Medieval Origins of the Witch Hunt

ABOUT 1159 THE ECCLESIASTICAL STATESMAN John of Salisbury

wrote to the effect that
there are people who claim that a certain Herodias or Mistress
of the Night holds nocturnal gatherings and feasts, where she
lords it over her various servants, and that witches there are
offered babies, - some to be torn to bits and eaten, others to be
laid back in their cradles. Who is so blind as not to see that this
is all a mischievous illusion caused by demons? This is shown,
if by nothing else, by the fact that it is always the simpler men
and women, and those less firm in the faith, that believe these

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things.
John of Salisbury's words not only announce his own scepticism in
witches' 'sabbaths' (to use a term coined later). An experienced
man of the world, he wrote as if his scepticism was common to
those of his contemporaries with any claim to intellectual respect-
ability. We happen to know that his scepticism also resumed an
old tradition, continuous since the conversion of the Germanic
peoples. The ninth-century canon episcopi, for example, which
was taken up in the canonical collections of the central middle
ages, spoke in the same vein: it imposed penances for belief in
witches' sabbaths (to whose details it added that the night-women
are supposed to ride 'various animals').
Three centuries later all this had changed. It was no longer only
the simpler women and men who believed in the meetings, but
churchmen in high authority. What was punishable was no longer
the belief in sabbaths, but the supposed act of taking part in them.
In 1460 a Dominican inquisitor in Arras (or an aide) opened a
treatise on a local sect: 'It is commonplace for anyone versed in
philosophical and sacred scripture that demons can convey human
bodies physically from one place to another'. He went on to des-
cribe the 'hellish congregations' to which the sectaries are trans-
ported, and which they devote to the eating of babies, sex orgies,
preparation of magical mischief, and - not least - obscene devil
worship. This view too represented a tradition; but a younger one,
gathering full force only towards 1500. In i486 the Malleus Malefi-
carum ('Hammer of Witches') which came out with letters of ap-
proval from a pope and a faculty of theology, began by showing
that to disbelieve in these magical meetings was heretical. The
switch could not have been more complete.
64 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

There are few human beings, good or bad, who could believe in
such things without being gripped by fear. And fear breeds vio-
lence. In this case the violence led during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries to the death by burning of some tens of thousands
of women.
The question how such a fateful shift in official belief came about
cannot be denied importance. What it has too often been denied
so far is an appropriate scholarly approach. The question is a
medieval one; and most of the excellent recent writers on witch-
craft (to say nothing of the not-so-excellent) have been anthropolo-
gists or post-renaissance historians, for whom the medieval ques-
tion is secondary. It is true that since Josef Hansen's big study
seventy-five years ago there have been exceptions (notably J. B.
Russell of California). But the subject has not enjoyed the kind of
back-and-forth debate which best guarantees a thorough scrutiny of

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documents, and which has been accorded to some other medieval
religious subjects, e.g. the origins of Catharism. A scholar who
would mend this situation must have a rare set of qualities: special-
ist medieval knowledge, particularly in fringe religion; and a keen,
even zealous sense of distinction between fact and fantasy. One
English historian has always excelled in these qualities: Norman
Cohn. So we can be glad he has turned his attention to the subject.
Back in 1957 the same author put all students of history in his debt
with The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of early revolution-
ary messianism. That concerned an illusion of underdogs. Now
(if his theories are right) he turns to the overdogs; and, in
Europe's Inner Demons,1 attempts to trace the formation of the
beliefs behind the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch
hunt.
There are some writers for whom the source of these beliefs
has never been a problem. (I say 'writers' advisedly, not 'historians';
Margaret Murray, main exponent of the following view, was an
Egyptologist and folklorist, not an historian; and her disciples
have mainly been non-historians.) People believe in witches' sab-
baths, these writers say, because there were witches' sabbaths. Or
rather, what the persecutors portrayed as witches' sabbaths were in
fact functions of the pre-Christian European religion, surviving
more-or-less intact for ten centuries under a veneer of official
Christianity. Only towards the end of the middle ages did the
authorities gather enough confidence to stamp the old religion
out; and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw its death
throes. There are shreds of demonstrable truth in this view; e.g.,
1
Chatto, Heincmann, for Sussex University Press. £4.50.
 MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE WITCH HUNT 65

that some types of maleficium (causing harm by occult means)

reflect continuous pre-Christian beliefs. But the view as a whole
has suffered a chronic shortage of medieval evidence; of real evi-
dence, that is, for there has been just enough apparent evidence
to keep the view alive. Most of the first part of Europe's Inner
Demons is accordingly devoted to showing that even this apparent
evidence is illusory.
First of all Professor Cohn (much in his element here) shows
that most things said about witches in the late fifteenth century
had been said about unpopular minority sects since the Roman
Empire, including sects in whose regard we know for sure that the
stories are false. Early Christians, the same who were martyred
in the arena (partly on grounds of this charge), were widely thought
by the less well-informed to engage in secret sex orgies and ritual
infanticide. When Christianity became respectable in the fourth

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century, similar accusations reappeared against some heretics, in
particular Manicheans and Montanists. In the eighth century it
was the turn of the Paulicians of Armenia. The charges here
(which find no support whatever in N. Garsoian's recent authori-
tative work on the Paulicians [1967]) for the first time include one
of devil-worship. In the medieval west the charges are found
lodged for the first time (complete with devil-worship) in the
case of the Orleans heretics condemned in loss. After then they
became a current if minor feature of propaganda against more
than one group of heretics: principally Waldensians, and from
1466 Fraticelli (the former without, the latter with, the infanti-
cide motif).
So it was all an old story. Of course the story might still, in
principle, for all its falsehood in the other cases, have been true
about old women in the fifteenth century. So the investigation
turns next to find out whether it was. The author looks at sup-
posed primary testimony for the existence of a devil-worshipping,
orgiastic, ritualistic society of witches at the end of the middle
ages. He patiently shows that all of it belongs to one of two cate-
gories. Either (a) it comes from a witness just tortured; or (b) it
comprises elements — e.g. a witch turns into a mouse — suggestive
of fantasy. (The studious replacement of such elements by dotted
lines in source-quotations is made a damaging charge against
Margaret Murray; Dr. Murray's slips in reading crucial material
have indeed fed some highly dubious 'facts' into witchcraft litera-
ture, tenacious even among the most learned.)
Professor Cohn's early chapters provide a model in the art of
historical debunking. As a result of them, his question rephrases
itself all the more sharply. If there was no sect of witches, how did
66 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

belief in it originate? Before attempting an answer of his own,

Professor Cohn remains a debunker for one more chapter, to
criticise an answer already current. The apparent continuity,
around the end of the thirteenth century, between the disappear-
ance of Albigensian Catharism and the rise of the witch hunt,
together with their common interest in the devil, has suggested
a link between them. This hypothesis hangs on a handful of appar-
ently contemporary testimonies to the burning of witches (includ-
ing a batch of two hundred at once) between 1S75 and c.1360. A
dazzling essay in detection exposes these testimonies as forgeries
or jeux d'esprit from later centuries. (The story of the Baron de
Lamothe Langon makes particularly entertaining reading. The
baron's three-volume Histoire de I'Inquisition en France sits
solemnly among the sources in Hansen's big source-book on witch-
beliefs, whose compiler little suspected to what he was thus lend-
ing universal credit. Lamothe Langon claimed in his preface to

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have spent twenty years researching and writing the Histoire de
I'Inquisition. It is now known that he wrote it in one year [i8ag],
and that in the same year he produced no less than twenty other
books, mostly novels — with names like La Vampire, ou la Vierge
de Hongrie, or Les Apparitions du chdteau de Tarabel. This or-
phaned, beggared, self-educated, spendthrift sdon of the Toulouse
patriciate was in fact a prince of literary hacks and imposters, in
a time when that title was subject to keen competition. No reliance
at all can be placed on his 'sources'.) Having knocked away these
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century falsehoods, Professor Cohn
postpones the full official stereotype of witch-sect - devil, orgy,
child-killing, maleficia and all - to a prosecution of 1458. It then
appears only sporadically until the 1450s. The belief is therefore
a fifteenth-century phenomenon, and its genesis must be explained
accordingly.
Professor Cohn sees this genesis in a convergence of three main
elements. First was plain malcficium: the perennial idea, well
attested throughout the middle ages on all social levels, that a
person could harm another - e.g. killing him, causing impotence,
or sending a storm to ruin his crops - by occult means. Spectacu-
lar as maleficium may sound, it had until the late middle ages an
unspectacular history. Suspects were of course unpopular locally.
Lynchings and private vengeance for maleficia are often recorded.
But not so official trials. The lack of them may be partly ex-
plained by ambivalence in ecclesiastical views on the subject. Al-
though penitentials, etc., regularly reprove maleficium, they see
it less as a secular than as a religious offence, i.e. as a regression
from Christian belief. Ecclesiastical penances, and indeed inter-
 MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE WITCH HUNT 67

ventions, usually represent a moderating effect on popular rage

against maleficii. (Leading churchmen did not believe in the
grander sorts of maleficium, like storm-making, anyway.)
While this ambivalence may have been one reason for the pau-
dty of maleficium trials before the late middle ages, there was a
more material one. It lay in legal procedure. In most times and
places in the early and central middle ages, prosecution for this
kind of offence depended on accusation by a private citizen. There
was a reason why a private dtizen should not accuse another be-
fore a law court. By the lex talionis an unsuccessful accuser
changed places with his intended victim, i.e., was in this case
drowned or burned. Who would risk that in a matter so uncertain
of proof? The witch-hunters of the fifteenth century were well
aware of this obstade, and denounced the accusatory procedure
where they found i t

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Professor Cohn has more than this to say about legal procedure,
and I shall return to it, after looking at the other two main ele-
ments he finds in the notion of the witches' sabbath. The second
was a moving element: an increasing obsession with the devil
and his demons. This growing obsession can be traced in the
supposed practice of magic itself. References to magic from the
late thirteenth century describe practices more elaborate than the
old maleficium. Professor Cohn calls this 'ritual magic'. It is char-
acterised by the use of books (e.g. the 'Solomonic' books which
spread during the thirteenth century); by complex formulae and
ceremonial, involving for instance cocks and corpses; and above all
by the conjuring of demons. The demons are often embodied, for
instance in negroes, or sometimes idols. This growing preoccupa-
tion with the devil and demons was not confined to magidans.
Professor Cohn contends that church writers in general, in the
thirteenth century and later, became more consdous of the devil
and devils than their predecessors had been. So they were on a
sharper look-out for his human agents.
The third conceptual tributary to the witch-hunt, in Professor
Cohn's view, was the notion of a sect or conspiracy. Such a sect was
bound together, like the church itself, by meetings and ceremony
- the latter in this case appropriately obscene. The idea of a secret
sect of diabolical evil-doers had divers matrices. One was the
heretical sect. This aspect of the reputation of Waldensians and
Fraticelli has been mentioned. The use of the term 'Vauderie'
(from Vaudois = Waldensian) for the supposed witch-sect at Arras
in 1459 confirms this affiliation. A second matrix was the religious
order. Between 1305 and 1314 the military order of Knights Tem-
plar fell a victim to a reputation, ruthlessly nourished by Philip the
68 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

Fair of France, for ritual apostasy and devil worship. (The crucial
role of Philip the Fair's totalitarian government in the prehistory
of the witch-trials is rightly emphasised in this and other respects.)
A third matrix - smaller, but closer this time to the maleficia of
old women - was the family group. In 1324-5 Dame Alice Kyteler
of Kilkenny was tried for sorcery in the company of eleven others
related or allied to her family. Here, then, were several ante-
cedents to the notion of a diabolical conspiracy. Before such a
notion could attach to maleficii or ritual magicians in general,
only one obstacle remained to be overcome. Heretics, Templars
and small family groups were at least known to meet behind
closed doors, whatever they did or did not do there. Witches and
magicians, by contrast, were traditionally individuals, scattered
among towns and villages. That they should meet in big assem-
blies without being seen, was not only not known; it was physically
impossible. How on earth could all those old women travel so far

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to their rendezvous (often in remote mountains), and get back to
their villages before dawn? The answer was, that they did not do
it on earth at all. Theyflew,on animals, etc. Belief in night-flights
thus became a factor binding the other elements together. It al-
lowed the three separate bugbears of maleficium, demoniacal
magic and a secret society to coagulate in one.
That seems to be what happened. But Professor Conn incorpor-
ates an important and cogent suggestion on how it happened.
Night-flights (not to mention the metamorphoses that often went
with them) were a potential strain on credulity The renaissance
was in some respects a more critical age than its predecessors. The
strain had to be met It was met partly, no doubt, by the fact that
some women - it can be told from the nature of their confessions,
and is confirmed by modern anthropological findings - made no
sharp distinction between dreaming and waking experience. They
dreamed they flew, etc., and spoke of it as material reality. (The
late thirteenth-century poet Jean de Meung complained of just
this confusion in the Roman de la Rose, lines 18395-430 [ e i F.
Lecoy, vol. 3, Paris 1970].) This elision between dream and reality
was given more effect, howeveT, by a further circumstance. Once
more it is legal It lies in the almost simultaneous development,
after c.isgo, of the inquisitorial procedure and of judical torture.
By the inquisitorial procedure (after which the Inquisition was
named, not vice versa) authority could initiate prosecution with
or without private accusation. Trials could furthermore be stream-
lined, i.e., held in private, without defence counsel. As for judicial
torture, this was a paradoxical sequel to the success of enlightened
lawyers in abolishing the ordeal. (Professor Cohn might have
 MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE WITCH HUNT 69

strengthened his case by explaining more fully why. Over much

of continental Europe, the true home of the witch-hunt, theTe was
no jury. Not only did this weaken resistance to the spread of the
inquisitorial procedure. Without either the ordeal or a jury (or
of course forensic science), a judge had no way of telling the truth
of a charge. His most tempting way out - a way first discovered by
secular courts and borrowed from them by the papal Inquisition
in 1S5S - was to torture the suspect to confess.)1
Taken together, these two developments made a system nicely
calculated to transform fantasy to reality. The system was in more
than one way self-perpetuating. A confession made under torture
could not safely be retracted. For that was seen (by a deft mis-
reading of canon law used first on a large scale against the Tem-
plars, and later responsible for the death of Joan of Arc) as 'relapse
into heresy', which meant burning. Again, once the first person
had confessed, through fantasy or torture, to flying on a hyena,

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how could anyone reasonably pretend (the manuals argued) that
such things did not happen? Finally, the more fearsome the pro-
cedure became the more palpable were the witches' motives for
secrecy: they could scarcely be expected to meet anywhere else
than on mountains, at night, magically invisible. The crowning
touch was that the devil could give witches power to keep silence
under torture. Here really was an infallible system. Its effect was
not reduced by its being worked by officials in direct subordina-
tion to the distant papacy. Not only could such officials by-pass
(and even threaten) the usually more conservative episcopate.
They had the ear of the highest judge in Christendom, who was
not always (at that distance) the least gullible.
A simplified summary of Europe's Inner Demons does no jus-
tice to the author's wide but easy scholarship or strong prose. But
this is the gist. It remains to comment. If I in my turn were tor-
tured into making a single criticism it would be that Professor
Conn is happier with the later middle ages (say C.1S30 on) than
with the earlier. This tilt jeopardises those parts of the book con-
cerned with slow change, especially the chapters which portray
obsession with the devil, and ritual magic, as characteristically
late medieval phenomena. In the case of ritual magic (to leave on
one side the question of the devil: a historian's hot potato) the
big turning-point was surely the Christian capture in 1085 of
Toledo, putative headquarters thenceforward of the magic art.
The slanders brought against Pope Gregory VII include, as it hap-
' Cf. R. C. Van Caenegem, 'La preuve dans le droit du moyen Age occiden-
tal', Recueilt de la SocUU Jean Bodin 17 (Brussels 1965) 691-753, esp. 735-9,
S4S-4-
70 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

pens, from just after then, a splendid case of conjuration of a

demon through a magic book. There are more in the twelfth cen-
tury.* This criticism can be yielded up with an easier conscience
for the lack of harm it does to Professor Cohn's main formula: his
amalgam of notions may have united c.i^io without each notion's
necessarily having had a one-way evolutionary history before then.
Out of any torture chamber, however, and indeed at Professor
Cohn's own invitation (for he does not claim to have said the last
word) I venture to suggest directions in which his explanations can
be taken further. The suggestions fall into two groups. First, more
sources can be tracked down for the notion of the witches' sab-
bath. For a start, the sabbath was from one angle an upside-down
version of Christian worship. Professor Cohn says there was no
such thing. But what would he make of the following assertion,
made c.1410 (it was the assertion not of a tortured simpleton,

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but of a scholar with a notable taste for literal truth, who claimed
to have been there)?
They put on masks, they find a clerk and dress him up in hor-
rible garb, put him back-to-front on an ass and lead him into
the church to celebrate Mass. There I have seen him cense the
altars, and as he does so lift his leg and shout 'boo!', while his
clergy bear huge firebrands in front of him in lieu of candles.
Then I have seen the clergy don their fur cowls back-to-front,
and dance in church.
But Professor Cohn is right This is not a 'Black Mass'; though it
might have been from the indignation which our witness, John
Hus of Prague, brings to his memory (I have shortened his account
in translation). This was the Feast of Fools, most boisterous of the
many parodies, literary and ceremonial, which medieval Catholi-
cism evoked. Those who think such revels have nothing to do with
the notions of a witches' sabbath should reflect on the following
traits in them: the use in some places and festivals of animal
masks, asses' heads, etc.; the naming of the chief actor in one By-
zantine version of the ceremony as 'Theophilus' (the name of the
man everyone knew had sold his soul to the devil); insolence in
church improper 'even if used to cooks in a kitchen'; and occas-
ional nude dancing. (C/. E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage
[Oxford 1903] I, esp. S74-335) Much of the imagery, that is to
say, of the witches' anti-religion, certainly existed in this popular
parody, itself a pre-Christian vestige.
The mention of nude dancing leads us naturally to the subject
1
B. Holbling-Gloor, Natur trnd Aberglaube im Policraticus des Johannes
von Salisbury (Zfirich 1956), review! the scene c. 1159.
 MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE WITCH HUNT 71

of sex orgies. There is every reason, a priori and a posteriori, to

believe that events meriting this description did take place in some
times and places in the thousand years of the middle ages. Whether
they were bound up with a diabolical religion is another matter;
there is no good evidence for it, though I remain inclined to be-
lieve - with Gottfried Koch and against Norman Cohn - that puri-
tanical heresies may, occasionally, have slipped down this wrong
turning. What we know for certain is,first,that some people openly
declared that man's sexual nature was there to be satisfied as he
felt inclined (the view was condemned in 1*77; as well as it might
have been, since the same poet Jean de Meung had just written
something very like it into the most widely-read romance of the
later middle ages; and it was an old view); second, that some people
— unless we dismiss vivid references to such people by vernacular
preachers — gave free rein to this tenet; and, third, that some of
these, in turn, did so collectively, at night, in holy places (Humbert

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de Romans c.1870 complained of practices at certain vigils for
saints' days which were 'turpe...etiam dicere' [Bibl. Max. Veterum
Patrum (Lyon 1677) XXV, 563H]). To accuse heretics or witches
of nocturnal sex orgies was only to transfer to them, elaborated,
practices we can be fairly sure marked some of the less decorous
pockets of individual life.
High-spirited parody; sexual license: this much real raw mater-
ial was there for the witch-hunters' imaginations to work on. But
there was plenty more: so much, in fact, that now that Professor
Cohn has cleared the ground a whole new book could be written
on this subject For instance: Boniface VIII, whose posthumous
trial by Philip the Fair's government was apparently the first for
ritual magic, was said by one of Philip's witnesses to have possessed
an 'idol'. Now Boniface VIII was the first pope of whom we cer-
tainly have portraits. The stunning effect of the new naturalistic
style of Giotto (painter of one of the portraits) is attested by con-
temporaries, - an effect no doubt analogous to that produced
recently by the first television. It may be suggested (and there have
always been puritan hardliners to applaud such an association)
that the idea of magical 'idols' c.1300 owed something to the grow-
ing prevalence of lifelike portraiture. A second example might be
the relationship between devil-imagery and Islam. Professor Cohn
notes that the figure of the devil as a negro comes into its own in
the biography of Saint Afra, written between 700 and 850. That
happens to have been the age when the great race of swart infidels
first served formidable notice of itself on Christian Europe. A pos-
sible influence from the same race might be suggested also at the
other end of the story. The fifteenth century, which saw such prolif-
78 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

eration of diabolical familiars, saw too a spread of black domestic

slavery in rich Italian households (C/. I. Origo, in Speculum 30
[1955] gsi-66). The dark page-boy, appearing and vanishing in the
shadowed doorway of a private palace, was the very image of fami-
liar demon: and may well have been his unconscious original. Yet
a third field of coincidence suggests itself in the matter of those
night-flights and assemblies. Assemblies are a constitutional pheno-
menon. The early fifteenth century abounded in constitutions.
Witches' assemblies first appear in a judical charge in 14*8, in a
Swiss chronicle. The most nearly autonomous of medieval church
councils met not far away in Basle in 1431. Its rise and fall dosed
the golden age of medieval representative assemblies, what with
church councils, parliaments, and royal and imperial estates and
diets. The influence of reality on fantasy here can be palpable;
e.g., the bigger witches' sabbaths were supposed to meet 'three or

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four times a year', a technicality with all the stamp of late medieval
constitutionalism on it.
I shall indicate only one more of these possible sources for the
imagery of the witches' sabbath. It concerns the charge of child-
killing. Some faint relationship might be found between this
charge, and the reports (which P. Browe showed in 1938 were es-
pecially common in the late middle ages) of those Eucharistic
miracles where the Host appeared as a child. (Professor Conn
speaks of this relationship in respect of slanders against primitive
Christians, but leaves it there.) But there was a less miraculous
source for the charge of child-killing; namely actual infanticide.
The medieval history of this intrinsically elusive crime can never
be written. But we know it was committed. Hostiensis and other
canonists discuss its various forms, especially overlaying (inten-
tional and unintentional) and exposure. Saint Bernardino of Siena
denounces the crime vividly - as an evil which had got worse - in
14*4, on the very threshold of the witch hunt (I. Origo, The World
of San Bernardino [London 1963] 197-8). The function of an old
woman as midwife must sometimes have cast her then, as in the
eighteenth century, as the Mother Midnight, the Meg Murdock-
son, whose role it was to dispose of unwanted children. This under-
world of generation, and its various modes of frustration, unques-
tionably holds one clue to the origin of the witch-mythj. The
Malleus, for example, reverts again and again, not only to baby-
snatching and -killing, but to maleficia designed to frustrate sex
in other ways.
So much for further possible sources for the witch-imagery. My
second group of suggestions to add to Professor Conn's study con-
cerns the possible dynamic origins of the witch-myth. Messrs.
 MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE WITCH HUNT 73

McFarlane, Thomas and others have taught us, for later periods,
to read the beliefs about witches partly in terms of social tensions.
Professor Cohn deliberately plays down this approach, no doubt
to leave himself freer for his own. But the very facts he cites point
beyond the bounds he has set himself. For one thing there is the
inevitable question of 'capitalism'. Some of the notorious early
victims of demonolatry — and infanticide — charges were people
who had accumulated a dangerous amount of money. The Orleans
heretics of loss were said to have been given 'heaps of money' by
the devil. In 1300 the dizzily successful upstart Guichard of Troyes
was accused of sorcery: chief witnesses were an archdeacon (dioc-
esan general business-manager) and the agent of an Italian bank.
The Templars of course were the French king's bankers before
he struck them down. Dame Alice Kyteler and her usurer-husband,
in their turn, were substantial creditors to their accusers. A larger

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fact can be set with these. The reign of Philip the Fair, within and
without the king's own sphere of influence, saw a marked rise in
the currency of charges of sorcery, etc. The same reign, 1885-1314,
happens to cover the final eclipse of the Jews as national financiers
in France and England. Now the Jews had suffered under similar
accusations, especially that of child-murder, and especially in the
twelfth century when they were at the height of their financial
power. About 1300 they handed over their financial ascendency
in France and England to non-Jews. With it went a damnosa here-
ditas: the invidious reputation of usurer, and - at times, it seems
- appropriate slanderous fantasies.
But there is a second social fact to be noticed in Philip the Fair's
reign, besides the expulsion of the Jews. A symptom of it can be
found already in the prominence of those upstart lawyers, who
taught Philip — unless it was he who taught them - how to
manipulate law for political goals, and who gave torture and
propaganda the role in the story which Professor Cohn has so
admirably identified. But those upstart lawyers were part of a
larger phenomenon: the expansion of a university-trained class.
Rashdall and his editors have argued that numbers at both Paris
and Oxford reached new peaks in this span of years, 1*85-1314.
And nine more European universities were founded in the first
half of the fourteenth century. The new academics, lawyers and
the rest, stood in a changing numerical relation to the uneducated
mass they had risen from. It may be suggested that there were
growing pains, with results in official attitudes to popular belief
and practice. This can actually be more than suggested. For the
years C.1370-C.1400 saw another surge in university populations,
followed by that great academic manifestation, the conciliar move-
74 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

ment. One sequel to that movement - manifest in Gerson and his

contemporaries, and continuing into the 1440s - was a new, queru-
lous intolerance of, inter alia, those grotesque popular festivals
mentioned earlier (cf. Chambers, op. cit. ags-joo). Converts can
be overzealous. Gerson and Hus, like many of their colleagues,
were ex-peasants, converts to a relatively rationalistic view of the
world. Such men turned with all the more ardour, it may be pro-
posed, on the superstitions they had outgrown: so much ardour,
that the less cautious of them gradually fell into a new supersti-
tion of their own.
Norman Cohn has again earned the thanks of medievalists.
Europe's Inner Demons may lack some of the easy coherence of
The Pursuit of the Millenium. But it tackles a harder subject. The
author has dispelled numerous misconceptions about this subject,
and laid solid foundations for future discussion of i t There is

Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on June 20, 2015

much still to explain. But those who try to do the explaining will
do well to start with this book beside them.

Alexander Murray