The Witch
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It may be helpful at this point, therefore, to emphasize how the image of the magician which underpinned the fourteenth-century trials differed from that of the satanic witch which underpinned those of the early modern period. There was no sense in the late medieval attack on magic that magicians were part of an organized and widespread new religious sect, which posed a serious menace to Christianity. They were, rather, viewed just as individuals or small individual groups, in particular places at particular times, who yielded to the temptation to gain access to normally superhuman powers for their own ends. The ends concerned, though selfish, were generally just for personal profit rather than dedicated to the commission of evil as an end in itself, and most of those targeted offered their services for sale to others or sought assistance from such experts. The acts with which they were charged were usually heavy in the paraphernalia – special objects, substances and spoken words – on which ceremonial magic generally relied. In most cases the element of apostasy from Christianity was not central to the charges, and because those accused were not expected to belong to a sect, there was no cumulative effect of arrests, as those already under interrogation were not required to name accomplices. As a result of all these features, the overall body count produced by the persecution was low: between 1375 and 1420 the total number of people executed for offences related to magic, across Western Europe, was probably in the scores rather than hundreds. In this period as throughout the previous Middle Ages, there was in practice no significant element of gender among those tried, save that – mirroring educational patterns in society as a whole – men were more likely to be accused of the more text-based and learned kinds of magic, and women of the less. The stereotype of a witch that underlay the early modern trials had not yet appeared by the opening of the fifteenth century.
The Making of the Early Modern Witch
The most important feature of the concept of the satanic witch that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages was that it was new. This was, as shall be seen, fully acknowledged at the time of its appearance. In 1835 Jacob Grimm, as part of his pioneering work into the history of Germanic folklore, came up with a two-stranded explanation for its development. One strand, the more dynamic, consisted of the increasing concern of the medieval Catholic Church to purify the societies which it controlled, by identifying and eliminating heresy. This supplied the basis for the imagination of an organized sect of devil-worshipping witches, but Grimm also suggested that the forms which that imaginative creation took were conditioned by his second strand, popular beliefs inherited ultimately from the pagan ancient world.86
It will be the contention here that Grimm’s model was correct, but it must be noted too that historians developed its two components largely separately in the century and a half after he wrote. That of folk beliefs rooted in the ancient world acquired momentum in the rather different form of seeing the people prosecuted as witches as practitioners of a surviving pagan religion, which, as said earlier, finally ran into a dead end in the 1970s. Scholars who were themselves expert in the later Middle Ages and early modern period tended to emphasize the other component, of a medieval Western Church determined to identify and eradicate heresy, as not merely false but as satanic religion. One of the greatest of these was an archivist from Cologne, Joseph Hansen, who at the beginning of the twentieth century edited and published many of the primary texts relating to the medieval and early modern persecution of magicians and witches. His collections have been an invaluable resource for historians ever since, and are prominent in the endnotes to this present chapter. It was also he who pinpointed the apparent place and time at which the stereotype of a satanic sect of witches first appeared: in the western Alps during the early fifteenth century.87 The collapse of the theory of a surviving pagan religion, and the beginning of sustained and large-scale research into the witch trials, cleared the way for a new investigation of the origins of that stereotype. In circumstances considered in the last chapter, one was provided in 1975 by Norman Cohn, who essentially restated Grimm’s explanatory model, starting afresh and with much more extensive evidence.88 Once more the primacy of importance of the Church’s drive against heresy was stated, but with much deeper roots, going back to ancient Roman stereotypes of antisocial behaviour by groups with aberrant religious beliefs, especially early Christians themselves. He also drew attention to the orthodox reaction to ceremonial magic in creating the particular context for a drive against witchcraft. None the less, Cohn also emphasized the significance of the folkloric element, likewise rooted in antiquity, in contributing important images to the new concept of the witch. His interpretative model was robust and convincing enough to secure general assent. In 2004 one author on the subject, Steven Marrone, could commence a study of his own by declaring that ‘there is no need to rehearse Cohn’s argument here or re-examine his evidence. Both have been so well received as to constitute a fixture of current understanding of the rise of the witch-craze.’89
This being so, two other first-rate historians who were also working on the same problem, Richard Kieckhefer and Carlo Ginzburg, had to signal their differences from Cohn in order to draw attention to the value of their own ideas. Both actually endorsed his basic model, of witch-hunting as a spin-off from heretic-hunting but informed by folkloric traditions. All three of them agreed also with Hansen’s identified place and time as the most important origin-point for the new concept of witchcraft. Kieckhefer indeed only disagreed with Cohn over details, tackled in footnotes, but Ginzburg was much more emphatic in drawing attention to his differences from both Cohn, and Kieckhefer.90 Those differences embraced both parts of Cohn’s (and Grimm’s) model. With respect to the folkloric elements, Ginzburg related those which had been found relevant before to a much broader and deeper cultural substratum in ancient Europe which he termed shamanistic; and which has been considered at length in Chapter Three of the present book. With respect to the heresy-hunting element, he placed a new emphasis on the importance of specific persecutions of lepers and Jews as secret enemies of society in fourteenth-century France, in preparing the way for a novel stereotype of witchcraft. In 1996 Michael Bailey summed up Ginzburg’s book as ‘one of the most controversial studies of witchcraft’, and its status in this respect has not much altered.91 The inspiration it gave to authors such as Éva Pócs and Wolfgang Behringer, considered earlier, is not relevant here, because they were really concerned with the manner in which folkloric motifs coloured local witch trials, and not with the origins of the stereotype of the satanic witch itself. Historians who have been concerned with those origins have tended instead to elaborate the part of Cohn’s model that referred to heresy-hunting. Michael Bailey has found the conception of the early modern witch in the conflation by clergymen of elite ceremonial magic, the common tradition of practical spells, and the general fear of malevolent magic, in a single demonic construct. This mixture was then grafted onto standard medieval caricatures of heretical sects. Bailey faulted Ginzburg for overstating the factor of night flight in the creation of the image of demonic witchcraft, such flight being a crucial element in Ginzburg’s argument for the importance of shamanistic traditions in that process of creation.92 Bailey’s fellow American, Steven Marrone, has emphasized the impact of ceremonial magic, and the greater agency which orthodox churchmen allowed to demons in response to that impact.93 Wolfgang Behringer and the Swiss historian Kathrin Utz Tremp have restated the importance of attitudes to heresy, showing how trials of heretics in parts of the western Alps turned seamlessly into trials of satanic witches.94 The Dutch historical anthropologist Willem de Blécourt has rejected Ginzburg’s model comprehensively, arguing that the shamanistic analogy is completely unhelpful and that Ginzburg had made an inappropriate projection of atypical south-eastern European folk customs onto Western Europe.95 It has actually been Richard Kieckhefer who has applied Ginzburg’s ideas most closely to the question of origins, agreeing that popular mythologies were important but suggesting that there was no unified imaginati
ve construct of witchcraft in the fifteenth century; instead he has argued for multiple mythologies, in regional varieties, which functioned differently under different circumstances.96
There is thus a considerable recent debate over the matter; but there is also a large amount of new material available with which to take that debate forward. One conclusion that can be drawn from that material is that the western Alps alone were not the birthplace of the construct of the satanic witch. Indeed, the earliest clearly dated reference to that construct is in another range of mountains, the Pyrenees. There, in 1424, the leading men of the Aneu Valley, high in the Catalan end of the range, were summoned by the local count and agreed to act against local people who accompanied bruxas by night to do homage to the Devil. They would then steal sleeping children from their homes and murder them, and use poisonous substances to harm adults. Some had already been apprehended and confessed to this crime, and it was decided that they and any convicted of it in future would be burned to death.97
Bruxas was a medieval Catalan term for the nocturnal demons known in ancient times from Italy to Mesopotamia who were believed to kill children: the Roman striges. In the course of the fifteenth century, as the belief in gatherings like those in the Aneu Valley spread slowly across northern Spain, it came to be applied to the women who attended them, until it became the standard Spanish term for witches.98 A leading expert in the Spanish material ascribes the appearance of the demonic witch stereotype in Catalonia to the activities of Vincent Ferrer and his disciples, Dominican friars who staged preaching campaigns between central France and north-eastern Spain between 1408 and 1422, calling in particular for the punishment of magicians as part of the new Western European crackdown on them. He notes likewise that from the 1420s onwards, secular courts in the Languedoc area of France, bordering Catalonia, began to prosecute individual women for doing homage to the Devil and thus acquiring the power to enter houses through closed doors and poison the inhabitants.99
In the same year in which the stereotype of a sect of satanic witches appeared in the Pyrenees, it surfaced at Rome itself, where two women were executed for killing large numbers of children by sucking their blood on the orders of the Devil. They gained entry to the homes of their victims by anointing themselves with ointments and turning themselves into cats.100 More details of the sect were provided in a trial held by the captain of the city of Todi, to the north, in 1428.101 It was of a celebrated local service magician who sold spells and charms to secure health and love, and break bewitchments. She became caught up in the continuing drive against magic, but what was new about her case was that she was also charged with sucking the blood and life force of children, like a strix, when going abroad at night in the shape of a fly. Moreover, she was accused of riding a demon in the form of a goat (when herself in human form) to join other people of her kind in revelling and worshipping Lucifer, who ordered her to destroy the children. To make it possible for her to fly on the demon’s back, she was supposed to anoint herself with substances such as the blood of babies, and of bats, and the fat of vultures. She was sentenced to burn. Once again a preaching campaign has been associated with this case, this time that of Bernadino of Siena which covered central Italy between 1424 and 1426 and directly encouraged his audiences to report practitioners of magic to the authorities. He had spoken at Todi and co-operated with the reigning pope in launching the hunt at Rome. Bernadino did not believe in the reality of gatherings of witches to which participants flew in order to worship Satan, or that the spells of witches had any power over virtuous Christians, or that they could transform their shape into that of animals. In opposing these ideas, he remained an early medieval churchman. He did, however, think that demons acted for the witches with whom they made pacts, taking the form of animals and sucking the blood of babies to kill them; and in this manner he unleashed ancient and widespread fears which earlier clerics had damped down.102
Between Bernadino’s territory of central Italy and that of Vincent Ferrer and his pupils, which extended from eastern Spain to the River Rhone, stretched the western Alps, recognized since Hansen’s time as the birthplace of the early modern witch-hunt. The three areas were all connected by the networks of preaching friars: Bernadino, for example, cited a fellow Franciscan who had told him of a group of child-murdering heretics in Piedmont, at the north-west end of Italy, who used the bodies for a potion which conferred invisibility.103 The Alpine one was, however, to be the most influential in propagating the new image of witchcraft. Understanding what happened there has become much easier in recent years because of a remarkable cluster of scholars centred on the Swiss university of Lausanne, which lies at the centre of the main region for early witch trials. This group has edited and published the surviving records of those trials, with the literary texts associated with them.104 The import of their work suggests that the appearance of the new image of witchcraft in the Alps can first be securely dated in the region to 1428, the year of the Todi case and four years after the hunts in the Aneu Valley and at Rome. This was when a vicious series of prosecutions began in the Valais region, in the heart of the western Alps to the east of Lake Leman. It lay at an intersection of linguistic, cultural and political boundaries, where the French-, German- and Romansh-speaking areas of Switzerland met, and with them a complex of territories ruled by the local bishop (of Sion or Valais), the duke of Savoy, and other petty states. The trials started in two French-speaking valleys, Anniviers and Hérens, as high in the Alps as Aneu is in the Pyrenees, but they spread across most of the region. They were recorded, about a decade later, by Hans Fründ, a chronicler at the city of Luzern to the north, who was clearly well informed about events in Valais.105 What Fründ recorded was the finding of a conspiracy of ‘sorcerers’106 to kill their fellow humans at the behest of the Devil, whom they worshipped after he had transported them to nocturnal group meetings on chairs into which a flying ointment had been rubbed. Satan, who manifested in animal form, turned some into wolves, to kill sheep, gave others herbs which made them invisible, and changed the appearances of yet others into those of innocent people. Aided by him, they murdered, paralyzed and blinded their neighbours, and produced miscarriages and impotence among them, as well as destroying their crops, stealing milk from their cows, and rendering their wagons and carts useless. In particular, they killed their children by making them sicken at night, so that they could then dig up and eat the bodies. This conspiracy was said to have been growing so fast that its adherents believed they would have taken over the area, and destroyed Christianity, after another year.
Fründ made clear in this case what may be suspected in those of the Aneu Valley, Rome and Todi: that the confessions were extracted by torture, sometimes applied so brutally that people died under it. He estimated that the hunt resulted in the burning of more than two hundred individuals, both female and male, in one and a half years; which is a large body count even by the standards of the early modern witch trials at their height. It was probably the largest for at least a millennium of people put to death for working magic. Local legal records show that it was conducted by petty lords who were driven by a sudden popular fear of witchcraft, and that the trials began in 1427 and lasted until 1436. These records mention all the details recorded by Fründ except the flight to meetings, and make his estimate of the number of executions credible.107 Once again, a preaching campaign to raise awareness of the threat from magic seems likely to have provided the context for the trials. These mountain valleys may have been remote from the main centres of contemporary population, but were not sleepy places ignored by political and religious authorities: on the contrary, they were on the front line of religious evangelism and state-building.108 Two aggressive states in particular, the duchy of Savoy and the city of Berne, were seeking to extend their power in the western Alps, while vassals like the landowners in the territory of the bishop of Sion were trying to assert independence of their overlords. In the process the economy was being shifted from self-sufficiency to p
roduction for the market, with proportionate social tension. Moreover, mountains had become refuges for members of heretical Christian sects driven from or wiped out in more accessible areas, and so by the late Middle Ages were especial targets for the friars who acted as evangelists and inquisitors, supported by religious and secular authorities. In the Pyrenees, these heretics were above all the Cathars, and in the western Alps another austere and idealistic branch of unorthodox Christianity, the Waldensians. The latter were subjected to especially intense persecution in the western Alpine region in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the trials of them merged into those of the new kind of witchcraft, as both were accused of worshipping the Devil in groups with similar rites; indeed, in parts of the region, the same word, Vaudois, was used of both heresies.109 The territory in which Ponce Feugeyron acted as inquisitor general, and in which the pope in 1409 had ordered him to root out heresies, including specifically any associated with magic, bordered directly on the Valais. His powers to do this were renewed in 1418 by Martin V, the pope whose election ended the Great Schism and who co-operated later with Bernadino of Siena in the latter’s witch-hunt at Rome.110
The record therefore shows that a belief in a conspiracy of devil-worshipping magicians, to harm other people, and especially to kill babies and children, appeared in the mid- to late 1420s at different points widely dispersed across a broad area, stretching in an arc from north-eastern Spain to central Italy. The single factor which can link them all is the preaching of friars who were co-operating in a campaign against popular heresy and unusually conscious of the danger posed by magic, as part of the resurgence in the prosecution of its practitioners which had commenced in Western Christendom in the 1370s. This seems to have ignited responses among the populace, amounting at times to panics, in particular places where the circumstances were propitious, perhaps because of unusual infant mortality and other misfortunes, and certainly where justice was in the hands of local secular lords and captains who were easily carried away by public feeling, in a period of political and economic instability. There was a clear connection between these responses and folk beliefs derived from ancient origins, but those did not so obviously derive from ‘shamanistic’ motifs of spirit-flight so much as the figure of the child-murdering demoness, the Roman strix and the Germanic nocturnal cannibal woman. The main part of the new construct, of a group of people who gathered secretly by night to worship the Devil, who appeared to them in animal form, was absolutely standard as an orthodox accusation against heretics in the high and later Middle Ages.111 Richard Kieckhefer has pointed, correctly, to the differences of detail between the Swiss and Italian cases as mirroring distinctive local folkloric traditions, and argued from them that there was no single imaginative model of satanic witchcraft in the fifteenth century; only multiple regional mythologies.112 It is proposed here instead that there actually was such a single construct involved, right at the beginning, and that it took on local forms as it was propagated. The obvious creators and propagators of it were the preaching friars of the mendicant orders, Dominican and Franciscan. Moreover, they were not just any members of those orders, but leaders of a particular movement within them, the Observant, which believed in purging Christendom of all laxity and ungodliness as part of the period of reform, which succeeded the Great Schism of rival popes that had riven the Western Church in the decades around 1400. A study of pastoral literature published in and around Siena in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries provides an important microcosm of this movement at work.113 It reveals that most of it, following earlier medieval tradition, treated popular magic as the product of ignorance and credulity and not as heresy, saw harmful magic as antisocial rather than demonic, and condemned belief in the strix. Bernadino took the opposite view on the first two counts and identified the strix as a human woman empowered to fly by the Devil. In the process, he and his fellow reformist preachers gave a new power and terror to the image of the strix and launched a new kind of witch-hunt. The bricolage of elements that went into the creation of that new model is clearly displayed in the second of the famous texts which have recently been edited by the Lausanne cluster, the Formicarius (Ant Hill) of Johannes Nider, a prominent Dominican, written in the 1430s.114 Nider relied on others for his knowledge, and combined into his model of satanic witchcraft phenomena reported to him by three different people. One was a former ceremonial magician, who had hired out his services, and another a Dominican inquisitor at Autun in central France, who described the local magicians, many apparently serving clients, whom he had prosecuted. The latter man also reported the exposure of a sect of devil-worshipping sorcerers in an area near Lausanne and the Duchy of Savoy, which was presumably the Valais. Most interesting to historians, however, has been Nider’s third source, a ‘Judge Peter’ from Berne, who governed the Simmen Valley on behalf of his city, which had just annexed it. This valley ran into the mountains south of Berne, which divided its region from the Valais. ‘Peter’ became concerned about magic because of a panic created in the district by rumours of ‘evil-doers’115 who were using spells to kill babies in their cradles in such a manner as to resemble natural death. The murderers then dug up the little corpses and ate them, using some of the flesh to make an ointment that conferred magical powers, including flight and shape-shifting. The judge used torture to extract confessions from the accused, not just of baby-killing but of causing a range of injuries to people, as well as offering magical aid to customers. Some seem to have been solitary operators, but ‘Peter’ had no doubt that many belonged to a devil-worshipping sect with an initiation rite which included abjuring Christianity and drinking a liquid distilled from a dead infant. He burned both those who were made to confess and those who refused to do so, and seems to have claimed many victims.