An Afterword

This afterword reflects on the four articles in this issue and the way, in scholarship as in early modern jurisprudence, witchcraft remains a crime apart. For scholars, witchcraft is so deeply rejectedas a cosmic reality that there is a point when studying any witchcraft narrative at which the scholar chooses to stop believing what is being said–something that creates a rift between the scholar and his subject that is more palpable here than in any other area of history. Yet this fine collection of essays serves to reinforce an awareness that the construction of credible narrative is crucial not only to the way in which cultures which dread witchcraft articulate and justify that dread, but in which professional scholars articulate and justify their own approaches to it; and that special difficulties attend both.