Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland by Andrew Sneddon (review)

Ireland looms large in modern witchcraft traditions, but has received little scholarly attention in witchcraft studies, in part because it saw relatively few trials. Andrew Sneddon's Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland fills in some important gaps in our understanding of witchcraft beliefs and trials since the sixteenth century. Its most important contributions lie in its careful consideration of varying attitudes towards witchcraft and its prosecution among Ireland's three main religious denominations, Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian.

Sneddon here builds on his previous studies of Bishop Francis Hutchinson, "the only eighteenth-century English witchcraft sceptic living in Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s," and the 1711 Islandmagee trial, which his 2013 book title proclaims "Ireland's only Mass Witchcraft Trial" (106). He skillfully argues that English and Scottish settlers brought their home countries' witchcraft beliefs with them to Ireland and deeply feared malefic witchcraft until the mid-eighteenth century, by which time Protestants had come to regard themselves as "polite, rational, and enlightened" and witchcraft allegations as "self-evidently irrational and ridiculous" (123), something they imputed more to ignorant and superstitious Catholics. Yet, as Sneddon and others note, Ireland's Catholics were far less likely to accuse people of witchcraft than were its Protestants. Sneddon explains this as arising from Irish Catholics' "more benign, culturally-specific witch figure [who] was not threatening enough to warrant legal proceedings" (146). They saw witches primarily as butter-thieves who "were easily combatted by religious, magical, or ritualistic means, and consequently they posed a minimal economic and social threat to their communities" (54). In addition, fairy beliefs offered Irish Catholics a more compelling explanation for mysterious misfortune than did witchcraft allegations.

Both Catholics and Protestants, however, continued to believe in the power of "cunning-folk," magical practitioners who could heal and help counter supernatural afflictions of people and property, especially crops and animals, and Sneddon ably integrates attitudes toward and allegations against such individuals into his analysis. He also diligently considers scholarship on witchcraft in Ireland since the sixteenth century, especially works by St. John Seymour, Raymond Gillespie, Ronald Hutton, and Elwyn Lapoint, and carefully contextualizes Irish developments with those occurring in England and Scotland.

Yet, while Sneddon's Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland fills some significant gaps, it also creates new ones, especially if it becomes the standard study of the subject, as it has the potential to do. His title should include the qualifier, "from the sixteenth to the twentieth century." His discussion of medieval evidence is preliminary at best, and all of his chapter titles rightly specify that they explore either early modern or modern Ireland. His treatment of the 1324 Kilkenny trial of Alice Kyteler and her alleged accomplices is breathtaking in its brevity, consisting mainly of four sentences, two of which contain inaccuracies (Alice had eleven, not ten, alleged accomplices, and we know only that she escaped from Kilkenny, not that she fled to England, as Sneddon asserts) (16). Tried by the English-born, French-trained, Franciscan bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede, who was handpicked out of obscurity for the office by Pope John XXII, the case plays a pivotal role in European prosecution of witchcraft, marking the dawn of the devil-worshipping witch. Consequently, it regularly features in general studies of European witch trials, yet Sneddon, who focuses specifically on witchcraft in Ireland, scarcely considers it. He briefly mentions it at two other points, once to note that Seymour included it in his 1913 Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (71), and again to note that in 1781 Hibernian Magazine proclaimed it "a frightful picture of the effects of superstition and ecclesiastical tyranny" (112). Sneddon's index omits the Kyteler case in its references to Irish witch trials (221), and his overall neglect of the case results in significant misrepresentations, such as claiming William Sellor as "the only male formally prosecuted for witchcraft in Ireland" (90), though four of Alice...