‘The divels speciall instruments’: women and witchcraft before the ‘great witch-hunt’

Review of periodical literature published in 2005

“…Jones and Zell consider late medieval and early Tudor witches, while Warner et al . explore the female brawlers of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century Portsmouth. Jones and Zell demonstrate that women were already associated with ‘black’ magic before the late sixteenth‐century ‘witchcraze’. Using records from the diocese of Canterbury between 1396 and 1563, they show that although the upsurge in witchcraft cases was a mid‐Tudor phenomenon, the stereotype of the evil female witch was already evident in fifteenth‐century cases.…”

“…Shaw describes elements of social capital that have also been explored by McIntosh in her own work on women and men in late medieval and early modern communities; here he quantifies a network density for leading townsmen and illustrates how wealth and status contributed to the construction of large social networks consistent with the functioning of oligarchy within the urban community. Using church courts records from the diocese of Canterbury from the end of the fourteenth century until the second half of the sixteenth century, Jones and Zell argue that ‘black magic’, unlike magic of more benign kind, was associated with women from at least the close of the middle ages. An early modern preoccupation with female witches has, it is then suggested, an earlier origin.…”

How Historians Begin: Openings in Historical Discourse

“…84 It is 'common knowledge' that the majority of accused 'witches' during the 'witch-craze' of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were female. 85 And finally, the other (later) moves and steps in the Swales model also feature occasionally as opening statements in historical articles. A few authors go straight for the gap: 'Historians of English witchcraft have not been particularly interested in male witches'.…”

Licit medicine or ‘Pythagorean necromancy'? The ‘Sphere of Life and Death’ in late medieval England

“…This author has yet to uncover any evidence from the middle ages of someone being reprimanded for using this item specifically, but the rare court records that survive from the period show that people in medieval England were occasionally punished – though usually not severely – for engaging in divinatory practices and claiming to predict life or death. The only evidence of prosecution for the use of a ‘Sphere’ is from 1564, when John Betson, a clergyman, was ordered by the northern court of high commission to hand in his copies of ‘Plato's Sphere’ and ‘Pythagoras's Sphere’, which he had used to recover stolen goods, before doing public penance by declaration in the markets of Yarm, Richmond and Northallerton. Looking at the evidence from medieval trials for divination and the case of Betson, then, it is likely that if a prosecution for using a ‘Sphere’ did take place pre‐1500, then the punishment would not have been particularly severe, ranging from the handing over of the device to the authorities to performing public penance.…”