In the roughly 200 years from the late-fifteenth until the late-seventeenth century, more than 500 people in Swabian Austria and nearly 800 in the Electorate of Trier were executed for witchcraft. In a most stimulating and informative comparative study, Johannes Dillinger seeks to understand and explicate this phenomenon.
After an initial, detailed discussion of the legal and administrative matrices in these two territories, Dillinger addresses the conceptualization of witchcraft. Agrarian crises—not theologically determined demonological positions—encouraged people to consider the role of harmful magic, particularly in its relation to weather. These fears blended with local folk legends, and, in the popular consciousness, witches came to fill roles traditionally played by fairies or ghosts. Although the populations under study did not develop an explicit understanding of witches as a diabolical sect, their local, popularly formed notions still fortified fears of witchcraft. Witchcraft trials became popular because they offered an anxious populace a means of fighting back. The ideologies and processes of confessionalization, while limiting the options available for fighting witches, did not explicitly stimulate witch hunting.
Significant is Dillinger's finding that religious metaphors and rituals did not organize these people's understanding of the witches’ sabbath, which they conceived more as a corporate than religious feast. The witches’ society was an analog of the secular community, not of the parish, and, although an “imagined alternative society,” the witches’ sabbath was nonetheless situated within real social structures (pp. 50–51). Descriptions of the sabbath may thus be used, as Dillinger skillfully does—one of many highlights of the book—to interpret and analyze contemporary, especially rural, understandings and critiques of early-modern society. In general, sabbath fantasies in these two areas maintained and reinforced real social hierarchies, while simultaneously attacking them as unjust.
Dillinger next addresses the processes that generated suspicion of witchcraft. In both territories, suspicion of witchcraft was disproportionately directed against the political and social elite, although criminals, beggars, and strangers were also suspected (p. 83). Certain members of the elite were seen as antisocial beings who damaged the economy through witchcraft for selfish gain. Social tensions played a decisive role in this process, and people who achieved unusual economic success in a time of inflation and viticultural decline were suspected. Avarice, not wealth, per se, was the key ingredient. Witch trials offered a means for those without power to defend themselves, but they were not instrumentalized. Accusations were not levied to attack someone for antisocial behavior; rather, antisocial behavior suggested the person was a witch (p. 95). Social climbers who were not members of the traditional, local elite but who demonstrated a blatant political ambition, one motivated either by service to the territorial state or by assuming positions antagonistic to local interests, were likewise suspected. In this regard, suspicions arose as part of the larger conflict between the centralizing state and the local community striving to retain its traditional autonomy (p. 88). Suspicions of witchcraft were, however, unpredictable; no set pattern ultimately emerges.
Dillinger systematically analyzes the management of the trials and the agents behind them, discussing, on a regional basis, the popular demand for witch trials, the role of gossip and rumor, dynamics of self-accusation, levels of adherence to legal codes, the practice of persecution, the impact of the witch hunts, and the reasons for their decline. In most of Swabian Austria, town councils were dominated by elites who were less affected by economic crises, reluctant to initiate trials that might lead to social unrest, and possessive of their judicial rights. These factors reduced witch hunting. In contrast, the communal-based witch committees in Hohenberg and in the Electorate were more socially diverse, and these committees embraced the common man's fears of witches. Discrete witch hunts in these areas were curtailed or ended when the committees ran into financial difficulties, and the cost of continued persecution became untenable. The territorial lords in both areas were less eager for witch hunts than were the common people, but, for much of this period, their governments were unable to regulate effectively all the towns, villages, and courts because their respective administrative systems were relatively weak, albeit for dissimilar reasons. In most of Swabian Austria, town-council elites retained a strong degree of political and judicial agency; in Hohenberg and the Electorate of Trier, communities maintained committees that preserved their jurisdiction over criminal courts and judicial processes. Once the territorial lords were able to take control over local judicial structures, witch hunting diminished.
Significantly, Dillinger does not view witch hunting as a means for religious and secular authorities to acculturate their subjects; he argues that the centralizing, territorial governments gained influence and control by limiting and ultimately ending the witch hunts. Territorial governments could not abolish the witch hunts without weakening the communal systems, along with their local aspirations and disregard for the territorial state's own apparati. If the territorial state did transform the common man, it did so by ending, not supporting, witch hunts (pp. 199–200).
This study is a complex, valuable, and challenging comparative work, one that does not merely compare witchcraft between the Electorate of Trier and the lands of Swabian Austria. Dillinger also develops informative intra-territorial comparisons, and establishes rewarding comparisons of these lands with other regions in Germany, Europe, and even Salem. Throughout, Dillinger respectfully and succinctly introduces the ideas of important scholars in the field, such as Thomas, Midelfort, Behringer, Muchembled, and Labouvie, and discusses his findings against theirs in dialogic fashion, establishing yet another edifying comparative framework. This penchant not only informs his own presentation, but inspires one to revisit their works. Another strength of this book is Dillinger's ability to anticipate the reader's questions and to suggest answers based on his profound understanding of the archival material. To give but one example, he offers reasons that those suspected of witchcraft did not avail themselves more often of slander trials, to attack those who had defamed them, given the success of this strategy whenever it was employed (p. 79). The translation is superb; the text's syntax is sophisticated, yet fluid and natural. The book contains many useful maps, illustrations, a glossary, and an informative appendix that provides quantitative analyses.
