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Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. By WALTER STEPHENS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 451. $20.00 (paper).
This is an important book, one that asks us to reconsider the weight of scholarly tradition on witchcraft and to place it within a much different intellectual and historical context. Stephens examines in exhaustive detail many of the main treatises on witches written between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and asks simply "Cui bono?" "To whose benefit" were charges of witchcraft and consorting with demons? His simple but revolutionary answer is this: the theologians writing about witchcraft wanted to convince themselves that such things happened and, in doing so, could still believe that spiritual entities existed and that they made regular contact with human beings. Witchcraft theorists, as Stephens calls them, did not reflect the last gasps of ancient superstition but the beginnings of modern agnosticism.
Over and over Stephens makes this point in clear and elegant language that helps in the reading of this hefty book. He begins by asserting what the charges of witchcraft were not, against the consensus of modern scholarship: they were neither pornographic nor misogynistic fantasies of celibate male clerics. First, sexuality was simply the best opportunity for demonstrating human-demonic interaction: best because sex was a very intimate form of human contact and because it left undeniable traces in the insemination of witches and in the birth of "strange" children. Second, while witchcraft theorists happily made use of the misogynistic language of medieval Christianity, their emphasis on women's contact with demons merely provided shorthand for the active role of demons, given contemporary assumptions about women's passive role in sexuality. One cannot do justice to this part of Stephens's argument with such a brief synopsis except to add that it is persuasive.
Stephens continues chapter by chapter with an analysis of the various activities associated with witches and how each is reminiscent of the larger purpose of the accusations made against them. The belief that witches can fly, even though it contradicted medieval authorities...