The Enemy Within Read online

  Time and Space. How was witch-hunting distributed, chronologically and geographically?

  The great European witch-hunt, as it has occasionally been called, was not a single, sustained continent-wide event. To the contrary, it was actually a series of events, an assortment of somewhat smaller hunts, loosely linked and raggedly distributed through time and space. Meanwhile, village witchcraft in the old sense, locally sited and modestly scaled, continued basically as before, though its specific occurrence would be increasingly obscured by all the new and spectacular “panic” outbreaks.

  There was, throughout, a heartland of persecution in north-central Europe, including much of what was then the Holy Roman Empire and is today Germany, Switzerland, northeastern France, and the southern part of the Netherlands. This region, with somewhat less than half the continent’s population, seems to have produced roughly three-quarters of its witchcraft prosecutions. Additional centers of major witch-hunting were spotted farther to the north and west, in Scotland and Denmark, and to the east, in Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania. More moderate levels of involvement could be found in England, Sweden and adjacent Finland, central and southern France, Spain, and northern Italy.

  There was also a peak period of witch-hunting as measured simply in quantitative terms, lasting from approximately 1580 to 1650. And, within that stretch, the years 1610-30 produced an especially massive bulge. But, again, there were other peaks both earlier and later. Some parts of southwestern Germany experienced panic witchcraft as early as the 1560s. On the other hand, Sweden’s peak did not come until the late 1660s and early ’70s. Poland had barely started with witch trials in 1650, but then maintained a high rate through the end of the century and even beyond. And in the Bavarian region of southern Germany, trials continued, sometimes with considerable intensity, until at least 1750.

  As this brief summary immediately suggests, it is only when space and time are brought together that witch-hunting begins to look at all patterned. On the one hand, political fragmentation and the coexistence of small, chronically struggling state entities seem to have been especially conducive to panic witch-hunting. The Holy Roman Empire itself was vulnerable this way, with its inherent institutional weakness and its messy internal patchwork of quasi-independent units (duchies, principalities, counties, bishoprics). On the other hand, political integration and strong centralized government seem to have worked in the opposite direction—that is, largely to restrain witch-hunting. In France, seat of the continent’s most advanced monarchy, witch trials occurred only to a moderate degree—with the significant exception of certain borderland regions (Normandy, Lorraine) where the hand of royal government was weakly felt. In short, the presence or absence of broadly effective state authority does suggest one element of patterning.

  On the temporal side, it seems clear that the 1580-1650 period brought extraordinary forms, and levels, of hardship to much of Europe: a persistent inflationary spiral and periodic depression in trade; the start of a wrenching transition to commercial agriculture, with much resultant dislocation and dispossession for large elements of the peasantry; recurrent political turmoil, including local revolts, religious and civil wars, and even national revolution; harsh climatological change; and epidemics of plague with accompanying famine. These broad tendencies, while impossible to correlate with particular bursts of witch-hunting, helped create an atmosphere of anxiety and suffering within which such events might more readily occur.

  A narrowing of focus to smaller territorial units brings a sharper, more differentiated image into view. In Scotland, for example, there were major peaks in the early 1590s, again at the end of that decade, and also in the late 1620s, the late 1640s, and the early 1660s. None of these lasted for more than a couple of years, and the long intervals between them were virtually devoid of witch trials outside the most limited, local context. The Scottish peaks can be more or less directly linked to political upheaval; the first two, indeed, seem to have been instigated by the monarch himself ( James VI), while the later ones reflected struggles within the governing elites. In southwestern Germany, a particular hotbed for witch-hunting, peaks occurred in 1594, in 1611, and, most extensively, between 1627 and 1632. However, what the German situation especially reveals is the importance of single-community venues; only in such connection can clear patterns be established. Thus Wiesensteig experienced a witchcraft panic in 1562 and again in 1583, Ellwagen in 1611-13, Baden in 1627-31, Esslingen in 1662, and so on. Here the causal chains run more to specifically local events: outbreaks of disease, periods of famine, internal factionalism in the aftermath of warfare. Occasionally, witch-hunts would spread from one place to another, as if by a kind of contagion. But most places within the same general region produced a quite distinctive profile of witch prosecutions over time; this was true even of close neighbors.

  Scope. How many people were prosecuted—and how many lives were taken—in witch-hunting?

  There is no way now to reach exact conclusions about the number of individuals directly involved in the “craze.” Records from the time have been lost, and were imperfectly kept to begin with. Any broad total is perforce a composite of figures for numerous different places and regions, some of which have not yet been carefully studied. At best, therefore, the available numbers are estimates.

  But such numbers have been a source of much interest and speculation for a very long time—indeed, for as far back as the craze period itself. Inquisitors were eager to gauge the size of the enemy’s forces, and confessing witches would frequently try to assist them. In 1570 one such confessor warned the French king of 300,000 Devil-followers mustering around his realm. Several years later Henri Boguet, a respected judge and demonologist, used that figure to project a total of 1,800,000 witches for Europe as a whole; moreover, Boguet commented, witches “are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth as worms in a garden.” Sabbat attendance was often a special focus here: witch-hunters wanted to know, how big a crowd? The answers varied widely, between a few hundred and many tens of thousands per gathering.

  The point is that for people of the time witchcraft seemed huge—quantitatively huge. And historians followed their lead. Thus, until not so long ago, a figure of 9,000,000 was widely accepted as the total of executions from witch trials. Recent studies have, however, drastically scaled this down; now most estimates fall in a range of 50,000 to 100,000. The most reliable regional subtotals come from the British Isles (about 1,000, with at least half of those in Scotland), Switzerland (about 5,000), and France (about 4,000). The various German territories would, presumably, account for much the largest number of all—probably in excess of 20,000.

  Note that the overall range is meant to cover the entirety of Europe before, during, and after the craze period. And remember, too, that it includes executions only. In fact, executions represent only a rock-bottom minimum of witchcraft involvement. People arraigned and tried—in short, all the defendants—would make a separate, much larger category. The best modern scholarship suggests a ratio for tried to executed of approximately two to one. But this is just an average; one must assume great variation around it. In many German communities gripped by “panic” outbreaks, a summons to trial would be a virtual sentence of death. By contrast, a substantial majority of English cases resulted in outright acquittal.

  The sum of actual trials was, then, probably between 100,000 and 200,000. And most trials engaged a large roster of participants: defendants, first of all, but also prosecutors, judges, bailiffs, jailers, and witnesses—plus an unrecorded host of keenly interested spectators. (There were special subcategories as well: for example, “witch-prickers” and “searchers,” experts called in to test mysteriously insensitive spots on a suspect’s body or simply to find the Devil’s “mark.”) Take all such groups into account, and the total of those involved increases by some exponential amount. Consider, finally, that many who were never officially brought to trial lived nonetheless “under suspicion” and likely were subject to periodic harass
ment or even to informal, unsanctioned attack. Under such conditions people might think about witchcraft, talk about witchcraft, worry about witchcraft, and act against witchcraft at almost any time.

  Hence the field of experience around witchcraft was, to repeat, huge. The threat itself seemed huge. And the response would, necessarily, be of matching dimensions.

  Participants: the accused. What sorts of people did witch trials especially target, in such terms as sex, age, marital status, economic and social position, and personal character? In short, who were the witches anyway? Did they, taken as a group, present a coherent profile?

  Few questions in witchcraft study have seemed as obvious, important, and controversial as the one about gender. The bare facts are thunderously clear. The vast majority of accused witches were female; the Europe-wide proportion was approximately 80 percent. To be sure, a not-insignificant minority—and a group that included some very striking individuals—was male. (In at least a few particular venues, accused men approached or actually reached a majority.) Moreover, the prevalent pattern of demonological thinking did not ostensibly single out women; a witch might, in theory at least, as easily be male as female. And the Devil himself was certainly male, as were many of his attendant “demons.” Still, in practice—and practice does count most of all here—a witch was typically a woman. Put differently: suspicion of witchcraft was sex-related, if not fully sex-determined. Was this perhaps the result of patriarchal social structure?

  It is clear enough that pre-modern Europeans took male dominance as a given, at least in a formal sense. Men were the leaders in many key sectors of routine experience: in community life (especially as “governors” of one sort or another), in family life (as “heads” of households), in law (where men alone could initiate judicial proceedings), in religion (as clergy), in cultural life (as authors, philosophers, artists, and poets). The prevalent modes of Christian belief furnished direct validation here; as the playwright John Milton famously put it in Paradise Lost, “he for God only, she for God in him.” Yet there were definite countertendencies. Women exerted their own forms of influence—for example, in their homes (as caregivers), neighborhoods (as overseers of moral standards), and local marketplaces (as purveyors of essential goods). Moreover, women’s lives overlapped men’s at many points; a wife might serve, in almost any arena, as her husband’s deputy. At the same time, women would everywhere form social groups (and work groups) limited to their own sex; these, too, carried influence. Indeed, clusters of neighbor-women would often appear at the center of witch trials—as accusers of other women.

  But if social structure does not help very much to explain the woman-witch equivalence (again, equivalence on the whole and in practice), ideation gets somewhat closer. From time out of mind, European cultural tradition had affirmed a broad-gauge principle of masculine superiority. Men were, according to this tradition, simply stronger and better than women: in physique, in powers of “reason,” in moral instinct. The difference was a matter of degree rather than kind; men had more of the key attributes that defined and elevated humans above the animal world. This was the essential point in speaking, as pre-modern folk endlessly did speak, of women’s inherent “weakness,” of their being “the weaker sex.” And, for certain, it had much to do with witchcraft. Women’s weakness made them vulnerable to the Devil’s attentions; in effect, they lacked the mental and moral strength to resist him. In this connection the biblical story of Eve, tempted by the serpent and thus made “first in sin,” was seen throughout European Christendom as paradigmatic.

  However, the explanatory power of European cultural tradition carries only so far. For witch-hunting was, and is, a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon—an attacker, a killer, of women almost everywhere. In present-day Africa as well as the Far East, among pre-modern Native Americans no less than pre-modern Europeans, witches have been “found” mainly among women—sometimes overwhelmingly so. There must be a reason that goes beyond the cultural and the historical.

  And there is: enter the psychological. Witchcraft embodies, in each and every one of its otherwise disparate settings, a basic impulse of misogyny—a fear, and a hatred, of women so generalized that it crosses virtually all boundaries. This includes the boundaries of gender itself, for women are misogynous, too. According to current developmental theory, the roots of such feeling lie buried deep in our psychic bedrock; they reach back, indeed, to our first experiences of life. Because in every known society women are primary caregivers to infants, those first experiences and the unconscious traces they leave behind put female presence squarely at the center. A mother—a woman—is the primal Other, the nonself from which self is progressively distinguished; further, she disposes a kind of absolute power to meet, or reject, infantile need. As such, she retains forever afterward an “aura” of what a discerning psychologist has called “magically formidable” qualities. Moreover, much of this weighs inevitably on the downside: the Bad Mother, who denies and displeases, alongside the Good Mother, who nourishes. The link to misogyny, and from there to witchcraft, is obvious; what more apt modifier for a witch than “magically formidable”?

  At the same time, another part of these inner-life foundations seems clearly sex-defined. Male anxieties about woman-power—as expressed in sexuality, menstruation, and, most especially, childbearing—are patent through much of the old demonological writing. The evident disconnect between such power, on the one hand, and the formal structures that affirmed male dominance, on the other, might readily generate worry and tension, and a sense of weakness—specifically in men.

  This tableau is perhaps too brief to be more than suggestive—and needs, in any case, a few modifiers. First, the woman-accusing-woman aspect of witch trials is worth underscoring; for this, more than anything else, undercuts arguments centered on simple patriarchy. Second, the woman-witch equivalence was very clear in the small, fully localized cases, but had some tendency to break down whenever “panic” attitudes took over; then the trendline of accusation might shift somewhat to encompass increasing numbers of men. Third, those men who did find themselves accused, in whatever context, were often linked to women who had previously fallen under suspicion. They were the husbands or sons of supposed witches, and thus could be seen as contaminated by close contact. Indeed, they were subject to a quite literal process of guilt by association.

  From sex we turn to age. There is, of course, a hoary stereotype to reckon with here: the figure of the elderly witch, the “old hag.” The stereotype is accurate only in part. True, a disproportionate number of convicted witches were on the “old” side; quite a few were age 60, 70, or more. Still, many others belonged to what we would call the midlife cohort. Moreover, when the focus is shifted from court trials and convictions to suspicions and accusations, the age median drops substantially. Most of the accused seem to have acquired a reputation for witchcraft—an important benchmark—as early as their 40s and 50s. From such beginnings a chain of events might then unwind, until time and accumulated suspicion brought official charges—and a summons to trial.

  The pattern here reflected deep discontinuities in the life-cycle experience of early modern European women. A good many would be widowed during or after the middle years, and thus left in an impoverished situation; henceforth they would constitute a burden on their families and communities. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, a smaller subgroup—the widows of well-to-do men—might suddenly assume independent control of property, in direct contrast to prevailing norms. Either way, such women might become targets of resentment and suspicion. And either way, they lacked the protective influence afforded by male next-of-kin. In fact, the extant records do suggest that widows were disproportionately represented among accused witches. But even without being widowed, women in midlife were obliged to absorb a profound loss of status, as menopause brought an end to their childbearing years. The same cultural traditions that had hitherto affirmed—even celebrated—their role in “replenishing the ear
th” (the biblical phrasing) would now declare them “barren.” As such, they could be presumed to harbor feelings of dispossession, not to say raw envy.

  Other attributes of the accused can be presented more simply and categorically. Most were poor, many quite wretchedly so. And most were drawn from well below the “middling ranks” in the traditional social hierarchy. (There were also, as previously noted, important exceptions.) Finally, many, if not most, were regarded as being of unpleasant, abrasive character: too self-centered, too quick to anger, too “meddling,” too “covetous,” and so on. These descriptors proved especially telling when applied—as they were applied, again and again—to women. To be sure, they came largely from the testimony of accusers; but where there was so much shared opinion, there may also have been some reality behind it. Clearly, the wisest course in early modern community life—especially for a woman—was to blend in and not to seem too openly self-assertive. To be, or to behave, otherwise was to open oneself to suspicion of witchcraft.

  Participants: accusers and victims. What sorts of people would typically take the lead in accusing others of witchcraft? And who were most often the victims?

  In a sense, almost anyone was potentially an accuser of witches. For belief in, and fear of, witchcraft was virtually universal in pre-modern Europe. Given so many different venues, spanning such a long period, individuals of every stripe would somewhere, sometime, be cast as accusers.

  Most conspicuous of all were those who led the way in full-fledged “panic” witch-hunts. They could be clerics, including popes (such as John XXII), bishops, and priests of lesser rank (or ministers, in the case of the Protestants). They could also be secular authorities, ranging from crowned monarchs ( James I of Scotland, Philip the Fair of France) to zealous bureaucrats (Nicholas Remy, a publisher and prosecutor in French Lorraine, and Wolfgang Kolb, a frequent “interrogator” in southern Germany, among many others). Some were self-appointed “witch-finders”; two such, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, orchestrated virtually by themselves the biggest single panic outbreak ever to occur in England (during the early years of the Puritan interregnum, roughly 1645-47).