Comments on whether Ronald Hutton or any other Pagan scholar should bother to respond to Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft.

by Fritz Muntean

From a scholar’s point of view, Whitmore’s criticism of Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon must appear to be little more than an exercise in trolling, which a recent NYTimes article defined as ‘the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums’. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30zhuo.html>

A great deal of Whitmore’s appeal is based on his willingness — in full-blown Tea Party mode — to simply call names. Hutton is a ‘provocative’ and ‘maverick historian’, who is ‘far more conservative than most’, and guilty of a typically English ‘insularism’ (p.2). Much of Hutton’s work is ‘one-sided, misleading, or plain wrong.’ (p.2) Hutton’s work is nothing more than a ‘new myth to replace an old one’. Hutton’s discussions with other writers are ‘polemics’ (p.9). Hutton relies on ‘a number of theories’ that are ‘quite dated’ (p.6f15), as well as ‘bizarre notion[s]’ (p.62).

Whitmore consistently accuses Hutton of ‘misrepresenting’ his sources (p.17), and ‘misrepresenting’ the works of Murray (p.80). Hutton ‘mischaracterizes most wildly’ the works of Ginzburg (p.35f135), and engages in ‘a series of pedantic attacks’ on the scholarship of Leland (p.36).

Hutton is guilty of  ‘graceless admission of error … made even more surreal by [watch this:] the fact that, having been accused of discrediting an author through misrepresentation, Hutton has proceeded to discredit the very author of his accusation, by blatantly misrepresenting him’ (p.80).

Whitmore’s frequent accusations of misrepresentation should be familiar to readers of Don Frew’s responses to his own critics. In fact, Frew, who Whitmore credits with being a ‘Wiccan scholar’ (p.45) and a ‘Pagan historian’ (p.37 f135), seems to be Whitmore’s major source of inspiration. Frew’s name appears 32 times in Whitmore’s text (23 times in the footnotes, and many of these are references to works written by Frew before Triumph of the Moon was published). As Whitmore warms to his argument, Frew’s name appears more often – twice on p.45, 6 times on p.64, and 15 times on p.80.

Whitmore is protective of Frew’s reputation. Hutton’s response (Hutton 2000) to Frew’s Ethnologies article (Frew 1998) is ‘extremely bitter’ (p.80). Frew’s response to Hutton (Frew 1999) ‘is hardly a personal attack’ because he credits one of the authors he criticizes ‘with having written an “otherwise fascinating book”’. Hutton should not complain about Frew’s ‘“negative process” of fault-finding’ because Hutton has found critical things to say about the works of others, including ‘Frew himself’ (p.80 f288).

The NYTimes article I quoted above mainly addresses the perils inherent in the anonymity of the Internet. Of course Whitmore isn’t completely anonymous. We have his name, and a rough idea of where he lives (‘rural Auckland, New Zealand’). Beyond that, we’re offered virtually nothing in the way of bona fides or qualifications. Other than Don Frew, Whitmore mainly cites Max Dashu and Asphodel Long as sharing his concerns (p.79).

Hutton has refused (according to Whitmore) to respond to Dashu’s critique of his earlier book Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. This reported reluctance has its parallel in the reticence of senior Christian theologians to engage in dialogue or debate with born-again Evangelicals. Basically, why bother?

Further reading

You can read more discussion of Ben Whitmore at the Wild Hunt blog.