Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 (review)

To the commoners, legalists, theologians, magistrates, and theater professionals of early modern England and its American colonies, witchcraft presented a compelling epistemological puzzle. Today’s cultural and literary historians, in turn, are bent on unraveling the multilayered and often contradictory solutions to this puzzle offered by the early moderns. At issue—then as now—are the distinction between illusion and reality, determining the agency of supernatural acts, establishing and evaluating the authorship of witchcraft narratives. In Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750, Marion Gibson revisits these issues for the third time since the publication of her astute study of the discordant rhetorical goals in the creation, recording, and transmission of early modern stories about witchcraft, Reading Witchcraft (1999). Like its immediate predecessor, Gibson’s pamphlet collection Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (2000), her latest book offers a valuable and usefully annotated collection of primary sources on English witchcraft—a good number of them made available for the first time to modern readers. The engaging introductions to the texts map out intertextual connections among the documents, introduce relevant historical and literary contexts, and provide useful insight into the documents’ representative value. While Gibson’s Early Modern Witches interrogates, in a tightly focused fashion, the makings and rhetorical purposes of the genre of the docu-fictional witchcraft pamphlet that flourished during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Witchcraft and Society in England and America is much more ambitious in its scope. It includes excerpts and some full texts of legal acts, court documents and observers’ records, docu-fictional pamphlets, polemical theological treatises, plays, and poetry illustrating the dynamics and interpretive breadth of witchcraft beliefs in Old and New England over two centuries.

Organizing this rich material presents a significant challenge. Gibson has opted for a typological and roughly chronological arrangement of the texts, devoting the opening four chapters to the representations of witchcraft (maleficium) in several key discursive domains, then focusing subsequent chapters on representations of, respectively, demonic possession, learned magic, and “supernatural” trickery and cozening, and finishing the book with a chapter on the records of the dramatic upheaval of witchcraft persecution in colonial New England, and a final chapter on the discursive dilution of witchcraft in the eighteenth century. While the material chosen for each of the chapters is tightly focused, there is considerable tension between the typological structure of the collection and the emphasis placed throughout on agency, authorship, and the rhetorical uses of witchcraft narratives. The result is a certain disproportion in the length and complexity of the chapters. This could have been avoided had the collection opened with a section on the representations of witches, conjurors, and cozening wise men and women in legal discourse, followed by a second section representing these groups in docu-fictional narratives by the observers of their acts, a third section on these agents of the supernatural as represented in theological polemic, and a final section on their literary representations.

The most elaborate section in Gibson’s collection is certainly the one on witchcraft. It begins by illustrating, in Chapter 1, the transmutations of this concept in the legislative discourse from Henry VIII’s Act of 1541–42, which first defined it as a felony, through the refashioning of witchcraft as fraud in George II’s Act of 1735. A valuable asset of this chapter is the selection of pretrial and trial manuscript documents from cases brought by the notorious Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General. The skillfully interwoven editorial narrative here underscores the shaping and fracturing of information during the investigation and trial under the pressures of the question-and-answer format, the transfer from the oral to the written sphere, and the transmission of fragile accounts. Throughout the opening chapter, Gibson raises important questions about the power dynamics in the authorship of these legal texts, underscoring personal and political influences on the texts’ authors and transcribers. Focusing on courtroom experiences documented by observers of the witchcraft trials...