Introduction

This special issue of Preternature, "Capturing Witches," comes out of a three-day international conference held at Lancaster University on August 17-19, 2012, to commemorate the lives of the ten people convicted of witchcraft at the Lancaster Witch Trials and executed on Lancaster Moor on Thursday, August 20, 1612: Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock, Alison Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Katherine Hewitt, Alice Nutter, Anne Redferne, Isabel Robey, and Anne Whittle.¹ The "capture" and hanging of ten Lancashire witches at one go was, as James Sharpe claims, a remarkable phenomenon since "nothing in the experience of witch trials in England before 1612" had prepared either the Lancashire population or the literate public for the Lancaster Trial and Thomas Potts's attempt to capture the proceedings in his published account.² Four hundred years later, the 2012 anniversary saw a range of activities, including a new edition of Potts's record of the trial; the publication of fictional rewritings including Livi Michael's Malkin Child (2012), Jeanette Winterson's novella The Daylight Gate (2012), and Blake Morrison's A Discoverie of Witches (2012); the broadcast of television documentaries; and the inscription of the date 2012 in huge white letters on the side of Pendle Hill for an assembly of t wenty-first-century witches and tourists on August 19, 2012.³ Although the digital forms of transmission in 2012 were new, the circulation of stories and publicity generated by the 1612 trial dates back to the seventeenth century. Indeed, a second Lancashire Witch Trial in 1634 was inaugurated by the testimony of one Edmund Robinson, who later confessed that "he had heard neighbors talk of a witch feast that was kept at Mocking Tower [Malkin Tower] in Pendle Forest about twenty years since and thereupon he framed those tales concerning the persons aforesaid."⁴ Robinson's stories of sabbat meetings and maleficium, used to capture a second generation of witches, were subsequently dramatized in Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's 1634 play The Late Lancashire Witches, which was staged in Lancaster Castle as part of the conference Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images 400 Years After the Lancashire Witches.⁵ The conference took the historical events of 1612 as a starting point to consider how critical and creative responses to the figure of the witch, from the seventeenth century through to the present, are inevitably engaged in the politics of representation, just as much as Potts's original attempt to "capture" what he witnessed. The most tangible example of witchcraft's political immediacy at the conference was the presence of the charitable organization Stepping Stones Nigeria, dedicated to protecting an increasing number of children in the Niger Delta who are accused of being witches with the power to cause diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, typhoid, and cancer), material poverty, and social breakdown in the family and community. The types of maleficium attributed to child witches in Nigeria sound chillingly close to those leveled against the Lancashire witches in the seventeenth century; conference delegates commented on how Stepping Stones raised awareness of witchcraft and the politics of representation as "live" issues.⁶

The articles collected here take up the central question of "Capturing Witches" by means of word, image, and song, and examine it as a live issue in both historical and transhistorical forms. Our introduction begins by referring back to iconic biblical and classical figures whose legacy can be seen across the centuries, in order to provide a context for introducing the questions of representation addressed by each of our contributors. Chronologically, the articles cover material from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, starting with Yvonne Owens's account of the conflation of Jews and witches as marginalized "others" in images by Hans Baldung Grien in sixteenth-century Germany. Articles by Diane Purkiss, Meg Pearson, and Eleanor Rycroft focus on early seventeenth-century England and the Lancashire Trials, while the piece by Marcus Harmes outlines a wider context for the trials by tracing the competing accounts of witchcraft in clerical and legal discourses in Jacobean England. The ways that twenty-first-century digital technologies can be...