August 10, 2005

• It'd be pointless to have witchfinders these days; you can't sling a cat without hitting a wannabe-witch (no cat-slinging, though). But Witchfinder General is still a cool title.
• And here I thought Pratchett and Gaiman made that stuff up in "Good Omens"
• "Of course I know the Lord's Prayer. I could say it backwards if you like." Blackadder 2 rulez!
• Hopkins was personally responsible for one of the major peaks in witch trials in Britain. Then again, many people aren't aware of how rare witch trials really were. As the article notes, only about 500 people were hanged, from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century.
• (sorry, that's 500 people in England. About 40,000 executions in Europe. But again, over 200 years.)
• Jb, I've a feeling your numbers are a tad off. That's recorded as hanged. With benefit of trial. Doesn't include small villages where some poor old woman got done in because the neighbors didn't like her much. Let's add another 20,000 or so.
• One of the interesting points made in K. Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic in that the 'witch craze' in England was in part as result of the Reformation. Protestants didn't have recourse to the kind of ecclesiastical counter-magic of the Papists, so could only take recourse in the law if they felt one of their neighbours was giving them the Evil Eye. As for those countries where Catholicism still held sway, he observes that '[l]ater medieval theologians seem to have been steadily working towards that deprecation of the power of ecclesiastical remedies which was consummated by Protestantism' and that 'Continental intellectuals were thus abandoning their claims for the efficacy of Church magic'. Of Hopkins, Thomas notes that although the statutes existed to execute for certain types of conjuration and the like, in fact usually the death penalty was imposed only for supposed murders committed using the black arts. Hopkin's campaign however secured the death sentence on mere evidence of maleficium or of making a compact with the Devil - his activities also produced the first sworn testimony to written examples of the latter. Of course, the social breakdown of the Civil War period must also have created the kind of uncertain climate in which arseholes like Hopkins thrive.
• So, logically... If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood. And therefore? A witch!
• Bluehorse - I would be really surprised if that happened often, they would be charged with murder. I remember hearing about a trial of a man in England about 1736, for dunking a suposed witch, who accidentally died; he was hanged for murder. You were not allowed to take law into your own hands. And it's not like England was ever a large country with remote villages - the justices knew. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, parishes had constables. They rounded up vagrants and sent them home, passing them from constable to constable, they wouldn't miss murders in the thousands. Now English central government was more organised than other countries, but most of Europe was more densely settled and controlled in the early modern period than most people understand. They knew if you didn't attend church or pay your taxes - they would know if you burned a old lady without going through the proper channels. The Roman church for one would never allow it; people would never have been allowed to take an important matter like heresy into their own hands. As for Thomas - his book Religion and Magic is extremely important book (and I need to read it this week), but while his ideas are very influential and significant, there has been a lot of important writing on witchcraft prosecution as a phenomenon in the two decades since he wrote that, and many people have qualms about the details of his theories. I have heard that book is based mostly on English examples, and England has a very different profile of witchcraft prosecution than most European countries, as it was never prosecuted as heresy, but only as maleficium. (Hopkins clearly changed this, for a brief period). But also, my advisor recently did an analysis of the patterns of trials and executions in England, and found something interesting - if you look at national statistics, there are apparently two peaks, one in the 1560s (or 1590s - sorry, this is from memory from a lecture he gave), and one in the mid-seventeenth century. But if you break the trials down by county, most have a small but steady number of trials (a certain number each decade). The apparent peaks were coming mainly from one county - Essex. One of those peaks was Mathew Hopkins (in the mid-seventeenth century). The earlier peak was an interesting situation. It seems that just before there had been a few local widely publicised trials, with lurid pamphlets - and he was wondering if what happened was a mini-witch craze set off by these pamphlets. This is all a bit vague - any inconsistences or problems with the analysis is due to my poor memory of something I heard months ago (and the notes are in another city). Witchcraft is not his specialty; he just started looking more closely for his class lecture. It doesn't explain why judges believed in maleficium in the 17th century, but not in the 18th century (which is itself an important question), but it does make one question certain assumptions that national trends represent some kind of big cultural moments - at those low numbers, they are as much influenced by one man, like Hopkins, or perhaps by local issues, or maybe just stirred up out and getting out of control on its own steam and good propaganda. Maybe the witchcraft was like Satanist child abuse scandals in the 80s - people talking about it actually made it "happen".
• Oh, and just so we're clear. England hanged witches (because they weren't charge with heresy, for the most part). But on the continent, they were usually charged as heretics, and burned. (Took me forever to work it out - I kept getting confused). I know the Catholic situation better than Protestant Continental Europe, because I've done a fair bit of reading on Inquisitions. I can't imagine that the inquisitors would be very happy about people honing in on their territory. Carlo Ginzberg's Night Battles is a very fascinating book about a series of strange witchcraft trials in the Friuli region of Italy, which also gives insight into how the inquisitors approached witchcraft investigations, at least in Italy.
• Interestingly, not one of the trials of the benandanti in Night Battles ended in execution - the reviewer says that he was left with the impression that the judges "considered the peasants too silly to have been heretics". I have actually read the book fairly throughly, but I didn't remember that. Damn my memory.
• Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt is a well-researched essay on the subject of witch trials.
• Oh, that is a good article. It would have been interesting for her to go into some of the recent literature on women as accusers and witneses, too, when she was discussing gender. In many places more women were accused than men, but women were also more likely to be accusers and witnesses. I didn't know that there were so few trials in Ireland, though I knew Scotland had more than England (despite the lower population) - the elite in Scotland were closely connected to France in the early part of the sixteenth century. And in Iceland most accused witches were male - fascinating. So many things I have to read! My knowledge is very skewed to England and to Friuli (I'm just a big Ginzberg fan), though I once read a fascinating section from a book on mothers accusing lying-in maids in Germany, when babies sickened or died. Lying-in maids were not respected like mid-wives, but poor women who cared for the baby and mother after the birth.
• And here I thought Pratchett and Gaiman made that stuff up in "Good Omens". They didn't always get it right, but they didn't make up even half of it.
• Jews, Cathars, witches, homosexuals. Geeze, is there anyone God doesn't hate?
• Please leave God out of this. He is very tired today.
• "Jews, Cathars, witches, homosexuals. Geeze, is there anyone God doesn't hate?" Himself. Although, on reflection, that may in fact be innaccurate and the very root of his fucking problem.
• Vincent Price played Matthew Hopkins in the 1968 British film Witchfinder General (released in the US as The Conqueror Worm, though it has nothing at all to do with that poem; AIP just wanted to include it in their Poe series). It was pretty good, as I recall.
• Fascinating article, but after two pages I got: "In order to continue to view this site, we ask that you spend a few minutes to register with us." Screw you, Fortean Times. So, how did it come out? Did Hopkins get his comeuppance, or go happily on killing witches till he dropped?
• "Jews, Cathars, witches, homosexuals. Geeze, is there anyone God doesn't hate?" Himself. Although, on reflection, that may in fact be innaccurate and the very root of his fucking problem. Well, I think you can make a case from sending His Son to get tortured to death, which He knew about since He sent visions to the prophets about it. And, standard doctrine states that the Father and the Son are one, so it sounds like a very complicated method of suicide on His part. So, yeah, perhaps He does hate Himself...
• Witch hunts across the ages
• Abie: enjoyed your link One of the things discussed their that I found jaring was the concept of "crone" or "hag" and the idea that these women were in their forties and fifties. Given the average lifespan of women in those periods, reaching fifty would be reasonably rare. Granted, the chances would be better in spinsters not having to deal with the dangers of childbirth. If you've ever looked at poor women in third-world countries, you think they're in their fifties or sixties, and then find that they're only late twenties or early thirties. Poor nutrition, hard work, no health care, and a lack of Olay Age Defying Daily Renewal Cream, with Beta Hydroxy Complex, will do that. I'm wondering if there are any statistics on actual age for these women recorded.
• Not from the rural areas, BlueHorse, very little data exists from that era. From the cities, more so. I think the fact that about 20-30% of people rurally (at least in the later half of the 17thC) were able to read and write. The percentage was higher in cities like London. So fewer records or accounts exist from the rural areas. When they call them crones, basically, these people had no dental care and their teeth were gone by their 30s, and you know that makes your whole face collapse. Plus the points you mention. Diseases of skin and bone were also rife, such as smallpox. The really horrible thing is that many of these people were just women with pets, like cat ladies.
• Actually, I'm afraid you are misunderstanding the concept of life expecation. It's the average life expectation. Let me give you some made up numbers - let's say 1/2 of children born died within the first year. Then everyone else lives to a ripe age of 70. That population would have a life expectency of 35. No one is "old" by 35, they just have really bad infant mortality. That's actually why you'll often hear about life expectency over 5 or for adults - to get around that problem. In the seventeenth century (the period I'm writing my thesis on), there was relatively high infant and child mortality. Once you survived childhood, many young and middle-aged men did die in accidents, while many more women than today did die in childbirth. This further affected life expectency rates. But they didn't age faster than we do - in fact, they think puberty may have been later. In North West Europe, women didn't start marrying or having children until their early to mid-twenties. They were bearing children into their thirties, just like we do. People were working at hard manual labour into their sixties. I'm sure they looked more hardened and aged than someone like Rachel Welch, but no more aged than many lower class people today. As for what they expected from life - the saying back then was that "three score and ten years" - that is 70 years - was what a man could expect from a good life. My 70 year old grandmother just died; my grandfather died at 60. But there were people in the seventeenth century who lived into their 80s and 90s. As for people in third world countries today - I'm not sure. What I study is Europe, of the time of the witchhunts. But I do know that outside of Europe, childbearing traditionally began earlier, with women getting married in their mid to late teens, instead of twenties. This may have an effect. Also, contemporary refugees have a much worse diet than employed farmers and workers in the seventeenth century - a recent study shows that even those in a well run workhouse got 2000 calories a day (for mostly children and elderly) - the expectation of a good diet for a working man was much more like 4000-5000 calories a day. This varies by region and income, of course. Southern England was relatively rich, didn't have the subsistence crises that places in France did after the mid 17th cen. But even in places with periodic subsistence crises, these were only periodic crises, which disproportionately affected the poor. For some perspective, look at this painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525-69, The Peasant Wedding - you can see the people, the bride, women around her who could include her mother, her aunts, etc. They look a littled more hardened from work than we do, but no more than our grandparents and their parents. Crones would have been truely past childbearing age, like fifty and above. There may be statistics on age recorded, in the trial records, but I don't have it to hand. By the way, Lyndal Roper's thesis is very controversial, so take it with some grain of salt. I know that the professor I am doing my religion examination field with thought it was a very bad book, and unconvincing. I would have to read it myself to know, but there have been many arguments, even contradicting, proposed to try to "explain" witchhunts, and none have been really satisfactory, at least beyond a local scale. The main things that I think are agreed upon is that women accussed women, more women were accussed than men, probably for similar reasons as why women were seen more likely to be poisoners (a man would be directly violent, a woman indirectly), some witchhunts were tainted by local politics, some by local hysteria (and feeding on each other). And some in Italy were witch-fighters accused of being witches. It's all very very complicated
• Tanzania suffers rise of witchcraft hysteria
• The Witches are Coming!