Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530

238 Pages·2011·1.423 MB·English

by  Laura Stokes (auth.)

Demons of Urban Reform
Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
Series Editors: Jonathan Barry, Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies
Titles include:
Edward Bever
THE REALITIES OF WITCHCRAFT AND POPULAR MAGIC IN EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life
Alison Butler
VICTORIAN OCCULTISM AND THE MAKING OF MODERN MAGIC
Invoking Tradition
Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller
WITCHCRAFT AND BELIEF IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND
Jonathan Roper (editor)
CHARMS, CHARMERS AND CHARMING
Alison Rowlands (editor)
WITCHCRAFT AND MASCULINITIES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Rolf Schulte
MAN AS WITCH
Male Witches in Central Europe
Laura Stokes
DEMONS OF URBAN REFORM
Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530
Forthcoming:
Johannes Dillinger
MAGICAL TREASURE HUNTING IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA
A History
Soili-Maria Olli
TALKING TO DEVILS AND ANGELS IN SCANDINAVIA, 1500–1800
Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
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Demons of Urban Reform
Early European Witch Trials and
Criminal Justice, 1430–1530
Laura Stokes
Assistant Professor,
Department of History,
Stanford University, USA
© Laura Stokes 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-1-4039-8683-2
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ISBN 978-1-349-54105-8 ISBN 978-0-230-30904-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230309043
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20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Evil by Any Other Name: Defining Witchcraft 10
Part I Witch Trials in the Cities
2 Basel: Territorialization and Rural Autonomy 37
3 Nuremberg: The Malleus that Never Struck 50
4 Lucerne: Urban Witch Hunters 62
Part II A Revolution in Criminal Justice
5 Between Two Worlds: Fifteenth- Century Justice at the
Threshold of the Early Modern 81
6 The Advancing Death Penalty and the Re- imagining of
Magical Crimes 104
Part III Reforming Zeal and Persecution in Lucerne
7 Urban Reform and Social Control 129
8 Witchcraft, Sodomy, and the Demonization of Crime 154
Conclusion 174
Appendix: Selected Trial Documents 179
Notes 186
Bibliography 210
Index 225
v
Figures
6.1 Executions and witch burnings in Basel 106
6.2 Executions and witch burnings in Lucerne 107
6.3 Modes of execution in Lucerne 108
6.4 Punishments for theft in Lucerne 110
7.1 Nuremberg fines for misbehavior 136
vi
Acknowledgments
The questions that eventually grew into this book began at Reed College
nearly fifteen years ago, as part of a senior thesis investigating the social
construction of deviance. Accordingly, the first thanks go to my advisors
there: Ray Kierstead, who inspired my love for the early modern, and
David Sacks, who showed me how to be a historian. At the University of
Virginia my interest matured through a series of seminar papers and a
master’s thesis on Johannes Nider that owed much to the assistance of
Ted Lendon. This book appeared in its first draft as a dissertation under
the mentorship of Erik Midelfort, with the advice and support in par-
ticular of Anne Schutte, Paul Halliday, and Sönke Lorenz.
With invaluable input from many friends and colleagues, this project
has changed much in the years since its appearance as a dissertation. I am
grateful to engaged and interrogative audiences at the Arbeitskreis inter-
disziplinäre Hexenforschung conference (2003), the Sixteenth Century
Society & Conference (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009), the “Boundaries
of Witchcraft” conference at Oxford (2008), and the “Devil in Society
in the Premodern World” conference in Toronto (2008). I am also
indebted to audiences at Bucknell University (2006) and the University
of Minnesota (2008) and to innumerable individuals who have taken
the time to listen and offer their thoughts along the way. In particular I
am grateful for the collegial friendship of an emerging cohort of young
demonographers and witchcraft researchers, especially Mike Bailey,
Tamar Herzig, and Maryse Simon. I have also benefitted from the intel-
lectual community at Stanford, where I have enjoyed opportunities to
present my thoughts in various forums, including workshops of the
Stanford Humanities Center. This book has been improved by a long
list of readers along the way, to whom I remain grateful: Erik Midelfort,
Anne Schutte, Paul Halliday, Alison Weber, Philippe Buc, Desi Hopkins,
Willem de Blécourt, and Sara Beam.
This book is dedicated to the entire community of witchcraft schol-
ars, who have welcomed me into their ranks and encouraged my
work. I hope this book proves an interesting contribution to the grand
conversation.
vii
Introduction
In July of 1519, Andreas from Tschafel was condemned to die in Lucerne
along with two accomplices: Hans Stächli from Meerschwand and
Barbel Vermeggerin from König in the territory of Bern. Under what
tortures the three confessed their supposed crimes is unknown to us,
but their confessions bear all the marks of creativity inspired by tor-
ment. Andreas confessed first to one theft, then to several more. His
interrogators, clearly unsatisfied with the list, pressed him further.
Under pressure, Andreas not only confessed generally to more thefts
than he could remember, but to a whole litany of anti- religious and
anti-s ocial crimes:
He has confessed that he has stolen so much money that he cannot
remember the amount. He has admitted to having had sex with a
cow, and he has confessed to having florentinized six boys. Also he
has confessed how he was gambling once and could not win, and so
he gave the little finger on his left hand to the Devil, that he might
make him win. But it never helped him. Also he has admitted that
he has not been to confession in fifteen years. Moreover, he has con-
fessed that he has renounced God, His worthy mother, and the whole
heavenly host, and has given himself to the Devil and believed in
him. [The Devil] instructed him, taught him how to make hail and
overcome good. He has confessed that he made a storm in Güns, not
far from Chur, but it was not a big storm. This he attempted often; at
times he succeeded, others not.1
Even then, Andreas’s confession was not at an end. He went on to tell
of a quarrel with a shoemaker whose dog had tried to bite him. He said
he stabbed the shoemaker and ran off, not knowing if he lived or died.
1
2 Demons of Urban Reform
Last of all, Andreas confessed to having chanced upon a sleeping man,
murdered him in his sleep, and stolen his money.
Andreas’s confessions raise compelling questions. What was the
Devil doing in the confessions of a thief? Historians of the witch hunts
have long recognized that interrogators in witch trials often sought
confessions of diabolism and that it was usually in the process of inter-
rogation that the Devil and the more fantastic elements of witchcraft
entered the trials. The Devil was central to the elite concept of witch-
craft, and in many jurisdictions investigators may have felt they needed
a confession of diabolism to ensure a conviction. This was certainly not
what motivated Andreas’s interrogators. As a foreigner, his confession
of habitual theft would have guaranteed execution in Lucerne during
the early sixteenth century. His questioners seem to have sought con-
fessions of every crime Andreas had ever committed, a complete biog-
raphy of crime and sin. The combination of charges such as theft and
murder with those of sodomy and witchcraft was more pronounced
in this case than in many others, but the appearance of witchcraft in
conjunction with other crimes was not unusual. This might come as
something of a surprise if one approached the subject with a mental
image of witchcraft as a kind of heresy, a particularly religious crime.
Andreas’s trial, however, was conducted entirely by a secular, urban
court. His judge and interrogators were members of the Lucerne city
council, yet they did not hesitate to prosecute him for religious trans-
gressions like avoidance of confession. At Andreas’s execution, where
his confession would likely have been read aloud, they demonstrated
their authority to the gathered people by establishing their power to
control and punish both crime and sin, and thus to protect the com-
munity from the wrath of God.
The story of how such a powerful demonstration came to take place
stretches back a full century before this trial, to a time when crimi-
nal justice in Lucerne almost never ended in execution and the main
focus of the council’s efforts at social control was the maintenance of
civic harmony through the prevention and mediation of interpersonal
conflict. Over the years there have been calls to examine witch trials
in the context of other forms of prosecution, but the project has rarely
been undertaken.2 Andreas Blauert did so for the Hochstift Speyer,
and his results in that study are similar to my own; he concludes that
witchcraft prosecution, criminal justice generally, and the policing of
indecent behavior were interrelated phenomena.3 The story of how this
interrelationship developed in Lucerne is central to the argument of
this book because, as we shall see, the origins of witchcraft prosecution