The Present in the Past: Hunting the Witch

The Crucible(Nicholas Hytner, 1996)
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)
Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943)

Anyone interested in the contemporary cultural meanings of ‘the witch’ could do worse than to visit one of the many online film databases (eg: IMDB, Allmovie) and run a keyword search on the word. The result will be dominated by one genre: the horror movie. But, very likely, the same keyword search will bring up a number of suggested words including witch-hunt and witch-persecution, which will themselves produce another listing, partially overlapping the first (Witchfinder General has, indeed, been described as among the greatest horror movies ever made). Even if we find the image of the witch disturbing, witch-hunting is a major twentieth-century symbol of persecution, perhaps surpassed only by the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews. But the Holocaust is a matter of recent record and living memory. The hunting down of witches, in contrast, belongs to a more distant past; in film it belongs overwhelmingly to the seventeenth century. And yet it retains a powerful hold on the collective imagination: a powerful metaphor for intolerance and ’superstition’, for the oppression of minorities by the powerful, and the triumph of bigotry over reason.

Film-makers are often more interested in the dramatic, sensational episodes (Salem in 1692, East Anglia in the 1640s) than the more typical small-scale witch-trials (fuelled by long-standing local tensions and conflicts) reconstructed by historians from contemporary court records. They frequently focus the camera on an individual or small group of individuals - very often with a male character at its centre, whether he is the hunter or the hunted. Sexual relations may well be significant; gender relations rarely are: the film-makers show little interest in the fact that in most regions, women - not particularly powerful, young or sexually exciting women, unfortunately for film purposes - comprised the majority of accused witches (not to mention, quite often, their accusers).

The historical record is frequently subjugated to the demands of the plot, or other desires of the film’s creators. At the centre of The Crucible are the figures of John Proctor and Abigail Williams: as Miller presents it, she is about 17, he is perhaps in his early forties; they had had an affair until he rejected her to return to his wife (and dismissed her from her post as a servant); her accusations are motivated by jealousy. Well, the real Abigail was a central player, and John Proctor was one of those hanged. But she was only 11 years old, and he was sixty; they would barely have known each other, if at all. Factionalised village politics and his own outspoken scepticism probably combined to bring Proctor to the gallows. Or the cult film Witchfinder General simply invents a gory end for the witchfinder, whose death is in reality obscure; and it turns his educated puritan colleague John Sterne into a loutish, brutal sidekick.

So, if there is so much to criticise in these films, why should a historian bother at all? For one thing, perhaps, because these films have so much to say about the present, and the historian, with a privileged view of just what is being invented, might be able to offer particular insights into the modern significance of those inventions. And, moreover, it makes this an ideal subject for thinking about the relationship of present to past, how we understand both history and ourselves. Of all categories of ‘early modern’ film, that of the witch-hunt seems most to resemble ‘medieval’ film as outlined by Arthur Lindley. Medieval films, he argues, are used ‘to serve as a mirror and an alienating device for viewing the mid-century present and/or the timeless present of parable.’ It presents its subject in an ‘analogical’ rather than a ‘linear and causative’ relationship to the present. But, as Lindley comments, ‘This is not a fault, merely a fact.’

The inventions of the witch-hunt film are not simply due to a film-maker’s historical ignorance; they are made in order to serve the film’s purposes. The Crucible, famously, was written as political analogy, with Salem representing American persecution of Communists in the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War. This may no longer be relevant, but the 1996 film could still play on fertile liberal anxieties, not least those concerning ‘fundamentalist’ religious politics, or even the politics of ‘political correctness’. Alternatively, Witchfinder General is parable: a specific historical setting is used to ground its picture of the corruption and cruelty that lies just under the surface of human society, all too easily released by the disruptions of war. It makes for powerful film. And, despite their inventions and limitations, these two films are certainly not entirely without ‘historical’ merit. In particular, the court scenes in The Crucible may well give a genuine sense of the ‘real’ thing: the fears of those involved, the sheer physicality of the trials, the pressures to conform. Witchfinder General provokes thought on the disruptions, the uncertainties and fears that the Civil Wars must have brought into everyday lives - even if it never really explores them.

After all, ultimately, both films rely on the idea of ‘witch hunt’ as symbol of unjustified, cruel persecution, whether in the twentieth century or the seventeenth. The potential power of the theme, though, is underlined by one film unlike the rest, and considerably less well-known beyond film critics’ circles, where it is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece by a director of genius, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Day of Wrath (1943) is a story, not of mass panic, but of the more usual local, small-scale accusation, its context and consequences. While the making of the film cannot be divorced from its political context in Nazi-dominated Europe, that is never used as explicit analogy. What’s more, it was based on extensive historical research and a historical interpretation that was decades ahead of the ‘real’ historians: they would not seriously explore gendered and familial relations, popular beliefs and the social context of witchcraft accusations for more than twenty years. (Even if they have made up for it since then.)

Moreover, Day of Wrath is ambiguous: are the accused witches guilty or innocent? Perhaps Anne really kills Absalon, her husband, with sorcery; perhaps he dies of a heart attack at the shock of learning of her adultery with his own son. Or again, perhaps it is fear that kills him; in this scene, Anne is terrifying in her burning hatred - a malevolence which Absalon must additionally fear to be inspired by the Devil himself. The film makes room for all of these interpretations, imposing none. Anne is undoubtedly ‘guilty’ of wanting Absalon to die; but as he admits himself, he has terribly wronged her. The film is about love, hate, evil, power: the power of belief, as much as power relations in society. It is only in part about powerful men attacking ’strong’ women: Anne is ultimately accused by her mother-in-law, an indisputably strong, and powerful, woman whose hatred for Anne is matched only by love for her dead son.

And the Lutheran patriarchs who torture the old woman Herlof’s Marte and sign her death warrant are not, in those scenes, appealing characters, but nor are they ‘evil’; they are motivated by beliefs and fears that are deeply held and widely shared. One of them dies later in the film, racked by the conviction that he has been brought to his death by Herlof’s Marte’s curse: a young man dying before his time in terror and pain. We are made aware of his humanity; he is not a monster. And yet Day of Wrath brings home, I think, the human tragedies of these trials and executions in a more compelling way than two-dimensional certainties of innocents hounded by bigotry and malice. Day of Wrath is an indictment of intolerance, but one that is deeply aware of its complexities, of its human face; it refuses either to demonise the persecutors or to romanticise the persecuted.

General Witchcraft Resources
Further resources on more specific themes are listed under the individual films

Bibliography

For anyone seriously interested in studying early modern witchcraft, the online bibliography at http://www.hist.unt.edu/witch01.htm is quite simply the essential (if highly unwieldy) resource. This list is intended simply to provide a few pointers

European witchcraft: general surveys and collections

B Ankarloo and G Henningsen (eds), Early modern European witchcraft: centres and peripheries (Oxford , 1990)

Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford, 1997) An extremely important book, though not ideal for beginners; it’ll challenge both your intellectual and arm muscles…

Stuart Clark (ed), Languages of witchcraft: narrative, ideology and meaning in early modern culture (Basingstoke, 2001)

J Barry, M Hester and G Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in early modern Europe: studies in culture and belief (Cambridge, 1996)

Robin Briggs, Witches and neighbours: the social and cultural context of European witchcraft (London, 1996) A good recent synthesis

B P Levack, The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (London, 1987)

Regional studies

Carlo Ginzburg, The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Baltimore, 1983) (Italy)

Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, crime and the courts in early modern England (London, 1994) includes two articles on witchcraft

Christine Larner, Enemies of God: the witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981)

Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study (London, 1970)

H C Midelfort, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany, 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972)

Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, religion and sexuality in early modern Europe (London, 1994) (Germany)

James Sharpe, Instruments of darkness: witchcraft in England, 1550-1750

Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic (London, 1971) (England: a pioneering study of much more than witch beliefs)

……….

Online Resources

On studying the films and the history

The ahistoricism of medieval film (Arthur Lindley, Screening the Past)

Studying the Early Modern Witch Hunt essay by Jenny Gibbons on the developments in historical research of the last thirty years

Historical Background

The Witching Hours (Shantell Powell) resource on witchtrials 1100-1700AD

The History of Witchcraft (Whitney Leeson) pages for a taught course, a useful introduction and overview, with bibliography and links [NB: Wayback Archive]

Greywing’s Witch-hunt Pages Stephanie du Barry)

Historical Occult Links (Marc Carlson)