The Past and Present Society
Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany
Author(s): Alison Rowlands
Source: Past & Present, No. 173 (Nov., 2001), pp. 50-89
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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WITCHCRAFTAND OLD WOMEN IN
EARLYMODERN GERMANY*
That old women were particularlyvulnerableto accusationsof
being witches is -
at least for some historians -
an axiom of
earlymodernGermanwitchcraftresearch.Recently, for example,
WolfgangBehringerdescribedthe 'classicwitch' as an 'old, single,
poor woman',1while Lyndal Roper noted: 'The witch-hunt as it
operated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had offered
a clear way of dealing with evil, by locating the source of evil in
an old woman. Old women were disproportionatelyrepresented
amongst the victims of the witch craze; and the old woman was
the abiding stereotypicalwitch'.2 Moreover, although there are
many difficultiesin ascertainingor even plausiblyguessing how
old alleged witches were when tried, the idea that women aged
fifty and above were over-representedamongst the accused in
relationto the proportionof the populationthat they constituted
is suggested by what little definitive archivalevidence we have
on the ages of accused witches.3Why was this the case? In this
article I will explore answers to this question in the light of my
* This article stems from a
paper given at the 'Old Age in Pre-Industrial Society'
conference held at Ithaca College in September 1999. I am grateful to the organizers
for inviting me to participate, the discussants for useful feedback, and the AHRB for
the Overseas Conference Grant which enabled me to attend. I am also grateful to the
following for reading and commenting on drafts of this article: Joan Davies, Julie
Gammon, Steve Smith, John Walter, and - especially - Herbert Eiden and Jeremy
Krikler. For technical assistance, thanks also to Franz-Josef Knochel.
1 Wolfgang Behringer, Hexen: Glaube, Verfolgung,Vermarktung,
2nd edn (Munich,
2000), 62. However, Behringer also notes that the gender, age and social status of
accused witches were subject to geographical and chronological variation: see ibid.,
and also Wolfgang Behringer, "'Erhob sich das ganze Land zu ihrer Ausrottung":
Hexenprozesse und Hexenverfolgungen in Europa', in Richard van Dulmen (ed.),
Hexenwelten:Magie und Imagination(Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 150-1.
2 Lyndal Roper, "'Evil Imaginings and Fantasies": Child-Witches and the End of
the Witch-Craze', Past and Present, no. 167 (May 2000), 123. See also H. C. Erik
Midelfort, Witch Hunting in SouthwesternGermany, 1562-1684: The Social and
IntellectualFoundations(Stanford, 1972), 194; Gerhard Schormann, Hexenprozessein
Deutschland,2nd edn (G6ttingen, 1986), 118-19.
3 Eva Labouvie offers particularlydetailed statistics to this effect for accused women
in the Saarland,Lorraine, Electoral Trier and Pfalz-Zweibriicken in her Zaubereiund
Hexenwerk:LdndlicherHexenglaubein derfriihen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1991),
172-3, where she shows that 15.4 per cent of all women of known age were aged
(cont. on p. 51)
) The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2001
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
51
own research into witch-trials in the Lutheran south German
imperial city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in general, and in
view of one witch-trial in particular:that of fifty-six-year-old
AppoloniaGlaitterfrom Windisch-Bockenfeld,one of the villages
of Rothenburg'srural hinterland.She was accused of witchcraft
in July 1671 by her neighbours, forty-two-year-old Endres
Klenckh, his wife Appolonia,and his eighty-two-year-oldfather
Michael, and released from custody with the charge against her
unproven two months later. During the early modern period
Rothenburgand its ruralhinterlandexperienceda very restrained
pattern of witch-trials: there were no severe, large-scale trialepisodes and only three executions for witchcraft in the city
between 1500 and 1750. The area thus offers the historian the
chance to examine why some people rather than others became
identifiedas witches in circumstanceswhere trialswere endemic,
not epidemic, and where the lower orders and the city council
both evinced a lack of enthusiasmfor using the law with alacrity
or severity againstalleged witches.4Elite cautionin the prosecution of witchcraftalso tended to result in long trialsand rich case
documentation, which in many cases allows the historian to
explore in depth the complex and lengthy stories of social and
psychicconflictwhich lay behindthe makingof witchcraftaccusations. The two-month trial of Appolonia Glaitter, for example,
producednearly three hundredpages of statementsby witnesses,
interrogationsand legal opinions, from which it is possible to
(n. 3 cont.)
between thirty and thirty-five when accused of witchcraft, 34.6 per cent were aged
forty to forty-five, and 50 per cent were aged fifty and above. A preponderance of
accused female witches aged fifty and above is also shown for the county of Lippe by
Rainer Walz in his Hexenglaubeund magische Kommunikationim Dorf der Friihen
Neuzeit: Die Verfolgungenin der GrafschaftLippe (Paderborn, 1993), 299-305, and
for the Jura region by E. William Monter in Witchcraftin France and Switzerland:
The Borderlandsduring the Reformation(Ithaca, 1976), 122-3. Edward Bever makes
the same point for Europe and New England more generally in 'Old Age and
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe', in Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Old Age in PreIndustrialSociety (New York, 1982), 181. My research on Rothenburg suggests that
most of the women accused of witchcraft there were aged between thirty and sixty,
with those in their fifties perhaps slightly more at risk of accusation. For further
discussion of these statistical data, see my forthcoming article, 'Stereotypes and
Statistics: Old Women and Accusations of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe', in
Susannah Ottaway et al. (eds.), Old Age in Pre-Industrial Society (Westport, Conn.,
forthcoming 2002).
4 The witch-trials of Rothenburg are the subject of my forthcoming book, Narratives
of Witchcraftin Early Modern Germany:Fabrication,Feud and Fantasy (Manchester,
2002).
52
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
reconstructher life historyand to explorein detailthe relationship
between her age and the development of her reputation for
witchcraft.5
I
THE PSYCHOLOGICALAND PHYSIOLOGICALEFFECTS OF AGEING
Both early modernand contemporarywritershave attributedthe
preponderanceof older women as alleged witches to forms of
mental instabilitysupposedlyconnected particularlywith female
old age. In his 1563 work De praestigiisdaemonum,for example,
witchcraftsceptic and physicianJohannWeyer arguedthat older
women were 'by reason of their sex inconstantand uncertainin
faith, and by their age not sufficientlysettled in their minds', and
were thus 'much more subjectto the devil's deceits, who, insinuating himself into their imagination . . . introduces all sorts of
shapes, cleverly stirring up the humours and the spirits in this
trickery'.6They were thereforemore likely than other people to
believe that they were witches and to confess as much to the
authorities. In 1949 Sona Rosa Burstein likened the antisocial
behaviour ascribed to old, female witches in early modern
demonologies and witchcraft pamphlets, and especially their
alleged tendencies to mumble incoherently to themselves or to
curse and scold others aggressively, to patterns of behaviour
identified by twentieth-century gerontologists as evidence of
senile psychosis. She thus suggested that old women were more
likely to be accusedof witchcraftin earlymodernEuropebecause
they were more likely to suffer from mental disorders which
manifestedthemselvesin forms of antisocialbehaviourthat their
neighbours identified as witch-like.7 Edward Bever has since
criticized Burstein'stheory, arguing that the known ages of the
5 For full case records, see Rothenburg Stadtarchiv(hereafter RStA) Urgichtenbuch
A908, documents relating to the trial of Appolonia Glaitter, 11 July - 11 Oct. 1671
(unpaginated); Ratsprotokolle B45, fos. 127r, 128r. Discussion of the gendering of
witchcraft beliefs and accusations is beyond the scope of this article; see chapter 5 of
my forthcoming book for more details.
6 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe, paperback edn (Oxford, 1999), 198. See also ibid., 117-18, 198-213; H. C.
Erik Midelfort, A History of Madnessin Sixteenth-CenturyGermany(Stanford, 1999),
196-227, for further discussion of Weyer's text.
7 Sona Rosa
Burstein, 'Aspects of the Psychopathology of Old Age Revealed in
Witchcraft Cases of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', Brit. Medical Bull.,
vi (1949).
WITCHCRAFT
AND OLD WOMEN
53
older women accusedof witchcraftwere fairly evenly distributed
between forty and eighty, making it 'unlikely that most suspects
could have been exhibiting symptoms of advanced senility'.8
Bever suggested instead that older women were most likely to
display the hostility and aggression allegedly characteristicof
accused witches because their gender and age rendered them
particularlysubject to pressing and frustrating socio-economic
problemsand socioculturalrestrictions,and becausethe complex
biologicaland psychologicalchangestriggeredby the menopause
could causethe intensificationof these 'negativepersonalitytraits'
in some women.9
The witch-trialsfrom Rothenburgoffer little support to these
ideas, however. The only individuals described specifically as
foolish (ndrrisch)or melancholy(melancholi) in trial recordswere
not allegedwitches but three people who accusedothersof witchcraft in cases from 1641, 1652 and 1709.10 Evidence about the
behaviourof all three suggests that they were mentallydisturbed
in some way and that this probablymade them more fearful of
witches. In 1709, for example, the council noted that Maria
AppoloniaSchumacher- who was convinced that her motherin-law was a witch - behaved like a woman who was not in her
right mind, after she explained that her head often became so
full of thoughts of witchcraft that she had to hit it against the
wall to gain relief.11Almost all of those individualswho confessed
to being witches of their own volition in Rothenburgwere youngsters below the age of twenty, who behaved in this manner for
variouspsychologicaland social reasonsand who were less inhibited in their willingnessto talk about witchcraftand less likely to
be punishedfor so doing becauseof their youth.12 The behaviour
of older women accused of witchcraft, on the other hand, was
usuallycharacterizedby an indignantand tenaciousdenialof their
guilt as witches which endured despite the fact that they might
be subjected to lengthy imprisonmentand torture. In 1671, for
8
Bever, 'Old Age and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe', 169-70.
9
Ibid., 171-7.
'0 RStA Urgichtenbiicher A896, fos. 259v, 260r, 266r, 278' (1641), and A938, fos.
326V-327' (1709); StaatsarchivNtirnberg (hereafter StAN) Rothenburg Repertorium
200/III Konsistorialakten, vol. 2087, fos. 11', 18' (1652).
n RStA
Urgichtenbuch A938, fo. 336'.
12 The cases of these self-confessed child-witches are discussed further in Rowlands,
Narratives of Witchcraft,chs. 3-5. Two adult women, Magdalena Dirr and Barbara
Ehness, also confessed to being witches under interrogation for other crimes (infanticide and attempted murder respectively): see ibid., ch. 5 and appendix 1.
54
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
example, Appolonia Glaitter maintainedher assertion that she
was not a witch and that the Klenckh family had accused her
unjustly out of enmity throughoutfifty-two days in prison and
six interrogations,duringwhich she was subjectedto intense and
hostile questioning, confrontationswith her accusers and, on
2 August, three bouts of torture with thumbscrews.13Even
eighty-eight-year-oldAnnaMaas,the oldest womanto be accused
of witchcraftin Rothenburgand so frail that she was unable to
walk to the town hall in Rothenburgto make a statementabout
her alleged witchcraftin 1673, resolutely denied that she was a
witch.14The Rothenburg evidence suggests that as women got
older their sense of identity became stronger and the likelihood
that this would be broken by accusationsof witchcraft or the
processesof interrogationlessened ratherthan increased.
Theories about the greater vulnerabilityof older women to
witchcraft accusationswhich, like those advanced by Burstein
and Bever, rely for their explanatorypower on the assumption
that it was necessarilythe overly hostile or erratic behaviourof
such women which was the crucial factor in encouragingothers
to believe that they were witches, also tend to obscuremore than
they help revealaboutthe complexityof the socialconflictunderlying witchcraftaccusations.5 The evidencefrom the Rothenburg
witch-trialssuggests that, far from behaving in a mannerwhich
was hostile or eccentric, many women suspected or accused of
witchcrafthad tried to behave towardstheir neighboursin what
they regardedas a friendly and helpful way, becoming understandablyangry only when the same neighboursopenly accused
them of witchcraft. This is suggested in the case of Appolonia
Glaitter.16The pastor of Leuzendorf, for example, told the city
councillors that, although Appolonia had long been reputed a
witch within the parish, there was nothing in her observable
behaviour to suggest anything improper to him; she went to
13
The thumbscrew broke during the third bout of torture and was left on
Appolonia's hand for half an hour while the torturer fetched a spare part: see RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, interrogation dated 2 Aug. 1671.
14 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A909, fos. 278r-280v.
15See also section III for further discussion of this
point.
16 It made sense for a reputed witch to remain on good terms with as many of her
neighbours for as long as possible, as this lessened the risk of a formal accusation.
Appolonia's patience with the Klenckhs had run out by the time she was in custody,
however; she called Endres and Michael liars and implied that they were committing
perjury with their allegations against her during interrogations on 18, 21 and 27 July
1671: RStA Urgichtenbuch A908.
WITCHCRAFT
AND OLD WOMEN
55
church and sent her daughter to school diligently and behaved
peaceablytowardsher neighbours.17 She had also nursedMichael
Klenckh's wife during a severe illness and had assisted both her
and her daughtersin childbirthwhile relationsbetween the two
households had been reasonably amicable.18The event which
helped trigger the formal accusation of Appolonia by the
Klenckhs in 1671 was also one in which she had been helpful
rather than hostile. In the spring Endres Klenckh had been in
his gardenplantingsome herbs when Appoloniahad approached,
offering to help. While helping him she had commentedthat his
plants were very small and suggested that he send his elevenyear-old daughter, Eva, over to her garden to fetch some of
her own plants, which were larger. Eva did this, but a few days
after returning from Appolonia's garden with the plants her
foot became swollen with pus. The Klenckhs rapidly blamed
Appolonia,who had a long-standingreputationfor being able to
lame by means of witchcraft,for Eva's infected foot.19
While Appoloniahad intendedto be helpful, then, and insisted
in custody to her interrogatorsthat she had offered Endres
Klenckh her assistance'in good will with a true heart',20he had
perceived her words and actions as far more threatening,as his
narrativeof the events showed. He claimed that she had initially
approachedhim and offeredhim her help 'withoutbeing asked',21
and that he had only reluctantlysent Eva to Appolonia'sgarden
because Appolonia had repeated her offer of the larger plants
'frequently and insistently'.22Appolonia's behaviour in this
instance can be seen as aggressive, but only in so far as she had
tried too aggressivelyto make Endresaccept her help againsthis
will. However, Endres only perceived Appolonia'sbehaviouras
aggressive because her pre-existing reputation for witchcraft
meant that he alreadybelieved that she was a witch. The assistance given by Appolonia to Endres was thus transmutedin his
imaginationinto an unwanted and dangerousintrusion into his
RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statement by Hans Georg Waldman, 13 July 1671.
Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 21 July 1671.
19
Ibid., statements by Endres Klenckh, 1 July 1671, and by Eva, 19 July 1671.
20'in allem guten mit treuem Herzen': ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 18 July
1671.
21 'in sein
Krautgartenohn beruffen kommen, und sich zur Hilf angebotten': ibid.,
statement by Endres, 11 July 1671.
22 'so hab sie doch so
lang und viel an ihm gebettelt biss ers geschehen lassen':
ibid., statement by Endres, 11 July 1671.
17
18
56
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 173
family'sdomesticspace(theirgarden);into a humiliatingcriticism
of his abilities as a gardener(in the offer made by Appoloniato
Endresof her own, largerplants);and into an alarminginsistence
that Eva Klenckh do Appolonia'sbidding which Endresand Eva
seemed ultimatelypowerlessto resist.23
What was crucial, then, in this exchange was not what
Appoloniadid but how her actions were interpretedby Endres.
Witchcraftin the early modernperiod was very much in the eye
and the imaginationof the beholder; this was why the concept
was so flexible and adaptable.This meant that, as Rainer Walz,
Walter Rummel and Johannes Dillinger have argued for other
partsof earlymodernGermany,a wide varietyof types of behaviour, and even those that to us seem apparently insignificant,
mundane or intentionally non-aggressive, could be interpreted
(or reinterpreted) by contemporaries as threatening, socially
unacceptable,and motivatedby malevolence:in short, as witchcraft.24 This was particularly the case with individuals who
already had reputations as witches; once someone had such a
reputation,anythingshe did could be interpretedas evidence of
her hidden, evil nature.25To focus too much on one type of
behaviour(such as hostility or irritability)on the part of alleged
witches, then - or, indeed, to focus solely on the behaviourof
the witch at all, as opposed to how this was experienced and
interpreted by her accuser - will therefore miss much of the
complexity and nuance in any explanationof why a particular
individual was formally accused of witchcraft, at whatever age
this happened. Moreover, as the careful contextualizationby
Rainer Walz of witch-trials from rural Lippe has shown, even
when trial evidence suggests that an alleged witch had displayed
traits of verbal aggression,such as quarrelsomenessor the use of
curses, we should be wary of assuming that this meant that she
had behaved in ways significantlydifferent from those of her
23 Michael Klenckh also construed
any help that Appolonia had given his family in
the past as intrusive and unwanted by them: ibid., statement by Michael Klenckh,
26 July 1671; ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 21 July 1671.
24 Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,
46-7, 269-305; Walter Rummel,
'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei: Das Wirken des Alltags in Hexenprozessen
und die alltagliche Bedeutung des Hexenthemas', in Gunther Franz and Franz Irsigler
(eds.), Methoden und Konzepte der historischenHexenforschung(Trier, 1998), 83-6,
91-8; Johannes Dillinger, "Bdse Leute": Hexenverfolgungenin Schwdbisch-Osterreich
und Kurtrierin Vergleich(Trier, 1999), ch. 5.
25 Dillinger, "Bose Leute", 185; Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und
Hexerei', 93.
WITCHCRAFT
AND OLD WOMEN
57
neighbours. Threats and curses were a normal part of social
interactionwithin villages which were riven with all manner of
social conflicts.26
Like Bever, other historianshave pointed to the menopauseas
a potentiallysignificantwatershedin explainingwhy older women
were more vulnerableto suspicionsand accusationsof witchcraft.
For the duchy of Lorraine,for example, Robin Briggs suggests
that there was a 'modest tendency' for the transfer of women
into the pool of witchcraftsuspects 'to coincide with the menopauseor the end of childbearing',and offers two possibleexplanations for this. He suggests, first, that some women may not have
accomplishedthe social and physical transition from fertile to
post-menopausalas smoothly as others. They experienced this
change as alienating and thus felt and expressed a resentment
about their new status which may have been perceived as disturbingand thus as witch-like by theirneighbours.Second,Briggs
implies that the greater vulnerabilityto suspicionsof witchcraft
of women between the ages of forty and sixty may have had only
a coincidental connection with the fact that they would have
undergonethe menopauseat some point during these years and
had more to do with the fact that mid-life 'was the time when
the exercise of power usually became centralto personalexperience'. As 'misusedpower was a key meaningof witchcraft,then
it is not surprisingto find this age group notably suspect'.27
LyndalRoper has recently suggestedthat it may have been the
physical effects of the menopause on women's bodies and the
fear and contempt with which these effects were regarded by
contemporarieswhich helps explain why older women were imagined to be witches in disproportionatenumbers. Analysingartistic representationsof women and witches from early modern
Germany, Roper suggests that post-menopausal women were
portrayed with sagging breasts and shrivelled wombs to show
that their childbearingdays were over, and that this portrayal
should be understoodin terms of a contemporaryconcern with
and glorificationof fertility. These images reflected a misogyny
directed not againstwomen in general but againstold women in
Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,47, 303-5, 512-14.
Robin Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours:The Social and CulturalContextof European
Witchcraft(London, 1996), 264. Briggs draws on the ground-breaking work of John
Demos on witchcraft and age in his 'Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of
Seventeenth-Century New England', Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxv (1970), for the idea of a
link between mid-life and the exercise of power.
26
27
58
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
particular,which was mobilized around a fear of the bodies of
older women who were no longer fertile and not, as other historians have suggested, around fears of their allegedly unbridled
sexualityor isolationfrom patriarchalcontrol.28Roper suggested
how these fears might be played out in her analysis of those
Augsburgwitch-trialswhich aroseas a result of accusationsmade
by newly delivered mothers against the older, poorer, often
widowed, post-menopausalwomen who had acted as their lyingin maids and who were accused of having harmed either the
mothersthemselves,or their babies,or both. Roper suggeststhat,
in their accusations,the motherswere projectingonto the lyingin maids their anxieties about the survival of their babies and
about their abilitiesto nourishtheir infants,so that harmto either
themselves or their babies was believed to have been caused by
the maids, as evil 'other' mothers, rather than by their own
mistakes and feelings of ambivalenceor hostility towards their
children. The lying-in maid was predestinedfor the role of evil
motherbecauseher post-menopausalbody was understoodwithin
the early moderneconomy of bodily fluidsas the negativeinverse
of the childbearingwoman'sbody: as driedup ratherthanflowing
with the fluids of menstrualblood and breastmilk, and as potentially poisonous, because these fluids no longer flowed outwards
to purify her body of them. It was thus not surprisingthat her
witchcraftwas understoodto attackfertility, tied as it was to her
own loss of fertility and the physical changes that accompanied
it.29
The menopauseand its effects on women's bodies may have
played some role at the subconscious level in explaining the
greater vulnerabilityof post-menopausalwomen to accusations
of witchcraft, but I am not convinced that we can push the
connectiontoo far, at least at this stage of the research.To begin
with, we know little about how menopausewas experiencedand
understoodby earlymodernpeople, especiallyamongstthe lower
28
Lyndal Roper, 'Sex, Bodies and Age: Misogyny and the Witch-Hunt' (unpublished paper given at the Women's History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research,
London, 4 June 1999).
29Lyndal Roper, 'Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany', in her
Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe
(London, 1994), esp. 208-9, 211, 222. Roper also notes, however, that lying-in maids
were vulnerable to accusations of having harmed newborn infants and their mothers
because they had the means and opportunity to do so. Roper gives the age of only
one of her lying-in maids, Anna Ebeler, who was sixty-seven when accused of
witchcraft in 1669: ibid., 199.
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
59
orders. The analysis by BarbaraDuden of the case books of
the eighteenth-century German physician Johann Storch, for
example, shows that some women claimed to experience what
they perceivedto be menstrualflows into old age, suggestingthat
the menopausemay not have been linked so strongly then with
a particularstage of the female life-cycle as it is today.30Second,
we shouldnot forget that the blood of menstruationand childbirth
in themselves could be regardedwithin early modern culture as
potentially poisonous substances.31This idea was suggested in
connectionwith witchcraftin a trialin Rothenburgin 1641, when
a forty-year-oldman calledMichaelRost claimedthat his twentyseven-year-old wife Margaretha,who he believed was a witch,
had tried to poison him by fillinghis throatwith her post-partum
vaginal discharge.32It was thus possible that, if bodily function
did play a role in encouragingwitchcraftsuspicions,older women
who no longer menstruatedmay have been regarded by their
contemporariesas less rather than more poisonous than premenopausalwomen.33
As regardsthe appearanceof older women it may also be worth
noting that the physical effects of ageing would probably have
been most apparent to villagers in terms of the greying hair,
wrinkled facial skin, toothlessness, and stooped or hunched
30BarbaraDuden, The Womanbeneaththe Skin: A Doctor'sPatients in EighteenthCentury Germany(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 20, 115. On our lack of knowledge of
how menopause was experienced and understood during the early modern period,
see also Lynn Botelho, 'Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern
Suffolk', in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (eds.), Womenand Ageing in British Society
since 1500 (Harlow, 2001), 53.
31 See, for example, Ottavia Niccoli, "'Menstrum quasi monstrum": Monstrous
Births and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century', in Edward Muir and Guido
Ruggiero (eds.), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective(Baltimore, 1990); David
Cressy, 'Purification,Thanksgiving and the Churchingof Women in Post-Reformation
England', Past and Present, no. 141 (Nov. 1993), esp. 115-17; Merry E. Wiesner,
Womenand Genderin Early ModernEurope(Cambridge, 1993), 44-5; Olwen Hufton,
The Prospect beforeHer: A History of Womenin WesternEurope, vol. 1, 1500-1800
(London, 1997), 43-4.
32RStA Urgichtenbuch A896, fo. 255-v. Menstrual blood was also imagined as a
key ingredient of women's love-magic during the early modern period: see Ingrid
Ahrendt-Schulte, WeiseFrauen- bdseWeiber:Die Geschichteder Hexen in der Frihen
Neuzeit, 2nd edn (Freiburg, 1995), 64; SaraMendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women
in Early ModernEngland, 1550-1720 (Oxford, 1998), 26.
33For example, Mendelson and Crawford note that 'In general, early modern
medical writers viewed the menopause positively, not as a particularly unfortunate
stage in a woman's life': Womenin Early Modern England, 25; while Botelho notes
that, according to Hippocrates, 'menopause signalled the re-assimilation of the female
body to the male (and hence more tractable) body': 'Old Age and Menopause', 52.
60
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
posture of their female neighbours,34ratherthan in terms of the
sagging breasts and shrivelled stomachs which Roper suggests
were the key markersof infertility.35And, while contemporary
writersoften commentedon the formerfeaturesin the old female
witches whom they described,36in Rothenburgat least the physical appearanceof a witch was seldom if ever mentioned by her
accusersin trialrecords;it was her behaviourwhich was of crucial
importanceto them as evidence of her hidden, evil nature.37If
alleged witches' bodies were commentedon at all by their neighbours it was usually in terms of bruises on their arms or faces
which suggestedthat they had been beaten by the Devil.38It was
arguablythis physical indistinguishabilityof witches from their
neighbourswhich helped necessitatethe search during trials for
witches' marks, allegedly left by the Devil on their bodies, as a
way of trying to obtain some physical proof of their identity.
Thus while the negative pictorialrepresentationof old women in
the early modernperiod may have been indicativeof a particular
strain of misogyny against them, it does not explain why some
women rather than others were first reputed and later perhaps
accused as witches by their neighbours.39
Finally, I would suggest that too strong an emphasison postmenopausalwomen as archetypallyevil, 'other' mothers risks
blinding us to the fact that contemporariesmight plausibly link
allegedly unmaternalbehaviourto reputed female witches of all
ages. For example, two allegations made against Appolonia
Glaitter in 1671 focused on her supposed ill-treatment of her
own children. Michael Klenckh claimed that Appolonia had
As Botelho suggests in 'Old Age and Menopause', 51-61.
Roper, 'Sex, Bodies and Age'.
36 See the
examples cited by Burstein, 'Aspects of the Psychopathology of Old
Age', 63-4.
37 See also Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraftin Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional
and ComparativeStudy, 2nd edn (London, 1999), 158.
38 See, for example, a reference to this effect made about sixty-one-year-old Anna
Dieterich in 1629: RStA Urgichtenbuch A888, fo. 607r. The bodily malfunction of
twenty-eight-year-old Magdalena Diirr was commented on by witnesses during her
trial of 1628-9 (she was incontinent), but this was a peculiar case. She was initially
arrested on suspicion of infanticide and claimed to be a witch during interrogation;
no one else accused her of witchcraft. See Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,ch. 5,
for more details.
39 For discussion of the negative pictorial representation of old women, see Roper,
'Sex, Bodies and Age'; Lynn Botelho, 'Images of Old Age in Early Modern Cheap
Print: Women, Witches and the Poisonous Female Body', in Ottaway et al. (eds.),
Old Age in Pre-IndustrialSociety.
34
3
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
61
deliberatelyabandonedone of her infants in the late 1630s when
the inhabitantsof Windisch-Bockenfeldhad been forced to flee
from the maraudingtroops of Johannvon Werth,40while Maria
Gruber, who had once worked as a maidservantfor Appolonia,
claimedthat one baby Appoloniahad had in the early 1650s had
been badly bruised at birth and had died shortly afterwardsas a
result of the fact that Appoloniahad deliberatelybelted her apron
too tightly while pregnant.41Of course, these allegationsmight
have been conveniently 'remembered'in 1671 by the Klenckhs,
who were keen to amassevery possible scrap of evidence against
Appolonia, and by Gruber, who also had reason to feel enmity
towards her.42Moreover, in the creation and strengtheningof
any individual'sreputationas a witch the retrospectiveattribution
of misfortuneto the workings of witchcraftnecessarilyplayed a
role, as neighbourspored over past events for additionalevidence
of his or her malevolence.Appoloniacertainlydenied the allegations vehemently in custody and offered plausible explanations
for her behaviourin both instances.43Even if the allegationshad
been fabricatedor the events reinterpretedas sinister after they
had taken place, however, the fact that both Klenckhand Gruber
focused on Appolonia's alleged lack of maternal instinct at all
shows that this trait in a woman could be understoodby contemporariesas an indicationof her unnaturalemotionalhardnessand
thus of her identity as a witch. And the fact that Appoloniahad
been twenty-threeor twenty-four at the time of the first incident
and between her mid-thirties and early forties at the time of
the second shows that unmaternalfeeling might be attributed
plausiblyto a pre-menopausalwoman of any age.44
II
MARITALSTATUS
In the early 1970s the pioneers of witchcraft scholarshipsuggested - admittedlywith little data on either the ages or marital
RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, interrogation of Appolonia, 21 July 1671.
statement by Gruber, 26 July 1671.
42 See
p. 76 for details.
43 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, interrogations of Appolonia, 21, 27 July 1671.
44 It is possible to estimate fairly accurately how old Appolonia would have been at
the time of these incidents from the brief life history she gave at the start of her first
interrogation on 18 July 1671 and from knowledge of when the troops of von Werth
were in Rothenburg's hinterland.
40
41 Ibid.,
62
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
statusof accusedwitches- that, in additionto her age, the status
of an older woman as single or widowed rendered her more
vulnerableto a witchcraftaccusation.For example,Keith Thomas
suggested that older women and widows were more dependent
on the assistanceof their neighbours in early modern England
and were thus more likely than other people to become involved
in the problematicexchangesover materialassistancewith their
wealthierneighboursfrom which accusationsof witchcraftwere
likely to emerge.45For Erik Midelfort it was not so much their
poverty as their problematicand isolatedstatuswithin patriarchal
society as unmarriedwhich rendered widows and spinsters in
earlymodernGermanymorevulnerableto witchcraftaccusations,
since 'persons without families were automatically peculiar,
unprotected, and suspect'.46This may have been especially so
at a time when, Midelfort suggested, the number of unmarried
women within society was increasingas a result of demographic
changes.47
Where the sources have enabledsubsequenthistoriansto provide more detailed statistical analysis of the ages and marital
status of accused female witches the evidence suggests that the
majoritywere marriedor widowed at the time of accusationand
that unmarriedand never-marriedwomen probably constituted
a relatively small proportionof those accused. For example, the
figures compiled by E. William Monter from the witch-trialsof
the Jura region show that the average percentage of widowed
accusedwas 36 per cent, of marriedaccused, 52 per cent, and of
single accused, 12 per cent.48For the electorate of Mainz the
figuresshow 6.85 per cent widowed, 55.84 per cent married,2.54
per cent single, and 34.77 per cent of unknown maritalstatus;49
while of the twenty women tried as witches between 1554 and
1603 in the north-west Germantown of Horn, six were widows,
45 Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 669-79. Of
course, high mortality rates ensured that not all widows in early modern Europe were
necessarily old, although, as Heide Wunder suggests, widows who were younger
tended to find remarriage easier: "Er ist die Sonn', sie ist der Mond": Frauen in der
FriihenNeuzeit (Munich, 1992), 186-7.
46 Midelfort, Witch
Hunting in SouthwesternGermany, 185.
47Ibid., 184-5.
48Monter, Witchcraftin France and Switzerland, 121-2.
49 Herbert Pohl, Zauberglaubeund Hexenangst im KurfirstentumMainz, 2nd edn
(Stuttgart, 1998), 221.
63
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
eleven wives, and three of unknown marital status.50For the
duchy of Lorraine, Briggs notes that around half the women
accusedof witchcraftwere widows, in additionto being on average much older and slightly poorer than their neighbours,while
Eva Labouvie has discovered an even more significant overrepresentationof widows (64 per cent) amongst the accused
female witches in the Saarregion of Germany.51My own figures
for Rothenburgshow a slightly different pattern. Of the fortysix female accused and self-confessed witches there, nine were
unmarried, eight were widows, two were of unknown marital
status, and twenty-seven, or 58.7 per cent, were married. The
unmarriedwitches constituted a rather peculiar category, however, consistingof six self-confessedwitches aged between eight
and twenty-two and only three individuals(aged twelve, thirteen
and twenty-three) who were accused by others of witchcraft.52
The statisticsfrom Rothenburgare not irreconcilablewith the
findings of Monter, Briggs and Labouvie, however. Along with
many other witchcraft scholars, Briggs and Labouvie note that
many of the women who were finallyformallyaccusedof witchcraft had been reputed as witches within their communitiesfor
years and often decades before their trials.53This meant that,
while a woman might not have been formally accused of witchcraft until she was a widow, she might well have been first
suspected of witchcraft while married. Of the eight widows
accused of witchcraft in Rothenburg,for example, at least four
had reputationsas witches that may have arisen while they were
still wives.54 One important -
but by no means the only -
way
in which witchcraftwas imaginedby early modernpeople was as
a set of skills which were the malevolentinverse of the positive
nurturing and productive skills expected of the dutiful housewife and mother.55This way of imagining female witches had
50
Ingrid Ahrendt-Schulte, Zauberinnenin der Stadt Horn (1554-1603): Magische
Kultur und Hexenverfolgungin der FriihenNeuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 244-5.
51 Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,263-4; Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,173.
52 See Rowlands, 'Stereotypes and Statistics', and Narratives of Witchcraft, for
more details.
53 Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,22-3; Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk, 167;
Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,61, 301-2.
54See Rowlands, 'Stereotypes and Statistics', and Narratives of Witchcraft, for
more details.
55Lyndal Roper in 'Witchcraft and Fantasy', Ingrid Ahrendt-Schulte in Zauberinnen
in der Stadt Horn, chs. 4-5, and Diane Purkiss in The Witch in History: Early Modern
and Twentieth-CenturyRepresentations(London, 1996), ch. 4, all focus on this idea.
In my opinion, however, they have underemphasized the degree to which the impor(cont. on p. 64)
64
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
particular resonance because, as Briggs points out, 'misused
power was a key meaning of witchcraft',56and it was as a wife,
motherand mistressof a householdthat an earlymodernGerman
woman attained and exercised most social and cultural power.
One factor renderinga woman more vulnerableto suspicion of
witchcraft,then, was the fact that she was or had been married,
even if she was a widow at the time of accusation.57
How might we account for the over-representationof widows
as accused witches in the findings of Monter, Briggs and
Labouvie? Widows were certainly the subject of ridicule and
contempt in early modern writing and imagery, particularly
around the theme of their allegedly unbridled sexuality.58
However, lust in old men might also be ridiculedand the generally
pejorative stance towards lusty old people should perhaps best
be understood in terms of the contemporarycondemnationof
marriagesbetween people unequalin age and status, ratherthan
in terms of hostility towards widows.59Widowhood alone, as
Alan Macfarlanenoted in 1970, was insufficient to cause an
accusationof witchcraft.60In the case of any accusedwidow, the
existence of a long-standing reputationfor witchcraft and/or a
particularlyproblematicrelationshipwith certain of her neighbours would have been crucial, if not always possible to tease
out in adequatedetail from availablesources.61Poverty, and perhaps the worsening poverty of old age, may have increasedthe
/ n. 55 colt.
v
tance of the housewife's educational role contributed to contemporary imaginings of
witches, and have also underemphasized the equally important ways in which men
and children were plausibly imagined as witches by contemporaries. See Rowlands,
Narratives of Witchcraft,ch. 5, for further discussion.
56 Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,264.
57Labouvie, for example, notes that 85 per cent of all accused female witches in
the Saarland,Lorraine, Electoral Trier and Pfalz-Zweibrucken had been married and
settled in their communities with families, even if 64 per cent of them were widows
when finally accused: see Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,173.
58 See Charles Carlton, 'The Widow's Tale: Male Myths and Female Reality in
16th and 17th Century England', Albion, x (1978); Elizabeth Foyster, 'Marrying the
Experienced Widow in Early Modern England: The Male Perspective', in Sandra
Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds.), Widowhoodin Medieval and Early ModernEurope
(Harlow, 1999), 111.
59See Keith Thomas, 'Age and Authority in Early Modern England', Proc. Brit.
Acad., lxii (1976), 41, n. 2; Cavallo and Warner, Widowhoodin Medieval and Early
ModernEurope,7-8; Foyster, 'Marrying the Experienced Widow', 112; Wunder, "Er
ist die Sonni',sie ist der Mond", 181-2.
60
Macfarlane, Witchcraftin Tudorand Stuart England, 164.
61
It is, however, harder to do this from English pamphlet sources than it is from
German legal records.
WITCHCRAFT
AND OLD WOMEN
65
likelihood of widows finding themselves in situations of social
conflictwith their neighboursand thus also the likelihoodof their
being accusedof witchcraft.However, it is worth bearingin mind
that poverty per se might have had this effect at any stage of a
woman's life, regardlessof her age or maritalstatus, and that it
was anyway by no means the case that all poor widows were
accused of witchcraft or that all accused witches were poor or
poorer than their accusers.62The key factor explaining the vulnerability of widows to accusationsof witchcraft (regardlessof
why they had gained their reputations as witches in the first
place) was probably- as Midelfortsuggestedin 1972- the fact
that they had lost the protection of their husbands.63Although
AppoloniaGlaitterwas marriedat the time of her trial for witchcraft in Rothenburgin 1671, her case offers interestinginsights
into the protective role that husbandsof reputed witches could
play, as long as they were willing to do so.
Appoloniahad first marrieda man called Leonhardat the age
of eighteen in 1633; he had died of dropsy after four years. Her
second marriage to Hans Kern had been her longest, lasting
twenty-five years from c.1637/8 to c.1662/3. Her third husband,
Hans Fuchs, died rapidly of consumptionafter their marriage,
which probablylasted only from c.1663 to c.1664/5, after which
point she marriedGeorg Glaitter,her servant, to whom she was
still marriedin 1671.64Appoloniawas alreadyreputed a witch at
the age of about twenty-two in c.1637/8 before her marriageto
Hans Kern, and evidence from her trial in 1671 suggests that she
had made it a condition of her marriageto him that he support
her in the face of any allegationsof witchcraftthat might be made
againsther. One witnessstatedthat she had once saidthis publicly
of Kern,65while Appoloniaherself confirmedin custody that she
62 The issues of social and economic status are discussed in the next section. On
the dominance of widows among recipients of early modern poor relief, see Hufton,
The ProspectbeforeHer, 250; Claire S. Schen, 'Strategies of Poor Aged Women and
Widows in Sixteenth-Century London', in Botelho and Thane (eds.), Womenand
Ageing. However, MargaretPelling suggests intriguingly that these figures may reflect
the greater ability of older women than men to survive on their own, rather than
widows' greater desperation and dependence: see her 'Who Most Needs to Marry?
Ageing and Inequality among Women in Early Modern Norwich', ibid.
63 Midelfort, Witch Hunting in SouthwesternGermany, 185-6. Walz suggests the
same in Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,305, but also points out that remarriage could also catalyse conflicts that might lead to witchcraft accusations.
64 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, interrogation of Appolonia and statement by Georg
Glaitter, 18 July 1671.
65
Ibid., statement by Adam Horn, 14 July 1671.
66
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
had told Kern before marryinghim that 'if anyone accused her
of anythingevil, he must take this on himself ... so that no one
could make a witch out of her by force'.66Appoloniamay well
have remarriedso often deliberatelyto availherselfof the protection her husbandsoffered her against accusationsof witchcraft,
in additionto the economic and sexual benefits they would have
brought to her life. She was able to do this despite having a
reputation as a witch because she was wealthy; her husbands
presumablyfelt that the advantagesof marryingher outweighed
the risks, either of becoming tarred with the same brush of
witchcraftor of becoming embroiledin disputes on her behalf.67
And, although the sources are silent on this point, she may also
have been particularlyattractive.Rummel cites an example of a
reputedwitch fom the electorateof Trier whose motherhad been
executed for witchcraftand who still managedto find two men
willing to marry her 'on account of her beauty and property'.68
Poorer and perhaps uglier women would probably have found
remarriagemore difficult.
Some idea of the protection a husband might offer a wife
reputed to be a witch is apparentfrom events that took place
involving the second husbandof AppoloniaGlaitter,Hans Kern,
in 1653. In that year he fell into a quarrel in a tavern in
Rothenburg with a man who had been repeating rumours that
Appolonia had lamed another man called AndreasHorn. These
rumoursemanatedoriginallyfrom Horn himself, who had been
claiming that Appolonia had crippled him since 1637. After
coming to the defence of his wife in the tavernKern had returned
home to discuss the matter with her. The two of them had then
gone to the nearbyvillage of Metzholz, where Horn was working
as a herdsman,in order to accost him about his allegationsand
hopefully to make him retractthem. The tactic backfired,however, as Horn had accused Appoloniapublicly of having lamed
him through witchcraft. Appolonia and Kern were then forced
to take the next step in her defence, of trying to call Horn into
66
Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 1 Aug. 1671: 'Wie dieser ihr man gestorben,
habe sie den andern den sie geheiirathet, angedeutet, wan sie einer etwas boses
beziichtige, miiste er sich ihrer annehmen ... man werde also kein Hex mit gewalt
auss ihr machen'.
67
See the next section for discussion of Appolonia's wealth.
68 Walter Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen: Studien zur Sozialgeschichtesponheinmischer
und kurtrierischerHexenprozesse,1574-1664 (Gittingen, 1991), 318: 'umb
ihrer hubtschichkeit und ihres guts halben'.
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
67
Rothenburg in order to answer a defamation suit against her.
However, Horn never appeared- allegedlybecausehis crippled
foot had become worse - and Appolonia did not pursue the
matter further, claiming that she had let the matter rest because
the inhabitantsof Metzholz had asked her not to deprive them
of their herdsman.In reality, probablyneither party was willing
to risk a formal investigationof the suspicionsraised by Horn.69
A crucialfactor in motivatingthe formalaccusationof Appolonia
by the Klenckhs in 1671 may have been the fact that her fourth
husband, Georg Glaitter,was known to be unsupportiveof her.
In 1671 Endres Klenckh claimed that when Glaitter had been
Appolonia's servant and before his marriage to her, he had
repeated rumours about her reputation as a witch to drinking
companionsin a tavern.70Glaitterdenied this,71but the fact that
he fled Windisch-Bockenfeldwith as much of the couple's moveable wealth as he could carryaroundthe time of her releasefrom
jail suggeststhat he may alwayshave harboureddoubts about the
wisdom of being marriedto a reputed witch.72
Husbands,then, might be willing to defendtheir wives' reputations againstrumoursof witchcraftverbally or physicallyand to
help them pursue legal or quasi-legalmeans of forcing accusers
to retracttheir allegations.In Rothenburgthey were also important in the aftermathof trials, when women who had been tried
as witches were releasedwithout punishment.This was because
a formal trial, even if it did not force them into confessing their
guilt as witches, made the accusationsagainst them as public as
possibleand subjectedthem to the dishonouringeffects of imprisonment and torture. In 1652, for example, two marriedwomen
from Rothenburg's hinterland villages of Wettringen and
Bettenfeld who had been accused of witchcraft were released
without punishment after maintainingthat they were innocent
but after being jailed for lengthy periods and suffering torture
69 For reference to the events of
1653, see RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statements
by Adam Horn (Andreas Horn's son), 14 July 1671, Michel Horn (Andreas Horn's
brother), 31 July 1671, and Michael Klenckh, 26 July 1671; interrogations of
Appolonia, 18 July, 1 Aug. 1671.
70 Ibid., statement by Glaitter, 18 July 1671.
71
Ibid.
Ibid., statement by Hans Michel Ackermann, 15 Sept. 1671. This was despite
the fact that Glaitter had requested and received a formal document from the council
of Rothenburg, guaranteeing that anyone who in future slandered either himself or
his wife in connection with her trial would be fined: see ibid., attestation issued by
the council, 8 Sept. 1671.
72
68
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
with thumbscrews.The husbandsof both women subsequently
wrote to the council in Rothenburg seeking its protection for
their families against their neighbours, who were making it as
difficult as possible for them to continue living in their villages.
One woman, whose husbandwas still alive and supportiveof her,
managedto continue to live with her family in Bettenfeld until
at least 1660; the other, whose husband had died shortly after
her trial, was finally driven from Wettringenwith her daughter
in 1656.73 It is unclearfrom the sources what effect the flight of
Georg Glaitterfrom Windisch-Bockenfeldhad on Appoloniain
1671. On the one hand, there is no evidence to show that she
was forced to leave the village herself, and the fact that the
Klenckhshad failed to make the chargeof witchcraftagainsther
stick in 1671 would probablyhave discouragedthem and others
from attemptingto bring her to trial again, especiallyas Michael
Klenckh had been heavily fined by the authoritiesin September
1671 for having consulted cunning folk, a crime - in the eyes
of the city councillors- to which he had confessed during the
trialof Appolonia.74The councilalso threatenedwith finesanyone
who slandered Appolonia or her husband as witches after her
release from custody.75Moreover, Appolonia seems to have
retainedsome personaldeterminationand male supportafter her
releasefrom custody:she immediatelyappearedbefore the council with two male relativesor friendsto demandthat the Klenckhs
be forced to pay the costs of her trial and to provide her with a
documentconfirmingher innocenceof their allegations.76One of
these men also appealed to the council on behalf of Appolonia
for help in forcing Georg Glaitter to return the goods he had
taken from their household.77In the long term, however, the
departureof Glaitter,the economicdamagethat it and her lengthy
imprisonmentwould have causedher, and the greaterabhorrence
probably felt towards her by her neighboursas a result of her
73 See Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,chs. 5-6, for discussion of these cases.
See RStA Urgichtenbuch A898, fos. 485r-535", and Bettenfeld Dorfakten A491, fos.
43r-57r, for Bettenfeld case-documents; StAN Rothenburg Repertorium 200/III
Konsistorialakten, vol. 2087, fos. lr-164r, for Wettringen case-documents.
74 RStA Ratsprotokolle B45, fo. 128r.
75 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, attestation issued by the council, 8 Sept. 1671.
76 RStA Ratsprotokolle B45, fo. 128'.
77 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, appeal by Hans Michel Ackermann, 15 Sept. 1671.
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
69
trial, may have rendered Appolonia increasinglyisolated within
her village.78
III
SOCIALAND ECONOMICSTATUS
In the early 1970s, Alan Macfarlaneand Keith Thomassuggested
an explanatorymodel for English witchcraft accusationswhich
focused particularlyon the relative poverty of alleged witches.
Accordingto Thomas, older and perhapswidowed women were
more likely than other people to be accusedof witchcraftbecause
they were more likely to be reliant on their neighboursfor material assistance. When this aid was refused, which happened
increasinglyduring an age of demographicand economic pressure, the anger of the spurned woman was understood as the
cause of certainmisfortunessufferedby her wealthierneighbours
as a result of the guilt that the latter felt at having failed to fulfil
their traditionalbenevolentobligations.The witchcraftaccusation
thus served to project the wealthierneighbour'sfeelings of guilt
onto the woman who had caused them, at the same time as it
might offer individualsthe chance to negotiatethe uneasy transition from traditionalto more modern ways of dealing with the
problems posed by poverty and old age.79Macfarlaneargued
along similar lines, concluding that witchcraft prosecutions in
Essex emanatedfrom tensions between middlingto rich villagers
and their less prosperous and older neighbours - who were
usuallywomen and often widows - duringa period of economic
and social transitionwhich caused changes in attitudes towards
treatment of the aged poor.80However, although Macfarlane
discussed at greatest length the idea of the accused witch as 'a
person [who] was refused some small object and in her anger
retaliatedby bewitching her refuser',81unlike Thomas he noted
that witches might also be women who were seen by their neighbours as 'too solicitous, too eager to lend and borrow',82and that
78Ackermann suggested that Appolonia was in debt in his appeal of
15 September 1671.
79
Thomas, Religionand the Decline of Magic, 652-80.
80
Macfarlane, Witchcraftin Tudorand Stuart England, 205-6, 149-52, 162-4.
81
Ibid., 174 (see also 173-6).
82
Ibid., 172.
70
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 173
the problematicexchangesbetween neighboursto which misfortune might be attributedwere not merely limited to gift-giving.83
Research subsequentlyundertakenon the economic status of
accused witches in other areas of early modern Europe suggests
that they might, indeed, be poor. For the duchy of Lorraine,for
example, Briggs notes that 'witches were on averagemuch older
and slightly poorer than their neighbours',while Labouvienotes
for the German-speakingpart of Lorraine,the Saarregion, electoral Trier and the county of Pfalz-Zweibriickenthat 43 per cent
of all accused female witches belonged to the lowest class of
villagerswho owned no propertyor were beggars,with 53.4 per
cent coming half from those villagersof very slender means and
half from a lower-middleclass who possessedsome smallamount
of property or income, and only 3.5 per cent coming from the
upper-middlerankswho owned land.84However, this datacannot
be read as providingunproblematicsupport for the emphasisby
Thomasand Macfarlaneon the links betweenthe old age, poverty
and vulnerability to witchcraft accusation of early modern
women. As Labouvie points out, the vast majority(84 per cent)
of all women in the area upon which she focuses belonged to the
lower economic groups within their villages.85We would therefore need to analyse the case of each accused witch individually
in order to ascertainwhy some of these poor women ratherthan
others became the focus of witchcraft suspicions and to what
extent tensions connected particularlywith their economic and
social status played a role in this process. And, even though
Labouvie and other historiansof Germanwitchcraftare able to
identify some beggars amongst the accused witches in their
regions of study, being a beggar constituted only one possible
form of apparently antisocial behaviour which early modern
people might perceive as witch-like.86This was because, as the
work of Walz, Rummel, Labouvie, Dillinger and Briggs for
Europe and, more recently, Malcolm Gaskilland Diane Purkiss
for England has shown, a much wider variety of social tensions
could be understood and managed by early modern people
through the imaginative mesh offered them by contemporary
83
Ibid., 174.
Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,263-4; Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,176.
85Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,178.
86
Ibid., 182-5; Dillinger, "Bose Leute", 196-229, esp. 202-5.
84
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
71
witchcraft beliefs than simply a refusal of neighbourly assistance.87We should also not forget that it may have been a preexisting reputationfor witchcraft, rather than the relative economic positionsof the protagonists,which played a key role even
in instances when a wealthy neighbour did refuse a poorer one
assistance. It may well have been the latter's reputationrather
than her poverty which lent such sinistermeaningto her request
for help and which justified the refusal of that request by her
neighbourin what might have constitutedjust one event in a set
of problematicexchanges between their two households which
were of wider range and longer standing.
Materialdependence,then - which usuallyincreasedwith age
for women of the lower orders - may have strengthenedthe
potential for conflict with her neighbours on the part of an
individualand thus increasedthe risk of her becoming the focus
of witchcraft suspicions or of strengtheningher already extant
reputationfor witchcraft,particularlyif she managedher dependence badly, displayingangerand aggressionratherthan deference
and humility towards her neighbours.88However, this was just
one amongst several such risk factors. Moreover, precisely
becausesuch a wide varietyof social tensionscould be accommodated and negotiated by individuals by means of witchcraft
beliefs, it was by no means invariably the case that accused
witches were poorer than their accusers. Gaskill and Walz have
suggestedthat witchcraftaccusationscould ariseequallyplausibly
betweenhouseholdsof relativelyequalsocialand economicstatus,
perhaps as one means of articulating their competition for
resourcesand influencewithin their communities.89This rivalry
found its clearest and most brutal expression in the witch-trials
examined by Rummel for electoral Trier and the county of
Sponheim,in which witch-huntingcommitteesstaffed by men of
87 Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk;Dillinger, "Bose Leute"; Walz, Hexenglaube
und magische Kommunikation;Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei';
Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours;Malcolm Gaskill, 'Witchcraft in Early Modern Kent:
Stereotypes and the Background to Accusations', in Jonathan Barry, MarianneHester
and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraftin Early ModernEurope: Studies in Cultureand
Belief (Cambridge, 1996); Purkiss, Witch in History, ch. 4.
88 See Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei', 98-9, and Dillinger, "Bose
Leute", 197, who notes that witches could be perceived by their neighbours as showing
any of the following negative emotions or attributes: anger, envy, vengefulness,
deceitfulness, roguishness, overbearing pride, or aggression.
89 Gaskill, 'Witchcraft in Early Modern Kent', 283-4; Walz, Hexenglaubeund magische Kommunikation,304-5.
72
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
the high or middlingranksof villagerspursuedaccusationsagainst
the wives of members of the higher ranks of their communities
with a ruthlessness which their judicial overlords were often
powerless to stop, even when they desired to do so.90That the
ages of the committee membersidentifiedby Rummel tended to
rangefrom twenty to forty, with those of accusedwitches ranging
between fifty and seventy, supports the idea advanced by
Macfarlanethat witchcraft accusationscould run along lines of
generationalconflict.91However, Rummel'swork shows that the
old might be resented by the young not becausethey were poor
and dependent but rather because they were powerful and
wealthy. Perhapsthe roots of any generationalconflictapparently
surfacing in some witchcraft accusationsare to be sought, not
only in the relative economic positions of younger accusersand
older witches, but also in the fact that early modern society was
structuredculturallyand socially in ways which tried generally
to ensure and justify the subordinationof the young to the old.92
Witchcraftaccusationsmight thus enable younger members of
society legitimately to express hostility rather than deference
towardsthe old, and also in certaininstancesto attacktheir social
and economic power in more concrete ways. The witch-trials
involving childrenand adolescentswho accusedadults of having
seduced them into witchcraft fit this typology most obviously,
but such hostility expressedconsciouslyor subconsciouslyby the
youngeragainstthe older within a communitymight occur at any
stage of life, might be aimedat men as well as women, and might
be indicative of rivalries between households rather than individuals.93I am thus not convincedthat we should understandthe
intergenerationalconflict which may have played a role in some
witchcraft accusations as revolving so exclusively around the
mother-childrelationship,and as so linked to feelings of hostility
and anxiety projectedby accusersonto women perceived to be
90Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei', 96-7; Rummel, Bauern,
Herren und Hexen, 257-84, 294-8, 301-21.
91
Rummel, Bauern, Herrenund Hexen, 311-12; see n. 80 for Macfarlane.
92 Rummel discusses these ideas in
Bauern, Herrenund Hexen, 311-13.
93 These ideas are discussed in
Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,esp. ch. 5. For
discussion of witch-trials involving children, see ibid., chs. 3-5; Rainer Walz, 'Kinder
in Hexenprozessen: Die GrafschaftLippe, 1654-1663', in Gisela Wilbertz et al. (eds.),
Hexenverfolgungund Regionalgeschichte:Die GrafschaftLippe im Vergleich(Bielefeld,
1994); Wolfgang Behringer, 'Kinderhexenprozesse: Zur Rolle von Kindern in der
Geschichte der Hexenverfolgung', Zeitschriftfur HistorischeForschung,xvi (1989);
Hartwig Weber, Hexenprozessegegen Kinder (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, 2000).
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
73
malevolent mothers as the work of various historians on the
psychic motivationsof witchcraftaccusationshas suggested.94
The analysis by Dillinger of the witchcraft accusationsmade
against Diederich Flade, vice-governor (Statthalter)of Trier,
between 1587 and 1589, and ChristophWendlervon Bregenroth,
vice-governor of Hohenberg, between 1594 and 1608, also suggests that economic and political success rather than poverty
could renderan individualmore liableto suspicionsof witchcraft.
Dillinger suggests that the two vice-governors became increasingly suspectedas witches within their communitiesbecausethey
consistently failed to live up to communalexpectations of how
men in their position should behave:they were corruptand selfinterested in the execution of their duties, and greedy in their
financialdealings, accumulatingpersonal wealth at the expense
of others during times of economic crisis. Becausethey appeared
to be motivated by self-interest rather than a desire for the
common good, they were regarded as aggressive and ruthless,
types of behaviour which were perceived as indicationsof the
likely identity of an individualas a witch becausethey threatened
traditionalcommunal norms and because witches were generally understood to be characterizedparticularlyby their hardheartedness.95
Dillinger implies that this way of thinking about witches was
relevant only in cases where elite men were drawn into the web
of accusations.However, the evidence from Rothenburgand its
hinterlandsuggests that resentmentand envy of the real or perceived success of their neighbourson the part of accuserswere
also amongstthe most importantfeelings in encouragingaccusers
to explain this success in terms of witchcraftand thus to imagine
neighboursof highersocialand economicstatusas witches.96This
way of imaginingwitches also made a great deal of sense in terms
94 See, for
example, Purkiss, Witchin History,esp. ch. 4; Deborah Willis, Malevolent
Nurture: Witch-Huntingand Maternal Powerin Early ModernEngland(Ithaca, 1995);
Roper, 'Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany'; Nancy Hayes,
'Negativizing Nurture and Demonizing Domesticity: The Witch Construct in Early
Modern Germany', in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds.), Maternal Measures:
Figuring Caregivingin the Early ModernPeriod (Aldershot, 2000).
95JohannesDillinger, 'Richter als Angeklagte: Hexenprozesse gegen herrschaftliche
Amtstrager in Kurtrier und Schwabisch-Osterreich', in Helga Schnabel-Schiile (ed.),
VergleichendePerspektiven, Perspektiven des Vergleichs: Studien zur europaischen
Geschichtevon der Spdtantikebis ins 20. Jahrhundert(Mainz, 1998); Dillinger, "Bose
Leute", 206-33.
96See
Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,chs. 1, 5, for further detail.
74
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
of the still-prevalentnotion that there were only limited amounts
of materialgoods and good fortune availablein any community:
the successof one individualwas thus often understoodas having
been attained by magical means and at the expense of another.
The apparentlygreatersuccessof a neighbourin relationto one's
own could be imagined around any of the productive or reproductive activities in which early modern households engaged:
aroundchildbearingand rearing,for example, or the production
of milk, butter and cheese from dairy cattle, or the generationof
income from any number of sources which were not necessarily
gender-specificto either women or men.97Some idea of how this
way of imagininga witch worked, and of how women as well as
men might plausibly be imagined as ruthless, greedy and thus
witch-like because of their economic dealings, can be gleaned
from the trial of AppoloniaGlaitterin 1671.
There is much evidence to suggest that Appoloniawas wealthy
in reality. She was able to marryfour times, with Georg Glaitter
and in 1671
bringinga portion of fifty gulden to their marriage,98
she owned eleven cows, probably more than anyone else in
She probablyproducedbutterand cheese
Windisch-Bockenfeld.99
seems to have owned her own plough-team
for sale at market,100
of oxen,101and sold steers that were surplusto her own requirements to townspeople and butchers,102perhaps making a profit
from the burgeoningcattle tradethat Tom Robisheauxhas shown
emerging in south-west Germany in the late seventeenth century.103When Georg Glaitter fled their marital home after her
trial he took - in addition to his own clothes, some of her
clothes, and twenty-five gulden in cash - seventy ells of cloth,
and clothingbelongingto the tavern-keeperof Leuzendorf,which
suggests that Appolonia may also have been involved in pawnIbid.,esp. ch. 5.
RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, letter from the Schrotzbergauthorities to the council
of Rothenburg, 24 Sept. 1671.
99 Ibid., statement by cowherd Hans Michel Hartlieb, 15 July 1671.
100Ibid., statements by Maria Gruber, 26 July 1671, and KatharinaMaier, 29 July
1671; interrogation of Appolonia, 27 July 1671.
101Ibid., statement by Michael Klenckh, 26 July 1671; interrogation of Appolonia,
27 July 1671.
102
Ibid., statement by Georg Christoph Bezold, 24 July 1671.
103
Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Searchfor Order in Early Modern
Germany(Cambridge, 1989), 254-6.
97
98
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
75
broking or trade in cloth or clothing.104That the Klenckhs may
have been in a less advantageoussituation than Appolonia economicallywas suggestedby her commentin custody that Michael
Klenckh 'had squandered his property, so that other widows
must give theirs instead',105perhapsto support the Klenckhs or
more probablyto make up the tax quota imposedby Rothenburg
on Windisch-Bockenfeld.That the Klenckhsmay have been envious of Appoloniawas suggested in her assertionthat the accusations against her were the work of 'evil people, who begrudge
her everythinggood'.106
What was probably more important than Appolonia's actual
wealth, however, was the Klenckhs' feeling that she prospered
at their expense. In addition to the laming of Endres's daughter
Eva, the Klenckhs alleged that Appolonia was responsible for
significantmateriallosses and problemsrelatingto their livestock.
Michael Klenckh blamed Appoloniaand her mother before her
for all the harm that had befallen his cattle in the time that the
two familieshad lived in close proximity.107 He also claimedthat
Appoloniawas able to control her plough-teamswhen he could
not ploughproperly,the implicationbeing that her skill depended
on magic and worked only at his expense.108The belief that
Appolonia was unusually skilled in controlling steers was also
attestedto by townsmanGeorgChristophBezold, who explained
that, after a steer which he had purchasedfrom her had fallen
ill, it had refused to respondto anyoneuntil Appoloniahad come
into its stall and called to it.109Appolonia plausibly countered
both of these allegations, explaining in terms that were very
unflatteringto MichaelKlenckhthat she could plough better than
him because he was lazy and she was hard-workingand pious,
and that Bezold's steer had respondedto her becauseit had been
raised by her from birth and therefore had recognized her
voice.11 In both instances,however, her unusualdegreeof success
104 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, petition on Appolonia's behalf from Hans Michel
Ackermann, 15 July 1671.
105Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 1 Aug. 1671: 'der Klenck sey ein falscher
mann, hab das seinige verthun, das hergegen andere Wittweiber das ihrige geben
miissen'.
106 Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 21 July 1671: 'b6se leiith, die ihr nicht gutes
gonnen'.
107
Ibid., statement by Michael Klenckh, 18 July 1671.
108
Ibid., statement by Michael Klenckh, 26 July 1671.
109
Ibid., statement by Georg Christoph Bezold, 24 July 1671.
110
Ibid., interrogations of Appolonia, 27 July, 1 Aug. 1671.
76
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
with and control over her animals in relation to those of other
people was imagined as possible or actual witchcraft. What is
interestingin the case of Appoloniais that, while she was believed
by former maidservantsto be unusually successful at dairying
and to have achievedthis success by magicalmeans,11her power
over livestock was also imaginedin relationto steers and ploughanimals. This hints at the idea that it could be success with
livestock more broadly understood, rather than just success in
the particularly female-dominated sphere of dairying, which
encouragedothers to believe a woman was a witch."2
There is also evidence to suggest that the business methods
employed by Appoloniawere perceived as dubious and ruthless
because they were believed to work to her own benefit at the
expense of others. Her formermaidservantMariaGruberclaimed
that Appoloniahad docked her wages of an unreasonableamount
of money after she had rolled a barrelof butter down the cellarsteps and broken it. She was still so resentful of the fact that
Appoloniahad not paid her all the money she believed was her
due when she left her servicethatshe had subsequentlychallenged
Appolonia about this when they had met at the market in
Rothenburg, but had given up pursuing her claim against her
formermistressafter Appoloniahad allegedlythreatenedto harm
her."3 Gruberalso claimedthat she had been horrifiedto see that
Appolonia had mixed the milk of a sick cow with that of her
healthycattle, which had then been turnedinto butterand cheese
for householdconsumptionand sale. Appoloniaadmittedthat she
had done this, but only before realizingthat the beast had been
ill. As soon as she had realized it was ill she had sold it for
slaughterto a butcher who, she insisted, had been satisfiedwith
the purchase."4This sense that Appolonia was a shrewd businesswomanwho drove what othersmight regardas a hardbargain
and who managedto overcome potential losses was also evident
in the more ambivalent testimony given by Georg Christoph
Bezold about the steer he had bought from her. He conceded
that Appoloniahad been perfectly willing to take back the steer
after it had fallen ill and to reimburse what he had spent on
11 Ibid., statements
by Maria Gruber, 26 July 1671, and Margaretha Lang,
29 July 1671.
112 Diane Purkiss
suggests a strong connection between women, dairying and ways
of imagining witchcraft in The Witch in History, ch. 4.
113 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, statement by Maria Gruber, 26 July 1671.
114
Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 27 July 1671.
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
77
trying to restore the animal's health. However, he implied that
the fact that the steer had fallen ill so soon after being sold to
him was evidence of sharppracticeby Appolonia,and added that
Appolonia had anyway been able to slaughterthe steer and sell
the meat herself, presumablyin order to recoup her losses.115
A crucialfactor in encouragingearly modernpeople to believe
more strongly that one of their neighbours was a witch was
behaviourby the latter which appearedto clash consistentlywith
the ideals of everyday, interpersonalcommunal living.116 This
behaviourmight come in myriad forms but, in so far as it was
relatedto socialand economicstatus, might just as easily manifest
itself in the actions of the successful and wealthy as in those of
the materiallydependent. What may have been crucialin either
case was a sense on the part of neighboursthat such actionswere
too aggressive;again, it was the way in which the behaviourof
the reputed witch was interpreted, rather than the behaviour
alone, which was of most importance.It may have been the case
that, in those early modern European communities which had
developed more capitalistic agrarian practices and forms of
exchange, the materiallydependentwere seen as more of a problem by those with most social and political power, while in
communitieswhere such practices and forms of exchange were
less well developed and understood and where the traditional
ideal of the common good held stronger sway, the thrusting,
wealthy entrepreneur was more likely to be imagined as a
witch.117 Given that communal norms and ideals were highly
contested by different social groups within towns and villages,
even in the early sixteenth century,"8 both ways of imagining
witches (along with others) could probablycoexist in most communities. The question of who was most likely to be accused,
tried and perhaps executed as a witch thus rested ultimatelyon
other variables,such as whether there was sufficientneighbourhood consensus against a suspected individual, whether the
115
Ibid., statement by Georg Christoph Bezold, 24 July 1671.
See Labouvie, Zauberei und Hexenwerk, 182-3; Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit
Hexen und Hexerei'.
117
I am very grateful to my colleague, Jeremy Krikler, for making me think more
critically about comparative economic development and its possible role in witchcraft beliefs.
118 On this point for early modern Germany, see Lyndal Roper's ground-breaking
"'The Common Man", "The Common Good", "Common Women": Gender and
Meaning in the German Reformation Commune', Social Hist., xii (1987).
116
78
PASTAND PRESENT
NUMBER173
judicial elites were willing to take accusations seriously, or
whether there were judicialmechanismswhich members of the
lower orders might use on their own initiative against alleged
witches.19 So while old, poor women were numbered amongst
the accused,to suggest that this was primarilybecausethey were
old and poor is to oversimplifymassivelythe complexrelationship
between age, gender, social and economic status and the relative
vulnerabilityof different individualsto suspicionsof witchcraft.
IV
LENGTHOF REPUTATION
Like many of those accused of witchcraft in non-panic trialepisodes, AppoloniaGlaitterhad been reputed a witch for years
before the Klenckhsaccusedher formallyin 1671. Evidencefrom
England, Scotland,the duchy of Lorraineand parts of Germany
shows that accused witches often had reputationsof fifteen to
forty years' duration by the time they were tried;120Walz, for
example, notes that women with lengthy reputationsfor witchcraft constitutedthe majorityof all women accusedof witchcraft
in the duchy of Lippe during the early modern period.12'In
Rothenburg,just over half of all the women accusedof witchcraft
had pre-existing reputations as witches and in around half of
these cases witnesses testified to the length of these reputations:
they rangedin durationfrom six to many years, with the numerical average working out at approximately eighteen years.122
Witnesses in the trial of Appolonia Glaitter talked variously of
her having had a reputationas a witch for twenty years, for over
thirty years, in one case even for forty-five years, or for as long
as they could recall,123but her reputationfor workingwitchcraft
seems to have crystallizedchiefly aroundevents which occurred
119
Such as the witch-hunting committees described by Rummel; see nn. 90-2.
120Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart
England, 162; Julian Goodare,
'Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland', Social Hist., xxiii (1998), 290, n. 8; Briggs,
Witchesand Neighbours,22-3, 264; Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,167.
121
Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,300-2.
122
See Rowlands, 'Stereotypes and Statistics', for more detail on these figures.
123 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, statements by Endres Klenckh, 11 July 1671, and
Adam Horn, 14 July 1671 (thirty years); Hans Deeg of Funkstatt, 26 July 1671
(twenty years); Michel Rekes of Standorf, 26 July 1671 (as long as he could recall);
MargarethaKraft, 5 Aug. 1671 (forty-five years).
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
79
in 1637, which would have meant that she had been reputed a
witch for at least aroundthirty-fouryears by 1671.124
This evidence lends weight to the point made by Briggs that
'age at the time of the trial is an artefactof the whole process by
which reputations were built up';125 in other words, that the
advancedage of an alleged witch at the time of trial may simply
have been the result of the fact that the gap between the point
at which she first gained a reputation as a witch within her
communityand the point at which she might perhaps,but by no
meansinevitably,be accusedformallyof witchcraftby her neighbours could be a long one. Ratherthan focusing simply on trying
to explainwhy certainindividualswere formallyaccusedof witchcraft, then, and on whether and in what ways this vulnerability
to formal accusationwas linked to age (or gender or social or
economic status or any of the other variablesthat ideally ought
to be taken into account), the fact that formal accusationswere
often the culminationof a lengthy period during which suspects
were reputed and rumouredto be witches should encourageus
to ask a series of different questions. Why and at what age did
an individualfirst gain a reputationas a witch? Why did it take
so long for formal accusations to be brought against reputed
witches by their neighbours?And why were some, but by no
meansall, reputedwitches finallyformallyaccusedof witchcraft?
Moreover, given that early modern witchcraftwas very much in
the eye of the beholder, in thinking about each stage of this
possiblylengthy processwe need to focus as much on the behaviour, personalitiesand emotions of her accusers in their interactions with the alleged witch as we do on those of the alleged
witch herself. If the sourcesto do so are available,these questions
are best answeredby meansof detailedreconstructionof as much
of the pre-trial story of the alleged witch's life and allegedly
conflictualrelationshipswith her neighboursas possible, and by
the densest contextualizationof specificcases and their protagonists as possible. I can do little more than suggest a few points in
answer to each question here.
The work of various Germanwitchcrafthistorianshas shown
the potentially contingent nature of the first attribution of a
reputationfor witchcraftto a particularindividual.For example,
Walz, Rummel and Dillinger argue that belief in witchcraftwas
124The events of 1637 are discussed in detail later.
125Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,264.
80
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
so widespreadand so flexible in early modern Germanythat a
very broadrange of types of behaviouron the part of one neighbour might be interpretedas acts of witchcraftby another.Once
such an initial interpretationhad been made, the level of surveillance of the allegedwitch by her neighboursincreased,as did the
probabilitythat more of her words and deeds might be perceived
as malevolentand as furtherevidenceof her identityas a witch.126
The likelihoodof a woman first acquiringa reputationas a witch
and of this becoming stronger over time was greater if, as
Rummel, Dillinger and Labouviesuggest, she enjoyeda particularly conflict-riddenor problematicrelationshipwith others, in
which they felt constantlyat a disadvantagein relationto her, or
if she was perceivedby othersto be particularlyhostile, vengeful,
graspingor aggressive in her social relationshipsin ways which
appeared to challenge the norms of communal life - factors
which I have already indicated were also central to the way in
which witches were imaginedin Rothenburg.127In commonwith
other historiansof witchcraft,these scholarsalso all point to the
importance of the relationship of an individual to an already
executed or suspected witch in encouragingothers to suspect
them of witchcraft, because witchcraft was widely believed by
contemporariesto be an art taughtby the initiatedto the uninitiated.28 This belief was also very importantin Rothenburgand
its hinterland. There witchcraft was more frequently imagined
to be passed on by mothers to daughtersbut, precisely because
it was believed to be a learnedart, it could also be imaginedas
something taught and acquired by male blood-relativesand by
in-laws and unrelatedhousehold members and acquaintancesof
both genders. 29
All of these factors which increasedthe likelihoodof a person
gaining a reputation for witchcraft or which strengthened an
individual'salreadyextant reputationcould be influentialregard126Walz, Hexenglaube und mlagischeKommunikation,esp. 47; Rummel, 'Vom
Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei', esp. 84-6, 91-3, 97-8, 101-2; Dillinger, "Bose
Leute", 184-96.
127Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei', 94-8; Dillinger, "BdseLeute",
196-229; Labouvie, Zaubereiund Hexenwerk,182-3.
128Walz, HexenglaubeundmagischeKommunikation,
300-1; Rummel, Bauern,Herren
und Hexen, 259-60; Dillinger, "Bose Leute", 204-5; Labouvie, Zauberei und
Hexenwerk, 168-9; David Warren Sabean, The Power in the Blood: Popular Culture
and Village Discoursein Early Modern Germany(Cambridge, 1984; paperback edn,
1987), 107-8.
129
See Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,for further detail.
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
81
less of the age of the reputed witch; what is strikingin the cases
from Rothenburgand its hinterlandwhere length of reputation
was mentioned was the relatively young age - often in their
twenties or thirties - at which women were first suspected of
witchcraft.130This was particularlythe case in those instancesin
which alleged witches were shown to be related in some way to
other reputed witches. For example, alleged witches whose
mothers had also been reputed witches might be able to trace
their own reputationsback at least to their twenties or thirties,131
while BabeleinKuch of Hilgartshausen,who came from a maternal dynasty of alleged witches, was aged only thirteen when
accused of attending a witches' dance in 1587.132 Women who
gained reputationsas witches as a result of marryingratherthan
being born into reputedwitch familiesalso riskedgainingreputations themselves in their twenties, given that the average age at
firstmarriagefor women in the regionwas aroundtwenty-four.133
The degree to which their reputationswere likely to remainwith
them and to strengthen then depended on the length of the
marriageand/orthe amountof contactthey had with other members of the alleged witch family, however.'34Finally, maidservants were also at risk of gaining reputationsas witches at an
early age by working for mistresseswho were alreadyreputed as
130
See Rowlands, 'Stereotypes and Statistics', for further detail.
This was probably the case for Anna and Appolonia Kellner of Finsterlohr,
whose mother had been reputed a witch for at least twenty-nine years before being
tried in 1563: see RStA Urfehdenbuch A847, fos. 353v-355v; RStA Urgichtenbuch
A861, fos. 497r-517r. Anna Weh of Oberstetten was described as young in 1582 when
she was accused of witchcraft by a neighbour; both her mother and grandmother
were reputed witches: see RStA Urfehdenbuch A853, fos. 393r-394r; RstA
Urgichtenbuch A875, fos. 186r-229v.
132 See RStA Urfehdenbuch A855, fos. 446V-447v; RstA Urgichtenbuch A877, fos.
532r-579v. Maria Rampendahl - the last person to be tried for witchcraft in Lemgo
in 1681, aged thirty-six - had probably been reputed a witch since the age of
eight, when her paternal grandmother had been executed for witchcraft: see Gisela
Wilbertz, 'Hexenverfolgung und Biographie: Person und Familie der Lemgoerin
Maria Rampendahl (1645-1705)', in Wilbertz et al. (eds.), Hexenverfolgungund
Regionalgeschichte,157.
133
See, for example, the case of MargarethaHorn from Rothenburg's hinterland
village of Bettenfeld: RStA Urgichtenbuch A898, fos. 485r-535v, Bettenfeld Dorfakten
A491, fos. 43r-57r, and discussed in Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,ch. 6. This
average age at first marriage is taken from Robisheaux's data for the seventeenth
century from the county of Hohenlohe, which bordered Rothenburg's hinterland: see
Rural Societyand the Searchfor Order, 115-16. Unfortunately no demographicanalysis
of this kind has been done for Rothenburg or its hinterland.
134 This was made
explicit in relation to MargarethaHorn of Bettenfeld: see RStA
Urgichtenbuch A898, fo. 518r-v.
131
82
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
witches, given that service could start for girls at twelve and
commonlycontinueduntil their mid-to-late twenties. One young
woman who had worked for Appolonia Glaitter had left her
serviceearlyin 1650in orderto escapethe stigmaof her mistress's
reputation,'35while a twenty-three-year-oldmaidservantfrom
the village of Wettringen called BarbaraBratsch was formally
accusedof witchcraftin 1652 along with her mistressand master,
who were aged fifty-three and sixty-three respectively.136 All of
this suggests that an individualcould be imagined by others as
an actualor potentialwitch from a surprisinglyearly age in early
modern Germany.Dillinger even has an example of neighbours
asserting that a twenty-five-year-old man had been reputed a
witch for forty years - from before his birth, in other words so powerful was the stigma of being born into a reputed witch
family.'37One intriguing conundrumis whether the increasing
prevalencein Germanwitch-trialsof the late sixteenthand seventeenth centuryof self-confessedchild-witchesinfluencedpopular
witch-beliefsto the extent thatpeople were morelikely to imagine
others as witches from increasinglyyoung ages, or whether the
long-standingpopularbelief in witchcraftas a learnedart passed
on within householdshelped ensure that the confessionsof these
child-witcheswere taken so seriouslywhen they were made.'38I
favour the latter interpretation,and suggest that we should not
see witch-trialsinvolving allegedly bewitched or possessed child
accusersand those involving adult accusersas somehow qualitatively different, but rather as stemming from the same set of
popularbeliefs in witchcraftas a learnedart into which the young
were seduced by their elders.
Severalwitnesses in the trial of AppoloniaGlaittertraced her
reputationfor witchcraftback to aroundthe year 1637, when she
would have been twenty-two years old and when she had taken
on a servant called AndreasHorn, whom she had subsequently
allegedly lamed. Horn was dead by 1671 but his son Adam
from Lichtel, his sixty-five-year-old brother Michel from
Kleinbarenweiler,and a fifty-year-old man called Michel Rekes
135
This was Margaretha, who was married to Barthel Lang of Gammesfeld by
1671: see RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statement made on 29 July 1671. Appolonia
allegedly followed her telling her she was a fool and had nothing to fear.
136StAN Rothenburg Repertorium 200/III Konsistorialakten, vol. 2087, fos.
I -164r.
137
138
Dillinger, "Bise Leute", 204-5.
See n. 93 for literature on child-witch trials in early modern Germany.
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
83
from Standorfall testifiedon his behalf againstAppoloniaduring
her trial. They claimed that Horn had told them that Appolonia
had bewitched him because he had refused to have sex with
her after she had grabbedhis penis one day while he was going
about his chores. Despite having begged Appolonia to lift the
bewitchmentin 1637, Horn's lamenesshad never been cured and
he had left her service to become an itineranttinker and then a
herdsmanin the nearby village of Metzholz, while continuingto
voice his suspicions against her.139 She insisted during her trial
in 1671that Horn had had the plaguebeforejoiningher household
and that his leg was already badly ulcerated as a result of the
disease when he came into her service.140It is unclear exactly
what caused Horn to blame his affliction on Appolonia;it may
have been resentmenton his part at her allegedattemptto seduce
him, envy of her economic and social status relative to his, or
simply the fact that she happened to be his mistress at the time
when his leg was afflictinghim most and when he was having to
come to terms with the fact that he would be lame and in pain
for the rest of his life. Michael Klenckh claimed in 1671 that
Appolonia'slong-deadmotherhadalso been a witch, which would
have predisposedHorn to imagine Appoloniaas the cause of his
lameness and the Klenckhs to imagine her as the cause of their
loss of livestock, althoughno witnesses apartfrom Klenckh corroboratedthis claim.14 Both Horn and Klenckhhad also obtained
confirmationof their suspicions against Appolonia from several
of the most renownedlocal cunning men and Horn had persisted
in believing that Appoloniawas a witch even on his deathbed.142
A defining moment in his relationshipwith Appolonia seems
to have occurred for Endres Klenckh in about 1641, when he
was twelve and she twenty-six. Endres had been in her service,
which suggests that relations between the two households were
still reasonablyamicable at that time, when one night he had
heard strange cries from Appolonia's bedchamber which had
preventedhim from sleeping. He claimedin 1671 that Appolonia
had called him into her bedchamberto tell him that 'the Devil
139 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statements by Adam Horn, 14 July 1671; Michel
Rekes, 26 July 1671; Michel Horn, 31 July 1671.
140
Ibid., interrogations of Appolonia, 18 July, 1 Aug. 1671.
141
Ibid., statement by Michael Klenckh, 18 July 1671.
142
Ibid., statements by Adam Horn about his father, 14 July 1671; by Michael
Klenckh, 18 July 1671; by Michel Horn about his brother, 31 July 1671; and interrogation of Appolonia, 18 July 1671.
84
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
had been there and beaten her [becausehe] particularlylikes to
torment fat women', and to tell Endres to get into bed with
her.143Her husbandhad been away at the time. Appoloniaconfirmed that she had cried out that night, but because she herself
had been pressed by a witch, and denied that the Devil had been
in her bedchamber.'44It is possible to imagine her having made
the comment about the Devil and fat women in 1641 as a joke
to comfort twelve-year-old Endres, although in so doing she
might merely have confirmedhis pre-existing fear that she was
a witch. She may also have taken him into her bed to comfort
him, although Endres may have come to believe or claim that
this had happened as further proof of - or wishful thinking
about - an apparentsexual aggressionon the part of Appolonia
which may have been imagined as paralleling her perceived
aggressionin social and economicexchanges,and which was also
suggested by the long-rememberedallegationby AndreasHorn
that Appolonia had grabbed hold of his penis.145In addition to
various members of the Klenckh family, the witnesses who testified for the deceasedHorn, and MariaGruber(the formermaidservantof Appolonia),the other key witnesses who were willing
to testify againstAppoloniain relationto specificacts of maleficium
in 1671 were a man named Hans Schmidt, who claimed that
Appolonia had bewitched him at the age of twelve in the late
1640s,and seventeen-year-oldHansMichelHartlieb,the cowherd
of Windisch-Bockenfeld,who claimed that Appolonia had also
lamed him in the spring of 1671.146
As the trial of Appolonia Glaitterillustrates,reputed witches
could live for years and often decades in communitiesin which
some of their neighbours believed them to be witches before
being formally accused of witchcraft. This was because, outside
the sporadic'panic' episodesof witch-trials,most people in early
modern Europe regarded the law as the weapon of last resort
against the alleged witches in their midst and used a variety of
extra-legalmethods for coping with them instead, while alleged
witches and their families also had various strategies that they
143Ibid., statement by Endres Klenckh, 15 July 1671: 'es were der teufel ... da
gewesen und sie geschlagen, er setze eben den dickhen Weibern hart zu'.
144
Ibid., interrogation of Appolonia, 18 July 1671.
145 As recounted
by Michel Horn and Michel Rekes in 1671: see above, n. 139,
for details.
146 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statements
by Hans Schmidt, 14 July 1671, and by
Hans Michel Hartlieb, 15 July 1671.
AND OLD WOMEN
WITCHCRAFT
85
could employ to defend themselves against rumoursand formal
accusationsof witchcraft.Popularrestraintin using the law against
witches is discussedin detail in my forthcomingbook on witchtrials in Rothenburg,where it was significantlyreinforcedby the
lack of enthusiasm evinced by the city council for hunting
witches,147but is also demonstrated,for example, by Briggs for
the duchy of Lorraine,by Behringerfor early modern Bavaria,
and by Walz for the county of Lippe.148It was primarily this
popularcautionin using the law againstwitches and the defence
strategies available to alleged witches which accounted for the
fact that women were often middle-agedor old by the time they
were formallyaccusedas witches. The prelude to formalaccusation was frequentlya long and complex process of the spreading
and counteringof harmfulrumoursabout alleged witches within
and between communitiesby meansof which a significantenough
weight of opinion in favour of legal action needed to be reached
before such action could be taken.149
The final decision to accuse Appolonia was almost certainly
made by the Klenckhs;in 1671 Appoloniaaccusedthem of organizing the entire case againsther,150and it is striking that Endres
Klenckh was careful to refer to the alleged laming of both Hans
Michel Hartlieb and the deceased Andreas Horn in addition to
that of his own daughter,Eva, by Appoloniain his first statement
to the council, in order to build as broada case as possibleagainst
her.151It is less clear exactly why the Klenckhs chose July 1671
to attack Appolonia, however. First, they may simply have run
out of patiencewith the fact that they lived in such close proximity
to someonethey believed to be a witch, particularlyas the laming
of Eva Klenckh appearsto have been the first direct attack on a
147
Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft,chs. 1-2.
Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation;and also Robin Briggs,
'Verteidigungsstrategien gegen Hexereibeschuldigungen: Der Fall Lothringen', in
Franz and Irsigler (eds.), Methoden und Konzepte der historischenHexenforschung;
Briggs, Witches and Neighbours;Wolfgang Behringer, Hexenverfolgungin Bayern:
Volksmagie,Glaubenseiferund Staatsrdsonin der Frihen Neuzeit (Munich, 1987), trans.
J. C. Grayson and David Lederer, WitchcraftPersecutionsin Bavaria: PopularMagic,
ReligiousZealotry and Reason of State in Early ModernEurope(Cambridge, 1997).
149See especially Walz, Hexenglaubeund magischeKommunikation,for an excellent
discussion of the lengthy and complex communication processes by means of which
such rumours were strengthened and resisted, and Rummel, 'Vom Umgang mit Hexen
und Hexerei', for an excellent discussion of how and why a consensus in favour of
formal accusation might be built up within a community.
"0RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, interrogation of Appolonia, 21 July 1671.
151
Ibid., statement by Endres Klenckh, 11 July 1671.
148See
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER173
Klenckh family member as opposed to the family's livestock.
Secondly,they may have thoughtthatthe opportunityfor a formal
accusationoffered by the alleged laming of cowherd Hartliebby
Appolonia was too good to miss. Hartlieb was exceptionally
importantto the Klenckhsas a witness againstAppoloniabecause
he was alive (unlikeAndreasHorn), unrelatedto MichaelKlenckh
(who openly admitted the enmity which he and his family felt
against Appolonia), and willing to testify against her (at least
initially).'52Thirdly, the possibility that Georg Glaitterwas not
wholeheartedlysupportiveof his wife may have further encouraged them to make the accusationagainsther when they did.153
Finally, there is also the possibilitythat, becauseof her age, the
Klenckhs may have imagined the magical powers supposedly
possessed by Appoloniaand the threat that these posed to their
own physicaland economicwell-beingas being particularlystrong
in the late 1660sand early 1670s.EarlymodernGermandepictions
of the stages of life as a series of ascendingand descendingsteps
put men and women aged fifty at the apex,'54 while David
Sabean's work on the south German village of Neckarhausen
suggests that men aged between forty-five and fifty-four dominated the village in terms of property held from 1700 to 1870.155
These scraps of evidence about the imagined and actual power
accordedto people aged aroundfifty, coupled with the fact that
AppoloniaGlaitterwas still obviously exercising significanteconomic influence in 1671 in Windisch-Bockenfeldand beyond,
may supportthe idea suggestedby Robin Briggsthat women may
have been more vulnerableto accusationsof witchcraftbetween
the ages of forty and sixty becausethis was when their power as
allegedwitches may have been believed by certainof their neighbours to be at its peak.'56
AppoloniaGlaitterowed her releasefrom custodyin September
1671 to the fact that the Rothenburg councillorshad the good
sense to seek and then adhere to advice from the legal faculty of
152 Michael Klenckh admitted his
enmity against Appolonia to the councillors on
26 July 1671: RStA Urgichtenbuch A908. Hartlieb testified on 15 July 1671, but had
fled to Schrotzberg in the county of Hohenlohe by 21 July 1671: ibid., letter from
Schrotzberg authorities of that date.
153 For discussion of this
point, see section on marital status.
154 See Richard van
Dillmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Friihen Neuzeit, vol. 1, Das
Haus und seine Menschen(Munich, 1990), 199, 226, for examples.
155David Warren Sabean, Property, Productionand Family in Neckarhausen,17001870 (Cambridge, 1990), 256-8.
156
Briggs, Witchesand Neighbours,264.
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
87
Tiibingen University, the first time in the history of the trial of
witches in the city that such a consultationhad taken place.157
The advice provided by the Tiibingen jurists was very scathing
of the case brought by the Klenckhs against Appolonia. They
pointed out that all of the testimony supportingthe claim made
by Andreas Horn that Appolonia had bewitched him and from
which her reputationas a witch chiefly stemmed was extremely
weak becauseit was hearsay,as Horn himselfwas deadby 1671.158
The testimonygiven by the Klenckhswas also weakenedsignificantly in their eyes because of the fact that Michael Klenckh
had openly admitted to the enmity that he and his family bore
Appolonia.'59The credibilityof both AndreasHorn and Michael
Klenckh was further damaged in the jurists' eyes because they
had both consultedcunningmen for corroborationof their suspicions, actions which not only went againstLutheranteachingon
the proper response to misfortune but which also contravened
directlyclause21 of the imperiallegal code (the Carolina),which
explicitly dismissedevidence obtainedfrom such sources as null
and void.160As for the remainderof the twenty-seven separate
allegationsmade againstAppoloniain the course of her trial, the
Tiubingenjuristsnoted either that they probablyhad other, natural, explanationsand were not the result of witchcraftat all,161
or that they did not constitute sufficient proofs of witchcraft
as these were defined in clause 44 of the Carolina,162or that
Appolonia had adequately purged herself of any suspicions of
guilt by means of the torture that she had already suffered.163
The case againstAppoloniahad also been weakenedsignificantly
by the fact that cowherdHartliebhad fled the city and its environs
midwaythroughproceedings,thus deprivingthe Klenckhsof one
of their most importantco-plaintiffs,164
and by the fact that not
all of those who had allegedlybeen touched by Appolonia'smalevolence were willing to testify against her. The sixty-six-yearold father of Hans Schmidt, for example, refused to corroborate
157 RStA
Urgichtenbuch A908, 19 Aug. 1671. This 43-page document is internally
foliated; nn. 158-63 are referenced accordingly.
158
Ibid., fo. 6r-v.
159
Ibid., fos. 21r-, 31r.
160
Ibid., fos. 8v, 14-v, 21V.
161
See, for example, ibid., fo. 18v, for discussion of Eva Klenckh's lameness.
162
163
164
Ibid., fo. 37r-v.
Ibid., fos. 38r, 41'.
See above, n. 152, for details.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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the claim made by his son that Appoloniahad bewitched him as
a child,165while relatives of the sister of Appolonia'sthird husband, Hans Fuchs, who the Klenckhsclaimedhad been poisoned
to deathby a soup she had eaten while visitingAppoloniain 1665,
were similarlyunwilling or unable to accuse Appoloniadirectly
of having killed her.166Despite their best efforts, then, the
Klenckhs ultimately failed to persuade enough people of sufficient credibility to offer testimony of sufficient weight against
Appolonia in order to be sure of gaining her conviction for
witchcraft.
CONCLUSION
As with many stereotypes, there is an element of truth in the
idea that women of middle or old age were slightly more at risk
of being formallyaccusedof witchcraftthan other people in early
modern Europe. This did not, however, stop people of all ages,
both genders, and all social and economic groups from being
imaginedand accused by others as witches; the idea that witchcraft was a power to do harm which could be taught by the
initiatedto the uninitiatedwas so flexible a concept that it could
accommodateplausiblyany personand any situationof perceived
social conflict in the mind of an accuser. Even when old or
middle-agedwomen were accused as witches, however, a closer
look at their life-stories often reveals that their age at the time
of formal accusationwas just one piece of a far largerand more
complex picture, in which age at first attributionof reputation,
and the gap between this and formal accusation- if the latter
ever occurred- were equally importantand worthy of analysis
and explanation. The likelihood that an individual would first
gain a reputationas a witch, that this would be strengthenedover
the years, and that this would finallylead to a formal accusation
depended on a set of beliefs, emotions and perceptions, social
and economic circumstances and conflicts, and interrelations
between alleged witches and particularneighboursand/or relatives so complex and contingentthat, while certaincarefulgeneralizationscan be posited about them, they can arguablyonly be
teased out and pieced together with any confidenceat the level
165 RStA Urgichtenbuch A908, statement by Georg Schmidt of Hartershofen,
18 July 1671.
166
Ibid., statement by Burkhard Fuchs of Funkstatt, 18 July 1671.
WITCHCRAFT AND OLD WOMEN
89
of the detailed micro-study. An adequatelynuanced history of
the varied and complex relationshipsbetween age, ageing and
vulnerabilityto accusationsof witchcraftwill thus be best written
on the basis of the biographiesof individualalleged witches like
AppoloniaGlaitter.167
University of Essex
Alison Rowlands
167
As has, for example, been pioneered by Gisela Wilbertz in her study of Maria
Rampendahl: see 'Hexenverfolgung und Biographie'.