The Witch in the Western Imagination

Lyndal Roper

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813933009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In an exciting new approach to witchcraft studies, The Witch in the Western Imagination examines the visual representation of witches in early modern Europe. With vibrant and lucid prose, Lyndal Roper moves away from the typical witchcraft studies on trials, beliefs, and communal dynamics and instead considers the witch as a symbolic and malleable figure through a broad sweep of topics and time periods.

Employing a wide selection of archival, literary, and visual materials, Roper presents a series of thematic studies that range from the role of emotions in Renaissance culture to demonology as entertainment, and from witchcraft as female embodiment to the clash of cultures on the brink of the Enlightenment. Rather than providing a vast synthesis or survey, this book is questioning and exploratory in nature and illuminates our understanding of the mental and psychic worlds of people in premodern Europe.

Roper's spectrum of theoretical interests will engage readers interested in cultural history, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, art history, and early modern European studies. These essays, three of which appear here for the first time in print, are complemented by more than forty images, from iconic paintings to marginal drawings on murals or picture frames. In her unique focus on the imagery of witchcraft, Lyndal Roper has succeeded in adding a compelling new dimension to the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

Notes

	ABBREVIATIONS
SAS	Staatsarchiv Sigmaringen
SAW	Staatsarchiv Würzburg
StadtAA	Stadtarchiv Augsburg
Urg.	Urgichtensammlung

INTRODUCTION

1. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (London, 2004).

2. On images of witchcraft, see, in particular, Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 2007); Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2005); Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge, 2005); and Jane P. Davidson, The Witch in Northern European Art, 1470–1750 (Freren, 1987).

3. On the importance of fantasy and its role in depictions of witchcraft, see Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland.

4. For some important reflections on this issue, see Griselda Pollock, “The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor,” in Psychoanalysis and the Image, ed. Pollock (Oxford, 2006).

5. See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001), 34–46.

6. Storm clouds issue from the chalice, implying that the Devil is helping her to raise storms.

7. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

8. Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 2007).

9. See also Patricia Simons, “Italian Classicism: Eroticism and Envy,” forthcoming.

10. See, for Italy, Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 (New Haven and London, 2005).

11. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London, 2004), 242.

12. Bettlade mit Selbstporträt, 1533, in Max Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1550, rev. and ed. Walter Strauss, 4 vols. (New York, 1974), 3:803.

13. Another features a skull (Bettlade mit Totenkopfwappen), while others feature triumphant putti and extravagant decoration (Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, rev. and ed. Strauss, 3:804, 805, 806).

14. Cranach’s workshop provided the paintings for the marital bed of John the Steadfast and Margaret of Anhalt. (Mark Evans, “ ‘The Italians, Who Usually Pursue Fame, Proffer Their Hand to You’: Lucas Cranach and the Art of Humanism,” in Cranach, ed. Bodo Brinkmann [London, 2008], 53). On gingerbread molds and a variety of objects produced by the Cranach workshop, see Gunnar Heydenreich, Lucas Cranach the Elder: Painting Materials, Techniques and Workshop Practice (Amsterdam, 2007), 269.

15. Francesco de Rossi, called Salviati, Design for a Ewer, in Old Master Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum, by Christopher White, Catherine Whistler, and Colin Harrison (Oxford, 1992), 60 (fig. 19). He also, however, made designs for real ewers.

16. See Staatsarchiv Weimar, EGA Reg. Bb, 5942–5952, Kleiderrechnungen, e.g., 5949, Rechnung for 1531, fol. 8, under Wittenberg, “luckas Maller zu Wittenbergk.” On Cranach’s David and Bathsheba, see Brinkmann, Cranach, 300. On clothing, see Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010).

17. On de Gheyn, see Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland; and Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse, 145–75. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Beschwörungsszene der Hexen bei Vollmond,” 1776–79. See Sabine Schulze, ed., Goethe und die Kunst (Stuttgart, 1994), 126.

18. Joseph Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London, 1990).

19. Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, by Geertz (1983; New York, 2000), 99.

20. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (1972; Oxford, 1988), 38–39; see also esp. 77–103.

21. Clifford James Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Culture, by Geertz (New York, 1973).

22. See the powerful critique by Mark Salber Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” in History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 123–41.

23. Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993), esp. 441; see also Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft, 32–36.

24. Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft, 99–109. These images are based on the idea of the Wild Ride, and Zika argues that they reflect gender inversion.

25. See, on this image and on the case itself, Jörg Haustein, Martin Luthers Stellung zum Zauberund Hexenwesen, Münchener Kirchenhistorische Studien 2 (Stuttgart, Berlin, and Cologne, 1990), 141–44, 187.

26. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989).

27. See Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft, 125–55.

28. Albrecht Altdorfer, Lot and His Daughter, 1537, Gemäldegalerie des Kunsthistorischen Museums Vienna, Inv. Nr. 6391; Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus und Amor, 1509, Hermitage, St. Petersburg; Werner Schade, Lucas Cranach. Glaube, Mythologie und Moderne, catalogue for exhibition at Statens Museum of Art, Copenhagen, 2002 (Ostfildern, 2003), 67, 178.

29. See Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2008).

30. Charles Zika, “Fears of Flying: Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, by Zika, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 91 (Leiden and Boston, 2003).

31. I am grateful to Deanna Petherbridge for this point.

32. Dieter Koepplin, “Ausgeführte und entworfene Hausfassadenmalereien von Holbein, Stimmer und Bock — Kunsthybris mit dem erhobenen Zeigefinger,” in Spätrenaissance am Oberrhein. Tobias Stimmer 1539–1584, exhibition catalogue from Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, 1984), 40–46.

33. Gareth Roberts, The Languages of Alchemy (London, 1997).

34. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Rosenkranztafel from the Nürnberger Frauenkirche, ca. 1518–19, Inv. Nr. Pl.O.229, Workshop of Veit Stoss.

35. See Jacques Thuillier and Jacques Foucart, eds., Rubens’ Life of Marie de Medici, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York, 1967), esp. 85–86, 88–89ff.; see also plates.

36. There are at least three witchlike figures in the cycle. In The Felicity of the Regency, completed in 1625 and the last of the images, the queen vanquishes Envy, Ignorance, and Vice — Envy’s sagging breast is visible at the bottom of the image below her outstretched arm; while in The Queen Opts for Security, a hag is one of the representations of Evil that the figure of the queen keeps at bay.

37. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992).

38. Ibid., 49–54.

39. Ibid., 158.

40. On paganism and witchcraft, see the following works by Ronald Hutton: The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994); The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996); and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 1999).

41. Sebastian Franck, Weltbuch: Spiegel und Bildtnisz des gantzen Erdtbodens (Tübingen, 1534).

1. WITCHCRAFT AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION

1. “On y voit de grandes chaudieres pleines de crapaux et impres, coeurs d’infants non baptisez, chair de pendus, & autres horribles charognes, & des eaux puantes, pots de graisse et de poison, qui se preste & se debite a cette foire, comme estant las plus precieuse & commune marchandise qui s’y trouve” (Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, 2nd ed. [Paris, 1613]; Ziarnko’s image faces p. 118). For a brilliant discussion of the text, see Margaret M. McGowan, “Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons: The Sabbat Sensationalised,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sidney Anglo (1977); and see now the excellent translation, Gerhild Scholz Williams, ed. and trans., On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre de Lancre’s “Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons” (1612), Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 307 (Tempe, Ariz., 2006).

2. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance et instabilité de toutes choses (1607; 2nd ed., Paris, 1610); Pierre de Lancre, L’incredulité et mescreance du sortilege plainement conuaincue (Paris, 1622). The confessions on the other side of the Spanish border in the same panic were also very elaborate (see Gustav Henningsen, The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution [Leiden, 2004]; Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition [1609–1614] [Reno, 1980]; and Julio Caro Baroja, The World of the Witches, trans. Nigel Glendinning [London, 1964]).

3. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

4. Early on in the work, he considers why it is that a man can walk along a narrow beam when it is stretched across the street, but cannot do so if it is suspended over deep water: “because his imagination would most strongly impress upon...