The Dubious History of the Witch-Hunts Marko Nenonen The
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THE DUBIOUS HISTORY OF THE WITch-HUNTS Marko Nenonen The witch-hunt has been seen as one of the strangest phenomena of the European past. At the end of the twentieth century it became clear that research into the history of the witch-hunt has been stranger still. For over a century scholars had been explaining a phenomenon that never existed. The British historian Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), who studied and researched at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, became known beyond the boundaries of academia for at least two things. In the 1980s, having examined the supposed Adolf Hitler diaries, he declared them to be genuine, but they were shown to be a bad forgery soon afterwards.1 He was also known as the historian of the European witch-hunts, as his work, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1969/1967)2 was for a long time the most important, and indeed for most students, the only work used as a general source and in lecture series, so that its main features were considered sound by those who did not research the witch- hunt themselves. Trevor-Roper stated in his book that the general outline of the witch persecutions was already familiar from earlier research. All that was needed was a new and up-to-date explanation. In fact, the youngest of the writers referred to in his overview, the German scholar Joseph Hansen, had been born in 1862, a century before Trevor-Roper returned to the matter. Hansen’s works have remained classics in the field of witch-hunts, but in the mid-1970s it was found that he had accepted as genuine a col- lection of sources that told of medieval witch trials, for a long time consid- ered trustworthy but actually nineteenth-century forgeries.3 Despite this, the majority of Hansen’s collections are still considered dependable. 1 On H. R. Trevor-Roper, see Marko Nenonen, Noitavainot Euroopassa. Myytin synty (Keuruu: Atena, 2006), 271–272. 2 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Har- mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). Published for the first time in his collection Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967). 3 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (London: Basic Books, 1975), 126–139; Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials. Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300– 1500 (London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 16–18. 18 marko nenonen Many western European witch-hunt scholars later erred far more than Joseph Hansen by failing to read the documents they used for their conclu- sions carefully enough. The infamous piece of work by Heinrich Kramer (Institoris), Malleus Maleficarum (1486 or 1487),4 which instructed in the investigation of witchcraft, is mentioned in many works on the history of the witch persecutions. However, it is clear that many of these researchers had not read Malleus Maleficarum, since it was not noted that in the origi- nal Latin text of the work almost every third witch mentioned was of the masculine gender. These references must therefore be to male witches, or male and female witches. Strangest of all was that it was not scholars researching the witch-hunts that made this observation, but writers from outside the field. The problem was exposed by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow in their work, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (2003).5 Their observation was a surprise when we note that Malleus Maleficarum had been considered the Bible of misogynist churchmen. Of the works written by inquisitors and theologians, Malleus Malefi- carum was not the only one that mentioned male witches and men practicing witchcraft. Interestingly, in some of these works male witches are mentioned more frequently than female.6 In addition, it surely can- not have escaped attention that men as well as women were prosecuted during the era of witch trials. How is it possible that a central question in witchcraft research had been handled so badly as late as the end of the twentieth century? In much of the research the very idea of male witches in the early modern period had been considered almost a cat- egorical impossibility.7 If such a huge mistake could be made about such a 4 Heinrich Kramer (Institoris), Der Hexenhammer. Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Wolf- gang Behringer, Günter Jerouscheck and Werner Tschacher, 3rd edition (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003; 1st edition in 2000). Malleus Maleficarum was first published in 1486 or 1487. 5 Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 2003), 104. Studies on male witchcraft have been appearing with increasing regularity. Most recently: Alison Rowlands, ed., Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch. Male Witches in Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (first in German Hexenmeister. Die Verfolgung von Männern im Rahmen der Hexenverfolgungen von 1530 bis 1730 im Alten Reich. Bern/Frankfurt a.M, etc.: Peter Lang, 2., ergäntze Auflage, 2001). For a recent exploration of this, see also Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Mod- ern Society. Finland and the Wider European Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 6 Apps and Gow, Male Witches, 104–108. 7 E.g. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons. The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999/1997), e.g. 107–133, esp. 112, 115, 119 and 133..