This chapter reframes veneficium not as a form of magic but as a Roman category for theorizing causation at a distance, tracing how philosophers, jurists, and poets grappled with the conditions under which harm could occur without observable contact. By treating “witchcraft” as a comparative prompt rather than an emic term, the chapter shows that debates over veneficium reveal Roman efforts to manage uncertainty about agency, efficacy, and the mechanics of harm.

Whereas male poets such as Coleridge and Keats used the figure of the witch to explore the connections between the shapeshifting powers of the female demonic and (male) creativity, the third chapter reveals how women novelists like Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth remapped contemporary cultural anxieties in Britain surrounding witches and transgressive female energies onto the colonial landscape of Jamaica. These two authors position the female practitioners of Obeah as an intriguing alternative to the degradation of women in England and the enslaved populations in the colonies.

Spirit mediums were the commonest type of ritual specialist in the Mao era, and they were primarily involved in channelling spirits to drive out the demons that cause illness. But they undertook a range of activities in defence of communities. The majority were women and, unlike male shamans, did not engage in ecstatic public performances. The chapter discusses the different forms of spirit mediumship and shamanism, examines how people became mediums, different forms of possession, and the relationship of mediums to their clients. Historically, wu shamanism had had a connection with the black arts, so the chapter examines some rare cases of witchcraft, arguing that it was not as widespread as in some other cultures because there were well-established practices for dealing with demonic evil. The final section examines twists and turns of CCP policy towards spirit mediums, suspicious that they were a destabilizing element, but constrained by the fact that the majority – as poor, elderly women – represented a ‘contradiction within the people’.

Chapter 7 introduces the cultural and political context of post-war Britain in which the rise of English nationalism, immigration from the Commonwealth countries, Cold War anxieties, and the development of the Neo-Pagan Wicca religion contributed to the association of witchcraft with the dark other. The chapter reviews Plath’s short stories and poems written about a small English village community and beekeeping during the early 1960s, arguing that she engages with contemporary concerns of exclusionary politics and the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft. Her bee metaphor interrogates the binary between self and otherness and ideas about magical and racialised power. The chapter concludes that in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women, Plath simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.

The Conclusion reviews Plath’s engagement with the supernatural within the political, cultural, and literary context of post-war America and Britain. It summarises the nuances of concepts like witch, witchcraft, black and white magic, and their relation to gender and power. The Conclusion also emphasises the importance of examining Plath’s manuscripts and additional archival materials, which her demonstrate continuous interest in magical themes around gender power dynamics. Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural concludes that the re-examination of Plath’s works with an approach of the supernatural is timely and significant not only for Plath scholarship but for literary studies. It positions the comprehensive analysis of this book in the historical reckoning with witch trials and reflects on the lasting relationship between the language of magic and poetry.

The Introduction situates Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural within the current scholarship of Plath studies along with the recent new publications of Plath’s works. It introduces the purpose of the book and reviews the previous, often misguided approaches to Plath’s relationship to the supernatural and the occult. The Introduction emphasises the new approach of bringing together literary studies with the framework of the early modern witch trials and historical studies on witchcraft to interrogate the full extent Plath engaged with the political, cultural, and literary heritages of the European and American witch-hunts. Across seven chapters, this book reviews the way in which gender, magic, and power intersect in her poetry and prose contextualised within the post-war era.

Though sanitised in popular gothic television across the late-twentieth century, the figure of the witch has since the early modern period been connected to gendered forms of capitalist violence, functioning as a tool for (literally) domesticating women both in Europe and the colonies at moments when existing organisations of labour are restructured. At the same time, witchcraft (a contested term) has also been a cultural site of gendered and epistemic resistance, where anti-patriarchal practices intersect with the reclamation of non-Eurocentric cosmologies. This chapter examines these different dimensions of the witch, incorporating a range of regional and cultural perspectives.

This chapter assesses the Spanish Inquisition’s treatment of so-called “Old Christians,” meaning Spaniards who allegedly had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors in their genealogies. While Old Christians convicted of serious heresy could be relaxed to the secular arm and burned at the stake, their ancestry meant that Spanish inquisitors usually interrogated them less stringently, tortured them less frequently, and penanced them more lightly. Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition did not single out Old Christians as a potentially heretical group. Instead, inquisitors typically arrested Old Christians for morals offenses -- which connoted religious error -- as part of a larger effort to discipline Spain’s Catholic population. Speech acts, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, witchcraft, and magic committed by Old Christians preoccupied Spanish inquisitors. The Inquisition’s attention to a wide range of more prosaic crimes beyond crypto-judaizing rendered the Holy Office a constant presence in the lives of Old Christians.

The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

Panama’s authorities identified and combatted unmarried cohabitation or "amancebamiento" as a threat to the social order. This chapter discusses marriage’s lack of popularity on the isthmus, due to non-Catholic cultural traditions as well as the convenience and potential advantages of “living in sin.” In particular, it notes a proliferation of young widows described as “single” but free from paternal and conjugal authority. Alongside legal and fiscal measures to promote marriage, cases for marital separation or annulment provide insights into gendered obligations associated with the sacrament. Such cases’ success at court depended upon family support and alleged compliance with gender obligations. Other women turned to magic to shape their marital, affective, and economic relations. Inquisitorial trails, recorded in the summaries sent from Lima or Cartagena to Madrid, detail the experiences of Afro-descendants whose amatory and divinatory techniques garnered them prominent clienteles or merged with indigenous traditions in nocturnal revelries. Finally, Portugal’s separation from the crown of Castile disrupted the slave trade more than Portuguese residents in Panama.

The seventeenth century saw the development of increasingly centralised polities in northern and eastern Europe that sought to normalise the religious status of their unchristianised minorities. A new kind of antiquarian curiosity about unchristianised peoples was shown by figures such as Johannes Schefferus, although ethnographic study often went hand in hand with campaigns of conversion and confiscation of sacred objects (like Sami rune drums). At the same time, anxieties about witchcraft were sometimes brought to bear on unchristianised peoples as idolaters potentially in league with the devil - although attitudes varied greatly from region to region. This chapter explores the impact of colonial expansion on Europe’s unchristianised minority and the role of missionaries, antiquarians, witch-hunters, and ethnographers in redefining the ‘pagan’ threat.

Chapter 4 discusses the sign of the cross, another gesture with a long history going back to the early church. In the Middle Ages the cross was believed to have power to protect against evil, and was widely used both as a gesture of everyday blessing and in rituals and charms of healing. After the Reformation its use was discouraged, but it survived in the Prayer Book rite of baptism, where the minister was instructed to trace a cross on the child’s forehead. This necessitated a radical transformation in its meaning, removing the associations with exorcism and purification and redefining it simply as a symbol of allegiance to Christ. Yet the belief in the apotropaic power of the cross persisted in early modern England and was reflected both officially, in the ritual of the royal touch, and unofficially, in the use of the gesture as a form of protection against witchcraft. Even among theologians who regarded the cross as symbolic, there was still a sense that it was not ‘merely’ symbolic but retained some kind of operative power to effect change.

Chapter 5 argues that the increasing number of female servants and resulting visibility of women at court had political ramifications. By exploring the more active roles played by ladies and damsels in political events of the realm, I demonstrate how female courtiers found ways to access privilege for themselves, their families, and other associates through intercession. For example, they dramatically assisted Isabella’s coup against her husband Edward II and courageously stood by Catherine of Aragon during her divorce crisis. On the other hand, when national sentiment turned xenophobic, a queen’s foreign attendants faced scorn, retribution, and even banishment during periods of conflict. Some female attendants faced misogynistic attitudes that attacked their perceived propensity toward immodest sexuality, greed, and darker forces like witchcraft and poisoning. This role of women at court – apart from queens and particularly notorious examples like Edward III’s mistress Alice Perrers – has been neglected in many discussions of medieval court politics and patronage. I contend that the hostility experienced by some female courters highlights how medieval contemporaries themselves recognized women’s potential access to insider information about monarchs and the favors that could be bestowed to their kin, friends, and associates.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.