The Witch Hunts

A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America

Robert Thurston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317865001
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Tens of thousands of people were persecuted and put to death as witches between 1400 and 1700 – the great age of witch hunts. Why did the witch hunts arise, flourish and decline during this period? What purpose did the persecutions serve? Who was accused, and what was the role of magic in the hunts? This important reassessment of witch panics and persecutions in Europeand colonial America both challenges and enhances existing interpretations of the phenomenon. Locating its origins 400 years earlier in the growing perception of threats to Western Christendom, Robert Thurston outlines the development of a 'persecuting society' in which campaigns against scapegoats such as heretics, Jews, lepers and homosexuals set the scene for the later witch hunts.

He examines the creation of the witch stereotype and looks at how the early trials and hunts evolved, with the shift from accusatory to inquisitorial court procedures and reliance upon confessions leading to the increasing use of torture.

Chapter One
New Fears in Europe: 700-1500

In the film The Return of Martin Guerre (directed by Daniel Vigne, 1983), set in early sixteenth-century France, a young peasant cannot consummate his marriage. Everyone around him knows that he is unable to perform sexually, and he is the object of a cruel mockery, called a charivari, in which most of the other village males humiliate him. Nonetheless, all of his neighbours want him to carry out his conjugal duties.

At one point an old woman with cloudy eyes comes to chant over Martin. Peasants commonly saw impotence as caused by an evil person or spirit who had 'tied' a man. So the old woman intones, 'I unbind thee, blessed flesh, I unbind thee!' She gestures ponderously over Martin as she sprinkles a powder onto his trousers. As this mumbo-jumbo ends, the film cuts instantly to the next scene, in which the village priest makes his own attempt to help. The priest circles around the couple, who have been bound loosely to a pole inside a dark room, and flicks holy water on to their naked backs. Accursed demon, leave this body. Holy Spirit, I ask Thee to help Martin', he prays. 'It worked, that same day', the young peasant's wife later tells a visitor.

What worked, we suppose now, was the power of suggestion, not the old woman's counter-spell or the priest's holy water. But the problem posed by these two scenes is in trying to figure out what the villagers believed. The film, based closely on surviving documents, implies that the peasants wanted to leave nothing to chance with regard to a 'cure' for Martin. If a doctor had been available and they could have afforded to consult him, the family would probably have done that as well. Had they lived close to a shrine or the relics of some saint reputed to help in such matters, they would have journeyed there.¹ What they did do in this case was to appeal to traditional sources for aid: the old woman might have some special knowledge or connections to supernatural forces, and so might the priest.² In this respect The Return of Martin Guerre puts the traditional 'healer', as we shall call her for the moment, and the representative of organized, official religion on the same plane.

Belief Systems and ‘Superstitions’

Martin Guerre's story illustrates the difficulty of trying to decipher what people really believed in the early modern period — or, for that matter, in any time and place. Did the peasants of southwestern France in the 1540s themselves know what they believed in? Did they sometimes change their minds about what to think? Did they perhaps not believe in much at all, but merely opted for a kind of insurance policy by trying different methods and sources when problems arose? After all, neither the Church, the doctors, nor the healers were of much help in most illnesses. People died young, crops sometimes failed, and invaders spread devastation no matter what.

Early modern Europeans at all social and educational levels tried many means to solve misfortunes,³ which suggests that they did not have great confidence in any one kind of remedy or appeal. They probably turned to various putative aids, ranging from herbs to magic, to religion, not so much from a firm belief that they would help as out of desperation or a sense that it was unwise to leave any possibility unexplored. Even today, people can 'accommodate different and even contradictory beliefs, one coming to the fore at one time, another at another'.⁴ For the purposes of trying to understand why the people of Europe behaved in any way or changed their behaviour in a given period, it is best to note first the symbols and words they used to describe their world.

Relatively few sources provide direct glimpses into the ideas of the lower classes in the early modern era; when their words were recorded, it was by educated people, who imposed their own frames of reference on what they heard. Nevertheless, scholars have found scattered remarks that appear to come directly from the peasants; some of these indicate popular doubt in the existence of hell or even of the soul.⁵ Certainly the common folk often felt resentment toward the clergy, especially those in its higher ranks who came from the elite and reflected its outlook.⁶ Yet lower-class critics of a society may also be among its staunchest patriots, as the experience of American and British workers shows. In all likelihood, their lower-class European counterparts until quite recently picked and chose among the symbols available to them, fashioning their own interpretations of the universe around them in the process.

Religion can be seen as a 'cultural resource' from which people drew, producing different understandings according to 'social, professional, age and gender groups';⁷ of course, individuals within any group fashioned their own outlook. One of the most persistent features of European world views, as we shall see, was the presence of humans who used magic to help or hurt their neighbours.

It is not especially useful to call such a notion a 'superstition'. Gustav Jahoda wrote that 'there is no objective means of distinguishing "superstition" from other types of belief and action'. Superstitions are relative to time and place, and they refer merely to ideas and practices which reasonable people do not accept at the moment as valid. Any use of the word has an 'emotional element' that people notice, even if they do not act on it. Jahoda added that in the Middle Ages, 'the world as people saw it included witches, devils, fairies and all kinds of strange beasts . . . magic and miracles were commonplace'. Certainly this picture can be extended to cover most people in the early modern period. 'Sceptics were in an important sense maladjusted, deviants who risked their lives if their doubts were too openly voiced.'⁸

Virtually all the phenomena Jahoda mentioned as part of the medieval belief system, as well as his deviants, require more discussion, which will follow later in this book; in the meantime, he was correct to point out that during the era of the witch trials, strong pressure to accept certain views of the universe existed in many places. However, neither coercion nor the frequent repetition of certain images could guarantee that people would believe in them. In any event, the words, concepts and pictures that provided a matrix for beliefs in western Europe changed rapidly between 1000 and 1400.

The Persecuting Society

At the start of the new millennium, western Europe was hardly a tranquil setting. However, society was relatively open and tolerant. Jews and Christians lived near each other, heresy within the Church was not a pressing problem, sexual behaviour was a personal (or at least a local) affair, and authorities did not try to prescribe daily conduct for their subjects. There was a lot of talk and many laws, judging by extant codes, against people who practised evil magic. But as yet the sorciers, wicca, and so on were persecuted only sporadically. From time to time these 'cunning folk' or 'wise' people were arrested and put to death, legally or otherwise, for supposedly using black magic. But into the late medieval period, these judgments did not amount to a regular pattern of persecutions; such magic did not yet appear to be a major danger, at least in the eyes of the elite.

By 1400, western Europe had changed dramatically in these respects and more. Jews, now forced to live in ghettos across the Continent, had been attacked, tortured and murdered by Christians on many occasions. Heretical movements had appeared, spread, and been the targets of gruesome campaigns of extermination in France and elsewhere. In earlier centuries, lepers had been fastidiously avoided by almost everyone but had not been the object of special persecution; by the fourteenth century local and royal authorities were rounding up lepers, confining them, stripping them of all civil rights and often murdering them. Homosexuality had been outlawed and made a capital crime in every land. Finally, Christian church and lay authorities had become deeply concerned with how people lived on a day-to-day basis and adopted legislation designed to regulate their behaviour.

In the words of R. I. Moore, by the late Middle Ages a 'persecuting society' had arisen in western Europe. Governments, courts and other institutions practised 'deliberate and socially sanctioned violence . . . against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life; . . . membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks'.⁹ Jews, heretics and lepers were the first three major categories to fall victim to the persecuting society. In fact, many of the images and accusations that mainstream Christians attached to one of these three groups were also ascribed to the others: that they were sexually hyperactive and dedicated to luring innocent people into their ranks through their sexual prowess; that they engaged in disgusting anti-human practices, sexual and otherwise; and that they were determined to infiltrate and bring down the larger society around them. In short, the idea became popular that one or more vast conspiracies were trying to destroy Christianity from within. The plotters were reputedly financed and abetted by an outside, evil force, often the Muslims.

All societies, it seems, create images of the 'Other', Humans appear to need ways to distinguish themselves from members of different societies. It is common in preliterate cultures to refer to one's own group as 'people' and to members of other groups as monkeys, crocodiles or any other handy animal. The 'we' and 'they' mentality appears in the earliest written records of civilization, from Sumer. Literate societies often expend considerable effort to develop images of the Other; Edward Said has documented the myriad ways in which western Europeans constructed images of 'Orientals' (Middle Easterners) as devious, imitative but uncreative, romantic, emotional instead of rational, childlike, undisciplined, lazy and sexually perverse.¹⁰ From at least the 1500s onwards, Western accounts of Russians retailed many of these same features. Within the West, Germans and English held each other in polite contempt but reserved their most careful denigration for peoples on the periphery of the Continent, especially the Irish and Spanish.

However much the Other appears as a socially necessary figure — in other words, an anthropologically functional device — around the world, it is certain that western Europeans became especially adept at manufacturing and using the construct. Any major collection of art from late medieval and early modern Europe, virtually the time frame of the witch hunts, contains paintings of twisted men in turbans or Jews' conical hats tormenting Jesus, to cite one common motif. There is an almost constant emphasis, especially in the 'northern' European art of France, Germany and the Low Countries, on repulsive figures who differ from the decent stock around them. Although these Others are usually shown as stupid and bestial, it is clear that they can cause serious trouble if they so choose.

Along with these images and labels came the rise of the devil. His meteoric career after 1000 is a story unique to western Europe. Rarely has a culture produced one powerful and widely publicized devil determined, so a great many words and pictures indicated, to destroy the world of goodness and faith in the true God. Demons and petty, evil spirits apparently exist in every society; people seem to need them to explain misfortune. But one big devil, almost as powerful as God, or equally powerful in some variants, is largely a Western creation, although it possibly derives from Persian traditions that there is a realm of good and a realm of evil in the universe. The bright and benign part is that of the spirit and the heavens, while the dark and evil side is that of the flesh and the earth. The two are equal, or nearly so, in this outlook, called dualism. Chinese, Indian, African, even Russian or Byzantine Christian art, representing societies in which dualism is not prevalent or has been suppressed, does not depict one great devil. Naturally, 'no other religion ever raised hell to such importance as Christianity, under which it became a fantastic underground kingdom of cruelty, surrounded by dense strata of legend, myth, religious creed, and . . . dubious psychology'.¹¹

By the late Middle Ages, the chief of this realm became the most widely cited outside force striving to annihilate the good society. Like the heretics, lepers and so on, the devil was supposedly busily recruiting agents — the witches — among the Christians. Petty demons do not seem to need human help; why should they, if there are many of them? The big devil, on the other hand, supposedly had many human assistants; at least that was the argument of leading witch hunters. But why would a big devil need any help at all? Critics of the witch hunts posed this question almost from the time they began; for the moment, we may note that the zealots answered that the devil supposedly profited from tempting souls into his service — the more witches, the more guaranteed residents of hell.

Here, then, is the persecuting society in about 1400, full of dreadful words, images and fears that decent life was close to disappearing. Armageddon, the final battle between the forces of God and those of the devil's son, the Antichrist, often said to have a Jewish mother, was discussed in many works as an imminent event. Good would triumph, but the victory would not be easy, and many souls would enter hell. This is hardly a picture of confident Christian faith. To reiterate a point, there is no way to tell how many people believed that a multifarious crisis was upon them, but it is possible to discuss the actions, including the witch hunts, that appear to reflect a sense of such impending disaster. Why did such broad anxieties and fears, undoubtedly related in their origins and effects, notably the torture and execution of thousands of people, arise in western Europe?

Europe Under Siege: 700-1500

New enemies of Western Christendom, and some old ones in new form, began to appear by the eighth and ninth centuries. They continued to arrive, to harass the edges of the western subcontinent, and even to strike deep into it, until the late 1600s. The most devastating of these attacks came from the Vikings across an arc from Russia through England, Ireland, France and even Sicily; from Muslims in the Middle East and Spain; from Magyars (Hungarians) in central Europe; from the Mongols (or Tatars) in eastern Europe; and from the Ottoman Turks in the south-eastern and central parts of the Continent.

In 711, an ethnically mixed Islamic army entered Spain. The 'Moors' were defeated in southern France in 732, but remained in control of much of Spain through the Middle Ages and were not completely driven out until 1492. For more than 700 years, with strong effects that linger to this day, Spanish society, values and culture centred on the Reconquista, the effort to retake the country from the Moors.

Viking assaults on Ireland, England, France, Russia and elsewhere are recorded from 787 onwards. The destruction was so extensive in Ireland, for example, that the great monastic sites, among them Glendalough and Kells, with their treasures of gold, silver and books, were left in ruins. For a long period, the only real protection against Viking attacks was storms that pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Preface to the revised edition
• Introduction
• 1. New fears in Europe: 700-1500
• 2. Towards the Witch Pyres: Images and Realities of European Women to 1500
• 3. The Spread of the Witch Trials
• 4. Victims and Processes
• 5. The Decline and End of the Hunts
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Websites
• Afterword and acknowledgements
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index