Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (review)

This is an important book, one that asks us to reconsider the weight of scholarly tradition on witchcraft and to place it within a much different intellectual and historical context. Stephens examines in exhaustive detail many of the main treatises on witches written between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and asks simply "Cui bono?" "To whose benefit" were charges of witchcraft and consorting with demons? His simple but revolutionary answer is this: the theologians writing about witchcraft wanted to convince themselves that such things happened and, in doing so, could still believe that spiritual entities existed and that they made regular contact with human beings. Witchcraft theorists, as Stephens calls them, did not reflect the last gasps of ancient superstition but the beginnings of modern agnosticism.

Over and over Stephens makes this point in clear and elegant language that helps in the reading of this hefty book. He begins by asserting what the charges of witchcraft were not, against the consensus of modern scholarship: they were neither pornographic nor misogynistic fantasies of celibate male clerics. First, sexuality was simply the best opportunity for demonstrating human-demonic interaction: best because sex was a very intimate form of human contact and because it left undeniable traces in the insemination of witches and in the birth of "strange" children. Second, while witchcraft theorists happily made use of the misogynistic language of medieval Christianity, their emphasis on women's contact with demons merely provided shorthand for the active role of demons, given contemporary assumptions about women's passive role in sexuality. One cannot do justice to this part of Stephens's argument with such a brief synopsis except to add that it is persuasive.

Stephens continues chapter by chapter with an analysis of the various activities associated with witches and how each is reminiscent of the larger purpose of the accusations made against them. The belief that witches can fly, even though it contradicted medieval authorities who said that it was heretical to believe that human beings could be transported from one place to another by magic, was necessary to demonstrate that what witches claimed—or, rather, confessed under torture—was real and not imaginary. (If it were imaginary, of course, it would place into question whether the demons themselves and all spiritual realities were also imaginary.) The power and evil deeds (maleficia) attributed to witches, even while they played only a small role in most witchcraft theories (and even though, as Stephens notes, this power was incapable of preserving the witches themselves from harm), were equally necessary to demonstrate that witches did pose a real danger to others and thus that the prosecution of witches was required. The legends that witches desecrated eucharistic hosts, either torturing them or using them in magical unguents (a theme borrowed from late medieval charges against Jews), was likewise necessary to demonstrate the validity of the doctrine of transsubstantiation. The belief that witches killed babies (again, a theme taken from medieval accounts about heretics) made it easier to deal psychologically with the high mortality rate of children without having to attribute the deaths to a supposedly benevolent God and to expound the benefits of baptism. The idea that witches turned themselves into cats or other creatures became an important part of witch lore, especially in England, where defendants could not be tortured to confess and where "familiars" could be adduced as "proofs" of the presence of a witch. Finally, the idea that witches stole penises was linked, through contemporary court cases arguing impotence through bewitchment, to the efficacy of the sacrament of marriage. Again, it is difficult to do justice to the sophistication of Stephens's arguments briefly, but they are thoroughly and effectively argued.

As skilled as Stephens's analysis is of texts and artwork (Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola's Strix, an imagined conversation between an inquisitor, a skeptic, and a witch, is especially fascinating), his insistence on placing the charges within their historical context is equally...