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Conversation
A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution
India Rakusen*†
,
indiarakusen.media@gmail.com
Ronald Hutton‡
, Laura Kounine§
, A.K. Blakemore¶
Abstract
This conversation considers the definition of witchcraft, its origins, history, and various manifestations of witches in history and literature. The speakers discuss the issue of the gender of witches, and how thinking about witches and witchcraft has changed over time. Witches are a global phenomenon, but the conversation concentrates on their European history. Emphasis is placed on the impact of the Reformation and the religious nature of many of the waves of witch persecution, including those of the English ‘witch-finder general’. Matthew Hopkins, the subject of a recent novel by A.K. Blakemore. The discussion shows how witchcraft was often thought of as a Satanic conspiracy, and that the widespread nature of persecution was possible because so many people, including those labelled as witches, shared this assumption. The history of witch persecution is discussed in terms of judicial processes and the history of the emotions.
Keywords
EuropegenderMatthew Hopkinshistory of the emotionspersecutionreformationsatanismwitchIntroductions and welcome
India Rakusen: Welcome to this evening. It is, I have absolutely no doubt, going to be a completely fascinating dive into the history of the witch and into some of the legends that were created by and for the witch trials. I am India and I made the series Witch for the BBC, which involved me jumping down numerous rabbit holes in a vain attempt to try to define what a witch is and to try to get to the root of what happened at the witch trials, why they happened, and why we have this growing interest in it today.
With the collective knowledge of these three people in the room this evening, we have one of the deepest understandings of the witch trials available and I don’t think I’m overstating that. I just want to take a moment to remember what we’re talking about when we talk about the witch trials. The most recent figures that we have for the witch trials—and remember that this is something that’s very difficult to calculate or estimate and it’s hard to find real data that you can rely on—is that around 100,000 trials took place in early modern Europe. Half of those led to executions and, of those, it’s believed about 80 per cent were women. It’s interesting that we find ourselves now 450 years or so on from where it’s generally agreed that the witch trials were starting to hit their peak. And we have this ever-growing hunger to try to understand the significance of the witch phenomenon.
Alongside that, we also have this real interest in trying to define and understand what a witch is today and what that might mean to us. There are many questions that I could ask this evening, and that you could ask this evening. But, we are going to focus on some specific things. Tonight, we are going to explore where we can trace the witch back to, looking at some of the definitions of the witch and also looking at how we got to the European witch trials. We’re going to look at the ways that gender became and still is really important in the way that people imagine the witch. We’ll also be looking at the big hurdles that face us when we are examining and representing the witch trials and particularly those accused.
Panel discussion
IR: Ronald, what is witchcraft? How can you possibly define it?
Professor Ronald Hutton: Witchcraft is something practised by a witch, so the big question is, ‘What is a witch?’ This is the tough one, because there are at least four different definitions of a witch circulating in the modern world, and now bumping into each other like dodgems. Two of them are old, and two of them are modern. The two that are modern are that a witch is a feisty, independent woman who is persecuted by the patriarchy for not fitting in, and rubbed out by it—the witch as a feminist icon. She matters, because the witch is one of the very few images of independent female power that traditional European culture has bequeathed to the present.
The second modern definition is that a witch is a practitioner of a nature-based, feminist, pagan religion, and that also works. It’s correct. It’s what happens to and with a lot of people at the present day.
The two older definitions go back to the beginning of history and the roots of the English language. The first is that a witch is somebody who uses magic to harm other people and to destroy people’s lives or those of their families, their livestock, or their livelihood. The other is that a witch is somebody who uses magic for any purpose, good or bad, although people who use this terminology often distinguish good from bad magic with expressions like white witches or good witches.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, in my experience of the records, nobody who believed in magic and used it ever called a good magician a witch. It was a word reserved purely for the bad. Those who called the people whom ordinary people called cunning folk, wise folk, or good magicians, witches were those who wanted to wipe them out. They were those in authority from Anglo-Saxon times onwards who didn’t think that anybody should resort to magic for anything and, therefore, smeared the good magicians by calling them witches.
When you put these four definitions together, what you get is a modern world in which the witch figure is really complex, really exciting, and really confusing.
IR: How far back can you trace witchcraft? It’s global, but how far back can you really go?
RH: Until the beginning of history. Most of us know about the horrid old test presumed for a suspected witch—that you throw the person into water and, if they float, they’re guilty; if they sink, they’re innocent, and you try to fish them out. Fewer people know that this test is first recorded in the law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi almost 4,000 years ago, but you can perspective it differently by saying that most human societies in each inhabited continent on the planet have feared magic practised by other human beings, and have attacked other human beings under suspicion of practising it. Hunting witches is what most of the human race does. That doesn’t mean that all of the human race have done it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they should do it.
IR: It is really complicated, isn’t it? You’ve outlined those four definitions at the beginning, and how people view the witch as well, but there is a very key difference, isn’t there, between global practices of witchcraft, whether now or far back, and the witch as we might picture it from the early modern witch hunts. There’s a real difference there.
RH: In practice, there isn’t. In theory, there is. In practice, peoples in other parts of the world were quite as capable of wiping out really large numbers of their neighbours under suspicion of being witches as the early modern Europeans were. In Tanzania, in four years in the 1990s, the Ministry of the Interior for Tanzania estimated that 5,000 people were burned to death by their neighbours on suspicion of being witches. That’s a body count greater than anything in early modern Europe, but early modern Europe is unusual in two ways.
The first is it’s the only place on the planet where being a witch was equated with being a practitioner of a different kind of religion—an evil religion, or an anti-religion, worshipping a force of intense evil. The other—and this is the good news—is that Europe is the only part of the globe where an intense, official, and immemorial hatred of witches was transformed into an official disbelief in witchcraft and the eradication of witch hunting as an acceptable social and legal practice. That matters a lot.
IR: I know it’s a huge story, but how did the early modern witch hunts begin?
RH: They begin because Western Christianity—Protestant and Catholic—loses its nerve. It becomes fixated upon internal enemies, hidden and imagined groups of people in society worshipping the devil, the fears and fantasies of people, and the sense that Christianity is contracting. This, after all, is the period in which Islam—the Ottoman Turks—is swallowing up southeastern Europe and engulfing the north shore of Africa, so they can then strike at the underbelly of Europe across the Mediterranean.
Western Christianity feels exceptionally under threat and starts hunting for reasons. Factor in the appearance of bubonic plague and worsening climate destroying farming, and God really looks angry with Europe, so this is part of a response to root it out. That’s how the idea appears in the 1420s of a satanic crusade to destroy Christianity and, therefore, decent humanity by enlisting wicked people, getting them to worship Satan, and then giving them magical powers worked by demons so they can annihilate their neighbours.
IR: It wasn’t like a load of people in Europe sat down and made a plan for this. They didn’t meet somewhere, did they? Why did they start looking for witches? Who was it, and how did it disseminate?
RH: It’s two forces meeting in the middle. This idea about a satanic conspiracy—which, after all, is the ultimate conspiracy—that anybody in your community whom you don’t like could be a witch is spread by wandering friars, or preachers, in the 1420s, and it slowly permeates the elites in different parts of Europe, so they are now prepared to encourage witch hunting in a way they hadn’t been prepared to do for hundreds of years.
That meets another force coming up from below, which really pushes the accusations. Most ordinary Europeans had always believed in witchcraft, and so when the climate gets worse, when the population rises, and when people are pushed towards the limit of subsistence, they turn upon each other as never before, and they now have a legal system encouraging them to accuse those they fear and dislike in their community of witchcraft. The push to denounce comes from below, but permission to do something about it is imposed from above.
IR: Laura, you’re an early modernist, and you’ve spent a lot of time looking at the witch trials. What, for you, is a witch? I know we’ve had some definitions, but you’ve spent a lot of time looking at court records, thinking about the people who were accused, and looking at what happened particularly in Germany. Does this idea of the accusation of a witch have boundaries for you? Does it have a very clear image to you?
Dr Laura Kounine: That’s a really good question. What’s really interesting is that there are two things going on. There are ideas of the witch. If not completely fixed, there are definitely motifs about what a witch should look like and who they are. That’s in art. That’s in demonologies. That’s in sermons. Then, at the ground level—and Ronald talked about this as well—what’s so terrifying is that the witch could be anyone, and I’ve written about this in my book. We think the witch is this clearly defined ‘other’. In some ways, witches are, but when it comes to harm befalling you, you look around to anyone within your midst, and the fear is that any of those people could be a witch. Your neighbour could be a witch. Your mother could be a witch. The witch is not easily definable.
I do think it depends on the territory, but in the territory that I was looking at [in southwestern Germany], in the court records, magistrates say, ‘We just don’t know if this person is a witch.’ Another interesting thing about witches in terms of judicial procedure is that there is no real evidence about whether someone is a witch. It’s often about emotions—anger, envy, and spite. There’s no corpus delicti. How do you prove that someone is a witch?
It’s incredibly intangible. There are no fixed boundaries. In the Cambridge Companion that I’m currently co-editing, that is our key message. The reason the witch is so pervasive through time—and, as Ronald says, from the beginning of time to now and into our future—is because the witch is a very blurred, heuristic category that can mean different things at different times to different people.
IR: What drew you to get so interested in the witch trials? Was it this emotional element?
LK: It started with failed saints. I was interested in women who had been brought to the Inquisition for feigning sanctity. That was as an undergraduate. Then I thought, ‘What other persecuted women are out there in the early modern period?’ It started with gender and thinking about this fine line between toleration and persecution, and that found its greatest manifestation in the witch trials. The emotions just came into that organically, because witchcraft is a crime of emotion, particularly in the early modern period.
IR: Amy, what drew you to the witch trials?
A.K. Blakemore: It was a local connection originally. My dad lives in Manningtree, which is where this novel is set. Manningtree was the location in which Matthew Hopkins, as you said, latterly known as the ‘witchfinder general’, began his career, so to speak, investigating the activities of the local, so-called coven. Matthew Hopkins is probably the most iconically recognisable witch hunter of the early modern period. In some way, he has informed our culture in quite a nefarious way, in the same way Jack the Ripper has, for instance, in terms of our image of an archetypal villain. It began more as an interest in how we think about our history, and particularly the darker aspects and more violent aspects of our history and our national myth. Manningtree is a very sleepy little town. Not much has happened there since the Peasants’ Revolt—but Matthew Hopkins happened there. On a sign at the edge of town that says, ‘Welcome to Manningtree’, there’s a woodcut of him, and that was really fascinating to me. It’s a source of local pride. Until recently, there was no memorial to the women of Manningtree who were persecuted by Hopkins. Hopkins himself puts the number at about 200 women and men. He was directly involved in their trial and execution.
It started with that very specific interest and then, digging into the sources more, I just became so intrigued by the cross-section and this snapshot of a specific place at a specific time they offered, and the social dynamics that the Manningtree witch trials revealed at this intense moment of English history that was the Civil War.
IR: When you’re talking about the book and when we chatted as well, it was interesting that you were quite clear when you set out that you didn’t want to write torture porn and you didn’t want to prettify things. Is that something you felt had happened quite a lot with the witch trials?
AKB: There are a lot of witch trial novels out there, of various qualities. As a genre, I had had problems with a lot of the witch trial novels I had read, because it felt like there was this imaginative failure to engage with the beliefs that engendered witch trials on their own terms. A lot of the novels situated their protagonists outside of the religious milieu of the early modern period. That, to me, seemed like missing what was interesting in the story there.
When I was writing The Manningtree Witches, what was most fascinating to me and what I wanted to explore is the potentially emotionally disfiguring effects of believing in an incarnated Satan, in an absolutely evil force at work in the world, in damnation, and how, as we’ve already been speaking about, the paranoia, particularly in small communities, would alter the psychology of both the persecutor and the persecuted.
IR: What the novel does so well, which is everything that Laura and Ronald have just been talking about there, is look from the ground at the way that the image of the witch is built and established within that society. I wonder if you’d be happy to do a little reading for us from the book.
AKB: Sure.
‘Parliament secures a victory over the king in Berkshire against long odds, prompting a confused atmosphere of dog days carnival across the villages and hamlets of Essex, the men drinking and firing their muskets off into the lilac dusk, for God’s judgment is surely passed upon the unrighteous. They massage the spare accounts of the battle to increasingly extravagant divinity, and soon the archangel Michael is manifesting over the field of engagement, and white horses gallop through their fuddled cider dreams. September becomes October, becomes November. The harvest is brought in as the languid summer finally exhausts itself, and a painted effigy of the pope is set to blaze on the village green’.
‘Matthew Hopkins reopens the Thorn Inn with little ceremony. As the year turns, his taste for dismal costuming provokes less astonishment, and even begins to make a sort of sense. While others rush about their outdoor business as quickly as they might through the autumn drizzle in an effort to repair to the comfort of their hearts, Matthew Hopkins struts about the town like a dour, long-legged crow, with John Eads and John Stern, and the most learned company he is able to find in so backward a place as Manningtree, happy as a Puritan might be. Some call him a backward man, a coal tit. Others admire him, no family to speak of, but plenty of money, it seems’.
‘Matthew Hopkins rides his horse through a field at dawn and notices a black feather lying in the grass, glossy and ideal. Matthew Hopkins hosts, Matthew Hopkins expounds, Matthew Hopkins discourses, the town’s foremost autodidact groping for each morsel of his exultant theology. “For he is, of course, a prince of air”, says Hopkins, lifting the edge of his riding cloak in such a way that his learned companions might better appreciate the broidery of the hem, the sleekness of the sable, and it makes sense to them then, when he puts it like that, how the devil might thicken like butter and slide under the pantry door to cover a man all over—a man or a woman’.
IR: That was so beautiful—an absolutely stunning book. What’s going on there that I love is this picture of Matthew laying all these seeds. These were happening in the mid-1640s. Already a lot of witch trials had happened in Europe at that point. From your research in Manningtree specifically, how much was that already a precedent? How much were they already drawing on a picture of a witch? How much was being created not just by Matthew Hopkins but by the paranoia in the town?
AKB: That’s a really interesting question. Essex was known as witch county because of the intensity of the witch hunting and the trials that went on in Essex. You’d had St Osyth already before Manningtree. You get a sense, looking at Essex’s history in the context of witch hunting, that familiarity with the idea of what a witch was was infective. The idea that there was a local coven would move from one town to the other.
The role that Hopkins and men like him played, but certainly that Hopkins played, was enabling the catalysing of suspicion into action. He was a very educated man, possibly with some legal education, although we don’t have too many absolute biographical facts about him. You get the sense that there would be local ill feeling. He would ride in and tell people, ‘It’s okay, what you feel. You’re probably right’, and that’s quite frightening. Something that I always found interesting about him was that all he claimed to do was to find the witches. What happened to them afterwards wasn’t really down to him.
IR: That’s really interesting. Thank you. Laura, how much do you find in your research this interplay between what people on the ground, as you put it, are creating, and what’s being told down to them by pamphlets, by witch hunting manuals and by the church?
LK: Amy is completely right—and you talked about this as well, Ronald—insofar that everyone believes in witchcraft. Not everyone is accusing their neighbour of witchcraft, though it is about this mobilising of suspicions when they do arise. People believed in witchcraft throughout the early modern period. It really depends on the territory in terms of how much those suspicions then become mobilised, and how much particular witch finders or councils want to then make that turn into an accusation and into a trial process. What you quickly find as a witchcraft historian is that witch trials are highly dysfunctional. They are not a great way of sorting out conflict. In a way, I’m always amazed, particularly in areas where witch hunts are fuelled by accusations ‘from below’, why they ever come to trial.
In terms of where they’re getting these ideas from, what I found so interesting in your brilliant book, Amy—and I agree that it’s often very painful to read historical fiction about witches, and I try not to too much—is that Matthew Hopkins is reading other demonologies and, as you say, when these suspicions become more crystallised, people are referring to pamphlets about earlier trials. People would have heard about trials. People would be talking about trials. There are ideas about what a witch should look like and what they would do. Most people aren’t reading demonologies because most people can’t read those kinds of things, so it’s a very messy crossover between elite and popular ideas, but there is a lot more crossover than people think.
IR: Ronald, how much did folklore inform ideas of witches? We have these images being drawn up by witch hunters in their manuals and demonologies, and the Malleus Maleficarum. We have sermons from the church. How much is local folklore? How much does that get absorbed into what people start to imagine as the witch?
RH: To a certain amount. Across what you might call the heartlands of the early modern witch hunt, from Britain across Germany, there’s not a lot of folklore involved, disappointingly. When you head up to the peripheries—to Scotland, northern Italy, the Alps, and the Balkans—you find a lot, and there’s no good answer yet as to why that should be.
What you can’t easily say is that witch hunting in the early modern period depends upon ancient images and ideas. What you can say is that, rather than finding exciting bits of folklore in most of the trial records, you find that ancient ideas condition the basic foundations of the way in which a hunt operates.
Let’s take the enormous issue of why most of the victims are women across Europe. In terms of the answer, I say this with pride because I ran a research project at my university in the 2010s that was directed towards this. We assembled inside and outside the research grant team of nine people, so we could crack quite a lot between us. It depends on the ancestral attitudes to magic in your area.
Across most of Europe, it’s believed since ancient times that women are the magical sex. Men can learn magic from books or from teachers, but women can just do it. It’s in them. That is why women are the prophetesses and the sybils, and why they’re at Delphi, not a bloke. They just have the access to it, which is why, in this zone, when witch hunting comes, it’s assumed that women are the more dangerous because they can let loose the magic with a bit of help from Satan.
There are large areas of Europe where there are different prehistoric traditions. In Iceland, 93 per cent of the victims in a vicious local witch hunt are men. That’s because, in Iceland, magic is through early writing, or runes, and men do that. In Finland and the Baltic states, they have what we call shamanism, which is a tradition where practitioners who deal with magic go into a trance and call upon spirits to help them. Most of those practitioners are men, which is why, when witch hunting gets in, it’s men who are targeted. In Normandy, it’s shepherds who are the magicians and they’re men, so they get attacked savagely. In the broad Austrian lands, it’s vagrants, and they’re mostly men, so they get attacked. In Russia, magic is assumed to be an extension of local politics, and so it’s men who get attacked there, and Russia is a pretty big place.
Geographically, we’ve just covered half of Europe, so the conclusion here is that the societies which hunt men instead of women in Europe have the same religions, the same gender relations, and the same societies as those that do, so none of the explanations that have been produced that account for the targeting of women in terms of early modern patriarchal structures that suppress women can work, because the areas that target men have exactly the same structures. That’s quite a big discovery.
IR: That’s absolutely incredible. In many places, as you outlined, it really does become fixed to women. Laura, you’ve brought along a couple of images, because this is something that you’ve looked very deeply at, in terms of how images of women and images of the witch become entwined.
LK: Let’s look at Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat. This image becomes iconic, and it really builds this visual imagination of what a witch looks like. There are just a few things I wanted to point out here, which fix so much in the visual imagination about this idea of the witch as female, and not just female, but the wild, unbridled sexuality of this older female. It’s quite clearly an old woman with a post-menopausal body. What’s so interesting is that it’s a really androgynous body, withered, muscular, and hard, and no longer feminine, but then you have the juxtaposition of this wild, flowing hair. There’s so much going on here, but they are motifs that we then see play out in witch beliefs and witch trials.
This is the most terrifying form of sexuality because it’s sexuality without procreation. It’s wild. It’s untamed. She’s riding the goat backwards. If anyone’s seen the 2015 film, The Witch [Director Robert Eggars], you’ll know how much goats figure in witchcraft beliefs—the goat is a symbol of Satan, as well as unbridled lust. You might be able to see there in the corner that she is brewing a hailstorm. Again, it goes back to Ronald’s point of bad climates and the fact that witches are believed to cause destruction and destroy fertility.
It’s very much this idea of the witch as female, but as no longer fertile who also wants to destroy fertility. That’s what becomes so very threatening. Just as a reminder, this is 1500. Can you imagine, in the 1500s, the kinds of images that people would be …
IR: Who would see this, and how accessible was an image like this? How widely shared was it, and how do you react to it?
LK: This Dürer image was very popular. It would have just been absolutely shocking. It’s still shocking to us today. Imagine, in the 1500s, you’re only really seeing biblical images, and then you see this. The witch is stark naked, so it’s meant to be shocking, but it’s also meant to be titillating. What’s striking is that this is very much creating this visual identification of the witch. Most people couldn’t read at this time, so these images have even more power and even more currency than they might do today.
IR: There were images and the written word, but how important were images like this to gendering the witch?
LK: There’s another one, and I don’t know if ‘favourite’ is the right word to describe witchcraft images, but let’s say it is an iconic, paradigmatic image. This is of the Witches Sabbath. [Hans Baldung] Grien was one of Dürer’s students, and these motifs are very clear cut here of the witches’ unbridled sexuality. You’ve got the hag in the middle, and then you’ve got this nubile woman riding the goat backwards, which is a variation of the image we saw from Dürer.
You probably won’t be able to see it, but they’re also grilling some sausages. You asked about folklore symbolism. There’s a real sense of this fear of witches destroying virility. Some of the cases that I’ve looked at in my book and in my articles are to do with stolen manhood, so that does translate into popular belief. I still don’t know why Conrad Streich [in one of the trials I look at in Imagining the Witch] decided to declare in public that a witch had stolen his manhood. I don’t think that was maybe the best way of resolving his affliction, but he did, and so we have that now on record. There’s this very deep fear of the female body, female sexuality, and the power it has over men.
You asked how important these images are. We have to understand images in their own right. These images were created well before the height of the ‘witch craze’. The so-called ‘witch craze’ only begins in earnest in the 1560s. The images I’ve just shown you are from 1500 and 1510, so they’re not just representing reality. They’re not just representing beliefs. They’re creating a new belief and a new visual imagination, so we have to understand that there are different sources that people are drawing from that are not a direct representation of what is happening. This is not coming from trials necessarily. This is a new visual language of the witch.
IR: Older women, as you pointed out particularly in the first image, were also a really massive target. I can’t remember the statistics from Scotland, but they were overwhelmingly older women, weren’t they? I’ve got that right, haven’t I?
LK: Yes.
IR: I’m sure that is a big, long story of why the older woman becomes such a part of that image, but I’m wondering if you can give us some insight.
LK: There are quite a few different explanations. If you’re thinking about the images, one is this fear of the post-menopausal body. In the early modern period, there is a humoral understanding of the body, based on the four humours, and a healthy body is a flowing body. Women’s bodies transform through menstruation, through lactation and through pregnancy, and there is very much this fundamental fear of what happens when a woman stops menstruating, and what happens to the body and to the humours. Do they become poisonous and blocked, and does that lead them to have these evil intentions?
There is something in the early modern cosmology of the body. Some historians, such as Lyndal Roper, very much place fears of older women specifically to do with fears of their post-menopausal body. Other historians say that older women were more garrulous and more argumentative. Others suggest that accused witches were often widows, so no longer under patriarchal control. Other historians say they were old because they’d had a reputation for years, and that comes up in your book, Amy. A lot of these people had been thought of as being witches for decades before they finally went to trial.
There are lots of different explanations, but just to temper that, I will say that it is also a stereotype. There’s an over-representation of older women, but I also have found trials of young married women, unmarried women, children, and men. Again, it’s a messy picture.
IR: How much do we see this imagery still with us today? It’s really clung, hasn’t it, Ronald? I don’t know if you want to speak to that.
RH: Yes. The witch is a huge figure in the modern world because ‘she’, usually, in the West, can do so much work for us. She is an image of the victimisation of the feminine. She is also an image of fear and power wielded by the feminine. She challenges our sense of the rational. She is a figure at the heart of a collective guilt of the past. Just think of the stunning realisation of the 18th century, which is only one or two generations after the actual witch trials, that tens of thousands of people had been put needlessly to death, not by strangers or by long-ago ancestors, but by their parents and grandparents. This is a very big mental sea change for European elites, and no wonder it’s so uncomfortable for them trying to find whom to blame, and we’re still trying to do that at the present day.
IR: When Laura was talking about the image of the older woman and the witch, I was really thinking of all those heartbreaking scenes with Mother Clarke. It’s absolutely devastating, as you’ve written in your book, that she is the old lady who is the very first person to be picked up by Matthew Hopkins and accused of being a witch. It is absolutely terrifying, really, what they do to her and how her vulnerability plays so easily into, you could say, his desires and what he’s trying to achieve.
AKB: Yes. It’s Mother Clarke, alias Mother Beanfield, as she was sometimes called. She was one of the oldest women, if not the oldest woman, although we’re not sure of her exact age, to be accused of witchcraft in Manningtree. Laura already touched on this idea that, very often, older or widowed women wouldn’t have a male protector, which left them vulnerable in certain ways.
One of the interesting things that also connects up to the image of the witch as an older woman is that, very often, certainly in Essex in the 1640s, witchcraft accusations would proceed from begging and vagrancy, as Ronald mentioned earlier. That’s partially tied to the early Protestant ethic and this idea that wealth could proceed from virtue and piety, and that poverty could be connected to impiety or evil. If you were poor, it was because God didn’t like you very much and you were going to hell.
There was a sudden reversal of fortune. When bad things happen to people domestically or economically, rather than believe it’s because they’ve done something to upset God, it’s nicer to believe that it’s happening because someone set a demon on you. It was the English Civil War, a time of famine and political confusion when the Manningtree witch trials were going on. You get this dovetailing of the idea that poverty is attendant on sin, with a time when lots of people are seeking aid to help deal with their poverty. It’s not surprising that, suddenly, economically inactive, older women who were widowed and who were viewed as not really contributing anything to their communities become a social dead weight that is very easy to scapegoat. That is part of it as well, in that older women just weren’t viewed as helpful, useful, or constructive to the communities that they belonged within, in many cases.
IR: Perhaps one of the misconceptions of the witch trials, which you deal with really delicately in The Manningtree Witches, is that people sometimes think it was hysteria, and neighbours with pitchforks, but it was frighteningly judicial, wasn’t it?
LK: Yes. I’ve written about this in my book, and I suggest that the witch is created during the trial process. There is no ‘witch’. Often, there are just rumours and gossip, and people might die with it going no further than that. It’s the trial process that solidifies someone’s identity as a witch, and it is incredibly judicial. Those are often the only records we will have for how this person becomes a witch.
What’s really interesting is that there’s a lot of resistance to that identity as well. That’s what I’ve written about in my work. People don’t just put their hands up and say, ‘Yes, that’s me’. You talked at the very beginning about the statistic of 50 per cent of the 100,000 trials ending in execution, but there’s a story there that 50 per cent didn’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it all ended well, because they might be fined or banished, and other awful things might have happened to them. There is also, as Amy shows so brilliantly in her novel, agency there of the people who are being accused of witchcraft. Some people really say, ‘No, that’s not me’, but it is a highly judicial process, and that is, fundamentally, where this identity gets constructed.
IR: Is there awareness from people that this version of the witch is being created, or does it feel like it’s speaking to some sort of passed down stories, passed down folklore, or ancient beliefs?
RH: Laura is absolutely right that the process of witch trials generates a body of belief and a set of stereotypes which then enable witch trials. The role of print in this is quite important across Germany and England. You can trace the effect of particular pamphlets describing and justifying witch trials. You have to justify witch trials because, right through the period, there are still sceptics around at all levels of society. The idea of a satanic conspiracy is not automatically, intuitively believable.
A statistic worth bearing in mind—and Laura was coming to this—is that, if you are accused of being a witch in Tudor or Stuart England, as long as the normal law courts are there, you have a 75 per cent chance of being found not guilty. It’s the unrepresentative minority who get convicted and executed, and one of the difficult questions is, ‘Why?’ It’s this minority who are represented overwhelmingly, and almost totally, in the pamphlets, and that’s because the pamphlets are mostly written to justify having put people to death for witchcraft against those who have doubts about it.
As Laura has said, and has been wonderfully illustrated in your novel, Amy, not only is a witch trial a risky business in all sorts of ways, but the evidential and ideological basis of it keeps on worrying people until, eventually, the worries become so big that the convictions end, and then the trials end, and then the laws get repealed. The beginning of the end of the witch hunts lies not in an increase in rationalism or a shift in a world picture about religion. It’s increasing doubts about the evidence of every case.
IR: During this, are people speaking up and going, ‘This is being invented’? Is there that voice there?
AKB: The epigraph to my novel is from Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584. ‘If our witches’ phantasies were not corrupted, nor their wits confounded with this humour, they would not so voluntarilie and readilie confesseth that which calleth their life into question.’ Already in 1584, you have someone basically saying, ‘Everyone’s delulu. What are you on about?’ Hopkins’ own career ended very quickly, and in shame and embarrassment, because people started to push back against what he was doing, and then he died at the age of 27.
IR: With Matthew Hopkins, you had to dig quite a lot into who he was. What was it like spending time in the headspace of a man like that?
AKB: It’s interesting, because I ended up feeling a little bit sorry for him in a strange way. I was trying to imagine myself from a very modern and irreligious point of view as earnestly as I could into one of the most ascetic, religious, and rigid ways of thinking you could in terms of 17th-century Calvinism and, as I was saying earlier, the disfiguring effect that would have on your emotions, your sexuality, the way you understood yourself, and the way you understood the people around you. It would have been incredibly more difficult to be a Puritan woman, but there was still that disfiguration attendant on Protestant manhood, and I began to see Hopkins as an example of that.
One of the reasons he’s so intriguing to people historically is that we will never know precisely why he did what he did. He was paid to be a witch hunter, but also there is every chance, and it is probably more likely, that he believed what he was doing was his spiritual duty as a Christian. I lean towards the latter interpretation because that’s more frightening—a person who believes that the violence that they carry out is morally justified rather than the cynic who’s doing it all for money. Part of the reason he is so intriguing is there will always be that ambiguity there around him as a figure.
IR: There is this sense that he whips himself almost up into a frenzy. Do you think that’s fair? That’s the feeling I got.
AKB: It was really interesting when you were talking about, in those images, the strange admixture of disgust and titillation that the witch’s body produces, because Hopkins got a book deal out of being a witch hunter and published his own manual on witch hunting. I read it when I was writing the novel, and the strange sensuality of his writing is just so striking. There’s a quote in the novel. ‘[T]hey all consult with Satan to save themselves, and Satan stands ready prepared with a, “What will you have me do for you, my near and dearest children, covenanted and compacted with me in my hellish league, and sealed with your blood, my delicate firebrand-darlings?”’. It’s so weird but really brilliant.
As you were saying—and that was a really good way of putting it—there is the fear of the desire that women’s bodies can produce, but also the witch embodies the absolute unknowability of another person in a way that reflects unease within domestic relationships, her at home, and how you can’t know what she’s thinking. Is she laughing at me when she’s doing the laundry down by the river? What are those women all talking about? It’s from the Malleus Maleficarum—‘When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil’, which is a quote that sums it up. It gets to something about the solipsistic experience of being a human, and the, ‘Why can’t I get into her head? If I can’t, I’ll just destroy it.’
LK: I completely agree with all of that, and that’s why my book ended up being about selfhood. I wanted it to be about the devil, but, in the end, my witches rarely spoke about the devil. It didn’t really come up.
IR: This is your book in Germany.
LK: Imagining the Witch [OUP, 2018]. You would think that the devil would come up quite a lot, but a lot of the trials are about much more mundane things. It is about selfhood. It’s about trying to work out, ‘Who is this person? Are they a witch? Are they evil within? How does one find that out?’
IR: I have so many questions to ask you all. We are running out of time. Laura, I briefly want to touch on the important question of reading emotions in the courts of the people accused, and what you saw there and how that was to study.
LK: I’m a historian of emotions, so I feel this very strongly, that witchcraft is a crime of emotions. It’s about fear. Fear is what drives persecution, but it’s also the belief that someone else’s emotions can cause you tangible harm. A lot of this is about ill will. It’s about what lies beneath. I have looked at accusations against a woman who is accused of harming her neighbour’s child by breathing on them, but breathing on the child is not the issue. It’s about what she feels when she does that. Lyndal Roper has written about this as well in terms of envy driving witch persecutions. You cannot understand witch hunting if you cannot understand the fear that witchcraft engendered. Emotions very viscerally drive the persecutions.
It’s also about these mixed emotions. It’s the fact that there is titillation. These demonologies were a form of entertainment for people, and there is clear titillation there. There are all these sexual fantasies that are given voice. Most of the people writing these books are (at least theoretically) celibate men and that’s really striking. There is a sense that witchcraft gives voice to the things that you cannot say otherwise, and that’s where the emotions come in.
IR: It’s interesting, because I remember, in the introduction to the early 1900s edition of Malleus Maleficarum that I have, John Simmons says that, basically, some people might find this a useful, corrective instruction on the rise of feminism today. It’s shocking, isn’t it, that that prevails? Ronald, how do you think the way the witch trials have been portrayed has changed? Where do you think we are at with it today?
RH: They do all sorts of work at the present day. Mostly, the witch trial is a metaphor for intolerance and persecution in general; hence the overworking of the word ‘witch hunt’ in political contexts. Also, the witch trial has become a way of looking at and negotiating unease between the sexes and, in particular, the position of women in a society, and the potential of women in a society.
Just as for the witch hunters, as both of you have illustrated visually and in words, there remains something extremely exciting about the figure of the witch. The witch is titillating in all sorts of ways and all sorts of levels. I was not aware, until I hit the wrong part of the internet, what a flourishing pornography there is at the present day on the theme of the witch.
IR: I just want to really check in with you, Amy, lastly, on how people have responded to your book. That must give you quite an indication of how the witch trials are viewed today. What sort of significance do people still put on this particular image of the witch?
AKB: It’s interesting, because we were talking before about the strange questions you get. One I get quite a lot is, ‘Yes, but were witches real? Is magic real?’ That is an impossible thing to answer, but also, ‘No, not in the sense that Matthew Hopkins believed in them, certainly.’
IR: Are people struggling to untie those questions from the witch trials?
AKB: I think so. There is still a sense, for some people, that it was almost a no-smoke-without-fire situation, somehow. That genuinely seems to be a response you sometimes get—the idea of, ‘Yes, but they must have had some power that raised hostility against them’. This book came out quite a long time ago now, and I’m still doing events about it, which is great, but one of the things that is very interesting about the witch trials for me, and that it has been great to get to share in writing and talking about this book, is that it’s very rare to feel like you can get the texture of a non-elite woman’s life, historically. One of the reasons I became so enamoured of this material is that you get that from witch trial records. Sometimes, you get this insight into what life would have looked like for a 19-year-old girl living in an Essex village in 1643, what her preoccupations were, and the way she felt about her body. That’s not something you really get. Working-class women don’t have history unless something horrible is happening to them, generally.
IR: Amazing. We will stop my questions there. Can I have a massive thank you, please, for these amazing people? We do have time for some questions.
Questions and answers
Participant: Why do you think the witch in modern terms is often young and green?
RH: I understand what you’re saying. It’s because of the fourth definition I gave at the beginning of witchcraft as a modern pagan religion, which is an idea that arose in the 19th century that the people prosecuted in the early modern witch trials were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion. That imagined witch religion got recreated in the 20th century in a very positive way to produce an environmentalist, feminist, and liberationist modern religion that works very well. The idea of the young, nature-loving woman coming into her power through contact with the forces of the land and of her own innate powers is an immensely attractive and, indeed, empowering one.
Participant: Amy said that Hopkins was a fierce Calvinist. How much was the rise of the witch hunt movement a product of the Protestant Reformation?
RH: That is a good question. Something worth bearing in mind is that 80 per cent of the people put to death in the European witch hunts died in one long lifetime, between 1560 and 1650. This is because it’s the time when the Reformation struggle is at its height, and when Protestant and Catholic have given up trying to kiss and make up and are trying to annihilate each other. All over Europe, the religious thermometer is zooming up to fever pitch. Witch hunting is always part of a package that includes Catholic hunting, Protestant hunting, Jew hunting, and vagrant hunting. It’s a clean-up on the neighbourhood. In this context, a satanic conspiracy makes better sense than it does at other times.
Similarly, when the wars of religion come to an end, and Protestant and Catholic realise that, for some reason, God wants them both to carry on existing, the thermometer comes straight down, and toleration of accused witches, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, vagrants, fornicators, and every other form of Christian no-no comes together in a Europe that is no longer so afraid of plague, bad climate, and the Turks, and is starting to conquer the world.
Participant: Why are witches always depicted as owning a black cat?
RH: The modern stereotype of the witch settles in the 18th century. She gets a steeple black hat, a black dress, and often a cloak, because this is simply one of the most common costumes of poor women in the 17th century. The black cat is the last residue of the early modern idea of the witch’s familiar. Witch’s familiars are any kind of domestic pet, absolutely any kind, so ferrets, dogs, and rabbits, but because the cat stares at you, like the hare, it is one of the most magical of animals in folklore, so the rest of the pets get dumped and the black cat gets retained. That’s how you get the identikit picture put together.
Participant: To what extent did the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches manual have an influence on witch trials?
LK: It did have an influence, unfortunately—and quite a large one—in the 16th century. Kramer was obsessed with female sexuality. As Ronald said earlier, in around the 1420s, you get this definition of the witch being in league with the devil, but the Malleus makes it very clear that it’s a female witch in league with the devil through a sexual pact. From the 1430s, we have treatises and demonologies talking about the fact that the witch is satanic and wants to overthrow Christendom, but it’s not starkly gendered and not always a sexual pact, and the Malleus really changes that. You see the Malleus’ direct influence also in the images that I showed you.
In the end, other demonologies come and supplant the Malleus, but the longevity of the Malleus remains because it is so starkly to do with the female witch, where 16th- and 17th-century demonologies are a little more open about the gendering of the witch. It’s usually women, but they do allow for men as well. For Kramer, it’s all about women and that’s to do with their carnal lusting.
It goes back also to what Ronald was saying, which is that, in the early modern period, women are seen as the weaker vessel, more like Eve, and more open to divine influence, but also, therefore, more open to demonic influence. They don’t have the strength of nature that men do.
RH: The Malleus is also very big. Kramer, the author, is a great storyteller. It’s absolutely chock full of urban legends of a classic horror movie kind, and so, in that sense, it’s a really exciting read.
Participant: I was really interested by what you brought up before when you were talking about this idea of the creation of the witch during the trial and, in particular, the effect that the persecution can have on the persecuted. I know we see it a little bit in the Pendle witch trials, but I’d love to know how far we see that across other witch trials as well. Is this something that you can see in the court documents in terms of this idea of working-class women not being really visible unless it’s through these judicial processes? How much of the victim do we see in this process here?
LK: Amy made this point, and you asked me why I was drawn to witches. I was drawn to female voices, and female voices in the early modern period are few and far between. Unfortunately, as you said, it is the persecuted voices that we hear. There’s no evidence for these women otherwise. There are no traces of their voices in the archives.
It depends a bit on the nature of the trial record. Pamphlets are different because they’re almost literary recreations of what the trial was about. In the trial documents I work with, the voices are written in the third person, and I don’t think any historical source gives you a direct lens on any person’s voice, whether a witch trial record or not, but I do think you get glimpses of them. In particularly long trial processes, which I looked at, not only do you get the people who are being accused, but you get all the witnesses coming in. They’re huge community affairs, and they’re all trying to work out who the witch is, and they’re putting forward their own versions of the truth.
You see also testimonies changing. People are trying to survive, and so testimonies change. The sources I’m looking at are in southwestern Germany, in an area of relatively low levels of persecution, and I do think these trial records can give you a glimpse. You have to be careful, but there’s a glimpse, and they are worth trying to work with because they’re the only source we have for these women.
AKB: Do you want to hear one of my favourite bits of Matthew Hopkins lore, which is connected? There’s this great interview that Hopkins and John Stern are subjecting a woman to who has just confessed, or been impelled to confess, that she had congress with the devil. They ask her, ‘In what form did he appear? What did he look like?’ and she says he was a man. Stern gestures to Hopkins and says, ‘A man like him here?’ and she says, ‘No, he was a lot better looking.’ I’m paraphrasing, obviously, but who knows how accurate it was to what went on? You can see her. You can hear how annoyed she is about this. It just seems like such a tiny moment of defiance, and I love moments like that, when, as you say, it feels like you get just a fragment or a spicule of the voice 400 years later.
IR: Thank you. That is all that we have time for.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a07
Published on: 30 March 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 16
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Rakusen, I., Hutton, R., Kounine, L. & Blakemore, A.L. (2026), ‘A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(1): a07 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a07Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
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July 2023
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