DAVIES
2004 (7SDB2018)
Owen
Davies and Willem de Blécourt (ed.)
Manchester University Press and
New York, 2004, 224 p. (pdf.)
Contents
List of contributors
– vii; Introduction: beyond the witch trials (Owen Davies and Willem de
Blécourt) - 1; 1 Marking (dis)order:
witchcraft and the symbolics of hierarchy in late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century (Finland Raisa Maria Toivo) – 9; 2 Pro exoneratione sua
propria coscientia: magic, witchcraft and Church in early eighteenth-century (Capua
Augusto Ferraiuolo) – 26; 3 From illusion to disenchantment: Feijoo versus the
‘falsely possessed’ in eighteenth-century (Spain María Tausiet) – 45; 4
Responses to witchcraft in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden The
aftermath of the witch-hunt in Dalarna (Marie Lennersand) – 61; The
superstitious other (Linda Oja) – 69; 5 Witchcraft and magic in
eighteenth-century Scotland (Peter Maxwell-Stuart) – 81; 6 The Devil’s pact: a
male strategy (Soili-Maria Olli) – 100; 7 Public infidelity and private belief?
The discourse of spirits in Enlightenment Bristol (Jonathan Barry) – 117; 8
‘Evil people’: a late eighteenth-century Dutch witch doctor and his clients (Willem
de Blécourt) – 144; 9 The archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic (Brian
Hoggard) – 167; 10 The dissemination of magical knowledge in Enlightenment Germany.
The supernatural and the development of print culture (Sabine
Doering-Manteuffel) – 187; Grimoires and the transmission of magical knowledge
(Stephan Bachter) – 194; Index – 207.
Contributorsibutors
Stephan Bachter has studied folklore, history, cultural anthropology and
educational science at the universities of Augsburg, Munich and Trento. In 1997
he obtained his MA in folklore science at the University of Augsburg with a
dissertation on German travellers to Italy in the eighteenth century. Since
2000 he has been working at the University of Munich. He teaches and publishes
on occultism in the modern period, prophecy and nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Bavarian outlaws. He is currently working on the history of
German grimoires.
Jonathan Barry is Senior Lecturer in History and Head of the School of
Historical, Political and Sociological Studies at the University of Exeter. He
has published widely on urban society and culture in early modern and
eighteenth-century England. He is co-editor of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1996), and is currently preparing volumes on Witchcraft and
Demonology in South-West England (University of Exeter Press) and Religion in
Bristol c. 1640–1775 (Redcliffe Press).
Willem de Blécourt is Honorary Research Fellow at the Huizinga Institute of Cultural History,
Amsterdam. He has written numerous articles on witchcraft, popular culture and irregular
medicine, published in Dutch, German and English journals such as Social History,
Medical History and Gender & History. His most recent book is Het
Amazonenleger [The Army of Amazons] (1999), which deals with irregular female
healers in the Netherlands, 1850–1930. He is currently writing a book on
werewolves to be published by London and Hambledon Press. He is also working on
a history of witchcraft in the Netherlands and editing a volume of essays about
witchcraft and the body.
Owen Davies is a Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire. He
has published numerous articles on the history of witchcraft and magic in
eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England and Wales. He is also the author of Witchcraft,
Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester University Press, 1999), and A People
Bewitched (1999). His most recent book is Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in
English History (2003).
Sabine
Doering-Manteuffel is Professor of Folklore at
the University of Augsburg. She previously studied anthropology, folklore,
history and philosophy at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn. She has been a
visiting researcher in Vienna, Paris and St John’s, Newfoundland. Between 1987
and 1991 she helped co-ordinate a major oral history research project
‘Grenzgeschichten. Berichte aus dem Niemandsland’, the results of which were
published in 1991. She has published widely on regional history, oral history, propaganda
and the printing press, neo-paganism and social movements. Her most recent research
project concerns magic and the Enlightenment.
Augusto Ferraiuolo is a cultural anthropologist at the Dipartimento di Salute
Mentale, Capua, Italy. He works on narratives, ritual, festival and religion,
connected with identities. His most recent book, based on work on the
Inquisition records of Capua, is Pro exoneratione sua propria coscientia. Atti
di denuncia per stregoneria nella Capua del XVI–XVIII secolo (2000).
Brian Hoggard is a history graduate and independent researcher from Worcester,
England. He has been working on the archaeology and history of folk magic since
1998. His website on the subject has provoked a good deal of public
interest. He is the author of Bredon Hill: A Guide to its Archaeology, History,
Folklore and Villages (1999).
Marie Lennersand received
her PhD in History from Uppsala University, and is currently a researcher at
the Dalarna Research Institute in Falun, Sweden. Her thesis, Rättvisans och
allmogens beskyddare [The Protector of People and Law], was published in 1999
and concerns the efforts of the absolutist Swedish rulers of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to prevent corruption among civil
servants. Her other publications deal with legal history, and especially the
‘legal commissions’ that, among other things, were appointed for big witch
trials. She is currently working with Linda Oja on a research project
investigating the aftermath of the witch trials in Dalarna.
Peter Maxwell-Stuart is an
honorary lecturer in the Department of Modern History in the University of St
Andrews. He has recently published an edited translation of Investigations into
Magic by Martin Del Rio, and Satan’s Conspiracy, a study of magic and witchcraft
in sixteenth-century Scotland. He is about to publish a new translation of the Malleus
Maleficarum, and An Abundance of Witches, a study of the Scottish
witch-persecution of 1658–62.
Linda Oja received
her PhD in History from Uppsala University for her thesis Varken Gud eller
natur [Neither God nor Nature]. She is currently a researcher at the Dalarna Research
Institute in Falun, Sweden. Her thesis, published in 1999, investigated
attitudes to witchcraft, superstition and diabolical pacts amongst different
social groups in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden. Other
publications deal with magic and gender, ecclesiastical legislation and popular
jesting. She is currently working with Marie Lennersand on the local
consequences of the witch-craze in Dalarna around 1670.
Soili-Maria Olli is
currently finishing her PhD on blasphemy and Devil’s pacts in earlymodern Sweden
at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Umeå. She obtained her
Masters degree from Åbo Akademi, Finland, in 1997. Her academic interests
include the Finnish middle ages, the history of mentalities, and witchcraft and
demonology. Her most recent publication is ‘Drängen Henrich Michelssons
Änglasyner. Demonologiska och medicinska förklaringsmodeller i tidigmodern
tid’, in Hanne Sanders (ed.), Mellem Gud og Djaevelen. Religiöse og magiske
verdensbilleder i Norden 1500–1800 (2001).
María Tausiet received
her PhD from the University of Zaragoza (Spain) with a dissertation on
Aragonese witchcraft in the sixteenth century. She has published Ponzoña en los
ojos: Brujería y superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI (2000), Los posesos de
Tosos (1812–1814): Brujería y justicia popular en tiempos de revolución (2002),
and has contributed a chapter to Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft (2001).
She has also written many articles in Spanish on subjects related to
witchcraft, superstition and popular religiosity. She is currently conducting
research on alchemy, and Moorish magic in early modern Spain.
Raisa Maria Toivo is
currently completing her PhD at the Department of History, University of
Tampere, Finland. She is working on the cultural production and reproduction of
social hierarchies in early-modern peasant society. She is the author of ‘Agata
Pekantytär and Aune Pertuntytär ca 1676 – A Witchcraft Trial in a Local Social
Context’, in Peter Aronsson, Solveig Fagerlund, and Jan Samuelsson (eds), Nätverk
i Historisk Forskning – metafor, metod eller teori (1999). She has also written
other articles on the social history of witchcraft and on traffic and
communication in early modern Finland.
Introduction: beyond the witch
trials
(fragment)
(Owen Davies/ Willem de Blécourt)
The so-called Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century has often been portrayed as a period in which much of
Europe cast off the belief in witchcraft and magic under the influence of new
philosophies, and advances in science and medicine. This received wisdom has
often led to the academic dismissal of the continued relevance of the belief in
witchcraft and magic, not only for the poor and illiterate in society but also
for the educated. This book seeks to counter this scholarly tendency, by
looking at aspects of the continuation of witchcraft and magic in Europe from
the last of the secular and ecclesiastical trials during the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, through to the nineteenth century. It will
examine the experience of and attitudes towards witchcraft from both above and
below, in an age when the beliefs and ‘worldview’of the ‘elite’ and the
‘people’ are often thought to have irrevocably pulled away from one another. It
is too crude and misleading to portray the Enlightenment as a period of
intellectual and social leaps. It should rather be seen as a period of subtler
renegotiation between cultures, and a period when the relationship between
private and public beliefs became more problematic and discrete, and therefore
more difficult for the historian to detect. The study of witchcraft and magic
provides us with an important means of exploring these broad changing patterns
of social relations and mentalities, just as it has done much to help our understanding
of social relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society. Yet the
‘beyond’ in the title of this book refers not only to the chronological emphasis
of its contents, but is also indicative of the differentmethodological
approaches that can be applied to the last of the trials, and the variety of
sources that can be used to illuminate our understanding of the continued
relevance of witchcraft once it was decriminalised. The contributors come from
different academic disciplines, and by borrowing from literary theory,
archaeology and folklore they move beyond the usual historical perspectives and
sources” (p.1).
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