Early modern scholars wrote about witches and in response to the growing body of witch texts being published. Textual patterns and legal trends coiled across time and twisted through in pulp-fiction pamphlets and encyclopedias of witch beliefs, interwove with quarter annual trials and mob-law, and spun stories about witches which were whispered in streets. As greater interest developed, judges and witch hunters had an increasing arsenal of symptomotologies of bewitchment and guidelines about what witches could do, why they might or might not exist, and what to do about witches and witch beliefs. Our own scholarly understanding of witchcraft evolved in part from the intersecting erudite and popular cultural understanding of witchcraft in early modern England.
As cheap print made these stories accessible in early modern England, electronic resources are making witch texts increasingly accessible to scholarly and popular audiences. These electronic resources extend the possibilities of the scholarly monograph, acting as agile and expandable complements rather than replacements. When considered in tandem, the electronic resource and textual reference volume, can provide scholars new ways of seeing witches. As such, this project would tie the publication of an electronic resource called Throwing Bones and with publication of a scholarly encyclopedia called Witches and Bewitched: Persons and Assertions of Witchcraft in Early Modern England. ??
Throwing Bones, the first arm of the project, leverages the tools and approaches found in digital humanities, which has made the digitized text, the key word search, and the date / author search, common research tools. Digital tools can likewise expand interpretative possibilities by providing critics and researchers new ways into witch texts. Throwing Bones is a visualization tool that provides coded image-referents for the ‘who, what, where, when, and why, and even the sometimes how,’ of English witchcraft that was reported and recorded as 'true.'??
The second arm of the project is a scholarly encyclopedia called Witches and Bewitched: Persons and Assertions of Witchcraft in Early Modern England. The print cultures of early modern England themselves defined and identified the witches in their midst; a number of texts which remained in manuscript form have subsequently made their way into print. This 'big book of English witches' expands the dialogue on witchcraft by providing readers the 'real' stories of witches and those they have bewitched in one place. Whereas many other excellent volumes have reproduced the texts themselves, this resource will focus on the witches and the bewitched themselves, and how they fit into the cultures and contexts which created them. ??
Through the careful categorization, re-articulation, and organization of primary textual materials, these resources illustrate the many ways in which witchcraft had a textual and physical evolution and proliferation in early modern England. Both resources are broad in scope, providing details on approximately 150 years of English witchcraft texts printed between 1550-1700. The texts that compose the corpus are also chosen because their publication and subsequent digitization allows users to engage in ideas that were part of an elite and pop-cultural landscape, which reproduced witches with each printing. ?