Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe

Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, Liv Helene Willumsen, Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, Liv Helene Willumsen

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000080803
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Geschichte
• Sous-sujet: Weltgeschichte

Demonology – the intellectual study of demons and their powers – contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. But how exactly did intellectual ideas relate to prosecutions? Recent scholarship has shown that some of the demonologists' concerns remained at an abstract intellectual level, while some of the judges' concerns reflected popular culture. This book brings demonology and witch-hunting back together, while placing both topics in their specific regional cultures.

The book's chapters, each written by a leading scholar, cover most regions of Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain through to Germany, France and Switzerland, and Italy and Spain. By focusing on various intellectual levels of demonology, from sophisticated demonological thought to the development of specific demonological ideas and ideas within the witch trial environment, the book offers a thorough examination of the relationship between demonology and witch-hunting.

Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of demonology, witch-hunting and early modern Europe.

1

Demonology and the Relevance of the Witches’ Confessions

Rita Voltmer

I

Since the publication of Stuart Clark’s impressive studies, we know that demonology (including demonography¹) was not a mere shady and notorious playground for mentally disturbed witch-haters (and hunters). On the contrary, “thinking with demons” opened a serious and learned field of Christian epistemology in the search for knowledge and truth.² In a broad sense, the term “demonology” embraced far more than the science of demons and their alleged mischief. Together with its counterpart angelology, demonology devoted itself to elucidating cosmology, the divine order of creation.³

Thus, the umbrella term “demonology” labels a container of ideas, within which assembled various kinds of cultural attempts to imagine, to explore, and to understand the divine macrocosm and microcosm.⁴ Classical philosophy, medieval and early modern religion, the natural sciences, the law, and politics all took part in “thinking with demons.” Since late antiquity, demonology had echoed the binary system of the Augustinian city of God and city of Satan. In musing about the powers of Satan and his minions, categories to describe the Almighty’s power were established, because the existence of demons, angels, and spirits proved His existence. Scholars discussing demonic powers organized their thinking according to the accepted system of induction and deduction. They relied on authorities, marshalled in traditional exempla, which validated their assumptions.

In early modern times, a flood of religious, catechetical, political, legal, medical, and literary writings emerged, including tracts, sermons, leaflets, and drama. Christian churches filled up the container “demonology” with their own readings. There seems to be not a single genre of text that did not from time to time include fragments of “thinking with demons,” which offered the opportunity to scrutinize the limits of perception, to investigate the value of human senses.⁵

Very few thinkers denied the physical, creaturely presence and impact of evil spirits in the material, visible world. These deniers included the Anabaptist and spiritualist David Joris (1537) or Mennonite writers such as Abraham Palingh (1659).⁶ As antidotes to the magical belief system including witchcraft, Reginald Scot,⁷ Cornelius Loos⁸ and Balthasar Bekker⁹ wrote what may be called anti-demonologies.¹⁰ Apart from these rare examples, both promoters and opponents of early modern witch-hunts shared similar beliefs and arguments about the demons’ machinations; so did Protestants and Catholics.¹¹

However, many debates about the materiality or illusoriness of witches’ flight, the sabbat, metamorphosis, or carnal intercourse remained open and unresolved.¹² The omnipresent learned discourse on demons even showed its comical, entertaining, and indeed, anti-demonological aspects, in court festivals, theatre, poetry, fiction, chapbooks, and images.¹³ Learned and popular concepts of the Devil and his human agents (be they male or female) intermingled. The circulation of knowledge was dynamized by many factors, with the media revolution playing a vital role.¹⁴ At the same time, learned demonology was popularized, and popular lore about witches and their maleficium was absorbed by elite writers. Thus, I label as “demonology” all kinds of texts (including images), whose authors of various religious confessions thought about and debated the extent of the power of Satan, demons, and witches, about their corporeality or their illusory nature.¹⁵

From the beginning of the period of witch trials, debates about demons drew on a new and remarkable source of evidence for the occult, invisible world of the dark fallen angels: the legally confirmed confessions of truth, made by convicted witches in their own voice, stabilized in trial records.¹⁶ Additionally, and especially in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, the confessions of demons themselves, gained through staged exorcisms in public, could be heard.¹⁷ However, it remained highly debatable whether the demons’ deceptive word could be trusted. By contrast, the witches’ confessions were part of the legal record, obtained by secular judges and inquisitors under divine auspices. Sceptical “thinkers with demons” such as Johann Weyer (Wier; Figure 1.1), or anti-demonologists such as Cornelius Loos, tried to invalidate and ridicule confessions, arguing that they were made by melancholic women or forced by torture. Others, such as Friedrich Spee, avoided any open discussion about demonology and the Devil’s pact, but radically attacked the criminal procedure of witch trials, based as they were on torture.¹⁸ But demonologists, who proclaimed the destructive danger of diabolic witchcraft conspiracies to godly order and state authority, created the sub-genre of political demonology. They moved from solely “thinking with demons” to acting to promote witch-hunts, building their bridge upon the evidence of confessions.

In this chapter, the interplay between demonology, witchcraft trials and confessions shall roughly be outlined. Firstly, I give a short and incomplete introduction to the state of research. Secondly, I outline the arrival of early modern political demonology. Its propagandists used the witches’ confessions as sources of evidence to crown the traditional exempla. Thirdly, I look at the demonologists’ search for valid confessions. Fourthly, the importance of legal manuals as well as the person of judges and notaries in the process of transmitting knowledge is briefly outlined.

Figure 1.1 The Dutch physician Johann Weyer (1515–1588) published his demonology in 1563 as a warning against exorcisms and witch-trials, which he thought to be sheer bloodshed.

Portrait from his treatise De Lamiis (On Witches; Basel, 1577).

II

The interplay between demonology, witchcraft trials, and confessions began in the late middle ages, where thinking with demons and angels had a firm sociological and political setting. It was rooted in schemes of religious reform, and the establishing of a universal papal church, partnered and backed by powerful Catholic monarchies and principalities. Thinking with demons meant thinking with allegedly widespread heresies, which were believed to organize themselves in counter-churches and diabolic conspiracies.¹⁹

At the core of the newly established late medieval heresiology stood the idea that heretics, rebelling against godly order, met at nocturnal gatherings, committing blasphemous crimes and adoring demons or the Devil in a shape of an animal. Theologians and inquisitors sought desperately to understand and to illustrate the dangerously subversive character of heresy. At the same time, they wanted to instigate its prosecution, and found the narratives that they needed as evidence for this in the confessions of convicted heretics. It is no coincidence that in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) the obligation of every Christian to attend auricular confession at least once a year went together with the introduction of the inquisitorial criminal system, based on Roman law, authorizing torture and judicial confession.²⁰

One of the most striking examples occurred in the early thirteenth century. The notorious inquisitor Conrad of Marburg fabricated the confession of a Cologne Cathar named Lepzet as a fundamental document in defining the occult rituals of a fearsome sect called Luciferians, which never existed. Lepzet’s confession, including the stereotypes of nocturnal gatherings and worshipping demons, became canonical. Its contents were repeated in the famous papal bull Vox in Rama (1233) and in many anti-heresy tracts.²¹

With the initiation of late medieval prosecution of assumed or real heretical sects, a strong connection between “thinking with demons” and the juridical handling of alleged demonic crimes such as heresy, necromancy, and sorcery was established. Inquisitors sought for actual confessions from courtrooms because the admission of guilt, extracted from the very mouth of the heretic, necromancer, or sorcerer, manifested the material reality of Satan and his machinations. Medievalists have scrutinized at length how inquisitorial procedure, interrogatories (formal lists of questions), torture, and the art of the scribes fabricated standardized confessions, serving a twofold purpose: as proof of guilt and as sacrament-like confession of sin.²² Additionally, a third purpose has to be taken into account. The confessions, as part of the legal acta (records), gave testimonies of the specific truth, constructed by the inquisitorial procedure and manifested by the trial. This particular confessional truth served as a source of evidence in tracts and manuals of inquisitors to come.

Martine Ostorero has shown how the concept of the witches’ sabbat developed as the core of diabolic witchcraft.²³ Historians agree that diabolic witchcraft was largely invented, fuelled during the fifteenth century by apocalyptic panics, demands for Christian reform, and fears about conspiracies of vagrants, sorcerers, magicians, heretics, Jews, Hussites, and Turks. But problems persisted: how to prove the material presence of demons and witches at the sabbat, how to prove demonological aspects such as demonic intercourse, flight, or metamorphosis? Therefore, the first five texts that dealt with the new crime of diabolic witchcraft, in the early fifteenth century, drew on detailed confessions of tortured witches as sources of evidence. The interplay between writing about witches and demons, fearing their mischief, and hunting witches has to be seen in the framework of reforming attempts and political self-assertion. Through the impressive research of Martine Ostorero, Kathrin Utz Tremp, Georg Modestin, and others, this fact has been stated for the early witch trials in Savoy, Dauphiné, Lausanne, Valais, and northern Italy.²⁴

III

In the fifteenth century, the concrete interplay between demonology, trials against conspiratorial heresy, and the new crime of witchcraft (“Hexerei”) seems evident. Since the advent of the Reformation, anxieties about diabolical conspiracies, be they plotted allegedly by Jews, Turks, or heretics such as witches or Anabaptists, increased. The demonological discourse about secret nocturnal gatherings with black masses, adoration of Satan, and diabolical re-baptisms dynamized the demonization of the religious, political, and social “other.” Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Catholic Reform, and confessionalization deployed their impact on European witchcraft trials.²⁵

Looking at the intensifying debate...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction: Demonology and witch-trials in dialogue
• 1. Demonology and the Relevance of the Witches’ Confessions
• 2. The Metamorphoses of the Anti-Witchcraft Treatise Errores Gazariorum (15th Century)
• 3. “I Confess That I Have Been Ignorant:” How the Malleus Maleficarum changed the universe of a cleric at the end of the fifteenth century
• 4. “In the Body:” The Canon Episcopi, Andrea Alciati, and Gianfrancesco Pico’s humanized demons
• 5. French Demonology in an English Village: The St Osyth experiment of 1582
• 6. English Witchcraft Pamphlets and the Popular Demonic
• 7. Witches’ Flight in Scottish Demonology
• 8. Demonology and Scepticism in Early Modern France: Bodin and Montaigne
• 9. Judge and Demonologist: Revisiting the impact of Nicolas Rémy on the Lorraine witch trials
• 10. Demonological Texts, Judicial Procedure, and the Spread of Ideas About Witchcraft in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber
• 11. To Beat a Glass Drum: The transmission of popular notions of demonology in Denmark and Germany
• 12. “He Promised Her So Many Things:” Witches, sabbats, and devils in early modern Denmark
• 13. Board Games, Dancing, and Lost Shoes: Ideas about witches’ gatherings in the Finnmark witchcraft trials
• 14. What Did a Witch-Hunter in Finland Know About Demonology?
• 15. The Guardian of Hell: Popular demonology, exorcism, and mysticism in Baroque Spain
• 16. Interpreting Children’s Blåkulla Stories in Sweden (1675)
• 17. Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe
• Index