The Enemy Within (6 page)

Thus the bare bones of witchcraft's “smaller” cases, in which there was little or no need for follow-up. When the trial ended, a balance was restored, and life in the local community could proceed as before. Yet this did not mean that witchcraft would entirely drop from view. For there would be other suspects—who might or might not prompt other trials, depending on the circumstances. Virtually all pre-modern communities held a little pool of possible or probable “witches”; indeed, a village or town would hardly have seemed complete without them.

The bare bones' version is exactly that; actual cases would add a wealth of place- and person-specific detail. There might be other participants beyond the principals—in effect, a supporting cast. Sometimes “cunning folk” would receive and respond to a direct appeal from the victim(s); this might involve confirming the witch's identity or suggesting a remedy for particular forms of “affliction.” Sometimes physicians would be needed to rule out natural causes. In certain contexts, clergy would come to the home of those most centrally involved to offer prayers for divine guidance and intervention. And a corps of associates and neighbors might enlist on one side or the other—to support, or rebut, the charges against the accused. In this way an entire community could be galvanized, and mesmerized, by the supposed operations of witchcraft, for weeks or months at a stretch.

At the other end of the witch-trial spectrum stood the full-fledged “panic” outbreak. This meant witch
-hunting
in a much more concentrated form. Sometimes it would grow out of an initially limited case, with a single suspect then joined to others in a steadily widening spiral. But sometimes it depended on the organized effort of inquisitors or “witch finders.” Most often, the latter were clergy; yet secular authorities would usually run close behind and act in direct collaboration. The mood in such cases was most definitely one of panic, as accusations piled rapidly on one another. A central element was confession by the accused, for this would nearly always bring forth the names of fellow witches. And crucial to obtaining confession was the purposeful use of torture (or at least the threat). Common methods included various forms of physical distension—stretching on a rack, for example, or being strung up in midair by a device called the “strappado,” a pulley system roped to the arms—or else of compression, by means of clamps or screws attached to head, legs, thumbs, and other sensitive body parts.

Episodes of panic witchcraft raised the stakes at every level. The emphasis would shift from
maleficium
to diabolism—from specific moments of personal injury and distress in a particular victim, to broad-gauge, Devil-inspired conspiracy against all of Christendom. Just here, the idea of
sabbat
would prove especially powerful. What the inquisitors most wished to hear, and what the accused did frequently provide, was detailed information about this utterly blasphemous nighttime proceeding—with the Devil himself in full charge—and including not only a parodied version of the traditional Christian sacraments but also naked dancing, sexual orgy, ritual infanticide, and gluttonous feasting on human flesh.

The process of concluding a panic outbreak, with its invariably high toll in lives taken or radically disrupted, is hard to discern from several centuries later on. It must often have involved some form of retreat, with the details left unrecorded. Perhaps there came a point of sheer exhaustion. And probably there was a sense among some in positions of authority that events had gone far enough, if not already too far. Occasionally the spiral of accusation might seem to have overreached itself by touching certain quite unlikely targets (persons of high social rank or previously unquestioned moral character). Then, one way or another, those at the center would decide to stand down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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