Charles Zika’s The Appearance of Witchcraft is a study of the visual imagery of witchcraft during the sixteenth century. It is in this century, Zika argues, that our current ideas about the imagery of witchcraft first developed.
Zika’s first two chapters examine how, in the early sixteenth century, a small group of German illustrators created the visual language of modern witchcraft. All of the things we now associate with the visual imagery of witchcraft are first found in the illustrated books and pamphlets of the time. The illustrated book as an easily available item with wide distribution was also new in this period. Zika suggests that an artist named Hans Baldung Grien was especially important in the development of the images. The illustrations that Grien created were reproduced or imitated in many books, including those of Ulrich Molitor, another important figure in the dissemination of the new witchcraft images. The third person whose work was important in the dissemination of these images was Hans Vintler. Vintler’s illustrated Buch der Tugend was well-known, and the illustrations from his book were often imitated or reprinted.
The third chapter examines illustrations of witches’ cauldrons and witches’ bodies. Again Zika shows how the modern imagery associated with both is first found in the illustrations of sixteenth-century books, broadsides, and pamphlets. His fourth chapter, “Wild Riders, Popular Folklore and Moral Disorder,” examines the imagery associated with two topics directly related to the folklore of the period, witch riding and the Wild Ride. In the book’s fifth chapter, “Transformation, Death and Sexuality in the Classical World,” the author “explores the interest of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists in the sorcery of the classical world and how their images [of this sorcery] helped shape and gain credibility for the new visual language of witchcraft” (127). Chapter 6, “A Biblical Necromancer and Two Christian Saints,” continues this examination of classical models, while extending its coverage to biblical sorcery and witchcraft as well. The seventh and eighth chapters look at the images of witchcraft in the new media of the time: broadsheets, broadsides, and pamphlets. Chapter 7, “Reporting the News and Reading the Signs,” considers how witchcraft, signs, and omens were represented in these media. Chapter 8, “On the Margins of Christian Europe,” examines the relationship of witchcraft images and those of the new and exotic cultures that the Europeans of the time were encountering in the New World and elsewhere.
The book is profusely illustrated, as one would hope in a book dealing with imagery, and these illustrations are very well produced. The imagery of early modern witchcraft has not had such a detailed study before, and thus Zika’s study is very welcome. His attention to both elite and popular versions of illustrations, and to the folklore of the period, make this an informative book on the folk beliefs of the time as well. The Appearance of Witchcraft is a book that anyone with an interest in witchcraft and supernatural belief in Europe or America should know.
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[Review length: 502 words • Review posted on October 22, 2013]