Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (20230
By Marion Gibson
Scribner, 261 pages + back matter.
★★★★
Many people think “Salem” the moment the word “witch” is uttered. There is little doubt that the events in 1692 Massachusetts are a stain upon the pages of American history, Yet they are a mere blip on the far bigger, older, and ongoing global scapegoating record. That’s why Marion Gibson, a professor at the University of Exeter in England, devotes just one of her 13 chapters of Witchcraft to Salem.
Scholars have long known that the persecution of witches runs deep in the veins of Western history, hence Gibson begins her study with the 1485 trial of Helena Scheuberin in Austria. It’s not even close to being the oldest witch accusation in the West–the Old Testament sanctions killing witches–but it was a watershed in leading to mass witch hysteria. Scheuberin was acquitted, but her case fired the zeal of demonologists and led to the publication of guides on how to identify witches (and male wizards), the most infamous being Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, which held sway for centuries.
Untold numbers of women suffered in the post-Scheuberin period. An estimated 35-50,000 were executed between 1450-1750. Gibson recounts the toll in North Berwick, Scotland in the 1580s-90s–one tale of which influenced Shakespeare’s MacBeth–and those in Europe’s “colonial edge” of northern Scotland, Scandinavia, and North America. These tragic details are known to scholars, but there is a lesser-discussed synthesis involved in Gibson’s readable account. She reminds us that witchcraft upheavals through the ages take place for many of the same reasons across time–religious disputes, non-scientific speculation, political manipulation, fear of outsiders (Jews, travellers, the Sami people), the Reformation, offshoots of warfare–but also that the very definition of witchcraft has been malleable.
The Bible indeed mentions witches, but how do we explain the rarity of accusations in Europe prior to the 15th century? Gibson argues that witchcraft has undergone cycles in which it was superstitious to believe or to not believe in it. In the 1620s, Joan Wright became America’s “first” witch. She was a respected healer, herbalist, and midwife in Virginia, but because she wasn’t always successful in her ministrations and the colony was starving, she came under suspicion. As far as we know, Wright survived but the transformation from healer to witch planted the very idea of Satan loose upon North American soil.
Gibson detected “echoes” of witchcraft paranoia after Salem and the rise of Enlightenment thinking–during the French Revolution, homophobia outbreaks, attacks on indigenous beliefs, and during sensational murder trials– but the prevailing norm in the West shifted to associating malevolent witchcraft with archaic superstition. In chapters set in Sub-Saharan Africa Gibson reminds us, though, that the Western norm is not universal. Nor does the Western ideal always have salutary effects. In her final chapter on Stormy Daniels Gibson shows how rejection of the power of witches can be manipulated for political advantage. She speculates that Donald Trump’s charge that his detractors and accusers are engaging in a “witch hunt,” is an attempt to tar them with ideological superstition.
This is both an enlightening and entertaining book, though it has its flaws. I appreciated Gibson’s attempts to globalize witchcraft fears, but she is open to the charge of having written a Eurocentric book that’s merely a drive-by peek at the rest of the world. This, in my estimation, is fair commentary. There would have been nothing wrong with confining her study to the West and, having heard her speak, she had plenty of material to have expanded Western examples.
Gibson sometimes draws distinctions too sharply. In later chapters she presents modern-day witchcraft as a return to the standards before Joan Wright’s trial; that is, that witches are either benign or engage in healing arts. That depends on who you ask! If she’s right, Trump’s evocation of a witch hunt is a political gamble. There are plenty of evangelicals and cultural conservatives who continue to demonize homosexuals, witches, spiritualist mediums, astrologists, those holding non-Christian beliefs, and (paradoxically) scientists. Some ministers and priests would happily append Malleus Maleficarum to the New Testament.
I wish to emphasize that I’m one of the scholars who has delved into the topic at hand and thus my eye is more critical than that of the average reader. You need not wade in academic waters to enjoy Gibson’s short volume. You’ll learn a lot if you do.
Rob Weir
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