Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe Book

Stuart Clark has attempted to re-think the great European witch-hunt in terms of the cultural turn, and has added a great deal to our understand thereof. He points out that previous approaches have analyzed this event wholly in terms of the "irrationality" of the participants, and have ignored the fact that, within their own premises of reality, they were acting in a completely rational manner. As such, his effort is to examine the ways in which a demonological world-view informed and determined the boundaries of discussion during the Early Modern period, or, as he puts it "in believing in witchcraft, writers of demonology took up positions in main areas of contemporary debate" (684). The areas he chooses to examine in (considerable) depth are science, history, religion, politics, and language.

As might be expected from a cultural historian, this last is the building-block of the others, and it is suggested that the ways in which people speak about a thing is determinative of the ways in which it is perceived and thought about. He finds that in concepts of "contrariety" and "inversion" the idea of the witch becomes an inevitable outgrowth of the nature of the universe as it was understood. If God and the faithful existed, logic demanded their opposite, the Devil and his witches. Clark is less interested in describing the downfall of the witch-paradigm, but it becomes clear that as people began to speak about the nature of the universe in different terms, due to shifts away from Aristotelianism and theology as the primary intellectual pursuit, witches became superfluous and even ridiculous.

Perhaps more surprising is Clark's finding in regards to "Maleficium," the use of harmful magic by witches. This, it seems, was most important at the popular level of witch-belief, but was looked at with some scorn by the intellectual class. The real danger they saw was people who thought they were faithful Christians seeking out "helpful" witches for protection against Maleficium. Since all witches were of necessity in league with Satan, these innocents were being deceived into sin by their superstitious belief in magic. Rather, they should bear up under hardship after the model of Job, who refused to ask the Devil for help during his trials.

This is by no means an introductory book on the subject, and would serve mostly to confuse students who are not familiar with at least some of the standard literature on the subject. It is, however, a masterful specialist exploration of a complex topic - one which never loses sight of exactly how complex of a topic it is, unlike many of its predecessors.