Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 ed. by Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec (review)

For many years, both in Europe and the United States, witchcraft and witch trials have been some of the most popular and imagination-stirring subjects of the studies of history, culture, and religion. The history of infamous Malleus Maleficarum, magical practices, the religiosity of lower strata of contemporary societies, and many other themes have fascinated anew generations of scholars. Their works include almost every region of Europe, such as Italy, France, Germany, northern Europe, or Poland. However, one part of Europe, the Muscovy/Russian Empire and the eastern part of today's Ukraine, is in this respect one of the least studied regions of the Old Continent. The reason for that is simple: the witch trial records known to us from this part of the continent are scarce and were inaccessible for many decades to western scholars in any other form than hard-to-reach manuscripts. This will change, I think, with the publication of a monumental sourcebook edited by Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec, Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900. It allows us to see dozens of examples of witchcraft and witch trials from the territories of Ukraine and Russia, each presented in English translation with extensive coverage that provides a great introduction to the topic, even for a person unfamiliar with the subject. Some of the records included in this book were published previously by other scholars; most of them, however, are presented to wider audiences for the first time.

Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine is not only important for those who are interested in witch trials in the Orthodox world, but also for all those who study the phenomenon of witchcraft practices, demonology, and witch trials in early modern Poland. In a recent review of Kateryna Dysa's Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia 17th-18th Centuries,¹ I stressed that we have very few archival sources about witch trials in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in fifteenth-eighteenth centuries in general, but especially scarce is information about witch trials which occurred in the eastern part of this vast country—in the lands that currently constitute the territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and most western oblasts of the Russian Federation. While Dysa's latest book serves well as a source of general information about witch trials in right-bank Ukraine (and to some degree: in left-bank Ukraine), its value as a collection of sources that can be quoted and further studied by religion and history scholars is severely limited. In this context, Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine appears as a natural and most welcome complement to Dysa's book.

The first two chapters of Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine in large part are devoted to the oldest source materials related to the theme of magic and witchcraft in Rus (except the last few pages of Chapter 2, most sources are dated between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries). Though very scarce, those archival materials form perhaps the most fascinating section of the whole book. It shows that witch trials were well known in Orthodox Rus long before the sixteenth century. In fact, a few examples presented by Kivelson and Worobec are centuries older than the oldest known to us, sources from western Poland, where, according to the theory of centers and peripheries², witch trials were supposed to occur first, incorporated from the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century.

In Chapter 3, the authors discuss the legal aspects of witch trials, as well as official guidelines for persecution of witches, which were applied and circulated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Muscovy/Russian Empire. This is a very strong presentation of the problem, but there is one reference to witches and witch trials in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that I do...