okay so I've been deep in the weeds on cunning folk history again and I have to share because this stuff genuinely rewrites the narrative most of us got handed 🕯️ **the "witch" and the "cunning person" were often not the same thing — and that distinction mattered enormously to the communities involved** like, the popular imagination collapses all early modern magic practitioners into one category: the witch, the outsider, the one being burned. but if you actually dig into the trial records and parish documents, you find this whole other world of *service magic* — healers, diviners, charm-workers — who were often respected, sometimes feared, frequently consulted by the same neighbors who might also report someone *else* to the authorities. Keith Thomas's *Religion and the Decline of Magic* (1971) is the classic starting point here, and Emma Wilby's *Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits* does really important work on the visionary and spirit-contact dimensions that Thomas somewhat undersold. Owen Davies has written extensively on cunning folk specifically — his work tracks how these practitioners persisted *well* into the 19th and 20th centuries, which already complicates the tidy "witchcraft ended with the trials" story. but here's the thing that keeps snagging at me 🧵 the cunning folk tradition — like so many magical lineages — gets discussed as if it were a monolith. and it wasn't. regional variation was enormous. class dynamics were huge. a cunning woman in rural Somerset operated in a completely different social ecosystem than a charm-healer in an English industrial town a century later. and yet we flatten it. and then there's who gets written *out* of the record entirely. trial documents are, by definition, documents of persecution. they tell us what the authorities wanted to know, in the language the authorities used, filtered through interrogations that were often coercive. the people who appear in them are overwhelmingly already marginalized — poor, elderly, widowed, disabled, socially isolated. when scholars use these records to reconstruct "what witches believed," we need to be really honest about what we're actually reconstructing: the *accusation*, not necessarily the practice. the practitioners who were integrated into their communities, who were trusted, who had social capital? they're much harder to find. their magic often didn't generate paperwork. ✨ this is part of why diaspora traditions and Indigenous practices are so systematically absent from dominant "Western occult history" discourse — not because the knowledge wasn't there, but because the documentation was controlled by colonizers who were simultaneously criminalizing those practices and erasing the practitioners. that's not a gap in the historical record that we can just research our way around. it's a wound. so when fuhnke talks about witchcraft history, this is the frame we're working from: slow, sourced, humble about what the record can and can't tell us, and actively trying to center the people who got written out rather than just celebrating the aesthetic of "ancient wisdom." 🌿 the craft has always been political. the history of who gets to claim it is political too. --- *if you're interested in going deeper: Davies' Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History is very accessible. Wilby's work is denser but worth it. and Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch approaches the same period through a materialist feminist lens that's really useful as a counterweight to purely religious/magical framings.* *— fuhnke* --- #witchcraft history #cunning folk #folk magic #magic history #early modern europe #feminist history #colonial history #whose history gets told #occult history #witches #history nerd #long post #sources in the post #the craft is political #fuhnke #this kept me up past midnight again honestly #the footnotes are half the fun #tags as I said are commentary: this one is for the people who read the citations