The symposium’s keynote speakers are Egil Asprem and Carla Suhr.
Professor Egil Asprem (University of Stockholm)
Professor of the history of religions Egil Asprem has specialised in alternative spiritualities, the history of magic and the relations between esotericism and science. He is the co-editor of New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (2021) and author of Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (2013). Asprem is a board member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) and presently holds the roles of treasurer and membership secretary within the society. Professor Asprem’s ongoing research focuses on the Roma in the European study of magic within the field of critical Romani studies. See https://www.su.se/english/profiles/easpr-1.285371.
See the abstract for the keynote below:
“Gypsy Fortune-telling” as Science and as Fraud: Roma as Ambiguous Others in the History of Occultism
In 1892, the self-made American folklorist and first president of the Gypsy Lore Society, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), published the first monograph dedicated entirely to the subject of Romani magic: Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling. Part ethnographic bricolage, part an original work of occultism, it is a bewildering read. Leland held that “Gypsy” fortunetellers had originally pretended to possess magic powers in order to trick the superstitious, but eventually discovered a way to uncover real superhuman knowledge from the unconscious mind. These techniques, Leland argued, had the potential to turn everyone into magicians, and ought to be taught in schools for the betterment of society.
Leland’s book was part of a long tradition in which Romani people were represented as ambiguous Others in matters of occult science. Often understood as a people from Egypt (the origin of the exonym “Gypsies”), Romani ethnic stereotyping revolved in large part around associations with magic. While we have evidence that Romani women were sought-after practitioners tapping into the “common tradition” of service magic, they were also widely accused of fraud. Learned practitioners seeking to defend their own occult arts could thus use “Gypsies” as a contrasting case, signalling distinctions between fraudulent and real, superstitious and learned, foreign and domestic, pagan and Christian, female and male. But what can we say about the practices that Romani women offered to their customers, and how should we understand the accusations of fraud? Finally, what does the “Gypsy fortuneteller” reveal about majority-population Europeans?
Title of Docent, Senior University Lecturer Carla Suhr (University of Helsinki)
Dr Suhr’s research focuses on historical (corpus) pragmatics, genre studies, and discourse analysis. She has a strong interest in combining book history with her research into historical English texts. Her PhD (2011) dealt with the development of the genre of witchcraft pamphlets, and currently she works with early modern news pamphlets more generally and medical texts from the period 1500 to 1800. Since 2000, she has been a member of the Scientific Thought-Styles project – a part of the VARIENG research group – which has compiled a large corpus of historical medical writing, the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEMW). See https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/carla-suhr.
See the abstract for the keynote below:
Medicine and magic in early modern English witchcraft pamphlets
Witchcraft and medicine were inextricably connected in the early modern period. By definition, bewitching induced in its alleged victims behavior and ailments that were considered unnatural, and which therefore could not be explained or cured by natural, medical means. While theologists focused on discussing the roles of God and the devil in witchcraft or the value of exorcism, medical doctors weighed in on the interpretation of symptoms of witchcraft. Doctors like John Cotta (1616) emphasized the role of the medical professional in determining whether a suspected bewitching was caused unnaturally by a witch or naturally by a medical condition. Spurred by an infamous case of possession, Dr. Edward Jorden (1603) argued that in many cases of suspected witchcraft the alleged victim of possession was in fact suffering from a medical condition known as the Suffocation of the mother, or hysteria. Influences of Glover’s descriptions of hysteria have been seen in, for example, some of Shakespeare’s female characters (Peterson 2016; Laghi 2021).
In this paper, I analyze accounts of bewitching described in popular witchcraft pamphlets. How do these accounts change over the course of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries? Can we see the influence of medical writings on witchcraft in descriptions of symptoms? The primary material for the study consists of the Corpus of Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets (Suhr 2011).