In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem by Owen Davies
  • Alison Games
Owen Davies . America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 384. ISBN 978-0-19-957871-9.

Modern inhabitants of the United States are a people of belief—they believe, or so pollsters report, in a supreme being (90 percent), the Devil (70 percent), and angels (77 percent).1 Some 31 percent also believe in witches.2 General readers curious about the historical variety of witchcraft beliefs in the United States will find Owen Davies's book an interesting and useful starting point. In researching America Bewitched, Davies found hundreds of cases of witch beliefs over the past three centuries. His evidence speaks authoritatively to the deeprooted [End Page 222] nature of magical beliefs and practices. The witchcraft of Davies's book is primarily non-diabolic, comprising mostly the practices of maleficium that are pervasive in so many societies. America Bewitched is chock-full of interesting cases, involving an admirably wide range of participants—newly arrived immigrants, longtime inhabitants of European, African, and Amerindian descent, neighbors, strangers, men, and women. His cases also encompass the entire United States, from Appalachia to Alaska.

Davies provides an encyclopedic look at the range of witch beliefs in the territory that became the United States in the period after 1692, and the strengths and weaknesses of his work lie in this approach. Davies has pulled together an extraordinary array of reports about and cases of witchcraft, witch accusations, and witch beliefs. Drawing almost exclusively on published sources, Davies has made especially fruitful use of newspapers—deploying, I hope, good search engines to find this material, located in scores of local periodicals—and has also drawn effectively on folkloric sources. He organizes his material into seven thematic chapters: "Magic of a New Land," "The Law," "Witches," "Dealing with Witches," "Dealing with Witch Believers," "Insanity," and " Witch Killings Up Close." He concludes with an interesting chapter that reflects on witchcraft in the second half of the twentieth century, with the emergence of the Wicca movement and what we might call the taming or domestication of witchcraft, as seen, for example, in such U.S. television programs as Bewitched.

His extensive compilation of cases offers a salutary corrective to those who might flatter themselves that such beliefs and practices subsided by the nineteenth century. This, indeed, is his purpose: to demonstrate that witchcraft persisted after 1692. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about Salem suggested, Davies argues, that witchcraft ended there. "This book," Davies writes, "tears open the veil and reveals a very different story" (3). He tackles some interesting problems, including, for example, why some English colonies adopted the English 1604 Act Against Witchcraft and Conjuration in 1712 (South Carolina) and 1718 (Pennsylvania), dates that seem relatively late in terms of the actual prosecution of witches in British America. Davies does an especially good job recovering the fear and horror with which some U.S. inhabitants regarded witches and witchcraft in the past two centuries, sentiments that might seem alien to many in the era of Harry Potter; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Davies's study demonstrates why the United States is useful to examine through the perspective of witchcraft: his evidence illustrates how the diverse inhabitants of North America adapted and adopted the beliefs of others. Similar [End Page 223] histories of interwoven belief systems have been written for other jurisdictions, but Davies's is the first such study for the modern United States.3 Chapter 2, "Magic of a New Land," highlights this process of creative adaptation. Davies examines, for example, "witch balls," which were hairballs that witches could allegedly shoot or throw into animals and which had no precedent in Europe (32). Another interesting example concerns "plugging," which involved drilling a hole and inserting a plug to seal in sympathetic magic. Davies suspects that this practice reached the United States with German migrants, and that African Americans adopted the practice from them (111). Other beliefs, such as those in fairies, failed to cross the Atlantic as successfully (37). Davies also draws our attention to moments when ethnic differences...

pdf