Matthew Hopkins; Witch Finder General

RICHARD DEACON, Matthew Hopkins; Witch Finder General, London, Frederick Muller, 1976, 8vo, pp. 223, illus., £6.50. The current interest in witchcraft and the occult continues unabated, and no doubt this book is intended for this insatiable appetite. In addition, however, the author, who is a professional writer, claims the relevance of historical witchcraft to similar practices today, which is one reason for this present-day fascination. In his book he pursues the tantalizing, yet elusive, self-styled Witch Finder General of the Civil War period and provides the first full-scale biography of him. He has investigated his topic thoroughly, and it is, therefore, a pity that the documentation which he provides for the text is so rudimentary that many of the references are untraceable; the illustrations are likewise mostly anonymous. The account given here of the periods before the seventeenth century will eventually have to take into account Professor Norman Cohn's very recent and widely accepted thesis that until the sixteenth century there was no concept of witchcraft corresponding to the seventeenth-century model (Europe's inner demons, Sussex University Press, 1975; reviewed in Med Hist., 1976, 26: 346-347). Little is known of Hopkins before or after his three years of activity in East Anglia, but the details of his crusade and the sinister methods he employed during this brief period are carefully surveyed. His techniques, as Mr. Deacon points out, are not only of interest from the purely historical point of view, but also coincide closely to those employed recently, in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and by McCarthy, the Chinese and even by British militant shop stewards, and in the Watergate affair. Here is another explanation for modem concern with seventeenth-century witchcraft. This book, therefore, will appeal to a variety of readers: those concerned with seventeenth-century history, both general and medical; those interested in the history of witchcraft and occultism; and the reader seeking the historical background to modem behaviour and practices which involve applied psychology.