reputation that demonological texts have as documents of barbarity, superstition, and irrationality. H.R. Trevor-Roper, for example, said of them that To read these encyclopedias of witchcraft is a horrible experience. Each seems to outdo the last in cruelty and absurdity. Together they insist that every grotesque detail of demonology is true, that
patriachal elite’, whose statements and confessions were simply forced rehashings of that elite’s demonology.1 On the contrary – and despite the fact that power over the trial process lay ultimately with the council – alleged witches were capable of contributing to and of shaping the course of interrogations in idiosyncratic ways. At the same time, however, the trial of Margaretha shows that it was becoming increasingly problematic for women accused of witchcraft in early modern Rothenburg to articulate defiance against their accusers and the council without this defiance
. tales of erotic debauches, infanticide and cannibalism were revived and applied to various religious outgroups in medieval Christendom. In the process they were integrated more and more firmly into the corpus of Christian demonology. … the powers of darkness loomed larger and larger in these tales, until they came to occupy the very centre of the stage. Erotic debauches
, p. 63. See also Ülo Valk, ‘On the Connections between Estonian Folk Religion and Christian Demonology’, Mitteilungen für Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte 8 (1994) 197. 31 Per Sörlin, Trolldoms- och Vidskepelseprocesserna i Göta hovrätt 1635–1754 (Umeå, 1993), p. 30. 32 RA Stockholm, Justitierevisionens Arkiv, JR, Utslagshandlingar, 31 October 1694, Bunt III, nr. 334. 33 RA Stockholm, Justitierevisionens Arkiv, JR, Utslagshandlingar, 1 December 1756, nr. 3. 34 RA Stockholm, Justitierevisionens Arkiv, JR, Utslagshandlingar, 22 December 1776, nr. 49. 35 See also
called innovative to the conception of the devil, they did alter the ways in which he and his works were perceived, in such a way that they emerged more powerful, more independent, and more obviously present in the quotidian world than before.13 Systematization was the hallmark of scholastic demonology: Aquinas’s great achievement in this field was the creation of a theoretical framework in which the devils of Augustine, Dionysius, and the early Church could comfortably reside alongside their more contemporary kin.14 The mere existence of such a system, though, had an
hierarchy. In Robin Briggs’s view, the sabbath concept can be seen as an anti-fertility rite, representing the opposite of the desirable commonweal.30 In learned demonology, descriptions of Satan, Hell and the activities of witches were characterised by ritual backwardness. The whole cosmic order was inverted, the Devil put in the place of God, and the servants of God on earth – the secular and religious magistrates – displaced. Stuart Clark has linked the notions of the world upside down in learned demonology to a general conception of a polar world, found in many areas
historiography, based on our readings of learned demonology,statistical evidence and certain cases drawn from wide geographical and temporal spans. The Malleus maleficarum , or Hammer of Witches, is the best-known early modern work on witchcraft,infamous for its misogynist statements about women and for its argument that most witches were women. With very few exceptions, modern scholars have taken a one
. I can mention two of these in connection with the material under scrutiny here. One of them is the greater importance accorded to the role of the Devil in Eastern liturgy. In relation to this, in Orthodox Eastern Europe the peasants’ world-views and the popular beliefs of witchcraft are closely related to the church demonology’s concept of the Devil. In Western and Central Europe the heyday of the demonological concept of witchcraft, and
. Protestant demonology which emphasised the idea that many aspects of witchcraft were delusions caused by the devil might help support such a moderate elite viewpoint, as might a confessionally neutral awareness of the difficulty of proving witchcraft accusations unequivocally at law. It was not the size, cohesion or location of a territory which made it more or less likely to fall prey to the horrors of large-scale witch-trials in early modern Germany, then, but rather the question of whether and for how long this set of restraining factors pertained in its particular case
events . . . through the framework of the witchcraft confession’, adopting ‘the language of demonology’ to explain their feelings.8 A ‘murdering’ mother? Magdalena Dürr, 1628–29 Can these ideas help us understand the gender-bias of the Rothenburg witchtrials? Let us begin to answer this question by examining the case of Magdalena Dürr, a twenty-eight-year-old woman from the village of Standorf who was arrested on 23 December 1628 on suspicion of having killed her eleven-weekold daughter four days earlier. Magdalena claimed that she had found the baby lying dead next to