97.Heinrich Kramer (?and Jacob Sprenger), Malleus maleficarum, Mainz, 1486, 104A.
98.Bodin, De la démonomanie, Book 2, c. 4.
99.Nicholas Remy, Daemonolatreiae libri tres, Lyon, 1595, Book 1, c. 14.
100.Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 39.
101.For example, Rita Volmer, ‘Hexenprozesse in der Stadt Trier und im Herzogtum Luxemburg Geständnisse’, in Rosemaries Beier-De Haan (ed.), Hexenwahn, Wolfratshausen, 2002, 72–81 (for Trier); George L. Burr, The Witch Persecutions, Philadelphia, PA, 1902, 23–8 (for Bamberg); Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, London, 2004, 207 (for Eichstätt); Peter A Morton (ed.), The Trial of Tempel Anneke, trans. Barbara Dahms, Peterborough, Ontario, 2006 (for Brunswick); Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg, New York, 2009, 164 (for Hohenlohe).
102.Per Sorlin, ‘Child Witches and the Construction of the Witches’ Sabbath’, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, 99–126.
103.De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, Book 2.2.1, 5; 2.31. For other examples of demonologists working similar material, see Boguet, Discours des sorciers, c. 14; Francesco Maria Guaccio, Compendium maleficarum, Milan, 1626, p. 70; and Del Rio, Disquisitiones magicae, Book 2.6.16.
104.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, 6; Brian Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, London, 3rd edition, 2006, 13.
105.Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 67–8, 196–218, 236–7. See also Frans Ciappara, Society and Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, San Gwann, 2001, 261–300.
106.Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 5–40.
107.Since 1900, indeed the only apparent case of any scholar doing this is the thoroughly eccentric Montague Summers, of whose work Julian Goodare reminded me.
108.For the Swedish evidence, see Soili-Maria Olli, ‘How to Make a Pact with the Devil’, Studia Neophilologica, 84 (2012), 88–96.
109.For especially good studies of the manner in which confessions could be achieved in these circumstances, in the Continental heartland of the trials, see Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze, London, 2004; and Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg. It is also very apparent in the trial records edited by the Lausanne cluster and by older scholars such as George Lincoln Burr.
110.Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 350.
111.Gustav Henningsen, ‘The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors’, Folklore, 120 (2009), 57–74.
112.Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 65–214. Bever provides two different definitions of shamanism, both viable and in actual use by authors, one narrower and one broader: the problem is that he then applies both to his own material, sliding between one and the other according to occasion. In general, I find his approach to an understanding of early modern beliefs and accusations a worthwhile one. John Demos pioneered the use of psychoanalysis in the understanding of witch trials, in Entertaining Satan, Oxford, 1982, and it was adopted fruitfully by a number of other scholars, most notably Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, London, 1994, and Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, London, 1996. What is needed now is for some more historians of the subject to follow Bever’s example in engaging with psychology and neuroscience, as those disciplines continue to evolve, and debate ways in which better insights may emerge from such an engagement.
113.Bever mentioned the significance of magical treasure hunting in his discussion cited above, and see also Johannes Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America, Basingstoke, 2012.
8 Witches and Fairies
1.For example, J. A. MacCulloch, ‘The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Scotland’, Folklore, 32 (1921), 227–44; Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, New York, 1930, 148–75; K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, London, 1959, 99–116; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things, London, 2000, 85–115; Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, East Linton, 2001, passim; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy, East Linton, 2001, 63–141.
2.Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies, Harmondsworth, 1992, 96–109; quotation on p. 109.
3.Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Brighton, 2005. I am very grateful to Emma for the gift of this book and its successor.
4.Furthermore, she distanced herself from what she termed the ‘ideological excesses’ of Margaret Murray and the ‘imaginative abandon’ with which modern Pagans have ‘spiritualized beliefs and practices associated with early modern witchcraft and magic’: ibid., 190. She has, however, a deep respect for modern Western shamanism. Ginzburg himself, as a secular rationalist, has never shown any interest in modern Paganism or modern shamanism, and referred to Margaret Murray’s interpretation of the Scottish material as ‘obviously absurd’, a blunter term than many other critics of her work have used: Ecstasies, 112.
5.Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Brighton, 2010. The case that some Scottish people accused as witches might actually have been guilty both of devil-worship and attempted destructive magic had also been argued by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, in Satan’s Conspiracy. It is indeed conceivable, though seems impossible to prove from the evidence and does not explain the fantastic elements in the confessions.
6.For a range of reviews see the Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 1083–5; Shaman, 19 (2011), 89–95; Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 93–4; Time and Mind, 6 (2012), 361–6; and Folklore, 124 (2013), 111–12. I am very grateful to Clive Tolley and Malcolm Gaskill for reminding me of the locations of two of these. See also Owen Davies, Cunning Folk, London, 2003, 177–86. Emma Wilby herself has gone on to develop her own theories in essays on what she terms ‘dark shamanism’ in Britain, but they add nothing to her earlier work for the purposes of the present book, instead enlarging on other aspects of it.
7.Admittedly she sometimes steps beyond the bounds of caution – for example in Cunning Folk, 243 and The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, 281, where what is usually admirably suggestive and tentative in her work suddenly becomes certain and conclusive – but these moments are rare.
8.Julian Goodare, ‘Scottish Witchcraft in its European Context’, in Julian Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, Basingstoke, 2008, 30–38; quotations on p. 31.
9.He both adopted this term, from Ginzburg, and problematized it.
10.Julian Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland’, Folklore, 123 (2012), 198–219.
11.Julian Goodare, ‘Seely Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits’, forthcoming in Éva Pócs (ed.), Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural Communication. I am very grateful to Julian for sending me an advance copy of this paper.
12.The sources for this are those that underpin Chapter One, and are listed there and in the appendix: the particular case of animal spirits will be considered in Chapter Ten.
13.Éva Pócs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-eastern and Central Europe, Helsinki, 1989; and ‘Tundéres and the Order of St Ilona, or, Did the Hungarians Have Fairy Magicians?’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 54 (2009), 379–96.
14.Zoran Čiča, ‘Vilenica; Vilenjak’, Narodna umjetnost, 39 (2002), 31–64.
15.Fabián Alejandro Campagne, ‘Charismatic Healers on Iberian Soil’, Folklore, 118 (2007), 44–64.
16.For example, Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 140–47, 163–4; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 99. The great example of a historian who used such materials is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971, 608–9.
17.National Records of Scotland, JC26/1/67.
18.The most recent publication of the trial is in Wilby, Cunning Folk, viii–xv.
19.Robert Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1833, vol. 1, part 3, 161–5.
20.See the satire on him that mocks and slanders her as an evil magician consorting with ‘seely wights’, ‘The Legend of the Bischop of St Androis Lyfe’, lines 371–89; printed in James Cranstoun (ed.), Sat
irical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, Edinburgh, 1891, vol. 1, 365.
21.Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 1, part 3, 192–204.
22.Stirling Council Archives, CH2/722/2.
23.Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 2, part 2, 25–6.
24.John Stuart (ed.), The Miscellany of the Spalding Club: Volume One, Aberdeen, 1841, 177.
25.Ibid., 119–25.
26.G. F. Black, Examples of Printed Folk-lore Concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands, ed. Northcote W. Thomas, London, 1903, 72–4, 111–15.
27.John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1835 536, puts her encounter in Caithness, but she herself was from Orkney.
28.Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. 11, 366–7, 401. See Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 130–31.
29.John Stuart (ed.), Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie, Aberdeen, 1843, xi–xiii.
30.The record is printed in Alaric Hall, ‘Folk-healing, Fairies and Witchcraft’, Studia Celtica Fennica, 2 (2006), 10–25.
31.Black, Examples of Printed Folk-lore, 124.
32.Described in Margo Todd, ‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders’, in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds), The Impact of the European Reformation, Aldershot, 2008, 193.
33.Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.
34.William Cramond (ed.), Records of Elgin 1234–1830: Volume Two, Aberdeen, 1908, 357.
35.Her confession is most recently published in Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, 37–52.
36.Cited in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, An Abundance of Witches, Stroud, 2005, 112–13.
37.J.R.N. MacPhail (ed.), Highland Papers. Volume Three, Edinburgh, 1920, 36–8.
38.Page 7 of an Account of Two Letters, appended to A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girl, Edinburgh, 1697.
39.I have excluded beings described in the trial records who, from their characteristics, such as being green-clad spirits, could well be fairies but are not clearly so.
40.Todd, ‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders’.
41.Robert Law, Memorialls, ed. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Edinburgh, 1818, lxxv.
42.Julian Goodare, ‘Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland’, in Karin E. Olsen and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), Airy Nothings, Leiden, 139–70; and ‘Scottish Witchcraft in its European Context’. I am very grateful to Julian for the gift of this essay.
43.By Michael Hunter, as The Occult Laboratory, Woodbridge, 2001.
44.Ibid., 143, 150.
45.Ibid., 51–191, passim.
46.William Hay, Lectures on Marriage, ed. John C. Barry, Edinburgh, 1967, 126–7: ‘Nam quaedam sunt mulieres que dicunt se habere commercium cum diana regina pharorum Alie sunt que dicunt pharos esse demones et eas nullum commertium cum eis habere Sed se convenisse cum innumera multitudine mulierum simplicium quas vocant lingua nostra celly vichtys’.
47.This is in an essay on ‘Seely Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits in Scotland’, forthcoming in a collection edited by Michael Ostling for Palgrave Macmillan and entitled Small Gods. I am very grateful to Julian for sending me an advance copy of it.
48.Julian Goodare also notes that Hay describes the women of the canon Episcopi, uniquely, as riding on swallows, and argues that this was one of the characteristics of the ‘cult’ of the seely wights, whose adherents thought they did so in ecstatic visions. This is possible, but it is not actually what Hay says, and nobody accused of magic before a Scottish court claimed to fly in that manner: the closest Julian can find was Bessie Henderson, who spoke of meeting fairy-like beings who ‘flew like a swallow’.
49.Incidentally, while including the Northern and Western Isles in my survey of this subject with respect to Scotland, I am leaving the Channel Islands out of my consideration of southern Britain. This might be justified by geography, as they are properly part of Normandy, and legally a remnant of its duchy. It is also, however, for lack of material. Some public excitement, and confusion, has been caused by Darryl Ogier’s article ‘Night Revels and Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey’, Folklore, 109 (1998), 53–62, which dealt with the prosecution in 1630 of youthful male merrymakers for going about at Christmastide disguised as (perhaps) werewolves. However, nobody at the time associated them with witchcraft, magic or a ‘cult’, the case record concerns only one or (possibly) two incidents involving the same small group, and the translation of a term as ‘werewolf’ is uncertain as it might equally mean ‘outlaw’. The post-Reformation authorities in Guernsey were cracking down on traditional seasonal customs, especially those involving rowdiness and disguise. The penalty exacted was merely suspension from communion. This episode had nothing to do with the intense and lethal witch-hunt conducted in the early modern Channel Islands, for which see John Linwood Pitts, Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands, Guernsey, 1886; G. R. Balleine, ‘Witch Trials in Jersey’, Société Jersaise Bulletin Annuel, 13 (1939), 379–98; and Darryl Ogier, ‘Glimpses of the Obscure’, in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, 2010, 177–91.
50.Thomas Scott Holmes (ed.), The Register of John Stafford, Somerset Record Society 31–2 (1915–16), 225–7; Claude Jenkins, ‘Cardinal Morton’s Register’, in R. W. Seton-Watson (ed.), Tudor Studies, London, 1924, 72–4; The Examination of John Walsh, London, 1566; Somerset Record Office, D/D/Ca/21–2; Borthwick Institute, R.vi.A2, fo. 22.
51.John Penry, A Treatise Concerning the Aequity of an Humble Supplication, Oxford, 1587, 46.
52.East Sussex Record Office, RYE 13/1–21. The social and political context of the case has been intensively studied by Annabel Gregory in ‘Witchcraft, Politics and “Good Neighbourhood” in Early Seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 31–66; and Rye Spirits, London, 2013.
53.Moses Pitt, An Account of one Ann Jeffries, London, 1696; Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries, 13 (1924), 312–14. The case has been well studied by Peter Marshall, ‘Ann Jeffries and the Fairies’, in McShane and Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, 127–42.
54.Durant Hotham, The Life of Jacob Behmen, London, 1654, C3; John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, London, 1677, 301.
55.All this is recorded in Wharton’s journals, British Library, Add. MSS 20006–7. A full-length study of Parish, which treats her with deep sympathy, has been produced by Frances Timbers, The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish, Kirksville, MO, 2016.
56.John Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, London, 1705, 104–5.
57.This was noticed particularly by Davies, Cunning Folk, 70.
58.Thomas Bell (ed.), Records of the Meeting of the Exercise of Alford, Aberdeen, 1897, 257.
59.John Stuart (ed.), Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery and Synod of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, 1846, 310.
60.Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 196.
61.Ibid., 51–3, 60, 142–7, 161–72. This makes the more curious and anomalous the statement of Thomas Pennant from the late eighteenth century, that those who claimed to possess second sight on the Hebridean island of Rhum gained visions during ‘paroxysms’, in which they ‘fall into trances, grow pale, and feign to abstain from food for a month’: cited in Julian Goodare, ‘Visionaries and Nature Spirits in Scotland’, in Bela Mosia (ed.), Book of Scientific Works of the Conference of Belief Narrative Network of ISFNR, 1–4 October 2014, Zugdidi, Georgia, 2015), 106. Online at www.zssu.ge/zssu2/sites/default/files/page/Book%20of%20Scientific%20Works.pdf. It could be that such figures had developed a new technique in the intervening century, but more likely that such a method had been part of their repertoire earlier, but – to judge from those earlier reports – a minor one.
62.Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 177.
63.Goodare, ‘Visionaries and Nature Spirits’, 102–16; Margaret Dudley and Julian Goodare, ‘Outside In or Inside Out’, and Julian Goodare, ‘Flying Witches in Sc
otland’, in Scottish Witches and Witch-hunters, Basingstoke, 2013, 121–39, 159–76.
64.This motif features in the cases of Bessie Dunlop, Janet Boyman and Alison Pearson. For English cases see C.M.L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake Counties, Kendal, 1948, 215–16; William Lilly, History of his Life and Times, London, 1715, 102–3.
65.For general accounts of British fairy belief, see the sources in n. 1, plus Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, Wymeswold, 2004.
66.A point emphasized by Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, London, 1967, 48–50; and Gillian Edwards, Hobgoblin and Sweet Puck, London, 1974, 33–48.
67.What follows in this section, unless otherwise referenced, is a summary of Ronald Hutton, ‘The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), 1157–75. Full arguments and source references, and tributes to other scholars in the field, are to be found there.
68.For much of the twentieth century it was more or less orthodoxy that the fays were intrusions into the French romance tradition from Celtic culture, but this has now been abandoned as unprovable: see the references in my article.
69.For the Somerset magician, see the first source in n. 50. In a Latin treatise on the Ten Commandments, a magical text is known as a ‘helvenbook’, i.e. elven book, as further proof of the widely perceived connection between fairies and magic by this date. The treatise may actually be earlier, but exists only in fifteenth-century copies: Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Middle English Lexicon’, in Michael Korhammer (ed.), Words, Texts and Manuscripts, Woodbridge, 1992, 472.
70.A point emphasized by William Grant Stewart, The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland, London, 1851, 49–51; and Donald A. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life, London, 1935, 195–210. Although they relied mainly on modern folklore, their view is borne out in the rare cases where a seventeenth-century source for Gaelic fairy belief survives, such as Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (for which I have used the edition in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 77–106).
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