Blood Beliefs in Early Modern Europe
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Hertfordshire Research Archive Blood beliefs in early modern Europe Francesca Matteoni Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire for the degree of PhD. January, 2009 1 Contents Abstract 4 1. Blood themes: Introduction 5 1.1 Blood, feelings and the soul: perspectives 5 1.2 Late medieval and early modern Europe: blood and the sealed body 11 1.3 History and Anthropology: methodologies 15 1.4 Blood, power and violence. Anthropological views 19 1.5 Chapters’ outline 24 2. Drawing blood: The Devil’s pact and witchcraft 27 2.1 Witchcraft and blood 27 2.2 Intruders: from Jews to witches 28 2.3 The devil’s brood and the cannibalistic feast 33 2.4 The pact 43 2.5 Harmful magic: vampirism, lameness and pins 54 2.6 Domestic spaces 59 2.7 The decaying body 66 3. Supernatural beings: Fairies, vampires, werewolves 71 3.1 Blood and supernatural beings 71 3.2 Fairies and witches 72 3.3 Elf-shot and milk-stealing 75 3.4 Fairyland and the dead 84 3.5 The vampire 90 3.6 Human counter-measures 98 3.7 Shapeshifting and the werewolf 101 4. The integral body: Theories of blood 108 2 4.1 The liquid body and the spirited blood 108 4.2 Consumptive diseases 116 4.3 Bleeding and putrefaction 120 4.4 Breaking physical boundaries: blood and imagination 124 4.5 Passions of the mind. Frenzy, madness and melancholy 130 4.6 The intruder: epilepsy, envy and fascination 134 4.7 Menstruation 138 4.8 The diffusion of medical theories and folk-remedies 147 5. Feeding your own demon: The case of England 150 5.1 Blood connections: the devil’s mark, fairy tradition and the familiar spirit 150 5.2 The nurturing witch 160 5.3 The animal form and the representation of the soul 168 5.4 Scratching 176 5.5 Witch-bottles and counter-magic 182 5.6 The power to harm and Protestant influences 184 6. Witches, love magic and healing blood: The case of Italy 187 6.1 The magical universe, Inquisition and the body 187 6.2 Vampire witches 193 6.3 The power of touch and maleficium 196 6.4 Evil eye and the importance of feelings 199 6.5 Menstrual blood, love magic 201 6.6 Saints, healing blood and relics 208 6.7 Blood, magic and the sacred in the Catholic world 217 Conclusion 219 Bibliography 227 3 Abstract This thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe. Starting from the view of blood as a liminal matter, manifesting fertile, positive aspects in conjunction with dangerous, negative ones, I show how it was believed to attract supernatural forces within the natural world. It could empower or pollute, restore health or waste corporeal and spiritual existence. While this theme has been studied in a medieval religious context and by anthropologists, its relevance during the early modern period has not been explored. I argue that, considering the impact of the Reformation on people’s mentalities, studying the way in which ideas regarding blood and the body changed from late medieval times to the eighteenth century can provide new insights about patterns of social and religious tensions, such as the witch-trials and persecutions. In this regard the thesis engages with anthropological theories, comparing the dialectic between blood and body with that between identity and society, demonstrating that they both spread from the conflict of life with death, leading to the social embodiment or to the rejection of an individual. A comparative approach is also employed to analyze blood symbolism in Protestant and Catholic countries, and to discuss how beliefs were influenced by both cultural similarities and religious differences. Combining historical sources, such as witches’ confessions, with appropriate examples from anthropology I also examine a corpus of popular ideas, which resisted to theological and learned notions or slowly merged with them. Blood had different meanings for different sections of society, embodying both the physical struggle for life and the spiritual value of the Christian soul. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the dualism of the fluid in late medieval and early modern ritual murder accusations against Jews, European witchcraft and supernatural beliefs and in the medical and philosophical knowledge, while chapters 5 and 6 focus on blood themes in Protestant England and in Counter-Reformation Italy. Through the examination of blood in these contexts I hope to demonstrate that contrasting feelings, fears and beliefs related to dangerous or extraordinary individuals, such as Jews, witches, and Catholic saints, but also superhuman beings such as fairies, vampires and werewolves, were rooted in the perception of the body as an unstable substance, that was at the base of ethnic, religious and gender stereotypes. 4 1. Blood themes: Introduction 1.1 Blood, feelings and the soul. Perspectives The subject of this thesis concerns the exploration of ideas on blood in early modern Europe, considering the importance of religious and medical theories in witchcraft beliefs and how they were assimilated by the population. From this study I hope to demonstrate that blood, and the bodily symbolism attached to it, is not only a reflection of social and individual beliefs, but can be used as means to read and interpret them. Blood will be considered as a cultural theme which encloses values and concepts of the world at different periods, and that can also be employed to understand how human identity is built inside a society. In the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his Thick Description: toward an Interpretive Theory of Cultures : Culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. 1 In this work blood themes will be employed to explore the early modern European world as a multifaceted reality, a corpus of interwoven theories and notions, ranging from the belief in witches to the medical knowledge of the body, and the two diverging religious contexts of Protestantism and Catholicism, which will be compared to find significant variations or parallels. It is also clear that different views of blood not only correspond to different faiths, but to the presence of plural blood traditions, medical and religious, and to the perception of them by different groups of people within the same society. Thus we are confronted with the problem of identification. We need to be aware of the background and nature of the people we are discussing. ‘Popular culture’ seems in fact more than a homogeneous complex of beliefs a quite vague concept, concerning different branches of the same society. According to the cultural historian Peter Burke, the usual definition of “people” in 1 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p.89 5 western culture emerges from opposed categories: the people are the poor for the rich, the laity for the clergy, the commoners for the nobility, and, we can add, the illiterate for the literate. These categories are not definitely detached and independent one from the other. Elites shared the same patterns of belief of ordinary people, while learned notions diffused, although changed, into the world of popular knowledge. The continuous interaction between learned and popular culture makes the distinction problematic. 2 To explain this I will focus a moment on the possible receptions of the witch-figure in early modern society, a fundamental point of this thesis. Witchcraft historiography reflects the problem of the reception of the witch-figure by different sections of society, and historians have widely considered the socio-economical problems and changes in early modern society, the religious tensions and the impact of Reformation, and the construct of the witch-figure and its relation with gender. In this thesis I develop new perspectives regarding these factors, starting from the physical perception of the witch and concentrating on the object she or he exchanged with the devil. Although blood figures in many secondary works on the subject and in the primary sources as one of the most important things claimed by the devil, there is no exhaustive work which explicitly analyzes its role. Thus, exploring blood beliefs related to magic and witchcraft I will consider the body of the accused and of the victim in order to understand the feelings and fears of both elites and common people, and the relation between the physical and the spiritual world that was at the basis of the alleged crime. Though generally recognised as an enemy with supernatural skills, the witch did not represent the same danger and menace to all the populace, and his or her physical person was not the vehicle of the same power for all the people involved in accusations. Witchcraft was a religious crime for theologians and judges, but it was perceived as mainly a source of sickness and death for the rest of the community, which feared maleficium , that is the capacity to harm by magic. Regarding the motivations of the accused, witchcraft was seen as a means of obtaining revenge - an illusory ability, often depending on distorted passions and feelings, and even on an involuntary action, resulting from an innate negative power inscribed in certain 2Peter Burke, “Popular Culture between History and Ethnology.”. Ethnologia Europaea , vol. XIV (1984): pp. 5-13; Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pp.