The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic - Оксфордская история магии и колдовства

Many people are vaguely familiar with the history of witchcraft and magic. The topic attracts regular media interest. Yet it is also a subject around which swirls much misunderstanding, misinformed opinion, and dubious facts. One such perennial notion is that witches were burned in England, and likewise the erroneous belief that millions of people were executed during the era of the witch trials. Over the last two centuries this notorious episode in European history has repeatedly been portrayed as a stain on the medieval age. Yet the vast majority of the prosecutions and executions took place not in the Middle Ages at all, but in what historians refer to as the early modern period, an era which runs roughly from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Words like ‘hysteria’ and ‘craze’ litter the older literature on the subject, and continue to be widely used to describe the trials. Yet as James Sharpe and Rita Voltmer show in their chapters, the causes and pattern of the European witch trials were not the result of mass delusion or credulity. The greatest minds of the era believed in the reality of witchcraft and magic. This was a time in Europe when the Reformation transformed religion and politics, legal systems were becoming more sophisticated, and science made great strides in understanding the natural world. The belief in witchcraft and magic was not some evolutionary stage that society passed through on the way to general enlightenment and scientific progress.

 

The intense academic and public focus on the early modern witch trials can, itself, be seen as problematic. Does the execution of tens of thousands of people, for example, make it more important and of more historic value to research and understand witchcraft and magic in this era rather than before or after? One of the aims of this Oxford Illustrated History is to describe how witchcraft and magic have a history that stretches back to the beginning of writing 5,000 years ago, and remain with us today as relevant cultural phenomena that continue to reflect fundamental aspects of contemporary societies and individual psychologies. The last three chapters (by myself, Robert Wallis, and Willem de Blécourt) show that we continue to live in a world fascinated by the promise of magic.

 

The origins of magic were already being debated in antiquity, and histories of the witch trials were appearing in Europe before the last of the trials and executions had ended. The topic has excited the minds of artists, playwrights, novelists, and screen writers over the centuries. For some it is the details of magical practices in pursuit of wisdom, health, wealth, desire, and harm that are of most interest, or the fabulous stories of the seemingly impossible, such as flying, shape-changing, and conjuring demons and angels. For others it is the gruesome stories of torture, persecution, and execution that intrigue, provoking reflection on how otherwise reasonable human beings could allow and perform such tasks. The history of witchcraft and magic provides rare glimpses into the human psyche and the complexities of human relationships in the past in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, and social status.

 

Less exciting to some, perhaps, but equally fascinating is what the history of witchcraft and magic can tell us about how societies formed, developed, and changed over the centuries. It enables us to see the profound if often subtle interactions between different cultures that are obscured by studying the ‘bigger picture’ of war, conquest, and the political games between kings, queens, and emperors. Peter Maxwell-Stuart’s chapter provides us with an overview of how magical knowledge and practices reveal the cultural and religious flows between successive empires and religions in the ancient world. Magic unites as well as divides ideologies and religions. Sophie Page’s chapter on medieval magic examines the extraordinary but brief flowering of knowledge exchange between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain.

 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. – 333 p.

ISBN 978–0–19–960844–7

 

List of Colour Plates 

List of Tables 

Further Reading 

Picture Acknowledgements 

Index

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Оуэн Дэвис – Оксфордская история магии и колдовства

Adeptus Novus, «Подпольная Оккультная Лавка», 2024. – 274 с.

 

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