A Cultural History of Witchcraft

A Cultural History of Witchcraft Gábor Klaniczay Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 5, Number 2, Winter 2010, pp. 188-212 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

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A Cultural History of Witchcraft ´ B O R K L A N I C Z AY GA Central European University for Peter Burke

It was Peter Burke who got me into the ‘‘witchcraft business’’ more than a quarter of a century ago, and this overview of research on witchcraft, the first version of which was prepared for a conference celebrating his seventieth birthday in 2007, is dedicated to him. Let me begin this historiographic overview with a few personal remarks recalling our cooperation. I first met Peter Burke in 1982 at an Economic History congress in Budapest. I was a research assistant at the time, developing an interest in various aspects of ‘‘popular religion,’’ such as heresy, sainthood, and shamanism,1 and I was eager to hear his theoretically based insights into the history of ‘‘popular culture.’’2 He invited me to a large-scale comparative conference on the history of European witchcraft in Stockholm, which he was organizing with Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen in coordination with the Olin Foundation in 1984. He encouraged me to broaden my interest from Hungarian shamanism to an overall examination of Hungarian witch trials (a historical topic that at the time had not been made the subject of much scholarly study). It was the first international conference to which I had been invited as a speaker.3 To cope with the challenging task posed by this invitation, the preparation of a new and conclusive historical overview of the witch trial documents in early-modern Hungary, I entered into cooperation with a group of Hungar1. Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Le culte des saints dans la Hongrie me´die´vale: Proble`mes de recherche,’’ Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 57–77; idem, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft,’’ in Shamanism in Eurasia, ed. Miha´ly Hoppa´l (Go¨ttingen, 1983), 404–22. 2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1977; 2nd ed. Aldershot, 1994). 3. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990). Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2010) Copyright 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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ian folklorists and worked together with E´va Poćs, who intended to research popular witchcraft mythologies, on the basis of both historical and present day documentation.4 We made the ambitious plan to develop a computerbased encoding and a structural analysis of maleficium narratives,5 but as I drew closer to the material I realized that I had to combine (or rather counterbalance) this ‘‘Proppian’’ morphology6 with what I referred to in the paper I delivered at the 1984 Stockholm conference as ‘‘the transformations and blackouts in the universe of popular magic’’—that is a thorough study of the historical transformations in the structural patterns of witchcraft beliefs, something to which I will refer here as ‘‘a cultural history of witchcraft.’’7 Actually, a few years later I gave the subtitle ‘‘social or cultural tensions’’ to a lecture I presented in Burke’s presence in Cambridge on witch-hunting in Hungary.8 Seen in this light, my version of the ‘‘cultural history of witchcraft’’ is largely the fruit of Peter Burke’s inspiration. Here I want to rethink its premises: do they still make sense in the light of recent orientations of cultural history? 1

By recalling personal memories from the 1980s I mean to focus on a particular historiographic moment when a significant renewal occurred both in the study of European witchcraft and in the concept of cultural history—this will be the starting point of my overview. Let me rely here on the synthetic image Peter Burke himself formulated in the conclusion of the 1984 Stockholm conference entitled ‘‘The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,’’ starting with the observation that ‘‘in the last twenty years or so, witchcraft 4. On E´va Poćs and our Budapest research group, see my review of her book Between the Living and the Dead (Budapest, 1999): ‘‘Enchantment or Witchcraft?’’ Budapest Review of Books 9 (1999): 71–77. 5. Ga´bor Klaniczay, E´va Poćs, Pe´ter G. To´th, and Robert Wolosz, ‘‘A Kλειω-boszorkańyper-adatba´zis’’ [The Kλειω witchcraft database], in Demonolo´gia e´s boszorkańysa´g Euro´pa´ban [Demonology and witchcraft in Europe], ed. E´va Poćs (Budapest, 2001), 293–335; cf. Peter Becker and Thomas Werner, Kλειω Ein Tutorial, Halbgraue Reihe zur historischen Fachinformatik, ed. Manfred Thaller (St. Katharinen, 1991). 6. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed. (Austin, Tx., 1968). 7. Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of Popular Magic,’’ in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 219–55. 8. Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Witch-hunting in Hungary: Social or Cultural Tensions?’’ in idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Cambridge, 1990), 155–67.

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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2010

has moved from the periphery of historical attention to a place near the centre.’’ The reasons for this interest were manifold: witchcraft was a topic that cut across established disciplinary boundaries and provided a possibility for fruitful exchanges between various fields of research, including social, legal, and cultural history; the folklore of magical beliefs, practices and mythologies; and anthropological enquiries into social, moral, and cultural meanings, functions, or dysfunctions. The combination of these different approaches, together with a renewed close scrutiny of archival documents, led in these decades to a number of studies and monographs, linking this topic to other concerns of contemporary research, such as community studies, family history, gender approaches, historical anthropology, and histoire des mentalite´s.9 Taking all this into account, Burke noted the paradox that ‘‘when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his lively essay on what he called, following nineteenth-century German scholars, the European ‘witch-craze,’ he could have hardly guessed that he was summarising and synthesising the conventional historical wisdom on the subject at the very time when this conventional view was being undermined.’’10 While Trevor-Roper, like many of his predecessors,11 explained the rise and decline of persecutions with reference to the short-sightedness, shameful irresponsibility, and frequently the vested interest of clerical and lay elites and the inconsistencies in the juridical systems, a row of historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, E. William Monter, Erik Midelfort, and Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, started to study witchcraft according to the contemporary trend of historiography, relying on ‘‘popular’’ testimonies.12 This meant the examination of entire new domains of documentation on or related to witchcraft. 9. Peter Burke, ‘‘The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,’’ in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 435–41. 10. Ibid, 435; Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Harmondsworth, 1969). 11. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901; reprint Hildesheim, 1963); Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols., ed. Arthur C. Howland (Philadelphia, 1939). For a detailed overview of the historiography of witchcraft see Thomas A. Fudge, ‘‘Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch-Hunting,’’ History Compass 4/3 (2006): 488–527 (I owe thanks to Melissa Calaresu for having called my attention to this article). 12. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Torino, 1966); translated as Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and

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Earlier witchcraft research primarily focused on analysis of the confessions of accused witches most frequently extracted by torture, and tried to make sense of the ludicrous revelations on the witches’ traffic with the devil and their mysterious nightly assemblies. This was supported and complemented by analysis of related works of learned demonology.13 New witchcraft enquiries were turning instead to the mass of testimonies by the accusers, a huge judicial documentation barely touched on in previous research. The emerging new explanation of witchcraft conflicts was based on understanding the problems and fears of villagers and the motivations for persecution ‘‘from below,’’ an approach labelled by Alan Macfarlane ‘‘the sociology of accusation.’’ This methodology drew on the experience of British social anthropologists working on contemporary African witchcraft, above all the legacy of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s seminal study on the Azande, put on front stage by the discussions prompted by Mary Douglas and published by her in the volume Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations in 1970 (which contained articles by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, who later published influential monographs on the subject that became the flagships of the emerging new current of historical anthropology).14 The new historical portrait of early modern witchcraft has shown that the spectacular outbreaks and epidemic witch hunts that had been the focus of scholarly attention were merely occasional explosions within a broader, widespread, steady, and unspectacular set of accusations that were, for several centuries, part of the everyday life of early modern European village communities, representing a system to handle regular conflicts, neighborhood quarrels, and denial of expected charity in an age of the breakdown of the traditional system of communal solidarities. Instead of spectacular tales of witches’ sabbaths, these testimonies revealed a set of interwoven conflicts stemming from everyday animosities and offered explanations for misfortunes in terms of suspected maleficium attributed to Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970); E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, Calif., 1972); Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). 13. Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid, 1969); translated as The World of the Witches, trans. O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago, 1964); Sidney Anglo, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), 32–52. 14. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937); Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London, 1970).

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local enemies. The new interpretations diverged as to whether witchcraft accusations and persecutions ultimately constituted a system of sanctions for the breaking of communal norms, whether they ‘‘helped to uphold the traditional obligations of charity and neighbourliness at a time when other social and economic forces were conspiring to weaken them’’ (as suggested by Keith Thomas following Evans-Pritchard)15 or, conversely, whether they were a tool in the hands of individualist accusers to liberate themselves from the obligations of expected solidarity (not only refusing charity, but also eliminating those who grudgingly demanded it, by accusing them of having resorted to magical vengeance), as proposed by Alan Macfarlane.16 Despite this divergence a new consensus emerged that only a detailed microscopic examination of all local economic, social, and cultural tensions could further any genuine understanding of magical conflicts, an argument advanced in studies by E. William Monter for Calvinist Geneva, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum for Salem, Robert Muchembled for Cambre´sis, Wolfgang Behringer for southern Germany, and Robin Briggs for Lorraine.17 In addition, a renewed approach of the sociology of accusation was complemented by new attention to the political, religious, and judicial background of ‘‘large panic trials’’ by Erik Midelfort in southwest Germany, Bengt Ankarloo in Sweden, Gustav Henningsen in his study of the inquisition in the Basque lands, and Christina Larner in Scotland.18 The contributions to the 1984 Stockholm conference (published in 1990) were early representa15. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 564. 16. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 158–67, 204–5. 17. Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, 42–66; Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, passim; Robert Muchembled, ‘‘Sorcie`res du Cambre´sis: L’acculturation du monde rural aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles,’’ in Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, Willem Frijhoff, and Robert Muchembled, Prophe`tes et sorciers dans les Pays-Bas: XVIe–XVIIIe sie`cle (Paris, 1978), 155–262; Wolfgang Behringer, Hexenverfolgung in Bayern: Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staatsra¨son in der fru¨hen Neuzeit, (Munich, 1987); translated as Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer (Cambridge, 1997); Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989). 18. Midelfort, Witch Hunting; Bengt Ankarloo, Trolldomsprocesserna i Sverige (Stockholm, 1971); Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (Reno, Nev., 1980); idem, ed., The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frıás and others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Leiden, 2004); Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981); cf. Christina Larner, Christopher Lee, and Hugh McLachlan, Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977).

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tives of this new approach, broadening the comparative horizon from the centers to the peripheries, from Sicily and Portugal to Estonia, from Norway to Hungary.19 At this juncture it is worth raising the question as to what extent these approaches could be called a ‘‘cultural history’’ of witchcraft. How can one isolate the specific contributions of cultural history within this broader field, and how does a cultural historical approach of European witch trials differ from other competing approaches? To quote Peter Burke again, from his recent formulation of What is Cultural History, ‘‘a cultural history of trousers, for instance, would differ from an economic history of the same subject.’’20 So how do we distinguish a cultural history of witchcraft from a social or religious one? Following Burke, who was looking for a definition of what cultural history is in the cultural history of cultural history, I would try to scrutinize from this angle recent witchcraft studies, which have been closely intertwined, from the 1970s on, with three historiographic currents exercising great impact on what we now call cultural history. The most important among them, in my view, is the French Annales school,21 which, after the original (and still influential) history of mentalite´s collectives (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) and civilisation mate´rielle (Fernand Braudel), produced a real explosion of a diversified set of new approaches in the 1970s under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and in the wake of the worldwide success of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou.22 These methodologies, popularised in anthologies such as Faire de l’histoire and La nouvelle histoire,23 though not calling themselves cultural history (with a later exception of Roger 19. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft. 20. Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004), 3. 21. Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London, 1999); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89 (Cambridge, 1990). 22. Marc Bloch, Me´langes historiques, vols. 1–2 (Paris, 1963); Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire a` part entie`re (Paris, 1962); Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe sie`cle (Paris, 1962); Peter Burke, ‘‘Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities,’’ History of European Ideas 7 (1986): 439–51; reprinted in Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1990), 162–82; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation mate´rielle, ećonomie et Capitalisme XVe–XVIIIe sie`cle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979); translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siaˆn Reynolds (New York, 1981); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a` 1324 (Paris, 1975); abridged translation as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1978). 23. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire: Nouveaux problems— Nouvelles approaches—Nouveaux objets (Paris, 1974); Jacques Le Goff et al., ed., La nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1978).

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Chartier24), proposed an anthropological-structural minded analysis of a number of relevant fields: acculturation, festivities and rituals, imaginaire, the social history of the body and sexuality, family and kinship, the politics of language, memory, popular religion. All these themes were taken over and further developed by the ‘‘third generation’’ of annalistes: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jacques Revel, Roger Chartier, and Mona Ozouf.25 The second emerging new field was the history of popular culture. The manifold historiographic and cultural roots of this current of cultural history cannot be discussed in detail here. Let me only mention the debate on the Bibliothe`que bleue prompted by Robert Mandrou and Genevie`ve Bolle`me,26 the translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais,27 and the first critical reassessment of his concept of ‘‘popular culture’’ in the preface to Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.28 Peter Burke’s 1978 book remains the methodologically most refined overview of this field, and its thesis on the early modern ‘‘reform of popular culture’’ became very influential in witchcraft research as well.29 The third and perhaps the most important field of cultural history to emerge in the 1970s was that of historical anthropology and, in second phase, microhistory.30 The impact of the work of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, 24. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1988). 25. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint le´vrier: Guinefort, gue´risseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe sie`cle (Paris, 1979), translated as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983); idem, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident me´die´val (Paris, 1990); Jacques Revel, Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Une politique de la langue: La Re´volution française et les patois: L’enqueˆte de Gre´goire (1790–1794) (Paris, 1975); Jacques Revel and Arlette Farge, Les logiques de la foule: L’affaire des enle`vement d’enfants Paris 1750 (Paris, 1988); Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Re´volution française (Paris, 1991); Mona Ozouf, La feˆte re´volutionnaire (Paris, 1976). 26. Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles: La bibliothe`que bleue de Troyes, (Paris, 1964); Genevie`ve Bolle`me, La bibliothe`que bleue: Litte´rature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe sie`cle (Paris, 1971). 27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) 28. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio nel ’500 (Milan, 1976), xi–xxxi; translated as The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). 29. Burke, Popular Culture. 30. On historical anthropology, see: Peter Burke, ‘‘Anthropologists and Historians: Reflections on the History of a Relationship,’’ Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1989/ 90, 155–64; Bob Scribner, ‘‘Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe,’’ in

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and Claude Le´vi-Strauss prompted French, Italian, and Anglo-American historians to redefine their approaches to the history of culture as shared sets of meanings, including high and low culture and artefacts and representations to be interpreted according to the rules of ‘‘thick description,’’ charting binary oppositions, structural patterns, ritual processes, and liminalities.31 2

Having made these preliminary points, let me come to my subject: how did cultural history infuse the history of witchcraft? Let me start with a remote historiographic reference. In his 1946 essay ‘‘Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution?’’ Lucien Febvre reviewed the old style French witchcraft history of François Bavoux and used this as a pretext for a stimulating formulation of the objectives of the history of collective mentalities.32 Historians should not be shocked or scandalized that people living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even cultivated, high-ranking intellectuals such as Jean Bodin, attributed the status of reality to magical phenomena and bewitchments and agreed with the measures taken against witches. They should rather investigate how, in that age, the standards of proof, evidence, and reality were different from ours, and examine when a ‘‘mental revolution’’ brought a break in this (an epistemological discontinuity, as Michel Foucault would later have said).33 This same principle was guiding Julio Caro Baroja, one of the pioneers of the new style of witchcraft research, who in his Las brujas y su mundo in 1969 concentrated on the conceptions of the world that made belief in witchcraft possible.34 Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbu¨tteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 11–34. On microhistory, see: Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991); Giovanni Levi, ‘‘On Microhistory,’’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 1991), 93–113; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,’’ Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn, 1993): 10–35. 31. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968); Edmund Leach, Le´vi-Strauss (New York, 1970). 32. Lucien Febvre, ‘‘Sorcellerie, sottise ou re´volution mentale?’’ Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1948), reprinted in Febvre, Au coeur religieux, 301–9; translated as ‘‘Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution?’’ in Febvre, A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York, 1973), 185–93; François Bavoux, La sorcellerie aux pays de Quingey (Paris, 1947). 33. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1966). 34. Baroja, Las brujas, as n. 13 above.

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Among French contributions, the book on Magistrats et sorciers (1970) by Robert Mandrou stands out.35 Written by an Annales historian sensitive to Lucien Febvre’s propositions concerning histoire des mentalite´s and as a direct response to the call formulated in the article just mentioned, it experimented with a kind of serial history of early seventeenth century public debates and political, religious, and medical pamphlets related to scandalous witch trials and above all to the spectacular possession cases of Loudun and Louviers. On the basis of this, Mandrou became one of the few scholars who dared to address the question how exactly did this major change in mentalities come about, how could a significant majority of the elite lose faith in the reality of magical activities. Strangely enough, Mandrou did not connect his take on the problem of witchcraft with his earlier innovative (though much criticised) views on popular culture, mentioned above. This issue became central, subsequently, in the work of Robert Muchembled. Muchembled’s book on popular and elite culture in early modern France, which was published only two years after Peter Burke’s related book, proposed to regard witch hunts as the most efficient means of suppressing and disciplining popular culture, resulting in a devastating ‘‘acculturation.’’36 The concept of witchcraft, according to Muchembled, became a kind of ‘‘melting pot’’ in this process. All traditional beliefs, popular festivities, dances, customs, and healing practices could be stigmatized and forbidden by being integrated into the satanic myth of the diabolic witches’ sabbath. Muchembled’s thesis has been accepted rather critically, as was the acculturation thesis in general.37 The new academic consensus rather opted for what Peter Burke described as the resilience of popular culture.38 Nevertheless, the distinction between elite and popular culture in terms of different beliefs concerning ‘‘superstition’’ (and the elite fight against this), magical healing, and midwifery became fertile territory for cultural history, providing further development to insights developed by Muchembled, who himself authored numerous contributions to the history of the sorcie`re au village.39 35. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe sie`cle: Une analyse de psychologie historique (Paris, 1968); idem, Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe sie`cle: Textes ine´dits (Paris, 1979). 36. Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des e´lites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe sie`cle) (Paris 1979); cf. also idem, ‘‘Sorcie`res du Cambre´sis.’’ 37. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 53–57. 38. Burke, Popular Culture, 218. 39. Robert Muchembled, La sorcie`re au village (Paris, 1979); idem, Les derniers buˆchers: Un village de Flandre et ses sorcie`res sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1981); idem, ed., Magie et sorcellerie en Europe du Moyen Age a` nos jours (Paris, 1994).

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There was one distinct territory in which the new categories of elite and popular culture came to be used for elaborating a new paradigm in research on witchcraft: the problem of demonology and the witches’ sabbath. When Carlo Ginzburg discovered the benandanti in 1966,40 he contrasted the popular, shamanistic concepts unfolding from the confessions of these seventeenthcentury ‘‘good witches’’41 with the learned demonological dogmas of inquisitions, and analyzed the historical process by which the century-long persecution of the benandanti managed to distort and transform this archaic popular belief system, assimilating it into the inquisitors’ elite concept of the diabolic witches’ sabbath. Inspired by this insight, Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer pointed out in their books on Europe’s Inner Demons and European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture (published almost simultaneously) that the person of the devil was altogether absent from medieval witch trials principally related to courtly, urban, or village conflicts concerning maleficium accusations.42 Demonological elements were only introduced into the universe of popular witchcraft beliefs in the course of late medieval witchcraft persecution by ecclesiastical and juridical elites, which developed the explosive ‘‘demonological cocktail’’ of the witches’ sabbath by the late fourteenth century. This was a long process of evolution, integrating ‘‘black mass’’ accusations against medieval heretics,43 notions of ritual magic, ecclesiastic legends on the pact with the devil, and demonological constructions resulting from the trial against the Knight Templars and other scapegoats in the reign of Philip the Fair and later the papacy of John XXII.44 This new cultural history of witchcraft advanced the proposition that the traditional ‘‘archaic’’ witchcraft concepts of popular culture were transformed, 40. Ginzburg, I benandanti, as n. 12 above. 41. Peter Burke, ‘‘Good Witches,’’ New York Review of Books no. 32 (1985): 32–34. 42. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt (New York, 1975); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976). 43. Inspired by Cohn, I studied this issue in 1982, translated into English as ‘‘Orgy Accusations in the Middle Ages,’’ in Eros in Folklore, ed. Miha´ly Hoppa´l and Eszter Csonka-Takaćs (Budapest, 2002), 38–55. 44. Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1994); Alain Boureau, Satan he´re´tique: Histoire de la de´monologie (1280–1330) (Paris, 2004); translated as Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 2006); idem, ed., Le pape et les sorciers: Une consultation de Jean XXII sur la magie en 1320 (manuscrit B.A.V. Borghese 348) (Rome, 2004).

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perverted, and made simultaneously more vulnerable and more dangerous by the repeated interventions of the elite ecclesiastical culture in the later Middle Ages. The gradual introduction of the diabolic concepts of the witches’ sabbath could be followed with chronological accuracy, and the geographic and regional dimensions could also be clearly perceived. The comparative inquiries initiated in 1984 in Stockholm and continued in a similar large conference in 1988 in Budapest revealed that the diabolic concept of the witches’ sabbath and the related mechanism of chain-accusations spread like an innovation to the east and the north of Europe, with a considerable time-lag.45 Whereas in the Netherlands and France the diabolic nightmares and the prosecutions for witchcraft declined in the first half of the seventeenth century, in northern Germany, Sweden, New England, and Austria they reached their heyday half a century later, while in Hungary and Poland the peak of the persecutions came around the middle of the eighteenth century.46 The ‘‘transfer’’ of such a cultural model is clearly illustrated by Hungary, where German soldiers played a noteworthy role as witch-accusers in generating this new, more epidemic type of witch hunt.47 In addition, in Norway, Finland, Hungary, and south-east Europe one could observe a similar coexistence of witchcraft accusations and the activities of an archaic, shamanistic type of sorcerer-figure, such as the one shown by Ginzburg with the benandanti of Friuli. Such were the ta´ltos in Hungary, the kresnik in Croatia, and the noaide among the Sami in Lapland.48 These sorcer45. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 219–423; Ga´bor Klaniczay and E´va Poćs, ed., Witch Beliefs and Witch-hunting in Central and Eastern Europe, special issue of Acta Ethnographica Hungarica: An International Journal of Ethnography 37 (1991/92). 46. On France and the Netherlands: Marijke Gijstvijt-Hofstra, ed., Nederland betovert (Amsterdam, 1987); Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle: Le Parlement de Paris (16e–18e sie`cles) (London, 1992). On Germany: Gerhard Schorman, Hexenprozesse in Nordwestdeutschland (Hildesheim, 1977). On Sweden: Ankarloo, Trolldomsprocesserna i Sverige; cf. more recently Per So¨rlin, ‘‘Wicked Arts’’: Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden, 1999). On New England: Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982). On Poland: Bohdan Baranowski, Procesy czarownic w Polsce w XVII i XVIII wieku [Witch Trials in Poland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century] (Ło´dz´, 1952); Wanda Wyporska, ‘‘Jewish, Noble, German, or Peasant?—The Devil in Early Modern Poland,’’ in Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology, vol. 2 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Ga´bor Klaniczay and E´va Poćs (Budapest, 2006), 139–51. These results are synthesized by Brian Levack, The WitchHunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987; 3rd ed. 2006). 47. Klaniczay, ‘‘Hungary,’’ 228–31, 249–51. 48. On Hungary: Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements’’; idem, ‘‘Hungary’’; more

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ers were similarly caught in the web of new-style witchcraft conflicts. They assumed the role of the opponents of witches, but this ultimately led to their demise. They themselves were accused of being witches, not only by church inquisitors or witch-hunting secular courts, but also by their clients and neighbors.49 The cultural history of the mixture of different concepts of magical aggression (elite, popular, demonological; archaic, shamanistic; western, eastern; northern-southern) also revealed that this cannot be considered a one-way process. Rather, it has to be seen as a complex and entangled set of cultural transmissions, borrowings, and transformations. The concept of the witches’ sabbath, as Carlo Ginzburg pointed out in connection with the benandanti,50 was not only a learned or inquisitorial invention. It also integrated existing popular concepts and practices that were subsequently transformed and diabolized (this observation earned Ginzburg the misplaced accusation of being a follower of Margaret Murray51). Robert Rowland, examining Portuguese inquisitional documents, underlined the fact that the interrogation of witches and witnesses was actually a cooperative process that fed more and more local and popular beliefs into the internationally disseminated and theoretically structured system of the diabolic witches’ sabbath.52 Recognizing the cultural dynamics defining the elements of this construct, Stuart Clark pointed out in

recently idem, ‘‘Shamanism and Witchcraft,’’ Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006): 214–21; E´va Poćs, ‘‘Hungarian Ta´ltos and His European Parallels,’’ in Uralic Mythology and Folklore, ed. Miha´ly Hoppa´l and Juha Pentikaïnen (Budapest-Helsinki, 1989), 251–76. On Croatia: Maja Bosˇkovic´-Stulli, ‘‘Testimonianze orali croate e slovene sul Krsnik-Kresnik,’’ Metodi e ricerche, N.S. 7 (1988): 32–50. On Lapland: Rune Blix Hagen, ‘‘The King, the Cat, and the Chaplain: King Christian IV’s Encounter with the Sami Shamans of Northern Norway and Northern Russia in 1599,’’ in Communicating with the Spirits, vol. 1 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Ga´bor Klaniczay and E´va Poćs (Budapest, 2005), 246–63; idem, ‘‘Sami Shamanism,’’ in Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006): 227–33. 49. Wolfgang Behringer, Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Munich, 1994); translated as Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, Va., 1998). 50. Ginzburg, I benandanti; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 223–24. 51. Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921); on Murray see J. Simpson, ‘‘Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?’’ Folklore 105 (1994): 75–86. 52. Robert Rowland, ‘‘Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons: European Witch-beliefs in Comparative Perspective,’’ in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 161–90.

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a fascinating essay the semantics of inversion in the emerging mythology of the witches’ sabbath.53 I will return to this topic below. The explanation of witchcraft accusations in terms of the paradigm of conflicts between popular and learned culture also attracted the attention of Aron Gurevich, who followed the debates on ‘‘popular culture’’ and ‘‘popular religion’’ attentively and with a critical alertness, and prepared his own synthetic overviews on the topic in 1976 and 1981.54 In an insightful study on witchcraft persecutions in 1987,55 he combined the popular-elite cultural perspective with a social-psychological interpretation that grew out of approaches related to the French histoire des mentalite´s, an approach represented by Jean Delumeau, whose La Peur en Occident had a significant impact.56 Gurevich attempted to situate beliefs concerning witchcraft in a broader set of anxieties concerning death and the other world (a topic he had been studying himself57), and also to relate it to popular rebelliousness against the more oppressive state and judicial systems of the early modern period as well as the Reformation’s and Counter-Reformation’s impact on popular culture. Gurevich also integrated in his overview the recent insights and conclusions of historical anthropology (the ‘‘sociology of accusations’’ advocated by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane). Beyond the acculturation model, the opposition of popular and elite versions of beliefs concerning witchcraft, and the problem of the general climate of anxiety in the early modern period, there was a fourth fertile territory within the popular culture approach to research on witchcraft: examination of the conflicts related to popular medicine, healing and midwifery, and the role of cunning folk. Again it was Alan Macfarlane who redirected the atten53. Stuart Clark, ‘‘Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft,’’ Past and Present 87 (1980): 98–127. 54. Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, Popularnoie bogoslovie i narodnaia religiosnost srednich vekov (Moscow, 1976) [People’s theology and popular religiosity in the Middle Ages]; idem, Problemi srednievekovnoi narodnoi kulturi (Moscow, 1981), translated as Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Jańos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 1990). 55. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, ‘‘Vedima v dierevnie i pred sudom (narodnaia i uchionnaia tradicii v ponimanii magii)’’ [Witches in the village and on the bench of the accused: Popular and learned traditions in the interpretation of magic], in Jaziki kulturi i problemi perevodimosti [Languages, cultures and the problems of mediation] (Moscow, 1987), 12–46. 56. Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe sie`cles): Une cite´ assie´geé (Paris, 1978). ˆ ge: Conscience individuelle et 57. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, ‘‘Au Moyen A image de l’au-dela`,’’ Annales E.S.C. 37 (1982): 255–75.

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tion of historians to this field, which was subsequently explored by Willem de Blećourt, Robin Briggs, E´va Poćs, myself, and more recently Owen Davies, Emma Wilby, and Marıá Tausiet.58 The most fascinating enquiry concerning this theme was made not by a historian, however, but a psychologist, Jeanne Favret-Saada, who turned to ethnological research and examined present-day witchcraft beliefs in the French region called Bocage.59 In her books, cultural and psychological history became an experience-centered personal account offering fascinating insight into how bewitchment narratives were shaped and reworked in the context of the special therapeutic climate of the unwitching procedures arranged by the cunning folk for their clients. 3

As I hope to have shown, the cross-fertilization of new approaches in cultural history and research on early modern European witchcraft has resulted in an impressive series of new studies, starting in the 1970s and 1980s and in many respects continuing to the present day. In fact, these results have been so prolific that I cannot do justice here to all the recent research in which witchcraft is analyzed within the framework of some variety of cultural history. In this third part of my study I will enumerate some of the research directions that seem the most inspiring to me from this point of view and elaborate a bit on the one in which I am currently engaged. I would begin with some of the recent products on the history of witchcraft that follow the methodologies of historical anthropology and microhistory in the footsteps of Thomas, Macfarlane, and Boyer and Nissenbaum. In 58. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 115–34; Willem de Blećourt, ‘‘Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,’’ Social History 19 (1994): 285–303; Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London, 1996), 169–87; idem, ‘‘Circling the Devil: Witch-Doctors and Magical Healers in Early Modern Lorraine,’’ in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed. Stuart Clark (London, 2001), 161–79; Poćs, Between the Living and the Dead, 121–64; Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements’’; idem, ‘‘Witch-hunting in Hungary,’’ 156–64; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History (London, 2003); Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2007); Marıá Tausiet, Abracadabra Omnipotens: Magia urbana en Zaragoza en la Edad Moderna (Madrid, 2007). 59. Jeanne Favret-Saada, Les Mots, la mort, les sorts: La Sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1977); translated as Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, trans. Catherine Cullen (Cambridge, 1980); eadem, Corps pour corps: Enqueˆte sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1981).

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1991 in Exeter Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts organized an entire conference as a tribute to and a critical appraisal of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic.60 On the basis of documentation relating to witchcraft from Lorraine, Robin Briggs re-examined the principal thesis of Thomas and Macfarlane in his Witches and Neighbours.61 A valuable rejoinder to this historical anthropology of witchcraft accusations was the book by Ildiko´ Kristo´f on witch trials and midwifery in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, with special attention to conflicts arising from rival paradigms of healing.62 In another 1991 conference on ‘‘Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe,’’ organized by Bob Scribner in Wolfenbu¨ttel, Lyndal Roper examined the psychological tensions in early modern households and the vulnerability of women after childbirth, explaining the genesis of accusations of witchcraft in this framework.63 So the cooperation between history and anthropology continues in this domain, though it does not seem to be a universal solution to unsolved questions.64 As for microhistory, the reconstruction of moving histories of some individual witches maintained its fascination: in the footsteps of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s witch of Jasmin and Franco Cardini’s San Miniato witch Gostanza, a French team of the ENS Fontenay unearthed an extremely richly documented trial in Berry.65 Under the direction of Agostino Paravicini Bag60. Jonathan Barry, ‘‘Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft,’’ in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge, 1996), 1–48; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘Witchcraft in Early Modern Kent: Stereotypes and the Background to Accusations,’’ in ibid, 257–87. 61. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours; cf. idem, ‘‘ ‘Many Reasons Why’: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation,’’ in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 49–63; idem, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007). ¨ rdo¨gi mesterse´get nem cselekedtem’’: A boszorkańyu¨ldo¨ze´s ta´rsa62. Ildiko´ Kristo´f, ‘‘O dalmi e´s kultura´lis ha´ttere a kora u´jkori Debrecenben e´s Bihar va´rmegye´ben [‘‘I haven’t practiced any devilish craft’’: Social and cultural background of witchcraft prosecutions in early modern Debrecen and Bihar county] (Debrecen, 1998). 63. Lyndal Roper, ‘‘Hexenzauber und Hexenfantasien im Deutschland der fru¨hen Neuzeit,’’ in Po-Chia-Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 139–74. She later expanded this argument into two major books: Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994); Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, Conn., 2004) 64. Ronald Hutton, ‘‘Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?’’ Historical Journal 47 (2004): 413–34. 65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, La sorcie`re de Jasmin (Paris, 1983); translated as Jasmin’s Witch, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1987); Franco Cardini, ed., Gostanza, la strega di San Miniato: Processo di una guaritrice nella Toscana medicea (Rome-Bari,

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liani, the members of a research group in Lausanne published a series of fascinating microhistorical studies of fifteenth-century Swiss witches.66 A recent addition to this genre, the story of Anne Gunter, came from James Sharpe, one of the authorities on the history of witchcraft prosecutions in England.67 Finally, Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill elaborated a series of perceptive analyses of individual English trials.68 The question arises at this point as to what extent these historicalanthropological and microhistorical analyses of witchcraft cases can be ranged in the category of the cultural history of witchcraft. I am inclined to say only to a limited extent. The real novelty of the anthropological approach lay in the explanation of accusations of witchcraft with reference to underlying social tensions, treating them as a kind of ‘‘social strain-gauge,’’ and microhistory also aimed at the ‘‘thick description’’ of the social conflicts leading to accusation. I will return shortly to recent critiques of this approach by Stuart Clark and others. At the same time I must stress that these analyses also implied an attentive scrutiny of the cultural and religious surroundings of the accusation, and this naturally evolved in the direction of cultural history. A second important field of the cultural history of witchcraft was the unfolding of a new, often passionate debate on the origins of the witches’ sabbath. Carlo Ginzburg’s Ecstasies provoked a renewal of research here after 1990.69 Ginzburg’s principal argument, based on his earlier success with the 1989); Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preáud, eds., Les sorciers du carroi de Marlou: Un proce`s de sorcellerie en Berry (1582–1583) (Grenoble, 1996). 66. Martine Ostorero, ‘‘Folaˆtrer avec les de´mons’’: Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers a` Vevey (1448) (Lausanne, 1995; 2nd ed., 2008); Eva Maier, Trente ans avec le diable: Une nouvelle chasse aux sorciers sur la Riviera le´manique (1477–1484) (Lausanne, 1996); Sandrine Strobino, Françoise sauveé des flammes? Une Valaisanne accuseé de sorcellerie au XVe sie`cle (Lausanne, 1996); George Modestin, Le diable chez l’e´veˆque: Chasse aux sorciers dans le dioce`se de Lausanne (vers 1460) (Lausanne, 1999); Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser, Wiederga¨nger, Hexen und Rebellen: Biographien zu den Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg im ¨ chtland (1399 und 1430) (Freiburg, Switz., 1999). U 67. James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England from 1550–1750 (London, 1996); idem, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (London, 1999). 68. Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early Modern English Witches (London, 1999); eadem, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London, 2000); Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (London, 2001). 69. Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin, 1989); translated as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1991).

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benandanti, tried to identify a (Celtic, Scythian, Slavic) ‘‘shamanistic substratum’’ in European witchcraft beliefs, and related these ideas to broader archetypes of universal culture of communication with the spirits of the dead. He worked with a methodology inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Claude Le´vi-Strauss that he called ‘‘morphology.’’ His propositions provoked an unusual storm of critical reactions from various sides. While the limits of the applicability of the notion of shamanism can indeed be debated,70 much of the criticism addressed to Ginzburg, frequently with strong inquisitorial rhetoric, seems to me unwarranted.71 Another recent attempt to reconstruct this archaic layer of European beliefs concerning witchcraft was elaborated by the Hungarian folklorist E´va Poćs.72 She gave a comparative analysis of central- and southeast-European sorcerers, cunning people, and beings from folk mythology (sze´passzony, vila, mora, zmej, rusalia, etc.). On the basis of these examples she identified, in addition to shamanism, another important popular belief system that could have played an important role in the formation of the concept of the witches’ sabbath, namely ambivalent fairy-mythologies. In 1991 a conference was organized by Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preáud on the various concepts of the sabbath, where, in addition to Ginzburg and Poćs, many other researchers engaged in discussion.73 The French folklorist Claude Gaignebet pointed to the inquisitorial tendencies of modern scholarly interpretations,74 Alain Boureau proposed his first theses on the theological origins of late medieval demonology, later expanded in his Satan he´re´tique (2004),75 Stuart Clark gave an overview of the sabbath as a symbolic system (in preparation 70. Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanism and Witchcraft,’’ Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006): 214–21. 71. For Ginzburg’s exchange with Perry Anderson, see London Review of Books, 8 November 1990 and 10 January 1991; cf. Klaus Graf, ‘‘Carlo Ginzburgs’ Hexensabbat’—Herausforderung an die Methodendiskussion der Geschichtswissenschaft,’’ kea: Zeitschrift fu¨r Kulturwissenschaften 5 (1993): 1–16; for a recent recycling of this debate see Willem de Blećourt, ‘‘The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies?’’ in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Basingstoke, 2007), 125–45. 72. E´va Poćs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe (Helsinki, 1989); eadem, Between the Living and the Dead. 73. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preáud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe– XVIIIe sie`cles (Grenoble, 1993). 74. Claude Gaignebet, ‘‘Discours de la sorcie`re de Saint-Julien-de-Lampon,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preáud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 47–55. 75. Alain Boureau, ‘‘Le sabbat et la question scolastique de la personne,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preáud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 33–46; idem, Satan he´re´tique.

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of his subsequent monograph on the subject),76 and Charles Zika pointed to the iconographic schemes that helped shape the demonological nightmares in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.77 Another important research initiative connected to this question unfolded in the research group directed by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani in Lausanne, which prepared critical editions and detailed studies of the earliest documents of diabolic witchcraft beliefs in Switzerland. In addition to the exemplary volume on the ‘‘imaginaire du sabbat,’’78 they published a series of detailed case studies that threw new light on the relationship between late medieval heresy and early formulations of the witches’ sabbath, also recently subjected to scholarly scrutiny by others.79 The emergence of the concept of the witches’ sabbath remained central in subsequent enquiries and conferences, such as the one arranged in Budapest in 1999, where a special round-table was organized around Ginzburg’s Ecstasies, and many other papers touched 76. Stuart Clark, ‘‘Le sabbat comme syste`me symbolique: Significations stables et instables,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preáud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 63–75; idem, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997). 77. Charles Zika, ‘‘Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century WitchcraftLiterature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius,’’ in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 175–218; idem, ‘‘Les parties du corps: Saturne et le cannibalisme: Repre´sentations visuelles des assembleés des sorcie`res au XVIe sie`cle,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preáud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 389–418; idem, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2003); idem, The Appearance of Witchcraft (London and New York, 2007). 78. L’imaginaire du sabbat: E´dition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440 c.), ed. Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp, in collaboration with Catherine Che`ne (Lausanne, 1999). 79. Catherine Che`ne, Juger les vers: Exorcismes et proce`s d’animaux dans le dioce`se de Lausanne (XVe–XVIe s.) (Lausanne, 1995); Martine Ostorero, Kathrin Utz Tremp and Georg Modestin, eds., Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse romande: Le registre Ac 29 des Archives cantonales vaudoises (1438–1528) (Lausanne, 2007); see also n. 66 above. Beyond the work of the Lausanne seminar, see Andreas Blauert, Fru¨he Hexenverfolgungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989); Bernard Andenmatten and Kathrin Utz Tremp, ‘‘De l’he´re´sie a` la sorcellerie: L’inquisiteur Ulric de Torrente´ OP (vers 1420–1445), et l’affermissement de l’inquisition en Suisse Romande,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 86 (1992): 72–74; Pierrette Paravy, De la chre´tiente´ romaine a` la re´forme en Dauphine´: E´veˆques, fide`les et de´viants (vers 1340–1530), 2 vols. (Rome, 1993); Michael D. Bailey, ‘‘The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath,’’ Exemplaria 8 (1996): 419–39; idem, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, Pa., 2003); Wolfgang Behringer, ‘‘How Waldensians became Witches,’’ in Klaniczay and Poćs, Communicating with the Spirits, 155–92; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Von der Ha¨resie zur Hexerei: ‘‘Wirkliche’’ und imagina¨re Sekten im Spa¨tmittelalter (Hannover, 2008).

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on the issue.80 The same interest was preserved in the 2002 Paris conference on ‘‘le diable en proce`s.’’81 Parallel to this enquiry concerning the earliest sources of the diabolic witches’ sabbath, there was also an increasing interest in the first writings of learned demonology: in Johannes Nider, author of the Formicarius,82 and Heinrich Kra¨mer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.83 At this point one again must raise the obligatory question: is this a cultural history of the witches’ sabbath and related demonology? My preliminary judgement would be that the duality of shamanism, fairy beliefs, or other archaisms, on one hand, and the religious-intellectual-institutional history of the construction of the complex sabbath mythology on the other certainly demand the critical skills of cultural history, but they might lead in too many divergent directions and fields to be examined along the lines of a unified methodology. These classificatory uncertainties surface less with the third type of inquiry to be presented here, the one operating under the banner of the ‘‘linguistic turn,’’ promoted at the 1998 Swansea conference organized by Stuart Clark.84 80. ‘‘Round-table Discussion with Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, E´va Poćs, Giovanni Pizza and Ga´bor Klaniczay,’’ in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, vol. 3 of Demons, Spirits and Witches, ed. Ga´bor Klaniczay and E´va Poćs (Budapest, 2008), 35–49; see also Martine Ostorero, ‘‘The Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath in the Alpine Region (1430–1440) Text and Context,’’ in ibid, 15–35. ˆ ge, ed. Martine 81. Le diable en process: De´monologie et sorcellerie a` la fin du Moyen A ´ ´ ´ Ostorero and Etienne Anheim, special issue of Medievales 44 (2003). 82. Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437: Studien zu den Anfa¨ngen der europaïschen Hexenverfolgungen im Spa¨tmittelalter (Aachen, 2000); Bailey, Battling Demons; Johannes Nider, Les Sorciers et leurs tromperies: ‘‘La fourmilie`re,’’ livre V, ed. and trans. Jean Ceárd (Grenoble, 2005); Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘The Process of Trance: Heavenly and Diabolic Apparitions in Johannes Nider’s Formicarius,’’ in Procession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Ottawa, 2007), 203–58. 83. Malleus Maleficarum von Heinrich Institoris (alias Kramer), ed. Andre´ Schnyder (Go¨ppingen, 1991); Gu¨nter Jerouschek, ed., Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (Hildesheim, 1992); Peter Segl, ed., Der Hexenhammer: Entstehung und Umfeld des Malleus Maleficarum von 1487 (Cologne, 1988); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002); Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester, 2003); Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge, 2006); The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester, 2007); Tamar Herzig, ‘‘Heinrich Kramer e la caccia alle streghe in Italia,’’ in ‘‘Non lasciar vivere la malefica’’: Le streghe nei trattati e nei processi (secoli XIV–XVII), ed. Dinora Corsi and Matteo Duni (Florence, 2008), 167–96. 84. Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, (London, 2001).

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Concerning earlier historical anthropological explanations of witchcraft, the participants argued that the model of the ‘‘sociology of accusation,’’ that is, the explanation of witchcraft conflicts with reference to underlying economic, social, and cultural motifs, in fact explains away the specificity of the irreducible experience of the participants in conflicts over witchcraft accusations. Aiming to provide an accurate and attentive interpretation of witchcraft narratives as preserved in judicial recordings of these testimonies, Clark advocates paying more attention to how the ‘‘cultural narratives’’ of witchcraft have been constructed, imagined, and represented, and basing analyses on the primacy of language and the referentiality of texts in order to uncover plots and tropes. Studies by Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill examined the story-types, the legal narratives, pointing out that the social conflict repeatedly proposed by historical anthropologists as the typical motivation for witchcraft accusations, the ‘‘refusal of charity,’’ is itself a story-type, a narrative that may count as proof in the eyes of the court and may be employed by accusers as such.85 A careful consideration of such textual-narrative aspects of our documentation certainly allows a more critical (and reserved) evaluation of ‘‘underlying causes.’’ The attention to narrative and communication also subsequently led to very interesting studies on gossip and slander, and a detailed examination of the modes of speech about witchcraft.86 The fourth major issue among recent trends of what I refer to here as the cultural history of witchcraft has been the question of gender, and above all the implication of women in matters of witchcraft. One may wonder whether this in fact constitutes a new question. Quite early on, Jules Michelet and Joseph Hansen treated this as one of the central issues of the history of witchcraft persecution.87 It was brought up again by feminist discourse,88 and 85. Marion Gibson, ‘‘Understanding Witchcraft? Accusers’ Stories in Print in Early Modern England,’’ in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 41–54; eadem, ‘‘Thinking Witchcraft: Language, Literature and Intellectual History,’’ in Barry and Davies, Witchcraft Historiography, 164–81; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘Witches and Witnesses in Old and New England,’’ in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 55–81; idem, ‘‘Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,’’ Past and Present 198 (2008): 33–70. 86. Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1562 (Manchester, 2003). 87. Jules Michelet, La sorcie`re (1861; reprint Paris, 1962); Hansen, Quellen, 416–44. 88. Andrea Dworkin claimed in her book Woman-Hating (New York, 1974) that nine million women were burned as witches; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English came forward with the thesis that witch hunts were geared at eradicating women’s medicine, especially midwifery, in Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1973).

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subsequently nearly all relevant analyses have touched on it, from William Monter and Christina Larner to Carlo Ginzburg.89 With the new vogue of witchcraft research in the 1980s, a number of specific studies exploring this dimension of witch hunting had many overlaps with cultural history, relating witchcraft beliefs and conflicts to the specific relations of women to healing, the domestic sphere, fertility, and also the position of women in the family, society, and culture.90 As Stuart Clark remarked, in the 1990s ‘‘witchcraft history intersected with feminism in a much more fruitful manner than was initially the case.’’91 Marianne Hester analysed ‘‘patriarchal’’ power mechanisms and re-evaluated the data of Macfarlane’s analysis of Essex from a gendered perspective.92 Anne Llewellyn Barstow dwelt on the problem of victimhood in witchcraft cases.93 Partly in debate with Hester, Diana Purkiss stressed that there could also be agency and deliberate self-fashioning on the part of witches themselves, with some deliberately representing themselves as witches.94 In making this assertion she relied on Tanya Luhrmann’s sophisticated analysis of the religious experience of adepts in contemporary witch89. E. William Monter, ‘‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft,’’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, (Boston, 1977), 119–36; Larner, Enemies of God, 89–102; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 89–121. 90. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987); Susanna Burghartz, ‘‘The Equation of Women and Witches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,’’ in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, ed. Richard J. Evans, (London and New York, 1988), 57–74; Dagmar Unverhau, ‘‘Frauenbewegung und historische Hexenforschung,’’ in Ketzer, Zauberer, Hexen: Die Anfa¨nge der europaïschen Hexenverfolgungen, ed. Andreas Blauert (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 241–83; Brian P. Levack, ed., Witchcraft, Women and Society (New York and London, 1992); idem, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 5, Gender and Witchcraft (New York and London, 2001); Willem de Blećourt, ‘‘The Making of a Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period,’’ Gender and History 12 (2000): 287–309; Katharine Hodgkin, ‘‘Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychonalysis,’’ in Barry and Davies, Witchcraft Historiography, 182–202. 91. Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 11. 92. Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (London and New York, 1992); eadem, ‘‘Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch Hunting,’’ in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 257–87. 93. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco, 1994). 94. Diana Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representation (London and New York, 1996).

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craft movements.95 Lyndal Roper’s aforementioned studies used psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts to explain conflicts regarding witchcraft within the world of household cares and anxieties over motherhood.96 It is worth recalling that the attention dedicated to the gender issue also provoked interesting criticism. The exaggerated role attributed to women in witchcraft matters has been countered by Malcolm Gaskill, Eva Labouvie, Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Rolf Schulte, and Alison Rowlands, who all attempt to shed light on the neglected role of ‘‘male witches.’’97 The obligatory question again returns: is the gendered approach to witchcraft a cultural history? Let me quote here the observation of Miri Rubin: ‘‘Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History is as much an essay on the history of gender as it is on cultural history, and history in general.’’98 This statement holds equally for the problem of gender and witchcraft, which is entangled in the cultural history of male and female roles. This leads me to the fifth (and last) current of the cultural history of witchcraft I would like to discuss here, the one I have been trying to cultivate myself over the past two decades, in connection with an unfinished book project on Sainthood and Witchcraft. The problem itself could be formulated by viewing witchcraft beliefs and their function in explaining and handling everyday misfortune, illness, and calamities by situating the related practices in a broader religious, cultural, and gendered framework in the long-term history of the universe of positive and negative concepts regarding the supernatural. This implies a meticulous structural comparison of the two sets of beliefs within Christianity, where supernatural capacity and agency is attrib95. Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 96. Lyndall Roper, ‘‘Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany,’’ in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 207–36; eadem, Oedipus and the Devil; eadem, Witch Craze. 97. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England,’’ Historical Research 71 (1998): 142–78; Eva Labouvie, ‘‘Ma¨nner im Hexenprozess: Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘ma¨nnlichen’ Versta¨ndnisses von Magie und Hexerei,’’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 56–78; Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2003); Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. Linda FroomeDo¨ring (New York, 2009); Alison Rowlands, ed., Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2009). 98. Miri Rubin, ‘‘Cultural History I—What’s in a Name?’’ in Making History, http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/cultural_history.html (accessed on February 10, 2009); referring to Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).

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uted to real human beings, namely to saints and witches. With this enquiry there emerges a need to situate the related (or attributed) manifestations of these two figures in a common analytical framework—miracle and bewitchment (maleficium)—and also to study the manner in which the surrounding culture narrates, reformulates, and adjudicates these phenomena. I first articulated my ideas on this subject in the 1990s in studies on the ambivalence of late medieval female sainthood and the structural ambiguities in medieval miracles on vengeance, which came close to bewitchments.99 The comparative cultural history of sainthood and witchcraft relied on important precedents. The first chapter of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic on the ‘‘magic of the medieval Church’’ can be considered as a point of departure that also inspired Valerie Flint in her Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe.100 More recently an increasing number of scholars have pursued enquiries into the binary opposition of saints and witches, such as Marcello Craveri and Gabriella Zarri,101 or, more generally, into the relationship between ‘‘holy and unholy,’’ as formulated by Richard Kieckhefer.102 This coupling of the two opposed but interrelated figures had been strengthened by famous overlaps: Joan of Arc, who received both qualifications,103 and several other late medieval and early modern religious women described by Peter Dinzelbacher.104 Late medieval debates concerning the evaluation of ecstatic and somatic female spirituality were first studied in depth by Caroline Walker Bynum and connected with the problems of the ‘‘discernment of spirits,’’ visions, apparitions, possession, heresy, and witchcraft a decade later by Barbara Newman, Nancy Caciola, Dyan Elliott, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Tamar Herzig.105 99. Ga´bor Klaniczay, ‘‘Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning Late Medieval Female Sainthood,’’ in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 49–74; Klaniczay, ‘‘Miracoli di punizione e malefizia,’’ in Miracoli: Dai segni alla storia, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Marilena Modica (Rome, 1999), 109–37. 100. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 25–50; Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1991). 101. Marcello Craveri, Sante e streghe (Milan, 1980); Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ’400 e ’500 (Turin, 1990). 102. Richard Kieckhefer, ‘‘The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,’’ The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 355–85. 103. Klaniczay, ‘‘The Process of Trance.’’ 104. Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffa¨lliger Frauen in Mittelalter und Fru¨hneuzeit (Zu¨rich, 1995). 105. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1987); Bynum, Fragmentation and

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I continue to work on this as well, trying to approach the subject from three different angles. One of the issues I am currently dwelling on is the interplay of medieval interpretations of dreams with the discernment of heavenly and diabolic apparitions in the work of Johannes Nider and the mass of witness depositions in late medieval canonization processes and early modern witch trials.106 The analysis of these testimonies also allows a meticulous confrontation of the narrative structure and the dramatic sequence of events in miracle accounts and bewitchment tales.107 Finally, this allows the consideration of the cultural history of ‘‘making a saint’’ through an histoire croiseé of local, ‘‘popular’’ initiatives and the legal procedures of processes of canonization, and it allows us to confront all that with the cultural history of ‘‘making a witch’’ through slander, gossip, evil reputation, and vicious accusations, all framed by the legal constraints and pressuring tools of witch trials.108

The interest in the history of witchcraft seems far from being exhausted. The first decade of the new millennium has produced a series of new syntheses on this question, such as the six volume series edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark on Witchcraft and Magic in Europe,109 the four volume Encyclopedia Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991); Barbara Newman, ‘‘Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,’’ Speculum 73 (1998): 733–70; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2007); Tamar Herzig, ‘‘Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer’s Ties with Italian Women Mystics,’’ Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 24–55. 106. Klaniczay, ‘‘The Process of Trance’’; idem, ‘‘Learned Systems and Popular Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment,’’ in Klaniczay and Poćs, Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, 50–82; idem, ‘‘Angels and Devils,’’ in Memory, Humanity, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Andrei Ples¸u’s Sixtieth Anniversary, ed. Mihail Neamt¸u and Bogdan Ta˘taru-Cazaban (Bucharest, 2009), 111–18. 107. Michael Goodich, ‘‘Filiation and Form in Late Medieval Miracle Story,’’ Hagiographica 3 (1976): 306–22. 108. Peter Rushton, ‘‘Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England,’’ in Clark, The Languages of Witchcraft, 21–40; Bengt Ankarloo, ‘‘Postface: Saints and Witches,’’ in Proce`s de canonisation au ˆ ge: Aspects juridiques et religieux—Canonization Processes in the Middle Ages: Moyen A Legal and Religious Aspects, ed. Ga´bor Klaniczay (Rome, 2004), 363–68. 109. Frederick H. Cryer and Marie-Louise Thomsen, Biblical and Pagan Societies; Valerie I. J. Flint, Richard Gordon, Georg Luck, and Daniel Ogden, Ancient Greece

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of Witchcraft edited by Richard Golden,110 the individual syntheses by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Wolfgang Behringer, and Lyndal Roper,111 the initiation of the new book-series in ‘‘Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic’’ at Palgrave-Macmillan under the editorship of Jonathan Barry, Willem de Blećourt, and Owen Davies,112 and, last but not least, the publication of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. These all bear testimony to ongoing interest in this topic. And, as I have attempted to argue, much of this ongoing research continues to expand the cultural history of witchcraft.

and Rome; Karen Louise Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, The Middle Ages; Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter, The Period of the Witch Trials; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Willem de Blećourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean La Fontaine, The Twentieth Century (London and Philadelphia, 1998–2002). 110. Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006). 111. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400–1800 (New York, 2001); Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge, 2004); Roper, Witch Craze. 112. The first important publications: Julian Goodare, Laureen Martin, and Joyce Miller, Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (New York, 2008); Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life (New York, 2008); Schulte, Man as Witch; Rowlands, Witchcraft and Masculinities; Jonathan Roper, ed., Charms, Charmers and Charming: International Research on Verbal Magic (New York, 2010).

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A Cultural History of Witchcraft

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