Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, and: Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (review)

The continuation, and continued development, of magical beliefs and various forms of witchcraft and countermagic in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has become an increasingly important topic for scholars. Ever since the resurgence of European witchcraft studies in the 1970s with, among other landmark publication, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, tremendous attention has focused on the (mainly) sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch hunts. As Thomas’s title indicates, the need to explain the decline of magical beliefs and the transformation of Europe from a witch-hunting society into a putatively “disenchanted” one was always part of this scholarly project. Yet the important question of decline (and continuation) received significantly less attention than the horrors of the hunts themselves. For some time it seemed adequate to assume that belief in witches receded as governments decriminalized the act of witchcraft. We now know that picture is highly inaccurate. Prosecution of witches in most regions of Europe declined almost to nothing decades before law codes were changed to eliminate witchcraft as a crime, and belief in witchcraft and other “popular” magical practices continued among large segments of Europe’s population for centuries afterward.

The two volumes under review here represent the (early) coming of age of the study of European magic and witchcraft after the witch hunts. Certainly, some works preceded these. Already in 1999 appeared the volumes of Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark’s Witchcraft and Magic in Europe covering the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. That same year, one of the editors here, Owen Davies, published his groundbreaking Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture 1736–1951. In 1992 Martin Pott had already published an important study of superstition in the early German Enlightenment. Yet by bringing together essays from numerous scholars (twenty-one different contributors across the two volumes), these collections provide an important cross-section of this young field. Bound together mainly by chronology—the first volume treats the long eighteenth century of the Enlightenment, while the second concentrates on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the essays gathered here nevertheless often speak to one another in terms of underlying concerns. They provide a valuable, although inevitably not exhaustive, overview of the sort of questions scholars in this field are posing and at least the preliminary answers toward which they are moving.

Rather than discuss, all too briefly, each of the articles contained in these volumes, I will instead treat them as unified books, drawing out some of the major themes they develop and questions they raise. The editors have made this task easier, particularly for the Enlightenment volume, where they use their introduction to focus attention on what they see as three broad themes evident throughout the articles. The first of these concerns authorities’ shifting condemnation of “folk magic” from demonic menace to fraudulent crime. The second concerns intellectual elites’ continued interest in demonic or spiritual activity in the world. The third entails attention to the growing importance of printing and the written word in what had previously been a much more exclusively oral culture of folk belief and practice.

The first focus is obvious and unavoidable. Despite the volume’s overall intent of demonstrating the continued prevalence of magical beliefs and practices throughout the period of the Enlightenment, no study can escape the fact that this era witnessed a major refocusing of concern about magic among educated intellectual elites. Whereas previously ruling elites had accepted the reality of witchcraft as a terrible demonic threat, they now dismissed claims to magical power as foolish superstition. The only social danger that claims of witchcraft now carried was that they might further delude the credulous populace. Charges against supposed witches, or more often against magical healers and cunning folk, now asserted that they committed...