A Cultural History of Witchcraft

B O R K L A N I C Z AY
GA
Central European University
for Peter Burke

It was Peter Burke who got me into the witchcraft business more than a
quarter of a century ago, and this overview of research on witchcraft, the first
version of which was prepared for a conference celebrating his seventieth
birthday in 2007, is dedicated to him. Let me begin this historiographic overview with a few personal remarks recalling our cooperation. I first met Peter
Burke in 1982 at an Economic History congress in Budapest. I was a research
assistant at the time, developing an interest in various aspects of popular
religion, such as heresy, sainthood, and shamanism,1 and I was eager to hear
his theoretically based insights into the history of popular culture.2 He
invited me to a large-scale comparative conference on the history of European witchcraft in Stockholm, which he was organizing with Bengt Ankarloo
and Gustav Henningsen in coordination with the Olin Foundation in 1984.
He encouraged me to broaden my interest from Hungarian shamanism to an
overall examination of Hungarian witch trials (a historical topic that at the
time had not been made the subject of much scholarly study). It was the first
international conference to which I had been invited as a speaker.3
To cope with the challenging task posed by this invitation, the preparation
of a new and conclusive historical overview of the witch trial documents in
early-modern Hungary, I entered into cooperation with a group of Hungar1. Gabor Klaniczay, Le culte des saints dans la Hongrie medievale: Proble`mes de
recherche, Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 5777; idem,
Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft, in Shamanism in Eurasia,
ed. Mihaly Hoppal (Gottingen, 1983), 40422.
2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1977; 2nd ed.
Aldershot, 1994).
3. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft:
Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990).
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2010)
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ian folklorists and worked together with Eva Pocs, who intended to research
popular witchcraft mythologies, on the basis of both historical and present
day documentation.4 We made the ambitious plan to develop a computerbased encoding and a structural analysis of maleficium narratives,5 but as I drew
closer to the material I realized that I had to combine (or rather counterbalance) this Proppian morphology6 with what I referred to in the paper I
delivered at the 1984 Stockholm conference as the transformations and
blackouts in the universe of popular magicthat is a thorough study of
the historical transformations in the structural patterns of witchcraft beliefs,
something to which I will refer here as a cultural history of witchcraft.7
Actually, a few years later I gave the subtitle social or cultural tensions to a
lecture I presented in Burkes presence in Cambridge on witch-hunting in
Hungary.8 Seen in this light, my version of the cultural history of witchcraft is largely the fruit of Peter Burkes inspiration. Here I want to rethink
its premises: do they still make sense in the light of recent orientations of
cultural history?
1

By recalling personal memories from the 1980s I mean to focus on a particular historiographic moment when a significant renewal occurred both in the
study of European witchcraft and in the concept of cultural historythis will
be the starting point of my overview. Let me rely here on the synthetic image
Peter Burke himself formulated in the conclusion of the 1984 Stockholm
conference entitled The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft,
starting with the observation that in the last twenty years or so, witchcraft
4. On Eva Pocs and our Budapest research group, see my review of her book
Between the Living and the Dead (Budapest, 1999): Enchantment or Witchcraft?
Budapest Review of Books 9 (1999): 7177.
5. Gabor Klaniczay, Eva Pocs, Peter G. Toth, and Robert Wolosz, A K-boszorkanyper-adatbazis [The K witchcraft database], in Demonologia es boszorkanysag
Europaban [Demonology and witchcraft in Europe], ed. Eva Pocs (Budapest, 2001),
293335; cf. Peter Becker and Thomas Werner, K Ein Tutorial, Halbgraue Reihe
zur historischen Fachinformatik, ed. Manfred Thaller (St. Katharinen, 1991).
6. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed.
(Austin, Tx., 1968).
7. Gabor Klaniczay, Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of Popular
Magic, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 21955.
8. Gabor Klaniczay, Witch-hunting in Hungary: Social or Cultural Tensions?
in idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Cambridge,
1990), 15567.

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has moved from the periphery of historical attention to a place near the
centre. The reasons for this interest were manifold: witchcraft was a topic
that cut across established disciplinary boundaries and provided a possibility
for fruitful exchanges between various fields of research, including social,
legal, and cultural history; the folklore of magical beliefs, practices and
mythologies; and anthropological enquiries into social, moral, and cultural
meanings, functions, or dysfunctions. The combination of these different
approaches, together with a renewed close scrutiny of archival documents,
led in these decades to a number of studies and monographs, linking this
topic to other concerns of contemporary research, such as community studies, family history, gender approaches, historical anthropology, and histoire des
mentalites.9
Taking all this into account, Burke noted the paradox that when Hugh
Trevor-Roper published his lively essay on what he called, following nineteenth-century German scholars, the European witch-craze, he could have
hardly guessed that he was summarising and synthesising the conventional
historical wisdom on the subject at the very time when this conventional
view was being undermined.10 While Trevor-Roper, like many of his predecessors,11 explained the rise and decline of persecutions with reference to
the short-sightedness, shameful irresponsibility, and frequently the vested
interest of clerical and lay elites and the inconsistencies in the juridical systems, a row of historians, including Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas, Alan
Macfarlane, E. William Monter, Erik Midelfort, and Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum, started to study witchcraft according to the contemporary trend
of historiography, relying on popular testimonies.12 This meant the examination of entire new domains of documentation on or related to witchcraft.
9. Peter Burke, The Comparative Approach to European Witchcraft, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 43541.
10. Ibid, 435; Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-craze of the 16th and
17th Centuries (Harmondsworth, 1969).
11. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und
der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901; reprint Hildesheim, 1963); Henry
Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols., ed. Arthur C. Howland
(Philadelphia, 1939). For a detailed overview of the historiography of witchcraft see
Thomas A. Fudge, Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European
Witch-Hunting, History Compass 4/3 (2006): 488527 (I owe thanks to Melissa
Calaresu for having called my attention to this article).
12. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento
(Torino, 1966); translated as Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983); Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and

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Earlier witchcraft research primarily focused on analysis of the confessions of accused witches most frequently extracted by torture, and tried to
make sense of the ludicrous revelations on the witches traffic with the
devil and their mysterious nightly assemblies. This was supported and complemented by analysis of related works of learned demonology.13 New
witchcraft enquiries were turning instead to the mass of testimonies by
the accusers, a huge judicial documentation barely touched on in previous
research. The emerging new explanation of witchcraft conflicts was based
on understanding the problems and fears of villagers and the motivations
for persecution from below, an approach labelled by Alan Macfarlane
the sociology of accusation. This methodology drew on the experience
of British social anthropologists working on contemporary African witchcraft, above all the legacy of Edward Evans-Pritchards seminal study on
the Azande, put on front stage by the discussions prompted by Mary Douglas and published by her in the volume Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations
in 1970 (which contained articles by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane,
who later published influential monographs on the subject that became the
flagships of the emerging new current of historical anthropology).14 The
new historical portrait of early modern witchcraft has shown that the spectacular outbreaks and epidemic witch hunts that had been the focus of
scholarly attention were merely occasional explosions within a broader,
widespread, steady, and unspectacular set of accusations that were, for several centuries, part of the everyday life of early modern European village
communities, representing a system to handle regular conflicts, neighborhood quarrels, and denial of expected charity in an age of the breakdown
of the traditional system of communal solidarities.
Instead of spectacular tales of witches sabbaths, these testimonies revealed
a set of interwoven conflicts stemming from everyday animosities and offered
explanations for misfortunes in terms of suspected maleficium attributed to
Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and
Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970); E. William Monter,
Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 15621684: The
Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, Calif., 1972); Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
13. Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid, 1969); translated as The
World of the Witches, trans. O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago, 1964); Sidney Anglo, ed.,
The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), 3252.
14. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford,
1937); Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London, 1970).

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local enemies. The new interpretations diverged as to whether witchcraft

accusations and persecutions ultimately constituted a system of sanctions for
the breaking of communal norms, whether they helped to uphold the traditional obligations of charity and neighbourliness at a time when other social
and economic forces were conspiring to weaken them (as suggested by
Keith Thomas following Evans-Pritchard)15 or, conversely, whether they
were a tool in the hands of individualist accusers to liberate themselves from
the obligations of expected solidarity (not only refusing charity, but also eliminating those who grudgingly demanded it, by accusing them of having
resorted to magical vengeance), as proposed by Alan Macfarlane.16
Despite this divergence a new consensus emerged that only a detailed
microscopic examination of all local economic, social, and cultural tensions
could further any genuine understanding of magical conflicts, an argument
advanced in studies by E. William Monter for Calvinist Geneva, Paul Boyer
and Stephen Nissenbaum for Salem, Robert Muchembled for Cambresis,
Wolfgang Behringer for southern Germany, and Robin Briggs for Lorraine.17
In addition, a renewed approach of the sociology of accusation was complemented by new attention to the political, religious, and judicial background
of large panic trials by Erik Midelfort in southwest Germany, Bengt
Ankarloo in Sweden, Gustav Henningsen in his study of the inquisition in
the Basque lands, and Christina Larner in Scotland.18 The contributions to
the 1984 Stockholm conference (published in 1990) were early representa15. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 564.
16. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 15867, 2045.
17. Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, 4266; Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed, passim; Robert Muchembled, Sorcie`res du Cambresis: Lacculturation du monde rural aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles, in Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat,
Willem Frijhoff, and Robert Muchembled, Prophe`tes et sorciers dans les Pays-Bas:
XVIeXVIIIe sie`cle (Paris, 1978), 155262; Wolfgang Behringer, Hexenverfolgung in
Bayern: Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staatsrason in der fruhen Neuzeit, (Munich, 1987);
translated as Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer (Cambridge, 1997); Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early
Modern France (Oxford, 1989).
18. Midelfort, Witch Hunting; Bengt Ankarloo, Trolldomsprocesserna i Sverige (Stockholm, 1971); Gustav Henningsen, The Witches Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the
Spanish Inquisition, 16091614 (Reno, Nev., 1980); idem, ed., The Salazar Documents:
Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Fras and others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Leiden,
2004); Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland (London, 1981);
cf. Christina Larner, Christopher Lee, and Hugh McLachlan, Source-Book of Scottish
Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977).

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tives of this new approach, broadening the comparative horizon from the
centers to the peripheries, from Sicily and Portugal to Estonia, from Norway
to Hungary.19
At this juncture it is worth raising the question as to what extent these
approaches could be called a cultural history of witchcraft. How can one
isolate the specific contributions of cultural history within this broader field,
and how does a cultural historical approach of European witch trials differ
from other competing approaches? To quote Peter Burke again, from his
recent formulation of What is Cultural History, a cultural history of trousers,
for instance, would differ from an economic history of the same subject.20
So how do we distinguish a cultural history of witchcraft from a social or
religious one? Following Burke, who was looking for a definition of what
cultural history is in the cultural history of cultural history, I would try to
scrutinize from this angle recent witchcraft studies, which have been closely
intertwined, from the 1970s on, with three historiographic currents exercising great impact on what we now call cultural history.
The most important among them, in my view, is the French Annales
school,21 which, after the original (and still influential) history of mentalites collectives (Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) and civilisation materielle (Fernand
Braudel), produced a real explosion of a diversified set of new approaches in
the 1970s under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and in the wake of the worldwide success of Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries Montaillou.22 These methodologies, popularised in anthologies such as Faire de lhistoire and La nouvelle histoire,23
though not calling themselves cultural history (with a later exception of Roger
19. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft.
20. Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004), 3.
21. Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London,
1999); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 192989
(Cambridge, 1990).
22. Marc Bloch, Melanges historiques, vols. 12 (Paris, 1963); Lucien Febvre, Pour
une histoire a` part entie`re (Paris, 1962); Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe sie`cle (Paris,
1962); Peter Burke, Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities, History
of European Ideas 7 (1986): 43951; reprinted in Burke, Varieties of Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1990), 16282; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation materielle, economie et Capitalisme XVeXVIIIe sie`cle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979); translated as Civilization and Capitalism,
15th18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1981); Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a` 1324 (Paris, 1975); abridged translation as
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1978).
23. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de lhistoire: Nouveaux problems
Nouvelles approachesNouveaux objets (Paris, 1974); Jacques Le Goff et al., ed., La
nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1978).

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Chartier24), proposed an anthropological-structural minded analysis of a number of relevant fields: acculturation, festivities and rituals, imaginaire, the social
history of the body and sexuality, family and kinship, the politics of language,
memory, popular religion. All these themes were taken over and further developed by the third generation of annalistes: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jacques
Revel, Roger Chartier, and Mona Ozouf.25
The second emerging new field was the history of popular culture. The
manifold historiographic and cultural roots of this current of cultural history
cannot be discussed in detail here. Let me only mention the debate on the
Bibliothe`que bleue prompted by Robert Mandrou and Genevie`ve Bolle`me,26
the translation of Mikhail Bakhtins book on Rabelais,27 and the first critical
reassessment of his concept of popular culture in the preface to Carlo Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms.28 Peter Burkes 1978 book remains the
methodologically most refined overview of this field, and its thesis on the
early modern reform of popular culture became very influential in witchcraft research as well.29
The third and perhaps the most important field of cultural history to
emerge in the 1970s was that of historical anthropology and, in second phase,
microhistory.30 The impact of the work of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner,
24. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1988).
25. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint levrier: Guinefort, guerisseur denfants depuis le XIIIe
sie`cle (Paris, 1979), translated as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since
the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983); idem, La raison des
gestes dans lOccident medieval (Paris, 1990); Jacques Revel, Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Une politique de la langue: La Revolution francaise et les patois: Lenquete de
Gregoire (17901794) (Paris, 1975); Jacques Revel and Arlette Farge, Les logiques de la
foule: Laffaire des enle`vement denfants Paris 1750 (Paris, 1988); Roger Chartier, Les
origines culturelles de la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1991); Mona Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire (Paris, 1976).
26. Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles:
La bibliothe`que bleue de Troyes, (Paris, 1964); Genevie`ve Bolle`me, La bibliothe`que bleue:
Litterature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe sie`cle (Paris, 1971).
27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hele`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968)
28. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio nel 500 (Milan,
1976), xixxxi; translated as The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi
(Baltimore, 1980).
29. Burke, Popular Culture.
30. On historical anthropology, see: Peter Burke, Anthropologists and Historians: Reflections on the History of a Relationship, Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1989/
90, 15564; Bob Scribner, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, in

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and Claude Levi-Strauss prompted French, Italian, and Anglo-American

historians to redefine their approaches to the history of culture as shared sets
of meanings, including high and low culture and artefacts and representations
to be interpreted according to the rules of thick description, charting
binary oppositions, structural patterns, ritual processes, and liminalities.31
2

Having made these preliminary points, let me come to my subject: how did
cultural history infuse the history of witchcraft? Let me start with a remote
historiographic reference. In his 1946 essay Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution? Lucien Febvre reviewed the old style French witchcraft
history of Francois Bavoux and used this as a pretext for a stimulating formulation of the objectives of the history of collective mentalities.32 Historians
should not be shocked or scandalized that people living in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, even cultivated, high-ranking intellectuals such as Jean
Bodin, attributed the status of reality to magical phenomena and bewitchments and agreed with the measures taken against witches. They should
rather investigate how, in that age, the standards of proof, evidence, and
reality were different from ours, and examine when a mental revolution
brought a break in this (an epistemological discontinuity, as Michel Foucault
would later have said).33 This same principle was guiding Julio Caro Baroja,
one of the pioneers of the new style of witchcraft research, who in his Las
brujas y su mundo in 1969 concentrated on the conceptions of the world that
made belief in witchcraft possible.34
Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia
and R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbutteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 1134. On
microhistory, see: Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost
Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991); Giovanni Levi, On Microhistory, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 1991), 93113; Carlo Ginzburg, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It, Critical Inquiry
20 (Autumn, 1993): 1035.
31. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); Victor Turner,
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968); Edmund Leach,
Levi-Strauss (New York, 1970).
32. Lucien Febvre, Sorcellerie, sottise ou revolution mentale? Annales dhistoire
sociale 3 (1948), reprinted in Febvre, Au coeur religieux, 3019; translated as Witchcraft: Nonsense or a Mental Revolution? in Febvre, A New Kind of History and Other
Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York, 1973), 18593; Francois Bavoux, La sorcellerie
aux pays de Quingey (Paris, 1947).
33. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York, 1966).
34. Baroja, Las brujas, as n. 13 above.

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Among French contributions, the book on Magistrats et sorciers (1970) by

Robert Mandrou stands out.35 Written by an Annales historian sensitive to
Lucien Febvres propositions concerning histoire des mentalites and as a direct
response to the call formulated in the article just mentioned, it experimented
with a kind of serial history of early seventeenth century public debates and
political, religious, and medical pamphlets related to scandalous witch trials
and above all to the spectacular possession cases of Loudun and Louviers. On
the basis of this, Mandrou became one of the few scholars who dared to
address the question how exactly did this major change in mentalities come
about, how could a significant majority of the elite lose faith in the reality of
magical activities. Strangely enough, Mandrou did not connect his take on
the problem of witchcraft with his earlier innovative (though much criticised)
views on popular culture, mentioned above. This issue became central, subsequently, in the work of Robert Muchembled.
Muchembleds book on popular and elite culture in early modern France,
which was published only two years after Peter Burkes related book, proposed to regard witch hunts as the most efficient means of suppressing and
disciplining popular culture, resulting in a devastating acculturation.36 The
concept of witchcraft, according to Muchembled, became a kind of melting
pot in this process. All traditional beliefs, popular festivities, dances, customs, and healing practices could be stigmatized and forbidden by being integrated into the satanic myth of the diabolic witches sabbath. Muchembleds
thesis has been accepted rather critically, as was the acculturation thesis in
general.37 The new academic consensus rather opted for what Peter Burke
described as the resilience of popular culture.38 Nevertheless, the distinction
between elite and popular culture in terms of different beliefs concerning
superstition (and the elite fight against this), magical healing, and midwifery became fertile territory for cultural history, providing further development to insights developed by Muchembled, who himself authored
numerous contributions to the history of the sorcie`re au village.39
35. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe sie`cle: Une analyse de
psychologie historique (Paris, 1968); idem, Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe sie`cle: Textes
inedits (Paris, 1979).
36. Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des elites dans la France moderne
(XVeXVIIIe sie`cle) (Paris 1979); cf. also idem, Sorcie`res du Cambresis.
37. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 5357.
38. Burke, Popular Culture, 218.
39. Robert Muchembled, La sorcie`re au village (Paris, 1979); idem, Les derniers buchers: Un village de Flandre et ses sorcie`res sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1981); idem, ed., Magie et
sorcellerie en Europe du Moyen Age a` nos jours (Paris, 1994).

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There was one distinct territory in which the new categories of elite and
popular culture came to be used for elaborating a new paradigm in research
on witchcraft: the problem of demonology and the witches sabbath. When
Carlo Ginzburg discovered the benandanti in 1966,40 he contrasted the popular, shamanistic concepts unfolding from the confessions of these seventeenthcentury good witches41 with the learned demonological dogmas of inquisitions, and analyzed the historical process by which the century-long persecution of the benandanti managed to distort and transform this archaic popular
belief system, assimilating it into the inquisitors elite concept of the diabolic
witches sabbath.
Inspired by this insight, Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer pointed
out in their books on Europes Inner Demons and European Witch Trials: Their
Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture (published almost simultaneously)
that the person of the devil was altogether absent from medieval witch trials
principally related to courtly, urban, or village conflicts concerning maleficium
accusations.42 Demonological elements were only introduced into the universe of popular witchcraft beliefs in the course of late medieval witchcraft
persecution by ecclesiastical and juridical elites, which developed the explosive demonological cocktail of the witches sabbath by the late fourteenth
century. This was a long process of evolution, integrating black mass accusations against medieval heretics,43 notions of ritual magic, ecclesiastic legends
on the pact with the devil, and demonological constructions resulting from
the trial against the Knight Templars and other scapegoats in the reign of
Philip the Fair and later the papacy of John XXII.44
This new cultural history of witchcraft advanced the proposition that the
traditional archaic witchcraft concepts of popular culture were transformed,
40. Ginzburg, I benandanti, as n. 12 above.
41. Peter Burke, Good Witches, New York Review of Books no. 32 (1985):
3234.
42. Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt (New York, 1975); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations
in Popular and Learned Culture, 13001500 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976).
43. Inspired by Cohn, I studied this issue in 1982, translated into English as Orgy
Accusations in the Middle Ages, in Eros in Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and Eszter
Csonka-Takacs (Budapest, 2002), 3855.
44. Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1994); Alain Boureau,
Satan heretique: Histoire de la demonologie (12801330) (Paris, 2004); translated as Satan
the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan
(Chicago, 2006); idem, ed., Le pape et les sorciers: Une consultation de Jean XXII sur la
magie en 1320 (manuscrit B.A.V. Borghese 348) (Rome, 2004).

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perverted, and made simultaneously more vulnerable and more dangerous by

the repeated interventions of the elite ecclesiastical culture in the later Middle
Ages. The gradual introduction of the diabolic concepts of the witches sabbath could be followed with chronological accuracy, and the geographic and
regional dimensions could also be clearly perceived. The comparative inquiries initiated in 1984 in Stockholm and continued in a similar large conference
in 1988 in Budapest revealed that the diabolic concept of the witches sabbath
and the related mechanism of chain-accusations spread like an innovation to
the east and the north of Europe, with a considerable time-lag.45 Whereas in
the Netherlands and France the diabolic nightmares and the prosecutions for
witchcraft declined in the first half of the seventeenth century, in northern
Germany, Sweden, New England, and Austria they reached their heyday half
a century later, while in Hungary and Poland the peak of the persecutions
came around the middle of the eighteenth century.46 The transfer of such
a cultural model is clearly illustrated by Hungary, where German soldiers
played a noteworthy role as witch-accusers in generating this new, more
epidemic type of witch hunt.47
In addition, in Norway, Finland, Hungary, and south-east Europe one
could observe a similar coexistence of witchcraft accusations and the activities
of an archaic, shamanistic type of sorcerer-figure, such as the one shown by
Ginzburg with the benandanti of Friuli. Such were the taltos in Hungary, the
kresnik in Croatia, and the noaide among the Sami in Lapland.48 These sorcer45. Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, 219423; Gabor
Klaniczay and Eva Pocs, ed., Witch Beliefs and Witch-hunting in Central and Eastern
Europe, special issue of Acta Ethnographica Hungarica: An International Journal of Ethnography 37 (1991/92).
46. On France and the Netherlands: Marijke Gijstvijt-Hofstra, ed., Nederland
betovert (Amsterdam, 1987); Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle: Le Parlement
de Paris (16e18e sie`cles) (London, 1992). On Germany: Gerhard Schorman, Hexenprozesse in Nordwestdeutschland (Hildesheim, 1977). On Sweden: Ankarloo, Trolldomsprocesserna i Sverige; cf. more recently Per Sorlin, Wicked Arts: Witchcraft and Magic
Trials in Southern Sweden, 16351754 (Leiden, 1999). On New England: Boyer and
Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982). On Poland: Bohdan Baranowski, Procesy
czarownic w Polsce w XVII i XVIII wieku [Witch Trials in Poland in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Century] (odz, 1952); Wanda Wyporska, Jewish, Noble, German,
or Peasant?The Devil in Early Modern Poland, in Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology, vol. 2 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pocs
(Budapest, 2006), 13951. These results are synthesized by Brian Levack, The WitchHunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987; 3rd ed. 2006).
47. Klaniczay, Hungary, 22831, 24951.
48. On Hungary: Klaniczay, Shamanistic Elements; idem, Hungary; more

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ers were similarly caught in the web of new-style witchcraft conflicts. They
assumed the role of the opponents of witches, but this ultimately led to their
demise. They themselves were accused of being witches, not only by church
inquisitors or witch-hunting secular courts, but also by their clients and
neighbors.49
The cultural history of the mixture of different concepts of magical aggression (elite, popular, demonological; archaic, shamanistic; western, eastern;
northern-southern) also revealed that this cannot be considered a one-way
process. Rather, it has to be seen as a complex and entangled set of cultural
transmissions, borrowings, and transformations. The concept of the witches
sabbath, as Carlo Ginzburg pointed out in connection with the benandanti,50
was not only a learned or inquisitorial invention. It also integrated existing
popular concepts and practices that were subsequently transformed and diabolized (this observation earned Ginzburg the misplaced accusation of being
a follower of Margaret Murray51). Robert Rowland, examining Portuguese
inquisitional documents, underlined the fact that the interrogation of witches
and witnesses was actually a cooperative process that fed more and more local
and popular beliefs into the internationally disseminated and theoretically
structured system of the diabolic witches sabbath.52 Recognizing the cultural
dynamics defining the elements of this construct, Stuart Clark pointed out in
recently idem, Shamanism and Witchcraft, Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1 (2006):
21421; Eva Pocs, Hungarian Taltos and His European Parallels, in Uralic Mythology and Folklore, ed. Mihaly Hoppal and Juha Pentikainen (Budapest-Helsinki, 1989),
25176. On Croatia: Maja Boskovic-Stulli, Testimonianze orali croate e slovene sul
Krsnik-Kresnik, Metodi e ricerche, N.S. 7 (1988): 3250. On Lapland: Rune Blix
Hagen, The King, the Cat, and the Chaplain: King Christian IVs Encounter with
the Sami Shamans of Northern Norway and Northern Russia in 1599, in Communicating with the Spirits, vol. 1 of Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva
Pocs (Budapest, 2005), 24663; idem, Sami Shamanism, in Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft
1 (2006): 22733.
49. Wolfgang Behringer, Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus
der fruhen Neuzeit (Munich, 1994); translated as Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, Va.,
1998).
50. Ginzburg, I benandanti; Cohn, Europes Inner Demons, 22324.
51. Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921); on
Murray see J. Simpson, Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why? Folklore
105 (1994): 7586.
52. Robert Rowland, Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons: European Witch-beliefs
in Comparative Perspective, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European
Witchcraft, 16190.

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a fascinating essay the semantics of inversion in the emerging mythology of

the witches sabbath.53 I will return to this topic below.
The explanation of witchcraft accusations in terms of the paradigm of conflicts between popular and learned culture also attracted the attention of Aron
Gurevich, who followed the debates on popular culture and popular religion attentively and with a critical alertness, and prepared his own synthetic
overviews on the topic in 1976 and 1981.54 In an insightful study on witchcraft persecutions in 1987,55 he combined the popular-elite cultural perspective with a social-psychological interpretation that grew out of approaches
related to the French histoire des mentalites, an approach represented by Jean
Delumeau, whose La Peur en Occident had a significant impact.56 Gurevich
attempted to situate beliefs concerning witchcraft in a broader set of anxieties
concerning death and the other world (a topic he had been studying himself57), and also to relate it to popular rebelliousness against the more oppressive state and judicial systems of the early modern period as well as the
Reformations and Counter-Reformations impact on popular culture. Gurevich also integrated in his overview the recent insights and conclusions of
historical anthropology (the sociology of accusations advocated by Keith
Thomas and Alan Macfarlane).
Beyond the acculturation model, the opposition of popular and elite versions of beliefs concerning witchcraft, and the problem of the general climate
of anxiety in the early modern period, there was a fourth fertile territory
within the popular culture approach to research on witchcraft: examination
of the conflicts related to popular medicine, healing and midwifery, and the
role of cunning folk. Again it was Alan Macfarlane who redirected the atten53. Stuart Clark, Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft, Past and
Present 87 (1980): 98127.
54. Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, Popularnoie bogoslovie i narodnaia religiosnost srednich
vekov (Moscow, 1976) [Peoples theology and popular religiosity in the Middle Ages]; idem,
Problemi srednievekovnoi narodnoi kulturi (Moscow, 1981), translated as Medieval Popular
Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 1990).
55. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, Vedima v dierevnie i pred sudom (narodnaia i
uchionnaia tradicii v ponimanii magii) [Witches in the village and on the bench of
the accused: Popular and learned traditions in the interpretation of magic], in Jaziki
kulturi i problemi perevodimosti [Languages, cultures and the problems of mediation]
(Moscow, 1987), 1246.
56. Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIVeXVIIIe sie`cles): Une cite assiegee
(Paris, 1978).
ge: Conscience individuelle et
57. Aaron Iakovlevich Gurevich, Au Moyen A
image de lau-dela`, Annales E.S.C. 37 (1982): 25575.

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tion of historians to this field, which was subsequently explored by Willem

de Blecourt, Robin Briggs, Eva Pocs, myself, and more recently Owen
Davies, Emma Wilby, and Mara Tausiet.58 The most fascinating enquiry concerning this theme was made not by a historian, however, but a psychologist,
Jeanne Favret-Saada, who turned to ethnological research and examined
present-day witchcraft beliefs in the French region called Bocage.59 In her
books, cultural and psychological history became an experience-centered
personal account offering fascinating insight into how bewitchment narratives were shaped and reworked in the context of the special therapeutic
climate of the unwitching procedures arranged by the cunning folk for their
clients.
3

As I hope to have shown, the cross-fertilization of new approaches in cultural

history and research on early modern European witchcraft has resulted in an
impressive series of new studies, starting in the 1970s and 1980s and in many
respects continuing to the present day. In fact, these results have been so
prolific that I cannot do justice here to all the recent research in which witchcraft is analyzed within the framework of some variety of cultural history. In
this third part of my study I will enumerate some of the research directions
that seem the most inspiring to me from this point of view and elaborate a
bit on the one in which I am currently engaged.
I would begin with some of the recent products on the history of witchcraft that follow the methodologies of historical anthropology and microhistory in the footsteps of Thomas, Macfarlane, and Boyer and Nissenbaum. In
58. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 11534; Willem de Blecourt, Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition, Social History 19 (1994): 285303; Robin Briggs, Witches
and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London, 1996),
16987; idem, Circling the Devil: Witch-Doctors and Magical Healers in Early
Modern Lorraine, in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early
Modern Culture, ed. Stuart Clark (London, 2001), 16179; Pocs, Between the Living
and the Dead, 12164; Klaniczay, Shamanistic Elements; idem, Witch-hunting
in Hungary, 15664; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History
(London, 2003); Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary
Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2007); Mara Tausiet,
Abracadabra Omnipotens: Magia urbana en Zaragoza en la Edad Moderna (Madrid, 2007).
59. Jeanne Favret-Saada, Les Mots, la mort, les sorts: La Sorcellerie dans le Bocage
(Paris, 1977); translated as Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, trans. Catherine Cullen (Cambridge, 1980); eadem, Corps pour corps: Enquete sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage
(Paris, 1981).

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1991 in Exeter Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts organized an entire conference as a tribute to and a critical appraisal of Keith
Thomass Religion and the Decline of Magic.60 On the basis of documentation
relating to witchcraft from Lorraine, Robin Briggs re-examined the principal
thesis of Thomas and Macfarlane in his Witches and Neighbours.61 A valuable
rejoinder to this historical anthropology of witchcraft accusations was the
book by Ildiko Kristof on witch trials and midwifery in the Hungarian city
of Debrecen, with special attention to conflicts arising from rival paradigms
of healing.62 In another 1991 conference on Historical Anthropology of
Early Modern Europe, organized by Bob Scribner in Wolfenbuttel, Lyndal
Roper examined the psychological tensions in early modern households and
the vulnerability of women after childbirth, explaining the genesis of accusations of witchcraft in this framework.63 So the cooperation between history
and anthropology continues in this domain, though it does not seem to be a
universal solution to unsolved questions.64
As for microhistory, the reconstruction of moving histories of some individual witches maintained its fascination: in the footsteps of Emmanuel Le
Roy Laduries witch of Jasmin and Franco Cardinis San Miniato witch Gostanza, a French team of the ENS Fontenay unearthed an extremely richly
documented trial in Berry.65 Under the direction of Agostino Paravicini Bag60. Jonathan Barry, Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and
Gareth Roberts (Cambridge, 1996), 148; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft in Early
Modern Kent: Stereotypes and the Background to Accusations, in ibid, 25787.
61. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours; cf. idem, Many Reasons Why: Witchcraft
and the Problem of Multiple Explanation, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft,
4963; idem, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007).
rdogi mesterseget nem cselekedtem: A boszorkanyuldozes tarsa62. Ildiko Kristof, O
dalmi es kulturalis hattere a kora ujkori Debrecenben es Bihar varmegyeben [I havent practiced any devilish craft: Social and cultural background of witchcraft prosecutions in
early modern Debrecen and Bihar county] (Debrecen, 1998).
63. Lyndal Roper, Hexenzauber und Hexenfantasien im Deutschland der fruhen
Neuzeit, in Po-Chia-Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early
Modern Europe, 13974. She later expanded this argument into two major books:
Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe
(London, 1994); Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New
Haven, Conn., 2004)
64. Ronald Hutton, Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft:
Potential for a New Collaboration? Historical Journal 47 (2004): 41334.
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, La sorcie`re de Jasmin (Paris, 1983); translated as
Jasmins Witch, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1987); Franco Cardini, ed., Gostanza,
la strega di San Miniato: Processo di una guaritrice nella Toscana medicea (Rome-Bari,

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liani, the members of a research group in Lausanne published a series of

fascinating microhistorical studies of fifteenth-century Swiss witches.66 A
recent addition to this genre, the story of Anne Gunter, came from James
Sharpe, one of the authorities on the history of witchcraft prosecutions in
England.67 Finally, Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill elaborated a series of
perceptive analyses of individual English trials.68
The question arises at this point as to what extent these historicalanthropological and microhistorical analyses of witchcraft cases can be
ranged in the category of the cultural history of witchcraft. I am inclined to
say only to a limited extent. The real novelty of the anthropological approach
lay in the explanation of accusations of witchcraft with reference to underlying social tensions, treating them as a kind of social strain-gauge, and
microhistory also aimed at the thick description of the social conflicts leading to accusation. I will return shortly to recent critiques of this approach by
Stuart Clark and others. At the same time I must stress that these analyses also
implied an attentive scrutiny of the cultural and religious surroundings of the
accusation, and this naturally evolved in the direction of cultural history.
A second important field of the cultural history of witchcraft was the
unfolding of a new, often passionate debate on the origins of the witches
sabbath. Carlo Ginzburgs Ecstasies provoked a renewal of research here after
1990.69 Ginzburgs principal argument, based on his earlier success with the
1989); Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud, eds., Les sorciers du carroi de Marlou: Un proce`s de sorcellerie en Berry (15821583) (Grenoble, 1996).
66. Martine Ostorero, Folatrer avec les demons: Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers a` Vevey
(1448) (Lausanne, 1995; 2nd ed., 2008); Eva Maier, Trente ans avec le diable: Une
nouvelle chasse aux sorciers sur la Riviera lemanique (14771484) (Lausanne, 1996); Sandrine Strobino, Francoise sauvee des flammes? Une Valaisanne accusee de sorcellerie au XVe
sie`cle (Lausanne, 1996); George Modestin, Le diable chez leveque: Chasse aux sorciers
dans le dioce`se de Lausanne (vers 1460) (Lausanne, 1999); Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser,
Wiederganger, Hexen und Rebellen: Biographien zu den Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg im
chtland (1399 und 1430) (Freiburg, Switz., 1999).
U
67. James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England from 15501750
(London, 1996); idem, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of
Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (London, 1999).
68. Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early Modern English Witches (London, 1999); eadem, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing
(London, 2000); Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britains Witches (London,
2001).
69. Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin, 1989); translated as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New
York, 1991).

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benandanti, tried to identify a (Celtic, Scythian, Slavic) shamanistic substratum in European witchcraft beliefs, and related these ideas to broader archetypes of universal culture of communication with the spirits of the dead. He
worked with a methodology inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Claude
Levi-Strauss that he called morphology. His propositions provoked an
unusual storm of critical reactions from various sides. While the limits of the
applicability of the notion of shamanism can indeed be debated,70 much of
the criticism addressed to Ginzburg, frequently with strong inquisitorial rhetoric, seems to me unwarranted.71
Another recent attempt to reconstruct this archaic layer of European beliefs
concerning witchcraft was elaborated by the Hungarian folklorist Eva Pocs.72
She gave a comparative analysis of central- and southeast-European sorcerers,
cunning people, and beings from folk mythology (szepasszony, vila, mora,
zmej, rusalia, etc.). On the basis of these examples she identified, in addition
to shamanism, another important popular belief system that could have
played an important role in the formation of the concept of the witches
sabbath, namely ambivalent fairy-mythologies. In 1991 a conference was
organized by Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud on the various
concepts of the sabbath, where, in addition to Ginzburg and Pocs, many
other researchers engaged in discussion.73 The French folklorist Claude Gaignebet pointed to the inquisitorial tendencies of modern scholarly interpretations,74 Alain Boureau proposed his first theses on the theological origins of
late medieval demonology, later expanded in his Satan heretique (2004),75 Stuart Clark gave an overview of the sabbath as a symbolic system (in preparation
70. Gabor Klaniczay, Shamanism and Witchcraft, Magic, Ritual, Witchcraft 1
(2006): 21421.
71. For Ginzburgs exchange with Perry Anderson, see London Review of Books, 8
November 1990 and 10 January 1991; cf. Klaus Graf, Carlo Ginzburgs HexensabbatHerausforderung an die Methodendiskussion der Geschichtswissenschaft, kea:
Zeitschrift fur Kulturwissenschaften 5 (1993): 116; for a recent recycling of this debate
see Willem de Blecourt, The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies? in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Basingstoke, 2007), 12545.
72. Eva Pocs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe
(Helsinki, 1989); eadem, Between the Living and the Dead.
73. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers XVe
XVIIIe sie`cles (Grenoble, 1993).
74. Claude Gaignebet, Discours de la sorcie`re de Saint-Julien-de-Lampon, in
Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 4755.
75. Alain Boureau, Le sabbat et la question scolastique de la personne, in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 3346; idem, Satan heretique.

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of his subsequent monograph on the subject),76 and Charles Zika pointed to

the iconographic schemes that helped shape the demonological nightmares
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.77
Another important research initiative connected to this question unfolded
in the research group directed by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani in Lausanne,
which prepared critical editions and detailed studies of the earliest documents
of diabolic witchcraft beliefs in Switzerland. In addition to the exemplary
volume on the imaginaire du sabbat,78 they published a series of detailed
case studies that threw new light on the relationship between late medieval
heresy and early formulations of the witches sabbath, also recently subjected
to scholarly scrutiny by others.79 The emergence of the concept of the
witches sabbath remained central in subsequent enquiries and conferences,
such as the one arranged in Budapest in 1999, where a special round-table
was organized around Ginzburgs Ecstasies, and many other papers touched
76. Stuart Clark, Le sabbat comme syste`me symbolique: Significations stables et
instables, in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 6375; idem, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).
77. Charles Zika, Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century WitchcraftLiterature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius, in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the
Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 175218; idem, Les parties du corps:
Saturne et le cannibalisme: Representations visuelles des assemblees des sorcie`res au
XVIe sie`cle, in Jacques-Chaquin and Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers, 389418; idem,
Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe
(Leiden, 2003); idem, The Appearance of Witchcraft (London and New York, 2007).
78. Limaginaire du sabbat: Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.1440
c.), ed. Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp, in
collaboration with Catherine Che`ne (Lausanne, 1999).
79. Catherine Che`ne, Juger les vers: Exorcismes et proce`s danimaux dans le dioce`se de
Lausanne (XVeXVIe s.) (Lausanne, 1995); Martine Ostorero, Kathrin Utz Tremp and
Georg Modestin, eds., Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse romande: Le registre Ac 29 des
Archives cantonales vaudoises (14381528) (Lausanne, 2007); see also n. 66 above.
Beyond the work of the Lausanne seminar, see Andreas Blauert, Fruhe Hexenverfolgungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989);
Bernard Andenmatten and Kathrin Utz Tremp, De lheresie a` la sorcellerie: Linquisiteur Ulric de Torrente OP (vers 14201445), et laffermissement de linquisition
en Suisse Romande, Zeitschrift fur Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 86 (1992): 7274;
Pierrette Paravy, De la chretiente romaine a` la reforme en Dauphine: Eveques, fide`les et
deviants (vers 13401530), 2 vols. (Rome, 1993); Michael D. Bailey, The Medieval
Concept of the Witches Sabbath, Exemplaria 8 (1996): 41939; idem, Battling
Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, Pa.,
2003); Wolfgang Behringer, How Waldensians became Witches, in Klaniczay and
Pocs, Communicating with the Spirits, 15592; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Von der Haresie zur
Hexerei: Wirkliche und imaginare Sekten im Spatmittelalter (Hannover, 2008).

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on the issue.80 The same interest was preserved in the 2002 Paris conference
on le diable en proce`s.81 Parallel to this enquiry concerning the earliest
sources of the diabolic witches sabbath, there was also an increasing interest
in the first writings of learned demonology: in Johannes Nider, author of the
Formicarius,82 and Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.83
At this point one again must raise the obligatory question: is this a cultural
history of the witches sabbath and related demonology? My preliminary
judgement would be that the duality of shamanism, fairy beliefs, or other
archaisms, on one hand, and the religious-intellectual-institutional history of
the construction of the complex sabbath mythology on the other certainly
demand the critical skills of cultural history, but they might lead in too many
divergent directions and fields to be examined along the lines of a unified
methodology.
These classificatory uncertainties surface less with the third type of inquiry
to be presented here, the one operating under the banner of the linguistic
turn, promoted at the 1998 Swansea conference organized by Stuart Clark.84
80. Round-table Discussion with Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, Eva
Pocs, Giovanni Pizza and Gabor Klaniczay, in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions,
vol. 3 of Demons, Spirits and Witches, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pocs (Budapest,
2008), 3549; see also Martine Ostorero, The Concept of the Witches Sabbath in
the Alpine Region (14301440) Text and Context, in ibid, 1535.
ge, ed. Martine
81. Le diable en process: Demonologie et sorcellerie a` la fin du Moyen A

Ostorero and Etienne Anheim, special issue of Medievales 44 (2003).

82. Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437: Studien zu den
Anfangen der europaischen Hexenverfolgungen im Spatmittelalter (Aachen, 2000); Bailey,
Battling Demons; Johannes Nider, Les Sorciers et leurs tromperies: La fourmilie`re, livre
V, ed. and trans. Jean Ceard (Grenoble, 2005); Gabor Klaniczay, The Process of
Trance: Heavenly and Diabolic Apparitions in Johannes Niders Formicarius, in Procession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Ottawa, 2007),
20358.
83. Malleus Maleficarum von Heinrich Institoris (alias Kramer), ed. Andre Schnyder
(Goppingen, 1991); Gunter Jerouschek, ed., Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (Hildesheim,
1992); Peter Segl, ed., Der Hexenhammer: Entstehung und Umfeld des Malleus Maleficarum von 1487 (Cologne, 1988); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and
the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002); Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum
and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester, 2003); Henricus Institoris and Jacobus
Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge, 2006); The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester, 2007); Tamar Herzig, Heinrich Kramer e la caccia alle streghe in Italia, in Non
lasciar vivere la malefica: Le streghe nei trattati e nei processi (secoli XIVXVII), ed. Dinora
Corsi and Matteo Duni (Florence, 2008), 16796.
84. Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in
Early Modern Culture, (London, 2001).

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Concerning earlier historical anthropological explanations of witchcraft, the

participants argued that the model of the sociology of accusation, that is,
the explanation of witchcraft conflicts with reference to underlying economic, social, and cultural motifs, in fact explains away the specificity of the
irreducible experience of the participants in conflicts over witchcraft accusations. Aiming to provide an accurate and attentive interpretation of witchcraft narratives as preserved in judicial recordings of these testimonies, Clark
advocates paying more attention to how the cultural narratives of witchcraft have been constructed, imagined, and represented, and basing analyses
on the primacy of language and the referentiality of texts in order to uncover
plots and tropes. Studies by Marion Gibson and Malcolm Gaskill examined
the story-types, the legal narratives, pointing out that the social conflict
repeatedly proposed by historical anthropologists as the typical motivation
for witchcraft accusations, the refusal of charity, is itself a story-type, a
narrative that may count as proof in the eyes of the court and may be
employed by accusers as such.85 A careful consideration of such textual-narrative aspects of our documentation certainly allows a more critical (and
reserved) evaluation of underlying causes. The attention to narrative and
communication also subsequently led to very interesting studies on gossip and
slander, and a detailed examination of the modes of speech about witchcraft.86
The fourth major issue among recent trends of what I refer to here as the
cultural history of witchcraft has been the question of gender, and above all
the implication of women in matters of witchcraft. One may wonder
whether this in fact constitutes a new question. Quite early on, Jules Michelet
and Joseph Hansen treated this as one of the central issues of the history of
witchcraft persecution.87 It was brought up again by feminist discourse,88 and
85. Marion Gibson, Understanding Witchcraft? Accusers Stories in Print in
Early Modern England, in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 4154; eadem, Thinking
Witchcraft: Language, Literature and Intellectual History, in Barry and Davies,
Witchcraft Historiography, 16481; Malcolm Gaskill, Witches and Witnesses in Old
and New England, in Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 5581; idem, Witchcraft and
Evidence in Early Modern England, Past and Present 198 (2008): 3370.
86. Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 15611562
(Manchester, 2003).
87. Jules Michelet, La sorcie`re (1861; reprint Paris, 1962); Hansen, Quellen,
41644.
88. Andrea Dworkin claimed in her book Woman-Hating (New York, 1974) that
nine million women were burned as witches; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
came forward with the thesis that witch hunts were geared at eradicating womens
medicine, especially midwifery, in Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women
Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1973).

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subsequently nearly all relevant analyses have touched on it, from William
Monter and Christina Larner to Carlo Ginzburg.89 With the new vogue of
witchcraft research in the 1980s, a number of specific studies exploring this
dimension of witch hunting had many overlaps with cultural history, relating
witchcraft beliefs and conflicts to the specific relations of women to healing,
the domestic sphere, fertility, and also the position of women in the family,
society, and culture.90 As Stuart Clark remarked, in the 1990s witchcraft
history intersected with feminism in a much more fruitful manner than was
initially the case.91 Marianne Hester analysed patriarchal power mechanisms and re-evaluated the data of Macfarlanes analysis of Essex from a gendered perspective.92 Anne Llewellyn Barstow dwelt on the problem of
victimhood in witchcraft cases.93 Partly in debate with Hester, Diana Purkiss
stressed that there could also be agency and deliberate self-fashioning on the
part of witches themselves, with some deliberately representing themselves as
witches.94 In making this assertion she relied on Tanya Luhrmanns sophisticated analysis of the religious experience of adepts in contemporary witch89. E. William Monter, The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and
Claudia Koonz, (Boston, 1977), 11936; Larner, Enemies of God, 89102; Ginzburg,
Ecstasies, 89121.
90. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial
New England (New York, 1987); Susanna Burghartz, The Equation of Women and
Witches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenth
and Sixteenth Centuries, in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German
History, ed. Richard J. Evans, (London and New York, 1988), 5774; Dagmar Unverhau, Frauenbewegung und historische Hexenforschung, in Ketzer, Zauberer,
Hexen: Die Anfange der europaischen Hexenverfolgungen, ed. Andreas Blauert (Frankfurt
am Main, 1990), 24183; Brian P. Levack, ed., Witchcraft, Women and Society (New
York and London, 1992); idem, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 5, Gender and Witchcraft (New York and London, 2001); Willem de Blecourt,
The Making of a Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early
Modern Period, Gender and History 12 (2000): 287309; Katharine Hodgkin, Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychonalysis, in Barry and Davies, Witchcraft
Historiography, 182202.
91. Clark, Languages of Witchcraft, 11.
92. Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of
Male Domination (London and New York, 1992); eadem, Patriarchal Reconstruction
and Witch Hunting, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 25787.
93. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch
Hunts (San Francisco, 1994).
94. Diana Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representation (London and New York, 1996).

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craft movements.95 Lyndal Ropers aforementioned studies used

psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts to explain conflicts regarding
witchcraft within the world of household cares and anxieties over motherhood.96 It is worth recalling that the attention dedicated to the gender issue
also provoked interesting criticism. The exaggerated role attributed to
women in witchcraft matters has been countered by Malcolm Gaskill, Eva
Labouvie, Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Rolf Schulte, and Alison Rowlands,
who all attempt to shed light on the neglected role of male witches.97
The obligatory question again returns: is the gendered approach to witchcraft a cultural history? Let me quote here the observation of Miri Rubin:
Joan Wallach Scotts Gender and the Politics of History is as much an essay on
the history of gender as it is on cultural history, and history in general.98
This statement holds equally for the problem of gender and witchcraft, which
is entangled in the cultural history of male and female roles.
This leads me to the fifth (and last) current of the cultural history of witchcraft I would like to discuss here, the one I have been trying to cultivate
myself over the past two decades, in connection with an unfinished book
project on Sainthood and Witchcraft. The problem itself could be formulated
by viewing witchcraft beliefs and their function in explaining and handling
everyday misfortune, illness, and calamities by situating the related practices
in a broader religious, cultural, and gendered framework in the long-term
history of the universe of positive and negative concepts regarding the supernatural. This implies a meticulous structural comparison of the two sets of
beliefs within Christianity, where supernatural capacity and agency is attrib95. Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witchs Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary
England (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
96. Lyndall Roper, Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany, in Barry,
Hester, and Roberts, Witchcraft, 20736; eadem, Oedipus and the Devil; eadem, Witch
Craze.
97. Malcolm Gaskill, The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and
Belief in Jacobean England, Historical Research 71 (1998): 14278; Eva Labouvie,
Manner im Hexenprozess: Zur Sozialanthropologie eines mannlichen Verstandnisses von Magie und Hexerei, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 5678; Lara
Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2003);
Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. Linda FroomeDoring (New York, 2009); Alison Rowlands, ed., Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early
Modern Europe (New York, 2009).
98. Miri Rubin, Cultural History IWhats in a Name? in Making History,
http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/cultural_history.html
(accessed on February 10, 2009); referring to Scott, Gender and the Politics of History
(New York, 1988).

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uted to real human beings, namely to saints and witches. With this enquiry
there emerges a need to situate the related (or attributed) manifestations of
these two figures in a common analytical frameworkmiracle and bewitchment (maleficium)and also to study the manner in which the surrounding
culture narrates, reformulates, and adjudicates these phenomena. I first articulated my ideas on this subject in the 1990s in studies on the ambivalence of
late medieval female sainthood and the structural ambiguities in medieval
miracles on vengeance, which came close to bewitchments.99 The comparative cultural history of sainthood and witchcraft relied on important precedents. The first chapter of Keith Thomass Religion and the Decline of Magic on
the magic of the medieval Church can be considered as a point of departure that also inspired Valerie Flint in her Rise of Magic in Early Medieval
Europe.100 More recently an increasing number of scholars have pursued
enquiries into the binary opposition of saints and witches, such as Marcello
Craveri and Gabriella Zarri,101 or, more generally, into the relationship
between holy and unholy, as formulated by Richard Kieckhefer.102 This
coupling of the two opposed but interrelated figures had been strengthened
by famous overlaps: Joan of Arc, who received both qualifications,103 and
several other late medieval and early modern religious women described by
Peter Dinzelbacher.104 Late medieval debates concerning the evaluation of
ecstatic and somatic female spirituality were first studied in depth by Caroline
Walker Bynum and connected with the problems of the discernment of
spirits, visions, apparitions, possession, heresy, and witchcraft a decade later
by Barbara Newman, Nancy Caciola, Dyan Elliott, Moshe Sluhovsky, and
Tamar Herzig.105
99. Gabor Klaniczay, Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning Late
Medieval Female Sainthood, in Hsia and Scribner, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, 4974; Klaniczay, Miracoli di punizione e malefizia, in
Miracoli: Dai segni alla storia, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Marilena Modica (Rome,
1999), 10937.
100. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 2550; Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise
of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1991).
101. Marcello Craveri, Sante e streghe (Milan, 1980); Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive:
Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra 400 e 500 (Turin, 1990).
102. Richard Kieckhefer, The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and
Magic in Late Medieval Europe, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24
(1994): 35585.
103. Klaniczay, The Process of Trance.
104. Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffalliger Frauen in Mittelalter
und Fruhneuzeit (Zurich, 1995).
105. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance
of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1987); Bynum, Fragmentation and

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I continue to work on this as well, trying to approach the subject from

three different angles. One of the issues I am currently dwelling on is the
interplay of medieval interpretations of dreams with the discernment of heavenly and diabolic apparitions in the work of Johannes Nider and the mass of
witness depositions in late medieval canonization processes and early modern
witch trials.106 The analysis of these testimonies also allows a meticulous confrontation of the narrative structure and the dramatic sequence of events in
miracle accounts and bewitchment tales.107 Finally, this allows the consideration of the cultural history of making a saint through an histoire croisee of
local, popular initiatives and the legal procedures of processes of canonization, and it allows us to confront all that with the cultural history of making
a witch through slander, gossip, evil reputation, and vicious accusations, all
framed by the legal constraints and pressuring tools of witch trials.108

!
The interest in the history of witchcraft seems far from being exhausted. The
first decade of the new millennium has produced a series of new syntheses
on this question, such as the six volume series edited by Bengt Ankarloo and
Stuart Clark on Witchcraft and Magic in Europe,109 the four volume Encyclopedia
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York,
1991); Barbara Newman, Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and
the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century, Speculum 73 (1998): 73370; Nancy
Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture
in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every
Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago,
2007); Tamar Herzig, Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramers Ties with
Italian Women Mystics, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 2455.
106. Klaniczay, The Process of Trance; idem, Learned Systems and Popular
Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment, in Klaniczay and Pocs, Witchcraft Mythologies
and Persecutions, 5082; idem, Angels and Devils, in Memory, Humanity, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Andrei Plesus Sixtieth Anniversary, ed. Mihail Neamtu and Bogdan Tataru-Cazaban (Bucharest, 2009), 11118.
107. Michael Goodich, Filiation and Form in Late Medieval Miracle Story,
Hagiographica 3 (1976): 30622.
108. Peter Rushton, Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England, in Clark, The Languages of Witchcraft,
2140; Bengt Ankarloo, Postface: Saints and Witches, in Proce`s de canonisation au
ge: Aspects juridiques et religieuxCanonization Processes in the Middle Ages:
Moyen A
Legal and Religious Aspects, ed. Gabor Klaniczay (Rome, 2004), 36368.
109. Frederick H. Cryer and Marie-Louise Thomsen, Biblical and Pagan Societies;
Valerie I. J. Flint, Richard Gordon, Georg Luck, and Daniel Ogden, Ancient Greece

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of Witchcraft edited by Richard Golden,110 the individual syntheses by P. G.

Maxwell-Stuart, Wolfgang Behringer, and Lyndal Roper,111 the initiation of
the new book-series in Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic at Palgrave-Macmillan under the editorship of Jonathan Barry, Willem de Blecourt, and Owen Davies,112 and, last but not least, the publication of Magic,
Ritual, and Witchcraft. These all bear testimony to ongoing interest in this
topic. And, as I have attempted to argue, much of this ongoing research
continues to expand the cultural history of witchcraft.

and Rome; Karen Louise Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, The Middle
Ages; Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter, The Period of the Witch
Trials; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter, The Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries; Willem de Blecourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean La Fontaine, The
Twentieth Century (London and Philadelphia, 19982002).
110. Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition
(Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006).
111. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 14001800
(New York, 2001); Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History
(Cambridge, 2004); Roper, Witch Craze.
112. The first important publications: Julian Goodare, Laureen Martin, and Joyce
Miller, Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (New York, 2008); Edward Bever,
The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition
and Everyday Life (New York, 2008); Schulte, Man as Witch; Rowlands, Witchcraft and
Masculinities; Jonathan Roper, ed., Charms, Charmers and Charming: International
Research on Verbal Magic (New York, 2010).

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