Hexen: Wissen was stimmt (review)

In this slim volume, Rita Voltmer undertakes to survey historical European witchcraft. Unlike most other such surveys, which typically develop a basically chronological narrative that begins with the origins of various elements of witchcraft beliefs (harmful magic, diabolical pact, sabbath, etc.), follows these ideas through the years of major witch hunting (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and concludes with the decline of trials and eventual intellectual discrediting of much of the witch stereotype in the eighteenth century, she instead organizes her survey around a number of myths and misconceptions about historical witchcraft that have persisted in popular, and in many cases in scholarly, understanding in the modern era; that is, from the nineteenth century onward. The result is both engaging and useful.

In the course of debunking various myths and clarifying what was really true ("was stimmt") about historical witchcraft, Voltmer covers much of the same ground as more traditional surveys. She recounts the roots of various elements of the classic witch stereotype. She discusses the operations of a typical witch hunt, while of course noting that each region, and to some extent each trial, had its own norms and peculiarities. She estimates the total number of victims, exploding yet again, as other scholars have done before her, that most demonstrably fabricated but still persistent myth of nine million people executed as witches during the era of the major hunts. She addresses the economic and social characteristics of a typical victim, and of course addresses the gender question—why the great majority of those accused and executed for witchcraft were women. Approaching all these issues from the perspective of common misperceptions gives a freshness to her presentation of otherwise mainly standard points. As with any survey, one can quibble about what has necessarily been left out, or simplified, or streamlined. But the book is clear, well-informed, and engaging—exactly what one hopes for in a survey. I often found myself wishing, as I read, that the book were in English, so that I might use it with undergraduates—I can easily imagine its myth-busting approach holding great appeal for those students who are less than enthralled with straightforward chronological narrative. Certainly instructors could mine the text for useful strategies and examples.

There is, to my mind, one major element of this book that moves well beyond the realm of the standard survey and begins to examine some very interesting and altogether too little studied points. Voltmer, on occasion, enters into an exploration of when and why such persistent myths about historical witchcraft arose. Her conclusion is that they almost all stem from the nineteenth century, when enlightened "rationalists," but also Romantic folklorists, began to construct the study of witchcraft as a historical field. From the Enlightenment side come such myths as the notion that the witch hunts were essentially a "medieval" phenomenon, when in fact, of course, the cumulative concept of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft only developed at the very end of the Middle Ages, and the major European hunts were entirely early modern. Tied to the "medieval" stereotype is the clerical stereotype—the notion that a monolithic "Church" was the main agent behind most witch trials, above all through the agency of its terrible "Inquisition." As all experts know, trials in the major early modern hunts were typically conducted by secular courts, although naturally they were deeply influenced by religious ideals and morality. The great standing Inquisitions of the early modern period—the Spanish and Roman—were generally very conservative in handling cases of witchcraft, and were responsible for very few executions. Yet the need for Enlightenment thinkers to demonize "medieval" religion as superstitious, violent, and oppressive is evident, and witchcraft provided a very useful theme by which to do so.

Another major myth of the hunts is that they were driven from above by agents of a repressive and controlling state. Again, experts know that the larger and more developed states of early modern Europe generally...