Skepticism, Science, and Superstition: The Decline of Witchcraft Trials in the Seventeenth Century

The height of the witch craze in Europe occurred between roughly 1560 and 1630, but the decline and eventual disappearance of witchcraft trials transpired in a much more disjointed fashion chronologically and geographically. Several historiographical explanations exist to account for this demise, and emergent cultural and intellectual trends throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provide a context through which to understand these changes. The rise of the mechanistic world view of Descartes, Newton, and others posed a problem for witchcraft because prevailing natural interpretations of previously unexplainable events established a schema into which witchcraft could not easily be assimilated. Greater religious toleration and the acceptance of religious pluralism in many places allowed diverse beliefs to coexist within the same social milieu and thus fears of witchcraft diminished. However, it should also be noted that although the trials themselves ceased, a general belief in witchcraft, especially among commoners, did not. This points to a gradual shift of the import that the notion and term “witch” carried in popular consciousness. The category and terminology surrounding the idea of the witch lost a great deal of cultural cachet during the seventeenth century among the elites in charge of its prosecution and devolved into broader associations with superstition. I intend to critique four historians’ approaches to the problem of witch trial decline and the growing gap between the elite opinion regarding witchcraft “superstitions” and the commoner continuation of belief largely devoid of its legal implications.

In his analysis of the decline of witchcraft, Brian Levack asserts that new legal safeguards and procedures regarding the prosecution of witches accompanied the edification and centralization of the nation-state. In keeping with his overarching thesis that the centralization of authority actually contributed to a decrease in witch trails and helped to restrain more zealous local authorities, Levack argues that new legal protections beginning in the early seventeenth century made it more difficult for authorities to prosecute for witchcraft. He cites four major changes contributing to a decline of witch trials: greater judicial centralization, limited or forbidden use of torture, greater necessity of evidence for conviction, and better legal defense allocated to those accused of witchcraft. According to the new judicial world view, far fewer people were actually capable of being witches. Skepticism grew among elites, but at first this skepticism did not extend to a belief in the authenticity of witchcraft. Rather, it entailed judicially specific skepticism of the efficacy of torture to extract true confessions and to greater doubt concerning the adequacy of evidence presented in the majority of trials. Even while authorities in the early seventeenth century grew more skeptical of the presence of a vast conspiracy of witches, its reality as a crime remained.

This new skepticism was accompanied by a redefining of the term “witch” to narrow its meaning and grant it less power. Johann Weyer, for example, distinguished witchcraft from “magicians, evil-doers, enchanters, and poisoners” all of whom might be charged with witchcraft by less discerning prosecutors. He explained witchcraft as a natural phenomenon and, through textual exegesis and linguistic analysis, claimed that the Biblical witch from the heavily quoted Exodus 22:18 did not directly correlate to those accused of witchcraft in the early modern era. Similarly, John Webster argued over a century later that witches were better classified as “Deceivers, Cheaters, Counteners, and Imposters” and that natural explanations could be employed to explain the persistence of these beliefs. A greater emphasis on natural explanations to describe seemingly supernatural events coincided with this growing skepticism. During the seventeenth century, the intellectual outlook of European elites inclined toward more empirical, materialistic, and scientific visions of the universe, and this has historically been regarded a common justification for the decline of witchcraft trials. There are two problems with this approach. One is that, according to Levack, the rise of this world view came several decades after the worst of the witchcraft prosecutions had already subsided. The other is that, within the time frame of the decline, the “scientific” world view embraced far more natural philosophies than simply the materialistic. Neoplatonism, for example, still exerted a great deal of intellectual influence as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it much more readily accommodated occult and esoteric ideas. Only the mechanistic weltanschauung would not incorporate witchcraft, and according to Levack, it had not yet ascended to prominence.

Levack acknowledges the problem of chronology and does not specify precisely when the trials came to an end, leaving a very broad time frame for decline—beginning in some places as early as 1600 and not in others until the 1670s. This implies not only that new scientific and philosophical ideas diffused at different rates in different regions but also that the abatement of the importance of witchcraft as a categorical notion depended largely on cultural factors in specific regions. In the case of England, for example, Marion Gibson contends that controversy surrounding particular witchcraft trials caused a hesitance to prosecute on the part of the judiciary. Gibson refers to J.A. Sharpe and recounts a more precise chronology than Levack, tracking skepticism via the decline of witchcraft pamphlets through the 1620s and 1630s. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, published in 1621, was the last until 1643. However, Gibson claims that the reduction of pamphlets led to a decrease in witch trials though it seems just as likely that declining elite interest in witchcraft hastened the demise of the pamphlet. From the chronological information provided, the two appear to have ebbed simultaneously. In either case, witchcraft simply did not hold the cultural or judicial currency for prosecutors it once possessed.

Owen Davies answers some of Gibson’s lingering questions in his acknowledgment of the fact that witchcraft declined at different rates in different geographical areas for distinct reasons. For Davies, the growing cultural divides between rural and urban spaces most greatly affected long term witchcraft trends. Particularly, the lack of an agricultural lifestyle in urban settings and different levels of contact with livestock may have had an impact on the subsiding trials. Davies attests to the utilitarian nature of the peasant version of witchcraft, noting that nearly half of all witchcraft cases in rural Surrey involved livestock and humans as opposed to less than a third in the comparable urban setting of Southwark, implying that rural accusations still revolved around the hexing or cursing of animals. However, this seems to be a broad assumption because Davies never defines the degree to which urban environs differed from their rural counterparts before the Industrial Revolution. A complete dichotomization of rural and urban settings had not yet occurred in the seventeenth century, and it would not be until industrialization that a substantial divorce arose.

The more convincing aspect of Davies’ argument is his contention that the constant flux of people in and out of cities comprised the greatest difference between rural and urban landscapes: families lived for generations in rural peasant communities whereas cities had a higher turnover rate of inhabitants. This lack of communal cohesiveness made it far more difficult for the type of internal feuds that oftentimes typified witch hunts. The idea that witchcraft ran in families lacked cultural significance in cities where multigenerational contact and continuity was not often the norm.

Davies is also very careful to note, as Levack and Gibson imply, that the decline in witchcraft prosecution does not necessarily indicate an absence of witchcraft belief. He notes numerous accounts of common witchcraft belief throughout nineteenth century England and in France, in one particular incident, as late as 1968. Of course, by this time the trials had long since subsided, and these existed as folk explanations of unusual activities devoid of illicit meaning. This pertains to physical objects as well. Horseshoes, for example, once held specific significance for witchcraft deterrence, but later seem to have dissolved into general superstitious belief. By the time dangerous witchcraft beliefs came to be regarded as innocuous superstitions by the elites, witchcraft prosecutions waned. Later elite contempt for the explanatory power of witchcraft likely contributed to the Enlightenment view of witchcraft as a simple superstition since this was the most immediate and contemporary form of belief educated elites encountered among common people.

Given that the concern for witchcraft diminished in the legal sphere throughout the Enlightenment, why was there a continued acceptance of witchcraft among commoners? It is possible that we see a return to pre-trial era modes of discourse about witchcraft, and the meaning that this term carried may have reverted back to "illusions and phantasms." While it may not have contributed directly to the decline in witchcraft trials, the “disenchantment” of the world throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost certainly contributed to a decline in the acceptance of witchcraft among the educated elite. Among the commoners, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra concurs with Davies and surmises that a more stable domestic life and a less precarious agricultural system affected witchcraft beliefs because misfortune no longer required a supernatural explanation. This was reserved for “personal” justification of events—beneficent experiences were attributed to God, whereas maleficent ones could still be blamed on witches. However, as the witch hunts decline, this had little bearing on “impersonal” explanations of the mechanistic, material universe.

In conclusion, it was largely the elite perception of witchcraft that underwent a substantial change throughout the seventeenth century. Peasant understanding of its nature continued as it had for generations while a growing skepticism, informed by new ways of thinking about the natural world, issued from elites. This change was gradual and not until science ceased to encompass occult ideas did a marked decline occur. In a sense, just as elites made the crime of witchcraft more serious in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they also made it less serious throughout the mid to late seventeenth. The shifting zeitgeist of the time period is reflected in the morphing terminology used to define and describe witchcraft, in the greater legal protection afforded to the accused, in the waning of pamphlet publications in England, and in increasing distinctions between rural and urban life. For these reasons, among others, witchcraft trials decreased throughout the seventeenth century.

Gender as a Causal Factor for Witchcraft within the Orbit of Early Modern Class Structure

Was gender a causal factor in the witch hunts? The question of causality is in some ways binary, and historians have aligned themselves affirming gender as a causal factor or denying it; but few historians are monocausal, and their answers to this question are far more cautious and nuanced. While this is a straightforward question, it has no simple answers. In posing the question at all, historians implicitly state the obvious: that the majority of those accused of witchcraft were female. If femaleness was a causal factor, how do we explain the fact that there were witches to be found among men? Conversely, if femininity was not a causal factor, why were so many witches women? Is class as important as gender, and if so, does class encompass gender? Certainly, from the raw data alone, the association between gender and witchcraft can be demonstrated, but correlation is not always causation, and we must examine the relationship between gender and the process of accusing a witch, especially the degree to which one informs the other, before we can understand causation. By scrutinizing the historiographical notion of gender as a causal factor, I intend to demonstrate that masculinity and femininity are both integrally important to understanding witchcraft, but only under certain social conditions within the larger configuration of class.

In his landmark work Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn integrates common and elite ideas of gender and convincingly argues that the archetype of a witch as a woman cut across class boundaries. However, according to Cohn, the reason that elites perpetuated this stereotype was because it was already so instilled in the peasant mentality that identifying women rather than men was expected. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that Cohn never explicitly states whether he regards class or gender as more important. Clearly, for the accused, femininity would be a great hindrance whether it conformed to the ideas of the peasant community or the elites in charge of prosecution.The question we must ask is which informed the other? Were the majority of witches women because elites were already persecuting mostly women or were women being persecuted by elites because the lower classes expected this? This is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand, Cohn is at least partially incorrect when he asserts that an elite prosecutor, for whom the conspiratorial and subversive acts of witches were of the utmost importance, was equally likely to deem a male or female a witch. Misogynistic elements permeate the Malleus Maleficarum and other witch hunting manuals, and educated authorities were armed with a tradition of medical knowledge, religious beliefs, and cultural assumptions that denigrated women as lesser than men in most ways. On the other hand, as elites became more involved with trials, their ideology of misogyny surely corroborated and reinforced already held beliefs. If the average peasant had already come to the conclusion that a witch was more likely to be female than male, he did so concurrently with authorities. It is unclear the degree to which class informed ideas about gender primarily because both upper and lower classes seem to have held similar ideas in the first place.

Perhaps we should rephrase our original question. Undoubtedly, gender is a contributing factor in understanding witchcraft, so we might instead ask how gender affected witchcraft and whether other forces overwhelmed it. Christina Larner judiciously answers the question of feminine causality in both affirming and dissenting terms. She claims that gender was a causal factor as evidenced by the fact that women made up the vast preponderance of witches but that it was not a direct or even the most important factor because they were persecuted for being witches, not women. In Larner’s own terminology, determining who was a witch was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” though she reminds us that early modern peasants and elites usually had women in mind. Larner explicitly states, in “Who Were the Witches?” that witch-hunting was woman-hunting or at least the hunting “of women who [did] not fulfill the male view of how women ought to conduct themselves.” However, she seems to answer the titular question of her essay “Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?” in the negative or at least renders the question moot, since the former incorporated the latter. All roses are flowers but not all flowers are roses. For Larner, women-hunting was always conducted under the auspices of witch-hunting.

Just as witch-hunting subsumes women-hunting, so too can class act as categorical architecture within which to position gender as a causal factor. Diane Purkiss asserts that the theory that witch-hunting was entirely the result of patriarchal dominance over women has been overblown by radical feminists of the twentieth century in their efforts to imbue their contemporary ideological struggles with historical antecedents. Purkiss maintains that most witches were executed not because they were women but because they were among the weakest of the lower classes. True, early in the witch hunts, upper class women such as Dame Alice Kytler had been accused and when witch hunts became particularly pervasive in one locale, persecutions tended to stride higher up the social ladder, but by and large, these were exceptions. Most women accused of witchcraft were very poor. It is no coincidence that in his encounter with witches, the devil often promised women monetary rewards and financial gain. And, in regards to the relationship between class and gender, it is telling that women accused of witchcraft were often not poor of their own accord but simply because they were married to poor men . Their poverty was a result of their class not their gender.


Class, it must be noted, was more than merely the separation between the elite authorities and the peasants. Social distinction existed within peasant communities and the relative lack of midwife accusations is another piece of evidence to support the notion that witch-hunting was women-hunting only within the confines of the lowest stratum of the peasant class. Jane Davidson has proffered ample evidence that women who were involved in healing practices were not culled from their communities as witches based on gender or occupation but, as upstanding citizens, they were largely immune from persecutions and even participated in the legal prosecution of witches. Cohn believed—perhaps understandably given the earliness of his contributions to modern witchcraft historiography—that midwives figured into the category of the accused, but Purkiss, Briggs, and Davidson, among others, have dismantled the myth that midwives were ever regularly accused of witchcraft. They have also attacked the idea that the witchcraze was an attempt by masculine medical authorities to keep women out of the profession of healing. Davidson denounces this theory by providing the example of Johann Weyer, an educated elite physician, who actually chided less educated (lower class?) physicians for resorting to witchcraft as an explanation for their medical mysteries. Nevertheless, to be fair, Weyer was a noted skeptic of witchcraft to begin with. This relationship in itself can be taken as evidence that class distinction, even among the elites, was important in regards to witchcraft accusation. Larner subscribes to the theory of masculine medical dominance in part, observing that in Scotland, laws were passed limiting the authority of midwives in medical matters, but she is careful to note that the major change in the status of midwives did not take place until well after the major witch hunts were over.

During the height of the witch hunts, midwives actually colluded with the authorities and aided in the search for the witch’s mark on the body of the accused at the behest of the male prosecutors whose Christian sensibilities prohibited them from doing so. By their very participation, midwives seem to contravene the idea that with-hunting was women-hunting, although, as Clive Holmes has argued, these women may have been purposefully reinforcing their conformity to the legal process by participating as witnesses. In either case, their social standing saved them and their gender did not condemn them.

The difference between gender and class may best be examined through the lens of the legal system. Larner claims that legal responsibility shifted from men to women during the early modern era. Whereas women were once the legal responsibility of their fathers and husbands, the new Protestant ethic of personal accountability made women more susceptible to direct attacks in court. E.J. Kent contends that the legal system worked better for males, and they tended to utilize the courts more often to resolve their disagreements. The male sphere of influence, even among lower classes, was much broader than females because their economic sphere extended beyond the household. For example, as Holmes documents, witnesses in witchcraft cases dealing with property were more likely to be men whereas those dealing with personal illness or death were more likely to be women. He also argues that, in spite of the fact that women participated in the process of identifying a witch, witch-hunting can certainly still be construed as woman-hunting because males were in control of this process the entire time. Arguably, it was mostly elite, wealthy men in charge of this process; lower class males simply used the system to their advantage.

Without a doubt, gender played a substantial role in the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, it may have played the most important role, but gender seems to have exerted itself as a direct causal factor primarily within the environs of the peasant class from which most witches were to be found. Elite and peasant conceptions of a witch may have been poles apart in most ways, but both tended to agree that a witch was more likely to be female. Historians have often remarked that elite prosecutors of witches developed their own feedback loop of expectation from witch confessions that reinforced already held beliefs. Some modern historians seem to have developed a feedback loop of their own, claiming that witch- hunting was woman-hunting because so many witches were women while simultaneously asserting that so many witches were women because women conformed to the feminine stereotype of a witch. Misogyny was a reality in early modern Europe, as was poverty. If gender were the sole or even most important causal factor, we would expect to see far more elite women being persecuted as witches. As a “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” crime, witchcraft corresponded to culturally inculcated archetypes of the non-virtuous woman, but encompassed a broad enough subset of crimes to include males as well. The fact that the vast majority of these men and women emerged from the peasant class goes a long way towards explaining the incorporation of ideas about gender within ideas about class.

Integrating the Process of Inversion into the Process of Othering in the Context of the Early Modern Witch Hunts*

*This essay is something of a synthesis of the previous two papers (and posts) on the degree to which witchcraft can be viewed (in terms of social anthropology) as inversion or othering. By inversion I mean, in the context of the witch hunts, that witches were "inverted" and regarded as exactly the opposite of whatever the accusers considered the prime example of perfection in their society. In early modern Europe, this tended to be some version of the "virtuous Christian, made more complicated by the fact that Protestantism and all its variations complicated that view after 1517. By "othering", I mean that accusers were defining witches against oneself and highlighting those aspects of an individual that most differentiated them from their accusers. The idea of the "other" has been a concept in psychology and philosophy for several centuries but was given its most modern (or postmodern) meaning by Edward Said, who applied it to peoples of the periphery - geographical, cultural, religious, etc. I have attempted to retain some of his definition. This essay is very postmodernist, even though I don't particularly consider myself a postmodern historian. Still, the terminology gives me a vocabulary to elucidate ideas that I otherwise would not have.

The issue of how to situate a person accused of witchcraft within the larger political, religious, and social structures of the early modern period constitutes one of the most important questions in witchcraft historiography. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these social structures were in the continuous process of defining and redefining themselves. Even the concept of “witch” was ambiguous and carried different connotations for people depending on their social distinction, religious affiliation, or national identity. What embodied a witch for an elite ecclesiastical authority was not always the same for a local peasant, but two elites of different religious persuasions or from disparate geographic locales did not always agree on definitions either.


Amidst these chaotic social conditions that so characterized the early modern period, many scholars have sought to understand the meaning of a witch in terms of the degree to which she either conformed to or diverged from social norms as recognized by both her socio-economic peers and superiors. Scholars have viewed the witch’s relationship with society in varying gradations of complexity as an inversion of social norms or as a convenient way for marginalized peoples to be “othered” by elites or commoners in their attempts to affirm a specific social, religious, or political identity. However, inversion corresponds to schemas far too binary and simplistic to yield knowledge about the diverse ways in which these marginalized peoples were regarded. The less dualistic notion of “the other” represents a more fruitful theoretical account of this multifaceted relationship. Rather than viewing the relationship of the witch to society as one of pure opposition, the concept of the other allows historians to determine how social groups distinguished witches by identifying the feature or features that set them apart from the in-group. It is my intent to recast inversion not as separate from othering but as an extreme version of the process and situate inversion within the greater dynamic process of defining the ideal Christian against the other.

How does one define the idiom of inversion? In the terminology of Stuart Clark, inversion is a reversal of the most exalted ideals of a given social structure or the construction of an oppositional model to the prevailing institutions. Clark has attempted to understand the relationship between the witch and society as an inverted one, in which the witch personified precisely the opposite of what was understood to comprise the ideal Christian. This binary relationship denoted the witch as a particularly odious and dangerous enemy of society. While this can be a useful conceptual framework in which to situate the idea of witchcraft, it does not take into account the convoluted manner in which early modern peoples defined a witch. The idea of a “good” and “bad” witch amounts to a value judgment that simply did not accord with the worldview. Certainly, as Christians, they subscribed to the notions of absolute good and evil, represented by Christ and Satan, but the functional nature of a witch, who had the power to both to cause and prevent harm, was also acknowledged by early modern commoners. All magic derived from Satan; therefore, even practically beneficial magic was evil because the process, not the result, determined its morality. This idea would later prove highly influential among witch hunters who, unlike the commoners they were persecuting, believed that all acts of magic emanated from Satan.

As several scholars have illustrated, most peasants did not equate witchcraft with Satan until the intervention of authorities, and these authorities only gradually came to accept this as an integral part of witchcraft theory. According to H.C. Erik Midelfort, seventy-five to one hundred years passed from the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum until the concept of the devil’s sabbat was integrated into the elite accusation of witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, and even after this time, some secular officials maintained the original distinctions of harmless magic and maleficia. For example, Alison Rowlands has described that officials in Rothenburg ob der Tauber may never have fully conflated witchcraft with other forms of magic and regarded the general problem with superstition as a greater threat than the specific problem of witchcraft. Lutheran skepticism of the active power of the devil, in this instance, may have significantly diminished the reality of the witch as other elites understood it, and condemned the more credulous commoners whose utilitarian exploitation of magic savored of heresy. Similarly, Joyce Miller argues that as late as the seventeenth century, Scottish courts tried “charmers” differently than they tried witches and the principal disparity was the lack of the demonic element in the former. However, the variation between Scotland and Rothenburg was that in Scotland, witches were punished more severely than charmers, whereas in Rothenburg, their persecution was less harsh. Christina Larner has pointed to the fact that the pact with the devil did not figure prominently in English witchcraft trials or laws in the mid-sixteenth century and that the Witchcraft Acts of 1542 and 1563 actually curbed its spread. These discrepancies can be attributed to religious and political idiosyncrasies of their respective regions and countries. The inclusion of Satan—who represents the most obvious inverted symbol of the Christian ideal—seems particularly important if we are to regard the relationship between the witch and society as an inversion. His absence, at least in these instances, makes othering a more viable option.

Gender also plays an important role in understanding the relationship between inversion and the other. The sexual dichotomy of male and female obviously provides the perfect context for inversion, and medically speaking, male elites often defined women as inverted men. Appropriate early modern gender roles were often confirmed by the process of accusation and confession itself. Some women seem to have intentionally asserted their identity as ideal Christian women by adopting submissive positions during interrogations and reinforcing their roles in society. However, as both Diane Purkiss and Christina Larner have explicated, this inversion did not extend to the social realm since it was extremely common for women to accuse other women of witchcraft. If othering requires degrees of similarity between accuser and accused, this type of witchcraft allegation epitomizes that process. For Purkiss, class and gender conflicts converge in these examples, and marginal women faced double jeopardy: inversion of the male perception of an ideal woman by authorities and othering in the context of the typical housewife or mother by her female peers. Given that women sometimes made accusations independently to settle personal scores and sometimes colluded with authorities, inversion and othering are further appended. Purkiss, however, is often imprecise with her terminology and seems to use “other” and “inversion” almost interchangeably. For example, while describing the typical responsibilities of a housewife, Purkiss uses language very similar to Stuart Clark when she depicts the inverted housewife as causing “utter disorder,” but then portrays the anti-housewife, a dual concept, as “her own dark Other who causes pollution where there should be order”. While she begins with inversion, her ideational structure reconciles with othering more effectively. Purkiss can certainly be forgiven for this muddled apprehension since the foremost problem in situating the witch within this tortuous cultural landscape is the relationship between the witch and her political, social, and religious positions. And perhaps, by combining the idea of othering with inversion, Purkiss is allowing the other to subsume the more simplistic nature of inversion.

In the inversion thesis, witches represent people who counter the ideal of the model Christian. In fact, they signify the exact opposite. How do we, perhaps imitating Purkiss, situate this within the concept of the other? The difference between inversion and otherness can be understood as degrees of complexity, but far from being separate representations, inversion seems to be a simplified subset of otherness. If inversion is a binary reflection of oppositional models of the perfect society or the perfect individual, we must take care to define not only the “inverted side” of the spectrum but the “ideal side” as well. The notion of witches as inverted Christians is confounded by the kinetic nature of political and religious social structures of the early modern period. What do we place opposite the inverted witch? The Reformation created various versions of the “ideal” Christian, and within both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, the “perfect Christian” would come to encompass different things. Protestants recognized the direct relationship between a Christian and God as an important component of faith, and they deemphasized the need for an intermediary between an individual and God, seeking to demonstrate that faith alone (sola fide) was necessary for salvation. Catholics, regarding the institution of the Church as that intermediary, denounced Protestants for this assertion. The relationship between the Christian and the Church can be interpreted as “inverted” in that Protestants and Catholics came to opposite conclusions concerning the power of the Church but, despite their differences, these Christian traditions still retained enough similarities to require more than simple inversion. According to Jean Delumeau, Protestants were not simply rebelling against Catholics or the institution of the Church, but both Catholics and Protestants were attempting, in their own ways, to reverse the trend of spiritual crises and decadence perceived in early modern spiritual life. A rededication to Christianity, by definition, included a repudiation of all non-Christian elements, perhaps witchcraft foremost among them.

Protestant and Catholics, amidst the backdrop of this Reformation and Counter-Reformation religious strife, could highlight their differences as evidence of “the other” more readily due to their general congruity. Since othering seeks to accentuate seemingly minor differences, the majority sameness between these distinct groups provides a context within which the ideal Christian can be situated. Clearly, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and proliferation of diverse sects within the Protestant world complicates the idea of the witch as an inverted Christian, since the definition of the ideal Christian loses all meaning when applied across religious and social groups.

There is historical precedent for this type of in-group/out-group fracturing, and the importance for early modern witchcraft persecutions may lie in an examination of the evolution of divergent sects within in-groups. Briefly, an in-group may be defined as a cohesive community with similar values and loyal members subscribing to them. An out-group conforms to different values that do not correspond to one’s in-group. Note that this does not necessarily presage an inverse relationship, as many in-groups differ from perceived out-groups only slightly, leading to a greater capacity for othering instead of inverting. To use a biological analogy, as in-groups drift and differentiate, speciation occurs and two out-groups with a common ancestor appear. Both Norman Cohn and Elaine Pagels have examined how this process transpires, and both have demonstrated that events in antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least in part, provided a template for later witch hunters to use in their persecution of witches.

It is perhaps ironic that Cohn, writing in the 1960s-70s, argued for continuity between the ancient world and the early modern witch hunts since his writings have been interpreted as a reaction to and a critique of Margaret Murray’s own theories of continuity. Cohn himself has undergone criticism for the fact that he has relied too heavily on elite sources at the expense of the peasants on which these sources comment. However, Cohn does not argue for a direct, continuous link between ancient persecutions of Christians and later medieval and early modern persecutions of witches. What he has stressed is that the pattern of these persecutions is similar enough to suggest common motives of social and political control. According to Cohn, long before these elite authorities were condemning commoners as practitioners of witchcraft, Romans were using virtually the same tactics. Specifically, Cohn has maintained that the early modern harassment of witches mirrors the ancient Roman condemnation of Christians, and just as the Romans accused Christians of crimes they surely did not commit, early modern elites were in turn charging witches with crimes that had no bearing on their actual behavior. This extreme singling out of one portion of society implies the existence of a cohesive and powerful in-group banding together against a weaker out-group. Cohn also detects a precedent for the persecution of witches not only in the ancient Roman persecution of Christians but in the treatment of more recently emerged sects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the Waldensians and Cathars.


The Waldensians were a sect of Christians originating in Germany and known for their piety and asceticism. Cohn writes that they remained unadulterated by non-Christian influences and that they were eventually charged with heresy because of their sympathetic view that Satan and his demons, which were expelled unjustly from heaven, would eventually be granted eternal salvation. Since the central authorities rejected the charge of devil-worship and instead emphasized their refusal to follow papal authority, the Waldensians clearly fit the model of an othering. What is even more interesting is the fact that Conrad of Marburg, who first circulated the accusation of devil-worship, seems to have had the intention of inverting them by ascribing to them a reversal of Christian in-group values. But what resulted was an othering since the Waldensians never deviated entirely from the Christian norm—they simply had the misfortune of being denied papal approval to preach. The rise in mendicant groups throughout the twelfth century prompted the papacy to limit their power at the Lateran Council of Rome in 1179 and forbade any new ones from forming at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Here again, inversion is situated within the wider process of othering.

The Cathars provide perhaps a greater challenge to incorporating inversion into othering, since their views were admittedly dualistic. And unlike the Waldensians, the Cathars were influenced by non-Chrisitian ideas, most notably from the Gnostic and Manichaean traditions. The Cathars believed in two deities: a creator of the spiritual realm (whom they identified with God) and a separate creator of the material realm (whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament and equated with Satan). Christian orthodoxy had assimilated dualism of good and evil into its doctrine, but since God had created Satan, evil was always subservient to good. In the radical dualism of the Cathars, good and evil were equalized and locked in eternal combat.


The nature of the Cathars’ beliefs provides a great template for Clark’s inversion thesis, but again we see a greater degree of othering than inverting. Whether people in the twelfth century believed the tales that the Waldensians or Cathars were engaged in devil worship is not the issue, and certainly Cohn believes the best evidence against this is that it is not mentioned in contemporary sources. What is at issue is the method of Cathar persecution, and the underlying motives behind it relate more to the expansion of French royal authority into the Languedoc region of southern France and the territorial expansion of northern French noblemen than to their supposed inversion of Christian traditions. Indeed, their disdain for the material world marked them as paragons of the Christian ideals of poverty, purity, and chastity—the very ideals they criticized the Church for not upholding. As we shall see, the contentious issue of state-control informs a great deal of modern historians’ understanding of the nature of persecutions. In short, Waldensians and Cathars began as internal threats which authorities attempted to stigmatize with inversion and evolved into out-groups distinct enough from Christianity, as far as the authorities were concerned, that they were othered.

There are earlier templates for this pattern as well. Elaine Pagels delves even further into ancient history in order to discover the nature of the other, and in her quest for the origins of Satan, she attempts to understand the development of a singular adversary, as opposed to multiple satans, within the milieu of the culturally diverse eastern Mediterranean. The Jews, who originally defined themselves as one cohesive group, witnessed a great deal of fracturing in the few centuries before Christ. Traditionally, Jews identified themselves in ethnic, political, and religious terms and clearly demarcated themselves from all “others” or the ha goyim. Among in-groups, Jews developed very distinct rituals to foster collective cohesion and distinguished themselves from non-Jews through practices such as circumcision and keeping kosher dietary laws. Greater contact with non-Jewish peoples following the inauguration of the Hellenistic era contributed on the one hand to greater solidarity among Jews in order to separate them from non-Jews but paradoxically more sectarianism as various Jewish groups assimilated ideas of other peoples.

Where “us” and “them” were once clearly defined, the propagation of these sects within Judaism—Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees—did not go so far as to create new out-groups, but rather produced in-groups within the greater in-group. At first glance, the Jews seem to have had a well-grounded conceptual framework to deal with exactly this. Rather than one singular evil embodied in Satan, they employed multiple satans or “adversaries” not consigned to one particular figure, and in the role of adversary, satans could actually be beneficial if they stood in opposition of one embarking on the wrong path or if they were employed through the will of God. The latter is exemplified by the story of Job, and here, the satan is clearly obedient to God. Why did the Jews not assign satans directly to those they wished to other? Undoubtedly, Jews clashed with one another over their sectarian differences, but identification with Israel took precedent over these squabbles in a way that Christians would not later emulate during their struggles with heterodoxy. Pagels may be insinuating that one of the most significant breaks between Jews and Christians in the first century was that for Jews the ethnic in-group still surpassed the ideological differences of its sects, whereas for Christians, ascription to the teachings of Christ, especially after the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, broke all ethnic barriers. Christians, following the Essenes, possessed a dichotomized mental architecture incorporating a singular Satan to whom enemies could be consigned. And as Christianity came to consist of more and more Gentiles after around 100 CE, what may once have been regarded as another Jewish sect, or in-group, soon developed an identity of its own, and came to view Jews as a new out-group ripe for othering.

Following the functional anthropological approach to witchcraft, Stuart Clark specifies that on a sociological level, the hunting of witches bonded a community against a common internal threat. This certainly seems to be applicable to the Waldensians and Cathars as internal threats to Christianity and the Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees as, at least originally, internal threats to Judaism. The Waldensians and Cathars may be regarded as internal threats to Christianity who differentiated themselves enough to be considered out-groups. Inversion breaks down when these internal threats become external out-groups, as these aforementioned sects appear to have done as they had more and more contact with authorities. Since othering appears when in-groups must accentuate minor differences, and charges of devil-worship did not succeed in convincing the authorities, the elites were required to rely on the heretical deviance of both sects. Inversion works better when employed to describe the social dynamics within an entire in-group, such as a peasant community, versus an out-group, such as another religious sect, ethnic group, or nationality. Clark’s inversion thesis is accompanied by the concept of misrule, a sort of “disorderly behavior” that exists to strengthen a social structure by subtly making a mockery of it. In the case of a peasant community, Clark implies that since witchcraft took on such horrific dimensions, the social structure of early modern Europe must have been especially entrenched and rigid. This implication is supported by Wolfgang Behringer who avers that the ruling elites solidified their power during the social and economic tensions resulting from the climatic changes wrought by the Little Ice Age. These elites were largely insulated from food shortages and inflation rampant in the lower classes and were even able to profit from this disorder. On the other hand, as many historians have vociferously argued, the degree to which authority was centralized in early modern Europe is open to question and certainly some places were more centralized than others. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, made up of an amalgamation of principalities—some Protestant, some Catholic—was not centralized politically or religiously during the height of the witch hunts. Behringer and Clark both suggest, however, that the lack of state-control over territory pales in comparison to the socio-economic control these elites exerted over the lower classes.

Finally, perhaps the most befitting area of study for a direct comparison and synthesis of otherness and inversion lies in the nascent nation-state and the emergent identity of people as belonging to particular cultural/ethnic groups. The imprecision of national borders and the fact that numerous populations resided in geographic locations that did not correspond to their own ethnic, cultural, or religious identities exacerbated the problem of witchcraft and contributed to the othering of people who lived, quite literally, on the physical margins of society. And it is surely no coincidence that borderlands between nations and regions where separate cultures, ethnic groups, and religions cohabitated often witnessed the most widespread persecutions. Particularly, the borders between Scotland and England; between France and the Holy Roman Empire in Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Lorraine; and the Basque region of the Pyrenees between France and Spain provide excellent case studies for the process of othering and the further subtending of inversion. It is also no coincidence that these were regions that either spawned the most celebrated and revered demonologists or allowed them to flourish: James VI hailed from Scotland, Heinrich Kramer was from Alsace, Nicolas Rémy from Lorraine, and Pierre de Lancre prospered in the town of Labourd in the Basque country.

We have already noted the marked lack of obvious inversion in the Scottish witch trials: there was no devil-worship, no pact with the devil, no eating of babies, and very few sexual orgies or other prototypical Continental witch ideals. Larner advocates the importance of the centralization of political control in Scotland as both a reason for heightened persecution of witches as criminals of the state and for the lack of demonological elements as a necessity. The capital offense of witchcraft in Scotland had become a crimen exceptum, or a crime that suspended the traditional procedural protection of the plaintiff in the interest of protecting the state from its enemies. Witchcraft, which had once been a solitary offense, came to be a crime against the state, and the “godly kingdom” of Scotland affirmed its national character by ferreting out those that did not fit this mold. Larner considers Scotland a prime example of early modern state-building, and Scotland’s self-identification with devout Christian principles, coupled with its adoption of some aspects of Roman law, allowed for especially efficient judicial prosecution of witches. Conversely, Brian Levack, though he acknowledges the importance of the growth of the Scottish state, alleges that it was precisely that legal and administrative infrastructure that allowed Scottish officials to rein in some of the more zealous local officials. In either case, as far as the average Scottish commoner was concerned, it likely did not matter where the persecutions originated and the records certainly indicate that, even though torture may have been less prominent in Scotland, the existence of witches was not.

In a very real sense, the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire were all borderlands. Local princes exerted almost complete control over their principalities independent of the authority of the emperor. Protestants and Catholics lived side-by-side in a much more integrated way than in many other places in Europe, and as we have seen, between Protestants and Catholics, othering was supremely important. William Monter has theorized, like Levack, that decentralized authority led to the most atrocious witch hunts. However, unlike Scotland, which had a central authority to control these outbreaks, the Holy Roman Empire’s lack of centralization contributed to one of the most brutal witch hunts in all of Europe. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Catholicism and Protestantism become more ensconced in the areas where they were proscribed, and the purposeful creation of a more religiously homogeneous society generated conditions that made it more difficult to point out witches since the state had supposedly succeeded in forcing religious conformity, thus negating much of the power of othering. Perhaps it is no coincidence that major witch hunts in the Holy Roman Empire, and across Europe, began to decline in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

It has not been my intention to argue that inversion did not exist in the conceptualization of the crime of witchcraft in the early modern era—merely that it provides only a starting point from which to understand the more intricate relationships between the witch and the social, religious and political arrangements of the day. Inversion is obviously a useful construct, but its definitive categories do not easily accommodate non-binary modes of discourse or take into account the evolutionary nature of early modern mentalités. What may start out as inversion within an in-group can morph into a more variegated othering as in-groups transform into new out-groups. Because of these labyrinthine correlations, it is incumbent upon the historian to restructure his frame of reference to incorporate inversion into the broader system of othering.

The Witch and the Self: Imposed and Self-Actualized Identity in Early Modern Witchcraft

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.

Inversion and Convergence in the Formation of the Early Modern Witch Cult: A Construction and Deconstruction of Binary Opposition

Because it's October, and Hallowe'en is just a few weeks away, I think this would be the perfect month to post another series of writings on witchcraft. As many of you may know, I'm mildly obsessed with the history of witchcraft. My graduate writing sample, which has been posted here previously, was a comparison of the legal status of witchcraft and astrology in Western Europe between 1400 and 16oo and I am currently enrolled in a class on the social history of witchcraft in a global setting (primarily the greater Atlantic world). It's been just extraordinary so far, reinforcing the knowledge I had prior to enrollment in this course and clearing away a lot of erroneous information I had on the topic. In general, this class has elucidated for me just how complex witchcraft was and that it doesn't fit into too many molds that we as moderns can foist upon the past. I think I had a common misconception of witches entering this class: that they were simple scapegoats of society, upon whom any problem could be blamed, especially those problems that had no easily identifiable culprit (bad weather, dying crops, etc.); that this was an attempt by oligarchic male authorities to keep women in their socio-economic places; that witchcraft manuals such the Malleus Maleficarum were the most important factor in the identification, prosecution, and execution of a witch, and so on. But at least from what we've read in class, these seem to be the cases in some circumstances, but not in many others. For one thing, most of what I had read prior to this class focused mainly on the elite conceptions of witchcraft at the expense of what common people actually believed. I also, perhaps, focused a but too much on witchcraft as only a crime, when in fact many women (from folk-healers to simple charmers) actually believed themselves to have the power that they were later accused of. In any case, over the next month, leading up to Hallowe'en, I plan on writing five or six posts, based on the writings I've done in this class on various aspects of witchcraft such as the construction of the belief in early modern witch-cults, the structure of witchcraft accusations amidst the backdrop of the Reformation, the concept of inversions and subversions of societal norms versus the scapegoating instinct or "othering," gender as a causal factor, why the witch hunts subsided, and why European ideas jumped the pond to New England. Since these are modified versions of what I wrote in class, they might occasionally not make too much sense without the context. These are largely historiographical writings, critiquing and analyzing historians and their own writings on witchcraft. I'll try to include at least some hyperlinks that clarify where these historians stand on the issues on which they comment. So, here's the first of a few posts on various aspects of witchcraft in world history:

Perhaps the most contentious issue in the historiography of witchcraft is the question of its origins, and it is impossible to discuss these origins without examining the notion of the witch cult in both its elite and peasant conceptions. This dichotomous relationship is key to understanding how the persecutions unfolded. The literate, ecclesiastically and judicially powerful elite, beginning in the late fifteenth century and culminating in the most intense persecutions between 1570 and 1630, envisaged witchcraft primarily as a crime against God and the Church. It began with a pact with the devil, included a subversive sabbat and a denial of the Christian faith, and gave the witches, through the devil, a variety of maleficent magical powers. However, for the average non-literate peasant in late medieval and early modern Europe, the witch inhabited a very different reality. Peasants, among whom the vast majority of witches were to be found, were far more distressed by the practical harm that could befall them if witches succeeded in conducting this magic, and the origins of this power were of little concern compared with the need to stop it. Thematically, Simpson, Midelfort, Clark, Pócs and Ginzburg emphasize the importance of these oppositional models in constructing a dynamic view of the relationship between a witch and society. For some, it is a merger of these schemas that produced a cohesive premise upon which elites and peasants could agree. For others, it is the differentiation and edification of these binary oppositions that constitute the raison d’être for persecutions in the consciousness of both elite and peasant classes.

This begs several questions. When persecutions started from below and were initiated by peasant communities, how important was the witches’ sabbat at all in identifying and demonizing a witch? Conversely, when the elite authorities were at the helm, how did peasants respond to the idea of a sabbat? Did they respond at all? Each scholar comes to distinct conclusions. I will argue that the structuralist theory of binary opposition—demonstrated especially by the peasant/elite, social/antisocial, order/disorder, and Christian/un-Christian dichotomies—serves as a mold for understanding the subversive and antagonistic models in which witches were situated. In considering this oppositional nature of the witch, the aforementioned scholars have constructed the idea of the witch by defining and delineating these oppositions or by deconstructing and merging them entirely.

The dichotomy of peasant versus elite conceptions of witchcraft and the existence of a witch cult is best evinced by the sabbat. Sabbats included promiscuous and indiscriminant copulation with other witches and the devil himself as well as a wide range of other reprehensible activities regarded as perversions of the Christian faith. The sabbat, along with the pact with the devil, formed the backbone of the heretical harassment that defined authoritarian witch hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, according to H.C. Erik Midelfort, most peasants in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where the largest witch persecutions occurred, had no conception of the sabbat, the pact with the devil, or any other activities designating a witch in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities. He contends that the lay populace had to be coerced into believing that these were legitimate threats. The peasant population regarded witchcraft as a communal crime since the witch, through acts like crop destruction and weather manipulation, disrupted the shared life of the community. With authoritative input from the elites, witchcraft was oppositionally reconstructed as a solitary offense against God and by association the Church—the better to track down and single out individuals for the crime. In a sense, these authorities made the terrestrial witch phantasmagorical by inserting demonological elements into common witch cult structure. Éva Pócs, by contrast, disagrees and argues that peasants, at least in Hungary, did have a notion of the witches’ sabbat independent of these authorities, though it was decidedly different. Here, if the persecutors had an impact, it was in converting the phantasmagorical, which for the peasant was the “alternate world” of the witches’ sabbat existing in another dimension, into a dangerously real terrestrial occurrence. In both cases, we see oppositional models tuned on their heads in order to merge what were heretofore incompatible visions.

Stuart Clark addresses this chaotic restructuring directly and is the most binary in his construction of the witch cult. He sees the inversion of social norms and the idea of “misrule” or “disorderly behavior” on the part of the witch at the very heart of the witch cult. For Clark, the elite understanding of the sabbat assigned to witches certain ideals diametrically opposed to the Church and Christian faith, and the idea of the witches as demon-worshiping, illicit magic using criminals served to define them as and confine them to the out-group of society. Witch cults were not “bad” because they somehow subverted society but because they supplied an exact reflection in reverse of how a healthy Christian society should function. Thomas Aquinas had centuries earlier addressed the problem of evil in a similar fashion by affirming that evil exists because without it, good would have no reason to assert itself. Clark points to the prefiguring of a witches’ apostasy in the religious example of demons themselves, who in the Christian tradition are fallen angels. And, as an historical example contemporaneous with the height of the witch hunts, he cites James I of England, who remarked that to understand something, one must first understand its opposite. This is not simply a “know-thy-enemy” mentality but an interpretation of the evil of the witch cult as anything diametrically opposed to the supreme good as displayed by the Christian religion, the Church, and the elite secular powers.

Even Margaret Murray, whose scholarship is rightly questioned, emphasized that since witches were accused of causing impotence and destroying crops, this must be an inversion of what were once the opposite rites of a fertility cult. Jacqueline Simpson plays devil’s advocate to an extent and argues that the much maligned Murray, despite her failings as a scholar, attempted to form a middle ground in early twentieth century witchcraft historiography by reconciling the credulous religious viewpoint that the supernatural witch cult was a reality with the skeptical rationalist denial of its existence at all. These uncritical supernaturalists tended to accept the statements and records of prosecutorial authorities at face value. This included the Reverend Montague Summers, an English translator of the Malleus Maleficarum, who by and large believed the very words he was translating represented an accurate account of the witchcraft culture on which it commented. By asserting that witches did engage in religious acts harkening back to an ancient fertility cult but that these acts were not in any way supernatural, Murray attempted to understand this inversion as evidence of a widespread European witch cult dating back to ancient times. Murray contends that the crimes of witches—causing impotence, the destruction of crops, the conjuring of bad weather—were really inversions of their true intention in these fertility cults.

A post-structuralist might ask where this opposition contravenes itself and important questions certainly arise with this model. If Clark’s misrule can be considered a “mockery” or “parody” and necessary to reaffirm the existing social structure, why did witchcraft take on such a heinous form rather than a more benign festival of inversion like Saturnalia in which Roman masters served their slaves? Clark contends that misrule strengthens or subtly protests a social structure; therefore, the power structure in late medieval and early modern Europe must have been especially well established and inflexible. Ginzburg offers a more deconstructionist interpretation of these oppositions and demonstrates a major contradiction in this idea of inversion: it has explanatory power only insofar as the elite viewpoint is concerned because many of those involved in perceived witch cult activities regarded themselves as acting on behalf of Christ. Like Pócs, Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of merging extant peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created a homogeneous prosecutorial classification. For Ginzburg, this amalgamation of ideas is best epitomized by the benandanti, an agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy, who regarded themselves not as an inversion of the social norm but as a weapon on the side of Christianity against the evil forces of witchcraft. It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they were attempting to exterminate.

Pócs and Ginzburg, however, fall into Murray’s trap of selective narrative and they both rely too heavily on narrow case studies to demonstrate any pan-European explanation of why witch cults represent either inversions of social norms or conflations of elite and peasant ideas. Pócs’ thesis may be true of Hungary in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and Ginzburg’s of Friuli during the height of the witch craze, but they both examine only a microcosm of witchcraft beliefs. Clark is more a literary critic than a documentary historian, and his inflexible division of witchcraft into black and white bifurcations obscures and disregards its dynamic complexities. Midelfort is more promising if only because his thesis rests on a study of the geographic locus of the largest persecutions. In any case, the exploration of the meaning of the witch cult in terms of the construction and deconstruction of binary oppositions is a hardy formula for understanding the inversions and mergers of it ever changing nature.

Potential Paper Topics

I thought I'd go ahead and throw out some paper topics that have been rattling around in my mind for the past few weeks. One of the biggest differences between being an undergraduate and being a graduate student is in the amount of writing that is required of you. In sense, we have less writing, considering that we have fewer total papers to write than undergrads, but of course the papers that we are required to write are thirty, forty, fifty pages, not counting the thesis, which we are theoretically supposed to be working sporadically on for the next two years. The big project for my historiography class is a paper comparing the differences in method, theory, and approach to historical writing of two historians, examining especially how their own historical time periods shaped them and how their biases or their their time periods' biases shine through in their works. Our professor encourages any historical comparisons, but the idea of the project is to compare a historian that we've actually read in class with someone in whom we're personally interested. He also advocates choosing historians that belong to different historical eras and different nationalities as this highlights national as well as periodizational comparisons. In any case, most of the class seems to have settled on a topic and while I haven't exactly, I have a couple of ideas that I feel merit further exploration:

A Jungian Analysis of the Archetypal Hero in Eusebius' Life of Constantine and Einhard's Life of Charlemagne

To me, Eusebius and Einhard, though they don't demarcate any bookends in terms of historical writing, both write about figures who did bookend a historical period that truly demonstrates the emergence and culmination of the Christian Romano-German synthesis and the creation of a distinct European culture. Eusebius certainly belongs to the ancient world even if he was a Christian writing for a primarily Christian audience, and, like Augustine and Jerome, he certainly bridges the gap between ancient and medieval: he relies on the rhetorical style of writers like Cicero but is philosophically grounded in Christian thought (though, interestingly, he held a moderate position between Orthodox and Arian Christianities). Einhard is certainly a typical medieval chronicler but by virtue of his proximity to the Emperor Charlemagne, he had recourse to write about a man who was arguably the most powerful Christian ruler on the Continent since Constantine. Many scholars, Henri Pirenne, Alouis Reigl, and notably the inimitable Peter Brown, have remarked that the tripartite periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras is obviously simplistic and does not account for the transitional politico-religious realignments, but replacing these ossified categories is a difficult task even for the most of eminent of historians. Brown argues for the use of a "bridging" period between the 2nd century imperial crises and the Islamic conquests through the 8th century. Norman Davies, in his monumental general history Europe divides the ancient (Roma) and medieval (Medium) periods with his Origio on the cultural birth of Western civilization rising from the ashes of the Greco-Roman world, and it is telling that he dates this period from 330 (the founding of Constantinople) to 800 (the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor). In any case, politically, Constantine and Charlemagne provide convenient markers on either side of the "late antique divide" that one could point to as cohesive Christian polities unifying vast culturally and ethnically diverse landscapes, the latter consciously modeling on the former. In terms of the historians who wrote on these figures, I'm interested in looking at the archetypal models on which Eusebius and Einhard based their "characters" of Constantine and Charlemagne and whether or not, for example, they used Biblical precedent and/or the ancient Greco-Roman biographers of the kings, consuls, and Caesars (Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.) Since Jung himself compared the idea of "archetypes of the collective unconscious" to the Platonic world of forms, it seems fruitful to also examine the impact of Platonic thought on these compositions, especially because Eusebius was likely familiar with his work and Einhard was not (I'm actually not sure of this supposition; it's just an educated guess).

Pirenne and Brown: The Problem of Periodization in Late Antique and Early Medieval Historiography

Following the aforementioned difficulty in historiographical periodization, another related topic which very much interests me is that of the origins of the Middle Ages. This may strike any casual reader as a purely academic debate (and it is), but it is certainly important from a historiographical standpoint insofar as it is the in this period that what think of as Western civilization is really born--a messy combination of Roman law and institutions, Germanic and Latin-based languages, Germanic customs, and the Christian religion. The traditional date for the beginning of the Middle Ages is often marked as 476, the year of the deposition of the ironically named Romulus Augustulus and the end of the Roman Empire as completely independent from Germanic kings. In most general history books, the Middle Ages typically starts ca. 500 because it is a nice round number and because the year 500 in much of Europe is certainly quite different politically from the year 400 or any other "round number" from this era. Two historians have been at the forefront--one in early 20th century and one in mid to late 20th century--of a movement to change this traditional view. Brown, who I have mentioned, is among the popularizers of the "Late Antquity" model, positing a distinctly different time period between the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the Islamic conquests and reorganization of Europe into feudal kingdoms. Pirenne, who wrote earlier, was among the first historians to really challenge the 18th and 19th century enlightenment/positivist viewpoint of the Middle Ages as a dark time in Western history with little to no progress of any sort. The famous Pirenne thesis argues that the true beginning of the Middle Ages is not until the late 8th century after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia cut off Europe from the major trade routes of the Mediterranean, and Pirenne gives ample evidence of continued trade throught the 6th and 7th centuries when merchants and traders saw their life change little and in some instances may have actually seen improvement. Both these points of view are endlessly debated and considering that both these historians challenge long held tenants of Western historiography, I think a comparison of their approaches to defining the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval would be interesting.

The Church and Science: Late Twentieth Century Reassessments of the Draper-White Conflict Thesis of Medieval Science

This is the paper I'm currently leaning towards. This is a topic that has really driven my historical interest in the Middle Ages for the last couple of years, and I think it is among the most current and important modern issues in the historiography of science. I've written about the debate elsewhere and won't get into the details. Suffice to say, from a historiographical standpoint, this debate is very applicable to our current cultural climate where science and religion are pitted against one another as mortal enemies. The 19th century in general is such a bipolar age with regards to this topic in that the century saw both the rise of secular education and the belief, especially among European intellectuals, that empirical rationalism would soon supplant religious faith. It is also important to note that the late 19th century also witnessed the birth of Christian fundamentalism as we know it today. Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper both wrote of the great war raging between science and religion and of the modern triumph of enlightenment ideas over the superstition of the Middle Ages. It would take nearly a century for modern historians such as David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers to really argue against this viewpoint. It is certainly still very much popularly believed to be the case today. If I do end up writing on this topic, I'll be sure to post my research.

On Organizing a Personal Library

"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."

~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

Despite the fact that I have been reading regularly since I was five or six and have been collecting books since I was at least a sophomore in college, I have never really sat down to organize my library or really put much thought at all in to how I arrange my books. Up till now, it's mostly been an issue of aesthetics, arranging books based on how well they looked on a particular shelf in a particular room; or on logistics, fitting an ever growing number of books onto ever shrinking shelf space. This may surprise some people since I tend to be a compulsive list-maker and categorizer, but I am, in general, an unorganized person, so developing a really well-planned-out library has never been at the top of my to-do list. It's been nearly three years since I have had all of my books in one location, and even when I did have them all together at my parents' house, the structure of the house was not terribly conducive to getting all of them in one place and shelving them on the basis of subject. Unfortunately, I was not able (nor really willing) to transport all of my collection from Indiana to South Carolina and ended up bringing down a little over a third of the books I own. I haven't been so anal as to count every book I own in two or three years, but at last count I had just short of 1600 and I'm sure I've accumulated at least another hundred since then. God bless Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop in East Lansing for providing me with an inexpensive, relatively wide array of books from which to choose. For obvious reasons, the books that made the cut are primarily non-fiction humanities and social sciences. Some major books left behind include almost my entire science fiction collection, most of my general and classic fiction and poetry, and even a fair amount of history not germane to my focus, such as the many general histories of the United States and World War II now whiling away in storage at my parents' house. It's always a tough decision to make, but after heaving the tenth or eleventh enormous box of books onto and off of the U-Haul I felt vindicated in leaving behind Page Smith's eight volume People's History of the United States and three years worth of Asimov's Science Fiction magazines.

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

So the real question is, how does one arrange a personal library? Using an existing method, such as the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress? The way a bookstore would arrange by genre? Or something a little more personal that really underscores my own mental arrangement of information? I opted for the personal, since I feel a library is at best a material representation of one's education and knowledge base, but with some important advice from the previous tried and true systems. For one thing, it doesn't make too much sense to use, say, the Library of Congress system to the letter when the vast majority of my books fit into only a few of their categories. Something much broader, but also more specifically tailored to my collection is important. I'm probably making this sound like it was a lot bigger an ordeal than it actually was, but I have to admit that I spent a fair amount of time staring a the stacks of books scattered about the floor completely flabbergasted as to how I was going to arrange all of these on the limited bookcases I possess.

"Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. "
~John Lyly

First off, I essentially eliminated anything that did not fit roughly and broadly into the categories of history, political science, philosophy, religion/mythology/folklore, science (mostly human perspectives on), language, and psychology from the equation. About 95% of all the non-fiction I own can be categorized as such, and I used them as my macro-categories. Anything not in those categories went to the miscellaneous shelf in our bedroom. I arranged philosophy and religion together partially because I think they are (or at least can be) facets of the same inquiry but also because Clemson groups them both into the same academic department and because many of the philosophy books I have are on the philosophy of religion. Mythology and folklore are in the same bookcase buffered by psychology, as most of the psychology books I own pertain to an exploration of the collective unconscious, Jungian and non-Jungian, and the greater sociological factors related to cultural anthropology and group psychology. I have about a shelf's worth of language studies, mostly dictionaries and grammar books for French and Latin, but also a few works in these languages as well as Spanish and Italian dictionaries, a book on defunct ancient writing systems, several histories of the English language, and most of Kirsten's books on speech-language pathology, audiology, and communicative sciences and disorders. Political science was a difficult one to arrange, primarily because I have just enough to justify its having its own section, but not so many that it really distinguishes itself. I opted to include it as sort of an addendum to history, as I see it as related in the way that psychology is related to mythology, but I'm not terribly happy with its location and may change it in the future. History was paradoxically the easiest and the most difficult. It was easy, in that I arranged them chronologically by subject matter, but difficult in that it is by far the largest section and took me a long time to decide how to integrate primary sources and very specific topics that cover long periods of time not related to any particular chronological era (histories of witchcraft and astrology being the primary examples). It was also difficult to decide how I wanted to incorporate ancient and medieval authors. Do I put Plato and Aristotle in with philosophy or ancient history? If ancient history, do I put them in chronologically with all the secondary sources or do I group all ancient writers together in their own subsection? Needless to say, I put a fair amount of thought into what, in reality, are mostly trivial matters.

"Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh."
~Judah Ibn Tibbon

It probably sounds like I have a lot more books than I actually do after going through all of that. As I mentioned earlier, only a fraction of my books made it down from Indiana. I think somewhere slightly over one-third, or between 500 and 600 are here, so I may be a bit overzealous in calling it a "library". But Alcuin of York's library at the court of Charlemagne in the early ninth century, the envy of many a medieval scholar, reputedly had only a few thousand texts and the far flung monasteries at Jarrow and Lindisfarne even fewer and they were no less important to their owners. Perhaps one day when we own a house or at least have a larger study/office/library and I have a stronger back, I'll get all of them in one place finally. For now, I'm pretty content with what we have arranged. And, being in graduate school, I've already accumulated somewhere in the vicinity of thirty new books just in the month we've been here in South Carolina, and I'm sure that number will continue to grow. Happy reading all!