Historical Approaches to Child Witches

Abstract

“Historical Approaches to Child Witches” is a bibliographical survey of research literature related to children involved in witchcraft trials. The main emphasis is on children accused of witchcraft in the Early Modern period in Europe and colonial America. In addition, some references are included dealing with children as witnesses as well as victims in witchcraft trials. Bibliographical references to the topic of children who allegedly were possessed by the devil have not been included in this bibliography. Chronologically, children were accused of witchcraft throughout the period of witchcraft persecution. There were early cases from the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth where children were believed to be witches and were accused of witchcraft, particularly in Germany and Spain. However, the bulk of children involved in witchcraft trials are found at the end of the witch-hunt era, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this late era of the witch-hunt, we find several witchcraft panics, linked witchcraft trials taking place during a concentrated period of time, where children were involved, for instance in Scandinavia and in colonial America. However, the increasing tendency was that trials involving children were sent to courts of appeal, as the juries in local courts found these cases difficult. From the late seventeenth century, skepticism made itself felt as to the possibility of regarding witchcraft a crime, and courts of appeal acquitted many children accused of witchcraft. The notion that children were sacrificed to the devil by their mothers is presented already in 1486 in the demonological treatise Malleus Maleficarum by Jacob Sprenger (b. 1436–d. 1496) and Heinrich Kramer (b. 1430–d. 1505). The ideas about children possibly being witches were not discussed more thoroughly until Peter Binsfeld gave out his demonology in Trier in 1589. He argued for torture to be used to bring children below fourteen years of age to confess to witchcraft as well as for taking children’s denunciation of adults seriously. Ideas related to children being ensnared by the devil had by 1662 found its way even to the district of Finnmark in northern Norway. In a panic taking place in 1662–1663, the confessions contained notions about a pregnant woman carrying a devil, not a child, the devil fathering a child, the mother sacrificing her eldest daughter to the devil, and the impossibility for a family to get rid of the devil as soon as he had gotten a foothold in a family. As a select bibliography, the entries below are aimed to give information about research related to children in witchcraft cases all over Europe, in addition to the 1692 cases in Salem in colonial America.