The male witch in Poland? Men before the Kleczew’s town court

In recent years male witches have come to the forefront of historical scholarship, with many historians attempting to explain why some men were accused of witchcraft. This article argues that by focusing on two under-examined factors – representations in popular pamphlets, and the role of the Devil in English witchcraft – we can reincorporate male witches into a broader paradigm of English witchcraft as a diabolical crime. This article argues that the behaviour of both male and female witches was portrayed remarkably similarly in print and that, rather than being defined by their gender, witches of either sex were increasingly described in popular discourse as those men and women who had entered into a pact with the Devil. In doing so, this article re-incorporates male witches into a larger framework of English witchcraft belief and stresses the importance of the demonic to our understanding of English witchcraft.

Reviewed by: Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 1500–1800 by Wanda Wyporska Hans Peter Broedel Keywords Jacqueline Borsje, Wanda Wyporska, Polish Magic, witchcraft, early modern witchcraft, early modern magic, Polish witchcraft wanda wyporska. Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. xv + 245. The first thing you notice when you pick up Wanda Wyporska's recent introduction to Polish witchcraft is the arresting illustration on the cover: a witch in peasant garb stands with a huge tankard in one hand, and her other on the back of her companion, a devil, who is the spitting image of Max in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. He has the large, clumsy clawed feet, tail, and oversized ears of Max's pajamas, but in contrast to the witch, who smiles knowingly, the devil seems fretful, as if uncertain about his life choices and the wild rumpus to come. This image is apt as well as charming, introducing one of Wyporska's principal themes: that in early modern Poland, both witches and devils were complex characters who could evoke humor and sympathy as well as hatred, fear, malice, and blasphemy. Wyporska's Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (a revision of her 2007 Ph.D. dissertation) attempts to develop a comprehensive understanding of what witchcraft meant in early modern Poland, and of the relationships between the witch of texts, and the witch "in the flesh," as encountered in trials. To this end, after some brief but necessary historical and historiographic scene setting, Wyporska examines some two hundred and twenty-five trial records from Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) spanning roughly the period between 1500 and 1800. Although the sample is far from complete because, as Wyporska points out, many records have been destroyed or lost, as one of the few systematic surveys of Polish witchcraft, her work constitutes a major achievement. Her analysis reveals that while Polish trials share much in common with better-known European examples, they have many distinctive features. Prominent among these is the stifling influence of the petty aristocracy, the szlachta, whose dominance over the judiciary determined in large part the scope and character of the trials. Also notable is Poland's confessional diversity, for during the era of the witch trials a Catholic majority lived alongside significant Protestant, Jewish, and radical reformed communities. In keeping with Central Europe generally, Poland's period of most intense persecution came late, peaking, Wyporska estimates, in the first half of the eighteenth century, but she argues that this was not due to the venerable notion of a [End Page 113] "cultural lag" between east and west, but rather to the economic, political, and environmental crises besetting Poland at the time. Other characteristics of Polish trials are more familiar. The witches in her sample were accused of typical maleficia, such as causing physical harm, stealing milk, and abuse of the Eucharist; they were often local "wise women" whose practices became increasingly diabolized over time, as well as women with evil reputations, servants, and simply those unlucky enough to have run afoul of their local lord. Significantly, however, ninety-six percent of the accused witches in Wyporska's sample were women, which is consistent with other studies that have shown that Poland had a higher proportion of female witches than almost anywhere in Europe, and Wyporska devotes a chapter to seeking an explanation. She shows that Polish society was oppressively patriarchal, that the socioeconomic position of poor women was undoubtedly precarious, that maleficia was most often perceived in the domestic sphere, and that witchcraft and fertility were often interrelated. But of course all of this was usually true for the rest of Europe. Then, as elsewhere, Wyporska turns to the canon of British witch scholars for guidance: the opinions of Lyndal Roper, Robin Briggs, Alison Rowlands, and Christina Larner are duly canvased and all find support from the evidence of Poland's trials (60). Although the gendering of witchcraft accusations is an enormously complicated issue, this lengthy nonanswer left this reader somewhat disappointed. The rest of the book surveys the witch as she appears in various genres of textual sources, and looks for points of connection between the discourses of demonographies...

Two unequivocal conclusions can be drawn from the systematic analysis of witch trials in Holstein, Carinthia and Franche-Comte: First, the courts charged large numbers of men independently of women and in their own right. Their identification as alleged witches was neither a by-product of trials of female witches, nor can it be seen as collateral damage. Side by side with and on the same level as the female witch there stood a male witch, who was by no means a scaled-down or dwarf version of the majority type. Notwithstanding these general conclusions, any analysis of gender distribution must take account of regional context and popular as well as learned witch images, for the dynamics of the witch-hunts produced absolute majorities of female witches just as they occasionally also produced only a minority.

On November 8, 1610, eleven Basque “witches” were burned at the stake in Logroño, Spain—six alive, five in effigy. Most of these “witches” were women. In this article, I show that the “witches” persecuted in Logroño and those “captured” by Pierre de Lancre in his treatise On the Inconstancy of Witches (1612) deviate widely from those captured in Basque song. The former represent male and female witches as sexually deviant, cannibalistic, poison-procuring servants of the Devil deserving death for profaning God's name and violating his most sacred laws. The latter features witches—always female—as unruly, fun-loving tricksters but certainly not handmaidens of the Devil. I suggest that the lyrical resources released by these Basque songs about witches remain ambiguous and deserve further study.

Tomasz Wiślicz, for his part, focuses on the apparitions of Virgin Mary in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in his article ‘From an Experiencer to a Saintly Man: Losing Biography, Gaining Hagiography in the Accounts of Marian Apparitions in Early Modern Poland’. By using devotional prints and manuscripts related to Marian shrines, Wiślicz examines the transformation and use of the life stories of visionaries who gave rise to the shrines. He finds that popularity among pilgrims to the shrines made the life stories become more detailed and hagiographic serving the needs of pastoral care, especially of people of the lower strata.

A generation ago, alert historians jolted the field of witchcraft studies by calling attention to the fact that it was women in particular who burned on the pyres of the European witch trials. Amazingly enough, earlier historians had overlooked, or at least underplayed that particular skew in the record. Now the idea of witch-hunts as a “women's holocaust” is old hat, and in fact, has made one of those rare successful crossovers into popular culture. Historical approaches never stay still, however, and recent publications have reoriented the discussion yet again. A spate of new interpretations, particularly by Stuart Clark and Robin Briggs, push gender off the center of the screen, arguing that other factors were equally or more important in shaping accusations. Other works muddy the waters by noting the many places, particularly in the Baltic and Scandinavia, but also pockets within Western Europe, where men, not women, comprised a large fraction or even the majority of the accused.Evidence of male witches in Estonia, Finland, and Iceland is found in Maia Madar, “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 257–72; Juhan Kahak, “Estonia II: The Crusade against Idolatry,” in ibid., 273–84; Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, “Finland: The Male Domination,” in ibid., 319–38; Kirsten Hastrup, “Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism,” in ibid., 383–401; Marko Nenonen, ‘”Envious are all the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate”: Finnish Witches and Witch Trials in the 17th Century,' Scandinavian Journal of History 18 (1993):77–91. In Western Europe, regions that produced larger trials generally included higher percentages of males among the accused. See E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). In the heart of Europe, France also offers some exceptionally high representation of males in particular jurisdictions, although not uniformly throughout the country. Alfred Soman finds that over half of the 1,300 defendants who appealed witchcraft convictions before the Parlement of Paris were male. Alfred Soman, “Les Proces de sorcellerie au Parlement de Paris (1565–1640),” Annales 32 (1977):790–814; and “La Sorcellerie vue du Parlement de Paris au debut du XVII e siecle,” Actes du 104 e congres national des societes savantes, Bordeaux, 1979, Section d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1981); and Sorcellerie et justice criminelle (16e–18e siecles) (London, 1992), 798–99. William Monter finds an extraordinary pocket of male witches in Normandy. “Here, in the Pays de Caux, lay the epicenter of male witchcraft in Western Europe.” W. Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997):563–95, quote on 581. Other discussions of the involvement of men in witchcraft trials include Eva Labouvie, “Manner im Hexenprozess. Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘mannlichen' Verstadnisses vom Magie und Hexerei,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990):56–78; Robert W. Thurston, Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America (London: Longman, 2001), 126–27.On Russia's male witches, see Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 82 (1977):1187–207; Valerie Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000); E. B. Smilianskaia, Koldun i ved'ma v kontekste russkoi kul'tury XVIII veka (Moscow: ROO “Sodeistvie sotrudnichestvu Instituta imeni Dzh. Kennana,” 2000); “Sudebno-sledstvennye dokumenty kak istochnik po istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia (iz opyta izucheniia “dukhovnykh del” pervoi poloviny XVIII v.),” in Issledovaniia po istorii knizhnoi i traditsionnoi narodnoi kul'tury Severa (Sytyvkar, 1997), 168–75; and her forthcoming book, Volshebniki, bogokhul'niki, eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost' i dukhovnye prestupleniia v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2002). W. F. Ryan also acknowledges some gender imbalance among those accused in Russia, in, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998):49–84. Still, little systematic work has appeared that seriously attempts to sort out why in some areas people believed that, “particularly through the agency of woman are infernal enchantments brought to pass,” and elsewhere men became the more common targets of accusation.The quote is taken from an early Russian text, but the presence of this textual tradition did not prevent later Muscovites from accusing primarily male witches. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans and ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1973), entry for the year 1071, p. 153.

For a long time, historians thought that witches were almost all women, and that the witch hunt therefore had to do with women and femininity. Current research suggests, however, that a growing proportion of witches in Western Europe were male, and consequently male witches and masculinity are attracting more and more scholarly and cultural interest. 1 In Finland, it was common that men appeared as the accused in witchcraft and magic trials: altogether a little over half of the accused were men. Within Finland, male witches clearly predominated in the eastern parts of the area, but they were not uncommon in western regions either. Throughout the country, the proportion of women accused in witch trials grew during the 17th century and especially after the 1660s. From the 18th century, a comprehensive analysis of the relative weight of the two genders in witch trials is not yet available, but preliminary results suggest that men regained a greater share among those accused of magic than women. 2 This chapter seeks to analyse the role of male witches and masculinity in Finnish 17thcentury witch trials.

This article concentrates on the way ordinary people in English communities in East Anglia and New England represented male witches and male witchcraft when they accused men of criminal magic. I begin by examining the data from the indictments of male witches in early modern Essex courts in order to demonstrate some of the ways English male witchcraft was distinct from the larger prosecution of female witches. The remainder of the paper is devoted to four case histories of individual men and demonstrates how early modern ideas of manhood shaped the witchcraft beliefs of accusers. I argue that, because they were men, these witches had had very different relationships to the legal, cultural, social and economic institutions of their day, and that this must be considered in any analysis. Throughout, I am concerned with how application of masculinity as a category of analysis reconfigures historiographical ideas of early modern witchcraft

Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. By Peter J. Klassen. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009. xviii, 260pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. Maps. $40.00, hard bound. - Volume 69 Issue 3

Zodiacus vitae, an influential philosophical poem by Marcello Palingenio Stellato, enjoyed popularity in Early Modern Europe, as evidenced by over sixty foreign editions, several translations and a 16th-century Polish-language paraphrase. Despite the latter being a testimony to Palingenius’work being read by the most prominent Renaissance humanists in Poland, the poem’s readership in Old Polish literature has remained largely unknown. The goal of this article is, therefore, to outline a new map of its readership in Early Modern Poland, Pomerania and Silesia, citing its presence in book inventories, public libraries, book collections and monastery libraries. Zodiacus circulated for instance in the 16th and 17th centuries among booksellers and bookstore owners in the most important printing centre in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth − Lviv (Piotr of Poznań, Baltazar Hybner) and Cracow (Helena Unglerowa, Franciszek Jakub Mercenich). It was no less popular in the private book collections of the townspeople, physicians, noblemen and aristocracy. Among the owners of the poem can be found for example: famous scholar and professor Jan Brożek, historian at the court of King Stephen Bathory –Giovanni Michele Bruto, poet Jan Gawiński, reformer of education and the mayor of Toruń−Henryk Stroband. Some light on the problem of the Zodiacus’popularity is also shed by an analysis of copious amounts of marginal notes in over seventy extant copies of Palingenius’work preserved in Polish libraries.

The following essay studies the importance of formal agreements (ugody or kontrakty) between representatives of Jewish communities and Christian burghers in early modern Poland. As a specific genre of legal document, these agreements, or contracts, are a unique source for understanding Jewish-Christian relations and the integration of Jews into local social fabrics. These contracts also reflect the importation and continuity of legal traditions that originated in German territories and arrived in Eastern Central Europe, and they corroborate suggestions that there was significant improvement in the legal status of the Jews in Eastern Europe as opposed to that under which they previously had lived in the West. The ugody document, finally, the emergence of what I have called elsewhere the contractual character of Polish-Jewish relations in the early modern period. (See Francois Guesnet, “Politik der Vormoderne—Shtadlanut am Vorabend der polnischen Teilungen,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 1 (2002), pp. 235–255, and more recently idem, “Political Culture of Polish Jewry: A Tour d’Horizon,” Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2007–2008, pp. 61–76, 67–68.)

Jews were prominent among buyers and sellers of stolen goods (fences) in early modern Poland. This appears to have been a result of the economic niche they occupied and because of the view of Jewish law which was opposed to dealing in stolen goods but at the same time recognized that there was a legal basis for such trade. However, also Jews in Western and Central Europe played a central role in fencing. Even though the authorities could have repressed this trade in East and West, such ‘services’ rendered by moneylenders and dealers in used goods, who sometimes dabbled in the sale of stolen goods, were tolerated. What was unique to Poland was the rapid growth of the Jewish population, which probably caused an increase of Jewish fences and great concerns of the non-Jewish society in Poland for this activity of Jews.

Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland. By Michael Ostling. Past and Present Publications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv, 279 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Tables. Maps. $110.00, hard bound. - Volume 72 Issue 1

Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. By Peter J. Klassen. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xv+260 pp. $50.00 cloth. - Volume 79 Issue 2

Eichstatt, a small, fractured prince-bishopric on the fringes of the Bavarian Duchy, experienced a relatively intense series of witch-persecutions between 1590 and 1631. Of those arrested for witchcraft in the territory over this period, only about 12 per cent (or, up to 35 suspects) were men.1 These figures are low, even when compared with gender ratios among witch-suspects in other German and western European witchcraft episodes, and one might be tempted to ignore them as an insignificant aberration.2 Yet, the presence of these men in the Eichstatt data is perhaps the most troubling aspect of this particular series of witchhunts. Whilst it is a relatively simple exercise to explain why well over 200 women were arrested in the principality over the same period, the arrests of men such as Enders and Georg Gutmann, Valtin Lanng, Hans Baur and Michael Hochenschildt can seem arbitrary. The prosecutions of the female witch-suspects were undertaken in a systematic fashion as the local judges and, later, ecclesiastical witch-commissioners worked their way through the names of accomplices supplied by witch-defendants faced with the threat of torture. As the first witches arrested were mainly women, their alleged accomplices tended to be drawn from their everyday networks of female kin, neighbours, and friends. The interrogators therefore soon possessed a very long list of female accomplices, a list that could have sustained persecution well beyond 1631 had circumstances not forced an end to it then. The interrogators also chose to ignore the very many denunciations of male witch-accomplices made by both the female witches and some of the men they did arrest.3 But why did they choose these men in the first place when so many of the other alleged but unmolested male accomplices were of a similar age and status?