[Cover image – Witchcraft pamphlet account of proceedings by Teodora Bujenita]
Richard Raiswell
In January 2022, I taught an upper-year seminar centring on the infamous 1486 witch-hunting manual, the Malleus maleficarum. The Malleus is an important book, for it is one of the first printed texts to describe what modern scholars have termed “the elaborated concept of witchcraft”—the idea that witches made a formal pact with the devil, sealed through intercourse with Satan, in order to work maleficent magic throughout the world. It is this reworking of witchcraft theory that came to underlie many of the prosecutions of suspected witches in Europe into the middle of the seventeenth century.
The Text and Its Difficulties
While the Malleus is certainly the best known of the many witch-hunting texts produced through the early modern period—and the go-to reference for popular critiques of medieval (sic) superstition, irrationality and bigotry—it is a bad book: it is badly written and poorly argued, replete with contradictions and errors in reasoning; sources are sometimes misconstrued, mischaracterised and misquoted—often deliberately. And for a text rightly singled out for its rampant misogyny, the authors frequently forget to feminise the nouns and pronouns of the source material from which they draw. In part, this is because the Malleus’s principal author—the Dominican inquisitor Henricus Institoris—wrote much of the work hastily in a fit of pique after the prosecution of six witches he had been leading in Innsbruck the previous year collapsed.
Even leaving aside its objectionable content, this means that teaching the text poses more than a few pedagogical problems!
As an intellectual historian, my principal goal in teaching the Malleus was to help students understand the text on its own terms and in the context of the environment from which it sprang. That is, I wanted students to be able to eschew the populist inclination to historical condescension and instead to appreciate the urgency that permeates the text, and the sense of eschatological crisis that underlay and informed the thinking of Institoris and his collaborator, the Kölner theologian Jacobus Sprenger. However, the text also afforded an opportunity to have students think about the ways in which legal procedures can be manipulated by “right-thinking people” to protect society in the face of a moral (or existential) panic—to ensure that what “everybody knows” is the “correct verdict” reached, and that “an obviously guilty” person does not escape righteous justice on the basis of “some legal technicality.”
The Malleus is divided into three very different sections. The first is comprised of a series of dense, abstract, theological arguments organised in the scholastic fashion characteristic of the style used in the universities of the high Middle Ages. The second examines how witches are able to work their maleficent magic and is grounded upon the evidence of trustworthy witnesses and legally adduced “facts” obtained through “voluntary” confessions. The final third of the text is effectively a legal treatise on the procedures to be followed in prosecuting witchcraft cases. It describes how proceedings should be initiated, how testimony should be taken and witnesses deposed, the types of evidence likely indicative of guilt, the lines of defence that should be permitted to an accused, the circumstances under which torture can licitly be applied, and the types of sentencing appropriate for a convicted witch. While this section makes dry reading, it was intended to be practical—indeed, at various points, it includes sample text meant to be used for particular parts of proceedings. Following Institoris’s lead, I used this section to develop a moot inquisition to help students understand how witch trials might work, and why—under particular conditions—accusations might spiral into a full-fledged witch panic. This in-class inquisition ran over eight 75-minute classes through the second half of the semester.
[Image: Inquisitor Thomas of Mainz (played by Thomas Haslam) and Notary Erika Kraus (Vira Kirk) take an oath from a deponent. Photo courtesy of the University of Prince Edward Island.]
The Scenario
I set proceedings in the town of Ravensburg in 1494. Located in the southwest of what is now Germany, Ravensburg was then an important trading centre. The choice was not arbitrary. Institoris had been active in the city a decade earlier, working with the city’s magistrates to secure the prosecution and conviction of two women for witchcraft-related offences—and so for the purpose of the characters students would come to adopt, this meant that the fact that witches had lived within the town was still within relatively recent memory.
This setting also afforded me an opportunity to get students to think about life in a moderate-sized fifteenth-century town. To that end, I developed a series of background documents detailing the city’s recent history, and sketching its physical, social and economic geography. I also provided them with an early modern map of the city, identifying many of what would have been its most important landmarks—the Rathaus, markets, churches and the various towers controlling access into the city through its walls. The point was to get students thinking about the spatiality of an early modern urban environment and how that might have conditioned social relations.
Most students in the class were required to take on the identity of one of the characters I developed as townspeople. These personae came from across the breadth of the social and economic spectrum. At the very bottom, I had an unmarried migrant woman, several widows with children, and a piecework spinner. These were balanced against some women with social capital, including the mayor’s wife and the wife of a wealthy merchant. There were also characters who occupied more precarious or liminal positions in the town, including an unlicensed herbalist, a midwife and the local priest’s concubine. To mirror the general level of familiarity with which townspeople would have had with each other, I provided all students with a basic description of each character, their disposition and popular reputation. Upon selecting a character to play, each student then received a much more comprehensive description of their figure which was known only to them. This sketched their economic and social circumstances, their friendships, rivalries and enmities—valuable information they were to draw upon as the scenario developed. As an introductory assignment, I required them to develop their character more extensively, drawing upon some of the rich secondary literature on early modern working women, on lived religion and popular superstition.
Central to the whole exercise, though, were the prosecutors—the inquisitor, his notary, and like-minded ecclesiastics, both local and itinerant. In order to mimic what would have been the gendered dimension of a real inquisition, I wanted these parts to be taken by male students. However, in a class of 20 people, I had only 4 males—and so I called upon a female student to take on the role of the notary. While this was something of an historical stretch, there is some precedent for wives of notaries overseeing the documentation of more mundane activities in north Italy—although I know of none where a woman served as a notary for an inquisition into heretical depravity!
The Inquisition
The scenario began with a student playing an itinerant preacher giving a fire-and-brimstone, hell-blast of a sermon railing against the evils of witchery, modelled on some of the more venomous preaching of the early fifteenth-century Franciscan friar, Bernardino of Siena. Reminding their listeners that the devil and his servants were a real and threat—when combined with unexpectedly dire economic conditions—seems historically to have preceded outbreaks of witch panic in various parts of the continent. To capitalise on this heightened wariness, I followed this by having the townspeople participate in a “rumour mill”—an online discussion board in which characters cast aspersions against each other, spreading gossip, and blaming each other for the recent unusually wet summer and its consequences for the price of grain and other foodstuffs. Ultimately, I wanted to predispose the townspeople not just to think with demons—but to see the demonic in the mundane actions of others.
As was the case in Ravensburg in 1484, our inquisition began with a general denunciation. Borrowing the sample text Institoris provided in the Malleus, our inquisitor issued a general summons ordering townspeople to denounce before him and his staff anyone in the community they suspected of heresy or witchery harmful to people, animals or crops. One by one, students came before the inquisitor to make denunciations based on their character, reporting suspicious behaviour, apparently inexplicable occurrences, seemingly significant coincidences under oath. For the most part, these did not involve overt accusations of demonism, reflecting instead local antagonisms filtered through popular belief and superstition.
As Institoris counselled, the deponents were also questioned about their social position and reputation, and their relationship to the people they accused of maleficence in order to gauge their trustworthiness. After all, as Institoris argued, to safeguard the process and to protect an accused from malicious prosecution, the testimony of mortal enemies should be given no credence—that of normal enemies, thouh, was wholly acceptable! Their depositions were taken down by the notary in great detail—noting among other things, the demeanour of the accuser.
With the deposition process concluded, it was left to the inquisitor and the notary to work their way through the testimony that had been supplied, distinguishing the credible from the malicious or the deluded. I was particularly interested in this part of proceedings, for witchcraft is a secret crime, one known largely through the empirical “evidence” of its effects in the natural world. The difficulty in reasoning from effects to causes, as the authors of the Malleus argued, was how to distinguish harm wrought through maleficent sorcery from natural misfortune: a freak hailstorm wiping out one townsperson’s orchard could be either. Given this, it was important for the inquisitor to establish a hierarchy of testimony based upon the social credit of the parties deposed. In so doing, I was keen to see how the inquisitor and the notary reconstructed the anxieties and prejudices of the community to fit their demonised cosmography, and the extent to which accusations mirrored the town’s social geography.
On the basis of their analysis of the depositions, the inquisitor’s suspicions came to centre on two women: the herbalist rumoured to sell amatory charms alongside her more salutary potions; and Anna Notterin, a cantankerous, pugnacious middle-aged widow who survived on the meagre income she made from selling sauerkraut, and who had recently assaulted one of the city’s inspectors when she was accused of short selling, grabbing the inspector’s hair, reportedly exclaiming “I’ll rid myself of you or may God strike me dead!”
The inquisitor decided to proceed with the suspicions raised against Notterin, for hers seemed the stronger, more straightforward, case—and the finding of one witch in the community would make subsequent prosecutions that much easier. To this end, the inquisitor summoned back those students who had made allegations against Notterin. Those students who were recalled had no idea what they would be questioned about—and the student playing Notterin had no idea that she was the focus of the inquisitor’s attentions. While the Malleus lists the questions that should be posed to these witnesses and details how they should be proffered, the inquisitor’s job at this point was to look for evidence that caused him to strongly suspect Notterin of witchcraft. The hair-pulling incident in itself was an assault, but it was only the fact that the inspector deposed that he had been feeling unwell ever since that altercation that suggested that Notterin’s threat was actually a curse. This suspicion was further amplified by hearsay testimony that accused Notterin of slipping out of town later that day to burn the hair she had pulled out, along with a child’s turd and some seeds. All depositions differed in specifics but taken as a whole they agreed on the essence of the crime: that Notterin was a witch. Accordingly, the inquisitor ordered Notterin arrested.
Arrest and Interrogation
In our post-scenario reflection, many students said this was the moment at which the proverbial penny dropped, for what is often described as “the trial of the accused” was not actually a trial in any sense with which we are familiar, for the inquisitor had already largely established the guilt of the accused. Indeed, such were the “safeguards” inherent to the system that he would not have had her arrested had he not already been reasonably certain that she was a witch. This is reflected in the type of questions the Malleus suggests should be posed to an accused at this point. These focus not on establishing the suspect’s version of events. Rather, they are premised on her guilt: had her parents died natural deaths or been burned; why was she so feared by ordinary people; why had she cursed so-and-so; why was she present at such-and-such a place.
Nevertheless, at this point, the accused was permitted a lawyer. While the lawyer was given copies of the depositions made against the accused, these had been anonymised to protect the deponents from retaliatory magic. Working with Notterin, the lawyer was able to link some of the testimony to specific people in the scenario and so challenge their suitability to give evidence, the inherent difficulties of his position quickly became clear. An accused witch denying the sworn testimony of a number of witnesses formally deposed by the inquisitor himself was obviously going to be lead nowhere—and could be deemed merely a delaying tactic, opening the lawyer himself up to a charge of suborning heresy. The only real way to challenge the case against her was to call into question the constitution of the court itself or its operation. In Innsbruck, Institoris’s inquisition had collapsed in part over the question of procedural irregularities over the appointment of his notary. In our scenario, though, the accused’s lawyer focused on the fact that the inquisitor’s notary was female. Turning the misogyny of the text to the accused’s advantage, the lawyer argued that in relying on a female notary, the inquisitor had opened up proceedings to the possibility of demonic contamination. Citing the Malleus’s spurious etymology of femina (woman) as derived from minus (less) and fe (an abbreviated form of fidei, faith), the lawyer suggested that as women are more envious and so more prone to cast aside the faith and turn to demonic sorcery to realise their carnal desires, testimony deposed to a female notary ought not to be trusted. While an ingenious strategy—and really the only line of defence open to the accused—it failed because the arbiter of questions to do with process, the Malleus asserted, was the inquisitor himself.
When questioned directly, the accused denied that she was a witch or that she had cursed the town’s inspector. But given that he already strongly suspected the accused of witchcraft, he had more than sufficient grounds to subject her to torture.
The application of torture is central to understanding the dynamics of witch panics. Leading questions posed under severe physical duress tends to be the point at which an accused reframed her account in the terms suggested to her. It is the point at which the suspect admits that expressions of social and economic tension were actually part of a demonic conspiracy in which she was a part.
There was obviously no way to come up with anything approximating any part of this process. Instead, I used this point to take a break from the trial and to discuss the theory and legal application of torture both historically and in the context of the “learned debate” about its use in response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
When the trial resumed a week later, Notterin confessed voluntarily and openly before an audience of townspeople—not just that she had cursed the inspector, but that she had used sorcery to render impotent a man who refused to buy her sauerkraut, that through witchery she had been able to shapeshift and to travel to the witches’ sabbat where she renounced her faith, ate the corpses of baptised infants, and exercised her unnatural lusts with demons. Indeed, she admitted that the man people had thought was her husband was actually an incubus demon, and that he was the father of her daughter. And—crucially—given that she was at the sabbat, she was also able to name some of the others who she had encountered there. In coercing the accused to recontextualise the accusations against her into the frame of the intellectual world view of the inquisitor, torture had revealed a much broader conspiracy of witches than had first been suspected. There was clearly more work to do in Ravensburg.
On the basis of her confession, the inquisitor determined that Anna Notterin was guilty of witchcraft. Being repentant, she was sentenced to life imprisonment—although the inquisitor noted that some of the crimes to which she confessed were also offences under secular law, and so it might be right and proper for these to be prosecuted by those authorities, too.
Reflection
As a final assignment, every student was to write a pamphlet account of what happened from the perspective of their character. Such pamphlets survive in large numbers from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but are incredibly problematic sources to use historically, for their authors are often deeply invested in their interpretation of proceedings—even when composed by figures to whom we would be inclined to ascribe more social capital and more objectivity. Judges are invested in the verdicts they hand down. And in the case of this scenario, the accused’s lawyer was determined to argue that proceedings had been contaminated by the demonically inspired malevolence of the notary—and the notary was keen to counter such scurrilous accusations.
During our debriefing session, I had students discuss their pamphlets and their character’s perspective on events to get a sense of just how invested and so difficult to use such sources are. I also had students reflect on the exercise as a whole. In general, they found it an exciting way to think about the text—treating it as a living document. But more than that, not knowing how proceedings would unfold—whether they themselves would end up being accused of witchery—not knowing who deposed what against them really helped synthesise some of the anxiety around the presence of an inquisitor.
From my perspective, the exercise allowed students to see directly how the poorly argued theology of Institoris and Sprenger could recast normal expressions of social tension into evidence of a broad Satanic conspiracy—recontextualising a petty dispute about the size of a measure of sauerkraut as part of the ultimate battle between good and evil wrought across and through all of creation.
I have revisions and refinements planned for the next iteration of the course scheduled for January 2024.
Richard Raiswell is Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island and Fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He is editor and translator most recently of The Medieval Devil: A Reader (with David R. Winter), and co-editor of the Routledge History of the Devil (with Winter and Michelle Brock, forthcoming, 2024).