| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Marion Gibson. Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. New York: Routledge. 1999. Pp. 242. Cloth $75.00, paper $24.95.

Marion Gibson's title indicates precisely the scope of her book. Its primary focus is the pamphlet accounts of witchcraft trials in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the problems they pose, and how scholars may profitably engage with this material. English witches were tried before the Assize Courts, many of whose records have not survived or survive only as indictments without supporting depositions. Pamphlet accounts offer far more circumstantial detail, but scholars have always been acutely aware of the problems of reliability they present. Gibson wrestles more fully than any previous scholar with the issues of how these texts were constructed, who wrote them and why, and what we can hope to derive from them. She sees the pamphlets as primarily representations of witchcraft, no more reliable as factual accounts than oral history or a Mills and Boon novel (a curious and alarming parallel she draws twice). She insists that these accounts remain valuable, however, as rich evidence of contemporary understandings of witchcraft, a tool for cultural rather than social analysis. . . .

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