Witchcraft as Symbolic Action in Early Modern Europe and America

In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. By Mary Beth Norton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002; pp 496. $30.00.

Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. By Walter Stephens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; pp xiv + 460. $35.00.

One of the stranger beliefs about witches in the heyday of the European witch hunts was that they had nearly complete control over the human imagination. Their power of praestigium, or illusion, extended to imaginary castration. In Malleus Malificarum (the "hammer of witches"), that influential compendium of witch-hunting lore by the Dominican priest Heinrich Kramer, we find the following tale, told entirely without irony:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who . . . sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? . . . For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a certain witch to ask her to restore his health. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take whichever member he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, "you must not take that one," adding, "because it belonged to a parish priest."¹

The rhetorical dimensions of this brief tale include the witch's power over the imagination of the memberless man, Kramer's use of the example to advance his witchcraft theory, and the curious residue of what surely must have been an anticlerical joke before the humorless Dominican priest adapted it to his own purposes. In the rhetoric of academic inquiry scholars have read the tale as emblematic of Freudian castration anxiety, the repressed sexuality of medieval Catholicism, and, more recently, in feminist terms as male fear of women's power.

Despite continuing interest in witchcraft in historical and literary-cultural studies, rhetoricians thus far have not done much work on the subject. ² From a broadly Burkeian perspective, early modern witchcraft trials are interesting as case studies in symbolic action, ritual, unconscious motivation, and scapegoating. From an argumentation perspective, the trials and the scholarship about them provide an opportunity to investigate shifting cultural patterns in the understanding of practical reasoning and legal or historiographic strategies for gaining assent. From a critical-cultural, or broadly Foucauldian, perspective, the trials are a good example of how "expert" discourses of law, religion, sexuality, and demonology intersect with the exercise of political power. The rapid decline of belief in witchcraft after the late seventeenth century may be one of the best examples of the sort of epistemic shift Foucault documents in The Order of Things. ³

This review essay does not pretend to be a thoroughgoing rhetorical account of witchcraft, but rather a prolegomenon to such study, focusing on two recent books on witchcraft by scholars in American history and European cultural studies, respectively: Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, a new political explanation of the Salem witch trials of 1692, by a distinguished pioneer of women's social history, and Walter Stephens' Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief, a new explanation of early modern Europe's obsession with witches, by a scholar of Italian culture influenced by the "new historicism." Both books illustrate the potential importance of witchcraft as a topic for rhetorical study.

The Politics of Salem Witchcraft

Over three hundred years later, popular and scholarly interest in the Salem witch trials remains strong. In March 2003 CBS broadcast a two-part miniseries about the trials, starring Shirley MacLaine, Alan Bates, Peter Ustinov, and Kirstie...