Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany (Emotions in History)

257 Pages·2019·4.88 MB·English

by  Laura Kounine

Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany
Laura Kounine
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799085.001.0001
Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780191839580 Print ISBN: 9780198799085
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Copyright Page 
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Published: November 2018 ad
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Subject: Early Modern History (1500 to 1700), European History, Social and Cultural History http
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Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany
Laura Kounine
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799085.001.0001
Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780191839580 Print ISBN: 9780198799085
FRONT MATTER
Acknowledgements 
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This book, and the thesis on which it is based, would not have been possible without the support of many e
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people and institutions. My �rst and greatest debt of thanks is to my doctoral supervisor, Ulinka Rublack, ic.o
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for her invaluable guidance, intellectual rigour, and encouragement during both my MPhil and my PhD, in p
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preparing my manuscript for publication, and which she continues to provide now. Her generosity, m
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enthusiasm, creativity, and brilliance continue to inspire me. oo
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Many other people have helped me in the writing of this book. For putting me on the path of early modern 79
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history in the �rst place, I would like to thank Alex Walsham. I am extremely grateful to Alex for her h
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continuing support. Lyndal Roper sparked my interest in the phenomenon of the German witch-hunts and te
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has been supportive in so many ways. Thanks to Lyndal and Mary Laven who, as my PhD examiners, 5
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provided incisive feedback, and have been unfailing in their advice and support from the very early stages of 86
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my postgraduate work. Carol Gilligan generously hosted me at New York University as a PhD student and 03
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warmly welcomed me into her classes and mentored me during my time there. I have learnt profoundly y U
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from Carol. I also bene�ted from workshops with Natalie Zemon Davis and Kathryn Hughes. Thank you also iv
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to my friends and peers in the Self-Narratives workshop and the Gender and History workshop at rsity
Cambridge. of C
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Since �nishing my PhD, I have continued to receive support and mentorship from a number of di�erent b
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people and institutions. My post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max g
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Planck Institute in Berlin provided the perfect environment to continue researching and writing this book. s
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Ute Frevert, the Director of the Center, has been an inspiration in her vision for the history of emotions. Her r o
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support has been invaluable. I have learnt so much from my colleagues there. Anja Berkes at the MPIB kindly 6
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helped me with the images for this book, while Christina Becher provided support throughout my ug
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fellowship. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Charles Zika, who mentored me during an Early t 2
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Career International Research Fellowship at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the 2
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University of Melbourne, and who I have since worked with in a number of collaborative conferences on
‘Witchcraft and Emotions’. Charles is one of the most generous scholars I have had the privilege to work
with—his enthusiasm, intelligence and kindness are boundless. Malcolm Gaskill has been brilliantly
supportive throughout the writing of this book and has provided incisive feedback as well as invaluable
encouragement and guidance along the way. I have also been lucky enough to work with Michael Ostling on
our co-edited book Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, and I am extremely grateful to him for his time,
feedback, and encouragement in my own work. My colleagues in the School of History, Art History and
Philosophy (HAHP) at the University of Sussex have provided me with a welcoming and supportive
p. vi environment in which to �nish this book, and I am grateful in particular to the fantastic women with
whom I work. Thank you also to the series editors for Emotions in History, Thomas Dixon and Ute Frevert,
who provided perceptive feedback on the manuscript, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers and
delegates at OUP. Thank you also to Robert Faber for taking this book on, to my editor and Cathryn Steele for
all her assistance, and to Louise Larchbourne and Donald Watt for all their work on the copy-edits and
proofs.
There are many others who have shown me kindness and provided guidance in the writing of this book. Tom
Robisheaux, David Sabean, David Myers, Joel Harrington, Peter Burschel, Claudia Ulbrich, Claudia Opitz,
Claudia Jarzebowski, and Robin Briggs took time to meet with me and o�er help and advice. Pamela Selwyn
and Janine Maegraith helped me decipher early modern German demonologies and trial records. Wolfgang
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Behringer, Rita Voltmer, and the members of the Arbeitskreis Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung all w
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provided a welcoming forum in which to share my ideas in Germany, as has the Arbeitskreis loa
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Geschlechtergeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. Johannes Dillinger has generously o�ered advice and shared ed
archival materials. Ed Bever, likewise, kindly shared materials and references. The late Sönke Lorenz also fro
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welcomed me warmly when I worked in the Tübingen archives. The archivists of the Hauptstaatsarchiv in http
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Stuttgart, in particular Frau Kremser, o�ered a supportive environment and were consistently helpful in my ://a
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numerous requests for source material. a
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The opportunities I have been given to present my work at various institutions have greatly bene�ted my ic.o
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research and the way in which I think about my subject. I am grateful to the organizers of these seminars p
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and conferences, and to all those who o�ered invaluable comments and questions, at venues including the m
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University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Queen Mary, University of London, the German o
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Historical Institute London, Birkbeck College, University of London, the University of Manchester, the /9
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University of East Anglia, the University of Basel, the University of Giessen, the Freie Universität Berlin, the 9/c
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Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, and the University of a
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Melbourne. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present my work at the seventeenth Transatlantic r/1
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Doctoral Seminar at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, the German Studies Association 5
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conference in Oakland, CA in 2010, the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in New Orleans in 2014, the 69
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Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär conference in Nashville in 2015, and the Renaissance Society of America b
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conference in Berlin in 2015. U
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I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my MPhil and PhD, as well as rsity
the Cambridge History Faculty trust funds, the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, the o
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Australian Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the Max Planck Society, and a
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the University of Sussex for supporting research and conference visits. All of these funds made writing this rid
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book possible. e
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I have also learnt and bene�ted enormously from discussions with Florence Sutcli�e-Braithwaite, who has r o
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helped my thinking in so many ways. I am also grateful for many discussions with and numerous acts of 6
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kindness and help from friends and colleagues, including Waseem Yaqoob, Kristen Brill, Natalie ug
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p. vii Thomlinson, Laura Tisdall, Stephen Cummins, John Jordan, Nikolas Funke, Hannah Murphy, Margaret t 2
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Lewis, Ashley Elrod, Jan Machielsen, Joanne Paul, Jenny Spinks, Sasha Handley, Philipp Nielsen, Rob 2
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Boddice, Stephanie Olsen, and Gian Marco Vidor. There are of course so many others who have helped me in
innumerable ways in the writing of this book.
Some material in chapter 1 has been taken from my chapter ‘The Witch on Trial: Narratives of Con�ict and
Community in Early Modern Germany’, in Stephen Cummins and Laura Kounine (eds), Cultures of Con�ict
Resolution in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), reproduced with permission of Taylor and
Francis. Parts of chapter 2 have been previously published in my article ‘The Gendering of Witchcraft:
Defence Strategies of Men and Women in German Witchcraft Trials’, German History, 31 (2013), 295–317,
reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press. Parts of chapter 4 have been previously published in
‘Satanic Fury: Depictions of the Devil’s Rage in Nicolas Remy’s Daemonolatria’, in Laura Kounine and
Michael Ostling (eds), Emotions in the History of Witchcraft (London: Palgrave, 2017), reproduced with
permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Most of all, I would like to thank my mother, Christa Schreiber, for unfailingly providing support and love in
every way. Kiran Sande �lls my life with so much love, companionship, and joy, and I could not have written
this book without him. My daughter Maya was born during the �nal stages of writing this book and I can’t
p. viii imagine a world without her. This book is for all of you.
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Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany
Laura Kounine
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799085.001.0001
Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780191839580 Print ISBN: 9780198799085
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Maps and Figures 
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Maps ic.o
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1 Map of the duchy of Württemberg.  22 /b
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2 Stuttgart. Map from Matthäus Merian (1643).  25 /92
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Figures
0.1 Württemberg harvesting work; detail of woodcut in Johann Bauhin, De aquis medicatis nova
methodus, 1612.  23
0.2 The trial record of Anna Müller, 1616.  32
4.1 Hans Baldung Grien, Neujahrsgruß mit drei Hexen, 1514.  178
4.2 Georg Pencz, illustration for Hans Sachs, Das Feindtselig Laster, der heymlich Neyd (Nuremberg,
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1534).  179 o
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4.3 Melchior Küsel, Allegory of Discord, 1670.  179 ad
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4.4 Zauberey. A broadside on the various aspects of witchcraft, with an engraving by Matthaeus Merian fro
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the Elder from a drawing by Michael Herr, depicting di�erent scenes involving witches and demons, http
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with Latin text by Johann Ludwig Gottfried, and German verses in letterpress, 1626.  180 ://a
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4.5 Jan Ziarnko, Description and Depiction of the Witches’ Sabbath, etching, in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de e
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l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613).  182 ic.o
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4.6 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium male�carum, 1626.  183 o
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4.7 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium male�carum, 1626.  184 o
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4.8 Hans Baldung Grien, Die Hexen, 1510.  185 9
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4.9 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium male�carum, 1626.  186 te
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4.10 A Genevan wagon-driver and his Devil Moreth come upon a witches’ sabbath in the woods near the 9
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city, in 1570, Wickiana.  187 9
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p. xii 4.11 The relationship between a Genevan wagon-driver and his Devil Moreth, in 1570, Wickiana.  187 U
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Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany
Laura Kounine
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Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780191839580 Print ISBN: 9780198799085
CHAPTER
Introduction 
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This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early .o
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modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, .c
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gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft /b
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persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also o
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provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and 2
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provides an overview of the current state of the �eld of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on /c
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psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of p
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emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the r/1
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legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the 9
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witch-hunts in this region into context. 02
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Keywords: witch-hunt, gender, history of emotions, subjective, selfhood, psychological, methodological, iv
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This book explores emotions, gender, and selfhood through the lens of witch trials in early modern r o
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Germany. The Holy Roman Empire was the heartland of the witch craze: it witnessed the greatest number of 2
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executions of witches in the early modern period, around 23,000, reaching a peak in the late sixteenth and A
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early seventeenth centuries.1 While women constituted approximately three quarters of those tried for gus
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witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, a signi�cant minority were men. Gender and emotions have 0
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underpinned prominent explanatory frameworks of the early modern German witch persecutions. Those
accused of witchcraft were predominantly women and this was to do with fears of their transformative
bodies—through menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause —their roles as wives and mothers, and the
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p. 2 projection of envy onto women who could no longer reproduce. The belief that witches could destroy
engendered a highly visceral fear: it centred on the notion that one person’s emotions could have tangible
and deadly physical consequences. Understandings of gender, the body, and emotions are thus closely
interlinked. In order to understand how early modern people imagined the witch, and why the witch could
on the one hand provoke such fear, but on the other hand be living in their midst, we must �rst begin to
understand how people understood themselves and one another. Through an exploration of gender,
subjective experience, and individual embodiment, this book seeks to do just that.
Understanding the Early Modern Witch Craze
Few other areas in history have been as vigorously debated as that of the witch trials in early modern
Europe. Perhaps the only consensus is that there is no single universal explanation for the European witch
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persecutions. The range and diversity of explanations pro�ered by historians as to why men and women
were persecuted as witches during this period (and, indeed, why far more of the latter were persecuted than D
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of the former) can be attributed to the fact that a range of interdisciplinary methods (anthropological, n
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sociological,6 folkloric,7 and more recently psychoanalytical8) have been used to look at the witch trials, as ad
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p. 3 well as that the emphasis of much of the research has been on regional and local studies. In the last fro
couple of decades, three historiographical arguments have prevailed: the ‘bad neighbour’ thesis, espoused m
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by Robin Briggs and Alison Rowlands, which argues that witchcraft accusations arose within neighbourly ttp
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con�icts;9 the ‘little ice age’ thesis, propounded by Wolfgang Behringer, which links the witch-hunts with ://a
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agrarian crises; and the ‘small states’ thesis, advanced by Johannes Dillinger, Eva Labouvie, and Brian d
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Levack, which suggests that it was absence of state control which allowed popular support for witch- ic
hunting to come to fruition.11 The emphasis in these studies has thus been on the causal and explanatory .ou
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factors underpinning witch persecutions. o
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More recently, a new line of inquiry has been advanced, focusing on a hitherto neglected aspect of the early ok
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modern witch-hunts: the ‘witch’ itself. As Malcolm Gaskill suggests, we ‘need to consider what witchcraft 27
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meant to the witch, an area neglected because witch-trials have been too closely linked to the history of /c
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persecution’.12 Diane Purkiss and Lyndal Roper have been at the forefront of this approach, emphasizing the apte
role of fantasy on the part of both the accused and their interrogators in the production of witchcraft r/1
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confessions, and thereby the ‘identity’ of the witch. Both Purkiss and Roper focus speci�cally on why it was 98
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women who were over-represented in the early modern witch trials. As such, the identity of the witch has 2
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become inextricably linked to her female gender. by
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Roper, for example, suggests that the ‘witch craze’ in baroque Germany was primarily concerned with e
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attacks on fertility. Hence, it was mainly old women, now infertile, who were accused of witchcraft, often by ity
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younger women, either friends or family. While the propensity for old women to be accused of witchcraft f C
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has long been axiomatic in early modern German witchcraft research, Roper sets herself apart in her m
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emphasis on the perceptions of old women’s bodies. Consequently, it was fear that these women attracted, ridg
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above all by what they represented: barrenness and death.13 Purkiss, too, focuses on the gender of the witch. u
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p. 4 Following from Mary Douglas’s concept of pollution, Purkiss argues that the witch is the ‘anti- r o
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housewife’, who causes pollution where there should be order. Rather than seeing the witch as the church’s 2
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‘other’, or the man’s ‘other’, Purkiss argues that the ‘witch is the dark other of the early modern woman, u
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expressing and acting on desires that other women must repress to construct their identities as mothers’. s
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In this way, Purkiss examines why women themselves were willing to take on the mantle of the witch, 02
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elucidating the fact that it was an identity which was the product of a dynamic and interactive process of
negotiation. Women were not simply passive recipients of this identity; rather, they ‘invested heavily in the
�gure [of the witch] as a fantasy which allowed them to express and manage otherwise unspeakable fears
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and desires, centring on the question of motherhood and children’. Like Roper, Purkiss also focuses on the
body of the witch to explain why sex, as well as gender, was important to the identity of the witch:
The idea of a maternal body, which is both an object of desire and a source of pollution, becomes
the basis for an understanding of the witch’s magic as that unseen and in�nitely extended aspect
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of her body which can do harm beyond her apparent bounds.
Ingrid Ahrendt-Schulte, too, places the female reproductive body at the heart of her explanatory framework
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for why women bore the brunt of witchcraft persecutions. She suggests it was the perceived ability of the
female body to transform, for example in menstruation and pregnancy, that rendered women so
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dangerous. Moreover, women were potentially threatening in their role as housewives, with their ability to
transform the food and drink which they made and prepared. These ‘good’ acts could thus be put to use in
‘bad’ ways.
Indeed, notions of the body are integral to understanding early modern witchcraft beliefs, particularly at a
time when the boundary between mind and body was viewed as porous and permeable. This was a time
when emotions were seen to have physical consequences, and this belief played a key role in witchcraft
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cases. Torture was employed precisely because pain was understood as the means to reveal the truth. w
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Roper asserts: loa
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p. 5 witchcraft involves wishing ill to other people, and in this way, it centrally concerns the impact of fro
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emotional states on physical ones. It confronts us with the relationship between feelings and the h
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body in a period before Cartesian dualism neatly divided mind from body. s
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To be sure, the early modern German witchcraft trials are imbued with imagery of the ‘hard’ or ‘dry’ body of e
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the witch, the symbolism of which can be understood, within the context of early modern notions of the ic
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body, as a direct contrast to the healthy ‘�owing’ body. p
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While Purkiss’s and Roper’s approaches have added a sophisticated complexity to the research on early /b
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modern witch-hunting, particularly in its psychological aspects, one key historiographical problem k
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remains: the phenomenon of male witches. This has brought to the fore the question of how gender is used 7
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as an analytical category: gender, in the case of witchcraft, has often meant asking questions about women, h
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rather than interrogating understandings of both men and women, the masculine and the feminine, in a te
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given context. Indeed, this propensity to look at women, rather than gender, has had deleterious 5
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consequences for how we understand embodied emotions in witchcraft beliefs. As witchcraft was not a 8
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crime solely attributed to women, witchcraft beliefs cannot simply be explained through the framework of 21
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fears about women’s bodies and their transformative powers. Joan Scott has recently reminded us why she y
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hailed gender as a useful category of historical analysis in the �rst place. She writes: iv
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Gender is a useful category only if di�erences are the question, not the answer, only if we ask what o
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‘men’ and ‘women’ are taken to mean wherever and whenever we are looking at them, rather than a
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assuming we already know who and what they are.23 b
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The term ‘gender’ is useful only if we stop presupposing di�erences between men and women, but rather us
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examine how and when di�erences came into play.24 Gender identities, Alex Shepard argues, ‘were neither r o
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static nor given, but the product of social interaction’. Where can we �nd di�erences within the sexes as 6
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well as common ground between the sexes, even if this upsets neat characterizations of the experience of u
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men and women in any particular historical context? Moreover, ‘gender’ does not remain a constant and st 2
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p. 6 clearly de�ned category even within the same society, community, or household. When were 2
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understandings of masculinity and femininity rigidly characterized, demarcated, and upheld, and when
were they �uid and porous? This book thus explores how and when gender was made to matter in the
criminal construction of the witch. It does so by also looking at trials of men, while not obfuscating the clear
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propensity for women to be accused as witches; and, moreover, it attempts to write a history that allows
gender to be a category of analysis, that is, a category of inquiry.
A second key aim of this book is to uncover and understand the subjective experience of being on trial, and
how understandings of emotions, gender, and the self were shaped, experienced, and performed in the ways
in which men and women gave accounts of themselves. The crime of witchcraft in this context is an