"By the Strength of Fancie": Witchcraft and the Early Modern Imagination
Author(s): Robin Briggs
Source: Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 3 (Dec., 2004), pp. 259-272
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Folklore115 (December2004): 259-272
THE TWENTY-SECONDKATHARINEBRIGGSMEMORIALLECTURE,
NOVEMBER2003
"By the Strength of Fancie": Witchcraft and
the Early Modern Imagination
Robin Briggs
Abstract
The elite theories of witchcraftin early modern Europe rested on the elaborate
imaginary constructsof scholastic theologians, with their implications about a
cosmic struggle between good and evil. These were reinforcedby a range of
popular beliefs and practices,and by the iconographyof such artists as Bosch,
Grien and Cranach.The imaginaryworld of witchcraftalways tended towards
a Manichean dualism that commanded widespread popular support, but
aroused doubts among the elites. The fears on which it played, of sterility and
dearth, bad mothers, and death, gave it an extraordinaryimaginative appeal,
which also helps to explain its reappearancein modern literature.
Introduction
The obvious first step in response to the flattering invitation to deliver the
KatharineBriggs Lecture was to re-read Pale Hecate'sTeam,and be reminded
what a sensitive and shrewd scholar that much-loved folklorist was. The book
was published in 1962, at a time when few historians knew anything about
witchcraft, and much of what had been written was wildly misleading.
KatharineBriggs displayed astonishingly good judgement in avoiding the numerous mantrapsaround the subject;had she been revising the book today there
is much that she might have wished to add, but virtually nothing in the text that
she would have needed to delete or amend. It is also a book of great charm,
which displays her deep knowledge and love of sixteenth-centuryand seventeenth-centuryliterature,the subject in which she obtained her doctorate from
Oxford. What it does rather curiously lack is any systematic treatment of the
folklore of witchcraft,for this is usually invoked only to explain aspects of the
literary sources. So I hope that may be a sufficient excuse for me to adopt a
similarly oblique approach.
One of the deftest performances in Pale Hecate'sTeamis that which politely
dismisses the eccentricspeculations of MargaretMurray (Briggs 1962, 2-8). The
admirablerecent work by JacquelineSimpson,JulietteWood and CarolineOates
has shown how little Murray'switchcrafttheories had to do with The Folklore
Society, although it does look as if they may have created a kind of collective
embarrassmentsuch that the whole subjectwas sidelined (Simpson 1994, 89-96;
Oates and Wood 1998). Recent numbers of Folkloreshow how much this has
changed, with contributions from those already mentioned, and from such
leading experts as Ronald Hutton, Owen Davies and William de Blecourt.This
is an area in which I believe that folklore specialists can be a great help to
ISSN 0015-587Xprint;1469-8315online/04/030259-14;RoutledgeJournals;Taylor& FrancisLtd
© 2004TheFolkloreSociety
DOI:10.1080/0015587042000284257
260
Robin Briggs
historians; it is not quite so clear to me what goods my tribe can offer in
exchange, beyond a range of printed and archival sources for folk beliefs in the
past. A mere anthology would be an unworthy offering, however, so I have
chosen to explore a theme. Perhaps I should say themes, because the early
modem imagination cannot be reduced to a single strand, any more than the
imaginary and imaginative aspects of witchcraft belief can be.
"By the Strength of Fancie"
"By the strength of fancie" is a phrase taken from a deeply hostile commentary
on the first wave of Matthew Hopkins trials at Chelmsford in July 1645, by
Arthur Wilson, steward of the Puritan Earl of Warwick. There were several
reasons for borrowing this citation from the first chapter of Pale Hecate'sTeam,
where Katharine Briggs herself used it to demonstrate that even Puritans could
be sceptical about witchcraft charges (Briggs 1962, 13). In brief, I think that
ArthurWilson's comments, which I shall cite a little later, give us a keen insight
into early modern ideas both on witchcraft and on the imagination; they also
underline the point that any treatmentof witchcraftmust be incomplete without
a serious attempt to incorporate fantasy. When writing my own general book
about witchcraft it hardly seemed necessary to belabour Margaret Murray
afresh, so the one strong point I made was that her theory was desperately,
leaden-footedly, literal-minded, quite ignoring the power of fantasy. Today I
want to explore some aspects of the problem that I may have underplayed or
omitted when constructing Witches& Neighbours(Briggs 1996, 2002), where the
primary focus was on local society and individual experience. An important
preliminary matter is the meaning of the term imagination, because this is one
of those words whose resonancehas changed markedly over time. The primary
meaning is of course the formation of mental images independently of direct
input from the senses. In the early modern period this was usually seen as a
dangerous source of illusion and error,whereas in recent times imagination has
been linked to the highest creativepowers of the mind. This shift must be linked
to the very differentviews of original and independent thought in the respective
eras. When truth was believed to be absolute and decided by authority, then
originalitywas seen as a presumptuous threat;once intellectualshad come to see
their task as clearing away a mass of old errors it became a term of high praise,
and imagination was revalued alongside it.
The real difficulty of making such a shift can be seen if one looks at one of the
most original and dangerous books of the seventeenth century, burned in the
Bodleian quadranglein 1683 as atheistic and impious (Mintz 1969, 50 and 61-2).
The second chapter of Hobbes's Leviathan is entitled "Of imagination," and it
becomes plain that this great enemy of many received opinions still saw the
imagination partly as a source of corruption and error. He wrote
"IMAGINATIONtherefore is nothing but decayingsense;and is found in men,
and many other living creatures,as well sleeping, as waking" (Hobbes 1960, 9).
Hobbes went on to make the curious assertion that it was identical with
memory, before suggesting that:
Fromthis ignoranceof how to distinguish dreams,and other strong fancies, from vision and
and the EarlyModernImagination
Witchcraft
261
sense, did arise the greatestpart of the religion of the Gentilesin time past, that worshipped
satyrs, fawns, nymphs, and the like; and now-a-days the opinion that rude people have of
fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and of the power of witches. For as of witches, I think not that
their power is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they
have that they can do such mischief,joined with their purpose to do it if they can;their trade
being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science (Hobbes 1960, 12).
The relevance of this passage will become evident as I go on; for now it is
important to add that Hobbes did then associate imagination with understanding, and trains of imaginations with mental discourse, which he further described as "seeking,or the faculty of invention." Here he is evidently moving
towards a more positive view, yet never formulates it very specifically (ibid.
1960, 13-15). At the end of the book, in the section on the Kingdom of Darkness,
he famously described Greek thought as systematic error:
The natural philosophy of those schools was rathera dream than science, and set forth in
senseless and insignificant language; which cannot be avoided by those that will teach
philosophy, without having first attainedgreat knowledge in geometry (Hobbes 1960, 438).
Hobbes's materialism necessitated a massive repudiation of the traditional
world system, and reminds us of the irony that the medieval construction of
reality, with its grandiose truth claims, was almost wholly false. One might well
call it one of the most elaborateworks of the human imagination ever seen, one
which privileged concept affirmationfar above referentialaccuracy.
To a modern eye the whole theory of witchcraftis one of the ultimate follies
emanating from this closed mentality;that is my own fundamentalposition, but
historians must make the effort to be relativists and get inside the times and
phenomena they study, if they are to avoid anachronistic sneering at their
forebears. It is not hard to sympathise with Arthur Wilson, who attended the
trial and execution of eighteen women, then remarked that he:
could see nothing in the evidence which did perswade me to thinke them other than poore,
mellenchollie, envious, mischevous, ill-disposed, ill-dieted, atrabilius constitutions;whose
fancies working by grosse fumes and vapors, might make the imaginationreadie to take any
impression;whereby their anger and envie might vent it selfe into such expressions,as the
hearersof their confessions (who gave evidence) might find cause to beleeve, they were such
people as they blazon'd themselves to bee.
And they themselves, by the strengthof fancie, may thinke they bring such things to passe,
which, many times, unhapelie they wish for, and rejoyce in, when done, out of the
malevolent humour which is in them:which passes with them as if they had reallie acted it.
And, if there be an opinion in the people that such a bodie is a witch, their own feares
(coming where they are) resulting from such dreadful apprehensions, do make everie
shaddow, an apparition;and everie ratt or catt, an imp or spirit (Briggs 1962, 13).
This is an astonishingly acute psychological reading, with its emphasis on the
manner in which these women might come to believe that their ill-will had
directly harmed other people, and on illusions generated by fear. The language
is partly that of the conventional humoural pathology of the day, while the
fancies are associated with physical agencies-fumes and vapours-that transmit them to the imagination.Such expressions are characteristicof early modern
medical argument, a style readily adopted by educated laymen as well as
262
Robin Briggs
doctors. The curious semi-hydraulic system used to explain bodily and mental
functioningwas little more than a set of metaphors,while therapeutictechniques
were pathetically limited, and interventionistdoctors more likely to kill than to
cure. Wise practitioners concentrated on advising healthy lifestyles, but also
made great play with the powers of the imagination;the most famous example
was the theory that pregnant women scared by some non-human agency might
give birth to suitably monstrous children. Another standardcase was that of the
patient who believed they had a creature eating them from within, only to be
cured by a trick, with a snake, other animal, or object supposedly extracted and
shown to them in a bucket. Montaigne uses both these examples in his essay on
the power of the imagination; in the great essay "Of Cripples," he famously
remarked "The witches of my neighbourhood are in mortal danger every time
some new author comes along and attests to the reality of their visions"
(Montaigne 1948, 788). He told of meeting an old woman who had confessed to
being a witch, for whom he would have prescribed hellebore--a herbal treatment for insanity-rather than the poison hemlock. "Afterall, it is putting a very
high price on one's conjecturesto have a man roasted alive because of them"
(Montaigne 1948, 790).
Both Wilson and Montaigne were, in their fashion, following the arguments
advanced by the most famous early critic of witchcraft trials, Johann Weyer, a
Netherlander who trained in France, and ultimately became physician to the
Duke of Cleves. Early medical historians made Weyer into an anachronistic
rationalist hero, with the predictable result that much recent scholarship has
concentrated on his weaknesses and inconsistencies. It has even been argued
that Weyer's 1563 book De PraestigiisDaemonumwas counter-productive,fuelling the persecutionby provoking highly convincing retorts (Baxter1977,55-75).
That strikes me as a double error, which at once underestimates the force of
Weyer's arguments and misconceives the relationship between doctrine and
action. To take the latter point first, there is no clear link between those writers
who advocated sweeping campaigns to eradicatewitches and the messy reality
of what were largely small-scale local persecutions.
ElsewhereI have argued at some length that most trials were instigated within
village communities, while even such unquestioned witch-finders as Hopkins
and Stearne relied heavily on existing suspicions (Briggs 2002). This will come
up obliquely in some of my later remarks,but in this context the more significant
point is that Weyer's critique highlighted a dangerously weak link in all
demonological literature.However much his own defective logic and confusing
presentation left him open to all kinds of attacks, he succeeded in publicising
this one key issue to great effect, although none of his argumentswas truly new,
as his own referencesto a range of mainly Italianthinkers reveal. Weyer is often
misrepresented as having simply identified witches with the mentally ill,
through his argument (following Cardano) that these old women were melancholic. That is really no more than a secondary explanation, one that he
advanced to account for their willingness to confess impossible things, when the
centralpoint was that witches were deluded, and possessed no power to achieve
anything whatsoever. They should be seen as victims of the devil, not his agents,
and as people who needed medical aid and religious instruction rather than
punishment (Weyer 1991).
and the EarlyModernImagination
Witchcraft
263
The idea that the Devil used his immense powers of deception to manipulate
the imaginations of the witches was a commonplace in the writings of witchhunters as well as those of their defenders. The notorious MalleusMaleficarum
of
1487 achieved the bizarre feat of representingwitches as a dangerous sect who
possessed no specific power at all. Weyer was therefore far from original, and
his prominence may be no more than an accident of timing or of publishing
history. In the aftermathof StuartClark'smasterly reconstructionof the intellectual universe of demonology we can see that most authors were taking positions
within an extended debate, whose subject matter and arguments were more or
less common property. As Clark also emphasises, that debate placed
demonology at the centre of many contemporary preoccupations about the
nature of both the world and the divine purpose (Clark1997).Once the issue of
responsibility for evil was raised, witchcraft was plugged into one of the truly
perplexing problems that arises from any monotheistic religion, that technically
known as theodicy. The standardposition was that the Devil could only act with
the permission of God, so that ultimately all evil was at least sanctioned by the
deity. The logical conundrum generated by this stance would appear to defy
solution by any merely human agency, when one remembersthat even Original
Sin was apparently provoked by the Devil. Where witches were concerned the
Gordian knot might be cut by taking the ruthless attitude recommended by
Hobbes, that of punishing individuals for their evil intentions despite their total
inefficacy,but it is hardly surprising that many lawyers and theologians should
have disagreed. A remarkablepassage from a Swiss citizen defending a suspect
as early as 1467 shows us how this might be stated:
On this occasion special attention is requiredbecause it is not just a matter of people who
are accused,imprisoned,and tortured,then under the torturesay one thing when they mean
another, but our lord of Sion should consider the matter very carefully on account of the
simple people who learn from such depositions that the devil and his followers make the
snow, the ice, the storms, and so forth.Yet they do not make them, since they come from the
sole power of God. One must presume that many things have their origin in the dreams of
people who believe in non-existent things (Strobino1996, 145).
He went on to identify the fundamental dualism that always tended to creep
into demonological arguments:
One must also know that accordingto our Catholicfaith the devil can accomplishnothing
without divine permission, and only does that which God permits. Otherwise there would
be two princes in the kingdom of createdthings, God and the devil; that is a hereticalbelief
(Strobino1996, 141).
One might well argue that despite the best efforts of its formidableintellectuals, who included some of the finest logicians of all time, the medieval church
had found it impossible to live up to the exacting demands of pure monotheism.
However many times outright dualist heresies were condemned, most preachers
and legislators, to say nothing of ordinary believers, found it impossible to do
without the cosmic drama of the struggle between good and evil forces. As the
centuries passed they added more and more layers to the symbolic structures
that reinforcedsuch attitudes, while their overt messages disregardedthe subtle
reservations of scholastic theologians. In any case those same theologians had
264
Robin Briggs
tried to deal with the problem of evil by making it necessary to the existence of
good, in a world that actually ran on binary oppositions. The theory known as
concordiadiscorsmight be said to have made inversion a required mode for any
cosmology (Clark 1997, 43-79). In the end the world picture these thinkers
created was a wonderfully complex fiction, a work of the imagination that
merely purported to make sense out of human life and its environment. From
the eleventh century onwards the clericsbuilt up the image of Satan, seen as the
embodiment of the criminal vassal who became a traitor to his master, an
appropriateimage for a feudal society. They also emphasised the importanceof
saints and guardian angels, the great protectors against the demons, as the
imaginary celestial world became inextricably mixed with the everyday one.
Everything combined to build up belief in this parallel world, in which microcosm and macrocosmwere linked by complex networks of correspondencesand
powers. The sacred was a vast source of power, to be invoked against all the
disorders of nature. Human communities were constantly menaced by hostile
externalpowers, so needed to maintain a protective carapaceby assiduous ritual
practice.Witches would eventually come to be seen as a peculiarly grave threat
because they were the secret traitorsthrough whom Satan could break through
the protective barrier.This was a world of splitting and fantasy, of projection
and persecution, dominated by powerful and capricious forces, in which Satan
was the alter ego of the Creator.Ultimately it was a superbly subjective vision,
whose polarised binary logic was uniquely suited to the projection of internal
worlds into these infinitely flexible categories.
Elite Representations of Witchcraft
It is hardly surprising that significant groups among the elites came to feel
deeply uncomfortablewith this almost hallucinatory construct. Some thought
that true religion was being undermined by magical practices,others that most
people lived like animals and relied on formal practices or last-minute bribes to
escape the consequences. The compromise with popular religion was so extensive that it finally generated a reaction, of which the Reformationwas the most
obvious expression. Other kinds of response were possible, and a recent analysis
of the MalleusMaleficarum
has suggested that its author, the Dominican Heinrich
was
troubled
Kramer,
deeply
by his own relationshipwith the world of angels
and spirits. A close analysis of the text reveals that Kramermade last-minute
changes to emphasise his centralpoint, which was that sexual relationsbetween
women and demons provided irrefutable evidence for the existence of the
parallel spirit world; one plausible reading is that he was desperate to compensate for his personal inability to achieve any contactwith angels (Stephens2002).
He also developed this personal obsession into an extraordinary fantasy,
whereby the Devil was primarily interested in gathering human seed (through
these couplings) in order to breed his own race of servants; this was part of a
scheme that would delay God in his plan to complete the number of the just, and
thus postpone the day of the Last Judgement.
Weyer represents a different attitude, more typical of Protestants although
shared by numerous Catholics, in his insistence that the most serious offenders
were the magical healers and local witch-doctorswho sustained the whole set of
and the EarlyModernImagination
Witchcraft
265
idolatrous practices behind witchcraftbeliefs. The sustained effort by the early
Reformersto make out that Catholic ritual was itself a diabolical corruption of
true faith and a set of deceits complicated mattersfurther,since it createda need
for Catholics to defend some aspects of the spirit world even as they tried to
eliminate superstition.
One would have to be suspicious of any attempt to describe general
attitudes whose sources came exclusively from the clerical world and the
authors of demonological works. The late medieval world view can be found
in a much wider range of evidence, and was sustained by a great variety of
cultural expressions; these included paintings and sculptures in the churches,
pictures and tapestries in private houses, printed books and engravings, and
oral performances ranging from sermons to folklore. Much of this material
suggests the vivid quality of late medieval and early modern imaginings. The
great Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, who died in 1516, still fascinates us today with his capacity to represent an extraordinary range of
nightmarish creatures, devils and monsters. This is in fact a striking example
of how artistic invention can operate brilliantly within a very tight organising
scheme, for most of Bosch's greatest works are moralities, which set out to
convey a deeply pessimistic vision. Scenes like the Gardenof EarthlyDelights
occur in triptych paintings that end with grim scenes of eternal torment, the
punishment for self-indulgence and above all for illicit sexuality, the primary
source of corruption.In his extensive use of alchemical imagery Bosch is linked
to the world of learned magic, while he also shared the repressive attitude of
the urban elites around him towards popular festivities and enjoyment. This is
surely a world fit for witches, although this great painter of devils never
included any witches in his major canvases, and the occasional drawings
where scholars have identified them are very unspecific. The great popularity
of these pictures is shown by the numbers of copies and imitations produced
over several decades after the artist's death, while engravings made his images
more widely available (Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck and Vermet 2001; Dixon
2003).
For all their brillianceand originality in detail, the message of these paintings
is deeply conventional.The true order of the world is being pervertedby sin and
the wiles of the devil, just as in the scholastic system the sublunary world was
one where the elements were out of place, while women appear in a decidedly
unfavourable light. In his striking analyses of the visual culture of witchcraft
Charles Zika picks up on similar themes. He shows how early sixteenth-century
representations emphasised the dangers of ignoring or reversing the correct
gender order, and display a fear that female sexuality might appropriatemale
power. In several famous pictures by Hans Baldung Grien witches flaunt their
transgressivesexuality, while such elements as the cauldron,female groups, and
riding on animals all have their special significance. The riding theme, for
example, was associated with the idea of women riding subjugatedmenfolk. The
devil is notably absent from most of these scenes, which ratheremphasise female
agency and rebellion. This could also be said of Cranach'sMelancholia paintings, whose background scenes use an erotically inflected language of
witchcraft, combined with the folkloric traditions of the Wild Hunt and the
Venusberg. Such images evoke transgressive desire as much as transgressive
266
Robin Briggs
illusions, and might be associated with the idea that trances and dreams helped
women to preserve their independence (Zika 2003, 269-304).
No artists of equal status can be identified with the very different representations of the later decades of the sixteenth century, when the emphasis was on
the violent horrorsvisited on the bodies of the victims, in scenes of dismemberment, castration, and cannibalism. Witches were no longer young and seductive, but old crones, who symbolised the bad mothers of nightmare. Other new
themes included images of Saturn,sterile and cannibalistic,and of Amerindian
savages. Zika suggests that the growth in the number of images showing the
savagery of witchcraft points to growing anxieties about communal disintegration, in an age of economic dislocation and religious violence. He also
believes that the artists invoked a range of contemporary cultural discourses,
such as fortune and misfortune, moral disorder and crime, providence and the
devil, the marginal and the exotic, and that these helped to make witchcraft
beliefs more acceptable,when articulated in forms intelligible to a broad social
audience, and invested with the new authority of print. Powerful visual
associations of this type allowed the visionary world of the dead and the
demons to be linked to fears about the power of sexuality and also to acts of
terrible violence and destruction. As a final stage in this evolution of visual
culture, themes from literary accounts of the sabbat appear in the art of the
early seventeenth century. There are also some interesting gaps; only at a late
stage, around the 1590s, do images of the witches' dance appear, as if artists
found it difficult to envisage witchcraft as a group activity led by Satan. Oral
aggression was also rarely depicted, perhaps because witches were supposed to
attack their victims internally and invisibly. What the visual culture of
witchcraft constantly invokes are fears about destructive impulses within European society, which threaten the integrity of the body politic. The concerns
about social fragility are reinforced by those about assaults on the human and
social body through the murder of children, and more generally by attacks on
fertility (Zika 2003, 375-479).
The changing iconography of witchcraftseems to relate to another trend that
only developed fully in the later sixteenth century, that of turning demonology
into a kind of experimental science. Although this was certainly present in the
Malleus Maleficarum,it was a group of writers from the 1580s onwards who
deployed material from actual trials in an attempt to silence all criticism. This
can be seen in limited form with Jean Bodin and Peter Binsfeld, to emerge more
fully with Nicolas Remy, Henry Boguet and Pierre de Lancre.As they cited the
confessions of witches and their own personal experience, these writers brought
popular and elite notions of witchcraft together to produce an ever more lurid
picture of perverted rituals and night-time orgies. The undoubted champion was
de Lancre,who employed a sensationalistrhetoricalstyle to spice up the stories
of his adolescent Basque witches. In 1613 Jan Ziarnkodrew a frontispiecefor de
Lancre'sbook, a complex series of tableaux that required printed explanations
for each scene, and may be regarded as the climax of the whole process of
elaboration. This image, with de Lancre's own description of the marvellous
theatre of the Basque aquellareor sabbat,where the witches took pleasure in the
flight and in the stimulationof their sexual desires, has left a remarkablydurable
impression across the centuries. Here was the ultimate eroticised sabbat, which
Witchcraftand the Early Modern Imagination
267
allowed both writer and artist freedom to explore the forbidden, the cruel and
the erotic, under cover of a moralising purpose (de Lancre 1613).
Trial Records and Related Documents
The story that I have told so far might suggest a fairly orderly chronological
development, in which elements of popular belief and folklore were slowly
absorbed into the elite representationsof witchcraft,becoming more elaborate
and acquiringnew symbolic richness in the process. One can also make a strong
case that later demonologists used such material in an attempt to defend
themselves, as the logical difficulties of their position became more obvious, and
as they realised that many of their educated contemporaries were at least
mitigated sceptics about witchcraft.Yet there remains a major puzzle, once we
leave the world of books and paintings to investigate the trial records and
related documents. What these show us is that virtually all the shocking and
extravagant elements in later descriptions are present in some of the earliest
cases, at the very moment when the myth of the sabbatwas being forged, in the
Western Alps of the early fifteenth century. There must have been a contamination from earlier fantasies about destructive conspiracies by Jews, heretics,
and lepers; a version of this syndrome was then attached to witches, whose
secret apostasy had supposedly turned them into conspiratorson behalf of the
ultimate enemy of Christian society, the Devil himself.
A striking early example is provided by the Lucerne chroniclerHans Friind,
in his account of the persecution in the Valais region between approximately
1428 and 1436. Friundexplained how the Devil tempted vulnerable individuals
by offering them riches and the power to avenge their wrongs, persuading them
to renounce God and enter his service. These witches had used poisons to kill
people or make them ill, often rendering men impotent and women sterile. The
application of ointment to chairs enabled them to fly on these by night, while
many became werewolves, or learned how to use herbs to make themselves
invisible. Some would cause quarrels through their ability to remove the
illnesses inflicted by other magicians, because they did this by transferringthe
sickness to someone else. The witches held secret meetings at night, where the
Devil preached to them and imposed penitences on those guilty of good
conduct. They killed babies whose flesh they subsequently cooked and ate,
destroyed crops, made cows lose their milk, and damaged carts to render them
useless.
The persecution had come only just in time, for the witches already numbered
700, and expected that in a year they would be in a position to elect a king; soon
they would be so strong that no court or power could act against them, but they
would take control and coerce the Christians.Four more early texts dating from
the late 1430s and early 1440s add further details, which between them cover
virtually every feature of the imaginary world of the witches as it would be
repeatedly invoked over the next two centuries. In these versions we find the
witches using the remains of their victims with other ingredients to concoct
powders and ointments, which might serve as poisons, enable them to fly to
their sabbats on brooms and sticks, or transformthem into animals. They were
also described as engaging in indiscriminate and perverse sexual activities as
268
RobinBriggs
part of their ritualised misbehaviour. Another significant addition was the
suggestion that the Devil or the witches used spells to counteract the effects of
torture, requiring countermeasures from the judges (Ostorero, Paravicini
Bagliani and Utz Tremp 1999).
Just how this remarkable concoction of dark imaginings was brewed seems
likely to remain something of a mystery, in the absence of further sources. The
early accounts locate the region concerned beyond much doubt, and strongly
suggest a process of fusion between popular beliefs and the more elaborate
versions recorded by literate members of the elites, which probably took place
over two or three decades after about 1400. Several key themes can be seen as
transfers or adaptations of allegations routinely made against heretics and Jews,
but this does not necessarily mean that clerics and judges were directly respon-
sible for introducing such elements; it is equally possible that they were
incorporatedinto the popular imagination,then fed back into the judicial system
by those on trial. Such stories as those of host desecrationwere widely disseminated, to the point where they had been absorbedinto the broader understanding of the miraculous and the transgressive. Other material may have been
derived from more autonomous forms of popular culture, including both such
long-standing traditions as the Wild Hunt and the very immediate creations of
village storytellers. In a society that was almost literally bathed in fantasies
about miraculous powers and supernaturalbeings, yet combined these with a
very earthy realism about human desires and actions, stories about witches and
sabbatswould have been incorporatedalmost effortlessly into the social imagination. Most of the people concerned with witchcraft trials-clerics, minor legal
officials, scribes,gaolers-were members of small local communities,well placed
to facilitate the transmission of material between the legal system and its
clientele. Another key group, that of the itinerantpreachers,displayed a marked
tendency to integrate popular culture within their repertoire, then encourage
dubious methods for countering the dangerous forces whose constant threat
they emphasised.
A classic example was the FranciscanObservant friar Bernardino of Siena
(1380-1444),whose cult of the name of Jesus, employing what were effectively
magical tablets, sparked off accusationsof heresy. When called to defend himself
in Rome (probablyin 1426) Bernardinolaunched an astonishing counter-offensive, whipping up popular feeling against the witches he claimed were everywhere in the city. At least two women were burned as a result, then in Siena the
next year a new series of inflammatorysermons included an exhortation "let's
send up to the Lord God some of the same incense right here," although the
citizens proved deaf to this open invitation to light a new set of witchcraftpyres.
There also looks to be a direct link between another of Bernardino'smissions in
the town of Todi and the 1428 trial of MatteuciaFrancesci,a magical healer who
was almost certainly tortured into a set of florid confessions about bewitchments, diabolism and the sabbat (Mammoli 1972). The oddity here is that the
friaris never known to have preached specifically about the sabbat,although he
did give dramatic accounts of secret meetings of heretics by night, featuring
sexual orgies and the use of an extractof murdered babies to confer invisibility.
These stories of the "people of the keg" reappearin some later fifteenth-century
witchcraft trials in the region, to leave an open question about whether the
Witchcraftand the Early Modern Imagination
269
preacher was reporting popular traditions or creating them. Bernardinowas a
genuine reformerin the idiom of his own times, yet to modern eyes he looks, in
his popular sermons at least, more like a fanatic whose violent rhetoric was a
cover for personal obsessions and hopeless intellectualconfusions. A number of
intelligent contemporariesevidently thought much the same, understandingthat
the devotions he championedwere often as superstitiousas those he denounced,
and that he offered no checks against the victimisation of the innocent. In his
relentless demonisation of witches and sodomites, and to a slightly lesser extent
of Jews, Bernardinorepeatedly blurred categories while employing rhetorical
tricks to polarise everything in stark black and white terms (Mormando 1999,
52-108).
The Dominicans who staffed the local tribunalsof the Inquisitionusually took
a rather cooler view, but from early trial records they do appear to have been
principally concerned to eradicate the members of a new sect of heretical
devil-worshippers, and to build up information about their relationship to the
Devil. This can be seen in the 1448 trial of Jaquet Durier, which seems to have
begun with an admission made to a secular court, that Jaquethad killed Jeande
Mossel with a powder given him by his master Satan. It was this diabolical
element that probablybrought his case before the Inquisitors,who were not very
interested in the murder, and took no notice when Jaquet changed his story to
claim that he had used a brown ointment while remaining concealed in a cloud.
He then admitted that he had been seduced some eleven or twelve years earlier
as he walked in the fields in a melancholy mood, when he met Pierre Ruvinat
with an unknown man he called Satan, who persuaded him to forswear God.
Later he flew to the sabbat where he participated in feasting, a ceremony of
homage to the devil and a sexual orgy.
Another interrogationfollowed, with fifteen prepared questions, of which ten
had no relation to Jaquet's previous confession, and produced very confused
responses. The Inquisitorswere clearly imposing their own agenda on the trial,
according to a demonological schema that included the themes of cannibalism
and infanticide,the recruitmentof others to the sect, the creation of storms, and
the theft of the host. Jaquet now admitted the large-scale killing and eating of
young children, receiving money from Satan, taking hosts to him, and having a
spell (a parchmentimpregnatedwith the sweat of the devil and his own blood)
sewn under his skin, which would prevent any torturefrom forcinghim to avow
the truth.Questions were asked about the sticks on which the witches flew to the
sabbat, where they were hidden, and how big they were. Jaquet told of a
witch-queen who sat higher than the others and whom no-one must denounce,
then named no less than 30 accomplices (Ostorero 1995, 67-93).
Cases like this have lain unread in local archives for more than five hundred
years, before their publication by modern scholars within the past decade.
Gutenberghad not yet set up his press when JacquetDurier was on trial, so we
might simply conclude that the means of diffusion was lacking. Oral continuity
at the level of both judges and people is likely to have preserved the outline
stories within the region itself, so that they could have fed back into later trials,
and finally influenced printed works. These issues about possible transmission
are not the most interesting ones, however. Such extraordinary continuities
suggest that although the hidden world of the witches was indeed a product of
270
RobinBriggs
the imagination, the fantasies that composed it were generated within a relatively narrow range of possibilities, so that even if constantly reinvented they
remained essentially the same. In other words, they were structurally determined by persistent and deep-seated fears. Fantasies only work, in the sense of
commanding belief and adherence, if they relate strongly to experience. So the
fictions of witchcraft dramatised the most basic concerns of early modemrn
people, those about reproduction and fertility, and the most fundamental
relationships, those between mothers and children. The witch was the ultimate
bad mother, who killed children, caused other women to miscarry, and might
even sacrificeher own offspring to the Devil. She was also the great enemy of
the community, who conspired with the Devil and the other witches to destroy
crops and animals. When ordinary people were browbeaten or tortured into
confessing their apostasy, they constructed their false identity out of these
standard elements. In the vast majorityof cases the sabbatwas less an inversion
of the central Christianmysteries, as clerics would have liked it to be, than of
those innumerable rituals intended to protect the crops, which dominated the
religious calendar in the village. It was essentially an anti-fertilityrite (Briggs
1993, 155-81).
Conclusion
Even at this point there was still a misfit between the diabolical conspiracy
theory and the popular conception of witchcraft. From thousands of trials we
can see that most witches were principally suspected of multiple acts of
individual spite and envy against neighbours, dating back many years.
Witchcraftthereforebecame the basis of a widespread form of therapy, because
a standard response to sickness was to identify the witch responsible, then
coerce them into providing a cure. The fantasy expression of this came in two
stories that few demonologists picked up: firstly that the Devil quite illogically
gave his subjects powders to heal as well as to harm, secondly that only the
witch who had laid the spell could take it off. This was the world of those
magical healers whom Weyer denounced so roundly, but whom no amount of
effort could hope to eliminate. Local judges and clerics frequently played along
with this view, making a mockery of the official attitude that all such dealings
amounted to an implicit contract with the Devil. Once you started extracting
confessions from people who admitted that they had bewitched their neighbours, and plainly accepted the reality of such power when directed by human
agency, the finer distinctionsabout the ultimate causes of evil must have seemed
irrelevant.The devil might provide the deadly powders, and incite his followers
to avenge their wrongs, yet he seemed almost wholly dependent on their ill-will
and their willingness to inflict harm. Emotionally and imaginatively witchcraft
only made sense if adherence to the Devil empowered the witch, as popular
ideas always insisted was the case. One Lorraine witch gave this memorable
expression when she named her devil "Pensdedefemme,"nothing but her own
thoughts (Briggs 2002, 21-2). Elite persecutorswho tried to discover the nature
of witchcraft from the trials inevitably ended up as mouthpieces for popular
beliefs. In the end these and other multiple inconsistencies of both belief and
conduct would be crucial in undermining the credibility of witchcraft per-
Witchcraftand the Early Modern Imagination
271
secution. What I would suggest, however, is that for a long time the imaginary
world of the witches proved highly successful in papering over logical
difficulties and justifying terrible injustices, not least because it dealt in such
basic, visceral fears. That may also help to explain why witchcraft has enjoyed
such a remarkable renaissance in the modern imagination, to the dismay of
contemporaryevangelicals.
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Biographical Note
RobinBriggsis a SeniorResearchFellowof All Souls College,Oxford,and a specialistin Frenchhistory
fromaround1500 to 1800,especiallysocial,culturalandreligioushistory.He is currentlywritinga major
studyof The Witches of Lorraine,to bepublishedby the OxfordUniversityPress.Previouspublications
includeEarly Modern France, 1560-1715 (1977, 2nd ed. 1998), Communities of Belief (1989), and
Witches & Neighbours (1996, 2nd ed. 2002).