Which brings us to a 2010 Guardian article, The truth about witches and witch-hunters, by the distinguished researcher Julian Goodare (Reader in History at Edinburgh University). In that article, Goodare posed the question: "So what about the 'wise women', the midwives and healers?" To which he provides the following answer:
In fact, midwives were hardly ever accused of witchcraft. Traditional, magical healers (men as often as women) were sometimes prosecuted, but only if they were seen to have misused their powers, harming instead of helping. Healers sometimes even encouraged witch-hunting, helping clients to identify the person who had bewitched them.
Unfortunately for Professor Goodare, his own data flatly contradicts what he has written. According to the information publicly available at the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft website (for which Goodare was the lead researcher), folk healers were actually quite a frequent target of Witchcraft accusations. In those cases where we have some information concerning the specifics of the charges and who the charges were against, almost 1/5 of the accused Witches were folk healers (and it is more than one out of five if we include midwives and practitioners of "white magic"). And half of the known cases involving folk healers did not involve any accusation of using magic to cause harm. Here are the numbers:
876 cases with information about the charges against the individual
141 cases of accusations against folk healers (21%)
74 of the cases against folk healers also involved maleficium (52 %)
For a little more background on where these numbers come from, along with some brief analysis, see this previous post: Benevolent Magic and "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft."
Also par for the course is the fact that Goodare not only misrepresents the numbers themselves, but he fantastically oversells the quality of the existing data concerning historical Witchcraft. His own website makes it clear that in the large majority (nearly 3/4) of the Witchcraft trials for which we have any records at all there is no real information about what people were actually charged with. Obviously (or at least one would hope it should be obvious) when such basic information is missing one cannot determine, one way or the other, anything about whether such cases involved folk-healing, midwifery, or anything else. But Goodare ignores such concerns and defies the most basic principles of logical reasoning by assuming that cases in which there is no evidence of what Witches were accused of doing can be cited as positive evidence of what Witches were not accused of doing.
You see, simply being named in a Witchcraft accusation (and, as a matter of fact, in a great many cases even the names are missing!) could mean any of a dizzying variety of things. It could mean that one of your neighbors claimed to have seen you literally flying through the air riding on a broomstick. Or it could mean that you were implicated in a plot to poison the King. Or it could mean that you were suspected of using incantations to cure a sick child. Or it could mean that you were accused of helping a neighbor retrieve stolen goods, or of giving your neighbor's cow the evil eye, or of casting a horoscope, or of formally renouncing your Christian baptism. And so forth.
But, to repeat myself, when we do have information about what people were actually charged with, these cases frequently involved folk healing (and this frequency increases the more categories of benevolent magic we add in). And when folk healing, or some other form of benevolent magic, was involved in Witchcraft prosecutions, this did not automatically mean that there was also an accusation of maleficium, even though Goodare, who would know better if he looked more closely at his own data (but I assume that is what graduate students are for?) misrepresents that this was the case.
Whatever criticisms I may have of Goodare, however, are to a great extent mitigated by the important work he has done in making so much data on the Scottish Witchcraft trials readily available to the public. But when Goodare goes out of his way to contradict that very data, well, he really should be called on it.
[Here is the complete citation of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, taken from their "how to cite us" page: Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, 'The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft', http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/witches/ (archived January 2003, accessed March 2013).]
