Celebrating Recent Work by Julie Stone Peters

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Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials

by Julie Stone Peters

While the judicial machinery of early modern witch-hunting could work with terrifying swiftness, skepticism, and evidentiary barriers often made conviction difficult. Seeking proof strong enough to overcome skepticism, judges and accusers turned to performance, staging “acts of Sorcery and Witch-craft manifest to sense.” Looking at an array of demonological treatises, pamphlets, documents, and images, this study shows that such staging answered to specific doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; producing “violent presumptions” of guilt. But performance sometimes overflowed the demands of doctrine, behaving in unpredictable ways. A detailed examination of two cases – the 1591 case of the French witch-demoniac Françoise Fontaine and the 1593 case of John Samuel of Warboys – suggests the manifold, multilayered ways that evidentiary staging could signify, – as it can still in that conjuring practice we call law.

About the Author

is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her most recent books are Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022). Previous scholarly publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000), Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford University Press, 1990). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Public Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, and elsewhere.

About the Speakers

, associate director of graduate studies and Mark Van Doren professor of humanities, works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture. She has written on Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, the Sidneys, Anne Clifford, Margaret Hoby, and Mary Wroth, as well as on post-Reformation religious culture, the history of reading, and the history of sexuality. Her articles have appeared in Studies in English Literature, English Literary History, Renaissance Drama, PMLA, Early Modern Culture, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare, The Oxford Companion to Popular Print Culture, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500-1610, and in a wide range of edited collections.

writes and teaches about gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is also the chair. She uses spatial and geographic frameworks (from the transpacific, to the regional, to the Global South) to examine previously unstudied archives (from the first works of English literature by Filipina and Filipino authors, to private papers that document connections between the Midwest and U. S. empire, to fashion shows in Manila). She contends that this combined analytical and archival approach extends our understanding of the importance of national, regional, transnational, and global dynamics in North America, the Philippines, and Asia.

is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist whose work appears often in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times. She is the author of four books: Atmospheric Disturbances (Novel, FSG, 2008), American Innovations (Short Stories, FSG 2014), Little Labors (Essays, New Directions, 2016), and her latest, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (FSG 2021). She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, The Berlin Prize, and The William J. Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. She teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

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