made up the “witch-craze”? | | |
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