Witchcraft, Confessionalism and Authority

Witch Trials

“… The possibility that confessional strife may have played a role in early modern European witch‐trial activity is mentioned in some form in nearly every major witchcraft study in the historical literature (Midelfort, ; Monter, , ; Schormann, , ; Larner and Macfarlane, ; Behringer, ; Levack, ). With few exceptions (Trevor‐Roper, ; Waite, ), however, these mentions are followed by dismissals of confessional competition's importance.…”

Contended Bodies

“…28 Beginning in the 1580s and in tandem with the witch panics, there were only two successful harvests over the course of the decade. 29 This statistical analysis revealed the addressed crop failures contributed to further suffering and increased anxiety. It is in this period that mass witch-hunts developed primarily in Western Germany under the ecclesiastical authority of archbishop-electors, including the Archbishops of Trier, Mainz, and Cologne.…”

“…In each of these cases, existing prejudices established a lack of tolerance which were, in turn, rampantly reproduced as accusations with the emergence of the initial mass witchcraft panic in late sixteenth century Trier in the Germanlands. 6 While local collective memory and rumour circulation almost exclusively produced accusations of witchcraft, these allegations necessitated the production of mala fama (bad reputation) essential for witchcraft to take hold, the widespread parallel between early modern accusations of witchcraft and perceived Jewish violence merit acknowledgement. 7 Such medieval theories extended well into persecution throughout the early modern period, and propagated the dangers of (primarily female) witches and Jewish peoples alike who committed infanticide, performed blood-letting, and practiced host desecration.…”

Introduction

“…Witch hunting, like plague and the Black Death, has become a stock phrase used to describe many modern events. Prosecutions or persecutions that appear to target any individual or group with [2] unseemly enthusiasm and questionable justification are called a 'witch hunt'. Bizarrely, this past tragedy has survived and become embedded in the modern consciousness while the pogroms and massacres of Jews in the course of the fifteenth century are not especially well known (perhaps having been obliterated by the more horrific manifestations of twentieth-century antisemitism).…”

“…1 His careful study of the various types of witchcraft and varieties of witches that inhabited the Franco-Swiss border in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does rely somewhat for its findings about gender, age and marital status on evaluations of the plague-spreading phenomenon in Geneva. 2 However, at critical points in his study he offers comments that make it clear to any careful reader of his work that these same plague spreaders, or engraisseurs (greasers), are a group apart. For example, his appendix 'Witch Trials in Geneva, 1527-1681' studiously avoids including those arrested and prosecuted for plague spreading in 1545 and 1571.…”