Reasoning with Unreason: Visions, Witchcraft, and Madness in Early Modern England

Abstract

To study witchcraft is for most of us to study something we do not believe in; the active power of malevolent magic, the physical reality of the devil, night flights to the sabbat are no longer realities to be taken for granted. This, however, is true of other fields of study too. Among the consequences of history’s increasing preoccupation with religious and magical world views has been the need to engage with events at odds with everyday notions of the possible: conversations with God, visits from spirits, angels and devils, bewitchments, visions. Such magical and spiritual events and experiences take place in different contexts, and have different meanings — divine inspiration, prophetic trance, possession, witchcraft, madness. In their extraordinariness to our own categories of thought, they seem to mark out our difference from the mentalities of the early modern period, and perhaps to offer a way into that difference. We cannot understand them straightforwardly as literal descriptions of real events (however problematic such notions have become, even for historians); the need to be aware of our own interpretative moves, our presuppositions, our methodologies, is much more insistent where we are dealing with something not self-evident.¹