The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic

333 Pages·2017·66.57 MB·English

by  Owen Davies

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THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF
WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC
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The historians who contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft
and Magic are all distinguished authorities in their field. They are:
OWEN DAVIES, University of Hertfordshire
WILLEM DE BLÉCOURT, Huizinga Institute/Meertens Institute, Amsterdam
PETER MAXWELL-STUART, University of St Andrews
SOPHIE PAGE, University College London
JAMES SHARPE, University of York
RITA VOLTMER, University of Trier
ROBERT J. WALLIS, Richmond University
CHARLES ZIKA, University of Melbourne
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THE OXFORD
ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF
W I T C H C R A F T A N D
M AG I C
Edited by
Owen Davies
1
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1
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EDITOR’S FOREWORD
Many people are vaguely familiar with the history of witchcraft and magic. The
topic attracts regular media interest. Yet it is also a subject around which swirls
much misunderstanding, misinformed opinion, and dubious facts. One such peren-
nial notion is that witches were burned in England, and likewise the erroneous belief
that millions of people were executed during the era of the witch trials. Over the last
two centuries this notorious episode in European history has repeatedly been por-
trayed as a stain on the medieval age. Yet the vast majority of the prosecutions and
executions took place not in the Middle Ages at all, but in what historians refer to as
the early modern period, an era which runs roughly from the mid-fifteenth century
to the mid-eighteenth century. Words like ‘hysteria’ and ‘craze’ litter the older litera-
ture on the subject, and continue to be widely used to describe the trials. Yet as James
Sharpe and Rita Voltmer show in their chapters, the causes and pattern of the Euro-
pean witch trials were not the result of mass delusion or credulity. The greatest minds
of the era believed in the reality of witchcraft and magic. This was a time in Europe
when the Reformation transformed religion and politics, legal systems were becom-
ing more sophisticated, and science made great strides in understanding the natural
world. The belief in witchcraft and magic was not some evolutionary stage that society
passed through on the way to general enlightenment and scientific progress.
The intense academic and public focus on the early modern witch trials can, itself,
be seen as problematic. Does the execution of tens of thousands of people, for exam-
ple, make it more important and of more historic value to research and understand
witchcraft and magic in this era rather than before or after? One of the aims of this
Oxford Illustrated History is to describe how witchcraft and magic have a history
that stretches back to the beginning of writing 5,000 years ago, and remain with us
today as relevant cultural phenomena that continue to reflect fundamental aspects of
contemporary societies and individual psychologies. The last three chapters (by
myself, Robert Wallis, and Willem de Blécourt) show that we continue to live in a
world fascinated by the promise of magic.
The origins of magic were already being debated in antiquity, and histories of the
witch trials were appearing in Europe before the last of the trials and executions had
ended. The topic has excited the minds of artists, playwrights, novelists, and screen
writers over the centuries. For some it is the details of magical practices in pursuit of
wisdom, health, wealth, desire, and harm that are of most interest, or the fabulous
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vi Editor’s Foreword
stories of the seemingly impossible, such as flying, shape-changing, and conjuring
demons and angels. For others it is the gruesome stories of torture, persecution, and
execution that intrigue, provoking reflection on how otherwise reasonable human
beings could allow and perform such tasks. The history of witchcraft and magic
provides rare glimpses into the human psyche and the complexities of human relation-
ships in the past in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, and social status.
Less exciting to some, perhaps, but equally fascinating is what the history of
witchcraft and magic can tell us about how societies formed, developed, and changed
over the centuries. It enables us to see the profound if often subtle interactions
between different cultures that are obscured by studying the ‘bigger picture’ of war,
conquest, and the political games between kings, queens, and emperors. Peter Max-
well-Stuart’s chapter provides us with an overview of how magical knowledge and
practices reveal the cultural and religious flows between successive empires and
religions in the ancient world. Magic unites as well as divides ideologies and reli-
gions. Sophie Page’s chapter on medieval magic examines the extraordinary but brief
flowering of knowledge exchange between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain.
The geography of witchcraft and magic is another important theme running
through this book. As Rita Voltmer observes with regard to the witch trials, thinking
in terms of modern state boundaries can hinder our understanding of why and how
things happened in the past. The same issue applies to the ancient and medieval
worlds as well. Maxwell-Stuart notes the problem of talking about ‘Greece’ as an
entity, for example. A basic understanding of the Holy Roman Empire is hugely
important for making sense of the pattern and nature of the witch trials. During the
early modern period the Holy Roman Empire had influence over a big swathe of
central and western Europe, and yet this long-lived European dynastic state is little
known to the general public today. Germany and Italy did not exist as countries until
the mid-nineteenth century, and yet we understandably talk about Germany when
discussing the heartland of the trials. As well as being aware of the political geog-
raphies of different eras, I highlight in my chapter on popular magic that we also
need to be sensitive to local and regional beliefs, and traditions that were not defined
by national, religious, or administrative boundaries.
This Oxford Illustrated History follows a familiar path in concentrating primarily
on telling the story of how witchcraft and magic were viewed, practised, and sup-
pressed in the Mediterranean and European world. But, of course, witchcraft and
magic are global concepts. Encapsulating the diversity and complex contexts of mag-
ical beliefs and practices across seven continents is beyond the scope of a volume
such as this. Yet the European experience was not isolated from global influences.
Through colonial conquest and expansion from the sixteenth century onwards,
Christian conceptions of witchcraft and magic determined how indigenous religions
and beliefs overseas were conceptualized and dealt with by Europeans. Indigenous
magical practices filtered subtly into European traditions. From the late nineteenth
century onwards, western spiritualists and ritual magicians drew inspiration from
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Editor’s Foreword vii
the mystical traditions and religions of India and the East. Meanwhile the early
anthropologists busied themselves gathering data for magical practices from across
the globe, searching for overarching theories of human development. And in the final
chapter on screen representations of witches and wizards we see how, today, cinema
presents certain stereotypes to a global audience.
We should not see different parts of the world as being in different stages of
human development because they believed in witches or relied on magic in their
daily lives. The chapters in this book reveal remarkable continuities in what, why,
and how people performed magic in different cultures over the millennia. The reader
will find, for instance, the practice of sticking pins into figurines in the chapter on the
ancient world and in the one concerned with European folk magic. The books con-
sulted and copied by the medieval magicians discussed by Sophie Page have been
‘rediscovered’ over the centuries and are now found on the internet and used by
modern magicians. While some of the key concepts that underpin magic are thou-
sands of years old, we must also be careful not to portray the myriad beliefs and
practices encompassed by the term ‘magic’ as somehow ageless or unchanging, either
globally or within different cultures. Magic both reflects and is shaped by changes in
environment, religion, science, and social relations over time.
The writings of the demonologists explored by James Sharpe provide us with a
direct line into the mind-set of influential individuals and what informed their ideas
and convictions. But most of the sources for the history of witchcraft and magic are
much less authorial, much less tangible, and concern a mix of emotions, thoughts,
dreams, fantasies, insinuations, verbal accusations, and physical actions that, when
recorded at all, usually come down to us through the distorting lenses of bureaucratic
selection and interpretation. The written archive is not all we have, though. In a
book that has the gift of numerous illustrations it would have been wasteful not to
focus on the material expressions of magical practice and visual media. Whether
with regard to antiquity, non-literary cultures overseas, or nineteenth-century Euro-
pean folk magic, we are fortunate to have numerous archaeological remains for the
history of magical practices. In some instances, from all periods and places, the material
remains are the only record we have of widespread popular practices and rituals.
As to the pictorial record of witchcraft and magic, the chapters by Peter Maxwell-
Stuart and Sophie Page show how the diagrams and depictions on ancient vases,
tablets, and amulets, and the illuminated illustrations in medieval manuscripts, are
as important for our understanding of magic as the written inscriptions and instruc-
tions recorded on such materials. Charles Zika’s survey of the artistic representation
of witches from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries explores how developments
in technique and representation created a new visual language for depicting what
witches and magicians were thought to do. Photography enabled modern magicians
to shape and control their public magical personae, while the moving image, as dis-
cussed by Willem de Blécourt, led to a further reformulation of historic notions,
stories, and stereotypes for a mass audience.
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viii Editor’s Foreword
The remit of the Oxford Illustrated History series offers a great opportunity to
provide a distinct approach that will focus on how the archives, imagery, and ma terial
culture shape our understanding of the history of witchcraft and magic, and how
history shapes the sources we have. The contributors to this book have risen to this
challenge. Let the magic begin.
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CONTENTS
List of Colour Plates xi
List of Tables xiii
1. MAGIC IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 1
Peter Maxwell-Stuart
2. MEDIEVAL MAGIC 29
Sophie Page
3. THE DEMONOLOGISTS 65
James Sharpe
4. THE WITCH TRIALS 97
Rita Voltmer
5. THE WITCH AND MAGICIAN IN EUROPEAN ART 134
Charles Zika
6. THE WORLD OF POPULAR MAGIC 167
Owen Davies
7. THE RISE OF MODERN MAGIC 195
Owen Davies
8. WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC IN THE AGE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 225
Robert J. Wallis
9. WITCHES ON SCREEN 253
Willem de Blécourt
Further Reading 281
Picture Acknowledgements 289
Index 293