20.Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 56–84.
21.Jeremy Harte, ‘Herne the Hunter’, At the Edge, 3 (1996), 27–33.
22.The references are gathered in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, Chicago, 1994, 118–19.
23.The argument summarized in this section will be found given in full, with the source references, in my article ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, Folklore, 125 (2014), 161–78.
24.Regionis abbati Prumiensis libris duo, ed. F.W.H. Wasserschleben, Leipzig, 1840, 355. Translations are now in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 167; Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 9; and Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 89–90.
25.The problem here is that Burchard’s text survives in variant copies. The most generally used is that published by Jacques-Paul Migne in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 140, which relies on the 1549 Paris edition, and which I have employed. For other versions, and discussions, see F. W. Hermann Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtlichen Einleitung, Halle, 1851, 624–82; Hermann Joseph Schmitz, Due Bussbücher und das Kanonische Bussverfahnen, Düsseldorf, 1898, 403–67; Paul Fournier, ‘Études critiques sur le Décret de Burchard de Worms’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et etranger, 34 (1910), 41–112, 289–331, 564–84; John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (eds), Medieval Handbooks of Penance, New York, 1938, 321–3; and Greta Austin, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000, Farnham, 2004. Cohn, Ginzburg and Lecouteux did not reckon with this problem when discussing Holda, while Behringer did, in Shaman of Oberstdorf, 50–51, without being able to resolve it; and nor can I.
26.Burchard, Decretum, Books 10, c. 29; and 19, cc. 70, 90, 170–71.
27.These texts are printed, in the original Latin and medieval French, in Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, London, 1882, vol. 1, 282, 286–8. Grimm only prints part of John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, 2.17. To his sources can be added British Library, Cotton MS Faust. A.8, fo. 32 (the late twelfth-century penitential of Bishop Iscanus of Exeter).
28.Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, c. 102.
29.Stephen of Bourbon, Septem doni spiritus sancti, no. 97.
30.Jons saga baptista c. 35.
31.Quoted in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15.
32.Cited in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 170–71.
33.The Middle High German references are collected in Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 277–8.
34.Martin of Amberg.
35.Jacopo Passvanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenza, quoted in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 171–2. Carlo Ginzburg adds another reference to a nocturnal society led by Diana or Herodias recorded at Verona in the earlier party of the century: Ecstasies, 94.
36.These references are collected in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15–17; Ginzburg providing more detail for the Nuremburg sermons in Ecstasies, 101; and the Thesaurus pauperum text being printed in Claude Lecouteux, Mondes Paralleles: l’Universe des Croyances du Moyen Age, Paris, 1994, 51–2; and von Haselbach’s in Anton E. Schonbach, ‘Zeugnisse zur deutschen Volkskunde des Mittelalters’, Zeitschrift des vereins für Volkskunde, 12 (1902), 5–6.
37.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 272–82.
38.Ibid., vol. 1, 267–72.
39.Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, Early English Text Society, vol. 275, 1976, 157. The canon Episcopi is on the next page.
40.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 297–9.
41.These records were first published in 1899 and are discussed by Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 173–4; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 91–3; and Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 54–5, 173–4, who provides original texts and a translation.
42.Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis Opera, Paris, 1514, vol. 2, fos 170v–172r.
43.Ibid., 17–46. Behringer supplies the missing details from modern folklore, as had Grimm, an approach that is avoided here for reasons stated: though both of us, by different routes, agree on the apparent absence of a leader for the spirits concerned, and his general treatment of the distinctive nature of different regional traditions of night-roaming spirits also seems to me correct.
44.Renward Cysat’s Chronicle, printed in Meisen, Die Sagen, 111–20.
45.Gustav Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.
46.For example, there is no sign of it in David Genticore’s study of trials for magic in the heel of Italy, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra D’Otranto, Manchester, 1992.
47.This is Giovanni Lorenzo Anania, quoted in Giuseppe Bonomo, Caccia alle Streghe, Palumbo, 1971, 30.
48.There Pau Castell Granados speaks of a late medieval belief in ‘good ladies’ who visited houses and with whom women were sometimes said to go: ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”: The Mythical Components of the Iberian Witch’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 70–95. He does not, however, go into the evidence for this, and so establish whether it is a securely recorded local tradition or one cited by Catalan churchmen who may have been quoting references to it from elsewhere in Europe.
49.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 285–6.
50.Grimm’s references were repeated, with full citation of the original sources, in Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 168.
51.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 91.
52.Ibid., 91–3.
53.Ibid., 104. On p. 116 Ginzburg dismisses the identification of the steed as a peacock, already made by the French scholar Benoît, as unconvincing, without saying why.
54.Reinardus Vulpes, Book 1, lines 1143–64, translated into French as Le Roman de Renart; there are various modern editions.
55.Ratherius, Praeloquiorum libri, 1.10, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 136, col. 157.
56.Her latest appearance as such seems to be in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 25 and 33.
57.J. R. Farnell, ‘Hekate in Art’, in Stephen Ronan (ed.), The Goddes Hecate, Hastings, 1992, 36–54.
58.Line 13.
59.Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Bruno Snell, Göttingen, vol. 1, 115.
60.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 132–3.
61.The classic catalogue of material relating to her is René Magnen and Émile Thenevot, Épona, Bordeaux, 1956, updated by Claude Sterckx, Élements de cosmogonie celtique, Brussels, 1986, 9–54; and Katheryn M. Linduff, ‘Epona: A Celt among the Romans’, Latomus, 38 (1979), 817–37.
62.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 104–5.
63.The basic study of them remains F. Haverfield, ‘The Mother Goddesses’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 15 (1892), 314–36. See also Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts, London, 1986, ch. 3; and Celtic Goddesses, London, 1995, 106–11.
64.Most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 114, col. 1094.
65.2 Kings 22:14–20; and 2 Chronicles 34:22–33. Grimm was uneasily aware that in 1522 Martin Luther had suggested that Huldah could be the origin of the Holda of the night rides, but rejected this because of the prominence of Holda in modern German folklore, which Grimm took as an article of faith to be an unchanged survival from the ancient world. He therefore missed the link between the biblical heroine and Walahfrid’s poem: Teutonic Mythology, vols 1, 271, and 3, 1367.
66.Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 281.
67.John B. Smith, ‘Perchta the Belly-Slitter and her Kin’, Folklore, 115 (2004), 167–86. Compare the interpretation of Lotte Motz, ‘The Winter Goddess’, Folklore, 96 (1984), 167–86, who makes the argument that Perchte and Holda were different aspects of a northern pagan goddess. She wrote firmly in the Grimm tradition, and indeed relied for most of her material on a work published in 1914. I would emphasize that her hypothesis remains possible, though it is highly speculative and back-projects modern folklore wholesale onto an imagined ancient past, a method avoided by Smith.
68.Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 19–20.
69.Volundark vida, verse 1; Helgakviđa Hundingsbana II, in the Poetic Edda, verse 4, prose opening fit 2, and prose opening fit 4. Lecouteux prints the relevant passage concerning the Disir, from the Flateyarbók
, in Phantom Armies, 20–21.
70.Claude Lecouteux, ‘Hagazussa-Striga-Hexe’, Hessische Blätter für Volks- und- Kulturforschung, 18 (1985), 59–60.
71.Most of these are helpfully described in Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, 1993, 36–58.
72.This and what follows is a summary of the arguments made with source references in Hutton, ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, 171–5; with further material added from Le register d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, ed. Jean Duvernoy, Paris, vol. 1, 544.
73.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.
74.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 94–5. The contribution of dreams to the development of the concept of the sabbath in general is considered by Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers, Chicago, 2002, 125–44; and the whole subject of how early modern people sought to distinguish reality from fantasy or dream in Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye, Oxford, 2007.
75.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’.
76.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 17–21.
77.Nider and Alfonso Tostato, both quoted in Josef Hansen, Quellen und Unterschungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 89–90, 109 n. 1.
78.Quoted, in the original Latin, in Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 145.
79.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 176.
80.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 103; the latter view is Cohn’s: Europe’s Inner Demons, 176–9.
81.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 132.
82.They could thus be viewed, with equal plausibility, as genuine martyrs, who died for defending their own faith; reckless and self-important fools; or tragic simpletons, whom Nicholas of Cusa would have dismissed as demented.
83.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 296–307; Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 54–67, 82–133.
6 What the Middle Ages Made of the Witch
1.Valerie Flint, ‘The Demonization of Magic in Late Antiquity’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Two: Ancient Greece and Rome, London, 1999, 279.
2.Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1989, 35–41.
3.Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, Lanham, MD, 2007, 43.
4.Origen, Contra Celsum, 1.6.8–15.
5.Augustine, De civitate Dei, 7.34–5; 8.18–26; 9.1; 10.9–10; 13.18; 21.6; and De consensu Evangelistarum, 1.9–11.
6.Acts 8:9–24; 13:6–12; 19:13–17; Revelation 17:3–6.
7.A recent analysis of the early Christian attitude to magic is found in Kimberly B. Stratton, Naming the Witch, New York, 2007, 107–41.
8.Galatians, 22:18.
9.These measures are listed in Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 52–3; and Spyros N. Trojanus, ‘Magic and the Devil: From the Old to the New Rome’, in J.C.B. Petropoulos (ed.), Greek Magic, London, 2008, 44–52.
10.The relevant sections of the Theodosian Code and Digest of Justinian are listed in Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2009, 280, 333–6. To these can be added Theodosian Code 3.9.16.
11.Ammianus Marcellinus, History, 19.12.1–18; 26.3; 28.1.8–21; 29.1–2.
12.The importance of Maternus’s text in this context was first noticed by Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, London, 2001, 150.
13.Libanius, Orations, 1.43, 62–3, 98, 194, 243–50. For an overview of Libanius’s relationship with magic, see Campbell Bonner, ‘Witchcraft in the Lecture Room of Libanius’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 63 (1932), 34–44.
14.Libanius, Declamations, 41.7, 29, 51.
15.John Chrysostom, Homily XXXVIII on Acts xvii.16, 17. I am very grateful to my colleague at Bristol, Bella Sandwell, for providing me with this reference after I had mislaid an original note of it.
16.Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine, London, 1972, 119–46; John O. Ward, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery in the Later Roman Empire’, Prudentia, 12 (1980), 93–108; Natasha Sheldon, Roman Magic and Witchcraft in Late Antiquity, Coalville, UT, 2002.
17.Brown and Ward, above, debate possibilities to no ultimate effect; the one offered here is my own.
18.Dayna S. Kalleres, ‘Drunken Hags with Amulets and Prostitutes with Erotic Spells’, in Kimberly B. Stratton with Dayna S. Kalleres (eds), Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World, Oxford, 2014, 219–51.
19.John Wortley, ‘Some Light on Magic and Magicians in Late Antiquity’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 42 (2001), 289–307.
20.Walter M. Shandruk, ‘Christian Use of Magic in Late Antique Egypt’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 20 (2012), 31–57.
21.David Frankfurter, ‘The Perils of Love: Magic and Countermagic in Coptic Egypt’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 480–500.
22.Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era, New York, 1923, 973.
23.H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, London, 1969, 12.
24.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edition, London, 1993, 213; Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1550, London, 1976, 8–16.
25.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 52–6.
26.First found in the Theodosian Code, 9.16.4.
27.For all this see especially Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, 1993; but also Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, Hassocks, Sussex, 1978, 1–62; Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 11–51; Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe, Oxford, 2010, 29–75; Karen Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic’, in Karen Jolly et al. (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three, London, 2002, 1–65; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 35–51; and Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 60–91. Henry Charles Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, vol. 1, 137–43, prints a succession of early medieval condemnations.
28.See Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section 1. Volume 1, Hanover and Leipzig, 1902, 95. 257 (for the Visigoths); Theodore John Rivers (ed.), Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks, New York, 1986, 210–11; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2005, 140 (for Charlemagne). For subsequent medieval laws, spanning Western Europe, see Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung, Munich, 1900, 55–60, 387.
29.Most of the primary texts are printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 113–21; and another by Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Medieval Europe, 90. Two more incidents are recounted in Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century, trans. Patrick, J. Geary, Chicago, 1984, 322.
30.They are gathered and listed in Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, 53–6, with the exception of the Bohemian reference below.
31.Though this entry only seems to survive in an early modern source, Dubravius’s history of Bohemia, quoted in Lea, Materials towards a Hstory of Witchcraft, ed. Howland, vol. iii, 1280.
32.Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet,11.9.10; Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences, Distinctio 34, Article 3, ad. 3; and Summa contra Gentiles, Book 3, Part 2, cc. 104–16.
33.Source printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 118–19.
34.Monumenta Germaniae historica. Epistolae Selectae. Volume 2, Part 2, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1955, 498.
35.Agobard of Lyons, Contra insulam vulgi opinionem de brandine, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 104, cols 147–58. The existence of these protection racketeers makes readily understandable the fact that churchmen could both denounce magicians who claimed to be able to raise storms and declare that their claims were in fact erroneous: see the texts discussed in Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Stephen Stallybrass, London, 1882, vol. 3, 1086; and
Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 110–14.
36.Russell Zguta, ‘The Ordeal by Water (Swimming of Witches) in the East Slavic World’, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 224.
37.Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores XIII, Hanover, 1881, 57.
38.Printed in Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 1.
39.Source printed in Hansen, Zauberwahn, 381.
40.The references are collected in Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature, Toronto, 2005, 310–12.
41.Hincmar of Rheims, De Divortio Lotharii, most accessibly edited in Patrologiae Latina, vol. 125, cols 718–25.
42.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 214–17.
43.This concept was most clearly introduced by R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford, 1987.
44.The decrees and homilies are listed in George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, New York, 1929, 28–31, 378–80; Ronald Holmes, Witchcraft in British History, London, 1974, 37; Karen Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Chapel Hill, NC, 1996, 71–95; and Stephen Pollington, Leechcraft, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk, 2000, 33, 52–3, to which can be added material from Dorothy Whitelock et al. (eds), Councils and Synods, Oxford, 1981, vol. 1, 320, 371, 366. The classic example of a leading churchman using a range of native words for magic, and magicians, to signify magic in general and to condemn the lot, is Aelfric of Eynsham: see his De Auguriis, ed. Walter W. Skeat in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, Early English Text Society, 76 (1881), 364–83; and his sermon in The Sermones Catholici, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, Aelfric Society, 1844, vol. 1, 476–7. Joseph Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. T. Northcote Toller, Oxford, 1898, 1213, shows how Anglo-Saxon words were used to gloss a range of Latin terms signifying different sorts of magician, including healers and diviners.
45.This discussion is based on the three standard Anglo-Saxon dictionaries of Borden, Bosworth and Wright.
The Witch Page 50