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Mitchell, Stephen A. Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 365 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-812242904. $49.95.
In Witches and Neighbors (1996), Robin Briggs defines a witch as "a human being who has betrayed his or her natural allegiances to become an agent of evil" (3), But this agent role is itself tied to the fifteenth-century concept of the witch as part of a conspiratorial demonic cult, rather than one who uses various means to achieve power in the manipulation of the world around her or him, Stephen A, Mitchell argues in Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages that this view only developed within the Scandinavian world after beliefs regarding witchcraft and those who practiced magic at the end of the Viking Age evolved into the Early Modern witches of the Reformation, Mitchell says no one would try to use the weird sisters of Macbeth "as source material for eleventh-century Scottish witchcraft beliefs rather than those of Jacobean Britain" (xi). This study focuses on the period 1100-1525 because the use of late medieval Icelandic sagas to recover the magical worldview of the Viking Age (ca. 800-1100) is deeply flawed, as is using the accounts of the early modern witch-hunts to describe medieval witchcraft practices, A commonplace in studies of witchcraft is that the principal shift in the understanding of magic happened in the fifteenth century, a view often supported by reference to Kramer and Sprenger' s Malleus Maleficarum (1486), But Mitchell contends that the actual change begins during the twelfth-century renaissance, when the reintroduction of Roman law and the inquisitorial (as opposed to accusatorial) process entered Scandinavia through Denmark, Sweden, and the cities of the Hanseatic League, Knowledge of "black magic" - necromancy - also entered the Nordic world in this era via clerical elites. Both helped to alter the native non-Christian beliefs of magic and eventually bring them more in line with continental views of diabolical pacts, Faustian bargains, and belief that all magic was demonic in origin,
A pitfall of some ethnographers is to use such a tight focus that they portray Scandinavia as a homogenous culture with one set of orthodox beliefs. But the pan-Nordic sphere of Mitchell's monograph is vast; it spans northern...