Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions (review)

This volume is the third in a series deriving from a conference held in Budapest in 1999. While the first volume focused on communication with spirits and spirit possession, and the second examined the place of demons and spirits in learned demonology and common belief (see reviews in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1.2 [2006]: 257–60; 3.1 [2008]: 99–101), this volume deals directly with the topic of witchcraft, which the editors identify as "the most central theme of our conference" (p. 1). As in the previous volumes, most of the articles collected here focus on the early modern period, with brief forays back into the Middle Ages (and in one case into deep antiquity), along with some more extended considerations of the continuation of witchcraft beliefs into modern times. The authors approach their topics from the disciplines of history, anthropology, and ethnography. Again as with the previous volumes, some articles are inevitably stronger than others. Some are quite short and tentative in their conclusions, seeming not to have been expanded much, if at all, from the conference papers that were their origin. A number of articles are very worthwhile, however, and as a whole this volume shares the strength with its earlier companions of including a large number of articles that focus on eastern European lands, which are typically relegated to the periphery of European witchcraft studies.

The editors have divided the articles in this volume into three sections. The first, "Mythologies," deals mainly with the concept of the witches' sabbath, and is the most thematically coherent. The second, "Legal Mechanisms, Social Contexts," is more hodgepodge, with articles focusing in various ways on the operations of witch trials and the conditions behind them in diverse places and periods. The third section, on "Witchcraft and Folklore," also covers fairly wide ground, but the articles here are unified at least by a common methodological problem: how does one (and need one) identify and work specifically with traces of folkloric beliefs embedded in records of witch trials and testimonies of witchcraft?

The first section begins with an article by Martine Ostorero summarizing the research that went into the 1999 volume L'imaginaire du sabbat, not yet published at the time of the original Budapest conference. L'imaginaire du sabbat edited and analyzed all the major early witchcraft sources composed in the 1430s. Although the volume itself is now available, a summary in English of its important conclusions is valuable. Next in this section is the record of a roundtable discussion in which four scholars addressed Carlo Ginzburg's provocative work on the origins and nature of the sabbath, with Ginzburg responding. This is followed by an excellent piece by Gábor Klaniczay in which he carefully parses the connections between spiritual visions and witchcraft. At one level, of course, visionary experience has nothing to do with the practice of maleficium, yet ideas of witchcraft often contain elements of visionary experience, nowhere more so than in the concept of the sabbath, generally held to be illusory by authorities. Klaniczay brings a number of key issues to the surface of these troubled waters.

In a particularly interesting article in the next section, Polina Melik Simonian contrasts Russian witch hunts with their Western counterparts. She concludes that both Western and Eastern trials focused on "marginal" people. While in the West, however, such marginal people tended to come from within given communities, in Muscovy, foreigners—non-Russian and non-Eastern-Orthodox—figured significantly in witchcraft accusations. Thus witchcraft functioned as an aspect of Muscovite "xenophobia."

The articles in the final section focus on folklore as the basis of many elements of witchcraft beliefs, but they do not fall into the trap of attempting to distinguish too sharply between "learned" and "popular" conceptions. Ülo Valk, for example, in his examination of Estonian trial records, which he mines as a source of folkloric beliefs, carefully delineates the...