The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  13.Sources as above.

  14.Dömötör, ‘The Cunning Folk’, 185.

  15.T. P. Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’, Folklore, 100 (1989), 9–24.

  16.Mircea Eliade, ‘Some Observations on European Witchcraft’, History of Religions, 14 (1975), 158–9.

  17.Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’.

  18.Nicole Belmont, Les signes de la naissance, Paris, 1971.

  19.Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 134; Klaniczay, ‘Learned Systems and Popular Narratives’, 65.

  20.Rune Blix Hagen, ‘Sami Shamanism’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 93–9; and ‘Female Witches and Sami Sorcerers in the Witch Trials of Arctic Norway (1593–1695)’, Arv, 62 (2006), 122–42; and ‘Witchcraft and Ethnicity’ in Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 141–66; Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North, Leiden, 2013, 255–9, 300–19. I am very grateful to Rune for sending me some of his work in draft, and initiating a valuable correspondence. We differ slightly over the element of shamanism in the trials, but this does not affect our overall agreement on the main issues. Willumsen helpfully prints much material from a well-recorded trial, again allowing room for differences of interpretation which show how polyvalent this material can be. The fact that the Sámi accused seemingly moved between expressing belief in the Christian God and in several lesser deities is taken by her as showing his unreliability and wish to please his interrogators; but it could equally express a genuine, syncretic, belief system.

  21.Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, ‘Finland’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 319–38; Anna-Keena Siikala, Mythic Images and Shamanism, Helsinki, 2002; Laura Stark-Arola, Magic, Body and Social Order, Helsinki, 2006; Marko Nenonen, ‘Envious are the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 18 (1993), 77–91; Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, Aldershot, 2008.

  22.Nenonen, ‘Envious are the People’, 79; Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, 61. I am very grateful to both Marko and Raisa for gestures of friendship, and gifts of their work, over the years.

  23.Maia Madar, ‘Estonia I’, and Juhan Kalik, ‘Estonia II’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 257–72; Űlo Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends at the Witch Trials of Estonia’, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, 269–82.

  24.Kalik, ‘Estonia II’.

  25.I also have some reservations about the way in which Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends’, tried to plug gaps in the witch trial evidence with modern folklore. There are possible references to fairy-like beings in the trial records, but what is much more apparent from Valk’s material is the way in which the Christian Devil, and demonic witches’ assemblies, were absorbed, lastingly, into Estonian folk belief.

  26.Madar, ‘Estonia I’.

  27.Petrus Valderama, Histoire generale du monde, Paris, 1617, Book 1, pp. 257–61; Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, Basel, 1568, Book 1, c. 10; Bodin, De la démonomanie, Book 2, c. 6; De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, Book 4, Discourse 1.1. See also the earlier account, which attributed the annual assembly to the werewolves of all the Baltic peoples, in Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, Rome, 1555, 442–3; and other sixteenth-century references to the Livonian kind cited by Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London, 1991, 156–9, including the Caspar Peucer one to the man at Riga.

  28.Discussed in Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 28–30.

  29.This argument has been made, and the superficiality of the resemblances emphasized, by Rudolf Schende, ‘Ein Benandante, ein Wolf oder Wer?’, and Christoph Daxelmüller, ‘Der Werwolf’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 82 (1986), 200–208; and Willem de Blecourt, ‘A Journey to Hell’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 21 (2007), 49–67.

  30.Valk, ‘Reflections of Folk Beliefs and Legends’, was convinced that Estonian witch-beliefs had emerged from ‘Balto-Finnish shamanism’; but he was heavily influenced by Ginzburg’s model. It would be so nice if he were right, and a compact sub-shamanic province could be constructed around two sides of the Baltic with a core of genuine shamanism among the Sámi, but that seems too much to conclude firmly on the known evidence.

  31.On this see Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Sweden’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 285–318; and Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 2011, 119–45.

  32.Gunnar W. Knutsen and Anne Irene Rilsǿy, ‘Trolls and Witches’, Arv, 63 (2007), 31–69. I am very grateful to Gunnar for the gift of this article.

  33.Jonas Liliequist, ‘Sexual Encounters with Spirits and Demons in Early Modern Sweden’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Christian Demonology, Budapest, 2006, 152–67.

  34.Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015, 151.

  35.Stephen Mitchell, ‘Odin Magic’, Scandinavian Studies, 81 (2003), 263–86.

  36.Magnus Rafnsson, Angurgapi, Holmnavik, Iceland, 2003, 46.

  37.Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Iceland’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds) Early Modern European Witchcraft, 383–402.

  38.The best extant study of the Icelandic witch-hunt in English is Rafnsson, Angurgapi, which seemingly does not exist in any British library and can be obtained only directly from the author. There are also Hastrup, ‘Iceland’; and R. C. Ellison, ‘The Kirkjuból Affair’, Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993), 17–43.

  39.Russell Zguta, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-century Russia’, American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 1187–1207; ‘Was There a Witch Craze in Muscovite Russia?’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 41, 1977, 119–28; and ‘Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia’, Russian Review, 37 (1978), 438–48; Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, Armonk, NY, 1989, 83–91; Valerie A. Kivelson, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft’, in Barbara Evans Clements et al. (eds), Russia’s Women, Berkeley, 1991, 74–94; ‘Lethal Convictions’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 6 (2011), 34–61; and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Russia, Ithaca, NY, 2013; William F. Ryan, ‘The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?’, Slavonic and East European Review, 76, 1998, 49–84; and ‘Witchcraft and the Russian State’, in Johannes S. Dillinger et al. (eds), Hexenprozess und Staatsbildung, Bielefeld, 2008, 135–47; Kateryna Dysa, ‘Attitudes towards Witches in the Multi-Confessional Regions of Germany and the Ukraine’, in Eszter Andor and István György Tóth (eds), Frontiers of Faith, Budapest, 2001, 285–9; ‘Orthodox Demonology and the Perception of Witchcraft in Early Modern Ukraine’, in Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler (eds), Friars, Nobles and Burghers, Budapest, 2010, 341–60; Maureen Perrie, ‘The Tsaritsa, the Needlewoman and the Witches’, Russian History, 40 (2013), 297–314; Marianna G. Muravyeva, ‘Russian Witchcraft on Trial’, in Nenonen and Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, 109–40.

  40.Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 21.

  41.Kivelson, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft’, 84.

  42.Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 22, 31–2.

  43.What is known is summarized in William Monter, ‘Witch Trials in Continental Europe 1560–1660’, in Clark et al., The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic, 40–44; and ‘Witch Trials in France’, in Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 218–31. Most of it is filtered through the appeals system of the Parlement of Paris, of which the classic study is Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et Justice Criminelle, Aldershot, 1992. One good study of local records for a set of trials in central France, Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Préaud (eds), Les sorciers du carroi de Marlou, Grenoble, 1996, is not helpful in this context, though it is in many others.

  44.William Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists’, French Historical Studies, 20, 1997, 563–95.

  45.That is summarized in
Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland’, in Barry et al. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 93–5; a more recent study of Tyrol, Hansjörg Rabanser, Hexenwahn, Innsbruck, 2006, does not shed much light on the problem of gendering.

  46.Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, Basingstoke, 2009, 218–45.

  47.William Schindler, Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn, Cambridge, 2002, 236–92.

  48.The most accessible edition is the Strasbourg one of 1612.

  49.Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 88–91; and ‘Avenging the Blood of Children’, in Alberto Ferreiro (ed.), The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998, 91–110.

  50.Maria Tausiet Carlés, ‘Witchcraft as Metaphor: Infanticide and its Translations in 16th-Century Aragon’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft, Basingstoke, 2000, 179–96.

  51.Pau Castell Granados, ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 181.

  52.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, CA, 1980, 27–9.

  53.Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 69–70, 91, 99.

  54.Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans’, 9–17.

  55.Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power, ch. 10, shows that blood-sucking only became strongly associated with vampires in the mid-eighteenth century.

  56.This will be discussed in a later chapter.

  57.Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, Basingstoke, 2011, 16–26, 181–3. See also Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 553–5; and Henry Charles Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, vol. 1, 348–9. On pp. 65–6 Stokes suggests that elements of a case at Luzern in about 1450 provide evidence of a local fertility cult like that of the benandanti, but it seems to describe a routine assembly of witches to raise storms, not anything resembling a combat with adversaries. Likewise, I cannot confidently extend the range of the medieval and early modern ‘dream warrior’ tradition westwards to Corsica, where a twentieth-century folk belief was recorded in mazzeri, people born with the need to send out their spirits to kill animals at night, and the power to predict human deaths in their community: Dorothy Carrington, The Dream-hunters of Corsica, London, 1995. On one night each year, the mazzeri of a village would band together in their dreams to fight those of another village, and those killed in these battles would die in reality within the year. The similarities with the South Slav complex of beliefs are obvious, but also the differences (the mazzeri were of no benefit to their communities), and the records of the early modern Corsican Inquisition, though well stocked with cases regarding magic, have no mention of this belief.

  58.Peter Burke, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art, London, 1977, 45.

  59.These accounts are all collected in Alice Azul Palau-Giovanetti, ‘Pagan Traces in Medieval and Early Modern Witch-Beliefs’, York University MA thesis, 2012, 79–99 and Appendix; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 100, 108–9, 131–2; and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Charlottesville, VA, 1998, 55–6.

  60.The references here are collected by Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 96, 131–2, 302; and The Night Battles, 54–5.

  61.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, esp. 148–52.

  62.Ibid., 34.

  63.Gustav Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern Witchcraft, 191–218. See also Giovanna Fiume, ‘The Old Vinegar Lady’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), History from Crime, Baltimore, MD, 1994, 45–87.

  64.Maurizio Bertolotti, ‘The Ox Bones and the Ox Hide’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, Baltimore, MD, 1991, 42–70. See also Palau-Giovanetti, ‘Pagan Traces’, 50–53; and Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, trans. H. R. Erik Midelfort, Charlottesville, VA, 2008, 91–4.

  65.Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 39–46.

  66.Brian P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition, London, 2006, 237–42.

  67.In addition to the sources cited below, see Mary O’Neil, ‘Magical Healing, Love Magic and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-century Modena’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, Beckenham, 1987, 88–114; Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, Oxford, 1993; Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015; and Tamar Herzig, ‘Witchcraft Prosecutions in Italy’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford, 2013, 249–67; Matteo Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell, Florence, 2007 (I am very grateful to Debora Moretti for the gift of this book).

  68.Jonathan Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, Cambridge, 2011, 35–44.

  69.Gustav Henningsen, ‘The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors’, Folklore, 120 (2009), 57–8.

  70.Francisco Bethencourt, ‘Portugal’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 403–24.

  71.Carmel Cassar, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Social Control in Seventeenth-century Malta’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 3 (1993), 316–34.

  72.Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark, Basingstoke, 2015, 61.

  73.Gunnar W. Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, Oslo, 2004. I am very grateful to Gunnar for the gift of this book.

  74.Francesca Matteoni, ‘Blood Beliefs in Early Modern Europe’, University of Hertfordshire PhD thesis, 2009, 194–6.

  75.For example by Debora Moretti’s comparative study of Novara and Siena, in research being conducted under my supervision.

  76.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 78.

  77.Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha, Baltimore, MD, 1992, 179–81.

  78.Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550–1650, Oxford, 1989, passim, and Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 35–8, 135.

  79.Thomas Deutscher, ‘The Role of the Episcopal Tribunal of Novara in the Suppression of Heresy and Witchcraft, 1563–1615’, Catholic Historical Review, 77 (1991), 403–21.

  80.Anne Jacobsen Schutte, ‘Asmodea’, in Kathryn A. Edwards (ed.), Werewolves, Witches and Wandering Spirits, Kirksville, MO, 2002, 119–25.

  81.David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, Manchester, 1992, ch. 8.

  82.Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, 117–34.

  83.Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, 196–200.

  84.Cassar, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Social Control’; Bethencourt, ‘Portugal’, 403.

  85.Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, 61–145, is the latest and best study of the process, supplemented by Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell, 32–45; and Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 196–244.

  86.Ana Conde, ‘Sorcellerie et inquisition au XVIe siècle en Espagne’, in Annie Molinié and Jean-Paul Duviols (eds), Inquisition d’Espagne, Paris, 2003, 95–107; William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, Cambridge, 1990, 255–75; María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, Basingstoke, 2014; Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, passim; Agusti Alcoberro, ‘The Catalan Witch and the Witch Hunt’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 153–69.

  87.Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, 113–31.

  88.This is based on the studies cited above and below, and also listed in the bibliographies of the general works listed in n. 1 above.

  89.Without reference to this tradition, Eva Labouvie, Martin Moeller and Alison Rowlands have suggested that folk belief among Germans associated women more with malevolent magic: Labouvie, ‘Men in Witchcraft Trials’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History, Cambridge, 2002, 49–70; Moeller, Dass Wi
llkür über Recht ginge, Bielefeld, 2007, 228–31; and Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, Manchester, 2003, 170–79.

  90.This has been especially well pointed out by Dillinger, Evil People, 44–6. Dillinger also, however, warns (on p. 51) that the sabbath is best perceived as an imagined early modern anti-society rather than as ‘a condensation of older traditions’.

  91.Jens Christian V. Johansen, ‘Denmark’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, 360–66.

  92.Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, Oxford, 2007, 143–6.

  93.Wanda Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, Basingstoke, 2013, 97–101. Another historian of the Polish trials, Michael Ostling, carefully considers the relationship of Christian and non-Christian elements in early modern Polish ideas of magic, and household or nature spirits, and concludes that those ideas were thoroughly, if unorthodoxly, Christianized: ‘Ordinary peasants did not perform a thinly Christianized magic; rather, they protected themselves from Christian devils by means of Christian holy objects.’ See Between the Devil and the Host, Oxford, 2011, 183–236; quotation on p. 188.

  94.Dillinger, Evil People, 55–6.

  95.Alison Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Popular Religion in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, London, 1995, 108. The traditions associated with May Eve (to use the English name) are considered by me in The Stations of the Sun, Oxford, 1996, 218–43.

  96.Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke, 2008, 96 and passim.