Abstract

Judging from the number of publications documenting and commenting on contemporary witchcraft cases, the latter half of Queen Elizabeth's reign can be justly called the era of the witch. Although witchcraft had long been a topic favored by both religious elites and readers of the middling sort, the preoccupation of the late Elizabethan popular press with this issue was unprecedented. Since the appearance of the first documentary witchcraft pamphlet in 1566, the numbers of these publications steadily increased: five were registered in the 1570s, four in the 1580s, and ten more during the remaining thirteen years of Elizabeth's reign. These numbers alone indicate that witchcraft must have excited the imagination of varied reading and subsequently theater-going audiences. Granted, the attention of the press to this issue was more or less congruent with the historical prominence of the crime. Yet even for the "Witch County" of Essex, the numbers of the witches and their victims in pamphlets and ballads were significantly higher than those in surviving indictments in assize records.There were important ideological reasons for this boom in witchcraft docu-fiction. As Stuart Clark has explained, witchcraft--"overthwartness made systematic, unruliness or overturning taken to ritualistic lengths"--had an important cognitive function for the early moderns. Along with other kinds of misrule, it was rendered as the "necessary evil" which, in the prevalent antithetical thinking of the era, defined the institutions of God's order and the monarch's by providing their negative image. In the period's language of "contrariety," which defined good through evil, order through disorder, soul through body, male through female, and the ordered commonwealth through demonic tyranny, witches epitomized the inversion of natural, patriarchal, Christian, and national order. No ordinary criminals, they were, to quote the impassioned words of a contemporary pastor-demonologist, "most wicked runnagates from the fayth, false forswearers of Gods power, traytours of the majestie of God, most vile starters aside."But such inversionary thinking, Clark argues, entailed a constant and ultimately destabilizing semantic exchange between the two terms of the antithesis. The "superior" term was completely dependent for its meaning on its "inferior" partner and could never be affirmed without evoking precisely what it sought to suppress. In the context of the cultural beliefs and practices of pamphlet readers of the middling sort, the semantic dependence of the "superior" term frequently translated as an enhanced interest in the forcefulness of its privative or "inferior" partner. Indeed, the witches' words recorded in the popular pamphlets wielded a performative force which, I argue, provoked the admiration and even the approving laughter of the middling audiences.The pamphleteers tried hard to demystify, order, and circumscribe a slippery rhetorical phenomenon which I call witch-speak. Its manifestations, to which I will return shortly, included endlessly variable disturbances of signification, equivocations, moans, giggles, and incantations of intangible shape but unmistakably material effect. Though lacking in authentic creative power, witch-speak nonetheless possessed the power to induce fear and wonder, to make believe. It was, literally, overspeaking, getting the upper hand in a verbal strife, asserting oneself over one's superior in the social or gender hierarchy. Far from quelling the mysterious force of witch-speak, the late-Elizabethan pamphleteers, driven by conflicting ideological and marketing impulses, frequently succeeded in enhancing it.A discussion of witch-speak and its performative force allows us to refine and develop further the strong thesis of feminist historians Christina Larner, Marianne Hester, and Anne Barstow that witch-hunts were women-hunts, "sexual violence against women within a context of male supremacist social relations." The important ideological ramifications of this thesis have been pursued more recently by Diane Purkiss in a discussion of witchcraft persecution during the English Civil War. This persecution, she claims, was a vehicle utilized by Parliamentarians and royalists alike for the assertion of a masculine military identity. Yet in their effort to expose the full terror of female persecution, which has fortified the historical foundations of the modern nation state and the reformed church, these feminist historians have underplayed the witches' masterful performances in the local contestations of power. The pamphlet literature of..