Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England by Charlotte-Rose Millar (review)

Charlotte-Rose Millar has published a number of articles and essays that have established her as a growing presence in early modern English witchcraft studies. In this book she develops her ideas and interpretations into a full-blown monograph which offers an original and in most respects effective reappraisal of early modern English witchcraft, derived mainly from her exhaustive study of witch trial pamphlets. Other scholars (notably Barbara Rosen and Marion Gibson) have worked on these materials, but their focus has largely been on the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Millar covers the full chronological range covered by the sixty-six witch trial pamphlets which survive from early modern England, ranging from 1566 to 1712. The main objective of her arguments is to develop and confirm a tendency, originating on a scholarly level from the 1990s, which questions the well established idea, expressed by Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, and earlier writers, that the central issue in English witchcraft was maleficium, and that the satanic elements that were identified as being typical of “continental” witchcraft were largely absent in England.

Millar’s close reading of the pamphlets that are her main source allows her to attain this objective admirably. After an introduction which raises the possibility of rethinking English witchcraft, Millar approaches her topic through five chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of her project. In the first, she examines the role of and images of the Devil in early modern England, engaging in particular with the work of Nathan Johnstone and Darren Oldridge. Overall, Millar finds varying concepts of the Devil emerging from the pamphlets. There are strong elements of the post–Reformation recasting of the Devil, admirably set out by Johnstone, as an omnipresent force for evil and an avid tempter of the unwary Christian, although likewise there are elements of the Devil’s older image of a trickster who can be thwarted. Nevertheless, one must agree with Millar’s overall conclusion that there was a strong and continuing belief in the Devil which survived into the eighteenth century even as the number of witch trials declined. Likewise, the chapter on the witch’s familiar, on one level a small, personal devil, has perforce to encounter considerable complexities. Millar’s main objective, however, is to offer a systematic examination of the familiar’s demonic characteristics, and this is accomplished very effectively, with Millar also noting that the concept of the familiar remained basically stable over the century and a half covered by the witch trials. In common with all other historians who have approached the topic, Millar is unable to pin down the origins of the English familiar, although her argument that the concept emerged from popular beliefs rather than those of theologians is one that needs to be taken seriously.

The three following chapters explore more uncharted topics. Millar has been involved with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and deploys this experience to good effect in her third chapter, “Anger, Malice and Emotional Control.” She analyses how emotions “work” in the context of witchcraft pamphlets, focussing on how the roles of witches, victims, witnesses, and, indeed, the pamphleteers themselves were combined to create a literary genre which presented witchcraft as a crime very much enmeshed with strong emotions. Thus through these pamphlets we can achieve an understanding of the various emotional motors which were believed to drive interactions between witches and their accusers and supposed victims, and also between the witch as presented in the pamphlet and the pamphlet’s reader. The following chapter, entitled a little coyly “Sleeping with Devils” (much of the activity described took place outside the bedroom), is concerned with an issue which has so far received little attention from historians of...