Experiments in the Courtroom: Social Dynamics and Spectacles of Proof in Early Modern English Witch Trials

Abstract

This article presents the composite social context surrounding the “experiments” that were used to prove witchcraft accusations in early modern England. It demonstrates that legal proof was not imposed by elite legislators and judges, or fashioned in accordance with the voice of scientific experts, but was shaped through complex social dynamics in which the middling sort and petty gentry fulfilled a crucial role. Through this process, popular beliefs percolated into judicial proceedings. Members of influential provincial families were the social agents who reconstructed old supernatural methods of proof into innovative rational experiments, often replicating public displays of proof that helped bolster the criminal charges and provided a competing arena of evidence. The article claims that the judges' cooperation with these “experiments” might have been an endeavor by the official legal system to circumvent the threat posed by a popular grassroots alternative to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court system.

Sex Ambiguity in Early Modern Common Law (1629–1787)

“…The common law's commonsense philosophy placed its faith in "the good sense of the laymen" so juries, rather than experts, were granted the authority to determine judicial facts (Boorstin 1996, 111). Medical experts had been invited to testify in common law courts since the earliest days of common law, and, by the early modern period, such testimonies were in frequent use in England (Darr 2014). However, during most of the eighteenth century, expert knowledge was not granted special status in the doctrine of 26.…”