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Contended Bodies Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Germanlands

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Contended Bodies Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Germanlands Contended Bodies Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Germanlands AUTHOR: Leyla Pavão Chisamore EDITED BY: Kendall Fisher, Julian Matheson, and Marisa Coulton These tracts [on magic] did agree one by broader religious, cultural, and social unrest point, namely, that the greatest danger as throughout the European context. This paper will well as the single most powerful sign of follow historian Ronald Hutton’s global defnition humankind’s special status was its free of witchcraft, wherein a witch possesses fve key will. Only free will drove men and women characteristics: the ability to cause harm by uncanny to seek knowledge, be it of good or of evil. means, to act as internal threat to a community, to Paracelsus concurred; he agreed that free function within a tradition, to be evil, and the ability will was at once humankind’s greatest gift to resist counter-attacks.2 A contemporary feminist and its most precious divine burden. framework will be used to examine witchcraft in the Reformation Germanlands, this framework will -Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defning Dominion, 1995 address the existing gaps in the historiography. Emphasis will be reassigned not only to female and In this examination of discourses on magic male witches (and so offer agency to the historical and witchcraft, German Literature Professor subjects), but also to emphasize inherited medieval Gerhild Scholz Williams emphasizes the complex understandings of the sexuality and the gendered relationship between the seemingly disparate body. experiences of institutionalized religious belief and illicit, privately conducted magical practices. Medieval notions of magic were central The occult popular throughout the medieval to the lay religious experience which placed period as lay religious life incorporated a range substantial emphasis on materiality in faith of diverse religious practices, including Christian (e.g., sacramental items, saintly relics). These sacramental systems, rural mystical traditions, theoretical underpinnings preceded the loss of and undercurrents of folk practices ranging material practices instigated by the emergence from charms to exorcisms.1 Here, the religious of theological shifts within Reformer movements transition and subsequent political turbulence of and so impacted wider knowledge of magic and the Reformation produced a Protestant denial of witchcraft. Both ecclesiastical authorities and the these manifestations of spiritual experience while wider public understood licit magic, or Scientia also expanding interfaith anxieties surrounding magica, could “heal the rift between themselves witchcraft practices and heresy. and their Creator, between body and soul [which] always represented the institutionalized, scientifc This essay will examine the development transgression of boundaries.”3 In this, magic as of early modern defnitions of witchcraft and its an idea was inextricable from power relations, production into a gendered and illicit programme differentiated between the phrases magic and by shifts in the theological and political landscape mysticism themselves: individuals who exercised continental Europe. Emphasis will be placed on the control over the supernatural and individuals who early modern Germanlands, and will be informed surrender control to the supernatural, respectively.4 60 In this distinction, humanity’s free will and the both individual susceptibility and free will, then popular Augustinian position toward an inherent cultural regulations deemed that authorities inclination to sin produced a potentially corruptive mitigated the potential social dangers formed by nature to all emphatically magical practices. social deviance. This stringent regulation, which underscored the possibilities of extreme immoral Scientia magica became malefcum, or bad behaviour included binary gender defnitions. magic. Socio-religious and gendered frameworks Church authorities defned negative behaviour of the period also imbued a ‘universal knowledge’ to assert the positive values and corresponding that extended to the peasant classes within which benefts of homogeneity.9 Both internalized and certain categories of individuals were inherently communally policed at a local level, this gendered more susceptible to sin and its consequences. This behavioral code contributed to accusations which defnition predominantly encompassed women, increasingly led to interventions and trials with the Jewish minorities, and many physicians of the burgeoning witchcraft panics.10 The convenience period.5 Concepts of religious deviance and moral of witchcraft in this context was also reliant on its corruption acted simultaneously, and thereby ability to unify non-conformist behaviours into a produced magical potential for realized social harm singular package of punishable deviance through beyond the existing moral dangers associated which control was widely asserted.11 Moralistic with female sexuality and Judaism. In each of violence was a key tool to reassert spiritual authority these cases, existing prejudices established a and political control. lack of tolerance which were, in turn, rampantly reproduced as accusations with the emergence The development of the printing press in of the initial mass witchcraft panic in late sixteenth both literary and art practices was signifcant to the century Trier in the Germanlands.6 spread of religious dissent for reformer movements, but also in the establishment of witchcraft knowledge While local collective memory and rumour and tropes.12 Historian Lyndal Roper addresses circulation almost exclusively produced accusations early images of witchcraft produced during the late- of witchcraft, these allegations necessitated the ffteenth century which condemned witchcraft with production of mala fama (bad reputation) essential more intensity than produced heretofore.13 Earlier for witchcraft to take hold, the widespread parallel works were sensual, produced for entertainment, between early modern accusations of witchcraft and or rooted in pagan, classical imagery.14 She perceived Jewish violence merit acknowledgement.7 questions the change that occurred during the Such medieval theories extended well into period to allow for such a contrast in imagery within persecution throughout the early modern period, a matter of decades. In answer, the late-ffteenth and propagated the dangers of (primarily female) century publication, Malleus Malefcarum, written witches and Jewish peoples alike who committed by inquisitors Henry Institoris (known also as infanticide, performed blood-letting, and practiced Heinrich Kramer) and Jacob Sprenger, was central host desecration.8 Through these descriptors, to the design of this early modern witch as used moral degradation became associated with social in their investigations of heresy in the Rhinelands deviance in multiple capacities. For example, and Upper Germanlands.15 Translated as Hammer the extreme dangers included a programme of of the Witches, this guide defned the stereotypical gendered and ethnocultural prejudice by which imagery of haggard women on broomsticks and locals and ecclesiastical authorities bore a nude dancing women at the Witches’ Sabbath, later watchful eye for transgressions committed by non- reproduced extensively following its printing and conforming women, Jewish peoples most explicitly. widespread distribution. Both accessible literature and prints incorporated the developing witchcraft If the deviance that begot sin necessitated tropes. Bodin aimed his exclusive vernacular work, 61 Démonomanie des sorciers (On the Demon-Mania secular crime, which, in turn, bolstered Catholic of Witches) for example, at a wide audience and authority in both moral and temporal capacities. loosely structured around the then century-old Malleus, attesting to its widespread popularity.16 Just as inquisitors reframed witchcraft in Frequently, these tropes borrowed from paganism the local psyche, Malleus constructed witchcraft and mimicked images of personifed Envy – the as a formal ceremony with the devil (through his vice central to female witches in the Malleus.17 This demons) on earth and conceptually amalgamated production of imagery inserted itself into largely medieval folk belief with a theological worldview.23 illiterate lay communities and altered perceptions This delineation between magic and mysticism was of witches to clearly denoted visible markers. In then formally erased in the European context, which doing so, Germany and the Rhinelands saw a favoured instead a singularly structured anti-Church shift in public perception which infuenced local through which already susceptible individuals suspicions, rumours and, in turn, accusations. converted to witchcraft. Ronald Hutton notes the Following its distribution and proceeding artistic anomalous nature of the European context as it renditions, individuals formally charged with is the sole continent to frame witchcraft through malefcia increased notably over period.18 this exclusive binary as the Malleus develops: “a heretical anti-religion, dedicated to the worship Additionally, Malleus Malefcarum not only of an embodied principle of evil in the cosmos.”24 extensively defned witchcraft through formal Constructed in this work as this formal ceremony legislation including a witch’s qualities, rituals, antithetical to the Mass, the Witches’ Sabbath and methods of propagation, but further denoted included a mirrored desecration of the sacramental structured local opportunities for personal resistance communion: and
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