1 When Druids and Mystics Ruled Harshly Over the Superstitious Peasants Aquinas College Undergraduate Seminar Witchcraft Papers Fall 2007 Contributing Authors: Stacey Dearing, Will Eberle, Rachel Koval, Doug Seites, Brandon Sexton, Tim Weed and Theresa Woodbridge Edited by Stacey Dearing and Will Eberle 2 This project is the culmination of the work of the Fall 2007 Aquinas College HY 401 Witchcraft Seminar class. The students were expected to research and write an original piece of scholarship on witchcraft, a field of history that has exploded in scholarly interest in recent years. The papers were peer-reviewed, professor reviewed, and finally edited by Stacey Dearing and Will Eberle as part of an independent study project on scholarly editing. The papers represent the capstone work of Aquinas history majors and are meant to be a step toward producing graduate level research. The issues covered range from individual biographies, to the function of the Roman law in witchcraft trials, to the role that gender and church relations played in the trials. The editors would like to thank Dr. Charles D. Gunnoe for his help throughout the editing process and for a great semester. The title of our collection is borrowed from a line in the “documentary” Witches Curse from the Channel 4/ PBS series Secrets of the Dead. The class found the pseudo-scientific claims of this production to be so ridiculously overstated and historically implausible that it provided backhanded inspiration for class discussions and research. 3 Table of Contents Torture in the Witch Trials: The Roman-Canon Law of Proof Stacey Dearing………………………………………………………………………4 Convent Possession Cases: Study in the Paradoxes of the Early Modern Witchcraft Paradigm Will Eberle…………………………………………………………………………27 Fairies of Early Modern England and Scotland: Familiar Spirits or Ghosts? Rachel Koval……………………………………………………………………….48 Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition Doug Seites………………………………………………………………………....65 The Role of Women as Portrayed in the Malleus Maleficarum Brandon Anthony Sexton……………………………………………………………83 James I and Demonology Tim Weed……………………………………………………………………....….105 Courtiser les sorcières en France, mid 1500s-early 1600s Theresa Woodbridge…………………………………..……………………………126 4 Torture in the Witch Trials: The Roman-Canon Law of Proof Stacey Dearing Stacey Dearing is a Junior from Clarkston, Michigan. She will graduate with a major in History and a minor in English. Known for her ability to divine the location of lost items and to provide healing for her neighbors, Anna Roleffes, or Temple Anneke as the citizens of her home town of Harxbüttel referred to her, satisfied many of the stereotypes of a witch in early modern Europe. Anneke was old—in her mid-sixties, widowed, and economically dependent on her family.1 In 1663 she assisted a neighbor, Hans Thiemann, in recovering items that had been stolen from him.2 Shortly thereafter she was arrested, tortured and executed for committing the crime of witchcraft. Such witchcraft trials were rampant in Europe in the early modern period. Few lands were completely free of witch trials, but the vast majority of trials occurred in the German territories belonging to the Holy Roman Empire. It has been posited that nearly half the executions of witches, approximately 45,000, took place in the Holy Roman Empire.3 In addition to the political institutions, the legal institutions of the Holy Roman Empire facilitated and fueled the witch craze. The development of the inquisitorial method of law and the Roman-canon law of proof, with its emphasis on torture, made the wildest periods of the witch trials possible. In order to understand how torture served as a vital part of eliciting confessions and further inciting hunts during the witch craze, it is vital that the development of the Roman-canon law of proof be understood. 1Peter Morton, ed., The Trial of Temple Anneke (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2006), xiii-xiv. 2Ibid., xiii. 3Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.), 21. 5 The Accusatorial Method to the Inquisitorial Method The method of law used before the inquisitorial model provides insights into how and why the new system developed in early modern Europe. This earlier model is known as the accusatorial method. In this system, charges were initiated by a private citizen, meaning a person who was not employed as a part of the legal system.4 It was then the responsibility of the accuser to prepare and enact the prosecution of the defendant. This system was not highly conducive to the effective prosecution of crimes because the average citizen was not a competent lawyer. Furthermore, crimes such as witchcraft, for which there was very little or no tangible evidence or witnesses, were extremely difficult to prosecute. In order to prove the guilt or innocence of the defendant in such a trial, a system known as the ordeals was used. The ordeals were tests that the accused had to pass in order to prove their innocence.5 The premise was that the accused would be put through the ordeal and if they were innocent, God would ensure that the result was in their favor. An example is the commonly referenced trial by water. In this ordeal the defendant is plunged into deep water. If they sink, they are innocent. If not, they are guilty.6 Another common ordeal was that by fire. In this case a part of the body, such as the hand, was burned. If, after a few days, the wound miraculously healed, the accused was declared innocent. The healing was interpreted as a sign of God’s favor and therefore of the 7 innocence of the defendant. 4Levack, 75. 5Ibid. 6Ibid., 76. 7Ibid. 6 This system of ordeals appears, to the modern reader, to be irrational.8 Such tests could hardly have been accurate indications of guilt or innocence. Furthermore, it was not an efficient method of handling criminal prosecutions. Thus, the ordeals were largely abolished in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council.9 With this abandonment of a key portion of the legal process, the development of a new system became vital. One of the main challenges in attempting to devise such a system was that the citizens were unlikely to accept a legal code that took the power of judgment out of the hands of God and put it into the hands of mortals.10 The ordeals may have been highly inaccurate but it was God who was passing judgment, which legitimized them. John Langbein writes, “The problem that confronted the legal systems of the church and of the secular governments…was to make this fundamental change acceptable in the tradition- conscious and religiously devout societies of the day.”11 With the ordeals, even if evidence that exculpated the accused came to light after the execution it would be assumed that God had a reason for allowing that person to die, not that it was mistake. Humans could make mistakes in their judgments, God, by definition, could not. The easiest way to solve this dilemma and create a legal code that was acceptable to the populace was to establish a set of legal proofs that would need to be met by the prosecution in order for a guilty verdict to be rendered in capital cases.12 Such a system of statutory proofs would ensure that mistakes could not be made. In order to have such a 8John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancient Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 6. 9Ibid. 10Ibid., 7. 11Ibid., 6. 12Ibid. 7 mistake-proof legal code, rules had to be put in place that clearly defined what evidence was legitimate and acceptable and how much was then required for conviction. Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, a variety of legal codes were put in place throughout Europe that attempted to establish a system that would be accepted by the populous. Not only were kings and princes devising various legal strategies, but the Popes, too, were trying to stomp out witchcraft.13 To this end, Pope John XXII excommunicated “anyone who made a pact with the Devil” in his Super illius specula of 1326.14 Over the next three centuries this system of legal codes would be solidified into one definitive work. The final product can be found in the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532. This legal code, devised in the Holy Roman Empire under the reign of Emperor Charles V, laid out requirements for sufficient proof.15 This was the institutionalization of the Roman-canon law of proof. The Carolina The Carolina laid out the guidelines and principles to be applied to all criminal trials in the Holy Roman Empire, not just those cases relating to witchcraft. It began by listing the expectations and rules that court personnel were expected to adhere to. After handling several other preliminary issues, such as how to deal with undisputed cases, the issue of how to deal with cases in which there is doubt as to the guilt of the accused is 13The efforts of the kings were varied, with some pursuing witchcraft cases avidly, and others refusing to even prosecute the crime because they did not believe it existed. See Marina Montesano, “Laws on Witchcraft (Medieval),” Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006). 14Ibid. 15John H. Langbein, Prosecuting crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) 272 (See the appendix for the Carolina). 8 discussed. These are cases in which a “legally sufficient indication of crime” needs to be established.16 Such an indication of the crime would not then lead to