THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY of WITCHCRAFT and MAGIC OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, Spi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi The historians who contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic are all distinguished authorities in their field. They are: OWEN DAVIES, University of Hertfordshire WILLEM DE BLÉCOURT, Huizinga Institute/Meertens Institute, Amsterdam PETER MAXWELL-STUART, University of St Andrews SOPHIE PAGE, University College London JAMES SHARPE, University of York RITA VOLTMER, University of Trier ROBERT J. WALLIS, Richmond University CHARLES ZIKA, University of Melbourne OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC Edited by Owen Davies 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2017 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933208 ISBN 978–0–19–960844–7 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi EDITOR’S FOREWORD Many people are vaguely familiar with the history of witchcraft and magic. The topic attracts regular media interest. Yet it is also a subject around which swirls much misunderstanding, misinformed opinion, and dubious facts. One such peren- nial notion is that witches were burned in England, and likewise the erroneous belief that millions of people were executed during the era of the witch trials. Over the last two centuries this notorious episode in European history has repeatedly been por- trayed as a stain on the medieval age. Yet the vast majority of the prosecutions and executions took place not in the Middle Ages at all, but in what historians refer to as the early modern period, an era which runs roughly from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Words like ‘hysteria’ and ‘craze’ litter the older litera- ture on the subject, and continue to be widely used to describe the trials. Yet as James Sharpe and Rita Voltmer show in their chapters, the causes and pattern of the Euro- pean witch trials were not the result of mass delusion or credulity. The greatest minds of the era believed in the reality of witchcraft and magic. This was a time in Europe when the Reformation transformed religion and politics, legal systems were becom- ing more sophisticated, and science made great strides in understanding the natural world. The belief in witchcraft and magic was not some evolutionary stage that society passed through on the way to general enlightenment and scientific progress. The intense academic and public focus on the early modern witch trials can, itself, be seen as problematic. Does the execution of tens of thousands of people, for example, make it more important and of more historic value to research and understand witchcraft and magic in this era rather than before or after? One of the aims of this Oxford Illustrated History is to describe how witchcraft and magic have a history that stretches back to the beginning of writing 5,000 years ago, and remain with us today as relevant cultural phenomena that continue to reflect fundamental aspects of contemporary societies and individual psychologies. The last three chapters (by myself, Robert Wallis, and Willem de Blécourt) show that we continue to live in a world fascinated by the promise of magic. The origins of magic were already being debated in antiquity, and histories of the witch trials were appearing in Europe before the last of the trials and executions had ended. The topic has excited the minds of artists, playwrights, novelists, and screen writers over the centuries. For some it is the details of magical practices in pursuit of wisdom, health, wealth, desire, and harm that are of most interest, or the fabulous OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi vi Editor’s Foreword stories of the seemingly impossible, such as flying, shape-changing, and conjuring demons and angels. For others it is the gruesome stories of torture, persecution, and execution that intrigue, provoking reflection on how otherwise reasonable human beings could allow and perform such tasks. The history of witchcraft and magic provides rare glimpses into the human psyche and the complexities of human relation- ships in the past in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, and social status. Less exciting to some, perhaps, but equally fascinating is what the history of witchcraft and magic can tell us about how societies formed, developed, and changed over the centuries. It enables us to see the profound if often subtle interactions between different cultures that are obscured by studying the ‘bigger picture’ of war, conquest, and the political games between kings, queens, and emperors. Peter Max- well-Stuart’s chapter provides us with an overview of how magical knowledge and practices reveal the cultural and religious flows between successive empires and religions in the ancient world. Magic unites as well as divides ideologies and religions. Sophie Page’s chapter on medieval magic examines the extraordinary but brief flowering of knowledge exchange between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain. The geography of witchcraft and magic is another important theme running through this book. As Rita Voltmer observes with regard to the witch trials, thinking in terms of modern state boundaries can hinder our understanding of why and how things happened in the past. The same issue applies to the ancient and medieval worlds as well. Maxwell-Stuart notes the problem of talking about ‘Greece’ as an entity, for example. A basic understanding of the Holy Roman Empire is hugely important for making sense of the pattern and nature of the witch trials. During the early modern period the Holy Roman Empire had influence over a big swathe of central and western Europe, and yet this long-lived European dynastic state is little known to the general public today. Germany and Italy did not exist as countries until the mid-nineteenth century, and yet we understandably talk about Germany when discussing the heartland of the trials. As well as being aware of the political geog- raphies of different eras, I highlight in my chapter on popular magic that we also need to be sensitive to local and regional beliefs, and traditions that were not defined by national, religious, or administrative boundaries. This Oxford Illustrated History follows a familiar path in concentrating primarily on telling the story of how witchcraft and magic were viewed, practised, and sup- pressed in the Mediterranean and European world. But, of course, witchcraft and magic are global concepts. Encapsulating the diversity and complex contexts of magical beliefs and practices across seven continents is beyond the scope of a volume such as this. Yet the European experience was not isolated from global influences. Through colonial conquest and expansion from the sixteenth century onwards, Christian conceptions of witchcraft and magic determined how indigenous religions and beliefs overseas were conceptualized and dealt with by Europeans. Indigenous magical practices filtered subtly into European traditions. From the late nineteenth century onwards, western spiritualists and ritual magicians drew inspiration from OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL 11/11/16, SPi Editor’s Foreword vii the mystical traditions and religions of India and the East. Meanwhile the early anthropologists busied themselves gathering data for magical practices from across the globe, searching for overarching theories of human development. And in the final chapter on screen representations of witches and wizards we see how, today, cinema presents certain stereotypes to a global audience. We should not see different parts of the world as being in different stages of human development because they believed in witches or relied on magic in their daily lives. The chapters in this book reveal remarkable continuities in what, why, and how people performed magic in different cultures over the millennia. The reader will find, for instance, the practice of sticking pins into figurines in the chapter on the ancient world and in the one concerned with European folk magic. The books con- sulted and copied by the medieval magicians discussed by Sophie Page have been ‘rediscovered’ over the centuries and are now found on the internet and used by modern magicians. While some of the key concepts that underpin magic are thousands of years old, we must also be careful not to portray the myriad beliefs and practices encompassed by the term ‘magic’ as somehow ageless or unchanging, either globally or within different cultures.

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