The Meaning of the Word “Witch”

During the past few decades, scholarly interest in the history of witchcraft beliefs, and especially of those associated with the early modern witch trials, has increased greatly. The resulting publications, however, have not manifested any consensus over the meaning of the words “witchcraft” or (indeed) “witch.” Some authors have used them to describe only harmful magic, some all kinds of magic, destructive and beneficial, and some have used them by turns to mean both, or accepted both while in practice privileging one. The argument of this article is that such confusion goes to the roots of the English language, in the Anglo-Saxon period. However, by the early modern period certainly, and before then possibly, use of these words was determined largely by a person’s place in the social order. All used the words pejoratively, but educated elites did so to describe magic in general, while the bulk of the population reserved them for malevolent magic. The article proceeds to explore the semantic fields thus created, through different genres, and the understanding of early modern cultural norms and tensions thus provided.