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Once a staple of UK African anthropology, witchcraft became a non-topic with the debate over ‘magic’ in the 1970s. But the irresistible rise of witch-finding movements all over subSaharan Africa, among many other events, made the topic of such beliefs, and their major vehicle, witchcraft narratives, an increasingly important focus of current anthropological research. Post-modern approaches to narrative mean that we no longer need to decide about ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ but can be content with negotiation, ragged ends, and variable strategies in complex social situations. Earlymodern historians are exploring similar approaches to their trial material. Given this background ESTHER EIDINOW (Erfurt) and RICHARD GORDON (Erfurt), both historians of antiquity, set up an international conference at the end of the Summer semester 2016 within the framework of the ERC ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ project, directed by Jörg Rüpke and Rubina Raja, to explore the possible extravalue provided by a comparative perspective on such narratives. To that end, we invited ten international speakers: an African anthropologist, three early-modern historians, an expert on Kabbalah, two authorities on the ancient Near East (Babylonia, Egypt), two commentators on early Christian material, and a philologist. Given the differences between the types and extent of the primary material available in these different historical periods, the contributors played to their strengths. PETER GESCHIERE (Amsterdam) emphasized the moral ambiguity of healers/witches in the territory of eastern Cameroon, the waves of new fashions and crazes of mystical protection, the ceaselessly inventive bricolage of new witchcraft narratives, and the fears of attacks emanating from one’s own family expressed in the new rumours of zombieworkers. He also underlined the need, if we are to do comparative research at all, to ignore minor differences between different areas and periods and look for dominant patterns. Above all, ‘witchcraft’ is not an explanation, as is so often claimed, but a black hole requiring to be filled. MARION GIBSON (Exeter) used two of the English witchcraft pamphlets arising from trial-proceedings, a genre that exists nowhere else, to show how variable the narratives relating to the self-same case might be. Stories of witchcraft events and the roles adopted in them by the principals are/were in constant flux in accordance with the short-term needs of the tellers, to say nothing of the judges and the pamphlet-writers, so that there never could be a ‘final’ version. ALISON ROWLANDS (Essex) used the extensive documentation from Rothenburg ob der Tauber concerning the case of Margaretha Horn (1652) to provide a memorable account of one peasant woman’s long struggle to resist an accusation of witchcraft. Here again, the elusiveness of the charge, the ambivalence of every claim and every item of evidence, and the central importance of framings were beautifully brought out. WOLFGANG BEHRINGER (Saarbrücken) showed how the authors of demonological treatises manipulated narratives they found in trial records in order to fit their own truth and fully appreciated the value of such ‘first-hand’ mininarratives in granting credibility to their demonological scenarios.
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