Over the past decade, we have been fortunate to welcome a wealth of regional studies of early modern witch persecutions and beliefs, many of which focus for the first time on European “peripheries”—particularly Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic and the Balkans. A substantial study of Polish witchcraft has remained, however, a notable lacuna among this burgeoning scholarship, which makes the publication of Michael Ostling's new monograph, a revision of his 2008 dissertation, so especially welcome. Ostling approaches Polish witchcraft from several perspectives, but he is most consistently concerned with the conceptual basis of the “witch imagined,” a project broadly in the tradition of Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), but less exclusively interested in the views of intellectual elites. Instead, Ostling's research illuminates the dynamic intersection of the learned and pan-European hegemonic discourse of Satanic witchcraft with local Polish society, politics, folk traditions, religion, and judicial procedures. Ostling shows that out of this evolving reconfiguration of ideas and practice emerged an experience of witchcraft that was in many respects unique, but which also conformed to trends and patterns that scholars have identified elsewhere.

The work is loosely divided into three parts of unequal length. The first, “History,” provides a geographical and chronological overview of Polish witch trials, focusing on the period of most intense persecution, from 1610 to 1750. Here, for those unfamiliar with early modern Poland, is a brief sketch of the social, judicial, and political contexts of the trials, and a discussion of the relevant historiography and surviving archival sources. Ostling's commentary charts a middle course between extremes of Polish exceptionalism and normality, illustrating instead how local contexts determined variations on typical themes of witchcraft persecution. For example, as one might expect given the lack of strong central judicial regulation, Polish witch trials were both numerous and long lasting. Yet unexpectedly, Ostling points out that the very fragmentation of Polish judicial administration and the independence of Polish noblemen so constrained local judiciaries that true witch panics were extremely rare (101). A detailed overview of the trials themselves follows, in which Ostling balances useful generalizations about procedure and dramatis personae with careful descriptions of the many possible variations that these could take.

The rest of the book explores how conceptions of the early modern Polish witch (that “cosmopolitan indigene” in Ostling's nice phrase) emerged through the interplay of native Polish traditions with those imported from European religious and scholarly elites. First, Ostling turns to the role of religion in the creation of Polish witch mythologies, and posits the essential “Christianity” of the Polish witch. From a close reading of trial testimony, confessions, and more-or-less learned contemporary texts, Ostling argues that in Poland, for accusers and accused alike, the shared assumptions, beliefs and knowledge through which witchcraft was conceived and articulated was rooted in a deeply pious Christianity. For all concerned, what was imagined as “witchcraft” tended to emerge at points of tension between orthodoxy and folk Christianity, such as the instrumental use of herbs, sacramentals, prayers, and, especially, the Host. Ostling observes that the conceptual building blocks through which the uneducated made sense of Christian ritual could all too easily be used to construct and inform practices objectionable to the Church as “superstition,” as well as those imagined as witchcraft. Thus, Ostling shows that a Polish peasant's thoroughly Christian and indeed orthodox understanding of the power of the sacraments could lead him logically to use that power in ways completely unacceptable to the Church, and that, in turn, this superstitious usage could develop into charges of witchcraft.

This discussion leads to the book's final section, an investigation of the role of demonology and the devil in the conception of Polish witchcraft. Here, Ostling takes as his point of departure the “polyvalent” (198) Polish devil—a trickster, monster, tempter, incubus, or servant, according to context—and in a series of short chapters tries to work out the foundations for this creature's complexity. He suggests that the unique characteristics of demons in early modern Polish witch trials derives from the assimilation of the devil of demonological theory with the preternatural beings of folk cosmologies. The malevolent spirits of unbaptized infants, for example, became devils in the Polish imagination, as did, occasionally, the more amorous ghosts of departed husbands (221). Similarly, the latawiec, which shared characteristics with house spirits and bogies, as well as with ghosts, became instead a demon or incubus. The result was a creative synthesis in which folk traditions were diabolized, but as Ostling points out, in which equally “devils [were] domesticated” (232). These concluding arguments are provocative and always interesting, but perhaps not as clearly successful as those in earlier sections of the book. In part, I suspect they are simply not quite long enough, nor sufficiently integrated to do justice to their topics, but in part, too, the author's reading, elsewhere quite impressive, seems inadequate to the task. To take one example, Ostling's analysis of the diabolization of malevolent ghost children lacks any consideration of either Juha Pentikainen's work on very similar Nordic beliefs (The Nordic Dead Child Tradition: Nordic Dead-Child Beings, FFC 202 [Helsinki: Soumalainen tiedeakatemia, 1968]), or that of the late medieval Polish theologian and ghost expert, Jacob de Jüterbogk (Tractatus de animabus, 1496).

Such minor criticisms, however, do little to detract from the value of this text, which will be welcomed by specialists and more general readers alike as a useful and insightful contribution to early modern witchcraft studies.