Witchcraft

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WITCHCRAFT

J. A. Sharpe

Witchcraft is a subject that has attracted considerable scholarly attention as well as a lively popular interest, and around which a number of historical myths have gathered. Most of the scholarly work on this phenomenon has, understandably, centered on the era of mass persecutions, the so-called European witch craze, between about 1450 and 1750. Work on this period has produced an extensive and ever-expanding body of publications rich in varied, imaginative, and exciting interpretations. Yet beliefs in witchcraft, themselves part of a wider intellectual framework incorporating popular magic and what the modern observer would categorize as folklore, have been present in Europe throughout recorded history.

The terms "witchcraft" and "magic" have, of course, been used broadly and present considerable definitional problems. In 1937 the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed a widely accepted set of definitions that attempts to distinguish clearly between witchcraft and magic. He argued, in effect, that witchcraft is normally thought of as an innate quality, probably inherited by the supposed witch, and is used primarily to inflict harm through the occult power of the witch's ill will. Magic, conversely, involves a number of techniques, and the ability to carry out these techniques is not inherited but rather acquired through learning.

It might be possible to sustain something like this distinction when dealing with witchcraft as a phenomenon in European history. Observers in 1600, for example, generally accepted a difference between the witch, normally female, illiterate, and lower class, and the magician, often learned, sometimes a member if the social elite, and nearly always male. Yet the village witch always existed in the intellectual context of a culture that enjoyed much wider beliefs in the magical, the occult, and the supernatural, and throughout the medieval and early modern periods terms that translate as witchcraft, sorcery, or magic tended to be used interchangeably. Witchcraft is, therefore, best understood as a broad range of beliefs and practices that flourished within a wider belief system that accepted the supernatural.

As noted, witchcraft attracts popular interest and has been surrounded by more than its fair share of historical myths. The problems resulting from this became increasingly marked in the twentieth century by the emergence of Wiccan and Pagan groups that adhered to witchcraft as an ancient, pre-Christian religion. While having no wish to offend people's religious sensibilities, one should point out that there is little evidence that what was described or persecuted as witchcraft in the medieval or early modern periods was an organized religion—though admittedly a number of contemporary theorists thought it was—and that the practices of Pagans and Wiccans have only tenuous connections with peasant beliefs of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. Modern witchcraft, despite its claims, seems to have little historical foundation.

The subject of witchcraft was also firmly lodged in the mentalities of learned writers in late medieval and early modern Europe, when it was referred to frequently in theological, medical, and scientific writing. Along with the peasant belief in witchcraft, demonological writers from the fifteenth century onward created a view of the subject that stressed the importance of the demonic pact, the witches' sabbat, and the notion that the witch was a member of an organized, heretical, satanic sect. Peasants had witchcraft, and members of the elite had natural magic, a set of occult ideas and practices that often attracted men of considerable intelligence and learning. The latter was closely connected to pursuits such as astrology and alchemy as well as to mathematics, astronomy, and science. Witchcraft existed in relation to a broad, rich, intellectual context.

FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

Anthropologists have demonstrated that belief in witchcraft and associated phenomena was present in a wide range of societies and likely has been a part of the mental world of Europeans from the earliest times. As might be expected, however, evidence for early witchcraft beliefs and practices has to be drawn mainly from the works of Greek and, more important, Roman writers. The concept of magia, which seems to have corresponded roughly to medieval and early modern magic, was familiar in ancient Rome and comprehended sorcery and witchcraft. Certainly by the end of the Roman period something like the witch image, so common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, already existed. Consider the following description given by the poet Lucan (a.d. 39–65) in his Pharsalia (book 6, lines 511–523):

The gods of heaven, and the fact that she was still living, did not prevent her from hearing the silent converse of the dead, or from knowing the dwelling places of hell and the mysteries of subterranean Pluto. The witch's face is haggard and loathsome with age; her dreadful countenance, overlaid with a hellish pallor and weighed down by uncombed locks, is never seen in the clear sky; but if storms and black clouds take away the stars, she then comes forth from robbed tombs and tries to catch the night-time lightnings. Her tread blights the seeds of the fertile cornfield, and her breath poisons air that was previously innocuous.

The stereotype of the witch as the hag, the elderly, worn, and probably lower-class woman, clearly dates back to classical culture.

The problem of magic, witchcraft, sorcery, and the occult became somewhat more complex with the beginning of the era of the Christian conversions in about the fourth century. The realities of the situation meant that, despite the reservations of some Christian thinkers, the early church had to make a number of accommodations with the pagan religions it sought to supplant. Thus churches were built on or near the sites of pagan worship, saints' shrines were located in pagan holy places, and Christianity incorporated many aspects of the preexisting practices surrounding divination, prophecy, and folk healing. The "magic of the medieval church" obviously helped make Christianity accessible and acceptable to the bulk of the population, although it never quite escaped the censure of religious purists. The learned held some practices unwarrantable despite an inherently ill-defined line between the sacred and the profane. Partly as a result of this lack of definition, occasional charges of sorcery arose, and certain people, because of their actions or public opinion, were considered appropriate targets for accusations of witchcraft. Conversely, early law codes suggest that at least some rulers regarded accusations of witchcraft as ungodly and disruptive and consequently attempted to discourage them among their populations.

Certainly the religious observers upon whose writings much of our knowledge of early medieval Europe is founded were convinced that their world was full of magical practitioners, denounced variously as praecantatores, sortilegos, karagios, aruspices, divinos, ariolos, magos, maleficos, inantantores, phitonocos, or veneficos. (The terms defy precise or consistent translation.) For these writers, however, the problem was still that occult practitioners offered a type of magic that competed with that of the church. They were diviners, fortune tellers, lot casters, and faith healers rather than malefic witches. The malefic existed, of course, but the tendency was to regard witchcraft and associated popular magical beliefs as a sign of ignorance and superstition rather than the presence of demonic influences. Occasionally writings refer to witches being punished, like the tenth-century note of a woman proved guilty of witchcraft who was drowned "as is the custom with witches." But most stories about witchcraft end with a description of the clergy deploying saints' relics or other holy items to defeat the witch's magic rather than with a description of execution.

This situation was to change during the fifteenth century. The exact processes involved remain perhaps a little unclear, but three main factors seem to have been at work. First, there was a general theological shift, perhaps as a by-product of the psychological impact of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, which emphasized the uncertainty of human life, the pervasiveness of sin, and the power and influence of the Devil. Second, in a series of treason-cum-sorcery cases among Europe's political elite, highly placed persons were found guilty of using sorcery and magic to harm monarchs and popes. Last, the persecution of heretics, which had flourished over the High Middle Ages, shifted its focus to include witches, now defined as a satanic sect. The witch was no longer the individual with occult powers that might occasionally be used to do harm but rather one of Satan's agents in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. The religious insisted on the importance of the pact between the witch and the Devil, and the development of ideas regarding the sabbat provided a collective image of witchcraft. The witch now flew to nocturnal meetings, where she met scores, hundreds, or even thousands of other witches, feasted on the flesh of newborn children, danced, drank, and engaged in orgiastic sexual intercourse, the whole proceedings being presided over by the Devil.

By the late fifteenth century the witch myth was firmly established, and the witch, for the educated at least, was a willing tool of the Antichrist. Two changes had taken place. The developed witch stereotype was now generally that of a lower-class person, more than likely a female. In theory anybody could be a witch, but in practice it was peasant women who were most often accused. But contemporaries were aware that educated, relatively wellborn men also practiced magic. One of the contextual elements that allowed belief in witchcraft to flourish among Europe's elites was the involvement of some of their members and associates in magic, in attempts to contact the spirit world, in alchemy, in astrology, and in that broad neo-Platonic mode of thought that left ample room for the occult. The educated and the wellborn, of course, rarely incurred the wrath of officialdom for their magical or occult interests; peasant women were burned as witches by the thousands.

THE GREAT WITCH-HUNTS

Belief in witchcraft was firmly entrenched in late medieval Europe and was part of a wider system of thought that accepted the occult and magic as everyday realities. However, during the period following the Middle Ages, from about 1450 to about 1750, witchcraft enjoyed its highest profile as a historical phenomenon. That was the timespan of the persecution of witches, described by some historians as "the European witch craze" (Trevor-Roper, 1969). Because of deficiencies in the survival of records, it is impossible to determine how many people suffered legal prosecution as witches over those three hundred years. Certainly the figure of 9 million executed witches, once accepted in feminist and Wiccan circles, has been exploded. Scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s has suggested much lower figures, with perhaps 100,000 accused and 40,000 executed (Levack, 1995). What is also certain is that the period of the witch persecutions was the tragic outcome of a confluence of elite and popular concerns. This general conclusion is borne out by that handful of detailed scholarly local studies of the rise and fall of witchcraft persecution which have demonstrated what a complex and multifaceted phenomenon the craze was.

The crucial issue was the desire for a purer, more defined, and more rigorous Christianity, which lay at the root of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In the two centuries preceding the Reformation, the struggle of the Catholic Church against heresy had continued, and during the fifteenth century the traditional village witch came to be identified as a member of a new, diabolical, heretical sect. At the same time that the inquisitors were beginning to try people for witchcraft, learned theologians in their libraries and studies were developing a new and more frightening image of the Devil. This formative phase of demonological theorizing was summed up in 1487 with the publication of the Malleus maleficarum (witches' hammer), written by two Dominicans, Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer. The importance of the Malleus has been overstated: it did not represent the ascendancy of a triumphant, hegemonic view of witchcraft but was rather a propaganda piece written to justify the actions of its authors in a set of controversial trials. One of its major objectives, in fact, was to convince sometimes reluctant secular authorities that they had a part to play in witch-hunting.

This last issue became less contentious as the sixteenth century progressed. The Reformation and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation helped define Christian and hence anti-Christian beliefs and behavior more clearly. But these religious movements also had a political dimension: the secular concept of the good citizen was now inextricably enmeshed with the church's concept of the good Christian. At a crucial stage of state formation, many people in positions of influence thought they were attempting not only to bolster secular government but also to produce a "godly commonwealth." The witch became the enemy of the king and the magistrate as well as of the clergyman and the true Christian.

These long-familiar developments led to the once standard interpretation of the witch craze as concocted by bigoted, ignorant, power-crazed judges and clerics and foisted on the population to destroy pre-Christian beliefs. The subject was treated as an issue of intellectual rather than social history—until the early 1970s, when two British historians, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas, developed a paradigm that put witchcraft accusations firmly in their social context. They shifted their focus of attention away from legal treatises and demonological tracts to court records and trial pamphlets on English witchcraft cases. Arguing that it was possible to write a history of witch-hunting "from below," they stressed that the phenomenon is explicable not just through the thoughts, policies, and actions of the powerful but also through the fears, strategies, and cultural horizons of the ordinary villager.

In particular Macfarlane's work, founded on a close examination of the unusually rich documentation for the English county of Essex, convincingly rooted witchcraft accusations in both village life and the broader socioeconomic changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He noted that witchcraft accusations were normally brought by richer villagers against poorer ones. Probing more deeply, he discovered that a witchcraft accusation commonly was brought after a dispute between the accuser or members of his or her household and the accused over the denial of charity. The alleged witch, characteristically a poor and elderly woman, would come to the accuser's house and ask for money, food, drink, or perhaps the chance to work. Her request denied, the old woman would make off in an angry mood, possibly muttering threats. A little later an inexplicable illness or some other disaster would befall the refuser of charity, his family, or his farm animals. The earlier altercation, threats, or ambivalent phrases uttered by the supposed witch would be connected to the misfortune, especially if the woman requesting charity had already been suspected of witchcraft.

Macfarlane linked this model of witchcraft accusations after the refusal of charity to broader changes in the region during the period of accusations. In England, as in most of Europe, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked by steady population increase. This increase created tremendous pressure at the bottom of society, especially in that it created a large body of poor. Traditional forms of poor relief, in Macfarlane's model, were unable to cope with the extent of poverty, and it took time to put an effective poor law into operation. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries many substantial villagers were uncertain about how to deal with the poor, both in practical and in psychological terms. In harsh times the neighbor begging at the door was refused, but a lingering communal ethic made the refuser feel guilty. Under these circumstances, a witchcraft accusation was a method of transferring guilt: it was not the refuser of charity who was challenging community values but rather the perpetrator of malefic witchcraft. Macfarlane had learned from anthropology that witchcraft accusations ran along the fault lines in society, symbolizing redefinitions of community and the severing of social relationships. He connected the Essex cases to broad and familiar themes, such as the development of capitalist agriculture, the breakup of the traditional village community, and the rise of individualism.

Macfarlane's charity-refused model, although a consistent theme in accusations, has not proved universally applicable to early modern Europe. He and Thomas, however, did demonstrate convincingly that witchcraft can be studied in the context of peasant beliefs, which can no longer simply be dismissed as ignorant superstitions or ideas foisted on the peasantry by the elite. Rather, witchcraft on this level, however distant and alien to the modern observer, made sense and had a function for those involved in the phenomenon. In the 1970s historians' ideas about witchcraft trials were dominated by knowledge of the big crazes, which, for example, led to hundreds of burnings during the early seventeenth century in the German territories of Ellwangen, Trier, Würzburg, and Bamberg. Further research demonstrated that the pattern Macfarlane established was far more common, and accusations were launched sporadically, normally against individuals or two or three supposed witches. Robin Briggs's work reveals that witchcraft accusations were an established feature of early modern Lorraine, for example, but they were located in the world of the peasant and in the petty disputes endemic to village life. Moreover, it became clear that over the whole of Europe the major peasant concern was with maleficium, the concrete harm supposedly perpetrated by witches, rather than the demonic pact or the witch's candidacy for membership in a diabolic heretical sect.

Another striking feature of accusations of witchcraft during the witch craze was that they were most frequently directed against women. A few regional case histories to the contrary, most court records containing witchcraft accusations demonstrate that the malefic witch was thought of as female. In Macfarlane's Essex sample, over 90 percent of the accused were women, and perhaps 80 percent of the accused in Europe as a whole were women. A number of differing interpretations attempt to explain the connection between women and witchcraft.

In the 1970s writers, most of them not academic historians, within the women's movement interpreted the gender imbalance in witchcraft accusations as one of the most overt and horrific outcomes of the male oppression of women. The acceptance of the estimate of 9 million executions made this manifestation of men's unpleasantness toward women seem all the more terrible. These writers did well to focus attention on and demonstrate the importance of an issue on which male historians had rarely commented, but few scholars of witchcraft history have regarded the inordinate accusations against women simply in terms of male oppression. Early modern Europe was a male-dominated society in which medical theory, science, and theology all agreed on the moral, intellectual, and physical inferiority of women, but it has proved difficult to establish exactly how this generalized intellectual context translated into individual witchcraft accusations.

Research has suggested a deeper set of issues. Pertinent questions are how frequently witchcraft accusations were launched between women, how often women acted as witnesses against women, and how often women participated in semiofficial actions against female witches, such as searching for the witch's mark. No political system, not even early modern patriarchy, works unless the majority of those it seeks to rule accept or at least acquiesce to it. Thus the involvement of women as accusers and prosecution witnesses in witchcraft cases might be further evidence of the dominance of male values. It seems more fruitful, however, to regard witchcraft as a phenomenon that operated to a large extent within the female sphere, in that world of female concerns over child rearing, the protection of domestic space, and the politics of reputations and local gossip that social and cultural historians of early modern Europe have been slowly reconstructing. A number of studies assert that accusations often revolved around the bewitchment, frequently to death, of children. Their mothers were the accusers, and postmenopausal women were the accused. Psychohistorians have begun to explore this theme within the paradigm, familiar in psychoanalysis, of the malevolent mother. At the very least, examinations of popular attitudes toward menopause, rather than a consideration of generalized misogyny, are needed.

From court records and the published works of contemporary demonologists, moralists, and skeptics emerges a folklore of countermagic providing strategies for those who thought themselves bewitched to use against their alleged tormentors. On a village level witchcraft was about power. The accused witch was often an old woman who was unlikely to seek revenge through violence or litigation against those who had offended her, but she supposedly wreaked havoc on her adversaries through the deployment of occult forces. Her power could be counteracted by rival magic. Religious reformers argued that these countermeasures were without scriptural basis and hence were as ungodly as maleficium, but they had little impact on a population that desired more immediate and overt relief from witchcraft than the church's remedy, prayer. In hopes of alleviating the sufferings caused by witchcraft or transferring them to the witch, people scratched witches to draw blood from their faces, burned hair from their heads or thatch from their roofs, or made witch cakes from grain and the urine of the bewitched and burned them.

"Good witches" were crucial to this countermagic and an essential element in the broader culture of popular magic. The practitioners of popular magic, folk medicine, and divination, good witches were probably as common a feature of the period's witch beliefs as were the malefic witches who loom so much larger in the historical consciousness. Macfarlane and Thomas, in their studies of English witchcraft beliefs, gave due importance to those the English commonly called "cunning folk." Many contemporary writers observed that these folk were widespread and their services eagerly sought by the population at large. Cunning men and women offered medical services that were cheaper, probably less unpleasant, and possibly as effective as those available from the officially qualified physicians of the period. They could find stolen goods or identify the thieves who had taken them. They could tell fortunes and were consulted by young girls on the identities of their future husbands and by pregnant women regarding the sex of their unborn babies. They were the obvious counselors for victims of witchcraft, for they confirmed suspicions about who was behind the bewitching and recommended methods of combating the malefic witch and averting her witchcraft.

As might be expected, the equivalents of the English cunning men and women were to be found all over Europe. Research on Lorraine, for example, has demonstrated the importance of what were, literally, "witch doctors," specialists in treating witchcraft and identifying witches, who frequently played a key role in focusing and developing accusations. Some were itinerants, and even those who were not sometimes acquired reputations that spread over a radius of twenty miles. These devins or devineresses (soothsayers) did little more than confirm existing fears that an illness was supernatural and existing suspicions as to who was responsible for its occurrence. Much of the knowledge about them surfaces through records of formal prosecutions of witches, but their main objective was to keep their patients away from court action, which would undermine the good witches' position as the major source of relief and possibly attract the unwanted attention of officialdom. The activities of these Lorraine practitioners, like good witches everywhere in Europe, were illegal and reprehensible in the eyes of the church. The evidence in the Lorraine archives and elsewhere of the activities of devins and cunning folk constructs, in effect, a magical underworld.

The techniques used by the cunning folk and other practitioners varied widely. Mostly unlettered, they used charms and bastardized versions of Christian prayers. In England following the Reformation, for example, cunning folk apparently were fond of using doggerel fragments of the Latin prayers and creed of the old church, much to the distaste of the Protestant authorities. In Catholic areas like Lorraine, cunning folk often used prayer and holy water in their deliberations. All over Europe cunning folk used the sieve and shears, a practice in which the sieve, balanced on the points of a pair of shears, would move when questions were put to it. Another common technique involved primitive versions of the crystal balls popularly associated with fortune tellers. Other practitioners of folk magic employed more elaborate techniques, some of which point toward connections with the learned magic of the elite. By the mid-seventeenth century a reasonable proportion of cunning folk, in some regions at least, was literate, possibly signifying access to unusual and powerful knowledge in a period when illiteracy was the norm. Some had books, particularly of astrology, and used them when aiding their clients. No doubt the literate cunning man or woman had access to the almanacs and popular medical treatises of the period. As the frequent references to both cunning men and cunning women and devins and devineresses make clear, if malefic witches tended overwhelmingly to be female, good witches were of either sex, the implications of which deserve full exploration.

The cunning folk attracted particular odium from Protestant writers, locked as they were in the battle to inculcate right religion in the face of entrenched ignorance and superstition. The English Protestant theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) argued that, since good witches got their powers from the Devil as clearly as did the bad ones, they were equally deserving of death and were doubly reprehensible because they used devilish practices to convince the population that they were doing good. Nevertheless, good witches rarely received severe punishment. The secular authorities treated them lightly or subjected them to the generally weak penalties of the ecclesiastical courts. Yet the theologians' attitude brings into question officialdom's perception of witchcraft and why the witch-hunts declined.

The established tradition, in many ways correct, is that the Christian church, both before and after the Reformation, played a key role in creating the witch persecutions of early modern Europe. The church's revised view of the importance of the Devil, the perceived need for a more sharply defined Christianity, and the "acculturation" of the population at large, or at least some sections of it, to accept this official, more stringent Christianity were all of essential importance. Many societies have accepted that witches exist and that they are evil, but the European witch craze was a unique event that owed much to changes in official Christianity from about 1450 onward. Yet the church's role was not one of simple and unthinking repression. Some convinced and theologically orthodox Christians allotted witchcraft only a marginal importance. The key theological issue was the significance awarded to Divine Providence. Skeptical writers argued that many of the afflictions popularly attributed to witchcraft were, in fact, the product of the will of God, designed as a test for the faithful. This position was a little austere for the bulk of the population. People could take a witch to court or consult cunning folk about how best to deal with witchcraft, but such remedies were not available against the Almighty. A related position regarded the whole slate of witchcraft beliefs as the product of popular superstitions rather than of the influence of the Devil. Thus a conundrum arises. In some areas the processes of Christianization unleashed by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation resulted in witch persecution, but in others they led to the attitude that witchcraft beliefs were a sign of popular ignorance, demanding the mild sanctions of the church courts and the education of the population rather than witch burnings.

While theologians and senior clerics developed a number of theoretical positions on witchcraft, judges and legal writers also demonstrated ambivalent attitudes toward the phenomenon. The legal codes of most if not all European states of the period included laws against witches, but witchcraft in many respects enjoyed a peculiar status as a criminal offense and was difficult to prove. To solve the problem some judges simply dropped the normal rules relating to evidence, especially to evidence and confessions elicited by torture, which frequently fueled the large witch-hunts. Other judges were more cautious. In England the high acquittal rate in witchcraft cases, the comparative lack of large-scale hunts, and the rarity of convictions after the 1650s owed much to the fact that assize courts, where most English witch cases were tried, were presided over by highly qualified and experienced judges appointed by the central government. In France, where those convicted of capital crimes had a right to appeal to the judges of the Parlement of Paris, most local convictions for witchcraft were quashed by the 1630s. In Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie, the lord advocate during much of the late seventeenth century, was extremely skeptical about witchcraft accusations and helped reduce the number of trials and convictions.

These signs of elite skepticism about witchcraft lead to that most complex of problems, the decline of the belief in witches and witchcraft. Some discussions of this development have centered around the marginalization of witchcraft beliefs by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. A new religious style stressing rational belief rather than extreme sensitivity to daily manifestations of Divine Providence was also of considerable significance. The importance of these factors is undeniable, yet seemingly the skepticism among the elite was caused as much by a cleavage between elite and popular culture as anything else. By about 1700 senior judges, senior ecclesiastics, senior bureaucrats, and learned and polite society in general were likely to deride witchcraft beliefs and witchcraft accusations as evidence of peasant ignorance and popular superstition, just as they might dismiss some manifestations of popular religion. To understand the end of the European witch craze requires an awareness of the social history of snobbery.

By 1750, except for a few isolated burnings, the persecutions had ended. In France, England, and much of Germany the executions had been reduced to a trickle by 1650. In the Dutch Republic, Spain, and Italy malefic witchcraft had never been a matter of much concern to the authorities. In some places, like Poland and Hungary, witch persecution came late, but even in these territories it had more or less collapsed by the mid-eighteenth century. The provincial elites, local clergy, petty noblemen, and urban patricians joined their social superiors in rejecting witchcraft beliefs, although this process was slower and less complete than might be imagined. Belief in witchcraft and magic had become the prerogative of the common people. Although such matters were rarely recorded in the late eighteenth century, the few extant reports of a good witch's activities, the occasional record of supposed malefic witches being assaulted or killed, the odd paper charm that survived, all suggest the resilience of what were by then subterranean supernatural beliefs.

THE SURVIVAL OF WITCH BELIEFS

For the elite the early eighteenth century marked the point at which, whatever their subsequent ideas about the occult, credence in the old style of witchcraft had waned dramatically. Among the lower orders, above all Europe's peasantry, the established beliefs in witchcraft, sorcery, and magic lived on, waiting to be rediscovered by nineteenth-century folklorists and country clergymen.

One of those clergyman, the Reverend J. C. Atkinson, recorded the existence of witchcraft beliefs and the pervasiveness of popular magic among nineteenth-century country dwellers. In 1841 Atkinson became vicar of Danby in North Yorkshire, a remote parish on the edge of the North York moors near the North Sea coast. England by that time regarded itself as a progressive, advanced society marked by science and industrialization. Atkinson, a southerner, was amazed to discover how widespread beliefs in witchcraft were. He wrote in 1891:

I have no doubt at all of the very real and deep-seated existence of a belief in the actuality and the power of the witch. Nay, I make no doubts whatever that the witch herself, in multitudes of instances, believed in her own power quite as firmly as any of those who had learned to look upon her with a dread almost reminding one of the African dread of fetish. Fifty years ago the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament in this district was so surcharged with the being and the works of the witch, that one seemed able to trace her presence and her activity in almost every nook and corner of the neighbourhood. (Atkinson, 1891, pp. 72–73)

Atkinson described beliefs in shape changing, concerns about maleficium, the widespread use of charms and amulets, and a general willingness to consult cunning folk.

Indications are strong that the situation Atkinson described probably prevailed in other rural areas of nineteenth-century England. Specific research demonstrates the persistence of witchcraft beliefs even in the urban lower classes, in London, for example, up to the mid-nineteenth century. Judith Devlin constructed an overview of France in the century and a quarter after the Revolution. Popular magic, quasi-magical manifestations of popular Christianity, and belief in the occult were still firmly entrenched. Christianity was still distorted by popular misconceptions, by a lively folklore surrounding saints and shrines, and by a refashioning of the fundamentals of the faith to meet the pragmatic devotional needs of the peasantry. Folk medicine, which depended on pagan rites, traditional techniques, miracles, and faith healing, still offered a viable alternative to "official" medicine. The popular mind, especially in rural areas, still accepted apparitions and prodigies and a world suffused with werewolves, monsters, fairies, elves, ghosts, and omens, and belief in demonic possession, astrology, and prophecy continued.

In this mental world, Atkinson's "folklore firmament," witchcraft enjoyed a central position. Devlin argued that witchcraft by this time was not a matter of explanatory and practical functions so much as an adaptable social vocabulary that allowed individuals to bring retrospective charges against those who they thought inflicted excessive or unnatural misfortunes on them. Countermagic, spells, charms, and good witches still helped against bad witches. But the basic functions of witchcraft in nineteenth-century France were, as had probably always been the case in peasant Europe, to reflect strained relationships in a backward, traditional society and to relieve and justify anxiety and anger. For people worried that they had fallen short of the ideals of their society, witchcraft transferred feelings of guilt or uncertainty onto others, who were accused as witches.

It might seem that developments in the early twentieth century finally rendered witchcraft beliefs redundant. How could such beliefs survive in a world marked by universal education, the triumph of science and technology, secularization, mass culture, and rapid communications? Over much of Europe witchcraft disappeared as a genuine traditional element in popular belief. Yet in the 1960s the French anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, working in the Bocage region in western France, discovered persistent beliefs in malefic witches. Those who thought themselves bewitched sought help from "unwitchers," the equivalents of sixteenth-century cunning folk. Obviously witchcraft in the Bocage in the 1960s was not exactly the same as the witchcraft of the early modern period, but striking parallels appear, including concern about occult power and occult fields of force, apprehension over series of inexplicable misfortunes, feelings of helplessness in the face of bewitchment, and nervous confrontations and negotiations between witches and victims. Although most educated moderns would assume that the history of witchcraft ended three centuries ago, Favret-Saada's work leaves room for speculation as to what beliefs and practices have persisted in isolated parts of rural Europe.

Witchcraft has been the focus of considerable attention from specialist scholars, nonspecialist thinkers, and the general public. This attention has created a lively historiography that has postulated a variety of interpretations of the phenomenon, especially regarding the "burning times" in early modern Europe. Among these interpretations, social history methodologies have attempted to reconstruct what witchcraft and witchcraft accusations meant in the context of the village communities of late medieval and early modern Europe. Research in these periods, and that dealing with witchcraft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has produced an unexpected possible conclusion. Often dismissed by historians as a marginal or even bizarre topic, witchcraft, defined as a set of beliefs that help people make sense of many aspects of their world, has been one of the most enduring components of popular mentality in European history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atkinson, J. C. Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: Reminiscences and Researches inDanby in Cleveland. London, 1891.

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Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980.

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