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Introduction

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.3.1.0001

2161-2196

Alison Findlay, Liz Oakley‐Brown,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

This special issue of Preternature, “Capturing Witches,” comes out of a three-day international conference held at Lancaster University on August 17–19, 2012, to commemorate the lives of the ten people convicted of witchcraft at the Lancaster Witch Trials and executed on Lancaster Moor on Thursday, August 20, 1612: Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock, Alison Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Katherine Hewitt, Alice Nutter, Anne Redferne, Isabel Robey, and Anne Whittle.1 The “capture” and hanging of ten Lancashire witches at one go was, as James Sharpe claims, a remarkable phenomenon since “nothing in the experience of witch trials in England before 1612” had prepared either the Lancashire population or the literate public for the Lancaster Trial and Thomas Potts's attempt to capture the proceedings in his published account.2 Four hundred years later, the 2012 anniversary saw a range of activities, including a new edition of Potts's record of the trial; the publication of fictional rewritings including Livi Michael's Malkin Child (2012), Jeanette Winterson's novella The Daylight Gate (2012), and Blake Morrison's A Discoverie of Witches (2012); the broadcast of television documentaries; and the inscription of the date 2012 in huge white letters on the side of Pendle Hill for an assembly of twenty-first-century witches and tourists on August 19, 2012.3 Although the digital forms of transmission in 2012 were new, the circulation of stories and publicity generated by the 1612 trial dates back to the seventeenth century. Indeed, a second Lancashire Witch Trial in 1634 was inaugurated by the testimony of one Edmund Robinson, who later confessed that “he had heard neighbors talk of a witch feast that was kept at Mocking Tower [Malkin Tower] in Pendle Forest about twenty years since and thereupon he framed those tales concerning the persons aforesaid.”4 Robinson's stories of sabbat meetings and maleficium, used to capture a second generation of witches, were subsequently dramatized in Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's 1634 play The Late Lancashire Witches, which was staged in Lancaster Castle as part of the conference Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images 400 Years After the Lancashire Witches.5 The conference took the historical events of 1612 as a starting point to consider how critical and creative responses to the figure of the witch, from the seventeenth century through to the present, are inevitably engaged in the politics of representation, just as much as Potts's original attempt to “capture” what he witnessed. The most tangible example of witchcraft's political immediacy at the conference was the presence of the charitable organization Stepping Stones Nigeria, dedicated to protecting an increasing number of children in the Niger Delta who are accused of being witches with the power to cause diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, typhoid, and cancer), material poverty, and social breakdown in the family and community. The types of maleficium attributed to child witches in Nigeria sound chillingly close to those leveled against the Lancashire witches in the seventeenth century; conference delegates commented on how Stepping Stones raised awareness of witchcraft and the politics of representation as “live” issues.6The articles collected here take up the central question of “Capturing Witches” by means of word, image, and song, and examine it as a live issue in both historical and transhistorical forms. Our introduction begins by referring back to iconic biblical and classical figures whose legacy can be seen across the centuries, in order to provide a context for introducing the questions of representation addressed by each of our contributors. Chronologically, the articles cover material from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, starting with Yvonne Owens's account of the conflation of Jews and witches as marginalized “others” in images by Hans Baldung Grien in sixteenth-century Germany. Articles by Diane Purkiss, Meg Pearson, and Eleanor Rycroft focus on early seventeenth-century England and the Lancashire Trials, while the piece by Marcus Harmes outlines a wider context for the trials by tracing the competing accounts of witchcraft in clerical and legal discourses in Jacobean England. The ways that twenty-first-century digital technologies can be used to reconstruct narratives about early modern witchcraft from the fragments in historical records is addressed in Kirsten C. Uszkalo's account of the ongoing online project Witches in Early Modern England.7 Digital humanities creates a methodology for trans-historical research to offer “robust searching and pattern finding within references from 290 texts, providing entries on approximately 150 years of English witchcraft published between 1550–1700.” Macro-reading across such a large database produces new stories of these early modern subjects.An explicitly transhistorical approach is adopted in the two articles by Begoña Echeverria and Chloe Buckley. In “Capturing Basque Witches, Releasing Lyrical Resources,” Echeverria moves “From Historical Cases to Folk Song” in an account of how the stories used to capture and burn eleven Basque women in 1610 were translated into lyrics celebrating a subversive, female-centered community, a folk tradition that was recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chloe Buckley's piece, “‘Hatcht up in Villanie and Witchcraft’: Historical, Fictional, and Fantastical ‘Recuperations’ of the Witch Child,” offers an account of how the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trial, and its central witness Jennet Device, have been reconfigured in the fictional representations and in the BBC documentary produced to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary in 2012.Although the Lancashire Witch Trial was a new phenomena to early modern England, the “capturing” of “witches” in 1612 is part of a long tradition of persecution stretching back to classical Europe as well as forward to twenty-first-century representations. A fear of female learning, of sources of knowledge or understanding that threatened exclusive masculine control, is evident in both secular and spiritual contexts. The mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (370–415) and the biblical figure of the Witch of Endor are two figures whose ancient, iconic status illuminates the ways in which gendered constructions of witchcraft are configured and reconfigured across time. Hypatia's involvement in a political battle between the leaders of church and state led to her being hacked to pieces by a mob wielding sharp objects (possibly oyster shells), and then being dismembered and burned, a fate that has obvious parallels with the persecution of witches in later periods. We do not know whether the mob was enraged by Hypatia's political stance, her supposed beguiling with “enchantments,” or her position as head of the Neoplatonist school in Alexandria.8 The fact that her punishment mirrors Constantius II's law of 358 that magicians, augurs, astrologers, and pretenders to divination should have their flesh torn off with claws or iron hooks, suggests that Hypatia's claims to authority in public, traditionally masculine fields of activity may have been construed as a form of forbidden knowledge. Maria Dzielska has ably demonstrated how Hypatia has fascinated later centuries of writers, serving as an icon of intellectual inquiry in times of change in texts like Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia.9 Perhaps the legacy of Hypatia's construction as a witch lay behind the curious labeling of the work of a subsequent female mathematician, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–99). In 1748, Agnesi, who, at the age of nine, had declaimed a Latin oration defending women's rights to an academic education, published an algebraic calculation for the turning curve versiera first studied by Pierre de Fermat in 1630. Versiera (deriving from the Latin “to turn”) was mistranslated as “witch” (from the Italian aversierre) by John Colson (1680–1760) and ever since the curve has been called “The Witch of Agnesi.”10In the spiritual context, the figure who most preoccupied Christian writers was the Witch of Endor who, at Saul's request, raised a spirit that resembled the aged, cloaked figure of the dead prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28). The Witch of Endor posed a particular problem to early modern religious commentators. Thomas Bentley's Sixth Lampe of Virginitie, conteining a mirrour for maidens and matrons (1572) was unequivocal in its condemnation of “Suche as vsed vile witchecraft, sorcerie, and diuelish inchauntmentes, contrary to Gods Lawes,” citing “Iesabell, the witch of Endor,” and “the woman and hir mayde of Phillippie” as examples.11 However, Bentley's account of 1 Samuel 28 (where Saul disguises himself and goes to Endor to ask a woman to raise the spirit of the prophet Samuel) is more equivocal. Bentley certainly names her as the “witch” but presents her more as a victim than an agent of evil, and Saul as an empowered, active pursuer of it. Saul had outlawed all forms of witchcraft, and the Witch of Endor, anticipating a trap, “vtterly refused to satisfie his desire” to raise a spirit. Once Saul had reassured her, she “went to worke her diuelish feate” at his bidding. Having recognized Saul through his disguise, however, she thinks “her selfe but a dead woman for playing the sorceresse.”12 Bentley's version of the biblical narrative assumes the Witch of Endor's perspective here and in subsequent events, where it assumes more authority. The woman's recognition of her master contrasts with Saul's misrecognition of the spirit as Samuel, “although in truth it was Sathan”; Saul's weakness takes physical form after hearing the spirit's prophesy of defeat and death at the hands of the Philistines: “Sore frighted & astonied in his mind, wt feare at these terrible threatnings” he faints and collapses while, most uncharacteristically for the type, “ye witch seeing him thus sore troubled, thinking yt he had fainted with fasting too long,” advises him with motherly care to have something to eat.13 Bentley's witch is deferential but firm, ending the story like a typical housewife who sends off Saul and his men having “thus well refreshed and cheered them vp” with bread and meat (1 Samuel 28: 20–25). Bentley reads “Gods heauy iudgment vpon Saule,” rather than the witch, with the story offering Christian readers of the present an example “whereby we see and may learne what those foolish and vaine women (or men) get for the most part, that in their troubles and misery so forsake God and follow Sathan, by seeking vnlawfull meanes, euen in these bright shyning dayes of Christs Gospel.”14Being deluded by false authority and pursuing “unlawfull meanes” rather than the true path took on extra resonance in the socio-religious context of Counter-Reformation Europe and Protestant England. The Witch of Endor's apparent ability to raise the spirit of Samuel hit on a major point of theological difference: the nature of ghosts. In Henry Holland's dialogue A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590), Mysodaemon and Theophilus have a long argument about whether the Witch of Endor has the power to conjure the spirit of a Christian who has gone to heaven, like Samuel. Mysodaemon is highly skeptical as to whether the Witch of Endor or any such “seely women, haue anie artes to coniure the deuill, or to conuey him into a boxe (as they say) to raise tempests, to kill and make aliue, I thinke all these are but vaine surmises of credulous and foolish people.” However, Theophilus believes there may be such “Sathanicall witches, which worke indeed many wonders by the help and ministrie of Satan.”15As every early modern subject would have appreciated, the return of spirits to the world of the living was a belief of the “old religion,” rejected by Protestantism. Andrew Willet's Synopsis papismi, that is, A generall viewe of papistry wherein the whole mysterie of iniquitie, and summe of antichristian doctrine is set downe (1592), was quick to point out that to believe “the very soule of Samuel … appeared at the witches' house at Endor vnto Saul” was an egregious error, a willful misreading designed to “proue that the soules of the Patriarkes were not in heauen, but in some infernall place, before Christs coming.”16 Thomas Adams's The Happines of the Church (1619) likewise condemned those who “alleage the Witch of Endor” made “Samuel appeare to Saul, and answere him. But the truth is, that was not Samuel indeed, but an apparition, the meere countefet of him. For not all the Witches in the world, nor all the Diuels in hell can disquiet the soules of the faithfull.”17The association of “meer counterfeit” Catholic worship with witchcraft is taken up in this volume via Diane Purkiss's essay, “Charming Witches: The ‘Old Religion’ and the Pendle Trial.” Purkiss directs attention to the residual culture of Catholicism in early modern Lancashire as a factor that casts new light on the 1612 testimonies recorded by Potts. The charms attributed to the women accused of witchcraft in 1612 are, she asserts, garbled forms of Catholic prayers, defined as such by the Device family and close to “many a modern novena to saints.” The “garbling” may be the result of the process of memorial construction in which the Devices “remembered bits of liturgy with regard to the known denotation of words, but without regard to or perhaps even knowledge of grammar.” In addition, Potts's transcriptions may have been deliberately fashioned to show the charms' garbled Latin as diabolic, since, “for Potts, and increasingly for others, the search for witches and the search for Catholics were one and the same.” Conflating witches with people who held “alternative” religious beliefs was a useful policy for the dominant authorities.The powers of church and state were not always united in their approaches to witchcraft, however, as Marcus Harmes's article, “The Archbishop and the Lord Chief Justice: Dispossessions and the Clash of Jurisdictions in Jacobean England,” demonstrates. Harmes shows how clearly defined types such as crones, witches, and cantankerous old women were “catalysts for arguments about the negotiation of power” between the clergyman Richard Bancroft and the judicial authorities such as the Lord Chief Justice Edmund Anderson and his successor. Beginning with an outline of the civil and ecclesiastical courts, the article explores how Richard Bancroft, bishop of London and subsequently archbishop of Canterbury and representing the High Commission, clashed with judges of the King's Bench over cases of alleged demonic possession in the trials of Alice Goodridge, Elizabeth Jackson, and Mary Glover. Harmes then considers how this conflict, amplified and refracted, featured in anti-episcopal polemic, focusing in particular on the writings by and about the minister and lecturer John Darrel, including the anonymous tract The Triall of Maist[er] Dorrell; or, A Collection of Defences (1599).The policy of strategically conflating marginalized religious groups with witches (as considered by Diane Purkiss with reference to Lancashire Catholics) is taken up again by Yvonne Owens in her article, “The Saturnine History of Jews and Witches.” Whereas Purkiss focuses on charms, Owens concentrates on artistic representations of witchcraft by the Strasburg Humanist Hans Baldung Grien. His fantastic images, she argues, exemplify a tendency on the part of church and state powers in sixteenth-century Germany to group witches and Jews together as peoples infused with polluted blood. Owens offers ample evidence of how the typing of Jews as ruled by Saturn, and thus melancholic, phlegmatic, and physiologically toxic, contributed much to the debates on witches, and that these debates were exemplified in pictorial representations as well as in words.Hans Baldung Grien made what is perhaps a more surprising visual connection between witchcraft and religion in his 1511 picture of St. Anne, as Jean Wirth has shown.18 This remarkable engraving depicts the Holy Family and St. Anne beside a dead tree with a living vine climbing up it (alluding to the Passion). While the Christ child reaches up for Mary's hair, his grandmother, St. Anne, places her outstretched index and middle finger over his genitals, on which her gaze is firmly focused. Carl Koch, who noticed the detail in 1959, proposed that under the pretext of a pious painting of the Virgin and her mother, Baldung had in fact represented St. Anne casting a spell over the infant Jesus.19 Wirth points out that it is impossible to know whether this is a protective charm or a maleficent curse (the latter being fulfilled in the Passion where Jesus suffers a premature death and dies without children). Either way, as he observes, Baldung has presented St. Anne as a witch. Wirth proposes that this and three similar examples that feature St. Anne with the traditional posture or accouterments of a witch, are part of a strategic attempt to dismantle the cult of St. Anne, which had become increasingly powerful since its foundation in 1494.20The affective power of visual representations of witchcraft was recognized by Charles Lamb in an 1823 essay titled “Witches, and other Night Fears.” Lamb's alter ego, Elia, illustrates the persistence of human irrational fear of witches, even in post-Enlightenment England, by referring to a pseudo-autobiographical account of how, as a child, he was haunted by an illustration of the Witch of Endor in Thomas Stackhouse's New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity (1742–44).21 Lamb's essay draws attention to the child as a key figure in the transmission of experiences of witchcraft, something that features strongly in the accounts of the two Lancashire Witch Trials and runs through to examples of contemporary fiction for children as well as stories focused on children. Chloe Buckley's article takes up this topic, focusing on the appearances of Jennet Device as a key witness in the 1612 trial and in Thomas Potts's account, and then her ghostly reappearances in the BBC's television documentary The Pendle Witch Child (2011). For Buckley, “the representation of historical witches often serves to tell a story about the present.” Thus “Jennet, the vulnerable witch child who acted with her persecutors against her family, throws up the most unstable interpretations and threatens to undo the recuperation for which retellings of the Pendle story strive.” By placing The Pendle Witch Child alongside Joseph Delaney's fantasy novels for children, The Wardstone Chronicles (2004–), Buckley shows how the witch child can inhabit a multiplicity of possibilities and landscapes, including a textual space where she can talk back rather than being ventriloquized.The subversive nature of the witch's voice, noted by Purkiss in the garbled prayers or charms attributed to the Lancashire women, is further explored in Begoña Echeverria's article. In order to contextualize the persecution of the eleven Basque women who were burned at the stake in 1610 in Logroño, Spain, Echeverria begins with a detailed analysis of Pierre De Lancre's treatise On the Inconstancy of Witches.22 His account of witchcraft in Lapurdi presents details of the witches' sabbaths, including images of their cooking, dancing, flying, assignations with the Devil, and enjoyment of diverse diabolical “melodious instruments” by which they are “enraptured.” Echeverria argues that these pictures of witchcraft, consistent with the confessions of the Logroño witches, are specifically Basque, informed by Basque mythology and produced by the Inquisition. She goes on to show how the witches, captured by De Lancre and in Logrondo, differ widely from those that appear in later Basque folk songs. While the former are sexually deviant, cannibalistic, and Devil-worshipping, the latter are comic, fun-loving tricksters. Witchcraft among these all-female groups involves drinking, gambling, and gossiping, creating carnivalesque disorder, such as objects moving of their own accord, and transforming into cats, and outwitting male authority figures.The subversive carnivalesque humor associated with witches in the folk songs is played out to its fullest in Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's 1634 play The Late Lancashire Witches, as discussed in Meg Pearson's article, “The Late Lancashire Witches: The Girls Next Door.” Pearson concentrates on the community rituals that characterize the Lancashire society depicted in the play: its feasts, weddings, and skimmington ride, allying these to the popular image of Lancashire as a county notorious for its determination to retain the practice of old festive traditions, including the “old religion” (as discussed by Purkiss). Pearson argues that, rather than being seen as terrifying, witchcraft is shown as “domestic, as nonthreatening, and as theatrically festive as a maypole or a feast,” a fully integrated part of “a Lancashire community centered on fellowship.” The play can thus be read as an interrogation of the patterns of hegemony and exclusion found in other early modern witchcraft plays.Eleanor Rycroft's essay, “Voicing Women, ‘Community’ Drama, and The Late Lancashire Witches” considers how the dynamics of community in the script translated to a contemporary context by critically appraising the production she directed at Lancaster Castle on August 17, 2012. While the play was the product of a period that rendered witchcraft less visible, Rycroft argues that it nevertheless offers a “substantial response and contribution to the witchcraft phenomenon.” London-centric in their immediate focus, “the playwrights uneasily negotiate a witchcraft belief that they alternately try to displace onto a gullible, rural, Catholicized northern community, and at the same time tentatively endorse, as they await the ruling of the London authorities.” With a view to revivifying the dramatic textures of The Late Lancashire Witches via a critical approach attendant to the politics of space and place, Rycroft's semi-staging of the play in Lancaster Castle—“the first (albeit staged) witchcraft trial to be held at the castle since the trial of the women who are the subject of the play”— illustrates “the value and potential for scholarly application of critical understanding gained through practice-based theater research.”In many ways, Heywood and Brome's play engages with the politics of spatiality inherent in the 1612 Lancaster Witch Trials. Indeed, “the whole case started with an encounter [on March 21, 1612] between a traveling peddler [John Law] and a girl [Alizon Device] on the road.”23 One of the most evocative creative dialogues with the 1612 trial was Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Katie Etheridge's Signs & Wonders, “a series of walking performances and interventions in the city and landscape,”24 which drew attention to the phenomenological aspects of the early modern witch. With an emphasis on the poetics of emplacement, Signs & Wonders presented a series of interactive episodes that began on Thursday, August 20, 2012, with a piece called Decanting in which the performers, dressed as peddlers, implicitly cast the audience as Alizon Device as they assembled to walk the precise number of steps taken by the women and man convicted in the 1612 trials as they moved from Lancaster Castle to the site of their execution. Providing a counterpoint to Potts's statement that it is “necessary for men to know and vnderstande the meanes whereby they worke their mischiefe, the hidden misteries of their diuelish and wicked Inchauntmentes, Charmes, and Sorceries,”25 these immersive encounters make manifest the ways in which selfhoods are contingent on bodies as well as minds. In her account of “The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity,” Constance Classen explains that: while men could be accused of witchcraft as well as women, the witch was typically represented as female and most of the witches brought to trial were women…. (Even male witches were symbolically female in their alliance with “feminine” forces of corruption.) In the case of the witch all the faults customarily attributed to women were magnified and demonized. To begin with, witches defined sensory and social norms by using the feminine senses of touch, taste and smell as media for self-gratification, rather than self-sacrifice, and as avenues for empowerment rather than instruments of service.26 The multisensory depictions of witchcraft, using images, sounds, song, and associations of touch, smell, and taste, are evident across the articles in this “Capturing Witches” issue, from garbled charms, to Hans Baldung Grien's engravings, to Basque folk songs, to the carnivalesque disorder in Brome and Heywood's play. Nevertheless, the propensity to define the early modern witch in line with the sexual politics of the early modern sensorium, noted by Classen, is indicative of a culture ready to embrace the hierarchical demarcations of Cartesian dualism in terrifying ways.Our own fascination with revisiting these earlier stories is evidenced in the popular Witches in Early Modern England digital database and website, dedicated to remembering the lives recorded in scraps of evidence and fragments of stories found in legal records and other printed texts from the early modern period. The aims of the project and an outline of some of its possible applications are given by Kirsten C. Uszkalo in her essay on the project as a means of “Capturing Magics” via micro-historical and visualization research. Over the last four hundred years, from words spoken in courtrooms or on stage or written on paper, to images and sculptures, interactive websites and reenactments in Lancaster Castle and on Pendle Hill, witches have been captured rhetorically and artistically to entertain, teach, amuse, and shock readers and listeners. All the articles presented here testify to the truth of Charles Lamb's view on the enduring power that witches exert over the imagination. His essay begins with the following words: “We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their Creed of Witchcraft.” Figures like sorcerers and witches are “transcripts” or types, but “the archetypes are in us, and are eternal.”27