Articles about Early Modern Witch Hunts
All of these articles are about, among other things, the myth that midwives were especially likely to be accused of witchcraft. This myth came about from taking the works of Early Modern demonologists, such as Heinrich Kramer, at face value and assuming that what he believed and that what a lot of clergy believed was identical to what everyone also thought and therefore that since the clergy was suspicious of midwives, lay people were as well.
Unfortunately, trial records don’t bear this myth out. There were some midwives accused, such as Walpurga Hausmannin and La Voisin, but both of these women seem to have been the exception rather than the rule and their cases were not typical of most witch trials; their relatively high-rank suggests that there were many factors behind their cases. We don’t know who first accused Hausmannin, but the accusations against La Voisin were driven by high-profile poisoning cases among the aristocratic elite of 17th century France and La Voisin was initially arrested on charges of poisoning. Linking poisoning with witchcraft was not uncommon, but it suffices to say that there was more afoot in the Voisin case than being a straightforward example of a midwife-witch. In total, Harley’s analysis of trial records finds only 14 midwife-witches, not all of whom were executed and sometimes their midwifery was rather incidental to the accusations of witchcraft.
What’s more, it turns that the assumption that Early Modern clergy (both Catholic and Protestant) and lay people had the same beliefs about witchcraft and magic seems entirely wrong. To make a long story short: the clergy were most interested in associating witches with cannibalism, pacts with Satan, Witches’ Sabbaths, and sex with demons. The peasantry, on the other hand, was most interested in magic that caused direct harm, such as causing a sudden storm or a child or animal to sicken seemingly without any explanation. This point on this divide was also made in this recent article, “The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism” by Michael D. Bailey.
In a lot of cases, what lay people thought seems to have been rather more important to understanding the witch-craze, because the vast majority of Witch Trials were caused by accusations from people who were not members of the clergy and were generally of roughly the same social status as those they were accusing. (As in, most of the trials were the result of peasants accusing other peasants). Another point made in the Horsley articles is that while the line between beneficent and malevolent magic was sometimes blurry in the minds of lay people there does, nevertheless, seem to have been a line. By which I mean that the belief that all magic is inherently evil seems to most often been the viewpoint of the clergy. Harley, meanwhile, suggests that the clergy’s writings on midwives might have originated in the fact that midwives often did use quasi-magical techniques to promote easier childbirth and also possibly that midwives provided a rather neat and tidy explanation for where the supposed witches engaged in baby-killing rituals were getting the babies from without attracting a lot of attention. This aside, however, midwives, in fact, seem to have been highly-respected and valued members of their communities. Indeed, they were trusted enough to testify as expert witnesses for legal cases involving rape, illegitimacy, and/or infanticide.
The recent article by Bailey and both of the articles by Horsley also emphasize that witch hunts most often coincided with times of economic instability and thus, it is interesting to note that, aside from being mostly middle-aged or elderly women, a lot of accused witches were also beggars.
These works also discuss the Malleus Maleficarum and its often overstated influence on Early Modern witch trials. Thing thing about the Malleus is that it was originally written by a man named Heinrich Kramer as a way to vindicate himself as an Inquisitor and witch hunter after the cred-stripping debacle that had happened to him in Innsbruck in 1485. Namely, while running a trial against an accused witch named Helena Scheuberin and six other women, Kramer apparently spent most of his time asking Scheuberin endless questions about her sexual behavior. Georg Golser, the Bishop of Brixen, was not amused and had the trial shut down, the accused all freed, and Kramer expelled from Innsbruck.
Despite Kramer’s intentions, the Malleus was not initially an influential work; it was published during a lull in European witch-hunting and the peak of the Witch Hunt panic actually occurred around 140 years later. The lack of immediate popularity was probably due to, among other things, that the book was initially condemned by the faculty of Cologne due to objections over its demonology and recommended legal procedures. That Kramer was German and the heart of the Witch-Craze was in the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire is interesting, but it’s not enough to draw a one-to-one cause and effect, because there were other social, cultural, and political reasons for the German parts of the HRE produced so many witch trials.
