4. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, vii. Before the Scientific Revolution, the difference between correlated phenomena and causation between phenomena was not as widely understood as it is today. Close juxtaposition of two events could easily be mistaken for causation. Similarly, before the spread of the germ theory of disease, sickness could often strike with bewildering, and therefore suspicious, suddenness.
5. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, viii. The phenomenon of false confession poses some intriguing problems. A few North American cases seem to suggest that the confessing witch enjoys having a negative reputation. In other instances, most notoriously the probable forced confession of Tituba Indian at the outset of the Salem panic, confession appears as against the will of the confessor.
6. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, xi. Popular imagination assumes that witches were executed by burning at the stake. In English settlements, however, this was not the case. Witchcraft was a felony and was punished as a felony by hanging.
7. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, xii.
8. Excerpted from W.W., A true and just recorde, of the information, examination and confessions of all the witches taken at S. Oses in the Countie of Essex, originally published in London by Thomas Dawson, 1582. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway .proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft _id=xri:eebo:image:1960. As Early English Books Online is a subscription service, an alternate version may be found at http://gateway .proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88=200&res=xri:eebo&rft _id=xri:eebo:image:1960.
9. The tragedy of a healthy four-month-old baby falling from a cradle and breaking its neck provides a focal point for the conflict between Ursula and Grace. Ursula has publicly questioned Grace’s fitness for motherhood, whereas Grace has taken Ursula’s regret—or lack of surprise—at the baby’s death as an example of threat followed by maleficium, or evil done by supernatural means. Instead of expressing doubt about Grace’s capacity, Ursula was instead making a prediction, which she then caused to come true.
10. To “lie in” means to take to bed in preparation for childbirth.
11. “Unwitching” someone was a skill for cunning folk, people of importance in the early modern village system, who offered occult services for a fee, marshaling folk magical belief to their own economic gain while sidestepping the label of “witch.” See Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 29.
12. “Priuily” in the original, so “privily.”
13. Michaelmas, or the feast of Saint Michael, one of the quarter days in England, usually falling around September 29. In English tradition, quarter days fell roughly on Lady Day, Midsummer Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas, and beginning in the Middle Ages were days on which lawsuits were settled and rents were due.
14. Ursula needs sand probably to scour her floors and she is offering to trade for it her labor dyeing a pair of women’s stockings. Barter for goods and services was a more common mode of commerce between neighbors than the use of cash.
15. Modern usage treats “naughty” more mildly, connoting childlike misbehavior. However, the OED defines “naughty” in this period as “morally bad, wicked.”
16. “Gyile” in the original.
17. Another reference to the cunning person, who blames Ursula for the sick Letherdall child. The cunning person’s main task in the early modern English village was unbewitching, which often involved reinforcing assumptions held by the client about who the responsible witch might be.
18. Spirit familiars were thought to be small demons or imps that attended to a witch and helped with maleficium, or mischief done using spiritual means, in exchange for feeding from the witch’s body. Even the name of one of these spirits, Tittey, alludes to the images of inverted motherhood common to folk beliefs about witches.
19. Saint John’s-wort, which is still used by some today as a mood regulator.
20. “Wonderful” did not have today’s positive association in this time period. Instead “wonderful” means astonishing. See OED, 1928.
21. Seven eight?
22. Ursula Kemp confessed to her various witchly activities in the apparent hopes of being treated leniently, but her hopes were in vain. In Salem a century later, confessions would help accused witches escape execution, but such an outcome was unusual. In previous examples of witch trials such as this one, confession was more likely to hasten conviction and punishment than it was to lead to any leniency.
REGINALD SCOT, THE DISCOUERIE OF WITCHCRAFT, 1584
1. Sydney Anglo, “Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Skepticism and Sadduceeism” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 108.
2. Anglo, “Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft,” 117.
3. Scot represents a way station on the movement of witchcraft thought from the Continent to the British Isles, and eventually to North America. He turns his critical attention not only to witch trials contemporary to his own experience, but also to examples drawn from earlier Continental witch-hunting manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486; writing as a Protestant, Scot sees some of the most notorious descriptions of witchcraft in the Malleus as examples of the venality so widespread in the Catholic Church.
4. Excerpted from Reginald Scot, The discouerie of witchcraft vvherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected . . . Originally published in London by Henry Denham for William Brome, 1584. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res _id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:44. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/discoverieofwit00scot.
5. This is widely read as a reference to Job 5:17, which states, “Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty.” All Bible quotes are taken from the King James Bible (American version).
6. Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all thee that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
7. Original reads “fraied.”
8. Johan Brentius, 1499–1570, a Lutheran theologian.
9. This assertion derives from a number of biblical passages; among them Psalms 25 and 83, Ecclesiastes 43, Luke 8, Matthew 8, and Mark 4:41. “And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41).
10. For “cousining,” which meant “cheating.”
11. John 10:21, “Others said, These are not the words of him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?”
12. Haggai 2:17, “I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labors of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the LORD.”
13. Eyewitness.
14. Foolish or insipid. See OED, 1897.
15. It is tempting to regard this passage as evidence that the vicar resorted to a cunning person to determine who was responsible for bewitching his son.
16. Syphilis.
17. In this case M. D. Lewen is likely an “ordinary” in the ecclesiastical sense, which the OED of 2004 defines as “A person who has, of his or her own right and not by the appointment of another, immediate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical cases, such as the archbishop in a province, or the bishop or bishop’s deputy in a diocese.”
18. Scot has no love for this licentious vicar, though his criticism is subtle. Even writers about witchcraft depend on the power of rumor and reputation as much as, if not more than, hard evidence.
19. Scot also notes the degree of risk inherent in the making of a witchcraft accusation at all. In colonial North America in the generation following, the mere spreading of a rumor
of witchcraft was sufficient for the rumored witch to bring charges of slander against the rumor monger. Witches were so feared as a category that Scot admits that simply being accused could as often as not end in death for a suspected witch.
20. Original word reads “boten.”
21. Stew or porridge.
22. Scot points out a surprising irony about suspected early modern witches, which is that usually they were living in poverty. In a time of scarcity, without structured public means of relief for the poor, begging was a sad necessity for some, while also imposing a hardship on the rest of the community.
23. A sudden-onset malady, usually taken to be a stroke.
24. Misdeeds and charms cover ignorance.
25. Defined by the OED, 1989 edition, as a “deceiver, cheat, impostor.”
GEORGE GIFFORD, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFTES, 1593
1. Alan Macfarlane, “A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 140.
2. Scott McGinnis, “‘Subtiltie’ Exposed: Pastoral Perspectives on Witch Belief in the Thought of George Gifford,” Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIII/3 (2002): 665.
3. McGinnis, “‘Subtiltie’ Exposed,” 672.
4. Gifford is less concerned with whether witches exist or not than with what witches mean. He recognizes that the witch as an idea serves an important cultural role, either by offering a scapegoat for misfortune, or (in the role of the cunning person) by offering occult defense against misfortune. Gifford seems sympathetic to the fear and uncertainty that marked early modern English village life. He doesn’t necessarily condemn belief in witchcraft as ignorant in the way that Scot does. Instead, Gifford wishes to channel that fear and hopelessness, leading believers in witchcraft to strengthen their belief in God.
5. Excerpted from George Gifford, A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes In which is laide open how craftely the Diuell deceiueth not onely the witches but many other and so leadeth them awrie into many great errours. Originally published in London. Printed by John Windet for Tobie Cooke and Mihil Hart, 1593. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.pro quest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft _id=xri:eebo:image:5997. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/adialogueconcer00giffgoog. The physical document is located at Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call number 59292.
6. 2 Corinthians 7:10, “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.”
7. A person who rails, or rants, OED, June 2008.
8. A gambler, or someone addicted to gambling with dice, OED, 1895.
9. English folk magic belief held that bewitchment established a sympathetic relationship between the witch and the bewitched animal. As such, a common method of unbewitching consisted of burning the afflicted animal alive. It was thought that burning the animal would convey the burning onto the witch responsible. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 308.
10. “Showing in a glass” is another way of saying “scrying,” or looking for images in a highly reflective surface, such as a mirror, a dish of oil, or a polished ball of crystal. Scrying could be used to either see spirits or reveal the location of unknown information, such as the identity of people or objects. Scrying persists in popular culture today in the form of the crystal ball still seen in the windows of ostensible psychics in American cities—as recognizable a professional symbol as three gold balls for a pawn shop or a striped barber pole.
11. For “puckerel,” meaning demon or imp; OED, 2007. This word is rare enough that one of the two OED examples is actually this usage of Gifford’s.
12. The wearing of the first few words of the gospel of St. John on the body was considered to be a good luck charm. See Cora Linn Daniels and C. M. Stevans, eds., Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences, vol. III (Chicago: JH Thewdale and Sons, 1903), 1635.
13. “Between two stools” is a proverbial expression from “between two stools the ass hits the ground,” that is, stuck between two choices. See Bartlett J. Whiting, Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 417–418.
14. This is the crux of Gifford’s argument: not that maleficium is impossible, but that belief in witches and witchcraft is an error of faith, transferring confidence to the Devil that rightly belongs to God.
15. At the risk of subjecting Gifford to unfairly presentist criticisms, one cannot help but express amusement at the sharply circumscribed role of the nameless “wife.” Other than serving as another untutored mouthpiece for common English folk magic beliefs, the wife serves no purpose whatsoever. Gifford’s indifference underscores the paradoxical gender politics of witch fear during this period. Women are effectively invisible in Gifford’s discourse, and yet pose the gravest threat when tempted by the Devil into witchery. Gifford will go on to worry about witches’ being tempted into “whoredom” and “uncleanness,” anxieties that allude to the sexual undertones of much anti-witch sentiment. The “wife” here fades into invisibility, yet the theoretical witches described by Daniel, Samuel, and M. B. stalk the narrative like avaricious devils.
16. Gifford has chosen accurate examples of the complaints that early modern English villagers often lodged against witches. To a modern reader, the sudden unexplained death of a healthy hen, or the failure of butter to come from churning, might seem meager in the grand scheme of things. But for subsistence farmers, the quotidian struggles of everyday life would have loomed very large indeed.
17. Gifford is likely alluding to Scot’s skepticism. Puritan theologians like Gifford would have thought it irreligious to doubt the existence of witches, for to do so would go against the Bible’s truth. Gifford doesn’t wish to argue that witches do not exist. He only wishes to persuade his readers that their power is misunderstood, and is a delusion of Satan.
18. For “cavillers,” defined as “one who cavils; a captious or frivolous objector, a quibbling disputant.” OED, 1889.
19. Gifford is intrigued by the problem of self-confessed witches. How can spirit familiars be said not to exist when confessed witches like Ursula Kemp have confirmed that they do?
20. Possibly an archaic word for the plural of cow, though this incidence is much earlier than the OED examples. See OED, 1901.
21. Gifford’s fictional dialogue also offers a reliable representation of witches’ gender. In general, witches were thought to be women, but not always.
KING JAMES I, DAEMONOLOGIE, 1597
1. Stuart Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 156.
2. Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie,” 165.
3. Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie,” 168.
4. Excerpted from King James I, Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three bookes. Originally published in Edinburgh. Printed by Robert Walde-graue, printer to the King’s Majestie, 1597. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003& res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:7990. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/daemonologie25929gut.
5. Melancholia, or an excess of black bile, according to the Hippocratic principles of humorism. Here James addresses whether supposed effects of witchcraft are really caused by a physical or mental imbalance.
6. The Bible is at pains to distinguish between magicians, necromancers, sorcerers, and witches. Necromancy is the conjuring of the spirit of the dead to divine the future. Magician
s are soothsayers using occult means, as in Genesis 41:8, “And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.” A biblical sorcerer is similar to a magician, as in Daniel 2:2, “Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams.” Witches consist of the slipperiest category of magic user in the Bible, defined principally by their negative qualities and their association with the Devil.
7. James takes on here the skeptical writers against witchcraft, most notably Reginald Scot, who doubt witchcraft’s existence, rather than the writers of a more theological bent, like Gifford, who believe that witchcraft exists but who argue that its meaning and function are errors of faith.
8. The “Pythonisse,” or Pythoness, is the witch of Endor, who conjures the image of Samuel for Saul. The OED defines “pythoness” as “a woman believed to be possessed by a spirit and to be able to foresee the future; a female soothsayer; a witch,” and indicates that the word refers most often to either the biblical witch of Endor, or to the Delphic oracle.
9. James’s account makes so much of the risks of feeble-mindedness or insanity that it almost seems to be overkill—he wishes to be taken for an intellect and an authority so intently that he sets up straw men to bat down.
10. An antique term for medicine.
11. Referring to Acts 16:16–19, in which the apostle Paul meets a young woman “possessed with a spirit of divination,” who follows him for several days before Paul commands the spirit to leave the woman in the name of Jesus Christ. The passage is commonly interpreted as an exorcism, but James here sees the soothsayer as an example of a “sorcerer or witch,” and so further biblical proof of the reality of witchcraft.