Interesting, but maybe begs a few questions
Via one of my academic listservs today (not the one on which brangling and brouhaha are the current order of the day), review of Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010).
According to the reviewer, the author is making a case that Isobel Gowdie was not merely being falsely accused of an imaginary crime:
[S]he may have actively practiced harmful ritual magic and performed real acts of maleficium.
Which is, do admit, an interesting take and not outwith the bounds of possibility, though personally I would have modified those statements to say something like 'ritual magic intended to do harm', because that it might have actually caused harm (except through nocebo effect on a victim who knew it was happening) is a stretch rather further than I would care to go.
I'm also, as a besotted Ronald Hutton fangirl, not sure about the invocation of 'shamanism' in a universalising sense, at least in historical context.
Plus, as a medical & sex historian, I'm far from entirely persuaded by the claim that
[T]he author argues [that] to assume that there was nothing real at the root of these fears, that for three hundred years Europe was fixated on the identification and elimination of an entirely imaginary crime, is a hasty and rather condescending presumption.
Masturbation-panic lasted in various allotropic forms from the publication of Onania in the first decade or so of the C18th to the mid-C20th and occasional manifestations may still be around in an urban-mythy way.
Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is anyone of any historiographical reputatibility alleging that there was anything in the centuries-long string of anti-semitic libels (poisoned wells, blood libel, descretion of the host, etc).
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