The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  46.The measures concerned are respectively the Laws of Alfred, Introduction, section 30; Laws of Athelstan, c. 6; (so-called) Laws of Edward and Guthrum, c. 11; Laws of Ethelred, 6, c. 6; and Laws of Canute, c. 5.1. Editions and translations can be found in Benjamin Thorpe (ed.), Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, London, 1840; F. L. Attenborough (ed.), The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, New York, 1963; and Whitelock et al. (eds), Councils and Synods.

  47.All these points were well made by Jane Crawford, ‘Evidences for Witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon England’, Medium Aevum, 32 (1963), 99–116; and Audrey L. Meaney, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England’, and Anthony Davies, ‘Witches in Anglo-Saxon England’, in D. G. Scragg (ed.), Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester, 1989, 9–56.

  48.Meaney, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Magic’, deals with the terminology.

  49.Henry Sweet (ed.), The Oldest English Texts, Early English Text Society, 83 (1885), 94, 99, 116.

  50.Lacnunga, c. 76.

  51.Leechbook III, fos 123a–125v. For different translations, see Crawford, ‘Evidences for Witchcraft’, 110; and Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge, 2007, 104.

  52.The record is edited and translated in Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 89, and discussed by Crawford and Davies, above.

  53.The spells and charms against evil magicians are in the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, c. 86.4; Leechbook, 1.45.6 and 1.54, and the ‘Aecerbot’ rite, printed in Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, Halle, 1948, 172–87. These works, and the Lacnunga, represent the major collections of such remedies.

  54.They are all studied in detail by Davies, ‘Witches in Anglo-Saxon England’, who draws the same conclusion.

  55.Thorpe (ed.), Ancient Laws and Institutes, 251; Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, 38–9.

  56.These cases were carefully detected and assembled by C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, London, 1933, 27–8.

  57.Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, 39; Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, 3.45.6; Bartholomaeus de Cotton, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Richards Luard, London, 1859, 171–3.

  58.For what follows below, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY, 1972, 132–94; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 102–43; Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 33–176; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 116–70; Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic’, 20–62; and Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 79–130.

  59.For the English material see Hansen, Quellen, 2; and Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 29.

  60.For the growing fear of the Devil, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer, Ithaca, NY, 1984, 295–6; Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge, 2003, 20–21; and Alain Bougereau, Satan the Heretic, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Chicago, 2006, passim.

  61.The documents are printed in Hansen, Quellen, 2–6; and Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, London, 1888, vol. 3, 455, 657. For the background, and supporting data, see Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 130–33; Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 129–35; and Bougereau, Satan the Heretic.

  62.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 186–7, 193–4.

  63.haeretici sortilagae.

  64.The primary sources are edited with commentary by L. S. Davidson and J. O. Ward, as The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler, Asheville, NC, 2004. For analyses, see Anne Neary, ‘The Origins and Character of the Kilkenny Witchcraft Case of 1324’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 83C (1983), 333–50; Bernadette Williams, ‘The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler’, History Ireland, 2 (1993), 20–24; and Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch and the Wild Irish, Dublin, 2015.

  65.G. O. Sayles (ed.), Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Edward III. Volume Five, Selden Society, 1958, 53–7.

  66.Ralph A. Houlbrooke, ‘Magic and Witchcraft in the Diocese of Winchester’, in David J. B. Trim and Peter J. Balderstone (eds), Cross, Crown and Community, Oxford, 2004, 113–20.

  67.The documents are printed in Hansen, Quellen, 8–11.

  68.Ibid., 64–6.

  69.Ibid., 11–12.

  70.Ibid., 15–16.

  71.The cases are listed in Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, 120–25; Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 34–5; and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The British Witch, Stroud, 2014, 68–83.

  72.For all this, see Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 34–8; Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 104–12; J. R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France, Leiden, 1998; and Tracy Adams ‘Valentina Visconti, Charles VI, and the Politics of Witchcraft’, Parergon, 30 (2013), 11–32.

  73.Hansen, Quellen, 528.

  74.Directorium inquisitorum, 335–8. The most readily available edition is the Venice one of 1595.

  75.The records were published by Hansen, Quellen, 518–23.

  76.This case was discussed in the previous chapter.

  77.Hansen, Quellen, 524–6.

  78.Gene A. Brucker, ‘Sorcery in Renaissance Florence’, Studies in the Renaissance, 10 (1963), 7–24.

  79.Christine Meek, ‘Man, Woman and Magic: Some Cases from Late Medieval Lucca’, in Christine Meek (ed.), Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, Dublin, 2000, 43–66.

  80.The cases are collected in Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 35.

  81.Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 126–30.

  82.For all this, see the medieval sources, and commentaries upon them, cited in Chapter Four.

  83.Meek, ‘Man, Woman and Magic’.

  84.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 118–43.

  85.It is printed in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages, London, 2011, 30–31. Carlo Ginzburg has drawn attention to the Pope’s emphasis on seeking new heresies as especially significant, in Ecstasies, 68–9, but I do not.

  86.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, 946–52, 1046–7.

  87.In Hansen, Zauberwahn.

  88.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons.

  89.Steven P. Marrone, ‘Magic, Bodies, University Masters, and the Invention of the Late Medieval Witch’, in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds), History in the Comic Mode, New York, 2007, 266.

  90.Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials; Ginzburg, Ecstasies.

  91.Bailey’s comment is in ‘The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath’, Exemplaria, 8 (1996), 419–39. For an appraisal of the overall reputation of the Ginzburg thesis, see Yme Kuiper’s essay in Chapter 3, n. 15. For immediate critiques of it, see the reviews by Robert Bartlett in the New York Review of Books, 13 June 1991, 37–8; Richard Kieckhefer in the American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 837–8; and John Martin in Speculum, 67 (1992), 148–50.

  92.Michael Bailey, ‘The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath’; ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960–90; ‘The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 19 (2002), 120–34; Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, University Park, PA, 2003, 32–48; and ‘A Late Medieval Crisis of Superstition?’, Speculum, 3 (2009), 633–61.

  93.Marrone, ‘Magic, Bodies, University Masters’; and see also now his A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, London, 2015, 163–96.

  94.Tremp’s ideas are most accessibly summed up in her article on ‘Heresy’ in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, vol. 2, 485–7, with another summary in ‘The Heresy of Witchcraft in Western Switzerland and Dauphiné’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 6 (2011), 1–10; and Behringer’s in ‘How the Waldensians Became Witches’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Communicating with the Spirits, Budapest, 2005, 155–92.

  95.Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Return of the Sabbat’, in Jonathan B
arry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, Basingstoke, 2007, 125–45.

  96.Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’, in Alberto Ferreiro (ed.), The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998, 91–110; ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 79–107.

  97.The document is now translated in Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, 158–60.

  98.Pau Castell Granados, ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”: The Mythical Components of the Iberian Witch’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 170–95.

  99.Ibid.

  100.Bernadette Paton, ‘“To the Fire! To the Fire”’, in Charles Zika (ed.), No Gods Except Me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe 1200–1600, Melbourne, 1991, 7–10.

  101.Dommenico Mammoli (ed.), The Record of the Trial and Condemnation of a Witch, Matteuccia di Francesco, at Todi, 20 March 1428, Rome, 1972.

  102.Franco Normando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernadino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy, Chicago, 1999, 52–87.

  103.Ibid., 86.

  104.Martine Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons: sabbat et chasse aux sorciers à Vevey (1448), Lausanne, 1995; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, Lausanne, 1999; Georg Modestin, Le diable chez l’éveque, Lausanne, 1999; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande, Lausanne, 2007; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Von der Haresie zur Hexerei, Hanover, 2008; Martine Ostorero, Le diable au sabbat, Florence, 2011. For an account of the cluster and its work, see Kathrin Utz Tremp, ‘Witches’ Brooms and Magic Ointments’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 173–87.

  105.The text is edited in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 30–45, with a commentary based on the local records by Chantal Amman-Doubliez at pp. 63–93. For two of those records, see Hansen, Quellen, 531–9. See also Tremp, ‘Witches’ Brooms and Magic Ointments’, for Fründ.

  106.Sortiligi or sortileia.

  107.This is based on Amman-Doubliez’s account, at n. 105.

  108.For what follows, see the works at n. 105, plus Edward Peters, ‘The Medieval Church and State on Superstition, Magic and Witchcraft’, in Jolly et al. (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three, 233–6; and Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds, Cambridge, 1991, 101–22.

  109.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 51–60, 203–7; Tremp, Von der Haresie zur Hexerei; Andreas Blauert, Frühe Hexenverfolgungen, Hamburg, 1989, 27–43.

  110.Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages, 30–31.

  111.On this see, especially, Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 35–101. He also emphasized the importance of the strix, on pp. 162–80.

  112.Kieckhefer, ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’. He does, however, also emphasize the importance of child murder as a motif in these early hunts, in ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’.

  113.Paton, ‘“To the Fire! To the Fire!”’, 7–36.

  114.Edited, with commentary, in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 122–248.

  115.Malefici.

  116.Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 223–48.

  117.This revised chronology throws out, in particular, that suggested for the evolution of the stereotype of satanic witchcraft in Ginzburg’s Ecstasies.

  118.Edited with commentary in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 272–99. For a further discussion of authorship, see Martine Ostorero, ‘Itinéraire d’un inquisiteur gâté’, Médiévales, 43 (2002), 115–16. For George of Saluzzo, see Georg Modestin, ‘Church Reform and Witch-hunting in the Diocese of Lausanne’, in Andrew P. Roach and James R. Simpson (eds), Heresy and the Making of European Culture, Farnham, 2013, 405–10.

  119.Tholosan’s book is Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores, edited with commentary in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 363–438. References to the trial records of Dauphiné are found in the commentary; an example was edited by Hansen, Quellen, 459–66.

  120.Edited in Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, 339–53; Modestin, Le diable chez l’éveque; Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande; Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons.

  121.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 33–88.

  122.See sources at n. 93.

  123.Ostorero, Le diable au sabbat, 584.

  124.For recent testimonies to its importance, see Michael D. Bailey and Edward Peters, ‘A Sabbat of Demonologists’, The Historian, 65 (2003), 1375–96; and Hans Peter Broedel, ‘Fifteenth-century Witchcraft Beliefs’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013, 42.

  125.These have been listed, edited or discussed in Hansen, Quellen, 44–231; Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, vol. I, 348–404; and Ostorero, Le diable du sabbat.

  126.Marmoris’s work is Flagellum maleficorum. It is extensively discussed by Ostorero, Le diable du sabbat, 503–58.

  127.For accounts of this spread, see Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, 66–82; Franck Mercier, La Vauderie d’Arras, Rennes, 2006; Laura Stokes, ‘Early Witch-hunting in Germany and Switzerland’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 4 (2009), 54–61; Broedel, ‘Fifteenth-century Witchcraft Beliefs’, 43–5; and Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The First Wave of Trials for Diabolical Witchcraft’, in Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 169–78; and the original documents edited in Hansen, Quellen, 34–5, 547–600, are still worth consideration.

  7 The Early Modern Patchwork

  1.This has been summed up in textbooks on differing scales, from a pocket size to a weighty volume, of which the following represent some of the best: Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010; Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe, 2nd edition, Basingstoke, 2001; Brian P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition, London, 2006; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004; and Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016. Those who prefer composite volumes by different hands may try Bengt Ankarloo et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume Four: The Period of the Witch Trials, London, 2002; and Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013. The classic work on the learned texts that underpinned the trials remains Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, Oxford, 1997. All the information summarized in this introductory section may be found in these surveys, and the detailed studies listed in them and in the references below.

  2.For example, Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers, Paris, 1580, preface; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (sic), Paris, 1612, Book 1, Discourse 1.5; Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers, Lyon, 1610, dedication; Martín del Rio, Disquisitiones Magicae, Leuven, 1608, prologue.

  3.The importance of Germany’s localized system of judicial authority, in explaining the exceptionally large number of witch trials there, was noticed as long ago as the 1840s: Karl Friedrich Koppen, Hexen und Hexenprozesse, Leipzig, 1844, 60.

  4.Two fairly recent and equally good studies of witch trials in different German states, Johannes Dillinger, Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, trans. Laura Stokes, Charlottesville, VA, 2009, and Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany, Leiden, 2007, have provided perfect portraits of the pressure to prosecute emanating from below and above in society, respectively.

  5.Fabienne Taric Zumsteg, Les Sorciers à l’Assaut du Village Gollion, Lausanne, 2000.

  6.The phrase was coined by Robin Briggs for a conference paper in 1991, published as ‘Many Reasons Why’, in Jonathan Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1996, 49–63. Similar arguments were made by Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germa
ny and Switzerland’, in the same volume, 64–5; and Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Witch Trials in Northern Europe 1400–1700’, in Ankarloo et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe vol.4, 55–63.

  7.De Lancre, Tableau, Book 1, Discourse 1.1.

  8.Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1983 (quotation on p. 25). His research has now been challenged by Franco Nardon, but not in respects that are a concern here: Franco Nardon, ‘Benandanti’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006), vol. 1, 108–9; Willem de Blecourt, ‘The Roots of the Sabbat’, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, Basingstoke, 2007, 135–45; William Monter, ‘Gendering the Extended Family of Ginzburg’s Benandanti’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 88–92.

  9.Friedrich Salomon Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen, Leipzig, 1908, 41–3; Maya Boškovič-Stulli, ‘Kresnik-Krsnik, Fabula, 3 (1960), 275–98; Gàbor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, trans. Susan Singerman and ed. Karen Margolis, Cambridge, 1990, 133–5.

  10.Boškovič-Stulli, ‘Kresnik-Krsnik’; Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 136–7, 228; Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, trans. Szilvia Redley and Michael Webb, Budapest, 1999, 127–30.

  11.This information is all found in Gail Kligman’s famous study Călus, Bucharest, 1999.

  12.Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, 137–43; ‘Hungary’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 244–53; and ‘Learned Systems and Popular Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment’, in Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions. Volume Three, Budapest, 2008, 50–58; Mihály Hoppál, ‘Traces of Shamanism in Hungarian Folk Beliefs’, in Anna-Leena Siikala and Mihály Hoppál (eds), Studies on Shamanism, Helsinki, 1992, 156–68; Jeno Fazekas, ‘Hungarian Shamanism’, in Carl-Martin Edsman (ed.), Studies in Shamanism, Stockholm, 1967, 97–119; Tekla Dömötör, ‘The Problem of the Hungarian Female Táltos’, in Mihály Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia, Göttingen, 1984, 423–9; ‘The Cunning Folk in English and Hungarian Witch Trials’, in Venetia Newall (ed.), Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century, Woodbridge, 1980, 183–7; and Hungarian Folk Beliefs, Budapest, 1982, 63–70, 132–57; Ágnes Várkonyi, ‘Connections between the Cessation of Witch Trials and the Transformation of the Social Structure’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 37 (1991–2), 427–34; Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 37–87, 134–49; and ‘Tündéres and the Order of St Ilona’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 54 (2009), 379–96.