The Witch in the Western Imagination by Lyndal Roper (review)

In this slim book, just 177 pages of text, Lyndal Roper goes after some very big game. She boldly rejects “the linguistic turn” as “an explanatory dead end,” and presents her own iconographic and psychological approach as an alternative (8, 87). Her goal is to answer the central question about the early modern witch hunts: why early modern Europeans persecuted with “extraordinary viciousness … apparently harmless individuals, old women, or even children,” sending tens of thousands of them to the stake (1).

Roper rejects “discourse analysis” because analyzing “texts as systems of signs” and approaching “witchcraft as a totalizing discourse … of inversions,” leads “to predictable results” and therefore has “ceased to generate new knowledge” (8). Furthermore, it cannot “explain the hold that witchcraft had on fantasy, why it” was “so compelling to early modern Europeans.” The “linguistic turn” has “limited and distorted our understanding,” and, furthermore, it is unable to account for “how language and ideas lead to action” or “why some discourses should prove particularly powerful at certain historical moments and not at others” (8, 87).

Roper’s alternative is the psychoanalytically informed version of the history of the emotions she pioneered in her earlier works Oedipus and the Devil (1994) and Witch Craze (2004), here enriched by the interpretation of visual images and, to a lesser extent, literary styles. Focusing on “the emotional power of imagery,” she looks for insight into the “unconscious fears, dreams, and fantasies that moved” early moderns, “why the witch could arouse such intense emotion, and … be used in such contradictory ways” (14, 11). By exploring “the diverse and contradictory nature of culture, its repressions and elisions, and the conflicts to which it gave expression,” she seeks to uncover of how “emotions can cause social action” in general, and the emotional “dynamics of the witch hunt” in particular (10, 116).

Given the independent origins of most of the chapters in this book—five of the seven were published previously as articles—it does not present a closely reasoned, comprehensive study. Rather, it contains a series of discrete explorations of topics related to her thesis. Nevertheless, there is a conceptual arc to the succession of chapters. The first three center on the role of the Northern Renaissance’s adoption of classical themes and images in the genesis of the witch figure, and emphasize the complex, even ambivalent attitudes depictions of witches manifested. In the fourth chapter Roper lays out her primary thesis that witchcraft centered on envy: the witch’s envy, in the minds of the witch-hunters; the persecutors’ unconscious envy that they projected onto her, in Roper’s view. The last three chapters turn to the later phases of the persecutions and themes related to their decline: one juxtaposes an eighteenth century trial and a contemporary dramatist’s depictions of village society; another focuses on child-centered trials, most of which occurred in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring what they reveal about early modern children’s inner lives; and the last discusses a young man’s pact with the Devil in connection with a similar story analyzed by Freud in order to highlight the potential as well as the limitations of psychoanalytically informed history.

The first and last three chapters all present interesting and important insights into the iconography and literary depictions of witchcraft, the variability of meanings and feelings attached to the witch figure, the importance of the revived Classical heritage, changing attitudes toward witchcraft over time, and the role of the Devil in early moderns’ conceptualizations of anger, rebelliousness, and wrongdoing. Roper’s insistence on the primary importance of envy in the middle chapter, however, is less satisfactory. To begin with, while she makes a compelling case that there was a strong connection between envy and witchcraft in both demonology and iconography at the time, her discussion becomes mono-causal and ultimately reductionist: “the witch, after all, is an embodiment of an emotion: envy” (91). She slights other emotions related to witchcraft...