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Summary
Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe's history
"Traces the idea of witches far beyond the Salem witch trials to beliefs and attitudes about witches around the world throughout history."-- Los Angeles Times
The witch came to prominence--and often a painful death--in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early-modern stake.
This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft. Hutton, a renowned expert on ancient, medieval, and modern paganism and witchcraft beliefs, combines Anglo-American and continental scholarly approaches to examine attitudes on witchcraft and the treatment of suspected witches across the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and North and South America, and from ancient pagan times to current interpretations. His fresh anthropological and ethnographical approach focuses on cultural inheritance and change while considering shamanism, folk religion, the range of witch trials, and how the fear of witchcraft might be eradicated.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
A magisterial account across space and time of why people have been accused, and how some societies have stayed clear It comes as no surprise to learn that the study of witches and witchcraft has been pockmarked by feuds and even the occasional falling-out. According to the opening section of Ronald Hutton 's magisterial book, the battle lines were drawn from the 1960s to the 90s between those scholars who insisted on taking a global view of maleficent magic and those who argued for a more local approach. The big-picture people tended to be an older generation of anthropologists who believed that all expressions of witchcraft could be traced back to a pocketful of ancient sources. Local characteristics -- hanging upside-down naked from a tree in Uganda, dressing your pet toad in a frock in the Basque country -- were simply a dialect version of a universal shamanistic language that had trickled down from prehistory. For a slightly later cohort of scholars this approach reeked of ethnographic bias. It was naive to think that a change of costume and climate was all it took to explain the differences between the troll-whisperers of Scandinavia and the baby-eaters of New Guinea. As for the fact that francophone witches from early-modern Alsace went about their dastardly deeds as freelancers while their German-speaking neighbours hunted in packs -- such distinctions really meant something, if you were only prepared to find out what. While Wicca, or white magic, is growing apace in Britain and overseas, Hutton concerns himself with the bad, black version of the craft that has terrified poor souls for centuries. His approach blends a broad geographic sweep with the detailed attention of microhistory. What quickly emerges is that, wherever and whenever you are, black magic is always personal. Witchcraft is the dark side of staying put, which is why you seldom find it among nomads. Whenever the herdsmen of Siberia or hill tribes of Uttar Pradesh found themselves spooked by someone, they simply peeled off and started again somewhere else. Witches also tend to pop up at those moments when the people in charge appear to have lost the plot. During the middle ages, the Catholic church had everything its own way and trials for witchcraft were correspondingly few and far between. Pope Gregory VII even wrote to the king of Denmark in 1080 telling him to stop burning mumbling old crones on account of the harvest being a dud. Didn't His Majesty realise that crop failure was God's way of punishing the Danes for their sins? To blame it on witchcraft was not only an act of impiety, it was positively barbaric. But with the arrival of Protestantism, such lofty certainty was no longer possible. With each side of the sectarian divide now accusing the other of snuggling up to Satan, the possibility that the person with whom you shared blood ties or even a bed might be up to no good became blazingly plausible. Add in the paranoia to be found in a patchworked Europe where neighbouring duchies and federations habitually rubbed each other up the wrong way, and it was easy to imagine that you had just spotted your brother-in-law sneaking off to the woods to confer with the Evil One. What's more, it kept -- keeps -- happening. The rupturing of British rule in India following the rebellion of 1857 precipitated a craze of witchhunts among the local tribes. Likewise, the ending of minority rule in Africa in the 20th century resulted in hundreds of witch-killings, including one particularly terrible frenzy in the Limpopo province of South Africa when 43 people were burned alive. In post-apartheid Soweto, meanwhile, the daily fear of witchcraft had become tremendous by the 1990s, with every older woman at risk of "democratic" justice. By 2012 the terror had spread to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 20,000 children were living on the streets of Kinshasa, expelled from their homes on suspicion of witchcraft. For the final section of his book Hutton narrows his focus to Britain, and answers the question that has long kept sensible people awake at night: in a battle between witches and fairies, who would win? The answer, cheeringly, turns out to be the fairies, along with their cousins the elves, pixies and imps. During the early-modern period, these quaint little people were much in evidence in the folk traditions of the Celtic fringe. And crucially it was in these areas -- Wales, Ireland, the Highlands -- that witchhunting failed to catch fire. While East Anglia trembled under the terrifying visitations of the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, and Lancashire got busy torturing the citizens of Pendle, the outlying parts of Britain and Ireland jogged along gently. There have been all sorts of attempts to explain this -- the Irish didn't want to shop anyone to the Protestant authorities, the Welsh had a culture of reparation towards witches rather than prosecution -- but this isn't enough. Hutton suggests instead that believing in fairies provided a kind of inoculation against witches. The imaginative cosmos simply wasn't big enough to hold both of them. For every "but" in Hutton's revisionary account of witchcraft there are two "ands"; in other words, it is the continuities that excite him most. This is thrilling in the way it makes the subject live across time and place, but it also contains a warning. A belief in witchcraft, and all the horrors that can come in its wake, is demonstrably not a phenomenon that can be tucked up safely in a storybook past. Rather, on the evidence of Hutton's analysis, it is a set of free-floating anxieties that can be conjured at those moments when the world seems out of joint and there is not quite enough of anything to go round. It is at this point that the strange neighbour or annoying elderly relative starts to take the shape of all our terror and frustration, our humiliation and distress. In the process other people become monsters and we become something less than human. And as for the fairies, they are nowhere to be seen. - Kathryn Hughes.
Choice Review
Cursed with an unfortunate subtitle, this book is not a history in the strictest sense. Instead, it places early modern European witch hunts in their cultural, historical, and geographical contexts, addressing common questions and misconceptions. Historian Hutton (Univ. of Bristol, UK) begins with a survey of anthropological literature on witches, the methodology behind which remains unexplained, then proceeds to the witch hunts of antiquity in various settings. Potential causes of European witch beliefs, including shamanistic survivals, learned ceremonial magic, and folk beliefs in nocturnal processions, are followed through the medieval era to the trials themselves, which receive short shrift. Hutton rounds out the book with chapters on the links between fairies and witchcraft in Britain, the possible effects of "Celtic" cultures on accusation patterns, and the role of familiars in witch trials. Those interested in a more detailed look at the famous European hunts themselves should consult Brian Levack's The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (CH, Nov'13, 51-1631) or Julian Goodare's The European Witch-Hunt (CH, Apr'17, 54-3944). Hutton's own The Triumph of the Moon (CH, Nov'00, 38-1508) covers the rediscovery or creation of modern paganism. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Daniel Harms, State University of New York College at Cortland
Library Journal Review
In this comprehensive study of the factors leading to the European witch hunts of the late Middle Ages and early modern era, Hutton (history; Univ. of Bristol; Pagan Britain) draws upon research in history, anthropology, and folklore studies to pinpoint the characteristics of the typical witch figure and to identify global occurrences of the archetype. The author then narrows his focus to Europe and the Near East, tracing factors over time that contributed to the development of a widespread fear of satanic witches believed to threaten both the safety of local communities and the stability of the Christian faith. Cultural traditions of nocturnal female demons combined with a criticism of elite ceremonial magic to create this concept, which Hutton identifies as the primary catalyst for the vicious persecutions that spread across the continent beginning in the late Middle Ages. Particularly fascinating are Hutton's findings regarding the lack of a strong fear of witches in the Celtic areas of Britain, where an enduring belief in fairies diverted the blame for uncanny misfortunes away from practitioners of alchemy. -VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in witch trials, European folklore, and the history of magical beliefs and -practices.-Sara Shreve, Newton, KS © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements | p. vi |
| Author's Note | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. xiii |
| Part I Deep Perspectives | |
| 1 The Global Context | p. 3 |
| 2 The Ancient Context | p. 44 |
| 3 The Shamanic Context | p. 74 |
| Part II Continental Perspectives | |
| 4 Ceremonial Magic-The Egyptian Legacy? | p. 99 |
| 5 The Hosts of the Night | p. 120 |
| 6 What the Middle Ages Made of the Witch | p. 147 |
| 7 The Early Modern Patchwork | p. 180 |
| Part III British Perspectives | |
| 8 Witches and Fairies | p. 215 |
| 9 Witches and Celticity | p. 243 |
| 10 Witches and Animals | p. 262 |
| Conclusion | p. 279 |
| Appendix | p. 289 |
| Notes | p. 293 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 345 |
| Index | p. 346 |