In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.

Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

About the Author

Valerie Kivelson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia, also from Cornell, and Autocracy in the Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century. She is coeditor of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture,The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland, and Orthodox Russia: Studies in Belief and Practice.

Reviews

"Desperate Magic is a triumphant crowning of years of careful work and wide-ranging inquiry. It is a milestone in the study of witchcraft in the European eastand it will certainly give those who work on the "centers" much to ponder."-David Frick

* Slavic Review *

Desperate Magic is a good value, reasonably priced considering the fact that it has color plates. It has a good bibliography and index and would be an excellent choice for a graduate seminar on the cross-cultural analysis of witchcraft and witch-hunting.

-- William E. Burns * Sixteenth Century Journal *

Early modern Russia shared with its European neighbors an intense fear of witches. Yet the characteristics of witches and witchcraft in Russia sharply diverged from those most frequently identified in the West...In articles over the past twenty years Valerie Kivelson has developed new approaches to this topic. In this long-awaited monograph, Kivelson goes further, enunciating an original and compelling thesis about the occurrence of witchcraft in early modern Russia.

-- Eve Levin * Nova Religio *

Full of material that illuminates fascinating corners and major issues in late-Muscovite Russiathe author's latest book is the definitive source for information on witchcraft and witch trials in the seventeenth century.... Kivelson makes the reader think more about how hierarchy and protection worked in Muscovy and when and how they failed to keep social order.

-- Robert W. Thurston * The Historian *

In her new monograph, Valerie Kivelson fulfils the promise of her earlierarticles on Russian witchcraft by producing an impressive study of the subject.Kivelson's work is grounded in the analysis of two hundred and thirty trialsinvolving about five hundred people-the most exhaustive list of seventeenth-centurycases yet compiled. Though the examination of the cases themselveswould be a considerable contribution to the field, the book also serves as aninsightful investigation into the nature of Russia's social fabric in one of its most pivotal centuries.... [Desperate Magic] is exhaustive in its breadth, informative in its erudition,and inspiring in its ability to raise new questions about Russian history.Both scholars of witchcraft and of early modern Russia have much tolearn from her work.

-- Matthew Romaniello * English Historical Review *

Valerie Kivelson has provided the goods splendidly here, filling out another corner of our picture of Europe's witch hunts with a fine study which is the more important for the manner in which so many of its features run counter to the continental norm.

-- Ronald Hutton * Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies *

Kivelson has produced a thorough study of witchcraft trials in 17th-century Russia that draws on over 200 court cases and a wealth of scholarship unavailable in English. She employs the concept of 'moral economy' to emphasize the function of witchcraft in early modern Russia's social hierarchy with accusations erupting at points of tension and trials serving to police and preserve a rigid sense of order that proceeded from God to czar to subjects. The author examines prescriptive religious and political documents, trial procedure and the use of torture, and various gender and class dynamics at play in the extant records. Kivelson carefully considers the broader literature on early modern witch-hunts, demonstrating that the Russian cases defy patterns observed in western Europe. She highlights contrasts between Latin and Orthodox intellectual frameworks, finding Russians far less interested than their western counterparts in sorting out theological inconsistencies. Broadly suggestive regarding the relationships among religion, law, political culture, and social relations, the book will be valuable for a variety of specialists. Summing Up: Recommended.

* Choice *


Awards
Winner of Winner, Historia Nova Prize for the Best Book on R.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801479168
Author Valerie A. Kivelson
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 23mm