Strange Histories

The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

Darren Oldridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351595711
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Strange Histories is an exploration of some of the most extraordinary beliefs that existed in the late Middle Ages through to the end of the seventeenth century. Presenting serious accounts of the appearance of angels and demons, sea monsters and dragons within European and North American history, this book moves away from "present-centred thinking" and instead places such events firmly within their social and cultural context. By doing so, it offers a new way of understanding the world in which dragons and witches were fact rather than fiction, and presents these riveting phenomena as part of an entirely rational thought process for the time in which they existed.

This new edition has been fully updated in light of recent research. It contains a new guide to further reading as well as a selection of pictures that bring its themes to life. From ghosts to witches, to pigs on trial for murder, the book uses a range of different case studies to provide fascinating insights into the world-view of a vanished age. It is essential reading for all students of early modern history.

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1 Introduction

Strange worlds

In 1608 the English naturalist Edward Topsell published a study of dragons. Surveying the compendious evidence that he had amassed, he observed that it should “satisfy any reasonable man that there are winged serpents and dragons in the world”. As these dangerous creatures were seldom seen in his homeland, Topsell hoped “that we never have better arguments to satisfy us” by their appearance on English soil. A few years earlier, the Flemish theologian Martín Del Rio began a discussion of the danger of harmful magic by noting that its existence was beyond dispute; there was no need to prove that evil magic was real, only to explain its nature and the various forms in which it occurred. Henri Boguet, the judge of the lands of the Abbey of St Claude in Franche-Comté, expressed astonishment in 1602 that anyone could doubt the existence of witches. Like Topsell’s dragons, the evidence for them was so compelling that it stretched credulity to suggest they were not real.¹

These ringing assertions conveyed, perhaps, a hint of insecurity. It was certainly true that some people in Boguet’s day did question the wisdom of witch trials, though very few doubted the reality of the crime. Topsell’s appeal to the good sense of “any reasonable man” betrayed his need to fend off potential sceptics: after all, he did not make such arguments about the existence of foxes or deer, or other familiar animals on which he wrote. Nonetheless, the statements of Topsell, Del Rio and Boguet were sincere: they believed firmly in the phenomena they described, and found it truly surprising that others might not. Moreover, their views were rooted securely in the learning of their day, and they presented them with careful (and sometimes ostentatious) scholarship. The most interesting thing about Renaissance experts on dragons, magic and witchcraft is not that they were mistaken: it is that they belonged to the mainstream of their culture’s intellectual life.

This simple observation has some big effects. To most readers of this book, the world of dragons and witches is the world of fiction: indeed, such things are staples of the fantasy genre. It is almost impossible to think of them as part of the real world. As a consequence, we struggle to take seriously those men and women in the past for whom these things were real; at best we seek to explain their folly, and at worst we dismiss them as fools. But in doing so we miss an opportunity for something far more rewarding. If we can try to understand how dragons, magic and witches were part of a coherent and rational understanding of the world, we can use these and other seemingly strange beliefs as points of entry into a vanished way of thinking.

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The problems raised by such beliefs are illustrated by an event described by the German friar Heinrich Institoris in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). A woman from Rothenbach in the Black Forest was accused of witchcraft before the seigniorial court of the Count of Fürstenberg. Instead of relying on human judgement, the count placed the matter in the hands of God. The suspect was subjected to “the trial by red-hot iron”. She was asked to take an iron from a furnace and carry it for three paces, after which her hand was bound for a time before the wound was inspected; if it healed cleanly she was innocent, but if it festered she was condemned. The woman took the test with remarkable confidence: indeed, she offered to carry the hot iron for more than the stipulated three steps. She was subsequently acquitted. In his account of the case, Institoris objected that the decision was unsafe because the ordeal was open to demonic manipulation. The Devil, as a master of natural science, may have protected her hand from the effects of the hot iron. This led him to warn judges in future to avoid the ordeal.²

The conceptual terrain of this story is utterly foreign. There is nothing here to help a modern-day observer find their bearings. The woman was accused of a crime that is now regarded as impossible, and she was set free by a process that seems arbitrary. When Institoris condemned the proceedings, he ignored the obvious problems that modern readers would point out: the apparent randomness and unfairness of the ordeal, not to mention its brutality. Instead, he based his objections on the supposed power of the Devil, and assumed the suspect was guilty as charged. The desire to make sense of such events by explaining them away can be overwhelming. It is tempting to dismiss them as “superstitious”. This is linked to the view that those involved were somehow irrational: their behaviour derived from stupidity or some kind of hysteria. More darkly, some people may suspect ulterior motives: those responsible were exploiting popular credulity for financial gain or as an excuse for sadism. Others might assume that ignorance and poor education were to blame. The people involved simply “didn’t know better”.

But these reactions bear little relation to the surviving evidence. One of the first things to strike any reader of medieval and Renaissance writings on witchcraft is the painstaking, often tedious scholarship they contain. Whatever else we may think of these texts, they do not appear to have been produced by hysterics. Books like the Malleus Maleficarum were based on extensive and highly conventional learning, rooted in the Bible and the philosophy of the Church Fathers. The most serious allegations against witches – that they gathered at night to kill babies and worship the Devil – were found mainly in the writings of educated men. While the legal prosecution of witches was exceptional in many respects, there is little in the surviving records to suggest it was normally characterised by malice or a cavalier disregard for justice. Equally, the practice of trial by ordeal took place in a spirit of seriousness and attention to correct procedure that belies the view that it was based on cruelty. In some cases the suspects themselves asked to undergo the ordeal, apparently confident in the belief that God would judge them truly. As Institoris noted sourly, this was the case with the accused woman at Rothenbach. By the time of this incident, the use of the ordeal was rare; but until its decline in the thirteenth century, its application was supported by some of the most thoughtful and devout Christians in western Europe.

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This book will argue that concepts like “superstition” and ignorance do little to help us understand the world of the witch of Rothenbach. On the contrary, they actually prevent us from seeing that world as it probably was: a community of men and women who were no less reasonable and well intentioned than we are. It is not only simplistic to view these people as hysterical: it also denies their humanity. To regard them as irrational is no less insulting – or mistaken – than to view African tribespeople as “savages”. The idea that the pre-modern world was befogged with superstition also separates us from the past. The romantic nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle affirmed this point as he contemplated the ruined English abbey of Bury St Edmunds:

Let us know always that this was a world, and not a void infinite of grey haze, with phantasms swimming in it. These old St Edmundsbury walls, I say, were not peopled with phantasms; but with men of flesh and blood, made altogether as we are. Had thou and I then been, who knows but we ourselves had taken refuge from an evil time, and fled to dwell here?

Carlyle was a conservative thinker who yearned gloomily for an idealised past. But he also challenged the arrogant assumption that the modern age was intellectually superior to its predecessors. He denied that the extinct society of the Suffolk monks was any less reasonable than his own, and implied that the beliefs of its inhabitants – and presumably those of his contemporaries as well – were shaped by the conditions in which they chanced to live. These simple ideas provide the basis for this book. However peculiar they now seem, the beliefs of pre-modern people were normally a rational response to the intellectual and social context in which they were expressed.³

This leads to the idea of “strangeness”. When something appears to be strange, this often means it is outside our normal experience. It is strange to put a pig on trial, to execute a dead man, or to attempt to conjure a spirit. By the same token, an idea may seem strange if it is unfamiliar. Historians of witchcraft have noted that allegations of the crime were more readily believed when they included well-known motifs: the bad reputation of the supposed witch, their threats to their neighbours, and “unusual” afflictions. The sheer familiarity of these ingredients made accusations more plausible. In an important study of the Malleus Maleficarum, Hans Peter Broedel has shown how its author placed the widely held beliefs of late medieval villagers in a context acceptable to Renaissance intellectuals. Institoris’ vision of witchcraft proved more successful than the work of other writers because it “was more closely aligned with the perceived reality” of his time. For much the same reason, the Malleus seems utterly incredible today. This observation may seem banal, but it has an important implication. If the feeling of strangeness results from unfamiliarity, then this feeling depends largely on what we are normally used to doing and believing. Saying something is strange is just another way of saying, “This is not what I do”, or “This is not what I believe”. Its strangeness would vanish if we were transported, as Carlyle imagined, into another world where different assumptions prevailed.⁴

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Our own lives are filled with experiences and beliefs that are peculiar to our culture, and would seem bizarre to anyone outside it. We do not need to look far for examples. The ability to read is a good illustration. For the great majority of western people, the habit of literacy makes it impossible to scan the shelves of a newsagent’s shop without noticing the titles of magazines. When we walk down the high street, we recognise the words on posters and shop window displays without even trying to do so. These actions are automatic: they feel as natural as breathing. But reading is an acquired skill that can only be mastered through years of practice. Moreover, mass literacy is a comparatively recent phenomenon: only a fraction of the European population could read in the fifteenth century. More remarkably, it is quite likely that widespread literacy is an exception to the normal pattern of human culture: anthropologists and historians have argued convincingly that reading has emerged in only a minority of human societies. In reading this book, you may well be doing something that runs counter to normal human experience. From the perspective of most people in history, the activity you are engaged in would appear to be truly strange.⁵

If familiarity is one measure of strangeness, another is “making sense”. Many strange beliefs strike us as nonsensical. It is not only unusual to acquit a suspected criminal because she can carry a hot iron for six paces: it also seems absurd. But the strangeness of a belief does not make it illogical. In 1940 the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood noted that all careful thought is based on presuppositions about the world, indeed, the acknowledgement of this fact, and the willingness to examine one’s own presuppositions, is essential to sound reasoning. Collingwood also proposed that at the base of rational thought were certain unquestioned or “absolute” presuppositions. These were distinctive to particular communities at particular times. It followed that careful thinking in one era might produce outcomes very different to those in another. Through the development of a mature “historical consciousness”, individuals could appreciate “how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought”, and recognise that their own presuppositions cannot be “ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always”. This approach acknowledges the reasonableness of people in the past while accepting that their ideas sometimes diverged dramatically from ours.⁶

A complementary approach can be borrowed from anthropology. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz has argued that people always understand their life experiences in the context of a “system of belief”. This is a looser structure than Collingwood’s apparatus of logical presuppositions, and does not necessarily imply a systematic body of thought. For Geertz, a belief system is “the framework of beliefs, expressive symbols, and values in terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings, and make their judgements”. Belief systems are not created from scratch. Women and men are born into them, and accept them in much the same way that they accept their physical environment. “Common sense” judgements reflect the prevailing assumptions of communities at particular times, which often differ from one another. In this model, ideas can be viewed as rational if they are consistent with prevailing knowledge. When we are familiar with the dominant assumptions of a certain culture – such as our own – we tend to regard the behaviour of people who act in conformity with these assumptions as perfectly sensible; when we have little understanding of the beliefs of another society, many of the acts that routinely occur within it may strike us as absurd.⁷

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In the period covered by this book – from the late Middle Ages to the beginnings of modern science at the end of the seventeenth century – the prevailing system of belief permitted many ideas that now seem unfamiliar or ridiculous. Can the dead walk? Most people in medieval Europe believed they could, and orthodox Christians assumed t...