A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution (review)

A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-century Witchcraft Prosecution by Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn. London: Routledge, 1997, 284 pp., $75.00 hardcover, $24.99 paper.

A Trial of Witches by Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn offers a freshly provocative and insightful case study of a 1662 witchcraft trial in which two women, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were eventually hanged for bewitching their neighbors in Lowestoft, England. The study carefully traces the course of the legal proceedings that occurred in Bury St. Edmunds against the two women, with the entire trial report included in the appendix. At the same time, the major participants in the legal proceedings are each in turn studied: first, the two accused women themselves; and then, the mixture of working-class and well-to-do accusers and their allegedly demonically tormented young daughters, foremost among them the Durrants, Pacys, Bockings, and Chandlers. More time, however, is devoted to the characters and roles of the powerful officials without whose involvement and consent the trial could not have proceeded: the expert witness, Sir Thomas Browne, and the main judiciary officials who presided over the case, most notably, Sir Matthew Hale and Sir John Keeling. All of their views, backgrounds, reputations, and general interactions with others are discussed in order to offer an understanding of how this could have happened at all, especially at a time when belief in witches was declining and in a country that was largely excluded from the panics that gripped the continent. That the tragedy did happen can be seen as doubly horrific because not only did two women lose their lives in the end, but also the trial set an influential precedent for the Salem witchcraft trials.

One of the main strengths of this work that makes it so compelling and refreshing to read for both academics and interested nonacademics is the compassionate stance of the authors for the victims of this witchcraft trial. All discussions are firmly grounded in a genuine horror and compassion for what happened to Amy Denny and Rose Cullender. Thus, though thoroughly engaged in the discussions of the political conflicts and the biographies and personalities of the people involved in the case, the authors never let their readers forget the terrible outcome of this particular trial. In short, they never allow discussions of a more philosophical nature to obscure the fact that two old women lost their lives because of particular individuals' beliefs and actions.

This compassionate stance is further enhanced by the authors' methodical and powerful analysis of the individuals who played a role in the proceedings. Other works on the witch persecutions often try to understand and explain why the terrible phenomena happened in terms of tensions between groups of people, for example, gender groups, economic classes, geographic areas, or different religious groups. Geis and Bunn's analysis of the Bury St. Edmunds trial, however, is different in that it seems to cut across many of these groupings by clearly focusing on the people involved in this case and trying to understand what caused certain individuals to act in such destructive and relatively uncharacteristic ways. The in-depth, thorough, and engaging character studies demonstrate that those involved in the case made very real choices that led to the hangings, breathing new life into the figures who were involved in the trial and, in turn, underscoring the terrible reality of the events. In this particular case, an odd combination of personalities led to the senseless death of two old women. In the case of the witchcraft trials as a whole, such combinations led to the deaths of thousands of people, mostly women.

Such specific attention to the key officials in the trial poignantly reminds the reader of each individual's ultimate responsibility in this particular tragedy. No philosophy, personal conviction, religious tenet, in fact, nothing can excuse the individual authorities whose arrogance and "wrong-minded self-righteousness" led to the irresponsible wielding of their power...