Recent years have seen an explosion of academic research on the topic of witchcraft and witch-hunting in European history. This has led to a proliferation of undergraduate courses on the subject. This excellent collection of primary sources is clearly a response to the need to supplement scholarly research in books and articles with some of the key documentary sources for this area of study and will be of immense benefit in undergraduate teaching. An acknowledged expert in the field, Brian Levack is the author of The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe , a book that after almost two decades still remains a most useful introduction to the field.
While The Witchcraft Sourcebook inevitably includes a considerable number of documents found in modern editions or in other source collections, such as the revised 2001 edition of Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700 , edited by Alan Kors and Edward Peters, it nicely complements these and introduces the reader to a number of not so easily accessible or newly translated sources. The sixty-one documents range from the classical period through to the twentieth century, although the majority are dated between about 1400 and 1700, and only one is later than the repeal of the English and Scottish witchcraft statutes in 1736. Most are excerpts from demonological treatises and trial records, but a number of legal and literary sources are also included. A pleasing aspect of the collection is that none of the excerpts are excessively short, and even though necessarily reduced in order to ensure a fair spread of documentation in a single volume, the passages chosen are very representative and provide a good sense of the particular author's position or key arguments.
The book is divided into eight parts. It begins with a series of texts from the ancient world such as the biblical story of the medium from Endor, the accounts of sorcery by Apuleius and Horace, St Augustine on demonic power, and some interesting curse tablets. The second section on the medieval foundations of witch-hunting includes familiar texts, but it is useful to have extracts from the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland in the fourteenth century, and the important condemnation of magic and sorcery of the University of Paris from 1398. A section follows on the elaboration of full-blown diabolical witchcraft by theologians, judges, and authors of demonological treatises, such as Henri Boguet, Nicolas Remy, Martin del Rio, and Francisco Maria Guazzo. These are well known from recent and not so recent English translations; but this is not the case for Pierre de Lancre's very important French account of witchcraft in the Basque-speaking province of Labourd in southwestern France (although a translation and new edition by Gerhild Scholz Williams is soon to appear), while the early Calvinist account of witchcraft by Lambert Daneau, translated into English a year after its publication in 1574, seldom finds its way into modern collections.
Parts IV and V contain legal documents on trying and punishing witches, as well as excerpts from trial records and witches' confessions. These include excerpts from James VI, Jean Bodin and Robert Filmer, the opponents of torture, Friedrich Spee (who refers to so many witches created by peoples' tongues) and Christian Thomasius, and the 1736 repeal of the English and Scottish witchcraft statutes. The records of witch trials include a number not previously published to my knowledge: a confession by the mayor of Trier, Niclas Fiedler, caught up in the terrible hunt of 1589-91, during which the better known rector of the University of Trier, Dr Dietrich Flade, also perished; the case of Françatte Camont in Lorraine in 1598, which demonstrates how witches were caught up in the tensions and conflicts of their villages; the remarkable confessions of a number of women on the Isle of Guernsey in 1617, which grew in lurid detail as torture was applied; the very dramatic transcript of a woman accused and tortured for witchcraft in Eichstätt in 1637, which clearly illustrates the use of interrogatories to extract information and how responses ebb and flow with the use of torture; and the trial of male witches in Lukh, northeast of Moscow, in 1657, for bewitching the wives of several townspeople by causing them to be possessed by spirits, and for other evils caused by spells. To these selections are added the more widely known cases of Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton, of Johannes Junius at Bamberg, and of Tituba, Bridget Bishop, and Susannah Martin at Salem.
The three final sections cover demonic possession and witchcraft, the sceptical tradition, and dramatic representations. The cases of demonic possessions are most instructive, describing in graphic detail the usual symptoms of the possessed, the attempts to test whether such behavior had supernatural or natural origins, the discourse over genuine and fraudulent possessions, and the techniques employed to exorcise demoniacs. The cases include that of Loyse Maillat (as described by the French judge, Henri Boguet, in 1598), of Marthe Brossier (as told in the English translation of the 1599 treatise of the French physician, Michel Marescot), of the London girl, Mary Glover (as discussed by the English physician, Edward Jorden, in the 1603 study of hysteria), of the nuns of an Ursuline convent in Loudun (as told by Nicolas Aubin), of the children of John Goodwin in Boston in 1688 (as narrated by Cotton Mather in his Memorable Providences ), and of a Scottish girl from Renfrewshire, Christian Shaw (whose story of 1697 was published in various pamphlets over subsequent years).
Johann Weyer, Reginald Scott, Hobbes, Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker are the expected representatives of the sceptical tradition. The 1677 work of the English physician and neo-Platonist, John Webster, however, a fierce opponent of the views on witchcraft of the Cambridge Platonist and member of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill, is not usually represented in such collections. Webster's view of witchcraft as the product of a melancholic imagination and religious ignorance, demonstrates the long-term influence of Weyer and Scot over the next century and beyond. While the extract from a 1612 report into the prosecution of witchcraft in Navarre by the Spanish inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías (the full account of which has recently been made more accessible through an English translation and edition by Gustav Henningsen) should help counteract the widely held and mistaken view that the Spanish Inquisition was heavily involved in the prosecution of witchcraft. In Part VIII, Seneca's Medea , Fernando de Rojas' Celestina , Thomas Middleton's Hecate , and Hans Wiers-Jenssen's Anne Pedersdotter represent witches in literary dramas. Only the last, a character in an early twentieth-century play by the Norwegian playwright, Wiers-Jenssen, based on the trial and execution in 1590 of the wife of a Lutheran theologian in Bergen, seems a little incongruous. Although the play demonstrates considerable insight into the psychology of self-confession and identification, is well known through Scandinavia, and has inspired a number of opera librettists as well as the renowned Danish filmmaker, Carl Theodor Dreyer, in his creation of the acclaimed 1943 film, Day of Wrath , the Sourcebook contains no other documents of witchcraft from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide some comparison and context.
Each of the eight parts of the book, as well as each document, is preceded by a short and informative introduction. The only major genre missing, in my opinion, is pamphlet and broadsheet literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This leaves unexplored how the new technology of print and the subsequent fascination with "news" served to disseminate notions of witchcraft far and wide throughout Europe and amongst a broad range of readers and viewers. The literary and visual images of witchcraft created by such cheap print often helped draw together and integrate quite different intellectual and popular beliefs and traditions. It is pleasing that the collection also contains a dozen visual images of witchcraft, together with brief commentaries in the form of captions below. In these cases, as in some of the introductions to the documents, a little more specific information might have been provided. Baldung Grien's woodcut, The Bewitched Stable Groom (fig. 3), for instance, is not dated (and is incorrectly called an engraving); and there is no information about the artist who produced the greatest number and most influential images of witchcraft in the first half of the sixteenth century. A figure like Lambert Daneau might have also been described more fully. While the woodcut of Faust practising ritual magic (fig. 1) is dated to the sixteenth century, with the source a 1636 edition of Marlowe and no further explanation. A small but valuable addition to this collection would have been a short bibliography of two or three items appended to each of the documents, which would allow a reader to pursue the relevant scholarly literature.
This is an extremely useful source collection based on broad knowledge and profound scholarship, for which students and teachers will be very grateful for many years to come. Since the collection is likely to see a number of further printings, I point out a few minor copy-editing slips that could be corrected in future. On p. 83, l. 23, 'by led' should read 'be led'; p. 95, l. 7, 'Simon's witch' should probably read 'Simon, a witch'; p. 97, l. 23, remove full stop; 176, l. 19, 'adherents' should read 'adherence'; p. 183, l. 34, 'The' should read 'Then'. And the woodcut from Molitor's work (fig. 2) would be more appropriately described as a scene of demonic coupling or demonic pact, rather than simply of demonic temptation.