The renaissance of witchcraft research

✍ Scribed by H. C. Erik Midelfort

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 335 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/1520-6696(197707)13:3<294::aid-jhbs2300130310>3.0.co;2-4

✦ Synopsis

Witchcraft has long been a subject of interest to the historians of the behavioral sciences, and especially to historians of psychology. In the last seven years, however, the history of witchcraft has grown from a hardy perennial into a staple crop. To change the image, witchcraft studies are now a major growth industry. This renaissance of scholarly studies of witchcraft has elevated witchcraft to a new position of importance in European history, but historians of the behavioral sciences have not yet taken full account of the changed situation.' Some of the most arresting new conclusions have come from scholars who have reexamined the history of medieval witchcraft. In 1972 it was still possible for Jeffrey B. Russell to argue that witchcraft may well have existed as an organized cult, a popular re1igion.l In other respects, Russell's book was a thorough summary of the best continental scholarship going back to the nineteenth century. Yet already it appears that many of Russell's theses are sadly in need of revision. Norman Cohn has shown, for example, that three key texts suggesting the existence of an organized witch cult in the fourteenth century are forgeries.a As a result of Cohn's exercise in debunking, it now seems impossible to claim that medieval Europe had any popular witch cult. This point is reinforced by the persuasive study of Richard Kieckhefer who has neatly dissected the popular and learned notions of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages.' Cohn and Kieckhefer show that at the popular, grass-roots level, witchcraft meant maleJcium, the use of magic to cause harm. It is clear enough that real witches did use charms, spells, incantations, and amatory magic, but it is now also abundantly clear that the common people did not know about (or fear) any Satanic counterreligion of witchcraft. It was instead the learned jurists, theologians, and philosophers who fostered the vast conspiracy theory of witchcraft involving gruesome, sacrilegious sabbaths, dancing, fornication with and worship of demons, heresy, and apostasy from the Christian Church. Faced with this remarkable discovery, Cohn and Kieckhefer take utterly divergent paths. Kieckhefer is content to dismiss the history of the witches' sabbath and of diabolism in general as a learned embellishment of little importance.6 Cohn perceives, however, that the intellectual and elite fantasy of the Satanic sabbath provided the major rationale for the extensive 294