As a historian of the early modern era, I am endlessly fascinated by the paradoxes and contradictions of the period we call the Scientific Revolution. On one hand, the 17th century saw an unprecedented explosion of new ideas and methods that would lay the groundwork for our modern understanding of the world. Bold thinkers like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle unlocked the secrets of gravity, matter, and more. The Royal Society was founded to promote experimental knowledge. A new age of reason and progress seemed to be dawning.
Yet at the very same time, in the latter half of the 1600s, dozens of people – mostly women – continued to be accused of diabolical witchcraft, dragged before courts, and sentenced to death across the English-speaking world. This was no mere holdover of medieval "superstition" among the ignorant masses. Shockingly, some of the most renowned intellectuals of the day, steeped in the new learning of the Scientific Revolution, actively defended and promoted the reality of witches and the necessity of executing them.
The Trial of the Salisbury "Cunning Woman"
Perhaps no single witchcraft case better illustrates this paradox than the sensational trial of Anne Bodenham in the English city of Salisbury in 1653. Bodenham, an elderly widow, was known locally as a folk healer and "cunning woman" who used traditional charms and spells – a dangerous profession in an age of witch paranoia. In that year, she was accused by a servant girl named Anne Styles of practicing diabolical witchcraft.
According to Styles‘ testimony, as recounted in a popular pamphlet published soon after, Bodenham had allegedly lured her into a pact with the Devil himself. Bodenham was said to have conjured demons in Styles‘ presence and enticed her to sell her soul. On the strength of Styles‘ lurid account, the elderly woman was brought to trial, convicted of witchcraft, and sentenced to death by hanging.
Witch trials were nothing new in England; the notorious Matthew Hopkins had sent hundreds to the gallows as a self-appointed "Witchfinder General" in the 1640s. What made the Bodenham case different was the active involvement of one of the preeminent minds of the age: Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist philosopher and Royal Society member. More personally investigated the case in great detail and published his findings in the 1655 treatise An Antidote Against Atheism. To More, Bodenham‘s conviction was ironclad proof of the reality of witchcraft. He saw no contradiction between practicing experimental science and believing in the diabolical magic of witches. In fact, he argued that denying the existence of witchcraft was tantamount to atheism.
More was no outlier. Across England, other titans of the "new science" and luminaries of the early Enlightenment were also obsessed with proving the reality of witches:
- The naturalist and doctor Thomas Browne provided expert testimony that helped send two accused witches to their deaths in the town of Lowestoft in 1662.
- The clergyman and Royal Society member Joseph Glanvill publicized the 1658 hanging of an alleged witch named Jane Brooks as further evidence for his theory of the "impossibility of witchcraft."
- In his popular work The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, the writer Richard Baxter claimed in 1691 that those who denied witchcraft were "Sadduces", referencing a Jewish sect from antiquity who rejected the supernatural.
From Salisbury to Salem
This intellectual defense of deadly superstition would reach a horrific crescendo in 1692 with the outbreak of the infamous Salem witch trials in the American colony of Massachusetts. Over the course of that year, more than 200 people, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft in the Puritan towns surrounding Salem. Nineteen were hanged, and one man was pressed to death under heavy stones. Five more died in squalid prison conditions. It was one of the deadliest witch hunts in American history.
As with the trial of Anne Bodenham decades earlier, the Salem tragedy was enabled and promoted by learned elites, not just credulous commoners. The colony‘s governor, Harvard-educated minister William Stoughton, presided over the trials as chief justice and expressed his certainty that "God would frown upon a country where witchcraft went unpunished." The prominent Boston ministers Cotton Mather and his father Increase, both voracious readers of More, Glanvill, and other English defenders of witchcraft, helped instigate the moral panic with fiery sermons and pamphlets.
While the Salem trials marked the last major outbreak of deadly witch-hunting in the English Atlantic world, sporadic witchcraft prosecutions would continue on both sides of the ocean into the early 18th century. Historians estimate that between 1450 and 1750, at least 50,000 people, 80% of them women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe and European colonies, with the largest numbers in the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, France, and Poland. England, Scotland, and Ireland saw some 2,000 to 5,000 witchcraft executions in this period, while estimates for colonial America range from 35 to 50.
Reason‘s Slow Triumph Over Superstition
So what are we to make of this dark chapter in the history of the early modern Western world? How could an age that saw such tremendous advances in science and learning also feature the continued, even intensified persecution of alleged witches?
Recent scholarship by historians of science and intellectual culture like Stuart Clark, Michael Hunter, and others suggests that the continued elite belief in witchcraft stemmed from a larger worldview they call the "supernatural Enlightenment." In this view, the new experimental methods and skeptical mindset of the Scientific Revolution did not displace older religious and magical beliefs, but coexisted with and even reinforced them in complex ways.
To thinkers like More and Glanvill, the rigorous study of nature went hand in hand with proving the reality of the supernatural. Witchcraft was not an embarrassing medieval superstition to be outgrown, but a testable phenomenon to be investigated and rationally explained. Uncovering the secret workings of witches, spirits, and demons was of a piece with revealing the hidden laws of the universe. In practice, this meant poring over accounts of accused witches, interviewing witnesses, and looking for "empirical" evidence of diabolical magic, which they inevitably found.
Of course, what they were really doing was participating in a terrible self-fulfilling cycle of confirmation bias, leading questions, and pseudoscience to prop up received cultural beliefs. The Enlightenment concepts of skepticism, empiricism, and rational inquiry were pressed into service to justify irrational prejudices and deadly persecutions. Progress in human knowledge did not automatically mean moral progress. A mind can be both curious and credulous, both forward-thinking and beholden to the past.
The Scientific Revolution‘s complicity in the witch hunts offers a sobering historical lesson that still resonates today. We may look back from our modern vantage point and wonder how such brilliant minds could succumb to such blatant superstition. But are we really so different? Do we not still see the distortion of science, the spread of misinformation, and the triumph of ideology over evidence in our own supposedly enlightened age? The forces of unreason never fully disappear, even as human knowledge marches forward. They simply evolve and adapt to fit the times.
So let us remember the tragedy of Anne Bodenham, hanged in Salisbury, and Bridget Bishop, hanged in Salem, and the countless other victims of the early modern witch trials. Let their deaths be a reminder to stay forever vigilant against dangerous delusions, no matter how respectable their pedigree. For the flickering light of human progress is ever at risk of being swallowed by the darkness.
