Pamphlets, Propaganda and Witch- Hunting in Germany c.156o-c.1630

Abstract

Historians of the European Witch-Hunt have, for the most part, paid only scant attention to the popular pamphlets on witchcraft, because they regarded such broadsheets as providing little more than entertainment literature for a sensation-seeking public. However, this study suggests that the pamphlets, particularly those published in Germany between 1560 and 1630, should be viewed from a more wide-ranging perspective. Greater consideration needs to be given to the pamphlets’ potential for ‘propaganda’ purposes, and for encouraging the common people to demand that the magistrates engage in witch-hunts. In a similar manner to the early Reformation broadsheets’ propagation of the evangelical message to a mass audience, witchcraft pamphlets helped to disseminate to the public the learned ideas about witches and their supposed demonic crimes. Pamphlets often adopted some of the propagandist techniques utilized by Reformation pamphleteers to convey ideas to a mainly illiterate audience: for example, they presented information in the form of a popular song, and they supplemented the written text with woodcut illustrations that drew on the common people’s predominantly visual culture. Through such devices, the peasantry were provided with information in a straightforward and easily comprehensible manner about conspiracies of destructive witches-witches that threatened to destroy the lower orders’ crops and livestock. Under the intensely distressing circumstances of serious climatic deterioration and severe subsistence crises associated with the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’, ordinary men and women may have been especially receptive to the pamphlets’ message that evil witches were directly responsible for their economic troubles. Nuremberg’s city council, in particular, was deeply concerned about the pamphlets’ potential for inciting witch-scares, and it banned the sale of a recently published witch-newsletter. The city’s prompt act of censorship had practical consequences and helped to ensure that Nuremberg was not engulfed by the current witch-anxieties raging in neighbouring Bamberg and Wiirzburg. Pamphlets could certainly play an active part in promoting the persecutions, and they could act as a significant form of propaganda for the war waged against the demonic witch sect.