Being on trial

Abstract

This chapter examines the legal, communal, and individual understandings of witchcraft. Witchcraft, at its most fundamental, involves wishing harm to others. It thus centrally concerns the impact of emotional states on physical ones. In a court of law, since physical evidence of witchcraft was highly ambiguous, interrogators, accusers, and witnesses had to search for other signs to prove the accused guilty. How did they behave during a trial? What did their physical features and reactions reveal about their emotional states? How was someone’s physical and mental state utilized in the courtroom as ‘proof’ of their supposed transgressions? By comparing how mind and body were understood in both male and female witch-trials, this chapter sheds light on broader understandings of gendered expectations of emotional repertoires, as well as cultural, legal, and medical notions of what constituted innocence, guilt, and the ‘truth’.