“It’s easy to blame the dark,” writes Sylvia Plath in Witch Burning. witch hunt stories show us how darkness is given a name; they tell us about anxiety and belief and our hunger for scapegoats. all those pious fantasies of women nursing their relatives! witch hunts are just a metaphor now, we hope, but we’re just as drawn to them as ever.
the white house witch hunter would like to tweet that he is the hunted, but in reality it is the marginalized, the outspoken, those who have no voice or annoy their neighbors who are hunted. those less responsible become more guilty: the rake, the widow, the harpy. because, above all, the witch hunt has focused on controlling the sexuality of women and their languages. When “one reads of a witch who is shunned, of a woman possessed by demons, of a wise woman who sells herbs,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a room of her own, “I think we are on the trail of a lost novelist, a repressed poet “. women writers, in particular, are reclaiming these voices.
You are reading: Books about witch hunts
The books take us back to earlier times of crisis and guilt: the Reformation, the English Civil War, Puritan New England. my new novel, the wheelwright’s daughter, was inspired by a landslide in 1571 that brought down part of marcle ridge in rural herefordshire. He became famous; it is still called the wonder in the OS maps. In 1586, William Camden wrote that the hill awoke as if from a deep sleep and moved, roaring, for three days straight. what a figure, I thought, for the terrifying dislocations of reform. how could it have been understood, how could people have looked for a scapegoat? Writing in the age of Brexit, with climate catastrophe looming and populism on the rise, the parallels with contemporary Britain were inescapable.
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The books and stories below variously and wonderfully follow the threads of the witch hunt.
1. Reginald Scott’s Discovery of Witches (1584)“Truly, I do not deny that there are witches,” Scot insists in his epistle to readers, before spending 560 pages doing just that. he painstakingly piles up the sorcerers’ arguments and knocks them down; enchanters, fortune-tellers, alchemists, conjurers, and occultists are not in league with the devil, he says, they are charlatans. shakespeare drew on scot for puck in a midsummer night’s dream and the witches in macbeth. King James I had the book burned. I couldn’t resist giving scot a supporting role in my book.
2. the gate of daylight by jeanette winterson the pendle witch trials of 1612 led to the deaths of 12 people, including the enigmatic alice nutter. my grandmother from lancashire liked to say that we were descended from her, but she told many stories about her. defiant alice winterson made me wish it was true. the book is bristling with magic: there are talking heads, toothpicking, and dealings with the devil, but there is also a ferocious analysis of power and its abuses. Winterson’s raw, poetic prose ensures this will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.
3. Circe by Madeline Miller I thought I knew the story of the witch who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs, but Miller’s magnificent novel gives Circe her own epic. She is the daughter of the sun, she is banished to Aiaia where she, part god, part herbalist, learns magic for herself. she needs it, because it’s not only men who threaten: gods can also be witch hunters. The writing shines and the figures including Daedalus and Odysseus weave beautifully into Circe’s story as she learns not only sorcery but love, and what it could mean to be mortal.
4. edmund spenser’s queen of the fairies in book ii, canto xii, sir guyon valiantly hunts the witch acrasia in the “bowre of blisse”. acrasia is cunning; she brutalizes men with sex and turns them into pigs, but her bower is all music, all delight. “Pick up the rose of love while there is still time,” sings a minstrel, and all the birds echo her song. however, acrasia gets tied up and sir guyon trashes her gazebo. What brings me back to Spenser’s Elizabethan masterpiece, in all its archaic exuberance, is his ambivalence: she pauses wistfully in the garden she condemns.
5. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas Thomas shows how belief in magic and witchcraft became intertwined in the way people understood the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The voices of ordinary people echo on almost every page: Ursula Clarke in 1667 hoping that William Metcalfe would “waste like dew against the sun”; lodowick muggleton stating that cursing “did more good for him than if a man had given him 40 shillings”. At 800 pages, it’s a bible of a book: dive in again and again; it’s worth it.
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6. the witch hunter’s sister by beth underdown “once, she barely believed in the devil,” she begins alice hopkins, before widowhood forces her to move in with her brother matthew is collecting names. We follow Alice’s attempts to not only document but also understand the cruelty of her brother. “Turn the stone around,” she says, “and find another story, struggling to escape.” We need more of these stories.
7. Arthur Miller’s Crucible No list of witch-hunting books would be complete without Miller’s work. through the story of the salem witch trials of 1692-1693, the play indicts 1950s mccarthyism, and trump, and farage, and… when the play is suddenly a hit somewhere, Miller observed, it is “a warning of tyranny to come or a reminder of tyranny that has just passed.” It happened then, not now.
8. lois the witch by elizabeth gaskell when orphaned lois barclay lands in new england in 1691 she finds the ground as unstable as water. and might as well. gaskell shows us a community in terrified opposition to its native forests and its people. She loves the way she refuses to patronize or simply condemn: she puts the reader in the middle of panic, feeling it spread. The novel has been overshadowed by Gaskell’s novels, but it’s a brilliant little gem.
9. i, tituba, black witch of salem de maryse condétituba, the “black” witch convicted at the salem witch trials (in fact she was probably arawak) tells her own story: a life that began when her mother was raped in a slave ship called christ the king. tituba is flawed and passionate; Puritans denounce her, but we see her as a witch on her own terms, rejecting America: “a vast and cruel land where spirits only breed evil!”
10. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Decades before Salem, Hester Prynne is released from Boston prison with her “witch girl.” On her chest is the shameful scarlet letter, but Hester has sewn it herself, beautifully and artfully, and as it weaves into her life and through the novel, it takes on new meanings and readings. Hawthorne’s luminous romance and her tragic heroine, punished for sexual transgression, continue to haunt witch-hunt literature.
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the carter’s daughter by eleanor porter is published by boldwood, priced at £8.99. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
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