Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern
Europe.
By Stuart Clark. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3.
£75.00.
The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and
colonization. By Walter
D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426.
ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50.
Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in
early modern Europe. By Lyndal
Roper. London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. ix+254. ISBN 0–415–10581–1.
£13.99.
As Professor Richard Evans's spirited In defence of history
attests, postmodernism
continues to arouse strong passions and suspicions among distinguished
practitioners of
the discipline. This is hardly surprising: in their most extreme and undiluted
form, the
theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and more particularly
their many disciples, are stubbornly corrosive of the ethos and rationale
of history as
conventionally taught and written. To insist that the production of knowledge
is
inherently – indeed insidiously – political, and to claim that
the veil of language which
divides us from the past can never be pierced is to unsettle many traditional
epistemological assumptions. And yet postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic
turn’
have posed timely and fundamental questions about truth, discourse, and
objectivity
which historians can ill afford to ignore. They have also helped to generate
some of the
most innovative and provocative historical writing in recent years. In
different ways,
each of the books under review engages with and reacts to the swirling
debate about this
influential and controversial body of ideas. All three make strenuous demands
upon
their readers; all three challenge us to reflect critically upon the methodologies
we
employ and the categories, concepts, polarities, and narrative paradigms
to which we
instinctively resort. Taken together they highlight both the potential
strengths and
weaknesses, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study
of witchcraft,
sexuality, and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World.
