THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 2016

VOL. 31, NO. 3, 375–379

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2016.1191370

REVIEW ARTICLE

Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and politics in early modern

England
Jacqueline Pearson
Department of English, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and politics in early modern England, by Peter Elmer,

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, 384 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-1987-1772-0

The supernatural has lately emerged as a key theme in studies of early modern Europe,
with witchcraft continuing to be a particularly richly researched area. While few
historians would disagree that politics “shaped patterns of witch-hunting” in early
modern England (1), none has as yet argued this as comprehensively or in as much
detail as Peter Elmer in this important, infuriating book. Elmer’s arguments are
properly complex, circling back to key ideas and teasing away at apparent contra-
dictions. The specificities of local circumstances are acknowledged, but not viewed in
isolation from broader developments. There is no inherent link, it is alleged, between
puritanism and witch-hunting, although the evidence cited nonetheless demonstrates
that most prosecutors of witches were puritans, while sceptics, in most periods, tended
to be Anglicans. Witch prosecutions had potentially contradictory significance, since
they sometimes served as an “agent of political consensus”, bringing communities
together against a common enemy, but could equally lead to “acute polarization” (7).
Elmer aspires to deal with both witchcraft theory and the practices of witch hunting,
although he properly notes that there is no simple or necessary relationship between the
two. Moreover, while theories and metaphors of witchcraft were remarkably consistent
and long-lived, the actual prosecution of witches was not a “regular or uniform process”
(1); explaining its peaks and troughs in political terms is one of the achievements of the
book. Witch prosecutions, Elmer argues, happened at times when the authorities found
their sense of order threatened. When a government, even a puritan government, felt its
authority secure, as in Dorchester between 1629 and 1637, there were no witch trials
(85), although they continued elsewhere. He concludes that witch trials ended in the
early eighteenth century not so much with the coming of the new science – many of
those who continued to argue for the reality of witchcraft and the propriety of its
prosecution were advocates of the new science – but as a more “pluralistic polity” (298)
emerged. This is not a new argument – Stuart Clark, Michael Hunter and others have
voiced similar views – but Elmer’s arguments are well supported and offer fresh insights
into some important cases.

CONTACT Jacqueline Pearson jacqueline.pearson@manchester.ac.uk

© 2016 The Seventeenth Century
376 J. PEARSON

Elmer organises his book in chronological order, from the reign of Elizabeth to the end
of the witch-hunts. Elizabethan and Jacobean accusations of witchcraft (Chapter 2) are
represented as primarily expressions of tension between puritans and conformists as the
Church of England sought to establish and reinvent itself. Unlike his father, Charles I
(Chapter 3) was uninterested in witchcraft; he had other things to think about, and his
particular brand of sacral royal absolutism represented itself as invulnerable to demonic
threat, though metaphors of witchcraft were prominent in theology, literature, and theatre.
In this section, Elmer follows closely in the footsteps of his mentor and model Stuart Clark’s
Thinking with Demons, and arrives at similar conclusions. In the 1640s (Chapter 4),
however, especially in Matthew Hopkins’ East Anglia, witchcraft re-emerged as a terrifying
threat as local communities became ever more “politicized” and struggled against external
and internal enemies to construct a godly society (115). After the Restoration (Chapters 5–
7), as “political and religious allegiances grew ever more unstable” (175), witchcraft belief
increasingly moved out of the mainstream and became associated with dissent. At the same
time, changing views on medicine and the care of the insane also changed the ways
witchcraft was conceptualised. The last witchcraft accusations – Richard Hathaway’s
apparently fraudulent claim that Sarah Moredike had bewitched him in 1701 and the
case of Jane Wenham, the last woman to be found guilty of witchcraft in England, in 1712 –
were the result of party factionalism. Moredike was prosecuted by Whigs and nonconfor-
mists who had seen their power wane and used the case to regain the political initiative:
when they regained political power, they lost interest in the prosecution of witches. The
prosecution of Jane Wenham was, conversely, driven by the local Hertfordshire Tory elite
who used her trial to court popular opinion. This chronological framework makes for some
repetition, especially in the latest periods, and Elmer does not always avoid the risk that
successive chronological moments can seem almost watertight, with little close comparison
and contrast between chapters.
Elmer’s overall arguments demand serious attention and are, up to a point, convincing.
Any book must make choices, and Elmer allows himself – or is allowed by his publisher –
less than 300 pages (compared with more than twice that of Thinking with Demons).
However, the result is important gaps. Elmer’s previous research interests set the agenda,
so there is much on the rise of the new science, early modern medicine and physicians,
early Quakers, and the reasons for the end of the witch-hunts, to the exclusion of other
issues that might seem equally relevant, like, to name only a few possibilities, the role of
anti-Catholicism in witch theory and practice, gender, popular witchcraft beliefs, and the
origins of early modern witch-hunting. The “conundrum” (1) of the decline of witch-
hunting takes a central role in the book, as it has tended to do in recent witchcraft studies,
but what is surely equally a conundrum, the origin of the witch-hunts in England, goes
almost unexplored, as, again, it has tended to do in recent studies. It is surprising that
while witchcraft in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I is given only one chapter (52
pages), the period after the Restoration, when actual witch-hunting was in terminal
decline, is given three (123 pages). In Chapter 2, Elmer moves at breakneck speed, giving
only the most cursory attention to the best-known cases, the Witches of Warboys of
1589–93, the Pendle witches of 1612, or the bewitchment of the children of the Earl of
Rutland by Joan Flower and her daughters in 1618. Chapters 5–7 move much more
ponderously, with some repetition – for instance, the many uses of the assertion of 1
Samuel 15:23 that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft”.
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Chapter 2, on Elizabethan and Jacobean witchcraft, is the weakest in the book. Elmer’s
analysis begins only in about 1580, but this ignores the fact that the initial surge in
prosecutions happened not then but in the 1560s. Why, as early in her reign as 1563, did
it seem to Elizabeth’s government necessary to introduce a new act against witchcraft?
The result was a number of witch-trials and executions – Elizabeth Lowys of Great
Waltham, Essex, Eden Worsley of Southwark (both 1564), the witches of Hatfield Peverel,
Essex, of 1566, subjects of the first published English account of a witch trial, and others.
Elmer sees the origins of the Elizabethan witch-hunt in the 1580s, as a result of the Earl of
Leicester’s project to support puritan evangelism. But if this explains the 1580s, it does
not explain the 1560s. Did witch-hunting contribute to the stability of the new regime in
the earliest years of the Elizabethan settlement, and if so, by exactly what mechanisms?
The prosecution of village maleficium was of negligible importance in the reigns of
Edward VI or Mary I (although conjuring was a continuing source of anxiety); why
did it in the 1560s suddenly become a significant part of Elizabethan culture? And, an
equal conundrum, why were some people in the 1560s charged as witches, others, who
apparently performed very similar actions, not?
Another gap in Elmer’s argument arises from a general failure to define terms; the
short introduction could have done more both to explain methodologies, clarifying for
the reader the choices he has made and so what it is reasonable to expect from his
analysis and what not, and to define key terms. While he does in a later chapter defend
his use of the contested term latitudinarianism (210–11), he gives no such attention to
the equally contested term puritan, whose meaning and validity are simply taken for
granted. In addition, neither politics nor witchcraft is given clear explanation or
definition. The “problem”1 of defining witchcraft both as crime and as concept is not
really engaged with, and as a result, the assertion that after 1660 “linguistic instability”
caused witchcraft to be “redefine[d]” as a form of “spiritual apostacy and political
subversion” (233) loses some of its force. Nor are witchcraft’s “ambivalent relationship
to magic”2 or its changing involvement with demonic possession really engaged with.
After 1590, most possession victims – the Throckmorton children at Warboys, the
Starchie family in Lancashire, and the Fairfax girls in Yorkshire – were thought to suffer
through the intermediary of witches. But what changed in about 1590, since before that
the devil was thought perfectly able to possess unfortunates like Anne Mylner (1563) or
Alexander Nyndge (1573) without human assistance?
Politics, too, goes undefined, and although Elmer insists we consider it “broadly
defined” (3), it would have been helpful to know how broadly. This leads me to perhaps
the most significant gap in the book. Politics, we infer, for Elmer involves exclusively
the activities of elite-class men, and his treatment of witchcraft is remorselessly top-
down. A great strength of the book is his ability to offer detailed sketches of intellectual
circles and connections, unearthing plausible and unexpected agendas behind particular
episodes. We learn a great deal about the clergymen, magistrates, lawyers, politicians,
physicians, and scientists who published on witchcraft as fact and as metaphor or
otherwise entered into the witchcraft debate. The circle around Elizabethan sceptic
Reginald Scot suggests not so much one who is religiously “radically unorthodox”,3
perhaps a connection of the Family of Love,4 as a one-time evangelical who now
castigated former puritan allies in an attempt to defend the necessary stability of the
established church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy. The intellectual circles around Joseph
378 J. PEARSON

Glanvil also suggest a great deal about the latitudinarian agenda of his work on the
supernatural (though the analysis would be further strengthened by some examination
of why Saducismus Triumphatus is such an important book). This strategy of concen-
trating on the intellectual circles around a major figure pays off in some respects, but
risks the text becoming atomised, and sometimes indeed the clear thread of argument is
diluted by a series of mini-biographies.
Elmer is, however, almost silent about what Christina Larner called “the politics of
popular belief”,5 and there is little attempt to construct the lives of those, primarily women,
who were accused of witchcraft, or who were involved as witnesses or victims. Elmer is less
interested in the real individuals caught up in witchcraft trials than in what he calls
“surrogate witches” (70) and in metaphors of witchcraft used to demonise political and
religious opponents, masques in which witches figure disorder, sermons where rebellion is
equated with witchcraft, and medical works discussing the relationship between madness
and bewitchment. Especially in the early chapters, real individuals accused of witchcraft
tend to become invisible, their names omitted altogether or relegated to footnotes. But if
there is a top-down story to be told, there are also, as Malcolm Gaskill, James Sharpe and
others have emphasised, bottom-up stories. What happened when the politics of local or
national elites collided with the village politics of those who feared they were the victims of
demonic witchcraft, or found themselves accused of witchcraft? In 1604–1605, for
instance, Anne Gunter, daughter of an Oxfordshire gentleman, developed alarming
symptoms that were blamed on witchcraft. Three women were accused, Elizabeth
Gregory and Agnes Pepwell and her daughter Mary (none named by Elmer), but in
1606 the legal action took an unexpected turn when Anne’s father Brian Gunter was
prosecuted in the court of Star Chamber for orchestrating the alleged fraud. Brian Gunter,
Elmer suggests, was supported by an influential group of vigorously anti-Arminian clergy-
men, who had come into collision with proto-Arminian royal chaplain, later Archbishop
of York, Richard Neile and his allies, Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft, and
Samuel Harsnett, Bancroft’s chaplain and later also Archbishop of York, three men who
were responsible for the proceedings against Gunter. At this time, “the future of the
Anglican church was in the balance” (50), and a dispute over bewitchment became an
opportunity to persuade the king to reject emerging Arminianism and remain loyal to the
Calvinist traditions of the English church. But what of Elizabeth Gregory and the Pepwells,
who all but disappear in Elmer’s retelling? Were they merely collateral damage? If at the
level of elite argument the case meant one thing, what did it mean at the level of village
politics? The next challenge would be to identify exactly what happened when top-down
struggles about religious orthodoxy and state formation met bottom-up anxieties about
maleficium, demonic familiars, and anti-social (usually female) individuals. Elsewhere,
Elmer attacks historians who dismiss witchcraft accusations as “mere strategies in political
controversies” (85), but at times he is guilty of a similar approach.
Elmer’s writing is, especially in the first half of the book, densely packed. The reader will
need to pay close attention to footnotes as well as the main text, and may wish that some of
the footnote material were incorporated into the text. The book is full of fascinating
nuggets of information, though they do not always further the argument in direct ways.
Chapter 6, for instance, is interesting on linguistic instability, the law, madness and its
treatment, the politicisation of medicine, and the influence of Hobbes, but these do not
always constitute a coherent argument about witchcraft and witch-hunting. Elmer is well
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 379

versed in medical and scientific literature and has interesting information from sermons
and theological and demonological tracts, but oddly he ignores, for the most part,
pamphlet accounts of witch trials and especially witches’ confessions. These are, of course,
difficult to use in any straightforward way as transparent historical sources, but surely no
more difficult than the masques, sermons, or political propaganda he is happy to use, and
there is interesting and necessary work still to be done on the politics of pamphlets and
other cheap print sources for witch trials. However, despite its flaws, this is an important,
wide-ranging, and scholarly book that will need to be engaged with by all later writers on
early modern English witchcraft.

Notes
1. Levack, “Introduction”, Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 5.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Clark, Thinking With Demons, 242.
4. Wootton, “Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love”.
5. Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Bibliography
Clark, S. Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
Gaskill, M. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. London: John Murray, 2006.
Larner, C. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
Levack, B. P. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and
Colonial America, edited by Levack. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Sharpe, J. The Bewitching of Anne Gunter. London: Profile Books, 1999.
Wootton, D. “Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love.” In Languages of
Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, edited by S. Clark,
119–138. London: Macmillan, 2001.
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