The Winnowing of White Witchcraft by Edward Poeton (review)

This short treatise was written in the 1630s by Edward Poeton, a Sussex physician. It was probably intended for publication, but was never published at the time. The manuscript, in the British Library, has been discussed in scholarship before—Keith Thomas mentioned it in Religion and the Decline of Magic—but this is its first full appearance in print. It has been ably edited by Simon Davies.

The Protestant genre of anti-superstition writings included a number of semi-popular works against beneficial magic. Magical practitioners in England were often called "cunning folk." More rarely we find terms like "good witches" (William Perkins) or, here, "white witches." The attack on magical practitioners was usually combined with an attack on actual witchcraft, or an attack on other sins, but in this treatise Poeton, unusually, concentrates solely on the popular healers. Or at least he purports to do so; in practice he sometimes strays from his professed target.

The treatise takes the form of a dialogue with three characters: a divine called "Dr Dreadnought," a physician called "Phylomathes," and a villager called "Gregory Groshead." The separate voices of the two learned characters, as they try to persuade Gregory that beneficial "white witches" are really in league with the Devil, provide much of the interest. Gregory himself speaks in dialect, a remarkable literary feature of the treatise. The divine and physician are firm with him and often patronizing, but always patient and courteous.

While the learned speakers purport to address their speeches to Gregory, they often seem uninterested in his presence. They use pompous and obscure words like "dehorts" (counsels against) or "sublunary," and are addicted to alliteration. They fail to engage with some of Gregory's arguments, and sometimes drift away from the point. They bury him under long lists of biblical citations which, they assure him, prove that he is wrong—but the impartial reader today may well feel that many of these citations (helpfully catalogued in the index) are irrelevant. Poeton's main argument is driven by just two biblical passages: Deuteronomy 18:10–12 (the prohibition on divination, charming, and necromancy) and 2 Corinthians 11:14 (against false apostles, "for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light"). The Bible was inspirational to learned Protestants, but difficult to use as a pastoral manual. Davies observes in his introduction that Poeton, as a physician, was less adept at this pastoral task than George Gifford, one of the best-known English writers in the genre.

Perhaps as a result of this ineptitude, Gregory proves hard to persuade. After a while, the divine and physician think that they have won him over, but he comes back with "Mee thinks still, that zuch vokes as doo no harme, shud not bee witches" (34). One can almost hear the learned speakers sighing as they realize that he has still not got the point.

Gregory makes his own best point with the aid of his own rudimentary knowledge of the Bible: "If these good vokes wor witches, az you wood zeem to make um, than the wood nere [i.e. they would never] speak zo much agenst witches az the doo: noe nor the wood nere tell there vrends whoo hurt um: vor in zo dooing (in my zimple understanding) Zatans kingdome shud bee devided" (26, in which Gregory has in mind Mark 3:23–24). But of course the learned characters have an answer to this, or they say that they have.

As is common in this genre, there are taxonomies of different types of magical practitioners and their practices (principally 29–33). As Davies points out, Poeton lifted part of this section from a general reference work, the Treasurie of Ancient and Modern Times (1613), rather than from specialist academic sources.

Poeton's most distinctive contribution to the genre is a medical one. His medical character, Phylomathes, is qualified...