‘I feele not in my selfe those common antipathies’
Religio Medici
IN EARLY 2014, anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe. Islamophobia – a word that barely existed until the 1990s – is widespread. In London, the Metropolitan Police stands charged, permanently it seems, with ‘institutional racism’, a situation doubtless reflected in other cities, and doubtless reflective to some unplumbed extent of the feelings of the majority of the people they protect. Our views about ‘travellers’, migrants and asylum seekers are formed in ignorance and suspicion.
But we have surely made progress since the seventeenth century.
Norwich’s greatest failure of tolerance may be this. In Holy Week of 1144, according to a hagiography produced soon afterwards by a monk newly arrived in the city, a twelve-year-old boy called William was lured away from home with the promise of work and then ritually tortured and crucified by Jews. His body was found in Thorpe Woods beyond Mousehold Heath with a wooden teasel stuffed into the mouth.
Norwich did not at first rise against its Jewish population – a small community had settled in the shadow of the Norman castle, on the site where Thomas Browne’s house would later be built. It was only later, possibly when the Church saw an opportunity to create a cult around the ‘martyr’ William, who is depicted in various East Anglian rood screens with thorns piercing his head and bearing his own cross, that the story grew into the first medieval accusation of blood libel against the Jews, and the pogroms began. In 2004, as work was beginning on the construction of a new shopping centre in the city, seventeen skeletons, including those of eleven children, were discovered at the bottom of an old well. DNA tests proved inconclusive (religion is not genetic). But other evidence strongly supported the theory that the remains were those of Jews slaughtered some time after about 1150.
Following increasing persecution, England’s Jews were expelled in 1290. It was not until 1655 that they were readmitted and a small Sephardic community was established in London. Thomas Browne therefore knew no Jews in Norwich, and nor did almost everybody else in England. People nevertheless believe, as Browne states it in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ‘That the Jews stink naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savour.’ This is ‘a received opinion we know not how to admit’, he adds.
Browne does not follow our contemporary liberal reflex and spontaneously reject this insult outright. Instead, shockingly perhaps, he turns to comparative zoology. It is not unreasonable that men should smell if other animals do, he points out. Nor is it improbable that persons may have individual odours detectable, if not by their fellows, then at least by their dogs (Alexander the Great smelt especially delicious, according to Theophrastus). This comparison with animals may serve as a reminder of how lowly many Christians regarded Jews (even if they never met one), but for Browne it is a habitual dimension of his scientific enquiry. Now he comes to his judgement: ‘But that an unsavoury odour is gentilitious or national unto the Jews, if rightly understood, we cannot well concede; nor will the information of reason or sence induce it.’ Browne’s use of the word ‘gentilitious’ is a clear signal that the imputation of malodorousness might also be made, with equal unfairness, against any non-Jewish nation. Browne’s own mongrel theory is that Jewishness, ‘however pretended to be pure, must needs have suffered inseparated commixtures with nations of all sorts’. This in fact squares well with modern genetic studies which show that there is often little to distinguish Jewish people from many non-Jewish Levantines.
Browne’s determination to explore this topic in all scientific earnestness next leads him to examine possible links between diet and human odour. If anything, he argues, Jews should be less odorous than the rest of the population – and indeed healthier – because of their dietary laws, which proscribe the eating of too much meat and other excesses, and hence ‘prevent generation of crudities’.
Logic is on his side too. Though they are ‘of the same seed’, converted Jews are never accused of exuding this odour. It is ‘as though Aromatized by their conversion, they lost their scent with their Religion,’ he notes. Some people in the seventeenth century suspect that Jews go among them, hiding their true religion; but if that were the case surely then ‘could they be smelled out’.
Finally, Browne brings in personal testimony. There may be no Jews in Norwich, but he has certainly met Jews in Padua where there was a ghetto much like the one in nearby Venice. In both Padua and Leiden, Jews were able to enroll as students, often studying medicine. In conversation with them, and even entering the synagogue, he can recall no smell. The origin of the popular slur he traces ultimately to a biblical metaphor of abomination being taken as literal. He ends with some wisdom that modern xenophobes would do well to remember, ‘it being a dangerous point to annex a constant property unto any Nation’.
Browne is more critical of Islam: ‘the Alcoran of the Turks (I speake without prejudice) is an ill composed Piece, containing in it vaine and ridiculous errours in Philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond laughter,’ he asserts confidently in Religio Medici. That parenthetical phrase may read to us now a bit like ‘I’m not racist but . . .’, yet he does truly endeavour to speak without prejudice, for his thoughts often lead him to comparisons with more familiar Christian texts where he also finds plenty that is ridiculous.
He does not itemize the vanities of the Qur’an. Browne’s chief regret is the squandering of Arab scholarship occasioned by the spread of this religious text, and the ensuing ‘policy of Ignorance, deposition of Universities, and banishment of Learning, that hath gotten foot by armes and violence’. His own religion is of course hardly blameless in this regard, and he compares the Muslims’ abolition of universities with the Christian propensity to condemn literature, which he suggests arises again from over-literal interpretation of scripture, in this case the injunction, ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy’, contained in Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians.
Being closer to the events, scholars in the seventeenth century were in some ways more aware than they are today of the great debt that the Western Renaissance owed to Arab intellectuals. These men preserved the science of the ancient Greek and Roman world, and built substantially on it, especially in the fields of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and chemistry. Browne singles out the alchemist Geber (J
bir ibn Hayyn), who developed the theory that all metals were composed of different proportions of mercury and sulphur, and Avicenna (Ibn Sīn), the author of medical textbooks used up until medieval times. Such thinkers could surely never be satisfied with the Prophet Muhammad’s explanation of earthquakes as ‘the motion of a great Bull, upon whose horns all earth is poised’. With examples like this, ‘is it not without wonder, how those learned Arabicks so tamely delivered up their belief unto the absurdities of the Alcoran’.
Browne nevertheless sees it as his duty to enlighten readers of Pseudodoxia Epidemica as to some of the curious aspects of Muslim worship. In a long discussion of the deceptive nature of east and west (deceptive at least to those who believe the Earth is round because the two must meet), he mentions their holy cities, Mecca and Medina, the places where the Prophet was born and is buried. Although Muslims in the west face east when they pray, in order to face Mecca, Muslims in the east must face west, he points out. The ceremonial is only ‘Topical’; there is no mystery or magic in it. Furthermore, he refutes the idea that Muhammad’s tomb in Medina hangs, as some have said, suspended in the air without support – even with the aid of magnets. The ‘conceit is fabulous and evidently false from the testimony of Ocular Testators, who affirm his Tomb is made of Stone, and lyeth upon the ground’.
Demystifications such as these are an important feature of Browne’s discussion of religions about which most people know little and fear much. They are something we need again today, with media scares about ‘unlabelled’ halal meat and the insinuation of elements of sharia law into Western legal practice.
Colour was a mystery in the seventeenth century. Why is grass green? Why do other plants have white roots and black seeds, or yellow roots and purple flowers? Why can the fashionable tulip be cultivated to produce almost every colour except blue? When the chemical nature of pigments lay undiscovered, there was no way to begin to explore the matter. Browne asks the questions – and makes a fair attempt to answer them, proposing that colours are due to particular mixtures of the elements. (He means the four ancient elements, not the modern chemical elements, but he is right in principle, as it is often the presence of particular elements, such as magnesium in chlorophyll or iron in haem, that alters the colour of otherwise chemically similar substances.)
Browne is warming up to his real topic, which is ‘Of the Blackness of Negroes’, to which he devotes two substantial chapters and a further digression in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. He wants to answer the question of ‘Why some men, yea and they a mighty and considerable part of mankind, should first acquire and still retain the gloss and tincture of blackness?’ His exploration follows the usual rambling path, discounting fanciful theories based on causes ranging from the natural to the mythological, and diverting into the coloration of animals in different latitudes. Unlike the stoat or the mountain hare, Browne notes, dark-skinned people transplanted into Europe’s ‘cold and flegmatick habitations’ do not turn white. Nor are their children born paler than they. Unless they mix with people of paler complexion, that is: Browne is relaxed about racial mixing, as are many at this time. The first anti-miscegenation laws were only introduced in 1664 in the American colonies, when Maryland outlawed marriage between white people and slaves. The prohibition was soon extended to any marriage between races and was not overturned in many southern states until 1967.
Browne eliminates ‘the fervour of the Sun’ as the primary cause of blackness, pointing out that there are no ‘black’ people indigenous to the Americas, which span the equator. He concludes instead that the black complexion is exclusively African in origin, there being people in Africa living far from the equator who are as black as any. But as for what produced the original colour ‘mutation’ – he uncannily uses this word so suggestive of Darwin and modern genetics – this remains ‘a Riddle’.
Browne is more interested in the emerging politics of race. He dismisses the opinion that black skin was a curse of God by means of hermeneutical analysis, and with a startlingly modern gust of righteous liberalism: ‘Whereas men affirm this colour was a Curse, I cannot make out the propriety of that name, it neither seeming so to them, nor reasonably unto us.’ It is simply difference that provokes prejudice. He goes much further, finding no reason why black people should not be considered beautiful, the bodily ideal of the Greeks and Romans being all about proportion and saying nothing about colour. (The days when the proportions of various parts of the body would be used – by European ‘scientists’ – to devise racial hierarchies lay a few decades in the future.) Browne’s writing here soars to a meditation on beauty. It is almost as if he has fallen for some negress, as he echoes lines in Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ sonnets: ‘Then will I sweare beauty her selfe is blacke, / And all they foule that thy complexion lacke.’
Although Browne does not comment on the iniquities of the slave trade, his scientific and moral belief in the unity of humankind is apparent. Long before the European colonial project has reached its peak, he displays a vivid postcolonial imagination, which shows most clearly in the unlikely medium of a spoof verse written in reply to a friend who has sent him a prophecy. Browne responds with his own ‘Prophecy Concerning the future state of several Nations’, written, like the famous Prophecies of Nostradamus, published a century earlier, in rhyme.
Satirically meant or not, I would be disappointed if I did not find that Browne’s predictions are a cut above most of those doing the rounds. The verse reads:
When New England shall trouble New Spain.
When Jamaica shall be Lady of the Isles and the Main.
When Spain shall be in America hid,
And Mexico shall prove a Madrid.
When Mahomet ’s Ships on the Baltick shall ride,
And Turks shall labour to have Ports on that side,
When Africa shall no more sell out their Blacks
To make Slaves and Drudges to the American Tracts.
When Batavia the Old shall be contemn’d by the New.
When a new Drove of Tartars shall China subdue.
When America shall cease to send out its Treasure,
But employ it at home in American Pleasure.
When the new World shall the old invade,
Nor count them Lords but their fellows in Trade.
When Men shall almost pass to Venice by Land,
Not in deep Water but from Sand to Sand.
When Nova Zembla shall be no stay
Unto those who pass to or from Cathay.
Then think strange things are come to light,
Where but few have had a foresight.
Browne provides his unknown friend with a detailed exegesis of his prophecy that need not concern us here. The predictions are remarkable enough as they stand: the development of African nations, the rise of an Hispanic population in America, the growth of American spending power, the economic expansion of Mexico, and even a Wallander-style fear of Islamists insurgent in Scandinavia. Applying a proper Brownean scepticism, I am bound to add, though, that I see little sign of Tartars subduing China or of the Venetian lagoon silting up.
This embrace of other races and religions stems from one simple thought. In Religio Medici Browne writes: ‘I hold there is a generall beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind or species of creature whatsoever.’ Taking in man as part of creation, as he always does, Browne counts all humankind as formed in equal perfection.
It is Browne’s continental tour of the 1630s that has taught him not to fear difference. He is proud – inordinately so, it seems to us now – that foreign foods agree with him; he has shared frogs and snails with the French and, if he is to be believed, locusts with Jews. He points out – and he believes he is new in doing this – the dangerous temptation to stereotype national behaviour and stoutly resists it.
His travels must have tested his mettle. France provided the first real taste of Catholicism for an Englishman born in the year of the Gunpowder Plot. The French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants (1562–1598), ending with the Edict of Nantes safeguarding the rights of Protestants, were still fresh in the memory. Things were especially tense in Montpellier, where Browne studied; having declared itself Huguenot, the city heroically resisted a siege by the king’s army in 1622. Padua placed Browne closer to the centre of Catholicism, but in a city and university under the sway of the Venetian republic, where papal dogma came second to commercial and intellectual freedoms. When he travelled north from Italy to Leiden, he would have been made aware once again of religious tensions, this time between the Catholic Spanish Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic. In short, he has passed through ‘many reformations; each Countrey proceeding in a particular way and Method...some angrily...others calmely’.
Browne saw rather less of the civil wars that awaited in his own country. The first battles broke out in 1642, not long after he had settled in Norwich. Though East Anglia was largely Parliamentarian (Oliver Cromwell was Member of Parliament for Cambridge) and Browne was by inclination a Royalist, any conflict in Browne’s mind was never fully realized on the streets. Though there were intermittent riots protesting against taxes levied by the Parliamentarian forces, the major moment of violence visited upon the city was in fact an accident. On 24 April 1648, there occurred the ‘Great Blow’, in which the county arms store and ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder were set off in a vast explosion which killed forty people, blew out the windows of St Peter Mancroft church, and rained debris over the marketplace close to where Browne’s house stood.
‘You might read every word of Sir Thomas Browne’s writings and never discover that a sword had been unsheathed or a shot fired in England all the time he was living and writing there,’ noted the Scottish preacher Alexander Whyte in his 1898 appreciation of Religio Medici. My feeling is that Browne’s experience of the English Civil War is a bit like that of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, who misses the revolution of 1848, so wrapped up is he in his own affairs, or like Christopher Lloyd in Julian Barnes’s Metroland, who follows in his footsteps oblivious of the Paris événements of 1968 – or, if I might add my own modest moment of suspended reality, driving home from eating out in central London on the night of the Poll Tax Riots in 1990, vaguely wondering why there were burning cars lying upturned in the roadway.
Whyte’s evaluation is not quite accurate, however. There are intriguing hints here and there in Browne’s writing that all is not at peace, from a strange preoccupation with Roman battle formations in The Garden of Cyrus to the stork we met earlier, said to be found only in republics, a story concocted ‘to disparage Monarchical government’, he says. Though Browne was a loyal supporter of the king, he was, of course, not unreasoning in his support, and there are times when his thinking appears to align more closely with the Parliamentarian view. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, for example, he writes concerning sources of error that states have no right to deceive the people. The gesture behind publication of this book is also profoundly populist: it could never be perceived, as the work of the Royal Society, founded upon the Restoration of Charles II, perhaps could be, as a means of crown institutions gaining control over new knowledge. Browne ‘deprecated the frown of Theology’ as Edmund Gosse puts it, meaning that he was no Puritan. But after the Restoration he was, in his private correspondence, nevertheless critical of the king for not reining in his extravagant lifestyle. In all, he walked a careful line.
Browne may suffer from terminal indecision, but its dividend is his almost boundless tolerance for the individual. His attitude towards other religions and races, shaped by his European travels and wide learning, is mostly exemplary; it stands up well to scrutiny today. By the standard of his day, it is almost miraculous in its benevolence. He speaks up for classes of humanity that were often ostracized or demonized. He would have something to add to our current debate on multiculturalism.
He will engage with anybody with whom he can reason. His personal challenge is the multitude, ‘that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast’. This is not a matter of social class, for ‘there is a rabble even amongst the Gentry’. It is purely a matter of numbers. It is what the Victorian writer Charles Mackay would call ‘the madness of crowds’ that baffles him. He would, therefore, like to think of himself as especially wary when weighing the passions of the masses.
But this paragon of tolerance is about to disappoint us. For there is the matter of the witch trial. The story has all the right paraphernalia for a supernatural tale. It involves unappealing old women, innocent children driven into fits and swoons, props including vomited pins, extra nipples and a toad, and an untimely death. Or, to put it another way, it involves feared women on the margins of society, comfortable accusers with manufactured grievances, class friction, hallucinations and delusions, ignorance and credulousness, and the misfortune of sudden illness with no apparent natural cause or cure.
On 10 March 1662, two widows from Lowestoft were brought before the assizes at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. They had been charged the year before with bewitching seven children and young women of the town. Rose Cullender was probably about sixty years old at the time of the trial and had been widowed for twenty-three years. But she was not poor, like many accused witches, and she lived in the house which had passed to her son when her husband died. Amy Denny, or Duny, was rather younger and was more recently widowed. It is likely that her husband had been a persistent minor criminal in the Lowestoft area. She lived in rented accommodation on the southern fringe of the town.
The two women’s interactions with their accusers were commercial before they came to be seen as supernatural. Amy Denny was called upon for ad hoc childcare duties, and both of the women had sought to buy herring from two of the plantiffs’ houses. The first of these exchanges had occurred five years to the day before the trial began, the others intermittently thereafter.
The first to testify was Dorothy Durrant, a tradesman’s wife. On 10 March 1657, she told the court, she had asked Amy Denny to look after her infant son, William, for a short period while she attended to some business away from home. William was just twenty months old, and Dorothy stressed that Denny was not to suckle him. When Dorothy returned, Denny apparently explained that she had offered the infant her breast. After a row, she left the house in high dudgeon. That night, the boy fell into ‘swounding’ that lasted for several weeks. Dorothy then called a Yarmouth doctor known for treating bewitched children. The witch-doctor advised her to hang up the infant’s blanket during the day in order to shake out anything that might be in it, which should then be burnt. When this was done, a large toad fell out and was caught and thrown onto the fire, where it exploded with a loud pop. William recovered following this, while Amy Denny was found the next day with scorch marks over her face, making further curses against the Durrant family.
A couple of years later, Dorothy’s elder stepdaughter, Elizabeth, then aged about ten, complained of being afflicted by Denny. When Dorothy returned from the apothecary where she had gone to get medicine for Elizabeth, she found Amy Denny in her home, paying an unbidden visit to the sick child. Denny departed, saying the child would not live long. Elizabeth died two days later, while Dorothy became so lame in her legs that she required crutches.
The next witness was Samuel Pacy, a well-to-do fish merchant, the father of Elizabeth and Deborah, respectively about twelve and eight years of age. The prime mover behind the charges, Pacy had had Amy Denny put in the stocks as punishment for a first offence of witchcraft the previous year. Now he described how the sickly Deborah was one day taken lame. When Denny came to the house to buy herring a week later, she was repeatedly turned away. Upon being sent away for a third time, Denny grumbled something and Deborah, seeing this, was taken with severe fits. After this, their father told the court, both sisters began to experience hallucinations of Amy Denny and also Rose Cullender, and fell into fits and swoons. Between them they vomited up more than forty crooked pins as well as a ‘twopenny nail with a very broad head’, which were produced as evidence in court.
Elizabeth was present in the court, but apparently unable to speak or move during the proceedings, except for one remarkable episode which took place away from the main trial, as we shall see. Deborah was in such a bad state that her parents did not even bring her to the assizes. But the girls’ failure to testify for themselves was more than compensated for by Samuel’s evidence, which was copious and lurid in its detail and delivered in a sober manner that greatly impressed the court officials.
Sixteen-year-old Jane Bocking was also too weak to attend court, but her mother Diana testified that she had experienced fits and stomach pains and had vomited up pins, accusing both Denny and Cullender. Edmund Durrant (apparently unrelated to the other Durrants) testified that Rose Cullender had come to his house to buy herrings, but when she was sent away empty-handed, she afflicted his daughter Ann with the same symptoms. Ann was silent in court but fell into renewed fits when brought before the accused. Susan Chandler, eighteen years old and employed in service in Lowestoft, was likewise silent at the trial. Her mother Mary described the same symptoms and also accused Cullender. Mary Chandler had been one of six townswomen appointed to strip-search Cullender at the time the arrest warrant was issued. They had found first one ‘thing like a teat’ on her lower belly, then others ‘in her privy parts’. It was following this that Cullender had bewitched her daughter. Ann Baldinge, a single woman aged seventeen years, testified that Cullender had bewitched her too, just a few weeks before the assizes. Other accusers included further family members, various town officials, and Cullender’s landlady.
The judge was Sir Matthew Hale, one of the most senior judges in England, known for his humane and fair-minded treatment of prisoners in his dock. Though broadly a Royalist, he was notably lenient in cases where national security was supposedly under threat, and portrayed himself in his memoirs as a champion of the oppressed. But he had tried witchcraft cases before and passed the death penalty.
I cannot relate the full details of the trial, which lasted four days. The story is superbly told and analysed by Gilbert Geis, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of California, and Ivan Bunn, a local historian in Suffolk, in their book A Trial of Witches. The book also includes in an appendix the only first-hand account of the court proceedings, though this was first published as late as 1682, some twenty years after the events it describes, by an anonymous agent, who claims in a preface to have come by the original transcript of the court proceedings ‘in a private gentleman’s hands in the country’. The document has been shown to be unreliable, with discrepancies between the manuscript and printed versions. It even wrongly dates the trial to 1664.
It is time to call forth our expert. It is not clear why Thomas Browne was present at the Bury assize, but it is probable that he was summoned by those seeking to secure a conviction of the accused women. He had tenuous social connections with at least one of the court officials and with the principal plaintiff, Samuel Pacy.
He makes his entry at a key juncture. After the plaintiff families have all given their evidence, the proceedings are unexpectedly interrupted by ‘divers known persons’, according to the 1682 record. These are three serjeants-at-law – officers with duties of arrest and enforcing judgement – who are unhappy about the prospect of a conviction based on ‘the imagination only of the parties afflicted’. (The unease of all three was redacted in the record to name only one doubter among them, John Keeling.) Two modern-seeming measures might serve to demonstrate proper impartiality: an independent expert witness; and an experimental test.
The testimony of ‘Dr. Brown of Norwich, a Person of great knowledge’, in the words of the 1682 report, is brief. He gives his view that the ‘afflicted persons’ were truly bewitched. This is a matter of simple medical opinion, presumably based on observing their erratic behaviour in the courtroom. He then expands on this, recalling a recent case he has heard of in Denmark where witches had been discovered using the very same method of affliction by pins and nails. Such ‘swounding fits were natural, and nothing else but that they call them other’,* Browne suggests, ‘heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the devil, cooperating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villanies’. It is a fine distinction indeed that he draws between natural illness and supernatural affliction.
This is the sum of Browne’s contribution according to the court record. He may or may not have been present for the remainder of the trial. It is a loss if he was not, since it involves an experiment whose conduct and outcome should have greatly interested him.
The reason for going to the further trouble of an experiment to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused may lie with the judge himself. For Matthew Hale was a man who recognized the value of empirical observation in the testing of hypotheses. In 1674, he would publish an account of his own scientific investigation, Difficiles Nugae: Or, Observations Touching the Torricellian Experiment, and The various Solutions of the same, especially touching the Weight and Elasticity of the AIR. (The publisher was the same as for the trial report.) Torricelli’s famous experiment demonstrated the existence of barometric pressure by inverting a tube containing mercury, sealed at one end, over a bath of mercury; when this is done, the mercury in the tube falls to a leave behind a pure vacuum above it that is a standard length of about 76 centimetres. Hale could not believe that this volume was an empty void. He believed that in God’s creation everything was suspended from the sky and thus that there was no requirement for the atmosphere to exert such a downward pressure. More broadly, he felt that scientists, once in possession of an exciting theory, have a way of losing their impartiality when it comes to considering challenging new evidence. Torricelli thought he had a vacuum, but others had repeated the experiment and reached different conclusions. Could Hale disprove him once and for all?
How is this science at all connected with witchcraft? To Hale, the concept of a vacuum – nothing – implies that everywhere else is occupied by something, by matter, and this leaves no space for the spiritual. If there are regions where the Holy Spirit does not reach, then this may be where the devil and his witches reign. Hale replicates Torricelli’s apparatus and discovers, when he puts his finger over the end of the glass tube, a force of attraction sucking on his fingertip. ‘Most evidently the force that the finger feels is from within, and not from without,’ he writes, suggesting that it is not, as Torricelli believes, air pressure all around that is producing the sensation. For Hale, there had to be a physical something in the void responsible for the attraction. ‘First therefore I say it is not Nothing, or a pure Vacuity, but it is some corporeal substance that succeeds in the head of the Tube, derelicted by the Mercury.’
The experiment conducted in the Bury courtrooms was very different, although just as scientific in its way. In the first instance, the accused women were instructed to touch the afflicted girls ‘in the midst of their Fitts’. Only they, it was found, had the (demonic) power to release them. Next, the girls were made to place their aprons over their heads so they could not see. Rose Cullender was then instructed to touch them, which produced the same change as before. At this, however, an ‘ingenious person’ in the court objected that the girls might still be counterfeiting. The court officials then resolved on a more careful experiment. This time, in a private part of the court building, before a select few observers, one of the girls was again blinded with her apron, and one of the accused, this time Amy Denny, brought forward. But instead of her being made to carry on and touch the girl as before, another person stepped in to do this, ‘which produced the same effect as the touch of the Witch did in the Court’. This simple substitution should of course have been enough to show that a conviction would be unsafe. Surely now the girl had to be confeiting. But the witnesses returned to the court more confused than ever, protesting that they must have seen some kind of imposture, and the judge was unconvinced.
Would this little drama have altered Browne’s opinion? Probably, it would have confirmed it, making the children’s affliction seem less organic, and more maleficent.
The trial now moved toward its end. The judge did not sum up the case for the jury, lest, as he explained, he introduce his own bias. But he told them the questions they had to answer: were the children bewitched, and were the accused women guilty of the bewitching? Browne had affirmed that the former was the case, but had apparently said nothing specifically to implicate the women in the dock. But once bewitchment was agreed, who else was there to blame? The sentence was passed and the abbreviation sus per coll inked into the original indictments – suspendendae per collum, to be hanged by the neck. Verdict given, most of the girls made a spontaneous recovery; Dorothy Durrant walked again. Amy Denny and Rose Cullender were hanged on 17 March. The last words in the trial record: ‘but they confessed nothing’.
Where does the Bury trial sit on the historical timeline of English witchcraft? Was witchcraft on the rise or on its way out? Were the proceedings a fair example of modern jurisprudence or a throwback to more superstitious times? We need to know if we are to understand Browne’s testimony and certainly if we are hoping to excuse his actions.
A belief in witches and evil magic is of course as old as Eden, but the practice of witchcraft was only made a capital offence in England in 1542. The witchcraft act in use at the time of the Bury trial was passed in 1604, the year after the accession to the English throne of James I, and was influenced by his exploration of the topic in his book Daemonologie. This law remained on the statute book until 1736, but the last woman to be judicially hanged as a witch in England went to her death well before this, in 1685, although there were occasional vigilante lynchings until well into the nineteenth century.
The Bury trial thus falls somewhere after the peak of the English witch frenzy, which gathered momentum in the 1560s, and included the notorious episode of the Pendle witches in 1612 and the activities of the ‘witch-finder general’, Matthew Hopkins, chiefly in Essex and Suffolk during the 1640s. In 1645, Hopkins had chosen Bury St Edmunds as the site of a special court (properly constituted courts being hard to convene during the Civil War) at which eighteen ‘witches’ were hanged. In all, Hopkins’s campaign accounted for almost half of the estimated 500 people ever executed for witchcraft in England. It is notable that legal action against witches spiked at times of national tension, such as in the 1580s, when there were fears of invasion and regicide, and during the Civil War years. With the Restoration in 1660, relative normality is regained.
The trial of 1662 nevertheless casts a long shadow that reaches across the Atlantic to the infamous Salem witch trials thirty years later – trials that, according to Geis and Bunn, ‘might not have taken place if there had not been a trial at Bury St. Edmunds’. Their reason for this startling claim is that the movers behind the Salem trials, including the Massachusetts Puritan minister Cotton Mather, believing that ‘witchcrafts here most exactly resemble the witchcrafts there’, wished to proceed in proper fashion, and took the 1682 account of the Bury trial as their guide.
In parallel with this crisp timeline of historical events there is another, fuzzier line which shows that witchcraft did not simply rise and fall during the course of the seventeenth century, but that at all times it was a matter of dispute and uncertainty, even though it had a certain status in law.
There were of course those who firmly believed in witches throughout this period. Thomas Browne has to be counted as one of these. ‘I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are Witches,’ he writes in Religio Medici. He has hardly shifted his position by the sixth edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica thirty years later, where he writes of the devil as an agent of error whose devious methods include ‘endeavours to propagate the unbelief of Witches’. For him, belief in witches is a theological necessity: belief in God entails a belief also in the devil, and belief in the devil means belief also in his agents, witches and demons. Those who deny the existence of witches can only be atheists in this view. Contemporaries such as the religious scholar Méric Casaubon pursued a more nuanced line, admitting certain natural explanations for witchcraft, including medical explanations, while still upholding belief in witches themselves, fearing that denial would encourage atheism.
But there were sceptics. Oddly, one Dr Browne, a physician of Norwich, was in 1578 accused of spreading mistrust in the law by asserting that witches did not exist. Even some of those inclined to go along with the law and Christian doctrine could see that it was hard to say exactly who was a witch. The arts of sorcery could be acquired through academic study, for example, as well as from the devil, which meant that not all those who cast spells were true witches. Contrary to popular belief, witch trials in fact often led to acquittals (except where zealots like Hopkins were running proceedings). In later trials, doubts began to be raised about the reliability of witnesses. In 1675, eight Stockholm women were accused of witchcraft by a number of children, including some of their own. But the children’s testimony that they had been carried off to a witches’ sabbath was shown to be unreliable when their stories did not agree. Some of the children who refused to cease their accusations were sentenced to death to stop the stories spreading, and some of the accused women were released.
More forthright opinions began to be voiced. The Yorkshire physician and occultist John Webster wrote The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft in 1677, in which he argued that witches did not exist and that belief in them only arose from mistranslations in the Bible. His view was endorsed by the Royal Society, though not, unsurprisingly, by the Church. Joseph Glanvill, an early fellow of the Royal Society, positioned himself as a sceptic’s sceptic, keen to take witchcraft at face value as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. There were soon so many eager debunkers of witchcraft that even people who should have disbelieved, such as the scientist Robert Boyle, felt driven to affirm its existence. The sceptics themselves stood to be demonized along with the witches. Witchcraft was thus still widely believed and accepted during the rest of Browne’s life. Thereafter, witches began to be seen as harmless; by 1750 in Norwich it was ‘no offence to be a Witch but to pretend to be so which is very penall’.
‘The Bury trial is interesting for the light it throws on how a witch trial could be conducted after the Restoration (especially in Bury, site of the notorious Hopkins trials in 1645),’ according to the historian Ian Bostridge. It was ‘a model witch trial’. The doubts aired, experiments conducted, and independent opinion heard all contributed to this impression. Browne fills the role of the expert whom Casaubon recommends should be present at witch trials. He ‘makes the necessary discrimination between natural and supernatural’. He explains that bewitching is the act of the devil, aided by witches. But he does not say that the accused women are witches. There again, he doesn’t say they are not, or apparently propose any better way of testing the matter.
Seventeenth-century justice has been done. The twenty-first century stands dismayed. Model it may be, but the Bury trial stands as an illustration to us now of the dangers of letting Christian doctrine dictate the actions of English courts, or any religion dictate any judicial proceeding. It also shows that those who go about with the assurance that they are rational beings using the latest scientific methods can still lead us into dark corners.
Can we exonerate Browne? Even to explain his actions, we need to see the events described and enacted in court not in the self-congratulatory terms of our own supposed enlightenment but in terms of his own century. We know that a toad could easily have tumbled out of a blanket in a dank house, although we know too that toads are popularly associated with witchcraft, and the image of a toad, once suggested, would be hard for people to get out of their heads. We know that the vomited pins and nails produced in court, another entirely standard feature of such cases, could easily be faked, but we know too that swallowing objects is a classic behaviour observed in people with certain mental disorders. We know that the extraneous teats are probably hernias or some other organic growth. We know that the women’s behaviour – grumbling and cursing when they do not get what they have come for – is perhaps no more than the habitual resentment of those made to feel socially inferior.
Why can’t the rationalist in Browne see this? Because he sees something else first. Like Hale and others in the courtroom, he sees evidence of his Christian faith in the existence of witchcraft and witches. There is also a secular reason guiding Browne. Thinkers such as Hobbes and Casaubon understood that witchcraft is an imagined activity, but one that should nevertheless continue to be called criminal in order to bind Church and state authority together. A guilty verdict at Bury, so soon after the Restoration, will act as a social glue, enabling all religious factions to unite against a common evil.
In a modern play of Browne’s life, the witch trial would undoubtedly be the pivotal scene after which nothing is the same again. But there is every sign that it was no such moment. Browne carried on regardless. He never wrote about the trial, his role in it, or the fate of the accused women. In his commonplace book some years after the trial, there is only this: ‘Wee are no way doubtfull that there are wiches, butt have not been alwayes satisfied in the application of their wichcrafts or whether parties accused or suffering have been guiltie of that abomination.’ Is this a specific regret, or Browne’s customary hedging generalized to cover all eventualities?
A few weeks after I met Kevin Faulkner, the Browne enthusiast, he sends me an email. It seems I have not allayed his fears about how I might represent Browne. ‘I am not totally sure whether my interest in Browne will be portrayed in a very favourable light in any forthcoming publication of yours,’ he writes. ‘Like all good scientists, including Browne, you have a strong grain of scepticism about him. Not sure that judging him from the vantage-point of our age always the wisest. Too easy to condemn him without any empathy or full understanding of the intellectual climate of his age which shifted considerably in his lifetime. If you look closely the same fixed viewpoints in Religio Medici are reiterated by him in old age. What do you think?’
Who might be the victims of ‘witch-hunts’ and ‘witch trials’ today? The terms are bandied about by those with a sharp sense of grievance. Bankers in New York and London have claimed they were the victims of a witch-hunt when proposals were brought in to limit their bonuses following the financial crisis of 2008. An ally of Lord Rennard, the former chief executive of the Liberal Democrats accused of groping female parliamentary candidates, has compared his friend’s treatment by the party’s leadership to the Salem witch trials.
But these are absurd examples. We need to establish some firmer parameters. First, for the experience of the twenty-first-century accused to be at all comparable to that of the seventeenth-century ‘witch’, there must be an element of public mania leading up to the arraignment or apparent during the judicial process. Second, the case is likely to involve a plaintiff and defendant who are known to each other, or who are participants in some unequal social transaction. Third, we should have a sense that the alleged crime is something that in other places or in future times might be understood in more enlightened ways.
Paedophiles seem an obvious group to start with. Those who are guilty truly do horrible things and great harm to children, of course, but the blind frenzy of hate that surrounds our fears means it is easy to accuse the innocent. Social workers deemed to have been negligent or worse in their duties are perhaps a closer fit. They are often women, have a duty of care of children who are not their own, and are seen by some to exert ‘unreasonable’ powers. Their unfavourable judgement of our parenting abilities may seem not unlike a curse, and they are able in a final resort to ‘take’ our children. There are websites where you can ‘name and shame’ people you suspect to be in either group.
The parallel with witch trials is not exact in either case, because we know witches do not exist. But there still seems to be something about the way society treats both groups that reaches back through the centuries. I share my quandary with a barrister friend who isolates the difficulty I am having: ‘These days, we tend not to try people if they’ve not done anything,’ he says drily. He’s right, of course. But it occurs to me that his statement might equally well have been made by any seventeenth-century prosecutor. We only try people for the crimes of the day.
Let us expand our search. There is no shortage of contemporary cases that have an air of moral panic about them. One of the most notorious of recent years is that of Amanda Knox, accused together with Raffaele Sollecito of the murder of a fellow student, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. Knox claims to have been called strega – witch – by lawyers representing the man she falsely named under police questioning as the perpetrator. Vocal, pretty, and erratic in her behaviour, Knox became the focus of intense media speculation. This was sustained throughout the original trial, the subsequent appeal and a retrial. Following the guilty verdict reinstated at the retrial, Knox has continued to protest her innocence in very public ways, for example posting online a picture of herself holding a placard in Italian proclaiming her innocence. This produced a backlash in Italy, but as Knox herself has observed: ‘Whether they mean to or not, these Perugia vi odia [‘Perugia hates you’] people, who bear their emotions on placards, are helping me and the world to understand what has really happened in this case.’
Italian sisters Elisabetta and Francesca Grillo had been employed for years as assistants in the household of the cookery writer Nigella Lawson and her then husband, the art collector Charles Saatchi. In 2012, they were accused of using credit cards they had been given for work for their own gain. At a pre-trial hearing, the Grillos reneged on an agreement to conceal Lawson’s use of drugs from her husband, and in the trial itself complained of ill treatment at the hands of their employers. The case has the mutual dependence, the grant of trust, and the outsider element of historic witch trials. It soon became apparent that the two accused were merely a lightning rod for Saatchi’s and Lawson’s marital difficulties. As the marriage imploded, the Grillos were found not guilty, and it was soon Lawson who felt that a ‘witch hunt’ had been launched against her.
In 2013, Bijan Ebrahimi, a disabled Iranian immigrant, was maliciously identified as a paedophile by neighbours after he was accused of photographing children vandalizing his garden. Police were called, but it was Ebrahimi who found himself arrested, a crowd taunting him as he was driven away. Finding no truth in the accusations, the police then released him. Two days later, he was viciously murdered by the father of the children he had photographed, and his body was burnt. His real crime, in the eyes of his vigilante killer, was presumably his otherness – his foreignness and his disability. The first victim of the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins in 1644 was the one-legged widow Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree.
A special hatred – driven by incomprehension and the deep fear that we have the capacity to do the same ourselves – is reserved for mothers accused of killing their own children. In 1999, Sally Clark was convicted of the murder of her two infant children in 1996 and 1998 (they were later shown to have died from ‘cot death’). The popular press treated her with the brightly coloured vitriol it reserves for ‘evil’ child killers. But Clark’s persecution was worse in prison where, as a solicitor and daughter of a police officer, as well as an apparently unrepentant child killer, she was an easy target. However, it was later shown that the conviction had been based on flawed expert testimony. The paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow had asserted in court that the odds of a single cot death in such a family were 1 in 8,500, and therefore that the odds of two such deaths would be 1 in 73 million (8,500 x 8,500 rounded up) – so unlikely that it was effectively ruled out as a cause of both deaths, as Clark’s defence was claiming; double murder was statistically far more likely. In fact, the chances of a double cot death in the same family cannot be calculated in this way. Nevertheless, the jury returned a majority guilty verdict, and Clark served three years in prison before being freed on appeal. Clark never came to terms with the actions of a legal system in which she herself had invested her career, and she was found dead of alcohol poisoning in her home four years later.
Social workers are often the focus of public vilification: the work they do – intervening where normal social structures have failed – is poorly understood and is backed by state powers of control over people’s lives. Oversights and errors can have tragic consequences. In 2007, the death of ‘Baby P’ produced a public outcry against social workers in the London borough of Haringey, where the infant was on an at-risk register because of violent treatment by his mother and others. The ultimate focus of the witch-hunt in this case was not the mother but the borough’s head of children’s services, Sharon Shoesmith, who, although she had not been directly involved in the decisions in the case, had had the temerity to defend her department and her own position, which made her seem callous in the eyes of the media. The Sun newspaper amassed a petition with more than a million signatures calling for ‘smug’ Shoesmith to go. She was eventually sacked by the government minister with responsibility for children, but later won financial compensation for unfair dismissal. It is argued that many children have been saved as a result of the moral panic in this case, although it also became harder to recruit social workers.
Following the exposure of the well-known disc jockey Jimmy Savile as a paedophile after his death in 2011, a wider enquiry was launched into claims of historical child abuse and sexual exploitation by a number of well-known media figures in Britain. Michael Le Vell was one of three actors in the popular Coronation Street television soap opera to be arrested. Le Vell was accused and later acquitted of child abuse offences including rape.† At first the UK Crown Prosecution Service had not sought to bring a case, but a review of evidence and fresh allegations – and then the breaking news of Savile’s history – led to a reassessment that there would be a ‘realistic prospect of conviction’. Two other actors in the series were also cleared of similar offences, and the CPS was then accused of having launched a ‘celebrity witch hunt’. These verdicts do not of course prove that prominent persons have not used their celebrity to prey upon impressionable and vulnerable persons, nor do they show that their accusers are malicious fantasists. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the pursuit of these investigations with such vigour so long after they were alleged to have happened does not represent some kind of displacement activity away from things we do not want to confront that are happening in our society now.
These modern ‘witch trials’ reveal what witch trials always have the potential to reveal: the limits of our tolerance and the shape of our own deepest fears and weaknesses. Our human response to such cases may have changed, but perhaps not as much as we like to think. We tell ourselves that we no longer seek out witches, but somehow we still find them brought before us. The courts stand in judgement, appearing harsh in some cases, lenient in others, as they are bound to do if they are society’s instrument of fairness. The major difference between now and then is surely the role played by the media, which ensures that our collective reaction has not progressed as far as the individual response of our better nature, and which appoints itself in the Matthew Hopkins role as the chief rooter out of ‘evil’.
There have been more extreme examples of moral panic that have the explicit Christian dimension that accusations of witchcraft seem to demand. During the 1980s the United States and then Britain and other countries experienced a wave of ‘satanic abuse’ cases where social services removed children from pre-school, day-care facilities or their families because they were said to be victims of abuses that included elements of ritual. Tales spread of bestiality, child sacrifice and cannibalism. In Britain, seven children from an extended family were taken into care in Nottinghamshire, twenty were taken into care in Rochdale, nine on the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay, and there were other similar instances. No evidence of ritual abuse was ever found, despite allegations made not only by concerned adults but also by the child victims. In a veritable throwback to the seventeenth century, in some cases lack of evidence was itself cited as evidence of the devilish deviousness of the perpetrators.
Subsequent investigation into the handling of these incidents found that the social workers had been too ready to believe the children’s stories and unwilling to take denials of wrongdoing at face value. They had used flawed interviewing techniques in which leading questions and ‘anatomically correct’ dolls served to project interviewers’ imagined versions of what might have happened onto the children’s accounts. The apparent clustering of satanic abuses turned out in some cases to be an effect of the way that social services categorized the children – an excess of zeal to echo the statistical blip produced in Essex and Suffolk by the witch-finder Hopkins in 1645, according to Jean La Fontaine, a social anthropologist who examined the modern epidemic.
This is not to say that these satanic abuse claims can be attributed to a wholly irrational mass hysteria, or that nothing depraved was going on. Recently uncovered paedophile rings made more plausible the extrapolation to satanic cults. Many other factors doubtless contributed: the breakdown of nuclear family life, evangelical Christianity, millenarian fears, the spread of violent and sexual imagery on video, and so on. Nor were social workers’ fears entirely unfounded; in some cases, children had been encouraged to repeat lurid stories in order to provide a smokescreen that would lead investigators to discredit claims of ‘ordinary’ abuses. In the end, though, ‘satanic’ meant little more than ‘organized’. As La Fontaine writes in her study, Speak of the Devil: ‘Mackay regarded the belief in witchcraft as a popular delusion, but 150 years later, social scientists do not dismiss it so lightly.’
Furthermore witchcraft is a living tradition in many countries. Belief in witches can lead to abuses both through the practice of witchcraft on vulnerable persons and through witch-hunts against people believed to possess demonic powers. Twins and people with albinism are among those at risk from witches because their body parts are thought to have magical properties as medicine. According to a report produced for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2011, thousands of people accused of witchcraft – mainly older women and children – are persecuted, tortured and murdered every year. Precise figures are understandably hard to come by, although a study by the Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network, claimed to be the first systematic attempt to assess the scale of the problem worldwide, concluded that at least 865 people were murdered or harmed by witchcraft practices and accusations during 2013, based solely on reports in English-language media. The beliefs that lead to these atrocities are based in local traditions, but are often exacerbated by recent conflict as well as by the involvement of evangelical Christians from outside.
The British are not a people much given to trumpeting their virtues, but one thing we do like to tell ourselves is how tolerant we are. Tolerance is part of our national myth. In other countries, notably the United States, personal freedoms are more clearly protected by law, and so there is perhaps less need to bang on about tolerance. But tolerance can only be protected so far by law. Ultimately, it must be held as a good thing by the people.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we are conflicted about this. Many quickly take offence when their beliefs or prejudices are challenged; we are told we must respect the views of minorities. The uneasy stand-off between offence and respect is a long way from true tolerance. It suggests in fact that we are basically intolerant, although we may be prepared temporarily to muzzle our intolerance. Count the things we tell ourselves we have zero tolerance for – drugs, terrorism, law-breaking, anti-social behaviour, bullying – and we quickly find ourselves confronting what is known as the tolerance paradox: how to tolerate those who are intolerant.
We deal with this difficulty largely by avoidance. Like most people, I try to arrange my life so that my tolerance of my fellow human being is not tested too forcefully. In that way I can then proclaim how tolerant I am. Thomas Browne undoubtedly pursued the same strategy in more trying circumstances. If I hear views that I regard as unacceptable, it is most likely to be through the media. My answering outrage at this can only be manufactured; it does not have the authenticity of spontaneous shock at a remark delivered face to face.
The tendency is to congratulate ourselves on how tolerant we are rather than to consider how much more tolerant we might be. In the seventeenth century, boiling alive and hand amputation were no longer the legal punishments for poisoning and publishing books hostile to the crown, for example. The practice of serfdom had recently lapsed. But it was still, as we have seen, more than respectable to believe in witches. We tolerate ‘witches’ now because we understand that they are merely people unlucky enough to find themselves at the margin of society, unfairly judged for living alone or exhibiting unusual appearance or behaviour. How do we now learn to tolerate, say, paedophiles? Pretending they do not exist or do not matter – the strategy of previous generations – will not do. But neither will the tabloids’ option of calling them evil scum. We need to understand that paedophilia is not an evil, nor even an illness (with the implication of a medical cure), but a species of human behaviour, however hard that is to accept, and then to limit our sanctions against paedophiles to curtailing harm rather than exacting retribution that is fuelled by fears of our own subconscious.
We might be inclined to bask in self-righteousness at the progress we have made, but the greatest test of tolerance is to make the forward comparison, to look back at ourselves now from the future, and to discern the unquestioned justice that will seem by then cruel and inhuman. Even the greatest minds of Browne’s age never imagined a day when slavery was abolished, when there was freedom of religion, when the vote might extend to women.
We might start with some basics. Is disability (mental as well as physical) fully accepted, when the disabled must be roughly ‘assessed’ for their eligibility to receive government benefits? Are the elderly treated with true equality by healthcare systems? Are the young treated fairly by the adults who fear them and envy their liberty? Of the four economic freedoms of the European Union – the free movement of capital, goods, services and people – it is not hard to see that it is the people who get the short straw (evident not least in the pernicious rhetoric of the moment which redefines people as workers, thereby reducing those who are not working to a subhuman level). Does a human have the right to deny another human liberty by imprisoning them? Does our love of meritocracy blind us to the inequality at its heart that leaves the stupid, lazy and feckless at a perpetual disadvantage?
Would it be going too far to predict a measure of animal equality? As I write, Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed a habeas corpus suit on behalf of the captive chimpanzees of New York State, where he has discovered that the legal definition of ‘personhood’ is not explicitly limited to Homo sapiens. The notion of animal trials would have been nothing strange to Browne, when animals were occasionally brought to court for crimes of murder, injury and destroying crops. (These days, by comparison, when a dog mauls a child, it is usually put down with no such formality – is that progress?) In the very year in which Amy Denny and Rose Cullender were hanged at Bury, for example, a man called Potter was executed in New Haven, Connecticut, for ‘damnable Bestialities’, according to the redoubtable Cotton Mather, but not before he had been forced to see hang his guilty partners in the crime, ‘a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows’.
hallucination (PE, 1646): Browne defines hallucination as occurring if vision be ‘depraved and receive its objects erroneously’. He implies that the word is in current usage with this meaning, and does not claim to invent it (although Browne’s usage is the earliest citation given in the OED). This corresponds well with modern definitions such as Webster’s: ‘perception of objects with no reality usu. arising from disorder of the nervous system or in response to drugs (as LSD)’. Were unicorns, basilisks or witches hallucinations? Browne did not believe so. They were all subject to rational explanation. Were the apparitions described by bewitched children hallucinations? By his own definition, Browne should have thought them so. But no; they were understood as appearances of reality – solid enough to be admissible in court as ‘spectral evidence’, as they were at Bury, and as similar apparitions would be later at Salem, and impossible to refute. According to Carl Sagan, it was not until the eighteenth century that the role of hallucinations in the persecution of witches began to be properly recognized.
* In all accounts of the trial that I have read, this part of the transcript reads, ‘. . .but that they call the Mother’, but sense surely dictates it is ‘them other’ that is meant, in other words that the afflicted persons ascribe supernatural causes to their illness.
† Customary judicial advice to treat rape allegations with extreme scepticism, assiduously followed in many British and American trials until feminist campaigning in the 1970s, originates in notes on recommended legal procedure made by Matthew Hale, probably in the 1670s.