Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
New Haven : Yale University Press, 2017.
Description
"The witch came to prominence--and often a painful death--in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early-modern stake. This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft. Hutton, a renowned expert on ancient, medieval, and modern paganism and witchcraft beliefs, combines Anglo-American and continental scholarly approaches to examine attitudes on witchcraft and the treatment of suspected witches across the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and North and South America, and from ancient pagan times to current interpretations. His fresh anthropological and ethnographical approach focuses on cultural inheritance and change while considering shamanism, folk religion, the range of witch trials, and how the fear of witchcraft might be eradicated"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member antiquary
This is competently done and gives a very broad survey of witchcraft as imagined, prosecuted and possibly practiced It includes quite a lot of very grim material on the revival of witch-hunts in modern African nations, stressing that although there was some influence from evangelical Christianity,
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much of the hunting was done for political purposes, with native supporters of he former colonial regimes being targeted, The book then reverts to the ancient world, particularly Egypt, and follows through in roughly chronological order to the present again. Show Less
LibraryThing member ritaer
Professor Hutton has produced a widely researched and closely argued book about a controversial topic. He starts with the assertion that many cultures, but not all, through history and around the world have had beliefs concerning members of their societies who are able to use supernatural powers to
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harm fellow humans, livestock and crops, influence the weather, cause death and disease. He chooses the English word 'witch' to label these people, while noting the other, more recent uses of the term. In some cultures these people are believed to act through innate powers, either controlled or involuntary.. In other cultures the witches derive their powers from supernatural entities commonly called demons. Other figures who use magic may act for the benefit of persons in their societies. These people he labels "service magicians" although they are sometimes called good or white witches. Hutton traces the ideas that beliefs about witches were remnants of pre-Christian religion, that the practices of witches derive from shamanism and that the persecution of witches was a uniquely Christian phenomenon. He presents evidence that these beliefs are incorrect. He does identify an area of northern Europe in which there is some overlap between the abilities attributed to witches and the activities of shamans. He also acknowledges that the belief in the classic satanic witch was a construct of the late Medieval and Early Modern period, influenced by increased exposure to ceremonial magic among elites and a blending of ideas about magic workers with the evil acts of cannibalism, sexual depravity and other anti-social acts routinely attributed to Jews and heretics. The chapters on the British Isles contain an analysis of the belief in fairies as teachers of magic; an examination of the relative lack of witch trials in Celtic areas such as HIghland Scotland, Ireland and Wales; and a study of the role of the animal familiar in English trials. This is not light reading. But it is a very interesting work and exposes the reader to the writings of European researchers who have not been translated and made available to the lay reader in America. 360 pages, extensive footnotes, bibliography and index. Small section of photographs. I highly recommend this work for anyone researching or teaching the topic. Show Less
LibraryThing member Diana_Long_Thomas
Book received from NetGalley.
I've had this book for awhile but something in me had to wait to read it until the "spooky" days of October. I have to admit I love Ronald Hutton, the television shows he's been in show just how quirky but knowledgeable he is. I've read a few other books of his and
I've had this book for awhile but something in me had to wait to read it until the "spooky" days of October. I have to admit I love Ronald Hutton, the television shows he's been in show just how quirky but knowledgeable he is. I've read a few other books of his and
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enjoyed them just as much. My only issue with the book is he seemed to have a set number of pages he wanted to write so he tried to shove quite a bit of information into these pages. I'm not sure how much a general history reader will get from this, and I definitely believe if you're just starting on your journey into this subject you shouldn't start with this book. You can tell he's an academic and that's who the book seems to be written for. Even with all that I loved it and even though I've read quite extensively on this subject I learned quite a few things. This is for the rest of the Pagans out there, this is a book I highly suggest you add to your library if you have one focused on The Craft. Show Less
LibraryThing member Widsith
Twenty years ago, Ronald Hutton literally wrote the book on modern witchcraft (The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft), in which he was generous and open-minded about the value of Wiccan religions, while also making clear that their claims to represent the survival of an
Most people who have written about this before have tended to concentrate on the European witch-trials, which in the early-modern period saw some 40,000–60,000 people legally put to death (though probably ‘in the lower half of that range,’ Hutton judges). His own strategy is much broader, both in time and space: he goes all the way back to Ancient Mesopotamia in search of the origins of the witch figure, and ranges around the world to consider witchcraft as it is still conceived of (and feared) in many traditional societies. The results of this are enlightening, with the events of early-modern Europe emerging as part of a distinct patchwork of global-historical beliefs rather than looking like an explosive anomaly. In his summary, Europe's distinction when it comes to witchcraft is slightly different:
Europeans alone turned witches into practitioners of an evil anti-religion, and Europeans alone represent a complex of people who have traditionally feared and hunted witches, and subsequently and spontaneously ceased officially to believe in them. In fact, both developments came relatively late in their history and are probably best viewed as part of a single process of modernization, driven by a spirit of scientific experimentation.
Hutton's approach is ruthlessly historiographical. Every line of inquiry is examined in the context of the scholars who proposed or investigated it. The advantage of this is that you feel like you're getting real oversight of the debate: with other books, when a given idea about paganism or witchcraft comes up, you might think vaguely: yes, I've heard of that, or I've seen someone argue against that somewhere. With Hutton things are infinitely clearer: you can now think, for example, Oh yes, that's an idea that was raised by American academics in the 50s but fell out of favour after research in Italy in the 1970s. The entire subject is flooded with light and acquires edges, handles.
The downside, though, is that it gives his prose a rather cool, distant tone: the impression one gets is not of someone digging into the context of witchcraft with relish, but rather of someone sifting dispassionately through the academic sources. It's kind of a shame, since my memory of reading some of his earlier books was that he seemed to really revel in the subject matter, while also taking it seriously. Indeed this is one of Hutton's hallmarks – he writes about subjects that some serious historians only mention in sneering tones, and manages to be completely even-handed (sometimes almost to a fault: in a section about magicians who claimed to liaise with elves and fairies, Hutton concedes that ‘to be perfectly just, one might admit the final possibility that some of the people concerned actually met non-human beings’!).
There was a lot in here that was new to me, since even the familiar material is being approached from strange new perspectives – the debt owed by Germanic folklore to Egyptian ceremonial magic, for instance, or the way the scientific method is still meshing with witchcraft (as it did during the European witch hunts) in present-day South Africa. I had also been unaware of the extent to which the witch is a Swiss creation – the first witch trials were held in the Valais and the mountains east of Lake Geneva, and the literary records of these events, circulated thanks to a major church council in Basel soon afterwards, did a lot to create the modern image of the witch and the Satanic sabbath.
Minor niggles about the style notwithstanding, then, this is a huge achievement, even if it can't easily be recommended for those looking for a pop-historical overview of witchcraft. But if you already have some familiarity with the field, or if you just like academic prose generally, then this is surely the most comprehensive and wide-ranging survey around – and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future (to the extent that futures can be foreseen, with or without some eye of newt).
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ancient heritage of European paganism were nonsense. Now he turns his attention to the more culturally persistent kind of ‘witch’ – the figure of a maleficent magic-user, wreaking havoc on his (or more usually her) community from within.Most people who have written about this before have tended to concentrate on the European witch-trials, which in the early-modern period saw some 40,000–60,000 people legally put to death (though probably ‘in the lower half of that range,’ Hutton judges). His own strategy is much broader, both in time and space: he goes all the way back to Ancient Mesopotamia in search of the origins of the witch figure, and ranges around the world to consider witchcraft as it is still conceived of (and feared) in many traditional societies. The results of this are enlightening, with the events of early-modern Europe emerging as part of a distinct patchwork of global-historical beliefs rather than looking like an explosive anomaly. In his summary, Europe's distinction when it comes to witchcraft is slightly different:
Europeans alone turned witches into practitioners of an evil anti-religion, and Europeans alone represent a complex of people who have traditionally feared and hunted witches, and subsequently and spontaneously ceased officially to believe in them. In fact, both developments came relatively late in their history and are probably best viewed as part of a single process of modernization, driven by a spirit of scientific experimentation.
Hutton's approach is ruthlessly historiographical. Every line of inquiry is examined in the context of the scholars who proposed or investigated it. The advantage of this is that you feel like you're getting real oversight of the debate: with other books, when a given idea about paganism or witchcraft comes up, you might think vaguely: yes, I've heard of that, or I've seen someone argue against that somewhere. With Hutton things are infinitely clearer: you can now think, for example, Oh yes, that's an idea that was raised by American academics in the 50s but fell out of favour after research in Italy in the 1970s. The entire subject is flooded with light and acquires edges, handles.
The downside, though, is that it gives his prose a rather cool, distant tone: the impression one gets is not of someone digging into the context of witchcraft with relish, but rather of someone sifting dispassionately through the academic sources. It's kind of a shame, since my memory of reading some of his earlier books was that he seemed to really revel in the subject matter, while also taking it seriously. Indeed this is one of Hutton's hallmarks – he writes about subjects that some serious historians only mention in sneering tones, and manages to be completely even-handed (sometimes almost to a fault: in a section about magicians who claimed to liaise with elves and fairies, Hutton concedes that ‘to be perfectly just, one might admit the final possibility that some of the people concerned actually met non-human beings’!).
There was a lot in here that was new to me, since even the familiar material is being approached from strange new perspectives – the debt owed by Germanic folklore to Egyptian ceremonial magic, for instance, or the way the scientific method is still meshing with witchcraft (as it did during the European witch hunts) in present-day South Africa. I had also been unaware of the extent to which the witch is a Swiss creation – the first witch trials were held in the Valais and the mountains east of Lake Geneva, and the literary records of these events, circulated thanks to a major church council in Basel soon afterwards, did a lot to create the modern image of the witch and the Satanic sabbath.
Minor niggles about the style notwithstanding, then, this is a huge achievement, even if it can't easily be recommended for those looking for a pop-historical overview of witchcraft. But if you already have some familiarity with the field, or if you just like academic prose generally, then this is surely the most comprehensive and wide-ranging survey around – and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future (to the extent that futures can be foreseen, with or without some eye of newt).
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LibraryThing member AngelaJMaher
This extremely detailed non-fiction book is fascinating, but certainly not a light read. Allocate quite a bit of time to tackle this. It is very much like a textbook, and I think if it had been presented more like one, with images breaking up the text more, it might have been easier to read. The
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information is in-depth, but without being too wordy. The global context is particularly interesting. Show Less
LibraryThing member asukamaxwell
"The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present" is very true to its title. It is an anthropological, deeply thorough study of the practice of magic and witchcraft. Hutton explains how the study of witchcraft broadened to include cross-cultural comparisons, a re-evaluation of
Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. Hutton actively avoids generalizations or pin pointing precise causes. They approach it all with an academic, objective eye. It's not a quick read, but if you're serious about the subject, you can't get much better.
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ancient texts, as well as shamanism, at least for comparison. We learn that witchcraft trials were not only a consequence of political machinations and social turmoil, but a thousands year old evolution. The Christian witch is a result of Mesopotamian demonology and the concept of astral magic, Persian dualism, Hebrew monotheism, and the Roman witch figure. Most interesting was the two sided effect of Rome conquering Egypt: the Romans introduced a fear if witches but Egyptian magic leaked out to the rest of the empire, solidifying their mystical reputation. But while the conceptual roots of witchcraft (Ch 5) is ancient, as a religion it is very new. We are NOT the "daughters of the witches you tried to burn." And while Hutton's book focuses on the West, Native and African traditional practices are included in the discussion, as well as the consequences of colonialism and forced conversion. In Pt 3, the Witch Hunts of 1530s to 1630s are examined and Hutton shows their expertise as a British folk historian. Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. Hutton actively avoids generalizations or pin pointing precise causes. They approach it all with an academic, objective eye. It's not a quick read, but if you're serious about the subject, you can't get much better.
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ISBN
9780300229042
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