In the history of art, Salem witch tests often take the form of the most cinematographic moments: arrest, prosecution and execution. These images Define our popular understanding of this historical event, told through the objective of its most public moments. But we see very few documents of documents that made this possible – and how these tests finally ended.
There is an astonishing moment in Witchcraft: a story in thirteen trials by Marion GibsonProfessor of rebirth and magic literature at the University of Exeter in England. Describing the sadly famous trials of Salem witches, she underlines that in 1693, some 200 people – the majority of whom were women – awaited the trials and civilians of Massachusetts began to protest.
“Whatever the demonology said,” writes Gibson, “there could not be so many witches. In addition to becoming theologically incredible, the number of trials was organizational unsustainable and the judicial system collapsed under a backward.” Consequently, an entirely new court and an updated law have been created for the rest of the business. The tests, Gibson show us, worked like all the other tests: with documents, demonstrations, politics and people mixed with an often disorderly and bureaucratic process which required state intervention to adapt. And while the author embarks on a day through the legal and procedural consider of Witch Trials from the 17th Century to Today in Places Like England, the United States, France, and the British Colony of Basutoland in Present-Day Lesotho, She Never Lets Us Lose Sight of the accused Persons Caught Up in them, Often suffering under an Existing Culture of Misogyny, Ableism, Enslavement, and Colonization.
Gibson begins with a simple question: “What is a witch?” The answer is deeply political. Magic, she notes, has been with humanity for a very long time, and although witches seem to be creatures from time immemorial, it argues that they represent a specific change during the medieval period of Europe. In the 15th century, Christian institutions made a distinction between daily magic and the work of God, which “were considered to be religious truth, a special class of power reserved for Christian ecclesiastics”.
The witch accusations emerged for a particularly polarizing period, when the reform led Catholics and the Protestants to try to find the influence of the devil in the religious practices of the other. Before this point, Gibson writes: “Most of the men of church considered the healers and the diviners in their communities as ineffective fantasmians – light sinners trafficking charms and curses who could not do a lot of trouble.” But at the time of the reform, the identification of heretics naturally progressed to identify witches.
Gibson takes us into the world of the accused, offering a modern interpretation which frames their tests through the lens of power and marginality of the state, in which visual culture and art played an important role. She considers Elizabeth Clarke's trialA young mother with a leg accused of witchcraft in the 17th century in England. Delighting female ideals by having a physical handicap, no husband and very little money, Clarke was already living in the margins when she was accused of having strange conversations with animals, who could have been her familiar.
During his arrest, Clarke was subject to interrogation and torture. Women examined her body for “demonic marks”, in the form of small blood caps that the familiar would have taken as awards. She was also subjected to a form of sleep deprivation called “watch and walk”, which would make her move and wake up for days to maximize the chances that a familiar could appear. As Gibson points out, these are the conditions under which People could make false confessions. Clarke inevitably succumbed and promised to show his observers his “imps”. She was finally sentenced to the gallows alongside nearly 30 other accused women.
Narration in Witchcraft Takes great care to help us see the accused as people with an inner life and extraordinary trials that meet with the heartbreaking realities of the Empire. In another chapter, Gibson works to reconstruct the life of Tatabe, an native woman who may have grown up in current Venezuela before being captured and sold in Barbados. She would be one of the first people accused of witchcraft in the sadly famous trials of the Salem witches.
Tatabe is popularly known as Pressure Today, but Gibson has chosen to use the old name, both because of its probable historical precision and because it separates the human from the legend and the myth that surrounds him. Historical representations of her, as An engraving not attributed in the London Mary Evans image libraryShow him in grotesque form, playing on the racialized and xenophobic fears of an upright nation state. Tatabe was finally released by a large jury in the careful examination Surrounding the tests. Gibson and other historians do not quite know what happened to him after that, but Witchcraft makes an effort to restore his humanity in this story.
Crossing centuries, Gibson argues that the witch trials have continued the past Salem through colonization, the Second World War, and today. They have never finished, transforming rather over time, while relying on the mechanisms of the judicial system. And even if I would have liked to see more discussion on the embrace Witchcraft as an act of political resistanceThe narrow extent of the book gives us a detailed context to explain why such a resistance holds merit: tests like this have a historical beginning a few hundred years ago and, as such, will one day have a historical end as an attitudes towards women, the magic and the people of the colonized countries change and evolve.
Witchcraft: a story in thirteen trials (2024) by Marion Gibson is published by Scribner Book Company and is available online and via independent booksellers.
