Studia Neophilologica 84: 130–142, 2012
Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft
Pamphlets
CARLA SUHR
1. Introduction
In the early modern period, witchcraft was a concern for people at all levels of society.
News about sensational witchcraft trials spread quickly through the new medium of pamphlets, which were short printed tracts that usually cost no more than two pence. Increasing
basic literacy among the lower social classes guaranteed a growing readership, and popular pamphlets were among the first kinds of texts to be written for the new semi-literate
or abecedarian readers. Potential audiences even included the completely illiterate, for
the practice of reading texts aloud as a kind of social activity was still prevalent in the
early modern period (Fox 2000: 36–39; Chartier 1989). Witchcraft pamphlets, along with
accounts of other serious crimes, of monstrous births or of natural disasters, fall into the
category of what Rosen calls popular moralistic pamphlets:
Pamphlets properly called moralistic rather than moral or religious are those which not only treat events,
situations, phenomena, and fashions as objects of moral reflection, but also subject all kinds of experience
to moral judgement of a trite and limiting kind. They are in various ways less serious, less considerable
than moral or religious pamphlets, more frivolous, more ephemeral, less far-reaching, and their context is
restricted to a realm of easy judgement and fixed unquestioned standards. (1969: 33)
Witchcraft pamphlets share the views demonstrated in learned demonological and especially Protestant theological writings, but rather than discussing theoretical points, the
concerns are illustrated through vivid examples. While readers are titillated by the descriptions of unnatural events and afflictions interpreted as the results of witchcraft, they also
learn that witchcraft is a way of punishing humanity for its predilection to sin as well as a
way of testing individuals in their faith, and that no one is safe from witches or the devil.
Reliance on God through prayer and on magistrates by bringing suspected witches to trial
are the only paths to deliverance from bewitching, not resorting to cunning folk or white
witches; old traditional means of identifying and dealing with witches are condemned as
superstitions that should be eradicated along with other popular superstitions as a means
of achieving a godly society. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, writers were
increasingly concerned about countering a perceived threat to the true faith from atheism
and deism, and consequently emphasized the reality of the devil by insisting on the reality
of witchcraft and the link between the devil and witches (Sharpe 2001: 16–21, 74).
The attitudes of both the authors and the various participants in the events described
in witchcraft pamphlets are important vehicles for bringing across these points. Readers
are invited to share the attitude portrayed in the texts, and thereby to embrace the beliefs
of the writers regarding witches and witchcraft. There is no question of how the author
evaluates “poor souls [who] (aiming at nothing but ruine) imbrace Folly instead of Wisdom,
present pleasure for eternal pain; take Flames for Crowns, misery for happiness, change
God for a Devil, and a Soul for Hell” (1682_Exeter: 1–2). Such strong statements, with
structural repetition used for rhetorical effect, are easily identified by readers as elements of
contemporary writing style. However, writers could influence readers in more subtle ways,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2012.686220
Studia Neophil 84 (2012)
Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets 131
as well, through their word choices and by emphasizing certain aspects of the events over
others. For example, recording the reactions of victims or spectators, usually fear or fearful
amazement, engenders similar emotional reactions in the reader (or hearer) of a narrative,
but repeating a list of times when a familiar was sent to bewitch someone or something is
not likely to cause such a reaction. Emphasizing the unnaturalness of events while insisting
upon the veracity of the account and the credibility of the witnesses reminded readers of
the reality of witchcraft and the ever-present threat of the devil; it is also a stylistic device
meant to awaken interest. All these ways of attempting to influence readers of witchcraft
pamphlets are the focus of this paper.
Considering the topic of the pamphlets, negative assessment of witches and their actions
is to be expected to dominate the texts. However, analyzing who or what else is evaluated
(the accounts, the witnesses or the victims) and whose evaluation is portrayed (the author’s
or someone else’s) reveals not only changing conventions for writing witchcraft pamphlets
but also how changing views on witchcraft are reflected in the texts. Consequently, pamphlets repeating information fairly verbatim from witchcraft trial documents are likely to
be impersonal and to focus on the actions that had brought an accused to trial, whereas
accounts in narrative form include interpersonal and emotive language and may focus also
on the victims and their behavior rather than the accused or suspected witch. At the same
time, the kinds of actions evaluated, whether positive or negative, show what was desirable
and what condemnable behavior in contemporary society.
2. Materials and methods
The material for this study comes from the Corpus of Early Modern English Witchcraft
Pamphlets, a purpose-built single-genre corpus that covers the period between 1566 and
1697. The corpus comprises 36 witchcraft pamphlets, and totals just over 122,000 words.1
The most important criteria for texts included in the corpus are the topic of witchcraft and
a length of up to 48 pages.2
The number of corpus texts by decades illustrated in Figure 1 below reflects the
waxing and waning of the authorities’ willingness to prosecute witchcraft cases and
changing motives for writing witchcraft pamphlets.3 The late sixteenth century had periods of increased witchcraft prosecutions, which can be seen in the clustering of the
witchcraft pamphlets: there are two texts from 1566, three texts from 1579, and three
texts from 1589–1592. After these peaks, trials start to decrease despite a few sensational cases, and by the 1630s few cases made it to trial anymore. The Civil War reversed
the downward trend: Matthew Hopkins’s notorious witch-hunting activities in the period
Fig. 1 The breakdown of texts by decades in the Corpus of Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets.
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1645–1647 ensured plenty of material for witchcraft pamphlets, and the number of trials
remained high in the following decade. From the late 1660s onwards, the number of trials
dropped once more, and so pamphlet writers had to resort to reporting on suspected cases
of witchcraft that were never tried in court in order to promote the reality of witchcraft as
a way of combating growing atheism and deism. While the last witchcraft trial was only in
1712, the last known execution of a convicted witch took place already in 1685. Ultimately,
the decline of trials results in the decline of witchcraft pamphlets, for after 1697 there are
no more popular pamphlets on witchcraft.4
All of the witchcraft pamphlets originate either from witchcraft trials or from events
suspected to have been caused by witchcraft but which did not result in trials. In many
cases, the pamphlet writers appear to have had access to the official trial documents or at
least notes from the trials, as the texts refer to various parts of witchcraft trial proceedings
such as interrogations and confessions of the accused or witness depositions. Often section
headings, if they exist, are copied from trial proceedings, as in “The confession of Ioan
Vpney of Dagenham, in the Countye of Essex, who was brought before Sir Henrye Gray
Knight, the third of May. 1589” (1589_Chelmes-ford: f.A4v ).
Pamphlet writers edited the trial materials to differing degrees, according to current
conventions. Especially sixteenth-century trial reports are simply lists – sometimes even
numbered lists – of the answers of an accused witch or a witness to the unrecorded
questions of examiners. The tone is impersonal, following the conventions of the legal proceedings repeated in the texts. This practice is continued into the mid-seventeenth century,
though the list structure of the sixteenth century evolves into summaries of documents.
Already beginning around the turn of the seventeenth century, trial texts begin to be more
extensively rewritten into cohesive narratives, where the focus is not so much on the trial
but more on the events leading to it. Authors are clearly present in these texts through, for
example, subjective commentary. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, witchcraft
accounts also took the form of news pamphlets; these were shorter texts where the narrative structure is retained, but the scope is reduced, the action is condensed and there
is less authorial involvement. These changing conventions for writing witchcraft pamphlets are reflected in the interpersonality and the evaluation portrayed in the texts (for
interpersonality, see Suhr 2011: 166–182).
The analysis of attitude in witchcraft pamphlets was carried out by using appraisal
theory, and specifically of its sub-category ATTITUDE (Martin and White 2005; White
2005).5 The attraction of this theory lies in its definition of appraisal as “the semantic
resources for negotiating emotions, judgments and valuations, alongside resources for
amplifying and engaging with these evaluations” (Martin 2000: 145), which allows for
the analysis to include both explicit and implicit expressions identified through contextual
cues rather than through specific grammatical forms. The method is labor intensive, as it
requires close reading of all the texts, but the Corpus of Early Modern English Witchcraft
Pamphlets is small enough to keep the task manageable. Appraisal theory has not been previously applied for the analysis of historical materials, apart from a rather cursory study of
nineteenth-century business letters by Dossena (2010) and a more quantitatively oriented
study of attitude in witchcraft pamphlets (Suhr 2011: 183–217).
Martin and White (2005: 42–58) divide attitude into three sub-systems, defined below,
with illustrative examples taken from the corpus used in this study:
APPRECIATION is “[the] assessment of the form, appearance, composition, impact, significance, etc. of
human artefacts, natural objects as well as human individuals (but not of human behaviour) by reference to
aesthetics and other systems of social value” (White 2005)
“thinges which were so miraculous and strange” (1592_Fian, f.B4r ) 6
AFFECT registers positive and negative feelings.
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“many yeeres before shee died both hated, and feared among her neighbours” [i.e., her neighbors hated
and feared her] (1612_Northamptonshire, f.B1v )
JUDGMENT is concerned with the moral or ethical assessment of human behavior, actions and character.
“lewd and wicked people” (1674_Foster, 4)
All three sub-systems can be broken down into further sub-divisions, but a distinction
between positive and negative is sufficient for this study. Of the three sub-systems, JUDGMENT, and specifically negative JUDGMENT , should be the most frequent kind of attitude
in witchcraft pamphlets, since the texts deal with socially condemned people and their
behavior.
The intention of writers is that their readers will share the evaluation presented in the
text, and in this way learn the “proper” doctrine on witchcraft. In the above examples,
attitude is portrayed explicitly through clearly evaluative lexis. However, attitude can also
be conveyed implicitly, for factual expressions that have no evaluative lexis in themselves
can nonetheless as a whole still provoke attitude, if the writer and reader share the same
social norms. White (2005: Implicit versus Explicit Judgment) gives the following factual
description of socially condemned actions as an example of implicit JUDGMENT that is
so internalized in modern culture that it can almost be considered explicit JUDGMENT:
“They ordered a pizza and then shot the deliveryman in the head at point-blank range.” I
have extended this interpretation to include confessions of performing socially condemned
actions, as the end result is also a negative judgment of the person confessing. For example,
the expression “she confessed that she had caused several ships at sea to be cast away”
(1682_Essex: 2) has no explicitly evaluative lexis – it reports what the accused confessed
to doing – but since causing shipwrecks is not considered proper behavior, the expression
reporting such actions provokes negative judgment of a person confessing to doing such a
thing. These kind of factual expressions that describe or report socially condemned actions
such as killing or injuring others are also included in the analysis as implicit JUDGMENT.7
3. Results
Unsurprisingly, the attitude in witchcraft pamphlets is primarily negative JUDGMENT: 70%
of all expressions of attitude are JUDGMENT and 85% of expressions of JUDGMENT are
negative. There are slightly more expressions of APPRECIATION (17%) than there are of
expressions of AFFECT (12%) in the corpus.8 The following sub-sections describe the ways
in which APPRECIATION, AFFECT and JUDGMENT are actually expressed in the material:
who or what is the target of positive and negative evaluation in witchcraft pamphlets, and
whose attitude is described (i.e., is the author describing his own attitude or reporting
someone else’s attitude).
3.1 APPRECIATION in witchcraft pamphlets
The targets of APPRECIATION are most often the texts or the events described: they are
wonderful (i.e., full of wonders or astonishing) and unbelievable yet nonetheless true. This
kind of attitude is often found in the titles on title pages (example 1), but it can also occur
within the body of the text (example 2).
(1) Discouering how they pretended to bewitch and drowne his Maiestie in the Sea coming from Denmarke,
with such other wonderfull matters as the like hath not been heard of at any time. (1592_Fian: title page)
(2) At this Swimming of her, were present, such a Company of People of the Town and Country, and many
of them, Persons of Quality, as could not well be Numbred; so that now, there is scarce one Person that
doubts of the Truth of this thing. (1689_Beckenton: 2)
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Note how the singularity of the events in example (1) and the verity of the account in
example (2) are emphasized by implicit rather than explicit APPRECIATION. A simple factual statement such as “wonderfull matters” is not considered enough to convince a reader,
and the description of a swimming needs to include a mention that no one doubts that the
event took place because there were such credible witnesses present. Whether the APPRECIATION is positive or negative has to be decided on the basis of the textual context. The
“other wonderfull matters” in example (1) are comparable to bewitching and drowning the
king, and therefore negative, whereas the statement of singularity is intended to highlight
positively the news value of the account. In example (2), the APPRECIATION is positive,
for it evaluates the account of events as truthful rather than fictitious.
It would not be unexpected to find negative APPRECIATION in the expressions of false
humility that are so common in early modern prefaces, and in fact a few such expressions
do occur. For example, Richard Galis dedicates to his patron Robert Handley “this handful
of scribled and barren papers” (1579_Galis: f.A2r ). However, the false humility concerns
more often the skills of the writer than the quality of the text, and so it occurs as negative
JUDGMENT of the author. Prefaces are found mainly in texts most similar to the original
trial documents, where they are the only parts of the texts in which the personalized voice
of the authors can be found, since the bodies of the texts consist of impersonal language
copied from trial documents.
Negative APPRECIATION is occasionally also directed towards the physical appearance
of an accused witch or the victim of witchcraft. Thus, the witch Elizabeth Sawyer is
described in the following way:
(3) 1 Her face was most pale & ghoast-like without any bloud at all, and her countenance was still
deiected to the ground.
2 Her body was crooked and deformed, euen bending together, which so happened but a little before her
apprehension. (1621_Sawyer: f.A4v )
However, starting in the middle of the seventeenth century, negative APPRECIATION is
increasingly found in descriptions of the unnatural results of witchcraft, or the condition of
the bewitched, as in examples (4) and (5):
(4) . . . he found thirty of his Sheep in a condition dead, and in a strange and miserable manner, their Leggs
broke in pieces, and their Bones all shattered in their Skins. (1674_Foster: 4)
(5) . . . her tongue lolling out of her mouth in so sad and lamentable a manner as struck an astonishment
in all the beholders. (1669_Ware: 8)
In example (5), the misery of the victim is made more vivid by the expression of AFFECT
portraying the emotional reaction of the witnesses of the event: they were “struck [by] an
astonishment”.
A striking feature of APPRECIATION is that the evaluation of the target almost always
comes from the author – or in the case of title pages, probably the printer, as he was
responsible for the text and appearance of the title page in the early modern period –
rather than a victim, a witness or someone else involved in the actual events. Especially
in late seventeenth-century pamphlets, where the target of APPRECIATION is most often
the account itself, authors take pains to emphasize the veracity of the account, perhaps in
anticipation of the growing disbelief in witchcraft on the part of readers and listeners (see
example [2]).
3.2 AFFECT in witchcraft pamphlets
There are three main sources of AFFECT in witchcraft pamphlets: anger or offence, fear and
amazement. Of these, anger and fear are clearly negative emotions, whereas amazement
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can be either positive or negative, depending on the context. Examples (6)–(8) below show
the kinds of people usually affected by these emotional reactions:
(6) . . . which this Chicken of her Dammes hatching, taking disdainefully and beeing also enraged (as they
that in this kind hauing power to harme, haue neuer patience to beare) at her going out told the Gentlewoman
that shee would remember this iniury, and reuenge it. (1612_Northamptonshire: f.B2v)
(7) [The Devil] coming constantly about the dead time of the Night in the likeness of a Rat, which at his
coming, made a most lamentable and hideous noise which affrighted the people that did belong to the Goal.
(1674_Foster: 7)
(8) . . . is now since that come safely into his own Native Country, England, and is come to his own
dwelling house at Cambden, to the no little astonishment and wonderful amazement of all his Friends
and Relations, nay of all the Country round. (1662_Harrison: 9)
In example (6), it is the witch – a junior one, as she is called a “Chicken of her Dammes
hatching” – who is offended and angry because of an “injury” committed against her
(she was fired from her job for theft). In example (7), witnesses are scared by the coming of the devil; the other common group of people showing fear are the victims of
witchcraft, who are afraid when they encounter their bewitcher. Fear is the most common
source of AFFECT, and it is found in all of the witchcraft pamphlets. Example (8) is an
example of positive amazement, as witnesses are surprised by the return of the long-lost
William Harrison; he was a respected member of his community and had been thought
dead. Negative amazement occurs most in late-seventeenth century pamphlets, where the
emphasis is on describing the unnaturalness of events rather than their wonderfulness, and
witnesses are therefore struck by fearful awe instead of joy or wonder. These pamphlets
no longer describe the emotions of suspected witches, as the motivation for their maleficent acts is claimed to be their innate evilness or their assumed pact with the devil. These
traits are analyzed as negative JUDGEMENT rather than AFFECT, since they deal with the
characters and actions of the accused.
As with APPRECIATION, most AFFECT originates from the author of the texts. If emotional reactions are cast as the evidence of witnesses, for example, they are usually found
in texts faithful to trial documents, as these texts are structured as miniature accounts or
abridged versions of official trial proceedings, which could include witness depositions
as well as examinations and confessions of the accused. In texts structured as narratives,
authors take a more active role in constructing the accounts by interpreting and combining
materials from confessions, examinations and witness depositions and/or hearsay into a
cohesive story where the author is the narrator. The authorial voice is therefore much more
visible in these texts than in the documentary pamphlets.
3.3 JUDGMENT in witchcraft pamphlets
Not surprisingly, the targets of JUDGMENT are overwhelmingly the accused witches.
Cataloguing their confessions and the evidences given against them takes the form of
implicit JUDGMENT, as listing the socially condemned actions of the accused paints
their behavior in a negative light. In contrast, characterizations of their nature are usually
explicit, as the word play on the name of the accused in example (9) below shows:
(9) Intemperate Temperance Floyd who was the eldest of the three, pleaded to her Indictment, and owned
the Accusation, acknowledging she had been in League with the Devil 20 years and upwards, and that
in the term of those years she had been guilty of many Cruelties, and by Hellish power afflicted both
Man and Beast. (1682_Exeter: 2)
The description of Temperance Floyd’s actions piles many expressions of implicit JUDGMENT on top of each other, adding to the total weight of the judgment. Floyd’s guilt is
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exacerbated by the long duration of her unlawful association with the devil and the many
cruelties she had committed against men and animals in that time: the negative JUDGMENT
of Floyd is more than the sum of its parts. This kind of implicit JUDGMENT accounts for
most of the negative JUDGMENT found in witchcraft pamphlets. Not only is witchcraft
demonstrated to be a very real crime, contrary to what opponents such as Reginald Scot
claimed, but the lists of crimes and victims also show that no one was safe from witches or
the threat of bewitching.
Although it is more common to point out the witches’ recalcitrance and refusal to repent
at the place of execution, witches do occasionally merit positive JUDGMENT as well, when
they show remorse for their crimes. Accused witches’ denials of their guilt have also been
analyzed as positive JUDGMENT. In some of the early texts, the accused claim that they
are not witches but wisemen or wisewomen who only use their spirits to heal people, to
identify if a person is bewitched or to perform counter-magic when someone has been
bewitched. They evaluate their own actions in a positive way, as in the following example:
(10) Shee further confesseth, that shee neuer hurt any body, but did helpe diuers that sent for her, which
were stricken or fore-spoken: and that her Spirit came weekely for her, and would tell her of diuers persons
that were stricken and forespoken. And shee saith, that the vse which shee had of the Spirit, was to know
how those did which shee had vndertaken to amend; and that shee did helpe them by certaine prayers
which she vsed, and not by her owne Spirit. . . (1619_Flower: f.E4r )
In this case, the accused admits to having a familiar spirit – to which she had promised
her soul, according to her confession – but claims that she uses the spirit only as a kind
of messenger. She did not use the spirit for counter-magic, but healed bewitched people
through prayers. This may not seem like behavior that should be condemned, but the gifting
of one’s soul to someone other than God was considered by theologians and demonologists
to be a crime against God (technically the law only banned dealing with evil spirits). Clearly
the implication was that anyone capable of doing good by magic is surely just as likely to
use magic for evil as well, and it seems that in the above case the examiners suspected as
much, because the accused is answering unrecorded questions asking for details about her
relationship with her spirit. Certainly the writer wants his readers to make this connection,
since the report of the examination is included amongst other examinations where the
accused confess to using their spirits for maleficent acts. This reminds the readers of the
biblical injunction that is occasionally quoted in witchcraft pamphlets: “Though shalt not
suffer a witch to live.” There is no such thing as a good witch, and all witches should be
denounced to magistrates rather than tolerated – this was the message pamphlet writers
wanted to transmit to their readers.
In texts with prefatory materials, readers are often addressed as “gentle” or “Christian”.
Mostly, however, the targets of positive JUDGMENT are the victims of witchcraft and the
magistrates who try the cases at court, as in examples (11) and (12):
(11) . . . in this matter, neither were they busie-bodies, flatterers, malicious politians, vnderminers, nor
supplanters one of anothers good fortune; but went simply to worke, as regarding the honor of the
Earle and his Lady, and so by degrees gave light to their vnderstanding to apprehend their complaints.
(1619_Flower: f.C3r)
(12) The Court sum’d up each Circumstance With great care, tenderness, and Moderation and delivered their Opinions to the Jury, with all the Leagal Fairness, and Justice that could be desired, or expected,
even from the Witches themselves, desiring God to direct them in their Verdict. (1690_Worcester: 7)
Underlining the good character and innocence of any wrong-doing of the victims, as in
example (11), serves to emphasize the maliciousness of the accused witch, and draws a
parallel between the innocent victim and Job being tested in their faith. At the same time,
it is also implied that anyone – also the reader – could be the next victim if the witch is not
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brought to trial and condemned. By noting the careful work of the court (example 12) the
author stresses the fairness of the judgment: only guilty people are condemned.
There are a few texts where JUDGMENT takes a different form than in other witchcraft
pamphlets. One autobiographical text (1579_Galis) is conspicuous in its positive description of the author, who is the unhappy victim of witchcraft and wrongly considered a
troublemaker by his community. In his account of his grievous sufferings and his attempts
to bring the guilty parties to trial, the mayor of his town is roundly denounced for “forgetting his oth and dutie towards God and his Prince” (f.B1v ) and ordering the release of a
woman Galis suspected had bewitched him and members of his family, rather than prosecuting her. Two texts are responses to other texts in the corpus, and they give an opposing
view of events by discrediting the previous accounts through negative JUDGMENT of the
alleged victims and positive judgment of the alleged witch. Thus the pamphlet attempting
to exonerate Joan Peterson after her execution for witchcraft describes her as the innocent
victim of a conspiracy to discredit the heir to some property that the villainous conspirators had expected to inherit themselves. According to this account, Peterson was framed
for witchcraft so that she could not reveal the conspiracy when she refused to bear false
witness against the rightful heir. In addition, the whole pre-trial procedure, presided by a
judge, is declared irregular and contrary to law.
When the target of JUDGMENT is the accused witch – which is the majority of cases –
the JUDGMENT originates from the accused themselves when they describe their actions
in their confessions and examinations, as well as from witnesses and victims who gave
evidence against the accused. The pamphlet author simply reproduces the words of others. This is the case in examples (9) and (10) above. However, when victims, witnesses
and magistrates are judged, it is usually the author’s characterization rather than someone
else’s, as examples (11) and (12) above show. Example (13) illustrates both the accused
witch’s negative JUDGMENT of witnesses and how authors could discredit such attitudes:
(13) The prisoner in her own defence, said that they were all Malicious people and deny’d that she
had Confessed any thing to the Evidence, insinuating as if they had formerly an old Grudge against
her, and thereupon made a strange Howling in the Court, to the great disturbance of the whole
Bench. (1690_Worcester: 4)
Here the witnesses are judged negatively as malicious people holding an old grudge, but the
source of the evaluation is not the author but the accused witch. The author of the pamphlet
discredits this negative evaluation by using the verb insinuate to characterize it, and then
assesses the nature (“made a strange howling”) of the behavior of the accused (negative
JUDGMENT ) and the reactions of the court to it (“greatly disturbed”; negative AFFECT ).
This kind of authorial intervention is not found in texts reproducing trial documents, which
on the whole focus their JUDGMENT on the accused witches by listing what maleficent acts
the accused have confessed to during examinations. In narrative pamphlets, where victims,
witnesses and magistrates have more of a presence, it is natural for their actions to be
judged as well, and in a positive light that highlights their trustworthiness.
4. Discussion
Attitude in early modern English witchcraft pamphlets is mainly portrayed as JUDGMENT,
and especially as negative JUDGMENT. JUDGMENT is often implied by listing the socially
and/or legally condemned actions of the accused, such as injuring or killing other people, keeping spirits or giving their souls to the devil in the case of negative JUDGMENT,
and by enumerating the socially laudable actions of witnesses, victims or magistrates to
portray positive JUDGMENT of them. In light of the topic and the common source of trial
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proceedings, these are not surprising findings. However, differences in who or what is
evaluated and how much of the evaluation is positive reflect changes not only in writing
conventions but also in motives for writing witchcraft pamphlets.
The most salient feature of the first kind of witchcraft pamphlets to appear is their
structural indebtedness to trial documents, which results in an impersonal and official writing style copied from legal documents in the body of the texts. These texts are the most
common form of witchcraft pamphlet until the early decades of the seventeenth century.
APPRECIATION in these texts – found mostly in the prefaces – vouches for the truthfulness
of the accounts, in addition to noting the strangeness of the events they recount. AFFECT is
mostly negative, portraying either the anger of the accused witch or very occasionally the
fear of the victim. JUDGMENT is overwhelmingly targeted at the accused witches, because
the texts focus on listing their reprehensible actions and on stressing their immoral involvement with spirits. Positive JUDGMENT is found mainly in the conventional praise of readers
found in prefatory matters, or in denials of guilt of the accused. In these texts, it is evident
that the writers are denying the possibility of good witches and beneficial association with
spirits as well as the old practice of resorting to counter-magic in cases of bewitching.
Instead, all suspected witches should be brought to trial.
Another style of writing appears already in the late sixteenth century alongside the trial
document–style pamphlets. In narrative witchcraft pamphlets, victims, witnesses and magistrates have a much larger role. The texts are now framed as true stories rather than as
reports from court, and therefore describe the feelings and reactions of a wider range of
people in more detail. This in turn leads to more AFFECT and positive JUDGMENT, which
are often the interpretation of the author rather based on confessions or examinations of
the accused and the witnesses. The emphasis on the innocence of the victims paints them
as good Christians being tested in their faith, but also brings home the point that no one
is safe from the crime. The victims also exhibit proper Christian responses to bewitching
by praying to God for deliverance. Over the course of the seventeenth century, narratives
also begin to conspicuously stress the strangeness or unnaturalness (i.e., negative APPRECIATION ) of the portrayed events by commenting on it repeatedly. This denial of natural
explanations for strange happenings stresses the reality of witchcraft.
In the mid-seventeenth century the trial document–style witchcraft pamphlets disappear,
and in their place come witchcraft pamphlets modeled on news pamphlets. These texts are
still narrative in form, but they are much shorter and less emotive than the earlier narratives (which still remain). The target of JUDGMENT is again only the accused witch, since
the role of witnesses is reduced to recording scared amazement (negative AFFECT) and
vouching for the truthfulness of the accounts (positive APPRECIATION). Despite the positive witness statements, APPRECIATION is still mostly negative, because more emphasis
is placed on the unnaturalness of the events and the terrible conditions of the tormented
as they are described in the accounts. The strangeness is also emphasized by the negative AFFECT of the witnesses. Again, this signals a concern with stressing the reality of
witchcraft over natural explanations, but also paints the victims as contemporary Jobs.
Whether pamphlet authors were successful in influencing their readers’ views on
witchcraft is impossible to say. If the number of witchcraft trials is used as an indicator in
belief in witchcraft, it would seem that the writers’ attempts were not successful; modern
historians, however, claim that witchcraft trials decreased because of growing skepticism
that the crime could be proved in court rather than skepticism about the reality of the
crime (see e.g., Sharpe 2001: 24). Though popular witchcraft pamphlets disappeared concurrently with witchcraft trials, the attitudes portrayed in these texts nonetheless give us
fascinating glimpses of how the concerns and beliefs of contemporary pamphlet writers
changed over a period of a century and a half, and an example of how generic writing
conventions evolved over time.
Studia Neophil 84 (2012)
Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets 139
Department of Modern Languages
University of Helsinki
P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40 B)
FI-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback that helped to improve this article.
NOTES
1 See the Appendix for a list of the corpus texts and the short titles used to identify them in this article. See
Suhr (2011: 49–60) for a more detailed description of the corpus.
2 Translations and texts printed outside England or Scotland were excluded from the corpus, as were reprints or
new editions of texts included in the corpus. The page limit of 48 pages was set on the basis of the minimum
price of pamphlets (two pence, according to Clark [1983: 25]) and the number of sheets required for printing
them, as paper was the most expensive component of pamphlets. 48 pages equals six sheets of paper in quarto
size, or three sheets of paper in octavo size; these were the most common formats of pamphlets. In fact, all
but three of the corpus texts are made up of less than four sheets of paper, and two thirds of the texts, mostly
from the latter half of the seventeenth century, consist of less than two sheets of paper. With the average retail
price of texts at halfpence per sheet before 1635 (Johnson 1950: 93) and a penny per sheet at the end of the
seventeenth century (Raymond 2003: 82–83), this gives an average retail price of tuppence for the corpus
texts. Raymond (2003) places the maximum length of pamphlets at 96 pages, and Bach’s limit is 64 pages
(1997: 15). Previous historical studies of witchcraft pamphlets do not limit the length at all, and include texts
of well over 100 pages in their discussions (Notestein 1968[1911]; Rosen 1969; Gibson 1999, 2000).
3 An excellent survey of English witchcraft is Sharpe (2001). The seminal works are still MacFarlane (1970)
and Thomas (1971).
4 There are two controversies over sensational witchcraft cases in 1701 and 1712, but they are polemical rather
than popular pamphlets. Many of the texts taking part in the controversies are much longer than the 48 pages
that is considered the maximum length for pamphlets in this study.
5 I follow Martin and White (2005) in using small capital letters to avoid confusing the labels of sub-categories
and sub-systems of appraisal with more general usage of the words “attitude”, “appreciation”, “affect” or
“judgment”.
6 In all examples, the emphasis in bold is mine but italic typefaces are original.
7 Martin and White (2005) use the terms “inscribed attitude” for explicitly (i.e., lexically) portrayed attitude and
“invoked attitude” for implicit attitude. Invoked attitude can be analyzed on a cline from the “less” implicit
“provoked attitude” to the “more” implicit “afforded attitude”, but this study only includes provoked attitude,
since the interpretation of the “more” implicit kinds of attitude is problematic for historical materials, where
the precise context and reader position is not always clear. In the interest of using familiar terms, in this study
“explicit attitude” refers to Martin and White’s “inscribed attitude” and “implicit attitude” to their “provoked
attitude”.
8 There are a total of 2701 expressions of attitude in the corpus. Of these, 1900 express JUDGMENT, 467 express
APPRECIATION , and 335 express AFFECT (Suhr 2011: 199–200).
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Studia Neophil 84 (2012)
Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets 141
APPENDIX: The Corpus of Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets
The texts are referred to in the text with their short titles. All texts are available through Early English Books
Online (EEBO) at <http://eebo.chadwyck.com>, with the exception of 1674_Foster, which is located in the
British Library, London.
Short title
1566_Chensforde
1566_Walsh
1579_Chelmisforde
1579_Galis
1579_Winsore
1589_Chelmes-forde
1592_Burt
1592_Fian
1612_Northampton-shire
1613_Sutton
1619_Flower
1621_Sawyer
1628_Lambe
1643_Newbury
1645_Chelmesford
1645_Feversham
1645_St.Edmondsbury
1646_Huntingdon
Full bibliographical details
The examination and confession of certaine wytches at Chensforde in the
Countie of Essex . . . Imprynted at London: by Willyam Powell for
Wyllyam Pickeringe, 1566. STC (2nd ed.) 19869.5.
The examination of Iohn Walsh, before maister Thomas Williams . . .
vpon certayne interrogatories touching wytchcrafte and sorcerye . . .
Imprynted at London: by Iohn Awdely, 1566. STC (2nd ed.) 24999.
A detection of damnable driftes, practized by three vvitches arraigned at
Chelmisforde in Essex . . . Imprinted at London: [by J. Kingston] for
Edward White, 1579. STC (2nd ed.) 5115.
[Galis, Richard. A brief treatise conteyning the most strange and horrible
crueltye of Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham and her confederates . . .
London: J. Allde, 1579.] STC (2nd ed.) 11537.5.
A rehearsall both straung and true, of hainous and horrible actes
committed by . . . fower notorious witches . . . Imprinted at London:
[by J. Kingston] for Edward White, 1579. STC (2nd ed.) 23267.
The apprehension and confession of three notorious witches. [London:
E. Allde, 1589.] STC (2nd ed.) 5114.
[B., G.] A most vvicked worke of a wretched witch . . . [London]: Printed
by R. B[ourne] for William Barley, [1592]. STC (2nd ed.) 1030.5.
[Carmichael, James.] Newes from Scotland, Declaring the damnable life
and death of Doctor Fian . . . London: Printed [by E. Allde?] for
William Wright, [1592?]. STC (2nd ed.) 10841a.
The witches of Northampton-shire. London: Printed by Tho. Purfoot for
Arthur Iohnson, 1612. STC (2nd ed.) 3907.
Witches apprehended, examined and executed, for notable villanies by
them committed both by land and water . . . Printed at London: [by
William Stansby] for Edward Marchant, 1613. STC (2nd ed.) 25872.
The wonderfvl discoverie of the witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip
Flower, daughters of Ioan Flower neere Beuer Castle . . . Printed at
London: By G. Eld for I. Barnes, 1619. STC (2nd ed.) 11107.
Goodcole, Henry. The wonderfull discouerie of Elizabeth Savvyer a
witch, late of Edmonton . . . London: Printed [by A. Mathewes] for
VVilliam Butler, 1621. STC (2nd ed.) 12014.
A briefe description of the notoriovs life of Iohn Lambe, otherwise called
Doctor Lambe . . . Printed in Amsterdam [i.e. London: G. Miller?],
1628. STC (2nd ed.) 15177.
A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a vvitch [S.l.]: Printed by
John Hammond, 1643. Wing (2nd ed.) M2870; Thomason E.69[9].
F., H. A true and exact relation of the severall informations,
examinations, and confessions of the late Witches . . . London: Printed
by M. S. for Henry Overton and Benj. Allen, 1645. Wing (CD-ROM,
1996) F23; Thomason E.296[35].
The examination, confession, triall, and execution of Joane Williford,
Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott . . . London: Printed for J. G., 1645.
Wing (2nd ed.) E3712; Thomason E.303[33].
A true relation of the arraignment of eighteene vvitches . . . Printed at
London: by I[ohn] H[ammond]., 1645. Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) T2928;
Thomason E.301[3].
[Davenport, John.] The witches of Hvntingdon their examinations and
confessions . . . London: Printed by W. Wilson for Richard
Clutterbuck, 1646. Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) D368; Thomason
E.343[10].
142
C. Suhr
Studia Neophil 84 (2012)
Short title
1649_St.Albans
1652_Declaration
1652_Maidstone
1652_Peterson
1653_Bodenham
1659_Blackley
1659_Cambridge
1662_Harrison
1669_Ware
1674_Foster
1682_Buts
1682_Exeter
1684_Fowler
1686_Pensans
1687_Exeter
1689_Beckenton
1690_Worcester
1697_Renfrew
Full bibliographical details
The divels delvsions or a faithfull relation of John Palmer and Elizabeth
Knott two notorious VVitches . . . London: Printed for Richard
Williams, 1649. Wing (2nd ed.) D1227; Thomason E.565[15].
A declaration in answer to several lying pamphlets concerning the witch
of Wapping . . . London: [s.n.], 1652. Wing (CD-ROM 1996) D598.
G., E.. A prodigious & tragicall history of the arraignment, tryall,
confession, and condemnation of six Witches at Maidstone . . .
London: Printed for Richard Harper, 1652. Wing (2nd ed.) G13;
Thomason E.673[19].
The witch of Wapping. Or an exact and perfect relation, of the life and
devilish practises of Joan Peterson . . . London: Printed for Th. Spring,
1652. Wing (2nd ed.) W3137; Thomason E.659[18].
Doctor Lambs darling: Or, strange and terrible news from Salisbury . . .
London: Printed for G. Horton, 1653. Wing (2nd ed.) D1763;
Thomason E.707[2].
[Blackley, James.] A lying vvonder discovered and the strange and
terrible newes from Cambridge proved false. London: Printed for
Thomas Simmons, 1659. Wing (2nd ed.) B3075.
Strange & terrible nevves from Cambridge, being a true relation of the
Quakers bewitching of Mary Philips . . . London: Printed for C.
Brooks, 1659. Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) S5827.
The power of vvitchcraft, being a most strange but true relation of the
most miraculous and wonderful deliverance of one Mr. William
Harrison . . . London: Printed for Charls Tyus, 1662. Wing (2nd ed.)
P3109.
[Y.,M.] The Hartford-shire wonder. Or, strange news from VVare . . .
London: Printed for John Clark, 1669. Wing (2nd ed.) Y3.
A full and true relation of the tryal, condemnation, and execution of Ann
Foster . . . London: Printed for D.M., 1674. Wing (CD-ROM
1996) F2335.
An account of the trial and examination of Joan Buts . . . London:
Printed for S. Gardner, 1682. Wing (CD-ROM 1996) A413.
The tryal, condemnation, and execution of three witches . . . [London]:
Printed for J. Deacon, 1682. Wing (2nd ed.) T2175.
Strange nevvs from Shadwell, being a true and just relation of the death
of Alice Fowler . . . [London: Printed by E. Mallet, 1684.] Wing (2nd
ed.) S5903.
A true account of a strange and wonderful relation of one John Tonken of
Pensans in Cornwall . . . London: Printed by George Croom, 1686.
Wing (CD-ROM 1996) T2333.
The life and conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd, and
Susanna Edwards thee eminent witches . . . London: Printed by J. W.,
1687. Wing (CD-ROM 1996) L1990A.
Great news from thewWest of England. Being a True Account of Two
Young Persons lately Bewitch’d in the Town of Beckenton . . . London:
Printed by T. M., 1689. Wing (CD-ROM 1996) G1738A.
The full tryals, examination, and condemnation of four notorious
witches... London: Printed by J. W., [1690]. Wing (CD-ROM
1996) F2378.
[P., T.] A relation of the diabolical practices of above twenty wizards and
witches of the sheriffdom of Renfrew . . . London: Printed for Hugh
Newman, 1697. Wing (CD-ROM 1996) P118A.
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