As the sarcasm in Trevor-Roper’s account suggests, the supposed practices of sorcerers and sorceresses were fabricated out of the same whole cloth that was used to tailor the accusations against other victims of the Inquisition. To be sure, a few of the ancient folk traditions still practiced in medieval Europe—herbal remedies, fertility rites, and even some aspects of midwifery—might have been regarded as acts of practical magic, at least as the inquisitors defined it. Ordinary men and women, then as now, were amused by fortune-telling and comforted by amulets and talismans, none of which was officially countenanced by the Church. They told their children folktales and fairy tales whose characters and incidents were fanciful and sometimes magical. Even such luminaries as Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk who is credited with a crucial role in the early stirring of science in western Europe, did not draw a bright line between magic and scientific inquiry. But the conjurations of the witch-hunters surely owed far more to their own dark fears and secret longings than to the actual deeds of the women whom they singled out for slander and murder.
“Jacob Grimm established that certain folk beliefs, including beliefs about fertility, entered into the picture of the sabbat,” explains Norman Cohn, “but that proves nothing about the reality of the sabbat.”38
Some historians have argued that at least a grain of truth can be found at the root of these horror stories, a survival of the pagan beliefs and practices that had always constituted an “underground religion” and only much later came to be called witchcraft when it caught the attention of the Church at the outset of the Inquisition. “Even so skeptical (and anticlerical) a historian as Henry Charles Lea thought so,” observes Cohn, “and today it is still widely assumed that such a cult must have existed.” But other scholars, including Hugh Trevor-Roper, insist that Devil worship in general and the cult of witches in particular are purely mythic. “There is in fact no serious evidence for the existence of such a sect of Devil-worshippers anywhere in medieval Europe,” insists Cohn. “One can go further: there is serious evidence to the contrary.” The best such evidence is to be found in the inquisitor’s manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich, both of whom offer advice only on hunting down the occasional practitioner of black magic—“sorcerers, fortune-tellers and those who summon demons,” according to Gui’s manual. “In fact, neither Eymerich nor Gui even hint at the existence of a sect of Devil-worshippers,” writes Cohn, “and that should settle the question.”39
By a certain irony, modern feminist historians and polemicists proudly affirm that the Witch Craze was inspired by the existence of an underground community of women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including midwives and folk healers, whose purpose in gathering was “trading herbal lore and passing on the news.” Even if these women “were not in fact riding broomsticks or having sex with the devil,” according to feminist historian Anne Llewellyn Barstow, they were “healing, both by spells and potions, delivering babies, performing abortions, predicting the future, advising the lovelorn, cursing, removing curses, making peace between neighbors.” The availability of such services, however wholesome they may appear to modern eyes, was quite enough to arouse fear and loathing in the Church and to bring down the terrible wrath of the Inquisition.40
By another irony, the Witch Craze failed to strike any sparks in Spain, where the Inquisition operated on a vast and terrifying scale but chose an entirely different target, as we shall see. After some eighteen hundred men and women confessed to witchcraft during the period of grace at the opening of an inquisitio in Navarre in 1612, the Spanish Inquisition conducted a formal inquiry, calling on chemists to examine the contents of the witches’ supposed potions and recruiting doctors to determine whether women who claimed to have engaged in sexual intercourse with Satan were, in fact, still virgins. “I have not found indications from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred,” wrote the same skeptical Spanish inquisitor quoted above. Even in places where women were burned as witches in appalling numbers, some sober observers were willing to allow only that “witches were persons whose minds had been deranged and imaginations corrupted by demons,” and they insisted that such victims of delusion and derangement “were not responsible for their actions and confessions any more than the insane.”41
Nevertheless, a kind of madness seemed to seize the collective imagination. An act of adultery, a failed marriage, a miscarriage or a stillbirth, an infertile woman or an impotent man, a dispute between neighbors, the failure of a business or a crop, a batch of beer that went bad, a plate of spoiled oysters that resulted in a case of food poisoning—any such commonplace of ordinary life might provoke an accusation of witchcraft. For example, when a midwife named Dichtlin, and her daughter, Anna, were accused of witchcraft by their neighbors in a Swiss village in 1502, one witness complained that when his late mother was also working as a midwife, “women called his mother in more than they did Dichtlin, and in time his mother went down with a long illness, and when she came to die, she swore, as she hoped to be saved, that it was Dichtlin’s doing.” Another witness reported that he had once seen Anna looking into a stream and splashing water between her legs, “and before he got home, there was a heavy downpour.” Such was the fama—that is, pure speculation and slander—that served as evidence in the proceedings of the Inquisition.42
Although some men were tried and burned during the Witch Craze, the fact is that “80 percent of the accused and 85 percent of those executed were female.” And although the victims included adolescents and even children, the risk was especially acute for women of a certain age and circumstance. Married women and widows ranging from fifty to seventy years old represented the greatest number of victims. Various physical defects and personality traits were also likely to draw suspicion and, often enough, a formal charge; a woman was more likely to be accused of witchcraft if she were “solitary, eccentric, or bad-tempered,” for example, or “ugly, with red eyes or a squint, or pock-marked skin,” or merely crippled or stooped with age. A woman named Barbara Knopf, accused of crippling and killing her victims by means of sorcery and charged with witchcraft in Lucerne in 1549, insisted to the magistrate that “she had done nothing, only she had a nasty tongue and was an odd person.”43
The victimization of old, lonely, eccentric, and disabled women may help explain why so many confessed to the preposterous charges laid against them by the inquisitors and other witch-hunters. Torture was routinely applied to accused witches: “Because of the great trouble caused by the stubborn silence of witches,” as Kramer and Sprenger put it in Hammer of Witches, “torture is not to be neglected.” If the Knights Templar—warrior-monks trained in the art of combat—were so quick to confess to false charges under torture, a frail old woman was unlikely to fare better when the inquisitor reached the third degree. Still, the inquisitors themselves credited their victims with remarkable courage and stamina, although they reasoned that it was the result of supernatural invention, whether divine or diabolical: “Unless God, through a holy Angel, compels the devil to withhold his help from the witch,” they insisted, “she will be so insensible to the pains of torture that she will sooner be torn limb from limb than confess any of the truth.”44
The Inquisition commonly resorted to “sadistic sexual torture,” as we have already seen, but the women accused of witchcraft were subjected to the very worst excesses. All victims of torture were stripped, for example, but a suspected witch might be shaved of her body hair down to the bare skin, if only to facilitate the search for the telltale Devil’s mark. A supernumerary teat—or just a skin blemish—was regarded as evidence of guilt and resulted in a death sentence, often by burning, sometimes by hanging or crushing. At the core of the Witch Craze, argues historian Anne Llewellyn Barstow, we find an institutionalized form of “sexual terror and brutality” whose aim and achievement were the “organized mass murder of women.” To put it another way, Barstow insists that the “witch-hunting” was actually “woman-hunting.”45
/> How many of these women did the inquisitors and the other witch-hunters send to the stake or the gallows? How many died under torture? The death toll has been “reliably” estimated at between 200,000 and one million, according to Edward Burman, while Norman Cohn dismisses such figures as “fantastic exaggerations.” A feminist writer, Andrea Dworkin, puts the number of women executed as witches at nine million, with Barstow insisting that Dworkin’s estimate “is off by about 8,900,000.” Thus Barstow adopts Voltaire’s estimate of 100,000 victims, first offered by the famous philosopher not long after the end of the Witch Craze in the eighteenth century, but she suggests that twice that number of women were accused of witchcraft. They, too, were victims whose lives were distorted and sometimes destroyed.46
Even if the body count is impossible to fix with certainty, the meticulous records maintained by some witch-hunters confirm that the Witch Craze amounted to mass murder on an appalling scale. According to the archives of a single canton in Switzerland, a total of 3,371 victims were tried on charges on witchcraft during the period 1591–1680, “and all, without exception, were executed.” After the witch trials in the bishopric of Trier in southwestern Germany in 1585, “two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.” To be sure, a vast, sinister, and deadly conspiracy was at work, just as the Inquisiton had always insisted, but the malefactors were the inquisitors themselves.47
The childhood recollections of a young woman who grew up in the French village of Domrémy in the early fifteenth century provide an intriguing glimpse into the folk traditions that so alarmed the Inquisition. Near the village was an old tree, known by the locals as “The Ladies Tree” and “The Fairies Tree,” and a spring that bubbled up from an artesian source. “And I have heard say,” she recalled, “that those who are sick of fevers drink of that spring and go and fetch its water for health’s sake.”48
The young woman is known to us as Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431), and she spoke these words under interrogation during her trial before the Inquisition on charges of heresy and witchcraft. She conceded that some of the old women in the village—“but not of my own family,” she was careful to say—claimed to have seen “Fairy Ladies” in the vicinity of another great tree, a beech, and some boys and girls from the village danced around the beech tree and made garlands from its boughs. As the interrogation continued, Joan struggled desperately to distance herself from these goings-on: “I never saw those fairies at the tree, so far as I know,” she declared. “I do not know whether I have danced by the tree since I came to years of discretion, but I may well have danced there with my companions, and I sang there more often than I danced.”49
Joan of Arc, of course, attracted the attention of powerful men for reasons wholly unrelated to dancing fairies. A farm girl who could neither read nor write, she was also a young woman of extraordinary charisma who presented herself to the French king and persuaded him to put her in command of his army. But it is also true that she provided her enemies with the kind of evidence upon which the Inquisition could and did rely in condemning her as a servant of the Devil. She famously wore the garb of a soldier and carried a sword, both of which were reserved to men alone under biblical law and pious tradition. From the age of thirteen, she claimed to see visions and hear voices; at the age of seventeen, she was serving as a seer in the court of King Charles VII; and by the age of nineteen, she was burned alive at the stake as a witch.
Charles himself was dubious at first, and it was only after the teenager was vetted by the royal theologians that he allowed her to serve in his army. But Joan of Arc’s real offense was purely a matter of politics. Charles VII was engaged in a war for the French crown against an invading English army and its French collaborators. At Orléans, where gnostic cultists had been burned as heretics some three centuries earlier, Joan of Arc succeeded in breaking the English siege, and the so-called Maid of Orléans was an honored participant in the coronation of Charles VII as the rightful king of France.
But the English army remained on French soil, Paris remained under English control, and the fighting continued. Joan continued to lead the army of King Charles until she was wounded in battle and taken prisoner by the English and their French allies, who promptly resolved to put an end to their vexing adversary once and for all. She was imprisoned and interrogated behind the locked door of her cell, and then put on public trial at Rouen for six days in 1431. The charges of heresy and witchcraft were set forth in seventy articles of indictment, including such specific accusations as dressing like a man, entering into a pact with the Devil, and submitting to a ritual of initiation into sorcery while still a child. The “Voice from God” that she claimed to have heard since early adolescence, according to the bill of particulars, was diabolical rather than divine. The deputy inquisitor of France was summoned to participate in the proceedings and thereby place the imprimatur of the Inquisition on what was simply and clearly a show trial.50
The charges against Joan were trumped up to serve the naked political interests of the English and their French allies. Her personal eccentricities were convenient to her persecutors, but their real motive had nothing to do with Joan herself; rather, they sought to defame and discredit King Charles by demonstrating that his now-legendary champion was a witch and a heretic. An oblique clue to the realpolitik behind the trial of Joan of Arc is found in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I, in which the Maid of Orléans is addressed as “Thou foul accursed minister of hell!” As seen through English eyes, both in her own lifetime and in Shakespeare’s time, Joan was a dangerous enemy who took up arms against an English king claiming the right to sit on the throne of France. To the French, then and now, she was “a heroine of the French resistance” who opposed the English invaders and their collaborators in a war of national liberation. Although the Inquisition never managed to extend its long reach to England, the English were not reluctant to invoke its jurisdiction and put Joan on trial as a heretic and a witch, thereby ensuring both her death and her disgrace.51
“The King has ordered me to try you,” a French bishop supposedly informed Joan, referring to the English monarch, “and I will do so.”52
The surviving transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc by the Inquisition allow us to witness for ourselves some of the intimate moments in an actual witch trial. As in any interrogation or trial conducted by the Inquisition, every word uttered in an unguarded moment, every friendship and relationship, was a potential snare for the victim and a weapon in the hands of a skillful inquisitor. When, for example, the interrogator asked whether Joan’s godmother—the woman who claimed to have seen those Fairy Ladies dancing around the old beech tree—“was reputed to be a ‘wise woman,’” Joan understood the thrust of the question. In the parlance of the Inquisition, a “wise woman” was a sorceress. And Joan sought to parry the thrust: “She is held and reputed a good and honest woman,” she insisted, “and no witch or sorceress.”53
Joan, not yet twenty years old and on trial for her life, insisted that she was a good Christian. “I learned my Pater and Ave and Creed from my mother,” she testified. “I confessed once a year to my own parson and, when he was hindered, to another priest by his leave.” When she made garlands from the branches of the beech tree, they were intended not for the Fairy Ladies but “for the image of St. Mary at Domrémy.” When the inquisitor, following the standard line of questioning for accused witches, demanded to know whether Joan knew of “those who went riding with the Fairies”—“riding” was a reference to night flights on a broomstick to attend a gathering of witches—she continued to assert her own innocence. “That I never did nor never knew,” she declared. “I have indeed heard that there was a ride on Thursdays, but I believe not in that which is witchcraft.”54
Joan was cross-examined at length by the inquisitors about the source of her visions. Significantly, neither Joan nor the judges entertained the notion that she had experienced only visual and auditory hallucinations, but they debated over whether she had trafficked w
ith angels or devils. “The Voice comes to me from God,” insisted Joan, who identified her celestial visitors as the archangel Michael and a pair of saints, Catherine and Margaret. The inquisitors insisted that Joan had actually consorted with Satan himself and a couple of demons, Belial and Behemoth. But at least one question and answer reveal the political subtext of the trial and the real reason for her conviction and execution.55
Q: Does not St. Margaret speak English?
A: Why should she speak English when she is not on the English side?56
Like so many less famous victims of the Inquisition, Joan was granted a life sentence after she agreed to abjure her supposed heresies. As part of the plea bargain, she assured the inquisitor that she would give up her men’s clothing. For four days after she had signed the document of abjuration, she endured various acts of brutality and sexual abuse at the hands of her English guards, and then she suddenly repudiated her promise to dress like a woman. According to the cruel and inflexible logic of the Inquisition, Joan was now a relapsed heretic and thus unworthy of the mercy of a life sentence. At 7:00 a.m. on May 30, 1431, she was formally excommunicated “and burned as quickly as was decently possible on the same morning.”57 A Dominican monk accompanied her to the pyre, yet another inquisitorial commonplace, and she begged him to hold a crucifix where she could see it until the flames finally extinguished her life. Her only regret was that her mortal remains would not be interred in consecrated ground. “Alas! That my body, whole and entire, which has never been corrupted,” she cried, referring to her self-imposed vow of chastity, “should today be consumed and burned to ashes!”58
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