The Witchcraft Reader [3 ed.] 9781351345231, 1351345230

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The Witchcraft Reader Third Edition

The Witchcraft Reader offers a wide range of historical perspectives on the subject of witchcraft in a single, accessible volume, exploring the enduring hold that it has on the human imagination. The witch trials of the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have inspired a huge and expanding scholarly literature, as well as an outpouring of popular representations. This fully revised and enlarged third edition brings together many of the best and most important works in the field. It explores the origins of witchcraft prosecutions in learned and popular culture, fears of an imaginary witch cult, the role of religious division and ideas about the Devil, the gendering of suspects, the making of confessions and the decline of witch beliefs. An expanded final section explores the various “revivals” and images of witchcraft that continue to flourish in contemporary Western culture. Equipped with an extensive introduction that foregrounds significant debates and themes in the study of witchcraft, providing the extracts with a critical context, The Witchcraft Reader is essential reading for anyone with an interest in this fascinating subject. Darren Oldridge is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Worcester. He has written extensively on religion and belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His most recent publications include The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge 2016)  and Strange Histories:  The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds (2nd edn, Routledge 2018).

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Routledge Readers in History

The History of Sexuality in Europe Reader Edited by Anna Clark The History on Film Reader Edited by Marnie Hughes-​Warrington The Irish Women’s History Reader Edited by Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart The Modern Historiography Reader Edited by Adam Budd The Nature of History Reader Edited by Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow The New Imperial Histories Reader Edited by Stephen Howe The Oral History Reader Edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson The Postmodern History Reader Edited by Keith Jenkins The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts Edited by Michael Drolet

The Public History Reader Edited by Hilda Kean and Paul Martin Renaissance Thought: A  Reader Edited by Robert Black The Slavery Reader Edited by Gad Heuman and James Walvin The Terrorism  Reader Edited by David J. Whittaker The Twentieth Century Russia Reader Edited by Alistair Kocho-​Williams The Victorian Studies Reader Edited by Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam The Witchcraft Reader (Second Edition) Edited by Darren Oldridge The World War Two Reader Edited by Gordon Martel The American Urban Reader (Second Edition) Edited by Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven H. Corey

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The Witchcraft  Reader Third Edition Edited by

Darren Oldridge

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Third edition published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Darren Oldridge; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Darren Oldridge to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2002 Second edition published by Routledge 2008 British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Oldridge, Darren, 1966– editor. Title: The witchcraft reader / edited by Darren Oldridge. Description: Third Edition. | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2019. | Series: Routledge readers in history | Identifiers: LCCN 2019017181 (print) | LCCN 2019018367 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315123035 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138565401 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138565425 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft–History. Classification: LCC BF1566 (ebook) | LCC BF1566 .W7395 2019 (print) | DDC 133.4/309–dc22 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017181 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​56540-​1  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​56542-​5  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​12303-​5  (ebk) Typeset in Bell Gothic and Perpetua by Newgen Publishing UK

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For my father, with love always

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Contents

Preface to the third edition Acknowledgements General introduction

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PART ONE

Medieval origins

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1 Richard Kieckhefer W I T C H T R I A L S I N M E D I E VA L E UR O P E ( 1 9 7 6 )

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2 Norman Cohn T H E D E M O N I S AT I O N O F M E D I E VA L H E R E T I C S ( 1 9 7 5 )

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3 Michael D. Bailey W I T C H C R A F T A N D R E F O R M I N T H E L AT E M I D D L E A G E S ( 2 0 0 3 )

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4 Hans Peter Broedel T H E M A LL E US M A L E F I C A RUM A N D T H E C O N ST R U C T I O N O F W I T C H C R A F T ( 2 0 0 3 )

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5 Charles Zika U L R I C H M O L I T O R A N D T H E I M A G E RY O F W I T C H C R A F T ( 2 0 0 7 )

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PART TWO

Witchcraft, magic and fear

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6 Robin Briggs T H E E X P ER I E N C E O F B E W I T C H M E NT ( 2 0 0 2 )

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7 Euan Cameron SPIRITS IN POPULAR BELIEF (2010)

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8 Joyce Miller W I T C H E S A N D C H A R M E R S I N S C OT L A N D ( 2 0 0 2 )

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9 Edward Bever T H E M E D I C A L E F F E C T S O F W I T C H C R A F T I N E A R LY M O D E R N E UR O P E ( 2 0 0 0 )

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10 Wolfgang Behringer W E AT H E R , H UN G E R A N D F E A R :   O R I G I N S O F T H E E UR O P E A N W I T C H - ​H UN T S I N C L I M AT E , S O C I E T Y A N D M E N TA L I T Y ( 1 9 9 5 )

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PART THREE

The idea of a witch cult

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11 Jacqueline Simpson M A R G A R E T M UR R AY ’ S W I T C H C U LT ( 1 9 9 4 )

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12 H. C. Erik Midelfort H E A RT L A N D O F T H E W I T C H C R A Z E ( 1 9 8 1 )

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13 Gustav Henningsen F R O M D R E A M C U LT T O W I T C H E S ’ S A B B AT H ( 1 9 9 3 )

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14 Éva Pócs T H E A LT E R N AT I V E W O R L D O F T H E W I T C H E S ’ S A B B AT ( 1 9 9 3 )

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15 Stuart Clark I N V ER S I O N , M I S RU L E A N D T H E M E A N I N G O F WITCHCRAFT (1980)

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PART FOUR

Witchcraft and the Reformation

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16 Stuart Clark PR OT E STA N T W I T C H C R A F T, C AT H O L I C W I T C H C R A F T ( 1 9 9 7 )

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17 Alison Rowlands A L U T H ER A N R E S P O N S E TO W I T C H C R A F T A N D M A G I C ( 1 9 9 6 )

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18 Gary K. Waite A N A B A P T I ST S A N D T H E D E V I L ( 1 9 9 9 )

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PART FIVE

Witchcraft and authority

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19 Gerhild Scholz Williams P I ER R E D E L A N C R E A N D T H E B A S Q UE W I T C H - H ​ UN T ( 1 9 9 9 )

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20 Brian P. Levack STAT E - ​B U I L D I N G A N D W I T C H H UN T I N G I N E A R LY M O D E R N E UR O P E ( 1 9 9 6 )

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21 William Monter W I T C H C R A F T, C O N F E S S I O N A L I S M A N D A U T H O R I T Y ( 2 0 0 2 )

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PART SIX

Witchcraft, possession and the Devil

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22 H. C. Erik Midelfort T H E D E V I L A N D T H E GER M A N P E O P L E ( 1 9 8 9 )

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Charlotte-​R ose  Millar T H E D E V I L A N D FA M I L I A R S P I R I T S I N E N G L I S H WITCHCRAFT (2017)

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24 Kathleen Sands THE SOCIAL MEANINGS OF DEMONIC POSSESSION (2004)

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25 Sarah Ferber E C STA S Y, P O S S E S S I O N , W I T C H C R A F T ( 2 0 0 4 )

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26 Elisa Slattery J O H A NN W E Y E R A N D T H E D E V I L ( 1 9 9 4 )

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PART SEVEN

Witchcraft and gender

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27 Karen Jones and Michael Zell W O M E N A N D W I T C H C R A F T B E F O R E T H E “ G R E AT W I T C H -​H UN T ” ( 2 0 0 5 )

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28 Jane P. Davidson T H E M Y T H O F T H E P ER S E C U T E D F E M A L E H E A L ER ( 1 9 9 3 )

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29 Elizabeth Reis D A M N E D W O M E N I N P UR I TA N N E W E N G L A N D ( 1 9 9 7 )

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30 Clive Holmes WO M E N , W I T NE S S E S A N D W I T C H E S ( 1 9 9 3 )

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31 E. J. Kent MASCULINITY AND MALE WITCHES IN OLD AND NE W E N G L A N D ( 2 0 0 5 )

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PART EIGHT

Reading confessions

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32 Virginia Krause W I T C H C R A F T C O N F E S S I O N S A N D D E M O N O L O GY ( 2 0 0 5 )

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33 Louise Jackson W I T C H E S , W I V E S A N D M OT H E R S ( 1 9 9 5 )

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34 Lyndal Roper O E D I P US A N D T H E D E V I L ( 1 9 9 4 )

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PART NINE

The decline of witchcraft

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35 Brian P. Levack T H E D E C L I N E O F W I T C H C R A F T PR O S E C U T I O N S ( 1 9 9 9 )

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36 Marion Gibson T H E D E C L I N E O F T H E W I T C H C R A F T PA M P H L E T ( 1 9 9 9 )

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CONTENTS 

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37 Owen Davies UR B A N I Z AT I O N A N D T H E D E C L I N E O F W I T C H C R A F T :   A N E X A M I N AT I O N O F L O N D O N ( 1 9 9 7 )

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Marijke Gijswijt-​H ofsra W I T C H C R A F T A F T ER T H E W I T C H T R I A L S ( 1 9 9 9 )

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PART TEN

Witchcraft today

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39 Diane Purkiss M O D E R N W I T C H E S A N D T H E I R PA ST ( 1 9 9 6 )

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40 Ethan Doyle White WICCA AS WITCHCRAFT (2016)

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41 Jean La Fontaine W I T C H C R A F T A N D S ATA N I C A B U S E ( 1 9 9 8 )

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42 Marion Gibson H A R RY P OT T E R I N A M E R I C A ( 2 0 0 7 )

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43 Julian Goodare M O D E R N W E ST E R N I M A G E S O F W I T C H E S ( 2 0 1 6 )

Index

452 457

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Preface to the third edition

Witchcraft does not belong to historians. Nor does it belong to the wider community of academics who have frequently taken an interest in the subject. Rather, it is part of the public culture of the Western world, and has long been the object of “common knowledge” and imaginative representations. To call something a “witch-​ hunt” is to denounce it as a deliberately unjust persecution. In a different context, witchcraft is understood by many as a collection of non-​Christian and magical beliefs that once thrived in Europe and North America –​beliefs often viewed as irrational or superstitious. For others, witchcraft is a living religious tradition that can be embraced, tolerated or feared. These interpretations have flourished independently of scholarly research on the subject, and where they conflict with the findings of that research they are unlikely to change. This new edition of the reader gives considerably more attention to popular engagement with witchcraft beyond the academic world. It contains new chapters on the religious movement of “Wicca” (Doyle White, 40), the reception of magical themes in children’s fiction (Gibson, 42), and the representation of witches in Western media (Goodare, 43). These demonstrate the vitality and diversity of public perceptions of witchcraft today. We may no longer inhabit a world in which magical powers are universally accepted as real and potentially threatening, but the idea of witchcraft, in its various contemporary guises, remains remarkably potent. The continued fascination with witchcraft derives, of course, from the historical record of judicial prosecutions for the crime in late medieval and early modern communities. The analysis of this record remains the bedrock of this book. Here

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some additions have also been made. One aspect of the age of witch trials that has recently gained scholarly attention is the pictorial representation of witches. Printed images helped to generate the threat of malicious magic and combine it with diabolism, and to circulate these ideas to a wide, semi-​literate audience. These pictures have their own histories, and often convey information absent from documentary sources. New chapters by Charles Zika (5) and Charlotte-​Rose Millar (23) make arresting use of these images. The illustrations they contain offer a new way of seeing the dangers of witchcraft as they appeared to contemporaries, and open fresh perspectives on their demonic and sexual aspects. This edition also includes new chapters on the world of spirits in popular culture (Cameron, 7) –​a realm that resisted the attempts of late medieval and early modern scholars to purge its non-​biblical inhabitants  –​and the perennial topic of gender (Jones and Zell, 27) in witchcraft allegations. These and the other new extracts and images will, it is hoped, bring more vividly to life the world in which fears of harmful magic and dangerous spirits once flourished. The rest of the book preserves almost all of the content of the second edition. In bringing together the work of many different authors, I have tried as far as possible to preserve the conventions that were used in the original texts. This means that there are some inconsistencies of spelling and style between the chapters. The “sabbat” and “witches’ Sabbath” are used interchangeably throughout. While every effort has been made to avoid mistakes, the Devil and my own weakness may have caused some to slip inside the pages that follow; I apologise for these. I am grateful to the many scholars who have offered advice on the expanded new text, and the splendid editorial team at Routledge. My partner Sharron has my love, always, for her magical interventions in my life. I am also indebted beyond measure to the love and support of my parents, and this book is dedicated to the memory of my father.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all those who have granted us permission to reproduce the extracts listed below. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge ownership of copyright material used in this volume, please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. From: European Witch Trials, Richard Kieckhefer, pp. 10, 13–​14, 15–​16, 18, 20–​ 3, 25–​6, copyright © 1976 Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. From:  Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn, published by Pimlico (1975), pp.  51, 52–​3, 73–​6, 77–​8. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited © 1975. Michael Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, pp. 46, 48, 49, 119, 122, 123–​4, copyright © 2003 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. From:  The Malleus Maleficarum, by Hans Peter Broedel, 2003, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, pp. 51, 58, 99–​100. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLS Clear. Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-​ Century Europe (Routledge: 2007), pp. 18–​27, including the following images: Figure  5.1:  Two Witches Cooking Up a Storm, title page in Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, 1496–​1500. From [Albert ] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 8. Fig. 928. Figure  5.2:  A Female Witch Lames a Man with an Arrow, in Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, c.  1494. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 16. Fig. 615. Figure 5.3: The Witch and Death, Danse Macabre des Femmes, c. 1500. BNF MS fr. 995, fol. 39v.

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Figure 5.4: Witch and Devil Embracing, in Ulrich Molitor, Von den Unholden oder Hexen, c.  1490?, fol. B5v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 5. Fig. 419. Figure 5.5: Witch and Devil Embracing, in Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, c. 1495, fol. 1v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 22. Fig. 1278. Figure 5.6: Transformed Witches Ride a Forked Stick through the Sky, in Ulrich Molitor, Von den Unholden oder Hexen, c.  1493, fol. B3r. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 16. Fig. 618. Figure 5.7: Male Witch Riding a Wolf, in Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, c. 1495, fol. 8v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 21. Fig. 713. Figure  5.8:  Female Witches Eating Together, in Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, c.  1496–​1500, fol d2r. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 8. Fig. 935. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours:  The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, second edn, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, pp.  63–​ 5, 67, 68–​70, 72–​4, 75–​8, 84, 86–​8, 90–​2, 93. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe:  Superstition, Reason, and Religion (OUP: 2010), pp. 41–​4. By permission of Oxford University Press. Joyce Miller, “Devices and Directions: Folk Healing Aspects of Witchcraft Practice in Seventeenth-​Century Scotland”. From The Scottish Witch-​Hunt in Context, by Julian Goodare (ed.), 2002, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, pp.  93–​5, 96–​8, 104. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLS Clear. Edward Bever, “Witchcraft Fears and Psychosocial Factors in Disease”. Reprinted from The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 30, no. 4 (2000), pp. 583–​6, 588–​90, with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. © 2000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. Wolfgang Behringer, “Weather, Hunger and Fear”, German History, 1995, 13, pp.  6–​8, 9–​10, 11–​12, 13–​16, 17, 18–​24, 25–​7. By permission of Oxford University Press. From:  “Margaret Murray:  Who Believed Her and Why?”, Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore, 105, Routledge 1994, pp.  89–​94, 96. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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H. C. Erik Midelfort, “Heartland of the Witchcraze”, History Today, 31, February 1981, pp. 27–​31. Reproduced by permission of the author and History Today Ltd. Gustav Henningsen, “The Ladies from Outside: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath”, Early Modern European Witchcraft, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 195–​6, 197–​8, 204–​7, by permission of Oxford University Press. Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age, Central European University Press, 1993, pp. 73–​ 7, 78–​80, 85–​6, 88–​90, 91–​2, 95–​6. Reproduced by permission of Central European University Press. Stuart Clark, “Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft”, Past and Present, 1980, 87, pp.  98–​9, 100–​104, 117–​22, 125–​7, by permission of Oxford University Press. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons:  The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 527–​37, 540–​4, 545, by permission of Oxford University Press. Alison Rowlands, “Magic and Popular Religion”, Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds, Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–​1800, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996, pp. 102–​3, 104–​5, 111–​12, 116–​17. Reproduced with permission of SNCSC. Gary K.  Waite, “Between the Devil and the Inquisitor”, Werner O.  Packull and Geoffrey L. Dipple, eds, Radical Reformation Studies, Ashgate, 1999, pp. 120–​ 24, 126–​8, 130, 134–​40. Reproduced with permission. Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion: The Discourse of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany, University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 89, 90–​3, 95–​6, 119. Reproduced with permission. Brian P.  Levack, “State Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe”, in (eds) Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe:  Studies in Culture and Belief, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 96–​107, 108–​15. Reproduced with permission. William Monter, “Witch Trials in Continental Europe, 1560–​ 1660”, Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark and William Monter, eds, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Volume 4, The Athlone Press, 2002, pp. 9–​ 12, 22–​3, 24–​5. By kind permission of Continuum. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. H. C. Erik Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People”, from Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Stephen Ozment, pp. 99–​119 © Truman State University Press, 1989. Used with permission of the publisher and author.

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Charlotte-​Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (Routledge: 2017), pp 1, 48, 49–​50, 117–​18. A version of the following image appears in Millar’s book: Figure  23.1:  frontispiece from Nathaniel Crouch, The Kingdom of Darkness (Printed for Nath. Crouch, London 1688). “The British Library Board, C.118.b.3, engraved title page”. British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/​Bridgeman Images. From:  Demon Possession in Elizabethan England, Kathleen R.  Sands, pp.  9, 10–​12, 13–​5, 17–​18, 21–​3, 27–​8. Copyright © 2004 by Kathleen R. Sands. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. From:  Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France, Sarah Ferber, Copyright © 2004 Routledge, pp. 115–​23. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. Elisa Slattery, “To Prevent a ‘Shipwreck of Souls’: Johann Weyer and De Praestigiis Daemonum”, Essays in History, 36, Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, 1994, pp. 73–​9, 83–​5, 87. Karen Jones and Michael Zell, “  ‘The Divels Speciall Instruments’:  Women and Witchcraft Before the Great Witch-​Hunt”, in Social History, 30:1, pp 45–​9,  55–​7. Jane P. Davidson, “The Myth of the Persecuted Female Healer”, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 14 (1993), pp. 115–​ 16, 122–​3, 126–​9. Copyright © 1994 by the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. From:  Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England, Elizabeth Reis, copyright © 1997 by Cornell University Press, pp. 2, 93–​4, 110–​13, 115–​ 16, 118–​20. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Clive Holmes, “Women, Witches and Witnesses”, Past and Present, 1993, 140, pp.  45–​ 6, 47, 48–​ 9, 50–​ 6, 57–​ 62, 64–​ 78, by permission of Oxford University Press. Elizabeth Kent, “Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England”, History Workshop Journal, 2005, 60, pp.  69–​92, by permission of Oxford University Press. Virginia Krause, “Confessional Fictions and Demonology in Renaissance France”, in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume 35, no. 2, pp. 327–​ 8, 330–​1, 333–​7, 343–​4. Copyright, 2005, Duke University Press, All rights reserved. Used by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press. From: “Witches, Wives and Mothers”, Louise Jackson, Women’s History Review, 4(1), Routledge 1995, pp. 63–​83. Reprinted by permission of the author and Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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From: Oedipus and the Devil, Lyndal Roper, Copyright © 1994 Routledge, pp. 226–​ 7, 229–​40. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. Brian P.  Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions”, Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter, eds, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Volume 5, The Athlone Press, 1999, pp. 7, 13, 14–​15, 20, 26–​7, 30–​1, 33–​4, 35–​7, 42–​3. By kind permission of Continuum. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. From:  Reading Witchcraft:  Stories of Early English Witches, Marion Gibson, Copyright © 1999 Routledge, pp. 186–​7, 188–​90. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. From:  “Urbanization and the Decline of Witchcraft” by Owen Davies from Journal of Social History, 30 (1997), pp. 597–​617. By permission of Oxford University Press. Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra, “Witchcraft after the Witch Trials”, Marijke Gijswijt-​ Hofstra, Brian P. Levack and Roy Porter, eds, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe:  Volume 5, The Athlone Press, 1999, pp.  175, 177–​8, 179–​80, 186, 187–​8. By kind permission of Continuum. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. From:  The Witch in History, Diane Purkiss, Copyright © 1996 Routledge, pp. 39–​ 41, 42, 43–​4, 52–​3. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. Ethan Doyle White, Wicca:  History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Sussex Academic Press: 2016), pp. 77–​85. J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England, 1998, © J. S. La Fontaine 1998, Cambridge University Press, pp. 33, 79–​80, 81, 82–​3, 91–​3, reproduced with permission. Marion Gibson, Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (Routledge:  2007), pp. 186–​94. This is reproduced with permission from Routledge. Julian Goodare, The European Witch-​Hunt (Routledge: 2016), pp. 382–​5. This is reproduced with permission from Routledge.

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1

General introduction

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N T H E L A T E S P R I N G O F 1 5 9 8 , a case of demonic poisoning was reported in the village of Laygoutte in the Duchy of Lorraine. The story emerged in the proceedings against Françatte Camont, the wife of a blacksmith, who was accused of witchcraft. Camont had apparently persuaded a man named Demenge Aubert to help her in some farm work several years earlier. As the evening light dimmed and it became impossible to continue, they sat down together and she offered him some food. He accepted the gift but found one morsel hard to swallow; but because “he was afraid of her, he swallowed it rather than spit it out, after which he had a pain in his stomach and became very swollen, feeling he had an animal inside him”. He recovered and got married soon afterwards, but after a year, the illness returned and he confided to his wife that a creature was living inside him and devouring his heart. When she pressed her ear to his chest, she thought she could hear the thing crying. The couple’s suspicions of witchcraft were confirmed by a local healer, who gave them some herbs and instructed them to boil them in an earthenware pot; this, they were told, would cause the person responsible to visit the sick man. The spell worked: Camont appeared at his bedside and asked how he was. It appears that she did not reverse the spell, however, and whatever had invaded his body eventually took his life. Before he died, he told his wife that he had always tried to keep away from the suspect’s house, but he “had not been careful enough and it was there he had taken the morsel of death”.1 This story was one of many recounted by the witnesses against Françatte Camont. Taken together, these describe a trail of suspicions and misfortunes that stretched back over decades. Around 1586, Jean Colin had quarrelled angrily with the suspect before suffering the death of his livestock and one of his children;

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like Aubert, his fears of witchcraft were confirmed by an expert in “divination” who identified Camont as the source of his troubles. Some years later, Magdelaine Cointzelin was taken sick after her pregnancy, and suspected Camont because she had made threats against her health and refused to visit her during the illness. Not long afterwards, Andreu Gerardin apparently overheard the suspect’s husband call her a witch during an argument in a tavern. When she was confronted by these and other witnesses, the accused woman denied their allegations and denounced them as liars. On the basis of the evidence against her, the procureur general of Lorraine, Nicolas Rémy, proceeded to the use of torture. “Racked severely”, Camont initially maintained her innocence and insisted that “she was a good Christian”. But after further time on the rack, she confessed to the principal allegations that her neighbours had brought against her, and added much that was new. She had been seduced by a wicked spirit named Persin some ten years before; he had given her a purse and magical powders that she used to injure her neighbours and their animals; and she had attended the “sabbat”, or secret gathering of witches, “more times than she could remember”. On 27 June she claimed that all this was a lie, but on “the suggestion that Persin must have visited her in prison to persuade her to say this, she then agreed that the confessions had been true”. Eleven days later she was put to death.2 Françatte Camont was one of around 50,000 people executed for witchcraft in Europe and North America between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. To any Western reader today, the documents of her trial invoke a sense of tragedy and injustice. It is with these connotations that the phrase “witch-​hunt” has entered the modern vocabulary. The evident unfairness of the proceedings against the blacksmith’s wife, and the implausibility of the charges with which she was arraigned, make us regard her trial as a dreadful mistake and, at best, a tragedy from which we may hope to learn some lessons. To do so, however, it is necessary to confront some basic problems of interpretation. In the words of Katharine Hodgkin, to “study witchcraft is for most of us to study something we do not believe in”.3 This makes the problem of “present-​centredness” –​the tendency to explain the past in terms that relate mainly to the present –​especially acute in the case of witchcraft. We simply know that the crimes for which Camont was executed were impossible; so, when we seek to explain her condemnation, we are forced to look for the “real” reasons behind it, instead of the ones recorded by her contemporaries. These issues of present-​centeredness and moral judgement will be considered later on. Before that, it is necessary to consider two major themes that stand out in Camont’s trial and are central to the history of witchcraft as a whole:  the magical beliefs that saturated pre-​modern communities such as Laygoutte, and the interaction between ordinary people and educated demonologists and lawyers such as Nicolas Rémy.

THE WORLD OF MAGIC Magical beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of medieval and Renaissance culture.4 There is no reason to assume that people were any more willing to believe

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in magic in the age of witch trials  –​from around 1450 to 1700  –​than in any earlier period. Nor was the acceptance of magic confined to any one social group, though some educated people differed from the rest of the population regarding the origins and nature of magical activities. But the core assumptions of magic –​ that unseen or “occult” forces could be manipulated to create physical effects –​ extended far beyond the world of peasant “superstition”. Indeed, some branches of magic were the preserve of the educated and relatively wealthy: around 1600, the Jesuit Martín Del Rio warned against poor people practising alchemy because their circumstances might incline them to seek financial gain rather than knowledge from the art.5 The distinction between religion and magic was often cloudy, despite the efforts of theologians to mark a clear boundary between the two; and for most Europeans, the rites of Christianity belonged to a larger economy of supernatural powers to be called upon, placated or feared. The beliefs associated with witchcraft were only one part of this wider commerce between mortals and an “invisible world” of forces that could influence their lives. As an illustration of this point, it is worth considering the role of supernatural powers in one relatively small but vital human activity: the breast-​feeding of babies. A cluster of rites –​both religious and “magical” –​was practised to ensure the flow of milk in nursing mothers. The Christian service of “churching” after childbirth was widely believed to confer blessings on mothers and infants, and to preserve their physical health. More specifically, appeals to the saints of the medieval and Counter-​Reformation Church ensured that mothers could suckle their infants successfully; St Agatha was especially favoured in this regard, while the miracles attributed to St Catherine of Siena included the cure of nursing mothers whose breast milk had dried up. Overlapping with the protections of the Church, magical aids were also widely employed: the wearing of amulets and necklaces –​ most often made from milk-​white agate –​was practised in many regions. Rituals involving the placenta were also common. In Lucania in southern Italy, the threefold immersion of the placenta in water was accompanied by the repetition of a charm: “As this bag fills with water, so may these breasts fill with milk”. Across much of Europe it was common for mothers to eat morsels of the placenta to induce the same effect.6 The value of such observances was obvious in rural communities in which the sickness and death of infants were painfully common, and the distinction between religion and magic was erased by the facts of human need. It was in the context of this economy of supernatural influences that harmful magic  –​ or maleficium  –​was identified and combated. The activity of witches provided one of many potential explanations for the failure of mothers to produce milk; and as importantly, this diagnosis offered the hope of an effective remedy –​ either through counter-​magic or a reconciliation between the victim and the witch. A  few years before he conducted the trial of Françatte Camont, Nicolas Rémy described how witches used “venomous” powders and herbs to dry up the breast milk of nursing mothers.7 In 1601 Henri Boguet noted that witches in the Franche Compté “very frequently dry up the milk of nurses, apparently making them swallow a certain powder which they throw in their broth”.8 More dramatically, the Swiss demonologist Lambert Daneau claimed in 1574 to have “seen them who, with only laying their hands upon a nurse’s breasts, have drawn forth all the milk and dried

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them up”.9 The English pastor Alexander Roberts repeated this claim in 1616.10 In the culture that these men described, witchcraft was one of many hidden forces that could affect the maternal breast; the identification of witches was a potential means of managing these forces for the benefit of mother and child. The example of breast-​ feeding illustrates, in miniature, two themes that apply more generally to witch beliefs in pre-​modern communities: their intensely practical nature; and the willingness of accusers themselves to resort to magic to combat maleficium.11 Since the identification of witchcraft was normally an attempt to alleviate illness or misfortune, it was seldom made in a trivial or indiscriminate fashion. Accusations only occurred when there was a credible suspect; this person could then be confronted or appeased in the hope of reversing the spell. A viable suspect had often accumulated a reputation for practising harmful magic over many years, and could be shown to harbour spiteful intentions towards the victim. These factors were exemplified in the case of Françatte Camont. According to one of the witnesses against her, she was already “rumoured to be a witch” some 20 years before her trial.12 Others described altercations with the accused woman that preceded the affliction that befell them. This pattern has some major implications for the interpretation of witchcraft. As Robin Briggs notes in this volume (6), “suspicions of bewitchment were much commoner than criminal prosecutions”. Witch trials represented only one, relatively uncommon, response to the threat of maleficium in the early modern world. More often, we must assume that the diagnosis of witchcraft led to the successful use of counter-​magic, a reconciliation between the witch and her accuser, or lingering enmity against the supposed culprit. If the law was normally a last resort, it appears that magic was often the first option employed to confirm and counter the effects of witchcraft. Again, the depositions against Françatte Camont provide a useful illustration. Demenge Aubert consulted a village magician when he suspected he was bewitched, and obtained a spell that brought the suspect to his door. Jean Colin took the same route when his family and livestock sickened after his quarrels with the alleged witch. He visited a woman in Val de Villiers to discover the cause of his troubles, and obtained satisfaction through an elaborate piece of divination: After some speech between them she said that it was the work of the woman he suspected, and to confirm what she said took a glass in which she put something like a round apple, and after performing some trick she made him see an effigy of a woman resembling the said Françatte, asking him if it was the one he suspected, and after looking hard several times, he replied that he recognized it was her.13 The magical detection of maleficium was found wherever witchcraft was recorded in Europe and North America. In Chapter  8 of this collection, Joyce Miller describes the activities of “charmers” who identified and countered witchcraft in seventeenth-​ century Scotland; she concludes that “in the wider context of

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witchcraft belief, the practice of charming was mainstream, rather than alternative, medicine”. The same could probably be said of counter-​magical activities across early modern Europe. Wolfgang Behringer has recently noted the involvement of hired magicians, or “witch-​doctors”, in the earliest large-​scale witch panics in Germany. In an extension of the normal pattern of villagers seeking expert advice on suspected acts of maleficium, the Count of Rechberg engaged a magician and executioner to identify those responsible for unnatural weather in the lordship of Illereichen in 1562.14 This incident illuminates a further theme that has been central to the interpretation of witch trials in the last 50 years: the relationship between “elite” culture and the beliefs of ordinary people. If the fear of maleficium was rooted in the universal acceptance of magic, other ideas about witchcraft were confined to a much narrower group of educated lawyers and theologians. It was the willingness of these men to treat witchcraft as a serious crime that made possible the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was also among the educated that the most extreme and terrible concepts of witchcraft developed and spread, with results that were sometimes calamitous. Thus, the emergence of this body of learned theory, and its interplay with much older fears of harmful magic in village communities, demand careful attention.

SATANIC WITCHCRAFT When her neighbours made their depositions against Françatte Camont in 1598, they were concerned overwhelmingly with the practical effects of her maleficium. Their statements displayed no interest in the origins of her power. This was not the case for Nicolas Rémy, the judge who scrutinised their testimonies and obtained, through torture, the confession of the blacksmith’s wife. Three years earlier Rémy had published a treatise on the “abominable blasphemy” of witchcraft. In this he explained that witches obtained whatever powers they possessed by entering into a pact with the Devil, which he sealed by making a secret and insensible mark on their bodies. Once they were enlisted in his company, witches gathered in nocturnal assemblies  –​or “sabbats” –​where they joined in feasts and dances that dissolved into frenzies; they practised obscene rites in the presence of demons, culminating in their ritual supplication before Satan in the shape of a “hideous goat”. Rémy was interested in the many acts of maleficia that witches performed against their neighbours, and detailed these forensically in the pages of his book, but his main concern was the relationship between witches and the Devil. This was, he insisted, “the cause from which all the other manifestations of witchcraft have their origin and beginning”.15 Opinions like Rémy’s were by no means accepted by all educated Europeans, but his work contributed to an extensive and, by the 1590s, rapidly expanding body of scholarly literature. The central theme of this literature was the pact between the Devil and the witch. This idea had first been constructed in the fifteenth century by the monastic reformer Johannes Nider, and was later developed by the inquisitor

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Heinrich Kramer who found evidence of diabolism in the sorcery practised in German villages in the 1480s.16 By 1563, the idea that witches were in league with Satan was sufficiently well established to merit a lengthy rebuttal by the sceptical demonologist Johann Weyer which provoked a further round of publications defending the reality of the witch’s pact. The related concept of the sabbat was less well documented by the time that Rémy composed his text (1595); but it had been described at some length by the French jurist Jean Bodin in 1580 and the German suffragan bishop Peter Binsfeld in 1589. Thus, little in Rémy’s work was original, and little would have shocked a well-​informed contemporary with an interest in the world of demons. Equally, his outlook was somewhat detached from the concerns of most ordinary Europeans who still thought of witchcraft primarily in terms of malicious magic. How did these two conceptions of witchcraft interact? At the most practical (and perhaps the most important) level, the spread of demonological theory after the 1480s encouraged some jurisdictions to take the crime of witchcraft seriously. The medieval Church had generally regarded peasant allegations of harmful magic as superstitious; witch trials became possible only when churchmen and lawyers were prepared to believe such allegations. Beyond this, historians have been divided on the role played by elite theories of witchcraft in creating and sustaining prosecutions. Some have contended that the learned idea of a satanic conspiracy was a tool for the extension of political power. This view is consistent with the published work of some demonologists: Jean Bodin presented witchcraft as a form of treason against God that had to be opposed by the action of a strong prince; and according to Gerhild Scholz Williams (19), the French magistrate Pierre de Lancre perceived his campaign against witches in the Basque country in 1609 as the extension of good government into a dangerous wilderness. The pervasive belief that witchcraft represented the inversion of social norms –​as Stuart Clark shows in Chapter 15 –​made demonology an attractive medium for asserting the goodness of existing power structures. “It is well known”, wrote the author of a Scottish witchcraft pamphlet in 1691, “that the king is the child and servant of God, and they but servants of the Devil”.17 It followed that witches desired the “utter destruction” of the monarch, and that good Christians should honour him in order to frustrate their intentions. It is clear that the experts on witchcraft could support the interests of secular rulers  –​and the political culture of early modern Europe made this likely to happen –​but the claim that learned demonology was a driving force behind witch trials is more problematic. Recent research on the prosecution of witches suggests that popular anxieties about maleficium often played a more important role. In the German-​speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire, where some three-​ quarters of all executions took place, trials were normally driven from below. This pattern was evident in the dreadful cycle of persecutions that were sanctioned by the German “witch-​bishops” in the episcopal principalities of Trier, Mainz and Cologne between the 1580s and the 1630s. Wolfgang Behringer (10) has shown that these mass trials were initiated by petitions from villagers seeking relief from the disastrous harvests that blasted the rural economy in this period. As William

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Monter argues (21), the political weakness of the prince-​bishops probably made it difficult for them to resist such demands, despite the enormous disruption that the ensuing panics caused. In cases such as these, the development of demonological theory appears to have been a response to the appalling situation on the ground –​ though this response in itself could fuel the panic by promoting the idea of a satanic plot. In more settled conditions –​when the threat of maleficium was less urgent and government was more secure –​magistrates were more likely to constrain the prosecution of witches than to encourage it.18 The view that learned demonology was a response to popular fears of harmful magic –​a response that permitted witch trials to take place but did not, in general, instigate them –​explains a number of features of European witchcraft. The most intense period of prosecutions, between 1560 and 1660, coincided with a series of crises in the agricultural economy that made the destructive power of maleficium appallingly relevant.19 As well as the pattern of trials, the strikingly disproportionate number of women among the accused is probably best explained by popular beliefs rather than learned theories. Approximately three-​quarters of those executed for witchcraft in Europe and North America were female. The preponderance of women among the accused was frequently noted by experts in the sixteenth century; but it was emphasised most often by the opponents of witch trials, such as Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot, who argued that confessions to witchcraft were more common among women because they were more susceptible than men to mental illness. As late as 1616, Alexander Roberts found it necessary to point out that some men did practise witchcraft in order to counter the claim “that there be no witches at all, but a sort of melancholic, aged and ignorant women, deluded in their imagination”.20 It seems likely that women were accused more often than men because the popular image of the witch had always been female. In their study of allegations of illicit magic brought to the ecclesiastical court in Canterbury between 1396 and 1543, Karen Jones and Michael Zell find that 15 women, and not a single man, were reported for cursing and other forms of hostile magic (27). They conclude that the stereotype of the female witch was already rooted in popular culture before the widespread prosecution of witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Michael Bailey points out in this book (3), Johannes Nider was following popular tradition when he became the first demonologist to identify witchcraft as a particularly feminine crime in the 1430s. If the men who developed and promulgated the concept of satanic witchcraft did not initiate the majority of trials, they were in a position to stop them. Sceptical lawyers and churchmen could, and often did, prevent the prosecution of witches. This was the case across Europe until the last decades of the Middle Ages, when the Church discredited allegations of maleficium and the legal apparatus required to pursue them did not exist. In the period that followed, the Roman Inquisition proceeded with great caution in cases of witchcraft, and refused to credit even apparently spontaneous and voluntary confessions.21 More famously, the inquisitor Alonso Salazar put an end to the Basque witch trials in 1612; and in 1692, the Massachusetts pastor Increase Mather persuaded the authorities to suspend the

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trial of witches in Salem.22 Such incidents raise questions about the responsibility, even culpability, of those involved in witchcraft prosecutions. Given the material and intellectual context of the early modern world, is it possible to make fair judgements about the conduct of people such as Nicolas Rémy and the witnesses who testified against Françatte Camont? Or are such attempts inevitably destined to reproduce the preconceptions of our own time?

“PRESENT-​CENTREDNESS” AND LESSONS FROM THE PAST The most profound obstacle to understanding the witch trials of the early modern period is also the most obvious: most Western people find the claims associated with witchcraft impossible to believe. This applies to the acts of maleficium described by the neighbours of Françatte Camont as well as the demonic pact and night flights to the sabbat that were recorded in her final confession. As Julian Goodare has noted (43), our incredulity in the face of such material can lead to a search for ulterior motives behind the prosecution of witches: since many of the accusations now seem impossible, we find it hard to accept that they were made in good faith. Our lack of belief in witchcraft can also impair our understanding of the men and women for whom it was a cultural reality. At its worst, this encourages the stereotype of such people as “hysterical” or brutish that still dominates mass-​media representations of witch trials. More subtly, our inability to take their accounts at face value makes it hard for us to sympathise with their experiences. It is too easy to forget that their feelings and deeds were based on assumptions that are different to ours. In the case of maleficium, the existence of good and bad magic was so widely accepted that it constituted an aspect of “common sense”. It is the characteristic of common sense to present itself as empirically self-​evident and to deny its foundation in a particular view of the world. In the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “common sense represents matters –​that is, certain matters and not others –​as being what they are in the simple nature of the case”.23 This quality means that its operation often goes unacknowledged; but occasionally it surfaces explicitly in accounts of witchcraft. Martín Del Rio opened his discussion of maleficium in Investigations into Magic (c. 1600)  by stating that “I am not arguing about whether it exists or not. I take for granted that it does.”24 In the same spirit, the witnesses against Françatte Camont did not ask themselves if the crimes she was accused of were possible –​any more than the witnesses in a case of poisoning would have questioned the possibility that people can be poisoned. Rather, they considered whether maleficium was a reasonable explanation for the events they had observed. Some were equivocal or uncertain. The deposition of one woman, who fell ill after being threatened by the suspect, recorded that “if Françatte was a witch as reputed, in view of her threats, she thought she was the cause”. Another witness had suffered a serious fall after Camont had allegedly uttered words against him, though these had not been spoken to his face; he asserted in his statement that “he did not think she had caused his fall, and if she had he

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forgave her”.25 For many of those who made depositions against the blacksmith’s wife, it appears that her behaviour towards them and the reputation that she had acquired over many years, and which was confirmed by the testimony of others, made her maleficium a viable explanation for their particular misfortunes. There was, of course, a tragic circularity in this process. But their statements support the assertion of Robin Briggs (6) that early modern European villages “were not populated by a race of credulous half-​wits who attributed any and every misfortune to witchcraft”. Not only was maleficium a plausible explanation for some afflictions; it is also likely that some of those accused were actually guilty of attempting to commit the crime. In his work on witch trials in the Duchy of Württemberg, Edward Bever has identified a number of cases in which this appears to have been so. He considers some of the suspects involved in Chapter 9. Bever also draws attention to the probable psychosomatic effects of witchcraft within communities that accepted healing and harming magic as a given. There are strong medical reasons, he argues, to assume that some people really did suffer physical harm because they perceived themselves to be the targets of maleficium.26 These effects could occur even when the suspect had not deliberately attempted to cause injury:  ill-​feeling between neighbours or members of families, combined with fear of “occult” harm, was sufficient to induce maladies such as lameness and impotence.27 In such cases, the diagnosis of bewitchment was consistent with the medical facts. Bever concludes that pre-​modern people were not wrong “to think that their neighbors might try, or might be able, to injure them … through various means associated with witchcraft”. Witch beliefs could also provide a satisfactory explanation for common medical conditions. The phenomenon of “sleep paralysis”, in which people awake from sleep to find themselves unable to move and feel a weight pressing on their chest, was recognised as a form of maleficium in early modern Europe. In 1601, for example, Henri Boguet described how a man bewitched by his wife “could not move from his bed, and seemed to be caught fast by the legs, and was not even able to cry out”.28 As it has been estimated that around one-​third of the population experiences this disorder at one time or another, many readers will recognise these symptoms; others may recall the more frightening experience of “sleep paralysis attack”, in which the same condition is combined with menacing hallucinations and a powerful sense of dread. In a recent study of pre-​modern perceptions of this syndrome, Owen Davies suggests that victims of this kind of maleficium “were clearly not just dreaming, and nor were they liars, mentally ill, or on drugs”. Rather, they were “normal people who experienced something extraordinary but natural, and who made sense of it in the best way they could, based on what they believed and what they thought they saw, heard, and felt.”29 If maleficium belonged to the realm of common knowledge, the claims of educated demonologists were always open to question. The centre-​piece of learned witchcraft theory –​that witches were compacted to the Devil –​was largely absent from the allegations that ordinary people brought to the courts. The same was true of the sabbat. This latter concept developed slowly and enjoyed greater prominence in the work of some theorists than others. Most importantly, expert opinion was

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divided on whether witches should be prosecuted at all. Indeed, it was the publication of Johann Weyer’s highly sceptical treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) that launched the cycle of theoretical witchcraft literature in the second half of the sixteenth century. For Weyer, and later critics such as Reginald Scot and Friedrich Spee, the women condemned as witches were mostly impotent crones who had been induced to confess by melancholy, torture or demonic delusions. The participants on both sides of the debate, however, rooted their opinions in a common body of knowledge derived from scripture and the church fathers. The Bible condemned witches and consulters with “familiar spirits” (Deut. 18: 10–​12), and confirmed the existence of the Devil and his ability to cause afflictions and carry bodies through the air (Matt. 4: 5). As a consequence, both the proponents and critics of witch trials agreed that the demonic pact and the sabbat were theoretically possible. As Elisa Slattery notes (26), Johann Weyer was even more pessimistic about the Devil’s power in the world than the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum. He also devoted a chapter of his book to proving that the Devil “truly snatches up bodies and carries them through the air”.30 Friedrich Spee asserted in 1631 that the existence of witchcraft “cannot be denied without rashness and all the marks of preposterous opinion”.31 These authors differed from their opponents in their attitude towards the treatment of alleged witches, not the reality of the crime itself. The philosopher Donald Davidson suggests that “those who can understand one another’s speech must share a view of the world, whether or not that view is correct”; he contends that it is therefore impossible to have a meaningful disagreement without “a background of shared belief”.32 Learned disputes about witchcraft in the early modern period appear to exemplify this point. For those who advocated the trial of satanic witches, the evidence from scripture and other authorities was supplemented by the detailed confessions of the witches themselves. Jean Bodin wrote that these were the real experts on the subject, whose testimony proved beyond doubt the enormous reach of Satan’s conspiracy.33 Some confessions were spontaneous; but since witchcraft was a secret and exceptionally dangerous crime, it was necessary to coerce many from their silence or denials with the use of torture. This was applied only when there were “sufficient grounds” to assume that the suspect was guilty, and its purpose was to obtain information that might otherwise be concealed. These grounds were often furnished, as in the case of Françatte Camont, by the testimony of neighbours to a long career of maleficium. As her confession also demonstrates, it was usually under torture that details of diabolism emerged. The reason for this becomes apparent when one reads the guidance for interrogation included in some demonological texts. In his enormously influential Investigations into Magic, Martín Del Rio listed the questions that a judge could ask: What profession do they make to the evil spirit? How do they usually come to make profession and what ceremonies and rituals do they use therein? What do they swear to the evil spirit they will do? What form of words is used in the oath? … What rewards do they have and what rewards do they hope to have from their prince, the

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Evil Spirit? From which simple compound mixtures do they make the ointments with which they plaster their bodies when they go to the assemblies? With what do they make other venomous malefices? … What kind of sacrifices do they make and how are these celebrated? Do they offer prayers and gifts to the evil spirit? Do they pray for things during a special ceremony while they make their aforesaid profession of loyalty? In the passage that follows, Del Rio advises the judge to avoid torture if he can otherwise arrive at the truth. He acknowledges that torture can yield unreliable testimony, and states that the suspect should not be injured during the process. Nonetheless, he concedes that some “laceration” and “breakage of the bones and muscles … are scarcely avoidable”.34 Placed as it is within the most authoritative treatise on witchcraft in circulation in the seventeenth century, this text exemplifies the process by which the science of demonology created its own subject. As Virginia Krause points out (32), confessing witches were required to produce personal testimonies to validate the existence of their crime, and composed these from the narratives their interrogators supplied; the demonologists reserved the right to interpret these testimonies; and they published the results to affirm the threat of the witch cult and the need for torture to help to uncover and destroy it. No vicious circle was ever more vicious. At a distance of 400 years, and equipped with a world view that makes many of the events described in these confessions incredible, it is easy to see the lethal circularity at work. It was far harder, of course, for the participants to appreciate what was happening. For a start, the sheer number of confessions discouraged disbelief: even if some testimonies were false, this did not invalidate the overwhelming consensus of the others. As Lyndal Roper points out (34), contemporaries were capable of dismissing some confessions while retaining a firm belief in satanic witchcraft as a whole. Potential doubts were also eased by the consistency of details in confessions recorded from different parts of Europe, which seemed to prove that the witch cult was real.35 The relative novelty of the mass media may explain the apparent naivety of men such as Jean Bodin and Martín Del Rio in this regard; the construction of satanic witchcraft coincided with the first age of print, when the effects of “media feedback” were not readily appreciated. Once the reality of the sabbat was accepted, its peculiar nature also presented problems that seemed to legitimise the use of torture to obtain confessions. The members of the sect gathered and committed their crimes in secret, so the only evidence against them was likely to come from insiders; but such people were not inclined to offer information freely. For many, the torture required to break their silence was more defensible than allowing the guilty to escape: witchcraft was the most appalling and dangerous of all crimes and, as Rémy observed, “the peace and safety of the public must be the first consideration”.36 Finally, judges were often presented with detailed and extensive allegations of witchcraft from local communities, though this normally centred on harmful magic rather than diabolism. Faced with apparently compelling evidence against a suspect, but frustrated by

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the person’s denials, the decision to proceed to torture was perhaps not difficult to understand. If such actions made sense in the context of the early modern world, it does not mean that the men who encouraged or conducted witch trials can be excused from blame. Rather, a “past-​centred” understanding of Nicolas Rémy and his fellows can help to clarify the nature of their mistakes and their responsibility for them. Others shared the same core assumptions and heard similar allegations, but were able, nonetheless, to reach different conclusions about the treatment of alleged witches. A theme that ran through the work of sceptical writers was the need for caution. This was often expressed in relation to the demonic nature of the crime: critics such as Johann Weyer, Friedrich Spee and Increase Mather claimed that innocent people could be condemned as the result of diabolical illusions. Just as the Devil could, in theory, transport people through the air to the sabbat, he could also plant delusions in their minds to confound justice.37 Thus the utmost care was needed to establish that suspects were telling the truth. Confessions could also proceed from mental imbalance, or “melancholy”, or the overheated imagination of young children. For Spee, the very aspects that encouraged others to proceed “harshly” against supposed witches were reasons to exercise circumspection: This crime is completely secret, as everyone admits. It is usually committed at night amid shadows and in disguise. Therefore you need great prudence and reflection to bring it properly to light. … Since the matter is so serious and so enormous, can there be any diligence great enough to prevent an error occurring which also entangles innocent people in these trials?38 In 1611, Alonso de Salazar Frías, a canon lawyer in the service of the Spanish Inquisition, began an extended investigation of witchcraft in the Basque country which proved that such diligence was possible. Following the execution of 11 witches at Logroño, Salazar obtained an Edict of Grace that allowed others to confess without penalty. He examined the statements of more than a thousand alleged witches and the witnesses against them, and tested these for internal consistency and external corroboration. In a series of nine reports between 1611 and 1623, he concluded that all the confessions were false. Most were based on dreams that, the inquisitor surmised, may have been sent by the Devil to create uproar and confusion. Allegations of maleficium derived from “rumour-​mongering” initiated by the original trial, which created an atmosphere in which “there is no fainting fit, illness, death or accident that is not attributed to witches”.39 Salazar’s intervention effectively ended witch trials in Spain. The difference between Salazar and less careful judges such as Nicolas Rémy was not a matter of belief; rather, it was the Spaniard’s judicious caution in circumstances where human lives were at stake. This was exemplified by his attitude towards torture. Like Bodin, he viewed confessions as the most important evidence against witches; but in his view, “the truth was inevitably distorted” when

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confessions were obtained by duress.40 Critics of witch trials frequently noted the tainted nature of statements made under torture in cases that required, in Michel de Montaigne’s words, “sharp and luminous evidence”.41 Historians have confirmed this view. As Brian Levack points out (20), convictions for witchcraft increased markedly wherever torture was introduced in the interrogation of suspects, and restrictions on its use contributed to the end of prosecutions. By seeing the need for caution in the face of “invisible” and baffling crimes, some contemporary judges and churchmen rejected the use of torture without doubting the reality of satanic witchcraft; and this highlights the rashness of others who took a different course. This rashness may well have been driven by idealism or genuine fears of a satanic plot, but the tragedies that ensued were avoidable nonetheless. Perhaps the most important lesson from the age of witch trials was set out by Friedrich Spee in 1631: the threat of appalling and secret conspiracies requires the highest standards of justice from those who seek to defeat them. If the crime “is difficult to prove, then there is need for stronger, not weaker proofs”, and “if it is hidden and shrouded in shadows, then there is need for more light, not less, in order to illuminate it”.42

Notes The depositions from this case are available in Brian P. Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd edn, Routledge 2015), ch. 38. The deposition cited here was made by Aubert’s widow. 2 Ibid., 204–​5,  207–​8. 3 Katharine Hodgkin, “Reasoning with Unreason: Visions, Witchcraft and Madness in Early Modern England”, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Macmillan 2001), 217. 4 For an excellent overview of magical beliefs in the period, see Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Magic and Ritual in Pre-​Modern Europe (Bloomsbury 2000). 5 Martín Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P.  G. Maxwell-​ Stuart (Manchester University Press 2000), 66–​7. 6 Wilson, Magical Universe, 256–​7; 264–​5, 268. 7 Nicolas Rémy, Demonolatry (1595), ed. Montague Summers, trans. E.  A. Ashwin (John Rodker 1929), 119, 160. 8 Henry Boguet, An Examen of Witches (1602), ed. Montague Summers, trans. E. A. Ashwin (John Rodker 1929), 90. 9 Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, 80. 10 Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (1616), 17. 11 For an example of counter-​magic against the “theft of milk” from nursing mothers, see Wilson, Magical Universe, 266. 12 Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, 204. 13 Ibid., 205. 1

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Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-​Hunts (Polity Press 2004), 85–​7. For the prevalence of charming and counter-​magic in early modern Europe, see Jonathan Roper, Charms and Charming in Europe (Macmillan 2005). 15 Rémy, Demonolatry, xi, 66. 16 For the contributions of Nider and Kramer to the concept of satanic witchcraft, see Chapters 3 and 4 in this volume respectively. 17 Newes From Scotland (1591), 29. 18 Brian Levack presents this argument in detail in Chapter 20 in this volume. 19 In Chapter 10, Behringer attributes these crises to the cooling of Europe during the “Little Ice Age”. See also Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (Basic Books 2001), and Astrid E. J. Ogilvie, ed., The Iceberg in the Mist: Northern Research in Pursuit of a Little Ice Age (Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001). 20 Roberts, Treatise,  4–​5. 21 See, for example, Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Asmodea: A Nun-​Witch in Eighteenth-​ Century Tuscany”, in Kathryn A. Edwards, ed., Werewolves, Witches and Wandering Spirits (Truman State University Press 2002). 22 For extracts from Salazar’s report on the confessions of the Basque witches, see Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, ch. 64. 23 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (Fontana 1993), 85. 24 Del Rio, Investigations, 117. 25 Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, 204. 26 Robin Briggs makes the same point in relation to “voodoo death” in Chapter 6. 27 The fact that these afflictions resulted from interpersonal conflicts may help to explain the emphasis on reconciliation between the victim and the “witch” that occurs in many accounts of early modern bewitchment. Such reconciliations may well have produced a cure. 28 Boguet, Examen, 47. 29 Owen Davies, “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis and Witchcraft Accusations”, Folklore, 114:2 (2003), 199. 30 George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, eds, trans. John Shea, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum, Vol. 73, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991, 197. 31 Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, trans. Marcus Hellyer (University of Virginia Press 2003), 15. 32 Davidson is quoted in C.  A. D.  Coady, Testimony:  A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press 1992), 156. 33 Jean Bodin, On the Demon-​Mania of Witches, ed. Jonathan L. Pearl, trans. Randy A.  Scott (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto 1995), 43. 34 Del Rio, Investigations, 215–​16. 35 A similar process occurred in the construction of “satanic abuse” in the United States and the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. 36 Rémy, Demonolatry, 185. 37 Alison Rowlands, Chapter 17 in this volume. 14

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38 Spee, Cautio Criminalis,  23–​4. 39 Selections from Salazar’s reports on the visitation can be found in Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, ch. 64. 40 Levack, Witchcraft Sourcebook, 364. 41 Montaigne’s critique of witch trials is available in Alan Kors and Edward Peters, eds, Witchcraft in Europe, 1100–​ 1700:  A Documentary History (University of Pennsylvania Press 1972), ch. 37. 42 Spee, Cautio Criminalis, 145.

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PART ONE

Medieval origins

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R I T I N G I N T H E L A S T Q U A R T E R O F the twelfth century, the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall described the extraordinary climax of a heresy trial in the French town of Rheims. The trial ended with the burning of an unnamed young woman, who faced her death so “steadfastly and eagerly” that it astonished even those responsible for her prosecution. The woman was a humble member of a heretical community whose alleged leader was tried alongside her, and was also sentenced to the flames. The older woman escaped her punishment, however, through the intervention of a demon: When the fire had been lighted in the city and the officials were about to drag them to the punishment decreed, that mistress of vile error exclaimed, “Oh foolish and unjust judges, do you think now to burn me in your flames?” … With these words, she suddenly pulled a ball of thread from her bosom and threw it out of a large window, but keeping the end of the thread in her hands; then in a loud voice, audible to all, she said “Catch!” At the word, she was lifted from the earth right before everyone’s eyes and followed the ball out [of] the window in rapid flight, sustained, we believe, by the ministry of the evil spirits who once caught Simon Magus up into the air. What became of that wicked woman or whither she was transported, the onlookers could in no wise discover.

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This strange tale underlined Ralph’s conviction that the ultimate source of all heresy was the Devil. The link between religious dissent and Satan was reinforced in the conclusion of his account. Here he offered a brief exposition of the doctrines held by the two women, which conformed closely to the known beliefs of the Cathars, a heretical Christian sect that flourished in southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. At the end of this passage, Ralph added a dark rumour that was apparently circulating about the Cathars’ practices: “Some also say that in their subterranean haunts they perform execrable sacrifices to their Lucifer at stated times, and that there they enact certain sacrilegious infamies.”1 Ralph’s account suggests that one of the key elements of the theory of witchcraft –​the belief in a clandestine society of Devil-​worshippers –​was already known to some educated men in the High Middle Ages. Indeed, the charge of meeting in secret to perform “sacrilegious infamies” had been made against dissenting groups since antiquity, when it was levelled against the early Christians.2 It would be misleading, however, to assume that the threat of witchcraft was a major preoccupation in medieval Europe. While the heretics at Rheims were explicitly linked to the Devil in Ralph’s chronicle, and rumoured to have participated in diabolical rites, they were formally accused of heresy rather than satanism; and his account makes no reference to the practice of harmful magic, which played a crucial role in the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Trials for witchcraft were uncommon at the time of the events in Rheims, and this remained the case for at least a hundred years. It was once believed that major witch persecutions took place in France during the fourteenth century, but the documents supporting this claim were exposed as forgeries in 1975.3 This discovery led to a “chronological revolution” in the history of witch trials, which redefined the subject as an essentially modern phenomenon.4 The concept of witchcraft that emerged in the late Middle Ages was a composite of several elements that existed separately until the 1430s. The blending of these elements was encouraged by intellectual and legal developments in the fifteenth century. In 1437, the Dominican scholar Johannes Nider was one of the first churchmen to link allegations of Devil worship such as those recorded at Rheims with the practice of sorcery. As Michael Bailey notes (3), Nider used the idea of satanic witchcraft as part of his broader campaign to raise standards of Christian behaviour in order to combat the Devil’s power. For Norman Cohn (2), fears of a satanic cult also reflected concerns about the threat of social and political disorder. As the ultimate symbol of chaos, the Devil emerged as the natural leader of a secret plot to destroy Christendom. The attempt to eliminate witches was, therefore, “an urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”.5

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In his account of satanic witchcraft, Johannes Nider stressed the ability of the Devil to cause physical harm as much as his traditional role as a spiritual tempter. Henry Institoris, the principal author of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), also emphasised Satan’s power to bring about illness and misfortune through his surrogates in the witch cult. By focusing on demonic acts of maleficium, these men bridged the gap between learned demonology and peasant fears of harmful sorcery. This meant that inquisitors familiar with the new doctrine could take seriously the allegations of destructive magic that had always circulated in medieval communities; indeed, these allegations now furnished evidence of a powerful demonic threat. According to Hans Peter Broedel (4), the main achievement of the Malleus was to align academic theology with the beliefs of ordinary people. This process was assisted by the emergence of an iconography of witchcraft that combined popular ideas with learned demonology. As Charles Zika shows in Chapter 5, the woodcuts that accompanied Ulrich Molitor’s treatise on witchcraft in 1489 portrayed the role of the Devil in the crime while eliding the theological subtleties of the text, and helped to build a “visual language” of diabolical sorcery that could appeal at many social levels. The emerging synthesis of theology and popular belief meant that widespread fears of maleficium could be used to demonstrate the threat of satanic witchcraft. This process was further encouraged by changes in the legal system in the fifteenth century. Richard Kieckhefer (1) suggests that the introduction of inquisitorial procedures in the European courts, and the abolition of the principle of talion, whereby lay accusers faced serious penalties if their allegations could not be proven, made it easier to bring successful prosecutions for secret crimes like destructive magic. Confessions were also easier to obtain as the use of torture became more widely accepted. In this regard, the logic of demonology created a vicious circle:  Institoris argued that the unparalleled threat posed by satanic witchcraft, together with the hidden nature of the crime, meant that the normal restraints on the use of judicial torture should be waived. By the late fifteenth century, then, a body of learned theory had emerged that made possible the persecution of an imaginary sect of Devil-​worshipping witches. This was one of the foundations of the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it did not make that outcome inevitable. Elite groups were increasingly concerned with the threat of satanism at the close of the Middle Ages, and this concern was expressed in a series of witchcraft prosecutions; but their number was still relatively small, despite the lethal potential of the ideas promulgated in the Malleus Maleficarum. The more intense period of witch trials that followed was caused by the social, religious and political circumstances of early modern Europe. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that the sufferings of late medieval heretics can be viewed as part of a great European campaign to rid the world of witches.

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Notes Ralph’s text is reproduced in Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York 1969), 251–​4. 2 See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edn (Pimlico 1993), ch. 1. 3 See Chapter 1 in this volume by Richard Kieckhefer. Kieckhefer’s conclusions were confirmed independently by Cohn in Europe’s Inner Demons, 187–​93. 4 Gustav Henningsen and Bengt Ankarloo, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford 1990), Editors’ Introduction, 2. 5 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, Preface, xi. 1

 

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Chapter 1

Richard Kieckhefer WITCH TRIALS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

A

L O N G W I T H N O R M A N C O H N (2), Richard Kieckhefer established the chronology of medieval witch trials that is now accepted by scholars in the field. The modern concept of witchcraft developed gradually in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here Kieckhefer identifies four phases in this process. It was not until the last of these phases, from around 1435 to 1500, that the ideas of nocturnal Devil-​worship, the satanic pact, and harmful magic were combined in a series of major trials, and even in this period, such trials were still less common than prosecutions for simple sorcery. Before the 1430s, the various elements that would eventually coalesce into the witchcraft stereotype surfaced occasionally in the prosecution of magicians and heretics, and politically inspired actions like the suppression of the Order of the Knights Templar in fourteenth-​ century France. Kieckhefer shows how these elements provided the raw material for the fantasy of satanic witchcraft that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages; he also demonstrates that the lethal potential of this fantasy was only partially realised before the 1500s.

In comparison with the mass persecution of following centuries, the witch trials of the years 1300–​1500 were few and sporadic. There was seldom a sustained effort in any one community to exterminate witches, as occurred frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even in years when there were multiple

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trials, they generally occurred in widely separate towns.Yet historians have rightly viewed the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as witnessing the initial stages of the European witch craze. It was during this period that prosecution of witches first gained real momentum. And the intensified hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be explained only as outgrowths of an earlier obsession. Even during the period 1300–​1500, though, one must distinguish various stages of prosecution. On the one hand, the rate of frequency changed sharply; on the other, the nature of the accusations altered significantly. Bearing in mind both the intensity and the form of witch-​hunting, one can perceive four broad periods during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, extending roughly from 1300 to 1330, from 1330 to 1375, from 1375 to 1435, and from 1435 to 1500. During the first period, the rate of frequency was low indeed. For all of Europe, the trials occurred on an average of roughly one each year. Slightly more than half of these come from France; among other countries, only England and Germany had significant numbers of witch-​hunts.1 Probably the most remarkable feature of the trials during this first phase is their political character. Almost two-​ thirds of them involved prominent ecclesiastical or secular figures, sometimes as suspects but most commonly as sorcerers’ victims. … The best-​known political trials of the early fourteenth century are those of the Templars and of Dame Alice Kyteler. The Templars, tried on the urging of the French crown, were convicted of charges that were certainly exaggerated, if not wholly fabricated. In addition to sodomy, blasphemy, and other species of immorality, they are supposed to have venerated the Devil in the guise of an animal named Baphomet.2 Whereas the motives in many political trials are only vaguely ascertainable, the desire of Philip IV to confiscate the Templars’ abundant wealth is notorious. Almost as apparent were the political motives in the trial of Alice Kyteler, an aristocratic lady of Ireland. This woman had family relations with numerous political leaders, and the best accounts of her trial explain it as largely an outgrowth of feuds among these aristocratic families. Her accusers charged that she had killed three husbands and reduced a fourth to debility through sorcery; she had furthermore maintained an imp named Robert Artisson, and engaged in diabolical rituals. The prominence of the sorcerers and victims in these trials is of the utmost importance. Though in some instances the accusers may have raised the charges cynically as ways of undermining their opponents, in the majority of cases the charges were no doubt based on sincere belief in the reality of witchcraft. Yet the fact that these trials reflect concern with sorcery and invocation is less important in the long run than the likelihood that they intensified this concern throughout western Europe. The notoriety and suggestive force of these episodes may have

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been largely responsible for the gradual increase in witch prosecution through the following generations. Apart from the political character of prosecution during the first phase, its most significant feature is the mildness of the allegations. Sorcery was by far the most common charge; invocation was not so frequent, but was known; diabolism, though, was extremely rare, and even when alleged it was usually not described in great detail. Even in the trials of the Templars, and Alice Kyteler, the depictions of Devil-​worship are less lurid than in later trials. Pope John XXII routinely spoke of pacts with the Devil, yet did not specify whether these agreements led to diabolism or merely to invocation of the Devil. … Long before it appeared independently or in connection with sorcery, the charge of diabolism had been used in trials against heretics. No matter how rigorous their moral codes might be, medieval heretics such as the Cathars and Waldensians were believed to reject moral law entirely  –​a position known as antinomianism. They allegedly held nocturnal orgies, and in some instances were thought of as paying homage to the Devil.3 In a few trials of the early fourteenth century charges of diabolism seem to have been made against heretics, in the specific form of Luciferanism. The basic premise of Luciferanism, if indeed anyone actually subscribed to the doctrine, seems to have been that Lucifer would eventually attain salvation, and would even rule over creation in place of the Christian God. Churchmen accused Luciferans of venerating the Devil in underground assemblies. To be sure, in most instances the charge of Luciferanism is related only in chronicles, usually of questionable veracity. Thus it is not even fully certain that the accusation actually arose in the heresy trials, much less that it was accurate. In any case, the allegation was set forth a few times in the years 1300–​30, though its importance was apparently minimal. The second period, from around 1330 to about 1375, is like the first in that the accusations were still for the most part relatively tame, but unlike it in that trials connected with important public figures were virtually unknown. … Largely because of the decrease in political trials, the rate of prosecution in the second phase was slightly less than in the first. With a few exceptions, the trials occurred in France and Germany, with only a scattering of cases in England and Italy. Once again, apart from a few trials for Luciferanism, the charge of diabolism was rare and undeveloped. … It was during the third period, roughly 1375 to 1435, that a twofold change took place. Throughout these years there was first of all a steady increase in the number of trials for witchcraft in general, and second an intensification of concern for diabolism. The rise of prosecution during this period may in part be an optical illusion caused by the general increase in extant judicial records from these years.

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But it is surely not coincidental that the later part of the fourteenth century was the period when in many places municipal courts began to adopt inquisitorial procedure. Once such procedure was adopted, even if the judges were not yet familiar with theological notions of diabolism, there would be machinery appropriate for handling sorcery charges that arose among the populace. Perhaps the most important feature of inquisitorial procedure, for present purposes, is that it did away with the earlier custom of judicial penalties for an accuser who failed to substantiate his charges. In trials for sorcery it would be particularly difficult for the accuser to prove his case, because the alleged culprit was not connected with the victim in the usual ways; the sorcerer might carry out his deed several blocks away from the scene of the crime. Prior to the development of inquisitorial justice, it must therefore have been particularly dangerous to accuse someone of sorcery or of witchcraft generally. In one peculiar case from Strasbourg in the mid-​ fifteenth century the earlier, accusatory procedure was revived: a man accused a woman of weather magic, and when he was unable to prove his claim he himself was drowned. If those judicial rules had been maintained throughout Europe, no doubt very few people would have raised accusations of this kind, difficult as they were to prove. … Indirectly, the spurt of witch trials beginning around 1375 may also have been influenced by the plague. The long-​term social effects of the plague, particularly in those areas where it brought migration from the countryside into the cities, may have stimulated social friction that could have aggravated the preoccupation with witchcraft. … The overall acceleration can be traced most clearly for Switzerland, where conditions in modern times have favoured the survival of documents that might have been lost elsewhere. Prior to 1383 there are no known instances of sorcery in Swiss territories. In the last decades of the fourteenth century there were four minor cases, each involving a single sorceress –​though in one of these there seem to have been no judicial proceedings. Around the turn of the century there was a famous outbreak in Simmenthal under the secular judge Peter of Greyerz [also known as Peter of Bern], who related his discoveries to the Dominican John Nider. The original records do not survive, but if one can believe the much later account that Nider wrote, the subjects in this case were accused of diabolism as well as sorcery. They were supposed to have made homage to their ‘little master’, repudiated the Catholic religion, and devoured a total of thirteen infants. When the authorities sought to capture one member of the ‘sect’, their hands began to tremble uncontrollably, and their noses were assaulted with a loathsome stench. Yet the judge was zealous, and despite severe opposition from the witches he managed to apprehend and burn numerous offenders.4

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Between the turn of the century and the year 1435 there were more than twenty trials in various towns of Switzerland, notably Lucerne, Basel, and Fribourg. In most, the charges were simple sorcery. In 1428 there was extensive persecution in Valais; whereas the fragmentary judicial documents speak only of sorcery, the chronicler John Fründ gives abundant details about a Devil-​worshipping cult in southern Switzerland.5 According to Fründ, the Devil seeks out men who are in a state of doubt or despair, and promises to make them rich, powerful, and successful, and to punish those who have done them harm. First, though, they must dedicate themselves to him, deny their former faith, and make some kind of sacrifice to him –​a black sheep, one of their bodily limbs (to be claimed after death), or some other offering. Fründ tells of wild assemblies in which the Devil appeared in bestial form and encouraged the witches to commit foul deeds; the witches are supposed to have flown to orgies or elsewhere on chairs that they anointed with an unguent. Though not typical of Swiss witch cases during this period, this chronicler’s account shows the kind of extravagant detail that was beginning to be associated with maleficent activities. Italy, like Switzerland, joined with France and Germany in the forefront of witch persecution during the third period. But there is another, more important respect in which Italy took the lead at this time: with the exception of the trials in Simmenthal and Valais, it is from Italy that the only definite instances of prosecution for diabolism come during this phase. … The trials from Italy during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were still for the most part restrained; the allegation of diabolism, though more common, was still often vague and peripheral. Thus a Florentine subject named Niccolò Consigli was accused primarily of sorcery, necromancy, and unlicensed exorcism, but an additional charge was that, while imprisoned, he dedicated himself to demons named Lucifer, Satan, and Beelzebub. No further elements of diabolism are mentioned in the records of his proceedings.6 In a small minority of Italian trials, one finds a mixture of charges that cannot be categorized as either sorcery or typical diabolism. For example, a Milanese woman who went before an inquisitor in 1384 confessed that each Thursday evening she went to an assembly led by a woman named Oriente. There was every kind of animal at this meeting except the ass, which was excluded because of its role in Christ’s passion. Oriente gave instruction to her followers, foretold future events, and revealed occult matters. After their deaths, the followers’ souls were received by the signora. Perhaps the most important statement by the accused woman is that she had never confessed her involvement in these activities, because it had never occurred to her that they were sinful. The details of this case, which do not at

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all fit the stereotype of contemporary demonology, suggest that the woman was merely engaging in a popular festivity or ritual. The gatherings that she attended may have survived from before the conversion of the Italian countryside to Christianity; yet it would be misleading to speak of them as conscious and deliberate pagan survivals since the participants seem to have viewed themselves as Christians, despite the reservations that churchmen evidently held. In an age when notions of diabolism were becoming important, however, a sinister interpretation of these activities lay readily at hand. When this woman relapsed into her illicit activities she again fell prey to an inquisitor, and this time went to the stake for outright diabolism.7 Why did diabolism enter into witch trials during this period? The component elements of diabolism –​veneration of Satan, nefarious assemblies, flight through the air, formation of a pact, and so forth –​had been known for centuries. They had arisen in trials of heretics as early as the eleventh century. In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, jurists and theologians tended increasingly to view witchcraft as a form of heresy. The theological faculty of the University of Paris deliberated in 1398 whether maleficia, or acts of sorcery, entailed idolatry and apostasy if they were accomplished through a tacit or express pact with the Devil. The conclusion reached was that such deeds did involve idolatry and apostasy, and were thus tantamount to heresy. This decision –​which was merely the culmination of a series of writings to the same basic effect –​was intended to justify the prosecution of witchcraft by inquisitors, whose main task was supposed to be the extirpation of heresy. A secondary result of this definition of witchcraft as heresy was that the stereotypes earlier found in heresy trials now increasingly transferred to witch trials. The new obsession with diabolism was also related to developments in the theological literature of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which set forth all the elements of diabolism in great, pornographic detail. The first of these writings were brief treatises, or sections in judicial manuals; for the most part they were technical works, yet they evidently circulated widely among the people engaged in prosecution. … The full force of the new composite notion of witchcraft came only in the fourth phase of witch prosecution, from around 1435 to 1500. This is the longest of the four stages, and in virtually every way the most important. Trials were particularly frequent during the years 1455–​60 and 1480–​5, while during the intervening years the rate of prosecution remained higher than it had been in any previous period. The intense witch-​hunting of this stage anticipated, if it did not equal, the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Once again there is correlation between judicial and literary developments. Around the year 1435,

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an extended and non-​technical account of Devil-​worship was produced with the fifth book of John Nider’s Formicarius. Further writings followed; the publication of Jacob Sprenger and Henry Institoris’ Malleus Maleficarum in 1487 made available a fully developed manual for witch hunters. Even if these writings were not solely responsible for the acceleration of trials, they surely must have contributed greatly towards that result. By far the majority of cases during this final period occurred in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Only a few took place in England and Italy, and virtually none in further countries. Once again, the majority of trials were for sorcery alone, or for vaguely specified ‘witchcraft’, with no specific allegation of diabolism. Yet in addition there were now many trials throughout Europe in which diabolism was charged, and when it came forth at all it was usually the prominent allegation. Thus, more than any previous period, this fourth phase was a time of sensational trials. Some of the earlier political trials –​those of the early fourteenth century, and especially that of Joan of Arc in 1431 –​had aroused widespread attention. But in the later fifteenth century the charge of diabolism or even sorcery by itself, regardless of political implications, was enough to produce a dramatic episode. In the mid-​fifteenth century an epidemic that struck a French town resulted in vigilante prosecution of sorceresses thought to be culpable; the affair aroused such attention that the king himself intervened, and punished the local officials for failure to maintain order. A famous trial that began a few years later at Arras led to hearings before the parlement of Paris. By the end of the century, secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries commonly recognized a duty to purge their lands of the menace: examples such as Sigismund of Tirol or Innocent VIII are merely the best known. Nor was the concern limited to ruling circles. The above-​mentioned case of vigilante justice, as well as other incidents, suggests that the people at large were keenly aware of the supposed problem. … In 1477, in the Savoyard town of Villars-​Chabod, a woman called Antonia stubbornly refused to confess what the inquisitor Stephan Hugonodi demanded that she admit. After more than a month the imprisonment and torture to which she was subjected broke her resistance, and at last she gave a lengthy confession. About eleven years earlier, one Massetus Garini found her in a state of sorrow and discontent, and ascertained that she had fallen into financial embarrassment. He told her that she could solve her problems by going with him to a certain friend. Reluctantly she left her home and went to Giessbach, where a synagogue was being held, with a large number of people feasting and dancing. Allaying her apprehensions, Massetus introduced her to a demon named Robinet, in the form of a black man, and said that he was the master of the group. He explained that to obtain her desires she would have to pay homage to this demon by denying

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God, the Catholic faith, and the blessed Virgin, and taking Robinet as her lord and master. She hesitated. Robinet addressed her in a barely intelligible voice, promising her gold, silver, and other good things; others in attendance likewise encouraged her. Then she consented, kissed the demon’s foot, received a ‘sign’ on her left little finger (which was deadened ever afterward), and trampled and broke a wooden crucifix. The demon gave her a purse full of gold and silver, a container full of unguent, and a stick. When she rubbed the stick with the unguent and recited an appropriate incantation, the stick would transport her through the air to the synagogue. After further feasting and dancing, the members of the sect paid homage to the demon who by now had changed into the form of a black dog by kissing [him] on the posterior. Then the demon cried out ‘Meclet! Mechet!’ and the fire was put out, whereupon the participants in the festivity gave themselves ‘over to each other sexually, in the manner of beasts’. When the meeting was over Antonia went home, only to find that the purse she thought was filled with gold and silver was in fact empty. In further confessions she told of the activities she engaged in as a member of the sect: further synagogues, consumption of human infants, manufacture of maleficent powders from the bones and intestines of these babies, use of such powders to inflict illness and death on men and animals, and desecration of the eucharist.8 … As already indicated, even during the years 1435–​1500 cases of this kind were less common than trials for mere sorcery, yet the incidence of diabolism was far greater than in any previous period.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

Here “France” applies to all French-​speaking territories, and “Germany” to all German-​speaking lands, with the exception of Switzerland, which is treated separately. For the suppression of the Knights Templar, see Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge 1978). Norman Cohn describes the demonisation of Cathar and Waldensian heretics in Chapter  2 in this volume. Despite the allegations of Devil-​worship that were frequently made against them, Cohn maintains that no medieval heretics actually practised satanism. –​  Ed. See Chapter 3 in this volume for the attitudes of Peter of Greyerz and Johannes Nider towards witchcraft –​ Ed. L’Abbé J. Grémaud, ed., Documents relatifs à l’histoire du Vallais, VII (Lausanne 1894), 549–​51; Joseph Hansen, Quellern und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahn und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn 1901), 533–​7.

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6 7

8

For a detailed account of this incident, see Gene A. Brucker, “Sorcery in Renaissance Florence”, in Studies in the Renaissance, X (1963), 13–​16. This episode is similar to those described by Henningsen in Chapter  13 in this volume – Ed. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Roman Inquisition recorded numerous accounts of women and men travelling to distant places while dreaming; here they joined others to participate in beneficent rituals. Like the Milanese woman in 1384, these informants did not regard this activity as witchcraft. For contemporary documents relating to this episode, see Charles Henry Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, Vol. I (Philadelphia 1939), 238–​41.

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Chapter 2

Norman Cohn THE DEMONISATION OF MEDIEVAL HERETICS

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H E A L L E G A T I O N S O F B L A C K M A G I C , orgies and diabolism that were attached to heretical movements in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries later resurfaced in the concept of a “witch cult”. Here Norman Cohn describes the demonisation of heretics in the late Middle Ages. He argues persuasively that the charges of magic and Devil-​worship made against them were fictions imposed by their prosecutors, with no connection to the actual practices of the groups concerned. The idea of a satanic cult had no basis in reality; rather, it was the product of a new preoccupation with the power of the Devil among late medieval churchmen.

In 1173 a rich merchant of Lyons called Valos or Valdos was moved by a passionate craving for salvation.1 The words of Jesus, in the parable of the rich young man, seemed to point the way: ‘If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor’. Valdos disposed of all his possessions and became a beggar. A  group formed around him, intent on following the way of absolute poverty, after the example of the apostles. And soon these men began to preach. So far the story exactly parallels the beginning of the Franciscan venture which was to come a generation later. But whereas St Francis and his companions succeeded, with some difficulty, in obtaining papal approbation for their way of

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life, and with it permission to preach, Valdos and his followers failed: when they appeared at the Lateran Council in Rome in 1179, the pope, though impressed by their piety, imposed restrictions on their preaching. Faced with the alternatives of giving up preaching or of disobeying the pope, ‘the poor of Lyons’ chose the latter course, with the inevitable consequence that in 1181 they were excommunicated; and in 1184 were formally condemned as heretics. … The Waldensians were practically untouched by non-​Christian influences. They managed to get the Vulgate translated into their various vernaculars; and these (often rather inaccurate) renderings of the Bible supplied the framework of their faith. Though they were not learned people –​being mostly peasants and artisans –​they devoted themselves to an intensive study of the Scriptures; even the totally illiterate were often able to recite the four Gospels and the Book of Job by heart. … Such was the sect which, according to Conrad of Marburg and Pope Gregory IX, practised nameless orgies and worshipped the Devil. In the thirteenth century the discrepancy between the accusations and the reality was obvious to many even amongst the guardians of orthodoxy. The archbishop of Mainz, when he wrote to the pope after Conrad’s assassination, was clearly unimpressed; and so was the celebrated preacher David of Augsburg when, around 1265, he wrote his Treatise on the Heresy of the Poor of Lyons. In this systematic account of the sect and its doctrines, the charge of Devil-​worship is flatly rejected. … Nevertheless, the old defamatory stereotype survived in the German-​speaking lands, and early in the fourteenth century it woke to new life. From 1311 to 1315 Duke Frederick of Austria joined with the archbishop of Salzburg and the bishop of Passau in a drive to clear the Austrian lands of heretics who, again, were clearly Waldensians. As usual, those who would not recant were burned; and these seem to have been the great majority. A contemporary chronicler notes that ‘all showed an incredible stubbornness, even to death; they went joyfully to execution’. The same chronicler summarizes the sect’s doctrine –​and amongst tenets which the Waldensians really hold he intersperses some which come straight from the bull Vox in Rama [issued by Gregory IX in 1233.] These people, he says, believe that Lucifer and his demons were unjustly expelled from heaven, and in the end will find eternal blessedness; whereas Michael and his angels will be eternally damned. Meanwhile God neither punishes, nor even knows of, anything done under the earth; so the heretics hold their meetings in subterranean caverns, where they indulge in incestuous orgies –​father with daughter, brother with sister, son with mother. Conveniently, this view of the doctrine and behaviour of the Waldensians was confirmed by the confession which Dominican inquisitors extracted from one Ulrich Wollar, of Krems.

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Popes took these fantasies seriously and used their unique authority to disseminate them. Like Gregory IX before him, John XXII incorporated them into a bull; and in both cases the pope took this step under the influence of a single cleric in a distant country. Just as Pope Gregory in Rome took on trust the reports which Conrad of Marburg sent from Germany, so Pope John, resident at Avignon, accepted without question the tales concocted by a canon of Prague cathedral. The canon, Henry of Schonberg, was not even a genuine fanatic like Conrad but simply an intriguer, intent on ruining his bishop. Inspired by this man, the pope in 1318 issued a bull accusing the bishop of protecting heretics. Here, too, the heresy described is unmistakably Waldensian –​but here, too, real Waldensian doctrine is blended with fantasies of Lucifer-​worship and of nocturnal orgies in caverns. … Again and again, over a period of many centuries, heretical sects were accused of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies in the dark; of killing infants and devouring their remains; of worshipping the Devil. Is it conceivable that no sect ever did such things at all? In the past, historians have diverged over that question. But here the matter must be settled once and for all; for otherwise my whole argument hangs in the air. One of the charges can be dismissed without more ado. Normally, when heretics were tried and interrogated by inquisitors, transcripts of the proceedings were kept. Hundreds of these transcripts have survived, and they offer no evidence for the killing and eating of babies or children. Indeed, only one sect ever seems to have been formally charged with such offences –​the Fraticelli ‘de opinione’ at Fabriano and Rome; and the ‘evidence’ produced even in that belated instance turns out to have been taken almost verbatim from polemical tracts and monastic chronicles, written centuries before. All the other accounts of child-​eating derive from the same literary tradition. Weighed against the silence of the inquisitors, they have no authority whatever. At first glance, the charge of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies might seem to have rather more basis in real happenings. It is certain, for instance, that some of the heretical mystics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit did claim to have attained a state of total oneness with God, in which all things were permitted to them; and it was widely believed at the time that they gave expression to this conviction by practising free love amongst themselves. There is also the case of the Dualist heretics known as Cathars. According to Catharist doctrine, all matter was evil, and human bodies were prisons from which human souls were struggling to escape; whence it followed that procreation was an abomination. Catholic polemics pointed out the logical consequences of such a view. If all procreation was utterly evil, no form of sexual intercourse was more

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reprehensible than any other; incest between mother and son was no worse than intercourse between man and wife. So long as no more souls were incarcerated in flesh, no harm was done; and to avoid that, abortion or even infanticide were legitimate. However, on closer examination none of this really provides an explanation for the tales of promiscuous and incestuous orgies. There is no firm evidence that in practice Cathars ever drew libertine consequences from their hatred of the flesh. Catharist morality was only meant to be followed by the elite of the sect, the perfecti; and in general even the Catholic clergy, while attacking Catharist doctrine, paid tribute to the chastity of these people. Nor is there any reason to think that the Brethren of the Free Spirit indulged in collective orgies; if any of them did indeed practise free love, they did it in private. Indeed, of all the innumerable stories of nocturnal orgies only one, concerning an incident which is supposed to have taken place in Cologne in 1326, could possibly refer to the heretical mystics of the Free Spirit; and even that has now been shown to be mythical.2 Above all, there are the brute facts of chronology. Stories of heretics and their orgies were circulating in France already in the eleventh century –​but there were no Cathars in the west before the middle of the twelfth century, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit are first heard of in the thirteenth. The beliefs and activities of these sectarians can no more account for the defamation of the Waldensians or the Fraticelli than the activities of the Carpocratians can account for the very similar tales told of the early Christians. And of course it is to those ancient tales that we must look for an explanation. After all, both the accusations of promiscuous orgies and the accusations of child-​eating belong to a tradition dating back to the second century. The Fathers who first defended the Christians against these accusations also, by the very act of putting them in writing, perpetuated the accusations. Embedded in theological works which were preserved in monastic libraries and which, moreover, were frequently recopied, these tales must have been familiar to many monks. It was only to be expected that, when it came to discrediting some new religious out-​group, monks would draw on this traditional stock of defamatory clichés. Moreover, it is known that by the fourteenth century certain chroniclers deliberately inserted such stories into narratives in order to provide preachers with materials for their sermons against heresy. More serious consideration has to be given to the idea that heretics worshipped the Devil. This charge cannot simply be derived from what pagan Romans said about the Christian minority in their midst. Did it, then, reflect what some group or sect of medieval heretics really believed or practised? …

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Three arguments have been advanced in support of this view. It has been pointed out that some medieval sources describe a coherent and conceivable doctrine, which they attribute to a sect of ‘Luciferans’. It has been suggested that the Dualist religion, pushed to its logical conclusion, could very well lead to Devil-​worship. And it has also been said that the intelligent, educated and devout men –​including some popes –​who accepted that a cult of Satan existed, would not have done so without solid evidence. These arguments have to be examined. It is true that accounts of a Luciferan doctrine are to be found not only in the bull which Pope Gregory IX issued at the prompting of Conrad of Marburg in 1233, but in half a dozen other German and Italian sources. The Luciferan doctrine, it appears, taught that Lucifer and his demons were unjustly expelled from heaven, but will return there in the end, to resume their rightful places and to cast God, Michael and his angels into hell for all eternity. Meanwhile the Luciferans must serve their master by doing everything in their power to offend God; their reward will be everlasting blessedness with Lucifer. The accounts agree with one another and are not, on the face of it, implausible. But how reliable are they? Internal evidence shows them to be wholly unreliable. Each one is accompanied by statements which are anything but plausible. In one case we hear of demons who vanish into thin air when the Luciferan rite is interrupted by the appearance of the Eucharist. Another source blithely states that in Austria, Bohemia and the neighbouring territories alone the worshippers of Lucifer number 80,000. Another –​a confession attributed to a heretic called Lepzet, of Cologne –​proclaims that the man himself, in his zeal to serve Lucifer and offend God, has committed more than thirty murders! Yet another speaks of a magic potion containing the excrement of a gigantic toad; while in the bull Vox in Rama both a demonic toad and a demonic cat receive kisses of homage. We have reliable information concerning the real beliefs of the Cathars  –​ including some Catharist writings. Like other Dualists, they were convinced that the material universe was created by an evil spirit –​in effect, the Devil –​who still dominated it. But so far from worshipping the Devil they were passionately concerned to escape from his clutches. That aspiration was the very heart of their religion. For souls were not created by the Devil but by God. Indeed, in the Catharist view, souls are the angels who fell from heaven; they have been imprisoned in one body after another, and they yearn to escape from the material world and re-​enter the heaven of pure spirituality. The morality of the Catharist perfecti  –​their condemnation of marriage, their horror of procreation, their

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vegetarianism and fasting  –​reflects their total rejection of the material world, imagined as a demonic creation. To come to terms with the flesh, to accept the world of matter –​that is to reveal oneself as a servant of the Devil; and to be a servant of the Devil is to be incapable of salvation. There is, then, no reason to think that, even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tales of a Devil-​worshipping sect reflected something that really existed amongst the Cathars. Moreover in the fifteenth century, long after the Cathars had been exterminated, those Bible-​studying Christians the Waldensians were still being persecuted as ‘Luciferans’. Finally, we must ask ourselves whether intelligent, educated and devout men could have accepted that a cult of Satan existed, if they had not had good grounds for thinking so. Several modern historians have argued, and have convinced many readers, that such a thing is inconceivable. But they are in error. The same people who accepted that a cult of Satan existed, also accepted that Satan miraculously materialized at the celebration of his cult, usually in the form of a gigantic animal. The two beliefs were practically inseparable, and if the one seems to lack evidential value, so should the other. There is in fact no serious evidence for the existence of such a sect of Devil-​ worshippers anywhere in medieval Europe. One can go further:  there is serious evidence to the contrary. Very few inquisitors claimed to have come across these Devil-​worshippers, and most of those few are known to have been fanatical amateurs, of the stamp of Conrad of Marburg.We may be sure that if any sect really had held such beliefs, it would have figured in one or other of the two standard manuals for inquisitors: that by Bernard Gui or that by Nicolas Eymeric[h]‌, both dating from the fourteenth century, when the Luciferans are supposed to have been at the height of their influence. But it does not. The only kind of ‘demonolatry’ known to Eymeric[h] lay in the efforts of individual practitioners of ritual or ceremonial magic to induce demons to do their will –​which is a different matter altogether. Gui’s comments have even less bearing on the matter. In fact, neither Eymeric[h] nor Gui even hint at the existence of a sect of Devil-​worshippers; and that should settle the question. To understand why the stereotype of a Devil-​worshipping sect emerged at all, why it exercised such fascination and why it survived so long, one must look not at the belief or behaviour of heretics, Dualist or other, but into the minds of the orthodox themselves. Many people, and particularly many priests and monks, were becoming more and more obsessed by the overwhelming power of the Devil and his demons. That is why their idea of the absolutely evil and anti-​human came to include Devil-​worship, alongside incest, infanticide and cannibalism.

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Notes 1 2

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (Pimlico, London 1975), 51–​3, 73–​8 –​  Ed. On the Free Spirit, see Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (University of California Press 1972). Lerner discredits the account of the orgy at Cologne in 1326, and doubts whether the Brethren ever practised free love at all.

 

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Chapter 3

Michael D. Bailey WITCHCRAFT AND REFORM IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

T

H E D O M I N I C A N T H E O L O G I A N Johannes Nider played a major role in developing the concept of satanic witchcraft in his treatise Formicarius, or The Ant Hill, composed in Vienna in 1437–​8. Nider is remembered today primarily for his work on witchcraft, but he was also extremely active as a religious reformer. Here Michael D. Bailey locates Nider’s writings on sorcery and Devil-​worship within his much broader agenda for Christian renewal: in this context witches were a warning of the pervasive threat of the Devil, and their defeat was a demonstration of the power of pious Christians to overcome great evils. Bailey notes that Nider linked harmful sorcery to diabolism, and presented witches as participants in a deadly cult; but his concept of the witches’ meetings did not include the idea of flying to the sabbat which was to become prominent in sixteenth-​century demonology.

As the idea of a satanic cult of witches became established and accepted, authorities naturally began to attribute elements of standard anti-​heretical polemic to the emerging figure of the witch. Notions of secret conventicles, perverse and often demonic orgies, infanticide, cannibalism, and other horrific elements quickly came together to form the full stereotype of the witches’ sabbath. Several of Nider’s most detailed accounts of witchcraft focused on these dark assemblies.1 The similarities between the witches’ sabbath and earlier heretical conventicles are immediately

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apparent, although minor changes were effected in the polemical tradition so that it would bear more directly on magical practices in the sabbath. For example, the very first heretics to be burned in the medieval West, at Orléans in 1022, had been accused of participating in rites similar to those of later witches’ sabbaths. Among other atrocities, they supposedly murdered and cremated children in order to use their ashes to make a potion that, when drunk, prevented members of the sect from ever returning to the true faith. In one of Nider’s descriptions of the sabbath, witches made a similar potion from the “liquid parts” of the bodies of children. From the “more solid parts” they concocted magical potions and powders with which to carry out their “desires, and arts, and transmutations.” In yet another description of the sabbath, witches drank this potion in order to gain an instant understanding of how to perform their maleficent arts. Much scholarship has focused on elements of witchcraft that originated in European folklore. Ideas such as the magical transformation of witches into animals and the night flight to the sabbath were rooted in what appear to be the remnants of archaic shamanistic practices widespread in European (and indeed Eurasian) culture. Authorities simply uncovered these beliefs and practices among the peasantry and, misunderstanding them, twisted them into witchcraft. Yet, while such elements would eventually figure prominently in the witch stereotype, in the earliest phase of that idea’s formation they appear only marginally, if at all. In none of Nider’s several descriptions of sabbaths, for example, did night flight figure in any way. Indeed, the only gathering of witches for which he specifically provided a location supposedly occurred in a parish church, not in some dark cavern or on a night-​shrouded mountain peak. … Nider recognized the power of demons to transport people through the air (even if he generally maintained that it was most often only an illusion). He also accepted the reality of cults of witches gathering at periodic sabbaths. He did not, however, link these two ideas in any significant way. Thus he reveals that ideas of night flight or spiritual transportation to a nocturnal gathering, which may well have been relatively widespread especially among the European peasantry as a vestige of some archaic form of shamanism, nevertheless were not yet firmly linked to the emerging idea of witchcraft in the 1430s, when all the other important elements of that concept were being assembled. Rather, the idea of the sabbath, a gathering of witches based mainly in earlier clerical polemic against heretics, arose directly from the notion of witches’ idolatry and particularly their apostasy. Having sold their souls to the Devil and become his servants, they then gathered periodically to worship him and to receive from him instruction in the magical powers with which they could then attack the Christian faithful. The need to explain common magical practices in this way arose from the collision and conflation, in

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the minds of learned authorities such as Nider, of two quite different systems of elite and common magic. Other elements of the stereotype of witchcraft and the witches’ sabbath, while important, were secondary to these central concerns. … Johannes Nider, in his Formicarius, was the first clerical authority to argue explicitly that more women than men were inclined towards witchcraft. … That he would fall back on standard arguments of feminine weakness when confronted with what was already emerging as a predominantly female evil is by no means surprising. That he should have been able to do so, however, reveals a subtle but important aspect of witchcraft. Earlier views of demonic magic and maleficent sorcery in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tended to highlight the power and authority of the human magician. Learned necromancers were highly skilled and educated men, if still condemnable, and even common sorcerers were often seen as wielding impressive demonic power. As the full stereotype of witchcraft began to develop, however, authorities no longer placed so much stress on the power and authority of human sorcerers. Now the emphasis fell on susceptibility to temptation and submission to demonic forces, with the ability to perform powerful sorcery obtained only at the cost of complete subservience. Thus authorities were able to accept the notion that most witches were women, a “reality” already present in the accusations and trials, because they conceived of witchcraft, quite unlike earlier forms of demonic sorcery, as essentially a female crime. … At the heart of Nider’s thought lay an abiding commitment to reform. Although he engaged in institutional reform among the religious orders, ultimately his conception of reform entailed an internal spiritual renewal. Not content to limit his activity in this area to his own religious order or even to the institutional church, in his greatest work he pressed for a reform in this broad sense among all believers. This was the primary thrust of the Formicarius. … Again and again he returned to the notion that against the terrible threat represented by witches stood the power of the true faith. His tales of witchcraft, and especially the defenses against bewitchment and the remedies that he prescribed, became exhortations to proper belief and pious living. … Throughout the Formicarius, Nider’s moralizing stories and exempla performed two functions. Accounts of the lives of saints and the deeds of pious men and women presented positive examples for the laity to follow, while negative stories of impious behavior, heresies, and superstitious beliefs served as negative examples for them to avoid. His extensive accounts of witchcraft, however, in a sense served both functions at once. Certainly these stories presented the negative example of people who had been seduced into the service of Satan, and thus Nider instructed the laity about the nature of witchcraft and made clear why it was such a terrible crime. At the same time, however, he sought to encourage proper

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behavior and renewed belief among the laity by using the menace that witches represented –​that is, the threat of maleficium that could afflict any Christian at any time –​to reinvigorate devotion to Christ and encourage closer adherence to the rites and practices of the true faith as laid out by the clergy. Here the common conception of harmful sorcery and the elite concern over diabolism and apostasy comes into play. Religious authorities sought to establish and enforce correct belief and pious behavior. Their harsh opposition to witchcraft arose because of its supposedly demonic nature, which in their view necessarily entailed idolatry and ultimately the complete rejection of the Christian faith. The laity was concerned, more basically, about the dangers of harmful sorcery worked by witches  –​ hailstorms, withered crops, impeded fertility, disease, and the deaths of animals and children. While in no way rejecting the clerical message that most sorcery was demonic, the greater part of late medieval society did not share in the full diabolical and conspiratorial fantasies of the elites. Nider, however, clearly realized that he could use the basic fear of maleficium to his own more spiritual ends. A story told to Nider by Peter of Bern perfectly illustrates this connection between the threat of maleficium and exhortation to proper faith. A  witch captured by Peter confessed that sometimes he was unable to work his evil sorcery entirely as he wished, for he could not harm those who were strong in faith. As he confessed: I myself called the little master, that is, the demon, who told me that he was able to do nothing. “Does he [the intended victim] have good faith,” he [the demon] asked, “and does he diligently protect himself with the sign of the cross? Therefore I cannot harm him in body, but [only] in the eleventh part of his yield in the field, if you wish.”2 Witches often tried to injure or kill Peter himself, but they never could, “because he acted in good faith and was accustomed diligently to protect himself with the sign of the cross.” On one occasion, however, he failed to “guard himself entirely by the Lord,” and witches were able to assail him. At some point after he had stepped down as the Bernese official in the Simme valley, the scene of his major witch-​ hunting activity, he was again traveling through that region and spent the night at his former official residence in the castle of Blankenburg. He went to sleep, having dutifully protected himself with the sign of the cross, intending to rise early the next morning to write some letters and then depart. In the middle of the night, however, a group of witches, having learned that their old persecutor was again in the region, were apparently able to deceive him with a “fictitious light.” Waking and thinking he had slept past the dawn, Peter was in such a hurry to get dressed

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that he failed to make his customary sign of the cross. Descending from his bedchamber to the lower chamber where he had stored his writing materials, he found the place still locked for the night. Angered, he began to climb back to his room, cursing to himself, and perhaps (so Nider suggested) even uttering the name of the Devil. Because of this moral lapse, Peter fell into the power of the witches. Through their magic they immediately struck him with a temporary blindness, and as the complete darkness overcame him, he tumbled down the stairs, injuring himself severely. Viewed from a modern perspective, what Nider described as a threatening assault by witches appears to have been merely a case of a man stumbling angrily up and down narrow castle stairs in the dark of night, only half awake and slipping and falling down. Our skepticism should not be projected back on to Nider, however. There is no indication that he did not completely believe the stories he presented in the Formicarius. In the prologue he asserted that he had been careful to include accounts only of such wonders as he himself had experienced or of which he had learned from reliable sources. He was a theologian after all, and as he noted, theology “detests falsehood.” Moreover, the power of demons to harm people was proved and accepted by theologians and the laity alike in the Middle Ages. Witches were both the masters of demons and, in their subservience to Satan, their servants. It was accepted that demons actually preferred to work harm through witches, since in this way they could not only achieve whatever evil ends they desired but corrupt a human soul in the bargain. The witches described by Nider, in performing their magic through demonic agency and under the direction of Satan himself, became in effect surrogate demons. That is, they functioned in his exempla essentially as demons functioned. Nider truly feared demons as active forces for evil in this world, as terrible foes of God’s church, and especially as bitter opponents of reform. More threatening than simple superstition, witchcraft was also more than just another form of heresy. Witches were maleficent sorcerers who wielded tremendous supernatural power. The danger they represented was not just corruption of the faith by terrible error (idolatry and apostasy) but very real harm worked in the physical world –​withered crops, aborted pregnancies, murdered babies, pestilence, and disease. Thus witches appeared far more threatening to average Christians than the proponents of any other heresy or error, and so they became far more useful to reformers such as Nider. Studies of witchcraft often, and entirely correctly, stress that for clerical authorities the real horror of witchcraft lay in the witches’ rejection of the true faith, not in their acts of harmful sorcery. Errors of faith aside, matters of simple maleficium could be left to secular authorities, and theologians throughout the Middle Ages, indeed theological authorities since the

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time of the early church fathers, had all stressed the necessary heretical implications of demonic sorcery, rather than the worldly harm it could cause, as their principal grounds for opposition to such practices.Yet Nider did not treat witchcraft exclusively, and in a sense not even primarily, as an error of belief. Tellingly, he was in no way concerned with the correction and salvation of witches themselves, or with preventing the spread of their pestiferous sect. Indeed, while he obviously approved of the prosecution of witches by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities, he was not involved in this activity in any way, either directly or through his writings. Rather he was very much concerned with the effects wrought by witches in this world and the means that could be used to combat them. In this sense the closest parallel to witches, in his mind, was provided not by human heretics but rather by demons. Witches, of course, commanded demons to work their magic, but, like these fallen spirits, they were also themselves bound to the service of Satan. Thus, just as clerical authors had long been accustomed to employ tales of demonic power to demonstrate the consequences of weak faith and improper acts and to encourage proper belief and behavior, so now they might use accounts of the horrors of witchcraft as a powerful tool in an essentially reformist effort to encourage a spiritual renewal among the laity.

Notes 1 2

An extract from Nider’s work describing the witches’ Sabbath is available in Brian P.  Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 2nd edn (London and New  York 2015), ch. 13 –​  Ed. Formicarius, ed. G. Colvener (Douai 1602), 5.4, 356.

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Chapter 4

Hans Peter Broedel THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WITCHCRAFT

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H E M A L L E U S M A L E F I C A R U M , or Hammer of Witches, was the most influential early treatise on diabolical witchcraft. The text was substantially the work of the Dominican inquisitor Henry Institoris, known also by his German name of Heinrich Kramer, but was published jointly with Jacob Sprenger, a prestigious Dominican theologian and fellow inquisitor. Its immediate context was Institoris’ campaign against witchcraft in the Rhineland and upper Germany in the mid-​1480s. The book was printed 15 times between 1486 and 1520, and went through another 19 printings during the fiercest period of witch persecutions in Europe between 1569 and 1669. For Hans Peter Broedel, one of the major achievements of the Malleus was to combine popular ideas of harmful sorcery with a theologically plausible model of the Devil’s activity on earth. This allowed Institoris and subsequent investigators to find evidence of diabolism in the allegations of destructive magic that circulated in Renaissance communities. Like Johannes Nider (Bailey, 3), the authors of the Malleus also focused on the physical harm done by the Devil through witchcraft as much as his spiritual role as a tempter. As a result, their text united the concerns of educated churchmen and ordinary people fearful of maleficium, with potentially lethal consequences.

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That demons used [their] powers tirelessly to the detriment of mankind, Institoris and Sprenger demonstrate through a catalogue of typical diabolic activities:1 Rational in mind, yet reasoning without discourse, subtle in evil, desirous of doing harm, ingenious in deceit, they alter the senses, they corrupt dispositions, they agitate people while they are awake, and disturb sleepers through dreams, they bring disease, they stir up storms, transform themselves into angels of light, they bear hell with them always, they usurp the worship of God to themselves through witches; through them they bring about the magic arts, they seek to rule over the good and attack them further as much as possible; to the elect they are given as a trial, and always they lie in wait for a person’s ruin. This demonic agenda represents a considerable change from that assumed by earlier authors: where Augustine, for example, saw diabolic evil chiefly in terms of temptation and subsequent sinful human behavior, Institoris and Sprenger saw the work of demons rather in acts of material harm. While, to Augustine, the locus of the demonic threat was essentially interior, manifested in the impulse to sin, and resisted through the grace of God, in the Malleus the operation of demons is conceptually outside one’s self; even when demons persecute a sleeper through dreams, the dreams are not his own, but have been sent, like an unwelcome psychic parcel, to the recipient. This change in the locus of demonic activity allows Institoris and Sprenger to make an analogical association between demons and witches:  since the harm caused by demons resembles traditional ecclesiastical definitions of maleficium very closely, and since demons and witches share similar goals and means, it was possible to elide the earthly presence of one in favor of the other. … For Institoris and Sprenger, witchcraft is the key to understanding the demonic, and not the other way round. The Devil exists in two almost completely autonomous forms: the powerful, largely theoretical demons who invisibly moved men to sin and caused calamities on earth, and the minor spirits who haunt houses and crossroads. The witch, defined by her relationship with an incubus demon (itself mid-​way between these extremes) provides a necessary intermediate term in this system, allowing the awesome power of the Devil to operate on earth without the incongruous presence of decidedly unimpressive demons as agents. The witch thus becomes a human extension of the diabolic realm, at times capable of assuming the characteristics, motives, and behaviors of demons, while still retaining those of women. Further, because Institoris and Sprenger identify witches with actual women, they locate responsibility for misfortunes in the witches’ own real,

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socially constructed, moral evil, rather than in some abstract principle of evil or in the malice of nature spirits and preternatural beings. This kind of conception of the demonic, I would suggest, corresponds closely with a level of anxiety in witch-​ beliefs that is at least in part responsible for sustained witch prosecutions in the late fifteenth century: on the one hand, it accurately mirrored notions of maleficium and the harmful occult powers of humans found in traditional European peasant communities; on the other, it provided a context in which these beliefs could be embraced by a learned clerical elite. … Institoris and Sprenger were singularly sensitive to the value of rumor. Indeed, local rumors provided such a reliable indication of the presence of witchcraft that when such rumors reached the authorities, they were sufficient in themselves to warrant an investigation. Most investigations, Institoris tells us, begin in this way, without any specific accusations. His sample declaration which would formally initiate the inquisitorial process testifies to the centrality of rumor in the hunt for witches: It often comes to the ears of such and such official or judge, of such and such a place, borne by public gossip and produced by noisy reports, that such and such a person from such and such a place has done such and such things pertaining to maleficia against the faith and the common good of the state. When rumors coalesced around particular individuals, they could lead to specific charges. Much of the evidence Institoris assembled against Helena Scheuberin at Innsbruck amounted to very little more than rumor. The first charge against her states that she is defamed particularly regarding the death of a certain knight, Spiess by name, and this not even in Innsbruck but all over the place throughout the surrounding regions, and especially among the noble and powerful. Whether he perished by poison or witchcraft there remains some doubt. However it is generally rumored that it was from maleficium because the witch had been devoted to evildoing from her youth. Having a bad reputation, mala fama, was almost a requirement for real witches as far as Institoris was concerned, and provided an important link between moral delinquency and maleficent magic. A  bad reputation might encompass a wide range of moral failings and social deviance, and provided the necessary ground for more sinister rumors of witchcraft to take root.

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Rumors provided witch-​hunters with the perfect narrative basis for their inquiries. It is often said that accusations of witchcraft came principally from the lower ranks of society and not from the elite, and in a general sense this seems to be true; but in an environment where vague rumors of maleficia were swirling around, it may also be that concrete accusations were constructed by prosecutors through the examination of rumor-​bearing informants. It is a characteristic of rumor narratives that they become more detailed, more rooted in local conditions, and more attached to specific points of reference, as they are challenged and interrogated. Further, as witnesses are required to supply increasing levels of detail, they become increasingly amenable to the guidance of the interrogator, and begin to look to the forms and subtext of the examiner’s questions to provide the bases for their answers. The availability of rumor legends, then, may have determined the extent to which an investigator was able to impose his own conception of witchcraft upon locally divergent cases. If this were the case, then the activities of the inquisitor begin to assume familiar contours: he becomes the catalyst which transforms suspicion and diverse experience into an actionable charge focused upon a single person. In modern rural France, this role is assumed by the “unwitcher” who occupies a crucial position between the bewitched victim and the alleged witch. As authorities agitate the community, and the level of anxiety rises, the amount of rumor in circulation rises as well; eventually, such “hot” legends may become reified into a set of consistent, specific accusations. From rumors, memorates, and denunciations and confessions couched in traditional terms, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their image of witchcraft. As inquisitors and priests they were uniquely well positioned to hear an astonishing range of opinion and narrative concerning witches, and were equally obliged to make sense of it all. The witch-​beliefs of the Malleus draw heavily upon traditional beliefs and previously constituted categories which Institoris and Sprenger reinterpreted in a manner consistent with a theologically Thomist view of the world. The success of this project was due less to their theological sophistication and rigorous logic (neither of which is especially evident), than to their sensitivity to the world picture of their informants. They did not simply demonize popular belief, but tried instead to construct it for their own purposes. Their picture of witchcraft was successful precisely because it corresponded so closely with the ideas of the less well educated. Other demonologists treated witchcraft as a sect, worse than, but otherwise similar to, other heresies; because of their epistemological and metaphysical assumptions, however, Institoris and Sprenger understood witchcraft much more as did the common man, as part of a spectrum of human interaction with preternatural and supernatural powers. For this reason, though the model of witchcraft in the Malleus is certainly a composite,

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constructed from several different but interrelated idea-​clusters, the fit between this model and supranormal events as they were reported was closer than the competing models of other learned observers, and was thus more persuasive. … Institoris and Sprenger were merely two of many scholars, clerics, and magistrates who found traditional conceptions of a world that was almost witch-​ free unacceptable in the light of contemporary evidence, and their representation of witchcraft was simply one of several such models that competed for attention and influence towards the end of the fifteenth century. Their model is notable, however, in that, more successfully than most of their competitors, they reconcile the demands of experience, reason, and theologically determined truth. Their understanding of witchcraft contains features which mark it distinctively as the product of their own experience:  a sensitivity to popular narrative discourse, strangely combined with an almost complete lack of understanding of the differences between oral genres; a view that supernatural powers are in a sense balanced, the power of the Devil being set against the even greater power of sacramentals and the Church; a corresponding acceptance of a remarkably wide range of popular remedies against witchcraft; and especially their insistence that witchcraft is linked inextricably with the female sex. Most of the notions about witchcraft in the Malleus can be understood as the product of minds which  –​ although theologically learned and aware –​have a view of the world that in many respects comes extremely close to that of their informants.

Note 1

An extract from the Malleus is available in Brian P.  Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 2nd edn (Routledge, London and New York 2015), ch. 14. For a full translation, see Christopher S.  Mackay, The Hammer of Witches:  A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009) –​  Ed.

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Chapter 5

Charles Zika ULRICH MOLITOR AND THE IMAGERY OF WITCHCRAFT

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H E W O O D C U T S T H A T A C C O M P A N I E D Ulrich Molitor’s On Female Witches and Seers (De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus) (1489) contributed to the emerging iconography of witchcraft in late medieval Europe, and the development of subsequent representations of witches. Indeed, they still appear in many popular and scholarly accounts of the subject. Here Charles Zika considers the contemporary resonance of these images. He also notes their tendency to smooth out the theological nuances of Molitor’s text, and to emphasise the fear of bewitchment that dominated popular understanding of the crime (Briggs, 6). While Molitor himself was sceptical about many of the powers attributed to witches, the woodcuts told another story. They also provide early evidence of the idea of witchcraft as a collective activity, which is discussed in the extracts in Part Three.

Ulrich Molitor, a doctor of laws and procurator of the episcopal curia in Constance, had been commissioned to write his work by Archduke Sigismund of Austria. The commission was probably the result of regional tensions created in Innsbruck in 1485 by the Dominican inquisitor and [co-​]author of the Malleus Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer [also known as Henry Institoris], which led to strong opposition from Bishop Georg Golser of Brixen, and to Kramer’s eventual expulsion from Golser’s diocese in early 1486. Molitor’s work took the form of a discussion of nine questions by three participants: the Archduke Sigismund, Konrad Schatz, the mayor of Constance, and Molitor himself. Partly because of its dialogue form Molitor

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was able to express a range of viewpoints and considerable scepticism concerning various claims made for the powers and behaviour of witches. The text denied the witches’ sabbat and night riding, for instance, just as it refuted the claim that witches could cause impotence or transform humans into animal shapes. These apparent effects were imaginary, it argued, the result of diabolically induced fantasy and illusion. The woodcuts were something of a fourth voice within this meandering colloquy and communicated views which differed from those found in the literary text: they represented the powers of witchcraft not as diabolical illusion but as producing real effects in the everyday world. For that reason they could be understood and digested independently of the text. It must have been this independent status, together with the capacity for continual recycling as a series, which enabled them to achieve their pre-​eminent role in establishing a visual language for witchcraft in the later fifteenth century, and for the adoption and transformation of some of their key iconographical elements by artists such as Baldung early in the next century. The woodcut that occurs most frequently in the various editions of Molitor’s work, and achieves considerable prominence through its reproduction as a title page in at least seven cases, depicts two witches putting a cock and a snake into a belching cauldron and causing a hailstorm (Figure 5.1).1 In most editions it accompanies the section headed “Whether the Devil can make hail or thunder”. While the text is concerned to stress that weather sorcery can be performed only by the power of the Devil and not by witches’ rituals, the woodcut ignores this issue of the Devil’s agency. The artist depicts weather sorcery as the result of rituals performed around a cauldron, and the agency of the women remains unquestioned. In this way the woodcut transmits quite traditional beliefs about the magical powers women were believed to have in causing bad weather. So why did the cauldron achieve such wide circulation in the 1490s through the many editions of Molitor’s work? From as early as the sixth century there had been an association between witchcraft and cauldrons, as the receptacles in which it was believed witches brewed their potions. But cooking up dead animals in cauldrons did not seem to be a common technique for performing weather sorcery. The only visual depictions of weather sorcery we have prior to Molitor involve conjuring with an animal’s jawbone, while almost all literary descriptions involve water. However, one of the most common literary and theological sources for the development of fifteenth-​century witchcraft theories, the work called Formicarius (The Ant Colony) by the Dominican Johann Nider, describes how a witch named Stadlin from the Swiss town of Boltingen would stir up hailstorms by sacrificing a black chicken at a crossroad[s]‌and then throwing it up in the air for the prince of demons to catch. This story would have become widely known in the late 1480s and 1490s by its inclusion in the Malleus Maleficarum and, in this way, may have become the source of the Molitor woodcut.2 While weather

05

FIGURE 5.1  Two Witches Cooking Up a Storm Title page in Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, 1496–​1500. From [Albert ] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 8. Fig. 928.

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sorcery was a relatively infrequent charge in fifteenth-​century witchcraft trials, it was most commonly found in south German and Swiss territories, where there was also considerable concern about ecclesiastical weather blessings.3 This anxiety may have helped create a climate for viewing weather sorcery, a form of magic with communal rather than merely individual consequences, as an especially destructive and therefore evil form of magic. And storm-​making may have therefore emerged as an iconic image for the new social crime and heresy of witchcraft.4 An image depicting women performing weather sorcery around a cauldron must have also been considered very apt to head a work that closely identified women and witchcraft. First, weather sorcery was generally associated with women. Second and most importantly, both the Latin and German titles of Molitor’s work specified that it concerned female witches and seers. While the laniae [or lamiae] and pythonicae [or phitonicae] of the Latin title are rather abstruse terms, the critical descriptor is mulieres (women). It is a treatise about witches and diviners who are women. The subtitle in the German editions is very direct: A treatise concerning evil women called witches (Tractatus van den bosen wyber die man nennet die hexen). The most common title-​page woodcut for early editions of Molitor’s work depicted sorcery as a social threat which stemmed from groups of female practitioners. Another Molitor woodcut to draw on traditional malefic sorcery to represent the power of witchcraft is that of a woman laming a man by shooting him in the foot with a reversed, and possibly charmed or poisoned, arrow (Figure 5.2). In most editions the woodcut accompanies the chapter of Molitor’s text headed, “On the harm and illness done to children and adults”, and leaves little doubt about the effectiveness of this act of malefice, represented symbolically by the loss of the peasant’s boot. In most versions the female witch is shown bareheaded, displaying her flowing hair. Her unkempt hair signifies her wild and dishevelled nature, a common visual cue increasingly employed in the sixteenth century.There may also be suggestions of uncontrolled sexuality here, given that the witch is depicted as an aggressive virago, transgressing her proper female role. An almost contemporary representation from a Parisian Women’s Dance of Death of c. 1500 also depicts the witch with long and dishevelled hair (Figure 5.3), a characteristic which distinguishes her from the other female characters in the dance, while in the earlier 1491 printed version, on which this later manuscript was modelled the witch was represented as a traditional sorcerer, with a head covering and exclusive attention given to her gesture of conjuration. It seems as though the loose unbridled hair of the sexually dissolute had begun to be considered an appropriate visual cue for identifying the social and moral threat of witchcraft in the last decade of the fifteenth century.This woodcut of a laming witch primarily

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FIGURE 5.2  A Female Witch Lames a Man with an Arrow Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, c.  1494. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 16. Fig. 615.

gives expression to the most common charge of malefic sorcery in later medieval Europe: the inflicting of physical harm, injury or sickness. Although the shooting of an arrow would not normally involve magic, the reversed arrow suggests it is not the weapon itself which will bring harm to the victim, but the poison or charm for which the arrow has become the means of contact. The woodcut in the Speyer edition (Figure 5.2) displays very clearly the reversal of the arrow and includes something attached to the shaft.5 The shooting of bristles and other substances into an animal or human by means of an arrow was a common form of malefice in the fifteenth century and was also cited in the sixteenth century as the work of the Devil. Smearing with unguents and hurling powders, offering poisoned food or drink, placing charms in a person’s proximity such as under a pillow or above

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FIGURE 5.3  The Witch and Death Manuscript illumination, in Danse Macabre des Femmes, c. 1500. BNF MS fr. 995, fol. 39v.

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a lintel, were all ways of doing harm to an enemy. The arrow sorcery represented here is a particular variant of bringing magical substances in contact with the bodies of those to be harmed. While Molitor’s text did not deny the physical threat of witchcraft, as expressed most graphically in the woodcut of the laming witch, it tended to emphasize the diabolical source of such action and the divine permission needed to carry it out successfully. The woodcut series reflects this diabolical emphasis in one particular image –​a devil and [a]‌witch shown embracing in a country setting. The embrace clearly signifies sexual liaison and would therefore seem to be a very early visual representation of the diabolical pact. In the Zainer edition from Ulm (Figure 5.4)

FIGURE 5.4  Witch and Devil Embracing Ulrich Molitor, Von den Unholden oder Hexen, c. 1490?, fol. B5v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 5. Fig. 419.

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the Devil sports a hunting hat, but his true nature is betrayed by the tail emerging from beneath his short, slit-​style tunic, by his donkey ears and his hoofed feet; in most other editions, such as the Amerbach edition from Basel (Figure  5.5), the Devil has been given clawed feet and also fang-​like teeth, which give him an especially lecherous appearance. These are common visual characteristics of the Devil in the later fifteenth century and emphasize his beastly and sensual nature. Here they are particularly apt as the Devil draws the witch towards him and –​in the Zainer edition –​rests his right hand on her breast. The woman’s headdress indicates she is married, and so we have a scene not only of diabolical seduction, but also of adultery. This woodcut was usually located in one of two chapters that

FIGURE 5.5  Witch and Devil Embracing Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, c. 1495, fol. 1v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 22. Fig. 1278.

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raised key demonological questions of the period: “Whether the Devil can appear in human shape and sleep with women” and “Whether children can be born of the sexual intercourse of the evil spirit [with women]”. While Molitor’s textual discussion of these questions was complex, the woodcut simply affirmed the sexual liaison between witch and devil as fundamental to witchcraft belief. The diabolical nature of witchcraft also features in the Molitor woodcut depicting three witches with animal heads, about to ride a forked stick through the sky (Figure 5.6). The image represents the witches’ powers of metamorphosis and their capacity to traverse vast distances. The assumption of animal form is analogous to the Devil’s assumption of human form. Molitor’s accompanying chapter is headed, “Whether they themselves can be transformed into another shape or

FIGURE 5.6  Transformed Witches Ride a Forked Stick through the Sky Ulrich Molitor, Von den Unholden oder Hexen, c. 1493, fol. B3r. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 16. Fig. 618.

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whether they can transform others”. The riding of the cooking fork, seemingly the first instance of this implement to appear in scenes of witchcraft, makes it fairly clear that these are transformed witches rather than bewitched victims. Transformation was seldom a concern in late medieval sorcery or witch trials, but it did constitute an important theme in late medieval discourse. The Malleus, for instance, discussed it at considerable length in a number of its chapters, and it was also frequently represented in visual form. The late medieval viewer, on the other hand, may well have related this image to the animal-​mask in traditional carnival, for the ass was a figure resonant with folly, while the rooster and its bristling comb was employed to represent the exhibitionism, transgression and sexual masquerading of carnival time. In this way witchcraft would allude to issues of moral order, the subject of the pre-​Reformation folly literature of moralists such as Sebastian Brant and Thomas Murner, and a theme developed further by Dürer and Baldung a decade later: in the inversions of the riding witch, or the inclusion of bells and fools’ caps into Baldung’s witchcraft scenes. By the time of the Molitor editions of 1544 and 1545, the female witch riding a cooking fork through the sky is depicted caught in the Devil’s lusty embrace. The riding motif appeared in another Molitor woodcut and in somewhat surprising form: a witch is depicted riding a wolf through the countryside, and in all editions other than the Zainer, the witch is depicted as male (Figure  5.7).6 The woodcut is clearly an illustration of a particular story in Molitor’s text that told of a peasant from the territorial court of Constance and how he was bewitched and struck lame by a male witch riding a wolf. In the Zainer edition, where the riding witch is depicted as female, it would appear that the artist was illustrating the subject of the chapter as a whole, “Whether witches can ride to their feast on an oiled stick or on a wolf ”, rather than the particular story from Constance. Indeed, in the summary of chapters found at the beginning of the Latin edition of Molitor’s work, the chapter heading was expanded to read “or on some other animal”; while in the German edition it became “or on wild animals”. In other words the riding motif would have been critical, rather than a particular narrative or even the gender of the witch. Any who read Molitor’s accompanying text were also quite likely to have linked the woodcut to a whole genre of medieval stories about the Wild Ride. For the text specifically compares the ride of these witches out to their feast –​or “to their pleasure” (“wollust”), as Molitor calls it –​and the fantasies of women in medieval penitential literature who claimed to ride out on animals in the company of pagan goddesses such as Diana and Herodia. Why the artist did not attempt to portray a group of wild female riders for this chapter remains a little puzzling. But perhaps in the last decade of the fifteenth century witchcraft was still generally perceived in terms of traditional malefic sorcery, rather than as the behaviour of a

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FIGURE 5.7  Male Witch Riding a Wolf Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, c. 1495, fol. 8v. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 21. Fig. 713.

diabolically linked and mainly female group. It was not until the first decade of the sixteenth century that Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer developed these early tentative images into the disturbing visual code of the riding witch. And the extent to which this influenced the visual tradition, and even later illustrations of Molitor’s work itself, can be clearly seen from the 1544 and 1545 editions, where the artist has used inversion to clearly identify the witch’s ride as wild and disorderly. The sixth Molitor woodcut (Figure 5.8) marks a significant point of transformation in the representation of sorcery in the later fifteenth century. It emphasizes

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FIGURE 5.8  Female Witches Eating Together Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, c.  1496–​1500, fol d2r. From [Albert] Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, 23 vols, Leipzig, 1920–​43. Vol. 8. Fig. 935.

witchcraft as a group female activity rather than the action of a solitary male or female sorcerer. The scene of three women engaged in a meal and conversation under a tree clearly links witchcraft to contemporary fascination with female sociability and independence. The differing dress and ages of the three women serve to emphasize the bond between them, a bond of conviviality created both through the consumption of the food and drink on the table and through the conversation represented by their gestures. The pointing gesture of the senior figure has been adapted from the declamatory gesture of the rhetor and is commonly used in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to represent female prattle or gossip.

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It is also used to designate the uttering of sibylline prophecy and the casting of spells. The 1473 edition of Boccaccio’s On Famous Women for instance, printed in Ulm by Zainer, included many woodcuts of the sibyls and of sorcerers such as Mantho and Circe, with very similar hand gestures. It seems likely that these apparently innocent scenes of female conviviality were meant to convey stern warnings concerning the powerful tongue of witchcraft. The Cologne editions in particular, with the heavily underlined eyes of the female participants (Figure 5.8), convey a strong sense of evil. A sausage held up by a woman with a knife may also allude to the attested power of witches to castrate. For the scene is of the women’s “pleasure” –​ a site of unlicensed, sensual gratification out in the countryside, beyond the supervision of legitimate authority and outside the mastery of men. These intimations of female desire, in a context of food, drink and conviviality, may well have been the stimulus for the far more explicit sexualized images of groups of witches created by artists such as Baldung and Altdorfer in the following decade.

Notes 1

This image features as the title-​page in four Cologne editions:  Cornelius von Ziericksee, c. 1496–​1500; in Leipzig: Arnold von Köln, 1495; in Basel, c. 1510. It is repeated in the four Cologne editions and in two editions of Basel:  Johann Amerbach, 1490–​95. 2 Nider, Formicarius, book 5, ch. 4; Malleus Maleficarum, Part 2, Question 1, ch. 15. 3 See Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston 2003), 163–​6. 4 See Chapter 10 by Wolfgang Behringer for the significance of weather magic in later allegations of witchcraft in Germany and central Europe –​ Ed. 5 The other versions of the woodcut, with the exception of the Zainer edition, have the witch shooting what looks like a splayed stick. 6 For the Zainer woodcut, see Zika, Exorcising Our Demons, 325, fig. 40. In two editions the witch is also shown gesturing with his right hand, casting the spell referred to in the text.

16

PART TWO

Witchcraft, magic and fear

T

HE EXISTENCE OF WITCHCRAFT DEPENDED ON a complex set of cultural assumptions. These assumptions established the possibility of the ­ crime, identified the motives behind it, and determined the kind of people who were most likely to be its perpetrators. It can be argued, of course, that similar assumptions underlie the perception of all crimes; and, indeed, some thinkers have argued that the concept of “crime” itself should be viewed as a social construction, shaped entirely by ethnic and historical circumstances.1 In the case of witchcraft, the role of cultural factors is particularly obvious to modern observers, since many of the assumptions which made it possible –​notably the existence of harmful magic –​are no longer taken seriously in Western industrial societies. As the historian Christina Larner has noted, the refusal of most Westerners to accept the existence of magic per se makes it difficult for witch trials to take place in the modern age: even if individuals attempt to cast harmful spells, most of their contemporaries will simply ignore them or regard them as mad.2 The willingness of most people in pre-​industrial Europe to accept the reality of witchcraft, therefore, illustrates the gulf between their view of the world and our own. The nature of early modern witch beliefs, and the wider cultural assumptions and social experiences which sustained them, are the subject of the extracts in Part Two. The cultural context of accusations of witchcraft is considered in depth in the first contribution by Robin Briggs (6). Briggs notes that cases of witchcraft normally centred on experiences of illness or misfortune, and allegations of maleficium

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provided an explanation for such occurrences. But he also notes that very few types of disease or hardship were connected exclusively with the crime. In other words, witchcraft could be linked to a wide range of very different experiences; and this meant that it could, in principle, be used to explain practically any form of human suffering. It is striking, however, that relatively few unpleasant experiences were understood in this way. Why, then, were some events ascribed to hurtful magic when many others were not? Briggs suggests that a key factor was the existence of a plausible suspect, who appeared to possess both a motive for wishing harm on the afflicted individual and the requisite magical skills. When such a person was identified, the principal motive of those accusing them was often to have the spell lifted. This could be accomplished in many cases without recourse to the courts: informal contacts between the alleged witch and their victim could restore neighbourly relations and provide an ostensible “cure”. Briggs’ work challenges several modern assumptions about witchcraft: it suggests that many allegations might have been resolved peacefully, and therefore escaped the written record; and it reverses the normal priorities in witchcraft research by asking why trials did not occur more frequently than they actually did. The acts of supposed maleficium that Briggs describes were part of a larger economy of occult forces. This included a multitude of spirits that existed alongside, and often penetrated, the domain of human affairs. Belief in these beings was by no means confined to the uneducated: indeed, the frequent references to angels and demons in the Bible and the works of the church fathers made them a staple of early modern scholarship. As Euan Cameron shows (7), spirits also pervaded the beliefs of ordinary Europeans. Our knowledge of popular ideas about these creatures depends largely on second-​hand accounts produced by a literate minority; but nonetheless it is clear that most people accepted the existence of a rich and variegated assembly of spirits. While theologians tended to view these beings as either good or wicked, it appears that the rest of the population believed in morally ambiguous entities of various kinds, which could both harm and assist men and women. The almost universal belief in the propensity of spirits to interact with humankind was part of the background in which the prosecution of witches took place: it allowed both judges and ordinary villagers to accept the involvement of supernatural beings in harmful sorcery –​though their exact role remained open to interpretation. As Cameron suggests, the concept of “familiar spirits” who helped witches to harm their neighbours, and featured prominently in English and North American trials, probably derived from popular beliefs about the world of spirits.3 The practice of “charming” was another aspect of the economy of invisible powers. In her study of magical beliefs in seventeenth-​century Scotland (8), Joyce Miller reconstructs the thinking and activity of charmers from the records

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of the church courts. Her research complements Robin Briggs’ insight that most responses to witchcraft occurred outside the official framework of the law, and were predicated on the diagnosis and lifting of harmful spells. The Scottish charmers whom she describes espoused a distinctive and internally consistent model of medicine based on the ability of neighbours to harm one another through magic and the “ill eye”. This could be remedied by protective or curative rituals. In some cases, these involved the mending of a fractured relationship between the victim and the person responsible for their suffering, such as the man who recovered from fainting fits in 1608 after asking Isobel Greirson three times to restore his health. The breach between them had been caused by a debt that he repaid as part of his cure. In the world of bewitchment and counter-​magic described in these records, no one doubted that bad feeling between villagers could lead directly to sickness and death. Until recently, this assumption has been regarded as the “central fallacy” of witch-​believing cultures; but this view may be mistaken. In their contributions to this section, both Robin Briggs and Edward Bever note that the fear of maleficium can cause medical harm in societies that accept the concept. The conflict between Isobel Greirson and her neighbour may well have made him ill. Through a study of witchcraft cases in the Duchy of Württemberg (9), Bever argues that many medical symptoms associated with maleficium were consistent with “psychosomatic” effects that can be observed today; and if these symptoms are now understood in terms of psychophysiology, they were explained equally well in pre-​modern societies in terms of occult harm. This argument has some striking implications. First, many victims of bewitchment may have experienced physical symptoms that were entirely genuine, and were susceptible to cure through counter-​magic. Second, a minority of those accused of witchcraft may have actively sought to injure their neighbours and succeeded in doing so. As Bever points out, “some of the suspects were clearly guilty, perhaps not of witchcraft as defined by demonologists, but definitely of witchcraft as commonly understood”. The social dynamics examined by Briggs, Miller and Bever concern allegations of witchcraft against individuals. Wolfgang Behringer (10), in contrast, focuses on the fears of collective maleficium that fuelled the large-​scale witch panics in Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In some important respects, however, Behringer’s approach is similar to the other authors in Part Two. First, he views fears of collective witchcraft as an explanation for human suffering, and efforts to deal with witches as a means to counteract this suffering. During the major German panics, he argues that ordinary people tended to ascribe bad weather to the activity of witches. This was an understandable response since the idea that groups of witches could maliciously alter the climate was already well established; and it made sense to attribute an attack on a whole community, such

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as the blighting of harvests by unseasonal weather, to the actions of more than one individual. Popular anxieties about weather magic forced local authorities to act against those who were believed to be responsible, despite the general reluctance of political elites to take the initiative in such matters. Second, Behringer suggests that fears of witchcraft were provoked by real phenomena. There was a severe decline in the climate in the period of the major panics, and this abnormal circumstance could be reasonably explained in terms of witchcraft. The exceptional weather patterns of the late sixteenth century encouraged the exceptional response of large-​scale witch trials. While Behringer is careful to avoid attributing witchcraft prosecutions solely to climatic phenomena, he convincingly explores the role of weather, hunger and fear in promoting popular concerns about the crime. By locating witch beliefs in their cultural context, the extracts in Part Two indicate the pitfalls of applying modern assumptions to past societies. In the same way that anthropologists can read their own expectations into the practices of so-​called “primitive” societies, historians are prone to interpreting the beliefs and actions of early modern people in terms that relate primarily to the present. Equally, we are often tempted to isolate one particular set of social practices –​like those surrounding the persecution of witches –​and examine them outside the wider context of beliefs to which they belonged. It is only by considering the belief system of early modern people as a whole that we can start to understand the meaning of witchcraft. Ironically, it may be that one consequence of this approach is the discovery that modern historians are more preoccupied with witchcraft than were people in the pre-​industrial age, who viewed maleficium as just one aspect of the vast “economy of the sacred”.

Notes 1 2 3

For an overview of social constructionist thought, see Vivien Burr, Social Constructionism, 2nd edn (Routledge 2003). Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion (Basil Blackwell 1984), 83. For the origin of familiars in English witch beliefs, see Charlotte-​ Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil and Emotions in Early Modern England (Routledge 2017), 50–​55. Millar argues that these spirits were a kind of demon.

 

56

Chapter 6

Robin Briggs THE EXPERIENCE OF BEWITCHMENT

A

L L E G A T I O N S O F M A L E F I C I U M were a response to misfortune. Here Robin Briggs considers the circumstances in which such allegations could plausibly be made: these involved a suitably “unusual” affliction and a viable suspect. Briggs also discusses the medical effects of witchcraft in communities for which it was a cultural reality. This relates to Edward Bever’s work on “psychosocial” factors in maleficium (9), and also Kathleen Sands’ analysis of demonic possession (24).

When the Devil promised witches prosperity and freedom from want he inevitably proved to have deceived them. It was very much otherwise with the power to harm others. His money might turn into leaves, but the powder or the familiars remained with his new servants and were all too efficacious. As far as other people were concerned, witchcraft was about power. To be bewitched was to suffer the effects of the witch’s power; it was the defining experience of what this meant in the real world. In most cases a person or an animal fell ill; later they possibly died. There was general agreement that the affliction itself must be strange or unnatural, so known illnesses were almost never ascribed to witchcraft. Given the modest state of medical knowledge in early modern Europe, this still left a vast field open for argument.

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The most clear-​cut cases were those of sick people who were convinced they had been bewitched and named the witch responsible. They might demonstrate alarming symptoms if the suspect approached, or even at the mention of their name. The violence of some of these episodes is quite startling. The possessed London girl Mary Glover, having seen her alleged persecutor Elizabeth Jackson in church, went home and fell into a grievous fit, which was through repetitions of the witch’s view, increased both in strength and in strangeness daily. In so much as now, she was turned round as a hoop, with her head backward to her hips; and in that position rolled and tumbled, with such violence, and swiftness, as that their pains in keeping her from receiving hurt against the bedstead, and posts, caused two or three women to sweat; she being all over cold and stiff as a frozen thing. We may well see this particular instance as a hysterical attack, with the additional motive of gaining power and revenge, for when later the old woman was brought before her during such fits, a strange voice apparently coming from the girl’s nostrils repeatedly said ‘Hang her’.1 There is every reason to suppose that such conviction could be an illness itself and that in some circumstances it might kill, either on its own or in conjunction with another complaint. The phenomenon of ‘Voodoo death’ sees the level of anxiety rise to a traumatic state, so that normal body functions collapse, and death may follow.2 In effect those who are cursed or believe themselves to be the target of witchcraft go into shock; in most cases the result is some kind of pain or neurosis, which may well redouble in the presence of the suspect. Such phenomena have long been remarked on by observers of primitive societies, while more recently doctors have come to recognize how the immune system is affected by emotional states. The current trend towards less mechanistic ways of understanding the causes of sickness is very apposite here. In certain circumstances, it would appear, people can effectively be scared to death; more commonly, their normal social functioning and sense of well-​being can be seriously impaired. While Haiti may be an extreme case, where impressive rituals reinforce the process, there is a very striking example from rural France as recently as 1968. In this instance a nocturnal session of counter-​magic was followed the next day by the hospitalization of a neighbour suspected of witchcraft, who would presumably have been well aware of what was going on, and that the magic was intended to send the evil back to its alleged source. The woman concerned baffled the doctors; she would only repeat endlessly ‘I’m afraid’, and was too terrified to eat properly, dying seven months later.3

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In societies where people believe in witchcraft their own fears usually function in this way, so that curses, threats and other expressions of ill-​will have genuine power against the suggestible. The crime itself may be imaginary, but the imagination can be an immensely strong force. It is not surprising that children and adolescents seem to have been particularly prone to such disorders. While it would appear that most cases did not involve the most intense forms of witchcraft paranoia, a much larger number included claims that one or more of the alleged victims had blamed the accused for their fatal sickness.This was usually explicit, but might be expressed in a more oblique fashion, particularly if it was in a face-​to-​face encounter with the suspect. Margueritte Liegey, known as la Geline (‘the hen’), had allegedly been a much feared beggar in the villages around Mirecourt in southern Lorraine for twenty years. After Claude George refused her alms one day she fell ill with her mouth twisted; when Margueritte returned she told her she had been very ill since the refusal. The suspect had no difficulty understanding the subtext of this remark, retorting ‘so she wanted to say that she had given her the illness’; Claude still thought herself bewitched when she died three months later. This was just one of numerous allegations in this case from 1624, which ended with the confession and execution of the sixty-​year-​old widow. Eighteen months before the trial, Humbert Journal’s wife had died after a violent illness lasting six days, during which she named Margueritte as the cause. Humbert chased after the suspect to beat her but she took refuge in the house of Didler Mongenot; Mongenot’s wife had at first tried to keep her out and now believed she was bewitched, because several rat-​sized animals seemed to be running about inside her body.4 … Witnesses undoubtedly liked stories about blame attributed by past victims because they placed responsibility for the charges on persons who were safely dead. When it came to their own suspicions they were often more evasive, making use of various equivocations. … Wherever possible the diagnosis of witchcraft was attributed to a third party. Jennon Napnuel might well have felt nervous when summoned as a witness against Georgeatte Herteman, since the latter, asked if she were not very vindictive, admitted she had a very quick temper. Jennon told of a quarrel at the mill and the subsequent death of a cow, whose flesh was rotting and coming away, so that the slaughterman ‘gave it as his opinion that it was witchcraft’. These devices can be seen as evidence for the reluctance with which villagers testified at all, and their desire to leave a way open for reconciliation in case of an acquittal. They may also reveal the genuine uncertainty most people felt about witchcraft as an explanation, an awareness that there was something fragile and unreliable about it. … Early modern European villages were not populated by a race of credulous half-​ wits who attributed any and every misfortune to witchcraft. Such people existed,

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but enjoyed little credit among neighbours who usually held more sophisticated views about causation and understood that sick people might be more desperate than wise. When Claudon Grand Demenge was on his deathbed he said a woman had caused his death; his brother thought he referred to his wife Jennon, but his sister-​in-​law thought it wrong to take any notice of what he said because he seemed to be out of his mind at the time. Since this was the most serious charge in a rather poorly supported accusation, these doubts may have been important in the subsequent decision to release Jennon without taking proceedings any further.

RELIGION, MEDICINE AND MISFORTUNE Misfortune has always been a difficult concept, both intellectually and emotionally. Very few people are content to accept that blind chance plays a large part in their lives; they seek reasons in logical connections even where these do not really exist. In early modern Europe there were two large-​scale systems which claimed to offer general explanations for success and failure, health and sickness, life and death. To the modern observer both appear almost wholly false, with their genuine power to explain being as meagre as their claims were grandiose. The first was religious or providential: God was an active force in the world, rewarding the faithful and punishing the impious, showing his hand in the issue of battles or the infliction of famine and plague. Some clever sleights of hand were necessary in order to deal with the more obvious cases in which the divine verdict was patently unjust; the almighty perforce became a very crafty operator, lulling some into a false sense of security while others endured tribulations designed to test or consolidate their faith. Although the resulting system was a supreme example of circular reasoning, it underlay a vast network of spiritual and therapeutic agencies that provided real comfort for many. Just as witchcraft could kill those who believed in it, so faith in divine power might well cure or succour them. The Devil himself was part of this way of thinking, and a particularly intractable one. Theologians wrestled none too successfully with the problem of evil and the reasons why God either inflicted it himself or allowed the Devil to do so in his stead. The other, parallel system was that of natural philosophy, largely borrowed from Greek antiquity and imperfectly merged with the Christian tradition. This was the world of the elements and the humours, fictitious categories which supposedly governed everything from meteorology to medicine. Balance and harmony were the keys to peace in the skies, the state and the body alike. A whole arsenal of powerful imagery, still present in modern language and magnificently expressed by such authors as Shakespeare and Racine, was deployed to support

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these commonplaces. These literary glories cannot disguise the fact that the theory was little more than sonorous nonsense, which a few bold spirits were beginning to undermine, and would finally start replacing, in the later seventeenth century. … The intellectual leaders among clerics and doctors may have been ensnared in defective systems of thought, but they were quite capable of sharp perception on specific questions. For various reasons, they were never won over to support for the stronger versions of witchcraft theory, some isolated individuals apart. More importantly in the present context, these world views were far from being unknown at the popular level. It was the business of the clergy to disseminate Christian teachings, while almanacs and local medical practitioners were among the agencies which put about a rather fragmented version of natural philosophy. For all their weaknesses, these schemes had a very powerful effect on the way people at all levels of society apprehended their world. Explanations in terms of divine purpose and natural forces were normal; they did not exclude witchcraft, but both had a tendency to push it to the margins. … It was a commonplace among critics of persecution to ridicule the way medical failure was explained away by alleging witchcraft. There is no need to suppose this was merely cynical, for baffled doctors might have perfectly reasonable grounds for deciding on a supernatural explanation. At other times, university-​ trained physicians could behave like any local wizard, identifying witchcraft on the basis of a sample of urine without even seeing the patient. The 1597 case of Alice Gooderidge, from Stapenhill near Burton-​upon-​Trent, shows how a diagnosis could evolve progressively. An aunt to a sick boy, Thomas Darling, took his urine to a physician, who suggested worms, then suspected witchcraft when the illness worsened. The aunt rejected the idea, but the possibility was then discussed in the boy’s presence after which hecame up with the story of his meeting with Alice Gooderidge and her anger against him. He had farted in front of her, ‘after which she angrily said “Gyp with a mischiefe, and fart with a bell: I will go to heaven, and thou shalt go to hell” ’, then stooped ominously to the ground. At a later stage in this case a cunning man was called in who subjected the wretched old woman to a form of torture, putting her close to the fire with new shoes on her feet. This totally irregular (and indeed illegal) procedure was apparently carried out before an assembly of' ‘many worshipful personages’. Although she did not make a proper confession on this occasion, Alice finally agreed that she had been angry because the boy called her witch, then caused the Devil, in the form of a small dog, to afflict him; according to the pamphlet record she was convicted, only to die in prison.5 Yet in the areas on which we have detailed information such episodes are relatively rare; it seems likely that a diagnosis of bewitchment was only made in a tiny fraction of all cases. This is particularly striking when

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one considers how much medical expertise was relatively amateurish and local. If practitioners had resorted to this technique to explain every failure, or those cases they did not understand, then accusations would have proliferated dramatically, far above the levels of which we know. In the absence of direct evidence one cannot know for sure why they were so restrained. They may have been so committed to their own approaches and methods that they preferred to seek explanations within the system rather than outside it; often they blamed the patient for not following the prescribed treatment. Nothing in most of the illnesses seems to mark them off, apart from the reiterated claim that they were strange and unfamiliar, at best a highly subjective judgment. Sudden fatality and lingering decline might both be attributed to witchcraft, as might anything from eye trouble to a bad foot. People who felt sudden weights on their chest at night, so that they could not breathe, reported seeing other persons in the room who might attack them physically. Jacotte Simon told a complicated story about how she had remained in bed after her husband rose before dawn to work, then she felt something press down on her. Although she could not move, she managed to make the sign of the cross with her tongue, calling out to her husband for help. Finally managing to raise her head a little she saw Penthecoste Miette at the foot of her bed, but there was no reply when she spoke to her. Her husband then rushed in, at which two cats, both ‘marvellously big and ugly’ left with a great noise. She suspected that Mengeatte Lienard had been the other cat. On other occasions the cats spoke and might even hold a debate. Mesenne Vannier was ill in bed when three cats appeared and discussed whether to kill her, but decided that she was to be spared on account of her youth and recent marriage; their voices identified them as Jennon Zabey, the widow Rudepoil and Claudon Marchal’s wife. This sounds like a typical hallucination brought on by a high fever. Other incidents where the sufferer felt paralysed in bed probably resulted from the quite common phenomenon of regaining partial consciousness while in a deep sleep. In addition, the various panic attacks may well have had a strong psychosomatic component, making them particularly suited for witchcraft explanations. … Angry exchanges and suspicions of bewitchment were much commoner than criminal prosecutions. A very powerful motive for accusing someone was the hope that they might offer a cure. This was likeliest if the charge were made indirectly, often in the form of an invitation to visit the sick person. There must have been a complex code in operation here, full of implicit understandings which are all too likely to escape the modern eye. In the negotiations which followed the witch was really being invited to accept responsibility, then secure pardon and immunity by removing the evil. Cures might be effected by touching, by bringing or preparing

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food, by more formal medical treatment with herbs or charms, or by pilgrimages and rituals. In the Labourd, according to de Lancre, it was customary to ask the suspect to wash their hands in a basin, then give the water to the sufferer to drink, a ritual with multiple resonances.6 The display of good-​will involved cancelled out the negative charge of the original ill-​will; in many cases it must have made the sufferer feel much better. A good many of the witnesses in court cases were talking about episodes of this kind, which would have been regarded as closed until legal action started. …

PARENTS, CHILDREN AND WITCHCRAFT Whereas illness was unpredictable, the dangers of childbirth were the opposite. Women had every reason to be nervous about the risks to themselves and their babies, against which they sought to mobilize help and protection. The presence of neighbours and relatives offered moral as well as practical support at a moment of great danger and stress. Failure to summon a neighbour with a reputation as a witch to either the birth or the christening was to keep them at a safe distance, while running the risk of giving offence that might provoke hostile action. This scenario appeared frequently in the trials as the explanation of a bad outcome for mother, child or both. Jacquotte Tixerand refused to attend the baptism of George Guyart’s son, since she had not been asked to the childbed, but when she visited the house a week later she admired the child, telling the mother to keep it well; when it sickened the same day, to die a week later, the inference was obvious. … High infant mortality rates were general across Europe, with many babies languishing then dying for no obvious reason. These deaths inevitably formed one cause for suspicion; difficulties with breastfeeding, another very common problem, were often blamed on witchcraft too. Older women, who provided the normal source of advice in such cases, could easily find themselves in ambiguous positions. When Zabel Rémy lost her milk, her relative Dion Rémy (who was about seventy-​five at the time) came to her aid; she made Zabel drink some wine, then damped some coarse cloth, warmed it by the fire and applied it to her breasts. Another witness remembered, however, that she had not been invited to the celebrations after the birth, was suspected by the parents, then invited to dinner in an attempt to secure relief. Professional help in delivery was normally provided by midwives and it has been widely supposed that any misfortune might be blamed on their witchcraft, allegedly linked to their position as ‘popular’ healers in traditional folklore. Midwives have thus become a paradigmatic case of female medical specialists

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under attack from men who wanted to control them and destroy their autonomy. Whatever truth there may be in these wider claims, the putative association with witchcraft is illusory. No statistical evidence of any significance has been produced to support it; where figures have been established they show that midwives were rather under-​represented among the accused.7 The theme is present in demonological literature mainly because the Malleus Maleficarum went on about witch-​ midwives at some length and was copied by later writers. … In general, however, it is easy to understand why midwives were rarely accused; they were selected precisely because they were regarded as trustworthy persons by the community so that it must have taken a catastrophic drop in their standing for them to become suspects. A rare instance of association between child-​care and witchcraft tends to bear this out, for in the German city of Augsburg a number of lying-​in servants found themselves on trial. These were women who specialized in helping out in households around the time of childbirth, but they lacked the skills or status of midwives and were much more vulnerable in consequence.8 …

ANIMALS AND BEWITCHMENT If there was one area in which people thought of bewitchment more readily than in connection with their own illnesses, it was over the misfortunes of their animals. Domestic animals are extremely vulnerable to infectious diseases and small accidents; even with modern techniques their ailments can be difficult to diagnose and treat. Furthermore, a substantial amount of the capital of early modern society, especially in the rural world, was tied up in these fragile creatures. If the medical profession was rudimentary, the veterinary one hardly existed at an official level. Every peasant needed some practical skills in treating animals; in difficult cases they turned to neighbours reputed [to be] skilful in healing, including herdsmen, shepherds and smiths. The usual range of practical and pious remedies was on offer; quite large numbers of magical prayers survive. This was probably because suspected witches saw them as perfectly normal and accepted forms of treatment, so were ready to repeat them before the judges. In other respects the bewitchment of animals followed the same pattern as that of humans. It usually followed quarrels and threats, was closely linked to these by its timing and frequently led to demands for the witch to effect a cure. … With animals more even than with humans, one is conscious of how flexible the diagnosis of illness might be. Strangeness and suddenness were taken as signs of witchcraft  –​the cow which ate normally but wasted away, the horse which dropped dead in the stable. Slaughtermen and others who cut up dead animals

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would sometimes claim that they were rotten inside, something which must proceed from witchcraft. Mayette Gaste was suspected of causing the death of a horse whose flesh was found to be blackened as if burned, so that the butcher said it had been given a drink by some evil persons. Commonest of all was the allegation that an animal had died ‘as if rabid’, a curious example of having it both ways, with the natural explanation being simultaneously advanced and rejected. Perhaps the symptoms of animals which lashed out at their masters and foamed at the mouth were thought similar to those of demonic possession. The various infections which resulted in the feet and legs rotting away were also cited as proof of bewitchment, although they seem all too plainly natural to a modern reader. … Milking cows were very susceptible to infections (such as brucellosis and other disorders), which often coincided with minor disputes over requests for purchases or gifts of milk. A  routine pattern saw these episodes interpreted as witchcraft. Demenge Saulnier claimed that Margueritte Liegey had asked his wife to sell her some wood and after several refusals went to the door of the stable, turned round and came back. This was repeated three times, then she asked to buy milk, responding to a further refusal with a threat that she would repent. Their only cow then sickened, only recovering within hours of a threat to beat her. … Virtually all these beliefs seem to have been applied only to a minority of cases, so that yet again the identification of witchcraft must have depended as much on awareness of a suspect as it did on the nature of the misfortune. This applied in the case of one specific nexus of beliefs, that in werewolves. The notion that witches could be transformed into the likeness of other animals, such as cats and hares, was particularly threatening when extended to these dangerous and much feared predators. The number of known cases across Europe is very small, despite the fairly widespread belief, so it is very hard to understand why it occasionally surfaced in a prosecution. Attacks by wolves might be interpreted in this way on the grounds that a particular animal had been singled out, a notably unconvincing attempt to give the normal behaviour of predators diabolical purposiveness. More plausible stories picked up on claims that the wolves had an abnormal appearance; according to Boguet, when Perrenette Gandillon turned herself into a wolf and killed a child, the creature had no tail and human hands in place of its front paws.9 In 1573 rumours were circulating that the villages near Dole were ‘Infested with wolves the size of donkeys’ that ate people and were impossible to capture; these were naturally supposed to be werewolves.10 Alternatively they behaved unnaturally, like the wolf which strangled the foal of Claudon Jean Claudon, refusing to loosen its grip when burning sticks were put against its throat. Earlier the same day his son Curien (who was guarding the herd) had quarrelled with one of Claudon Marchal’s sons, and this was not the only

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suspicion of the kind against him. The extreme and sensational cases were those of wolves which devoured children, bringing together the werewolf theme with the cannibalism sometimes found at the sabbat. When the children of Grattain were running after the wolf which had taken Claudon Didier Vagnier’s child, Claudette Dabo was seen in the vicinity and a strong rumour spread that she had eaten it. The whole business of shapeshifting is a curious mixture of ancient folklore and practical everyday fears, which lurks around the fringes of witchcraft belief without ever becoming an integral part of it. Figures for later periods suggest that quite large numbers of children were attacked by wolves; apparently only a tiny minority of these events were openly attributed to werewolves.

ACCIDENTS AND POVERTY Another large area of bewitchment was that of damage from a range of physical causes. Work accidents –​including injuries inflicted by sharp tools, falling objects and the like –​made occasional appearances in the depositions. A variety of other accidents might be presented as life-​threatening, as when millwheels disintegrated suddenly after a quarrel with the suspect. This happened to Colas Chretien at Moyenmoutler just as his wife was telling him of a quarrel with Mongeatte Joliet and warning him to be careful how he tried to clear the frozen millwheel which had only just been repaired. Newly built structures were known to collapse after visits by local witches. Livelihoods could be put at risk in similar ways. The frequent disputes over milk might be followed by an inability to make butter churn; there were various folkloric remedies, including putting a heated horseshoe or other metal object in the cream, a move some thought would cause severe pain to the witch responsible. Ovens or forges would mysteriously refuse to reach the correct temperature, however much fuel was added. Francois Pelletier had a dispute over the price of some work he did for Hellenix le Reytre, then found the hides he had in store had rotted, causing him serious losses. He wisely reduced his price, then she advised him to use his own cellar for storage in future, which proved successful. … Serious damage to crops was most readily linked to witchcraft through the stories of hail, rain or frost being made at the sabbat. Individual witches were much less likely to be blamed here, although very selective damage or marked immunity might start tongues wagging. … Vines and fruit trees might suffer as well as grain crops, while gardens could prove strangely infertile. A run of bad luck was as threatening in these sectors of agricultural life as it was with animals. Behind local fluctuations there lurked the spectre of general economic failure,

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bringing personal ruin with it. In maritime communities, such as were found in Scotland, England, parts of Scandinavia or the Basque country, weather magic extended to the sinking of ships. Fishing villages which lost significant numbers of menfolk were extremely vulnerable, for this was one activity in which women could not replace them. Violent suspicions of this kind might lead to direct action, as with an incident in 1573 involving some sailors from Enkhuizen, anchored off the Dutch island of Ameland. At the request of the inhabitants, who believed a woman living on the island to be responsible for wrecking ships, they threw her into the sea, then beat her to death with an oar.11 Like every other aspect of bewitchment, this one reminds us just how precarious life must have felt to most ordinary people. Neither prosperity nor good health were to be counted on for the morrow. Those who stayed fit themselves might still be dragged down by the burden of a sick or crippled spouse or child. The unlucky could end up as vagrants and beggars, despite the very real degree of charity and mutual help offered by the community. … The peak decades for persecution were ones in which communal and family bonds were being tested to the limit, for European society was passing through a phase of change accompanied by severe hardship for many.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

S. Bradwell, “Mary Glover’s Late Woeful Case”, in M. MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London (London 1991), 5–​6, 19. W. B.  Cannon, “Voodoo Death”, American Anthropologist, new set, 44 (1942), 169–​81. J. Favret-​Saada, Deadly Words:  Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge 1980), 78–​911. For brevity, the archival sources used in this essay have been omitted from this edition. Full references can be found in Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours (London 1996), ch. 2 –​ Ed. The Most Wonderfull and True Storie, of a Certaine Witch Named Alse Gooderidge of Stapenhill (London 1597), 1–​4. There are summaries and extracts from the pamphlet in C.  L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (Heath Cranton 1933), 176–​81, and G. B. Harrison, ed., Lancaster Witches 612 (London 1929), xxxiv–​viii. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’Inconstance (Paris 1613), 356. See Chapter 19 of this book for De Lancre’s account of Basque witchcraft –​ Ed. See David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-​Witch”, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1–​26. Lyndal Roper, “Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany”, in Oedipus and the Devil (London 1994), 199–​225.

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9 Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers, 3rd edn (Lyon 1610), 361–​2. 10 C. F.  Oates, “Trials of Werewolves in the Franche-​Comte in the Early Modern Period” (Ph.D. thesis, London 1993), 150–​1. 11 H.  de Waardt, “Prosecution or Defense:  Procedural Possibilities Following a Witchcraft Accusation in the Province of Holland before 1800”, in M.  Gijswijt-​ Hofstra and W. Frijhoff, eds, Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (Rotterdam 1991), 83.

 

7

Chapter 7

Euan Cameron SPIRITS IN POPULAR BELIEF

F

O R M O S T O R D I N A R Y P E O P L E in the age of witch trials, fear of bewitchment was combined with a lively awareness of the activity of spirits. The existence of a spirit world was also accepted by theologians, but ideas about the nature of its inhabitants differed considerably between scholars and ordinary people. In this extract Euan Cameron suggests that most Europeans believed in morally ambiguous spirit-​creatures, such as fairies, which could either help or harm them in their daily lives. This departed from the orthodox view that spirits were either benevolent, in the case of angels, or wicked, in the case of demons; it also permitted the existence of creatures that did not fit comfortably within the Christian cosmos. Theologians could either dismiss these beings as figments of the imagination, or view them as demons in disguise. This latter tendency was part of the “demonization of the world” described by H. C. Erik Midelfort (22). The widespread belief in supernatural agents of various kinds also helps to explain some local accounts of the witches’ Sabbath, such as that described by Gustav Henningsen in Sicily (13).

In the case of the invisible creatures of the world there was a real and vital rift between the culture of the theologians, who wrote the bulk of the surviving literature, and the rest of the population. Yet discerning the beliefs of non-​theologians about the spirit world challenges the skills of critical analysis. Only as a last

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resort will this survey review works of imaginative literature or the output of folklorists. In the case of the former, it is impossible to know how seriously to take the imaginative world of, say, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or The Faerie Queen. In the case of folklorists’ inquiries it is sometimes difficult to date the stories precisely, and the problem of constructive imagination arises there also. For preference, the approach used here will be to read the theological treatises (as it were) against themselves. Where they criticize a belief as something people believed and ought not to have done, it will be assumed, provisionally, that they were not attacking an imaginary foe and that some people did hold the views criticized. At a special meeting of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris held at St Mathurin’s on 19 September 1398, the Faculty adopted the definition of certain “errors” that were commonly held in relation to magic. The “errors” were almost certainly codified by the chancellor of the University, Jean Gerson. Gerson then expanded this list of errors with a discursive treatise On Errors Regarding the Magic Art and the Condemned Articles, subsequently published in his collected works and elsewhere. Most of the “errors” refuted in the articles stated that it was permissible to conjure demons, to use them for divination, and to achieve magical effects. Included within them was this statement: “That some demons are good, some are benign, some know all things, some are neither saved nor damned. Error.” Gerson felt it was necessary to refute the belief that invisible spirits were morally diverse or ambiguous. This belief rejected centuries of theological orthodoxy. If such a belief was current in the years around 1400, it was not derived from the teachings of the theologians. A working hypothesis can be extracted from the superstition-​literature. In the popular mind (as well as in certain forms of neoplatonic thought current in the Renaissance) spiritual creatures were believed to be diverse and varied in their characters and moral significance. The world was liberally and abundantly populated with creatures who did not fit into the Christian-​Aristotelian-​Thomist categories of God, people, angels, and demons.These creatures could interact with people in a range of ways, sometimes as friends or helpers, sometimes as sources of threats or mischief. Generally speaking the theological literature classes them, as it were by elimination, as “demons”; but it also testifies, through the beliefs that it rejects, to a more complex classification. It would seem that pre-​modern people were relatively comfortable with the idea of spirit-​creatures being around them, even in their households. From various parts of Europe come stories about “ladies of the house”, mostly female spirits supposed to take part in the housekeeping and reward good housewives. In Alfonso de Spina’s work they were called “duen de casa”. In the Sicilian fairy cult

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discovered in inquisitorial papers by Gustav Henningsen, they were known as the “ladies from outside”, and described as brilliantly dressed, small female creatures with paws rather than feet.1 In Germany they went (and in some circles still do) by the name of “Wichtelin”. Martin Luther reported that some people have certain domestic demons, in the same way as there used once to be lares familiares, who sometimes appear by day. Some people in the vernacular call these Vichtelen, others Helekeppelin. It is believed that a house is most fortunate, if it is occupied by these illusions of demons; people are more afraid to give offence to those demons than to God and the whole world.2 Clearly these creatures were not feared as the ecclesiastics thought they should be. Johann Weyer, who stood somewhat outside the preoccupations of ecclesiastics in this respect, made similar comments: Some of them are gentle and deserving of the title Lares familiares; they are active in households especially at night during the first period of sleep, and, by the noises that they make, they seem to be performing the duties of servants—​descending the stairs, opening doors, building a fire, drawing water, preparing food, and performing all the other customary chores—​when they are really doing nothing at all. Many of these gentle spirits, having foreknowledge of the future on the basis of hidden signs, can be heard ahead of time tending to things which we find actually being done a little later. They will even announce ahead of time, by signs, that merchants will soon arrive to offer their wares for sale. As a boy, I witnessed this phenomenon on several occasions, quite in fear, along with my brothers Arnold and Matthew, in the house of my parents Theodore and Agnes (may God in His ineffable mercy remember them at the resurrection of the just). Sometimes—​when the hops lay heaped in great quantities upon the floor, and the buyers were about to come—​ on the night before their arrival we would hear the sacks being thrown downstairs—​just as in truth happened on the following day.3 We are here dealing with the archetypes of the pixies and fairies of the folklorists, but reported in an era when “official” religious culture was very hostile to such stories. It is therefore surprising to discover even the scraps of information that are forthcoming. De Spina depicted, in a way worthy of Disney, female “fates” attending the birth of children and influencing their destinies in the rest of their lives.

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Scandinavia reputedly produced a particularly rich source of lore on such creatures. The Catholic archbishop of Uppsala, Olaf Magnusson [also known as Olaus Magnus] (1490–​1557), published in 1555 his History of the Northern Peoples, including a great deal of Nordic myth and folklore.4 On the whole Magnusson’s approach resembled that of other superstition-​writers: he expressed great hostility to the pagan mythologies that had only been overtaken by Christianity, in some parts of the Baltic, within the previous two centuries. He muddied the waters considerably by drawing cross-​cultural analogies between Nordic and Graeco-​Roman spirits and minor deities, and citing the commentaries of classical authors on them. However, he quoted some interesting local legends about “nymphs” dispensing good or bad fortunes to young boys.5 Although he treated the legends of the dances of elves and spectres as demonic apparitions, he believed that they took place and described them as realities. He even reported that the hero Høther had tracked such creatures down by following their footsteps in the dewy grass.6 In general he oscillated between reporting the beliefs of the northern peoples, and confining them within Christian demonology like a good churchman.7 Magnusson was liberally quoted by other writers as describing demons who acted as household servants for ordinary people in Scandinavian countries. Here the story improved somewhat in the telling:  Magnusson’s own text was far less interesting than the paraphrases of it that were reported by others. Several commentators reported that demons were used as domestic servants in the northern countries, citing Magnusson as a source. However, the idea that demons might work as domestic servants appeared in other texts, and seems to have been something of a constant factor in Germanic folklore. In the Latin literature these became “familiar spirits”, ultimately the source of the demonic “familiars” of the English witch-​trials. Johann Weyer reported a remarkable tale from Trithemius of Sponheim of a spirit-​creature called “Hutgin” (also spelled “Hudgin” or “Hodecken”) who reportedly served for some time in the household of the bishop of Hildesheim, sometimes helping him enlarge his diocese, at other times quarrelling with the other servants in the kitchen and causing mayhem in the castle.8 Like the “Friar Rush” of English folklore discussed by Reginald Scot, Hutgin assisted an absent husband by frustrating his wife’s attempts to have adulterous affairs in his absence. Intriguingly, that motif in his legend may derive ultimately from a sermon by Jacques de Vitry which only later petrified into folklore.9 Weyer also reported the beliefs about mountain spirits, who were essentially no more nor less than the antecedents of the mining dwarves of the folk-​tales. Various kinds of spirits were said to haunt the mines of the Anneberg, the Schneeberg, and elsewhere. Sometimes they were helpful; at other times they terrified the

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miners and were blamed for the abandonment of mines. More typically they were reported to be merely harmless or mischievous. All kinds of environments had their spirit-​creatures:  Johannes Nider referred ambivalently to the “sylvestres”, forest-​creatures or sylphs, quoting Albertus Magnus on the subject.

Notes See Gustav Henningsen, Chapter 13 in this volume – Ed. Martin Luther, Decem Praecepta wittenbergensi predicata populo (Wittenberg 1518), sigs Biiv–​Biiir. 3 Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, eds George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 73 (Binghamton, NY 1991; repr. 1998), 72. 4 Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome 1555); English edn as Description of the Northern Peoples, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens, ed. Peter Foote, 3 vols, Hakluyt Society; 2nd series, nos 182, 187–​8 (London 1996–​8). 5 Magnus, Description, i.162. 6 Ibid., i.164–​5. 7 Ibid., i.170–​7. 8 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, bk 1, ch. 22, 74–​6. 9 This piece of folklore has an interesting history. See W. D. Paden, “Mt. 1352: Jacques de Vitry, the Mensa Philosophica, Hodeken, and Tennyson”, Journal of American Folklore, 58/​227 (1945), 35–​47. 1 2

28

 

Chapter 8

Joyce Miller WITCHES AND CHARMERS IN SCOTLAND

S

C O T T I S H “ C H A R M E R S ” W E R E magical healers who could detect and remove the effects of maleficium. Here Joyce Miller examines the treatment of charmers in the church courts, and shows that they were generally dealt with differently –​and more leniently –​than those suspected of witchcraft. She also considers the role of charmers in the economy of magic and health. It is interesting to compare Miller’s findings with Alison Rowlands’ work (17) on the German town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Rowlands found that magical healers were also placed in a different category to witches, but the Lutheran authorities tended to punish them more severely than witches.

Life in seventeenth-​century Scotland was extremely difficult for the majority of people, and survival was often a struggle. Religious and political wars, famine and plague killed many, but there were other, more immediate and personal dangers. A fear of witchcraft and the power of witches themselves, to some extent encouraged by religion, existed at all levels of society. … Yet this belief in and fear of witchcraft as a negative or destructive power also permitted its neutralising through the use of charming. Charming included either counter magic, which could be used against an identified source of malefice, or protective magic, which was used in a more generalised beneficial manner. Society needed to believe that the power of witchcraft could be reversed. In 1608

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Isobel Greirson from Prestonpans was accused of casting an illness onto Robert Peddan which caused him to ‘swoon and fain’.1 Peddan then remembered that he owed Greirson 9s 4d which he took to her and asked her three times to restore his health, saying: ‘Gif ye haif done me ony wrang or hurt, repair the samin and restoir me to my health’. Within 24 hours Peddan had recovered his health. In another case Elspeth Wood was accused by the Haddington kirk session in 1653 of causing George Forrest’s cow to lose its milk by stealing a tether. The milk was later restored when the tether was returned to Forrest. In the right circumstances, both parties understood that what had been harmed by witchcraft could be healed by charming. But what was meant by the term ‘charming’ and how did it differ from witchcraft? The term was included in the dittays against many of those accused of witchcraft. James Reid from Musselburgh was accused in 1603 of being a common sorcerer and charmer, and Isobel Bennet was accused of sorcery, witchcraft and charming in 1659. However, there were also those who were classified simply as charmers, with no reference to the nefarious practices of witchcraft or sorcery. Janet Anderson from Stirling was accused of charming in 1617 and 1621. She confessed that she cured a child who had ‘tane a brash [i.e. short burst] of seiknes thrugh ane ill ee’ by charming the child’s vest using her hands and a spoken verse. George Beir from Haddington was a seventh son, and he told the session how he cured people of the cruells, also known as the king’s evil or scrofula –​a form of lymphatic tuberculosis –​by using threads and a spoken charm. He was told by the kirk session in 1646 that if he ‘should be found practising the curing of the cruells heirefter that he should satisfy as a charmer’.These cases reveal that certain people and practices were perceived as being quite distinct from witches and witchcraft. In contemporary terms, therefore, charming clearly had quite a different purpose from that of either witchcraft or sorcery. Charming was the antidote to witchcraft but could also be used to cure some natural diseases. Many of the rituals and practices were common to all three, but the intent, and the source of the power, of charming were very different. Like witchcraft and sorcery, charming used magical power but it was used to counteract witchcraft and sorcery. Unlike witchcraft and sorcery, the source of charming power was not, according to charmers, demonic. It was some other source, sometimes human or sometimes spiritual. On occasion these spirits may have been categorised by others as having been demonic in form, and even sometimes as the Devil himself, but not by the charmers themselves. … The diagnoses offered by charmers were based on the principle that diseases or misfortune were caused by bewitchment, which involved the transference of a negative or evil force through the use of sympathetic magic. The treatments they offered used the same principle. People, animals or objects could be bewitched

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either deliberately or accidentally, but the rationale behind the charms was the removal of the disease  –​or more accurately the force or energy which caused its transfer onto someone or something else or its disposal elsewhere. Several charmers explained how they disposed carefully of intermediate objects, such as clothing, or hair and nail trimmings, which had belonged to the diseased person, in case the disease was transferred accidentally to someone else. Andrew Aiken told the Stirling presbytery in 1636 that ‘ane part of the witchcraft went with the water nd gif any passed over it, they wald gett skaith by it’. In contrast, according to contemporary elite medical theories, diseases were caused by an imbalance of the four humours, and the rationale which informed early modern medical treatment was the restoration of balance using purges to remove and tonics to restore. According to Galenic medical theory each individual symptom would be treated separately. Although on the surface it would appear that the different systems of medical advice had little in common, it is possible to argue that a philosophy of peace and balance informed both forms of treatment. Both groups appear to have believed that an external force had an internal effect, both physically and spiritually. Orthodox medical practitioners attempted to expel an unwelcome humoral disturbance followed by the administration of a restorative tonic, whereas those who believed that bewitching was the cause of illness understood that some form of force had to be expelled before spiritual and physical balance could be restored. Both systems had their own internal logic, were firmly based on accepted principles and beliefs, were part of a shared popular and elite culture and, importantly, were legitimised by the rest of society who participated in their use. Although some of the principles behind the treatments recommended by charmers may have shared something with orthodox medicine, the content and application were very different. Orthodox medical treatments were still firmly Galenic and Hippocratic in their approach and the emphasis was on purging or expelling using blood-​ letting, enemas, emetics, diuretics, expectorants and diaphoretics. After being purged, the patient was restored by the administration of tonics. Most of the ingredients for these prescriptions were vegetable in origin although occasionally animal products would be used. Charmers recognised the causes of those diseases which they felt they could treat and those they could not. Janet Anderson told the privy council that she could tell when someone was ‘witchit’ or ‘blasted by an ill wind’, but she stressed that she could not treat the gravel  –​stony deposits in the bladder or kidneys. The gravel was one of the most serious and painful physical complaints recorded in the seventeenth century and although medical treatments were used the condition often required surgical intervention, something charmers did not do. In

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general, treatments recommended by charmers did not include the same physical ingredients that were used in orthodox medicine. Ingredients or components recommended by charmers were important, but their power or perceived efficacy came from their ritual use as much as the ingredients themselves. The recurrent motifs or features in charming treatments may be categorised according to time, place and manner.The ritual could be carried out at a particular time of day, week or year; at a particular place such as a boundary, crossroads, bridge or river; in a particular manner, perhaps in silence; or particular direction, moving sunwise, anti-​sunwise or backwards. Further categorising motifs which were recorded included the use of words or spoken charms; the use of a particular type of water, or at specific places; numbers; fire; the use of an object such as a shoe, nail, thread or belt; cutting of nails or hair; use of an animal; meal, usually oats but occasionally wheat. Although charmers did not use the polypharmacy of orthodox medicine they still employed a wide variety of motifs. Detailed research in local sources from the presbyteries of Haddington and Stirling between 1603 and 1688 has revealed almost 100 references to some form of charming. … The use of a physical ritual was by far the most common feature, as nine out of ten treatments (92 per cent) included a reference to some form of ritual or routine. Physical rituals by themselves featured in over half the total charms (54 per cent).Words were mentioned in 42 per cent of the charms. A third (38 per cent) used words and ritual together but in this sample, perhaps rather surprisingly, only 3 per cent used words by themselves. Andrew Youll, who tied a live toad around the neck of his sheep in 1646, told the church officials that he had not used any words along with his ritual. Nevertheless he was reprimanded by the Haddington kirk session and told that unless he stopped using the ritual he would be censured as a charmer. The Haddington presbytery decided that Adam Gillies and his wife were not witches because, although they had tied wheat and salt to their cows’ ears, they had not used any words and had merely been carrying out, in the words of the church authorities, an ‘ignorant superstition’. To a large extent these physical rituals appear to have been excused as simple ignorance rather than deliberate transgressions. The use of ritual alone appears to have been regarded by the church and judicial authorities as charming not witchcraft. … The remedies offered by charmers in the seventeenth century were as varied as the treatments prescribed by orthodox medicine, but both were founded on logical principles and experience. The treatments displayed a consistency of technique, belief and participation, which show that charmers and society had a solid cultural foundation for understanding the causes of disease and the efficacy of their healing practices. Knowledge and skill in charming was both passed

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on through generations and gained through empiricism, but the knowledge was neither arbitrary nor chaotic. The charms were founded on both cultural and religious or spiritual traditions; their similarity with pre-​Reformation practice was certainly marked although their principles and origins are likely to have been even older. This does not imply that charming was simply an alternative religious belief system recognised by a small section of the population. On the contrary most of society practised and understood an amalgamation of beliefs. It was the organised church itself, not society, which incorporated certain beliefs and rituals for its own purposes and rejected others.The pre-​Reformation church accepted pleas to saints or pilgrimages to holy sites to help relieve suffering, but the Protestant church removed these elements of worship or ritual as being too Catholic in meaning. It has been suggested that the Protestant church in Scotland caused a change in attitude towards the causes and cures of disease. The church wanted sufferers to turn to the comfort of prayer and personal contemplation and responsibility, rather than using charms or magic. The goal was to achieve an ideal godly state, but it is clear from the records that many of the ordinary members of the population were slower in abandoning a system which they had followed for generations and which provided comfort, hope and control. In the absence of access to professional healers and in the wider context of witchcraft belief, the practice of charming was mainstream, rather than alternative, medicine.

Note 1

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Joyce Miller, “Devices and Directions: Folk Healing Aspects of Witchcraft Practice in Seventeenth-​Century Scotland”, in Julian Goodare, ed., The Scottish Witch-​Hunt in Context (Manchester University Press, Manchester 2002), 93–​8 –​ Ed.

 

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Chapter 9

Edward Bever THE MEDICAL EFFECTS OF WITCHCRAFT IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

C

O U L D M A L E F I C I U M C A U S E medical harm? Here Edward Bever examines the possible “psychosocial” effects of witchcraft in magic-​believing cultures. He relates a small number of witchcraft cases from the duchy of Württemberg to the emerging medical consensus that psychological factors can play a significant role in human disease. While the physiological basis for this effect is imperfectly understood, its reality is well documented. The conditions that Bever describes fall into three broad types. In “somatoform” illnesses, patients experience symptoms with little or no organic damage; in “psychosomatic” conditions, organic damage is caused or strongly influenced by psychological factors; and in “immunosuppressant” conditions, the patient’s immune response is weakened by psychological factors such as stress, making them vulnerable to organic disease. All three types appear to have been involved in maleficium in Württemberg.

Anecdotal evidence of a connection between early modern witchcraft and psychosocial influences on disease abounds in the secondary literature, but historians have slighted it because of their limited understanding. My investigation of witchcraft in the duchy of Württemberg, however, focused on a sample of small trials1 –​ supervised by the ducal Oberrat –​in part to explore the incidence and nature of the maladies attributed to witchcraft. The study was restricted to trials involving

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five or fewer suspects in order to minimize the effects of mass hysteria and judicial abuses, thus deliberately de-​emphasizing the processes of victimization that featured so heavily in early modern European witchcraft. Unfortunately, since the documents are legal rather than medical, information about the ills caused by the suspects is spotty. Nevertheless, psychosocial influences on disease seem to have been a significant element in early modern popular witchcraft fears. The diseases ranged from somatoform disorders to general medical conditions affected by psychological factors. In some instances, the suspects’ influence on other people was unintentional; in others, it resulted from deliberate attempts to inflict harm. The sampled cases conform generally to the patterns reported by anthropologists and historians elsewhere. Those accused tended to have limited social power and reputations for chronic hostility, and the denunciations tended to attribute specific harms to them. The purpose of the trials was essentially to determine whether their behavior manifested a deep hostility toward the community in general, whether they were, in contemporary terms, “no Christian, but given over to loathsome Satan”. The types of injury reported in the trial records included theft, arson, poison, assault, occult injury, and harm to animals, but in accord with the cross-​cultural typology, almost all of the accusations involved health issues. Occult injury is the category most obviously related to psychosocial influences, but because psychosocial stressors can influence a wide variety of physical problems, the other sources of injury need to be considered as well. Many accusations of occult injury did not specify how the damage was supposed to have been done. In a few cases, the depositions were so cursory that a physical mechanism may have been involved but not mentioned, but in most of them, the wording implies that injury resulted from an occult power exerted by the suspect. In one case, a man said that a woman caused his wife to become ill after he angrily threw her out of their house. In another, a man claimed that a woman caused him to become lame when he refused to let her use his oven to bake bread. In both cases, the ailments could have resulted in whole, or in part, from the interpersonal conflict, although, since nothing was said about the suspects’ behavior, the harms most likely reflected the internal psychological reaction of the injured party exclusively. Other accusations of occult injury explicitly stated the means by which the injury was supposed to have been inflicted. Suspects either bewitched victims, performed ritual or symbolic acts against them, harassed them verbally, or displayed a palpable ill will toward them. The accusations of bewitchment convey only that suspects may have cast a spell; other accusations described overt actions on the part of suspects that could well have caused, or contributed to, the accusers’

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suffering. In one example, an older woman made bawdy comments and tweaked the trousers of the young groom at a wedding, until “suddenly such a fright came over him” that “he lost his manhood and thereby became impotent”. In a second example, a woman said that another woman, Catharina Ada, stood “to her right side [and] without a word” ripped a loaf of bread in half, causing her “head to hurt somewhat”. The next day, she “became lame on her right side” and hurt so badly that she seemed to be losing her mind. In a third case, an elderly woman named Agnes Langjahr was accused of “frequently going … in the house” of her neighbor and harassing the family, so distressing his daughter that she refused to go out for fear of encountering the woman and eventually died. In all three cases, the evidence seems to indicate that the suspects’ actions played a significant role in causing the accusers’ maladies, whether they were intended to do so or not. In the first case, the exact terms of the accusation are significant, because modern psychologists have found that men’s “erectile problems tend to be associated with fear”.2 If the groom were merely trying to save face by blaming someone for his plight, he would more likely have concocted a spell or a curse than adduced his own fear. In the second example, both the timing and nature of the victim’s physical symptoms suggest that they were caused by her distress about Catharina Ada’s behavior with the bread. Pain and paralysis are typical symptoms of conversion disorder, and since “there is a strong association between somatic symptoms and psychological distress”,3 it is telling that the symptoms appeared at the time of the event and on the side where Catharina Ada stood. In the third example, the girl’s refusal to leave the house shows the extent to which Agnes’ behavior bothered her. Given that psychological distress can indeed contribute to fatal ailments, the father’s conviction that Agnes Langjahr’s harassment caused his daughter’s demise is hardly far-​fetched. Even if this girl, and the accusers in the other cases, had psychological or organic problems that contributed to their vulnerability, in the circumstances as described, the notion that their injuries were inextricably tied to interpersonal conflicts is not unfounded. Some accusations of occult injury undoubtedly involved misdiagnosed organic ailments in which psychological factors played little or no role, and others involved ailments in which all of the psychological influences originated purely in the minds of the accusers. But overall, the accusations concerned disorders and circumstances that make the ascription of psychosocial causality eminently reasonable. Consideration of the accusations concerning physical assaults suggests that psychosocially generated stresses also played an important role in them. In most instances, the injuries resulting from assaults were cuts and bruises, but injuries of this nature rarely triggered accusations of witchcraft. Most of the accusations

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involving physical contact cited paralysis, severe pain, or, in one case, distress eventually leading to suicide. A  few of the paralysis cases might have resulted from purely mechanical trauma, but most of the injuries from physical attacks appear to have involved a significant psychosocial component. For example, a girl complained that Catharina Ada’s daughter slapped her arm three times, “[causing] the whole arm to hurt and become lame, and ultimately her entire side began to hurt”. A boy said that he became lame when Agnes Langjahr hit him but became better after she rebuked him for accusing her. In these, and most of the other, assault cases, the blows were real, but the full damage seems to have stemmed from both physical and psychological factors. … In addition to demonstrating the overall importance of psychosocial influences on disease in early modern witch fears, the cases from Württemberg contain evidence that the processes by which these influences were conveyed included not just somatoform disorders  –​“psychosomatic” disease as historians have generally understood it –​but also psychophysical maladies and illnesses resulting from immunosuppression. Although many of the accusations involved pain and paralysis –​typical of somatoform disorders –​psychogenic impotence, the problem that apparently afflicted the young groom, is not a somatoform problem but a psychophysical one, it is a direct physiological result of stress. Moreover, several documented deaths could well have been caused by cardiac arrhythmias, which are also psychophysical disorders. In the most dramatic, a woman testified that four years earlier her husband had “come home very sick” one day and “said he was going to die” because Catharina Ada “had assailed him saying he must die”. When he died soon thereafter, his widow “let it be known numerous times that the pig herder’s wife had killed her husband”. Her charge had “until now provoked no rebuttal”. Death can occur because of other responses to interpersonal relations as well. A woman was said to have become so distraught when a reputed witch stroked her thigh that she hanged herself. Catharina Ada was said to have placed curses on two refugees, causing one to become paralyzed and die and the other to swell up and die. The first might have succumbed to a stress-​induced arrhythmia, the paralysis being an accompanying conversion symptom. Although stress activated by Catharina’s curse could also have had something to do with the other refugee’s death, swelling per se is not a typical somatoform or psychophysical symptom. It seems more likely that the stress suppressed the victim’s immune system, making him or her more vulnerable to some disease. Similarly, Agnes Langjahr’s intrusive behavior might have caused her neighbor’s daughter to suffer a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, but since the predisposing heart disease is far more strongly associated with older males than female children, it seems at least as likely that

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Agnes’ hostility contributed to the girl’s death by inducing stress that reduced her immune competence. The final issue in the relationship between witchcraft beliefs and psychosocial influences on health is the degree to which displays of hostility that may have contributed to various disorders were unconscious, and the degree to which they were deliberate. The evidence from Württemberg suggests both etiologies. In many instances, harm caused by the suspect derived from an apparently spontaneous display of anger, as when a seventy-​one-​year-​old woman berated and hit a servant girl who refused to pay her debt until the girl fell down “so limp that she could only crawl away”. In other cases, however, suspects obviously meant to cause harm. Catharina Ada explicitly cursed a number of people and appears to have made a symbolic attack on another. Agnes Langjahr was said to have placed three eggs (widely thought in German folklore to transmit witches’ spells) on the bed of a village judge, causing him to fall “into a painful and miserable sickness” and his wife to fly into a rage. In addition to these purely occult attempts to hurt people, other cases involved deliberate assaults and poisonings. Even though the great majority of suspects in European witch trials were entirely innocent, some of the suspects were clearly guilty, perhaps not of witchcraft as defined by demonologists, but definitely of witchcraft as commonly understood. Although this analysis of the psychophysiological roots of witchcraft fears clarifies the inclination to ostracize those who appear to abuse the interpersonal ties that bind communities together, it does not explain why most people who believe in witches attribute impossible powers to them. Nor does it address the related problem of why witchcraft fears became so pronounced in early modern Europe. Nevertheless, a clearer understanding of the potential role of psychosocial influences in disease casts our fundamental assumptions about witchcraft in a new light. Apart from such supernatural feats as weather magic and shape shifting, which have had only a secondary place in most witchcraft beliefs, the primary “fallacy” most frequently mentioned with regard to witchcraft is that ill will can cause maladies and accidents. However, this causal relation is by no means an illusion; it is the result of a complex interaction between mind, body, and social environment. Belief in malefic witchcraft concerns legitimate accusations, even if, like any other criminal charges, they may not hold in every instance. Although we may reasonably doubt that a diabolic conspiracy of witches existed in early modern Europe, or that many of the fantastic activities ascribed to witches in other times and places actually took place, neither early modern Europeans nor any other pre-​modern peoples were mistaken to think that their neighbors might try, or might be able, to injure them, their dependents, or their livestock through various means associated with witchcraft.

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Accusations of malefic witchcraft are often naive or cynical attempts to create scapegoats, but the belief in witchcraft is not fundamentally a scapegoating reflex. Nor is it first and foremost a means of rationalizing inexplicable misfortune. Rather, it reflects the realization that the members of small communities are not isolated in their health and wellbeing; they are subject to each other’s intentional, or unintentional, abuse. This realization is one of Briggs’ “universals which transcend contextual differences”,4 at least part of the human sensibility that makes the concept of “witch” comprehensible to practically everyone.

Notes 1 2

3 4

For references to archival material held in Stuttgart, please see the original article in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 30, no. 4 (2000) –​ Ed. Julia Heiman and John Hatch, “Conceptual and Therapeutic Contributions of Psychophysiology to Sexual Dysfunction”, in Stephen Haynes and Linda Gannon, eds, Psychosomatic Disorders:  A Psychophysiological Approach to Etiology and Treatment (Praeger, New York 1981), 223. Gregory Simon et al., “Somatic Symptoms of Distress: An International Primary Care Study”, Psychosomatic Medicine, LVII (1996), 481. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours (HarperCollins, London 1996), 373.

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Chapter 10

Wolfgang Behringer WEATHER, HUNGER AND FEAR Origins of the European witch-​hunts in climate, society and mentality

A

P P R O X I M A T E LY T H R E E -​Q U A R T E R S of all executions for witchcraft occurred in German-​speaking territories. In this important essay, Wolfgang Behringer attributes the German witch persecutions to a lethal combination of bad weather and food shortages that blighted the region in the century after 1560. This led peasant communities to demand the prosecution of witches, and also encouraged an austere and punishing religiosity conducive to witch trials. Behringer’s analysis supports the view that witch trials were driven from below, though he notes that mass persecutions were made possible by “the construction of an early modern, cumulative concept of witchcraft”. The worst excesses of witch-​ hunting were also encouraged, as William Monter points out in Chapter 21, by the unstable and decentralised politics that characterised some German principalities.

I Whereas common maleficium involved individuals in conflict, charges of weather-​ magic were frequently raised by entire communities. These collective accusations directed against a fictive collective rather than individual culprits justified the employment of any means necessary to track down the conspiracy. In this sense,

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peasant perceptions corresponded with those of Christian demonology. That a crime as heinous as the destruction of crops by weather-​magic could be committed by a single person seemed inconceivable, a preconception lending the crime an added dimension. If the authorities refused to bend to popular pressure, communities occasionally responded with open unrest. A characteristic example is provided by the largest witchcraft persecution in German-​speaking regions during the sixteenth century in Trier, which claimed some 300 victims and was previously written off to the personal persecution complex of the Prince-​Elector.1 In an impressive dissertation on the witch trials in Trier and the County of Sponheim, Walter Rummel proves the inadequacy of this old interpretation. Actually, the persecuting impulse ‘was fostered almost completely “from below”, from communities and their representatives’.2 … These circumstances unmistakably explain the laconic remarks of a contemporary chronicle from Trier on the causes of the great persecution: ‘Because everyone generally believed that crop failures over many years had been brought on by witches and malefactors out of devilish hatred, the whole land rose up to exterminate them’. Obviously, rain, snow, and hail were not invented in the sixteenth century and illness and death are constant companions in humanity’s path through history. However, just as people differentiate between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ illnesses, so too have they differentiated between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, i.e. magically conjured weather. One important cause of witchcraft persecutions in the second half of the sixteenth century appears to have rested in popular perceptions of ‘unnatural’ types of weather (e.g. cold winters, persistent snowfall, evening frosts late in the spring, wet summers, floods, severe hailstorms, etc.). In the eyes of contemporaries, ‘unnatural’ weather deviated from long-​experienced norms. Let us examine climatic history in the period identified by researchers as the high point of the European witchcraft persecutions, the decades between 1560 and 1630. Closer analysis reveals a striking correlation between this epoch and a period of general climatic deterioration after 1560, sometimes known as the ‘Little Ice Age’. Although dates for the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’ vary slightly, there is general consensus that a climatic deterioration occurred in early modern Europe, marked by falling annual temperatures, a curtailed growing season, pervasive meridional cold streams from the poles, extreme winters, a lowering of the snowline on mountains, and the advance of Alpine glaciers. Statistics based on an interdisciplinary study by Christian Pfister regarding the history of [the] Swiss climate permit precise conclusions for individual years in Central Europe.3 … By 1562, a heavy increase in wet weather was already apparent. Extreme cases, such as the freezing of Lake Constance, the largest alpine lake, in 1563 and again in 1572–​3 for a full sixty days impressed contemporaries as

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unusual climatic developments and were recorded for posterity by chroniclers as centennial events. The climax of the cooling off that began in 1560 was reached in 1573. ‘At that time, nature seems to have left its usual course’, was the sober conclusion of one glacial researcher on the years after 1570,4 a comment very close to the view of contemporaries. In the early 1570s, Central Europe was visited by a major famine, which must have profoundly shocked this relatively affluent society. After 1586, colder winters were intensified by a period of cold wet springs. In 1587, snow fell until the beginning of July and, by mid-​September, the valleys were again covered with snow. In 1588, storms besetting the Spanish Armada coincided with the wettest year of the century. The years 1584–​9, particularly cold and wet, provided climatic impetus to the witch-​hunts in Trier, the largest up to that time in German-​speaking lands. The Trier witchcraft persecution was no isolated incident; a simultaneous hunt occurred in the Duchy of Lorraine, reported in the Daemonolatria of the witch-​hunting judge Nicolas Rémy. Potential witch-​hunts also threatened other parts of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland. Furthermore, increased interest in maleficent magic –​though without major persecutions  –​is apparent in Austria, England, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Baltic region. In light of interwoven ecological factors, we cannot dismiss the unusual accumulation of reports concerning ecological catastrophes by contemporary authors as mere tropes. For, as the anonymous author of a pamphlet appearing in southern Germany noted in 1590: So many kinds of magic and demonic apparitions are gaining the upper hand in our time that nearly every city, market and village in all Germany, not to mention other peoples amid nations, is filled with vermin and servants of the Devil who destroy the fruits of the fields, which the Lord allows to grow with his blessing, with unusual thunder, lightning, showers, hail, storm winds, frost, flooding, mice, worms and many other things … causing them to rot in the fields, and also increase the shortage of human subsistence by spoiling livestock, cows, calves, horses, sheep, and others, using all their power, not just against the fruit of the fields and livestock, but yes, not even sparing kinsfolk and close blood-​relatives, who are killed in great numbers. The direct connection between weather-​magic, witchcraft persecutions, and harvest failures made by contemporaries is even more obvious when one reconstructs the circumstances of individual hunts, for example, in the county court of Schongau, where sixty-​three women were legally executed as witches in the years 1589–​91. These hunts were not initiated by denunciations arising from previous

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hunts nor from outside accusations. Nor did they commence at the instigation of the authorities, local judges, or the parish clergy. Instead, popular pressure obviously motivated the authorities to act. In so far as documentary reconstruction is possible, the prerequisite was a series of storms damaging crops and resultant crop failures, as chronicled for the regions near Kempten, Memmingen, and Augsburg, culminating in peasant unrest. On 26 June 1588, a severe hailstorm decimated crops in the community of Schwabsoien, a Bavarian border community partially under the jurisdiction of the Bishophric of Augsburg whose 100 households the protocols of the episcopal Court Council in Dillingen referred to as consisting mostly of poor cottagers. Although the Bishop expressed his willingness to provide new seed for the coming year, the inhabitants remained unsatisfied: the village prominence, among them the village judge Hans Kerbl, and the committee of four appeared before the county judge of Schongau requesting the ‘extermination’ of the witches held responsible for the disaster. For the relatively poor community, all means to that end were justifiable. They were even prepared to sell the communal forest to pay for the services of the renowned executioner of Biberach. In a communal meeting with their pastor, the villagers explained that they would gladly sell the forest, if the proceeds would go towards the extermination of the witches. … In 1594, four years after the conclusion of this great persecution, the County Judge of Schongau requested that Duke Ferdinand erect an ‘eternal pillar’ to commemorate the witch-​hunt, because the power of the witches had been broken and harvests had returned to normal. Tangentially, his request sought to underscore costs incurred during the hunt in the hope of reimbursement, but one assumes that the request for a monument would have been appropriate only if it fit the mood of the populace. Similar correlation between climatic catastrophes and witch-​hunts like that of the 1580s recurred thereafter. In particular, climatic conditions in the years 1621–​ 30 resembled those between 1586 and 1599, marked by cold winters, late springs, and cold wet weather in the summer and autumn. 1628, the year in which witchcraft persecutions in Germany, indeed Europe in general, reached their absolute peak, is referred to by Pfister as ‘the year without a summer’. These persecutions benefited from the experience of witch-​hunts conducted since the 1580s. When crop failures beset the Saar region in 1627, communities gathered under the ‘village linden trees’ (a traditional meeting place) to discuss plans of action and elect representatives in order to organize witch-​hunts. In summary, the age of the great persecutions corresponded generally to the ‘Little Ice Age’ and the individual hunts corresponded to specifically catastrophic years. …

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II Adverse climatic anomalies of the late sixteenth century were Europe-​wide rather than just local events, and the same holds true of social-​historical events, such as crop failures and rising grain prices, changing structures of demand, market failures for manufactured goods, indebtedness, broken contracts, the firing of employees, poor nutrition among the lower classes, increased susceptibility to disease, and famine. … In a primarily agrarian society, providing sustenance was of paramount importance. Malnutrition during famines in the early modern period increased susceptibility to disease. Crop failures led to inflation, making it impossible for large parts of the population to feed themselves adequately. Bread provided the staple of the early modern diet. The pious wish, ‘give us this day our daily bread’, was fully justified. Naturally, the lower classes were immediately affected by price-​ inflation on consumables, and literally starved in the streets during subsistence crises in the heart of Europe. … These periods of inflation had more dramatic impact in southern Germany because the Swabian textile industry had lost its traditional market in Holland as a result of the Dutch Revolt. Malnutrition spread, thereby lowering immunity to diseases. Two major plague epidemics in 1585–​8 and 1592–​3 decimated the population. The situation of subsistence crisis accounts for widespread witchcraft persecutions around the year 1590. The aforementioned chronicle of Trier explicitly mentions the constant lack of grain caused by crop failures as the background to the persecution of 1585–​92. … In order to understand the effects of crop failures, it should be made clear that the greater part of the population, in the country as well as in the city, did not participate directly in subsistence agriculture, purchasing necessities at local markets. The entire range of shortages was transmitted to the lower peasant and urban classes at the market in the form of higher prices for basic consumables. The existentially threatening connection of crop failure and inflation caused a knee-​jerk reaction based on demonology, as the consecrated Bishop of Trier, Peter Binsfeld argued in a polemic for exceptional measures to fight witches in 1589: ‘Witches are traitors to the Fatherland, because they secretly conspire, as experience shows, to destroy the wine harvest, rot the fruits and drive up prices of grain’.5 Such inflationary crises often had a supraregional or even Europe-​wide impact as a consequence of the deficient transportation infrastructure afflicting trade-​routes during periods of regional hardship. The inflation mentioned by the demonologist Binsfeld is the same one that afflicted northwest Germany and Bavaria after 1589 at the onset of major persecutions.

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A similar correlation of persecutions and crop failure/​inflation can be observed in the major witch-​hunts of the seventeenth century, the worst ever. Thousands fell prey to them in Franconia and the Rhineland during the late 1620s. Here as well, contemporary chroniclers suggested a direct connection between ‘unnatural’ storms and exorbitant inflation. The peasant population in these regions was doubly hit, since –​insofar as they relied on the wine industry –​their crop as well as their income declined measurably. According to a contemporary chronicler at the beginning of a mega-​persecution: In the year 1626 on the 27th of May, the vineyards of the bishoprics of Bamberg and Würzburg in Franconia all froze over, as did the grain fields, which rotted in any case. Everything froze like never before remembered, causing a great inflation. There followed great lamentation and pleading among the common rabble, questioning why his princely Grace delayed so long in punishing the sorcerers and witches for spoiling crops since the beginning of the year. The Würzburg witch-​hunt, one of the largest in European history, claimed some 900 victims between 1626 and 1630. … Where we already possess in-​depth analyses, such as for the Prince-​Bishopric of Mainz, the evidence shows that a ‘seismographic’ connection between inflation and persecutions exists. Each of the four hunts there was directly connected to an inflationary crisis; in Franconia the long-​term crisis which began in 1624 led to the most excessive witch-​hunts under Prince-​Bishop Georg Friedrich of Greiffenclau, who ruled briefly from 1626–​9 and had 900 victims burned as witches. As elsewhere, criticism in Mainz involved the accusation of weather-​magic and its sociological consequences. As early as 1593, in conjunction with the first major persecutions, the local official Jeremias Lieb complained, the common man has become so mad from the consequences of crop failures, the death of livestock and similar things, that he no longer holds them for the just punishment of God for our sins, but blames witches and sorceresses. Precisely because of these pre-​Christian peasant beliefs, there exists a fundamental social-​historical connection between crises of the Ancien Régime and the proclivity to persecutions. Crop failures, attributed to witches, led to inflated costs for consumables and consequently to malnutrition and disease. Hunger and disease struck all of Europe during particularly unfavourable years simultaneously.

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Only this method allows us to comprehend the otherwise chance synchronicity of peak waves of persecutions in lands as distant as Scotland and Bavaria.

III The link to broader social developments is an important step in historically locating conjunctures of persecution. However, the synchronicity of subsistence crises and witch-​hunts should not, indeed cannot, be interpreted as mechanical determinism. Times of crisis and disaster are historical constants but external forces do not summon forth mechanical human responses, since they are constructed within modes of cultural perception. Before the construction of an early modern, cumulative concept of witchcraft, mass persecutions were unthinkable. The complex and only partially researched phenomenon of its reception was, not surprisingly, hesitant. Characteristically, the witchcraft persecution of 1563 began in southwest Germany, traditional home of the initial hunt conducted by the papal inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (Institoris). Interestingly, the torturers/​executioners employed during the trials in southern Germany initially came from the region around the Ravensburger persecution. The so-​called ‘history of mentalities’ is another important aspect.Turning first to ‘collective mentalities’ (i.e. expectations and outlook not merely attributable to individual views), we should consider characteristics of social groups or even entire epochs. This is not the pervasive ‘fear in the west’ which Jean Delumeau and others believed could be identified for the whole of the early modern period, but rather a concretely dated and localized fear with concrete causes and results. Not wishing to explore the individual psychology of fear, I merely want to point out evidence of ‘fear’ in contemporary sources in connection with subsistence crises. The ‘Fugger-​Zeitungen’, weekly, handwritten reports sent to the merchant Philip Eduard Fugger from the major cities of Europe, specifically mentioned the term ‘angst’ only in connection with extreme crisis-​years; elsewhere it was not employed. In 1586, the hungry poor lost their work and begged from door to door fearing for their lives, while the rich feared to go out in public. Angst had many faces, but had a common cause. Also of interest are contemporary comments pessimistically describing the condition of the world and its constant decay. These remarks have often been viewed as topical stereotypes, but when eyewitness accounts frequently recur in connection with concrete historical circumstances, suggesting that ‘recent years have shown themselves ever harder and more severe as time goes on, and a reduction in living things, people and animals as well as fruits and crops’, they ought

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to be taken more seriously. Meteorological anomalies and subsequent inflationary crises, as previously noted, were attributed to the will and deeds of ‘evil persons’, transformed and personified as enemies according to popular beliefs in the occult. Magical explanations always enjoy the advantage of justifying direct action. Without reflecting on the esoteric game of magic and counter-​magic, the populace struck an alliance with the authorities, using the latter’s own demonological theories and judicial rituals to achieve a popular aim, to exterminate the evil persons and uproot the scourge. To their chagrin, many authorities, normally unable to encourage plaintiffs to bring charges of magic before the courts instead of settling them within the community, now suddenly found themselves besieged on all sides by massive pressure from peasant communities to intervene, threatening vigilante justice and open unrest if they failed to do so. In turn, collective action with [a]‌ ritualized character psychologically offset the fear of evil persons, a euphemism for witches. The quality of life varied greatly between classes and groups in early modern society and dearth during subsistence crises increased want among the lower classes while others profited from shortages. In essence, the shortage of resources added to economic and social tensions. Social unease arose in the imperial city Augsburg in the wake of the famine years 1570–​1 when inflation struck. Contemporary descriptions portray dramatic scenes of unexpected unemployment, the first appearances of disease and increased social tensions; the helpless anger of those whose savings proved insufficient to purchase their ‘daily bread’ was directed against speculators, who hoarded grain in the hope of driving up prices further. Sources describe animosity against the rich and ‘unchristian utterings’ against usurers leading to curses and, ultimately, to acts of maleficent magic. As this example demonstrates, existential crises and the fear of the lower classes held grave consequences for the ruling elite, who escaped inflation, indeed profited from it, either directly through speculation or indirectly by using the temporary material want of the lower and middle classes to their advantage. The primary consequence, social polarization, was matched by secondary transformation of inter-​personal relationships at these times. The use of specific terminology reveals a toughening of social relations, reflected in an accentuated hierarchical and hegemonic ideology characteristic of the early modern state, as well as other social organizations. These tendencies included limited access to guilds and the lower nobility, the construction of ideologically binding norms by religious confessions, the disenfranchisement of oppositional groups, an almost maniacal proliferation of laws, a trend towards absolutist rule, and a criminal justice system that applied unprecedented brutality against crimes of violence, property damage, and moral infractions, which accounted for over ninety percent of all executions, in addition

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to crimes involving magic. Never before or since have so many people been legally executed in such a grotesque manner as in the years 1560–​1630. This new social toughness corresponded to a radical transformation of mentality among the ruling elite independent of nominal confessional allegiance and only indirectly connected to subsistence crises. In crass terms, they departed from an open, vivacious, pleasure-​seeking, this-​worldly oriented, ‘Renaissance’ mentality, with contact with the popular world of the carnivalesque, to seek refuge in dogmatic, confessional, ascetic, other-​worldly oriented, religious principles that offered solace in a situation perceived as precarious. Normally, much breath is spent on the elucidation of opposing confessional tendencies rather than noting just how much the competing religious ideologies had in common. However, clear signs of a mentality transformation are just as apparent in Catholic as in Protestant areas, as is the case in the Jesuit province of Upper Germany, where Peter Canisius excited the population through stern sermons and sensational exorcisms. Witchcraft was a recurrent theme in his sermons, which Canisius accepted along with the theologically problematic issue of weather-​magic. After the first persecution of 1563, he wrote: Everywhere they are punishing witches, who are multiplying remarkably. Their outrages are terrible. … Never before have people in Germany given themselves over to the Devil so completely. … They send many out of this world with their devilish arts, excite storms and wreak terrible havoc among our countryfolk and other Christians. Nothing seems safe from their horrid wiles and power.6 The sermons of both Catholic and Protestant preachers called for witchcraft persecutions, thereby reinforcing the peasants in their demands for witch-​hunts. Götz von Pölnitz characterized the reaction of the Augsburg elite to the missionary activities of Canisius as follows: The remarkable increase in reports concerning a mood of penance and ecstatic excitement awakened in the elite testify to an atmosphere of transition. They lie somewhere between the princely exuberance of the near-​decadent late-​Renaissance and the ascetic rigour of certain Counter-​Reformation saints.7 The radical transformation of mentality manifested itself in personal catharses, virtual ‘bolt of lightning’ conversion-​experiences among the nobility and princely dynasties, such as those of Dukes Albert V and William V of Bavaria in the 1570s.

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Furthermore, the ‘Marian state-​ programme’ developed in Catholic regions, offering the image of the Virgin as a counter-​pole to that of the witch. The Virgin Mary, immaculate symbol of fertility, stood in stark contrast to the female personification of infertility, the witch. … In the wake of the ‘second Reformation’ of Calvinism and Tridentine Catholic reform, a climate of gloom set in that accurately reflected deteriorating living conditions. The dramatic transformation of attitudes transcended confessional allegiance, replacing the optimistic mood of the first half-​century with pessimism. Hard times hardened social structures, even reaching into iconographic representations after 1560. Preachers inculcated an accentuated consciousness of sin in the ruling elite and directed them to attribute the origins of decline to the wrath of God, providing fertile ground for social disciplining, as well as mystic and apocalyptic visions; free from the worries of the everyday struggle for limited resources, the elite was circumspectly dragged along with the tide of change. Indeed, it was the elite who first felt the screws of self-​discipline, work-​ discipline, ascetic manners, constant spiritual exercises, and moral rigidity at princely courts after 1560. The depressingly sober seriousness with which these changes of habit were enforced, a ‘remodelling of affectation’, reached into the most private personal affairs. Duke William V (1579–​97), who conducted the first Bavarian witch-​hunt, lived in strict accord with a daily schedule of prayer and spiritual exercises, wore a penitential hairshirt, and engaged in self-​flagellation. His successors, Maximilian (1598–​1651) and Ferdinand Maria (1657–​79) signed devotional blood pacts to the Virgin Mary at Altötting; they can be interpreted as the antithesis of the witch’s pact with the Devil. Historians now generally assume that the radicalization of attitudes towards witches took place after 1560, as mirrored in criminal legislation against witchcraft in England, Scotland, and Germany, the synchronicity of renewed witch-​ hunting in France and Germany around 1570, or the simultaneous climax of persecutions in Scotland, the Rhineland, and Bavaria around 1590. However, the complex interaction of social developments, times of crises, traditional modes of behaviour, and opposing ideological interpretations make it impossible to define the activities of elites as a simple reaction to [a]‌popular demand for persecution. Here we arrive at a juncture that seriously challenges theories regarding the existence of ‘collective mentalities’ in the early modern era. Records of criminal interrogations reveal an extraordinary range of perceptions even among the common people, one equalled in expressions recorded by literate members of society. This range of perceptions surrounding the issue of witchcraft comes more often to the fore than with other themes. The question of the existence of witches, the physical reality of their deeds, the judicial possibility and political

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desirability of their persecution was debated like hardly any other problem of the age. In Catholic Germany, an ideologically motivated group supported persecutions with the opinion that both people and rulers risked the wrath of God, if they failed to uproot the evil and ‘radically’ weed out witches. Justifying their policy of extermination with ‘correct enthusiasm for the honour of God’ for which no sacrifice was too great, the radically penitential and atoning spirit earned them and their followers the name ‘zealots’. Pope Urban VIII (1623–​44) condescendingly referred to this group as the ‘zelanti’. The ‘zealots’ viewed witchcraft as no isolated occurrence. For them, its elimination formed part of a domestic policy aimed at establishing a hierarchical, other-​worldly, Catholic, model state, a political theory set out by Adam Co[n]tzen in his Methodus [Doctrinae Civilis,] seu Abissini Regis Historia (1628). Other aspects of his programme included an end to fornication, the replacement of frivolities like gambling and dancing with spiritual exercises (i.e. Corpus Christi processions, ten-​hour prayers, etc.), the repression of popular culture and its replacement with a literate ‘high culture’ based on biblical authority. The total programme of internal reform accompanied foreign policies of missionary conversion and the destruction of confessional opponents. Fear of heavenly retribution provided the explicit motivation behind the desire for rigid measures. The rapid advance of a gloomy world-​view after 1560, intensified after the 1580s, depicts a transformation of mentality which indicates, at least partially, a break with the past. This factor ultimately explains the sudden decision of ruling elites in some areas to give in to popular demands for persecutions. The traditional rejection of popular belief in weather-​magic, also widespread among theologians, was temporarily rolled back along a broad front. It was the correspondence of interests, though for different reasons, between the upper and lower echelons of society that temporarily enabled the great persecutions around 1600. …

IV The European witchcraft persecutions are tied to a specific epoch, the early modern period, and characterized by elite abhorrence of magic and its diabolical origins. … It is important to recognize the social background to the major persecutions within a specific epoch. Authorities certainly bear political responsibility for witch-​hunts but, as recent research indicates, hardly in the sense that they provided the impulse for initiating persecutions. This is true not only in individual cases, but for major persecutions as well, often preceded by massive pressure from the population bordering on open rebellion against the established order. …

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Crop failures resulting from inclement weather led to inflation, malnutrition, and hunger. Increased susceptibility to disease or even major epidemics were the consequences. Such climatically induced crop failures occurred with greater frequency after 1560 during the period climatic historians refer to as the ‘Little Ice Age’, and periods of inflation dragged on. We can identify enough correspondence between cyclic agrarian crises and conjunctures of witchcraft persecutions that it is possible, without doubt, to speak of a fundamental social-​historical correlation. The major persecutions were rooted in years marked by agrarian crises. The connection of persecution with agrarian crisis explains the synchronicity of witch-​hunts in geographically distant regions. Furthermore, it explains the publication dates of demonological literature and territorial decrees against witchcraft. The nexus of causality between agrarian crisis and persecutions is based upon four supports. First, witches were held directly responsible for weather damage and crop failures, despite the official teachings of theologians. This explains the vehemence of discussion around the issue of weather-​magic. Second, illness and death multiplied in the wake of crop failures, especially among children, who were also held accountable as witches. Third, latent conflicts emerged virulently because shortages of resources during agrarian crises increased social tensions, adding a psychological dimension that needed to be resolved. Fourth, witch-​trials provided ‘positive’ feedback, leading to further accusations in the region. … Now we need to ask why certain regions of Europe proved particularly susceptible to persecutions at certain times. The answer lies in a fundamental correlation to agrarian crises. These shortages varied in intensity according to regional distribution of wealth, as well as structures of trade and communication. Centres of international trade like Holland and England were apparently little affected. Similarly, lands on the thinly settled periphery (Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Iberian peninsula, European colonies) were also little affected, since the possibility of diffusion in open spaces served to decrease pressure. The semi-​peripheral areas with their relatively high population density were especially hard hit by witchcraft persecutions because their agricultural products, like grain and wine, were highly susceptible to meteorological disasters. This is as true of Scotland as for parts of France, Switzerland, and Germany, while the agrarian economy of Southern Europe was spared climatic deterioration as a benefit of its latitude. Behind the major European witch-​hunts, we can detect three archaic factors affecting every agrarian society, but particularly so in Central Europe during the early modern era. The exact conditions were quite specific, in effect, that rulers and subjects believed commonly in the existence of ‘inner enemies’ and sought their eradication, each for their own reasons. The authorities fought for religious salvation, while subjects harboured more material interests. And it was their interests that

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called the tune of persecution. The campaign against witches might be viewed as a metaphor. Its complex origins in climatic history, social history, and the history of mentalities, today understood as its major causes, were, for contemporaries, reducible to three simple concepts: weather, hunger, and fear. Translated by David Lederer Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

William Monter describes the witch-​ hunts in the Archbishopric of Trier in Chapter 21 in this volume –​ Ed. Walter Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen (Göttingen 1991), 88 ff. Christian Pfister, Klimageschichte der Schweiz 1525–​1860 (Bern 1988), 118–​27. Bernhard Friedrich Kuhn, “Versuch über den Mechanismus der Gletscher”, Höpfners Magazin, 1 (1787), esp. 35. For Binsfeld’s career as a witch-​hunter, see Chapter 21 in this volume by William Monter –​  Ed. Berhard Duhr, Die Stellung der Jesuiten in den deutschen Hexenprozessen (Cologne 1900), 23. Götz Frhr. von Pölnitz, “Petrus Canisius und das Bistum Augsburg”, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landeskunde, 18 (1955), quote 382.

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PART THREE

The idea of a witch cult

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A R LY M O D E R N A C C O U N T S of the collective activities of witches –​and particularly the rites associated with the sabbat –​were often as repulsive as they were bizarre. The ritual slaughter of infants, the feasting on excrement and human flesh, and the act of copulation with the Devil all appeared frequently in depictions of the satanic mass. Such activities represented, as Jean Bodin noted in 1580, “the most despicable wickedness that the human mind can imagine”.1 In the absence of any credible evidence that such practices ever took place, modern readers might find it hard to imagine how such allegations emerged. To put it bluntly, why should any culture create such sickening myths? The emergence of the idea of collective satanism is not only an intriguing psychological puzzle:  the myth played a central role in the history of European witchcraft, though historians are divided on its origins and the extent to which it encouraged the prosecution of alleged witches. Some scholars have argued that the sabbat myth was inspired by the existence of a real cult. The English Egyptologist Margaret Murray was the most famous proponent of this view. According to Murray, the witch cult described by demonologists was based on a pagan fertility religion that had survived the imposition of Christianity; this ancient movement was demonised in the late Middle Ages and was subsequently extinguished by witch-​hunters. Historians have thoroughly discredited Murray’s thesis, which was based, as Jacqueline Simpson shows in Chapter  11, on a highly selective and distorting interpretation of the

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surviving evidence. The demise of Murray’s fertility cult has not, however, completely destroyed the idea that real cultic activities lay behind the concept of the sabbat. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has argued that the idea of witches’ assemblies was not simply “imposed from above”; rather, it was an elite reconstruction of pagan beliefs. Ginzburg identifies two “belief clusters” that combined to create the sabbat:  the ideas associated with women flying at night with the goddess Diana; and men fighting “night battles” against evil spirits to protect the harvest. These ideas were conjoined and distorted, he argues, to create the myth of flying witches who worshipped the Devil. To support this view, he points out that some features of the sabbat, notably the idea of witches flying through the air, were absent from earlier accusations against Jews and heretics and were therefore unlikely to have derived from this source. Moreover, he notes that demonologists actually rejected some beliefs recorded in trial records, such as the transformation of witches into animals. Such beliefs, he suggests, derived from a “deep mythical and ritual stratum” that predated the idea of the sabbat.2 Ginzburg presents his work as a kind of intellectual archaeology. He locates examples of the “belief clusters” that survived in Renaissance Europe and traces them back to their ancient roots. In some cases, he points out, the process of demonisation continued in the sixteenth century. Local studies from Italy and Eastern Europe lend some support to his thesis. In the 1580s, the Roman Inquisition began to record testimonies from the benandanti, members of a shamanistic cult in the Friuli region of northern Italy. These described rituals in which they travelled in dreams to battle the enemies of the harvest. Over a period of years, the Inquisition redefined the benandanti as sabbat-​attending witches, and this new interpretation was eventually accepted by the communities in which they lived.3 Gustav Henningsen has identified a similar process in Sicily, where the Inquisition transformed the folkloric idea of travelling and feasting with fairies into evidence of satanism (13). Folk beliefs about “spirit journeys” were reinterpreted in a similar fashion in eighteenth-​century Hungary (Pócs, 14). These examples show that shamanistic cults existed in parts of Europe and sometimes provided the raw material for local versions of the sabbat. Ginzburg’s argument is problematic, however, when it is applied to the continent as a whole. Except for isolated examples like the benandanti, he relies largely on fragmentary evidence scattered over Western and Central Europe; this fails to demonstrate the existence of a living belief-​system of the kind described by Henningsen and Pócs in those regions at the centre of Europe’s witch trials. Nor is there strong evidence that this existed in the period in which the concept of satanic witchcraft first emerged. As Hans Peter Broedel notes in his study of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), it is hard to reconstruct a consistent body of folklore from which medieval

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demonologists fashioned the sabbat:  “the evidence available is scattered and contradictory, and suggests a group of more or less related components rather than a single, coherent belief-​system”.4 Moreover, the idea of the sabbat itself developed over an extended period of time, and was always subject to regional variations: the idea of the witches’ flight, for instance, was largely absent in English versions. This makes it difficult to locate a core pattern of beliefs associated with the witches’ assemblies, and therefore weakens Ginzburg’s claim that such a pattern can be traced back to ancient pagan ideas.5 It is also possible to explain the origin of the sabbat without reference to any folk beliefs at all. Robert Muchembled has argued that it was “simply and solely a figment created by theologians, whose ideas governed the imagination of the elite classes of Europe in the late Middle Ages”.6 According to Norman Cohn (2), the idea of a secret conspiracy of Devil-​worshippers derived from false allegations against Christian heretics; ultimately, it was a fantasy of irreligion and disorder. In a seminal article on the concept of “inversion”, Stuart Clark (15) has attempted to explain the construction and appeal of such a fantasy. Clark points out that pre-​modern Europeans tended to think in terms of absolute opposites, so that most social, religious and political conventions were defined in terms of their negative mirror images. This inclination was apparent in festivals like the “feast of fools”, which turned conventional social hierarchies temporarily upside down, and in a wide range of artistic and academic practices. In this context, it was possible for demonologists to construct the major features of the witch cult by simply reversing the positive aspects of their own view of society. Indeed, it was even necessary for them to do so, since the existence of a good society presupposed the possibility of its wicked opposite. To Clark, the business of describing in detail the frightful events of a witches’ sabbat was a “necessary way of validating each corresponding, contrary aspect of the orthodox world”.Thus, the principle of inversion goes some way to explaining the psychological riddle posed at the start of this introduction: it made sense for scholars to emphasise the most repellent aspects of satanic witchcraft because each feature of the demonic anti-​society affirmed the goodness of the normal world. The idea of inversion also provides an alternative explanation for some features of the sabbat that might otherwise be attributed to folklore. Clark suggests, for example, that the idea of witches turning themselves into animals was an inversion of contemporary ethics: it replaced reason with animal instinct and morality with bestial desire. As well as the origin of the sabbat, historians have disagreed about the role the idea played in encouraging witch trials. In Chapter 12, H. C. Erik Midelfort argues that the concept of the sabbat, imposed from above on the peasant population of Germany, was directly responsible for mass persecutions. By encouraging the courts to pursue the associates of alleged witches, and forcing suspects to name others who

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attended their assemblies, the fantasy transformed isolated allegations of maleficium into panics involving dozens of people. In the most extreme instances, like the panic in Trier between 1587 and 1593, mass executions decimated whole villages. Thus “the fateful intervention of learned and thoughtful lawyers and theologians … sent thousands of women to their deaths”. Recent research has modified this conclusion in two respects. First, Wolfgang Behringer (10) has suggested that fears of collective witchcraft could arise without the idea of the sabbat: German villagers sometimes believed that groups of witches conspired to attack whole communities through weather-​magic. Second, many of the large-​scale panics in Germany appear to have been initiated from below (Monter, 21). This suggests that the idea of the sabbat was not itself the catalyst for the mass trials that blighted parts of Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These conclusions do not mean that the idea of the sabbat played no role in the prosecution of witches, however. For a start, the willingness of local elites to accept the existence of a witch cult probably encouraged them to accede to peasant petitions for trials, or at least to acquiesce in the process. This factor is particularly important given the evidence, set out by Brian Levack in Chapter 20, that government attitudes were normally decisive in restraining the excesses of witchcraft prosecutions. Belief in a secret conspiracy also meant that witchcraft was treated as an exceptional crime, in which normal restrictions on the use of torture and evidence from minors could be waived. Equally, the concept of the sabbat encouraged judges to look for the accomplices of suspects in custody. The combination of these factors meant, as Friedrich Spee observed at first hand in 1620s Germany, that “once a single woman is implicated, innumerable others will continue to be implicated”.7 Though the intensity of the German trials was not reached elsewhere, these effects of the sabbat myth were felt in other parts of Europe and North America. In his research on the Franche-​Comté region between France and Switzerland, William Monter found that initial accusations of witchcraft could fan out into serious panics, fuelled by the denunciations by witches of their alleged accomplices.8 Even in areas where the idea of the sabbat was not fully developed, and played only a minor role in the confessions of the accused, the notion of collective witchcraft could give impetus to prosecutions. The panic in Essex in 1645 was encouraged by the conviction of local authorities that they were dealing with a “horrible sect of witches”.9 When the first suspect named her supposed confederates, this set in motion a series of accusations based on local suspicions of maleficium. It is significant, perhaps, that the idea of collective witchcraft was usually absent in English trials before this date, and the Essex trials claimed far more victims than any previous prosecutions for the crime. The same is true of the witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

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Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9

Jean Bodin, On the Demon-​Mania of Witches, ed. Jonathan L. Pearl, trans. Randy A.  Scott (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto 1995), 204. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies:  Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Penguin 1991), 12. Ginzburg bases much of his argument on the case of the benandanti. For his original study of this group, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles:  Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Johns Hopkins University Press 1992). Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester University Press 2003), 102. For a survey and critique of Ginzburg’s work on the sabbat, see Willem de Blécourt, “The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archaeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies?”, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, eds, Witchcraft Historiography (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), ch. 8. Robert Muchembled, “Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality”, in Bengt Ankaloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford University Press 1993), 139. Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, trans. Marcus Hellyer (University of Virginia Press 2003), 24. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Cornell University Press 1976), 128–​32. Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), 2.

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Chapter 11

Jacqueline Simpson MARGARET MURRAY’S WITCH CULT

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A R G A R E T M U R R A Y W A S arguably the most influential writer on witchcraft in the twentieth century, though her impact was felt mainly outside the academic world. As the originator of the idea that witches belonged to a goddess-​worshipping fertility cult that survived in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, Murray accidentally contributed to the growth of “Wicca”, a new religious movement that claims to descend from this cult. Her ideas about the “old religion” are often repeated in popular representations of witchcraft, from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer to movies such as The Craft and The Wicker Man. Few respectable historians can claim such a legacy. As Diane Purkiss has observed (39), Murray’s influence is a striking instance of the gulf that can sometimes exist between academic research and popular culture. Her claim that the witches’ sabbat was a demonised version of a real pagan religion was debunked in the 1970s:  no such religion existed. Here Jacqueline Simpson describes the false logic and dishonesty that characterised Murray’s work, and considers the reasons for her continuing appeal.

No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret Murray without embarrassment and a sense of paradox. She is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a

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prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments. … The main reason why Murray’s ideas had such impact must lie in the fact that in 1929 she was commissioned to write the entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and seized the opportunity to set out her individual interpretation of the topic as if it were the universally accepted one.The entry was reprinted in later editions up to 1969, making her views virtually infallible in the eyes of the public, and influencing such well-​known authors as Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves. They were also accessible to journalists, filmmakers, popular novelists and thriller writers, who adopted them enthusiastically; by now they are so entrenched in popular culture that they will probably never be uprooted. … She was a wholehearted sceptic and rationalist, who wanted to strip away every notion of the paranormal or supernatural from the concept of witchcraft –​ and yet in the 1950s her descriptions of alleged rituals, festivals and organizations of witches were used by Gerald Gardner as a blueprint for setting up a new system of magical and religious rituals, the Wicca movement of Britain and America, now the most widespread and best known branch of neo-​paganism. She believed she was rediscovering the forgotten facts of history; she never dreamed her work would be used to train new generations in the beliefs and practices of magic. … So what was the appeal of her work? Part of the answer lies in what was at the time perceived as her sensible, demystifying, liberating approach to a longstanding but sterile argument between the religious minded and the secularists as to what witches had been. At one extreme stood the eccentric and bigoted Catholic writer Montague Summers, maintaining that they really had worshipped Satan, and that by his help they really had been able to fly, change shape, do magic and so forth. … In the other camp, and far more numerous at least among academics, were sceptics who said that all so-​called witches were totally innocent victims of hysterical panics whipped up by the churches for devious political or financial reasons; their confessions must be disregarded because they were made under threat of torture. When TheWitch-​Cult inWestern Europe appeared in 1921, it broke this deadlock.Yes, said Murray, witches had indeed been up to something of which society disapproved, but it was in no way supernatural; they were merely members of an underground movement secretly keeping pagan rites alive in Christian Europe. … But how, one must ask, was this persuasively rational picture achieved? Sadly, the reply has to be by selection and distortion. Firstly, Murray refused to give any attention whatsoever to what she called “operative magic” (as opposed to cultic ceremonies), which included all the supernatural damage of which witches were accused, such as blighting crops, bringing disease, raising storms, killing beasts

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and men. Her sources, the trial records of Britain and the writings of continental inquisitors and demonologists, were of course full of such material, plus all the marvels associated with the Sabbath: the personal presence of Satan, often in animal form; magical flight; shape-​shifting; magic eating of the essence of animals, and so on. Murray was of course right to say that all these were impossibilities. But, instead of examining them in terms of recurrent and socially conditioned fears, beliefs and story-​patterns, as a modern folklorist or social historian would do, she dismissed “operative magic” from consideration and struggled mightily to find some core of material fact within each item of the alleged cult. By this reinterpretation, the Devil was reinterpreted as simply a human coven-​leader dressed in black or in an animal mask; witches did not turn into hares or cats, they just put masks on and mimed animal actions; their “mark” was a tattoo; their flying was mimed by hopping along with a stick between their legs, or possibly was a hallucination caused by herbal ointments. Such rationalizations can be unintentionally funny, as when she accounts for Satan’s cloven hoof by saying it was “perhaps a specially formed boot or shoe” which a coven-​leader wore to make sure he was recognized. But reductionist interpretation is not in itself a sin. Murray is far more to blame for the extreme selectivity with which she cited from her sources, producing a cumulative distortion which she unscrupulously exploited. Norman Cohn gave several examples of this process, one of which is particularly revealing. Murray is arguing that witches’ feasts were simply shared suppers for which food was collected from friends, and cites as proof these words from a trial at Forfar in 1661: Some of them went to John Benny’s house, he being a brewer, and brought ale from hence … and others of them went to Alexander Heice’s house and brought aqua vitae from thence, and so made themselves merry. The three dots are important; they are there in The Witch-​Cult in Western Europe (1921), but when the same passage is quoted in The God of the Witches (1933), they have disappeared. And what had the dots replaced? The missing words are: “and they went through a little hole like bees, and took the substance of the ale”. These words would destroy the naturalistic picture of a neighbourly bottle-​ party which Murray has in mind, so she calmly omits them, and in her second book even hides the fact that any omission has been made. Cohn is rightly scathing about the dishonesty, but a folklorist has further reason to be angry, for the phrase she suppressed is a vital clue to the true nature of the story offered in evidence at

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that trial. It is an international migratory legend about supernatural beings who enter a cellar to steal drink, or rather the non-​material “substance” or “goodness” of the drink; it is told not only of witches but also of fairies and werewolves and benandanti. The motif of transformation to a bee is also known elsewhere. Murray could not have known the parallels from distant lands (though some British fairy ones were already in print); this is forgivable, but not the fact that, in order to create a rationalized picture, she simply cut out evidence that went against it. Her manipulation of sources is sometimes so blatant as to be naïve, for even a cursory reader can spot what is going on. At one point she is arguing that witches went to their meetings on foot or on horseback in a quite non-​magical way, and quotes from the well-​known confession of Isobel Gowdie: “I had a little horse, and would say ‘Horse and Hattock’, in the Devil’s name!” –​but without mentioning that the “horse” Isobel is talking about was a magic wisp of straw. Then, five pages later, she quotes the same passage again, but this time in full, straw and all, to show how witches had hallucinations of flight. She does not realize that she has thereby wrecked her previous rationalistic interpretation of this passage. … Murray’s work is also notable for its passionate system-​building. Rites of initiation, dates for festivals, Sabbath rituals, discipline and hierarchy within covens –​ all are presented as a rigidly codified and uniform system throughout Britain and Europe. The monolithic long-​term stability of ancient Egyptian religion or (allegedly) of Roman Catholicism may have subconsciously affected her judgment on this point and led her into this historically most implausible claim. She does occasionally admit that the clues she is following are very slight and scattered; for example, that only one source names all four of the festivals which she said were held annually everywhere; and that only one witch actually mentioned covens of thirteen. But normally she writes as if every detail were firmly fixed, amply documented, and universally obeyed for centuries. Perhaps this picture of a highly disciplined organization secretly permeating society suited the outlook of her times. Conspiracy theories have flourished since the nineteenth century, often involving small secret cells of plotters, whether in fact or fiction:  anarchists, Fenians, Bolsheviks, the Elders of Zion, the German Fifth Column. There have in fact been writers, both before and after Murray, who saw witch meetings as an outlet for political discontent or a cover for political conspiracy. But this was far from being Murray’s view; her witch cult had a very different purpose. Murray maintained that witches were keeping alive an ancient religion concerned with fertility, a notion which fitted current assumptions in the 1920s. Frazer’s The Golden Bough had had a huge impact, shifting public understanding of primitive religions from generalized animism or sun-​worship to a specific

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concern with [the] fertility of crops, animals and humans, and linking it to ancient kings and dying gods. The pattern was firmly established; but how could Murray, a devout Frazerian, make the witchcraft records conform to it? Her logic on this point was even more eccentric than usual, consisting solely in an argument by reversal of evidence: witches were invariably accused of blighting crops, killing animals, killing children and making men impotent, and therefore they must have “originally” been doing just the opposite. She cites from Isobel Gowdie’s confession a charm in which a toad yoked to a miniature plough was loosed on someone’s land to make it sterile, saying such rites must have been “originally for the promotion of fertility, but were misunderstood by the recorders and probably by the witches themselves”.1 Many early folklorists were quick to accuse their primary informants of misunderstanding the essence of a tradition; Murray is, as far as I am aware, unique in simply turning the information upside down. She created a startling new figure, the witch as a benevolent purveyor of fertility; but its similarity to familiar ideas in Frazer (the popular one-​volume edition of whose work came out in the following year) must have helped make it acceptable. … Another factor in Murray’s appeal was her emotionalism, especially in her second book, The God of the Witches (1933). In The Witch-​Cult she had already praised the “sheer enjoyment” of the Sabbaths, the food and drink, the dancing, the promiscuous sex. But at that stage she was still honest enough to include as equally valid certain less pleasant items from the trial evidence and confessions. … When she wrote The God of the Witches, however, she cut out or toned down most of them. … Whereas the style of the first book had been dry and academic, the second bubbles with enthusiasm: Throughout all the ceremonies of this early religion there is an air of joyous gaiety and cheerful happiness which even the holy horror of the Christian recorders cannot completely disguise. …2 Although she has not dropped her picture of the secret and persecuted society of witches, she now also presents a different picture of their social standing, couched in glowing terms and presumably based on a romantic exaggeration of the position of “wise women” in rural communities: For centuries both before and after the Christian era, the witch was both honoured and loved. Whether man or woman, the witch was consulted by all, for relief in sickness, for counsel in trouble, or for foreknowledge of forthcoming events. They were at home in the

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courts of kings … Their mystical powers gave them the authority for discovering culprits, who then received the appropriate punishment.3 Her language has become emotionally inflated and coloured with religious phraseology. … The Horned God and his human representatives the coven-​leaders are now regularly called the Incarnate God, the Master, the Dying God, the Divine Man, the Divine King, the Divine Victim, and even “the Man Divine who died for his people”.4 Such titles are deemed applicable because Murray has now fully developed a Frazerian scenario already outlined in her first book:  namely, that “originally” a human representative of the Horned God was periodically “burned alive in the presence of the whole congregation” and his ashes scattered on the fields to make them fertile.5 After Christianity made this human sacrifice impossible, she claims, the witches were determined to carry it on by devious means; they would deliberately provoke the authorities into sentencing them to death by burning, in imitation of their god; failing that, they would contrive to get themselves murdered. The evidence for the “original” sacrifice was feeble in the extreme, merely five statements culled from French and Belgian demonologists that at the end of the Sabbath the Devil in goat form had burst into flames and vanished. The association of apparitions of the Devil with flames is such a cliché in religious writings and folklore of all periods that one is amazed that Murray ascribed significance to these passages. But then, Frazer had taught that gods and their surrogates in fertility cults were necessarily killed, so she doubtless felt it essential to find something corresponding in her Old Religion. By 1933 she was claiming sweepingly (though without citing additional evidence) that inquisitors were “unanimous” in saying such sacrifices took place, and that the trial accounts support them. On this basis she then built her notorious fantasies that Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, and several kings of England plus an assortment of their wives, ministers or favourites, had all volunteered to be killed as Divine Victims in the Old Religion. When this theme reached its full flowering in her third book, The Divine King in England (1954), even her admirers must have been embarrassed. One further feature of Murray’s writings which exasperated the academic mind may, perversely, add to their impact on uncritical readers. I  refer to the inclusion of many chunks of miscellaneous material from a huge variety of periods and cultures, flung together in a hotchpotch where a Palaeolithic cave painting, an Egyptian mask and a Dorset Ooser all are said to represent the same Horned God, and where Robin Hood, fairies, scrying, Merlin, Norse seers and Celtic saints are all swept up in the discussion. Precisely because this material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified,

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and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship which they dare not query. Her books, alas, are not alone in profiting from this effect. … Looking back, one can heartily wish that some prominent folklorist had tackled her errors openly in the 1930s or 1940s, instead of leaving the job to be done by historians in the 1970s and 1980s. If anyone had, it is hard to imagine that an encyclopedia and a leading university press would have continued to afford her a platform.

Notes Margaret Murray, The Witch-​Cult in Western Europe (Oxford University Press 1921), 115. 2 Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (Oxford University Press 1933), 84. 3 Ibid., 110–​11. 4 Ibid., 131. 5 Murray, Witch-​Cult, 159–​62. 1

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Chapter 12

H. C. Erik Midelfort HEARTLAND OF THE WITCHCRAZE

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N T H I S L U C I D A N D COMPELLING account of the origins of German witch trials, H. C. Erik Midelfort describes the lethal effects of the concept of the sabbat. He suggests that the idea of Devil-​worshipping witches was largely unknown in peasant communities, but was imposed by scholars as a by-​product of the extension of imperial law in the sixteenth century. As a result, allegations of maleficium were transformed into major witch panics that could consume whole communities. Research since this article was written has challenged parts of Midelfort’s analysis. This suggests that while ordinary people were far more concerned with the practical effects of witchcraft than the demonic aspects of the crime, the idea that witches acted together had roots in popular culture. Wolfgang Behringer (10) argues that fears of collective witchcraft reflected the widely-​held belief that large-​ scale maleficium like weather-​magic was normally the work of groups of witches. As William Monter also points out (21), the desire to eradicate large numbers of witches in Germany was often driven from below. Thus, the acceptance of the sabbat among local elites was not the catalyst for mass trials, though it may have encouraged the authorities to acquiesce in the process. By prompting interrogators to ask leading questions about attendance at the sabbat, the myth also added to the number of suspects once a panic had taken hold.

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Maximillian I, Holy Roman Emperor and the ‘last knight of the Middle Ages’ kept a magician, Johann Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, at his court. On one occasion, the Emperor asked him to settle empirically the rival claims of the pagan and biblical worthies by bringing them back to earth. We do not know what the famous humanist abbot made of this imperial request; nor can we tell what spectacles and illusions he produced to entertain the court at Innsbruck.What we do know is that Trithemius had a reputation as a learned necromancer. But was his art witchcraft, a demonic gift made possible only by a pact with the Devil? No one in the early sixteenth century seems to have thought so. Indeed, Germany was alive with learned magicians in those years, men whose neo-​Platonic convictions led them to harness the magical forces of the cosmos. Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim and Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, [the latter] known more simply as Paracelsus, flourished in the early sixteenth century and tried to bring magic to the aid of philosophy and medicine. Dr Faust may even have given himself to the Devil before his death in 1540, thereby engendering a myth that has firmly linked Germany and the Devil together ever since. And yet it is worth noting that none of these magicians was ever even prosecuted for witchcraft. Theologically they all deviated from Christian orthodoxy, but even dabbling with demons did not endanger their lives. Later in the century, David Leipzig might actually sign a pact with the Devil and receive a punishment no more severe than expulsion from his university. In a court of law all of these men might have been convicted of witchcraft, but the interesting point is that no one thought of bringing charges against them. In 1563, in his famous De Praestigiis Daemonum, Johann Weyer complained bitterly that these magi infames got off scot free while deluded old women were convicted and executed by the hundreds. Weyer’s sense of outrage illustrates the important point that, regardless of what the theologians and jurists might say, witchcraft in Germany was not simply a crime of mental or spiritual deviation; it was not primarily heresy or apostasy or learned diabolism. Rather, witchcraft was mainly a social offence: the use of harmful magic by a secret conspiracy of women. The German prosecutors who assumed the task of rooting out the godless witches knew whom they were looking for. And they were so successful that they made the German-​speaking territories the classic land of the witch-​hunt. It is certain that the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland executed far more witches than any other parts of Europe. How can we account for this? Recent studies have illuminated the important extent to which witchcraft trials remained popular in inspiration or became subject to learned influence and interference. It has become clear that down to 1550, and probably much later, the common folk of the village feared witchcraft not as a demonic conspiracy but as

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a practical threat to the fertility of their fields, flocks and families. Witches were popularly imagined as solitary sorcerers, practising their malefic magic through the manipulation of cursing tablets, ointments, charms, and all the mysterious rubbish that could be combined in a Hexentopf. Their baneful poisons could cause hailstorms and untimely frosts; sickness in man and beast; impotence, miscarriage and death. These were everyday threats to country life, and it is not surprising that common people accused the local crone of enviously casting evil spells. Indeed it is probable enough that some of the locally accused were guilty as charged of at least trying to harm a neighbour or secure his affection with love magic. Throughout the centuries of the witch-​hunt these locally inspired and locally controlled sorcery trials continued to be common. They usually ended as abruptly as they had begun, with the execution or banishment of one or two witches. There was nothing peculiarly German in this procedure and nothing to cause the panic that the great witch-​hunt inspired. But the true panic did not remain rooted in these rural concerns and did not rest content with the extermination of one or two geriatric outcasts. To have some understanding of the difference we may look with profit at some of the frightful trials that became characteristic of Germany, especially in the prince-​bishoprics and ecclesiastical states of central Germany. Between 1587 and 1593 the Archbishop-​Elector of Trier sponsored a witch-​hunt that burned 368 witches from just twenty-​two villages. So horrible was this hunt that two villages in 1585 were left with only one female inhabitant apiece. In the lands of the Convent of Quedlinburg, some 133 witches were executed on just one day in 1589. At the Abbey of Fulda, Prince Abbot Balthasar von Dernbach conducted a reign of terror in the first decade of the seventeenth century: his minister Balthasar Ross boasted of having sent over 700 witches to the stake, no less than 205 of them in the years 1603–​05 alone. At the Furstprobstei of Ellwangen, ecclesiastical officials saw to the burning of some 390 persons between 1611 and 1618, while the Teutonic Order at Mergentheim executed some 124 in the years 1628–​30. The Prince-​Bishopric of Würzburg endured a frightful panic during the 1620s: in just eight years Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg executed some 900 persons including his own nephew, nineteen Catholic priests, and several small children. In the Prince-​Bishopric of Eichstatt some 274 witches were executed in 1629. At Bonn, the Archbishop-​Elector of Cologne supervised the execution of his own Chancellor, his wife and his secretary’s wife. The worst ecclesiastical excesses may well have occurred in the Bishopric of Bamberg, where Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim is said to have eliminated 600 witches during his reign of ten years (1623–​33), including his own Chancellor and one of the burgermeisters of Bamberg, Johann Junius.

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Although these ecclesiastical territories were the most ferocious exterminators of witches, secular territories were not always far behind them in their zeal to purge the commonwealth. The tiny county of Helfenstein killed sixty-​ three witches in 1562–​ 63. The Duchy of Brauschweig-​ Wolfenbuttel executed fifty-​ three between 1590 and 1620, while Duke August of Braunschweig-​Luneberg eliminated seventy between 1610 and 1615 in the tiny district of Hitzacker. The County of Lippe tried 221 witches between 1550 and 1686 and another 209 in the town of Lemgo. All told the Duchy of Bavaria probably executed close to 2,000 witches, and the secular territories of south-​ western Germany very likely accounted for another 1,000. Even the imperial cities hunted witches in sizeable numbers, both among their own burghers and among the peasants of their outlying hinterlands. When we ask who these witches were, the German evidence agrees closely with that from most of the rest of Europe: they were women, usually old and poor, often widows. Overall, some 80 to 90 per cent of the accused were female, and one cannot begin to understand the European witch-​hunt without recognising that it displayed a burst of misogyny without parallel in Western history. Scholars are still far from agreement as to the sources of this hatred and fear of women, but it is clear that the major trials sprang from fears that were no longer rooted merely in the vagaries of peasant misfortune. The thousands executed in these chain-​reaction trials may have had to confess to harmful magic, but their chief crime was one of which peasants were generally unaware: the obscene worship of the Devil. Where and how had this idea penetrated the German-​speaking lands? The first massive persecutions in Germany are inseparably connected to the [principal] author of the famous Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, published in 1487: Heinrich Institoris, OP. In 1484 Institoris obtained from Pope Innocent VIII a bull (Summi desiderantes) urging German secular and ecclesiastical officials to co-​operate with Institoris and his associate, Jacob Sprenger, OP, in the hunting of witches. Theologically, this bull contained nothing that previous popes had not said; but the bull had considerable importance because it seemed to sanction the subsequent activities of these two Dominican inquisitors. Reprinted with every edition of their Malleus, the bull seemed to bestow papal approval on their inquisitorial theories as well. So successful was this stroke of advertising strategy that the authors hardly even needed the approval of the Cologne University theologians, but just for good measure Institoris forged a document granting their apparently unanimous approbation. Armed with the bull, Institoris began a campaign in the diocese of Constance and executed forty-​eight witches between 1481 and 1486. Although these efforts finally ran into the effective opposition of the

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bishop of Bressanone, Institoris assembled enough practical experience to enliven the manual he and Sprenger composed in 1486. The Malleus Maleficarum is a remarkable treatise that actually reveals how far Germany still was from a full-​fledged witch-​hunting panic. True enough, the two Dominicans injected so much misogynist venom into their pages as to construe witchcraft almost exclusively as a crime of female lust. True, too, the Malleus recommends a degree of judicial terror and deception that helps us understand why those accused of witchcraft often found that they had no real chance to defend themselves. But it is also true that the Malleus repeatedly mentions popular incredulity. In the late fifteenth century Germans were still far from unanimous in their acceptance of the fine points of demonology. In fact, the Malleus itself is innocent of the most important detail of late medieval witchcraft theory: the witches’ dance or Sabbath. Institoris and Sprenger spent so much time working out the way that witches co-​operated with the Devil that they neglected to spend any attention on the single feature that made massive, chain-​reaction trials possible. Indeed it was another 75 to 100 years before the orgiastic ritual of the Sabbath had worked its way into the obsessions of the learned and the imagery of the artists. It is noteworthy that German artistic representations of witchcraft in the late fifteenth century agree with the Malleus in portraying a basically solitary crime. The famous prints of Hans Baldung Grien and Albrecht Dürer enliven the theme with visual jokes, playing changes on the theme of the classical muses, but their figures are still far from the lusting, turbulent, populous scenes of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Malleus, for all its wealth of corrupt and confused argument, cannot be viewed as the final synthesis of witchcraft theory. In its own day it was never accorded the unquestioned authority that modern scholars have sometimes given it. Theologians and jurists respected it as one among many informative books; its peculiarly savage misogyny and its obsession with impotence were never fully accepted. Emperor Charles V promulgated a criminal code for the Empire in 1532 (the Carolina) with a witchcraft clause that was still far from reflecting the spirit of the Malleus. Article 109 read simply: When someone harms people or brings them trouble by witchcraft, one should punish him with death, and one should use the punishment of death by fire. When, however, someone uses witchcraft and yet does no one any harm with it, he should be punished other-​wise, according to the custom of the case; and the judges should take counsel as is described later regarding legal consultations.

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This article preserved intact the Roman legal distinction between harmful and harmless magic, a distinction that appeared impious to the authors of the Malleus. As long as courts insisted that witchcraft prosecutions be closely tied to actual cases of harm and loss, there was little chance of a chain-​reaction trial breaking out. Unfortunately, the witchcraft article of the Carolina did not make full theological sense, for it seemed to permit a more lenient treatment of the most diabolical magic so long as it harmed no one. Through the middle and late decades of the sixteenth century in Germany, one can mark the advance of two notions, both fateful for the development of the German panic trial; gradually, the witches’ Sabbath became a common obsession among the ruling elite; and, just as gradually, territorial laws were altered to allow for the execution of witches whose only crime was association with the Devil, regardless of harm (maleficium) to anyone. In 1572 the Criminal Constitutions of Electoral Saxony declared, for example, that ‘if anyone, forgetting his Christian faith, sets up a pact with the Devil or has anything to do with him, regardless of whether he has harmed anyone by magic, he should be condemned to death by fire’. With a law such as this, one could proceed to torture a suspect until one had not only an admission of guilt but a list of the names of others seen at the witches’ dance. These persons could then in turn be examined and tortured if necessary. A panic might be under way. To return to our earlier question, it seems clear that the German holocaust of witches depended both on torture and on the learned obsession with the Sabbath. But where had local courts and the petty princes of Germany obtained their notions of the Sabbath? And let us make no mistake that it was an illusion:  no careful researcher has discovered even a trace of a true witch-​cult with Sabbaths, orgies, black masses and devil worship. So how did this inquisitor’s nightmare become part of the secular law of hundreds of German jurisdictions? Here the notion of the peculiarly German reception of Roman Law is useful again. For as Roman procedures replaced traditional ones in the sixteenth century, local judges were frequently at a loss as to how to proceed. Roman procedure dictated the rational device of seeking learned counsel, as we have seen in the witchcraft article of the Carolina; and, beginning in the mid-​sixteenth century and with regularity in the seventeenth century, local districts turned to the juridical faculties of the German universities. In this way local procedures all across the Holy Roman Empire were tied to the Roman legal theories of the professors –​but, just as fatefully, local witchcraft theory was now dependent as never before on the demonological illusions of learned jurists. In requiring ignorant petty judges to take counsel, the Carolina in effect undercut its own prudent Roman witchcraft

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doctrine, and opened the door to the possibility that the panic about the witches’ Sabbath could spread beyond the learned studies where it had first taken root. The Holy Roman Empire thus became the classic land of the witch-​hunt, not so much because of the ‘German temperament’ as because of the German legal system, a system that allowed bishops and other ecclesiastics an unparalleled degree of influence in their territories, and permitted university professors to become full members of the judicial mechanism. Episcopal and professorial fantasies still need close investigation, but at least it seems clear now where we need to look in order to understand how popular and peasant notions of merely harmful magic were perverted into the witchcraft delusion. We may find that the full panoply of demonology never became deeply rooted in the villages, that local accusations almost always stemmed from some local misfortune. At any rate it appears that small-​scale witch-​trials could survive long after the chain-​reaction panics had disappeared. Across the Empire the mass trials proliferated between c. 1570 and c. 1630. Some regions had flare-​ups again in the 1670s, but by 1630 in most places the worst was over. How shall we understand this decline? A common answer has been that the magistrates and learned elites of Europe finally gave up their belief in witchcraft. Without their support, trials were no longer possible. This may help explain why even the small, local trials withered away in the eighteenth century; but by then the large, chain trials had been dead for a generation or more. One reason for the disappearance of large trials is that during the seventeenth century they came increasingly to involve children. Most of the huge trials after 1625 featured children as accusers and even as the accused. In several cases it was finally recognised, if not by learned university jurists then at least by local officials, that the testimony of minors was simply not credible. Critics of witchcraft trials, from Johann Weyer in the sixteenth century to Friedrich von Spee in the seventeenth, had long maintained that tortured evidence was equally unreliable. Slowly but surely the territories of the Holy Roman Empire put on the brakes, becoming much more cautious in the use of torture than they had been. Already in 1603 the Protestant Archbishop of Bremen, Johann Friedrich, published an Edict Concerning Witchcraft that made continuation of the trials almost impossible. In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden put an end to witchcraft trials in Verden, which was controlled by her country after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Bishop Johann Philipp von Schönborn ordered the end to trials in Würzburg in 1642 and carried this caution to Mainz when he became Elector and Archbishop there in 1647. Similarly Prince-​Bishop Christoph Bernhard von Galen put a stop to trials in Munster. By the 1670s the legal faculties of Tübingen and Helmstedt were urging extraordinary caution in the application of torture.

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Although the enlightened Professor Christian Thomasius of Halle won renown for his dissertation De Crimine Magiae (1701) and for his other attacks on the witchcraft theory and demonology of the learned, by then the true age of witchcraft trials was over. A glance at witchcraft in Denmark can serve as a comparative check on the picture presented here of the Holy Roman Empire. The Lutheran Bishop of Sealand, Peder Palladius, urged vigorous prosecution of witches in 1544 and reported that successful trials were uncovering ‘swarms’ of witches in Malmo, Koge, and Jutland, and that at Als and in the nearby islands a chain-​reaction trial had sent fifty-​two witches to the stake as ‘one of them betrays another’. But all of these trials dealt with specific cases of maleficium, and in general the Danish trials never developed the fascination with the Devil and the Sabbath that one finds just to the south. The main reason for this surprisingly ‘backward’ condition (one much like that of England) was the promulgation of two laws in 1547. The first forbade the use of testimony from those convicted of infamous crimes, such as theft, treason, and sorcery, against others. The second held that ‘no person shall be interrogated under torture before he is sentenced’. These two rules effectively cut off the spread of massive chain trials like those of 1544. It was no longer possible to torture suspects into confessing their horrible misdeeds or into naming those whom they had seen at the witches’ dance. From beginnings that seem similar to those in Germany, Danish trials were thus steered into an English path. Even without ideas of the Sabbath, the best recent estimate suggests that the Danes tried some 2,000 persons and executed something less than 1,000. A further reason for the Danish ‘mildness’ is that after 1576 all death sentences had to be appealed to the high court (Landsting), which often proved more cautious than the local courts. After 1650 cases dropped off dramatically to just a few per annum. As in the Holy Roman Empire, however, the popular fear of maleficium survived long after the elite had put an end to actual witchcraft trials. In the rest of Scandinavia, however, the picture was somewhat different. In Norway, where the records of about 750 trials survive between 1560 and 1710, torture was seldom used and only one quarter of those accused (mostly those convicted of causing the death of a person or an animal) were executed. But in Sweden, although the use of torture was infrequent in the sixteenth century, church leaders convinced the government that all found guilty of making a pact with the Devil should be sentenced to death. From 1668 until 1676 a major witch panic gripped northern Sweden (with repercussions in Finland until 1684): thousands were accused, interrogated and tortured; over 200 were executed. After 1672, persons accused by several witnesses were executed even if they did not confess. The panic only abated in 1676 when several child-​witnesses involved in a

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major Stockholm trial admitted that their stories of Sabbaths and covens were entirely false. These Scandinavian trials all serve to point up the extremely pernicious effects of legalised torture and the idea of the Sabbath.Wherever the testimony of witches and the possessed could be excluded, trials remained small and manageable; but whenever these restraints were relaxed, the Scandinavians rapidly imitated the legal excesses of the prince-​bishops of central Germany. Local suspicions of maleficium seem to have flourished throughout northern Europe for centuries, certainly surviving long into the nineteenth century, and even into our own. By themselves, however, these suspicions never led to more than a few trials or lynchings. It was the fateful intervention of learned and thoughtful lawyers and theologians with their panic-​stricken demonology that sent thousands of women to their deaths. It is a legacy for the learned to ponder.

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Chapter 13

Gustav Henningsen FROM DREAM CULT TO WITCHES’ SABBATH

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H E A U T H O R I T I E S T H A T dealt with witchcraft in early modern Europe sometimes reconstructed regional folk beliefs into versions of the witches’ sabbat. Here Gustav Henningsen describes how the Roman Inquisition attempted to demonise a Sicilian “fairy cult”. Fairies were also included in accounts of satanic witchcraft in the British Isles, and were mentioned by James VI of Scotland in his Daemonologie (1597). Some historians, such as Carlo Ginzburg and Éva Pócs (14), have argued that the kind of dream cult recorded in the Sicilian archives gave rise to the idea of the sabbat elsewhere in Europe; but the surviving evidence for such belief systems is scattered and incomplete in those regions where the sabbat first emerged.

The picture of the Sicilian fairy cult painted by the Inquisition’s trial records displays a flourishing tradition,1 with variations from district to district. The fairies are participants in a group of seven, six, or five women, and one of them is the ‘Queen of the Fairies’. … They are described as beautiful women dressed in black or white, but their supernatural origin is revealed by their feet: cat’s paws, horse’s hooves, or ‘round feet’. In one or two cases, it is stated that they have little pig’s tails, and that their flesh is ‘soft’. Sometimes one of the group is a male fairy, who plays the lute or guitar to the others when they dance with linked hands.

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Fairies and human beings are organized in ‘companies’, which have different names according to their district. A wise woman, Vicencia [la] Rosa from Noto on the south-​east coast, related that there were no less than five ‘companies’ in her town: the ‘Company of the Noble’, three companies of the ordinary people, and the ‘Company of the Poor’, to which she herself belonged. The same woman described how ‘in the month of March they assembled with many other [companies] from various regions in a wood full of trees, and that their prince did not wish them to do evil things, but to heal [people]’. There is little information on the size of these companies. In one place twenty-​two persons are mentioned, in another thirty, and in another thirty-​three, but it is not clear whether the fairies are included in these numbers. In Noto, the Company of the Noble numbered twelve, and each of the others had nine members. … In 1627, a 36-​year-​old wise woman, married to a journeyman from Alcamo, who was a member of the ‘Company of the Romans’, related how she was taken by them far and wide, to Rome, Messina, and to ‘a vast plain with a big walnut tree in the centre’. Replying to her friends’ questions about what kind of folk these ‘Romans’ were, she had explained on several occasions That they were the wise Sybil’s people, who came from a cave that was in the tower of Babylon, and that the Sybil was King Solomon’s sister. She had instructed the others together with the bliss-​crowned Virgin Mary, and had received the impression that she herself must be the Mother of God. But when she saw that it was not to be her, but the bliss-​crowned Virgin, she threw all her books on the fire. But Mary kept hers under her arm. The journeyman’s wife also entertained her friends with accounts of the company’s tours around the houses of the town each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night, when ‘the Matron’ took the lead carrying a torch to light them all along, although this was visible only to the members of the company. When they went into a house with their songs and music and fine clothes they would say: ‘With God’s blessing let the dance increase!’, and when, after taking a look into people’s clothes’ chests –​and eating some of the food, if there was a festive gathering in progress –​ they left to go on somewhere else, their parting salute was: ‘Stop the dance and let prosperity increase!’ Everything considered, we can see that poor Sicilians talked endlessly among themselves about the fairies, and that those of them who were themselves donas de fuera gladly described their wonderful adventures, even when this might be dangerous. The large numbers of informers and witnesses in the donas cases

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speak for themselves: there could be ten, twenty, or thirty witnesses against one accused person. After being informed of the witnesses’ statements, a 40-​year-​old nun from Ragusa admitted: ‘that sometimes to please her listeners she had told them things that she had neither seen nor had any knowledge of’. Some of the inquisitors seem to have had a clear understanding of the real state of affairs. In 1630 they sentenced 30-​year-​old Vicencia la Rosa from Noto to a brief period of banishment, but strictly enjoined her never in future to speak to anybody of the things she had been accused of. But alas, Vicencia, or ‘La Riciola’ as she was known among friends, could not contain herself. She went on telling her friends about her familiar spirit, Martinillo, who took her to the Sabbath three times a week, when she consulted her ‘prince’ about people’s diseases and bewitchings, and she told them who belonged to the Company of the Noble, and who to the Company of the Poor. Six years later the hammer of the Inquisition fell, and this time she was sentenced to perpetual banishment from her home district. It can hardly be doubted that both listeners and storytellers in the main believed the tales and took them seriously. … The Sicilian fairy cult was a daydream religion that allowed poor people to experience in dreams and visions all the splendours denied them in real life. … Among the sixty-​five accused we find only eight male ‘witches’. The fairy cult in Sicily was a decidedly feminine phenomenon. … The Italian witch-​trial records and demonological writings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries teem with accounts of orgiastic nocturnal gatherings that people took part in while their bodies remained in their beds. For instance, the Dominican monk Bartholomeo Spina in Quaestio de Strigibus (Venice 1525) describes a witches’ Sabbath in the province of Ferrara that is presided over by a certain ‘Domina cursus’, whom the witches also call ‘the wise Sybil’. During the nightly meetings that are held twice a week on the bank of the River Jordan ‘the wise Sybil’ tries again and again to fly down and touch the river, striving with all her might; for if she can only get one finger in the water she will have power over the whole world. But she never manages it. Here we find a resemblance to the fairy cult from Sicily, but a new element has now appeared: ‘Domina cursus’ demands of her Ferrara witches that they must kill a child once every fortnight, so they run around in the shape of cats and slink into the houses, where they suck the blood from small children, who die a few days later. Everywhere on the Italian mainland there are signs of a similar diabolization of popular idea complexes, like the one so brilliantly documented by Carlo Ginzburg in the case of Friuli. In the first cases brought against benandanti from the end of the sixteenth century these popular charismatic healers succeeded in persuading the inquisitors to accept them as specialists in combating witchcraft and consequently to accept that they could

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not be witches, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century the inquisitors’ ‘understanding’ had come to an end and the benandanti were gradually obliged to confess that they themselves were witches too. As a result, writes Ginzburg, in a benandante’s confession from 1634 for the first time anywhere in Friuli we have a coherent description of the witches’ Sabbath.2 In the same way as the Italian inquisitors in Friuli and the other Italian regions succeeded with the diabolizing process, so too did the Spanish inquisitors in Sardinia, aided by the local bishops, meet with success when they conducted dozens of witch-​trials. The only place where no witch-​hunt took place was Sicily. Inquisition and Church did their utmost to get the people to realize that their ‘men and women from outside’ were purely and simply witches, but their efforts did not bear the same fruit as in other places, where we must assume that the propaganda started a chain reaction in the population. During confession and inquisitorial interrogation male and female donas were naturally obliged to admit that in reality their fairy cult was demonolatry, and a few of them were also encouraged to produce authentic descriptions of Sabbaths. However, every time the Inquisition seized upon one of these ‘witches’, they had to begin all over again. Many of the accused declared under interrogation that they had not known there was anything wrong in these things, until their confessors or the inquisitors had explained to them that there was. In one or two cases the accused even tried to exempt their fairies from the serious accusations by pointing out that they were not, like demons, afraid of the cross and holy water; indeed, one of the accused went so far as to describe a mass that had been said at her ‘fairy Sabbath’ by some Catholic priests who had been brought by ‘Doña Zabella’ from Malta. I believe that the reason for the lack of success in diabolizing the Sicilian donas and bringing on them the same fate as that of their charismatic colleagues in Friuli, the lack of success in involving the Devil in the poor Sicilians’ dream world and giving him a permanent place there, is connected with the fact that no notions of wicked and mischief-​making witches existed in Sicily. In Friuli popular tradition included both ‘good’ witches (benandanti) and ‘bad’ witches (stregoni), while the Sicilians did not hold a similar dualistic system of belief. Their fairies and ‘witches’ could exercise both good and ill, although the harm they caused was seldom so bad that it could not be repaired by an expiation ritual. This is the reason for Sicily presumably having retained a particularly archaic form of witch belief, almost identical with the ‘witch cult’ that Margaret Murray attempted to demonstrate on the evidence of north and mid-​European material. There is, however, one vital difference: Murray saw the Sabbath and the witches’ rituals as based on the real, material world, while the Sicilian documentation shows that we must look for the Sabbath and most of the rituals in quite another place: in an immaterial world of

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dream and vision. Once we have recognized this we can perfectly well go along with the grand ambition of Murray and her predecessors: to uncover the popular origins of the Sabbath concepts. … There is an almost total congruence between the popular dream cult and the witch religion that the learned demonologists completed their definition of in about 1600. It is merely that practically all the elements have acquired opposite value: the beautiful fairies have turned into horrible demons, the splendid food into a rotten, stinking mess; the sweet music has become hateful caterwauling, the joyful dance exhausting capering, and the pleasurable love painful rape. The prolific monkish fantasies were inexhaustible when it was a matter of diabolizing the popular dream world, a dangerous rival to the joyless society of Christendom. Future research must show whether it is also possible to reconstruct the positive notions of the Sabbath for other parts of Europe, or if it is only in Italy that (thanks to especially favourable survivals of sources) we may see the process of diabolization at work.

Notes 1

2

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Gustav Henningsen, “The Ladies from Outside:  An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath”, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford 1993), 195–​8, 204–​7 –​ Ed. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (Turin 1966), 152.

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Chapter 14

Éva Pócs THE ALTERNATIVE WORLD OF THE WITCHES’  SABBAT

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N H E R R E S E A R C H O N witch trials in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​ century Hungary, Éva Pócs has uncovered a version of the witches’ sabbat that was rooted in regional folklore. She demonstrates that a popular concept of witches’ meetings was reported to the courts throughout this period, and received only relatively minor modifications from the authorities. In these extraordinary depositions, witches and their victims were transported to an “alternative world” that existed in parallel to reality, where they engaged in feasting, magical feats, battles, and punishments. Like Wolfgang Behringer (10), Pócs suggests that fears of collective witchcraft were as common among ordinary people as they were among elites, though she traces these fears to folkloric concepts of the sabbat instead of the belief in large-​scale maleficium.

JOURNEYS In the witch trial narratives that concern visions, the terms “enchantment” and ­“abduction” have a range of meanings. In their primary senses they refer to an altered state of consciousness in which the supernatural is perceived, apparitions are experienced, and occasionally a journey is made to the alternative world. Bewitched individuals lived through experiences such as demonic witches entering houses and holding their merriments there, injuring their victims, or taking them to the witches’ sabbat.

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The enchanted person lying in [a]‌trance may be observed by others, at the same time that both the injured party and the witches can travel on soul journeys. In the account of a 1747 witch trial in Kiskunhalas, Anna Hos reported seeing her husband in bed, lying there stiff, barely drawing breath, and she called to her husband “what happened to you, are you asleep?” For a long while she and her stepdaughter tried to awaken him … and after a long time he awoke and cried out, “My Lord Jesus help me! Fiery witches took me to Maramaros, and they put six hundredweight of salt on me.” …1 The narratives of witches’ confessions were strongly influenced by the expectations of the court: witches had to confess to “witches' companies,” or even to a pact with the Devil, which obviously meant that their testimonies included the traditional demonological witches’ sabbat doctrines along with any relevant personal experiences. … We can presume that, through the medium of sermons, the literature of visions substantially influenced local traditions concerning witnesses and the accused, and the visual experience of church frescoes also probably played a role. It is possible to trace Christian visionary imagery of heaven and hell in several themes in the terrestrial otherworlds of witches. While visionary literature lent Christian motifs of the otherworld to narratives on the witches’ sabbat, witch-​hunting demonology gained its place and influence over the participants in the trials through the court’s questions to the accused. This mainly had the effect of making experiences tangible, rational, and “terrestrial.” All this is because the alternative of experience, a “real” adventure in the otherworld or a narrative, was always present for the people at the trial, whereas looking at it through the eyes of the court, one form of witches’ sabbat alone was what certainly existed: an authentic terrestrial gathering of heretic God deniers who actually and physically participated. If they flew, it was accomplished with the help of the Devil, but they flew in a physical sense. The other demonological alternative was that the adventure of the witches’ sabbat was nothing other than devilish illusion. …

SCENES According to hundreds of Hungarian witness accounts, one of the common scenes of witches’ sabbats and merriments was in the house or yard of the injured party, where the bewitched was compelled to take part in the merriments of the

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witches. On other occasions the victims were transported farther away  –​they were dragged or carried –​but only in a few instances were they taken beyond the borders of the village. “Carrying” is a particular form of abduction and a term that appears frequently in the trials. It refers to a rapid horizontal flight by the abducted to actual terrestrial sites, such as “Laposdomb” (Flat Hill), “the stove of Janos Vas,” “Antal’s pear tree,” and so on. This flight in pairs does not constitute the real witches’ sabbat, but its essence is the same. The abducted party arrives in an alternative world with the witches; the narratives also refer to a parallel world existing in terrestrial scenes. References to breaking away from earth are often attached to narratives about more “realistic” carrying; for example (from Otomany, Bihar County 1735), “her feet could not touch the ground”; and “she walked on the tree tops.” Another example, from Kisvarda, Szabolcs County, speaks of rapid horizontal flight: “with a speed like the winds she was rushing down the road … Mrs. Mihaly Sandor passed her at speed on a brownish horse.” The scenes of group witches’ sabbats, if not in or around the house of the injured party, mostly occurred on a hillock, a hill, or a mountaintop. Presumably this is no accident, given that these are the symbols of the universal “sacred center of the earth.” Specified hills, such as Gellért and Tokaj, as well as unnamed surrounding hillocks were commonly mentioned examples. Going to Gellért Hill would probably have been a legendary topos in those days; even in Hungary’s Modern Age legends, it is the most frequent scene of the witches’ merriments. Every kind of landscape surrounding the village was represented: vineyards, meadows, gardens, forests, fields, valleys, and waters. References to cities and palaces are striking among village scenes. It is not out of the question that the “vast, monstrous cities and vaulting arches,” the “palaces and churches” raise the heavenly city of Christian visions through a series of linked stages of transmission. …2 In the eyes of the interrogator, who knew nothing about “soul trips,” witches could not possibly fly except with the help of the Devil. Therefore, admitting to flying constituted an admission of witchcraft and indirectly indicated participation in the witches’ sabbat. So it was not accidental that, in Hungarian trial minutes as elsewhere, a question about flying followed an accusation of witchcraft: “Did you fly about the rooftops?” was the question to a witch from Feketeardo in 1732. …

TRANSFORMATIONS Those who were abducted became demons themselves, like their abductors. This is true of Hungarian demonic night witches too. In one descriptive example, Mrs. Márton Virágos, a witch from Bihar County, spoke to the women of the

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village about “whether [her illness] was caused by a human” –​that is, whether or not it was maleficium. One of the women told her, “You bumped your head into the roof beams when you were a fairy,” meaning that she had become ill when she was a fairy, and she was a fairy when the fairies visiting her house had enchanted her to dance (and caused her to bump her head against the roof beams). … The record of the 1747 trial of Mrs. Andras Gulyas, in Kassa, contains unique elements that suggest a probable visionary experience. Appearing in the text are spirit horses, victims who are turned into horses, and witches that saddled them, as well as a rather ghoulish company of riding witches. The other world is signified by the symbolism of encircling or losing one’s way, and on another level there is a reference to the abducted victim’s trance state. Mrs. Gulyas enters the house in the night, the witch from Göncz saying “Do you know what I  asked from you? You dog! Come here, dog!” With this she threw the bridle over her head and turned her into a horse there and then. Leaving the place with a mighty noise, she tied her to the door post … then she mounted the horse, and by which time there were three waiting outside in front of the gate on black horses … thus they went to Szina. A black horse in fancy decoration preceded them everywhere, [and] it was glittering, with light. Then later the witch just threw the bridle over her neck, [and] sat on the back of the fatens. Going toward the fields of Rosal the fatens saw a powerful steed and with grand preparations it glittered with light. Following this steed while they were going to the fields of Rosal, the fatens still had her senses, but after that where the fatens was carried she did not know. Only as she finally came home to town did she come round once more, [as] Mrs. Gulyas made the fatens circle her own house three times. A totally different way of traveling to the witches’ sabbat was to fly on magical objects. The basis for this motif of legends was the demonological idea of “satanic help.” The topoi of the literature of magic, as well as motifs from tales that referred to magical objects, magical spells, and magical transformations, constituted a rich source of ideas for such help. Flying on objects created through illusion was a recurring motif of court narratives. Witches claimed (although mostly in confessions following torture) to have traveled on carpets with the help of the

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wind, a cannonball, or carts that rose into the air through magic, as in Erzsébet Hampa’s 1737 trial in Sumeg: The six horses mentioned previously were naught but cats in truth, two black cats belonging to Ilona … the carriage was only a sieve and a bolter sieve thrown to the air, which were put together like wheels and were started with a whiplash … they traveled like the wind. …

SOCIETIES The figure of the Devil, particularly in the making of pacts, appeared only occasionally in narratives about witches’ merriments or witches’ sabbats. What was an indispensable part of the narratives was being together as a group, the actual society of witches. We can read about the society of witches in contexts at different levels, from narratives on experiences of death troops to confessions following torture where guilty partners were enumerated. We know that participation in the sabbat was a key focus of interrogation, in order to expose the assumed conspiracy. The company of witches, like other features of the witches’ sabbat, was not invented by demonologists to serve the aims of interrogation. This society, just like the Devil making a pact, had a popular basis. In the first century of the hunts there was no mention of the Devil at all in the narratives about the witches’ sabbat. Apparently, the conspiring society of witches organized by devils did not exist then, not even in the minds of Hungarian judges. It seems probable that the peasant witnesses conceptualized only one type of company: the gathering of the dead with supernatural witches and their demonic relatives, fairies, and werewolves. The ghoulish nature of these troops can often be traced to witches’ sabbats: these witches are “the evils,” “the evil souls,” or children with fiery eyes in “the troop.” What was really connected to the dead was the troop’s black or white flag, which grew to extraordinary supernatural proportions at night. That was a repetitive motif: witches came to the house at night carrying a flag, and as the “troop of the dead” they called their victims to them with flags. The troop flags disappeared upon the dispersal of the group, but they were of great size and are described as “very beautiful and shiny,” or “scarlet silk with golden dots,” and as being made of silk, gold, copper, or embroidery. Like other accessories of the witches’ sabbat, the flag may be understood through the eyes of the interrogators and the words of the tortured confessors as magical objects created through illusion. One, for example, “reached from the Hill of Tokaj as far as the River Tisza when it was unraveled.” The flag is an emphatic

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object rich in meaning, the positive symbol of the alternative world with its simultaneous connotation of death and heaven. The latter examples suggest that it had some connection with the fairylike “heavenly” joys of the otherworld. Its parallels were the flags of Southeastern European fairy troops, or the heavenly flags of religious visions. …

FAIRY MERRIMENTS Witches with fairy attributes are mentioned several times in the trial records.They brought glittering beauty to the houses in which they appeared, and they abducted their victims into their companies and their fairylike witches’ sabbats by making music and dancing. Negative witch characteristics are totally absent from some of these source narratives, which depict an alternative world full of beauty and joy that contrasts with the miseries of the terrestrial world. So, fairylike witches’ sabbats also belong in the world of desire. One account from Hodmezövasarhely in 1739 reports, “in the group they all seemed of beautiful and gentle colors, and even if they are in rags at home, there their clothes are all of straight beauty.” The most important motif of the fairy sabbats was the merriment with dance. Around sixty narratives concerning fairy merriments emerged from Hungarian trials across the country (excluding Transylvania), where, as in Romania, it was the witches with a werewolf or unbaptized demonic character who attended sabbats. The heart of fairy merriments was the feast, and the stories about it refer to cooking and baking, food and beverages, cooks and servants. At times we are witness to a wonderful range of dishes and drinks: from ten seeds of millet they feed “the entire company” as guests, or three thousand of them drink from a single drilled vine root. The mythological topos of magic food from antiquity and the Middle Ages was often broadened with the motif of the magically timed harvest (for example, wheat harvested before Pentecost or grapes harvested at Christmas time). These themes are known from the elite literature of magic, as well as from village crop magic. The accessories of a fairylike witch feast were golden and decorative, as in Southeast European or Celtic fairy heavens. According to confessions made in a 1728 trial in Komarom, the company of Mrs. Mihaly Olah enjoyed themselves with silver and golden glasses while they traveled over water on a bolter sieve. On another occasion, “they comforted [the injured party] with an extraordinarily sumptuous feast.” This fairy world of desire realized in dreams and apparitions was characteristic of the fairy beliefs of the Central Southeastern Europeans –​it also has close parallels in the Celtic, Italian, and Scandinavian regions –​and it lent particular

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fairy attributes to the witches’ sabbat in many areas. Something fairylike is always closely linked with the archaic and demonic witches’ world of the dead –​so much so that at times the shiny, heavenly features are missing from the image of the feast, and a “black” fairy world of the dead appears before us. The following example concerns a “black” troop of fairies with whom, however, it was possible to have a good time. From Mrs. Gyorgy Gemes’s 1739 trial in Hodmezövasarhely, we learn that her husband, when she fell ill, asked that she take me in that black troop, how long is it since I was there? … my dear dove, it is an age since I drank from that good old wine of Tokaj, that we drank in the black troop, give me a glass of that. …

THE UNDERWORLD AND HELL Demonologists imagined the feast of the desired world to be a dinner in hell with lizards, snakes, and frogs, as the French demonologist Pierre de Lancre described the end of an illusory feast. In narratives about witches’ sabbats, the glittering table became “a tussock in the meadows,” the golden glass turned into a shinbone, and the girl who had been taken to dance was transformed into a boat.These are motifs from legends about witches and fairies known throughout the region. They are presumed to have been very popular in the early modern Age, and have had their enduring formulation in legends dated as early as the trial documents. Hell appeared in narratives about witches’ sabbats as a consequence of these processes –​for example, in the demonological context of the illusory feasts of plenty, if the fairy banquet had an infernal ending. On the other hand, there was also a “popular” hell present in the texts, which was on earth (as were all the other worlds of the witches), and only certain symbols of hell referred to its connection to the underworld or the Devil. From these symbols the most frequently occurring were the scenes of the feasts: mill, cellar, wine cellar, pub, stable, pigpen, oven, or cauldron. These symbolic terrestrial hells are known mainly from the narratives that refer to the hellish merriment of the Balkan and Central European underworld demons. Presumably they entered the narratives about witches’ sabbats through those demons. Chimneys and chimney flues also represent hell; witches of the underworld used them as a passageway to reach the sabbat. Certain food types could also signal the satanic, infernal nature of the feasts. Examples are the stone bread and stone pears that witches ate at their merriment in wine cellars. Animal bones, stones, and animal or human excrement, which

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appeared as the transformed food and trappings of illusory feasts, are the antithesis of the appetizing dishes of golden banquets. Repugnant actions occurring in the context of witches’ sabbats could also denote the underworld or the Devil: for example, the serving of slurry or manure dinners, defecating into dishes, or urinating or vomiting into barrels at the end of feasts. A great number of the dishes possessed the character of the underworld, consisting of such things as water animals or creatures that slither and slide –​that is, hellish animals and concoctions from visions and demonological literature. Examples include references to a “sliding animal” and the “inside of a snail,” and to frogs and turtles. …

THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCHES’ SABBAT Tracing the origins of the witches’ sabbat in all their complexity would be an impossible task.The few connections between the texts mentioned only hint at the linkages that interwove around Europe in the Middle Ages and the early modern Age. However, the search for the foundations of the witches’ sabbat in popular belief is more promising ground since these elementary images are astonishingly homogeneous throughout Europe, as we have emphasized several times.The sabbat was in essence a visionary experience, an “alternative adventure.” Carlo Ginzburg, in tracing the origins of images of European witches’ sabbats, came to the conclusion that the ancient European basis of these was the journey to the realm of the dead.3 His findings were confirmed by our detailed research in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as by Gustav Henningsen (13) with his research on fairy cults in Sicily (1990), and later by Wolfgang Behringer in his book about the Stoeckhlin fairy magicians (1994).4 Visions of the dead and witches (Ginzburg did not emphasize the latter, since he focused on the precursors) offered the common European fundaments of images of the witches’ sabbat. The most important basis for these was European belief in doubles, mora, and werewolves. All of this of course refers to the undemonologized popular witches’ sabbat. That can be much more clearly understood from the Eastern and Central European documentation than elsewhere in Europe because in this region theological doctrines did not overshadow that sabbat to such a great extent, and consequently the doctrines are easier to peel away from the “original” images, as mentioned earlier. I think that the references here constitute enough evidence to assert that the following phenomena, among the general European elements of the sabbat, had a strong “predemonologic” foundation in this region:  flying, turning into an animal, gathering of the dead and demons, and the sabbat itself as a trance and dream experience.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

For full citations of the sources used in this essay, see the original version in Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead (Central European Press, Budapest 1999), ch. 5 –​  Ed. See Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1988), 69, 89. See the introduction to Part Three in this volume for Ginzburg’s argument –​ Ed. Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (University of Virginia Press 1998; original publication 1994).

 

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Chapter 15

Stuart Clark INVERSION, MISRULE AND THE MEANING OF WITCHCRAFT

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H E P R I N C I P L E O F “inversion”, set out in this seminal essay by Stuart Clark, relates to many themes in the study of witchcraft. By thinking in terms of opposites, Clark argues that Renaissance demonologists constructed the sabbat as an imagined “anti-​community”. The same process helps to explain other supposed inversions that are discussed in this book: the reversal of family and gender relationships in witchcraft, and the construction of imaginary demonic versions of Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Since these reversals affirmed the value of the “good” world that witches sought to destroy, they also tended to uphold established sources of authority.

I We no longer readily understand the language of early modern witchcraft beliefs. Demonological classics like [the] Malleus Maleficarum (1486–​7) or Jean Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580) seem to reveal only an arcane wisdom. It is not apparent what criteria of rationality are involved, nor how the exegesis of authorities or use of evidence support the required burden of proof. Since individual steps in the argument are difficult to construe, its overall configuration often remains impenetrable. And the accounts given by other authorities like Nicolas Rémy and Pierre De Lancre of the ritual practices of witches and demons,

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notably those associated with the sabbat, appear sensational and absurd. Faced with such refractory meanings, some past commentators have tried to put Renaissance demonology to the test of empirical verification by asking if it described, albeit in exaggerated or symbolic form, the actual activities of real agents. Agreed (largely) that it did not, that there were no witches in fact, they turned with relief to sceptics like Johann Weyer who, even at the height of prosecutions, cast doubt on the reality of witchcraft phenomena by offering non-​magical theories of causation. And with intimations of rationalism of this sort historians have continued to feel an intellectual affinity. A second popular approach has been the explanation of learned witchcraft beliefs in terms of social and socio-​psychological determinants, especially those thought to be at work in the designation of criminal actions or the persecution of demonized “out-​groups”.1 This too has had the advantage of bypassing the problem of their meaning by reducing them to epiphenomena; tracing them, for instance, to the periodic social need to relocate moral and cultural boundaries by means of accusations of deviance, or, again, to the neuroses which are said to accompany the repression of erotic or irreligious impulses in devout minds. Yet there is surely prima facie reluctance to dismiss Bodin as a victim of obscurantism or delusion, let alone regard a whole tradition of discursive argument, successfully sustained for nearly two hundred years, as essentially irrational. … Part at least of our puzzlement over this particular way of thinking and writing about witchcraft can be successfully removed by filling out the prevailing conventions of discourse, particularly political discourse, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of central significance are those arguments considered appropriate for identifying and contrasting the key conditions of order and disorder. I  want to argue that Renaissance descriptions of the nature of Satan, the character of hell and, above all, the ritual activities of witches shared a vocabulary of misrule, that they were in effect part of a language conventionally employed to establish and condemn the properties of a disorderly world. …

II That witches did everything backwards was as much a commonplace of scholarly demonology as it has been of romantic fiction since. But in this respect they were not alone. Throughout the late medieval and Renaissance period ritual inversion was a characteristic element of village folk-​rites, religious and educational ludi, urban carnivals and court entertainments. Such festive occasions shared a calendrical licence to disorderly behaviour or “misrule” based on the temporary but complete reversal of customary priorities of status and value. One typical

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recurring idea was the elevation of wise folly over foolish wisdom. Another was the exchange of sex roles involved in the image of the “woman on top” or in transvestism. Clerical parodies of divine service substituted the profane for the sacred, and low for high office. Most pervasive of all were mock political authorities, the princes des sots or “abbeys” or “lords of misrule” who presided over ephemeral commonwealths complete with the paraphernalia of serious kingship but dedicated to satire and clowning.2 Often these various modes of topsy-​turvydom were invoked simultaneously, as in the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools or the activities of the French urban confraternities, the sociétés joyeuses. Sometimes one relationship was explored; the street charivari in which partners in unequal or violent marriages were ridiculed by the symbolic ride backwards focused on the dangerous social and moral inversions implied when familial disorder threatened patriarchal rule. Similarly “barring out” the master in English grammar schools has been shown to depend on assumptions about the limits of pedagogic government over pupils, especially with the onset of the vacation.3 Whatever the case, however, seasonal misrule involved not simply riot or confusion but conventional styles of ritual and symbol associated with inversion –​recognized forms of “uncivil” rule. It would be remarkable if no links could be established between these forms of inverted behaviour and descriptions of demonic practices, flourishing and declining as they did in the same period. Certainly there were borrowings from accounts of sabbat rituals where the world upside-​down was an important theme of festival occasions at court. Conversely the demonologist Pierre Crespet located the witches’ dance in a tradition including the bacchanalian revel, early Christian transvestism and the masquerades, the Maschecroutte of contemporary Lyon. The inferior clergy of late medieval France celebrated Christmas and the NewYear with burlesques which were readily attributable to God’s ape –​singing in dissonances, braying like asses, making indecent grimaces and contortions, repeating prayers in gibberish, censing with puddings or smelly shoes and, above all, mocking the sermon and the mass with fatuous imitations. As late as 1645 the lay brothers of Antibes marked Innocents’ Day by wearing vestments inside out, holding liturgical books upside-​down and using spectacles with orange-​peel in them instead of glass. According to the social reformer Philip Stubbes, English rural practitioners of misrule encouraged in their soliciting for bread and ale what was in effect a propitiatory sacrifice to Satan as well as a profanation of the Sabbath. In France attempts were made by Jean Savaron and Claude Noirot to link the history and etymology of popular entertainment with those of witchcraft; Savaron thought that masquerading was a form of demonic sabbat. Moreover carnival devil figures could be seen taking an important part in processions and even organizing festivities.

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But even if they shared no specific types of inversion, both festive behaviour and learned demonology were dependent on inversion itself as a formal principle. And this allows us to apply to witchcraft studies some of the questions currently being asked by historians and anthropologists about the meaning of misrule. To some extent attention has concentrated on the practical benefits accruing to a community from what is actually done at times of ritual licence. For instance it is argued that traditional institutions and values are reaffirmed by the mockery of offenders against social codes, the deflation of pretentious wisdom and overweening authority or simply the open expression of grudges borne against neighbours. In this fashion, misrule strengthens the community by symbolic or open criticism and its moderating influence. Alternatively the same carnivalesque practices have been associated with innovation and protest because they offer freedom to explore relationships potentially corrosive of existing structures and therefore not normally tolerated. Neither of these readings is particularly helpful when applied to demonology. For although the differing social functions are largely seen as latent in the behaviour, some attribution of intentions to agents is required in each case. In the first, we would therefore be committed to something like Margaret Murray’s theory that Renaissance witchcraft consisted of rites of inversion actually performed by folk worshippers of a surviving Dianic fertility cult. And the second would involve accepting the connections which Le Roy Ladurie has claimed existed between conceptions of revolt based on a “fantasy of inversion” shared by rural peasant insurrectionists, festival fools and witches in southern France at the end of the sixteenth century.4 Yet the accredited historical evidence for maleficent witchcraft comes very largely from allegations or from stereotyped confessions; we therefore have few grounds for attributing witches with intentions of any kind, whether re-​integrative or innovatory in character. This forces us back to a second set of issues relating to misrule, concerning the conditions which must obtain if inverted behaviour is to be seen as having not only various social-​functional uses but any meaning at all as an act of inversion.The starting-​point here must be the fact, emphasized many years ago by Enid Welsford and recently reiterated by Natalie Davis and Keith Thomas, that misrule necessarily presupposes the rule that it parodies.5 Thus the fool could only flourish, in fact or in literary imaginations, in societies where the taboos surrounding divine kingship and sacramental worship were especially rigid. The street theatre and cacophonous, “rough” music of the charivari were effective precisely because all other ceremonial occasions were solemn; while turning social or sexual status upside-​down, and the laughter it provoked, only began to make sense in a world of simply polarized hierarchies. The degree of meaningfulness of carnival misrule therefore depended on the extent of familiarity with such orthodoxies. And the

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performance of ritual inversion was only successful if accompanied by possibly complex acts of recognition. An example from modern anthropology is McKim Marriott’s failure to comprehend the Indian village festival of Holi as an actor but his subsequent understanding that its apparent disorder was “an order precisely inverse to the social and ritual principles of routine life”.6 Reverting to the language of use, there is the further suggestion that, simply in obliging the spectator to see the conventional world in the guise of its opposite, misrule embodies a cognitive function that, in part at least, must be essentially conservative –​a restatement of the normal from a “ritual viewpoint”. Stronger still is the claim that only by exploring this contrary perspective can men make themselves conceptually at home in a world of unchanging polarities. …

III It was in a world accustomed to think in these ways about contrariety and disorder that the arguments of the demonologists made sense. In the face of Sadducism or qualms merely about publicizing witchcraft their whole intellectual engagement could be defended as an example, perhaps the paradigm case, of the principle that the appreciation of good consisted in the recognition and exploration of its opposite. In his Daemonologie (1597) King James claimed that: since the Devill is the verie contrarie opposite to God, there can be no better way to know God, then by the contrarie; … by the falshood of the one to considder the trueth of the other, by the injustice of the one, to considder the justice of the other: And by the cruelty of the one, to considder the mercifulnesse of the other: And so foorth in all the rest of the essence of God, and qualities of the Devill. This applied to all specific offices and ordinances of divine origin, indeed to all features of a world imbued with an invertible morality. Thus James’s own attempt in 1590–​1 to write into the confessions of the North Berwick witches a special antipathy between demonic magic and godly magistracy had been a way of authenticating his own as yet rather tentative initiatives as ruler of Scotland. Similarly in Pierre De Lancre’s Du Sortilege (1627) it was the very fact that the Devil chose to mimic the Catholic liturgy which was said to be incontrovertible proof of its divinity.7 The rationale of all such institutions would accordingly be seriously undermined without demonological science. Establishing in exact detail what occurred at a witches’ sabbat was not pedantry or intellectual voyeurism but a

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(logically) necessary way of validating each corresponding contrary aspect of the orthodox world. And the full intelligibility of demonological literature was, in the end, dependent on success in reading into each individual facet of demonism an actual or symbolic inversion of a traditional form of life. In this respect the most appropriate context of meanings was that of conceptions of disorder as a world turned upside-​down by disobedience and tyranny. For demonic inversion was inseparable, in the first instance, from notions of archetypal rebellion and pseudo-​monarchy. The Devil’s original presumption prefigured every subsequent act of resistance, while the style of his rule in hell was, as Erasmus explained, a model for all those whose political and moral intentions were most unlike God’s. Although some sort of order could be discerned there, it was therefore fitting that it should comprise the opposite of perfect princely and paterfamilial government. Aquinas had established that demons only co-​operated out of common hatred for mankind, not from mutual love or respect for magistracy. Though there were ranks among the fallen angels the criteria involved were those of greatness in malice and, consequently, anguish rather than worth and felicity. These principles became essential to all formal demonology. Their relation to the wider context can be seen in a discussion such as D’Acuto’s. Here the fact that demons had inverted the angelic nature is offered as one example, albeit historically prior, of a universal overturning wrought by the rebellion which constitutes sin. The contrarieties involved in the fall of Lucifer (for instance, from prince of heaven to tyrant of hell) and the qualities both of his subject devils and the corresponding moral faction of mankind are expressed in a series of the usual linguistic antitheses.8 In effect, then, the Devil’s regimen was a compendium of the paradoxes of misrule: a hierarchy governed from the lowest point of excellence, a society in which dishonour was the badge of status and a speculum imitable only by the politically vicious. This was worse than simple anarchy.9 Moreover there was a specific sense in which demonic allegiance was necessarily associated with disobedience and its consequences. The voluntary contract with the Devil which was thought to be the essence of malevolent witchcraft could be seen, primarily, as spiritual apostasy, symbolized by rebaptism at the sabbat. But the non-​sacramental significance of baptism and the insistence on both the physical corporeality of devils and their political organization inevitably brought it as close to an act of literal, if indirect, resistance. English puritan demonologists argued that the proper spiritual response to the tribulations of Satan was that of Job, while using the language of politics to convey the essential rebelliousness of his agents the witches. William Perkins, for instance, recommended that the natural law enjoining the death penalty for all enemies of the state be extended to “the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be … For [the witch] renounceth God

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himselfe, the King of Kings, she leaves the societie of his Church and people, she bindeth herself in league with the Devil”.10 The text occasioning this argument, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (I Samuel XV. 23) could be used to demonstrate the identity in substance as well as in seriousness of the two sins. Hence the sensitivity of French and English writers to the double meaning involved in the word “conjuration”; hence too the overtones in the claim made in the English Homily against Disobedience that rebels “most horribly prophane, and pollute the Sabbath day, serving Sathan, and by doing of his work, making it the Devils day, instead of the Lords day”.11 While witchcraft was constituted by an act of revolt, rebels effectively promulgated the sabbat. Even the many commonplaces to the effect that civil rebellions could only result from bewitching or sorcery or from “the mixing of heaven and hell” take on an added meaning. These associations of ideas must have influenced the understanding of maleficium. For it was to be expected that witches should intend not only outright confrontation with the godly prince (as Lambert Daneau warned in theory and as was actually alleged in Scotland in 1590–​1) but the promotion of those other inversionary phenomena which were thought to be, or to symbolize, disorder. Thus it was widely accepted that they could destroy the marital hierarchy by using ligature to prevent consummation, by sowing dissension or by incitements to promiscuity. Pierre De Lancre and Sebastien Michaelis claimed specifically that witchcraft subverted familial authority by destroying filial love in its devotees and victims. This echoed the earliest charges made against the alleged maleficium of the Vaudois by Johann Tinctor:  “Friends and neighbours will become evil, children will rise up against the old and the wise, and villeins will engage against the nobles”. In the Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood comedy The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) a well-​ordered household is attacked (in a “retrograde and preposterous way”) by such sorcery –​the father kneels to the son, the wife obeys the daughter, and the children are overawed by the servants. The demonological point is hardly obscure but it is nevertheless underlined; a nephew comments that it is as if the house itself had been turned on its roof, while a neighbour protests that he might as well “stand upon my head, and kick my heels at the skies”. Ligature and the symbolism of a charivari reinforce the same theme.12 The idea that witches could change themselves and others into animals is another instance of inversion. Although it became usual to argue that the transformations were illusory, the concept of metamorphosis itself, if it was entertained at all, suggested that instinct might replace reason and brutishness virtue. The further example of the natural disorders supposedly wrought by maleficium is perhaps the most explicit.Witches, with demonic aid, were assumed to interfere with elements and climate to achieve especially hurtful or unseasonable reversals. Their

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most powerful magic hardly knew these limits. Henry Holland thought that the notion “that witches have power to turne the world upside down at their pleasure” was mistaken, but only because it suggested that this was not, indirectly, God’s work.13 Nicolas Rémy listed the detailed wonders: there is nothing to hinder a Demon from raising up mountains to an enormous height in a moment, and then casting them down into the deepest abysses; from stopping the flow of rivers, or even causing them to go backwards; from drying up the very sea (if we may believe Apuleius); from bringing down the skies, holding the earth in suspension, raising fountains solid, raising the shades of the dead, putting out the stars, lighting up the very darkness of Hell, and turning upside down the whole scheme of this universe.14 These were extravagant claims, inspired by Ovid’s Medea and Circe as well as Apuleius’s Meroë and as popular with poets and dramatists as with demonologists like Rémy. Nevertheless we recognize, with him, the familiar lineaments of the mundus inversus. Indeed an important part of the meaning of all these various types of maleficium, whether in the family, society, the body or the world, was that they were conventional manifestations of disorder. Once descriptions of the diabolical polity and the alleged intentions of witches are seen in this context, it becomes possible to read related meanings into the symbolic actions of the sabbat itself. Here many contemporaries were forcibly struck by the systematic and detailed inversions of liturgical forms, by what they recognized as a specious religious observance. Yet since religiosity was not confined to church worship, elaborate ceremonies of homage, however perverted, did not preclude other interpretations. In fact they facilitated an understanding of sabbat rituals in terms of the forms of the Renaissance court festival. Thomas Heywood’s own account of the induction of witches is couched in part in the language of formal patronage and clientage and tries to evoke a mood suitable to “the pompe of regalitie and state”. The rubric is minutely observed, but the (unstated) intentions are there to remind us of the irony of the situation. The most sustained of such descriptions is, however, in Pierre De Lancre’s influential demonology Le Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons (1612), where it is illustrated by an engraving by Jan Ziarnko. In form at least the occasion is unmistakably that of a court spectacle, organized by a “master of ceremonies and governor of the sabbat” before the thrones of Satan and a designated “queen of the sabbat”. A new client is presented, courtiers engage in a feast and various ballets, and there is instrumental music. An audience of aristocratic figures includes a

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group of women “with masks for remaining always covered and disguised”. There is the same emblematic quality here as in other court festivals of the period, the same attention to detail in the performance, the same use of symbol and imagery, and the purpose is equally didactic. “For an instant”, it has been said, “one catches a glimpse of the magnificences at the late Valois Court”.15 This impression of a festive hell is, of course, confirmed and not weakened by an absolute antithesis of content. In place of godlike monarchy and perfect Platonic love, the sabbat celebrated the most extreme tyranny and the foulest sexual debasement, and its aim was not to bring moral order and civil peace through the acting out of ideal roles but to ensure chaos by dehumanization and atrocities. If Ziarnko’s engraving shows a court, it is, then, an anti-​court and De Lancre’s impresario is not, as it were, a master of revels but a demonic lord of misrule. Certainly the symbolic inversions are not merely those of the world upside-​ down but specifically those of so many anti-​masque mises en scene, albeit in more horrendous forms –​the elevation of the passions over reason by ritual depravities, physical reversals involving the priority of left-​handedness and backwardness and even complete bodily inversions, vertiginous dancing, discordant music and nauseating food.

VI Given the enormity of their sins and a world in which all phenomena were subject to inversion there was in fact no limit to the disorder of which (with the Devil’s aid and God’s permission) witches were capable. Nevertheless it is clear that audiences and readers were able and expected to make sense of their activities in a number of conventional ways, anchoring the meaning of witchcraft in terms of styles of thinking and writing about the world upside-​down. Each detailed manifestation of demonism presupposed the orderliness and legitimacy of its direct opposite, just as, conversely, the effectiveness of exorcism, judicial process and even a royal presence in actually nullifying magical powers confirmed the grounds of authority of the priest, judge or prince as well as the felicity of his ritual performance. But it also had indirect meaning in terms of the many relations, both of causal interdependence and of “correspondence”, which interlaced the Christian and neo-​Platonist universe. The Devil’s tyranny was an affront to all well-​governed commonwealths but also to every state of moral equipoise. The wider implications of attacks on the family, and of the fact that they were promoted largely by women, could hardly have been missed in a culture which accepted the patriarchal household as both the actual source and analogical representation of good government.

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The reversing of the human bodily hierarchies or of priorities in natural things had effects which could literally be felt throughout a world thought to be an organic unity of sentients. Especially resonant were references to the dance; for dancing not only had its own powers to confer (or destroy) order and virtue but figured the harmonic relations to which every phenomenon was subject. A single ritual act such as the anal kiss perverted religious worship and secular fealty, dethroned reason from a sovereign position on which individual wellbeing and social relations (including political obligation) were thought to depend and symbolized in the most obvious manner the defiant character of demonic politics as well as its preposterousness. In these ways demonology superimposed image upon image of disorder. This profusion of levels of meaning made witchcraft beliefs ideal material for the literary imagination; but that they should have been integrated in performances as carefully structured as the court ballet and masque shows how naturally they cohered with men’s general conception of things. The best example of a dramatic fusion of this sort is, of course, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is a critical commonplace that the pervasive disorder in the play is expressed in a series of multiple inversions of contraries in the personal, political and natural planes.16 Especially striking in the present context are the substitution of tyranny for true magistracy, both in fact and in Malcolm’s self-​accusation to Macduff, and the reiterated consequences of disobedience to anointed kings and fathers. Even without the explicit witchcraft it would have seemed quite appropriate that Macbeth should be prepared to turn the world upside-​down, that his castle and kingdom should become a hell and that his actions should be inspired by ultimately deceitful incantations. Nevertheless the witches’ presence is vital, for it establishes the two crucial features of the play’s atmosphere. One is the sense of obscurity, uncertainty and dissimulation which clouds the subsequent action and its physical location with the effect of claustrophobia. The other is the repeated expression in linguistic antitheses of the inversions which this action embodies and provokes. Both are fixed at the very outset, not only by the famous ritual utterance, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”, but also by the reference to a “hurlyburly” with its suggestion of misrule and topsy-​ turvydom.17 We must suppose that the dramatic effectiveness of this opening scene presupposed the wider context in which demonism was traditionally understood.

VII A contextual reading of Renaissance demonology may not help us to answer the major questions about the genesis or decline of the European “witch-​craze”,

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though it surely confirms the view that these were related to the fortunes of an entire world-​view. My aim has been rather to sketch some of the conventions of discourse which governed the successful persuasion of audiences at the height of the persecutions, say, between 1580 and 1630. In fact these turn out to be so important that it becomes difficult to explain, not how men accepted the rationality of the arguments, but how, occasionally, sceptics doubted it. What it made sense for demonologists to say depended partly on traditional metaphysical notions about the logical shape and moral economy of the world and partly on shared linguistic patterns for describing its most disturbing aspects. The first entailed a conception of evil for the sake of structural coherence, linking demonism with all privations of good; the second required inversion (both in forms of thought and forms of words) to ensure linguistic felicity, linking demonology with the articulation of key political concepts. The idea of witchcraft was not then a bizarre incongruity in an otherwise normal world; like all manifestations of misrule it was that world mirrored in reverse, and the practices of the alleged witches were no less (and no more) meaningful than those of ordinary men and women.

Notes 1

Applications of labelling theory to early modern witchcraft include K.  Erikson, Wayward Puritans:  A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New  York 1966); E. P. Currie, “The Control of Witchcraft in Renaissance Europe”, in D. Black and M. Mileski, eds, The Social Organization of Law (London 1973), 344–​67. 2 Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London 1935), 197–​217; N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London 1975), 97–​123, “The Reasons of Misrule”, and 124–​51, “Women on Top”; P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London 1978), 182–​91. 3 K. V.  Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading 1976). 4 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris 1966), i, 407–​14. 5 Welsford, The Fool, 193; Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 100; Thomas, Rule and Misrule, 34. 6 Cited by Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​Structure (Aldine Transaction 1995), 185–​6. 7 See Chapter 19 in this volume for Pierre De Lancre’s interpretation of witchcraft –​ Ed. 8 Affinati D’Acuto, II mondo al roversica e sossopra (Venice 1602), 447–​92 9 A tract which brings together many of the features of the mentality of contrariety in an attack on the devil’s mockery is Artus Desire, La singerie des Huguenots (Paris 1574). The Huguenots, inspired by the devil’s desire to turn all things upside-​down, have substituted for every true form of worship its exact opposite. This is said to

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bear witness to the “advancement of Antichrist” and is expressed in a series of linguistic antitheses; it is also called “witchcraft”. 10 William Perkins, Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, in his Works, 3 vols. (London 1616), iii, 651; cf. Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft (Cambridge 1590), sig. Aiir. 11 Anon., The Seconde Tome of Homelyes (London 1563), 292–​3. 12 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols. (London 1874), iv, 178 (Act I, scene i). 13 Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft (Cambridge 1509), sig. Giiir. 14 Nicolas Rémy, Daemonolatreiae libri tres (1595), iii. I, in Demonolatry of Nicolas Rémy, ed. M. Summers (London 1948), 141. 15 M. M.  McGowan, “Pierre De Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons: The Sabbat Sensationalised”, in Sydney Anglo, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (Routledge 1977), 192–​3. 16 L. C.  Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, in his Explorations (London 1946, repr. Harmondsworth 1964), 28–​48; Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. K. Muir, Arden edn (London 1951), Introduction. 17 Macbeth, Act I, scene i, 3–​11.

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PART FOUR

Witchcraft and the Reformation

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H E N T H E E N G L I S H P R O T E S T A N T John Bale contemplated the horrors of the Roman mass in 1547, he declared that “it serveth all witches in their witchery”. Expanding on his theme, he claimed that “all sorcerers, enchanters, dreamers, soothsayers, necromancers, conjurers, cross-​diggers, [and] devil-​raisers” owed their powers to the sacrilegious magic of the Catholic church.1 Bale was entirely typical among his Protestant contemporaries in regarding “popery” as the source of witchcraft; and this accusation was thrown back with enthusiasm by polemical writers on the other side of the religious divide, who associated the reformed faith with satanic delusions and identified Luther as the Devil’s spawn.2 In the same period, both Catholic and Protestant authorities viewed the more radical elements within the Reformation movement as a threat akin to witchcraft. As Luther himself noted in his commentary on St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Anabaptists were “sorcerers and authors of witchery”, whose false teachings were “a manifest sign that they are bewitched of the Devil”.3 Witchcraft continued to figure in denominational conflicts in a rather different way after the end of witch trials in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. As Stuart Clark notes in the first contribution to Part Four (16), Protestant and Catholic historians tried to attach blame for the “witch craze” to their religious opponents. In a less adversarial fashion, Clark himself has stimulated discussion about the differences between Protestant and Catholic demonology in recent years.

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While accepting that both sides developed essentially similar views on the crime, he identifies differences “of scope and accent” in the ways in which they dealt with it. In Clark’s view, one notable difference concerned the options available to counter maleficium. While Catholics retained sanctified objects and practices to ward off the power of evil spirits, their Protestant counterparts were prevented by their theological views from employing such methods: there were no Protestant equivalents to holy water or the mass. On the contrary, such ritualism was regarded as positively harmful by the reformers, who viewed it as evidence of Satan’s dominion in the Roman Church. As a consequence, Protestant demonologists tended to emphasise divine providence and utterly reject the power of sacraments to overcome the Devil. Clark also suggests that the religious preoccupations of the two sides encouraged them to focus on different aspects of witchcraft. For Protestant writers, who were particularly concerned with the “covenant” between the individual and God, the pact between witches and the Devil was paramount. On the other side, the Catholic respect for ritual encouraged a greater emphasis on the ceremonial desecrations associated with the sabbat. As well as exploring the variations between Catholic and Protestant demonology, Clark considers the relationship between witch trials and the Reformation as a whole. He suggests that the eagerness of both parties to associate their opponents with witchcraft was an essential aspect of religious identification in early modern Europe: the charge of witchcraft identified what it was that was so offensive about enemy faiths, as well as evoking the sense of an unbridgeable distance between them. To be a Protestant or a Catholic was thus, in part, to have precisely this view of one’s foes. Since both sides identified witchcraft so closely with their opponents, their desire to eradicate the crime can be viewed as part of their wider religious agenda. The efforts to suppress popular magic in some Protestant states, for example, were an expression of the anti-​Catholic zeal that motivated their ruling elites, since magic was intimately connected with the “superstition” of the Roman Church. At a deeper level, Clark argues that witchcraft made sense in the ideological context of the kind of “state churches” that emerged in the Reformation era. The religious uniformity that these institutions demanded was challenged by the “counter-​ institution” of the witch cult, with its own demonic priesthood and practices organised under the leadership of Satan. The idea of witchcraft was also an essential element in the moral system of a confessional state, since it offered a mirror-​image to the

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positive values that it sought to enforce. For these reasons, Clark suggests that the fear of witchcraft was confined to the advocates of “church-​type” religious organisations:  witchcraft lost its meaning in the context of “sect-​type” groups like the Anabaptists, since they had no desire to impose their beliefs on the whole community, and no need for a satanic anti-​church to mirror their own endeavours. Clark’s work offers an exceptionally rich and nuanced interpretation of the relationship between witchcraft and the Reformation. Its implications are taken up, directly and indirectly, in the other two contributions to Part Four. In the first of these, Alison Rowlands examines the treatment of witches in the imperial town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (17). The rulers of Rothenburg embraced Lutheranism in 1544; and their subsequent efforts to deal with witchcraft and magic were, Rowlands suggests, coloured by a distinctively Protestant demonology. This identified many forms of popular “superstition” with irreligion and the Devil, and targeted “cunning folk” such as charmers and soothsayers for punishment. Such people were occasionally treated with considerable severity, such as the travelling charmer Anna Gebhartin who was pilloried and branded with a cross in 1581. At the same time, the town fathers dealt less harshly with supposed witches.This was because the women involved were often prone to “fantastical imaginings”, and could not be proven to have entered willingly into association with the Devil. Charmers, in contrast, engaged knowingly in forbidden activities. The Reformation in Rothenburg achieved mixed results. While the authorities checked the potential excesses of witchcraft prosecutions, their campaign against popular magic was largely unsuccessful. Ordinary people maintained an essentially utilitarian approach to all forms of magic. “Popular concern was not with whether a practice was superstitious or a cunning man ungodly, but with whether the practice worked and whether the cunning man gave value for money.” While Rowland focuses on a “church-​type” Reformation, the last contribution by Gary Waite (18) considers the relationship between witchcraft and the Anabaptists, the most successful of the “sect-​type” groups to emerge in the sixteenth century. Throughout Europe as a whole, some 3,000 Anabaptists were executed between 1520 and 1565 for actions that, Waite contends, resembled those attributed to witches. Both Anabaptists and witches were sent to the flames for renouncing their original baptism and pledging themselves to an alternative religious community; and in the eyes of their persecutors at least, both groups came under the leadership of the Devil. As Waite reminds us, “it was often the same court officials who tried both sets of victims, sometimes conducting such seemingly distinct trials during the same week”. This parallel has some fascinating implications for witchcraft research. For a start, it suggests that witch trials were an aspect of the more general impulse to suppress unorthodox religious groups that arose

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during the Reformation. The chronology of the persecutions also raises important questions, since the most intense attacks on Anabaptism occurred before the second wave of European witch trials, during a relative lull in the prosecution of witches. It appears, therefore, that magistrates turned their attention away from the activity of religious sects to concentrate on the far greater threat of satanic witchcraft in the late sixteenth century. Viewed in this way, the attempt to eradicate witchcraft was an alternative to the persecution of heretics. Since witches were more numerous than groups like the Anabaptists, and their activities provoked popular hostility as well as official concern, it was also easier to sustain the attack on this new and more terrible enemy. The link between Anabaptism and witchcraft also relates to Clark’s observations about “church-​type” religious organisations in early modern Europe. For Protestant and Catholic churches of this kind, the threat posed by witchcraft and religious sects was essentially the same: both challenged the “universal dominion” claimed by the official faith, and served as a frightful but necessary mirror-​image of the values of orthodoxy. The fact that such groups were clandestine, and appeared to exist at the very heart of the God-​fearing community, could only add to the horror that they aroused. The fear of an “anti-​church” is not hard to detect in the proceedings against Anabaptists in the early sixteenth century. In 1528, for example, the interrogators of the Regensburg schoolteacher, Augustin Wurzlburger, asked him about “the secret assemblies attended by him and his fellows”, and wanted to know “what signs they used to recognise one another”.4 Similarly, Gary Waite notes that the threat of heresy in 1540s Holland was “heightened to the level of a secret and dangerous conspiracy” with the ultimate aim of overthrowing Christianity. The parallels with witchcraft are obvious. Moreover, the fear of Anabaptism and witchcraft was perfectly understandable in a culture that equated Christianity with a church-​type model of religious organisation. What of the Anabaptists themselves? Clark suggests that the threat of witchcraft was largely irrelevant to members of such “sect-​type” religious groups, since they made no attempt to impose conformity on the population at large. As Waite’s essay shows, however, this did not mean that sectarians rejected the idea of a demonic conspiracy. On the contrary, they attributed their persecution and the false beliefs of their Catholic and Protestant adversaries to the inspiration of Satan. For Anabaptists and other separatist groups, the Devil’s servants were not a secretive cult but the rulers of their own society. It was this conviction that underpinned the doctrine of social separation adopted by Swiss and German Anabaptists in the 1520s, and later expressed by separatist preachers like the Englishman John Canne, who declared in 1634 that Christians were “a faithful people called and separated from the world and the false worship and the ways thereof”.5 In this

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respect, the beliefs of sectarians can be viewed as a curious inversion of the demonology of their religious opponents: they held that the Devil-​worshippers had already overthrown the public institutions of Christianity, and their best option was to isolate themselves from the witch-​like practices that dominated the world.

Notes 1 2

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John Bale, The Lattre Examinacyon of Anne Askew, Lately Martyred in Smythfielde (1547), 60r. One early English example, entitled “A little Treatise Confownding the Great Hereses that Rayge”, presented Luther as a “poisonous dragon” and Protestant doctrines as filth “from the devil”. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Ballads from Manuscripts (1868–​ 72), Vol. I, 282. Alan Kors and Edward Peters, eds, Witchcraft in Europe, 1100–​1700: A Documentary History (University of Pennsylvania Press 1972), 199. The proceedings of Wurzlburger’s trial are reproduced in Hans Hillerbrand, ed., The Protestant Reformation (Harper & Row 1968), 137–​42. John Canne, A Necessitie of Separation from the Church of England (Amsterdam 1634), 165.

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Chapter 16

Stuart Clark PROTESTANT WITCHCRAFT, CATHOLIC WITCHCRAFT

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H E C O R E T H E M E S O F D E M O N O L O G Y were established before the Reformation, and were subsequently endorsed by some Protestant thinkers such as Lambert Daneau and James VI of Scotland. As Stuart Clark argues here, there was nothing inherently Catholic or Protestant about the prosecution of witches. There were, however, differences of emphasis in the treatment of witchcraft across the various religious confessions, based largely on the Protestant determination to root out “superstitious” magic. Clark also suggests that interdenominational conflict intensified anxieties about witchcraft, along with the determination to create “true” Christian societies. William Monter makes a similar point in Chapter 21. Brian Levack (35) also echoes Clark’s view that the emergence of religious toleration helped to bring witch trials to an end.

If we look at the fundamental ingredients of demonology, there does seem to be little to distinguish the Protestant from the Catholic formulations. The thought patterns and linguistic habits that governed representations of witchcraft stemmed from cosmological traditions, communication theories, and evaluative strategies that transcended religious difference. That difference, with all its bitter irreconcilability, vastly exaggerated the tendency to polarize and dichotomize, but this tendency was not in itself peculiar to any of the major religions. Concerning the causal mechanics of demonism –​the limitations on the powers of devils to effect

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changes in the natural world and their consequent resort to illusion –​there was total agreement between the faiths, grounded on a shared intellectual indebtedness to Augustine and Aquinas. On the general causation of witchcraft phenomena, [the Protestant writers] Zanchy, Casmann, and Pettus Martyr spoke with the same voice as [the Catholics] Torreblanca, Binsfeld, or Del Rio. The eschatological view that witchcraft flourished because the world was in a state of terminal decline was, likewise, as common among French Catholic authors such as Michaelis, Nodé, and Le Normant, as among the writers of Lutheran Germany and Calvinist England –​in this case reflecting the popularity of apocalyptic history in both major Reformations. Even when we arrive at religion itself there seems paradoxically little evidence of strong theological or pastoral preferences. The tendencies in Europe that turned maleficium into a case of conscience, made ‘witches’ of the churches’ competitors, and cast ‘superstition’ as religion’s greatest obstacle worked their intellectual effects irrespective of clerical allegiance. There were, however, differences of scope and accent. Catholic reformers could not deritualize conduct to the same extent as their rivals. … The Roman Church had to spend more time making distinctions between the use and abuse of its practices than others did, as the pages dedicated by [the Catholic theologian] Lorichius to Catholic superstitions testify. For their part, Protestants simply did not have some of the doctrinal commitments that, like the belief in purgatory and the invocation of saints, gave ancillary encouragement to spirit activity. While allowing that there was no essentially Protestant doctrine of witchcraft, William Monter has also suggested that nearly all Protestant writers on the subject ‘insisted on a few common elements’, above all, the extent of divine power and providence.1 … If it is not the case that Protestant authors dealt with themes that found no place in the Catholic literature, they nevertheless seem to have dealt with them to the neglect or exclusion of other elements in witchcraft beliefs, notably those concerning the sabbat and the other sensational aspects of demonism like metamorphosis and sexuality. … Covenant theory, likewise, gave extra inversionary meaning to the demonic pact, especially in its implicit form. Protestant biblicism provided little or no help on the subject of sabbats, but its influence over interpretations of witchcraft as a spiritual and moral problem could be total. Besides, the sabbat, with its pronounced anti-​ritualism, was of much greater significance to Catholics. But probably the most important reason was that the typical Protestant author was more likely to be involved first-​hand in clerical practice –​indeed, he was usually a pastor with a flock, rather than an academic theologian with a student audience –​and, therefore, more interested in the evangelical and homiletic aspects of witchcraft, than the theoretical and intellectual.

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These qualifications apart, it remains difficult –​with one important exception –​to trace in demonology any serious repercussions of the doctrinally most divisive issues of the reform era. That the things that defined witchcraft for clerics were the things they largely agreed on is borne out by its universal placement in the Decalogue as a sin against the first Commandment. How to relate Old Testament and gospel, works and faith, sinning and salvation, could not have been more controversial; but that the Law was an indispensable element in such calculations was presupposed by all. However theology coped with it, and wherever it was placed in the catechism, it provided the essential benchmarks of human depravity. Although, too, the circumstances in which the individual sin of idolatry occurred might be hotly contested –​above all, in connection with images –​idolatry itself was a transgression that no Christian could do without. The aspects of doctrine and worship that underpinned it, notably the stress on a providential divinity who required total and undivided loyalty, were incontestable and, thus, shared. … It therefore looks very much as though the history of demonology conforms to what reinterpreters of early modern religious change have, in the wake of Delumeau, been telling us  –​that the two major Reformations had so much in common that their similarities are more significant than their differences. Delumeau’s own celebrated proposal was that, despite their doctrinal and liturgical rivalries, Protestants and Catholics were jointly attempting to ‘Christianize’ the average westerner.2 In his own judgements about the state of the average westerner’s religion before the reformers got hold of it, as well as their success or failure when they did, Delumeau was vulnerable to criticism. But there is scarcely any doubt that ‘Christianizing’ was what reformers of all the major churches thought they were doing, and that what they meant by this was, in part, the spiritualization of misfortune, the abolition of magic, and the discrediting and eradication of a wide range of popular cultural forms as superstitions. Seen in this light, demonology comes to have a crucial bearing on the impetus to reform, while evangelism makes better sense of clerical hostility to witchcraft. What was reflected in many witchcraft prosecutions, it has been claimed, was not so much the differences between the religions involved (or any inter-​sectarian strife) as their common missionary determination to impose the fundamentals of Christian belief and practice on ordinary people. This is a principle that has been put to work in the cases of Calvinist Scotland, the Catholic Netherlands and north-​east of France, the duchy of Luxembourg, Hungary, and the areas covered by the Mediterranean Inquisitions. It also applies well to the circumstances of the witch trials in the Catholic ecclesiastical territories of Bamberg and Würzburg. The one exception to this all-​party consensus lay in the area of remedies against witchcraft and against demonism in general. If ordinary people, fearing

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bewitchment, were not to counteract it by resorting to ‘magic’ and ‘superstition’, or rely solely on the lawcourts, how should they respond? Writers of all denominations agreed that they should appeal to the spiritual and moral protections of the Church (as well as to allowable medicine) and often concluded their discussions by listing the permissible alternatives and giving advice. But there could be little agreement across the churches about what specific remedies to list, given that Lutherans and Calvinists had removed entire areas of the traditional therapeutic repertoire. A Jesuit like Maldonado could offer these typical ‘ecclesiastical’ protections: exorcism, the name of Christ, the sign of the cross, saints’ relics, reciting the Creed, fasting and prayer, the eucharist, holy water, and the word of God. But by then, patently, no Protestant could possibly expect to ward off maleficium with relics or holy water, and Catholics too had to pay attention to their correct significance when using them. The remedies against demons and witchcraft were the same as the responses to any spiritual threat or physical misfortune, but these changed in nature and number according to which church was recommending them. … This was so highly contentious an area because it lay at the very heart of what divided the faiths. Any witchcraft writer who prescribed an ‘ecclesiastical’ remedy involved himself necessarily in this wider polemic at least tacitly, and many took the opportunity to make a vigorous contribution to it. Thus discussions of the purely spiritual remedies offered by Protestantism not only defended the efficacy of faith, the Word, prayer, fasting, and vigils; they very often turned into denunciations of Catholic ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’. … The case of remedies apart, the dominance of demonology by Decalogue theology meant that serious confessional divergence was only able to arise when idolatry –​in the form of witchcraft, magic, or superstition –​was detected in the beliefs or observances of a religious competitor. Agreeing, for the most part, on what witchcraft was, Protestants and Catholics were still free to identify it in each other’s church –​indeed, not only free but desperately eager. This is another feature of early modern religious life that might seem almost too obvious to deserve record. Without doubt, much of what was said was sloganizing and name-​calling, but it was so widespread, so endemic in the discourse of religious difference, that it must be seen as constitutive of what opponents thought of each other, and not merely a decorative addition. However unthinking and repetitive, the surface of polemical invective usually reveals deeper meanings. Calling each other ‘witches’ helped religious enemies just to vent their anger and hatred but it also identified what it was that was so offensive about enemy faiths, as well as evoking the sense of an unbridgeable distance between them. To be a Protestant or a Catholic was thus, in part, to have precisely this view of one’s foes.3 …

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There were countless depictions by adherents of each major faith of the ‘witchcraft’ inherent in the other, and these were reflected in demonological writings. Protestant propaganda to this effect in England is familiar from Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic and the historian of its continental equivalents need only extrapolate from his findings. Religious reformers from the Lollards onwards asserted that Catholicism was inherently magical since many of its rituals relied on securing material effects from non-​material causes –​blessings, exorcisms, hallowings, and the like. These were attempts to endow physical things with powers beyond their natural capacities and, since they were spurious in this way, they fell into the category of tacitly demonic operations. All the Church’s sacramentalia were obviously vulnerable to such an attack, but so too was transubstantiation itself, which in many denunciations became a ‘conjuration’ and an ‘enchantment’. Catholic priests were no better than magicians, sorcerers, and witches, it was repeatedly said.4 … English witchcraft authors plainly shared these views and, since many of them were of ‘puritan’ persuasion they tended to express them forthrightly. Henry Holland compared Catholic to ‘heathen’ magic, saint-​worship to Devil-​worship, and the sign of the cross to witchcraft by ‘characters’. For him, the ‘witches’ of Rome were ‘more wicked then the Heathen Witches, for these abuse the Worde and Sacramentes of God’. Thomas Pickering introduced the 1610 edition of Perkins’s Discourse by pointing out that the miracles associated with saints and their relics were ‘but meere Satanicall wonders’, while Perkins himself said they were ‘Satanicall impostures’ wrought by sensory delusion, that Catholic exorcisms were ‘meere inchantements’, and that the sign of the cross ‘carrieth the very nature of a Charme, and the use of it in this manner, a practise of Inchantment’.5 For Bernard, it was natural that among people most likely to blame witches for misfortune were the ‘popishly affected’ and among those most likely to become witches were the ‘superstitious and idolatrous, as all Papists be’; after all, sorcery was ‘the practice of that Whore, the Romish Synagogue’, and devils could be relied on to teach popery during exorcisms.6 Later, John Gaule repeated again the view that witches were more common in societies with ‘superstitious’ religions, notably Catholicism.7 This was one of the refrains of English witchcraft theory, underlined by the universal association of Catholicism with the Antichrist, and by the conviction that the strengths of the true religion and of magic varied in inverse proportion. All would have agreed with the Welshman Charles Edwards, who remarked that since the faith was repaired even the fairies (which he took to be familiar demons) were not so bold as they had been in the time of the Papacy: ‘It is a sign of the dawn of evangelical day’, he wrote, ‘when the insects of darkness went into hiding’.8

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Continental parallels for these Protestant attributions of witchcraft to Catholicism are likewise abundant. The Tübingen theologian Heerbrand, for example, called Catholic rituals ‘nothing but truly diabolical, ungodly, and magical blasphemies’.9 Ellinger likened Catholic baptism to demonic magic, both of them relying spuriously on an intrinsic power in words, and the same objection could obviously be brought against the text of the mass.10 In Denmark, Hemmingsen wrote of the supplanting of the ‘diabolical impostures’ of Rome by the true faith and of the Devil transferring his attention to countryside magicians instead.11 It was widely alleged that several medieval Popes had practised magic and that the Jesuits were likewise magicians and witches. The assumption that the Pope was the Antichrist also cemented Catholicism’s connection with the black arts. That it was the quintessence of superstition was a view so general to Protestant cultures that it ranks as the merest of commonplaces in the history of early modern religion. But it helped witchcraft authors too to explain away the centuries of darkness and error and to defend the need for radical change. Equally prevalent, of course, was the association of superstition with demonism. In essence, therefore, the Protestant accusation that Catholicism was a religion based on witchcraft arose from questioning the sense in which specific religious rituals could be said to be efficacious. Catholics returned the accusation but not by raising the same questions about the rituals of their enemies. Instead, they took a long view of the church militant and argued that, from the example of Simon Magus onwards, heresy had always been intimately associated with magic. Theirs was an argument based on a simple dualism between God’s true church and the Devil’s false versions, backed up by a reading of history. That the medieval Church did indeed link heresy with demonism, that heretics were accused of crimes with close similarities to witchcraft, and that the first ‘new’ witches of the fourteenth century were assimilated to the ‘old’ heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth, are all commonplaces of modern scholarship and there is no need to rehearse them again here. The main point is that, for the Catholic controversialists of the post-​ Lutheran era, Protestant ‘witches’ were only the latest in a long series of demonic threats to the faith. It seemed, moreover, that the things that Protestants denied in Catholicism were precisely the things that were rejected, parodied, ridiculed, or otherwise subverted by witches –​the Virgin, the saints, the sign of the cross, and so on. This was yet further evidence of the closeness of their alliance and not, as we might read it, of the working out of a particular representational and symbolic pattern. A classic example of this polemic was the oration given at a graduation ceremony at Louvain on 30 August 1594 by the English professor of theology, Thomas Stapleton. Deploring the practice of witchcraft in every part of Europe, Stapleton

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argued that this was a natural accompaniment to the equal spread of heresy, given the intimate links between the two. They had the same demonic origins, of course, but were also inspired by the same motives, notably ‘carnal desire’, hatred of authority, and curiosity, and they appealed to the same kinds of dissidents and waverers. The true faith was denied in both cases, at first in small matters, but eventually in essentials, leading to the systematic flouting of all the church’s laws and ceremonies. Moreover, heresy and magic were intrinsically connected: just as the wonderful effects of the magic art cannot themselves be attributed either to the magicians’ own intelligence or to the artefacts they use, such as figures, images, and incantations, but are produced by a different intelligence, by the Devil himself, and only he does everything … so today the leading astray of the people by heretics does not happen because of the learning, eloquence, cunning, or wickedness of the heretics themselves, but through that same Satan whose servants they are and who works through them. Magicians and witches, like heretics, were deceptive and difficult to discern, their threat to orthodoxy not always being acknowledged. They were betrayed by their use of superfluous, ‘ceremonial’ efficacies (magic) or by superfluous and novel doctrines (heretics). … The French Counter-​Reformation witchcraft authors Nodé, Crespet, Massé, Michaelis, and Boucher were especially vocal in their denunciations of the ‘witches’ who had overrun the Protestant territories in Germany and the British Isles and were threatening France. Their whole view of witchcraft was premised on a historiography of heresy seen as the continuous expression of demonism.12 Nodé, for example, traced it to the later medieval heresies, in particular to Hus, Wyclif, and Luther, and feared a future alliance between witches and Huguenots. All the medieval heresies, said Massé, had had links with the magic arts, and the Anabaptists’ resort to prophecy by divination was only a further example. Michaelis complained that the Genevan authorities neglected the laws against witchcraft but added that he was not surprised by this: ‘for besides their rage in depressing as much as in them lies the honour of God and his Saints … they have the property that all Hereticks naturally have, to love Magicians and Sorcerers’.13 Throughout Europe, indeed, Catholics could link the flourishing of witchcraft to the prevalence of the new heresies. In this way, witch-​hating was certainly influenced and exacerbated by confession-​hating, even if (so-​called) witch-​hunting resulted from additional, more complex, and, indeed, earlier circumstances. To the extent that counter-​reforming was seen as a sectarian as well as an evangelical

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process –​entailing the obliteration of the enemy faiths as well as the improving of lay piety  –​anti-​witchcraft legislation could be presented as one of its key ingredients. This was the argument of one of the most influential proclamations, the Ordinance of 1592 issued by the Viceroys of the Spanish Netherlands in the name of Philip II. In this sense, it is not the case that the disputes of the Reformation era had no major impact on the history of witchcraft. Actual prosecutions, in reflecting, say, Protestant zeal, were reflecting what that zeal meant, and it meant anti-​Catholicism; thus, witch-​hunting could have been directed against things that were defined in terms of their anti-​Catholicism, even if it was not necessarily directed against Catholic individuals. The same was true, presumably, for Catholic zeal. Stapleton demanded equal detestation of magic and heresy from his audience; for him, an age of religious reform must, of necessity, be an age of anti-​magic and vice versa: For such is the affinity between them, being related in so many different ways … that there is not a Christian who does not fight against the outrages of heresy and magic with the same hatred, and dread them with equal detestation. Just as to have dealings with magicians and witches, and to make peace with them, is abhorrent to all Christians, so the same commerce with heretics is to be rejected. Just as we imprison magicians by public authority, expel them from the community, and inflict terrible punishments on them, so we must take the same pains and use the same force against heretics. Just as the arts of magic, and their professors and books, cannot be suffered among Christians and are destroyed by sword and fire, so the same is decreed for heretics.14 In some respects, it has proved fruitful to look for the interesting differences concerning witchcraft within, rather than between, the major faiths –​matching the suggestion that both were divided internally by similar doctrinal disputes. It was Erik Midelfort’s argument, for example, that during the sixteenth century all three confessional groups in south-​western Germany were split internally between those who took a strongly ‘providential’ and, thus, moderating view of the crime, and those who adopted a more ‘fearful’ and punitive perspective in the manner of the Malleus Maleficarum. This was not a question of confessional commitment but of how far men of religion were prepared to spiritualize human experience by raising its significance beyond the plane where physical harms by witches and devils and physical punishments and remedies against them mattered most. … Ultimately, however, the religious reasons for taking witchcraft seriously or not can be related to differences between what (following Ernst Troeltsch)

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we might call the ‘church-​type’ and the ‘sect-​type’ churches of early modern Europe. Atheists, libertines, and other ‘unbelievers’ who (when they existed at all) recognized no religion and no church were, presumably, not touched by any demonology either. But church members had very divergent social doctrines, moralities, and even theologies, depending on the type of organization to which they belonged, and these were reflected in their views about religious deviance. For Troeltsch (writing in 1912)  a ‘church’ was, in principle, universal, because its aim was ‘to cover the whole life of humanity’; compulsory, because it tried to impose its values and institutions on all the members of a society; and conservative, because it embraced and became integral to the secular order and reinforced that order’s social and political hierarchies. He spoke of it utilizing and interweaving with the state and its ruling classes and becoming dependent on them. ‘Sects’, on the other hand, were highly selective, always voluntary, and usually radical. They: aspire after personal inward perfection, and they aim at a direct personal fellowship between the members of each group. From the very beginning, therefore, they are forced to organize themselves in small groups, and to renounce the idea of dominating the world. Their attitude towards the world, the State, and Society may be indifferent, tolerant, or hostile, since they have no desire to control and incorporate these forms of social life; on the contrary, they tend to avoid them; their aim is usually either to tolerate their presence alongside their own body, or even to replace these social institutions by their own society.15 The church, moreover, controls access to the supernatural by associating it with ecclesiastical conformity, channelling asceticism into the achievements of a heroic class of monastics, and monopolizing the means to salvation; for the sects, on the other hand, the supernatural is directly available to the individual through the personal asceticism of detaching from the world and (for example) refusing ‘to use the law, to swear in a court of justice, to own property, to exercise dominion over others, or to take part in war’. The church is sacerdotal and sacramental, claiming a monopoly of truth and power and the right to supervise faith and punish heresy. … This is an ideal-​typical distinction, of course, but its relevance to the history of witchcraft is that it suggests a further important differential in the very meaning of the crime. In the context of church-​type religious organizations –​in effect, ‘state churches’ –​witchcraft was a serious counter-​institutional competitor for the allegiance of potentially all Christians. Its significance lay precisely in the

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challenge it posed to universal domination, and the magistrate must play a part in stamping it out. The powers of the Devil threatened directly the miraculous basis of church-​type authority and had to be carefully downgraded to the status of mere wonders. The witch was the apparent rival of the official priesthood, whether professionally as purveyor of alternative therapies, or sacramentally as perverter of the vehicles and signs of grace. The ceremonies of the sabbat were invariably the inverse of required liturgical norms, and its entire mood was in direct contravention of a church-​type asceticism based on what Troeltsch called ‘the repression of the senses’. Superstition was always tied to conceptions of true religion as a public and official cult. At the same time, the Devil, hell with its terrors, and witchcraft itself were all contributors to the moral systems of the state churches and, in some respects, indispensable to their functioning. They provided the mirror-​images of their positive equivalents, and they were sanctions against sinning. Punishing demonism and witchcraft made a valuable statement about collective orthodoxy and its enforcement. In every way, then, the witchcraft found in traditional demonology was an ecclesiastical crime, and the fact that it allegedly flourished among the laity was an affront to religious evangelism. Its very significance was relative to the expectations of church-​type Christians. Transferred into the realm of the sects, witchcraft presumably lost all these terrors. Detached from claims to monopoly and inclusivity, religious deviance takes on altogether different connotations. Sects that turned their backs on the world and its institutions could not have treated religious apostasy either as a threat to ecclesiastical unity or as a token of social and political disorder. … The views of the early modern sectaries concerning witchcraft are a neglected subject. The history of radical religious groups in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands certainly bears out much of Troeltsch’s typology of sect-​type churches, and makes it clear that they often took up doctrinal and moral positions that were, in principle, inimical to traditional demonology.16 These included the abandonment of the idea of territorial reform, the rejection of magistracy and capital punishment in religious affairs, pacifism, confessional toleration, perfectionism and mysticism, and mortalism (the doctrine of the sleep or death of the soul prior to the resurrection). Sectaries and mystics were much more likely than orthodox witchcraft theorists to prefer figurative to literal readings of biblical texts. … It is also difficult to see how they could have equated witchcraft with heresy. Advocates of witchcraft prosecution did sometimes say that reluctance to invoke a secular punishment for the crime was an ‘anabaptist’ error. … No doubt accused of witchcraft (amongst other crimes) by their many enemies, the radicals may well prove to be the least ‘demonological’ of all the religious groups of the age.

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This seems to have been the case with the Netherlands Anabaptists and spiritualists of the sixteenth century, of whom the most renowned, David Joris of Delft, taught that original sin was an inner (and thus reversible) process, that the Devil was merely the fallen nature of each individual, and that witchcraft was ‘nothing’. Among the Dutch witchcraft writers of the next century, it was the Mennonites Jan Jansz Deutel, Antonius van Dale, and Abraham Palingh who initiated the most sceptical arguments, adopting a strict spiritualism and providentialism that eclipsed demonic physical activity altogether and made the idea of the witches’ pact untenable.17 … In England, too, it was the sectaries of the 1640s and 1650s, together with their clandestine predecessors, who were associated with the kind of radical anti-​ Calvinism that rejected a physical hell and physical devils. The symbolic location of hell in the hearts of men and women was suggested by, or attributed to, the Familists, John Everard, the ‘ranter’ pamphleteers Jacob Bauthumley and Lawrence Clarkson, and the ‘digger’ prophet Gerrard Winstanley.18 … It was in order to spiritualize the Devil and witchcraft, and to defend mortalism, that Lodowick Muggleton published a ‘true interpretation’ of the witch of Endor story in 1669. ‘There is no other devil’, he wrote, ‘or spirit, or familiar spirit for witches to deal withal, or to work any enchantments by, but their own imagination’.19 In giving the Devil only a symbolic existence, the religious sects encouraged the view that was also central to witchcraft scepticism, that his role in human affairs could never take a material form. Of great significance, in this respect, is the evidence linking the two most effective witchcraft sceptics in England with religious radicalism. In the case of Reginald Scot, this takes the form of an association with Abraham Fleming, whose theology was similar to Scot’s but whose Diamond of Devotion has suggested to David Wootton contacts with Elizabethan Familism.20 Among alleged Familist beliefs was the usual view of the spiritualists, but also the view of Scot, that the witches and devils in scripture should be treated metaphorically. Moreover, in the 1665 edition of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a further anonymous treatise was added as ‘Book 2’ to Scot’s own supplementary ‘Discourse of Divels and Spirits’, containing arguments presumably felt to complement those in the original text but derived from the radical theology of the 1650s. Amongst them was the reduction of demonic activity to mental operations internal to the ‘hell’ that was the state of mind of evil persons. … As in continental Europe, the religious radicals of mid-​seventeenth-​century England were accused of weakening witchcraft belief. There were even occasions when the labelling processes at work in traditional witchcraft beliefs were thrown into reverse. When Winstanley called the clergy ‘witches’ and said that their

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interests were demonic, was he not turning round a field of force that, for half a century, had led zealots like George Gifford and Arthur Dent to reject popular culture as implicit, if not explicit, sorcery? One of the most extraordinary things about Winstanley’s extraordinary book, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), is that he retains the death penalty for witchcraft but defines a witch as ‘He who professes the service of a righteous God by preaching and prayer’. This is not to escape completely from the mentality of witch-​hunting, but it does demonstrate vividly the rejection by the unorthodox of the church-​type religiosity of those who usually promoted it. One of the reasons, we may suppose, for the decline of witchcraft prosecutions and of witchcraft beliefs in general was the coming of a religious pluralism that permitted the members of all types of churches to coexist and spelt the end of the confessional state.

Notes 1 William Monter, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Brighton 1983), 31. 2 Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans. J. Moiser (London 1977), 161. 3 For the relationship between witchcraft prosecutions and religious change, see Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Clarendon 1989), 395–​7, and Brian Levack, The Witch-​Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London 1987), 93–​115. 4 For numerous examples, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London 1972), 51–​77. 5 William Perkins, Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge 1610), 25–​6, 150, 152. 6 Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-​Jury Men, 2nd edn (London 1630), 73–​4, 95–​7. 7 John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience (London 1646), 16–​17. 8 Charles Edwards, Hanes y Ffydd Ddiffuant (History of the Unfeigned Faith), facsimile of 3rd edn of 1677, ed. G.  J. Williams (Cardiff 1936), 238 (trans. kindly provided by Prys Morgan). 9 Jacob Heerbrand, De Magica (Tübingen 1570), 13–​15, quotation at 15. 10 Johann Ellinger, Hexen Coppel (Frankfurt 1629), 6–​11. 11 Neils Hemmingsen, Admonitio de Superstitionibus Magicis Vitandis (Copenhagen 1575), sigs F1v–​F3v. 12 For the tendency of French Catholic writers to conflate Protestant heresy with witchcraft, see A.  N. Galpern, Religions of the People in Sixteenth-​Century Champagne (Cambridge 1976), 157–​8. 13 Sebastien Michaelis, “Pneumology, or Discourse of Spirits”, in The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman, trans. W.  B. (London 1613), 71.

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Thomas Stapleton, “Cur magia partier cum haeresi hodie creverit”, in Orationes Academicae Miscellaneae Triginta Quatour, in Stapleton, Opera, 4 vols (Paris 1620), ii, 507. 15 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols (London 1931), i, 331. 16 See especially G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (London 1962). 17 See Chapter  18 in this volume by Gary K.  Waite for the attitudes of Dutch Anabaptists towards witchcraft –​ Ed. 18 These and other examples can be found in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London 1972), 23, 149, 172, 176–​7, and esp.  136–​45; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic,  170–​1. 19 Lodowick Muggleton, A True Interpretation of the Witch of Endor, 5th edn (London 1856), 1; Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians (London 1983), 122–​4. 20 Here I  depend totally on an unpublished paper, kindly made available by David Wootton:  “The Serpent in the Garden:  Reginald Scot and Abraham Fleming”. Wootton also finds elements of perfectionism, egalitarianism and Nicodemism in Scot, Fleming and the Familists. 14

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Chapter 17

Alison Rowlands A LUTHERAN RESPONSE TO WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC

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E R E A L I S O N R O W L A N D S identifies a distinctively Lutheran approach towards witchcraft in the imperial town of Rothenburg. This emphasised the suppression of “superstitious” magic rather than witchcraft. The authorities’ lenient treatment of alleged witches in Rothenburg also reflected the fact that torture was not used against the crime. In this respect, the low level of witch trials and convictions supports Brian Levack’s observation that the use or prohibition of torture could determine the severity of witchcraft prosecutions (20).

Rothenburg ob der Tauber was an imperial town in Franconia of about 6,000 inhabitants. It was ruled by a patrician sixteen-​man council which also had jurisdiction over a large rural hinterland containing a further 10,000–​11,000 subjects. Though Lutheranism was adopted in 1544, Rothenburg’s reformation did not gain an institutional basis until 1559, when a Church Ordinance was published and a Consistorium established to oversee religious matters. A  trawl through Rothenburg’s legal records for the years 1544–​16301 provides a meagre enough catch of witchcraft cases to suggest that the town’s elites embraced a distinctly moderate approach towards witches and witchcraft. During this period the town council investigated only some nine cases involving suspicions of witchcraft in any great depth. None of these cases escalated into the sort of large-​scale hunt which typically occurred in areas where witchcraft was treated as crimen exceptum and

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where all legal safeguards on the use of torture and admissibility of evidence were abandoned. Only one case ended with an execution and that was more for infanticide than for witchcraft. There is also evidence in the Rothenburg cases to support a connection between mild treatment of suspected witches and a particular Lutheran perception of witches as creatures who were not only powerless, but in fact non-​existent, the product of diabolic illusions. In 1582, for example, a woman named Margaretha Seitzin claimed that three of her village neighbours, Gertraud Durmenin, Anna Wehin and Anna Schneiderin, were witches who had transported her against her will to their nocturnal feast. Two jurists commenting on the case argued that Seitzin’s experience had probably been an illusion created by the Devil to endanger her three neighbours and to corrupt other villagers by encouraging them in their superstitious belief in witches. Seitzin’s claims were investigated no further. This idea was developed further in a report written in 1627 by Rothenburg’s foremost religious official, Georg Zyrlein, on a case in which thirteen-​year-​old Margaretha Hörberin claimed to have had sex with Satan and attended numerous witches’ Sabbaths. Zyrlein’s approach was to divide those who had had dealings with the Devil into two categories. In the first came the magician, necromancer, exorciser of devils, poisoner, sooth-​sayer, and astrologer. These individuals gave themselves to Satan willingly, made pacts with him by means of oath or blood signature, and did harm by magic with his help. The Bible condemned them to death. Witches made up the second group. They did not enter willingly into associations with Satan but were forced or deceived by ‘fantastical imagination’ into so doing. They did not confirm pacts in writing and did no magical harm to man or beast. They should go unpunished:  that the Devil had already plagued them was bad enough. Zyrlein felt that Hörberin came into this second category. Here then was an elite tendency to see witchcraft not as reality but as diabolic illusion or deception. A witch did not really fly through the night astride a fire iron or dance at Sabbaths or cause any harm, but was merely deluded by Satan into thinking that she could do so. And if witches were not real, then there was no need to be terrified of them or of what they might do and no need to orchestrate a ruthless campaign to root them out and destroy them. It seems likely, therefore, that this perception of witches helped fashion and sustain the extremely scrupulous and sceptical legal approach which Rothenburg’s council and the jurists advising it took towards individual cases of suspected witchcraft. This approach was characterised by two features which made the execution of witches and development of witch-​hunts highly unlikely:  the treatment of witchcraft as an ordinary crime, subject to all legal safeguards, rather than as

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crimen exceptum, and the assumption that a suspected witch was innocent until proved guilty, not vice versa. … A bad reputation, or ill-​fame, for witchcraft did not necessarily seal a woman’s fate in Rothenburg and its rural environs. Whilst investigating the Seitzin case it emerged that a rumour had been circulating in Oberstetten for at least seven years which maintained that one of the three supposed witches, Gertraud Durmenin, had once transported her husband back to the village on a goat. This potentially damning piece of evidence was treated with disdain by two of the jurists advising on the case, who pointed out that it was impossible to pinpoint who had started the rumour to see if they were honourable, credible people. One jurist also noted that it was the habit of common people to accuse old women of such things on the slightest pretext. The problem of tracing ill-​fame to its original sources was likely to crop up in most cases of supposed witchcraft, as it was usually of several years’ standing. Not only did Rothenburg’s council and the jurists advising it tend to interpret what constituted a ‘sufficient indication’ of witchcraft with great scrupulousness, they also tended towards caution and scepticism in their general handling of witchcraft cases. Again the Seitzin case illustrates this. One of the jurists, named Renger, advised general caution in the investigation of Seitzin’s claims, telling the council that it was better to proceed too slowly and cautiously than with too much haste and zeal. Jurist Hardessheim echoed these sentiments, citing Wiesensteig, where sixty-​three women had been executed as witches in 1562–​3, as a salutary example of what could happen if witch trials got out of hand. The jurists also suggested other, more ‘plausible’ explanations to account for what Seitzin had experienced without recourse to witchcraft, the most popular of which proved to be that she had been blind drunk and imagined the whole thing. This same desire to prove that things could not have happened as a result of witchcraft was apparent in other cases. In 1627 young Margaretha Hörberin was examined by the town midwives to see if she had lost her virginity, while the girl with whom she shared a bed was asked whether Margaretha had ever disappeared at night, to disprove once and for all her claims that she had had sex with Satan and flown to witches’ Sabbaths. Both investigations proved negative, thus vindicating official scepticism. The Hörberin case illustrates a similarly sceptical and legally scrupulous approach towards people named as Sabbath-​attenders by supposed witches. Margaretha named nineteen women and three men she claimed to have seen at Sabbaths. In an area where witchcraft was taken more seriously this list of names might have provided the next batch of witches to be hunted. In Rothenburg the jurists advising on the case noted that the girl’s statement alone was insufficient

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evidence on which to arrest and torture any of those named. Additional proofs, such as the possession of bad reputations or evidence of harm done to neighbours or their animals, were needed and it was up to the council to investigate further. None of the twenty-​two was taken into custody, thereby forestalling any self-​perpetuating hunt. … If popular superstition was perceived as a greater problem than witchcraft, was it also deserving of harsher punishment? Again the Rothenburg evidence would suggest that this was the case. If one considers Superintendent Zyrlein’s report on the Hörberin case of 1627, most of the people he assigned to his first category as willingly in cahoots with Lucifer and deserving of death according to God’s word were exactly the sort of people who were most usually found offering their services to the ‘superstitious’ villager or town-​dweller –​the astrologer, the soothsayer, the worker of magic, the exorciser of evil spirits. In fact the only person missing from Zyrlein’s list of enemies of the faith was the Segensprecher, the person who literally ‘spoke blessings’ as a means of healing, protecting and endowing objects with ‘magical’ power and significance and who was an especial bugbear of the Lutheran establishment thanks to this impious misuse of God’s word. The ‘speaker of blessings’ did make an appearance in an ordinance issued by the council in 1612 to curb popular resort to cunning folk (amongst other acts of popular ungodliness). According to the ordinance, the council had realised with deep regret that people in both town and rural hinterland were running for help to astrologers, speakers of blessings, exorcisers of devils and purveyors of magic on account of the slightest misfortune, in search of good health and because they had lost things. And this despite the fact that God had ordered that such people should not be suffered to live! Such behaviour constituted the most infamous blasphemy of God’s beloved name and majesty and was prohibited on pain of (unspecified) corporal punishment. Furthermore, villagers were to look out for any purveyors of magic trying to sneak into the rural hinterland and were at once to capture and give into council custody any they encountered. As well as rhetoric like this there are examples in Rothenburg’s legal records of cunning folk actually suffering fairly severely at the hands of the law. In 1582, for instance, Georg Kissling, the smith and cunning man of Ergersheim, was set in the pillory, flogged and banished for activities which included using a crystal ball to retrieve stolen goods and special herbs to protect animals from worms and witches. A year earlier, travelling quack Anna Gebhartin had also been banished after being set in the pillory and having a cross burned into her forehead and two holes burned through her cheeks. She had claimed that she could make bad marriages good, restore male potency and find hidden treasure with the help of a spirit.

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A cursory glance, then, would seem to support the idea that leniency towards witches on the part of the elites was accompanied by severity towards popular superstition in Rothenburg and its rural environs. However, a closer look reveals that, in actual fact, as far as popular superstition was concerned, the bark of Rothenburg council and its advisors was far worse than its bite, and that there was little in the way of a particularly active, systematic or punitive campaign against popular superstition between 1544 and 1630. Take the 1612 ordinance as an example. What is most significant about it was not so much what it said but the fact that it was very probably the earliest piece of legislation designed specifically to deal with the problem of popular superstition and popular resort to cunning folk. This is strange, given that some of the earliest ecclesiastical visitations of both town and rural hinterland brought popular use of magic to the authorities’ attention. Before 1612 the council may well have hoped that its general ordinances against blasphemy would have covered the popular superstition problem, or that patient exhortation and instruction from men of the cloth would be sufficient to persuade the misguided to see the error of their ways. Whatever the case, the authorities had not exactly been making huge efforts to eradicate the problem. As for the legal records, there is no gainsaying the fact that Georg Kissling, Anna Gebhartin and others like them were quite severely punished for their activities. However, they were hardly the targets of any sustained campaign against purveyors of magic. Georg Kissling and another cunning man named Leonhardt Geüder from Gattenhofen came to the attention of the authorities in the first instance for crimes other than their trafficking in magic –​Kissling for defamation, Geüder for adultery, bigamy and threefold perjury –​and the final summaries of their cases focused mostly on these major transgressions. … While the elites condemned this magic as superstitious, popular attitudes towards it were utilitarian. With little or nothing in the way of medical help available or affordable and with an unsystematic legal system and non-​existent police force, it made a lot of sense to those of the lower orders to do what they could to cope with misfortune. And the emphasis was very much on doing something, on taking action to resolve a problem –​which was no doubt why the Lutheran line of coping with misfortune by means of repentance and prayer was less enthusiastically received. Popular concern was not with whether a practice was superstitious or a cunning man ungodly, but with whether the practice worked and whether the cunning man gave value for money. The perceptual gulf between popular and elite views on the issue of beneficent magic can be seen in cases where the two clashed. On being told to stop misusing God’s word in the attempt to cure her aching toes in 1560, old Kulssheimerin had

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apparently said that she would use the blessing again if she were in pain, even if she ended up in Hell for it. In 1570 Anna Lösin described a method, involving three leaves of wintergreen, a pan of fat and God’s name, which she used for retrieving stolen goods, adding that she had not thought it was a sin. In 1611 another woman excused the fact that she had put objects under the altar cloth in the hospital chapel to be blessed by explaining that she had done it ‘with good intentions’. All three women obviously failed to see how the authorities could possibly object to something done with good in mind. The example of Rothenburg ob der Tauber and its rural hinterland, then, does lend support to [Stuart] Clark’s theory of a distinctive early modern Protestant pastoral demonology.2 Rothenburg’s literate, educated elites did adopt a moderate approach towards witchcraft, an approach born of legal scrupulousness and a particular conceptualisation of witches which made the development of large-​ scale hunts virtually impossible. The same elites did express themselves as more concerned with the problem of popular magic than with that of maleficent witchcraft, branding it ‘devilish’ and ‘superstitious’. However, this was by no means the whole story. Two things emerge as especially significant in the case of Rothenburg to nuance these findings. The first was the fact that although they expressed greater concern with the problem of popular superstition, the authorities did not really do a great deal to try and stamp it out. The second was the fact that, despite their differing opinions on the merits of beneficent magic, the elites and at least some of their subjects seem to have shared a streak of scepticism with regard to witches and their activities. There was therefore far less of an elite attempt to discipline popular behaviour and far more harmony of belief between the authorities and their subjects in Rothenburg and its rural hinterland than the Protestant pastoral demonology highlighted by Clark could have led one to expect.

Notes 1

2

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Alison Rowlands, “Magic and Popular Religion”, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds, Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–​1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, London 1996), 102–​5, 111–​12, 116–​17 –​ Ed. Stuart Clark argues for a distinctive Protestant demonology that condemned popular magic and downplayed the capacity of witches to cause harm. See Chapter 16 in this volume for Clark’s wider discussion of Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards witchcraft –​  Ed.

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Chapter 18

Gary K. Waite ANABAPTISTS AND THE DEVIL

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H E A N A B A P T I S T S W E R E the most successful of the “radical” groups to emerge from the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Anabaptists embraced an apostolic model of Christianity and espoused the voluntary baptism of adults. Unlike the “mainstream” Protestant denominations, the movement did not establish a state religion –​or a “church-​type” religious organisation, in the terminology used by Stuart Clark (16). As a consequence, Anabaptists suffered persecution under both Catholic and Protestant regimes. In this chapter Gary K.  Waite explores the neglected relationship between the campaign against Anabaptism and the prosecution of witches. He shows that Anabaptists, like witches, were accused of renouncing their Christian baptism and being led by the Devil. But unlike earlier heretical groups, such as the Waldensians described by Norman Cohn (2), they were not formally accused of Devil-​worship. More broadly, the conflict between Anabaptists and their enemies contributed to the intense awareness of the Devil’s power that characterised the period. This theme is considered further in Part Six.

This study explores the intersections between the heresy of Anabaptism and the supposedly even greater apostasy of demonic witchcraft. Anabaptism challenged the institutional churches because of its rejection of the official social structure and hierarchical understanding of the cosmos. The early Anabaptists, moreover,

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depicted the ecclesiastical authorities in apocalyptical terms as the antichrist (the son of the Devil), thereby turning the accusation of a diabolical conspiracy on its head.1 However, once a relative truce had been declared with Lutherans, and Anabaptists had been persecuted into an underground and largely sectarian existence, it seems [that] many authorities turned around 1566 to the suppression of magical deviance with increased fury and near unanimity. This chronological development leads to several related questions:  first, did the perceived threat of Anabaptism have anything to do with this revival of diabolical conspiracies? Second, did the popular or official image of Anabaptists change in any way after the rise of witch-​hunting? Third, was there any overlap in [the] official perception of Anabaptists and witches during the critical decades of the 1540s to 1560s? This much is agreed upon: the flare-​up of the persecution of witches followed close upon the heels of the waning of large-​scale heresy prosecution by 1565, although there were a number of individual cases of prosecution for witchcraft that took place coterminously with the trials against religious dissidents. However, it was not the isolated witch who brought periodic bouts of terror to the hearts of Europeans through the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the belief that witchcraft was a diabolical conspiracy between Satan and groups of women and men meeting secretly at night who performed perverse inversions of Christian rites, worshipped the Devil, kidnapped and roasted unbaptized infants, and plotted the overthrow of Christian society. Certainly belief in magic and witchcraft was endemic to European society, but it was not until the fifteenth century that this stereotype of the diabolical and conspiratorial witch was fully developed. Even so, persecutions of these supposed diabolical agents seem to have died down by the end of the century, and soon the inquisitorial and secular courts were preoccupied with religious dissidents. Brian Levack’s suggestion of a chronological intersection between heresy persecution and witchcraft trials has been recently pursued by William Monter, who has calculated that there were some 3,000 legally sanctioned executions for heresy from 1520 to c. 1565, and about two thirds of these victims were Anabaptists.2 He argues that the apparent rise of Anabaptism from the ashes of the German Peasants’ War of 1525 and the fear of further sedition provoked by these religious dissenters led to the secularization of heresy trials in the German Empire, the Low Countries and eventually elsewhere in Europe.3 Monter asks why this momentous attack on heresy by secular states has not seriously been seen as contributing to the even more horrific assault on accused witches. The reason is perhaps quite simple: historians of the Reformation and historians of witchcraft, in Monter’s words, ‘rarely read each other’s works’, a conclusion that is perhaps unfair in some cases, but is too often corroborated when reading the secondary literature in both fields.4 It is this major gap in our understanding of the persecution

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of both heretics and witches that this chapter broaches, seeking to communicate to scholars of both the Reformation and the witch-​hunts. Given what we now know about early modern popular culture, it seems likely that ordinary people who witnessed the fiery executions of both Anabaptists and accused witches would have confused the two sets of victims, especially since contemporary polemicists condemned Anabaptists as a demonic sect threatening the Christian religion. Perhaps ordinary people also misconstrued some Anabaptist ideas or practices as somehow magical and demonic. Lutheran and Reformed polemicists showed little caution in demonizing their more radical opponents, and in some cases, associating them with sorcery. In his Lectures on Galatians Luther wrote the following in a passage about witchcraft: Thus in our day we, too, must labour with the Word of God against the fanatical opinions of the Anabaptists and the Sacramentarians … For we have recalled many whom they had bewitched, and we have set them free from their bewitchment, from which they could never have been untangled by their own powers if they had not been admonished by us and recalled through the Word of God. … So great is the efficacy of this satanic illusion in those who have been deluded this way that they would boast and swear that they have the most certain truth.5 Of course Luther distinguished between physical and ‘spiritual’ witchcraft. However, not all of his readers, or those who heard Luther’s ideas second hand, made such careful distinctions.6 That Menno Simons (c. 1496–​1561) found it necessary to respond to charges that he and his fellow Mennonites were demon possessed illustrates the potential ramifications of such polemical characterization.7 Instead, Menno argued, infant baptism was a ‘ceremony of Antichrist, a public blasphemy, a bewitching sin’. While this position may have led some opponents to believe that Anabaptists were demon possessed, Menno responded that, We consider those possessed of the Devil who speak the Devil’s words, who teach the Devil’s falsehood instead of truth, steal God’s glory from Him, and sadly deceive souls … we hate the word of the Devil from our inmost souls. … This is an evident sign that we are not possessed of the spirit of the Devil but of that of the Lord. If we were of the Devil as we are reviled, we would walk upon a broader road and be befriended by the world and not so resignedly offer our property and blood for the cause of the Word of the Lord.8

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In other words, the true agents of the Devil are the religious and civic authorities that vigorously pursue the Anabaptists. A start to examining the implications of Anabaptist rejection of infant baptism can be found in the published court records relating to Dutch Anabaptists.9 These are the records of the court officials, reflecting the interrogations as understood and recorded by the prosecutors. We can then turn to a source that presents the perspective of the arrested Anabaptists themselves as they underwent their interrogations and reflected on their final days.This is the martyr book The Offering of the Lord (1570), and while the documents in this work too have undergone a complicated process of transmission and editing, they reflect the authentic voice of the persecuted. Both of these types of sources provide important information on the relationship between accused heretics on the one side and their official interrogators on the other. …

ANABAPTISTS IN THE AUTHORITIES’ PERSPECTIVE As with most secular court materials, the Anabaptist court records present very skimpy summaries of the proceedings; however, a few things can be gleaned from them. First, it appears that what most concerned court officials was the extraction of confessions about the principal beliefs of heretical Anabaptism, most notably its rejection of infant baptism and transubstantiation and the adoption of adult baptism. The records describe this latter act as a renunciation of one’s original baptism, and hence of the church and Christian society. In most cases, the accused had come to regard infant baptism as ineffectual and the priestly consecrated Host as ordinary bread. Furthermore, some Anabaptist parents were discovered because they had not had their infants baptized, in itself a criminal act.10 … Increasingly, especially after Anabaptists had successfully taken over Münster in 1534, authorities sought to uncover the conspiracy of Anabaptism, to extract from the accused the names of all others who had attended the secret meetings and who were also supposedly plotting insurrection.11 Thus descriptions of the sect included the appellative ‘seditious’ as well as the more typical ‘heretical’. The imperial placard against Menno Simons of 7 December 1542 described him as deceiving the simple people with his false teaching during secret, night-​time meetings. Like diabolical witchcraft, the crime of rebaptism, because of its inherent social danger, was treated as an exceptional crime of ‘lese majestatis’, of treason against both divine and human authority. The concern over heresy had therefore been heightened to the level of a secret and dangerous conspiracy. Mandate after mandate ordered local officials and clergy to uncover people hiding in attics or cellars,

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to keep their eyes on any who did not attend yearly confession or mass and to report on the kind of lives they led, those with whom they associated, any secret meetings at their homes, as well as to relate the presence of any strangers in their midst. Furthermore, on 6 January 1536, Karl van Egmond, Duke of Guelders, ordered all the clergy of his domain to conduct a visitation in Drenthe and the region of Groningen to discover any heretical beliefs.To underscore the authorities’ seriousness regarding the presumed Anabaptist threat, in most areas of the Low Countries those convicted of such heresy were, like convicted witches, burned at the stake, although under certain conditions the accused might be accorded the mercy of a drowning or beheading. Fears of an Anabaptist conspiracy to overthrow Christendom did not dissipate quickly. Two decades after the Münster debacle the [C]‌ourt of Friesland issued a placard denouncing the increase in dangerous heretics hiding in their midst who reject all the sacraments, steal from people and churches, and secretly plot a godless revolt to expel and exterminate Christians. To accentuate the danger of this threat, the president of the court, Hippolitus Persijn, calls these Anabaptist heretics ‘an evil race of men and monstrous creatures’. Of course, part of Persijn’s concern was to counteract the Batenburgers, a small group of militant Anabaptists who committed acts of robbery and violence as a means of visiting divine vengeance upon their persecutors.12Yet Persijn makes no distinction between militant and peaceful Anabaptists, such as the Mennonites, presumably wishing to keep the size of the fearful conspiracy as large as possible. Three years later the stadholder of King Philip II attempted much the same thing in his attempts to force the city of Groningen to fall in with the king’s policy of harsh suppression of Anabaptism, telling the city fathers that the Anabaptists and related sects were gaining the upper hand in the city and would soon overthrow it. The city council responded in a very interesting fashion:  its members knew of some women who refused to baptize their children, but they did not consider these to be dangerous, nor were they aware of any portentous buildup in militant Anabaptist forces. In other words, in this case the local civic authorities had become acquainted with their Mennonite residents and knew them to be no threat to law and order, whereas the more distant royal government continued to propagate a conspiratorial vision of these heretics. Interestingly enough, one of the worst outbreaks of executions in the Netherlands for witchcraft occurred in the Groningen Ommelanden, the rural area outside of the city, where twenty executions took place in 1547 and another five in 1562.13 Unlike Friesland, where the Court of Friesland kept a firm hand over local courts and controlled heresy hunting, completely suppressing potential

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witch-​hunts, the Ommelanden courts had a relatively free hand and were more easily manipulated by ‘foreign’ pressures to prosecute, such as the royal government or advocates of witch-​hunting from East Frisia. At the same time it seems [that] both Groningen’s and the Ommelanden’s officials strongly resisted royal pressure to prosecute Mennonites, forcing the stadholder in 1567 to hire, without the approval of the local authorities, a band of mercenaries to ‘rob, disturb and hunt down’ Mennonites in the Ommelanden. Evidently, in this region of the Netherlands, witchcraft was perceived as a much more serious threat to social order than was Anabaptism, royal propaganda notwithstanding. In neighbouring Friesland, however, it appears that judicial officials were content to limit their efforts in counteracting heresy to Anabaptism. Such broad-​ranging conspiracies usually had at their centre the leadership of the Devil. Yet the Devil figures hardly at all in the published court records. Of course, this could simply mean that his presence and activity were assumed. It could also mean, as it did in many witchcraft cases, that the accused themselves did not mention the Devil, even though the interrogators constantly attempted to put a demonological slant on the accused's confessions. …

THE ANABAPTISTS’ PERSPECTIVE The accounts of Mennonite trials composed by the victims and collected by an anonymous editor as The Offering of the Lord, fill in the picture of the official accounts of interrogations. Unfortunately, only a handful of The Offering’s martyrs appear in the published sources surveyed above and merely one of these, the trial of Lysbet Dircxdochter in Leeuwaarden, Friesland, in 1549, adds considerable new detail. In this account of the interrogation of Lysbet, a former nun executed for her rejection of the sacraments of the church, the authorities ask her what she believed about the ‘most worthy, holy sacrament’. In her own account, she responds that she had read nothing of a holy sacrament in the Scriptures, only of a Lord’s Supper. To this the gentlemen of the court respond, ‘Silence, for the Devil speaks from your mouth.’ Preparing her for torture, they strip her against her pleas to force her to confess the names of her associates. She holds firm and is drowned as a heretic. Lysbet’s experience in the interrogation room was not far removed from that of accused witches; she was questioned according to a set script, stripped and tortured to uncover her cohorts, and accused of diabolical inspiration.We must not forget, in spite of our proclivity to make sharp distinctions between different fields of study such as heresy and witchcraft –​reflected in the practice of pulling Anabaptist records out of their juridical contexts and publishing

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them separately –​that it was often the same court officials who tried both sets of victims, sometimes conducting such seemingly distinct trials during the same week. One would therefore expect the interrogators to carry over techniques and ideas from one interrogation to another, although in most cases the Dutch authorities were able to distinguish clearly between those accused of Anabaptist heresy and those charged with diabolical witchcraft. As seen in the case of Lysbet, and a few of the other cases from The Offering which we will examine now, accusations of diabolical guidance provided one common thread between the two sets of judicial victims. Another case is that of Claesken Gaeledochter, executed by the Court of Friesland on 14 March 1559. Claesken records that she was asked the standard questions, what she believed about baptism, who had baptized her, why she had not baptized her children. Then she adds, these are the questions which he [the inquisitor] asked me. But he had many more words, and when I did not answer him well, then he said that I had the mute devil in me, for the Devil places himself as an angel of light in us, which was true of all heretics. (This would have been a reference to a specific demon whose job it was to cause its servants to remain mute when questioned by the authorities.14) When two monks were brought in to convince her of her errors, Claesken notes that because of her stubbornness, they too insisted she was controlled by the Devil: ‘The beginning and end was that I had the Devil in me, and that I was deceived.’ After the inquisitor compared her rebaptism with the baptism of a Jew –​which by this time was believed to be of little effect –​Claesken writes that ‘all that he kept saying was that we had it all from the Devil, and that we had the proud devil in us’. Faced with Claesken’s intransigence, the inquisitor concluded that the Devil had called her. She refuted this conclusion by asking, ‘is the Devil now of such a nature that he rejects the evil and does the good?’, for that is what she and her colleagues have done in their baptism. If the accounts presumably composed by the victims themselves can be trusted (and there seems little reason to doubt their veracity on this point), it appears that the Devil was a more prominent figure in interrogations than the brief trial summaries provided by the authorities would lead us to believe. Anabaptists were apparently accused of being under the lordship of the Devil, even to the degree of possession.15 Their response was that their godly lives gave the lie to this allegation. Those in league with or possessed by the Devil hardly committed acts of charity towards their fellow humans.

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In several instances, Anabaptists charged their interrogators with being those truly in league with the Devil. Hans van Onerdamme, tried in Ghent in 1550, apparently answered the monks who demanded he swear on his baptism and faith to tell the truth: ‘What, will you swear much? I regard not your swearing, for it is a craft of the sorcerers, who swear against the truth.’ He notes that three of his co-​religionists had been returned to the Catholic fold in the course of their trials, something that Hans blamed on the monks’ ‘bewitched swearing, that they did not keep themselves from the Devil’s deception’, for they did not have the gift of disputation. He compares his opponents to the Egyptian sorcerers who opposed Moses, and concludes his remarks to the gentlemen of the court, now understand, you noble sirs, the misuse and abuses of your state or ministry, for we confess it not to be of God, but of the Devil, and that the antichrist has so bewitched and blinded your eyes, through the deceit of the Devil, that you do not perceive yourselves to be what you are. Similarly after his interrogation in the prison of Antwerp in August 1551, Jeronimus Segersz wrote to his wife that ‘we must oppose the princes and mighty of this world, yes the spirits that work in the air, which is the old serpent and Satan’. He warns her of the Devil which seeks to damn their souls and of the false prophets which have only the teaching of the demons. Peter van Weruick, imprisoned in Ghent in 1552, writes to his sisters and brothers that they must distinguish between what is the worship of God and that which is really the worship of the Devil and idolatry. Those who perform righteousness are the children of God, he continues, while those who sin are from the Devil. Peter was not reticent to make his opinion known to his interrogators; he reports that he told them ‘perhaps your teaching is the teaching of the Devil, for it is against the truth’. Another Anabaptist, Claes de Praet, who was eventually executed in Ghent in 1556, was told by Pieter Titelmans, the infamous inquisitor of Flanders, that he had been deceived by the Devil and misled by artisans and that he should now be instructed by the learned. Claes responded, ‘why then do they [the learned] lead the life of a devil?’ The Anabaptist belief that Catholic practices were witchcraft (or sorcery) seems to have been widespread. The lengths that Anabaptists would go to avoid baptizing their infants suggests that they viewed the Catholic rite as one that would, at the very least, taint their children with the diabolical. (On the other hand, spiritualists like David Joris depreciated the importance of externals such as water baptism while at the same time denying the physical existence of the

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Devil.16) In 1553 in Kortrijk Joos Kint was interrogated by inquisitor Titelmans. She confronted him bravely, responding to his demand [that] she renounce her rebaptism by stating ‘my faith and baptism I know, but I have nothing to do with your swearing, I would then confess to you sorcerers’. She then warns him not to tell others that she had recanted or that she had a devil in her, not to mention that she was damned among the simple folk. Several times, in fact, she told her accusers to ‘get behind me Satan’. For these courageous souls facing their own destruction, it was quite clear who were truly in league with the Devil. Were there any incidents wherein the authorities conflated beliefs about witches and those about Anabaptists? Joke Spaans has recently discovered some intriguing evidence from Amsterdam witchcraft trials of the 1550s and 1560s where under torture two accused witches appear to have changed their accounts of a meeting with a Mennonite or other sectarian leader in order to conform to their interrogators’ views of the Devil. One of the accused, Volckgen Harmansdr of Blokzijl, was executed in 1564 because ‘before the enemy she had denied her baptism and christendom’. In her first testimony, Volckgen describes this ‘enemy’ as a weaver from the Waterland. Spaans plausibly suggests that this could have been a Mennonite, for a relatively high proportion of both Waterlanders and weavers were attracted to this branch of radical reform. In the Amsterdam court records there were also numerous reports during this period of Waterland Mennonites proselytizing in the port city.17 In any event, in her later confession Volckgen changes the character of the ‘enemy’ to fit the accepted appearance of the Devil. Spaans also rightly points out that those who underwent sectarian ‘rebaptism’ were like witches charged with having denied their original baptism and Christian faith. In other words, both Anabaptists and supposed witches were accused of renouncing their original baptism and hence opening themselves to demonic control. The difference is that Anabaptists were not, as far as I have been able to determine, charged explicitly with making a pact with the Devil, the key charge against witches.

CONCLUSIONS It is much easier to describe what this investigation into one form of sixteenth-​ century religious heresy and witchcraft belief has not shown rather than what it has proven. Certainly I  do not wish to revive the old ‘witchcraft as heresy’ school –​that witchcraft was a Christian heresy which developed out of French Catharism –​so well demolished by Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer, who discovered that the fourteenth-​century documents providing the link between

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heretical Cathars and the earliest witchcraft trials were forgeries. As far as I have been able to determine, of all the major religious traditions of the sixteenth century, Anabaptists were the least caught up in magical beliefs or practices (apart from those, I  suppose, who emphasized immediate revelation).18 On the other hand, I  think it fair to suggest that scholars have been too reluctant to return to the question of the relationship between heresy and supposed demonic sects, especially in the sixteenth century. At least at the level of officialdom, and perhaps too of popular perception, the prosecution of sixteenth-​century Anabaptism and of magical deviance had much in common. For one thing, rejection of infant baptism carried with it, in the minds of sixteenth-​century people, several diabolical ramifications, not the least of which was the increase in the number of unbaptized and ‘unexorcized’ individuals who were presumed to be much more susceptible to diabolical influence. Perhaps too the supposed collusion of midwives in assisting Anabaptist parents [to] avoid baptizing their newborn infants helped rekindle suspicions that midwives were in league with the Devil to supply it with unbaptized infants. These and many other parallels between [the] persecution of Anabaptists and witches appeared during the decades of the 1540s to 1560s, precisely the moment when authorities across Europe were becoming less concerned with Anabaptism but even more worried about the menace of witchcraft.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

For an early example of this apocalyptical ideology from Holland Anabaptists, see Gary K.  Waite and Samme Zijlstra, “Antiochus Revisited:  An Anonymous Anabaptist Letter to the Court at the Hague”, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 66 (1992),  26–​46. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-​Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (London and New York 1995), 120;William Monter, “Heresy Executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–​1565”, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge 1996), 48–​64, esp. 49. Monter, “Heresy Executions”, 50. Ibid., 62. Martin Luther, Works, Vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians,  194–​5. Martin Luther certainly believed that his phrase “Freedom of the Christian Man” had been badly misused by the German peasants as a slogan of rebellion in 1525. Notwithstanding Luther’s protest, the rebellious peasants “thought of the enterprise as their contribution to the Reformation”. James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War (Montreal and Kingston, ON 1991), 35. For Menno’s defence, see his comments in “Brief Defense to All Theologians” (1552), in John C. Wenger, ed., Leonard Verduin, trans., The Complete Writings (Scottdale, PA 1956), 535; and in “Reply to False Accusations” (1552), ibid., 571–​2.

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8 Menno, The Complete Writings, 133, 140. 9 For full citations of the Dutch sources used in this essay, see the original version in W. Packull and G. Dipple, eds, Radical Reformation Studies (Ashgate, Aldershot 1999), ch. 8 –​ Ed. 10 In May 1538 Uulbe Claeszoon was executed for refusing to baptise his infant, who had died 17 weeks after birth. Pieter Picterszoon was condemned in January 1569 for abducting his newborn daughter from her mother so that she could not be baptised. 11 This is seen, for example, in the case of Andries Clacszoon of Doonrijp, tried on 16 March 1535 by the Court of Friesland, who freely confessed to rebaptism, to holding conventicles in his house, and who was convicted for being a member of the “rebellious” sect of Anabaptists in Münster. 12 For the Batenburgers, see Gary K.  Waite, “From Apocalyptic Crusaders to Anabaptist Terrorists:  Anabaptist Radicalism after Münster, 1535–​1544”, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 80 (1989), 173–​93. 13 Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra, “Six Centuries of Witchcraft in the Netherlands: Themes, Outlines, and Interpretations”, in Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff, eds, Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (Rotterdam 1991), 1–​36, esp. 26. See also Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra, “The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch Variant”, Social History, 15 (1990), 181–​94. 14 In Chapter 32 in this volume Virginia Krause considers the implications of the “spell of silence” that prevented witchcraft suspects from confessing –​ Ed. 15 See Chapters  24 and 25 for the classic signs of possession  –​ Ed. These included convulsive movements or seizures, speaking in a voice different from one’s own, expressing horrible blasphemies, and exhibiting eyes that bug out, a grossly extended tongue, and a head wrenched nearly backward facing. 16 Gary K. Waite, “ ‘Man Is a Devil to Himself’: David Joris and the Rise of a Sceptical Tradition towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands, 1540–​1600”, Dutch Review of Church History, 75 (1995), 1–​30. 17 Joke Spaans, “Toverijprocessen in Amsterdam en Haarlem, ca. 1540–​1620”, in Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff, eds, Nederland betoverd (Amsterdam 1987), 69–​79, esp. 76–​8. 18 On this point, see Chapter 16 in this volume by Stuart Clark –​ Ed.

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PART FIVE

Witchcraft and authority

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HE AGE OF WITCH TRIALS COINCIDED with the emergence of the modern “nation-​state”: the independent, centrally governed territory with its own political institutions, bureaucracy and laws. Several factors combined after 1500 to increase the authority of secular rulers across Europe. The Reformation undermined the power of the papacy in both Protestant and Catholic regions, and placed the clergy more firmly under the control of lay magistrates; the new technology of printing encouraged the development of administrative systems, and allowed central authorities to communicate more effectively with outlying areas; and changes in legal practices tended to place more power in the hands of government institutions, while limiting the independence of alternative jurisdictions like the church courts. It has been argued that the combination of these factors produced the “confessional state”, typified in the late sixteenth century by Bavaria, Scotland, France and Spain: political entities identified with one religious denomination, and possessing the means to impose standards of belief and behaviour on their populations.1 Understandably, the coincidence of this period of “state-​ building” with the criminal prosecution of witches has encouraged historians to seek links between the two phenomena. One influential model for explaining witch trials within confessional states was advanced by Christina Larner in the 1980s. Larner argued that witchcraft was one of a number of crimes removed from the jurisdiction of church courts

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and prosecuted with increased severity by secular authorities; other offences of this kind included sexual misconduct, infanticide and religious dissent. These were “abstract crimes” against a model of correct behaviour embraced by governing elites. Within this larger context, the prosecution of witches was an effective way of asserting political and religious authority and attacking deviance.2 It appears that some early modern writers and jurists who dealt with witchcraft did indeed think in these terms. In the first contribution to Part Five, Gerhild Scholz Williams (19) claims that the French judge and demonologist Pierre De Lancre viewed the suppression of witches “as part of the French monarchy’s inexorable move toward absolute power”. In 1609 Lancre led a royal commission to the Labourt region of the Basque country between the kingdoms of France and Spain; thus his efforts to exterminate witches in this territory involved the imposition of French law and the authority of the crown. In his theoretical discussion of witchcraft, his analysis was also consistent with Larner’s interpretation. He viewed witches as the highest and most dangerous enemy of the state: they represented not only a threat to true religion but also the social order. Their removal from the Labourt was, therefore, necessary for the extension of civilisation and the assertion of strong government. But how typical were men such as Pierre De Lancre, and did their political analysis of witchcraft reflect the actual practice of European states? Robin Briggs has argued that Larner’s model of witch trials as an assertion of state power is mistaken. For Briggs, the idea that “ideological crimes” were used to legitimise political regimes is “hardly less wrong” than Margaret Murray’s fantasy of a pagan witch cult.3 In Chapter 20, Brian Levack identifies some of the weaknesses of Larner’s position. He contends that central authorities, far from initiating witch persecutions, were often responsible for restraining the excesses of local officials who wished to eradicate witchcraft in their neighbourhoods. Taking the example of Scotland –​where Larner’s primary research was also based –​he shows that only a minority of witch trials directly involved the central government, and these trials resulted in an unusually high level of acquittals. The bulk of prosecutions were initiated from below, though they took place under warrants issued from Edinburgh. The use of torture, which was instrumental in securing many convictions, appears to have been largely illegal:  local groups exploited the lawful practice of “pricking” for the Devil’s mark to extort confessions from alleged witches, though such forced confessions were regarded as unacceptable by the higher courts. In Levack’s view, it was the failure of the central administration to control events in the localities that allowed most witch trials to occur; and he argues that a similar state of affairs applied in the other emerging nation-​states of early modern Europe.

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The most dramatic excesses of witch persecution, the mass panics in the episcopal principalities of Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, appear to confirm Levack’s interpretation. These large witch-​hunts occurred where central authority was weak and local officials had free rein in the interrogation and punishment of suspects. As William Monter points out (21), the “witch-​ bishops” of Trier, Mainz and Cologne lacked the dynastic stability of other German princes, and had to share power with often contentious cathedral chapters. The result was chronically ineffective central government, and the delegation of witch trials to “village inquisitions”. In their scale and rapaciousness, these decentralised persecutions dwarfed anything that occurred elsewhere in Europe  –​and were responsible for around a quarter of all executions for witchcraft; the commission led by Pierre De Lancre, in contrast, probably claimed fewer than 20 lives. These grim figures make it hard to conclude that witch trials were typically the instrument of a strong central state. If witch trials did not serve the interests of centralised governments, or express the power of these institutions, what was the relationship between witchcraft and the early modern state? For Monter, there was an indirect connection between the rise of Catholic and Protestant state churches and heightened anxieties about witchcraft in the period after 1560. As rulers sought to create purified Christian communities –​each one defined against the heresies of their confessional opponents –​national churches inculcated a deep sense of demonic temptation and sin in their subject populations; this created a climate in which fears of witchcraft, among other insidious crimes against public religion and morality, could flourish. This echoes Larner’s emphasis on the “politicisation of religion”, though the governments of early modern Europe did not take the lead in prosecuting witches. More broadly, there is some evidence that witch trials functioned as a tool of social control and a means by which elite groups legitimised their authority. The key issue is the level at which these processes took place. As Levack notes, those responsible for the bulk of the prosecutions in Scotland were not “private individuals” or “vigilantes”: they were members of local elites who went to some length to obtain permission from central government to investigate witchcraft in their own communities. They “were acting as the rulers of their towns and villages”, and used “the judicial authority of the state” for their own ends. A similar process occurred in parts of Germany. In a period of increased concern about social order, sexual conduct and religious conformity, it is understandable that local leaders sometimes sought to eliminate the perceived threat of witchcraft; and this process may well have increased their standing among their neighbours. The exercise of political authority played a role in the witch trials of sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century Europe, though it was not usually the authority of the centralised, confessional state.

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Notes 1

2 3

For the emergence of confessional states in Germany, see R.  Po-​Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation (Routledge 1989); also Richard Muchembled, “Satanic Myths and Cultural Realities”, in Bengt Ankaloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford University Press 1993). Larner develops these ideas in Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Blackwell 1984), 64–​5, 89–​91, 124–​6. Robin Briggs, “Many Reasons Why:  Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation”, in Jonathan Barry, Mariaane Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press 1996), 52–​3.

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Chapter 19

Gerhild Scholz Williams PIERRE DE LANCRE AND THE BASQUE WITCH-​H UNT

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I E R R E D E L A N C R E was appointed by Henry IV of France to investigate the activity of witches in the Labourt region of the Basque country in 1609, and published an account of his proceedings in 1612. Here Gerhild Scholz Williams discusses De Lancre’s text as an argument for royal authority. De Lancre’s construction of the Basque witches as a kind of “anti-​monarchy” was also part of the larger tendency to imagine witchcraft as the antithesis of established institutions and values, as examined by Stuart Clark in Chapter 15.

The French magistrate Pierre de Lancre lived and worked in Bordeaux, the city of his birth, around the turn of the [sixteenth] century. Like Bodin, he was one of the immensely learned lawyers who, toward the last third of the sixteenth century, gave a destructive twist to the witchcraft dispute. There were other sources, but Bodin’s influence on Lancre is pronounced; in turn, both writers were frequently read and widely quoted. They shared the conviction that a stern judicial approach was primary in any attempt to control the practice of satanic magic. But the task was far from easy. At times Lancre seemed overwhelmed by the inescapable realization that in all parts of the world, however remote, there were men, women, and children who had been seduced by Satan. Whatever other cultural differences separated these victims, they were always considered a danger to themselves and a threat to their communities as a result of their contact with the

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Devil. The personal and the communal thus came together in the practice of magic and witchcraft. … Lancre was entirely convinced of woman’s inclination toward witchcraft and of the universal threat to the individual, the community, and the state caused by this proclivity. He felt especially convinced that such practices threatened political and economic stability in the French border regions, especially since the French religious wars had made it imperative to secure France and its territories. The presumed instability of the Basque people, their distance from the French national center, Paris, and the fact that the Basques had become part of France only a century before are three reasons that explain the difficulty of rallying the Labourt population firmly behind the cause of French national interest. It was not until 1747 that the borders between Spain and France were drawn definitively, thereby putting an end to the peculiarly free and exempt status of this people between two rival European powers. Lancre’s frequent comments on the antisocial and antinationalist behavior of the Basque people make it clear that the witch prosecutions had not only religious but political motives as well. These prosecutions clearly formed part of the French move toward the absolutist state. We note that, alongside their tracts on demonology, Bodin and Lancre also produced lengthy tomes on the order and ideals of the state and on the nature of princely government. Thus demonology was less an odd deviation in the thinking of otherwise reasonable men than it was an extension of their ideals concerning the role of authority in society. Born in 1553 or 1556, Lancre studied in Toulouse and Turin. In 1583 he joined the Bordeaux parlement as a magistrate. In 1609 King Henry IV of France appointed him head of a commission to investigate the activities of witches in the Labourt, the Basque region of France. Situated in the extreme southwest corner of France, which bordered on Spain and Navarre, the Labourt had approximately thirty thousand inhabitants. According to Lancre, most of these people engaged in active satanic associations and practices. During the course of a visit that lasted until December 5, 1609, Lancre by his own account led investigations against forty-​ six suspected witches, among them twelve priests, and thirty-​five informants. His report notes that three priests and eight witches were actually burned. In 1612 the Spanish inquisitor Salazar, who was occupied with the same problem on the Spanish side of the border, reported eighty persons burned as witches in the Labourt.1 During that year Lancre published a report on his extraordinary four-​month stay in the Labourt, the Tableau de l’Inconstance. … Lancre based his book on the original trial records. Since these records were destroyed during the eighteenth century, Lancre’s report has to this day assumed the authority of an authentic witness to the persecutions. …

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Closely scrutinizing the Labourt, which to him was a foreign culture, Lancre produced a report that went beyond the established parameters on witchcraft indictments and warnings. The reasons for this departure are twofold: Lancre’s account is clearly more politically motivated than comparable tracts of the period; and his authorial posture, that of a man encountering a strange culture and an unfamiliar people, has much in common with contemporary reports of travels to the New World. Descriptions of exotica from across the ocean supplied Lancre with a rhetoric that familiarized the unfamiliar, the rhetoric needed to articulate the combination of strangeness and fear that marked his encounter with the Labourdins. His descriptions of the religious, demonological, and judicial aspects of the witchcraft phenomenon were guided by the investigative gaze of a bureaucrat with strong anthropological interests. His depictions of the Labourdins and their unfamiliar language and customs oscillate between amazement at their strange behavior, on the one hand, and on the other, authoritative pronouncements about people who were, like him, subjects of the king of France and bound by monarchic law. Lancre was a product of elite French culture –​he was raised and educated at the court and the university –​and his social and economic distance from the people whose deliverance from satanic magic was entrusted to him could not have been greater. He found to his utter amazement that these people, not unlike the natives of the New World, adored Satan and his demons and practiced rituals that would have been as incomprehensible to him as those of faraway peoples, had it not been for his previous knowledge of demons and witches. Worse yet, since Christian missionaries had been successful in spreading God’s word among the natives, Satan and his demons had been forced to leave their hiding places in the Americas and to return to Europe, specifically to the Labourt, in large numbers. Lancre cites travelers who had seen them flying across the sky: Travellers coming in search of wine in this city of Bordeaux assured us that on their way they saw great numbers of demons appearing as horrific human beings passing through France. This is the reason why the number of sorcerers is so great in the Lambourt. It had been reported from overseas that the natives sought access to their demon-​ divinities by inhaling the smoke of a plant they called cohoba: “Having remained a certain time in an ecstatic state, they rise all lost and crazed, telling marvels about their false gods that they call Cemis, just like our witches when they return from the Sabbath.” From what Lancre could observe, the Labourdins practiced similar customs. They smoked tobacco, which seemed to put them into a trance; when

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they awoke, they reported having flown across the sea to distant shores in the company of many of their friends and having delighted in strange and wonderful experiences. Lancre believed in the reality of such transports. But he also saw the poverty of the people who smoked these weeds, and he offered yet another, more sober explanation for such indulgence. He noted that the herbal smoke quieted hunger pangs and that the imagined travel to distant and happier shores might merely have been a fanciful escape from the misery and poverty of daily life. … It appears that Lancre understood his mission to be to bring light into this dark corner of the realm and as part of the French monarchy’s inexorable move toward absolute power. Pacifying and purging the Labourt of satanic elements also meant the clarification of the disputes over the borderlands that had occupied Spain and France for some time. The elaborate title-​statement [of Lancre’s book] celebrates the French monarchy as unique and destined to lead Europe: “The Tableau of the inconstancy … in which one sees how justice in France is handled with greater judicial dexterity and in more pleasing ways than in any other empire, kingdom, republic, or state.” The royal councilor at the Bordeaux parlement translated this charge into a political agenda of royal self-​presentation of the highest order.Witch-​ hunting was eventually subsumed under the myth of the supremacy of French royal power. Lancre was convinced that his objective had to be cast in the context of the sacred power of the state, which transcended even the church’s authority: The reason is that the heretics bring unrest to the state, where the church is located, and not the state that is placed in the church … and [that] the judges of the church … have no other coercive power than that of the sword of the spirit. The superior authority of the state over the church was especially important in matters of witchcraft, an even more heinous crime than heresy. Heretics congregated together and endangered only each other; they tried to remain hidden. Witchcraft, on the other hand, constituted an aggression against all living souls, and therefore its practitioners affected the whole public good. Referring the reader to his 1607 tract on the inconstancy of all nations, Lancre further underscored his belief that only under the rule of a just king would and could France be victorious in the struggle against Satan’s assault. The echo of the religious wars is inescapable. Lancre enumerated four dictates that impelled him to action: first, the need to convince all doubters of the reality of the witch menace; second, his belief that witchcraft was heresy and apostasy but was even more dangerous to state and church than either of these enemies; third, the depositions of innumerable witnesses about the real bodily transport of witches to the Sabbath, which must

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effectively silence the doubts of even the “most stubborn, stupid, blind, and dazed” of his colleagues; and finally, confirmation once again of the accuracy of those who wrote on the subject before him. … In the name of royal majesty, Lancre strove to punish these people with the full weight of the law behind him. He was not entirely successful. “Making justice” meant more to him than prosecuting individuals accused of witchcraft; his work had broader implications. Commenting on the two priests who were burned for their satanic activities, he declared: It is very dangerous that a priest be pardoned of sorcery, magic, and similar crimes, even one who is in charge of souls. For this clemency is ill conceived and very dangerous for the republic, and especially for a country as infected as the Labourt. The results of leniency were “atheism, heresy, idolatry”. Satan and his minions wanted more than to destroy souls; they wanted to annihilate the society of Christian men and women.

Note 1

The number of witches executed during De Lancre’s commission remains uncertain. The best recent estimate is the three priests and around a dozen other alleged witches. See William Monter, “Witch Trials in Continental Europe, 1560–​1660”, in Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark and William Monter, eds, Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic, Vol. 4: The Period of the Witch Trials (Athlone 2002), 42.

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Chapter 20

Brian P. Levack STATE-​B UILDING AND WITCH HUNTING IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

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I T C H T R I A L S I N V O LV E D the exercise of power to control deviant or apparently dangerous behaviour. But was this power normally exercised on behalf of the state or local elites? Here Brian P. Levack argues that the prosecution of witches was usually driven by decentralised authorities, and that higher courts often restrained their excesses. This argument complements Wolfgang Behringer’s work on the persecutions in Germany (10), and also relates to Levack’s analysis of the decline of witch trials (35): this occurred in part, he argues, because of stronger supervision of regional justice by central courts.

During the last two decades a number of historians have attempted to establish a causal relationship between the great European witch hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the development of the modern state. These scholars have claimed that ‘the rise of the nation state’ is at the very least one of the secondary causes of the witch hunt; that the hunt resulted from the centralisation of royal power; that it is one reflection of the advance of public authority against ‘particularism’, that it is integrally related to the assertion of reason of state; and that it proceeds from an impulse towards both absolutism and state sovereignty.1 The general impression one gets from this line of argument is that witches were in a certain sense victims of the advance of that emerging leviathan, the centralised, bureaucratised, secularised modern state. The purpose of this chapter

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is to examine this line of argument and to suggest some limitations to it. It will also test some of these theories about the connection between state-​building and witch hunting with reference to one country in which it is alleged that they are especially apparent, the kingdom of Scotland. The argument consists of four separate but related strands.The first deals with judicial and administrative centralisation, which is incontestably one of the most salient features of state development. Here the argument is that the growth of the state involved the advance of central, that is to say royal, jurisdiction, as a result of which areas which had enjoyed a large measure of autonomy, especially those on the geographical periphery of royal domains, came within the ambit of central government control. The ideal after which rulers strove was ‘a centralized authority with a perfect bureaucracy, consisting of local official bodies that were merely executive powers’.2 This attack on localism and particularism, so it is claimed, led to an increase in the prosecution of witches, as the state enforced witchcraft edicts from the central government and instructed local authorities about a crime they were ill prepared to prosecute. … The second strand of the argument deals with both the officialisation of judicial power and its enhancement through new methods of repression, especially judicial torture. The rise of large-​scale witch hunting was facilitated by the adoption of inquisitorial procedure, according to which governmental officials conducted the entire legal process by themselves and used physical force to compel men suspected of secret crimes to confess. Inquisitorial procedure was improved during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mainly by involving the state more and more in the initiation of cases, and by the seventeenth century it had become one of the main features of the absolutist state. When witches were subjected to this procedure they became entrapped in what is referred to as the state machine, from which, so it is argued, there was little hope of escape. It is interesting to note in this connection that the justification given for the exercise of these new judicial powers was the doctrine of ‘reason of state’, which itself reflected the ‘secular rationality’ of the early modem period. The third strand of the argument deals with the efforts of the state to reform society and transform it into a godly community. This involved the disciplining of the population or the ‘acculturation of the rural world’ that Robert Muchembled sees as one of the main characteristics of the absolutist state. This enterprise was undertaken by an entire hierarchy of officials, from the king down to the local judges and parish priests, all of whose authority the state was promoting.The prosecution of witches, according to this thesis, was just one part of this process of acculturation, one in which the state, usually with the assistance of the church, pursued the ultimate objective of destroying superstition, producing a more godly

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and homogeneous population, and promoting obedience to the ‘absolute king and to God’.3 The fourth part of the argument concerns the relationship between church and state. One of the main indications of the growing power of the state during the early modern period was that it effectively gained control over, or at least secured the support of, the church. In terms of jurisdiction, this meant either the assumption of control by secular authorities over matters previously entrusted to the church, or the use of ecclesiastical courts to provide effective support for secular tribunals. These changes, which took place throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, greatly facilitated the prosecution of witches. The state, with its almost unlimited judicial resources, was much more capable of conducting these prosecutions than the church had ever been. Even more important was the cooperation that developed between church and state, which was especially apparent in a crime of mixed jurisdiction like witchcraft. As that cooperation became more common, the crime of witchcraft was often viewed as treason against God on the one hand and an act of rebellion against the state on the other. The identification of secular and religious crime was deliberate:  the state prosecuted witches, so it is argued, in order to legitimise new regimes through the pursuit of religious deviants. It is not the purpose of this essay to challenge all these propositions. There is much of value in the historical work that has just been summarised, and historians of witchcraft have used it to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon we are studying. It is, for example, incontestable that the secularisation of witchcraft prosecutions had a dramatic impact on the intensity of prosecutions and the number of executions.4 It is also incontestable that the use of inquisitorial procedure by temporal authorities facilitated numerous prosecutions that otherwise might have been unsuccessful. There is, however, a danger inherent in this line of thought that we shall view the state, and especially the monarchy and the central authorities that most clearly embodied and represented it, as the dynamic force in witchcraft prosecutions.5 Nothing could be further from the truth. The active, the dynamic force in most witchcraft prosecutions were local authorities, members of local elites who did whatever they could to gain the sanction of central authorities but who did not serve as their direct agents.The central officers of the state, moreover, did much more to restrain these local authorities than to abet them in their efforts to prosecute witches. In order to illustrate this point, let us look closely at the Scottish situation. In many ways Scotland serves as the ideal test case for the process we are studying. The witch hunt in that country has been referred to as one of the major witch hunts in Europe, and the intensity of prosecutions was quite high, perhaps twelve

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times as great as in England, although it did not reach the level of some German states. While by no means one of the most powerful states of Europe, Scotland made sustained efforts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to increase the power of the central government, and it is precisely this attempt to strengthen the state that lies at the centre of the argument that has been outlined above. The Scottish parliament proclaimed the imperial status of its monarchy even earlier than did England, and from the fifteenth century onwards its rulers aspired towards absolute power. Scotland also experienced a reception of Roman law and adopted at least some aspects of inquisitorial procedure. Torture was used as part of an effort to repress political dissent and to assist the state in prosecuting crime. The links between this process of state development and witch hunting appear to be stronger in Scotland than in other European states. The prosecution of witches was secularised in Scotland at a fairly early date, and there was considerable cooperation between church and state in prosecuting the crime. James VI, the king of Scotland during one of the country’s most intense periods of witch hunting, not only was a royal absolutist but also wrote a treatise that encouraged the prosecution of witches. There were many efforts made throughout this period to associate witchcraft with political dissent. Finally, and most important, the crime of witchcraft was, according to Christina Larner, centrally managed. It seems therefore that Scottish witchcraft prosecutions can easily be placed within a framework of political development. According to Larner, the ‘Scottish witch-​hunt spanned a period which began with the rise of the doctrine of the divine right of kings and ended with the decline of the doctrine of the godly state’.6 Our inquiry must begin with the passage of the Scottish witchcraft statute of 1563, the law upon which all secular prosecutions were based until its repeal in 1736. On the face of it, this, like other European witchcraft statutes, proclamations or edicts, was an attempt by the state to assume control of a crime that was prosecuted, if at all, under the jurisdiction of relatively impotent church courts. But the statute does not represent any such secular initiative. The witchcraft statute was adopted by a parliament that was under considerable pressure from the church to inaugurate a campaign of moral reform and establish a godly discipline. This pressure marked the beginning of a long campaign by the clergy to encourage secular Scottish authorities to prosecute witches. This pattern is worth noting; the history of witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland is much more the story of a reluctant central government responding to pressure from subordinate authorities, in this case the clergy, than the attempt of a developing state to discipline the population. Far more important than the 1560s, at least for our purposes, are the 1590s, when intense witch hunting began, apparently under the supervision of the central

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government. Regarding the crisis of 1590–​1 and the subsequent orgy of witchcraft prosecutions much has been written, and there is no question that James VI, who became convinced that he, a divine right monarch who was the chief enemy of Satan, was the target of the witches’ activities, played a significant role in it. At one point he personally interrogated the North Berwick witches, who together with the earl of Bothwell were believed to have been involved in treason as well as witchcraft. But it would be misleading to see the government as the inspiration of the large rash of witchcraft trials that took place between 1591 and 1597, much less those that occurred after 1597. It is true that between 1591 and 1597 the privy council issued standing commissions to local authorities to seek out and punish witches in their towns and parishes. These commissions, however, represented responses to local pressures for prosecution, not initiatives taken by the king or privy council. Moreover, the government, having responded to the crisis in this way, discovered that the situation had become out of control, and in 1597 the privy council withdrew the standing commissions. In order to prevent such miscarriages of justice from ever occurring again, it insisted that henceforth all witchcraft trials receive authorisation from the privy council or the parliament. It was this decision that made Scottish witchcraft, in Larner’s words, a centrally managed crime, and it was this central management that allegedly allowed large witch hunts to develop in Scotland at a later date. But how much ‘management’ did the central officers of the Scottish state exercise over witchcraft prosecutions, and what was the effect of that management? Secular witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland took three different forms. The first was a prosecution in the central criminal court, the court of justiciary, a process that was often initiated by the lord advocate before royal judges. The second was in a circuit court, presided over by a judge from the central courts. The third was by a commission of justiciary, a warrant granted by either parliament or privy council that allowed members of local elites, such as elders and magistrates, to prosecute and execute witches. There was much more central management of the crime in the first two situations than the last. Although the government approved all three types of prosecutions, and to that extent exercised some control over the judicial process, it actually supervised the process only in the central and the circuit courts, in which officials of the central government conducted, or at the very least presided over, the trials. When commissions of justiciary were granted, however, the government virtually abdicated its control, allowing the local authorities to proceed as they wished, without any guidance or supervision from the state. This failure of the government effectively to ‘manage’ prosecutions in the localities assumes enormous significance when we learn that a solid majority of Scottish witchcraft prosecutions originated in parliamentary or conciliar commissions of

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justiciary, while less than one-​third took place in the justiciary court or in the circuit courts. Even more significant are the outcomes of those commissioned trials which, on the basis of admittedly limited evidence, resulted in the astonishingly high conviction rate of 95 per cent. By contrast the conviction rate in the central courts was 57 per cent, while in the circuit courts, which did not function effectively until the late seventeenth century, the conviction rate dropped to an even lower 45 per cent.7 What these figures suggest is that central authorities tended to exercise a restraining influence over Scottish witchcraft prosecutions while the members of local elites took the lead in demanding and obtaining their prosecution and conviction. It is important to emphasise that the activities of local elites which are reflected in these statistics are not those of private individuals, much less vigilantes. These men were acting by properly delegated authority, and the fact that they went to great lengths to obtain it, sending an agent to Edinburgh and producing sufficient documentation to the proper authorities, suggests that the rule of law was perhaps more firmly established throughout the kingdom than is usually conceded. What we are witnessing, however, is much more the local elite’s use of the judicial authority of the state for its own ends than the central government’s imposition of its will on subordinate authorities in the localities. The initiative is coming from the periphery, not the centre. The elders and magistrates who conducted these local trials were acting as the rulers of their towns and villages, not as agents of the central government or as executors of a central governmental policy. The role that central state authorities played in the process was minimal. … But what about the procedures that were used to try those witches who were successfully prosecuted? Part of the argument that links witch hunting to the growth of state power is the employment of inquisitorial procedure and the use of torture in the prosecution of witches. Both of these developments mark the officialisation and bureaucratisation of the judicial power as well as the replacement of private by public authority. With inquisitorial procedure the state assumes control over, if it does not also initiate, prosecutions, and through methods like torture it acquires the information that it needs successfully to prosecute dissenters and other enemies of the government. In many ways the advent of inquisitorial procedure is the quintessential expression of the new power of the state. Now it is important to recognise that Scottish criminal procedure was only partially inquisitorial. Scotland never did away with the petty trial jury, for example, an institution that vanished in those countries where the state gained full control of the judicial process. Nevertheless, Scottish courts did employ many features of continental criminal procedure, such as the initiation of cases by information and the creation of a legal dossier, and therefore it is worthwhile to inquire

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whether those features of Scottish justice contributed to the intensification of witch hunting. A strong case can be made for the fact that they did not. The main consideration here is that anything resembling inquisitorial procedure was utilised only in the court of justiciary and on circuit, where trained judges could oversee the judicial process, and it was precisely in these tribunals that witch hunting was greatly restrained. The lord advocate, to be sure, did initiate cases that might not have otherwise reached the courtroom. But once the case began, the officialisation of the Scottish criminal process worked to the advantage of the witch, resulting in a surprisingly high percentage of acquittals, almost as high as in England. One reason for this was the fact that in these central trials the witch was often granted a defence counsel, a luxury denied to her southern English neighbour. The relative moderation of central Scottish witchcraft trials can also be explained by the infrequency of the administration of judicial torture. Here we come to one of the great misconceptions in the history of Scottish witchcraft, one which also helps to explain the severity of local prosecutions. Contrary to widely held assumptions, Scottish courts did not have authority to use torture as an ordinary instrument of criminal prosecution. The Scottish law of torture was in fact almost the same as its English counterpart.Torture could be administered only by a warrant from the privy council or parliament and only when the members of those bodies considered information from the accused to be vital to the state. For this reason, the great majority of English and Scottish torture warrants dealt with crimes of a political nature:  treason, rebellion, sedition, attacks on prominent statesmen and religious subversion. Considering the large amount of information we have regarding the use of torture in Scottish witchcraft cases, one would expect to find a large number of warrants dealing with that crime. This is not the case. Between 1590 and 1689 the Scottish privy council issued only two warrants to torture suspected witches: the famous trials of 1591 in which James VI was the intended victim, and the trial of six men for murder by poison, witchcraft or some other ‘develische’ practice in 1610.8 If the official authorisation of torture in Scottish witchcraft cases occurred so infrequently, how then do we account for its reported use in numerous other witchcraft prosecutions? How, for example, do we account for the report published in England in 1652 that six Scottish witches had been whipped and their feet and heads burned by lighted candles while hanging by their thumbs with their hands tied behind their backs? The answer is that local magistrates were using torture illegally, a practice that central Scottish authorities only periodically tried to curb. In the case just cited, officials of the kirk were accused of having applied the torture before referring the case to the civil magistrate. In fact, almost all

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the evidence we have regarding the use of torture in Scottish witchcraft cases indicates that local magistrates or clergy, not central judges or councillors, were administering it without warrant, usually during the interrogations that took place shortly after apprehension.9 … It appears therefore that the growth of state power and the officialisation of the judicial process did very little to intensify witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland. Indeed, it was the failure of the state to control local authorities and to supervise local justice that led to the great prosecutions of the seventeenth century. These local authorities figured [out] how to use the power of the state to their advantage, mainly by obtaining commissions that entitled them to proceed. Once they started that procedure, however, they virtually ignored the rules regulating the administration of justice that the state had established, and illegally used one of the most terrifying instruments of state power, judicial torture, to secure convictions. … Leaving Scotland for the moment, let us ask whether we can extend this argument regarding state power to other European countries. It would seem that England, the country with which Scotland is most frequently compared, would completely destroy the argument and provide strong negative support for those who see links between absolutism and state power on the one hand and intense witch hunting on the other. The low number of witchcraft convictions in England is widely known, and it is tempting to attribute this, at least in part, to the country’s low level of ‘stateness’. … The problem here is that we tend to confuse what Michael Mann has referred to as despotic and infrastructural state power.10 England may have resisted the impulse towards absolutism, and its central government may have been both small and constitutionally restricted, but its judicial system was highly centralised, and the central government was able to run the country quite effectively. Indeed, if we measure stateness by the effective judicial power of the central government, England, a country with a common law and a national circuit court system, was one of the most powerful states in Europe. There is no better illustration of the effects of this strength than in the prosecution of witches, which was undertaken locally and without central governmental initiation but which was supervised quite closely and effectively by central judges at the semi-​annual assizes. It was this supervision, which was almost absent in local Scottish trials until the late seventeenth century, which ensured that the English prohibition of judicial torture would be enforced and the rules of evidence applied. … The importance of central supervision in English witchcraft prosecutions can be illustrated by the effects of its failure in the 1640s, when England experienced the largest witch hunt in its history. Between 1645 and 1647 the self-​defined witch-​ finders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, acting with considerable support and

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encouragement from towns and villages in the southeastern part of the country, discovered and assisted in the prosecution of large numbers of witches. In their work of detection they used procedures of highly questionable legality, including the torture of forced sleeplessness. Under normal circumstances the justices of the assize would have prevented the use of such evidence at the trials. At the Essex assizes in the summer of 1645, however, where most of the early convictions in this witch hunt took place, the circuit judges from Westminster were not in attendance. Instead, the court was convened under the presidency of the earl of Warwick, a legally untrained nobleman who represented military authority. Without the participation of judges from the central court, the justices of the peace who prosecuted the cases were given much more latitude in the use of evidence than they would have otherwise received. A second illustration of the absence of central judicial supervision comes from the English colonies in North America, where there was no circuit court system and where men without legal training served as judges. The danger inherent in such an arrangement became evident in Massachusetts in 1692, when 156 persons, most of them from Salem Village and Andover, were charged with witchcraft, a relatively large witch hunt that led to 19 executions. The judges who presided over these trials failed to enforce the fairly strict standards of judicial proof that had been applied both in English witchcraft trials and in those held in New England prior to the Salem episode.11 They also tolerated the use of both physical and psychological pressures in order to obtain confessions, thereby violating one of the most important procedural safeguards in Anglo-​American criminal law. It is interesting to note that these legally untrained men all came from the general vicinity where the accusations originated and were affected, therefore, by the highly charged emotional atmosphere that developed during the early stages of the hunt. Thus the Salem judges had more in common with the elders and lairds who served as local commissioners of justiciary in Scotland than with the central judges who went on circuit in England. … In France the prosecution of witches has been associated not only with ‘centralising absolutism’ and an attack on particularism but with the efforts of the state to discipline the population. Robert Muchembled has seen witch hunting as part of a larger attack on popular culture that was conducted by agents of state and church and was inspired by both the Counter-​Reformation and a programme of royal absolutism.12 Now if we consider the ‘state’ to comprise all ‘natural rulers’ from the king down through the hierarchy of provincial and local officials to parish priests and fathers within families, as Muchembled does, and if we consider absolutism to have entailed an assertion of power by all these authorities, then it is hard to deny that witchcraft prosecutions, which usually

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involved the exercise of power by elites over their inferiors, were the result of the rise of the absolutist state. The difficulty arises only when we attribute the inspiration of these witchcraft prosecutions to those royal officials who stood at the top of this hierarchy and when we see these trials as part of a policy of centralisation. It is true that most of those prosecutions took place in the peripheral regions of the kingdom, outside ‘royal’ France, but it is difficult to see this as part of an effort to destroy particularism. Indeed, the main reason why prosecutions flourished in these outlying regions was the failure of the government to supervise the judicial process. Local elites in these areas, to be sure, did everything they could to use state power to their advantage, just as they did in Scotland, but they did not prosecute witches as part of some centrally managed or centrally inspired campaign. Further evidence for the negative role of the French absolutist state in witchcraft prosecutions comes from the work of Alfred Soman on the decriminalisation of witchcraft in those areas which came under the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris. According to Soman, the source of the parlement’s policy of obligatory judicial review of all witchcraft convictions, which was proposed in 1588, enacted in 1604 and reenacted in 1624, was a local panic in the Champagne-​Ardennes region in 1587–​8. In this episode, which was not unlike the Scottish panic of 1591–​7, local officials were swimming suspected witches, using the courts to settle personal disputes, and executing suspects in summary fashion, sometimes by lynching. The process of establishing control over these local panics was a delicate one, but it eventually succeeded. Part of this process, it should be noted, was the effort of the parlement to restrict the administration of torture to itself, just as the Scottish privy council had tried to do.13 The important consideration for our purposes, however, is the fact that the process of state-​building, the process of controlling the periphery, indeed the process of establishing anything more than the most tenuous links between the centre and the periphery, had nothing to do with the encouragement of prosecutions and everything to do with its restraint. The effect of judicial centralisation in France was that the higher courts could monitor the actions of local judges, as they did frequently between 1580 and 1650, and even bring criminal charges against those who used abusive procedures in trying witches. … When we turn our attention to Germany, we find ourselves in a somewhat different political world. Here we have difficulty identifying the central state authorities. Should they be the officials of the large and amorphous empire or those of the 350 smaller political units that it comprised? If we decide upon the former, the main argument of this chapter finds strong, albeit negative, support. Even though the famous imperial law code of 1532, the Carolina, included a provision

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for prosecuting witches, imperial authorities did not actively pursue witches or encourage subordinate officials to do so. Even if they had, their task would have been difficult since imperial power was exceptionally weak. That of course is the reason why the smaller political units within the empire were able to prosecute witches with such freedom. However much the emperor might have wished to emulate the national states of Europe in restraining witchcraft prosecutions, he had virtually no jurisdictional weapons with which to act. He had no intendants, no viceroys, no circuit judges. He had a central imperial court, the Reichskammergericht, but no method of making appeals to it mandatory. In fact the only provision that imperial authorities could make for local witchcraft trials was the requirement that law professors from nearby universities provide instruction in a crime about which local authorities knew little. This provision, of course, had a devastating effect on witchcraft prosecutions, since it was these very jurists who provided local magistrates with demonological theories as well as a certain amount of procedural training.14 As we turn from Germany to Spain, the terms of the argument change once again, since many witchcraft cases were heard before the tribunals of the inquisition, which was of course an ecclesiastical institution. It was, however, also a royal institution, under the control of the king, and therefore can legitimately be considered as part of the state apparatus. Indeed, the inquisition has been referred to as ‘an instrument of royal policy, an agent of centralisation’, and a defence against the ‘centrifugal forces’ in Spanish politics. The extent to which the inquisition served to restrain the process of witch hunting, mainly by controlling the various tribunals through the central supreme council in Madrid, helps to illustrate how little witch hunting can be considered the result of centralisation or, more generally, the process of state-​building.15 Further support for this thesis comes from the evidence we have of intense witch hunting in the local municipalities, such as in the towns of Catalonia in 1618, which were sometimes able to evade strict control from the centre. Witch hunting in Italy, where most historians contend that the development of the modern state began, had much in common with the prosecutions that took place in Spain. In Italy, as in Spain, most witchcraft prosecutions came under the control of the inquisition, and as in Spain the judicial record is one of almost astonishing restraint. The main point to be made here is that it was in the courts of the Roman inquisition that inquisitorial procedure was perfected, and where the interest of the state in prosecutions was most boldly asserted. Yet that highly developed procedure, as John Tedeschi has shown, worked constantly in favour of the accused witch, certainly as much as the highly touted common law procedure that prevailed in England.16

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The final country in this survey, Denmark, is especially relevant to our concerns, since that kingdom, like Scotland, had a monarch who developed a personal commitment to witch hunting. Christian IV (1588–​1648), duly alarmed by a witch hunt that took the lives of eleven women in Koge in 1612, apparently was instrumental in the promulgation of the famous ordinance of 1617, which defined the crime of witchcraft for the first time and reserved the penalty of burning only to those who had made pacts with the Devil. Since prosecutions increased dramatically after 1617, it is tempting to see them as the result of actions taken at the centre, especially since accompanying legislation against adultery and fornication suggests a broader policy of state-​sponsored discipline.17 Once again, however, appearances are deceptive. Whatever the role of King Christian in these trials –​and it has not been established that there was any at all –​his government can certainly not be assigned responsibility for the hunt that occurred. Quite to the contrary, the impulse to witch hunting came from below, from the district courts, whereas the role of the central government was to ensure the adherence to established procedures, and to guarantee that all convictions from the lower courts be appealed to the county courts and, if necessary, to the supreme court. It is instructive to note that just under 90 per cent of the cases heard at the district level, where trials were held by juries that knew the accused, resulted in convictions, whereas the proportion at the royal county courts was approximately 50 per cent.18 These percentages, it should be recalled, come remarkably close to those in Scotland, and in both cases the local courts proceeded by jury trial, whereas in the higher courts inquisitorial procedure prevailed. Some of the conclusions that emerge from this study of witch hunting may not be all that startling. It has long been recognised that local courts pursued witches more aggressively than central courts; that many witchcraft convictions were reversed on appeal; that scepticism appeared first in the central courts.What is not often recognised, however, is the role that state-​builders played in this whole process. However much they may have wished for a more homogeneous population, however much they may have desired to discipline the lower classes and help the church wipe out superstition, they also were firm advocates of what has come to be called the rule of law, and that often meant adherence to strict legal procedure. These two goals, of social control and judicial restraint, came in conflict with each other, especially in cases of witchcraft, and the state found itself regulating over-​ zealous local authorities who exceeded the bounds of royal justice. If we wish to speak about reason of state and absolutism in connection with witch hunting, we should look less at the celebrated introduction of state-​sponsored prosecutions and the application of judicial torture, and much more at the central regulation of local justice.

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Notes 1 Gerhild Scholz Williams presents a version of this argument in the context of the Labourt region of the Basque Country in Chapter 19 in this volume. Joseph Klaits also suggests that witch hunts were encouraged by the extension of central governments in Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington, IN 1985), 131–​47 –​ Ed. 2 Hilde de Ridder-​Symeons, “Intellectual and Political Backgrounds of the Witch Craze in Europe”, in La Sorcellerie dans les Pay-​Bas sous l’Ancien Régime, Vol. 86 of Anciens pays et assemblées d’Etats (Georgia 1987), 37–​64. 3 See R.  Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–​1750 (Baton Rouge, LA 1985), 224–​30, 235–​78. 4 B. P.  Levack, The Witch-​Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London 1987), 77–​84; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt in Scotland (London 1981), 66. 5 The definition of the state used throughout this chapter is a formal and autonomous political organisation under one sovereign and final authority, the officers of which have the legally sanctioned authority to require obedience from the inhabitants of a large and usually contiguous territory over an extended period of time. 6 Larner, Enemies of God, 192. 7 In each calculation the author has considered only those cases whose outcomes are known. He also excludes those cases classified as “miscellaneous” since they were never fully tried, the accused having escaped from jail. The conviction rate for the circuit courts is especially low, since those courts heard cases only very late in this period, by which time the hunt was declining. The statistics for the trials authorised by commission receive confirmation from Sir George Mackenzie, who claimed that “scarce ever any who were accused before a Country Assize of Neighbours did escape that trial”, The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (Edinburgh 1678), 88. 8 In one sense the warrant of 1591 authorised an “indiscriminate witch-​hunt”, as Larner has argued, since the commissioners were given the power to examine and torture “all and sundrie persons” who had been, or would be, accused. The warrant did not, however, authorise indiscriminate witch hunting in the localities. It did not delegate the authority to torture to any other individuals besides the six commissioners, and it specifically reserved to the Council the decision whether to put the interrogated suspects to the knowledge of an assize. 9 See for example the report of locally administered torture in 1652 in B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (London 1652), 522. One of the main reasons for the use of torture at the local level is that the Council required a confession before granting an ad hoc commission to try the suspect. See Mackenzie, Laws and Customes, 88. 10 Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results”, in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford 1986), 114. 11 On the problem of proof in New England, see Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in 17th-​Century Massachusetts (Amherst, MA 1984), chs. 7–​ 10. The main decision of the judges was to accept spectral evidence. The judges

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also disregarded the two-​witness rule, which was part of New England criminal procedure. 12 Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture. 13 Alfred Soman, “Decriminalizing Witchcraft: Does the French Experience Furnish a European Model?”, Criminal Justice History, 19 (1989), 6. 14 On this practice see Gerhard Schormann, Hexenprozesse in Nordwestdeutschland (Hildesheim 1977), 158–​9. 15 See E. W. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy (Cambridge 1990), 69, for the tightening of controls over the local inquisitors, who in the earlier period were “virtually a law unto themselves”. 16 John Tedeschi, “Inquisitorial Law and the Witch”, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford 1990), 83–​118. 17 J. C.  V. Johansen, “Denmark:  The Sociology of Accusations”, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft,  345–​6. 18 Ibid., 349–​50.

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Chapter 21

William Monter WITCHCRAFT, CONFESSIONALISM AND AUTHORITY

W

I T C H T R I A L S V A R I E D greatly in number and intensity in different parts of Europe. Persecutions were most severe in German-​speaking territories; but even in these regions, the pattern of prosecutions was uneven. As William Monter shows here, a small number of huge panics were concentrated in the lands of the German “witch-​bishops” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, while other regions were relatively unscathed. Monter considers the legal, political and religious factors that contributed to the trials, and argues that decentralised courts and weak governments encouraged the worst witch-​hunts. It is interesting to compare his observations on the role of the “confessional” state with Stuart Clark’s chapter on witchcraft and the Reformation (16).

The huge differences in trials and executions of witches between the two largest regions of western Europe –​the kingdom of France and the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ –​masks major similarities between them. In both places, the impulse to hunt witches came primarily from beneath, from prominent people in local villages. Such local agendas were easily and willingly accommodated by local courts, but not by regional governments; higher court systems, as at Toulouse, were frequently critical of the primary-​level village courts which they supervised. For a legal scholar, the major difference between France and the Empire is that the former had a court system which was thoroughly centralized, while the

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latter was extremely decentralized. One example should suffice to illustrate the enormous difference in practical consequences between local self-​government and appellate justice. At the opposite extreme from French parlements, which generally rejected village testimony, stood the 550 villages and eleven small towns which today comprise Germany’s Saarland. During the half-​century after 1580, these virtually autonomous rustics executed 450 per cent more witches than the parlement of Paris, in a corner of the Empire divided among four principal overlords, two Protestant and two Catholic. Throughout the Saarland, witch-​ hunting remained firmly controlled by village authorities, usually operating through a system of special committees or ausschusse[s]‌, which a recent historian has aptly labelled ‘village inquisitions’.1 In this region, testimony about witches’ sabbats remained uncommon until the late sixteenth century, being employed first by younger people; but it spread quite rapidly after 1600. Thus the importance of the sabbat increased sharply at the village level in both central France and western Germany precisely when witch trials began to multiply around the end of the sixteenth century. We cannot say to what extent these French and German villagers grasped the theological implications of the concept of witchcraft as Devil-​worship which regional demonologists had been vigorously promoting since 1580; but it is painfully obvious just how eager they became around this time to learn about their neighbours’ dealings with the Evil One. … It is frequently claimed that witch trials multiplied across much of central and western Europe because of the religious fanaticism engendered by both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, which disastrously exacerbated the fears of an ignorant and suspicious peasantry. While it is difficult to deny some kind of connection between these movements, which had such profound effects on all layers of European society, and the concurrent wave of witch trials across much of western and central Europe, the exact relationship between these phenomena remains elusive. It is undeniable that both Protestant and Catholic governments sponsored witch-​hunting. Sometimes, as in the Saarland, Catholic overlords (the Duke of Lorraine and the Archbishop of Trier) were more likely to sponsor witch-​ hunts than Protestant sovereigns (in this case, the Lutheran Count of Nassau and the Calvinist Count of Zweibrücken). But in other regions, for example French-​speaking western Switzerland, Protestant rulers were more severe than Catholic overlords in prosecuting witches. The majority of Europe’s witch trials and executions took place in the century after 1560, coinciding with Europe’s wars of religion in France and the Low Countries, and frequently rose to a crescendo during the Thirty Years War. It has therefore been tempting to conclude that Europe’s great witch-​hunt was simply one tragic social consequence of its religious conflicts. However, any correlation between these two phenomena is far

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from direct. In the first place, the outbreak of warfare, whether or not religiously motivated, temporarily ended witch trials whenever and wherever it occurred. War disrupted all normal government activity. In the Saarland, for example, witch-​hunting ended abruptly in the mid-​1630s and did not resume for 30 years, because the region was so badly devastated that it lost up to four-​fifths of its population. Subtler connections must be found. Let us rethink the problem, starting from the fact that the two greatest leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Luther and Calvin, both explicitly approved the conduct of witch trials in their respective residences of Wittenberg and Geneva in the early 1540s. Since the papacy had officially approved the Malleus Maleficarum 60 years previously (or so its authors and publishers claimed) and Holy Scripture apparently threatened witches with death (Exodus 22:18), there was no reason for any major sixteenth-​century theologian to doubt the reality of witchcraft, although no socially responsible theologian would deliberately provoke witch-​hunts.2 So what, if anything, connects the Protestant Reformation, which occupied centre stage in most of Europe after 1520, to the rapid increase in witch trials in most of Europe during the century after 1560? If we reconceptualize the religious history of western Europe after 1560, traditionally known as the age of religious warfare, under its newer general label as ‘the age of confessionalism’, we can sketch a different picture. Long after Luther’s defiance of the papacy in 1520, the Protestant Reformation remained essentially a movement which was often repressed vigorously by major governments in western Europe. While thousands perished for heresy across western Europe between 1520 and the early 1560s, governments rarely sponsored witch trials. But the movement evolved into several organized churches, each with elaborate dogmatic codes designed to separate itself from the unorthodox. Protestant confessionalism seems to have flourished most vigorously around 1560, just when Catholicism was redefining itself through the Council of Trent. Confessionalism meant well-​trained clergy systematically indoctrinating precisely defined creeds. The Reformation transformed itself into well-​organized and well-​disciplined churches, most of which were under state control. These Protestant governments soon entered into long and ultimately inconclusive armed conflict with Catholic states. Both kinds of states relied heavily on their clergy to support their respective war efforts, and both sets of clergy responded enthusiastically. Regardless of whether or not their governments were officially at war, Europe’s rival confessions competed constantly with each other in demonstrating religious zeal. The need to discipline members who failed to meet confessional norms created a climate in which overt repression of religious deviance increased. Witchcraft –​an extremely dangerous form of Christian apostasy –​now became

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a much-​feared form of religious deviance, in addition to the social dangers which maleficent magic had always posed. Under such conditions, theologians of all confessions warned about an alarming increase in witchcraft; a few of them, for example the Calvinist Lambert Daneau or the Jesuit Mart[í]n Del R[i]‌o, even composed demonologies, while a great many others preached sermons on the subject. Although the role of confessionalism in encouraging witch-​ hunting remained indirect, mainstream Protestant and Catholic Churches exerted much energy across the ‘confessional century’ after 1560 in catechizing their membership and reinforcing an awareness of sin and diabolical temptations in both oneself and others. Parishioners’ fears of immoral activities, among which witchcraft occupied a uniquely powerful place, increased; and in the Saarland and northern France, awareness of the witches’ sabbats spread at the local level. Overt warfare between confessions, however, was extraneous to this process and actually interfered with it. … A handful of huge witch-​hunts, sponsored by the three archbishop-​electors of western Germany and a few other prelates, accounted for over one-​third of all executions for witchcraft in [the territories that constitute] present-​day Germany, and for almost a quarter of all such executions in Europe, during the century after 1560. This phenomenon was noticed by at least one seventeenth-​century contemporary, himself a fugitive from the largest witch-​hunt of all. ‘The Roman Catholic subjects, farmers, winegrowers, and artisans in the episcopal lands are the most terrified people on earth’, noted Hermann Loher, ‘since the false witch trials afflict the German episcopal lands incomparably more than France, Spain, Italy, or Protestants’. These huge witch-​hunts began in the lands of Johann VII von Schönenberg, Archbishop of Trier, in the mid-​1580s and ended in the lands of Ferdinand of Bavaria, Archbishop of Cologne, in 1639. Between these dates, and almost midway between Trier and Cologne, several cycles of witch-​hunting under consecutive Archbishops of Mainz between 1593 and 1631 resulted in approximately 1,500 deaths for witchcraft in this Electorate, surpassing the overall total for Trier and not far below the total for Cologne. What made some Catholic landed prelates, and especially their leaders, the three archbishop-​electors, such remarkable witch-​hunters? Not their religion. Seventeenth-​century Germany’s two most prominent and equally devout Catholic brothers, Maximilian and Ferdinand of Bavaria, took diametrically opposed positions on witch-​hunting. After some hesitation, Maximilian effectively stifled witch-​hunts in [Bavaria], Germany’s largest Catholic duchy during his long reign, while Ferdinand orchestrated the single largest witch-​hunt in European history. The most persuasive explanation for such differences is that Catholic landed prelates were ‘prisoners of their situation’ within the Empire. Their political

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weaknesses stemmed from two main causes. First, unlike secular princes, they had no heirs and thus no continuity in office. Second, their authority was often stymied by their chapters, who were permanent, irremovable and frequently pursued interests opposed to theirs. Thus the central governments of the great ecclesiastical princes were proverbial for their inefficiency, and their control over the large blocks of territory owing allegiance to them tended to be haphazard. At the same time, these prelates were spiritual as well as temporal lords: their moral obligation to improve the spiritual as well as the material environment of their subjects was more direct and more intense than for even the most paternalistic and zealous secular rulers. The resulting combination of inefficient government and heightened moral obligation defined the parameters within which these great landed prelates operated. Of course, the material needs of their subjects also played a vital part in precipitating and sustaining witch-​hunting. The Lutheran ruler who began Germany’s first large witch-​hunt had been enraged by the ruin of Wiesensteig’s 1562 wine crop through a sudden and severe hailstorm which he and some of his subjects imputed to witchcraft. The archbishopric of Trier, located along the Mosel valley, included important winegrowing regions, vulnerable to hailstorms which could destroy a harvest within an hour. The remarkably lengthy and severe witch-​hunts which afflicted the archbishopric of Trier during the 1580s and 1590s coincided with a prolonged cycle of extremely poor grain and wine harvests; in the eighteen years of Archbishop von Schonenberg’s reign since 1581, noted a local chronicler, Trier had seen only two good harvests.3 Germany’s first ‘superhunt’, unrolling against this gloomy backdrop of chronic dearth, seems noteworthy for several reasons. First, its scale was unprecedented; this was the first occasion in European history where we know the exact names and locations of hundreds of accused witches tried and executed in one small region within a few years, although unfortunately it would not be the last such instance. Second, it produced some peculiar twists in the social history of witchcraft and witches’ sabbats. Last but not least, it generated theoretical treatments of witchcraft with significant consequences for German Catholicism in this confessional age. The sheer scale of the persecutions in the lands of the Archbishop of Trier between the mid-​1580s and early 1590s can best be approached through the elaborate register of suspects made for Claudius Musiel, a highly placed official: it lists over 6,000 accusations resulting from over 300 executions scattered across several districts of the electorate in a few years. Complementing it are more than a hundred surviving trial dossiers, including many names not found in Musiel’s register. Although lacunae make exact totals impossible to calculate, it seems certain that

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no fewer than 500 and no more than 1,000 people were executed on charges of witchcraft in the electorate of Trier during von Schonenberg’s reign. … Because of its sheer scale, Europe’s first ‘superhunt’ reached unusually high up the social ladder in searching out suspected witches. Musiel’s register includes the names of some priests who were indicted and burned as witches; one of them, it seems, became the principal accuser of the most prominent victim of this panic –​ or, for that matter, the most prominent person executed for witchcraft anywhere in sixteenth-​century Europe. Doctor Dietrich Flade, vice-​rector of the University of Trier and former electoral councillor, was probably arrested because he and a few magistrates in the city of Trier had tried to obstruct the witch-​hunters. A carefully orchestrated campaign produced numerous accusations by convicted witches that they had seen Dr Flade at the sabbat. Moreover, many of them insisted that he and his influential cronies flaunted their social rank at these diabolical assemblies. Instead of the broomsticks used by ordinary witches, they arrived in horse-​drawn carriages, wearing expensive silks and furs, and enjoyed front-​row seats while the Devil exhorted his audience to do as many evil deeds as possible. Under torture, Dr Flade made a full confession and was burned in 1587. His fate remained exceptional; although one encounters several wives of officials and even an occasional magistrate among the victims of subsequent German witch-​hunts, this elaborate vendetta and the accompanying accusations about social discrimination at witches’ sabbats found no real echo in the subsequent history of witch-​hunting in the Empire. The official orchestrating this ‘superhunt’ was not Trier’s archbishop, but his vicar, Peter Binsfeld. In order to justify such an extensive prosecution and the burning of such prominent people, Binsfeld composed a short Treatise on the Confessions of Witches and Sorcerers, which he had printed at Trier in both Latin and German between 1589 and 1591. Although he claimed that the guilt of witches was ‘clearer than the noonday sun’, Binsfeld desired a more comprehensive and effective refutation of the heretical sceptic, [Johann] Weyer, and hired a Dutch Catholic scholar named Cornelius Loos to compose one.4 However, Loos decided after reading him that Weyer was essentially correct, and he had begun printing his treatise at Cologne in 1593 when his furious patron managed to stop the presses and have all copies of the book destroyed. Loos was arrested and shipped to Trier, where he was compelled to perform a public abjuration in Binsfeld’s presence. A  stubborn man, Loos was soon imprisoned again at Brussels for his outspoken criticisms of witch trials. The official silencing of this Catholic intellectual inadvertently solidified a Catholic confessional position about a previously unresolved issue, much as Galileo would subsequently do with Copernicanism.

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From the archbishopric of Trier, which continued to prosecute witches sporadically until the 1630s, the pattern of major witch-​hunts soon spread north-​east to the archbishopric of Mainz. In this region, where executions for witchcraft were almost unknown before 1590, four main cycles of persecution occurred in 1593–​8, 1601–​5, 1611–​18 and 1627–​31, under five consecutive archbishops. As at Trier, much evidence from Mainz suggests that ‘village inquisitions’ which indicted, tortured and convicted witches were primarily responsible for these trials, leaving the archbishop’s officials with little to do except organize executions. At Mainz, the earliest prosecutions were directed overwhelmingly against women (only five men and 61 women were executed here in the 1590s), while men were more common among the final group of victims (30 per cent of the 141 people executed at Dieburg from 1627 to 1630). As at Trier, there was a ‘spillover effect’ from Mainz into condominiums ruled jointly with secular lords and even into such Lutheran lands as Büdingen. In fact, the worst outbreak under Archbishop Adam von Bicken (1601–​5) occurred in the condominium of Alzenau, comprising thirteen small villages east of Frankfurt which he ruled jointly with the Calvinist Counts of Hanau: in 40 months, no fewer than 139 witches (thirteen of them men) were burned at Alzenau –​almost one adult in ten and one adult woman in every six. However, the persecutions in the archbishopric of Mainz apparently peaked only after 1626, lasting until Swedish troops captured Mainz in December 1631. An outbreak of plague then severely depopulated the archbishopric and effectively paralysed witch-​hunting for over a decade.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Walter Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen (Göttingen 1991).Wolfgang Behringer also draws on Rummel’s work in Chapter 10 in this volume –​ Ed. Stuart Clark considers the similarities between Protestant and Catholic demonology in Chapter 16 in this volume  –​ Ed. For the “unnatural weather” that inspired fears of maleficium in Trier, see Chapter 10 in this volume by Wolfgang Behringer –​ Ed. Elisa Slattery examines Weyer’s arguments against witch trials in Chapter 26 in this volume –​  Ed.

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PART SIX

Witchcraft, possession and the Devil

A

L A T E M E D I E V A L W O O D C A R V I N G I N Malvern priory church in England depicts a confrontation between a monk and the Devil. The viewer is left in no doubt about who is having the best of the encounter: wearing a gleeful expression, the monk pokes the thin end of a pair of bellows into the fiend’s anus and squeezes the handles with all his might. This grotesque image captures some of the qualities often attributed to the Devil in the late Middle Ages. First of all, the evil one is depicted as vulnerable: his attempt to torment a pious churchman is plainly doomed to fail. Second, the Devil is imagined as a physical creature, with bodily limitations that are crudely underlined by the method of his ousting. Lastly, the fiend is shown as a suitable subject for comedy: the carving’s scatological humour is typical of late medieval and early sixteenth-​century jokes about the Devil that flourished in popular drama and collections of “merry tales”.1 These light-​hearted representations were not, of course, the only way in which Satan was perceived. The vivid and ghastly depictions of hell and the Last Judgement that adorned churches across medieval Europe were a reminder of the fate awaiting sinners in the life to come. Equally, the surviving accounts of pious Christians who came face to face with the evil one, and poor souls who suffered the pains of demonic possession, testify to the horror that Satan could sometimes inspire. For Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-​century mystic and author of the earliest autobiography in the English language, visions of demons “with mouths all alight with burning flames of fire” were so terrifying that they drove her to contemplate

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suicide.2 But such perceptions of the Devil co-​existed with a wide range of different representations. In various contexts, the fiend could appear as a figure of comedy or dread, as a mighty “prince of the world”, or a limited creature with little power over God-​fearing Christians. Out of this abundance of diverse images and conceptions of Satan in the late Middle Ages, one particular strain of thought emerged as a dominant pattern among the magisterial classes of early modern Europe. This was a particularly pessimistic view of the Devil’s influence in earthly affairs, which tended to portray him as an ever-​present threat to the wellbeing of individuals and societies. In the first contribution to Part Six, H. C. Erik Midelfort (22) describes this process as the “demonization of the world”, in which educated Christians came increasingly to “describe the apparent chaos of life as a dramatic encounter of good with evil, of angelic with diabolical”.This trend was particularly evident in the second half of the sixteenth century, and expressed itself in a wide variety of forms: the new German literary genre of Teufelbücher, which depicted the seven deadly sins as expressions of demonic power; the high-​profile cases of possession and exorcism in Germany, France and Italy; and the marked tendency among Catholic and Protestant writers to attribute all sinful thoughts and behaviour to the direct inspiration of Satan. In England, this last trend was exemplified in devotional writings and catechisms. In 1560, for example, Thomas Becon devoted three pages to the temptations of Satan in his exposition of the line “Deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer, whereas earlier commentators had covered the whole prayer without a single reference to the Devil.3 In seeking the origins of this trend, it is important to note that it occurred across confessional boundaries, and cannot therefore be attributed to the influence of one particular creed. The “demonisation” of Europe can probably be explained by the context of religious conflict itself, since this encouraged both sides to appreciate the power of evil in what many believed to be the last days of the world; it might also have arisen from the efforts of state churches to impose new standards of morality and religious belief on their populations, as these standards exposed the myriad imperfections of a nominally Christian society.4 This process had some major implications for the crime of witchcraft. It created a climate in which reports of maleficium could easily be perceived as the work of the Devil. This was true when diabolical elements were absent in the original allegations, but emerged subsequently through the intervention of individuals acquainted with Christian demonology; but it could also involve a blending of learned and popular ideas about harmful spirits. As Charlotte-​Rose Millar argues in her contribution (23), the association between witchcraft and evil spirits was especially marked in England. Here it was linked to the pervasive belief in witches’ familiars –​or “sprites” or imps –​which featured prominently in popular

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printed accounts of the crime across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some respects, these creatures confounded orthodox ideas about Satan:  they often took the form of small animals that fed on teats concealed on the witch’s body. But as Millar suggests, they were sufficiently similar to traditional Christian representations of the Devil to add a decidedly demonic aspect to English witch beliefs. She develops this idea further to argue that the demon-​creatures described in the pamphlets often engaged in sexual activity with their human associates by sucking at teats located on their breasts and genitals. When familiar spirits took human form, as was reported more frequently after the East Anglian trials in the 1640s, they also indulged in sexual intercourse with witches. Thus, English witchcraft had a distinctly diabolical character, apparently incorporating both popular and learned ideas about malevolent spirits. Another effect of “the demonization of the world” was the proliferation of allegations of witchcraft arising from cases of possession. This was because the affliction was frequently attributed to witches who cast demons into their victims’ bodies. Consequently, possessed individuals –​or “demoniacs” –​were encouraged to identify the person responsible. Here again there was a discrepancy between folk beliefs and learned theology. As Erik Midelfort notes (22) in the context of sixteenth-​century Germany, cases of possession were often “the product of popular fears, fancies, and images of the Devil or of other spirits”, and these attitudes “were thoroughly strange to the biblical, classical, or medical minds of the literate”. Nonetheless, popular beliefs about possession generated accusations of witchcraft; and this process was easily combined with orthodox demonology when the afflicted person was subjected to a Christian exorcism. In their contributions to Part Six, Kathleen Sands and Sarah Ferber explore the role of possession and exorcism in the “confessional” culture of early modern Europe. Both note the political significance of these experiences. The confrontation between the exorcist and the Devil was an opportunity to demonstrate and publicise the power of the ministry; and since the ability to cast out demons was a sign of the true Church, it also affirmed the legitimacy of the Protestant and Catholic confessions. During the dispossession of Anne Mylner in 1564, Sands (24) describes how Mylner’s Anglican exorcist prevented her (or the demon inside her) from calling on the Virgin Mary for help. The successful expulsion of the demon demonstrated the vanity of such popish behaviour. Subsequently, Mylner’s deliverance was the subject of a sermon in Chester cathedral and a pamphlet to record the “rare and notable” event. In contemporary France, the expulsion of demons demonstrated the power of the Catholic mass. As Sarah Ferber notes (25), the spirits inside possessed women were heard to cry out in pain when their victims were offered the consecrated host. Like their Protestant equivalents, these

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exorcisms were actively publicised. German Jesuits also appreciated the value of exorcism in their missionary efforts:  from the 1560s onwards, their public dispossessions attracted large crowds and were often directed to winning converts to Catholicism.5 For the participants in these events, possession and exorcism were a complex form of cultural theatre. The role of the demoniac was conditioned by the expectations of those around them; and a successful “performance”, as Kathleen Sands points out, could confer benefits on the individual and the wider community. For a brief period, the demoniac enjoyed an enhanced social status; they could also, if their dispossession was successful, obtain relief from emotional or physical distress. For the community at large, the act of exorcism demonstrated the power and presence of God in an insecure world. But the performance of possession was also a difficult and potentially hazardous enterprise. In the context of Catholic France, Sarah Ferber notes that possessed women had to conform to exacting standards of behaviour. Crucially, they had to present themselves as the wholly passive victims of an invading force that could be confronted and constrained by the men who set about their dispossession. Evidence of physical suffering helped to legitimise their performance, and excessive displays of authority aroused suspicion. The brutal exorcism of Anne Mylner in 1564, in which she was pinned down as vinegar was poured down her throat, suggests that Protestant demoniacs did not escape the effects of similar expectations. The passivity of possessed individuals marked them as innocent victims of the Devil’s malice. The same was not true of witches, who were held to enter willingly into compacts with Satan. This view underpinned the concept of witchcraft as a crime: the witch had chosen deliberately to assist the Devil in his plans to cause suffering and death. As Elisa Slattery points out, however, this position limited the Devil’s power in important respects. In her study of the sceptical demonologist Johann Weyer (26), she shows how a more pessimistic view of Satan as the “prince of this world” could undermine the whole basis of witch trials. Following the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Weyer perceived the Devil as a mighty and ingenious spirit whose capacity to harm was limited only by the laws of nature and the will of God. For Weyer, it followed that the Devil had no need to enlist human confederates in order to work maleficium  –​he could do so on his own account. Weyer acknowledged the reality of the demonic pact, but he viewed it as a cruel deception with no status in law. If women compacted with Satan it was because they were unable to resist his great intellect and false promises –​not least because of the “weakness of spirit, mind, and natural disposition” that characterised their sex. They were, in effect, much closer to the innocent victims of possession than equal partners in a crime.

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It can be argued that Weyer’s analysis was as much a product of the “demonization of the world” as the work of Martín Del Rio and Pierre De Lancre. He accepted, like the great majority of demonologists, that the Devil was bound by natural laws; but he rejected the optimistic view that he could be defeated by human ones. For Weyer, witch trials were an inadequate instrument with which to fight evil spirits; still worse, they were one that the Devil himself could exploit for his own purposes. As a master of deceit, he could use allegations of maleficium to condemn the innocent and spread misery and fear. The best way to deal with cases of witchcraft, therefore, was to exercise scepticism and caution. Weyer’s example shows that belief in a mighty and terrible Devil did not lead inevitably to the persecution of witches. On the contrary, it could encourage a prudent determination to evade his many snares.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

For comic representations of Satan, see Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England (History Press 2010), 35–​7, 87–​93. The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Penguin 1985), 41–​2. Thomas Becon, The Worckes (1564), Vol. I, 323r–​324r. In 1530, Richard Whytford’s A Werke for Householders included a commentary on the same text that did not refer to the Devil at all. See the chapters in Part Four of this book for the efforts of Protestant and Catholic reformers to build a Christian society. William Monter also considers this theme in Chapter 21 –​  Ed. For Jesuit exorcisms in Counter-​Reformation Germany, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe (Routledge 1994), ch. 8.

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Chapter 22

H. C. Erik Midelfort THE DEVIL AND THE GERMAN PEOPLE

H

I S T O R I A N S H A V E O F T E N noted a preoccupation with the power of the Devil in early modern Europe. Here H. C. Erik Midelfort explores this theme at many levels in the context of Germany, the region most severely affected by witchcraft persecutions. Among much else, he charts the rise in cases of demonic possession and notes the contrast between learned and popular understandings of this phenomenon. This theme has affinities with Clive Holmes’ discussion of possession and “familiar spirits” in English witchcraft (30), as well as the chapters by Kathleen Sands (24) and Sarah Ferber (25).

The world of ordinary experience in the villages of sixteenth-​century Germany was full of spirits, who might frighten the cattle, spoil the beer, and keep butter from forming in the churn. … It is hard to find out much in detail about these spirits and goblins and elves because literate people usually described such ideas as superstition. For Lutherans and Catholics alike, the world was not full of all sorts of spirits. Instead there were, fundamentally, only two kinds of spirits in the world: good angels and bad; and of the two, devils were far the more active. Indeed, one of the most pervasive processes across the sixteenth century, and not just in Germany, was the growing demonization of the world. The learned and literate found that it made better sense of their world to describe the apparent chaos of life as a dramatic encounter of good with evil, of angelic with diabolical.

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The process of demonization has been particularly well studied in the area of Lutheran ethics, for here the process resulted in an entirely new genre of literature, the Teufelbucher [devil books], in which all the old vices of vanity, drunkenness, gluttony, lust, gambling, and infidelity were transformed. What Sebastian Brant and his generation around 1500 had attributed to folly in the Ship of Fools was rebaptized and reinterpreted as diabolic, starting in the 1550s with such works as Gorlitz’s Sauffteufel and Musculus’s Hosenteufel, Fluchteufel, and Eheteufel.1 By the 1560s the genre had become a publishing fad, with as many as twenty-​ one “devils” detected and described by (mainly) Gnesio-​Lutheran moralists up to 1569.2 The odd result of this flurry was not exactly what the authors earnestly intended. If every vice had not just some foolish blindness at its base but a specific devil, then the Devil himself could begin to seem foolish, consuming his destructive energies in the effort to tempt mankind to wear large ruffled collars, pointed shoes, pleated shirts, and enormous pantaloons, or coaxing would-​be Christians into un-​Christian dancing, swearing, disobedience to masters, melancholy, and general laziness. It should be more widely recognized that even among the literate and learned the Devil had an amazing variety of shapes, ranging from these faintly ridiculous echoes of the medieval vice and folly figures up to figures of full apocalyptic terror. Before we draw too sharp a contrast between the Devil of the learned and the demons of the people, therefore, we should have firmly in mind the fact that even among the learned, and even during the process I have called the demonization of the world, the learned and literate were hardly unanimous in their view of what was meant when it was said that the Devil was everywhere. Even so it would be foolish to deny that popular and learned culture diverged over just such an issue, as the history of witchcraft suggests. … By studying the publicly reported cases of demon possession I hope to uncover what the ordinary people of sixteenth-​century Germany may have thought of the Devil. I  have now read most of the pamphlets, broadsides, wonder books, and sermons published before 1600 in which demonic actions of all sorts were reported. I am prepared to claim, moreover, that certain popular views are evident in these reports and sermons, but of course such sources have their obvious weaknesses and limitations as guides to the popular mind. First of all, such books make no claim to list all the cases of possession even for a given town or year. Their authors selected examples in order to illustrate a conclusion, and one can search in vain, for example, for Catholic accounts of unsuccessful exorcisms, even though we know that there must have been many unsuccessful efforts to free the victims of demonic obsession or possession. It was, moreover, never against the law to be demon-​possessed, and so we cannot expect to find official registers anywhere of the possessed. Like Judith Klatten, many of the possessed may have lain

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in obscurity without ever coming to literate attention. We don’t know how large the “dark figure” may have been. Second, the sources I  have read are often pieces of zealous polemic.3 They can hardly be said to have even tried to present cool-​headed, objective observation. When Johann Conrad Dannhauer of Strasbourg described the pitiful case of a ten-​year-​old daughter of a high noble family in 1654, he recorded such detailed and theologically correct conversations between the girl and the Devil that any modern reader will be drawn to the conclusion that Dannhauer himself composed these dialogues. Similarly, when Tobias Seiler described the possession and liberation of a twelve-​year-​old Silesian girl in 1605, the Devil apparently entered into such theologically learned arguments with Seiler and with other observers, over several days, that any reader is bound to conclude that Seiler was composing not only his own lines, but the Devil’s, too. These are hardly examples of straight reportage. Even so, I think that we can get some real glimpses of what these girls may have actually said, some impression of how they understood their troubles, as distinguished from the theological and polemical interpretation to which they were immediately subjected. For example, Dannhauer’s Strasbourg girl spoke so often and apparently so movingly of wanting to die, of being ready to die, and of seeing God, that we can surely regard her as a religiously melancholy child with strongly mystical yearnings. And Seiler’s girl seems to have spoken with the voice of the Devil, threatening to leave a terrible stench and warning that he would shit in the pastor’s throat to make him hoarse. Such notes, I am suggesting, have the ring of spontaneous reporting. They do not seem to me to be merely the acidulous products of overheated theological zeal, although one should reckon with the possibility that Luther’s scatalogical contempt for the Devil persuaded his followers to use rough talk with the Enemy. Even so I believe that Seiler was here providing a reasonably accurate account of this event. It remains true that these sources are colored lenses that distort what they permit us to see, but if we can take the shape and color of the lens into account, we may yet be able to say something of what demon possession was like to the demon-​possessed and, more generally, what ordinary people in the German-​speaking lands thought of the Devil. One fact on which both the learned and the illiterate would have agreed was the evident rise in demon possession in the second half of the sixteenth century. Observers at the time were so impressed with this spread of possession that no previous age, with the exception of Christ’s own age, seemed to have presented so many frightful examples of the Devil’s rage. His attacks were a staple feature of the wonder and prodigy literature of the second half of the century. Job Fincel’s Wunderzeichen, for example, was entirely conceived in the spirit of proving that the rising tide of monstrous births, fiery signs in the heavens, and devilish interventions

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in the shape of storms, disasters, and demonic possessions gave proof of the imminent end of the world and the urgent need to repent so long as a few seconds remained before the end. Johann Weyer’s famous attack on witchcraft trials, the De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563), endorsed this point of view by claiming that in this, the old age of the world, Satan lorded it over the minds of men as never before.4 Similarly, when a panel of pastors and theologians investigated the mass possessions at Friedeberg and Spandau in 1593–​94, they concluded in their report that such demonic actions were only possible because the second Advent Christi was at hand. As in the days of his incarnation, now too the world swarmed with devils and with possessed persons. After all, God had revealed (Rev. 20) that Satan would be turned loose exactly one thousand years after the reign of Gregory the Great: 593 + 1000 = 1593.5 Here we do surely see the learned theological mind at work, but at its base lay the commonplace that there had never been so many possessions before. No work set forth this point of view more successfully than the sturdy treatise by the ecclesiastical superintendent of Mecklenburg, the well-​ known Lutheran moralist Andreas Celichius, whose Notwendige Erinnerung Von des Sathans Letzten Zornsturm (1594, 1595) gathered all of these observations and arguments together. In just the last twelve years, Celichius exclaimed, he had himself seen about thirty cases of possession, “some of whom became possessed and convulsive here, but others of whom have come wandering here from Holstein, Saxony, and Pomerania, presenting such horrible spectacles that modest souls have been thoroughly disgusted.” To understand such sufferings and to learn how to treat the miserably possessed were, therefore, timely, even urgent, tasks. … At least thirty-​two places [in the German-​speaking lands] were touched by possession between 1490 and 1559, a span of seventy years; but the next twenty years (1560–​79) found twenty-​three places infected; and the last twenty years of the century (1580–​99) added a further forty-​four locations (and a generous increase in scale as well). I  do not think that we should regard this apparent increase as an artifact, a product, let us say, of better publicity or better survival of the appropriate sources. If such factors were important we would have a hard time explaining the apparently dramatic drop in possession cases in the first half of the seventeenth century, a time period during which I record only fourteen publicly known cases of demon possession in the various Germanies. Therefore we should confront the fact that demon possession cases became common in Germany just as witchcraft was generally assuming the dimensions of an epidemic as well. It is well known that Germany experienced relatively few and small witchcraft trials from ca. 1490 to 1560, but that from then on the panic began to spread.6 Were the two sorts of diabolical activity connected? In several well-​known cases the answer is definitely yes. One widespread assumption

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was that witches could cause another person to become demon-​possessed, an assumption so widespread that already in 1563 Johann Weyer devoted Book Three of De Praestigiis Daemonum to refuting it as an absurdity. His critique went unattended in many cases, such as in the 1583 possession and exorcism of Anna Schlutterbaurin, whose very own grandmother was convicted and executed for causing the granddaughter’s possession. Dannhauer’s report from 1654 of the miserably possessed girl in Strasbourg contained the same information, and although the girl could not be helped in any dramatic way, at least the witch responsible for her troubles could be eliminated, by burning. Roughly speaking, this was the crime of the witches at Salem, Massachusetts, forty years later, for they, too, were convicted of bewitching the tormented girls of Salem. The problem with proving the guilt of a witch accused of causing the possession of another was that invariably the accusation lay in the mouth of one who was known to be full of the Devil, the very father of lies. From the beginning of the great witch-​hunts after 1560, therefore, theologians and jurists repeatedly cautioned against taking the accusations of the possessed as serious evidence. And this caution was so widely heeded that we cannot draw any general connection between cases of possession and the rising tide of witchcraft prosecutions. This parallel to witchcraft is worth exploring in some detail, for even if one did not regularly cause the other, there are similarities we should not overlook. For example, physicians, jurists, and theologians agreed that women were more likely to fall into the crime of witchcraft, and they cited all the well-​known spiritual and physical weakness of women, especially post-​menopausal women. In their weaknesses, loneliness, poverty, melancholy, infidelity, uncontrollable fantasies, and general sexual frustration, old women made easy victims for the Devil, who usually offered them comfort, riches, companionship, dances, feasts, and an active sex life.7 So much for the general theory. The match with judicial reality was surprisingly exact. We know that roughly 80 percent of the persons executed as witches in Europe were women, and that older women were more commonly convicted than younger girls or young married women. What we have hitherto failed to notice is that the very same medical and theological reasons existed for expecting demonic possession to predominate among older women as well. The Devil was keen to exploit the weakness, loneliness, infidelity, and melancholy of old women, and yet here we historians have been trained or misled, especially by a few celebrated French episodes, to think that demon possession was mainly an affair with young women, especially nuns. Medical theory in the sixteenth century did regularly note the mental hazards of celibacy for cloistered nuns, but even for physicians it was old nuns who were most at risk, owing to their excessive dryness. Young women were supposedly too healthy to be regular victims of the Devil, and

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they constitute therefore a major breach in the link between medico-​theological theory and actual cases of demon possession. If we look carefully, however, we will find an even more dramatic breach. Gender in German cases of possession, 1490–1650 Dates

1490–​1559 1560–​1579 1580–​1599 1600–​1650

Individual possessions

Mass possessions

Female

Male

Gender unknown

Female

Male

Mixed genders

19 10 17 5

10 2 15 8

0 0 7 1

1 5 1 0

0 1 0 0

4 1 7 0

From an examination of the table we can discover that women did indeed predominate in the relatively quiet period before 1560, although even then I have recorded four episodes of mass possession (Geel, Lemgo, Thuringia, and Mechelroda) in which the sexes were mixed (we have no clue as to the proportions within the mixture). The period 1560–​79 matches our common expectations most perfectly, with ten individual female cases and five cloisters compared to only two male individual cases, but even in this period there was one mass possession of boys (thirty boys from Amsterdam, 1566) and one mixed mass possession (among the citizens of Hamm). Thereafter, our expected picture runs into even more trouble. For the period 1580–​99, male individual possessions ran about equal to the female cases (15 to 17), and we need to add the extraordinary mass possessions from Brandenburg and, to a lesser extent, Saxony. The reports of eyewitnesses in Brandenburg from the 1590s repeatedly stated that the Devil seized people and shook them, sending them off into seizures without respect of age or gender. Some 150 were afflicted in the Neumark town of Friedeberg, and about 40 people fell under attack in Spandau, just west of Berlin. Berlin itself came under siege, as did the towns of Stendal, Tangermande, and the Saxon town of Lindau. Unfortunately, we cannot tell the proportions of male and female in these episodes, but contemporary observers were struck by the promiscuous nature of these assaults. Although there are only a few cases after 1600, the new pattern apparently continued, with eight men and five women coming to public attention between 1600 and 1650. I find this deviation from learned theory instructive, for it suggests that theologians, jurists, and physicians of the sixteenth century were in no position to evoke cases of demonic possession in exactly the shapes they dictated or expected. Unlike witchcraft, it was no crime to be possessed, and perhaps this simple

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difference left possession more in the hands and minds of ordinary people than the crime of witchcraft, which was after all defined, prosecuted, and routinized by the literate magisterial classes of Europe. This means in turn that the actual cases of demonic possession, as we find them in the accounts of publicists of the sixteenth century, were certainly in part, and in some cases in large part, the product of popular fears, fancies, and images of the Devil or of other spirits. Some of the aspects of demon possession as it actually occurred were thoroughly strange to the biblical, classical, or medical minds of the literate. Let us pursue this question further by looking at the preconditions of possession, as they were commonly understood.Throughout the sixteenth century it was widely conceded that the Devil might possess both the greatest of sinners and the least sinful of all. In order to display his majesty, God might allow a demonic possession only to show how strong the Christian sacraments and sacramentals were. Or of course God could permit a horrible invasion of demons to punish the sins either of the possessed or of another person. Possession could chasten or test the faithful or simply present the power of the Devil, a display often thought necessary in the sixteenth century when pastors thought their congregations full of Sadducees, Epicureans, and self-​satisfied worldlings, who refused to recognize the reality of the spirit world. Despite the wide range of options open as victims of the Devil, I have the impression that most theologians in the first half of the century were likely to think of possession as a punishment for the sins of the victim. The theological lexicographer Johann Altenstaig was content to rattle off four reasons for demonic possession: for the glory of God, for the punishment of sin, for the correction of the sinner, or for our own instruction. And Martin Luther usually thought of demon possession as a punishment for, or an instantiation of, sin.8 Later in the century the learned personal physician to the Elector Palatine, Johann Lang, was even willing to opine that true piety actually kept the Devil away. This was a sentiment enthusiastically endorsed by the Freiburg theologian, Jodocus Lorich, who held that the best way to secure one’s health and to escape the attacks of the Devil was to fear God and lead a pious life, for the Devil flees such persons. Unfortunately for the theory that the Devil worked mainly as God’s gaoler and executioner, the published accounts of demonic possession show a very different Devil, one that positively preferred to attack pious young Christians. A  good example is the “gruesome story” from 1559 of the godly girl from Platten, close by Joachimstal. She was chaste and modest, went regularly to church, took the sacrament often, and was said to have learned the gospels by memory. Suddenly at Shrovetide she was taken sick with seizures, so that her parents thought she had epilepsy. She lay helpless for four weeks, but after Easter the Devil began to speak blasphemies from her. Moreover she began to display such classic signs of

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possession as eyes that bugged out of her head, a tongue that would stick out a whole handspan, and a head that was wrenched around to face backwards. After repeated tortures and extended conversations with the attending pastors, the Devil was finally driven out through the congregational prayer and song of some one thousand common people. Before he left, however, he claimed that God had sent him to plague Anna’s body (but not her soul) in order to warn people to give up their godless pride, gluttony, and drunkenness. And as he flew out the window like a swarm of flies he was reported to say, “All who don’t go gladly to church and would rather stay at home to read and don’t attend the Sacrament, and wallow in gluttony, drunkenness, and usury, are all mine, body and soul.” So here was another reason for possession, one that the pastors and theologians had not dreamed of: this devil allowed a simple smith’s daughter to take up the position of the authors of the Teufelbucher, to preach virtue while at the same time giving vent to her most blasphemous and irreverent ideas. It is possible that these words and indeed the whole account were corrupted by our pastoral reporter, but I think it more likely that this girl was pious and did say something of the sort. Hers was not an isolated case. When Veronica Steiner was seized by the Devil in 1574, in the castle Starnberg in Lower Austria, she too possessed two voices, one the deep, coarse, manly voice of the Devil, and the other her own tender, reasonable, modest, Christian voice. With her own voice she prayed, praised God, admonished others to pray, sighed over her own sins, and accepted the Catholic faith. But with her devilish voice she cursed and barked, spat against the Catholic religion and its adherents, and sang unchaste drinking songs and perverted Psalms. She too seems to have found in demon possession a way of expressing the two violently contradictory ways she felt about religion. Or take the case of the eighteen-​year-​old maid from Meissen, who fell down in fits in 1560, but on recovery would launch into extraordinary prophecies. God had been good to everyone, she reminded her listeners, but no one showed a proper thankfulness and so God’s punishment was coming. Girls must give up their vanity, married persons their adultery. Woe to the rich who did not help the poor; woe to parents who did not discipline their children; and woe to all Germany for constant drunkenness, gluttony, pride, and the deliberate ignoring of godly sermons. This girl fell repeatedly into trances in which she saw God, angels, and hell. Suspicious of this behavior, Hieronymus Weller (the well-​known student of Luther) examined her and had to admit that “it is nothing but Scripture that I heard, and a serious sermon of repentance, which should move us as directly as if it were a good angel’s voice.” Here was a girl who would certainly have been labeled demon-​possessed at other times or in other places, but her piety prevailed in this case. She was allowed to preach in this odd way.

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When the noble lady Kunigunde von Pilgram was seized by the Devil in 1565, one of the signs of her possession was that she wanted to pray but was forcibly restrained by the Devil. Both the accounts by Melchior Neukirch of a possession case from Braunschweig in 1595–​96 and that by Johann Conrad Dannhauer with respect to the noble girl from Strasbourg (1650–​54) allow us to make the same point, but with even more pathos. In the Braunschweig case, Appolonia, the daughter of Heinrich Stampken, was known to all for her piety. She loved her catechism, using it in her prayers both morning and night; she attended sermons eagerly, took the Lord’s Supper and absolution gratefully, and was altogether too good. One day she fell into weakness and depression, a debilitating combination that lasted three-​ quarters of a year, but then she broke out in fully demonic gestures and speech. With loving pastoral care she arrived at lucid intervals and admitted that the beginning of her troubles had been when she had heard someone curse her and wish the Devil into her. From then on she had had horrible doubts that perhaps she was not a child of God, maybe she was not of the elect. These religious doubts had prompted her depression, which in turn opened the door to the Devil. Neukirch mobilized the whole congregation of Saint Peter’s and others as well, with repeated prayers and hymns that were printed up so that all of Braunschweig could pray at once for her release. Most dramatic and peculiar of all are the prayers composed by Appolonia herself, long stanzas of rhymed verse of which I give only two examples: The Devil uses great force And plagues me horribly in many ways. Seizes me in all my members, Rips me and pains me greatly. O Lord help me from this torture. Preserve my body and soul. God’s Son must win the battlefield and drive you, Devil, from his house Do your worst for God is with me I fear you not at all. Here was surely a girl who had taken in rather too much of the Lutheran teachings to which she had been exposed, or perhaps it would be safer to say that she experienced Luther’s Anfechtungen but had them drawn out over months at a time. Dannhauer’s noble girl of Strasbourg (1650–​54) was just ten when she fell to the Devil, but the odd thing about her condition was that while her body and her “outer and inner senses” were tortured, her mind remained clear and Christian,

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and she was able, apparently, to curse Satan herself and order him to leave her. She was persuaded firmly that she was a child of God, no doubts on that score, but she assured others that it would be better for the godless to experience her pangs in this world. “For they give themselves over to godless gaming, gluttony, and drinking, to whores and lovers, and forget all about God. But how will it turn out for them in the end?” God will punish those who have not borne crosses in this world. She was not content to echo the sermons of the moralizers, however, for this pre-​adolescent also had a strong urge to die. She went on and on, in words that Dannhauer must have put in her mouth; but the basic message may well have been hers: “I'll gladly die if Thou wilt, if it be Thy fatherly will. O dear God I thank you from the bottom of my heart that you are giving me the strength still to escape.” In some of her visions she saw God and his angels. Here then were demon possessions that produced revival sermons and angelic visions. These afflicted souls may have been using the cultural idiom of demon possession, but they were surely extending it well beyond what the theological wisdom of the sixteenth century had led anyone to expect. By the 1570s this was plain to observers such as Georg Walther, pastor of Halle, or even earlier to Veit Dietrich, the short-​lived pastor of Nuremberg, both of whom commented on the pious, modest Christianity displayed by the possessed (or at least many of them) when they were given a little respite from the assaults of the Devil. In these deviations from official expectation I think we can see what ordinary people were able to make of the cultural idiom of demon possession. In another area a sort of popular confusion arose. In high legal theory as it developed in the sixteenth century, the difference between the crime of witchcraft and the condition of demonic possession was clear. Witches were those who entered into a pact with the Devil while the possessed were those who passively, involuntarily endured the external and internal assaults of the Devil. What could be clearer? But is it clear what happened to Anna Roschmann in 1563? At the age of twenty as she lay in her Augsburg bedroom, the evil spirit came to her and asked her to be his, “whereupon she began to act very strangely and as if she had lost her reason.” Soon she was showing the symptoms of full, raging possession, but we must note that it had begun with an invitation from the Devil. Or what shall we think of Anna Barbara of Stein am Rhein, whose mother had cursed her and caused her to be possessed? Many common folk thought of her as a witch. Truly confusing is the case of Hans Schmidt, a smith’s apprentice from Heidingsfeld, near Wurzburg. In 1589 at the age of nineteen, Schmidt fell in with bad company, and got hold of a book that contained the secrets of the magic arts. Realizing its dangers, Schmidt finally burned the book, but he suffered further temptations. Satan offered him money on one occasion and on another tempted him to hang himself, but Schmidt resisted

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these advances until he was finally possessed by a highly frustrated Devil. Here the story began as many a witchcraft seduction tale began, but because of his powers of Christian resistance the youth was possessed. Indeed by the late sixteenth century many a suicide attempt was attributed to demon possession. To take another example, Appolonia Geisslbrecht was confronted first, in 1583, by a devil who offered her plentiful food, drink, and dance. In this case she actually accepted the Devil’s offer but was then at once possessed. Instead of witchcraft, this case turned confusingly into obsession. Pastor Nicolaus Blum told a similarly confusing story from his parish in Dohna. In 1602 it appears that God permitted a noble student from Prague to be possessed as punishment for the sin of “Zauberey,” that is, the crime of magic, for which women were being executed by the hundreds at just that time. Here again it may have been the youth’s resistance to Satan that made the difference, but it could also have been his noble and student status. We know of other adventurous students who signed actual pacts with the Devil, for example, without having to pay the ultimate penalty for their indiscretions. So it was with the desperate twenty-​five-​year-​old [man] whom Tobias Wagner tried to help in 1643. In a deep depression and eager for money, the young man made a pact with the Devil, who then prompted him to attempt suicide.When he was saved from death by his wife, he merely fell into a deeper and more demonic melancholy.9 Why was this case not treated as witchcraft? Perhaps because of the suicide attempt, perhaps because of the evident depression and desperation. But also perhaps because ordinary people were having trouble keeping the supposedly clear categories of witchcraft and possession clearly separate. Certainly that would seem to be the case with the famous Christoph Haizmann, the painter whose demonic possession in 1677 was studied by Sigmund Freud as an example of “diabolical neurosis.” Haizmann, too, had a pact with the Devil, or perhaps two pacts, but he was not treated as a witch; instead, a pilgrimage and repeated exorcisms liberated him from the Devil and from his pacts.10 So here too we have a cloudy area where the jurists and theologians had taught clarity. I take these cloudy areas to be indirect evidence of the independent willfulness and indocility of popular culture at certain points. We would be very wrong to think that ordinary people did not have a notion of the Devil, but my examples of pious demoniacs and of those who curiously made a pact with the Devil or dabbled in magic or were suicidal only to become possessed suggest areas of resistance to or ignorance of the official word of jurists and pastors. I would be reluctant to describe the method I am using here as a form of “higher criticism,” for these pamphlets and wonder books were far from being canonical texts; but there is a certain vague similarity in that we need to develop what I would call “educated surprises” in order to imagine what may lie behind a text.

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Another old approach, and one still worth using, is that of simple geography. Many things seem noteworthy on the maps I have drawn, but I find it especially significant that only thirty-​nine towns and villages south of the Main River had cases of demon possession and only one of these was a true obsessional epidemic (Eichstatt). In contrast, northern Germany had over sixty-​five separate towns with cases of actual or suspected demon possession, and several of these episodes, especially in the northeast or northwest, were massive outbursts of daemonomania. A  surprising number of these northern cases came from Lutheran Saxony and Brandenburg, a fact that may be connected to the great Gnesio-​Lutheran controversy over exorcism at baptism.11 And only a tiny number appear in the great lands of the Counter Reformation, Bavaria and Austria. Proud as he was of the miracles performed by Our Lady of Altotting, Dr. Martin Eisengrein, writing in 1570, listed only one dispossession of demons in his almost-​200-​page-​long treatise on that famous pilgrimage shrine. Demon possession does appear now and then, but rarely, in the Bavarian and Franconian miracle books; and so it seems that southern Germany, and especially the southeast, was surprisingly lacking in demon possessions and famous exorcisms. I do think it is important to notice the frequency of demon possessions among nunneries and among the most Gnesio-​Lutheran areas, for in both situations the attempt to live an ever more perfect life may have led to stronger temptations than those felt in other parts of Germany. This would help to explain the account from Brandenburg in the 1590s in which the Devil was said to have strewn coins all over the streets, but whoever picked up a coin became instantly (but not permanently) possessed. Perhaps only a region where the demonic vices of greed, usury, pride, and vanity had been censured for over a generation and with increasing apocalyptic fervor could have generated such a story. And that in turn suggests that when we speak of popular ideas of the Devil, we cannot mean only those ideas that literate, educated people did not share. By the late sixteenth century the German people generally believed that demon possession was on the rise, and they may even have taken the rise as a sign of the imminent end of the world. But while accepting this learned interpretation of what they saw around them, ordinary people also knew how to shape the idiom of possession to some of their own ends.

Notes 1

For full citations of the German sources on which this essay is based, see the original version in Steven Ozment, ed., Religion and Culture in the Reformation and Renaissance (Sixteenth-​Century Journal Publishers 1989), 99–​119 –​ Ed.

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2 Gnesio-​Lutherans were a faction within the Lutheran church in the second half of the sixteenth century. Styling themselves as the “true followers” of Luther, they opposed the less militant Protestantism espoused by the followers of Philipp Melanchthon, whom they accused of Catholic leanings –​ Ed. 3 Kathleen Sands also notes the polemical nature of possession literature in Chapter 24 in this volume –​ Ed. See also D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Ashgate 1981). 4 See Elisa Slattery in Chapter 26 in this volume on Weyer’s pessimistic view of the Devil’s power –​  Ed. 5 See Robin B.  Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis:  Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford University Press 1988), for a discussion of this sort of Lutheran numerology. 6 Brian P.  Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Routledge 1987), 152–​68. 7 There are examples of such seduction scenes in H. C. E. Midelfort’s Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–​1684:  The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford University Press 1972). 8 For Luther’s views on the Devil and demonic possession, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Fontana English edn 1993); and Jeffrey B. Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Cornell University Press 1986). 9 On this case, see H. C. E. Midelfort, “Catholic and Lutheran Reactions to Demon Possession in the Late 17th Century:  Two Case Histories”, Daphnis, 15 (1986), 623–​48. 10 For a fascinating account of the case of Christoph Haizmann, and Freud’s interpretation of his experiences, see Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness (Oxford University Press 1987), 83–​9. 11 See note 2 above –​ Ed. For the details of this dispute, see Bodo Nischan, “The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987), 31–​51.

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Chapter 23

Charlotte-​Rose  Millar THE DEVIL AND FAMILIAR SPIRITS IN ENGLISH WITCHCRAFT

T

H E P O P U L A R L I T E R A T U R E of witchcraft in England almost invariably featured spirits, or “familiars”, that assisted the witch in doing harm. The origins of these creatures are obscure, but it is clear that they belonged to a popular understanding of witchcraft that fitted somewhat awkwardly with orthodox Christian demonology. In this chapter Charlotte-​Rose Millar notes the remarkable prevalence of these creatures in English witchcraft pamphlets, and their apparently demonic associations. On the basis of this evidence, she argues that historians should reconsider the traditional view that diabolism was largely absent from English witch trials. Moreover, there was a sexual aspect to the relationship between English witches and their spirits. Millar’s analysis relates to the role of “doubtful spirits” in early modern popular culture more generally, a topic addressed by Euan Cameron in Chapter  7 of this book. By identifying English witches as the sexual partners of demons, she also provides a fascinating addition to the discussion of gender and sexuality in witchcraft presented by the contributors to Part Seven.

In 1566 a sensational pamphlet was published in London which described the crimes of three women accused of witchcraft in Chelmsford, Essex. Elizabeth Francis, Mother Agnes Waterhouse and Joan Waterhouse all confessed to possessing a familiar spirit whom they identified as ‘Sathan’. This creature, first described as a

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‘whyte, spotted Catte’, then a toad and, finally, ‘a thyng lyke a blacke dogge with a face like an ape, a short tail, and a peyre of hornes on his head’, was said to ‘require a drop of bloud’ which he sucked from the accused witches. In return for this blood Satan brought his mistresses riches and revenge. He killed children and made several men impotent. He also forced the accused witches to ‘say [their] pater noster [and all other prayers] in laten’.1 After performing these acts, the familiar spirit betrayed his mistresses to the authorities. One hundred and fifty years later, in 1712, Jane Wenham became the last person to be found guilty of witchcraft in England. Though Jane was later pardoned, her story was immortalised in eight different pamphlet narratives, all published in 1712. Despite being published in a very different world to that inhabited by the Chelmsford witches (in 1712 Jane Wenham’s witchcraft was linked to her connections with Dissenters rather than her supposed Catholicism), pamphlet accounts of the case described many similar beliefs to those seen in 1566. Witchcraft was still described as a diabolical crime, the witch was still said to be acting out of a desire for revenge, and nonconformity was still allied with witchcraft. By 1735, the date that James I’s witchcraft statute was repealed, England was almost unrecognisable from the country that, one hundred and seventy years earlier, passed the 1563 witchcraft statute. It had also changed dramatically from the date of the second witchcraft statute in 1604. Yet, throughout this one hundred and seventy year period, witchcraft remained a concern, witchcraft belief continued and, even up until as late as 1717, witchcraft trials were held. Across this entire period, pamphleteers emphasised the importance of the Devil in witchcraft. … The familiar spirit is one of the most important yet understudied aspects of English witchcraft belief.These creatures, almost entirely unique to England, went by many names: familiar spirits, imps, sprites, devils and demons. They were bestial, tangible creatures which were most often described as domestic or common animals such as dogs, cats, chickens, toads, rats or ferrets although they could, on occasion, appear as mythological animals such as dragons. These creatures, which featured in nearly all English witchcraft pamphlets, were very often described as or conflated with the Devil. Through their bonds with accused witches, familiar spirits created a demonic pact between themselves and the accused witch and, in doing so, added a strong diabolical element to English witchcraft belief. … Although historians do refer to the familiar and suggest that it performs the role of the Devil, the implications of this claim and the specific nature of familiars have yet to be given the attention they deserve. In 1996, Sharpe argued that ‘the widespread belief in familiars takes us away from a model of witchcraft which is based on village maleficium into one where something very like a diabolical element is present’.2 This chapter takes Sharpe’s assertion as a starting point and

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explores how beliefs about familiars contributed to the diabolical elements of early modern English witchcraft belief. The fundamental importance of the familiar, when understood as a diabolical agent, creates an image of English witchcraft that contains strong diabolical elements and, as such, encourages us to rethink the paradigm of English witchcraft as a primarily non-​diabolical activity. … There are sixty-​six remaining witchcraft pamphlets from the entire period of state-​sanctioned witchcraft accusations.3 Of these sixty-​six witchcraft pamphlets only three fail to mention witches’ reliance on the Devil to help them inflict maleficium.4 In all but five of these sixty-​three remaining pamphlets the Devil is represented as a familiar spirit.5 This representation is usually explicit through the description of animalistic creatures acting as the Devil but, in a handful of pamphlets, becomes more implicit through references to hidden teats found on the body of the witch. References to familiars are one of the most unchanging aspects of early modern witchcraft pamphlets. Even as witchcraft trials declined in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and fewer pamphlets were published, familiars remained a crucial element of witchcraft narratives. The high percentage of familiars visible in pamphlet narratives appears to be significantly greater than those in trial records.This suggests that pamphleteers chose to publish cases in which the role of the Devil was a key concern, either as a warning against the trappings of Satan (as is clear in many epistles) or out of the belief that stories of demonic animals would sell. Pamphlets were a powerful vehicle for spreading beliefs about witchcraft to the masses. As Keith Thomas has argued, ‘contemporaries … were dependent for their knowledge of the subject [of witchcraft] upon the chance appearance of a pamphlet account of a notable trial’.6 The apparent preference given to diabolical narratives would have created a very specific understanding of witchcraft amongst English readers and positions pamphlets as a key source for understanding the connection between witchcraft and diabolism in early modern England. Eight of the ten extant sixteenth-​century witchcraft pamphlets refer to familiar spirits, as do forty of the forty-​eight remaining seventeenth-​century pamphlets and six of the eight remaining from the eighteenth century. This means that between 1566 and 1735 fifty-​four of sixty-​six witchcraft pamphlets (or over 80 per cent) include references to familiar spirits. As well as highlighting the prevalence of familiar spirits in pamphlet literature, these statistics also remind us that familiars were not, as has frequently been suggested, simply a feature of the Civil War period. Although the trials overseen by Matthew Hopkins during the 1640s are often seen as atypical of English witchcraft, Sharpe has argued that ‘whatever was untypical in the Hopkins trials, the familiar was not’.7 Sharpe has discovered that of one hundred and ten Hopkins narratives, seventy-​eight involved familiar spirits.8 These figures, particularly

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when added to my own findings (as described above) reinforce the centrality of the familiar spirit within pamphlet literature not just in the 1640s but throughout the entire period of early modern witchcraft belief in England. Through analysing all sixty-​six extant witchcraft pamphlets from this period, it becomes clear that the familiar provided a crucial diabolical element to English witchcraft beliefs. As such, it is not possible to understand the important role of the Devil in English witchcraft without a thorough understanding of the familiar spirit. … My analysis of the forty-​eight witchcraft pamphlets that survive from the seventeenth century demonstrates that twenty-​ three (or 48 per cent) contain examples of sexual interactions between witches and devils. In ten of these pamphlets (or approximately 20 per cent) this interaction is described as ‘carnal intercourse’ between a witch and a devil. In the other thirteen pamphlets a range of sexual behaviour is described, the most common being devils sucking at teats in a witch’s genitalia or anus. These descriptions are part of an ongoing English belief in the witch’s pact with the Devil. The belief that familiars sucked blood from witches (often from teats) as part of the diabolical pact was well established in popular print from as early as the sixteenth century. The position of these teats varied but, as James Sharpe has argued, by the early seventeenth century, it was generally accepted that the [witch’s] mark [in the form of a teat] would be on the witch’s genitals or on her anus, thus adding a sexual dimension to the relationship between the female witch and her familiar.9 Sharpe’s argument is a relatively new one in a field that has for so long viewed English witchcraft as asexual. In this chapter I  argue that the Devil’s frequent sucking at witches’ genitalia, as well as accounts of sexual intercourse between witches and devils, provide strong evidence for understanding English witchcraft as a sexualised activity. In seventeenth-​ century pamphlet accounts of sexual practices between witches and devils, devils take two main forms. The first is as we would typically think of a familiar: a small domestic or common animal such as a rat, cat, dog, bird, toad or ferret that performs the role of the Devil. The second is slightly more difficult to categorise. It can best be described as a devil that resembles a man, who may or may not be defined as a familiar, but is always demonic. The first category of devils (animalistic familiars) is more likely to engage in sexual activity that stops short of penetrative sex. These devils perform acts that resemble foreplay, cunnilingus or anilingus on witches by sucking at teats located on the breasts, genitalia or anus. The more man-​like devils, although they too

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engage in these practices, are more often described as engaging in penetrative sex with their mistresses. Pamphlets do not just describe the physical acts between witch and devil; they also describe the witch’s willingness to participate in them and emphasise their pleasurable nature. These two main forms of sexual activity in witchcraft pamphlets are clearly limited to discrete chronological periods. Pamphlets from the first half of the seventeenth century focus primarily on non-​penetrative sexual practices. These activities are described in pamphlets as late as the 1690s, but from the 1640s onwards they tend to be supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by references to witches engaging in intercourse with man-​like devils. This change from familiar spirits to a mixture of familiar spirits and man-​like devils represents a shift in beliefs about English witchcraft. Although familiar spirits very clearly perform the role of the Devil, and are often described in pamphlets as the Devil himself, their supplementation with man-​like devils introduces a change to the way in which diabolical witchcraft was portrayed in England. … By the 1680s there appears to be a strong tradition of witches being portrayed in pamphlets as women who regularly engaged in illicit sexual practices with their devils. The assumption of deviant sexuality in witchcraft narratives is perhaps strongest in a frontispiece engraving from 1688. This image from Nathaniel Crouch’s The Kingdom of Darkness clearly shows two female witches kneeling before the Devil and performing fellatio (Figure 23.1). This extraordinary depiction is part of a montage of common witchcraft beliefs, including witches and devils dancing and feasting together, witches conjuring devils from a magic circle, and witches riding goats through the sky.10 The witches fellating the Devil are very prominently depicted. The witches’ kissing of the Devil’s genitals, as well as having very clear sexual overtones, could also be viewed as a reversal of the obscene kiss, an act in which, in parts of Continental Europe, the witch kisses the Devil’s backside as a show of allegiance.This illustration is, to my knowledge, the only depiction of fellatio in an English witchcraft pamphlet, and it appears to have been overlooked by historians. Despite its non-​English origins (the engraver is Dutch) its inclusion on the frontispiece of an English witchcraft book from the late seventeenth century demonstrates that witchcraft was strongly associated with deviant, diabolical sex at this time and that this view of witchcraft was being circulated in English print. Only three more early modern references to familiars sucking at witches’ genitalia remain. In a 1690 pamphlet Margaret Landish, a witch accused of killing a child, confesses that ‘her Imps did usually suck two Teats near the privy parts’.11 Two of the other witches in this pamphlet, Susan and Rose, are also accused of having teats. Women searching Susan and Rose claim to have found ‘several large Teates in the secret Parts of their Bodies’, which both witches adamantly deny at

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FIGURE  23.1 A Witch Performing Fellatio on the Devil and Other Scenes, Depicted in Nathaniel Crouch, The Kingdom of Darkness London:  Printed for Nath. Crouch, 1688, frontispiece. © The British Library Board, C.118.b.3, engraved title page.

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trial.12 For one last, far more graphic description of demonic cunnilingus, we need to venture into the eighteenth century. One witness, Mrs Evans, described how she was foolishly seduced into witchcraft by Eleanor Shaw and Mary Phillips; but was then terrified when the moment for her conversion came. Mrs Evans deposed that Eleanor and Mary had told her that ‘she was a Fool to live so Miserable as she did, and therefore if she was willing, they would send something that Night that would Relieve her’.13 Being a self-​described ‘ignorant woman’, Mrs Evans agreed and that same night: Two little black Things, almost like Moles came into her Bed and sucked her lower Parts, repeating the same for two or three Nights after, till she was almost frighted out of her Sences, insomuch that she was forced to send for Mr Danks, the Minster to Pray by her several Nights, before the said Imps would leave her.14 Mrs Evans is clearly terrified by her night-​time encounter with these familiar spirits, so much so that she calls in the minister. In this encounter, demonic sex, specifically cunnilingus, is described as the entry into witchcraft, a key part of the relationship between witch and Devil. Some acknowledgement needs to be made of the shape of the Devil during these encounters. In all of these interactions, the Devil was described as taking animal form. From 1533, bestiality was a crime punishable by death in England. But bestiality was not just condemned as an offence against the state. For early modern authors, bestiality was ‘a sin against God, Nature and the Law’ and an ‘abominable and detestable sin’.15 Bestiality was ungodly, an offence against Christian morality. Erica Fudge has demonstrated that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed increasing concern over human-​animal relationships, and about the boundaries of being human.16 Human-​animal relations were increasingly viewed as monstrous and threatening, a concern evident in the early modern preoccupation with monstrous births.17 These new early modern understandings of the dangers of human-​animal relationships open up another way in which contemporaries may have interpreted witchcraft narratives. Not only were accused witches turning away from God and entering into pacts with the Devil, the Devil’s animalistic form made their deviancy even more unnatural and disturbing. Throughout the seventeenth century pamphlets highlighted a preoccupation with the idea that animalistic familiars could and did suck at teats within witches’ genitalia, on their anus or on their thighs. Many of these cases are confined to the first half of the century, although there are several in the 1640s and a few in the decades following. Descriptions of familiars sucking at witches’ genitalia,

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anuses and thighs demonstrate the increasing sexualisation in popular print of the relationships between witches and devils and of the demonic pact.These narratives generally depict witches as willing participants in sexual liaisons. In the decades following the 1640s, instances of sexual relations between witches and their devils become even more common in pamphlet narratives. Although instances of devils sucking at thighs and genitalia remain (as we have seen), from the 1640s onwards interactions between witches and devils were increasingly described as ‘carnal intercourse’.

Notes John Phillips, The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chelmsforde in the Countie of Essex (1566), 1A6r, 2A4v, 3A2r. 2 James Sharpe, “The Devil in East Anglia: The Matthew HopkinsTrials Reconsidered”, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe:  Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996), 248. 3 These are defined as pamphlets that describe a witchcraft trial, or series of trials, for the consumption of a popular audience. All sixty-​six titles are listed in Appendix A of Charlotte-​Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (Routledge, London 2017). 4 These are: Anon., A Magazine of Scandall (for R.H., London 1642); Anon., Strange and Wonderful News From Yowel in Surry (Printed for J. Clarke, London 1681); and Anon., A Full and True Account of the Apprehending and Taking of Mrs Sarah Moordike (Printed for John Alkin, London 1701). 5 Pamphlets that mention the Devil but do not mention the presence of a familiar spirit are: Anon., A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch (Printed by John Hammond, London 1643); Anon., Signes and Wonders from Heaven (Printed by I.H., London 1645); Anon., The Power of Witchcraft (Printed for Charls Tyns, London 1662); Anon., Great News from the West of England (Printed by T.M., London 1689); and Anon., A Full and True Account of the Tryal, Examination, and Condemnation of Mary Johnston, a Witch (Printed by T. Bland, London 1706). 6 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 2nd edn (Penguin, London 1973),  537. 7 Sharpe, “The Devil in East Anglia”, 248. 8 Ibid. 9 James Sharpe, “Familiars”, in Richard M.  Golden, ed., The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition (ABC-​CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA 2006), 347–​8. 10 Although the Sabbath is often viewed as a phenomenon more common in European witchcraft, there is compelling evidence for the presence of this belief in England. Until very recently most English witchcraft historians viewed the Sabbath as a Continental phenomenon. For an alternative perspective, see Sharpe, “In Search 1

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of the English Sabbat: Popular Conceptions of Witches’ Meetings in Early Modern England”, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2 (2013), 161–​183. 11 Anon., The Full Tryals, Examination, and Condemation of Four Notorious Witches, at the Assizes Held at Worcester, on Tuesday the 4th of March (Printed by J.W., London 1690), 4. 12 Ibid., 6. 13 Ralph Davis, An Account of the Tryals, Examination and Condemnation, of Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips (Printed for F. Thorn near Fleet Street, London 1705), 4. 14 Ibid. 15 Michael Dalton and Edward Coke, quoted in Erica Fudge, “Monstrous Acts: Bestiality in Early Modern England”, History Today, 50 (2000), 21. 16 Fudge, “Monstrous Acts”,  20–​25. 17 For a fascinating case study incorporating some of these issues, see David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England:  Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000), 9–​28.

 

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Chapter 24

Kathleen Sands THE SOCIAL MEANINGS OF DEMONIC POSSESSION

I

N T H I S C H A P T E R Kathleen Sands considers the possession and exorcism of Anne Mylner from Chester in England in 1563–​4. As well as the extraordinary experience of Mylner herself, Sands shows how this event valorised the Protestant clergy of early Elizabethan England. The widespread support for Mylner’s dispossession contrasted with later episodes in which the English Church challenged the reality of demonic possession; Marion Gibson discusses the effects of this controversy in Chapter 36. In a general discussion of possession and exorcism at the start of the chapter, Sands also considers the social and psychological functions of these experiences. She points out that exorcisms could cure their “victims”. It is interesting to compare the symptoms and treatment of possession to other apparently psychosocial conditions discussed by Edward Bever in the context of witchcraft (9).

Demon possession is a highly emotional experience in which a subject  –​the demoniac –​displays behaviour that manifests a state of religious distress. It is a public experience, validated by witnesses, that serves as a method of communication by which the demoniac can convey the nature and seriousness of this distress to others in mutually comprehensible language and concepts. It is a coping mechanism that allows the demoniac to express this distress without alienating him or her disadvantageously from other members of the community. It temporarily

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upgrades the demoniac’s social status in the community by implying special divine attention to that one member of the community. It occurs in virtually every religious culture that believes in the literal existence of a malevolent intelligence, a conscious evil force that has the will and power to harm humankind. It is not necessary to believe in the existence of such a force in order to understand demon possession, but we must acknowledge that a great many people do hold this belief. Nearly all English Elizabethans did. … Those who were possessed by demons during Elizabeth’s reign offered an opportunity for proselytizers on both sides of the religious schism to offer demonstrations of the legitimacy of their positions through exorcism, a vivid and immediate demonstration of the power of good over evil, of truth over falsehood. Exorcism was perceived as an irrefutable sign of God’s continuing presence and influence in the fallen world of humankind. As a demonstration of God’s unanswerable authority, exorcism (or dispossession, as Protestants called it) functioned as social reassurance, forcing evil to emerge from its hidden lair and show itself, forcing it to name itself and admit its purpose. This act reduced and circumscribed the power of evil, showing it to be less significant, weaker, than it seemed when its limitations were unknown. Indeed, so weak was Satan’s power in the face of God that even a mere sinful man, the exorcist, acting as God’s agent, could successfully execute what was essentially a judicial investigation, judgment, and punishment against the demon. Of course, in addition to the social and political advantages of exorcism, there was the medical advantage: exorcism often did relieve the sufferings of the demoniac, sometimes only temporarily, but [at] other times permanently. Both illness and cure are often induced by the mind, as most educated early modem people realized. Even the most ardent early modern critics of exorcism admitted that the practice was frequently efficacious if the demoniac believed that it would be. For instance, Johann Weyer, a sixteenth-​century [Dutch] physician, said, “That physician in whom more patients trust effects more cures. … It is the power of the confident mind [that cures]”.1 Weyer reported a case of a girl whose protection against the Devil consisted of a folded paper inside a leather bag worn around her neck. The paper was blank, but the girl’s assumption that it bore a powerful word-​ charm against evil allowed her to recover, developing a good appetite and appearing cheerful and contented for the rest of her life. Another physician, Edward Jorden, made the same observation: “The confidence of the patient in the means used is often times more available [efficacious] to cure diseases then all other remedies whatsoever.”2 John Webster, who practised medicine for forty years and never saw a case of demon possession that he considered genuine, admitted that many of his patients were cured solely because of their faith in his procedures, not because the

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procedures themselves possessed any inherent efficacy. George Gifford, a minister, concurred, observing that “imagination is a strong thing to hurt, all men do find, and why should it not then be strong also to help, when the party’s mind is cheered by believing fully that he receiveth ease?”3 Modern studies show that recovery rates in patients who receive placebos that they believe are effective are higher than recovery rates in patients who receive no medication, thus proving that hope and confidence contribute to curative success. Exorcism was a form of what one medical historian has called “therapy of the word”, a precursor of Freud’s “talking cure”. The role of faith in alleviating mental distress was vital during the early modern era, when educated physicians were few and their attention expensive and often unpleasant. Most people had no geographical or financial access to skilled medical care. When they did receive the attention of a physician, the prescribed course of treatment was sometimes worse than the disease. … The surgical approach to curing mental distress was bloodletting, either through the application of leeches or through cutting into the veins of the forehead. The only chemical alternatives to surgery were opiates such as oil of poppy or mandrake. No other drugs available at the time were pharmacologically effective, and virtually all other drugs were violent and dangerous purges or emetics, such as antimony and mercury. Both the bloodletting and the purges were intended to evacuate the excessive bodily “humours” whose vapours were thought to cause a “sick brain”. The four elemental bodily humours (fluids) were widely perceived as the source of human health and temperament:  blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. An excess of any one of these humours caused an imbalance in the bodily system, resulting in physical or mental distress. For instance, an excess of black bile produced a melancholic personality tending to depression, whereas an excess of blood produced a choleric personality tending to anger. Humoural theory was basic to the early modem logic of exactly how Satan could afflict mankind –​what exactly was the physical mechanism at work here –​and the answer, to an Elizabethan, was readily comprehensible: he simply perpetuated an imbalance in the humours of a human body. By overloading a man with blood, Satan could naturally induce that man to fits of violent rage. By overloading a woman with black bile, Satan could naturally induce that woman to commit suicide. … On October 18, 1563, 18-​year-​old Anne Mylner left her house on Bridge Street, in Chester, to herd her father’s cows into a nearby field for grazing.4 Suddenly, she was stricken by fear when a “white thing” seemed to “compass her round about”. Mylner returned home, very ill, and took to her bed for four months. During this time, she ate very little, only a tiny amount of bread and cheese once a day. She also slept very little, only about three hours a night.

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The malevolent “white thing” approached Mylner as a formless cloud, enveloping her. This approach reflected the idea that Satan had a body but no inherent form. True, his body was much more tenuous than a human’s, accounting for his great swiftness and his ability to pass through tiny portals, but he was no less material. Because he was corporeal, it was generally presumed that possession could occur only when Satan entered a human body through an orifice, such as a nostril, an ear, a wound, or a skin pore. And as Satan entered, so he exited: a would-​be exorcist had to be prepared to “force absolute garlands of demons to stream out the natural openings of the body in single file”. One of Satan’s favourite targets was the mouth, as was shown when he implored Helen Fairfax “to open her mouth and let him come into her body”, or when he tried to repossess William Somers by entering his mouth as a rat. Demoniacs often became possessed by consuming unblessed lettuce, apples, or bread that an invisible demon happened to be lurking upon at the moment of ingestion. The mouth also afforded a demon the perfect opportunity to enter a body through a kiss. The vulnerability of the mouth to demonic violation was mirrored by the vulnerability of the nether mouth. Tales of possession and exorcism via the anus were extremely common. … Saint Martin of Tours exorcised a demoniac by thrusting his fingers into the man’s throat, forcing the demon to exit from the anus. The scatological potential of this situation lent itself easily to attacks on heretics: political philosopher Jean Bodin reported that in 1554 some Jewish Roman demoniacs were possessed by devils that spoke “through the shameful parts”. Similarly, Protestants were fond of relating the story of how a famous [Catholic] expeller of devils, having cast out an evil spirit from a man in a monastery at Cologne, and being politely asked by the Devil for some place of retiral, jokingly told him to go to the privy.The ejected one having established him in that place of resort, was enabled at the first visit of the facetious brother to most effectively attack him during the temporary absence of his rear guard. To dislodge a demon so ensconced, the quickest means of relief was to break wind. The best-​known exponent of this form of self-​help was Martin Luther, whose repulse of Satan in this manner was frequently retold by both admiring friends and disgusted enemies.5 In reading the report that the malevolent “white thing” enveloped Mylner’s body, therefore, we are meant to understand that the objective of the act was for the formless but corporeal demon to find an open doorway –​an orifice –​into that body. …

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During Mylner’s four months of illness, several symptoms manifested themselves, primarily recurring trances. In this state, Mylner lay in her bed “as still as a stone” with her eyes and mouth half open, her tongue “doubling between” her teeth (curled back and protruding), her face unnaturally red, and her head as “heavy as lead” for a bystander to lift. To the bystanders, she appeared “aghast” (as though she had seen a ghost). Mylner also suffered from convulsions that occurred intermittently between her trances. Lying on her back in bed, Mylner would suddenly arch her back and lift her torso up, bending her legs backwards beneath her so that they almost touched her head, thus “casting herself (her belly being upward) into the shape of a hoop”. Not only was Mylner’s belly on prominent display because of this hooped posture, it also swelled “up and down, sometimes beneath her chest, sometimes up to the throat, in such vehemence that a man would have thought she would have burst”. Convulsions and contortionism would figure prominently in several later cases of demon possession, such as that of William Somers of Nottingham (1597), the Meredith children of Bristol (c. 1675), and Richard Hathaway of Surrey (1701). The commentator on one of these cases, that of the Meredith children, asserted that the four children’s violent distortion of their faces and limbs was a sign of demon possession because, as he believed, children of such a young age (eight to fourteen years old) were not naturally capable of such extreme convulsions, an assertion that many parents would dispute. In all these cases, it seems clear that the putative demoniacs were largely or entirely faking their symptoms, including their convulsions. In the case of Anne Mylner, however, the convulsions may well have been the result of a disease, such as epilepsy, meningitis, encephalitis, Reye’s syndrome, or some other illness characterized by convulsive episodes causing extreme rigidity of the torso and limbs. At the time of Mylner’s experience, of course, the initial diagnosis of most of these diseases was still in the future and therefore not available to the bystanders as a culturally acceptable explanation of what they were seeing. The exception to this generalization was epilepsy. Since at least Aristotle’s time, ancient physicians had diagnosed epilepsy and had differentiated it from demon possession. Most uneducated people, however, associated the two afflictions, and educated people began associating the two more closely during the Middle Ages. The scriptural tales of Christ’s casting out of demons wrought the major change in attitude: the young man whose story is told [in Luke 9: 37–​42] is described in terms that clearly identify him as an epileptic, yet Christ treats him as possessed, rather than ill. Church fathers such as Origen therefore interpreted this story supernaturally: the boy’s affliction “is obviously brought about by an unclean deaf and dumb spirit”. Thus, the belief in possession and exorcism changed from

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the polarizing idea between educated and uneducated to that between Christian and pagan. Epilepsy therefore had a long tradition as a “sacred disease”, provoked by supernatural causes and susceptible only to supernatural treatment –​a punishment for sin. Following logically from this belief was reluctance on the part of most onlookers to touch or otherwise interfere with the demoniac during an attack because of his or her perceived uncleanness. The description of Mylner’s symptoms implies that she may have been experiencing epileptic seizures, possibly triggered or aggravated by her extreme fasting and insomnia. … During the four months that Mylner was bedridden with her distressing symptoms, friends and neighbours frequently visited her house to commiserate with the family, offer charity, pray, or simply watch the show. Among Mylner’s visitors were several important local people, including John Pierce, one of the canons of Chester Cathedral and reader of the divinity lectures there. His visit to the afflicted woman so moved him that in December, while conducting a service at the cathedral, Pierce asked his congregation to kneel and say a special prayer for Mylner’s deliverance from her suffering. The effect of this request was naturally to ensure that virtually everyone in Chester knew of the situation. A month later, near the end of January, John Lane, a fellow of Christ Church, Cambridge, and a “famous and godly preacher of the gospel”, happened to be preaching at a town near Chester. Lane was reputed for his ability to help those with mental afflictions: “it is well known to diverse credible persons … what rare and singular remedy God hath wrought by Master Lane in some that sustained of late no small decay of mind and memory”. At this time, Lane was approached by two men of Chester, who described Mylner’s affliction to him. These men were among those whose religious beliefs caused them to “seek miracles to confirm God’s word”. When, therefore, they told Lane that they thought Mylner was possessed with evil spirits, “as in times past”, the miracle they sought was clearly a dispossession –​the Protestant alternative to a Catholic exorcism. … Lane went to the Mylner family’s house on February 16, accompanied by his host [Sir William Calverley] and his host’s wife, Lady Calverley; another knight, Sir William Shepherd; and other important guests. Arriving at the Mylners’ house, Lane and his entourage were taken to see the afflicted woman, who was lying in bed wearing only her undergarment. Mylner’s belly began to swell and her body began to contort into a hoop. Observing this, Lane asked whether Mylner’s attendant had ever tried to force Mylner’s body down when it was in its hooped posture. The attendant said that she had indeed tried but without success. Mylner was too strong for her, she said, but Lane was welcome to try to do it himself. At this point in the conversation, Mylner had contorted her body into a hoop four or five times before the amazed eyes of her guests. Lane grabbed her ankles,

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yanked her feet out from under her, forcibly straightened her legs, and sat on them. He then leaned over her body and held her hands down as well. During this, Lane’s first physical confrontation with Mylner, he found her strength so prodigious that he was convinced that she was, as he said, possessed. While he sat on her legs, the bystanders pressed Mylner’s belly down with as much weight and strength as they could muster and observed that she “was very like to have thrown them over”. Lane sat on Mylner and restrained her for two hours, preventing her belly from swelling and her body from arching.The observers, noting the sweat dripping down Lane’s face, begged him to release her, fearing that the ordeal was too difficult for both minister and demoniac. Lane, weakening, considered giving up, but he persevered, gaining renewed strength from the prayers of the onlookers as well as his own. He prayed silently, repeating the fiftieth psalm in his mind and asking God to deliver Mylner “through the blood of his son Jesus Christ”. At the end of the two hours’ stalemate, his strength exhausted, Lane finally called for vinegar. The bystanders objected, pointing out that this age-​old remedy had already been tried several times and had always failed. Lane insisted. The vinegar was brought and poured into Lane’s mouth. Still sitting on Mylner’s legs, still leaning over Mylner’s prone body to hold down her wrists, Lane forcefully expelled the vinegar from his mouth into Mylner’s nostrils. When Lane spat the vinegar into Mylner’s nostrils, the girl cried out her first words in four months: “Ah, Lady, Lady”, an appeal to the Virgin Mary to rescue her from the stinging, burning pain. Lane immediately reprimanded Mylner for this outcry. Her prayer, he said, ought to address God and “the blood of Christ”, not any saint, not even the Virgin. Mylner was silent in the face of this reprimand. Lane therefore called for more vinegar, whereupon Mylner cried out, “No, no, no more, for God’s sake.” Lane then ordered Mylner to say the Lord’s Prayer and the Te Deum after him and to continually call upon God’s name. She complied. … This brief exchange illustrates one of the most controversial theological prohibitions levied by the English reformed church on its parishioners: the prohibition against praying to saints. … The day after Mylner’s deliverance, Lane preached a sermon at Saint Mary’s in Chester. In the congregation was Mylner herself, behaving decorously in public for the first time in months. Also in the congregation was John Throgmorton, Esq., the Queen’s Majesty’s High Justice in the County of Chester, who was so impressed with Lane’s sermon and Mylner’s demeanour that he invited the girl to visit him so he could converse with her about her astonishing experience. Two weeks later, on March 4, Master Rogers, Archdeacon of Chester, preached another sermon on the subject, this time in a more prestigious venue, Chester Cathedral, before an even

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more important congregation, including the mayor of Chester, two bishops, and a great multitude of citizens. In this sermon, Rogers asserted that whatsoever was the original cause of so great and strange a disease, yet was the cure wonderful, and wrought by God, either to the great commodity, or else for the great plague of the City of Chester, and the country adjoining. Less than three weeks later, on March 24, an account of Mylner’s affliction and deliverance was published by John Fisher, a gentleman who had been one of the witnesses to Lane’s treatment of Mylner. In addition to Fisher, other important witnesses to the event signed their names to the account, including Sir William Calverley, knight; and Richard Hurleston, Esq. Fisher explained that his motivation for publishing the account was that the event was “so rare and notable that it should not be kept from posterity”.

Notes 1

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Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum (Of the Wiles of Devils), published as Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, eds George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea,Vol. 73, Medieval & RenaissanceTexts & Studies (Binghamton, NY 1991), 414, 420. Edward Jorden, A Brief Discourse of the Suffocation of Mother (1603), reprinted in Michael MacDonald, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (Tavistock/​Routledge, London 1991), 25. George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593), reprinted in Peter Haining, ed., The Witchcraft Papers (University Books, Secaucus, NJ 1974), 110. For full citations of the sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Kathleen R. Sands, Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (Praeger, Westport, CT 2004), 9–​15, 17–​18, 21–​3, 27–​8 –​  Ed. The discussion of demons’ use of orifices to access the human body is adapted from Kathleen R. Sands, “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation and the English Protestant Dispossession of Demons,” History, 85 (July 2000), 450–​2.

 

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Chapter 25

Sarah Ferber ECSTASY, POSSESSION, WITCHCRAFT

D

E M O N I C P O S S E S S I O N H A D M U C H in common with divine inspiration: both the Devil and the Holy Ghost could seize control of a person’s body and voice. As Sarah Ferber shows in this study of charismatic experiences in seventeenth-​century France, the line between the two states was often unclear, not least because the Devil could masquerade “as an angel of light”. The “performance” of religious ecstasy or possession had to convince observers of its authenticity, and clerical experts could reclassify aspiring saints as victims of the Devil. Since women were believed to be unusually open to supernatural forces –​and the nature of these forces was ultimately decided by men –​this process relates not only to Midelfort’s “demonization of the world” but also the gendering of witchcraft.

William Monter once described the seventeenth century in western Europe as the ‘golden age of the demoniac’,1 but the same period in France is also referred to as the ‘century of saints’; and overlapping in time with the rise in cases of demonic possession and the Catholic spiritual renewal was the witch-​hunt. Traditional historiographies of demonic possession, ecstatic spirituality and witchcraft have tended to treat these categories as separate, but recent work has identified significant areas of overlap between them. In this period, many individual women –​ and we are speaking almost exclusively of women –​found themselves in more than one of these categories at different times in their lives, or even at the same

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time, depending on the views of outsiders. Some early modern ecstatics were seen as witches, or were made the object of probative exorcism; while possession was arguably a subcategory of ecstatic spirituality. Witches for their part were seen as those who caused possession, but at times as themselves possessed, all depending on the case. The performances of the possessed as demons under exorcism were the functional equivalent of the raptures of ecstatics, and indeed they were characterised by similar symptoms, such as ‘falling as if dead’, and a return to consciousness, after which they were able, for example, to bring news from purgatory. Concentrating predominantly on French possession cases,2 we will outline here what might be called a sliding scale of rapture. At one end was the ecstatic spiritual who had surrendered her will to that of God and was rewarded with ecstasies and insight, and a possible reputation for sanctity. At the other end was the witch, whose renunciation of her will, and her baptism, in exchange for extraordinary powers (or at least a belief that she possessed such powers) aligned her totally with the Devil. In between was the possessed, whose state, unlike ecstasy, always involved the Devil, but which, unlike witchcraft, could be turned to good ends. I want to suggest that what took place in the murky realm where the role of the Devil was constantly at issue and difficult to determine can give us further insight into Catholic reform, and the possibilities for, and limitations on, female identity within it. I shall begin by describing a shift which occurred in this period from a traditional understanding of possession as a punishment for one’s own or another’s sin, to possession being increasingly represented as the consequence of witchcraft, with the possessed as victim. This victim status, in turn, emphasised suffering as the foundation of holiness, and for this reason, possession became in many cases a feature of devotional life. At the same time, however, critics feared diabolic manipulation in cases of positive possession, as they did in cases of ecstatic spirituality. Theological and medical explanations of possession in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth century, tended to emphasise the responsibility of the possessed in bringing about their own misfortune. Yet these explanations were often out of step with the actuality of events. From the mid-​sixteenth century on, positive possessions became the dominant mode in public life, and something of a gap developed between theory and reality. The traditional and one might say non-​ empirical view was expressed by Pierre Crespet, a Celestine, when he wrote in 1590 that the ‘devil never possessed anyone he does not find to be in mortal sin’. In 1618, the Augustinian Sanson Birette noted that devils have an ‘extensive jurisdiction over men infected by sin’ and he enumerated the sins for which possession could be a punishment. These were pride, hate, envy, lust (notably between

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married people), attacks on good and holy people, apostasy, blasphemy and the mocking of sacred things. In a similar vein the physician Barthélemy Pardoux, writing in 1639, gave the following reasons for possession:  infidelity, vexatious arguments, abuse of sacred things, the persecution of good people, contempt of religion, mistreatment of parents and ‘horrible curses’. … There was some awareness of blameless possession, however. Birette cautioned that ‘it is not necessary to have a bad opinion of all those agitated by evil spirits, seeing that they might be in the grace of God and may die in it’, and he devoted considerable space to stories of parents making their children possessed by cursing them. Pardoux similarly noted that God permits ‘persons of good and holy life and of irreproachable appearance [to] fall into this discomfit’ in order to avenge the sins of parents on their children, or for some other ‘incomprehensible effect of His providence’. Possession caused by the sins or curses of parents pointed to external causes, to something like witchcraft. In a possession case from 1586, Jeanne Féry, a Soeurs Noires nun at Mons-​en-​Hainaut in the Spanish Low Countries, became possessed partly as a result of her father having cursed her when she was two years old. Through Jeanne’s mouth, her devil ‘Cornau’ reported that once when her mother had gone with Jeanne in her arms to a tavern to retrieve her husband, the child’s father said the girl could go to the Devil. After this, the Devil had gained power over Jeanne, and when she was four years old, the Devil asked her if she would take him as a father, to which she agreed. Her infantile act of apparently free will led to the Devil looking after Jeanne and replacing the father who had consigned her to him. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, outright witchcraft came to be the most common cause of possession leading to exorcism. Some contemporary commentators noted the shift. Father Gerard Radius wrote simply: ‘It is a great pity to see today that witches have such power, which is a bad sign.’ And an exorcist involved in the exorcisms of the Ursulines at Loudun wrote in 1634: ‘In these unfortunate times we see that most possessions occur through evil witchcraft, God permitting that demons afflict the bodies of the most innocent through the intervention of witches and magicians.’ Henri Boguet argued for the exemplary value of the suffering of the innocent possessed, when he wrote: Sometimes … God allows innocents to be possessed and afflicted, not for any sin, but that His justice and His works may thereby shine the more gloriously. … Loyse Maillat, at eight years old, was possessed of five devils; but what ensued from this? It led to the discovery of countless witches who have been punished as the gravity of their crimes deserved.3

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Concern for the welfare of the possessed reflected a new premium attached to innocence and suffering. In the several dramatic possessions in seventeenth-​ century France, for example, in which possessed women successfully accused prominent men of witchcraft, exorcists defended their own witch-​hunting by referring constantly to the suffering of the ‘poor girls’. For possessed women themselves the traditions of martyrdom, which emphasised internal struggles with devils, increasingly informed understandings of possession. Possessing devils thwarted their attempts to participate in religious life by preventing the possessed saying the words of confession, or making them reject the Host. Typically when priests offered the Host to the possessed, their ‘devils’ bellowed curses such as ‘I’m burning! I'm burning’, showing their torture in the presence of God. The possibility that possession could be seen as holy, however, also made it more likely to attract suspicion, a risk shared with more traditional forms of ecstatic spirituality. Both ecstatic spirituals and the possessed existed in an ambivalent sphere in which claims of direct, divine intervention in the body were open to charges of being willed, merely physical manifestations, or false claims to divine illumination. True ecstasies or holy possession were by definition not something which could be willed. Rather, they signalled a victory over the human will by the will of God, in the gracious endowment of ‘favours’, which could include ecstatic experiences (in St Teresa’s word, ‘lights’), or the granting of light into the true nature of apparently holy phenomena. Critics saw attempts to force these favours as a culpable, and possibly diabolical intervention in emotional life, and numerous accounts show women as vulnerable to accusations of having feigned sanctity or cultivated its outward signs, in order to advance their worldly standing. Such cases show a preoccupation with the power of the will. One could achieve the appearance of divine favour by assigning one’s will to the Devil through a written pact, for example, or as a result of seduction by a devil or male witch, or through the donation to the Devil of something personal like a hair. Martín Del Rio regarded voluntary ecstasy as a sure sign of witchcraft, and he cited a case of a girl in Saragossa whose fraud was discovered in 1585, her ‘frequent raptures’ made possible by a pact she had made with the Devil while minding her sheep. Both Del Rio and Jean Bodin cited the well-​known case of Magdalena de la Cruz of Cordova, an abbess in the mid-​sixteenth century, who was regarded by some as a saint. Some of her nuns suspected her of being a witch and in the end she confessed that she had given herself to the Devil in the form of a Moor when she was 12, and had had sexual relations with him over the next 30 years. Another noteworthy case from France in the 1590s is recorded in the biography of Madame Barbe Acarie, the great Discalced Carmelite, and in the biography of the cardinal and promoter of positive possession, Pierre de Bérulle.

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Each work describes the career of a young woman named Nicole Tavernier of Reims.Tavernier was intensely pious: she had revealed people’s sins, discoursed on passages from the Bible, foretold the future, had experienced ecstasies, revelations and visions, and people asked her to pray for them. Once she had even appeared to come back from the dead. During the Wars of Religion, militant Catholics undertook a general procession through Paris under her advice. She had been examined by the leading theologians of the time and had satisfied their doubts. Yet Madame Acarie was suspicious of her. In one instance, Tavernier had disappeared for an hour while on the way to Mass with Acarie, claiming on her return that she had gone from Paris to Tours to discuss religious affairs with a ‘powerful person in the kingdom’. Reflecting on this claim, Acarie recalled the debate on the possibility of witches’ transports, saying: ‘Isn’t it so that those over whom the Devil has power say customarily that they have been in distant places, even though they have only been there in their imaginations?’ Besides, added Acarie, if Tavernier really had gone to Tours, the Devil could have taken her there. Acarie’s biographer, the theologian André Duval –​someone accustomed to reflecting on the powers of the Devil –​reported that one day Acarie and Tavernier and several priests were in a room together when a trail of gunpowder appeared on the floor before them, blowing up and leaving a foul odour. This they took to signify outwardly the departure of the Devil from Tavernier’s body in a sort of spontaneous exorcism, with the result that Tavernier was no longer able to speak in ‘fine discourses and high conceptions’. In the words of Germain Habert, Pierre de Bérulle’s early biographer, the Devil ‘left this girl, who appeared a miracle of knowledge and piety, coarse, ignorant, stupid, and hardly different from an idol, that the spirit, which had provided it with false oracles, has quit’. Habert’s simile suggests how much was seen to be at stake in such a case: the image of Tavernier becoming like an idol promoted the idea that a powerful female autodidact was as menacing as a false god. It may be noted, however, that as the primary intention of these accounts was to publicise the spiritual acuity of Acarie and Bérulle, this anecdote had none of the militancy of more moralistic tales, such as Del Rio’s. Duval told the story in order to praise the capacity of Acarie to detect deceit behind the outward appearance of spirituality, and Habert also takes a relatively sympathetic view, concluding that Tavernier had been taken in by the demon. The exorcisms of the nun Jeanne Féry –​whose drunken father had cursed her as an infant –​produced at one point a strikingly similar result to that of the ‘exorcism’ of Tavernier. As her consent to the Devil at four years old shows, Féry was depicted as having been possessed partly as a consequence of her own volition.When she was being exorcised as a nun in her twenties, her devil pleaded with her that he not be abandoned. He even spilled candy (‘little round sweets called Anis d’Alexandre’)

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about the room to tempt her, then threatened that if she let the exorcisms deliver her, she would lose her intellectual powers. This was a very subtle entreaty to her nature, the narrator claims, as Féry had all her life been endowed with a sharp mind. The implication is clear, that Féry’s intellectual pride was demonically inspired. Her exorcist, abbé Mainsent, resolved that he would sooner see her mind reduced to that of a child than see her possessed. Having reassured Féry that he would be like a father to her, as the Devil had been, he continued the exorcisms. During one unconventional and aggressive ‘exorcism’, exorcists held her head under water for as long as she could stand it. Then Féry, emerging from the water to breathe, miraculously produced from her mouth a letter, which declared that, thanks to the intercession of Mary Magdalene, she was free from the possession of devils and might now be ‘instructed and indoctrinated surely in the praise of God, of which she is ignorant’. The story goes on: ‘After the rendition of the said letter … the nun remained with the understanding of a mere child of four, ignorant and idiotic.’Thus an opening was made for officially approved learning, and the episode concludes: ‘So little by little the rudiments of Christian piety were taught to her, even though she had to go back to her ABC to learn to read.’ These stories are especially poignant in relation to the educational standing of women in the context of Catholic reform. They clearly suggest a disjunction between the level of religious knowledge that was accessible and often encouraged for young women, and what was seen as fitting. What was emerging in the late sixteenth century, was, in effect, a tension between a growing responsiveness in the Catholic Church to the desire of young women to participate in public religious life, and a parallel anxiety about the legitimacy of female authority. In this scenario, broader fears about the value of female charismatic spirituality and demonic possession were fed by concern about the powers of the Devil in the world. This made it critical to discern divine from diabolical inspiration. The so-​called ‘discernment of spirits’ required either the sufferer to interrogate her own experience, or an outsider to scrutinise it, in order to provide an official hierarchical intervention. St Ignatius described the minute attention which was required to discover the source of apparently divine prompting. He described the process whereby the whole experience of an emotion, from its source in thought to its expression in feeling, helped one ‘little by little … to know the difference in the spirits that were at work, one of the Devil and the other of God’. Jeanne Féry said that Mary Magdalene had visited her and explained how to discern the actions of good and evil spirits: Good spirits when they arrive bring fear to the person, but when they leave, leave them full of joy and consolation. In contrast, evil spirits

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cause when they arrive some apparent recreation, and when they leave, leave the person confused, perplexed, bewildered and ill at ease. Willingness to submit oneself to scrutiny in case of doubt was also seen as a mark of holiness: St Teresa of Avila had stressed that a devotee who believed she was the recipient of some kind of personal divine communication should submit herself to a confessor and Madame Acarie, following the founder of her order, had her own ecstasies scrutinised by two churchmen. To correctly ‘discern spirits’ in others was itself also regarded as a divine gift. André Duval praised Madame Acarie’s capacity to discern ‘whether it was the spirit of God or the evil spirit that attended a soul’, saying that, in the Tavernier case, she saw ‘more clearly than the most famous doctors and those most advanced in the interior life’. The act of discernment thus generated a hierarchy among candidates for spiritual credibility. Significantly, however, as Duval’s deferential tone suggested, this establishment of a spiritual hierarchy occurred sometimes in the absence or even instead of official church hierarchy. Indeed what we see in the Tavernier case are the workings of a parallel and sometimes competing spiritual hierarchy: here, one member of this hierarchy, Madame Acarie, was denying another, Tavernier, status and authority. Patronage from within the traditional institutional hierarchy also continued to figure in these cases, however. In one notable story, Claude Pithoys, a Minim priest, approached the Bishop of Toul in 1620 after the possessed Lorraine widow Elisabeth de Ranfaing had accused a Minim provincial of witchcraft. Pithoys told the bishop he thought Ranfaing’s possession may be the result of ‘a diabolical illusion caused by means of some demon present, but not possessing’, implying heavily it was her own witchcraft. Unfortunately for Pithoys the bishop was Ranfaing’s chief sponsor, and after hearing Pithoys out, he demanded what Pithoys knew of possession, and finally ordered him out of his sight, saving:  ‘Get out! Go! Get away!’ And while this alienating experience may have influenced Pithoys’ subsequent conversion to Protestantism, papal officials later turned the tables on Ranfaing herself. Bypassing her local patronage networks, they worked to dismantle her personal cult after members of the Jesuit hierarchy accused her of having a possibly diabolical hold over some of the order’s younger members. Even when positive possession was legitimated, the role of the holy possessed usually aroused a degree of suspicion, and the status of possessed women –​even those of high social standing or who were supported through many strands of church hierarchy  –​was rarely free of the taint of the primary association of possession with the Devil and with the body. Robert Mandrou’s characterisation of people such as Mother Jeanne des Anges (the possessed superior of the Ursulines of Loudun) as ‘second-​order mystics’ is itself a reflection of the notion, which

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was pervasive in the seventeenth century, that possession, even when interpreted favourably in some quarters, was a suspect source of spiritual worth. The fate of the 19-​year-​old Ursuline nun Madeleine Demandols, whose admissions under exorcism facilitated the execution of Louis Gaufridy for witchcraft, attests to this ambivalence. … She became a social outcast after the execution of Gaufridy and, at the age of 64, was herself prosecuted for witchcraft for having caused a young woman to become possessed. And two of the most successful possessed women from this period, Mother Jeanne des Anges and Elisabeth de Ranfaing, each of whom became a religious leader of some note, only achieved their status after distancing themselves from the initial demonic possession which had provided its foundation. Finally, the legitimacy of demonic possession was largely dependent upon the possessed being seen to be totally in the sway of demons, and upon their (or their demons’) active submission to higher authorities. In the case of Elisabeth de Ranfaing, the Paris Faculty of Theology made this clear. The Faculty did not condemn Ranfaing’s many demonic speeches outright, but tried to nuance its response by judging her performances to be suspect because they went on for too long, ‘without syncope or interruption’. In other words, for her displays to be legitimate, Ranfaing should have either fallen into a faint (showing an unambiguous sign of the Devil’s physical domination of her body), or have been interrupted in some other way, possibly by the exorcist. The Faculty appears to have seen an uninterrupted performance as inherently suspect, occurring as a result of the unmediated desires of either Ranfaing herself, or the Devil. Anything which allowed for the interpolation of the exorcist’s authority, and showed control over the woman or the Devil, it appears, would have made the performances authentic, in the opinion of the Faculty. Similarly, the many instances of physical interaction of the possessed with audience members at public exorcisms might be interpreted as a way in which the possessed ‘purchased’ both their credibility as truly possessed, and belief in what they said. … Nicole Obry was said to have felt like wood, and at Aix, commissioners of the Parlement were invited to feel the action of the Devil in Madeleine Demandols’ body. At Loudun a member of the Parlement of Rennes, Sieur Queriolet, was told by the exorcists to put his hands on one of the possessed nuns, which the ‘demon’ resisted, saving ‘no, I don’t want him to touch me. His hands are smelly. Oh you’re crazy  –​it pains me to see you’. And a visitor to Loudun related that audience members were also permitted to touch the protruding tongues of the possessed, to discern their unnatural hardness. Indeed, exorcists appear to have offered direct contact with the bodies of the possessed as enticement to audience members to gain their support. I do not

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suggest that exorcists necessarily consciously ‘used’ the bodies of the possessed. That would imply that exorcists perceived a distinction between the sexuality or physicality of the possessed, and the religious significance of their physical state, and there is no evidence for such a claim. However, their imperviousness to what modern eyes can see as abuse does not alter the reality of the imbalance in the power relations between exorcists and the possessed, an imbalance that was at times characterised by physical and psychic violence. In fact, possession showed few signs of anything like true ecstasy. Notably lacking from cases of possession was the kind of celebration of divine gifts found in the work of St Teresa, for example, or the ‘joy and consolation’ promised by Mary Magdalene to Jeanne Féry. This was a joyless and morbid religiosity, which permitted cruelty in exorcists and, at times, the possessed. The ability of the possessed in some cases to generate witchcraft accusations and to gain support for their spiritual quests could make them powerful, even dangerous, women.Thus, while it is important to understand the limitations that possession could place on female power, it remains that the power and authority the possessed could claim was sometimes significant. Even so, authority came at a cost; giving credence to what ‘demons’ said depended on an oscillation between the possessed being seen as a suffering female body, and being listened to for the content of her speech. Father Tranquille, an exorcist at Loudun, made [it] clear that he saw the physical violence of demons in the bodies of the possessed as an index of the credibility of what the women said. He argued that if the demons were tortured, exorcists must be hitting their mark. ‘We can see well’, he wrote, that when the demons ‘can only speak with great constraint and violence, the interrogation is exact and pressing … especially when the authority and intention of the Church is interposed’. Credibility, in other words, was measured in physical suffering. Yet a woman might find a potent form of devotional expression in demonic possession, even if she did so unconsciously, or indeed, on condition that she was seen to do so unconsciously. For claims to spiritual authority or access to divine mysteries through possession were subject to the same scepticism as ecstatic spirituality, as, by promoting direct contact with God, each claim to spiritual authority implicitly challenged the position of the institutional hierarchy in the Church. At the same time, it was this kind of spiritual fervour that kept alive the devotional core of the Church as a whole. … Possessed women performed within a treacherous terrain in Catholic devotional culture, which they, with their exorcists, constantly manipulated and expanded. Buttressed by an understanding of possession as analogous to spiritual ecstasy, they were nonetheless subject to intense scrutiny because of their inescapably demonic associations. When accusations of witchcraft were involved, the stakes were very high. Working in a volatile religious

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atmosphere, subject to jurisdictional tensions within and between secular and religious hierarchies, possessed women were exposed to the full implications of the proximity of diabolic power which their possessions entailed. For every successful religious career launched by a woman’s public displays of possession or ecstasy, another ended in obscurity or ignominy. It is saying nothing new to claim that women seeking a holy life in western Catholicism have often needed to do so by means of affective spirituality, due to their relative lack of authority within the male hierarchy. We have considered here the distinctive role that demonological speculation and the backdrop of witch-​ hunting had in shaping how these women saw themselves and how others saw them, in order to suggest that the volatility of notions such as ecstasy, possession and witchcraft made it difficult for the women in such cases to retain any kind of secure identity. These events took place in a period of Catholic history in France when notions of hierarchy were being both severely tested, and expanded, by charismatic spirituality and positive possession. What the performances of the possessed and the tests they underwent reveal is not only instability in meanings and sources of authority, but the persistence of a distinctive process whereby authority was constituted in the Church. The emphasis on the need for discernment between divine, demonic and human activities is evidence of what could be called the force of a will to hierarchy, an impulse which served not only pre-​existing institutional hierarchies, such as the secular hierarchy, but also most people and groups who stood to gain esteem by staking a claim for what might be called a spiritual hierarchy. Even, or especially, these spiritual parvenus needed to reinforce some kind of scale of authenticity, to vouch for their own place in the institution of the Church. That the entrenchment of notions of hierarchy came about partly through the agency of apparently centrifugal forces is, like possessing devils preaching for the Church, one of the productive paradoxes of Catholic reform.

Notes 1 2 3

E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1976), 60. For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (Routledge, London and New York 2004), 115–​23 –​ Ed. Henri Boguet, An Examen of Witches, trans. E.  Allen Ashwin, ed. Montague Summers (John Rodker, London 1929), 13–​14.

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Chapter 26

Elisa Slattery JOHANN WEYER AND THE DEVIL

J

O H A N N W E Y E R , the physician to the Duke of Cleves, was one of the most trenchant and influential critics of witch trials. While acknowledging the reality of witchcraft, he argued for judicious scepticism in the treatment of suspects. This was partly because of the Devil’s ability to delude unwary mortals and confound justice. Alison Rowlands demonstrates the practical effect of this approach in her study of Rothenburg (17), where allegations of witchcraft were often dismissed as satanic tricks. In the chapter below Elisa Slattery sets out the characteristics of Weyer’s cautious demonology.

Johann Weyer set out to provide a clear-​eyed attack on witch-​hunting in his book, De Praestigiis Daemonum, first published in 1563.1 Weyer believed witch-​hunts were misguided attempts to punish harmless and crazy old women, and rather than removing dangerous criminals witch-​hunts rent the fabric of society. … In terms of his belief in demons, Weyer can be situated somewhere between the Catholic witch-​hunters Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger and the thoroughly skeptical witch defender Reginald Scot.2 Like the witch-​hunting authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Weyer believed that the Devil was expert at deceiving the senses and harming people. Unlike Reginald Scot, Weyer neither discounted the Devil’s existence nor minimized his power. Weyer remained within the belief system of his time. It can even be argued that Weyer “[left] the Devil in full command.” But

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Weyer, strongly influenced by Lutheran thought, left the Devil in a different kind of command than Institoris and Sprenger. … According to the theories of the time, witches could be prosecuted legally because they had free will. Drawing on St. Augustine’s theories of sin and free will, Institoris and Sprenger asserted that the witch’s will was at least initially free from the Devil’s control. Witchcraft was seen as a combination of harmful magic and heresy in which the witch willingly renounced the Christian faith and made a pact with the Devil in exchange for sexual satisfaction and powers which would allow her to perform maleficia.The witch was not simply an innocent victim of the Devil (as with demonic possession) but rather his willing instrument. “But a witch is depraved through sin,” they wrote, and “therefore the cause of it is not the Devil but human will.” The Malleus Maleficarum “tried to shift the focus away from the actual harm done to the spiritual state of infidelity and heresy that made maleficium possible.”3 Brian Levack posits that the witch provoked anxieties within society on many levels: As a heretic and apostate the witch was considered guilty of lèse majesté or treason against God; as a Devil-​worshipper she was part of an enormous political conspiracy; as a lower-​class peasant she was part of a movement that was striving to turn the world upside down, reversing the divinely established order of society and rejecting all its moral norms.4 By choosing to give their souls over to the Devil witches had committed crimes against man and against God. The gravity of this double crime classified witchcraft as crimen exceptum, and allowed for the suspension of normal rules of evidence in order to punish the guilty. Claiming that witches posed no danger except to themselves,Weyer defended witches using the full array of his knowledge of medicine, law, philosophy, and theology in an effort to prevent the “constant shipwreck of souls” which he saw as the outcome of misguided witch trials. By punishing those who could not be held accountable for their supposed or real crimes, witch-​hunters were creating more misery and tainting their own souls thus creating more fodder for the Devil. … Like Institoris and Sprenger, Weyer saw the Devil as a master of illusions, an expert at obfuscating the truth, but he questioned the immense physical capabilities with which they imbued the Devil. Weyer argued strongly for the limits placed on the Devil’s behavior by natural laws which he defined as “the measure and order established by God.” According to Weyer, the Devil had physical powers carefully limited by God, and the duty of a good observer was to discover what

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the Devil could and could not do. Weyer shared an equal dislike for theories which denied the existence of demons and stories which exaggerated their power. Through common sense and careful attention to natural laws, Weyer claimed to be able to discern whether an alleged maleficium resulted from natural causes or the Devil’s work: Many things come before our eyes from time to time which are thought to be beyond the law of nature, and deemed to be the mocking activities of demons, even though nature –​the parent of all things –​has produced them from definite causes not difficult to understand. Weyer retrieved from the Malleus Maleficarum a space in the natural realm in which the clear thinking and educated mind could function. Close and informed observation could detect the truth. Illusions were not so rampant that the powers of reason were struck wholly useless. Weyer claimed to find simple natural explanations for seemingly mysterious events. But his explanations were not always so simple.Weyer stopped a witchcraft investigation by arguing that an ill nobleman was “a victim not of maleficium but of demonic possession.” The Devil was busy at work in the world but he acted directly, not through witches as intermediaries. Natural laws limited not only the activities of the Devil but those of men and women as well. Humans were incapable of committing acts beyond their natural power, and witches –​often weak and feeble women –​had even less strength to perform miracles than other members of society. On the contrary, they can do nothing beyond the innate strength of human nature, even if the demon cooperate a thousand times over; rather, because of their sex and age … they hinder the work of the demon’s fine and subtle substance. Weyer asserted the physical impossibility of the acts attributed to witches and established a natural hierarchy in which the Devil occupied a prominent position, overturning the idea that the Devil needs humans in order to commit maleficia. “Satan needs the help of no second creature in displaying his power and declaring his actions, he who is constrained by the will or command of none but God and God’s good ministers.” The Devil was more powerful than humans but less powerful than God. By making human cooperation unnecessary for the Devil, Weyer expanded the powers of the Devil on earth. The Devil’s power on earth in the Malleus was

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constrained not only by God’s will but by the will of those who refused to aid the Devil. Witch-​hunting, according to Institoris and Sprenger, was necessary to root out those who would aid the Devil and in this way protect others from harm. A strong human will was one of the last bulwarks against demonic control. Weyer undermined one of witch-​hunting’s purposes by asserting that witches (and magicians) could do no physical harm. But that claim alone could not eliminate the need for witch-​hunts. Witchcraft was the double crime of harmful magic and heresy. Weyer had disposed of the crime of harmful magic but the witch’s pact with the Devil remained. In making this pact, Institoris and Sprenger wrote, the witch willingly and joyfully renounced the Christian faith. Even if a witch could not perform harmful magic, she was still guilty of heresy and apostasy. Weyer attacked the importance of the pact from several angles. It was not a legally binding agreement because the Devil could not provide what he promised, nor did he have any intention of doing so. A  bad faith agreement contracted between a deluded old woman and a malicious spirit, it could not outweigh the initial good faith contract of baptism with a truthful God. As for the fact that she confessed to deserting God and adhering to the demon, this will not be actionable in civil court. For who of us is there who does not do the same? –​since indeed everyone who sins is a slave to sin according to Christ’s teachings. To sin against God in any way meant joining with the Devil, and all humans were guilty of that at some point.That type of sin could be punished only by God himself. The witch was not guilty of heresy but of error. Her will was somehow impaired when she entered into the pact. She was “dulled by age, or inconstant by reason of her sex, or unsteady because of her weak-​mindedness, or in despair because of a disease of the mind.” Weyer turned the argument of women’s susceptibility to sin as reason for punishment on its head. Instead, he argued they should be accorded more mercy than men because of their weakened states: “Though of sound mind and body, and though forewarned by Christ,” Weyer argued, “Peter denied Christ three times, going against the testimony of his heart; he even added an oath thereto,” and he was nonetheless forgiven by Christ. Weak-​ willed and feeble-​ minded women should be punished less than sound-​minded men. It is commonly said that in the same type of offense, women sin less than men and should be punished less than men, all other things being

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equal. This is of course because of their weakness of spirit, mind, and natural disposition. Even if witches could not be exonerated from charges of heresy and apostasy on account of illness or coercion by the Devil, “the singular debility of their age or simpleness of their sex should exonerate them or at least mitigate their punishment.” For Weyer, the Devil made such a powerful adversary that it was unrealistic to expect people, especially women, not to fall into his trap. … The human intellect and senses were another battleground for control between good and evil. They were a battleground of especial interest to Weyer because he placed so much emphasis on the value of observation and clear thinking. Drawing on Dionysian theories of the intellect, Weyer wrote of understanding as a passive process in which both the angelic influence and the Devil “can impress a certain form upon the intellect.” The angelic influence impressed the intellect in order that humans might understand whereas the Devil used his natural power to persuade and deceive. And the Devil was an expert of deception. He knew how to: display various forms, fashion empty idols with wondrous skill, confound the organs of sight, blind the eyes, substitute false things for true with remarkable dexterity (lest they be detected), cover over things which really exist, so that they are not apparent, and show forth things which in reality do not exist, in such a way that they seem to do so. By deceiving the senses, Weyer posited, the Devil could lead humans astray. Through illusion and disturbance of the nerves and humors the Devil could drive men “to wonderment, lack of faith, false opinions about others, lies, forbidden remedies, and murder.” It was no small wonder for Weyer that weak-​minded women were easily deceived by the Devil when he wielded such powers over their senses and minds. Less excusable for Weyer was that magicians and other healthy men would allow the Devil to delude them and join with the Devil in his work of deception. It was difficult enough to trust one’s senses with the Devil loose in the world without magicians aiding the Devil in his trickery. In fact, Weyer argued, one could only trust one’s senses to a certain degree. The Devil could muddy the waters so much that the truth might be impossible to discover. Magistrates might be blinded to the truth and in their own blindness could destroy the lives of innocent victims. While Weyer thought a physician’s expertise could be useful in determining whether criminal action was necessary in specific cases, there were situations in which no one could be certain. Where one

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could not determine whether maleficium had occurred it was best to use the tools of faith and medicine to bring those who had wandered back into the fold. In this way, one could avoid the often widespread tragedy that a witchcraft trial could bring: Assuredly in matters admitting of little certitude, the less cautious [princes and legal officials] would not then be slipping from one single error into a thousand others, as though trapped in an inextricable labyrinth … From long experience, that crafty old weaver [the Devil] knows how to weave such webs skillfully. As witchcraft assured little certitude,Weyer asserted, it was best left to a God who could understand and discern all things, a God whose senses remained immune to the Devil’s tricks. Weyer challenged Institoris and Sprenger’s somewhat optimistic belief that one could limit the Devil’s power through the legal system. Law was an inadequate tool with which to overcome the Devil. Rather law could become a tool of the Devil. The only way to keep the law from becoming yet another method of spreading misery, Weyer asserted, was to exercise caution and skepticism in the face of accusations of witchcraft and confessions by witches. … Weyer’s Lutheran bent made it clear that humans were inherently sinful creatures inhabiting imperfect bodies doing battle with an incredibly powerful devil. To persecute them for what they could not help, instead of offering the possibility of repentance, was bound to create more misery and sorrow.

Notes 1

2

Extracts from Weyer can be found in Brian P. Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 2nd edn (Routledge, London and New  York 2015), chs 54 and 62. Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum is available in translation as Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, eds George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 73 (Binghamton, NY 1991) –​ Ed. Institoris and Sprenger were the authors to the Malleus Maleficarum first published in 1486/​7.The Malleus defines witchcraft and then provides the legal tools for combating it. It is often credited with causing a surge in witchcraft trials, but the Malleus was published only in Latin and thus accessible to a rather small group of learned individuals. (Weyer is responding directly to claims made by Institoris and Sprenger among others.) Reginald Scot defended witches in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by claiming that supernatural powers did not exist, thus rendering witchcraft impossible.

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3 4

H. C.  Erik Midelfort, “Johann Weyer and the Transformation of the Insanity Defense”, in R.  Po-​Chia Hsia, ed., The German People and the Reformation (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London 1988), 235. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-​Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Longman Group UK Limited, New York and London 1987), 58.

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PART SEVEN

Witchcraft and gender

B

U R I E D A W A Y I N T H E turgid and relentlessly misogynistic pages of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) is a story so surreal and comic that it is impossible to forget. Interrupting their discussion of the witch’s power to cause impotence in men, Institoris and Sprenger invite their readers to consider the following information: And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who … sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? … For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take whichever member he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, ‘You must not take that one’, adding, ‘because it belonged to a parish priest’.1 This strange anecdote can be read as a testament to male anxieties about the sexual power of women.2 It is also notable because it owed more to folklore than learned theory. Hans Peter Broedel (4) has shown how the Malleus bridged the

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worlds of theology and popular belief to produce a model of witchcraft that was plausible to both academics and ordinary people. This involved the appropriation of many popular assumptions about witches, not least of which was the view that they were normally female. On this point Institoris and Sprenger, and most later demonologists, were at one with ordinary villagers: they assumed that the majority of witches were women. This assumption is reflected in the surviving records of witch trials. The best modern estimates suggest that three-​quarters of those executed for witchcraft in Europe were women, though the figures varied considerably from place to place. Men and women appear to have been equally vulnerable to accusations in parts of France, while men outnumbered women as suspects in some countries on the periphery of the continent like Iceland and Estonia.3 These figures were outweighed, however, by those from Germany and Scotland, where some 70 per cent of the accused were women, and regions like Hungary, Denmark and England, where 90 per cent of witches were female. The potential influence of sexual stereotypes on prosecutions was illustrated in a list of “presumptions against witches” drawn up for JPs in Yorkshire in 1592: the first presumption was “that they are most comonly weeke women”.4 Such records have obliged historians to evaluate the relationship between witch trials and gender in the early modern period. But despite the considerable attention paid to this issue, there is still no consensus among academics in the field. In the first contribution to Part Seven, Karen Jones and Michael Zell (27) point out that witchcraft was already associated with women before the major phase of prosecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and consider the implications of this fact. In their study of the late medieval church courts in the English diocese of Canterbury, they found that men and women were equally likely to be accused of practising magic for positive purposes, such as the finding of treasure; but only women were prosecuted for causing magical harm.5 As it appears that maleficium was already strongly gendered in the late fifteenth century, it was not surprising that women outnumbered men as suspects in the more numerous and serious prosecutions that followed; and the explanation for this fact should not be sought in the later period. More broadly, it is likely that rising anxieties about destructive magic and the Devil fuelled the large-​scale prosecution of witches from the middle years of the sixteenth century, rather than specific concerns about gender. As Julian Goodare has observed in a different context (43), early modern people were anxious about witchcraft per se: we cannot assume that they prosecuted it for ulterior reasons. One popular but discredited argument based on the supposed ulterior motives of witchcraft accusers is that male medical practitioners used allegations of maleficia

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to discredit female healers and midwives. Jane P. Davidson shows in Chapter 28 that there is no evidence to support this claim: the great majority of women accused of witchcraft cannot be identified as “healers”, and midwives were seldom named as suspects.6 Thus the idea of a “male medical conspiracy” is based on unsupported conjecture. Moreover, this argument obscures the central role that women played in non-​professional medicine throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a role that was fully accepted within their communities. A more subtle and persuasive analysis is presented by Elizabeth Reis in her study of witchcraft in puritan New England (29). Reis argues that Protestant conceptions of the soul and the susceptibility of women to supernatural influences meant that witchcraft was identified primarily as a female crime.With weaker bodies than men, women were less able to resist the temptations and assaults of the Devil; and the essentially passive nature of their spirituality made them an easy target for demons. Paradoxically, these same qualities made women unusually receptive to the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit; but in “the context of the witchcraft outbreaks, a time of extraordinary uncertainty and fear, New Englanders focused on the darker side of womanhood, emphasizing the vulnerability of women’s bodies and souls to the Devil”. Reis locates the targeting of women as witches within the intellectual framework of puritan Christianity; but other scholars, such as Sarah Ferber (25), have noted the same connection between female passivity and vulnerability to the Devil in the context of the Catholic Reformation. It can be argued that both Protestants and Catholics embraced a model of femininity that endorsed the identification of witchcraft with women. As Reis points out, women figured prominently as victims of maleficium and accusers of other women in the New England trials. This was also the case in Europe. Indeed, it appears that women were more active in the prosecution of witchcraft than they were in most other crimes. In England, for example, they featured not only as accusers but also in the specialist role of “searchers” who examined the bodies of suspects for hidden teats used to suckle familiar spirits. Licensed midwives, with their specialist knowledge of female anatomy, were often employed in this capacity, thus reversing the idea that midwives were commonly accused of witchcraft.7 Clive Holmes considers the various roles played by women in the prosecution of witches in Chapter  30. He argues that women frequently voiced concerns about maleficium but normally stopped short of taking formal accusations to the courts. Like Robin Briggs (6), he emphasises the informal efforts of individuals to placate and co-​exist with those suspected of the crime: the witches at Pendle in Lancashire, for example, were appeased by their neighbours for decades before reaching the attention of local magistrates. Holmes argues that women were generally less inclined to move beyond this strategy than men. He

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points out that female witnesses in trials often testified about misdeeds that had occurred many years before the prosecution itself, suggesting that these acts were not instrumental in the proceedings against the accused. Men, on the other hand, described more recent acts of maleficia. He concludes that it was men rather than women who took the lead in prosecuting witches: they were the primary actors in the legal drama, and made the crucial decisions about who should be tried for the crime. By taking this into account, Holmes returns our attention to what he calls “the misogynous dimension of witchcraft”. This leads to the question of how men were occasionally accused of the crime. In the context of Germany, William Monter suggests that men were more likely to become suspects when the normal stereotype of the witch was undermined: this was the case in the mass panics in Trier in the late sixteenth century, when fears of a vast conspiracy of witches led eventually to the execution of senior churchmen (21). In the last chapter in this section, E. J. Kent considers the less sensational circumstances in which men were accused of maleficium in seventeenth-​century England and colonial America (31). She argues that male witches, like their female counterparts, were perceived as a threat to communal norms and good order. Unlike female witches, however, male suspects were often substantial figures in their communities, and their offences were played out in the world of public affairs  –​disputes over land, religious controversies and litigation in the courts. Such men were perceived as unruly and threatening to their male neighbours. They also abused the traditional sources of masculine power such as education, the law and the government of households. As such, they represented a disordered version of manhood: they were quintessentially “bad men”, just as female witches displayed a perverted and uncontained femininity. All the texts in Part Seven concentrate on the accusation and trial of alleged witches by other members of their community. This approach is essential for understanding the social dynamics of prosecutions; but there is a danger that it obscures the experience of the accused witches themselves, and depicts them as passive victims of forces completely beyond their control. As E. J. Kent and Clive Holmes suggest, those suspected of maleficium could play an active role in the formation of their own reputations. Indeed, the idea of witchcraft provided a cultural resource for those who fell under suspicion of the crime as well as their accusers: the supposed powers of the Pendle witches, for example, probably afforded them more influence in their community than they would otherwise have enjoyed. This was also true for some of the witches described by Joyce Miller (8) and Edward Bever (9). This idea has been developed by Geoffrey Scarre, who argues that the constraints imposed by patriarchal culture meant that women were more likely to resort to magic than men:

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For men, there were usually more direct methods for attaining their ends or revenging themselves on their enemies; and it is possible that the complaints of a man against harsh or uncharitable treatment would have been listened to, just because he was a man, more sympathetically than those of a woman. Witchcraft may have held more appeal for women than for men not because, as contemporaries thought, women were more wicked and more easily led than men, but because their social and economic position imposed greater constraints on their possibilities of action.8 Scarre’s interpretation restores the agency of women who believed themselves capable of maleficium, but places this in the context of wider social restraints. A similar picture has emerged from the study of witchcraft confessions in recent years: these texts reveal how some women came to internalise the idea of witchcraft as an act of self-​definition, but did so in a culture that allowed them only a limited range of alternative models by which to understand themselves. The study of this material provides a further insight into the relationship between gender and witchcraft; but this will have to wait until Part Eight.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

6

Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (Dover 1971), 121. It should be noted, however, that the Malleus’ preoccupation with female wickedness was absent in most later demonologies, though there was a consensus among later writers that women’s weaknesses made them more susceptible to the Devil’s temptations. Allegations of causing impotence were comparatively rare in witch trials. For a survey of the sex-​distribution of witchcraft suspects, see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours (HarperCollins 1996), 260–​2. Archives of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, DD146/​12/​2/​10. For male practitioners of magic in the Canterbury records, see the full text in Karen Jones and Michael Zell, “ ‘The Divels Speciall Instruments’: Women and Witchcraft Before the Great Witch-​Hunt”, Social History, 30:1 (2005). The idea that midwives were commonly accused of witchcraft was originally encouraged by the excessive reliance of historians on the Malleus Maleficarum, which claimed that midwife witches abducted infants for ritual sacrifices. But surviving trial records suggest that midwives were not particularly prone to being accused. See David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-​ Witch”, Social History of Medicine, 3:1 (1990), 1–​26; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil:  Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge 1994), 201.

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7

8

Jim Sharpe, “Women, Witches and the Legal Process”, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (UCL Press 1994). Geoffrey Scarre, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-​Century Europe (Macmillan 1987), 53.

 

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Chapter 27

Karen Jones and Michael Zell WOMEN AND WITCHCRAFT BEFORE THE “GREAT WITCH-​H UNT”

W

H E N W A S W I T C H C R A F T F I R S T identified as a predominantly female crime? As Karen Jones and Michael Zell argue here, this question is central to attempts to explain why the offence was gendered in this way at all. In the first part of the extract, Jones and Zell point out the chronological problems attached to many theories of the gendering of witchcraft in the age of large-​scale prosecutions: these often depend on establishing wider changes in early modern society that seem improbable or hard to prove. In the second part they make the case that the practice of harmful magic was already associated with women before the age of witch trials, at least in the surviving records of the English church courts. Attempts to explain the identification of women with witchcraft on the basis of later social, cultural or political developments may therefore be misplaced. As well as providing an insightful reminder of the importance of chronology to debates about witchcraft and gender, the authors direct our attention back to the context of late medieval witch beliefs explored in Part One of this book.

It is common knowledge that the majority of accused ‘witches’ during the ‘witch-​ craze’ of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were female. There is less unanimity, however, about the reasons for the gender imbalance. The whole phenomenon of the witch-​hunt has been attributed variously to the religious, economic, demographic, social and political changes of the late sixteenth century.

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Moreover, it is often assumed that these changes must somehow account for the femininity of most of the witch-​hunt’s victims. But although later sixteenth-​ century developments may explain the increased concern with witchcraft which characterizes that period, the fact that witches were generally expected to be female can be more satisfactorily explained by reference to an earlier time. This article, drawing upon the records of the church courts of the diocese of Canterbury between the earliest extant prosecution for sorcery in 1396 and the passage of the Elizabethan witchcraft statute in 1563, explores that intriguing question. It will argue that, while in the later Middle Ages witchcraft employed for beneficent purposes might be attributed to men or women, ‘black’ magic was already considered a largely female preserve, well before the early modern ‘witch-​craze’  began.

I Women’s vulnerability to accusations of witchcraft is often linked to their susceptibility to poverty in the economic conditions of the later sixteenth century. They are assumed to have been the most dependent members of the community and so more likely than men to ask for charity. The view suggested by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, that the main cause of English witchcraft accusations was guilt at refusing charity to the indigent at a time when a commercial ethic was replacing a communal one, is still influential, although it has been subject to criticism.1 This ‘refusal of charity’ model is in line with much evidence from early modern depositions, but it seems implausible that no guilt was aroused when charity was refused to men, or that feeling uneasy about refusing a loan or handout to a poor neighbour was something new in Elizabeth’s reign.2 Furthermore, the argument that women were disproportionately likely to be accused of witchcraft because they were the poorest depends largely on the assumption, which owes more to early modern witchcraft literature than to actual prosecutions, that most accused witches were old, poor and socially isolated. In fact, elderly widows were probably a minority of accused witches in England, who were often of similar social standing to their accusers.3 Macfarlane found the Essex accused ‘moderately’ rather than very poor, a finding confirmed by Pollock for Kent.4 Defendants who were old at the time of their trial had often acquired reputations as witches many years earlier.5  The Elizabethan sceptic Reginald Scot described the typical witch as an ugly old hag, but Scot’s description has often been quoted out of context. He was emphasizing pathetic old women in order to demonstrate the folly of believing

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such people had supernatural powers. Of thirteen alleged witches Scot described from his own experience, only three could have been widows, yet when generalizing he always referred to witches as old women.6 Another view links the strains of the sixteenth century indirectly with women and witchcraft, suggesting that men’s thinking about women changed, and that the persecution of female witches was one aspect of a more misogynistic attitude, which also resulted in increased prosecution of other ‘female’ offences such as scolding, prostitution and infanticide. Marianne Hester has suggested that in the tensions resulting from the religious, social and economic changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witchcraft accusations were ‘a means of recreating the male status quo in the emerging social order’, and that malice and the use of supernatural power were being increasingly seen as female attributes.7 But … these were already considered female characteristics in the fifteenth century. Sigrid Brauner suggested that women, becoming more economically disadvantaged in the later sixteenth century, reacted with socially inappropriate behaviour which made them susceptible to charges of witchcraft. The use of strong language by women, Brauner claimed, had formerly been grudgingly accepted, but changing elite views about appropriate behaviour for women in sixteenth-​century Germany caused sharp-​tongued females to be considered potential witches.8 However, at least in England, the idea that verbal aggression by women became less acceptable during the sixteenth century will not stand up to the results of recent research showing that prosecutions for scolding were probably as widespread in the late Middle Ages as in the period of the witch-​hunts.9 Some historians have emphasized the connection between prosecutions for witchcraft and for other crimes. During the sixteenth century, several European states began to prosecute a number of new offences, including vagrancy and begging, and a range of crimes formerly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, including blasphemy, sexual misconduct and infanticide as well as witchcraft.10 Christina Larner described this process as the criminalization of women, while Robin Briggs considers it part of a drive to exercise greater moral and social control, which adversely affected many men as well as women.11 The truth is perhaps somewhere between these two views. Women were prosecuted for sexual offences in English secular courts before the sixteenth century. Men were more likely than women to be prosecuted for vagrancy, and the largely male offence of drunkenness begins to appear in both secular and ecclesiastical courts from around 1560.12 Witchcraft and infanticide were the only predominantly female offences among the new, or newly secularized, crimes, but they were also the only ‘new’ crimes which became punishable by death, and so the criminalization of a wider range of anti-​social behaviour had more serious results for women than

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for men. But it is self-​evident why most infanticides were female; this is not the case with witches. Some other explanations for the femininity of witches do not locate it in any specific time. Accusations by women of women have been interpreted as a struggle between women for control of female social space, or ascribed to women’s own anxiety about their role as mothers.13 Prosecutions by men of women have been ascribed to men’s fear of impotence, to male reactions to women’s real or imagined power as mothers and nurturers, or as attempts to suppress the independence of women perceived to be outside patriarchal control, as widows, or as healers or midwives.14 Conversely, others attribute the persecution of women as witches to their weakness. It has been suggested that witchcraft offered a source of power to the powerless, and that women, lacking the physical strength to assault their enemies, or the power to initiate litigation, resorted to verbal means, including cursing.15 It is hard to see why these explanations should apply particularly to the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The relevance of psychoanalytic explanations depends on the assumption that, as their protagonists maintain, aspects of human nature are enduring.16 The masculinization and professionalization of the medical profession came about too late to be relevant.17 The desire to keep women under patriarchal control, like male fears about virility and female anxieties centred on motherhood, was a constant over centuries. The witch-​craze was similarly pre-​dated and outlasted by belief in women’s moral and intellectual weakness, but this was adduced as a reason for their susceptibility to demonic temptation in the fifteenth century, the time when, as studies of late medieval witchcraft have shown, women became disproportionately likely to be suspects.18 In England, the trials calendared by Kieckhefer were almost exclusively of men in the fourteenth century, while in the fifteenth women formed a slight majority.19 In France in the years around 1400, men and women were accused of sorcery in equal numbers.20 In Europe generally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, women outnumbered men by about two to one as defendants in witch trials, with female predominance becoming greater in the late fifteenth century.21 These figures, drawn mainly from printed sources, probably over-​represent high-​ profile, often political, cases in which men were more likely to be prominent. However, there is little doubt that the fifteenth century was a crucial period in the feminization of witchcraft. Henry IV’s writ of 1406, ordering the bishop of Lincoln to take action against practitioners of magic, enumerates sortilegi, magici, incantatores, nigromantici, divinatores, arioli, all masculine forms of the Latin nouns.22 About the same time, the didactic text Dives and Pauper deplores the prevalence of witchcraft ‘amongys … men and women’.23 So, at least in England, in the early fifteenth century, witches were not particularly identified as female.

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The notoriously misogynistic Malleus Maleficarum, which first appeared in 1487, was the first widely read European text to identify witches specifically as female, although two Italian writers in 1460 used the feminine form in their titles.24 The feminization of witches developed in fifteenth-​century Europe alongside the transferral of the Devil-​worshipping stereotype from heresy trials to witch trials, and the evolution in learned theory of what Brian Levack terms ‘the cumulative concept of witchcraft’, which involved not only using magic to harm others, but also night-​ flight, attending the witches’ sabbat and sealing a pact with the Devil by copulating with him.25 Belief in the diabolic pact made witches dependent agents of a male Devil (a role more suited to patriarchal notions about women), rather than independent directors of demons.26 And once ritual coupling with the Devil was part of the stereotype, it was natural to assume most witches were women:  popular imagination made the Devil masculine, and insatiable lust was ascribed to women.27 These beliefs, far removed from the popular concept of the witch as a person with inherent power to do harm, developed essentially because learned theologians believed that sorcery could only work through diabolical power.28 The idea of the diabolic pact was not mentioned in the English Witchcraft Acts of 1542 and 1563, and played no part (at least formally) in English secular witch trials until the seventeenth century.29 However, it was the rationale for the prosecution of witchcraft by the church courts. The logical conclusion of belief in the pact was the abolition of the traditional distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic: the witch’s power was evil whether it was used to harm or heal.30 Thus church courts, from the late fourteenth century onwards, prosecuted people accused of using witchcraft for both malevolent and benevolent purposes. But benevolent ‘witches’, at least in the late medieval Canterbury church courts, were about equally likely to be men or women, while ‘bad witches’ were almost exclusively female. Few of either were prosecuted until the late 1550s. The church courts in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, though they may have accepted the idea of the pact in theory, were perhaps sceptical about its application in practice, and reluctant to stigmatize beneficent activities such as long-​established folk-​healing practices as diabolical. They may have accepted the premise that witches who caused harm were more likely to be women, or this idea may have developed among lay people during the fifteenth century for reasons unconnected with the theologians’ theorizing. …

II Ninety-​five citations of ninety individuals involving the practice of magic survive in the Canterbury ecclesiastical courts from 1396 to 1543, although very few

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of these pre-​date 1450.31 … Up to 1543, fifteen women were cited for doing, or attempting to do, various forms of harm to their neighbours by supernatural means. Not a single man was accused of such offences. Two women allegedly spoiled their neighbours’ ale, a common accusation against English witches.32 Of the remaining thirteen, all were accused of harming, or intending to harm, either their neighbours’ persons or their livestock. A striking difference between these cases and those between 1557 and 1563 is that the former include several cases where the offence was clearly the defendant’s intention to cause harm, not any actual harm inflicted. The use of human excrement in witchcraft was common to both European and non-​European societies: two Canterbury women, over seventy years apart, were accused of burning it with a holy candle, with a view to causing harm to their neighbours.33 One of these, Alice Duraunt, reportedly performed the ritual in noctis silencio; ‘the silence of the night’ was also when Alice Ralfis was accused of ‘making a prayer with an image called in the vulgar [tongue] a Mandrake’.34 Nocturnal activity of any kind was immediately suspect in this period, and night was the proverbial time for witches’ activities throughout Europe and elsewhere.35 The aim of this mandrake ritual is not specified, but mandrake could be used for spells to avenge injuries, some of which appear in the Liber Iuratus (c. 1300).36 Vengeance was the commonest alleged motive for witchcraft in the early modern period, and is almost the only specified motive in the few cases where any reason for doing harm is given. Joan Glover was accused of ‘offering candles with prayers for vengeance on her neighbours’, presumably with the same purpose as in a London case of 1490, when a woman was said to have used a candle in the anticipation that ‘as the candle consumes, so the man must waste away’.37 According to Dives and Pauper, it was common for witches to drop holy candles in an enemy’s footsteps to make his feet rot off. A Folkestone woman in 1507 denied that she was guilty of ‘fasting a certain fast called a blakke fast for vengeance against enemies’. The ‘Black Fast’ was said to have been practised by a woman in Lancashire in 1519, and the practice of fasting either to raise demons or to procure the death of an enemy was widespread.38 Another woman, Alice Havyn, was accused of ‘celebrating the fasts of Saints Ninian and George’; St Ninian’s fast was, according to Kittredge, an alternative name for the black fast, though Havyn may have used it for finding lost goods.39 But elaborate rituals were not necessary as proof of evil intent:  the power of the spoken word was enough. Joan Dundys was cited for habitual cursing, and predicting that those she cursed would suffer.40 In fact cursing seems to have been thought the most effective way to cause actual harm to one’s neighbours. Five women, all in the late fifteenth century, were accused of killing or harming humans or livestock. Agnes Broke was accused

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of killing her neighbours’ cattle; Julian Bartholomew of killing livestock and hurting humans; Joan Cotyne of causing those already ill to die; Joan Newey of harming and killing people and animals; and Elizabeth Woddis of killing ‘diverse people’. Bartholomew, Cotyne and Newey were all reported to have cursed their victims; the other two were simply said to have used ars magica.41 No man was accused of cursing, or of any malevolent ritual. That female cursing was the only specified means whereby women were believed to have killed or injured might simply indicate that cursing required no preparation, was often the result of a momentary outburst of temper in the course of a confrontation and so was public, while fasting or performing rituals with excrement or candles involved premeditation and might be done in secret. Alternatively, like scolding and defaming, it might be taken to demonstrate fear of ‘the unruly female tongue’.42 The expectation that ‘bad’ witches would be female, then, seems to have been established long before the beginning of the Elizabethan witch-​hunt and to have merely persisted into the early modern period. Its origins can have had nothing to do with the economic or other problems of the later sixteenth century. It may have originated with the clergy, entirely as a corollary of the diabolic pact, or it may be an aspect of growing misogyny in England during the fifteenth century. The late medieval church courts were on the whole protective towards women, so it seems more likely that a misogynist attitude came from laymen.43 In the later fifteenth century all sorts of charges against women began to figure more prominently in local secular courts, which McIntosh suggests may be due to male fear of possible disorder among women, ‘particularly in places undergoing rapid economic restructuring’.44 If women enjoyed improved employment opportunities in the aftermath of the Black Death, and economic recession in the later fifteenth century produced male resentment of this, it could be that men became more disposed to believe women guilty of malevolent witchcraft, as well as increasingly anxious to control more mundane forms of female misbehaviour.45

Notes 1

2 3

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth 1973), 678; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London 1970); for criticisms see articles by Barry and Gaskill in J. Barry, M.  Hester and G.  Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge 1996). C. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion (Oxford 1984), 51. Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge 2000), 48–​9, 61; A. Pollock, “Social and Economic Characteristics of Witchcraft

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Accusations in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-​century Kent”, Archaeologia Cantiana, XCV (1979), 40. For Germany, see Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”, Past and Present, CLXXXIII (November 2001),  61–​3. 4 Macfarlane, Witchcraft, 151; Pollock, “Social and Economic Characteristics”, 46. 5 Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Power in Early Modern England”, in J. Kermode and G.  Walker, eds, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London 1994), 131; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness:  Witchcraft in England, 1550–​1750 (Harmondsworth 1997), 63; Macfarlane, Witchcraft, 95. 6 R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) (New York 1972), 3–​4, 31–​2, 37, 72, 75, 86, 89–​90, 147. 7 M. Hester, “Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch-​ Hunting”, in Barry et  al., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 289, 291–​2. 8 Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews:  The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany (Amherst 1995), 17, 19–​20, 23–​7. 9 S. Bardsley, “Scolding Women:  Cultural Knowledge and the Criminalization of Speech in Late Medieval England, 1300–​1500” (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1999), 98; Martin Ingram, “ ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?”, in Kermode and Walker, Women, Crime and the Courts, 53; Karen Jones, “Gender, Crime and the Local Courts in Kent, 1460–​1560” (Ph.D., Greenwich 2001), 108–​12; Karen Jones and Michael Zell, “Bad Conversation? Gender and Social Control in a Kentish Borough, c.  1450–​c.1570”, Continuity and Change, XIII (1998), 11–​31; M.  K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–​1600 (Cambridge 1998), 58–​9. 10 S. Burghartz, “The Equation of Women and Witches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”, in R. Evans, ed., The German Underworld (London 1988), 69; Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 59; Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London 1996), 262. 11 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 86; Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 262. 12 Jones, “Gender”, 185–​201,  237–​8. 13 Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 185; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London 1994), 202 and passim; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (London 1996), 100. 14 V. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages”, in C.  Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities:  Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (London 1994), 42; Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 166; Roper, Oedipus, 189; J. B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (London 1972), 280; Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford 1988), 183; Barbara Ehrenreich and D. English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (London 1973), 22. 15 Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 188; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 623; Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Power”, 129. 16 Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 376; Roper, Oedipus, 13. 17 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 152.

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18 Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 145; Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1990), 187. 19 R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials (London 1976), 106–​47. 20 C. Gauvard, “De grace especial”: Crime, Etat et Société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris 1991), Vol. I, 317. 21 Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 198; Brauner, Fearless Wives, 6. 22 G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, MA 1929), 59 and note. 23 P. H. Barnum, ed., Dives and Pauper (Oxford 1976), Vol. I, part I, 165. 24 Brauner, Fearless Wives, 34; see also Hans P. Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester 2003), esp. 25–​6. 25 B. P.  Levack, The Witch-​Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London 1987), 27–​46; Brauner, Fearless Wives, 7. 26 Levack, Witch-​Hunt, 34–​5; Merry E.  Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 1993), 228. 27 Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 145, 182–​3. 28 Kieckhefer, Witch Trials, 79. 29 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 528. 30 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 4. 31 The records are held in Canterbury Cathedral Archives (hereafter C. C. A.). It is possible that some cases may have been missed in the process of scanning the voluminous and often hardly legible act books. 32 C. C. A., X.8.3/​55 (1464);Y.1.11/​38 (1469). 33 Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 13–​14; Kieckhefer, Witch Trials, 53; C. C. A., Y.1.11/​204 (1472); J.  Strype, Memorials of Archbishop Cranmer (Oxford 1848), Vol. I, 232. 34 C. C. A.,Y.1.11/​173v. 35 Macfarlane, Witchcraft, 21; Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 23. 36 R. Kieckhefer, “The Devil’s Contemplatives: The Liber Iuratus, the Liber Visionum and Christian Appropriation of Jewish Occultism”, in C.  Fanger, ed., Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud 1998), 255. 37 Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 137; Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 85. 38 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 612; C.  Fanger, “Medieval Ritual Magic”, in Fanger, Conjuring Spirits, viii; Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 129–​30; Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 208; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 611–​12. 39 Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 129–​30. 40 C. C. A.,Y.1.10/​132 (1472). 41 C. C. A.,Y.1.11/​209v, 210v (both 1473). 42 For discussion of this, see J.  Barry, “Introduction”, in Barry et  al., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe,  37–​8. 43 Jones, “Gender”, 174; P. Mills, “Spiritual Correction in the Medieval Church Courts of Canterbury” (Ph.D., Rochester 1980), 113–​14. 44 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior, 13.

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45

C. Barron, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London”, Reading Medieval Studies, XV (1989), 74–​8; P.  J. P.  Goldberg, Women, Work and Lifecycle in a Medieval Economy: Women inYork andYorkshire, c. 1300–​1520 (Oxford 1992), 7; A. Kettle, “Ruined Maids: Prostitutes and Servant Girls in Later Medieval England”, in R. Edwards and V. Ziegler, eds, Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge 1995), 20; R. Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA 2003), 9.

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Chapter 28

Jane P. Davidson THE MYTH OF THE PERSECUTED FEMALE HEALER

T

H E I D E A T H A T F E M A L E healers were often accused of witchcraft is an enduring theme of popular writing on the subject. The belief is sometimes accompanied by the claim that male medical practitioners encouraged their persecution. As Jane P. Davidson points out, however, there is no documentary evidence to support either assertion. Other scholars such as Joyce Miller (8) and Alison Rowlands (17) have demonstrated that early modern authorities distinguished between allegations of witchcraft and magical healing.The suggestion that midwives were targeted in witchcraft allegations is also problematic. As Robin Briggs notes (6), midwives made unlikely suspects because they owed their position to their good standing in their communities; witches, in contrast, were typically disreputable.

The idea that most women condemned as witches during the classic periods of witch persecution in Europe (between 1500 and 1700) were in actuality unlicenced healers who were suppressed by the male medical establishment arose among feminist writers, historians and religious leaders. This idea has been around for more than twenty years now and has become a familiar strain in women’s studies. It has been presented often as historically valid by scholars of both genders. The theory is that the midwife, the ‘cunning woman’, and the female folk herbalist were condemned as witches by male physicians in order to keep these women in their places –​that is, out of organized medicine. …

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There is no need to agree with this interpretation. In fact, the historical evidence concerning European witchcraft which is derived from accounts and transcripts of trials and other forms of primary literature1 fails to support such a theory. On the contrary, the historical evidence shows that female healers, with the exception of midwives, were rarely those denounced as witches. While the belief that midwives were witches was widespread, evidence indicates that even the number of practicing midwives that were tried and condemned is not particularly large. Thus, the concept that midwives were witches or witches were midwives appears to be as reliable as the concept that witches flew to Sabbaths on the backs of goats or on broomsticks. … Such a concept as doctors ‘ganging up’ to persecute women healers, or even women midwives, just does not appear in the many hundreds of examples of witchcraft literature published during the periods of classic persecution. Some of this literature was written by doctors. The famous physician Johann Weyer (1515–​1588) took the opposite stance and made fun of unlearned or poorly trained doctors who were so ignorant of medicine and the normal course of diseases that they proclaimed witches to be at work whenever they could not cure an individual. He accused them not only of ignorance and superstition but also of attempting to use witchcraft as an excuse to avoid being sued for malpractice. He never mentioned the concept that a male doctor might yell ‘witchcraft’ in order to prevent a woman from practicing any type of medicine: Meanwhile I  do not deny that the one refuge of some incompetent persons who shamelessly and deviously boast of an understanding of medicine –​the one refuge when they do not know the nature of an illness, far less its cure, and are forced to make their decisions like blind men judging colours –​is to assert at once that it is a case of witchcraft. Under this cloak they cunningly cover up their own ignorance in matters pertaining to the hallowed art of medicine. … By referring to evil doing or witchcraft as a pretext, they strive carefully to turn aside malicious accusations, or rather legal actions justly instituted against them –​they who are truly the evil-​doers.2 Just as there is no historical evidence of a doctors’ conspiracy, there are also very few documented instances of female healers who were condemned as witches. Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of trial records have been examined and transcribed. Hundreds of women’s names have surfaced; however, only a small number of European witches were specifically described as healers. This number is expanded somewhat if one includes witches who were midwives. Yet even here

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the vast majority of females accused of witchcraft were merely listed by name or as the wife of so and so. Their occupations, even that of midwifery, were generally not given. It is bad historical practice to assume that every female witch was either a healer or a midwife when there is no evidence to establish this. … Witchcraft literature from the period of the persecutions indicates that the idea that witches murdered children was a widely held belief and undoubtedly a part of both learned and popular culture. Often, these witches were believed to be midwives. One finds this concept in the Malleus Maleficarum, where the subject of midwives has a whole chapter, and in earlier witchcraft literature. Johannes Nider’s Formicarius, written between 1435 and 1437 during the Council of Basle and printed about 1475, states that witches killed infants and ate their flesh. Martin le Franc’s poem, Le Champion des Dames, written about 1440, also states that witches killed infants. But in spite of such literature, there are few documented examples of midwives tried as witches. However, we can identify some witch midwives from historical documents. One of these was Walpurga Hausmann[i]‌n from Dillingen, Germany, who was put to death in 1587. She was accused of killing many children, as well as of bewitching numerous farm animals, chiefly cattle. A contemporaneous pamphlet tells of her trial and the accusations made against her. …But even when we consider that she was by profession a midwife, the pamphlet is not illustrated with Walpurga’s deeds as a healer or a midwife, but rather with a scene in which she is shown meeting the Devil for the first time. The artist and publisher emphasized her ensuing pact with the Devil rather than her later deeds of maleficia. If it were so important to suppress witch midwives, would it not have been more logical for the printer of this pamphlet to have shown Walpurga killing babies? What do such examples indicate? The answer is simple. If one looks at the historical record for a medical conspiracy against women healers, such a conspiracy is not there. On the contrary, some recent scholarship demonstrates that in fact women did play a recognized and accepted role in medicine during the seventeenth century in England. An example is Doreen G. Nagy’s Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-​Century England, which focuses an entire chapter on ‘Women’s Role in Stuart Medicine’. Nagy writes: Since most medical historians of the early modern period have written from the perspective of professional medicine, they have either completely ignored the role of ordinary women in the provision of medical services, or dismissed them with patronizing terms such as wise women, white witches, or simply old women, often implying that they were little better than cranks. … [In fact] women played a central role

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in Stuart health care. Because of their gender, women were only very rarely found among the ranks of professional surgeons and physicians. As a result academic studies have focused on plotting the linear development of the medical profession. … A  case study of the role of women sheds considerable light upon the topic of popular medicine.3 Nagy discusses documented instances of women medical professionals and a number of cases of unlicenced women healers. She writes that the ‘medical literature from the period indicates an acceptance of women’s roles as nonprofessional medical practitioners and in some cases approval and encouragement from the professionals themselves’.4 This interpretation is in direct opposition to the theory that male medical professionals were trying to eradicate female healers by calling them witches and hauling them into court.

Notes 1

2

3 4

For full citations of the sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Jane P. Davidson, “The Myth of the Persecuted Female Healer”, in Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 14 (1993), 115–​16, 122–​ 3, 126–​9 –​  Ed. Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum (Of the Wiles of Devils), published as Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, eds George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea,Vol. 73, Medieval & RenaissanceTexts & Studies (Binghamton, NY 1991), 153. Doreen E.  Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-​Century England (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green, OH 1988), 54. Ibid., 74.

 

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Chapter 29

Elizabeth Reis DAMNED WOMEN IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND

I

N T H I S C H A P T E R Elizabeth Reis relates the gendering of witchcraft to attitudes towards female religiosity in colonial New England. She argues that women were identified as particularly open to supernatural influences  –​ both demonic and divine. Reis’ analysis bears interesting comparison with Sarah Ferber’s work on pious women, demoniacs and witches in early modern France (25):  here too it appears that women were figured as vessels for both demons and the Holy Spirit. In the Old World and the New this idea was linked to female passivity.

The witchcraft episodes of the seventeenth century,1 when women were accused and convicted far more than men and when women actually confessed to being in the Devil’s snare, display the sense of women’s inherent wickedness which the community –​women and men –​endorsed. Puritans may have professed publicly that the sexes were equal before God, but they were not equal before the Devil. It was women, by and large, whom the Devil tortured, hoping to recruit them into his service as witches.The women who confessed to witchcraft were so assured of their essential sinfulness that they became convinced they had actually covenanted with Satan rather than with God. Believing themselves to be sinners in any case, women easily blurred the line between ordinary sinning, which necessitated repentance, and the more egregious act of signing the Devil’s book and becoming a witch. …

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Puritans regarded the soul as feminine and characterized it as insatiable, in consonance with the allegedly unappeasable nature of women. If historians have noticed the New England Puritans’ feminized representation of the soul, they have failed to comment on it or accord it much significance. Yet such representation is crucial to understanding how the soul could unite with Christ on regeneration or, alternatively, with the Devil through sin. The body, for its part, also entangled women. Puritans believed that Satan attacked the soul by assaulting the body. Because in their view women’s bodies were weaker, the Devil could reach women’s souls more easily and breach these “weaker vessels” with greater frequency. Not only was the body the path to the soul’s possession; it was the very expression of the Devil’s attack. A witch’s body clearly manifested the soul’s acceptance of the diabolical covenant. Women were in a double bind during the witchcraft episodes. Their souls, strictly speaking, were no more evil than men’s, but the representation of the vulnerable, perpetually unsatisfied, and yearning female soul, passively waiting for Christ but always open to the Devil as well, implicated corporeal women themselves. The representation of the soul in terms of worldly notions of gender and the understanding of women in terms of the characteristics of the feminine soul, led by circular reasoning to the conclusion that women were more likely than men to submit to Satan. A woman’s feminine soul, jeopardized in a woman’s feminine body, was frail, submissive, and passive –​qualities that most New Englanders thought would allow her to become either a wife to Christ or a drudge to Satan. Witches, unlike commonplace sinners, took a further damning step. Their feminine souls made an explicit and aggressive choice to conjoin with the Devil. By defining a witch as a person whose (feminine) soul signed a pact with Satan rather than wait quiescently for Christ, Puritans effectively demonized the notion of active female choice. A woman was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. If her soul waited longingly for salvation in Christ, such female yearning could evoke the image of an unsatisfied woman vulnerable to Satan; if, on the contrary, a woman’s soul acted assertively rather than in passive obedience, by definition it chose the Devil. Although theoretically they were no more inherently evil than men, the process of defining the soul and the body in the context of life in Puritan New England made them seem so. … Applying the teachings of their ministers rather literally, the laity expected that women’s weaker bodies would suffer more severely than men’s in a world besieged by Satan’s wrath. Because women’s bodies lacked the strength and vitality of men’s, according to popular thought, the Devil could more frequently and successfully gain access to and possess women’s souls, thus bringing them, according

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to Deodat Lawson, “into full submission, and entire resignation to his hellish designs.”2 The Devil pursued souls with particular vigor and success during witchcraft outbreaks; yet he did not display any new methods or depart in any significant way from his well-​known devices. Satan perhaps asserted himself more physically and immediately in these incidents. Indeed, the evocative language in which the clergy expressed God’s wrath toward those who refused to convert may have led the laity to interpret God’s anger and the Devil’s torments so literally. But the powers of Satan nevertheless corresponded to those detailed by Puritan ministers. The laity saw Satan in various guises, often in the accused witch’s bodily shape. Civic and religious leaders disputed whether the specter was a sign that the one impersonated had actually compacted with Satan or whether Satan could simply assume the bodily shape of an innocent person. Either way, the clergy and the laity believed that the Devil, in any form, meant to molest the bodies of potential recruits in order to capture their souls. Anxious to dominate their souls, Satan harassed his victims’ bodies first. The language of the indictments brought against the accused illustrates the extent of the agonies; its nearly formulaic repetition attests to the ubiquitous belief in Satan’s physical powers. The indictments read that the victims were “tortured, afflicted, consumed, pined, wasted, and tormented.” Presumably, Satan had already possessed the body and soul of his primary victim, the witch, and so with her permission, and through her body, he attacked yet more victims. The accused woman Mary Bridge, testified that “the way of her afflicting was by sticking pins into things and Clothes & think of hurting them.” Those claiming such affliction described their tortures more graphically. One woman, Mary Walcott, swore that the apparition of Goody Buckly came and “hurt me and tortord me most dreadfully by pinching and choaking of me and twesting of my nick several times” in order to persuade her to sign a covenant with Satan and renounce God. Likewise Susannah Sheldon told the court, “I have very often ben most grievously tortored by [the] Apperishtion of Sarah Good who has most dredfully afflected me by bitting pricking and pinching me and almost choaking me to death.” Sheldon recalled that on June 26, 1692, Good “most violently pulled down my head behind a Cheast and tyed my hands together with a whele band & allmost Choaked me to death.” The court records abound with women testifying that the Devil, usually but not always in the shape of the accused, brutally tormented their bodies and tempted them to sign his book in blood, signifying his possession of their souls. The Devil’s victims usually tried to endure his torture of their bodies and to resist relinquishing their souls, though with mixed results. Mercy Lewis told the

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court that the Devil came to her in the shape of the accused George Jacobs Sr. and urged her to join his minions. “Because I would not yeald to his hellish temtations,” she surmised, “he did tortor me most cruelly … and allmost redy to pull all my bones out of joynt … but being up held by an Allmighty hand … I indured his tortors that night.” The Devil could damage her body but not ultimately master it, and so he would not have her soul. The possessed Mary Warren, however, owned that she “yielded,” and “was undon body and soul,” and that she did it “for eas to her body: not for any good of her soul.” The Devil often appeared directly to his prospective converts and he could be so persuasive that some women confessed to giving themselves completely to him. Sarah Bridges testified that “the Divil Came Somtimes like a bird Som times like abare Sometimes like aman,” and she admitted “renouncing God and Christ & gave her soul & body to the Devil.” Bridges acknowledged that the Devil threatened to kill her if she confessed, but still she told the court that she used to “afflict persons by Squezing her hands & Sticking pins in her Clothes.” Mary Barker also confessed that she was “afrayd she has given up her self soul & body to the Divel.” These two and many others admitted that the Devil had urged them to inscribe his book and that they had capitulated. Once they signed over their souls, they were expected to inflict harm on others, while the Devil seized their shapes to attack, entrap, and recruit additional witches for his service. The Devil’s victims endured affliction either from the Devil directly or from the shape of a witch. Women suffered afflictions particular to their sex. It was not unusual, Puritans believed, for a witch who had given herself body and soul to Satan to have suckled familiars, or imps. These little creatures, often animals or small, strange beasts, were thought to have received nourishment in the form of blood from the witch’s body. Often the familiars sucked at the breasts, but they were as likely to latch onto any unusual marking, or witch’s teat.The West Indian woman Tituba told the court that she saw a small yellow bird “suck [Sarah] Good betwene the fore finger & Long finger upon the right Hand.” … In Connecticut the authorities searched the body of Mercy Disbrough and found “on her secret parts growing within ye lep of ye same a los [loose] pees of skin and when puld it is near an inch long somewhat in form of ye fingar of a glove flatted.” … Satan also tried to capture men’s souls, but his torture of their bodies was markedly different and less drastic than that of women. Men were not as likely to be seen suckling imps, although their bodies were searched during the trials, and the investigations occasionally found evidence of such activity. … But the Devil’s possession of men contrasted with his domination of women because New Englanders expected that men’s heartier bodies were more difficult and less tempting objects of the Devil’s attacks. The assumption that the Devil

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had a different relationship with men was never explicitly articulated, but the incidents recounted at the trials can provide us with some insight into Puritans’ thinking about gender and the affliction of evil. First, witches were less likely to seduce men than women into the Devil’s service. And when men described their encounters with the accused, their testimony centered on bizarre acts of maleficence, rather than the physical harm allegedly caused by the witch’s shape. Samuel Endicott charged Mary Bradbury with selling the captain of his ship butter that turned rancid after he and his crew were at sea for three weeks. She was at fault whether she had been negligent or fraudulent or had used magic to transform good butter into bad, and he did not doubt that she was a witch. As additional evidence, Endicott described a violent storm that cost the ship its mainmast, its rigging, and fifteen horses. The ship sprang a leak and took on four feet of water, and its crew was forced to unload the cargo. When they came upon land, Endicott saw “the appearance of a woman from her middle upwards, haveing a white Capp and white neckcloth on her, which then affrighted him very much.” Mary Bradbury’s shape frightened Endicott, and her misdeeds plagued him, but he suffered no direct, violent, physical abuse. … Characteristically, Satan granted extraordinary power to his accomplices, either clairvoyance or great bodily strength. In keeping with seventeenth-​century notions, Satan bestowed unequal powers on men and women. He endowed his male witches with unusual strength, and so made even other men vulnerable to the male witches’ physical violence. Women’s bodies he gave only enough strength to torture their female victims, often, apparently, through their mere presence and without any particular bodily force. Female witches seemed able only to abuse other women, whereas male witches could torture naturally weaker women as well as typically robust and potent men. George Burroughs, a former minister at Salem and a condemned witch, epitomized the strength that Satan could contribute to male collaborators. After the trial, one eyewitness, Thomas Greenslit, revealed that he had seen Burroughs exhibiting strength so extraordinary that it could only have come with the Devil’s assistance. Greenslit saw Burroughs “lift and hold Out a gunn of Six foot barrell or thereabouts putting the forefinger of his right hand into the Muzle of said gun and so held it Out at Armes End Only with that finger.” Simon Willard concurred with this report; he had heard that “said gun was about or near seven foot barrill: and very hevie: I then tryed to hold out said gun with both hands: but could not do it long enough to take sight.”. Four others had heard that Burroughs had carried a barrel of molasses with only two fingers for some distance without putting it down. Interestingly, only the male witnesses offered unusual strength as evidence that Burroughs had colluded with Satan and become a witch; his terrible strength,

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in sharp contrast to their own limited abilities, resonated with their notions of manliness and their expectations about how the Devil might empower male witches. The women who testified against Burroughs claimed bodily afflictions similar to those they attributed to female witches. No extra strength was required to afflict women. Since Puritans believed that Satan designed his attacks to fit his quarry, it made sense that women and men perceived Satan’s tortures differently. Just as female victims were more likely to be physically tormented, the women witches themselves –​the majority of the accused –​also experienced greater bodily distress as Satan destroyed their bodies to capture their souls. Though men’s bodies were hardly invulnerable, in women the Devil sought easier marks. Curiously, although a weak body and a vulnerable soul left one open to Satan, they might also encourage one’s faith in God. Indeed, Cotton Mather and other ministers suggested that the frailty of women’s bodies, compounded by the dangers of childbirth, gave women more reason to seek the Lord since death was more immediate. Anne Bradstreet, bemoaning an illness that had plagued her for months, hoped that her soul would gain some advantage while her body was faltering. Accepting the belief that God inflicted bodily illness only for the good of the soul, she mused, “I hope my soul shall flourish while my body decays, and the weakness of this outward man shall be a means to strengthen my inner man.” Bradstreet called her soul the “inner man” and tried to dissociate its spiritual strength from her body’s physical weaknesses. She cultivated resignation: “And if He knows that weakness and a frail body is the best to make me a vessel fit for His use why should I not bear it, not only willingly but joyfully.” Bradstreet went so far as to suggest that good health might divert her from the Lord. She wrote, “The Lord knows I dare not desire that health that sometimes I have had, lest my heart should be drawn from Him, and set upon the world.” Perhaps women’s weaker bodies brought them closer to God, as Bradstreet hoped. Women, then, had a particular potential for goodness, but their more fragile bodies also exposed them to Satan, perhaps encouraging a peculiar potential for evil –​Eve’s legacy. In the context of the witchcraft outbreaks, a time of extraordinary uncertainty and fear, New Englanders focused on the darker side of womanhood, emphasizing the vulnerability of women’s bodies and souls to the Devil, rather than their openness to regeneration. Women as witches were so threatening because their souls had asserted themselves to ally with Satan. Too impatient or too weak to wait passively for Christ’s advance, witches strode out upon the Devil’s path. In the course of living their errand in the North American wilderness, Puritans thus constructed a gendered ideology and society that conceived of women, ironically, as closer both to God and to Satan.

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Notes 1 2

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, NY and London 1997), 2, 93–​4, 110–​13, 115–​16, 118–​20 –​ Ed. Deodat Lawson, Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield against Satan’s Malignity (Boston, MA 1704), 27.

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Chapter 30

Clive Holmes WOMEN, WITNESSES AND WITCHES

W

O M E N W E R E F R E Q U E N T LY involved in the prosecution of other women for witchcraft. Here Clive Holmes discusses the part played by women as witnesses in English witch trials, and also their more specialist roles as victims of demonic possession and searchers for the “witch’s mark”. He shows that women often played a passive role in the judicial machinery against witchcraft, which was activated and controlled by men. Like H. C. Erik Midelfort (22), his analysis sheds light on the relationship (and confusions) between learned demonology and popular ideas about the Devil; it also complements Kathleen Sands’ discussion of demonic possession in England (24).

The role played by women in the legal process against witches, as accusers or witnesses, has been frequently cited in the course of skirmishes about the question, as posed by Christina Lamer, “Was witch-​hunting women-​hunting?” Keith Thomas has argued that “the idea that witch-​prosecutions reflected a war between the sexes must be discounted, not least because the victims and witnesses were themselves as likely to be women as men”. This argument is mirrored by that of Alan Macfarlane, and has been followed, in relation to the New England trials, by John Demos.1 Feminist scholars, like Larner, Carol Karlsen and, most recently, Marianne Hester, have found such reasoning “simplistic”.2 Yet Karlsen’s acknowledgement that the role of women as accusers remains “one of the most baffling

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questions about witchcraft” does suggest the need for further discussion. … An examination of the process of witnessing –​a process, as I shall argue, of considerable cultural complexity –​will illuminate a number of issues raised by the witchcraft prosecutions: the shaping role of the legal system, the dynamic interweaving of elite theology and the concerns of the populace, and, not least, the misogynous dimension of witchcraft. We may distinguish three ways in which women might participate in the trial procedures against witches. Two of these are very distinctive. First, women might testify as “possessed” victims of the witch’s malice; control of their minds and bodies had been seized by the Devil at the instigation of the witch. Secondly, women might report the results of physical searches that they had been instructed to conduct upon the witch’s body, designed to discover the incriminating physical characteristics that indicated her complicity with Satan and his minions. In both instances the female deponents appear to acquiesce in and reinforce theories of witchcraft, developed by theologians and lawyers, which emphasize female weakness  –​the greater susceptibility of women to satanic temptation; their greater sensual depravity. Before discussing these instances, it will be necessary to examine a third group of women involved in criminal prosecution: those who testified simply to their experience of the witch’s maleficium –​to children lamed or killed, to stock or crops blighted, to the interruption of agricultural or domestic procedures. …

I In the 1590s the clerk of assize for the Home Circuit began to endorse some of the indictments upon which the accused were tried with the names of the witnesses in the case, and this was uniformly practised after 1600. In the course of the following century some nine hundred and seventy witnesses were recorded on witchcraft indictments: almost half of these (47.68 per cent) were women.3 The endorsements also suggest that women were becoming proportionally more involved in witchcraft accusation in the course of the period. In the last years of Elizabeth’s reign (1596–​1602) 38.2 per cent of witnesses against witches whose names were endorsed on the indictments were women; 43.4 per cent in the reign of James I. However, after the Restoration female witnesses were in the majority (52.9 per cent) in the counties that formed the Home Circuit. They were also in a majority in this latter period in indictments emanating from the assize courts of the Northern Circuit (56 per cent), though not in Norfolk Circuit cases (43 per cent).4 …

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Why did this significant shift in the proportions of male and female deponents occur in the century after 1590? The phenomenon is paralleled by an increase in the involvement of female deponents in all cases before the assizes. Women formed only 10 per cent of the witnesses in non-​witchcraft cases in a sample of sessions of the Essex assizes between 1596 and 1625; after the Restoration the proportion had more than doubled (22 per cent).5 But this shift reflects, not any change in the courts’ readiness to accept female testimony, but simply the fall in the number of property offences coming to the attention of the assizes. Property crimes –​larceny, burglary, housebreaking –​had dominated proceedings from the 1590s until the end of the reign of James I; they declined markedly after l660.6 And in these prosecutions the bulk of the testimony was provided by men. … The rising percentage of women witnesses in witchcraft cases is also related, though tangentially, to offences against property. In the reigns of Elizabeth and James 36.8 per cent of all witchcraft cases coming to the attention of the assizes involved an indictment alleging that the accused had damaged stock; in 14.3 per cent of incidents, stock-​damage formed the sole charge. Indictments of stock-​ damage, either alone or in conjunction with other acts of maleficium, dropped to 15.8 per cent in Charles I’s reign, rose slightly to 25 per cent in the Interregnum, then plummeted to a mere 2.9 per cent after the Restoration. And in indictments concerning malefic damage to stock, as in all property crimes, the testimony of men predominated: men formed 80.8 per cent of witnesses to these charges. As the crime of witchcraft was increasingly perceived as involving mysterious human ailments and death, so the proportion of female witnesses increased. Women, attendant at the sick-​bed of the victim, were well placed to describe the mental anguish and mortal physical torments inflicted by the witch. Here, then, is the explanation for the growing proportion of women formally testifying in witchcraft cases in the course of the seventeenth century. Women were simply better placed than men to describe the incidents and activities that conformed to the altered perception of the nature of witchcraft as a criminal offence. The shift in the conceptualization of the offence was instigated by the legal elite. After 1660 the local justices and the courts were reluctant to admit charges of witchcraft except in cases of mysterious and terrifying illness leading to death or, more rarely, where the accused was directly alleged to be involved in diabolic practices. This restructuring of the offence by magistrates and lawyers certainly does not indicate any fundamental change in the nature of popular belief concerning witchcraft. The ancillary material produced in the official investigation of the late seventeenth-​century cases demonstrates that at the local level witches were still believed to exercise their powers in the destruction of stock or the interruption of agricultural and domestic procedures. But the legal elite,

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unlike its Elizabethan predecessors, now refused to entertain formal accusations based on this kind of evidence. So, for example, at the Suffolk assizes in 1694 four indictments, three for killing by witchcraft and one for entertaining evil spirits, were preferred against Philippa Munnings of Hartest but, though no charges were formally levelled, her neighbours also believed her to be guilty of destroying stock and spoiling brewing.7 … Local suspicions and concerns had to be moulded to the requirements of legal categorization and procedure and, beyond these, to the political and theological concerns of the elite which informed and shaped the juridical forms. … From 1563 suspicions rooted in folklore had to be orchestrated to accommodate them to the machinery and the values of the elite. This raises a critical point concerning the analysis of the role of witnesses, male and female.We must consider: first, how local fears and suspicions were drawn to the attention of the magistracy; secondly, how far the authorities tailored the evidence to the constraints imposed by the changing assumptions of a system in which the witnesses were, in some measure, only marginal participants.

II It is difficult to make confident assertions about the nature and patterns of popular beliefs about witchcraft. All the sources are, in some measure, distorted by refraction through the conceptual framework of the elite. Yet we may suggest a couple of its features salient to this enquiry. First, the mysterious powers that constituted witchcraft would normally be possessed by women. There is little of the sophisticated misogyny, a powerful brew of Biblical and Aristotelian emphases on female inferiority, developed by elite commentators obliged to explain the substantial plurality of women in prosecution.8 In so far as any attention was paid at the popular level to questions of the origin of this power, it appears that it was thought to inhere in matrilineal lineage:  “by discent … from the grandmother to the mother, and from the mother to the children”. Secondly, men and women shared a fear of witches. From a sample of the cases coming to the attention of Richard Napier, minister of Great Linford and astrological physician, between 1601 and 1627, Ronald Sawyer has noticed the plurality of women both among those named as witches (94.7 per cent), and among Napier’s patients, a group of 109 persons, who believed themselves the victims of witchcraft (59.7 per cent). Sawyer’s figures further suggest that women were quicker to nominate those they held responsible for their sufferings: 45.5 per cent of Napier’s male patients were ready to name the witch persecuting them; the figure for female patients is

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58.2 per cent.9 Women seeking the protection of the ecclesiastical courts against the damage to their reputations, occasioned by abuse or rumours that suggested that they were witches, name men and women in almost equal numbers as their slanderers.10 But a general fear of a local woman possessing the formidable powers attributed to witches does not automatically transmute into legal prosecution. Confronted by power-​wielding women, villagers at [the] first instance might seek to ensure that they were not the victims of such power, perhaps to control and deploy it for their own purposes. The witch, in consequence, might be treated with an elaborate if cautious deference. Edward Fairfax noted that the inhabitants of Knaresborough Forest coexisted with the witch-​clans in their midst, and that the head of one of the latter “had so powerful hand over the wealthiest neighbours about her, that none of them refused to do anything she required, yea, unbesought they provided her with fire, and meat from their own tables”.11 A similarly dense and long-​standing network of social relations is apparent in Pendle Forest between the rival witch-​families, headed by their respective matriarchs, Old Chattox and Old Demdyke, and the villagers. The latter not only tolerated the petty thefts, begging and extortion of the suspected witches, but employed them routinely both in domestic industry and as healers.They sought protection from the witches’ power both by paying blackmail and by recourse to counter-​magic.12 How did villagers who may have co-​operated, if uneasily, with the suspected witch come to testify against her? In both Knaresborough and Pendle that transformation was accomplished by the direct intervention of members of the elite. Fairfax’s engagement in the prosecution of the Knaresborough witches stemmed from the mysterious illness of his daughter, Helen, who eventually attributed her condition to their maleficence. In Lancashire the zealous magistrate, Roger Nowell, “a very religious honest gentleman, painefull in the service of his Countrey”, was moved by local rumours to launch an investigation. Nowell’s intervention, while spurred by local suspicions and tensions, swiftly transformed them. Relentless interrogation of one of the accused  –​the boy attempted suicide  –​eventually elicited the required confession of diabolic activities. Such examples of direct elite orchestration are, however, rare. In the bulk of cases the decision to bring a witch to the attention of the authorities appears to have been undertaken entirely within the neighbourhood, and the process of transmutation, whereby suspicion became prosecution, is opaque. Yet a few cases provide significant indicators concerning that process. Brian Darcy’s self-​congratulatory account of his short but spectacular career as a witch-​hunter in north-​eastern Essex in 1582 permits some discussion of the local instigation of prosecution. Darcy, like Roger Nowell, was well versed

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in the continental theories concerning the satanic dimension of witchcraft, and he proved a vigorous and inventive inquisitor; in cases from St Osyth, Darcy’s home, and its immediate vicinity, local beliefs hinted at in the earliest depositions were quickly swamped by a plethora of importations from the current theology of witchcraft. However, not all the 1582 cases were generated directly by Darcy’s inquisitorial techniques or refracted through his rich imagination. His activities acted as a catalyst, encouraging the villagers of Oakley and Walton to voice their long-​held suspicions of their neighbours, Annis Heard and Joan Robinson, to the authorities. Darcy, dedicating his energies to the pursuit of the St Osyth coven, seems to have made little attempt to shape primary testimony from these peripheral communities. All witnesses concurred that to cross these women, to refuse to lend or sell them implements or goods, to demand the return of borrowed articles or payment, could be dangerous. Agricultural and domestic routines had failed; stock had sickened, died, or acted unnaturally (Thomas Rice’s goose, “that hath been as good for the bringing foorth of her broode as any goose in Walton”, had refused to hatch her eggs). Illness, occasionally mortal, had afflicted their enemies. Yet, as in Knaresborough and Pendle, social relations were maintained with the witches. The villagers, if they did fall foul of Heard or Robinson, had recourse to counter-​magic –​heating a bewitched spindle to get it to work again; burning the ears of an afflicted pig to cure it; using a red-​hot iron to get milk to churn and wort to brew. Men and women concurred in suspecting Heard and Robinson of witchcraft, but female experience of their maleficence tended, not surprisingly, to concentrate on the interruption of domestic routines.Women also seem readier to deploy, or perhaps merely to acknowledge their use of, counter-​magic to frustrate the witch. The suspicions against Heard and Robinson, generally held, were obviously of long duration; they came to the attention of the authorities because the villagers were inspired and educated by Darcy’s crusade at neighbouring St Osyth. But the effective decision to transmute village suspicion into official testimony, and to organize their neighbours for this, was taken by local men. Edward Upcher had long suspected Robinson for the death of his wife. He visited the gaoled St Osyth woman, Ursley Kemp, who, under Darcy’s relentless questioning, had become his star witness, confessing satanic practices and naming a wide coven of accomplices; she readily confirmed Upcher’s suspicion, and he led the Walton prosecution. In Oakley, John Wadde, a yeoman who had suffered heavy stock losses for several years, was the first formally to denounce Heard, initially to the ecclesiastical court, then, encouraged by the St Osyth’s investigation, to Brian Darcy.13 The role of local men in organizing the process whereby suspicion and gossip were transformed into formal accusation, as in the 1582 Oakley and Walton denunciations, is apparent in other cases, admittedly few, where we can reconstruct

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a narrative with some confidence. In 1682 Temperance Lloyd was convicted for afflicting Grace Thomas of Bideford; the bulk of the testimony was provided by women who had attended the girl during her long sickness, but the accusation was driven on by her brother-​in-​law, Thomas Eastchurch, a respected local merchant. He had sought the advice of a number of eminent physicians on Grace’s behalf. Once the witchcraft diagnosis had been suggested, he pursued Lloyd’s destruction with equal vigour.14 Ten years before, a local J.P. had reported that Widow Peacock of Malmesbury was “of very bad fame and very terrible to the people”, yet “nobody will eyther be at the charge to prosecute her, or run the hazard of her revenge if she be acquitted … except such a person as this Mr Webb”.15 With Robert Webb, a wealthy member of the Malmesbury elite, we have another figure like Upcher, Wadde and Eastchurch: a man with wealth, standing and confidence. These characteristics were essential, given that prosecution was time-​consuming and expensive and its failure might leave accusers hostage to the malice of the witch, if a complaint was to be brought to the attention of the authorities.Yet the energetic prosecutor would not stand alone; his immediate complaint against the witch would be backed by corroborative testimony from his neighbours, both men and women. It is significant that the women who became involved in the process often retailed older grievances and suspicions that had festered but previously gone unremarked to the authorities. John Swettson, a Cambridge apothecary, indicted Margaret Cotton for the death of his infant daughter in the summer of 1608; two poor women joined him in the prosecution, complaining of mysterious deaths in their families eighteen months before. Samuel Pacy, a Lowestoft merchant, held Amy Duny and Rose Cullender responsible for the mysterious illness of his two daughters, and he and other members of his family testified to their afflictions at the assizes. They were joined by eight additional witnesses. Three testified concerning the ailments of their children, subsequent to, but mirroring, the torments of the Pacy girls. Three, two men and a woman, deposed concerning the interruption of agricultural routines that they attributed to the witches; Anne Sandeswell recalled an incident seven or eight years before, while the men referred to occasions “not long since”. Of the witnesses, only Dorothy Durent blamed the witches for a death, that of her daughter five years before, and she also testified concerning her infant son’s illness, for which she had sought help from a cunning-​man, in 1657.16 In some cases the ancillary testimony offered by women deals with incidents so remote as to rouse the court’s suspicions concerning the witness’s motives in coming forward. When Elizabeth Field testified that her child had died many years ago upon Jane Wenham’s touching it, the judge asked “why she did not prosecute … immediately?” Her artless reply –​she appeared

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now, “the opportunity presenting itself ”, and had not done so before because “she was a poor woman, and the child had no friends” –​drew from the judge a stinging and insensitive retort: “was [she] grown rich since?”17 Yet her experience, drawn into the court to supplement a case orchestrated by others, may have been typical of that of many women. In several cases in the Home Circuit in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period a witch would be charged on a number of indictments, some alleging maleficent acts undertaken years before; so, in 1572 at Chelmsford assizes, Agnes Francys was arraigned on four indictments; two alleged recent incidents of murder and the destruction of stock; the other two dealt with murders respectively three and six years earlier. In 1596 at Hertford, Alice Crutch was arraigned upon two indictments for the recent destruction of the stock, and upon a third indictment for murder by witchcraft four years previously; in this case two men testified to their losses, while a woman deposed concerning the earlier death. This latter case is not untypical of those involving several indictments in which the names of witnesses are listed: women formed a higher proportion of the witnesses to the charges of earlier maleficence than to those of more recent provenance.18 One further pattern that emerges from the Home Circuit indictments may reinforce the suggestion that women were being mobilized by men, who were the driving force behind the decision to bring local suspicions and fears to the attention of the courts. In 27.7 per cent of the witchcraft accusations between 1596 and 1642 men alone acted as witnesses, while in 67.7 per cent of them men and women testified together; only in 4.6 per cent of the cases did women testify against an accused witch alone. Men and women believed that their female neighbours could deploy maleficent powers. They treated such witches warily, guarding themselves by seeking to avoid conflict, by elaborate deference, and, when necessary, by erecting a protective shield of counter-​magic. However, another response had been made available by the legislation of 1563. This strategy, prosecution, was usually pursued by substantial men in the community who would lay the charge, and solicit the confirmatory testimony of their neighbours, often women.Yet the elite who controlled the judicial machinery had their own agenda, and cases emanating from local tensions and suspicions would have to be adjusted, and might be transformed, when brought to the attention of magistrates and ministers. These groups were concerned, not with the trivia of stock-​loss or the interruptions of domestic and agricultural processes, but (as in the case of [Mary] Smith [of King’s Lynn, whose conviction for witchcraft was described by Alexander Roberts in A Treatise of Witchcraft (London 1616)]) with diabolism, or with mysterious ailments and death. The development of this latter emphasis in the course of the seventeenth century explains the preponderance of female witnesses in later cases.

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Women, despite their numerical involvement, were largely passive actors in the formal legal process against witches in the bulk of the cases that came to the attention of the judiciary. Does this argument also hold for those women whose depositions, on the face of it, suggest far more engagement in the concerns of the elite? Women also witnessed against witches in two more distinctive, if rarer, contexts: first, as victims of diabolic possession through the instigation of a witch; secondly, as examiners for the physical marks which were increasingly seen as key evidence in prosecution. Such testimony, it seems, reflected and confirmed intellectual edifices –​of witchcraft as diabolism; of the inferiority of women as indicated by their greater susceptibility to satanic temptation –​constructed by the elite. Protestant divines sought to transform the gross popular superstitions that emerged in the witchcraft trials. Their missionary efforts, apparent in the interrogation of Mary Smith and the triumphant publication of her eventual confession of diabolism, were designed to insist on their theological conceptualization, that [the] satanic covenant was the essence of the offence. Their treatises, sermons and editions of confessions, often explicitly designed for “the capacity of the simpler sort”, were reinforced by works that were more obviously popular –​chapbooks, broadsides and ballads –​and by the theatre of the court and the gallows. By the Civil War their educational efforts appear to have borne fruit. In confessions from eastern England in 1645–​7 the Devil figures prominently: he appears in human guise, contracts directly with his acolyte, and has carnal relations with her. This extensive group of depositions is a tribute, in part, to Matthew Hopkins’s acquaintance with continental theories, his skill as an inquisitor, and his own prurient fantasies. But many of the confessions are far from stereotyped, particularly the accused’s artless accounts of their discussions with Satan: so Elizabeth Southerne, a Dunwich pedlar, met the divell midsomer last like a black boy 10  years old by a whitethorne as she went to Westleton and there he promised her 2s 6d and he had it not then but said she shold have it the next time she came that way but he fayled of his promise, he met her indeed, but complayned of the hardnes of the times.19 The idea that a direct relationship with the Devil is the foundation of the witch’s power, largely absent in early depositions, seems to have become more generally understood by the mid-​seventeenth century. We could simply argue that the testimony of women in possession cases or as searchers, in which they repeated and confirmed elite theories, is another indication of the general transformation of popular belief engineered by the divines.

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However, a detailed analysis suggests that a more complex process of cultural construction was involved, in which ministers and lawyers played a direct and immediate role.

III The most spectacular testimony in witch-​trials, which, in consequence, is over-​ represented in the published accounts, was provided by those who, it was claimed, were possessed by the Devil through the agency of a witch. Nine women were convicted at Leicester assizes in 1616 upon the testimony of the thirteen-​year-​old Edward Smith; his fits during the trial, “in the syght of all the greatest parsons here, as dyvers knyghts and ladies and manny othars of the bettar sort”, were “most terrible to be tolld”. Horror might be punctuated by moments of didactic piety. William Avery, after raving in the presence of the judges, “came to his perfect understanding, and … spoke very discreetly, Christianly, and charitably to every point”; Jane Throckmorton, upon the witch’s courtroom confession, emerged from her fit, kneeled and asked her father’s blessing.20 Cases of diabolic possession through the agency of a witch presented the maximum opportunities for an edifying and cathartic drama in the court. They also emphasized the diabolic origins of the witch’s power upon which the divines so pertinaciously insisted. As in New England, women, particularly adolescents, preponderate among “possessed” accusers.21 The degree of involvement of these girls who in their testimony so comprehensively reinforced academic theory deserves discussion. Most of the published accounts of possession cases provide a narrative which describes the victim’s confrontation with the witch as the first act of the subsequent drama. Thomas Darling inadvertently farted as he passed Alice Gooderidge; William Perry failed to salute Joan Cocke with sufficient courtesy when they met; Mercy Short, when an accused witch held in Boston gaol begged her for a little tobacco, “affronted the hag”:  all were subsequently subjected to fearful physical and mental torments.22 But, by the time it was employed by Cotton Mather in his accounts of the possession of the Goodwin children and of Mercy Short, this was simply the formulaic convention of a substantial literary genre. The actual process whereby the sufferer’s affliction was recognized as possession, and the witch-​intermediary nominated, involved far more complex transactions. A few documents enable us to see this process directly. According to a pamphlet of 1612 Mrs Elizabeth Belcher, “a vertuous and godly gentle-​woman”, struck Joan Vaughan, the daughter of a notorious local witch, after Joan had made an obscene gesture at her:  a few days later Elizabeth was possessed, crying out in

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her fits, “Heere comes Joane Vaughan, away with Joane Vaughan”. A manuscript offers a very different account. Elizabeth had been sick for fifteen months; physic was unavailing, as were the efforts of the local practitioner of astrological medicine, Richard Napier. Belcher’s friends suspected witchcraft, but she refused to entertain this suggestion. Then, when Elizabeth was in her fit, those attending her began to nominate suspects; all were rejected until they named Joan. “Hath she done it?”, the sick woman asked; the bystanders named Joan again: Elizabeth responded, “Did she?”, and from that moment never ceased to accuse Joan, testifying at Northampton assizes where the witch was condemned.23 In other cases, the conventional format of the narrative barely conceals the more diffuse reality. The orthodox beginning of the account of the possession of the daughter of Lady Jennings –​her fear of an old woman “who suddainly appeared to her att the dore and demanded a pin of her” –​seems quite irrelevant to the subsequent story. The girl only nominated witches after a severe illness of four months during which desperate medical remedies had been unsuccessfully attempted, and there had been much discussion among the family and visitors of the possibility of witchcraft. If the possession-​through-​witchcraft diagnosis is the product of a dialogue involving many actors, so too was the subsequent behaviour of the victims, culminating in their courtroom performances. A basic pattern of language and gesture, gaining definition in the century after 1590, was learned by the possessed, largely in response to the expectations of those who gathered about them to offer consolation and to participate vicariously in the conflict with Satan. Michael MacDonald, analysing Dr Stephen Bradwell’s account (1603) of the possession of Mary Glover, shows how her symptoms, initially “undistinctive”, “strengthened and changed over time, so that they confirmed with increasing clarity” a diagnosis of possession through witchcraft.24 Dr John Cotta, writing in 1619, complained that the actions and accusations of the possessed “ordinarily” involved “the abusive impression of some indiscreete whispering about the sick”, while in several cases paradigms of appropriate behaviour, in the form of earlier possession narratives, were available in the sickroom.25 The behaviour and testimony of the possessed were thus entangled with the interests of various other participants in the drama, chiefly from their own family networks, but also of medical professionals and divines. The possessed themselves were not simply malleable puppets articulating the concerns of others in a process of social ventriloquism. The witchcraft-​possession identification might prove seductive to those whose symptoms bewildered medical experts, their families and neighbours, and, crucially, themselves. The victim became the focus of an intense attention, often, as with Katherine Wright and Anne Gunter, demonstrably absent from their previous affective relations. The behavioural traits of possession, while conforming to a basic pattern, could be

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individually shaped to provide an outlet for personal feelings that would not otherwise achieve sanctioned expression  –​sexual fantasies, religious doubts, rage at parents, frustration with the constrictions imposed by social and gender roles. Nicholas Starkey’s children, aged nine and ten, delighted in “filthie and unsavoury speeches”; they scoffed at Scripture as “bible bable, bible bable”; the boy bit his mother and called her “whore”; Margaret Byrom, a poor kinswoman who lived on the Starkey family’s charity, “nicknamed and taunted” her benefactors.26 But while the possessed were appropriating language and behaviour in ways that were intensely personal and liberating, the structure to which most accusations conformed, including the assertion of the responsibility of a witch for the victim’s experience, was the product of a social process in which key roles were played by adults and males. The possessed adolescents were the tools of the divines; their dramatic performances reinforced the witchcraft-​as-​diabolic-​covenant theology, with its ancillary emphasis upon the frailty of the “weaker sexe” in the face of satanic temptation.

IV A similar analysis is also appropriate in discussion of the evidence of the third group of female witnesses, those who testified to the physical marks that were thought to characterize a witch. They too confirmed, if more tangentially, suppositions concerning both the diabolic nature of witchcraft and female inferiority. And equally it is the element of elite construction and manipulation of their testimony that is most apparent. At Lancaster assizes in 1634 some twenty people were convicted as witches. The accusation, levelled by a ten-​year-​old boy, was firmly rooted in long-​standing local suspicion:  it was corroborated by evidence of the witch-​marks on the accused. Four men and sixteen women were accused; thirteen of the women were found to have marks or paps, and these were located in the genital area of eleven of them. The Lancaster case provides the first instance of the fully developed, officially sanctioned, search for the witch’s mark in England, and their usual discovery in the pudenda. Lancaster should also have been the last instance of the presentation of such evidence in court. The 1634 convictions troubled some of the authorities and they sought a respite of execution while further investigations were undertaken: these, sanctioned by the Privy Council, included an evaluation of the physiological evidence. Four of the convicted women were brought to London and re-​examined. Ten London midwives “made diligent search and inspeccion of those women” in the presence of a panel of distinguished physicians headed by

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William Harvey. They reported that one of the women had unusual but explicable marks; on the other three they found “nothing un naturall neyther in the secrets or any other partes of theire bodyes, nor any thinge lyke a teate or marke, nor any signe that any suche thinge haith ever beene”. Yet despite this critique, and further questions concerning the reliability of the search procedure during the wave of prosecutions in East Anglia in 1645–​6, pre-​trial examination of the accused by “ancient skilfull matrons and midwives” continued as a feature of the witch accusations in England and the American colonies into the eighteenth century.27 The testimony of these “knowing women” resulted in the condemnation of a number of individuals. Moreover, with its emphasis upon the female genitals, it reinforces the gender-​oriented dimension of the academic theory of witchcraft, and resonates with the more overt continental discussions of women’s insatiable lust as a major element in their compact and relationship with Satan. As with the possessed adolescents, however, a full understanding of the context in which their role as witnesses developed allows us to see the matrons and midwives as marginal participants in procedures originating in the concerns of exclusively male professional groups: the clergy, again, and the magistracy. Academic writers were frequently embarrassed by aspects of the popular beliefs about witchcraft that emerged in accusations.Yet “that which by experience is found to be true”28 could not simply be dismissed, and consequently had to be read or shaped in a way that permitted its incorporation into their theoretical constructs –​ hence the misogynous explanations developed by the divines to account for the plurality of female witches that emerged from popular accusation. That the accommodation of popular belief and intellectual theory often proved awkward, and the resultant synthesis uneasy, is very apparent in the divines’ wrestling with the problem posed by the witches’ familiars. These creatures, which according to popular belief were kept by the witch and employed to execute her designs, were almost unique to English folklore. In consequence they were often the butt of the jibes of sceptics, and divines were taxed to explain their presence in terms of their theology of witchcraft. Gifford set out the difficulty: Satan was the efficient cause of the witch’s maleficence; Satan and his minions were described in Scripture “to be mightie terrible spirits, full of power, rage and cruelties”. Why, then, were they masquerading as “such paltrie vermin, as cats, mise, toads and weasils”? Having posed the problem, Gifford sketches an answer. The Devils adopt these base guises so as not to terrify their dupes by revealing their horrendous forms and power.29 This early answer is fleshed out by later writers into a more detailed narrative of the witch’s transaction with Satan that assimilates further “odd performances”, as Joseph Glanvill ingenuously described them, from the popular belief system.30 It appears in the earliest trials that it was commonly thought that the witch housed

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and fed her familiars: Ursley Kemp lodged her two cats, a lamb and a toad in a large wool-​lined pot, maintaining them on beer, cake and white bread. The diet seems ordinary enough, if extravagant, but it was occasionally supplemented with the witch’s blood. So, after accomplishing Mother Waterhouse’s fell purposes, her familiar, a cat, was rewarded with a chicken and a drop of her blood; this she gave him “by pricking her hand or face and putting the bloud to his mouth whyche he sucked”.31 Decontextualized and analysed in isolation, this blood-​gift bore some affinities to the idea of Protestant continental theorists, that Satan, after making the covenant, clawed his new disciple, drawing blood with which to sign the compact and leaving an insensible scar as its tangible symbol. From this structural resemblance, the English commentators developed a syncretist theory, combining continental concepts and insular folklore. The witch enters a covenant with Satan who marks her and draws blood; the Devil then provides a familiar who regularly sucks blood from the resulting wound, drawing it into a teat; this inverted Eucharist is designed to “put her in mind of ” the original transaction, “the more to aggravate the witch’s damnation”.32 The work of the academics had been to incorporate local ‘‘experience” emerging from the substrate of popular belief into a general theory, while still maintaining the coherence of the latter. Their theories were to be reinforced, and developed, by another group: lawyers and magistrates. By the early seventeenth century some local officials were clearly troubled by the evidential problems posed by the usual form of witchcraft accusation. Accounts of the victim’s sufferings that followed a curse, reinforced by various dubious bits of confirmatory counter-​magic, increasingly seemed insubstantial. Accordingly, in the absence of a confession, magistrates sought tangible proof of the witch’s status. … The discovery of the physical peculiarities thought to mark a witch provided, as did the water-​ordeal, the desired positivistic test of guilt. And, like the ordeal, it was an importation from continental practice, though reworked to accommodate parochial experience. European commentators asserted that at the making of the covenant the Devil clawed or branded his neophyte, leaving an insensible scar; proper physical examination could reveal such satanic stigmata and, by 1600, their discovery by qualified experts was essential for conviction in some jurisdictions. A  few English theorists follow their continental counterparts in describing the anaesthetic mark, but in other writings and in local police practice the test was transformed, duplicating the English account of the covenant by an emphasis on the familiar. In England, the discovery of the sucked teat becomes an appropriate demonstration, equivalent to the search for the insensible brand in Scotland or Geneva, of the witch’s pact with Satan. The search was employed intermittently before 1634: the earliest surviving instance is the demand of a Southampton leet

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jury in 1579 that Widow Walker should be searched for any bloody marks “which is a comon token to know all witches by”; Brian Darcy had suspects searched in the 1582 St Osyth investigation, as did the Derbyshire J.P.s in 1597.33 But the practice was not universal: in 1593 Mother Samuel’s mark was discovered after her execution, and in 1621 a J.P. had to press his colleagues on the Middlesex Bench to institute the search of a suspect; in this case two of the three women who examined Elizabeth Sawyer were “brought in by the officers out of the streete, passing there by chance”.34 Nor, in these early examples, was the search so concentrated on the genital area. The key event behind the 1634 Lancaster proceedings with their emphasis on female sexuality, and the frequent appearance of similar “paps or marks in her secrets” in the findings of the searchers thereafter, is the publication of the fourth edition of The Countrey Justice by Michael Dalton, lawyer and Cambridgeshire J.P., in 1630. Dalton revised his influential vade-​mecum for local magistrates in the light of the 1627 Guide to Grand-​Jury Men by the divine, Richard Bernard, which sets out the full-​fledged theory expressing the role of the familiar in terms of the diabolic compact. Dalton cites Bernard with enthusiastic approval and emphasizes the utility of the discovery of the marks as incontrovertible proof –​“maine points to discover and convict … for they prove fully that those witches have a familiar and made a league with the Devil”. Yet Dalton also transforms his source in a key respect. Bernard insists, with copious citation of the available English cases, that the mark may be anywhere, but that, since it is likely to be in “very hidden places”, the search must be diligent. Dalton, in his summary, shifts the language of Bernard’s argument: the teats, “these the Devil’s marks … be often in their secretest parts, and therefore require diligent and careful search”.35 Fortified by Dalton’s confident pronouncements, magistrates after 1630, confronted by the evidential difficulties that typified all witchcraft accusations, employed the recommended body search as a routine aspect of pre-​trial procedure. And the search focused upon the genital area, as Dalton’s misreading of his source proved equally authoritative. The role and self-​perception of the women who participated in the search procedures do not admit of easy analysis. It has been suggested, in the colonial context, that a particularly active part was played by midwives who, given an official distrust of their profession and the suspicions of witchcraft that focused on their presidency over the enclosed process of birth and their use of charms, were protecting their own precarious positions by associating themselves with orthodox belief.36 But this hypothesis cannot survive David Harley’s demonstration that its essential premise, the vulnerability of midwives to witchcraft prosecution, is a myth.37 Certainly some midwives were prepared to assert categorically that physical marks were unnatural, and to denounce those they searched as guilty

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of diabolic relations. In 1645 Bridget Reynolds of Ramsey searched three local women, diagnosed their marks as suspicious, and testified against them at the assizes. In 1653 another midwife, Mrs Odill of Fairfield, Connecticut, authoritatively silenced those women who, in a macabre scene beneath the gallows, had examined the corpse of an executed witch and argued that the genital marks were “such as other women might have”. Yet, while some midwives affirmed and reinforced the search procedures that had been shaped in the intersection of theology and jurisprudence by divines and lawyers, others were more wary, using a neutral, even ambiguous, language in their depositions. When Ellen Garrison of Upwell was searched in 1647, “some that were there that pretended to have skill in the discovery of witchcraft sayd that some of the Deviles impes had sucked her”; but, despite this weighty professional opinion from [John] Stearne and his circus, then touring the Isle of Ely, the local midwife was far more circumspect in her testimony. Some, like the London midwives in 1634, were prepared to exculpate individuals, or to question the validity of the entire procedure; John Hale, minister of Beverley, Massachusetts, reported the doubts of “a skilful midwife” concerning the witch’s mark.38 The laconic references in the English records, and even the fuller verdicts of colonial juries, hardly permit any exhaustive analysis of how the “Ansient and Knowing Women” perceived their marginal role as searchers. In particular, those searches in which no incriminating marks were found, thus exculpating an accused witch, leave few traces in the English records, though such occasions may have been frequent. It is tempting to fill the lacunae by introducing a comparative discussion of the other related activities where women played a role in the penumbra of the legal system. While women were appointed to conduct physical examinations in civil and criminal cases turning on virginity or pregnancy, they were most frequently employed on juries empanelled to test the claim that a woman convicted of a capital felony was pregnant. In the event of a positive determination execution was delayed, and the respite usually became a reprieve, even in those cases where the jury’s “pregnant” verdict was subsequently proved incorrect. J. S. Cockburn, considering the frequency with which such “mistakes” were made, has argued that the jury of women embodied the sentiment of the court and the wider community in favour of mercy in a particular case.39 A similar argument may explain some of the determinations in searches for the witch’s marks; they were simply expressions of local sentiment concerning the innocence or guilt of the accused. Searchers were often prepared to testify not only to the accused’s physical marks, but to her reputation as a witch, or to their own experience of her maleficence. Frances Ward, with three other women nominated by the constable of Heath, found incriminating marks on Margaret Morton. Yet Ward was hardly

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a neutral observer: she attributed the deaths of two of her children to Morton, and reported that the accused, her mother and her sister were “all a long time suspected” of witchcraft. Yet long-​standing popular suspicions did not invariably lead to the discovery of the conclusive physical evidence; the search of the Widow Coman of Coggeshall, generally supposed to be a witch, found no discovery of that nature.40 The searchers obviously took their responsibilities seriously, and this might lead to arguments among them resulting from their doubts in individual cases or about the procedure in general. The searches were an unstable creation that juxtaposed the conceptual schemes of the theologians with a pragmatic response by the magistracy to increasingly troubling evidential problems. Those women, midwives and others, who affirmed that their searches had revealed the Devil’s mark reinforced, often unwittingly, ministerial theories concerning the satanic dimension of witchcraft and the inferiority of women. But arguments among the searchers and the ambiguous language with which they often hedged their findings may equally have led to elite concern regarding both the efficacy of the test and, beyond that, the intellectual viability of the demonological speculation upon which it rested so uneasily.

V The prosecution of witches in early modern England, and thus the role of women as witnesses, is a process of considerable cultural complexity. It involved a continuous but shifting dialogue among a variety of social and professional groups. Popular belief, shared by men and women, was that the mysterious, harmful power that constituted witchcraft would inhere in certain women. The response to this power, to the threats that it posed to life, to health, to property, and to domestic routines, was essentially instrumental: to placate or “curry favour” with the witch; to secure an effective counter-​magic against assaults. In 1563 the elite, following the example of their continental counterparts, constructed a machinery of prosecution and so added a new weapon in the armoury against witchcraft. Victims could now choose to destroy their assailants through the formally sanctioned procedures of the courts. The opportunity created by the legislation was employed by both men and women, but men, usually those of some status in their communities, were the more engaged participants. It was they who brought charges and who orchestrated the prosecution, organizing their neighbours to testify to earlier experiences of the accused’s malice. Women, though active in the creation of local suspicions through gossip, and in the deployment of the traditional protective therapies and techniques that ratified accusation, were ancillaries in the formal procedures of quarter sessions and assizes.

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Those who chose to employ the official machinery against witches were obliged to shape the local fears and rumours from which the prosecution emanated to the formalities of the law as defined by the statutes and to the reading of these by magistrates and judges. The changing concerns of the latter groups explain the growing proportion of female witnesses in witchcraft trials, apparent in the 1630s and after 1660. The judiciary were no longer prepared to entertain indictments for stock-​damage, to which men had testified; fearful mortal illness or mental anguish alone would sustain a prosecution and women, attendant at the sick[-​]‌bed of the victim, were better placed to give evidence. The concerns of the legal elite also explain the involvement of women in the searches for those physical characteristics which indicated conjunction with diabolic familiars. Lawyers, troubled by the absence of evidence that met increasingly strict norms for conviction, experimented with a number of procedures that might provide tangible proof of guilt or innocence. The search for the witch’s mark by committees of women, approved by the leading practical manual for local magistrates, proved the most enduring of these official confirmatory tests. Its justification lay in the developing theories of the other major professional group involved in witchcraft prosecution, the divines. Witchcraft prosecutions after 1563 placed the clergy, well read in the continental theory of the essentially diabolic origins of the offence, in a quandary. Much of the popular belief that emerged in the courts seemed to trivialize witchcraft and to give ammunition to sceptics. In consequence, engaged divines used every opportunity to educate the populace concerning their witchcraft-​as-​heresy formulation, to transform popular belief with, to judge by the mid-​seventeenth-​century evidence, some success.Yet in this process aspects of popular belief were incorporated into the theories of the divines. The features of witchcraft that emerged regularly in the trials could not easily be dismissed, and had to be accommodated to theological presuppositions. So the animals who frequently attended the witch were diabolized as familiar spirits or emanations of Satan himself. From this theological reading of folklore emerged the test of the witch’s mark in its English form, and with it the committees of women who searched the accused. All witnesses, but particularly those girls who described their possession and the matrons who discovered the genital marks, ratified the misogynous rationalizations proffered by the divines to explain the preponderant numbers of women accused of witchcraft. Their testimony apparently confirmed that women were the weaker sex, more easily seduced by satanic temptation. But the machinery in which they became involved, often at the instigation of men, was created, controlled, and ultimately discarded by the magisterial and clerical elite. And it was they who read local experience in terms of a particular intellectual scheme. The

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construction of a prosecution was a complex, dialogic process, involving many actors, and the intersection of divergent and shifting systems of ideas.We can show that female participation as witnesses in the English trials was extensive and, proportionately, growing in the seventeenth century. But the social meaning of these figures is not so easily read.They certainly do not eliminate “gender” or “misogyny” as key categories for any discussion of witchcraft beliefs and prosecutions.

Notes Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London 1971), 568. See also Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London 1970), 160; John Demos, Entertaining Satan (New York 1982), 64. 2 See Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion:  The Politics of Popular Belief (Blackwell 1984), 79–​91; Carol F.  Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New  York 1987), 226; Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches (London 1992), 201. 3 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (London 1929), provides synopses of all the assize indictments. 4 For full citations of the archival sources used in this essay, see the original version in Past and Present, 140 (1993), 145–​79 –​ Ed. 5 The sample consists of those assizes at which Essex witchcraft cases were determined; twenty courts between 1600 and 1624; six between 1660 and 1675. 6 For a general discussion of the “fall in the levels of indictment for property offences”, see J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England (London 1984), 58–​60. 7 Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London 1720), 59–​60; PRO., ASSI 35/​135/​14. 8 For further discussion of this issue, see Clive Holmes, “Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates and Divines in Early Modern England”, in S. L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture (Berlin 1984), 94–​5. 9 Ronald C. Sawyer, “ ‘Strangely Handled in All Her Lyms’: Witchcraft and Healing in Jacobean England”, Journal of Social History, xxii (1988–​9), 46. 10 Based on an analysis of the Essex defamation cases listed in Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 278–​301. 11 Edward Fairfax, Daemonologia, ed. William Grainge (Harrogate 1882), 32–​5. 12 Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (London 1613), sigs C, E1v, E2v. 13 W. W., A True and Iust Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of All the Witches, at S.  Oses in Essex (London 1582). The text is reproduced in Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England (Massachusetts 1991), 103–​57. This “anonymous” tract is obviously Darcy’s own work. 14 A True and Impartial Relation of the lnformations against Three Witches (Exeter 1682), esp. 17–​23. 1

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15 Letter of an anonymous Wiltshire J.P.  of 1672, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, cii pt. 1 (1832), 492. 16 A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes Held at Bury St Edmonds (London 1682). 17 Francis Bragge, A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Practiced by Jane Wenham of Walkerne (1712), 28. 18 Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, 127, 185. 19 Ibid., 299. 20 John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4  vols. (London 1795–​1811), ii pt. 2; C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London 1933), 209–​12; The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys (London 1593), sig. Ov. This last text is reproduced in Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 239–​97. 21 The author calculates that in English cases that were believed to involve possession through the agency of a witch, just over 80 per cent of victims were female. In New England the figure is 86 per cent. See Chapter 25 in this volume for the relationship between possession and gender in France –​ Ed. 22 I[ohn] D[enison], The Most Wonderfull and True Storie, of a Certaine Witch Named Alse Gooderige (London 1597), 3; Richard Baddeley, The Boy of Bilson (London 1622), 46; Cotton Mather, “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning”, in Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648–​1706, ed. G. L. Burr (New York 1914), 259–​60. C1. This text is 23 The Witches of Northamptonshire (London 1612), sigs B2–​ in Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 344–​56. See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Cambridge 1981), 212. 24 Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London (London 1991), xxxvi; see, in general, xxxiii–​xxxix. 25 John Cotta, A Short Discoverie of Severall Sorts of Ignorant Practisers (London 1619), 69. The account of the possession of the Throckmorton children, published in 1593, was made available to the demoniac William Sommers at Nottingham in 1597–​8, and to Ann Gunter in Berkshire in 1604. Samuel Harsnet, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of J. Darrell Concerning the Pretended Possession of W. Somers (London 1599), 93. 26 John Darrell, A True Narration of the Strange and Grevous Vexation by the Devil, of 7 Persons in Lancashire and W. Somers: Wherein the Doctrine of Possession and Dispossession of Demoniakes […] Is Applyed […] (London 1600), first pagination, 2, 3, 9, and second pagination, 10; George More, A True Discourse Concerning the Certaine Possession and Dispossession of 7 Persons in One Familie in Lancashire (Middleburg n.d.), 45. 27 The search was employed in a Virginia case of 1706 and in the accusation against Jane Wenham of Walkern in 1712. 28 Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-​Jury Men, Divided into Two Bookes: In the First, Advice before they Bring in a Billa Vera in Cases of Witchcraft; In the Second, a Treatise Touching Witches (London 1627), 91. 29 George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (London 1593),  22–​3.

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30 Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, 2nd edn (London 1682), pt. 1, 17–​23. 31 W. W., True and Iust Recorde, sig. A3; Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, 319. 32 Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), 3. 33 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 75; W.  W., True and Iust Recorde, sigs C3, D3. 34 Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie, sig. 04; Henry Goodcole, The Wonderfull Discoverie (London 1621), sigs B2v–​B3. 35 Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice, 4th edn (London 1630), [273]; second pagination, after 276. 36 Sanford Fox, Science and Justice: The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore, MD 1968), 83–​90; Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in 17th-​ Century Massachusetts (Amherst, MA 1984), 88, 101–​3. 37 David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-​Witch”, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1–​26. See also Chapter 28 in this collection –​ Ed. 38 John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (Boston, MA 1702), 72. 39 S. Cockburn, Introduction to the Assize Calendars (London 1985), 122. There is a very useful discussion of the various court-​appointed bodies made up of women in James C. Oldham, “On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons”, Criminal Justice History, vi (1985), 1–​64. 40 William Gilbert, “Witchcraft in Essex”, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, new series, xi (1911), 211, 215.

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Chapter 31

E. J. Kent MASCULINITY AND MALE WITCHES IN OLD AND NEW ENGLAND

A

P P R O X I M A T E LY A Q U A R T E R of all those executed for witchcraft were men. Historians such as E. J. Kent have recently focused attention on the circumstances in which men could be accused of the crime. Here she argues that male witches were perceived by other men as “bad patriarchs” and threats to the public good. Unlike the female witches described by Clive Holmes (30), male witches were often the target for legal action early in their careers, and they often appeared as plaintiffs themselves. They were therefore less vulnerable than women accused of maleficium –​but also, from the perspective of their accusers, potentially more dangerous.

This essay concentrates on the way ordinary people in English communities represented male witches and male witchcraft when they accused men of criminal magic. English witchcraft was certainly ‘a variation on a European theme’,1 but there were also sufficient differences in feature, scale and intensity to make a comparison with men in continental trials problematic, so I do not attempt one here. Rather, I focus on communities in East Anglia and New England. … In the case of Nicholas Stockdale,2 there seems little doubt that gender and status allowed this male witch to respond to witchcraft accusations in ways female witches generally could not. In 1607 he brought a case in [the] Star Chamber alleging that the villagers of Brancaster, Norfolk, had conspired to accuse him

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of witchcraft. Nicholas, a yeoman, alleged that the villagers, with the complicity of the constable, had engineered his arrest on assault, then, by manipulation of Justices of the Peace, had added charges of three deaths by witchcraft when he was in custody. The villagers alleged that he murdered Thomas Skippon by witchcraft in 1595, and in 1602 caused the deaths of Mary Skippon and Margaret Headon. Mary Skippon, wife of William Skippon, a husbandman, had told Edmund Cremer, a yeoman, that she had never been well since Stockdale and her husband had fallen out, and she believed Stockdale had ‘done ill by her’. Accusations of witchcraft against Stockdale had been heard in the Assize: in 1600 an apparently false accusation was made by John Fring that Nicholas had bewitched some sheep, and in July 1602, the charges of witchcraft and assault were heard. Both times the cases were thrown out for lack of evidence. Nicholas claimed he had gone to the Star Chamber to allege conspiracy and seek redress for the vile slander perpetrated upon his name and reputation. The story of Nicholas Stockdale demonstrates two things very clearly. Firstly, Stockdale was accused by men. Three important studies of English witchcraft have argued that witchcraft accusation was very much the business of the female sphere.3 Yet in this case, and the others that follow, it is men who are significant accusers of male witches. Women provide important evidence of bewitchment, like Mary Skippon, but men are the majority of accusers, and drive the accusations. Secondly, Stockdale was accused from within a context of chronic masculine conflict. Like many female witches, Nicholas Stockdale lived in considerable contention with his masculine peers, all of whom, like him, were of middling rank. Nicholas described how he was brought before the manorial court on charges of breaching the rule of waste, and of riot, and how his peers had tampered with the jury. A charge of riot was also made in an earlier Brancaster Star Chamber suit from 1605. It recounted how Nicholas, with his wife and son, had been part of an enclosure riot in Brancaster, against Luke Cotton, a local yeoman, who sought to enclose the common. Stockdale and his family were accused of assaulting Cotton’s servants. Instead of battles over households, domestic product and children, this witch and his male peers battled over rights to land and resources. Social embeddedness, not marginality, assertive economic behaviour, not poverty, and intense competition, characterize this conflict. Stockdale and his accusers were actively engaged in interpersonal dispute and neighbourly conflict in ways that cut across political and theological idealizations of masculine communal harmony. … Stockdale disrupted corporate, economic expectations –​he was unapologetic about his breach of the rule of waste, asserting his right to do as he pleased on his own land. But he was also a conservator of local customs that acted to his benefit, resisting Luke Cotton’s efforts to enclose common land. Nicholas Stockdale

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appears to have challenged local masculine economic culture, with an overtly self-​interested, individualistic, ambivalent approach to economic life, aimed at securing the best economic outcomes for himself. The case of Stockdale indicates that male witchcraft accusations could arise between male neighbours, and that men could be active witchcraft accusers against a man, within a male community that was fundamentally antagonistic and competitive. In the case of female witches, a court appearance generally marked some resolution of the conflict. Preceding this, issues of contention, sometimes over many years, were expressed in the informal public of the street or neighbourhood, in arguments between neighbours, rumours and gossip, as communal suspicions hardened into belief and justified formal prosecution.4 By contrast, legal activity, not always centring on witchcraft charges, is over-​represented in the Stockdale case.The conflicts between Nicholas and his neighbours were played out in local courts (the manorial court, the Quarter Sessions), in the county courts (the Assize), and in the central courts in London (the King’s Bench and the Star Chamber). Clearly the fact that the accusers and accused were male permitted this lengthy, expensive, strategic use of the early modern legal system. Female witches and their accusers generally seem not to have deployed the resources that enabled the wholesale transfer of neighbourly conflict into litigation. … The case history of John Lowes, minister of Brandeston, Suffolk, shares some basic similarities with that of Nicholas Stockdale. Lowes was accused by men, his parishioners and neighbours, with whom he had battled for many years. Like Stockdale’s, Lowes’s accusers objected to his self-​assertion, self-​interest and contemptuous disregard for local expectations in the pursuit of his own agenda. Lowes and his parishioners, like Stockdale and his peers, shared a complex history of legal conflict, and this case also mentions litigation in the Quarter Sessions, the Assizes, the King’s Bench and Star Chamber. But there are also some distinct differences. The accusations against Nicholas Stockdale need to be seen within the context of the local conflicts in Brancaster. By contrast, the case of John Lowes merely begins amidst the village rivalries of Brandeston, but then extends over half a century to end in 1645 amid the East Anglian witch-​hunt and the English Civil War. The masculinity of the witch, I suggest, is central to understanding the much-​expanded theatre of this particular witchcraft case. John Lowes was a graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, and took up the benefice of Brandeston in Suffolk between 1596 and 1600, by which time he had already been in conflict with the Church. Lowes had married a local woman, Margaret Cotton, and may have had family ties to Brandeston. Litigation between Lowes and his parishioners exists from 1614. In that year, Lowes had prosecuted Ellis May for pulling down a hedge and building a pigsty, which caused the footings

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of Lowes’s barn to rot. In 1615, a jury was empanelled at Woodbridge to inquire whether Lowes was a ‘common barrator [disturber] of the peace, and a person of bad name, fame, condition, conversation and disposition’. In this year also, the first witchcraft allegations appear. Jonas Cooke, one of the Woodbridge jurors, said that Lowes had bewitched his daughter Mary to death. Jonas Cooke, and Toby Barrow, alleged that Lowes appeared in their chambers, with his imps, threatening to kill them. In a Star Chamber suit from 1616, Lowes claimed that his education, erudition, honesty, virtue, industry, and diligence had led to his Brandeston incumbency. For fifteen years he attempted to reform his parishioners from all manner of vices, but they resisted and conspired to have him put from the benefice. Lowes recounted various attempts of the Brandeston residents, all men, to accuse him of witchcraft. He claimed he was falsely imprisoned and tried in the Assize, including charges of confederacy with a local female witch. This bill was thrown out (because, one defendant alleged, Lowes had a ‘cuzen’ [cousin] on the jury), so the charges were revived in the Quarter sessions, but again he was cleared. Still, Lowes claimed, daily his parishioners pursued him and sought to drive him out of the parish. The answers of his parishioners were very different. Lowes had, they said, plagued them unmercifully for fifteen years. As well as bewitching Mary Cooke to death, Lowes had caused illness among her siblings, attempted to poison a son of the local gentry, bewitched livestock, and aided and abetted a female witch who had murdered Ellis May’s father. Lowes was a ‘turbulent spirit’, who caused all manner of ‘troubles, controversies and contentions’ by harassing his neighbours. He had preached ‘strange’ doctrine to the young people, harangued his parishioners from the pulpit, and continually pursued his neighbours with vexatious litigation. The Brandeston villagers asked the court to intervene,‘lest he be to their utter undoinge’. Lowes reappears in 1642 in a pamphlet entitled A Magazine of Scandall. The anonymous pamphleteer recounts the activities of two scandalous ministers, one of whom is John Lowes of Brandeston, a common barrator. The anonymous pamphleteer accused the Church hierarchy of corruption and complicity in refusing to put this reprobate out of the ministry. The pamphlet description of Lowes is both fascinating and lengthy. It described him as a ‘reading’ parson, a witch and a conjurer, the associate of recusants, a barrator and a braggart. He is described as a man of ‘pragmatick disposition’ who sold his skills, and would ‘rip it from market to market, yet even to London’. Lowes boasted he had great skills in law and physic, as well as military prowess, and could have ‘wonne all the Country’ had the King but sent for him when the ‘Isle of Rhys’ voyage was on. Lowes next appears in 1645 in the documents of the East Anglian witch trials (1645–​7). These witch trials were the largest trials in the history of English

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witchcraft prosecution. The trials were certainly the product of village conflicts, but these local energies were focused by the activities of two ‘witch-​finders’, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Both Hopkins and Stearne examined John Lowes, by then aged eighty. According to the witch-​finders, Lowes was ‘swum’ in the moat at Framlingham, and confessed to practising witchcraft and possessing familiar spirits. Lowes had confessed to getting his familiars to wreck ships by raising storms at sea, and had preached sixty sermons after his covenant with the Devil. He had remained in his parish, despite being indicted for witchcraft and barratry over thirty years before. He confessed to many other ‘mischiefs’ and claimed that he had a charm to keep him from hanging. But this last proved useless. He was hanged at Michaelmas 1645, in Bury St Edmunds. This case coincides with key themes in English history in the first half of the seventeenth century as the country moved to civil war. The early charges made by the Brandeston villagers –​that Lowes taught strange doctrine, seldom preached, taunted his neighbours from the pulpit, and harassed them with vexatious litigation –​echo the discontent expressed by people all over Suffolk, and beyond, with the standard of parish clergy. By the early 1640s parishioners all over East Anglia clamoured for change. In 1642, the year when the struggle between King Charles I and Parliament became the open warfare of the first English Civil War, protest against clerical standards contributed to the establishment of the Parliamentary Committee [for] Plundered Ministers. This committee was empowered to hear evidence against, and remove, ‘insufficient’ clergy who supported the King, employed ‘popish’ innovations in liturgy, or were drunken, idle, occupied with worldly concerns, and generally unfit for their office. In this same year, A Magazine of Scandall framed its account of Lowes’s misdeeds with reference to these discontents. The anonymous pamphleteer appropriated a village narrative of imps, maleficium and corrupt ministry and turned it into a propaganda piece that backed parliament against king and church. John Lowes, the Devil’s parson who perverted the sacred trust of his office, was made to personify ambitious men with access to institutional power. If the witchcraft stories of the civil war represented ‘all there was to fear’, then this witchcraft narrative indicates a fairly acute fear of the masculine capacity to foster anti-​social forces (recusants, witches and Anglicans) with the power they gained from institutional affiliation. The witchcraft narrative surrounding John Lowes is a story about male power. This description of John Lowes the witch was fundamentally shaped by Lowes’s professional identities, real and imagined. It indicates a popular concern with men who could wield words as weapons, to harry their less educated, less expert fellows, to exploit their ignorance for personal gain. Lowes emerges from these

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various accounts as a purveyor of disordered law and scandalous theology, in a uniquely masculine image of institutional power run amok. In numerical terms, the English colonies, which saw 95% of witchcraft accusations in British North America, were not overly concerned with male witchcraft between 1630 and 1692. But it is from this period that some of the most detailed accounts of male witchcraft prosecution survive, and these suggest elevated levels of concern over individual men and their witchcraft. One of these men was Hugh Parsons, sawyer and brickmaker, who was accused of witchcraft by his neighbours in the town of Springfield, a trading outpost on the western frontier of Massachusetts. Springfield was a fractious community, devoted to the pursuit of profit, settled by people valued more for their skills than their devotion to the visible kingdom of the saints. It was in this community, between 1650 and 1652, that Hugh Parsons was accused of witchcraft. As in the cases of John Lowes and Nicholas Stockdale, the accusations of witchcraft against Hugh Parsons reflect anxieties about masculinity as well as masculine anxieties. Hugh’s wife Mary was his chief accuser; but forty-​one others came forward to testify at Hugh’s trial in a town with only thirty-​nine households on the 1646 tax roll. Springfield was a community accustomed to its residents’ disorderly behaviour, but even these worldly new Americans found this man intolerable. Twenty-​ eight men testified at Hugh’s trial, including all of his near neighbours, as did fourteen women. Some men and women gave evidence of affliction, generally in the form of diabolic visions, though several women accused Hugh while in ‘fits’. All of Hugh’s direct neighbours came forward with tales of the bewitchment of domestic product, household items and tools  –​milk, a pudding, a lost trowel, lost knives, an enchanted beer keg, a horse and cart –​objects of both the male and female worlds. Hugh was believed to have bewitched to death children in the town; perhaps two of his own sons, two daughters of the minister, and two daughters from the elite Smith family, granddaughters of William Pynchon, the town’s founder. Hugh’s accusers supported their contention that he was a witch with reference to his disorderly behaviour. Hugh was frequently away from home, apparently preferring to lie out in the fields overnight, rather than return to his family. His neighbours testified he was frequently in their houses, often just before or after the effects of his witchcraft were felt. People reported themselves bewitched after Hugh became enraged at their refusal to give him things he wanted. Several persons commented that Hugh had shown no grief at the death of his son and told the court how, when informed of the child’s death, Hugh had stopped to take a pipe of tobacco before returning home to Mary. Hugh was notably greedy, even for Springfield: he was ‘eager after the world’ and motivated by ‘lucre and gain’. Many

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of his accusers attested to Hugh’s habit of making ‘threatening speeches’ during the course of business. Generally associated with bargains that went bad, or that Hugh did not keep, these ugly words upset his peers. Moreover, Hugh threatened nearly everyone, from his neighbours to the minister. His threats, neighbours said, were often followed by evil events and strange occurrences. Mary Parsons said that Hugh was a man of quick temper, given to cursing and abuse. Mary told the court that Hugh had murdered their son so that her labour would be free for the harvest. Hugh had threatened Mary with violence, and she told women in the town that she was terrified of him. Mary portrays Hugh as a frustrated abusive man, given to fits of rage and cursing. For his part, Hugh said that Mary would ‘be the means to hang him’ and that she was the worst enemy he had. Hugh was found guilty of witchcraft, but the General Court vetoed the decision, judging him ‘not legally guilty of witchcraft’. Mary Parsons was acquitted of witchcraft, despite confessing, was convicted of infanticide, and died in prison. Hugh did not return to Springfield from his trial in Boston, going instead to Rhode Island. Hugh Parsons has been described by Kamensky as a ‘mis-​speaker’ who used the feminized speech codes of the scold, failed to assume his masculine prerogatives, and wielded the weapons of the weak.5 This framework precludes any examination of how masculine behaviour might have shaped accusers’ ideas of witchcraft. Witchcraft accusations have an important relationship to householding and to parenting identities, and this seems as true of Hugh Parsons as it was of any female witch. Desirable patriarchal practice in early New England was measured along a number of different axes. Chief amongst them was the proper exercise of family governorship at the head of a household. Hugh, however, was the head of what was plainly, publicly, a dysfunctional household. Instead of modest self-​containment, this household irrupted into the public realm, with stories of witchcraft, abuse, anger, cursing and death. Hugh’s wife confessed she danced with the Devil, and believed that Hugh had killed his child for the sake of profit. Neighbours, immediate and distant, found this story credible and added their own stories of dead children, lost tools, sick livestock, and diabolic visions which prevented neighbourly harmony. Hugh’s neighbours complained of how Hugh spread the disorder of his own household to the households of other men, and expressed multiple anxieties about Hugh’s preoccupation with self-​interest, profit, tobacco and revenge. A second axis along which the social practice of patriarchy was assessed was a man’s economic behaviour. Here, too, Hugh’s neighbours told how Hugh’s threats erupted powerfully from the male world of exchange relationships; disordering bargains and menacing male provision. Hugh’s threatening speeches were powerful articulations: of his lack of honesty and manly restraint, his inability for

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plain-​dealing, and his potential to disrupt the economic interdependencies of the small world of Springfield. Hugh Parsons, whose words disturbed men’s bodies and minds, whose presence disordered their households, seems to be a man in full possession of a compelling masculine authority. Hugh’s accusers identified him as a witch, not because of his social impotence, but to mark him out as having a particular and powerfully negative hold over the townsfolk of early Springfield. ‘Feminizing’ Hugh Parsons prevents any examination of a wider masculine context. Hugh was accused of witchcraft at a very particular time in Springfield’s history. William Pynchon, Springfield’s founding father, major landowner, prime employer, chief creditor, and magistrate, was facing heresy charges in Boston. Pynchon was identified with a group of Puritan rationalists, resident in the towns neighbouring Springfield in the Connecticut River Valley. In 1650 a tract Pynchon had published was condemned as heretical by the General Court. Pynchon’s heresy trial was exactly contiguous with the years of the Parsons’ witch trial. Early in 1652, after being ordered to recant by the General Court, Pynchon left the colony, returning to England, where he continued to publish, leaving Springfield in the hands of his son John. Suspicions against Hugh Parsons had been circulating in Springfield for at least two years, but hardened into legal action at exactly the time the town’s chief patriarch was threatened. J. A. Sharpe has suggested that witchcraft accusations could be made at times when communities were experiencing an ‘erosion of traditional authority’.6 Sharpe’s example is the East Anglian witch-​hunt, but it seems true of Springfield in 1650–​2. The removal of William Pynchon, I suggest, provided the impetus for legal action against Hugh by creating economic anxiety and institutional insecurity. The witchcraft accusations against Hugh Parsons were a means by which this community sought to secure its boundaries, to promote ‘social cohesion and unity’ by emphasizing the ‘dominant political values of the ruling group’.7 The majority of [the] men who accused Hugh were prominent in the Pynchon account-​books, and would remain so, as employees, tenants, or those otherwise dependent on Pynchon patronage. Within this context it is hard not to see the witchcraft accusations against Hugh as a political demonstration of the values the male community of Springfield felt they most needed to affirm. Hugh Parsons’s accusers told the court of his diabolic husbandry, murderous paternity, and deeply dysfunctional householding. These witchcraft accusations are obviously shaped by his character and his dubious conduct as a householder, workmate, neighbour, father and husband. Hugh Parsons was not a marginal, weak figure in the minds of his accusers. He was significant enough to be blamed for many and sundry hurts, sorrows, humiliations and failures, and to embody fundamental anxieties about the capacity of Springfield to tolerate the removal of

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a central authoritarian figure. When their patriarch was threatened, the people of Springfield responded by diabolizing the most anti-​patriarchal man in their midst. That they did so at this particular time, I suggest, indicates that witchcraft accusations can tell us about the proper exercise of masculine authority in this community. A man less ideally masculine than John Godfrey, of no fixed address, colonial Massachusetts, would be hard to find. Everything we know of his life indicates that Godfrey lived almost completely outside normalizing masculine institutions. John Godfrey was in New England by 1640 and died in Boston, of natural causes, in 1675. Between these years, Godfrey appears to have remained a bachelor, to have been highly mobile (he gave his place of abode as fifteen different towns), and to have been involved in 132 separate court cases (eighty-​nine as plaintiff, thirteen criminal indictments, thirty as defendant). John Demos described him as a man ‘continually at odds with his peers, over a host of quite specific, personal and mundane affairs’ –​defamation, suborning witnesses, lying, cursing, being drunk, profaning the Sabbath, public smoking –​charges made repeatedly during his lifetime. Godfrey was also repeatedly charged with witchcraft over a decade, mainly by men, but also by women. Evidence first appears in 1659, with a verdict directing Samuel Symonds to pay damages and costs after slandering Godfrey as a witch, though Godfrey was also thought suspicious. The same year a petition was signed by eleven people, all alleging injury and losses they blamed on Godfrey’s witchcraft. Godfrey was a herdsman by trade, so it is unsurprising that animals feature in the accusations against him. Isabelle Holdred described being attacked by the vision of a bull, then being attacked by a real bull, after she had a falling-​out with Godfrey. Abraham Whitaker, one of the 1659 signatories, who battled with Godfrey for years, alleged that his hogs had died after his wife Elizabeth had an argument with Godfrey. Later, Whitaker cattle were found dead after Godfrey had reacted angrily to being refused the work of herding them. The Whitakers suffered other losses, and Elizabeth was debilitated all that summer. The young son of the Remington family was injured when his horse was attacked by strange creatures as he was riding home from herding his family cattle. Again this occurred after Godfrey was in a ‘great rage and passion’ after being denied herding work. Job Tyler, another signatory of the 1659 petition told how Godfrey had slandered his wife by suggesting she was a witch. Charley Brown and his wife told the court that they had seen a witch’s teat under Godfrey’s tongue, six or seven years before, when he had yawned in church. The evidence suggests that Godfrey used his reputation as a witch to some degree –​ three years before, Godfrey had been at the Browns’ house talking about witches, saying that if they were not given beer and victuals, they might let all the beer

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out of the cellar, and if they looked steadfastly on a man or beast, they would die. A young man named Jonathan Singletary, in prison due to debts he owed Godfrey, was visited by a vision of his creditor, urging him to pay. In 1665 Godfrey appeared on witchcraft charges and was found not guilty, but suspicious. The last round of witchcraft litigation, in 1669, alleged that Godfrey had been in two places at once, and had travelled with supernatural speed. Godfrey died in 1675. He left some bequests from his small estate, which were challenged and the matter remained contested for two years. In a society based on peaceable, God-​fearing masculine householders, Godfrey presented the nightmare of a disputatious, mobile, criminal bachelor, roaming free of constraint. Disordered and depraved, Godfrey, with his drinking, cursing and public profanity, demonstrated what happened when men subverted godly principles, and bedevilled attempts at good order. At every turn, Godfrey invited the Lord’s wrath, and must have horrified those he encountered who truly believed they lived in a covenant with God requiring them to police the civility of their fellows. Where his mobility might have offered some respite, it also presented the prospect of his return to disturb the peace again. That Godfrey was ever ready to defend his way of life by litigation meant that he represented an intractable problem. One of the witnesses against John Godfrey told the court that Godfrey was an ‘evil-​looking fellow’ and ‘if he came before a judge his looks would hang him’. Meagre as it is, this is one of the very few representations of the body of the male witch in the primary sources used here. On the other hand, witchcraft scholarship indicates that the female witch’s body, as a deviant body, was central to English ideas of witchcraft. In order to understand how the male witch’s body might be represented in the accusations against Godfrey, we need to remember that for early moderns ‘the body’ included both mental and physical states. Early modern ideas of bodily health included ideas of emotional balance, and strong emotions were believed as damaging as bodily illness. The achievement of good health was as much about avoiding emotional extremes as about any purely physical condition. It was not that men were expected to be emotionless, in fact the opposite. Healthy men confided emotional highs and lows with trusted friends, exchanged care and affection with their wives and families, extended respect and love to their superiors, authoritarian benevolence to their servants and other depend[a]‌nts. As in their bodily life, early modern men, of all ranks, were expected to exercise mastery of their emotions to ensure that they achieved proper manly equilibrium. Needless to say, Godfrey, in his ‘rage and passion’, seems not to have achieved this happy state of masculine poise. In his cursing, threats, aggressiveness and mercurial outbursts of temper, Godfrey’s embittered emotionality must have

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disturbed his fellows because of its association with spiritual disorder, social and physical dysfunction. To early New Englanders, Godfrey’s improper emotions, so improperly expressed, indicated he was among the ‘unregenerate’, not one of the elect who would find eternal life. To a people who lived within the difficult psychology of predestination, Godfrey lacked those signs of ‘ritual self-​abasement’ so idealized in Puritan social theory and theology. His angry outbursts were uncomfortable evidence of the essentially depraved nature of man. When Godfrey raged at his peers, he was man in a state of original sin, degenerate instead of regenerate, damned instead of saved. Godfrey’s emotionality was diabolic because it carried the whiff of brimstone. Significantly Godfrey was a man who lived outside of the relationships of confession and redemption, which structured the Puritan spiritual and social world. Godfrey’s loneness had particular affective consequences which suggested social dysfunction. Far from denoting hardy self-​sufficiency, Godfrey’s lack of settled household and community indicated the lack of an essential affective context. Lone persons, especially highly mobile ones, could not be emotionally healthy because they did not live within the stable relationships of a family household or community of friends, and did not maintain the ‘flow of sociable emotion’ so necessary to individual health and communal well-​being. Without these proper emotional relationships, Godfrey vented emotional disorder into the public world, disrupting the affective ties that bound individuals together. In Puritan New England, masculine emotionality was associated with certain body types. Fertile men were ‘even-​tempered’, ‘had good health, wit and carriage’. Undesirable character traits, such as anger and combativeness, were associated with the ‘hard, thin, lean’ body of the impotent man. Sexual activity in marriage had a political and social dimension –​it indicated a man was able to care for a wife,8 and his other subordinates, which in turn indicated he was a suitable building block for a redeemed society. Within the early American taxonomy of the male body, which associated reproductive potential with body type, Godfrey’s ‘love of brawling’, his loneness, mobility and fundamental instability, described an incapable man, one unable to achieve self-​mastery, and therefore unable to govern others. This impotence should not be theorized as feminization –​it was a masculine state, a specifically masculine failure, understood in relation to masculine ideals and with reference to a masculine body. Despite his manifest failures, Godfrey remained a masculine man. Godfrey’s emotionality, then, provides a clue to understanding the male body when direct descriptions of the body itself are absent. In essence ‘bodily control’, the definition of which included emotional control, denoted self-​mastery, that core attribute of the successful patriarch, and the source from which all other forms

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of mastery flowed. That John Godfrey was angry, aggressive, rough, provocative, unpredictable, greedy, and hyper-​contentious suggested a particular configuration of the masculine body. He seems to me to be a masculine counterpart to the leaky, boundless body of the female witch. Like the female witch, who ‘scattered herself across space’,9 Godfrey’s formlessness enabled people to accuse him of being in two places at once, of travelling at superhuman speed, or passing through the walls of Jonathan Singletary’s prison. But instead of the polluting fluids of the maternal body, the body of the male witch leaked envy and anger, aggression and revenge, malice and spite. Early modern English people in communities on both sides of the Atlantic had a distinct set of beliefs about male witches. The evidence suggests that some of these beliefs described male witchcraft as technology, the means to effect solutions to everyday problems and desires. This form of male witchcraft is marked by references to expertise –​to reading from written instruments or learning from a master –​that could be applied by those who had access to such knowledge. A wide range of sources describe witchcraft beliefs of this type, and they nearly always refer to male witches. This form of witchcraft was one of the important ways male witchcraft differed from female witchcraft. But men were also accused of maleficium and were believed to perpetrate the black magic of harm and injury. In these descriptions, male witchcraft is much more closely tied to a man’s character and masculine behaviour: men who were unpredictable, did not observe communal consensus about the rules of exchange, mutual obligation, duty to others, personal and public mastery.These male witches were overtly self-​interested, assertive personalities who were problematic, not because they were marginalized outsiders, but because they were embedded in the relationships of their community, where they disrupted and contravened local masculine cultures. The sins of the male witches examined here seem to have encompassed most aspects of masculine identity –​householding, paternity, social and economic behaviour, professional identities, and relationships with others. Accusers of male witches were mainly men who used accusations of witchcraft to police the boundaries of gender-​community and the behaviour of their masculine fellows. Male witches and their accusers were heavily entangled in litigation as well as social conflict, and this does indicate something quite distinct about male witches in contrast to female witches. With higher social status, and access to resources, the conflicts of male witches and their accusers did not need to remain within the immediate world of street and neighbourhood. In three of the four cases, both the male witch and his accusers had used court action and counter-​suit in their battles with each other. Some of the matters of litigation were witchcraft accusations, that

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the male witch might attempt to rebuff, even though he had escaped conviction. In addition, however, male witches and their accusers sued each other over other matters as well, creating complex, interwoven histories of litigation. Witchcraft historians have repeatedly suggested that male witches were ordinary criminals for whom witchcraft was not the original charge, but was added on ‘to make the initial accusation more heinous’.10 The evidence of litigation in these cases, combined with the difficulty of securing a conviction against a male witch, suggests perhaps that the reverse of this dictum may be more appropriate: other crimes may well have been added to witchcraft charges in order to demonstrate that a man was a witch. The wider world could appropriate male witches and their witchcraft to express particular anxieties surrounding the exercise of male power. This is most apparent in the case of John Lowes, which articulated multiple concerns about the way this male witch represented public male authority, particularly as it was enshrined in institutional affiliation and articulated by literate professions. The Lowes case contains articulations of anxieties that resonate with the concerns of local, regional, even national, communities. The case of Hugh Parsons, on a more modest scale, expresses similar concerns –​about patriarchal practice, economic probity, work ethics and the public face of manhood. The relationship between male witchcraft and the mediation of anxieties about male power suggests that we need to recognize that men gained reputations as witches because their accusers believed them to be powerful, not powerless. The historiography of witchcraft in English communities has shown that witchcraft encompassed specific cultural idioms, practices and sites –​same-​sex conflict, social and economic identities, parenting identities, the household and the body. Witchcraft scholars have usually analysed these in relation to the dominant female witch, but the categories are not intrinsically feminine. I have demonstrated that they can equally be employed to examine masculine social and cultural practices. The case histories of male witches indicate that witchcraft accusations reflect cultural ideas associated with beliefs about witchcraft and witches, and were not simply coded articulations of femaleness. Male witches were masculine others, whose poor practice of patriarchy cut across paradigmatic idealization of masculine virtue. There remains the question of how male witches should be contextualized within the wider social practice of manhood in early modern England. … In some respects, virtuous economic, social, religious or political behaviour was the uncontested ground of early modern English patriarchy. Men definitely held institutional power in these areas and could invoke it over women, children, and subordinate men. Of greater subtlety was the exercise of subcultural power. Here we might find ‘subordinated’, ‘marginalized’

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men, even ‘anti-​patriarchs’, asserting their manhood via ‘counter-​codes’ of masculinity and, in doing so, gaining considerable public and personal influence: like the witch Hugh Parsons in the mind of Springfield, or John Lowes in the mind of civil war Suffolk. In moving away from polarized models between the genders, we need to be careful not to replace them with polarized models within the genders. A bad patriarch was a patriarch nevertheless.

Notes James A.  Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness:  Witchcraft in England, 1550–​1750, (London 1996), 32. 2 For full citations of the sources used in this chapter, see the original version in E. J. Kent, “Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England”, in History Workshop Journal, 60 (2005), 69–​92 –​ Ed. 3 See Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture (New York 1995), 14–15; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (London 1996), 92; and Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 182. 4 For the neighbourhood disputes, informal allegations and negotiations that preceded many witch trials, see the chapters by Robin Briggs (6) and Clive Holmes (30) in this book –​  Ed. 5 Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York 1997), 158–​9. 6 Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 141. 7 Peter Elmer, “Toward a Politics of Witchcraft in Early Modern England”, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft:  Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (London 2001), 104. 8 By giving her sexual pleasure and hence effecting conception. This relies on the early modern idea that both men and women had to achieve orgasm for conception to occur. See Richard Godbeer, The Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, MD 2002), 49–​62. 9 Purkiss, The Witch in History, 81. 10 Anne Llewelyn Barstow, Witch Craze:  A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco, CA 1994), 25. 1

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PART EIGHT

Reading confessions

I

F W E A R E T O B E L I E V E T H E confession of Ellen Driver, one of the women accused of witchcraft in Suffolk in 1645, an extraordinary wedding service took place in her parish some sixty years earlier. It was then that she married the Devil in the shape of a man, who subsequently lived with her and gave her two children, which turned out to be “changelings”. Driver’s infernal spouse “enjoined her before [their] marriage to deny God and Christ”; and on their wedding night he “had the carnal use” of her body, but she found him to be “cold”. As they lay in bed together “she felt of his feet and they were cloven”. Their relationship lasted for two years, and only ended when her lover died. In all this time, however, Driver claimed that “she did not know that any of his neighbours did ever see him”.1 To modern eyes, this story is an obvious delusion. This response is confirmed when one considers the context in which the old woman’s disclosures emerged. She was kept awake for two nights by “watchers” before she confessed; and this deprivation of sleep, combined with her age and the immense psychological pressure to which she was subjected, probably explain her willingness to do so. To some of Ellen Driver’s contemporaries, the details of her confession would have seemed no more plausible than they do today: early modern critics of witch trials dismissed such testimonies as the product of mental illness or coercion. For many others, however, the disclosures of women like Driver confirmed and illuminated the dreadful reality of satanic witchcraft. The chapters in Part Eight consider the various meanings of

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such confessions: to the demonologists who used them to construct the image of a demonic cult, to modern-​day readers and to the witches themselves. In the first contribution (32), Virginia Krause describes the central role of confessions in the expert literature on witchcraft in Renaissance Europe. She shows how writers such as Jean Bodin used confessions to affirm the existence of a witch cult and to delineate its activities. In several respects, demonology was a “self-​legitimating discourse”. It supplied suspects with a narrative that they were obliged to embrace in the context of their interrogations; and it reserved the right to interpret these disclosures, so that any inconsistencies or omissions could be explained with reference to other confessions and expert opinion. Based on their acquaintance with a huge collection of “first-​hand” testimonies, demonologists could demonstrate their expertise on the secret world of the witches’ sabbat; and they used this expertise to obtain and elucidate further confessions. Thus men such as Bodin created the subject of their own work: “the villain of the story told by demonologists  –​the ‘witch’ herself  –​was produced by the very institution that ostensibly sought to destroy her”. Krause presents a compelling account of the circular logic that underpinned demonology. By focusing on this process, however, she leaves little space for the contribution of the suspects themselves; they appear to be passive victims on whom the narratives of others were inscribed. Other historians have suggested that alleged witches played a more active role in the creation of confessional fantasies. For Lyndal Roper (34), a person’s confession to witchcraft was not merely “a conduit” for the beliefs of their accusers. Rather, “the fantasy had to be created by an individual witch out of the elements of fantasy available to her, from what her culture knew of the Devil and his ways, and what she selected had a logic”. This proposition can be applied to the confession of Ellen Driver in 1645: her account of the Devil’s appearance and the “changeling” children that she bore him appear to derive from contemporary folklore. In Chapter 33, Louise Jackson explores the confessions of other women who were tried alongside Driver in 1645. She argues that they were using the language of demonology to explain and deal with real-​life situations that created emotional traumas. Susanna Stegold, for example, appears to have convinced herself that she was responsible for the death of her abusive husband because of the “ill wishes” she had for him. Tormented by guilt when he died from a sickness with no obvious explanation, she came to believe that she had killed him with maleficium. In other cases, women who acted in ways that offended against gender stereotypes –​such as failing to care for their children because of post-​natal depression –​resolved their feeling of guilt by attributing their actions to demonic intervention. Since they perceived their own behaviour as “unnatural”

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and evil, it was relatively easy for such women to believe that they had entered a pact with the Devil. While Jackson examines the testimony of several women in the pressurised context of a major witch panic, Lyndal Roper considers the spontaneous and apparently voluntary confession of a single individual (34). In 1670 Regina Bartholome of Augsburg confessed to making a demonic pact and taking the Devil as her husband. Roper applies ideas from psychoanalysis to explain Bartholome’s testimony, and argues compellingly that she used an imaginary relationship with Satan to express feelings about her father and her unsatisfactory experiences with other men. The narrative of this relationship was shaped in the context of her interrogations, but its main elements came from Bartholome herself. For Roper, the narrative created by Regina Bartholome reflected –​and was partly shaped by –​ the anxieties of the ruling elite in Augsburg about the stability of family life. This concern was both moral and political, since the city fathers regarded the household as a microcosm of society as a whole: an attack on one undermined the other. Roper notes that witchcraft “exposed the yawning possibility that an individual might attack paternal authority and, with it, society, the community of Christians which the city constituted”. Since Bartholome used her confession of witchcraft to express anxieties about her own father, and the town council perceived itself as a paternal authority, there was a lethal understanding between the witch and those conducting her prosecution. Roper’s analysis raises problems about the relationship between the present and the past. By using the methods of twentieth-​century psychoanalysis to explain the mental world of a seventeenth-​century woman, she invites the charge of anachronism. She is alert to this problem, and counters it by pointing out that all historical inquiries rely on the assumption that people in past cultures were in some respects similar to those living today: “historical interpretation as we undertake it day by day nearly always depends at base on the assumption of a measure of resemblance: how else can we make sense of historical actors?”2 If we accept that this is the case, it seems that the only consistent response to the charge of anachronism is to abandon the study of history altogether. A more specific criticism of Roper’s work concerns the validity of psychoanalysis itself. The value of psychoanalytical theories for interpreting human behaviour is the subject of much debate, not least within academic psychology.3 Indeed, Virginia Krause suggests that psychoanalysis is a self-​justifying discourse akin to demonology. In the particular case of Regina Bartholome, Roper makes an impressive case that some of the ideas central to psychoanalysis –​the relationship between parents and children and the use of fantasy to resolve feelings of guilt –​could lead to confessions of

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witchcraft. The relevance of these themes in other situations, and the usefulness of psychoanalysis to explaining them, must await the outcome of further research. Taken together, the work of Jackson and Roper suggests that witch beliefs could provide a psychological resource for early modern women in times of personal distress; but this resource was risky and often destructive. There is a parallel here with the experience of some puritan women in seventeenth-​century England, who used the idea of satanic temptation to overcome feelings of guilt they experienced as a result of unhappy marriages. In an anonymous spiritual autobiography of 1652, a London woman described the hatred she felt for her drunken and abusive husband when “the Devil set his foot into my heart”. When she identified the demonic origin of these feelings, however, she called on God to help her vanquish the evil one and live contentedly with her unreformed spouse.4 Testimonies of this kind can be viewed as the mirror image of the witchcraft confessions discussed in this section. It seems that for some women the attribution of “ill wishes” to the Devil allowed them to cope with the material frustrations of their lives by joining battle with Satan; but others appear to have succumbed to the belief that they were guilty of witchcraft. Both outcomes, however, had the practical effect of reinforcing the authority of men.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Driver’s deposition is reproduced in C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (Heath Cranton 1929), 303–​4. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil:  Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge 1994), 228. The literature on psychoanalysis is huge, and a comprehensive account of the subject is beyond the scope of this book. For a critical introduction, see Alex Howard, Challenges to Counselling and Psychotherapy (Macmillan 1996), Anthony Stevens, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Psychotherapy (Duckworth 1998). Vavasour Powell, ed., Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1652), 160–​91. For more examples, see Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England (History Press 2010), 127–​30.

 

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Chapter 32

Virginia Krause WITCHCRAFT CONFESSIONS AND DEMONOLOGY

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E A N B O D I N W A S O N E O F T H E most esteemed European writers on satanic witchcraft, and also among the most radical. Here Virginia Krause considers the methods by which Bodin and other French demonologists constructed and sustained the concept of the witches’ sabbat. In their insistence on the value of witchcraft confessions, and their own expertise in interpreting them, Krause suggests that Bodin and his fellows embraced an approach similar to modern psychotherapy. They also resembled the experts on “satanic ritual abuse” described by Jean La Fontaine (41). This contrasted with the more cautious and empirical model advocated by Renaissance sceptics on witchcraft such as Johann Weyer, discussed by Elisa Slattery (26).

With his De la Démonomanie des Sorciers,1 Jean Bodin attacks the sceptics of demonology as much as the legions of demons and execrable witches supposedly plotting universal destruction. In the chapter devoted to confessions in trials, he refers to an idea apparently voiced by some of his peers. These reticent judges hesitate to condemn witches because they believe that their confessions are so strange that they must be “fables”. Strange indeed are these witches’ confessions, carefully extracted during trials and then recorded, surveyed, scrutinized, and interpreted by specialists in demonology, the so-​called science of demons. These confessions tell of nocturnal assemblies where witches and demons are said to

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fornicate and dance naked, where members of an underground cult affirm and reaffirm their allegiance to the Devil, where would-​be plots are made and spells are cast, where children are sacrificed and then consumed in anthropophagous rituals. Strange stories, and yet remarkably coherent, as Bodin observes: “we see that the confessions of witches in Germany, in Italy, in France, in Spain, in Ancient Greece and Rome, are all similar”. Confession was indeed a central resource for demonologists across Europe who used it in their concerted effort to condemn witches and to understand witchcraft. Without confession, there would have been no demonology –​at least not in the form of the discursive and institutional practice elaborated between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. And without demonology, there would have been no “witches”, for the villain of the story told by demonologists –​the “witch” herself –​was produced by the very institution that ostensibly sought to destroy her. … Among contemporary historians, there is consensus that the witches’ sabbat is sheer myth –​the stuff of demonologists’ nightmares rather than actual occurrences. Nevertheless, thousands of accused “witches” produced these first-​ person narratives that sealed their fate. … In a very real sense, the confession existed before its would-​be author. For a suspect, to confess was to demonstrate willingness to assume the first-​person in a pre-​existing utterance supplied by the judge and ultimately by demonological theory. Through confession, accused witches were in effect constrained to reproduce demonological theory, each reiteration serving to confirm both the reality of the sabbat and the necessity of the witch-​hunt. … Demonologists resorted to confession as a weapon for convicting and condemning the members of what they perceived to be a satanic cult threatening the very fabric of society. Indeed, witches were believed to strike hard where the community was most vulnerable. They were accused of jeopardizing the community’s material subsistence (by destroying crops); of preventing reproduction (by causing impotence among men and by killing infants); and of threatening the community’s religious foundation (by signing a pact with the Devil and by participating in the sabbat’s black mass or inversion of the liturgy). But this eminently practical objective pursued by demonologists was inextricably linked to a theoretical agenda: understanding the occult world of witches and their clandestine activities. Through confession, the demonologist sought access to the world of witches that remained stubbornly elusive without these first-​person narratives. For he was excluded from the sabbat in the same way that if one of the participants made the sign of the cross, the assembly was thought to vanish into thin air. Bodin emphasizes the function of confession as a vehicle for information on the

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sabbat:  “the assemblies, and other wickedness … cannot be learned except by their confession or from their accomplices”. To quote Walter Stephens, “witches were expert witnesses to the reality of demons”.2 And while some visual traces of their clandestine activities were believed to remain (such as the famous “mark” the Devil supposedly left on the witch’s body), the stories they told were the key to unravelling the mystery of their covert operations. The judge had to listen more than observe. Hence, no doubt, Bodin’s elaborate attempts to demonstrate that among the five senses hearing is more reliable than vision. “For hearing is not less, but much more certain than seeing; indeed all the more certain since hearing can be deceived less than seeing which is often mistaken.” It is perhaps with Bodin’s dubious demonstration in mind that Montaigne relates the story of a village terrorized by the prank of a youth who imitated the voice of a spirit.3 As though to emphasize the human ear’s vulnerability to error, Montaigne suggests that the entire village was taken in by what was in fact a rudimentary prank. Its author was neither a spirit nor even a fiendishly clever man, but rather a simpleton described as “stupid and foolish”. While witches were charged with supplying confessions, demonology reserved for itself the privilege of deciphering them. The agent that articulated confession (the witch) was thus kept separate from the agency claiming to possess hermeneutic mastery (the institution of demonology). When it came to the precise methods employed, demonology remained faithful to respected interpretive practices of the time, including the use of authorities, etymologies, and the method of parallel passages. In defence of the reality of witches’ flight, Bodin summarizes the hierarchy of confirmations: “Now we have shown by divine and human authorities, and by the proof of all antiquity, and by divine and human laws, experience, judgments, convictions, confrontations and confessions, the transport of witches.” In the first place, the demonologist-​hermeneutic respected a time-​honoured tradition by reading the strange stories told in trials against authorities –​sacred texts, the writings of the church fathers, ancient philosophy and history. Thus when Bodin sets out to explain on what days evil spells can be cast, he begins by invoking evidence given during trials:  “And in many trials I  found that evil spells were set usually on Saturday.” He proceeds to confirm this supposition with Biblical commentary, invoking Abraham bin Ezra’s twelfth-​century commentary on the Decalogue. Bodin relates the commentator’s observation that God “solemnly commanded that one abstain from work and sanctify Saturday above all”. He then provides an etymological explanation based on the word for Saturn (the prince of witches) in Hebrew, Sabthai or “resting”, while linking it to the word Sabbath, meaning “rest”. Biblical commentary and etymology are thus called upon to explain and confirm the narratives gathered in trials.With a final flourish, Bodin

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then brings the reasoning full circle, using more judicial confessions to confirm the association Saturday-​Sabbath-​witchcraft by invoking another trial “where the witches confessed that while dancing with devils they raised high their broom and cried, ‘Har, Har, Sabbath, Sabbath’ ”. The pattern described here is indeed circular, for the first-​person narratives generated during trials provide both the initial hypothesis (spells are usually cast on Saturday) and the final confirmation (witches cry out “Sabbath, Sabbath” at their sabbat). Demonology soon claimed for itself an authoritative status as demonologists interpreted puzzling features of witchcraft in light of the work of other demonologists. In the Malleus Maleficarum, references to Johannes Nider’s Formicarius reside comfortably alongside passages from Aquinas, both texts serving as authorities. Renaissance demonologists (Bodin, de Lancre, Rémy) cite reverentially the authoritative texts of demonology’s founding fathers in order to make sense of the ever-​growing number of confessions generated by trials. Another passage from Bodin follows a pattern similar to the one observed above, with the authority now coming from demonology itself rather than biblical commentary. He begins by [citing] what he terms a fact “confirmed by experience”, namely that witches never cry. The authority here comes in the form of two inquisitors, Paolo Grillando and Jacob Sprenger, who “state that they were never able to make a single witch cry”. Cross-​referencing to other demonological treatises was by Bodin’s time a common strategy. Demonology had become in effect its own self-​ legitimating discourse. In addition to the use of authorities and etymologies, the demonologist-​ hermeneut applied the technique of parallel passages to elucidate confessions. Borrowed from [biblical] exegesis, this method was based on the principle that “nothing is conveyed in a hidden manner in one place of the Holy Scripture that is not explained elsewhere in a manifest manner”. The judicial confessions extracted during trials constituted a veritable corpus –​demonologists elucidated more obscure passages in light of clearer passages. Bodin states this principle succinctly: “Now to confirm the proof of witches’ confessions, one must link them with the confessions of other witches.” In this way, raw data generated by new confessions was confirmed by pre-​existing confessions. Another passage shows Bodin applying this method to establish the hereditary dimension of witchcraft, believed to pass from parent to child. He invokes Jeanne Harvillier (a convicted witch), whose daughter fled upon learning that her mother had been indicted for witchcraft. This case appears unclear: how can one know for sure if Jeanne’s daughter was a witch if she disappeared without a trace? The obscurity of this case is dispelled by a second “parallel passage” in the form of another case: the daughters of Barbe Doré who also fled when their mother was arrested. In this

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second instance, however, an associate later testified that everyone in the family was a witch. For Bodin, the clarity of the second passage dispels the ambiguity of the first. The demonologist can thus apply the same reasoning to all cases, namely, because witchcraft is hereditary, when the daughters of witches flee upon learning that their mothers have been accused, this flight shows that they, too, are witches. Bodin’s formulation also makes clear the interpretive move of adding ever more confessions from trials to prove that an initial supposition is true. The construction strings along with the conjunction “and” one example after another. And indeed, when Jeanne Harvillier’s daughter saw that her mother was imprisoned, she fled, and since then it was learned that she was also one [a witch]: And upon learning that their mother was indicted for acts of witchcraft, the daughters of Barbe Doré fled, without being either accused or pursued, and since then one of the witches who was familiar with the said Doré testified that the whole family were witches. With the technique of parallel passages, confessional narratives were called upon to confirm one another in what was a truly vicious circle. Confession thus lay at the very basis of the house of cards that demonology had become. For let us recall that the same institution that was elaborating a complex theoretical model for making sense of confessions was also actively engaged in eliciting them by any means necessary. In this way, demonology’s epistemological and judicial endeavours converged. It is within this convergence that one should situate the invention of the witches’ sabbat –​demonology’s most spectacular fiction. Drawing on Foucault’s work, we can better appreciate how the sabbat could be at once the primary object of demonology and its invention. To illustrate the dynamic at stake, this picture of demonology can be compared to the Foucauldian understanding of sexuality and the institution devoted to piercing its mysteries:  psychoanalysis. In both cases, first-​person narratives constitute the institution’s primary instrument for penetrating a hidden empire. Both demonologist and psychoanalyst claim to uncover an obscure truth –​clandestine satanism and unconscious drives respectively. What the demonologist knows about the secret activities of witches he knows through listening to their confessions just as the psychoanalyst’s best access to an individual patient’s condition is listening to the patient’s own words. Further, in both cases hermeneutic expertise is reserved for the agency eliciting and listening to the narratives instead of the subject producing them. But the most striking element common to both institutions gets to the heart of Foucault’s thesis that sexuality is

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not a biological given, an “object” described by modern human sciences, but rather a construction. Likewise, the institution of demonology produced the sabbat –​a fiction manufactured by demonology rather than an actual event. Finally, each institution elaborated a comparable self-​legitimating device against doubt.The idea of the “spell of silence” in demonology is structurally analogous to the mechanism of repression in psychoanalysis. Thus if a patient does not acknowledge a sexual drive, it is because of the unconscious defence mechanism of repression; likewise, if a witch does not confess to having engaged in sex with demons or praying to the Devil, it is because she is under a spell. … If confession has come to occupy a privileged place in western culture, we might conclude that this reflects more the needs of institutions than the psychological needs of the individual. To be sure, demonology presents an extreme example of institutional uses and abuses of confession. Yet the lessons of the Renaissance’s science of demons are all the more important to recall given demonology’s particular moment in history. For confession was increasingly hailed as the privileged instrument of self-​discovery and self-​expression, the occasion for an individual to express and affirm his or her singularity. Poised on the threshold of the modern period, demonology stands as a sobering example of how the confessing subject can be called upon to reaffirm an institution’s own narratives.

Notes 1

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An extract from Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorciers is available in Brian P. Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 2nd edn (Routledge, London and New York 2015), ch. 27. For an extensive translation, see Jean Bodin, On the Demon-​Mania of Witches, trans. Randy A. Scott (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto 2001) –​  Ed. Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers:  Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL 2002), 43. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1958), 787.

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Chapter 33

Louise Jackson WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS

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H E E A S T A N G L I A N W I T C H -​H U N T in 1645–​7 was by far the largest persecution in England: at least 100 witches were executed. In this extract Louise Jackson examines the confessions of Suffolk women caught up in the trials. She suggests that these women used the language of demonology to explain painful experiences in their lives. Since this language was fashioned by men, the process involved the assertion of male authority. Jackson also points out that accusations of witchcraft involved a reversal of accepted female roles: witches were poisoners instead of providers of food, harmers instead of healers, and child killers instead of child protectors. Thus, a typical witch was the mirror-​image of a “good woman”, while possessing an excess of archetypally female vices. The role of “inversion” in representations of witchcraft is described by Stuart Clark in Chapter 15.

In August 1645 Suffolk woman Anna Moats was judged guilty of witchcraft at a special court of Oyer and Terminer held in Bury St Edmunds. Magistrates were told she had confessed, within two hours of her arrest, to having ‘imps’ or evil spirits and that the Devil had first appeared to her “when she was alone in her house and after she had been cursing of her husband and her children”.1 Branded as a scold and a witch, Anna had been persecuted for her failure to conform to the accepted norms of female behaviour –​instead of fulfilling the expected role of a ‘good’ wife

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and mother she had been cursing and shouting at her husband and children. Anna was just one of over 100 individuals, mostly women, who were the victims of [the witch finder Matthew] Hopkins, the remaining details of whose cases I shall be examining here. I shall try to show, through my examination of the remaining source material, not only that witch-​hunting was woman-​hunting –​a way of sifting out subversive females –​but that the women accused, in their confessions, were judging themselves in their role as neighbours, wives and mothers. Indeed it seems to be the case that some accused witches were, within their court confessions, contextualising their own insecurities and experiences within the linguistic framework of demonology. The main primary source for my investigation of the 1645 trials is a manuscript account of the Suffolk depositions, now in the British Library, and which was transcribed and published in full by C. L’Estrange Ewen in the 1920s.2 Ewen wrote that these depositions “from their rough nature bear the appearance of having been taken down at the time of the examinations on three separate occasions or perhaps at their reading in the court at the trials”.3 The depositions name 91 accused witches and vary in length from a name, to a line to a paragraph. However, they are extremely useful, both qualitatively and quantitatively, since a large number contain details of what the witch was alleged to have told her confessors and how freely this information was given. These have been supplemented through the use of a tract written by Hopkins’s assistant, John Stearne, in 1648 which gives further names and details about executions.4 Ewen has estimated that a total of 124 witches can be traced who appeared in the Suffolk court in 1645 and it seems that 68 of these were executed.5 At least 80% of these ‘Suffolk witches’ were women.6 … Most major studies of the phenomenon have tended to concentrate on the power dynamics of the witch-​hunts and have given political or economic analyses of the relationships between accusers and accused, church and state, or elite versus popular culture. … My aim is to approach the witch-​hunts from a very different level: to try to examine what was happening from the perspective of the women who were themselves accused of being witches. This is not to say that the issue of power dynamics will not be taken into consideration, but that my central focus will be gauged at the level of the personal, and I will be mostly concerned with an attempt to put the experiences of the ‘witches’ themselves into our picture of events.

THE PROCESS OF CONFESSION Christina Hole wrote that “the problem of voluntary confessions has troubled many who share the widely held modern belief that all condemned witches were

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innocent victims of credulity and ignorance”.7 In other words, why on earth did some women condemn themselves to death through their own utterances? Of course confessions were, in many cases, the result of ill-​treatment; however, it is undoubtedly the case that some of the alleged witches do seem to have been quite ready and prepared to make confessions and statements that they had bewitched their neighbours. Witch trial sceptic Reginald Scot, writing in 1584, was clearly bothered by the incidence of voluntary confession; he decided the women concerned must be suffering some form of madness or delusion. Using contemporary medical terminology, he suggested that their over-​vivid imaginations were brought on by an excess of the humour ‘melancholy’ in their bodies: “If our witches fantasies were not corrupted, nor their wits confounded with this humour, they would not so voluntarily and readily confess that which calleth their life in question”.8 I do not believe pathology provides a sufficient explanation for the women’s behaviour –​can there really have been that many mad women in Suffolk and why should they all have thought they were witches? Nor do I believe, like Margaret Murray, that the women who claimed they were witches were actually members of some highly organised Dianic cult inherited from a pagan past.9 Although a few of the women implicate others whom they worked with as witches, most do not. Most of the women, as I shall show in my examination of the Suffolk material, seem to have been very isolated in their role as witches. … Physical and mental pressures explain to a certain degree why a substantial number of women accused of witchcraft made the confessions they did; the amount of bullying and harsh treatment that was used against them must not be underestimated. However, this does not provide the whole picture. Some women clearly believed they had met the Devil and he had persuaded them to use witchcraft; their motives for believing this can only be unravelled by working towards an understanding of their material and psychological experiences. The confession records show a great attention to detail and an interesting mix of popular elements of witchcraft belief (the Devil, imps) with localised, individualised aspects. There are interesting references in the Suffolk depositions to local topography (meetings with the Devil at named places in the neighbourhood) and domestic objects and food items (apples, butter) within a broader symbolic framework of a widely accepted demonology.10 There is clearly an interaction taking place in the confession-​making process; between the accused, her accusers and her interrogators; between a widespread witchcraft belief and individual experience. We need to treat the confession text as a palimpsest: it is made up of different layers of detail and interpretation, added one on top of another as different people became involved in the process of accusation and confession.

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An alleged witch may have told earlier versions of her story before she came into contact with the courts. At some point in her career she chose, for some reason, to take on the language of demonology to describe her actions and motives. …

PERSECUTION AND GENDER The key to understanding the witch trials lies in their gender-​specificity. The details of the cases refer directly to traditionally defined feminine space  –​the home, the kitchen, the sickroom, the nursery: to culturally defined female tasks or occupations and their direct opposites –​feeding (poisoning), child-​raising (infanticide), healing (harming), birth (death). Given the involvement of women in the dairying economy of Suffolk, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Suffolk material contains many references to witchcraft in the dairy and the bewitching of cattle. When things went wrong in the domestic world or the farmhouse –​the cream curdled, the butter would not set or the child fell ill –​witchcraft might be suspected. Women were in a potentially extremely powerful position through their control over child-​rearing and feeding; the witchcraft persecutions can be seen as an officially sanctioned bid to control this threat and to reassert male power over women. Woman were faced with a basic set of role models against which to judge themselves  –​the good wife, the witch, and the scold.11 … The witch was the stereotypical opposite of the good wife. She was the woman who was trying to act entirely independently of male control, asserting her own powers, sexual and otherwise, to gain financial reward or carry out revenge on her enemies.The witch was a warning to women as to what would happen if they behaved in a way which could be counted as subversive. As I have said, the type of activities associated with witchcraft were a direct inversion of the traditionally accepted roles for women. The position of the ‘scold’ was a ‘halfway house’ –​she was the woman who was just beginning to break out of control and therefore must be kept in order through the bridle or the cucking stool. In the production of confessions, coercion was as much cultural as it was physical. Frameworks of belief about women’s roles, responsibilities and expectations would lead women to condemn themselves. It is important to remember that it was a popularly held belief during the seventeenth century that the Devil existed as a material phenomenon and that any individual could meet him in a wood or on a country road. Chance meetings with strangers or animals could be explained in such a way. Explanations for both macrocosmic and microcosmic events were similarly sought in terms of God and the Devil. Hence, when Thomas Hudson

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fell lame and his doctor could find no cause for it he assumed that Ann Ellis of Metlingham had bewitched him; however, the deposition records that “lately changing his surgeon he doth now begin to mend” –​and Ann was found innocent. The Devil also functioned in the psychological as well as the material world –​on mind as well as body. Ann Laurence has shown that seventeenth-​century women who gave testimonies to the civil war churches about their conversions referred to extremes of emotion in terms of religion: A woman who was convinced that God had ceased to love her because [of] her transgressions reported that ‘I had temptation by Satan to drown myself in a Pond’, and another woman reported that it was only her unborn child which prevented her from destroying herself. Two other women mentioned suicide among the temptations offered by Satan, which they overcame thanks to God’s intervention.12 Personal life crises such as suicide attempts and depression were almost always seen as temptations from the Devil; desire to carry out acts which were considered morally bad was associated with evil. What we today might choose to call undesirable thoughts, impulses, or drives were in early modern England seen as external influences on the individual and were associated with the Devil. In shorthand, Satan was everything you did not want to admit to. The temptations of the Devil were a particular feature of the conversion narratives produced by members of baptist and other sects. Presbyterian Hannah Allen described in her autobiography, which took the form of a religious testimony, how she had battled against the Devil during the dark days of her melancholy to regain her faith and happiness in God: 12th May 1664. Still my time of great distress and sore trials continues. Sometimes the Devil tempts me woefully hard and strange thoughts of my dear Lord which, through his mercy, I dread and abhor the assenting to, more than hell itself. She also recorded that the Devil had suggested to her that she must die and be with him.13 Baptist Sarah Davy, in her autobiographical account, Heaven Realised, described how her “distrustful heart” was “exercised with variety of temptations by the Devil as to distrust the goodness of the Lord”.14 The language Hannah Allen and Sarah Davy used to describe their emotional despair is not very different, as I will show, from the words attributed to the women of Suffolk in their witchcraft confessions.

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WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS What I would like to suggest, by looking closely at some of the material in the Suffolk cases, is that women’s insecurities as wives and mothers as well as traumas about experiences or events, were being played out through the framework of the witchcraft confession. Susanna Stegold of Hintlesham was found guilty of using witchcraft to kill her husband. One of the inquisitors, John Easte, read out her confession in court. She had, he said, confessed that the Devil had first come into her after her marriage and that she knew she had special powers because her greediest pig had died when she had wished it would stop eating. The marriage seems to have been an extremely unhappy one for Susanna; she may well have been beaten or ill treated. She had allegedly confessed that her husband was a ‘bad husband’ and Susanna clearly hated him. Indeed her strength of feeling was so intense that, when he died mad, she seems to have believed she had killed him through her own evil thoughts: Her husband being a bad husband she wished he might depart from her meaninge as she said that he shold die and presently after he died mad … she cryed out, oh! my deare husband, but being asked whither she bewitched him or noe and said she wished ill wishes to him and what so ever she wished came to pas. In common law a man was entitled to beat his wife (so long as it was not fatal) and a woman was supposed to accept it as her due –​only when a woman’s life was actually in danger could the ecclesiastical court intervene.15 Susanna’s husband had obviously made her suffer in some way but it is she who was racked with guilt. She knew that sickness which had no obvious natural explanation was attributed to the Devil. Hence the framework of belief about gender roles and about the association between witchcraft and illness caused her to feel his death might be her fault. She assumed she was a witch and went on to confess that she had three evil spirits or imps. For Susanna, belief in the Devil seems to have been a way of coping with guilt or hiding the emotional trauma. Susanna’s case is not the only one in which it appears that a victim of abuse may have taken on the language of demonology to explain her feelings or experience. Margaret Benet confessed that “the divell in the shape of a man … carried her body over a close into a thicket of bushes and there lay with her and after scratched her hand with the bushes”. Jana Linstead “met with the devill in the shape of a man who would have lyen with her but she denied him whereupon he threatened her but did her no hurt”. Widow Thomazine Ratcliffe

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confessed that a month after the death of her husband there came one to her in the shape of her husband and lay hevy upon her and she asked him if he wold kill her and he answered in the voice of her husband no I will be a loveing husband. Belief in the Devil could provide a framework to describe a situation in which a woman was frightened or felt threatened and which she was unable to articulate in any other way.With no other language available to describe or explain her feelings, belief in the Devil became the only answer. Nazife Bashar has shown that, while rape legislation existed in early modern England, prosecutions were very few.16 It is likely that in many instances, women did not possess the vocabulary to describe a bad experience such as rape. Furthermore, if these are cases of abuse it is very significant that the women should assume they themselves are actually guilty of witchcraft as a result of the experience. As victims they are seeing themselves at fault and blaming themselves for what has happened. I have chosen to examine next the cases of Susanna Smith and Prissilla Collit since they both contain references to infanticide, a crime which has recently been associated with post-​partum psychosis but which, in seventeenth-​century England, was seen as the work of the Devil. Again it was a subversion of the normal ‘motherly’ female role. Suicide, also referred to in these cases, was a great sin according to the church and canon law and was similarly the work of the Devil. Prissilla Collit of Dunage confessed, after she had been watched, that during a sickness some twelve years previously the Devil had tempted her to kill her children to escape poverty. She refused to make a covenant on this occasion but did place one of her children next to the fire to burn it. Fortunately another child pulled its sibling away from the fire: In a sickness about 12  years since the divell tempted [her] to make away with her children or else shold allways continue poore, and he then demanded a covenant of her which she did deny, but she carried one of her children and layed it close to the fyer to burn it, and went to bed again and the fier burnt the hare and the head lining and she heard it cry but cold not have the power to helpe it, but one other of her children pulled it away. Here the Devil is performing both a practical and psychological function. Firstly, for poor women like Prissilla, who had no economic resources or means of bettering their lives, a pact with the Devil could, they hoped, bring financial security. It was a common cultural belief that the Devil could bring his servants money and other

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rewards and could help them against their enemies. Indeed Prissilla confessed [that] the Devil promised her 10 shillings for sealing the covenant although she never received it. Other women, in their confessions, mention similar unfulfilled promises. Elizabeth Hobert, for example, covenanted with the Devil that, in return for her body and soul, she would be avenged of those who angered her and would be furnished with money; he never performed it, however. Women may well have ‘turned to witchcraft’, through conscious decision, as a solution to poverty and powerlessness. Some of them may even have been open about their activities as a way of achieving status in the village, status which for poor women was impossible to achieve in any other way. Marianne Hester, analysing the 1566 Chelmsford cases of Elizabeth Frauncis, Agnes and Joan Waterhouse, has suggested that all three women were using witchcraft as a “means of empowerment: to obtain a rich husband and various commodities, to get their own back on their husbands or neighbours or to kill their husband with whom they quarrelled”.17 In Prissilla Collit’s case the Devil came up with another practical suggestion –​ killing her children to escape poverty. The links between infanticide and poverty were strong throughout this period: Sharpe, in his study of Essex court cases, has shown that most women accused of infanticide were unmarried mothers, often domestic servants, who could not afford to bring up a child and were forced into the act out of desperation.18 Of course it is impossible to tell whether prosecutions reflected the actual incidence of the crime –​were single domestic servants simply more likely to be suspected than married women? However, although we cannot properly answer this question, it is undoubtedly true that infanticide was, for some women, a solution to poverty and desperation. In discussing infanticide and the Devil it is important to consider the psychological role of demonic intervention as an explanation of behaviour. Wrightson has shown that certain assumptions were generally made as to what ‘normal’ maternal feelings consisted of; he quotes the writer William Gouge who, in 1622, praised the “tender care” of the mother for the child, and argued that God had “so fast fixed love in the hearts of parents as if there be any who it aboundeth not, he is counteth unnatural”.19 Although the courts were just beginning to accept illness as mitigation for infanticide in the most exceptional cases, there was no discussion of what we would perhaps now term post-​natal depression or post-​partum psychosis. Unmarried servant girl Sinah Jones, tried at the Old Bailey in 1668, was sentenced to death for stifling her baby although she said “she knew nothing of the cloth in the mouth of the child, and that she had not her senses and was light-​headed”.20 Infanticide was considered a crime against God and nature; it was a deviant subversion of the role of the ‘godly’ mother and therefore likely to be associated with witchcraft. One has only to glance over the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum to

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find many references to witches cutting up and eating babies, inducing abortions, and cutting off male reproductive organs. Murder and harm to children is a common feature of many witch trials and the Suffolk material is no exception –​approximately 20% of the Suffolk ‘witches’ were accused of harming or killing children. It is interesting, however, that several of the Suffolk witches confessed to trying to kill their own children rather than someone else’s. Generally, as Thomas and Macfarlane have shown, the typical accused witch was the older woman in the village, usually a widow or spinster who lived on her own.21 However, in the Suffolk material some 24 of the women named as witches are either specifically referred to as uxor (meaning married woman) or wife, or mention is made of a husband. One woman, Elizabeth Deekes, is described as “a silly young woman”.22 We know that 10 of the women were widows, but in most cases marital status is not given. Although no ages are given, by no means all the women are post-​menopausal since mention is made of young offspring. It could well be that, as a result of the frenzied witch-​hunting activity generated through the involvement of Matthew Hopkins, the concept of who was a likely suspect expanded to encompass younger women. Hoffer and Hull have described the growth in persecutions for infanticide and witchcraft at this time as attempts to control deviant young women and deviant old women respectively.23 In Suffolk in 1645, however, it can be argued, the two crimes were no longer distinctive but were, rather, closely merged; younger women were accused of witchcraft and, furthermore, accused witches of different ages produced confessions of trying to kill their children at the suggestion of the Devil. Prissilla Collit had clearly been very ill when the Devil appeared to her suggesting she kill her children to escape poverty; she may well have been feverish and confused, light-​headed like Sinah Jones, or suffering from psychosis. Lyndal Roper has suggested that mothers who accused their lying-​in-​maids of bewitching their newborn children in Reformation Augsburg were projecting their own negative feelings towards their infants (perhaps a result of post-​partum psychosis) on to others.24 A similar process may have been taking place in Prissilla Collit’s case –​she, however, projected her ‘evil’ feelings against her children on to the Devil, leaving herself in a dangerously complicitous position. … In Prissilla’s case, the battle against what society told her were normal natural motherly feelings and her own ‘sinful’ impulses appears to be articulated in terms of God and the Devil. Speaking in terms of the Devil could be a way of trying to exonerate herself from personal blame although of course this backfired and resulted in a witchcraft accusation. Prissilla was not the only Suffolk woman who referred to infanticide in her confession. Mary Scrutton, a married woman, confessed that the “devill appeared

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to her twise, once like a beare, once like a cat, and that she tempted her in a hollow voyce to kill her child”. It is worth noting that this is the only reference I have come across to the Devil as a ‘she’ –​one can only presume the change of gender occurred because the cat was seen as female. Susanna Smith confessed to Robert Mayhew the day after her arrest that 18 years previously the Devil had appeared to her in the form of a shaggy red dog and tempted her to kill her children. We are told that “she strove with him 24 hours before he went from her but she would not kill them”. … The case of Susanna Smith is particularly interesting because the rest of the deposition is based on incidents which took place while she was in prison and therefore tells us much about the state of mind of an accused witch awaiting her fate. Although she began confessing, the questioning had to stop because her throat was so swollen she could not speak, possibly for medical reasons and possibly through trauma. The deposition says that “being desired to relate further of her witchcraft there rise two swellings in her throat so that she cold not speak”. When Mayhew returned the following day to complete the session Susanna told him the Devil had appeared to her the day before her arrest and told her to fast. She confessed that the divill … appeared to her in likenesse of a black bee and told her that she shold be attached [arrested] the next day and that if she confessed anything she shold die for it and beinge demanded why she wold eate nothinge there being good meate provided for her she said the divell told her she sholde never eat nor drink again but they then provided and brought her meate and with much trembling she got some downe. Susanna is now describing the traumas she is suffering as a result of imprisonment in terms of the Devil because that is the language she has been given. Mayhew has, presumably, been questioning her for two days about her involvement with the Devil and, in her disordered state, she turns to this frame of reference to describe her emotions. Susanna’s personal experience is being shaped and created in terms of demonological language right before our eyes. Susanna decides to refuse food, saying that the Devil has told her to do so. We can, if we choose, read her fast as a desire to withdraw into herself, to separate her inner self from her body; in a similar way the swelling in her throat cut off all communication with the outside world since she could not speak. In rejecting the food brought to her by her enemies the gaolers, Susanna was perhaps aiming to gain more control of her situation; the interrogator was in a clear position of dominance and she may have been trying to take back some of that power for herself.

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Susanna allegedly told her confessors on the next occasion that the Devil had given her a knife so she could kill herself: The divell had told her weare there was a rusty knife in the room wheare with she might kill herselfe and they looked in that place and found such an old knife as she described but she said that she cold not kill herselfe because they was … in the next room. Hatred of her bodily existence and desperate fear of what will happen to her combine to make Susanna contemplate suicide. This is a theme which crops up several times in the Suffolk material and the conceptualisation of suicide as the work of the Devil is very interesting, particularly because of the close similarities in language between the witchcraft confession and the religious testimonies provided by ‘the godly’ of the civil war churches (as quoted above). Lidea Taylor confessed “that her imps counseled her to steale and that they counseled her to kill herselfe”. Ellen Greenehif confessed that her “mother did send her 3 imps that after she had them she [was] oftene tempted to kill herselfe”. Elizabeth Fillet of Wetherden confessed that “the divell tempted her to kill herselfe to avoid the scandal of prosecution”. Suicidal tendencies, like those of infanticide, were conceptualised as an external force (the Devil), acting on or overriding a woman’s will. Suicide was seen as a sin by the church, preventing proper Christian burial on sacred ground, and was a crime according to the law of the land. Michael Dalton described it in 1626 as “an offence against God, against the king and against Nature” (like infanticide it was ‘unnatural’).25 Those who were alleged to have taken their own lives were tried posthumously by a coroner’s jury, and if found guilty of self-​murder (as it was usually known) had their goods confiscated and, as popular custom had it, were buried at a crossroads face-​down in the grave and with a stake driven through them to stop their malevolent souls from straying. In their search for personal or spiritual identity (both closely interconnected at this time) both the godly puritans of the civil war sects and the women who ended up in court as accused witches spoke of battles against the Devil. Both confession and testimony were personalised accounts of experience which followed a very standard stylised format.26 Both spoke of the influence of the Devil. It was a fine line between saint and witch. It was context which decided how the woman would be labelled –​as Hopkins very visibly and openly hunted through Suffolk, it is likely that more and more women began to question their own behaviour in terms of witchcraft. The witch-​hunts created the witch; the civil war churches created the mystic conversion of their members. …

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CONCLUSION While historians have, for the most part, concentrated on recreating the political and social agenda within which the witch-​hunts were set, it is also important to look at the impact this had on women’s lives –​particularly those women who were involved in the trials. A couple of recent studies have opened up the discussion on the role of women in the witch-​hunts –​Roper’s analysis of the motivations of mothers as accusers, and Holmes’s study of women witnesses.27 I have tried to add to this discussion by focusing on those women who were the direct targets of the persecution, and by showing that it is possible to carry out a productive examination of the different meanings of their alleged confessions despite the complicated problems surrounding the use of such a source. I  have tried to listen for their voices, however faint. The standard formula of the witchcraft confession provided a set framework of meanings within which the accused witch presented and thereby defined her own experiences. It is important to stress that it has not been my intention to put clear labels on these experiences. Confession texts, as I hope I have demonstrated through my study of the Suffolk material, can be ‘read’ in a number of ways. However, it is possible to use these texts to open different windows on to the lives of the women who said they were witches. Firstly, we can see that emotional responses to events and concerns were being articulated through the medium of the witchcraft confession; demonological language and the conventions of witchcraft belief were used to cover or explain personal traumas, insecurities or dilemmas. The references to sexual assault and abuse are veiled but present; those to suicide, and ‘bad’ husbands much easier to find. Secondly, it is clear that the witchcraft confession was intricately connected with self-​identity; it specifically required a woman to judge herself and her behaviour within the constraints of demonological language. For a few women self-​ definition as a witch could be a form of empowerment. For others, however, who refer to feelings of guilt, remorse and shame, it was very much a negative construct. Margaret Legat allegedly told an informant she was “a damned creature”; and Elisabeth Warne “confessed that pride and lustfulnes had brought her to this and desired she might be walked apace for she had the devill within her”. I have shown how the image or stereotype of the witch had been defined as the opposite of the good or godly woman (particularly in her roles as wife and mother). The Suffolk cases contain many references to nagging wives or lewd women, infanticide and child care. These cases clearly show that the accused women, in their confessions, were judging themselves as wives and mothers –​they

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were judging their anger, their bitterness, their fears and their failures to live up to the expectation of others. These conclusions also provide us with an answer to Christina Hole’s problem of “the voluntary confession”.28 The Suffolk women who confessed that they were witches were also confessing that they were ‘bad’ mothers, ‘bad’ wives and ‘bad’ neighbours. The cultural, social and psychological impact of the county-​wide witch-​hunt cannot be overestimated –​the knowledge that ‘witches’ existed and were rife at home and abroad may well have caused every woman to examine her life very closely, and some to come forward and confess. Women’s insecurities about their roles as wives and mothers were being played out within the context of the witchcraft confession.

Notes C. L. Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (Kegan Paul, London 1929), 305. British Museum Add. MS. 27402, folios 104–​121; Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, Appendix VI, 291–​313. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this essay are from this source. 3 C. L. Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (Heath, London 1933), 302. 4 John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of  Witchcraft (William Wilson, London 1648). 5 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 302. 6 It is not possible to attribute sex in cases where surname only is given. The 80 per cent represents those accused known to be women. 7 Christina Hole, A Mirror of Witchcraft (Chatto & Windus, London 1957), 182. 8 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (Dover Publications, New York 1972), 33. 9 See Chapter 11 of this book for Margaret Murray’s discredited witch cult –​ Ed. 10 For example, Margaret Benet confessed that “the devil met her as she came from Newton” and Margaret Spara confessed that she met the devil in the wood at Mendam. Katherine Tooley sent her imp Jackly to meet the minister on the road from Celsol to Westleton to strike him and his horse dead. 11 See S.  Amussen, “Gender, Family and Social Order 1560–​1725”, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985). 12 Anne Laurence, “Women’s Psychological Disorders in Seventeenth-​ Century Britain”, in A.  Angerman, G.  Binnema, A.  Keunen, V.  Poels and J.  Zirkzee, eds, Current Issues in Women’s History (Routledge, London 1989). 13 Hannah Allen, Satan his Methods and Malice Baffled (1683), extracts printed in E. Graham, H. Hinds, E. Hobby and H. Wilcox, eds, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth Century Women (Routledge, London 1989), 202–​4. 14 Sarah Davy, Heaven Realised (1670), extracts printed in Graham et  al., Her Own Life. 1 2

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15 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570–​ 1640 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987). 16 Nazife Bashar, “Rape in England between 1500 and 1700”, in London Feminist History Group, eds, The Sexual Dynamics of History:  Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (Pluto Press, London 1983). 17 Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches (Routledge, London 1992), 163. 18 J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983), 6. 19 Quoted in K.  Wrightson, “Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth Century England”, Local Population Studies, 15 (1975), 11. 20 Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1968), 126. 21 Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1972), 161; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1971), 671. 22 Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, 12. 23 P. C. Hoffer and N.  E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–​1803 (New York University Press, New York 1981), 28. 24 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and the Devil in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, London 1994), ch. 9. 25 Quoted in M. Macdonald, “The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660–​1800”, Past and Present, 111 (1986), 253. 26 See Graham et al., Her Own Life, 165, for a discussion of the structure of the conversion narrative. A woman would be required to examine her experiences, looking for “signs that God had destined her for heaven and to draw out broader theological lessons from things that happened to her”. 27 For the study by Clive Holmes, see Chapter 30 in this volume –​Ed. For Roper’s analysis of the motives of mothers making witchcraft allegations, see her Oedipus and the Devil, ch. 9. 28 Hole, A Mirror of Witchcraft, 182.

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Chapter 34

Lyndal Roper OEDIPUS AND THE DEVIL

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H E W I T C H C R A F T C O N F E S S I O N O F Regina Bartholome in 1670 is a powerful example of how early modern women could construct fantasies involving the Devil. In this chapter Lyndal Roper attempts to explain this fantasy with reference to the documented facts of Bartholome’s life. She also suggests that the themes of her confession –​in which the Devil usurped the role of her father and lover –​provoked the desire of her prosecutors to restore patriarchal authority. Thus the story illustrates, in miniature, the psychology of male dominance that underpinned the prosecution of witches. In her reading of Bartholome’s confession, Roper borrows from psychoanalysis the idea that subconscious sexual desires can be expressed in fantasy. In this respect her work makes an interesting contrast to Virginia Krause’s more sceptical view of the subconscious mind in Chapter 32.

In 1670, Regina Bartholome confessed that she had lived with the Devil as man and wife. Aged 21 when she was interrogated by the Augsburg Council, she had met the Devil five years before. She recalled that the Devil was clad in silken hose with boots and spurs and that he looked like a nobleman.They enjoyed trysts twice weekly at a tavern-​bakery in Pfersee, a nearby village where Jews lived. The Devil ordered lung sausage, roast pork and beer for her and the two ate with relish alone in the inn parlour. He promised her money, but she had received barely 6 Kreuzer

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from him, and even that had turned out to be bad coin. In return for this meagre reward, Regina had signed a pact with the Devil for the term of seven years. She had forsworn God and the Trinity, and she had taken the Devil –​her lover –​as her father in God’s stead. This story, dramatic in its simplicity, begins to make more sense when related to the life story which she also provided. Regina’s father, a poor man, worked for the council as a day-​labourer. Around the time Regina first encountered the Devil, and having just reached puberty, she had embarked on her first sexual liaison with a man some years her senior, Michael Reidler, who worked as a prison overseer. At about the same period, her mother had initiated an adulterous affair with a young man, Regina’s cousin, who boarded in the house. Mother and cousin had also travelled to the village of Pfersee, where her mother pawned the occasional item with the Jews. Regina’s mother’s affair ended in disaster: Regina’s mother was publicly exhibited in the stocks and humiliated, she was banished forever from the city and her young lover fled the town and died ‘of drink’ not many years after. Regina, left alone with her father, cooked and kept house for him: ‘when he came home from his hard work there was no one else who could cook him something warm so that he could restore himself’, as her father put it in a petition to the council on her behalf. So far as practical matters were concerned, Regina had taken her mother’s place.1 Bartholome took in another lodger, this time a young man named Jacob Schwenreiter who was engaged to be married and who worked, like him, as a day-​labourer: the two men, Schwenreiter and Bartholome, shared the marital bed. Regina, now parted from her first lover, fell passionately in love with this new male presence, bringing him brandy, bread, cheese, soups and sitting on his bed. She told him she knew a ruse to get money from the Jews at Pfersee, and promised him a share in the proceeds. But her feelings were not returned. Schwenreiter soon brought his bride to the house, fondling her for hours, so Regina believed. Meanwhile, Regina’s plot to swindle the Jew[s]‌at Pfersee and thereby win the young man’s affections had misfired:  she had accused a Jew of having sex with her (a relationship which would have offended against the taboo on intercourse between Jews and Christians) but her target was a man of unimpeachable character and her accusations failed to stick. She was lucky to escape with a mere censure and brief imprisonment for perjury. She lost her young man Schwenreiter forever when he married, and about this time, so Regina claimed, another young man, a furrier, sought to gain her affections by plying her with a love potion. The ensuing quarrels in the Bartholomes’ house finally brought the whole household, including the newly-​weds, before the council’s disciplinary officer, the mayoralty. Once there, Regina’s publicly-​uttered threat to kill the new bride was

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enough to guarantee her incarceration, and thus began the process of criminal interrogation which was to lead both to her confessions of involvement with the Devil and the revelation of her own history which I have provided here in brief. …

I Regina Bartholome was not generally reputed to be a witch. No one accused her of witchcraft, although people concurred that she was ‘strange’. The history of witchcraft has often taken women to be victims, scapegoats for the anxieties of a society. Yet one of the troubling features of a case such as this is the witch’s own self-​destructive capacity. Regina precipitated her own imprisonment. She first embarked on the highly risky strategy of accusing a Jew of having an adulterous relationship with her, an imputation which she could not prove, and which threatened her own reputation as it undermined his. It also embroiled her in a dangerous criminal investigation from which she was lucky to escape with a short term of imprisonment. Her history is littered with false accusations. She accused the young bride of Jacob Schwenreiter (the young man who was the object of her affections) of stealing something from her –​as indeed she had; but it was her bridegroom, not her ‘tin pan, bedstead and half a measure of corn’ that she had stolen. When Regina cited her before the authorities and then, in the chancellery itself, threatened to kill her, she secured her own imprisonment. The momentum of Regina’s trial derived in part from her own drive to accuse herself, to punish herself and to uncover the truth of a crime she felt herself to have committed. Under interrogation the witch faced two council representatives and ultimately the torturer, who would be her executioner. It is easy to see their exercise of power over their victim: they stood for the power of the council, and they were armed with the instruments of torture. It is less easy, and less comforting for the historian, to see the witch’s own manipulation, however unsuccessful, of the situation or to discern the ways in which the sadism of the questioning process may have gratified the needs of the witch. … A witch fantasy had to persuade its hearers of its truth. Indeed, the interrogation was a lengthy process because the authorities had constantly to assure themselves of the witch’s veracity, summoning witnesses to confirm details and checking punctiliously for inconsistencies in her account. The fantasy had to be created by an individual witch out of the elements of fantasy available to her, from what her culture knew of the Devil and his ways, and what she selected had a logic. In Regina Bartholome’s account, there was no clutter of diabolic characters to distract from the central focus of the tale, the relationship between Regina and the

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Devil. There were no sister witches, no accomplices, no apprentice witches whom Regina had seduced, no nocturnal gatherings. Instead, this pared-​down form of testimony allowed the themes of her own psychology to emerge more clearly.

II How did the witch fantasy emerge? The summary of Regina Bartholome’s relations with the Devil with which I began was not a free initial admission. It emerged, with considerable resistance, over the course of eight sessions of interrogation both with and without torture and its threat. During these she provided four different accounts of her relations with the Devil, each time moving the moment of her initial encounter with him further back into the past, and each time attaching the moment of his initial appearance to a different love relationship in her own short life. First she told how the Devil appeared after she was given a love potion by the young furrier who she believed was trying to force her into marriage. This was an extraordinary, voluntary admission, not a response to a question. It was Regina herself who brought the Devil into the story, explaining how he had visited her in her cell when she had first been imprisoned by the council: diabolic interpretation was not the consequence of the council’s own determination to construct her story in this way. Once introduced, however, the Devil’s role became a joint concern as her interrogators sought to make sense of her behaviour. Regina’s first account soon gave way to the story that the Devil had appeared to her some months earlier, when she was involved in bringing the accusations against the Jew of Pfersee, at the time when she was hoping to persuade the young day-​labourer Jacob Schwenreiter to be her lover. In a later interrogation, Regina confessed she had known the Devil long before, and dated the time of her diabolic seduction to the period when her mother began the adulterous affair which was to end in her banishment. And finally, in a last burst of revenge, she made this period more precise, associating it with her very first affair with Michael Reidler, the prison overseer. Why was he not punished as she had been, she demanded? This man, her first seducer, ‘may well have been the Devil himself’. As Regina well knew, this was an accusation which, if the council had believed her, would surely have led to his being incarcerated and tortured just as she was. Each new version of the story elicited in response to the council’s questions thus progressively traced back the moment of her own departure from the Christian community to a prior period in Regina’s own psychological history, stopping only when she reached puberty. … Along the way, Regina introduces

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us to the characters who populated her own life history. But there is something odd about this seemingly real ‘life’. All the stories, apart from the first love potion story, reveal the same theme of love and rejection. Even the first story is an inversion of this pattern, for this time it is Regina who plays the part of the rejecter, a role which, we might observe, she is also attempting to play (by means of the interrogation) in relation to the Devil, freeing herself from his power and attempting to rejoin the Christian community. And we might notice that the retelling of her stories in interrogation allows Regina to take revenge, to retaliate against those who rejected her, a dynamic which reaches its culmination in her accusation that her first seducer was the Devil himself. Here we might make use of Joyce McDougall’s helpful image of the ‘theatres of the mind’, which she employs to describe the use individuals make of other people to play the split parts of the person’s own inner world, so that it is the individual’s inner conflicts which are projected into fantasy and acted out in relations with others. Because these conflicts are intolerable and unresolved, they are constantly repeated and re-​enacted.2 Interrogation for witchcraft, we might say, conferred [on] the accused a theatrical opportunity to recount and restage these linked conflicts and what better audience than the rapt ears of the council’s representatives and the executioner? But what are the themes of these dramas? The images which Regina chose and the narratives which she offered are littered with Oedipal themes. At its most basic, the logic of her account apparently suggests that she felt herself to have succeeded in gaining her father’s love and stealing her mother’s position by cooking and keeping house for her father. It was as if, by a terrible retribution of fantasy, her forbidden Oedipal desires seemed to have been fulfilled. No wonder she felt herself to be worthy of punishment. It is important, here, to note that these transactions occurred at the level of fantasy: there is no evidence that we are dealing with a case of incest, an observation which does not, however, diminish the importance of the theme. Oedipal themes also recurred in the relations she recounted with others. Her first lover appeared just as her mother took a new lover, deserting her father. Regina herself was aged only 12 at the time. This was in seventeenth-​century eyes a precocious sexual affair with a man her social superior, senior to her in age. Ominously enough, Reidler seems to have worked as a prison overseer. If her first lover evinced some paternal characteristics, older than she, and a Landsmann of her father’s, the second man with whom she fell in love, Jacob Schwenreiter, was yet more closely associated with her actual father. He shared not only her father’s trade but even his bed. His inaccessibility and the cruel manner in which he flaunted his new wife only served to underline Regina’s failure to establish an independent love-​relationship: indeed, he allowed her to repeat the

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Oedipal drama, this time against a mother-​figure who refused to be dislodged. And when Regina attempted to blackmail the Jew at Pfersee for engaging in sexual relations with her, her revenge displayed a similar retaliatory logic. He, too, was an older, married man. She had pawned goods with him just as her mother had pawned goods with the Jews at Pfersee, yet he had given her neither more money nor had he returned her goods. He had right and the law on his side: her revenge therefore had to take the form of an extreme and dishonest assault on his sexual reputation. In the kind of symbolic repetition that typifies Regina’s story, she accused him of breaking a taboo akin to the taboo on incest, the taboo on sexual relations between Jew and Christian. Pfersee was, of course, the setting for the idyll between her mother and her nephew. And in a ‘return to the scene of the crime’ so characteristic of Regina’s interrogations at every turn, it transpired in the end that Pfersee was the locale of her own seduction by the Devil. In the very same tavern, she finally claimed, the Devil and she regularly stole away to a side room where she did his will, a scenario, incidentally, which neither the bemused keeper of the inn, his wife nor his servant could bring themselves to substantiate. There is no mileage, I  think, in the usual historical strategy of teasing out the ‘real’ from the fantastic elements in this account. We cannot isolate the point at which events which we know to be ‘real’, her mother’s affair, her relationship with the prison overseer, end, and where the fantastic begins. Indeed, discarding the fantastic would be an inappropriate strategy because what is important are the elements which Regina chose to make sense of her life. … It is important first to uncover the psychic logic of her tale, a story which interweaves diabolic with sexual themes, before we can guess at its meaning. So far, the patterns I have described are rather like the patterns which might be expected to be evoked by a kind of free association. But interrogations were not conducted as analytic discussions. The threat of torture, even when it was neither threatened nor carried out, was implicit in the interrogation and when there were specific points on which the council was not content with its subject’s answers it would, after consultation, authorize the exhibition and then use of the instruments of torture. In Regina’s case, actual torture was resorted to only once, after the sixth interrogation, when she was suspended from the rack with empty weights for two sessions. The application of torture, however comparatively mild in this case, does not in itself explain what the witch confessed, why she provided the particular narrative she did or how she persuaded the council of its truth: the council knew that pain sometimes led people to false confessions. And there is another salient feature of difference in seventeenth-​century witch narratives: the role of the Devil. To us, the fantasies which surround him seem clearly part of the realm of the imaginary, more definitively unreal than

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the material I have been describing. But to them he was part of the real world. In talking about the Devil, therefore, Regina was not engaged in an activity different in kind from the rest of the confession she gave. This observation is helpful in considering how we ought to interpret diabolic material. Diabolic fantasy as it appears in interrogation is not, I would argue, to be equated with some kind of hallucinatory activity or treated as any more part of the world of the imagination than the rest of her confession. Instead, I think it should be interpreted as part of the whole narrative that the witch offered. In the figure of the Devil, the witch had available to her a character who could dramatize psychic conflicts with extraordinary clarity. There were good reasons why, in seventeenth-​century Germany, confessing oneself to be a witch might involve supplying both a life history and a story about the Devil. The Devil whom witches encountered was not an abstract force or a symbolic figure of evil. Though he appeared in different guises he was, first and foremost, on each occasion a character with whom one had a relationship. Regina, for instance, discovered he shared her taste for lung sausage and beer. His dashing clothes placed him as a nobleman in contrast to her drab workaday world. His appearance, his gestures and his attire always had to be specifically described by the witch, even while she drew from a possible repertoire of familiar elements with which to describe him. Becoming a witch meant engaging in an intimate relationship, usually sexual, with the Devil as a character, and consequently, its discovery entailed the analysis of the wellsprings of the witch’s own personality, motives and emotions. Interrogation therefore aimed at the construction of an account of the individual’s own history and his or her relations with others which could explain how someone could come to sever human attachments, choosing instead to cleave to the Devil in a kind of perversion of the soul. The diabolic elements of Regina’s interrogation thus echoed the themes of the life history with precision. As the formula of renunciation of Christ which Regina provided had it, she had forsworn God and taken the Devil as her father. He, too, was her lover. She even imagined the possibility of giving him children: whether these were sired by him or by her other lovers, the Devil had told her she must surrender them to him. In this way, we might say, the story of the Devil allowed her to develop the Oedipal narrative yet further so that she might in imagination provide her father with the phallic compensation of children; but so powerful and persecuting was this father-​figure that she was not even to be allowed to keep these children. Of course no seventeenth-​century court would have interpreted her story in this way. But her seventeenth-​century hearers would have invested the diabolic narrative with a similar epistemological importance. For them, the diabolic narrative helped explain the life history, and the life history, the relationship

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with the Devil. It was because Regina listened to the Devil that she had acted as she had; it was because she wanted money and because she was lascivious that the Devil was able to seduce her.

III The Oedipal elements were not, however, restricted to the motifs of the narrative Regina provided. Her narrative was the product of a conversation. If we look at the interaction in the interrogation, we notice that much of it dramatizes relations between fathers and daughters. Regina began her interrogation by appealing to her interrogators to be allowed ‘to return to her father’, and throughout the course of the interrogation, she made this appeal again and again. … Claiming to love her father and desiring to return to him, her pleas implicitly contrast him with the powerful, cruel council and show the council to be another powerful father-​ figure:  ‘She begs that my lords should behave to her as fathers, and should not drive her out of her fatherland’. Repeatedly she rails against the council, castigating it for its lack of mercy, crying that ‘she could not sense that there was a gracious authority here, because they were trying to drive her out into misery’. Here she is rejecting the council’s own claim to be a benevolent paternal authority, the vision of itself which it so tirelessly repeated in its steady stream of ordinances and public pronouncements. Behind the council, sanctifying its power, loomed another paternal authority: God. For Regina, he, too, was a father who failed her, and in his stead she said she had adopted the Devil as her father. As she put it in her rendition of her blasphemy against God, she admitted that ‘she said because God was no longer her father, she would take the Devil as her father, he should be her father’. Regina’s rage against paternal figures is uncontainable: against the council, whom she blames for her mother’s exile, against God, who will not hear her. Her anger is expressed in her constant threats of suicide, the blame for which she lays at the council’s door: ‘if my lords were to shame her and to banish her then she would throw herself in the water. They had sent her mother away in the same way, let it rest on their consciences’. ‘My lords should not drive her out into misery, for otherwise she would drown herself or hang herself, and then my lords would he responsible’. Seventeenth-​century people, who viewed suicide as a crime and a sin, had perhaps a livelier awareness than we do of the aggressive logic of killing oneself.3 This rage is also expressed through the vehicle of a fear of public mockery. Public humiliation, her mother’s fate, was the outcome she claims constantly to fear; and yet her own behaviour precipitated her

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interrogation and ultimately the most lurid, public form of shaming imaginable, a public account of her sexual exploits with the Devil, read out for all to hear at the moment of her execution. It is evident that Regina’s world is populated with good and bad fathers. We might say, following Melanie Klein, that by splitting her mental universe up into ‘good’ fathers, who offered protection and love, and ‘bad’ fathers, who did not care for her, Regina was able to contain a ‘good’ image of her own father while projecting the ‘bad’ father on to other figures.4 This was an assignment of values which was highly unstable: the Devil, the ‘good’ father who offered her sausage, money and love, proved unreliable and maltreated her, giving her false coin, failing to prevent her imprisonment and beating her in her cell. The cost of Regina’s perverse reassignment of moral values was immense. Her pact with the Devil excluded her from Christian society, and made her unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer. It left her suffering from a rage and anger against others which made it impossible for her to live peaceably with her neighbours. Paradoxically, the interrogation thus offered her the chance of reconciliation and reintegration with the community of Christians in the town, with the council, in acceptance of its just power and in submission to its decrees about her faith in God, in conversion before her execution. By the fourth interrogation, after about six weeks of being unable to recite an Our Father, she found she was once more able to pray. … Until the sixth interrogation, Regina had not confessed to any acts of malefice and her crime had concerned her pact with the Devil, not any use of sorcery to harm man, woman or beast. But now she confessed to attempting to set two houses on fire, to having attempted to poison the bride of the young man with whom she was in love, to having ‘ridden the beasts’ naked at Goggingen, causing them to sicken, and to having tried to commit parricide, a transgression against natural affection and social order. Witnesses were called to cross-​check these latest admissions. The supposed victims of arson rejected all talk of sorcery out of hand; the shepherds at Goggingen could find nothing amiss with their herds. The young bride had noticed no ill effects but did express fear of Regina. But when Regina’s father, Hans Bartholome, was interrogated, he faltered. He explained that he had no idea that his daughter had attempted such a thing. Seeking to defend himself from the imputation of fatherly irresponsibility, he stated that He could not say that on a single day of his life he had ever sensed that the Evil One came to her, as he only now heard, she was supposed to have had dealings with him [the evil one] at Pfersensteg.

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He explained that his daughter had been ‘aggressive in the head’ since her youth, but was not able to supply a forthright denial of the possibility that his daughter was a witch, or even to deny that she might have felt hatred for him. Regina ended her final confession beseeching the council to let her return to her father: tragically, he was in the end unable to protect his daughter. Like his wife before her, he was compelled to deliver Regina to the council’s justice.

IV To this point, we have explored the dynamic of Regina Bartholome’s confession. But why should the council have believed that she was a witch? The answer to this question is not as straightforward as one might expect. For the council did have available to it an alternative explanation of Regina’s behaviour: namely, that she was of unsound mind. Indeed, when she was at first tried for her accusation against the Jew of Pfersee, the council agreed with the assessment of her neighbours that she was simply ‘a bit touched’, and sent her on her way recommending that good care be taken of her. In the second trial, the council took care to have its own medical experts examine Regina to see whether she was mentally imbalanced: they determined that she was of sound mind and that her melancholic tendencies were to be explained, as she herself did, by the conditions of her incarceration. Just twenty years later, two other supposed witches’ lurid confessions of involvement with the Devil did not faze the council: in each case, it concurred with its own medical advisers that the woman was suffering from melancholy, and freed her.5 And about the time that Regina met with execution for her whoredom with the Devil, Regina Schiller was failing to convince authorities in Augsburg and all over southern Germany that she was indeed, as she claimed, bound to the Devil by a diabolic pact written in blood. Regina Schiller’s diabolic confessions were more elaborate and more riveting than those of Regina Bartholome:  she could even produce the scrap of paper on which she had signed her baptismal birthright away in blood. Why then did the council suddenly change its mind about Regina Bartholome and embark on a trial for witchcraft? These disquiets led me back to the role of the interrogators: of the council, who formulated the questions and who voted on guilt; of the questioners, the council’s representatives who interrogated Regina over eight sessions and who coaxed her answers from her; and the executioner. Their role as questioners was to tie in the threads of Regina’s narratives, discarding what they took to be false or irrelevant. Their questions supplied a logic of motive for her admissions: Why did she make a pact with the Devil? To whom did she feel hatred and envy? What

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had the Devil whispered to her? Some motives they held to be not further analysable, and greed was foremost among these: when Regina several times claimed she summoned the Devil ‘for the sake of filthy money’ they adopted this as a primary explanation of her sin in the final condemnation. Similarly, they elicited material about paternal relations and not about maternal ones because women’s relations with men fitted their own explanatory paradigm of witchcraft, women’s seduction by the Devil. Of course, we face particular difficulties here because we are dealing with a collective character, the council, not with a discrete individual. It is hard, moreover, to do more than guess at the psychic investments which underlay their interest. Of necessity our information must be indirect, derived from the question structure itself, its turns of phrase and its dynamic: interrogators put questions, and are not subject to them. Nonetheless, asking questions is never an innocent activity, and questions shape narratives. That the councillors were able to elicit this material seems likely to have been in part because of their own unconscious investments in the elements of her tale. Regina posed no real threat to the power of the council, but her extreme behaviour gave voice to an insubordination towards authority, secular and divine, which her audience of councillors found at once appalling and compelling. At her very first interrogation in the second trial her questioners demanded to know ‘whether she did not have to realize and admit how kind the authority had been in punishing her so graciously’, proceeding to ask her how she dared to claim the council was acting unjustly; in the fifth interrogation they again asked, as Regina repeated her complaints, ‘what she had to complain about, that one treated her too severely, since she had well deserved this many times before’; and in the sixth interrogation they once more asked her why she had said in the previous questioning session that she had an ungracious government, trying, with the following question, to bring her to confess that they were generous rulers. In part for this reason, the question script compiled on behalf of the council focused at first upon the pact Regina made with the Devil. It was not only that belief in the pact characterized elite beliefs in witchcraft, though this was clearly important as the council strove to make sense of the confrontation of its own demonological beliefs with the plethora of fantastical empirical evidence which Regina supplied. The pact was so significant because it gave documentary form to the transgression the council perceived to lie at the root of witchcraft: the rejection of the good, just and paternal authority and its replacement with its inverse, the Devil. … Witchcraft exposed the yawning possibility that an individual might attack paternal authority and, with it, society, the community of Christians which the city constituted. But it also made evident the fact that reintegration into the community was sanctioned, in the last analysis, by force:  it secured Regina’s

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acceptance of its ‘gracious’ authority by the relentless questioning and threats of torture of which she complained. This violence at the heart of the benign paternal relations of authority offered an arresting allegory of the psychic dimensions of the councillors’ own power as fathers. Witchcraft interrogations involve two parties, the witch and her interrogators. Both are required for the production of fantasy. It was her interrogator’s relentless questioning and ruthless eye for detail which encouraged the fantasy from the witch, and supplied the connections to motive and guilt. Both had psychic investments in its content. At times, as the process of interrogation continued, the collaborative drive between witch and interrogator could become so intense that the questioners elaborated on the script of questions they had been given: it was her interrogators who suggested to Regina that she must have lived with the Devil as man and wife, a formulation which made deep psychological sense, and which she was willing to adopt as a description of her own behaviour.6

V Historians have long puzzled why so many more women than men were the targets of witchcraft accusations. I have argued elsewhere that the prevalence of women among witches cannot be explained in terms of the sociological characteristics of women as a group:  only a tiny proportion of women were interrogated for witchcraft, and they were often accused by members of their own sex.7 But it can, I think, be related to dilemmas surrounding the psychic identity of womanhood. Elements in the interaction between the witch and her persecutors allowed the fantasy of witchcraft to unfold. The psychic conflicts attendant on the feminine position, whether Oedipal or related to motherhood, provided the substance of the psychic drama of the witchcraft interrogation, and supplied the material on which their interrogators could work in fascinated horror, developing in turn their own fantasies about femininity, about fatherhood and about diabolic activity. Most women, of course, managed the psychic conflicts of femininity without falling prey to morbid diabolic temptation. Not every case of witchcraft furnished interrogations displaying an emotional engagement with the Devil, nor did all witches produce witch fantasies. But in those few cases of women witches who did, the possibilities present in a culture obsessed with the power of the Devil, of fathers and of women, enabled a combustion of interests to occur, flaring up into interrogations under torture and the production of those sadistic, masochistic stories which so whetted their contemporaries’ appetite for tales of the relation between women and the Devil.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

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For full citations of the German sources for this essay, see the original version in Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London 1994), ch. 10 –​ Ed. Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage (New York 1985). See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam. Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge 1981), 132ff. 45 See Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–​ (London 1988). In October 1696 Anna Bohm was found to be not integra mentis, although she did evince all sorts of evil. In July 1699 Anna Scheifelhut was found to be suffering from melancholica and her tendency to curse and blaspheme was held to be aggravated by loneliness. Her relatives were admonished not to leave her alone. We seem here to have practical examples of the way in which the currency of the views of witch sceptics like Johann Weyer or Reginald Scot that witch fantasies might be the melancholy productions of old women could co-​exist with the belief that there were nonetheless real witches. See Louise Jackson’s contribution to this book (33) for examples of a similar process in seventeenth-​century England –​  Ed. See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford 1997), ch. 8; and Robin Briggs, “Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community”, French History, 5 (1991), 438–​50.

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PART NINE

The decline of witchcraft

F

O R M O S T M O D E R N W E S T E R N E R S , scepticism about witchcraft is primarily a matter of belief. The crimes once attributed to witches now seem simply incredible. Most importantly, the core assumption that underpinned early modern witch trials is no longer accepted: very few people believe in harmful magic, and those who do are unlikely to be taken seriously by the rest of their community. In 1984, Christina Larner spelt out the implications of this pervasive incredulity: If ten covens were to … inform me that my name was being pronounced backwards while they danced widdershins around a casket containing a milk tooth from my younger son, a hair from the underbelly of my cat, and sealing wax from my desk, I would not be unduly dismayed; nor would I  be in any way remarkable for not being dismayed. The social backing essential to the effective performance of maleficium simply is not there.1

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that historians have often argued that the rise of disbelief in witchcraft led to the end of prosecutions for the crime. Scholars in this tradition have pointed to the emergence of the “mechanical philosophy” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries:  this philosophy attributed all earthly phenomena to natural laws, leaving no room for magic or the

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intervention of demons. As Brian P. Levack points out, however, the spread of these ideas in educated circles occurred several decades after witch trials had ceased in much of Western Europe (35). While the acceptance of a “clockwork universe” made it impossible for official prosecutions to resume, it does not appear to have been responsible for their decline. For Levack, it was not disbelief in maleficium that caused the trials to end, but the spread of a new brand of “judicial scepticism”. This new approach did not involve the rejection of witchcraft per se; indeed, it was often combined with “a firm belief in the reality and possibility of the crime”. But new standards of procedure and evidence made it increasingly hard to obtain guilty verdicts, and eventually discouraged further trials. The torture of suspects was restricted in many jurisdictions, and the authority of central courts was imposed more effectively to prevent forced confessions; at the same time, judges demanded stronger evidence to support allegations of maleficium –​and this was hard to provide in what remained an “invisible crime”. Ultimately, the new standards represented the triumph of the cautious approach towards witchcraft advocated by early critics of the trials such as Johann Weyer (Slattery, 26). Alongside these legal developments, Levack suggests that the emergence of religious toleration in some states in the second half of the seventeenth century created a climate less conducive to witch trials. Here he echoes the analysis of Stuart Clark (16), who notes that prosecutions declined with “the coming of a religious pluralism that permitted the members of all types of churches to coexist and spelt the end of the confessional state”. This development, as well as the others that Levack describes, went hand in hand with the growth of stable central governments.2 It was a characteristic of such institutions to discourage internal religious conflicts, and this impulse could sometimes lead indirectly to the end of witch trials. This appears to have happened in England in the early seventeenth century, when witchcraft became entangled with the politically contentious subject of demonic possession. Following the trial of the puritan exorcist John Darrel in 1599, and the ensuing pamphlet war that identified Protestant nonconformity with belief in possession, the Church of England effectively banned the practice of exorcism.3 This also undermined the idea of witchcraft, since possession was a common form of maleficium. In Chapter 36 Marion Gibson shows how the controversy about possession discouraged the publication of witchcraft pamphlets, as the subject was tainted with official disapproval. She suspects that this explains the low level of witch prosecutions in the decades before the civil war, since witchcraft no longer enjoyed the “oxygen of publicity”. The discussion thus far has focused on the beliefs and actions of political elites, whose changing attitude towards witchcraft is traditionally cited as the

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major cause of the decline in prosecutions. In some cases, however, popular opinion could bring witch-​hunts to an end; and when trials were driven primarily by fears of maleficium, the alleviation of these fears could cause them to cease. Wolfgang Behringer suggests in Chapter 10 that the worst period of witch panics in Germany coincided with Europe’s “Little Ice Age”, and came to an end when weather patterns returned to normal. But while such factors probably reduced the number of witch trials, it remains likely that the attitude of elite groups was more significant in bringing them to an end: the formal prosecution of witches depended on the support of the judiciary, and the withdrawal of this support made trials virtually impossible. There is, moreover, much evidence that witch beliefs survived in the general population long after they were abandoned in some educated circles, and were eventually undermined by rather different factors. In Chapter 37 Owen Davies investigates the impact of urbanisation on the long-​term decline of popular witch beliefs in England. He argues that the urban environment per se was not responsible for ending allegations of maleficium:  indeed, such allegations were quite common in the London borough of Shoreditch until the early eighteenth century. A more important factor was the rapid turnover of population in some urban areas, as this disrupted the kind of neighbourhood relationships that were essential for witch beliefs to flourish. Davies notes that “the reputation of a witch was usually generated and sustained through the long-​term accumulation of supposed maleficent acts, held in the collective memory of the community”; and such reputations were hard to maintain in a largely transient population. The effects of urban mobility did not undermine all occult beliefs, however: practices such as fortune-​ telling and the magical detection of thieves proved to be more enduring than the accusation of witches, since they did not depend on a stable social environment. Even some remedies against witchcraft remained widespread in London until the nineteenth century, as long as they did not involve a face-​to-​face confrontation with the alleged witch. Thus it was common to hang horseshoes on doors as a protection against maleficium until the 1830s. Davies’ work points to the persistence of witch beliefs well into the modern age, and implies that they may have continued in more personal forms in small communities that were less affected by social mobility. In the last chapter in Part Nine, Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofsra charts the survival and gradual disappearance of such beliefs across Western Europe (38). She shows that the range of misfortunes attributed to maleficium has tended to narrow over time, from disasters that affected whole communities to the much smaller realm of personal illness. In this limited context, the concept continued to function as a means of explaining and countering affliction. Gijswijt-​Hofsra notes that the survival of witch beliefs was bound up with much broader cultural trends –​notably the process of secularisation

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and the rise of effective medicine; but the belief in maleficium could co-​exist with other, non-​religious or scientific responses to misfortune. This last point was confirmed to the historian Gustav Henningsen as recently as 1965–​8, when he discovered a culture of flourishing witch beliefs among the peasants and fishermen of Galacia in northern Spain: here the idea of witchcraft existed alongside conventional medicine as an explanation for disease, and spells could be lifted “by any one of a series of experts –​doctors and wise women, priests and fortune tellers, psychiatrists and exorcists”. Since the acceptance of witchcraft was apparently undisturbed by education, he was left wondering “why it is that so-​called modern people do not believe in witches”.4

Notes 1 2 3

4

Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion (Basil Blackwell 1984), 83. See the chapters in Part Five for a wider discussion of the role of central authorities in witch trials –​ Ed. For a full account of the controversy over possession and its aftermath, see D.  P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Scolar 1981). Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate:  Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (University of Nevada Press 1980), 12–​13.

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Chapter 35

Brian P. Levack THE DECLINE OF WITCHCRAFT PROSECUTIONS

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I T C H T R I A L S B E G A N W H E N T H E judiciary in Renaissance Europe started to take seriously allegations of malicious sorcery; they ended when the courts effectively threw out such accusations in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Brian P. Levack argues here that it was not doubts about the reality of the crime that brought about this change. Rather, it was the introduction of legal safeguards in the treatment of alleged witches. This more cautious approach had been advocated by early critics of witch trials such as Johann Weyer (Slattery, 26), and was already practised in some regions in the early 1600s. The practical effect of such “judicial scepticism” is illustrated by Alison Rowlands in her study of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (17).

The starting point for any investigation of the decline of witch-​hunting must be the development of a growing awareness by those persons who controlled the judicial machinery that many witches were being convicted and executed for crimes they had not committed. This realization, which usually arose in response to the excesses of witch-​hunting in certain localities, led judges and other persons involved in the hunts to criticize the ways in which the trials were being conducted. These critiques led in turn to the formulation and implementation of stricter procedural roles for the conduct of witchcraft trials, including greater restraint in the administration of torture and the application of more demanding

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standards of evidence. As a result of these changes in the judicial process, the trials of witches resulted in a larger number of acquittals, the mass panics in which scores of witches perished no longer recurred, and the courts became increasingly reluctant to initiate prosecutions in the first place. I have used the phrase ‘judicial scepticism’ to describe the attitude of those judges, inquisitors, magistrates, and writers who responded to the trials in this way. In the context of witchcraft the word scepticism usually denotes the attitudes of those who doubt or deny the existence of witches or the possibility of their crime. Judicial sceptics did not necessarily adopt such a stance. The essence of their intellectual position was a genuine doubt whether those persons who were being prosecuted were actually guilty as charged; and this concern led in turn to a more general uncertainty whether the crime could ever be proved at law. Some judicial sceptics may have also harboured a more fundamental, philosophical doubt whether witchcraft even existed. But judicial scepticism could, and in many cases did, coexist with a firm belief in the reality and possibility of the crime.1 … Four changes in particular had a bearing on the number of witchcraft trials and convictions and executions:  1) the tighter control, supervision and regulation of local witchcraft trials by central or superior courts; 2) the restriction and in some cases the prohibition of torture in witchcraft cases; 3) the adherence of trial judges to more demanding standards of proof; and 4) the admission of more lawyers to represent witches at their trials. … The classic example of the way in which central authorities contained the witch-​hunting zeal of local officials comes from the large portion of northern France that was subject to the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris, one of the nine royal courts that exercised an appellate jurisdiction in the country. In 1587–​ 8 a large witch-​panic broke out in the Champagne-​Ardennes region, which fell within the jurisdiction of the Parisian tribunal. In this local panic, which claimed hundreds of lives, all semblance of due process appears to have vanished. In an effort to discover the identity of witches, village judges were using the popular method of swimming those who had been named, a vestige of the medieval ordeal by cold water which was now illegal. Local officials were also torturing suspects without restraint and executing them in summary fashion. In response to this crisis the parlement proposed a policy of obligatory judicial review of all witchcraft convictions, an unprecedented imposition of central judicial authority on the French localities. The implementation of this policy, which involved the punishment of local officials for violating procedural norms, was a most delicate process. Nevertheless, the policy of automatic appeals was formally adopted in 1604 and published as an edict in 1624. From the adoption of that policy one can trace the

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decline of witch-​hunting within the parlement’s jurisdiction, even if some of the later sentences were upheld on appeal. A similar pattern to that which obtained in France can be found in Spain, where witchcraft was considered a crime of mixed jurisdiction and could be prosecuted either by the Spanish Inquisition, an ecclesiastical institution that was under the authority of the king, or the secular courts. The Inquisition was a highly centralized, national institution, consisting of nineteen regional tribunals which reported to, and were supervised by, a central court, la Suprema, in Madrid. One of the functions of this central tribunal, which was headed by the Inquisitor General, was to enforce procedural rules in the trial of the crimes brought before it.The first set of guidelines, which were issued in 1526 in the wake of a witch-​hunt in Navarre, were intended to govern the activities of inquisitors who tried witches in the regional tribunals. These guidelines restricted the practice of confiscating a witch’s property, required consultation with the Suprema before convicting a witch a second time, and forbade the arrest or conviction of a witch solely on the basis of another witch’s confession. These rules, coupled with a tradition of leniency that those rules encouraged, were in large part responsible for keeping executions for witchcraft in Spain at extremely low levels during the sixteenth century. Indeed, on a number of occasions the Inquisition succeeded in acquiring jurisdiction over cases of witchcraft that had originated in the secular courts and reversed the sentences of death that had been pronounced on the victims.2 … In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the administration of torture in all criminal cases, and particularly in witchcraft cases, came under attack, resulting ultimately in the prohibition of torture in all European jurisdictions. The earliest critiques appeared in the first half of the seventeenth century. In addition to [Friedrich] Spee, two Jesuits from Ingolstadt, Adam Tanner and Paul Laymann, wrote large works on moral theology that included sections on the use of torture in witchcraft trials. Both of these books, like Spee’s, reflected first-​hand experience with the trials themselves. From the Protestant side came works by Johann Meyfarth, a Lutheran professor from Erfurt whose work betrayed a heavy reliance on Spee, and Johannes Grevius, a Dutch Arminian theologian who condemned the use of torture by Christians for any purpose whatsoever. This body of critical work on torture continued to grow in the late seventeenth century. The appearance of new works at that late date attests to the continued use of the procedure, even after its employment in witchcraft prosecutions had become less frequent. … Scepticism regarding the sufficiency of evidence in witchcraft cases took a number of different forms. It can be seen, first and foremost, in a growing reluctance among judges and legal writers to accept confessions, traditionally regarded

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as the queen of proofs, as sufficient proof of guilt.3 This scepticism was not restricted to those confessions that were adduced under torture, which, as we have seen, had their own special evidentiary problems. Judges and lawyers seemed just as unwilling to accept at face value those confessions that witches had allegedly made ‘freely’.This scepticism arose mainly when the confessions had a high diabolical content, i.e., when the witches had confessed to either a pact with the Devil or attendance at the Sabbath. Reginald Scot had argued that confessions of this sort were the least reliable of all evidence, while the other great sixteenth-​century sceptic, Johan Wier (Johann Weyer), attributed them to the mental weakness of the women who had made them. An even more sophisticated interpretation of free confessions as the product of dreams or illusions, especially juvenile dreams, emerged during the investigation conducted by Alonso Salazar in the great Basque witch-​hunt of 1609–​11. By the late seventeenth century judges were willing to accept confessions to witchcraft (or any other crime) only if such confessions were in no way extorted, if they contained nothing that was impossible or improbable, and if the person confessing was not either melancholic or suicidal. In 1788 the Danish jurist Laurits Norregard, in urging the greatest possible caution in witchcraft cases, warned that the last thing an authority should do would be to believe the accused person’s own confession. A second and even more frequent expression of judicial caution in the interpretation of evidence was based on the possibility that events attributed to supernatural agency may have had natural causes. This was particularly relevant to charges of maleficium, in which it was claimed that witches had inflicted harm by supernatural, i.e., diabolical, means. The sceptical response to such allegations, frequently adopted when lawyers defended witches against such charges, was that the act had natural causes, and that in order to convict a person of the crime, the possibility of natural causation had to be ruled out. Thus in Spain, in the wake of the hunts of 1526 and 1609–​11, inquisitors were instructed to inquire whether the maleficent deeds that witches confessed to, such as having killed children or destroyed crops, might have had natural causes. Inquiries of this sort became more and more common in later seventeenth-​century trials. In Italy inquisitors from the Congregation of the Holy Office insisted that in cases of infanticide by witchcraft, the physicians who had treated the children should be examined to discover whether they could determine ‘if the illness was or could have been natural’. The burden of proof was on the prosecution; all that was necessary to secure acquittal was evidence that natural causation was possible. In a number of trials in Scotland in the late 1620s, advocates for the witches went to great lengths to prove that malefices might not have been the product of supernatural intervention. In securing the acquittal of a witch accused of murder by sorcery in 1662, Paul von

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Fuchs was content to show that the alleged supernatural cause of the disease which killed his victim could not be proved. … Closely connected to the careful and sceptical handling of evidence was the increasing frequency with which witches gained legal assistance as the trials declined in number. … Although we cannot possibly gain any kind of accurate figures regarding the number of witches who had the benefit of counsel, there is a sufficiently large record of legal representation in the seventeenth century to suggest that the number of cases in which lawyers defended the accused was increasing. The large volume of business that was directed to the appellate courts of France by itself accounts for some of this increase, since legal representation at such trials was mandatory. Even in trials in the first instance, however, lawyers started pleading for witches in greater numbers during the seventeenth century. In Scotland lawyers began to defend witches in the court of justiciary in the 1620s, and in some cases they succeeded in securing acquittals. Most of those acquittals came after 1670, such as that of the witch known as Maevia, whom Sir George Mackenzie successfully defended before the High Court of Justiciary. To this can be added the acquittals of Margaret Clerke in 1674 and Bessie Gibb in 1680, each of whom had an attorney, who in the latter case was her own husband. By the 1660s the legal representation of German witches also seems to have become fairly common. In Hungary counsel for accused witches appear as early as the 1650s and receive frequent reference in the records of eighteenth-​century cases, when the number of trials finally began to decline. … The behaviour of these judges and officials raises the fundamental question whether the judicial scepticism they manifested proceeded from or contributed to a more fundamental philosophical scepticism or disbelief regarding the power of the Devil, the existence of witches, and the theoretical possibility of their crime. Put another way, the question is whether the men who stopped the trials did so because they no longer believed in witchcraft. … The decline of witchcraft prosecutions has traditionally been associated with a rational, scientific, and secular world view that denied the reality of witchcraft and the possibility of demonic intervention in the physical world. Prior to the late seventeenth century such ‘enlightenment’ was rare. Few educated men denied the existence of witches, and even fewer denied the possibility of their crime, especially its magical component. Those who adopted a sceptical position usually doubted the collective aspects of witchcraft, especially the Sabbath, and the explicit pact with the Devil, rather than the possibility that a person could harm man or beast by means of the Devil’s power. It is fairly safe to assume that if jurists in the kingdom of Castile did in fact ‘hold it as a certainty that there were no witches’, as the supreme council of the Spanish Inquisition claimed in 1526, they were referring to the witches’

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alleged worship of the Devil, not their practice of harmful magic. None of the most famous witchcraft sceptics of the sixteenth century denied the possibility of the crime they were discussing. Certainly Wier and [Johann Georg] Goedelman did not deny it, however bitterly they attacked the activities of witch-​hunters. Cornelius Loos and Reginald Scot came much closer to a full denial, but neither made a categorical statement to that effect. Loos, like almost all the others, denied the reality of the Sabbath, night flight, and the explicit pact with the Devil, but not magic itself. Scot insisted in good Calvinist fashion that the age of miracles had passed and that a sovereign God would not permit human beings to exercise supernatural power, but he did not include the ‘working of wonders by supernatural means’ in his summary of the ‘absurd and impossible crimes’ attributed to witches. One reason for the rarity of categorical denials of witchcraft, even among the most sceptical and cautious critics of witch-​hunting, was that until the late seventeenth century the philosophical systems that prevailed in academic, theological and judicial circles made the existence of witchcraft possible, even likely. Late medieval scholasticism readily accommodated the operation of demons in the world and provided a solid intellectual foundation for the great witchcraft treatises of the period from 1450 to 1650. Neo-​Platonism, which served as the main challenge to scholasticism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was more predisposed to see magic in natural rather than supernatural or demonic terms, and that outlook gave rise to some of the earliest challenges to learned witch-​ beliefs. But neo-​Platonism, with its belief in a magical world of various occult forces and its acceptance of the existence of demonic as well as angelic spirits within that ‘natural’ world, proved to be an insufficient foundation upon which to mount an assault on the entire set of learned witch-​beliefs. A neo-​Platonist would have found it difficult to argue that witchcraft and magic were impossible crimes. Only in the seventeenth century did a new philosophy emerge that had the potential to undermine the belief in the reality of witchcraft. The mechanical philosophy, which ranged itself equally against scholasticism and neo-​Platonism, viewed the earth as a machine that followed regular, immutable laws of nature.The challenge that this new philosophy presented to the belief in witchcraft became evident in the work of mechanists René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza, all of whom denied that spirits, if they existed at all (and the materialist Hobbes would not even accept that), could exercise influence on the operation of the material world. Because of the strength of this philosophical challenge to witchcraft, and the ability of this new philosophy to spread among the learned elite in a culture increasingly dominated by print, the decline of witchcraft prosecutions and executions is often attributed to its influence. Only when the members of the

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ruling and educated classes began to think in this new way, so it is argued, did witchcraft prosecutions enter a permanent and irreversible decline. According to Trevor-​Roper, it was the new philosophy of Descartes that ‘dealt the final blow to the witchcraze in western Europe’.4 Categorical statements like this require serious qualification. The mechanical philosophy may very well have helped to undermine the belief that many educated persons had in the reality of witchcraft, although recent scholarship has tended to minimize its role in this regard, especially in England. Whether the dissemination of the new philosophy had anything to do with the decline and end of witchcraft prosecutions is much more problematic. The problem is largely one of chronology. We have seen that the decline in prosecutions began in some areas as early as 1600 and in most other areas by 1670, with the exception of a few countries on the eastern and northern periphery of Europe. These were the years when the new mechanical philosophy first made its appearance. The spread of this philosophy, however, was a gradual process, and it was not uncontested. A few natural philosophers embraced the new ideas in the 1650s but it took some time for mechanism to exercise a more pervasive influence within the universities, the legal profession and the bureaucracies of the state. It is unlikely that the judges and officials who applied the early brakes to witch-​hunting during the first seventy years of the seventeenth century were even exposed to, let alone influenced by, the new ideas. When the ideas did reach them, moreover, they had often undergone significant modification at the hands of natural philosophers who had tried to reconcile the harsh mechanism of Descartes and Hobbes with their belief in a providential, if not an immanent God. The critical period in the reception of the new philosophy appears to have been the years between 1690 and 1720, the period of the early Enlightenment. Thus the new philosophy did not appreciably affect the mental outlook of the educated classes until well after prosecutions had begun to decline in number and in some cases until they had stopped altogether. … Perhaps the most important religious source of the decline of witch-​hunting was the new attitude of tolerance that began to characterize some Protestant and even a few Catholic communities in the second half of the seventeenth century. There is a solid foundation for this religious tolerance in the Protestant tradition, most notably in the Heidelberg Catechism, even though intolerance was more characteristic of Protestant practice during the first century of the Reformation. This Protestant tolerance was manifested mainly towards members of other religious denominations, but the same sentiment could be extended to those suspected of witchcraft, since they were widely regarded as either heretics or at least as religious transgressors.5 It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that

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witch-​hunting first began to decline in the Dutch Republic, a country known for its early religious tolerance. When [Balthasar] Bekker pleaded eloquently in 1691 that Protestants should not pass judgment on other Christians, he was reflecting a Dutch tradition that reached back to Erasmus in the early sixteenth century. It was also no coincidence that Poland, the Roman Catholic ‘state without stakes’, not only tolerated religious diversity but also did not prosecute many witches in the sixteenth century, although both religious persecution and witch-​hunting did develop belatedly in that kingdom in the late seventeenth century. Not unrelated to this new spirit of tolerance was the abandonment of the determination by both Protestant and Catholic public authorities in many states to use their secular power to create an ideal Christian community.6 This determination to establish a godly state, which was widely evident in many small German states as well as in Scotland, Denmark and colonial Massachusetts, often involved the imposition of a strict moral discipline on the population. In response to clerical pressure, the legislatures of these states had passed laws against blasphemy, drunkenness, adultery, and sodomy as well as witchcraft, and on the basis of these laws the courts had prosecuted these sinners with a vengeance. … In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the various states of Europe abandoned this type of moral crusading, a process indicative of the secularization of both law and politics. The end of prosecutions in many of these states can be linked, at least in general terms, with this change in thinking regarding the functions of the state.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

Lyndal Roper illustrates the coexistence of judicial scepticism with the acceptance of the reality of witchcraft in Chapter 34 in this volume, note 5 –​ Ed. Brian P. Levack and William Monter present more evidence of the restraining influence of appellate courts on local communities troubled by witchcraft in Chapters 20 and 21 in this volume, respectively –​ Ed. Virginia Krause argues in Chapter 32 in this volume that confessions to witchcraft played a central role in the development of Renaissance demonology. The refusal of judges to accept such confessions in the late seventeenth century may, therefore, have helped to undermine the intellectual basis for witch trials –​ Ed. Hugh Trevor-​Roper, The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​ Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 110. This idea complements Stuart Clark’s argument that “church-​type” Christians were more likely to fear and prosecute witches than “sect-​type” Christians. See Chapter 16 in this volume –​ Ed. William Monter considers the role of such attitudes in the “age of confessionalism” in Chapter 21 in this volume –​ Ed.

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Chapter 36

Marion Gibson THE DECLINE OF THE WITCHCRAFT PAMPHLET

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H E I N T E R V E N T I O N S O F central government could suppress trials for witchcraft, but could also curtail prosecutions in more indirect ways. Here Marion Gibson describes how a controversy about demonic possession and exorcism in England made authors reluctant to publish witchcraft pamphlets in the early seventeenth century. In 1599 the exorcist John Darrel was tried for fakery and removed from his living. Darrel’s prosecution was part of a wider campaign by the Church leadership against puritan clergy who promoted their cause through spectacular public dispossessions, often involving allegations of witchcraft. A  bitter pamphlet war followed Darrel’s trial, and in 1604 exorcism was effectively proscribed in the English church. As Gibson argues, these circumstances made all public discussion of witchcraft difficult in the decades before the civil war.

After 1621 few [English witchcraft] pamphlets were produced until the civil war.1 Some earlier works were reprinted, some continental cases reported, Richard Bernard wrote his Guide to Grand[-​]‌Jury Men and Dr Lambe’s case received attention. But from 1621 to 1643 no new English witchcraft pamphlet appeared. Accounts such as Edward Fairfax’s account of the possession of his daughters (1621) and the Lancashire case of 1634 were not printed. Why did witchcraft pamphlets cease being produced in the 1620s and 1630s?

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J.A. Sharpe suggests that prosecutions were at a very low level by 1620 and witchcraft was ‘a dying subject’ because it was no longer taken seriously by the authorities or educated people.2 He says that ‘England may well have been ready to join those other western European countries where witchcraft was at best of little more than peripheral concern both to the learned elite and to the criminal justice system’. … Sharpe noted that scepticism grew in the 1620s and 1630s and because of mass trials witch-​hunters were distrusted as ‘enthusiasts’ by the 1660s, while Walker believes that earlier possession cases damaged belief in witchcraft in the same way.3 In fact the relationship between well-​publicised possession cases in pamphlets and the decline of witchcraft pamphlets is clearly visible, very precise, and backs up Sharpe’s and Walker’s perceptions in that interest in printing works on witchcraft falters when it becomes controversial. Once the subject was no longer discussed in print in the traditional, home-​grown way by English theorists and based on cases in English villages and towns, it was, first, no longer available to a wide audience and, second, such works could not be cited as validating continued belief in witches as they often were in Jacobean pamphlets and demonologies. Accounts from Loudun and Prague, especially alleging the murder by Bohemian witches of eighteen and nineteen spouses, respectively, would not carry the same conviction as a case from St Osyth or Exeter.Thus a decline in publication could be the cause as well as the effect of the growing scepticism described by Sharpe, and this cause is directly linked to the publication of possession pamphlets. The suppression of and disbelief in possession pamphlets also may have cut off the ‘oxygen of publicity’ for witchcraft. … The first suppression of possession pamphlets occurred in 1602–​3. During the possession-​and-​publishing frenzy lasting from the publication of The Most Wonderfull and True Storie […] (1597) to Samuel Harsnett’s unanswered last word on possession A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), no witchcraft pamphlets were published. The only reference to witchcraft came in the stories of Doll Barthram and Anne Kerke appended to the Triall of Maist. Dorrell (1599), and in passing in the cases of Thomas Darling, William Somers, and Darrel’s other patients, and Mary Glover. And witchcraft pamphlets did not re-​emerge until 1612, except for the material inserted into The Most Cruel and Bloody Murther […] (1606). When witchcraft pamphlets returned, they did so with elements of possession still in them. The case of Mrs Belcher and Master Avery in The Witches of Northamptonshire (1612) is implicitly a possession case, but apparently dares not be identified as such. Even John Cotta, whose discussion of the case of a gentlewoman in his Triall of Witchcraft [1616] is supposed to refer to Mrs Belcher, does not speak of it as possession. But the convulsive fits and visions experienced by the victims are a kind of possession (revealed even more clearly in the MS dealing with the case). …

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The last surviving Jacobean witchcraft pamphlet, and the last new one for twenty-​two years, was Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer […] (1621). It may explain for itself why witchcraft pamphlets died out in the 1620s. Goodcole stresses his reluctance to write, which is not unusual with him, but there is a note of panic in his voice: The publication of this subject whereof now I  write, hath been by importunity extorted from me, who would have been content to have concealed it, knowing the diversity of opinions concerning things of this nature, and that not among the ignorant, but among some of the learned. For my part I  meddle here with nothing but matter of fact, and to that end produce the testimony of the living and the dead, which I hope shall be authentical for the confirmation of this narration, and free me from all censorious minds and mouths. It is none of my intent here to discuss, or dispute of witches or witchcraft, but desire most therein to be dispensed with all. There is more than conventional modesty in this disclaimer of intent. It takes up the whole of the first page of the pamphlet. Goodcole sees the discussion of witchcraft as ‘meddling’, leading to censure. He wants to be ‘free’ from this, ‘to be dispensed’ with it, and to ‘conceal’ anything that might bring about controversy among those with a ‘diversity of opinions concerning things of this nature’. This phrase must include matters magical, and in this period that must include possession. We recall also [the author of] the penultimate witchcraft pamphlet, The Wonderfull Discoverie [of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower] (1619), saying, on his first page, as his first line: My meaning is not to make any contentious arguments about the discourses, distinction or definition of witchcraft, the power of devils, the nature of Spirits, the force of charms, the secrets of incantation, and such like; because the scriptures are full of prohibitions to this purpose, and proclaims death to the presumptuous attempters. The first thing late Jacobean witchcraft pamphleteers think of is the absolute necessity of not being ‘contentious’. This one even fears death as the result in an illogical and convoluted way. He discusses many previous writers on witchcraft (King James, Gifford, Cotta) with approval, yet fears demonology. He is anxious not to add to their number and almost seems to include them within the ranks of the ‘presumptuous attempters’. In a similar move to elude the demonological,

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witchcraft pamphlet genre, Goodcole’s pamphlet should perhaps be seen in the context of his string of morality, crime and religion pamphlets, hiding witchcraft among other crimes and other debates. Witchcraft is no longer a matter which can stand alone in a pamphlet, although whether this is for commercial, ideological or political reasons, or related to the development of news, is unclear. Interest in witchcraft had waned, as Sharpe shows, but from the evidence of possession and witchcraft pamphlets this loss of interest may have been, paradoxically, a result of too much interest in controversial forms of witchcraft, and forbidden forms of writing about it. Earlier writers began by discussing God, Pliny or their patron, secure in the knowledge that their genre was mainstream, safe, approved of. By the later Jacobean period this assurance has disappeared, and witchcraft pamphlets disappear with it.

Notes 1 2 3

For full citations of the pamphlets used in this chapter, see the original version in Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (Routledge 1999), 186–​90 –​  Ed. J. A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–​1750 (Hamish Hamilton 1996), 109–​10, 146. D. P Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Scolar 1981), 1.

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Chapter 37

Owen Davies URBANIZATION AND THE DECLINE OF WITCHCRAFT An examination of London

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H E D E C L I N E O F W I T C H B E L I E F S occurred over a longer period than the ending of witch trials, and for different reasons. Historians have emphasised social changes that reduced the need to explain misfortune in terms of maleficium:  these include improved standards of living and the rise of effective medicine. Belief in bewitchment also required the identification of plausible suspects, who had normally acquired long-​term reputations for causing magical harm. In this chapter Owen Davies suggests that this was increasingly difficult in urban areas with rapidly changing populations. He also shows that belief in good and bad magic remained strong in London long after the end of witch trials, even though the figure of the neighbourhood witch was less common.

Historical studies of European witchcraft have been remarkably quiet concerning the impact of urbanization on the structure of magical beliefs and practices. The work which has been done on witchcraft in urban areas of early modern Europe does suggest, however, that this would be a fruitful area for future study. Ruth Martin, for example, in her work on Venice, found an absence of “traditional” maleficium associated with agricultural production. She also noted that much witchcraft activity centred instead “on the main commodity of interest to an urban and a commercial society  –​money.”1 Jens Christian Johansen also found that in Danish towns, witches were more often accused of bewitching trade and

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business than in rural areas. There was also less agriculturally related witchcraft. Rural witches, for example, were charged with souring milk three times as often as urban witches.2 What these brief observations indicate is that the urban environment does seem to have had an effect on the nature of witchcraft accusations. This encourages one to look more closely at the possibility that as urban societies expanded and underwent profound economic and social change, so this wrought equally profound transformations in the structure of witchcraft accusations and beliefs. As indicated by the title of this essay, much of the following discussion will concentrate on evidence from London. As an urban centre spanning both pre-​ industrial and industrial ages, it provides a sense of continuity over a considerable period of time. A number of different urban contexts will also be introduced briefly when they represent substantially different models of urbanization. Instead of subscribing to the dogmatic idea that the spread of social and intellectual “progress” led to the decline of witchcraft in urban society, this essay will look at the relationship between urban community structures and the formation of witchcraft accusations. We can gain some insight into the nature of witchcraft accusations in early modern London through an examination of the Surrey Assize records.3 These allow us to compare indictments from urban Southwark with those from the rest of rural Surrey. Of the forty-​two indictments which state the nature of the victims of witchcraft (whether human or animal), seven (16.6%) came from Southwark, and in all seven indictments the victims were human. Of the thirty-​ five rural indictments, 31% related to the bewitchment of livestock only, and, if we consider those cases involving both animals and humans, that percentage goes up to 43%. The absence of agriculturally based accusations from Southwark is not surprising in itself, but when we consider that 43% of the rural accusations involved livestock, then we have to ask ourselves what effect the divorce from livestock rearing had on accusations of witchcraft amongst the urban population. As Morgan’s London Map of 1682 shows, Southwark was not completely divorced from rurality, showing considerable areas of adjacent open ground. Through much of the seventeenth century nearly half of the acreage of the parish of St George, Southwark, for example, consisted of St George’s Fields, which was mostly agricultural land. From the Southwark witch indictments the occupational status of six of those involved directly or indirectly (husband of the accused for instance) can be extracted.They show a strong non-​agricultural bias: a butcher, joiner, blacksmith’s apprentice, waterman, labourer, and yeoman. Statistical analysis of the baptism register of St Saviour’s, Southwark, 1618–​25, further reveals that from a sample of 1,860 only 1.5% of the working population were agricultural workers.4

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Evidence that by the eighteenth century there was still a strong belief in witchcraft in London comes from the persecution and prosecution of Sarah Moredike in 1701. Richard Hathaway, a blacksmith’s apprentice, accused Sarah Moredike, wife of a Southwark waterman, of having bewitched him on 1 April, 1700, since when he had been terribly ill and was seen to vomit crooked pins and nails. What is significant is the large number of Southwark citizens who apparently believed Hathaway’s imposture and took part in the mobbing of Moredike. Local pressure was so great that she removed herself to Paul’s Wharf, only to be followed by Hathaway. Even after her acquittal she continued to be persecuted. A  public collection was made for the bewitched Hathaway, and prayers were put up in the local churches.5 Another late accusation brought before magistrates at the Surrey Quarter Sessions in 1699/​1700 came from the neighbouring urban parish of Maria Magd[a]‌lena, Bermondsey, when Thomas Watts, a scrivener, was accused by William Langham “for being a sorcerer and using sorceries and witchcrafte.”6 A pamphlet also records that in July 1704, Sarah Griffith of Rosemary Lane, was swum in the New River Head. She apparently swam like a cork, and was subsequently taken before Justice Bateman in Well-​Close, who committed her to the Bridewell, Clerkenwell.7 After these last cases of the prosecution period I have not come across any other examples of witchcraft from urban London until 1818.That, of course, does not mean that none exists. I would be surprised if an exhaustive and systematic survey of eighteenth-​century London newspapers did not turn up a few relevant reports. In 1818 one Michael Kenlish, an Irish shoemaker, was charged before the Bow Street magistrate with threatening to murder a woman.8 Kenlish stated in evidence that the prosecutrix, and another woman, had bewitched him three years since, by means of some “stuff ” which they had put in his tea, after drinking which he was left in a trance for several days. They also bewitched him by means of a black cat and a “pound of pins.” He was subsequently told by the two women that the only way he could rid himself of the spell they had put upon him was by “crossing the sea.” He informed the court that he was shortly about to act on this advice and return to Ireland. Kenlish entreated the court not to suppose that he was deranged, but that his distracted state of mind arose wholly from his bewitchment, which had so disabled him that he was unable to work properly, and was, in consequence, so poor that he could not pay for the washing of his shirt. The prosecutrix denied any knowledge of the accusations made by Kenlish, but gave it as her opinion that his delusions resulted from his being a Roman Catholic and extremely superstitious. The charges against Kenlish were dismissed on condition that he keep the peace towards the prosecutrix prior to his leaving for Ireland.

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The next piece of evidence for witch-​beliefs in London comes from the prosecution of Sarah McDonald for “obtaining the sum of 14s 6d, under the pretext of practising witchcraft,” heard before Mr D’Eyncourt, at the Worship-​street Police-​court, 3 September, 1858.9 The case resulted from a complaint made by Mrs Mary Ann Gable, “a ladylike person,” wife of a coppersmith, who resided in Russell-​street, Stepney. She told the court that having had a great deal of trouble and illness lately, and fearing that a “spell” was upon her, she paid a visit to Mrs McDonald, who lived in Cudworth-​street, Bethnal-​green. Gable suffered from “frightful pains, cutting, shooting, pricking, and darting through” her head and body, for the relief of which she had consulted a Dr Ramsbotham. She had asked him if he thought they resulted from a “spell,” and he said he thought not. He gave her some medicine, and for a time she felt better. Subsequently she got worse again, and decided to consult McDonald. Gable stated in court that McDonald “lays the cards and, indeed, is very clever with them. I  had heard of that, but not that she possessed the power of relieving persons from torment by burning powders.” This suggests that unbewitching was a secondary and less employed aspect of McDonald’s activities. McDonald told Gable that a person was doing her an “injury,” and suggested as a remedy that she buy some of her powders for sixpence each. She bought ten powders, and McDonald proceeded to put each powder in the fire whilst inaudibly repeating an incantation –​the object of this ritual being to “torment” the person who was “injuring” Gable. However, the substance of Gable’s complaint against McDonald was not that she had defrauded her, but that whilst McDonald was being paid by her to do “injury” to her tormentor, the very same tormentor –​a relative who was coming into property –​was, in turn, paying McDonald to burn powders against Gable. Mr D’Eyncourt was obviously shocked to find such beliefs in urban London, and felt it necessary to inquire where Gable had been brought up, perhaps hoping to find that she was a country-​woman, which would somewhat extenuate the circumstance of such beliefs being held in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately for D’Eyncourt’s peace of mind Gable replied that she had been brought up in the parish of Bethnal[-​]g‌ reen, where her father was a timber merchant, and had possessed a large property. Furthermore, Gable’s eighteen-​year-​old daughter, Eliza, “a rather pretty healthy-​looking girl,” also stated her belief in such things:  “Oh I  have suffered much from her spells, can’t rest or sleep, and feel as though I could fly out of the place. I am sure she is a witch and has the power of making spells.” Police-​ constable Horton, 37 K, gave evidence to the effect that a great number of people believed in McDonald, and he also suspected that she bribed several people to report her fortune-​telling abilities. D’Eyncourt further inquired of Horton: “You

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do not believe in it, I suppose? –​Not a bit, sir. I offered to let her try her spells upon me, but she would not.” D’Eyncourt in summing-​up remarked “how such absurd notions can be entertained I cannot comprehend,” and had McDonald held on remand pending her being sent to the House of Correction. Looking back on the case eleven years later, the editor of All theYear Round expressed his dismay at the way in which the case had “exhibited the metropolis in nearly [my italics] as unfavourable a light as the country districts”.10 Four years later, Charles Tilbrook, a discharged soldier, aged 27, was brought before the Bow Street magistrates charged with attempting to murder his grandmother, aged 75, residing in Charles-​street, Westminster. On April 13, 1862, Tilbrook had attacked his grandmother with a razor, cutting her head and face, and then beat her head with a boiling stick. She was taken to Westminster Hospital where she recovered. When confronted with the evidence in court, the prisoner took exception to the claim that he had beaten her without any provocation: I have had enough provocation. Mr Corrie [magistrate] –​Do you wish that to be taken down? Prisoner –​I wish it to be known that she is a very bad character, and not fit to live at all. She is a witch, in daily intercourse with the Devil. I know you don’t believe in spirits, in what you call “this enlightened age,” but I don’t call it enlightened. I call it a very dark age.11 Subsequently, when brought before the Central Criminal Court, Tilbrook explained sullenly that he had no intention of actually killing his grandmother: if I had wanted to take her life I should have locked the door; I merely intended to draw some of her blood, and that is the fact of the matter [sensation in court]. If she does not work at witchcraft or devilish arts I am willing to forfeit my life for her.12 He added that the reason why he shed her blood was so that “she should not possess the power over him that she had done.” The witchcraft beliefs expressed in these cases, and the behaviour of those concerned, certainly conform to the same patterns of accusation and counteraction which occurred in rural communities of the period. However, as will become apparent later, there are some indications that the urban social context, within which these accusations were generated, was having some effect on the nature of the accusations. …

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The question of the nature of urban communal relations is obviously a crucial factor in the apparent decline of witch-​accusations in the urban environment. Historical thought on witchcraft has been heavily influenced by the work of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, both of whom have stressed that the dynamics of witchcraft were embedded in village communal relations. John Putnam Demos has followed the same argument and has come to the conclusion that “witchcraft belonged, first and last, to the life of the little community.”13 If this is the case, then we might expect witchcraft accusations to decline as a result of the less close-​ knit, more individualistic, ill-​defined communities of the modern city, but be less affected by the community structure of “industrial villages.” Generalizations about urban social relationships are rightly open to criticism, and quantifying the strength and extent of communal relationships is incredibly difficult, whether in an urban or rural context, and more so over a period of time. One of the arguments against the sociological concept of “urban villages,” for example, is the high level of mobility of the urban population, which created instability within communal relationships. As Clark and Souden have pointed out though, mobility can be an important force for stability within the social system, as well as a dynamic and disruptive force for change.14 In early modern England the flow of rural migrants to an expanding London did not necessarily lead to irrevocable breaks in social relations between village and city. Rural teenagers were apprenticed to urban relations or friends, and many townspeople returned to their village homes to help at harvest time, thus reinforcing those kinship links which geographical distance might otherwise have broken. Jeremy Boulton’s work on seventeenth-​century Southwark has revealed just such a picture of a mobile but stable urban community. Boulton found that while there was a fairly high population turnover, much of this movement was localized. Householders “moved from house to house and from street to street in response to social and economic forces but kept within the same familiar area.” In fact, the turnover statistics from the Boroughside of Southwark are not significantly higher than those from rural areas in the same period. Boulton remarks several times on the continuities of lifestyle between urban and rural living: “As in English rural society, many Boroughside householders may have possessed geographically restricted social horizons, living out much of their lives within a local social system.”15 This depiction of a seventeenth century urban community in Southwark helps explain the continued vigour of witch-​accusations in the area until the early eighteenth century. There was sufficient residential stability for the formation of informal social networks based on neighbourhood ties, and in the sense that this fostered a level of communal interaction similar to that in the village, Southwark neighbourhoods, like the village unit, generated an environment conducive to witch-​accusations.

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Communities are not static, though, and as London continued to expand, especially in the nineteenth century, one might expect once stable, “old” neighbourhoods to be overwhelmed by new immigrants, new housing, new industries, so that they lose their identity, and social networks are constantly undergoing a series of fluctuations. In this situation we might, if we follow the above argument, expect accusations to decline significantly. But we should be cautious in making gross generalizations about this process, since while some stable, cohesive communities disappear others are constantly being formed. The crucial factor is the frequency of these changes in comparison with the general long-​term stability of villages. Peter Willmott’s comparative study of mid nineteenth-​century Bethnal Green and Preston highlights the varying experiences of urban community formation.16 Willmott found that mid nineteenth-​century Bethnal Green was characterized by rapid changes in the composition of its population, and reckoned that this hampered the formation of primary networks. In terms of family, only twenty-​three households out of a thousand contained a relative of another household in the same neighbourhood. In contrast, the growth of Preston’s textile industry led to chain migration, making the formation of extensive and tight-​knit family networks possible, where newcomers could integrate. As we have seen, the social environment of late sixteenth and seventeenth century Southwark was conducive to the making of witchcraft accusations. Communities remained relatively stable, as stable as many villages of the period, despite quite high levels of mobility, and it is quite likely that relations remained quite strong between migrants in urban Southwark and their relations in the rural home. Urban dwellers were still strongly bound to rural culture. Southwark was not so big that those who lived there were unaware of the agricultural rhythm of life, and many still returned to their rural home to help with harvesting or for village festivals. The complete divorce between urban and rural culture had not yet developed sufficiently to lead to potentially significant changes in the social organization and behaviour of urban dwellers, which could concomitantly affect the level of witchcraft accusations. The links with the rural home were firm but there was probably little thought of returning. Social mobility was high but the flow of people was not so much from Southwark to home village as from street to street. Thus resilient communities could form, firmly rooted through a level of social networking and interaction similar to that in the village community. In these circumstances, the victim’s search for the person responsible for his or her misfortunes need not be sought back in the village community, since relations with fellow neighbours and colleagues were sufficiently personal and intimate for accusations to be levelled within the urban community. Witchcraft accusations have been seen by some as a response to communal insecurity and instability, but

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what this examination of urban witchcraft suggests is that the converse is also true. Witchcraft accusations may, in fact, be indicative of social stability. It is possible, therefore, that once that stability starts to break down, there might be a concomitant drop in the level of witchcraft accusations. The rapid expansion of London during the nineteenth century led to quite significant levels of social instability (as seen from Willmott’s work on Bethnal Green), resulting in the breakdown and swamping of existing communities. That is not to say that close[-​]k‌ nit urban communities did not exist, but the intimacy of neighbourly relations and primary networks which fostered witchcraft accusations may not have been able to develop in this environment to the same extent as it had once done in early modern London, or as they continued to do in rural areas. As a result of this instability, it may be that some community-​level social control mechanisms, such as witchcraft accusations, ceased to function properly, and declined. Without that depth of networking within a community, when suspicions of witchcraft were generated, a direct or public accusation was not made because the victim was uncertain as to how the people around would react to his or her claims. … Another supernaturally inspired social control mechanism which does seem to have survived quite well within urban London was the use of the Bible-​and-​key for the identification of thieves and stolen property. In 1832, for example, Eleanor Blucher, a native of Prussia, was brought before the Thames Police-​[c]‌ourt charged with assaulting Mary White, the wife of a mechanic. Both parties lived in the same court in Ratcliff.White, having recently lost several articles of value from her yard, assembled a number of other women to perform the Bible-​and-​key to find out the thief.17 The key turned and it was unanimously agreed upon that Blucher was the thief, and it was accordingly given out in the neighbourhood that she had stolen two pairs of “inexpressibles” belonging to Mrs White’s husband. Blucher, incensed by the accusations, subsequently assaulted White. In court Blucher stated that the “the neighbours were always turning the key upon her.” White replied that the key and Bible was the surest way to discover a thief. In turn, Mr. Ballantine (magistrate) replied facetiously that he was sure “the spell would be of great service to the police, who would be glad to avail themselves of it.” He also expressed surprise that “such superstition should exist in the British metropolis in the 19th century.”18 At the same police-​court fifty-​two years later, Ellen Lyons, twenty-​seven, a married woman, residing at 18, Pell-​street, St. George’s-​in-​the-​East was charged with violently assaulting Sarah O’Brien after accusing her of theft. It transpired that Lyons had lost a shawl, and certain that it had been stolen she gathered several friends to her room where the Bible[-​]and[-​]key was performed. Lyons repeated several names to no effect until O’Brien’s name was uttered and the key fell right out of

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the Bible. The same ritual was repeated to discover the name of the pawnbrokers where the shawl was pledged.19 The significance of the continued practice of the Bible[-​ ]‌ and[-​ ]key in nineteenth-​century London lies in the fact that, to gain legitimacy, the divination ceremony had to be performed in the presence of neighbours and friends (who, by inference, believed in the magic involved), who would then sanction the resulting accusation in the neighbourhood. For this control mechanism to operate, there had to be a certain level of communal integration, such as occurred in residential courts like those in Ratcliff. The crucial question this poses is whether witchcraft accusations were also generated in such enclosed London communities. Possibly, but not necessarily. Accusations concerning both types of social crime –​theft and witchcraft –​were usually based upon reputation, but the formation of reputation in each case was often different. Within the little community, complete strangers and newcomers were equally likely, if not more likely, to be potential petty thieves than long-​term residents. One wonders, for example, if Blucher gained her reputation purely because she was a foreigner. Accusations of petty theft were easily made and reputations easily gained. On the other hand, the making of the reputation of a witch was usually, but not always, based on certain traditional criteria such as visual appearance, gender, age, and position in the communal hierarchy. More importantly, the reputation of a witch was usually generated and sustained through the long-​term accumulation of supposed maleficent acts, held in the collective memory of the community. So, it is possible that even in urban neighbourhoods where the Bible-​and-​key could operate effectively, a high population turnover could prevent the formation of the long-​term reputations which led to public accusations. There is some indication that in nineteenth-​century London, accusations of witchcraft were more likely to be made within the family group than in the wider community. The immediate family group was a social arena where relationships were still sufficiently intense, personal and long-​standing to produce accusations. It is, perhaps, significant, therefore, that in all seven cases of witchcraft from early modern Southwark, the accusations were apparently generated outside the family group, whereas in two of the three nineteenth-​century cases conflict was located within the family. Irwin Press has also found that in non-​western cities where witchcraft accusations do operate in the urban arena, they usually result from dyadic conflicts between individuals closely related to each other and particularly susceptible to mutual sanction: “siblings, spouses, lovers, and rivals for mates are more common sources of supernatural attack than are business rivals, jealous neighbours, or generally antisocial acquaintances.”20 If, in nineteenth-​century London, social conditions were not so conducive to witchcraft accusations against neighbours and acquaintances as they were in

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rural society, and accusations were more likely to be made within the kin group, then another factor responsible for declining accusations may have been the weakening and dispersal of the traditional family group. As we have already seen, in the area of Bethnal Green, where Mary Gable and Sarah McDonald lived, only twenty-​three out of a thousand households contained a relative of another household in the same neighbourhood. The potential weakening of the extended family group may have also been an influential factor in the decline of witch-​beliefs as well as witch-​accusations. Stories concerning witches and witchcraft, were primarily, though not exclusively, perpetuated through oral transmission, particularly within the family group  –​with perhaps the most influential flow of such information being from grandparent to grandchild. In urban environments, where communities are continually in a state of flux, where shared group knowledge is less intimate and the collective memory of the community is neither so broad nor so deep, the continued transmission of old traditions and beliefs through the family group becomes even more crucial. But as that pathway becomes increasingly interrupted and redundant, so the maintenance of those beliefs amongst subsequent generations can weaken. A  folklore study of Humr communities in Khartoum, fifteen years after their migration there, has revealed just such a process. Out of thirty-​two informants interviewed, only one reported that she had experienced story-​telling during her stay. The rest of the informants stated that they had neither heard nor told any stories or riddles ever since they came to Khartoum.21 This can be attributed to the break-​up of the extended family system, which meant that the grandmother, who was the major story-​teller in Humr society, was absent. That is not to say that folklore died in London, for while old folkloric traditions disappeared, new genres and new occasions for the exchange and performance of folklore were created. However, these were rooted in the new socio-​economic conditions of the city rather than in the culture of the rural past. The increasing separation from the vagaries of agricultural life must have also had an effect upon the relevance of witchcraft in an urban environment.Witchcraft accusations often stemmed from the inexplicable illness and death of livestock, or from problems associated with the processing of agricultural products. In early modern rural Surrey, nearly a half of all accusations involved livestock, and nearly a third related to livestock only. It was not only farmers who depended on livestock. Most members of rural society were involved in animal production in one way or another. The pig which many labourers fattened up in their backyards, for example, was an important economic and even psychological asset in a subsistence existence. In this context farm animals could almost be considered as an extension of the family group. As the importance of livestock rearing in the lives of urban dwellers diminished, then this, in the long term, must surely have had

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a concomitant effect, not only on the pattern of witchcraft accusations, but also on the number of accusations, in that the range of potentially sensitive targets of witchcraft was narrowed. On a broader level, many magical operations involving farming practices, and rural flora and fauna, also became irrelevant and therefore redundant in the urban environment. Where livestock still remained, then, even by the end of the century, we continue to find evidence of rural magical practices concerning them. As late as 1902, the folklorist, Edward Lovett, came across the case of a cowkeeper, a migrant from Devon, living in the north-​east district of London, who, believing his cows were bewitched, removed the heart of one dead cow, stuck it full of pins and nails and hung it up in his chimney as a counter-​charm.22 The tradition of keeping a goat (sometimes a donkey) with cattle to prevent the latter from slipping their calves and to protect them from disease and bewitchment, was continued in the livery-​ stables of London. Many London carriers apparently kept them in their stables for the same purpose. A correspondent to Notes and Queries also recalled seeing the donkey charm for rickets being performed in Hoxton market-​place in 1845, though the practice seems to have died out soon after.23 Charles Phythian-​Adams, in an innovative study of May Day rituals in London, has attempted to chart the process of London’s growing detachment from that culture and economy. By the eighteenth century, the maypole had fallen out of use in urban London. Instead, Londoners forsook the urban streets for the day, and went out to celebrate and join in festivities in the surrounding countryside, a move indicative of an increasing separation of rural and urban spheres. From the mid-​ seventeenth to the late eighteenth century a contrary migration also took place, with milkmaids leading garlanded cows through the streets of London, bringing a breath of the country back into the city for the day. Around 1800 this last vestige of rural symbolism disappeared, partly as a result of the introduction of winter-​ feeding on oil cake in urban milk factories, but more significantly due to the appropriation of the festival by soot-​blackened chimneysweeps. As Phythian-​Adams concluded, “what had originated in a largely rural society ended up in London as a strictly limited ritual dialogue between two separate urban ‘nations’.”24 The irrevocable separation of London from traditional rural culture by the early nineteenth century has also been traced by Mark Judd through an examination of the city’s fairs. The traditional function of fairs as markets for agricultural produce and hiring of labour had declined significantly by the early nineteenth century. The old seasonal basis for fairs had also lost much of its significance by this time.25 Lynn Lees found that the initial impact of urban London on Irish migrants was to force them to abandon much of their rural lifestyle, a wide variety of cultural practices and communal rituals, as well as the use of the Irish language:  “Irish migrants

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abandoned a complex agricultural society for a complex urbanizing one.”26 Not surprisingly, Lees has also suggested that the belief in witches and fairies amongst Irish immigrants declined in this environment, though no real evidence from London is cited. It is quite clear that witch-​believing rural migrants were not going to suddenly discard their beliefs and cultural baggage on entering their new home in the city. The first time they were subjected to some unaccountable misfortune there might still have been a suspicion of witchcraft, even if that suspicion was not openly expressed. This begs the question whether the decline in urban accusations was actually indicative of a declining belief in witchcraft. Of course, one has to be extremely careful about extrapolating from individual accusations of witchcraft. Two of the three accusations of witchcraft I have found occurred within the family group. All we can infer from this is that the families concerned obviously believed in witchcraft, but we cannot conclude that the rest of the community they lived in were also believers. Conversely, an absence of accusations need not necessarily indicate an absence of belief. An individual accusation of witchcraft within a rural context was usually representative of a communal expression of the belief in witchcraft. Most accusations may at first appear to involve only the accused and the accuser, but usually accusations were the culmination of a period of incubation during which the opinions of family, friends and neighbours were canvassed. Accusations were not usually made until the accuser was sure that those in his or her social group were convinced that there were grounds for the accusation. An accusation was, therefore, the legitimizing step towards the communal sanctioning of a direct action against a witch, whether that action be swimming, scratching, or prosecution prior to 1736. In nineteenth-​century London, public accusations of witchcraft seem to have been rare because direct action against a witch outside the family group was not certain to receive sanction by the community in which both actors lived. There were other manifestations of the belief in witchcraft, however, which were not reliant on public accusations, face to face confrontation, or direct action. Private means of forcing witches to remove their spells were also employed. This could be achieved by supernaturally tormenting the witch: by burning powders, as Gable paid Sarah McDonald to do, by piercing a cow’s heart as Lovett’s cow-​ man did, or by employing a witch-​bottle. One of the most common measures employed to prevent witchcraft was the displaying of horseshoes. It is the evidence of this expression of belief which provides us with the only indicator, albeit very basic, of the declining relevancy, if not the declining belief in witchcraft. Considering the paucity of information and lack of continuity of the other anti-​ witchcraft measures, the use and disappearance of horseshoes in London, from the

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late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, provides us with at least some sense of change over time. In the late seventeenth century John Aubrey commented that most houses in the west end of London had horseshoes on their thresholds to ward off witchcraft.27 A hundred years later, in 1797, the antiquarian John Brand recorded that in Monmouth Street, in the West End, many horseshoes were still to be found nailed to the thresholds. In 1813 Sir Henry Ellis, editor of several editions of Brand’s Observations, counted no less than seventeen horseshoes nailed against the steps of doors in Monmouth Street. However, when he surveyed the Street again in 1841, only five or six remained.28 Up until at least the 1820s a famous horseshoe was to be found on the door of the one-​time residence of Lady Hatton, wife of Sir Christopher Hatton, in Bleeding-​heartYard. An inhabitant of the house in the early nineteenth century recalled how one old woman begged for admittance repeatedly to satisfy herself that the horseshoe was still secure in its place.29 By the time of the First World War, the horseshoe was still to be found in London houses, but instead of being displayed on the threshold to ward off witchcraft, it was now to be found placed above the bed as a preventative against nightmares. By the twentieth century, then, not only had the display of the overtly superstitious horseshoe become a private affair, but its original purpose as a prophylactic against witches had been lost. This significant withdrawal of the horseshoe from public view seems to have occurred sometime during the 1820s and 1830s. This not only indicates the redundancy of the horseshoe in an urban environment where witchcraft was fast becoming an irrelevancy, but also reflects upon an increasing sense of public embarrassment concerning the visual display of anything superstitious. Such a date for the declining relevancy of witchcraft in London fits well with the time-​scale, posited above, for the declining relevancy of rural symbolism, traditional pastimes, and seasonal, agricultural dependency. The reputations of rural cunning-​folk were often built around their ability to unbewitch humans and livestock, and much of their business consisted of this activity. In London, though, cunning-​folk such as Sarah McDonald were, it seems, more recognized for their prowess at fortune-​telling and fortune-​making than for their unbewitching skills. With the decline of this aspect of their business, many cunning-​folk were, to all intents and purposes, little more than common fortune-​ tellers. Not surprisingly, then, the terms “conjuror,” “wizard,” “white witch,” “wise-​ man” and “wise-​woman” all seem to have been uncommon but not unknown in London. McDonald, for example, was known as a “wise woman,” and the fortune-​ teller James Ball was popularly known as the “wise man of Stepney.” Otherwise, though, “fortune-​teller” and “astrologer” were the only epithets popularly used for occult practitioners. Similarly, a correspondent writing of Bristol in the 1890s,

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remarked that the term “white witch” had become obsolete in the city, and that “planet-​ruler” had become the popular term to describe such people.30 Such shifts in popular terminology are not discernable in rural areas during the same period. There has been a tendency amongst historians of witchcraft and magic to see the belief in witchcraft and other expressions of popular magic as a single cultural phenomenon. Because of this assumption, it has been taken for granted that the social and economic factors which affected the belief in witchcraft also similarly affected the belief in other aspects of popular magic. What this study of witchcraft in London indicates, however, is that different expressions of popular magic decline and survive at different rates depending on particular socio-​economic changes. Thus the divorce from rurality and changing urban community structures seem to have led to a decline in the expression of witchcraft beliefs in London, but did not similarly affect the belief in fortune-​telling, divination and love magic. While the modem urban environment militated against the expression of personal misfortunes and tensions in terms of witchcraft, the same insecurities were still able to find relief in the fortune-​teller’s assurance of better things to come, and in the resort to magical manipulation of the future.

Notes 1 Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550–​ 1650 (Oxford 1989),  241–​4. 2 Jens Christian V.  Johansen, “Denmark:  The Sociology of Accusations”, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford 1990), 30. 3 J. S. Cockburn, ed., Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments, Elizabeth I (London 1980); Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments, James I (London 1982). For an examination of seventeenth-​century witchcraft beliefs in another part of London see Robert Higgins, “Popular Beliefs about Witches: The Evidence from East London, 1645–​60”, East London Record, 4 (1981), 36–​41. 4 Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge 1987), table 3.3. 5 See A Full and True Account of the Apprehending and Taking of Mrs. Sarah Moordike (London 1701); The Tryall of Richard Hathaway (London 1702). 6 Surrey Quarter Sessions Roll, Epiphany 1699/​1700 (m117). 7 A Full and True Account of the Discovery, Apprehending, and Taking of a Notorious Witch (London 1704). 8 The Times, 21 October 1818; Westmorland Gazette, 7 November 1818. 9 Somerset County Herald, 4 September 1858. 10 All the Year Round, 6 November 1869. 11 The Times, 2 June 1862.

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12 Somerset County Herald, 21 June 1862. 13 John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan:  Witchcraft and the Culture of New England (Oxford 1982), 275. 14 Peter Clark and David Souden, Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London 1987), 22. 15 Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, 291. 16 Peter Willmott, Kinship and Urban Community: Past and Present (Leicester 1987). 17 In this instance the ritual involved the street-​door key being placed on the 50th Psalm, the Bible being closed and fastened tightly with a woman’s garter, and then suspended from a nail. Blucher’s name was then repeated three times by one woman, while another recited the following words: “If it turns to thee, thou art the thief, and we are all free”. 18 The Times, 17June 1832. 19 The Times, 17 April 1884. 20 Irwin Press, “Urban Folk Medicine:  A Functional Overview”, American Anthropologist, 80 (1978), 73–​83; 76. 21 Sayyid H. Hurriez, “Folklore, Urbanization and Modernization in Contemporary Africa”, in Szilárd Biernaczky, ed., Folklore in Africa Today (Budapest 1984), 6,  19–​63. 22 Edward Lovett, Magic in Modern London (1925), 67. Areas of north-​east London like Walthamstow and Wanstead still backed onto agricultural areas by 1902. 23 Notes and Queries, 6 October 1855, 260. The charm involved passing the afflicted child over the back and under the belly of the donkey 81 times. 24 Charles Phythian-​Adams, “Milk and Soot: The Changing Vocabulary of a Popular Ritual in Stuart and Hanoverian London”, in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds, The Pursuit of Urban History (London 1983), 104. 25 Mark Judd, “ ‘The Oddest Combination of Town and Country’: Popular Culture and the London Fairs, 1800–​1860”, in John Walton and James Walvin, eds, Leisure in Britain 1780–​1939 (Manchester 1983), 11–​30. 26 Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (New York 1979), 247. 27 John Aubrey, Miscellanies (London 1696), 148. 28 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, revised with additions by Henry Ellis (London 1849), 17. 29 Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York 1932; first published 1841), 558–​9. 30 The Spectator, 17 February 1894, 231.

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Chapter 38

Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofsra WITCHCRAFT AFTER THE WITCH TRIALS

T

H E F E A R O F M A L E F I C I U M persisted in parts of Europe long into the twentieth century. English villagers were occasionally presented to petty courts for “pretended witchcraft” in the 1920s and 1930s, and the practice of bewitchment and counter-​magic was recorded in rural France as late as 1968 (Briggs, 6). Here Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofsra considers the circumstances in which such beliefs continued to function as an explanation of misfortune in the centuries after the witch trials. She also sets out the broad pattern of their slow decline.

Long after the end of the witch trials, thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft still formed part of the cultural repertoire which was available to people in cases of misfortune. For those concerned, witchcraft remained a useful, culturally accepted and therefore rational strategy for dealing with certain problems. It could explain misfortune and the responsibility for it could be attributed to someone else. At the same time, witchcraft was a means of power, an instrument which could be used to damage the position of another person and/​or improve one’s own. To counteract the threat of bewitchment there was the threat of accusation. Nevertheless, although it by no means disappeared in cultural terms, witchcraft had to concede ground, both as regards content and in a social sense. How this process took place in the different European countries can only partially be reconstructed. …

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The range of misfortunes that were linked to bewitchments was greater during the zenith of the witch trials than afterwards. On the one hand, there were misfortunes which could in principle affect a whole community, such as extreme weather conditions or epidemics. Misfortunes of this kind were attributed to the work of witches particularly in the core areas of the witchcraft prosecutions. They were considered by the prosecutors as a serious attack on society, contrived through a demonic pact. Less extensive, but equally dramatic disasters, such as shipwrecks and fires, could just as well be interpreted as results of bewitchment. On the other hand, there were the more personal misfortunes in the form of sickness or injury, damage to possessions (including the sickness of animals), and accidents with butter making and beer brewing. Naturally, with this sort of bewitchment it was not only single persons who were affected, but also whole families. Eventually the range of misfortunes was reduced and only the more or less personal misfortunes remained. Thus in the area of Holland shipwreck was still sometimes connected with witchcraft until virtually the end of the sixteenth century, but not afterwards. In general, the reduction of enchantment to the sphere of personal misfortune coincided with the approaching end of the witch trials. What kinds of personal misfortune were attributed to bewitchments in the different parts of Europe in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which kinds occurred most frequently, which disappeared from the scene, and which remained? From the research materials available the following picture emerges.1 Protracted or otherwise exceptional illnesses of children (but also of adults), and also misfortune in the domestic economic sphere, such as the sickness of animals or the failure of butter making, were attributed to bewitchment. Not surprisingly, the latter forms of misfortune disappeared from the witchcraft repertoire earlier in the towns than in the countryside. Thus, in rural England the pig, “the cottager’s friend”, remained a popular target for bewitchment up to the nineteenth century. In some places earlier, in others later, the realm of bewitchments became reduced to the most personal sphere –​people’s health. In the comparatively rich province of Holland this development had already started in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, and particularly in the rural areas, it presumably took place much later. The more the vulnerability to misfortune in the sphere of the domestic economy decreased, the fewer were the bewitchments in this area. Thus, it has been established for the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and for England that with the coming of the milk factories butter making ceased to be a target for bewitchment. As a form of bewitchment which tended above all to affect girls and younger women, possession occasionally occurred for a considerable time after the end of the witch trials. There are various cases known in England from the second half

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of the eighteenth century and a possible last case in 1815, while a Russian village still experienced a real possession epidemic as late as 1898–​9. In France, too, such attacks of possession did not finish directly after the witch trials, although researchers make no mention of them for the nineteenth century. A similar situation occurred in the Netherlands, but there the number of cases remained comparatively small and there is no further mention of them after the seventeenth century. … Apart from the scope and the frequency of bewitchments, their social complexion also changed. This took place more by fits and starts than is suggested by research conducted as if former societies consisted only of two social strata –​ “elite” and “people” –​each with its own way of thinking and acting. The end of the witch trials did not imply that elites became “enlightened” straightaway, and thereby rose far above the ordinary “superstitious” people. For some time after the witch trials had been discontinued it appears, for instance, that parsons in rural England, Jesuits in the Dutch Republic and priests in French villages and small towns were willing to give active support to victims of bewitchment. From rural municipalities in Twente in the east of the Netherlands and Alsace there are comparatively late examples known from the end of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth century respectively of burgomasters who were involved in witchcraft, sometimes as the next of kin of the bewitched. Moreover, from Dutch, German and English research it can be seen that orthodox Protestant traditions –​ respectively Calvinist, Pietist and Methodist  –​formed a comparatively favourable breeding ground for thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft. For those for whom the Biblical word was law, it was but a small step from the Devil to the witch. Furthermore, in addition to French research, Belgian and Mediterranean studies have shown just how closely the Roman Catholic faith, as it found expression in rural areas, was also intertwined with witchcraft. … Although no bewitchment occurred without misfortune, not every, and also not every kind of misfortune was attributed to witchcraft. Already in the early modern period there were numerous areas of life, for example trade and administration, where bewitchments scarcely occurred. The reduction in the range of misfortunes connected with bewitchments, which occurred earlier in one place and later in another and eventually resulted in only the sickness of humans being left, was to a considerable extent brought about by structural changes in societies. [Owen] Davies mentions the decline in the number of households keeping domestic cattle, the development of factory-​produced butter and cheese, and also the increased possibilities of insurance against risks. This meant that fewer people were vulnerable to misfortune in these fields. A similar reduction in vulnerability in the realm of sickness –​particularly with regard to children –​took considerably

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longer. In connection with the sandy areas and peat lands in Drenthe, [Willem] de Blécourt speaks in this fashion of “the conditions” –​namely the economic, and especially the accompanying demographic developments  –​in which witchcraft accusations could exist, flourish and decline.2 … In the event of misfortune people could draw on a variety of available cultural repertoires: witchcraft was one of them, alongside a wide range of religious and non-​religious forms of knowledge and behaviour, even reaching as far as “science”, including medicine. Generally speaking, people could explain misfortune either in personal or impersonal terms. Following Alan Macfarlane’s classification a “personal” explanation could take three directions: the misfortune could be attributed to God (as punishment for one’s own sins or the sins of the community), to another person (the witch or another scapegoat) or to oneself (one’s own sins or otherwise). An “impersonal” explanation, on the other hand, was based, in the terminology of Macfarlane, on impersonal forces which were set in motion at random (by chance) or according to certain, scientific, mechanistic laws.3 A certain relationship existed between the personal explanations in so far as people sought the (ultimate) cause of misfortunes in themselves. The stronger the sense of sin, the smaller the step to witchcraft. This partly explains why thinking in terms of bewitchment continued to possess relatively great appeal in orthodox Protestant circles, such as the Württemberg Pietists, the English Methodists and the Dutch Bible belt. Cultures of misfortune provided not only explanations of, but also prescriptions for, adversity. In short, where prayers were of no help and the doctor was powerless, the unwitching specialist could bring relief. The effectiveness of the prescription ultimately tipped the scales. As long as doctors were unable to accomplish very much, there was a flourishing demand for unwitching specialists, and they could in turn generate fresh demand. A similar argument applies to the Catholic and sometimes the Protestant clergy; in so far as the clergy were prepared to offer help in unwitching, they contributed to the continuity of witchcraft. This is at the same time one of the ways in which the cultural transmission [of witch beliefs] took place –​through the active help of church officials and unwitching specialists. The practice of bewitching and unwitching, and the attendant gossip and propaganda, were the best guarantees of the continuity of witchcraft. Seeing is believing. In a more indirect way oral tradition also contributed to the cultural transmission of witchcraft. As bewitchment affairs became less common, and the chances decreased of ever coming into contact with witchcraft oneself, this form of tradition became even more important than in the past. However, where the narrative culture lost ground, at least as far as stories of concrete incidents were concerned, the younger generation remained deprived of this source of information. But

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even so, hearing is not seeing. A story about witchcraft from grandmother’s or grandfather’s time lacked the persuasiveness of an actual confrontation with a bewitchment. Our world may not yet be disenchanted, but it does not have far to go. The fact that nowadays some people label themselves as (good) witches shows that the risk of being branded as a maleficent witch has become negligible. The process of “disenchantment” has largely kept pace with that of secularisation. Loss of ground by religion has in general been accompanied by loss of ground by witchcraft. As long as the church cooperated in unwitching, whether intentionally or otherwise, and whether directly or indirectly, then not only was the link with the church strengthened, but the reality of witchcraft was confirmed. And where the Bible was literally interpreted, witchcraft always found a favourable breeding ground.

Notes 1

2 3

For full citations of the archival sources used in this chapter, see the original version in Marijke Gijswijt-​Hofstra, “Witchcraft after the Witch Trials”, in Marijke Gijswijt-​ Hofstra, Brian P. Levack and Roy Porter, eds, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Volume 5 (The Athlone Press, London 1999), 175, 177–​80, 186, 187–​8 –​  Ed. Willem de Blécourt, Termen van toverij (Sun, Nijmegen 1990), 256. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 2nd edn (Routledge, London 1999), 203.

14

PART TEN

Witchcraft today

T

H E L A N G U A G E O F W I T C H C R A F T is flourishing in the twenty-​ first century. It is relatively easy to meet “witches” in the modern West, though they bear little resemblance to the people condemned for maleficium and Devil-​worship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern witchcraft movement is one of the fastest-​growing religions in Europe and North America; it may even be, in Ronald Hutton’s striking phrase, “the only religion England has ever given the world”.1 In a more negative context, the phrase “witch-​hunt” has become an all-​ purpose description for alleged injustice, intolerance and scapegoating. And in one recent controversy it has been invoked with unusual precision and bitterness: the ongoing debate about “satanic ritual abuse”. Both the modern witchcraft movement and allegations about a “satanic underground” raise important questions about the relationship between the present and the past. These are considered in Part Ten. In the first contribution, Diane Purkiss explores the historical claims of contemporary witches or “Wiccans” (39). As she notes, many in the movement claim lineage to an ancient religion suppressed in the early modern age. This religion has affinities to the spurious “witch cult” described by Margaret Murray in the 1930s, discussed by Simpson (11); and the assertion that modern witches are reviving or rediscovering this cult is equally implausible. For Purkiss, these claims illustrate the potentially liberating and subversive nature of popular history, as

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well as showing the limits of academic influence on the genre. “Most of all”, she argues, “modern witches offer a new way to see history from below, history as a space that can be colonised and occupied by people who are not part of academic institutions”. Unfettered by the standards of conventional scholarship, they can use historical narratives “to tell stories about their own identities and about power and its operations”. The complex relationship between Wiccans and the history of witchcraft is explored further by Ethan Doyle White (40). Like Purkiss and other scholars of the modern “craft”, Doyle White notes the importance that its practitioners attach to the connections between witchcraft past and present. While the founders of the movement claimed, erroneously, that they were continuing a cult repressed in the early modern period, some Wiccans have accepted that this claim is unsustainable. Doyle White considers the tensions that this has created. Responses range from outright denial of the sceptics’ arguments to more subtle, and supple, acknowledgements that modern pagan witchcraft originated in the twentieth century but contains links to older traditions. For some, this means that aspects of the craft  –​such as the practice of certain forms of magic  –​ derive from activities established in antiquity; others suggest that the beliefs of modern witches merely resemble older forms of spirituality, though they cannot be traced to them directly; and for some, the historical claims of the movement are essentially symbolic. As Doyle White observes, none of these responses is entirely successful. It should also be noted that these various strategies are often combined in a kind of creative fuzziness. Assertions of the symbolic value of the history of witchcraft can segue easily, and invisibly, into the claim that modern pagan witches are continuing ancient traditions. More fundamentally, the acceptance by some contemporary witches that “the universal old religion may not have existed geographically” exists alongside a tendency to use the historical claims of the modern witchcraft movement as if they were matters of fact.2 This ambiguity has interesting effects. Some of these have been described by the sociologist T.  M. Luhrmann: [They] have it both ways. They appeal to the past, and claim a distinguished, blood-​ s tained lineage with all the emotional depth which that entails. Thousands of years of magical practice imply a solidity against which contemporary scepticism seems a minor irritation. Yet magicians free themselves from the need to prove their historical accuracy and the cultural pertinence of the appropriate mythology by arguing that history can serve the role of personal metaphor or myth.

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This is a powerful and attractive device. As Luhrmann points out, even when the invented histories of modern witches are openly described as myths, they retain “the aura of genuine history, meaningful within the authoritative canon of apparently objective science”.3 As Doyle White notes, modern pagan witches have always read selectively from the history of European witch trials. The image of the child-​killing, Devil-​ worshipping witch that emerged in early modern demonology was rejected by twentieth-​century pagans, who viewed themselves instead as descendants of a peaceful fertility cult. A much darker version of witchcraft –​and one nearer the beliefs that contributed to some large-​scale prosecutions in the pre-​modern age –​ has persisted in some parts of contemporary Western culture. By far its most dangerous manifestation is the concept of “satanic ritual abuse”. Allegations of satanic abuse can be dated to the publication in 1980 of Michelle Remembers, a “survivor’s testimony” of life in a clandestine organisation of Devil-​worshipping child-​killers in Montreal. Subsequently, a series of reports concerning satanic abuse were made to police and social workers in North America and the United Kingdom. Many of these, like Michelle Remembers itself, came from adult survivors of abuse that had apparently occurred in childhood. Other allegations, including most of those in Britain, were made by children taken into care on suspicion of abuse. Some of these disclosures resulted in the removal of children from other families, and the prosecution of adults for alleged participation in demonic rites. In 1990 the children of two families were removed from their parents on the Orkney Islands in Scotland, and returned amid a storm of media interest when a judge ruled there was no case to answer. Four years later six men were convicted of crimes including ritual abuse in Pembroke in South Wales.4 In 1993 the sociologist Jean La Fontaine published a government-​commissioned inquiry into eighty-​four cases of alleged child abuse in a ritual context, which concluded that there was no evidence of organised satanic abuse in the U.K.5 There is, nonetheless, a continuing debate about the existence of the phenomenon, which has inspired passionate contributions from therapists, police officers and academics.6 Many critics of ritual abuse allegations have described them as a modern “demonology”, and some historians have echoed this theme. Thus Robert Walinski-​ Kiehl concluded an article on the trial of child witches in early modern Germany by noting that historians can no longer “console themselves with the comforting knowledge that satanic scares involving children have been banished from the historical stage never to return”.7 More trenchantly, Robin Briggs has asked how long it will be “before the renewed enthusiasm for the death penalty in the United States leads to someone being executed for, in all but name, being a witch?”8 It is more

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surprising, perhaps, to find that some specialists who believe in satanic abuse have also referred to early modern witchcraft:  both Brett Kahr and Martin Katchen have suggested that child-​killing sects did indeed exist in the pre-​industrial period.9 The analogy between witchcraft and satanic abuse is irresistible but only partially true. Modern accounts of satanic crime contain few references to harmful magic, which was the most widely accepted aspect of pre-​industrial witchcraft. While the testimonies of alleged survivors often mention supernatural events –​such as flight, bodily transformations or the physical appearance of the Devil –​these details are generally dismissed by therapists and social workers, whose cultural background does not permit them to accept the reality of such things. In effect, the concept of satanic abuse is a secularised version of the sabbat:  the secret gathering of satanists to perform obscene acts of worship, indulge in unlawful sexual acts and murder young children. In Chapter 41, Jean La Fontaine explores the parallels between satanic abuse and satanic witchcraft. She points to some disturbing similarities between the two phenomena, both in the content of allegations and the attitudes of those who accept them. She argues that the supporters and sceptics of satanic abuse allegations tend to use two different approaches to evidence –​both of which were also employed in the age of witch trials. Modern sceptics echo the inquisitor Alonso Salazar in demanding external verification of descriptions of sabbats; believers, in contrast, tend to accept the authority of child and adult “survivors” and the clinical experience of professionals in the field. There is a parallel here between the Renaissance advocates of empirical scrutiny, such as Friedrich Spee, and demonologists such as Jean Bodin who argued from expert opinion and the evidence of confessions (Krause, 32). It follows from La Fontaine’s distinction that both believers and sceptics can accept the potential reality of the crime –​as Spee and Salazar did –​ and sufficient corroboration could persuade sceptics that it had really occurred in some cases. In practice, however, very little corroboration has ever been found. As Richard Jenkins notes in a survey of the literature, there remains an “obstinate absence of the kind of evidence that one might expect the extensive organized murder and abuse of children to produce”.10 This certainly applies to the British allegations investigated by La Fontaine. Tellingly, she concludes that belief in satanic abuse –​and indeed satanic witchcraft –​is untouched by the lack of external evidence because of the “authoritative opinions” on which it is based. For sceptics such as La Fontaine, the language of witchcraft implicitly underlines the danger of satanic abuse beliefs: the trial of alleged diabolists in the past casts an uncomfortable light on the present. It is possible, however, to move in the opposite direction. Before the 1980s the concept of satanic witchcraft belonged mainly to

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the distant past and African tribal cultures. In both cases, there was a temptation among Western thinkers to regard the idea as “primitive” or “irrational”. It is much harder to sustain this view when the advocates of a “satanic underworld” are Western professionals, and their concerns are given space in serious newspapers and academic books. Thus the modern experience of satanic abuse reduces the distance between ourselves and the demonologists of a previous age. One consequence, perhaps, is to make us appreciate the appalling problems involved in dealing with secret and apparently terrible crimes. The awful content of the allegations puts a high price on scepticism, since to disbelieve the supposed victim is to allow the atrocities to go on. Once the idea of the witches’ sabbat was widely disseminated in Renaissance Europe, those concerned with the threat of satanic witchcraft faced a similar dilemma. Indeed, their situation was worse than ours, as they had less room for scepticism. The universal belief in magic and the power of the Devil meant that no one could identify impossible elements in witchcraft confessions; and the scholastic tradition of arguing from authoritative sources discouraged the kind of empirical investigation that could expose them as fantasies. Viewed in this light, the judicious caution of thinkers such as Weyer and Salazar becomes more impressive; but it is also unsurprising that many Europeans came to believe that action was required to suppress a satanic conspiracy. The fact that our contemporaries have sought to suppress a variant of the same idea, and made dreadful mistakes in the process, may help us towards a better understanding of our early modern forebears. If satanic ritual abuse is a modified version of the sabbat, other negative ideas about witchcraft have persisted in modernised forms in Western culture. One of these is the association between witchcraft and the Devil. As Julian Goodare has noted (43), this connection is seldom made in popular entertainment that deals explicitly with demonic themes; but it has emerged in recent controversies in America about the series of children’s books and films about the boy-​wizard Harry Potter. Marion Gibson considers these controversies in Chapter  42. For Gibson, the attacks on the Potter franchise by some American Christians, who view it as an invitation to children to delve into satanism and the occult, can be explained largely by the transplantation of a distinctively British story into a different culture. She also notes the failure of the two sides in the controversy to understand their opponents’ perspective, with many defenders of the Potter series reduced to dismissive incredulity by the whole affair. Such bemusement is unsurprising given the wider reluctance in much of the Western world to give credence to allegations of supernatural witchcraft  –​as opposed to the non-​magical version of the sabbat at the heart of satanic ritual

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abuse. (Indeed, the existence of a substantial number of Christians in the United States who do take such things seriously is one of the cultural differences behind the Harry Potter controversy.) The fact that most Westerners find the supernatural assumptions that once underpinned witch trials simply incredible has larger implications for the portrayal of these events today. As Julian Goodare observes (43), many popular representations of the age of witch trials fail to take the historical fear of witchcraft seriously: instead, they assume that prosecutions were motivated by other things, such as jealousy, political vendettas or greed. This explains many enduring misrepresentations of the history of witchcraft. There is also a persistent tendency to assume that those involved in the trials –​when they were not driven by ulterior motives  –​were simply irrational. At one level such misconceptions are unimportant:  as Goodare points out, we can hardly blame people for lacking expertise on the history of the subject. The deep-​rooted unwillingness to treat allegations of witchcraft in the past as sincere and rational does, however, indicate a cultural blind spot. It is the kind of distancing mechanism that prevents people from acknowledging their own potential complicity in terrible mistakes, by imagining that only malicious or unreasonable individuals could commit them. The history of witch trials overturns this comforting myth. It is not surprising, then, that many popular ideas about “witch-​hunts” present a less plausible but more palatable alternative.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

7 8

Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press 1999), vii. The quotation is from the Wiccan writer Margot Adler, who is not immune to this ambiguity. See Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today, 2nd edn (Beacon 1986), 56–​8. T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Picador 1989), 265. Byron Rogers, “The Child Snatchers”, Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1999. I  am grateful to Irena Kruszona for alerting me to this case. Jean La Fontaine, The Extent and Nature of Organized Ritual Abuse (HMSO 1994). For a survey of the literature on satanic ritual abuse in the context of witchcraft, see Richard Jenkins, “Continuity and Change: Social Science Perspectives on European Witchcraft”, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, eds, Witchcraft Historiography (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), esp. 212–16. Robert Walinski-​Kiehl, “The Devil’s Children:  Child Witch-​Trials in Early Modern Germany”, Continuity and Change, 11:2 (1996), 186. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours (HarperCollins 1996), 411.

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9

10

Brett Kahr, “The Historical Foundations of Ritual Abuse”, in Valerie Sinason, ed., Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse (Routledge 1994), 52–​3; Martin Katchen, “The History of Satanic Religions”, in David Sakheim and Susan Devine, eds, Out of Darkness: Exploring Satanism and Ritual Abuse (Lexington Books 1992), 1–​19. Jenkins, “Continuity and Change”, 215.

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Chapter 39

Diane Purkiss MODERN WITCHES AND THEIR PAST

I

N 1 9 3 9 A N E N G L I S H C I V I L S E R V A N T named Gerald Gardner claimed to have discovered a coven of witches led by “Old Dorothy”, who initiated him into the group’s rituals and showed him its sacred books. The coven, and others like it, had supposedly maintained a clandestine existence during centuries of persecution; but with Gardner’s assistance and the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, its teachings were made available to new generations of earth-​worshipping “witches”. Gardner’s foundation myth is wholly implausible, not least because there is no evidence that a witch cult ever existed in early modern England or Europe (Simpson, 11). As Diane Purkiss argues here, the improbability of such claims has not discouraged modern witches from fashioning their own histories from a blend of esoteric and fictional texts, as well as themes borrowed from academic writing. For Purkiss, the appropriation of the past by modern witches presents a radical challenge to the conventions of historical scholarship, but also one that is potentially liberating.

Witches have recently become rather worried about their history. Despite the ongoing tension between fiction and authenticity in modern witchcraft, or perhaps because of it, many modern witches are anxious about the validity of [Gerald] Gardner’s pronouncements, and especially about the authenticity of his Book of Shadows. This is the text Gardner claimed to have obtained from Old Dorothy’s

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coven; he identified it as a sixteenth-​century witch’s notebook. Readers within and outside modern witchcraft have disputed this claim. Gardner’s Book of Shadows is an implausible pastiche of Elizabethan English; it refers to witches in England being burned alive for their crimes (which never happened); it contains clear borrowings from the work of Aleister Crowley; it also contains extensive borrowings from a magazine article on an Old Sanskrit manuscript.1 Gardner admitted to Doreen Valiente that borrowings were necessary because the hereditary coven’s surviving rituals were fragmentary. What modern witches want to know is whether Gardner had any contact with hereditary witches. While some witches are happy to argue that Gardner’s writings represent a triumph of creative imagination, others are bothered by the proposition that the Old Religion is no older than the National Health Service. The entire dispute shows that the oldness of modern witchcraft is important to it. Even those who, like Zsuzsanna Budapest, are cavalier about Gardner claim that witchcraft is known to be ancient: “I don’t know whether Goddess-​worship is 70,000 or 7,000  years old”, says Budapest, but 7,000 years still sounds pretty ancient, quite different from seventy years. For other witches, attempts to establish the precise age of witchcraft are somehow patriarchal: Brooke writes breezily that “the argument as to whether our witchcraft traditions are ‘authentic’ seems to be the usual male intellectual posturing, debating the number of angels on a pinhead”.2 She adheres in every page of her book to the idea that witchcraft as Goddess religion is very old, and sees no need to justify this. … Or the witch can claim an alternative, non-​Gardnerian hereditary tradition: one of the witches who spoke to me told me that she has been trained by a New Forest coven who were not Gardnerians, but traditional hereditary witches. Similarly, Claire Nahmad claims that “I was fortunate to inherit, as a child, the traditional wisdom of the Craft from my maternal grandmother”.3 Many other writers have made this claim, not necessarily untruthfully; the point is that the age of their traditions is important to them. Though enthusiastic about ritual, witches are resistant to its hierarchical enforcement, preferring to emphasise “what works for you”. So some witches see the construction of historical reality in experiential terms: “it doesn’t matter whether the grandmother was a physical reality, or a figment of our imagination. One is subjective, one is objective, but we experience both”.4 The solipsism involved, however, constitutes a substantial challenge to norms of historical or philosophical veracity. It removes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, licensing the use of both in terms of “what works” rather than “what’s true”. This is an exceptionally appropriate response to Gardner’s apparent blurring of those boundaries.This valorisation of historical creativity rather than historical authority no doubt explains why women have been able to be so prominent in modern

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witchcraft; individual histories obviate the need to do battle with institutional and social understandings of whose word goes, understandings that are invariably gendered. Whether seen as fantasy or reality, witchcraft comes from a grandmother and not from a granddaughter. The witch is a vision from the past, for only in the past can an alternative to the modern world be imagined. The sense of connection with a lost past is important to modern witches in part because they see themselves as the recoverers of the values lost to modern industrial society. … The modern witch’s history of herself is a lapsarian narrative. Indeed, there is not one Fall, but many. Characteristically these include the loss of Atlantis, the coming of Christianity to Britain, the death of Arthur, the promulgation of a papal bull against witches, the Burning Times, the rise of the modern industrialised world with its disregard for and despoliation of nature, the rise of Enlightenment science and medicine. Such lapses or losses are followed by attempts at recovery, in both senses of the word, in which witches are portrayed as struggling to regain what has been lost. This defines modern witches as both restorers and inventors of a lost tradition. This kind of narrative can be closely paralleled in nationalist political rhetoric, which is perhaps why some occult writings bear too-​evident traces of such rhetorics, despite the general liberalism of modern witchcraft. The story of idyll, decline and active recovery of a lost and more desirable past has become associated with both fascism and conservatism:  it is a short step from kindly, nature-​loving witches to spinsters on bicycles going to Evensong, partly because both would-​be utopias embody ideas of natural order and organic wholeness in the feminine. However, most actual spinsters on bicycles would not feel very comfortable with the imaginative and creative play with the sacred and with history which is the keystone of the modern witch’s sense of empowerment. When viewed as a figuration, the modern witch is only too easily understood in essentialist and heritage-​industry terms; when understood as an active subject, she seems much more liberated and liberating. Looked at from a sceptical point of view, then, the historical narrative of modern witchcraft is not problematic because it is a fantasy; it is problematic as a fantasy. The meanings it produces about past golden ages are a refusal of modernity which owes more to Romanticism than feminism. The myth of a lost matriarchy is disabling rather than enabling for women. To relegate female power in politics or religion to a lost past, to associate it with the absence of civilisation, technology and modernity, is to write women out of the picture. To confine female power to the marginal space of a reinvented religion which rejects any vestige of mainstream power is to reify women’s exclusion from the public sphere. This explains why feminist versions of modern witchcraft are so often criticised

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(sometimes wrongly) for political quietism. The recovery of a pre-​civilised space does not sort too well with mixing it in the corridors of power or even in pagan campaigning groups. Although the myths of modern witchcraft have inspired some women’s activism, this has largely been confined to causes like pacifism and environmentalism, most notably in the UK at Greenham Common. While these activities are valuable, feminist witches surface as feminist witches less often in more narrowly feminist campaigns, such as securing equal pay or fighting for reproductive rights. Witches emerge only rarely from pagan activities to make common cause with other women, and as long as this is so, other women will continue to misjudge them. Moreover, modern witches’ claims to be ignoring history cannot really be sustained. They are also using history, in the sense that their own historical narratives derive from an eclectic mix of historical texts, some of which were once mainstream. The process by which the non-​specialist reader makes such selections may not be to the liking of professional historians, but it does provide an intriguing instance of the impossibility of the profession controlling popular history. Ironically, this is reminiscent of the early modern period, where a village miller nicknamed Menocchio could appropriate the writings of humanists and theologians to synthesise a world-​picture which they could never have intended.5 In similar ways, modern witches have used a pot-​pourri of philosophers and historians to synthesise their own world-​view. Many, perhaps most, modern witches are passionate autodidacts, often bibliomaniacs whose houses are stuffed with books. Many also write:  not only books, but journals, magazines, letters to mainstream and occult presses, samizdat rituals, prayers, polemics which circulate within their own covens or activist groups. They give talks, lectures and courses of instruction. Still others paint or sculpt or compose songs and music. Witches are not dutiful consumers of the truths of others, but makers of their own truths, though these by no means evade altogether the constraints of ideology. As creators, they recall Michel de Certeau’s useful term “poaching”,6 a process of reading whereby the protocols of authorship and ownership of a text, and hence the protocols of intentionality, are discarded in favour of a mode of reading which creates by bricolage a new text. Since no form of reading could be less academic, as de Certeau points out, this challenges and also reuses academic history. It brings a selection of academics into the sphere of the popular, but it also disrespectfully ignores academic protocols. In a further twist of irony, it is the work of Carlo Ginzburg that is currently being taken up and reshaped by modern witches, displacing “older” histories such as those of Margaret Murray. One of the witches I  met gave me an account of her own participation in night battles (under that name), which had, she said,

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been going on since the Middle Ages between white and black witches. Her own most recent encounter of that kind, she said, had been over the Twyford Down roadworks, but this was a mere skirmish in comparison with the last big night battle, which had taken place during the Second World War and had resulted in a victory for the white witches which had prevented a German invasion. She added that “some book by Clineburg, I  think” had described these battles. Ginzburg’s narrative of what Friulian peasants thought they were doing has become a narrative of what they really were doing. This witch is unusual in dramatising her role as a fighter against evil; most witches choose less militaristic metaphors. What is striking, however, is her use of an academic historical narrative to fashion an identity for herself as the foe of evil witches. Self-​fashioning does not, however, mean that modern witches are immune to all the effects of ideology. Rather, their choice of historical texts for validation is determined by their perception of how useful such texts will be in subtending their notion of what witchcraft is. Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, the dominant voices in English witchcraft studies for over a decade, are rarely read by modern witches, and none of those I met had even heard of them. Nor have I ever seen Religion and the Decline of Magic in an occult bookshop, perhaps because witchcraft is not mentioned in the title, perhaps because the second half of the title seems to modern witches either gloomy or simply silly. What can be poached is limited by the desires and fantasies of the reader, and by the limits set by the text concerned. While Ginzburg uncovers a hidden tradition in the depositions of peasants, following a narrative path familiar from Leland and Murray as well as Gardner, Thomas lends much less credence to the statements of accused witches, rarely quoting their words and seemingly disregarding their own beliefs about themselves. Many feminist academics might agree with witches that this has the effect of replacing a focus on women with a focus on men. Moreover, what in academic circles might seem like rigorous consideration of evidence strikes pagans as narrow-​mindedness; they would wonder why Thomas never consults materials and histories handed down orally, for instance. … Modern witches offer a new way to see history from below, history as a space that can be colonised and occupied by people who are not part of academic institutions. Because they are not constrained to interpret the witch according to the rules of evidence, modern witches have recovered the early modern possibility of appropriating her in order to tell stories about their own identities and about power and its operations. In this at least, they are right to say that they are reviving an early modern popular practice. Modern witches’ histories of witchcraft represent a much cleaner break with academic values than anything feminist historians have produced or have wished

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to produce. Far more than Derrida or Foucault, popular history disregards the assumptions which make Enlightenment history possible. Genuine indifference to the boundaries between memory and invention, fact and fancy, truth and fiction must alarm, and some of this alarm is perfectly justified. Nonetheless, it is striking that culturally, the second of each of these pairs tends to be coded as feminine, as is the personal, the therapeutic self-​inscription. Given that such coding is itself the outcome of a history in which Romanticism played a key role –​given, that is, that the same factors which shaped the figure of the modern witch now oppose her to history by presenting her as “too soft” on fact –​the modern witch’s identity as a figure in history and as maker of history and its rules could come to represent the irruption of “femininity”, with its semiotic uncertainties, its high affect, its lack of interest in empirical scrutiny, into the masculine space of historical empiricism. Perhaps modern witches show what feminist history might be like if it really abandoned empiricism altogether instead of simply calling it into question from time to time. The vision might appall: modern witchcraft can be solipsistic, mired in a self-​centred present, and far too willing to ignore inconvenient truths. On the other hand, a feminist history which sought to draw on the strengths of this movement rather than simply pointing to its weaknesses might be exciting. Like modern witches, it might be speculative, unreliable, often wrong, sometimes ridiculous, politically very useful, other than authoritative, and absolutely scandalous in the academy. … What if women writing history allowed their invention to play about freely in the fields of the past, searching for fantasies that might be at least temporarily enabling or interesting, rather than (or as well as) for new ways to do empirical history? What if we were all less concerned to win the admiration of non-​or anti-​ feminist male scholars, and more eager to excite or influence other women? I am not suggesting that women are incapable of empirical history, or that empirical history is always oppressive. Sometimes an unknown truth is the most explosive thing there is, and there are appalling risks involved in parading fantasy as truth. However, this should not rule out exploiting the power of imagination or fantasy about the past. Modern witches put the project of feminist history into question more than any other group, because only they suggest that it may be less important to feminism and even to women to know the truth than to invent a good fantasy. We could try to think about how to harness the power of the imagination and the power of feeling without abandoning the project of telling the truth. We might begin seriously trying to invent ways to do history which allow for storytelling, mythmaking; ways of understanding history which allow us to see women mythmakers as historians, women’s poetry or painting or fiction as history.

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Notes 1

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Gardner’s own works are The Meaning of Witchcraft (Magickal Childe, New York 1982, first published 1959), and Witchcraft Today (Magickal Childe, New  York 1954). For Gardner’s borrowings, see Rosemary Elizabeth Guiley, “Witchcraft as Goddess-​Worship”, in Carolyne Larrington, ed., The Feminist Companion to Mythology (Pandora, London 1992), 411–​24. Elizabeth Brooke, A Woman’s Book of Shadows:  Witchcraft:  A Celebration (Women’s Press, London 1993), 59. Claire Nahmad, Earth Magic: A Wisewoman’s Guide to Herbal, Astrological, and Other Folk Remedies (Rider, London 1993), 5. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, revised edn, (Beacon, Boston, MA 1986), 90. Carlo Ginzburg reconstructs Menocchio’s story in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-​Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Routledge, London 1980). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F.  Rendall (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 1984), 175.

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Chapter 40

Ethan Doyle White WICCA AS WITCHCRAFT

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H E H I S T O R Y O F W I C C A as a new religious movement has emerged recently as a subject in its own right. This has made an impact within the Wiccan community itself. In this extract Ethan Doyle White explores the complex and sometimes troubled relationship between modern Pagan witches and their own past, as well as the history of witchcraft. As he shows, some modern Pagan witches have acknowledged the relatively recent origins of their movement, while seeking in various ways to preserve its association with the historical figure of the witch. He also considers the reasons why the name “witch” retains its appeal to many contemporary Pagans. His analysis complements that of Diane Purkiss (39), and relates to Julian Goodare’s wider discussion of representations of witchcraft in modern Western societies (43).

Wicca arose out of nineteenth and early twentieth-​century ideas about what the alleged witches of early modern Christendom really believed and practised, and as a result the religious movement has always been deeply intertwined with the term “witchcraft” and wider Western understandings of how a witch looks and behaves. Indeed, when the religion was in its infancy, it was known largely as “Witchcraft” or the “Witch-​cult”, with pioneering practitioners like Gerald Gardner (1884–​ 1964) and Doreen Valiente (1922–​1999) using these contentious words prominently in their book titles. The term “Wicca” only began to be used as an alternate

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name for the religion in the early 1960s, when it was popularized largely by the burgeoning Alexandrian “tradition”, as Wiccan denominations are known.1 While “Wicca” would grow in popularity, and today is the name by which the faith is most commonly known, the idea that the religion is a form of witchcraft remains strong. Thus, becoming a Wiccan entails becoming a witch –​a term used for both male and female practitioners –​and involves a process of identification with those who were persecuted and often brutally killed as witches in past centuries. As the religion emerged, many practitioners saw those who suffered in the trials as their forebears, thus adopting the Murrayite witch-​cult hypothesis which provided Wicca with a history stretching back far into the reaches of the ancient past. As historians challenged and demolished this theory in the 1960s and 1970s, many Wiccans were shocked. Some accepted that the theory was not factually legitimate, instead portraying the Murrayite story as a mythical history for (what they often call) “the Craft” and seeking to emphasize the religion’s other historical antecessors. Other practitioners however vehemently defended Murray’s hypothesis against academic critique, viewing it as a significant article of faith.

THE WITCH AS POSITIVE ANTITYPE From the Biblical Witch of Endor right through to L. Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West, most images of the witch that exist in Western culture are inherently maleficent, negative, and anti-​social. This being the case, the question must be asked as to why any non-​vindictively minded individual in the contemporary Western world would seek to identify as a witch? One clear reason for doing so was pointed out by scholar and Wiccan practitioner Joanne Pearson when she noted that while often malicious, the witch is nevertheless a powerful figure throughout folklore and literature, one who can curse and heal, transform her enemies into frogs, fly through the air, and see the future. In proclaiming themselves to be witches, Wiccans can therefore identify themselves as tapping into that symbolic source of power.2 However, there are other factors at play too; one of the world’s foremost scholars in the study of Western esotericism,Wouter J. Hanegraaff, has asserted that Wiccans like Gardner viewed the witch as a “positive antitype”, one which gains its power through its “implicit criticism of dominant Judeo-​ Christian and Enlightenment values”. Hence, for those who wish to reject the values of mainstream Western society, the witch —​who was traditionally viewed as being opposed to those values —​ becomes a positive figure; as Hanegraaff put it, “there is hardly a better way to express one’s rejection of the values informing mainstream society than claiming

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the name of its traditional enemies”.3 Expanding on this idea, folklorist Sabina Magliocco highlighted that the Wiccan adoption of the term “witch” can be seen as a part of its “oppositional culture”, through which it establishes its difference from mainstream society and thus consolidates its own unique identity.4 This question is one that is particularly pertinent when it comes to feminist forms of the Craft. In the words of anthropologist Kathryn Rountree, why would any feminist want to “embrace a label which epitomized the misogyny of patriarchal cultures”?5 However, as religious studies scholar Cynthia Eller noted, within the feminist spirituality movement, describing oneself as a “witch” was “often a feminist statement, the symbolic encapsulation of a feminist political program”, with Rountree herself accepting that for these Pagans the witch became an image of “female power which lies outside male control”.6 Thus, the act of defining oneself as a “witch” can be an attractive prospect for those —​particularly women —​ who are unhappy with dominant cultural and religious values, rooted as they are in Christianity, patriarchy, and capitalism, and who feel powerless or marginalized within their society. Whilst Wiccans have therefore adopted the term “witch” as a form of self-​identification, they have only done so on the condition that the image and understanding of what a “witch” is be defined on their own terms.7 As Hanegraaff noted, while early Wiccans claimed to be the spiritual descendants of the witches persecuted in the Early Modern trials, they did not adopt the Early Modern stereotype of the witch in its entirety. Instead they appropriated it in a dialectical manner, by rejecting some elements of the stereotype (infanticide, cannibalism, anti-​ Christian blasphemy), embracing others (secretive nocturnal meetings, predominantly female following), and giving a new meaning to several more (interpreting Satan as the pre-​Christian Horned God, viewing the malevolent magic as benevolent magic, and converting sexual orgies into a sex-​magic ritual termed the Great Rite).8 In doing so they created an image of the witch that was less malevolent, less controversial, and more to their own liking. Further, they made the effort to actively attack this original stereotype as a perversion of the truth; in early Wiccan narratives, the witches of the Early Modern [era] were not nefarious Satanists bent on harming others, but gentle practitioners of a pre-​Christian religion. In this way, Wiccans were claiming ownership of the very idea of the “witch”, a controversial move given that there were others —​among them Satanists and non-​religious feminists —​who also laid claim to that same concept. The new image of the witch that Wicca purported was a far cry from the child-​devouring Devil-​worshippers who haunted the Early Modern imagination. Pearson commented that many Wiccans hold to “a perception of the witch as being close to nature, untrammeled by modernity, indigenous to Britain and Europe,

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and representing a kind of ‘alternative spirituality’ as opposed to ‘institutionalized religion’ ”.9 This witch was not a diabolist but “a healer-​herbalist [and] all-​round good egg there to help her community”.10 Similarly, anthropologist Loretta Orion noted that American Wiccans identified with the witch as a symbol of “self-​ sufficiency where the individual’s authority is being eroded” by “an encroaching bureaucracy”.11 In this, it seems that Wiccans were drawing more upon the image of the cunning-​folk or professional folk magicians than that of the witch, in doing so actively conflating the two figures.12 Furthermore, in cleansing the image of the witch of its negative connotations, various Wiccans provided alternate etymologies for the term “witchcraft”. Rather than accepting that the word, which stems from the Old English wicca, was initially used explicitly in reference to malevolent practitioners of magic, in various Craft books one finds the erroneous claim that the words “witchcraft” and “Wicca” stem from an Old English word for “wisdom”.13 In this way, there was a real Wiccan process of whitewashing the image of the historical witch so that it would better suit the purposes of modern Wiccans themselves. It is also noteworthy that in describing themselves as witches, Wiccans are drawing links between themselves and the victims of the Early Modern witch trials, a period that Wiccans often term “The Burning Times”. Wiccan literature commonly exaggerates the intensity of the trials; while scholarship currently puts the death toll at between 40,000 and 60,000, Gardner claimed that nine million “were tortured to death”.14 While this hyperbolic claim is no longer common, exaggerated figures still appear in Wiccan publications, as with Silver RavenWolf’s (b.1956) statement that “over two million people were murdered by the Witch Finders”.15 There are various reasons why Wiccans have incorporated an emphasis on the trials —​and more specifically, the torture and executions —​into their own history. As Hanegraaff noted, part of the explanation is that Wiccans are reminding mainstream society of its culpability in the witch trials while expressing solidarity with the victims.16 A  more important factor was highlighted by the sociologist Helen A. Berger when she suggested that the witch trials served to create a “community of memory” among the Wiccan community, with similarities to the ways in which Jews relate to the Holocaust. Berger noted that this phenomenon continued to exist even after most Wiccans had rejected Murray’s witch-​ cult theory, suggesting that practitioners made use of it because it served as a unifying point for their community, which is otherwise made up of individuals from disparate ethnic and religious backgrounds.17 Wicca’s emphasis on the witch trials as a tragedy with ongoing resonance for their community closely mirrors that of sectors within the second-​wave feminist movement. In the latter, various activists have portrayed the trials as a patriarchal suppression of women driven by the male-​dominated

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medical profession’s desire to eradicate female healers and midwives; for certain radical sectors of the feminist movement, the trials have become “a Holocaust of their own”, much as they have done for Wiccans.18 To state that all Wiccans reclaim “witch” and embrace it as a badge of pride would however be misleading, for there are a distinct minority within the community who are uneasy with it, finding the term a little embarrassing or fearing repercussions as a result of the hostile reaction that it can generate.19 The historian Ronald Hutton aptly noted that “those who take on the identity of witches … are only safe in a society which does not believe in witchcraft”.20 Problematically, in some parts of the world where Wicca is presently active, beliefs regarding the reality of malevolent witchcraft do persist. The debate over the validity of the term has become particularly heated in South Africa, where “witchcraft” is closely associated with the malevolent practice of magic among indigenous communities; in this context a “good witch” is an oxymoron. As a result, some Pagan groups in the country have campaigned for Wiccans to cease using the term “witch” as a self-​ descriptor.21 Nevertheless, various South African Wiccans continue to adhere to it; the priestess Donna Darkwolf Vos for instance referred to what she unusually spelled “witchCraft”.22 Moreover, debates over the appropriateness of “witchcraft” are not restricted to developing nations; on the basis of her research into feminist Pagan Goddess-​worshippers in New Zealand, Kathryn Rountree noted that about a third of those she interviewed either eschewed the term “witch” or were ambivalent about using it.23

WICCA AND ITS HISTORY It would be wrong to assume that early Wiccans accepted Murray’s theory simply because they knew of no alternative. Gardner stated that he was aware of differing interpretations regarding the witch trials but that he defended Murray’s thesis because “its findings accord with my own experience”.24 The prominent US Wiccan Leo Martello (1931–​2000) noted that while he was aware that Murray’s theories had been criticized, he stood by her original hypothesis; in his view, post-​Murrayite historians had been unable to find solid textual proof of the cult because knowledge about it had been passed down through oral tradition, leaving little textual trace.25 Without such documented proof of the cult, various Wiccans sought out evidence for it elsewhere, including in folklore. In Britain, for instance, practitioners highlighted folkloric stories that associated witches with various megalithic monuments to assert that such sites had been places used by the cult for ritual purposes. In doing so, they were both claiming to have found evidence

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to defend Murray’s theory while also legitimi[z]‌ing contemporary Wiccan usage of such sites too.26 The increasing academic critique and demolition of the Murrayite theory certainly exerted some influence on Wiccan understandings of their faith’s history, eroding what Kenneth Rees has called the Wiccan “myth of continuity”.27 How this was achieved is not entirely clear, although presumably it would have been via those practitioners who took a keen interest in witchcraft historiography. The US Wiccan Margot Adler (1946–​2014) noted that by 1975, most of her fellow religionists had recognized that there were flaws in the Murray thesis, even if they did not reject it completely.28 Stating that “invented history is satisfying myth”, in 1989 the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann commented that while some Wiccans accepted the Murrayite theory, others qualified it as “symbolic”, viewing it as “metaphorical truth” despite its “factual falsehood”.29 In 1999, the sociologist Helen Berger stated that most of the practitioners that she had encountered did not “literally interpret the myth”, while the historian Ronald Hutton noted that at a London event in 1990, he overheard Wiccan spokespeople “declare, one by one, that its traditional historiography should be regarded as myth and metaphor rather than as literal history” —​at the same time, he accepted that “the foundation myth” was still adhered to literally by many practitioners.30 Seeking to unearth the factual history of the Craft, in 1999 he published The Triumph of the Moon, in which he explored Wicca’s early development. The book had a strong impact on Britain’s Pagan community, with some talking of a “Huttonisation” of Wiccan history.31 Anthropologist Helen Cornish was studying the community in this period, and noted that after the book’s emergence many Wiccans made an effort to be very clear about dividing the mythical from the historical. Cornish believed that this was tied to “a growing conviction that an irrational sense of history is an obstacle to mainstream acceptance” and that by allowing and encouraging rigorous academic research into their history, Wiccans could escape their marginalized and powerless position in society by proving that they were “no longer gullible romantics”.32 In this way, Hutton’s tome served as something of a catalyst for large sectors of the Wiccan community to recognize that theirs was not the survival of the Murrayite witch-​cult, but a new religious movement. Indeed, by 2007, Hutton could claim that the old myth had been “largely abandoned” by the Wiccan community.33 Not all Wiccans embraced this change, instead clinging to their old understanding of Wicca’s history and passionately rejecting the work of post-​ Murrayite scholarship. In 1994, Cora Anderson (1915–​2008), an American co-​ founder of Feri Wicca, declared her tradition to be “a direct survival of old Stone Age religion”, while two years later, the founders of the Church of All Worlds, Morning Glory and Otter G’Zell, referred to Wicca as “a pre-​Christian European

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Pagan magical tradition”, a form of “European shamanism” that had been persecuted in the Early Modern witch trials by the Inquisition.34 In 2002, Patricia Crowther (b.1927), a British Priestess in the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca, praised Murray’s “distinguished work” and referred to the Craft as a “continuous, unbroken tradition from the distant past”.35 In a 2000 work, the American author Raven Grimassi (b.1951) propounded a version of the witch-​cult theory when he proclaimed that Italian folk magicians had been worshipping a Goddess and Horned God for centuries, and that the figure of Aradia, who had appeared in the folklorist Charles Leland’s 1899 work Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, was in fact a fourteenth-​ century witch who had revitalized the faith in Northern Italy.36 In what could be read as a challenge to the new scholarship, Grimassi asserted that it did not matter what historians thought on the subject, because “everyone who practices the Old Ways knows in their hearts, and in their spirits”, that they are practising an ancient faith.37 In this way, the historical studies of scholars were bypassed by reference to intuition and emotion as the final arbiter of truth. While many of these individuals simply continued expressing belief in the Murrayite witch-​cult without challenging those who had intellectually demolished it, a small number —​most notably Donald Frew, Jani Farrell-​Roberts, and Ben Whitmore  —​actively criticized the new scholarship in print. While none felt able to defend Murray’s hypothesis completely, they all offered critiques of those scholars who had criticized Murray and passionately defended the idea that pre-​ Christian survivals played a role in the emergence of Wicca.38 Hutton referred to these individuals as “counter-​revisionists” because they were reacting against the revisionist paradigm in witchcraft historiography which had dismantled the witch-​ cult theory. He added that none of them had been able to successfully construct a “counter-​revisionist” account of history, but that instead they had critiqued the mainstream accounts on matters of detail, thereby hoping to challenge their overall credibility, perhaps in the belief that in doing so some variant of the Murrayite hypothesis could be vindicated.39 Hutton pertinently observed that whilst rare in Britain, this counter-​ revisionism was strong in the central and western parts of the United States, although it also had vocal proponents in Australia and New Zealand.40 Of relevance to this was the suggestion from religious studies scholar Christine Hoff Kraemer that these counter-​revisionist voices might be rooted in the widespread anti-​ intellectualist current within American culture. While individuals like Whitmore and Frew do cite academic studies in their critiques, Kraemer pointed out that they appeared ignorant of scholarly etiquette and codes of acceptable behaviour, thus exacerbating tensions between them and academics.41 Seeking a psychological explanation for this behaviour, the scholar of Paganism Caroline Tully suggested

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that the counter-​revisionists were suffering from cognitive dissonance, in that when presented with information that contradicted their beliefs they sought to reduce dissonance by rejecting the new information. Thus, Tully suggested, these individuals engaged in “denial, justification, accusations of anti-​Pagan prejudice [against academics], and indulgence in confirmation bias: the favouring of information which confirms their preconceptions, regardless of whether it is true”.42 Not all practitioners sought to defend Murray’s hypothesis, however. Many expressed the view that the factual origins of the religion were not actually important; in the early 1990s, Lord Uther, a Wiccan in Atlanta, Georgia, exclaimed that “If this [Wicca] doesn’t work as a living religion, it wouldn’t make any difference if it were five thousand years old or made yesterday”.43 Even counter-​revisionist Whitmore expressed the view that “no historian can take away what I’ve learnt and experienced, or the joy and wisdom I’ve found within the Craft”.44 For these individuals, it was the spiritual experiences that they underwent as practitioners that fundamentally legitimized their religion, not any links that it had to the ancient past. Nevertheless, even without a direct line of succession via the witch-​cult, links to the [P]‌agan world were something that remained important to many practitioners. Since the 1970s various Wiccans have emphasized other historical avenues through which their movement is connected to the pre-​Christian world, primarily through ceremonial magic. The early British Gardnerian Frederic Lamond (b.1931) stated that through Renaissance magic, Wicca could identify a pedigree stretching all the way back to the ancient Babylonian magi, while Don Frew asserted that he was convinced “that a direct line of transmission can be traced from the Hermetic and Neoplatonic theurgy of late antiquity to the beginnings of the modern Craft movement in the 1930s”.45 Although the accuracy of Lamond and Frew’s claims are debatable, Hutton himself has supported this broad approach, opining that through ritual magic Wicca’s pedigree stretches back to Hellenistic Egypt.46 However, this argument can nevertheless become a little specious; the fact that one element within Wicca has a pedigree that ultimately stretches back into the ancient world should not necessarily be used to claim that Wicca itself has a pedigree stretching back to the ancient world. As this illustrates, having ancient roots to their religion is incredibly important for the Wiccan community, as it is perceived as lending their contemporary beliefs and practices a sense of greater authenticity. However, not all practitioners have sought to emphasize a direct lineage between the past and the present; the US practitioner Scott Cunningham (1956–​1993) for instance adopted a differing approach when describing Wiccans as the “heirs of the pre-​ Christian folk religions of Europe”, drawing particular parallels between Wicca

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and the purported shamanistic beliefs of the Palaeolithic.47 In doing so he —​like many other Wiccans —​treated the Craft as the descend[a]‌nt of Europe’s ancient [P]agans by virtue of a similar spiritual world-​view and ethos. Indeed, there is a great interest in such pre-​Christian societies among Wiccans and other Pagans, whether it be those of Anglo-​Saxon England or Ancient Egypt. However, perhaps the most widely invoked ancient society among the Wiccan community is that of the “Celtic” communities of Iron Age Western Europe.48 Ideas of “Celticity” have proved highly popular among Pagan and New Age communities, and while the term was initially used in reference to a linguistic, ethnic, or cultural grouping, being “Celtic” has since become an ethereal and intangible quality applied to a wide variety of things. This has led to the emergence of people whom folklorist Marion Bowman termed “Cardiac Celts”, individuals who identify as “Celtic” as a form of spiritual nationality but who might otherwise have no ethnic connection to Western Europe.49 Sociologist Ann-​Marie Gallagher has noted that although this adoption of “Celticity” is typically benevolent in intent, it can be seen as racist in that it ignores the social marginali[z]ation and poverty faced by contemporary linguistically “Celtic” populations (i.e. in Ireland, Wales, and the Isle of Man) while mining their cultures for elements that can be used to bolster Pagan conceptions of historical authenticity.50 Bowman highlighted that throughout both the Pagan and New Age milieus, there was a pervasive belief in a long-​lost Golden Age, in which women were accorded equality with men and humans lived in harmony with the Earth. She claimed that practitioners of these spiritualities typically sought to emulate the spiritual values and beliefs of these “Noble Savages” in the hope of establishing a future Golden Age free from many of the problems that plague Western society.51 This is something that appears to have been particularly prevalent within feminist-​ oriented versions of the Craft, where ideas of ancient, Goddess-​venerating, peace-​loving matriarchies that were overthrown by the warlike patriarchy have been espoused by the likes of prominent Wiccans Zsuzsanna Budapest (b.1940) and Starhawk (b.1951).52 Religious studies scholar Chris Klassen noted that in viewing themselves as remnants of a society conquered and colonized by patriarchy, these feminist Wiccans identified themselves with other communities who had been colonized throughout the world.53 However, like the witch-​cult theory, claims pertaining to ancient matriarchies have been largely rejected by mainstream scholarship, with Cynthia Eller publishing an important work outlining both the factual problems with such interpretations of the past and the problems that they pose for contemporary feminist activism.54 Works like Ellen’s have had an influence, and many feminist Wiccans have accepted that claims regarding ancient matriarchies lack sufficient supporting evidence.55 However, even when viewed as

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myth rather than history, these ideas can still raise concerns; the feminist historian Diane Purkiss has emphasized that this interpretation of the past “is not problematic because it is a fantasy, it is problematic as a fantasy”. According to this view, the theory of a matriarchalist past associates women’s power and prestige solely with a pre-​modern world, in doing so neglecting women’s status in modernity.56 Thus, while it praises women as shamans and priestesses, it ignores them as politicians and CEOs, hence doing little to aid the feminist cause. Although there are many Wiccans who take a great interest in the genuine history of their religion, it is nevertheless true that pseudo-​ historical and pseudo-​archaeological ideas pervade older Wiccan literature and remain present throughout the community itself. As anthropologist Lynne Hume noted, Wiccan versions of history are often “romantic past-​as-​wished-​for, rather than an historical past-​as-​known”, reflecting a “romanticism of a long forgotten, fairy-​like Celtic past” that is “based on sketchy historical facts rather than any rational piecing together of the jigsaw of history”.57 Whether accurate or not, it is such understandings of the past that inform Wiccans’ contemporary beliefs and practices, being important components of their own identities as both “witches” and “Pagans”.

Notes 1

Ethan Doyle White, “The Meaning of ‘Wicca’: A Study in Etymology, History and Pagan Politics”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 12:2 (2010), 185–​207. 2 Joanne Pearson, “Witches and Wicca”, in Joanne Pearson, ed., Belief beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age (The Open University and Ashgate, Milton Keynes and Aldershot 2002), 163. 3 Wouter J.  Hanegraaff, “From the Devil’s Gateway to the Goddess Within:  The Image of the Witch in Neopaganism”, in Pearson, Belief beyond Boundaries,  304–​5. 4 Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture:  Folklore and Neo-​Paganism in America (University of Pennsylvania State Press, Pennsylvania 2004), 185. 5 Kathryn Rountree, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual Makers in New Zealand (Routledge, London and New York 2004), 3. 6 Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (Beacon Press, Boston, MA 1993), 195; Rountree, Embracing, 3. 7 Rountree, Embracing, 117. 8 Hanegraaff, “From the Devil’s Gateway”, 305–309. 9 Pearson, “Witches and Wicca”, 133. 10 Pearson, “Resisting Rhetorics of Violence: Women, Witches and Wicca”, Feminist Theology, 18:2 (2010), 152. 11 Loretta Orion, Never Again the Burning Times:  Paganism Revisited (Waveland, Long Grove, IL 1994), 27.

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12 On this see Helen Cornish, “Cunning Histories:  Privileging Narratives in the Present”, History and Anthropology, 16:3 (2005), 363–376. See also Ethan Doyle White, “The Creation of ‘Traditional Witchcraft’: Pagans, Luciferians, and the Quest for Esoteric Legitimacy”, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 18:2 (2018), 188–​216. 13 Paul Huson, Mastering Witchcraft:  A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks & Covens (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New  York 1970), 63; Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft:  Past and Present (Robert Hale, London 1986), 343; Leo Martello, Witchcraft:  The Old Religion (Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ 1985), 15; Donna DarkWolf Vos, Dancing Under an African Moon:  Paganism and Wicca in South Africa (Zebra Press, Cape Town 2002), 3–​4; Anne-​Marie Gallagher, The Wicca Bible: The Definitive Guide to Magic and the Craft (Godsfield, London 2005), 16. 14 Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (Rider, London 1954), 35. 15 Silver RavenWolf, Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation (Llewellyn, St. Paul, MN 1998), 12. 16 Hanegraaff, “From the Devil’s Gateway”, 305. 17 Helen A.  Berger, A Community of Witches:  Contemporary Neo-​Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1999),  70–​72. Century 18 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History:  Early Modern and Twentieth-​ Representations (Routledge, London and New York 1996), 7–​8. 19 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshippers and Other Pagans in America, 3rd edn (Penguin, London 2006), 40. 20 Ronald Hutton, “Afterword”, in Dave Evans and Dave Green, eds, Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon: Academic Approaches to Studying Magic and the Occult (Hidden Publishing, St Albans 2009), 225. 21 Dale Wallace, “Debating the Witch in the South African Context:  Issues Arising from the South African Pagan Council Conference of 2007”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 10:1 (2008), 113–​119; Anika Teppo, “ ‘My House Is Protected by a Dragon’: White South Africans, Magic and Sacred Spaces in Post-​Apartheid Cape Town”, Suomen Anthropologi:  Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 34:1 (2009), 27–​28. 22 Vos, Dancing Under, 2. 23 Rountree, Embracing, 47. 24 Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (Aquarian, London 1971), 9. 25 Martello, Witchcraft,  58–​61. 26 Ethan Doyle White, “Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft”, Folklore, 125:1 (2014), 60–​79. 27 Kenneth Rees, “The Tangled Skein:  The Role of Myth in Paganism”, in Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, eds, Paganism Today (Thorsons, London 1996), 26. 28 Adler, Drawing Down, 83. 29 Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1989), 242–​243. 30 Berger, Community of Witches, 21–​22; Hutton, Witches, Druids, 265. In 1998, a significant article critiquing the witch-​cult theory from within the Pagan community

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was published: see Jenny Gibbons, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt”, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 5 (1998),  2–​16. 31 Helen Cornish, “Spelling Out History: Transforming Witchcraft Past and Present”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 11:1 (2009), 18–​21. 32 Cornish, “Spelling Out”, 22–​3. 33 Ronald Hutton, “The Status of Witchcraft in the Modern World”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 9:2 (2007), 121. 34 Cora Anderson, Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Privately Printed, San Leandro 1994), 12; Morning Glory and Otter G’Zell, “Who on Earth Is the Goddess?”, in James R. Lewis, ed., Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (State University of New York Press, Albany 1996), 31. 35 Patricia Crowther, From Stagecraft to Witchcraft: The EarlyYears of a High Priestess (Capall Bann, Milverton, UK 2002), 176. 36 Raven Grimassi, Italian Witchcraft: The Old Religion of Southern Europe, 2nd edn (Llewellyn, Woodbury, MN 2000), 4, 249–​261. 37 Grimassi, Italian Witchcraft, 276. 38 Donald H.  Frew, “Methodological Flaws in Recent Studies of Historical and Modern Witchcraft”, Ethnologies, 20:1 (1998); Ben Whitmore, Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft (Briar Books, Auckland 2010). 39 Hutton, “Revisionism and Counter-​ Revisionism in Pagan History”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 13:2 (2011), 225, 250–​ 251; see also Hutton, “Paganism and Polemic”, where he deals with the counter-​ revisionist position of Frew, “Methodological Flaws”; and Hutton, “Writing the History of Witchcraft: A Personal View”, in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 12:2 (2010), 253–​258, where he tackles these issues in response to Whitmore, Trials. 40 Hutton, “Revisionism”, 250. 41 Christine Hoff Kraemer, “Perceptions of Scholarship in Contemporary Paganism”, paper presented at the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group, American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, 21 November 2011, 3–​6. 42 Caroline Jane Tully, “Researching the Past Is a Foreign Country:  Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 13:1 (2011), 99. 43 Allen Scarboro, Nancy Campbell and Shirley Stave, Living Witchcraft:  A Contemporary American Coven (Praeger, Westport, CT and London 1994), 57. 44 Whitmore, Trials, 85. 45 Frederic Lamond, Fifty Years of Wicca (Green Magic, Sutton Mallet, UK 2004), 13; Donald H. Frew, “Harran: Last Refuge of Classical Paganism”, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 9 (Summer 1999), 17. 46 Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (Blackwell, Oxford 1993), 337. 47 Scott Cunningham, Wicca:  A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (Llewellyn, St. Paul, MN 1988), 3, 63. The manner in which many Wiccans identify Palaeolithic

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shamans as their spiritual forebears has been noted by Robert J.  Wallis, “Neo-​ Shamanisms in Europe”, in Nevill Drury, ed., Pathways in Modern Western Magic (Concrescent, Richmond, CA 2012), 134–​135. 48 The idea of the “Celts” as a culturally unified group is largely a myth developed in recent centuries: see Timothy Champion, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (St Martin’s Press, New York 1992), and Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? (British Museum Press, London 1999). 49 Marion Bowman, “The Commodification of the Celt:  New Age/​ Neo-​ Pagan Consumerism”, Folklore in Use, 2:1 (1993), 47–​56; Marion Bowman, “Cardiac Celts: Images of the Celts in Paganism”, in Harvey and Hardman, Paganism Today; Marion Bowman, “Contemporary Celtic Spirituality”, in Pearson, Belief beyond Boundaries, 55–​101. 50 Anne-​Marie Gallagher, “Weaving a Tangled Web? Pagan Ethics and Issues of History, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Pagan Identity”, Diskus, 6 (2000). 51 Marion Bowman, “The Noble Savage and the Global Village:  Cultural Evolution in New Age and Neo-​Pagan Thought”, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 10:2 (1995), 139–​49. 52 Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries:  Volume I, revised edn (Susan B.  Anthony Coven No. 1, Oakland, CA 1986), 15–​18; Starhawk, The Spiral Dance:  A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (HarperSanFrancisco, San Fransisco, CA 1989), 17–​19. See also Eller, Living in the Lap, 157–​70. 53 Chris Klassen, “The Colonial Mythology of Feminist Witchcraft”, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 6:1 (2004), 70. 54 Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Beacon Press, Boston, MA 1993). See also Andrew Fleming, “Myth of the Mother Goddess”, World Archaeology, 1:2 (1969), 247–​261. 55 Rountree, Embracing, 62, 67. 56 Purkiss, Witch in History, 42. Purkiss’s approach was however criticised for emphasising the victimisation theme of the Burning Times myth in Glenn W. Shuck, “The Myth of the Burning Times and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary American Wicca”, Journal of Religion and Society, 2 (2000), 1–​9. 57 Lynne Hume, Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia (Melbourne University Press, Carlton South 1997), 40.

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Chapter 41

Jean La Fontaine WITCHCRAFT AND SATANIC ABUSE

I

N 1 9 9 3 J E A N L A F O N T A I N E published a report commissioned by the British government into allegations of “satanic ritual abuse” during the 1980s and early 1990s.1 She concluded that there was evidence of child abuse involving “ritual elements” in a small number of cases, but these elements did not involve any organised satanic cults; nor was there any evidence of the satanic rites described in the statements of alleged child survivors, such as animal sacrifice and ritual murder. In subsequent work, La Fontaine has explored the parallels between early modern witchcraft and contemporary allegations of satanic abuse. Here she argues that satanic witches and satanic child abusers represent the “ultimate evil” in their respective societies. The willingness to believe in such phenomena is independent of and unsupported by “external and objective evidence”.

On balance, the similarities between the allegations of satanic abuse and the accusations of the witches’ Sabbath are sufficient to treat them as similar social phenomena, despite being separated by three centuries. Enshrined in folklore and in Christian myths of the fight against evil, the idea of the witches’ Sabbath as a ritual directed at the worship of Satan and constructed out of the negation of humanity’s most basic rules of life, remains a potent image. Given that the sexual abuse of children is the most potent representation of human evil in the late twentieth century, linking the sexual abuse of children with “satanic ritual” is quite intelligible. The old myth refurbished has apparently lost none of its impact. …

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Some common elements [in children’s allegations of satanic abuse] resemble quite closely the early modern conceptualisation of evil: human and animal sacrifice and the cannibalistic consumption of the flesh and blood of the sacrifice are features of the witches’ Sabbath. … Human sacrifice was the most frequently mentioned act in allegations of satanic abuse, but it figured in fewer than half the cases and the victims varied: babies were the most often mentioned, but children and occasionally adults also figured as victims, and in some accounts of rituals there was more than one kind of human sacrifice. Interestingly, an animal was said to be sacrificed almost as often as babies were. It is the spilling of blood that is the common theme. As night witches break all the normal sexual rules, so illicit sexual practices were associated with Devil-​worship, both in the form of orgies and in practices that the “normal” world abhorred, such as incest, homosexuality and anal eroticism. In the modern world, satanic abuse may include references to paraphilia and bestiality. Intercourse with animal familiars and the Devil in his animal form as a goat was also thought to be what the witches did at the Sabbath. … The witches’ Sabbath was a secret and conspiratorial meeting that took place at night. The darkness and secrecy of the location represented its conspiratorial nature, just as the reference to the secret places visited often at night give a mysterious air to the modern satanic conspiracy. … Satan gave instructions to these minions [the witches] to further his own aims and through a pact with him they achieved power and escaped detection. Detecting the perpetrators of the sexual abuse of children is so difficult that it may seem that they are under the protection of a powerful hidden cabal. The threat of a national or international conspiracy of which some fundamentalist Christians have warned, and that resembles the traditional idea of Satan’s imperial ambitions, is more easily accepted as an explanation of the success of evil doing. … Witchcraft accusations are not always accepted at face value, however general the belief in witchcraft itself. Accused witches in early modern Europe were brought to trial in court. Evidence was required to prove the guilt of particular persons who had been accused.The Spanish inquisitor Salazar wrote to La Suprema (the council of the Spanish Inquisition) on 3 October 1613, putting his view of the problem succinctly, if with some irritation: nor is it useful to keep saying that the learned doctors state that the existence of witchcraft is certain. This is only a needless annoyance, since nobody doubts this. … The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occurred in a given situation simply because of what the [self-​confessed] witches claim? It is clear that the witches are not

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to be believed and that the judges should not pass sentence on anyone unless the case can be proven by external and objective evidence sufficient to convince everyone who hears it.2 Three hundred years later, “external and objective evidence” for witchcraft and Devil-​worship is once again being sought. … Some “proof ” offered by believers [in satanic abuse] is based on conflating different types of case. The fact that networks of men who abuse children (paedophile rings) have been discovered and their members convicted may be cited in support of the allegations involving cult organisations. Some children have been murdered by the paedophiles who abused them and their cases are particularly likely to be seen as “proof ” of the allegations of satanic abuse, because they involve sexual abuse and murder. However, there is no evidence that these children were either abused or killed during rituals. Forty-​three cases involving such networks or paedophile rings were reported to our survey as were another sixteen cases of sexual abuse taking place in residential homes for children; none of them involved the killing of a child and in none was there any indication that the abuse was performed within rituals, satanic or otherwise. It may be argued by “experts” that satanic abuse is a new form of the sexual abuse of children, and as difficult to substantiate as the initial discovery was, but that in the future it is likely that proof will be easier to find as more victims come forward. This claim seems to have the objective of fusing the different elements out of which “satanic abuse” has been constructed into a new social problem. None of the separate elements is in fact newly discovered, but like the combination of diabolism and witchcraft that fuelled the great witch-​hunt, putting them together has unleashed the determination to seek out and destroy those who are accused of the new version of ultimate evil. … The absence of evidence to support the allegations of satanic abuse does not shake the belief of most believers, who continue to have faith that evidence of satanism will eventually be forthcoming. In fact, it is likely that many supporters of the idea that children are threatened by this new and terrible danger do not know that there is no evidence that these things are true. They accept what they are told because they accept the authority of the person who tells them. This is probably particularly the case with fundamentalist Christians who are disposed to believe the information as a matter of faith. But it is true of many therapists as well. Clinical experience or good work in one particular field may give professionals in the psychotherapeutic world a very much wider credibility. The idea that many people may refuse to accept what they find to be too painful is usefully adapted to avoid discussion: the sceptics are said to be “in denial”.

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Therapists may also hold to a belief that being believed is the beginning of healing and maintain that victims have a need to be believed. This locates the authority that guarantees the truth in the patient. To start with, in the satanic abuse cases, it was the culprit/​witch who was identified. By 1994, statements that all victims are also culprits, since they are forced to become perpetrators of abuse on more recently recruited or younger children, indicate that the difference is less significant than it appeared to begin with. The controversy over satanic abuse has underlined the existence of two quite different views of the nature of proof. The two co-​exist and one is not more “traditional” than the other; we may even operate with one in one situation and the other in another. First, there is the proof by authoritative opinion, that bases proof on the personal authority of the experts, whether these are clinicians who claim the ability to assess their patients’ truthfulness, or religious figures who claim this by virtue of their knowledge of the faith, or patients who have the authority of their suffering. In these circumstances the person, not the evidence, guarantees the truth. It may be significant that those who take this attitude talk of believing rather than being convinced. Salazar’s view quoted earlier epitomises the rationalist approach; “external and objective evidence” is required as proof before an allegation can be accepted. So far there has been very little of it. The absence of material evidence to corroborate the allegations of satanic abuse has confirmed sceptics in their views and may have induced a more cautious attitude among some members of the public, but it has converted few believers. However, it has been seized on as a weapon by those who would dispute the fact that incest and the sexual abuse of children does occur. By reversing the argument of some believers, extreme sceptics may claim that the lack of material corroboration for cases of satanic abuse is a lack of substantiation for sexual abuse. This is not so; children may be sexually abused in extremely sadistic ways without those guilty of abusing them being organised in a Satanist cult. The lack of evidence undermines only the Satanist element. Most believers have not been affected by the lack of evidence but, on the contrary, buttress their faith with the nature of their explanations of it. Lack of corroborative evidence may be attributed to the power of Satan to protect his servants or, more often, to the meticulous care of the Satanists to dispose of any evidence. Attacking the personal authority of sceptics in order to destroy their credibility rather than addressing the substantive issue is another common method. The argument that a different point of view constitutes “denial” relies on an argument from psychiatry and thus concentrates on the sceptics’ (presumed) emotions, deflecting attention from the evidence for or against the allegations. In one seminar I also

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heard it said that no one who was not a clinician treating survivors could understand satanic abuse, an argument basing veracity on occupation and particular experience in it. An argument of the same type, but for belief, is the assertion discussed above that it is because children are said to be telling the stories of satanic abuse that these accounts must be believed. It is not necessary for witches to exist for the beliefs in them to persist. There is no evidence in these cases that what has been alleged to have happened has happened. There is no evidence for human or animal sacrifice, for drinking blood or cannibalism. … However, the satanic conspirators of the satanic abuse allegations, like night witches or the celebrants of the witches’ Sabbath, reflect “the nightmares of the group”. These are shared fears of figures of evil that reflect and embody social concerns. It is because the fears are shared that belief in their reality is so tenacious.

Notes 1 2

Jean La Fontaine, The Extent and Nature of Organized Ritual Abuse (HMSO 1994). Salazar is quoted in Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–​1614 (University of Nevada Press 1980), 350.

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Chapter 42

Marion Gibson HARRY POTTER IN AMERICA

T

H E A D V E N T U R E S O F T H E fictional boy-​wizard Harry Potter have provided perhaps the most celebrated modern representations of “witchcraft”. They have also inspired controversy in the United States, as some Christian groups have contended that the positive portrayal of magic in the series invites children to experiment with the occult. Here Marion Gibson examines the reception of the Potter phenomenon in America, and identifies the cultural forces that influence the opponents and defenders of the franchise. In some interesting ways, the arguments against the Potter novels and films revive older Christian concerns about the insinuating power of the Devil and the dangers of all forms of magic; in this respect they echo the demonologies of a previous age. As Gibson shows, however, there are also Christian defenders of the boy-​wizard. More broadly, the controversy illustrates both the persistence and the retreat of anxieties about the supernatural threat of witchcraft in public life: a fear of witchcraft survives in some large and well-​organised American religious communities, but this is met with incredulity by many outside these groups, and the Potter industry continues to thrive.

Surprisingly, the most explosive events in America’s late-​ twentieth-​ century engagement with witchcraft surrounded a children’s book imported from Britain. In June 1997 Joanne Rowling, a schoolteacher in Edinburgh, had her first novel published by the Bloomsbury publishing house in London. It was called Harry

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Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and was about a boy who attended a school for witches and wizards, Hogwarts. Although this premise was not entirely original, the book was witty, inventive, and packed with adventures set in a carefully imagined alternative world. It appealed to boys as well as girls. It also tapped into resurgent interest in magical fantasy among the young. So it was immediately noticed by the American publisher Scholastic. “I love this novel by this unknown woman in Scotland,” said the editorial director Arthur A. Levine, and he was prepared to pay $105,000 for the rights.1 Only one major change was made to the book in order to sell it to an American readership: for publication in the United States, the novel was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was done, with Rowling’s permission, because it was thought that American children might not be familiar with the word “philosopher,” or the concept of the mythical philosopher’s stone. But ironically, the retitling of the first Harry Potter novel may have attracted, and sent precisely the wrong signals to, some of those who subsequently became vigorous critics of J. K. Rowling and her world of witches. Although the change made the novel sound more accessible, it also made it sound more “magickal.” Sorcery was a concept with almost uniformly negative connotations: even Tolkien’s Gandalf could be seen as anti-​Christian in the right cultural context. Harry Potter might at best be seen as a sorcerer’s apprentice (along with Mickey Mouse), but in many American Christian homes the word “sorcerer” simply conjured up images of their children falling victim to Devil-​worship. Ironically, the replaced phrase, “philosopher’s stone,” had plentiful Christian associations. The alchemical quest to discover it was widely regarded in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as an allegory of the Christian search for purity and, through God’s love, the elixir of eternal life –​which, in Rowling’s book, has been discovered by the real, historical alchemist Nicolas Flamel. Like the Holy Grail, only the pure might hope to find it, and its spiritual significance far outweighed any material or magical value.2 So Rowling’s novel echoed these Christian motifs: like any Gawain or Galahad, the hero Harry Potter battled the forces of evil personified in the dark Lord Voldemort and the vicious Malfoy family, whose names contain allusions to the power of death and bad faith. His own struggle was to keep his motivation pure, in a world where it would have been easy to succumb to hate (Voldemort had murdered Harry’s parents), and arrogance about his own powers. The book’s most striking symbol is perhaps the Mirror of Erised. Here, Harry faces a classic riddling temptation. As its name suggests, the mirror reflects his deepest desire, which is to see his parents alive and with him. Yet to pursue this dream, and sit looking into the mirror forever, would be to neglect the real meaning of their sacrifice: they died fighting evil and protecting Harry because

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they loved him, and it is this love that will help Harry defeat the forces of death and evil again. The next time Harry looks into the mirror, his desire is a pure and unselfish one: he must use the mirror to find the philosopher’s stone before Voldemort can harness its power for evil. Rowling’s original concept was thus a reworking of a traditional Christian image –​something some American Christian writers perceived. For example, Connie Neal, a youth pastor who has become one of Rowling’s chief Christian defenders, explicitly links the “philosopher’s stone” theme of parental sacrifice and pure love with the crucifixion of Christ.3 But by the time Neal published her analysis, the book’s retitling had already rung alarm bells among sensitized American parents. The claims of opponents of the book and its successors were consistent. They took two main forms: an uneasy fury that the books appeared to be promoting paganism, and expressions of dismay about the power that they granted children to challenge authority figures. The whole purpose of these books is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult. What better way to introduce tolerance and acceptance of what God calls an abomination, then [sic] in children’s books? … Note how the adults are depicted as hateful and perhaps strict, then note how these wizards and other creatures are the good guys. These types of writings are nothing more then Satan’s way to undermine the family.4 This second accusation was motivated by Harry Potter’s own family situation. With his parents dead, he had been left in Cinderella’s predicament, in the custody of an uncaring aunt and uncle, who were “muggles” or nonwitches. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia house Harry in a broom cupboard, and let their malicious son Dudley beat him up and blame him for everything that goes wrong. Naturally, Harry loathes them and the reader does, too, rejoicing when they are humiliated by their own crassness, or when Harry gets away with disobeying their unreasonable rules. Some American parents worried that their children might think that the author was generally sanctioning these attitudes toward parental control. By 1999, the Harry Potter books had become the volumes most often “challenged,” which meant that a parent or other concerned party had objected to their presence on a school’s curriculum or in its library.5 Several books specifically devoted to an attack on Harry Potter appeared. The minister Richard Abanes summed up many Christian concerns in Harry Potter and the Bible, voicing suspicions that Rowling’s world, by mixing historical figures and practices with imaginary ones, blurred the boundaries between fantasy and actual occultism. Abanes was concerned that

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the books, in a sense, taught witchcraft, and that divination and other practices forbidden by the Bible were important aspects of life at Hogwarts School. He objected to the use of swear words and blasphemies in the books, and [the fact] that Harry and his friends lied and broke rules frequently. The “good” adults in the book were often poor role models, while the emerging and mysterious connection between Harry and Voldemort, good and evil, was morally confusing.6 Abanes concluded his book with an account of Sean Sellers, a teenager who had killed his mother, stepfather, and another victim while under the influence of satanism, and a discussion of the growth of occultism in “post-​Christian America.”7 Fellow-​ minister Gary Greenwald went even further with the unambiguously titled Harry Potter: Satan’s Trojan Horse? 8 Much of the debate took place online, and the release of the Harry Potter films intensified the proliferation of webpages devoted to it. The Southern Baptist churches were particularly active in their opposition to the Potter phenomenon. Articles in the Baptist Press argued that children should not be allowed to see the movie and criticized schools that organized trips for their pupils.9 In November 2001, the Arkansas Baptist State Convention passed a resolution stating, “The Harry Potter book series and its subsequent materials are inconsistent with Biblical morality and ethics and promotes pagan beliefs and practices.” Delegates committed themselves to speaking out against the books and notifying booksellers of their “anti­Christian” content.10 The Baptist assault on the Potter film was monotone and ubiquitous enough for the satirical, liberal “Betty Bowers” website to parody it, especially its “anti-​family” jibes: Hollywood is coming after the hearts of our children with tales of mystical powers even more appealing than those in the Bible. … In the world of Harry Potter, children wave 11-​inch rods to cast spells and routinely backtalk adults. In the Old Testament, adults use 11-​inch rods to beat the stuffing out of children (Proverbs 13:24) –​and stone them to death if they backtalk (Deuteronomy 21:18–​21). Clearly J. K. Rowling has a defter touch than our Lord when it comes to writing a book that children will kneel before their beds at night and pray is true. For good measure, “Betty” pointed out that witches were “virtually indistinguishable from the Mary-​genuflecting Catholics” and Harry was a “homosexual recruitment poster boy.”11 Material from another satirical website found its way back into the attack on Harry Potter when its fictitious contents were taken as accurate representations of the views of J. K. Rowling (“these books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son of God is a living hoax ….”) and her

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readers (“I want to learn the Cruciatus Curse, to make my muggle science teacher suffer for giving me a D”).12 For a number of Christian right-​wingers, Harry Potter fitted the Devil­shaped hole in American life. Like Clinton, Brandi Blackbear, or Damien Echols, he symbolized all that was wrong with American society and the American family. One of the remarks that Rowling had made about her books was that: the idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me.13 This was quoted over and over again in support of the belief that she was telling children to rebel against their parents, and become witches. J. K. Rowling and her fans were bemused, and they often responded with flat denial that further outraged her critics. Asserting baldly that the books are “not about witchcraft,” “not trying to influence anyone into black magic,” or that “the truth is very different,” and moving quickly to discuss the books’ concerns with racism, education, or sexuality, was ineffective. Rowling has become increasingly resigned to criticism. Interviewed by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman in 2003, she was surprised to hear that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was longer than the New Testament. But immediately she responded: “the Christian fundamentalists will find a way to turn that into a reason to hate me as well. She’s more verbose than God.”14 It is clear that neither camp can imagine the moral universe of the other. To fans, accusations that Rowling promotes Satan or encourages children to rebellion seem like lunacy. But seen in the context of the Columbine-​related panic about influences on America’s children, it is easy to imagine why Harry Potter caused such a furor in America. As the Reverend Lori Jo Schepers remarked on CNN, of Harry Potter readers: as we expose our kids to the occult, we expose our kids to blood, to violence and desensiti[z]‌e them to that. … What I can expect is those kids, as they mature, have a very good chance of becoming another Dylan Klebold and those guys in Columbine.15 Perhaps the fuss surrounding Harry Potter and his allegedly anti-​Christian, anti-​ family values was not so surprising after all. The books’ Britishness was also part of the problem for critical American readers. With her English and Scottish inspirations, Rowling had wondered why they had become so popular with American children:  “They are such British

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books,” she said. In fact, she had defended her books’ un-​Americanness vigorously, refusing to translate English into American unless absolutely necessary.16 Like many liberal Britons, she seemed suspicious of American cultural imperialism and was antagonistic to any suggestion that she might modify her story to maximize sales in the United States. “You are not going to get an American exchange student brought in at Hogwarts,” she announced. So, like many ideas that cross the Atlantic, something was lost on the journey. Those Americans who expected Harry’s world to be the God-​fearing, conservative, and patriotic one in which they were trying to raise their children found Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione foreign in almost every way. These were independent-​minded, disrespectful heathens, who swore, disobeyed parents and teachers, held dangerously liberal views, and never went to church or spoke of God. Most British readers recognized instantly in the mildly eccentric, anarchic world of Hogwarts school their culture’s stereotypical virtues and vices: embarrassment at “speechifying” or public displays of spirituality, suspicion of authority and uniformity, interest in the oddities of history and folklore. Harry Potter fitted for them into the British genre of the “boarding school story,” like the Malory Towers series or Tom Brown’s Schooldays, rather than the “children’s conduct book.”17 Britain was also the land that, as historian Ronald Hutton points out, gave the world the modern religion of Gardnerian Witchcraft, and most Britons regard it with tolerance –​whether they perceive it as New Age nonsense or ancient wisdom.18 Most Christian Britons were accustomed to their children reading about witches and meeting people who regarded themselves as pagans, and they were used to the idea of religion as a private matter. So were their non-​Christian neighbors. These readers would all have squirmed at overt godliness or attempts to preach the ideology of good versus evil, however pleased they might be by the books’ implicit morality: many Americans squirmed at the absence of everyday pieties. In part, the Harry Potter controversy developed because Britain and America were divided by a common culture and language, differently interpreted: just as in the seventeenth century, they had different beliefs about the proper response to witches. Not all American Christians found the books and films threatening, however. One of the most notable pro-​Potter voices was that of Charles Colson, a former adviser to President Nixon jailed for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Now a Christian campaigner, Colson argued that “some Christians may try to keep their kids from reading these books, but with 8 million copies … floating around American homes, it’s almost inevitable that your own children or grandchildren will be exposed to them.” Instead of resisting, he urged American parents to “help them to see the deeper messages … contrast the mechanical magic in the Potter

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books to the kind of real-​life witchcraft the Bible condemns.”19 Colson and others believed that because the books were based on a literary, nondemonic version of magic, that did not involve actual conjuration, they were safe to read and might offer positive models of bravery, goodness, and loyalty to child readers. His view was attacked by Abanes and others.20 Berit Kjos went so far as to accuse Colson and his camp of helping “lure kids to witchcraft.”21 It seemed that Harry Potter was indeed doing the Devil’s work, as the controversy over his status divided Christians. So vicious was some of the debate that pastor Connie Neal wrote What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? to advise Christians to stop fighting each other and “work through these perplexing issues within the body of Christ.” She believed that the Potter books and films emphasized ethical behavior, did not promote Wicca or satanism, and even that they could be used to preach the gospel. Children liked the books, she said, because they wanted hope, empowerment, self-​esteem, affirmation of their emotions and tools to help deal with them, knowledge that they could face and conquer fear, a sense of belonging, love, and good friends. The books answered all of these needs, providing examples of children taking responsibility for decisions and their consequences, dealing with depression and grief, and so on. The fact that children yearned for such comforts, and for a supernatural context for these reflects the longing in our kids’ souls for God. … Harry Potter is not the real thing. Which is why many Christian parents are concerned about it. Nor is it the best way to satisfy our kids’ desire. But you can use the Potter craze to get kids and grandkids into something that leads them on to the real thing.22 As Neal’s argumentative strategy shows, for many Americans the crucial question is whether the classic images of American witch and all-​American family can be reconciled. Will American children still love and defer to their parents and grandparents if they read about Harry Potter? Or will Wicca cause them to murder their families? Are family values actually compatible with witches, creatures once thought to be archetypally antisocial? But, as Neal’s words demonstrate, where the two images of family and witch can be harmonized, the result is positive. Where the witch is alone, without a proper family context, he or she is usually seen as predatory and a conduit for evil forces. Where witchcraft can be seen as family-​ friendly, or a witch is domesticated and anchored within a family community, he or she is often seen as safer. This is true of child-​witches Harry Potter and his friends, but [it] is also true of the female witches, wife and mother figures, who so richly populate other American fictions.

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Notes 1 J. K.  Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury, London 1998); Levine quoted in Sean Smith, J. K.  Rowling:  A Biography, revised edn (Arrow, London 2002), 181; figures from Julia Eccleshare, A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels (Continuum, London and New York 2003), 3. 2 See, for example, Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy (British Library, London 1994). Its power was, however, easily abused by the wicked seeker, as Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) shows. 3 Connie Neal, What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? (Waterbrook Press, Colorado Springs 2001), 195. 4 www.exposingsatanism.org/​harry-​potter/​ 5 American Library Association, Library Journal (7 February 2000), quoted in Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible (Christian Publications, Camp Hill, PA 2001),  4–​5. 6 Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible, 23–​4, 33–​9, 57–​9, 89–​91, 97–​9,  136–​8. 7 Ibid., 177–​86, 205–​23. 8 Gary Greenwald, Satan’s Trojan Horse (Eagles Nest Ministries, Huntsville, AL n.d.). 9 Robert McGee, “First Person: Parents Should See Harry Potter Without the Kids”, (16 November 2001), at www.bpnews.net/​12190/​firstperson-​parents-​should-​ see-​harry-​potter-​without-​the-​kids; Tobin Perry, “Harry Potter Movie Lambasted” (12 November 2001) at www.bpnews.net/​12138/​harry-​potter-​movie-​lamented​as-​kids-​first-​look-​at-​the-​occult 10 Charlie Warren, “Arkansas Baptists Support 2000 SBC Beliefs Statement”, Baptist Press, 9 November 2001. 11 “Harry Potter: A $7 Ticket Straight to Hell”, originally posted on the Betty Bowers website; online source no longer available. 12 Quoted in Neal, What’s a Christian to Do,  104–​5. 13 This quotation can be found at www.exposingsatanism.org/​harry-​potter/​and numer­ ous other sites. 14 BBC 2, Newsnight (19 June 2003). 15 Martin Savidge, “Bubbling Troubles Trail Harry Potter”, CNN, 6 July 2000. 16 Lindsey Fraser, Telling Tales: An Interview with J. K. Rowling (Mammoth, London 2000), 31. 17 See David K. Steege, “Harry Potter,Tom Brown and the British School Story: Lost in Transit?”, in Lana A. Whited, ed., The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon (University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London 2002). 18 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999), vii, 253–​86. 19 Charles Colson, “Witches and Wizards: The Harry Potter Phenomenon”, BreakPoint (2 November 1999), n.p. 20 Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible, 62. 21 Berit Kjos, “Harry Potter Lures Kids to Witchcraft with Praise from Christian Leader”, originally posted on the Crossroads website; online source no longer available. 22 Neal, What’s a Christian to Do,  65–​7.

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Chapter 43

Julian Goodare MODERN WESTERN IMAGES OF WITCHES

W

I T C H E S A B O U N D I N W E S T E R N popular culture. As Julian Goodare observes in this extract, their media representations preserve many aspects of the early modern age, while discreetly abandoning others. Witches still fly, for example, but the purpose of their flight –​to attend the sabbat –​has largely vanished from the public imagination. Perhaps the most profound shift in attitudes concerns the perceived threat of witchcraft. In common with vampires and werewolves, which were once viewed as horrors of the real world, witches have assumed the safer role of characters in fictional entertainment. Indeed, this is what made the furore about Harry Potter in America so perplexing to many (42). The incredible nature of witchcraft has also made it impossible for many people to grasp the real fear that it once inspired, leading to persistent and revealing popular misconceptions about the history of witch trials.

In the industrial western world today, popular images of “witches” derive from the witches of early modern Europe. However, these images have been shaped to modern purposes, and we can hardly expect historical accuracy to be an overriding priority for modern storytellers, illustrators and film-​makers. We tend to view early modern witches through these well-​known modern images, which may distort our perspectives. A few points may be made about the way in which ideas of witchcraft have developed since early modern times. Some early modern

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ideas have continued, while others have been dropped, and still others have been transformed. The image of the witch in modern western popular culture seems well entrenched. The old woman in cloak and pointed hat, riding a broomstick, is universally recognised. Often she has a cat, an echo of the English witch’s familiar. Early modern familiars also included toads, insects and fantasy creatures but the cat has survived because we can readily imagine cats as pets. The pointed hat is also English; it became part of the popular image of a witch in the eighteenth century, when such hats, like witches, came to be seen as old-​fashioned. The broomstick, by contrast, was originally French; historical English witches were rarely described as flying. It is surprising that the broomstick survived, since many more witches were accused in Germany, where witches flew on forked cooking-​sticks. Today’s old woman witch is thus a composite image. She usually grins cheerfully, and is rarely malevolent or frightening, except to young children. She does not belong to the everyday world; when airborne, for instance, illustrators show her from an imaginary sideways viewpoint, rather than from the point of view of a real observer on the ground. One thing is certain, though: unlike the historical witches, she is always female. The idea that men could ever have been witches has largely vanished. Perhaps as a result, another image of the witch has gained prominence: that of the young, sexy female witch. Unlike her early modern predecessor, she is presented as a largely positive role model. Practising teen witches, mostly female, find themselves navigating between commercial imagery in films, magazines and websites, and the more serious spirituality of Wicca.1 The image of the young, sexy witch has arisen from the commercialisation of culture, the promotion of glamorous “celebrities”, and the emphasis on young adulthood as an ideal state. For commercial artists, there is no money to be made from depicting old women, but a great deal to be made from exploiting images of young women. The young, sexy witch is still partly dependent on her elderly relative; she may need a pointed hat, for instance. But her sexuality can be emphasised in a way that an older woman’s no longer can –​and sex sells. The power of sex in modern culture even helps to make the young, sexy witch a particularly convincing “magical” figure. “Magic” is almost as large a part of the stock-​in-​trade of the advertising copywriter as sex itself. A young female witch can readily wield magical power. She is “enchanting”, or “glamorous” (a word originally meaning “magical”), or even “bewitching”. The young, sexy witch is not actually new. Renaissance artists delighted in depicting her, and probably for some of the same sexist reasons. But then she was typically depicted alongside older women. A late literary example of this is Robert Burns’s comic poem “Tam o’ Shanter” (1791), in which Tam drunkenly stumbles

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across a witches’ Sabbath. Most of the witches are old hags, but Tam’s –​and the reader’s –​attention falls on the one young woman in the group, a “winsome wench” invitingly dressed in nothing but a short chemise (a “cutty sark”). This leads on to another shift in the image of the witch: the abandonment of the witches’ Sabbath. Burns depicted it with gusto, and in 1867 the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky created a musical portrait of a St John’s Eve witches’ Sabbath in his orchestral tone-​poem “A Night on Bald Mountain”. But, in 1940, when Walt Disney added pictures to Mussorgsky’s music in the film Fantasia, the witches were replaced by demons and ghosts. The disappearance of the Sabbath is probably related to the general positive revaluation of the witch during the twentieth century. What then is left today of the idea of the evil witch? Disney has provided some pointers to where the idea has gone. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) the wicked queen was effectively a witch, complete with cloak and pointed hat. However, she developed her spells in a laboratory, evidently a nod to the prestige of modern science and technology. The evil laboratory is one way in which imagery of evil has shifted away from the witch; the renegade scientist whose inventions threaten the world is a powerful figure in popular fiction, but the scientist is almost always male, and his inventions are not presented as “magical”. Magic has nevertheless returned by the back door –​if indeed it ever left; but evil magic is rarely associated with witches. Along with the rise of science has come a blurring of the separation between science and magic in popular culture. Cartoon heroes, from Superman onwards, wield amazing powers that are supposedly “scientific” (with much reference to space travel, radioactivity and so on) but are often in effect magical. Horror films use “magic” more overtly –​but they tend to use a broader concept of the “supernatural”, with actual witches being absent (Carrie, 1976) or peripheral (The Blair Witch Project, 1999). Some films use elements of traditional Christian demonology (The Exorcist, 1973), but the combined concept of the demonic witch seems to have vanished. The demons in some horror films are clearly non-​Christian (The Evil Dead, 1981, 2013). There are some remnants of the evil witch among the plastic paraphernalia of the modern Hallowe’en, but they are not really threatening, except perhaps to small children. Meanwhile, however, awareness of historical witch-​hunts remains important. How do people use the idea that witches were persecuted in the past? They usually seem to do so constructively and sensibly. Most people today are not expert historians, and there is no point in criticising them for this. Some popular ideas on witch-​hunting may seem to arise from present-​day common sense –​which is well worth commending, even though it may not be enough to get beyond present-​day values.

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One modern idea seems unnecessarily condescending to the people of the past: the popular story of how the swimming test was conducted. It is commonly related that those who floated were executed, while those who sank were drowned although they were innocent. In fact, ropes were tied to the suspect to pull them out of the water. The popular version of the story functions as an affirmation of our own cultural superiority: we, today, are cleverer or more sensible than the ignorant witch-​hunters. An early instance of this comes from the missionary David Livingstone in the 1850s, who explained the swimming test in this way to his African followers as part of “the wisdom of my ancestors” in order to criticise some of their own traditional customs.2 Livingstone’s celebrated writings may have originated the idea, but it is the kind of story that could have arisen in more than one place independently. Many people have told me that a witchcraft accusation was a means of “getting rid of anyone you didn’t like”. This seems to mean that the accusation was hypocritical: the accuser named someone as a witch, not because they thought they were a witch, but for some other motive. In modern fiction, the motive is often sexual jealousy; accusations come from a rejected suitor or lover. Arthur Miller’s celebrated play about Salem, The Crucible (1953), includes an accusation of this kind. Although much of The Crucible is believable historically, this theme strikes a false note. A person who rejected a suitor or lover was not behaving like a witch –​ there was no indication of harmful magic or dealings with the Devil. A related popular idea focuses, not on sex, but on money. In this account, the accuser was jealous of the witch because of the witch’s economic success.Typically, the idea is that the witch’s crops grew better than the accuser’s, which the accuser resented. Historically, there were occasional accusations against suspects who had prospered unaccountably, but such suspects were usually men, and this pattern of accusation was rare even for men. Witches were more often getting poorer than getting richer. The “getting rid of anyone you didn’t like” idea, and the economic jealousy idea, seem to arise today among people who sense that community relationships were important, but who know little of pre-​industrial society. What of the popular idea that witches were accused in order to make money? Usually it is said that the authorities themselves stood to profit, but sometimes accusations by neighbours are said to have been motivated by the neighbour’s desire for the alleged witch’s goods. Some courts could confiscate a criminal’s goods, but many other courts did not do this, and most witches were too poor to have possessions worth coveting. A  few active witch-​hunters like Matthew Hopkins received payment, but even he received only modest fees plus expenses; it was certainly not desire for money that made him a witch-​hunter. A handful of rich witches were accused because of resentment at their inheritance of property,

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but they were a tiny minority. The idea of witch-​hunting for money is attractive because it attributes to the witch-​hunters a motive that is readily understood in the modern world. In origin it is probably a modern fantasy. These ideas also display an inability to take witchcraft itself seriously. People tend to think that witchcraft is not (and was not) real, so they jump to the conclusion that witchcraft accusations must “really” have been about something other than witchcraft.The idea that accusations were really about money or sex is readily grasped because people today take money and sex seriously. Some accusers certainly had ulterior motives  –​or perhaps they should be called additional motives –​for their accusations. At Salem, accusations were made by one political faction in the village against its enemies, but there is no evidence that this was done cynically. On the contrary, the leading accusers were desperately upset by the demonic tormenting of their daughters; it seemed clear that witchcraft was the cause, and it seemed logical that it would be their enemies –​ those who were believed to hate them –​who would be behind the tormenting.The worst interpretation we can put on this is to say that the accusers psychologically projected their own anger onto those whom they accused, believing that it was the accused who were really angry and destructive. Occasionally, they also faked evidence, especially when prosecutions seemed to be going badly. But they did not deliberately invent accusations that they knew to be false. There are in fact no grounds for thinking that accusers’ beliefs differed from those of the general population. People believed in witchcraft and that included the witches’ accusers. A witchcraft accusation was not “really” about something else:  it was really about witchcraft. The overwhelming majority of witchcraft accusations occurred, not because of sexual or economic jealousy, but because the suspect simply appeared to have been behaving like a witch or to fit one of the stereotypes of a witch. If witches of the past are discussed in modern culture, it is better for historical understanding if the past belief in witchcraft is taken seriously.

Notes 1 2

See Chapter 40 in this volume for Wiccan spirituality –​Ed. Also valuable is Denise Cush, “Consumer Witchcraft:  Are Teenage Witches a Creation of Commercial Interests?”, Journal of Beliefs and Values, 28 (2007). David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London 1857), 622.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Abanes, Richard 446–​7 abduction 135; transformation following 136–​8; of victims to alternative world 135–​6 Acarie, Barbe 260, 261, 263 accidents at work 74–​5 Adler, Margot 431 adultery 54, 55, 80, 211, 234 agrarian crises 74, 94–​6, 97–​9, 103–​5, 218 Allen, Hannah 351 altered state of consciousness 134–​5 Alzenau, Germany 220 Amsterdam, Netherlands 188, 232 Anabaptists 171, 180–​90; authorities conflating beliefs about witches and 188; authorities’ perspective of 183–​5; chronology of persecution of 181; executions 181; fears of a conspiracy to overthrow Christendom 183–​4; militant 184; parallels between persecution of witches and 185–​6, 189; persecutions for heresy and intersections with persecution of witches 180–​2; perspective of, on trials for heresy 185–​8; rejection of infant baptism 182, 183, 187 Anderson, Janet 83, 84

animals: bewitchment and 72–​4; cooking 49, 50; Devil in form of 28, 243, 246; familiars in form of 314–​15; witches as, an inversion of contemporary ethics 149; witches depicted with heads of 56–​7, 56; witches riding 57–​8, 58; witches transformed into likeness of 70, 73–​4, 131 Antonia 27–​8 anus, possession and exorcism via 252 appearance of witches 51, 52, 53, 453; male 57, 58, 332 Appolonia 235 Aquinas, Thomas 148, 162, 344 Aradia 432 arrow sorcery 51–​2, 52, 54 assize courts 208, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 318, 324, 325, 326, 392 Augsburg, Germany 72, 96, 100, 101, 236–​7, 355 see also confession of Regina Bartholome Augustine, St. 44, 162, 268 Austria 31, 334 babies 32, 71–​2, 293 Bale, John 155

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458  I NDEX

baptism 148; Anabaptists rejection of infant 182, 183, 187 Bartholome, Regina see confession of Regina Bartholome Basque witch-​hunt  195–​9; demons returning from New World to 197; parallels drawn between Lambourdins and New World natives 197–​8; political motivations 196, 198 Batenburgers 184 bee, transformation to a 115–​16 Beir, George 83 belief in witchcraft 9, 92, 102–​3; declining 126, 383–​4, 388, 402–​4; mechanical philosophy challenge to 384–​5; popular 7, 19, 46, 100, 103, 276, 304, 305–​6, 314–​15, 318, 319; problem of “present-​centredness” in explaining 2, 8–​13 benandanti 108, 131–​2 Berger, Helen A. 429, 431 Bernard, Richard 316, 387 bestiality 246, 440 Bethnal Green 394, 397, 398, 399, 400 bewitchment 65–​76; eighteenth and nineteenth century misfortunes attributed to 407–​9; accidents and 74–​5; accusations of urban 392–​5; animals and 72–​4; Church remedies for 163–​4; deaths attributed to 45, 66, 90; an explanation for misfortune 68–​71; illness and 1, 2, 4, 8, 63, 65, 66–​8, 69, 83, 84, 90, 308, 312, 326, 393; medical failure and 69–​70; by men 328, 329; parents, children and 71–​2; poverty and 74–​5 Bible: angels and demons 62; casting out of demons 253–​4; condemnation of witches 10, 149; Harry Potter and 447, 450; on magicians 175; Ten Commandments 163, 164; on turning loose of Satan 230; Waldensians and 31, 35 Bible-​and-​key to identify thieves 398–​9 Binsfeld, Peter (Bishop of Trier) 97, 219 ‘Black Fast’ 286 Boccaccio 60 bodies: deviant female 332; health of 332; marks on witches’ 303, 310, 313–​18, 319; route to souls 296–​8, 300; Satan’s entrance and exit

orifices 252; types of, and masculine emotionality 333–​4 Bodin, Jean 6, 10, 107, 143, 144, 195, 252, 260, 338, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345 Boguet, Henri 39, 73, 259 Boulton, Jeremy 396 Bowman, Marion 434 Bradstreet, Anne 300 breast-​feeding 3–​4, 71 Brethren of the Free Spirit 32, 33 Brome, Richard 149 Budapest, Zsuzsanna 420 burning: of clergy 196, 199, 219; of heretics 17, 31, 38, 184; of witches 98, 122, 196, 211, 220 Burns, Robert 453–​4 Burroughs, George 299–​300 butter making 74, 227, 299 Calvinism 102, 162, 164, 171, 216, 217, 384, 408 Camont, Françatte 1–​2, 4, 5, 8–​9, 10 candles, rituals with 286 Canisius, Peter 101 cannibalism 32, 74, 293, 440 Canterbury ecclesiastical court records 282, 285–​6 carnival 57, 144, 145, 146 Carolina, witchcraft article of 124–​5, 125–​6 “carrying” 136 carving of Devil, church 221 castrate, power of witches to 60 Cathars 18, 23, 32–​3, 34–​5 Catholic Reformation 101, 167–​8, 208, 215, 217, 238 Catholicism: Anabaptist belief in witchcraft of 187; attributions of witchcraft to Protestantism 155, 166–​8; calls for persecution of witches in Germany 102–​3, 215, 217–​18; demonology 156, 161–​3, 164; increasing religious tolerance 172, 386; Marian state-​programme 102; papal bulls 31, 32, 34, 123; Protestant attributions of witchcraft to 155, 164–​6, 168; remedies against witchcraft 164; women and 258–​62 cattle see livestock, accusations involving cauldrons 49, 50 Celichius, Andreas 230

9 5 4

IN D E X  459

“Celticity” 434 Certeau, Michel de 422 charity, refusal of 282 charmers: gap between elite and popular views of 178–​9; punishment in Rothenburg for 177–​8 charmers, Scottish 82–​6; Church attitude to 86; diagnoses and treatments of orthodox practitioners and 83–​5; as distinct from witches 83; knowledge and skills 85–​6; use of ritual and words 85 childbirth 71–​2; post-​natal depression and 354; post-​partum psychosis and 353, 354, 355 children: attacked by wolves 74; demon possession of 229, 253, 259, 313; involvement in witch trials 126; killing of 32, 131, 293; maleficium towards 303; parents and 71–​2, 259; Satanic abuse of 439–​43; witches’ potions from bodies of 38 chimneys 140 Christian IV, King 211 Christianity and churches: American response to Harry Potter 445, 446–​9; asceticism 102; attitude to illness 86, 300; early 18, 33, 145; fundamentalism 440, 441, 448; inter-​denominational splits over witchcraft 168; opposition to witchcraft 40; ‘state churches’ and ‘sect type’ churches and views on witchcraft 156–​7, 169–​72, 193; state relationship with 201, 202, 203, 208, 211, 216; visionary imagery of heaven and hell 135; witchcraft a counter-​competitor to 169–​70 see also Bible; Catholic Reformation; Catholicism; clergy; Protestantism; Reformation clergy 287, 297, 314, 319, 408; accusations of witchcraft 122, 196, 199, 219, 325–​8; case of John Lowes 325–​8; confessional 216; dissatisfaction with parish 327; unwitching and 409; witch as rival to 170 climate: origins of witchcraft persecutions in deterioration of 94–​6, 103–​5, 218; witches’ interference with 149–​50 Cohn, Norman 115 Collit, Prissilla 353–​4, 355

Colson, Charles 449–​50 community relations and impact on witchcraft beliefs and accusations 396–​8 confession of Regina Bartholome 361–​73; acts of malefice 369; fantasy of her relations with Devil 361–​2, 364–​5, 366–​9; father’s interrogation at trial of 369–​70; interactions between interrogators and 370–​2; life story 362–​3; Oedipal drama 365–​6, 367, 368; precipitating her own imprisonment 363–​4; risk to paternal authority of society 371–​2; suicide threats 368; torture of 366 confessionalism 191, 216–​17 confessions of witchcraft 7, 10; Antonia and 27–​8; battles with Devil and 27–​8, 297–​8, 310, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357; demonology and 341–​6; growing reluctance to accept as proof of guilt 381–​2; influenced by expectations of court 135; parallel passages to elucidate 344–​5; persecution and gender in 350–​1; torture and obtaining 10–​11, 12–​13, 27, 388 see also confession of Regina Bartholome; East Anglian witch-​hunt Conrad of Marburg 31, 32, 34, 35 Co[n]tzen, Adam 103 counter-​magic, deployment of 5, 63, 100, 306, 307, 309, 318 courts: central control of 184–​5, 200, 211, 376, 380; church 7, 63, 191, 202, 203, 276, 281, 282, 283, 285–​6, 287, 306, 307, 352; Danish 127, 211; decline of witchcraft prosecutions 379–​86; Dutch 183, 184–​5, 186, 187, 188; English 207, 208, 276, 281, 282, 283, 285–​6, 287, 306, 307, 324, 325, 348, 394; French 209, 214–​15, 380–​1, 383; German 95, 96, 125, 210, 214–​15; heresy trials 183, 184–​5, 186, 187, 188; higher 192, 200, 209, 211, 214; Inquisitorial 19, 181, 210, 211, 381; local 24, 211, 214, 304, 325; North America 208, 329, 330; police 394, 398; Scottish 204, 205–​6, 383; secular 181, 183, 192, 202, 283, 287, 381, 386; Spanish 210, 381; women and

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460  I NDEX

283, 287, 304 see also assize courts; Star Chamber crop damage and failures 74, 94–​6, 97–​9, 103–​5, 218 Crouch, Nathaniel 244, 245 Cruz, Magdalena de la 260 cunning folk 177, 178, 403, 429 Cunningham, Scott 433–​4 cursing 286–​7, 329, 347–​8 Dalton, Michael 316, 357 dance 51, 53, 152 Dannhauer, Johann Conrad 229, 231, 235–​6 Darcy, Brian 306–​7, 316 Darrel, John 387 Davy, Sarah 351 death, being scared to 66 deaths: attributed to bewitchment 45, 66, 90; infant mortality 71 Decalogue theory 163, 164 Del Rio, Martín 8, 10–​11, 260–​3, 261 Delumeau, Jean 99, 163 demon possession 249–​56, 334–​5; convulsions and contortions 253, 254–​5; and dispossession of Anne Mylner in England 253, 254–​6; epilepsy and 253–​4; gender and 231–​2, 298–​300; performance of 224, 249–​50, 258, 264; preconditions for 233; rise in 229–​30, 238; studying sources on 228–​9; testifying against witches responsible for 303, 311–​13 see also demon possession in France; demon possession in Germany demon possession in France 257–​66; and accusations of witchcraft 259–​60, 265–​6; after end of witch trials 407–​8; ‘discernment of spirits’ 262–​3, 266; ecstatic spirituality and 258, 260, 265; exorcism 261–​2, 264–​5; legitimacy and credibility of 263–​5; notions of spiritual hierarchy 263, 265, 266; positive 258, 263–​4; shift in causes of 258–​60; sliding scale of rapture 258 demon possession in Germany 227–​39; areas affected by 230, 238; demonization of the world and 222–​3, 227–​8; gender and 231–​2; increase coinciding with increase in witch trials 230–​1; methods of entry and exit of body of possessed 252;

in nunneries and Gnesio-​Lutheran areas 238; popular confusion between witchcraft and 236–​7; published accounts of pious girls and young women afflicted by 233–​6; significance of geography 238 demonology 6–​7, 9–​10, 19; attempting empirical verification of 144; deciphering of witches’ confessions 343–​4; inversion and validating of orthodox world 147–​8, 150, 152–​3; key questions of 56; parallel passages technique 344–​5; parallels with Foucault’s work on sexuality 345–​6; Protestant and Catholic views on 161–​3; remedies against witchcraft 163–​4; requirement for confessions 341–​3; spell of silence 346; use of authorities 344 demons 35, 38, 41, 42, 44–​5, 148; as household servants 80; New World 197; in popular belief 78–​9, 228; transformation to 136–​7 Denmark 127, 166, 211 depression 235, 236, 237, 251, 349, 351, 370 Descartes, Renée 384, 385 Devil: access to bodies and souls of women by 296–​8, 300; animals performing role of 243, 246; arrow sorcery work of 52; belief in financial payments from 27–​8, 353–​4, 361–​2; clawing and branding of neophytes 315; confessions and battles with 27–​8, 297–​8, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357; deception of intellect and senses by 271–​2; different representations of 221–​2; embracing with witches 54–​5, 54, 55; English church carving depicting 221; familiar spirits conflated with 241–​2; featuring in trials of Anabaptists 185, 186–​8; legal system to limit power of 272; no need of human assistance 269–​70; paradoxes of misrule 148; planting delusions in minds of accused 12; power of 18–​19, 170, 268–​9, 269–​70, 272; sectaries and rejection of physical 171; sexual relations between witches and 55–​6, 176, 243–​7, 245, 268, 285, 337, 361–​2, 364–​5, 366–​9; suicide as work of 357; Weyer and beliefs on 267–​73; witches’ pact with

1 6 4

IN D E X  461

5–​8, 102, 121, 125, 127, 148–​9, 237, 243, 268, 270, 285, 296 devil books (Teufelbucher) 228 Devil-​worship 10–​11, 12, 18, 21, 23, 181, 440–​1; cult in Switzerland 25; elite constructing witchcraft as 310; examining arguments of heretic 33–​5; fantasies of Waldensian  30–​2; illusion of 175; medieval trials and charges of 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–​8; in Molitor woodcuts 54–​7, 54, 55 D’Eyncourt, Mr 394–​5 diagnosis of witchcraft, reluctance of community to make a 67–​8 Dircxdochter, Lysbet 185 dispossession 223–​4, 254–​5 domestic spirits 78–​9, 80 dream cult, Sicilian 129–​31; attempts at diabolization of 132, 133 Driver, Ellen 337, 338 Dutch Republic 386, 407, 408 East Anglian witch-​hunt 110, 208, 326–​7, 347–​60; confessions of infanticide 353–​6; connection with self-​identity 358; insecurities as wives and mothers 348–​9, 352–​7, 359; persecution and gender 350–​1; process of confession 348–​50; Susanna Smith in prison and awaiting trial 356–​7 ecstatic spirituality 258, 260, 265 Edwards, Charles 165 elite: agenda in witch prosecutions 309–​10, 319–​20; attempt to control power of women 193, 201–​2, 211, 284, 350, 355; concern with threat of Satanism 19; culture and beliefs of ordinary people, relationship between 5, 6; fear of lower classes 100–​1; fear of witchcraft 5, 28; inferiority of women constructed by 310; obsession with Sabbath 124–​5; and popular views on charmers 178–​9; restructuring of offence of witchcraft by legal 304–​5, 319; transformation of mentality in ruling 99–​102; views on appropriate behaviour for women 283 Eller, Cynthia 428, 434 empowerment of self-​definition as a witch 354, 358

enchantment 134, 135, 137 England: attributions of witchcraft to Catholicism 165; central judicial supervision of witchcraft prosecutions 207–​8; Chelmsford witches 240–​1; Civil War  327; dispossession of Anne Mylner 253, 254–​6; familiar spirits 240–​7, 314–​15; Knaresborough Forest, England 306, 307; male witches 323–​8; Oakley 307–​8; Pendle 277, 278, 306; practice of misrule 145; sectaries and views of witchcraft 171; state-​building and witch hunting 207–​8; Walton  307–​8; witchcraft pamphlets 240–​7, 311–​12, 326, 327, 393; witches’ flight absent in 109; women as witnesses in witch trials 302–​22 see also East Anglian witch-​hunt; London epilepsy 253–​4 “errors” in magic 78 eschatology 162 Estonia 276 excrement 34, 141, 286 executions: factors in reducing number of 380; for heresy 181; laws altered to allow for 125–​6; witch trial 2, 7, 93, 100–​1, 110, 122–​3, 184, 208, 217, 218, 220, 348 exorcism 165, 250–​1, 252, 254–​5, 259–​60, 261–​2; Church of England ban on 376, 387; prosecution for fakery 387; Protestant 223–​4, 254–​5; public 223–​4, 264–​5; unsuccessful 228; Ursulines at Loudun and involvement in 259, 264, 265 Eymeric[h], Nicolas 35 fairies: merriment 139–​40; and pixies 79–​80; Sicilian “fairy cult” 129–​31, 132, 133 familiar spirits: conflation with Devil 241–​2; in England 240–​3, 314–​15; in New England 298; sexual activity with witches 243–​7 Familism 171 family: authority, subversion of 149, 151; group accusations of witchcraft 395, 399–​400, 402 fasting 164, 286

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462  I NDEX

fear of witchcraft 19, 63, 91, 158, 181, 305–​6; common folk and practical 99–​100, 121–​2; and deference to witches 306, 307, 309, 318; and exhortations to proper faith 40; and nomination of witches for prosecution 305–​6; resorts to counter-​magic and charming 82–​3, 306, 307, 309; taking seriously 416, 456 feasts 115, 139–​41 feminism 421–​2, 428, 429–​30, 434–​5 fertility cult, pagan 113–​14, 116–​17, 118 Féry, Jeanne 259, 261–​3 Fincel, Job 229–​30 Fisher, John 256 Flade, Doctor Dietrich 219 flags 138–​9 Fleming, Abraham 171 flying witches: Bodin on 343; and “carrying” of abducted parties 136; Lancre’s report on 197; and modern image of broomstick 453; origins in pagan beliefs 108, 109; regional variations on 109; to Sabbath 38, 137–​8; woodcuts, Molitor 56–​7, 56 folklore 38, 74, 400; spirits in 79–​80 see also Sabbath rooted in Hungarian folklore; witch cult theory food 1, 59–​60, 59, 139, 140–​1 Formicarius 27, 39–​41, 49, 293, 344 fortune-​tellers 403, 404 France: Basque witch-​hunt 195–​9; Champagne-​Ardennes witch panic 209, 380; comparing witch trials in Germany and 214–​15; decline of witchcraft prosecutions 380–​1; gender of defendants in witch trials 284; heresy trial in Rheims 17–​18; increase in testimonies about Sabbath 215; legal defence of witches 383; medieval witch trials 27–​8; parlements 209, 215; practice of misrule in 145; rise of absolutist state and prosecution of witches 208–​9; University of Paris 26, 78; witchcraft after end of witch trials 408 see also demon possession in France Franch-​Comté area  110 Fraticelli 32, 33 free will 268 Friedrich, Johann (Archbishop of Bremen) 126

Friesland 184–​5, 186 Friuli, Italy 108, 131–​2 Fründ, John 25 Gable, Mary Ann 394–​5 Gaeledochter, Claesken 186 Gardiner, Gerald 114, 419, 420, 423, 426, 427, 429, 430, 432, 433 Germany: attributions of witchcraft to Catholicism 166; Augsburg 72, 96, 100, 101, 236–​7, 355; Carolina law code 124–​5, 125–​6; Catholic landed prelates and witch hunting 217–​18; comparing witch trials in France and 214–​15; correlations between crop failure, weather, hunger and mass witch-​hunts 94, 95–​6, 97–​8, 99, 101–​2, 103, 104, 218; courts 95, 96, 125, 210, 214–​15; decline in witch trials 126–​7; Franconia witchcraft persecution 98; increase in testimonies about Sabbath 215; laws on execution of witches 125–​6; Lutheran response to witchcraft and magic in Rothenburg 174–​9; Mainz 98, 126, 217, 220; reasons for mass persecution of witches in 125–​6; ruling elite’s obsession with Sabbaths 124–​5; Saarland 215, 216; Schongau 95–​6; state and role in prosecution of witchcraft 209–​10; statistics on executions in witch-​hunts  122–​3; Trier witch-​hunt 94, 95, 97, 122, 217, 218–​20; witch trials 6–​7, 120–​8, 193, 217–​20; witchcraft pamphlets 93, 293; Württemberg  87–​92; Würzburg 98, 122, 126 see also demon possession in Germany Gerson, Jean 78 Gifford, George 251, 314 Ginzburg, Carlo 108, 109, 131, 132, 141, 422, 423 Glover, Mary 66, 312 Godfrey, John 331–​4 godly state, doctrine of 86, 203, 386 Golden Age 434–​5 Goodcole, Henry 389, 390 Gooderidge, Alice 69 Gregory IX, Pope 31, 32, 34 Grimassi, Raven 432 Groningen 184–​5

3 6 4

IN D E X  463

Gui, Bernard 35 Gulyas, Andras 137 hair of witches 51, 52, 53 Haizmann, Christoph 237 hand gestures 59–​60 Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 427, 428, 429 Harry Potter 444–​51; American Christian opposition to 445, 446–​8; American voices in support of 449–​50; cultural differences between Britain and America and understanding of 448–​9; Mirror of Erised 445–​6; Southern Baptist assault and parody online 447; title change in America 445 harvests 74, 94–​6, 97–​9, 103–​5, 218 Hausmann[i]n, Walpurga  293 healers, female 71–​2, 291–​4 hell 135, 140–​1, 148, 171 Henry IV, King 196, 284 Henry of Schonberg 32 heresy: and accusations of Devil worship 30–​2, 33–​5; of Anabaptism and intersections with witchcraft 180–​2; Anabaptist trials 185–​8; cannibalism 32; Catholics accuse Protestants of 166–​7; connection with magic 26, 167; demonization of medieval 30–​6; early 14th century trials 23; and hunt for Anabaptists 183–​4; orgies of heretics 31, 32–​3; persecution and chronological intersection with witch trials 181; secularization of trials for 181; trial in Rheims 17–​18; trial of Pynchon in Boston 330; Weyer defends witches against accusations of 270–​1; witchcraft viewed as 25 Herteman, Georgeatte 67 Heywood, Thomas 149, 150 Hole, Christina 348–​9, 359 Holland, Henry 150, 165 Hopkins, Matthew 177, 207, 242, 310, 327, 348, 355, 357, 455 Hörberin, Margaretha 175, 176 Horned God 118, 428, 432 horseshoes 402–​3 human sacrifice 118 Hungary 276, 383 see also Sabbath rooted in Hungarian folklore

hunger, correlations between crop failure, weather, witch trials and 93–​9, 103–​5 “Hutgin” 80 Hutton, Ronald 411, 430, 431, 432, 433, 449 Iceland 276 idolatry 163, 164 Ignatius, St. 262 illness: bewitchment and 1, 2, 4, 8, 63, 65, 66–​8, 69, 83, 84, 90, 308, 312, 326, 393; church attitude to 86, 300; explanations for common conditions 9; immunosuppression 90–​1; physicians’ treatments for 251; psychosocial influences on 87–​92; psychosomatic 9, 63, 70, 87, 90; somatoform disorders 88–​90; treatments of orthodox practitioners and charmers 83–​5; unfamiliar 70; witchcraft and cures for 1, 70–​1, 394; women attending sick beds 304, 319 images of witches: German fifteenth century 124; group of female witches 58–​60, 59; influenced by Christian motifs 135; laming witch 52–​3, 52, 54; sexualised 60; weather sorcery 49–​51, 50; witch and Devil embracing 54–​5, 54, 55; witch riding a wolf 57–​8, 58; witches fellating Devil 244, 245; witches with animal heads 56–​7, 56 images of witches in modern Western world 452–​6; and abandonment of Sabbath 454; awareness of historical witch hunts 454; blurring of science and magic in popular culture 454; cloak, hat, cat and broomstick 453; inability to take witchcraft seriously 456; money motives in accusations of witchcraft 455–​6; swimming test 455; young, sexy, female 453–​4 immune system 66, 90 immunosuppression and psychosocial effects of witchcraft 90–​1 impotence 89, 90, 333 infanticide 283, 353–​6, 382 inflation crises: correlation between witch-​hunts and  97–​9; social tensions and toughening of social relations 100–​1

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464  I NDEX

inquisitorial procedure 24, 201, 202, 205, 210, 211; rumours and initiation 45–​6; in Scotland 203, 205, 206 Institoris, Henry (Heinrich Kramer) 5, 19, 27, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 99, 123, 124, 267, 268, 270, 272, 275, 276 intellect and senses, Devil’s influence over 271–​2 inversion 109, 144–​7, 153; of familial authority 149, 151; of liturgical forms in Sabbath 150, 170; metamorphosis and 149 invocation, medieval trials and charges of 22–​3 Italy: benandanti 108, 131–​2; decline of witchcraft prosecutions 382; folk magicians 432; Sicilian “fairy cult” 129–​31, 132, 133; state and role in prosecution of witchcraft 210; witch trials 25–​6, 131–​2 Jackson, Elizabeth 66 James VI of Scotland, King 129, 147, 161, 203, 204, 206 Jesuits 164, 166, 217, 223–​4, 263, 381, 408 John XXII, Pope 23, 32 Joris, David 171, 187–​8 journeys, to an alternative world 134–​5 judges: Del Rio’s advice to 10–​11; demanding stronger evidence 376, 380, 441; English 208; French 209, 380; German 210; North American 208; reluctance to accept confessions 381–​2; responding to community pressure 11; sceptical 341, 380, 381–​2, 383; Scottish 204, 206, 207; torture and 11, 12, 13 jurists 26, 124, 125, 126, 210, 237, 317; accusation of tampering with 324; evidence of demonic possession and 231; in Rothenburg 175, 176, 177; in Scotland 205, 211 Kenlish, Michael 393 Khartoum 400 Kint, Joos 188 kiss, obscene 152, 244 Knaresborough Forest, England 306, 307 Kramer, Heinrich see Institoris, Henry (Heinrich Kramer) Kyteler, Dame Alice 22, 23

laming witch woodcut 52–​3, 52, 54 Lancre, Pierre de 71, 140, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 192, 193; Basque witch-​hunt  195–​9 Lane, John 254–​5 Langjahr, Agnes 89, 90, 91 Larner, Christina 61, 191–​2, 203, 283, 302, 375 Laurence, Ann 351 Le Roy Ladurie 146 legal assistance for witches 383 legal procedures: inquisitorial procedure 24, 45–​6, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210, 211; limiting Devil’s power through 272; Scottish criminal 205–​7; tighter control over witch trial 379–​81; witchcraft article of Carolina law code 124–​5, 125–​6 see also courts; judges; jurists; magistrates Levack, Brian 181 Liegey, Margueritte 67 livestock, accusations involving 67, 73, 83, 286–​7, 293, 331, 350, 392, 400–​1 London 392–​404; Bible-​and-​key to identify thieves 398–​9; changing witchcraft terminology 403; declining belief in witchcraft 402–​4; fairs 401; family group accusations of witchcraft 395, 399–​400, 402; folklore in 400; horseshoes 402–​3; increasing separation from rural sphere 400–​1; livestock rearing 400–​1; May Day rituals 401; measures to prevent witchcraft 394, 401, 402–​3; nature of urban communal relations and effect on witchcraft beliefs and accusations 396–​8; prosecutions and witch-​beliefs  392–​5; Southwark 396, 397, 399; Southwark comparison with rest of Surrey 392–​3 Loos, Cornelius 219, 384 Low Countries 181, 184, 215, 259 Lowes, John 325–​8, 335 Luciferanism 23, 34–​5 Luhrmann, Tanya 412–​13, 431 Luther, Martin 79, 155, 182, 216, 233, 252 Lutheran response to witchcraft and magic in Rothenburg 174–​9; gap between elite and popular views of issue of charmers 178–​9; handling of accusations of witchcraft 175–​7;

5 6 4

IN D E X  465

perception of witches 175; prosecutions for witchcraft 174–​5; punishment of charmers 177–​8

Macbeth 152 Macfarlane, Alan 282, 302, 355, 396, 409, 423 magic: blurring of science and 454; connections of heresy and 26, 167; “errors” in 78; legal distinction between harmful and harmless 125; Lutheran response to witchcraft and 174–​9; world of 2–​5 magicians 4, 5, 39, 121, 166, 167, 168, 271, 432 magistrates 7, 126, 158, 170, 271, 300; English 304, 306, 309, 315, 316, 319, 347, 393, 395, 398; German 210, 219; Scottish 204, 205, 206, 207 Magnusson, Olaf (Olaus Magnus) 80 Mainz, Germany 98, 126, 217, 220 male witches 7, 220, 276, 284; appearance 57, 58, 332; beliefs about 334; benevolent 285; and challenge to ‘good’ patriarchy 323, 329, 330, 331, 333, 335–​6; English 323–​8; Hugh Parsons 328–​31, 335; John Godfrey 331–​4; John Lowes 325–​8, 335; masculine emotionality and body types 333–​4; and masculinity anxieties 323–​36; Nicholas Stockdale 323–​5; in North America 328–​34; prosecution of Flade 219; and their male accusers 324–​5, 331, 334–​5 maleficium 3–​5, 8–​9, 12, 19, 26, 286–​7; causing medical harm 87–​92; collective 93–​4, 96, 100, 120; disorder of 149, 150; distinguishing between natural causes and Devil’s work 269, 382; image of an act of 52–​3, 52, 54; link between exhortation to faith and threat of 39–​41; men accused of 334; motives for 286; stock damage 304; survival of suspicions of 127, 128; testifying to experience of witches’ 303, 305–​9 see also bewitchment Malleus Maleficarum 19, 27, 48, 49, 57, 124, 125, 143, 268, 275–​6, 344, 354–​5; collection of male organs 275; construction of witchcraft 43–​7; identifying witches as female 285;

infanticide references 354–​5; on midwives 72, 293; neglect of Sabbath in 124; papal approval 123, 216; power of Devil 269–​70; weather sorcery 49 Marian state-​programme  102 marks on witches’ bodies 303, 310, 313–​18, 319 marriage 333, 364; unhappy 340, 352 see also wives and mothers, witches as Martello, Leo 430–​1 McDonald, Sarah 394–​5, 403 McKim Marriott 147 mechanical philosophy 384–​5 medicine: acceptance of women’s role in 17th century 293–​4; conspiracy against women in 291–​4; early modern era treatments and drugs 251; humours, theory of 251; treatments of orthodox practitioners and charmers 83–​5; witchcraft an explanation for failure of 69–​70, 292 medieval witch trials 1300–​1500 21–​9; 1300–​1330 phase  22–​3; 1330–​1375 phase 23; 1375–​1435 phase 23–​6; 1435–​1500 phase  26 melancholy 235, 236, 237, 251, 349, 351, 370 men: contrast in demon possession between women and 298–​300; as defendants in witch trials 284; demon possession of 232; impotence 89, 90, 333; instigating accusations of witchcraft 306–​8, 309, 318–​20, 324–​5, 331, 334–​5; as witnesses at witch trials 309 see also male witches Menno Simons 182, 183 Mennonites 171, 182, 183, 184, 185, 188 mentalities, history of 99–​102, 103 metamorphosis, powers of 56–​7, 56, 149 Michaelis, Sebastien 149, 162, 167 midwives 71–​2, 293; body searches of women accused of witchcraft by 313–​14, 316–​17; medical conspiracy against 291–​3 milk 73, 74, 83, 392, 401 misfortune: explanations for 68–​71, 409; gap between elite and popular views of response to 178–​9; personal and impersonal explanations 409 misogyny 123, 124, 283, 287, 305

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misrule 144–​7, 148, 151, 152, 153 modern witches 419–​25; feminist versions of 421–​2; history of witchcraft and 421–​4; narrative of loss 421 see also Wicca movement Molitor, Ulrich 48–​60 money: from Devil 27–​8, 353–​4, 361–​2; motives in accusations of witchcraft 455–​6 Monter, William 110, 162, 181 Moredike, Sarah 393 mothers: nursing 3–​4, 71; witches as wives and 348–​9, 352–​7, 359 mountain spirits 80–​1 mouth, demonic violation of 252 Muchembled, Robert 109, 201, 208 Muggleton, Lodowick 171 Murray, Margaret 107–​8, 146; comparison of Sicilian “fairy cult” with witch cult of 132–​3; critique of 113–​19, 430–​1 Musiel, Claudius 218, 219 Mussorgsky, Modest 454 Mylner, Anne 223, 224, 249, 251–​2, 253, 254–​6 Nagy, Doreen G. 293–​4 Napier, Richard 305, 312 Napnuel, Jennon 67, 68 natural philosophy 68–​9 Neal, Connie 446, 450 neo-​Platonism 121, 151, 384 Netherlands 11, 104, 184–​5, 188, 232, 408; Ordinance of 1592 168 see also Anabaptists; Dutch Republic Neukirch, Melchior 235 New Age communities 434 New England, Puritans of 295–​301; absence of central judicial supervision 208; contrast in demonic possession of men and women 298–​300; familiar spirits 298; feminised representation of soul 296; male witches 328–​34; Salem witch trials 208, 231, 456; weakness of women 296–​7, 300 New World  197–​8 New Zealand 430, 432 Nider, John (Johannes) 7, 18, 19, 24, 27, 37, 38–​42, 49, 81, 293 nocturnal activity 286, 440

Nodé 162, 167 Norway 127 Nowell, Roger 306 nuns 231, 238, 259, 261–​3 nursing mothers 3–​4, 71 Oakley, England 307–​8 Oedipal themes 365–​6, 367, 368 Onerdamme, Hans van 187 oral tradition 400, 409–​10 Ordinance of 1592 168 orgies 23, 25, 31, 32–​3, 125, 428, 440 paedophile rings 441 pagan: beliefs, witches’ sabbath a reconstruction of 108–​9; fertility cult 113–​14, 116–​17; rituals 25–​6, 108 see also Wicca movement pamphlets, witchcraft: decline of 177, 387–​90; English 240–​7, 311–​12, 326, 327, 393; German 93, 293 papacy, Protestant views on medieval 166 papal bulls 31, 32, 34, 123 parents and witchcraft 71–​2 Parsons, Hugh 328–​31, 335 paternal authority, witchcraft and attack on 368, 371–​2 patriarchy 145, 151–​2, 284, 285; feminism and 428, 429, 433; male witches and challenge to ‘good’ 323, 329, 330, 331, 333, 335–​6 see also Oedipal themes Pendle, England 277, 278, 306 Perkins, William 148–​9, 165 Persijn, Hippolitus 184 Peter of Bern 40–​1 physicians 69, 84, 231, 232, 233, 250, 251, 259, 271, 292, 294, 382 Phythian-​Adams, Charles  401 Pickering, Thomas  165 Pierce, John 254 Pithoys, Claude 263 plague 24, 220 politics: and medieval trials 22–​3, 27; and motivations of Basque witch-​hunt 196, 198 Pölnitz, Götz von 101 “positive antitype,” witches as 427–​30 post-​natal depression  354 post-​partum psychosis 353, 354, 355

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IN D E X  467

potions 34, 38, 49, 362 poverty: accidents and 74–​5; links between infanticide and 354; witchcraft as a solution to 353–​4 powders 3, 28, 38, 394 power: of Devil 18–​19, 170, 268–​9, 269–​70, 272; elite attempt to control women’s 193, 201–​2, 211, 350, 355; of witches 41, 305, 306, 427, 428 pregnant women 317 “present-​centredness” 2, 8–​13 prevention of witchcraft, measures for 394, 401, 402–​3 property, offences against 304 Protestantism: attributions of witchcraft to Catholicism 155, 164–​6, 168; Catholic attributions of witchcraft to 155, 166–​8; confessionalism 216–​17; demonology 156, 161–​3, 164; dispossession 223–​4, 254–​5; religious fanaticism of, and links with witch trials 215–​16; religious tolerance 172, 385–​6; remedies against witchcraft 164; in Scotland 86 see also Anabaptists; Calvinism; Lutheran response to witchcraft and magic in Rothenburg; New England, Puritans of; sects psychoanalysis and explanations for witchcraft 339–​40, 345, 345–​6, 365–​6, 367, 368 psychosocial effects of witchcraft on health 87–​92; degree of intent in displays of hostility and 91; immunosuppression and 90–​1; somatoform disorders 88–​90 psychosomatic effects of witchcraft 9, 63, 70, 87, 90 Puritans see New England, Puritans of Pynchon, William 328, 330 Ralph of Coggeshall 17–​18 Ranfaing, Elisabeth de 263, 264 rape 352–​3 Rees, Kenneth 431 Reformation 155–​9; Catholic attributions of witchcraft to Protestants 155, 166–​8; ‘church type’ and ‘sect type’ churches of 156–​7, 169–​72; Protestant attribution of witchcraft to Catholicism 155, 164–​6, 168; religious fanaticism of, and links with witch trials 215

religious: tolerance 172, 385–​6; wars 215–​16 remedies against witchcraft 163–​4; counter-​magic 5, 63, 100, 306, 307, 309, 318 see also charmers; charmers, Scottish Rémy, Nicolas 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 95, 143, 150 reputation as a witch 4, 45, 335, 377, 399 Rheims, France 17–​18 riding, witches 56–​8, 56, 58 see also flying witches Rogers, Master (Archdeacon of Chester) 255–​6 role models for women 350 Rothenburg see Lutheran response to witchcraft and magic in Rothenburg Rountree, Kathryn 428, 430 Rummel, Walter  94 rumour in hunt for witches 45–​6 Russia 408 Saarland, Germany 215, 216 Sabbath rooted in Hungarian folklore 134–​42; fairy merriments 139–​40; journeys 134–​5; origins of 141; scenes 135–​6; societies 138–​9; transformations 136–​8; underworld and hell 140–​1 Sabbaths 5, 6, 9, 11; claims of social discrimination at 219; confessions a vehicle for information of 342–​3; contemporary historians’ consensus on myth of 342; disagreement on origins of 109–​10; German ruling elite’s obsession with 124–​5; increase in testimony of 215; inversion of liturgical forms 150, 170; modern imagery and abandonment of 454; neglected in Malleus Maleficarum 124; Nider’s concept of 37–​9; origins 108–​10, 141; primary object of demonology and its invention 345–​6; and role in encouraging witch trials 109–​10; Satanic abuse and similarities with accusations over 439–​40; scepticism over 176; in Sicilian “fairy cult” 131, 132–​3; similarities with earlier heretical conventicles 37–​8; symbolic inversion of court festival 150–​1;

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traveling to 38, 137–​8; validating contrary orthodox world 147–​8 Salazar Frias, Alonso de 7, 12, 196, 382, 414, 415, 440–​1, 442 Salem witch trials 208, 231, 456 Sardinia 132 Satanic abuse 439–​43; “proof ” of 441–​3; and similarities with accusations over witches’ Sabbath 439–​40 Sawyer, Ronald 305 scepticism 7, 12, 153, 171, 211, 219, 285, 314, 319, 388, 415, 421; of ecstatic spirituality 265; growing, and decline in witch trials 388; judicial 376, 380, 381–​4; of Molitor 49; of Murray 114; in Rothenburg 175, 176, 179; of Satanic abuse claims 412, 414, 415, 441, 442; of Scot 282–​3, 349; of Weyer 6, 10, 144, 219, 224, 267, 384 Scheuberin, Helena 45 Schiller, Regina 370 Schmidt, Hans 236–​7 scholasticism, late medieval 384 Schongau, Germany 95–​6 Scot, Reginald 7, 10, 80, 171, 267, 282–​3, 349, 382, 384 Scotland: conviction rates in witch trials 205; criminal procedures in prosecution of witches 205–​7; decline of witchcraft prosecutions 382; failure of state to control local authorities 206–​7; legal defence of witches 383; state development and links with witch hunting 202–​7; use of torture in witch prosecutions 206–​7; witchcraft statute of 1563 203 searchers of witches’ marks 310, 313–​14, 316–​18 sects 169; ‘church type’ and ‘sect type’ churches and views on witchcraft in Reformation 156–​7, 169–​72 see also Anabaptists secularization 386, 410; of crimes 181, 186, 202, 283–​4, 287; of witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland 203, 204 Segersz, Jeronimus 187 Seiler, Tobias  229 Seitzin, Margaretha 175, 176 sermons 101, 135

sexual abuse: of children 440, 441–​2; of women 352–​3 sexual liaisons with Devil 55–​6, 151, 268, 285, 337, 361–​2, 364–​5, 366–​9; witches fellating Devil 244, 245; witches in England and 243–​7 sexual offences, women prosecuted for 283 sexualised images of witches 60 sexuality, suggestions of uncontrolled 51 Shakespeare, William  152 shamanism 38, 108, 432 shape shifting 74, 91, 115 Sharpe, J. A. 241, 242, 243, 330, 354, 388, 390 shipwrecks 75, 407 sibyls and sorcerers 60 Sicilian “fairy cult” 129–​31; attempts at diabolization of 132, 133 sleep paralysis 9, 70 Smith, Susanna 353, 356–​7 social control, witch trials as a tool of 193, 201–​2, 211 social developments and links to witch-​hunts  99–​103 society of witches 138–​9 somatoform disorders and psychosocial effects of witchcraft 88–​90 sorcery: charmers and 83; demonic 39–​42; and Harry Potter 445; as heresy 26; medieval trials and charges of 19, 21, 22–​3, 24, 25, 27, 39, 284; Molitor’s imagery of 48–​60; weather 49–​51, 50, 75, 101, 149–​50 soul: Puritan representations of 296; route to 296–​8, 300 South Africa 430 Southwark 392–​3, 396, 397, 399 Spaans, Joke 188 Spain 12, 378; decline of witchcraft prosecutions 381, 382; the Inquisition 210, 381, 383–​4, 440–​1; state and role in prosecution of witchcraft 210 Spee, Friedrich 10, 12, 13, 110, 126, 381, 414 spell of silence 346 spirits: in popular belief 77–​81, 227; theological view of 79 spiritual hierarchy, demon possession and notions of 263, 265, 266

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IN D E X  469

Sprenger, Jacob 27, 44, 45, 46, 47, 123, 124, 267, 268, 270, 272, 275, 276, 344 Stapleton, Thomas 166–​7, 168 Star Chamber 323, 324, 325, 326 state-​building and witch hunting 200–​13; acculturation process 201–​2; conflict between social control and judicial restraint 211; in Denmark 211; in England 207–​8; in France 208–​9; in Germany 209–​10; in Italy 210; judicial and administrative centralisation 201; judicial power and torture 201; in North America 208; relationship between church and state 202; in Scotland 202–​7; secularisation of prosecutions 202, 203; in Spain 210 Stegold, Susanna 352 stock, destruction of 304 Stockdale, Nicholas 323–​5 suicide: attempts 237, 306, 351; contemplation of 357, 368; work of the Devil 251, 357 superstition 78–​80, 85, 157, 162, 227, 310, 402–​3; Catholic 162, 164, 165, 166; Lutheran punishment of popular 177–​8, 179 Sweden 126, 127–​8 swimming test 455 Switzerland 24–​5, 49, 51, 94 Tavernier, Nicole 261, 263 teats, witches 243, 244–​5, 298, 315, 331 Templars 22, 23 Teufelbucher (devil books) 228 ‘theatres of the mind’ 365 Thomas, Keith 146, 242, 282, 302, 355, 423 Tilbrook, Charles 395 torture 125, 201, 205, 366; of Anabaptists 185; caution in use of 126–​7; crimen exceptum and justification for 174–​5; in France 380; and obtaining confessions 10–​11, 12–​13, 27, 188; prohibition of 381; in Scotland 206–​7; swimming test 455 transubstantiation 165, 183 transvestism 145 Trier, Germany 94, 95, 97, 122, 217, 218–​20 Troeltsch, Ernst 168, 169, 170

Truthemius, Johann (Abbot of Sponheim) 121 Tully, Caroline 432–​3 underworld 140–​1 United States of America: response to Harry Potter 444–​51 see also New England, Puritans of University of Paris 26, 78 unwitching specialists 46, 409 urbanization: impact on structure of magical beliefs and practices 391–​2; urban communal relations 396–​8 see also London Virágos, Márton 136–​7 visions 134–​5, 137, 141, 236, 261, 328, 329 Volckgen Harmansdr 188 Waldensians 23, 30–​2 Walt Disney 454 Walton, England 307–​8 weather: origins of witchcraft persecutions in ‘unnatural’ 94–​6, 103–​5, 218; sorcery 49–​51, 50, 75, 101, 149–​50 Weller, Hieronymus 234 Wenham, Jane 241, 308–​9 werewolves 72–​3 Weruick, Peter van 187 Weyer, Johann 6, 7, 10, 79, 80, 81, 121, 144, 219, 224–​5, 230, 231, 250, 261, 292, 341, 376, 382, 384; and beliefs on Devil 267–​73 Whitmore,, Ben 432, 433 Wicca movement 114, 426–​38; “The Burning Times” in literature of 429; “Celtic” connections 434; “community of memory” 429; counter-​revisionists 432–​3; Golden Age of matriarchies 434–​5; and its history 430–​5; unease over term “witchcraft” in 430; witch cult theory and 427, 430–​3; witches as a “positive antitype” 427–​30 Wier, Johann see Weyer, Johann William V, Duke 101, 102 wine industry 98, 218 Winstanley,Gerrard 171–​2 “wise women,” witches as 117–​18, 403

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470  I NDEX

witch cult theory 107–​8, 146; comparison of Sicilian “fairy cult” with Murray’s 132–​3; critique of Murray’s 113–​19, 430–​1; Wicca movement and 427, 430–​3 wives and mothers, witches as 348–​9, 352–​7, 359 women: 15th century feminisation of witches 284–​5; accounts of possession of pious young girls and 233–​6; attending sick-​beds 304, 319; as ‘benevolent’ and ‘bad’ witches 276, 285, 287; Catholicism and 258–​62; changing elite views on appropriate behaviour for 283; conspiracy in medicine against 291–​4; contrast in demon possession between men and 298–​300; Devil’s access to bodies and souls of 296–​8, 300; disproportionate numbers accused of witchcraft 7, 39, 220, 276, 284, 286; elite attempt to control power of 193, 201–​2, 211, 284, 350, 355; explanations for witchcraft as a crime of 281–​4; moral and intellectual weakness of 39, 271, 284, 287, 296–​7, 300, 310; old 121, 123, 176, 231, 267, 282–​3; personal feelings of guilt 38, 339, 340, 352, 358; pregnant 317; prosecutions

for sexual offences 283; ‘refusal of charity’ model 282; at risk of demon possession 231–​2; role models for 350; sexual abuse of 352–​3; typical portrayals of, as witches 282–​3; vulnerability to accusations of witchcraft 282–​5; Weyer defending weak 270–​1; and witchcraft prior to sixteenth century 281–​90; witchcraft seen as a social offence of 121; as witnesses at witch trials 302–​22; wives and mothers, witches as 348–​9, 352–​7, 359 woodcuts, Molitor 48–​60; group of female witches 58–​60, 59; laming witch 52–​3, 52, 54; weather sorcery 49–​51, 50; witch and Devil embracing 54–​5, 54, 55; witch riding a wolf 57–​8, 58; witches with animal heads 56–​7, 56 world, upside down 145, 149–​50, 150, 151, 152 Württemberg, Duchy of 87–​92 Würzburg, Germany 98, 122, 126 Ziarnko, Jan 150, 151 Zyrlein, Georg 175, 177