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  • Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 by Laura Stokes
  • Scott A. Moir
Laura Stokes . Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. vii+235. ISBN 978-1-4039-8683-2.

In recent years, a new generation of scholars have taken up the challenge to re-examine witchcraft prosecutions in the context of the broader fields of criminal justice and social control. In the latest edition to the Palgrave Macmillan Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, Laura Stokes carves out an important place for herself in this literature, which should be of interest well beyond the stated bounds of her study. While interested in the belief systems that facilitated witch-hunting, the author is far more interested in the mentalities and power structures that led elites to persecute witches and prosecute witchcraft through the judicial system. Her research grows out of case studies looking at legal developments, the broader prosecution of capital crimes (including witchcraft), and efforts at social control by the magistrates of Basel, Nuremberg, and Lucerne.

In terms of approach, Stokes's arguments are clear and concise, and her work appears to be well grounded in the archives of her respective cities, with the added bonus of a small but interesting appendix containing an English translation of selected primary sources that will be of interest to researchers and students alike. The work is firmly embedded in the current historiography of witchcraft although, as mentioned above, it explicitly focuses its attention away from the broader social meanings of witchcraft, choosing to focus on the elites through the operation of the courts. In this respect, the work places witchcraft into the larger story of transformations in the legal and judicial systems that mark a shift in the structure and practice of criminal justice between the early modern and medieval periods. There is a particular emphasis on the literature in German, which provides a good [End Page 267] refresher on important developments, debates, and perspectives that have occurred in the last decade in a language that is not always accessible to many English-speaking scholars and students. Throughout her work, Stokes is careful to remind her readers of the problems of her sources, particularly contingencies of the survival of records in the cities she has chosen for her case studies.

In her opening chapter, Stokes sets down an important element of her methodology. Seeking a more nuanced approach than historians who she believes have become used to equating the development of demonological ideas and "diabolic witchcraft" with the origins of witch-hunting, Stokes draws on the work of Wolfgang Behringer, seeking to use a broader definition of the word "witch" as "a person believed to accomplish evil through supernatural means" (16). In doing so, the author does not wish to ignore the importance of diabolism in changing some elements of how witchcraft was viewed and prosecuted, but rather to emphasize its secondary or catalytic role, alongside the older traditions of harmful magic that were indigenous to local communities all over Europe. Diabolism did not create new witchcraft beliefs, but it did mesh nicely with some elements of existing indigenous traditions about evil people who possessed magical powers. For instance, Stokes argues that beliefs in hail-raising weather witches had developed through much of the German Alps and the Upper Rhineland prior to the introduction of beliefs in diabolic witchcraft, but the new beliefs in a Satanic conspiracy of witches seemed to activate and attach themselves to this particular subset of magical practitioners, confirming beliefs in this evil, and rendering them more believable and present.

Stokes then moves on to examine the general patterns of witch-hunting in the urban centers of Basel, Nuremberg, and Lucerne. Her narrative reveals three urban areas that bore superficial similarities, but produced very different results. Stokes argues that her research provides powerful evidence to support and confirm the importance of the theories of Johannes Dillinger, who suggested that the smaller a city was, the more likely the magistrates would share the views and "see eye to eye" with the populace...

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