Historians and witches

Abstract

We have come full circle. If the witch craze of the early modern period can tell us anything, then it is about the power of fantasy. But to truly locate such fantasies historically, we need to explore the sets of cultural fantasies of which they formed part. Stories about cannibalistic witches, for instance, did more than explain how witches caused harm. It is no coincidence that a society as exercised as was early modern European society about the nature of the Eucharist was it really Christ's body and blood? or did the bread and wine merely represent his body? was it a kind of cannibalism, then, to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Saviour? should have developed fantasies about the killing and eating of children's flesh. Such tales have a long pedigree. We meet them in the accounts of the alleged ritual murder of Christian children by Jews, which enjoyed such popularity in southern Germany, particularly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. But the fantasies of witchcraft are not only derived from religious images. Nor are they exhausted by the study of relations between mothers and babies. A history of witchcraft must take seriously the question of why it was above all women who were the victims of the witch craze. It must also consider the rural culture in which the persecutions thrived. Witchcraft made sense within an agrarian society, deeply anxious about fertility in the natural as in the human world. We need to think not just about witches' attacks on infants and children, but about their attacks on horses, pigs and cows. We need, odd as it may sound, to think about the psychic significance of animals. And we need to relate people's emotional terrors to what it meant to farm in early modern Europe. Only then can we begin to grasp the force of the attack on fertility as a whole which witchcraft represented the destruction of animals, crops, and the Christian community itself.