Abstract
Why did Europeans in general and Scots in particular begin to doubt the reality of witches and witchcraft?2 This is an important and longstanding question. It was raised most recently for me when I wrote about the western witch-hunt of 1697–1700.3 In that hunt large numbers of witches were accused but only a few were executed, despite ‘ideal conditions’ for a witch-hunt as judged by past Scottish experience. I concluded that the relative failure of the hunt was due to pervasive doubt on the part of the legal and political authorities concerning the reliability of the evidence used against the accused witches. But what was the source of this doubt? I intend to propose a solution here: the doubt concerning evidence was being inspired by what we call the ‘scientific revolution’, and especially — but not exclusively — the mechanical world view that was associated with it.
The decline and apparent final collapse of the witch-craze in the late seventeenth century, while other such social stereotypes retained their power, is a revolution which is surprisingly difficult to document.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1967.1
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Notes
H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The European witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries’, in his Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London, 1967), 168.
M. Wasser, ‘The western witch-hunt of 1697–1700: the last major witchhunt in Scotland’, in J. Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002).
J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London, 1996), ch. 11: ‘Science and the decline of witchcraft’.
B. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 225
B. P. Levack, ‘The decline and end of witchcraft prosecutions’, in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra, B. P. Levack and R. Porter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1999), 36.
I have found the following sources useful. For Boyle and Glanvill, M. Hunter, ‘The discovery of second sight in late 17th-century Scotland’, History Today, 51:6 (June 2001), 48–53, and the introduction to M. Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland: the Secret Commonwealth and other Texts (Woodbridge, 2001).
For Newton, M. White, Isaac Newton: the Last Sorcerer (Reading, Mass., 1997). Sharpe suggests that the ‘real’ change came with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, not with seventeenth-century science: Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 256. See also R. Porter, ‘Witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal thought’, in Gijswijt-Hofstra, Levack and Porter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 197–9.
C. Larner, Enemies of God: the Witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 175–7, and B. P. Levack, ‘The decline and end of Scottish witch-hunting’, in Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, 168–9.
See R. Briggs, ‘“Many reasons why”: witchcraft and the problem of multiple explanation’, in J. Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), especially at p. 53 where he refers to chaos theory. Stephen Jay Gould has also applied evolutionary theory to human cultural evolution with interesting results: see for example ‘The creation myths of Cooperstown. Or why the Cardiff Giants are an unbeatable and appropriately named team’, Natural History, xcviii (Nov. 1989), 14–24.
M. Wasser, ‘The privy council and the witches: the curtailment of witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland, 1597–1628’, SHR, 82 (2003), 20–46.
Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or a Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions … with an introduction by Coleman O. Parsons (Gainesville, FL, 1966), 62.
I have used a reprint of the 1685 edition: George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Gainesville, FL, 1969).
S. Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 94, 185, 211, 214, 264, 299; 151–311 deals with the whole topic of witchcraft and science.
Glanvill lacks a modern study. For some earlier efforts see W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, DC, 1911; repr. New York, 1965), ch. 12
J. I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill, Anglican Apologist (St Louis, Miss., 1956)
M. E. Prior, ‘Joseph Glanvill, witchcraft, and seventeenth-century science’, Modem Philology, 30 (1932), 167–93.
In what follows, unless otherwise noted, I am drawing on T. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
For receptions of Descartes in England, see D. Jesseph, ‘Mechanism, scepticism and witchcraft: More and Glanvill on the failures of the Cartesian philosophy’, in T. M. Schmaltz (ed.), Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe (London, 2005). Regarding atomism and Cartesian physics, there were also discussions and disputes in seventeenth-century ‘mechanical’ science over the nature of the particles that composed the universe. These have not been addressed here, partly because they are beyond the scope of the chapter, partly because they did not matter much to those laymen who were struggling to understand the new science.
See, for example, C. Lüthy, J. E. Murdoch and W. R. Newman, ‘Introduction’, in C. Lüthy, J. E. Murdoch and W. R. Newman (eds), Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (Leiden, 2001), 18, where it is mentioned that contemporaries viewed many of the disputes as ‘for the most part a matter of metaphysics or of religious caution’.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, (ed.) and trans. D. M. Clarke (London, 1999), xiii.
Trevor-Roper, ‘The European witch-craze’, 180–1, and R. L. Harris, ‘Janet Douglas and the witches of Pollock: the background of scepticism in Scotland in the 1670s’, in S. R. McKenna (ed.), Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature (Lewiston, NY, 1992). At pp. 97–8, Harris suggests that Sir George Mackenzie was practising a certain self-censorship in not attacking witch-hunting with even greater vigour in his Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal.
M. Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 133–43, 151–80, and Nicolson, World in the Moon, 36–61. M. Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948), also contains numerous references to an inhabited moon.
J. Scotland, The History of Scottish Education, 2 vols. (London, 1969), i, 134, 143
C. M. King, ‘Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum of the Scottish Universities in the 17th Century’ (University of Edinburgh PhD thesis, 1974).
J. W. Cairns, ‘Importing our lawyers from Holland: Netherlands influences on Scots law and lawyers in the eighteenth century’, in G. G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton, 1996), 151.
A. Robertson, The Life of Sir Robert Moray: Soldier, Statesman and Man of Science (1608–1673) (London, 1922); Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory, 2, 19, 173–5, 177, 180. For Lauderdale’s interest in demonic possession see B. P. Levack, ‘Demonic possession in early modern Scotland’, Chapter 7 above.
H. Ouston, ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the patronage of learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in J. Dwyer et al. (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, n.d. [1982]).
W. Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (London, 1885), 268.
Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, (ed.) D. Crawford (SHS, 1900), xxxix. Unfortunately I have not yet been able to consult either his Decisions or his manuscrints.
G. Brunton and D. Haig, An Historical Account of the Senators of the College of Justice (Edinburgh, 1832), 442–3, and NAS, high court of justiciary, books of adjournal, JC3/1, fo. 66.
H. Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: the Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, 8 vols. (2nd edn, 1914–28), iii, 453–4.
M. Hunter, ‘“Aikenhead the atheist”: the context and consequences of articulate irreligion in the late seventeenth century’, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds) Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992).
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, Ill., 1962).
In this discussion I am drawing upon both Clark, Thinking with Demons, and B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd edn, London, 2006), ch. 2.
A. L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Scottish Church, 1688–1843: the Age of the Moderates (Edinburgh, 1973)
I. Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), 184–91.
L. Henderson, ‘The survival of witchcraft prosecutions and witch belief in south-west Scotland’, SHR, 85 (2006), 52–74.
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Wasser, M. (2008). The Mechanical World-View and the Decline of Witch Beliefs in Scotland. In: Goodare, J., Martin, L., Miller, J. (eds) Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591400_10
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