ABSTRACT
Despite feminism's fascination with the figure of the witch, there have been surprisingly few attempts to read women witnesses' depositions at witch trials as texts authored by early modern women, texts that illustrate women's ideas about witches and witchcraft. There are several reasons for this neglect. The depositions of women witnesses are often presented as impenetrable or unreadable, offering a tangled network of signs which point only into a disorderly mass of ‘primitive’ superstition. 1 For example, Clive Holmes compares the depositions of the possessed and midwives to ‘those who testified simply to their experience of the witch's maleficium’. He writes dismissiveiy that ‘this kind of testimony [i.e. to maleficium) is more inco-hate than the other two categories; it lacks their conceptual clarity and sophistication’. 2 Some judges and intellectuals in the early modern period found women's stories as incomprehensible (and unbelievable) as Holmes does. For example, Reginald Scot's account of the trials at St Osyth, Essex of 1582 reduces women's testimonies to smali-time malice rather than trying to understand their stories about witchcraft as part of a coherent system of popular belief.' This illustrates the dangers of using the works of the learned to interpret the stories of village women, since there is nothing ‘simple’ or ‘inchoate’ about such testimonies. Careful reading of them shows that they depend on a set of assumptions and tropes which make sense on their own terms, reflecting and managing the fears and desires of village women.
