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Book Review
| The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World. By John Demos. (New York: Viking, 2008. xvi, 318 pp. $25.95, ISBN 978-0-670-01999-1.)
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| A quarter century after the publication of his now-iconic monograph on witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England (Entertaining Satan, 1982), John Demos has returned to the subject with an ambitious overview of witch-hunting in Europe and North America over the last two thousand years. Several scholars have written synthetic volumes on witch beliefs and witch-hunts in medieval and early modern Europe; but Demos is the first to take on the challenge of writing a history of this phenomenon as it unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic (albeit limiting himself to North America). His book, which is aimed at general readers, reminds us that it is possible for a professional historian to communicate complex ideas in prose that is utterly transparent and accessible. |
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The book is divided into four sections, each of which combines broad overview with vignettes that focus on a particular person or incident. The first section examines witch-hunting in early Christian, medieval, and early modern Europe. The second deals with the seventeenth-century British colonies and the third more specifically with the Salem witch-hunt. The latter includes an engaging, balanced account of how theologians, historians, scientists, and nonscholars such as the playwright Arthur Miller have explained the witch-hunt over the past three hundred years. It is perhaps not surprising that a historian of early America would devote a disproportionate amount of space to the witch trials that occurred there, but some readers may be disappointed that Demos allots only seventy pages to one and a half millennia of witch-hunting in Europe (while one century of witch-hunting in New England gets over a hundred and fifty pages) and that he did not include a history of interpretative perspectives on the European witch-hunts to match the one he provides for Salem. But Demos does encapsulate a vast body of scholarship on the witch-hunts in Europe and England; those of us who have tried to do so in our own scholarship or in undergraduate courses will appreciate that as no small achievement. |
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