Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials
by Julie Stone Peters

While the judicial machinery of early modern witch-hunting could work with terrifying swiftness, skepticism, and evidentiary barriers often made conviction difficult. Seeking proof strong enough to overcome skepticism, judges and accusers turned to performance, staging “acts of Sorcery and Witch-craft manifest to sense.” Looking at an array of demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, this study shows that such staging answered to specific doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; producing “violent presumptions” of guilt. But performance sometimes overflowed the demands of doctrine, behaving in unpredictable ways. A detailed examination of two cases – the 1591 case of the French witch-demoniac Françoise Fontaine and the 1593 case of John Samuel of Warboys – suggests the manifold, multilayered ways that evidentiary staging could signify – as it can still in that conjuring practice we call law.

About the Author

Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her most recent books are Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials(Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022). Previous scholarly publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000), Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford University Press, 1990). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Public Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, and elsewhere.