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WITCH TRIALS with Professor Alison Rowlands · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Alison Rollins is a professor of European history at the University of Essex with specific
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  interests in the early modern period, gender history and witchcraft, which is what we're
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  going to be discussing today. Professor Rollins, welcome to Smart Cookies. It's a pleasure
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  to have you. Thank you. You did a wonderful series of short lectures for historical association
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  on the topic of early modern German witchcraft. And in the beginning of those, you said that
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  witchcraft emerged from European popular culture in kind of like late medieval period. It emerged
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  from people believing in magic, good and bad. But if we can stop here for a brief moment,
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  what was magic exactly? Was it more of like a supernatural property or ability ascribed
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  to just anything that couldn't be explained otherwise, kind of like, you know, filling
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  the gaps sort of thing? Or was it a bit more defined than that? Yeah, I think I think it's
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  both of those. I think it's absolutely central to how people at that time imagined their
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  world. It was also a profoundly religious society. And so I think magic needs to be
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  seen as part of that overall system. So people believe in God, in saints, but they also believe
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  in the devil, in spirits, in the possibility really of, I guess we could call it supernatural
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  intervention in the world. So it's a very, very, very different mindset to the mindset
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  that we have today. Most of us nowadays tend not to think that we're going to meet the
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  devil when we go shopping or, you know, that a familiar spirit is going to encounter us
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  in our kitchen. And interestingly, we probably tend to laugh about those ideas now, but people
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  then took them very seriously. And there was a very broad kind of division between sort
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  of good or at least ambivalent magical power. But also there was the idea that you could
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  actually do bad things with magic. So magic was really a power as well. Humans felt they
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  could do magic, perform magical rituals to harm people, but also to find buried treasure,
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  to cure people. So it wasn't just a negative power. It was believed to be possible to put
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  it to good uses, to tell fortunes, to prophesy and so on. The other thing I'd add, Zaza,
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  is that it's actually, it's not just popular culture. It's taken super seriously by the
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  elites as well. So you actually have quite a few very well educated men who would practice
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  magic, necromancy, for example, to try and raise and control spirits to do certain things
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  for them. So I think it's such a powerful belief because it's so widespread and it's
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  so important to the way people explain things and manage their lives.
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  You mentioned that people believed in supernatural intervention in their lives. Was that a regular
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  occurrence? Did it happen every day or was it reserved for exceptional circumstances?
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  That's a really good question. I think there are exceptional circumstances in which it
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  would happen. And certainly, in the context, say of perhaps encountering a demon, that
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  would be very exceptional, very unusual. But most people on a fairly day to day basis would
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  have used, for example, protective magic. They might have worn an amulet around their
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  neck or they might have blessed their cattle before taking them out in the morning to the
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  fields or very often doorways are used as protective mechanisms for people going in
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  and out of houses or livestock going in and out of barns. And you might put a symbol,
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  for example, over your threshold or over your door as a protective mechanism.
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  So there's a general sense in which magic was much, much more part of just the everyday
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  life. It was very practical. If you're a 15th century peasant, lots of stuff can go wrong.
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  You can get ill, your cows can die, the weather can be really bad. So you're very pragmatic,
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  I think. You would use whatever you can to try and get through the day, get through the
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  year and show you've got a good harvest and so on. It makes a lot of sense really. And
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  if you think doing a bit of good magic or protective magic is going to help, then I'm
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  sure we would have done it if we'd have lived there. And I'm sure we would have done much
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  the same. Yeah, you said whatever gets you through the
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  day. And that's why I still read the Zodiac. Okay, there you go. It helps me get the continuity
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  of belief. So that's a whole other story. But on the other hand, if you were a 15th
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  century peasant and every time you lost your pitchforks or whatever, you went, oh, the
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  devil took them or I've been bewitched or whatever, people would probably say, I'll
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  get off it, mate. It's just you lost your pitchforks again. You're clumsy, you're forgetful.
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  So you couldn't just claim that for everything. Probably there were some standards of ascribing
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  what was witchcraft or what and what wasn't. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in the 15th
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  century, the 15th century is really, really interesting because what happens in the 15th
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  century is that there was a big change in belief, but mainly on the part of the educated
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  elite. So you've had for a long time, broadly speaking, kind of general belief in good magic
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  and bad magic and in the possibility of people working magic. But what happens in the course
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  of the 15th century is a really, really new idea emerges, which is that there's a new
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  type of witch. And this is really the radical innovative. This is very innovative. This
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  is very new. This hasn't been around before. And so what happens at the level of particularly
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  religious elites is that they start to fear a new threat to Christianity, a new heresy.
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  And they begin to think not just that a witch could work harm by magic, but also that witches
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  are in league with the devil, that witches are a new form of heresy. And that's really
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  what changes. Well, it changes the way people believe about witchcraft, but I think it changes
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  the level of fear of witches. So the witch is no longer imagined as someone in a village
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  who could work magic, but it gets elevated in some of this elite thinking to someone
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  who can work magic, but is also in league with the devil, plotting with other witches
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  and the devil. And it kind of elevates the threat of witchcraft onto a whole new level.
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  And that really, I think, is what explains to some extent the witch trials of the 16th
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  and 17th centuries. It's this new, very new idea that witchcraft is a new heretical threat.
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  And that's why the church, secular elites, why do they take it so seriously? Will they
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  take it so seriously at this time in history, in Western Europe particularly, because of
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  this very new idea in witchcraft as a new threat, a new heretical threat to the church?
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  We're going to come back to the early modern period, but just to go back just a little
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  bit just to illustrate how stark this change is. And please correct me if I say anything
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  stupid here. But from my limited understanding, a lot of early Christian doctrine regarded
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  witchcraft as superstition. It actually went so far that certain Christian rulers, such
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  as Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, I just read this, I don't know if it's right,
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  that he outlawed burning witches at the stake because it was considered pagan. In fact,
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  if you did that, you yourself would end up being killed. So could you talk more about
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  why did this religious dogma change so dramatically?
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  No, I think you're right. In the Middle Ages, it was still possible to be executed for witchcraft
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  if it was believed that you'd try to kill somebody through image magic, for example,
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  or through poisoning someone. You could still be executed for harmful magic. But there was
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  much more of an emphasis on belief in witchcraft as a superstition. There's a very famous early
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  10th century church decree. It's called the Canon Episcopi. And it basically talks about
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  people believing in magic, still believing in the goddess Diana and people flying about
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  with the goddess Diana through the air. But what it says is that people who believe this
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  are superstitious. Actually, it's a bit worse than that. They are actually technically idolatrous.
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  They're breaking the first commandment because they're believing in false gods by believing
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  this. But the interesting thing is, well, I think there are two really interesting things.
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  The first one is there's much more of an emphasis on this as a kind of a spiritual problem.
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  It's kind of a wrong belief rather than anything. And the other important thing is that the
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  remedy for it is to try and teach people better Christian doctrine. It's not that they're
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  all going to be carted off to be executed. So, I mean, ultimately, you could be excommunicated
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  if you stuck to these idolatrous beliefs. But it frames ideas about witchcraft, magical
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  flying, these sorts of things as being a spiritual problem, which could be and should be solved
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  not through prosecution, not through execution, but through better education. So actually,
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  I think you're absolutely right, Zaza. The Middle Ages, often people say, oh, the medieval
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  witch burnings, but actually, the Middle Ages were relatively, and I use that term very
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  advisedly with the annoying fingers, but relatively sort of restrained in relation to belief about
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  witchcraft. What changes? I think various things change in the later Middle Ages. You
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  have the massive plague epidemic of the 14th century, which I think just makes people much,
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  much more anxious, concerned about mortality, concerned about who's causing and spreading
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  diseases. There are actually some sort of various groups in society get some, there
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  are some sort of accusations against Jews, some against lepers. This idea that there's
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  a secret underworld plotting against Christian society, that's accentuated by the plague
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  epidemic. You also get massive, real heretical movements in the late Middle Ages, the Cathars,
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  the Waldensians. So again, the Christian church is really under threat from heresy, particularly
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  in the late Middle Ages. And you also get a slight change in terms of how people think
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  about demons and the devil, particularly as a result of, for example, writers like Thomas
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  Aquinas, that there's much more of a sense in some of this theological thinking from
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  sort of the 12th, 13th century onwards, that this demonic threat is a physical, real one
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  rather than it being kind of a mental, spiritual one. There's the idea that it's actually much
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  more of a real threat. And then just to go back to the 15th century, what happens in
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  the 15th century is that inquisitors are sent by the pope to investigate heretics, to try
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  and bring them back to the church. And we have several Dominican inquisitors, particularly
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  going into the Alpine regions, into sort of southern Germany. And they're looking for
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  heretics, they're looking for Waldensians, particularly real heretics, as the church
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  would have it. Excuse me, I have to stop you here. I don't
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  know what Waldensians are. They are a heretic. Is that like Cathars?
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  Yes, very similar to Cathars. Yeah. So these are two very significant heretical movements.
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  So they are genuine movements where, you know, fairly ordinary people in some cases are critical
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  of the church, want things changing, and they are perceived as a real problem for the Catholic
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  church. And so they expend a lot of effort and energy in prosecuting them and in effectively
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  suppressing them. But I think it raises the church's anxiety about the threat of heresy.
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  So when inquisitors go out in the 15th century, as part of this heretic fighting program,
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  they encounter people in villages, you know, on mountain sides, who have lots of what they
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  regard as really strange beliefs about magic, magical powers, magical flying, the possibility
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  of harming people through magic. And what they do, and it's quite a long complicated
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  process in the 15th century, but what they do in the context of these sort of cultural
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  encounters, if you like, between Dominican inquisitors and ordinary people, the Dominicans
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  begin to think that these magical beliefs are part of this, are a new sort of heresy.
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  And you can actually see the idea emerging in some of the 15th century writings. These
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  Dominicans, these churchmen write about Waldenzians, this heretical group, and then they begin to
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  write about Waldenzian witches. You can kind of almost see this logical progression of
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  their arguments, quote unquote. But the way that we can tell it's different is because
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  they emphasize the power to do magical harm. And they also say that this new sect has the
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  power of magical flight. So it kind of reframes that earlier idea of night flying as a superstition
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  to a real kind of marker of this sort of new heresy. And that's really what the 15th century
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  is really, really important, really interesting, because without that change, without that
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  new idea of witchcraft as a heresy, a new heresy, another heresy that the church is
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  feeling threatened by. I don't think, you know, we wouldn't have had the scale of persecution
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  that we get in the early modern period, you need that shift of emphasis. So witches are
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  now not just people who can do harm, which is kind of scary enough, but they're also
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  in league with the devil. It's kind of a new conspiracy theory, if you like this, this
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  unseen kind of threat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I interviewed one of the first interviews
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  I did on this podcast was with Dr. Del Finito Isabelle. I think she's a I mean, I think
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  I know she's a scholar of female mysticism in medieval Europe. And during the conversation,
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  we also touched on witch trials a little bit. And she said something I was totally not expecting.
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  She said that if a woman was accused of witchcraft, that was the medieval period, of course, by
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  her community, the best chance she had was running straight to the nearest Inquisitor,
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  because at least these men were educated enough to know that no woman can walk through walls
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  or fly around because these powers were reserved for God alone. So in most cases, she would
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  end up getting acquitted. But that was earlier, right? You're talking about 15th century Inquisitors
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  on the hunt for heresy. But it's still, again, it's quite dramatic how things change, even
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  within the Inquisition. Yeah. Although I should say that actually, although a lot of this
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  sort of a lot of the a lot of the change in terms of this idea can be linked to Dominican
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  Inquisitors in the 15th century, the vast, vast majority of the trials that happen sort
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  of from the late 15th to the 18th century, they're virtually all done by secular courts,
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  not by the Inquisition, not by church courts. So what happens is this idea of witchcraft
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  as a threat and as a heresy, it kind of gets taken out by the godly rulers of early modern
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  states. And that's another so in the same way that the idea that witch trials were kind
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  of a medieval thing, that's a myth. Another kind of myth is that witch trials were the
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  work of the Inquisition. I think the Inquisitors, particular Inquisitors in the 15th century
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  are really important in terms of developing this new idea. But they really they call on
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  secular rulers to take up the fight, as it were, and because, you know, most early modern
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  states are really kind of theocracies, you know, they're they're godly states and religion
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  is is absolutely central to them. It's the secular elites, you know, that they're part
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  they pass laws, they pass statutes against witchcraft. So it's very much a secular, legal
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  persecution. So even though it has obviously very, very significant links to to religion,
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  it's actually driven forward by by secular. Interesting. I think most of us have this
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  image of Inquisition from popular culture, like, I remember the movie In the Name of
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  the Rose is based on a novel by Umberto Apo. And the Inquisition just rolls in with those
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  scary kind of half bald haircuts. And they just start burning everybody. And then that's
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  it. Everybody gets burned at the stake. And they, yeah, they press their scary caravan
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  onwards. You don't hear or secular courts are just not depicted that often in popular
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  culture, I think, probably because they're less scary in the popular imagination. Probably.
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  Yeah, no, I think it's it's a really interesting point, Zazzo. It shows how much our perceptions
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  are shaped by by film and books and kind of TV and so on. Yeah, I mean, I think probably,
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  you know, some of the 15th century Inquisitors, somebody like Heinrich Kramer, the author of
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  the Malleus, I can imagine he would have been pretty scary. And certainly, I'm sure some
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  of them were like that. But I mean, what Inquisitors want to do is not, they don't really want
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  to execute people at the end of the day. They really want people to return to the fold,
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  if you like. So and actually, the places, if you look at a map of early modern witch
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  persecution, Italy and Spain, so places that are kind of really dominated still by Inquisitions,
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  that they have and again, I'm using my relatively term, they have relatively low numbers of
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  witch trials and executions. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition from the early 17th century
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  onwards is relatively skeptical about witch prosecution. So again, really, I thought that
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  was the scariest one, the Spanish one with Torquemada and, you know, driving out all
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  the Jews and slain everywhere in Gothenburg. Yeah. I mean, maybe they were less concerned
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  about witches because they were too taken up with persecuting other groups. But certainly
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  in terms of actual witch trials, that they're, again, on the comparative scale, Spain, Portugal,
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  Italy have relatively few witch trials and certainly relatively few executions. So once
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  they crystallized, as you outlined right now, these beliefs about witches and witchcraft
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  and what witches can do, what were these beliefs? Why are witches flying around and cavorting
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  with the devil? I mean, some of the ideas are just common to what the Christian church
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  has always thought about heretics. So there's a way in which Christianity tends to assume,
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  you know, what's the worst thing that a Christian could do? Well, worship the devil, obviously,
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  from Christians. So there is a kind of set of central beliefs that get projected onto
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  several heretical groups. You know, you could take it all the way back to things like the
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  Knights Templar. So there's a sort of a cultural expectation, if you like. You know, what are
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  the worst things a Christian could do if they turn their back on God? And it's very much
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  this kind of inversionary thinking. So if you don't, you know, it's kind of the world
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  turned upside down, if you like. So if you don't worship God, you must worship the devil.
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  You know, and you do all sorts of really horrendous things like have all sorts of immoral sex,
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  perhaps eat babies, you know. So none of this is actually happening. I hasten to add this
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  is absolutely all fantasy, but it's a very, very powerful fantasy. What's different about
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  the witchcraft? The things that really make it obviously different are, first of all,
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  this idea of magical flight. That's really, really new. So these longstanding popular
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  beliefs in the possibility of magical flying, which most people nowadays probably immediately
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  think of Harry Potter and Quidditch. But anyway, at the time, it was a really kind of bizarre
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  idea and the Inquisitors thought this was what marked this new heretical group out as
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  new. So the flying is new. The emphasis on, you know, the really kind of concerted acts
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  of harmful magic is new. And the other thing that's quite new by the end of the 15th century
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  is the idea that witches are more likely to be women, because up until then, heretics
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  could be either men or women, or in fact were more likely to be men, actually, more of the
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  heretical persecution sort of involved sort of either any reasonably even number of men
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  and women, or they were more directed against men. So the things which make this new imagined
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  sect of witches different is the magical flying, the magical use of harmful magic, but also
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  the idea, the gendering of it, that it's more often in this belief system likely to be women
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  who are witches. And the way you know this is because if you start prosecuting people
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  and you ask them all sorts of leading questions and you pressure them and you probably torture
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  them, your beliefs kind of get reaffirmed. So if you say to someone, you know, have you
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  flown to a witch's gathering and you make them say yes, that makes you think the witch's
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  gathering was real. So a lot of the ideas kind of get expanded upon and confirmed for
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  people by the actual trials. So they're kind of a set of ideas, if you like, on paper,
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  but then if you introduce legal prosecution and you kind of get people to say stuff that
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  you want them to, then that's a way of this belief system getting kind of strengthened
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  and spread. I think the other important things to mention are number one, technological change
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  because we get print emerging in the late 15th century. So I think, again, the speed
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  and spread of these ideas is helped by print technology. We also have the Reformation happening
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  in the early 16th century. So you get a lot of religious division, concern about godliness,
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  desire, you know, a lot of states want to show how godly they are by persecuting people
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  who aren't godly and obviously witches could fit into that category. It's also a period
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  that's known as the Little Ice Age. So there was a, we know from weather historians that
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  particularly the 16th and 17th centuries are quite badly affected by very poor weather.
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  So it's much kind of wetter and colder. And so harvests aren't so good. So there's kind
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  of a general context of religious tension, bad weather concern over resources, concern
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  over food. So those sort of preconditions to make people more worried about their lives,
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  their families, that can sort of feed into the making of witchcraft accusations as well.
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  You must have read a lot of original court transcripts and documents from that era. Could
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  you take us through a typical witchcraft court case from the moment of presumably a woman
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  was accused of being a witch?
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  Yeah, sorry, I was just gonna say, one of the problems is that the legal treatment of
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  witchcraft is quite varied. So we have the belief and we have laws against witchcraft.
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  But if you looked at a map of early modern Europe, you'd see some areas which have really,
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  really, really severe prosecution rates and other parts of Europe where barely anybody
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  is accused at all. So I think a really important point to make is that although there are laws
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  against witchcraft and there are beliefs in witchcraft, the degree to which that translates
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  into trials is very, very varied. It varies from region to region and it changes a lot
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  across time as well. So some parts of Europe have virtually no witch trials, other parts
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  of Europe have terrible witch trials. They might come in waves, they might come in patches.
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  So I think there's a very, very variegated pattern. In an area where people believe in
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  witchcraft as a heresy and they're very worried about witchcraft, very often there would be
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  a very short, very brutal trial. In other words, somebody would be questioned, very
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  often tortured and made to confess. They would be forced effectively to confess by the torture.
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  But the other thing that they would often be forced to do, they would be asked, who
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  else did you see at the witch's gathering? Who else did you see at the witch's...
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  So denouncing others.
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  Yeah. Or they were called witch's dances very often in German. So the problem with that
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  mechanism, so if you have severe torture, really kind of concerted effort to get rid
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  of witches and the belief in the witch's Sabbath or the witch's gathering, that's where you've
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  got that mechanism for rapid, brutal and relatively large scale prosecution. Because yeah, if
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  you denounce people... I mean, we have, there's some records, for example, one person prosecuted
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  in late 16th century Germany, I think they denounced 150 other people. So you kind of
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  have this mechanism for spreading denunciations. So that's quite a different mechanism from
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  one neighbor accusing another, say in a village here in Essex, which is more typical of say
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  the English witch trials. You'd have a neighbor, perhaps whose child has died or fallen ill,
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  who suspects someone in their community of having caused that illness. But there are
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  also parts of Germany. I mean, I work bizarrely on a part of Germany that has relatively few
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  witch trials. So one of the things I've been interested in doing in my own research has
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  been to say, well, what stops these trials happening? What stops them escalating? Because
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  I think there's a tendency perhaps for us to think everybody in the early modern period
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  was always afraid of witches, was always wanting to prosecute them, was always willing to execute
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  them. And actually there are some parts of Europe where there's a lot less in the way
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  of trials and prosecutions. So a lot depended where you were accused, a lot depended when
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  you were accused. If you were accused in the context, say of Bamberg in Germany in the
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  late 1620s, you'd be caught up in one of these terrible, large scale, brutal, rapid persecutions.
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  And you probably have no chance whatsoever of surviving. You would confess and be executed
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  or you would probably die because the torture was so terrible. And something in the region
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  of 600 people are executed in Bamberg in four years from say 1626 to 1630. If you were accused
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  just up the road from Bamberg in the town that I work on, there are three executions
• 30:54
  in the whole of the early modern period. So you'd have a much, much better chance of being
• 31:01
  found not guilty, perhaps being just banished rather than executed or not being accused
• 31:07
  in the first place. So I think there's a very, very variegated pattern. It depends what the
• 31:18
  local courts want to do with accusations. So there's a lot of room for different legal
• 31:28
  authorities to sort of almost decide, are we going to run with this? I mean, again,
• 31:32
  we don't have the documents. They don't sadly leave us these nice texts where they say,
• 31:37
  we did this because. But there seems to me a sense in which some authorities really run
• 31:43
  with these trials, perhaps because they're being pressured to do so, perhaps because
• 31:48
  they want to do so. But other authorities are more kind of a little bit more careful
• 31:55
  about letting that genie out of the bottle because it's quite hard once you've started,
• 32:00
  I think, to sort of stop.
• 32:04
  Sounds remarkably like some sort of Stalinist show trial where people get presented with
• 32:10
  what they have to say in advance and then it gets confirmed, obviously, because otherwise
• 32:15
  their family is going to get the worst of it. And of course, they're also beaten and
• 32:19
  tortured sometimes. But why did prosecutors who were probably educated believe in torture?
• 32:30
  Obviously they knew that people are going to say what they want them to say.
• 32:34
  Well, in most of Europe at this time, torture is part of the legal system. So, for example,
• 32:43
  in most of central Europe, Germany, what was the Holy Roman Empire at the time? The law
• 32:50
  code which governs criminal prosecution allows for the use of torture, not just in witchcraft
• 32:56
  cases, but in all kind of serious cases. Now, it wasn't the case that everybody was tortured
• 33:04
  repeatedly. Even these very rudimentary law codes try to put some sorts of rules and regulations
• 33:12
  on the use of torture. So, for example, they'd say, you have to be accused by an honorable
• 33:17
  person, there has to be a certain amount of evidence against you. And also the idea was
• 33:23
  that if you were tortured, say mildly, if there could ever be such a thing. I mean,
• 33:32
  the first actual degree of torture was being shown the instruments of torture, which I
• 33:39
  don't know about you, Zaza, but I would just confess, you know, I would just see what was
• 33:44
  going on and I would just sort of confess. So that was the first...
• 33:47
  I would confess already when they would tell me that they're going to show me the instrument.
• 33:52
  Yeah, exactly. But the idea was that if you maintain your innocence, your denial of guilt
• 33:59
  under torture, then unless there was any new evidence, you couldn't be tortured again.
• 34:03
  So it sounds very, very barbaric and very crude by our standards, but actually it was
• 34:11
  an attempt to regulate the use of these methods. So the really large scale, rapid, brutal trials
• 34:21
  happen in parts of Europe and particularly parts of central Europe, Germany, where local
• 34:28
  authorities basically ignore these sort of overarching law codes. They treat witchcraft
• 34:37
  as what they call an exceptional crime. In other words, they think it's so bad, so ungodly,
• 34:43
  so threatening that they basically throw the rule book out the window. I mean, it wasn't
• 34:49
  a great rule book to start with, but they effectively say anything goes in relation
• 34:53
  to witch trials because they felt it was such a heinous crime. But your point's a really
• 35:04
  good one. I mean, people at the time know that people make false confessions. Some of
• 35:08
  the 17th century critics, I mean, it was quite risky to be a critic of witch persecution,
• 35:13
  but early modern people do recognize that the law is effectively forcing people to confess.
• 35:23
  So I think it's not by any means an objective legal system because it's dealing basically
• 35:30
  with a non-existent crime. And if you're dealing with a non-existent crime, such as meeting
• 35:37
  the devil, going to a Sabbath, harming a child, destroying a harvest, you either believe in
• 35:44
  it and run with that belief, or you say, we really can't prove it at law. So in the area
• 35:56
  that I work on, the authorities, they believe in witches, the possibility of witches, they
• 36:01
  believe in the devil. But what they tend to say is, we don't want to execute an innocent
• 36:08
  person by accident. We don't want that on our conscience. So we will leave the judgment
• 36:14
  up to God. There's this really profound belief in God judging everybody when they're at the
• 36:19
  day of judgment. So some authorities think it's better to leave the judging to God who
• 36:25
  can see and know everything because witchcraft is such a secret, hidden crime. Their own
• 36:33
  legal systems can't reliably work out who's innocent and who's guilty. In other parts
• 36:40
  of Europe, the authorities think they've got, if you like, a bit more arrogance. They think
• 36:48
  they can find the witches. And the irony there is what they say is the confessions prove
• 36:54
  this hidden demonic world. So you get in this horrendous loop of using false confessions
• 37:03
  to prove what you were trying to prove in the first place. So I think once you start
• 37:08
  unpicking it with a modern kind of rational, logical approach, it just really doesn't make
• 37:14
  it. It was about what people wanted to believe, were willing to believe, and then what they
• 37:20
  were willing to do on the basis of that belief system. So you could believe in witchcraft
• 37:27
  but not want to prosecute people or not want to really prosecute them very often. But in
• 37:34
  other parts of Europe, people ran with those beliefs into very large scale persecutions.
• 37:45
  If people tried to resist torture, they would say, well, the devil's helping them. They're
• 37:49
  only resisting the torture because the devil's on their side. And that was proof. So in a
• 37:54
  way, it was a catch-22 in those situations. You either admitted you were guilty, in which
• 37:59
  case you're a witch, or you resisted torture, in which case the devil was helping you and
• 38:04
  you were a witch. So again, in that situation- Fantastic choice.
• 38:08
  Yeah. Yeah. You would just probably be well advised to-
• 38:12
  Could you ever get acquitted then if you were caught up in a particularly vicious period
• 38:18
  in a particularly vicious time, like in Bamberg, as you mentioned, you got caught up in this
• 38:22
  mass hysteria or whatever it was and you were accused of being a witch? Was there any chance
• 38:27
  of you getting off the hook? It's very, almost impossible. Almost impossible.
• 38:35
  So they were basically like show trials? Yeah. Yeah. Because as I say, any resistance,
• 38:42
  any attempt to not confess, you would still be tortured again. That's why breaking the
• 38:50
  rule, using torture excessively and repeatedly. So there's a very famous case from Bamberg,
• 38:59
  a man called Johannes Unius, who's a man of status, political influence, wealth. He's
• 39:09
  accused of witchcraft and taken to this specially built witch prison in Bamberg. And we have
• 39:15
  a letter that he wrote to his daughter that was never actually delivered outside the jail.
• 39:21
  So it survived amongst his trial documents. And it's a really interesting letter because
• 39:27
  he basically says, it's almost like he's realized for the first time, anybody who goes into
• 39:32
  that witch prison will just be forced to confess because they can't withstand the torture.
• 39:39
  It's a very moving, harrowing letter because he's trying to work through how... Because
• 39:46
  he's going to purge himself. If you're a very good Christian, a very religious person, if
• 39:50
  you deliver a false confession, that's kind of a sin in and of itself. So he's trying
• 39:55
  to work through in this letter. He's saying, I'm going to have to confess. I'm going to
• 40:00
  have to purge myself, but I'm only doing it because they're making me. Now we don't get
• 40:05
  these glimpses of that process very often because obviously most of the accused can't
• 40:12
  write, can't read. And there are some of these letters, but they're quite few and far between.
• 40:19
  But yeah, you had almost no chance of being acquitted in that context. What tends to end
• 40:26
  these sorts of trials is some sort of external intervention. So for example, in Bamberg and
• 40:33
  Wurzburg, you get the families of people who've been executed, you get them appealing to a
• 40:40
  higher level appeal court and asking for external intervention on that score. Very occasionally,
• 40:51
  you get an absolutely stunningly resistant and resilient individual who just holds out
• 41:01
  for so long against the pressure, against the torture, that it begins... Once the prosecuting
• 41:08
  elites start to doubt what they're doing, that's usually what slows things down, brings
• 41:14
  things to an end. And you occasionally get people who resist the torture for so long
• 41:22
  that the prosecuting elites just begin to think, well, are we doing the right thing?
• 41:27
  Are we doing this properly? And in a way, it's very, very difficult for us, I think,
• 41:34
  and I don't think we should empathize with persecutors anyway, but I think the problem
• 41:39
  they have is once they've started one of these horrendous, brutal, cruel trial episodes,
• 41:47
  what do you do if you realize you've got it horribly wrong? You say, what do you do? How
• 41:56
  do you go back on that if you've executed people? I mean, it's very interesting. In
• 42:01
  Salem, I don't know if you've heard of the Salem witch trials?
• 42:04
  The American thing, right?
• 42:05
  Yeah, in the late 17th century, what's really unusual about the Salem witch trials is that
• 42:13
  some of the men who were involved in the prosecutions and the convictions, they actually apologize
• 42:20
  afterwards. So, for example, the 12 men of the court jury who sat in the English and
• 42:32
  New English legal system, it was trial by jury. So you get the 12 jury men of Salem
• 42:38
  apologizing for what they did. But the explanation they give is really interesting. So they say
• 42:45
  they're really sorry about what happened and the fact that people got executed.
• 42:52
  Everybody died, but I'm really sorry about that.
• 42:54
  They were being deluded by the devil. So it's not that they suddenly say the law was wrong
• 43:01
  or gosh, we've all become really rational or enlightened or anything. It's not to do
• 43:05
  with that. It's to do with the fact that they felt that the devil was manipulating all of
• 43:10
  the people to effectively cause discord, cause communities to get divided and to execute
• 43:17
  innocent people. Because at the end of the day, that's what the courts were doing. These
• 43:23
  people we know now can't really work magic. They can't fly about on broomsticks. They
• 43:29
  can't have sex with demons. We know that now. So they're effectively being executed for
• 43:34
  non crimes in our eyes. But it's interesting that by the late 17th century, there is that
• 43:43
  kind of realization that the law could actually have got things wrong. But again, it's part
• 43:49
  of that the belief system is still so strong. The idea of the devil was deluding people
• 43:56
  into executing the innocent.
• 43:58
  Wow. The devil provided really handy excuses like the dog ate my homework of the medieval
• 44:04
  era or the early modern period. You can always say, oh, the devil made me do it.
• 44:10
  Yeah. But it's interesting they felt the need. I think that shows what effect a witch trial
• 44:18
  could have on a community. It would have divided families. It would have caused poverty, people
• 44:26
  who are left behind if they've lost family land. The vast majority of suspects in Salem
• 44:31
  are released without being executed. But they'd have been in jail for months. Even being in
• 44:38
  an early modern prison for any period of time, you could easily die of disease. Your farm
• 44:46
  and your house would all go to rack and ruin in your absence. So even not being convicted
• 44:54
  would have had a really profound impact on your life, on your livelihood. And I think
• 45:00
  we tend to look at numbers of executions and obviously rightly so. But there's probably
• 45:04
  a lot of the wider impacts even in trials which don't end in conviction or execution.
• 45:11
  It would have had a absolutely horrendous impact on families, on people's reputations,
• 45:20
  on their livelihoods and so on.
• 45:23
  Speaking of the numbers of executions, do we have any idea of the total in the early
• 45:27
  modern period of how many people are executed?
• 45:31
  That's a really good question because lots of very inflated figures have entered some
• 45:37
  of the popular coverage of this topic. You sometimes read of millions of women being
• 45:45
  executed. The academic historical figure is around 50,000, 50,000 to 60,000 executions.
• 45:59
  Somewhere in the region of say 100,000 to 120,000 trials, about 50,000 to 60,000 executions.
• 46:07
  So half of the people did get acquitted.
• 46:09
  Yes.
• 46:10
  And what was the population of the entire region, entire Western Europe at the time?
• 46:17
  Approximately.
• 46:18
  I don't know off the top of my head to my shame. But that's a really good question.
• 46:23
  There's been some really good work done by a historian called Wolfgang Behringer. He's
• 46:28
  got a really good book called Witches and Witch Hunts, a global history, which is really
• 46:33
  great because it situates this early modern European witch hunting in a broader global
• 46:39
  context. But the reason I really like that book and I use it a lot when I'm teaching
• 46:44
  is he looks at executions for witchcraft in early modern Europe and he looks at the population
• 46:50
  totals of the individual countries. So he's doing exactly what you're suggesting, Zaza,
• 46:55
  which is that you've got to relate the total number of executions in as far as you can
• 47:01
  because obviously the data isn't very precise to the population of a particular region.
• 47:07
  I have no idea what, for example, early modern era France, how many people live there? Was
• 47:13
  it 500,000? Was it 10 million? I have no idea.
• 47:17
  I was going to say, if I had my bearing a table in front of me, I could...
• 47:22
  Yeah, no worries. I mean, these are very specific things.
• 47:25
  What he does with that is he works out... So he's got the total number of executions
• 47:29
  for any particular region, but then he's got the per capita chance of being executed, if
• 47:35
  that makes sense. And I think if memory serves, the early modern Germany has by far the highest
• 47:43
  number of total executions, it's 25,000. But I think if memory serves, the highest risk
• 47:50
  place to be to get executed as a witch was Liechtenstein, just because it's a relatively
• 48:00
  small enclave, then the numbers of executions relative to the overall population was quite
• 48:12
  significant. So for example, in the British context, England
• 48:18
  has a relatively low rate of prosecutions. There are something like 500 executions overall
• 48:26
  in England, which is fairly densely populated. The witch hunt in Scotland is more severe
• 48:34
  because you've got something like 1500 at least executions in a much, much less densely
• 48:41
  populated area. So yeah, that's a slightly more nuanced way of thinking about it.
• 48:52
  So I mean, all of those executions, one execution is a very problematic thing. So I don't think...
• 49:04
  I mean, I think there's been some sort of feminist kind of emphasis on these overinflated
• 49:09
  nine million and they were all women. And that's kind of a bit of a politicized narrative,
• 49:14
  which I don't think is particularly helpful because I think 50,000 executions is bad enough.
• 49:21
  So I don't think we really need to sort of talk about those really inflated things.
• 49:28
  I get your point. How were people executed? Was it always... Were they always burned at
• 49:33
  the stake? I think that's also from the movie In the Name of the Rose, where they tie you
• 49:37
  to the stake and unless you recant and kiss the cross that's offered, you're going to
• 49:42
  get burned alive. I mean, it's horrific.
• 49:45
  Most people are burnt at the stake. Most people are killed first. They are strangled usually.
• 49:59
  It wasn't always the case. Some people sadly were burnt alive. That was the sort of the
• 50:02
  punishment for heresy and some other crimes as well. So for example, you would also have
• 50:11
  sadly at the same time, particularly in the 16th century, there were also executions for
• 50:15
  heresy where people were burnt at the stake. But that was another pressure on people. They
• 50:20
  would be told that if they confessed and kind of made their peace with God, they would be
• 50:26
  shown the mercy and I'm doing the thing again with my fingers, the mercy of being strangled
• 50:31
  first. So again, if you think about the psychological pressure facing you with that sort of choice,
• 50:38
  that's another reason why people confess. In England and in the English colonies, witchcraft
• 50:48
  was defined slightly differently. It was defined not so much as a heresy, but as a felony.
• 50:55
  And so in England and New England, if you were convicted of harmful witchcraft, you
• 51:02
  would be hanged. So the mode of execution is slightly different in England and New England.
• 51:10
  Yeah, so most I would say, I mean, again, we don't have exact data, but kind of most
• 51:18
  people would probably have been strangled before execution as a supposed mercy.
• 51:28
  What sort of people were usually if we can even generalize in such a manner, what sort
• 51:34
  of people were usually accused of being witches? You said that the majority of them were women,
• 51:40
  at least in the early modern period. Yeah, I'm assuming. But you mentioned also that
• 51:44
  rich man from Bamberg. But I'm still assuming most of them probably weren't rich people,
• 51:52
  or peasants with a weaker social network or social support, women, older women, or am
• 51:59
  I totally wrong here? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that
• 52:02
  the gendering of it is very important. So overall, somewhere like 75 to 80% of all the
• 52:13
  accused and all those executed were women. So it's a very profoundly gendered phenomenon
• 52:20
  against women. But that also just reminds us that it was possible also to be accused
• 52:28
  and executed if you were a man. Again, there's a lot of regional variation on the gendering.
• 52:36
  So for example, in Bamberg, the reason somebody like a wealthier man could get dragged into
• 52:42
  the trials is because they are so extremely severe. I mean, once you start torturing people
• 52:49
  and asking them to denounce people, people can begin to imagine anybody being a witch,
• 52:56
  anybody being at this witch's gathering. So part of the dragging in of male suspects
• 53:02
  is due to that very large, in those cases, a very large scale escalation of accusation
• 53:10
  through denunciation that makes it possible to drag men in. And you can see that in some
• 53:17
  of the imagery of the time, you see images. So artists and demonologists and printers,
• 53:23
  they're kind of imagining what did the witch's gathering look like? And you can see them,
• 53:28
  there are men at the witch's gathering as well as women. So once you get into that sort
• 53:34
  of imaginative world, which they believed in, you can incorporate male figures into
• 53:41
  that Sabbath. But the vast majority of women, the vast majority are sort of peasant women,
• 53:49
  but then most people in early modern Europe are peasants anyway. So they're not beggars
• 53:55
  for the most part, they're not vagrants. They're usually adult women who are married or have
• 54:04
  been married. So it's not necessarily that they're always targeting sort of single women
• 54:11
  or widows. It's almost always, or very often women who are married or at least have been
• 54:16
  married, women very often of middling years, sometimes much older women get accused. And
• 54:23
  it's often the case that they've had a reputation for some time beforehand. So they might be
• 54:29
  accused in their 60s or 70s, but they might have had a reputation, they might have been
• 54:34
  a suspicion for much longer that they were witches. And again, it's very, very difficult
• 54:44
  to generalize, but it seems to be the case that women who were particularly sort of quarrelsome,
• 54:54
  verbally aggressive, argumentative, perhaps feisty, if you like, you know, women who perhaps
• 55:03
  cursed or scolded or a bit interfering. So I think women who were perhaps a bit verbally,
• 55:11
  we might see them today as verbally confident and verbally articulate, but that was sort
• 55:15
  of coded as quite a negative and threatening way of behaving then. People who, women who
• 55:21
  perhaps interfered too much in their neighbors' houses, in their neighbors' lives. And quite
• 55:27
  often, I think the really sad thing about some of these cases is that it's quite often
• 55:33
  the women accusing these female neighbors of witchcraft. So it's women accusers who,
• 55:41
  you know, perhaps whose child has fallen sick, who have had a miscarriage, who's, you know,
• 55:47
  dairy making that, you know, they're trying to churn butter and it's not working. And
• 55:52
  very, very sadly, one way in which they might manage their own kind of anxiety or fear or
• 55:59
  sense of failure about themselves as a wife and a mother, one way they might do that was
• 56:05
  by kind of projecting that onto another female neighbor that they imagined as having caused
• 56:13
  that problem or that misfortune. So when you dig into sort of the village level, if you
• 56:21
  like, the village level tensions and accusations, you know, it's quite sad, I think, that you
• 56:29
  quite often see some of these accusations coming out of these areas of female interaction,
• 56:35
  female activity, childbearing, household management, food production and so on. And it's women
• 56:41
  actually fearful of other women and accusing them of being witches. I think when women
• 56:47
  get taken to court, obviously, that looks much more like, you know, the patriarchal
• 56:52
  legal system, prosecuting them, but quite often, the initial accusation is voiced by
• 56:59
  another woman in the community. Fascinating how we're coming back to this sort of conspiracy
• 57:07
  mindset. I interviewed a journalist whose research in conspiracy theories in the United
• 57:13
  States, he wrote a famous book about the QAnon conspiracy theory. I don't know if you've
• 57:18
  heard of it. It's really crazy. But he said something similar about people who believe
• 57:23
  in it. He said that it's usually people who experience some sort of trauma or a tragedy
• 57:29
  in their family. And that's the only way that they can sort of process it is to find some
• 57:33
  sort of cabal of hidden forces that are to blame for it.
• 57:37
  Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, it's absolutely crucial to think about, you know, what situation
• 57:46
  were people in? What were their lives like? Kind of what was going on inside their heads?
• 57:53
  I think there are a lot of similarities, sadly, between, you know, some of the emotional psychological
• 58:00
  processes that were going on in the early modern period are actually very similar to
• 58:06
  some of the conspiracy theory, some of the conspiracy theories that we have today. So
• 58:13
  although, you know, when we look at some of this witchcraft material, you know, we're
• 58:17
  puzzled by it, we laugh at it, but I think some of the fundamental processes of scapegoating
• 58:23
  people, of projecting feelings or ways of coping with trauma, projecting them onto other
• 58:32
  people, blaming other people for them, you know, I think a lot of that is still, sadly,
• 58:39
  you know, very relevant today, even though the beliefs might be very different. So I
• 58:46
  think, yeah, there are people who, I mean, if you're an early modern woman and your child
• 58:51
  has died, it's quite difficult. You know, you could say, it's my fault. I'm to blame.
• 58:56
  I'm a bad mother. You could say, it's God's will. And obviously, most people tended to
• 59:02
  explain misfortune in that way. They would assume that it was part of God's divine plan
• 59:09
  and try and, you know, cope with it through religion and prayer. So it's not that everybody
• 59:15
  was immediately thinking it was witchcraft. There are, that's bad luck. There are other
• 59:22
  ways of explaining misfortune. But for some people, they would process it by blaming somebody
• 59:30
  else. It was a way of perhaps of relieving their own sense of anxiety, sense of guilt.
• 59:36
  And it also gave them something to do about it. If you're feeling quite powerless, a sense
• 59:42
  of agency, yeah, you know, I can accuse someone I can, you know, perhaps go to a white witch
• 59:49
  about them, I can take some action. So I think it's about it's about the emotional and psychological
• 59:57
  way of managing trauma and loss. This is exactly what Mike Rothschild, that journalist said
• 1:00:03
  that it gives people a sense of agency that they can do something about it. Fascinating
• 1:00:08
  stuff. Yeah. I wanted to you alluded to this earlier in, I believe nine, excuse me, 1486,
• 1:00:17
  some German dudes, some clergymen published a treatise on how to spot and persecute witches.
• 1:00:25
  The book was called Malos. Go ahead. No, I like the idea of him being a German dude.
• 1:00:30
  Yeah. Heinrich Kramer. Yeah. Yeah. He's actually one of the Dominican inquisitors. He was from
• 1:00:36
  Germany. So you're absolutely right. He gave himself the much more highfalutin name of
• 1:00:43
  insta tourist though, because that was what he did. What is that? Well, it's a Latin,
• 1:00:48
  he took on a Latin, lots of early modern learned men to give themselves more kind of claims
• 1:00:56
  to authority, I think give themselves Latin surnames. So, but his name was Heinrich Kramer
• 1:01:01
  or Kramer. Yeah. I mean, the Malleus Maleficarum, it means the hammer of witches in English.
• 1:01:09
  So in a way, it was part of that process I talked about earlier, this 15th century development
• 1:01:16
  of this new idea of the witch as a heretic. Kramer kind of comes at the end of that process.
• 1:01:23
  He's a Dominican inquisitor. He's gone into Germany to try and fight heresy and he thinks
• 1:01:30
  he's finding witches. The difference in his case is he writes a text about it. And it's
• 1:01:38
  the first text about witchcraft to go into print. So I think that's where we see the
• 1:01:43
  importance of the print technology. So there had been earlier kind of manuscript texts
• 1:01:48
  written by inquisitors, but his is the first one that actually goes into print. And I mean,
• 1:01:56
  it's one of many demonologies, the early modern period, because this is demonology. Yeah,
• 1:02:01
  it's called a demonology. It's a genre of writing. It's a genre of writing about demons
• 1:02:06
  and witches and the devil. And it was considered nonfiction. Nonfiction. Yeah. Okay. Some of
• 1:02:12
  the most learned minds of the early modern period write demonologies. So the French political
• 1:02:22
  theorist Jean Baudin writes a demonology. The King of England and Scotland, James I
• 1:02:30
  and VI writes a demonology because it's such a contemporary topic. It's new. It's important.
• 1:02:39
  It's exciting. People debate it in print. So there are lots of these demonologies. So
• 1:02:45
  I think sometimes the malleus kind of gets a bit overemphasized because it's one of many.
• 1:02:53
  And the other important thing is although the vast majority really until about the 17th
• 1:02:58
  century are very much in favor of witch persecution, there are even in the 16th century, a couple
• 1:03:03
  of sort of brave souls who go into print saying, what a daft idea. I mean, they put it more
• 1:03:09
  learnedly than that. But so the weight of opinion until probably about the late 17th
• 1:03:16
  century is very much in favor of witch hunting. But even in the 16th and early 17th century,
• 1:03:21
  you occasionally get demonologists who are willing to say, this is a really bad idea.
• 1:03:28
  So again, I think we just, the opinion is a little bit more divided perhaps than people
• 1:03:33
  think. But the malleus is a really interesting text. The reason Kramer wrote it, I think,
• 1:03:40
  is because he had failed. He tried to start a witch hunt in his activities in Inquisitor.
• 1:03:50
  So he goes to, he's sent by the pope from Italy to Germany. He's trying to whip up anxiety
• 1:03:57
  about witches. He's trying to get people prosecuted. He's trying to get women executed. And the
• 1:04:01
  local authorities just say no. They say, what a weird idea. You know, who is this? And also
• 1:04:08
  they don't like the idea that this outsider is telling them what they should be doing,
• 1:04:14
  how they should be pursuing heretics. So Kramer is essentially a failed witch hunter. He fails.
• 1:04:24
  He is not supported by local authorities. He is not. His idea is about witches having
• 1:04:30
  sex with demons. People, I think honestly, they think he's almost kind of mad and almost
• 1:04:37
  sort of mentally unstable. And they find, you know, he's interested. He asks women,
• 1:04:44
  you know, who they've had sex with and things like that. Local people find this really,
• 1:04:48
  really problematic. So he's a failed witch hunter, but it's on the back of that failure
• 1:04:54
  that he writes the malleus. So he kind of, all his resentment and all his anger and all
• 1:04:58
  his misogyny is kind of poured out into that book. And I think there are a couple of really
• 1:05:05
  interesting things about it. He doesn't say anything that new about witches really, apart
• 1:05:09
  from he really emphasizes that they're more like...
• 1:05:13
  Sounds like an angry incel with a pen.
• 1:05:15
  Yeah, basically. Yeah, very much. Yeah. He's Dominican. He's not, you know, he doesn't
• 1:05:20
  marry, he doesn't have... So he really emphasizes that witches are women and that they make
• 1:05:27
  sexual pacts. So that becomes much more foregrounded in his writing. And the other really important
• 1:05:36
  thing he does is he says, witchcraft is a really serious crime. So secular courts really
• 1:05:45
  need to take up the fight against it. So in a way, one of his most sort of important influences,
• 1:05:52
  I think over time is partly the strengthening the gendering of the persecution, but also
• 1:05:59
  saying secular courts need to take the fight up and also that they should treat witchcraft
• 1:06:06
  as an exceptional crime. In other words, it's so terrible that they should do whatever they
• 1:06:12
  can to fight witches. So although he is an inquisitor, because he's sort of failed in
• 1:06:19
  his inquisitorial work as he sees it. And one of his main opponents was a local bishop.
• 1:06:25
  So I think he feels the church isn't doing a good enough job, if you like, and therefore
• 1:06:30
  it's secular courts that should take up the work. So it's a very important demonology,
• 1:06:40
  but there are others, you know, there are later demonologies which sort of replace it
• 1:06:46
  almost as not that they're any more or less misogynistic or whatever. It's just that because
• 1:06:51
  this is a very current important topic, people carry on writing about it, debating about
• 1:06:58
  it, adding to it, developing ideas. So it's kind of a really important starting point
• 1:07:06
  for those demonological debates that carry on.
• 1:07:12
  We think of the Renaissance as this great awakening from this dark, long slumber of
• 1:07:17
  the medieval period. You know, the scientific inquiries coming to the forefront and what
• 1:07:24
  impact did the Renaissance have on witch hunts?
• 1:07:29
  I think it has an impact. I think it has an impact insofar as it really, it reawakens
• 1:07:35
  interest in magic, in natural magic, in platonic magic, but that's a very, very kind of male
• 1:07:44
  elite. We're talking about a really kind of, you know, the only men who can read, you know,
• 1:07:50
  Greek, Latin, Hebrew, we're talking about a very kind of elite group of men. So there
• 1:07:55
  was always the possibility for, you know, men to practice that kind of level of elite
• 1:08:02
  magic. It could be risky, but it could also, you know, gain them positions of power. And
• 1:08:09
  if you think about, you know, John Dee, he was the sort of the court astrologer stroke
• 1:08:16
  magician in the...
• 1:08:17
  Queen Elizabeth, right?
• 1:08:18
  Yeah, in the court of Elizabeth I. So I think the Renaissance really, in the same way that
• 1:08:23
  it kind of, you know, reignited religious interest in ancient texts, it kind of reignites
• 1:08:29
  this sort of real interest in old, hermetic and natural and sort of platonic magical texts.
• 1:08:39
  I think insofar as it has any impact on witch persecution, I think the problem there is
• 1:08:46
  that because the Reformation begins to happen in the early 16th century, so I think you
• 1:08:53
  have kind of got a Renaissance moment, if you like, where things could have perhaps
• 1:08:57
  gone differently, you know, things might have gone differently had it not been for the Little
• 1:09:05
  Ice Age and the Reformation. And I think the Reformation, what the Reformation does, sadly,
• 1:09:11
  from the sort of 1520s onwards, is it causes huge religious division, religious tension,
• 1:09:20
  religious war and religious persecution. So because you've got massive religious division
• 1:09:27
  in Europe, that really feeds the sorts of anxieties and concerns about heresy that sort
• 1:09:34
  of encourage people to prosecute witches. And, you know, people at that time, they could
• 1:09:44
  imagine so many different sorts of magical practitioners. So they could imagine, you
• 1:09:49
  know, an old woman in league with the devil who needed prosecuting and an elite necromancer
• 1:09:55
  who was working at the local court. So I think, again, they've got a very, they've got a very
• 1:09:59
  kind of rich sort of number of potential magical practitioners. They'd also have a white witch
• 1:10:09
  in the next village who they'd go to for help. So they could imagine, I mean, early modern
• 1:10:14
  people are very, very kind of capable of imagining all sorts of different magical practitioners,
• 1:10:22
  and you wouldn't necessarily go to law or try and accuse all of them. So I think the
• 1:10:31
  Renaissance, you know, I think it's a moment where things could have gone differently,
• 1:10:35
  but I think because of those other things that happen, and I think particularly, you
• 1:10:39
  know, the Reformation, the religious division, the anxiety that that causes, and sadly, the,
• 1:10:47
  you know, I think religious zeal, people convinced of their own godliness, determined to discipline
• 1:10:56
  or get rid of people who don't, you know, subscribe to their level of godly zeal, I
• 1:11:02
  think that's a really dangerous thing as well. And when you get that kind of combined with
• 1:11:09
  a little ice age, a legal system that allows prosecution, you know, I think that's, and
• 1:11:15
  a patriarchal system, which obviously puts women in much more, at much more risk of prosecution.
• 1:11:22
  I think that's a really toxic sort of mixture that, but as I say, it's not happening to
• 1:11:28
  the same extent absolutely everywhere, which I know isn't much comfort, but you know, it's
• 1:11:34
  probably just worth mentioning at least.
• 1:11:38
  We have to wrap up, but I just wanted to ask you this at the end. Why did the public opinion
• 1:11:42
  finally turn against witch persecution?
• 1:11:47
  It turns against witch persecution largely because the educated elites stopped taking
• 1:11:52
  it seriously. So actually belief in magic and belief in witchcraft.
• 1:11:55
  So kind of top down.
• 1:11:57
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got this case from Essex in 1863. There's a village in Essex
• 1:12:08
  150 years ago.
• 1:12:10
  Yeah. A man was swum, allegedly because people thought he had harmed someone through magic
• 1:12:16
  in 1863 in Sybilheadingham in Essex. It's as far as I know, the last known witch swimming
• 1:12:23
  that happened in England.
• 1:12:25
  So the idea, well, not just in England, in parts of Europe as well, was the idea that
• 1:12:31
  if you tied somebody up and put them into water, a pond, if they sink, if they sink,
• 1:12:38
  they're innocent, but might drown. If they float, they are guilty. But very often people
• 1:12:53
  actually put sort of a rope around them. So it was, again, we're not talking objective
• 1:12:57
  tests here. You know, you could kind of manage it by what you did with the rope. So anyway,
• 1:13:02
  1863.
• 1:13:03
  So popular belief continues a great deal longer than we might think for quite a long time.
• 1:13:10
  After trials end, people still believe in magic and they still believe in witchcraft.
• 1:13:16
  What we get from the really late 17th, but primarily the 18th century, the educated elites
• 1:13:21
  who in the 15th century had kind of bought into this idea. By the late 17th, but really
• 1:13:28
  the 18th century, they begin to change their minds. They begin to become less willing to
• 1:13:36
  believe that supernatural intervention of the devil of witches. And that is to do, I
• 1:13:42
  think, I think some of the ideas that you mentioned earlier in relation to the Renaissance,
• 1:13:47
  they're really more a feature of the kind of 18th century enlightenment, the idea that
• 1:13:52
  the universe works on more rational principles.
• 1:13:56
  And I think there's also a kind of a degree of sort of snobbery about it. The educated
• 1:14:02
  men start thinking, well, you know, witchcraft, that's what peasants believe. That's what
• 1:14:07
  children, old wives tales. It kind of becomes in the minds of the elites, I think, the educated,
• 1:14:13
  particularly the secular elites, they begin to find witchcraft belief a lot more problematic.
• 1:14:21
  So in the 18th century, you begin to see the laws that allowed the persecutions, you begin
• 1:14:27
  to see them being repealed or being changed. So in England, in Britain, for example, in
• 1:14:34
  the 1730s, the old laws against witchcraft are repealed. But there's a new law which
• 1:14:41
  says anybody who claims to practice magic or witchcraft can be prosecuted as a fraud.
• 1:14:48
  So you can kind of really, really see in a really kind of clear example that that shift
• 1:14:52
  of emphasis. So witchcraft isn't real. It's an illusion and it's a fraud. But in many
• 1:14:59
  ways, they're kind of going back to the early medieval ideas. So but it's becoming enshrined
• 1:15:07
  at law. So technically, after that, you could prosecute magical practitioners for fraud
• 1:15:14
  if you wanted to. But that's a really kind of clear marker of this change.
• 1:15:19
  Instead of being accused of having sex with the devil, you're more relegated to being
• 1:15:24
  more of a scammer than a swindler.
• 1:15:27
  Yeah, getting things under false pretenses. So yeah. But it's a really interesting recategorization
• 1:15:34
  of magical practice. And that's a really kind of top down initiative. But as I say, ordinary
• 1:15:43
  people carry on, you know, beliefs aren't going to change at that level for longer.
• 1:15:49
  And it's a slower process.
• 1:15:53
  Are there still beliefs in witches somewhere in the world at the moment?
• 1:15:59
  Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by which I think, you know,
• 1:16:04
  one problem with English is it's not got a very big vocabulary. So for which and it's
• 1:16:10
  we assume it's female. But as I say, in German and, you know, in other languages, you'd have
• 1:16:16
  more gender differentiation. So I mean, you know, in England today, in Europe today, in
• 1:16:21
  America today, there are lots of people, particularly women, neo pagans, who self identify as witches.
• 1:16:31
  And in sadly, in many parts of the world. So for example, Papua New Guinea, parts of
• 1:16:39
  India, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, many of these beliefs, but also sadly, many, many
• 1:16:48
  of these sort of acts of violence and persecution against alleged witches, they're still going
• 1:16:53
  on. So what I've been talking about today is very much a kind of a kind of Western European
• 1:16:57
  European story. So I mean, I've just actually been at a conference where one of the papers
• 1:17:04
  was about the witchcraft in Ghana. And the speaker was talking about contemporary, contemporary.
• 1:17:14
  Yeah. And what they've what they've done in some parts of Ghana is set up kind of which
• 1:17:19
  villages so people accused women and it's almost entirely women accused of witchcraft,
• 1:17:26
  they can actually seek refuge there or they're kind of exiled there. So to avoid some of
• 1:17:34
  the extreme kind of violence that they then go and live in these sort of almost like kind
• 1:17:40
  of witch camps, if you like. So, so now it was a very, very sort of sally true reminder
• 1:17:46
  really that just because we sort of think of it as being a past phenomena and that,
• 1:17:51
  you know, it's not to say that it isn't going on in in other parts of the world today. I
• 1:17:55
  mean, there are there are sort of different contextualizing reasons for it. But but certainly,
• 1:18:01
  unfortunately, there is still a lot of violence against suspected witches and belief in their
• 1:18:09
  potentially magical powers. Professor Rowlands, thank you so much for taking the time. I really
• 1:18:15
  enjoyed this conversation. I hope at the end, I mean, I hope you don't mind that at the
• 1:18:19
  end, I ask you something a little bit more silly. Okay, despite studying this quite tragic.
• 1:18:25
  Yeah, often sad part of history. Can you still enjoy Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings? I
• 1:18:32
  can. I Okay. Yeah, I like I'm really interested apart from anything else in how how these
• 1:18:38
  long standing beliefs have have are still very much part of our culture. They're in
• 1:18:43
  a very different part of our culture. I mean, they're interestingly, particularly in Western
• 1:18:47
  Europe and the UK, you know, they're very much in children's literature nowadays. But
• 1:18:52
  it's really interesting to see the historical literary journey by which that that that sort
• 1:18:59
  of changes has happened. So yeah, but I absolutely love reading anyway. And I love reading on,
• 1:19:06
  you know, it was a brilliant thing to read to kids as well when they were little. So
• 1:19:10
  I'm, yeah, I do still enjoy it. But I it's funny, I sometimes when I'm watching the films,
• 1:19:15
  particularly I look at the quidditch scenes. And I think, you know, the first witch on
• 1:19:20
  a broomstick that I know of was from a mid 15th century manuscript. And I kind of think
• 1:19:26
  you can kind of see the way that image of the magical flying has come all the way from,
• 1:19:32
  you know, the Middle Ages into into quidditch. So that's quite interesting from a historical
• 1:19:39
  point of view to look at that. And it's quite a great way as well. If you're teaching this
• 1:19:42
  or talking to school children about it, it can be a really nice kind of way in to some
• 1:19:47
  of these ideas, because they're going to immediately have a have a kind of connection to it from
• 1:19:53
  from the literature. Right. And from villains to absolute heroes now. Yeah. Well, you say
• 1:19:59
  that but I mean, Harry Potter is really about the battle, isn't it? Between between good
• 1:20:03
  and bad magic. You know, you've got your good wizards fighting the so in a way, I mean,
• 1:20:10
  what it doesn't have is that kind of overlay of heresy. There's no devil, there's no kind
• 1:20:15
  of Christian framework, but it's fundamentally about using magical powers for good or using
• 1:20:22
  them for evil. So I suppose in that in that sense, it's still got that idea of the two
• 1:20:29
  possibilities of magic. Professor Rollins, thank you so much. Okay, do you have any social
• 1:20:35
  media? Where can people follow your work? I'm not very technologically good on social media.
• 1:20:43
  We have a we have a Twitter account, sorry, an ex account on in our School of Philosophical,
• 1:20:51
  Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies. So I tend to post sort of news about conferences
• 1:20:56
  and things through through our school, our school media network. So so University of
• 1:21:02
  Essex, University of Essex. Yeah. Okay, well include that below the YouTube video. Again,
• 1:21:09
  thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Great. Thanks, Elsa. Glad it worked out. Thank you.
• 1:21:13
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