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So after last weekends book buying extravaganza I now have too many books that I want to read. And of course the two I picked to read first are 800 and 400 pages each. Which can take a frustratingly long time to get through.
I've been reading "Witches and Neighbors" by Robin Briggs this afternoon. I had high hopes for this book, as it was recently published, 1996, and the author is a professor in Early Modern History at Oxford. Though I've found it slow going and not very interesting, which is quite disappointing. He does some nice things with the book, he incorporates a lot of recent anthropological work on witch craft into the book. Which of course i am very fond of. However the first hundred pages plus address the issue without an real reference to either magic or religion in the context of witch craft. Instead he focuses on common "folk beliefs" reporting largely from the trails as to what people believed witches were and what they did. I was finding the whole thing rather frustrating but I have to finish once I start a book. (despite all the tempting selections on my shelf currently)
But I'm glad I did as the last chapter I read was very interesting new and insightful. It still wasn't addressing the issues of magic and religion. But rather looked at the structure of a village, and the lives of the people. How early market economies worked, how people were expected to give each other charity, and refusal to do so could lead to feelings of guilt. How refusals and quarrels would lead to curses, and when some thing bad happened, the accusations of witchcraft would start. It looked at how unwanted beggars would get the reputation of being surly, and witches. How this could be used to their advantage, and people wouldn't want to refuse alms to someone they suspected of being a witch as they feared her curses. So when trials were rare, it would often work out in someones favor to be seen as a witch. When someone was disliked, they could easily be blamed for deaths of people and livestock.
It was a very good chapter. For a long time it seemed to confuse historians why villagers would accuse each other in the trials, not fitting with their theories that it was a panic brought on by the authorities at the time. The idea that quarrels over years and years, neighborly disputes, and guilt over charity, could lead to accusations was a good insight. Most accusations brought against witches, were not immediate problems, but suspicions that had gone on for years and years. It took the incidents out of the instant of the witch trials that were recorded, and put them back in the context of actual people's lives and the place and time they were living in.
So I'm no longer not liking my book, but once again find myself wishing I had more time to read.
I've been reading "Witches and Neighbors" by Robin Briggs this afternoon. I had high hopes for this book, as it was recently published, 1996, and the author is a professor in Early Modern History at Oxford. Though I've found it slow going and not very interesting, which is quite disappointing. He does some nice things with the book, he incorporates a lot of recent anthropological work on witch craft into the book. Which of course i am very fond of. However the first hundred pages plus address the issue without an real reference to either magic or religion in the context of witch craft. Instead he focuses on common "folk beliefs" reporting largely from the trails as to what people believed witches were and what they did. I was finding the whole thing rather frustrating but I have to finish once I start a book. (despite all the tempting selections on my shelf currently)
But I'm glad I did as the last chapter I read was very interesting new and insightful. It still wasn't addressing the issues of magic and religion. But rather looked at the structure of a village, and the lives of the people. How early market economies worked, how people were expected to give each other charity, and refusal to do so could lead to feelings of guilt. How refusals and quarrels would lead to curses, and when some thing bad happened, the accusations of witchcraft would start. It looked at how unwanted beggars would get the reputation of being surly, and witches. How this could be used to their advantage, and people wouldn't want to refuse alms to someone they suspected of being a witch as they feared her curses. So when trials were rare, it would often work out in someones favor to be seen as a witch. When someone was disliked, they could easily be blamed for deaths of people and livestock.
It was a very good chapter. For a long time it seemed to confuse historians why villagers would accuse each other in the trials, not fitting with their theories that it was a panic brought on by the authorities at the time. The idea that quarrels over years and years, neighborly disputes, and guilt over charity, could lead to accusations was a good insight. Most accusations brought against witches, were not immediate problems, but suspicions that had gone on for years and years. It took the incidents out of the instant of the witch trials that were recorded, and put them back in the context of actual people's lives and the place and time they were living in.
So I'm no longer not liking my book, but once again find myself wishing I had more time to read.