Witchcraft and Discourses of Identity and Alterity in Early Modern England, c. 1680-1760 by Charlotte McMurtry Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in History University of Ottawa © Charlotte McMurtry, Ottawa, Canada, 2020 ii Abstract Witchcraft and Discourses of Identity and Alterity in Early Modern England, c. 1680-1760 Charlotte McMurtry Dr. Richard Connors 2020 Witchcraft beliefs were a vital element of the social, religious, and political landscapes of England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. English society, buffeted by ongoing processes of social, economic, and religious change, was increasingly polarized along material, ideological, and intellectual lines, exacerbated by rising poverty and inequality, political factionalism, religious dissension, and the emergence of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning. The embeddedness of witchcraft and demonism in early modern English cosmologies and quotidian social relations meant that religious and existential anxieties, interpersonal disputes, and threats to local order, settled by customary self-regulatory methods at the local level or prosecuted in court, were often encompassed within the familiar language and popular discourses of witchcraft, social order, and difference. Using trial pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and intellectual texts, this thesis examines the imbrications of these discourses and their collectively- determined meanings within the increasingly rationalized legal contexts and widening world of Augustan England, demonstrating the often deeply encoded ways in which early modern English men and women made sense of their own experiences and constituted and re-constituted their identities and affinities. Disorderly by nature, an inversion of natural, religious, and social norms, witchcraft in the Christian intellectual tradition simultaneously threatened and preserved order. Just as light could iii not exist without dark, or good without evil, there could be no fixed state of order: its existence was determined, in part, by its antithesis. Such diacritical oppositions extended beyond the metaphysical and are legible in contemporary notions of social difference, including attitudes about the common and poorer sorts of people, patriarchal gender and sexual roles, and nascent racial ideologies. These attitudes, roles, and ideologies drew sharp distinctions between normative and transgressive appearances, behaviours, and beliefs. This thesis argues that they provided a blueprint for the discursive construction of identity categories, defined in part by alterity, and that intelligible in witchcraft discourses are these fears of and reactions to disruptive and disorderly difference, otherness, and deviance—reactions which could themselves become deeply disruptive. In exploring the intersections of poverty, gender, sexuality, and race within collective understandings of witchcraft in Augustan England, this thesis aims to contribute to our understandings of the complex and dynamic ways in which English men and women perceived themselves, their communities, and the world around them. iv Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Drs. Heather Murray and Nicole St-Onge for their examinations and evaluations of the thesis. Their feedback and suggestions have greatly improved the final iteration of this work. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for awarding me the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and to the University of Ottawa for the Excellence Scholarship and Teaching Assistantships. This generous funding enabled me to focus on my work and to travel abroad to carry out necessary archival research. I owe a great deal to my thesis advisor, Dr. Richard Connors, whose expert guidance, encouragement, wisdom, patience, and good humour taught me to think deeply and curiously about early modern history and motivate me to be a better historian. To Mom, Dad, Olivia, and the Farrells: Thank you for graciously giving me all the pep talks I requested, keeping me disciplined, believing in my ability when I didn’t, and distracting me when I needed it. To Lieyle and Kim: Thank you for the constancy, the support, and the laughter. For Koko. v Table of Contents Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………… ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………………… v Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One: Witchcraft Beliefs, Evidence, and Justice in a Changing Legal Culture .. 22 Transformations in legal thought and evidence ……………………………………… 30 Popular justice …………………………………………………………………..……. 47 Chapter Two: Ideologies of Poverty, Gender, and Witchcraft …………………………... 63 Gender, social order, and attitudes towards poverty …………………………………. 66 Gender, emotion, and embodiment …………………………………………………... 83 Chapter Three: Race, Gender, and Inversion in Witchcraft Discourses……………….... 93 Discourses of blackness ………………………………………………………………. 96 Race and sex in witchcraft pamphlets ………………………………………………... 109 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………………….. 126 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………… 134 1 INTRODUCTION Since the nineteenth century, witchcraft has been a perennial subject of historical interest. It has received continuous and sustained scholarly focus since perhaps the 1970s, with the marriage of historical and anthropological methods. Since then the study of witchcraft has become increasingly multidisciplinary. As the proliferation of approaches has shown, witchcraft can be understood at once as a social, cultural, political, religious, psychological and psychosocial, gendered, even perhaps racialized set of dynamic beliefs and processes. Not only was witchcraft a vital component of medieval and early modern cosmologies which recognized the existence of spirits, but it also played a constitutive role in the elaboration of social relations.1 Witch-trials were products of a complex intersection of factors: “the contingent functions of institutions, officers and law codes from above, reacting with the beliefs, fears and customs of the lower orders.”2 Since the 1970s, historians of witchcraft have followed trends in the broader historiography of early modernity, incorporating the interdisciplinary methods of social, cultural, linguistic, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches. The continuous fascination with witchcraft is in part tied to its interpretational fluidity. The penumbral nature of early modern mental worlds, the tangled webs of discourses, the regional and temporal peculiarities reflecting the scale of variegation in early modern societies, and the often opaque or piecemeal nature of documentary evidence about witchcraft both encourages the 1 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 489; Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 504, 510-11; Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80; Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991), 100. 2 Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,” Past & Present no. 198 (2008), 34. 2 historian’s imagination and limits the applicability of their findings. These considerations often render concrete assessments problematic. In attempting to counterbalance modern sceptical perspectives of the occult by foregrounding its inarguable embeddedness in early modern cultures and cognitive frameworks, historians are able to attend more closely to the interplay of mentalities, language and discursive construction, and broader social and economic forces intelligible in extant archival and print documents about witchcraft. The ‘new’ social history emerged in the 1970s as a response to the previous trends of social historical inquiry, borrowing from anthropology and proposing an alternative interpretation of social formations and patterns to the more structural and elite-driven interpretation which had previously dominated early modern British historiography.3 Regional and micro-historical studies of witchcraft are a part of this tradition and have persuasively shown the embeddedness of witchcraft beliefs in early modern localities both rural and urban, the disorderly impacts and reverberations of witchcraft activities and prosecutions on communities, and the complexities of neighbourly and official reactions and responses.4 3 See Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison, and Charles Jardine, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Keith Thomas, “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, Two Views,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1 (1975), 91-109; Keith Wrightson, “The Enclosure of English Social History,” Rural History 1, no. 1 (1990), 73-82; idem, “The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England,” in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (London: Macmillan, 1996), 10-46. For the historiography of the state in this period, see Steve Hindle, “Introduction: the State and Local Society,” in The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550-1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1-36. 4 See for example Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study