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Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft
Draws on recent research to discover the social and cultural context that bred the persecution of witches in Europe, examining who the witches were, what they practiced, and why they were feared
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
18 people are currently reading
1188 people want to read
About the author
Robin Briggs
10 books12 followersMy co-author Joel Greer and I were neighbors in the 60s. We reconnected via Facebook in late 2019. As a result, in 2020 when COVID-19 was in full swing, we created the CORONA RICHMOND Facebook page to provide a venue for a wide variety of friends to talk about how the pandemic was affecting their lives - whether mundane or live-threatening, suffering anxiety or providing hope. All contributed to this anthology of short, well-written vignettes about their lives In the Year of the Virus.
I am a former law firm Office Administrator, now retired, living in Pacifica, California. I have always had a passion for writing, especially travel logs.
Joel Greer is a retired sports writer, spending the last 55 years in a variety of journalistic endeavors, most notably as a college football writer/editor for the Bleacher Report website. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
I am a former law firm Office Administrator, now retired, living in Pacifica, California. I have always had a passion for writing, especially travel logs.
Joel Greer is a retired sports writer, spending the last 55 years in a variety of journalistic endeavors, most notably as a college football writer/editor for the Bleacher Report website. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 27, 2015
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.
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.
February 16, 2013
I borrowed this book from a friend, and I do appreciate the loan: it has a lot of good ideas, and I learned a lot from reading it. However, the prose was too opaque, and the organization too repetitive, to make it a fulfilling read.
Witches and Neighbors seems to be Robin Briggs' entry into an ongoing discussion about the causes and effects of European "witchcraft." I had the impression that he was inspired to write partially by the modern neopagan movements: several times he points out that the idea of a feminine "witch cult," as posited by Margaret Murray, has no basis in historical fact. Briggs argues that accusations of witchcraft are actually just explosions of preexisting social tension, and that the European and American witchcraft trials were really remarkably limited in scope.
I'm writing quite formally here, and it's hard not to after reading this book. You get the impression that Briggs' argument is directed entirely to his colleagues: he writes as though everyone who reads this book is expected to know the basics of the events he's talking about. If you plan to read this book, you might first want to read the Wikipedia articles on the Zande people and the devils of Loudun, as well as brushing up on your European history.
It's clear that the author did a great deal of research before he began to write this book, and it's also clear that he's totally fascinated with his sources. The problem is that these sources are poorly preserved, and appear to consist mostly of trial registers, with the result that Briggs' examples are short, disconnected anecdotes that don't seem to go anywhere. I think he actually refers to some incidents repeatedly throughout the book, but it's hard to tell: his research focused mostly on witchcraft persecutions in the modern-day French region of Lorraine, where there seem to have been very few names to go around. With so many Jeans and Jennons, Claudons and Claudettes and Claudattes, Demenges, and Mengins and Mengeattes, I often found it hard to tell whether I was reading about a man or a woman, much less whether I'd read the name before.
The real problem with sources like the ones the author seems to have used (in this case, the only ones available) is that you can't really go in-depth on any particular story. This was really brought home to me when I read his discussion of the Salem Witch Trials in Chapter 8. Here, as the author points out, there is very good evidence available, and he went into fascinating detail on the dynamics between the various families. If the entire book had been like that discussion, I would have given it a solid 5, despite the terrible prose (more on that in a second). After reading five pages about the rivalry between the Putnams and the Porters, and how the accusers pointed fingers at "their personal and political enemies" (314), I was disappointed to go back to the two- and three-sentence examples that make up the rest of the book.
My last, and most serious, complaint is that Briggs' writing style in this book is almost impenetrable. It almost comes across as a parody of scholarly writing: convoluted sentences, extreme reliance on passive voice, massive paragraphs that cover three and four separate subjects. An example, randomly chosen:
If complete breakdowns of family bonds leading to accusations between close kin are rarely apparent, there were other situations which manifested themselves repeatedly. Families were often disrupted by the deaths of adults, and relations between step-parents and stepchildren could never be without problems. Since widows with dependent children did not find it easy to obtain new partners, stepmothers were much commoner than stepfathers; the folkloric commonplace of the wicked stepmother was an exaggeration based on a well-known phenomenon. Women routinely accused one another of failing to feed or care for their stepchildren properly, while as we have seen the adult children by a previous marriage often displayed marked hostility to the replacement wife. Such tensions were exacerbated by latent or open quarrels about inheritance, which could also influence the relationships between half-siblings, with unfairness almost bound to be felt by some if not all parties, whatever efforts to avoid it.(237)
(That, by the way, is from the beginning of a section, and is consequently one of the shortest and most coherent paragraphs in the book.)
What makes this prose... style... doubly frustrating is that Briggs is actually capable of writing more clearly: his notes in the "Further Reading" section are entirely comprehensible.
Anyway. Here are my main takeaways from the book. Excuse me for not citing page numbers; this is a chapter-by-chapter summary:
1) Accused witches were not necessarily old women. Something like a quarter of accusations were actually directed at men, and even the old women accused might have been suspected for twenty or thirty years beforehand.
2) Natural physical and psychological problems were often taken as signs of witchcraft.
3) People believed wholeheartedly in supernatural powers, and often went to devins or "cunning folk" for cures. Often when a witch was accused, the accuser really just wanted a cure for the problem.
4) Briggs believes that many people who behaved badly to their neighbors assumed that their victims would want revenge. This projected anger would come out later, when the aggressors accused their victims of bewitching them.
5) "Witch-doctors" used prayers and supernatural tricks to hunt out witches. The line between "witch-doctors" and "witches" was often blurred.
6) Families both attacked and defended each other during the witchcraft trials.
7) Witchcraft trials were not a "battle of the sexes"; everyone believed in witches, and accusations against a woman were more likely to come from other women--who spent more time with her--than from men. Men, however, having more political power in general, were able to do more about it once the accusation was made.
8) The 16th and 17th centuries were a really crappy time for a lot of people: Europe's population had recovered from the Plague, and as a result the continent was getting more crowded and the economy was going downhill. Poverty and desperation may have been behind a lot of accusations of witchcraft, and may explain why there were so many trials during this period (instead of before it).
9) I think Chapter 9 was about alliances and betrayals, but I found it particularly hard to follow.
10) Chapter 10 deals a lot with psychology--both that of the accusers, and that of those who decided they actually were witches, and who told fantastic stories about the "sabbats" they intended. Briggs' psychological speculations seem to go out on a lot of limbs--stuff about children developing intense hatred towards their mothers when new babies replaced them, etc.--so I took it with a lot of salt.
In conclusion: This is a very detailed book with a lot of interesting information. Unfortunately, the style and organization make that information a little hard to get to. Worth reading if you're into history, the European and North American witch trials, or... village psychology, I guess? Otherwise, you might want to find something a bit more approachable.
Witches and Neighbors seems to be Robin Briggs' entry into an ongoing discussion about the causes and effects of European "witchcraft." I had the impression that he was inspired to write partially by the modern neopagan movements: several times he points out that the idea of a feminine "witch cult," as posited by Margaret Murray, has no basis in historical fact. Briggs argues that accusations of witchcraft are actually just explosions of preexisting social tension, and that the European and American witchcraft trials were really remarkably limited in scope.
I'm writing quite formally here, and it's hard not to after reading this book. You get the impression that Briggs' argument is directed entirely to his colleagues: he writes as though everyone who reads this book is expected to know the basics of the events he's talking about. If you plan to read this book, you might first want to read the Wikipedia articles on the Zande people and the devils of Loudun, as well as brushing up on your European history.
It's clear that the author did a great deal of research before he began to write this book, and it's also clear that he's totally fascinated with his sources. The problem is that these sources are poorly preserved, and appear to consist mostly of trial registers, with the result that Briggs' examples are short, disconnected anecdotes that don't seem to go anywhere. I think he actually refers to some incidents repeatedly throughout the book, but it's hard to tell: his research focused mostly on witchcraft persecutions in the modern-day French region of Lorraine, where there seem to have been very few names to go around. With so many Jeans and Jennons, Claudons and Claudettes and Claudattes, Demenges, and Mengins and Mengeattes, I often found it hard to tell whether I was reading about a man or a woman, much less whether I'd read the name before.
The real problem with sources like the ones the author seems to have used (in this case, the only ones available) is that you can't really go in-depth on any particular story. This was really brought home to me when I read his discussion of the Salem Witch Trials in Chapter 8. Here, as the author points out, there is very good evidence available, and he went into fascinating detail on the dynamics between the various families. If the entire book had been like that discussion, I would have given it a solid 5, despite the terrible prose (more on that in a second). After reading five pages about the rivalry between the Putnams and the Porters, and how the accusers pointed fingers at "their personal and political enemies" (314), I was disappointed to go back to the two- and three-sentence examples that make up the rest of the book.
My last, and most serious, complaint is that Briggs' writing style in this book is almost impenetrable. It almost comes across as a parody of scholarly writing: convoluted sentences, extreme reliance on passive voice, massive paragraphs that cover three and four separate subjects. An example, randomly chosen:
If complete breakdowns of family bonds leading to accusations between close kin are rarely apparent, there were other situations which manifested themselves repeatedly. Families were often disrupted by the deaths of adults, and relations between step-parents and stepchildren could never be without problems. Since widows with dependent children did not find it easy to obtain new partners, stepmothers were much commoner than stepfathers; the folkloric commonplace of the wicked stepmother was an exaggeration based on a well-known phenomenon. Women routinely accused one another of failing to feed or care for their stepchildren properly, while as we have seen the adult children by a previous marriage often displayed marked hostility to the replacement wife. Such tensions were exacerbated by latent or open quarrels about inheritance, which could also influence the relationships between half-siblings, with unfairness almost bound to be felt by some if not all parties, whatever efforts to avoid it.(237)
(That, by the way, is from the beginning of a section, and is consequently one of the shortest and most coherent paragraphs in the book.)
What makes this prose... style... doubly frustrating is that Briggs is actually capable of writing more clearly: his notes in the "Further Reading" section are entirely comprehensible.
Anyway. Here are my main takeaways from the book. Excuse me for not citing page numbers; this is a chapter-by-chapter summary:
1) Accused witches were not necessarily old women. Something like a quarter of accusations were actually directed at men, and even the old women accused might have been suspected for twenty or thirty years beforehand.
2) Natural physical and psychological problems were often taken as signs of witchcraft.
3) People believed wholeheartedly in supernatural powers, and often went to devins or "cunning folk" for cures. Often when a witch was accused, the accuser really just wanted a cure for the problem.
4) Briggs believes that many people who behaved badly to their neighbors assumed that their victims would want revenge. This projected anger would come out later, when the aggressors accused their victims of bewitching them.
5) "Witch-doctors" used prayers and supernatural tricks to hunt out witches. The line between "witch-doctors" and "witches" was often blurred.
6) Families both attacked and defended each other during the witchcraft trials.
7) Witchcraft trials were not a "battle of the sexes"; everyone believed in witches, and accusations against a woman were more likely to come from other women--who spent more time with her--than from men. Men, however, having more political power in general, were able to do more about it once the accusation was made.
8) The 16th and 17th centuries were a really crappy time for a lot of people: Europe's population had recovered from the Plague, and as a result the continent was getting more crowded and the economy was going downhill. Poverty and desperation may have been behind a lot of accusations of witchcraft, and may explain why there were so many trials during this period (instead of before it).
9) I think Chapter 9 was about alliances and betrayals, but I found it particularly hard to follow.
10) Chapter 10 deals a lot with psychology--both that of the accusers, and that of those who decided they actually were witches, and who told fantastic stories about the "sabbats" they intended. Briggs' psychological speculations seem to go out on a lot of limbs--stuff about children developing intense hatred towards their mothers when new babies replaced them, etc.--so I took it with a lot of salt.
In conclusion: This is a very detailed book with a lot of interesting information. Unfortunately, the style and organization make that information a little hard to get to. Worth reading if you're into history, the European and North American witch trials, or... village psychology, I guess? Otherwise, you might want to find something a bit more approachable.
April 29, 2021
This book has apparently had good press when published in 1996, so I had hopes of it being more informative than some other histories I've read of the 16th - 17th centuries, which is the main period on which this book concentrates, and of the social and religious tensions which led to the intensification of witchcraft persecution. However, it proved to be a disappointment unfortunately.
Partly, this was due to the style. The prose is quite dry, tends to long and convoluted sentences and avoids using names in favour of pronouns to such an extent that the meaning is obscured. I had to re-read some sentences three or four times to work out who he meant. One example was on page 246: "Lucie Rozieres had made no secret of her anger when her half-sister's husband Claude Borrellier sold her half of a house they shared". I think it was supposed to be the wife's half of the property, i.e. Lucie's sister who part-owned the house, but the fact that it was the sister who subsequently became ill and died rather than the brother-in-law didn't help to clarify it. There are lots of ambiguous phrases like that throughout.
The problems of clarity were not helped because the main historical source relied upon is trial records from what is now Lorraine, which abound with people who have the same names and sometimes different permutations of the same two or three names, just in a different order. As they are name checked in quick succession, in paragraphs that zoom through a number of different trials, it was difficult to keep track of who was being discussed. Possibly these people also came up later when different aspects of the persecution were being discussed, but if so, the style of presentation obscured that completely. It lent the book a fractured, bitty style.
Although the author did discuss one or two cases in more detail, such as the Salem persecutions, where the historical record is much fuller, his account was superficial and contained statements which I've seen contradicted in books that concentrate on Salem: for example, the authorities did not show rational and measured control of the proceedings, as he suggests - the trials were only halted when the escalating accusations became directed at privileged members of the community such as the governor's wife. Similarly, the jails were not speedily emptied, because not only did some people die in prison, but others languished there for a long time, unable to pay the bill (people had to pay for being imprisoned in those days and were billed for accommodation, food, and even the fetters with which they were confined). This led to whole families being impoverished, especially since their homes and goods had been illegally seized before they were convicted, even to the extent of leaving children unprovided. Most significantly, the author gives the impression that those who confessed were ensured pardon, whereas other books make it clear that they were being kept alive as witnesses against other accused - it seems likely that they, also, would eventually have been executed when those who maintained their innocence had been executed. And the profile of the witch developed in this book certainly does not fit saintly and upstanding members of the community such as Rebecca Nurse, who had no previous witchcraft reputation, but the author skates over that.
The book also rides a few hobby horses. One was a repudiation of modern New Age beliefs and the now discredited theories of Margaret Murray. Another was the idea that the persecutions had been responsible for a huge number of deaths throughout history and that this was a genocide aimed at women. Instead, the book locates it mainly in the two centuries mentioned above with an estimated total of 40,000 executions, and emphasises that about 20 to 25 per cent of accused were men (though that does still mean the vast majority were women, of course).
Some of what the author says about village tensions and the gradual accumulation of a reputation - and hence the advanced age of a lot of suspects at the time that they finally came to trial - is of interest. He does mention the guilt people would have felt at refusing charity to those who came begging, or asking for a 'loan' of food or other articles, an aspect I had already encountered in Keith Thomas' "Religion and the Decline of Magic", and goes beyond that to suggest projection, where people imagined that those to whom they refused such charity would have felt burning resentment, since they themselves would have experienced that if the positions were reversed. Those were interesting ideas, but he also veered off into fantasy when, in more than one place, he stated as a fact that children would have hated their younger siblings and the mothers who had 'abandoned' them to take care of babies, and that this was transformed into a hatred of women and a tendency to direct persecution to women in particular.
Altogether, given this balance of positive/negative aspects, I would rate this at 3 stars.
Partly, this was due to the style. The prose is quite dry, tends to long and convoluted sentences and avoids using names in favour of pronouns to such an extent that the meaning is obscured. I had to re-read some sentences three or four times to work out who he meant. One example was on page 246: "Lucie Rozieres had made no secret of her anger when her half-sister's husband Claude Borrellier sold her half of a house they shared". I think it was supposed to be the wife's half of the property, i.e. Lucie's sister who part-owned the house, but the fact that it was the sister who subsequently became ill and died rather than the brother-in-law didn't help to clarify it. There are lots of ambiguous phrases like that throughout.
The problems of clarity were not helped because the main historical source relied upon is trial records from what is now Lorraine, which abound with people who have the same names and sometimes different permutations of the same two or three names, just in a different order. As they are name checked in quick succession, in paragraphs that zoom through a number of different trials, it was difficult to keep track of who was being discussed. Possibly these people also came up later when different aspects of the persecution were being discussed, but if so, the style of presentation obscured that completely. It lent the book a fractured, bitty style.
Although the author did discuss one or two cases in more detail, such as the Salem persecutions, where the historical record is much fuller, his account was superficial and contained statements which I've seen contradicted in books that concentrate on Salem: for example, the authorities did not show rational and measured control of the proceedings, as he suggests - the trials were only halted when the escalating accusations became directed at privileged members of the community such as the governor's wife. Similarly, the jails were not speedily emptied, because not only did some people die in prison, but others languished there for a long time, unable to pay the bill (people had to pay for being imprisoned in those days and were billed for accommodation, food, and even the fetters with which they were confined). This led to whole families being impoverished, especially since their homes and goods had been illegally seized before they were convicted, even to the extent of leaving children unprovided. Most significantly, the author gives the impression that those who confessed were ensured pardon, whereas other books make it clear that they were being kept alive as witnesses against other accused - it seems likely that they, also, would eventually have been executed when those who maintained their innocence had been executed. And the profile of the witch developed in this book certainly does not fit saintly and upstanding members of the community such as Rebecca Nurse, who had no previous witchcraft reputation, but the author skates over that.
The book also rides a few hobby horses. One was a repudiation of modern New Age beliefs and the now discredited theories of Margaret Murray. Another was the idea that the persecutions had been responsible for a huge number of deaths throughout history and that this was a genocide aimed at women. Instead, the book locates it mainly in the two centuries mentioned above with an estimated total of 40,000 executions, and emphasises that about 20 to 25 per cent of accused were men (though that does still mean the vast majority were women, of course).
Some of what the author says about village tensions and the gradual accumulation of a reputation - and hence the advanced age of a lot of suspects at the time that they finally came to trial - is of interest. He does mention the guilt people would have felt at refusing charity to those who came begging, or asking for a 'loan' of food or other articles, an aspect I had already encountered in Keith Thomas' "Religion and the Decline of Magic", and goes beyond that to suggest projection, where people imagined that those to whom they refused such charity would have felt burning resentment, since they themselves would have experienced that if the positions were reversed. Those were interesting ideas, but he also veered off into fantasy when, in more than one place, he stated as a fact that children would have hated their younger siblings and the mothers who had 'abandoned' them to take care of babies, and that this was transformed into a hatred of women and a tendency to direct persecution to women in particular.
Altogether, given this balance of positive/negative aspects, I would rate this at 3 stars.
May 14, 2016
An in-depth look at the belief and trials and conditions of the witch craze
How the confession told of making pacts, about the sabbat and how hierarchical it was, with the demons all ordered and the witches too, by wealth as they were in real life, so the poor witches arrived on brooms and rich ones on carriages, and the food was horrible (or possibly totally illusionary, you were hungry when you went home) and the common practice was to produce hail and so ruin crops.
The Devil was said to promise wealth and prosperity as well as the power to revenge yourself, but he lied about the first, any money he gave turned to rubbish. Revenge, on the other hand, he could provide -- giving them a powder that could harm beasts and people. Some beggars certainly used reputations to extort alms. There's a good deal of evidence that it could take several decades to build up enough of a reputation as a witch to lead to a formal case, and in the interim, it certainly looks like some of them used curses as threats. Very dangerous, because the standards of evidence were very loose. Proximity of a curse and injury might be used as evidence of witchcraft -- but a gap of years would not preclude the curse being treated as the cause.
There was also demonic possession, popularly attributed to witches. Theological opinion was quite otherwise -- in particular, theologians insisted that the demon would lie, and therefore anything it said could not be trusted and certainly could not be used as evidence in a trial
Cunning folk were in a perilous borderland. For one thing, undoing a witching was often held to be best done by getting the witch to do something for the victim. Midwives, on the other hand, were unrepresented as accused.
How the trials were of about three quarters women, one quarter men, but there was a lot of regional variation -- some places were about ninety percent women, others ninety percent men -- and in France where writers wrote about how feminine witchcraft was, actually the numbers were about even.
And much more.
How the confession told of making pacts, about the sabbat and how hierarchical it was, with the demons all ordered and the witches too, by wealth as they were in real life, so the poor witches arrived on brooms and rich ones on carriages, and the food was horrible (or possibly totally illusionary, you were hungry when you went home) and the common practice was to produce hail and so ruin crops.
The Devil was said to promise wealth and prosperity as well as the power to revenge yourself, but he lied about the first, any money he gave turned to rubbish. Revenge, on the other hand, he could provide -- giving them a powder that could harm beasts and people. Some beggars certainly used reputations to extort alms. There's a good deal of evidence that it could take several decades to build up enough of a reputation as a witch to lead to a formal case, and in the interim, it certainly looks like some of them used curses as threats. Very dangerous, because the standards of evidence were very loose. Proximity of a curse and injury might be used as evidence of witchcraft -- but a gap of years would not preclude the curse being treated as the cause.
There was also demonic possession, popularly attributed to witches. Theological opinion was quite otherwise -- in particular, theologians insisted that the demon would lie, and therefore anything it said could not be trusted and certainly could not be used as evidence in a trial
Cunning folk were in a perilous borderland. For one thing, undoing a witching was often held to be best done by getting the witch to do something for the victim. Midwives, on the other hand, were unrepresented as accused.
How the trials were of about three quarters women, one quarter men, but there was a lot of regional variation -- some places were about ninety percent women, others ninety percent men -- and in France where writers wrote about how feminine witchcraft was, actually the numbers were about even.
And much more.
February 4, 2010
This book is on a reading list for the class I TA, so the copy I read has evidently been used by a whole generation of undergrads, with the marginalia to prove it. On the page facing the conclusion is a drawing of Harry Potter, with the caption: "today is my birthday!" Conclusion: undergrads are ridiculous, and this book is very brightly coloured as a result.
Argues that there was no culture of the occult in early modern Europe, but that witchcraft was instead a construct that was culturally located, and which was developed in reaction to social pressures. The types of witches and forms of witchcraft denounced were variable across regions and confessions; it is impossible to speak of a single model of witchcraft that held across Europe. Argues, finally (although this thread is dropped part-way through the book), that accusations of witchcraft declined less as a result of the spread of Enlightened ideas, and more as a result of social reorganization that diminished the particular kinds of pressures that led neighbours to denounce one another as witches. Argues that as a social fiction, witchcraft functions only in reasonably endogamous societies where social frictions are seldom eased but explosively.
Argues that there was no culture of the occult in early modern Europe, but that witchcraft was instead a construct that was culturally located, and which was developed in reaction to social pressures. The types of witches and forms of witchcraft denounced were variable across regions and confessions; it is impossible to speak of a single model of witchcraft that held across Europe. Argues, finally (although this thread is dropped part-way through the book), that accusations of witchcraft declined less as a result of the spread of Enlightened ideas, and more as a result of social reorganization that diminished the particular kinds of pressures that led neighbours to denounce one another as witches. Argues that as a social fiction, witchcraft functions only in reasonably endogamous societies where social frictions are seldom eased but explosively.
February 18, 2013
I enjoyed reading this book, and there were lots of interesting examples to back up the broader generalizations about witchcraft beliefs. I came to realize that a lot of things I thought I knew about belief in witches were actually wrong. I found it really interesting that the confessions pretty much all followed a standard pattern, the same way folklore and modern urban legends do -- partly because back then Everyone Knew what witches did the same way Everyone Knows now what happens to alien abductees (for example) even though neither Satan's actions nor the aliens' really make much sense on a practical level.
That said, it was kind of a confusing read for people who may not be terribly familiar with psychology, and a lot of the main points from chapter to chapter were a bit repetitive. I'm not sure I can blame the author, since, as I mentioned, the book is written about a phenomenon that displays a pretty clear pattern, but it does make it a little less interesting. And I'm now interested in reading more about some of the witchcraft skeptics, who were mentioned but not especially focused on.
That said, it was kind of a confusing read for people who may not be terribly familiar with psychology, and a lot of the main points from chapter to chapter were a bit repetitive. I'm not sure I can blame the author, since, as I mentioned, the book is written about a phenomenon that displays a pretty clear pattern, but it does make it a little less interesting. And I'm now interested in reading more about some of the witchcraft skeptics, who were mentioned but not especially focused on.
December 27, 2020
Briggs gives one of the sanest, most carefully documented accounts to date of Europe's witch hunts. Tracing local records across many nations, she focuses the locale, duration, and scope of the main witch-hunting episodes. Briggs studies what kinds of people were accused of evil, how the whole notion of evil varied, and how the persecutions developed. The reliance on records of specific individuals brings the whole process to light in an understandable way -- in the course of interrogations one accusation led to the next. According to trial records in Lorraine, Georgeatte Didier threatened that if she was accused, "she would accuse others whether they were good women or not." Mengeotte Lausson said that if she was burned, she would denounce her husband's sister Toussaine as well. Chrestaille Wathot said if she was arrested, "I would accuse such important people of witchcraft that they would release me for the love of them." (p. 361) Yet nearby communities were unaffected, because the neighbours refrained from labeling each other as evil.
Such periodic storms of fear are all the more disturbing when we are introduced to the people involved.
Such periodic storms of fear are all the more disturbing when we are introduced to the people involved.
July 1, 2025
Had to read this for my dissertation so it was not as enjoyable as I would have liked. Still a very informative book!
September 20, 2010
Witches and Neighbors covers the witch phenomenon in Europe and New England particularly at its height in the 16th and 17th century. Robin Briggs outlines the supernatural claims made by those accused of witchcraft. He further identifies these witches as part of a large equation, using a motif of small villages where there exists a web of dependency amongst peasants, land owners, nobleman, clergy, and, in many areas, the incipient state. Briggs further heavily weighs the psychological and sociological meaning of witchcraft, making an often dismissed idea relevant and important towards the shift towards modernization in Europe and the formation of the secular state.
Briggs takes on witchcraft in its entirety, using the whole of Europe for its examples. The majority of his work pulls from the Duchy of Lorraine, from which the author has scrutinized the records of some 400 trials. However, Brigg readily employs examples from other regions as well. I found the geographical scope to be too large, as often the author is able to make a conclusion, only to find it too generalized and have to give an example where said conclusion was not the case. Because these kingdoms were so different, I would have found it much easier to follow the author’s argument had he focused on Lorraine. Another complaint that I had was that the author gives several examples of curses and counter magic and we are too assume of the validity of these aggressions (as the civilians were very much convinced of the effectiveness of the deeds and misdeeds. The author does mention once or twice that many of these threats or supposed ‘favors’ were unsuccessful, yet in the vast majority of the book, we are to assume that a witch really was able to, say, make a person’s leg go limp soon after a threat. The author should have balanced coincidentally successful curses with at least an equal emphasis on the failures to follow up threats. I did enjoy reading how both Catholic and Protestant faiths reacted to witchcraft. It is clear throughout the book that the persecutions were everyone’s fault. While it would be natural to assume that torturous trials mostly implicate the judges or magistrates, as the title of the book suggests, the townspeople were the fuel behind these charades. Without local pressures and the desperate confessors who exploited proposed supernatural powers, often through their trials, witchcraft would have ebbed much quicker.
Briggs takes on witchcraft in its entirety, using the whole of Europe for its examples. The majority of his work pulls from the Duchy of Lorraine, from which the author has scrutinized the records of some 400 trials. However, Brigg readily employs examples from other regions as well. I found the geographical scope to be too large, as often the author is able to make a conclusion, only to find it too generalized and have to give an example where said conclusion was not the case. Because these kingdoms were so different, I would have found it much easier to follow the author’s argument had he focused on Lorraine. Another complaint that I had was that the author gives several examples of curses and counter magic and we are too assume of the validity of these aggressions (as the civilians were very much convinced of the effectiveness of the deeds and misdeeds. The author does mention once or twice that many of these threats or supposed ‘favors’ were unsuccessful, yet in the vast majority of the book, we are to assume that a witch really was able to, say, make a person’s leg go limp soon after a threat. The author should have balanced coincidentally successful curses with at least an equal emphasis on the failures to follow up threats. I did enjoy reading how both Catholic and Protestant faiths reacted to witchcraft. It is clear throughout the book that the persecutions were everyone’s fault. While it would be natural to assume that torturous trials mostly implicate the judges or magistrates, as the title of the book suggests, the townspeople were the fuel behind these charades. Without local pressures and the desperate confessors who exploited proposed supernatural powers, often through their trials, witchcraft would have ebbed much quicker.
May 23, 2013
This is the witch book to read if you want a ground-up, common peoples' history of witchcraft belief. Anecdote heavy. One good way to read this would be to just skim it, dipping into the brief example stories whenever you want - you'll get a lot of interesting glimpses of little moments in European village life, moments that led to accusations of witchcraft.
Briggs basically believes that small town social life is what witchcraft is all about. These sorts of beliefs exist everywhere people live in settled communities where petty jealousies and suspicions can fester, so basically everywhere in the world. It's all very doggedly rational to Briggs: everyone tended to believe in witches, the church was always reminding people that witches were real, and so these events were psychological. People were so obsessed with feeling bewitched that they ended up with psychosomatic symptoms. Meanwhile the people who were accused had probably wished ill upon their accusers at some point, and seeing sickness or death they concluded that they really HAD caused it. Briggs also reminds the reader that most of the time these little village battles were resolved without witchcraft trials. The actual trials were spotty, they would flare up in one place for a few years and die down, then flare up somewhere else, and many places in Europe saw hardly any witchcraft persecutions at all. It was only when the permanent undercurrent of witch belief suddenly matched up with a willingness on the part of elites to listen and prosecute that trials and executions happened.
Briggs also reminds readers that this was not only about women. It is true that women made up most of the persecuted witches, but across Europe about a quarter of the accused witches were men and in some places both sexes were accused at about the same rate. Again, for Briggs, all of this goes back to the minutia of small town life. Women were constantly in and around each others homes, and if a child took sick or some such thing then its mother would likely accuse some other woman of witchcraft, rather than a man (who was out plowing or felling trees or the like).
I didn't read the second half of this very closely but it would be a good one to peruse if you want to think about why Europeans became so fond of witch trials. There are other scholars with other opinions but I think Briggs' study is one of the more fascinating.
Briggs basically believes that small town social life is what witchcraft is all about. These sorts of beliefs exist everywhere people live in settled communities where petty jealousies and suspicions can fester, so basically everywhere in the world. It's all very doggedly rational to Briggs: everyone tended to believe in witches, the church was always reminding people that witches were real, and so these events were psychological. People were so obsessed with feeling bewitched that they ended up with psychosomatic symptoms. Meanwhile the people who were accused had probably wished ill upon their accusers at some point, and seeing sickness or death they concluded that they really HAD caused it. Briggs also reminds the reader that most of the time these little village battles were resolved without witchcraft trials. The actual trials were spotty, they would flare up in one place for a few years and die down, then flare up somewhere else, and many places in Europe saw hardly any witchcraft persecutions at all. It was only when the permanent undercurrent of witch belief suddenly matched up with a willingness on the part of elites to listen and prosecute that trials and executions happened.
Briggs also reminds readers that this was not only about women. It is true that women made up most of the persecuted witches, but across Europe about a quarter of the accused witches were men and in some places both sexes were accused at about the same rate. Again, for Briggs, all of this goes back to the minutia of small town life. Women were constantly in and around each others homes, and if a child took sick or some such thing then its mother would likely accuse some other woman of witchcraft, rather than a man (who was out plowing or felling trees or the like).
I didn't read the second half of this very closely but it would be a good one to peruse if you want to think about why Europeans became so fond of witch trials. There are other scholars with other opinions but I think Briggs' study is one of the more fascinating.
February 24, 2018
Less fun than its thematic brethren, but only because Briggs takes a much more sociological approach. As he admits at one point, it is almost impossible to recreate what people actually thought in their heads about things like witches and witchcraft, which Briggs dismisses outright as a "fiction". He then spends most of the volume attempting to situate those beliefs culturally and psychologically.
This isn't a history of witchcraft, but much more a history of the perception of witchcraft and that is both its strength and its flaw. Briggs brings to the fore interesting discussions on why people were accused, the social tensions that might have caused them, and dips dangerously into psychological interpretative territory, for which we have no evidence save interrogation records. But he skirts the issue of origins and contexts, which can't be dismissed.
As he himself points out, on the strength of other works, maybe 40,000 people total (1/4 male) were executed in total, and in very clearly delimited locales--but what about the places where no one was accused and executed? What about the majority of Europe who were surely believing the same things and negotiating their understanding of the natural world through them? In that respect, this fails as a history of a way of thinking. It is more a history of exceptions, than anything else, which does have its value. It succeeds as an attempt to pull apart and investigate certain aspects of the phenomenon, like issues of gender and the neighborly context of accusations and trials. It pulls back, though, from taking it any further.
This isn't a history of witchcraft, but much more a history of the perception of witchcraft and that is both its strength and its flaw. Briggs brings to the fore interesting discussions on why people were accused, the social tensions that might have caused them, and dips dangerously into psychological interpretative territory, for which we have no evidence save interrogation records. But he skirts the issue of origins and contexts, which can't be dismissed.
As he himself points out, on the strength of other works, maybe 40,000 people total (1/4 male) were executed in total, and in very clearly delimited locales--but what about the places where no one was accused and executed? What about the majority of Europe who were surely believing the same things and negotiating their understanding of the natural world through them? In that respect, this fails as a history of a way of thinking. It is more a history of exceptions, than anything else, which does have its value. It succeeds as an attempt to pull apart and investigate certain aspects of the phenomenon, like issues of gender and the neighborly context of accusations and trials. It pulls back, though, from taking it any further.
March 22, 2020
Witches. Magic. Satan. Robin Briggs writes a scholarly 411 pages on all things witch-related, and there is much ground covered. The research seems solid (a lot of the Lorraine area in particular is studied), and there are lots of misconceptions people have about the topic. For example: up to 25% of all accused witches were men, “only” an estimated 50,000 witches were killed in Europe (some falsely estimate millions), witch-hunts were rare, witches who were accused were often thought of possibly being witches over several decades, both Protestants and Catholics persecuted witches, European witch persecutions varied enormously by region, groups like Jews, lepers, and heretics were persecuted more than witches, there is no evidence for fake or real witch gatherings (“sabbats” - some mistakenly think that there were religious fertility rite gatherings), and witch persecutions took place far more in Early Modern Europe (late 1500s/early 1600s) than in earlier ages.
In the end, I would have preferred more of a coffee table book about this topic, but if you are interested in Early Modern Europe society and/or witchcraft this one is worth it. The writing is dry at times (lots of enormous, page-long paragraphs) and there seems to be one case study after another. It is a horrific chapter in history - to accuse and kill people based on fantastic beliefs - and we need to be careful about the irrationality that humans carry with them.
In the end, I would have preferred more of a coffee table book about this topic, but if you are interested in Early Modern Europe society and/or witchcraft this one is worth it. The writing is dry at times (lots of enormous, page-long paragraphs) and there seems to be one case study after another. It is a horrific chapter in history - to accuse and kill people based on fantastic beliefs - and we need to be careful about the irrationality that humans carry with them.
July 30, 2023
This book was one of my core texts for my history degree many years ago. This is the first time I've read the book in full. A slow read due to the style of writing; long words and language style. I found the examples and first hand accounts interesting. It's interesting to note that the witch trials in Europe were not similar and had various reasons around them. Also, persecution was not based on gender or religion. Men and women were tried as witches and Roman Catholic/Protestant regions persecuted people as witches. There was an interested case in Denby, which is not well known.
Glad to have read the book in full rather than delving into it for an essay.
Glad to have read the book in full rather than delving into it for an essay.
December 4, 2023
This book presents a lot of interesting ideas about the witch trials in Europe, but it's hampered by the way it's written. It goes from testimony to testimony, and while there are overarching themes each chapter, it's still confusing and repetitive. I saw multiple points get made multiple times, and each time it was presented as if that was the first time it was being brought up. As others have said, it's also confusing who did what during the various testimonies because of the way the pronouns are used. I would like to see someone take the information in this and distill it down to a more useful format, because as it is, I don't think this would benefit most laypeople.
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March 29, 2025Heavy writing. Informative of the social and cultural context of European Witchcraft(as advertised), offers a summation of popular arguments seeking to explain the emergence of the witch hunts, offers authors own conclusion, with interesting Freudian influence.
Felt weirdly timely, given the recent conspiracy driven antics that culminated in Jan 6.
Felt weirdly timely, given the recent conspiracy driven antics that culminated in Jan 6.
March 29, 2025
The superb #RobinBriggs #WitchesandNeighbours. Brings the era of the European witch hunts to life and explores the varied aspects of the different cases. Majestic and impressive, covers a broad range while also able to focus on the illustrative detail. 14th Feb 2025.
April 5, 2024
An excellent treatment of European witchcraft and witch hunts, plus a small amount of material related to the American experience of witchcraft (Naturally, mostly centred on Salem). One thing that slightly frustrated me as a layperson was the assumption of a lot of prior knowledge of a medievalist, despite this book being published under a popular nonfiction imprint.
February 14, 2023
There were ideas presented in this book that I enjoyed reading about. For example, the fact that nowadays, we reserve the image of old ladies wearing dark clothing, with long, grey hair, a cat and a broom, for witches. We forget, or perhaps never knew, that such women were absolutely everywhere because that's what older women looked like. Everybody's next-door neighbour looked the way we now think only witches look.
However, I did find much of the book to be very heavy going. There was a lot of repetition to slog through in between those occasional fascinating gems.
I feel as though I learned some things about our current concept of the witch and how it developed over the centuries, and that is worthwhile.
However, I did find much of the book to be very heavy going. There was a lot of repetition to slog through in between those occasional fascinating gems.
I feel as though I learned some things about our current concept of the witch and how it developed over the centuries, and that is worthwhile.
April 3, 2011
This is a good survey on the topic of withcraft, especially with regard to how it fits into the social context. Briggs doesn't develop the topic wholly, likely because his intended audience would not receive it well. For basic information this is a great start, for more information this book should be coupled with other works including Mary Murphy's much debated early work, and works by Richard Kieckhefer, Norman Cohn, and Carlo Ginzberg. Additionally, placing this contextually alongside other Historical matters of persecution is ideal for complete study.
February 11, 2008
ok maybe fun isnt the word but interesting history nonetheless
February 11, 2008
A little muddled at the time I read it, but I was in high school and it could've just been me. Did not find this all that fascinating, however.
February 1, 2010
Nonfiction. Am reading it as research for Universum.
April 29, 2011
A very imformative insight into the possible reasons/causes behind the witchcraft craze of the middle ages.
October 17, 2014
A very thorough, very dry investigation of the European witch trials. Well cited. Would be good for reference.
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