If you were a Londoner and a theatergoer in 1658, you might have parted with a penny to see "The Witch of Edmonton: A known true story" based on nothing more than its cover.
The title page of the play, billed a "tragi-comedy," features an illustration of "Mother Sawyer," a large-nosed old woman with a chin-strap beard, dressed in a black hat and a cape, carrying a staff.
Even 366 years after the play's publication, there is no mistaking what Mother Sawyer represents, says Kate Bush, visiting assistant professor of history. This fall, Bush is teaching the course Witchcraft Persecution in Europe (c. 1300-1700), which examines the history of magic, witchcraft, and society's mercurial relationship with the figure of the witch over four centuries. Bush, whose research interests include gender studies and religious culture, says one of her goals in teaching students about witchcraft and persecution is to make them better critical thinkers and public speakers.
"I'm working on getting students to claim their individual voices and their ability to speak up when things are difficult or when injustice happens," Bush says. "This is a useful function, morally, in society but also in corporate culture, politics and academia."
'Injustice can happen at any time'
Bush says the "heart" of the class is an examination of the witch panic (or craze) of the early modern period, circa 1500-1650, which saw 50,000 European people executed for witchcraft. Students examine a host of contributing factors that fueled the craze, including geography, the ascension of the legal system, agricultural catastrophes, Christianity, the Reformation and scientific and technological advances. The Gutenberg Press routinely appears on lists of inventions that changed the world, but progress has its downside, Bush notes. Not everyone benefits. The best-known treatise on witchcraft, the "Malleus Maleficarum," published in 1486, remained influential for hundreds of years after its publication.
In effect, Bush challenges students to consider the history of witchcraft and persecution of women as a counter to the narrative of progress.
"At points of expansion of information, there can be expansions of disinformation," Bush says. "We have to look at that in the past to be able to understand how it functions now."
Sometimes the distant past can feel very present. "The history of witchcraft and persecution reminds us that injustice can happen at any time," Bush says. "I teach a lot about anti-Judaism and the anti-semitic tropes circulating in the 15th century."
Bush and other scholars point to medieval church and municipal records containing accounts of accusers whose allegations were dismissed as crazy or vengeful. There's a cautionary tale there, she says.
"Quite often when persecution takes hold — in whatever era that happens in, and it can happen at any time — it's because people start operating blindly based on preconceived notions that have nothing to do with reality," Bush says. "So if I can teach students the mechanics whereby that happened in the past, hopefully they'll recognize when it's happening in contemporary times and be able to speak up and shut it down when people are making generalizations that just aren't correct."
The witch's real power: endurance
Somewhere along the line, society grew fond of its witches. In 2022, Americans spent more than $10.6 billion on Halloween, according to the National Retail Foundation. That same year, the debut of "Hocus Pocus 2" on Disney+ broke the Nielsen record for a streaming movie. In the not-too-distant future, movie theaters will offer a two-movie adaptation of the Broadway hit "Wicked," a live-action version of Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Practical Magic 2," with Oscar award-winning actors Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock reprising their 1998 roles as sister witches Gillian and Sally Owens.
And "The Witch of Edmonton" is still performed all over the world.
The titular character, the witch, is based on the historical figure Elizabeth Sawyer. Sawyer was executed for witchcraft in April 1621, according to "The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, late of Edmonton, her conviction and condemnation and death," a pamphlet written that same year by Henry Goodcole, a chaplain at London's Newgate prison.
What might it mean that the figure of the witch no longer scares us? Bush is thoughtful. Perhaps Mother Sawyer's real magic lies in her endurance and malleability.
"Who do we, even now in our own society, in our own lives, look to? Who has the most information about the past to pass onto the next generation? It's always women who are a little bit older," she says. "Maybe they are the ones who hold not traditional kinds of power but traditional kinds of wisdom who, potentially, in new social circumstances could make them a disruption to the social order. When you look at this idea of the positive witch, this idea that you can have individual autonomy and be free and work without massive complications, that you can hang out with other women and be empowered by that, I think that is connected to the history of witchcraft and persecution in a way."
