The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton (review)

Ronald Hutton’s The Witch is a thorough examination of not only early modern witchcraft belief, but also the traditions that surround it and the historiography that impacts how modern scholarship examines witchcraft trials. In one volume, Hutton walks his reader step-by-step through the history of Western witchcraft scholarship, rethinking the relationship between folklore, history, and anthropology, before finally applying this new-found knowledge to a case study of witchcraft trials in Britain. What would normally be an unwieldy amount of information is manipulated into a fascinating, readable, digestible book, one that I would recommend to anybody who is either starting out in any period of witchcraft studies, or who is simply interested in knowing more about witchcraft and magic in history.

The book is split into three sections. The first section addresses three different “contexts” of witchcraft: global, ancient, and “shamanistic.” These three chapters would form an excellent basis for classroom discussion. The first chapter focuses on witchcraft belief and folkloric tradition around the world, but especially outside of Eurocentric populations, and how they are studied by anthropologists. Here the author spends time discussing how historians and anthropologists can better share their methodologies; the bulk of the chapter, however, discusses the results of anthropological studies and what they tell us about non-European witchcraft belief. Five basic identifiers of the stereotypical witch are discussed, along with how they can be applied to different folkloric beliefs across the world; this definition provides a strong foundation for the rest of the volume.

The next chapter traces early witchcraft belief through Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, pointing out that while early modern scholars often acknowledge that the demonologists of the era obviously drew upon ancient texts, few modern scholars are eager to grapple with those ancient texts themselves. The third chapter is invaluable, and one that every student of witchcraft, or indeed any religious history student, should read: a treatise on the history of “shamanism.” Hutton points out that shamanism is an entirely Western construct. Its definitions were created by Western scholars and are “dependent in all its current public usages on the definitions that this scholarship has made of it” (p. 74). He traces the modern use of the word shamanism back to two scholars, Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian refugee who became one of the leading scholars in the history of religion. Hutton then discusses the influence these scholars had in defining all sorts of spiritual magic as “shamanism.” Scholars of Canadian Indigenous religious beliefs should pay particular attention to this chapter; the term “shaman” has been widely accepted as a term to describe Indigenous spiritual leaders, despite the term being so wholly rooted in Western scholarship.

The second section discusses the evolution of not only continental European witchcraft belief but of historiographical practice in early modern witchcraft studies. In a strong book overall, this section is the volume’s biggest achievement. While illustrating how witchcraft belief from ancient Egypt and Rome could be traced through to Europe in the Middle Ages by using concrete examples, such as an olive oil lamp used in a spell in England (p. 111), the most interesting aspect is the discussion of how certain historiographical beliefs came to be spread throughout the scholarship simply because scholars believed them to be accurate. There are many examples used by Hutton, but two illustrate the point. The first is the case of German night sabbaths. Hutton discusses how early German scholars believed “night sabbaths” were an expression of the continuation of early pagan beliefs, and witchcraft trials were the suppression of these pagan rituals. This assumption continued for most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, until they finally realized that assumption was wrong—setting the discipline back to square one (pp. 120–123). The other fantastic example of Hutton’s exemplary historiography is the case of “the Wild...