X-Nico

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Britain written by the British historian Emma Wilby.

Emma Wilby

Wilby's first published academic text, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005), was the first major examination of the role that familiar spirits played in Britain during the Early Modern period, and compared similarities between the recorded visions and encounters with such spirits, with shamanism in tribal societies.

•

In this manner, she has continued with the research and theories of such continental European historians as Carlo Ginzburg and Eva Pocs.

•

Wilby followed this work with The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010), which provided the first in-depth examination of the witch trial of Isobel Gowdie in 1662.

The Night Battles

Despite such criticism, Ginzburg would later return to the theories about a shamanistic substratum for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, and it would also be adopted by historians like Éva Pócs, Gabór Klaniczay, Claude Lecouteux and Emma Wilby.

see also