12 - Witchcraft repealed

Summary

For a long time now, the study of witchcraft has been afflicted with a tenacious and commonsensical historical assumption: that some time around 1700, probably before, and almost certainly in league with something like ‘rationality’, ‘science’ or ‘rationalisation’, witchcraft disappeared off the intellectual map. The period between widespread educated credulity around 1670 and the triumph of confident jeering scepticism some time in the eighteenth century has been largely ignored.

Elsewhere I have tried to present a history of belief in this period which goes beyond joining the dots. But any account, provisionally entitled ‘The Decline of the Belief in Witchcraft in England’, is beset with problems of definition and conceptual confusion (for instance, how is a belief historically manifested?). A few pointers must suffice in this brief chapter, which is not to say that the grander effort is not worth making. If we can understand the relationship between writing, action and belief in a marginal but defining area like witchcraft, we will have achieved a great deal both in terms of reassessing historical monsters like ‘the Enlightenment’ and in providing a model for understanding similar problems in other periods.

The relationship between these variables – writing, action and belief – is, however, complex. We should not confuse the business of the prosecution of witches in England – the history of persecution – with either the ‘discourse of witchcraft’ (narrowly and unproblematically defined as a body of texts) or the belief in witchcraft (often parlously psychologistic, individualistic and awkwardly placed for historical analysis).