UBC: Briggs

[truepenny]

Briggs, Robin. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchhunts. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1996.

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For most of this book, I was planning to blog about it and say basically, "This is a pretty good book." And then I hit the last chapter and the evolutionary psychology and no. He lost all the good will he'd built up and I started yelling.

LEAVING THAT ASIDE, this is a pretty good book. It is interesting and helpful because it is a comparison of witchhunts in various countries, and since I don't know very much about European witchhunts except what "everybody knows," I found the material fascinating. And he pointed out something about why Salem is so weird that I knew, but hadn't ever really noticed, which is that only in the Salem witch trials would confessing save your life. In Salem, if you confessed to being a witch, your life would be spared. Those who were hanged were uniformly those who refused to confess. But in other places and times, unless you got incredibly unlucky, if you could withstand a round or two of torture and still profess your innocence, you were likely to be released. Those who confessed were burned. It's an incredibly important point--and like I said, it's something I knew--and one thing Briggs does very well is foregrounding the backwardness of the Salem trials.

But Briggs is a sloppy writer; in particular (and crucially for discussions of witchcraft accusations), he is sloppy about pronouns and antecedents, so that it becomes very difficult to tell what is the accused's testimony (i.e., what they actually said) and what is the accuser's testimony about what the accused said. This is very problematic.

He also falls into a logical fallacy--and it's all over the evolutionary psychology conclusion--which goes something like this:

1. There were people genuinely practicing witchcraft, that is, cursing their neighbors in the belief that they had the power to make that curse work.

2. There were people accused of witchcraft.

ERGO, the people accused of witchcraft were practicing witchcraft, and were therefore actually a threat to their accusers.

He's very insistent about citing the studies about present day cultures in which witchcraft is still a powerful belief, the studies we've all heard about where it's shown that if a witch curses someone who believes in the witch's power, the victim will, in fact, die. (He ignores some pretty crucial differences between those cultures and the culture he's studying.) And there's a lot of handwavy elision around the evidence that some accused witches did utter curses and threats against the people who would go on to accuse them, and things get all turned around until the people making accusations of witchcraft are actually right to do so. (This is largely where the evolutionary psychology comes in.)

And that is so completely wrong that it makes me yell at the book. There are so many victims of the witchhunts that, yes, the laws of probability say that some of them did practice maleficium and did believe that they were witches. But it is abundantly evident, over and over again, that the vast majority of people accused of being witches were no such thing. They were generally misfits, not outsiders so much as people who just didn't quite fit with their neighbors, who were quarrelsome or pushy or just inconvenient. They did not deserve what happened to them, and I'm actually kind of furious at Briggs for twisting things around to suggest that they did.

Comments

Salem, MA

[dlandon.livejournal.com]

I lived in Salem for two years after college and they put on a play reenacting the trials in the summer for tourists with actual testimony and actual words from the trials. It's pretty clear in a few of the cases that these were women with property who refused to either a) sell it to the man who wanted it, or b) refused to re-marry and give him control over the land, and therefore said man accused them of witchcraft to get them out of the way. Older or younger women, widows, who'd inheirited property that someone else wanted. Sitting in the audience, listening to the testimony, was very fascinating. But the monetary motive there shouldn't be ignored (as it sounds like this guy did).

- D

[clhollandwriter]

I met someone who has a theory that the New England witchcraft trials were started by Matthew Hopkins, former "Witchfinder General" in England. She thinks he had a relative in NE and faked his own death in 1647, conveniently in the middle of a court session investigating his methods, to emigrate. The NE witchcraft trials began in 1648, and she thinks it was more than Hopkins' book that lead to the adoption of his methods in America too.