Magic and Superstition in Europe by Michael D. Bailey

Author:Michael D. Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461639886
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Development of Witchcraft to the End of the Fifteenth Century

The immediate influence of the new conception of witchcraft being developed in trials and treatises in the early 1400s should not be overestimated. These ideas were initially fairly localized to Savoy, Dauphiné, and what would become western Switzerland. They spread slowly to the eastern Alps, and in northern Italy, where there were many sorcery trials at this time, these ideas did not take immediate hold. There, accused witches, usually women who claimed some expertise in healing or love magic, were often still prosecuted as individuals, and, significantly, charges of infanticide and cannibalism, while present, continued to owe more to longstanding concepts of vampiric striges than to the idea of depraved witches’ sabbaths emerging to the north. Nevertheless, ideas developed in the western Alps gradually spread, in no small part thanks to the major church council that took place in the city of Basel just to the north of the lands that cradled the earliest conception of fully diabolical witchcraft. Like the earlier council at Constance, the Council of Basel (1431–1449) was a major ecclesiastical assembly drawing clerics from across Europe, and like Constance, Basel also had a strong reformist bent. Among the authors discussed above, Johannes Nider was an important member of the council for several years, and the Errores Gazariorum probably circulated in the city. From the council, a network radiated out, and many other figures associated with the spreading idea of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft were either present at Basel or were influenced by men who had attended the council.

One figure who spent several years in Basel was Martin le Franc (1410–1461), one of the most important French poets of the fifteenth century. While at the council, as secretary for Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy (reigned 1391–1439, when he abdicated to accept the council’s appointment as antiPope Felix V, reigned 1439–1451), Martin composed his long poem Le champion des dames (The Defender of Ladies) between 1440 and 1442. In this poem he included an extended section on witchcraft and the particular association of women with this crime. Through the voice of his “Champion,” Martin defended women from such charges as much as he could. He especially questioned the supposed flight of witches. As the idea of the witches’ sabbath developed, so did the notion that witches typically flew to these gatherings. This concept probably owed much to beliefs common in Alpine regions that sorcerers would fly to distant mountain peaks, often to raise storms and hail. Such a depiction of flight appeared explicitly in the Errores Gazariorum, for example. Among educated authorities, the locus classicus of the idea of flight in the service of demons was the tenth-century canon Episcopi , which also associated this practice exclusively with women. Yet the canon presented such flight as a demonic illusion, and if flight to a sabbath was only an illusion, then the horrific activities that supposedly transpired there, and much of the image of diabolical witchcraft, must be illusory as well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.