A Book About Witchcraft in the Courtroom

Witches and witch trials remain a source of enduring curiosity. Julie Stone Peters, H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has written a book that approaches them in a new light: Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials.

While the judicial machinery of early modern witch-hunting could work with terrifying swiftness, skepticism and evidentiary barriers often made conviction difficult. Seeking proof strong enough to overcome skepticism, judges and accusers turned to performance, staging “acts of Sorcery and Witch-craft manifest to sense.” By looking at an array of demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, Peters shows how such staging answered to specific doctrines of proof—catching the criminal “in the acte,” establishing “notoriety of the fact,” and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt. But the performances, as she shows, sometimes got out of hand.

Peters talks about the book with Columbia News, as well as what she’s reading, teaching, and working on now.

What was the impetus behind this book?

Early modern witch trials never cease to fascinate people (me included!). How could so many people have believed that the world was swarming with witches? How could so many innocent people—over 50,000—have been tortured and judicially murdered? Why did so many of the accused confess?

In my last book, Law as Performance, I discuss one case—the failed witch hunt that inquisitor Heinrich Kramer launched in Innsbruck in 1485. Kramer encountered a captivating, clever, and feisty woman, Helena Scheuberin. When he accused her and six other women of witchcraft, she courageously defied him, staged the women’s defense, won the case, and got him drummed out of town. Sadly, Kramer’s defeat provoked him to write his infamous Hammer of Witches (1486), the manual used to prosecute alleged witches for the next two centuries and beyond.

Writing about that case while teaching a course called Witchcraft and Law in the Early Modern World, I found I had much more to say about witch trials. The new book (which is really a mini-book) builds on my central argument in Law as Performance: That we need to recognize the crucial place of performance and spectatorship in theorizing, producing, and disseminating law, in the past as well as in the present.

My new book is also quite different. Unlike Law as Performance, which ranges from the ancient through the early modern period and looks at law generally, Staging Witchcraft zooms in on a particular kind of trial in a fairly circumscribed period (circa 1580–1620), and focuses specifically on evidence and proof. Scrutinizing demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, I look at how judges, accusers, and sometimes the victims themselves staged demonstrations of witchcraft as evidence of the crime. Surprisingly, what inspired these demonstrations was skepticism about the existence of witches: Skeptics demanded visible proof; witch-hunters and other accusers provided that proof through staging.

In courtrooms, examination chambers, prisons, and other public spaces, they ordered the accused to conjure the devil or devil’s familiars, create hailstorms, or turn themselves into wolves. They brought bewitched demoniacs before juries and witnesses, where the victims fell into fits: They spoke in demonic voices, turned their bodies into hoops, howled like dogs on their hands and knees, found themselves elevated in the air, or dragged by invisible hands across the courtroom floor, and vomited hair, straw, or nails. They made the invisible world visible.

What are some of the cases included in the book?

To give just a few examples, there is the case of the North Berwick witches, who performed a witches’ sabbat dance, mad scene, and other wonders in King James’s royal examination chamber in Edinburgh in 1590, allaying his skepticism (and relieving them of further torture). There is the case of the elderly charwoman Elizabeth Gregory, who, at her 1602 trial, was forced to participate in a public lineup of “aged, homely, grosse bodyed” women wearing hats and mufflers like hers in order to test the supposedly bewitched 14-year-old Mary Glover, whom skeptics accused of counterfeiting. Another case involves the 13- or 14-year-old Jean Grenier, who became a minor celebrity by claiming to be a werewolf, and leading examiners through the French countryside on a tour of his supposed attacks, re-enacting them on the young girls present.

These cases show accusers and officials using staging to serve three specific doctrines of proof—catching the criminal “in the acte” (in flagrante), establishing “notoriety of the fact” (notorietas facti), and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt (indicia indubitata). But, as I demonstrate in the two cases I examine at greater length, performance sometimes overflowed the demands of doctrine, in unpredictable ways.

One of these cases is that of John Samuel, one of the three “witches of Warboys.” I focus on a scene in the 1593 trial in which the judge brought the supposedly bewitched 13-year-old Jane Throckmorton into the courtroom and demanded that John recite a “charm:” “As I am a Witch, . . . so I charge the divell to [allow] Mistris Jane to come out of her fit.” When John refused, the judge declared that he would “incourage” John by reciting the spell himself. When that failed, he invited the parson, alderman, and others in the audience to recite the spell. As these upright men began to chant, “As I am a Witch,” “I am a Witch,” “I am a Witch,” the trial began to resemble a male witches’ sabbat.

The other case is that of a young servant, Françoise Fontaine, in Louviers, France, in 1591. The judge can’t figure out whether she’s a witch or a victim of witchcraft: Like a victim, she thrashes on the ground, her hair stands on end, her eyes pop out, her mouth grimaces, she seems to levitate and float horizontally across the courtroom floor while emitting “water and stinking smoke” from under her skirts. But she also confesses to a pact with the devil. The judge and the other officials find her terrifying. At one point in the trial, they approach her—a phalanx of men cloaked up to the eyes, crossing themselves and chanting from the gospel of John, but ready to run. Eventually, all the lights go out, and the judge thinks Françoise has conjured the devil. In the pitch-black courtroom, blows and swords fly randomly; robed officials grab at arms and legs and jump on one another’s backs. To find out what happens, read the book!

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

To mention just two, first, Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, a marvelous historical novel that draws on real documents in the case of Katharina Kepler, an illiterate widow and herbal healer who was the mother of the great astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler. The novel is, in part, about Kepler’s struggle to defend his mother from the charge of witchcraft.

Second, I recently finished Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, another historical novel, this one about the life of a boy wrongly charged with car theft and sent to a juvenile correctional institution in Jim Crow-era Florida (based on the historic Dozier School). There, the atrocities include whipping that amounts to torture, shooting runaways, and “disappearing” boys in a secret graveyard. I haven’t yet seen the recent film based on the novel, but plan to.

What’s next on your reading list?

I’m partway through Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. His 1947 novel, set in the first decades of the 20th century, retells the Faust legend through the life of a young German composer, Adrian Leverkühn. Adrian deliberately contracts syphilis, renounces love, and courts madness in exchange for artistic greatness—a pact with the devil of sorts.

The novel, which weighs in at almost 600 pages, is dense and difficult, with long, technical discussions of theology, philosophy, music, and political history, so it will be a while before I get to what’s next—Patricia Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law. Williams is a brilliant writer, and serves as a model for how to write academic essays—about politics, law, and cultural history—in luminous, heart-gripping prose.

What else are you working on now?

A book about how our culture of cameras and streaming media has changed law. The working title changes every day, but one version is The War of the Cameras: How Video Has Transformed Our Legal Battles and What to Do About It. It’s in part an answer to the question that Staging Witchcraft and Law as Performance raise: What do my arguments about historical legal performance have to do with law today? There are a lot of continuities: We still worry about the dangers of legal theatricality while deploying it for our own legal ends. But the media revolution of the past quarter century has also transformed law: How we perform when we come before the law; what we see as jurors, or on the 24/7 screens where we watch the police in action. My new project looks at the legal, ethical, and political significance of this transformation by examining cameras and videos in what we could call “legal scenes”—in police cars and on the streets; in interrogation rooms, courtrooms, and prison cells.

What are you teaching this semester?

I’m a Heyman Center Fellow this year, so I’m teaching only one class—a graduate course, Film, Media, and Law. The course—which is very much in conversation with my new project—starts with three premises. Law plays a significant role in shaping the expressive media that represent our world to us. Those media in turn shape law and our experience of it, effectively forming us as legal subjects. But law and media may also act as conflicting domains of judgment—spaces for the enactment of alternative visions of truth, authority, and justice. The class is a workshop: Scholars at the cutting edge of the field come to class sessions to share their work; at the same time, students develop their own scholarly work on the intersections and encounters between media and law.