Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark

L. Kallestrup

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137316974
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book offers a comparison of lay and inquisitorial witchcraft prosecutions. In most of the early modern period, witchcraft jurisdiction in Italy rested with the Roman Inquisition, whereas in Denmark only the secular courts raised trials. Kallestrup explores the narratives of witchcraft as they were laid forward by people involved in the trials.

1

Introduction

In 1650, the Roman Inquisition in the Tuscan town of Orbetello convicted Fra Stefano Tommei of witchcraft (sortilegio). Stefano was sentenced to arbitrary imprisonment and a fine of 500 scudi.¹ In 1620, the provincial court in Viborg in Jutland convicted Johanne Pedersdatter from Sejlflod in Denmark for witchcraft (trolddom). She was sentenced to death and to be burned alive at the stake.²

The two penalties reflect how diverse the outcome of a witchcraft case could be in 17^th century Europe. Arbitrary imprisonment and a fine of 500 scudi were among the harshest sentences imposed by the inquisitor in Orbetello, as opposed to Lutheran Denmark where execution by burning was the standard penalty in a guilty sentence for witchcraft. In Italy,³ several of the pre-Reformation witch-hunts had ended in capital punishment, but from the last quarter of the 16^th century, the Roman Inquisition put a halt to executions for witchcraft. In Denmark-Norway, the number of death penalties after the Reformation is estimated to amount to about 1,000 executions out of a total of approximately 2,000 trials.⁴ About 650 of these trials were conducted in Jutland. Digging a bit deeper, one discovers that the two trials also represent other and less evident differences as well as similarities. Both culprits had a reputation for practising witchcraft for several years, and in both cases the initial accusations started from below, as they were both denounced by their neighbours. Stefano Tommei was denounced for having used a magical book in rituals for love magic, and Johanne Pedersdatter was accused of having bewitched the vicar.⁵

Despite being prosecuted for – and found guilty of – the same offence, witchcraft, Stefano Tommei and Johanne Pedersdatter were sentenced by the two courts to two very different penalties. Being a crimen mixti fori, European cases of witchcraft could be tried by lay as well as religious courts depending on regional power relations and statutes. In Italy, cases of witchcraft were placed in the hands of the Roman Inquisition in most parts of the peninsula from the second half of the 16^th century. The inquisition was organized in 35 tribunals acting as representatives of their superiors at the Congregation of the Holy Office and ultimately answering to the Pope himself.⁶ The inquisitor to sentence Stefano was sent from the tribunal of Siena.⁷

A case before the inquisition was first and foremost a conflict between the individual and the Roman Catholic faith. The inquisitor represented and defended the faith; he was the one formally to press charges, to investigate, to interrogate and to sentence. Still, at the same time, he was the one holding the key to forgiveness through abjuration and penance. He was usually a trained canonist or theologian, and in addition to his own experience, he was obliged to consult and inform his superiors at the Tribunal, and in severe cases the Congregation in Rome, on the course of trials. After the verdict had been pronounced, the inquisition submitted the culprit to lay authorities for corporal punishment.

As with all suspects of witchcraft in post-Reformation Denmark, Johanne Pedersdatter had been prosecuted in a lay court. Initially one or more witchcraft accusations against a person were brought to the local lower court, and if a guilty verdict was sentenced, a trial of appeal was mandatory at the provincial court (Landstinget). In 1600, there were about 200 lower courts and four provincial courts in Denmark. The bailiff (herredsfogeden) was head of the lower courts. He was officially the king’s representative in local society, although in practice he was merely a peasant appointed by the king’s vassal, and he had no legal training. In court, the bailiff was accompanied by a number of legal witnesses (stokkemænd), who were commissioned to witness the course of the trials. At the provincial court, judges remained lay, but they were more educated, and were recruited from the nobility. In the Danish lower courts as well as the provincial courts, the trials were led according to a system which must be characterized as accusatorial, but with elements of inquisitorial procedures.⁸ In cases of witchcraft, the accusers were private individuals, mostly the victims themselves or their families, and the trial itself a ‘theatre of power’⁹ in which the stronger party won, and where the judge assessed who had the stronger case.

In short, since witchcraft was a crimen mixti fori, two essentially different courts representing two very different judicial systems could conduct the trials against Stefano Tommei and Johanne Pedersdatter. When comparing cases for witchcraft in Italian and Danish courts, it becomes clear that what historians term the ‘prosecution of witchcraft’ has multiple meanings depending on the court and country referred to.¹⁰ It is the purpose of this book to shed light on how and why prosecutions for witchcraft were so different in Italy and Denmark. In order to do so, a number of questions must be answered. Here, the key word is ‘witchcraft’. What did the authorities and the people involved in the cases consider as witchcraft? Which rituals and practices were to be identified as witchcraft? What were the learned and popular arguments for prosecution, and how were they interconnected? And not least: how did people respond to accusations of witchcraft when confronted in court?

The concept and the semantic field surrounding witchcraft vary greatly. In his closing sentence, Stefano Tommei’s inquisitor pronounced him ‘vehemently suspected of heresy and apostasy’.¹¹ In this sense, Stefano Tommei’s offence – sortilegio – was explicitly linked to sin and the inquisitors declared him an offender against the faith. The verdict over Johanne Pedersdatter contains the phrases (true) ‘witch’ (troldkone), ‘threatening with evil’ (love ondt) and ‘rumoured to be a witch’ (havde et trolddomsrygte), which indicates the court’s different understanding of the offence. The term ‘semantic field’ is applied to the pattern or the networks of concepts, in which the key concept, witchcraft, interacts with other related concepts. In this study the semantic field includes among others heresy, magic, the Devil and acts such as the diabolic pact, worshipping, the practice of rituals and threatening.¹²

Terms such as ‘witch’, ‘sorcery’ and ‘magic’ are used frequently and commonly today, but differ from academic use and meaning. As is mandatory in a book on witchcraft, these concepts need further specification. In English, ‘witchcraft’ is the term commonly used by scholars. This is far from comprehensive as a term, but it is nevertheless applied here as the overarching expression. A direct Danish translation would be hekseri, from the German word hexerei, but that term is attested in Danish only in the late 17^th century, and earlier legal cases as well as theological texts applied the word trolddom. The people involved in the Italian cases applied the term sortilegio, as did the inquisitor, who also often used the broader term superstitione (superstition). Directly translated, sortilegio means ‘sorcery’, whereas witchcraft would be translated as stregoneria. As this book will demonstrate, the examples given above are covered by the Danish term trolddom and the Italian sortilegio which correspond well to the scholarly use of the English term ‘witchcraft’ and to a lesser extent to ‘sorcery’. The term stregoneria is not commonly used in Orbetello, and in this book it is referred to as ‘diabolical witchcraft’. In this study, the term ‘witchcraft’ can therefore be considered as a working concept and as such it does not take into account its various nuances and connotations. Where such nuances are important, they will, of course, be highlighted.

Comparing witchcraft

This comparative study is triggered by a curiosity regarding what caused two courts to punish the offence of witchcraft so differently. The comparative approach owes much to the French historian Marc Bloch, who in his 1928 article, ‘Toward a Comparative History of European Societies’, outlined a number of points and aims for comparative studies.¹³ Bloch was one of the first historians to argue in favour of comparative studies. He stressed that the building blocks for trans-European comparison always consisted of local studies, but that comparative studies would contribute with new and fruitful interpretations for local studies. According to Bloch, the comparative approach can be applied in various ways – none being superior – and historians are advised to engage in comparative analyses of different or similar societies.¹⁴ If one wanted to search for similarities in the witch trials, an obvious pair of cases to compare would be Jutland with Slesvig or Skåne as they too were part of the Danish monarchy in the 16^th century and part of the 17^th century.¹⁵ For the Roman Inquisition, the obvious point of comparison would probably be the Spanish Inquisition. However, the strategy of comparison chosen for this study has been to single out two very different cases in order to reveal, along with the differences, similarities not apparent to contemporaries.

Recent years have offered interesting comparative works on witchcraft, of which three must be highlighted in the present context. In 2011, Stephen Mitchell, himself a folklorist, published a comprehensive study of witchcraft and magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. Based on a wide range of sources, Mitchell broke with a traditional view prevalent at least among Danish witchcraft scholars that the Middle Ages were a historical blind spot about which it was difficult to make any qualified assertions. Through a systematic reading of sagas, high and late medieval literature and through a study of the laws and the few medieval cases that have been preserved, Mitchell’s study confirms that the ways in which notions of witchcraft developed in Europe – becoming incorporated into theological writings and into court proceedings, as first suggested by Richard Kieckhefer – were paralleled in Denmark. In the Nordic judicial courts, medieval cases for witchcraft focused predominantly on personal conflicts, in which the harm caused by the witch was the centre of the offence. Mitchell points to a further important consideration regarding the perception of women as particularly wicked and vengeful. Through a close reading of late medieval moralistic texts and other elements of medieval culture, Mitchell determines how a popular tradition of wicked women challenging male authorities, corresponded very well with the misogyny of demonological writing of the 15^th century.¹⁶ I will return to this narrative of the evil woman during the course of this book.

Wicked people also play leading parts in Johannes Dillinger’s comparative study of Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier. Dillinger launches the ‘evil people principle’, which refers to the tense environment created by witch-hunts. By naming it the ‘evil people principle’, Dillinger directs attention towards the main argument of his book, namely that the cases were sparked from below by people, mostly villagers, attempting to protect themselves against witches. In both Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, the existing tension meant that every conflict held a potential accusation of witchcraft against the opposite party. Fear of a neighbour being an ally of the Devil lay at the heart of witch-hunts both in Swabian Austria and Trier and other territories in the region. Generally, the authorities experienced pressure from below to initiate cases, and in both territories, popular ideas of witchcraft combined with learned demonology were spurring on fear of witches.¹⁷

As with the Danish cases studied in this book, those examined by Dillinger concerned malevolent magic, as opposed to the cases in Italy, which mostly dealt with acquisitive magic, that is, magical rituals for personal gain, but with no explicit desire to harm. A similar difference prevailed in the comparative study by Gunnar Knutsen on the Spanish Inquisitions in Catalonia and Valencia. These cases were based on a charge that was typically termed ‘superstition’, a charge commonly employed by the Roman Inquisition. These cases encompassed both witchcraft and simpler forms of magic. In this important study, Knutsen shows how the Catalan tribunal mainly prosecuted cases for forms of witchcraft marked by maleficent magic and worship of the Devil. In Valencia in eastern Spain, most cases related to acquisitive magic, that is, the gain of either love or money.

In the present context, Knutsen’s emphasis on demographic diversity as an explanatory factor is very compelling. Drawing on the argument that rural areas and small village communities provided fertile ground for witch-hunts, Knutsen suggests that demonological ideas did not gain ground with the Morisco population inhabiting the rural areas of Valencia. Instead, cases for witchcraft in this region took place mostly in urban areas. These cases were related to magical offences traditionally linked to urban cultures, namely love magic and magical rituals for gaining wealth. Such magical practices were more in line with the urban ‘Old Christian’ population inhabiting the towns. In Catalonia on the other hand, the rural population was under the strong influence of French immigrants, which Knutsen sees as a factor contributing to the inclusion of demonological features in local cases.¹⁸

The present study has developed from the thesis that Italy and Denmark, two societies polarized by religion, culture and geography, nevertheless had one vital thing in common: they were Christian and had until very recently been Christians of the same sort, sharing the same doctrines. Regardless of the Protestant break with Rome, the two societies shared a fundamental condemnation of witchcraft and magical rituals generally, which gave rise to the prosecutions of the 15th–17th centuries. Both regions issued strict laws and regulations, and theologians published demonological treatises and writings against witchcraft and magic. In addition, many of the same demonological writings of the period circulated on both sides of the confessional border.¹⁹

A modern breakthrough

In the past four decades, witchcraft studies have been a growing field of research. Comparing two so geographically different socio-historical cases as Italy and Denmark means bringing together different research traditions. In 1976, Richard Kieckhefer published his ground-breaking study of medieval witch cases. Along with Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons, Kieckhefer’s studies erased the idea of a medieval witch-hunt, at least among scholars of witchcraft. But Kieckhefer’s book was also a co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The Prosecutors
• Part II The Prosecuted
• Part III Encounters in the courts
• Notes
• Archives/sources
• Bibliography
• Index