Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences General History Division The ‘Other’ Witches The Male Witch of Early Modern Europe A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Arnon Ram Under the Supervision of Dr. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos September 2006 Abstract Between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries about 110,000 people, mainly in Europe, were accused of causing harm to property, livestock, and people through supernatural means such as sorcery and witchcraft, and for turning away from their faith in Jesus Christ and paying worship to the devil. In the vast scholarly work that has been done during the past century about the witch hunts a large majority of the works have overlooked, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, a part of the population that has been accused and executed for the crime of witchcraft as well: men. These papers usually focused on the large amount of female witches that were accused and killed, asking why, who they were, and if misogyny has had anything to do with these events. Twenty-five to thirty percent of the people accuse of witchcraft were male. This paper will investigate who where these people? What were they accused of, and was it different from the accusation leveled against the female witches? Did the intellectuals and demonologists of the era acknowledge the existence of the male witches? And how did the courts deal with these men? The research will show that the intellectuals did indeed know of the male witches, giving plenty of examples of them in their texts, though never for a moment forgetting to remind us that while there were male witches, they were only a minority. To these people, women were the majority in this sin due to the fact that they were “weaker” in mind, body, and spirit; but they never claimed that men were innocent of this crime. Both men and women were accused of rather similar crimes in the context of witchcraft. Both men and women were lengthily interrogated and sometimes tortured in order to confess themselves as witches and reveal their accomplices. Both men and women were either declared witches and executed or released. The black-letter of the law did not differentiate between the sexes, and the men who ran the courts of law saw with equal severity any case that dealt with witchcraft and/or diabolical witchcraft. Table of Contents 1. Introductions iv 1.1. Terminology vi 2. Formation of a Concept 1 2.1. From the Priest to the Inquisitor 2 2.2. The Ingredient of a Witch 11 2.3. A Common Picture 14 2.4. The Typical and Atypical Witch 16 3. The Male witch and the Intellectuals of their Age 18 3.1. Formicarius by Johannes Nider 19 3.2. Summis desiderentes affectibus by Pope Innocent VIII 20 3.3. Malleus Maleficarum by Kramer and Sprenger 21 3.4. On the Demon-Mania of Witches by Jean Bodin 24 3.5. The Discoveries of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot 25 3.6. Demonology by King James VI of Scotland 27 3.7. Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo 29 3.8. Conclusions 31 4. Cases of Male witches 34 4.1. The Witches from Normandy 34 4.2. The Examination of John Walsh 35 4.3. The Witches from Trier 38 4.4. News from Scotland 41 4.5. The Witches of Northamptonshire 42 4.6. Johannes Junius, Burgomaster of Bamberg 44 4.7. The Witch-Trial at Lukh 46 4.8. A True Relation of the Arraignment of Eighteen Witches 48 4.9. Witches of Finland 49 4.10. Cases from Iceland 49 5. The Male witch 51 5.1. Male witches over Europe 51 5.1.1. Germany 52 5.1.2. France 54 5.1.3. England 55 5.1.4. Russia 56 5.1.5. Finland 56 5.1.6. Iceland 57 5.2. Demonic Lover and Sodomy 58 5.3. Accusations 59 5.4. The Male witch in Court 60 6. Conclusions 62 7. Appendixes 64 7.1. Appendix A 64 7.2. Appendix B 65 8. Bibliography 66 Figures 1. “Witch giving ritual kiss to devil.” Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum (Milan, 1608), taken from Montague Summers edition (London 1929; New York, 1988), p. 35 2. “Witches offering newborn to devil,” Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum (Milan, 1608), taken from Montague Summers edition (London 1929; New York, 1988), p. 16 (bottom) Introduction From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, witches occupied the thoughts and courts of Europe. Treatises were written during those centuries about the reason for witches, how they were tempted, why they committed maleficium, how to identify them, how they acted, what they did, and also of course, why most of them were women. The question of gender was never really a relevant one, as the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft during the early modern period in Europe and New England, were indeed women. Many early studies,1 and some recent ones,2 treated the era of the witch hunt as a time of a great misogynistic crusade: the witches were women who were hunted down and murdered for not accepting their role in society, for knowing too much, for practicing “medicine” in one way or another, for being poor and alone, and generally for being female. Later studies suggested that women were not accused of witchcraft for the sole reason of being women or for falling into a certain category, but also for a myriad of reasons such as intra-village politics and personal relations3; and also that not all witches were women. 1 A couple of the most noted of these early feminist studies are: Dworkin, A. Woman-Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974). B. Ehrenreich, and D. English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1973; London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1973). 2 Most notable of these is Anne L. Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. (Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1994). This book has been highly criticized for being biased towards women, and for the author ignoring whatever evidence that does not suit her theory (i.e. ignoring the Icelandic witch-hunt where 92% were male witches). 3 R. Briggs, Witches & Neighbors (New York, 1996); Sharpe, J. A. ‘Witchcraft and women in seventeenth- century England: some Northern evidence, in Continuity and Change 6 [2] (1991) p. 189 give us some examples of this. It is generally accepted today that around 110,000 people were tried for the crime of witchcraft during those centuries and about twenty-five percent were men.4 While certainly a minority, these men were not a separate phenomenon or a clerical mistake. They flew under the radar, drowning in the vastness of data and evidence which placed the women at the center of this phenomenon, taking a dubious and unhealthy center stage, pushing the men, unintentionally, to the side. The witches of Europe were a diverse group of people from all walks of life. Countless studies tried to understand who was persecuted, who was prosecuted, and why. Most of these studies discard the male witch after calculating the male-female ratio, and then go on to investigate how many of the witches were single, married, divorced, or widowed; how many had children, what their jobs were, what their social status in the community was, etc. These investigations are usually approached from the female witch perspective. No general study of witchcraft and its victims, even those who admitted to being witches, can be complete without giving the same treatment to the male witches. This kind of a study is beyond the scope of this paper. In this research I intend to take a closer look at the male witches of Europe. Who were they and how were they depicted in comparison to the female witch? How were they seen, if at all, by the demonologists and intellectuals of the era? And how did the courts deal with them in terms of charges, treatment, and penalties? I will tackle these questions first by delving into the rise of the witchcraft belief and how some of these beliefs evolved from the early and middle Middle Ages to the early modern period; what the main accusations leveled against those accused of 4 P. B. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 19- 22. witchcraft, what Levack calls the “Cumulative Concept of Witchcraft”5; and what the most common characteristics were of people who were accused of witchcraft. Secondly, there will be a short analysis of the scholarship on the witchcraft problem, written by intellectuals between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how they deal with the appearance, if at all, of male witches. But while viewing the male witches from the perspective of the intellectuals is important in learning who was perceived as a witch and what was expected from them, it does not tell us who they were. In most cases, these accused witches did not leave any written record in which they state their feeling and thoughts. For that, we are left with court records6 and pamphlets. The court records will also help us to piece together a general picture of the typical male witch, if he existed. The last chapter will begin with a description of the geographical spread of the male witches over Europe, and the characterization of the male witches in several regions. It will examine the accusations that were leveled against the male witches and whether they were any different from those brought against their female counterparts.