Early Modern Europe: Witchcraft

magic in early modernity

not all that taboo

Many Europeans practiced magic sometimes

• magic in Christian practice: resurrection, transubstantiation, miracles, etc.

• magical folk practices throughout Europe

• interrelated Jewish, Muslim, and Pagan magical traditions

Magic and religion fulfilled parallel functions

• Magic solves immediate problems like illness, bad luck, unfulfilling personal relationships

  • interconnected disciplines: astrology, palmistry, etc.

• Religion solves big, long-term problems about the afterlife, morality, and cosmic justice, gives life meaning

Magic challenges religion’s explanatory power = Clergy treat magic as a rival

• church lacks the power of magic

• religious should explain everything → take away power of religion by saying magic explains things

• both protestant and catholics hate magic

renaissance natural magic

Masculine intellectual tradition: unlike folks magic, men practice in groups

Using natural materials (rather than spirits) to cause changes in the world

• Kind of a scientific magic, related to alchemy, astronomy, and astrology

• Claims an ancient origin → Hermes Trismegistus as semi-legendary founder (work from ancient magician, unclear on person/divinity)

• images: black and white, print images, popular for the people (buying books and pamphlets

Tension with religious authorities → is this natural philosophy or heresy?

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 – 1494): young upstart magician who became an acolyte of Savonarola and burned his books, assassinated by a fellow practitioner

• believes humans are on a chain of divine animals, can go up the chain if we practice magic

• doesn’t want the church to have pico (destroy what they’re doing)

• justifying as not magicians but natural philosophers (turning lead into gold)

Marsilio Ficino (1433 – 1499): Catholic priest and scholar of natural magic (especially astronomy/astrology)

Accused and acquitted of heresy

reformation magic

The witch craze transcends distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism

Both Protestant and Catholic clergy saw themselves as direct competitors to magic

• And accused each other of being magic-adjacent (you have magic)

  • Protestants: the Catholic Church’s emphasis on ritual, hierarchy, and mystery is basically magic

  • Catholics: the Protestant emphasis on autonomous interpretation opens the door to demonic forces

Distinction between idolatry, heresy, and superstition (holds for most Christians)

• Idolatry: Worshipping something that is Not God (image, devil, human)

  • witches in a pact with the devil

  • big crimes

• Heresy: Worshiping God according to wrong belief (believe in the wrong things about god)

  • protestants and catholics accusing each other of this

  • witches and magicians accused

  • big crimes

• Superstition: Worshiping God the wrong way (correct intention, wrong process)

  • healing teachers: not devil worship, faith is in god but you’re not worshipping properly

  • small crime

  • folk practice: not ideal, churches (both) try to take it down but its not so problematic

witch

Power achieved by alliance with the Devil

• How is that power conveyed?

  • Sex with the devil: only females, males offer up their soul or a child

  • A deal with the devil in which the witch hands over their soul

Power to subvert nature

• Flying ointment: allows you to fly, make objects levitate, project yourself, harm people at a distance

• Killing infants and new mothers

• Killing cattle that are otherwise healthy

Powerful “accessories”

• Familiars: little spirits, animals (black cats)

• Brooms: pervert natural course of tools, used to fly

who is a witch

Men and women (more)

• Roughly 25% of all executed witches were men (this is not evenly distributed, depends on region)

Outsiders to gender roles

• Masterless women: women who have no man (husband, father, brother, etc.) to govern them

  • Women who have never married or had children (have not participated in the activity of building a family, helping community)

• Men who are disagreeable (don’t get along with other men), have no children, either married to accused witches or unmarried

The witch as a wise woman/local abortionist/herbal practitioner (cultural ideas)

• Most accused witches in Norway were folk healers (cunning women, midwives)

• Most witches in Europe are not known to be folk healers

Witchcraft accusations are highly regional

identifying witches

The peak of the witch craze was roughly 1580-1630

A run of strange things has to happen before you start looking for witches (cannot preemptively catch them)

Devil’s Mark can refer to several things, including:

• A mark on the witch’s body that is dead to sensation and does not bleed

• A third nipple from which a familiar can drink blood

• A mole or birthmark in a meaningful shape

• image: finding devils mark

“Swimming,” “pricking,” and other methods of investigation (once found mark)

• Swimming: it hypothesized that a witch thrown into water (tied to chair) would be similarly renounced by that water and float

  • theory that witches renounced their baptism: water will spit her out because water renounces her too

    • don’t let them drown, fish them out

• Pricking: Poking the Devil’s Mark with something sharp to demonstrate that it was numb and did not bleed

  • use sharp tool around it and then dull tool on devils mark so it won’t bleed

• Other methods included sleep deprivation, cutting witches, and judicial torture

  • muslim world: fed poison, if they die = witch

what makes a neighbour turn in a witch

Superstitious peasantry, and stupid: do anything they are suggested (weak explanation)

Genuine terror: scared of supernatural

The witch craze is often framed as men fearing women, but women’s fears are also central to witch persecutions

• Tapped into societal fears about infant mortality, maternal mortality, famine, blighted crops and cattle, etc. (fears about fertility and society’s ability to reproduce itself)

  • Fears triggered by local tragedies and the presence of masterless women, who were excluded from social and physical reproduction

  • women are also deeply afraid → can be convinced that they did it

    • transference: strong emotions about one thing and transfer them to something else (historians think)

    • over confession: say everything that they heard a witch did

Witches were often blamed for mass tragedies → East Anglian witch persecutions during the English Civil Wars

• Something is wrong with society, and we must get to the bottom of it before it destroys us

germany

Southern German Prince-Bishoprics were infamous for numerous witch hunts and violent executions

The witches accused in Germany were generally older, “masterless” women but young women, men, and even children were also accused → children are typically just victims elsewhere in Europe

Eichstätt Trials (1532-1723) → executed at least 224 people

• Series of witch trials, most intense phase between 1617-1637 (176 executions)

• Where did the accusation come from? Court records do not say

• Élite control of the judicial proceedings (judicial torture)

• Most victims initially from rural areas, but increasingly urban by 1617

• Frequently there are multiple victims in one family

• Fairly diverse in terms of rank, including 6 city councillors and 10 former mayors

The most common professions among the executed included brewer and midwife

Belief in witchcraft is self-reinforcing: every confession is further validation

france

Relatively limited documentary evidence survives: local court affairs as no national law existed pertaining to witchcraft

The Witches’ Sabbath is a particular feature of French accusations

• Women engaging in sexual immorality and men either participate or facilitate

• illustration: dancing around naked, satan on his thrown

50% of accused witches in France were men

Labourd Case: 70 people ultimately executed

• Labourd: region in the southwest of France that had been

  badly impacted by the wars of religion

• Pierre de Lancre (1553–1631): judge from Bordeaux

  • Estimated 10% of the population of Labourd practiced witchcraft (3,000 people)

  • Is he a serious demonologist or a lurid fantasist?

Emphasized the Witches’ Sabbath and immoral, illicit sex

england

Less emphasis on the Witches’ Sabbath & the coven

Not very much dancing naked in the woods; that’s more a continental and Scottish thing

Generally solo practitioners: poor, old women with bad reputations

Familiars more common in England: spirit/animal creature as magical companion

Witch persecutions: no judicial torture, high evidentiary burden

• Witches mostly hanged

Witchfinder General: Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620-1647)

• Rode around East Anglia purging towns of their witches

  • Most prolific witch executor in English history

• Not actually part of the army; gave himself that title

• Remembered as a monster, but people were grateful for his services and willingly turned over suspected witches

scotland

Executes more witches than England

• Judicial torture is permitted

• Lower evidentiary burden

• Judges do not circulate: a community can turn against an accused witch more easily

  • somebody they know and suspect

Witch beliefs in Scotland look more like continental Europe than England: historic connection with France

• Witches’ Sabbath, sex with the devil, coven-based activity

1590 Berwick trials: first major Scottish witch trials

• Involvement of King James VI– an anti-witch zealot

  • Danish witch trials due to the rough sailing James and his new bride, Anne, experienced in 1590

  • James convenes a tribunal to find Scottish co-conspirators

• More than 100 confessed, under torture, of being part of a coven trying to kill the king: treason and witchcraft!

Includes the Earl of Bothwell and numerous others of high status

america

Fear that Indigenous people were worshipping the devil

Witch trials are documented in Virginia as early as1626

Salem witch trials (1692-93)

• 300 accused: 19 people executed, 1 person killed during torture, at least 5 died in prison

  • executed by hanging, not burning: blend of English and Scottish models of witch hunts

• Witches were accused of afflicting people, especially young girls, with seizures and other unusual outbursts

  • First three accused: Sarah Good (unwed pregnant woman), Sarah Osborne (became wealthy by seizing her late husband’s inheritance for his sons, people don’t like it), Tituba (enslaved West Indian woman, treated as property)

    • Tituba was dismissed, Sarah Osborne died in prison, Sarah Good was hanged and her baby died of disease

    • women on the margins of society

  • Subsequent accusations targeted local church members as well (mass hysteria, extreme calvanism → even if you’re trying to be good you could actually be sinning, god dammned you and you wouldn’t know it)

• Evidence: the afflicted claimed to see a spectral shape of their tormentor

• Puritan culture came out of Calvinism: you could be wicked and not even know it → mass hysteria

• By 1696, members of the community began to ask forgiveness and perform acts of penance

gender

Witches as gender outlaws?

• People who are not part of physical or social reproduction, e.g. masterless women, childless couples, etc.

Witches as ordinary women and men?

• Historical evidence of plenty of otherwise unremarkable people accused of witchcraft, including plenty of mothers, wives, etc. the witch as an infiltrator)

Witches as feminist heroes?

• Strong affective relationship between witch craze and contemporary discussion of the patriarchy

• Taps into instances of “cunning women” and folk healers accused of witchcraft, but tends to ignore men and unremarkable women who suffered in the witch craze

  • Ignore ordinary people who genuinely believed that witchcraft was a threat

  • Controlling women vs. controlling magic?

Legacy of witchcraft recast more positively via new religious movements like Wicca, white magic, etc.

race

The witch as infiltrator

• Cultural panic about witchcraft happens at the same time as cultural panic around secret Jews and secret Catholics/Protestants

• This is also the period when we start thinking of disease as malignant spirits infiltrating the body

Racialized witches

• Saami

• Roma

• Enslaved African and Indigenous spiritual practitioners

Language of racialization mirrors language of witch accusation

• Fears about unregulated women’s sexuality, objectification of the body as a spectacle or tool

• Considered deviations from appropriate forms of humanity (Blackness as an “affliction” due to immorality)

• The 16th/17th century is when we start seeing people take an interest in somatic race and seek scientific explanations for differences in skin colour, etc.

Antisemitism in depictions of witches

• Pointy hat = Judenhut?

• Hooked nose an antisemitic caricature?

decline of accusations

Contemporary critiques about use of torture, weak evidence, coerced confession

• Not denying witchcraft existed

The Enlightenment?

• Witchcraft = superstition; Enlightenment rationalism destroys it

The “disenchantment of the world” after the Reformation?

• Religion & superstition devalued as capitalism & bureaucracy came to rule people’s day-to-day lives

Legalissues?

• Difficult to prove witchcraft in a legally-conducted trial

• 1635: Roman Inquisition acknowledges most trials were not performed in accordance with canon law

Disciplinaryproblems?

• Demonology = interdisciplinary field of study that underpins witchcraft & witch hunting

• Demonology debunked: decline of witch accusations

Increased political stability and strong, wealthy, centralized statesfewer accusations