MacDonald The Witches of Fife

Witch-Hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560-1710
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-85790-794-3
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Along the coast of Fife, in villages like Culross and Pittenweem, history records that some women were executed as witches. Nevertheless, the reality of what happened the night that Janet Cornfoot was lynched at Pittenweem is hard to grasp as one sits by the harbour watching the fishing boats unload their catch and the pleasure boats rising with the tide. How could people do this to an old woman? Why was no-one ever brought to justice? And why would anyone defend such a lynching? The task of the historian is to try to make events in the past come alive and seem less strange. The details of the witch-hunt are fascinating. Some of the anecdotes are strange. The modern reader finds it hard to imagine illness being blamed on the malevolence of a beggar woman denied charity, or the economic failure of a sea voyage being attributed to the village hag, not bad weather. Witch-hunting was related to ideas, values, attitudes and political events. It was a complicated process, involving religious and civil authorities, village tensions and the fears of the elite. The witch-hunt in Scotland also took place at a time when one of the main agendas was the creation of a righteous or godly society. As a result, religious authorities had control over aspects of people's lives which seem as strange to us today as beliefs about magic or witchcraft. It was not accidental that the witch-hunt in Scotland, and specifically in Fife, should have happened at this time. This book tells the story of what occurred over a period of a century and a half, and offers some explanation as to why it occurred.

Stuart Macdonald teaches at Knox College, Toronto, Canada.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macdonald, Stuart

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

Scottish and European Witchesg

Janet Brown. Beatie Dote. Lilias Baxter. None are names which automatically lead us to remember a story about Scotland’s past. None are names likely to be glorified by Hollywood stars in a big budget movie. Sometimes we don’t even have a name but only a passing reference that a ‘witch’ was tried and executed in a particular parish in Scotland. In other situations we know of these women only in relation to their spouse. The ‘wife of Thomas Wanderson’. The ‘wife of John Crombie’. Names. And yet it is through these names that an important part of the Scottish past can be told. This is part of Scotland’s past which until recently has been ignored. In a historical literature dominated by discussions of reformers and covenanters, the politics of the Stewart monarchy, and the looming crisis of the parliamentary union with England, there has been little room to discuss the fate of old women who were seen by their communities as witches.1 Yet in the seventeenth century itself concern about witches was widespread, affecting all levels of society from the parliament to the national church, from Edinburgh to the Orkney islands. Indeed, Scotland’s witch-hunt was only part of a much broader concern which included almost every corner of Europe.

Lilias Baxter who fled her home in Dysart, Fife when an accusation of witchcraft was levelled against her was one of only thousands of women who found themselves accused of the crime of witchcraft in the three hundred year period from approximately 1450 to 1750. Estimates vary as to how many women found themselves in this situation, as well as how many were executed. The earlier estimates of nine million women executed have been replaced with the more moderate estimates of approximately 110,000 accused, and between 40,000 and 60,000 executions throughout Europe.2 In most of Europe the accused were primarily women, although in Estonia, Finland and Iceland the majority of the accused were male. The predominance of women among those accused as witches has become one of the major questions in the study of the European witch-hunt. Accusations could fall against a solitary witch, or an entire region could be swept up in a fervour of fear. One of the most famous witch-hunts was the one which occurred on the soil of what is now the United States of America at Salem, in Massachusetts. Salem, while sharing many features of other witch-hunts, had its own unique qualities. What is particularly noteworthy was the role played by adolescent girls in the accusations, as well as the relative lateness (1692). It is hunts such as Salem, or the events surrounding the trial of the North Berwick witches (1590–91) in Scotland, where the hunt moves out in a serial fashion from one accused to another, which have gripped the popular imagination. Yet accusations of witchcraft often were made against troublesome neighbours, or older impoverished women who survived by begging and knowing various charms and cures.

Historians have struggled to explain what occurred over these three centuries. Early writings attempted to explain the entire witch-hunt across all of Europe. The title of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s influential 1967 essay ‘The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ is very revealing.3 At a time when few regional studies existed the essay covered Europe over two centuries. The term ‘witch-craze’ also suggested we were studying abnormal human behaviour, a ‘craze’ something like Beatle-mania, not beliefs, values, or social systems. Historians also struggled to deal with the popularity of the theories of Margaret Murray who had earlier in the century posited that the witch-hunts had been directed at organized covens of a pre-Christian pagan religion.4 Single causes for witch-hunting were put forward, causes which ranged from the effects of hallucinogenic substances (for example, ingested from wheat that had particular types of mould), to the shock of syphilis being introduced into Europe, to a cunning and successful plot by the political oligarchies of Europe to deflect criticisms of themselves onto the supposed witches.5 These outbreaks of persecution could be seen as the last outbreaks of mediaeval superstition until it was shown that one of the large mediaeval witch-hunts had, in fact, never occurred. Massive persecution of witches was not a product of the mediaeval period, but an early modern phenomenon.6

While historians continued to suggest broad themes and adopt interesting approaches in order to study witch-hunting in early modern Europe,7 more and more of the studies came to be done on particular geographical regions of Europe. This was in many ways not surprising. While early writers could paint in broad brush strokes, any attempt to prove these arguments as either correct or incorrect required more modest aspirations and a greater concern for detail. Europe was simply too large a field of enquiry. Historians naturally began to study the witch-hunt within particular regions. Works on Germany, France and Switzerland, Salem, Massachusetts, Spain, England and Scotland all appeared in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.8 Regional studies demonstrated the kinds of resources that were available and raised important themes. A pivotal point came with the publication in English in 1990 of the collection of essays Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries,9 key parts of which had originally been published in Swedish three years previously. The essays in this volume, as well as others which appeared elsewhere, have been central in demonstrating the variety of experiences across Europe and its colonies.10 Regional studies continue to challenge our conceptions of the dynamics and forces behind the European witch-hunt.

Another major contribution to the study of the European witch-hunt has been the realization that historians must distinguish between the preconditions for witch-hunting and the triggers that caused a particular region to begin seeking out and executing ‘witches’.11 Brian Levack has identified the preconditions (the factors needed before witch-hunts could occur) as: a new conception of what a witch was; increasing social tensions; and, changes in legal and religious systems. At the same time he argued it was essential to go beyond these

general causes of the hunt and explore the specific circumstances and events that triggered individual witch-hunts, for the European witch-hunt was really nothing more than a series of separate hunts, each of which had its own participants.12

Earlier historians had felt compelled to try to explain every detail of the witch-hunts, from the intellectual pre-conditions to why a particular woman in a particular village found herself accused. This distinction between the preconditions and the triggers which caused a witch-hunt to break out in a particular region at a certain time, has given historians more freedom to focus on specific themes and study them intensely. For example, Stuart Clark’s recent book Thinking with Demons, is an excellent study of the ideas in Europe in the early modern period and their relationship to witch-hunting, while Ian Bostridge explores the decline as a mainstream force of the idea of witchcraft in Witchcraft and Its Transformations.13 On the other hand, recent studies such as the current one, have been more concerned about the form which a particular witch-hunt took. Neither approach is better, but they are different and that difference needs to be understood and respected.

Finally, the study of the European witch-hunt has necessitated the adoption of a distinction between the cultures of the elite and the cultures of the general populace. For example, Richard Kieckhefer challenged historians to distinguish clearly between the learned theories, popular traditions and actual practice of witchcraft in Europe.14 His clear distinction between elite and popular cultures, as well as consideration of how they interacted, allowed Kieckhefer to see that the population at large was far more interested in village problems and sorcerers than any demonic theory.15 Similarly, Carlo Ginzburg in The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries demonstrated that the concerns of the interrogators and the concerns of those accused as witches were markedly different.16 This distinction has become the working understanding of almost all historians working in the area of European witchcraft. To give but a simple example: what precisely was understood by the term ‘witch’? For those who lived in the villages and burghs, the word would have many meanings, but a witch was usually considered to be someone who knew various charms and cures, someone who could heal and harm. The witch was both a valued and a feared member of the community. There were various popular understandings of the witch, but generally the witch was welcomed as long as she used her power for good (as a white witch) and not to do harm (black witchcraft). It was those with more education and power who gradually changed this idea, arguing that all witchcraft, whether white or black, was destructive to the community. It was also the elite which introduced the idea that to be a witch one had to have gained one’s power from the Devil. Witches thus became, at least in the eyes of some among the elite, the shock troops of a demonic conspiracy intent upon overthrowing society. If we are to understand the witch-hunt at all we need to recognise how different these understandings were.

The study of the European witch-hunt, while moving in various directions, has coalesced around these themes:...