The title of the first question of the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) introduces a note of doubt: ‘Whether claiming that sorcerers exist is such a Catholic proposition that to defend the opposite view steadfastly is altogether heretical'.Footnote ¹ As is well known, the Malleus maleficarum (1486) was for a long time the most authoritative and widespread handbook for the prosecution of witchcraft available to judges lay and ecclesiastical. Its author, the German Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, better known as Institoris (the Latin version of his name) was one of the most notorious witch-hunters of all time.Footnote ² In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which gave Institoris free rein in the prosecution of witches throughout Germany; this was joined to the Malleus as a type of foreword.Footnote ³ Papal endorsement and thorough treatment of the topic granted the book a remarkable success, and it went through six editions before the end of the century.

Given such an impressive foundation, why would the book open on such a note of doubt? Why is there such urgency to demonstrate that belief in the existence of maleficos (sorcerers or witches) was absolutely orthodox, and that its opposite was heresy? Reading through the book's index one realizes that Question One is not isolated: ‘whether it is a Catholic proposition to claim that humans can be begotten by incubus and succubus demons’ (Question Three); ‘whether a Catholic can in any way hold the view that the origin and increase in the number of sorcerers’ works derive from the influences of the heavenly bodies or from the superabundant evil of humans, and not from the filthy acts of incubus and succubus demons’ (Question Five).Footnote ⁴ While the examination of conflicting theses and the evaluation of arguments for and against each one were certainly dictated by the scholastic style of debating, the subjects treated, and the sense of urgency in rebutting the objections, indicate clearly that the author was set on dispelling doubts and rejecting scepticism.

As research into the witch-hunt over the last twenty years has shown, the opening of the Malleus is actually far from surprising. Indeed, it was only natural and logical that Institoris would design the first part of his ambitious work in such a way. He was adding his voice to a then fifty-year long but still very heated debate on a highly contested topic, namely, the nature and the very possibility of diabolical witchcraft. While Institoris and his fellow inquisitors held that witches met with the Devil face to face at the Sabbat, and could interact bodily with demons, a series of prominent ecclesiastics and theologians, but also lay authors from different backgrounds, were sceptical in this regard. Indeed, they believed that the supposed witches had only dreamed or imagined that they had experienced these things, though their dreams might have been provoked by the Devil's manipulation of their imagination. In short, the witch-hunters placed an unprecedented emphasis on the Devil's ability to operate physically in the world, including for example the power to carry witches through the air to the Sabbat, or to consort sexually with them. The opponents of the witch-hunt, to whom I will refer as sceptics or doubters, emphasized instead the Devil's skills at tricking the senses and mental faculties of those who gave in to his temptations. They held to more traditional positions than the demonology of their opponents: in particular, sceptics usually adopted the approach articulated in the influential canon Episcopi, which warned against the Devil's wiles but characterized them primarily as deceptions.Footnote ⁵ This article will focus on an aspect that scholars have not previously analysed in depth, namely the important contribution of a few sceptical lay jurists to the early phase of the debate. These jurists drew especially on medicine and theology to reject unqualified belief in witchcraft, thus systematically addressing issues outside their area of expertise. I will argue that such an interdisciplinary approach made their attack on the witch-hunters’ theories more radical than that represented by traditional scepticism. I will concentrate on the way lay specialists of law – especially Ulrich Molitor and Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio – discussed problems of metaphysics and offered original interpretations of scriptural passages, countering the inquisitors on their own ground.

Institoris and other fifteenth-century inquisitors described witchcraft as a new and frightening heresy, whose adherents would meet the Devil face to face in the course of secret night-time gatherings. At these meetings they would feast and party, then pay homage to their master by some obscene ritual, often involving the defilement of things sacred and the killing of innocent babies, and almost invariably sealed by the sexual act with the Devil. Having formally renounced Christianity and thus become the Devil's servants, these heretics, variously referred to as malefic / maleficae, sortilegae or strigae, would receive from their master the power to harm. They would then cause the illness or death of humans with their spells; they would make women and animals barren, and destroy crops by raising up hailstorms and tempests. Denounced by inquisitors and preachers from the first three decades of the fifteenth century, the crimes of the witches conflated elements drawn from learned magic and necromancy with the supposed features of heretical movements persecuted in previous centuries, especially the Cathars and the Waldensians. Witches were believed physically to meet the Devil, like ritual magicians, but unlike the latter they were not seen as isolated practitioners of black magic, but as members of an organized sect, like heretics; indeed, the meeting of witches was usually referred to using the same terms applied to heretical gatherings: ‘sect’ (secta), ‘synagogue’ (synagoga), ‘company’ (societas). However, witches differed from both types of predecessor for a number of crucial reasons. First of all, their affiliation with the evil one consisted in a total, permanent submission, body and soul, manifested by ritual degradation. Second, such perverted ceremony would normally take place in the course of a physical meeting of numerous witches with the Devil. Third, witches received from the Devil more effective magical powers than those of necromancers, without the need of any training or preparation. Finally, they were believed to reach the place of their meeting flying through the air astride sticks, or animals, but really with the help of demons. The Sabbat and the flight of witches signified a change of scale in beliefs about the practice of heresy: thanks to these features a greater number of humans than ever before were enticed into abandoning Christianity with the irresistible prospect of endless pleasures, which were offered to them in the course of regular mass meetings, thus multiplying the occasions of sin and harm. In sum, witches were renegade Christians set on doing as much harm as possible through the exceptional powers that the Devil had granted them, actively participating in a terrifying conspiracy with the final goal of destroying Christianity and overturning the world.Footnote ⁶

One of the first descriptions to include many of these features is found in a rare account of a trial, that of a certain Matteuccia di Francesco, tried at Todi in Umbria in 1428. Probably inspired by the fiery anti-witchcraft sermons of Bernardino da Siena, the trial ended with a capital sentence. Matteuccia had confessed to having killed numerous babies by sucking their blood, but also to having gone to a great meeting of witches:

While witchcraft trials such as that of Matteuccia and early descriptions of the sect multiplied in the 1420s and 1430s, from the following decade theologians, inquisitors and jurists began trying to make sense of the evidence of the new heresy, working out its physical and metaphysical implications, as well as the legal questions posed by its judicial prosecution. An impressive and steady flow of books, most of them printed not long after their composition, documents the sudden urgency of the theme, whilst at the same time charting the dimensions of the budding witch-hunt. Both the persecutions and the publications were markedly international phenomena: they developed from French-Swiss lands, just as the witch-hunts were spreading from the western part of the Alps – Savoy, Val d'Aosta, Valais, Pays de Vaud and Berne – to Southern and then Northern France, and then to the Germanic lands.Footnote ⁸ But there was also a major input from the Italian peninsula, with writers and hunters concentrated mostly in the regions closer to the Alps, and significant contributions from other areas less affected by the witch-hunt, such as the Iberian peninsula.Footnote ⁹ Most of the works were authored by members of the mendicant orders, with Dominicans leading the way: some were well-known theologians, such as the German reformer Johannes Nider, author of the seminal Formicarius.Footnote ¹⁰ Most were inquisitors, such as the French Jean Vineti and Nicolas Jacquier (both active in the mid-fifteenth century), the German Institoris, or Bernardo Rategno, Silvestro Mazzolini and Bartolomeo Spina, all Italian witch-hunters active during the end of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹ While these authors devoted their books specifically (or predominantly) to witchcraft, an even longer series of ecclesiastics discussed the topic at significant length in one or other part of their work. This group includes very prominent figures, such as the Spanish cardinal and influential canonist Juan de Torquemada, Bishop Alfonso Tostado of Ávila, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his capacity as bishop of Brixen, and Tommaso de Vio, master general of the Dominicans, better known as Cardinal Cajetan.Footnote ¹²

The problems that witchcraft presented were numerous, and had weighty implications. First of all, to believe that witches could commit the nefarious, extraordinary deeds mentioned above, one had to believe that the Devil and demons in general had, or could acquire, a material body. Thomas Aquinas had described the mechanism whereby demons, pure spirits, could create bodies made of thickened air, and with these could not only appear to humans, but also simulate human bodily operations. As early as 1326, Pope John XXII's bull Super illius specula condemned magical practices such as conjuring demons in rings or mirrors as based on actual, face-to-face dealings between magicians and the Devil. In the papal pronouncement the pact with Satan was not described as just a spiritual error, happening only in the mind of the heretic, but as something which had a physical, material dimension.Footnote ¹³ What the evidence from trials such as that of Matteuccia and many others indicated, however, was yet another level in the nature of the contacts between humans and demons. These were no longer thought of as the prerogative of a fairly restricted group such as learned magicians practising necromancy, but had become a matter of appalling routine. Witches would meet the Devil face to face, would be materially transported to the Sabbat on a weekly basis, and would have sex with their accompanying demons more often than they would with their spouses. Inquisitors and theologians of the time, working on a scattered body of information, from the witches’ confessions to norms of canon law, folkloric tales and sermons, were gradually creating a new, much more ‘realist’ demonology than that of traditional scholasticism. Their theories accentuated the Devil's powers of intervention in the natural world, as well as the variety of the methods he would employ to tempt and tease, entice and threaten human beings. In this way, as Martine Ostorero has aptly observed, these theologians were providing the metaphysical foundation for the possibility of witchcraft as it was being discovered in the trials, and at the same time finding confirmation of their theories in the transcripts of the trials.Footnote ¹⁴

The process of endowing Satan with enhanced faculties was certainly not linear or unopposed. To a large extent, the new demonology generated resistance based on the same foundations. The Devil, as explained by Aquinas, could intervene in the physical world not only through his virtual body, but in more subtle ways: for example, he could alter the balance of humours in the human body, causing madness, or trick the senses, causing someone to see things which were not there, or even intervene in a person's imagination to generate fictitious images of people or events that would appear as perfectly real and present.Footnote ¹⁵ It was therefore completely orthodox to suspect that at least some aspects of what the witches confessed could be the product of demonic delusion, especially since it was believed that the Devil's level of influence on a person's body would be at its maximum in the case of those who had given themselves over to him completely, as witches did.

Such suspicions, particularly those concentrating on the witches’ flight as well as the Sabbat, were not only orthodox but enshrined in canon law. One section of the canon Episcopi – a text dating probably from the tenth century – distinguished harmful magic, a concrete and very real threat, from the deluded visions of some ‘wicked women’ (sceleratae mulieres) who gave themselves over to the Devil and then, ‘seduced by the illusions and phantasms of the demons’, believed themselves to be part of the goddess Diana's retinue and to ride at night for long distances ‘upon certain beasts’. Episcopi calls the women's claims a ‘false opinion’: it is just a vision produced by the Devil in the imagination of these ‘miserable little women’ (mulierculae), as the text also refers to them, who are thus deluded into believing that such actions take place truly and corporeally.Footnote ¹⁶ Although it did not mention the Sabbat specifically, Episcopi underscored that, by taking hold of the imagination, the Devil could show humans images of many different events and people, fully persuading them of their reality. In the twelfth century Episcopi was included by Gratian in his influential Decretum, thereby acquiring a very authoritative status. Thus the only norm of canon law which spoke of beliefs akin to the witches’ ride and meeting interpreted them as nothing more than dreams or mental delusions, and stressed that the main error of the mulierculae was to believe that these things were actually happening.Footnote ¹⁷

The weight of Episcopi's stance explains why several witchcraft writers from the first generation display a marked uncertainty on these issues. In his Formicarius Johannes Nider describes the claims of a ‘delirious woman’ that she would go through the air with Diana and other women, in a chapter devoted to ‘delusory dreams’.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, he ridicules the woman for a pathetic attempt to fly to her meeting with ‘Domina Venus’ by stepping in a bowl she normally used to make dough. However, in another part of the book he presents the art of sorcerers as including the ability of ‘moving through the air from one place to another’, adding only a slight note of doubt (‘as they believe’).Footnote ¹⁹

While the theologian and reformer Nider has a hard time reconciling incompatible positions, one of the major canonists of the time, Juan de Torquemada, displays granitic conviction. In his commentary to the Decretum, dating from around the early 1450s, Torquemada argues at great length that no aspect of the beliefs described in Episcopi can ever exist outside of the imagination of these deluded women. He stresses the inherent absurdity of their tales – they cannot really ride with Diana, since this goddess does not exist – but he goes beyond logic and points out the physical impossibility of certain details. For example, their claim of riding animals for very long distances in the complete silence of the night is rejected because no animal could ever do that without resting a while and without being heard. While admitting the possibility that the Devil may transport bodies from place to place ‘as if they flew’, he refuses to believe that he would materially carry people, as this would mean attributing to him exceptional powers, which borders on paganism and idolatry.Footnote ²⁰

Torquemada does not seem to feel any anxiety over a spread of witchcraft, and deals with the issue in very traditional terms. But his attitude was increasingly perceived as questionable, if not unacceptable, by significant sectors of the ecclesiastical establishment. In 1453, around the time Torquemada was writing, the French Benedictine monk Guillaume Adeline, master of theology and preacher, was tried at Evreux by the vice-inquisitor of France for having participated in the synagogue vaudoise, or the sect of the witches. Besides the usual list of deeds such as the demonic pact, Adeline confessed to having preached, at the instigation of the Devil, that ‘this sect of vauderie was only an illusion’ (cette secte de vauderie n’estoit qu’illusion), further calling it ‘imagination and daydreaming’ (faintaisie et songerie), citing the canon Episcopi.Footnote ²¹ Evidently, upholding the standard position of canon law could be considered a dangerous heresy, as he was sentenced to life imprisonment. His trial may have represented a turning point in the growing discussion on the nature of witchcraft: mentioned by several different works in the following decades, the case of the master theologian enrolled in the Devil's army provided strong support to the argument developed by Nicholas Jacquier in his Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum (The Scourge of the Heretical Witches, 1458).Footnote ²² Jacquier is the first author to focus his attention not merely on the threat posed by witches, but particularly on the more insidious danger coming from those who doubt their existence. Indeed, his ‘preface to the reader’ is entirely devoted to exposing the ‘perverse principles and foolish assertions’ of ‘many people who – coming out in the most untimely manner – greatly favour and defend the fascinarii heretics [i.e. witches], to the serious detriment of the Catholic faith’. These unspecified sceptics, writes Jacquier,

This is not all, he continues: the doubters also argue that one should not believe that the Devil has been granted such great power to commit as many evil deeds as the witches confess to having perpetrated. Finally, and more insidiously, the sceptics make up the fable (fabulantur) that when witches accuse someone of having been with them at the Sabbat, they should not be believed, since it is possible that demons created an image of that person and induced the witches falsely to believe that the person was there with them, so that an innocent may be incriminated.Footnote ²³

With remarkable lucidity, Jacquier had summed up the arguments of the sceptics better than any of the sceptics themselves had yet managed to do: firstly, the thesis of the illusory nature of the witches’ ride and Sabbat, both only existing in the minds of the supposed heretics; secondly, God's love for humankind as an argument against the possibility that he set the Devil free to afflict humans so atrociously through the works of witches; finally and most notably, the legal consequences of the first two points, namely the worthlessness of the witches’ confessions or accusations against their supposed accomplices. Doubting witchcraft, then, meant emphasizing the Devil's powers of delusion, especially his ability to tamper with human senses and imagination, more than his skill at manipulating the elements to create a demonic body. Doubt also stemmed from, or encouraged, an optimistic understanding of God's attitude toward humankind, as opposed to the fear that he would be so angry as to abandon humans into the hands of Satan and his minions. In sum, doubters had a rather restricted conception of the extent to which God permitted demons to carry out their malevolent intentions – that is, limiting them to the spiritual sphere.Footnote ²⁴ On these grounds, they would conclude that a court case based just on the words of one or more witches was no case at all.

The fact of the matter, however, was that none of these questions had a clear-cut solution, as one could argue both for one thesis and for its opposite with equally strong reasons. Jacquier seems fully aware of this, as he deals in an orderly way with the conflicting possibilities. Starting with the alternative between reality and illusion, he describes the ways in which the Devil can deceive humans by exploiting physiological processes, inducing certain visions – as in dreams – and making a person believe that they are real. This is exactly what happened to the ‘miserable little women’ of the canon Episcopi, who were ‘truly’ deluded by Satan; but, Jacquier argues cleverly, today's witches are a completely different story. Demons appear to their ‘external senses’ using bodies made of ‘elementary matter’, and thus have physical interactions with them at the synagoga, including sexual activity. The reality of all these things can be demonstrated according to two orders of proof. The first comes from Scripture and from the lives of the saints (e.g. St Martin, St Anthony and St Theophilus), which show that demons – and equally angels – can effectively appear to men in plain daylight and even imitate vital functions, as did the angel Raphael, who appeared to Tobias as if he were eating and drinking (Tobit 6: 5). The second order of proof comes from the evidence of the trials, which consists in the countless spells cast by the witches and their material effects. But it also includes the tales of sexual debauchery at the Sabbat, which left the witches physically prostrated for days: a confirmation that incubi and their contacts with humans are absolutely real.Footnote ²⁵

Jacquier, however, finds his strongest argument for the reality of witchcraft by investigating why God would permit it. Situating the issue in the framework of the history of the world, he writes that while in former times heresies were created and led by human beings, now demons lead the practice of witchcraft, something which God allows out of anger at Christians’ ever increasing sins. Adopting a strongly eschatological tone, Jacquier states that the very existence of the witches’ sect is the proof that the prophecies about the end of times are being fulfilled: as the day of judgement is approaching, Satan is running loose, thus increasing the suffering caused by witchcraft.Footnote ²⁶ The author devotes a good third of his work to the question of theodicy, trying to explain that divine permission to Satan – conditio sine qua non for witchcraft – is always linked to God's overall ends, which are impenetrable to us but necessarily good; and that it is never unlimited, which explains why the Devil cannot do everything he pleases, such as, for example, exterminating humankind.Footnote ²⁷

Jacquier's lengthy survey of a principally theological issue leads to the third, very thorny legal question raised by the sceptics: since God allows the Devil to deceive humans, what should judges do, when a person accused by a self-confessed witch of having been at the Sabbat protests that the witch actually did not see him or her, but only a mental image created by Satan? Jacquier answers by subtly distinguishing two kinds of divine permission to the Devil: the first, ‘general', one was given once and for all at the moment of creation; but there is a second, which demons need in order to carry out specific tasks, such as creating the image of an innocent person in the imagination of a witch. Of this second type of permission, we cannot know anything unless it is revealed directly by God or manifested by some feature of the image from which its demonic origin would clearly result, as in our case. Now, Jacquier states, the burden of proof is on the shoulders of the accused: only if they can provide judges with unmistakable signs of such demonic intervention can their defence be admitted in court. By requiring that the defence of those accused of witchcraft meet such an evidently impossible requirement, Jacquier aimed to rule it out as de facto inadmissible. However, such intricate subtleties reveal his true concern: the real motive why the doubters’ claims must be rejected, he is forced to admit, is that the witches’ accusations against their accomplices are the only tool inquisitors have against the diabolical sect. If these testimonies were deemed unreliable, no other evidence could replace them, and therefore no other solid proof could ever be found of the existence of the Sabbat and of witchcraft itself as a collective crime.Footnote ²⁸ Not casually, then, in the last chapter Jacquier argues defensively that even if we concede that witches have been deluded in their sleep, they are anyway guilty of heresy, since they keep the commitments taken with the Devil and continue to abhor Christianity even during their waking hours.Footnote ²⁹ This was a clearly disappointing conclusion for a book that had portrayed witches as signs of the imminent end of the world. More importantly, it indirectly manifested the types of problems inquisitors could face in the prosecution of witchcraft, a task they shared with lay judges since it was a crimen mixti fori (‘crime of mixed jurisdiction’). While inquisitors could condemn even the simple thoughts and visions of the witches as sinful and heretical, this was not always the case in a secular tribunal, where judges would first and foremost seek to ascertain and punish the actual killings or diseases caused through spells.

Jacquier's book was meant to put the prosecution of witchcraft on solid ground, no matter what objections could be raised. As such, it shows once more that the very existence of the crime could be challenged on many accounts: from the mechanisms of sensation and of mental illusion, to the nature of spiritual beings and how they would interfere with the physical world, to the vexed question of an omnipotent, infinitely loving God tolerating evil in the form of the Devil's work.Footnote ³⁰ Theologians and inquisitors, engaging with all these issues, had necessarily to enter into a conversation (sometimes a confrontation) with specialists in other disciplines, especially jurists and physicians. This is what made the witchcraft debate a major occasion for fruitful exchanges between different fields, and also for notable and frequent overstepping of disciplinary boundaries. For example, when lay jurists wrote on witchcraft, they typically intervened on theological questions, bringing their distinctive heuristic principles to bear on complex, sensitive religious issues.Footnote ³¹

The Italian law professor Ambrogio Vignati (c.1410–80) was one of the first jurists to devote a significant portion of one of his works specifically to witches, and an early example of a non-ecclesiastical author dealing with an issue which up until then had been treated almost exclusively by clerics.Footnote ³² The twelfth question of his Tractatus de haeresi (Treatise on Heresy), written at roughly the same time as Jacquier's book (late 1450s), aims to clarify two points: whether things confessed by witches, such as traversing great spaces in a very short time, speaking and having sex with demons, or being changed into the shape of a cat, are possible or even likely; and whether the deposition of one or more witches accusing someone else of having participated in their crimes provides evidence strong enough to justify the torture of the supposed accomplice in order to elicit a confession.Footnote ³³ Surprisingly for a professor of canon law, Vignati chooses to deal with the first point almost without drawing on the canon Episcopi, but rather through an ambitious – if cursory – analysis of complex theological, as well as physiological, issues. As a matter of fact, he starts by underlining that demons are incorporeal substantiae and do not have organs: thus it would be impossible for human beings to have any bodily contact with them. In particular, he argues that, based on medical science, the supposed sexual encounters of witches with demons cannot be real. Since, as physicians say (dicunt Physici), semen is the product of the final digestion, demons, who lack all bodily functions including digestion, cannot have semen, and therefore cannot have sexual intercourse with witches.Footnote ³⁴ Vignati does not entirely reject the possibility that demons may actually do some of the things witches confess, always by divine permission; but he argues that such permission would be an extremely rare exception since ‘as a rule demons are detained in the dark prison of lower air until Judgement Day’, clearly an event that did not seem to him to be so imminent as it had to Jacquier.Footnote ³⁵ Vignati buttresses this point with a quotation from Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram explaining how God had confined demons in the lower air as if in prison, which in turn echoes Jude 6, on the fallen angels who have been kept by God ‘in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day’ (RSV).Footnote ³⁶ The rest of his analysis draws frequently on ecclesiastical writers and also on biblical passages: for example, he quotes Matthew 8: 28 on the two Gadarene demoniacs in order to demonstrate that demons cannot really do anything without God's permission.

In the end, Vignati argues that the great might of Satan has been ‘restrained by God's merciful omnipotence’, underscoring that the power he retains over human beings is mostly spiritual, not corporeal. The first conclusion one could draw from his quaestio is thus that the more outlandish features of the witches’ sect, such as the Sabbat, the flight or shape-shifting, are highly unlikely, if not outright impossible, since their regular occurrence, as alleged by witch-hunters, would imply that God granted the demons too many ‘special permissions’.

Vignati had thus first chosen to draw on metaphysics to argue for the demons’ incorporeal nature, and had then turned to natural philosophy and medical science in order to strengthen this point, interestingly leaving to the end the discussion of what pertained more strictly to his expertise, the legal side of the crime. As far as witches’ depositions against alleged accomplices go, Vignati writes that they do not provide sufficient proof for torture, since they often relate impossible events – such as shape-shifting – which are the product of demonic illusion. No judge, therefore, can proceed to torture someone on the sole basis of a witch's confession.Footnote ³⁷ The jurist's conclusion is as radical as Jacquier's parallel argument against the defence of those whom the witches accused, and explains why the latter had appeared so worried. The prohibition against torturing the witches’ supposed accomplices advocated by Vignati would have nipped any witch-hunt in the bud, since these were typically based on the confessions of witches giving names of fellow conspirators who, tortured in due course, would provide many more names still.

The analyses of Vignati and Jacquier seem to echo each other on several points, as both examine the witchcraft question from all sides – although of course from opposing angles. Unfortunately it is impossible to determine whether, in fact, Vignati's Quaestio was a reaction to Jacquier's Flagellum or vice versa, not least because we do not know exactly when Vignati wrote his work, and neither book was published until the late sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Objections such as those raised by the Italian jurist must, however, have been widespread within his profession, as shown in the first major witch-hunt to break out in France, the so-called ‘vauderie d'Arras’ of 1459–60.Footnote ³⁹ On that occasion, the avocat du roi – a sort of chief prosecutor – had been reluctant to accept the theologians’ opinion on the possibility of the witches’ flight: ‘it was not possible to go flying through the air on a stick’, he had declared, commenting scathingly that those who believed it were more heretical than those who confessed it in court.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was obvious that lay practitioners of law looked at witchcraft from a very different perspective from that of inquisitors, and their doubts could be a major obstacle to the prosecution of the crime.

One such lay practitioner was Ulrich Molitor (c.1442–1507), a German lawyer who was a prominent civil servant working for the archduke of Austria, and who authored the first printed book expressing strong doubts about witchcraft.Footnote ⁴¹ His De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (1489) was meant to be a refutation of at least some of the theses put forth by Institoris in the Malleus maleficarum, published just three years earlier. The issues discussed by Molitor include the possibility of witches harming and killing humans, transforming themselves into animals, flying on a stick to their meeting with the Devil, or having sex with demons and bearing children. Like Vignati, Molitor drew on a very broad range of sources: philosophical and theological works, Scripture, classical literature and hagiography. Particularly interesting is his discussion of the question of the children allegedly born out of the sexual encounters between witches and incubi, especially when compared to his polemical target, the Malleus maleficarum. Institoris devoted one question to discussing ‘How sorceresses practice carnal acts with incubus demons in the present day, and how they are increased in number as a result of these acts’. He did so in keeping with standard scholastic theory, which held that succubi could steal the semen of men and then use it as incubi to make women pregnant, thus overcoming the lack of reproductive organs.Footnote ⁴² Following the same eschatological perspective adopted by Jacquier, Institoris stressed that, while ‘in olden times’ women were infested by incubi against their will, now witches ‘willingly embrace this most foul and miserable servitude’. He depicted demonic sex as a system thanks to which witches could efficiently increase and multiply, since their progeny would be ‘strong in the practice of witchcraft’. To prove this point, Institoris drew on Genesis 6: 4: ‘The giants were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old'. Based on the Ordinary Gloss (the medieval, multi-author standard commentary to the Bible),Footnote ⁴³ Institoris understands the ‘sons of God' as the fallen angels, who lustfully consorted with women, and interprets the fact that giants were born from their union as proof that women had had sex with superhuman beings. Now, if those sexual encounters were fertile, it follows that the witches’ dealings with demons could be, too. In his conclusion, Institoris argues that the physical reality of children born from the witches’ obscene copulations is a crucial part of the diabolical plan to overthrow Christianity through an increase both of the number of witches and of God's wrath, caused precisely by the proliferation of their evil deeds.

As was his usual practice, Institoris corroborated scriptural passages with courtroom evidence: the ‘many sorceresses who were turned over to the secular arm by us for punishment in various dioceses, especially in the town of Regensburg in the diocese of Constance’ provided through their ‘expert testimony’ an additional proof that demonic sexual intercourse was real.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is a reference to one of his witch-hunting campaigns, which in 1485 had aroused strong opposition in Molitor's home town, Constance, and had led the lawyer to write De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus.Footnote ⁴⁵ Interestingly, however, in his book Molitor does not refer to the actual trials, as we might have expected a lawyer to do. He chooses instead to respond to the issues raised by Institoris (without ever mentioning him), firstly by proposing a different reading of the same passage from Genesis referred to by the inquisitor. Rejecting the suggestion of the Gloss, Molitor argues that the children born from the ‘sons of God' and the ‘daughters of men’ were ‘powerful and magnificent men’ who, although called ‘giants’ for their extraordinary qualities, were simply human beings.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such interpretation entailed a clear rebuttal of the theory that their fathers had been superhuman beings – demons. Even more remarkably, Molitor then brings up the incarnation (which Institoris, significantly, had not discussed) as the only known example of a fertile union between a human being and a spirit:

Molitor is evidently grounding his twofold confutation of the reality of the witches’ demonic sexual intercourse not on legal arguments but on a careful reading of the Scriptures. On the one hand, he does not take the mention of ‘giants’ in Genesis literally, but metaphorically, as allowed also by the Gloss's inconclusive interpretation. On the other hand, he (obviously) takes the incarnation as a literal truth, but reads it in the light of its absolutely exceptional status. The union between the Holy Ghost and the purest of human beings took place once and for all due to God's design to become man, and this exposes, by contrast, the utter absurdity of believing that women deprived of God's grace could copulate regularly with demons and multiply in this way, as witch-hunters claimed. Vignati had suggested that the physical transportation of human beings by demons, although not impossible in principle, as shown by biblical examples, must be considered an extremely rare occurrence because it required a specific divine permission. Now Molitor went one step further, presenting the exceptionality of one of Christianity's fundamental mysteries as a strong reason to doubt the supposed normality of demonic sexual intercourse. Both authors implied – Molitor much more forcefully than Vignati – that since such events had happened on a plane so distant from ordinary experience, they could not be drawn on in the courtroom to accuse common people of extraordinary deeds. The same line of reasoning would be followed, to more radical conclusions, by another lawyer with strong doubts about witchcraft, Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio, as will be discussed below.

Having decried the idea of children born from women and demons as theologically unacceptable and indeed almost blasphemous, Molitor moves on to critique its physical aspects on the basis of medical arguments, just as Vignati had done, but, again, more incisively. He argues that the whole theory of demonically assisted procreation does not hold water, since demons lack not only testicles, but also the main physiological source of procreation, the ‘potency of the heart’ (virtus cordialis), which regulates the operation of the testicles and the production of semen. Without this ‘potency’, which the incubus cannot acquire, the mere injection of stolen semen in a woman's womb cannot lead to conception.Footnote ⁴⁸ Both natural science and theology, therefore, suggest a firmly negative answer to Institoris's claim that demonic sexual contact is responsible for the dramatic increase of evil in the world and for God's subsequent anger.

Molitor's tract, however, does not end with a sweeping rejection of the entire witchcraft construct, but with a more moderate position of selective scepticism. While admitting that witches may be guilty of truly worshipping the Devil instead of God, the German lawyer defines their heresy, in traditional terms, as a purely mental act without any material consequences, since he restricts Satan's power to the ability to tempt humans to the spiritual level.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus all the elements composing the ‘new crime’ of witchcraft – flight, metamorphosis, demonic sexual intercourse – which inquisitors considered possible and real thanks to the Devil's physical capabilities, are interpreted as the mere products of diabolically induced visions. The implicit but very clear message of the book is thus that the alarm launched by witch-hunters is based on a grossly exaggerated evaluation of the witches’ actual powers.

The extraordinary success of Molitor's book, which surpassed Institoris's Malleus maleficarum in terms of the number of editions (ten) by the end of the fifteenth century, highlights the fact that doubts about witchcraft found a vast audience (and provided a large market for the publishing industry), doubtless including especially legal professionals such as judges and civil servants.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is only logical, then, that the next major attack on the arguments of the witch-hunters would come from another lawyer, the otherwise obscure governmental official, Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio (b. c.1460), from Piacenza.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1511 he authored Tractatus utilis et elegans de lamiis et excellentia utriusque iuris (A useful and elegant Treatise on Witches and on the Excellence of both Laws), the first book on witchcraft to be published in Italy which had not been written by a cleric. As he explains in the dedicatory letter, the great increase in witch trials in his home town had persuaded him of the necessity to write ‘true and useful things’ on a matter which had aroused many controversies.Footnote ⁵² There was a problem, though: witchcraft ‘seemed to be a matter for theologians’.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, from the very beginning, Ponzinibio identifies the most important foundation of the belief in the reality of the witches’ Sabbat as being a passage from Scripture, thus apparently within the sole scope of theologians: the narrative in the Gospels of the temptations of Christ.

Now, if the Gospels are the foundation of any discourse on witchcraft, then in order to bring his opinion to bear on the matter Ponzinibio must first demonstrate that ‘civil and canon laws can be adduced and brought forward to interpret the Scriptures and to decide on theological issues’, and thus that a lawyer has the right to discuss issues relating to Scripture and faith.Footnote ⁵⁵ To this goal Ponzinibio devotes the first, most ambitious and least studied part of the book.Footnote ⁵⁶ He strives to highlight the excellence of both civil and canon law (de excellentia utriusque iuris) over all other branches of knowledge, and to argue that, given the lofty status of their discipline, jurists can apply their learning to, and formulate authoritative conclusions on, problems which lie apparently outside the confines of their field.

Having thus established his (and his profession's) right to intervene on the matter of witchcraft, in the second part of the book, starting from the canon Episcopi, he proceeds to argue that the witches’ experiences are just dreams or hallucinations. To claim that witchcraft is a fact, as inquisitors do, is extremely far-fetched, because there is really no evidence. All testimonies relating how the witches are able to reach places very far away by flying at amazing speed are suspect or falsehoods, as they speak of events which are ‘far from likely’ (longe a verisimili).Footnote ⁵⁷ It follows that those confessing to participation in the Sabbat are deceived, especially since they happen to be mostly women, or at any rate uncouth country folk: both categories are easy prey for the Devil's tricks, and certainly unreliable witnesses in court. The witches’ confessions must not be trusted, not only, however, because they are the product of delusion, but also because they contain things – such as their flight – which are evidently impossible when judged on the basis of law and of natural philosophy (‘these things are rejected by law and nature’).Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, such confessions can only shed light on the witches’ beliefs, but are invalid as far as any fact happening outside of their minds is concerned. Doubt seems to reach greater heights here. By separating fact from mental construct, Ponzinibio was suggesting that the problem of witchcraft should not be examined on the basis of the standards of proof applied by theologians, who held as true an ‘opinion condemned' (opinio reprobata) by canon law such as the witches’ flight. Indeed, he was explicitly urging inquisitors systematically to seek the assistance of lawyers throughout witchcraft trials, implying that it would help avoid serious mistakes.Footnote ⁵⁹

Yet how could one possibly doubt the account in the Gospels of the temptations of Christ? If Satan had been capable of carrying the Son of God to the pinnacle of the Temple, why should he not be capable of carrying the witches to the Sabbat? Ponzinibio answers that Christ's flight cannot be taken as a valid precedent because of its wholly exceptional circumstances: Christ being God, his bodily ‘transvection’ or transportation through the air had been the consequence of direct, specific permission given by him to the Devil. Now, jurisprudence teaches that no rule can be derived from extremely rare events (ex his quae raro accidunt, non fit lex nec regula), otherwise, on the basis of the resurrection of Lazarus, we would need a ‘law on those raised from the dead'.Footnote ⁶⁰ This consideration enables Ponzinibio to turn the witch-hunters’ logic on its head: ‘since he [Christ] was transported or carried by the Devil by his own permission, we can infer and affirm that such transvection [i.e. that of witches] in no way can or must be admitted. . . . Indeed, the argument based on Christ can be reversed, and therefore is ineffective.’Footnote ⁶¹ The conclusion to be drawn from Matthew 4: 5 is not that witches can fly, but that we could believe in the possibility of their flight only if God's permission for it were evident, as in the narrative of the temptations –and this is obviously impossible.

The line of reasoning is clear and appears to be the one Molitor had also followed with regard to the incarnation, but with one major difference. While Molitor had rejected the idea of demonic procreation by passionately denouncing any similarity with the incarnation as blasphemous, Ponzinibio analyzed the question of Christ's transvection rationally, confuting the inquisitors’ claims through explicit recourse to law. He aimed to ground his critique of demonology not on emotional response, but on universally recognized legal principles. More than any other author before him, the Italian jurist had developed and organized his doubts about witchcraft in connection with the system of law, which he thus made the keystone of his approach.

Ponzinbio, however, still needed to deal with the witch-hunters’ final argument: the claim that God, angered by the sins of Christians, would currently grant the Devil an unprecedented degree of freedom to intervene physically in nature, thus enabling witches to perform their amazing deeds. Just as Vignati and Molitor had done, Ponzinibio counters this point by proposing a far more optimistic vision of the relationship between God and humankind. Shifting to eschatology and making reference to Revelation, he writes that the sacrifice of Christ has caused the Devil to be chained in hell, and has deprived him of any capability of operating in the material world, including bodily interaction with witches.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, Satan's limitations are very evident when one considers who, and how many, are the persons tried for witchcraft: overall, a very small number of people, and furthermore of lowly status (thus also unreliable as witnesses). Now, if Satan's powers really were as unrestricted as the inquisitors claim, he would gain a virtually unlimited following among all kinds of people, and would be able to carry an infinite throng to the Sabbat – but this is hardly what one finds in the trials.Footnote ⁶³ The truth is that Satan does not have any need of transporting his minions to an actual meeting, since what he really aims for is the full control of their minds so that they may worship him inwardly.Footnote ⁶⁴

Once again Ponzinibio, like his fellow jurists, had intervened in a theological question (the Devil's powers), and had based his conclusion on an alternative interpretation of Scripture. Turning to Scripture was indeed what both witchcraft believers and sceptics would do. Theologians and inquisitors, such as Jacquier and Institoris, building on a realist demonology which had been over a century in the making, looked to the Bible for evidence of the physical reality of the Devil's powers, and thus of the witches’ deeds. While traditional canonists, such as Torquemada, in keeping with the canon Episcopi, responded by upholding the view that all demonic manifestations were first and foremost the product of trickery and illusion, the three lay jurists discussed here also articulated their doubts through an ambitious examination of theological arguments and Scripture passages. With varying levels of sophistication and radicalism, Vignati, Molitor and Ponzinibio read the biblical events discussed by witch-hunters in the light of their exceptional, unique status. While Vignati and Molitor had not taken their arguments to their logical conclusion, Ponzinibio affirmed explicitly that, because of their absolute rarity, phenomena such as the bodily interactions between Christ and the Devil did not constitute a legal precedent for judges dealing with real-life situations. Belonging in a meta-historical dimension not comparable with the world of human experience, the events described in the gospels could not be resorted to in order to prove that witchcraft was ordinarily possible.

What the three jurists would ultimately look to the Scriptures for was not any physical evidence of witchcraft, but an alternative metaphysics. God, they implied, was not angrier with human beings now than he had ever been before. Contrary to what both Jacquier and Institoris maintained, therefore, there was no reason to fear that he would free the Devil to wreak his wickedness upon Christians. These sceptics unanimously argued that the Devil could not enable the witches to perform extraordinary feats, because God would never permit it. They all emphasized the limitations of Satan's powers in the physical world, and that the tempter's main sphere of operations was to be found within a man's, and especially a woman's, soul. While witchcraft existed – and witches must be punished severely, as Molitor expressly stated – it consisted essentially in the heretics’ decision to worship the Devil as God; it was thus a purely mental act.

The return to a traditional, pre-fifteenth-century demonology by these writers, was not, however, solely due to a more conservative understanding, such as that expressed in the time-honoured canon Episcopi. It was the product of a new approach, which emphasized – more or less explicitly according to the author's background and agenda – the absurdity of any attempt at using the Bible to explain supposedly physical events. Significantly, such ‘dematerialized', or markedly spiritualized, reading of the Scriptures (and of witchcraft) appears to have been a prerogative of non-clerical authors. By depriving the witches’ crime of any material dimension, they implied that theologians and inquisitors, who had been labouring to prove precisely that such a dimension existed, did not understand witchcraft at all. But since any definition of witchcraft was based to a large extent on biblical passages, the sceptics were ultimately challenging ecclesiastical primacy in the interpretation of the Scriptures.

To return to the first pages of this essay and Institoris's anxiety, it is now clear that the history of the witch-hunt is also the history of the doubts that it raised from the start. Some doubts had their roots in traditional theology and canon law. When evaluated on this basis, new theories describing the Devil as capable of carrying the witches through the air and of copulating with them appeared seriously problematic. Witch-hunters, seeking to solve such problems, looked to Scripture for incontrovertible proofs of the demons’ corporality, and to the natural sciences for an explanation of the mechanics of the biblical examples they brought forth. Sceptics had thus necessarily to tackle the same issues and discuss the same evidence in a debate which became markedly interdisciplinary. The legal status of witchcraft as a crime over which both ecclesiastical and secular courts claimed jurisdiction caused the debate to broaden further. The witch-hunt thus provided one of the first occasions for an open, and at times tense, confrontation between theologians (most of them also inquisitors) and a number of lay intellectuals, for the most part jurists and lawyers. I have shown that these latter leaned more or less decidedly towards scepticism, and that they fully accepted the challenge of addressing questions outside their own field. I have argued that the specific contribution of the sceptical law professionals was to propose alternative readings of some significant scriptural passages, or of key theological concepts, in order to reject the notion that witchcraft had a physical dimension. They interpreted biblical narratives in the light of their unique character, emphasizing their moral and spiritual value while at the same time confuting their applicability to concrete courtroom cases. Their original interpretation of theological questions was also significant in itself, as a sign that lay intellectuals could consider it part of their professional duty to intervene aggressively in the area of religious doctrine without any reverence for, and actually in open disagreement with, ecclesiastical experts. The rise of increasingly radical doubts about witchcraft thus marks an important step in the broader process of secularization of the debate on metaphysical questions. It is certainly no coincidence that the Dominican inquisitor and witch-hunter, Bartolomeo Spina, who in 1525 confuted Ponzinibio's book violently and called for its burning, had only a few years earlier attacked the Mantuan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) for having argued that the human soul is mortal, and that therefore no eternal rewards or punishments await us in the hereafter.Footnote ⁶⁵ Both Ponzinibio and Pomponazzi de-emphasized the Devil's power in the world, though in very different ways and at very different levels of intellectual sophistication. An inquisitor such as Spina would naturally see such theories as a serious threat to the teachings of the Church and to its cultural authority in contemporary society.

However bold and unconventional these ideas may look to us, they do not seem at first to have had a notable impact on the prosecution of witchcraft. Prompted by the first major waves of witch-hunting in northern Italy and southern Germany, the works of the doubters had no practical effect, and the numbers of trials and executions peaked on both sides of the Alps between the 1480s and the 1530s, that is, precisely in the decades when these works were being written and published. While there are good reasons to believe that Vignati, Molitor and Ponzinibio were not isolated within their profession or social groups, their ideas failed to persuade the majority of judges of their day – whether secular or ecclesiastical – that witches were not a terrible threat to Church and society. If we consider a longer time span in the history of the witch-hunt, however, we observe a surprisingly early and rapid change in the attitude of inquisitors towards at least some aspects of the witches’ crimes. The process began in the mid-1520s, when the Spanish Inquisition issued guidelines instructing local judges not to take the witches’ confessions at face value and to doubt unverified assertions of having participated in the Sabbat.Footnote ⁶⁶ These new norms, which stated explicitly that witches were often deluded and admitted that their experiences could be a product of their imagination, gradually came to be adopted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, established in the Italian peninsula in 1542 as the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.Footnote ⁶⁷ From the end of the 1550s, supreme inquisitors, organized in a central board based in Rome and controlling local branches throughout Italy, increasingly regarded the more problematic features of witchcraft – encounters with the Devil and flight – as more often than not the fruit of dreams or illusions. By the early 1580s, the Holy Office would routinely forbid local inquisitors to prosecute those people whom witches affirmed they had seen at the Sabbat. The rationale was spelled out in 1593 in a letter addressed to an unnamed inquisitor:

The prosecution of alleged accomplices on the sole basis of witches’ words had been denounced as a mistake more than a century before by Vignati, and more aggressively by Ponzinibio in 1511. The jurists had challenged the position of inquisitors such as Jacquier, who, on the contrary, argued that the testimony of witches should be trusted absolutely. Now the Holy Office was endorsing the doubters’ point, and almost echoing Ponzinibio's warning not to give credence to ‘those women’ (as he systematically refers to the witches), who are deluded by the Devil and who may thus be instruments in his design to incriminate ‘good and righteous men’.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the inquisitors’ about-face was concealed under an appearance of complete harmony with tradition, as was customary for the Roman curia.Footnote ⁷⁰ The contribution of the sceptics was not acknowledged openly, and it was accepted only as far as its legal aspect went: the prohibition on prosecuting supposed accomplices. While recognizing that witches were almost always deluded, and thus that their testimonies were totally unreliable, the Holy Office never affirmed that their claims to have encountered the Devil at the Sabbat were absolutely impossible. In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, cultural hegemony was reasserted, allowing the Church's leading theologians to put aside the troubling doubts that had been raised by the sceptics a century before. If witches, after all, were just silly women, they could be dealt with leniently and without much ado, leaving the difficult question of the reality of witchcraft for another time, another debate.