The Witch-Family in Elizabethan and Jacobean Print Culture

This paper argues that a new stereotype about witches emerged in print culture beginning in the late sixteenth century and intensifying during the early decades of the seventeenth century. This new image—of the witch as member of a witch-family—deserves recognition along with more familiar stereotypes of the solitary witch and the coven or conspiratorial cult. Though not as enduring or pervasive, the stereotype of the witch-family carried some significantly different implications than the others. If both solitary witches and covens were typically figured in terms of antithesis and inversion—as disruptors of traditional hierarchies of gender, family, community, and state—the witch-family was represented as dangerous because of its most normative features. While legal-documentary pamphlets of the Elizabethan period contain accounts that show family relationships among witches, they do little to call attention to or comment on them. Jacobean pamphlets, however, fashion the witch-family into a new kind of threat. Witch-parents behaved like proper parents, seeing to the protection and education of their young. They taught their children a kind of trade, passing on magical techniques and familiar spirits the way other parents passed on agricultural skills and livestock. Witch-children dutifully obeyed their parents and followed their instructions. Witchcraft therefore could spread through communities and across generations by means of behaviors that were viewed as godly in other contexts. Jacobean authors responded to this threat through rhetorical strategies of irony and satire, mocking the perverse order of witch-families, associating them with a hereditary, lower-class “baseness,” and contrasting them with the genteel virtues of their often-wealthier victims, whose deaths would be avenged by the providential workings of a godly justice system. Thus these pamphlets contributed to an evolving discourse about families of the “undeserving poor” whose hereditary “baseness” might combine with an unholy education to express itself in a variety of criminal or anti-social behaviors. Read against the grain, however, these pamphlets might also have suggested the potentially subversive function of family order and loving family ties when parents subscribed to resistant ideologies and schooled their children in them. Witch-families were crime-families, a part of a shadowy outlaw or reprobate class, but they also resembled families of recusants, aristocratic rebels, and radical sects.