Context

The proliferation of accounts of witchcraft trials in early modern England was one of the many consequences of the creation of the printing press, which enabled the production of cheap pamphlets, creating a public space for scholars and would-be scholars to debate the plausibility and the details of witchcraft beliefs. Although witchcraft accusations were part of an oral-cultural landscape, the publication of witchcraft tracts created witches by creating controversy about them. From this boiling cauldron, the theoretical discussion of witches often gave rise to the public production of real ones. There were a variety of opinions in play at any given time. For example, Johann Weyer believed in the Devil, but not the witch; he saw the women accused of witchcraft as sick, crazy, deceived (or all three), and in need of religious training. Reginald Scot located himself outside demonological tradition and within "demonological skepticism" (Clark 13). In 1587, George Gifford argued that witches were not powerful nor numerous; Satan gave the witch any power she had. In Daimonologie (1597), James VI of Scotland promoted the idea that the Devil gave witches image magic, medicinal magic, and poisons with which to harm their enemies. At a much later date, Joseph Glanville wrote Saducismus triumphatus (1682) to prove the existence of actual witches and their real power.

It can be argued that the witchcraft text's popularity, in a period when English witchcraft executions had dwindled to almost nothing, speaks to the witchcraft tensions returning to England from North America. The public remained intensely interested in the women who had once spoken in their midst. Robin Briggs argues that "there is no clear link between those writers who advocated sweeping campaigns to eradicate witches and the messy reality of what were largely small-scale local persecutions" (262); the real-time influence of Glanville, or any of the above authors, is difficult to prove. Moreover, the enduring contemporary interest in witchcraft texts points to critical interest in debating the reality of witches: propagating witches by stimulating interest in them. As more texts were published about witchcraft, more scholars wrote in response. As greater critical interest developed, judges and witch hunters had an increasing arsenal of broadly written guidelines outlining both what witches could do, and why they should be punished. Ultimately, more women were discovered to be witches once witches were written about. As the witch and prophet created reality with their words, so did their critics.

In the case of early English witches, researchers are still struggling to understand who these women were and how we can work to separate myth from mother. Women in early modern England did not suddenly appear as witches, scratching at their neighbours' doors. Nor did the interpersonal tensions between women explode into trials and executions until an accuser came to understand the accused as a witch. Women had to be seen and publicly labelled as witches before they could be prosecuted for witchcraft and eventually appear in print as accused witches. A woman needed to receive the forthright endorsement of her community, before she could even begin to be publicly persecuted as a witch, her physical body needed to display, or adopt, the key signifier - the witch's mark, and she had to be associated with a familiar - a supernatural companion figure who would do her magic for her. This study will uncover interconnectivity between all three of these defining factors and look at the role of the press in concretizing them

Scope and Objectives

The scope of this research is interdisciplinary and the results will contribute to scholarship in the fields of English, Historical, Humanities Computing, and Visual Communication Design. This study will focus on the roles of print culture in producing the concept of witch and witchcraft in early modern England. It will help researchers across the humanities to visualize the movement and evolution of Early English witchcraft - a distinctive, important, and often misunderstood phenomenon in European history. Taking a lead from the visualization projects done by the University of Virginia, this study will create visual meaning from a core group of texts published in early modern England between 1500-1700, written by a series of authors with competing agendas. Rather than strip-mining the texts for their hidden value, it will unfold them, letting the texts, as well as the researcher, create and recreate meaningful visual narratives.

This research will fulfill its objectives by addressing the following three interrelated questions:

1. How can we combine open-source semi-supervised clustering technologies, an interface design based on visual narrative, and GIS to help users trace the series of accusations, cross-accusations, relationships, and gossips which turned a restless baby in 1657 into a double execution in March 1662?

How can we trace the movement of accusations? In the case of the Lowestoft witches, the suspicions against Amy Denny began in March of 1657 with the illness of Dorothy Durrant's son. In 1659, Elizabeth Durrant dies of maleficium. In November 1661 Samuel Pacy's daughters identify Denny and a mystery witch as those responsible for their bewitching. By the end of November, Cullender is recognized by the community as a witch. By February 1662, Cullender is accused of working alone to hurt Susan Chandler. The dizzying series of cross accusations in the community of Lowestoft provide a network where accusation could spread, and multiply. In tracing and mapping multiple accusations across a community, we can not only see how ideas about power proliferated, but also the real way that the same concepts changed lives, one pin-vomiting fit at a time. Black and MacDonald argue that GIS gives the ability to query multiple attribute databases to look for trends and changes over time and pose complex queries for one or more locations, something that is "fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships of print culture factors and elements in the socioeconomic environment" (2000). The use of GIS in this project will create a visual framework for illustrating how witchcraft accusations moved across towns. Moreover, in combing the publication data, one will be able to see how those accusations were affected by the press and the effect the press had on influencing more accusations.

1. How can we trace the various witch's familiars, which are supernatural creatures that will not even stay in the same shape?

The familiar is, for the most part, an animal spirit which does the English witch's black magical work, or maleficium, for her. It is through the familiar, rather than spell casting, that witches hurt their victims. How do we investigate the morphing familiar whose presence in the text is what publicly signifies a woman as a witch, but whose name, form, and use may change based on who owns it and what use they put it to? The first published witchcraft case is that of Mother Waterhouse and her familiar Sathan (1566). It creates a blueprint for the economics of the familiar which will continue to frame published cases to come. The use of GIS should help us visualize and trace temporal, spatial, and societal patterns of witch's familiars, enabling the visualization, manipulation, and analysis of "both the geographic and the attribute data to produce new information about the familiar (Black and MacDonald 515, Ottensmann 26).

1. How can we reconcile the meaning of a witch's mark, which keeps moving across the body, has its meaning morph over time, and also mutates its owner?

Locating and exposing the hidden witch's mark was considered irrefutable proof that a woman was a witch. The trouble with witch's marks is that they changed. Like the familiar who sucked from them, their form and function morphed. The witch's mark began as a kind of invisible, insensible mark, morphed into a flea-bite of a sore, became an excrescence where a familiar would bite or suck, then became a kind of nipple which lactated unpurified blood. Over the next several publications that nipple moved into the witch's genitals. The mark also changed meaning - from a sign of power, to a way to renew a contract, to a means of placating a feisty familiar, to a kind of sexual organ used to pleasure the beast and hurt its bearer. The tagging schema will include a wide variety of data including author, publishers, and kind of text. In querying the texts, one will be able not only to cross-reference spatial and temporal details, but also illustrate connections between the publication of details on the witch's mark and its arrival in subsequent texts.