Loading...
The Lawyer, the Witch, and the Witness: Proving Witchcraft in the English Courts
Maddox, Trace M.
Maddox, Trace M.
Collections
Files
Abstract
In the sixteenth century, a new crime arrived on the scene of the secular
courts: witchcraft. Over the following two hundred years, tens of thousands
of individuals across Europe and its colonies would be tried and convicted
of this offense. In England alone, hundreds of men and women were
executed for covenanting with the Devil or using harmful magic against
their neighbors.
Almost universally, this "age of credulity and injustice"5 has provoked a
kind of retrospective horror that "rational, highly educated men 'could have
been so bigoted as to put people to death for ... patently impossible acts' ."
In popular thought, convictions for witchcraft must have been miscarriages
of justice: because witchcraft does not exist, witchcraft prosecutions are,
almost by definition, sham trials. And certainly, many aspects of the witch
trials seem barbaric by modem standards. In particular, much of the
evidence relied upon seems nonsensical. The criminal justice systems of
early modem Europe lacked many of the evidentiary rules that, today, seem
most fundamental - and contemporary commentators clamored for the
suspension of those that did exist. Because witchcraft was "an extraordinary
matter," the argument ran, it required "extraordinary dealing."