Why Some Men and Not Others? The Male Witches of Eichstätt

Abstract

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?