Becoming-Witch: Narrating witchcraft in early modern English news pamphlets

Abstract

This article focuses on news pamphlets about witchcraft from Elizabethan and Jacobean London. In these pamphlets, witchcraft is treated differently from other crimes in that it seems to have been thought appropriate to provide verbatim evidence of this crime to its readership outside the courtroom. In this construction of the crime, the words of the accusers and accused matter in a particular, exciting way that is emphasized as a marketing strategy. This paper, however, argue that this claim to verbatim status and documentary reliability is in essence illusory; it creates an impression of an overly neat and definitive version of witchcraft events, one that can be an impediment to understanding their complexity.