Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: Europe's Witch Craze

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

In 1597, King James VI of Scotland published a compendium on witchcraft called Daemonologie that laid down the kind of trial and punishment these practices merited.  But why was there a witch craze in Europe?  How were witch hunts triggered?  Who were the victims?  And why did witch trials spread to America?  Rob Weinberg asks the big questions on this dark but fascinating period to Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London.

Hello everyone, welcome to History Hit. It's another takeover, History Hit takeover today. It's another episode of the How and Why History. It's our new podcast. Please go and subscribe to that. In this edition, we're talking to the brilliant Mary Rubin. She's been on the History Hit podcast and so I wanted to get her back on this because you can never have enough Mary Rubin in your life. We delve deep into that dark time when the witch craze swept across Europe. So why people got so obsessed with witches and their persecution. If you like this, search How and Why History wherever you get your pods. Make sure you subscribe, rate, etc. All that junk. And then there's a new episode coming out every Tuesday and Friday. This Friday we're looking at the How and Why of the Berlin Wall.

And if you really like How and Why, I mean, if you're really super fan territory, please head over to History Hit TV and subscribe. It's the world's best history channel. It's got audio, it's got video. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free in one month, just one pound, euro or dollar. But before you do all that,

let's head back to the Middle Ages. The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch in post this following treaties of mine, to resolve the doubting both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced and that the instrument thereof merits most severely to be punished. In 1597, King James VI of Scotland published a compendium on witchcraft called Demonology. It was also published in England in 1603 when James acceded to the English throne. James fully believed in magic and witchcraft

and laid down what sort of trial and punishment these practices merited. A century earlier, the best-known treatise on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, endorsed the extermination of witches, recommending they be tortured to obtain confessions. But why was there a witch craze in Europe? What circumstances triggered witch hunts? Who were the victims? How did witch trials spread even to America?

To answer the big questions on this dark but fascinating period, History Hits Rob Weinberg met Professor Mary Rubin of Queen Mary University of London. How and why history? How did the witch hunt craze that took place in Europe come about? People use the word witch craze and people use the witch hunt. And hunting was also used in the 17th century, so I understand why people use it.

And some books have witch craze, some very, very good books have witch craze in their title. But on the whole, I think it is better to explain the phenomenon as a set of clusters of trials that it is true become almost infectious that is the trying of one person as which then the interrogation of that person leads under torture very often leads to the divulging of names of others and hence it grows and grows but the word craze doesn't help when we're trying to discern how a system of law, of justice, of what was in place at the time is actually operating as it were, as it ought. So rather than an aberration, it's better to think about it as what caused this continued and inexorable pursuit of people in the name of witchcraft. I know it may seem a subtle difference, but I think it helps us. And it wasn't everywhere, and it wasn't for very long periods.

It was nonetheless absolutely cruel, appalling, and an absolute blot on European history, but which craze gives the wrong impression in terms of the structured manner in which a whole lot of these proceedings actually took place. So how did it start? Let's start by thinking about magic. Let's think about magic as procedures and the ideas related to them that try to harness the powers of nature, the powers of the world as it is understood by a given community in order to secure health, to rid from illness, to acquire some sort of advantage in love, in battle. And in every society, and definitely in European societies, there are people who develop a sort of expertise, although a sort of low level of, let's say, magical activity can happen in every household. You know, strewing the bed of newlyweds with fragrant herbs,

is that magic? Is that just nice housekeeping? So there is a way in which a low level of this sort of particular insight into the properties of natural things and the mobilization of them is available very, very widely in households and communities throughout Europe. But within a Christian context, these magical activities often also mobilize materials and practices that are specifically Christian. So, for example, people taking blessed water away from the church and having some at home and using it together with healing practices

or blessing practices or fructifying your fields practices. That's Christian magic, but of a very low level and nobody's going to persecute people for this type of activity on its own. One might even say that the church encouraged it in giving people holy bread to take away or allowing holy water to be used is something that even acquired a name. It's not sacraments, it's sacramentals, sacramentalia. So it's against this background routine activity that we might call magic, the use of snippets of prayers, the invocation of angels and protectors, and indeed saints. That is a form of Christian magic that's very widely

known. Now throughout the medieval centuries and particularly from around 1100 on there develops a very robust sense developed by theologians and experts in Christian law about what is right and what is wrong religion. So there is the University of Paris, there's a court in Rome, there are people whose job it is, as it were, to define good practice and less good practice. And one very famous, wonderful historian, R.I. Moore, wrote a book which he called The Formation of a Persecuting Society. And once you're starting to look at practices that are right or wrong and copying them out into books that priests can use,

what do you do with these sort of practices? So they occasionally get identified. Certain types of manipulation of materials and uses of prayers or uses of holy materials, does get decried as being fanciful or being dangerous because it can lead people to be invoking powers that are not fully godly powers. So occasionally, for example, Jews who fail the test of orthodoxy, are also accused of having connection with the devil. Heretics are also deemed to be associated doing some sort of form of not white but black magic. So there's a beginning of an association of magical activities that are not benign, that are maleficium, maleficent, doing bad in the world, and doing bad not through the procedures that God has ordained, but through the invocation of the devil.

Now, in the 15th century, this comes together in a very, very big way. And it's just recent, very recent, last few decades of research that have truly shown us that something very special happens in the 15th century, whereby magic becomes diabolized. There's much, much more suspicion and discussion of the ways in which these women, who are, as it were, blessing, etc., are actually making pacts with the devil. And a whole lot of traditions, the traditions of carnival and the world upside down, the traditions of the theology around the operation of the devil in the world, because the devil exists, Satan exists, this is not something that does not exist, it does exist in the Christian imagination. All of this gets developed,

and it's often developed by the same sort of scholars, often members of the Dominican order, the leading intellectuals of Europe, who were also very often inquisitors charged with prosecuting suspects of heresy. By the mid-15th century, a number of really, really important texts have been written which systematize knowledge of witchcraft, not the benign type, but diabolical witchcraft, into a thing. Into a thing where they meet the devil, they go off and meet the devil at night, and that is the idea of the Sabbath, the Sabbath that develops, which is quite a

different thing from the sort of suspicions around women maybe using plants or other preparations in order to affect certain types of results. And it's from that association that all the energy of the Catholic Church, which has hitherto been directed as heretics according to their various theological beliefs, are now directed at witches as a very particular and really, really nasty form of heresy, which is in direct interlocution with the devil, which rejects the power of God and seeks to be servants. They worship the devil rather than God himself. So what were the kinds of circumstances that would tend to trigger a so-called witch hunt? So the first examples of spectacular trials, trials of more than one person,

trials that end up in capital punishment, that are much touted and written upon, are from the 15th century. We have a cluster of them in what would be northern France, Belgium of today, in Arras. And we have another cluster of them in the valleys, those very beautiful green valleys of Switzerland of today. And in both cases it's about people behaving in a way that is suspicious in terms of the now existing definition of witchcraft, of unusual preaching, of affecting harm in some big way. So it's about the affecting of harm to animals, to children, to individuals. Now, I should just

say that even before the development of the fully flung idea of the diabolical witch. There was a syndrome in Europe, in the courts of Europe, that is, rulers who suspected that in their courts, witchcraft was used to undermine them, to poison them, to kill their heirs. And we have quite a few examples, in England as well, in the 15th century, of such cases. But everything is ramped up really in a very, very big way in the 15th century. What also happens in the 15th century,

following the development of this new idea of diabolical witchcraft, which gets codified, which is in handbooks, most famously the very great handbook of the later part of that century called The Hammer of Witches, the Malleus Maleficarum, which is written by a Dominican, which systematizes exactly how to recognize what they do. What's very important there is that there's a great fascination with the role of women in witchcraft. What we soon get, within a decade or two, we start getting artists producing images, imagery, great artists, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Green, who are now imagining what does a witch look like? I mean, literally, sometimes on the broom, flying through the sky, sometimes naked and lascivious with wild hair and private parts

exposed, sometimes a wizened ugly old woman. But now there is also a visual component to witchcraft and its dangers and you know these are major artists whose prints and so on do spread quite widely. So there is a growing familiarity with and also a knowledge of how to act upon suspicions of witchcraft that then come together. And when you add to that that 16th and 17th century Europe sees some of the most fraught debates about religion, wars of religion after all, and of course accusations for witchcraft happen in Catholic countries as well as Protestant countries, this is what's so very interesting, and it becomes part of the operation of the state to protect its people. Then there is the potential

of this happening. Now there have been scholars who tried to relate the chronology of the trials, for example the very very famous and horrific trials in Franconia in the 1610-20s to particularly bad weather, particular plague, particular calamity and so on. And, you know, sometimes that works quite well. But above all, what's really interesting is the way it is basically a legal system working through its own logic. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach

us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Were witch hunts ever used to intimidate or victimise political opponents? Absolutely, yes. So, political opponents is a grand word, but we commonly find, and this is true also of accusations of heresy, and I'm emphasizing again and again, that witchcraft develops as a form of heresy, is understood and is treated as a form of heresy. So it's not uncommon, particularly in German cities, to find that the accused is someone who was in competition on the town council or perhaps in commercial

competition and as it were a struggle or a feud then is translated into an accusation also of maleficent magic or the use of witchcraft or the association with witchcraft. But most of the cases, definitely in England, usually arise from much lower the social scale in neighborhood situations. Hence, one of the most important books about witch persecution, witch trials, is Robin Briggs's wonderful book, Witches and Neighbors, because it is about how the neighbourhood environment, the sort of competition, the squabbles, the suspicion that somebody has cast an evil eye, if you believe that an evil eye is a thing, upon you.

And Keith Thomas, the very greatest, almost influential of British historians of witchcraft, developed an interesting theory, which has then been ramified and modified, but still has a really interesting core to it in his great book, Religion and the Decline of Magic of 1971, where he says that an accusation of magic can actually be an expression of guilt. Somebody you've fallen out with, a poor person you have maybe wronged or been less than charitable towards, and then something happens, and you suspect that it is then. And then, of course, you look for the signs, and you find the signs,

because when you look, you find. And the very famous case in Lancashire in 1612, the Pendle witch trial, is sort of that type, begins really with an accusation, a peddler who refused to sell pins to a young woman and then he goes his way and he immediately stumbles and has a stroke, but he survives just well enough to say she probably cast the spell upon him. And she says no, but his son brings evidence and ultimately 12 people end up in the Assizes, 10 of whom are hung. And that's quite unusual for England. And that's really interesting, that whole period of the very late Elizabethan,

immediately after Elizabeth, particularly under James I, he was very preoccupied with religion in general. He believed that it existed. He believed that it was also used politically. He definitely believed that those who were machinating against him in Scotland did use magic in order to capsize a ship he was on or other type of harm. And he legislated, in his first year he legislated the act against sorcery that actually defines it as a capital crime. So he was interested both intellectually, personally, and that created an atmosphere where quite a lot of the justices of the peace and people involved in trying occasionally when there were witchcraft cases were sort of emboldened or felt obliged to take this further. That seems very much to be the case with the justices of the peace,

both in York and in Lancaster, who tried the Pendle witches. So this was something they had to take very seriously, even if in another context they might have not. So again, so we see this issue of the witch trial clusters. It's not something that's everywhere in Europe. It's not at the same time all over Europe. It's a potentiality embedded in law, because there are now laws both in the Holy Roman Empire and in England. Throughout, there are laws against sorcery. There's a machinery. It occupies the imagination, not least through the visual representations. It's out there. So we find these extraordinary clusters. And there's also, in the case of the German, particularly the Franconian cases in the early 17th century, it's also the way the law operates, Roman law, which was repromulgated by Emperor Charles V, with many, many, many clauses about

trying witchcraft and all the difficulties around it, about evidence, about torture and so on. And the system of torture produces confessions and produces denunciations of other people. That's partly why it cannot stop. Now, in England, torture did not operate in that manner. And it's very interesting in the 1640s in Essex, well, in East Anglia, not just Essex, but mostly in Essex, when the guy, the self-appointed witch finder general, Matthew Hopkins, develops a reputation. He's a Puritan, a local from Suffolk, son of a clergyman. And he becomes known as the go-to guy when you have, because, you know, a township doesn't know what to do. Panningtree, Albra, what do you do with these accusations?

He becomes the expert and he tries these trials and he gets paid for them as well and he writes tracts about them. So he spreads the news as well. So people know about this being a thing beyond the localities. So then somewhere else, when the conditions are right, people have that knowledge because they've read the pamphlet, these widespread pamphlets, very cheap pamphlets about the operation of the trial. So in England, all this is happening in the middle of the Civil War. The discoverer never travelled far for it, but in March 1644, he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of

witches living in the town where he lived, a town in Essex called Manningtree, with divers other adjacent witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night, being always on the Friday night, had their meeting close by his house, and had their several solemn sacrifices there offered to the devil. One of which this discoverer heard speaking to her imps one night, and bid them go to another witch, who was thereupon apprehended and searched by women who had for many years known the devil's marks, and found to have three teats about her which honest women have not so upon command from the justice they were to keep her from sleep two or three nights expecting in that time to see her familiars which the fourth night

she called in by their several names the first she called wasolt, who came in like a white kitling. Jarmara, who came in like a fat spaniel without any legs at all. She said she kept him fat, for she clapped her hand on her belly and said he sucked good blood from her body. Vinegar Tom, who was like a long-legged greyhound, with a head like an ox, with a long tail and broad eyes who when this discoverer spoke to and bade him go to the place provided for him and his angels immediately transformed himself into the shape of a child of four years old without a head and gave half a dozen turns about the house and vanished at the door think in in a civil war, people suspecting each other, communities riven, families riven,

how the language of accusation and witchcraft can be deployed. So there's a lot of business to somebody who's willing to be very self-righteous and a know-all like him to make that operate. And that's the real context. And some witches were even suspected of being spies for the other side, the royalists or the Puritans. Rather than saying a European thing that happens everywhere, the features are very different. It can be Catholic or Protestant, it can be in the hundreds

or even thousands like in Franconia or in the tens. It can be areas where nobody, you don't get it at all, like Spain. Most of central and southern Spain, it just doesn't exist. Very, very little in Italy. Areas where there are men accused as well as women, like for example in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia, in the Baltic. So all of this is to make very, very complicated, as it ought to be across the whole continent, a phenomenon that in the public imagination is very much witch hunt, and we totally understand what it's about. And then witch trials spread to America, most famously Salem. So again, we have to think of these communities in New England, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as being really these are English people.

English people have settled, who have only very, very recently, like I think about a year before the trials, had actually become part of the British dominions, as it were, governed by a British governor, part of the British Empire, we might say. a British governor, part of the British Empire, we might say. And all of this introduces a whole lot of changes to lives of the community at Salem, which was a rural community outside Salem town, which is a harbour. I mean, it's a port. So there are a lot of things happening. And since the 1970s, historians have been probing. The archives are very, very, very rich of the trials.

And it begins with a group of teenage women. What were they doing? Some form of divination, some form of guessing who their husband might be. Married women get involved. A householder gets involved, observing these women. What's going on? Who's leading whom

astray and the accusations proliferate into sort of tens of people, young and old. So very young women, nubile women and very old women. I think Rebecca Nurse was 71 when she was executed. You can see her barn, it's still there outside Salem. But again, by that point in the late 17th century, what's really interesting, there is already the critique of the trial as the trial is going on. Most famously, Cotton Mather, who is a most extraordinary writer, clergyman, theologian, and his own mother was tried for witchcraft.

And he just is appalled by the instability of evidence, the changing of evidence. There's this poor indigenous woman, Tituba, who gets investigated. And they run circles around her and confuse her as they investigate her. And ultimately she confesses. If we're looking for what are the pressures, what are the tensions that cause this type of a community to turn against itself. So some historians have claimed that actually the incorporation

into the British sphere and the many commercial opportunities involved in the East India Company and so on that developed with it meant that the part of Salem community that were more involved in manufacture and trade and therefore were more connected to the new prosperity of Salem town were accused often by those who were the more let's call them the left behind those who were living more traditional lives and did not feel incorporated. So there's a quite neat geographical structure in terms of who accuses whom.

But then a most wonderful historian came and also emphasised the way in which anxiety and trauma affected these communities. These are communities that are constantly fighting for their survival with indigenous people, where there are raids, where there's constant warfare also within the north with French America, New France, that these are unstable and scary lives and therefore the idea that people are plotting and maybe making pacts with the devil to the detriment of the community would be very scary indeed to its leaders. And of course, above all, the issue of women and gender just operating fully and magnificently really.

There are a few men who are accused, but it's mostly women of every age and every position. But even as a trial is happening, the critique of it is already being written and pamphlets are circulating in critique. And indeed once the governor gets involved and once the commission looks into it, then it dies down. The accusations are not strong enough to uphold all the denunciations that were made. So here is an interesting point which is like European magic going global, that is to say, what happens with people's traditional beliefs about magic when they go and they settle in the

very precarious, the very scary, the very guilt-inducing, the very traumatizing situation of conquest and colonization. And we can see that in other parts of the world as well. There's been very interesting work about witchcraft trials in Manila, in the Spanish Philippines. And the people who are most vulnerable are always the indigenous people. Even if they've become Christian, the indigenous people who have that local knowledge, those traditions that Europeans don't quite understand. And now I think historians are really recognising

this global dimension in the study of witchcraft, so we're in for some very exciting new research. Miri Rubin, thank you for joining us. My pleasure. How and why history? you