Answer: The phenomenon of witchcraft therefore highlights both the need to believe in stories and the capacity to see through them.
Explanation:
Witchcraft is often thought of, wrongly, as a thing of the past. In fact, it continues to be taken seriously by people all over the world. But because the subject of this study is, specifically, early modern witchcraft and its dramatic representation, it will be necessary to clarify what the term ‘witch’ meant within this specific context. As several early modern authors on witchcraft argued, the meaning of the word has changed over time. The senses in which ancient Latin or Greek authors used the terms that are typically translated as ‘witch’ are distinct from the senses in which sixteenth- and seventeenth- century English people used those terms, as well as from the senses in which the word might be understood in the present. The situation is further complicated by the variety of different understandings of what defined witchcraft in early modern England. Accusations of witchcraft tended to focus on the issue of maleficium – the harm it caused – while theoretical writings on witchcraft were usually more interested in the witches’ supposed pact with the devil. Magical power might be conceived of as inherent in the witch herself, in the objects or words she used, in the spirit with which she bargained, or as merely illusory. Disagreement over these and other issues continued throughout the period during which witchcraft was a criminal offence.
One assumption of this study – widely but not universally shared today – is that magic operating outside the laws of nature and bargains with the devil are not and never were possible, and that people, both past and present, who believed these things to be possible were, and are, mistaken. Consequently, there can be no definitive description of what a witch was, only a description of what a given person or group of people imagined a witch to be. Assuming that witches did not exist in the sense that they were often believed to, it is hardly surprising that early modern society did not reach a consensus on what witchcraft was; the subject was debated for centuries and eventually faded from public discourse without ever having been resolved. No work on early modern witchcraft, therefore, can ignore the fact that there was a wide range of opinion on the matter. Furthermore, it would be misleading simply to rely on an exhaustive list of the various opinions (even assuming all of these were documented). Many early modern people appear to have been quite flexible in what they were prepared to believe, and ideas about witchcraft were often fluid rather than fixed points of reference against which real-life situations might be judged. Many people were open to persuasion and argument, evidence was often open to interpretation, and whether a given proposition about an alleged witch was accepted or not might depend on a variety of local factors. Nonetheless, some broad generalisations are possible. One important point is that the late medieval and early modern period in Europe saw the emergence of a specifically Christian conception of witchcraft. Witchcraft belief, and laws against witchcraft, had existed long before this. But from the fifteenth century onwards, important people within the late medieval Church began to accept the idea that witches were evil and genuinely powerful servants of the devil, and could therefore be punished as a species of heretic. Perhaps the most important texts here are the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) of Institoris and Sprenger and the decree made by Innocent VIII, which lent papal authority to the subsequent witch-hunts in Germany. Always controversial, always contested, this idea nevertheless spread through Europe and led to a period of intense witchcraft persecution, peaking in the late sixteenth century. This conception of witchcraft is described in a variety of theological, medical, and philosophical writings and constitutes an important part of the body of work known as demonology. Demonological views of witchcraft frequently form the intellectual context of this study.
