Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Darr, Orna Alyagon

Titel

Experiments in the Courtroom: Social Dynamics and Spectacles of Proof in Early Modern English Witch Trials

Ist Teil von

• Law & social inquiry, 2014, Vol.39 (1), p.152-175

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Access via Wiley Online Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article presents the composite social context surrounding the "experiments" that were used to prove witchcraft accusations in early modern England. It demonstrates that legal proof was not imposed by elite legislators and judges, or fashioned in accordance with the voice of scientific experts, but was shaped through complex social dynamics in which the middling sort and petty gentry fulfilled a crucial role. Through this process, popular beliefs percolated into judicial proceedings. Members of influential provincial families were the social agents who reconstructed old supernatural methods of proof into innovative rational experiments, often replicating public displays of proof that helped bolster the criminal charges and provided a competing arena of evidence. The article claims that the judges' cooperation with these "experiments" might have been an endeavor by the official legal system to circumvent the threat posed by a popular grassroots alternative to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court system.