Michael Ostling. Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (The Past & Present Book Series) OUP, Oxford. (December)
Outside the imagination, witches don't exist. But in Poland and in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, Ostling also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives.
Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self-imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft Ostling explores the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.
Jonathan Barry. Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England, 1640-1789. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan (December 30, 2011)
Barry's introduction and conclusion then bring out the wider implications, not only for the history of witchcraft and demonology, but for our understanding of the factors underlying cultural and intellectual change in England between the English and French revolutions, a time when political and religious pluralism and the impact of enlightenment ideas coexisted with deep-rooted commitment to a providentialist ideal of a united Protestant society, built on Biblical and legal traditions.
Investigating the continuing meaning of witchcraft and demonology in England in its period of supposed decline, Jonathan Barry takes six cases from south-western England between 1640 and 1789, and explores them in great depth to reveal the multiple and contested meanings of what occurred and how it was explained. Eschewing simple polarities of ‘belief’ or ‘scepticism’ about witches and the Devil, his studies here examine how our surviving evidence was created (and how carefully it must therefore be used) and transmitted down to our time.
