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

This book examines sixty-six extant witchcraft pamphlets in order to re-examine the role of the devil in beliefs around early modern English witchcraft. In addition, Charlotte-Rose Millar's monograph also emphasizes the relationship between witchcraft and emotion. Importantly, this book challenges previous understandings of English witchcraft as a 'predominantly non-diabolical crime' (pp. 2–3). It also investigates the collaborative nature of early modern witchcraft, which has, Millar claims, been overlooked in secondary literature that tends to represent witchcraft as a solitary or individual activity.

The monograph comprises five chapters: the first investigates the role of the devil in early modern England; Chapter 2 focuses on the complex and critical figure of the familiar; Chapter 3 turns its attention to how witchcraft and the devil provided a means for witches to act on their emotions; Chapter 4 explores the sexual nature of the relationship between a witch, familiars, and the devil; and the final chapter asserts the collaborative nature of early modern English witchcraft and offers suggested links between witchcraft, Catholicism, and Quakerism. In addition, the book includes fascinating images from the pamphlets and a useful chronological appendix of all sixty-six pamphlets.

The pamphlets are interwoven deftly throughout, although the book does not progress through its analysis of the pamphlets in an explicitly chronological fashion and this at times can feel slightly disorienting—although Millar does repeatedly offer context for the pamphlets discussed in detail. At various points I felt it would have been useful and interesting to incorporate further analysis of the narrative voices of the pamphleteers, the rhetoric employed, and the relationship between fiction and reality. For a reader not well-versed in pamphlet literature, extended discussion of the origins of the narratives (mentioned briefly at pp. 71, 132–33), critical analysis of authorship (where known), discussion of the sources of information (briefly speculated on p. 133), publication processes, and readership would have enhanced my understanding of the pamphlets and the public construction of early modern English witchcraft. Millar acknowledges that witches' confessions 'could be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by pamphleteers, judges, examiners, and clerks' (p. 104). More attention to this could have in particular enhanced discussion of the representation of gendered emotion as evidenced in the pamphlets.

The book clearly makes a case for the diabolical nature of early modern English witchcraft, so much so that occasionally it felt this point had been so well established that the book could move to further discussions. The 'understudied' (p. 48) figure of the familiar is illuminated thoroughly and European and English understandings of witchcraft are clearly articulated. Chapter 3's discussion of anger as 'a strong motif throughout witchcraft narratives' (p. 88) is less developed. Millar connects the decline of revenge narratives in witchcraft pamphlets with the decline of revenge tragedy in the seventeenth century (p. 87); discussion of the relationship between early modern drama and literature and witchcraft pamphlets might have been further expanded. This chapter also explores how the display of anger is not only gender-based but also 'class-based' (p. 90), and identifies that witches tend to be 'emotionally vulnerable' (p. 90). Chapter 4's discussion of the erotic nature of witch–devil relationships makes an important argument for the reinterpretation of the 1640s' pamphlets as offering evidence not of an 'aberration' but an 'intensification of ideas that were already circulating' (p. 137). This chapter offers a discussion not only of witchcraft and sex but of broader attitudes to sex and sexual practices in the period (p. 124). The final chapter situates the pamphlets within the major socioreligious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, broadly aligning social anxieties about witchcraft with Catholicism and Quakerism.

This monograph will be of value to those interested in early modern English witchcraft and the history of the emotions, specifically in terms of gender and emotion. It offers an invaluable appendix of pamphlets...