Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches.

Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. By Marion Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999. vii plus 242pp.).

Even while the recently revived field of witchcraft studies lay dormant over most of Europe, there was a steady tradition of taking English witchcraft seriously. Troublesome universalist works by authors such as Margaret Murray (1921) were paralleled by the sturdy local histories of Notestein (1911), George Lyman Kittridge (1929), and Alan Macfarlane, (1970). H.R. Trevor-Roper's crucial essay, "The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" (1969) and Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1972) opened the door to general serious historical investigation. It is not surprising, given the current so-called new historicism among scholars of literature, that they should take their turn with the primary sources for England's witchcraft.

Reading Witchcraft is among the products of a veritable cottage industry of literary, local, and feminist historians who have recently exploited English records and popular literature (e.g., Joy Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany, 1992; Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Dominance, 1992; Deborah Willis) Malevolent Nature: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, 1995; Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn, A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth Century Witchcraft Prosecution, 1997). Gibson's book differs from the others, however) because she describes a process rather than the result of an investigation. The gerund in the title is significant; this is a proposal on how to decipher the documents themselves. Where others might use the literature to establish an argument or conclusion, Gibson offers essentially a methodological manual which, as a means to an end, is in itself ultimately inconclu sive.

Gibson contends that a careful reading of pamphlet literature published in Elizabethan and Jacobean England can recover lost voices, perhaps even those of the so-called witches. Historians like Keith Thomas have assumed the latter were lost; Carlo Ginzburg, from first (Night Battles, 1966) to last (Ecstasies, 1989), has believed they were there to be heard. Gibson thinks she has possibly found them. With coaxing and knowledge of how the documents were created, the various representations of the witch can be pried apart and their sources identified. It is the provenance of these representations which is true, not necessarily what they describe. Gibson's credo is that "only a complex understanding of the pamphlets can redeem them from condemnation as fictions or misuse as facts"(p. 66). The two sections of the book deal, first with putative legal records recorded in pamphlets, and then with narrative pamphlets themselves. In both cases she has released new levels of meaning from often worked-over documents.

The analysis in Part One yields the more interesting and persuasive results. The so-called trial records themselves are shown to bow to the needs of the legal system. Legal proceedings require a linear narrative to be imposed upon evidence, but this construction can be decoded. Motives are assigned by the pamphlet authors; a causal sequence is their organizing principle. The records are demonstrably sewn, but they have seams which can recognized and Gibson's metaphor for her methodology is "picking at the seams" (p. 62). The legal systems need for a motive results in generic stories of denial, revenge, or "motiveless malignity." Gibson respects the probable legal process and, in a dialogue with legal historians, uses it to uncover fictions in the accounts the pamphlets parade as court reporting. Recognizing the tailored stereotypes makes them less opaque; then a "true" representation can be read through the falsified accounts. Gibson s intelligent and painstaking unlayering of the reports is able to challenge textual assumptions by Keith Thomas (pp. 98 and 151), among others, and to offer convincing alternatives.

Part Two relies more clearly on analysis of literary form and content to unlock meaning from these overtly authored accounts. The storytelling of the legal documents is replaced by the prefaces and narratives of the pamphleteers. Gibson analyzes the traditional distinction between "necessary" and "trivial" pamphlets and shows that both can yield equal information on perceptions of witchcraft. Here the language of deconstruction is used to good effect (the book is generally free from jargon). Gibson's method, which unfolds slowly and simply, is actually quite sophisticated epistemologically. Like a series of Russian boxes, the various representations of witches, however useless when judged as facts, are shown to be true projections of an interested party's construction of reality.

The book is necessarily suggestive and tentative, which makes for warily convoluted prose. This problem is compounded by an awkward stylistic device. Transitions to a new subject within a chapter or section are too often made with a series of rhetorical questions. When joined with "possibly," "seems," "suggests," and "may," the questions make the text turn in upon itself, evasive rather than just carefully qualified. Uncertainty is built into both the subject and style of Reading Witchcraft, ultimately making it difficult to read! A clearer initial introduction to and history of the sources would help any reader. A table of archival abbreviations, as notational conventions vary among documents and fonts, would be most welcome. It would be best not to litter the text with source citations, but to use generally fuller footnotes.

Had the book been better grounded intellectually, its stylistic air of hesitancy might have been relieved. The social scientist will wonder at the vague, anthropomorphic invocations of "community" and the undefined and neglected use of "class;" the historian will miss the sense of an exterior chronology against which the internal development of the pamphlets played. There is no real sense of an evolution over time; changes within the textual tradition are the only ones honored. Important new historical works on English witchcraft, like Ian Bostridge's Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650-1750, available in 1997, should be invoked when describing the cessation of the pamphlet tradition. A better sense of the current research on other European witch trials, such as the phases persecutions took in Bavaria (Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular magic, religious zealotry and reason of state in early modem Europe, translated 1997), also might help ground the text. In Gibson's readi ng of legal texts, one misses obvious analogues like Natalie Davis' Fiction in the Archives. Even literary scholars might wish for a comparative element to build a sense of the expectations of an Elizabethan-Jacobean reading audience. Sensitive and richly suggestive, Reading Witchcraft is ultimately too elusive to be itself an accessible read.