ABSTRACT
While the study of the Scottish family in the early modern period has been neglected, the study of witchcraft and witch-hunting in Scotland has been a comparative growth industry in recent years.1 These works on witch-hunting have brought to light a wealth of material useful for the study of the ideological position the family occupied in society, and the many ways in which Scots experienced the construction, maintenance and breakdown of family relationships. They point to new ways of approaching and understanding both fields, and emphasise the degree to which they are interconnected. At all levels of society, the framework of the family played a central role in how witchcraft was both constructed and experienced. But witchcraft accusations and trials were also a crucible where the basic constructs of society, namely ‘family’ and ‘neighbourhood’, were subjected to the most severe strains imaginable. In some cases, this process tempered the bonds of these relationships, revealing their strength and utility, while in other cases, witch-hunting exposed their flaws and weaknesses. An examination of how these relationships performed under stress provides a glimpse into the differences between the ideals and ideologies of these relationships, and the lived reality. Finally, study of the dynamics and context of witch-hunting provides an excellent template for unifying the often disconnected frameworks that have been used to study the family, underlining the artificial nature dichotomizing the family as either a unit of production or the locus of the emotional lives of individuals.2 Witch-hunting and family are overlapping fields of historical inquiry, since the framework of the family is essential for an understanding of how most witch-hunting was conceived and experienced, and at the same time, the documents produced by the Scottish witch-hunt provide unique insights that enrich our understandings of what family meant to early modern Scots.
