Marion Gibson - Witchcraft: The Basics

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at Exeter University and works on witches, magic, paganism and the supernatural in literature. Her previous publications include: Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft (2017), Imagining the Pagan Past (2013), Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity co-edited with Shelley Trower and Garry Tregidga (2012), Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (2007), Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (2006) and Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (1999).

NARRATIVE

BRONWEN THOMAS

PHILOSOPHY (FIFTH EDITION)

NIGEL WARBURTON

POETRY (THIRD EDITION)

JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT

THE QURAN (SECOND EDITION)

MASSIMO CAMPANINI

RACE AND ETHNICITY

PETER KIVISTO AND PAUL R. CROLL

RELIGION (SECOND EDITION)

MALORY NYE

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

PHILIP CLAYTON

RESEARCH METHODS (SECOND EDITION)

NICHOLAS WALLIMAN

ROMAN CATHOLICISM (SECOND EDITION)

MICHAEL WALSH

SHAKESPEARE (THIRD EDITION)

SEAN MCEVOY

TERRORISM

JAMES LUTZ AND BRENDA LUTZ

WITCHCRAFT

MARION GIBSON

WOMENS STUDIES

BONNIE SMITH

WORLD HISTORY

PETER N. STEARNS

RESEARCH METHODS

NICHOLAS WALLIMAN

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-Basics/book-series/B

Marion Gibson

First published 2018

by Routledge

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2018 Marion Gibson

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibson, Marion, 1970- author.

Title: Witchcraft: the basics / Marion Gibson.

Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series: The basics | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002465

Subjects: LCSH: WitchcraftHistory.

Classification: LCC BF1566 . G49 2018 | DDC 133.4/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002465

ISBN: 978-1-138-77996-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-77997-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72675-5 (ebk)

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Thanks to the students on my Witchcraft and Magic in Literature module, who road-tested chapters of the book for me: Kirsten Munday, Patrick Liddle, Rebecca Mixter, Catrin Komor, Alexandra Simon-Lewis, Robyn Benedikz, Hannah Goodfellow, Rossi Fiumefreddo. Other people who helped enormously and read sections or much of the text are: Harry Bennett, the four anonymous readers of the initial proposal, Jameson Tucker, Peter Geschiere, Ronald Hutton and Jacqueline Pearson. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you to Angela Gibson. Id also particularly like to thank Kate Sanders, Rachel Hogden, Jo Esra and Tabitha Stanmore, who have made it possible to finish the book, eventually, alongside my role as Associate Dean for Education, and the wonderfully supportive Routledge editorial team, Laura Pilsworth and Morwenna Scott, as well as Iram Satti, and Siobhan Poole, who commissioned the book.

This book comes out of my own experience of teaching students of Renaissance and contemporary English Literature and History at British universities, a thriving arena for Witchcraft Studies. It is primarily illustrated, therefore, with examples of witchcraft in the Anglophone world, and from the period from the early modern to the present. Ideally, it would have a couple of companion volumes: Witchcraft: The Anthropological Basics might be one, with a focus on the methodologies and historiography of the social sciences, whilst another would expand on wider European material; a third could cover just the Medieval period alone and a fourth might look at global witchcrafts. As much space as possible within the constraints of the series format has been given to this essential anthropological, Medieval, continental European and global context for witchcraft. However, you will probably find this book most useful if you are studying or teaching a course on the Anglophone world of witchcraft from around 1580 onwards, and its historical and literary study. The basics of Witchcraft Studies as they appear here, then, will not be basic to everyone studying witchcraft, but I hope the book will illuminate that wider study and its basics as I see them.

The belief in witchcraft is at least as old as the first writings of societies across the world. It is recorded in the oldest religious texts, poems and plays, and philosophical and scientific theory. Witchcraft belief is a phenomenon expressed through, and to some extent created by, language an idea that this book will explore in detail as we examine the story of witchcraft in history and culture. The book will take you on a journey through the history, literature and wider study of witchcraft, aiming to help you to understand the basic features of this complex phenomenon, particularly if you are at university or college and are taking a course on witchcraft texts or cultures, or periods of history that include witchcraft belief. The focus of exploration will be primarily witchcraft as harmful magic, defined by laws and treatises written against it, although we will also be looking at its more benign representation in literature and in some modern religious practices. Today, however, it is still possible to be prosecuted or attacked as a witch, making the topic a compelling one in life as well as in art.