Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  57. Heinrich von Schultheis, Eine Außführliche Instruction Wie in Inquisition Sachen des grewlichen Lasters der Zauberey gegen Die Zaubere der Göttlichen Majestät und der Christenheit Feinde ohn gefahr der Unschuldigen zu procediren … In Form eines freundlichen Gesprächs gestelt (Cologne: bey Hinrich Berchem, 1634).

  58. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender, and Society, p. 258. Several of the eighty-four items in this Eichstätt interrogatory focus on the connection between sex and the night, for example “On what occasion did she come to know her spouse …? Whether they did not meet together at night and confer with each other alone [before marriage]?” (pp. 256–57, 259).

  59. Richard van Dülmen, “Imaginationen des Teuflischen,” in Hexenwelten, ed. van Dülmen, pp. 94–130; here p. 102.

  60. The confession is published with Jürgen Macha, Deutsche Kanzleisprache in Hexenverhörprotokollen der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005) on the enclosed CD-ROM, under “St. Maximin 1587.” For a nearly identical confession from Barbara Erbin of the Alpine village of Oberstdorf (home of Chonrad Stoeckhlin) in 1587, see Behringer, Shaman, pp. 107–08.

  61. Elisabeth Biesel, “‘Die Pfeifer seint alle uff den baumen gesessen’: Hexensabbat in der Vorstellungswelt einer ländlichen Bevölkerung,” in Methoden und Konzepte der historischen Hexenforschung, ed. Eiden et al., pp. 298–302.

  62. “Hat also gebondenn gestanden, vnndt bekendt, eß sei ein Schwartzer man hinder seinem hauß vur Zwolff Jahrn, Zwischent tag vnnd nachtt Zu Ime Kommenn, alß er Seiner hausfrauwen Langwirriger Krankheit halben beschwerdtt, vnnd bekummertt geweßen, derselb hab gesagt, solt nit so Zaghafftt sein, Die Sachenn wurden Zum besten Kommen, derselb hab Ime Zugemuutet, er soll gott Verlaugnenn, vnnd seiner Motter, vnnd Ime Zustendig sein, er habs aber nit gethann.” Macha, Hexenverhörprotokollen, enclosed CD-ROM, under “Trier 1591”.

  63. John Linwood Pitts, Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands (Guernsey: Guille-Allès Library, 1886), pp. 33–51.

  64. Macha, Hexenverhörprotokollen, enclosed CD-ROM, under “St. Maximin 1587.”

  65. Pitts, Witchcraft, p. 22.

  66. As Dülmen has in his “Imaginationen des Teuflischen.” See also Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre and Maxime Préaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe (XVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1993).

  67. Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge University Press, 2006), II: 63. Daniel Ménager has observed that the Malleus “does not establish a relationship between the Sabbath and the night,” La renaissance et la nuit, p. 153, n. 5., challenging Jean Delumeau’s association of the witches’ sabbath with the night before the second half of the sixteenth century.

  68. Institoris and Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Mackay, II: 45.

  69. See Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 101–21.

  70. Institoris and Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Mackay, II: 248, 73–111. Even in this discussion of incubi and succubi, the traditional theme of nocturnal assault predominates over the sense of seduction in the night.

  71. 2 Henry VI, 1.4.19–23. Fitter, “Poetic Nocturne,” refers to this same passage to illustrate a more general point about darkness and evil in early modern literature.

  72. Current scholarship estimates that between 40,000 and 60,000 persons were executed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Merry E. Wiesner, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 1.

  73. Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. Randy A. Scott with an Introduction by Jonathan L. Pearl, Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation 7 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), pp. 114–17.

  74. Henry Boguet, Discours exécrable des sorciers: ensemble leur procez, faits depuis deux ans en ça, en divers endroicts de la France … Seconde édition (Paris: D. Binet, 1603), p. 168.

  75. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1618), p. 243.

  76. Behringer, Shaman, pp. 23–34.

  77. Boguet, Discours exécrable des sorciers, p. 47.

  78. Peter Binsfeld, Tractat von Bekanntnuss der Zauberer unnd Hexen, ed. Hiram Kümper (Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag, Schächter, 2004), p. 218.

  79. Martin Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 269.

  80. Nicolas Remy, Demonolatry, ed. Montague Summers, trans. E.A. Ashwin (London: J. Rodker, 1930), pp. 54–55.

  81. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons: où il est amplement traité des sorciers et de la sorcellerie, ed. Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre (Paris: Aubier, 1982), p. 96.

  82. Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 11–105. This logic was especially coherent for Protestants, who had largely eliminated regular night-time worship from their traditions. Christians forced by persecution to meet at night used their lived experience to refigure the association of nocturnal gatherings with evil; see below, chapter 3.

  83. Bernard, Guide to grand-iury men, p. 263.

  84. Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 134–35.

  85. Pierre Le Loyer, Discours et histoires des spectres, visions et apparitions des esprits, anges, démons et ames, se monstrans visibles aux hommes: divisez en huict livres … par Pierre Le Loyer (Paris: Chez Nicolas Buon, 1605), p. 356: “La nuict & les tenebres sont par eux desirees & cherchees, & Satan leur Prince pour tiltres d’honneur s’appelle Prince des tenebres. C’est le temps où les hommes & leurs corps bien nourris dorment & reposent subjects aux embusches des Diables, enclins à leurs tentations, & faciles à esmouvoir aux sensualitez & defits de la chair.”

  86. John Norden, A pensiue mans practise Very profitable for all personnes (London: Printed by Hugh Singleton, 1584), fo. 13.

  87. Pierre Le Loyer, IIII. livres des spectres, ou apparitions et visions d’esprits, anges et démons se monstrans sensiblement aux hommes (Angers: G. Nepueu, 1586), p. 515.

  88. The article by Lyndal Roper, “Witchcraft and the Western Imagination,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006): 117–41, opens with Ziarnko’s sabbath image and De Lancre’s treatise (pp. 117–19).

  89. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauuais anges et démons, ou il est amplement traicté des sorciers & de la sorcellerie (Paris: Chez Iean Berjon, 1612), engraving by Jan Ziarnko facing title page, legend “A”. The accused sometimes tried to avoid naming other suspects by claiming it was too dark at the sabbath to recognize anyone else: see van Dülmen, “Imaginationen des Teuflischen,” pp. 114–15.

  90. See Labouvie, “Hexenspuk und Hexenabwehr,” p. 87, on printed and popular representations of the sabbath.

  91. Teresa of Avila, The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus, 3 vols., trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972–75), I: 215–16.

  92. Nashe, Terrors of the Night, p. 146.

  93. Jean-Pierre Camus, A Draught of Eternity, trans. Miles Carr (Douai: By the widowe of Marke Wyon, at the signe of the Phnix, 1632), pp. 100–01.

  94. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005), pp. 10, 192; I.61–63, VI.380.

  95. Kastan, ed., Doctor Faustus, p. 17; 1.3.76–80 (A-text).

  3 Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530–1650

  1. Maria Rzepinska, “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Background,” Artibus et Historiae 13, 7 (1986): 91–112. See also Paulette Choné, L’Atelier des nuits. Histoire et signification du nocturne dans l’art d’Occident (Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1992), and Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, “Braunlicht und Seelenfunke – Das Nachtstück zur Zeit der Gegenreformation,” in Die Nacht, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster, Christoph Vitali, and Ilse von Zur Mühlen (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1998), pp. 83–94.


  2. Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” p. 92.

  3. Chris Fitter, “The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre,” Early Modern Literary Studies 3, 2 (1997): paragraphs 1, 62. Online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/03–2/fittnoct.html.

  4. Edward Reynolds, An explication of the hundreth and tenth Psalme … Being the substance of severall sermons preached at Lincolns Inne (London: Imprinted by Felix Kyngston for Robert Bostocke, 1632), p. 371 (original emphasis).

  5. Carl Krause, Euricius Cordus: Eine biographische Skizze aus der Reformationszeit (Hanau: König, 1863), p. 92; Ulman Weiss, “Nicodemus Martyr – ein unbekanntes Pseudonym Sebastian Francks?” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 85 (1994): 163–79, 167; Frederik Casparus Wieder, De Schriftuurlijke liedekens, de liederen der Nederlandsche hervormden tot op het jaar 1566 (’s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1900), pp. 53–54.

  6. Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 75, 102–20; D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–), XLVII: 1–28.

  7. See Stefania Tutino, “Between Nicodemism and ‘Honest’ Dissimulation: The Society of Jesus in England,” Historical Research 79, 206 (2006): 534–53; Nikki Shepardson, “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Anti-Nicodemite Discourses in France, 1550–1570,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme 27, 3 (2003): 37–61; John S. Oyer, “Nicodemites among Württemberg Anabaptists,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 71, 4 (1997): 487–514, and the literature cited there.

  8. The name “Huguenot” itself, in use by about 1552, was associated with worship at night. Beza reported that “At Tours there was a superstitious belief that the ghost of Hugh Capet roamed through the city at night. As the Protestants held their meetings in the night, they were derisively called Huguenots, as if they were the troop of King Hugh.” George Park Fisher, The Reformation (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1906), p. 227. See also Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 143.

  9. See Charles L. Kuhn, “The Mairhauser Epitaph: An Example of Late Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Iconography,” Art Bulletin 58, 4 (1976): 542–46.

  10. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 21.

  11. John Foxe, Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church … from the primitiue age to these latter tymes of ours, with the bloudy times, horrible troubles, and great persecutions agaynst the true martyrs of Christ, sought and wrought as well by heathen emperours, as nowe lately practised by Romish prelates, especially in this realme of England and Scotland. Newly reuised and recognised, partly also augmented, and now the fourth time agayne published, 2 vols. (London: Imprinted by Iohn Daye, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate beneath S. Martins, 1583), pp. 2075–76. See J.W. Martin, “The Protestant Underground Congregations of Mary’s Reign,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, 4 (1984): 522–23.

  12. Théodore de Bèze, Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées au royaume de France, ed. G. Baum and Eduard Cunitz (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1883), I: 345. For evidence of Reformed services at night in Paris in 1557, see Barbara Diefendorf, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009), pp. 48–56. On the massacre as nocturnal state violence, see Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 148.

  13. John Strype (1643–1737), The Life and Acts of John Whitgift … Digested, Compiled, and Attested from Records, Registers, Original Letters and Other Authentic Mss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), I: 165–66.

  14. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 372–80; for more examples, see Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher, eds., Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St. Edmunds, 1582–1590, Church of England Record Society 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), p. 218.

  15. Thomas Jackson (1579–1640), The humiliation of the Sonne of God by his becomming the Son of man, by taking the forme of a servant, and by his sufferings under Pontius Pilat … by Thomas Jackson Dr. in Divinitie, chaplaine to his Majestie in ordinarie, and president of Corpus Christi Colledge in Oxford (London: Printed by M. Flesher for John Clark, 1635), p. 355.

  16. On the most recent scholarship, see R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Radicals,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. David M. Whitford (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 103–10.

  17. Anabaptists first settled in Moravia in the 1530s. By 1545 there were thirty-one Hutterite communities on noble estates there. After decades of pressure from Habsburg supporters of the Catholic Reformation, the last Anabaptists were driven out of Moravia in 1622; most resettled in Hungary. See Claus Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 211–13.

  18. For an example of Anabaptists arrested at an afternoon gathering (“nachmittage umb iii slege”) in 1535, see Paul Wappler, Die Täuferbewegung in Thüringen von 1526–1584 (Jena: Fischer, 1913), p. 128.

  19. A survey of published primary sources reveals thirty-four specific documented gatherings by night in the period before 1618, as well as references to other specific meetings and to regular meetings at night. These must represent only a fraction of the total number of Anabaptists’ nocturnal gatherings.

  20. Stephen F. Nelson and Jean Rott, “Strasbourg: The Anabaptist City in the Sixteenth Century,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 58 (1984): 230–40.

  21. See the list in Jean Rott and Marc Lienhard, “La communauté de ‘frères suisses’ de Strasbourg de 1557 à 1660,” Saisons d’Alsace 76 (1981): 30.

  22. Ibid., p. 32.

  23. Elsa Bernhofer-Pippert, Täuferische Denkweisen und Lebensformen im Spiegel oberdeutscher Täuferverhöre, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 96 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1967), pp. 90–92.

  24. Günther Franz, ed., Wiedertäuferakten, 1527–1626, Urkundliche Quellen zur hessischen Reformationsgeschichte 4 (Marburg: Elwert, 1951), p. 178.

  25. The sermon on Revelation 11 might have stressed the measuring of the temple of God and its altar (Rev. 11:1) or the prophets identified as “two candlesticks [or torches] standing before the God of the earth” (Rev. 11:4).

  26. On this theme see Bernhofer-Pippert, Täuferische Denkweisen, pp. 38, 56, 98.

  27. Abraham Hulshof, Gescheidenis van de Doopsgezinden te Straatsburg van 1525 tot 1557 (Amsterdam: Clausen, 1905); for the Steinle account see pp. 208–11 (my emphasis).

  28. In 1600 the church council of the Palatinate noted the mocking tone of Anabaptist Niclaus Weitzel in a report on the growth of the movement in the principality: “When they [the Anabaptists] are told to go to church, they say they have a vast church; it has a great roof, and that is where they go.” Acknowledging this reference to the outdoor, typically nocturnal gatherings of the Anabaptists, the council remarked with resignation that “they too have their nocturnal assemblies in the area around Erpolzheim.” Manfred Krebs, ed., Baden und Pfalz, Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer 4 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1951), p. 233.

  29. In his “Dialog on Drunkenness” (1551) the Colmar poet Jörg Wickram explained that “the custom of Anabaptists is to meet in dark forests in old abandoned shacks.” See Jörg Wickram, Sämtliche Werke, vol. X, Kleine Spiele, ed. Hans-Gert Roloff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), p. 285.

  30. Gary K. Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525–1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 67.

  31. The title of the Dutch edition of 1576; printed as “Reply to False Accusations,” in Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, trans. Leonard Verduin, ed. John C. Wenger, with a bibliography by Harold S. Bender (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956), pp. 541–77; here pp. 566–67.

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p; 32. Ibid.

  33. Despite the rifts between Dutch–North German Mennonites and Swiss Anabaptism, shared persecution led to similar arguments, seen for example in a Swiss confession of 1588, the “Einfache Bekenntnis” of an unknown representative of the rural Zurich Anabaptist community. The confession explained that “we do our best [to gather] with thanks and praise in the forests, in stables or other places, wherever God gives us space and place.” When “the clear and pure truth … is neither heard nor accepted, but persecuted instead” then the “pious servants of Christ … shall preserve themselves from the persecutors and their enemies with caution and humility.” Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger, Die Zürcher Täufer 1525–1700 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2007), Appendix, p. 381: “sonder werden sich nach maß und bescheidenheit vor den vervolgeren und iren fynden hütten.”

  34. Hessian authorities discovered to their dismay that both Swiss Brethren and Moravians were meeting secretly at night in Hesse; Nolte attended a gathering of the Swiss Brethren. See Theodor Sippel, “The Confession of the Swiss Brethren in Hesse, 1578,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 23 (1949): 22–34.