Abstract
Although sources for the study of Dutch witchcraft are available from the Late Middle Ages to the twentieth century, this in-depth study of Rotterdam and the area to the south concentrates on newspaper reports from the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It is argued that a focus on local practices and categories is essential for understanding bewitchments (betoveringen), thought to have involved old women harming young children. Local and regional unwitchers, or cunning folk, played an important part here, not in combatting witches, but in providing means to identify them. In this way the (family and friends of the) bewitched could force the alleged witch to undo her spell. Bewitchments in this Protestant area were dealt with differently than in a Catholic environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), which we discussed in class before its publication. See also: Johannes Fabian, ‘The Other Revisited. Critical afterthoughts’, Anthropological Theory, 6 (2006), 139–52; id., ‘Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18 (2012), 439–53.
- 2.
In anthropology, the witchcraft–sorcery distinction is a reified opposition, derived from a translation problem by E.E. Evans-Pritchard; in history, it is deemed to separate the demonological Sammelbegrif of Joseph Hansen from a popular discourse but fails to do so because it ignores processes of adaptation.
- 3.
Jeanne Favret-Saada, Désorceler (Paris, 2009), translated by Matthew Carey as The Anti-Witch (Chicago, 2015). This is a reworked collection of articles which appeared between 1983 and 1991, still based on the original fieldwork in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Favret-Saada, Les mots, la mort, les sorts: La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1977), translated by Catherine Cullen as Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge, 1980), and Favret-Saada and Josée Contreras, Corps pour corps: Enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1981). I have retained the English from the first translation, i.e. ‘unwitcher’ and ‘unwitching’ rather than ‘dewitcher’ and ‘dewitching’. Until 1974 Favret-Saada published under her maiden name Favret and only used the double-barrelled name after her marriage. To be consistent, this chapter will refer only to Favret but retain her later name in the footnotes for work published or re-issued after 1974.
- 4.
Inter alia, from an endless list: Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, 1997); id., Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in Comparison (Chicago, 2013); Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago, 2005); Koen Stroeken, Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft (New York, 2010); Nils Bubandt, The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Ithaca, 2014).
- 5.
Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Witch, her Victim, the Unwitcher and the Researcher: The Continued Existence of Traditional Witchcraft’ in Willem de Blécourt, Ronald Hutton & Jean La Fontaine, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century (1999), 141–219. This essay covers the whole of Europe.
- 6.
An English student of witchcraft may find this discussion like splitting hairs, as both could occur; cf. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1999), 218–21.
- 7.
This issue is not taken up in the latest critique of Favret’s work: Gregor Dobler, ‘Fatal Words: restudying Jeanne Favret-Saada’, Anthropology of This Century 13 (2015) at aotcpress.com. Cf. Perle Møhl, Village Voices: Coexistence and Communication in a Rural Community in Central France (Copenhagen, 1997).
- 8.
See Owen Davies, ‘Witchcraft Accusations in France, 1850–1990’ in Willem de Blécourt & Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester, 2004), 107–32.
- 9.
These are their real first names (at least according to the newspaper); the Biblical connotation is unintended.
- 10.
De Dordrechtsche Courant, 13 July 1879; Rotterdamsche Courant, 15 July 1879. The verdict in De Dordrechtsche Courant, 21 July 1879.
- 11.
‘Unwitting Therapy’ in The Anti-Witch, 15. Cf. Favret-Saada, ‘Unbewitching as Therapy’, American Ethnologist, 16 (1989), 40–56.
- 12.
‘Unwitting Therapy’, 19.
- 13.
‘Unwitting Therapy’, 21. At this point the English translation is insufficient because it only implies that the remark is linked to ‘exhortatory narratives’, whereas the French states it explicitly: Désorceler, 40. Cf. Deadly Words, 233: ‘the unwitcher is absent from this questionnaire’; this only relates to the questions formulated by Arnold van Gennep in 1938. Cf. the motif-index where ‘wise men and women’ do feature (G271.6), but far too little (only when their spells are not known): Ernest W. Baughman, Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America (The Hague, 1966).
- 14.
Staphorst, Provinciale Drentsche & Asser Courant‚ 25 February 1862; Zutphen (arr.) Provinciale Drentsche & Asser Courant‚ 4 March 1862; Hornaar, Provinciale Drentsche & Asser Courant, 4 July1863.
- 15.
De Dordrechtsche Courant, 18 March 1873, 26 April 1873 (Lexmond); 20 July 1875 (Ammerstol); 9 May 1886 (’s-Gravendeel); Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 29 November 1890 (Rotterdam).
- 16.
See for England: Owen Davies, ‘Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1998), 139–66; Thomas Waters, ‘Maleficent Witchcraft in Britain since 1900’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2015), 99–122, the latter is mainly an inventory.
- 17.
I am thus revisiting the area discussed in my ‘Boiling Chickens and Burning Cats: Witchcraft in the Western Netherlands, 1850–1925’, in de Blécourt & Davies (eds), Witchcraft Continued, 89–106, now with a smaller geographical scope and mostly new material.
- 18.
Hans Knippenberg & Ben de Pater, De eenwording van Nederland. Schaalvergroting en integratie sinds 1800 (Nijmegen 1988), 188–9.
- 19.
Cf. Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels (eds), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, 2003).
- 20.
Désorceler, 27; Anti-Witch, 13.
- 21.
Anti-Witch, 84.
- 22.
Ibid., 15. The original French in Désorceler, 31. There are three other places where discours is not translated as discourse, cf. Anti-Witch 57, 59, 107 with Désorceler 94, 97, 160. Favret-Saada’s is supposed to be an academic text, not a work of literary fancy.
- 23.
Anti-Witch, 27. French: ne permet pas de comprehendre quoi que ce soit au désorcèlement, Désorceler, 50. See also the introduction to Deadly Words. This distinction deflates Dobler’s criticism in ‘Fatal Words’, but the question is whether the distinction is valid enough.
- 24.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 12 September 1879, citing Het Vaderland, of the day before.
- 25.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 12 September 1879.
- 26.
Leidsche Courant, 16 September 1879, citing Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant.
- 27.
Deadly Words, Appendix II.
- 28.
See the Annexe ‘Sorcières et Lumières’, in Corps pour corps, 333–63.
- 29.
Deadly Words, 9.
- 30.
Willem de Blécourt, ‘Time and the Anthropologist; or the Psychometry of Historiography’, Focaal, 26/27 (1996), 17–24.
- 31.
Renato Rosaldo, ‘From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor’ in James Clifford & George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986), 77–97.
- 32.
Les mots, la mort, les sorts, 124 (1985 edition); Deadly Words, 69.
- 33.
Les mots, la mort, les sorts, 328; Deadly Words, 192.
- 34.
Cf. De Blécourt, ‘The Witch’, 153 on other European examples of bewitched witches.
- 35.
Cf. De Maasbode, 24 April 1879; this relates the case of the assaulted priest, see De Blécourt ‘Boiling Chickens’, 96.
- 36.
Id., ‘On the Continuation of Witchcraft’ in Jonathan Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 335–52.
- 37.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 14 October 1885.
- 38.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 3 Februari 1892.
- 39.
Algemeen Handelsblad, 21 January 1895, citing Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant.
- 40.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 22 July 1896.
- 41.
De Dordrechtsche Courant, 31 May 1897.
- 42.
The notion that drawing blood from a witch (scratching) would cure her victim was English. See, for example, Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 193–5, 199–200. In the Netherlands it did not take hold.
- 43.
I paraphrase and adapt Favret’s conclusion about the relation between hypothetical physical aggression and actual metaphorical aggression, Les mots, la mort, les sorts, 133; Deadly Words, 75. In the Dutch narratives, the witch is very much present.
- 44.
Désorceler, 36. In Mayenne, at least according to one informant, touching the witch was ‘imprudent’ and ‘absurd’ as there was always the danger of retaliation: Deadly Words, 164; Les mots, 279.
- 45.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 13 December 1892.
- 46.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 28 July 1890.
- 47.
Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant‚ 19 May 1866; Schiedamsche Courant‚ 20 September 1880.
- 48.
Willem de Blécourt, Het Amazonenleger: Irreguliere genezeressen in Nederland, 1850–1930 (Amsterdam, 1999), 90.
- 49.
Leidsch Dagblad, 1 May 1875; Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 30 January 1892.
- 50.
Anti-Witch, 49.
- 51.
Owen Davies, Cunning Folk (2003), 85.
- 52.
Cf. De Blécourt, ‘Boiling Chickens’, 97–8; Hans de Waardt, Toverij en samenleving. Holland 1500–1800 (The Hague, 1991), 290–1.
- 53.
Respectively: Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 13 September 1880, 14 December 1886, 1 September 1887, 10 July 1889.
- 54.
Algemeen Handelsblad, 21 January 1895 citing Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant.
- 55.
Deadly Words, 111–17 (Chap. 8).
- 56.
Anti-Witch, 37.
- 57.
Ibid.; Désorceler, 66.
- 58.
De Blécourt, ‘The Witch’, 154, 172, 192, 209.
- 59.
Id., ‘“Keep that Woman Out!” Notions of Space in Twentieth-Century Flemish Witchcraft Discourse’, History and Theory, 52 (2013), 361–79, at 369–70.
- 60.
Deadly Words, 168.
- 61.
Ibid., 14.
- 62.
Ibid., 78.
- 63.
Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period’, Gender & History, 12 (2000), 287–309.
- 64.
See Willem de Blécourt, ‘Pins, Poppets, and Pain’ (forthcoming). I suppose that the few specimens that have been found (and exhibited in museums) were produced by cunning folk.
- 65.
Deadly Words, 198.
- 66.
Anti-Witch, 44; Désorceler, 77.
- 67.
It does not appear in Les mots, la mort, les sorts. She only formulated it explicitly and in these terms when editing the essays for Désorceler. In the original essay the difference is between les récits typiques and les récits inachevés: ‘L’invention d’une thérapie: la sorcellerie bocaine 1887–1970’, Le débat: histoire, politique, société, 40 (1986), 29–46. A rudimentary version appears in ‘Unbewitching as Therapy’, 44: ‘witchcraft discourse provides a second type of story, by definition incomplete…’.
- 68.
Anti-Witch, 5; Désorceler, 16. It is debatable whether connue translates as ‘experienced’ and not simply as ‘knew’.
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de Blécourt, W. (2018). Contested Knowledge: A Historical Anthropologist’s Approach to European Witchcraft. In: Barry, J., Davies, O., Usborne, C. (eds) Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present . Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63784-6_1
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