Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland by Michael Ostling (review)

The past thirty years have seen a renaissance in witchcraft studies in lands variously contained within Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. This is all the more important considering the dominance throughout a large part of the twentieth century of Baranowski’s erroneous statistics, in the French resumé of his 1952 Procesy czarownic w XVII i XVIII w. (Witchcraft Trials in the XVII and XVIII Centuries). His oft-quoted ten thousand judicial executions, plus five thousand to ten thousand lynchings for the territory of postwar Poland were anachronistic and methodologically unsound. Despite corrective articles published by both me and others, some historians persist in citing this figure long after Baranowski had revised it down to a few thousand in 1971.

However, by the end of the year, three major new studies of Polish witchcraft will have appeared. Pilaszek’s magisterial Procesy o czary w Polsce w XV– XVIII w (Witchcraft Trials in Poland in the XV–XVIII Centuries) was published in 2008, my own Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (1500–1800) is forthcoming, and Ostling’s Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland appeared in 2011. In contrast to the first two works, Ostling focuses very much on the “imagining” of the title. This makes for fascinating reading, and will certainly raise eyebrows among more traditional scholars. His framing of the wider question of what constitutes Christianity as an approach to reading witchcraft trials turns our attention to the margin between culture and self. His multidisciplinary approach (using comparative ethnology, folklore, and anthropology of religion) seeks to prove the very piety of the Polish Catholic peasant women accused of consorting with the devil through the motifs of diabolic copulation, host desecration, and invocation. He seeks to understand “how witches imagined themselves” (vii)—an ambitious task, when one takes into account the hundreds of extant trials.

In the first section, “History,” Ostling provides a basic historiography, a brief overview of vocabulary and the demographics of the accused witches. He discounts Pilaszek’s 558 known executions (based on a database roughly two and a half times the size of his) as too low, suggesting at least two thousand. He also posits an execution rate of between 54 and 65 percent and suggests the number of female accused ranged between 92 and 94 percent. Here he introduces his reading of witchcraft as an overconsumption or destruction of moisture, suggesting Roper’s focus on milk and fertility as areas of female anxiety and power fits Polish material well.

Selected Polish literature and legal writings are examined as well as the contested importance and/or temporary nature of the 1543 Constitution and German legal influence. The mitigating but rare effect of expurgatory oaths, dismissal, appeals, and intercession are mentioned, and he demolishes the previous emphasis on the exponential effect of denunciation on the number of trials by illustrating the fates of women caught up in the 1665 Chȩciny case. “Mechanisms of Justice” explores the effects of the mixed inquisitorial and accusatory system, expenses, judicial dependence, the deputation of trials and state formation.

Part two—”Religion”—showcases Ostling’s specialism in religious history, through his examination of the ambiguities inherent in healing and harming, and the Christianization of the use of herbs. His interpretation of religious invocations mentioned in confessions makes links to the circulation of moisture, drawing heavily on Freudian theories of orality and consumption. This leads him to speculate that “witches were above all those who stole moisture” (125), based in some part on witches stealing and burning fat, juicy babies—a relative rarity in Polish trials.

The chapters on Christianity are excellent on the synodal decrees protecting sacramentalia, host-stealing cases, the increased importance of Eucharistic worship, and the link between secondary-crime host-theft trials and accusations against Jews and witches. “Piety in the Torture Chamber...