The Devil Next Door: Why Witch Trials Never End
Daniel Woolf on Worlds of Fear and Wonder: Living with the Supernatural, Past and Present by Malcolm Gaskil
Malcolm Gaskill’s collection of essays explores the enduring presence of the supernatural in modern life and historical thought. In his review essay, historian Daniel Woolf, series editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice, shows how supernatural thinking has remained intertwined with rational inquiry and human habits.
A religious couple in a small community is deeply worried about evil forces in their midst. The source of this appears to be a near neighbor, a single woman who is an outlier, not like them. The couple believes that demons are abroad in the vicinity and that their neighbor is the source of this evil. They embark on a campaign to rid their community of this diabolical menace. This sounds like a classic case of early modern witchcraft persecution, perhaps from Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s, or a puritanical English village in the late 1500s. It is neither: it is a story of toxic unneighborly relations in the small Tennessee city of Maryville over the last few years, featured in the 2026 August issue of The Atlantic magazine.
Witches and demons, the miraculous or diabolical, are often thought of as the stuff of our remote past, pushed out of history by science and what the sociologist Max Weber famously called the Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world). Yet popular entertainment regularly produces witches, vampires and monsters to thrill us, and for most modern people the supernatural still operates in the background. Not really believing, but not wanting to tempt fate, we hedge our bets in a creepier version of Pascal’s wager. Less out of any real fear than from habit, I still honor my late mother’s many superstitions about not breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, or spilling salt. I avoid getting on airplanes on the 13th of any month. Others take things much more seriously, such as some of the citizens of Maryville; or the current American Vice-President who believes that sightings of alien UFOs are demons; or a friend in my own rural Canadian village who openly identifies as a Witch, though of the pleasant and helpful kind (I have no fear of my dog being turned into a Hellhound).
The endurance of belief in and awareness of the supernatural into our very modern times is a key theme of Malcolm Gaskill’s entertaining new book, which contains a collection of brisk essays, mostly previously published though slightly revised here to provide connective tissue. Some were given as lectures; several are witty contributions to the London Review of Books, the co-publisher of the volume. That makes the essay you are reading now a book review of a book of book reviews, rather than of a conventional academic monograph. There is little brand-new research here, though Gaskill himself is among the many historians who have written in detail on subjects such as demonism, witchcraft, and other supernatural or preternatural phenomena, and about why people believed in them. Several of these earlier scholars are named here, in particular Sir Keith Thomas, the Oxford historian whose 1971 book Religion and the Decline of Magic was that rare thing, a “game-changer” in its application of social anthropology to the study of popular beliefs in early modern England (and, full disclosure, a significant influence on this Oxford graduate’s own early-career intellectual development).
However, throughout these eighteen short pieces and an afterword, Gaskill does far more than simply review books; rather, he uses each book more as the hook on which to hang eloquent, chatty, and informative reflections on each subject, drawing from his own work and that of others. There is not a boring page between its covers. I read it in a single afternoon and despite knowing something about the various topics, learned a great deal thereby: not so much about witches or demons per se, but about why people in early modern Europe (and occasionally more globally—Gaskill ventures as far afield as Papua New Guinea and India for some of his examples) believed what and as they did.
Such beliefs were often strongly felt, Gaskill is at pains to argue, not because his subjects were silly superstitious clods with little education. In fact, magical thinking transcended social and economic status, as many figures we now associate with science and enlightenment engaged in it. One thinks of men such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler as being entirely rational pioneers of modernity, guided by experimental observation and mathematics, not by tradition and folkish error. But Newton was fascinated both by alchemy and by the problems of biblical chronology that had engaged some of Europe’s leading intellectuals for several centuries. Kepler’s laws of motion derived from a deep belief in numerology and in the divine perfection of geometric shapes. A figure of Kepler’s own time, the Scot John Napier, invented logarithms, which before the advent of pocket calculators were an essential aid to mathematics, not out of a far-seeing love of science but from a wish to be able to manipulate the large numbers involved in calculating the age of the world and its likely future end as forecast in the biblical Books of Daniel and Revelations.
The boundaries between high and low culture, between science and magic, and between knowledge and belief, were not hard and fast even among the most learned. Other works, such as Philip Ball’s Invisible, have demonstrated that fascination with the unseen world, far from being an obstacle to scientific knowledge, was ultimately an inspiration to its discovery, with electricity, microbiology and nanotechnology eventually displacing fairies, imps and demons; Gaskell provides a complementary early modern background. A strength of his essays is that they include both the prosperous and famous and the low-born and obscure. Kepler’s own involvement with the supernatural extended to acting as the defense advocate for his own mother, imprisoned for witchcraft, his primary tactic not being a denial of witchery but a forensic demolition of the credibility of Mrs Kepler’s principal accusers and the credulity of several witnesses.
Each of Gaskill’s essays is concisely titled in one or to two words. “Alchemy,” “Vampires,” “Puritans,” “The Witch,” “Witch Pardons,” and “Catholics.” We are treated to a profile of the infamous “Witchfinder General,” Matthew Hopkins, who roamed southeastern England on a self-appointed mission to track down and see punished witches during the country’s mid-seventeenth century Civil War. (Hopkins was, incidentally, an energetic young man of ambition trying to make a name, not the sinister middle-aged fanatic portrayed by Vincent Price in a 1968 horror film based on Hopkins’ career). The connection between demonism and the Galenic theory of the humors—and especially with melancholy, driven by the “Devil’s Drink,” black bile—is explored in one of the pieces not previously published. “Flying Nuns” takes us not to the young Sally Field’s Sister Bertrille of late-60s television but to the levitational abilities of figures such as St Teresa of Avila, and persons of comparable talent during the Second World War, including the French Augustinian Yvonne Beauvais, who like many Renaissance nuns before her, and quantum particles after, was able to appear in two places at once.
A couple of the most interesting contributions stray into modern territory. We get an extended study of the notorious career of the medium and con-woman Helen Duncan (or “Hellish Nell”) who before and during the Second World War made a small fortune by fabricating connections between grieving parents and widows with their killed or MIA loved ones. Gaskill describes, with great empathy, the efforts of the American-born but British-resident Josephine Fernald to connect with her favored elder son, the airman Van Dyck Fernald, shot down mere weeks before the 1918 Armistice. Both World Wars feature in some of the latter essays, as the troubled times with abrupt news of sudden violent death saw an uptick in spiritualism, both the intellectual kind pursued by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Hellish Nell’s more mercenary approach. On the Western Front, apparitions and ghosts were often observed by men in the trenches, some of whom kept lucky objects on their person without necessarily having firm convictions in their protective power—as one American flyer put it, since he had survived the war having used “talismans and charms”, who was to say such beliefs were wrong? Certain clerics were concerned that spiritualism was either demonic or phony, but others thought it a perfectly sound way to deal with the stresses of war. The Pascalian practice of “covering your bets” explains the willingness of a modern Shetland innkeeper to apologize to a young eighteenth-century mother whose pitiable ghost was believed to have been haunting the estate for nearly three centuries.
Inevitably in a collection such as this there is some repetition. Certain incidents or examples turn up more than once, as do ideas: we hear several times about the significance of emotions as drivers of human behavior in remote and recent times. This should perhaps be regarded as a strength since the history of the senses and emotions has become one of the most significant new branches of the discipline to emerge in recent years, and Gaskill uses the findings of its practitioners to make sense of several of the practices and beliefs he describes. This complements rather than contradicts earlier work such as Keith Thomas’s, which assigned the uptick in witchcraft persecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to fear and insecurity as much as local economic and social tension. (And it should be remembered that England experienced a relatively modest uptick in witchcraft trials compared with the more widespread and frenzied persecutions of contemporaneous Europe, when confessional differences added a whole new aspect to the link between suspect magical practices and heresy). “Emotions on the Frontier”, another previously unpublished piece, begins with the sorrowful tale of a recently emigrated Massachusetts couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons, imprisoned for witchcraft. Mary died in jail after confessing to infanticide, while Hugh’s witchcraft conviction was overturned.
Underneath this case lay a host of interpersonal stresses in the small community of Springfield (shades of modern Maryville, TN), including the accused couple’s apparently antisocial character and the machinations of the town’s Puritan founder and chief citizen, William Pynchon. But fear, anger, and envy were the fuel that drove this case, and many others on both sides of the Atlantic. And emotions help explain apparent contradictions in character, since real people, past and present, were rarely one thing or the other. Pynchon was fully capable of being both godly and greedy (seeming to bear out Weber’s and R.H. Tawney’s thesis about the connections between Protestantism and capitalism).
Gaskell’s treatment of his subjects, early modern and modern is consistently sympathetic without being patronizing, and he is humorous without appearing to scoff at individuals (even charlatans such as Hopkins and Hell Nell). He avoids what the Marxist social historian E.P. Thompson once famously termed the “enormous condescension of posterity” toward our ancestors’ foibles. He does so effectively while offering an introduction to the several more academic works featured. The absence of footnotes, or even clarity around which book in particular an essay is based on (though there is a list of further reading that includes and acknowledges these titles) is inconvenient for those of us in the profession who might wish to follow up some of the stories within. But this is a book clearly intended for the interested general reader, and in this mission it is extremely successful, simultaneously informative, interesting and delightful.
Daniel Woolf’s research has focused on two areas, early modern British intellectual and cultural history, and the global history and theory of historical writing. He is the author of five books and co-editor of several others, including the two-volume A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vols 1998). His 2003 monograph, The Social Circulation of the Past, won the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies in 2004 for the best book on British history pre-1800. His most recent books include A Concise History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and History from Loss: a Global Introduction to Histories Written from Defeat, Colonization, Exile, and Imprisonment (co-edited with Marnie Hughes-Warrington; Routledge, 2023). He is the Editor for History at the Marginalia Review of Books, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Past and Present, The American Historical Review, History and Theory, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is series editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice.
