Abstract
In attempting to understand the origin of the witch trials and the emergence of a demonological tradition in early modern Europe, writers on witchcraft have consistently sought to ascribe a role for science and medicine in that process. Until fairly recently, two broad assumptions have informed this literature. Firstly, that the rise of the mass persecution of witches, and the accompanying set of ideas which underpinned those trials, were in part the product of the superstitious, backward-looking and erroneous state of post-medieval science and medicine. And secondly, that the demise of witch trials and beliefs can be largely accounted for by the overthrow of antiquated scientific and medical opinion following the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Since the 1960s, aspects of this overarching explicandum have been slowly challenged and modified. It is only in the last decade, however, that a thoroughly revisionist account has emerged which has not only challenged the assumption that witchcraft was essentially a by-product of early modern science and medicine, but has also posed major objections to the idea that witchcraft was effectively argued out of existence by the onset of scientific, and to a lesser extent medical, innovation and change. This chapter seeks to chart the wider political and intellectual currents that have informed these interpretative traditions and to assess their contribution to our present understanding of the place of witchcraft in early modern history.
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Notes
For a brief but instructive overview of Enlightenment reactions to magic and demonology, and the encroaching medicalisation of witchcraft, possession and related phenomena such as religious ecstasy and enthusiasm in the eighteenth century, see Roy Porter, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 219–35.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 2 vols (London, 1865), Vol. I, p. 90. This work was printed in countless later editions.
Wilhelm Gottfried Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse aus dem Quellen Dargestellt (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1843); Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess in Mittelalter und die Entstehung der Grossen Hexenverfolgung (Leipzig: Oldenbourg, 1900); Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: C. Georgi, 1901).
E. William Monter, ‘The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971–72) 435; Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132. Chapter 8 of this work (‘Finding a Witchcraft’) contains a very useful summary of the post-Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historical reaction to witchcraft.
James Russell Lowell, ‘Witchcraft’, in Lowell, Among My Books (London: Trübner, 1870), pp. 81–150.
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1896), Vol. I, p. 361. Chapter 15 deals with witchcraft. White originally published abridged versions of these views in the popular science journal, Popular Science Monthly, in 1889. For a good general analysis of nineteenth-century American historiography of witchcraft, see Leland L. Estes, ‘Incarnations of Evil: Changing Perspectives on the European Witch Craze’, Clio 13 (1984) 136–8.
George Lincoln Burr (ed.), Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648–1706 (New York: Scribner, 1914); Burr, ‘The Literature of Witchcraft’, in George Lincoln Burr: His Life by R. H. Bainton. Selections from his Writings, ed. Lois Oliphant Gibbons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1943), pp. 166–89; Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. A. C. Howland, 3 vols (London and New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957). Burr was the first librarian at Cornell and was largely responsible for collecting the vast archive of witchcraft tracts now held there. His fellow-bibliophile, Lea, was responsible for amassing a similar collection at the University of Pennsylvania.
For this, and what follows, see especially Jan Goldstein, ‘The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern History 54 (1982) 209–39; Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 322–84, esp. pp. 369–73; Sarah Ferber, ‘Charcot’s Demons: Retrospective Medicine and Historical Diagnosis in the Writings of the Salpetriere School’, in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt (eds), Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 120–40.
An abridged version of Axenfeld’s lectures was appended as a preface to Boumeville’s 1885 French edition of Weyer. Another colleague of Charcot and Bourneville, Charles Richet, pointedly wrote in 1880 that the sick women whom he treated at the Salpetriere ‘would have been burnt in another time’; Charles Richet, ‘Les Démoniaques d’aujourd-hui’, Revue des Deux Mondes 37 (1880) 340; cited in Ferber, ‘Charcot’s Demons’, p. 137.
For one example among many that might stand as exemplary: ‘The belief in witchcraft decayed with as little apparent reason as it arose. The civilized world gradually discovered that it had ceased to believe in the existence of witches even before it had given up the practice of burning them … Clearly the change of attitude was due chiefly to the advance of science, which slowly defined the limits of man’s mastery over nature, and disclosed the methods by which this mastery is attained’; Sir William Cecil Dampier, A History of Science and Its Relations with Philosophy and Religion (4th edn, Cambridge, 1966; 1st edn, 1929), p. 144.
Gregory Zilboorg, The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), p. x. This work formed the central chapters of Gregory Zilboorg and George W. Henry, A History of Medical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1941).
This is evident from Zilboorg’s prologue to his History of Medical Psychology, where he refers, among other things, to the fact that the profession abounds in ‘quacks’ and ‘various nonmedical amateurs, lay and clerical’, who ‘are more readily accepted by patients and their relatives than are psychiatrists, and mental hospitals’ (p. 25).
These are discussed and cited most fully in Thomas J. Schoeneman, ‘The Role of Mental Illness in the European Witch Hunts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977) 337; Nicholas P. Spanos, ‘Witchcraft in Histories of Psychiatry: A Critical Analysis and an Alternative Conceptualization’, Psychological Bulletin 85 (1978) 417.
George Sarton, Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance (London: J. Lane, (1957] 1958), pp. 212–18.
Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 68. They would appear to have provided the chief source and inspiration for R. E. Hemphill, ‘Historical Witchcraft and Psychiatric Illness in Western Europe’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 59 (1966) 891–902.
Oskar Diethelm, ‘The Medical Teaching of Demonology in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 6 (1970) 3–15. Diethelm extends the medical roll call of honour to include Jean Fernel, Felix Platter and Daniel Sennert in addition to Weyer. He breaks new ground, however, in citing the evidence of medical dissertations to uphold his argument that the gradual acceptance of medical psychiatry, or primitive psychotherapy, set in motion a period of advance in relation to the medical diagnosis of witchcraft. This in turn, he argues, gained further momentum following the publication of the work of Descartes, Willis and Stahl in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In tracing the creation of a tradition in this way Diethelm’s work contrasts with that of Zilboorg, who was scathing in his condemnation of the contribution of later medical and scientific figures such as Willis to the progress of medical psychology; Zilboorg and Henry, A History of Medical Psychology, pp. 247–53, 256, 263, 277. Zilboorg’s antipathy toward the neurological approach of iatromechanists like Willis is probably best explained by his commitment to an autonomous psychiatric profession, practising Freudian psychotherapy, which eschewed neurological explanations for mental illness and a therapeutics based on drugs.
See, for example, Joost A. M. Meerloo, ‘Four Hundred Years of “Witchcraft”, “Projection” and “Delusion”’, American Journal of Psychiatry 120 (1963) 85–6. Meerloo describes Zilboorg as ‘one of our best historians of medical psychology’ (83).
Andrew Fix, Fallen Angels: Balthassar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer, 1999), p. 6; citing Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925) and Robert G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945).
Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); originally published in Osiris 4 (1938). As further examples of those working in this tradition, Fix cites the work of Eiejer Hookyaas, Paul Kocher, Richard Westfall, Theodore Raab, Barbara Shapiro, J. R. and Margaret Jacob, and Margaret Osler.
Frances A.Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). Yates was building on the earlier work of scholars such as Lynn Thorndike and D. P. Walker, who did much to reawaken academic interest in this otherwise esoteric subject; see Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York, 1923–58); Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 90–192.
Trevor-Roper, ‘The European Witch-Craze’, pp. 90–1, 99–100, 132. For an earlier attempt to hint at a similar division of interests in relation to scientific orientation and attitudes to witchcraft, see Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingdon Library, 1953), pp. 70–1.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 578–9, 643–4. Thomas did, however, acknowledge that the problem of decline represented ‘the most baffling aspect of this difficult subject’ (p. 570).
Brian Easlea, Witch-Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450–1750 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Thomas Harmon Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate’, Isis 72 (1981) 343–56.
This is the view developed by Sidney Anglo in his ‘Melancholia and Witchcraft’, in A. Gerlo (ed.), Folie et Déraison a la Renaissance (Brussels: University of Brussels, 1976), pp. 209–22, esp. pp. 210–12. Others, such as Christopher Baxter, have stressed the greater significance attached to his innovative religious beliefs (radical Protestant) in shaping his approach to witchcraft, while Erik Midelfort has argued that Weyer’s legacy was greater in the field of forensic medicine, where he pioneered the insanity defence; see C. Baxter, ‘Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum: Unsystematic Psychopathology’, in S. Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 53–75; H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Johann Weyer and the Transformation of the Insanity Defense’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 234–61.
Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 75. At the same time as Szasz was launching his crusade against the psychiatric profession of psychology as a form of social and political control, the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, was turning on its head traditional Whig historiography by postulating, among other things, that the eighteenth century had witnessed a ‘great confinement’ across Europe which stigmatised the mentally ill as antisocial outcasts and deviants; see esp. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965). A revised French edition of this work appeared in 1972.
Schoeneman, ‘The Role of Mental Illness’; Spanos, ‘Witchcraft in Histories of Psychiatry’. See also Irving Kirsch, ‘Demonology and the Rise of Science: An Example of the Misperception of Historical Data’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978) 149–57, who argues for a relativist approach in understanding the early history of psychiatry and its relation to witchcraft. Spanos rejected retrodiagnosis partly on the grounds that it was ahistorical, and partly because of the ‘ambiguity and unreliability’ surrounding the diagnosis of many contemporary medical conditions, such as schizophrenia; Spanos, ‘Witchcraft in Histories of Psychiatry’, pp.418–19. Clearly divisions within the psychiatric profession in the 1960s and 1970s were partly responsible for the revisionist approach to Zilboorg adopted by ‘insiders’ such as Schoeneman and Spanos. For a more recent critique of Zilboorg and his role in creating a foundational myth for psychiatry centred on Weyer, see Patrick Vandermeersch, ‘The Victory of Psychiatry over Demonology: The Origin of the Nineteenth-Century Myth’, History of Psychiatry 2 (1991) 351–63.
Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
For a good overview of these developments, and the application of social constructionism to the history of madness, see Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 1–18.
H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 49. Midelfort’s work probably represents the best example to date of an attempt, using a wide range of archival sources, to describe the cultural construction of mental illness in early modem Europe. His earlier ideas on this subject are summarised in his ‘Madness and the Problems of Psychological History in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981) 5–12. For an earlier case study seeking to refute the idea that modem concepts of mental illness first formed in reaction to witch hunts and cases of demonic possession, ‘so that scientific beliefs triumphed over superstition’, see David Harley, ‘Mental Illness, Magical Medicine and the Devil in Northern England, 1650–1700’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 114–44.
Midelfort, A History of Madness, p. 205; Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. viii–ix.
A notable exception is G. R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 205–6.
See, for example, Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 161–8. Outlining the traditional view of the onward march of science in the seventeenth century, Klaits argues that it was the ‘new ways of thinking inspired by science and Cartesian philosophy’ that informed the judgements of the French judicial elite, who were responsible for bringing witch trials to an end in France. In doing so, Klaits relies almost exclusively on the earlier work of the French witchcraft scholar, Robert Mandrou; see Mandrou, Magistrats et Sorciers en France aux XVIIe Siecle: Un Analyse de Psychologie Historique (Paris: Plon, 1968), pp. 539–64.
Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 54–5, 56–7, 218–22. Levack’s generally optimistic assessment of the impact of medicine on retarding the witch hunts is also noteworthy. It runs counter to the somewhat idiosyncratic and largely unsubstantiated view expressed by Leland Estes that the witch hunts were principally the fault of early modern physicians, who in their ignorance routinely deferred cases of suspected bewitchment and possession to witch-hunting clerics; see Leland L. Estes, ‘The Medical Origins of the Witch Craze: A Hypothesis’, Journal of Social History 17 (1983) 271–84. In related fashion, Garfield Tourney had earlier attributed the prevalence of witchcraft in late-seventeenth-century England to the ‘superstitious’ nature of contemporary medical practice and thinking; Tourney, ‘The Physician and Witchcraft in Restoration England’, Medical History 16 (1972) 143–55.
Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
See, for example, Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
There is now a vast literature on this subject. One of the most original and influential texts in this field, however, remains Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a broad overview of these developments, see Simon Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); Margaret J. Osler, ‘The Canonical Imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution’, in Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3–22.
Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, pp. 153–5. For Boyle on witchcraft, see also Michael Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle’, British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990) 387–410.
Allison Coudert, ‘Henry More and Witchcraft’, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies (Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 115–36.
Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Clark also provides in Part 2 of this work a useful introduction to the historiography of science and medicine in relation to witchcraft.
Clark, Thinking With Demons, esp. pp. 251–80. Clark identifies the contemporary preoccupation with monsters and a host of similar preternatural phenomena as related to the early modem interest in witchcraft. In both cases, they are said to provide exemplary material that, it was widely believed, might help to resolve some of those ‘boundary disputes’ spawned by the ‘epistemological uncertainty’ of the time.
Clark, Thinking With Demons, esp. pp. 299–309. Among other works cited by Clark, see especially Keith Hutchison, ‘What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?’, Isis 73 (1982) 233–54; Hutchison, ‘Supernaturalism and the Mechanical Philosophy’, History of Science 21 (1983) 297–333; John Henry, ‘Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory’, History of Science 24 (1986) 335–81.
Fix, Fallen Angels, pp. 11–12. For the traditional view of the debt of Bekker’s scepticism to Cartesian mechanism, see Robin Attfield, ‘Balthassar Bekker and the Decline of the Witch-Craze: The Old Demonology and the New Philosophy’, Annals of Science 42 (1985) 383–95.
Geoffrey Scarre, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 56. Roy Porter makes no mention of the role of science in his treatment of the decline of the witch trials in Enlightenment England; R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin Press, 2000), pp. 219–24. Jim Sharpe is equally reticent to accord science a prominent place in any explanations for the demise of witchcraft; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), pp. 256–75, esp. p. 26.
See, for example, B. P. Levack, ‘The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions’, in Ankarloo and Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, pp. 3–93; I. Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
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Elmer, P. (2007). Science, Medicine and Witchcraft. In: Barry, J., Davies, O. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593480_3
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