The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (review)

310 Reviews for any of his biographies he resorted to invention and that he was intent on holding the interest of his audience. Sometimes an excursus is developed from an etymological explanation or from a passage of scripture. However, Pizarro concentrates his study on the secular stories and traces the reshaping of the narratives, addressing only occasionally the strong scriptural flavour of most of Agnellus' writing. While still very selective in the passages chosen for analysis, this book is a more detailed and consequently more successful working through of the literary approach which Pizarro adopted in his earlier A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Ear Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989). Such a useful and valid analysis should be appreciated by a wider audience once the n e w critical edition and translation by Deborah Deliyannis appears in the series Oxford Medieval Texts. Ann Moffatt Department ofArt History Australian National University Purkiss, Diane, The Witch in History: Early Modern and TwentiethCentury Representations, London and N e w York, Routledge, 1996; paper; pp. viii, 296; R.R.P. unknown. In recent years important books on European witchcraft have been published in English by Jim Sharpe, Robin Briggs, Wolfgang Behringer and Stuart Clark. This book by Diane Purkiss is another testimony to the vibrancy of this field, even if it does not quite offer the broad historical sweep and integration which thetitlemight lead the reader to expect. But it is an important book which offers rich and n e w ways of exploring Early Modern witchcraft through Reviews 311 detailed analyses of the stories which witches told and of the texts which re-shaped and appropriated those stories for other ends. Purkiss is not interested in what she (curiously) calls the 'truth' about witchcraft—how witchcraft persecutions originated and ceased, w h y and what particular social groups were targeted for persecution, and so on. She is concerned to unravel the different energies which particular groups, including the accused village women themselves, invested in their stories. The emphasis is not quite as novel as Purkiss sometimes suggests. What is novel is the range and type of investments in witchcraft explored and the manner in which they are linked to the forging of identities. The three loosely connected sections of the book are typified by an understanding of the witch as a 'created myth', neither single or fixed, but multivalent, highly unstable, a site of conflict and contestation between diverse groups. Part O n e focusses on what historians generally call historiography. Purkiss explores h o w the understandings of witchcraft put forward by radical feminists, modern day witches and academic historians are critical to their self identities. She examines the underlying interests supporting a myth of the burning times on the part of some feminists, a supposed ancient lineage stretching back to the early pagans on the part of modern day witches, and an obsession with the origins of witch persecution and the credulity of witchcraft beliefs on the part of academic historians. Purkiss' observations are razor sharp and attimesquite trenchant, not least those on the practices and justifications of historians. But as a critique of academic history-making—of the profession's slowness to consider gender and its avoidance of serious engagement with witch-beliefs—the chapter is ultimately disappointing. O n e difficulty is that the critique is supposedly limited to English witchcraft studies, while m a n y of its claims 312 Reviews suggest more universal significance. This is also aggravated by the failure to contextualise the critique within thefieldof Early M o d e m English historiography. Given that Purkiss' argument is so strongly linked to the inadequacy of consideration of the supernatural and the dislike of popular culture by academic historians, some attention to the English historiography of the Reformation and of Early Modern popular culture would have been necessary. It could help explain the shaping of a culture in which 'it is very hard to make ourselves take early modern fears seriously enough, to imagine a world drenched in the supernatural' (p. 62); and whether the same difficulties exist for those in other cultural traditions. Purkiss' critique of the three approaches to Early M o...