Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 By Laura Stokes (review)

The most recent volume in Palgrave’s Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic notably enriches a valuable series. Although less wide-ranging than its title might suggest, Laura Stokes’s revised doctoral thesis opens some fresh paths, both by straddling the conventional boundary separating medieval from early modern history and by comparing early recorded trials for malefi-cent magic in three independent central European cities (Nuremberg, Basel, and Lucerne), each of which, the author notes (119), increasingly controlled a sizable rural hinterland. Everywhere, urban criminal justice was normally dominated by various types of theft; but these sovereign tribunals also adjudicated a broad range of dangerous speech ranging from slander to blasphemy and an equally wide gamut of sexual transgressions from unlicensed prostitution to bestiality, and all three city-states encountered numerous accusations of maleficium, both with and without traces of diabolism. Stokes also pays careful attention to the introduction and frequency of torture under circumstances ranging from Nuremberg’s professional juristic consultants like Christof Schuerl (mentioned eight times) to Lucerne’s decision in 1485 to hire a salaried hangman/torturer.

Building from recent high-quality and mostly Swiss scholarship about the creation of diabolized witchcraft in the late 1430s, the book’s principal achievement is to illuminate the early spread of this new concept eastward into Mitteleuropa and highlight its solidly gendered status in all three Germanophone places; unlike what is today French Switzerland, here men were never convicted and executed for maleficium until after 1500. Uninterested in political history, Stokes overlooks the synchronism during the last quarter of the fifteenth century between increasing prosecutions for maleficent magic and the dynamic growth of a militarily triumphant Germanophone Swiss Confederation; parallel developments affected both Lucerne, its fourth oldest canton, and “wannabe” Basel, which joined in 1501.

A careful reconstruction of criminal prosecutions in the canton of Lucerne from 1430 to 1530 constitutes the book’s real heart. After her third chapter, Stokes offers an admirably rich account of criminal justice in this remote place, which inter alia distinguishes eight levels of punishment for its 118 cases of theft recorded across a century (109–10). At the same time, she deftly inserts the transformations of maleficium in the place where the term hexe famously first appeared in 1419—as punishable slander, she reminds us. These local women raised agriculturally disastrous hailstorms and rode on wolves; elements of diabolism appear here as early as 1450 (see appendix on 181–82). Despite the frequent use of torture, by 1496 Stokes finds only a dozen confirmed executions among forty-two accused women (67–70), and burnings accounted for only about 20 percent of all capital punishments at Lucerne (108). Later, during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Lucerne would become a center of witch-hunting in the Swiss heartland; however, Stokes pauses her story exactly a century after 1419, just before the disruptions of Zwingli’s Reformation in nearby Zurich dominated its politics.

The most problematic aspects of this tightly drawn demonstration come from the huge disparity in both size and preserved records among these three self-governing central European cities. Nuremberg, Dürer’s city, ranked among the very largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated free cities in the German Empire—and after the 1470s its council records become so abundant that Stokes can only sample rather than explore them with the thoroughness she can deploy for Lucerne (91–92). Basel, with about half of Nuremberg’s population, occupies the middle; when it joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501, it became their largest city and brought them their first university. However, little Lucerne, sharing a lake with the original Swiss forest cantons, barely qualifies as a city: during this century, it probably contained fewer than two thousand inhabitants, few of them highly educated. Stokes thus devotes most of her attention to a quasi-rural state possessing...