Today we conclude our series: The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief with Professor Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, an expert in medieval devil lore, with another double episode release. If you're just joining us, we recommend checking out the previous series episodes first, though this episode can certainly stand on its own.
In this episode, part 3 of the series, Dr. Raiswell takes us into the minds and lives of Heinrich Kramer, aka Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger, the authors of the 15th century witch-hunting book, the Hammer of Witches, formally known as the Malleus Maleficarum.
This Dr. Raiswell series is essential for understanding how theological concepts about Satan evolved into specific witchcraft accusations and largely gendered persecution mechanisms that still influence witch hunting today.
The full series, in four parts, is available now wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to Witch Hunt Podcast.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
special treat for our listeners this week.
Not one, but two new episodes dropping simultaneously.
You are in the right place for today's episode drop.
We did do this last week and this is the second week of
double episodes. Can you keep up with this fun?
(00:21):
That's right, returning expert Professor Richard Raiswell of
the University of Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us
for a fascinating Speak of the Devil episode and last week's
two parter, The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief.
It's here to conclude his special series with more talk
about the malice mouth CARM. He is an expert in medieval
(00:42):
devil lore, bringing years of scholarly research to our
discussion, including his work on the new book Rutledge History
of the Devil in the Western Tradition.
For those of you who might have missed it, Speak of the Devil
was the episode where we explored Satan as one of
history's most enduring and complex figures throughout
medieval thought. In last week's two-part special
(01:03):
The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief, Professor
Raiswell took us deeper into thedark intersection where
demonology meets witch persecution.
Today in Part 3, you'll be taking into the minds of the
Witch's Hammer authors Springer and Insta Taurus.
Both Part 3 and Part 4 are available now wherever you get
(01:25):
your podcasts. So settle in for a fascinating
and chilling exploration of the Malleys Maleficarum Times 2.
Welcome back to Witch Hunt podcast.
Doctor Richard Raiswell, it's a real pleasure to have you back
again today. Can you remind us about
yourself, your work and what youwill be sharing?
Well, thanks very much for having me back and for some more
(01:47):
devil talk, one of my favorite things, I'm Richard Racewell.
I'm a professor of history at the University of Prince Edward
Island in Eastern Canada, in theMaritimes, published quite a bit
of stuff on aspects of the devil, particularly in the
Middle Ages and in the early modern period.
I've got a source collection of primary sources on the medieval
(02:09):
devil which came out a few yearsago and in about a month.
Well, I'm one of the editors of the New Routledge History of the
Devil, which should be out. Thank you so much for coming
back. We've really enjoyed the
previous two discussions. Can you give us a brief summary
of where we got to last time? Yes, thank you.
(02:31):
So last time around I tried to set the scene for talking about
the Malleus Maleficarum, the great witch hunting manual of
the late 15th century. I tried to stress a few things.
Firstly, the early relationship between Christianity and magic.
If you think about magic in the context of the late antique
(02:51):
marketplace, it's a commodity which is available to buy and to
sell. And so when Jesus shows up, he
is offering similar sorts of cures.
And one of the problems that early Christians have to deal
with is how to differentiate themselves, their own tradition
of wonder working, their abilityto harness supernatural power to
(03:14):
perform wonders and that which is available in the marketplace.
And so one of those things, one of the strategies that early
Christians use is to demonize their competitors.
The magic that you could buy in the marketplace did work, but it
worked only because it involved demons.
(03:36):
Somewhere in the end, whoever was manipulating things, trying
to perform some sort of magical ritual, magical spell, was
engaged in commerce with demons at some point.
So it works. The magic gets you by the
marketplace works, but it's dangerous.
The only legitimate form of access to supernatural power is
(03:57):
the Christian form, and it has to come through Christian holy
man, that is, church officials and Saints.
But this debate about magic and demonology is happening at the
time that the Roman Empire is crumbling.
And what that means is that centralized communication
networks are declining. It's very difficult for
(04:20):
Christians to try and impose anything on the beliefs of
ordinary people. The popular tradition of magic,
this sort of idea that you can buy, feeling, remedies, these
sorts of things, that still continues, and the church really
doesn't have much to do with it.There's still a guy in Rome
(04:42):
who's the Pope, but his ability to control or enforce belief is
decidedly limited. So this popular tradition of
magic still continues in the countryside, and sometimes it's
even integrated into Christian rituals.
I mean, if you're working up some sort of healing potion or
whatever, why not add a few prayers into the process, bring
(05:05):
in even more forms of supernatural power.
So this sort of popular tradition of magic still
continues on. It is demonic at some level when
churchmen start thinking about it, but in the end it's useful.
People do need to have access toremedies when their children are
sick or when their animals are sick and they're interested in
(05:28):
protecting the harvest, all of these sorts of things.
Now, every now and again you find a churchman vigorously
complaining about what they termthese popular superstitions.
And the most important of these for our purposes, what comes up
today is a church Canon that is a point of church law, which
(05:52):
seems to be late night, early 10th century.
This Canon is called Episcopy, and this says that there are
some women who believe that on certain nights they're summoned
by the Roman goddess Diana, and then they fly through the air on
the backs of beasts. And a Canon, though, doesn't say
(06:17):
that these women should be condemned because they're
somehow in league with the devilor with demons.
Rather, what it says is that these people who believe that
this happens are deceived by thedevil.
They may think that they're flying through the air, but in
actual fact they're not. They've just had some sort of
(06:41):
illusion implanted in their brain by the devil.
So the kind of Episcopal goes onto say that anyone who believes
that they're flying through the air to these gatherings with the
goddess Diana is beyond doubt aninfidel.
(07:02):
So what you have here is something that looks like the
idea of women who are flying, obviously a fundamental trope of
witchcraft as it develops in the15th or 16th century.
But the church is saying that ifyou believe this happens, you're
not a Christian, you're beyond doubt an infidel.
(07:22):
So this Canon is going to prove to be a real problem for some of
the early people who are theorizing about witchcraft in
the 15th century. And it's something that features
quite heavily in the Malleus Maleficaron, because they've got
to get around that. I talked a little about a couple
of early witch stories. We've got the story of the Witch
(07:43):
of Barclay, for instance, which is theft in the middle of the
11th century. It describes a woman who spends
most of her life performing sorcery with the aid of demons.
But the way the story is framed suggests that this woman is a
loner. She's alone.
(08:04):
She's not part of any vast secret sect of witches.
And it also suggests that the only person she harms is
herself. She's carried away after her
death by the devil on horseback.Nobody else is injured.
We don't have a secret sect of witches here.
(08:25):
She's an idiot for resorting to sorcery, but in the end the only
person she hurts is herself. Now, through the high Middle
Ages, the boundaries between magic and what we might call
natural science shifts backwardsand forwards.
The Church has no problem, but people who take natural things
(08:47):
and mix them together to create new things, which have new
powers, unexpected powers, you just don't actually know why
this is happening. I mean, scientists still have
that sort of problem today. We do have some sort of
experiment, mix some things together and some sort of
reaction happens. Don't really properly understand
(09:09):
it. We'll get to that later.
But isn't this interesting now? The church has no problem with
that sort of stuff in the 12th, 13th century.
The only problem that the churchhas is when demons are
specifically involved, so they feel of some sort of natural
scientists trying to create somehealing potion, and you
explicitly summon demons to makethis potion really effective.
(09:33):
Yeah, that's not all. But otherwise, messing around
with the sort of natural things is OK.
But as I argued, things begin toshift at the start of the 15th
century. We've got reports from a judge
named Peter around the city of Ben in Martin, Switzerland.
(09:55):
Now he is not a churchman. He's a secular judge.
Now, unfortunately, we don't have records from the trials
over which he presided. What we've got are second hand
reports from this theologian named Johannes Neda.
Neda seems to have had conversations with Peter of Ben
(10:19):
somewhere between 1420 and 1430,that sort of period.
And they seem to have chatted about these trials.
And what Peter suggests that he's seen, or at least from what
we could tell in media's reportsof his conversations with Peter,
is that he's begun to find something which resembles the
(10:43):
classic demonic witch who features so prominently in the
early modern witch trials and his luck would have it in the
early 14th century. There is a large church council
in the Swiss city of Basil quitenearby where all of this is
(11:03):
happening. So all of the major churchmen of
the day are in the city of Basilat this conference.
Now, this conference is to do with church politics.
It's not particularly interesting for our purposes,
but what historians think is happening is that if they had
coffee, if they had coffee breaks, they don't have coffee.
(11:27):
But during the breaks, many of these churchmen are getting
together to talk about the kind of things that Peter has found,
the kind of things that Nida is thinking about as well.
And we're beginning to get the beginnings of what his stories
are called, the cumulative or elaborated conception of
witchcraft. This is the conception of
(11:49):
witchcraft that underlies the witch hunts in Europe between
the 1450s and, say, 1650s, something like that.
And it's very, very different tothe witchcraft described in the
Witch of Barclays story. And it's hard.
The elaborated conception of witchcraft hinges upon the idea
(12:11):
that you've got a witch who is awilling partner with the devil.
This witch is part of a vast secret anti Christian conspiracy
led by the devil. When this would be which enters
this secret society, she renounces her allegiance to God
(12:32):
and takes an oath to the devil as her Lord instead.
And often this relationship is consummated through intercourse
between the witch and the devil.And at certain times of the year
these witches travel through theair to a great meeting.
This great meeting is originallycalled a synagogue, but over
(12:54):
time this shifts and it becomes called the Witch's Sabbath.
And this is a massive assembly of witches presided over by
demons, sometimes even by the devil himself.
And at the Sabbath, the witches engage in all sorts of
debauchery and anti Christian ritual.
(13:14):
They all confess all of their evil deeds for the last year.
They make ointments and powders,swap recipes for nasty noxious
substances, to kill people, to harm animals, that sort of
thing. And the climax of the Sabbath
comes with a great atrocious feast, which features, amongst
(13:36):
the other delicacies, the boiledor roasted flesh of infant
children. Thank you so much.
I want to say to our listeners that I hope they've caught your
most recent episode because the tale of the Witch of Berkeley is
so enjoyable to listen to, even though it's not a great tale.
(13:59):
But that was such a great part of last episode, so it was fun
to hear about her again a littlebit just now.
How does the Malice Malfa Carm fit in?
Well, as I said, we're on the cusp of this cumulative
conception of witchcraft from the 1430s to the 1440s, and this
(14:20):
seems to be disseminated throughsome of these men who are at the
Council of Basel. But The thing is, we're still at
the age of manuscripts, that is,handwritten texts.
You could go out and buy a copy of Nita's book if you wanted,
and you could pray to get it copied out by hand, but this
(14:41):
process is going to be slow. And what's more, books are
produced on parchment, so that'sanimal skin.
So that means they're always going to be expensive as well.
So there are never going to be very many copies of Meters for
Makarius floating around. In fact, nowadays there are only
(15:01):
about 26 or 27 copies of Nita's book, which has survived.
How many were actually made at the time?
I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.
Twice that, three times that. But the point is, not a lot of
those, not a lot of copies of neither.
But this changes with the great technological revolution of the
(15:24):
middle of the 15th century, and that's the coming of printing.
And with printing, it's possibleto make hundreds of copies of a
single book relatively quickly. And what's called printers start
using paper as an alternative toparchment, which is cheaper.
(15:46):
So books become comparatively cheaper comparatively in a lot
greater quantities as well. The other thing to remember is
that anybody who's educated at this time reads Latin.
So book printed in Latin could be read anywhere by educated
people across the continent. So what printing means is that
(16:10):
ideas circulate much more widely, much more quickly, and
many copies of a book can be produced quite fast and sold
cheaply. And this is enormously important
for the Malleus Maleficaro. It's printed in either late 1486
(16:30):
or 1487. There were other earlier texts
about witches that circulated inmanuscript, but the Malleus is
the first attempt at a comprehensive treatise about
witches, their powers, and the way the authorities should deal
(16:52):
with them. What it does in many ways is it
standardizes this cumulative conception of witchcraft and it
does so for the first time on a continent wide basis.
So it's really influential earlyon in the period of the witch
trials. It's reprinted 12 times between
(17:17):
its first appearance in 14861487and 1519, and we know that it's
printed in Germanic lands, but also in France as well.
Interestingly, it's not printed at all between 1520 and 1580,
(17:37):
but from 1580 to 1650 it's printed another 16 times.
And that period between 1580 and1650 is really the worst period
of the witch hunts in Europe. The Malaise is also the first
text that assumes that witches are generally female.
(17:59):
Peter Eburn, that secular judge who seems to be rooting out
witches round about 1400 in the foothills of the Alps.
He prosecuted both women and men, and if you read neither,
the witches he describes are both male and female.
And that actually seems to be the case in many of these 15th
(18:21):
century texts. But with the Malleus, the idea
of witchcraft is becoming profoundly gendered.
You actually see that in the title of the book.
Like French or German or Spanish, Latin is a gendered
language. Nouns and adjectives have the
(18:41):
gender Malleus. Meleficharum Arum makes that the
hammer of female evil doers. Literally translated,
maleficarum is a feminine pluralnoun.
So this is the hammer of witches, and in the title it's
making clear that these witches are female.
(19:05):
This all has me so curious. What is the Malleus Maleficarum
actually like? Well, the first thing to
appreciate is that it's actuallya very bad book because it's
morally repugnant. But it's also really poorly
written, and many of the theological arguments the
authors try to make it confused and quite badly done.
(19:29):
But it's made even worse by the fact that the most widely used
English translation of the text was done in 1928 by a man called
Montague Summers. This is the translation that you
can find free online or across the Internet in nice, elaborate
(19:49):
editions. But leaving aside the fact that
the translation reads very stilted, it's not a nice, smooth
translation. Summers translates the book
because he believes that the kind of witchcraft the Malleus
describes is real and it is a threat to society and.
(20:17):
He says in the introduction to his text that witchcraft is an
evil thing, an enemy to light, an ally of the powers of
darkness, disruption and decay. It is a vast political movement,
an organized society which was anti social and anti
hierarchical. It is a worldwide plot against
(20:40):
civilization. He's translating the Malleys
because it is still relevant, hethinks.
He concedes that the text does have what he calls some trifling
blemishes. But it's essential message, he
says, is just as relevant in hisown day, with its Bolsheviks and
(21:02):
anarchists, as it was in 1486. Some of the Malleus's misogyny
is a touch extreme, he concedes.But, he says, and this is
another direct quotation, it is a wholesome and needful antidote
to the current feministic age, which is confounding the sexes.
(21:26):
Obviously, anyone approaching a translation with that frame of
mind is going to produce a rather stilted product, but some
is just something else that's actually problematic.
The main author of the Malleus, so I'll probably talk about him
in a minute. The main author of the Malleus
was writing very, very quickly. He's lifting passages from other
(21:51):
texts to other sources that he has to hand, and this is
standard for the time. But when he does, he often
forgets to turn the nouns and the adjectives that he's copying
from into the feminine form. So it's not uncommon when you
read the malleus in Latin to find him in the text itself,
(22:15):
using masculine nouns and adjectives to describe witches.
And that's just a function of how incredibly careless he is as
a writer. He's writing really, really
quickly. He's copying stuff, and he's
forgetting that, oh, I'm talkingabout women here.
I better change all the nouns tofeminine forms.
But when Summers turns his hand to translation, he turns all of
(22:38):
these masculine nouns into feminine nouns, and he corrects
what the authors of the Malleus were trying to do.
So he makes the text actually even more anti feminine than it
was when it was originally written.
Don't use Summer's translation. I know it's free, you can find
(22:58):
it all over the place. But an absolutely excellent
translation of the text done into English about 15 years ago
by Christopher McKay. You can find it on Amazon.
It will cost you $30 Canadian anyway, but it's just called The
Hammer of Witches by ChristopherMcKay.
If you've got to use the Malleus.
If you want to read the Malleus,look at Mckay's translation.
(23:21):
It is a very fine piece of scholarship.
Summers isn't. Thank you.
That's one of the things that's so important to consider when
you're looking at translated work.
So thank you for making sure ourlisteners know where to go for
their research. I want to know about the author
(23:44):
of the Malleus Mafkar. He and his team, who are they?
To to understand the book, I think it's really important to
understand both of these men andthe circumstances in which the
text was written. When the book is printed, it's
attributed to a theologian from the University of Cologne in
(24:04):
northwest Germany named Jacobus Springer, and it says that
there's another unnamed collaborator.
But if you actually look throughthe text itself, it's clear that
the other unnamed collaborator was a man named Heinrichus
Instatorus, or Heinrich Karma inGerman.
(24:25):
Modern scholars argue that the work was probably largely mostly
the work of insta tourists. Some have even gone so far as to
suggest that Sprang Up really had nothing to do with the book.
That's probably going too far inmy opinion, because when the
book is printed, it's reviewed by the theology faculty at the
(24:47):
University of Cologne. Spring is a member of the
theology faculty of the University of Cologne, so you
would expect him to sort of say,I didn't write that, I've got
nothing to do with that, but that isn't the case.
Insta tourists. The other guy would have been an
idiot to try and pass this book by the University of Cologne's
(25:09):
theology faculty if one of the members of the theology faculty
hadn't actually been involved atsome level.
That said, we're not clear what Stranger did.
He was appointed as an Inquisitor at some point, but
it's not clear if he ever actually did any work as an
Inquisitor. And tellingly, the only other
(25:29):
stuff that he published is aboutpraying the rosary.
So very different sort of work that's attributed to him.
And what do we know about Insta tourists?
Isotaurus is a very different man.
(25:51):
So he's born around about 1430. He lives until 15 O 5.
He's universally trained in theology.
He becomes a doctor of theology,but he wasn't an intellectual
the way Springer probably was. He's much more a practical man.
He's interested in preaching, and he's particularly concerned
(26:12):
about the spread of heresy. And he's concerned about the
spread of heresy from early in his career.
In 1467, we find records of him in central Germany prosecuting
heretics. In a letter from the 1470's, the
Pope describes him as a man notable for his zeal in
(26:35):
religion, knowledge of letters that is books, integrity of
life, constancy of faith, along with many other praiseworthy
virtues and merits. That said, he seems to have been
quite widely disliked. In fact, he faced punishment a
couple of times himself. In 1474, he slandered the Holy
(27:00):
Roman Emperor. That's not going to make you too
many friends, but in 1482 he's also accused of embezzling money
collected to fund a crusade against the Ottoman Turks.
But in 1474, he's formally appointed as an Inquisitor.
(27:24):
He's responsible for the southern regions of what's
modern day Germany, plus parts of modern Switzerland and
western Austria. If you remember from last time,
this is that sweep of territory between Innsbruck and Leon,
north of the Alps, where witchcraft accusations seem to
(27:46):
begin. Insta Taurus is the Inquisitor
working in the eastern half of that then, and it's in that
capacity that he came to the city of Ravensburg in the summer
of 1484. Ravensburg is in the southwest
of modern Germany, is about 20 kilometres from Lake Constance
(28:09):
or the Bodenzer Engine. A couple of months earlier,
before he came to Ravensburg, there'd been a severe freak
hailstorm that had hit the city.The hailstorm had destroyed most
of the crops in people's fields and ruined the city's vineyards.
And this was just the latest round of bad luck to hit the
(28:31):
city. There'd been freak weather
previous 2 summers, torrential rains.
There'd been an outbreak of plague.
So by the summer of 1484, peopleare beginning to suspect that
something unnatural is happening.
(28:51):
Many people began to publicly wonder if this latest disaster
is a result of somebody casting evil spells.
In response to this public outcry, the chaplain of the
local church, a man named Johannes Grant, called for the
(29:12):
matter to be investigated by theInquisition, and he requested
that Instatorus be brought to the city to investigate.
What isn't much appreciated really in the modern historical
literature is that Instatorus had been to Ravensburg before
(29:33):
he'd been there nine years earlier, back in 1475.
He'd been sent there by the Bishop of Trent.
Trent is in northern Italy. The Pope is investigating the
Bishop of Trent because the Bishop of Trent had just
executed 13 Jews after the discovery of the body of a 2
(29:56):
year old Christian lad named Simon.
It's one of these classic blood libel cases, the idea that the
Jews kill Christian children in order to harvest their blood to
use in demonic rituals. Obviously it's utter
anti-Semitic garbage, but it's avery common anti-Semitic trope
(30:18):
and often they're used to justify massacres subsequently
of Jewish communities and members of the Jewish community
brought to trial for these ritualistic murders.
And that's what had happened in Trent.
The body of Simon had been discovered.
The Bishop turned his attention to the Jewish community and he'd
executed a number members of thecommunity.
(30:42):
But what's interesting is that after these executions of
prominent members of the Jewish community in Trent, various
Jewish communities across northern Ish Italy petitioned
the Pope and various other high-ranking officials to
investigate how the Bishop of Trent had handled this matter.
(31:03):
They argued what unlikely, quiterightly, that the Bishop had
targeted the Jewish community inTrent in order just to get his
hands on their money, to seize their assets, to defend himself
against this accusation and to show what he'd done was
perfectly legal and in response to a real accusation, the Bishop
(31:27):
of Trent had instatorus travelled to Ravensburg because
back in 1428 there'd been a verysimilar case in Ravensburg.
A young boy, a young Christian boy, had been found dead,
hanging by the neck from a tree.Popular attention focuses on the
Jewish community, and the Chronicles of the time record
(31:51):
that all of the Jews of the citywere condemned, many of them
were burned alive, and afterwards the town council
seized all of their assets. So when Instatorus goes to
Ravensburg in 1475, he's sent there to find out how the
officials in Ravensburg had handled the matter back in 1428
(32:17):
to help the Bishop of Trent makean argument that what he was
doing was absolutely fine. So he's the tourist is until in
1475, and he takes sworn depositions from members of the
town council and from other people who had vague
recollections of what had happened 50 years ago.
And he argues that absolutely, it was perfectly legal.
(32:40):
But the point is, in 1484, well,it's the Taurus's cold into
Ravensburg. He's a known commodity.
He'd been there just nine years earlier.
So Grandpa is calling in somebody he knows.
And he's coming in after this very bad, damaging weather and
(33:05):
other unlucky and unfortunate things are hurting the
community. Exactly.
Exactly. And what happens when he goes
back? So he comes into Ravensburg in
late summer 1484, and he begins by spending several days
preaching in the city's main church about the evils of
(33:29):
sorcery and the evils of witchcraft.
This is very, very common. It's a common prerequisite to
any sort of outbreak of witch hunting.
Effectively, what's happening isthat he's priming the pump, as
it were. Then he invites anybody with any
knowledge or suspicion or who had heard rumors about people in
(33:52):
the community using unnatural means to harm others or their
animals. He invites them to come forward
and to give depositions in frontof him, and according to
accounts, a great number of people gave depositions.
Don't know how many that is, butapparently quite a lot.
(34:14):
On the basis of the depositions they received, he arrests at
least three people and maybe 6, maybe as many as 6, all women.
Of these, he starts interrogating the two women of
the lowest social status, women who are described just as Agnes
(34:37):
the bathkeeper and Anna of Mendelheim.
And in the presence of Granpa, the mayor, other members of the
town council. The two of these women are
interrogated and then they're subjected to what's described as
the lightest torture. And as a result of this, both
(34:59):
women confessed to having had intercourse with incubai.
So male demons. Agnes said she'd been doing this
for 18 years, and Anna said she'd been doing it for 20.
Agnes also admitted that she hadcaused the hailstorm.
She said that she had been summoned by her demon lover
(35:20):
outside the town. The demon told her to bring a
large bowl of water with her, then the demon told her to dig a
hole and pour the water into thehole, which she was then to stir
using her finger, invoking the name of the demon.
And then probably all the water disappeared up into the sky.
(35:41):
And an hour later this freak weather event happened.
Dignus also admitted to harming various other people in town by
burying animal bones under the threshold of the house.
And when Anna was interrogated, she admitted much the same sort
of things. On the third day after their
(36:03):
arrest, the two women were handed over to the town's
secular authorities to have sentence carried out.
It's one of the great ironies ofall of this.
The churchmen can't shed blood, so if there's any executing to
be done, the church doesn't do it themselves.
(36:23):
What they do is they hand thingsover to the secular authorities
for the carrying out of punishment.
Before she died, Agnes made a full confession of her crimes
and she went to the stake embracing a cross crucifix.
Anna, though, would not confess and died slandering and cursing
(36:46):
the Christian folk of the town. And after that Instatorus
leaves, he leaves the city. But here's the interesting thing
I said. At least three women were
arrested, and perhaps as many assix.
So there's at least one other woman who's still in jail.
(37:08):
One of them is the wife of the local locksmith and she's
released just a few days after Insta Tourists has left.
She was allowed to swear out what's called an unfader.
This is a formal legal document which requires an accused to
(37:29):
swear that they will not take legal action against anybody
who's accused them. That's a condition of their
release, and she's also requiredto produce certain number of
guarantors who prepared to attest to her good behaviour,
(37:50):
and who are going to be libel ifshe does try to take revenge on
her accusers. So this old fader is sworn out
just days after insta tourist leaves town.
Given that she requires guarantors.
And of course they'd all be men,right?
They need to be men of particular social standing, men
(38:13):
of upstanding reputation. This suggests that while she had
been suspected of witchcraft by some people, she's much more
integrated into society. Right?
She's people have a dim view of hardly some people do, but
there's enough men who are prepared to sign this unfaida to
(38:36):
suggest that she's well integrated into society.
That suggests that Anna and Agnes must have been much more
marginal figures on the periphery, probably poorer,
probably older, and probably without any male family members
who'd be prepared to stand up for them.
(38:57):
What's also interesting is that there are three more unfaden
relating to Witcraft issued overthe next couple of years.
They date from 14861489 and 1490.
Now, it's not clear at all if these are related to the trials
that Vince the tourists began. Me.
(39:20):
The woman who swore out an UNFETA in 1430, for instance,
would have been in jail for at least six years by this point by
the time she swore out this document.
Jail is not a punishment. In the Middle Ages, sentences
are usually physical. Jail is just a place where you
(39:41):
hold people until a sentence is imposed, so allowing it to stay
in jail for six years is unusual.
But it is worth pointing out that even though there was a
public outcry after this hailstorm in Ravensburg in 1484,
with many people suspecting evilspells, not everybody who was
(40:04):
accused was convicted. At least one person wasn't.
And maybe as many as four were not people's position in society
really matters. This suggests it matters from a
very early point in this development of witch hunt and.
(40:28):
What happens when Instatoris goes to Innsburg?
So after he's done in Rammersburg, the Instatoris goes
down the road to Innsbruck in modern Austria, and he's there
by July 1485. We don't really know why he ends
up there. It's not clear.
There doesn't seem to have been a big freak hailstorm or
(40:50):
anything like that that got him invited.
But what we do know is that as soon as he arrived in the city,
he preaches against witchcraft and he preaches for 15 days
straight and then on every holy day for the next two months.
So really that process of priming the pub, getting people
(41:11):
to think the witchcraft is a big, huge threat in their
community and something needs tobe done about it.
And then, just as he did in Ravensbruck, he invites people
with knowledge or suspicion of witchcraft to come before him to
make depositions. This process in Innsbruck takes
six weeks. 64 people come forward to make depositions and
(41:37):
they end up accusing 46 different women.
Are these depositions a secret? The Inquisitor is the only one
who knows who's accusing whom. But The thing is, Insta Tourists
is an outsider coming into what is a fairly close knit town.
(41:59):
It's Innsbrook is bigger than Ravensburg, but it's still a
fairly close knit town. So despite his position of
authority as an Inquisitor, he'snot going to be able to get very
far in town without the support of important, influential
people. And initially, Instant Tourists
(42:21):
seems to have had this. He was supported by the local
Bishop, for instance. But as the investigations get
going, the Bishop has problems with how Inciturus is handling
things. The Bishop wants the names of
all the people who've sworn out depositions against accused
(42:42):
people to be made known to the people who are accused.
And this is actually standard practice under Church law,
unless there's any possibility that the accused might be able
to retaliate. The names of accusers are meant
to be known to the accused. But that's exactly what
instatorist doesn't want to happen.
(43:04):
He doesn't want it to happen because witchcraft doesn't work
like murder or any other crime. Witchcraft is a secret crime.
That implies that the witch has made some sort of practice the
devil to get access to crawlers.So just because she's sitting in
jail now doesn't mean to say shecan't still use witchcraft to
(43:28):
harm the people who are accusingher with a murderer.
The murdering obviously stops assoon as you stick the murderer
in jail. So the murderer can know the
names of the people who are accusing him.
That's not a problem. But witchcraft is different, so
it's the tourist refuses to allow the names of the accusers
to be made known. So you've got attention here
(43:50):
about legal process between two churchmen, between Insta
Tourists and Outsider and inquisitor, but also the local
Bishop of Innsbruck. And they understand what's
happening in different terms. Insta Tourists sees what he's
doing as a crime involving a secret satanic conspiracy.
(44:11):
The Bishop doesn't seem to thinkthat magical retaliation is much
of a problem from all those accusations he's got.
Insatourist decides to go ahead with the six strongest cases,
and these involve the testimony of about 20 witnesses.
This something that Insatourist later goes on to talk about in
(44:33):
the Malleus. Go ahead with the easiest
prosecutions first, get them outof the way, and maybe you get
some confessions and you'll implicate some other people
involved. Deal with the easy cases 1st and
then move on to the harder casesafterwards.
But the Bishop is getting very worried about what instatorists
(44:53):
is doing. So from what we can tell, the
Bishop hires the best lawyer around to defend the accused,
and the lawyer does what lawyersdo.
He accuses instatorists of all sorts of procedural
irregularities and even tries toget instatorists removed as an
(45:15):
inquisitor. Even tries to get him arrested.
Didn't work. And ultimately it's up to
Insaturus as inquisitor to evaluate whether he himself is
competent to act as a judge. And predictably, he finds
himself competent to act as a judge.
But at this point, the lawyer says that the proceedings are so
(45:38):
compromised, We're going to appeal over Insaturus head, and
we'll take the case to Rome. But Insaturus isn't deterred.
He tries to get the trial going again and it seems to have just
collapsed. The lawyer and the other
churchmen on the lawyer's side are keen to get the case removed
(45:59):
to be heard in Rome. And things just descend into
chaos. And the women who incitories had
arrested were released. They were released on the 3rd of
November. Now obviously there's a lot
going on behind the scenes here that we don't know about, but
(46:19):
there does seem to be a good amount of local opposition to
insta tourists by friends and relatives of the accused.
Keep in mind, if you're accusing46 women, that's a lot of
relatives and friends who are also wondering what's going on.
And it's clear that the Bishop while he may have had no problem
(46:41):
with the idea of witchcraft, he doesn't see it as the kind of
threat that Instotaurus does. And he certainly doesn't think
that it justifies changing normal legal procedure to try
and get convictions. It's clear that the Bishop is
working very hard to try and curb Instotaurus's power.
(47:03):
Despite things collapsing in Innsbruck, Instotaurus stays in
the city. But on the 9th of February 1485,
the Bishop has his brother writes Inciturus a letter
strongly suggesting that Inciturus get out of town.
Things are getting too hot for you here.
(47:23):
Leave. In fact, the letter is quite
amusing. It even goes so far as to call
Inciturus pretty much senile. He's only about 55 at this time,
so that's stretching it, but they're obviously trying quite
hard to insult him. So if Torres leaves Innsbruck in
1486, the Malleus Malficarum is ready to be printed at the end
(47:48):
of that year. We certainly don't know if he'd
been working on it on and off before this and how Springer got
involved, but it's safe to say that a good chunk of the text is
written very quickly in this fitof pique after Hinster Tourist's
(48:10):
prosecution in Innsbruck has collapsed and he's effectively
run out of town. This matters because his
experiences in Ravensburg and Innsbruck colour how the book is
developed and some of the evidence that he uses, but it
(48:30):
also colours the fact that he he's convinced that the secular
authorities and that the bishopsare not taking this seriously
enough. For him, witchcraft is an
established fact. What needs to happen is people
need to understand that and to take action, and that's not
(48:55):
what's happened. Thank you for joining us on this
special double feature Week of Witch Hunt podcast.
You just heard Part 3, but part four of the Special Conversation
with Doctor Raiswell is available right now.
The full series is available right now wherever you get your
(49:18):
podcasts. Let's go rejoin Professor
Raiswell on Part 4. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome back to Witch Hunt Podcast.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
special treat for our listeners this week.
Not one, but two new episodes dropping simultaneously.
You are in the right place for today's episode drop.
We did do this last week and this is the second week of
double episodes. Can you keep up with this fun?
(00:21):
That's right, returning expert Professor Richard Raiswell of
the University of Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us
for a fascinating Speak of the Devil episode and last week's
two parter, The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief.
It's here to conclude his special series with more talk
about the malice mouth CARM. He is an expert in medieval
(00:42):
devil lore, bringing years of scholarly research to our
discussion, including his work on the new book Rutledge History
of the Devil in the Western Tradition.
For those of you who might have missed it, Speak of the Devil
was the episode where we explored Satan as one of
history's most enduring and complex figures throughout
medieval thought. In last week's two-part special
(01:03):
The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief, Professor
Raiswell took us deeper into thedark intersection where
demonology meets witch persecution.
Today in Part 3, you'll be taking into the minds of the
Witch's Hammer authors Springer and Insta Taurus.
Both Part 3 and Part 4 are available now wherever you get
(01:25):
your podcasts. So settle in for a fascinating
and chilling exploration of the Malleys Maleficarum Times 2.
Welcome back to Witch Hunt podcast.
Doctor Richard Raiswell, it's a real pleasure to have you back
again today. Can you remind us about
yourself, your work and what youwill be sharing?
Well, thanks very much for having me back and for some more
(01:47):
devil talk, one of my favorite things, I'm Richard Racewell.
I'm a professor of history at the University of Prince Edward
Island in Eastern Canada, in theMaritimes, published quite a bit
of stuff on aspects of the devil, particularly in the
Middle Ages and in the early modern period.
I've got a source collection of primary sources on the medieval
(02:09):
devil which came out a few yearsago and in about a month.
Well, I'm one of the editors of the New Routledge History of the
Devil, which should be out. Thank you so much for coming
back. We've really enjoyed the
previous two discussions. Can you give us a brief summary
of where we got to last time? Yes, thank you.
(02:31):
So last time around I tried to set the scene for talking about
the Malleus Maleficarum, the great witch hunting manual of
the late 15th century. I tried to stress a few things.
Firstly, the early relationship between Christianity and magic.
If you think about magic in the context of the late antique
(02:51):
marketplace, it's a commodity which is available to buy and to
sell. And so when Jesus shows up, he
is offering similar sorts of cures.
And one of the problems that early Christians have to deal
with is how to differentiate themselves, their own tradition
of wonder working, their abilityto harness supernatural power to
(03:14):
perform wonders and that which is available in the marketplace.
And so one of those things, one of the strategies that early
Christians use is to demonize their competitors.
The magic that you could buy in the marketplace did work, but it
worked only because it involved demons.
(03:36):
Somewhere in the end, whoever was manipulating things, trying
to perform some sort of magical ritual, magical spell, was
engaged in commerce with demons at some point.
So it works. The magic gets you by the
marketplace works, but it's dangerous.
The only legitimate form of access to supernatural power is
(03:57):
the Christian form, and it has to come through Christian holy
man, that is, church officials and Saints.
But this debate about magic and demonology is happening at the
time that the Roman Empire is crumbling.
And what that means is that centralized communication
networks are declining. It's very difficult for
(04:20):
Christians to try and impose anything on the beliefs of
ordinary people. The popular tradition of magic,
this sort of idea that you can buy, feeling, remedies, these
sorts of things, that still continues, and the church really
doesn't have much to do with it.There's still a guy in Rome
(04:42):
who's the Pope, but his ability to control or enforce belief is
decidedly limited. So this popular tradition of
magic still continues in the countryside, and sometimes it's
even integrated into Christian rituals.
I mean, if you're working up some sort of healing potion or
whatever, why not add a few prayers into the process, bring
(05:05):
in even more forms of supernatural power.
So this sort of popular tradition of magic still
continues on. It is demonic at some level when
churchmen start thinking about it, but in the end it's useful.
People do need to have access toremedies when their children are
sick or when their animals are sick and they're interested in
(05:28):
protecting the harvest, all of these sorts of things.
Now, every now and again you find a churchman vigorously
complaining about what they termthese popular superstitions.
And the most important of these for our purposes, what comes up
today is a church Canon that is a point of church law, which
(05:52):
seems to be late night, early 10th century.
This Canon is called Episcopy, and this says that there are
some women who believe that on certain nights they're summoned
by the Roman goddess Diana, and then they fly through the air on
the backs of beasts. And a Canon, though, doesn't say
(06:17):
that these women should be condemned because they're
somehow in league with the devilor with demons.
Rather, what it says is that these people who believe that
this happens are deceived by thedevil.
They may think that they're flying through the air, but in
actual fact they're not. They've just had some sort of
(06:41):
illusion implanted in their brain by the devil.
So the kind of Episcopal goes onto say that anyone who believes
that they're flying through the air to these gatherings with the
goddess Diana is beyond doubt aninfidel.
(07:02):
So what you have here is something that looks like the
idea of women who are flying, obviously a fundamental trope of
witchcraft as it develops in the15th or 16th century.
But the church is saying that ifyou believe this happens, you're
not a Christian, you're beyond doubt an infidel.
(07:22):
So this Canon is going to prove to be a real problem for some of
the early people who are theorizing about witchcraft in
the 15th century. And it's something that features
quite heavily in the Malleus Maleficaron, because they've got
to get around that. I talked a little about a couple
of early witch stories. We've got the story of the Witch
(07:43):
of Barclay, for instance, which is theft in the middle of the
11th century. It describes a woman who spends
most of her life performing sorcery with the aid of demons.
But the way the story is framed suggests that this woman is a
loner. She's alone.
(08:04):
She's not part of any vast secret sect of witches.
And it also suggests that the only person she harms is
herself. She's carried away after her
death by the devil on horseback.Nobody else is injured.
We don't have a secret sect of witches here.
(08:25):
She's an idiot for resorting to sorcery, but in the end the only
person she hurts is herself. Now, through the high Middle
Ages, the boundaries between magic and what we might call
natural science shifts backwardsand forwards.
The Church has no problem, but people who take natural things
(08:47):
and mix them together to create new things, which have new
powers, unexpected powers, you just don't actually know why
this is happening. I mean, scientists still have
that sort of problem today. We do have some sort of
experiment, mix some things together and some sort of
reaction happens. Don't really properly understand
(09:09):
it. We'll get to that later.
But isn't this interesting now? The church has no problem with
that sort of stuff in the 12th, 13th century.
The only problem that the churchhas is when demons are
specifically involved, so they feel of some sort of natural
scientists trying to create somehealing potion, and you
explicitly summon demons to makethis potion really effective.
(09:33):
Yeah, that's not all. But otherwise, messing around
with the sort of natural things is OK.
But as I argued, things begin toshift at the start of the 15th
century. We've got reports from a judge
named Peter around the city of Ben in Martin, Switzerland.
(09:55):
Now he is not a churchman. He's a secular judge.
Now, unfortunately, we don't have records from the trials
over which he presided. What we've got are second hand
reports from this theologian named Johannes Neda.
Neda seems to have had conversations with Peter of Ben
(10:19):
somewhere between 1420 and 1430,that sort of period.
And they seem to have chatted about these trials.
And what Peter suggests that he's seen, or at least from what
we could tell in media's reportsof his conversations with Peter,
is that he's begun to find something which resembles the
(10:43):
classic demonic witch who features so prominently in the
early modern witch trials and his luck would have it in the
early 14th century. There is a large church council
in the Swiss city of Basil quitenearby where all of this is
(11:03):
happening. So all of the major churchmen of
the day are in the city of Basilat this conference.
Now, this conference is to do with church politics.
It's not particularly interesting for our purposes,
but what historians think is happening is that if they had
coffee, if they had coffee breaks, they don't have coffee.
(11:27):
But during the breaks, many of these churchmen are getting
together to talk about the kind of things that Peter has found,
the kind of things that Nida is thinking about as well.
And we're beginning to get the beginnings of what his stories
are called, the cumulative or elaborated conception of
witchcraft. This is the conception of
(11:49):
witchcraft that underlies the witch hunts in Europe between
the 1450s and, say, 1650s, something like that.
And it's very, very different tothe witchcraft described in the
Witch of Barclays story. And it's hard.
The elaborated conception of witchcraft hinges upon the idea
(12:11):
that you've got a witch who is awilling partner with the devil.
This witch is part of a vast secret anti Christian conspiracy
led by the devil. When this would be which enters
this secret society, she renounces her allegiance to God
(12:32):
and takes an oath to the devil as her Lord instead.
And often this relationship is consummated through intercourse
between the witch and the devil.And at certain times of the year
these witches travel through theair to a great meeting.
This great meeting is originallycalled a synagogue, but over
(12:54):
time this shifts and it becomes called the Witch's Sabbath.
And this is a massive assembly of witches presided over by
demons, sometimes even by the devil himself.
And at the Sabbath, the witches engage in all sorts of
debauchery and anti Christian ritual.
(13:14):
They all confess all of their evil deeds for the last year.
They make ointments and powders,swap recipes for nasty noxious
substances, to kill people, to harm animals, that sort of
thing. And the climax of the Sabbath
comes with a great atrocious feast, which features, amongst
(13:36):
the other delicacies, the boiledor roasted flesh of infant
children. Thank you so much.
I want to say to our listeners that I hope they've caught your
most recent episode because the tale of the Witch of Berkeley is
so enjoyable to listen to, even though it's not a great tale.
(13:59):
But that was such a great part of last episode, so it was fun
to hear about her again a littlebit just now.
How does the Malice Malfa Carm fit in?
Well, as I said, we're on the cusp of this cumulative
conception of witchcraft from the 1430s to the 1440s, and this
(14:20):
seems to be disseminated throughsome of these men who are at the
Council of Basel. But The thing is, we're still at
the age of manuscripts, that is,handwritten texts.
You could go out and buy a copy of Nita's book if you wanted,
and you could pray to get it copied out by hand, but this
(14:41):
process is going to be slow. And what's more, books are
produced on parchment, so that'sanimal skin.
So that means they're always going to be expensive as well.
So there are never going to be very many copies of Meters for
Makarius floating around. In fact, nowadays there are only
(15:01):
about 26 or 27 copies of Nita's book, which has survived.
How many were actually made at the time?
I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.
Twice that, three times that. But the point is, not a lot of
those, not a lot of copies of neither.
But this changes with the great technological revolution of the
(15:24):
middle of the 15th century, and that's the coming of printing.
And with printing, it's possibleto make hundreds of copies of a
single book relatively quickly. And what's called printers start
using paper as an alternative toparchment, which is cheaper.
(15:46):
So books become comparatively cheaper comparatively in a lot
greater quantities as well. The other thing to remember is
that anybody who's educated at this time reads Latin.
So book printed in Latin could be read anywhere by educated
people across the continent. So what printing means is that
(16:10):
ideas circulate much more widely, much more quickly, and
many copies of a book can be produced quite fast and sold
cheaply. And this is enormously important
for the Malleus Maleficaro. It's printed in either late 1486
(16:30):
or 1487. There were other earlier texts
about witches that circulated inmanuscript, but the Malleus is
the first attempt at a comprehensive treatise about
witches, their powers, and the way the authorities should deal
(16:52):
with them. What it does in many ways is it
standardizes this cumulative conception of witchcraft and it
does so for the first time on a continent wide basis.
So it's really influential earlyon in the period of the witch
trials. It's reprinted 12 times between
(17:17):
its first appearance in 14861487and 1519, and we know that it's
printed in Germanic lands, but also in France as well.
Interestingly, it's not printed at all between 1520 and 1580,
(17:37):
but from 1580 to 1650 it's printed another 16 times.
And that period between 1580 and1650 is really the worst period
of the witch hunts in Europe. The Malaise is also the first
text that assumes that witches are generally female.
(17:59):
Peter Eburn, that secular judge who seems to be rooting out
witches round about 1400 in the foothills of the Alps.
He prosecuted both women and men, and if you read neither,
the witches he describes are both male and female.
And that actually seems to be the case in many of these 15th
(18:21):
century texts. But with the Malleus, the idea
of witchcraft is becoming profoundly gendered.
You actually see that in the title of the book.
Like French or German or Spanish, Latin is a gendered
language. Nouns and adjectives have the
(18:41):
gender Malleus. Meleficharum Arum makes that the
hammer of female evil doers. Literally translated,
maleficarum is a feminine pluralnoun.
So this is the hammer of witches, and in the title it's
making clear that these witches are female.
(19:05):
This all has me so curious. What is the Malleus Maleficarum
actually like? Well, the first thing to
appreciate is that it's actuallya very bad book because it's
morally repugnant. But it's also really poorly
written, and many of the theological arguments the
authors try to make it confused and quite badly done.
(19:29):
But it's made even worse by the fact that the most widely used
English translation of the text was done in 1928 by a man called
Montague Summers. This is the translation that you
can find free online or across the Internet in nice, elaborate
(19:49):
editions. But leaving aside the fact that
the translation reads very stilted, it's not a nice, smooth
translation. Summers translates the book
because he believes that the kind of witchcraft the Malleus
describes is real and it is a threat to society and.
(20:17):
He says in the introduction to his text that witchcraft is an
evil thing, an enemy to light, an ally of the powers of
darkness, disruption and decay. It is a vast political movement,
an organized society which was anti social and anti
hierarchical. It is a worldwide plot against
(20:40):
civilization. He's translating the Malleys
because it is still relevant, hethinks.
He concedes that the text does have what he calls some trifling
blemishes. But it's essential message, he
says, is just as relevant in hisown day, with its Bolsheviks and
(21:02):
anarchists, as it was in 1486. Some of the Malleus's misogyny
is a touch extreme, he concedes.But, he says, and this is
another direct quotation, it is a wholesome and needful antidote
to the current feministic age, which is confounding the sexes.
(21:26):
Obviously, anyone approaching a translation with that frame of
mind is going to produce a rather stilted product, but some
is just something else that's actually problematic.
The main author of the Malleus, so I'll probably talk about him
in a minute. The main author of the Malleus
was writing very, very quickly. He's lifting passages from other
(21:51):
texts to other sources that he has to hand, and this is
standard for the time. But when he does, he often
forgets to turn the nouns and the adjectives that he's copying
from into the feminine form. So it's not uncommon when you
read the malleus in Latin to find him in the text itself,
(22:15):
using masculine nouns and adjectives to describe witches.
And that's just a function of how incredibly careless he is as
a writer. He's writing really, really
quickly. He's copying stuff, and he's
forgetting that, oh, I'm talkingabout women here.
I better change all the nouns tofeminine forms.
But when Summers turns his hand to translation, he turns all of
(22:38):
these masculine nouns into feminine nouns, and he corrects
what the authors of the Malleus were trying to do.
So he makes the text actually even more anti feminine than it
was when it was originally written.
Don't use Summer's translation. I know it's free, you can find
(22:58):
it all over the place. But an absolutely excellent
translation of the text done into English about 15 years ago
by Christopher McKay. You can find it on Amazon.
It will cost you $30 Canadian anyway, but it's just called The
Hammer of Witches by ChristopherMcKay.
If you've got to use the Malleus.
If you want to read the Malleus,look at Mckay's translation.
(23:21):
It is a very fine piece of scholarship.
Summers isn't. Thank you.
That's one of the things that's so important to consider when
you're looking at translated work.
So thank you for making sure ourlisteners know where to go for
their research. I want to know about the author
(23:44):
of the Malleus Mafkar. He and his team, who are they?
To to understand the book, I think it's really important to
understand both of these men andthe circumstances in which the
text was written. When the book is printed, it's
attributed to a theologian from the University of Cologne in
(24:04):
northwest Germany named Jacobus Springer, and it says that
there's another unnamed collaborator.
But if you actually look throughthe text itself, it's clear that
the other unnamed collaborator was a man named Heinrichus
Instatorus, or Heinrich Karma inGerman.
(24:25):
Modern scholars argue that the work was probably largely mostly
the work of insta tourists. Some have even gone so far as to
suggest that Sprang Up really had nothing to do with the book.
That's probably going too far inmy opinion, because when the
book is printed, it's reviewed by the theology faculty at the
(24:47):
University of Cologne. Spring is a member of the
theology faculty of the University of Cologne, so you
would expect him to sort of say,I didn't write that, I've got
nothing to do with that, but that isn't the case.
Insta tourists. The other guy would have been an
idiot to try and pass this book by the University of Cologne's
(25:09):
theology faculty if one of the members of the theology faculty
hadn't actually been involved atsome level.
That said, we're not clear what Stranger did.
He was appointed as an Inquisitor at some point, but
it's not clear if he ever actually did any work as an
Inquisitor. And tellingly, the only other
(25:29):
stuff that he published is aboutpraying the rosary.
So very different sort of work that's attributed to him.
And what do we know about Insta tourists?
Isotaurus is a very different man.
(25:51):
So he's born around about 1430. He lives until 15 O 5.
He's universally trained in theology.
He becomes a doctor of theology,but he wasn't an intellectual
the way Springer probably was. He's much more a practical man.
He's interested in preaching, and he's particularly concerned
(26:12):
about the spread of heresy. And he's concerned about the
spread of heresy from early in his career.
In 1467, we find records of him in central Germany prosecuting
heretics. In a letter from the 1470's, the
Pope describes him as a man notable for his zeal in
(26:35):
religion, knowledge of letters that is books, integrity of
life, constancy of faith, along with many other praiseworthy
virtues and merits. That said, he seems to have been
quite widely disliked. In fact, he faced punishment a
couple of times himself. In 1474, he slandered the Holy
(27:00):
Roman Emperor. That's not going to make you too
many friends, but in 1482 he's also accused of embezzling money
collected to fund a crusade against the Ottoman Turks.
But in 1474, he's formally appointed as an Inquisitor.
(27:24):
He's responsible for the southern regions of what's
modern day Germany, plus parts of modern Switzerland and
western Austria. If you remember from last time,
this is that sweep of territory between Innsbruck and Leon,
north of the Alps, where witchcraft accusations seem to
(27:46):
begin. Insta Taurus is the Inquisitor
working in the eastern half of that then, and it's in that
capacity that he came to the city of Ravensburg in the summer
of 1484. Ravensburg is in the southwest
of modern Germany, is about 20 kilometres from Lake Constance
(28:09):
or the Bodenzer Engine. A couple of months earlier,
before he came to Ravensburg, there'd been a severe freak
hailstorm that had hit the city.The hailstorm had destroyed most
of the crops in people's fields and ruined the city's vineyards.
And this was just the latest round of bad luck to hit the
(28:31):
city. There'd been freak weather
previous 2 summers, torrential rains.
There'd been an outbreak of plague.
So by the summer of 1484, peopleare beginning to suspect that
something unnatural is happening.
(28:51):
Many people began to publicly wonder if this latest disaster
is a result of somebody casting evil spells.
In response to this public outcry, the chaplain of the
local church, a man named Johannes Grant, called for the
(29:12):
matter to be investigated by theInquisition, and he requested
that Instatorus be brought to the city to investigate.
What isn't much appreciated really in the modern historical
literature is that Instatorus had been to Ravensburg before
(29:33):
he'd been there nine years earlier, back in 1475.
He'd been sent there by the Bishop of Trent.
Trent is in northern Italy. The Pope is investigating the
Bishop of Trent because the Bishop of Trent had just
executed 13 Jews after the discovery of the body of a 2
(29:56):
year old Christian lad named Simon.
It's one of these classic blood libel cases, the idea that the
Jews kill Christian children in order to harvest their blood to
use in demonic rituals. Obviously it's utter
anti-Semitic garbage, but it's avery common anti-Semitic trope
(30:18):
and often they're used to justify massacres subsequently
of Jewish communities and members of the Jewish community
brought to trial for these ritualistic murders.
And that's what had happened in Trent.
The body of Simon had been discovered.
The Bishop turned his attention to the Jewish community and he'd
executed a number members of thecommunity.
(30:42):
But what's interesting is that after these executions of
prominent members of the Jewish community in Trent, various
Jewish communities across northern Ish Italy petitioned
the Pope and various other high-ranking officials to
investigate how the Bishop of Trent had handled this matter.
(31:03):
They argued what unlikely, quiterightly, that the Bishop had
targeted the Jewish community inTrent in order just to get his
hands on their money, to seize their assets, to defend himself
against this accusation and to show what he'd done was
perfectly legal and in response to a real accusation, the Bishop
(31:27):
of Trent had instatorus travelled to Ravensburg because
back in 1428 there'd been a verysimilar case in Ravensburg.
A young boy, a young Christian boy, had been found dead,
hanging by the neck from a tree.Popular attention focuses on the
Jewish community, and the Chronicles of the time record
(31:51):
that all of the Jews of the citywere condemned, many of them
were burned alive, and afterwards the town council
seized all of their assets. So when Instatorus goes to
Ravensburg in 1475, he's sent there to find out how the
officials in Ravensburg had handled the matter back in 1428
(32:17):
to help the Bishop of Trent makean argument that what he was
doing was absolutely fine. So he's the tourist is until in
1475, and he takes sworn depositions from members of the
town council and from other people who had vague
recollections of what had happened 50 years ago.
And he argues that absolutely, it was perfectly legal.
(32:40):
But the point is, in 1484, well,it's the Taurus's cold into
Ravensburg. He's a known commodity.
He'd been there just nine years earlier.
So Grandpa is calling in somebody he knows.
And he's coming in after this very bad, damaging weather and
(33:05):
other unlucky and unfortunate things are hurting the
community. Exactly.
Exactly. And what happens when he goes
back? So he comes into Ravensburg in
late summer 1484, and he begins by spending several days
preaching in the city's main church about the evils of
(33:29):
sorcery and the evils of witchcraft.
This is very, very common. It's a common prerequisite to
any sort of outbreak of witch hunting.
Effectively, what's happening isthat he's priming the pump, as
it were. Then he invites anybody with any
knowledge or suspicion or who had heard rumors about people in
(33:52):
the community using unnatural means to harm others or their
animals. He invites them to come forward
and to give depositions in frontof him, and according to
accounts, a great number of people gave depositions.
Don't know how many that is, butapparently quite a lot.
(34:14):
On the basis of the depositions they received, he arrests at
least three people and maybe 6, maybe as many as 6, all women.
Of these, he starts interrogating the two women of
the lowest social status, women who are described just as Agnes
(34:37):
the bathkeeper and Anna of Mendelheim.
And in the presence of Granpa, the mayor, other members of the
town council. The two of these women are
interrogated and then they're subjected to what's described as
the lightest torture. And as a result of this, both
(34:59):
women confessed to having had intercourse with incubai.
So male demons. Agnes said she'd been doing this
for 18 years, and Anna said she'd been doing it for 20.
Agnes also admitted that she hadcaused the hailstorm.
She said that she had been summoned by her demon lover
(35:20):
outside the town. The demon told her to bring a
large bowl of water with her, then the demon told her to dig a
hole and pour the water into thehole, which she was then to stir
using her finger, invoking the name of the demon.
And then probably all the water disappeared up into the sky.
(35:41):
And an hour later this freak weather event happened.
Dignus also admitted to harming various other people in town by
burying animal bones under the threshold of the house.
And when Anna was interrogated, she admitted much the same sort
of things. On the third day after their
(36:03):
arrest, the two women were handed over to the town's
secular authorities to have sentence carried out.
It's one of the great ironies ofall of this.
The churchmen can't shed blood, so if there's any executing to
be done, the church doesn't do it themselves.
(36:23):
What they do is they hand thingsover to the secular authorities
for the carrying out of punishment.
Before she died, Agnes made a full confession of her crimes
and she went to the stake embracing a cross crucifix.
Anna, though, would not confess and died slandering and cursing
(36:46):
the Christian folk of the town. And after that Instatorus
leaves, he leaves the city. But here's the interesting thing
I said. At least three women were
arrested, and perhaps as many assix.
So there's at least one other woman who's still in jail.
(37:08):
One of them is the wife of the local locksmith and she's
released just a few days after Insta Tourists has left.
She was allowed to swear out what's called an unfader.
This is a formal legal document which requires an accused to
(37:29):
swear that they will not take legal action against anybody
who's accused them. That's a condition of their
release, and she's also requiredto produce certain number of
guarantors who prepared to attest to her good behaviour,
(37:50):
and who are going to be libel ifshe does try to take revenge on
her accusers. So this old fader is sworn out
just days after insta tourist leaves town.
Given that she requires guarantors.
And of course they'd all be men,right?
They need to be men of particular social standing, men
(38:13):
of upstanding reputation. This suggests that while she had
been suspected of witchcraft by some people, she's much more
integrated into society. Right?
She's people have a dim view of hardly some people do, but
there's enough men who are prepared to sign this unfaida to
(38:36):
suggest that she's well integrated into society.
That suggests that Anna and Agnes must have been much more
marginal figures on the periphery, probably poorer,
probably older, and probably without any male family members
who'd be prepared to stand up for them.
(38:57):
What's also interesting is that there are three more unfaden
relating to Witcraft issued overthe next couple of years.
They date from 14861489 and 1490.
Now, it's not clear at all if these are related to the trials
that Vince the tourists began. Me.
(39:20):
The woman who swore out an UNFETA in 1430, for instance,
would have been in jail for at least six years by this point by
the time she swore out this document.
Jail is not a punishment. In the Middle Ages, sentences
are usually physical. Jail is just a place where you
(39:41):
hold people until a sentence is imposed, so allowing it to stay
in jail for six years is unusual.
But it is worth pointing out that even though there was a
public outcry after this hailstorm in Ravensburg in 1484,
with many people suspecting evilspells, not everybody who was
(40:04):
accused was convicted. At least one person wasn't.
And maybe as many as four were not people's position in society
really matters. This suggests it matters from a
very early point in this development of witch hunt and.
(40:28):
What happens when Instatoris goes to Innsburg?
So after he's done in Rammersburg, the Instatoris goes
down the road to Innsbruck in modern Austria, and he's there
by July 1485. We don't really know why he ends
up there. It's not clear.
There doesn't seem to have been a big freak hailstorm or
(40:50):
anything like that that got him invited.
But what we do know is that as soon as he arrived in the city,
he preaches against witchcraft and he preaches for 15 days
straight and then on every holy day for the next two months.
So really that process of priming the pub, getting people
(41:11):
to think the witchcraft is a big, huge threat in their
community and something needs tobe done about it.
And then, just as he did in Ravensbruck, he invites people
with knowledge or suspicion of witchcraft to come before him to
make depositions. This process in Innsbruck takes
six weeks. 64 people come forward to make depositions and
(41:37):
they end up accusing 46 different women.
Are these depositions a secret? The Inquisitor is the only one
who knows who's accusing whom. But The thing is, Insta Tourists
is an outsider coming into what is a fairly close knit town.
(41:59):
It's Innsbrook is bigger than Ravensburg, but it's still a
fairly close knit town. So despite his position of
authority as an Inquisitor, he'snot going to be able to get very
far in town without the support of important, influential
people. And initially, Instant Tourists
(42:21):
seems to have had this. He was supported by the local
Bishop, for instance. But as the investigations get
going, the Bishop has problems with how Inciturus is handling
things. The Bishop wants the names of
all the people who've sworn out depositions against accused
(42:42):
people to be made known to the people who are accused.
And this is actually standard practice under Church law,
unless there's any possibility that the accused might be able
to retaliate. The names of accusers are meant
to be known to the accused. But that's exactly what
instatorist doesn't want to happen.
(43:04):
He doesn't want it to happen because witchcraft doesn't work
like murder or any other crime. Witchcraft is a secret crime.
That implies that the witch has made some sort of practice the
devil to get access to crawlers.So just because she's sitting in
jail now doesn't mean to say shecan't still use witchcraft to
(43:28):
harm the people who are accusingher with a murderer.
The murdering obviously stops assoon as you stick the murderer
in jail. So the murderer can know the
names of the people who are accusing him.
That's not a problem. But witchcraft is different, so
it's the tourist refuses to allow the names of the accusers
to be made known. So you've got attention here
(43:50):
about legal process between two churchmen, between Insta
Tourists and Outsider and inquisitor, but also the local
Bishop of Innsbruck. And they understand what's
happening in different terms. Insta Tourists sees what he's
doing as a crime involving a secret satanic conspiracy.
(44:11):
The Bishop doesn't seem to thinkthat magical retaliation is much
of a problem from all those accusations he's got.
Insatourist decides to go ahead with the six strongest cases,
and these involve the testimony of about 20 witnesses.
This something that Insatourist later goes on to talk about in
(44:33):
the Malleus. Go ahead with the easiest
prosecutions first, get them outof the way, and maybe you get
some confessions and you'll implicate some other people
involved. Deal with the easy cases 1st and
then move on to the harder casesafterwards.
But the Bishop is getting very worried about what instatorists
(44:53):
is doing. So from what we can tell, the
Bishop hires the best lawyer around to defend the accused,
and the lawyer does what lawyersdo.
He accuses instatorists of all sorts of procedural
irregularities and even tries toget instatorists removed as an
(45:15):
inquisitor. Even tries to get him arrested.
Didn't work. And ultimately it's up to
Insaturus as inquisitor to evaluate whether he himself is
competent to act as a judge. And predictably, he finds
himself competent to act as a judge.
But at this point, the lawyer says that the proceedings are so
(45:38):
compromised, We're going to appeal over Insaturus head, and
we'll take the case to Rome. But Insaturus isn't deterred.
He tries to get the trial going again and it seems to have just
collapsed. The lawyer and the other
churchmen on the lawyer's side are keen to get the case removed
(45:59):
to be heard in Rome. And things just descend into
chaos. And the women who incitories had
arrested were released. They were released on the 3rd of
November. Now obviously there's a lot
going on behind the scenes here that we don't know about, but
(46:19):
there does seem to be a good amount of local opposition to
insta tourists by friends and relatives of the accused.
Keep in mind, if you're accusing46 women, that's a lot of
relatives and friends who are also wondering what's going on.
And it's clear that the Bishop while he may have had no problem
(46:41):
with the idea of witchcraft, he doesn't see it as the kind of
threat that Instotaurus does. And he certainly doesn't think
that it justifies changing normal legal procedure to try
and get convictions. It's clear that the Bishop is
working very hard to try and curb Instotaurus's power.
(47:03):
Despite things collapsing in Innsbruck, Instotaurus stays in
the city. But on the 9th of February 1485,
the Bishop has his brother writes Inciturus a letter
strongly suggesting that Inciturus get out of town.
Things are getting too hot for you here.
(47:23):
Leave. In fact, the letter is quite
amusing. It even goes so far as to call
Inciturus pretty much senile. He's only about 55 at this time,
so that's stretching it, but they're obviously trying quite
hard to insult him. So if Torres leaves Innsbruck in
1486, the Malleus Malficarum is ready to be printed at the end
(47:48):
of that year. We certainly don't know if he'd
been working on it on and off before this and how Springer got
involved, but it's safe to say that a good chunk of the text is
written very quickly in this fitof pique after Hinster Tourist's
(48:10):
prosecution in Innsbruck has collapsed and he's effectively
run out of town. This matters because his
experiences in Ravensburg and Innsbruck colour how the book is
developed and some of the evidence that he uses, but it
(48:30):
also colours the fact that he he's convinced that the secular
authorities and that the bishopsare not taking this seriously
enough. For him, witchcraft is an
established fact. What needs to happen is people
need to understand that and to take action, and that's not
(48:55):
what's happened. Thank you for joining us on this
special double feature Week of Witch Hunt podcast.
You just heard Part 3, but part four of the Special Conversation
with Doctor Raiswell is available right now.
The full series is available right now wherever you get your
(49:18):
podcasts. Let's go rejoin Professor
Raiswell on Part 4. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
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