Verdorrende Bäume und Brote wie Kuhfladen: Hexenprozesse in der Leventina 1431–1459 und die Anfänge der Hexenverfolgung auf der Alpensüdseite (review)

Schatzmann’s doctoral dissertation Verdorrende Bäume is an important contribution to the literature on early witch trials. Building especially on excellent recent Swiss scholarship on the development of witchcraft persecutions in the fifteenth century, Schatzmann has masterfully woven together the general and the particular. In his work, which focuses on the valley of the Leventina in the southern Alps, Schatzmann provides a multidimensional analysis of the arrival and integration of the new diabolic conception of witchcraft into local trials.

Readers interested in the background and development of the diabolic concept of witchcraft will be well served by Schatzmann’s thorough summary of the question. The development of the diabolic conception of witchcraft and its integration into trials is, in the most general sense, the story of witchcraft in the fifteenth century. Recently, excellent studies have appeared of such important figures as Johannes Nider and Heinrich Kramer and their contributions to the development of demonology. Over the past two decades, works dealing with the early Swiss trials have demonstrated the tenuous but important connections between this elite, scholastic conception and the trials conducted and suffered by others. On this point, Schatzmann offers the important insight that the great divide lay not between elite and popular conceptions of witchcraft, but between the conceptions of such highly educated men as Nider and Kramer and those of just about everyone else.

Schatzmann gives an absolutely thorough treatment to the trials that form the heart of the story. First he provides several chapters of background both on the current state of research on the early witch trials and related questions and on the political, legal, and social conditions of the valley in those years. The thirty-eight trials themselves are first discussed in their individual details, then dissected for the ideas of witchcraft they contain. Here Schatzmann is able to offer more evidence that there was no “popular-elite” divide on the question; the local jury system ensured relatively high participation of the local populace in the trials themselves. Indeed, although Schatzmann shows that the trials in the Leventina were strongly influenced by the demonological ideas that were circulating at the time in the region of Lake Geneva, he emphasizes the ways in which the local stereotype of the witch differed from that of francophone Switzerland.

The trials themselves fell into two short periods, 1431–32 and 1457–59. During the first period, two women were accused. The involvement of the inquisition in the trial of the second appears to have introduced an early version of the diabolic concept of witchcraft, which was only just developing in Swiss Dominican circles at that time. The bulk of the trials analyzed in the text, however, took place during the late 1450s, under the recently renewed dominion of Uri. In analyzing the reasons for the witch hunt of 1457–59, Schatzmann argues that the causes were deeply political. Uri had regained control of the valley from Milan in 1439, having previously ruled there in the early fifteenth century. The legitimacy and security of Uri’s dominion remained shaky in the 1450s, however. The witch trials that began in 1457 were controlled by the upper echelon in the valley, in order to shore up local authority under the auspices of Uri’s rule. In a situation not unlike that analyzed by Arno Borst in the upper Simme Valley at the end of the fourteenth century, the witch hunt was a response to the process of territorialization. Throughout the fifteenth century, the cities of Switzerland were extending and consolidating their rule over the rural valleys about them. The witch trials offered an opportunity for the local officials to demonstrate to Uri their competence and efficiency at a time when Uri seemed to fear that the valley was on the verge of being won by Milan...