Abstract
Long before the prosecution of individuals for witchcraft was rendered a legal impossibility in the states of modern Europe, the judicial and executive institutions of those states and their precursors were decisive in both legitimating and moderating, facilitating and constraining the detection, trial, and execution of alleged witches. If we are to impute more than unresolved cognitive dissonance to this paradoxical relationship of the apparatus of state to the perceived reality and threat of witchcraft, then the preconditions and contextual factors predicating that relationship bear investigation. This paper identifies genealogical traces of criminological, political, social, and religious thought embedded within several pivotal bodies of early-modern law pertaining to witchcraft, and attempts to infer the cultural, institutional, and textual sources and conditions from which they derive.
Highlights
It has been convincingly argued that, in many instances, it was the institutions of the centralized state that moderated and restrained the prosecution of witchcraft in early modern Europe, even long before the legal grounds for such trials were and decisively rescinded (Behringer. 1996: 89; Bever, 2008: 392-7; Levack, 1996: 101-3)
These observations are immediately confronted with the fact that it was the legislative bodies of state who were responsible for producing the very laws which legitimated the witch trials and made them – at least sometimes – possible
The question posed by this apparent paradox, is: what made those laws possible? How did ordinances prescribing the torture and execution of individuals for sorcery fit into a legal framework integral to the rational, bureaucratic – even skeptical – apparatus of early modern governmentality? What kind of intellectual culture determined and legitimized the legislative and jurisprudential response to witchcraft? This paper will seek to explore the ideological, social, and political contexts that produced some of early-modern Europe’s most influential, or at least most representative, legal texts relating to witchcraft
Summary
It has been convincingly argued that, in many instances, it was the institutions of the centralized state that moderated and restrained the prosecution of witchcraft in early modern Europe, even long before the legal grounds for such trials were and decisively rescinded (Behringer. 1996: 89; Bever, 2008: 392-7; Levack, 1996: 101-3). In Württemberg for instance, by the middle of the seventeenth century the state, in the institution of the Oberrat, was attempting to closely monitor and regulate, through a relay of reports and instructions, how district courts conducted their criminal cases, and in witch trials reserving the right of final judgment for itself (Bever, 2008: 351, 394). These observations are immediately confronted with the fact that it was the legislative bodies of state who were responsible for producing the very laws which legitimated the witch trials and made them – at least sometimes – possible. Ian Bostridge (1996: 310) has suggested that “...the belief of an individual is often... conditioned by the discursive resources available to that individual.” If the historical evidence of witchcraft legislation can be interpreted to recover, to some extent, the beliefs of the legislators – what they believed was best for the commonwealth, as much as what they believed to be true and pertinent about witches – an examination of their discursive environment – the normative literature with which they may have been familiar and the particular socio-historical situations in which they lived: their texts and contexts – may permit some understanding of the relation between the laws and the discursive corpus that conditioned them
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
