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B O R K L A N I C Z AY
GA
Central European University
for Peter Burke
It was Peter Burke who got me into the witchcraft business more than a
quarter of a century ago, and this overview of research on witchcraft, the first
version of which was prepared for a conference celebrating his seventieth
birthday in 2007, is dedicated to him. Let me begin this historiographic overview with a few personal remarks recalling our cooperation. I first met Peter
Burke in 1982 at an Economic History congress in Budapest. I was a research
assistant at the time, developing an interest in various aspects of popular
religion, such as heresy, sainthood, and shamanism,1 and I was eager to hear
his theoretically based insights into the history of popular culture.2 He
invited me to a large-scale comparative conference on the history of European witchcraft in Stockholm, which he was organizing with Bengt Ankarloo
and Gustav Henningsen in coordination with the Olin Foundation in 1984.
He encouraged me to broaden my interest from Hungarian shamanism to an
overall examination of Hungarian witch trials (a historical topic that at the
time had not been made the subject of much scholarly study). It was the first
international conference to which I had been invited as a speaker.3
To cope with the challenging task posed by this invitation, the preparation
of a new and conclusive historical overview of the witch trial documents in
early-modern Hungary, I entered into cooperation with a group of Hungar1. Gabor Klaniczay, Le culte des saints dans la Hongrie medievale: Proble`mes de
recherche, Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 5777; idem,
Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft, in Shamanism in Eurasia,
ed. Mihaly Hoppal (Gottingen, 1983), 40422.
2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1977; 2nd ed.
Aldershot, 1994).
3. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft:
Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990).
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2010)
Copyright ! 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
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ian folklorists and worked together with Eva Pocs, who intended to research
popular witchcraft mythologies, on the basis of both historical and present
day documentation.4 We made the ambitious plan to develop a computerbased encoding and a structural analysis of maleficium narratives,5 but as I drew
closer to the material I realized that I had to combine (or rather counterbalance) this Proppian morphology6 with what I referred to in the paper I
delivered at the 1984 Stockholm conference as the transformations and
blackouts in the universe of popular magicthat is a thorough study of
the historical transformations in the structural patterns of witchcraft beliefs,
something to which I will refer here as a cultural history of witchcraft.7
Actually, a few years later I gave the subtitle social or cultural tensions to a
lecture I presented in Burkes presence in Cambridge on witch-hunting in
Hungary.8 Seen in this light, my version of the cultural history of witchcraft is largely the fruit of Peter Burkes inspiration. Here I want to rethink
its premises: do they still make sense in the light of recent orientations of
cultural history?
1
By recalling personal memories from the 1980s I mean to focus on a particular historiographic moment when a significant renewal occurred both in the
study of European witchcraft and in the concept of cultural historythis will
be the starting point of my overview. Let me rely here on the synthetic image
Peter Burke himself formulated in the conclusion of the 1984 Stockholm
conference entitled The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,
starting with the observation that in the last twenty years or so, witchcraft
4. On Eva Pocs and our Budapest research group, see my review of her book
Between the Living and the Dead (Budapest, 1999): Enchantment or Witchcraft?
Budapest Review of Books 9 (1999): 7177.
5. Gabor Klaniczay, Eva Pocs, Peter G. Toth, and Robert Wolosz, A K-boszorkanyper-adatbazis [The K witchcraft database], in Demonologia es boszorkanysag
Europaban [Demonology and witchcraft in Europe], ed. Eva Pocs (Budapest, 2001),
293335; cf. Peter Becker and Thomas Werner, K Ein Tutorial, Halbgraue Reihe
zur historischen Fachinformatik, ed. Manfred Thaller (St. Katharinen, 1991).
6. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed.
(Austin, Tx., 1968).
7. Gabor Klaniczay, Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of Popular
Magic, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 21955.
8. Gabor Klaniczay, Witch-hunting in Hungary: Social or Cultural Tensions?
in idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Cambridge,
1990), 15567.
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has moved from the periphery of historical attention to a place near the
centre. The reasons for this interest were manifold: witchcraft was a topic
that cut across established disciplinary boundaries and provided a possibility
for fruitful exchanges between various fields of research, including social,
legal, and cultural history; the folklore of magical beliefs, practices and
mythologies; and anthropological enquiries into social, moral, and cultural
meanings, functions, or dysfunctions. The combination of these different
approaches, together with a renewed close scrutiny of archival documents,
led in these decades to a number of studies and monographs, linking this
topic to other concerns of contemporary research, such as community studies, family history, gender approaches, historical anthropology, and histoire des
mentalites.9
Taking all this into account, Burke noted the paradox that when Hugh
Trevor-Roper published his lively essay on what he called, following nineteenth-century German scholars, the European witch-craze, he could have
hardly guessed that he was summarising and synthesising the conventional
historical wisdom on the subject at the very time when this conventional
view was being undermined.10 While Trevor-Roper, like many of his predecessors,11 explained the rise and decline of persecutions with reference to
the short-sightedness, shameful irresponsibility, and frequently the vested
interest of clerical and lay elites and the inconsistencies in the juridical systems, a row of historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas, Alan
Macfarlane, E. William Monter, Erik Midelfort, and Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum, started to study witchcraft according to the contemporary trend
of historiography, relying on popular testimonies.12 This meant the examination of entire new domains of documentation on or related to witchcraft.
9. Peter Burke, The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 43541.
10. Ibid, 435; Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the 16th and
17th Centuries (Harmondsworth, 1969).
11. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und
der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901; reprint Hildesheim, 1963); Henry
Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols., ed. Arthur C. Howland
(Philadelphia, 1939). For a detailed overview of the historiography of witchcraft see
Thomas A. Fudge, Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European
Witch-Hunting, History Compass 4/3 (2006): 488527 (I owe thanks to Melissa
Calaresu for having called my attention to this article).
12. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento
(Torino, 1966); translated as Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983); Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and
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Earlier witchcraft research primarily focused on analysis of the confessions of accused witches most frequently extracted by torture, and tried to
make sense of the ludicrous revelations on the witches traffic with the
devil and their mysterious nightly assemblies. This was supported and complemented by analysis of related works of learned demonology.13 New
witchcraft enquiries were turning instead to the mass of testimonies by
the accusers, a huge judicial documentation barely touched on in previous
research. The emerging new explanation of witchcraft conflicts was based
on understanding the problems and fears of villagers and the motivations
for persecution from below, an approach labelled by Alan Macfarlane
the sociology of accusation. This methodology drew on the experience
of British social anthropologists working on contemporary African witchcraft, above all the legacy of Edward Evans-Pritchards seminal study on
the Azande, put on front stage by the discussions prompted by Mary Douglas and published by her in the volume Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations
in 1970 (which contained articles by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane,
who later published influential monographs on the subject that became the
flagships of the emerging new current of historical anthropology).14 The
new historical portrait of early modern witchcraft has shown that the spectacular outbreaks and epidemic witch hunts that had been the focus of
scholarly attention were merely occasional explosions within a broader,
widespread, steady, and unspectacular set of accusations that were, for several centuries, part of the everyday life of early modern European village
communities, representing a system to handle regular conflicts, neighborhood quarrels, and denial of expected charity in an age of the breakdown
of the traditional system of communal solidarities.
Instead of spectacular tales of witches sabbaths, these testimonies revealed
a set of interwoven conflicts stemming from everyday animosities and offered
explanations for misfortunes in terms of suspected maleficium attributed to
Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and
Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970); E. William Monter,
Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 15621684: The
Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, Calif., 1972); Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
13. Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid, 1969); translated as The
World of the Witches, trans. O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago, 1964); Sidney Anglo, ed.,
The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), 3252.
14. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford,
1937); Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London, 1970).
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tives of this new approach, broadening the comparative horizon from the
centers to the peripheries, from Sicily and Portugal to Estonia, from Norway
to Hungary.19
At this juncture it is worth raising the question as to what extent these
approaches could be called a cultural history of witchcraft. How can one
isolate the specific contributions of cultural history within this broader field,
and how does a cultural historical approach of European witch trials differ
from other competing approaches? To quote Peter Burke again, from his
recent formulation of What is Cultural History, a cultural history of trousers,
for instance, would differ from an economic history of the same subject.20
So how do we distinguish a cultural history of witchcraft from a social or
religious one? Following Burke, who was looking for a definition of what
cultural history is in the cultural history of cultural history, I would try to
scrutinize from this angle recent witchcraft studies, which have been closely
intertwined, from the 1970s on, with three historiographic currents exercising great impact on what we now call cultural history.
The most important among them, in my view, is the French Annales
school,21 which, after the original (and still influential) history of mentalites collectives (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) and civilisation materielle (Fernand
Braudel), produced a real explosion of a diversified set of new approaches in
the 1970s under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and in the wake of the worldwide success of Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries Montaillou.22 These methodologies, popularised in anthologies such as Faire de lhistoire and La nouvelle histoire,23
though not calling themselves cultural history (with a later exception of Roger
19. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft.
20. Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004), 3.
21. Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London,
1999); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 192989
(Cambridge, 1990).
22. Marc Bloch, Melanges historiques, vols. 12 (Paris, 1963); Lucien Febvre, Pour
une histoire a` part entie`re (Paris, 1962); Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe sie`cle (Paris,
1962); Peter Burke, Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities, History
of European Ideas 7 (1986): 43951; reprinted in Burke, Varieties of Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1990), 16282; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation materielle, economie et Capitalisme XVeXVIIIe sie`cle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979); translated as Civilization and Capitalism,
15th18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1981); Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a` 1324 (Paris, 1975); abridged translation as
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1978).
23. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de lhistoire: Nouveaux problems
Nouvelles approachesNouveaux objets (Paris, 1974); Jacques Le Goff et al., ed., La
nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1978).
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Chartier24), proposed an anthropological-structural minded analysis of a number of relevant fields: acculturation, festivities and rituals, imaginaire, the social
history of the body and sexuality, family and kinship, the politics of language,
memory, popular religion. All these themes were taken over and further developed by the third generation of annalistes: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jacques
Revel, Roger Chartier, and Mona Ozouf.25
The second emerging new field was the history of popular culture. The
manifold historiographic and cultural roots of this current of cultural history
cannot be discussed in detail here. Let me only mention the debate on the
Bibliothe`que bleue prompted by Robert Mandrou and Genevie`ve Bolle`me,26
the translation of Mikhail Bakhtins book on Rabelais,27 and the first critical
reassessment of his concept of popular culture in the preface to Carlo Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms.28 Peter Burkes 1978 book remains the
methodologically most refined overview of this field, and its thesis on the
early modern reform of popular culture became very influential in witchcraft research as well.29
The third and perhaps the most important field of cultural history to
emerge in the 1970s was that of historical anthropology and, in second phase,
microhistory.30 The impact of the work of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner,
24. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1988).
25. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint levrier: Guinefort, guerisseur denfants depuis le XIIIe
sie`cle (Paris, 1979), translated as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since
the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983); idem, La raison des
gestes dans lOccident medieval (Paris, 1990); Jacques Revel, Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Une politique de la langue: La Revolution francaise et les patois: Lenquete de
Gregoire (17901794) (Paris, 1975); Jacques Revel and Arlette Farge, Les logiques de la
foule: Laffaire des enle`vement denfants Paris 1750 (Paris, 1988); Roger Chartier, Les
origines culturelles de la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1991); Mona Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire (Paris, 1976).
26. Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles:
La bibliothe`que bleue de Troyes, (Paris, 1964); Genevie`ve Bolle`me, La bibliothe`que bleue:
Litterature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe sie`cle (Paris, 1971).
27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hele`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968)
28. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio nel 500 (Milan,
1976), xixxxi; translated as The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi
(Baltimore, 1980).
29. Burke, Popular Culture.
30. On historical anthropology, see: Peter Burke, Anthropologists and Historians: Reflections on the History of a Relationship, Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1989/
90, 15564; Bob Scribner, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, in
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Having made these preliminary points, let me come to my subject: how did
cultural history infuse the history of witchcraft? Let me start with a remote
historiographic reference. In his 1946 essay Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution? Lucien Febvre reviewed the old style French witchcraft
history of Francois Bavoux and used this as a pretext for a stimulating formulation of the objectives of the history of collective mentalities.32 Historians
should not be shocked or scandalized that people living in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, even cultivated, high-ranking intellectuals such as Jean
Bodin, attributed the status of reality to magical phenomena and bewitchments and agreed with the measures taken against witches. They should
rather investigate how, in that age, the standards of proof, evidence, and
reality were different from ours, and examine when a mental revolution
brought a break in this (an epistemological discontinuity, as Michel Foucault
would later have said).33 This same principle was guiding Julio Caro Baroja,
one of the pioneers of the new style of witchcraft research, who in his Las
brujas y su mundo in 1969 concentrated on the conceptions of the world that
made belief in witchcraft possible.34
Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia
and R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbutteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 1134. On
microhistory, see: Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost
Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991); Giovanni Levi, On Microhistory, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 1991), 93113; Carlo Ginzburg, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It, Critical Inquiry
20 (Autumn, 1993): 1035.
31. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); Victor Turner,
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968); Edmund Leach,
Levi-Strauss (New York, 1970).
32. Lucien Febvre, Sorcellerie, sottise ou revolution mentale? Annales dhistoire
sociale 3 (1948), reprinted in Febvre, Au coeur religieux, 3019; translated as Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution? in Febvre, A New Kind of History and Other
Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York, 1973), 18593; Francois Bavoux, La sorcellerie
aux pays de Quingey (Paris, 1947).
33. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York, 1966).
34. Baroja, Las brujas, as n. 13 above.
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There was one distinct territory in which the new categories of elite and
popular culture came to be used for elaborating a new paradigm in research
on witchcraft: the problem of demonology and the witches sabbath. When
Carlo Ginzburg discovered the benandanti in 1966,40 he contrasted the popular, shamanistic concepts unfolding from the confessions of these seventeenthcentury good witches41 with the learned demonological dogmas of inquisitions, and analyzed the historical process by which the century-long persecution of the benandanti managed to distort and transform this archaic popular
belief system, assimilating it into the inquisitors elite concept of the diabolic
witches sabbath.
Inspired by this insight, Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer pointed
out in their books on Europes Inner Demons and European Witch Trials: Their
Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture (published almost simultaneously)
that the person of the devil was altogether absent from medieval witch trials
principally related to courtly, urban, or village conflicts concerning maleficium
accusations.42 Demonological elements were only introduced into the universe of popular witchcraft beliefs in the course of late medieval witchcraft
persecution by ecclesiastical and juridical elites, which developed the explosive demonological cocktail of the witches sabbath by the late fourteenth
century. This was a long process of evolution, integrating black mass accusations against medieval heretics,43 notions of ritual magic, ecclesiastic legends
on the pact with the devil, and demonological constructions resulting from
the trial against the Knight Templars and other scapegoats in the reign of
Philip the Fair and later the papacy of John XXII.44
This new cultural history of witchcraft advanced the proposition that the
traditional archaic witchcraft concepts of popular culture were transformed,
40. Ginzburg, I benandanti, as n. 12 above.
41. Peter Burke, Good Witches, New York Review of Books no. 32 (1985):
3234.
42. Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt (New York, 1975); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations
in Popular and Learned Culture, 13001500 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976).
43. Inspired by Cohn, I studied this issue in 1982, translated into English as Orgy
Accusations in the Middle Ages, in Eros in Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and Eszter
Csonka-Takacs (Budapest, 2002), 3855.
44. Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1994); Alain Boureau,
Satan heretique: Histoire de la demonologie (12801330) (Paris, 2004); translated as Satan
the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan
(Chicago, 2006); idem, ed., Le pape et les sorciers: Une consultation de Jean XXII sur la
magie en 1320 (manuscrit B.A.V. Borghese 348) (Rome, 2004).
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ers were similarly caught in the web of new-style witchcraft conflicts. They
assumed the role of the opponents of witches, but this ultimately led to their
demise. They themselves were accused of being witches, not only by church
inquisitors or witch-hunting secular courts, but also by their clients and
neighbors.49
The cultural history of the mixture of different concepts of magical aggression (elite, popular, demonological; archaic, shamanistic; western, eastern;
northern-southern) also revealed that this cannot be considered a one-way
process. Rather, it has to be seen as a complex and entangled set of cultural
transmissions, borrowings, and transformations. The concept of the witches
sabbath, as Carlo Ginzburg pointed out in connection with the benandanti,50
was not only a learned or inquisitorial invention. It also integrated existing
popular concepts and practices that were subsequently transformed and diabolized (this observation earned Ginzburg the misplaced accusation of being
a follower of Margaret Murray51). Robert Rowland, examining Portuguese
inquisitional documents, underlined the fact that the interrogation of witches
and witnesses was actually a cooperative process that fed more and more local
and popular beliefs into the internationally disseminated and theoretically
structured system of the diabolic witches sabbath.52 Recognizing the cultural
dynamics defining the elements of this construct, Stuart Clark pointed out in
recently idem, Shamanism and Witchcraft, Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006):
21421; Eva Pocs, Hungarian Taltos and His European Parallels, in Uralic Mythology and Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and Juha Pentikainen (Budapest-Helsinki, 1989),
25176. On Croatia: Maja Boskovic-Stulli, Testimonianze orali croate e slovene sul
Krsnik-Kresnik, Metodi e ricerche, N.S. 7 (1988): 3250. On Lapland: Rune Blix
Hagen, The King, the Cat, and the Chaplain: King Christian IVs Encounter with
the Sami Shamans of Northern Norway and Northern Russia in 1599, in Communicating with the Spirits, vol. 1 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva
Pocs (Budapest, 2005), 24663; idem, Sami Shamanism, in Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft
1 (2006): 22733.
49. Wolfgang Behringer, Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus
der fruhen Neuzeit (Munich, 1994); translated as Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, Va.,
1998).
50. Ginzburg, I benandanti; Cohn, Europes Inner Demons, 22324.
51. Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921); on
Murray see J. Simpson, Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why? Folklore
105 (1994): 7586.
52. Robert Rowland, Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons: European Witch-beliefs
in Comparative Perspective, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European
Witchcraft, 16190.
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1991 in Exeter Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts organized an entire conference as a tribute to and a critical appraisal of Keith
Thomass Religion and the Decline of Magic.60 On the basis of documentation
relating to witchcraft from Lorraine, Robin Briggs re-examined the principal
thesis of Thomas and Macfarlane in his Witches and Neighbours.61 A valuable
rejoinder to this historical anthropology of witchcraft accusations was the
book by Ildiko Kristof on witch trials and midwifery in the Hungarian city
of Debrecen, with special attention to conflicts arising from rival paradigms
of healing.62 In another 1991 conference on Historical Anthropology of
Early Modern Europe, organized by Bob Scribner in Wolfenbuttel, Lyndal
Roper examined the psychological tensions in early modern households and
the vulnerability of women after childbirth, explaining the genesis of accusations of witchcraft in this framework.63 So the cooperation between history
and anthropology continues in this domain, though it does not seem to be a
universal solution to unsolved questions.64
As for microhistory, the reconstruction of moving histories of some individual witches maintained its fascination: in the footsteps of Emmanuel Le
Roy Laduries witch of Jasmin and Franco Cardinis San Miniato witch Gostanza, a French team of the ENS Fontenay unearthed an extremely richly
documented trial in Berry.65 Under the direction of Agostino Paravicini Bag60. Jonathan Barry, Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and
Gareth Roberts (Cambridge, 1996), 148; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft in Early
Modern Kent: Stereotypes and the Background to Accusations, in ibid, 25787.
61. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours; cf. idem, Many Reasons Why: Witchcraft
and the Problem of Multiple Explanation, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft,
4963; idem, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007).
rdogi mesterseget nem cselekedtem: A boszorkanyuldozes tarsa62. Ildiko Kristof, O
dalmi es kulturalis hattere a kora ujkori Debrecenben es Bihar varmegyeben [I havent practiced any devilish craft: Social and cultural background of witchcraft prosecutions in
early modern Debrecen and Bihar county] (Debrecen, 1998).
63. Lyndal Roper, Hexenzauber und Hexenfantasien im Deutschland der fruhen
Neuzeit, in Po-Chia-Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early
Modern Europe, 13974. She later expanded this argument into two major books:
Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe
(London, 1994); Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New
Haven, Conn., 2004)
64. Ronald Hutton, Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft:
Potential for a New Collaboration? Historical Journal 47 (2004): 41334.
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, La sorcie`re de Jasmin (Paris, 1983); translated as
Jasmins Witch, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1987); Franco Cardini, ed., Gostanza,
la strega di San Miniato: Processo di una guaritrice nella Toscana medicea (Rome-Bari,
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benandanti, tried to identify a (Celtic, Scythian, Slavic) shamanistic substratum in European witchcraft beliefs, and related these ideas to broader archetypes of universal culture of communication with the spirits of the dead. He
worked with a methodology inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Claude
Levi-Strauss that he called morphology. His propositions provoked an
unusual storm of critical reactions from various sides. While the limits of the
applicability of the notion of shamanism can indeed be debated,70 much of
the criticism addressed to Ginzburg, frequently with strong inquisitorial rhetoric, seems to me unwarranted.71
Another recent attempt to reconstruct this archaic layer of European beliefs
concerning witchcraft was elaborated by the Hungarian folklorist Eva Pocs.72
She gave a comparative analysis of central- and southeast-European sorcerers,
cunning people, and beings from folk mythology (szepasszony, vila, mora,
zmej, rusalia, etc.). On the basis of these examples she identified, in addition
to shamanism, another important popular belief system that could have
played an important role in the formation of the concept of the witches
sabbath, namely ambivalent fairy-mythologies. In 1991 a conference was
organized by Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud on the various
concepts of the sabbath, where, in addition to Ginzburg and Pocs, many
other researchers engaged in discussion.73 The French folklorist Claude Gaignebet pointed to the inquisitorial tendencies of modern scholarly interpretations,74 Alain Boureau proposed his first theses on the theological origins of
late medieval demonology, later expanded in his Satan heretique (2004),75 Stuart Clark gave an overview of the sabbath as a symbolic system (in preparation
70. Gabor Klaniczay, Shamanism and Witchcraft, Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1
(2006): 21421.
71. For Ginzburgs exchange with Perry Anderson, see London Review of Books, 8
November 1990 and 10 January 1991; cf. Klaus Graf, Carlo Ginzburgs HexensabbatHerausforderung an die Methodendiskussion der Geschichtswissenschaft, kea:
Zeitschrift fur Kulturwissenschaften 5 (1993): 116; for a recent recycling of this debate
see Willem de Blecourt, The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies? in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Basingstoke, 2007), 12545.
72. Eva Pocs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe
(Helsinki, 1989); eadem, Between the Living and the Dead.
73. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe
XVIIIe sie`cles (Grenoble, 1993).
74. Claude Gaignebet, Discours de la sorcie`re de Saint-Julien-de-Lampon, in
Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 4755.
75. Alain Boureau, Le sabbat et la question scolastique de la personne, in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 3346; idem, Satan heretique.
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on the issue.80 The same interest was preserved in the 2002 Paris conference
on le diable en proce`s.81 Parallel to this enquiry concerning the earliest
sources of the diabolic witches sabbath, there was also an increasing interest
in the first writings of learned demonology: in Johannes Nider, author of the
Formicarius,82 and Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.83
At this point one again must raise the obligatory question: is this a cultural
history of the witches sabbath and related demonology? My preliminary
judgement would be that the duality of shamanism, fairy beliefs, or other
archaisms, on one hand, and the religious-intellectual-institutional history of
the construction of the complex sabbath mythology on the other certainly
demand the critical skills of cultural history, but they might lead in too many
divergent directions and fields to be examined along the lines of a unified
methodology.
These classificatory uncertainties surface less with the third type of inquiry
to be presented here, the one operating under the banner of the linguistic
turn, promoted at the 1998 Swansea conference organized by Stuart Clark.84
80. Round-table Discussion with Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, Eva
Pocs, Giovanni Pizza and Gabor Klaniczay, in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions,
vol. 3 of Demons, Spirits and Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pocs (Budapest,
2008), 3549; see also Martine Ostorero, The Concept of the Witches Sabbath in
the Alpine Region (14301440) Text and Context, in ibid, 1535.
ge, ed. Martine
81. Le diable en process: Demonologie et sorcellerie a` la fin du Moyen A
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subsequently nearly all relevant analyses have touched on it, from William
Monter and Christina Larner to Carlo Ginzburg.89 With the new vogue of
witchcraft research in the 1980s, a number of specific studies exploring this
dimension of witch hunting had many overlaps with cultural history, relating
witchcraft beliefs and conflicts to the specific relations of women to healing,
the domestic sphere, fertility, and also the position of women in the family,
society, and culture.90 As Stuart Clark remarked, in the 1990s witchcraft
history intersected with feminism in a much more fruitful manner than was
initially the case.91 Marianne Hester analysed patriarchal power mechanisms and re-evaluated the data of Macfarlanes analysis of Essex from a gendered perspective.92 Anne Llewellyn Barstow dwelt on the problem of
victimhood in witchcraft cases.93 Partly in debate with Hester, Diana Purkiss
stressed that there could also be agency and deliberate self-fashioning on the
part of witches themselves, with some deliberately representing themselves as
witches.94 In making this assertion she relied on Tanya Luhrmanns sophisticated analysis of the religious experience of adepts in contemporary witch89. E. William Monter, The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and
Claudia Koonz, (Boston, 1977), 11936; Larner, Enemies of God, 89102; Ginzburg,
Ecstasies, 89121.
90. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial
New England (New York, 1987); Susanna Burghartz, The Equation of Women and
Witches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenth
and Sixteenth Centuries, in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German
History, ed. Richard J. Evans, (London and New York, 1988), 5774; Dagmar Unverhau, Frauenbewegung und historische Hexenforschung, in Ketzer, Zauberer,
Hexen: Die Anfange der europaischen Hexenverfolgungen, ed. Andreas Blauert (Frankfurt
am Main, 1990), 24183; Brian P. Levack, ed., Witchcraft, Women and Society (New
York and London, 1992); idem, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 5, Gender and Witchcraft (New York and London, 2001); Willem de Blecourt,
The Making of a Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early
Modern Period, Gender and History 12 (2000): 287309; Katharine Hodgkin, Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychonalysis, in Barry and Davies, Witchcraft
Historiography, 182202.
91. Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 11.
92. Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of
Male Domination (London and New York, 1992); eadem, Patriarchal Reconstruction
and Witch Hunting, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 25787.
93. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch
Hunts (San Francisco, 1994).
94. Diana Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representation (London and New York, 1996).
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uted to real human beings, namely to saints and witches. With this enquiry
there emerges a need to situate the related (or attributed) manifestations of
these two figures in a common analytical frameworkmiracle and bewitchment (maleficium)and also to study the manner in which the surrounding
culture narrates, reformulates, and adjudicates these phenomena. I first articulated my ideas on this subject in the 1990s in studies on the ambivalence of
late medieval female sainthood and the structural ambiguities in medieval
miracles on vengeance, which came close to bewitchments.99 The comparative cultural history of sainthood and witchcraft relied on important precedents. The first chapter of Keith Thomass Religion and the Decline of Magic on
the magic of the medieval Church can be considered as a point of departure that also inspired Valerie Flint in her Rise of Magic in Early Medieval
Europe.100 More recently an increasing number of scholars have pursued
enquiries into the binary opposition of saints and witches, such as Marcello
Craveri and Gabriella Zarri,101 or, more generally, into the relationship
between holy and unholy, as formulated by Richard Kieckhefer.102 This
coupling of the two opposed but interrelated figures had been strengthened
by famous overlaps: Joan of Arc, who received both qualifications,103 and
several other late medieval and early modern religious women described by
Peter Dinzelbacher.104 Late medieval debates concerning the evaluation of
ecstatic and somatic female spirituality were first studied in depth by Caroline
Walker Bynum and connected with the problems of the discernment of
spirits, visions, apparitions, possession, heresy, and witchcraft a decade later
by Barbara Newman, Nancy Caciola, Dyan Elliott, Moshe Sluhovsky, and
Tamar Herzig.105
99. Gabor Klaniczay, Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning Late
Medieval Female Sainthood, in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 4974; Klaniczay, Miracoli di punizione e malefizia, in
Miracoli: Dai segni alla storia, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Marilena Modica (Rome,
1999), 10937.
100. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 2550; Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise
of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1991).
101. Marcello Craveri, Sante e streghe (Milan, 1980); Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive:
Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra 400 e 500 (Turin, 1990).
102. Richard Kieckhefer, The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and
Magic in Late Medieval Europe, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24
(1994): 35585.
103. Klaniczay, The Process of Trance.
104. Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffalliger Frauen in Mittelalter
und Fruhneuzeit (Zurich, 1995).
105. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance
of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1987); Bynum, Fragmentation and
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!
The interest in the history of witchcraft seems far from being exhausted. The
first decade of the new millennium has produced a series of new syntheses
on this question, such as the six volume series edited by Bengt Ankarloo and
Stuart Clark on Witchcraft and Magic in Europe,109 the four volume Encyclopedia
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York,
1991); Barbara Newman, Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and
the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century, Speculum 73 (1998): 73370; Nancy
Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture
in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every
Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago,
2007); Tamar Herzig, Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramers Ties with
Italian Women Mystics, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 2455.
106. Klaniczay, The Process of Trance; idem, Learned Systems and Popular
Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment, in Klaniczay and Pocs, Witchcraft Mythologies
and Persecutions, 5082; idem, Angels and Devils, in Memory, Humanity, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Andrei Plesus Sixtieth Anniversary, ed. Mihail Neamtu and Bogdan Tataru-Cazaban (Bucharest, 2009), 11118.
107. Michael Goodich, Filiation and Form in Late Medieval Miracle Story,
Hagiographica 3 (1976): 30622.
108. Peter Rushton, Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England, in Clark, The Languages of Witchcraft,
2140; Bengt Ankarloo, Postface: Saints and Witches, in Proce`s de canonisation au
ge: Aspects juridiques et religieuxCanonization Processes in the Middle Ages:
Moyen A
Legal and Religious Aspects, ed. Gabor Klaniczay (Rome, 2004), 36368.
109. Frederick H. Cryer and Marie-Louise Thomsen, Biblical and Pagan Societies;
Valerie I. J. Flint, Richard Gordon, Georg Luck, and Daniel Ogden, Ancient Greece
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and Rome; Karen Louise Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, The Middle
Ages; Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter, The Period of the Witch
Trials; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter, The Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries; Willem de Blecourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean La Fontaine, The
Twentieth Century (London and Philadelphia, 19982002).
110. Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition
(Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006).
111. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 14001800
(New York, 2001); Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History
(Cambridge, 2004); Roper, Witch Craze.
112. The first important publications: Julian Goodare, Laureen Martin, and Joyce
Miller, Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (New York, 2008); Edward Bever,
The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition
and Everyday Life (New York, 2008); Schulte, Man as Witch; Rowlands, Witchcraft and
Masculinities; Jonathan Roper, ed., Charms, Charmers and Charming: International
Research on Verbal Magic (New York, 2010).
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