Abstract
Following the publication of Stuart Clark’s groundbreaking study of demonology in 1997,1 it is probably no exaggeration to state that historians of witchcraft are better placed than ever before to understand how early modern Europeans conceived of witchcraft, and how it informed every aspect of their thought and culture. Largely concerned with the theoretical base of witchcraft, Clark has little, however, to say about the practical consequences of witchcraft belief, particularly the relationship between thought and action which culminated in the actual prosecution of men and women for the crime of witchcraft. In this chapter, I would like to suggest a number of ways in which it might be possible to utilize aspects of his research to generate a better understanding of one element of this process, namely the problematic nature of the uneven geographical and temporal pattern of witch trials. My initial interest in this subject was prompted by a desire to explore more fully the problem of the decline of élite belief in witchcraft in seventeenth-century England. It soon became apparent that the normal explanations for this phenomenon carried little conviction.
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S. Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).
K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1978), p. 684
cf. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), p. 169.
Cf. G. R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe (London and Sydney, 1987), pp. 120–1.
I share Quaife’s strictures on the functionalist model of witchcraft as state-building. For general discussion of this, and its limited application to the early modern period, see B. P. Levack, ‘State-Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe’, in J. Barry, M. Hester and G. Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 96–115.
See, for example A. Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, Politics and “Good Neighbourhood” in Early Seventeenth-Century Rye,’ Past and Present, 133 (1991), 31–66
A. R. DeWindt, ‘Witchcraft and Conflicting Visions of the Ideal Village Community’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 427–63.
N. Jones, ‘Defining Superstitions: Treasonous Catholics and the Act against Witchcraft of 1563’, in C. Carlton et al. (eds), State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England (Stroud, 1998), pp. 187–203.
This is most evident, of course, in the debate surrounding the Puritan exorcist, John Darrell, and the case of Mary Glover in London; see D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981)
M. MacDonald (ed.), Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London and New York, 1991).
A. Macfarlane, ‘A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue’ in S. Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), pp. 141–2, 154 n. 21.
D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), pp. 78–9, 165.
J. Richards, ‘“His Nowe Majestie” and the English Monarchy: The Kingship of Charles I before 1640’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 88–93.
For a recent reinterpretation of the Hopkins’ trials which suggests the advantages of such an approach, see J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London, 1996), pp. 128–47.
For a recent attempt to underline the importance of such an approach in the case of the Stour Valley riots of 1642, see J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999).
The itinerary of Dowsing’s campaign of iconoclastic destruction in East Anglia in 1643–44 bears close parallel with the route taken by Hopkins a year later. For a recent study of Dowsing, which positions his iconoclasm within the context of his well-informed and highly individual analysis of contemporary events, see J. Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the Bureaucratic Puritan’, in J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer (Oxford, 1993), pp. 173–203.
P. Hay, A Vision of Balaams Asse (London, 1616), p. 32.
C. L’Estrange Ewen (ed.), Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (London, 1929), pp. 223–4, 227.
For Newcastle, see R. Howell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967), pp. 232–3.
I. Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997).
See J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, The Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 61–82.
S. Petto, A Faithful Narrative of the Wonderful and Extraordinary Fits which Mr Tho Spatchet… was under by Witchcraft (London, 1693)
For a recent study of the Lowestoft witches which struggles to accommodate the religious moderation of Hale and Sir Thomas Browne with their advocacy of witchcraft, see G. Geis and I. Bunn, A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution (London and New York, 1997).
S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ, 1985), p. 303
[T. Barlow], Several Miscellaneous and Weighty Cases of Conscience (London, 1692), vol. 1, p. 45 [first written in manuscript in 1660].
For just one example of the way in which disputes over witchcraft were inextricably bound up with religious and political tensions, both at the local and national level, see J. Westaway and R. D. Harrison, ‘“The Surey Demoniack”: Defining Protestantism in 1690s Lancashire’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Unity and Diversity in the Church (Oxford, 1996), pp 263–82.
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© 2001 Peter Elmer
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Elmer, P. (2001). Towards a Politics of Witchcraft in Early Modern England. In: Clark, S. (eds) Languages of Witchcraft. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98529-8_6
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