Ostling, Michael

Michael Ostling

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Magic Ritual and Witchcraft

The Witch in the Western Imagination by Lyndal Roper

University of Queensland eSpace

101Reviews
everything’’-style philosophical statements and the dryly nominalist descrip-
tions of material objects and processes that have been typical of much of the
recent materialist turn. Indeed, a great portion of the force of its argument
comes from the very ethnographic specificity of the individual contributions
and the topical breadth represented by the collection as a whole. In sum,
those looking for a ready-made theoretical framework for the study of the
material components of ritual and religious practices will be disappointed.
Those, however, interested in learning or teaching how to ask better, smarter
questions about how religious systems and experiences alike articulate them-
selves in the world will find a wealth of food for comparative thought.
ian lowrie
Rice University
lyndal roper. The Witch in the Western Imagination. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. xii240.
As its title suggests, this collection of insightful essays illuminates the witch-
figure as imagined, as represented: as inscribed in print, carved in statuary,
engraved, painted, fictionalized. Roper’s conversation partners are such his-
torians as Stuart Clark and Charles Zika (she dedicates the book to the latter,
her early mentor at the University of Melbourne) who have looked to the
witch to reflect upon high-cultural concerns far removed from the village
quarrels and torture chambers of the witch trials. And yet, as in her Witchcraze
(2004), Roper never loses sight of the local, the human, the embodied: of
the origins of witch discourse in anxieties over fecundity and reproduction,
and the all too real consequences of this discourse to real women and men.
Just as demonology readily intermingled high theology, classical allusion, and
personal anecdote, juxtaposing wretched village crones with Circe and
Medea, Roper’s capacious erudition spans the several registers into which
modern scholarship slots the witch-figure: art and literature and drama; soci-
ology and psychohistory; theology and law. Throughout these seven essays,
she emphasizes the witch-figure’s talent for transgression, her propensity to
wander ‘‘in directions that led to moral ambiguity and doubt’’ (p. 27).
The title essay presents a provocative rereading of Kramer, Bodin, and De
Lancre: their tracts emerge as picaresque collections of titillating anecdote
that found a wide readership unconcerned with the authors’ theological con-
cerns. From the beginning, demonology formed a rich source for works of
drama, art, and fiction, from the Faustbuch to the great German baroque
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102 Reviews
confections of comedy and horror such as Johann Praetorius’ Stories from the
Blocksberg (1668). In Roper’s nuanced reading, ‘‘demonology did not limit
itself to mapping the witch-hunter’s intellectual belief structure, but contrib-
uted to a new literature of entertainment’’ (p. 27).
Chapters 2 through 4 explore the ‘‘symbolic and psychological capacious-
ness’’ (p. 3) of the imagined witch. Through the curious case of the ‘‘Gorgon
of Augsburg’’—a witch-like pre-Christian heroine alternately celebrated and
excoriated by the city-fathers of that imperial city—Roper shows that fictive
witches could be honored as valiant champions even while ‘‘real’’ witches
were burned at the stake. ‘‘Du¨rer’s Empty Frame’’ traces the emerging cen-
trality of the trope of Envy—an aging woman with dried up, dangling
breasts—in German artwork in the sixteenth century. This theme is eluci-
dated more fully in ‘‘Envy,’’ the longest chapter of the book and a summation
of its project. Envy bridges the gaps between discourse and habitus, text and
body, high art and village dynamics. Snake-haired and scowling, she stalks a
landscape encompassing every register of the early modern world: lurking in
the proliferating emblem books (where she preserves an ambivalence inher-
ited from Ovid: Invidia shadows and thus defines Cupid, emblem of desire),
but also in the emotionally charged atmosphere of childbirth, where young
women’s fear of the (projected) envy of postmenopausal elders ‘‘provided the
emotional fuel of the witch craze’’ (p. 113).
Chapters 5 and 6 move out of Augsburg to the rustic stock characters,
both real and fictitious, of the Obermarchtal villages. ‘‘Witchcraft and Village
Drama’’ juxtaposes the judicial theater of interrogation against the satirical
idylls of the Swabian playwright Sebastian Sailer: the latter’s depiction of a
‘‘coarse but cozy’’ village life provides an eerie backdrop to some of the last
German witch trials. ‘‘Witches’ Children’’ considers another sort of ‘‘play-
writing’’: the spontaneous incorporation of witchcraft into children’s games.
Children toyed dangerously with transgressive motifs such as the demonic
pact, initiating witch trials in the early seventeenth century but later contrib-
uting to the Enlightenment interest in childish imagination. The final chapter
provides a microhistorical analysis of a ‘‘Suicidal Student’’ and his autobio-
graphical account of diabolical pact and sexual escapade. Through the story
of Veit Karg’s tumultuous relationships with his devil and with the Augsburg
magistrates, Roper takes the opportunity to revisit and refine (but not to
repudiate) the Freudian approach that made her early reputation. The point
of such an approach is not to ‘‘prove the universal truth of the Oedipal com-
plex’’; rather, one uses psychoanalysis ‘‘as a heuristic device [to] expand our
idea of what kinds of motivations can cause people to act’’ (pp. 174–75).
Psychohistory casts some light, however tenuous, into the shadowy corners
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103Reviews
of early modern history—corners Roper has done more than most to illumi-
nate.
Roper consistently finds witch images in unexpected places, such as the
statue of Circe crowning the civic watchtower in Augsburg. Her gaze tends
to stray toward the margins of well-known artworks, where witches hide in
the corners, ‘‘in the background where one would not expect them’’ (p. 19).
Thus the well-fed, youthful figures of Peter Paul Rubens’ Council of the Gods
stand out in relief from an old woman skulking at the lower right edge of the
painting. Why is she there? And should any and every haglike figure ‘‘count’’
as a witch? Roper’s answer to the second question is provocative if not always
satisfactory: her book is about the imagined witch, a figure almost by defini-
tion old, dried up, and fired by a mixture of lubricity, malice, and envy. She
thereby also answers the first question: the shadowy figures at the margin
provide a point to the happy, fat, well-lit central characters. More than mere
contrarieties or inversions, such marginal hags represent half-acknowledged
and ambivalent potentialities: ‘‘the hags were integral to the pictures, and
they created a troubling undercurrent to the message these works ostensibly
conveyed’’ (p. 22).
Despite this focus on the witch as image (and the book is filled with care-
fully selected if not always sharply reproduced illustrations) Roper never loses
sight of the real bodies of real women, and this double emphasis develops a
gentle critique of Stuart Clark’s semiotic approach. Images can be treated as
texts in conversation with other texts, but ‘‘if the visual turn proceeds in the
same way as the linguistic turn, we will arrive at the same dead end’’—a
point of diminishing epistemological returns helping to explain the ubiquity
and internal coherence of witchcraft belief but failing to ‘‘explain the hold
witchcraft had on fantasy, and why it should prove so compelling to early
modern Europeans’’ (pp. 7–8). Though semiotic readings of demonology
have helped to render it sensible under given symbolic regimes, Roper wishes
to recapture ‘‘what it was that made images of witchcraft so disturbing’’ (p. 8)
to its early modern audience. ‘‘The figure of the witch took hold of the
Western imagination,’’ she argues, ‘‘because she could express terrors that lay
beyond words, reaching into deep ambivalence about death, identity, and
motherhood’’ (p. 24). However high and wide Roper’s perspective flies, it
always returns to earth, to the gravid materiality of bodies and the desires and
anxieties they provoke. Roper embraces this disjunction combining art his-
tory with microhistory because the anxieties expressed in art grow out of,
but also inform, the subjectivities of real people. She is thus willing to take
on thorny issues of causality sidestepped by much recent scholarship: she
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104 Reviews
wants to know how or whether images inspired witch trials without collaps-
ing image into accusation, representation into bodies burned. The ‘‘disgust
with aging female bodies’’ such images provoke made possible the ‘‘real vio-
lence against so many harmless old women’’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; but they could also offer insight into ‘‘the deepest human emo-
tions’’ (p. 24). Like pornography or the modern horror film, demonology
exploited the pleasures latent in fantasies of transgression, but ‘‘what gave
[demonology] a special frisson to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audi-
ences was the possibility that it might be true’’ (p. 31). For its early modern
consumers, demonology offered both titillation and a potential description of
the actual world. Roper convincingly insists that this ambivalence matters for
our interpretation of the witch trials and of the artwork and texts that both
fueled and reflected those trials.
michael ostling
University of Queensland
p. g. maxwell-stuart. Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Docu-
ments and Readings. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. Pp. 228.
The introduction of Maxwell-Stuart’s collection of sources, Witch Beliefs
and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings, begins with his
description of a world that has been substantially lost to our modern minds.
He describes a universe (called universum) created by a rational act of God,
where heaven, the earth, and hell were linked together in a meaningful pur-
pose. Living among us humans, according to this worldview, were magical
creatures, ghosts, faeries, and hobgoblins, some of whom sought to harm,
others to help. Magic and religion offered two methods to control these
potentially dangerous spirits. The Church considered its methods of interac-
tion with the divine as licit while condemning other more magical
approaches concerning the supernatural (such as worshiping demons) as illicit
superstition at first, then as idolatry and apostasy. Maxwell-Stuart cautions us
today against dismissing demon worship as ‘‘fantasy, lies, or gossip’’ (p. 7).
Instead, we should see magic as ‘‘rational and logical’’ (p. 12) ways of under-
standing God’s plan for the universum.
Maxwell-Stuart goes on to assert that nineteenth and early-twentieth-
century scholars of witchcraft belonging to the so-called ‘‘rationalist’’ school
rejected the old rational and logical universum as irrational in a postindustrial
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The Witch in the Western Imagination

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