Diviners and fortunetellers are familiar to anyone who has dipped even casually into the world of early modern witchcraft, for the simple reason that they are seemingly everywhere. One finds late medieval hedge wizards telling fortunes from congealed molted lead in the Malleus maleficarum, girls looking for future husbands in a Venus glass two centuries later in Salem, and everywhere in between. Throughout the era of European witch-hunting, divination and diviners were deeply imbricated into the structures of belief about witches, yet at the same time they were for the most part kept clearly separate: fortunetelling was not witchcraft, and diviners were not witches. For this reason, despite the vast number of pages that comprise the ever-growing body of witchcraft scholarship, their roles have largely been neglected and investigated only as part of the more generic category of “superstition.” We are fortunate, then, to greet the publication of Jason Coy's recent monograph, the first sustained examination of early modern divination and its relationship with witchcraft and witch-hunting.

Coy's book focuses on divinatory practice in early modern Thuringia and shows that, despite the deep hostility of Protestant clergy and the legal prohibitions of pious rulers, divination remained tenaciously ubiquitous in rural German society. Coy further argues that the “dogged persistence of divinatory practices” challenges the similarly persistent Weberian paradigm of European “disenchantment” and calls into question whether there was truly any “disenchantment” at all (10).

The Devil's Art begins with a brief excursion into the background of the Reformation era appreciation of divination, starting with the longstanding antagonism to soothsaying and fortunetelling in Jewish and Christian traditions. Medieval clergy likewise condemned popular divination but did not exert themselves unduly in attempting to root it out. Rather, medieval authorities on the whole “pursued a pragmatic course … dealing with divination through preaching and penance …” (29) rather than persecution. Given Coy's subsequent analysis of the complex negotiations that influenced official responses to divination in early modern Germany, it is a bit disappointing to find no reference here to Valerie Flint's examination of medieval attitudes toward magic, which in many ways parallels Coy's own (The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe [1991]).

Such de facto tolerance, however, did not last. As Coy shows in the following chapters, Lutheran clergy's zeal to foster spiritual reform among the common people made them far more eager to suppress popular superstitions than their medieval predecessors had been. Divination they found particularly objectionable, on the grounds that it constituted both a presumptuous attempt to acquire forbidden knowledge and an illicit appeal to demons. As fears of witchcraft grew more intense toward the end of the sixteenth century, attitudes hardened even further. Theologians and demonologists now viewed diviners and their clients almost entirely as participants in a reprehensible commerce with Satan, and encouraged secular authorities to punish them accordingly. Lutheran pastors likewise railed against divination in their sermons, and their invective only grew more heated during the Thirty Years War, when God's manifest anger seemed to make the punishment of sin imperative. Pious princes responded with suitably draconian legislation, yet Coy shows convincingly that officials on the ground were highly reluctant to enforce these statutes, and the harsh penalties proscribed were virtually never carried out (60).

Why this was true, and why the efforts of authorities to wean villagers from their reliance upon fortunetellers and cunning folk failed so consistently, is the subject of the rest of the book, and here it is most original and compelling. Drawing upon a series of richly textured narratives extracted from the archives, Coy unravels the densely intertwined strands of popular beliefs, anxieties, and the social, legal, and pastoral imperatives that infuse accounts of witchcraft and divination. Although, as Coy notes, rural folk resorted to soothsayers or fortunetellers for a variety of reasons, diviners emerge most clearly in the records of witchcraft investigations, for the simple reason that identifying witches was so often their responsibility. Their very utility as witch-finders, however, tended to shield diviners from prosecution, because the attention of secular authorities was consistently focused on the far deadlier crime of witchcraft (86–87).

During the eighteenth century, skepticism concerning supernatural phenomena grew rapidly among elites, while the pace of witch-hunting slackened and then ceased altogether. Divination was still illegal, although the authorities were now inclined to view it merely as a species of fraud or, as Coy writes, as a superstition “in the modern sense, as a foolish delusion …” (119). Still, fortunetelling and soothsaying continued to play major roles in rural life, and in fact Coy suggests that as magistrates lost interest in prosecuting witches, the common folk may have resorted more readily to the services of diviners and witchdoctors (118). In any event, despite more than two centuries of intense pastoral efforts—efforts that enjoyed at least intermittent judicial support—until well into the nineteenth century “[a] rich substratum of magical beliefs operated in tandem with official Christianity …” (130).

Coy illustrates this last point extremely well with his final example, the story of the “recalcitrant cunning man,” Johann Michael Koch, whose magical practice caused him to run repeatedly afoul of the authorities beginning in 1840. Educated observers rationalized Koch's activities as springing from his “magnetic nature,” as symptoms of his “Mania Religiosa,” or simply as fraud. Koch himself and his clients, however, seem to have accepted and appreciated his divinatory gifts at face value, in very much the same way and for the same reasons as their late medieval ancestors (125–126). As Coy suggests, this emphatically demonstrates the limitations of the “Weberian paradigm,” although just how tight a grip on historical interpretation the paradigm retains is doubtful. Nonetheless, Coy's book offers its readers a lucid overview of an often-overlooked aspect of early modern life that also neatly illustrates the complexity of the exchange between elite and popular points of view.