Talk:Cunning folk

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"Cunning folk are frequently confused with witches. The key difference between the two is that cunning folk were real, whereas there is no evidence that witches existed outside the imagination of those who believed they had been afflicted by them" Um, no?

"The spells and magic services offered by cunning folk were strictly speaking against the doctrines of the Catholic Church."

That's nice and all, but England was Protestant for all of the period in which good information on cunning men/women is available. But Protestantism barely shows up in the article. Bacchiad 08:55, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] POV?

This article seems to concentrate a bit too much on insisting witches didn't actually exist than it ought to, at the expense of citing more than one source for its main body of material. To differentiate is fine, but to say that there were absolutely no witches is unprovable. As with other legendary or semi-legendary phenomena, we simply can't know with certainty. I will be redoing the language accordingly in future. --Fire Star 04:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any evidence of a neutrality dispute, so I'm removing the tag. Tom Harrison Talk 00:18, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Semantics, I find it hilarious that Witches are said to not exist because people were smart enough not to call themselves something that might get them killed. People are really quite lacking in common sense these days. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.211.159.153 (talk • contribs)

Of course there were also quite a number of individuals who did claim to be witches during the early Modern Age. Even those who quite freely and openly admitted it, not under duress. Fuzzypeg☻ 18:59, 14 February 2007 (UTC)


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What I found troubling was this:

"Whether Cunning folk actually did possess any supernatural power is open to debate."

Naturally, supposing that anyone could actually have supernatural power leaves scientific scholarship and moves toward wiccan propganda.

Well it's a silly statement isn't it, and simply innuendo for "if you believe in magic you're a ning-nong". It would be more interesting to quote the opinions of some of the historians who have studied cunning-folk, who state that the magic did in many cases have some effect, presumably through placebo effect or otherwise impressing on the mind of the client. Doctors nowadays do exactly the same thing, of course, such as when they draw around a wart with their "anti-wart pen", a ritual that has no "scientific" basis but a quite clear clinical effect.
Feel free to remove that statement if you can fix up the rest of the sentence so it still reads well. I for one don't think our readership needs to be patronised by being told "you realise, don't you, that magic may or may not exist". If you don't believe in magic then it just seems silly, doesn't it? And if, like me, you do believe in magic, well, it just seems silly as well. Fuzzypeg☻ 04:34, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I think it is fair enough to make clear that the article is written from a neutral point of view, and not one blinkered by the scientistic cult. (And that's nothing against science, the best scientists do not subscribe to the cult; just as [[Isaac Newton]] for all his faults was at least free of "Newton's sleep", William Blake's name for the cult which he unfairly pinned on old Isaac. I'm dropping names just to signal that there is an argument to be had here.) Jeremy (talk) 01:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

Triumph of the Moon (TOTM) has a good roundup of British cunning folk in the 18th and 19th centuries. Including the "last" traditional wise woman said to have dies in the 1930s and to have been in many ways the very stereotype of a witch. She surely deserves a mention by name. TOTM mentions the wise woman in Under the Greenwood Tree but doesn't mention the Cunning Man in Tom Brown's School Days; these figures from realistic fiction probably also should be included.

I'd be cautious about including Hutton's analysis of the state of cunning craft, though, since he pretty much contradicts all his sources, characterising the cunning tradition as being composed of a few individuals largely isolated from each other, with methods that differ widely, and learning their craft out of subscription almanacs from London, so that the cunning craft phenomenon cannot be related to any earlier "witchcraft"-like tradition. In fact the authors on whose research he relies characterise the cunning craft tradition as longstanding and widespread, with in some areas as many cunning folk as Christian clergy (sometimes they were clergy), and with a lot of similarity between methods. (Alan Macfarlane, Owen Davies). E. William Monter even makes a comparison between the methods of English cunning folk and French "white witches" and finds remarkable similarities in their methods, suggesting a very widespread and well established tradition. This all flies in the face of Hutton, who is at pains to paint cunning craft as a minor and recent phenomenon (from memory, I believe he doesn't mention any cunning folk before the 18th century) and to distinguish it as being entirely different and opposed to witchcraft, going to such lengths that he even translates the Italian "stregheria" as "cunning craft", and berates Leland for referring to "witchcraft"! Contemporary sources, as quoted by Macfarlane, Cohn and Thomas, commonly used the term "white witch" or just "witch" for cunning folk, and Eva Pocs clearly demonstrates (Between the Living and the Dead) that "witchcraft" and "anti-witchcraft" are quite often exactly the same thing seen through different eyes.
Basically Hutton departs dramatically from the consensus of his academic peers, and only manages to do so by limiting what evidence he discusses. This is symptomatic of most of the book, but I won't go on... Suffice it to say, don't rely on Hutton alone! Fuzzypeg☻ 21:27, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

As sources I would suggest Emma Wilby's "Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits", Alan Macfarlane's "Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England", and of course Owen Davies' "Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History". Emma Wilby's work in particular establishes a better context and explanation for the strange practices and beliefs of these individuals. Fuzzypeg★ 20:38, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Emma Wilby material

Exciting! I've started adding details from Wilby's excellent book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. I've only added a little bit so far (probably enough already to stir up some controversy though!), but it's 2:30am now and I need some sleep. I'll probably try to add some more before I get stuck into rearranging and careful rationalisation of the sections. The info is roughly in the right place so far, and once we have a bit more we'll be able to see better what we've got to work with. If anyone has complimentary (or contrasting) sources and wants to add in another perspective, that would be great! I don't have Davies, Thomas or Macfarlane in front of me so I'm pretty much a one-book man at the moment. All the best, and good night! Fuzzypeg★ 14:43, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References tag

I just deleted the no references tag, as it is no longer true. Referencing could be improved of course....Jeremy (talk) 01:54, 28 May 2008 (UTC)