Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, then, begins promisingly by reproducing almost word for word the story told by Bessie Dunlop, a woman tried at Edinburgh Assizes in 1576. This is especially true if, as a literary scholar, one sees in the teller of the story a version of one's self as a writer-partial, creative, and subject to influences well beyond the scope of one's text. Both of these scholars' works sensitively walk a line between the traditional (and flawed) concept of academic objectivity and the (laudably acknowledged) human subjectivity that inevitably will and certainly should connect the author with his or her theme. In this it follows in the footsteps of at least two of the author's major influences, Ronald Hutton and the late Gareth Roberts. In its intellectual sophistication and ethical awareness it offers an excellent model of how the stories of witches and cunning people might best be approached.

Wilby's book proposes to address this vexed issue. When the tellers were the victims of witch hunts, the further disservice done to them by academic history is particularly evident.

In some cases, the story is crudely retold to suit the notions of the scholar, which is unforgivable when one considers that the story is often the only known remnant of the life of its teller. This can leave the reader feeling that the original teller has been badly served by academic attempts to categorize their experiences too rigidly, and that what such analysis has achieved has simply been to 'explain away' the mystery of the story and diminish its teller's individuality in the service of some wider aim.

The difficulty with such readings is that sometimes the theory comes to predominate-often anachronistically-over the substance of the story. But with the linguistic turn of historical thinking in recent years, these empiricist dismissals have given way to a belief that such stories might be read through various theoretical paradigms (psychological, feminist, or narrative, for example) and found to be meaningful after all. As Wilby explains, such stories have often been considered to be the ramblings of deluded or tortured people-stories that to traditional historians of fact do not mean anything definite and so are unworthy of or resistant to analysis as sociological or historical data.

Emma Wilby's Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is a bold, yet careful and intellectually rigorous, attempt to examine a hotly contested area of British history: the epistemological status of the stories of visionary journeys and experiences told by cunning people (practitioners of popular magic) and accused witches during the period of the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Cunning folk and familiar spirits