Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft - Taylor & Francis eBooks

New Perspectives on Witchcraft,Magic and Demonology

Volume 1Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft

Series Content

Volume 1DEMONOLOGY, RELIGION, AND WITCHCRAFT

Volume 2WITCHCRAFT IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE

Volume 3WITCHCRAFT IN THE BRITISH ISLESAND NEW ENGLAND

Volume 4GENDER AND WITCHCRAFT

Volume 5WITCHCRAFT, HEALING, AND POPULAR DISEASES

Volume 6WITCHCRAFT IN THE MODERN WORLD

New Perspectives on Witchcraft,Magic and Demonology

Volume 1Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft

Edited with introduct ions by

Brian P. LevackUniversity ofTexas

ROUTLEDGENew York/London

Published in 2001 by

Routledge29 West"35th StreetNew York, NY 10001

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Routledge is an Imprint of Taylor & Francis Books, Inc .Copyright e 2001 by Routledge

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or byany electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including anyphotocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.

109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library.of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

New perspectives on witchcraft I edited with introductions by Brian P. Levack.p.em.

Contents: v. I. Demonology, religion, and witchcraft -- v, 2. Witchcraft in continentalEurope -- v, 3. Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England -- v. 4. Gender andwitchcraft - v. 5. Witchcraft, disease, and popular healing -- v. 6. Witchcraft in themodem world, 1750-2000.

ISBN 0-8153-3668-3 (set)I. Witchcraft-History. I. Levack, Brian P.

BF1566 .N48 2002133A--dc21

2001048489

ISBN 0-8153-3668-3 (set)ISBN 0-8153-3669-1 (v.1)ISBN 0-8153-3671-3 (v.2)ISBN 0-8153-3672-1 (v.3)ISBN Q..8153-3673-X (vA)ISBN 0-8153-3674-8 (v.5)ISBN 0-8153-3670-5 (v.6)

Contents

Vll Introduction1 Witchcraft and Catholic Theology

Julio Caro Baroja27 The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late

Medieval EuropeRichardKieckhefer

59 The SpecificRationality of Medieval MagicRichardKieckhefer

83 The Devil' s Hoodwink: Seeingand Believingin the World of SixteenthCentury Witchcraft

Charles Zika130 Bernardino of Siena, Popular Preacher and Witch-Hunter: A 1426Witch

Trial in RomeFranco Mormando

165 Institors of Innsbruck:Heinrich Institoris, the SummisDesiderantes, andtheBrixen Witch Trial of 1485

Eric Wilson179 Protestant Demonology: Sin, Superstition, and Society {c.1520-c.1630)

Stuart Clark216 Martin Luther on Witchcraft: a True Reformer?

Sigrid Brauner231 The Devil as Doctor: Witchcraft, Wodrow, and the Wider World

Louise Yeoman245 The Devil's Encounter with America

Fernando Cervantes271 Witches, Sinners, and the Underside of Covenant Theology

Elizabeth Reis287 Visions of evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism and the Massachusetts

Witchcraft Crisis of 1692RichardP. Gildrie

304 Magic and the Theology of the Body: Exorcism in Sixteenth-CenturyAugsburg

LyndalRoper335 A Woman and the Devil:Possessionand Exorcism in Sixteenth-Century

FranceDenis Crouzet

v

VI Contents

361 The Devils of Queretaro: Scepticism and Credulity in Late SeventeenthCentury Mexico

Fernando Cervantes381 Balthasar Bekker and the Decline of the Witch-Craze: The Old

Demonology and the New PhilosophyRobin Attfield

395 'Man is a Devil to Himself': David Joris and the Rise of aScepticalTradition towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands

G.K Waite425 Witchcraft and Tolerance: The Dutch case

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra,437 "Saints or Sorcerers": Quakerism, Demonology, and the Decline of

Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century EnglandPeter Elmer

473 Acknowledgments

Introduction

During the period of witch-hunting in Europe (roughly 1400to 1750), the crime ofwitchcraft involved two types of alleged activity. The first , known in Latin asmaleficium, was the practice of maleficent magic.This was the use of some kind ofsupernatural, mysterious, or occult power to harm another human being. Thesecond was diabolism, or the worship of the Devil. The two were connected by thebelief, shared by most educated Europeans, that all magic, harmful as well asbeneficent, was performed through the power of the Devil. The belief developed,therefore, that in exchange for the use of demonic magical powers witches hadmade a pact with the Devil, by which they pledged themselves to his service. Thisclaim originated with reference to the activities of learned ritual magicians ornecromancers, many of whom were clerics, who sought to harnessdemonic powerto achieve personal wealth, power, or fame.

During the fifteenth century, however, the idea of the pact was applied topractitioners of simpler forms of villagemagic; many were poor, illiterate villagers,and most were women. As this process occurred, the idea of the pact itself wastransformed. Instead of being negotiated between two roughly equal parties, eachtrying to outwit each other, the pact came to be seen asan expression of the desireof women to become servants of the Devil and to have sexual relations with him.These women, identified as heretics and apostates because they had rejected theirChristian faith and entered the Devil's service, were believed to be part of a vastdemonic conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization.

Scholars who have studied European witchcraft have taken manydifferent routes in an effort to understand this phenomenon. One approach hasbeen to investigate changing ideas of the Devil and to relate those views to theprosecution of individuals for witchcraft. This has involved investigations oflatemedieval and early modern demonology, the body of mainly clericalwritings aboutthe Dev il and his powers. It has also involved the study of the reception of suchideasamong the lower clergy and their lay parishioners. This latter investigation isriddled with controversy, however, since it is uncertain the extent to whichtheological ideasabout the Devil penetrated local communities. In bringing chargesagainst witches, for example, villagers rarely referred to the demonic or diabolicalnature of the crime of witchcraft, only to the allegedinfliction of magicalharm. Onthe other hand all Europeans in the late medieval and early modern period,including those who were illiterate, shared a common religiousculture that includeda recognition of demonic power in the world.

The articles in this collection reveal the complexity of early moderndemonological thought and the var iety of ways in which it developed .Julio Caro

vii

Vlll Introduction

Baroja provides a comprehensive survey of Catholic demonology, showing how thewitch of the classicalperiod was gradually transformed into the magician who madea pact with the Devil. This process took place mainly in those areas of Europewhere classical civilization was strongest. Caro Baroja also studies the works ofseventeenth-century Catholic demonologists like the Jesuits Friedrich von SpeeandAdam Tanner, who began to challenge the views of earlier dernonologists aswell asthe conduct of the witch-hunts themselves. Two articles by Richard Kieckhefer onthe subject of medieval magic contribute to our understanding of the relationshipbetween the practice of magic and the science of demonology. The first argues thatall magic, natural and demonic, operated on the basis of rational principles, whilethe second explains how the categories of the holy and the unholy became blurredwhen ritual magicians conjured up demons. Charles Zika writes about a relativelyunknown demonological treatise by Paulus Frisius , The Deoil's Hoodwink (1583) ,which illustrates the way in which images taken from traditional folklore wereintegrated into a theological and diabolical framework.

Some of the articles in this collection explore the relationship betweendemonological ideas and the actual prosecution of witches. Franco Mormandodiscusses the part played by the great Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena inone of the earliest witchcraft trials in Rome in 1426. Eric Wilson reinterprets thefamous bull of Pope Innocent VIII, Summisdesiderantes, issued in 1484to HeinrichKramer (Henricus Institoris), the principal author of the Malleus maleficamm(1487),the most famous demonological treatise of the early modern period. Wilsondownplays the demonological significance of the papal bull by showing that it wasessentially a political document intended to facilitate Kramer's witch-huntingactivities in the diocese of Brixen . Stuart Clark's article on Protestant demonologyemphasizes that Protestant demonologists, most of whom were ministers,developed their ideas in a pastoral tradition and leveled chargesof diabolism mainlyagainst practitioners of popular beneficent magic rather than against maleficentwitches. Sigrid Brauner studies the views of the great Protestant reformer MartinLuther regarding witchcraft. She emphasizes Luther's rejection of the argument ofthe Malleus that female carnal lust was the source of witchcraft and supplies in itsplace Luther's image of the witch as a disorderly, undisciplined wife. Protestantpreachers also played a role in the promotion of witchcraft in Calvinist Scotland. L.A. Yeoman argues that Scottish Calvinists' belief in spiritual warfare between theforces of God and those of Satan, which was reflected in their own conversionexperiences, provided the foundation for their belief that witches made compactswith the Devil.

A cluster of articles deal with the ways in which views of the Devil weretransformed in the N ew World. The article by Fernando Cervantes on the Devil'sencounter with America explores the rise of nominalist views of demonic power inEurope and their influence on Franciscan missionaries who identified native Indianpractices with the worship of the Devil. In Puritan New England, where Calvinistnotions of sin and repentance were dominant, Protestant demonology underwent ametamorphosis. Elizabeth Reis discusseshow New Englanders were able to workwitches into their theological views of sin. Richard P. Gildrie sees theMassachusetts witchcraft crisis of 1692 as symptomatic of broader tensions

Introduction ix

between New England Puritanism and traditional English popular culture. Heargues that the confessions of the Salem witches reflected an internalization ofthese conflicts.

Demonology was central to the late-medieval and early-modern belief inthe power of the Devil to occupy or possess a human body. Protestants did notdeny this possibility, but they refused to follow the Catholic practice of exorcisingthe demonic spirits through an elaborate ritual . Protestants held that exorcism wasa magical practice and hence opposed to true religion. This volume contains threearticles on possession and exorcism. Lyndal Roper explores the way in which thecontroversy over exorcism inflamed confessional conflict between Catholics andProtestants in the 1560sand 1570s. The central issuewas the relationship betweenthe physical and the divine, between the profane and the religious. Denis Crouzetshows how the possession and exorcism of a young woman from Vervins inFrance was used by Catholic authorities to support Catholic doctrine and winconverts from among Protestant Huguenots. Fernando Cervantes studies theskepticism of Franciscan missionaries regarding a number of cases of possessionamong converts to Christianity in the Mexican city of Queretaro in 1683.

Just as demonology played a role in the rise of witch-hunting, changingviews of the Devil contributed to its decline. The classic illustration of thisconnection is the work of the Calvinist and Cartesian Dutch minister BalthasarBekker, who published his four-volume study TheEnchanted World (1691-1693) inwhich he denied the effectiveness of demonic power in the world. The article byRobin Attfield argues that Bekker's moderate Cartesian position on the relationshipof spirit and matter, his belief in an orderly universe and his theism allowed him toexercise greater influence than has been previously acknowledged on the declineoflearned witch-beliefs. G. K. Waite 's article on the skepticism of the DutchmanDavid Joris in the late sixteenth century suggests that Bekker was operating in aDutch tradition rather than simply as a follower of Descartes. The article byMarijke Gijswijt-Hofstra on the tradition of religious tolerance in the Netherlandsoffers a further reason for the special status of that country in the history ofwitchcraft . Peter Elmer argues that the chargesof witchcraft and diabolism madeagainst the Quakers in seventeenth-century England formed part of broaderprocess by which belief in witchcraft was identified with one political faction oranother. This politicization of demonology discredited the belief in witchcraft andcontributed to the decline of witchcraft prosecutions.

I

Witchcraft and Catholic TheologyJULIO CARO BAROJA

PRELIMI NARY N OT E

AT a time when so many works of great learning and discernmenthave been written concerning the history of magic in general andwitchcraft in particular, it may appear foolhardy to seek to add tothem. However, the present author would point out by way of excusethat he merely wishes to throw light on a specific subject, namely, howthe figure of the witch, already known in pagan antiquity, took ondifferent characteristics in subsequent periods, after the triumph ofChristianity. Finally, as will be seen, the witch-figure became the basisof an immense theological and juridical construction, superimposedon far more ancient and simple facts; and this construction was thework of intellectuals, although their culture was of a very special type .As has been said, the theme is a limited one ; but it is of parti culartheoretical interest, and may be relevant to a revision of the basicconcepts of modern anthropology: functionalism on the one hand,structuralism on the other, and , finally, historicism.

The historical figure with which this book is mainly concerned isdenoted by different words in the European countries of Romancelanguage and Catholic tradition : in France sorciere, in Italy strega, inSpain bruja , The French word derives from a particular meaning ofLatin sors, like the obsolete Spanish sortero and sortiariov the Italianfrom striga, which, like strix, is used either for a bird or for a witchwoman. ' The Spanish term is clearly of different origin; but the long

I The Basque word sorguin or sorguin contains the same element. Spanish sortilegio orsortilego seem 10 be learned forms or Lat inisms .

I Strigae in Petronius, Sal. Ixiii. 4: a real 'witches' tale' ,

1

20 Jlllio Cam Baroja

art icle by Juan Corominas on its etymology is inconclusive;' andGarcia de Diego merely says that its derivation is uncertain .' Thesame author indicates that brujo (skin, peel) and horujo (pack, bundle)come from Latin 1'1111/(// 11/11I (bundle, wrapping). ' This might lead us tosuppose that hruja is derived from an unattested rolucula, signifyingone who flies : the forms rolucra and rolucrcs were used for sirens,witches, and flying creatures in general." The Spanish word, in bothits masculine and its feminine form, is occasionally found from earlytimes with an II instead of a II : broxa occurs in Aragonese and Catalantexts and in a Latin work by Martin of Aries on the witches ofNavarre.' But the form hruxa became generalized and is progressivelydocumented in liter ary and theological texts of the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries; also in dictionaries and lexicons giving itsequivalent in other languages and proposing etymologies, which,however, have not found acceptance.

The best -known reference in an early literary text is in the prosedrama'La Celestina ((.I 500), where the old woman speaks to Parrnenoof the excellent qu alities of his mother, and relates how 'they accusedher of being a witch' because she was discovered by night at a crossroads, carrying candles and digging up handfuls of earth ." Other textsof that date or somewhat later use terms that are regarded assynonyms. For example, Fray Juan de los Angeles in his Considemdonessabre el Cantorde los Cautares says that 'Jeremiah compares the worldand the flesh to lamiae, which, as many bel ieve, are what we call1mljllsor hechiceras [sorceresses ] tlatinestriges rel sagas), who at night seek outchildren at the breast to suck their blood and kill them with theircursed arts." Thus an author writing at the end of the sixteenthcentury (his book was published in Madrid in dl07) not only introdu ced classical terms tor comparison, but also referred to biblicaltexts, whose relevance here is doubtful.")

., Juan Coro mina s, Diccionario critico etimokigicode la lengua castellana (4 vols.; Madrid,1'154-7), i , 530a-532a, with numerous examples. Corominas believes the word to bepre -Roman .

, Vicente Garcia de I)iego, Diaionario etimologico espanol I' hispdnico (Madrid, 1'174),127/J. S Garda de Diego, Diaionario, pp . 127/J and 1055(no . 72(2) .

• Ovid , Fast. vi. 131: ' sunt avidae volucres' . I lis description of the str iga is very d ear.; Corominas, Diccionariu , i . 530a and 53" 1., Fernando de Rojas, / ,11 Celestina, act \'11 : ed .Julio Cejador, i (Madrid , 11)13), 243.°1 Ohro»nustuus tid M.R.P. Fr.'[uan tit' los:11I!id es, pt . ii (Nueva bibliureca de autores

cspanoles, 24; Madrid , 11)17), 56a.II I jeremiah, Lam. 4: J, speaks of lamiae [in the Vulgate ; AV 'sea monsters'-trans

later's note] : these are sometimes confused with witch es , hut , according to var ious

2

I . WitchcraftandCatholicTheology 2 1

The word bruja continued to be written with an x until late in theeighteenth century . It is sign ificant that at on e time it also denoted aspec ies of owl, a night-bird .J I The witch-figure is familiar to Spani shclassical writers of the G olden Age; hut Cervantes, Lope de Vega, andFrancisco de Quevedo all refer to it with a tou ch of iron y or scepticismas to the witch 's powers . Other less-known authors also emphasize theaspect of falsity or spuriou sness. For exa mple, in l .a Mosi/llt'a , by thecornico-e pic poet j ose de Villaviciosa (ISHl)- 16SH), a terri fying figure isaddressed with the words:

Art thou perch ance a vile phantasm,Or some lying witch and sorceress ,T ha t by force of natu re or cata plasmDraine st the living subs tance?"

In Lop e de Vega's La Dorotea the beli ef in erot ic witchcraft plays acons ide rable part , but Julio, an educated man, is made to say th at 'It iswith lovers as with witches , who bel ieve tha t they arc carried bodily tothe place whith er their imagin ation takes them ." :' This short textintroduc es a point that , as we sha ll sec, theologians wer e to debate torcen turies; while ot her texts aga in reflect the belief that witch es suc kedthe hlood of childre n and grown person s." Return ing to the aspect ofde ceit, we may notice that the so-c alled Dicciouarunlcautoridadesstatedin 1726 that the word brujerias was used by tran sferen ce for 'feminineintrigue, deception and childish jokes' ." But the author who wrotemore extens ively and in a more richl y comic vein concern ing witch esand beli efs about them , not only in Anda luci a and Castille but also in

au thors, were fab ulous beings of a special kind . Dion Chrysostomos in Or. I\'. 10 (ed .H . l.a mar C rosb y, iv (London and Ca mb rid ge, I\lass ., Il)6z), 3SS- 9) says that nursesused to frig hten child ren with ta les of lamiae ,

11 Diccionuriodelu let/gila castellana, known as 'de Autoridades' (6 vuls.; Madrid , I7z639), i. 6<)20 , gives th is as an obsolete sense . T he modern dictionaries th at give mostinfor mation , apart fro m Corominas, are: Diaionario lustoricodrla lenguu espanola (z vols.:Madrid , 1936), ii. 37S h-3 76h, and Sa muel Gi li Gaya , Tesoro le.l iwgrtij;w, 1492- /726 (lase .1- 3 (A-Ch); M adrid , 11)'+7-5z), fasc, ii, pp . 37S(-37911 .

1/ Ca nto 5: Poetas epicos, i (Biblio teca de aurores espa noles, 16), 593a : an allusion 10

witche s' allege d practice of anointing and suck ing.1.1 l.a Dorotea, act I. v: ed . Arnerico Castro (1\lad rid , n.d. ( IlII I?» , 16.14 e.g. Q uevedo : 'Que ch upais sangre de ninox /vu mo hru,a ~ in tcrnales' , in a ballad

on old wome n, musa 6, no. 32: Ohms, iii (Hiblioteca d... autor es esp atio les, (H), 17(,/1 . :\ Isoothe r rets., ibid ., to old women's magic pra ctices .

IS Diaionariode la lenguu castellena, i . 6<)2h, S.\' .

3

22 Julio Caro Baroja

Navarre, was Cervantes in EI coloquio de los perms, on which valuableand learned comments were made a considerable time ago."

With more or less knowledge and in a more or less cursory manner,Spanish novelists and comic dramatists refer to witches and witchcraft, and even to memorable witch-hunting episodes." In a world inwhich freedom of conscience was not recognized as in the Protestantcountries-though the expression and its meaning were known, as wemay see from DOli QuixolelX-the subject, which caused agitation forcenturies among European peoples, gave rise to doubts, and moreI han doubts, deriving from two contrary attitudes represented bydifferent Catholic theologians, beginning with a Father of the Church.

II

Greek and Latin texts from pagan antiquity are sufficient to show thatthe image of the witch or sorceress that we find in them was transmitted to Christian society. Among the Romans it was commonlythought that men were by nature prone to thieving, while women, noless naturally, were inclined to witchcraft and poisoning. Accordingto Quintilian, 'latrocinium facilius in viro, veneficium in feminacredas'." Pliny the Elder likewise believed in propensities due tosex ." Greek antiquity, on the other hand, has left us real archetypes ofwitches, each reflecting a particular limn of their activity. Circe andCalypso arc figures who work their will upon men by amorous means,the type of the fell/me[atale; while Medea is a tragic heroine promptedby despair to magic acts." Throughout the Classical world, the femalefigure of antiquity appears at various levels of dignity: at the highest ,when she might be taken for a demi-goddess; at the middle level, thatof lovers depicted by lyric and erotic poets; and at the lowest, that ofcountry women casting malicious spells, or aged crones of grotesque,

" The fullest edn. is still thai of Agustin G. de Amezua, 'I:'I casamiento enganoso 'y '1:'1coloquio delosperms' (Madrid, IlJlz), zt>5-3t>S, with notes and introduction .

17 Thus in Moretu's comedy De[uera rendra .. ., II. ix, the comic servant Chichonsays : 'I would have you know I'm a nobleman, and it isn't my fault ifmy mother was awitch ; they cooked her goose tor it in Logrono. ' (:\n allusion to the famous trial, secbelow). See Comedias cscogidas de DOli /lgllSlill ,\ !orl'lo Cabana (Biblioteca de autoresespaiioles, 3lJ),(IXt'.

I' The Moor Ricorc uses the phrase with ref. to Germany in f)1I1I f..!uijole, pt ii , ch . 5~ .

IY Quintilian, 11151. or. v. 10 . Z5 . ,u Plinius, l listorianaturalis, xxv. 5. 10-11.

21 Julio Citro Baroja , ' :\rqueiipos y modelos ell '" historia de la brujeria', in Ritosyniitus cquitocos (Madrid, 1<17~), ZI5-5X.

4

J. Witchcraft andCatholicTheology 23

sord id appearance.i' Often, however, the female figur e is representedas pr ote cted by, associated, or allied with fem inine, nocturnaldivinities: the moon, Sel ene, Diana, or the terrifyin g crossroa ds figur eof Hecate. In relation to these deities, witch es possessed a power ofcoerc ion and, as it were, conjura tion.P In the Mi d dle Ages, it can beseen from penitential canons th at witches wer e beli eved 10 fly throughth e air on particular occasions under the au spi ces of Diana orHerodias;" and in the recent folklore of some co untries we find abelief in female spi ri ts inhabiting mountains or caves and presidingover witches' acti ons."

Officially, the triumph of Christianity left little room for anyconception other than that inherited fro m I Iebrew monotheism,according to which there arc only two spheres of action in human life:the Good, pursued by those who submit to the law of G od , and theEvil, inhabited by follow ers of the devil and demons. In Christianethics, all that is morally wrong-beliefs, vice s, violent passions-is ofdiabolical origin, and the ancient divinities arc nothing but representations of the de vil, by wh om, according to Ch ristian belief, thewh ole of humanity was plunged int o error until the advent of theMessiah. In consequence of th is view, to whi ch we may give th e nam eof 'diabolization', devilish powers were attributed to wit ches andsorce rers , male and female , and, in fact, to all th ose in volved in thegrand catalogue of 'magic art s' , of which we shall speak presently."But thi s far-reaching 'diab olizat ion ' is combi ned with a differenttendency whi ch cons ists in belittling the reality of the supposedlydi ab olical acts of witchcraft. The devil deceives his adepts, makingthem believe in act s whi ch are false and im agina ry. We have se en, forinstance, how in seventeenth-century Spain peopl e spo ke of the'fal sity ' of witches' acts, and thi s is an inheritance from the do ctrine ofthe early Church: there arc things whi ch are evil, bein g of diabolicalorigin, and which are at the same time false . There is an apparentcontradiction here, which will be found to emerge as the sub ject istreated historically.

21 My early work Las brujasy su mundo (Madrid , Illll ; English tran s., The II"rid of/h eWitches, C hicago and London, 1l)64) contains a chapter (pp. 17-40, in English ed n .) onthe cha racterization of witche s and sorceresses in G ree k and Lat in texts, to whic hothers could be added.

2J On the se divinities see The Worldof /lie Witches, pp. 24- 7." Ibid ., pp . 60- J .

/s e.g. in the Basqu e Co untry: ibid., pp. 237-H./0 On thi s process of diabolization see ibid ., pp . 41- 4.

5

Julio CamBaroja

The Christian theologian inherited from some rationalist writers,Greek and Latin, arguments for making fun of pagan myths andbeliefs which, ever since the time of pre-Socratic philosophers, hadbeen judged unseemly and contrary to the majesty of the Olympiangods. But there is a difference between the jesting of Lucian and themockery of certain Christian authors who insist on the absurdity and,above all, the immorality of paganism. The same writer who proclaimsthe value of absurdity in relation to his own creed insists on the inadmissible absurdity of other beliefs and on giving double versions ofthem, in a way that was also practised in the ancient world. There is ahuge difference between the figure of Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchaeand in the Frog~ of Aristophanes. The same thing happened as regardsthe devil. Popular anecdote transforms the embodiment of ult imateterror into a figure of tim, a small -time liar and deceiver seeking toentrap men and women who are in search of Christian perfection .Those who follow the devil are taken in by him, and witches andwizards arc the victims of private fantasies .

This brings us to a fundamental point in the history of Christian,especially Catholic, theology with reference to the acts attributed towitches. The relevant text is one in which St Augustine, relating apersonal experience, says :

When I was in Italy I hea rd of certain women , innkeepers by trade, andpractitioners of these evil arts, who (it was said) gave travellers cheese to eatand thereby transformed them into beasts of burden . When the y hadpe rformed the task the y reverted to their proper torm . Their minds did notturn to those of beasts, but remained human and rational.

St Augustine is well aware that this is more or less the same story asthat related by Apuleius in his best-known work, The Golden Ass, buthe docs not bel ieve that it happens in reality . Demons do not havepowerto affect the soul or to transform the body. But he passes onwhat he has heard in Italy and compares it with the tale of a certainPraestantius concerning an incident that happened to his father. Thelatter had consumed some kind of poisonous drug, also in a cheese,but this time in his own house. He remained apparently asleep in bed,but could not be awakened . In a few days' time he returned to hissenses and related what had happened during his long dream ortrance . He had turned into a horse, one of several that were carryingloads of grain to the army in Rhaetia . It was later found that thistransport of grain did in fact take place during the man's trance. St

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I . Witchcraft andCatholic The%KY

Augustine relates other cases of dreams with strange effects, on theauthority of trustworthy persons, and explains in this way such poetic'facts' as Circe's use of spells (cam/ina) to transform Odysseus'companions into swine." By divine permission, the demons ofpaganism might succeed in other deceptions also ."

For a long time, throughout the Middle Ages, St Augustine 's thesiswas adopted by Catholic theologians (less so, however, by lawyers andlay magistrates, who dealt with the crime of witchcraft from a civilpoint of view). There is diabolical action, yes; there are substanceswhich serve to carry it out; but the basic reality is lacking. Thetendency to limit the power of the devil also led to the invention, inmedieval times, of burlesque accounts of his relations with oldsorceresses." But, on the other hand, little by little, artists went oncreating images of the devil that were intended to inspire terror,though grotesque ones were invented as well. Thus there came to henew ways of representing the 'Fallen Angel', dissimilar from those 01:say, the sixth century, in which he has no particularly terrifyingfeatures. It was in the period of Rornanesque and still more of Gothicart-in capitals, portals, miniatures, paintings, and so on-that thedevil took on forms that were frightening as well as grotesque; thesecontinued down to the time of the Renaissance, and later still in the:illustrations to popular books." Such representations were not onl yauthorized by the Church, but reflected the intention to educate orguide the populace by means of images. The devil has power overmen; but in relation to God he is an imit ator, a skil ful charlatan, asTertullian says, especially where magic acts are concerned. H is'miracles' are illusory."

As the centuries passed, the Church became ever stronger; hut shecould not prevent people continuing to believe in the absolute realityof almost all the acts attributed to witches and wizards. There is afamous text of doubtful origin, but which exercised great authority,setting out the criterion observed by canon lawyers since, at latest, the

27 lie expressly cit es Virgil, Eel. viii. 70." Augustin, DeciritateDei, lviii . dl./ 9 Texts by Vincent of Beauvais and others in The World ofth«Witches, 1'1'. 6.J--f. The

practice of ridicule came later.)0 Ja cques Levron in f.eDiable dans I'art (Pari s, 1<)35) gives an idea of this, usin g clas sic

work s such as those by E. Mal e and others .) 1 Tert . Apol. xxii-xxiii. These 'demons', with which may he included the daimones of

Socrates and the Platonists, are invisible and insensihle. But there is alwa vs a basicillusion: 'Q uid ergo de caeteris ingeniis, vel etiam virib us fallacia spiritualis ejisseralll ?'

7

26 .7ulio Cam Baroja

tenth century. This is the Canon cpiscopi, supposed to have beenpromulgated by a council at Ancyra in the year jl.f, which in fact did

not take place. The canon appears in a work entitled De ecclesiasticisdisciplinis or De disciplinis ecclesiasticis by Regino, abbot of Priim in

Germany, who died in 915 . It reads :

Bishops and their auxiliaries shall endeavour as far as possible to uproot fromparishes all kinds ofsorcery and magic, which are pernicious inventions of theDevil. They shall expel with ignominy men and women guilty of this vice .Iioly Church must be purged from such a plague. Nor should any credence begiven to what follows : viz. that certain women, perverted and dedicated toSatan, seduced by diabolical fantasies and deceits , believe and profess thatthey ride at night-time with Diana, goddess of the pagans, and with lIerodias,astride certain beasts, in a company of innumerable other women, traversingimmense spaces and obeying Diana's orders like those of a mistress whoconvokes them on certain nights. It would not be so bad if they were the onlyones who die in such impiety, but they attract many others. Great throngs,de ceived by this false persuasion, believe in all these lies and thus fall backinto pagan error. Therefore priests should pre ach wherever it may benecessary to point out the falsity of these errors and make it known that suchtricks are produced by the Evil One who seduces the mind by vain imaginations. It is Satan who . . . having gained possession of the soul of an unfortunate woman . .. takes on the appearanc e of divers persons and deceivesthe spirit of the one in his power, by showing her unknown persons or guidingher on strange voyages . The soul that has abandoned itself to him imaginesthat it is accomplishing in the body things that take place only in the mind .I)oes it not happen to all of us in dreams to be transported a long way oft; andto see during that dream things we have never seen while waking? But no oneis so mad as to believe that such scenes, which arc only in the mind , have takenplace in the bod y. So it must be loudly proclaimed that those who believe suchthings have lost the faith and no longe r belong to God, but only to him inwhom they believe, that is the Devil ."

This is the doctrine followed by the canonist Burchard of Worms,and later by Yves of Chartres and Grarianus.'! as well as by doctors

with especial doctrinal interests, such us john ofSalisbury in Policrati(//5 :

14 It remained in effect from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and

.1/ Regino of Priim, De disciplinis ealesiasticis et rcligione christianae, ed . Baluze (Paris,,(71), vol. ii, col. 364. T he text has bcen rranscribed many times, both in old treatises onwitchcraft and hooks on the devil, and in modern histories: cr. The Worldofthe Witches,pp . 26ll-<) nn. 7-(j.

1.1 TheWorldo(the Wit(//I's p. 26<) nn . 11-'2. Burchard, Decret, x. I ; xix. 5; Ivon or lves ofChartres, Decret , xi. 30; Cirarianus, Decret . ii. 26; V. rz.

H johan of Sailisbury, Policraticus , ii. (Le iden, 163<)), ~ 3 '

8

I . Witchcraft andCatholic Theology

at the beginning of the fourteenth it was still repeated in the texts ofcertain councils. It may be called an Augustinian doctrine of anessentially psychological or spiritual character.

It is not easy to describe the process whereby, at a certain time, adifferent criterion came to be adopted by many Catholic theologians,and eventually by the Church itself as director of social and spirituallife. There was, however, a philosophical element which united withmore commonplace ideas, with the result that judicial practice, inconformity with Scholastic teaching, came to accept the absolute realityof the deeds attributed to witches: not only those described above, butothers as well. During the same centuries in which the old thesis wasmaintained, a number of ideas became widespread as to the existenceof real devil-worshippers or learned men who made a pact with thedevil. Rightly or wrongly, persecution was meted out to certain groupsat odds with the Papacy, on the ground that they were not what theyclaimed to be, but practised horrible rites and committed misd eedswithout number. In papal documents and trials the influence of thedevil was described as con stant, and a bod y of doctrine was evolvedaccording to which his followers actuall y invert the practices of divineworship and all normal and agreeable customs, living in a state ofunmixed horror. Many studies have been devoted to the groupsaccused of such perversions, which remain incomprehensible, and thecharges have often been considered huge falsifications. Historianshave approached them from opposite angle s according to theirdifferent religious tendencies. There is, for instance, the trial of theTernplars, an action already condemned by Dante, with trumped-upcharges and confessions extracted by torture; other, less well-knownpersecuted groups include the 'Stedingers', accu sed of still moreimprobable acts and beliefs and the Cathars and Albigensians, whowere also misrepresented as diabolists ." In all these cases the actualintervention of the devil was taken for granted, with a multiplicity ofappropriate images . Finally, an absolute doctrine was expressed in theterms of a passage from St Thomas Aquinas «(.1225-74): 'TheCatholic faith declares that demons are able to do harm by theiroperations, and to impede sexual congress.':" Thus the reality of

J\ Dante defends the T emplars in Purg. xx. 93-102, ascribing their trial to royalavarice. On the charges against the Cathars (sodomy, satan ism, etc.) see Rene Nelli , I.,'Phrnumenr cathare (Paris, 1964), X2.

J6 Aquinas, Qllaesliol1es quodlibetales, xi. 10, in Comment. in .lob, i . Quoted in manyworks on witchcraft.

9


diabolical action was maintained, not only as affecting the mind.:17

This goes far to explain the increased violence of persecution and thecategorical return to the doctrine laid down in Exodus 22: 18: 'Thoushalt not suffer a witch to live.':"

III

There is no doubt that the principles elaborated and applied in thethirteenth century acquired full authority in the fourteenth andfifteenth . It is also clear that the dramatis personae, as we may callthem, were to a certain extent associated with new qualities . It can nolonger be imagined that churchmen limited the devil's power to thesphere of mental life. That power appeared ever stronger; it includedthe propagation of doctrines contrary to the Faith, such as that of theAlbigensians or the Jewish minorities. The Church also strove tobanish the last residue of pagan ideas as to the role of 'Noctiluca',Diana, or what were thought to be the equivalent Germanic deities .:l~The master of witches and wizards, who clearl y carry out his orders, isthe devil, appearing at covens in the form of a he -goat. The doctrinecrystallized and was applied everywhere; it was international, like theChurch itself: and was intended to eradicate whatever might toda ycome under the heading of local folklore or particularism. This was asecond phase of the process of diabolization, with vast consequencesfor European communities at the end of the Middle Ages and thebeginning of the modern age. The 'crime of witchcraft' was rooted in abody of doctrine with effects undreamt-of in those communities, andproduced a veritable state of terror. It is not our concern here todescribe the course of trial s for collective witchcraft (which have alengthy history in the Pyrenean area), but to emphasize that theChurch systematically modified its judgement and the legal procedures relating to persons charged with witchcraft in particular ormagic in general. This modification may also correspond to anincreased belief in magic, and more extensive practice of its variousmanifestations.

JJ On the character of demons: Su mma thcol. i, quarsti« (,3, in I) articl es .... Women who prucriscd ne cromancy are mentioned in the Old Testament, e .g. the

Wit ch of Ln-dur ( I Sam . 1H: 7- -20 )..\'1 T he connecrion b"twt'en witches and Cicrmani« d ivinit ies is fully discussed b v

Jacob G rimm in 1)<'11/.•, II<' ,l ly /I/O/axil' (.+ vols.; lIeriin alld Vienna, II)H I), i, H' -(, and iii.H7-'! ·

10

I. Witchcraft andCatholic Theology 29

The key document in this respect is the hull SuperiI/ius specula (r326)ofJohn XXII, referring to the many Christians

who ally themselves with Death and make a covenant with I lell; who sacrificeto demons, making and causing to be made images, rings, mirrors, phials andsimilar objects intended as magic bonds to hold fast the demons whom theyinterrogate and from whom they obtain answers, having recourse to the samedemons to satisfy their depraved desires."

Without doubt there were persons of all social classes who practisedwhat was much later called 'satanism'. But it is also certain that thepractice and theory of papal inquisitors did much to foster beliefs thatwere afterwards ridiculed in such phrases, current in Spain, as 'tobelieve in witches' or 'tales of witches'. From the eighteenth centuryonwards, writers mistakenly ascribed to 'popular ignorance' theattitude of those who were in fact far from ignorant. Thus, in theEncyclopedic by Diderot and d'Alernbert, 'Sorcellerie' is defined as an'operation magique, honteuse et ridicule, attribuee stupidernent par lasuperstition it l'invocation et au pouvoir des demons'; and the articlecontinues: 'On n'entendit jamais parler de sortileges et de maleficesque dans les pays et les terns d'ignorance."! This reflects a certainoptimism as to the power of civilization in general. But in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries the subject was codified not by theignorant, but by educated people such as canon lawyers, jurists, andinquisitors. A much more telling attack has been levelled against theChurch by those who accuse it of seeking to enlarge its power byfostering belief in the existence of true satanism." From the time ofthe publication of the first writings designed to facilitate inquisitorialpractice (many more of which were to follow in the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries), witches and wizards were depicted far morespecifically as devil-worshippers, and methods of persecution wereprescribed accordingly." This was true not only of juridical but of

'0 Bulls in chronological order in the Matti/WI bullarium fl/1Ila1/U/II (IX57-) and earliered itions such as the Bullanum pririlegiorum ar diplumatum romanum pontificum usque luiClementem XII amplissima collectio . . . (2X folio vols .; Rome, 173X-45).

" Encyclopedie, lJUdiaionnaire raisonnedessciences. des IIr" el des metiers, ~v (Ncucharel,1']65),IISb,

" Thus the canon Johann Dollinger, E! Pontificad» ( IX61), Spanish trans , hyDemetrio Zorrilla (Madrid, n.d.), '71-&>.

... Before the invention of printing there wer e texts like that of Ilernard Ciu]. knownfor his leal and brutality, at the beginning of the I.llh c., hut also others that were mu.hcopied. T he inquisitor's propensity fur us ing torture, ove rr iding medical statements,and, in general, adopting attitudes most calculated to facilitate sen tencing, persisted

11

3° JulioCaro Baroja

more theological writings: for instance, the Formicarium ofJohannesNider in the fifteenth century."

Other works, developing ideas that have aroused horror andrepulsion in later times, bear titles indicating that they were intendedto serve as guides or manuals, or 'directories' like the work ofEymerich" and others. It is usually supposed that codifications andsubsequent compilations of laws have always signified an advance inlegal science; but actually they have sometimes had no effect, or anegative one, as Renan observed ." It must be admitted, on the otherhand, that the most brutal code of witch-hunting that has ever existedwas written, printed, and put into effect during the Renaissance; andthat its authors, contemporaries of Leonardo da Vinci, were men ofgenius, or at any rate intelligence, free from any prejudice imposed byauthority or tradition . In December 1484 Pope Innocent VIII, himselfa loose -liver, issued the bull SU1l1111is desiderantes effectihlls, describingthe activities of witches and wizards in the dioceses of Mainz,Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen. They are accused of carnalrelations with demons, and of using enchantments, spells, andsorceries to bring about the death of children and domestic animals,the failure of harvests, diseases without number, impotence, andsterility. The Pope, as we know, derived his information from a reportby the two Dominicans Heinrich Kraemer (Institor) and JakobSprenger, who obtained full powers to persecute those charged withsuch offences. The worst consequence of the papal zeal was thepublication of the sadly famous Mill/eus 1I1i1!e//WrlIlII (Tlammer ofwitches'); in later editions this was combined with Nider's work and

very late, as may he seen from C . Carena ofCremonu, TractatusSanctissimaelnquisitionis,de modoprocedeudi i ll causis Fidri; in trespartrsdirisus (I .yons , ,(49), 2 14a , 262" (pt. ii, titleIZ, 'De Sortilegis' , in 32' paras .).

H Johannes N ide r, Formicarium seu dialogus ad ritam chrtstianam exemplo [ormicaeincitatious ( lSI edn, Augsburg, 1475; znd edn. Strasburg, 'S'7-the author , however,lived from 13Ho to 143H). Frequently publ ished with the Mal/ws (see helow).

<I An extremely rare impression : Ni co laus l.ymerich, Directorium inquisitorum.Sequuntur decretales tituli de summa trinitate et fide catholica , AI the end appears the statement : ' Exp lici t totum direcruriurn inqu isirorum haeret icae pr avi tatis compilatum Avinione per fratrern Niculaum Eymerici , ordinis tratrum predicatorum sacre theologiemagisrrum ac inquisitorem Aragon ie haereti cae praviratis . Impressum Harchinonae perjoannem I.uschner Alemanum. Suh f'lcl is e t expensis . . . Didaci de D eca epi scopi 1'011ent ini . . . anno M .D. III ' (Barcelona, '5 03). The work was reprinted in Rome (' 57H)amiin later editions, also an ahridf(ed ir .mslanon (Lisbon 1- Paris], 'i'z), contrary toChurch aui huritv.

4/, Lsp . in his ' co lll lllen t,try on ' L'Histuire secret e de Procopt" in Essais de morale rtcritique (P aris , I HS') ' zH\- 5.

12


others to form a corpus entitled Malleus maleficorum. The two friarsevidently thought that far more women than men were given tosorcery; in this they followed ancient ideas, as we have seen. In anycase, they expounded systematically the belief that sorcerers formed asect with its own rites of initiation, abjuration, and so on, and in Part III

of the work they described methodically the legal procedure to befollowed in cases of witchcraft. The Malleus has given rise to differentkinds of commentary in different times: in our own day it has beenreprinted by, among others, supposed satanists, while on the otherhand it has been described as a 'stupid book'." Books that are merelystupid, however, do not have the unusual destiny of this one, whichinspired the publication of others as late as the seventeenth century,and witch-hunts that continued in Protestant countries after theReformation. In this paper, however, we are concerned only withCatholic Europe.

As to Spain, there were trials of witches and wizards in Vizcaya atthe beginning of the sixteenth century; but differing views were heldby theologians befo re, during, and after the period of Institor andSprenger. Fray Lope de Barrientos, bishop of Cuenca (1382- 14(9), ina treatise on divination, adhered firml y to the position of the Canonepiscopi" Alonso de Madrigal (1409-55), bishop ofAvila, known by thenickname El Tostado, expounds two opposite theses in different places,but essentially follows St Augustine." Much later, the t;1I110US

Francisco de Vitoria (1486- 1546) accepted the possibility of illusion,but also thought that 'sometimes' there might be real cases of

47 The work , with the title indicated, was published at Co logne in '4H6, prefaced bythe papal document. Later editions also include thi s documen t, and contain N ide r'swork following the Malleus. Thus, for instance, a Malleimalejicarum, explurimisauthonbus[sicl coaceruatus,acillduos tomos distinctus (Lyons, 15H4): in vol. i, the Malleus, with index,occupies pp . 1-464; Nider's treatise , pp , 465-54°' Vol. ii contains more moderntreatises, mentioned below . The Malleus has appeared in several modern editions andtranslations.

.. Lope de Barrientos, Tratado deluadiuinanza , published by Fray Luis G. A. Cetrino,Anales salmantinos, i (Salamanca, 1')27), ' 77-9.

4' H . C. I .ea uses Hansen's edition of Tostado's text in A Historyof the Inquisition ofSpain (4 vols.; New York , 1')07), iv. 2Q{). Late in the 17th <:.there appeared El Tostado sobreEusebio: Milleralde letras dirinasy humanas, en la llistoria Kt'tleml dr todos /", 'l'il'tllpll'.)' Revnosdel Mtmdo . . . , compiled by Fray Joseph de Almonazid (Madrid, ,hn), h7'-2 (pt . iii,ch. "n) : ' De las bruxas, y de las cosas que dell as se cuenten, como se deben entender.'This is an interpretation already used hy St AUKUSli,H', illus tmn-d bv a Spanish f ast·of a witch who anointed herself, fell to the ground. and , when she recovered cunsciousness, related things that had happened to her.

13

32 Jlliio Cam Baroja

metamorphosis, nocturnal flight, etc." This explains certain fluctuations that are found in inquisitorial practice.

In Italy, attitudes were perhaps still more varied; sometimes the yreflect group loyalties. We have seen how the Dominicans, first andforem ost, were associated with inquisitorial perse cutions, and naturally the y were the primary defenders of the Mal/ells against itsopponents. As we shall see later, the well-known rivalry betweenDominicans and Jesuits affect ed the views on witchcraft held by thetwo Orders. The principal Italian critics of the Mal/eus and, in general,of works affirming the real ity ofsorce ry and magic were men ofvaryingeducational background : firstl y philosophers and pure theoreticians,secondly lawyers, thirdly theologians, and finally scientists andphysicians. The complex situation in Renaissance Italy cannot be fullydescribed here; but, limiting ourselves to the theme of popularsorcery, we may note the attack on the Mal/ells by Gian FrancescoPonzinibio of Florence, who published a Tractatus de Lamiis in 1520;

he was answered by a Dominican with inquisitorial functions, FraBartolornmeo de Spina, in a treatise usually published with theAlaI/ellS and N ider's ami oth er similar works.!' Before Ponzinibio, achurchman defended the anci ent doctrine and was opposed byanother Dominican ." But , ind ependentl y of polemics, books werepublished expressing complete creduli ty, such as that by PaulusGrill andu s, This author is of especial interest for his knowledge of theorigins of traditions and beliefs that have pr evailed in southern Italyuntil modern times; some of these are pure inventions that have beenrepeated from pla ce to pla ce according to well-known principles oflocali zation and acrunlization.V Grillundus is particularly interestingon the South and the Benevento region.

It should he noted also that grea t Itali an theologians of the fifteenthcentury unhesitatingly followed what may be called the 'old ' doctrine.

; 11 Fra ncisco de Vituria, 'R ele ccion del arte m.igi cu' , in Hclcaumcs leoliiKictI,' , Sp ani shtrans . hyJaime Torrnhiano y Ripoll, iii (M ad rid , " P 7), ' 5l - 3,

\I De Spina wrure several tr eat ises . The first , !J11t'slio tit' strigibus, in 3l chs ., waspublished in the collec tions mentioned: e .g Mallei malejicarum, ex plurimis auctoribuscoadunati,ii (Lyons , ,(14), '47- l51). The second, entitled R.PY llart. Spill. IIIPonzinibiumdrl .amiis,tlpoloKia prima, was fnllowed hy three more : published in the sam e compilation, pp . lo O-317, th e lirst and second in i z chs, each, the third in 5 chs., the fourth in I.

The method is scholastic, and the refut at ion of the Canon epis(Opi furnishes a tundamental basis to both works.

\I T hus Samuel de Cassin is l'i.Hi-l'is th e D ominican Vin cente Dod o.;.\ Paulus Grill nndus, Tractatusdcherctiris,a sortilegiisomnijarimn coitu ... (Lyons, 1536

an d 1545); much qu oted hy subse quen t writers.

14

I . Witchcraft and Catholic Theology 33

Just as in Spain, the literary world made considerable use of the themeof magic; perhaps even more so in Italy, but in a way that could implydoubt or even satire.

The other Catholic country that produced an abundant theologicaland legal literature on the subject of witchcraft was France. There,from the second half of the sixteenth century, there was a tendencytowards systematization that came to exercise great influence; it wasrepresented largely by layfolk, but belongs to a later period than theone we are concerned with at present. Within the group connectedwith the works published together with the Malleus, two other authorsmust be considered. Firstly Bernard Basin, a noted preacher and adoctor of Paris University who became a canon of Sa ragossa, author ofDe artibus magicis et magorum maleficiis, published in 1483 and latereditions (Paris, 1506). Basin interpreted the sources very much in hisown way, invoking the authority of the pagan classics. His position,like Vitoria's, was eclectic: he accepted the reality of certain facts, andalso the power of demons to control the imagination. Like others, hebelieved women to be more given to magic arts than men ; heexplained thi s in part by their physical make-up, greater impressionability, and a kind oferotic malice. The work consists of nine propositions and an equal number of conclusions." Another text of theMalleus group is by the Swiss Ulrich Molitor, advocate to the bishopofConstance, who died in 1492. Besides works in German he wrote Delamiis etpythonicis mulieribus, published in 1489 in his native city and inCologne. The Constance edition presents a new feature, namely,woodcuts representing the acts attributed to witches and wizards, nodoubt as an awful example to readers . This, as we shall sec, was alsodone in sixteenth-century works . Molitor's learned treatise, in tenchapters, is dedicated to Archduke Sigisrnund of Austria, and is in theform of a colloquy between the author, the archduke, and one ConradSchatz. It refers to the popular belief(ofthat day and this) that witchesfly by night on broomsticks, as depicted by painters around that time ,and discusses the nature of covens. The most familiar traditions ofGermanic folklore are also noted, as are hagiographic episodes thatprovided inspiration to artists, such as the Temptations of StAnthony.I' Molitor's work is certainly more entertaining than others

" Bernard Basin, Deurtibus magicis et magorummalef iciis (Paris, qllJ ; znd edn ., I j(6).The author is briefly mentioned by Nicolas Antonio in Bibliotheca lli spana Nora, i(Madrid, ' 783), 222a . The work is in Mallei malejicarum,cxplurimis auctoribus , ii. I)- .p .

55 Ulri ch Molitor, De lamiiset pythonicis mulieribus (n.p., '48lj), repro Tractutus utiliss. etnecessarius, per riam dialogi, de Pythonicis mulieribus, in .\ Iulftoi malcficarum, ii. 32- 70.

15


of the same intention, including two more in the Mal/ells group: JeanGerson's Tracuuus deprobatione spirituumi" and, by Thomas Murner,OFM, Libel/us de Pythonico contractu ,57 The former is of no concern toour study, and the latter is also not quite of our period; it is mainly anattack 0'1 astrology and divinatory practices.

IV

But we must now move forward in time, to the second half of thesixteenth century.

In France there arc two facts that seem to me significant. First, theauthors of the best-known works on popular belief in the reality of theacts attributed to male and female sorcerers are laymen; and secondly,these laymen introduce concepts of wide range and significance.Leaving secondary authors aside, we come to the figure ofJean Bodin«(,1530-1)6). Bodin, a lawyer from Angers, is doubtless better known asa founder of political science than as the author of DelaDemonomaniedes Sorciers, which was published in 1580 and put on the Index not longafterwards.58 But, however suspect his ideas from the point of view ofCatholic orthodoxy, this 'black sheep' evinces a strong belief in thepower of the devil; as a good lawyer, he also displays a tendency tocodification and systematization. The word 'demonornanie' thatoccurs in his title (no acute accent in old editions) actually becomes'daernonolarria' in the work of a later author. We thus reach theculmination of the process of the 'diabolization' of witchcraft. Laterthis process was to give rise to such conceptions as 'satanic','satanisrn', and 'satanology', which were unfamiliar in Spain till wellinto the eighteenth century, unlike the name Satdn or Satands. To thisphase belongs, as will be seen, the widespread idea that witches andwizards, in their worship of Satan, do no more than invert Catholic

" Dncti el acutissimi sacra pagina lroaoris Ioannis de (;ersll1lO. Cancellarii Parisiensis,Tractutus perutilis de probatione Spirilllllmincipit focliciter, in Alalteimalcficarum, ii. 7I-Ho.

57 Tractatus perutiles de Pythonico contractu, [ratris Thomas Muft/er, liberalium artiumMagislri, ordinis Minorum. Ad instantiam generosi domini loannis Mohmer der Mt'rspergcompilatus , in Malteimalcficarum, ii . HI-140.

1M DelaDemonomanie des Sorciers. A MOIISt'ignt'ur M. Chrestofle de Thou Chevalier SeigneurdeCoeli, premierPresident (II laCourdeParlement, etConseiller du Roy(II sonpriueConseil. ParI.Bodinangerin (Paris, ISHa). Later edns , were published in 'SHz, ISH6, '5ll7, '004, etc .; andthere were translations into Latin , German, and Ital ian . However, De magorumDaemonomania was placed on the Index hy a decree of 'S94: cf lndicegeneralde loslibrosprohibidos (Madrid, 1H44), 4Sa.

16


practices; hence the 'black Mass' and other rites that have come downto our time in decadent societies, being regarded as perverse andexploited by certain writers in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury. Bodin deals with almost all aspects of the 'magic arts'-notonly traditional witchcraft, but also divination-and after the fourthbook he undertakes to refute the famous work by Jean Wier." Wier(1515-88), physician to the Duke of Cleves, had applied rationalmethods to the analysis of what was reported of witches and wizards,and had concluded that their punishment was not fully justified. In theface of legal codifications, displays of sacred and profane erudition,and the constant invocation of authority, Wier and others like himdiscussed the issue freely and expressed their doubts and experiences,though as yet with circumspection. During the first half of thesixteenth century other attempts were made to explain by naturalcauses such facts as the trances of sorcerers; a famous passage by DrLaguna relates to this subject." But the opposite doctrinal tendencyproduced new and famous fruits : for instance, the work of theLorraine magistrate Nicolas Remi or Remy (Remigius; 1554-1600),known as 'Ie Torquernada lorrain', whose Daemonolatria, published atLyons in 1595, attracted severe criticism." The most significant aspectof this book, based on terrible experiences and on principles established by the Malleus, etc., is that 'mania' turns into 'latria' : thesupreme worship that is due only to God is given to the Evil One, in asacrilegious and abominable manner, and is given to him directly,unequivocally. Remi is to Lorraine what Henri Boguet is to the Jura orPierre de Lancre to the Labourd district, somewhat later on. It hasnever been easy to fathom the mentality of these lay judges, some ofwhom were men of great learning, or to understand their activity incountries which, at least in theory, disapproved of inquisitorialtribunals; but we have their books, attesting what they thought andwhat they did. Nowadays some believe that their persecutions andothers like them were undertaken for political reasons, to establish

S' De/a Demonomanie, ed. cit., los. 2dl-52.Johan Weyer's work Depraestigiis durmonumel incantationibus ac veneficiis lib. VI was published at Basle in 1564 and went throughseveral edns ., including French translations. The French version of 1579was reprintedin Paris in 2 vols. in 1885 under the title Histoires, disputes et discours . .., in the seriesBibliotheque diabolique.

•0 Text reproduced in Andres Laguna, Maleria medica, iv, 75 (Antwerp, 1555),421-2.bI Nic. Remigii Daemonolatria lib. fJI, ex judiciis capitalibus noningentorum plus minus

homilium, quisortilegii crimen intraannos quindecim ill Lotharingis captifuerunt (Lyons, 1595;also later edns .).

17

J ulill CamBaroja

control over unreliabl e regions. Certa inly for a lon g time the civil lawsand autho rities were at least as strict on the subject of witchcraft aswere the eccl esiastical courts.

H owever, before moving on in time, we should no te how, independen tly of judicial practice, Catholic theologians wen t onelabora ting the body of doctrine concerni ng all forms of magic, inways th at co nfront us with bot h socio logical and psycho logicalproblems .

A nu mbe r of th eoretical works of interest were written at timeswhe n a revival of witchcraft took p lace in a pa rt icular area . O neof these was a trea tise by Martin de Aries y Andosilla, cano n ofPamplon a, who wrote in th e fiftee nt h century of the witches ofNavarre-whom he believed to be numerous amo ng th e commo npeople, but con cern ing who m he ado pted a cau tio us position ." Asregard s persecu tion s and trials in the first hal fo fthe sixtee nth century,th ere is ano the r treat ise in Span ish by Fray Marti n de Castanega,pu blish ed at Logrori o in 15 2!),'··1 whic h descri bes clearly th e oppositionbe tween the sacrame nts of the C hurch an d wha t he calls th e 'execramenr s' ofsorcerers : tha t is, the inversion we have spoken of, creati ng akind of diabolical Ch urc h. Castancga also knows and co mments onthe different opinions as to why th ere arc mor e witc hes tha n wiza rds,an d adduces names tha t have a Basque appearance, suc h as'Xorguinos' . Other general treatises of abo ut this date give less spaceto witchcraft as such, but reflect the interest aro used especially byrecent trials in N avarre;" this interest is also seen in some works ofliter ature and secular history . In a literary work, inspired by familia rclassical Latin texts, it is curious to note th at Navarrese witches arccredited with th e same activi ties as those of ancient T hessaly, bein gregard ed as from the same stock." But it is clear that the centurieshave no t ela psed in vain.

e Ma rtin de Aries y Andosilla, hilda tus tit' supcrsticionihus (Lyons , J510; znd edn ,Pa ris , ' 517).

oj Ma rtin de Castancga, Tratadomuysotily bien jundudod«lassupersticionesyhechizerias.vrurios conjures J' ahusiuncs ) ' otras (O ,'iI H al ( tH O tocautcsv de lu possibilitladJ' remedio dellas(Lo gron», '5 2'1); a very ran' work.

" e .g. that of PeJfII Cirucl«, Rcprouacion tie I'IIslI!' a sl i( ioll n y hcchicerias (Sa lamanca,' 55(,), fo. xix", There arc earl ie r cJns. of ' 52'1, ' ., 3'1, anJ ' 55 1.

, ; HICrotalon (B ue nos Aires , 11)45), 77 (can to 5).

18

I . Witchcraft andCatholic Theology

v

37

Greco-Larin culture stilI played a dominant role in sixteenth-centuryEurope, both in Catholic and in Protestant countries-perhaps withmore vital continuity in the former, especially in Italy . It may also besaid that that culture exercised a powerful influence on authorsconcerned with magic in general and witchcraft in particular, from atheoretical point ofview. The most striking example is Martin del Rio(1 551-160<)), a Spanish Jesuit born in Antwerp. I Ie was distinguishedfor his studies of clas sical literature, but stilI more for a voluminouswork, both learned and credulous, written shortly before 1600, theDisquisitionum magicarum libri sex" The first book tre ats of thegenerally accepted types of magic: the 'natural', the 'artificial', andthe 'deceitful'; the second, of 'demoniac magic' and its efficacy; thethird, of 'spells' and 'vain observances' . The fourth book dealswith 'prophecy', 'divination', and 'conjecture' ; the fifth discusses thefunction of judges and the order of criminal proceedings; the sixthtreats of the office of confessors and of licit and illicit remed ies. Inbook ii more especially, and throughout the work, witches arc dealtwith under quaestio 16, which speaks of nocturnal covens and thequestion whether witches are transported from place to place. Del Riois familiar with almost all the authorities we have mentioned and withsome others: both those who, unlike him, accept the theory of a tranceor illusion, and those (including a Calvinist writer) who believe thatthe occurrences are real. He cites numerous cases and witnesses infavour of the second view: some very recent, from the ISHos and evenfrom 1590. His views are close to those of Rerni and far from those ofJean Wier." His immense erudition goes some way to disprove theeighteenth-century idea that belief in witchcraft was founded in'ignorance': a theologian like del Rio, or a magistrate like Bodin, wereanything but ignorant . In del Rio's case, one may rather speak of a'world-view' decisively influenced by ideas ofauthority and by literaryerudition, as opposed to the view of those authors-including some ofmuch earlier date-who believed that right ideas must be founded onexperiment and direct observation of the real world .

•• cr.my ess ay 'M artin del Rio y sus Disquisiciones m.igicas ', in 1:'1 sOlor II/Kll isidoryotrasridas poroficio (Madrid, up!!) , 171- <)6. The Disquisitionrs were publ ished at l .ouvainin 15<)9-1600; other edn s. followed HI int ervals unt il at least 17-17.

01 Martin del Rio, Disquisitionum magicarumlibri Sf.\' (Venice, ,6(6) , 154a- 171a (bk ii ,quaestio 16).

19

JulioCaro Baroja

There is no doubt that at the end of the sixteenth and the beginningof the seventeenth century there was a positive obsession with thedevil 's physical presence in the world . Following Molitor's example,some authors accompanied their texts with hair-raising illustrations ofalleged events . An example is the Compenditnu malefirarum of F . M .Guazzo (Guaccius) of Milan, which shows witches and wizards onthe ir way to covens, abjuring the Faith, receiving the dev il's baptism,writing their names in the book of death (being erased from that oflife), vowing to sacrifice children, kissing the rump of the horned andwinged Satan, worshipping him on his throne, dancing, feasting,raising storms, seeking out corpses with which to make magic spells,and turning themselves into animals for the same purpose." Thisbook was published in the author's native city in 1608, a date ofimportance in the history of witchcraft, as we shall sec .

It must be confessed that these woodcuts, like others of the sameperiod depicting infernal and diabolic scenes, are less frightening thanthose of Go ya, although he, as a child of the Enlightenment, wasconcerned to satirize popular beliefs and their reflection in Spanishwork s of Guazzo's day. The latter's work appeared immediatelybefore a trial of witches and sorcerers in the far north of the kingdomof Navarre, the accused being condemned at an Ill/III da Jtf held atLogrono on 7- 8 November .rll O. The proceedings were described inSpanish in a far from theoretical Re/tIl'il//I,"" the publication of whichproduced scandal and surprise. For a considerable time afterwardsmore or less burlesque allusions were made to it, in the style of thepassage quoted from Moreto (note 17, above). After 1800, during aperiod of criticism of inquisitorial excesses, the Relacion was reprintedwith notes by Leandro Fernandez de Morann, a friend of Goya's,"and there is no doubt that it provided the artist with inspiration for histerrifying etchings. In fact it gives a fairly free account of the trial :while two of the judges accepted the absolute truth of all the testimonyand confessions, a third dissented. Together with details of time andplace, and references to particular individuals , the Reillcil/l1 comprised

.. The twelve engravin gs arc reproduced in ihe l Si edn. of Las brujasysu mundo; figs .2- 13 1(,llowing p . 30-!-

.. Relacion de laspersonas qu«salicron 11 1.,111111 de III1-t'<' que lossenoresDoctorAIIIIISII BezerraHolguin drl abitode Alcantara; li(m<"iado }1U1II de I 'allr Ali -aradoy licruciado Alonsode SalazarFrias . . ., rclrhrarun rn lu {uid"d tit'l .ogron», O J sictcv ('11 och» dill S tit'! lil t'S ,It' Norie mhre de ttn»: 1,10.1. I"dr las (o.\us.l'drlttns por'II/<'.II"'/"IJ1l (l/\ l lgll dm (I ,ogroll o , 11'1') , Full text published bythe present author in Brujcna l 'iJSCiI (San Sebast ian , "175), 7 ' - 12 1.

7<1 Edns. of IIII 2, I H20, IX36,etc.

20

I . Witchcraft andCatholic Theology 39

a systematic account of all that had been alleged against witches andwizards since the fifteenth century. The principal events in the casewere stated to have taken place in a mysterious spot, the cave ofZugarramurri : a natural tunnel in a calcareous mass, worn away by ariver still known in Basque as 'hell-stream' tinjernuko crreka). The caveserved both as a temple and as a court . A secret society with ahierarchy of degrees carried out wicked acts under the direction of thedevil in the form of a he-goat, and struck terror into the surroundingvillages. As in many other such cases, evidence was furnished bywomen, children, and infirm old people. The affair had importantconsequences which have only become known in modern times. Thethird, dissenting judge at LogroilO-licetlciadli Alonso Salazar y Frias,a man well grounded in the law-asked for and obtained a revision ofthe case . The detailed investigations which resulted are described infull by Gustav Henningsen in an excellent book;" they made itpossible to establish, by purely judicial procedure, the falsity of mostof the evidence that had been taken as certain. Salazar y Frias did notdiscuss the matter like a doctor, a natural scientist, or a criticalphilosopher (such as Montaigne or Charron), but in the style of alawyer examining the procedure followed in the particular case beforehim . As a result he obtained an edict of pardon, and from that dateonwards scarcely any trials for collective witchcraft were brought bythe Spanish Inquisition. This suspension did not apply to cases ofindividual witchcraft and other magic practices."

The action of the other two judges at Logrono is paralleled by thatof Pierre de Lancre, the famous magistrate of the parlement ofBordeaux, who presided over a terrible persecution in the Labourdcountry (bordering on Navarre), which he described in a work entitledTableau deI'inconstance des mauoais anges etdemons, published in Paris in1612 and illustrated by a curious engraving showing what was allegedagainst witches and wizards in the affidavits endorsed by the author."

71 Gustav Henningsen, Thr Witches'Advocate:Basque lt 'itclura]: and thr Spallish lnquisition (Reno, 19110).

7; For subsequent cases see Julio Caro Haroja, 1'idas magicas e Inquisiciv« (2 vuls .;Madrid, 1967)'

7.\ The full title is significant : Tableaudel'inconstancc drs //11111 1'tI istlllges "I drmons. Oil Ii ,'"amplementtraute de laSorcelerie etSorciers. l.irre Ires curieuxct trcsII Iii,', 111111 seulement «uxtuec»,maisatousceuxqui vivent soubs lesloixChrestiennes. Arecun discourscontenantlr procednre [aictcparles Inquisitions d 'hspaglle"1 de Naturrr, tiS3 Maxiciens, .:lp"sltlls, ]11iii, Sorrier; en la rtllc del .ogrogne 01 Castill«, I"9 de Norembre 16/0, Enlaquellr 011 "oil' ombirn l 'cxcrcis« dr lajustur I'll

France est plus juridiquement traicte, et al'ec de plus belles formes 'III ,'II tous autrrs I:'//Ipire",Royaumes, Republiques et Estats (Paris, 1612). A later work hy De l .ancre contains some

21

Julio Caro Baroja

Here again we have a man of great learning and some literary talent,who, unlike Salazar y Frias, represents the 'realist' view initiated bythe authors of the Malleus . Much has been written about Pierre deLancre, not all of it sensible; but it can be said that he is the lastsystemat ic author on this subject who possessed judicial authority andhimself carried out violent repression . lIe magnifies the allegedoffences of witches and wizards in a small, economically backwardregion, as though a diabolical court might have existed there, and as ifthe unfortunate, accused villagers were steeped in satanic lore ." Thisof course is contrary to the idea of the ignorance and simplicity ofcountry folk in general that emerges from many French and Spanishtexts of his time, in which the contrast between rural life and court lifeis a constant theme." Pierre de Lancre, in fact, stands for an ultimatedegree ofsophisrication' with regard to so widespread a phenomenonas belief in witches-a phenomenon whose recurrent characteristicshave little to do with such fabulous constructions.

VI

It cannot be said without qualification that theologians and theoristsof the kind described in the foregoing pages were no longer numerousafter the first two decades of the seventeenth century, but theycertainly had less influence than before. In Spain, for instance, thereappeared the very systematic treatise of Francisco Torreblanca, alawyer from Cordoba." In Portugal, Valle de Moura published a workconsisting of several 'monographs' that arc not without interest."

supplementary material: I. 'Illaedllli'l: t'l mescreuucc du sortilig« plaincment convancue ...(Paris, 1(22).

74 I\luch confusion is still caused bv the pra ctice of attributing the ideas of thepersecutors to the persecuted, and contusi ng the world of the populace with that of thecontroversialists.

7\ On the attitude towards count ry l<llk sec ,Iulio Car» Haroja, l.asiormascomplejas delavida religiosa:Religion, sociedady cardcter <'IIla fspat/a de IllS siglos X Vly X VII (Madrid, 'lj7X),12;-61.. i . D. Francisci Torreblanca Villalpundo Cordubensisjuris amsulti,Juris Spiritualis practicebilium libri IT. f .r lege Domini sire rerelatis a 1>1'11, prr Sacram Scripturam, rel ill CommuniEcclcsiae.1'1'1 ill purticulari hominum ( .ordoha, I (,35). There arc less complete earlier edns.A large pan of this work is devoted to witchcrutt.

77 1>1' incantutionibus scucnsalmis. OplISmlulII primnm, auctorr Emanuelede Vallede AlllllruDoctore nleolllgo, ut Sanctac luquisiuonis Deputatol .usitano Patria Calantica (Lvora, 1620).The hook consists of a series of themes treated monographically.

22

I. Witchcraft andCatholic Theology

But it is also the case that, within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy,a number of authors expressed reservations or open disapproval of thecredulity and severity of judges and inquisitors. It is noteworthy, forinstance, that among the Jesuits, in contrast to such as del Rio, therewere tho se who adopted a critical attitude for one reason or another,"and eventually others whose direct experience led them to much moreradical conclusions. The most famous case is that of Friedrich vonSpee, a German Jesuit who died in 1635 at the age of 44, and who in1631 published anonymously at Rinteln a work entitled Cautiocrimina/is seu de processibus contra sagas fiber. Authore incerto theolog«arthodoxol" A French translation was publi shed twenty-nine yearslater by F. Bouvet, a doctor at Besancon; this was used in .X6X by J.Tissot, professor of philosophy at Dijon, in a work on the irnagination ."

Von Spec's work was based on his own experience of courts andprisons, primarily as a confessor. He examines the circumstances inwhich people were accused of sorcery, and the variety of accusationssupported by more than doubtful testimony. He refers to the influenceof preachers, and to the fact that lawyers and inquisitors wereremunerated in proportion to the number of convictions. I Iedescribes the forms of detention , interrogation, and inspection ; theobtaining of confessions by torture, the passing of sentence, accusations of complicity, and retractation illextremis . The whole system waspermeated by deception and prejudice. Men and women were inexorably condemned to death in accordance with a stereotyped imageof their crime or crimes. The most difficult aspect for the free imagination to accept was the accepted notion of the nature of witchcraft. VonSpee's work was chiefly appreciated by intellectuals years after hisdeath, and was the subject of a commentary by Leibniz." It is

1K e.g. Adam Tanner, SJ, who had the honour of being him sel f mentioned as asorcerer in the Dictionnaire infernal byJ.C ollin de Plancy (Paris , I Xf'3), 650a-651t1. Thiswork , as is known, contains a great man y fables .

J. Spec (or Spe) is also noted as a German religious poet ; his lyric work s, publishedposthumously, combine Christian faith with pagan eru dition .

so Friedrich von Spec, Advisaux criminalistes sur les abus qui seglissent dans les proces desorcellerie, dedies aux magistrats d'Allemague. Licre tres necessairc ell ce temps i t}' atOI/S j l/ges,conceillers, confesseurs (tant desjl/gesquedescriminels); inquisiteurs, predicateurs, adrocats,etmcmcaux medecinspar le P. N. S ] , theologienromuin (Lyons, 1(60). Bouvet 's French translat ionwas extensively used byJ.T issot in I. 'Imagination. sesbi"lIliliISrt 5<'.1' ~~ a r e lll <'l1 ISS l/ rt o l/ l danslrdomaine du mcrreilleux (Paris, 18(8),372-437.

81 G. W . Leibnitz (1646-1 716), Die Theudizee, pt i, par as ,)6-7: ed . Arthur Buch anan(Hamburg, 4,8), 159-60 .

23

.Julio Caro Baroja

interesting to note how some Catholic theologians in later years tookup Spec's ideas and forgot those that had directly preceded them. Themost striking case is that of Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1718-90) in anarticle 'Sorcellerie' in the theological dictionary that forms part of theEncydopedie fllt!tlwtlique.R2 He gives three definitions of 'sorcery', andsays as regards the third :

The common people understand by 'sorcerers' those who have the power tofly through the air at night-time to remote places where they worship theDevil and abandon themselves to intemperance and lust. This is in fact abaseless illusion : the so-called 'witches ' sabbath ' is a disease of the imagination caused hy certain drugs used hy the wretches who seck after it. This isproved hy unquestionahle experience.

As his authority, Bergier cites Malebranche." Very well; but in layingthe whole responsibility on unlearned people he forgets the works oftheologians, inquisitors, judges, and civil magistrates, who, as we haveseen, make great play of their erudition and describe the 'sabbath'(also called aquelarre in Spanish) in lurid detail.

Bergier's view is similar to that of other Catholic theologians andphilosophers in the eighteenth century. But it does not reflect whatactually occurred from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of theseventeenth century: namely, the process of'diabolization' that wehave described and that came to affect the ideas of the commonpeople. It is also true, however, that the investigation of populartraditions sometimes shows that earlier ideas concerning persons indirect relations with witches, dictating their conduct and othermatters, were at variance with the theologians' interpretation postulating constant dependence on a demon in bodily shape, possessingspecial attributes and so on.

I thus come to the end of my purpose, which was to show how, starting from a b'TOUP of pre-Christian concepts and beliefs which werefurther developed among the nations of classical civilization, newconcepts and beliefs were created under the influence of a Christiantheological interpretation which went through at least two phases and

. 2 f.'llcyclypidie methodique: theologi« parM. 1 ~1bbi Bergier, Chanoine de l'Eglise de Paris, etConfesseur deMOllsier Frere duRoi, iii (Paris, 1790), S22b-S24a.

" Bergier, Encyclopedic methodique, iii . 52zb-5 23a.This author believed that there wasno question of an art ifice of the devil, which was an idea that had originated among thenorthern barbarians and penetrated 10 "lOS climats' , He refers to the testimony ofLcihnitz, saying that according to von Spec there was no single case of a convictedpe rson who could say with certainty that he had attended a sabbath.

24


which, in course of time, became attenuated and disavowed its ownprevious principles.

It is certain that in the mid-nineteenth century there were memorable cases of rural communities dominated by fear of witches andwizards, even in western Europe." It is also known that the legitimacyof belief in the power 01- certain persons to work evil in the devil'sname was defended and illustrated by men of good faith ," and also byall kinds of occultists, satanists, and so on . But the subject we areconcerned with from the historico-cultural point of view has little ornothing to do with the theme of demonological literature. It is aquestion ofseeing how the function of the witch existed independentlyof its pagan or Christian interpretation, in societies ofd ifferent types;how a set of ideas and supposed facts came to centre around it; howthese changed in such a way as to alter the general picture of thewitch's personality in a given society; and how, finally, 'collectiverepresentations' were sometimes created by authorities concernedwith their own techniques, who in the present case were theologianson the one hand and jurists on the other.

.. See Dr A. Constant, Reiatillf/suTufleepidimied'hystiro-dimOlwpllthicm /86/ (znd edn.Paris, 1863). This describes how the ills afflicting chi ldren at Morzine s (Haute-Savoie)were attributed to an unpopular curewho was said to be the chief of a group ofsorcerers(pp. 40-1). Tissot (L'Imagination, pp . 544-&)) gave much attention to the case , considered as primarily one of demoniac possession.

ss There are popular accounts of a fairly misleading nature, e.g. I. Hertand, 'LaSorcelleric ', in a collection entitled Religions etsciences II((I///(S (Paris, HiIZ).

25

References

trials ft in Ivces- is r-first tand 'of'aswelias the

BELlEN, H. 1991: Judicial views on tre cr ure of witcrcratt, In Gijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff, eds, pp. 53-65.

BLI,COURT, W. 00 1990: TerlT€n van toverii . Deveranderw.de betekenis van toverij in Noord~oost-tiederland tussen 00 16de en 20ste eeuw. Nij;egen.

BL~COURT, W. de/GIJSWIJT -HOFSTRA, M., eds 19B6: Kwadereosen , Toverij in Nederland. Special rurner ofVo1kskundig Bulletin 12, 1 (Amsterdam).

BL~COURT, W. de/PEREBOOM, F. 1991: Insult and adrroniticn:witchcraft in the Land of Vollenhove, seventeenth century .In Gijswijt-fufstra/Frijhoff , eds, pp. 119-Dl.

CASPERS , C.M.A. 1991: Witchcraft trials in Peelland ,1595. In Gijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff, eds , pp. 91-102 :

FRIJHOFF, W. 1991: Witchcraft and its changingrepresentation in Eastern Ge1derland, from the sixteenth totwentieth centuries . In Gijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff, eds ,pp. 167-180.

GERBENZON, P. 1987: De vervolging van toverij in Grooingenen Friesland, zestiende eeuw. 'Buiten1andse' invloeden ende invloed van reo';terlijke organisatie en procesrecht. InGijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff , eds, pp. 124-D2 .

GIELlS, M. 1991: The Netherlandic treologians ' views ofwitchcraft and the devil's pact. InGijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff, eds, pp. 37-52. _

GIJSWIJT -ffiFSTRA, M. 1990: The European witchcraft cebateand the Dutch variant . Social History 15:181-194 .

GIJSWIJT-ffiFSTRA , M. 1991: Witchcraft before Zeelandrragistrates and church councils, sixteenth to bl8ntiethcenturies. In Gijsw ijt-fufstra/Frijh:iff , eds , pp,103-118.

GIJSWIJT-HOFSTRA , M. FRIJHOFF, W., eds , 1987: Nederlar.dbetoverd. Toverii en hekserii van 00 veertiende tot in detwintigste eeuw. Amsterea:n : De Bataafsche Leeuw. (TheEnglish edition of parts of this book:Gijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff, eds , 1991) .

GIJSWIJT-ffiFSTRA, M. FRIJHOFF, W. 1991: Witchcraft in treNetherlands from the fourteenth to the twentieth century.Rotterdam.

MAnER, F. et a1. eds, 1990: Toverii in Nederland,1795-1985. Amsterda;n.

ROODENBURG , H. 1987: 'Een soorte van ciJivelscheafgoderije.' De bestrijding van toverij doo,r 00gereforrreerde kerkeraad te Amsterdam, 1580-1700. InGijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff ; eds, pp. 80-93 .

STEENHUIS, J. 1987: 'In een Q,jaad geruchte van tover ye.'Tover ij veer Utrechtse rechtbanken, ca . 1530-1630. InGijswijt-Hofstra/Frijhoff. ads, pp. 40-56.

STRDNKS, G.J. 19B7: Dnderwijs van de gereforrreerde kerl<over toverij en waarzeggerij, ca . 1580-1800. InGijswijt-Hofstra/Frijh:iff, eds , pp. 196-206.

STRDNKS, G.J . 1991. The significance of Balthasar Bekker's' The enchanted I'otlrld .' In Gijswijt-Hofstra!Frijhoff,eds , pp. 149-156. 6. 'Saints or sorcerers': Quakerism,demonology and the decline of witchcraft inseventeenth-century England PETER ELMER 'Strange creatures,not like other men and women ' is how one Welsh Quakerdescribed the contemporary response to his coreligionists.Mary Penington, an early Quaker convert, agreed: ' to everyclass we were a by-word: they would wag the head at us,accounting us fools, mad, and bewitched [and] as such theystoned, abused and imprisoned US'.1 The rich literature ofQuaker sufferings attests to the almost universal fear andhatred which first greeted their appearance on the stage ofinterregnum England. It is also an invaluable source forone particular accusation that was levelled at the Quakerswith inordinate frequency, that of using diabolicalwitchcraft to promote the new here sy and subvert theestablished order. Historians of Quakerism have often notedthis trend . More recent ly, Barry Reay has attempted toplace such accusations within the wider framework of theperceived threat posed by the sect to social, religious andpolitical order in mid-seventeenth-century Britain ."Somewhat surprisingly however, historians of witchcrafthave been slower to fasten on to the potential significanceand meaning of this large body of evidence.' In whatfollows, I hope to rectify this omission and 1 R. Davies,An Account of the Convincement, Exercises, Services andTravels of . . . Richard Davies (London, 1710), p. 79; M.Penington, Some Account ofCircumstances in the Life of Mary

Penington (London, 1821), p. 41. Davies also reported how,following his conversion to Quakerism in 1657, he found itdifficult to convince his mother that he 'was her Child,and that 1was not . .. Bewitched, or Transformed into someother Likeness, which was reported of Quakers then, andthat they bewitched People to their Religion ' ; Davies,AnAccount, p. 36. 1 B. Reay, The Quakers and the EnglishRevolution (London, 1985), pp. 68-71. For earlier Quakerhistorians on this subject, see, for example , A. M.Gummere, Witchcraft and Quakerism (London, 1908); W. C.Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London, 1923),pp. 53, 67, 102, 107, 181,220,487; R. M. Jones, The Quakersin the American Colonies (London, 1923), pp. 28-31 , 275. 3It is brietly noted in K. V. Thomas , Religion and theDecline ofMagic (London , 1978), pp. 580-1, and morerecently in the American context in C. F. Karlsen , TheDevil in the to suggest possible ways in which the evidenceof Quaker witchcraft might be used to shed important lighton the history of educated belief in demonology in thesecond half of the seventeenth century. In particular, Iwish to show its potential relevance to what Keith Thomas,in his pioneering work on witchcraft, has termed 'the mostbaffling aspect of this difficult subject', namely theroots of educated scepticism.' Of all the practices of theearly Quakers which aroused suspicions of diabolism, nonewas considered more dubious than the manner in which it wassaid that they made new converts. Opponents regularlyclaimed that Quaker preachers attracted proselytes by theuse of a wide variety of enchanted objects includingbottles, ribbons, strings and potions. How else might thegodly explain the apparent ease with which men and women,some of high standing in their communities, were persuadedto join the Quaker movement? Margaret Fell, for example,the wife of a nor thern judge and MP, recounted how at herconvincement, 'it raised such a Bitterness, & envy amongstye preists & professors, that . .. they all concluded itwas of ye Devill, and yt it was sorcery and witchcraft, &yt they gave us bottles to drink & tyed strings about ourarmes'< Stories such as these proliferated in the pages ofthe yellow press of the 1650s, but as Fell hinted, thechief source of such allegations was not 'vulgar ' opinion,but the men of learning, magistrates and the establishedclergy." To cite just two examples of the latter, RichardBaxter repeated similar claims, both in published works andprivate correspondence, whilst his celebrated Presbyteriancolle ague Samuel Eaton recounted the tale of a Nottinghamman who was seduced by the sorcery and witchcraft of theQuakers into attending their meetings. In the latter case,the ind ividual eventually recanted, but not before he fellsick and languished in trances, only recovering from the

Quakers ' spells when removed from their Shape of a Woman:Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York and London,1987), pp. 122 -5; and R. Godbeer, The Devil 's Domin ion:Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridg e, 1992),pp. 193-9. 4 Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic, p.681. 5 Friends House Library (hereafter FHL), Spence MSS,vol. 3, fo. 135. 6 For 'sen sationalist' accounts of thiskind in the popular press, see, for example, Anon., TheQuakers Fiery Beacon: or, the Shaking Ranters Ghost(London, 1655), p. 8; The Weekly Post (London, 1655), no.283 (31 July-7 Aug. 1655), pp. 1906-7; T. Underhill, HellBroke Loose (London, 1660) , pp. 36-7, 46-8. According toSamuel Pepys, such stories were still circulating in thecoffee houses of Restoration London ; see The Diary ofSamuel Pepys , eds., R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols.(London, 1970---83), IV, p .438. 438 company." Women andyoung men we re particularly perceived to be prone to suchdiabolism. In Massachus etts, for example, in 1662, a youngQuaker Mary Tilton was allegedly exiled from the Bay Colonyfor ' having like a sorceress gone from door to door tolure and seduce people, yea even young girls, to join theQuakers ' ." Not surprisingly, however, the vas t majorityof such claims were reserved for the Quaker leadership ,and George Fox in part icular. Described by Roger Will iamsas ' this bewitc hed and bewitching soul' , Fox wascredited with using all mann er of unhol y devices in orderto ensnare potential converts. Among the tricks of histrade, Fox was sa id to have bewitched one female followe rwith the gift of a magic bracelet, to have used enchantedribbons and bottles, and to have employed a familiarspirit. One northern min ister , Francis Higginson, claimedthat Fox, 'hath been and is vehemently suspected to be asorcerer' , cit ing as evidence his peculiar ability toout-stare and ' fascinate ' onlookers." Fox himselfrecorded in his Journal numerou s instances of similaraccusations, and seems to have regarded them as anessential element of his charismatic style of leadership.What others termed witchcraft, Fox clea rly perceived assemi-miraculous ac ts of divine providence, as for exam plein 1652 when the local ministers and magistrates of Furness' raised a report .. , yt neither water could drow ne mee:nor coulde they draw blood of mee: and yt su rely I was awitch "!" If the methods used to convert followers were notin themselves sufficien t evidence of Quaker diabo lism,their habits and actions offered further confirmat ion,since they were widely considered to imitate the behaviournormally attribute d to witches and sorcerers. The actionof 7 R. Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spi rits(London, 1691), p. 175; Dr Williams ' Library, London,Baxter Treatises, vol. 3, fo, 309'; S. Eaton, The Quakers

Confuted, being an Answer unto Nineteen Queries .. . sentto the Elders of the Church of Duckenfield in Cheshire(London, 1654), sigs. A4 v Br. H S. S. Booth, The Witchesof Early America (New York, 1975), p. 106. 9 R. W[iIIiams],George Fox Digg 'd out of his Burrowes (Boston, 1676),appendix, p. 116 (for further suggestions of Quakerwitchcraft in this work, see pp. 2, 9, 22, 26-3 0, 49, 101,181); [F. Higginson], A BriefRelation of the Irreligion ofthe Northern Quakers (London, 1653), pp. 18-19. Similartales of Fox's witchcraft were repeated and endlesslyrecycled; sec, for example, R. Farmer, Sathan Inthron 'd inhis Chair of Pestilence (London, 1657), pp. 38-9; [W.Fiennes], Folly and Madnesse made Manifest (Oxford, 1659),pp. 4-5, 66; [e. Leslie], A Parallel between the Faith andDoctrine of the Present Quakers, and that of the ChiefHereticks in All Ages of the Church (1700), sig. B'. 10 TheJournal of George Fox, ed., N. Penney, 2 vols. (Cambridge,1911), I, pp. 2-3, 38, 104-5, 169, 411n; The J ournal ofGeorge Fox.' A Revised Edition, ed., J. L. Nickalls(Cambridge, 1952), pp. 42-4,179. quaking itself, and thefits, trances and feats of fasting which characterised theactivities of many early Quakers were all listed by theirenemies as certain evidence of diabolical infatuation.Higginson, for example, cited William Perkins' Discourse onthe Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608) to prove that theQuakers' fits were truly from the devil, not God, whilstthe prominent New England minister John Norton drew onclassical and patristic sources to prove much the samepoint.'! Even more telling in the long run perhaps were thelurid contemporary accounts of Quaker apostates who, havingrejected the sect, accused their erstwhile colleagues ofpractising all manner of diabolical tricks, includingpossession. The most celebrated, or rather infamous,instance was that of the Kendal ex-Quaker, John Gilpin,whose strange antics and subsequent possession whilst underthe care of the Quakers was widely publicised throughoutthe second half of the seventeenth century.l? No doubtinspired by incidents such as these, puritan ministers wereconstantly on the look-out for similar cases of feignedtrances and diabolical possessions. No less an expert onthe subject than Richard Baxter asserted that 'when theQuakers first rose here, their Societies began likeWitches, with Quaking and Vomiting, and Infecting others,with breathing on them, and tying Ribbons on their Hands' .Written in 1691, such were the fruits of a life-time'sstudy and observation, though it is interesting to notethat Baxter's views on this subject had remained constantfor over forty years. Thus, in a letter to a friend writtenin 1654, Baxter opined that Quaker trances and feats offasting ' com [e] not fr[om] any ordinary Natural power',

but were cited as evidence of a diabolical conspiracy,orchestrated ultimately by the Papists, aimed at destroyingall order and godly religion in England. As if to underlinethe point, five years later Baxter confidently asserted inprint that William Perry, the infamous' Boy of Bilson' ,whose feigned possession was a cause celebre in the 1620s ,was now resident in Bristol as a Quaker.P Though from theQuaker point of view , prodigious acts of fasting, fits andthe like were readily taken as evidence of saintliness, itis not 11 [Higginson] , A Brief Relation, p. 18; J. Norton, The Heart of N England Rent at the Blasphemies of thePresent Generation (Cambridge, MA, 1659), pp. 5-6. 12 J.Gilpin, The Quakers Shak en: or, a Fire-brand Snatch 'd outof the Fire (Newcastle , 1653) . I~ Baxter, The Certaintyof the World of Spirits, p. 175; Dr William s' Library,Baxter Treati ses, vol. 3, fo. 302 ' and passim; R. Baxter,A Key for Catholics (London, 1659), p. 187; see also W. M.Lamont, RichardBaxter and the Millennium (London, 1979) fora useful discussion of Baxter 's religious world view.difficult to see how the Quakers' opponents might place adifferent construction upon them. As a method of makingconverts, it was fraught with potential problems, but thenso too were the more conventional approaches employed byQuaker prophets and evangelists. Their enemies, forexample, routinely claimed that their books and pamphletswere bewitched, and that those who read and digested theirmessage often became distracted and possessed. Thus MaryWhite of Suffolk was said to have suffered terrible fitsand 'become distracted or possessed with an evil spirit'after reading Quaker literature in 1655. Her subsequentdeath occasioned yet another anti-Quaker diatribe in whichthe diabolical vices of the Friends were painstakinglyrecounted.!' In a similar case in late-seventeenth-centuryNew England, Cotton Mather cited as evidence of theQuakers' diabolism the case of a possessed maid who couldonly read Quaker books 'as if ... the Witches or evilSpirits liked the Quakers books better, or that they weremore favourable to them'. And at Evesham in Worcestershirein 1656, a local magistrate, Thomas Milnard, accused theQuakers of having bewitched the mayor with their writingsand bibles which he subsequently refused to buy on thegrounds that it was 'Witchery stuff" .» Further evidence tosupport the learned perception of the Quaker as a form ofsurrogate witch was afforded by the thoroughlyunconventional behaviour of some of the early adherents.The attempt. for example, by Susan Pierson to raise afellow Quaker from the dead at Worcester in the 1650sevoked dubious comparisons with the deeds of necromancers.Equally, the tendency of early Friends to pronounceterrible curses upon their oppressors may have back-fired,

particularly when their judgements were vindicated in theoutcome. Roger Williams was probably not alone when hereasoned that 'tis true some of their Predictions have andmay come to pass', adding ominously ' as do many also ofConjurers and Witches, for the Devil knows the Complexionof persons and things, and what is like to pass'.» Anothersinister feature of early Quakerism 14 Anon . Quakers areInchanters , and Dangerous Seducers . Appearing in theirInchantment ofone Mary White at Wickham-skeyth in Suffolk,1655 (London , 1655). 15 J. Whiting , Truth and InnocencyDefended . . . in Answer to Cotton Mather . . . his LateChurch History of New England (London, 1702), pp. 50-1 ;[H. Smith and T. Woodrove] , The Cruelty of the MagistratesofEvesham (London, 1655), p. 3. 16 Baxter, The Certainty ofthe World ofSpirits , p. 175; F. Duke, An Answer to some ofthe Principal Quakers (London, 1660), p. 38 (see also pp.35, 59 and 68 where explicit accusations of witchcraft aremade against the Quakers); Williams, George Fox Digg'd outofhis Burrowes, p. 181. Dorcas Erbury also claimed to havebeen resurrected from the dead by James Nayler; see Reay,The Quakers and the English Revolution , p. 55. noted byits enemies was the tendency of the Quakers to meet inlonely, isolated places , frequently at night, thus raisingthe spectre of nocturnal gatherings with that 'grandQuaker' the Devil. Though descriptions of sabbats are veryrare in English witchcraft, we have what looks suspiciouslylike a Quaker sabbat, replete with feasting , in thenotorious case of the alleged bewitchment of theCambridgeshire Quaker-apostate Mary Philipps (or MargaretPrior by another account) whi ch reached the local assizesin the summer of 1659. Though this part icular case wasrapidly dismissed for want of reliable evidence, stories ofthe Quakers' strange nocturnal habits and meetingscontinued to circulate. Thus the Scottish Presbyterian andcelebrated witch-finder Alexander Peden claimed to haveattended a Quaker meeting in Ireland at which the devilappeared in the shape of a raven . Similar suspicions werearoused by the nightly activities of the Young Quakeress,Jane Holm es, in the north Yorkshire village of Malton inthe 1650s . For some, the mere fact that the Quakers firstappeared in the north, the acknowledged home of witche sand papists, was enough to taint them with the stigma ofdiabolism.' ? A common theme running through many of theseaccounts, and one which clearly added to the growing imageof the Quaker as witch , was the promin ence of animals ,or familiar spirits, the latter a quintessentially Englishfeature of witchcraft beliefs . In the Cambridge case citedabove, Philipps (or Prior) accused the Quakers oftransforming her into a mare and riding her to the feast,or sabbat, where there was apparently much talk of '

doctrine' . At the Cheshi re Quarter Sessions in 1656, JohnForshoe reported as suspicious a conversation with theQuaker William Mosse in which the latter claimed that hewas converted to Quak erism following a diabolical ride ona large black horse ." And one of the proofs adduced in thecase of Mary White (see above , p. 149) was that in herfits, it was reported 's omething in her body did run upand down, and 17 Anon., Strange and Terrible Newes fromCambridge being a True Relation of the Quakers Bewitching{IfMary Philips (Lond on, 1659) ; The Life and Propheciesof Mr A lexander Peden, ed., P. Walker (Falkirk, 1781), pp.46-7 (for Peden 's extraordina ry ability to detectwitches, see pp. 38, 39-40, 4950) ; R. Farmer. The GreatMysteries of Godlinesse and Ungodlinesse (Lond on, 1655) ,p. 77; C. Wade, Quakery Slain lr recoveraMy (London, 1657),p. 8. l ' [J. Blackley et al.], A Lying Wonder Discovered,and the Strange and Terrible Newes from Cambridge ProvedFalse (London, 1659), pp. 3-4 ; Quarter Sessions Records .. . for the County Palatine of Chester. 1559-1760, cds., J.H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhur st (Reco rd Society ofLancas hire and Cheshire, xciv, 1940), p. 164. Georg e Foxwas accused of both employing a familiar spirit as well asriding a suspi ciously large black horse; see Duke,AnAnswer, p. 35; J ournal of George Fox , cd., Penney, I. p.38. somtime she roared like a Bull; somtime barked like aDog, and sometime blared like a Calf'. Overtones oflycanthropy are everywhere apparent in the reports ofQuaker meetings, descriptions of bestial behaviour acommonplace. Some accused the Quakers of howling andshrieking like 'Night owls . . . infernal spirits . .. dogsand wolves', whilst in another widely reported case, aWrexham ex-Quaker, William Spencer, invoked the image ofthe devil as the lord of the flies when he reported hearingstrange buzzing noises emanating from the vicinity of hisQuaker hosts as they slept. 19 The annals of the earlyQuaker movement provide ample evidence of the'demonisation' of the sect, and the practical measureswhich were taken against them by those in authority tocombat this new threat to the ordered, godly commonwealth.In the most extreme cases, Quakers were formally accused ofthe crime of witchcraft, imprisoned and prosecuted for theoffence, as at Cambridge in 1659 (see above, p. 150). Inthe same year, two Devon Quakers, Sarah and ElizabethTripe, were examined by the mayor of Dartmouth, having beenformally accused of

witchcraft by one Richard Laing at the instigation of thelocal minister

John Flavell.P Far more dramatic however were the

revelations in 1659-60 concerning a mass gathering ofQuaker and Baptist witches at

Sherborne in Dorset which would appear to have led to theinstitution of formal charges against a number of localsectaries. According to one hostile account, 'three men andtwo Women formerly Quakers' had confessed to a whole seriesof crimes, including the murder by witchcraft of the lateminister of Sherborne and a campaign of harrassment againsthis successor. The two women, moreover, were said to haveadmitted that 'the divel hath oft times had Actual!copulation with them in sundry 19 Anon ., Quakers areInchanters , pp. 6, 7; Wade, Quakery Slain Irrecoverably,p. 56; S. Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking-Glasse both forSaints and Sinners . . . The Second Edition Much Enlarged(London, 1654), pp. 461-2. The story of Spencer isimmediately preceded by a section headed 'Examples of Godsjudgements upon Witches, Conjurers, Inchanters andAstrologers ' (ibid ., pp. 453-8). 20 Devon Record Office,Exeter, 'Minute Book of the Meeting for Sufferings held atExeter, 1682-4', 874D /SlO, 18 Jan . 1683, 8th minute; FHL,'Great Book of Sufferings', I, p. 354 ; J. Whiting,Persecution Expos'd, in Some Memoirs Relating to theSufferings of John Whiting, and Many Others of the PeopleCalled Quakers (London, 1715), p. 191. A year earlier, oneThomas Harvey was imprisoned at Exeter on suspicion ofwitchcraft where he was visited by two Devon Quakers,William Hingston and Anthony Tucker. Harvey was probably aQuaker since he had travelled with the two Devon men toBristol without a pass; see Devon Record Office, Exeter,'Minute Book of the Sessions of the Peace ', Cl/64, fo.429. I should very much like to thank Mr John Slate for hisgenerous help in alerting me to the existence of thesecases . shapes, but most commonly in the shape of Mr Lyfordand Mr Barnfield, the ministers of Sherburne, whom he andthey most hated and endeavoured to destroy ' . Once again,responsibility for these accusations seems to haveoriginated with the local incumbent, Francis Bampfield, aman of unstable temperament who was finally ejected fromthe living in 1662. 21 Formal accusations of this kindwere, however, relatively rare. Much more common wereinformal accusations and innuendo which, as Barry Reay hasstressed, were largely the product of the ruling elites .Typical in this respect were the actions of the Eveshamminister, George Hopkins, a close friend and colleague ofRichard Baxter, who in August 1655 preached on the subjectof the Quakers' diabolism and witchcraft and then proceededto lead the whole congregation in a full-scale attack upona local Quaker meeting.P Two other types of action whichwere especially reminiscent of English witch hunting, and

can be found extensively in the records of Quakerpersecution, were pricking and swimming. Pricking, or thepractice of searching for insensitive spots on the witch'sbody as proof of guilt, was widely employed in aritualistic fashion against the Quakers . Quaker apologistsroutinely complained that female members of the sect weresingled out for this treatment. John Crook , for example,claimed in 1664 that an arresting officer pricked the armsof several Quaker women ' till they were black', anexperience confirmed by the personal testimony of BarbaraBlaugdone who reported being assaulted by a man who ' runsome sharp Knife or Instrument . . . into the side of myBelly' .» Moreover, male members of the sect were notimmune from this barbarism. At both Oxford and Cambridge,scholars seem to have 2J [T. Smith] , A Gagg for theQuakers (London. 1659), unpagin ated app end ix entitl ed'A Memorable Adverti sement from Dorsetshire ' ; A. Wood,Ath enae Oxonienses, ed., P. Bliss, 4 vols. (London,1813-20), IV, cols. 126--7; Reay , The Quakers and theEnglish Revolution, p. 68. 22 H. Smith, A Collection of theSeveral Writings and Faithful Testimonies of . . . Humphrey Smith (London, 1683), 'The Sufferings, Tryals & Purgingsof the Saints at Evesham', sigs. A2'_v. Hopk ins had infact worked closely with Baxter in the case of a bewit ched Eves ham girl wh ose dispos session had led to theexecution of a local witch ; see British Librar y(hereafter BL) Ege rton MS 2570, fo. 88 v • Z ~ J. qrook],ATrue Informat ion 10 the Nation, from the People CalledQuakers (London, 1664), p. 11; B. Blaugdone, An Account ofthe Travels, Sufferings & Persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone(London, 1691) , p. 10. Blaugdone hers elf had fallen under sus picion of witchcraft on a numb er of occas ions. Whilst en route to Ireland , she was nearly thrown overboard bysome of the crew who suspected her of raising a storm. Onarrival, she was shunned by her erstwh ile friend s, someof whom claimed that she was a witch and treated heraccordingly; see ibid., pp. 21, 27-8. 'Saints or sorcerers'153 regularly abused Quakers in this manner, and JamesParnell complained of the jailor's wife at Colchester thatshe 'swore she would have my blood several times .. . andthat she would mark my face . . . cal1ing me Witch andRogue'i> However, by far the most dramatic instance of thisparticular practice comes from Restoration Reading wherebetween 1664 and 1676 local Friends were regularlysubjected to an appal1ing campaign of violent persecutionby the magistrate, Sir William Armourer. During thisperiod, Armourer seems to have become obsessed with the idea of Quaker bewitchment, frequently interrupting thei rmeetings in order to search female members for signs ofenchanted 'black strings and ribbons' . His favourite

technique on such occasions was to pull out a ' sharpInstrument somewhat like a pack needle' with which, theQuakers claimed, he ' mischiefously prickt severall womenuntill he drew bloud ' .25 The whole episode is highlyreminiscent of the treatment inflicted upon the prophetessAnna Trapnell in Cornwall in the early 1650s, thoughTrapnell was spared the attentions of Truro's"witch-tryer-woman ' and 'her great pin ' through what shecla imed was an act of divine intervention.w Sw imm ingwitches a common English practice is also echoed in thepunishments suffered by many early Quakers. We have alreadyseen how George Fox 's crossing of the notorious stretch oftidal water between Furness and Lancaster gave rise to therumour of his witch-like inability to drown (see above, p.147). In addition, Quakers were often assaulted and ducked,as for example at Mitcham in Surrey in 1659 when a group ofFriends was attacked, and individuals beaten and throwninto ditches and ponds, so that 'when they had soe donnethen they said freindes looket like witches' . Punishmentby water ordeal was also 24 [1. Haward et al.], HereFolloweth a True Relation of Some of the SufferingsInflicted upon the . . . Quakers by ... the Schollars andProctors of the University of Oxford (London?, 1654), p. 4;E. Sammon et al.,A Discovery ofthe Education oftheSchollars of Cambridge (London, 1659), p. 4; Anon., TheLambs Defence Against Lyes. And a True Testimony GivenConcerning the Suffering and Death ofJam es Parnell(London, 1656), p. 10. For further examples, see J. Besse,A Collection of the Sufferings of the People CalledQuakers, 2 vols. (London , 1753), I, p. 711; F. Gawler, ARecord ofSome Persecutions Inflicted upon Some Servantsofthe Lord in SouthWales (London, 1659), p. 27; [E.Hookes], For the King and Both Houses ofParliam ent(London, 1675), p. 14. 25 Besse, A Collection of theSufferings, I, pp. 15, 24, 25, 29, 32; Anon., PersecutionAppearing with Its Open Face, in William Armorer (London ,1667), pp. 5, 18,42,57, 70,71 ; BL, Dept. of MSS, MicrofilmM86317, fos. 81-5; Anon., The Continued Cry of theOppressed for Justice (London ?, 1676) , pt. 1, p. 12. 26A. Trapnell, Anna Trapnell's Report and Plea. Or, a Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwal (London, 1654),pp. 21-2, 24. For Trapnell, see below p. 167. inflictedupon the first two female Quakers to visit Oxford,Elizabeth Heavens and Elizabeth Fletcher. According to oneaccount: the students, hating reproof, fell to abusing theinnocent women, and drove them by Force, to the Pump inJohn's College, where they pump 'd Water upon their Necks,and into their Mouths, till they were almost dead : Afterwhich they tied them Ann to Arm, and inhumanly dragged themup and down the College, and through a Pool ofWater.27 The

encouragement of these practices was almost certainlydesigned to forge a common core of opposition to theQuakers, one which joined popular suspicion and hostilitywith that of the learned, governing elites. One measure ofits success may be found in the treatment of imprisonedQuakers who, if rarely prosecuted for witchcraft per se,were jailed in large numbers for all manner of otherreligious and civil offences. John Aynsloe, aCambridgeshire Quaker, thus reported that hiscoreligionists were regularly 'shut up in Dungeons andHoles, where they keep their Felons, and Witches, andMurderers'. Similarly, Margaret Parker of Aynho wasimprisoned at Northampton in 1659 for non-payment oftithes, but she nonetheless found herself ' closelyconfined among Murderers, Thieves, Whores, and some calledWitches, in a close nasty Place, where her friends were notadmitted ' .28 Jailors and their wives seem to have beenparticularly credulous on the subject of Quaker diabolism,and responded accordingly. George Fox, for example, claimedthat the jailor at Launceston in Cornwall tried to employ aconjurer to murder him. In the same year, the same manaccused the Quaker prophetess, Anne Blackling, of being awitch, though in this particular instance he may have beenconsciously echo ing the views of the local magistrate who,prior to sentence, accused her of being a 'whore' and a'witch' and told her ' she and that generation .. . werenot fit to live.?? "7 Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings, I, pp. 562, 689 (cf, II, p. 228); The Journal of GeorgeFox, ed., Penney, I, p. 340; see also Sammon et al.,ADiscovery, p. 4; Victoria County History of Nottinghamshire , cd., w. Page, 2 vols. (London, 1910), II, p. 74. csBesse, A Collection of the Sufferings, I, PI'. 91,530. ""The Journal of George Fox, cd., Penney , I, p. 330 ; [E.Pyott , W. Salt et al.], The West Answering to the North(London, 1657) , PI'. 49, 59, 62, 117. Rumours of MarthaSimmond s' witchcraft , and her bewitchment of JamesNayler, were circulating freely in Bristol following theQuaker's arrest for blasphemy in 1656. Most of these seemto have stemmed from the deposit ions of fellow prisoners ;see Farmer, Sathan lnthron 'd, 1'1' .7-8,10-12,20,22,23,24,38-9. Another Quaker , John Roberts ,was accused by the ja ilor of Gloucester of bewitching oneof his staff. Interestingly , Roberts seems to havepossessed some skill in locating the lost goods ofneighbours, an attribute unusual in a Quaker, but one thatnonetheless undoubtedly exacerbated fears of his There canbe little doubt that the inability of the authorities topunish Quakerism with the full severity of the lawsreserved for witches and other felons was seen by many as agrave omission. Indeed, Barry Reay has gone so far as to

suggest that a Quaker Salem was only narrowly avoided inEngland in the 1650s because of the divisions within theCromwellian ruling elite. The key turning point in thisrespect, and one which sheds much valuable light upon thesubject, was the debate which took place in parliament inDecember 1656 in the wake of the Nayler affair.w Reactionto the special committee formed to deal with the case, andto suggest a suitable punishment for the blasphemer, wasevenly divided, but the genuine strength of feeling arousedby the affair is beyond dispute . Hardliners such asMajor-General William Boteler, who argued vociferously forthe death penalty , did so, significantly, within thecontext of a wider debate which included reference to theexistence of legal punishments reserved for witches: Themagistrate is to be a terror unto evil works. If we punishmurder and witchcraft, and let greater offences go, asheresie and blasphemy, which is under the same enumeration;for my part I could never reconcile myself nor others toleave out the latter and punish the former." Others,however, pleaded for clemency, one on the grounds thatNayler himself was the hapless victim of bewitchment, thatof Martha Simmonds whose reputation for 'witchery' wasgiven widespread 'supernatural ' powers ; see D. Roberts,Some Memoirs of the Life of John Roberts (London, 1859),pp. 26, 56--62; D. Rollison, The Local Origins of ModernSociety : Gloucestershire 1500-1800 (London, 1992), pp.187-96. 30 For the best study of elite attitudes to theearly Quakers, see Reay, The Quakers and the EnglishRevolution , pp. 49-61 where the Nayler case is fullydiscussed . Some indication of the seriousness with whichthose in authority greeted the Quaker menace can be gleanedfrom T. L. Underwood's comment that 'of approximatelyninety-eight adverse authors of the Commonwealth periodlisted in Joseph Smith 's Bibliotheca AntiQuakeriana,nearly 40 per cent are included in the DictionaryofNational Biography '; The Miscellaneous Works ofJohnBunyan, ed., R. Sharrock, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1980-5), I, p.xxi. 31 Diary of Thomas Burton, ed., J. T. Rutt, 2 vols.(London, 1828), I, p. 25. Boteler's commitment to thepunishment of witches is well attested . In the 1640s, aschair of the bench, Boteler on three occasions admonishedthe Grand Jury of Bedfordshire on the legal requirement topunish the felony of witchcraft; see R. Lee, Law and LocalSociety in the Time of Charles I : Bedfordshire and theCivil War (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, lxv,1986), pp. 85, 95, 102. I cannot concur with Lee'sconclusion that reference to the statute against witchcrafton three out of four occasions represents an attitude ofapathy to the subject on the part of Boteler; ibid., pp.66-7. publicity by the Bristol preacher, Ralph Farmer.V In

the event, Nayler narrowly escaped execution, thusproviding an apparent victory for Cromwellian moderation.In practice, however, the hand of conservatives likeBoteler was strengthened, and much new legislation,designed to destroy the nascent Quaker movement, was placedon the statute book. Widespread persecution of Quakerismfollowed, both according to the new laws as well as by theingenious application of existing legislation, but withoutthe creation of Quaker martyrs in the form of surrogatewitches. For some , in retrospect, this would remain amissed opportunity, and there may have been many more likethe Irish Presbyterian, Lt-Col, Cunningham who in the earlyyears of the Restoration continued to assert that it oughtto be 'lawful to put the Quakers to Death as false Prophetsand Witches' .33 The persecution of Quakers as what I havetermed 'surrogate witches' was of course only part of amuch wider campaign of vilification levelled at members ofthe sect in its early years. Hostility to the Quakers, muchof it promoted and encouraged by those in authority,probably peaked around 1659-60, and has prompted onehistorian of the sect to speculate that it was partiallyresponsible for the Restoration of 1660. 34 With the changeof regime, however, the persecution continued unabated, andQuaker records amply testify to the general fear andsuspicion generated by Quaker activities in thepost-Restoration period. Throughout this time, newallegations of Quaker witchcraft continued to surface inprint to take their place alongside more established talesof Quaker diabolism. As late as the 1690s, there stillseemed to be an audience for such 3 ~ Diary of ThomasBurton, ed. Rutt , I, pp. 153, ISS; for Simmonds, see abovep. 154 n. 29 and P. Mack, Visionary Women: EcstaticProphecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992),pp. 197-208. 33 Besse ,A Collection ofthe Sufferings, II,pp. 472-3. Some indication of what might have taken placein Engl and , if the more conservative puritan element hadgained mastery of the Commonwealth is suggested by theintensity of the campaign against Quakers in New Englandfrom 1656 onwards. From their first arrival, the Quakerswere rapidly perceived as part of a diabolical conspiracyto undermine the godl y establishment of the colony, andaccusations of witchcraft were widespread; see especiallyKarlsen , The Devil in the Shape ofa Woman, pp. 122-5. Forattempts to link the Salem trials in 1692 to popularantipathy for local Quakers, see C. L. Heyrman, 'Spectersof Subversion , Societies of Friend s: Dissent and theDevil in Provincial Essex County, Massachusetts ' , in D.M. Hall, J. M. Murrin and T. W. Tate, eds., Saints andRevolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (London,1984) , pp. 38-74 (esp. pp . 47-54); Godbeer, The Devil 's

Dominion, pp. 193-9. 301 Reay , The Quakers and the EnglishRevolution, p. 81 (see esp . pp. 81-100). senastionalistjournalism." The negative effect of this publicity upon thereception accorded to Quakerism in late-seventeenth-centuryEngland is beyond doubt. What remains largely unexamined,however, is the extent to which the stigma of Quaker diabolism had an impact upon contemporary perceptions oftraditional belief in witches and witchcraft. Inconfronting this issue, one is immediately struck by acoincidence namely, that the 'construction' of theQuaker-witch stereotype took place at roughly the samemoment in English history when, according to mosthistorians of English witchcraft, belief in traditionallearned demonology was in decline.v At first sight, thismight appear paradoxical, but it is possible, I believe, toshow that the two processes may in fact be linked, part ofa complex and barely perceptible shift in the intellectualoutlook of the learned . However, in order to explore thisvital realignment of educated belief, it is first essentialto grasp the extent to which Quaker actions and doctrinesoffended against conventional assumptions and appeared tothreaten the whole edifice of life and belief inmid-seventeenth-century England. In the eyes of thegoverning elites, Quakerism represented not merely achallenge to the religious status quo, but a threat to someof the most cherished assumptions of their society and theworld view upon which they rested. In the words of oneCromwellian MP, its 'principles and practises arediametrically opposite both to magistracy and ministry . .. [and] will level the foundation of government into a bogof confusion'Y 35 See, for example [CO Leslie] , The Snakein the Grass: or Satan Transformed into an Angel ofLight .. . the Second Edition (London, 1697), pp. 300-9 where anincident which occurred in 1674 was used by the author toprove the existence of witchcraft among Cumberland Friends.As late as 1701, George Whitehead still felt that it wasnecessary to discredit the notorious fabrication of thediscovery of a nest of Quake r witches at Sherborne in1659; see G. Whitehead, Truth Prevalent: and the QuakersDischarged from the Norfolk-Rectors Furious Charge (London,1701), p. 125. The original incident is described above ,pp. 151-2 . 36 Among contemporary figures , John Aubrey ,Sir William Temple and the radical minister, John Everard,all attest to the significance of the civil war period as aturningpoint in this respect; see M. Hunter, John Aubreyand the Realm of Learning (New York, 1975), p. 220; W.Temple, Miscellanea. The Second Part. In Four Essays(London, 1690), pt. iv ('On poetry'), pp. 6-7, 43; J.Everard, Some Gospel-Treasures Opened (London, 1653), p.148. Dr Stuart Clark quite rightly reminds me however that

this is a claim which has never been fully authenticated byhard evidence, and that it is possible that much of theAnglican establishment before 1640 may have been more thana little sceptical of witchcraft. I intend to confrontthis, and many other related issues, in my forthcoming bookon English witchcraft, of which this essay represent s onesmall part . 37 Reay, The Quakers and the EnglishRevolution, p. 57. Concerns of this nature permeate theliterature of the interregnum and

Restoration, and were particularly uppermost in the mindsof those who

attempted to draw the link between Quakerism andwitchcraft. Thus the

Quakers' object , according to the title-page of one Quakerdemonology,

was to ' subvert all Civil Government both in Church andState', whilst

others pointedly referred to their stubborn refusal to bowor perform hat

service as yet further evidence of their wizardry.P Indeed,the Quaker

contempt for all forms of authority was axiomatic, rootedas it was in

their obdurate adherence to the 'light within' as the soleguide to all

matters, human and divine . That these impulses wereconstrued by their

opponents as demonic rather than divine was equallyaxiomatic given

the fruits of such wayward thinking. For example, theminister Ellis

Bradshawe, in a work dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, bewailedthe

blasphemous outpourings of the Quakers, and their assaultupon godly

ministers, by recounting the manner in which Satan first

established

contact with apostate witches: And is it not alwayes sowith Satan in his trading with Witches, that before hegranteth them a familiar spirit to be their servant, heeever ingageth them under a degree of bIasphernie . . . Andthen hee knoweth that he hath them sure as quite from underthe protection of God, and so ingageth them in covenant ... with himselfe ... as I might instance in many examplesthat I have read in Histories concerning divers Witches. 39

Moreover, it was not only the outward authority of churchand state that

was threatened by these 'Quaker-witches' . One of the mostfrequent

radical aspirations of a minority. As a result , faith in adivinely ordained,

ordered polity, reflective of the wid er harmony exhibitedby the

Creat ion, remained a commonplace of political thought inthis period,

notwi thstanding the fact that different factions or groupsmight differ in

the stress which they placed on specific aspects of thisharmonic world

view.v A by-product of this dominant metaphysic was thehermeneutic

principle that the best way to unde rstand the world ofGod, man and

nature was through an exploration of its antithesis, thedisorderl y world

of Satan, devils and H el1. 49 In plain terms, this meantSUbscription to the

language of binary oppositions and the logic of argument acontrariis,

which as Stuart Clark has shown informed all manner ofRenaissance

thinking, but was particularly appropriate when invokedwithin the

context of early modern demonology.w Educated belief inwitchcraft and the detailed theories of the

demonologists was thus part of a much broader intellectualspectrum a

whole universe of moral meanings which was firmly rooted inthe early

modem preoccupation with order, authority and uniformity.In England,

prior to the civil war, support for the godly commonwealthwas thus 4M It is not my purpose here to resurr ec t thatmonol ith of early modern polit ical thought, the greatchain of bei ng, which some histor ians have too read ilyacce pted as the sole source of pol itical autho rity inEngland before 1640. On the other hand, I am inclined tothe view that for the majority of the politica l nat ionbefore 1640, subsc ription to a divinely ordained civil polity, in whi ch unity, uniformi ty and hierarchy were thechief defining character istics, was largely automatic(regardless of specific differences of opi nion as to whatprecise form th is pol ity mig ht take) . This is a complexissue to which I intend to return at a later date. For twostudies whi ch stress the flexibili ty of conventiona lharmonist think ing, see R. Eccleshall, Order and Reason inPolitics: Theories ofAbsolute and Limited Monarchy in EarlyModern England (Oxford , 1978) and J. Daly, ' Cosmicharmony and political think ing in earl y Stuart Englan d', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 69(1979), ~ O . More rece ntly, interest in this controversial subject has bee n revived by Kevin Sharpe who,like Eccles hall and Daly, infers that the civil wa r actedas an esse ntial solvent of consensual harm onism; see K.Sharpe, 'A Commonwealth of meanings: languages, analogues,ideas and politics ' , in Sharpe, Poli tics and Ideas inEar ly Stuart England (London and New York , l Q 89), pp.1-71.

49 Such thinking has recently been invo ked in order toshed light on two vital areas of seve nteenth-century lifein Eng land, anti-popery and puri tanism. See P. Lake ,'Anti Popery ' , p. 73 and P. Co llinson , The Birthpangsof Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in theSixteen th and Seventeenth Centuries (Lo ndon, 1988), pp.146-8.

50 S. Clark, 'I nversion, misrule and the mea ning of witchcraft', Past and Present, 87 ( 1980), 118. I sho uldlike to thank Dr Clark, not only for numerous illuminatingdiscussions on this subject , but also fo r pe rmissio n toread the drafts of variou s chapters of his fort hcomi ngWitchcraft in Early Modern Thought (Oxford), in which theseand many related issues are discussed. reinforced by therecognition of its opposite, demonic disorder, which fortrue patriots took the form of devil-worshipping witches,aided and abetted hy Catholic fifth columnists. The wideappeal of such ideas was undoubtedly conducive to thepromotion of unity in the body politic, and arguably actedas a deterrent to rebellion and the expression ofdissent.>' The collapse of religious and politicalconsensus after 1640 however challenged the whole edificeupon which Protestant unity under the Stuarts was based,and as England fragmented into parties, factions and sects,so too did these groups attempt to appropriate forthemselves the sole custodianship of traditional moral,religious and political authority . One aspect of thisprocess was the attempt by all sides to lay claim to theauthorising language of demonic inversion and witchcraft.During the civil war itself, both sides sought to depictthe conflict as a struggle of cosmic proportions, anapocalyptic encounter between the forces of good and evil,order and disorder, God and the devil. Thereafter, theinability of successive governments to resolve the deepdivisions exposed by civil war ensured that thepoliticisation of witchcraft would continue to grow apacewith each new political crisis (the Restoration; ExclusionCrisis; the 'rage of party'). Seen against this background,the demonisation of the Quakers was just one example(though a particularly well documented one) of a longprocess which had its roots in the disintegration ofconsensus in the 1640s, and which was itself prefigured tosome extent by the gradual polarisation of the politicalnation in the reign of Charles J.52 There is insufficientspace here to document these developments in full, but someexamples taken from the post-civil war period should helpto illustrate the general point, namely that from 1640onward no one was immune from the charge of diabolism sincethere was no longer a single standard of good and evil, orright and wrong, by which to judge the 51 The Jacobeanpreacher, Samuel Garey's view that ' Popery is a witchcraftof religion ' would appear to have attracted near universalassent. The celebrated Elizabethan jurist William Lambardecons istently linked the activities of witches with thoseof Jesuits and papists in his charges to the Kent GrandJury, on one occasion referring to the Pope as 'that witch

of the world' ; see S. Garey, Great Brittans LittleCalendar: Or, Triple Diarie (London, 1618), appendix (' AShort Disswasive from Popery'), sig . 12 r ; WilliamLambarde and Local Government: His Ephemeris andTwenty-Nine Charges to Juries and Commissions, ed., C. Read(Ithaca, 1962), pp. 101, 110-11, 115. It would be easy tomultiply examples of this kind for the late sixteenth andseventeenth century. 52 For examples of such polarisation ,accompanied by the language of demonic inversion, before1640, see : CSPD, 1628-9, p. 43; J. Forster, Sir JohnEliot: A Biography, 1592-1632, 2 vols. (London, 1872), II,pp. 13, 111-12; J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, 8vols . (London , 1721-2), I, pp. 362, 391, 618.

actions of men. During the civil war itself, both sideshabitually resorted

to the language of witchcraft, most obviously as a form ofcrude

propaganda, but equally as a valuable authorising agent inthe struggle

to establish the righteousness of one's particular cause .On the parlia

mentary side, for example, the supporters of godly reformwere

bombarded with sermon after sermon in which it was allegedthat closet

papists, posing as royal counsellors, had 'bewitched theCourt and

Country' and threatened to destroy the godly commonwealth.Biblical

sources were ransacked in order to show that the king , inthe guise of

Saul or Pharaoh, had been deluded by the 'sorcery' of eviladvisers in the

shape of latter-day witches of Endor and Egyptianmagicians.P The cure,

as in the case of the bewitched, lay in an act ofdispossession, which

for most Puritans implied the thorough-going reform of theliturgy,

administration and teachings of the Anglican church . Thecorrelation

between public and private exorcism (itself suggested bythe therapeutic

performance of regular fast sermons) is also evident in thecareer of the

Puritan minister, Lewis Hughes, who as a young man in 1602had played

a leading role in the celebrated dispossession of MaryGlover .v Now,

forty years on, Hughes campaigned for the reform of theLaudian Prayer

Book on the grounds that some of its prescribed ceremonies(e.g.

churching) were directly comparable to those practised bydevil

worshipping witches .v Not surprisingly, supporters of theking and the established church

took a rather different view of events, though they tooinvoked

demonological precedents in order to explain therecalcitrance of the

rebels . The Bible in particular provided valuable comfortfor royalists in

were only one of a number of sects who were stigm atisedwith the taint

of demonolatry. Th e Baptists had long shared a similarfate, their denial

of infant bapti sm readily conflated with the witch 'sspiritua l rejecti on of chri stian baptism.S Similarl y,as Professor Davis has shown, the ' fabrication' of aRanter conspiracy in the early 1650s owed much to thepropensity of a new ruling class to envisage Ranter

opposition with in the framework of demonic inversion.sOther examples from the 1650s include the accusations ofwitchcraft which surfaced at the trial of thepseudo-messiah William Franklin and his 'spouse ' Mar yGadbury in

January 1650, and the allegations levelled at the radicalmini ster, J ohn Pordage in the mid-1650s, part of aconcerted effort by the local Puritan authorities todispossess him of the rich living of Bradfield .sOne of thebest documented examples of this process of dem on isationis to

be found in the autobiography of the fifth monarchist andprophetess ,

Anna Trapnell , where she describes her treatment at thehands of the

authorities in Truro in 1653 . Here , she recalled how shewas harried by ' Englands Rulers and Clergie ' wh oadjudged her to be ' under the

administration of evil angels, and a witch ' . One of herpersecutors, the St Ives min ister , Leonard Welste ad,even refus ed to take direct act ion

against Trapnell until ' the Rulers came, for then theysay, the wi tches can

have no power over them ' . Thus, she concluded, ' onedepends upon

vilification, much of it clothed in the langu age of thisdistinct Quaker demonology. 'A spiritual Witch and aMagician ' was how James Parnell described theHuntingdonshire minister, Thomas Drayton. Similardescriptions can be found scattered throughout the writingsof the early Quakers."! No aspect of the established churchwas immune from such invective. The universities inparticular were singled out for their role in plying thetrade of ' divination' (that is, teaching the clergy to 'divine' for money) and teaching the 'magick arts ' ofpharaoh's magicians . Moreover , excessive reliance onbooks and human learning to the detriment of the ' spiritwithin ' often led the Quakers to accuse orthodox ministersof practising a form of necromancy, that is, raising theliving spirit of God from the dead letter of the Bible.P'Who are the sorcerers who deceive all Nations but theirnational Teachers?' was a familiar refrain of Quaker

pamphleteers. Such ideas seem to have percolated down tothe

grassroots of the movement. In 1677, for example , JoannaMare, a Yorkshire Quaker, was presented at the archdeacon'svisitation for disparaging the Book of Common Prayer and'calling itt witchcraft' . Likewise, Nicholas Gibbens , aDorset priest, was accused by the Quaker

Anthony Mellidge of behaving 'like a sorcerer, making signswith his fingers in a scoffing manner' as he interrupted ameeting of Friends at Corfe in 1657.7 3 pp. 16-1 8; Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. E. H. W. Meyerstein(Oxford, 1945), pp. 27, 30, 31. Even the Quaker disapprovalof popular magic and astrology was largely couched in termsof the spiritual apostasy involved, rather than its overtdiabolism; see, for example, R. F[arnsworth] , WitchcraftCast Out from the Religious Seed and Israel ofGod (London,1655); E. Burrough, A Trumpet of the Lord Sounded outofSion (London, 1656), pp. 5-6. 11 Parnell, A Collection,pp. 31112, 393, 393-4. The Quakers frequently claimed thatit was part of their mission to cleanse the land 'of allfalse teachers and seducers . . . and witches, who beguilethe people, and inchanters, and diviners, and Sorcerers,and hirelings ' ; Anon., A Paper Sent Forth into the Worldfrom Them that are Scornfully Called Quakers (London,1654), p. 8; cf. [I. Penington et al.), Some Principles ofthe Elect People ofGod ... Quakers (London, 1671), p. 15.12 For criticism of the universities in these terms, see T.Lawson, Dagon 's Fall Before the Ark (London, 1679), pp.2-3; Parnell, A Collection , pp. 66, 207, 311-12, 460; R.Hubberthorne, A True Testimony of the ZealofOxford-Professors and UniversityMen (London, 1654), p. 9;E. B[illing),A Word ofReproof(London, 1659), pp. 19-20,35-6. For the ' necromancy' of the clergy , see G. Fox etal., Sauls Errand /0 Damascus (London, 1654), p. 7; [R.Farnsworth], The Priests Ignorance (London, 1655), pp. 4-5.13 W. Tornlinson ,A Word ofReproofto the Priests orMinisters (London, 1656), p. 7; The Diary ofAbraham de laPryme, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Society, liv, 1869), p. 293;A. Mellidge,A True Relation . . . ofAnthony Mellidge (?,1656), p. 5. In this interchange of invective and innuendo,the language of witchcraft habitually invoked by theQuakers was perhaps not so radically different from thatlevelled against them by their adversaries. True, theQuaker conception of witchcraft as primarily a spiritualcrime, based largely on scriptural precedents, did precludereference to the spurious claims of learned demonologists.But, in other respects, the various participants in thison-going debate shared much the same conceptual framework

in which the merits of unity and the fear of discord wereparamount. The early Quakers were not therefore averse fromreminding their persecutors of the religious chaos whichthey had spawned and the concomitant diversity of opinionwhich one of their number described as the 'womb ofWitchcraft' . There was no safe middle ground here, onlythe option of light or dark: ' your Rebellion is the crimeof Witchcraft, who cannot cease to do evill, for you havebound your selves in the Covenant with hell'.7 4 Thedualism which pervaded so much of the discourse ofmid-seventeenth-century England, and featured soprominently in orthodox Puritanism, was thus also a part ofthe mental outlook of the early Quakers . That suchthinking helped to sustain belief in witchcraft (howeverdefined) is equally apparent. What we now need to considerare the consequences for the latter in a world that after1640 was becoming slowly accustomed to the notion ofdifference and diversity (pluralism in the broadest senseof the word) and which precluded the simple classificationof social realities along the lines suggested by suchdualism." Most historians are agreed that some timebetween] 640 and 1700, elite belief in the reality ofdiabolical witchcraft underwent radical revision 74Burrough, A Trumpet of the Lord , pp . 11-13, 20; cf. theview of one of their opponents that the logic of Quakerismforc ed members of the sect to believe, ipso facto, thatall thei r enemies were to be excommunicated for ' Dogs,Devils . .. Whores, Antichrist, Witches, Sorc erers ' ; M.Byne, The Scornful! Quakers Answeres (London, 1656), pp.789, 100 . We should perhaps remember that just as theearly Quakers were not wedded to the notion of pacifism,nor were they initially outspoken advocates of a generalreligious toleration. 75 At precisely what point Englishsociety can be fairly described as 'pluralistic ' is ofcour se a matter of som e debate . What does seem beyondreasonable doubt, however, is that from 1640 onward, and with each successive political crisis, the polit ical andreligious divisions unleashed by the civil war , mo re andmore Englishmen were forced (albeit reluctantly) toacknowledge the existence of difference as a permanentfeature of the English ideological landscape. For a recentanalysi s of the seemingly insoluble divi sions in Englishsociety after 1660, see T. Harris , Politics under theLater Stuar ts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society,1660-1715 (London, 1993). ' and gradual extinction.Traditionally, historians anxious to explain thisphenomenon have focused on the emergence of a scepticaltradition, dating from the sixteenth century and the worksof Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot, which reached its apogeea century later when it coalesced with the growing

rationalism of the new empirical science." Today, however,this explanation looks increasingly untenable . Two mainobjections have been proposed. Firstly, there is preciouslittle evidence to support the view that those who wereactive in promoting the values of the new science wereequally forthright in their rejection of traditionalwitchcraft beliefs."? And secondly, as Keith Thomas himselfconfessed, the arguments of the sceptics of the lateseventeenth century differed little in tone or substancefrom those first articulated by Weyer and Scot a centuryearlier." The search for a mono-causal explanation for thedecline of educated belief in witchcraft has thus provedhighly elusive. It has surely not been helped by thetendency of all such accounts to intimate that the wholeedifice of Renaissance demonology was somehow suffused witha fallacious rationale which was ultimately bound to crackunder the weight of its own internal contradictions."?Contemptuous of the intellectual rigour and inner coherenceof such beliefs, modern commentators have thus tended toimply that it was only a matter of time before the'enlightened' few were able to persuade their more'credulous ' compatriots of the blinding error of theirways. Yet as recent studies have shown, analyses of thiskind have radically distorted the role of such ideas in thewider realm of early modem discourse. Far 76 See , forexample, Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic, pp.689-92; R. Holme s, Witchcraft in British History (London,1974), p. 156. Related to this idea is the belief that thecontinuing faith in ' occult' science and medicine helpedto perpet uate ' superstitions' such as witchcraft ; see,for example, G. Tourney, 'The physici an and witch craft inRestoration England', Medical History, 16 (1972), 153-4. 77See, for example, C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton(Cambridge, 1982), pp.99-100. 7H Thomas, Religion and theDecline ofMagic, p. 684. Much the same point is made byHugh Trevor-Roper in his 'The European witch-craze of thesixte enth and seventeenth centuri es' , in Trevor-Roper,Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London,1967), p. 169. 79 Clark, ' Inversion, misrule and the meaning of witch craft' , pp. 98-9. But, as Dr Clark suggestsin his forthcoming study, this is not to deny the pointthat the doctrines of the demonologists did contain withinthem the seed of the ir own destruction since they restedon a logic of contrariety that was inherently liable to self-deconstruc t. That this should occur in a world in which there was no longer an absolute fixed point from whichto measure right and wrong, good and evil , would seem tocomplement the main thrust of my argument here , namel ythat the decline of educated belief in witchcraft tookplace against a background of emerging cultural , religious

and political plur alism . from representing outmoded andirrational systems of belief which were marginal to theinterests of the men of this age, we are now being toldthat the sophisticated texts of the demonologists werecentral to the intellectual concerns of the era, so much sothat ' it becomes difficult to explain, not how menaccepted the rationality of the arguments, but how,occasionally, sceptics doubted it' .80 A subsidiary, butrelated, problem has been the tendency to view early modernopinion on this subject as polarised into two distinctivecamps: sceptics and believers. This simplistic division is,however, virtually impossible to document. Individualsdisplayed a bewildering variety of views on the subjectwhich seem to have been shaped more by circumstances thanthe dictates of ideological consistency. King James I andRichard Baxter provide just two examples.s' Moreover,contemporaries were quite capable of subverting, ordeconstructing, 'sceptical' authorities for their own ends.Amongst other examples, William Prynne's citation of Weyerin order to substantiate the witchcraft of the Quakersshould alert us to the dangers of attaching too muchsignificance to the published works of celebratedsceptics.sRather than seek explanations in ' great texts ',or attach excessive importance to the explanatory status ofa sceptical tradition, I would like to suggest analternative line of inquir y which takes as its startingpoint the relocation of the language of demonology withinthe wider context of RO Ibid., p. 127. s: S. Clark , ' KingJames 's Daemonologie: witchcraft and kingship ' , in S.Anglo, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature ofWitchcraft (Lond on, 1977) , pp. 161-3. I am particul arlyimpressed by the knowledg e that James' so-called conversion to sce pticism took place after his succession to theEnglish throne when, as Clark points out , 'it was the Jesuits who became the principal objects of his livelyapprehensions' and whom he now regar ded ' with a horro rpreviously reserved for witches ' ; ibid., p. 164. Baxter,on the other hand, was scrupul ous in the application ofrational 'empirical' methods to suspected cases of bewitchment and possession. On numerous occas ions, he seems tohave diagnosed the 'suffocation of the mother ' andprescribed medical help, yet he remained throughout hislife a fervent believ er in the reality of witchcraft anddemonic activity; see Baxter, A Key for Catholics, pp.184-9; cf. the similar approach adopted by the Anglic anminister and healer Richard Napier: M. MacDon ald, MysticalBedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Cambri dge, 1981), pp .211-12. R2 Prynn e, TheQuakers Unmasked, pp. 8-9, 22. Likewise, the Presbyt erianSamuel Jeake the elder saw no inconsistency in citing

Reginald Scot as a witne ss aga inst 'p opish miracle s 'in a letter in which he also assented to the reality ofdiabolical posse ssion and dispos session; see East SussexRecord Office, Lewes, Frewen MS 4223 , 'Som e Contranimadversions & Counter Consideracons to ye An imadversions& Consideracons of . . . Mr T[hom asJ Mlo rris] in his lastEpistle ' [28 Dec. 1667]. fos. 197' , 198'. early modernthought in England. Integral to this approach is a greatersensitivity to the linguistic conventions of the age, andthe manner in which these were exposed to revision in thelight of the events of the 1640s and succeeding decades.Though historians have been slow to chart these importantdevelopments, contemporaries seem to have been fully awareof what today we might term an on-going process oflinguistic deconstruction. The shock of civil war, and theattempt to come to terms with the legacy of divisionunleashed by the conflict, forced men to confront theinadequacies of inherited languages and traditional modesof discourse. As the newspaper Mercurius Aulicus reportedin 1644, the word 'rebel' was 'a good old statutible word,though scarce high enough for these rare modeme Rebels, whohave as much out-done Language as Men' .83 The acts of menwhich 'out-do language' are not easily reduced to the termsof conventional usage. In mid-seventeenth century England ,learned men, regardless of their particular religious orpolitical affiliation, were confronted with precisely thisproblem: how to signify the collapse of traditional formsof life in a world in which there were no longer anyuniversal 'signifiers'. Some, like Thomas Hobbes,immediately perceived the need to create an alternative'language' of civil society which owed nothing to divine orcosmic models, and everything to the artifice of man.Consequently, in his Leviathan (1651), common metaphors andanalogues take on new meanings, amongst them witchcraft,which now came to represent little more than a substitutephrase, literally a metaphor, for the act ofdisobedience.s83 Mercurius Aulicus, 11 Feb. 1645, pp.1378-9 (my emphasis) . According to Thomas Sprat, officialhistorian of the Royal Society , the 1640s were 'a time,wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase byextraordinary degrees; for in such busie and active times,there arise more new thoughts of men, which must besignifi'd, and varied by new expressions' ; T. Sprat, TheHistory of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), p.42. Other examples of this process of linguistic change arenoted in C. Hill, 'The word "revolution" inseventeenth-century England ', in R. Ollard and P.Tudor-Craig, eds., For Veronica Wedgwood These Studies inSeventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), pp. 134-51; andR. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two

Treatises ofGovernment (Princeton, 1986), p. 69. 84 T.Hobbes, Leviathan, ed., R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 18,300, 30~, 422-4. Hobbes' friend and staunch royalist ,William Cavendish, seems to have shared his views onwitchcraft, as well as those on the state; see M.Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, The Life of . . . WilliamCavendishe, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle (London,1667), pp. 144-5; T. P. Slaughter, Ideology and Politics onthe Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle 's Advice to CharlesII (Philadelphia, 1984). The latter contains the transcriptof a letter in which Newcastle advises the future king toforego reliance on outmoded 'harmonist' notions ofgovernment, and to rely instead upon 174 PETER ELMER Thevast majority of Hobbes' learned contemporaries, however,were either unable or unwilling to make such a leap in thedark. They chose instead to seek intellectual solace in atraditional world view which stressed the principle of agod-given, universal order and provided familiar linguisticconventions with which to make sense of the unfoldingevents of the 1640s and 1650s. As a result, as I have triedto show, all forms of opposition, recalcitrance, rebellionor apostasy were now susceptible to demonologicalexplication. Two conclusions may be drawn . Firstly, thepoliticisation of demonology (or alternatively thedemonisation of politics) ensured that witchcraft was muchless likely to act as a normative system of discourse whichfostered unity and concord in the body politic. On thecontrary, it, like language itself, had become the prey offaction and party, an instrument more likely to encouragecontinuing division and schism than religious and politicalharmony .s' The best illustration of this point is to befound in the evidence from witchcraft trials in this period, many of which on closer inspec tion reveal a large degreeof partial ity and factionalism. The Hopkins trials in EastAnglia in the mid-1640s, the Faversham witches (1645) andthe Bodenham case at Salisbury (1653) all testify to theuse of witchcraft trials as a means to ident ify and punish Machiavelli an deceit and the Hobb esian thre at offorce in the government of the realm ; ib id., pp. 34--5,69 . The implication here is that the civi l war destro yedthe fa ith of some royalists in traditional consensualpolit ics, and wit h it beli ef in ideas such as witchcraft whi ch had once seemed a natu ral part of that pre-civil war wo rld view. If so, then such a process might alsoa ccount for the scepticism of a man like Sir Robert Filmerwhose An Advertisement to the Jury-Men of England (London,1653) represented a radical volte-face fro m views held inthe 1640s; for an illumina ting discussion of Film er ' schanging views on this subject, see I. Bostridge, ' Debatesabout witchcraft in England 1 650-1736' , Oxford D.Phil

thesis, 1990, pp.2755. S5 Nowhe re is this more apparentthan in the stru ggle for the si ngle most important sourceof authority, the Bible. Aft er 1660, Restoration divinesfrequentl y lamented the way in which non-confo rmists hadattempt ed to appropriate specific scriptural texts forpartisan end s. The most frequently cited in loyali stcircles was Jud ges 5, 23 (' Curse ye Meroz ' ) which atleast one Restoration cleric attempted to reappropriate onthe grounds that it was ' the most loyal Te xt in all theBible', notw ithstandin g the fact that ' w ith thi s Text. . . was the King s Arm y roo ted [sic] , our Blessed KingMart yr 'd and Murther'd , and the Kingd om Ruined ' ; E.Hickering ill. Curse Ye Meroz. Or the Fatal Doom. In aSermon Preached in Guild-hall-Chappel, London [9 May 1680](London, 16 80), pp. 1-3. On a broader sca le, the wholelangu age of pre-civil war harmon ism, incorporatin g anappea l to patriarchal auth ority and divine right monarchy bec ame a trade -ma rk of loyal support for the restored regime afte r 1660. One facet of such loyal ism wasthe repeated recitation of 1 Samuel 15, 23 ; see below p.178, n. 94 for examp les.

religious and political dissidents.w During the early yearsof the

Restoration, witchcraft and claims of bewitchment were alsoused as a

vehicle for the expression of nonconformist dissent, mostnotably in

Suffolk where leading Puritans took an active part in thepromotion of

such cases which were clearly designed as some form ofveiled protest

against the new regime.s? In such instances, it isdifficult to escape the

conclusion that expressions of scepticism or credulity werefar more

likely to be conditioned by religious and politicalconsiderations than

they were by the actual ' facts' of the case. By the 1680s,events such as

these would appear to have led to the growth of a culture

of scepticism in

Anglican and Tory circles, despite the constant resort ofapologists for

the restored regime to demonological precedents in order tostigmatise

their opponents.w 86 Kent Archives Office, Maidstone ,Fa/JOe 14; Anon ., The Examination, Confession, Triall andExecution of Joan Williford, Joan Cariden, and Joan Hall .. . at Faversham in Kent (London, 1645); Bostridg e, 'Debates about witchcraft ' , p. 26; E. Bower , Doctor LambRevived (London, 1653) . I am currently undertaking a majorreappraisal of the Hopkins ' trials, though already it isclear from initia l research that much of the impetus forwitch-hunting came from local puritan elites intent oneradica ting all manner of dissident behaviour as part of amuch wider campaign of ' moral cleansing ' in the purit anstronghold of East Angli a. 87 The best illustration ofthis process can be found in the witchcraft-induced fits ofthe Dunwich nonconformist preach er, Thom as Spatch etwhich lasted from 1660 to 1667. The most remarkable featureof the physical torment s suffered by the body of Spatchetwas the manner in which they so closely paralleled eventsin the wider body politic at this time. They began forexample in March 1660, just one month before theRestoration, and reached a climax in mid-1662 at which timeSpatchet became comp letely incapacitated from engagementin prayer and worsh ip (i.e. at the time of the StBartholomew 's Day ejection). For a brief period at the endof 1662, co inciding with the issue of Charles II ' s firstDeclaration of Indulgence, he experienced a 'partial . . .freedom from his fits ' . They soon returned, howeve r, andby 1665 he became totally immob ilised (' his fee t wou ldbe as if they were nailed to the ground'), an allusion nodoubt to the passage and implementation of the Five MileAct. The fits finally ceased, albeit gradually, in 1667,ostensibly because of the death of the witch whom Spatch etheld responsible for his miserab le condition. But a morelikely explanation was the change of religious climate inthis year following the fall of Clare ndon when once againcomp rehens ion was on the royal poli tical agenda, anddiscussions were reopened nationwide wit h thenon-conformist leadership; see S. Petto,A FaithfulNarrative ofthe Wonderful and Extraordinary Fits which MrThoSpatchet . . . was under by Witchcraft (London, 1693),pp. 6, 8, 21, 27 and passim ; A. G. Matthews, CalamyRevised (Oxford, 1934), p. 454; The Correspondence ofHenryOldenburg, 11 vols . (Madison, Milwaukee and London,

1966-75), V, pp. 14-15. 88 In the Spatchet case cited above, for example, one gentleman is said to have remarked 'that if she Bewitched none but Spatchet and Manning [afellow congregationalist preacher, Samue l Manning] , andsuch as they are, she should never be Hanged by him' .Significantly perhaps no action was taken against thewitch; Petto , A Faithful Narrative, p. 19. For aparticularly good example of Tory sceptic ism, see TheLives Secondly, and perhaps less easily demonstrated, Ishould like to

suggest that the politicisation of the crime of witchcraftwas

accompanied by a radical reorientation on the part ofEngland's ruling

class as to the chief source of dissent in the bodypolitic. During the 1640s and 1650s, the puritanauthorities clearly saw the greatest threat to

orderly government emanating from de facto toleration andunbridled liberty, a consequence of the fact that in thewords of one of their

number 'famous England' had now become 'an Amsterdam ofmixtures [and] an Island of Monsters' . One consequence ofthis was the severity of punishment afforded to theQuakers, whose ubiquity, prominence,

beliefs and behaviour made them ideal candidates for therole of

surrogate witch. Though hard to prove, there is someevidence to suggest that the Quakers were beginning to takethe place of the witch in the

minds of some of the men who ruled England in the 1650s.The diary

of the puritan minister, Ralph Josselin, for example,testifies to the

genuine sense of fear and panic induced by the arrival ofthe Quakers in rural Essex in the mid-1650s. At the sametime, in one of the

few recorded instances of witchcraft in the diary, Josselindisplayed

remarkable scepticism in the case of a 'poore wretch ' whohad

been accused of bewitching the child of a localdignitary.s? In

neighbouring Suffolk, the Presbyterian Edward Willan, whohad played

a prominent role in detecting witches during the Hopkins'episode in 1645, was part icula rly active in persecutinglocal Quakers, even perh aps of the Right Hon Francis North. . . by the Hon Roger North. Together with theAutobiography of the Author, ed. A. Jessopp, 3 vols.(London, 1890), I, pp. 166-9; III, pp. 130-2. In one of thecase s cited by North, the Exeter witch es of 1682, thereis a clear suggestion that the trial was being used by someto foment political unrest in the wake of the Exclu sionCrisis; see CSPD, 1682, p. 347. '9 T. Hodge s, The Growthand Spreading of Haeresie (London, 1647) , p. 46 ; TheDiary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683, ed. A. MacFarlane(London, 1976), pp. 366, 379; A. MacF arlane , The FamilyLife of Ralph Josselin (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 26-7. For thesize and rapid spread of the Quakers, see Reay, The Quakersand the English Revolution, pp. 11, 26-31 where it issuggested that by 1660 they may have formed 1 per cent ofthe total popul ation of England, of which nearly half werewomen. Moreover, the rural natur e of the sect meant that 'not one count y escaped the effects of Quak er proselytizing ' ; ibid., p. 11. According to a survey conductedin 1680, nearly 11,000 Quakers had been imprisoned sincethe Restoration . In the event , the authorities did notneed to resort to witchcraft legislation in order to entrapQuaker suspects. There already existed extensive laws withwhich to pun ish them, and Quaker offences , 'unlike manyalleged cases of witchcraft ... actu ally took place' (orrather, one might say that the forme r were more eas ilyproven than the latter). In addit ion, unlike the major ityof witches, the Quakers frequentl y adm itted the ir guilt; see ibid. , pp. 43 , 44, 64 ,106, 140n, 143n and W. C.Braithwa ite, The Second Period ofQuakerism (London. 1919),p. 98 and passim . to the extent of fomenting accusationsof witchcraft against the sect in 1655. 90 Obviously,prioritisation of this kind did not in itself precludecontinuing belief in the existence of conventionalwitchcraft. For many, the two went hand in hand, part ofthe same species of dissent and diabolical subversion.Others, however, clearly saw the witchcraft of the Quakersas of a different order from that normally ascribed to old,poor and obscure women. As one opponent of the Quakers put

it in an admonitory letter of 1655, 'the Devil hath a finerway of witchcraft now, then ever he had since the worldbegan' .9 1 In her pioneering account of Scottishwitchcraft, Christina Lamer pointed to the significance oflabelling theory as a tool to help explain why Scottishwitches did not always fulfil the ideal of thestereotypical witch (old, poor, female) . In the event ,she cited the sociologist's emphasis upon ' process 'whereby any form of deviance was conceived 'not as a staticentity but rather as a continuously shaped and reshapedoutcome of dynamic processes of social interactionJ"Precisely the same forces seem to have been at work in therefashioning of the English witch after 1640. The culturalconstruction of the Quaker 'witch' should thus be seen aspart of a wider process of intellectual realignment duringwhich time the Quakers ' actions and beliefs were readilyintegrated into the learned, pre-civil war model of thedeviant witch . Within a few years of their appearance, thediabolism of the Quakers became firmly established in theminds of a large number of the ruling elite. 'That grandQuaker ' the devil now worked a new kind of magic moresuited to the millennial atmosphere of the times. Or, asone critic of the Quakers observed, Satan now 'seldomappears with his Horns and cloven feet, [for] his game isbetter played when he comes like an Angel of Light' .93 'XlC. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London,1933), pp. 282, 299; Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings,I, pp. 665--6. Willan 's conflation of witchcraft withradical sectarianism is evident in the Hopkins' trialswhere he testified that one of the accused was 'ananabaptist and runner after new sects ' ; L'Estrange Ewen,Witchcraft and Demonianism, p. 282. "I Anon., An Answer toa Scandalous Paper, sigs. A4 v , B'. n E. M. Schur,Labelling Deviant Behaviour (New York, 1971), cited in C.Lamer, Enemies ofGod : The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London,1981), p. 98. "3 Anon., Work for a Cooper (London, 1679),p. 2. For the Devil as 'that grand Quaker', and variationson this theme, see Anon., The Devil Turned Quaker (London,1656); I. Bourne, A Defence ofthe Scriptures (London,1656), p. 49; T. L[edger], Anti-Quakisme (1653), p. 2. TheFifth Monarchist, John Spittle house, described the Quakersas 'the Devils last game he hath to play' ; see B. S. Capp,The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-CenturyEnglish Millenarianism (London, 1972), p. 183. After 1660,the Quakers continued to suffer at the hands of theRestoration authorities, though now the object ofmagisterial attention was extended to all those religiousand political dissidents who had cooperated or sympathisedwith the government of the interregnum. Now, the threat ofthe rebel, in the broadest sense of the term, as the

archenemy of Restoration society, became paramount, and theeradication of this threat became the major preoccupationof the ruling class, a point readily confirmed by thebriefest perusal of the sermon literature of this period.Between 1660 and 1688, the Anglican clergy repeatedlyinveighed against the danger posed to the divinely ordainedgovernm ent of the restored Stuarts by rebels,nonconformists and assorted malcontents . More often thannot, they did so by recourse to the exemplary language oflearned demonology." The message, often delivered at assizetime, was not lost on the Restoration magistracy who, formuch of this period, proceeded against ' fanatics' andrebels with undue ferocity . At the same time, prosecutionsfor witchcraft dwindled to virtual extinction. As a threatto the peace of the ordered commonwealth, it would appearthat witchcraft had become relegated in the hierarchy ofconcerns which most impinged upon the minds of England 'sruling elite. 95 04 It is impossible to cite in full herethe vast sour ce material on this subject. For just a verysmall sample covering the yea rs from the Restoration tothe access ion of James II, see J. Douch, Englands Jubilee(London, 1660) , sig . A3'; w. Creed, Judah's Return totheir All egiance (London, 1660), pp. 29-30; J. Riland ,Elias the Second His Coming to Restore All Things ['Mosesthe peace-maker ' , sep arately paginat ed] , p. 41; G.Hascard, Gladius Ju stitiae (London, 1668), pp. 3-4; T.Bruc e, Monarchy Maintained (Lond on, 1682), pp. 19-20; J.Knight, The Sama ritan Rebels Perjured by a Covenant ojAssociati on (London, 1682) , pp . 19,22-3,28-9; J. Allen,OJ Perjury (London , 1682), p. 22; W. Gostw yke, A SermonPreached at . .. Cambridge (Cambridge, 1685), pp. 57; T .Heyricke, The Character oja Rebel (London, 1685), pp. 6-7,13, 20. 1 am curr entl y prepar ing a study of thepoliticisation of witchcraft in Restoration England whichwill utilise this and much othe r, hithert o disr egarded,material. 05 Anthony Fletcher, for ex ample, has noted thatafte r the Restoration, ' the focus of magisteria l anxietyshifted from social disord er to politi cal insecurity ' ;A. Fletcher, ReJorm in the Provinces: The Government ojStuart England (New Haven and London, 1986), pp. 333, 352 .Occasionally this shift of emphasis is discernibl e in theactions and statements of prom inent Restorat ion figure s.Thus Sir John Keeling, a notorious persecutor ofnonconformists (especiall y Quaker s), expresse d profoundscepti cism of the guilty verdict in the case of the BurySt Edm unds ' wi tches in 1664 . It seems highly probablethat his views on this occasi on were shaped to a largeextent by the fact that the drivin g force behind theprosecut ion of the two witches was Samu el Pacey, a prominent merch ant and nonc onformist. Conversely, the presiding

judge, Sir Matthew Hale, was renown ed as an advo cate ofreligiou s comprehension; see A Tryal ofWitches, Inconclusion, I would support the view of Christ ina Lamerthat educated belief in witchcraft was not argu ed out ofex istence, but rather that ' it simply ceased to havepolitical vitality ' ." Once witchcraft became the propertyof parties, sects and factions, it ceased to function as auniversal arbiter of divine truth or justice. In addition,with no agree d reference point from which to judge, withabsolute cert ainty , the actions and bel iefs of men,argument a contrariis, a fund amental ass umption oftraditional demonological discourse, was increasinglycontroversial and partisan. Accordingly, it became evermore difficult to answer the kind of quest ion put to theQuaker James Nay ler in 1656: ' whether the power thatworketh in you and in the rest of your quaking fraternity,be divine or diabolical? .. . and hereby let us knowwhether you be Saints or Sorcerers?' More importantly,perhaps, it became increasingl y unlikel y with the passageof time that such quest ions might arise in the firstplace.?? at the Assizes held at Bury St Edmun ds (London,1682), appended to Matthew Hale. A Short Treatise TouchingSheriffs Acco mpts (Londo n, 1683) . For Keeling ' spersecution of nonconformists and Quakers, see PublicRecord Office , Ass i 2/1, fo. 99 ; Historical ManuscriptsCommission. Fourteenth Report, Appendix. Part IV. TheManuscripts of Lord Kenyon (London, 1894) , p. 86: E.Stockda le. ' S ir John Kelyng, Chief Justice of the King's Bench 1665-1671 ' , in Miscellanea (Bedfordshir eHistoric al Record Socie ty, lix, 1980), pp. 43-53. 96 Lamer, Enemies ofGod, p. 176 . 97 J. Deacon, A PublickDiscovery of the Secret Deceit . . . where may easily bediscerned Saran Transformed into . . . an Angel of Light,in that Sect . . . called Quakers (London. 1656) , pp. 58-9. Rather than adopt a linea r view of this process ofdecl ine, Jona than Barry has sugges ted to me theadvantage of a cyclical pattern whereby with eachsuccessive political crisis, the num ber of witchcraft sceptics grew. If so, then the work of Ian Bostridge whichlargely co mplements my own in terms of its basic emphasisupon patterns of lingu istic change, wou ld sugges t thatthis process of decl ine continued well into the eighteenthcentur y; see Bos tridge, ' Debates about witchcraft', esp.chs. 4 and 5. I should like to thank Jon athan Barry forthis point, as well as many other perceptive comm ents onthe first draft of this paper.

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