NOTES

A Note on Referencing

In setting out these endnotes, a compromise has needed to be made between providing the fullest possible source references and pressing the boundaries of a generous but still strict word limit. The following conventions have therefore been observed. Instead of a bibliography, full publication details are given of each work cited, afresh, in the notes to each chapter, so they should be relatively easy to trace. When the sources involved are literary texts that exist in a number of different editions (much augmented now by the Internet), references are made to the section and chapter of the original work, to make them easy to trace in any of those editions. Only if a given text exists in only a single edition are references made to page numbers of that.

Author’s Note

1.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, 1978, 26.

2.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 4.

3.Katherine Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya 1900–1955, Cambridge, 2011, 49.

4.As before, I follow the practice of referring to the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East as ‘pagan’, and modern religions which draw on images and ideas from them as ‘Pagan’, as a simple mark of distinction. For the development of these modern senses of the witch figure, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999.

5.I intend to argue this point in detail in a subsequent publication.

6.Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur: Studies in Paganism, Myth and Magic, London, 2003, 98–135.

7.On this see Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, Chicago, 2005, 50–61.

8.Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain, London, 2013, viii–ix.

1  The Global Context

1.Most of the material in the first part of this section was published by me as ‘Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 413–34, where full quotation and citation are to be found.

2.Keith Thomas, ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, London, 1970, 47–8; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London, 1970, 211–53; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, Falmer, 1975, 220–3.

3.Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations; Max Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, Harmondsworth, 1970.

4.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, 1978, 23–50.

5.H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684, Stanford, 1972, 5; E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, Ithaca, NY, 1976, 11.

6.T. O. Beidelman, ‘Towards More Open Theoretical Interpretations’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 351–6.

7.For example, E. P. Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Midland History, 1 (1972), 46–55; and Max Marwick, review of Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, in Man, N.S. 6 (1971), 320–21.

8.Hence Edwin Ardener, ‘The New Anthropology and its Critics’, Man, N.S. 6 (1971), 449–67.

9.Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas, ‘An Anthropology of Religion and Magic’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), 71–110.

10.Malcolm Crick, ‘Two Styles in the Study of Witchcraft’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 4 (1973), 17–31 (quotation on p. 18); and Expositions in Language and Meaning, London, 1976, 109–27.

11.For example, Robert Rowland, ‘“Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons”: European Witch Beliefs in Comparative Perspective’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 161–90.

12.J.H.M. Salmon, ‘History without Anthropology: A New Witchcraft Analysis’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (1989), 481–6. Historians in general had internalized this message, which became obvious to me when, from 1991, I began to suggest in guest lectures and seminar papers at other universities that a new attempt to compare data from different parts of the world might be useful, and was invariably told that anthropologists had ruled any such exercise invalid.

13.A.-L. Siikala, ‘Introduction’, in A.-L. Siikala and M. Hoppal (eds), Studies on Shamanism, Helsinki, 1992, 15–16.

14.Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, London, 1992, 83–101; and ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed’, Africa, 69 (1999), 177–93.

15.J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England, Cambridge, 1998, esp. 180–92.

16.Andrew Sanders, A Deed without a Name, Oxford, 1995.

17.Ralph A. Austen, ‘The Moral Economy of Witchcraft’, in Jean and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, Chicago, 1993, 94; Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 12; Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft, Stanford, 1997.

18.Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, Charlottesville, 1997, 188–223.

19.George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, Athens, OH, 2001, 5.

20.Adam Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, Social Research, 63 (1996), 1183–1234.

21.‘The Global Context of the Scottish Witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Manchester, 2002, 16–32; and ‘Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft’.

22.Published at Cambridge.

23.Of recent examples of anthropological use of history, see Soma Chaudhuri, ‘Women as Easy Scapegoats: Witchcraft Accusations and Women as Targets in Tea Plantations of India’, Violence Against Women, 18 (2012), 1213–34; and Niek Koning, who will be discussed in detail below. A few notable historians of the early modern European trials have recently taken notice of the existence of non-European material. Johannes Dillinger, Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, Charlottesville, VA, 2009, 4–5, urged others to compare it with European concepts of magic. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010, used it intermittently to leaven the European data in his necessarily brief study, and tended to emphasize its differences from European patterns. Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016, 173–6, 375–81, commendably added short global comparisons to his subject matter, and drew attention to the potential value of a more extended application of this method.

24.All are listed either in the endnotes to the book or in its appendix.

25.None the less, though other relevant studies do exist in French, German and Spanish, their number is relatively small: it is notable that the great majority of material used by Behringer for his survey of the globe was in English, though he himself is German. My sample may thus be deemed to contain most of the information actually in print on the subject.

26.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, 394.

27.Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 223.

28.Thomas Frederick Elworthy, The Evil Eye, London, 1895; Clarence Maloney (ed.), The Evil Eye, New York, 1976; Alan Dundes (ed.), The Evil Eye, Madison, 1992; G. F. Abbott, Macedonian Folklore, Cambridge, 1903, 139–42; Fredrik Barth, Nomads of South Persia, Oslo, 1961, 144–5; Yedida Stillman, ‘The Evil Eye in Morocco’, in Dov Noy and Issachar Ben Ami (eds), Folklore Research Center Studies, Jerusalem, 1970, 81–94; William Francis Ryan, ‘The Evil Eye’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, Santa Barbara, 2005, vol. 2, 332–3; Aref Abu-Rabia, ‘The Evil Eye and Cultural Beliefs among the Bedouin Tribes of the Negev’, Folklore, 116 (2005), 241–54; Philippe Marcais, ‘Ayn, “Evil Eye”’, in H.A.R. Gibb (ed.), Encyclopedia of Islam. Volume One, Leiden, 1960, 786; Edward Westermarch, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, London, 1926, vol. 1, 414–78; Lisbeth Sachs, Evil Eye or Bacteria?, Stockholm, 1983.

29.Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 51–3; S. F. Nadel, ‘Witchcraft in Four African Societies’, American Anthropologist, 54 (1952), 18–29; P. Lawrence, ‘The Ngaing of the Rai Coast’, in P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, Oxford, 1965, 198–223; Meyer Forbes, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, Oxford, 1967, 32–5; I. M. Lewis, ‘A Structural Approach to Witchcraft and Spirit Possession’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 293–303; Andrew Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, Greed, Cannibalism and Death’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge, 1982, 111–33; Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, London, 1984, 205–7; Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, Berkeley, 1985, 341–2; John J. Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kaska Society’, American Anthropologist, 49 (1947), 222–42.

30.Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process, London, 1969, 1–43.

31.Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the Introverted Witch’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 333–50.

32.Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, N.S. 1 (1995), 599–609.

33.Edwin Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 141–60.

34.G. I. Jones, ‘A Boundary to Accusations’, in ibid., 321–32.

35.Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 340–43.

36.Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan, Chicago, 1941, 303–37.

37.Elias Bongmba, ‘African Witchcraft’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 39–79.

38.Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, in Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen (eds), The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, New Brunswick, 1989, 122–59.

39.Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts, Blood-sucking Witchcraft: An Epistemological Study of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in Rural Tlaxcala, Tucson, 1993.

40.Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in Modern Africa as Virtualized Boundary Conditions of the Kinship Order’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 243.

41.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1191.

42.R. F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, London, 1932, 150–54.

43.Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 112.

44.George T. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Lagona (Seattle, 1991), 398.

45.Wolf Bleek, ‘Witchcraft, Gossip and Death’, Man, N.S. 11 (1976), 526–41.

46.J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and Clanship in Cochiti Therapy’, in Ari Kiev (ed.), Magic, Faith and Healing, New York, 1964, 174–200.

47.Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism, Philadelphia, 1974, 30–35.

48.Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’, in John Middleton and E. H. Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London, 1963, 123–41; Jean La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’, in ibid., 187–220; Edward L. Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, St Lucia, Queensland, 1977, 101; Paul Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’, American Anthropologist, 60 (1958), 1–12; Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–53; Ryan Schram, ‘Witches’ Wealth: Witchcraft, Confession and Christianity in Auhelawa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16 (2010), 726–42; W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, New York, 2nd edition, 1958, 193–4.

49.This issue was one of the preoccupations of Sanders, A Deed Without a Name, 21–7, who concluded that the pattern of belief in a society seemed to have some independence of its social structure.

50.P.T.W. Baxter, ‘Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder’, in Max Gluckman (ed.), The Allocation of Responsibility, Manchester, 1972, 163–91.

51.Niek Koning, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Witch Hunts’, Human Nature, 24 (2013), 158–81.

52.Robert Brain, ‘Child-Witches’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 161–79.

53.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–52.

54.Max Marwick warned that his colleagues in anthropology were overstating the extent to which magical harm was attributed to outsiders among the peoples of Melanesia: ‘Witchcraft as a Social Strain-Gauge’, Australian Journal of Science, 26 (1964), 263–8. For examples of the use of magic as a weapon in war between rival communities there, see Fitz John Porter Poole, ‘Cannibals, Tricksters and Witches’, in Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (ed.), The Ethnography of Cannibalism, Washington, DC, 1983, 6–32; Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 340–43; and Mary Paterson, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Melanesia’, Oceania, 45 (1974), 132–60, 212–34.

55.Austen, ‘The Moral Economy of Witchcraft’, 89.

56.Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 11; van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in Modern Africa’, 241.

57.J. D. Krige, ‘The Social Function of Witchcraft’, Theoria, 1 (1947), 8–21; Armin W. Geertz, ‘Hopi Indian Witchcraft and Healing’, American Indian Quarterly, 35 (2011), 372–93.

58.David Tait, ‘Konkomba Sorcery’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 84 (1954), 66–74.

59.Robert F. Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 143–73.

60.G.W.B. Huntingford, ‘Nandi Witchcraft’, in ibid., 175–86; Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, Sorcery and Social Categories among the Safwa, Oxford, 1970, passim.

61.Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Manchester, 1957, 151–2; Michael D. Jackson, ‘Structure and Event’, Man, N.S. 10 (1975), 387–403.

62.Max Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-Witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa’, Africa, 20 (1950), 100–12.

63.Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 55; Monica Hunter Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56 (1951), 307–13.

64.K.O.L. Burridge, ‘Tangu’, in Lawrence and Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, 224–49.

65.John Middleton, ‘The Concept of “Bewitching” in Lugbara’, Africa, 25 (1955), 252–60.

66.Benson Saler, ‘Nagual, Witch and Sorcerer in a Quiché Village’, Ethnology, 3 (1964), 305–28.

67.Keith H. Basso, Western Apache Witchcraft, Tucson, 1969, 34–59.

68.Jean Buxton, ‘Mandari Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 99–121.

69.Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’; Alison Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 103–28.

70.La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’; Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely, 78–127.

71.K. M. Stewart, ‘Witchcraft among the Mohave Indians’, Ethnology, 12 (1973), 315–24.

72.Mayer, ‘Witches’, 55.

73.Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, 146.

74.Scarlett Epstein, ‘A Sociological Analysis of Witch Beliefs in a Mysore Village’, Eastern Anthropologist, 12 (1959), 234–51.

75.Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), 303–18.

76.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford, 1937.

77.Consider, for example, the titles of the famous collections edited by Middleton and Winter, Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, and Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, a division reflected in many of the contributions to them.

78.For example, Victor W. Turner, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery’, Africa, 34 (1964), 314–24.

79.The studies used here illustrate this point in detail between them. Sanders, A Deed Without a Name, 19–20, summed up the position reached by the mid-1990s, by which time the distinction between witchcraft and sorcery had largely been abandoned. Bruce Kapferer mounted a rearguard action to argue for its validity in 2002: ‘Introduction’ to Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, New York, 2002, 1–30.

80.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–54.

81.Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, Greed, Cannibalism and Death’.

82.Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’.

83.Hilda Kuper, An African Aristocracy, Oxford, 1947, 172–6.

84.Susan Drucker Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft, Subversion, and Changing Gender Relations’, Africa, 63 (1993), 531–49.

85.Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’.

86.Fiona Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions, London, 2000, 68–79.

87.Roy Ellen, ‘Anger, Anxiety and Sorcery: An Analysis of Some Nuaulu Case Material from Seram, Eastern Indonesia’, in C. W. Watson and Roy Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, Honolulu, 1993, 81–97.

88.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, passim.

89.Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, 308; Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely, 101.

90.Epstein, ‘A Sociological Analysis of Witch Beliefs in a Mysore Village’.

91.M. J. Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 149–60.

92.Richard E. Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, Berkeley, 1967, ch. 2.

93.Nicola Tannenbaum, ‘Witches, Fortune and Misfortune among the Shan of Northwestern Thailand’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 67–80.

94.Raymond Firth, Human Types, London, 2nd edition, 1956, 155–6.

95.Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’; Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, Boston, 1944, 67–121.

96.Frederica de Laguna, ‘Tlingit’, in William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (eds), Crossroads of Continents, Washington DC, 1988, 63.

97.John Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 27–55.

98.A. M. Hocart, ‘Medicine and Witchcraft in Eddystone of the Solomons’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 55 (1925), 229–70.

99.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Sorcery and Native Opinion’, Africa, 4 (1931), 23–8.

100.Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, 317.

101.Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’.

102.Don C. Talayesva and Leon W. Simmons, Sun Chief, New Haven, 1963, 331–3.

103.P. Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult among the South-Western Yoruba’, Bulletin de L’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 18 (1956), 315–34; Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African State’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 207–44.

104.Anthony Forge, ‘Prestige, Influence and Sorcery’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations.

105.Peter H. Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, New Haven, 1936.

106.Annemarie Shimony, ‘Iroquois Witchcraft at Six Nations’, in Dewar E. Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, Moscow, ID, 1970, 239–65.

107.Isaac Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, African Affairs, 51 (1952), 41–52.

108.Audrey Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’, Africa, 8 (1935), 448–61.

109.Hocart, ‘Medicine and Witchcraft in Eddystone of the Solomons’.

110.W. Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Allahabad, 1894, 352.

111.J. T. Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and Central Africa’, in J. T. Munday et al. (eds), Witchcraft, London, 1951, 12; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, London, 2001, 119–20.

112.Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeastern Asia, 99–122.

113.T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 57–98.

114.E. H. Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 277–99.

115.Lieban, Cebano Sorcery, ch. 4.

116.Harriet Ngubane, ‘Aspects of Zulu Treatment’, in J. B. Loudon (ed.), Social Anthropology and Medicine, London, 1976, 328–37.

117.Keith H. Basso, ‘Western Apache Witchcraft’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 11–36.

118.Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist, London, 1983, 103, 139.

119.Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, section 1.8.

120.Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 359–62.

121.Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, passim.

122.Gunter Wagner, The Bantu of Western Kenya, Oxford, 1970, 111–32.

123.Nancy D. Munn, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformations in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society, Durham, NC, 1986, 215–33.

124.John R. Bowen, ‘Return to Sender: A Muslim Discourse of Sorcery in a Relatively Egalitarian Society, the Gaya of Northern Sumatra’, in Watson and Ellen (ed.), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeastern Asia, 179–90

125.Mary Kingsley, West African Studies, London, 1899, 211.

126.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, passim; Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’.

127.Mayer, ‘Witches’.

128.Buck, Regional Diversity in the Elaboration of Sorcery in Polynesia, passim.

129.Daryll Forde, ‘Spirits, Witches and Sorcerers in the Supernatural Economy of the Yakö’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), 165–78.

130.Barbara Ward, ‘Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti’, Africa, 26 (1956), 47–60.

131.Burridge, ‘Tangu’, 226–30.

132.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 154–66.

133.Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’.

134.E. Paul Durrenberger, ‘Witchcraft, Sorcery, Fortune and Misfortune among Lisu Highlanders of Northern Thailand’, in Watson and Ellen (ed.), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 47–66.

135.Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence in Colonial Western India’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 109–41.

136.Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and Central Africa’, 12–13.

137.Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’; La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’.

138.S. F. Nadel, Nupe Religion, London, 1954, 188–90.

139.Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist, 103–4.

140.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

141.Herman Slaats and Karen Porter, ‘Sorcery and the Law in Modern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 135–58.

142.Geoffrey Parrinder, Witchcraft, London, 1963, 173–4.

143.Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 99–122.

144.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

145.Sir Alfred Lyall, Asiatic Studies: Religious and Social. First Series, London, 1899, 99–130; Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 356–9; Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism.

146.Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, section 1.8.

147.Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief’, 141–60.

148.Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, Oxford, 1981, ch. 6.

149.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

150.Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 363–5.

151.Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’; Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’; Maia Green, ‘Shaving Witchcraft in Ulanga’, in Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 28.

152.Merete Demant Jakobsen, Shamanism, New York, 1999, 94–100.

153.Beatrice B. Whiting, Paiute Sorcery, New York, 1950, 50.

154.Matthew Dennis, ‘American Indians, Witchcraft and Witch-hunting’, Magazine of History, 17.4 (2003), 21–3.

155.Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’; Margaret Wiener, ‘Colonial Magic: The Dutch East Indies’, in David J. Collins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, Cambridge, 2015, 496–7.

156.Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’.

157.Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kaska Society’.

158.A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London, 1929, 650–51; Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, ch. 17; Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, ch. II.3; A.F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, New York, 1972, 102–10; Stephen Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in Central Madagascar 1828–1861, Past and Present, 175 (2002), 90–123; Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed, Philadelphia, 2010.

159.R. D. Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, Lincoln, NB, 1985, 5–97; Jay Miller, ‘The 1806 Purge among the Indiana Delaware’ Ethnohistory, 41 (1994), 245–65.

160.Amanda Porterfield, ‘Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures’, Religion and American Culture, 2 (1992), 103–24.

161.Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

162.What follows is based on Audrey Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’; Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-Witchcraft Movement’; Willis, ‘The Kamcape Movement’; Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’; Ward, ‘Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti’; Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’; R. G. Willis, ‘Instant Millennium’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations,129–39; Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’; Jack Goody, ‘Anomie in Ashanti’, Africa, 27 (1957), 356–63; Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’; Karen E. Fields, ‘Political Contingencies of Witchcraft in Colonial Central Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16 (1982), 567–93; Andrew Apter, ‘Atinga Revisited’, in Comaroff and Comraroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, 111–28; Green, ‘Shaving Witchcraft in Ulanga’; John Parker, ‘Northern Gothic: Witches, Ghosts and Werewolves in the Savanna Hinterland of the Gold Coast, 1900s–1950s’, Africa, 76 (2006), 352–79; Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa’; David Tait, ‘A Sorcery Hunt in Dagomba’, Africa, 33 (1963), 136–46; Anthony A. Lee, ‘Ngoja and Six Theories of Witchcraft’, Ufahamu, 6 (1976), 101–17.

163.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

164.Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence’.

165.Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’; Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’.

166.Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’.

167.Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order, Cambridge, 1979, 102–5.

168.David J. Parkin, ‘Medicines and Men of Influence’, Man, N.S. 3 (1968), 424–39; Willis, ‘Kamcape’; Daniel Offiong, ‘The Social Context of Ibibio Witch Beliefs’, Africa, 53 (1982), 73–82; Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and Thieves’, Man, N.S. 21 (1986), 65–78; Douglas, ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed’; Simon Mesaki, ‘Witch-Killing in Sukumaland’, in Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, 47–60; Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft Suppression Practices and Movements’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997), 319–45; Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’; Blair Rutherford, ‘To Find an African Witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), 89–109; Mark Auslander, ‘Open the Wombs!’, in Comaroff and Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, 167–92; Cynthia Brantley, ‘An Historical Perspective of the Giriama and Witchcraft Control’, Africa, 49 (1979), 112–33.

169.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 130–82; and Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy: Continuity and Change in Green Valley, Lebowa, 1930–91’, Africa, 63 (1993), 498–530.

170.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1209.

171.Diane Ciekawy, ‘Witchcraft in Statecraft: Five Technologies of Power in Colonial and Postcolonial Coastal Kenya’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), 119–41.

172.Elizabeth Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’, Africa, 70 (2000), 333–58.

173.David Law, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, London, 1985, 167–8.

174.Blair Rutherford, ‘To Find an African Witch’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), 89–109.

175.Linda M. Heywood, ‘Towards an Understanding of Modern Political Ideology in Africa: The Case of the Ovimbundu of Angola’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 36 (1998), 139–67; Inge Brinkman, ‘Ways of Death: Accounts of Terror from Angolan Refugees in Namibia’, Africa, 70 (2000), 15.

176.Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks, The Witches of Abiquiu, Albuquerque, 2006; Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, 19–47; Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Durham, NC, 2003; William and Claudia Madsen, ‘Witchcraft in Tecapsa and Tepepan’, and Benson Sales, ‘Sorcery in Santiago El Palmar’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 73–94 and 124–46.

177.Ellis, ‘Witch-hunting in Central Madagascar’.

178.Dennis, Seneca Possessed.

179.Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-world Peoples, London, 1973, 83–4.

180.Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, London, 1963, 133–5.

181.Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’.

182.Wilson, Magic and the Millennium, 89–91, 94–101, 152–6.

183.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 27–41; Auslander, ‘Open the Wombs!; Bengt M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, Oxford, 1961, 109, 253–9.

184.Burridge, ‘Tangu’, 226–30; Birgit Meyer, ‘“If You Are a Devil, You are a Witch, and If You Are a Witch You Are a Devil”: The Integration of “Pagan” Ideas into the Conceptual Universe of Ewe Christians in Southeastern Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 22 (1992), 98–132.

185.Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’; J. R. Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, Oxford, 1967, ch. 16.

186.Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Creating “a Place to Feel at Home”: Christian Church Life and Social Control in Lusaka, Zambia (1970s)’ in Piet Konings et al. (eds), Trajectoires de Liberation en Afrique Contemporaine, Paris, 2000, 234–8.

187.Mary Douglas, ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed: the Lele Revisited’, Africa, 69 (1999), 177–93.

188.René Devisch, ‘Sorcery Forces of Life and Death among the Yaka of Congo’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 101–30.

189.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, ix–xii.

190.Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult’.

191.Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’.

192.R. G. Abrahams, ‘A Modern Witch-hunt among the Lango of Uganda’, Cambridge Anthropology 10 (1985), 32–45.

193.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 1–2; and ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’; Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Occult Economics and the Violence of Abstraction’, American Ethnologist, 26 (1999), 279–303.

194.Johannes Harnischfeger, ‘Witchcraft and the State in South Africa’, in John Hund (ed.), Witchcraft Violence and the Law in South Africa, Pretoria, 2002, 40–72.

195.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1215.

196.Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, 191–2; Michael Rowlands and Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘Sorcery, Power and the Modern State in Cameroon’, Man, N.S. 23 (1988), 118–32; Peter Geschiere and Cyprian Fisiy, ‘Domesticating Personal Violence’, Africa, 64 (1994), 323–41; Cyprian F. Fisiy, ‘Containing Occult Practices: Witchcraft Trials in Cameroon’, African Studies Review, 41 (1998), 143–63; Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 109–97; Mesaki, ‘Witch-Killing in Sukumaland’.

197.Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’.

198.David Macfarlane, ‘African Witch-hunts’, The Cauldron, 141 (2011), 42–4; Nick Britton, ‘Witchcraft Murder that Exposed Hidden Wave of Faith-Based Child Abuse’, Daily Telegraph (2 March 2012), 6; ‘Branded a Witch’, BBC3 television documentary, screened 20 May 2013.

199.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, xiii, 7–19, 120.

200.June Nash, ‘Death as a Way of Life: The Increasing Resort to Homicide in a Maya Indian Community’, American Anthropologist, 69 (1967), 455–70.

201.Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan, Gender and Tribe: Women, Land and Forests in Jharkand, New Delhi, 1991, 94; Puja Roy, ‘Sanctioned Violence: Development and the Persecution of Women as Witches in South Bihar’, Development in Practice, 8 (1998), 136–47.

202.Nathan Wachtel, Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya, Chicago, 1994, 77–9.

203.Knut Rio, ‘The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person’, in Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism, 129–30.

204.Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves (eds), Talking It Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia (Canberra, 2015) gathers seventeen essays on the problem.

205.Dawn Perlemutter, ‘The Politics of Muslim Magic’, Middle East Quarterly, 20 (2013), 73–80.

206.Slaats and Porter, ‘Sorcery and the Law in Modern Indonesia’.

207.Douglas, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, xiii–xxi.

208.On this see particularly Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’; and Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’.

209.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, chs 1.1, 1.4, 1.8; John Middleton, Lugbara Religion, Oxford, 1960, 238–50; Jean La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’, in ibid., 187–220; Lawrence and Meggitt, ‘Introduction’, in Lawrence and Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, 16–18; Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, 71; Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, 19.

210.Geschiere and Fisiy, ‘Domesticating Personal Violence’; Drucker-Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft’; Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Occult Economics’; Geschiere, ‘Witchcraft and New Forms of Wealth’, in Paul Clough and Jon P. Mitchell (eds), Powers of Good and Evil, New York, 43–76.

211.Niehaus, ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’, 503; James Howard Smith, Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya, Chicago, 2008; Brantley, ‘An Historical Perspective of the Giriama and Witchcraft Control’.

212.Ibid.

213.Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’.

214.BBC3, ‘Branded a Witch’.

215.Gerald W. Hartwig, ‘Long-Distance Trade and the Evolution of Sorcery among the Kerebe’, African Historical Studies, 4 (1971), 505–24.

216.Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kaska Society’.

217.Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, and Martin Zelenietz, The Effects of Sorcery in Kilenge, West New Britain Province, Port Moresby, 1979, are examples of respected scholars who have asserted that witchcraft did occur among the peoples whom they studied, but they do not provide evidence.

218.Richards, ‘A Modern Movement of Witch-finders’; Parrinder, Witchcraft, 173–4.

219.Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, Palo Alto, CA, 1979, 65.

220.Robert A. Levine, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery in a Gusii Community’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 221–55; Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, ch. 1.

221.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy, 63–87.

222.Tina Hamrin-Dahl, ‘Witch Accusations, Rapes and Burnings in South Africa’, in Tore Ahlbäck (ed.), Ritualistics, Åbo, 2003, 56–70.

223.Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 50–51.

224.Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 138–49.

225.Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, 410.

226.Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, ch. 2. The scholars of European witch trials to have taken the most sustained interest in this aspect of the subject have been Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Falmer, 2010, and Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2008.

227.Walter B. Cannon, ‘Voodoo Death’, American Anthropologist, 44 (1942), 169–81.

228.C. P. Richter, ‘On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Men’, Psychosomatic Medicine 19 (1957), 190–98; G. L. Engel, ‘A Life Setting Conducive to Illness’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 32 (1968), 355–65; David Lester, ‘Voodoo Death: Some New Thoughts on an Old Phenomenon’, American Anthropologist, 74 (1972), 378–85. For a rare examination of this theme in the early modern European context, with an updating of the medical literature, see Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 5–39, 287–303.

229.‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’, in John Middleton (ed.), Magic, Witchcraft and Curing, New York, 1967, 23–41.

230.The official title of the panel was the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murder in the Northern Province. A copy of its report is available at http://policyresearch.limpopo.gov.za/handle/123456789/406, accessed 15 March 2014. The resulting debate is well summed up by the essays collected in Hund (ed.), Witchcraft, Violence and the Law in South Africa.

231.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, 261–8.

232.I have already committed myself to this stance during my own minor intervention in the recent debates in South Africa, when its Pagan Federation called me in as an advisor for the development of a common policy that the country’s modern Pagans and Pagan witches could adopt in response to the issues. I am especially grateful to the Federation’s president at the time, Donna Voss, for the gift of John Hund’s edited collection, which was hard to obtain in Britain.

233.For example, Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951, Manchester, 1999; and A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-century Somerset, Bruton, 1999; Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, Manchester, 2004; and Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, Manchester, 2004; Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words; Witchcraft in the Bocage, Cambridge, 1980. The last case personally known to me in England of a persecution of people by their neighbours, among an indigenous community and solely because the latter suspected them of witchcraft in a wholly traditional way, occurred in the Cornish village of Four Lanes in 1984.

234.Nick Britten and Victoria Ward, ‘Witchcraft Threat to Children’, Daily Telegraph (2 March 2012), 1, and Nick Britten, ‘Witchcraft Murder that Exposed Hidden Wave of Faith-Based Child Abuse’, on p. 6. For helpful historical context, see Thomas Waters, ‘Maleficent Witchcraft in Britain since 1900’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2015), 99–122.

235.James T. Richardson et al. (eds), The Satanism Scare, New York, 1991; David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History, Princeton, 2006; La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil.

236.Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religion and the Media, Lexington, 2000; Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, New Haven, 2013, 240–53.

237.Smith, Bewitching Development; Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’.

2  The Ancient Context

1.The citations are indeed too numerous for page references: ‘passim’ is the best one to be attributed to any edition. The Malleus maleficarum cited Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Ptolemy and Seneca; Boguet cited Plutarch, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny and Philostratus; and del Rio cited Ammianus Marcellinus, Proclus, Apuleius, Antoninus Liberalis, Diodorus Siculus, Aristotle, Cicero, Herodotus, Hesiod, Pomponius Mela, Heliodorus, Virgil, Pliny, Epicurus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Julian the Apostate, Ovid, Lucan, Tibullus, Plutarch, Seneca, Lucretius, Martial, Hippocrates, Petronius, Plato and Suetonius.

2.The best brief summary of the development of the Macbeth legend seems to be Kenneth D. Farrow, ‘The Historiographical Evolution of the Macbeth Narrative’, Scottish Literary Journal, 21 (1994), 5–23 (I thank Julian Goodare for this reference): the ‘Weird Sisters’ appear in Andrew of Wyntoun’s chronicle c. 1420, and become witches in John Bellenden’s English translation of Hector Boece’s history, in 1536.

3.Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queenes, London, 1609 edition, lines 1–357.

4.Thus, Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe, Basingstoke, 2001, give two pages (11–12) to show that the Greeks and Romans believed in harmful magic and had a concept of the night-flying witch. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, allots three (47–50) to demonstrate that the persecution of alleged witches was known in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Rome. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010, has passages on four (9, 14, 30 and 47) which argue that the ‘nuts and bolts’ of witchcraft were already present in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Palestine. Again, he emphasizes uniformity, as in comments like ‘We know a lot about ancient Mesopotamian religion, enough to see how closely it resembles all religions’, on p. 9. Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016, is the main author to draw attention to difference, on three pages (31–3).

5.Fritz Graf, ‘Excluding the Charming: The Development of the Greek Concept of Magic’, in Marvin Meyer and Paul Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, Leiden, 1995, 29.

6.These are the words of the strongest exponent of such a course, Kimberly B. Stratton, in Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology and Stereotype in the Ancient World, Columbia, 2007, ix. She herself makes a comparison of definitions of magic among the ancient Hebrews, the pagan Greeks and Romans, and the early Christians.

7.The main recent exponent of this view of Egyptian magic has been Robert Kriech Ritner, in The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, Chicago, 1993; and ‘The Religious, Social and Legal Parameters of Traditional Egyptian Magic’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 43–60. It has been endorsed by Geraldine Pinch, Ancient Egyptian Magic, London, 1994; Jan Assman, ‘Magic and Theology in Ancient Egypt’, in Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg (eds), Envisioning Magic, Leiden, 1997, 1–18; David Frankfurter, ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt and the Problem of the Category “Magician”’, in ibid., 115–35; Dominic Montserrat, Ancient Egypt, Glasgow, 2000, 22–3; David Frankfurter, ‘Curses, Blessings and Ritual Authority: Egyptian Magic in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 6 (2005), 157–85; Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, 2009; and Friedhelm Hoffmann, ‘Ancient Egypt’, in David J. Collins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, Cambridge, 2015, 52–82. It was, however, stated in outline at the very beginning of the sustained study of the subject, by E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, London, 1899. The whole of the following section of this chapter draws on these authorities, and also on Raymond O. Faulkner’s editions of key primary sources: The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Oxford, 1969; The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, Warminster, 3 vols, 1973–6; and The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Plymouth, 1985.

8.The text is translated in Budge, Egyptian Magic, 173–7.

9.For what follows here, see Pinch, Ancient Egyptian Magic, 33–46; and Panagiotis Kousoulis (ed.), Ancient Egyptian Demonology, Leuven, 2011.

10.Homer, The Odyssey, Book 4, lines 216–48.

11.Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book 8, lines 42–5. For a bibliography of recent scholarly references to the trope of Egypt as the land of magic par excellence, see Jan Bremmer’s list in Dietrich Boschung and Jan Bremmer (eds), The Materiality of Magic, Paderborn, 2015, p. 254, no. 53.

12.Budge, Egyptian Magic, viii.

13.The sources for this paragraph are the sum of those in the notes below.

14.Marie-Louise Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Marie-Louise Thomsen and Frederick H. Cryer (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume One, London, 2001, 93.

15.Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, 88–92; Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture, Cambridge, 2004; A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, Chicago, 1964, 206–27; Erica Reiner, Astral Magic in Babylonia, Philadelphia, 1995. A key set of primary texts in translation is R. Campbell Thompson (ed.), The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, 2 vols, London, 1900.

16.Tzvi Abusch, ‘The Demonic Image of the Witch in Standard Babylonian Literature’, in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Religion, Science and Magic, Oxford, 1989, 27–31. Anthony Green, ‘Beneficent Spirits and Malevolent Demons’, Visible Religion, 3 (1984), 80–105; O. R. Gurney, ‘Babylonian Prophylactic Figures and their Rituals’, Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, 22 (1935), 31–96; Daniel Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’, in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, Oxford, 2011, 418–42; and ‘The Ancient Near East’, in Collins (ed.), Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, 17–51. Primary texts of rites are found translated in Gurney, above; Erica Reiner (ed.), Ŝurpu: A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations, Graz, 1958; and R. Campbell Thompson (ed.), The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, 2 vols, London, 1903.

17.G. R. Driver and John C. Miles (eds), The Babylonian Laws, Oxford, 1952, vol. 1, 13–14, 58–9. The use of such a river ordeal was common for settling both criminal charges and civil suits throughout ancient Mesopotamian history: the sources are summarized by Peter Tóth, ‘River Ordeal’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, Budapest, 2008, 131. Russell Zguta, ‘The Ordeal by Water (Swimming of Witches) in the East Slavic World’, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 220–30, was seemingly the first to suggest that this could be the origin of the notorious medieval and early modern popular European custom of detecting witches by putting suspects into deep water and declaring guilty those who floated. I accepted this idea myself in ‘Witchcraft and Modernity’, in Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 199, but now have doubts. The test of innocence in the Babylonian ordeal was precisely the opposite of that in the later European one, and the latter may have been an independent development after all, based on the Christian rite of baptism. Peter Tóth, in ‘River Ordeal’, expresses a similar possibility, while still holding out hope for Zguta’s suggestion.

18.The essential femininity of the ancient Mesopotamian witch is stressed by almost all the secondary sources cited here, but there is possibly room for some qualification of it. The Code of Hammurabi, cited above, assumed that witches were male, which may mean that the gender stereotype changed between the second and first millennia. Also, Daniel Schwemer, in ‘Magic Rituals’, 432–4, has noted that there are references to a kind of evil male magician, the bēl dabābi, who is mentioned more often than his female equivalent, the bēlet dabābi, and also seems equivalent to a witch. The balance of gendering may therefore be to some extent a linguistic illusion.

19.Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, 23–56; Tzvi Abusch, Mesopotamian Witchcraft, Leiden, 2002; H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon, London, 1962; Sue Rollin, ‘Women and Witchcraft in Ancient Assyria’, in Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt (eds), Images of Women in Antiquity, London, 1983, 34–46; Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’. The editions of primary texts referenced above remain very relevant here, and to them should be added Tzvi Abusch (ed.), Babylonian Witchcraft Literature, Atlanta, 1987; Tzvi Abusch and Daniel Schwemer (eds), Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals, Leiden, 2011; and Stephen Langdon (ed.), Babylonian Liturgies, Paris, 1913.

20.There is one recent substantial study: Satnan Mendoza Forrest, Witches, Whores and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran, Austin, TX, 2011.

21.Gabriella Frantz-Szabó, ‘Hittite Witchcraft, Magic and Divination’, in Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, New York, 1995, vol. 3, 2007–19. For other works on Hittite magic, see Richard H. Beal, ‘Hittite Military Rituals’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 63–76; O. R. Gurney, Some Aspects of Hittite Religion, Oxford, 1977, 44–63; and Alice Mouton, ‘Hittite Witchcraft’, in VII Uluslarasi Hititoloji Kongresi Bildirileri, Ankara, 2010 (no editors named), vol. 2, 515–28. I am grateful to Jan Bremmer for drawing my attention to the last piece.

22.This is based primarily on Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, Cambridge, 2008, 8–19, which confirms ideas and evidence found in Stephen D. Ricks, ‘The Magician as Outsider in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 131–43. Ann Jeffries, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria, Leiden, 1996; Frederick H. Cryer, ‘Magic in Ancient Syria-Palestine and in the Old Testament’, in Thomsen and Cryer, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume One, 102–44; and Yitschak Sefati and Jacob Klein, ‘The Law of the Sorceress’, in Chaim Cohen et al. (eds), Sefer Moshe, Winona Lake, IN, 2004, 171–90; and is supplemented by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 34–7.

23.Again, Bohak is my main authority: Ancient Jewish Magic, 70–142, supplemented by Florentino Garcia Martinez, ‘Magic in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Leuven, 2002, 13–33; and Brian B. Schmidt, ‘Canaanite Magic vs Israelite Religion’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, Leiden, 2002, 242–59.

24.Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 351–434; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 143–64; Simcha Fishbane, ‘“Most Women Engage in Sorcery”: An Analysis of Sorceresses in the Babylonian Talmud’, Jewish History, 7 (1993), 27–42; Meir Bar-Ilan, ‘Witches in the Bible and in the Talmud’, in H. W. Basser and Simcha Fishbane (eds), Approaches to Ancient Judaism, Atlanta, 1993, 7–32; Jonathan Seidel, ‘Charming Criminals: Classification of Magic in the Babylonian Talmud’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 145–66; Leo Mock, ‘Were the Rabbis Troubled by Witches?’, Zutot, 1 (2001), 33–43; Rebecca Lesses, ‘Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69 (2001), 342–75; M. J. Geller, ‘Deconstructing Talmudic Magic’, in Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition, London, 2006, 1–18; Michael D. Swartz, ‘Jewish Magic in Late Antiquity’, in Steven T. Katz (ed.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 4, 706–7; Michele Murray, ‘The Magical Female in Graeco-Roman Rabbinical Literature’, Religion and Theology, 14 (2007), 284–309; Daniel Breslaver, ‘Secrecy and Magic, Publicity and Torah’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, 263–82.

25.This was noted by H. S. Versnel, ‘Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-Religion’, Numen, 38 (1991), 177–97; and (more fully) by Graf, ‘Excluding the Charming’, but seems to have been largely forgotten in the debate reviewed by me (with my own contribution) in Witches, Druids and King Arthur, London, 2003, 98–117. The key ancient texts are printed in Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Ancient World, 2nd edition, Oxford, 2009, 1–50.

26.‘Hippocrates’, On the Sacred Disease, 1.10–46: quotation at 1.31.

27.Plato, Laws, 909B.

28.This change over time was valuably emphasized by Jan Bremmer, ‘Appendix’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 267–71.

29.Primary sources include Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 380–403; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen, c. 10; Euripides, Suppliants, line 1110; Iphigenia in Tauris, line 1338; and Orestes, line 1497; Plato, Republic, 364B–E and Laws, 10.909A–D; Aristophanes, The Clouds, lines 749–51; and the Derveni Papyrus (printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 23). Important discussions are in Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, Cambridge, MA, 1994, 21–31; Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, London, 2001, 28–36; Georg Luck, ‘Witches and Sorcerers in Classical Literature’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three: Ancient Greece and Rome, London, 1999, 98–107; Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Songs for the Ghosts’, in David R. Jordan et al. (eds), The World of Ancient Magic, Bergen, 1999, 83–102; and Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley, 1999), 82–123; Jan Bremmer, ‘The Birth of the Term “Magic”’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 126 (1999), 1–12; Esther Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk among the Ancient Greeks, Oxford, 2007, 26–41; Michael Attyah Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, Berkeley, 2008; and Stratton, Naming the Witch, 39–69.

30.Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 27–9; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 22–33; Richard Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, in Ankarloo and Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Two, 178–80; Johnston, ‘Songs for the Ghosts’; and Restless Dead, 82–123; Bremmer, ‘The Birth of the Term “Magic”’; Stratton, Naming the Witch,39–47.

31.The probable influence of Mesopotamian models on Greek ideas of magic, and practitioners, has been emphasized by Walter Burkert, ‘Itinerant Diviners and Magicians’, in Robin Hägg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century, Stockholm, 1983, 115–19; and M. L West, The East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 1997, 46–51.

32.Heraclitus, writing around 500 BC, might be interpreted as providing one. However, this passage of his work is only preserved in a much later text, Clement of Alexandria’s, Protrepticus, c. 22, and may be distorted. Moreover, he condemns magoi not as magicians, but in their original role as Persian priests, as part of a warning against novel and exotic forms of religion.

33.Plato, Laws, 909A–D.

34.The main sources for the case, and for those of accidental poisoning, are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 106–7; in addition there is Plutarch, Demosthenes, 14.4. They are discussed in Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk, 145–55; and ‘Patterns of Persecution: “Witchcraft” Trials in Classical Athens’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 9–35; Derek Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, Oxford, 2008, 133–6; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 51–4; and Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, 251. Another woman, called Ninon, was tried and executed for impiety in introducing unfamiliar religious rites, but this had no obvious relevance to magic.

35.Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 55–61.

36.Aesop, Fables, no. 26.

37.Both inscriptions are translated in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 275–7.

38.Termed agurtai and manteis.

39.Many are translated in John Gager (ed.), Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, Oxford, 1992; and there is a catalogue in Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk, 352–454. They are discussed by those historians, and by Christopher A. Faraone, ‘The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells’, in Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, Oxford, 1991, 3–32; Daniel Ogden, ‘Binding Spells’, in Ankarloo and Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume Two, 38–86; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 48–50; Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, 64–103. Plato’s reference is in his Republic, 364B-C.

40.The main primary texts are Homer, Odyssey, c. 10; Euripides, Medea; Hesiod, Theogony; Eumelus, fragments of Corinthiaca; fragments of Naupactica and Nostoi; Pindar, Fourth Pythian Ode; and Sophocles, Rhizotomoi. Most are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 82–95, 312–13. Ogden himself, in Night’s Black Agents, London, 2008, 7–35, makes a spirited defence of the idea that both Circe and Medea could be regarded as witches, against a current apparent majority view that they cannot. I hold here (for reasons given) to the majority, summed up by Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 5, 15, 34, 128, 135. A lot, however, hinges on the definition made of a witch, which varies between the different commentators, and within his own one, Ogden is correct.

41.On this see Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 79–95; and ‘Who Practised Love-Magic in Classical Antiquity and the Ancient World’, Classical Quarterly, N.S. 50 (2000), 563–83; Ogden, ‘Binding Spells’, 62–5; and Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, 211–39.

42.This is a point especially made by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 49–71.

43.It first appears in Aristophanes, The Clouds, lines 749–57. This and other sources are reproduced in D. E. Hill, ‘The Thessalian Trick’, Rheisches Museum für Philologie, 116 (1973), 221–38; and (of course) Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 226–40. For academic considerations of the trope, see the list compiled by Jan Bremmer in Boschung and Bremmer (eds), The Materiality of Magic, 252, to which can be added P. J. Bicknell, ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, in Ann Moffatt (ed.), Maistor: Classical, Byzantine and Renaissance Studies for Robert Browning, Canberra, 1984, 67–75.

44.Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 97–123.

45.Fritz Graf, ‘Magic and Divination: Two Apolline Oracles on Magic’, in Gideon Bohak at al. (eds), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden, 2011, 119–33.

46.Pliny, Natural History, 30.1–20; Seneca, Oedipus, lines 561–3.

47.Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 8.7.9–10.

48.Apuleius, Apologia, 26.6.

49.Plotinus, Enneads, 2.9.14.1–8.

50.For what follows, see Mary Beard et al., Religions of Rome, Cambridge, 1998, vol. 1, 154–6; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 135–9; Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World, London, 2001, 1–16; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 79–99; James B. Rives, ‘“Magus” and its Cognates in Classical Latin’, in Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simon (eds), Magical Practice in the Latin West, Leiden, 2010, 53–77; J. A. North, ‘Novelty and Choice in Roman Religion’, Journal of Roman Studies, 70 (1980), 86–91; and Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 36–60.

51.Reference at n. 46.

52.What follows is based on the sources at n. 50, plus James Rives, ‘Magic in the XII Tables Revisited’, Classical Quarterly, 52 (2002), 270–90; and ‘Magic in Roman Law’, Classical Antiquity, 22 (2003), 313–39; and Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, 141–62. For the pivotal third-century ruling, see Julius Paulus, Sententiae, 5.23.14–19.

53.Livy, History, 8.18, 39.41 and 40.43.

54.Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, 254–5, is an example of a distinguished historian who believes that the word signified magic.

55.Printed by Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 284.

56.Printed in ibid., 333.

57.For example, Virgil, Eclogue 8.2.

58.Horace, Epodes, 3.6–8; 5, passim; and 17; and Satires, 1.8; 2.1.48; and 2.8.95–6.

59.Lucan, Pharsalia, 6.415–830.

60.Virgil, Aeneid, 4.478–508.

61.Ovid, Amores, 1.8.

62.Propertius, Poems, 4.5.5–18.

63.Tibullus, Poems, 1.2.41–58.

64.Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 1.3–8; 2.22–8; 9.29.

65.Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.159–351; and Heroides, 6.83–94; Seneca, Medea, passim; Orphic Argonautica, lines 887–1021; Hyginus, Fabulae, 26.

66.Petronius, Satyricon, cc. 133–4.

67.Stratton, Naming the Witch, 79–96.

68.The references are collected in Valerie M. Warrior, Roman Religion, Cambridge, 2006, 96; and printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 222–6. I think those to Catullus and Horace ambiguous, but accept and cite the rest.

69.The main sources are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 281–4.

70.Tacitus, Annals, 2.27; 2.55; 2.69; 3.22–3; 4.52. These texts are well collated and discussed by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 100–105.

71.Sources at n. 39; plus Beard et al., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, 220. I accept the argument of Henk Versnel, that many of the tablets from the imperial period often grouped together with curse tablets are found in temples and shrines, and should be regarded instead as prayers to deities to avenge misdoings, and so not part of the traditional category of magic at all: his latest salvo in this, summing up the evidence and the debate to date, is in his essay ‘Prayers for Justice, East and West’, in Gordon and Simon (eds), Magical Practice in the Latin West, 275–354.

72.Published in Wolfgang Meid, Gaulish Inscriptions, Budapest, 1992, 40–46.

73.Andrew T. Wilburn, Materia Magica, Ann Arbor, 2012.

74.Pliny, Natural History, 28.19.

75.Printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 48.

76.Fritz Graf, ‘Victimology’, in Kimberly B. Stratton with Dayna S. Kalleres (eds), Daughters of Hecate, Oxford, 2014, 386–417.

77.David Frankfurter, ‘Fetus Magic and Sorcery Fears in Roman Egypt’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 46 (2006), 37–62.

78.Isaac Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, African Affairs, 51 (1952), 41–52.

79.Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London, 1922, 73–7, 239–42, 393.

80.Alex Scobie, ‘Strigiform Witches in Roman and Other Cultures’, Fabula, 19 (1978), 74–101.

81.For original texts, see O. R. Gurney, ‘Babylonian Prophylactic Figures and their Rituals’; and Langdon, Babylonian Liturgies, 12–15. For commentaries, Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, Detroit, 3rd edition, 1990, 221–2; Thompson, Semitic Magic, 65–8; Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’, 427–8; Markham J. Geller, ‘Tablets and Magical Bowls’, in Shaul Shaked (ed.), Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity, Leiden, 2005, 53–72; Kathrin Trattner, ‘From Lamashtu to Lilith’, Disputatio Philosophica, 15 (2014), 109–18.

82.Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 222. A much more famous terracotta figure of a nude winged female figure with clawed feet in the British Museum, known as the Burney Relief, or more romantically as the Queen of the Night, has often been used uncritically as a depiction of a lilitu, or simply of ‘Lilith’. From her iconography, however, she is certainly not a demoness but a goddess: Dominique Collon, The Queen of the Night, London, 2005.

83.This has been strongly argued by Judit M. Blair, De-Demonising the Old Testament, Tübingen, 2009, 63–95.

84.Original texts can be found in Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked (eds), Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity, Jerusalem, 3rd edition, 1998. Commentaries on them and on Lilith(s) in the Talmud and after are in Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 223–40; Lesses, ‘Exe(o)rcizing Power’; Geller, ‘Tablets and Magical Bowls’; and Blair, De-Demonising the Old Testament, 24–30.

85.The main texts for the lamia are printed in Daniel Ogden, Dragons, Serpents and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook, Oxford, 2013, 68–107. Discussions are in Johnston, Restless Dead, 119–23, 165–79; and ‘Defining the Dreadful: Remarks on the Greek Child-Killing Demon’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 361–87; Daniel Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2013, 86–92; and Stamatios Zochios, ‘Lamia’, Trictrac, 4 (2011), 96–112 (I am grateful to the author for the gift of this article).

86.For discussion, see Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution, Cambridge MA, 1992, 82–7; Ogden, Drakōn, 95; Johnston, ‘Defining the Dreadful’, 380.

87.All the more important primary texts are printed in Samuel Grant Oliphant, ‘The Story of the Strix’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 44 (1913), 133–49; and 45 (1914), 49–63, to which material can be added from Ovid, Fasti, 6.131–68. Discussions are found in Oliphant’s article and in David Walter Leinweber, ‘Witchcraft and Lamiae in “The Golden Ass”’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 77–82; Johnston, Restless Dead, 165–9; and Laura Cherubini, ‘The Virgin, the Bear and the Upside-Down Strix’, Arethusa, 42 (2009), 77–97. The following observations are based on these sources.

88.Ovid, Amores, 1.8.2; and Fasti, 6.131–68.

89.Sextus Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatione, 314.33, printed in Patrologia Latina, vol. 95, col. 1668. Festus probably wrote in the second century, but was summarizing a work of Verrius Flaccus from the first.

90.(?Pseudo-) Lucian, Lucius or the Ass, c. 12; Apuleius, Metamorphoses, c. 16.

91.Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 1.17, 5.11.

92.It was Norman Cohn who first noticed and exploited the full potential of this, in Europe’s Inner Demons, London, 2nd edition, 1993, 162–6. Some of the primary texts were published in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2005, 135–6.

93.Pactus legis Salicae, texts 19 and 64, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Four. Part One, Hanover, 1962, 81–2, 230–31.

94.Leges Alamannorum, Fragmentum II, paragraph 31, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Five, Hanover, 1962, 23.

95.Edictus Rothari, nos 197–8, 376, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Four, Witzenhausen, 1962, 53, 91.

96.Capitularia Regum Francorum, Capitulatio de partibus Saxonicae, paragraph 6, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section Two. Volume One, Hanover, 1973, pp. 68–9.

97.Again, it was Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 164–6, who drew attention to the trail of texts leading into the medieval period.

98.Paul Piper (ed.), Notkers und seiner Schule Schriften, Freiburg, 1883, vol. 1, 787. The term used for witches is the standard medieval German one.

99.Burchard, Decretum, Book 19, c. 170.

100.Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, Book 3, cc. 85–8.

101.Julius Caesar, Gallic War, 1.50.

102.Tacitus, Germania, c. 8.

103.Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, London, 1883, vol. 1, 95–7, 396; Grimm quotes the other relevant primary sources, Strabo, Dio Cassius, Gregory of Tours and Saxo Grammaticus.

3  The Shamanic Context

1.Graham Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in Harvey (ed.), Shamanism: A Reader, London, 2003, 18.

2.For accounts of its development, see Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Princeton, 1992; Jane Monnig Atkinson, ‘Shamanisms Today’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992), 307–30; Peter N. Jones, ‘Shamanism’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 17 (2006), 4–32; Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination, Oxford, 2007; and Jeroen W. Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, Groningen, 2011.

3.Examples of all these employments of the term are found in works cited in the sources above. For a range of discussions and characterizations since the century began, see Alice Beck Kehoe, Shamans and Religion, Prospect Heights, 2000; Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley (eds), Shamans Through Time, London, 2001; Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon (eds), The Concept of Shamanism, Budapest, 2001; Alby Stone, Explore Shamanism, Loughborough, 2003; Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion, 2nd edition, Oxford, 2006, 174–96; Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis, Historical Dictionary of Shamanism, Lanham MD, 2007, 2; Aldo Colleoni, ‘Shamanism’, in Colleoni (ed.), Mongolian Shamanism, Ulan Bator, 2007, 25–35; Angela Sumegi, Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, New York, 2008, 1–25; Thomas A. Dubois, An Introduction to Shamanism, Cambridge, 2009; Christine S. Van Pool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred’, Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology, 28 (2009), 177–90; H. Sidky, ‘Ethnographic Perspectives on Differentiating Shamans from other Ritual Intercessors’, Asian Ethnology, 69 (2010), 213–40; Adam J. Rock and Stanley Krippner, Demystifying Shamans and their World, Exeter, 2011, x–xi, 1–40; Diana Riboli and Davide Torri (eds), Shamanism and Violence, Farnham, 2013, 1; Marcel de Lima, The Ethnopoetics of Shamanism, Basingstoke, 2014, 1–5.

4.Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1983; and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, London, 1992; quotation on p. 300. His argument, based on older theories, was that shamanic practices had been brought to Europe by prehistoric migrations across the steppes: for the subsequent fate of these theories see Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Shamanism in Classical Scholarship: Where Are We Now?’, in Peter Jackson (ed) Horizons of Shamanism, Stockholm, 2016, 52–78, which also reflects on Ginzburg’s use of them.

5.Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, 129.

6.His great book was Shamanism, the English edition of which was first published in London in 1964. For my own critique of his definition, see Ronald Hutton, Shamans, London, 2001, especially at pp. 120–31; others may be found in works cited at nn.1, 2 and 4 above.

7.Mircea Eliade, ‘Some Observations on European Witchcraft’, History of Religions, 14 (1975), 149–72. For the apparent influence of Eliade on Ginzburg see also Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, Oxford, 2007, 170–86: Znamenski also emphasizes the importance to Ginzburg’s thought of his appointment to a chair at the University of California Los Angeles, a particular centre of enthusiasm for Eliade’s concept of shamanism.

8.This connection was especially made in the publications of Vilmos Dioszegi, the great mid-twentieth-century Magyar scholar of Siberian shamanism.

9.From a long list of their publications, some edited in partnership, the most relevant here are probably Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft’, in Mihály Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia, Göttingen, 1984, 404–22; and Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, Budapest, 1999.

10.Klaniczay, ‘Shamanistic Elements’; Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 14–15.

11.Gábor Klaniczay, Éva Pócs and Carlo Ginzburg, contributions to the Round Table Discussion, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, Budapest, 2008, 37–42, 45–9. See also Klaniczay, ‘Shamanism and Witchcraft’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 214–21.

12.At least in the English translation of his microhistory, bearing that title, made by Erik Midelfort and published at Charlottesville in 1998.

13.Eleven years of articulation of this opinion are summed up neatly in Henningsen’s contribution to the Round Table Discussion at n. 11, on pp. 35–7. For its first expression see Henningsen, ‘The White Sabbath and Other Archaic Patterns of Witchcraft’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witch Beliefs and Witch Hunting in Central and Southern Europe, Budapest, 1992, 293–304.

14.The critiques of Ginzburg’s ideas by Anglophone historians are summed up with references by Yme Kuiper, ‘Witchcraft, Fertility Cults and Shamanism’, in Brigitte Luchesi and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds), Religion in Cultural Discourse, Berlin, 2006, 35–59. Since 2005 two British scholars, Emma Wilby and Julian Goodare, have applied them to material from their island, with results that will be considered later in this book.

15.I have made exploratory attempts at this exercise in ‘Shamanism: Mapping the Boundaries’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 209–13; and before expert audiences at Åbo University, Finland, in 2007 and Harvard University in 2009. I am very grateful to members of those for their helpful and supportive comments, and above all to Carlo Ginzburg himself, at Harvard, for his generosity.

16.In Between the Living and the Dead, 7.

17.Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, Book 3, c. 34.

18.Gerald of Wales, Itinerary Through Wales, c. 16.

19.Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, Exeter, 2000, 226.

20.Matt Goldish, ‘Vision and Possession: Nathan of Gaza’s Earliest Prophecies in Historical Context’, in Goldish (ed.), Spirit Possession in Judaism, Detroit, 2003, 217–36.

21.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 188.

22.The classic work of this kind is Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman, London, 2005.

23.For other considerations of this problem, see Neil Price (ed.), The Archaeology of Shamanism, London, 2001; Michael Winkelman, ‘Archaeology and Shamanism’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12 (2002), 268–70; Christine S. Van Pool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 28 (2009), 177–90; and Homayun Sidky, ‘On the Antiquity of Shamanism and its Role in Human Religiosity’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 22 (2010), 68–92.

24.The term ‘rite technique’ is adopted from Anna-Leena Siikala’s The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman, Helsinki, 1987. The summary of Siberian shamanism that follows is based on my own Shamans, a book which was designed specifically as one of the foundations of the present one. It was based on a survey of the texts that recorded Siberian shamanism, in all languages, up to the early twentieth century.

25.Alexander D. King, ‘Soul-Suckers’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 10 (1999), 59–68. This study is of recent beliefs among the people concerned, but the author treats them as traditional.

26.The two classic studies of the Sakha’s traditional culture, Waclaw Sieroszewski, Yakuti, St Petersburg, 1896, and Waldemar Jochelson, The Yakut, New York, 1933, do not seem to mention this belief, but it is recorded in Russian legal records from the seventeenth century, studied in S. Tokarev, ‘Shamanstvo u Iakutov v 17 veke’, translated in Andrei A. Znamenski (ed.), Shamanism in Siberia, Dordrecht, 2003, 260–63. I am grateful to Professor Znamenski for the gift of this book.

27.Frederica de Laguna, ‘The Tlingit’, in William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (eds), Crossroads of Continents, Washington DC, 1988, 58–63; Merete D. Jakobsen, Shamanism, New York, 1999, 94–100; George Thornton Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Laguna, Seattle, 1991, 398–410; Daniel Merkur, ‘Contrary to Nature’, in Tore Ahlbäck (ed.), Saami Religion, Abo, 1987, 279–93.

28.Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman, London, 1995, 25.

29.Ágnes Várkonyi, ‘Connections between the Cessation of Witch Trials and the Transformation of the Social Structure Related to Hygiene’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 37 (1991–2), 427–31.

30.Laura Stark-Arola, Magic, Body and Social Order, Helsinki, 2006, 44–9.

31.Vilmos Dioszegi, Tracing Shamans in Siberia, Oosteehout, 1968, 61–5; Jeno Fazekas, ‘Hungarian Shamanism’, in Henry N. Michael (ed.), Studies in Siberian Shamanism, Toronto, 1963, 97–119; Mihály Hoppál, Shamans and Traditions, Budapest, 2007, 60–96: Tekla Dömötör, ‘The Cunning Folk in English and Hungarian Witch Trials’, in Venetia Newall (ed.), Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century, Woodbridge, 1980, 183–7. Dioszegi found parallels between Hungarian and Siberian folk myth, which may be telling, but are not directly associated with the táltos.

32.V. M. Mikhailowskii, ‘Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 24 (1895), 151–7.

33.This reference was turned up by Clive Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, Helsinki, 2009, vol. 1, 81, who provides the text and a translation.

34.Historia Norwegiae, 4.13.23.

35.Vatnsdaela saga, c. 12.

36.Ynglinga saga c. 13; Ólafs saga helga, in Heimskringla, ed. Erling Monson, Cambridge, 1932, 222; Haralds saga ins hárfagra, c. 25; Thorsteins thattr boejarmagns, c. 14.

37.Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson, St Paul MN, 2000, 629.

38.Rune Hagen, ‘Lapland’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, 2006, 125.

39.The original texts are quoted and analysed in Ahlbäck (ed.), Saami Religion; Carl-Martin Edsman, ‘A Manuscript Concerning Inquiries into Witchcraft in Swedish Lapland’, Arv, 39 (1983), 121–39; Juha Pentinkäinen, ‘The Saami Shaman’, in Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia, 125–48; Tore Ahlbäck and Jan Bergman (eds), The Saami Shaman Drum, Abo, 1987; Ake Hultkranz, ‘Aspects of Saami (Lapp) Shamanism’, in Mihály Hoppál and Juha Pentikäinen (eds), Northern Religions and Shamanism, Budapest, 1992, 138–45.

40.Prominent examples since 1990 have included Ake Hultkranz, Juha Pentinkäinen, Clive Tolley, Neil Price, John Lindow, Anna-Leena Siikala and Liv Helene Willumsen.

41.Rune Blix Hagen, ‘Sami Shamanism’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 227–33; and ‘Witchcraft and Ethnicity’, in Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 141–66.

42.Furthermore, Hagen quotes the trial record on which he chiefly relies as stating that the noaidi concerned ‘shed tears and appeared to be in a state of utmost devotion’ while playing his drum before the court. This – an eyewitness account – does sound rather like an altered state of consciousness: ‘Sami Shamanism’, 229.

43.The early modern account which I have been able to read in its entirety myself, by Knud Leem and translated in John Pinkerton, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, London, 1808, vol. 1, 477–8, could be, in every detail, a report of a Siberian shamanic performance.

44.Laura Stark-Arola, Magic, Body and Social Order, Helsinki, 2006, passim; Anna-Leena Siikala, Mythic Images and Shamanism, Helsinki, 2002, passim.

45.Siikala, Mythic Images, 17.

46.Sophia Kingsmill and Jennifer Westwood, The Fabled Coast, London, 2012, 330–31.

47.Neil Price, The Viking Way, Uppsala, 2002; quotations on pp. 315, 328, 390. He outlines previous debates over the issue on pp. 76–8, 233–5, and provides an excellent account of Sámi shamanism on pp. 233–75. Subsequent to this, Peter Buchholtz has succinctly restated the case for clear shamanic traits in Old Norse literature: ‘Shamanism in Medieval Scandinavian Literature’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Communicating with the Spirits, Budapest, 2005, 234–45.

48.Clive Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 2 vols, Helsinki, 2009: quotation on vol.1, p. 581 (with his emphasis). On pp. 3–4 of the same volume he sums up the historical debate over the issue (giving more weight than Price to the negative view), and in his second volume helpfully reprints most of the relevant medieval texts with translations.

49.Eiriks saga rauđa, c. 4. In his discussion of the text in The Viking Way, 119–22, 162–71, Neil Price criticizes me for calling Thorbjorg unique in medieval Norse literature (in Shamans, 140), while praising my book in general. He points out rightly that this literature has several other seeresses. I meant only that none of the others has all her attributes together, including the costume, and when that misunderstanding is removed, he and I are in general agreement.

50.Örvar-Odds saga, c. 3.

51.Friđthjofs saga fraekna, c. 5.

52.Gongu-Hrólfs saga, c. 3.

53.Hrólfs saga Kraka, cc. 3, 48.

54.Hrólfs saga Kraka, c. 48.

55.Ynglinga saga, c. 7. Katherine Morris, Sorceress or Witch? The Image of Gender in Medieval Iceland and Northern Europe, Lanham, MD, 1991, 97–117 has a discussion of shape-shifting among Norse deities in general; see also H. R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Shape-changing in the Old Norse Sagas’, in J. R. Porter and W.M.S. Russell (eds), Animals in Folklore, Cambridge, 1978, 126–42.

56.The Saga of Howard the Halt, ed. William Morris and Eikíkr Magnússon, London, 1891, 58–91.

57.Vatnsdaela saga, c. 29.

58.The sources are collected in Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, vol. 2, 133–6.

59.Laxdaela saga, c. 76.

60.Fóstbraeđra saga, c. 23.

61.Price, The Viking Way, 175–80, 325–7.

62.Norna-Gests Tháttr, c. 11; Orms tháttr Stórólfssonar, cc. 5–6.

63.Laxdaela saga, cc. 35–7; Gísla saga Súrssonar, c. 18. John McKinnell, Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend, Cambridge, 2005, 97, argues that the motif of the seiđr platform is ancient, because in the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Life of Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (c. 13) a pagan magician is shown cursing a Christian party from a hill: but there is nothing in that text to suggest that mounting the hill is a magical act, as opposed to the gaining of a practical vantage point. The antiquity of the concept is therefore an open question.

64.Thiđreks saga, c. 352.

65.Kormáks saga, c. 22.

66.Völsunga saga, cc. 5, 7, 8.

67.Eyrbyggja saga, c. 20. More examples of shape-shifting in Icelandic literature may be found in Morris, Sorceress or Witch?, 93–128.

68.Bosi and Herraud, in Seven Viking Romances, ed. Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, London, 1985, 204–8; Grettis saga, c. 79; Gísla saga Súrssonar, c. 18; Kormáks saga, c. 22; Fóstbraeđra saga, c. 9; Vatnsdaela saga, c. 19; Faereyinga saga, cc. 34, 37.

69.For which see Gísli Pálsson, ‘The Name of the Witch’, in Ross Samson (ed.), Social Approaches to Viking Studies, Glasgow, 1991, 157–68.

70.Such a suggestion has been made, and opposed, since the 1930s: see Price, The Viking Way, 315–17 for a summary of that debate.

71.Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 152–66. Morris, Sorceress or Witch?, 26–92, provides ample data for prophetic women in general, in medieval Scandinavian and German sources.

72.Tacitus, Histories, 4.65.

73.The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, ed. R. Quirk, London, 1957, 18.

74.Hávamál, line 155.

75.Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 129–30.

76.Ketils saga haengs, c. 3.

77.Thorsteins thattr boejarmagns, c. 2.

78.Tolley collects the medieval legal references, in Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 133–4.

79.Eyrbyggja saga, c. 16.

4  Ceremonial Magic – The Egyptian Legacy?

1.Robert Turner (ed.), Henry Cornelius Agrippa His Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, London, 1655, Sig A2.

2.George Gifford, A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraft, London, 1593, 54.

3.Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson, St Paul, MN, 2000, li.

4.Johann Weyer, De Lamiis, c. 1.

5.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edition, London, 1993, 102.

6.This self-image is expressed especially well in Frank Klaassen, ‘Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance’, Sixteenth-century Journal, 38 (2007), 49–76; and Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft and Magic in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24 (1994), 355–85.

7.For general surveys of this tradition, see Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1989; and Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, 1993.

8.The sources for the first statement would comprise most of those to be cited in Chapter Seven. The second one is readily supported, inter alia, by Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 102–43; J. R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France, Leiden, 1998; and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The British Witch, Stroud, 2014, 1–114.

9.Jean Bodin, De la demonomanie des sorciers, Paris, 1580, Book 1, c. 1.

10.For a selection of such studies, see T. Fahd, ‘Retour à Ibn Wahshiyya’, Arabica, 16 (1963), 83–8; Jack Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt, London, 1970; David Pingree, ‘Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-Hakim’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), 1–15; ‘Between the “Ghaya” and “Picatrix”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981), 27–56; ‘The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe’, in La Diffusione delle Scienze Islamiche nel Medio Evo Europeo, Rome, 1987, 57–102; ‘Indian Planetary Images and the Tradition of Astral Magic’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), 1–13; and ‘Learned Magic in the Time of Frederick II’, Micrologus, 2 (1994), 39–56; Peter Kingsley, ‘From Pythagoras to the “Turba Philosophorum”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), 1–13; Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England, London, 1997; and ‘Late Antique and Medieval Latin Translations of Greek Texts on Astrology and Magic’, in Paul Magdalino and Maria Mauroudi (eds), The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, Geneva, 2006, 325–59; W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, Stroud, 1999; and Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition, London, 2006.

11.Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, Stroud, 1997, 11.

12.Michael D. Bailey, ‘The Meanings of Magic’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 1–23; ‘The Age of the Magicians’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 3 (2008), 3–28; and Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present, Lanham, MD, 2007. Other good recent books which provide histories of Western magic, of different kinds from that attempted here, are Bernd-Christian Otto, Magie, Berlin, 2011 (I am very grateful to the author for the gift of this); Brian P. Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture, Cambridge, 2015; and Steven P. Marrone, A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, New York, 2015. The first is a survey of the main movements, works and characters in Europe from antiquity to the present. The second is really an intensive study of Renaissance magic, above all that of Marsilio Ficino, and the way in which it has been viewed by modern scholars. The third is a consideration of the relationship between learned attitudes to religion, science and magic between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, with its heaviest emphasis on the high and late Middle Ages.

13.After I had written this, Jan Bremmer drew my attention to Bernd-Christian Otto’s fine article, ‘Historicising “Western Learned Magic”’, Aries, 16 (2016), 161–240, in which he maps out a prospectus for a history of ceremonial magic to which, I believe, my own work here has – in parallel – conformed.

14.For comments on this process, see Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Temple and the Magician’, in Jacob Jervell and Wayne A. Meeks (eds), God’s Christ and his People, Oslo, 1977, 233–48; Robert K. Ritner, ‘Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire’, Aufsteig und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.18.5 (1995), 3333–79; Richard Gordon, ‘Reporting the Marvellous: Private Divination in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg (eds), Envisioning Magic, Leiden, 1997, 65–92; David Frankfurter, ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt and the Problem of the Category “Magician”’, in ibid., 115–35; and Religion in Roman Egypt, Princeton, 1998, 198–233.

15.The current standard translation is that of Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation including the Demotic Spells, Chicago, 1986. The papyri in Greek are usually abbreviated to PGM (Papyri Graecae Magicae), and those in Demotic to PDM (Papyri Demoticae Magicae). For commentaries, see Arthur Darby Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Oxford, 1972, 176–94; Hans Dieter Betz, ‘The Formation of Authoritative Tradition in the Greek Magical Papryi’, in Ben F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders (eds), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, London, 1982, 161–70; and ‘Magic and Mystery in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in Christopher D. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, Oxford, 1991, 244–59; William M. Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.18.5 (1995), 3380–84; Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Trading Places’, in Marvin Meyer and Paul Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, Leiden, 1995, 23–7; Leda Jean Ciriao, ‘Supernatural Assistants in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in ibid., 279–95; Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, Cambridge, MA, 1997, 97–116; Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Sacrifice in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in Paul Mirecki and Marvin Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, Leiden, 2002, 344–58; Anna Scibilia, ‘Supernatural Assistance in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Leuven, 2002, 71–86.

16.For example, PGM III.494–501; IV.930–1114; and XIa.1–40.

17.For example, PGM IV.850–929; V.1–53; VII.540–78; and XIV.1–92, 150–231.

18.PGM IV.850–929.

19.PGM IV.1265–74.

20.PGM III.494–501.

21.For example, PGM V.146–50.

22.PGM III.211–29; V.5; and XIII.335–9.

23.For example, PGM IV.475–7; and XII.92–4.

24.PGM 1.53, 127 and 191.

25.PGM LXX.5–16; and III.559–610.

26.PGM IV.164–221.

27.PGM IV.75–750.

28.The nature of the debate, and the main sources for it, up until the year 2003, are summed up and appraised in my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, London, 2003, 117–18.

29.Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira, Atlanta, 1990, 2; Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods, London, 1995, 93; Polymnia Athanassiadi, ‘The Chaldean Oracles’, in Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frere (eds), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 1999, 153–5. The current standard edition is that of Edouard des Places, Oracles Chaldaiques, Paris, 1971, with an English translation by Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles, Leiden, 1989. The numbering of the fragments here is that of des Places.

30.Fragments nos 2, 109, 132–3, 135 and 149–50.

31.Fragments nos 219, 221, and 223–5.

32.The best and most recent edition seems to be that by Henri Dominique Saffrey in Paris in 2012.

33.Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, 5.22–3; 96.13–97.8; 161.10–15; 197.12–199.5; 218.5–10; 227.1–230.16; 233.7–16; and 264.14–265.6. I have used the standard edition by Edouard des Places, published in Paris in 1966.

34.Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers, sections 474–80.

35.Proclus, Of the Priestly Art according to the Greeks, trans. Brian Copenhaver in ‘Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus and the Question of a Philosophy of Magic in the Renaissance’, in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (eds), Hermeticism and the Renaissance, Washington, DC, 1988, 103–5.

36.This was argued by E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, 1951, 296; and Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Ancient World, London, 2001, 317–18.

37.Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, line 3.41.3, ed. E. Diehl, Leipzig, 1906.

38.Johnston, Hekate Soteira, 90; Stephen Ronan, ‘Hekate’s Iynx’, Alexandria, 1 (1991), 326. For a more extended discussion of theurgy, see my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 117–28, which also provides an extensive bibliography. Notable publications since then have included Emma C. Clarke, Iamblichus’s ‘De Mysteriis’, Aldershot, 2001; and Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in Late Antiquity, Göttingen, 2013.

39.M. A. Morgan (ed.), Sepher ha-Razim, Chico, CA, 1983. For its dating, see the introduction to this edition, and P. S. Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, in Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, ed. Geza Vermes, Edinburgh, 1986, vol. 3, 347–8; and ‘Sepher ha-Razim and the Problem of Black Magic in Early Judaism’, in Todd E. Klutz (ed.), Magic in the Biblical World, London, 2003, 184–90; Pablo A. Torijano, Solomon the Esoteric King, Leiden, 2002, 192–244; and Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, Cambridge, 2008, 169–83. The reconstruction of the text was the achievement of Mordecai Margaliouth, who published the definitive Hebrew edition.

40.I have used the edition by Moses Gaster published in London in 1896. For commentaries, see Gaster’s introduction; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 350–52; and Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 169–83.

41.Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 143–350. See also Rebecca Lesses, ‘Speaking Angels: Jewish and Greco-Egyptian Revelatory Adjurations’, Harvard Theological Review, 89 (1996), 41–60, which draws similar conclusions. Texts on which they are based can be found in Lawrence H. Schiffman and Michael D. Swartz (eds), Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah, Sheffield, 1992.

42.I have compared the editions by F. C. Conybeare, in London in 1898 and D. C. Duling, in James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, London,1983, vol. 1, 935–87. For commentaries see the introductions to those editions, and to that by Charles Chariton McCown in Leipzig in 1922; and also Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘The “Testament of Solomon” from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 35–49; Torijano, Solomon the Esoteric King, 41–87; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 372–4; Todd E. Klutz, Rewriting the ‘Testament of Solomon’, New York, 2005; and James Harding and Loveday Alexander, ‘Dating the Testament of Solomon’, www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/guestlectures/harding, accessed 9 May 2014.

43.Key texts were edited by Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, as Ancient Christian Magic, Princeton, 1994. See also Nicole B. Hansen, ‘Ancient Execration Magic in Coptic and Islamic Egypt’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, 427–45; Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 257–64; and Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3470–73.

44.The references are collected in Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Oxford, 2009, 19–21.

45.These data may be found in Robert Kriech Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, Chicago, 1993, 36–8, 72, 111–90; and ‘Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire’, 3345–58; Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, London, 1994, 62–164; Frankfurter, ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt’; Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3429; Ian Meyer, ‘The Initiation of the Magician’, in David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone (eds), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives, London, 2003, 223–4; John Gee, ‘The Structure of Lamp Divination’, in Kim Ryholt (ed.), Acts of the Seventh International Conference of Demotic Studies, Copenhagen, 1999, 207–18; and Joachim Friedrich Quack, ‘From Ritual to Magic’, in Gideon Bohak et al. (eds), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden, 2011, 43–84.

46.Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3422–40.

47.S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology, Woodbridge, 1987, 11–29.

48.Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 212–14, collects most of the references, and some of these, plus others which he does not cite, are translated in Daniel Ogden (ed.), Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2009, 49–58.

49.The most prominent proponent of this view in recent years has probably been Christopher Faraone, in his various (splendid) publications.

50.Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, 2009, 165–7.

51.Origen, Contra Celsum, I.6.8.

52.It is now in the National Museum of Wales.

53.It is now in the Ashmolean Museum.

54.Roy Kotansky (ed.), Greek Magical Amulets, Opladen, 1994 supplies the texts.

55.It has been available in English since its appearance as The Magick of Kiranus in 1685, with a modern edition by Demetrios Kaimakis, Die Kyraniden, Frankfurt, 1980. For commentaries, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, London, 1923, vol. 2, 229–31; Henry and Renée Kahane and Angelina Pietrangli, ‘Picatrix and the Talismans’, Romance Philology, 19 (1966), 574–93; and Klaus Alpers, ‘Untersuchungen zum griechischen Physiologus und den Kyraniden’, Vestigia Bibliae, 6 (1984), 13–87.

56.I have not yet located this manuscript myself, but the charm is recorded as present in it by C.J.S. Thompson, The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic, London, 1927, 58, and I have found him to be a reliable scholar when I have been able to check other parts of his work. In my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 186, I reprinted it with the suggestion that it probably represented a direct transmission from ancient to Tudor times, though there was a slighter chance that an early modern scholar had obtained a Graeco-Egyptian text. Since then I have realized that it appears in PGM VIII.65–85, proving its ancient provenance. It is very difficult to believe that an original magical papyrus with the charm could have been obtained from Egypt in the early modern period, though it is not utterly impossible.

57.David Porreca, ‘Divine Names: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 17–29.

58.Ioannis Marathakis (ed.), The Magical Treatise of Solomon, Singapore, 2011, 56, 60, 64, 85, 159, 231. The Golden Hoard Press, which published this edition, has done much valuable work recently in producing good editions of European magical handbooks. The reed pen is also found in Book 1 of a sixteenth-century copy of another famous late medieval grimoire, Sepher Raziel, at British Library, Sloane MS 3846, now published on the Internet at www.esotericarchives.com/raziel/raziel.htm, accessed 9 May 2014.

59.Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 243, fo. 26.

60.PGM II.18; III.425; VII.412; PDM XIV.116.

61.Warren R. Dawson, ‘The Lore of the Hoopoe’, The Ibis, 121 (1925), 32–5.

62.Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century, Stroud, 1997.

63.Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 219, fo. 186v; British Library, Sloane MS 3132, fo. 56v.

64.Andrei Torporkou, ‘Russian Love Charms in a Comparative Light’, in Jonathan Roper (ed.), Charms, Charmers and Charming, Basingstoke, 2009, 126–49.

65.There are different versions in British Library Royal MS 17A.XLII, fos 15r–23, and Sloane MSS 313, fos 27–45; 3826, fos 58–83; 3854, fos 112–39; 3853, fos 1–25; and 3885, fos 1–25, 58–125. Joseph Peterson has edited a composite one at www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm, accessed 28 May 2014, and Gösta Hedegård another at Stockholm in 2002, with careful attention to the different recensions. For commentaries, see these editions, Robert Mathiesen, ‘A Thirteenth-century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from the “Sworn Book” of Honorius of Thebes’; and Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Devil’s Contemplatives’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, Stroud, 1998, 143–62 and 250–65; Katelyn Mesler, ‘The “Liber Iuratus Honorii” and the Christian Reception of Angel Magic’; and Jan R. Veenstra, ‘Honorius and the Sigil of God’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Invoking Angels, University Park, PA, 2012, 113–91.

66.The standard edition is the composite one of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in London in 1888. The introduction, printed on pp. 2–4, is taken from British Library, Additional MS 10862, a work of the mid-sixteenth century.

67.‘Albertus Magnus’, De virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium, Amsterdam, 1648, 128.

68.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a–2ae, Quaestio 96.

69.See sources at n. 6.

70.Julien Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age et à l’époque moderne, Florence, 2007, includes a critical edition of the text. A seventeenth-century version is translated and edited by Joseph H. Peterson, in The Lesser Key of Solomon, York Beach, MN, 2001, 155–220. For commentaries see Michael Camille, ‘Visual Art in Two Manuscripts of the Ars Notoria’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, Stroud, 1998, 110–39; and Julien Véronèse, ‘Magic, Theurgy and Spirituality in the Medieval Ritual of the “Ars Notoria”’, in Fanger (ed.), Invoking Angels, 37–78.

71.Nicholas Watson, ‘John the Monk’s “Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary”’; and Claire Fanger, ‘Plundering the Egyptian Treasure: John the Monk’s “Book of Visions” and its Relation to the Ars Notoria of Solomon’, in Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, 163–29 (providing the text between them); Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson, ‘The Prologue to John of Morigny’s “Liber Visionum”’, Esoterica, 3 (2001), 108–17 (with the text).

72.These features are especially apparent in British Library, Sloane MS 3854.

73.Joshua Trachtenburg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, New York, 1939. The same idea is repeated with further material in John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition, London, 1974, 31–5; Kieckhefer, ‘The Devil’s Contemplatives’; and Mesler, ‘The “Liber Iuratus Honori”’.

74.Giancarlo Lacerenza, ‘Jewish Magicians and their Clients in Late Antiquity’, in Leonard V. Rutgers (ed.), What Athens has to do with Jerusalem, Leuven, 2003, 401–19. For original early medieval texts by churchmen condemning the invocation of angels and naming of them, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 142, 145.

75.As well as the sources in n. 71, see Jan R. Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandel’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 189–229; Peter Schäfer, ‘Jewish Magical Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 41 (1990), 75–91; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 361–3; Michael Swartz, Scholastic Magic, Princeton, 1996; Rebecca Lesses, ‘Speaking Angels’, Harvard Theological Review, 89 (1996), 41–60; and Julien Véronèse, ‘God’s Names and their Uses in the Books of Magic Attributed to King Solomon’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 30–50. For early examples of Jewish angelic magic, see the Book of Tobit, 8.1–3; Sepher ha-Razim and Harba de-Moshe, above; and Schiffman and Swartz (eds), Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts. For Christian magical texts involving heavy use of angels and holy names, see the Testament of Solomon, Magical Treatise of Solomon, Sworn Book, and Sepher Raziel, above; Turner, Henry Cornelius Agrippa His Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, sigs F–K (‘Of Occult Philosophy or of Magical Ceremonies’, L–P2 (‘The Heptameron’), and Z–Dd2 (‘The Arbatel’); Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS D252, fos 85–87v; Peterson (ed.), The Lesser Key of Solomon, 109–45 (‘The Art Pauline’), and 147–54 (‘The Almadel’); and Stepher Skinner and David Rankine (eds), Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee’s Enochian Tables, Singapore, 2004.

76.Pingree’s main relevant publications are listed at n. 10.

77.For a detailed discussion of this, see my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 144–58. Key texts include Al-Kindi, De Radiis, ed. M. T. D’Alverny and F. Hudry, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age, 41 (1974), 139–260; Frank Carmody (ed.), The Astronomical Works of Thabit b. Qurra, Berkeley, 1960; Abu Bakr ibn Washiyya al-Nabati, Kitab al-Filaha al-nabatiyya, ed. Toufic Fahd as L’agriculture Nabateene, Damascus, 1993; and David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix, London, 1986. See also now Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, London, 2015, for the impact of Arabic astral magic on Western views of the cosmos.

78.PGM IV.2891–2942 and VII.795–845.

79.Corpus Hermeticum II and XVI, and Asclepius I.3. I have used the edition published by Walter Scott as Hermetica, Oxford, 1924.

80.For a discussion of this process and its results, see my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 159–63. Work on it published since then includes Burnett and Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition; Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic, University Park, PA, 2013; and Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister, University Park, PA, 2013, 73–92.

81.Thompson, The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic, 157–8.

82.Samuel Daiches, Babylonian Oil Magic in the Talmud and Later Jewish Literature, London, 1913, 32–3.

83.Lucian, Menippus, c. 7.

84.Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 57–67.

85.PGM IV.2006–25; and VII.846–61.

86.C. K. Barrett (ed.), The New Testament Background: Selected Documents, 2nd edition, London, 1987, 191–2.

87.G. Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, The Hague, 1948, 86–7.

88.Nicholas Campion, The Great Year, London, 1994, 87–94.

89.Al-Nadim, The Fihrist, ed. Bayard Dodge, New York, 1970, 746–7.

90.PGM IV.3172–86, VII.478–83 and XIII.821–88.

91.Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, 87–8.

92.J. E. Circlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, London, 1962, 196–7.

93.Lucian, A Slip of the Tongue in Salutation, c. 5.

94.C. J. de Vogel, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, Assen, 1966, 28–49 and 292–7; quotations on pp. 36 and 44, while the cup with the shield is on 47–8.

95.William of Auvergne, De legibus, c. 27.

96.Sources at n. 72.

97.In verse 27.

98.Antonio da Montolmo, De ocultis et manifestis, c.6.

99.Nicholas Eymeric, Directorium inquisitorium, Roman edition of 1587, 338. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 120, finds other fourteenth-century references to magic circles.

100.They are found, for example, in the various versions of the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Magical Treatise of Solomon and the Key of Solomon, cited above, ‘The Heptameron’, and the ‘Munich Handbook’, ed. Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites. See also Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandel’, and ‘Sepher Raziel’ and ‘The Dannel’ in British Library, Sloane MS 3853, fos 46–81 and 176–260; plus Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 173 and Rawlinson MS D252, fos 160–65.

101.J. Schouten, The Pentagram as a Medical Symbol, Nieuwkoop, 1968, 29–45.

102.Circlot, Dictionary of Symbols, 196–7.

103.‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Fit 2, verses 27–8; Antonio da Montolmo, De occultis et manifestis. c.6.

104.This is discussed by Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 175.

105.See the commentary on the manuscripts in Ioannis Marathakis’s edition. For overviews of Byzantine texts, see Richard P. H. Greenfield, Traditions of Belief in Late Byzantine Demonology, Amsterdam, 1988; Henry Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Magic, Washington DC, 1995; and Paul Magdalino and Maria Maroudi (eds), The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, Geneva, 2006.

5  The Hosts of the Night

1.I have discussed these developments more fully, with references, in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999, 111–50; and in ‘Witchcraft and Modernity’, in Marko Nennonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 191–212.

2.Again, I have discussed Margaret Murray’s career, ideas and impact in Triumph of the Moon, 194–201, 272–6 and 362. Other considerations of them have been generated from within the Folklore Society, of which she was a leader: Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Margaret Murray’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 89–96; and Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood, A Coven of Scholars, London, 1998.

3.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, London, 1975.

4.The book concerned is the one translated into English as The Night Battles, London, 1983. I have supplied an extensive analysis of its relationship to the ‘Murray thesis’ in Triumph of the Moon, 276–8.

5.Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London, 1992, 7–15: quotations on pp. 8–9.

6.In Triumph of the Moon, 112–31, I outlined the development of this complex of ideas, with full references.

7.Jeroen W. Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, Groningen, 2011, 134.

8.The Frazerian element in Ginzburg’s The Night Battles is discussed in detail in my Triumph of the Moon, 277–8.

9.All these statements can be found in Éva Pócs, ‘The Popular Foundations of the Witches’ Sabbath and the Devil’s Pact in Central and Southern Europe’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witch Beliefs and Witch Hunting in Central and Southern Europe, Budapest, 1992, 305, 335.

10.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, 1980; and ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 191–218.

11.For succinct recent summaries of the concept, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, see Jonathan Durrant and Michael Bailey, Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft, Lanham, 2003, 204; and Doris Boden et al. (eds), Enzyklopädie des Marchens, Berlin, 2011, vol. 14, part 2, cols 795–804.

12.Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 40–48; quotation on pp. 47–8.

13.Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, Budapest, 1999, 25.

14.Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night, trans. Jon E. Graham, Rochester, VT, 2011, 2, 199. For a shorter recent publication which embodies the Grimm construct in full, see Alan E. Bernstein, ‘The Ghostly Troop and the Battle over Death’, in Mu-Chou Poo (ed.), Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions, Leiden, 2009, 115–16. See also Steven P. Marrone, A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, London, 2015, 62–3, for a still more recent and very good work which still swallows whole the Ginzburg and Lecouteux vision of the Wild Hunt.

15.An extended illustration of this argument, with reference to British calendar customs, can be found in my The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford, 1996.

16.I have, again, considered this at length in Stations, and in Triumph of the Moon, 112–31. For a particular critique of Grimm’s methodology, see Beate Kellner, Grimms Mythen, Frankfurt, 1994.

17.The German studies are summarized, with references, in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 202–8; the milestone works for the debate mentioned are Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen, vol. 1, Frankfurt, 1934; and Friedrich Ranke, Kleinere Schriften, Munich, 1971, 380–408. To Lecouteux’s list can be added Jan de Vries, ‘Wodan und die wilde Jagd’, Die Nachbarn, 3 (1962), 31–59; and Edmund Mudrak, ‘Die Herkunft der Sagen vom wütenden Heere und vom wilden Jäger’, Laographia, 22 (1965), 304–23.

18.Karl Meisen, Die Sagen vom Wütenden Heer und wilden Jäger, Münster, 1935. Among writers of most relevance here, Meisen’s texts underpin the work of Carlo Ginzburg, Wolfgang Behringer and Claude Lecouteux.

19.Meisen was a pioneer of this. For later reflections of it, see Mudrak, ‘Die Herkunft’; Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, passim; and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, Charlottesville, VA, 1998, passim.

20.Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 56–84.

21.Jeremy Harte, ‘Herne the Hunter’, At the Edge, 3 (1996), 27–33.

22.The references are gathered in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, Chicago, 1994, 118–19.

23.The argument summarized in this section will be found given in full, with the source references, in my article ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, Folklore, 125 (2014), 161–78.

24.Regionis abbati Prumiensis libris duo, ed. F.W.H. Wasserschleben, Leipzig, 1840, 355. Translations are now in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 167; Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 9; and Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 89–90.

25.The problem here is that Burchard’s text survives in variant copies. The most generally used is that published by Jacques-Paul Migne in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 140, which relies on the 1549 Paris edition, and which I have employed. For other versions, and discussions, see F. W. Hermann Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtlichen Einleitung, Halle, 1851, 624–82; Hermann Joseph Schmitz, Due Bussbücher und das Kanonische Bussverfahnen, Düsseldorf, 1898, 403–67; Paul Fournier, ‘Études critiques sur le Décret de Burchard de Worms’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et etranger, 34 (1910), 41–112, 289–331, 564–84; John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (eds), Medieval Handbooks of Penance, New York, 1938, 321–3; and Greta Austin, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000, Farnham, 2004. Cohn, Ginzburg and Lecouteux did not reckon with this problem when discussing Holda, while Behringer did, in Shaman of Oberstdorf, 50–51, without being able to resolve it; and nor can I.

26.Burchard, Decretum, Books 10, c. 29; and 19, cc. 70, 90, 170–71.

27.These texts are printed, in the original Latin and medieval French, in Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, London, 1882, vol. 1, 282, 286–8. Grimm only prints part of John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, 2.17. To his sources can be added British Library, Cotton MS Faust. A.8, fo. 32 (the late twelfth-century penitential of Bishop Iscanus of Exeter).

28.Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, c. 102.

29.Stephen of Bourbon, Septem doni spiritus sancti, no. 97.

30.Jons saga baptista c. 35.

31.Quoted in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15.

32.Cited in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 170–71.

33.The Middle High German references are collected in Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 277–8.

34.Martin of Amberg.

35.Jacopo Passvanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenza, quoted in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 171–2. Carlo Ginzburg adds another reference to a nocturnal society led by Diana or Herodias recorded at Verona in the earlier party of the century: Ecstasies, 94.

36.These references are collected in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15–17; Ginzburg providing more detail for the Nuremburg sermons in Ecstasies, 101; and the Thesaurus pauperum text being printed in Claude Lecouteux, Mondes Paralleles: l’Universe des Croyances du Moyen Age, Paris, 1994, 51–2; and von Haselbach’s in Anton E. Schonbach, ‘Zeugnisse zur deutschen Volkskunde des Mittelalters’, Zeitschrift des vereins für Volkskunde, 12 (1902), 5–6.

37.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 272–82.

38.Ibid., vol. 1, 267–72.

39.Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, Early English Text Society, vol. 275, 1976, 157. The canon Episcopi is on the next page.

40.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 297–9.

41.These records were first published in 1899 and are discussed by Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 173–4; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 91–3; and Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 54–5, 173–4, who provides original texts and a translation.

42.Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis Opera, Paris, 1514, vol. 2, fos 170v–172r.

43.Ibid., 17–46. Behringer supplies the missing details from modern folklore, as had Grimm, an approach that is avoided here for reasons stated: though both of us, by different routes, agree on the apparent absence of a leader for the spirits concerned, and his general treatment of the distinctive nature of different regional traditions of night-roaming spirits also seems to me correct.

44.Renward Cysat’s Chronicle, printed in Meisen, Die Sagen, 111–20.

45.Gustav Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.

46.For example, there is no sign of it in David Genticore’s study of trials for magic in the heel of Italy, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra D’Otranto, Manchester, 1992.

47.This is Giovanni Lorenzo Anania, quoted in Giuseppe Bonomo, Caccia alle Streghe, Palumbo, 1971, 30.

48.There Pau Castell Granados speaks of a late medieval belief in ‘good ladies’ who visited houses and with whom women were sometimes said to go: ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”: The Mythical Components of the Iberian Witch’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 70–95. He does not, however, go into the evidence for this, and so establish whether it is a securely recorded local tradition or one cited by Catalan churchmen who may have been quoting references to it from elsewhere in Europe.

49.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 285–6.

50.Grimm’s references were repeated, with full citation of the original sources, in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 168.

51.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 91.

52.Ibid., 91–3.

53.Ibid., 104. On p. 116 Ginzburg dismisses the identification of the steed as a peacock, already made by the French scholar Benoît, as unconvincing, without saying why.

54.Reinardus Vulpes, Book 1, lines 1143–64, translated into French as Le Roman de Renart; there are various modern editions.

55.Ratherius, Praeloquiorum libri, 1.10, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 136, col. 157.

56.Her latest appearance as such seems to be in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 25 and 33.

57.J. R. Farnell, ‘Hekate in Art’, in Stephen Ronan (ed.), The Goddes Hecate, Hastings, 1992, 36–54.

58.Line 13.

59.Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Bruno Snell, Göttingen, vol. 1, 115.

60.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 132–3.

61.The classic catalogue of material relating to her is René Magnen and Émile Thenevot, Épona, Bordeaux, 1956, updated by Claude Sterckx, Élements de cosmogonie celtique, Brussels, 1986, 9–54; and Katheryn M. Linduff, ‘Epona: A Celt among the Romans’, Latomus, 38 (1979), 817–37.

62.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 104–5.

63.The basic study of them remains F. Haverfield, ‘The Mother Goddesses’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 15 (1892), 314–36. See also Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts, London, 1986, ch. 3; and Celtic Goddesses, London, 1995, 106–11.

64.Most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 114, col. 1094.

65.2 Kings 22:14–20; and 2 Chronicles 34:22–33. Grimm was uneasily aware that in 1522 Martin Luther had suggested that Huldah could be the origin of the Holda of the night rides, but rejected this because of the prominence of Holda in modern German folklore, which Grimm took as an article of faith to be an unchanged survival from the ancient world. He therefore missed the link between the biblical heroine and Walahfrid’s poem: Teutonic Mythology, vols 1, 271, and 3, 1367.

66.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 281.

67.John B. Smith, ‘Perchta the Belly-Slitter and her Kin’, Folklore, 115 (2004), 167–86. Compare the interpretation of Lotte Motz, ‘The Winter Goddess’, Folklore, 96 (1984), 167–86, who makes the argument that Perchte and Holda were different aspects of a northern pagan goddess. She wrote firmly in the Grimm tradition, and indeed relied for most of her material on a work published in 1914. I would emphasize that her hypothesis remains possible, though it is highly speculative and back-projects modern folklore wholesale onto an imagined ancient past, a method avoided by Smith.

68.Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 19–20.

69.Volundark vida, verse 1; Helgakviđa Hundingsbana II, in the Poetic Edda, verse 4, prose opening fit 2, and prose opening fit 4. Lecouteux prints the relevant passage concerning the Disir, from the Flateyarbók, in Phantom Armies, 20–21.

70.Claude Lecouteux, ‘Hagazussa-Striga-Hexe’, Hessische Blätter für Volks- und- Kulturforschung, 18 (1985), 59–60.

71.Most of these are helpfully described in Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, 1993, 36–58.

72.This and what follows is a summary of the arguments made with source references in Hutton, ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, 171–5; with further material added from Le register d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, ed. Jean Duvernoy, Paris, vol. 1, 544.

73.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.

74.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 94–5. The contribution of dreams to the development of the concept of the sabbath in general is considered by Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers, Chicago, 2002, 125–44; and the whole subject of how early modern people sought to distinguish reality from fantasy or dream in Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye, Oxford, 2007.

75.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.

76.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 17–21.

77.Nider and Alfonso Tostato, both quoted in Josef Hansen, Quellen und Unterschungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 89–90, 109 n. 1.

78.Quoted, in the original Latin, in Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 145.

79.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 176.

80.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 103; the latter view is Cohn’s: Europe’s Inner Demons, 176–9.

81.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 132.

82.They could thus be viewed, with equal plausibility, as genuine martyrs, who died for defending their own faith; reckless and self-important fools; or tragic simpletons, whom Nicholas of Cusa would have dismissed as demented.

83.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 296–307; Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 54–67, 82–133.

6  What the Middle Ages Made of the Witch

1.Valerie Flint, ‘The Demonization of Magic in Late Antiquity’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Two: Ancient Greece and Rome, London, 1999, 279.

2.Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1989, 35–41.

3.Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, Lanham, MD, 2007, 43.

4.Origen, Contra Celsum, 1.6.8–15.

5.Augustine, De civitate Dei, 7.34–5; 8.18–26; 9.1; 10.9–10; 13.18; 21.6; and De consensu Evangelistarum, 1.9–11.

6.Acts 8:9–24; 13:6–12; 19:13–17; Revelation 17:3–6.

7.A recent analysis of the early Christian attitude to magic is found in Kimberly B. Stratton, Naming the Witch, New York, 2007, 107–41.

8.Galatians, 22:18.

9.These measures are listed in Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 52–3; and Spyros N. Trojanus, ‘Magic and the Devil: From the Old to the New Rome’, in J.C.B. Petropoulos (ed.), Greek Magic, London, 2008, 44–52.

10.The relevant sections of the Theodosian Code and Digest of Justinian are listed in Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2009, 280, 333–6. To these can be added Theodosian Code 3.9.16.

11.Ammianus Marcellinus, History, 19.12.1–18; 26.3; 28.1.8–21; 29.1–2.

12.The importance of Maternus’s text in this context was first noticed by Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, London, 2001, 150.

13.Libanius, Orations, 1.43, 62–3, 98, 194, 243–50. For an overview of Libanius’s relationship with magic, see Campbell Bonner, ‘Witchcraft in the Lecture Room of Libanius’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 63 (1932), 34–44.

14.Libanius, Declamations, 41.7, 29, 51.

15.John Chrysostom, Homily XXXVIII on Acts xvii.16, 17. I am very grateful to my colleague at Bristol, Bella Sandwell, for providing me with this reference after I had mislaid an original note of it.

16.Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine, London, 1972, 119–46; John O. Ward, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery in the Later Roman Empire’, Prudentia, 12 (1980), 93–108; Natasha Sheldon, Roman Magic and Witchcraft in Late Antiquity, Coalville, UT, 2002.

17.Brown and Ward, above, debate possibilities to no ultimate effect; the one offered here is my own.

18.Dayna S. Kalleres, ‘Drunken Hags with Amulets and Prostitutes with Erotic Spells’, in Kimberly B. Stratton with Dayna S. Kalleres (eds), Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World, Oxford, 2014, 219–51.

19.John Wortley, ‘Some Light on Magic and Magicians in Late Antiquity’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 42 (2001), 289–307.

20.Walter M. Shandruk, ‘Christian Use of Magic in Late Antique Egypt’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 20 (2012), 31–57.

21.David Frankfurter, ‘The Perils of Love: Magic and Countermagic in Coptic Egypt’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 480–500.

22.Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era, New York, 1923, 973.

23.H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, London, 1969, 12.

24.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edition, London, 1993, 213; Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1550, London, 1976, 8–16.

25.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 52–6.

26.First found in the Theodosian Code, 9.16.4.

27.For all this see especially Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, 1993; but also Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, Hassocks, Sussex, 1978, 1–62; Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 11–51; Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe, Oxford, 2010, 29–75; Karen Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic’, in Karen Jolly et al. (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three, London, 2002, 1–65; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 35–51; and Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 60–91. Henry Charles Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, vol. 1, 137–43, prints a succession of early medieval condemnations.

28.See Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section 1. Volume 1, Hanover and Leipzig, 1902, 95. 257 (for the Visigoths); Theodore John Rivers (ed.), Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks, New York, 1986, 210–11; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2005, 140 (for Charlemagne). For subsequent medieval laws, spanning Western Europe, see Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung, Munich, 1900, 55–60, 387.

29.Most of the primary texts are printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 113–21; and another by Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Medieval Europe, 90. Two more incidents are recounted in Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century, trans. Patrick, J. Geary, Chicago, 1984, 322.

30.They are gathered and listed in Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, 53–6, with the exception of the Bohemian reference below.

31.Though this entry only seems to survive in an early modern source, Dubravius’s history of Bohemia, quoted in Lea, Materials towards a Hstory of Witchcraft, ed. Howland, vol. iii, 1280.

32.Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet,11.9.10; Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences, Distinctio 34, Article 3, ad. 3; and Summa contra Gentiles, Book 3, Part 2, cc. 104–16.

33.Source printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 118–19.

34.Monumenta Germaniae historica. Epistolae Selectae. Volume 2, Part 2, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1955, 498.

35.Agobard of Lyons, Contra insulam vulgi opinionem de brandine, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 104, cols 147–58. The existence of these protection racketeers makes readily understandable the fact that churchmen could both denounce magicians who claimed to be able to raise storms and declare that their claims were in fact erroneous: see the texts discussed in Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Stephen Stallybrass, London, 1882, vol. 3, 1086; and Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 110–14.

36.Russell Zguta, ‘The Ordeal by Water (Swimming of Witches) in the East Slavic World’, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 224.

37.Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores XIII, Hanover, 1881, 57.

38.Printed in Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 1.

39.Source printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 381.

40.The references are collected in Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature, Toronto, 2005, 310–12.

41.Hincmar of Rheims, De Divortio Lotharii, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 125, cols 718–25.

42.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 214–17.

43.This concept was most clearly introduced by R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford, 1987.

44.The decrees and homilies are listed in George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, New York, 1929, 28–31, 378–80; Ronald Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, London, 1974, 37; Karen Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Chapel Hill, NC, 1996, 71–95; and Stephen Pollington, Leechcraft, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk, 2000, 33, 52–3, to which can be added material from Dorothy Whitelock et al. (eds), Councils and Synods, Oxford, 1981, vol. 1, 320, 371, 366. The classic example of a leading churchman using a range of native words for magic, and magicians, to signify magic in general and to condemn the lot, is Aelfric of Eynsham: see his De Auguriis, ed. Walter W. Skeat in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, Early English Text Society, 76 (1881), 364–83; and his sermon in The Sermones Catholici, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, Aelfric Society, 1844, vol. 1, 476–7. Joseph Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. T. Northcote Toller, Oxford, 1898, 1213, shows how Anglo-Saxon words were used to gloss a range of Latin terms signifying different sorts of magician, including healers and diviners.

45.This discussion is based on the three standard Anglo-Saxon dictionaries of Borden, Bosworth and Wright.

46.The measures concerned are respectively the Laws of Alfred, Introduction, section 30; Laws of Athelstan, c. 6; (so-called) Laws of Edward and Guthrum, c. 11; Laws of Ethelred, 6, c. 6; and Laws of Canute, c. 5.1. Editions and translations can be found in Benjamin Thorpe (ed.), Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, London, 1840; F. L. Attenborough (ed.), The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, New York, 1963; and Whitelock et al. (eds), Councils and Synods.

47.All these points were well made by Jane Crawford, ‘Evidences for Witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon England’, Medium Aevum, 32 (1963), 99–116; and Audrey L. Meaney, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England’, and Anthony Davies, ‘Witches in Anglo-Saxon England’, in D. G. Scragg (ed.), Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester, 1989, 9–56.

48.Meaney, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Magic’, deals with the terminology.

49.Henry Sweet (ed.), The Oldest English Texts, Early English Text Society, 83 (1885), 94, 99, 116.

50.Lacnunga, c. 76.

51.Leechbook III, fos 123a–125v. For different translations, see Crawford, ‘Evidences for Witchcraft’, 110; and Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge, 2007, 104.

52.The record is edited and translated in Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 89, and discussed by Crawford and Davies, above.

53.The spells and charms against evil magicians are in the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, c. 86.4; Leechbook, 1.45.6 and 1.54, and the ‘Aecerbot’ rite, printed in Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, Halle, 1948, 172–87. These works, and the Lacnunga, represent the major collections of such remedies.

54.They are all studied in detail by Davies, ‘Witches in Anglo-Saxon England’, who draws the same conclusion.

55.Thorpe (ed.), Ancient Laws and Institutes, 251; Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, 38–9.

56.These cases were carefully detected and assembled by C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, London, 1933, 27–8.

57.Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, 39; Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, 3.45.6; Bartholomaeus de Cotton, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Richards Luard, London, 1859, 171–3.

58.For what follows below, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY, 1972, 132–94; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 102–43; Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 33–176; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 116–70; Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic’, 20–62; and Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 79–130.

59.For the English material see Hansen, Quellen, 2; and Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 29.

60.For the growing fear of the Devil, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer, Ithaca, NY, 1984, 295–6; Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge, 2003, 20–21; and Alain Bougereau, Satan the Heretic, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Chicago, 2006, passim.

61.The documents are printed in Hansen, Quellen, 2–6; and Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, London, 1888, vol. 3, 455, 657. For the background, and supporting data, see Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 130–33; Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 129–35; and Bougereau, Satan the Heretic.

62.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 186–7, 193–4.

63.haeretici sortilagae.

64.The primary sources are edited with commentary by L. S. Davidson and J. O. Ward, as The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler, Asheville, NC, 2004. For analyses, see Anne Neary, ‘The Origins and Character of the Kilkenny Witchcraft Case of 1324’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 83C (1983), 333–50; Bernadette Williams, ‘The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler’, History Ireland, 2 (1993), 20–24; and Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch and the Wild Irish, Dublin, 2015.

65.G. O. Sayles (ed.), Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Edward III. Volume Five, Selden Society, 1958, 53–7.

66.Ralph A. Houlbrooke, ‘Magic and Witchcraft in the Diocese of Winchester’, in David J. B. Trim and Peter J. Balderstone (eds), Cross, Crown and Community, Oxford, 2004, 113–20.

67.The documents are printed in Hansen, Quellen, 8–11.

68.Ibid., 64–6.

69.Ibid., 11–12.

70.Ibid., 15–16.

71.The cases are listed in Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 120–25; Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 34–5; and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The British Witch, Stroud, 2014, 68–83.

72.For all this, see Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 34–8; Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 104–12; J. R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France, Leiden, 1998; and Tracy Adams ‘Valentina Visconti, Charles VI, and the Politics of Witchcraft’, Parergon, 30 (2013), 11–32.

73.Hansen, Quellen, 528.

74.Directorium inquisitorum, 335–8. The most readily available edition is the Venice one of 1595.

75.The records were published by Hansen, Quellen, 518–23.

76.This case was discussed in the previous chapter.

77.Hansen, Quellen, 524–6.

78.Gene A. Brucker, ‘Sorcery in Renaissance Florence’, Studies in the Renaissance, 10 (1963), 7–24.

79.Christine Meek, ‘Man, Woman and Magic: Some Cases from Late Medieval Lucca’, in Christine Meek (ed.), Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, Dublin, 2000, 43–66.

80.The cases are collected in Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 35.

81.Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 126–30.

82.For all this, see the medieval sources, and commentaries upon them, cited in Chapter Four.

83.Meek, ‘Man, Woman and Magic’.

84.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 118–43.

85.It is printed in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages, London, 2011, 30–31. Carlo Ginzburg has drawn attention to the Pope’s emphasis on seeking new heresies as especially significant, in Ecstasies, 68–9, but I do not.

86.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, 946–52, 1046–7.

87.In Hansen, Zauberwahn.

88.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons.

89.Steven P. Marrone, ‘Magic, Bodies, University Masters, and the Invention of the Late Medieval Witch’, in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds), History in the Comic Mode, New York, 2007, 266.

90.Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials; Ginzburg, Ecstasies.

91.Bailey’s comment is in ‘The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath’, Exemplaria, 8 (1996), 419–39. For an appraisal of the overall reputation of the Ginzburg thesis, see Yme Kuiper’s essay in Chapter 3, n. 15. For immediate critiques of it, see the reviews by Robert Bartlett in the New York Review of Books, 13 June 1991, 37–8; Richard Kieckhefer in the American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 837–8; and John Martin in Speculum, 67 (1992), 148–50.

92.Michael Bailey, ‘The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath’; ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960–90; ‘The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 19 (2002), 120–34; Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, University Park, PA, 2003, 32–48; and ‘A Late Medieval Crisis of Superstition?’, Speculum, 3 (2009), 633–61.

93.Marrone, ‘Magic, Bodies, University Masters’; and see also now his A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, London, 2015, 163–96.

94.Tremp’s ideas are most accessibly summed up in her article on ‘Heresy’ in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, vol. 2, 485–7, with another summary in ‘The Heresy of Witchcraft in Western Switzerland and Dauphiné’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 6 (2011), 1–10; and Behringer’s in ‘How the Waldensians Became Witches’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Communicating with the Spirits, Budapest, 2005, 155–92.

95.Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Return of the Sabbat’, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, Basingstoke, 2007, 125–45.

96.Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’, in Alberto Ferreiro (ed.), The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998, 91–110; ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 79–107.

97.The document is now translated in Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 158–60.

98.Pau Castell Granados, ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”: The Mythical Components of the Iberian Witch’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 170–95.

99.Ibid.

100.Bernadette Paton, ‘“To the Fire! To the Fire”’, in Charles Zika (ed.), No Gods Except Me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe 1200–1600, Melbourne, 1991, 7–10.

101.Dommenico Mammoli (ed.), The Record of the Trial and Condemnation of a Witch, Matteuccia di Francesco, at Todi, 20 March 1428, Rome, 1972.

102.Franco Normando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernadino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy, Chicago, 1999, 52–87.

103.Ibid., 86.

104.Martine Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons: sabbat et chasse aux sorciers à Vevey (1448), Lausanne, 1995; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, Lausanne, 1999; Georg Modestin, Le diable chez l’éveque, Lausanne, 1999; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande, Lausanne, 2007; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Von der Haresie zur Hexerei, Hanover, 2008; Martine Ostorero, Le diable au sabbat, Florence, 2011. For an account of the cluster and its work, see Kathrin Utz Tremp, ‘Witches’ Brooms and Magic Ointments’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 173–87.

105.The text is edited in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 30–45, with a commentary based on the local records by Chantal Amman-Doubliez at pp. 63–93. For two of those records, see Hansen, Quellen, 531–9. See also Tremp, ‘Witches’ Brooms and Magic Ointments’, for Fründ.

106.Sortiligi or sortileia.

107.This is based on Amman-Doubliez’s account, at n. 105.

108.For what follows, see the works at n. 105, plus Edward Peters, ‘The Medieval Church and State on Superstition, Magic and Witchcraft’, in Jolly et al. (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three, 233–6; and Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds, Cambridge, 1991, 101–22.

109.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 51–60, 203–7; Tremp, Von der Haresie zur Hexerei; Andreas Blauert, Frühe Hexenverfolgungen, Hamburg, 1989, 27–43.

110.Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages, 30–31.

111.On this see, especially, Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 35–101. He also emphasized the importance of the strix, on pp. 162–80.

112.Kieckhefer, ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’. He does, however, also emphasize the importance of child murder as a motif in these early hunts, in ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’.

113.Paton, ‘“To the Fire! To the Fire!”’, 7–36.

114.Edited, with commentary, in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 122–248.

115.Malefici.

116.Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 223–48.

117.This revised chronology throws out, in particular, that suggested for the evolution of the stereotype of satanic witchcraft in Ginzburg’s Ecstasies.

118.Edited with commentary in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 272–99. For a further discussion of authorship, see Martine Ostorero, ‘Itinéraire d’un inquisiteur gâté’, Médiévales, 43 (2002), 115–16. For George of Saluzzo, see Georg Modestin, ‘Church Reform and Witch-hunting in the Diocese of Lausanne’, in Andrew P. Roach and James R. Simpson (eds), Heresy and the Making of European Culture, Farnham, 2013, 405–10.

119.Tholosan’s book is Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores, edited with commentary in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 363–438. References to the trial records of Dauphiné are found in the commentary; an example was edited by Hansen, Quellen, 459–66.

120.Edited in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 339–53; Modestin, Le diable chez l’éveque; Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande; Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons.

121.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 33–88.

122.See sources at n. 93.

123.Ostorero, Le diable au sabbat, 584.

124.For recent testimonies to its importance, see Michael D. Bailey and Edward Peters, ‘A Sabbat of Demonologists’, The Historian, 65 (2003), 1375–96; and Hans Peter Broedel, ‘Fifteenth-century Witchcraft Beliefs’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013, 42.

125.These have been listed, edited or discussed in Hansen, Quellen, 44–231; Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, vol. I, 348–404; and Ostorero, Le diable du sabbat.

126.Marmoris’s work is Flagellum maleficorum. It is extensively discussed by Ostorero, Le diable du sabbat, 503–58.

127.For accounts of this spread, see Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, 66–82; Franck Mercier, La Vauderie d’Arras, Rennes, 2006; Laura Stokes, ‘Early Witch-hunting in Germany and Switzerland’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 4 (2009), 54–61; Broedel, ‘Fifteenth-century Witchcraft Beliefs’, 43–5; and Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The First Wave of Trials for Diabolical Witchcraft’, in Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 169–78; and the original documents edited in Hansen, Quellen, 34–5, 547–600, are still worth consideration.

7  The Early Modern Patchwork

1.This has been summed up in textbooks on differing scales, from a pocket size to a weighty volume, of which the following represent some of the best: Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010; Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe, 2nd edition, Basingstoke, 2001; Brian P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition, London, 2006; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004; and Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016. Those who prefer composite volumes by different hands may try Bengt Ankarloo et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume Four: The Period of the Witch Trials, London, 2002; and Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013. The classic work on the learned texts that underpinned the trials remains Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, Oxford, 1997. All the information summarized in this introductory section may be found in these surveys, and the detailed studies listed in them and in the references below.

2.For example, Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers, Paris, 1580, preface; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (sic), Paris, 1612, Book 1, Discourse 1.5; Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers, Lyon, 1610, dedication; Martín del Rio, Disquisitiones Magicae, Leuven, 1608, prologue.

3.The importance of Germany’s localized system of judicial authority, in explaining the exceptionally large number of witch trials there, was noticed as long ago as the 1840s: Karl Friedrich Koppen, Hexen und Hexenprozesse, Leipzig, 1844, 60.

4.Two fairly recent and equally good studies of witch trials in different German states, Johannes Dillinger, Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, trans. Laura Stokes, Charlottesville, VA, 2009, and Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany, Leiden, 2007, have provided perfect portraits of the pressure to prosecute emanating from below and above in society, respectively.

5.Fabienne Taric Zumsteg, Les Sorciers à l’Assaut du Village Gollion, Lausanne, 2000.

6.The phrase was coined by Robin Briggs for a conference paper in 1991, published as ‘Many Reasons Why’, in Jonathan Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1996, 49–63. Similar arguments were made by Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland’, in the same volume, 64–5; and Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Witch Trials in Northern Europe 1400–1700’, in Ankarloo et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe vol.4, 55–63.

7.De Lancre, Tableau, Book 1, Discourse 1.1.

8.Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1983 (quotation on p. 25). His research has now been challenged by Franco Nardon, but not in respects that are a concern here: Franco Nardon, ‘Benandanti’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006), vol. 1, 108–9; Willem de Blecourt, ‘The Roots of the Sabbat’, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, Basingstoke, 2007, 135–45; William Monter, ‘Gendering the Extended Family of Ginzburg’s Benandanti’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 88–92.

9.Friedrich Salomon Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen, Leipzig, 1908, 41–3; Maya Boškovič-Stulli, ‘Kresnik-Krsnik, Fabula, 3 (1960), 275–98; Gàbor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, trans. Susan Singerman and ed. Karen Margolis, Cambridge, 1990, 133–5.

10.Boškovič-Stulli, ‘Kresnik-Krsnik’; Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 136–7, 228; Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, trans. Szilvia Redley and Michael Webb, Budapest, 1999, 127–30.

11.This information is all found in Gail Kligman’s famous study Călus, Bucharest, 1999.

12.Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 137–43; ‘Hungary’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 244–53; and ‘Learned Systems and Popular Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment’, in Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions. Volume Three, Budapest, 2008, 50–58; Mihály Hoppál, ‘Traces of Shamanism in Hungarian Folk Beliefs’, in Anna-Leena Siikala and Mihály Hoppál (eds), Studies on Shamanism, Helsinki, 1992, 156–68; Jeno Fazekas, ‘Hungarian Shamanism’, in Carl-Martin Edsman (ed.), Studies in Shamanism, Stockholm, 1967, 97–119; Tekla Dömötör, ‘The Problem of the Hungarian Female Táltos’, in Mihály Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia, Göttingen, 1984, 423–9; ‘The Cunning Folk in English and Hungarian Witch Trials’, in Venetia Newall (ed.), Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century, Woodbridge, 1980, 183–7; and Hungarian Folk Beliefs, Budapest, 1982, 63–70, 132–57; Ágnes Várkonyi, ‘Connections between the Cessation of Witch Trials and the Transformation of the Social Structure’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 37 (1991–2), 427–34; Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 37–87, 134–49; and ‘Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 54 (2009), 379–96.

13.Sources as above.

14.Dömötör, ‘The Cunning Folk’, 185.

15.T. P. Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’, Folklore, 100 (1989), 9–24.

16.Mircea Eliade, ‘Some Observations on European Witchcraft’, History of Religions, 14 (1975), 158–9.

17.Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’.

18.Nicole Belmont, Les signes de la naissance, Paris, 1971.

19.Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 134; Klaniczay, ‘Learned Systems and Popular Narratives’, 65.

20.Rune Blix Hagen, ‘Sami Shamanism’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 93–9; and ‘Female Witches and Sami Sorcerers in the Witch Trials of Arctic Norway (1593–1695)’, Arv, 62 (2006), 122–42; and ‘Witchcraft and Ethnicity’ in Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 141–66; Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North, Leiden, 2013, 255–9, 300–19. I am very grateful to Rune for sending me some of his work in draft, and initiating a valuable correspondence. We differ slightly over the element of shamanism in the trials, but this does not affect our overall agreement on the main issues. Willumsen helpfully prints much material from a well-recorded trial, again allowing room for differences of interpretation which show how polyvalent this material can be. The fact that the Sámi accused seemingly moved between expressing belief in the Christian God and in several lesser deities is taken by her as showing his unreliability and wish to please his interrogators; but it could equally express a genuine, syncretic, belief system.

21.Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, ‘Finland’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 319–38; Anna-Keena Siikala, Mythic Images and Shamanism, Helsinki, 2002; Laura Stark-Arola, Magic, Body and Social Order, Helsinki, 2006; Marko Nenonen, ‘Envious are the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 18 (1993), 77–91; Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, Aldershot, 2008.

22.Nenonen, ‘Envious are the People’, 79; Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, 61. I am very grateful to both Marko and Raisa for gestures of friendship, and gifts of their work, over the years.

23.Maia Madar, ‘Estonia I’, and Juhan Kalik, ‘Estonia II’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 257–72; Űlo Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends at the Witch Trials of Estonia’, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, 269–82.

24.Kalik, ‘Estonia II’.

25.I also have some reservations about the way in which Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends’, tried to plug gaps in the witch trial evidence with modern folklore. There are possible references to fairy-like beings in the trial records, but what is much more apparent from Valk’s material is the way in which the Christian Devil, and demonic witches’ assemblies, were absorbed, lastingly, into Estonian folk belief.

26.Madar, ‘Estonia I’.

27.Petrus Valderama, Histoire generale du monde, Paris, 1617, Book 1, pp. 257–61; Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, Basel, 1568, Book 1, c. 10; Bodin, De la démonomanie, Book 2, c. 6; De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, Book 4, Discourse 1.1. See also the earlier account, which attributed the annual assembly to the werewolves of all the Baltic peoples, in Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, Rome, 1555, 442–3; and other sixteenth-century references to the Livonian kind cited by Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London, 1991, 156–9, including the Caspar Peucer one to the man at Riga.

28.Discussed in Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 28–30.

29.This argument has been made, and the superficiality of the resemblances emphasized, by Rudolf Schende, ‘Ein Benandante, ein Wolf oder Wer?’, and Christoph Daxelmüller, ‘Der Werwolf’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 82 (1986), 200–208; and Willem de Blecourt, ‘A Journey to Hell’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 21 (2007), 49–67.

30.Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends’, was convinced that Estonian witch-beliefs had emerged from ‘Balto-Finnish shamanism’; but he was heavily influenced by Ginzburg’s model. It would be so nice if he were right, and a compact sub-shamanic province could be constructed around two sides of the Baltic with a core of genuine shamanism among the Sámi, but that seems too much to conclude firmly on the known evidence.

31.On this see Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Sweden’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 285–318; and Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 2011, 119–45.

32.Gunnar W. Knutsen and Anne Irene Rilsǿy, ‘Trolls and Witches’, Arv, 63 (2007), 31–69. I am very grateful to Gunnar for the gift of this article.

33.Jonas Liliequist, ‘Sexual Encounters with Spirits and Demons in Early Modern Sweden’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Christian Demonology, Budapest, 2006, 152–67.

34.Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015, 151.

35.Stephen Mitchell, ‘Odin Magic’, Scandinavian Studies, 81 (2003), 263–86.

36.Magnus Rafnsson, Angurgapi, Holmnavik, Iceland, 2003, 46.

37.Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Iceland’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds) Early Modern European Witchcraft, 383–402.

38.The best extant study of the Icelandic witch-hunt in English is Rafnsson, Angurgapi, which seemingly does not exist in any British library and can be obtained only directly from the author. There are also Hastrup, ‘Iceland’; and R. C. Ellison, ‘The Kirkjuból Affair’, Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993), 17–43.

39.Russell Zguta, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-century Russia’, American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 1187–1207; ‘Was There a Witch Craze in Muscovite Russia?’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 41, 1977, 119–28; and ‘Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia’, Russian Review, 37 (1978), 438–48; Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, Armonk, NY, 1989, 83–91; Valerie A. Kivelson, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft’, in Barbara Evans Clements et al. (eds), Russia’s Women, Berkeley, 1991, 74–94; ‘Lethal Convictions’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 6 (2011), 34–61; and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Russia, Ithaca, NY, 2013; William F. Ryan, ‘The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?’, Slavonic and East European Review, 76, 1998, 49–84; and ‘Witchcraft and the Russian State’, in Johannes S. Dillinger et al. (eds), Hexenprozess und Staatsbildung, Bielefeld, 2008, 135–47; Kateryna Dysa, ‘Attitudes towards Witches in the Multi-Confessional Regions of Germany and the Ukraine’, in Eszter Andor and István György Tóth (eds), Frontiers of Faith, Budapest, 2001, 285–9; ‘Orthodox Demonology and the Perception of Witchcraft in Early Modern Ukraine’, in Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler (eds), Friars, Nobles and Burghers, Budapest, 2010, 341–60; Maureen Perrie, ‘The Tsaritsa, the Needlewoman and the Witches’, Russian History, 40 (2013), 297–314; Marianna G. Muravyeva, ‘Russian Witchcraft on Trial’, in Nenonen and Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, 109–40.

40.Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 21.

41.Kivelson, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft’, 84.

42.Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 22, 31–2.

43.What is known is summarized in William Monter, ‘Witch Trials in Continental Europe 1560–1660’, in Clark et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic, 40–44; and ‘Witch Trials in France’, in Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 218–31. Most of it is filtered through the appeals system of the Parlement of Paris, of which the classic study is Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et Justice Criminelle, Aldershot, 1992. One good study of local records for a set of trials in central France, Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Préaud (eds), Les sorciers du carroi de Marlou, Grenoble, 1996, is not helpful in this context, though it is in many others.

44.William Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists’, French Historical Studies, 20, 1997, 563–95.

45.That is summarized in Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland’, in Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 93–5; a more recent study of Tyrol, Hansjörg Rabanser, Hexenwahn, Innsbruck, 2006, does not shed much light on the problem of gendering.

46.Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, Basingstoke, 2009, 218–45.

47.William Schindler, Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn, Cambridge, 2002, 236–92.

48.The most accessible edition is the Strasbourg one of 1612.

49.Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 88–91; and ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’, in Alberto Ferreiro (ed.), The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998, 91–110.

50.Maria Tausiet Carlés, ‘Witchcraft as Metaphor: Infanticide and its Translations in 16th-Century Aragon’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft, Basingstoke, 2000, 179–96.

51.Pau Castell Granados, ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 181.

52.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, CA, 1980, 27–9.

53.Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 69–70, 91, 99.

54.Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’, 9–17.

55.Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, ch. 10, shows that blood-sucking only became strongly associated with vampires in the mid-eighteenth century.

56.This will be discussed in a later chapter.

57.Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, Basingstoke, 2011, 16–26, 181–3. See also Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 553–5; and Henry Charles Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, vol. 1, 348–9. On pp. 65–6 Stokes suggests that elements of a case at Luzern in about 1450 provide evidence of a local fertility cult like that of the benandanti, but it seems to describe a routine assembly of witches to raise storms, not anything resembling a combat with adversaries. Likewise, I cannot confidently extend the range of the medieval and early modern ‘dream warrior’ tradition westwards to Corsica, where a twentieth-century folk belief was recorded in mazzeri, people born with the need to send out their spirits to kill animals at night, and the power to predict human deaths in their community: Dorothy Carrington, The Dream-hunters of Corsica, London, 1995. On one night each year, the mazzeri of a village would band together in their dreams to fight those of another village, and those killed in these battles would die in reality within the year. The similarities with the South Slav complex of beliefs are obvious, but also the differences (the mazzeri were of no benefit to their communities), and the records of the early modern Corsican Inquisition, though well stocked with cases regarding magic, have no mention of this belief.

58.Peter Burke, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art, London, 1977, 45.

59.These accounts are all collected in Alice Azul Palau-Giovanetti, ‘Pagan Traces in Medieval and Early Modern Witch-Beliefs’, York University MA thesis, 2012, 79–99 and Appendix; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 100, 108–9, 131–2; and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Charlottesville, VA, 1998, 55–6.

60.The references here are collected by Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 96, 131–2, 302; and The Night Battles, 54–5.

61.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, esp. 148–52.

62.Ibid., 34.

63.Gustav Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern Witchcraft, 191–218. See also Giovanna Fiume, ‘The Old Vinegar Lady’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), History from Crime, Baltimore, MD, 1994, 45–87.

64.Maurizio Bertolotti, ‘The Ox Bones and the Ox Hide’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, Baltimore, MD, 1991, 42–70. See also Palau-Giovanetti, ‘Pagan Traces’, 50–53; and Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, trans. H. R. Erik Midelfort, Charlottesville, VA, 2008, 91–4.

65.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 39–46.

66.Brian P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition, London, 2006, 237–42.

67.In addition to the sources cited below, see Mary O’Neil, ‘Magical Healing, Love Magic and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-century Modena’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, Beckenham, 1987, 88–114; Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, Oxford, 1993; Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015; and Tamar Herzig, ‘Witchcraft Prosecutions in Italy’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013, 249–67; Matteo Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell, Florence, 2007 (I am very grateful to Debora Moretti for the gift of this book).

68.Jonathan Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, Cambridge, 2011, 35–44.

69.Gustav Henningsen, ‘The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors’, Folklore, 120 (2009), 57–8.

70.Francisco Bethencourt, ‘Portugal’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 403–24.

71.Carmel Cassar, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Social Control in Seventeenth-century Malta’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 3 (1993), 316–34.

72.Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015, 61.

73.Gunnar W. Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, Oslo, 2004. I am very grateful to Gunnar for the gift of this book.

74.Francesca Matteoni, ‘Blood Beliefs in Early Modern Europe’, University of Hertfordshire PhD thesis, 2009, 194–6.

75.For example by Debora Moretti’s comparative study of Novara and Siena, in research being conducted under my supervision.

76.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 78.

77.Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha, Baltimore, MD, 1992, 179–81.

78.Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550–1650, Oxford, 1989, passim, and Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 35–8, 135.

79.Thomas Deutscher, ‘The Role of the Episcopal Tribunal of Novara in the Suppression of Heresy and Witchcraft, 1563–1615’, Catholic Historical Review, 77 (1991), 403–21.

80.Anne Jacobsen Schutte, ‘Asmodea’, in Kathryn A. Edwards (ed.), Werewolves, Witches and Wandering Spirits, Kirksville, MO, 2002, 119–25.

81.David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, Manchester, 1992, ch. 8.

82.Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, 117–34.

83.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, 196–200.

84.Cassar, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Social Control’; Bethencourt, ‘Portugal’, 403.

85.Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, 61–145, is the latest and best study of the process, supplemented by Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell, 32–45; and Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 196–244.

86.Ana Conde, ‘Sorcellerie et inquisition au XVIe siècle en Espagne’, in Annie Molinié and Jean-Paul Duviols (eds), Inquisition d’Espagne, Paris, 2003, 95–107; William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, Cambridge, 1990, 255–75; María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, Basingstoke, 2014; Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, passim; Agusti Alcoberro, ‘The Catalan Witch and the Witch Hunt’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 153–69.

87.Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, 113–31.

88.This is based on the studies cited above and below, and also listed in the bibliographies of the general works listed in n. 1 above.

89.Without reference to this tradition, Eva Labouvie, Martin Moeller and Alison Rowlands have suggested that folk belief among Germans associated women more with malevolent magic: Labouvie, ‘Men in Witchcraft Trials’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History, Cambridge, 2002, 49–70; Moeller, Dass Willkür über Recht ginge, Bielefeld, 2007, 228–31; and Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, Manchester, 2003, 170–79.

90.This has been especially well pointed out by Dillinger, Evil People, 44–6. Dillinger also, however, warns (on p. 51) that the sabbath is best perceived as an imagined early modern anti-society rather than as ‘a condensation of older traditions’.

91.Jens Christian V. Johansen, ‘Denmark’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 360–66.

92.Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, Oxford, 2007, 143–6.

93.Wanda Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, Basingstoke, 2013, 97–101. Another historian of the Polish trials, Michael Ostling, carefully considers the relationship of Christian and non-Christian elements in early modern Polish ideas of magic, and household or nature spirits, and concludes that those ideas were thoroughly, if unorthodoxly, Christianized: ‘Ordinary peasants did not perform a thinly Christianized magic; rather, they protected themselves from Christian devils by means of Christian holy objects.’ See Between the Devil and the Host, Oxford, 2011, 183–236; quotation on p. 188.

94.Dillinger, Evil People, 55–6.

95.Alison Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Popular Religion in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, London, 1995, 108. The traditions associated with May Eve (to use the English name) are considered by me in The Stations of the Sun, Oxford, 1996, 218–43.

96.Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2008, 96 and passim.

97.Heinrich Kramer (?and Jacob Sprenger), Malleus maleficarum, Mainz, 1486, 104A.

98.Bodin, De la démonomanie, Book 2, c. 4.

99.Nicholas Remy, Daemonolatreiae libri tres, Lyon, 1595, Book 1, c. 14.

100.Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 39.

101.For example, Rita Volmer, ‘Hexenprozesse in der Stadt Trier und im Herzogtum Luxemburg Geständnisse’, in Rosemaries Beier-De Haan (ed.), Hexenwahn, Wolfratshausen, 2002, 72–81 (for Trier); George L. Burr, The Witch Persecutions, Philadelphia, PA, 1902, 23–8 (for Bamberg); Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, London, 2004, 207 (for Eichstätt); Peter A Morton (ed.), The Trial of Tempel Anneke, trans. Barbara Dahms, Peterborough, Ontario, 2006 (for Brunswick); Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg, New York, 2009, 164 (for Hohenlohe).

102.Per Sorlin, ‘Child Witches and the Construction of the Witches’ Sabbath’, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, 99–126.

103.De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, Book 2.2.1, 5; 2.31. For other examples of demonologists working similar material, see Boguet, Discours des sorciers, c. 14; Francesco Maria Guaccio, Compendium maleficarum, Milan, 1626, p. 70; and Del Rio, Disquisitiones magicae, Book 2.6.16.

104.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, 6; Brian Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, London, 3rd edition, 2006, 13.

105.Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 67–8, 196–218, 236–7. See also Frans Ciappara, Society and Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, San Gwann, 2001, 261–300.

106.Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 5–40.

107.Since 1900, indeed the only apparent case of any scholar doing this is the thoroughly eccentric Montague Summers, of whose work Julian Goodare reminded me.

108.For the Swedish evidence, see Soili-Maria Olli, ‘How to Make a Pact with the Devil’, Studia Neophilologica, 84 (2012), 88–96.

109.For especially good studies of the manner in which confessions could be achieved in these circumstances, in the Continental heartland of the trials, see Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze, London, 2004; and Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg. It is also very apparent in the trial records edited by the Lausanne cluster and by older scholars such as George Lincoln Burr.

110.Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 350.

111.Gustav Henningsen, ‘The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors’, Folklore, 120 (2009), 57–74.

112.Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, 65–214. Bever provides two different definitions of shamanism, both viable and in actual use by authors, one narrower and one broader: the problem is that he then applies both to his own material, sliding between one and the other according to occasion. In general, I find his approach to an understanding of early modern beliefs and accusations a worthwhile one. John Demos pioneered the use of psychoanalysis in the understanding of witch trials, in Entertaining Satan, Oxford, 1982, and it was adopted fruitfully by a number of other scholars, most notably Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, London, 1994, and Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, London, 1996. What is needed now is for some more historians of the subject to follow Bever’s example in engaging with psychology and neuroscience, as those disciplines continue to evolve, and debate ways in which better insights may emerge from such an engagement.

113.Bever mentioned the significance of magical treasure hunting in his discussion cited above, and see also Johannes Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America, Basingstoke, 2012.

8  Witches and Fairies

1.For example, J. A. MacCulloch, ‘The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Scotland’, Folklore, 32 (1921), 227–44; Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, New York, 1930, 148–75; K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, London, 1959, 99–116; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things, London, 2000, 85–115; Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, East Linton, 2001, passim; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy, East Linton, 2001, 63–141.

2.Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies, Harmondsworth, 1992, 96–109; quotation on p. 109.

3.Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Brighton, 2005. I am very grateful to Emma for the gift of this book and its successor.

4.Furthermore, she distanced herself from what she termed the ‘ideological excesses’ of Margaret Murray and the ‘imaginative abandon’ with which modern Pagans have ‘spiritualized beliefs and practices associated with early modern witchcraft and magic’: ibid., 190. She has, however, a deep respect for modern Western shamanism. Ginzburg himself, as a secular rationalist, has never shown any interest in modern Paganism or modern shamanism, and referred to Margaret Murray’s interpretation of the Scottish material as ‘obviously absurd’, a blunter term than many other critics of her work have used: Ecstasies, 112.

5.Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Brighton, 2010. The case that some Scottish people accused as witches might actually have been guilty both of devil-worship and attempted destructive magic had also been argued by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, in Satan’s Conspiracy. It is indeed conceivable, though seems impossible to prove from the evidence and does not explain the fantastic elements in the confessions.

6.For a range of reviews see the Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 1083–5; Shaman, 19 (2011), 89–95; Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 93–4; Time and Mind, 6 (2012), 361–6; and Folklore, 124 (2013), 111–12. I am very grateful to Clive Tolley and Malcolm Gaskill for reminding me of the locations of two of these. See also Owen Davies, Cunning Folk, London, 2003, 177–86. Emma Wilby herself has gone on to develop her own theories in essays on what she terms ‘dark shamanism’ in Britain, but they add nothing to her earlier work for the purposes of the present book, instead enlarging on other aspects of it.

7.Admittedly she sometimes steps beyond the bounds of caution – for example in Cunning Folk, 243 and The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, 281, where what is usually admirably suggestive and tentative in her work suddenly becomes certain and conclusive – but these moments are rare.

8.Julian Goodare, ‘Scottish Witchcraft in its European Context’, in Julian Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, Basingstoke, 2008, 30–38; quotations on p. 31.

9.He both adopted this term, from Ginzburg, and problematized it.

10.Julian Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland’, Folklore, 123 (2012), 198–219.

11.Julian Goodare, ‘Seely Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits’, forthcoming in Éva Pócs (ed.), Body, Soul, Spirits and Supernatural Communication. I am very grateful to Julian for sending me an advance copy of this paper.

12.The sources for this are those that underpin Chapter One, and are listed there and in the appendix: the particular case of animal spirits will be considered in Chapter Ten.

13.Éva Pócs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-eastern and Central Europe, Helsinki, 1989; and ‘Tundéres and the Order of St Ilona, or, Did the Hungarians Have Fairy Magicians?’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 54 (2009), 379–96.

14.Zoran Čiča, ‘Vilenica; Vilenjak’, Narodna umjetnost, 39 (2002), 31–64.

15.Fabián Alejandro Campagne, ‘Charismatic Healers on Iberian Soil’, Folklore, 118 (2007), 44–64.

16.For example, Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 140–47, 163–4; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 99. The great example of a historian who used such materials is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971, 608–9.

17.National Records of Scotland, JC26/1/67.

18.The most recent publication of the trial is in Wilby, Cunning Folk, viii–xv.

19.Robert Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1833, vol. 1, part 3, 161–5.

20.See the satire on him that mocks and slanders her as an evil magician consorting with ‘seely wights’, ‘The Legend of the Bischop of St Androis Lyfe’, lines 371–89; printed in James Cranstoun (ed.), Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, Edinburgh, 1891, vol. 1, 365.

21.Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 1, part 3, 192–204.

22.Stirling Council Archives, CH2/722/2.

23.Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 2, part 2, 25–6.

24.John Stuart (ed.), The Miscellany of the Spalding Club: Volume One, Aberdeen, 1841, 177.

25.Ibid., 119–25.

26.G. F. Black, Examples of Printed Folk-lore Concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands, ed. Northcote W. Thomas, London, 1903, 72–4, 111–15.

27.John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1835 536, puts her encounter in Caithness, but she herself was from Orkney.

28.Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. 11, 366–7, 401. See Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 130–31.

29.John Stuart (ed.), Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie, Aberdeen, 1843, xi–xiii.

30.The record is printed in Alaric Hall, ‘Folk-healing, Fairies and Witchcraft’, Studia Celtica Fennica, 2 (2006), 10–25.

31.Black, Examples of Printed Folk-lore, 124.

32.Described in Margo Todd, ‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders’, in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds), The Impact of the European Reformation, Aldershot, 2008, 193.

33.Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.

34.William Cramond (ed.), Records of Elgin 1234–1830: Volume Two, Aberdeen, 1908, 357.

35.Her confession is most recently published in Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, 37–52.

36.Cited in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, An Abundance of Witches, Stroud, 2005, 112–13.

37.J.R.N. MacPhail (ed.), Highland Papers. Volume Three, Edinburgh, 1920, 36–8.

38.Page 7 of an Account of Two Letters, appended to A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girl, Edinburgh, 1697.

39.I have excluded beings described in the trial records who, from their characteristics, such as being green-clad spirits, could well be fairies but are not clearly so.

40.Todd, ‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders’.

41.Robert Law, Memorialls, ed. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Edinburgh, 1818, lxxv.

42.Julian Goodare, ‘Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland’, in Karin E. Olsen and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), Airy Nothings, Leiden, 139–70; and ‘Scottish Witchcraft in its European Context’. I am very grateful to Julian for the gift of this essay.

43.By Michael Hunter, as The Occult Laboratory, Woodbridge, 2001.

44.Ibid., 143, 150.

45.Ibid., 51–191, passim.

46.William Hay, Lectures on Marriage, ed. John C. Barry, Edinburgh, 1967, 126–7: ‘Nam quaedam sunt mulieres que dicunt se habere commercium cum diana regina pharorum Alie sunt que dicunt pharos esse demones et eas nullum commertium cum eis habere Sed se convenisse cum innumera multitudine mulierum simplicium quas vocant lingua nostra celly vichtys’.

47.This is in an essay on ‘Seely Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits in Scotland’, forthcoming in a collection edited by Michael Ostling for Palgrave Macmillan and entitled Small Gods. I am very grateful to Julian for sending me an advance copy of it.

48.Julian Goodare also notes that Hay describes the women of the canon Episcopi, uniquely, as riding on swallows, and argues that this was one of the characteristics of the ‘cult’ of the seely wights, whose adherents thought they did so in ecstatic visions. This is possible, but it is not actually what Hay says, and nobody accused of magic before a Scottish court claimed to fly in that manner: the closest Julian can find was Bessie Henderson, who spoke of meeting fairy-like beings who ‘flew like a swallow’.

49.Incidentally, while including the Northern and Western Isles in my survey of this subject with respect to Scotland, I am leaving the Channel Islands out of my consideration of southern Britain. This might be justified by geography, as they are properly part of Normandy, and legally a remnant of its duchy. It is also, however, for lack of material. Some public excitement, and confusion, has been caused by Darryl Ogier’s article ‘Night Revels and Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey’, Folklore, 109 (1998), 53–62, which dealt with the prosecution in 1630 of youthful male merrymakers for going about at Christmastide disguised as (perhaps) werewolves. However, nobody at the time associated them with witchcraft, magic or a ‘cult’, the case record concerns only one or (possibly) two incidents involving the same small group, and the translation of a term as ‘werewolf’ is uncertain as it might equally mean ‘outlaw’. The post-Reformation authorities in Guernsey were cracking down on traditional seasonal customs, especially those involving rowdiness and disguise. The penalty exacted was merely suspension from communion. This episode had nothing to do with the intense and lethal witch-hunt conducted in the early modern Channel Islands, for which see John Linwood Pitts, Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands, Guernsey, 1886; G. R. Balleine, ‘Witch Trials in Jersey’, Société Jersaise Bulletin Annuel, 13 (1939), 379–98; and Darryl Ogier, ‘Glimpses of the Obscure’, in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, 2010, 177–91.

50.Thomas Scott Holmes (ed.), The Register of John Stafford, Somerset Record Society 31–2 (1915–16), 225–7; Claude Jenkins, ‘Cardinal Morton’s Register’, in R. W. Seton-Watson (ed.), Tudor Studies, London, 1924, 72–4; The Examination of John Walsh, London, 1566; Somerset Record Office, D/D/Ca/21–2; Borthwick Institute, R.vi.A2, fo. 22.

51.John Penry, A Treatise Concerning the Aequity of an Humble Supplication, Oxford, 1587, 46.

52.East Sussex Record Office, RYE 13/1–21. The social and political context of the case has been intensively studied by Annabel Gregory in ‘Witchcraft, Politics and “Good Neighbourhood” in Early Seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 31–66; and Rye Spirits, London, 2013.

53.Moses Pitt, An Account of one Ann Jeffries, London, 1696; Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries, 13 (1924), 312–14. The case has been well studied by Peter Marshall, ‘Ann Jeffries and the Fairies’, in McShane and Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, 127–42.

54.Durant Hotham, The Life of Jacob Behmen, London, 1654, C3; John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, London, 1677, 301.

55.All this is recorded in Wharton’s journals, British Library, Add. MSS 20006–7. A full-length study of Parish, which treats her with deep sympathy, has been produced by Frances Timbers, The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish, Kirksville, MO, 2016.

56.John Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, London, 1705, 104–5.

57.This was noticed particularly by Davies, Cunning Folk, 70.

58.Thomas Bell (ed.), Records of the Meeting of the Exercise of Alford, Aberdeen, 1897, 257.

59.John Stuart (ed.), Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery and Synod of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, 1846, 310.

60.Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 196.

61.Ibid., 51–3, 60, 142–7, 161–72. This makes the more curious and anomalous the statement of Thomas Pennant from the late eighteenth century, that those who claimed to possess second sight on the Hebridean island of Rhum gained visions during ‘paroxysms’, in which they ‘fall into trances, grow pale, and feign to abstain from food for a month’: cited in Julian Goodare, ‘Visionaries and Nature Spirits in Scotland’, in Bela Mosia (ed.), Book of Scientific Works of the Conference of Belief Narrative Network of ISFNR, 1–4 October 2014, Zugdidi, Georgia, 2015), 106. Online at www.zssu.ge/zssu2/sites/default/files/page/Book%20of%20Scientific%20Works.pdf. It could be that such figures had developed a new technique in the intervening century, but more likely that such a method had been part of their repertoire earlier, but – to judge from those earlier reports – a minor one.

62.Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 177.

63.Goodare, ‘Visionaries and Nature Spirits’, 102–16; Margaret Dudley and Julian Goodare, ‘Outside In or Inside Out’, and Julian Goodare, ‘Flying Witches in Scotland’, in Scottish Witches and Witch-hunters, Basingstoke, 2013, 121–39, 159–76.

64.This motif features in the cases of Bessie Dunlop, Janet Boyman and Alison Pearson. For English cases see C.M.L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake Counties, Kendal, 1948, 215–16; William Lilly, History of his Life and Times, London, 1715, 102–3.

65.For general accounts of British fairy belief, see the sources in n. 1, plus Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, Wymeswold, 2004.

66.A point emphasized by Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, London, 1967, 48–50; and Gillian Edwards, Hobgoblin and Sweet Puck, London, 1974, 33–48.

67.What follows in this section, unless otherwise referenced, is a summary of Ronald Hutton, ‘The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), 1157–75. Full arguments and source references, and tributes to other scholars in the field, are to be found there.

68.For much of the twentieth century it was more or less orthodoxy that the fays were intrusions into the French romance tradition from Celtic culture, but this has now been abandoned as unprovable: see the references in my article.

69.For the Somerset magician, see the first source in n. 50. In a Latin treatise on the Ten Commandments, a magical text is known as a ‘helvenbook’, i.e. elven book, as further proof of the widely perceived connection between fairies and magic by this date. The treatise may actually be earlier, but exists only in fifteenth-century copies: Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Middle English Lexicon’, in Michael Korhammer (ed.), Words, Texts and Manuscripts, Woodbridge, 1992, 472.

70.A point emphasized by William Grant Stewart, The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland, London, 1851, 49–51; and Donald A. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life, London, 1935, 195–210. Although they relied mainly on modern folklore, their view is borne out in the rare cases where a seventeenth-century source for Gaelic fairy belief survives, such as Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (for which I have used the edition in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 77–106).

71.Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, 96–107, is especially good on these.

72.Robert Kirk, in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 81.

73.Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, lines 2225–2318.

74.Robert Henryson, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, anthologized in various editions.

75.William Dunbar, ‘The Goldyn Targe’, lines 125–6.

76.For example, Sir David Lyndsay, ‘The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo’, lines 1132–5; and Anon., ‘The Manner of the Crying of ane Playe’, in W. A. Craigie (ed.), The Asluan Manuscript, Edinburgh, 1925, vol. 2, 149.

77.Source references are provided in my Historical Journal article cited above.

78.This poem occurs in the Bannatyne Manuscript and is published in the various editions of that, sometimes catalogued under the first line, ‘Syn of Lyntoun’.

79.See the discussion of his poetry in Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 155–6.

80.Compare Lindsay’s ‘The Testament, and Complaynt’, as above, with his ‘Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estates’, lines 732, 1245–6, 1536–7, 4188–9; literary scholars spell him ‘Lyndsay’.

81.‘Ane Flytting or Invective be Capitane Alexander Montgomerie aganis the Laird of Pollart’, Book 2, lines 14–26.

82.James VI, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597, 73–4.

83.Philotus, eventually published in Edinburgh in 1603, stanza 132. I am grateful to Julian Goodare for pointing out the 1567 date for its performance.

84.The context of this is considered in my Historical Journal article, but I can go into the details of early modern English portrayals of fairies further here. Previous work into the subject has concentrated mainly on the literary manifestations of those portrayals, but with some regard for the social context: Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck; Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 124–85; Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Taken by the Fairies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 277–311; Marjorie Swann, ‘The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 449–73; Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene, Aldershot, 2005; Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, Selinsgrove, 2006; Peter Marshall, ‘Protestants and Fairies in Early Modern England’, in L. Scott Dixon (ed.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, Farnham, 2009, 139–61. The last of these provides the best overview of attitudes to date, but a more comprehensive and integrated one, with the cross-British comparison, can be given here.

85.In two editions of Albions England, London, 1602, 85, and London 1612, c. 91.

86.John Florio, A Worlde of Words, London, 1598, 401–2; Thomas Jackson, A Treatise Concerning the Original of Unbeliefe, London, 1625, 178; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas Faulkner et al., Oxford, 1989, 185–8; Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, London, 1635, 567–8; William Vaughan, The Souls Exercise, London, 1641, 113; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 4, c. 47; Henry Smith, Christian Religions Appeal, London, 1675, 45.

87.The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll, London, c. 1600.

88.The Divell is an Asse, London, 1616, esp. Act 1, Scene 1.

89.The Sad Shepherd, London, 1640, Acts 2 and 3.

90.British Library, Sloane MS 1727, pp. 23, 28; and MS 3851, fos 106v, 115v, 129; Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1406, fos 50–55; and MS e. MUS 173, fo. 72r; Folger Library MS V626, pp. 80, 185; Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book 15, cc. 8–9.

91.Edward Fenton (ed.), The Diaries of John Dee, Charlbury, 1998, 25; Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1491, fo. 1362v.

92.The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philip Flower, London, 1618, sig. E3.

93.William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, line 162; John Day, Works (London, 1881), vol. 2, 70; Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage (London, 1594), Act 5, Scene 1, lines 212–15; Gammer Gurton’s Nedle (London, 1575), Act 1, Scene 2, lines 67–9; The Merry Devil of Edmonton (London, 1608), Act 3, Scene 3; John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act 1, Scene 1, lines 114–17, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1906–12), vol. 2.

94.For an example of a charm from the Elizabethan period, see Bodleian Library, Add. MS B1, fo. 20r. For English service magicians acting against fairy-caused ills, see Bouch, Prelates and People, 230; and Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 184.

95.Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 150–61, collected the references.

96.George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, London, 1589, c. 15; John Aubrey, Three Prose Works, ed. John Buchanan Brown, Fontwell, 1972, 203; R. Willis, Mount Tabor, London, 1639, 92–3; Hertfordshire Record Office, HAT/SR 2/100. For the later history of the changeling tradition in the British Isles, see Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 236–45; and Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, 108–22. Julian Goodare tells me that there is evidence for the changeling belief in early modern Scotland as well.

97.A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, Cambridge, 1938, 435; Anthony Munday, Fidele and Fortunio, London, 1584, line 566.

98.Monsieur Thomas, London, 1639, Act 5, Scene 1.

99.The Pilgrim, London 1647, Act 5, Scene 4.

100.Grim the Collier of Croydon, London 1662, passim.

101.See the gloss for ‘June’, in line 25.

102.The Friers Chronicle, London, 1625, sig. B3v; see also Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft, Cambridge, 1590, 8; Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of egregious popish Impostures, London, 1603, 135–6; Richard Flecknoe, Aenigmatical Characters, London, 1665, 17; Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 175–6; Thomas Heyrick, The New Atlantis, London, 1687, 15–16.

103.George Chapman, An Humerous Dayes Mirth, London, 1599, 209–11; A Discourse of Witchcraft, London, 1621, 17; Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body, London, 1605, vol. 1, pp. 3–23 in the 1874 version of his Dramatic Works. See also Reginald Scot’s declaration that fairies were the inventions of maids to frighten or entertain children: Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book 4, c. 10.

104.William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 4 and Act 5, Scene 5; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, London, 1616, Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 5; The Buggbears, London, c. 1564–5, passim; The Valiant Welshman, London, 1663, Act 2, Scene 5; Wily Beguilde, London, 1606, passim; Munday, Fidele and Fortunio, passim.

105.The Brideling, Saddling and Ryding, of a rich Churle in Hampshire, London, 1595; The Several Notorious and lewd Cousnages of Iohn West, and Alice West, falsely called the King and Queene of the Fayries, London, 1613; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Hatfield House MSS, vol. 5 (1894), 81–3; C. J. Sisson, ‘A Topical Reference in “The Alchemist”’, in James G. McManaway et al. (eds), Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies, Washington, DC, 1948, 739–41.

106.Berners’ translation is now best known in the 1882 Early English Text Society edition by S. L. Lee.

107.See Lee’s comments in ibid., xxiv–li; and Robert Greene, The Scottish Historie of James IV, London, 1598.

108.Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Fairy, London, 1616; Robert Herrick, ‘Oberon’s Feast’ and ‘Oberon’s Palace’ in Hesperides, London, 1648, much anthologized since; Christopher Middleton, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England, London, 1597. See also Thomas Randolph, The Jealous Lovers, London, 1643, Act 3, Scene 7; The Midnight’s Watch, London, 1643 and Amyntas, London, 1638; [? Thomas Dekker], Lust’s Dominion, London, 1657, lines 1583–605.

109.See n.108.

110.On this see Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 176–218; Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 176–80; Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, 58–82; Lamb, ‘Taken by the Fairies’, 300–311.

111.In ‘The Politics of Fairylore’, Marjorie Swann has argued that the emphasis on conspicuous consumption in early modern English literature on fairies reflected the emergence of a consumer society. The problem here is that medieval aristocrats were no strangers to such consumption, and gorgeous lifestyles had always been associated with fays.

112.London, 1630. Following Shakespeare, fairies themselves were often treated in English literary works as diminutive beings, allowing writers to explore the imaginative implications of a world populated by such midgets. This genre has been well studied by literary scholars, including Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 176–218; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 44–70; and Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 181–3. Its (self-consciously) ridiculous nature may have made it still harder to take fairies seriously, and so as characters in witch trials, but devils could also be small: some of Alexander Montgomerie’s demonic fairies rode on beans and stalks.

113.Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, London, 1607.

114.Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I, Woodbridge, 1980, 99–118, 122, 126–42; Thomas Churchyarde, A Handful of Gladsome Verses, Given to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke, Oxford, 1593, Sig. B4; Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 143–4.

115.Ben Jonson, The Entertainment at Althorp, London, 1616; and Oberon, the Fairy Prince, London, 1616.

116.The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, London, 1595, Act 3, Scene 1, line 203; Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 100–105; A. H. Bullen (ed.), The Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889, 21–2; Michael Drayton, ‘The Quest of Cynthia’, in The Battaile of Agincourt, 1627; and ‘The Third Nimphall’, in The Muses Elizium, London, 1630; Selections from the Writings of Thomas Ravenscroft, Edinburgh, 1822, nos XXI–XXII; A. H. Bullen, Lyrics from the Song Books of the Elizabethan Age, London, 1889, 34–5. For translations of classical texts, see Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 59–73.

117.The Maydes Metamorphosis, London, 1600, Act 2, Scene 2, Sig. c4 and D1; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 9–25; John Lyly, Gallathea, London, 1592, Act 2, Scene 3; Walter W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe Papers, London, 1907, 135.

118.Samuel Rowlands, More Knaves Yet? The Knaves of Spades and Diamonds, London, 1600, Sig. F2; The Cobler of Canterburie, London, 1590, Epistle; Churchyarde, A Handeful of Gladsome Verses, Sig. B4.

119.John Selden, Table Talk, ed. Edward Arber, London, 1868, 82.

120.Rowlands, More Knaves Yet? The Knave of Spades, 40; John Marston, The Mountebanks Masque, printed in Peter Cunningham, Inigo Jones, London, 1898, 114; Jonson, The Entertainment at Althorp; Richard Corbet, Certain Elegant Poems, London, 1647, 47–9 and sources in n. 1.

121.Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 203.

122.He seems to appear as such in Tell-Trothes New Yeares Gift, London, 1593. Fairy monarchs sometimes shared this trait: the satirist Samuel Rowlands, Humors Antique Faces, London, 1605, prologue, claimed that ‘the Faerie King’ had charged him ‘to scourge the humours of this age’.

123.James Orchard Halliwell reprinted the three main pamphlets in this genre, in Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London, 1845, 120–54, 155–70. Only one, apparently the first in sequence, is dated, at 1628, but an earlier Victorian editor, J. Payne Collier, The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow, London, 1841, was convinced that it had been in existence since 1588, and was followed in this opinion by Robert Rentoul Reed, The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, Boston, 1965, 194–233. Their evidence, however, lay in references to Robin Goodfellow in general rather than to his actions in this tract in particular. His role as a champion of virtue had been presaged in Grim the Collier of Croydon, undated but seemingly Elizabethan in style, discussed above.

9  Witches and Celticity

1.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, xi.

2.This debate is summarized with full references in Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain, London, 2013, 166–71.

3.All this is, again, summarized with full references in Pagan Britain, as above.

4.Raymond Gillespie, ‘Women and Crime in Seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland, Edinburgh, 1991, 43–52; Elwyn C. Lapoint, ‘Irish Immunity to Witch-hunting, 1534–1711’, Éire-Ireland, 27 (1992), 76–92.

5.J. Gwynn Williams, ‘Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Flintshire’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 26 (1973–4), 16–33, and 27 (1975–6), 5–35; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Popular Beliefs in Wales from the Restoration to Methodism’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 27 (1977), 440–62.

6.Sally Parkin, ‘Witchcraft, Women’s Honour and Customary Law in Early Modern Wales’, Social History, 31 (2006), 295–318.

7.Stuart MacDonald, The Witches of Fife, East Linton, 2002, 22–3; Lauren Martin, ‘Scottish Witch Panics Re-examined’, in Julian Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, Basingstoke, 2008, 125.

8.Lizanne Henderson, ‘Witch-hunting and Witch Belief in the Gàidhealtachd’, in Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, 95–118.

9.Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gàidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree et al. (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, Cambridge, 1994, 250–51.

10.Ronald Hutton, ‘The Global Context of the Scottish Witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Manchester, 2002, 31–2.

11.James Sharpe, ‘Witchcraft in the Early Modern Isle of Man’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 11–28. I am very grateful to him for the gift of a copy of this article.

12.Richard Suggett, ‘Witchcraft Dynamics in Early Modern Wales’, in Michael Roberts and Simone Clark (eds), Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, Cardiff, 2003, 75–103; and A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, Stroud, 2008. I am very grateful for the gift by the author of a copy of the essay.

13.Ronald Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, Past and Present, 212 (2011), 43–71. What follows in the rest of this section may be found there, fully argued and referenced.

14.Here James Sharpe’s research is complemented and supported by my own: three years after he published it I followed it up with a piece of my own in the same journal: ‘The Changing Faces of Manx Witchcraft’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 153–70.

15.Here, as well as the work of Suggett and Parkin, cited earlier, there is important material in Lisa Mari Tallis, ‘The Conjuror, the Fairy, the Devil and the Preacher’, Swansea University PhD thesis, 2007. I am very grateful to Owen Davies for lending me a copy of this work.

16.Thomas Brochard, ‘Scottish Witchcraft in a Regional and Northern European Context’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 10 (2015), 41–74.

17.Andrew Sneddon, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Trials in Early Modern Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, 39 (2012), 1–25; and Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, Basingstoke, 2015. In the former work he is wholly in agreement with me, while in the latter he tries to find minor differences, pointing to his emphasis that Catholic nobles, at least, feared witchcraft, and that the ‘evil eye’ could be regarded as intentional. In reality, there is no dispute between us, as I never denied the first point and stated quite firmly in my article that the ‘evil eye’ was not always treated as innocent of malice in Gaelic regions.

18.His word is vetulas, i.e. crones: Topgraphia Hibernica, c. 19. Not all translated editions include this passage.

19.Burchard, Decreta, Book 19.

20.Bodil Nildin and Jan Wall, ‘The Witch as Hare or the Witch’s Hare’, Folklore, 104 (1993), 67–76; Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, Philadelphia, PA, 2011, 118, 138–45, 181–7.

21.Wanda Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, Basingstoke, 2013, 1–2, 22, 32–3, 39, 48, 61, 93.

22.Jeremiah Curtin, Tales of Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected from Oral Tradition in South-west Munster, London, 1895, 23–8; Jane Francesca Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, London, 1890, 75–83; Robin Gwyndaf, ‘Fairylore: Memorates and Legends from Welsh Oral Tradition’, in Peter Narvaez (ed.), The Good People, New York, 1991, 159–70; W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Oxford, 1911, 37–9; James MacDougall, Highland Fairy Legends, ed. George Calder, Cambridge, 1978, 80–81.

23.The folklore collections concerned are listed in Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 50–68. An especially good analysis of the implications of it in Ireland may be found in Richard P. Jenkins, ‘Witches and Fairies: Supernatural Aggression and Deviance amongst the Irish Peasantry’, in Narvaez (ed.), The Good People, 302–35.

24.This is a general feature of histories of Cornwall. Mark Stoyle has perhaps been the most prominent recent author to highlight Cornish exceptionalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a series of publications culminating in Soldiers and Strangers, London, 2005. I am very grateful to him for sending me copies of these.

25.Janet A. Thompson, Wives, Widows, Witches and Bitches, New York, 1993, 106–7, provides all the figures. It may be noted that other southern English counties could also have few known trials: Hampshire’s figure is twelve, and Sussex’s thirteen.

26.Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 50–68.

27.Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, London, 1703, 115–16, 179–82 (references are to the Stirling reprint of 1934).

28.Most notably Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, in Scottish Fairy Belief, East Linton, 2001, who concluded that such belief changed little between the fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Emma Wilby has also employed the same approach in both of her books, discussed in the previous chapter. All three have in fact been rather less cautious in their application of modern folklore to early modern issues than the approach taken here.

29.Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 64.

30.Alexander Thom (ed.), Ancient Laws of Ireland, 5 vols, Dublin, 1865–1901, vol. 1, 181, 203 and vol. 5, 295–7.

31.Cáin Adomnáin, no. 46.

32.Ludwig Bieler (ed.), The Irish Penitentials, Dublin, 1963, 78–81, 101.

33.This and what follows is a summary of the discussion, with full source references, in Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain, London, 2009, 30–44.

34.The word is ban-tua: the text, Cath MaigeTuired, was most notably edited by Whitley Stokes in Revue Celtique, 12 (1891), with this passage on p. 91.

35.Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, Cambridge, 1901, vol. 2, 357; R. I. Best, ‘Prognostications from the Raven and the Wren’, Eriu, 8 (1916), 120.

36.Edited by Charles Plummer, in Lives of Irish Saints, Oxford, 1922, vol. 2, 29.

37.Liam Breatnach (ed.), Uraicecht na Riár, Dublin, 1987, 114–15.

38.Jacqueline Borsje, ‘Celtic Spells and Counterspells’, in Katja Ritari (ed.), Understanding Celtic Religion, Cardiff, 2015, 18. I am very grateful to her for sending me copies of most of her publications over the years. See also, in particular, her essay ‘Witchcraft and Magic’, in Séan Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland, London, 2005, 518–20.

39.Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, Dublin, 1988, 46.

40.This is the story known and edited as Aided Con Culainn.

41.This is the story known and edited as Brislech Mór Maige Muirtheimne.

42.On this see particularly Richard Breen, ‘The Ritual Expression of Inter-Household Relations In Ireland’, Cambridge Anthropology, 6 (1980), 33–59.

43.The classic study of the phenomenon in the medieval texts is Jacqueline Borsje, ‘The Evil Eye in Early Irish Literature and Law’, Celtica, 24 (2003), 1–39. One that uses both bodies of evidence, drawing direct comparisons between those texts and modern Gaelic (in this case Scottish) folklore, is R. C. MacLagan, The Evil Eye in the Western Highlands, London, 1902.

44.Bieler (ed.), The Irish Penitentials, 56.

45.Cóir Anmann, c. 54. There are editions by Whitley Stokes, Leipzig, 1897, and Sharon Arbuthnot, for the Irish Texts Society, 2005.

46.Anne O’Connor, ‘Images of the Evil Woman in Irish Folklore’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (1988), 281–5.

47.This is in the story known as Echtra Airt meic Cuinn, trans. R. I. Best in Eriu, 3 (1906), 149–73.

48.This is the story called Bruidhean Chéise Corainn.

49.The story is entitled Cath Finntrágha.

50.The traditional translation of the saga by J. H. Todd in the Rolls Series, London, 1867, 174–5 has the term ‘destructive witches’ rendered simply as ‘witches’, but Mark Williams assures me that Todd’s version is misleading, and has suggested the alternative one employed here.

51.I am very grateful to Mark Williams for discussing the term with me, and greatly extending my knowledge of it. He also recommended William Sayers, ‘Airdreach, Sirite and Other Early Irish Battlefield Spirits’, Éigse, 25 (1991), 45–55, which discusses ‘spirits of the glen’ as featuring as spectres in other stories, and notes that ammait could mean either a woman or a spirit with supernatural power.

52.This is in the story called Aided Muirchertach Mac Erca. I am very grateful to Mark Williams, again, for bringing it to my attention. Mark’s own close reading of the tale, and especially of the character of the enchantress, can be found as ‘Lady Vengeance’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 62 (2011), 1–33.

53.See especially Alfred Nutt, The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, London, 1900; Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, New York, 1903; and Roger Sherman Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, New York, 1927.

54.For recent studies of the fays, see inter alia Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time, Oxford, 2004; Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge, 2007; Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, Cambridge, 2010; and James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance, London, 2011.

55.She appears in lines 1205–29, and is known as the Gwidon Ordu, the ‘Very Dark Hag’. More of these beings (in groups of nine as in Peredur) are overcome by heroes in the poem ‘Pa gur yv y porthaur’ and the hagiographical Life of Samson: see Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Early Welsh Arthurian Poems’, in Rachel Bromwich at al. (eds), The Arthur of the Welsh, Cardiff, 1991, 44–5.

56.Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, 42–3.

57.Ibid., passim; Tallis, ‘The Conjuror, the Fairy, the Devil and the Preacher’, passim.

10  Witches and Animals

1.For example, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971 (references to 1997 edition), 569; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, London, 1996, 71–4; and ‘The Witch’s Familiar in Elizabethan England’, in G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (eds), Authority and Consent in Tudor England, Aldershot, 219–20; Philip C. Almond, The Witches of Warboys, London, 2008, 51–5.

2.By Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569.

3.Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71–4; Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, London, 2015, 7.

4.Sharpe, ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, 228; Almond, The Witches of Warboys, 51–5; and his The Lancashire Witches, London, 2012, 26; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, London, 2000, 153; and ‘Fairies’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, 346–7

5.Emma Wilby, ‘The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland’, Folklore, 111 (2000), 283–305; Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Brighton, 2005.

6.Boria Sax, ‘The Magic of Animals’, Anthrozoos, 22 (2009), 317–32. I am very grateful to the author for sending me a copy of this article.

7.Charlotte-Rose Millar, ‘The Witch’s Familiar in Sixteenth-century England’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 38 (2010), 113–30; Victoria Carr, ‘The Witch’s Animal Familiar in England, 1300–1700’, Bristol University PhD thesis, 2017. I am very grateful to Victoria Carr for giving me a copy of this article, which was itself presented to her by the author, and to Dr Millar herself for subsequently showing me the relevant chapter of her forthcoming book with Routledge, The Devil in the Pamphlets, in draft. Both she and Victoria also commented on this chapter of mine.

8.James A. Serpell, ‘Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets’, in Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (eds), The Animal / Human Boundary, Rochester, NY, 2002, 157–92. This essay is remarkable for the way in which it incorporates many hypotheses and invalidates none: thus, it states that a survival of pre-Christian beliefs is difficult to demonstrate convincingly in the case of the English witch’s familiar but then goes on to say that the role of animals in European conceptions of witchcraft suggests ‘at least vestigial traces’ of shamanism (p. 184). In doing so it follows Ginzburg in assuming that shape-shifting is automatically a sign of shamanism.

9.For example, from George Lyman Kitteredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, New York, 1929, 174–5; to Serpell, ‘Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets’; and Sax, ‘The Magic of Animals’.

10.Elsie Clews Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’, in Max Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, Harmondsworth, 1970, 204–9; Benson Saler, ‘Nagual, Witch and Sorcerer in a Quiché Village’, Ethnology, 3 (1964), 305–28; J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and Clanship in Conchiti Therapy’, in Ari Kiev (ed.), Magic, Faith and Healing, Glencoe, 1964, 174–200; William and Claudia Madson, ‘Witchcraft in Tecopsa and Tepepan’; Benson Sales, ‘Sorcery in Santiago El Palmar’; and Annemarie Shimony, ‘Iroquois Witchcraft at Six Nations’, in Dewar E. Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, Moscow, ID, 1970, 73–94, 124–46, 239–65; Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan, Chicago, 1941, 303–37; Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Spiritual Power in Central America’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, London, 1970, 183–206; Florence H. Ellis, ‘Pueblo Witchcraft and Medicine’; and Louise Spindler, ‘Menomini Witchcraft’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 37–72, 183–220.

11.John Middleton, ‘The Concept of “Bewitching” in Lugbara’, Africa, 25 (1955), 252–60; Daryll Forde, ‘Spirits, Witches and Sorcerers in the Supernatural Economy of the Yakö’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), 165–78; Robert Brain, ‘Child-witches’; Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African State’; and Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the Introverted Witch’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 161–79, 207–44, 333–50; Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, Sorcery and Social Categories among the Safwa, Oxford, 1970, ch. 3; Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, N.S. 1 (1995), 599–609; Fiona Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions, London, 2000, 72; John Parker, ‘Northern Gothic’, Africa, 76 (2006), 352–79; C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, Oxford, 1937, 79–80; E. C. Rapp, ‘Akan’, 8, Africa (1935), 553–4; Michael Jackson, ‘The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant’, in Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp (eds), Personhood and Agency, Uppsala, 1990, 59–78; Harry G. West, Ethnographic Sorcery, Chicago, 2007, passim.

12.Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence in Colonial Western India’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 109–41; David N. Gellner, ‘Priests, Healers, Mediums and Witches’, Man, N.S. 29 (1994), 33–7; Knut Rio, ‘The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person’, in Bruce Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism, New York, 2002, 129–54; Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism, Philadelphia, PA, 1974, 21–32; Nicola Tannenbaum, ‘Witches, Fortune and Misfortune among the Dhan of Northwestern Thailand’; Roy Ellen, ‘Anger, Society and Sorcery’; and Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in C. W. Watson and Roy Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, Honolulu, 1993, 67–80 and 81–97.

13.Jackson, ‘The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant’.

14.Gary H. Gosan, ‘Animal Souls, Co-Essences, and Human Destiny in Mesoamerica’, in A. James Arnold (ed.), Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows, Charlottesville, NC, 1996, 80–107.

15.Manning Nash, ‘Witchcraft as Social Process in a Tzeltal Community’, American Indigena, 20 (1961), 121–6.

16.Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts (eds), Bloodsucking Witchcraft, Tucson, AZ, 1993, passim.

17.Isaac Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 108–20; Robert F. Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’, in John Middleton and E. H. Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London, 1963, 143–73; Harriet Ngubane, ‘Aspects of Zulu Treatment’, in J. B. Loudon (ed.), Social Anthroplogy and Medicine, London, 1976, 328–37; Brigit Meyer, ‘If You are a Devil, You are a Witch, and if you are a Witch, you are a Devil’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 22 (1992), 98–132; W. Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Allahabad, 1894, 353–6.

18.M. G. Marwick, ‘The Sociology of Sorcery in a Central African Tribe’, African Studies, 22 (1963), 1–21; Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, Neuchatel, 1912, vol. 2, 461–71; Hugh A. Stayt, The Bavenda, Oxford, 1931, 273–6; Isak A. Niehaus, ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’, Africa, 63 (1993), 498–530; Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and Thieves’, Man, N.S. 21 (1986), 65–78; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, Charlottesville, VA, 1997), 61–8; George Clement Bond, ‘Ancestors and Witches’, in George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, Athens, OH, 2001, 131–57; Simeon Mesaki, ‘Witch-killing in Sukumaland’, in Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 47–60; Roy Ellen, ‘Introduction’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 1–25; Gerald W. Hartwig, ‘Long-Distance Trade and the Evolution of Sorcery among the Kerebe’, African Historical Studies, 4 (1971), 505–24; and see nn. 30 and 33 below.

19.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford, 1937, 1.3; Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), 303–18; Jean Buxton, ‘Mandari Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 99–121.

20.John Middleton, Lugbara Religion, Oxford, 1960, 238–50.

21.A. W. Howitt, ‘On Australian Medicine Men’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 16 (1887), 34.

22.A.J.N. Tremearne, The Ban of the Bori, London, 1914, 151.

23.C. G. Seligmann, The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, 282–4.

24.Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, Oxford, 1961, ch. 6; J. T. Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and in Central Africa’, in J. T. Munday et al. (eds), Witchcraft, London, 1951, 8–13; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, London, 2001, 25–6; T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’; and Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 57–98, 123–41; Barrie Reynolds, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, London, 1963, ch. 1; C.M.N. White, ‘Witchcraft, Divination and Magic among the Balovale Tribes’, Africa, 18 (1948), 81–104; Jensen Krige and J. D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain Queen, Oxford, 1943, 250–70; Greta Bloomhill, Witchcraft in Africa, London, 1962, 67–76; Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, Oxford, 1961, 253–9.

25.Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, Berkeley, 1985, 112; Richard W. Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, Berkeley, 1967, 65–79.

26.Deward E. Walker, ‘Nez Perce Sorcery’, Ethnology, 6 (1967), 66–96.

27.W. D. Hammond-Tooke, ‘The Cape Nguni Witch Familiar as a Mediatory Construct’, Man, N.S. 9 (1974), 128–36; Monica Hunter Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56 (1951), 307–12.

28.J. R. Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, Oxford, 1967, 115–22.

29.E. H. Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 277–99.

30.Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, New Haven, 1944, chs 1.4, 2.3.

31.Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, 1–30, 115–22; Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 145–9.

32.Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, in Gilbert Herot and Michele Stephen (eds), The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, New Brunswick, 1989, 122–59; Marc Simmons, Witchcraft in the Southwest, Lincoln, NE, 1974, 54–95; Elizabeth Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’, Africa, 70 (2000), 333–58.

33.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, VA, 1978, 26, 42.

34.Wanda Wyporska, ‘Witchcraft, Arson and Murder’, Central Europe, 1 (2003), 41–54.

35.Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North, Leiden, 2013, 274–89.

36.Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jasmin’s Witch, trans. Brian Pearce, London, 1990, 56–63; Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, Oxford, 2007, 123–35; Petrus Valderama, Histoire generale du monde, Paris, 1617, vol. 2, 257–61; and sources at n. 37.

37.Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 109–12, 195–200, 204, 216–17; Henry Charles Lea, Materials Towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, 372, 394, 403–4.

38.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, NV, 1980, 78; T. P. Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans 1’, Folklore, 100 (1989), 9–24.

39.For example, Martín del Rio, Disquisitiones magicae, Leuven, 1608, 2.6.17; Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers, Lyon, 1610, c. 47; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, Paris, 1612, 4.1.1, 4.1.5, 4.36; Nicholas Remy, Daemonolatriae libri tres, Lyon, 1595, 2.5; Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers, Paris, 1580, 2.6.

40.See Ernest W. Baughman (ed.), Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America, The Hague, 1966, motif G275, for a large range of examples from historic sources and modern folklore collections. The Irish equivalents often took the form of the ‘milk-sucking hare’, mentioned in Chapter Nine. For early modern English and Scottish instances of the belief, see Richard Galis, A brief treatise containing the strange and most horrible cruelty of Elizabeth Stile, London, 1579; A Most Wicked worke of a Wretched Witch, London, 1592; The divels delusions, London, 1649; Doctor Lambs Darling, London, 1653, 7; Joseph Anderson (ed.), ‘The Confessions of the Forfar Witches 1661’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 22 (1887–8), 254–5; Joseph Glanvill, A Philosophical Endeavour towards a Defence of the Being of Witches, London, 1666, 16–17; A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations Against Three Wretches, London, 1682, 21; A tryal of witches at the assizes held at Bury St Edmunds, London, 1682, 7; Francis Bragge, A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Practis’d by Jane Wenham, London, 1712, preface; John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1834, 563; J. A. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Yorkshire, Borthwick Paper 81, 1991, 7; and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, webdb.ucs.ed.ac.uk/witches.

41.De Lancre, Tableau de ‘inconstance des mauvais anges’, 2.4.6; Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 75–8.

42.Athanasius of Alexandria, Vita Antonii, c. 9.

43.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edition, London, 1993, 39–41. For visual representations of demons in animal or part-animal form, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, 2003.

44.This is recorded in the ‘Narrative’ printed in L. S. Davidson and J. O Ward (eds), The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler, Ashville, NC, 2005, 26–70.

45.Edited in Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, Lausanne, 1999, 30–45.

46.Edited in ibid., 289–99.

47.Dommenico Mammoli, The Record of the Trial and Condemnation of a Witch, Matteuccia di Francesco, at Todi, 20 March 1428, Rome, 1972.

48.Ostorero et al. (eds) L’imaginaire du sabbat, 339–53.

49.Ibid., 451–82.

50.Georg Modestin, Le diable chez l’évêque, Lausanne, 1999, 186–275; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande, Lausanne, 2007, 40–65; Martine Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons, Lausanne, 1995, 237–75.

51.Remy, Daemonolatreiae, 1.23.

52.De Lancre, Tableau, 2.1.12, 2.2.1, 2.3.1, 4.1.8.

53.James Kirkton, The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland, ed. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Edinburgh, 1817, 421.

54.The reference for the survey is in n. 40. Many of the cases concerned can accessibly be read in detail in the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd series, vols 3 and 8, and 3rd series, vol. 1; and in the Spalding Club Miscellany, vol. 1, Aberdeen, 1841.

55.Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, 19, 32; Richard Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, Stroud, 2008, 16, 31–2.

56.G. J. Aungier (ed.), Croniques de London, Camden Society, 28, 1844, 3–4.

57.The first two cases are cited in Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 175–6, 181, the third in more detail in the Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, London, 1876, Appendix, 455.

58.James Raine, ‘Proceedings Connected with a Remarkable Charge of Sorcery’, Archaeological Journal, 16 (1859), 75–81.

59.Somerset Heritage Centre, D/D/Cd/1, sub 1530.

60.The Examination and confession of certain Wytches at Chensford, London, 1566.

61.The question of which of these possibilities is the correct one is of course important, and Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft, London 1999, is the best book on the problems of determining this. It is not, however, one that matters much for the purposes of this book, which is concerned with the development of a cultural motif, irrespective of who exactly was responsible for a particular text in which it appears.

62.The Examination of John Walsh, London, 1566.

63.A detection of damnable driftes . . ., London, 1579; A Rehearsall both straung and true, of heinous and horrible actes . . ., London, 1579.

64.See W. W., A true and just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S. Oses in the countie of Essex, London, 1582; and The Apprehension and confession of three notorious witches, Arraigned and by justice condemned and executed at Chelmes-forde, in the Countye of Essex, London, 1589.

65.Ralph Holinshed et al., Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, vol. 4 of 1808 edition, p. 892; Kent Archives Office, Fa/JQs/1 (bundle 104) and 23 (bundle 128).

66.I. D., The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certain Witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapenhill . . ., London, 1597.

67.This is apparent in A Rehearsall both straung and true . . ., sigs A5–A6; and W. W., A true and just Recorde, sigs 2A3, 2A8.

68.It features prominently in A true and just Recorde . . ., sigs 2A3, 2A8, C2, D2. The earliest known reference is in the court leet records of Southampton, for 1579, where it already seems treated as a well-known idea: first noticed by Cecil L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, London, 1933, 75. In the account of the Essex trial of 1566, it was already thought that repeated pricking of a witch’s body to feed her familiar blood would leave a series of red marks: but there is no sign yet of one particular, well-concealed, mark. Those in the trial of 1566 were noticed on the woman’s face.

69.James VI and I, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597, 80; William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, Cambridge, 1608, 203; Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witch-Craft, London, 1617, 88.

70.For Edmonton, see Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, London, 1621, sig. C3. The East Anglian records are summarized in Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 261–303; and many are reprinted in Malcolm Gaskill (ed.), English Witchcraft 1560–1736: The Matthew Hopkins Trials, London, 2003.

71.The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys, London, 1595, sig. O3.

72.I. D., The most wonderfull and true storie . . ., 8–9.

73.Witches Apprehended and Executed, London, 1613; The Witches of Northamptonshire, London, 1612.

74.Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, London, 1613, sigs B2, B4, C2, R3.

75.William Grainge (ed.), Daemonologia, Harrogate, 1882, 78.

76.Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 179, 181–2; Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 244–51.

77.A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations against Three Witches, London, 1682, 23–5; Francis Bragge, A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, London, 2nd edition, 1712, 11.

78.A True Narration of some of those witch-crafts which Marie, wife of Henry Smith, Glover, did practise . . ., London, 1616.

79.Goodcole, The wonderfull discoverie, sigs C2–C3.

80.British Library, Add. MS 27402, fo. 1176.

81.Ibid.

82.Wonderfull News from the North, London, 1650, 5.

83.The sources for these observations are the many works on local folklore published since 1800 which form the basis of Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, Oxford, 1996, and The Triumph of the Moon, Oxford, 1999, 84–111.

84.Especial honour, perhaps, is due to James Sharpe, long the presiding figure of studies of English witch trials, for launching the whole discussion, and to the American veterinary scientist James Serpell, who back in 2002 noted in passing the importance of the wider context of early modern European beliefs in servitor spirits and demons in animal shape, and the manner in which English beliefs developed in the Elizabethan period: see nn. 1–8, above. Among the younger scholars, both Charlotte-Rose Millar and Victoria Carr come out especially well, for looking to demonology as the most important single theme in the development of the English idea of the familiar.