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  • Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings
  • Michael D. Bailey
Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings. By P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. (New York: Continuum. 2011. Pp. x, 228. $32.95. ISBN 978-1-441-14965-7.)

This book’s title derives from that of Joseph Hansen’s Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexen-verfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1900), and the book itself offers in English [End Page 532] translation a selection of the original sources (most in Latin, but some in French and German) that Hansen edited. Maxwell-Stuart has drawn from parts 1, 2, and 6 of Quellen: papal pronouncements, the literature of witchcraft and demonology (that is, extracts from legal documents or theological treatises), and records of witch trials from both ecclesiastical and secular courts. Hansen’s collection had eight parts, but aside from part 3 containing long excerpts from the infamous Malleus maleficarum (now available in several English translations, including an abridgement by Maxwell-Stuart himself), the omitted parts of Quellen are quite small. Even from the sections he does translate, Maxwell-Stuart has had to abridge or excise many of sources to shrink a collection originally near 700 pages down to just over 200.

Aside from cuts and abridgements, this volume follows Hansen’s original selection and organization of sources, which is basically chronological within each section (although some of Hansen’s datings have been corrected by subsequent scholarship). Although noting that Hansen’s overall interpretation of the history of magic and witchcraft, which of course shaped his selection and organization of sources, is now outdated, Maxwell-Stuart declares that the “diversity” of Hansen’s materials “presents us with details and voices which generally go unheard or are scarcely noticed in modern collections” (p. 14). Since excerpts from demonological treatises and trial records are the bread and butter of all witchcraft source collections, this probably refers to Hansen’s focus on medieval material, whereas most subsequent collections have focused extensively or indeed exclusively on early-modern witchcraft. Among Hansen’s source-types, Maxwell-Stuart seems clearly to favor papal pronouncements, which fill fully 20 percent of his abridgement, whereas they compose a mere 7 percent of those sections of Hansen that he abridges.

As for the translations themselves, there are inevitably choices made that readers will either favor or not, depending on their own preferences. Regarding terms such as malefica or venefica, for example, Maxwell-Stuart adopts the accurate if admittedly “cumbersome” (p. 14) practice of rendering these as “female practitioner of harmful magic” and “female practitioner of poisonous magic” rather than simply as “witch.” He also has a proclivity for rendering long strings of Latin clauses as enumerated lists. This allows modern readers to follow along a bit more easily, but is not strictly faithful to the original texts. Although working exclusively from Hansen is certainly the most practical way to translate a significant volume of medieval sources, those editions have in some cases been augmented or corrected by later scholarship. It would have been useful to have a discussion of this somewhere in the volume. Maxwell-Stuart’s introduction is very brief and seems intended mainly to draw the reader back into a medieval world in which spirits and demons, miracles and magic are all rationally understood components of divine order. He provides very little overview of the medieval history of magic, and, despite presenting Hansen as a representative of the now largely discredited “rationalist” school of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries [End Page 533] (pp. 12–13), he offers no real overview of historiographic trends in witchcraft scholarship.

Michael D. Bailey
Iowa State University
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