Cases of Male Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1592-1692

Abstract

In early modern England people from all walks of life believed that men could be witches. When men were prosecuted for criminal magic, clerical and judicial elites appear to have merely observed that while the female sex was particularly prone to witchcraft, the word 'witch' 'exempteth not the male'. Masculine witches present more of a challenge for modern historians, particularly for those concerned with witchcraft and gender. Until recently historians have addressed the male witch in a perfunctory fashion, seeing him as not a 'real' witch, or as evidence that no 'hostility between the sexes lay behind the prosecutions'. More recently, however, increasing interest in male witches has meant that scholars are attempting to reconcile the 'physical as well as [the] theoretical reality' of male witchcraft with a dominant historiographical logic which stipulates that it was 'literally unthinkable [...] that witches should be male'. My approach in this book is congruent with the feminist demand that gender should be placed at the centre of any analysis concerning early modern witchcraft. I have pursued gender as my primary category of analysis because it appears that difference in gender was the prime distinction between male and female witches. Male witches, as witches, appear to have been remarkably similar to female witches. And many of the historiographical descriptors applied to the 'typical' (that is, female) early modern English witch - being married, of middle age, frequently involved in interpersonal conflict, having a history of being accused of other crimes, being abrasive and hyper-contentious in personal style - can be readily used to describe male witches. Certainly in early modern England there existed spheres of magical practice dominated by men - for example, elite magic, or natural magic - and certain forms of popular magic might also be 'specifically attributed to men' - for example conjuration, particularly for treasure-seeking. But overall, in England, no popular magical practice was exclusively allied to one gender to the exclusion of the other.