WITCHCRAFT CONTINUED: Popular Magic in Modern Europe
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WITCHCRAFT CONTINUED Popular magic in modern Europe edited by Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies Manchester University Press Manchester Copyright © Manchester University Press 2004 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6658 1 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 6658 0 ISBN 0 7190 6659 x paperback EAN 978 0 7190 6659 7 First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Monotype Bell by Carnegie Publishing Ltd, Lancaster CONTENTS Contents Contents List of contributors page vii Introduction: witchcraft continued Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies 1 1 A case of witchcraft assault in early nineteenth-century England as ostensive action Stephen Mitchell 14 2 Witchcraft, witch doctors and the fight against ‘superstition’ in nineteenth-century Germany Nils Freytag 29 3 The witch and the detective: mid-Victorian stories and beliefs Susan Hoyle 46 4 Narrative and the social dynamics of magical harm in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland Laura Stark 69 5 Boiling chickens and burning cats: witchcraft in the western Netherlands, 1850–1925 Willem de Blécourt 89 6 Witchcraft accusations in France, 1850–1990 Owen Davies 107 7 Magical healing in Spain (1875–1936): medical pluralism and the search for hegemony Enrique Perdiguero 133 8 Witchcraft, healing and vernacular magic in Italy Sabina Magliocco 151 9 Curse, maleficium, divination: witchcraft on the borderline of religion and magic Éva Pócs 174 10 Spooks and spooks: black magic and bogeymen in Northern Ireland, 1973–74 Richard Jenkins 191 Index 213 CONTRIBUTORS Contributors Contributors Willem de Blécourt is Honorary Research Fellow at the Huizinga Institute of Cultural History, Amsterdam. He has written numerous articles on witchcraft, popular culture and irregular medicine, published in Dutch, German and English journals such as Social History, Medical History and Gender & History. His most recent book is Het Amazonenleger [The Army of Amazons] (1999) which deals with irregular female healers in the Nether- lands, 1850–1930. He is currently writing a book on werewolves to be published by London and Hambledon Press. He is also working on a history of witchcraft in the Netherlands. Owen Davies is a Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published numerous articles on the history of witchcraft and magic in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century England and Wales. He is also the author of Witchcraft, magic and culture 1736–1951 (Manchester University Press, 1999) and A People Bewitched (1999). His most recent book is Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (2003). Nils Freytag is an assistant professor at the University of Munich. He is the author of Aberglauben im 19. Jahrhundert. Preußen und seine Rheinprovinz zwischen Tradition und Moderne 1815–1918 (2003), and along with Diethard Sawicki is currently editing Ent- zauberte Moderne?, a collection of essays on the occult in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. His research interests include the social, cultural and environmental history of Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan Hoyle took early retirement from British Rail in 1996 after a varied career, mainly concerned with public transport. She is now an independent scholar and writer, and amongst other projects is working on narratives about the battle of Trafalgar, as well as Victorian witches and detectives. She lives near Land’s End. Richard Jenkins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. He has carried out ethnographic field research in Northern Ireland, England, Wales and Denmark. Among his recent publications are Pierre Bourdieu (2nd edn, 2002), Social Identity (1996), Rethinking Ethnicity (1997), Questions of Competence (1998) and Foundations of Sociology (2002). Sabina Magliocco is Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of The Two Madonnas: The Politics of Festival in a Sardinian Community (1993), Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole (2001), and numerous articles. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Hu- manities fellowships, she has done fieldwork in Italy and the United States on ritual, festival, folk narrative and material culture. Stephen Mitchell is Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University. His research in recent years has focused on witchcraft and performance in medieval Scandinavia and includes ‘Nordic Witchcraft in Transition: Impotence, Heresy, and Diabolism in 14th-century Bergen’ (Scandia), ‘Blåkulla and its Antecedents: Transvection and Conventicles in Nordic Witchcraft’ (Alvíssmál), ‘Anaphrodisiac Charms in the Nordic Middle Ages: Impotence, Infertility, and Magic’ (Norveg), ‘Folklore and Philology viii Contributors Revisited: Medieval Scandinavian Folklore?’ (Norden og Europa), and ‘Gender and Nordic Witchcraft in the Later Middle Ages’ (Arv). Enrique Perdiguero is Senior Lecturer of History of Science at Miguel Hernández University, Alicante, Spain. His main research interests are the interplay between popular and academic medicine and the development of public health services. Recent publications in English include: J. Bernabeu, R. Huertas, E. Rodríguez and E. Perdiguero, ‘History of health, a valuable tool in public health’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (2001); J. Bernabeu and E. Perdiguero, ‘At the Service of Spain and Spanish Children: Mother and Child Healthcare in Spain During the First Two Decades of Franco’s Regime (1939–1963)’, in I. Löwy and J. Krige (eds), Images of Disease: Science, Public Policy and Health in Post-war Europe (2001). Éva Pócs has published widely on South-Eastern and Central European beliefs concerning fairies, magic and witchcraft from the medieval to the modern period. Her most recent major English-language publication is Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (1999). She is also the editor of Demons, Spirits, Witches: Church Demonology and Popular Mythology (Budapest, forthcoming). Laura Stark is a researcher at the Academy of Finland and a docent in the Department of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her recent publications include Magic, Body and Social Order: The Construction of Gender Through Women’s Private Rituals in Traditional Finland (1998), and Peasants, Pilgrims and Sacred Promises: Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk Religion (2002). Two current research topics include concepts of body as self represented in the magic beliefs and practices of nineteenth- century agrarian Finland, and how modernization was experienced by the Finnish rural populace between 1860 and 1960. Witchcraft continued Introduction Introduction: witchcraft continued Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies The study of witchcraft accusations in Europe during the period after the end of the witch trials is still in its infancy. The present volume, together with its companion Beyond the witch trials, intends to develop the field further by presenting a plethora of studies from across Europe and, most importantly, to inspire new research. Whereas Beyond the witch trials focused on the period of the Enlightenment, from the late seventeenth through to the end of the eighteenth century, here we pay attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once again we have sought to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, whose contributions demonstrate the value of applying the analytical tools of sociology, anthropology, folkloristics and literary studies to historical sources. Above all they show that the history of witchcraft in the modern era is as much a story of continuation as of decline. The nineteenth century stands out as the great unknown in witchcraft studies, although this differs from country to country. Flanked on one side by the eighteenth century, during which the pyres still flared occasionally in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Hungary, and the Mediterranean Inquisitions were still active, and on the other by the twentieth century, during which anthropologists, folklorists and legal researchers generated volumes of new witchcraft material, the 1800s have often escaped extensive scrutiny.1 This is at least the case when we look at witchcraft studies on a European scale. England is a notable exception, but compared with much of the continent it received little attention from twentieth-century fieldworkers.2 The question is whether this primarily reflects the state of research or the actual historical situation. The English case is complicated, moreover, by the invention of witchcraft as a pagan religion during the 1950s, which, as Gustav Henningsen wrote, had