Foreword: On Shamans, Witches, and Stories

In 2006, in the inaugural volume of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, a space was opened in the second issue for a forum where scholars were invited to consider the links between witchcraft, shamanism, and magical healing. The debate in those pages engaged the historiography of the shamanistic paradigm as it has been used in studies of witchcraft and sorcery, taking careful account of corollary sticky issues of methodology and definition. Michael Bailey’s foreword to that section concluded “We would welcome further contributions on this subject, and hope that this is an area (one of many) in which Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft can facilitate scholarly communication across disciplines.”

An answer to this invitation appears in the present issue, where we feature three contributions all examining the intersection of late medieval learned ideas of witchcraft with more local folk beliefs and practices. Two out of the three contributors orient themselves in relation to an idea of shamanism. All three articles resonate with one another, in part, because of the extent to which they are involved with similar types of stories, with each of the contributors working to untangle mingled layers of story, belief, and action in several different contexts of late medieval discourse.

Michael Bailey looks at a brief story from a famous sermon against sorcery by Bernardino of Siena. The story involves a kidnaped girl who is not treated by Bernardino as a sorceress at all, though the context and surrounding circumstances make the absence of a sorcery accusation something of a puzzle. Beginning with this small discontinuity between Bernardino’s evident sympathy for the kidnaped maiden and the expectations of witchcraft suspicion and accusation set up by the sermon itself, Bailey sifts through possible folk tale parallels in search of the potential origin of this story. Touching on kresniks, perchten, and blood-sucking strigae on the way, Bailey ultimately comes to suggest that the roots of Bernardino’s story may not be so much in folkish beliefs as actual practices that involved nocturnal dancing. He carefully does not suggest these are shamanistic practices, but does suggest a link between folk belief and real practices that may have informed the curious features of the story as retailed by Bernardino.

Emma Wilby explicitly addresses the idea of shamanistic practices, in an exuberant and provocative essay that begins with some of the same stories that colored Bernardino’s sermon against sorcery—tales, found in Burchard of Worms and elsewhere, about night-flying vampiric strigae. Burchard maintains that it is heretical to believe in the truth of such night fliers, which suggests, on a basic level, that the tales had some believers. Wilby goes further than this, however, suggesting that they might, on another level, also have had practitioners. But what would it mean to say this? Wilby collects accounts of shamanistic cannibalism from an array of anthropological sources in order to suggest that the methodologies used to understand dark shamanism worldwide may offer a paradigm for reconsidering the role of sorcerers in early modern Europe as well. She does not directly suggest that witches are shamans, but rather draws parallels with the kind of evidence used to justify the shamanistic paradigms and the evidence for beliefs about vampiric strigae in the early modern period in order to make the general point that beliefs do not generally exist in complete isolation from social praxis. The supernatural is humanly mediated; it is always embedded in a matrix of praxis, and Wilby suggests that we may need to look again at points where this matrix underlies and influences learned discourse about witches.

Aleksandra Pfau also examines local practices for controlling sorcery in the context of a small group of fifteenth-century letters of remission in cases where the crime is that of inflicting mortal injury on a putative sorcerer. The people thus targeted are often local healers, and in all cases examined by Pfau, the aggressive violence begins in an attempt to undo perceived harm or illness caused by the healer. Following Briggs and Muchembled, who have noted the integration of sorcerers into their communities, she shows how one aspect of their integration rests...