In Our Time - Witchcraft

Episode Date: October 21, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss witchcraft in Reformation Europe. In 1486 a book was published in Latin, it was called Maleus Mallificarum and it very soon outsold every publication in Europe bar the Bible. It was written by Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican Priest and a witchfinder. "Magicians, who are commonly called witches" he wrote, "are thus termed on account of the magnitude of their evil deeds. These are they who by the permission of God disturb the elements, who drive to distraction the minds of men, such as have lost their trust in God, and by the terrible power of their evil spells, without any actual draught or poison, kill human beings.""Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" says Exodus, and in the period of the Reformation and after, over a hundred thousand men and women in Europe met their deaths after being convicted of witchcraft.Why did practices that had been tolerated for centuries suddenly become such a threat? What brought the prosecutions of witchcraft to an end, and was there anything ever in Europe that could be truly termed as a witch?With Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex; Lyndal Roper, Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford; Malcolm Gaskill, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1486, a book was published in Latin. It was called Malias Malificarum, the Hammer of Witches. And it was very soon outsold every publication in Europe by the Bible.

It was written by Heinrich Kramer, a German- Dominican priest, and a witch-finder. He wrote, Magicians who are commonly called witches are thus termed on account of the magnitude of their evil deeds. These are they who, by the permission of God, disturbed the elements, who drive to distraction the minds of men, such as have lost their trust in God, and by the terrible power of their evil spells

without any actual draft or poison, kill human beings. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says Exodus, and in the period of the Reformation and after, It's estimated that over 100,000 men and women in Europe met their death after being convicted of witchcraft. Why did practices that had been tolerated for centuries suddenly become such a threat? What brought the prosecutions of witchcraft to an end?

And was there anything ever in Europe that could be truly termed a witch? With me to discuss witchcraft in Europe is Alison Rowlands, senior lecture in European history at the University of Essex, Lindel Roper, fellow and tutor in history at Bayleau College, University of Oxford, an author of Witch Cray, and Malcolm Gaskell, fellow and director of studies in history at Churchill College, Cambridge. Our listener, Erlen, before we discuss the witchcraft trials and how they started, what's behind it, the ideas of what witches were,

were also ideas of what magicians or so-called cunning folk had well before the, let's say, 15th century. Is that true? And if so, what was going on there? I think the late medieval period is one where the possibility and power of magic permeates the whole society from the elites down to the lowest orders. I think we can distinguish three ideas about magical witchcraft. One is the belief that people could work black magical maleficium, harmful magic against other people, cause them harm. So it's an idea about sorcery being able to cause harm through magic. Conversely, there are also ideas about individuals who could work good through magic, who these so-called white witches or cunning folk,

who could actually heal disease and protect against witchcraft and so on. So we've got a very, very long-standing set of beliefs around the idea of the possibility of sorcery or black magic and also white magic. And what really changes, and what I would see is, if you like, in an essential precondition of the period of trials, is a sort of a third layer of belief in witchcraft as demonic or diabolic witchcraft. Before we come to the witchcraft, before we come to the Reformation,

I'd like to just say the centuries before that, there were people who, in some level are at a folk level or at a court level could be called magicians, you say sorcerers. What were they dealing in? You've talked about white magic and black magic. So what were they dealing in? How did they trade, as it were, their occupation? Well, white witches, for example, or cunning folk, those who were deemed to be able to work good magic,

would very often have another occupation, perhaps one linked to working with livestock, shepherds, blacksmiths and so on. And it was kind of a sideline, if you like, their working of white magic, very often to protect livestock, which were very, very valuable in this period. So they literally did trade in white magic. They offered cures to the population. What sort of cures did they offer? I mean, are we going back to pagan times? are you going back to, we're going back to old folk recipes and so on.

I'd just like some details. Sure, yeah, it varies enormously. I think one of the problems is exactly tracing the origins. I think we've got a very sort of long-standing process where pre-Christian beliefs, pagan beliefs, and then Christian idea, they're kind of superimposed on them. So, for example, one thing that cunning folk might do is speak blessings over animals to try and protect them.

So they're kind of appropriating, if you like, the magic of the church. by using sort of quasi-Christian ritual. So I think they're kind of very eclectic. They take whatever they feel might be useful. It could be use of herbs. It could be use of blessings. It could be use of rituals and so on. So it's a very kind of eclectic mix of pre-Christian

and then-Christian as well. This was regarded as shamanistic and rather mysterious. But on the other hand, another way we're looking at it, this was a search for knowledge in a world where exact knowledge was far from available, wasn't it? They were looking for ways to find out how the world worked. how the world worked, and also how to cope with just the daily kind of misfortunes and hardships of life. I mean, disease, death, dearth, and so on. But I don't think we should make it seem too sort of shamanistic and mysterious.

I mean, these are people who live in their communities, that they're known and used by their neighbours. So I don't think we should try and see them as something too mysterious necessarily. Lindel Roper, finally on this pre-witch matter, did the witch grace start before the Reformation? had the magicians, the sorcerers, the conning folk, become persons open to persecution before the Reformation? Yes, they had, and there are a number of series of which panics. There are some in the early 15th century, and then you get occasional ones right throughout and up to the late 15th century.

So when you read from the Malayas, one of the interesting things about that text is that, it was written out of that Inquisitor's experience of a failed witch panic in 1485. So most people listening will think which is Reformation religion, but you're talking about it. Now, what prompted it before the Reformation? What prompts it before the Reformation is fears that the devil is at work in the world and that it's a new kind of heresy that has to be attacked. And what's absolutely fascinating is that once you get the Reformation itself,

witch hunting seems to stop. So there's a period when there's not really much witch hunting going on. And then it's this generation of people who've been formed by the Reformation and by the experience of the Counter-Reformation. And they're the people who get interested in witch-hunting. So what date are we talking about? Give us a block of dates here that we're talking about now when they're really interested in witch-hunting. It starts in the 15th century.

60s, but then it really gets going in the 1580s. And we're talking about the Catholics and the Protestants being equally zealous. We're talking about both of them being zealous witch hunters. Although we're also discovering that the places where there are most

victims turn out to be areas ruled by Catholic Prince bishops. And mostly in Germany. Mostly in Germany. Just to give you a sense of that, we think that in Germany there are something like 20,000 executions. That's about half the total that we know for Western Europe.

I'll come back to that in the second because why it should be in Germany is so heavy is a very interesting point. But just to take it to pace it through it through, given that Catholics and Protestants were so opposed in so many ways or seemed to be, why did they both go for witches in much the same way with much the same venom? You're absolutely right. It's very puzzling.

You would think Catholics and Protestants, they hate each other, and if you think, well, what about their views of women? That's one issue on which these two confessions are completely polarized. Catholics venerate Mary. Protestants are saying, Mary's just an example for all Christians. She's not someone to be venerated. Catholics are insisting on the importance of the convent and of a spiritual role for women, Protestants are closing down convent.

So you would think on the issue of women, they take very different sorts of views, and yet they both hunt witches. It is very puzzling. Well, let's just put it in now. About 20, 25% of the witches hunted were men, so it isn't just women. No, it's not just women. It's to do with the release of the idea of the devil, isn't it, Malcolm Gasco? I mean, we have a however imperfect, and we hear very little about, except how imperfect,

the Catholic Church was in the Middle Ages. However imperfect it was it was one thing. It was a canopy. And then it's riven. And that must have been, if we can try to reimagine ourselves back there, which is very difficult, it must have been, for many people,

terrifying that there was not one truth. There were two ways, at least, and maybe there's several other ways, and there are at odds with each other. So what had caused this, and one course could be the devil had got loose. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, one of the things we should see

is that before the Reformation, that the apparatus of, the ideology of witchcraft, if you like, was already being quite well formed. And so that what we see from the later Middle Ages into the early modern period is the way that trials for heresy and a more centralised idea for the Catholic Christian church shades into witchcraft mostly because of the inclusion of the idea of the devil. And we see this in the Western Christian tradition in St. Thomas Aquinas and in St. Augustine. is an idea of the demonic coming into Christian deviance,

and the idea, particularly, that ordinary human beings can actually form pacts with Satan. And so I think that the idea of the devil is coming to the fore before the Reformation, but in the Reformation period, this monopoly over Christian truth is really being divided into more of a free market of ideas between Protestantism and Catholicism, which opens up a fault line in society from the top.

top to the bottom in popular tradition and in learning tradition. So before this eruption, there's quite a lot of preparation, as it were, gone on inside the culture. What Alison was talking about, the sort of ideas of magic, which have gone on for centuries and cunning folk, sometimes black, sometimes white, the idea we've been talking about over here of persecution before the Reformation. But it was the idea of the devil being named

and thought to be the cause of disruption developed inside the Catholicians before the Reformation? Yeah, that's a lot to do with it. I mean, one of the ideas about witchcraft that I think we need to grasp is that it never means just one thing. It's always, in itself, is a contested definition right from the earliest days. So it's always a sort of an area in which other ideas

about society and culture and religion can be thrashed out. It's a kind of a symbolic vehicle for that. But that certainly, by the period of the referendum, I mean, for example, the Protestant reformers sometimes argue that the devil has actually been rather idle in the pre-Reformation period, and that actually by exposing the Pope as Antichrist, that the devil is really reactivated and is furious and goes charging through the world, trying to corrupt ordinary Christians to lead them to their own damnation. So these are sort of the clocks ticking for the last days of man, for many of these radical Protestant thinkers. So before we come to the horrible detail and sometimes comical, strange details of these terrible trials,

just one more contextualisation. We've talked about what's happening in the Catholic Church. We've talked about what's happening in the area of magic and so on. The meteorological conditions, the conditions of the time, all three of you have written about that, played a very important part. Now, can we have a brief... Malcolm, you'd like to say that first time back to our lesson. Well, one of the things about this period, the early modern period, roughly 1,700 to 1700,

It's sometimes called the Little Ice Age. There is an overall dip in temperatures across Europe which does affect crop yields. And that this is sometimes linked to the fact that it does actually at least coincide with the witch craze. It's sometimes seen as actually being one of the causal factors. It's undeniably the case that there are a series of bad harvest. I mean in England, for example, in the 1590s, this is both the period where witch hunting, witchcraft prosecutions escalate and also a period of great hardship, failed harvests. Now, I think that part of the connection here

is that actually this reduces the quality of life for most people raises competition within communities that causes tension between neighbours that might be expressed as a witchcraft accusation, rather than something that directly leads to witch-hunting. Because final context, we are talking about a period where just getting through the winter for a great number of people in what's now,

let's loosely call it Europe, enormously difficult. Sure, I mean, we're looking very much at a subsistence society where people are literally kind of permanently teetering on the edge of surviving and potentially not surviving. And I think for many centuries, people have believed that one of the types of evil magic

that witches could work is weather magic, that they can actually manipulate the weather and that they do that to actually damage harvests, destroy harvests. So for early modern peasants, if their harvest is destroyed, perhaps by a severe hailstorm, This happens in Germany in the 1580.

It's one of the triggers of the persecutions around the city of Trier. One way of explaining that, and actually being able to do something about it. So it's not just being able to explain something strange and unfortunate, it's then being absolutely able to take action against it. The idea is then that you can petition your overlords to actually bring prosecutions against the witches that you fear have actually caused this catastrophe to your local subsistence. Okay, well, let's go into much more detail now. Let's look at this book, Malias Malificarum, the Hammer of the Witches,

written by Kramer, Heinrich Kramer, German-Dominican. Can you give us one or two instances from it? What's his drive in that book, which was tremendously influential, the first of the demonologists? What was his drive? What was he essentially saying? He thinks that there's a conspiracy of witches who are out to attack Christendom, and he thinks that those witches are probably, primarily women, and he has these extraordinary passages in the work, which are incredibly misogynistic,

which talk about women's slippery tongues, which talk about how they meet and hold assemblies, and how they take children, and how they kill them and eat them in horrible banquets. It's a very gruesome book. It's a very strange book. It's set up as a scholastic treatise, and it has a series of questions,

answers, and it is an intellectual tour de force, which has all kinds of authorities that it appeals to, but it also has the most extraordinary stories within it. The stories of those he collected while he was being the witch finder going around, and they're sometimes comical, but sometimes odd. I mean, that witches could make the male member disappear, and they could also produce a bowl of male members from which you could choose the male member most suited to your purposes and get off. with it? So what's all that about is, are these reported tales? Well, there must be. I think it's a strange mixture. It's tales that he's come across during interrogation. But I think there are also ones that come out of popular culture. So that one that you mentioned, it is an extraordinary story. These are male members in a nest who are seen to eat wheat and corn. And when a man looks at these, he says, oh, I'll have that one pointing to the biggest.

And he's told, oh, no, you can't, because that belongs to the parish priest. And here he's taking up a whole series of popular tales which are directed against clergy and often written by monks who are in competition with secular clergy. So the whole thing becomes a complete mix of settling scores, heavy theology, folk, misogyny, and trying to find a way to turn the sorcerers and magicians and people in the village, and it's a tightly connected communities,

turned them into something else, into... Now, why, can you give us a bit of a map of Europe at this time? You've said already that it was in Germany, that this happened most ferociously and most extensively. How did other countries, just briefly compare? I mean, obviously, we're wondering about England and Scotland and so on, but Italy and so on. Well, Spain and Italy seem to have had comparatively little witch-hunting,

and that's very strange, because they're the areas where the Inquisition is important in witch hunting, and we all have this negative view of the Inquisition, and we think that the Inquisition was really hot on witches. But in fact, because the Inquisition is concerned to convert people and bring them back to true belief, witch hunting in Spain and Italy doesn't result in as many executions. And what about...

Why was it as ferocious as it was in Germany, then, before we move on? Well, I think that that's to do, with the very particular moral climate that you get in the wake of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. When people are absolutely convinced that the devil is about, that he's someone who might appear to you, who might talk to you and tempt you, and where people are very concerned

that the last days are coming, as Malcolm said, and where their religious identity has to be proved in competition with another faith. And briefly, England and Scotland, how do they compare? Do you want to say that? England and Scotland have what we might call milder intensities of persecution. For example, in England, it's been estimated that there are around 500 executions throughout the early modern period, as opposed to the 20,000 that Lindel mentioned for Germany.

In Scotland, the number is somewhat higher. It's around 1,000, although the population of Scotland is much smaller. So I guess when we're talking about intensity of persecution, we always need to bear in mind that the ratio of persecutions to population. I think one little note of caution I will just add is that we're talking at the moment about nations as though they were kind of whole units. And I think partly because I work on an area of Germany which experiences virtually no executions for witchcraft. And there are other parts of Germany, various southern imperial cities, the Rhineland platonate and so on. I think what we need to do is really take things down as well to a regional level because it's a very patchy phenomenon.

There are places, as Lindell has rightly said, which are very, very severely affected by which persecution, but others which aren't. And I think one interesting thing to think about is given the beliefs that are there and given that there are laws in place to persecute which is why it doesn't happen at the same rate everywhere. There's a slight digression in that sort of witch map of Europe. Coming back to the texts that drive for misogynia,

and the basic idea that women had uncontrollable sexual desires and this in terms of many of the demonologists was the root cause because this put them in contact with the devil. The devil could seduce them and his seduction was very unscifactory because of his, I'm afraid, back to your nest his ice cold member,

when they knew he was the devil and so on. But nevertheless, women's unlimited sexual desire was the cause of the problem according to some of these writers. Yeah, I think, again, And we need to be careful not to generalise too much from the Malias. Lindel's already said it's a particularly misogynistic text. I think it stands out even amongst the demonologies, which are generally misogynistic,

that it is peculiarly misogynistic and perhaps also peculiarly obsessed with exactly that sexual aspect of the pact with the devil. But certainly that's the essential idea that women are irrational, weaker in faith, more governed by their carnal lusts, and therefore they're more likely to be liable to the seduction of the devil. I mean, yeah, that's right. I mean, one thing we need to also remember is that misogyny wasn't something that was unusual in society and that this is a patriarchal society and patriarchy is about political authority and it's about the way that all early modern society is structured. So that to that extent that there's not an equation between women and evil or between women and witches,

there is an association based on the fact that women are seen through biblical authority and through tradition to be morally weaker and therefore more vulnerable to diabolical temptation, which is why we find 20% of witches being men. It's a tendency. It's not an exact correlation between women and witches. I think it's not just that women are very sexual and therefore open to the seductive wiles of the devil. It's partly that, but I think that. beneath that is the idea

that it's sex with the devil which can lead to no issue and I think it's the idea that the devil is out to attack fertility in the human as well as the natural world and that's why I think the stuff about weather and the crops comes together with fears which are very often to do with the deaths and diseases suffered by individual

babies and children in particular And I think that's why these fears really grab hold of people. Which, after all, it must be at the root of magic because they're the oldest human anxieties going back to 50,000, 100,000 years ago. Fertility. I mean, if we have to say one word, yeah. The life cycle.

And looking forward to, you know, when you get to winter, getting to spring, and being optimistic about that, which, after all, is a very important evolutionary development to be able to have magical belief. Well, we ask, to continue the demonologist for one moment and to bring it closer, literally to home to this country. James the 6th of Scotland,

before he became James the first of England, wrote a famous demonology and the fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches are enchanters and so on. What drove him to write that? Because this is a man in great authority in Scotland where there are a great number of witches.

And he was very intelligent man. What's he doing there? Well, he's a rather bookish, precocious teenager, really, who absorbs these texts, and his own demonology is very derivative. But again, I think this returns us to question of politics and to a sort of constitutional insecurity. And so James is interested in witchers, and obviously the demonology is a book about witchcraft. But again, behind that, if we dig a bit deeper, it's actually about the state. It's actually about divine right kingship. and the anxiety that centralising monarchies would be feeling in the 16th century.

Can you just develop, well, everybody's going to, can develop that a bit more? Well, is that the early modern state... No, James is... Sorry, it's nice to particularise it. What was James the first? What got his goat? What triggered him to write a demonology, precocious, bookish, he could have written all sorts of things. He wrote the demonologies.

Why did he do that? Right, well, one of the things which particularly triggers his interest is that there is a marriage match between himself and a Danish princess, as I recall, and the idea is that there are witches in North Berwick in Scotland who try to sink the ship that he's on, and this is reported back to him, and James takes a very personal interest in the examination of these witches, and actually is there himself. And to prove it, it is said, at least,

that one of the witches whispers into his ear the words that he said to his bride on their marriage night, this little bit of pillow talk, which is said, ultimately persuade him. Now, whether that's true or not, we don't really know, but it's, it certainly is seen to be in the established version of the trigger. So this culture is not just a culture of going around talking to folk. This is one of the things I'm trying to establish, but kings are taking this very seriously too. Do you want to say anything more about that? Can we move on to specific trials? Because I wouldn't mind talking about some, who wanted to do in a bit more detail. Lindel Roper, there's a trial of Ursula Hyder,

tried as a witch in 1518. and right, let's talk about that. Well, let's you talk about that. Well, Ursula Haider is a kind of child-minded, and she has two children in her care, and the first one dies. When the second one dies, the parents start being a bit alarmed about her, and they start to suspect her of witchcraft, and when she approaches the body of the child who's died,

the corpse starts to bleed, and that is the classic sign, that witchcraft is at work and that she has caused the child to die. So she's interrogated and gradually she starts to confess to having met the devil. Is this under torture? Does she start to confess?

Yes. And torture is starts with thumb screws. Yes. And then it's, what's he called? Strickardo, is it? Strapardo. Yes. Stretching on the rack.

Yeah, right. And it can involve a variety of techniques. So when you say a question, we're talking, you know. Yes. She's being tortured and under torture she confesses to And then the story changes And she starts telling stories about Meetings under the cellars

In the town where a whole series of prominent women in the town Have met with her and they've had these diabolic banquets So what we're seeing here is the beginning of a body of evidence about witches Which comes from women, on men, but let's get women Who are accused of being witches under torture and that's the only evidence we have, which is the basic evidence of there being witchcraft, comes from the distressed confessions of tortured people.

Yes, and the town council, interestingly enough, when it gets these confessions, it doesn't just say, well, fine, they're all witches. It says, well, let's see, these women say that they're having these banquets where they're consuming the flesh of babies who've been dug up from the churchyard, so let's test.

So they go to the churchyard. churchyard and they check to see whether the graves have been disturbed. The graves have not been disturbed. So you'd think that they would conclude that this is just all delusion. But they don't because the devil is the master of illusion. So if one can't actually see the evidence, that just proves that the devil is more cunning. And this puts everybody at risk in the community, doesn't it, Alison? Because especially older women, older women have to earn their keeper by being very, very useful.

like baking, looking after young children and the lying in was very protracted of business at that time. So they're looking after babies, they're looking after young children, they're baking, they're feeding. And this puts them at risk, because any illness, anything can be traced back to look, these older women looked after it. Is there something in that?

I think there is. I think one thing that we should probably just slightly backtrack on is this idea of the witch's Sabbath, which, again, comes from the late medieval context of changing beliefs about witchcraft as a heresy, a witchcraft as a pact with the devil because the kind of the momentum for the prosecutions of the type that Lindel

was talking about is that you don't just ask one individual to confess to being a witch herself, you then say, who else did you see at the witch's gathering, who else did you see at the Sabbath? And that creates a snowballing effect. So again, I think if we're thinking about why the early modern period sees these

large witch trials, this idea of the gathering, the collective, the scale of this demonic threat has to be taken into account. I certainly think that older women, because of the sorts of jobs that they may be doing, as you rightly said, are potentially more vulnerable. There are other factors as well. For example, if they're very poor, they're more likely to be having to do those sorts of poorly paid, potentially vulnerable jobs. They may also be widowed and not have the protection of a husband, which could actually perhaps help them if they were accused. And we do have to bear in mind,

however, that many individuals can be reputed as witches for years and years and years, even decades. I've got one case of a woman who was finally prosecuted in 1671 at the age of 56. And as far as I can trace back through the court records, she'd actually been reputed a witch since the age of 11. So I think we need to be careful about the issue of reputation, how a reputation for being a witch is built up before an actual accusation is made. I think the point of accusation is very important. But we also need to trace back the roots of that reputation. Just briefly, are what you started this program talking about, the cunning folk, the magicians, people, are they becoming, are they now called witches for doing exactly what they

were doing before? You would expect that. I think the expectation is that these white witches, these helpful witches, would be demonised in the context of these anxieties and these worries about the devil. But actually, what's surprising is that it doesn't happen as much as one would expect. For example, research that's been done on the Duchy of Lorraine, which had a very high number of witch trials, has suggested that only about 10% of those prosecuted were, in fact, cunning folks. So I think what we're actually seeing are early modern peasants who are very wily. They keep the white and the black witch conceptually distinct, because it's in their interest. The white witch is still their main way of fighting disease and of fighting

bewitchment and of fighting misfortune. So it doesn't really do them much good to hoik them to court and get them executed because then they're left without that very useful service. Malcolm Gaskell, did English and Scottish which trials differ from those in, say, Germany? Yes, they do. I mean, there are two different types of legal system, essentially, and this is something that, from Alison's saying there, thinking about who actually gets prosecuted, we really have to think about what the mechanics of prosecution are, how people actually convert a suspicion into a prosecution and to a conviction and execution. The Roman law tradition is much more prevalent in Central and Western Europe.

England has developed differently, and England has what's called an accusatory system, which basically means trial by jury. It means putting the responsibility for prosecution on the individual accuser. Now, in Europe, that's similar to the extent that probably most cases do come to the attention of the authorities from below, but once it gets into that official inquisition, then the process is much more professionalised a lot of the time, and that torture is used which is actually forbidden under English

common law. So this idea where you torture women and then they name others and you get a craze exploding really can't happen in England because of all the checks and balances from within the centralisation of the state that stopped that happening, except for one two-year period during the Civil War, where once those breaks

are taken off, England has its own witch craze. Yes. Lindelopa, what attributes and ability as a witch assumed to have? How did you suspect a witch was a witch? There's an accusation and there's a lot of spike going on and paying off debts and so on and so. But when they tried to nail the witch as being a witch,

what was it to do with? I think it's someone with whom you have a connection, and that's what's so awful about so many of these cases. What's clear is that there's an established relationship with that person and that she's often, or he, is often in the way. role of helping or being involved, for instance, in caring for a child, like that case I mentioned earlier from Nurtlingen. And it's often the woman who perhaps looks after the new mother, who cooks the soups for her during that period of lying in, and who helps care for the baby,

who, when the baby sickens and dies, is the one that you suspect. What about things like to bring back, which started, which was very present, again, The business of sexuality and the attributes such as the cat. Now, the cat was some sort of represented two or three things, didn't it? The cat, I think, is connected with sexuality. In what ways? Well, cats are very ambiguous, ambivalent creatures. And the witch is also connected with the goat,

and the goat is strongly connected with sexuality, and witches ride on goats to the Sabbath. I have one witch where the goat very obligingly bleats outside her door. when it's time to head off to the Sabbath. And what about the Meow Woman? What was that to do with? There's one case I've come across where it's a woman who's known as the Meow Woman.

She's an old woman, and she's also accused of having sexual relations with a lot of younger men, and she's seen naked at a window with her hair flying loose, and she's someone who people connect with inappropriate sexuality, sexuality in an old woman, and that's seen as deeply frightening. But again connected to the cat.

Yes, she has a cat. I was just going to say, though, I think the association that we have nowadays between a witch and a cat, I think that probably stems mainly from the English context, whether the idea of the pact with the devil becomes better to develop in the 17th century, but before then, there's a far stronger idea of a supposed witch making a contract, making a pact with a familiar, which was some sort of demonic imp in the shape of a small animal, which could be a cat or a ferret or a frog. So I think that's a situation.

I think the cat has sort of come down to us through the folklore of witchcraft, but in fact that if one looks at the particularly English witchcraft trials of the 17th century, then the diabolical familiar was a whole range of creatures. Were they looking for any physical markings on, let's take a little... Yes, live at your... Yes, they absolutely are looking for physical markings. In the case of the English ones, it's the teats where the diabolic familiar sucks. In the German cases, what they do as part of the interrogation is that the witch is shaved completely,

and they inspect her body. They shave the body of the witch in case the devil could secrete some kind of powerful charm in hair. But it's also a terrible sexual humiliation. and when that's done before interrogation actually happens, you often find women will confess without even any torture because of the degradation that's involved, partly because the executioner who does this and who is in charge of torture is a dishonourable person,

and if you're touched by him, you yourself become dishonourable, and that means that you're excluded from relationships with other people. At the same time as this terrible thing is going on, We have the person of the Magus, like John D is the most famous, the Court of Elizabeth I. But Newton later is carrying on practices, in the sort of ridiculously brief, which are not unlike those for which other people are being persecuted, tortured.

Now, are they exempt because they're rich, well protected, and so on, are they too rich to be confined, as it were? Malcolm? Well, yes, to an extent, yes. But that certainly in England, most prosecutions do take place for Malifiki, and that's to say, causing harm through Witchcroft. So, again, you really need somebody who's going to go to the authorities and prosecute.

So that there certainly could be suspicions. I mean, for example, John D., his house in Mork Lake is sacked by a mob who suspects that he is a witch. His libraries, but his books are scassed in the street and so on, yeah. But there's always a kind of a calculus of social relationships that Witchcroft fits into. There's never this case where somebody's suspicious. expected as a witch and then there's a howling mob go after them.

As Alison said, the reputation could build up over a great deal of time. And it's always an accumulation of factors that come together to cause a prosecution. So Newton alone, practicing numerology or alchemy or conjuring spirits, wouldn't be enough to have him prosecuted as a witch. But we are talking about an atmosphere in village after village, in town, city and town, where the fear around if who's a witch will they get me for being a witch, am I going to call him or her a witch and so on. This is the atmosphere of the time.

It certainly is, but it's not hysteria, except perhaps at very fixed points at certain, in certain places, at certain times when certain factors absolutely come together. I was just going to come in on that, and I think one of the real ironies and tragedies of the whole affair is that actually large-scale persecution, where you actually get caught up in this atmosphere of anxiety, and you perhaps see lots and lots of people being executed.

I think that actually helps increase anxiety, about witches. So the authorities probably think they're eradicating witchcraft, they're solving the problem, but actually by promoting large-scale persecution, they're actually perhaps, if you like, stoking the fires of anxiety. And certainly, I think we do have to be very wary of assuming that this happens everywhere. There are quite large parts of Europe where this level of anxiety, for reasons that we're perhaps not necessarily clear on yet, it is kept relatively low and that we need to sort of bear that in mind. The whole of early modern Europe isn't caught up in a massive panic for for hundreds of years. It's a patchy phenomenon.

But other things feed into it, don't they? Because we've talked about the Reformation feeding into what was already happening pre-Reformation, the Reformation and the Reformation and Counter-Reference. And then another more local example is when there's another sort of disruption, a political disruption in our society here in this country, the Civil War.

That erupts, and you have massive, well, in one region particularly, the witch, he became known as the Witchfinder General, wasn't he, Matthew Hopkins, in East? That's right. So he's still very potent.

It can still come out. Can you tell us a bit about him and why he? Well, Matthew Hopkins is an opportunist. He's not any way, he's no official authority. He just takes advantage of the fact that there are certain polarised political and religious conditions in East Anglian communities and the fact that the professionals in the English legal system, the judges, who typically ride out on circuit and really make sure that the law is followed through in proper procedure in trials are really taken out of the equation because of the dangers of the civil war.

So there's a lot more local justice as you see in, for example, in some of these German Catholic states or in Scotland where very much on the local level it means that witchcraft can get out of hand. And that's really what happens with, that's the story of the witch finder general. It's an aberration. It's not, there is not normal political and administrative circumstances. So we talked about the middle of the 17th century and about here the move. against it. Was it, were you fearful to talk against witchcraft before then?

I think it depended where you were. I certainly think that in Germany, perhaps in the 16th century, you could be at risk of being accused of witchcraft. There's a physician who published a sceptical tract in 1563, Johannes Weyer, and he was certainly, you know, the suspicion was voiced that he was in league with the witches, otherwise why would he have written that? So, I think certainly in certain parts of Germany, You know, you could be at risk of perhaps being associated with the devil and with witches if you wrote against them. We can talk about the Enlightenment and so and so forth, but what, in your view, when did it begin to turn against it? When did this persecution of witches really begin to fall away and people no longer followed it?

Well, it falls away in a very interesting manner. The great age of the witch craze is really over by about the 1640s. but then witch hunting doesn't die out completely and one of the things that I found most surprising and most disturbing was the witch cases I looked at from the middle of the 18th century which is ages after I expected

These were in South Germany and in one village that I looked at in particular in Alice Hausson This is a tiny village which hunts witches in the 1580s Then again in the 1620s and then in 1747 and even 1756. But that is exceptional, isn't it?

It is exceptional, but what it's made me rethink is the way I think about the Enlightenment. And whereas I'd seen the Enlightenment as being about stopping believing in witch-hunting and having a completely different attitude towards the world, at the same time in this village, there's an early Enlightenment poet who is transcribing the local dialect

and he's very interested in language. And I think what it's made me see is that at the heart of the Enlightenment is also an interest in human evil. I was just going to... Very briefly, I think what happens is that... That's interesting, that's interesting. Sorry.

I was just going to say the very, very large panics where we get lots and lots of executions and very severe torture and basically the legal rule book thrown out of the window. What people tend to do is lose confidence. confidence in these legal procedures. So I think what we see in the later 17th century in Germany is that people still believe in witches,

but they no longer have the confidence in their legal procedures to actually identify them very effectively. So that's why the trials stopped long before the belief dies away. Thank you very much, Alison Rowland's, Lyndall Roper and Malcolm Gaskell. Next week we'll be talking about rhetoric, which used to be the cornerstone of the British education system, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about History, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.