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Witchcraft in the Early Modern West, Comparative Civilizations Review Volume 72 Article 11 Number 72 Spring 2015 4-1-2015 Witchcraft in the aE rly Modern West Larry Gragg [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr Recommended Citation Gragg, Larry (2015) "Witchcraft in the Early Modern West," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 72 : No. 72 , Article 11. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol72/iss72/11 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the All Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Civilizations Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Gragg: Witchcraft in the Early Modern West Comparative Civilizations Review 137 Witchcraft in the Early Modern West Larry Gragg [email protected] In 1617, on the Channel Island of Guernsey just off the northern French coast, a woman named Collette Du Mont confessed to practicing witchcraft. She told a court: That the Devil having come to fetch her that she might go to the Sabbath, called for her without anyone perceiving it: and gave her a certain black ointment with which (after having stripped herself), she rubbed her back, belly and stomach: and then having again put on her clothes, she went out of her door, when she was immediately carried through the air at a great speed: and she found herself in an instant at the place of the Sabbath, which was sometimes near the parochial burial-ground: and at other times near the seashore in the neighbourhood of Rocquaine Castle: where, upon arrival, she met often fifteen or sixteen Wizards and Witches with the Devils who were there in the form of dogs, cats and hares: which Wizards and Witches she was unable to recognize, because they were all blackened and disfigured: it was true, however, that she had heard the Devil summon them by their names.1 Du Mont was only one of at least 100,000 people tried on charges of practicing witchcraft between 1500 and 1700 in Western Europe. Of that number, authorities likely executed over 40,000.2 Historians have offered a variety of reasons for the emergence of the large witch hunts of the period. They have variously “been attributed, in whole or in large part, to the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, the use of judicial torture, the wars of religion, the religious zeal of the clergy, the rise of the modern state, the development of capitalism, the widespread use of narcotics, changes in medical thought, social and cultural conflict, an attempt to wipe out paganism, the need of the ruling class to distract the masses, and the hatred of women.”3 In this complicated pursuit of answers to the question of how such a profoundly horrific death toll could have occurred in early modern Europe it is essential to examine the context in which beliefs about witchcraft developed. To the modern skeptical mind, the case of Collette Du Mont which involved diabolical witchcraft, magical powers, and familiar spirits seems irrational and remarkably superstitious. Yet, people in the early modern West lived in a mental world dominated by the supernatural. They sought meaning for their lives in an intriguing mix of pagan relics, Christianity, “wonder” stories, and witchcraft. Historians over the past few decades who have investigated witchcraft beliefs in Europe and in the European colonies in the Americas have 1 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987), 14. 2 John Demos, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World (New York: Viking, 2008), 38 and Merry E. Wiesner, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 1. 3 Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 2-3. Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015 1 Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 72 [2015], No. 72, Art. 11 138 Number 72, Spring 2015 discovered an almost universal belief “from intellectuals to peasants,” as Joseph Klaits has explained, “in the reality of invisible spirits, both angelic and demonic.”4 An examination of their “invisible world” helps the twenty-first century observer better understand not only the stunning outbreak of witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe, but also it provides another window through which one can view the social relations, values, and attitudes of the people who populated the continent’s villages. To begin, it is important to note the sources that historians have drawn upon to investigate the beliefs of people who largely have left no personal paper trail. There are, for example, few diaries or letters of ordinary folk from the early modern era. Instead, historians have tended to rely upon court records, wills, sermons, the accounts of church wardens, and “what contemporary observers said people thought and did.”5 Increasingly, however, scholars also have examined what people may have read as an indicator of their beliefs. Beyond the proliferation of Bibles (there were about a half million copies of Luther’s German Bible by 1574 and 600,000 Bibles available in England six decades later), inexpensive publications became increasingly popular in the early seventeenth century. Broadsides, pamphlets, almanacs, catechisms, chapbooks, ballads, and penny “godlies” were readily available in urban book stalls, and in the countryside, peddlers became a common presence hawking the latest “little books.” 6 Even those who could not read, and estimates for literate Europeans in the seventeenth century range only from a quarter to half of adults, had a chance to discuss the publications with the literate in churches, coffee houses, taverns, and town squares. For the diligent researcher, as Margaret Spufford has shown, these publications offer “valuable clues” in the quest to “reconstruct the mental world” of early modern Europeans.7 Drawing upon all these types of sources, it is evident that in both Roman Catholic and Protestant areas, most people were at least superficially Christian. However, parishioners 4 Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3. 5 Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6-7. 6 Geoffrey Parker, Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 231; Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 13; Margaret Spufford, “Portraits of Society: Popular Fiction in 17th-Century England,” History Today, 32 (February 1982), 11-12; Margaret Spufford, “The Pedlar, the Historian and the Folklorist: Seventeenth Century Communications,” Folklore, 105 (1994), 14; and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 72-73. 7 Parker, Success is Never Final, 232 and Spufford, “Portraits of Society,” 12. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol72/iss72/11 2 Gragg: Witchcraft in the Early Modern West Comparative Civilizations Review 139 regularly frustrated their spiritual leaders with their shallow understanding of the faith. To be sure, they exhibited a belief in God and in a heaven and a hell, but often little understanding of Christianity beyond that. For example, Martin Luther in the 1520s claimed the “common man” in Saxony villages knew “absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine.” A sixteenth-century English observer wrote that many in the parish “let the Preacher speake never so plaine, although they sit and looke him in the face, yet if ye enquire of them so soone as they be out at the church dores, ye shall easily perceive that (as the common saying is) it went in at the one eare, and out at the other.”8 A minister in Kent, England, in the early seventeenth century wrote that only about one in ten of his parishioners “knew the basics of Protestant doctrine.” As late as the mid-seventeenth century, Geoffrey Parker has written, “Protestant leaders, from almost all countries, execrated in similar terms the ‘incorrigible profanity of the multitude’ who seemed totally, almost congenitally, incapable of learning and remembering Christian doctrine.”9 To be sure, there was much hyperbole in the critiques offered by frustrated clergymen, but through the seventeenth century, such comments were common. Poor attendance at worship exacerbated the situation. There were instances of excellent attendance, most often in urban areas, but in most parishes, packed pews were uncommon. One English clergyman in 1572 noted, for example, “A man may find the churches empty, saving the minister and two or four lame, and old folke.”10 Six decades later, another clergyman complained that parishioners went “ten times to an Alehouse before they goe once to a church.” The worst attendance was among the poorest parishioners who seldom were present except to marry, baptize their children, and bury family members.11 Englishman Arthur Dent spoke for many whether they faithfully attended or rarely attended worship services when he wrote in his The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven of the ease of attaining salvation: “If a man say his Lords prayer, his tenne Commaundements, and his beleefe, and keepe them, and say no body no harme, nor doo no bodie no harme, and doo as he would bee done too, have a good faith to Godward, and be a man of Gods beliefe, no doubt he shall be saved.”12 For the largely rural population, beyond their generally limited understanding of the Christian faith and the challenges of understanding salvation, there was a long oral tradition, often embellished with each generation, about creatures that could affect their lives.
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