POPULAR HISTORY: Witchcraft, and Salem-sationalism.

While perusing the magazine racks in my local branch of WHSmith’s, my eyes fell on one title and I let out an inward groan of academic despair. I have to admit I have something of a love hate relationship with popular history magazines. Some are reasonably good, others are terrible. Some are only interesting for the farcical nature of the ‘history’ contained within. The title which drew my attention however, was one which might be considered both ridiculous and at the same time both irresponsible and dangerous. The title, produced by the same imprint which publishes All About History (a title which itself frequently retreads inaccuracies from simplified school history texts), was “History of Witchcraft”. The subtitle makes the bold statement that it “Uncovers the truth behind the trials that tore Europe apart”. As anyone with even a casual scholarly interest in witchcraft or magic is no doubt aware this is a distinctly bold and factually inaccurate claim. Even with this beginning standpoint however I admit to being under-prepared for the full extent of the inaccuracies, misrepresentations and poor judgement shown in compiling this particular volume. 

The opening section jumps rapidly from a role-play of a witch trial, to Ancient Rome, rarely stopping long enough to devote more than a single sentence to any one of a number of complex points, before starting in on the Medieval Inquisition. The first notable error is the conflation of the facts over the founding of the Inquisition itself - ignoring the fact that the inquisitions (note the plural) founded in the 12th century were temporary, their actual purpose, or indeed where they took place. The text states that the Inquisition was founded to tackle ‘secular faiths’ - with little explanation of what these faiths might be. The following few sentences inaccurately state that the Inquisition only began its work against the Cathars (whom it states had ‘adopted witchcraft as part of its doctrine’) in the 14th century - glossing other the rise of Catharism in the 12th century and the Albigensian Crusade in a single sentence. On the same page we have the first appearances of the usual suspects in the simplified history of witchcraft and magic - Matthew Hopkins, Jacob Sprenger, Heinrich Kramer, and Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg. Hopkins and von Ehrenberg appear in a side panel, possibly in vague deference to the near 200 years between them and Kramer and Sprenger. The narrative then goes on - jumping through centuries until landing in America and predictably at Salem via way of Pendle. Notably the conclusion of this first act in this farcical interpretation of a complex history not only contradicts its own information but is also wrong. The final claim is that the Witchcraft Act of 1835 led to other countries passing similar laws ‘signalling the end of two centuries of madness’ - despite having less than a page earlier noted cases from the 20th and 21st Centuries in Zambia, India, and Saudi Arabia. One is perhaps to wonder if the authors consider Zambia, India and Saudi Arabia as being some kind of geographical entities other than countries - but I fear such logic may be beyond them. It also fails to note that the Witchcraft Act led to at least one imprisonment (who incidentally appears elsewhere in a ‘Timeline of Persecution’) in the 20th Century, and that it has been replaced in UK law by an act criminalising ‘Fraudulent Mediums’. 

The next section ‘15 Most Notorious Witches’ simply over simplifies notable cases - and also seems uncertain as to whether it is dealing with people accused of witchcraft - or people believed to possess the ability to see the future, which is not necessarily the same thing. Similar confusion of terms occurs in the section before dealing with magic in the ancient world which sees a notable lack of distinction between people believed to have magical abilities, and the Gods and demi-Gods of the Roman and Hellenic pantheons. Possibly the most notable inaccuracy regarding the Roman world occurs on the first page of the section on the Middle Ages - which states that curse tablets were considered ‘an acceptable form of redress in an age without courts or police forces’. I do have to wonder what Cicero would have to say about this. In this section the ‘vast swath’ of the Middle Ages is on the subsequent page only worth considering from the 15th century onwards. With a recap regarding Kramer and Sprenger with no remark of the fact that the Malleus was condemned by the Inquisition in 1490, less than 3 years after its publication, and that it was condemned by the Faculty of Cologne on the grounds that it ran against the themes contained in Catholic doctrine in regard to demons and demonology. Furthermore, having linked Kramer and Sprenger in an earlier passage, the section on the Middle Ages refers to Kramer alone - but makes no comment as to his questionable status within the church, and further omits the fact that Sprenger’s association with the Malleus only came after his death. In fact there is very little evidence to link Sprenger with witch hunting or witch trials at all, and the only claims made of such an interest or link were made by Kramer, after Sprenger was, conveniently, dead. 

While earlier in the work there is a brief single sentence note of the fact that some monarchs did not approve of witch hunters and considered their actions more dangerous than their prey, little time is given to opposition to their actions. The fact that the same work previously states that witch hunting was driven by the Inquisition (and it is true that the Inquisition did have jurisdiction in this area) the failure to note the Inquisition’s view on Kramer is an classic example of how the popular narrative presented here glosses over inconvenient facts in favour of a narrative which fits with expectations. The section also makes the statement that ‘very few’ women in the Middle Ages could read Latin (again with no evidence in support, and in face of a large amount of evidence to contrary). 

In closing the section retraces a narrative which causes so many medievalists pain - the rediscovery of ancient knowledge by the Renaissance. (I would also note that this section contains the only time I was have ever seen the usage of the alternative spelling of leitmotifs - leitmotivs - in print in the UK - which is sure to confuse an bilingual English-German reader). 

The section following details the story of Gunnhild, and discusses historical narratives where ‘fact and fantasy blur’ - in a tone that I must admit made me wonder if the author had ever had even a casual interest in fantasy fiction, or had never considered that people in the past liked stories as much as most people today. Again the same conflations present in the narratives of the Roman and Greek periods occur - and similar stereotypes of ‘the Sagas’. 

Following sections detail the life of Joan of Navarre - building up the sensational aspects with little reference to sources or records. And then we arrive at the section titled the ‘Betrayal of the Knights Templar’ for round 4 of ‘Historical Myths that make Medievalists Want To Be Sick’. We are less than one page in when the Holy Grail makes its appearance in a mid page box headed ‘Templar Mysteries’. And in a fact I have to consider to be some form of sacrilege Parzival in mentioned in the same sentence as The Da Vinci Code. Further inaccuracies include the Templars being described as the West’s ‘first uniformed standing army’ - which if it were true would mean that by logical extension Greece (home of Europe’s first standing army consisting of the male citizenry of Sparta, and the first professional standing army in Europe under Philip II of Macedon) is not in the West, which it actually of course is generally considered to be.  Further ‘Templar Mysteries’ panels include ‘facts’ linking the Templars to the Shroud of Turin and the French Revolution. The section is also notable in that it highlights how the medieval sections of this work conflate heresy and witchcraft. It is generally as bad as you might expect when it comes to the Templars. 

The following section on Eleanor Cobham can best be described as a expanded recapitulation of the Wikipedia article on the same. The section immediately following this deals with Elizabeth Woodville. Titled ‘Elizabeth Woodville, White Queen & Black Magic’ it’s subtitle is ‘Was witchcraft behind the fairy-tale marraige of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville?’ No. While it states that there is unlikely to have been any truth in the allegations it consists primarily of a retread of her position within the court of Henry IV and what happened when Richard III took the throne. It does note that she was not punished - unlike Eleanor Cobham - or that the Act containing the charges (without any other details) was repealed immediately primarily because it made her daughter Elizabeth of York illegitimate, and Henry Tudor needed to shore up his claim to the throne by any means possible. The allegations, contained in Titulus Regius - of course only survive in a single copy in the Croyland Chronicle, any others destroyed on Henry’s orders.

We then come to a section on James VI of Scotland and his views and actions on witchcraft, with a revisitation of our usual suspect Kramer and the Malleus once again. The following sections all retread largely the same material intersperse with inappropriate infographics, until arriving two sections entitled ‘The Unholy Roman Empire’ and ‘The Dark Charisma of Matthew Hopkins’. If the titles were not the biggest give away, we once again tread the circuit around the views of Kramer, and von Ehrenberg, complete with more sections detailing the spread of the Malleus in Germany. The only amusement to be found within this section, which while the body text contains a valid point about the role of the patriarchy and male fears in texts like the Malleus it is saddled with the subheading ‘The Malleus Maleficarum was a tomb intended to identify and end the witch menace’. The same page also notes the misogynistic nature of the Malleus - but at the same time fails to note the point raised earlier in this post - that it had been roundly condemned by the Inquisition and by many noted theologians of the time. We are then faced with a further extended section on witch finding manuals - all from the time period of the Malleus, and a brief section on items used for protection from witch craft, as ever largely unsourced, and drawn from a wide variety of periods of history. We then travel to the Basque Witch Trials, where for the first 3 pages, the author appears, by what may have been the sheer law of averages, to hit a vague degree of accuracy. These pages detail the rigorous and sceptical inquiries of Alonso de Salazar and how his work led to the establishment of a scepticism of witchcraft within the Spanish inquisition. This however falls down on the next page where once again either by the layout or design the Malleus reappears this time showing its 15th Century front page and the description that it ‘set the tone for attitudes towards witchcraft in the Early Modern era’ - which if we are to trouble ourselves with things as basic to the historian’s craft as evidence - it did not (as indeed the work of Alonso de Salazar shows!). 

Then our round trip of well known incidents brings us to the mass witch trial of Wurzburg, during the Thirty Years War. Wurzburg is arguably one of the few mass witch panics which lines up with some of the popular perceptions of witch hunting and of the trials and their outcomes. It is also one for which there is a reasonable amount of documentation and scholarship to be drawn on. In this text it merits a single double page spread, half of which is an illustration. The tone of this passage is also somewhat questionable - describing the Thirty Years War as, rather sensationally, one of ‘the bloodiest conflicts in human history’. Temporarily putting aside the difficulties of placing numbers on the dead and dying of historic wars, this is questionable on the generally accepted statistics, even taking the higher of the two figures - 11.5 million - which is relatively only slightly higher than the Napoleonic Wars (and it is worth noting that various other contemporary conflicts are sometimes excluded from this second total) and the 1857 war in India. Note the lower estimate is 3 million - much lower than these other two conflicts and considerably lower than say the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, and considerably lower than the conquests of Timur or the Mongol conquests. The language used is sensationalist - even when speaking of the deaths of children. The text does however note the influence of these events on Friedrich Spee and his subsequent opposition to witch trials.

Then, inexorably, we arrive in the township of Salem. The events in Salem are the most commonly reviewed, discussed, sensationalised, and in some senses fetishized, in the popular history of witchcraft. It is here that the layout and design also commit probably its most ridiculous offense shown in the image below - setting the names of the alleged victims, the accused and the executed in a colour coded chart in the form of an inverted pentagram. 

This is the height of what I term Salem-sationalism - where a unique set of circumstances, a singular set of events, and their popular perceptions come to exclude scholarly consensus and actual evidence. Instead we are presented with a narrative which wouldn’t be out of place in a B movie taken from the discount horror section of your local DVD store, or the third page of Netflix. The theories of what may have caused the situation are contained in a single side bar, with each theory given one or two lines and including some of the most outlandish theories along with those which have some credibility. The titles more or less say all that can be said - “Hand of God... Fraud ... Acid Trip ... Indian Scare ... Hysteria ... Biological Pathogen ... Misogyny and Repression ...” - little consideration given to such a troubling thing as evidence. The final sections deal with possible explanations and what the text terms ‘the End of Witchcraft’ - despite having previously already described cases elsewhere in the world in the 21st century. 

In summary the text is sensationalist, dominated by Salem-sationalism, untroubled by the lack of evidence, largely untroubled by the complexity of the source material. The authors are entirely anonymous, and no historical consultants are listed, while the publishers, editors and designers are given the usual place within such a magazine on the fly leaf. The layout is driven by sensation and presents many of the more graphic depictions of witch trials from later paintings and from some contemporary manuscripts. These often have little relation to the actual material, and despite the brief discussions of the misogyny prevalent within witch trials, the layout makes frequent use of depictions of semi-naked women under torture or engaged if supposed witchcraft activities as little more than a sensationalist way to shift more copies. This is frankly simply misogynistic, and in effect the monetizing of representations of female bodies under torture and in pain.

This publication is, in reality, dangerous. Such popular history publications do not occur in a vacuum. They influence popular perception and thus culture. The idea that these are a form of harmless info-tainment is naive and ignores the fact that such misinformation can lead to real world consequences. The text runs largely against scholarly consensus - occasionally landing close to accepted scholarship through the sheer law of averages - and largely recapitulates rumour, popular thought and myth in a form presented as historical fact. The presentation is unbalanced with huge prominence given to Salem, while the witch trials at Wurzburg are given a single page. As Kieckhefer warns in his most well known work on Magic in the Middle Ages we may scoff at such beliefs, but the judges who sentenced men and women to death certainly believed in their power. The whole text is filled with unfounded conjectures, the language sensationalist and the design almost purposefully offensive. These publications are irresponsible, and it is this that makes rebuttals such as this part of the function of those profession it is to research, analyse and interpret the evidence and realities of these periods of history, the influence of which can be felt to this day. 

To conclude I present the song which all of this called to mind - We Go Hunting from the album Elegies to Lessons Learnt by I Like Trains - written from the view point of the minister Samuel Parris who was a key figure in the actual trials at Salem. As is usual for this particular band the video consists of a haunting stop motion animation which attempts to get inside the mind and drives of Parris throughout the trials.