The field of witch-hunt studies has now generally abandoned the idea that one overall theory can explain the European witch hunts. Instead, over the past decade or so scholars have concentrated on regional studies and have generally emphasized the diversity of witch hunting at different times and places. These two valuable books fit nicely into this trend by doing the hard, painstaking work of excavating the connections between demonological ideas and witch hunting on a local level.
Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen's collection of seventeen essays by leading scholars offers a wealth of material and insights. Bookended by extremely useful summaries and historiographical overviews by the editors, the essays examine the ideas and actions of both “prosecuting” and “non-prosecuting” demonologists, as well as how rural and urban communities responded to popular and learned demonology. Taken together, these essays illustrate the individual personal or human factors that operated within particular circumstances to connect ideas and actions. As the editors remark, “Demonology needed a medium, the specific situation and the interest of individuals to circulate its message and its ideas to different locations (rural and urban), different religious milieus, and different political and legal settings” (9).
The uniformly excellent essays range widely, both geographically (from Italy and Spain to Scandinavia) and chronologically (from the fifteenth century to the late seventeenth). At the start, Rita Voltmer lays out the methodological difficulties of pinning down connections between texts and trials, suggesting that a model of a “multi-leveled interfusing flow of ideas and practices” should replace any assumption of a one-way influence from demonology to witch hunts.
The chapters that follow amply document this conclusion. They fall into three groupings: an initial series dealing with the transition in the late medieval period from maleficum as occurring primarily in the imagination, to the belief that witchcraft was both real and corporeal; a second group on the interaction of witch hunting and demonological texts in France, Germany, Scotland, and England; and a final group focusing on the interplay of popular beliefs and formal demonology in areas marginal to Continental witch hunting—namely, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Spain.
Each essay focuses on examples of specific movements between texts and trials; even as demonological texts might influence trials, demonologists were also influenced by trials, sometimes resulting in further texts. This interactive pattern was established very early, as demonstrated by Georg Modestin's study of the Errores Gazariorum, written a half-century before the Malleus Maleficarum. Overall, the essays emphasize the diversity and specificity of demonological texts (which ranged from abstract intellectual works to how-to manuals for the successful conviction and execution of witches to idiosyncratic constructs merging popular beliefs with formal demonology), and the varied relationships of demonologists to witch hunting: while some demonologists were primarily focused on executing witches, others took a more skeptical or hands-off view.
Despite this diversity, several overall themes emerge from the collection. One, as emphasized by the editors, is the importance of individual actors in shaping the impact of demonological texts. Walter Rummel, for example, demonstrates how the Malleus Maleficarum convinced Wilhelm of Bernkastel, an obscure fifteenth-century cleric, that acts of maleficium were harmful in reality and not contrary to nature, leading him to become a supporter of witch persecutions (including a previously unrecognized large-scale witch hunt in Trier in the 1490s). Similarly, Marion Gibson demonstrates how the little-known English magistrate Brian Darcy attempted to globalize witchcraft discourse by promoting Bodin's aggressive interrogation techniques through a 1582 pamphlet, only to be stymied by Reginald Scot's sharp and mocking textual counterattack. Other essays, such as Alison Rowlands's study of expert judicial opinions written for councillors in Lutheran Rothenburg, demonstrate how prosecutors might cherry-pick texts to support conclusions influenced by personal, pragmatic, and political factors. Similarly, Raisa Maria Toivo shows how Nils Psilander, who presided over Finland's only serial witch hunt (1666–70), turns out to have had only “fragmentary, ad hoc” knowledge of demonological theory, “sought out in a hurry when the need arose” (297).
A persistent undercurrent of skepticism among elites about demonological beliefs and the utility of witch trials also surfaces. Gianfrancesco Pico's conviction that the witches’ sabbat was real and corporeal was hard-won in the face of contrary medical and philosophical arguments (Walter Stephens); Jean Bodin ironically used skeptical arguments about the reach of human knowledge to reject skepticism about witches (Felicity Green). Doubts about the plausibility of witches’ flight persisted among Scottish intellectuals throughout the seventeenth century (Julian Goodare). It is also striking how often in these essays those in position to prosecute witches exercised restraint or were restrained by the caution of others. Nicolas Remy's push to prosecute witches, for example, was curtailed by his lack of actual power to control local courts (Rita Voltmer and Maryse Simon).
Popular beliefs about witches and their intersection with more formal demonology are the focus in the final group of essays. A mélange of folklore and demonology resulted in colorful and personalized stories spread by traveling merchants, the pulpit, or through the ceremony of execution, during which the witch's confession was read aloud. In Denmark, for example, merchant judges heard stories of a local figure beating a glass drum with foxtails for the witches’ dance (Jens Chr. V. Johansen) or stories about how witches were served by a demon “boy” who acted not as a lover but as a servant (Louise Nyholm Kallestrup). In the Finnmark region of Norway, accused women also told stories about receiving a personal demon or “boy,” as well as playing board or card games with the devil at festive gatherings; several women reported losing a shoe while dancing with the devil, integrating folk belief into a demonological narrative (Liv Helene Willumsen). Swedish children insisted on the presence of beneficial angels during their abductions to Blåkulla, despite criticism from the Lutheran elites on the court (Jari Eilola), while in seventeenth-century Spain, Friar Juan, an elderly, self-aggrandizing exorcist, practiced an idiosyncratic exorcism ritual that interpreted the materialism of early modern popular Catholicism as sanctioning erotically charged mutual flagellation (María Tausiet).
Scott Eaton's examination of John Stearne's Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (1648), the first full-scale study of Stearne and his ideas on demonology and witchcraft, expands on the implications of a single work. In his thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding the writing of A Confirmation, Easton elevates Stearne from an obscure assistant to Matthew Hopkins, long regarded as England's only witch finder, to England's premier witch hunter and a central figure in the East Anglican witch hunts, England's largest, which resulted in 240 suspects, half of whom were executed.
Easton further positions A Confirmation, largely neglected by Stearne's contemporaries and subsequent scholarship, as an important work in the history of English demonology, reflecting both oral and print culture. Easton's claim for the importance of A Confirmation rests primarily on Stearne's emphasis on familiar spirits and his insistence on eyewitness observations of the witch's mark. Eaton paints Stearne as an empiricist, whose work reflected the influence of the Scientific Revolution, and A Confirmation as a “scientific text” (133). Belief in animal familiar spirits—that is, demonic spirits in the shape of animals that lived intimately with the witch and carried out malefic magic on their behalf in return for sucking the witch's blood—was a distinctive element in English witch beliefs. Easton acknowledges that Stearne's ideas on familiars were not entirely new but argues that Stearne's emphasis on their centrality as tangible evidence of the intimate relationship between witch and demon, and of their ability to furnish empirical, physical proof of guilt, was innovative. Equally, Easton emphasizes that Stearne understood witch hunting as a tool to expel subversive demonic forces in communities beset by civil war.
Each of these volumes illuminates both the diversity and commonalities of early modern demonology and witch hunting, exploring previously unexamined interactions between individuals, texts, and witch prosecutions, and placing these within a broad cultural and historiographical context. Both are invaluable additions to the literature. Sadly, the dynamics of the intersection of beliefs, political, and personal agendas and the prosecution of marginalized groups as explored in these two books seem all too familiar today.
