Witchcraft in Continental Europe

New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology

Brian P. Levack, Brian P. Levack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136538551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Witchcraft and magical beliefs have captivated historians and artists for millennia, and stimulated an extraordinary amount of research among scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This new collection, from the editor of the highly acclaimed 1992 set, Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, extends the earlier volumes by bringing together the most important articles of the past twenty years and covering the profound changes in scholarly perspective over the past two decades. Featuring thematically organized papers from a broad spectrum of publications, the volumes in this set encompass the key issues and approaches to witchcraft research in fields such as gender studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, history, psychology, and law. This new collection provides students and researchers with an invaluable resource, comprising the most important and influential discussions on this topic. A useful introductory essay written by the editor precedes each volume.

ARTICLES

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Weather, Hunger and Fear: Origins of the European Witch-Hunts in Climate, Society and Mentality

Wolfgang Behringer (University of Bonn)

I

When Jules Michelet eloquently suggested that the image of the witch coincided with an ‘Age of Despair’, his concept of despair differed from that of today's historian.¹ We can hardly accept his formulation, which held the Church responsible for the prevalence of despair. Instead, we might agree with Bronislaw Malinowski that witchcraft persecutions are symptomatic of anxieties arising in times of intense social transformation.² In any case, historiography has moved in that direction in recent decades and, since spectacular symptoms seem to require equally spectacular causes, theories have assumed appropriate dimensions: no less a force than the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism—mirrored in changing micro-economic relations— is held accountable for early modern accusations of witchcraft.³ Capitalism as an essential problem from its very inception: certainly a seductive theorytwenty years ago. Today, not much remains of this perception. Brian P. Levack speaks in vague terms of the ‘birth-pangs of the modern world’ to distinguish the crisis around 1600 from others, but leaves us with little more than a poetic metaphor.⁴

Whether it will ever be possible to elucidate the complex phenomenon of European witchcraft persecutions in monocausal terms appears increasingly doubtful. Still, important new perspectives have evolved since the 1980s, requiring the reevaluation of earlier scholarship and its fundamental premises. One easily recognizable premise is the assumption of variance between ‘English’ and ‘continental’ witch trials. Keith Thomas writes, ‘On the Continent the persecution of witches as a sect of devil-worshippers inevitably started from above. But in England the initial driving force was the fear of maleficium. It therefore emanated from below’.⁵ I will presently demonstrate why this premise is no longer tenable, since virtually every trial and every persecution on the continent originated with accusations from the populace for reasons of maleficient magic as well. Furthermore, Christina Larner designated those areas with persecutions as ‘territories with a bureaucratized form of inquisition supplemented by torture and where appeal was had to the Canon Law manuals of witchcraft’.⁶ This may ring true for a comparison of England with Scotland, but what about Portugal, where demonological theory, judicial torture, and an organized legal system were also present? As Francisco Bethencourt reveals, fewer magicians were executed there than in England; the same appears true for Southern Europe, as recent inquisition research has shown.⁷

In the past decade, researchers have finally begun to actually read the sources from the core area of witchcraft persecutions, Central Europe, with its extensive archival records. The examination of serial documents—council protocols, judicial account books, registers of executions, interrogatory files, etc.—still far from complete—has changed our picture of witch trials and their distribution in space and time. We have learned that trials were not as numerous as once imagined and, when they occurred, they were dramatic local events worthy of investigation solely because of the richness of documentary evidence.⁸ The perception of a continuous ubiquitous witchcraft persecution in Europe is, even in the core areas of the persecutions, no longer tenable. Nevertheless, these singularly local occurrences do display a chronological pattern within a regional, at times supra-regional, context. For some time, researchers have referred to these patterns metaphorically as ‘waves of persecutions’.⁹ In terms of economic theory, we might rather speak of ‘conjunctures’.

Let us consider the spatial and chronological distribution of the largest witchcraft persecutions in order to examine these conjuctures at their peaks. Twenty years hence, Henry Kamen's query whether or not major persecutions actually took place can now be unconditionally answered in the affirmative.¹⁰ Despite Norman Cohn's fictionalized accounts of events in Southern France during the fourteenth century, of Pierre Delancres in the Basques Country or Henry Bouget in Burgundy,¹¹ several terrible persecutions in Central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will not be explained away: in Savoy, the Swiss Waadtland/Vaud, Lorraine, Silesia and the Electorates of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier respectively, persecutions resulted in the execution of hundreds of victims over periods of several years. According to present research, the most adamant of all persecutors, Cologne Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria (1579–1650), had up to 2,000 persons burned as witches in the years after 1626 in the Duchy of Westphalia and his own archbishophric.¹² In such cases, the term ‘large witch hunt’, coined by H. C. Erik Midelfort to describe all persecutions with more than twenty executions, rings of understatement.¹³ On the other hand, the appellation ‘national witch hunt’, employed by Larner for Scotland.¹⁴ awakens false associations, because those regions between the Baltic and Mediterranean witnessing major persecutions, with their weak central authorities and fragmented legal jurisdictions, were not nations at all. My aim here is not to solve these taxonomical dilemmas, but instead to investigate the circumstances of the major witch-hunts in Europe.

If we imagine the persecutions statistically, the largest ones structure a general pattern along a time line: the gravest persecutions of witches in France, Germany, Scotland, and Switzerland occurred in the same rhythm. And this was no coincidence. What I hope to establish is a historical context in which major persecutions occurred. I want to demonstrate that the long, medium, and short term conditions for conjunctures of witchcraft persecutions can be identified, indeed certain conditions are measurable. In that regard, it should be remembered that most early modern societies were agrarian. Therefore, recognition of characteristic ‘agrarian crises and agrarian conjunctures’ provides the decisive point of access to approach these societies.¹⁵ With this in mind, the specific causes of the largest persecutions can, to a large degree, lead us to the causes behind European witchcraft persecutions in general. The following hypothesis is based upon a survey of older international literature, more recent studies of witch trials in German-speaking regions, as well as my own research.¹⁶

II

This argument does not begin by addressing the continental legal system, but a more fundamentally anthropological theme: the continental climate, changes in the ecological system and, as its indicator, the weather—at first glance a banal phenomenon. However, during the major witchcraft persecutions of Central Europe in the sixteenth century, accusations of weather-magic (Wettermacherei) recurred with striking frequency. Midelfort has already shown how important the question of weather-magic was for the revival of witchcraft persecutions in Southwestern Germany in 1562–3.¹⁷ The charge of weatherrelated magic was not new; it reflected a pattern of beliefs present in pagan antiquity and survived in popular culture into the Early Middle Ages. Virtually all Germanic law codes professed a belief in weather-magic, contained in proscriptions against it.¹⁸ In contrast, the Church denied the possibility of weather-magic, threatening the belief therein with severe penalties, exemplified by prohibitions established by the Council of Brega in 563.¹⁹ However, examples from the High Middle Ages reveal that this campaign met with little success and, long before the rise of a cumulative concept of witchcraft, groups of individuals were collectively persecuted for alleged weather-magic: Agobard of Lyon implicated southern French peasants in repressions, while a chronicler from the Bavarian monastery at Weihenstephan accused peasants in the Bishophric of Freising of being instigators of a persecution of weathermagicians—against the will of their ecclesiastical and secular overlords.²⁰

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the discussion of weathermagic accusations achieved new prominence. Although the belief was long considered theologically suspect, the Malleus Maleficarum²¹ unquestionably impuned to witches the ability to affect weather-magic, even as jurists and other theologians argued against this possibility on the dawn of modernity.²² In his consideration of the Malleus in 1489, Ulrich Molitor placed the question of weather-magic before all others in his ‘Traetatus de phytonicis mulieribus’.²³ After witchcraft persecutions set in again in the 1560s, the issue of weather magic returned to the centre of debate: an influential evangelical preacher, Thomas Naogeorgus of free-imperial Esslingen, blamed witches for hail damage to the harvest, calling for their persecution,²⁴ just as the representatives of Lutheran orthodoxy at Tübingen in the neighbouring Duchy of Württemberg energetically struggled against these beliefs with the traditional argument that only God was in a position to influence the weather.²⁵

Why did theologians argue so vehemently about the role of weather-magic? That the charge played such a decisive role is not surprising when one considers the importance of climate in agrarian societies.²⁶ The exact time and location of this debate is even more conspicuous. Most participants were from the Upper German-French-Swiss border regions: I...