The Flying Witch: Its Resonance in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands

Abstract

After the fifteenth-century Council of Basel, the distribution of witch trials across Europe did not proceed evenly as a monolithic “cumulative concept.” Rather, the different concepts such as apostasy, sabbat, and flying each spread along their own routes and showed their own dynamics. The scarcity of flying witches in the sixteenth-century Netherlands is explained by the reluctance of intellectuals to accept new witchcraft theories as expressed in the wake of the Arras trials and in the Malleus maleficarum . In the two cases wherein flying witches did occur, in the 1560s in the towns of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the influence of visual media may be suspected.