Witchcraft Casebook_ Magic in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 15th-21st Centuries (2013).pdf

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Russian History 40 (2013) i–ii
brill.com/ruhi
Witchcraft Casebook:
Magic in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, 15th-21st Centuries
Introduction: Bringing the Slavs Back In................................................ 281–295
Valerie A. Kivelson
I. Witches on Trial: Case Studies of Legal Prosecution, 17th-19th
Centuries
The Tsaritsa, the Needlewomen and the Witches: Magic in
Moscow in the 1630s ............................................................................... 297–314
Maureen Perrie
Unclean Spirits Unleashed: Flying Bricks, Demonic Possession,
and Blackmail in Russia, 1636 ............................................................... 315–330
Valerie A. Kivelson
A Different Use of Literacy: The 1676 Witchcraft Allegations
against A. S. Matveev .............................................................................. 331–351
André Berelowitch
A Family Matter: The Case of a Witch Family in an Eighteenth-
Century Volhynian Town ...................................................................... 352–363
Kateryna Dysa
Fortunetellers and Sorcerers in the Service of a Russian
Aristocrat of the Eighteenth Century: The Case of
Chamberlain Petr Saltykov ................................................................... 364–380
Elena B. Smilianskaia
The 1850s Prosecution of Gerasim Fedotov for Witchcraft ............... 381–397
Christine D. Worobec
II. Magic Outside the Courtroom: Medicine, Mutiny, and High
Politics in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Magic, Medicine and Authority in Mid-Seventeenth-Century
Muscovy: Andreas Engelhardt (d. 1683) and the Role of the
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI 10.1163/18763316-04004001
ii
Contents
/ Russian History 40 (2013) i–ii
Western Physician at the Court of Tsar Aleksei
Mikhailovich, 1656-1666 ......................................................................... 399–427
Robert Collis
How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics ........................... 428–450
Claudio Sergio Nun-Ingerflom
Earthly Mother, Holy Witch: Social Perceptions of Maria-
Magdalena Mazepa (1687-1707) ........................................................... 451–468
Liudmila V. Charipova
III. Witchcraft and Ethnic Identity
The Magic of Others: Mari Witchcraft Reputations and
Interethnic Relations in the Volga Region ........................................ 469–487
Sonja Luehrmann
‘Poison and Enchantment Rule Ruthenia.’ Witchcraft,
Superstition, and Ethnicity in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth........................................................................................ 488–507
Michael Ostling
A 1646 Case of “Ordeal by Water” of Individuals Accused
of Witchcraft in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania .............................. 508–517
Aleksandr Lavrov
IV. Magic in Practice through the Ages
The Sorcerer’s Stone: Magic of Water and Blood ................................. 519–531
Alexey V. Chernetsov
Verbal Charms against Authorities and Judges in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century Russia ........................................................... 532–539
Andrei L. Toporkov
Russian Village Magic in the Late Soviet Period: One Woman’s
Repertoire of
Zagovory
........................................................................... 540–558
Sibelan Forrester
Magical Practices in Russia Today: An Observer’s Report................. 559–567
Liudmila I. Avilova and Alexey V. Chernetsov
Magic in the Russian Marketplace: Creating Trust ............................. 568–586
Faith Wigzell
Russian History 40 (2013) 281–295
brill.com/ruhi
Introduction:
Bringing the Slavs Back In*
Valerie A. Kivelson
University of Michigan
vkivelso@umich.edu
Abstract
This introduction briefly surveys the vast literature on the history of witchcraft in Europe
and the far more limited historiography of Russian and East European witchcraft. It high-
lights a number of common themes emerging from the essays, including the interactions of
religion and witchcraft beliefs, modes of persecution, the role of literacy and of gender, the
mutability or stability of witchcraft belief over time, and the significance of ethnicity in
beliefs about magic. The introduction identifies points of agreement and divergence among
the authors and comments on the value of collecting detailed case studies.
Keywords
witchcraft; Russia; Poland; Ukraine; Lithuania; Mari
Over the past forty years or so, witchcraft studies have caught fire. Kindled
initially by the rise social history with its interest in the downtrodden
and forgotten, the field of witchcraft studies was then stoked by the bur-
geoning of women’s and gender history, and most recently reignited by the
flames of cultural studies. The literature on witchcraft and sorcery is enor-
mous – unmanageably so – but the quality of the publications in the field is
* I want to take this opportunity to thank Larry Langer and Kira Stevens for the invitation
to put this volume together, and for their support throughout the process. Thanks to all the
contributors for their willingness to contribute, their timely and generous responses, and
their enthusiasm for the project. Particular thanks to John Wesley Hill, Bertrand Metton,
and Christine Worobec for their translation work, and to Elena Smilianskaia and Christine
Worobec for their good counsel.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI 10.1163/18763316-04004002
282
V.A. Kivelson / Russian History 40 (2013) 281–295
consistently high, perhaps because the subject is so inherently fascinating.
Witchcraft belief is so uncompromisingly strange, so irreconcilably at odds
with the kind of rational, logical approach required by academic scholar-
ship, that it demands an extraordinary level of receptivity to alternative log-
ics and visions of the world. Explorations of such alterity reveal the inner
workings of strange and different worlds. The resulting insights can be
horrifying, gut-wrenching, or perplexing, but are always exciting and new.
Among historians, the efflorescence that began in the early 1970s con-
centrated primarily on the period of the European witch trials, the fifteenth
through eighteenth centuries, with some studies looking backwards toward
ancient or medieval origins. Only in the past decade have historians ven-
tured into the more recent past and begun to take seriously witchcraft
belief and practice in the modern world, a realm that had previously been
the terrain of ethnographers and folklorists.1 In addition to limiting its
chronological reach, the first wave of historical studies maintained resolute
geographic focus on Western and Central Europe, Britain, and Colonial
New England. The publication of Bengt Ankarloo and Gustave Hennigsen’s
European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries
in 1990 changed that once and
for all.2 Their inclusion of studies of Europe’s northern, and to some extent,
southern edges, with chapters on Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland,
Finland, Estonia, and Portugal, opened new vistas, allowing for fruitful
comparisons and compelling causal explanations. The volume was a hugely
welcome intervention, one that animated the field, and validated the work
of researchers laboring in less familiar outlying regions.
Centres and Peripheries’
outreach stopped west of the Slavic lands. It
encompassed Europe’s northern tier, took in Scandinavia and the Baltic,
but arched north of Poland and Lithuania. Confining its purview to a broad
swath of Catholic and Protestant Europe, the volume did not breach the
linguistic/cultural divide into the Slavic-speaking lands nor did it cross the
sectarian divide into Orthodox regions. The received wisdom on the subject
held that Eastern Orthodox Christianity lacked the fierce demonological
1) For example,
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999);
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The
Twentieth Century,
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Ronald Hutton,
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern
Pagan Witchcraft
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2) Early
Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries,
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and
Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
V.A. Kivelson / Russian History 40 (2013) 281–295
283
theology necessary to fuel a sustained witch-hunt. In an early articulation
of this position, Hugh Trevor-Roper asserted: “the Greek Orthodox Church
built up no systematic demonology and launched no witch-craze. By
the schism of 1054 the Slavonic countries of Europe – with the exception
of Catholic Poland, the exception which proves the rule – escaped
participation in one of the most disreputable episodes in Christian his-
tory.”3 Given this presumption (erroneous, as it turns out, and as the essays
collected here illustrate), truncating research on witchcraft at the religious
border was presumed to make sense. Investigation of witch-scares in the
Orthodox lands would yield meager results. The omission of Catholic
Poland, Trevor-Roper’s exception that proves the rule, from mainstream
witchcraft scholarship requires a different set of explanations, chief of
which may have been a lack of scholarship in languages accessible to
European scholars and the very real gulf that kept Eastern Bloc scholars
apart. Furthermore, significant early research had already put Poland on
the map as a hotbed of witch-hunting, the site of one of the most ferocious
and deadly hunts in Europe that took the lives of tens of thousands of
accused witches. For many decades these numbers stood unquestioned
and took their place in standard surveys of witch-hunting, but recent stud-
ies have deflated those casualty counts by almost an order of magnitude.4
Already at the time of Ankarloo and Hennigsen’s publication, a few
intrepid Slavists, both within the then-still-meaningful Soviet bloc and
outside of it, had ventured into the area of witchcraft research after a long
hiatus, enforced in the East by the Soviet regime’s antipathy to what it
categorized as retrograde superstition, and in the West by the popularity of
other forms of social history.5 In the intervening decades, a small boom
3) H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” in
The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and
Other Essays
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 185.
4) The extravagantly high numbers (10,000 executed and another five to ten thousand
lynched between the late sixteenth and eighteenth century were advanced by B. Baranowski:
Procesy Czarowinic w Polsce w XVII I XVIII wieku
(Łódź: Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe,
1952), 30. Michael Ostling argues for more reasonable figures, 2,000 executed over 250 years,
in
Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 16-18; and similarly, Wanda Wyporska,
Witchcraft in Early
Modern Poland, 1500-1800
(Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2013).
5) Among the pioneers in the new wave of work on the subject: N. N. Pokrovskii, “Ispoved’
altaiskogo krest’ianina,” in
Pamiatniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytiia. Ezhegodnik 1978
(Leningrad: Nauka,
1979), 49–57; idem., “Tetrad’ zagovorov 1734 goda,” in
Nauchnyi ateizm, religiia i sovremennost’,
ed. Aleksei Trofimovich Moskalenko (Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sibirskoe otd-nie, 1987), 239–65; Janusz

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