These "Damnable Superstitions": Legal Double Standards and Cultural Reflections of Witchcraft and Judicial Astrology, ca. 1200-ca. 1600: Part 2

Tracking the Categorization and Punishment
of Witchcraft, ca. 1400-1600

In discussing witchcraft, one immediately runs into the problem of how to define such a broad, open-ended, and constantly changing term. Some general aspects of the definition are useful. Pre-medieval witchcraft was usually indiscernible from what we would more generally call sorcery or magic, and it was usually appealed to in order to institute a sense of control amidst the seemingly uncontrollable forces of nature. This practice was typically outside the conventions of mainstream religion, often paired with folk beliefs and folklore, and it differentiated itself in that rather than involving the worship of God or gods (as religion did) or the study of natural processes (as sciences, including astrology, did), it sought direct management of these affairs.[1]

Late medieval witchcraft, on the other hand, differed from the above definition in some very important ways. First of all, although records do exist of men being tried and executed early in the witch-hunts (late fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), the crime of witchcraft became regarded as primarily a female transgression by the time of the late fifteenth century Inquisition. Accusations were generally leveled against women by men of the same class, usually within the confines of a peasant community such as a feudal manor or small countryside town, and oftentimes within one’s own family.[2] Various specific motivations existed for accusations, usually related to class or economic status, temperament and age, sexual deviance, and heresy. The early fifteenth century German Dominican author Johannes Nider, though not a witch-hunter himself, wrote of seven ways in which a witch could inflict harm upon a community: “by arousing [in men] extreme love or hate; by causing impotence, sickness or insanity; by causing death; or by the destruction of property.”[3] These behaviors are related to more ancient notions of witchcraft in which rituals developed around natural happenings that could not be controlled. If, for example, a flock of sheep was unable to maintain its numbers or a crop did not produce the desired yield, women were often blamed for casting spells of infertility, and culpability could be specifically allocated rather than charging the unpunishable Nature.[4]

One feature that coalesced into a widespread belief as “proof” of witches’ misdeeds throughout the fifteenth century, and related directly to the ubiquitous medieval axiom of the existence of demons, was that of the witches’ Sabbat, sometimes called the “Black Mass.” This supposed event, as its names imply, was a sort of perversion of an actual Catholic Mass and was believed to involve a wide range of reprehensible activities. Anne Llewellyn Barstow puts it rather succinctly when she describes women being accused of “flying to the sabbat on phallic broomsticks, being seduced by demon lovers, joining in orgiastic dances, kissing the devil’s ass, copulating indiscriminately with men, other women, relatives, demons, or the devil himself, and giving birth to demon children.”[5] These events imagined to exist as physical realities, of course, did not take place, but a separate category for witchcraft based on these specific heretical acts was emerging.

This had not always been the case and in fact, some earlier documents pertaining to the legal classification of witchcraft actually discouraged if not outright forbade a trust in its existence. For example, in Charlemagne’s Capitulary for Saxony (775-790), an administrative directive for local officials to impose on the recently conquered Saxons of eastern Germany, the Carolingian attitude toward witchcraft is clear: “If anyone is deceived by the devil, and believes after the manner of pagans that some man or some woman is a witch and eats people, and if because of this he burns her or gives her flesh to someone to eat or eats it himself, let him pay the penalty of death.”[6] Legally, the Carolingian empire deemed witchcraft a pagan superstition, and acceptance of it was essentially equivalent to heresy. The language used here implies that the influence of the devil is in the deception, but the devil’s role in the actual practice of witchcraft would support the argument of later witch hunters. Similarly, the Canon Episcopi (ca. 906) of Regino of Prum, Abbot of Treves, affirmed that the deeds attributed to witches, such as those supposedly performed during the Black Mass, were little more than illusions and maintained the legal distinction of the acceptance of witchcraft as heretical:

Bishops and their officials must labor with all their strength to uproot thoroughly from their parishes the pernicious art of sorcery and malefice invented by the devil, and if they find a man or woman follower of this wickedness to eject them foully disgraced from the parishes… It is also not to be omitted that some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights. But it were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many others into the pit of their faithlessness. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and relapse into pagan errors when they think that there is any divinity or power except the one God… Whoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or worse, or transformed into another species or likeness, except by God Himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond a doubt an infidel.[7]

It was heresy to believe in this form of witchcraft because it usurped the ultimate power of God and granted it to devils. The only power of devils, according to both the Capitulary and the Episcopi, was to deceive, and that deception was in convincing Christians that these witches engaged in these practices in the first place. Those condemned for witchcraft were not absolved of their crimes, since followers of that “wickedness” who had “relapse[d] into pagan error” were expelled from the flock, but the message from the authorities unambiguously asserts that these “illusions and phantasms” had no physical reality and to believe that they did went against the Church.

So what changed in the late fifteenth century that resurrected a belief in the dangerously real powers of witchcraft? A marked shift in the popular imagination occurred in the mid to late fifteenth century that changed the punishment of witchcraft forever. One of the main tools of persecution for witch-hunters was manuals or various books that defined the behavior of witches and displayed for the authorities what traits to look for when identifying possible witches. Johannes Nider, whom we have already discussed, penned one of the earliest of these so-called manuals, Formicarius: De Visionibus et Revelationibus (The Ant-Hill: On Visions and Revelations, 1435-37), but this book caused little stir and led to very few full-fledged witch trials, in part because at this time witchcraft was not pursued as a deadly offense unless actual harm had been done to another person.[8] This fact changed following the publication in 1486 of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) by two other German Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer (also known as Henry Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger, both professors of theology. Prefaced with a Papal Bull by Innocent VIII (r. 1484-1492) from two years prior (Summis desiderantis affectibus, 5 December, 1484), the Malleus armed witch-hunters with procedural rules and regulations for recognizing and punishing witches. After a short list of offenses witches were believed to have committed (similar to Nider’s list from nearly fifty years earlier), the ultimate religious authority in Western Europe granted to the inquisitors the power

to prevent the taint of heretical pravity and of other like evils from spreading their infection to the ruin of others who are innocent, the zeal of religion especially impelling us, in order that the provinces, cities, dioceses, [and] territories…may not be deprived of the office of inquisition which is their due, [the Pope] do[es] hereby decree, by virtue of our apostolic authority, that it shall be permitted to the said inquisitors in these regions to exercise their office of inquisition and to proceed to the correction, imprisonment, and punishment of the aforesaid persons for their said offences and crimes…[9]

Until the Malleus was published, it was the consensus among many Church and secular officials that the horrific deeds ascribed to women at these Sabbats did not exist in any physical reality at all but were rather illusion provided by devils.[10] Nider had said as much in the Formicarius, as had Charlemagne and Regino in their works. Nider’s work had been based largely on information gathered from an inquisitor who had punished a male witch. While males could still be accused of witchcraft, and though Institoris and Sprenger made numerous references to male witches, the femininity of the crime was becoming more entrenched with the Malleus. It drew from various sources to suggest that women were more likely to engage in witchcraft:

Why are there more workers of harmful magic found in the female sex, which is so frail and unstable, than among men? ...The first is that women are inclined to be credulous, and because the main aim of the Evil Spirit is to pervert and destroy the Faith, he prefers to attack them. [Quotation from Ecclesiasticus 19.4] The second reason is that the way they are made makes them naturally prone to leak, and this renders it easier for individual spirits [spiritus] to make an impression upon them by giving them revelations…. The third reason is that they have a lewd and slippery tongue and have difficulty in concealing from fellow-women those things they know by means of their evil skill; and because they do not have physical strength, they find it easy to assert themselves through harmful magic.[11]

Institoris and Sprenger argued that women were more prone to harmful magic because they were physically and morally weaker than men. They later went on to say that “[a woman] is more given to fleshly lusts than a man”[12] and that “a wicked woman waivers more quickly in her faith because of her basic character, and also denies her faith more quickly; and this denial is the foundation of acts of harmful magic.”[13] Heresy, or the denial of true faith, marked the beginning of witchcraft. Institoris and Sprenger concluded this section by stating that

one finds more women than men have been infected with the heresy of those who do works of harmful magic. Consequently, it should not be called the heresy of men who do works of harmful magic [maleficorum], but of women who do works of harmful magic [maleficarum], so that the derivation is taken from the party with the better claim to it. Blessed be the most high who continues to preserve the male sex from such a great disgrace right up to the present day. For He was willing to be born and suffer for us as a man, and therefore granted this immunity and exemption of men.[14]

Men were not recused of the crime of heresy in the matter of harmful magic but were excluded from the specific category of witchcraft. Maleficarum, as opposed to maleficorum, was a feminine offense, and the title of the work by Institoris and Sprenger indicates their concern with this subset of crimes.

The Malleus also shows a marked change in the punishment of witchcraft.[15] Assuming that no harm had actually befallen anyone, witchcraft was typically punished mildly before the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum. It most often involved penance when religious authorities were concerned or material compensation when property had been damaged or lost but little else. After the literature began instilling a fear in the lay populace over the fifteenth century, women began to be singled out more easily based on subconscious tactics of fear of groups perceived to exist on the fringe of society. This was also coupled with the fact that many Christians were beginning to perceive it as their duty to isolate and turn witches in to proper authorities. The Malleus stated, “The belief that there are such beings as witches is so essentially a part of the Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion manifestly savors of heresy.”[16] Indeed, witchcraft became more than heresy, adding to the ways the accused could be prosecuted. As allegations grew more frequent and more serious, the repercussions for such crimes grew more extreme as well. By the 1460s, even before the Malleus had been published, the crime had become a crimen exceptum, or a crime that could be punished on an individual basis, regardless of precedent, based on the perceived threat to the state. As one witchcraft scholar put it, it was a “crime so dangerous to the civil community that the very accusation acted to suspend the traditional procedural protection to the defendant, and opened the way for the most ruthless and thorough kind of persecution, undertaken to protect the state from its most dangerous enemies.”[17]

Particularly female customs were especially susceptible to attack from witch hunters. Women were often accused of ritual infanticide, primarily due to the fact that childbirth was so hazardous in pre-modern times that prospective mothers or midwives were often held responsible for the deaths of newborn children.[18] Midwives were directly referenced in the Malleus and miscarriages were mentioned as possible inflictions caused by witches. Book I, Question 11, is dedicated entirely to “midwives who work harmful magic, kill fetuses in the womb in different ways, procure a miscarriage, and, when they do not do this, offer newly born children to evil spirits.”[19] The Malleus relates a story told to Institoris by an inquisitor in Como:

[The inquisitor] was invited by the inhabitants of the county of Bormio to conduct an investigation into this matter. The reason was that man had lost his child from its cradle, and, while he was searching for it, he saw some women who had gathered together during the night-time and he came to the conclusion that they were slaughtering a child, drinking its fluid, and then devouring [the flesh]…. So [these things] are not incredible. They do happen exactly as people see them. But, there is this point, too. Witch-midwives cause more serious damage in all these matters, as penitent witches have often told me and others. They say, ‘No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives. When they don’t kill the children, they take babies out of the room, as thought they’re going to do something out of doors, lift them up in the air, and offer them to evil spirits.’[20]

The Malleus even differentiated between miscarriages caused by the invocation of “evil spirits,” which was within their purview and those which are caused “by using natural means such as herbs or other obstructive efforts,”[21] which was not. The existence of demons was taken for granted by most in the Middle Ages and it is easy to see why laypeople would view any deeds unfamiliar to them (such as the many folk remedies used by female healers) as unnatural in origin.

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[1] “Witchcraft”, Encarta Encyclopedia 2000.

[2] Barstow, Witchcraze, p. 16

[3] Quoted in Couliano, Ioan P., Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. by Margaret Cook. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 152.

[4] Barstow, Witchcraze, p. 113-14.

[5] Ibid. There is some evidence to support the view that some women did indeed engage in hallucinatory drug use, and the common modern conception of witches atop broomsticks has some basis in reality. One of the most popular illicit substances in use in the fifteenth century was a compound made mostly of ingredients from various plants of the nightshade family. This salve was best put into use by applying it to an object and absorbing it directly into the skin, and the most effective method was by taking a broomstick or other similarly shaped object smeared with the material and placing it under the female genitals or armpits where it would be absorbed most quickly. (See Culiano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 153.) Women were said to have received visions from demons and spirits while in these drug-induced trances. The sexual connotations here are self-evident, and women, in the same act, were inadvertently condemning themselves to persecution related not only to sexual deviance but also demon invocation, which were beginning to become intertwined in the eyes of the persecutors during the late fifteenth century. This was due in part to the fact that sexual deviance was one of the most intolerable offenses to Christian moral authorities and that women were far more likely to be accused of sexual malpractice since they were considered the more licentious gender. See Barstow, Witchcraze, p. 136. (Barstow describes many reasons for the masculine belief in feminine inferiority. Most specifically, menstrual blood was taken to be a physical example of their “sickness.” It was commonly believed that men used all their blood whereas women had a “superfluous amount.” The retention of this blood could cause serious melancholy in women or at worst trouble in her brain leading to suicide. Monthly menstruation was thought to be the female way of ridding the body of unhealthy melancholy [or the “Saturnine influence”]). See also Dyan Elliott’s Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, and below, p. 8-9.

[6] Charlemagne. “Selected Capitularies.” Readings in Medieval History. ed. by Patrick J. Geary. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, Ltd., 1989, p. 316

[7] Regino of Prum. Canon Episcopi. http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/witch/canon.html. edited 9 June 2004.

[8] Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 152. This is also discussed briefly in Barstow’s Appendix A (p. 172) in relation to the Malleus Maleficarum.

[9]Innocent VIII, Summis desiderantis affectibus, http://www.thenazareneway.com/malleus_maleficarum.htm., University of Pennsylvania. Dept. of History: Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European history, published for the Dept. of History of the University of Pennsylvania., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press [1897?-1907?]. Vol III:4, pp, 7-10 (Papal Bull), 6-7 (Nider), 10-13 (Hammer).

[10] Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 152.

[11] Institoris, Heinrich and Jacob Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. trans. and ed. by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 74 and 75.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., p. 76.

[14] Ibid. p. 77.

[15] The case has been made that the model for the persecution of medieval and early modern witches had its genesis in antiquity. As the historian Norman Cohn has argued, it was in its most basic form a continuation from ancient times of the persecution of outcast groups feared by political establishments to be insurrectionists. Long before the Christian authorities were condemning heretics and women as practitioners of witchcraft, Romans were using virtually the same tactics for the persecution, ironically, of Christians. This extreme singling out of one portion of society points toward a general fear among the dominant masculine hierarchy both in antiquity and the Middle Ages, both Roman pagan and Christian, of divisions of society thought to exhibit an inclination to undermine their power. We tend to see an evolution in thought and practice from the early persecution of Christians to the later persecution of witches. Christians were regarded early on by the pagan Roman aristocracy as a bizarre and secretive offshoot of Judaism. However, from the Roman point of view, they differed from Jews in some very important ways. Most importantly, they were not an officially recognized religion within the Empire, a benefit that Judaism enjoyed, because Romans respected the ancient roots of Hebrew tradition, of which Christianity had none. (It should be noted that Judaism and the Roman state were not always at ease with each other, and many of the Christian complaints against Rome were echoes of earlier Jewish problems, especially the sacrifice to pagan gods. The Romans brutally put down Jewish revolts in 66 and 132 C.E. and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Far from having a perfect relationship, Jews and Romans at least acknowledged each other with grudging respect. Christianity, which had much more in common with first and second century mystery cults [such as those of the Persian Sun god Mithras; the Egyptian goddess of the moon, nature, and fertility, Isis; the Phrygian “great mother goddess” Cybele; and Sol Invictus or the “Cult of the Unconquerable Sun”], was considered a religion without a history and thus less respectable than Greco-Roman paganism and philosophy or Judaism.) These mysterious, exclusivist, and usually misunderstood practices of Christians engendered anxiety in the Roman authorities that they were a potential threat to the status quo of the Imperial state. The principal reason that the Romans persecuted Christians was because of their unwillingness to pay homage to the Roman gods and goddesses or the Emperor, venerated as a semi-divine figure himself. The Roman religion had always been less a personal religion, as Christianity was, and more a practical application of the loyalty to the state and its ideals, which the gods embodied. Roman citizens were expected to pay reverence to the Emperor, as the pontifex maximus or “highest priest,” and protector gods and goddesses by the public ritual of burning incense, and Christians refused this act of civic patronage due to the fact that they deemed the observance blasphemous and sacrilegious. For Christians, accepting this would have been a betrayal of God, yet for the Romans their rejection was tantamount to treason. By honoring the gods with sacrifice, the citizenry was ensuring its and the state’s protection and endurance, and by refusing participation, Christians alienated themselves from the community—a dangerous action for an eschatological religion that eschewed the here and now in a society that emphasized public responsibility. As a religion that believed the end of the material world was at hand and the perfect Kingdom of God would soon replace earthly imperfection, which Rome symbolized, this act of supreme importance to Romans was inconsequential to Christians. Their god was the only God and any act that challenged that view was intolerable. In the same way, some Christian practices were misunderstood which in turn led to a demonization of the organization. The Eucharist in particular was embellished as a kind of cannibalistic orgy held in secret, where the Christian idea of the transubstantiation of the Host into the flesh of Christ metamorphosed into a wickedly depraved act. The history of the ceremony is expounded in the Bible by Paul, in which he bears witness to the words of Christ at the Last Supper that “This [bread] is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (I Corinthians 2:24). The official Church doctrine was to become a literal interpretation that the bread became the physical flesh of Christ, but even before the ecumenical councils, Roman aggressors against Christianity pounced on this as a form of cannibalism (a charge later leveled against witches). In short, the movement to pursue various groups of people was based less on actual behavior and more on perceived behavior, and viewed in the broader historical context it can be seen less as a serious attempt to rid society of a specific group of people and more a trend toward majority power holders to keep lower, powerless groups (Christians at first and women later) subordinate to their spiritual and economic masters. See especially Norman Cohn’s works Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt, New York: Basic Books, 1975 and The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961.

[16] Op. cit. Note that this is precisely opposite the Church’s position in the Canon Episcopi from over five centuries prior.

[17] Quoted in Barstow, Witchcraze, p. 135. The quote comes from Edward Peters’ The Magician, the Witch, and the Law.

[18] Ibid., p. 40.

[19] Institoris, trans. and ed. by Maxwell-Stuart, Malleus Maleficarum, p. 92.

[20]Ibid. p. 92 and 93. Possibly in reference to the Malleus, a law was passed in France in 1556 that all pregnant women were required to register with local officials and have a witness present at the birth. If the baby was to die and the mother had failed to follow through with these procedural requirements, then the mother or the midwife were often accused of murder. The male influence was also minimal in the affairs of birthing and raising children, and this lack of control often led to the suspicion that women were engaging in acts not permitted by their masculine church or feudal lords, usually because folk remedies and traditional medicine were used in these cases. See also Barstow, Withccraze, p. 135.

[21] Institoris, trans. and ed. by Maxwell-Stuart, Malleus Maleficarum, p. 92.