'A spectacle of strangeness': Dancing Witches on the English Renaissance Stage

[opening paragraph] The exact characteristics of a witch were contested in early modern Europe. Was the primary danger spiritual, as George Gifford argued in Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593), or could witches physically harm their victims, as King James VI of Scotland (and future king of England) argued in his treatise Daemonologie (1597) (Maxwell-Stuart 2020: 174–5)? For centuries, English witches had primarily spent their time on maleficium, magical acts intended to cause harm to people or property, such as causing bad weather and making people and livestock ill. However, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English witches were increasingly assumed to have adopted continental European witches' rather more colourful extra-curriculars, such as copulating with the Devil and his demons and dancing and feasting at the witches' Sabbath (Blécourt 2013: 93). Interrogators in English witchcraft trials made it clear through their questions that diabolical celebrating was expected of 'true' witches, along with flying on broomsticks, having a familiar, and pledging devotion or selling one's soul to Satan, perhaps with an osculum infame or Devil's kiss (See Fig. 1).