Before authorities could prosecute a witch, they first had to identify a witch. With the early modern proliferation of witch hunting manuals, elite categorization of witches relied on an increasingly standardized vision of the crime of heretical and maleficent magic. A witch’s status, however, was not entirely prescribed on high by an ecclesiastical authority; rather, witches were often actively engaged in determining and defining their own identities. The early modern era witnessed a burgeoning of new social taxonomies that had few antecedents in pre-modern times. During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Protestants and Catholics pursued divergent paths in terms of their relationship with God, Church, and Scripture. This had major repercussions on their respective approaches to witchcraft. Similarly, witches, especially those who regarded themselves as such, cultivated identities establishing witchcraft as a skill or discipline in a self-affirming rather than self-denying way. Finally, more and more cohesive countries in this age of proto-nationalism developed identities for themselves that informed their perspectives on witchcraft, delineating not only physical and geographical but also social and cultural boundaries. By examining the growing importance of selfhood—either imposed by authorities or self-determined and actualized by the witch—within the context of larger politico-religious identity structures, a more compelling definition of the witch emerges.
The Protestant Reformation was undoubtedly one of the greatest social shifts of the early modern era. The ways in which Protestants and Catholics began to define one another—and themselves against one another—had a marked impression on their respective and increasingly selective definitions of witchcraft. Stuart Clark argues that the two faiths did not come to separate conclusions regarding the existence or nature of witchcraft but that each sought to accentuate particular aspects of witchcraft and downplay others. This discriminating method of identification followed a pattern that underscores Clark’s overarching thesis of inversion. Protestants recognized the individual as the integral mediator between man and God through faith. A personal relationship with and individual commitment to God developed into important tenets of the new Protestant creed. Consequently, when identifying the crimes of a witch, Protestants prosecutors tended to emphasize the witch’s pact with the devil as the most serious crime because it stood in stark opposition to the pact Protestants forged with God through faith alone. Rituals, traditions, and Church hierarchy distinguished the Catholic faith, and Catholic prosecutors usually stressed the sabbat, an inversion of the Catholic Mass, as the most heinous witchcraft act. Peasants and lay people, for whom witchcraft had been a largely pragmatic concern, were required to readjust their methods of dealing with witchcraft after ecclesiastical authorities conflated counteractive magic with the maleficent variety. The prescription for neutralizing the effects of witchcraft followed predictably identifiable patterns: Catholics employed rituals such as making the sign of the cross, performing exorcisms, or exploiting the power of saints’ relics, while Protestants utilized simple faith, prayer, and personal communion with God to ward off the influence of witches. In short, the different ways in which Protestants and Catholics dealt with witchcraft highlighted and served to identify their own doctrinal differences, and witches supplied a convenient Other against which selfhood, and the basic ideology of their faith, could be defined.
It is important to note that these are inversions that occurred within the Protestant fold. Clark recognizes two modes in which Christians demonstrated belief in the early modern period: 1) “church-type” Christianity, which included Catholicism, and after institutionalized reform under Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, mainstream Protestantism; and 2) “sect-type” Christianity, which existed within Protestantism but asserted its independence from any institutionalized control. The quintessential “sect-type” religion of mid-sixteenth century Reformation Europe was the Anabaptist denomination, which was open to attack from Catholic as well as established Protestant Churches. Anabaptists, for example, were persuaded by neither the hierarchy of the Catholic Church nor the systematized Protestantism of Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli (or Henry VIII for that matter) and instead identified themselves against the “demonic” rites of infant baptism and transubstantiation. According to Gary Waite in “Anabaptists and the Devil”, the radical sect viewed such ritualistic behavior as little more than demonic illusions and magical unrealities. Since the infant had not chosen to have faith in Christ, a trademark of Protestant belief, the holy baptismal water had no power at all and the belief that it did was equivalent to belief in magic. Similarly, the idea that the bread and wine of the Eucharist physically changed into the flesh and blood of Christ was little different, in the eyes of the Anabaptist, from necromancy or the transformative powers assigned to witchcraft. Alison Rowlands observes that, as far as Lutherans were concerned, it was superstition (which encompassed witchcraft) that constituted the primary concern. However, for the persecutors, both Protestant and Catholic, this self-identification mattered little. As Waite aptly notes, witches and Anabaptists were often prosecuted as heretical in the same court by the same judges in the course of a single week.
Thus far, this examination has only to pertained to how various religious groups identified themselves vis-a-vis witchcraft, but what of the self-identification of witches? How does one, now or in the early modern period, define what a witch actually is when it appears to be all things to all people or a convenient category in which to place one's enemies? Diane Purkiss contends that for many witches, this identification was self-affirming rather than self-negating. Through self-identification, witches not only became self-actualized by exerting power in one of the few arenas open to them, but also rehabilitated and redefined the meaning of witchcraft within their own communities. Since it was relatively easy for authorities to legally usurp power from these marginal peoples, co-opting the definition of a witch and defining themselves in this way served to empower peasant women in some small way. However, just as religious groups reaffirmed their own particular religious practices and self-identified by denoting their binary oppositions in witchcraft, members of the lay populace constructed oppositional models as well based on more familiar dichotomies. Much as it was the inversion of the Christian religion that provided the persecutory impetus of the elites, it was the inversions of the norms of peasant woman, mother, and homemaker that identified her as a witch by her peers.
Inversions of womanhood were steeped in the ancient medical traditions of Western science and being a woman in the early modern period could be defined as not being a man. The Aristotelian notion of “qualities” attributed “hotness/dryness” to men and “coldness/moistness” to women, and the lasciviousness of women was explained by their need to balance these qualities with the heat provided by male semen, thus perpetuating the stereotype of the woman (and witch) as prone to sexual promiscuity. Similarly, applying heat to a bewitched object could “unwitch” it. Motherhood also afforded a well-demarcated category against which one could define a witch, and Purkiss goes so far as to call the witch an inverted or “anti-mother". The life-giving milk from a woman’s breasts was believed, in the same Aristotelian tradition—reaffirmed by such luminaries as Isidore of Seville, Albertus Magnus, and the contemporary medical practitioner Jacques Guillemeau—to be purified blood, and the emanation of blood from the breasts revealed an impure woman. Expressing too much knowledge of an infant or child often engendered suspicion among others in a community. The trope of forbidden knowledge, of course, is common in the Christian tradition, hearkening back to Eve’s plucking the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, itself interpreted as a didactic tale on feminine weakness.
During the lying-in period following childbirth, the home acted as a macrocosm of the new mother who has recently made the interior exterior through the process of giving birth—her emersion from the home after the lying-in period may be construed as a metaphor in itself of her own birth into motherhood. The macrocosm/microcosm relationship, so important to Renaissance philosophy, may be extended to yet another level. The household was the smallest economic unit of early modern society and the nation was the largest, and just as the home’s threshold symbolized the point at which the interior became exterior, so too were a nation’s borderlands the point at which a social and ethnic group’s self-identification encountered the Other. This provided the context for persecutions in borderlands such as Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté. The proto-nationalism of this period became important for the identification of a nation, at this point a relatively new concept, and the “in-group” was understood to be everything within the geographic as well as cultural boundaries. Due to the Reformation and the Thirty Year’s War, Europeans realigned themselves along new politico-religious contours. Scotland, for example, according to Christina Larner, identified itself as a “godly kingdom” in which opposition to the witch comprised a necessity. Just as people identified themselves through religious and ethnic groups and against witchcraft, so too could selfhood be manifested in national identity.
Selfhood is an important concept that must be integrated into early modern notions of the witch, but we must be careful not to glean too much information from this: Authorities were not the only people with the power to define a witch. The lay populace, especially other women, often incriminated witches—Purkiss is quick to remind us that this contravenes the supposed misogynistic element of witchcraft, but surely gender played a role.Presumably, there were women who identified themselves as witches who escaped persecution, just as there surely were women who did not self-identify as witches yet were consigned to the stake or gallows. Clark’s “sect-type” religion, while neatly opposing “church-type,” does not fit into all binary oppositional models in that, if one is not convinced of the efficacy of a religion to begin with, one will certainly not be convinced of its antithesis or inversion. Scotland, despite being a model of national identity politics, represents an outlier in the witch hunts in that it is a Protestant nation that deemphasizes both the devil’s pact as well as the sabbat. The self is a concept that would not truly materialize until Enlightenment ideas diffused across the social and cultural landscape of Europe over a century after the worst of the witch hunts were over. In the context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we may describe it, in part, as purely relational--defined intrinsically by and through involved communities, whether within families, neighborhoods, or religious communities. However, by contextualizing the self within these larger arrangements, the concept emerges of the witch as an identity to be defined and an identity against which to be defined.
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