Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England by Orna Alyagon Darr (review)

This book asks several deceptively simple questions—how and why did English witchcraft cases work in law, how were those cases proved, and what were the rules that included and excluded particular kinds of evidence? The published examples which Darr uses, derived entirely from printed accounts, are not new, but their deployment with these questions in mind certainly is. She also surveys, in parallel with the cases, the background of contemporary discourses around witchcraft and legal proofs. The bulk of the study is a detailed analysis of the kinds of tests, proofs, and other evidentiary material that was taken seriously in courts, as well as the debates about their reliability.

This represents an interesting step in English witchcraft studies. Because of the paucity of legal documentation surviving in England from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of the early work on witchcraft either relied on published debates or examined the bald statistical data constructed from the outlines of cases and their results in the court records. The earliest interpretations of the 1960s and 1970s were heavily influenced by the British tradition of social anthropological studies. These had divided into two broad camps, one adopting social reductionism, analyzing the identities of witches in terms of kinship, gender, or other structural factors, while the other took a cultural and intellectual approach, deriving from Evans-Pritchard, which sought to explore witchcraft's ability to explain unfortunate events. For anthropologists using the first approach, witchcraft was seen to run through the fault lines of the social structure, old against young, mothers-in-law against daughters-in-law, and men in rivalries of all kinds, including political conflicts. It was this insight that Sir Keith Thomas suggested, and Alan Macfarlane put into practice, in their pioneering work, and was to some extent picked up by feminist analysis. The second approach, while it did not entirely ignore social structures, examined how witchcraft acted as a personal and cultural worldview, explanatory certainly, but also providing a program of personal action against magical damage. As this perspective was applied to early modern cultures, it became clear that the analysis of both educated and popular concepts and beliefs was required, as there were often considerable contrasts. Class inequalities and a dominant literate culture made early modern Europe very different from the societies studied by anthropologists, and witchcraft was difficult to "read."¹

The subsequent attempts to integrate what might be called the cultural background with the judicial statistics—in the approaches by Sharpe and Gaskill, for example—have greatly added to our knowledge of how accusations arose and were treated by the essentially local legal system, by magistrates particularly, in the first stages of making an accusation official, and in subsequent trials in the county assize courts or elsewhere before London judges. This has been a very powerful method in case studies such as Sharpe's account of the Anne Gunter case. At the same time, the European intellectual background was definitively explored by a number of scholars, notably Stuart Clark in his imaginatively titled Thinking with Demons.² Scholars have had to accept that there was a variety of ideas and practices even in the same country with regard to witchcraft. Darr's study takes as read that early English modern society possessed these diverse cultures of witchcraft, derived from different levels of education, varieties of local belief, and religious backgrounds. She explores what made people certain that misfortunes were due to witches, but is more concerned with what might be called practical public reason, one that could be deployed in terms of evidence and proof. So, while she acknowledges that people needed explanations for misfortune, she also points to the way that they needed a target for defensive action. When asserting the evildoing of a witch, the theories had to be argued in public among a diverse but structured collection of players in the community, the legal...