Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (review)

Reviews 231 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Zika, Charles, Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 91), Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2003; hardback; pp. xx, 608; 112 b/w illustrations, EUR99.00/US$124; ISBN 9004125604. A collection of sixteen essays based on conference and seminar papers spanning more than twenty years, this erudite work underlines the importance of looking outside the square when it comes to witchcraft studies. The book is a seminal contribution to the discipline, eliciting themes through a little used resource in witchcraft studies, the visual image. The thematic approach begins with Renaissance magic and religious practices, the relationship between humanism and magic. Using perceptions of magical traditions from the classical and non-classical ancient world, sixteenth century intellectuals sought to make sense of their world, besieged as it was by the new technologies of printing, the discovery of non-European worlds, and the increasing appropriation of the past which ecclesiastical and social authorities sought to access for their ambitions. Zika explores philosophical magic and its contribution to European societies in the Renaissance through the works of Johann Reuchlin and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, examining the ways in which religious beliefs and practice intersect with the exercise of power and focussing on the experiential, the borders of religion, the understanding and meaning of these to the individual and the community within the controlling parameters of the sacred and the appropriation of the past. The contribution of visual iconography to the development of the witch figure, in both the illustrative and textual sense, is the theme, brilliantly expanded in a step by step process that begins with the flying witch. This figure engenders the discussion of visual representations in relation to the development of witchcraft and its association with female sexuality. The flying witch, a figure of evil, communicated fears on the threat of female sexuality and was used by Northern European societies of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to develop their discourse about the key role of sexuality in human affairs. Artists provided visual representations that enabled mediation between the theological framework being developed to define witches, popular belief and practice. Through visual representations, German artists of the early sixteenth century related witchcraft to the contemporary discourse on female sexuality, portraying female witches as masterless appropriators of male virility and power. Group meetings and feasts by such autonomous women in communities, 232 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) coincided with the Wild Ride of folklore, an image which demonologists more obviously linked with the notion of the Sabbat. The images of women flying through the air communicated a meaning of the other side of the right order, representing a world of disorder and misrule, and showed that, for many in the early sixteenth century, such images were not simply about demons but were about women’s bodies and women. Expanding the theme, the following chapters elucidate how visual codes were used to depict witchcraft: the cauldron as a sign of the physically destructive activity of witchcraft and the morally destructive seduction of sexuality; witches as a female group, emphasising separateness from mainstream society and the mastery of men; witches as riders indicating a concern with older folkloric traditions rather than the demonological discourse on flying witches. The siemann or She-man was the visual representation of witchcraft and sexuality. A critical factor in establishing the dominant visual codes of witchcraft through to the early seventeenth century was the manner in which imagery was linked to a contemporary discourse about the moral and sexual order, sexual potency and power. Moving from the early sixteenth century images of young women, the visual representations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries show the witch as a crone. The violence and savagery associated with this image, linking the cannibalism of witches with that of the New World Amerindians, did much to assist the perception of witchcraft as a serious religious and social threat, enabling the imaginative location of both ‘inferior’ groups in an expanded European world. Contextualising all within the visual, Zika achieves a highly creditable presentation, underlining the importance of pictorial artefacts of past societies as a mechanism of understanding...