Origins of the Witches' Sabbath by Michael D. Bailey (review)

Early in the fifteenth century beliefs about harmful magic (maleficium) began to transform. From a common understanding that individual "witches" might act alone to destroy crops or cause illness, a new set of ideas emerged in the 1430s suggesting that enemies of Christendom might be conspiring collectively to do evil to the Christian community, receiving teachings directly from demons. In the region known today as the Alpine Arc (southeastern France, Switzerland, and northern Italy), authoritative texts recorded ideas about witches forming heretical cults, traveling through the night to sign a pact with the Devil, and performing rituals of apostasy, lurid sexual acts, and anthropophagy. These nocturnal gatherings came to be known as the witches' sabbath.

Origins of the Witches' Sabbath is a sourcebook comprising translations of the earliest writings to capture these ideas of conspiracy and satanic assemblies that would shape European conceptions of witchcraft for centuries. These important works by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities offer varying perspectives; the idea of the sabbath lacks the uniformity seen in witchcraft treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead, these sources present stereotypes that are beginning to coalesce: "above all they agree that witches generally operated in groups, and that they regularly gathered together in the presence of a demonic master to foreswear their faith, engage in devil worship, and commit abominable acts of fornication and cannibalism" (2).

The contents of the book comprise a general introduction, seven texts translated from German and Latin into English, a map indicating nine locations associated with witchcraft and witches' sabbaths in the western Alps, as well as selective bibliography and index. Four of Bailey's translations (Lucerne chronicler Hans Fründ's report on witchcraft in the diocese of Sion in 1428; selections from the Dominican theologian Johannes Nider's Formicarius; the brief anonymous tract Errores gazariorum; and the French secular judge Claude Tholosan's treatise Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores manifesti ignorantibus fiant) are translated from the 1999 critical edition of these texts, which also rendered them into French.¹

Bailey's translations—the four texts described above, as well another descriptive text, "The Vauderie of Lyons," and materials from two witch trials—constitute the major narrative sources for the emergence of an idea of conspiratorial witchcraft in a single decade of the fifteenth century. In the General Introduction Bailey delineates the key elements in common among his translated sources on the witches' sabbath as demonic assemblies, night flight and nighttime revels, entering the Devil's service, infanticide and cannibalism, and sex with the Devil. The first translation, Report on Witchcraft in Valais, by Lausanne chronicler Hans Fründ is an account of reported witch trials and executions that began around 1428 in the diocese of Sion. Fründ's report is unique among these sources in mentioning witch lycanthropy. For the next source, Claude Tholosan's So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches . . . , Bailey translates only the most relevant section (the first third of the text) as it alone narrates the diabolical actions of witch assemblies. A secular lawyer in Dauphiné, Tholosan is mainly concerned that witch prosecution should fall under his own jurisdiction. He presents witches as foreign to the region of Briançon, hence he seeks to persuade society that those folks who are consulted for healing or necromancy are part of a vast yet clandestine demonic network. The third work, Errors of the Gazarii, was long thought to be an anonymous work although Swiss historian Martine Ostorero has recently argued that Ponce Feugeyron is the likely author. Derived from a general term for criminals or heretics (gazarii), Errors describes the diabolical transgressions committed at the sabbath and cites avarice and cupidity as major motivations for joining a witch's sect. Next comes a selection of translations from books 2 and 5 of Johannes Nider's Anthill (Formicarius written 1438, printed 1475). This diffuse treatise includes both new (in the fifteenth century...