Emotions in the History of Witchcraft

Laura Kounine, Michael Ostling, Laura Kounine, Michael Ostling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137529022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137529039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

    

© The Author(s) 2016

Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling (eds.)Emotions in the History of WitchcraftPalgrave Studies in the History of Emotions10.1057/978-1-137-52903-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: ‘Unbridled Passion’ and the History of Witchcraft

Michael Ostling¹ and Laura Kounine²

(1)

Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

(2)

University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

End Abstract

Wiem, że to grzech jest wielki, wiem, że wszelkie czary

Szkodliwe, ale żal mój nie ma żadnej miary.

I know witchcraft is harmful, that in practicing it I fall

Into great sin, but there’s no limit to my bitter gall.

—Szymon Szymonowic, Sielanki, 1614

In Thomas Dekker’s Witch of Edmonton (1658), Mother Sawyer is a quarrelsome old woman, ‘shunned/And hated like a sickness’. ¹ But she is no witch, until the hatred of her neighbours drives her to become one:

Some call me witch,

And being ignorant of myself, they go

About to teach me how to be one, urging

That my bad tongue—by their bad usage made so—

Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn,

Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.²

Insulted by a neighbour, she curses him (impotently, her malediction not yet empowered by the Devil). The neighbour beats her and leaves her bleeding, and in the desperate fullness of her rage against a cruel world, she invokes ‘some power, good or bad’ to ‘Instruct me which way I might be revenged/Upon this churl.’ When she declares her willingness to ‘give this fury leave to dwell within/This ruined cottage’ of her ageing body, the Devil appears in the form of a dog. He promises her his love and the power of revenge in exchange for her soul, and Mother Sawyer, not yet a witch when she had been beaten for witchcraft, becomes a witch in fact. ³

Scholars of witchcraft are rightfully reluctant to equate fictitious depictions of witchcraft with the actual practices of accused witches or their accusers. ⁴ And yet the depiction of Mother Sawyer’s trajectory towards diabolism closely parallels stories from the trials of accused witches. For example that of Mengeatte Grand Jacques in Lorraine, of whom a witness recalled that ‘she wished she could be a witch for two hours to do as she wanted’—in order to harm those who wrongly called her witch. ⁵ And Dekker’s play well illustrates the central conundrum of any attempt to recover a history of emotions from literature or from trials: witches were identified by their negative emotions, but these negative emotions were themselves inspired by suspicions or allegations of witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a crime of ‘headie and unbridled passion’, an overflowing of ‘bitter gall’ with ‘no limit’. ⁶ Witches are ‘fit to burst from enormous resentment’, or ‘exasperated with a wrathfull and unruly passion of revenge, or transported by unsatiable love’. ⁷ Witch trials themselves unfold as dramas of emotional expression and repression, wherein the ‘unbridled passions’ on view belong to accusers, witnesses, and officers of the court—such as the bailiff who, according to the testimony of one accused witch, ‘with gruesome and shocking torture took out his anger on me’. ⁸ Jurisprudential convention required accusers to present their case in coolly dispassionate language, such as when Stanisław Gałek, in early eighteenth-century Poland, assured the court that his accusation arose ‘not out of hatred, or rancour, or spite, or wrath … but because of the facts and the truth’. ⁹ But such accusations arose from almost unbearable grief and fear—at the loss of a cow or a child or one’s sexual potency, at the notion that one’s neighbour could be responsible for that loss. Meanwhile accused witches, under conditions ranging from intimidation at best to prolonged and brutal torture at worst, tried to maintain their emotional composure. But not too much composure—rant and rave and they proved themselves full of the ‘unbridled passion’ expected of witches, but if they failed to shed remorseful tears they displayed a culpable dispassion. As was noted in the record of a witch trial in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, which took place in 1616, ‘the prisoner, with her behaviour, without shedding a single tear, cheekiness, and lack of fear’ should not be let out of prison, even though she had confessed to nothing. ¹⁰ Witches were either all too emotionally human or inhumanly cool under pressure, and were damned either way.

As Lyndal Roper has recently noted, ‘witchcraft is fundamentally about physical harm caused by emotions … [W]ishing evil may well actually have caused harm, for emotional conflicts can make people ill’. ¹¹ However, the challenge for historians is to untangle whose emotions caused what harm: the accused witch, whose envy induced illness; or the accuser, torturer, and executioner, driven by grief or fear to dunk an alleged witch in the local pond, hang her from the strappado, or burn her at the stake. While curses or the evil eye might lead to a witchcraft victim’s sickness, the emotions of accusers and magistrates indubitably have led to the deaths of thousands of alleged witches. Roper has argued that ‘without an understanding of the emotional dynamics of witchcraft, we cannot comprehend the intensity and bitterness of the witch trials’. ¹² The unbridled passions discoverable in the history of witchcraft might belong primarily to the accusers.

The present volume attempts to take on this challenge, discriminating between the several emotional registers that both promise to illuminate and threaten to obscure any account of emotions in the history of witchcraft. Part I, ‘In Representation’, explores discourses about the emotional lives of witches. These chapters focus on the witch imagined, depicted, and contested in authoritative and influential works of demonology and visual art. Tamar Herzig revisits the notorious Malleus maleficarum, among the earliest and most reprinted of demonological manuals. Through an examination of the full corpus of works by its author Heinrich Institoris, Herzig complicates the standard reading of the Malleus as misogynistic rant: she shows that for Institoris the ungovernable emotionalism of women leads in one direction towards witchcraft, in another, towards sainthood. Charles Zika offers a detailed case study of a small set of prints and sketches by Jacques de Gheyn II, using these to explicate a Europe-wide visual script, drawing on humoral theory, which locates the affectless cruelty of witches as the flipside of the Virgin’s mercy and compassion. In contrast, Laura Kounine’s provocative reading of Nicolas Remy’s Daemonolatria, one of the most influential demonological texts during the height of the witch craze, turns away from the alleged emotions of female witches to depictions of their supposed master, the Devil, whose rage and jealousy drove people—both men and women—to witchcraft. Finally, E.J. Kent examines the male witch in old and New England, showing how his depiction is modelled on and reflects seventeenth-century concerns about masculine tyranny. Together, these four chapters integrate representations of witchcraft into contemporaneous theories of the emotions and of gender.

Part II, ‘On Trial’, would seem to move from representation to reality, from literary or visual or intellectual history to the history of experience. Rita Voltmer’s chapter on torture immediately dashes any such naïve hope, as she calls into question the possibility of recovering ‘authentic’ emotions from witch-trial records, arguing that these represent carefully constructed emotionological scripts, intended to justify the brutality of early modern courts. The other four chapters in this section express a cautious hope that trial records might provide a window onto the actual emotions of accused witches and their alleged victims. Valerie Kivelson resituates the often beautifully romantic love spells deployed by Muscovite women as part of a larger discourse negotiating relationships of hierarchy and dependency in a harsh feudal society where beatings and torture were routine. Robin Briggs draws on his decades-long immersion in the witch-trial records of Lorraine to consider the emotional landscapes of entire villages: the disruptive love that could move a woman to bewitch, the overwhelming grief that engendered suspicion, the hatred and fear necessary to overcome peasant solidarity and trigger formal accusations before courts of law. Michael Ostling looks to accounts of demon lovers in Polish witch trials to find evidence for marital affection in the least likely of places. Finally, Charlotte-Rose Millar makes use of a very full corpus of English witch-trial pamphlets to highlight the emotional underpinnings of what is often understood in terms of legal contract or theological covenant—the witches’ pacts with their familiar devils. Taken together, these five chapters emphasize the problems and prospects of mining the trial records to reconstruct early modern emotions.

Part III, ‘In the Mind’, turns inward, seeking explanations for the phenomenon and experience of witchcraft in the workings of the mind. Edward Bever takes an approach grounded in neurobiology and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that anger, hatred, and jealousy can trigger strong stress reactions in those to whom they are directed—reactions culturally explained as witchcraft. Peter Geschiere’s comparative ethnography of Africa and Europe explores the complex th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: ‘Unbridled Passion’ and the History of Witchcraft
• 1. In Representation
• 2. On Trial
• 3. In the Mind
• 4. In History
• Backmatter