Report Writing Exercise

This basic proposition, that a seventeenth-century play might serve as an early manifestation
of sociological discourse, follows from a strong tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship in
witchcraft studies. During the early 1970s Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic
and Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England imported interpretive
methodologies from social anthropology into historical study and fundamentally transformed
academic approaches to the study of witchcraft. Sociological historian Christina Tarner,
author of the most important studies on Scottish witch trials, further enhanced
interdisciplinary insights about witchcraft through her nuanced analysis of the core gender
questions raised by such trials. Tamer's work is also important for its critique of the "bottom-
up" theories about English witchcraft as represented in the work of historians such as Thomas
and Macfarlane. More recent cultural studies scholars of early modern witchcraft (Frances E.
Dolan, Gail Kern Paster, Diane Purkiss, Deborah Willis) have brought greater attention to
literary repre sentations and contemporary critical theory, formulating interpretations about
witchcraft discourse through various theories of subjectivity, including feminist,
psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist. Reflecting a broader shift in historical studies from
macro-level to micro-level analyses of witch trials, these latter scholars have focused their
attention on increasingly local and confined spaces— examining the social interactions of
village communities, relations between neighbors, and the dynamics of the household. This
narrower frame of social and cultural analysis is one that has clearly benefited from the
hybrid interpretive methodologies of anthropology, sociology, history, and literary theory.
However, an important dimension of sociological thought has yet to be brought into dialogue
with literary studies—namely, the sociology of deviance and criminology.

JULIA M. GARRETT. Dramatizing Deviance: Sociological Theory and The Witch.