Witchcraft

January 15, 2024
Historian Gibson (Reading Witchcraft) offers an empathetic survey of witch trials spanning seven centuries and three continents. Providing rich portraits of the accused, whom she argues posed a threat to the dominant social order as marginalized outsiders (being mainly female, poor, and disabled), Gibson begins with such lesser-known trials as that of Helena Scheuberin, a 15th-century Austrian woman who raged against the corruption of the Catholic church. Identifying the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts as a watershed moment in which the public first began to perceive accusations of witchcraft as baseless, Gibson explains that nonetheless belief in witchcraft persisted furtively in the West well into the 20th century and is still pervasive in Africa today. Throughout, Gibson links colonialism and state oppression to witchcraft persecution, with some examples more convincing than others; the 17th-century persecution of accused indigenous Sami witches in northern Norway and the twisted case of Montague Summers, a persecuted gay man in Edwardian England who became a priest and spent his career railing against witches, come off as better examples of state violence than the crackdown on fraudster mediums in early 20th-century Britain or the failed lawsuit against Donald Trump by Stormy Daniels, a self-professed medium. Still, this vividly drawn and often surprising account succeeds in its aim to provide an expansive vision of the witch trial that extends far beyond Salem.