Chapter Six Medieval Magic, Demonology, and Witchcraft In this chapter, we explore another channel of European religiosity that came to be identified by Christian thinkers of the high and late Middle Ages as explicitly heretical. In contrast to some of the previous topics, however, the fusion of magic and heresy did not emerge out of a specific response to (or criticism of) the Church or under the leadership of any charismatic individual. Rather, magic represented an enduring strand of European culture, transmitted from various ancient forebears and perpetuated in remarkably diverse forms across time and space. Ideas about magic, its specific relationship to heresy, and the danger it posed to Christendom changed dramatically in the high- and late-medieval centuries, and these escalating concerns would in turn lay an ecclesiastical, legal, and psychological foundation for the notorious witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To be sure, just as notions of “The Inquisition” based on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century models should not be applied to inquisitorial practice of the medieval period, so too must we avoid a facile association between later witch hunts and medieval concerns about magic. The Roman Inquisition and the early modern witch hunts (both small and large) came later and emerged out of specific historical contexts unique to the sixteenth century. Yet both were also outcroppings of earlier developments, of shifts in ideas and practices that influenced the centuries to come. One simple definition of magical practice generally is “the exercise of a preternatural control over nature by human beings, with the assistance of forces more powerful than they.”1 The two key elements here are control over nature and the manipulation or use of forces more powerful than humanity. One has only to reflect momentarily on the vulnerability of human life to understand the appeal of a system in which people can control the natural world. How much more keenly must this desire have been felt by those whose circumstances were unpredictable and unreliable, shaped by scarcity, famine, disease, violence, and warfare, and how irresistible would seem the power to compel the sun to shine, or to summon rain upon the fields, or to bar pestilence from one’s village. Beyond the most basic needs of food, water, and physical health, moreover, lie the demands of the heart and hearth, the desire to control other people’s nature to attain love, passion, wealth, devotion, justice, vengeance, or any of the other aspects of human experience. Because a belief in powerful preternatural forces is one of the earliest features of human societies, it should come as no surprise that people have long sought to harness those forces to their own personal desires and drives. But for the historian, magic is particularly tricky to study because (like heresy) it is more concept than reality, and because our sources are (like those on heresy) so often written by authors hostile to their topic. For our purposes, therefore, the term magic offers a way of categorizing a wide array of beliefs and practices, ranging from astrology and alchemy, charms and amulets, to sorcery and necromancy, trickery and entertainment, as practiced by both laity and clergy, by those of high and low social status, educated and uneducated, and found in diverse sources and contexts, including scientific and medical treatises, liturgical and other religious documents, and literary texts.2 Any subject that includes amulets, court tricks, and alchemy might sound obscure at best and thus not particularly relevant to the more traditional themes of European intellectual, political, and cultural histories. Surprisingly, the opposite is true: magic matters. From the earliest to latest Middle Ages, the realm of magic represented a unique space in which otherwise segmented cultures and traditions mingled and influenced one another. So while peasant farmers muttered charms and priests blessed fields with holy water for a good harvest, young people flirted over love potions, healers cured infertility with animal testicles and incantations, learned university scholars pored over magical Arabic texts and ciphers, and court astrologers sought to divine the political future (and secure their own good fortune) in sign and sky. Indeed, this precise quality of magic—its powerful intersections and accessibility—increasingly worried theorists of the high and late Middle Ages, for whom proper social and moral order was of paramount importance. By the high Middle Ages, magic would be characterized and literally demonized in terms of those intersections, as inappropriate conjunctions of people, power, and purpose through which hell erupted on earth. The Common Tradition of Medieval Magic Confidence in the effectiveness of magical practices was a hallmark of the premodern European world, sweeping not only across time and place but also extending broadly into all levels of society. Certainty in a power is not the same as approval of its use, however, and an astonishingly wide spectrum of people occupied themselves with pursuing how magic operated, who practiced it, and what they accomplished. Canon lawyers and theologians were not the only ones to ponder magic and its influence, but also popes, bishops, and inquisitors, whereas in the secular realm, royal, princely, and court authorities frequently dedicated time and energy to studying the magical arts. Due to the essential Christian explanation of magic as operating by the power of demons and forces of evil, however, no one would have labeled himself a magician any more than medieval figures embraced the term heretic to describe themselves and their beliefs. Accusations of magic and witchcraft would increasingly come to echo the charge against other types of heretic in the later Middle Ages; in both cases, the presumption becomes that the problem is not so much what the person does, but what he or she is. Before considering the hereticization of magical practice in the later Middle Ages, however, it is important to comprehend the depth and richness of the medieval magical tradition and the various strands of belief and practice that webbed through Western Christendom. One of the major complications in understanding medieval magic and its gradual reconceptualization into a category of heresy is that medieval people from all levels of society—from peasants to princes, laborers to lawyers, merchants to mendicants—often performed simple rituals or actions that seemed fully orthodox to them but that could appear “magical” to others. As with heresy, the meaning of “magic” lay very much in the eyes of the beholder, practitioner, theorist . . . or historian. For decades, scholars have attempted to isolate trends in “elite magic” as distinct from “popular magic,” essentially categorizing them as two worlds that never met. But the model does not work, because the worlds were always in contact and influencing each other in a dialogue that profoundly influenced Western perceptions of evil up through the modern period. Thus, instead of an artificial distinction between “elite” and “popular” practices rooted in socioeconomic distinctions, Richard Kieckhefer proposed instead that we consider a “common tradition” underpinning most magical practice across all social levels during the medieval centuries. It is, of course, risky intellectual business to attempt a brief description of such a vast and varied set of human beliefs across a thousand-year period, for all of the rich local details and distinctions across time and place are obscured. Common magical practices were as fluid and flexible between the fifth and fifteenth centuries as the political, economic, social, and religious contours of Europe. With that caveat, however, one might reasonably identify a crucial continuity within common magic in its focus on outcomes: although intellectual and legal authorities tended to focus on how magic worked and the means or agency by which ritual activity achieved its ends, most of the people who performed common magical practice were interested in what it achieved. This consistent concern about the ends rather than the means of magical activity extended from the early to late Middle Ages and represents one unifying element in what we today call medieval “magic.” Healing, harming, and protecting were the basic purposes of such practice: rather than seeking extravagant wealth or powers, medieval people who engaged in common magic were typically responding to the threats and pressures of daily life. Village healers, such as barber- surgeons and midwives, often possessed extensive practical knowledge of the body and seamlessly employed on the one hand herbs, unguents, and natural remedies with healing properties, and charms, amulets, rituals, blessings, and complex potions on the other. Although a modern reader is likely to discern two radically different approaches (the scientific and the religious), such a distinction was nonexistent in the medieval era. Healers not only employed these remedies as part of a single, unified understanding of the relationship between the material and the immaterial, but also combined and merged them in a kaleidoscopic array of forms. Another outcome frequently sought in the common tradition of medieval magic was the prevention of disease and injury, not only among human beings, but also for animals and crops. Such magical practices reflect the keen sense of looming mortality that cut across medieval society and the desperate need to maintain vitality—not only in one’s own body, but in those elements that provide crucial sustenance. Healthy domestic animals were often the lifeblood of medieval families, and magical rituals to cure or prevent harm to them were frequent. Not surprisingly in such a deeply agricultural society where the margin of existence was often appallingly thin, crops were also a regular object of protective spells and rituals. Because fertility of body, creature, and field often depended on weather conditions, other manifestations of common magical practice focused upon summoning rain, repelling insects, and generally protecting the often meager resources sustaining a family or village. Medieval fairy tales reflect this world, particularly stories in which a lucky individual is granted wishes; the wise choice in the story is rarely endless riches or power above one’s station but instead the simple safety net of a never-ending soup pot or a domestic creature that lays coins or golden eggs. Of course, sometimes those stories also tell of vengeance and the infliction of harm: the young man, for instance, who wishes for a pipe that when played forces his enemies to dance themselves to death; to run helplessly and painfully through thicket and briar; or to fart shamefully, and with devastating social consequences, upon command. Medieval Europe, particularly in the late tenth century, was a world of small communities and tight-knit relationships. Safety lay in community, but so did resentment, envy, and discontent—not only against the privileged members of this sharply divided socioeconomic structure, but also against family members, friends, neighbors, rivals, and so on within one’s own quotidian world. Harmful magic, or maleficium, could hurt and destroy. On some level, although people might utter beneficial spells or employ protective rituals without thinking twice, the performance of harmful magic was broadly understood as wrong, and those accused rarely admitted to doing it or even knowing how. As a consequence, it is impossible for us to know how widespread the actual practice of harmful magic was, much less to gain a sense of how often medieval people might have allowed themselves to reflect upon the possibility or daydream about taking vengeance on a perceived enemy through maleficium. This space left blank intentionally. Figure 6.1. Male Mandragora (Mandrake) Root, Said to Cure Sterility. Page from the Hebarium of Trent, Italy, 14th c. Photo by Alfredo Dagli Orti. Biblioteca del Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Trent, Italy. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY Love magic also claimed a central place within common magical practice, and a huge number of spells, charms, rituals, blessings, and potions were believed effective for inciting passion. In fact, perhaps the only elements unifying these diverse practices is that they presume a powerful agency that will help them dominate another’s will; after all, no magical forces would be necessary if the desired figure were at all interested in relations. For the person casting the spell and seeking their beloved’s embrace, the magic was of course beneficial and helpful. From the perspective of the enchanted one, however, such magic was no boon but rather an aggressive manipulation of her or his own will. Thus although love charms and potions may seem innocuous in contrast to some of the more overtly malevolent practices, the intention of controlling the will of another human being would prove increasingly troubling to authorities. A final major purpose of common magic was to determine the truth of a situation, to uncover a secret circumstance or condition, or to discern future events (termed “divining” in both ancient and medieval traditions, meaning that it worked through the involvement of supernatural powers). Like other common magical practices, divining was generally employed to ensure a positive outcome or to avoid or deflect harm—in other words, facilitating the safe continuation of the status quo—and was rarely wielded to secure enormous transformations in one’s circumstances. For instance, people tried to establish auspicious days for major events such as marriages, harvests, or battles; family members sought to know whether their children would prosper and whom they would marry; and the victims of crimes or misfortune employed divination to locate lost or stolen items and to identify the guilty party. In the tight-knit medieval communities in which everyone lived in proximity and depended upon relationships for survival, such knowledge and skills were perhaps just as important as the physical protection of body, animals, and crops. Throughout the Middle Ages, therefore, the purposes of medieval magic remained fairly constant as people continued to react to or attempt to control the immediate threats and challenges to their lives. But let us not take that to mean that medieval magic consisted of an unchanging set of practices: on the contrary, the different methods and systems employed in common magic varied tremendously, and only the barest hint of that diversity can be offered here. Among the most important and prevalent forms through which medieval magic was expressed were ritualized speech, including spells, incantations, blessings, curses, and other verbal formulas; material items from the natural world, or substances that could be fashioned and manipulated; and combinations of the verbal and physical, often involving ritualistic use of time and location. Very often such practices were organically infused into specifically Christian practices: a woman in labor might blend herbs, recite incantations, and pray to St. Margaret (the patron saint of childbirth), and a farmer might bury a consecrated wafer in his field to ensure a good crop. Educated churchmen would begin to scrutinize the array of practices in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, and their intellectual efforts would transform later medieval conceptions of magic from the complex realities of common practice into an increasingly uniform, monocausal (and largely fictitious) image of demonic magic. But why did authorities begin to scrutinize magic so carefully in and after the eleventh century, and how did a preoccupation with demons come to dominate later medieval conceptions of magic? One of the reasons has to do with a new form of magical practice that grew out of and beyond the common tradition we have discussed so far. As early as the eleventh century, educated men—necessarily clergy, because all university students were required to join orders—began to investigate and theorize magic, developing an exclusive, learned form that focused not on simple outcomes of healing, harm, or protection, but on deeper and potentially dangerous knowledge of powers both natural and supernatural. Although such men were trained in the most sophisticated theology of day, influenced by Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek thinkers, many of their esoteric practices were directly antagonistic to Church teachings. As we will see, ideas of medieval magic were profoundly shaped by members of the educated minority, who both participated in and railed against efforts to summon and control demonic forces. And it was with such concerns and considerations that the later (and historically lingering) category of medieval magic began to take form, as Church thinkers encompassed all of the various forms of common magic we have discussed here under the umbrella of demonic magic. Learned Magic in the Middle Ages The centuries between c. 1000 and 1300 c.e. European thinkers witnessed a vibrant resurgence of intellectual activity and the first major institutionalization of learning since the time of the Romans. Opportunities for advanced education remained sharply limited to men of a certain social, economic, or mental caliber, yet the percentage of literate men increased dramatically from earlier centuries. With the establishment first of schools and then universities in major European cities such as Bologna, Palermo, and Paris came increasingly sophisticated curricula and the organized exploration of topics ranging from law and medicine to theology, with texts including Aristotle, Galen, Augustine, and of course scripture. Magical practice also became a subject of serious study and analysis in this first blush of European intellectualism; although some highly educated figures put into practice what they learned while poring over new books and collections of magical knowledge, others simply studied the rites and rituals and the means by which they operated. The very involvement (pro or con) of learned men in magic lent a new weight to the subject, far beyond what the common practice had borne when earlier Christian thinkers deemed it the foolishness of rustics. In addition to the classic texts mentioned above, students were deeply influenced by recently translated Arab and Hebrew works flooding in from the East. Many important Greek texts that had been lost to the West had survived in the Byzantine East and had become thoroughly incorporated into sophisticated Arab learning by the tenth century. Muslim and Christian scholars were not regularly interacting face to face, which is not surprising given the long-standing hostility inflamed by the late eleventh-century call to crusade and capture of Jerusalem. Yet there were isolated key points of interaction between intellectuals from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions in locations such as Sicily, Spain, and Italy. Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 940–1103 c.e.), for example, was a Christian cleric from southern France who studied Arab mathematics and astronomy before teaching at the northern cathedral school at Rheims. He rapidly ascended the clerical ranks and upon his election as Pope Sylvester II in 999, critics muttered that he had used his occult Arabic knowledge to secure the throne. In truth, both Muslim and Jewish scholars had absorbed much magical knowledge from the ancient Greeks, particularly on the subjects of astrology and alchemy. Both topics became of great interest among certain circles of clerics, particularly those employed by secular authorities eager to discover (by whatever means necessary) what dangers and delights the future might hold. Such magic was usually called necromantia, or necromancy, in the growing body of texts that identified and criticized it, a term that originally meant the process of divining through the supplication of the dead. Not only pagan classical cultures but scripture itself lent weight to this tradition, as in the case of the Hebrew king Saul, who needed to know the outcome of a looming battle and thus consulted a diviner (the Witch of Endor) to summon the ghost of the dead prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28). Christian authorities flatly rejected such divination, but more important, they dismissed the notion that ghosts could return from the dead: once in heaven or hell, there was to be no return. Isidore of Seville thus explained that necromancers only appeared to summon the spirits of the dead, and later writers asserted a crucial new interpretation: that the supposed spirits were in fact demons and that necromancy was thus a black art, an invocation of demons. Necromantic magic usually consisted of many of the same basic forms and practices as the common tradition of medieval magic but in more complex combinations. Simple verbal formulas were routinely employed to command or control demons (“I conjure you,” or “I adjure you”) but combined with elaborate and precise rituals. Magic circles inscribed on paper or earth might be filled with language and symbols to heighten the spell’s power, and other objects such as plants, animals, food, wax, or any of a variety of natural materials might be cut, manipulated, burned, or otherwise offered up to entice the demons. Given their training and exposure to Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts, necromancers also frequently wove astrological and alchemical components into their magical practice. To make another person “abominable,” for instance, so that he is held to be ugly and deformed and odious, set up a lead image and put the feet in place of the fingers and vice versa, and a twisted face, in the hour of Saturn and on its day [Saturday]. Then write the name for the one for whom it is made on the head and the name of the planet Saturn on the chest, and first suffumigate the image with a horrible and fetid odor, saying, “Oh spirit of most resplendent Saturn and those descending from higher places, hand over into strife and hatred this person named N, of whom this image is made, sad ones, and in torment, unquiet ones, the same person, choleric ones.” Afterwards it ought to be buried in a deep, horrible and fetid place.3 In a sense, therefore, these clerical necromancers drew on the vocabulary of the existing common magical tradition but employed a new and uniquely demonic grammar so that the meaning of such magical practice was (although an outgrowth of the common tradition) nonetheless substantially different. By the high Middle Ages, the term necromancy had come to represent the learned and complex magical arts practiced by educated men whose illicit knowledge generally came from secret books and manuals. Purposes varied widely, from forecasting the future to generating powerful illusions that could affect the material world: for instance, creating an illusory horse that could actually transport a person or a satisfying banquet of delicious (but unreal) food. In any such necromantic magic, the assumption was that the agency was demonic and that appearances lied—the horse was actually a demon that only seemed an animal, and the delicious food only appeared as well. As a consequence, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an outcropping of theories about the exact nature and extent of demonic power over the natural world and human beings: they could not, for example, control human will, although they could manipulate bodies and circumstances to influence a person to love, hate, or otherwise act according to another’s wishes. Thus, no matter what the specific purpose of necromantic magic, its effectiveness and power came from demonic agency. A wise reader might ask at this point whether such magic was ever actually practiced, or whether necromancy was largely a figment of inquisitors’ imaginations (as was the case with so many of the “heresies” we have covered). Surprisingly, given the lurid nature of such magic and its underlying assumptions, the practice of necromancers was apparently real—limited, of course, to a small group of highly educated men, but real nonetheless, and documented by a striking array of guides to such magic. Many of these manuals still exist, and because the practitioners were usually clerics, there are striking parallels between the rituals of learned magic and the Church’s own liturgical rites. Nor did they disappear out of circulation; in the thirteenth century, William of Auvergne (a University of Paris scholar and bishop of Paris from 1228–1249) recorded that he had seen several books of necromancy. A century later, the inquisitor Nicolas Eymeric (c. 1320–1399) recorded in his important inquisitorial manual Directorium inquisitorum (Directory of Inquisitors) that he had seized and destroyed many such magical Latin texts, the titles of which provide some insight into their condemned contents: Clavis Salomonis (The Key of Solomon) and Liber iuratus Honorii (Sworn Book of Honorius the Magician). Even as late as the fifteenth century, necromancers’ manuals and other books of demonic magic were still being copied and transmitted; for example, the reforming Dominican Johannes Nider (c. 1380–1438) referred to a Viennese monk who had been a necromancer in his earlier life and possessed several such books.4 The tiny subset of clergy involved with necromantic magic was far outnumbered by their colleagues who either knew little about the practice or who condemned it outright. Necromancers typically defended their practice with the claim that they were compelling rather than submitting to demons, that they possessed the knowledge and power to do so safely, and even that the Christian value of such practice was demonstrated by the fact that Christ’s disciples themselves had the power to exorcise and thus control demons. Opponents such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) disagreed, echoing Augustine’s vehement concern about evil associations between humans and demons and noting that even a magician’s command over demons operates on the basis of a pact between the two. Whatever its purpose or form, Church authorities would tolerate no such practice. As Latinate necromancy performed by a small clerical underground began to attract more and more attention among Christian authorities after the twelfth century, condemnations of demonic magic mounted. And because such magic also employed the various formulas and objects of the older common magical tradition, all forms of practice ultimately became tarred with the brush of demonic magic. In other words, mounting concern about demonic agency and necromancy provoked a major shift in the Church’s stance on magic: by the later Middle Ages, simple healing charms, love potions, fertility rituals, and basic divination were now conceptualized as inherently diabolical, as resting on demonic rather than divine agency. This reinterpretation of the common magical tradition in explicitly demonic terms is crucial for understanding how and why magic became linked to the legal category of heresy in the thirteenth century. At heart lay the issue of sovereignty and an emerging theological certainty that human beings faced a black-and-white choice between service to God or service to the devil. Thinking about Magic and Heresy (c. 1100–1300 c.e.) European thinkers had long criticized magic on two basic grounds: the moral, which viewed such practices as alien and antisocial, and the legal, which tended to focus not so much on the qualities of general practice and practitioners but on the malicious or criminal outcomes of those practices. In other words, one layer of condemnation was rooted in notions of the social fabric and the other in specific theories of crime and punishment. During the early centuries of Christian practice in the medieval West, ecclesiastical authorities had associated magic with pagan rites and specifically with evil powers; as a consequence, all magical activity was theoretically deemed illicit within early medieval Christianity. Yet because a wide variety of common practices (pagan or otherwise) were so thickly interwoven into the strategies that early medieval people embraced for coping with their world, the same authorities actually responded mildly to actual cases of magical practice. Moral correction and penitential reconciliation were primary among the concerns of clergy rather than outright punishment. In cases in which royal or other secular leaders charged magicians, the trials tended to focus upon the legal (rather than moral) and criminal outcome of the act, whether theft, murder, or other maleficium. Such tendencies picked up momentum in the high and later Middle Ages: first was a further elaboration of evil in the world and the relationship between human beings and preternatural forces; second was a shift from the “what” of magic to the “how” and “why” of the power behind the act. As we have explored in other chapters, the economic and intellectual vitality of the high Middle Ages nurtured an explosion of legal innovations and institutions, including the shift from accusatorial to inquisitorial methods in court and the corollary establishment of new officials—the “inquisitors of heretical depravity.” Scholars churned out legal texts and theories in ever-greater numbers, which served to buttress the growing sense that matters of faith were indeed matters of law as well. In other words, the category of magic was (like that of heresy) in many ways forged by the legal and intellectual preoccupation of high medieval thinkers; it was perhaps simply a matter of time before the two realms were linked in the minds of those authorities. In 1140, a monk named Gratian, in the city of Bologna, produced one of the most important legal texts in Western history, which also provides a useful litmus test for attitudes toward heresy of all types. In the Concordia discordantium canonum (Concordance of Discordant Canons, or the Decretum) Gratian collected and compared the previously diffuse array of earlier rulings on a wide variety of issues or “cases.” The volume thus served as the first standard European legal text, became the foundation of canon law, and laid a profoundly important legal foundation for all aspects of Christian experience. Magic was no exception, although the space and thus significance allotted to it in the Decretum was relatively minor. In case 26, Gratian considered an array of important earlier rulings and largely echoed earlier medieval perspectives on magic and superstition. For Gratian, magical practices were generally understood to be the foolish error of simpletons, who (although deceived by the illusions and tricks of demons) posed no deep risk to Christendom. Persistent practice of sorcery and divination were to bear the penalty of excommunication—a consequence whose sting was of a moral or spiritual rather than specifically legal nature. Within about a century of Gratian’s publication, however, attitudes had begun to shift significantly as formative early ideas about the relationship between magic and demons were extended. Aquinas himself analyzed the relationship between magic, demonic agency, and heresy in a systematic way. In the Summa Theologica, for example, he considered the various assaults of demons in the following categories: Concerning this we have five points of inquiry: (1) Whether men are assailed by the demons? (2) Whether to tempt is proper to the devil? (3) Whether all the sins of men are to be set down to the assaults or temptations of the demons? (4) Whether they can work real miracles for the purpose of leading men astray? (5) Whether demons who are overcome by men, are hindered from making further assaults?5 He and other theologians demonstrated in practical terms, for example, how it was possible for offspring to result from sex between humans and demons (the demon obtains semen by seducing a man as a succubus, then taking the form of an incubus and impregnating a woman). Likewise, a pact with the devil came to be understood as an act akin to, but entirely subversive of, feudal homage. As we have seen, the mid-thirteenth century witnessed the deputization of papal inquisitors who began to bear down on newly categorized heretics, and ecclesiastical anxiety about organized, clandestine enemies of the Church mounted. The legal procedure of inquisitio allowed officials to investigate and charge potential suspects on the basis of their own authority rather than requiring an injured party to formally accuse a suspect. It is interesting that papal inquisitors were ordered in 1258 not to investigate cases of sorcery unless the practice specifically involved heretical practice, a decree that entered canon law forty years later in 1298 under Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1292–1303). But what was the distinction between sorcery and heresy in practice? Many inquisitors found the directive troubling. Escalating rumors of clerical necromancy and other forms of diabolical magic thus drew inquisitorial attention to magic by the mid-thirteenth century as well as to the belief that magical practices should fall within their purview as seekers of heretical depravity. One intriguing early case linking heresy with magic was reported by a Cistercian monk named Ralph of Coggeshall (d. 1227). According to his account, authorities in the French city of Rheims discovered a group of heretics known as “Publicans” whom they thought related to Cathars. The archbishop and his clergy (responsible for pursuing heresy in this era prior to deputized papal inquisitors) summoned and interrogated one old woman, whose apparent obstinacy earned her a death sentence. As the execution fires were being prepared, however, she effected a dramatic escape: pulling a ball of yarn from her pocket, she tossed it out a window, shouted “Catch!” and was literally spirited away by demons. Although we do not need to preoccupy ourselves with the literal truth either of event or account, the story does underscore that clerics were making those connections for themselves. Likewise, one might recall the wild report filed by the early inquisitor Conrad of Marburg. As we discussed in chapter 3, Conrad’s methods were neither official nor ultimately approved, and his excesses prompted a quick reevaluation of the inquisitorial role and scope of power by the papacy. However unorthodox his methods, the resulting description of heretics in the Rhineland appears to have had a tremendous impact on Pope Gregory IX. In 1233, the pope issued the decree Vox in Rama (A Voice in Rama), which directly echoed Conrad’s report, detailing the process by which heretics summoned and worshiped a demon. Capable of appearing in different forms (for example, a great toad, a pale man, a giant cat), the demon also inspired the heretics to acts of indiscriminate sexual depravity. These early reports by Ralph and Conrad influenced later ecclesiastical authorities in their clear association between heresy, demonic worship, and (particularly in the latter) the horror of untrammeled and criminal sexuality. As we saw in earlier chapters, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authorities were convinced that people who claimed pious lives were actually behaving in the most demented and depraved of ways. The growing definition of magic as the intersection of the demonic and human worlds, the “intercourse” of Christian and demon, meant that such accusations increasingly took on a sexualized element as well. Ideas about Magic and Jews Such perceptions of deviant behavior—wildly inaccurate imaginings rather than observations rooted in any kind of reality—would prove similarly crucial regarding Jews, as increasingly cruel and hostile stereotypes of their communities were folded into conceptions of diabolical magical practice by the late fourteenth century. As anxiety over nonexistent heretical conspiracies in the midst of Christendom escalated, so too did hysteria regarding the presence of Jewish communities, a visible group of religious outsiders and one whose long-standing presence in the Christian West was suddenly subjected to unprecedented violence and abuse in the high Middle Ages. Although the medieval Church tolerated Jews, claiming that their presence was necessary for the eventual conversion of all Jews prophesied in scripture, ignorance of Judaism and suspicion of Jewish communities was endemic, as was the association of Jews, heresy, and dark magic. As people explicitly beyond the boundaries of Christendom, they could not, of course, be heretics in the technical sense of the term, but they had long been treated as enemies of the Church. The decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, for example, included the demand that Jews wear distinctive garb to distinguish them from Christians and prohibited them from holding public office. Like so many of their Christian contemporaries, Jews had of course engaged in various elements of the common magical tradition from the earliest medieval centuries. But as ecclesiastical condemnations of magic as essentially demonic and diabolical heightened, those old associations between Jews and magic became particularly dangerous. Already depicted by early Christian writers in the most negative terms due to their “rejection” of Christ, Jews were easily and frequently represented as particularly close to demons. For example, the legend of the sixth-century saint Theophilus, who was persuaded by a wicked Jewish sorcerer to sign a pact with the devil, became archetypal for later conceptions of magic as explicitly involving a demonic joining. Such stories and theories quickly erupted into the material plane as accusations of ritual murder aimed at Jews began to escalate in the twelfth century. Perhaps the most famous example among many tragic cases was the accusation in 1144 that Jews murdered a little Christian boy named William near the English town of Norwich. Wild fantasies of Jewish demonic conspiracy burst across Europe, frequently including accusations of (Christian) child murder and cannibalization. As devotion to the Eucharist and the sacred power of the host flourished in the thirteenth century, so too did the ugly parallel belief that Jews were intent upon destroying that power. Hence rumors of wafer stealing and desecration mounted against Jews in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as did bloody attacks upon Jews and their communities. When plague erupted in the midfourteenth century, Jewish communities were scapegoated and slaughtered across Europe, as new paranoia fanned the flames of twelfth- and thirteenth-century hatreds. Ideas about Magic and Satan At the center of this rapidly developing story of battling demons was Satan himself, an entity shaped by ancient near-Eastern demons and spirits, and whose powers and intentions were initially rather ambiguous in both the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. In the book of Luke, for example, Christ describes Satan as a rebellious angel cast down from heaven; the flash of lightning as he fell prompted Satan to be associated with Lucifer, the “light bearer,” which was a name originally given to a fallen king of Babylon in the book of Isaiah. In the book of Revelation, which so fueled medieval apocalypticism, Satan appears as a dragon, “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceives the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Early Church fathers such as St. Augustine further articulated the particular role of Satan in the fourth and fifth centuries, providing an essential bridge between the classical and medieval worlds. Yet in both popular and clerical worlds through the early Middle Ages, the devil served as a catch-all figure for temptation, deception, wickedness, or sometimes simple trickery: far from representing an indomitable evil, the early medieval devil was often represented as a character to be fooled or foiled by clever peasants whose skills of barter, persuasion, and trickery were celebrated in a variety of literary forms. Not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did the terrifying notion of Satan as the single great, dragonlike adversary of God and lord of hell itself finally emerge, a product of the same intellectual world responsible for the new developments in law, theology, and inquisitorial procedure. And the “new Satan” fulfilled a crucial role in medieval authorities’ understanding of magic after the twelfth century as well, as the single diabolical master of all demons whom magicians allegedly served and worshiped. In other words, the crime of magic became even more serious once authorities accepted the notion that all magicians invoking demons were actually venerating the ultimate lord of darkness. Once again, we are reminded that the condemnation of medieval magic had much less to do with the actual practices and outcomes than it did with theories of sovereignty and subservience. This space left blank intentionally. Figure 6.2. The Devil Riding Behemoth. From the illustrated manuscript Liber floridus by Lambert de Saint-Omer. Flemish, 15th c. Parchment, 50 cm × 35.8 cm. MS724 folio 42 verso. Photo by René-Gabriel Ojéda. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY Magic, Heresy, and Inquisition (c. 1300–1400 c.e.) Because ideas about magic and heresy were enormously diverse and transformed slowly over time, it is not possible to identify a precise moment or place at which attitudes shifted. Nonetheless, one may reasonably argue that the first quarter of the fourteenth century ushered in a new era in the relationship between inquisitors, heresy, and magical practice. The unprecedented constellation of disasters that characterize the fourteenth century (ranging from natural catastrophes such as famine and plague to the man-made crises of papal schism and endemic warfare) doubtless heightened contemporary concerns about the source and causation of misfortune. In other words, the fourteenth century intensified and expanded existing concerns about who was wreaking disaster upon whom, why, and how. As a consequence, hostilities against heretics and Jews mounted across the century, and both categories would become increasingly triangulated with that of the demonic magician or sorcerer. Common fears and hatreds would play out on the local level of village, town, and city, fed by the growing body of papal decrees, academic treatises, and inquisitorial procedures aimed at revealing (by force, if necessary) the demonic intersections of hell and earth within Christendom. Already in the earliest years of the fourteenth century, royal and papal authorities were deeply preoccupied with demonic magic. Some cynically employed accusations as a means to an end; others appear to have fully believed in the diabolical wickedness of forces arrayed against them; all accepted that the strained political and religious circumstances of the day were rife with opportunities for demonic intervention. As we discussed in chapter 3, King Philip the Fair of France leveled charges of demonic involvement and magical practice at his opponent, Pope Boniface VIII, and also drew upon that same constellation of supposed magical practices to discredit and ultimately disband the wealthy military order of the Knights Templar. Historians agree that Philip deployed the power of such accusations for political and economic ends rather than out of any genuine belief that his declared enemies were invoking demons, but the fact remains that such charges were enormously damaging because so many contemporaries did fear the intrusion of diabolical forces. In fact, anxieties even at the same French court proved how real the intersection of political power and vulnerability to magical practice could seem: when Philip’s queen died at the young age of thirty-two in 1305, rumors of murder by magic and poison flew through the court. Philip’s own death in 1314 and those of his sons Louis X in 1316 and Philip V in 1322 were similarly scrutinized for evidence of diabolical causes. Pure political motives mingled with overt fear of demonic magic in other courts as well, particularly that of the papacy, located since 1305 in the southern city of Avignon. During the reign of Pope John XXII (r. 1316– 1334), the tangible effect of such concerns became particularly apparent. Accusations of magical practice became a staple of his political arsenal from the earliest days of his pontificate: in 1317, he accused Hugues Géraud, the bishop of Cahors, of attempting to murder him through sorcery; after confessing under torture, the bishop was convicted and burned alive. John’s concerns about magic were also pulled into specific local and regional antiheretical currents; the Franciscan Bernard Délicieux, for example, was tried in Toulouse for possessing books of sorcery, and a range of accusations was launched against Spiritual Franciscan radicals in the March of Ancona. Nor were secular authorities safe from accusations of magical practice, as John accused Matteo Visconti, the ruler of Milan, and his son in 1320 of plotting against him through magic and sorcery. To be fair to Pope John, some of his opponents probably were mulling over various strategies for removing him from the see—and whether or not any explicitly considered or performed demonic magic, few would have fundamentally doubted its efficacy. Pope John’s accusations represent one source of evidence about the intersection of politics and demonic magic in the early fourteenth century, and his official letters and decrees provide another. In 1320, for example, he dramatically reversed the traditional papal stance regarding inquisitors and magic. Overturning Pope Alexander IV’s 1258 injunction that inquisitors should not pursue magic and sorcery unless specifically heretical, John had a letter issued to inquisitors in Toulouse and Carcassonne (the heart of the earliest inquisitorial tribunals) ordering them to proceed against all sorcerers who infected Christendom by summoning, sacrificing to, worshiping, and joining with demons. A few years later, John himself issued the crucial decree Super illius specula (Upon His Watchtower), which automatically excommunicated anyone who invoked demons: Grievingly we observe . . . that many who are Christians in name only . . . sacrifice to demons, adore them, make or have made images, rings, mirrors, phials, or other things for magic purposes, and bind themselves to demons. They ask and receive responses from them and to fulfill their most depraved lusts ask them for aid. Binding themselves to the most shameful slavery for the most shameful of things, they ally themselves with death and make a pact with hell. . . . We hereby promulgate the sentence of excommunication upon all and singular who against our most charitable warnings and orders presume to engage in these things, and we desire that they incur this sentence ipso facto.6 Of particular interest here is that his language evokes the elaborate necromantic practice of a clerical underworld rather than the broad, common tradition of medieval magical practice. By now, the specifically demonic element of necromancy had been thoroughly—if mistakenly—applied to the entire spectrum of medieval magic. Magic in Inquisitors’ Texts The widening scope of inquisitors’ authority over magicians and sorcerers in the early fourteenth century is reflected in their handbooks and manuals. In 1326, Pope John XXII published a list of forbidden magical acts that inquisitors could investigate, including invoking or sacrificing to demons or their images, making a pact with the devil, or abusing the sacraments of baptism or Eucharist. One of the local papal inquisitors responding to John’s directives in these years was Bernard Gui in Toulouse, who finished compiling his comprehensive manual Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (The Practice of Inquisition into Heretical Depravity). Although Gui seems never to have sentenced anyone for sorcery during his years as an inquisitor, his handbook clearly indicates that magic fell under the umbrella of his authority. Such manuals were intended for practical use, and although later compilations were often simple copies or repetitions of old material, Gui wrote his based upon personal experience. In his eyes, and thus in his manual, sorcery and divination are categorized as one of six standard varieties of heresy that an inquisitor would likely encounter. To effectively respond to and persuade practitioners of magic away from their heresy, Gui proposed that an inquisitor pay careful attention to the status and nature of the person being interrogated, since various methods could be used effectively on different sorts of people. Individual interrogations, he continues, can be developed from questions regarding children or infants put under a spell or released from one; lost or damned souls; thieves who should be imprisoned; quarrels or reconciliation between spouses; making barren women fertile; things given to eat, hairs, nails and so on; the condition of the souls of the dead; foretelling future events; female spirits whom they call Good People who go about, they say, by night; enchantments and conjurations using songs, fruit, plants, straps and other things. . . .7 In contrast to John XXII, whose ideas about magic were drawn from the elite clerical practice of necromancy, Gui seems familiar with both the common and learned magical traditions. In his manual, he directs inquisitors not only to interrogate suspects about common magical practices such as healing and love charms but also to pursue demonic rituals and the superstitious misuse or abuse of sacraments. Gui’s quite practical manual circulated widely across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his assumptions (including his certainty in the demonic essence of most magic) powerfully influenced subsequent inquisitorial theory and practice. Over the course of the fourteenth century, inquisitors increasingly fixated upon defining and dismantling systems of demonic magic. At the end of the fourteenth century, an important stepping-stone in the linking of magic, demonology, and heresy emerged under the pen of the Catalan inquisitor Nicolas Eymeric (c. 1320–1399). In his Directorium inquisitorum (Directory of Inquisitors), Eymeric adopted a more theoretically inflected approach to the work of inquisition and the categories of heresy, considering whether magicians and diviners are to be considered heretics or as those suspected of heresy and whether they are to be subjected to the judgment of the inquisitor of heretics . . . [and] whether those who invoke demons, either magicians or heretics or those suspected of heresy, are subject to the judgment of the inquisitor of heretics.8 In the manual, he draws on authorities ranging from Augustine, Peter Lombard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and even Pope John XXII. In response to necromancers who claimed that they were in full control of the demons they invoked (and thus not guilty of serving or venerating evil), Eymeric insisted that the mere invocation of demonic power, regardless of intention, was prohibited for Christians. As a growing body of antiheretical and antimagical expertise circulated through the texts and tribunals of the fourteenth century, concerns about malevolent magic rippled through court and college, particularly in France. Two related developments from the end of the century illustrate how complex perceptions of magic had become as (1) a very real and effective (if illegal) tool, (2) a potent political weapon, and (3) an increasingly dangerous legal category. In 1398, rumors and accusations flew once again at the French court when two Augustinian monks were put to death in Paris after accusing the king’s brother of employing sorcery to harm him; suspicions of magic at court returned in the early fifteenth century. In direct response, the theologians at the University of Paris (who served as the medieval equivalent of a modern-day think tank) issued that same year a list of twenty-eight articles condemning sorcery, divination, and superstition. The eighteenth article, for example, proclaimed it an error to believe that “by such arts and impious rites, by sortilege, by incantations, by invocation of demons, by certain glances and other sorcery, no effect ever follows by aid of demons.”9 Likewise condemned were the notions that the blood of a hoopoe or kid or other animal, or virgin parchment or lion skin and the like have efficacy to compel and repel demons by the aid of arts of this sort, [that] our intellectual cogitations and inner volitions are caused immediately by the sky, [and] that by certain magic arts we can reach the vision of the divine essence or of the holy spirits.10 By categorizing so many different types of activities as magical and idolatrous, the theology faculty continued to mistakenly link common and learned practice in terms of the demonic underpinnings of both. Prosecutions for magic (now explicitly understood as heresy) had already begun to escalate by the late fourteenth century, particularly in the regions of modern-day Switzerland and Italy. Moreover, such developments laid the foundation for a major shift in the fifteenth century: a steep escalation of concern about magic and superstition and a consequent explosion of trials for diabolical witchcraft. Among these, women would become the most frequent targets in what Michael Bailey has called the “feminization of magic” in the fifteenth century. Fifteenth-Century Thinkers and Theorists Just as the historical contexts and conditions of the fourteenth century shaped contemporary dialogues about magic and heresy, so too did the changing set of issues and pressures of the fifteenth century. First, a series of late-fourteenth-century university foundations within imperial lands (including Heidelberg in 1386, Cologne in 1388, and Erfurt in 1392) contributed a crop of impassioned new scholars to join the ranks of Europe’s professional thinkers, dedicated to reforming Christendom, eradicating magical corruption, and elucidating the precise nature of demonic agency and human interaction. Thus luminaries such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429), the chancellor of the University of Paris, were joined by a talented cohort of scholars who focused their considerable intellectual sights on magic, superstition, and heresy in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Gerson denounced common and elite forms of magic alike in his many treatises, as did Nicholas Magni of Jauer (c. 1355–1435) at Heidelberg. In 1412, another theologian at Heidelberg, Johannes of Frankfurt, concluded in his analysis of demonic coercion that any invocation of diabolical powers did presume some form of worship or subservience. Many other such works followed throughout the 1420s, produced by some of the finest and best-trained minds of the day. Indeed, the potential eruption of demonic power into the material world was one of the most pressing issues of the day, and university scholars were deeply involved in the effort to discern and defuse the threat. Second, just as earlier heretical categories and inquisitorial decrees emerged out of twelfth- and thirteenth-century councils and reform movements, major fifteenth-century shifts in perspective also reflected new initiatives in ecclesiastical administration. Church officials and scholars were jointly engaged in reforming Christian governance and institutions in the early fifteenth century, efforts that culminated in key conciliar gatherings focused in no small part on issues of heresy, piety, and the proper relationship between the divine and mundane. At the Council of Constance (1414–1418), for example, clerical officials and authorities met to end the papal schism and deliberate on a variety of strategies for reviving Christian devotion. A few decades later, participants at the massive Council of Basel (1431–1439) sought, among other ambitious agendas, to replace the individual authority of the pope with the broader authority of a conciliar administrative system. Given the highly politicized context and concern for spiritual safeguards, it is not surprising that many attendees wanted to talk about the mounting Satanic attacks upon Christendom. Christian regeneration and rejuvenation was the issue of the day, and fifteenth-century reformers were quick to perceive magical practices as the devil’s work. Among the most important of these reforming authorities in terms of witchcraft was the Dominican Johannes Nider (c. 1380–1438), whose moral treatise Formicarius (The Anthill [1437–1438]) laid out a model for orderly, pious Christian society. In the fifth book of the treatise, he turns to the subject of “Witches and Their Deceptions,” claiming that his information came directly from the mouth of a secular judge who led trials between 1397 and 1406 in one of those western Alpine regions. According to the judge, the supposed community of demonic baby eaters was tortured until confessing maleficia of murder, infertility, and divination; in this case, the primary witch was a man named Stedelen, who provided a step-by-step overview of the group’s diabolical practices. Yet as a male witch, Stedelen was unusual. Already by the later fourteenth century, women were a clear majority of those accused of witchcraft; by the first half of the fifteenth century, women would represent nearly 70 percent of the accused. And contemporaries began to wonder why. Nider was one of the first theorists to address gender as a fundamental element of profiling witches and to set forth an argument about the relationship between women and maleficium. The evidence he marshaled was typical for a medieval cleric and drew on deeply established Greco-Roman and early Christian sources: for as “proved” by Aristotle and scripture, women were inferior to men in all matters, ranging from the physical and mental to the emotional and religious. Given the innate incapacity of females, then, why did men like Nider consider them capable of powerful and deeply destructive magic? As Nider had a bewildered student express it in the Formicarius, “I cannot wonder enough that the fragile sex should dare to rush into such presumptions,” to which the sage master responded, “Among simple ones like yourself, these things are wonders, but in the eyes of prudent men they are not rare.”11 But why was the association of women and magic “not rare?” Why did the deep misogyny of clerics not prompt them simply to dismiss women’s magic as merely foolish, the harmless babblings of fundamentally lesser beings? Necromancy, after all, had been a decidedly masculine act requiring skill, intelligence, and extensive education, qualities or resources denied most women. Nider provided a crucial explanation of how witches’ magic differed from that of necromancers: once again, it focused more upon the source of power rather than the act itself. For example, he described how a witch might appear to cause rain by dipping a broom in water, whereas the true agent in fact lay elsewhere: “The broom that the witch immerses in the water, so that it should rain, does not cause the rain, but a demon who sees this . . . the witch gives a sign with the broom, but the demon acts, so that it rains through the action of the demon.”12 Thus the easy power that female witches seemed to wield was actually not their own; their actions (spells, incantations, charms) were merely passive signs enacted upon by diabolical forces. Within Nider’s framework, the apparent contradiction between female incapacity and witches’ power was collapsed. Because of their weakness, carnality, deviousness, and self-seeking, women were deemed particularly prone to demonic temptations, inclined to respond to diabolical seductions, and likely to grasp at any form of available power—even the Satanic. In short, women’s weakness was perceived by the fifteenth century as an exceedingly dangerous soft spot in the spiritual barrier between humanity and the devil. Nider was not alone in his interests and passions, for many other mid-fifteenth-century theorists dedicated themselves in these decades to questions of witchcraft, heresy, and women’s particular proclivity to the crime. French inquisitors such as Jean Veneti in the south (d. 1475) and Nicolas Jacquier in the north (d. 1472) each argued in scholarly treatises that the witches of their day were a new heretical sect, one unknown in the earlier centuries of Christendom, and thus a particularly dire threat. Approaching the subject from a different milieu and set of assumptions was the brilliant poet Martin Le Franc (1410–1461), another figure who spent significant time among reformist circles in Basel and whose long poem Le champion des dames (The Defender of Ladies) contains an extended section on the linkage of women and witchcraft. In contrast to Nider and others who reinforced those connections, however, Le Franc challenged them, defending women from the charges and particularly rejecting the supposed “night flight” of witches to their diabolical orgies. By the mid-fifteenth century, contemporaries were not only thinking about witchcraft and heresy but intent upon exposing its darkness and secrecy—including the clear depiction of what one looked like. Marginalia from Le Franc’s text offer the first known depiction of witches riding broomsticks, whereas an illuminated manuscript of Johannes Tinctoris’s treatise from 1460 garishly rendered witches’ scandalous worship of the devil (here in the form of a goat). In the later fifteenth century, the development of printing allowed for the much wider dispersion of written materials and also of visual images in the form of woodcuts. Many early printed treatises on witchcraft contained illustrations, and other works dealing with moral virtues and vices often included images of witches. Woodcuts also appeared in widely distributed pamphlets and on their own. By the end of the century, visual images of witchcraft in various forms circulated throughout European society. A New Conspiracy Theory The intersection of new reformist concerns and a new generation of university men to implement them gave rise to the fusion of magic and heresy in the early fifteenth century, when authorities began to regard magical practice as a deeply threatening and specifically conspiratorial act. As noted above, in previous centuries, a man or woman’s dabbling in healing or love charms or divination might have been dismissed as an act of pagan nonsense to be lightly punished, whereas by the fifteenth century such acts came to be evaluated less in terms of the act itself and more in terms of its symbolic meaning—that the magical action (assumed to be demonic) meant that the individual herself or himself belonged to a diabolical cult of witches, a debased and demonic community of humans in league with Satan, intent upon overthrowing Christian sovereignty and unleashing hell on earth. Evidently, the more time these scholars dedicated to the task of thinking about demons, the more elaborate and terrifying their theories became. Such fears rippled through the highest ranks of the Church, and in 1409, the newly installed Pope Alexander V warned of new sects appearing in Europe and of novel dangers posed by sorcerers, diviners, and other practitioners of magic and superstition. In 1437, Pope Eugenius IV likewise affirmed the threat of such demonic sorcerers and proclaimed not only that Christian magicians were apostates for abandoning religion in the service of demons, but that they were members of conspiratorial, diabolical cults. By the early fifteenth century, the traditional vocabulary of maleficius (male) or maleficia (female) was still employed by clerical opponents, but the words’ meaning had shifted with profound consequences: no longer simply referring to harmful magic of various sorts, it now bore the specific and sinister implication of a collective and conspiratorial crime. This stereotype of magical practitioners as members of wicked communities bent on serving demons and loosing evil into the world would prove an exceptionally enduring image in the minds of European authorities up through the early modern period. Such broad new fantasies also tended to blend with local traditions and tensions, which helps to account for the diversity of accusations, inquisitorial procedures, penalties, and consequences across different regions and time periods. Thus the contribution of thinkers such as Johannes Nider and others was that witchcraft came to be perceived as a doubly heinous evil, consisting not only of the mundane crimes of maleficium but in the fundamentally heretical act of apostasy and idolatrous worship of the devil—an act increasingly depicted as a feminine crime. Fifteenth-Century Witchcraft Trials One palpable consequence of the new theories was a dramatic increase in the number of trials for magic and witchcraft in the mid-fifteenth century. Fewer than a hundred references to sorcery trials exist prior to 1420, whereas the subsequent decades witnessed an explosion in both the number (roughly between three hundred and four hundred trials) and intensity of prosecutions. These trials were centered in the Alpine regions of Italy, French-speaking Switzerland, and France, where the language employed betrays the growing link between heresy, magic, and witchcraft. In a particularly vivid example of how porous were categories of magic, heresy, and pejorative terminology, Alpine communities grafted the local term for Waldensian (Vaudois) onto witches. Let us consider some specific trials. In 1426, the popular sermons of Italian reformer Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) stirred up a frenzy of fear among Roman citizens that local healers were guilty of sorcery, and that to protect such people was in itself a despicable crime. It is interesting that the people he and the Romans targeted were local practitioners of healing magic, folks who provided a useful service to those who turned against them. The accused tended to be women, although men were also charged, and were often accused of slaughtering children by sneaking into their rooms at night and sucking their blood—a charge rooted in ancient folk beliefs in a vampiric creature known as the strix.13 Even more significant was the nearly contemporary incident in 1428 in the Italian town of Todi, which clearly reveals the new pattern of accusation and condemnation that would become typical of fifteenth-century trials. A woman named Matteuccia Francisci was charged at first with performing basic spells and love magic in the common tradition; by the end of the trial, however, she had been accused of being a strix who murdered children and who magically traveled to a distant town to worship demons at a diabolical gathering of witches. This space left blank intentionally. Figure 6.3. Witches Leaving for the Sabbath. Marginalia of Le Champion des Dames by Martin Le Franc, 1440. Snark/Art Resource, NY The last element represents a dramatically new element in the relationship of magic and heresy—for although maleficium had always been considered criminal in the eyes of medieval authorities, it had been an individual act (and thus an individual threat). Satan’s newly expanded role in the late-medieval period heightened the stakes of such activity, of course, but even the devil himself was apparently less terrifying to authorities than the notion of collective, conspiratorial behavior in his service. Matteuccia, as would so many other women and men in the decades and centuries to come, died at the stake. Evidently a gap yawned between the fears of laity and clergy: the former feared the particular outcome or end of harmful magic, whereas ecclesiastics were concerned instead with its means. The numbers and penalties involved ranged widely, although some trials sent up to a hundred victims to the stake. Such trials inspired still more, as the events traveled by word of mouth and ignited fears elsewhere. Near Savoy, an anonymous mid-fifteenth-century inquisitor penned a widely circulated treatise called “The Errors of the Gazarii” (a local term for witches) that provided a vivid silhouette of contemporary fears: not only were the accused seduced by the devil into using maleficium to kill and destroy, but they met regularly in secret nighttime gatherings to desecrate the holy, worship demons, eat babies, and defile themselves with illicit sex. If that accusation rings a bell, it is because we have encountered it repeatedly as a stereotype with which different communities were bludgeoned between the ancient and late-medieval worlds. By the mid-fifteenth century, the centuriesold set of smears first applied to early Christian movements and then medieval heretics was now harnessed to fifteenth-century notions of diabolical conspirators meeting in “sabbaths” that specifically inverted and denigrated sacramental grace. Clerical authorities echoed the claim, as in the graphic description penned by an inquisitor in Savoy in the mid-1430s who described cultic gatherings of witches who worshiped demons at their “synagogues” (a term certainly reflecting festering late-medieval antiSemitism), renounced Christianity, and forged pacts in their own blood. In the northern French city of Arras, thirty-four men and women were accused of witchcraft between 1459 and 1462; twelve were burned at the stake for devil worship and “attendance at the synagogue of the Vaudois.” Thus the elements of the late-medieval witches’ cult represented reformers’ concerns cast upside down: instead of reverently taking the Eucharist, witches gorge themselves on disgusting matter; instead of pious devotion within the domestic realm, they are women on the loose, riding broomsticks in prurient night flights to Sabbath gatherings; they subvert rites of traditional homage by kissing the devil’s backside and granting him sovereignty; they dissolve boundaries of sexual propriety by fornicating with demons and one another; and they desecrate the bonds of motherhood and kinship by slaughtering and eating babies. In the minds of fifteenth-century reformers and theorists, therefore, witches’ sabbaths were literally hell on earth. Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff. A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Critical Issues in World and International History). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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