Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736-1951 (review)

Owen Davies had an excellent idea. He noticed that almost all the historical studies of witchcraft and magic in England and Wales concluded at the latest with the passage of the Statute of 1736, which outlawed prosecutions of witchcraft, as if the idea and practice of magic and the fear of witches had simply withered beneath the Enlightened sun. Once he began digging around in newspapers and legal records (with special attention to Somerset), however, he found that popular fears and practices did not die off so easily, even though British courts no longer offered the community much relief. He ended his investigation with 1951, the year when the Fraudulent Mediums Act finally eliminated the concept of witchcraft from the statute books. With exemplary energy and imagination, Davies has uncovered vast patches of continuing “superstition” and magical practice, down into the twentieth century. And he has noted that the fear of harmful witchcraft survived into our time as well, prompting a continuing series of assaults and outrages. In five well-documented chapters, he studies the shifting attitudes of the educated toward witchcraft and magic; the continuation or rise of popular action against suspected witches (“witch-mobbing”) as official prosecutions waned; the ways in which popular literacy and literature kept certain elements of traditional diabolism and magic alive in folklore down into the nineteenth century; the survival of the witch both as a feared figure and as a social reality; and finally, the continuation of various sorts of occult practitioners, such as fortune tellers, right down to today. Over and over, Davies proves that most historians have been much too ready to assume that growing literacy and modernization undercut the social and intellectual bases for magical beliefs. Instead, from his evidence it appears that occult practitioners flourished even in the cities that should have theoretically made their survival difficult. Literacy, far from simply promoting popular enlightenment, actually spread certain ideas of the devil, of demonic possession, and of magic. In all of these details, Davies eschews the tempting pleasure of merely overturning the conclusions of his predecessors; instead he asks repeatedly what the social structure of continued magical beliefs was, where certain ideas and practices survived, what we can learn of different ideas of privacy (and of insults to privacy) from accusations of witchcraft, and finally, why witchcraft lost its cogency by the mid-twentieth century. In a concluding chapter Davies reflects on why witches disappeared among people who continued to believe in witchcraft. His work bears useful comparison with the recent studies from the Continent by Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1987); Willem de Blécourt, Termen van toverij: de veranderende betekenis van toverij. Noordoost-Nederland tussen de zestiende en twintigste eeuw (Nijmegen: SUN, 1990); and Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Such works are usefully undermining the once-common assumption that we live in a modem world totally different from the early modem.

The one major subject that Davies leaves virtually untouched is the rise of neo-pagan witchcraft in the twentieth century, deferring to Ronald Hutton, whose excellent book (The Triumph of the Moon. A History of Modem Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford University Press, 1999) has just appeared. The oddity of this omission is, however, that it masks the extent to which magical beliefs have in fact survived and continue to flourish in our own day. While Davies is right to emphasize just how long the figure of the witch has haunted the fearful imaginations of the British, he almost falls into the very trap he describes so well. Instead of trying to figure out why magic and witchcraft finally died out, a better question might be how and why it has recently shifted social location from the remotest rural areas to the middle classes. And instead of retaining cogency as...