Ashes and Stones by Allyson Shaw

Ashes and Stones: A Journey Through Scotland in Search of Women Hunted as Witches
by Allyson Shaw
Pegasus Books 2023

From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century in Scotland, more than four thousand people were accused of witchcraft, and more than two thousand of them were executed. Roughly eighty-five percent of those killed were women. In her study Ashes and Stones: A Journey Through Scotland in Search of Women Hunted as Witches, Allyson Shaw investigates the experiences of some of these women, considering not only their trials and executions but the ways in which the victims have been remembered and memorialized over the centuries.

In an effort to understand how such an atrocity could have happened, academic historians have investigated the underlying cauldron of religious and social disruption in European communities as the area transformed from medieval to modern. There is no obvious answer for why community leaders started believing that witches lived in their midst. Some scholars suggest that part of the explanation might be economic. Most of the witchcraft accusations and executions in Scotland happened during five specific periods lasting only a year or two, and those specific years had especially intense financial upheavals during which many communities were forced to reduce aid for spinsters, widows, people with disabilities, and other people in need of social support. These people seem to have been accused of witchcraft in much higher numbers than other community members.

Although historians of witchcraft often focus on why specific people might have been accused, the question is not of particular interest to Shaw. She seems to believe that even asking why individuals were targeted implies that they were at fault. “The people who died during the witch-hunts in Scotland,” she insists defensively, “were not witches.” Scholars are not trying to blame the victims. Instead, they are trying to understand why entire societies started not only to believe witchcraft was real but to think that people they knew well were consorting with the devil, to accuse them in formal trials, and to allow people in authority to act on those accusations by imprisoning, torturing, and executing their neighbors.

Nor does Shaw appear interested in the fact that both men and women were accused of witchcraft, although the percentage of accused men was significantly lower. The author argues without evidence that men faced “markedly different” experiences from what accused women faced. Shaw’s assumption predetermines her conclusion: because “those who died were women and not witches,” she assumes that the only explanation is hatred of all women. “The overwhelming majority were targeted simply because they were women,” she says. “What drove this misogyny?” Feminist scholars might ask different questions: how did the practice of accusing and convicting a very small percentage of women affect all women, even those who never became suspects? Did the threat of accusation, for example, limit their willingness to risk conflicts with people in authority? Did it change what they could do in public venues, perhaps? Local court records might show changes over time which would suggest particular answers.

Instead of researching actual historical evidence about these kinds of questions, Shaw is much more interested in talking about herself. She especially notes two experiences: her lifetime of chronic illness and the fact that she was assaulted by a boyfriend when she was a young woman. She carefully explains that she sees her own suffering reflected in the suffering of the women she studies. “In these accused women,” she writes, “I see myself and so many like me who are marginalized and erased.” Feeling connected to the accused women’s histories—and the strength she sees in them—gives her a sense of both identity and responsibility.

This story is quite moving, but it leads her to fallacious reasoning. Just as she argues without direct evidence that misogyny was the main cause of witchcraft accusations, she suggests that her own experiences in late-twentieth-century California were also at the root of why seventeenth-century women in Scotland were often accused of witchcraft. Misogyny, disability, and a culture of sexual violence might very well have been essential factors in the Scottish witchcraft trials, but until the author lays out a range of historical evidence, readers should remain open to other possibilities as well.

Historians, after they search for evidence and find it wanting, occasionally discard particular theories and interpretations. Shaw, on the other hand, continues to argue for conclusions that seem to be at best mythic (or perhaps metaphorical) and at worst romanticized. For example, she repeatedly suggests that accused women might have had access to “cunning folkways and ancestral knowledge” that allowed them to employ traditional ways of healing. She cites a hundred-year-old argument that has, as she says, been “much-maligned” by more recent scholars who’ve found no historical records indicating that the accused were likely to be traditional healers or midwives. While Shaw acknowledges that evidence shows that the original author was “wrong in an empirical sense,” she nevertheless defends her as someone who highlighted what “we” lost during those years: “power, wisdom, and a connection to the land, our ancestral birthright.” She continues, “The truth exists between the rhymes of a lost spell.” This standard of evidence is too nebulous to take seriously.

While Shaw is clear that the accused women in Scotland were not witches, she herself chooses to identify as a witch, as do many other modern women—at least in part to honor the women who were executed. The decision to choose this identity, she points out, “is happening alongside a movement of oppressed people telling their own stories in their own voices.” Do these self-proclaimed modern witches believe they have some special insight into the stories of the accused? Is the author implying that she and her fellow witches have a special right to tell the story of women she insists were not witches? “Those of us who identify as witches,” writes Shaw, “are feminist tricksters, myth-makers and storytellers in search of a history.” What they are not, however, are responsible historians committed to learning about the actual lives of these murdered women.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work includes Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.