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  • The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village
  • Michael D. Bailey
The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village. By Thomas Robisheaux (New York: Norton, 2009. 427 pp.).

Thomas Robischeaux has written a book valuable on several levels. He tells, in careful detail and vivid prose, the story of Anna Schmieg, a miller's wife in the village of Hürden, near the town of Langenburg, executed as a witch in 1672. Her trial was not part of a major hunt, but rather was a far more contained legal process. Aside from Schmieg, suspicions and accusations spread to a handful of people, but ultimately only two, Schmieg herself and another woman, Barbara Schleicher, were executed. By focusing on a small-scale "hunt," Robisheaux illustrates many of the typical mechanisms of early modern witch trials, which often became distorted by the extreme pressures of a major panic. With painstaking archival work and a few well-informed hunches he reconstructs the social relations between his small cast of central characters, and he clearly shows how those relationships created the conditions for suspicion and accusation, and then endured tremendous strain once accusations were made. He is also able to demonstrate the skepticism, as well as the credulity, of authorities, and how their fears of social disorder both motivated and restrained their witch-hunting zeal. Not least, he has been able to bring all the twisted strands of his story together into a gripping and at times deeply moving narrative.

It was not Anna herself but her daughter whose actions sparked the fire that ultimately consumed her mother. On Shrove Tuesday, 1672, Eva Küstner brought Shrovetide cakes that Anna had prepared to several neighbors, including Michael Fessler and his wife, also named Anna. No one received Eva or her cakes very warmly. Suspicion hung around her mother, who was loud, combative, and often failed to attend church. People warned each other not to eat the cakes that came from the Schmiegs' mill. Anna Fessler, however, took a bite. By that evening, she was acting strangely. By that night, she was dead.

That Anna Fessler died of poisoning was clear to almost everyone. That the poisoning entailed witchcraft was less so. Robisheaux pursues the mounting [End Page 988] suspicions at two levels. At the village level, he focuses on the social networks in and around Hürden that caused suspicion to fall at Anna Schmieg's feet. He explores her own background and personality, the social and economic status of her family, and even the political position of her husband, who had received the grant for the mill from the count of Hohenlohe. He outlines common conceptions of witchcraft, and he recounts previous suspicions and panics that had broken out in the Langenburg region. Anna Schmieg was the sort of woman one could suspect of witchcraft. She was combative and disruptive. Her family, through their possession of the mill and the grant they held from their territorial lord, enjoyed an elite status of a kind, but also they were outsiders. The mill, moreover, was often more of an economic drain than a benefit, and the family struggled and schemed to raise their status and that of their children (mainly by arranging favorable marriages).

At the "town" level, Robisheaux examines how the case circulated among various legal and medical authorities of the count's government. The first official act was an autopsy to determine the nature of Anna Fessler's mysterious death. At all stages of this process, Robisheaux is at pains to demonstrate that the Langenburg officials were not gullible or fearful fools. They employed the latest in medical and legal science, and they consulted leading experts in these fields. Above all, they sought to preserve social (and political) order. This meant they wanted to see malefactors rooted out and justice served, or at least an example of justice that could be shown to their lord's subjects. When suspicion came firmly to rest on Anna Schmieg, for example, they were willing to set aside skeptical advice they received from outside experts and consult instead with others more likely to return the legal opinions they wanted. But they...

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