1 - History and historiography Wier and the witch-hunts

Summary

Abstract

The topic of witch-hunts has been widely studied across the ages. Multiple complex interpretations have been offered to explain how the phenomenon arose, developed, and finally ended, thus tackling the difficulties inherent in a historical fact that occurred everywhere and over a significant period of time. This chapter takes up some of these stages, focussing on the interpretation and critique of Wier's thought. Wier was celebrated as the first advocate of witches and later defined as a forerunner of psychiatry, while others condemned him as a magician.

Key words: Witch-hunts, Witchcraft, Historiography, Freud

Girolamo Tartarotti, in his Del congresso notturno delle lamie (1749), observed that judges, from the mid-fifteenth century, had continued to pass sentence of capital punishment despite the criticisms, perplexities, and protests over the very existence of witchcraft. The condemnation of the senseless spilling of innocent blood continued into the Enlightenment, when witch-hunts were still under way. Tartarotti, however, had discovered a number of scholars, including Johann Wier, who had attempted to resist the hunting of and the superstition around witches. In a letter dated September 7, 1743, Tartarotti acknowledged Wier as having unsurpassedly altered the course of the discussion on demonology.

While a new form of rationalism crusaded against superstition from the mid-sixteenth century, the courts of law continued to adopt a variety of approaches; thus, in some areas, a decline in trials and beliefs can be seen, whereas elsewhere there was an upsurge in the number of trials. This refers only to the genesis and decline of witch-hunts, since belief in magic and witchcraft evidently has still not died out in the present day. Besides political, institutional, and religious causes, many scholars maintain that the witch-hunts took their shape due to the convergence of high and low culture, and that they gradually declined as the intellectual elites began to doubt the existence of witchcraft, in the wake of new Cartesian philosophy, just as many grew perplexed and indignant over the nonchalance with which legal authorities established and conducted the trials. In the present study, I follow this intellectual debate; the daily practice of turning to magic or the supernatural in order to solve all manner of problems, to cure ills, and to hunt treasures, will remain in the background.