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A Response to Michael Ostling's "Babyfat and Belladonna: Witches' Ointment and the Contestation of Reality" E D WA R D B E V E R SUNY College at Old Westbury In his article "Babyfat and Belladonna: Witches' Ointment and the Contestation of Reality" Michael Ostling makes a radical claim, that neither babyfat nor belladonna "was ever used by any early modern accused witch" because, he asserts, as far as we can tell, no "accused witches" tried "to fly (bodily or in trance) with the help of an ointment."1 He places the learned early modern discussion of hallucinogenic witch ointments in the context of the debate over whether witches flew bodily or only in their imaginations, in the process dismissing both the eyewitness accounts and the recipes contained in several early modern works as literary borrowings from ancient sources or previous authors or thought-experiments describing what the authors assumed must be happening rather than actual reports of real observations.2 He goes on to point to the lack of physical evidence of hallucinogenic salves among the accused's effects in trial records, and then questions whether the salves could have caused the experience of flight since topical medications that use the
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft – University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Dec 28, 2016
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