The Last Witchfinder

Looking back at the order of books that I have read thus far, I wonder to myself why I did not choose to pick this book up immediately after I finished reading Jonathan Kirsch's The Grand Inquisitor's Manual, a nonfictional account of the Inquisition. Now that I think about it, though, it was a good idea that I didn't go straight from Kirsch's work to Morrow's. The intellectual current started by The Grand Inquisitor's Manual would likely have prevented me from seeing and appreciating The Last Witchfinder for what it is: a rollicking yarn of a story about a woman fighting against injustice in the name of Reason.

To be fair, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual was very helpful when it came to reading The Last Witchfinder. The description of the various implements and methods by which the Inquisition tortured confessions out of their victims, as well as the basic set-up of an Inquisitional court and what counted as evidence within that court, all helped in understanding the reason behind the madness of the witch hunters written about in The Last Witchfinder. It allowed for a certain ease of reading and understanding, as I did not really have to linger long asking the whys and wherefores of such an institution that claims to dispense “justice” when what it dispenses is certainly no justice at all.

With such considerations rendered clear by an earlier reading, I was free to focus on other things, primarily the triad of characters at the heart of this book: Jennet Stearne, her brother Dunstan, and Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. If counting a book as a character strikes one as rather improbable, then reading The Last Witchfinder will certainly change one's opinion on the matter, as the Principia is the novel's narrator, recounting the life and times of its beloved Jennet Stearne.

The Principia makes for a fascinating character in its own right. It speaks of intertextuality, which as a word is rather intimidating on its own, but the Principia explains it in very uncomplicated terms which will be appreciated and welcomed with a knowing chuckle by any scholar intimately familiar with it, and which will, hopefully, make the meaning clearer to anyone who hasn't encountered it before. Intertextuality, at least the way the Principia puts it, is books breeding books, using authors as their vessels. Writers are readers too (they must be), and the books they read exert an influence on their writing, one way or another, whether they know it or not. So when the Principia says that books write other books using authors as vessels, what it's talking about is simply how, through intertextuality, what a writer reads inevitably finds its way into what the writer writes, whether they do so consciously or otherwise.

And so the Principia appears to use the author of The Last Witchfinder as a vehicle for telling the story of Jennet Stearne. Alternating between personal musings and personal battles (against the Malleus Maleficarum, to be precise), the Principia spins out a tale that is, in many ways, a touching memoir from an entity that has loved its object of affection from afar. Comparisons between Dante and Beatrice might occur to some readers (it certainly has to me), but the Principia fancies itself above exceedingly emotional demonstrations, and strives to give the reader as factual and as plain-faced an account as possible.

Of course, as soon as the reader begins reading about Jennet, one begins to doubt the Principia's promise of objectivity. Jennet's story reads like something closer to Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn instead of an objective account. Her adventures and encounters seem to occur on such a grand scale for just one woman - even her mission to fashion an argumentum grande contradicting witchcraft is seemingly larger than life. If books can be characters, and characters can be narrators, and narrators can be unreliable, then the Principia might be considered a somewhat-unreliable one, somewhat blinded by its adulation of Jennet.

And yet, perhaps the picaresque narrative style is really the only way to tell Jennet's story, given what happens to her and what she tries to accomplish. She certainly doesn't want for pluck or courage or cleverness to get her out of whatever trouble she might find herself in, and it's pretty clear she thinks well on her feet. Such characters inevitably find adventure in their lives, whether they choose it or not, and Jennet certainly chooses it right from the get-go.

The only problem with this style (and hence the novel) is that it occasionally favors adventure over furthering the (far more, in my opinion) interesting struggle against the anti-witchcraft laws and the witchfinders - the main reason why I was recommended this novel in the first place, aside from the intriguing concept of a book as a narrator and character in its own right. While it's made quite clear that whatever happens to Jennet, and whatever she does, is all for furthering her goal of completing her argumentum grande, there is still a great deal of story there that has absolutely nothing to do with the argumentum grande. It's only towards the latter end of the book that things really take off in line with that original premise. Those moments are diverting, but not exactly necessary.

Overall, though, this is an interesting book, and a pretty good yarn, if that's what the reader is looking for. This novel, first and foremost, is an adventure novel, a picaresque tale, and should be treated as such. The title and the beginning portion of the novel are misleading, promising something along the lines of The Scarlet Letter, perhaps, but with a pluckier heroine. But that is not the case, and what one gets is something more like Huckleberry Finn, with some Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island thrown in for good measure.

For the right reader, in the right frame of mind, with the right kind of expectations, the novel is sure to be a resounding success. For the wrong reader, it is likely going to disappoint.