Concerning “Witches and Witchbusters”: Interdisciplinary and International Co-operation

Abstract

In her article Witches and Witchbusters in Folklore 107 (1996) Jacqueline Simpson drew attention to trials and early modern witch-beliefs as a topic of folklorists. Her statement that wherever communal fears and fantasies are involved there is a place for the folklorist alongside the historian and the anthropologist can only be appreciated. The source materials are too manifold and too interesting to be neglected by either school. After Simpson's discussion of books about prosecution in Italy, Corsica and the Balkans I feel encouraged to give a brief review of books that deal with the folklore of early modern hunts in their centre: Germany. German ideas about witchcraft were - and probably are - different from British ones. By the end of the sixteenth century at the latest, German secular and ecclesiastical courts had accepted the demonological pattern of witchcraft. Explicitly renouncing the Christian faith, having sexual intercourse with demons, and flying through the air to nocturnal gatherings can be found in almost all the 40,000 German trials. The local courts often used torture without control or limits, restrictions imposed by imperial law (the Peinliche Halsgerichtsordnung of 1532) were widely ignored. This is the Continental paradigm of witchcraft and trials in its most pronounced form. Germany the mother of so many as the advocate Friedrich Spee called his fatherland, was clearly different from England and Wales. But, as Simpson pointed out, folk belief and learned theory intermingled in the trials themselves. Demonology became part of folklore and folklore part of demonology. Furthermore, for the vast majority of peasants and uneducated townspeople in Central Europe as well as in Britain the main feature of the was always her use of maleficient magic, not her apostasy. Therefore, there could and should be comparative studies concerning folk beliefs about witchcraft and their relation to demonology in Britain and on the Continent. German historical research has become more and more aware of the fact that prosecutions cannot be understood without taking into account folk beliefs current at the time. Wolfgang Behringer has edited sources that show fairy-beliefs at the very beginning of witch-beliefs. The German word for witch, Hexe, originally did not name a human being, but an elvish spirit, whose irrational malevolence was transferred to human witches or, as German sources often call them, Unholde, meaning the ones that are not good/beautiful. Both elements of folk belief remained closely related to each other: adopting demonology in German trials often meant nothing more than calling fairies, ghosts and poltergeists witches or devils. The influence of folktales and legends on witches' confessions is obvious. Behringer gave a detailed account of a trial against a Bavarian witch buster in which popular ghost beliefs and elements that Ginzburg would probably label shamanistic played a crucial part. The nineteenth-century rationalist concept of Soldan, who regarded trials simply as criminal proceedings without crime (Strafprozesse ohne Straftat) has long been put aside. New local or regional studies integrate witch-beliefs in the bigger and more complicated structure of everyday magical practice and magical worldview in which the devil was just one of many magical agents. Irsigler and Schwerhoff gave accounts of urban folklore and magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cologne. In some German lands trials were organised by peasant communities and townspeople without, or even against, aristocratic officials and governments. As Labouvie, Rummel and Becker point out, popular witch-beliefs were not only widely accepted, but formed the basis for large prosecutions organised by groups of peasants. …