| Book Review | Law and History Review, 27.3

Book Review

Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics, and Religion, New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 232. $34.95 (ISBN 978-0-415-39943-2).

Between the 1560s and 1720s, Scottish courts tried approximately 3,800 women and men for witchcraft, executing about 1,500. This was no small feat for a country whose population was less than a million. England, on the other hand, bore witness to fewer than 500 executions for witchcraft during the same period, despite having a population that was four times greater and sharing the same Protestant faith and (usually) monarchy. Witch hunts and executions were thus twelve times more virulent north of the River Tweed.

In this latest work by a leading scholar of witch hunts, Brian Levack explains this glaring discrepancy by emphasizing the influence of Scottish law, politics, and religion, as opposed to the primarily socioeconomic and intellectual factors that dominate the traditional historiography. Of these variables, the distinction between Scottish and English criminal law, "perhaps more than any other, explains the higher rate of convictions and executions in Scotland than England" (3). Prior to the early 1700s, Scotland's Privy Council or Edinburgh's central court issued commissions of justiciary to local authorities, as opposed to the English system of travelling circuit courts. This created a system wherein local authorities with no judicial training or experience adjudicated the vast majority of witchcraft cases. The absence of a grand jury to approve initial indictments further contributed to this scenario. Scottish courts also utilized torture to extract confessions and obtain admissible evidence much more frequently, despite the general illegality of such proceedings. Consequentially, Scotland's higher number of trials was matched by a higher conviction rate.

Regarding political factors, Levack challenges the argument that the rise of royal absolutism fostered witch hunts in order to exert state control over local elites. He contends that "the intensity of Scottish witch-hunting can be attributed as much to the weakness of the Scottish state, and in particular its failure to develop a powerful central judicial establishment, as to its strength" (101). More generally, Levack sees Scotland's more pervasive level of political unrest as a major cause of its witch hunts. (England's civil wars during the 1640s created a similar spike in prosecutions.)

Scottish witchcraft trials were defined primarily in religious terms, as opposed to England where witchcraft tended to be viewed as a crime against society rather than God. Scotland's 1563 Witchcraft Act, largely crafted by John Knox and other Presbyterian ministers, incorporated biblical injunctions and stipulated mandatory execution based on Scriptural authority—elements notably absent from England's Witchcraft Act of the same year. The religious (and decidedly Calvinist) element explains why condemned witches were burned in Scotland but hanged in England. Likewise, only in Scotland did church courts play a prominent roll in interrogating suspects.

Levack is most instructive and convincing when he examines the various judicial factors, but he raises some inconsistencies in the process. First, he rightly emphasizes that legal skepticism resulting from flagrantly unjust convictions—as opposed to intellectual skepticism—led to Britain's decline in prosecutions, which "long preceded the emergence of the belief that witches did not exist" (52). However, his dismissal of studies that emphasize "the emergence of modern rationalism [or] the rise of science" as mere products of Whig historiography (131) is rendered questionable by his conclusions elsewhere. For instance, Levack notes that legal reforms "reflected a broader effort of the Scottish government in the late seventeenth century to centralize and rationalize the criminal justice system" (137). He also notes that a "frequent expression of the new judicial skepticism was the argument of lawyers that events attributed to supernatural agency might have had natural causes" (142). These trends thus appear to be highly interdependent despite his claims to the contrary. Second, Levack argues that socioeconomic factors, while important, do not shed light on the comparative differences between Scotland and England. However, he notes the "correlations between dire economic conditions and intense witch-hunting," and that the majority of witch trials targeted the poor (13–14). The unnoted fact that Scotland substantially lagged behind England in material wealth might therefore make socioeconomics a significant comparative factor after all.

Lastly, a chapter analyzing the Privy Council's membership between the 1560s and 1710s would substantially bolster the author's numerous insights regarding the breakdown between the judicial center and the periphery. Levack emphasizes that the Privy Council "stood at the very centre of witchcraft prosecutions throughout the period," for the localities' ability to bring witches in their midst to trial hinged almost exclusively upon the Council's enthusiasm or reluctance to grant commissions of justiciary (159). An astounding 60% of all trials during the 170-year period took place during five episodic outbreaks totaling only ten years, while local requests for trials remained relatively steady. A biographical sampling may help to explain why some councils were decidedly more—or less—reticent than others.

Though at times inconsistent and unnecessarily redundant, this study ultimately provides a highly informative, thought provoking, meticulously researched, and frequently entertaining account of Scotland's legendary witch hunts.

Ryan K. Frace

Wellesley College

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.