The Voices of Women in Witchcraft Trials

Northern Europe

Liv Helene Willumsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000550566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

Women come to the fore in witchcraft trials as accused persons or as witnesses, and this book is a study of women's voices in these trials in eight countries around the North Sea: Spanish Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

From each country, three trials are chosen for close reading of courtroom discourse and the narratological approach enables various individuals to speak. Throughout the study, a choir of 24 voices of accused women are heard which reveal valuable insight into the field of mentalities and display both the individual experience of witchcraft accusation and the development of the trial. Particular attention is drawn to the accused women's confessions, which are interpreted as enforced narratives. The analyses of individual trials are also contextualized nationally and internationally by a frame of historical elements, and a systematic comparison between the countries shows strong similarities regarding the impact of specific ideas about witchcraft, use of pressure and torture, the turning point of the trial, and the verdict and sentence.

This volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of witchcraft, witchcraft trials, transnationality, cultural exchanges, and gender in early modern Northern Europe.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003255406-1

‘I listen to the dead with my eyes’.

Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas¹

The Topic

‘Reading is listening to the dead with your eyes’. Roger Chartier paraphrases a line by Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo in his inaugural lecture of a chair devoted to the roles of the written word in European cultures between the end of the Middle Ages and the present day.² The same line appropriately describes the work I set out to undertake in this book, as the act of listening out for voices in written texts forms the core of my study. Chartier maintains:

Only in rare documents, and in spite of the betrayals by the transcriptions of scribes, judges, or lettered men, can historians hear the words of the dead who were moved to tell of their beliefs and their deeds, recall their actions, or recount their lives.³

The historian’s desire is to find such rare documents—sources which can tell us about the life, imagination, and destiny of people who lived before us. In my view, recorded proceedings from witchcraft trials could be documents of this kind, as they contain voices of individuals that can be listened out for.

This book has to do with voices, witchcraft trials, and gender. It is a contribution to research on courtroom discourse in witchcraft trials and on the history of mentalities in Early Modern Europe. It deals with the question of how accused women made their voices heard in witchcraft trials while under severe persecution. The witchcraft trials in Europe took place in the period 1450–1750, and around 50,000 people were executed.⁴ Through a detailed study of individual trial records from eight countries in Northern Europe, this book sheds new light on how voices of women came to the fore in the courtroom in Spanish Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In addition to presenting the findings on a national level, I carry out a comparison between the countries. The study has significant implications for understanding Early Modern European witchcraft trials, because it is the first comparison of voices in witchcraft trials based on close readings of source material in the original languages of eight countries.

My thesis is that the voices of women as they appear in the court records of witchcraft trials may contribute to new and important knowledge about the ideas and abilities that ordinary women possessed and about courtroom discourse in a wider and more general sense. The strength of the study is its closeness to the language of the court records: it departs from the trials of individually accused women and the words these women uttered in the courtroom. Most often, the interrogation of a woman accused of witchcraft ended in a confession. I argue that these confessions are vital to elucidating the court records of witchcraft trials. These are multilayered, complex texts, with a rich potential for interpretation. In the confessions, it is possible to listen out for what the voices of women expressed as well as how this was expressed. It is further possible to uncover layers of meaning related to the development of the trial: positions taken by the accused women and the stages that each woman went through. The voices of women as they appear when listened out for in the recorded text tell about agony, despair, disillusion, strength, and hope. These voices are the theme of this book.

The following research questions constitute the backbone of my study: What were the witches’ words? What characterized the voices of accused women? What influenced the voices of women? What was the judicial response to witches’ voices? Can we find differences between various areas of Northern Europe? Can we find differences between the early and late period of witchcraft persecution in Northern Europe? The answers are manifold. The women protested, argued, told stories, and finally gave in. Their destinies lay in the hands of powerful men. However, even in this dark picture, in the most hopeless of situations, these women were left with a fragile thread of self-presentation, namely expressing themselves through enforced narratives—often with the Evil One as the main protagonist.

The confessions are particularly valuable parts of the records, as they provide insight into the mentalities of ordinary people in the seventeenth century. In addition, women’s voices emerged during interrogation of the accused as well as in testimonies given by witnesses. On the one hand, the voices of women that are audible in the sources let us hear people who were in distress, having been exposed to severe pressure in a legal trial that accused them of a crime they could never have committed. On the other hand, the voices provide a glimpse of a world of beliefs and stories, tales learned via oral tradition, and ideas acquired from learned men in court or from the preaching of the church. As learned ideas were steadily assimilated into ordinary people’s mental realm, the court records represent a rare possibility to encounter ideas that common people had about witchcraft, and to understand how these ideas were narrated in a courtroom.

The Sources

The main sources used to analyse the witchcraft trials from all over Europe are court records, as these trials were held mainly in secular courts. The proceedings of the trials were recorded by a scribe, and these records form the main objects of analysis. In addition, sources like accounts of expenses as well as adjacent judiciary documents shed light on witchcraft trials.

The court records analysed in this book are mostly unpublished sources, preserved in handwritten minute books or as loose documents in archival boxes. They were important documents in the legal field in a period when state bureaucracy was expanding, as they served to both document the trials and make it possible to pass the trial on to a Court of Appeal. While working on this book, I travelled to archives in person and read archival sources from all countries in the original language used by the scribe, except for court records from the Netherlands, where I needed professional assistance as I do not speak Dutch.⁵

The choice of which witchcraft trials to use for this study depended on several factors. The style used in the recording of the sources strongly influences the possibility to listen out for and conduct an analysis of the voices of women. The court records had to be written in a style that lets individual discourses, the speech of women, come to the fore. This means that it had to be possible to decipher the voices on an individual level and understand who was the speaker or whose words were rendered in a certain passage. It was also important to grasp the questions posed to the accused. In Northern Germany and Spanish Netherlands, questionnaires were used during interrogation, and the questions were written out. Sometimes, questions were denoted in the sources from the other countries, through insertions such as ‘Being asked’ or ‘When asked’. Other times, it was possible to use the technique of ‘shadow questions’, which scrutinizes the answer given to uncover the question posed. For most of the analysed court records, the questions posed during interrogation could be reconstructed.

Next, the richness of the records’ language mattered in the choice of trials to analyse, as a fruitful close reading of court records relies on these characteristics. The sources to be analysed had to be able to demonstrate the voices of women in great detail. Thus, the trial documents used in this study were chosen on linguistic grounds, as their style and linguistic richness made them particularly suitable for close reading with the intention of listening out for female voices. The recording of what was said in the courtroom provides shades and nuances to the trial document, and makes it possible to discern voices of all those who were active during the trial in one way or another.

I also aimed at achieving a balance between the different types of trials. Women accused of witchcraft were brought before the courts in two types of trials: single trials or witchcraft panics. These two types of trials were connected to different legal systems: the accusatorial or the inquisitorial system. A single trial most often followed an accusatory system, while a witchcraft panic most often was conducted according to an inquisitorial system. In a single trial, one individual at a time was brought before the court and accused of having performed witchcraft. In a witchcraft panic, one trial led to another in rapid succession during a short period of time due to denunciation of other suspects by the first accused person.

According to the accusatorial system,

a criminal action was both initiated and prosecuted by a private person, who was usually the injured party or his kin. The accusation was a formal, public, sworn statement that resulted in the trial of the accused before a judge. If the accused admitted his guilt, or if the private accused could provide certain proof, then the judge would decide against the defendant.⁶

If there was any doubt, the court would appeal to God for signs of guilt or innocence. In witchcraft trials, the prosecutor called on his witnesses and other evidence to establish guilt. Witnesses’ testimonies became important evidence. The content of these trials was tradi...