Witchcraft, Nostalgia, and the Rural Idyll in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

In 1747, over a hundred years after the witch craze had ended, Magdalena Bollmann found herself accused of witchcraft. Bollmann came from the village of Alleshausen in what is now part of Württemberg, high on the plateau by Lake Federsee, a flat, brooding landscape dotted with pilgrimage churches and ruled by the Praemonstratensian monks of the Abbey of Obermarchtal. Bollmann was not the first to be accused of witchcraft in this particular outbreak of witchcraft trials. By the time the accusations against her were heard, four women had already been burnt as witches, and three more would meet their deaths before the episode was over, seven women in a population of barely 500 people.1 It was extraordinary for such a large outbreak of witch-hunting to occur so late: this was the period of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment. Even the executions did not put an end to it. Just nine years later, three more women in the neighbouring village of Brasenberg were tried for witchcraft, escaping burning only because the village mayor and the advisory jurist declared the evidence inadmissable and so brought the trials to a halt.2