The witch‐hunt in early modern Finnmark

Reviewed by: Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition H. C. Erik Midelfort Richard Golden . Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition. 4 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2006. Pp. xxxvi + 1238. The world of scholarship has been eagerly awaiting this ambitious encyclopedia for several years. Its most comprehensive predecessor has long been The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959, with 227 entries), by the medieval English literary scholar Rossell Hope Robbins. Recent smaller entries into this field have not been an adequate substitute for a thorough reassessment of the state of this burgeoning area of historical research.1 Robbins’s work summarized much of what was known and thought before scholars began their systematic assault upon the archival records of witchcraft trials, and so it is not surprising that his entries on many individual demonologists have stood the test of time better than his attempts to survey the history of [End Page 87] actual witchcraft trials. In fact, Richard Golden’s four volumes with 758 entries, co-edited by six other prominent scholars and written by an international team of 170 experts (29% of them women) from 29 countries, combine such a wealth of knowledge from so many countries and cover so many aspects of the history of witchcraft, that they can serve as a means to assess the health, progress, and maturity of various subfields. In this review I will confine myself to the main emphases of the editors and of the authors they recruited. One should note at the outset that although the subtitle of the Encyclopedia is “The Western Tradition,” the vast majority of articles deal with European witchcraft between the years 1400 and 1750, that is, the years of the so-called great European witch hunt. A dozen learned articles treat ancient Greek and Roman witchcraft (e.g., “Homer,” “Medea,” “Greek Magical Papyri,” “Horace,” “Defixiones,” “Laws on Witchcraft—Ancient,” “Apuleius of Madaura”), and there are a few essential entries on the Bible (e.g., “Bible,” “Moses,” “Exodus 22:18,” “the witch of Endor”). Similarly, key medieval thinkers (e.g., Gratian, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Pope John XXII) and key medieval documents (e.g., the Canon Episcopi, “Laws on Witchcraft—Medieval”) attract a small bouquet of usefully learned articles. But these entries pale in comparison with the huge number of often overlapping articles treating the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The reason is not far to seek. The fundamental subject of Golden’s Encyclopedia is not so much the broad topic of witchcraft, demonology, or magic (as a belief or a practice) but the escalating series of witchcraft prosecutions that plagued much of Europe in the three centuries after 1420. So overwhelming is the emphasis on witchcraft trials that one can say that these volumes are now not only the single best place to begin the study of European witchcraft but actually also the best introduction to the comparative history of early modern European criminal procedure. E. William Monter has contributed sharply focused articles on “Accusations,” “Acquittals,” “Appeals,” “Confessions” (with Jonathan Durrant), “Confiscations,” and a more general survey entitled “Geography of the Witch Hunts,” while Edward Kern has provided articles on “Courts—Ecclesiastical,” “Courts—Inquisitorial,” and “Courts—Secular.” Vincinzo Lavenia treats some of the same topics, however, under “Episcopal Justice,” while Peter Dinzelbacher goes over some of this material again in “Inquisition—Medieval.” In addition, there are separate articles on the Portuguese, Roman, Spanish, and Venetian Inquisitions, as well as a general entry on “Inquisitorial Procedure” by Brian Levack, who has also contributed a substantial piece on “Torture.” There is even a separate entry on “Trials.” Along these same lines, Wolfgang Behringer has contributed a substantial [End Page 88] article on “Laws on Witchcraft—Early Modern,” Robert Thurston has contributed “Proof, Problem of,” while Robin Briggs has offered another article dealing with the “Parlement of Paris.” Near the end of the Encyclopedia, Rita Voltmer wraps up much of this material in an effective summary entitled “Witch Hunts,” but this summary does not by any means exhaust the list of legally focused entries. The upshot of so much information on trials and procedure is that we can now understand the varying intensity of the...

One of the most consistent yet least understood aspects of the early modern witch hunts is how accusation and persecution for witchcraft came to be largely directed against women, throughout Europe and the so-called New World. In an attempt to question why the greater proportion of those accused of witchcraft were women, this chapter seeks to move beyond Keith Thomas' analysis in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and also beyond the dichotomy of ‘sex-related versus sex-specific’ set up by Christina Larner's work. Focusing mainly on English material, it argues that in our quest to understand the phenomenon of the witch hunts we have to see male–female conflictual relations as an integral part of the process of accusation and persecution. The accusation of women was not merely a reflection of an age-old stereotype, nor merely the by-product of a patriarchal society; the witch hunts were a part of, and one example of, the ongoing mechanisms for social control of women within a general context of social change and the reconstruction of a patriarchal society. It is generally recognised that Europe in the early modern period experienced a variety of major changes in terms of demography, ideology, economy, religions and political systems. Levack has rightly pointed out that change is not a feature unique to this period, and that ‘change’ alone cannot explain the witch hunts at this time.

An exploration of why women were singled out as witches in 15th-century in Germany. Sigrid Brauner examines the connections between three central developments in early modern Germany: a shift in gender roles for women; the rise of a new urban ideal of femininity; and the witch hunts that swept across Europe from 1435 to 1750. In mediaeval discourse on witchcraft, Brauner argues, men and women were assumed to become witches in roughly equal numbers. But starting with the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (1487), witchcraft was reinterpreted as a gender-specific crime: its authors argued contentiously that most witches were women and linked the crime of witchcraft to women's voracious sexual appetites. The work raises questions about the genesis of the modern social problems of race, gender and class oppression, and locates their roots in the early modern period.

ABSTRACTThe nature of witchcraft beliefs and trials in the early modern Isle of Man has recently been the subject of some excellent research. The history of attitudes to witchcraft on the island is, however, also susceptible to a different approach: that of examining the manner in which they have developed and adapted over the time since the opening of the modern period. This longer perspective reveals, as did the close study of the early modern material, that Man both exhibited a number of individualistic features and acted as a microcosm of more general alterations in belief. As those alterations have, as yet, failed to attract any sustained interest from historians, the perspective shed upon them by the Manx material is all the more important. Man's abundant early modern archives and rich modern literary culture together provide ample evidence for such a case study, while the latter presents wider implications for the treatment of the subject in a broader context.

Journal Article Book Review: Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria. Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe Get access R. Po-chia Hsia R. Po-chia Hsia New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 17, Issue 3, July 1999, Pages 406–408, https://doi.org/10.1177/026635549901700308 Published: 01 July 1999

Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe. By Wolfgang Behringer. Translated by J. C. Grayson and David Lederer. Past and Present Publications. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxiv + 476 pp. $75.00. - Volume 68 Issue 2

Vers 1980, les tribunaux de la Province de l'Est du Cameroun commencèrent assez brutalement à condamner des « sorciers ». C'était un renversement dramatique de la jurisprudence antérieure. Jusqu'alors des gens accusés de sorcellerie ne pouvaient être condamnés — conformément à la jurisprudence coloniale — que s'il y avait des « preuves tangibles » d'agression physique. Mais à partir de 1980, les tribunaux de cette province se mirent à condamner de prétendus sorciers à de lourdes peines (jusqu'à dix ans d'emprisonnement et à des amendes relativement élevées) sur la base de « preuves » qu'on ne peut guère considérer comme « tangibles ». Souvent la preuve principale semble être la déclaration d'un nganga (guérisseur « traditionnel ») qui aurait « vu » l'accusé commettre des actes de sorcellerie. Apparemment — et c'est une autre déviation frappante de la jurisprudence coloniale — les juges sont maintenant prêts à accepter ces nganga comme des témoins-experts.

Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria : Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe

During the corpus-building operation of the Digital Database of Hungarian Verbal Charms we tried to augment the available material by the inclusion of witness statements of witch trials conducted in early modern Bihar County and the town of Debrecen. My paper explores the kinds of dilemmas and issues we were faced with concentrating especially on generic questions of verbal charms. As regards the exploration of early modern written sources of vernacular language use the most relevant recent approaches came from historical speech act research. Therefore, in the context of the corpus building project I shall also discuss to which extends the results of historical pragmatics, historical speech act research can offer any help (and if so, what kind of help) in solving the generic problems and questions of verbal magic.1

Arthur Miller's The Crucible had its Broadway premiere at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on January 22, 1953 and that year received the prestigious Antoinette Perry and the Donaldson Awards. Set in 1692, based on historical documentation of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, The Crucible was a veiled indictment of the powerful House on Un-American Committee (HUAC), which focused its investigations on what it regarded as both real and suspected Communists in positions of power, particularly in the film industry. Miller drew parallels between the injustices of the HUAC in its search for Communists and the Salem trials in which a number of citizens, falsely accused of witchcraft, were executed. Its popularity may be explained by its appeal as a political parable, based on one of the most terrifying events in American history during the early modern period when a village became an hysterical mob and virtually destroyed itself. Keywords:America; Arthur Miller; House on Un-American Committee (HUAC); hysterical mob; witchcraft

Early modern historians have long recognized the value of legal depositions (the informations of accusers and examinations of the accused) for reconstructing contexts of crime and criminal justice.1 In contrast to European states observing inquisitorial procedure, however, in England depositions were neither meticulously constructed nor routinely preserved as official records. More indictments have survived but, because their content is brief and formulaic, invariably they conceal an intricate substratum of circumstances at parish level which, due to the accusatory nature of English justice, determined not only the course of a trial, but whether an accusation reached the courts in the first place. Depositions also throw light on more general aspects of life, demonstrating, inter alia, the dynamics of social relationships, and popular thinking in action. The most enlightening examples concern witchcraft, not just because witchcraft exposes a belief alien to modern western mentalities (at least in terms of legal responses), but because it generated meanings which were contested and so changed over time.2 Of these, there are especially few due to the modest scale of English witch trials. Yet more could be made of what we do have by asking questions concerned less with why people made witchcraft accusations and more with how they formalized those accusations at law. This approach shifts the focus away from the traditional preoccupation with the ecological causes of accusations, and towards an exploration of their inner meaning in terms of social psychology and culture.

Reviewed by: Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction Marion Gibson Malcolm Gaskill . Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 146. OUP's Very Short Introduction series has established itself as the first port of call (other, of course, than the oracular Wikipedia) for scholars, students, and the general reader in subjects from Jung to medical ethics to privacy law. [End Page 230] So it is no surprise to see Malcolm Gaskill's volume on witchcraft join the set. Witchcraft is a subject of wide public interest as well as being studied in a wide range of university and college courses, from general introductions to early modern history to specific modules devoted to witch trials and their literatures. A volume on witchcraft was certainly needed, and it will surely be a popular title. The book begins enticingly—Gaskill admits engagingly that he's a victim of circumstance and passion. Witchcraft is a subject that just won't leave him alone. Most readers of this journal will know exactly what he means. This Very Short Introduction therefore sets out to explore why witchcraft is such a compelling topic, along with surveying the main features of its history, historiography, and contemporary cultural relevance. Gaskill is a fine writer: clear, direct, chatty, authoritative. He brings the subject to life with provocative analogies. Witches are special, different from other victims of persecution like Cathars and Lollards because, bizarrely, they are the subject of board games and children's TV shows. He teases and challenges the reader. Have you ever been truly hungry? If not, how can you judge those who accused their neighbors of spoiling their crops? Ever fantasized or hated? You too could have been a witch-hunter. Gaskill begins by embedding witchcraft belief into the longest possible durée, the (pre)history of human religiosity, inquisitiveness, and competitiveness. The persecution of witches, then, was no sudden "outbreak," madness, or even a category error. Human beings were, in certain senses, made to hunt witches. The book invites the reader to deal with this conclusion and move on, through the definition of terms like "superstition" and "rationality" to the specific notion of heresy in early modern Europe. Here we encounter a range of the usual suspects, necessarily discussed because their cases and theories are important (Jean Bodin, Johann Weyer, Reginald Scot, Alice Kyteler, Bridget Bishop, Cotton Mather, John Junius, Margaret Murray, Aleister Crowley, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Keith Thomas, Gerald Gardner, and so on). But the book also features less immediately obvious commentators on historical witchcraft and its religious context: Samuel Butler, Samuel Pepys, Dan Brown. The book takes pains to connect what scholars think they already know to the wider world of popular culture and general interest, making for a genuinely inclusive and thought-provoking read. Gaskill also talks about the duties of historians to their subjects—general introductory books like this one do allow a judicious stepping-back from the detail of texts to a general consideration of both why and how we should be studying the records of torture and execution that constitute our understanding of many witchcraft episodes. Good historians, he suggests, must accept a [End Page 231] relativist approach that does not condemn or excuse torturers, witchfinders, or those who consume images of their activities. Yet this statement is contextualized by repeated discussion of recent witch-hunting activities in Africa and indeed in Europe—the murder of Victoria Climbié, for example. How should we respond to such events, given our now quite deep and complex knowledge of their historical parallels? The book does not attempt to answer the question, but it opens it up for the reader's consideration. Overall, the approach is one of liberal relativist understanding: as Gaskill sums up (this time in discussing extreme feminist assertions about "millions" of executions), "when people get upset, they make mistakes." I remained uneasy with this as I read, despite wondering what else Gaskill could have said. The spread of witchcraft accusation around the world is a challenge to which witchcraft historians ought to be uniquely placed to respond. Is it enough to say that we understand and that it has all happened before? Witchcraft may be history for...

To understand the witch trials it is, of course, necessary to understand broader developments in European society at the time, and, in this respect, general historical accounts of early modern history proffer a fascinating paradox. The period from the mid fifteenth to the eighteenth century was a period of considerable development in science, technology and educational schemes. In the long run, living conditions changed for the better even for the commonalty, no matter how selective and sporadic the enhancement. Up until the early twentieth century, some writers, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, were bold enough to label this development as ‘progress’ and the course of history was seen to be a progressive advancement.1 Later generations, though, became much more cautious in attaching value judgements to historical occurrence, especially after the two world wars and other atrocities of the twentieth century. However, notwithstanding the fact that the word ‘progress’ appears little in current academic writing, many still see the improvement of social conditions and the development of western democracy as a progress incomparable with earlier centuries. To a great extent, European historiography can be seen as a grand narrative showing European nations’ — or Europeans’ — route from the supposed ‘Dark Ages’ of the medieval period, towards a modem society which we consider, despite its apparent shortcomings, superior to the living conditions of earlier centuries.2

Gerd Lüdemann The Unholy in Holy Scripture: The Dark Side of the BibleBruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and BeliefsBurton L. Visotzky Fathers of the World: Essays in Rabbinic and Patristic LiteraturesDan Cohn‐Sherbok The Jewish MessiahMichael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr and Edward Cook The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New TranslationPhilip F. Esler (ed.) Modelling Early Christianity: Social‐Scientific Studies of the New Testament in its ContextHalvor Moxnes (ed.) Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and MetaphorGillian Clark (ed.) Augustine, Confessions, Books I–IVElizabeth Clark (ed.) St Augustine on Marriage and SexualityRoland J. Teske, S.J. Paradoxes of Time in Saint AugustineT. Kermit Scott Augustine: His Thought in ContextBernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (eds) EriugenaHilmar M. Pabel Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus' Pastoral WritingsJames D. Tracy Erasmus of the Low CountriesJohn C. Olin Erasmus, Utopia and the JesuitsWolfgang Behringer Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern EuropeW. B. Patterson King James VI and I and the Reunion of ChristendomPamela Kirk Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art and FeminismNigel Aston (ed.) Religious Change in Europe 1650–1914: Essays for John McMannersJames H. Murphy Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland 1873–1922R. L. Brett Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth to LarkinLawrence J. McCaffrey The Irish Catholic Diaspora in AmericaRobert H. Craig Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United StatesJohn P. Boyle Church Teaching Authority: Historical and Theological StudiesServais Pinckaers The Sources of Christian EthicsDavid J. Atkinson and David H. Field (eds) New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral TheologyAndré Bélanger The Ethics of Catholicism and the Consecration of the IntellectualGarth L. Hallett Greater Good: The Case for ProportionalismRonald Cole‐Turner (ed.) Human Cloning: Religious ResponsesWesley Cragg The Practice of Punishment: Towards a Theory of Restorative JusticeStephen G. Post The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer DiseaseDavid Lamb Organ Transplants and EthicsJon Davies and Gerard Loughlin (eds) Sex These Days: Essays on Theology, Sexuality and SocietyMartha C. Nussbaum Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal EducationKathleen Coyle Mary in the Christian Tradition: From a Contemporary PerspectiveThomas S. Hibbs Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the ‘Summa Contra Gentiles’Eugene F. Rogers Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Knowledge and the Natural Knowledge of GodRobert Krieg Romano GuardiniJohn Swindells (ed.) A Human Search: Bede Griffiths' Reflections on his LifeKjell Nordstokke Council and Context in Leonardo Boff's Ecclesiology: The Rebirth of the Church among the PoorStephen Everson (ed.) Companions to Ancient Thought, Vol. 4: EthicsMark L. McPherran (ed.) Wisdom, Ignorance and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic StudiesNicholas D. Smith (ed.) Plato: Critical AssessmentsJohn Inglis Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval PhilosophyAthanasios Moulakis and Peter von Silvers (eds) The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 19 and 20: History of Political Ideas,Volumes 1 and 2

Confidentiality from BelowCan we talk about healer-patient confidentiality in the early modern period?The legal notion of confidentiality is very recent.In Imperial Germany, for instance, medical confidentiality only became a legal requirement for health professionals in 1871.1 Since the Hippocratic Oath, however, patient information has been considered private, and its protecting has been part of the medical code of conduct.The oath postulates:And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.2Different historical periods have informed the parameters of medical confidentiality as we know it today,3 but the issue of not wanting compromising information to become widely available had existed long before the laws that formalise this kind of privacy.Health practitioners of the past had to use their own discretion when they acquired sensitive information.No legal standard