a cultural history of witchcraft

A Cultural History of Witchcraft

G A B O R K L A N I C Z AYCentral European University

for Peter Burke

It was Peter Burke who got me into the ‘‘witchcraft business’’ more than aquarter of a century ago, and this overview of research on witchcraft, the firstversion of which was prepared for a conference celebrating his seventiethbirthday in 2007, is dedicated to him. Let me begin this historiographic over-view with a few personal remarks recalling our cooperation. I first met PeterBurke in 1982 at an Economic History congress in Budapest. I was a researchassistant at the time, developing an interest in various aspects of ‘‘popularreligion,’’ such as heresy, sainthood, and shamanism,1 and I was eager to hearhis theoretically based insights into the history of ‘‘popular culture.’’2 Heinvited me to a large-scale comparative conference on the history of Euro-pean witchcraft in Stockholm, which he was organizing with Bengt Ankarlooand Gustav Henningsen in coordination with the Olin Foundation in 1984.He encouraged me to broaden my interest from Hungarian shamanism to anoverall examination of Hungarian witch trials (a historical topic that at thetime had not been made the subject of much scholarly study). It was the firstinternational conference to which I had been invited as a speaker.3

To cope with the challenging task posed by this invitation, the preparationof a new and conclusive historical overview of the witch trial documents inearly-modern Hungary, I entered into cooperation with a group of Hungar-

1. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Le culte des saints dans la Hongrie medievale: Problemes derecherche,’’ Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 57–77; idem,‘‘Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft,’’ in Shamanism in Eurasia,ed. Mihaly Hoppal (Gottingen, 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).

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189Klaniczay ! A Cultural History of Witchcraft

ian folklorists and worked together with Eva Pocs, who intended to researchpopular witchcraft mythologies, on the basis of both historical and presentday documentation.4 We made the ambitious plan to develop a computer-based encoding and a structural analysis of maleficium narratives,5 but as I drewcloser to the material I realized that I had to combine (or rather counterbal-ance) this ‘‘Proppian’’ morphology6 with what I referred to in the paper Idelivered at the 1984 Stockholm conference as ‘‘the transformations andblackouts in the universe of popular magic’’—that is a thorough study ofthe 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 alecture I presented in Burke’s presence in Cambridge on witch-hunting inHungary.8 Seen in this light, my version of the ‘‘cultural history of witch-craft’’ is largely the fruit of Peter Burke’s inspiration. Here I want to rethinkits premises: do they still make sense in the light of recent orientations ofcultural history?

1

By recalling personal memories from the 1980s I mean to focus on a particu-lar historiographic moment when a significant renewal occurred both in thestudy of European witchcraft and in the concept of cultural history—this willbe the starting point of my overview. Let me rely here on the synthetic imagePeter Burke himself formulated in the conclusion of the 1984 Stockholmconference entitled ‘‘The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,’’starting with the observation that ‘‘in the last twenty years or so, witchcraft

4. On Eva Pocs and our Budapest research group, see my review of her bookBetween the Living and the Dead (Budapest, 1999): ‘‘Enchantment or Witchcraft?’’Budapest Review of Books 9 (1999): 71–77.

5. Gabor Klaniczay, Eva Pocs, Peter G. Toth, and Robert Wolosz, ‘‘A K!"#$-bosz-orkanyper-adatbazis’’ [The K!"#$ witchcraft database], in Demonologia es boszorkanysagEuropaban [Demonology and witchcraft in Europe], ed. Eva Pocs (Budapest, 2001),293–335; cf. Peter Becker and Thomas Werner, K!"#$ Ein Tutorial, Halbgraue Reihezur 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. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of PopularMagic,’’ in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 219–55.

8. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Witch-hunting in Hungary: Social or Cultural Tensions?’’in idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medie-val and Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Cambridge,1990), 155–67.

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190 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft !Winter 2010

has moved from the periphery of historical attention to a place near thecentre.’’ The reasons for this interest were manifold: witchcraft was a topicthat cut across established disciplinary boundaries and provided a possibilityfor fruitful exchanges between various fields of research, including social,legal, and cultural history; the folklore of magical beliefs, practices andmythologies; and anthropological enquiries into social, moral, and culturalmeanings, functions, or dysfunctions. The combination of these differentapproaches, together with a renewed close scrutiny of archival documents,led in these decades to a number of studies and monographs, linking thistopic to other concerns of contemporary research, such as community stud-ies, family history, gender approaches, historical anthropology, and histoire desmentalites.9

Taking all this into account, Burke noted the paradox that ‘‘when HughTrevor-Roper published his lively essay on what he called, following nine-teenth-century German scholars, the European ‘witch-craze,’ he could havehardly guessed that he was summarising and synthesising the conventionalhistorical wisdom on the subject at the very time when this conventionalview was being undermined.’’10 While Trevor-Roper, like many of his pre-decessors,11 explained the rise and decline of persecutions with reference tothe short-sightedness, shameful irresponsibility, and frequently the vestedinterest of clerical and lay elites and the inconsistencies in the juridical sys-tems, a row of historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas, AlanMacfarlane, E. William Monter, Erik Midelfort, and Paul Boyer and StephenNissenbaum, started to study witchcraft according to the contemporary trendof historiography, relying on ‘‘popular’’ testimonies.12 This meant the exami-nation of entire new domains of documentation on or related to witchcraft.

9. Peter Burke, ‘‘The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,’’ in Ankar-loo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 435–41.

10. Ibid, 435; Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the 16th and17th Centuries (Harmondsworth, 1969).

11. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns undder Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901; reprint Hildesheim, 1963); HenryCharles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols., ed. Arthur C. Howland(Philadelphia, 1939). For a detailed overview of the historiography of witchcraft seeThomas A. Fudge, ‘‘Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of EuropeanWitch-Hunting,’’ History Compass 4/3 (2006): 488–527 (I owe thanks to MelissaCalaresu 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 Sixteenthand Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983); KeithThomas, 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 confes-sions of accused witches most frequently extracted by torture, and tried tomake sense of the ludicrous revelations on the witches’ traffic with thedevil and their mysterious nightly assemblies. This was supported and com-plemented by analysis of related works of learned demonology.13 Newwitchcraft enquiries were turning instead to the mass of testimonies bythe accusers, a huge judicial documentation barely touched on in previousresearch. The emerging new explanation of witchcraft conflicts was basedon understanding the problems and fears of villagers and the motivationsfor persecution ‘‘from below,’’ an approach labelled by Alan Macfarlane‘‘the sociology of accusation.’’ This methodology drew on the experienceof British social anthropologists working on contemporary African witch-craft, above all the legacy of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s seminal study onthe Azande, put on front stage by the discussions prompted by Mary Doug-las and published by her in the volume Witchcraft Confessions and Accusationsin 1970 (which contained articles by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane,who later published influential monographs on the subject that became theflagships of the emerging new current of historical anthropology).14 Thenew historical portrait of early modern witchcraft has shown that the spec-tacular outbreaks and epidemic witch hunts that had been the focus ofscholarly attention were merely occasional explosions within a broader,widespread, steady, and unspectacular set of accusations that were, for sev-eral centuries, part of the everyday life of early modern European villagecommunities, representing a system to handle regular conflicts, neighbor-hood quarrels, and denial of expected charity in an age of the breakdownof the traditional system of communal solidarities.

Instead of spectacular tales of witches’ sabbaths, these testimonies revealeda set of interwoven conflicts stemming from everyday animosities and offeredexplanations for misfortunes in terms of suspected maleficium attributed to

Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor andStuart 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: TheSocial and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, Calif., 1972); Paul Boyer and StephenNissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

13. Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid, 1969); translated as TheWorld 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 witchcraftaccusations and persecutions ultimately constituted a system of sanctions forthe breaking of communal norms, whether they ‘‘helped to uphold the tradi-tional obligations of charity and neighbourliness at a time when other socialand economic forces were conspiring to weaken them’’ (as suggested byKeith Thomas following Evans-Pritchard)15 or, conversely, whether theywere a tool in the hands of individualist accusers to liberate themselves fromthe obligations of expected solidarity (not only refusing charity, but also elim-inating those who grudgingly demanded it, by accusing them of havingresorted to magical vengeance), as proposed by Alan Macfarlane.16

Despite this divergence a new consensus emerged that only a detailedmicroscopic examination of all local economic, social, and cultural tensionscould further any genuine understanding of magical conflicts, an argumentadvanced in studies by E. William Monter for Calvinist Geneva, Paul Boyerand Stephen Nissenbaum for Salem, Robert Muchembled for Cambresis,Wolfgang Behringer for southern Germany, and Robin Briggs for Lorraine.17

In addition, a renewed approach of the sociology of accusation was comple-mented by new attention to the political, religious, and judicial backgroundof ‘‘large panic trials’’ by Erik Midelfort in southwest Germany, BengtAnkarloo in Sweden, Gustav Henningsen in his study of the inquisition inthe Basque lands, and Christina Larner in Scotland.18 The contributions tothe 1984 Stockholm conference (published in 1990) were early representa-

15. 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, ‘‘Sorcieres du Cambresis: L’accultura-tion du monde rural aux XVIe et XVIIe siecles,’’ in Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat,Willem Frijhoff, and Robert Muchembled, Prophetes et sorciers dans les Pays-Bas:XVIe–XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1978), 155–262; Wolfgang Behringer, Hexenverfolgung inBayern: Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staatsrason in der fruhen Neuzeit, (Munich, 1987);translated as Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Rea-son of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer (Cam-bridge, 1997); Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in EarlyModern France (Oxford, 1989).

18. Midelfort, Witch Hunting; Bengt Ankarloo, Trolldomsprocesserna i Sverige (Stock-holm, 1971); Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and theSpanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (Reno, Nev., 1980); idem, ed., The Salazar Documents:Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frıas 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 ScottishWitchcraft (Glasgow, 1977).

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tives of this new approach, broadening the comparative horizon from thecenters to the peripheries, from Sicily and Portugal to Estonia, from Norwayto Hungary.19

At this juncture it is worth raising the question as to what extent theseapproaches could be called a ‘‘cultural history’’ of witchcraft. How can oneisolate the specific contributions of cultural history within this broader field,and how does a cultural historical approach of European witch trials differfrom other competing approaches? To quote Peter Burke again, from hisrecent 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 orreligious one? Following Burke, who was looking for a definition of whatcultural history is in the cultural history of cultural history, I would try toscrutinize from this angle recent witchcraft studies, which have been closelyintertwined, from the 1970s on, with three historiographic currents exercis-ing great impact on what we now call cultural history.

The most important among them, in my view, is the French Annalesschool,21 which, after the original (and still influential) history of mentalites collec-tives (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) and civilisation materielle (FernandBraudel), produced a real explosion of a diversified set of new approaches inthe 1970s under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and in the wake of the world-wide success of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou.22 These methodolo-gies, 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, Melanges historiques, vols. 1–2 (Paris, 1963); Lucien Febvre, Pourune histoire a part entiere (Paris, 1962); Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe siecle (Paris,1962); Peter Burke, ‘‘Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities,’’ Historyof European Ideas 7 (1986): 439–51; reprinted in Burke, Varieties of Cultural History(Cambridge, 1990), 162–82; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation materielle, economie et Capi-talisme XVe–XVIIIe siecle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979); translated as Civilization and Capitalism,15th–18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1981); Emmanuel Le RoyLadurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a 1324 (Paris, 1975); abridged translation asMontaillou: 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., Lanouvelle histoire (Paris, 1978).

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Chartier24), proposed an anthropological-structural minded analysis of a num-ber of relevant fields: acculturation, festivities and rituals, imaginaire, the socialhistory of the body and sexuality, family and kinship, the politics of language,memory, popular religion. All these themes were taken over and further devel-oped by the ‘‘third generation’’ of annalistes: Jean-Claude Schmitt, JacquesRevel, Roger Chartier, and Mona Ozouf.25

The second emerging new field was the history of popular culture. Themanifold historiographic and cultural roots of this current of cultural historycannot be discussed in detail here. Let me only mention the debate on theBibliotheque bleue prompted by Robert Mandrou and Genevieve Bolleme,26

the translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais,27 and the first criticalreassessment of his concept of ‘‘popular culture’’ in the preface to Carlo Ginz-burg’s The Cheese and the Worms.28 Peter Burke’s 1978 book remains themethodologically most refined overview of this field, and its thesis on theearly modern ‘‘reform of popular culture’’ became very influential in witch-craft research as well.29

The third and perhaps the most important field of cultural history toemerge 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 levrier: Guinefort, guerisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIesiecle (Paris, 1979), translated as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children sincethe Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983); idem, La raison desgestes dans l’Occident medieval (Paris, 1990); Jacques Revel, Michel de Certeau, Domi-nique Julia, Une politique de la langue: La Revolution francaise et les patois: L’enquete deGregoire (1790–1794) (Paris, 1975); Jacques Revel and Arlette Farge, Les logiques de lafoule: L’affaire des enlevement d’enfants Paris 1750 (Paris, 1988); Roger Chartier, Lesorigines culturelles de la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1991); Mona Ozouf, La fete revolution-naire (Paris, 1976).

26. Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles:La bibliotheque bleue de Troyes, (Paris, 1964); Genevieve Bolleme, La bibliotheque bleue:Litterature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1971).

27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene 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 Histori-

ans: 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 Levi-Strauss prompted French, Italian, and Anglo-Americanhistorians to redefine their approaches to the history of culture as shared setsof meanings, including high and low culture and artefacts and representationsto be interpreted according to the rules of ‘‘thick description,’’ chartingbinary oppositions, structural patterns, ritual processes, and liminalities.31

2

Having made these preliminary points, let me come to my subject: how didcultural history infuse the history of witchcraft? Let me start with a remotehistoriographic reference. In his 1946 essay ‘‘Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Men-tal Revolution?’’ Lucien Febvre reviewed the old style French witchcrafthistory of Francois Bavoux and used this as a pretext for a stimulating formu-lation of the objectives of the history of collective mentalities.32 Historiansshould not be shocked or scandalized that people living in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, even cultivated, high-ranking intellectuals such as JeanBodin, attributed the status of reality to magical phenomena and bewitch-ments and agreed with the measures taken against witches. They shouldrather investigate how, in that age, the standards of proof, evidence, andreality were different from ours, and examine when a ‘‘mental revolution’’brought a break in this (an epistemological discontinuity, as Michel Foucaultwould 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 Lasbrujas y su mundo in 1969 concentrated on the conceptions of the world thatmade belief in witchcraft possible.34

Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsiaand R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbutteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 11–34. Onmicrohistory, see: Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the LostPeoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991); Giovanni Levi, ‘‘On Microhistory,’’ in New Per-spectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 1991), 93–113; Carlo Ginz-burg, ‘‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,’’ Critical Inquiry20 (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,Levi-Strauss (New York, 1970).

32. Lucien Febvre, ‘‘Sorcellerie, sottise ou revolution mentale?’’ Annales d’histoiresociale 3 (1948), reprinted in Febvre, Au coeur religieux, 301–9; translated as ‘‘Witch-craft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution?’’ in Febvre, A New Kind of History and OtherEssays, ed. Peter Burke (New York, 1973), 185–93; Francois Bavoux, La sorcellerieaux 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) byRobert Mandrou stands out.35 Written by an Annales historian sensitive toLucien Febvre’s propositions concerning histoire des mentalites and as a directresponse to the call formulated in the article just mentioned, it experimentedwith a kind of serial history of early seventeenth century public debates andpolitical, religious, and medical pamphlets related to scandalous witch trialsand above all to the spectacular possession cases of Loudun and Louviers. Onthe basis of this, Mandrou became one of the few scholars who dared toaddress the question how exactly did this major change in mentalities comeabout, how could a significant majority of the elite lose faith in the reality ofmagical activities. Strangely enough, Mandrou did not connect his take onthe problem of witchcraft with his earlier innovative (though much criticised)views on popular culture, mentioned above. This issue became central, sub-sequently, 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, pro-posed to regard witch hunts as the most efficient means of suppressing anddisciplining popular culture, resulting in a devastating ‘‘acculturation.’’36 Theconcept of witchcraft, according to Muchembled, became a kind of ‘‘meltingpot’’ in this process. All traditional beliefs, popular festivities, dances, cus-toms, and healing practices could be stigmatized and forbidden by being inte-grated into the satanic myth of the diabolic witches’ sabbath. Muchembled’sthesis has been accepted rather critically, as was the acculturation thesis ingeneral.37 The new academic consensus rather opted for what Peter Burkedescribed as the resilience of popular culture.38 Nevertheless, the distinctionbetween elite and popular culture in terms of different beliefs concerning‘‘superstition’’ (and the elite fight against this), magical healing, and mid-wifery became fertile territory for cultural history, providing further develop-ment to insights developed by Muchembled, who himself authorednumerous contributions to the history of the sorciere au village.39

35. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siecle: Une analyse depsychologie historique (Paris, 1968); idem, Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siecle: Textesinedits (Paris, 1979).

36. Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des elites dans la France moderne(XVe–XVIIIe siecle) (Paris 1979); cf. also idem, ‘‘Sorcieres du Cambresis.’’

37. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 53–57.38. Burke, Popular Culture, 218.39. Robert Muchembled, La sorciere au village (Paris, 1979); idem, Les derniers buch-

ers: Un village de Flandre et ses sorcieres sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1981); idem, ed., Magie etsorcellerie 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 andpopular culture came to be used for elaborating a new paradigm in researchon witchcraft: the problem of demonology and the witches’ sabbath. WhenCarlo Ginzburg discovered the benandanti in 1966,40 he contrasted the popu-lar, shamanistic concepts unfolding from the confessions of these seventeenth-century ‘‘good witches’’41 with the learned demonological dogmas of inquisi-tions, and analyzed the historical process by which the century-long persecu-tion of the benandanti managed to distort and transform this archaic popularbelief system, assimilating it into the inquisitors’ elite concept of the diabolicwitches’ sabbath.

Inspired by this insight, Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer pointedout in their books on Europe’s Inner Demons and European Witch Trials: TheirFoundation in Popular and Learned Culture (published almost simultaneously)that the person of the devil was altogether absent from medieval witch trialsprincipally related to courtly, urban, or village conflicts concerning maleficiumaccusations.42 Demonological elements were only introduced into the uni-verse of popular witchcraft beliefs in the course of late medieval witchcraftpersecution by ecclesiastical and juridical elites, which developed the explo-sive ‘‘demonological cocktail’’ of the witches’ sabbath by the late fourteenthcentury. This was a long process of evolution, integrating ‘‘black mass’’ accu-sations against medieval heretics,43 notions of ritual magic, ecclesiastic legendson the pact with the devil, and demonological constructions resulting fromthe trial against the Knight Templars and other scapegoats in the reign ofPhilip the Fair and later the papacy of John XXII.44

This new cultural history of witchcraft advanced the proposition that thetraditional ‘‘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 Witch-

Hunt (New York, 1975); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundationsin Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976).

43. Inspired by Cohn, I studied this issue in 1982, translated into English as ‘‘OrgyAccusations in the Middle Ages,’’ in Eros in Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and EszterCsonka-Takacs (Budapest, 2002), 38–55.

44. Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1994); Alain Boureau,Satan heretique: Histoire de la demonologie (1280–1330) (Paris, 2004); translated as Satanthe 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 lamagie en 1320 (manuscrit B.A.V. Borghese 348) (Rome, 2004).

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perverted, and made simultaneously more vulnerable and more dangerous bythe repeated interventions of the elite ecclesiastical culture in the later MiddleAges. The gradual introduction of the diabolic concepts of the witches’ sab-bath could be followed with chronological accuracy, and the geographic andregional dimensions could also be clearly perceived. The comparative inquir-ies initiated in 1984 in Stockholm and continued in a similar large conferencein 1988 in Budapest revealed that the diabolic concept of the witches’ sabbathand the related mechanism of chain-accusations spread like an innovation tothe east and the north of Europe, with a considerable time-lag.45 Whereas inthe Netherlands and France the diabolic nightmares and the prosecutions forwitchcraft declined in the first half of the seventeenth century, in northernGermany, Sweden, New England, and Austria they reached their heyday halfa century later, while in Hungary and Poland the peak of the persecutionscame around the middle of the eighteenth century.46 The ‘‘transfer’’ of sucha cultural model is clearly illustrated by Hungary, where German soldiersplayed a noteworthy role as witch-accusers in generating this new, moreepidemic type of witch hunt.47

In addition, in Norway, Finland, Hungary, and south-east Europe onecould observe a similar coexistence of witchcraft accusations and the activitiesof an archaic, shamanistic type of sorcerer-figure, such as the one shown byGinzburg with the benandanti of Friuli. Such were the taltos in Hungary, thekresnik in Croatia, and the noaide among the Sami in Lapland.48 These sorcer-

45. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 219–423; GaborKlaniczay and Eva Pocs, ed., Witch Beliefs and Witch-hunting in Central and EasternEurope, special issue of Acta Ethnographica Hungarica: An International Journal of Ethnog-raphy 37 (1991/92).

46. On France and the Netherlands: Marijke Gijstvijt-Hofstra, ed., Nederlandbetovert (Amsterdam, 1987); Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle: Le Parlementde Paris (16e–18e siecles) (London, 1992). On Germany: Gerhard Schorman, Hexen-prozesse in Nordwestdeutschland (Hildesheim, 1977). On Sweden: Ankarloo, Trolldoms-processerna i Sverige; cf. more recently Per Sorlin, ‘‘Wicked Arts’’: Witchcraft and MagicTrials in Southern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden, 1999). On New England: Boyer andNissenbaum, Salem Possessed; John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Cul-ture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982). On Poland: Bohdan Baranowski, Procesyczarownic w Polsce w XVII i XVIII wieku [Witch Trials in Poland in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Century] (!odz, 1952); Wanda Wyporska, ‘‘Jewish, Noble, German,or Peasant?—The Devil in Early Modern Poland,’’ in Christian Demonology and Popu-lar Mythology, vol. 2 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pocs(Budapest, 2006), 139–51. These results are synthesized by Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt 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. Theyassumed the role of the opponents of witches, but this ultimately led to theirdemise. They themselves were accused of being witches, not only by churchinquisitors or witch-hunting secular courts, but also by their clients andneighbors.49

The cultural history of the mixture of different concepts of magical aggres-sion (elite, popular, demonological; archaic, shamanistic; western, eastern;northern-southern) also revealed that this cannot be considered a one-wayprocess. Rather, it has to be seen as a complex and entangled set of culturaltransmissions, 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 existingpopular concepts and practices that were subsequently transformed and diab-olized (this observation earned Ginzburg the misplaced accusation of beinga follower of Margaret Murray51). Robert Rowland, examining Portugueseinquisitional documents, underlined the fact that the interrogation of witchesand witnesses was actually a cooperative process that fed more and more localand popular beliefs into the internationally disseminated and theoreticallystructured system of the diabolic witches’ sabbath.52 Recognizing the culturaldynamics defining the elements of this construct, Stuart Clark pointed out in

recently idem, ‘‘Shamanism and Witchcraft,’’ Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006):214–21; Eva Pocs, ‘‘Hungarian Taltos and His European Parallels,’’ in Uralic Mythol-ogy and Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and Juha Pentikainen (Budapest-Helsinki, 1989),251–76. On Croatia: Maja Boskovic-Stulli, ‘‘Testimonianze orali croate e slovene sulKrsnik-Kresnik,’’ Metodi e ricerche, N.S. 7 (1988): 32–50. On Lapland: Rune BlixHagen, ‘‘The King, the Cat, and the Chaplain: King Christian IV’s Encounter withthe Sami Shamans of Northern Norway and Northern Russia in 1599,’’ in Communi-cating with the Spirits, vol. 1 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and EvaPocs (Budapest, 2005), 246–63; idem, ‘‘Sami Shamanism,’’ in Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft1 (2006): 227–33.

49. Wolfgang Behringer, Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte ausder fruhen Neuzeit (Munich, 1994); translated as Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeck-hlin 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?’’ Folklore105 (1994): 75–86.

52. Robert Rowland, ‘‘Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons: European Witch-beliefsin Comparative Perspective,’’ in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern EuropeanWitchcraft, 161–90.

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a fascinating essay the semantics of inversion in the emerging mythology ofthe witches’ sabbath.53 I will return to this topic below.

The explanation of witchcraft accusations in terms of the paradigm of con-flicts between popular and learned culture also attracted the attention of AronGurevich, who followed the debates on ‘‘popular culture’’ and ‘‘popular reli-gion’’ attentively and with a critical alertness, and prepared his own syntheticoverviews on the topic in 1976 and 1981.54 In an insightful study on witch-craft persecutions in 1987,55 he combined the popular-elite cultural perspec-tive with a social-psychological interpretation that grew out of approachesrelated to the French histoire des mentalites, an approach represented by JeanDelumeau, whose La Peur en Occident had a significant impact.56 Gurevichattempted to situate beliefs concerning witchcraft in a broader set of anxietiesconcerning death and the other world (a topic he had been studying him-self57), and also to relate it to popular rebelliousness against the more oppres-sive state and judicial systems of the early modern period as well as theReformation’s and Counter-Reformation’s impact on popular culture. Gure-vich also integrated in his overview the recent insights and conclusions ofhistorical anthropology (the ‘‘sociology of accusations’’ advocated by KeithThomas and Alan Macfarlane).

Beyond the acculturation model, the opposition of popular and elite ver-sions of beliefs concerning witchcraft, and the problem of the general climateof anxiety in the early modern period, there was a fourth fertile territorywithin the popular culture approach to research on witchcraft: examinationof the conflicts related to popular medicine, healing and midwifery, and therole of cunning folk. Again it was Alan Macfarlane who redirected the atten-

53. Stuart Clark, ‘‘Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft,’’ Past andPresent 87 (1980): 98–127.

54. Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, Popularnoie bogoslovie i narodnaia religiosnost srednichvekov (Moscow, 1976) [People’s theology and popular religiosity in the Middle Ages]; idem,Problemi srednievekovnoi narodnoi kulturi (Moscow, 1981), translated as Medieval PopularCulture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsw-orth (Cambridge, 1990).

55. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, ‘‘Vedima v dierevnie i pred sudom (narodnaia iuchionnaia tradicii v ponimanii magii)’’ [Witches in the village and on the bench ofthe accused: Popular and learned traditions in the interpretation of magic], in Jazikikulturi i problemi perevodimosti [Languages, cultures and the problems of mediation](Moscow, 1987), 12–46.

56. Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siecles): Une cite assiegee(Paris, 1978).

57. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, ‘‘Au Moyen Age: Conscience individuelle etimage 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 Willemde Blecourt, Robin Briggs, Eva Pocs, myself, and more recently OwenDavies, Emma Wilby, and Marıa Tausiet.58 The most fascinating enquiry con-cerning this theme was made not by a historian, however, but a psychologist,Jeanne Favret-Saada, who turned to ethnological research and examinedpresent-day witchcraft beliefs in the French region called Bocage.59 In herbooks, cultural and psychological history became an experience-centeredpersonal account offering fascinating insight into how bewitchment narra-tives were shaped and reworked in the context of the special therapeuticclimate of the unwitching procedures arranged by the cunning folk for theirclients.

3

As I hope to have shown, the cross-fertilization of new approaches in culturalhistory and research on early modern European witchcraft has resulted in animpressive series of new studies, starting in the 1970s and 1980s and in manyrespects continuing to the present day. In fact, these results have been soprolific that I cannot do justice here to all the recent research in which witch-craft is analyzed within the framework of some variety of cultural history. Inthis third part of my study I will enumerate some of the research directionsthat seem the most inspiring to me from this point of view and elaborate abit on the one in which I am currently engaged.

I would begin with some of the recent products on the history of witch-craft that follow the methodologies of historical anthropology and microhis-tory in the footsteps of Thomas, Macfarlane, and Boyer and Nissenbaum. In

58. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 115–34; Willem de Blec-ourt, ‘‘Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Histo-riography and Tradition,’’ Social History 19 (1994): 285–303; Robin Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London, 1996),169–87; idem, ‘‘Circling the Devil: Witch-Doctors and Magical Healers in EarlyModern Lorraine,’’ in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in EarlyModern Culture, ed. Stuart Clark (London, 2001), 161–79; Pocs, Between the Livingand the Dead, 121–64; Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements’’; idem, ‘‘Witch-huntingin Hungary,’’ 156–64; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History(London, 2003); Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic VisionaryTraditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2007); Marıa 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 Cul-len (Cambridge, 1980); eadem, Corps pour corps: Enquete sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage(Paris, 1981).

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1991 in Exeter Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts orga-nized an entire conference as a tribute to and a critical appraisal of KeithThomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic.60 On the basis of documentationrelating to witchcraft from Lorraine, Robin Briggs re-examined the principalthesis of Thomas and Macfarlane in his Witches and Neighbours.61 A valuablerejoinder to this historical anthropology of witchcraft accusations was thebook by Ildiko Kristof on witch trials and midwifery in the Hungarian cityof Debrecen, with special attention to conflicts arising from rival paradigmsof healing.62 In another 1991 conference on ‘‘Historical Anthropology ofEarly Modern Europe,’’ organized by Bob Scribner in Wolfenbuttel, LyndalRoper examined the psychological tensions in early modern households andthe vulnerability of women after childbirth, explaining the genesis of accusa-tions of witchcraft in this framework.63 So the cooperation between historyand anthropology continues in this domain, though it does not seem to be auniversal solution to unsolved questions.64

As for microhistory, the reconstruction of moving histories of some indi-vidual witches maintained its fascination: in the footsteps of Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s witch of Jasmin and Franco Cardini’s San Miniato witch Gos-tanza, a French team of the ENS Fontenay unearthed an extremely richlydocumented trial in Berry.65 Under the direction of Agostino Paravicini Bag-

60. Jonathan Barry, ‘‘Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witch-craft,’’ in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, andGareth Roberts (Cambridge, 1996), 1–48; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘Witchcraft in EarlyModern Kent: Stereotypes and the Background to Accusations,’’ in ibid, 257–87.

61. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours; cf. idem, ‘‘ ‘Many Reasons Why’: Witchcraftand the Problem of Multiple Explanation,’’ in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft,49–63; idem, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007).

62. Ildiko Kristof, ‘‘Ordogi mesterseget nem cselekedtem’’: A boszorkanyuldozes tarsa-dalmi es kulturalis hattere a kora ujkori Debrecenben es Bihar varmegyeben [‘‘I haven’t prac-ticed any devilish craft’’: Social and cultural background of witchcraft prosecutions inearly modern Debrecen and Bihar county] (Debrecen, 1998).

63. Lyndal Roper, ‘‘Hexenzauber und Hexenfantasien im Deutschland der fruhenNeuzeit,’’ in Po-Chia-Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of EarlyModern 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 (NewHaven, 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 sorciere de Jasmin (Paris, 1983); translated asJasmin’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 offascinating microhistorical studies of fifteenth-century Swiss witches.66 Arecent addition to this genre, the story of Anne Gunter, came from JamesSharpe, one of the authorities on the history of witchcraft prosecutions inEngland.67 Finally, Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill elaborated a series ofperceptive analyses of individual English trials.68

The question arises at this point as to what extent these historical-anthropological and microhistorical analyses of witchcraft cases can beranged in the category of the cultural history of witchcraft. I am inclined tosay only to a limited extent. The real novelty of the anthropological approachlay in the explanation of accusations of witchcraft with reference to underly-ing social tensions, treating them as a kind of ‘‘social strain-gauge,’’ andmicrohistory also aimed at the ‘‘thick description’’ of the social conflicts lead-ing to accusation. I will return shortly to recent critiques of this approach byStuart Clark and others. At the same time I must stress that these analyses alsoimplied an attentive scrutiny of the cultural and religious surroundings of theaccusation, and this naturally evolved in the direction of cultural history.

A second important field of the cultural history of witchcraft was theunfolding of a new, often passionate debate on the origins of the witches’sabbath. Carlo Ginzburg’s Ecstasies provoked a renewal of research here after1990.69 Ginzburg’s principal argument, based on his earlier success with the

1989); Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud, eds., Les sorciers du carroi de Mar-lou: Un proces de sorcellerie en Berry (1582–1583) (Grenoble, 1996).

66. Martine Ostorero, ‘‘Folatrer avec les demons’’: Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers a Vevey(1448) (Lausanne, 1995; 2nd ed., 2008); Eva Maier, Trente ans avec le diable: Unenouvelle chasse aux sorciers sur la Riviera lemanique (1477–1484) (Lausanne, 1996); San-drine Strobino, Francoise sauvee des flammes? Une Valaisanne accusee de sorcellerie au XVesiecle (Lausanne, 1996); George Modestin, Le diable chez l’eveque: Chasse aux sorciersdans le diocese de Lausanne (vers 1460) (Lausanne, 1999); Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser,Wiederganger, Hexen und Rebellen: Biographien zu den Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg imUchtland (1399 und 1430) (Freiburg, Switz., 1999).

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 ofDeception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (London, 1999).

68. Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early Modern English Witches (Lon-don, 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); trans-lated as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (NewYork, 1991).

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benandanti, tried to identify a (Celtic, Scythian, Slavic) ‘‘shamanistic substra-tum’’ in European witchcraft beliefs, and related these ideas to broader arche-types of universal culture of communication with the spirits of the dead. Heworked with a methodology inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and ClaudeLevi-Strauss that he called ‘‘morphology.’’ His propositions provoked anunusual storm of critical reactions from various sides. While the limits of theapplicability of the notion of shamanism can indeed be debated,70 much ofthe criticism addressed to Ginzburg, frequently with strong inquisitorial rhet-oric, seems to me unwarranted.71

Another recent attempt to reconstruct this archaic layer of European beliefsconcerning witchcraft was elaborated by the Hungarian folklorist Eva Pocs.72

She gave a comparative analysis of central- and southeast-European sorcerers,cunning people, and beings from folk mythology (szepasszony, vila, mora,zmej, rusalia, etc.). On the basis of these examples she identified, in additionto shamanism, another important popular belief system that could haveplayed an important role in the formation of the concept of the witches’sabbath, namely ambivalent fairy-mythologies. In 1991 a conference wasorganized by Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud on the variousconcepts of the sabbath, where, in addition to Ginzburg and Pocs, manyother researchers engaged in discussion.73 The French folklorist Claude Gaig-nebet pointed to the inquisitorial tendencies of modern scholarly interpreta-tions,74 Alain Boureau proposed his first theses on the theological origins oflate medieval demonology, later expanded in his Satan heretique (2004),75 Stu-art Clark gave an overview of the sabbath as a symbolic system (in preparation

70. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanism and Witchcraft,’’ Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1(2006): 214–21.

71. For Ginzburg’s exchange with Perry Anderson, see London Review of Books, 8November 1990 and 10 January 1991; cf. Klaus Graf, ‘‘Carlo Ginzburgs’ Hexensab-bat’—Herausforderung an die Methodendiskussion der Geschichtswissenschaft,’’ kea:Zeitschrift fur Kulturwissenschaften 5 (1993): 1–16; for a recent recycling of this debatesee Willem de Blecourt, ‘‘The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archeologies, Conjec-tural Histories or Political Mythologies?’’ in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiogra-phy, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Basingstoke, 2007), 125–45.

72. Eva Pocs, 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 Preaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe–XVIIIe siecles (Grenoble, 1993).

74. Claude Gaignebet, ‘‘Discours de la sorciere de Saint-Julien-de-Lampon,’’ inJacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 47–55.

75. Alain Boureau, ‘‘Le sabbat et la question scolastique de la personne,’’ in Jac-ques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 33–46; idem, Satan heretique.

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of his subsequent monograph on the subject),76 and Charles Zika pointed tothe iconographic schemes that helped shape the demonological nightmaresin the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.77

Another important research initiative connected to this question unfoldedin the research group directed by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani in Lausanne,which prepared critical editions and detailed studies of the earliest documentsof diabolic witchcraft beliefs in Switzerland. In addition to the exemplaryvolume on the ‘‘imaginaire du sabbat,’’78 they published a series of detailedcase studies that threw new light on the relationship between late medievalheresy and early formulations of the witches’ sabbath, also recently subjectedto scholarly scrutiny by others.79 The emergence of the concept of thewitches’ sabbath remained central in subsequent enquiries and conferences,such as the one arranged in Budapest in 1999, where a special round-tablewas organized around Ginzburg’s Ecstasies, and many other papers touched

76. Stuart Clark, ‘‘Le sabbat comme systeme symbolique: Significations stables etinstables,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 63–75; idem, Think-ing with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

77. Charles Zika, ‘‘Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft-Literature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius,’’ in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in theHistorical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 175–218; idem, ‘‘Les parties du corps:Saturne et le cannibalisme: Representations visuelles des assemblees des sorcieres auXVIe siecle,’’ in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, 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: Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440c.), ed. Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp, incollaboration with Catherine Chene (Lausanne, 1999).

79. Catherine Chene, Juger les vers: Exorcismes et proces d’animaux dans le diocese deLausanne (XVe–XVIe s.) (Lausanne, 1995); Martine Ostorero, Kathrin Utz Tremp andGeorg Modestin, eds., Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse romande: Le registre Ac 29 desArchives cantonales vaudoises (1438–1528) (Lausanne, 2007); see also n. 66 above.Beyond the work of the Lausanne seminar, see Andreas Blauert, Fruhe Hexenverfol-gungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989);Bernard Andenmatten and Kathrin Utz Tremp, ‘‘De l’heresie a la sorcellerie: L’inqui-siteur Ulric de Torrente OP (vers 1420–1445), et l’affermissement de l’inquisitionen Suisse Romande,’’ Zeitschrift fur Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 86 (1992): 72–74;Pierrette Paravy, De la chretiente romaine a la reforme en Dauphine: Eveques, fideles etdeviants (vers 1340–1530), 2 vols. (Rome, 1993); Michael D. Bailey, ‘‘The MedievalConcept of the Witches’ Sabbath,’’ Exemplaria 8 (1996): 419–39; idem, BattlingDemons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, Pa.,2003); Wolfgang Behringer, ‘‘How Waldensians became Witches,’’ in Klaniczay andPocs, Communicating with the Spirits, 155–92; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Von der Haresie zurHexerei: ‘‘Wirkliche’’ und imaginare Sekten im Spatmittelalter (Hannover, 2008).

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on the issue.80 The same interest was preserved in the 2002 Paris conferenceon ‘‘le diable en proces.’’81 Parallel to this enquiry concerning the earliestsources of the diabolic witches’ sabbath, there was also an increasing interestin the first writings of learned demonology: in Johannes Nider, author of theFormicarius,82 and Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.83

At this point one again must raise the obligatory question: is this a culturalhistory of the witches’ sabbath and related demonology? My preliminaryjudgement would be that the duality of shamanism, fairy beliefs, or otherarchaisms, on one hand, and the religious-intellectual-institutional history ofthe construction of the complex sabbath mythology on the other certainlydemand the critical skills of cultural history, but they might lead in too manydivergent directions and fields to be examined along the lines of a unifiedmethodology.

These classificatory uncertainties surface less with the third type of inquiryto be presented here, the one operating under the banner of the ‘‘linguisticturn,’’ promoted at the 1998 Swansea conference organized by Stuart Clark.84

80. ‘‘Round-table Discussion with Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, EvaPocs, Giovanni Pizza and Gabor Klaniczay,’’ in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions,vol. 3 of Demons, Spirits and Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pocs (Budapest,2008), 35–49; see also Martine Ostorero, ‘‘The Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath inthe Alpine Region (1430–1440) Text and Context,’’ in ibid, 15–35.

81. Le diable en process: Demonologie et sorcellerie a la fin du Moyen Age, ed. MartineOstorero and Etienne Anheim, special issue of Medievales 44 (2003).

82. Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437: Studien zu denAnfangen der europaischen Hexenverfolgungen im Spatmittelalter (Aachen, 2000); Bailey,Battling Demons; Johannes Nider, Les Sorciers et leurs tromperies: ‘‘La fourmiliere,’’ livreV, ed. and trans. Jean Ceard (Grenoble, 2005); Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘The Process ofTrance: Heavenly and Diabolic Apparitions in Johannes Nider’s Formicarius,’’ in Pro-cession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Ottawa, 2007),203–58.

83. Malleus Maleficarum von Heinrich Institoris (alias Kramer), ed. Andre Schnyder(Goppingen, 1991); Gunter Jerouschek, ed., Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (Hildesheim,1992); Peter Segl, ed., Der Hexenhammer: Entstehung und Umfeld des Malleus Malefic-arum von 1487 (Cologne, 1988); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, andthe Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002); Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarumand the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester, 2003); Henricus Institoris and JacobusSprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cam-bridge, 2006); The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manches-ter, 2007); Tamar Herzig, ‘‘Heinrich Kramer e la caccia alle streghe in Italia,’’ in ‘‘Nonlasciar vivere la malefica’’: Le streghe nei trattati e nei processi (secoli XIV–XVII), ed. DinoraCorsi and Matteo Duni (Florence, 2008), 167–96.

84. Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning inEarly Modern Culture, (London, 2001).

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Concerning earlier historical anthropological explanations of witchcraft, theparticipants argued that the model of the ‘‘sociology of accusation,’’ that is,the explanation of witchcraft conflicts with reference to underlying eco-nomic, social, and cultural motifs, in fact explains away the specificity of theirreducible experience of the participants in conflicts over witchcraft accusa-tions. Aiming to provide an accurate and attentive interpretation of witch-craft narratives as preserved in judicial recordings of these testimonies, Clarkadvocates paying more attention to how the ‘‘cultural narratives’’ of witch-craft have been constructed, imagined, and represented, and basing analyseson the primacy of language and the referentiality of texts in order to uncoverplots and tropes. Studies by Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill examinedthe story-types, the legal narratives, pointing out that the social conflictrepeatedly proposed by historical anthropologists as the typical motivationfor witchcraft accusations, the ‘‘refusal of charity,’’ is itself a story-type, anarrative that may count as proof in the eyes of the court and may beemployed by accusers as such.85 A careful consideration of such textual-narra-tive aspects of our documentation certainly allows a more critical (andreserved) evaluation of ‘‘underlying causes.’’ The attention to narrative andcommunication also subsequently led to very interesting studies on gossip andslander, 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 thecultural history of witchcraft has been the question of gender, and above allthe implication of women in matters of witchcraft. One may wonderwhether this in fact constitutes a new question. Quite early on, Jules Micheletand Joseph Hansen treated this as one of the central issues of the history ofwitchcraft persecution.87 It was brought up again by feminist discourse,88 and

85. Marion Gibson, ‘‘Understanding Witchcraft? Accusers’ Stories in Print inEarly Modern England,’’ in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 41–54; eadem, ‘‘ThinkingWitchcraft: Language, Literature and Intellectual History,’’ in Barry and Davies,Witchcraft Historiography, 164–81; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘Witches and Witnesses in Oldand New England,’’ in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 55–81; idem, ‘‘Witchcraft andEvidence 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 sorciere (1861; reprint Paris, 1962); Hansen, Quellen,416–44.

88. Andrea Dworkin claimed in her book Woman-Hating (New York, 1974) thatnine million women were burned as witches; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre Englishcame forward with the thesis that witch hunts were geared at eradicating women’smedicine, especially midwifery, in Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of WomenHealers (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1973).

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subsequently nearly all relevant analyses have touched on it, from WilliamMonter and Christina Larner to Carlo Ginzburg.89 With the new vogue ofwitchcraft research in the 1980s, a number of specific studies exploring thisdimension of witch hunting had many overlaps with cultural history, relatingwitchcraft 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 ‘‘witchcrafthistory intersected with feminism in a much more fruitful manner than wasinitially the case.’’91 Marianne Hester analysed ‘‘patriarchal’’ power mecha-nisms and re-evaluated the data of Macfarlane’s analysis of Essex from a gen-dered perspective.92 Anne Llewellyn Barstow dwelt on the problem ofvictimhood in witchcraft cases.93 Partly in debate with Hester, Diana Purkissstressed that there could also be agency and deliberate self-fashioning on thepart of witches themselves, with some deliberately representing themselves aswitches.94 In making this assertion she relied on Tanya Luhrmann’s sophisti-cated analysis of the religious experience of adepts in contemporary witch-

89. E. William Monter, ‘‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witch-craft,’’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal andClaudia 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 ColonialNew England (New York, 1987); Susanna Burghartz, ‘‘The Equation of Women andWitches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenthand Sixteenth Centuries,’’ in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in GermanHistory, ed. Richard J. Evans, (London and New York, 1988), 57–74; Dagmar Unver-hau, ‘‘Frauenbewegung und historische Hexenforschung,’’ in Ketzer, Zauberer,Hexen: Die Anfange der europaischen Hexenverfolgungen, ed. Andreas Blauert (Frankfurtam Main, 1990), 241–83; Brian P. Levack, ed., Witchcraft, Women and Society (NewYork and London, 1992); idem, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonol-ogy, vol. 5, Gender and Witchcraft (New York and London, 2001); Willem de Blecourt,‘‘The Making of a Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the EarlyModern Period,’’ Gender and History 12 (2000): 287–309; Katharine Hodgkin, ‘‘Gen-der, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychonalysis,’’ in Barry and Davies, WitchcraftHistoriography, 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 Reconstructionand Witch Hunting,’’ in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 257–87.

93. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European WitchHunts (San Francisco, 1994).

94. Diana Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Repre-sentation (London and New York, 1996).

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craft movements.95 Lyndal Roper’s aforementioned studies usedpsychoanalytic and anthropological concepts to explain conflicts regardingwitchcraft within the world of household cares and anxieties over mother-hood.96 It is worth recalling that the attention dedicated to the gender issuealso provoked interesting criticism. The exaggerated role attributed towomen in witchcraft matters has been countered by Malcolm Gaskill, EvaLabouvie, 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 witch-craft 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 onthe 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, whichis entangled in the cultural history of male and female roles.

This leads me to the fifth (and last) current of the cultural history of witch-craft I would like to discuss here, the one I have been trying to cultivatemyself over the past two decades, in connection with an unfinished bookproject on Sainthood and Witchcraft. The problem itself could be formulatedby viewing witchcraft beliefs and their function in explaining and handlingeveryday misfortune, illness, and calamities by situating the related practicesin a broader religious, cultural, and gendered framework in the long-termhistory of the universe of positive and negative concepts regarding the super-natural. This implies a meticulous structural comparison of the two sets ofbeliefs within Christianity, where supernatural capacity and agency is attrib-

95. Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in ContemporaryEngland (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, WitchCraze.

97. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘‘The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict andBelief in Jacobean England,’’ Historical Research 71 (1998): 142–78; Eva Labouvie,‘‘Manner im Hexenprozess: Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘mannlichen’ Verstand-nisses von Magie und Hexerei,’’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 56–78; LaraApps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2003);Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. Linda Froome-Doring (New York, 2009); Alison Rowlands, ed., Witchcraft and Masculinities in EarlyModern 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 enquirythere emerges a need to situate the related (or attributed) manifestations ofthese two figures in a common analytical framework—miracle and bewitch-ment (maleficium)—and also to study the manner in which the surroundingculture narrates, reformulates, and adjudicates these phenomena. I first articu-lated my ideas on this subject in the 1990s in studies on the ambivalence oflate medieval female sainthood and the structural ambiguities in medievalmiracles on vengeance, which came close to bewitchments.99 The compara-tive cultural history of sainthood and witchcraft relied on important prece-dents. The first chapter of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic onthe ‘‘magic of the medieval Church’’ can be considered as a point of depar-ture that also inspired Valerie Flint in her Rise of Magic in Early MedievalEurope.100 More recently an increasing number of scholars have pursuedenquiries into the binary opposition of saints and witches, such as MarcelloCraveri and Gabriella Zarri,101 or, more generally, into the relationshipbetween ‘‘holy and unholy,’’ as formulated by Richard Kieckhefer.102 Thiscoupling of the two opposed but interrelated figures had been strengthenedby famous overlaps: Joan of Arc, who received both qualifications,103 andseveral other late medieval and early modern religious women described byPeter Dinzelbacher.104 Late medieval debates concerning the evaluation ofecstatic and somatic female spirituality were first studied in depth by CarolineWalker Bynum and connected with the problems of the ‘‘discernment ofspirits,’’ visions, apparitions, possession, heresy, and witchcraft a decade laterby Barbara Newman, Nancy Caciola, Dyan Elliott, Moshe Sluhovsky, andTamar Herzig.105

99. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning LateMedieval Female Sainthood,’’ in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropol-ogy of Early Modern Europe, 49–74; Klaniczay, ‘‘Miracoli di punizione e malefizia,’’ inMiracoli: 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 Riseof 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, andMagic 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 auffalliger Frauen in Mittelalter

und Fruhneuzeit (Zurich, 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 fromthree different angles. One of the issues I am currently dwelling on is theinterplay of medieval interpretations of dreams with the discernment of heav-enly and diabolic apparitions in the work of Johannes Nider and the mass ofwitness depositions in late medieval canonization processes and early modernwitch trials.106 The analysis of these testimonies also allows a meticulous con-frontation of the narrative structure and the dramatic sequence of events inmiracle accounts and bewitchment tales.107 Finally, this allows the consider-ation of the cultural history of ‘‘making a saint’’ through an histoire croisee oflocal, ‘‘popular’’ initiatives and the legal procedures of processes of canoniza-tion, and it allows us to confront all that with the cultural history of ‘‘makinga witch’’ through slander, gossip, evil reputation, and vicious accusations, allframed by the legal constraints and pressuring tools of witch trials.108

!

The interest in the history of witchcraft seems far from being exhausted. Thefirst decade of the new millennium has produced a series of new syntheseson this question, such as the six volume series edited by Bengt Ankarloo andStuart 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, andthe Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,’’ Speculum 73 (1998): 733–70; NancyCaciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca,N.Y., 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culturein the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not EverySpirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago,2007); Tamar Herzig, ‘‘Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer’s Ties withItalian Women Mystics,’’ Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 24–55.

106. Klaniczay, ‘‘The Process of Trance’’; idem, ‘‘Learned Systems and PopularNarratives of Vision and Bewitchment,’’ in Klaniczay and Pocs, Witchcraft Mythologiesand Persecutions, 50–82; idem, ‘‘Angels and Devils,’’ in Memory, Humanity, and Mean-ing: Essays in Honor of Andrei Plesu’s Sixtieth Anniversary, ed. Mihail Neamtu and Bog-dan Tataru-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 Dem-onstration of Truth in Early Modern England,’’ in Clark, The Languages of Witchcraft,21–40; Bengt Ankarloo, ‘‘Postface: Saints and Witches,’’ in Proces de canonisation auMoyen Age: Aspects juridiques et religieux—Canonization Processes in the Middle Ages:Legal and Religious Aspects, ed. Gabor 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 ofthe new book-series in ‘‘Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic’’ at Pal-grave-Macmillan under the editorship of Jonathan Barry, Willem de Blec-ourt, and Owen Davies,112 and, last but not least, the publication of Magic,Ritual, and Witchcraft. These all bear testimony to ongoing interest in thistopic. And, as I have attempted to argue, much of this ongoing researchcontinues to expand the cultural history of witchcraft.

and Rome; Karen Louise Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, The MiddleAges; Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter, The Period of the WitchTrials; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter, The Eighteenth andNineteenth Centuries; Willem de Blecourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean La Fontaine, TheTwentieth 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 JoyceMiller, Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (New York, 2008); Edward Bever,The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognitionand Everyday Life (New York, 2008); Schulte, Man as Witch; Rowlands, Witchcraft andMasculinities; Jonathan Roper, ed., Charms, Charmers and Charming: InternationalResearch on Verbal Magic (New York, 2010).

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a cultural history of witchcraft

Documents

witchcraft winter

witchcraft business

central european witchcraft

history of popular culture

history of euro

economic history congress

cultural tensions

stockholm conference