'"They seem to have all died out": witches and witchcraft in Lark Rise to Candleford and the English countryside, c.1830–1930'. Historical Research, vol. 87 (2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
From Stakes to Ashes: The Witchcraft Decline of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Introduction: “It’s all her fault! She’s a witch! Burn her!” Some variation of this would have likely been a popular phrase during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the ‘witch craze’ raged on. The witch craze in the Western world was full of false accusations and executions: many shared the same stories of seduction by the Devil, or at least involvement with Satan himself, and one could believe that these stories were all fictionalized. A great many people were accused, convicted, and executed during the witch craze, to the point that it is a part in history in which many people today have knowledge: it helps as well that popular shows such as The Simpsons and Sabrina the Teenage Witch dedicate portions of episodes to the events (both tackling the events of Salem, Massachusetts). However, despite the fact that the witch craze dominated the Western world for a couple centuries (the seventeenth century more so than the rest), there was a random decline as the eighteenth century progressed. Had people come to their senses and realized it was not going any good? The witchcraft decline of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went from stakes to ashes in a figurative sense: from risking everything just to put innocent people to their deaths, the interest in the witch hunt just simmered down and blew away like ashes in the wind.
Crime, history and societies, 2003
Already in the first sentences of the preface to this book Sharpe shows that he is aware of the present flourishing of the historiography of witchcraft. Indeed, hardly a month passes without the appearance of new syntheses, studies, theoretical works or source editions. So, one is inclined to ask, why add a new title to this rapidly expanding list? The reason simply is that despite this booming, books like this one are only rarely produced. It is not meant as a contribution to debates of spec...
'Maleficent Witchcraft in Britain since 1900.' History Workshop Journal, vol. 80 (2015)
History Workshop Journal, 2015
It is often assumed that if witchcraft belief lived on in twentieth-century Britain, it did so only in the forms of the neo-pagan religion of Wicca and foreign imports. This essay draws on newspapers, folklore reports, religious handbooks and esoteric manuals to cast doubt on that assumption. Those sources reveal that, in fact, a largely indigenous culture of maleficent magic was surprisingly tenacious. Admittedly, belief in such things had become a minority creed and was a good deal less widespread than hitherto. Even so, witchcraft was still occasionally identified as the cause of misfortunes, and was still capable of inspiring powerful emotions. The core idea of maleficent magic, this essay argues, retained some purchase because it was adaptable. Far from being a hangover from the ancient past, it developed novel precepts and practices as the twentieth century unfolded. Pseudo-scientific and psychological terms were incorporated into witchcraft belief’s conceptual vocabulary, rendering it in a more plausible contemporary idiom. Regulatory and legal changes helped to suppress the centuries old cunning-craft; but around the same time new, more religious, and more law-abiding counter-witchcraft therapies emerged to cater to the persistent demand for deliverance from harmful occult forces. Far from dying out, therefore, the notion of maleficent witchcraft was refreshed and renewed.
Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England
Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England, 2016
The supernatural has lately emerged as a key theme in studies of early modern Europe, with witchcraft continuing to be a particularly richly researched area. While few historians would disagree that politics "shaped patterns of witch-hunting" in early modern England (1), none has as yet argued this as comprehensively or in as much detail as Peter Elmer in this important, infuriating book. Elmer's arguments are properly complex, circling back to key ideas and teasing away at apparent contradictions. The specificities of local circumstances are acknowledged, but not viewed in isolation from broader developments. There is no inherent link, it is alleged, between puritanism and witch-hunting, although the evidence cited nonetheless demonstrates that most prosecutors of witches were puritans, while sceptics, in most periods, tended to be Anglicans. Witch prosecutions had potentially contradictory significance, since they sometimes served as an "agent of political consensus", bringing communities together against a common enemy, but could equally lead to "acute polarization" (7). Elmer aspires to deal with both witchcraft theory and the practices of witch hunting, although he properly notes that there is no simple or necessary relationship between the two. Moreover, while theories and metaphors of witchcraft were remarkably consistent and long-lived, the actual prosecution of witches was not a "regular or uniform process" (1); explaining its peaks and troughs in political terms is one of the achievements of the book. Witch prosecutions, Elmer argues, happened at times when the authorities found their sense of order threatened. When a government, even a puritan government, felt its authority secure, as in Dorchester between 1629 and 1637, there were no witch trials (85), although they continued elsewhere. He concludes that witch trials ended in the early eighteenth century not so much with the coming of the new sciencemany of those who continued to argue for the reality of witchcraft and the propriety of its prosecution were advocates of the new sciencebut as a more "pluralistic polity" (298) emerged. This is not a new argument-Stuart Clark, Michael Hunter and others have voiced similar viewsbut Elmer's arguments are well supported and offer fresh insights into some important cases.
Assumptions about gender. Tracking and mapping the scale of the witch hunts. Omissions, certainty, and historiographical considerations. Analysis of how village witchcraft dynamics shifted under the diabolist judiciary and torture trials. Critical examination of authors' assumptions of judges' moderation and the ill-temper or senility of the accused, and a reexamination of sexual politics of the witch hunts versus psychological explanations.
This article compares and contrasts England’s first three Witchcraft Acts (1542, 1563, and 1604) with demonological treatises published by English theologians and clerics between 1580 and 1627 with the intention of highlighting the different ways both types of texts defined witches and their actions. This research focuses on cunning folk as healers to emphasize the disparity of interests and aims that underpinned the representation of witchcraft in civil law and religious treatises concerning that issue. I suggest that during Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, discussions about the definition of witchcraft became one of the battlefields where those who thought the English Reformation had achieved its ends and those who propelled a more thorough disciplining of the population to create a godly society collided. I argue that demonological works served, among other purposes, to express grievances about the official religious policy
Book review: Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2017
It has become something of a common place to insist on the plethoric nature of research on early modern witchcraft and witch hunts. Yet within this constellation of books, some shine brighter than others and Peter Elmer's latest book certainly illuminates the field if only through the imposing bulk of little-known evidence that the author conjures up. Since Keith Thomas's seminal work, historians have kept on revising some of his assumptions about what triggered the witch hunts and then their demise and more generally the decline of magic. A generation later, Stuart Clark showed that the demonological discourse permeated all the areas of early modern thinking and that the decline of witch trials could not be explained simply by the rise of New Science. Elmer's books focus on the political and religious context of English prosecutions, further trying to qualify a linear explanation of such a decline, while warning against reducing witch hunts to political opportunism. In his introduction, Elmer reminds the reader of the ambivalent status of witchcraft in early modern England, since it could either play an integrative role by reinforcing the normative behaviour, or, on the contrary, work as a subversive force by trying to undermine the established power. In any case, witchcraft invariably constituted a test of political legitimacy. Working with an impressive range of local archival funds, Elmer's main method is to reconstruct the immediate local context of each trial, recreating the networks of accusers, victims and magistrates involved, and, through such a series of microhistories, to look for more general patterns. It is, to quote the author, 'an exercise in contextualization' (8). And while explaining the motivations behind arraignments and convictions, he more broadly contends the role of political factors in shaping attitudes to witchcraft. After an introductory chapter, the rest of Elmer's book is divided into six chapters corresponding to six successive periods. But what might appear as a chronological and linear narrative, of the kind regularly denounced by Elmer, is in fact a division into time periods whose logic is to revolve around major crises within early modern English society. Chapter 2 covers a very long period including the reigns of Elizabeth and James I and is built around two emblematic cases. The first one is the masterfully