Emma Wilby | |
|---|---|
 Emma Wilby in 2019 | |
| Born | 1963 (age 60–61) UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Honorary Fellow, University of Exeter |
Emma Wilby is a British historian and author specialising in the magical beliefs of Early Modern Britain.
Emma Wilby | |
|---|---|
| Emma Wilby in 2019 | |
| Born | 1963 (age 60–61) UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Honorary Fellow, University of Exeter |
Emma Wilby is a British historian and author specialising in the magical beliefs of Early Modern Britain.
An honorary fellow in history at the University of Exeter, England, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she has published three books examining witchcraft and the cunning folk of this period. In the first two, she has identified what she considers to be shamanic elements within the popular beliefs that were held in this place and time, which she believes influenced magical thought and the concept of the witch. In this manner, she has continued with the research and theories of such continental European historians as Carlo Ginzburg and Éva Pócs.
Wilby's first published academic text, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005), was the first major examination of the role that familiar spirits played in Britain during the Early Modern period, and compared similarities between the recorded visions and encounters with such spirits, with shamanism in tribal societies.
The historian Ronald Hutton commented that "Wilby's book is a remarkably interesting, timely and novel way of looking at [magic and witchcraft], and one of the most courageous yet attempted." [1] Another historian specialising in Early Modern witchcraft, Marion Gibson, described the book by saying that "Wilby's conclusions turn out to be a challenge and inspiration to everyone who is interested in the popular magical cultures of the past or the present ... Optimistically and humanely, the book makes its strong case for a British shamanic tradition. Whether readers agree with Wilby’s conclusions or not, this is a very important book." [2]
Wilby followed this work with The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010), which provided the first in-depth examination of the witch trial of Isobel Gowdie in 1662. Wilby obtained copies of the trial records, which had been presumed lost for two centuries, from which she concluded that Gowdie had been involved in some form of shamanic visionary trances.
In The Visions of Isobel Gowdie Wilby extended the hypothesis set out in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits to include the concept of ‘dark shamanism’ (or, shamanic practices that benefit people or things belonging to one group by harming people or things belonging to another). She noted that recent anthropological research suggests that dark shamanism plays a much bigger role in tribal shamanic practice than previously thought and that when this new paradigm is brought to the analysis of witch confessions like Isobel Gowdie’s, the correlation between European witchcraft and shamanism becomes even more compelling. [3]
While controversial, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie was widely celebrated among historians of witchcraft for bringing new perspectives to the subject. Writing in the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, Lawrence Normand claimed that "Like the theoretical physicist, the historian of early modern witchcraft must speculate and hypothesise in order to generate understanding of inaccessible phenomena; and one of the great strengths of this book is the precision and daring of its speculations. Witchcraft studies should change as a result of the ideas this book contains … The extraordinary range of materials that it brings to bear on the Isobel Gowdie case will certainly change our understanding of this particular case, as well as the ways that witchcraft scholars are enabled to think about some of the most difficult questions of witchcraft itself." [4]
Writing in the journal Pomegranate, Ronald Hutton wrote that the book: "is in my opinion the finest reconstruction of the thought-world of somebody accused in an early modern witch trial yet made, making sense of elements that most people would find wholly fantastic." [5]
In her third book, Invoking the Akelarre (2019), Wilby examines the controversial Basque witch craze that took place in 1609-14. Here she argues against the assumption by academic writers that the sensational accounts of the Black Mass and orgies at the witches’ sabbath were largely reflections of witchcraft propaganda and stereotypes imposed by inquisitors. As in her first two books, she suggests that the witch suspects used genuine memories and dreams linked to their own thoughts and experience when claiming they had been involved in these events. [6]
Chapters cover the way that knowledge of domestic medicine, New World cannibalism and community Catholic ritual were used to create the dramatic accounts of talking toad familiars, cannibalistic feasts and the Black Mass. Even the accounts of Basque witch cult structure and rites, the most detailed in Europe, are linked by Wilby to suspects’ membership of religious confraternities and craft guilds before they were arrested. Through these analyses, Invoking the Akelarre continues Wilby’s efforts to restore agency to the women who were accused of Devil worship in Europe’s witch trials.
Witchcraft, as most commonly understood in both historical and present-day communities, is the use of alleged supernatural powers of magic. A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft. Traditionally, "witchcraft" means the use of magic or supernatural powers to inflict harm or misfortune on others, and this remains the most common and widespread meaning. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world." The belief in witchcraft has been found in a great number of societies worldwide. Anthropologists have applied the English term "witchcraft" to similar beliefs in occult practices in many different cultures, and societies that have adopted the English language have often internalised the term.
Isobel Gowdie was a Scottish woman who confessed to witchcraft at Auldearn near Nairn during 1662. Scant information is available about her age or life and, although she was probably executed in line with the usual practice, it is uncertain whether this was the case or if she was allowed to return to the obscurity of her former life as a cottar’s wife. Her detailed testimony, apparently achieved without the use of violent torture, provides one of the most comprehensive insights into European witchcraft folklore at the end of the era of witch-hunts.
A Witches' Sabbath is a purported gathering of those believed to practice witchcraft and other rituals. The phrase became especially popular in the 20th century.
In European folklore of the medieval and early modern periods, familiars were believed to be supernatural entities or spiritual guardians that would protect or assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic. According to records of the time, those alleging to have had contact with familiar spirits reported that they could manifest as numerous forms, usually as an animal, but sometimes as a human or humanoid figure, and were described as "clearly defined, three-dimensional... forms, vivid with colour and animated with movement and sound", as opposed to descriptions of ghosts with their "smoky, undefined form[s]".
The cunning folk were professional or semi-professional practitioners of magic in Europe from the medieval period through the early 20th century. In Britain they were known by a variety of names in different regions of the country, including wise men and wise women, pellars, wizards, dyn hysbys, and sometimes white witches.
Ronald Edmund Hutton is an English historian who specialises in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism. He is a professor at the University of Bristol, has written 14 books and has appeared on British television and radio. He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.
Akelarre is the Basque term meaning Witches' Sabbath. Akerra means male goat in the Basque language. Witches' sabbaths were envisioned as presided over by a goat.
The benandanti were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
European witchcraft is a multifaceted historical and cultural phenomenon that unfolded over centuries, leaving a mark on the continent's social, religious, and legal landscapes. The roots of European witchcraft trace back to classical antiquity when concepts of magic and religion were closely related, and society closely integrated magic and supernatural beliefs. Ancient Rome, then a pagan society, had laws against harmful magic. In the Middle Ages, accusations of heresy and devil worship grew more prevalent. By the early modern period, major witch hunts began to take place, partly fueled by religious tensions, societal anxieties, and economic upheaval. Witches were often viewed as dangerous sorceresses or sorcerers in a pact with the Devil, capable of causing harm through black magic. A feminist interpretation of the witch trials is that misogynist views of women led to the association of women and malevolent witchcraft.
The history of Wicca documents the rise of the Neopagan religion of Wicca and related witchcraft-based Neopagan religions. Wicca originated in the early 20th century, when it developed amongst secretive covens in England who were basing their religious beliefs and practices upon what they read of the historical witch-cult in the works of such writers as Margaret Murray. It also is based on the beliefs from the magic that Gerald Gardner saw when he was in India. It was subsequently founded in the 1950s by Gardner, who claimed to have been initiated into the Craft – as Wicca is often known – by the New Forest coven in 1939. Gardner's form of Wicca, the Gardnerian tradition, was spread by both him and his followers like the High Priestesses Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone into other parts of the British Isles, and also into other, predominantly English-speaking, countries across the world. In the 1960s, new figures arose in Britain who popularized their own forms of the religion, including Robert Cochrane, Sybil Leek and Alex Sanders, and organizations began to be formed to propagate it, such as the Witchcraft Research Association. It was during this decade that the faith was transported to the United States, where it was further adapted into new traditions such as Feri, 1734 and Dianic Wicca in the ensuing decades, and where organizations such as the Covenant of the Goddess were formed.
Witch, from the Old English wiċċe, is a term rooted in European folklore and superstition for a practitioner of witchcraft, magic or sorcery. Traditionally associated with malevolent magic, with those accused of witchcraft being the target of witch-hunts, in the modern era the term has taken on different meanings. In literature, a 'witch' can now simply refer to an alluring women capable of 'bewitching' others. In neopagan religions such as Wicca the term has meanwhile been adopted as the female term for an adherent.
Cunning folk, also known as folk healers or wise folk, were practitioners of folk medicine, helpful folk magic and divination in Europe from the Middle Ages until the 20th century. Their practices were known as the cunning craft. Their services also included thwarting witchcraft. Although some cunning folk were denounced as witches themselves, they made up a minority of those accused, and the common people generally made a distinction between the two. The name 'cunning folk' originally referred to folk-healers and magic-workers in Britain, but the name is now applied as an umbrella term for similar people in other parts of Europe.
The first historian to posit the existence of European shamanic ideas within popular beliefs of otherwise Christian Europeans was Carlo Ginzburg, who examined the Benandanti, an agrarian cult found in Friuli, Italy, whose members underwent shamanic trances in which they believed they battled witches in order to save their crops.
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft is a book of religious history by the English historian Ronald Hutton, first published by Oxford University Press in 1999. At the time, Hutton was a Reader in History at Bristol University, and had previously published a study of ancient pre-Christian religion, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991) as well as studies of British folk customs and the Early Modern period.
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Britain written by the British historian Emma Wilby. First published by Sussex Academic Press in 2003, the book presented Wilby's theory that the beliefs regarding familiar spirits found among magical practitioners – both benevolent cunning folk and malevolent witches – reflected evidence for a general folk belief in these beings, which stemmed from a pre-Christian visionary tradition.
Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Hungary written by the Hungarian historian Éva Pócs. The study was first published in Hungarian in 1997 as Élők és holtak, látók és boszorkányok by Akadémiai Kiadó. In 1999, it was later translated into English by Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb and published by the Central European University Press.
Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night is a study of the arrest and trial of Chonrad Stoecklin (1549–1587), a German herdsman from the town of Oberstdorf who was accused and executed for the crime of witchcraft after experiencing a series of visions. Written by the German historian Wolfgang Behringer, himself a specialist in the Early Modern witch trials of Germany, Shaman of Oberstdorf was initially published in German as Chonrad Stoekhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus der frühen Neuzeit by R. Piper GmbH & Co. in 1994. It was subsequently translated into English by H.C. Erik Midelfort and published in 1998 by the University of Virginia Press.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath is a study of visionary traditions in Early Modern Europe written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. First published by Giulio Einaudi in 1989 under the Italian title Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba, it was later translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal and published by Hutchinson Radius in 1990.
The Bute witches were six Scottish women accused of witchcraft and interrogated in the parish of Rothesay on Bute during the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1661–62. The Privy Council granted a Commission of Justiciary for a local trial to be held and four of the women – believed by historians to be Margaret McLevin, Margaret McWilliam, Janet Morrison and Isobell McNicoll – were executed in 1662; a fifth may have died while incarcerated. One woman, Jonet NcNicoll, escaped from prison before she could be executed but when she returned to the island in 1673 the sentence was implemented.
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