A Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft (review)

The Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft [SBSW]has had a long and distinguished reign as the indispensable source of information on Scottish witchcraft cases. That reign is now over, as we shall see, and the justification for reprinting it is tenuous at best; but in its time it was influential in fostering the revival of research into Scottish witch-hunting.

The SBSW was the brainchild of Christina Larner, the celebrated Glasgow historical sociologist. She had written a PhD in 1962 on Scottish demonology, and in 1970 Norman Cohn persuaded her to resume work on the subject. She published an influential article 'James VI and I and witchcraft' in 1973. She then obtained funding for a project to collect information on all recorded cases of witchcraft in Scotland. This produced the SBSW in 1977, exploiting hitherto-unused manuscript sources and providing a firmer statistical basis for the Scottish witch-hunt than ever before. The best estimates for numbers of executions had hitherto ranged between 3,000 and 4,500; the SBSW showed that the number must be much lower. Probably half or more of its 3,069 'cases' (the exact proportion was unknown) ended in acquittals or other non-capital outcomes.

Larner's masterpiece, Enemies of God: the Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), was also written at this time. It combined statistics with a detailed reading of individual cases, producing a beacon of methodological clarity that ranks among the most influential and widely cited regional studies of European witch-hunting. Sadly, Larner died in 1983, but Enemies of God has deservedly been reprinted, most recently by John Donald in 2000.

The problem with reprinting the SBSW in 2005 is that it was almost entirely superseded in 2003 by the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft (www.arts.ed.ac.uk/witches/). This not only gathered all the case information in the SBSW but greatly expanded it. It used local as well as central manuscript sources, especially presbytery and synod records (the SBSW used only central manuscripts), and corrected numerous errors in the SBSW (on which more in a moment). Most importantly, the Witchcraft Survey gathered much more detailed information on each case; instead of the SBSW's 10 data fields it had over 300. The Survey database is accessible online for simple searching and querying, or can be downloaded free of charge by those wanting to run more complex queries using Microsoft Access. The new, brief preface to the reprinted SBSW says (without explanation) that the Witchcraft Survey 'does not replace or supersede' the SBSW, and that the SBSW 'remains the most authoritative printed book for and catalogue of Scottish witchcraft cases'. The latter phrase is true in the very limited sense that the Witchcraft Survey is not a 'printed book', but the former is outrightly misleading.

The Witchcraft Survey provides 3,212 names of people accused of witchcraft (a few of whom had more than one 'case'), and has a further 625 records for unnamed people or groups of unnamed people, making a total of 3,837 cases (including some groups of unknown size). This is unlikely to include all Scottish witches but it is probably most of them. It is considerably more than the SBSW's 3,069 cases-especially since several hundred of these proved to be duplicates and had to be eliminated. The Witchcraft Survey has thus increased the known size of the Scottish witch-hunt by over one-third.

The SBSW essentially consists of 230 pages of lists of witchcraft cases, arranged by court or authority. For each case there is name, date, place, sex, marital status, 'trial status' (e.g. known trial, commission for trial, mentioned in another trial), fate (e.g. executed, acquitted, not known) and source. This information has been wholly superseded by the Witchcraft Survey. Then there is a short section of statistical tables, which have also been superseded in that...