Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Emotions in the History of Witchcraft

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.7.2.0275

2161-2196

Julian Goodare,

Research on the history of emotions has gathered pace in recent years, and certain lines of enquiry have emerged with particular clarity. Some of the most ambitious and original work has attempted to write the history of emotions themselves, charting the way in which different emotions rose and fell in their prominence or their cultural and political acceptability. Meanwhile, however, a second line of inquiry has emerged and become perhaps more common. This seeks out emotions within established historiographical fields, asking how the field can be enriched by a study of the emotions that were expressed by individuals in particular historical contexts. The book under review, as its title makes clear, pursues this second line of inquiry for a well-established historiographical field: the history of witchcraft.Witchcraft is an ideal field in which to study emotions. The quarrels and curses that fed into witchcraft accusations were emotional dramas at the village level. The elite fantasies of demonic sexuality and cannibalistic infanticide at the sabbath made a powerful emotional appeal. These themes, of course, were prominent during the history of Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and most of the book's chapters address this history.The book has been well planned to explore a wide range of themes, not all of which can be discussed in detail in this review. The chapters are arranged in four sections, of which the two largest, “In Representation” and “On Trial,” respectively explore emotions in demonological writings and emotions in witchcraft trial records. The third section, “In the Mind,” comprises three chapters that open up perspectives from beyond conventional history; Edward Bever's chapter on bullying and Sarah Ferber's on demonic possession draw on psychology, while Peter Geschiere's chapter on African comparisons with European witchcraft draws on anthropology. The final section, “In History,” comprises just one substantive chapter, by Laurel Zwissler, on contemporary neopagan uses of historical witchcraft, plus an “Afterword” from Malcolm Gaskill, whose own ongoing research into witchcraft and emotions enables him both to comment on the book's contents and to make recommendations for future research. One of his especially noteworthy points is that historians often encounter not the actual emotions of the past, but the ideas that contemporaries had about other people's emotions. The idea that witches were unable to shed tears is a case in point.Most of the book's contributors are established scholars, many of whom revisit familiar territory, and even, one suspects, some of their favorite cases. However, the focus on emotions always gives them something new to say. Tamar Herzig shows that the attitudes toward gender of the notorious demonologist Heinrich Institoris (Krämer) are more varied than might be thought from just reading his Malleus Maleficarum. E. J. Kent revisits male witches in England, showing that their representations have similarities with representations of “tyrants” whose emotions were out of control. Robin Briggs discusses a wide range of emotions, particularly the negative emotions of fear, anger, and hatred, in trials in the duchy of Lorraine. Valerie Kivelson examines Russian love charms, deployed by women attempting to solve various difficulties—not only seeking to gain or regain the affection of a partner, but also, in some cases, the affection of a master. Charlotte-Rose Millar brings a fresh angle to the much-studied English witchcraft pamphlets, looking at the emotional relationship that the narratives depict between the female witch and the male demonic “familiar.” Exactly whose narratives these are—the witch's or the anonymous narrator's—remains enigmatic, but these pamphlets continue to exercise a fascination.Rita Voltmer's chapter on “The Witch in the Courtroom” mounts a powerful and wide-ranging attack on the idea that we can identify actual emotions in witchcraft trial records. What the records give us, she argues, are “representations of emotion” (97)—accounts of conventional emotions that accused witches were assumed to express in the course of interrogation and torture. Voltmer meticulously reconstructs the ways in which such interrogations were carried out, culturally understood, and recorded. Her chapter actually worries the editors, who fear that she might be closing off our access to the genuine emotions of the past; they go so far as to state in their introduction that “most of the contributors to the volume come to different conclusions” than Voltmer does (12). Michael Ostling's own chapter, for example, focuses on “expressions arguably more representative of genuine emotional states” in Polish trial records (156). He ambitiously sets out to find, not anger, envy, fear, or other familiar witchcraft emotions, but the emotion of love—and does indeed find it. He also has a wise conclusion: “One does not discover the individual by subtracting discourse and examining whatever is left over, nor by peeling away convention and motif to reveal an authentic core. People express their subjectivity, to themselves as to others, through the motifs and structures available” (168). The apparent disagreement between Ostling and Voltmer may be a disagreement more in appearance than in substance.Laura Kounine's chapter on the Lorraine demonologist Nicolas Remy is important for its analysis of the Devil's emotions as Remy saw them—particularly jealousy and a propensity to violence. Kounine's argument is slightly marred by a facile and unnecessary attack on Stuart Clark, whose account of the gendering of demonology is subtler than she seems to think, but the idea of the Devil's emotions is a striking one. The “emotions” that we find in Remy's text are definitely not expressions of “authentic” emotions by any historical actor, yet they seem no less powerful for all that. Historians of “emotions” should more often take a broader view of their subject: not only actual emotions felt and expressed by concrete historical actors, but also emotions that historical actors attributed to others around them. Attributing emotions to others could also entail attributing emotions to otherworld beings, such as the Devil.Visual artists worked with a distinct concept of witchcraft in which the witch—almost always prominently female—was identified by her looks and her witchy accessories, rather than by her words or behavior. Charles Zika analyzes the witchcraft images of Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, in which fearsome hags mutilate corpses and brew up gruesome potions. The grouping of witches around a corpse, Zika argues, provides a “counter-Pietà image” (53), responding to the Pietà tradition in which the Virgin Mary and her associates lament the Crucifixion of Christ. Incidentally, one of the Pietà images that Zika illustrates is so affecting that it has also appeared on the cover of Jan Plamper's book The History of Emotions (Oxford, 2015). Zika's conclusion is a provocative one: de Gheyn was not trying to depict real practices, and probably did not believe that witches mutilated corpses or brewed potions. He more likely subscribed to the skeptical position of Johann Weyer that witches were harmless sufferers from “melancholy.” His point, therefore, was that the “melancholic” witch would imagine herself carrying out cruel and inhuman acts. Here, too, therefore, we see “emotions,” not as they are experienced and expressed directly, but as they are attributed to others.The volume's highlights include the methodological and comparative chapters, such as that by Peter Geschiere, a leading expert on witchcraft in modern Africa. He offers a comparative anthropological perspective, pointing out a fascinating conundrum: African witchcraft accusations usually play themselves out within extended families, whereas historians of early modern Europe give the impression that victims of witchcraft rarely pointed the finger at a member of their own kinsfolk. Geschiere reads these historians carefully to point out a number of occasions in which kinsfolk were accused, and to urge a more careful attention to the structures of power in the early modern village. Certainly, historians of early modern European witchcraft need to recognize that their topic is not just “witchcraft” or “witch hunting,” and that witchcraft documents may reveal insights about many other aspects of village life.Another highlight is Edward Bever's chapter on the relationship between bullying and witchcraft. Recent psychological research on bullying, he suggests, can enable us to identify patterns in early modern village quarrels. These quarrels, as we know, often led to accusations of witchcraft when a misfortune occurred to one of the quarreling parties. Bever distinguishes between two types of aggression: “reactive” aggression, which is defensive and often short-term, and “predatory” aggression, which is often purposeful over a longer term. Bullies are predators who plan their attacks on their victims. Some accused witches, Bever shows, acted in this way toward their neighbors. This chapter complements Bever's earlier work showing that some witchcraft victims are likely to have suffered illness from failures in their autoimmune systems as a result of being cursed; it brings out, perhaps more clearly than his 2008 book The Realities of Witchcraft, the broad interpretative framework within which he operates. He is certainly not trying to reduce everything to biology, as some of his critics have mistakenly argued. Bever's review of recent neuroscientific work on anger and fear, arguably the two most important emotions in witchcraft, is a valuable resource in itself. Historians of witchcraft should learn from his example, and from the example of the other contributors to this book, to take a broad view of their subject.