
Staging Witchcraft Before the Law
Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials
Julie Stone Peters(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 9. January 2025
Book
Hardback
78 pages
978-1-009-46970-8 (ISBN)
Description
While the judicial machinery of early modern witch-hunting could work with terrifying swiftness, skepticism and evidentiary barriers often made conviction difficult. Seeking proof strong enough to overcome skepticism, judges and accusers turned to performance, staging 'acts of Sorcery and Witch-craft manifest to sense.' Looking at an array of demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, this Element shows that such staging answered to specific doctrines of proof: catching the criminal 'in the acte'; establishing 'notoriety of the fact'; producing 'violent presumptions' of guilt. But performance sometimes overflowed the demands of doctrine, behaving in unpredictable ways. A detailed examination of two cases - the 1591 case of the French witch-demoniac Francoise Fontaine and the 1593 case of John Samuel of Warboys -suggests the manifold, multilayered ways that evidentiary staging could signify - as it can still in that conjuring practice we call law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
277 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-46970-8 (9781009469708)
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Julie Stone Peters
Staging Witchcraft Before the Law
Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials
Book
01/2025
Cambridge University Press
€26.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Author
Columbia University, Columbia University School of Law, and Queen Mary University of London School of Law
Content
1. Introduction; 2. Performance as proof of the 'Hidden Crime'; 3. Doing battle with Satan in a Louviers Courthouse: devil versus law in the trial of Francoise Fontaine (1591); 4. Staging possession in the trial of John Samuel: Witchcraft at the Huntington Assizes (1593); 5. Conclusion: Law as magic; References.