H I S T O R Y
Wicked witch hunts
The punishment of women who stood out from the crowd
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LAURA KOUNINE
WITCHCRAFT A history in 13 trials MARION GIBSON 320pp. Simon and Schuster. £20.
“W
H E N D I D E V E R Y B O D Y B e come a Witch?” a headline in the New York Times asked in October 2019. In the context of the #MeToo movement, the witch has come to represent both female persecution and female empowerment. “WitchTok” – videos with the hashtag “witch” on the social media platform TikTok – has amassed 45 billion views. The witch is evidently having a moment.
Yet the witch, or, more accurately, witch-hunting, has never really gone away. As Marion Gibson’s inventive and compelling Witchcraft: A history in 13 trials shows, the persecution of so-called witches has endured through time and space. Examining a selection of “witch trials” from the medieval period to the present day, Gibson charts how the meanings of the witch were created in demonological theory in medieval Europe, then exported across the globe, retaining some broad features – to do with heresy, subversion and transgression – while also melding with local folklores, conflicts and fears. She includes witch trials of men, but her emphasis is on histories of female persecution: women who were “too visible”. “Witches were”, she argues, “predominantly women regarded as politically subversive, religiously heretical, medically unqualified, socially disorderly and sexually immoral.”
The book is divided into three parts. The first, Origins, covers the period that will be most familiar to readers: the medieval and early modern witch hunts in Europe and America. The second part, Echoes, examines the witch as a metaphor for subversion from the period of the French Revolution up to the mid-twentieth century, in Europe, the US and Africa. In the final part, Transformations, Gibson reflects on witchcraft today: one chapter is dedicated to witchcraft in Africa, using the film I Am Not a Witch (2017) as a starting point; another discusses witchcraft in North America, with the discussion ingeniously centred on Stormy Daniels. These two chapters are particularly skilled and creative. Gibson uses her case studies to weave in the introduction of Pentecostalism in Africa and the importing of fears of the demonic nature of technology from the US; the emergence of Wicca in the UK and its spread to America; and the rise of “reclaiming movements” among modern pagan witches.
The history of witch-hunting has all too often been told through the lens of the witch-hunters. Gibson shifts the focus to those labelled as witches. Rather than narrating the fall, then eventual rise, of the German demonologist Heinrich Kramer – author of the highly influential, deeply misogynistic Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486–7 – she tells the story of Helena Scheuberin, the woman Kramer attempted – and failed – to indict for witchcraft in Innsbruck, Austria. The attractive, wealthy Helena had clearly riled Kramer: she was disgusted by the content of his demonological preaching; he called her a “lax and promiscuous woman”, and accused her of witchcraft. As his inquisitorial methods startled the authorities (Bishop Georg Golser later remarked: “He really seems to me to be c raz y ”) , Scheuberin
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returned after a recess armed with a lawyer and got the case thrown out.
Gibson’s book is a work of restitution and historical reparation, an attempt to give voice to those who have been silenced over the centuries. This i s particularly sensitively done in the case of the Native American Tatabe (whom many readers will know as
“The Execution of a Witch at Schilta” by Erhard Schoen, 1533; and Stormy Daniels, 2019
TLS
Tituba) during the 1692 Salem witch panic. Gibson explains that she uses the variant “Tatabe” because “it is the nearest approximation we have to a name possibly used by her to describe herself ”, and because doing so goes some way to extricate the “real” Tatabe from the myths that have surrounded her. Indeed, in her endeavour to give agency back to those accused of witchcraft, Gibson has chosen to use first names for all her protagonists. While this works in the cases of those persecuted for witchcraft, it feels more jarring when first names are used for demonologists such as Kramer. Nonetheless, the wider point stands: despite the systemic ( judicial, religious, societal) constraints placed on them, these women’s “own agency was crucial”.
Gibson also shows the slipperiness between the persecutor and the persecuted, and how one could shapeshift in to the other. Montague “Montie” Summers (1880–1948) was accused of “studies in Satanism”, and had been tried and acquitted for pederasty, before repositioning himself on the side of the witch-hunters, publishing the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum and other key demonologies. In 1920s Pennsylvania, John Blymyer, who murdered the “pow-wow” practitioner Nelson Rehmeyer, himself was said to sell “pow-wow” cures. Even now – and with no apparent sense of irony – men such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson call themselves victims of witch hunts.
The book is the product of meticulous research, drawing on archival, printed and online sources, and a vast secondary literature, as well as more than thirty years of working on the history of witchcraft. (The author is professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter). Gibson is careful never to overstate the evidence, but evokes past lives as well as geographical and emotional landscapes with absolute clarity: Tatabe’s turbulent passage from Barbados to Massachusetts; the binary mindset which structured early modern thinking, in which magic “was part of ordinary experience”.
Although some of the threads linking the chapters’ protagonists throughout the book can seem somewhat overstretched – how much does Montague Summers, the gay Catholic cleric turned demonologist, have in common with African child witches; and how far did John Blymyer, the magical practitioner and self-confessed murderer, really resemble the demonologist Heinrich Kramer? – this also speaks to the way in which the label of “witch” can be employed and, eventually, appropriated, in different contexts. The idea of the witch is so pervasive precisely because it is a label that incorpo r a t e s d i f f e re n t b e l i e f s a nd p r a c t i c e s ; i t i s a malleable category that can be revised and contested. And, as Marion Gibson shows, the powerful metaphor of the witch, in all her multifaceted guises, is likely to endure. n
Laura Kounine is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex. Her books include Imagining the Witch: Emotions, gender, and selfhood in early modern Germany, 2018
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