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From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages Michael D Iowa State University From the SelectedWorks of Michael D. Bailey October, 2001 From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages Michael D. Bailey, University of Cincinnati - Main Campus Available at: https://works.bepress.com/michael_bailey/6/ Medieval Academy of America From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages Author(s): Michael D. Bailey Source: Speculum, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 960-990 Published by: Medieval Academy of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903617 . Accessed: 19/05/2014 12:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Medieval Academy of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Speculum. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.186.1.55 on Mon, 19 May 2014 12:30:38 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages By Michael D. Bailey By the time the fires of the great European witch-hunts burned out in the seven- teenth century, untold thousands had been sent to their deaths upon conviction of this terrible crime. Exact figures are understandably difficult to come by, but the best available estimates set the number of the dead near sixty thousand, and this just for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch craze reached its peak in western Europe.' The first sparks of this conflagration appeared much earlier, although not as early as might perhaps be expected. The fully developed concept of witchcraft that held force throughout the years of the great European witch-hunts appeared only in the early fifteenth century, emerging from trials for heresy and sorcery conducted mainly in the high valleys of the western Alps and codified in a number of learned treatises beginning in the 1430s.2 This new concept was rooted, to be sure, in far older ideas of maleficent magic common in western European culture, and indeed, it would seem, in most premodern human cultures since their earliest development.3 In Christian culture, moreover, such sorcery had I would like to thank Richard Kieckhefer, Jennifer Kolpacoff, and Robert E. Lerner for their com- ments and suggestions at various stages of my work on this article. I am also grateful to the Taft Fund of the University of Cincinnati, which provided financial assistance during the course of some of my work. 1 See Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (London, 1995), p. 21; also Wolfgang Behringer, ed., Hexen und Hexenprozesse, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1995), p. 194. 2 On the development of the witch stereotype at this time and in these lands, see Andreas Blauert, Friihe Hexenverfolgungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts, Sozialge- schichtliche Bibliothek bei Junius 5 (Hamburg, 1989); Arno Borst, "The Origins of the Witch-Craze in the Alps," in idem, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics, and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago, 1992), pp. 101-22; Bernard Andenmatten and Kathrin Utz Tremp, "De l'h6ersie a la sorcellerie: L'inquisiteur Ulric de Torrente OP (vers 1420-1445) et l'affirmissement de l'inquisition en Suisse romande," Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique suisse 86 (1992), 69-119; Pierrette Paravy, De la Chretiente romaine a la Reforme en Dauphine: Eveques, fideles et deviants (vers 1340- vers 1530), 2 vols., Collection de l'Ecole francaise de Rome 183 (Rome, 1993), 2:771-905; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Kathrin Utz Tremp, and Martine Ostorero, "Le sabbat dans les Alps: Les premices medievales de la chasse aux sorcieres," in Sciences: Raison et deraisons (Lausanne, 1994), pp. 67-89; and Martine Ostorero, Foldtrer avec les demons: Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers a Vevey (1448), Cahiers Lausannois d'Histoire M6dievale 15 (Lausanne, 1995). On the early sources describing witchcraft, best now is Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp, eds., L'imaginaire du sabbat: Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.-1440 c.), Cahiers Lausannois d'Histoire Medievale 26 (Lausanne, 1999). 3 E.g., Tzvi Abusch, "The Demonic Image of the Witch in Standard Babylonian Literature: The Reworking of Popular Conceptions by Learned Exorcists," in Religion, Science, and Magic in Concert and in Conflict, ed. Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Frerichs, and Paul Virgil McCracken Flesher (New York, 1989), pp. 27-58. Abusch notes a process of demonization of popular images of witches by learned authorities that bears striking resemblance to later occurrences in western Europe (p. 39). 960 Speculum 76 (2001) This content downloaded from 129.186.1.55 on Mon, 19 May 2014 12:30:38 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions From Sorcery to Witchcraft 961 always been linked, at least in the minds of clerical authorities, to demonic agency, and thus resolutely condemned.4 Despite such long-standing and deeply rooted concerns, however, only toward the end of the Middle Ages did the critical trans- formation of simple sorcery into the far darker crime of witchcraft begin to occur. Over the course of roughly one hundred years, from the early fourteenth century to the early fifteenth, heightened clerical concern over harmful sorcery and chang- ing understandings of how magic operated combined with other factors to push authorities slowly but inexorably into accepting, defining, and promulgating the full horrors of witchcraft. That the idea of witchcraft emerged in the later Middle Ages out of earlier medieval conceptions of magic and concerns over magical practices is well known and widely accepted.5 What I shall undertake here is to trace more thoroughly the changing understandings of magic and magical operations that underlay the even- tual concept of witchcraft, as evinced in a series of documents, decrees, and trea- tises written by clerical authorities. In taking this more intellectual approach to understanding the rise of witchcraft, rather than a social or institutional one, I am informed by Stuart Clark's recent magisterial study of ideas of witchcraft and demonology in the early modern period.6 Whereas Clark seeks to link the fully developed concept of witchcraft to other aspects of contemporary European thought, and deliberately avoids any discussion of the rise or decline of the witch phenomenon, I intend to examine the process whereby that concept first emerged out of earlier concerns over sorcery and explore how the dynamics of that process helped shape the nature of the subsequent idea of witchcraft. To discuss medieval sorcery and witchcraft as two separate things, the one emerging out of, yet distinct from, the other, is to some extent to play a game of words, or rather, a game of a single word: the Latin maleficium. In its origin this word literally meant only an evil or harmful deed, by implication one performed through magic. Practitioners of harmful sorcery have presented a problem, both socially and legally, to all societies that have ever believed in the real efficacy of magical acts. Thus arose the biblical injunction of Exod. 22.18, famously rendered in the King James Version as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Thus also 4 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 38-40. 5 The process was largely described in Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York, 1975), slightly revised and reprinted as Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (London, 1993; all subsequent citations are to this revised edition); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (Berkeley, Calif., 1976); and Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia, 1978). In stressing the connection between witchcraft and earlier traditions of magic, all three were to some extent reacting against Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), which argued that witchcraft was essentially an outgrowth of medieval heresy. An alternative view stressing the links between witchcraft and elements of popular folklore and archaic shamanistic practices among the European peasantry is most closely associated with Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1991). I have addressed Ginzburg's approach, and my reaction to it, more fully in an earlier article, "The Medieval Concept of the Witches' Sabbath," Exemplaria 8 (1996), 419-39, esp. pp. 424-26. 6 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997). This content downloaded from 129.186.1.55 on Mon, 19 May 2014 12:30:38 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 962 From Sorcery to Witchcraft might such classical figures as the beautiful but dangerous Circe and Medea, or the hag Erictho, be described as "witches."7 Yet during the years of the great European witch-hunts, the term malefica carried a far more specific and far more sinister meaning than just a person accused of working harmful sorcery against others. Witches were certainly believed to perform magic with the aid of demons, indeed via the supplication and worship of demons. But worse even than that, they were accused of complete apostasy, of rejecting their faith and surrendering their souls to Satan himself in exchange for their dark powers.
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