An unexpected book. For a start the author admits that by ‘supernatural’ he really means ‘preternatural’: witches and curses and ever-filled purses and things that go bump in the night. The enquiry is whether English Catholics during the recusant period had the same, or different, attitudes towards witchcraft, ghosts, poltergeists, and exorcisms from those held by their Protestant neighbours and relations. On the whole, the answer is no: ordinary lay Catholics held much the same views on such matters. When witch-hunting was fashionable, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics were just as liable as Protestants to revel in absurd stories of broomsticks and midnight feasts. The sixteenth century did take such things seriously, along with astronomy and various forms of fortune-telling. The author seems to assume that the Middle Ages were sunk in superstition, and believed all stories uncritically, but surely such credulity is not a mediaeval phenomenon, but a by-product of the so-called Renaissance, under the influence of neo-Platonism. By the late eighteenth century Catholics and Protestants alike had swallowed the rationalism of the age, and agreed there was no such thing as witchcraft. The nineteenth century revelled in the Gothick, and loved to tell romantic stories, but in the security of disbelief which makes them comic rather than spiritual. The Ingoldsby Legends and the stories of M.R. James are not evidence of belief in the preternatural, rather the opposite – surely the rather indifferent Mezzotint reproduced on page 105, showing ghosts in Coldham Hall, does not change by moonlight to let us see them moving?
In general, our author has found very little material indeed to work on, and he does not indicate whether at any stage his quoted sources are typical of the Catholic community, or the eccentric ramblings of isolated individuals. An Appendix reprints Gregory Greenwood's bizarre ‘Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft’, written in the eighteenth century, but incorporating early seventeenth-century French material – and the author reminds us (p. 22) that this is the only treatise on witchcraft by an English Catholic.
Stories of ghosts and apparitions are typically pointless: a figure or figures is glimpsed in the half-light, but the interpretation depends on the preconceptions of the viewer. A Catholic might suppose this is a soul in purgatory requesting prayers: a rationalist looks for refracted moonlight projecting an image onto glass. Protestants expected many such tales were Popish tricks, designed to seduce the unwary.
Tales of witchcraft and possession can have a more serious content: the clergy did take notice of them, and some did attempt to practise exorcisms. Here perhaps there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant: the Catholics were much more inclined to be sceptical, precisely because they had the training in ascetic theology necessary to distinguish the fraud from the fool and from the really preternatural. We are reminded of Fr Brown's ‘incredulity’ – ‘Any sham lawyer could bamboozle me, but he couldn't bamboozle you; because you're a lawyer yourself … It's just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them’, said Father Brown. (‘The Arrow of Heaven’ in G.K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown).
All in all, I am not sure of the point of this book, or whether it tells us anything new. There are amusing passages, but on the whole I suspect it would have been better as an article.
