Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (review)

In the more than thirty years since the publication of Erik Midelfort'sWitchhunting in Southwestern Germany 1562–1684 (1972), the scholarly study of early modern witchcraft has been a booming business, with hundreds of articles and scores of books. Taken together, this enormous amount of scholarship has brought out the diversity in patterns of witch prosecutions: in eastern Europe and Iceland, men outnumbered women among those accused; in southern Europe, where the Spanish and papal Inquisitions tried witchcraft cases, almost no one was executed; in Scandinavia, sex with the devil was rarely mentioned and the Malleus Maleficarum was largely unknown. Readers of this literature have been encouraged to distance themselves from the popular stereotype of the cackling aged witch with her broomstick and black cat.

With Witch Craze, Lyndal Roper takes us back to the geographic and cultural heartland of the witch-hunts, southern Germany, which probably accounted for more than a third of the executions for witchcraft in all of Europe. Here the pattern that emerges in hundreds of trial records is strikingly like that of the discredited stereotype: eighty percent of the witches were women, and in the initial accusation most of these were old, poor, and somehow odd; witches were charged with harming children and threatening fertility, and were seen as motivated by envy and malice; witches were accused of sex with the devil, riding to sabbats on goats and pitchforks, consorting with animal familiars, cooking and eating infants; they often tempted children with sweets and delicacies, just like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. This familiarity is far from comforting, however. In complicating the story of the witch craze, we have been allowed to step back, analyze trends, and make comparisons quite dispassionately. Witch Craze brings us back to what Roper sees as the "heart of the story . . . the emotional dynamic of envy, dependence and terror, which for over two hundred years issued in acts of appalling ferocity against apparently harmless old women" (xi). She uses trial transcripts from many different courts and printed works of all types, as well as woodcuts, engravings, and other works of art, to explore ways in which fantasies of witchcraft provided evidence of its diabolic nature to individuals and communities, combining with worries about marriage, fertility, and sexuality in a deadly mixture.

The conjunction of "terror and fantasy" that Roper analyzes is not monolithic, however. Within the patchwork of small territories, Catholic and Protestant, that was southern Germany were areas that saw few witch-trials and others that saw many, periods that were relatively quiet and waves of mass persecutions. Roper incorporates the stress on local circumstances that has characterized modern witchcraft studies, analyzing particular family and neighborhood jealousies, suspicions, and hostilities that gave rise to witch accusations in great detail. In these situations, particularly when accusations grew into mass panics, learned and popular understandings of witchcraft intertwined; some things, such as sex with the devil, moved from the world of learned demonology into local accusations, while others, such as witches entering cellars and storerooms to steal food and wine, moved from popular charges into demonology. This intertwining is hardly surprising, for many of the writers of demonological treatises, including Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, had been witch-hunters first; their writings grew out of their experience in the field, not scholarly contemplation.

The most vigorous witch-hunters were the Catholic prince-bishops who were both secular and religious powers in their territories; as Roper notes, nine of these men were responsible for over 6,000 deaths. Witch-hunting is often contrasted with the other activities of these same men — founding universities and hospitals, building spectacular baroque churches, modernizing their administrative bureaucracies — but Roper makes clear that witch-hunting was an outgrowth of, and not a contradiction to, their vision of the perfect Christian state. Such states existed in a post-Reformation world of religious conflict and confessionalization, a...