From the issue dated June 18, 1999

New Research Plumbs Mysteries Behind European Witch-Craze

Seeking to explain paroxysms of paranoia, historians probe a vast, often baffling field

By PETER MONAGHAN

During three terrifying centuries of witch trials throughout Europe, from about 1450 to 1700, no method more effectively pried confessions from the accused than wrenching their arms from their shoulders. Unless it was making them sit on metal, fire-heated "witch's chairs," or crushing their limbs or extremities with mechanical devices.

And those were just some of the tortures devised. At the very least, 100,000 people, most of them women, were charged with witchcraft, and countless others were accused of it, during the paroxysm of paranoia that is commonly called the European witch-hunt or witch-craze – though it extended, famously, into colonial America.

Their ordeals did not stop with torture, trials, humiliation, and imprisonment. Historians believe that fully one-half of those accused were convicted, then hauled off to be publicly executed – most often, burned at the stake, after having been garroted or beheaded. Their supposed crime: to have bargained with incarnate demons for material benefits or carnal pleasures.

The persecutions have long provided historians with a vast, often baffling field of inquiry. "During this century alone," writes Brian P. Levack, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, in his much-cited The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Longman, 1995), "the witch-hunt has been attributed, in whole or in large part, to the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, the use of judicial torture, the wars of religion, the religious zeal of the clergy, the rise of the modern state, the development of capitalism, the widespread use of narcotics, changes in medical thought, social and cultural conflict, an attempt to wipe out paganism, the need of the ruling class to distract the masses, opposition to birth control, the spread of syphilis, and the hatred of women."

Scholars of the field now assert that only multidisciplinary approaches that suggest many causes can begin to provide much insight into the witch-hunt.

Researchers are combining historical methods with tools from sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, folklore, and literary studies to understand the phenomenon, and are looking increasingly at legal and religious seats of power together with the popular beliefs and practices of the time.

"It's easy to explain the witch trials through simple vilification of the witch-hunters," says Richard Kieckhefer, a professor of religion at Northwestern University and a leading researcher in the field. "The interesting historical problems arise when you realize that the witch-hunters were in many cases among the moral and even intellectual leaders of the society."

The historical context of the witch trials is dizzyingly complex. The persecutions emerged during a period of religious, social, and economic upheaval and uncertainty. They were facilitated by fundamental changes in criminal law under which the secular courts of kingdoms, states, and smaller jurisdictions took over from the Church and hugely expanded the prosecution of such crimes.

In an era when people believed in the reality of demons as commonly as they believed in God, prosecutors had no trouble finding defendants. Usually, the accused were said to have practiced maleficia, or black magic, that caused such ills as the death of babies or the spoiling of crops. Generally, as feminist historians have pointed out, those ill effects fell within women's sphere of influence.

In recent years, the view that woman-hating underpinned the witch-mania has been complicated by studies of persecutions in eastern and far-northern Europe, where the victims were often men.

Because most of the accused were peasants, the purported maleficia were usually of a folk character – for example, enlisting the aid of cats, dogs, toads, and other small animals in performing foul deeds. However, practices of more-educated people, such as alchemy, were also sometimes attacked as "white magic."

Maleficia, it was held, commonly were initiated at "sabbaths," orgiastic gatherings for morally subversive activities, to which witches flew. No witches were ever caught aloft on those weird, red-eye flights, and no evidence exists that the sabbaths even occurred. (That creates a modern-day irony, witch-hunt scholars note, when self-fashioned North American and European "wicca" stage sabbaths in Unitarian churches or airport hotels to claim direct descent from medieval witches. Still, the phenomenon is producing its own scholarly literature. Just out from the University of South Carolina Press, for example, is A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, a participant-observation study by Helen A. Berger, an associate professor of sociology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.)

Peasant and elite conceptions of witchcraft were quite different during the persecutions, and scholars have long been aware that both must be taken into account, along with their interactions. Mr. Kieckhefer, in his influential European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), traced how peasant and elite notions merged. The merger led to, among other changes, the increasing conversion of minor charges of sorcery into more-serious charges of diabolism – of witchcraft.

He has since studied the relations of witchcraft and magic more closely. "When I published European Witch Trials," he says, "the one serious reservation I had was that it seemed to me artificial to discuss witchcraft in isolation from other forms of magic." As a result, he wrote Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Penn State University Press, 1998), which analyzes what was included in magic manuals, and what light that throws on the witch-hunts.

Too few scholars, he says, have "clear and detailed knowledge of the kinds of magic that are contained in those manuals."

Enough necromancy manuals survive that scholars have long known that many clerics, primarily ordained university students, conjured demons. How, then, Mr. Kieckhefer asks, did secret male practices lead to widespread accusations of women's illicit dealings with the devil?

He is working on a suggestive clue. He believes that the proceedings outlined in the how-to manuals made charges of witchcraft seem plausible to theologians and prosecutors, allowing them to believe there was a widespread plot, orchestrated by the Devil, to undermine Christianity.

"The licensing of apprehension is the most important precondition for a phenomenon like the witch trials," he says.

At a recent witch-hunt conference at the University of California at Los Angeles's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, it was clear how widely researchers are casting their nets to find explanations for the witch trials. Topics included the concept of the witch in Greek and Roman antiquity, and in ancient Jewish culture; male witches in 17th-century Russia; and patterns of accusations of witchcraft against not just individuals, but whole families, in 16th-century England.

Participants also suggested that the store of research topics was far from exhausted. Julia M. Garrett, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, detailed her dissertation research on stock figures in late-16th- and early-17th-century English plays about witchcraft – the voyeuristic judge, the afflicted child, the bewitched lover, and the skeptical physician, to name a few. Each, she said, served to present particular kinds of knowledge or social problems associated with witchcraft – sexual knowledge, domestic discord, or new scientific epistemologies, for example.

She also noted that researchers were doing more to "recuperate the humanity of the persecuted" – the individuals who were tortured and executed as witches. Literature specialists are playing a role, she says in an interview, by closely examining the narrative aspects of judicial documents, learned treatises, and pamphlet literature about trials, as well as fictional works. Those documents reveal much about not just victimhood, but also the ways in which, for example, some village women did turn to witchcraft in an effort to increase their severely limited power.

Scholars still do not fully comprehend the social psychology of the witch-craze, according to Mr. Kieckhefer. Researchers have often come back to the same question: Why would educated people take charges of witchcraft seriously?

Striking new answers, he says, are in a forthcoming book, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and Belief (University of Chicago Press, 2000), by Walter E. Stephens, a professor of French, Italian, and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. "It's going to have a serious impact," says Mr. Kieckhefer. "It bristles with all sorts of fascinating insights."

Appropriate to its title, it asks what motivated literate, 15th-century men to formulate the specific theory that witches copulated with incarnate demons. That belief set European witchcraft of the period apart from any other – in Europe earlier or elsewhere. In effect, Mr. Stephens says in a telephone interview, the theory held that witchcraft was "a kind of anti-Christianity, an upside-down Christianity."

He set out, he says, to examine theological texts about witchcraft, asking: "Why was it important for them to accuse people of having actual, physical interactions with demons?"

He discovered that, in the period preceding the anti-witch treatises, Christian theologians were profoundly uneasy, because they had begun to doubt that spirit – which Church doctrine held was the ultimate reality, beyond physical matter – really existed.

For the theologians, Mr. Stephens suggests, that question appears to have amounted to "a kind of unacknowledgeable, unconfessable, unspeakable doubt about the fundamental definitions of reality put about by Christianity." And that, he deduces, led them to adopt a plan that would prove fateful for the 100,000 or more eventual victims of the witch purges. The theologians could hardly admit that they doubted the existence of spirit, let alone God. Unable to prove the reality of God, they feverishly set about demonstrating the inverse: Evil spirits, demons, really did have corporeal existence.

And what could prove it? Why, that they had had sex with real women, of course!

All that was needed were women's confessions that such liaisons had occurred.

The hunts had, Mr. Stephens suggests, a "convoluted and perverse" logic. "Of course it's abominable logic," he adds, "if you look at the human consequences of trying to prove what they were trying to prove."

Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education