James Sharpe, General Editor, Richard Golden,
Consulting Editor; and Marion Gibson, Malcolm Gaskill, and Peter Elmer, Volume
Editors. English Witchcraft 1560-1736 London: Pickering and Chatto,
2003. 6 Volumes. 2896 pp. ISBN 1 85196 735 4.
Ostovich, Helen. "Review of James Sharpe
et al, eds., English Witchcraft 1560-1736". Early Modern
Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004): 9.1-11 <URL:
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/revosto.htm>
This six-volume set of facsimile texts provides the context and arguments
for understanding the complexity of the witchcraft controversy in early modern
England. The texts include early demonological writings and trial pamphlets,
ranging from the scholarly to the sensationalist. Altogether, these works
track the debate on witches and the demonic pact, the decline in belief among
the educated classes, and the legal change from the harsh laws of the mid-
and late-sixteenth century to the repeal of the witchcraft statute in the
early eighteenth. Despite its many excellences in setting out clear and informed
introductions, headnotes, and annotations, the problem with this collection
is the editorial decision to use facsimile texts instead of either modern
editions, or REED-style old-spelling editions. The "Note on Copy-Texts"
(1.viii) points out the "extremely old and often fragile" state
of the texts, and admits that the facsimiles are not in fact exact copies,
since the editors and production team altered pagination and size, and inserted
some reconstructive work on damaged pages. That being the case, what was the
point of facsimiles at all? Certainly, the introductions and notes do not
make much of these publications as worthy representatives in the history of
the book, nor do they comment on choice of typefaces (especially the choice
of black-letter or gothic type), spelling, or marginal notation. The type
size changes from tiny to huge, without comment by the editors, other than
the initial warning that original page size was normalized to fit the modern
edition's uniform volumes. And although the photographers attempted to create
legible pages, the variations caused by fading especially present a considerable
challenge to a modern reader. Since the introductions and notes comment almost
entirely on content and context, the facsimile texts seem an expensive and
ineffective choice for clear communication of ideas.
The other bar to clarity for readers is the placement of the annotation
at the end of each volume, with no hint on the facsimiles themselves of what
notes are available. The notes themselves tend to identify historical figures
or references, whether biblical, classical, or contemporary, with some brief
but lively explanation of the tract's or pamphlet's argument. This information
is identified in the notes by page and line, although no running lineation
is offered on the texts. For example, in browsing the notes of Volume 1 and
finding "p. 53, l 32 , 'end'", the reader seeking the original context has
to count straw by straw to locate this needle in a haystack. That makes reading
notes a time-consuming process. Conversely, the reader may want a note to
explain some peculiarity of the text. For example, A Collection of Impostures
Detected (vol. 6, p. 203) mentions "Hanging of Blankets" as an act of
sorcery, a detail I haven't come across before. Perhaps Hutchinson is being
sarcastic here, but no note explains why blankets are mentioned in the same
breath as "Scratching to draw Blood" or "Burning of cakes". Regardless, the
reader must go to the back of the volume looking for a note that does not
exist. Although the volume introductions use footnotes, and the headnotes
have note numbers keyed to endnotes, the editors not only give no indication
of what is annotated, but also make no comment on the variation in length
of annotation. Volume 1, "Early English Demonological Works", has 373 pages
of text, but only 20 pages of annotations. Volume 2, "Early English Trial
Pamphlets", has 323 pages of text, and only 13 pages of notes. Volume 3, "The
Matthew Hopkins Trials", at 464 pages, has 38 pages of notes. Volume 4, "The
Post-Restoration Synthesis and its Opponents", has 455 text pages, with another
83 pages of notes. Volume 5, "The Later English Trial Pamphlets", with 360
pages of text, has 25 pages of notes. And Volume 6, "The Final Debate", at
498 pages of text, has only 20 pages of notes. That is, the variation is from
about 4% notation to a whopping 18%, with no explanation for the discrepancy
among volumes. Of course, using facsimiles makes annotation difficult. An
old-spelling edition could have used footnotes and made its information more
accessible to readers. And I would bet that the result would have been shorter
volumes, less costly to produce than the UK £495 or US $740 (about $1000 CAD).
A lot of space is wasted simply because of the facsimile format. In any case,
almost all of these facsimiles are available on EEBO (Early English Books
Online), and those few items in Volumes 5 and 6 that are not now on EEBO
no doubt soon will be.
That said, the editors of this compilation have provided useful brief guides
to the materials and their contexts. In Volume 1, Sharpe's General Introduction
offers a superb overview of the entire period of witchcraft prosecution, from
the Witchcraft Act of 1542 (repealed) to its reinstatement in 1547, connecting
witchcraft explicitly with Roman Catholicism and politics, to the Elizabethan
act of 1563, rubber-stamping the work of Henry VIII, and the more political
Jacobean variant of 1604. Sharpe asserts right from the beginning that history
is controlled by the winners, and the trajectory of witchcraft prosecution
and belief points to the sceptical winning side – represented initially in
these volumes by Henry Holland's A Treatise against Witchcraft (1590),
and repeated finally by Francis Hutchinson's A historical essay concerning
Witchcraft (1718). Both works, and several that were printed in between,
draw heavily on Reginald Scot's seminal sceptical tract The Discovery of
Witchcraft (1584), but others wrote with less wit and charm than that
plain-spoken original. The zealous witchcraft believers, beginning in these
volumes with Perkins (1608) and ending with Boulton (1722) cannot simply be
shrugged off as works of superstitious fools or zealots; both Perkins and
Boulton were educated professionals and experienced writers who knew how to
persuade readers – even though readers were a minority of the culture at large.
In Volumes 1 and 6, Sharpe reminds us through his pairing of adversarial arguments
(Holland vs. Perkins, Hutchinson vs. Boulton) that thoughtful men operated
on both sides of this debate; the witchcraft controversy was not simply a
product of religious frenzy compounded by ignorance. It had to do with how
a culture defines good and evil, and whether science, politics, and religion
can ever agree on how an ethical community is to understand or compensate
for the mysteries of creation, disease, human behaviour, and death.
What Sharpe suggests further, amply supported by the other volumes, is
that witchcraft prosecutions tend to cluster in periods of political change
or civil war, religious dissent, and radical shifts in science or philosophy
that challenge conservative thinking and foster fears of the destruction of
all a culture holds most dear. In Volume 2, Marion Gibson focuses on the apparent
demonic possession of children in a spate of cases (1579-1619) exacerbated
by pamphleteers who identify witches and witchcraft on the basis of no evidence
except the otherwise inexplicable conditions that seemed to proclaim demonic
agency. She also gives an excellent survey of critical opinion locating causes
for witchcraft accusations in fear of women, distaste for ignorant, impious,
or criminal behaviour, and rejection of the poor, infirm, and aged – ideas
first examined by Scot and endorsed by many modern scholars. Her ten-page
bibliography is a rich source for further reading, much superior to the slight
lists in the other volumes. The pamphlets in this volume deal largely with
cases of demonic possession, especially those involving children who became
disobedient, noisy, and nasty. Gibson justly argues that, whoever the pamphleteer,
whether a lawyer endorsed by the court, a clergyman concerned for his parish,
or an opportunist making a quick sale, the "evidence" is simply "persuasive
authorial narration", not documentation, and supported by woodcut illustrations
that seem irrefutable authentifications of wrong-doing, as though they were
surveillance photographs of actual crimes.
In Volume 3, the focus is squarely on Matthew Hopkins and the elderly clergyman,
John Gaule, who put an end to Hopkins' reign of terror during the civil wars
by accusing him of unlawfully forcing confessions out of deluded women accused
of witchcraft. Malcolm Gaskill's introduction makes a strong case, not only
for Gaule's unlikely heroism, but also for the fallacy of the view that the
English witch-scare was substantially different from the European model. He
argues that the pattern, especially during the civil wars, was identical with
Europe's situation: disruption of central social control, loss of local authorities,
lack of properly regulated justice, and locations remote from the already
threatened system. He also points to over-literal understanding of church
sermons warning parishioners to act against the devil. This is finally where
Gaskill locates Hopkins' motive for action, as a man who thought he saw witchcraft
and wanted to end its very real threat. In that sense, he was an exemplar
of his society – a sobering thought.
In Volumes 4 and 5, Peter Elmer looks at Restoration arguments about witchcraft
as reactions against republican zeal, with texts identifying witchcraft as
either a political conspiracy, or an intellectual controversy brought about
by fears of science and the new philosophy of man's corrupt state (inferred
from Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, and especially Hobbes). Volume 4 demonstrates
the complexity of such arguments by pitting John Wagstaffe's anticlerical
views against John Webster's enlisting of the new science in the service of
scepticism. The notes in this volume are particularly useful in making sense
of the bizarre range of second-hand citations that pepper both works. Volume
5, like Volume 2, is a fascinating collection of pamphlets, here demonstrating
the post-Newtonian values of critical inquiry and scientific progress. The
cases themselves are tired revivals of old accusations against poor, marginalized
women. But Elmer argues persuasively that the great divide between the educated
elite and the superstitious lower classes is what finally abolished witchcraft
as a crime: the educated liberals who oversaw the legal system rejected witchcraft
accusations as signs of right-wing Tory fundamentalist fanaticism, and buried
such ideology under the weight of Whig rationalism. The new binary system
blotted out the opposition. The choice of materials in this volume is fascinating
support for Elmer's argument in showing the last witch trials and last executions
in England: the Bideford Witches (1682), Richard Hathaway (1702), and Jane
Wenham (1712).
The value of English Witchcraft 1560-1736 is primarily in its scholarly
marshalling of documents in what has been, especially prior to 1990, a little
travelled intellectual by-way. This impressive six-volume set, like folio
printings in the early modern period, gives weight, stature, and density to
a peculiar historical moment, and connects it intellectually and by implication
with modern witch-hunts of other kinds. The organization of materials is particularly
satisfying in giving full attention to one phenomenon or debate in each volume.
The introductions and headnotes of all 6 volumes guide readers through the
maze of materials with dispatch and fascinating insights. Although I wish
the editors had followed a different procedure in preparing those materials
for print, libraries will – and should – purchase the set as vital for studying
the English handling of this important period of legal, social, religious,
and political violence.
Responses to this piece intended for the Readers'
Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.
