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Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652" (Manchester UP, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host and I'm here today with Alison Rowlands, professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Essex, to talk about her classic book Witchcraft Narratives In Germany, Rothenberg 1561-1652, out originally in 2003 with Manchester University Press. And we're talking on the occasion of a new edition, this time a paperback release that will dropping in January of 2026. So amazing. Yeah.
- [01:42]
C
Hi, Jana. Thank you. Yeah, no, great. It's great to be here to talk about the book and great to hear from Manchester that it's going to be reissued. I hadn't expected that at all. So that was a very nice surprise this summer.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, that is wonderful news. I mean a rare historical hit book. It's widely read, it's been translated into, into German and there was ebook edition and now we've got this paperback edition and it's neat. It demonstrates not only that it's use like it has staying power. It wasn't just a hit for a minute. What do you think it is? Why do you think this book has continues to have this kind of interest?
- [02:25]
C
I think a couple of reasons. Obviously, if I was being very immodest I'd say, because it's a great book. But I think it's more to do with the fact that it's probably more of an unusual book in that it's about an area of Europe which actually didn't see that many witch trials. And so it's perhaps a bit unusual in that it was trying to explain why witch trials didn't escalate into what we might think of as witch crazes. And I think that was a bit of a, kind of a niche opinion when I published it first, but I think that's becoming more widely recognized as actually quite an important aspect of the history of witch trials that we need to think about. I think the other reason is that there's a continuing, perhaps even a growing market for books about the history of witchcraft. I think there's a real public interest in the topic as well as an academic interest, which is reflected in sort of art and literature and theatre about witchcraft as well. But I think it's, it kind of helps those of us who work in the field to reach those wider audiences.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, both of those are really good points. Right. There's something that's just, I think, inherently interesting about witches, but I think also part of the success of the book is how well we get to know the people you talk about. You've got a lot of analysis of really good first person testimony, me, so I love the stories, I love how I feel like I know these people.
- [04:02]
C
Well, I'm glad you say that because, you know, sometimes as a historian you can be criticized for kind of going too much into detail and micro history and you know, someone could say, well, you know, is this particular peasant woman representative or what does this kind of six year old boy tell us more generally? But I'm a really, really strong believer in treating people in the past as individuals. And so I think the more we can look at their, their detailed life histories and narratives, the better. And I think part of the reason it works so well for this particular territory, Rotenburg, is that the sources there are just absolutely phenomenally detailed. So it's partly my own sort of historical philosophy of trying to sort of get at and understand people in the past as far as possible on their own terms. But also it's kind of a reflection of just this amazingly, amazingly rich archive that the, the city of Rotenburg actually has and still has. And a lot of it has been relatively under research because, you know, modern day Rotenburg, it's, it's not a university town, it's not a Big sort of regional capital city or anything. It's kind of fallen a little bit by the wayside in terms of the politics of Bavaria. So I think the archive is a little bit under research for that reason.
- [05:34]
B
Which is a delight. Right. Which is wonderful as an historian. And then you're able to really bring some fresh perspective with these sources. I'd like to hear more about them. Can you tell our listeners about the cases you're reading and what do they look like?
- [05:50]
C
Yeah, well, they're legal records, so they're, they're court records. And I think that's a really important point to start from because at this time, so the 16th and 17th century, we're looking at a period of European history where witchcraft was a crime in the eyes of the authorities. So to work harmful magic, as they believed was possible, and to be in league with the devil, which they also believed was possible. But these were things which were categorized as crimes in, in that society. It was a very godly society. And so these were kind of physical but also religious crimes against godly Christian society. So when you've got something that's criminalized formally, then that has the potential to create records because people could be accused of it and could be tried for it. So we've got lots of witch trial evidence from across Europe. But what's so brilliant about Rotenberg particularly is you don't just have the sort of trial verdict surviving in the archive. Quite, quite often in Germany, for example, you have a formal summary of a trial with a verdict that survives. So we kind of know who's involved, what happens to them, what the authorities thought about things. So they're very, they're very useful sources. But the difference in Rotenberg is that for most of the cases a vast amount of sort of background material also survives. So all the interrogation records, all witness statements, all these so called expert opinions by doctors or clergymen or lawyers, all the legal advice that the counsel has sought on the matter. So you get these kind of vast bundles of written evidence which for historian are just an absolute gold mine. They would have been created in many other cases, but for various reasons they were either deliberately destroyed or just kind of got rid of. Or if there was an accident in the archive, you know, if an archive were say flood damaged or bombed during the war, they might all get destroyed. So what you've got in Rotenberg is a very kind of interesting combination of circumstances where you've got this incredible survival of incredibly detailed trial records, but also a lot of other sources, parish registers, administrative records. So to some extent, you can situate the protagonists of a witch trial in their communities and in their families and in their relationships. And that's really helpful as well. I think we can understand the trial better because we can set it into that much more detailed context. So, yes, as I'm sure you know, Yana, you know, as a historian, you are kind of very much at the mercy of the records that you've got. And, you know, with Rotenberg, I've just been super lucky to have found an archive which has absolutely brilliant legal records.
- [08:58]
B
Yeah, it's amazing. It's absolutely wonderful. I'm so. I mean, just jealous, I guess, a little. But just. I love that you found them. I love that you've gotten to work with them, and I love the resulting. The work that we get to see. Like, imagine if we had these kind of sources, you know, in a town that did have a verifiable witch craze that was this well supported. That would be wonderful.
- [09:22]
C
Yeah. Interestingly, it's often in those towns that some of that evidence was destroyed by the authorities, because I think they. If you execute lots and lots of people for witchcraft and perhaps get criticized for it, one thing that can happen is that you perhaps kind of get rid of. Or as was the case in another German city called Lemgo, they actually formally burn some of that evidence as a way of sort of drawing a line under the persecution. So I think you're much more likely to get this sort of evidence at a town like Rotenburg, where you have a much more kind of cautious approach to witchcraft. You can almost see the counselors slowly trying to work out what they should do about people who were accused of witchcraft, or indeed, people who confessed that they were witches, because that was a real challenge as well, particularly if the people confessing were, say, children. So the counsellors are quite kind of slow and cautious. And that also, I think, helps the historian because it means they proceed quite slowly and carefully and look for lots of advice. And again, that creates a lot of written evidence.
- [10:30]
B
Right, so let's talk about the first couple chapters. Your first chapter explores popular speech about witchcraft and demonstrates, you know, the people definitely believed in witchcraft, but perhaps not in this cartoonish way that a modern audience might look back and. But. But people definitely believed in witchcraft and the ability of a witch to do harm, correct?
- [10:55]
C
Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I think because accusing somebody of witchcraft could have such devastating consequences, people tended to be quite careful about making those allegations public. And I think that's a really important sort of Reminder, as you were saying, that people weren't all absolutely petrified of witches all the time. They weren't all very willing to make public accusations. This is quite a kind of a careful way of thinking and speaking about witchcraft. So people, yes, they believe generally in witchcraft as a supernatural power to, to do, to do things for good or evil. Harmful magic could potentially be very, very threatening. But there's a big step, there's a big gap I think, between believing that at a general level and blaming an individual person for an act of witchcraft. So it's about people taking that kind of conceptual and emotional step of attaching that idea and that belief to a very specific person. Because it would usually have been a person they knew quite well, a neighbour, someone that they'd had sort of interactions with over several years, if not decades. So what I think is going on in Rotenberg is that people believe in witchcraft but they manage it through sort of informal mediation through the use of counter magic or white magic, through sort of non official channels. And they tend to avoid quickly and easily proceeding to formal accusation, partly because they don't know if it's going to be successful and also partly because they are worried that they could be accused of slander. So if you make an unfounded, serious allegation against someone that you end up not being able to prove in court, you could actually be prosecuted for slander. And actually someone who makes slanderous allegations was also seen as harming, you know, not, not as badly as a witch, but still you could harm someone's reputation like that. So kind of what I was trying to get at in that chapter was to give some sort of sense of that popular management of gossip about witchcraft. And that's often really difficult to get at because it's an oral thing, it's a verbal thing. And as historians, we, you know, don't often have sources that enable us to get at the, what people were saying, unless it's being written down. But I think it's probably a more important part of how people at that time were managing concerns about witchcraft. I think the witch, the excessive witch trials make us think that the only thing they ever did was prosecute people. But I think there's a lot more going on before someone got taken to trial or instead of taking someone to trial. But it's just a bit harder to, to get out through, through the material that we have left.
- [14:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. Which is, it's seeing this like very careful negotiation just doesn't. It reads very differently than a lot of other things that we think, and I mean, to be clear, right, witchcraft is very serious, but some of it, there's maleficium. Well, can you explain that? Like maleficium, Satanic facts.
- [14:25]
C
Yeah, sure, yeah. So maleficium is basically harmful magic. So people genuinely thought that some people could kill other people, damage their crops, kill their livestock, harm their children through magical methods, spells, curses, incantations. That's more of a concern amongst sort of what we might think of as ordinary people, villagers, people concerned about the harvest, about their health and so on. The more sort of upper class concern is with witchcraft as a heresy. And that's actually quite a new belief that really emerges. In the late medieval period. The European ruling classes begin to think that witches might also be in league with the devil. They might have got their magical powers from the devil. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to Christian rulers. If they think there are witches out there, you know, attacking Christian communities and damaging harvest, it kind of the next step is, I suppose, to imagine that they're doing that with, with demonic help. So these are capital crimes. These are things for which you could be not just prosecuted in a court of law, but actually, if found guilty, you could also be executed for them. So, yeah, witchcraft is, is potentially very, very serious. But I think in Rotenberg, that helps explain why people are so careful about talking about it so openly, because the consequences of a conviction for witchcraft could be so severe, you know, you could end up seeing one of your neighbors executed. That's why I think people think quite carefully about making those allegations. And I think it's also partly about the attitudes of the people ruling a territory. If you've got rulers who are very keen to hunt witches, very willing to execute them, that encourages ordinary people to make accusations more quickly. So I think what's particular about Rotenberg and some other parts of Germany as well is you've got ruling elites who are quite keen, I argue, in the book, to kind of keep a lid on things. They don't want to see excessive witch trials, they don't want to see excessive executions for all sorts of reasons. They think that can be a very bad and damaging thing. So you've got quite a powerful combination, I think, of this sort of popular unwillingness to make accusations, that sort of meeting an elite unwillingness to prosecute quickly. And that works in combination, I argue, to sort of keep things relatively low key. There are trials, there are three executions. But on the whole, I argue things don't escalate to the extent that you see them in other Parts of Europe.
- [17:22]
B
Yeah, there seems to be, I mean, some skepticism, right. That when if a 5 year old says they're a witch, then adults seem to be kind of questioning what might really be happening. And I see. Or what, or what have you, you know, there are a lot of reasons for crop failure or what have you. So I see like a mix of this skepticism with then this real concern about slander and damage like on this popular level and then the response from their elites, which is similar.
- [17:53]
C
No, I think, and I think it's really important as you, as you said earlier, that we, nowadays we don't assume that everybody who lived at that time immediately explained every misfortune through witchcraft. They don't, you know, they can blame God's intervention, they can blame fate, they can blame just sort of bad luck. So, so there are other ways of dealing with and managing misfortunes. So I think that that idea of skepticism is quite interesting. I think it's actually, it's not modern skepticism. I think that's just worth mentioning. So the counselors, the men who ruled Rotenburg and its surrounding rural territory, they absolutely believe in the devil. It's not that they're skeptical about the power of the devil or the power of God or religion, but they're so skeptical. Sorry, they're so. They're so worried about the devil's power that they actually think the devil could be deluding them. So, so they're worried that if they prosecute people too quickly for witchcraft and perhaps execute lots of people for witchcraft. They're actually worried that the devil is inciting them to do that, is deceiving them in, into making decisions that they will regret. And there's actually some quite interesting moments where they say, you know, we're just not sure who might be a witch. We're too doubtful about our own power to work this out. We are mere mortals. God is the ultimate judge. God will judge everybody at the Day of Judgment, but God will also judge us as counselors. So if we get this wrong, if we execute innocent people, our own souls are, you know, at risk. So it is absolutely a skepticism, but it's a skepticism within a very religious framework. And it's quite interesting actually, if any of your listeners know anything about the Salem witch trials. In the aftermath of the Salem witch trials, about a year after the trials in Salem, the, the men who had been the members of the, the jury in Salem who condemned people to death there, they actually apologize, they said, you know, we didn't know what we were doing. The devil was deceiving us. So there is this very strong idea at that time that you could be deceived by the devil into executing innocent people. So they seem to kind of take that on board in Rotenberg, but sort of use it as another reason to not convict people because they think, you know, we might be getting this wrong.
- [20:35]
B
And often, I mean, there you mentioned kind of a debate about are witches flying to a Sabbath or is the devil convincing them that they're flying to a Sabbath? And so there's a very. Within, it's a very logical rationed debate within a framework of positive belief.
- [20:55]
C
Yeah, yeah, I think the Sabbath is. It's really interesting that you mentioned that, Yana, because the Sabbath I think is really, really important because where the authorities in Europe take the idea of the witches Sabbath seriously. So the witches Sabbath is this idea that witches were really, physically gathering in really, really big numbers to worship the devil and to plot harmful acts against Christian communities. So it's very often the case that when people start taking that idea of the witches Sabbath seriously, their fears of witches grow and the scale of persecution grows as well. So that, that's often a bit of a kind of a litmus test for the scale of witch persecution. But what happens in Rotenberg is if someone tells them a story of a witch's Sabbath, or if a child says, oh, I flew to a witch's Sabbath with my mum, they say, no, you were just deluded by the devil into imagining that. So that's quite a neat way of taking on board what's being said, blaming it on demonic power. But you don't have to draw the conclusion there was a real Sabbath going on. And the minute you say, no, the Sabbath isn't real, then you kind of, you immediately sort of, you lessen the whole concern about the reality of witchcraft. But interestingly, that idea of the demonic delusion, that, that's actually quite an old idea. It goes back to a 10th century Christian belief that was written down in something called the canon episcopy, that the Devil basically deluded people into thinking they could fly and deluded people into imagining they could gather in the night. So I actually, I tend to think of the skepticism in Rotenberg. It's not modern, it's not kind of enlightened modern rational thinking. I actually see it as quite old fashioned medieval thinking. What's new at that time, what's new in the 16th century is actually this new idea that the witch is a heretic who really is in league with Satan. So in a way the authorities in Rotenberg are quite old fashioned, but kind of in quite a positive way. They're not jumping on this new kind of bandwagon of ideas about witches as this terrible new threat. So it is a skepticism, I think, but it's kind of quite an interesting old fashioned skepticism.
- [23:28]
B
That's really cool. That's just really neat to think of these ideas that you have this long tradition that 500 years later we see, like, let's be rational about archetypes.
- [23:43]
C
Exactly, yeah, let's not. And actually I think they're doing that. And again, it's really difficult because they don't, you know, they don't write down. I don't have a counsellor's diary saying, you know, we did this because. So I'm kind of inferring a lot of this elite attitude partly from the cases, the results of the cases, the opinions on the cases, partly also in the context of what they do in other religious and political sort of decision making processes. But I do have a couple of really intriguing hints that they're looking at which trials elsewhere in other German territories. They're kind of learning, they're seeing what's happening. You know, oh gosh, there was a really big set of trials in wiesenstein in the 1560s or oh my gosh, there's loads of witch trials in Wurzburg in the 1620s. So they're kind of learning by not doing, they're looking at what other people are doing and thinking that looks like a really bad idea to kill so many people and cause all that social division. So I think it's popular reluctance that's kind of combining with this top down reluctance to adopt these new ideas and really sort of persecute on a big scale.
- [25:02]
B
So I'd like to talk about an example of how this is working. Right. And you have a couple major trials. And I was just quite taken with the story of Hans Gockstadt, I think a self confessed child witch from the out of the way village of Hilgardshausen, I think, tried as a witch in 1587. So what's going on here?
- [25:25]
C
Well, that's, that's a very good example to, to pull out, I think, because it's, it's the first case of a child in, in Rotenburg saying not just that I am a witch, that I've gone to a Sabbath, that I've seen the devil and I've danced at the witch's Sabbath. But he's also saying my mother took me there. So he's drawing in his mother as a Potential suspect. And he's also drawing in the people he claims he saw at the witch's Sabbath as potential suspects. And it's posing the authorities in Rotenberg this new challenge stroke problem of what do we do about these sorts of cases? Because if you've got adults talking about witchcraft or accusing one another of witchcraft, then. Then you can usually manage that through the sorts of things we were talking about earlier. So you could perhaps, you know, prosecute somebody for slander or even punish somebody for slander, or the adults would realize what the risks were in talking so openly about witchcraft and magic. But when. When you've got a child of. Of five or six saying this, and I try and show in that chapter that he's very inconsistent, as you would expect. I mean, any of us who've got kids, you know, we know how inconsistent they can be. You know, one minute he's saying he really went to the witch's Sabbath, the next minute he's saying, oh, some older boys got me to tell this story. They gave me some marbles and I told this story. It almost sounds as though he's kind of fantasizing about being able to fly on a broomstick. You know, why not? You know, look at Harry Potter and Quidditch. There's all sorts of kind of fantasies of magical flying that are very powerful. So you've got kind of this child story that's suddenly being taken very, very seriously. And so. And I think that's a really interesting moment because it's a moment at which the authorities in Rotenburg could have decided to take all of this story about the Sabbath very seriously. And I think one reason why children are such a problem for the authorities is they don't quite know how to categorize them. Are they proper witnesses? Are they innocents who are being corrupted by the devil and by the witches? Should the counsellors step in to protect them as a godly ruler should do? Or should they just kind of punish them for being sort of slanderous and mischievous and so on? So I think what you see in that case is the authorities, not just the counselors in Rotenberg, but they have a very important legal advisor, a lawyer called Friedrich Preninger. And he really, I think, is very, very important. And again, it comes down to this very individual person. And it shows us, I think, in a very good way, how one individual giving a particular piece of advice, a key moment, can. Can sort of shape the course of. Of history. Preninger says, you know, we can't really rely on a Six year old, his testimony is too inconsistent. The best thing to do would be to just sort of draw a line under the whole thing. I mean, that's a summary of his longer opinion. But it's kind of a very important test case because what, what's been going on in, in another part of Germany, in the electoral territory of Trier, have been some quite severe witch trials which had come to rely to a large extent on boy witnesses claiming pretty much what Hans Gachstadt claimed, which was, I've been to a witches Sabbath, I was really there, I saw the devil, I saw all sorts of other people. And what was happening in Trier was that their testimony was being taken very seriously to justify the arrests of more and more supposed witches. So in the 1580s you begin to see in Germany these cases of child testimony. And it's so crucial then what do you do with that? If you're the local ruling elite, do you take it seriously, as was done in Trier, or do you in Rotenburg say no, we can't rely on this evidence. So I think that's a really, really important case. I mean, Hans and his mother would still have suffered terribly. You know, they're arrested, they're imprisoned, their Hans is beaten. So they still, I'm sure, would have been utterly traumatized by, by what happened. But they are not executed and there is no escalation. So I'm not trying to suggest that everything was hunky dory in Rotenberg for these people who were caught up in witch trials by any means, I think it's all relative. But still, the potential escalation that could have come about as a result of his story of this Sabbath doesn't actually, doesn't actually happen.
- [30:30]
B
Well, I mean, in what he says, you know, he's flying with a horned man and his mom, like through the skies, they're stealing, they're drinking wine, they're dancing at the witch's tree. I mean like his story is really serious and it's these very well known tropes. Like this is what a witch's Sabbath is. So yeah, the fact that, that the worst didn't happen is really notable, right? That this didn't turn into children damning his parents and his mother, like his mother and other women immediately also understand how bad this is, right? And like, so there's, there's this community response that this is dangerous. We have this response from the advisor. We only have this five year old who's like, so this crazy thing happened. Oh, nothing happened at all.
- [31:23]
C
No, I think that, I think it's, it gives you this kind of insight into, into how things are changing in, in Europe at this time. So these older mechanisms by which this sort of talk would have been kind of controlled or dampened down or treated as humorous. I mean, I had some evidence in that case of, you know, the men of the village chatting about it down the pub and probably, you know, in, in years gone by or years to come, they would have laughed about it. But it's, if it gets taken seriously, it changes the whole tone of those sorts of conversations. But I think the, the elements that you listed there, Yana, of, you know, the, the flight, the devil, the drinking, the dancing, the idea of there being something called a witch's tree in the vicinity of the village. I think it shows that, you know, those stories are circulating very widely in popular culture in, in, you know, this is, this is a village, this isn't near a massive printing center or anything. It's not, you know, kind of a particularly sort of educated group of people that we're talking about. But, but I think the, the, the wealth of detail that a child could actually sort of construct that story from. I think it just shows how widely known a lot of these kind of stories were. And I mean, in retrospect, it's perhaps quite surprising that not more of that kind of narrative came, came to the fore and was taken seriously. If a six year old can construct that sort of a narrative about, right.
- [32:58]
B
This is so much part of his, the way he understands the world. It's the equivalent of, you know, you know, my niece telling a story about how she went to school on her pink school bus or something, right? It's this thing that she can see happening. She's so familiar with it.
- [33:14]
C
And there's a really neat moment in that trial where some of the older boys in the village, this little boy's been going around boasting, I can fly to the witch's Sabbath. My mum takes me, I get a drink from the devil. And these older boys say that they kind of get a stick or a fire iron and they say to him, go on then, show us. Make it fly. It's kind of very practical moment where they're saying, well, you're boasting about it, so prove to us that you can do it. And of course he can't. So, but it, but it just gives you this, it just shows you this little glimpse into this children's world where they're probably talking about witchcraft, playing games related to it and sadly, in some cases that that becomes fatal. You know, we do begin to see children being executed as witches in the late 16th century because they are taken serious, these stories are taken seriously. And not only are they executed, but their allegations against other people are taking. Are taken very seriously as well. So it's. It kind of looks quite playful, but it could become deadly relatively quickly.
- [34:17]
B
Yeah. And, and listeners, when we say, like, it is remarkable that this went so well, this. Because, I mean, Allison has just laid out the other option, which is where, you know, children are executed for witchcraft when they don't, one can't imagine they really know what they're even like. It can even fathom the consequences of saying such a thing.
- [34:41]
C
And there are other. I mean, and that's quite another feature of some of the later trials in Rotenborg. There are nobody as young as Hans again. But there are several further examples of under 18s claiming that they are being taken to Sabbaths. That's quite a common. We see that across Europe. You know, there's very famous set of cases from the south of France, the north of Spain, where hundreds of children claim the same thing. So it becomes a very, very powerful kind of cultural narrative that some children talk about. And the idea is almost they're innocent victims of these adult women taking them to Sabbath. So it's partly a kind of a confession of witchcraft by a child, but it's really more about them implicating the women who've supposedly taken them. So again, these are very individual examples that I'm looking at, but they're part of a much wider European phenomenon.
- [35:45]
B
Sure. You mentioned women. And adult women are more likely to be caught up in witch trials in general and certainly in early modern Rothenberg.
- [35:54]
C
Yeah, yeah. No, generally the. I mean, the gendering of witchcraft in early modern Europe is somewhere in the region of sort of 70 to 80% women. I mean, that does still leave a significant minority of men who could also be imagined as witches. So it's not, it's by no means exclusively gendered against women, but it is definitely predominantly gendered against women. And insofar as I've been able to look at things like marital status and age, I show that for Rotenberg, it was mainly women between about the age of 30 and 60 who were at greater risk of being accused. And it's mainly women who were married or had been married. So I think there's a really strong link, particularly in the popular imagination, but also I think in the upper class, elite imagination, between adult women, particularly women who are married and have, have had children and, and the idea of the malevolent witch. It's almost like they're kind of polar opposites or inversions of each other. You know, on the one hand, you've got the good, nurturing, caring Christian mother who sort of cares for children, provides food, is a hard worker, an obedient wife, and so on. And the sort of, the, the inverse of that is the malevolent, uncaring, harming, poisoning witch who sort of attacks health, attacks crops, attacks fertility. So I think it's a very powerful way of imagining witches around that idea. But it's not so strongly gendered that a man couldn't be imagined as witch like. It's just much less likely.
- [37:47]
B
Well, and you know, when in the, the Hans case and Hans Gokstadt's case, right there, his mom gets. There's a moment when they say, didn't you say you were going to kill your child or something? And she's like, well, yeah, but wouldn't you Basically that, that.
- [38:07]
C
I think that's, that's, that's the problem, isn't it? Once you get accused of being a witch, and particularly if you're accused by your own child, the sort of reaction tends to be anger against the person accusing you. And perhaps, then, as you were saying, an angry outburst, a threat. But the problem with that reaction is it makes you look more aggressive and witch like. And she's also asked, they make a really big point of asking her whether or not she's raised hands properly, and they place a lot of emphasis on whether or not she's raised him to say his prayers properly. So the good Christian mother, in this case, the good Lutheran mother, should have raised her son to say the Lord's Prayer and other sort of prayers properly. So the motherly, the maternal duty in this case isn't just sort of caring for the child, but also kind of beginning his Christian education. And so the ability to sort of say prayers properly is often seen as a sort of a test case of whether or not you're a witch. Because if you get them wrong or you don't teach them properly, that's supposedly, you know, evidence that you're. That you're in league with the devil. But I think it just shows how hard it is once you are involved, once you've got kind of drawn into a formal process, it's so hard to sort of know how to behave. Because if you get angry at your accuser, that looks witch like to the, to the authorities, but also if, if there's evidence that you're very pious, they Might say, oh, well, of course you'd pretend to be pious if you're a witch. So. So the catch 22 is, is once you're in a trial situation, it's so difficult to know how to behave, what to say. I've got. I've got another case from the 17th century. A woman who's arrested is accused by a neighbor and is arrested and taken into custody in Rotenberg. And she. She claims during the interrogation, this is in the mid 17th century, that she's visited by an angel. And I think she's saying that because she's saying, God is on my side. I'm a good Christian woman. I go to church, I'm a godmother. You know, I've got a good household, I've raised my children properly, and. And God is sending me this angel to comfort me in jail. But the authorities say, of course, it's not the angel, it's just the devil pretending to be an angel. So it's really, you know, it's kind of like, what. What can these women do once they're in jail? Because almost anything they do or say could be interpreted to fit a particular sort of narrative. So, no, it's very. It just shows, I think, how difficult it is once you've been accused openly.
- [40:50]
B
Well, and when I'm also thinking about praying, you know, you mentioned, like, the ability to pray is a demonstration that you're good at your religion and you've raised your children well. But how often you should pray, in what way and who should do it, is very confessionally driven. Right. It's about the separation in this time when we're seeing wars of religion and the Reformations writ large. So what's the import on Catholicism and the era of Reformations at this time?
- [41:23]
C
Yeah, well, Rotenburg, this territory that I work on, is Protestant, Lutheran. And I think there's a huge emphasis within Lutheranism on parental teaching of offspring to be godly. So it's the idea of the holy household that the instilling of good Protestant behavior and teaching and orthodoxy starts in the household. And that's, I think, why mothers are important, because they're kind of being given this important task of, you know, raising godly children, but equally, that could turn against them if they're suspected of not doing that properly. I think the way. The way it works in Rotenberg. And again, this comes back to the very, very specific geographic context. They're in a part of Germany, they're in a territory now, Bavaria, but in the early modern period, the territory they were in was called Franconia Franken. And that's a very confessionally divided part of Germany. I mean, Germany is confessionally divided at that time anyway with the Reformation. But Franconia was particularly sort of divided between Catholic and Protestant enclaves. And I think that's another reason why the authorities in Rotenburg decide against mass witch persecution. They begin to associate that with Counter Reformation Catholicism. So, for example, in nearby territories, the prince bishoprics of Bamberg and Wurzburg, these are Catholic territories ruled by Catholic prince bishops, and they have particularly savage witch hunts in the early 17th century. So I almost think that the councillors in Rotenberg are sort of trying to make a political point, make a religious point that, you know, we are Lutheran and we don't do that. Excessive witch persecution. That's something that those cruel cast. This is their thinking, not mine, that those cruel Catholics get up to. The other thing is, if you're a territory which has a lot of witch hunts, the implication is you've got a lot of witches in your territory. So that's sort of almost like an admission that you're not very godly, that you haven't educated your population very well, that you perhaps haven't got particularly godly subjects. So I think there's a lot of religious and confessional kind of competition going on. So I think another reason for the restraint in Rotenberg is to say we don't have a witch problem like those Catholics do, and we certainly don't persecute people as cruelly as those Catholics do. So I think there is a kind of confessional explanation for. For what they're doing as well.
- [44:20]
B
Yeah. Okay. So kind of overall, I'm looking at why wasn't there a witch panic in Rothenberg? And the confessionalization is. Is certainly part of this. Like, being Lutheran, we see much more. There are a lot more of the witch craze. Something that'll go into. I'm making scare quotes, listeners. Which craze that's in Catholic land? For the most part.
- [44:43]
C
Yeah. As far as they're concerned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the reason why there's no witch craze in Rotenberg is due to a combination of reasons. And that probably sounds a bit boring, but I think it's. There's not one factor that explains it all. There's very, very rarely one thing that explains everything, as I'm sure you know, in history. History is complicated, messy. That's why we love it. So there's always a kind of a bundle of factors. And I think it's particularly crucial in Kind of explaining why witch trials happen, but also in other places why they didn't happen. So you've got the sort of Lutheranism, you've got the doubts about the witch's Sabbath, you've got that kind of elite skepticism that we talked about earlier. We've got the counsellors in Rotenburg kind of learning about witch trials by looking at them in other territories. You've also got a really crucial legal approach in, in Rotenberg, where they don't torture people repeatedly and without restraint, which really, really matters because you're much less likely to get confessions and you're much less likely to get denunciations of other people if you don't use torture to excess, which is what happens in a lot of the really big German panics. The rule book gets completely thrown out of the window in those cases. So you've got kind of a combination of political, religious, legal factors going on at the elite level. And that gets kind of combined with what we talked about at the beginning, that popular lack of enthusiasm to talk publicly a lot about, about witchcraft, to make accusations. So I think it's a very particular combination of factors, but they all kind of have to be there. So I think it, it's a bit like a house of cards. If you just took away one or two of those, then it might all have collapsed. But I think it's that combination of all of those things coming together. But it gets tested, I think, you know, we can't assume that it was always going to be there. So the case you talked about earlier, Yana, the hand scratched at moment when a five year old starts telling this fantastical story of a witch's Sabbath in 1587, that was a test moment. And you know, they could have gone down another path. They could have changed their minds and decided to treat things differently. So there are these kind of periodic moments where that set of factors is kind of tested and pushed. But throughout the 16th into the 17th, and we get the last sort of case in the early 18th century, interestingly, a boy claims, you know, he's gone to a Sabbath, been taken there by an adult woman, and he and his sort of sort of the family that's supporting him, they get, they get punished for slander. So I think there is a kind of a continuity of restraint, but it gets tested at key moments. And then by the 18th century, more generally speaking, there's sort of more general unwillingness to take witchcraft accusations seriously on a much wider German wide and European wide scale. But in a way, what's happening I think in the 18th century, enlightenment is kind of going back to that in many ways, that sort of an older medieval idea of not taking witchcraft accusations too seriously. It's just that in Rotenberg, it's kind of stayed. Stayed that way throughout the early modern period.
- [48:24]
B
Fascinating. What a cool community. What a great book. All right, so I've taken quite enough of your time right now, so I have just one last softball question. What are you working on now?
- [48:38]
C
Well, I'm working on a. Another case of witchcraft from Rotenberg. It's actually one I mentioned briefly in the book. It involves a man, a wheelwright called Michael Wirth, who is accused of sorcery in 1663. And it's another of those cases where there's just absolutely voluminous amounts of evidence. And it's a really interesting case because he's a man. He gets accused of harmful magic, and the person he's supposed to have killed is also a man. And it's his friend and neighbor and work colleague, a blacksmith. And I'm doing a really in depth study of their relationship, why their relationship breaks down to the point where the blacksmith thinks that Mika Elbert has actually murdered him. So it's a very interesting case. It's about male craftsmen, their relationship, their emotions, how and why it all goes wrong. So I'm sort of doing a really. A really deep dive into all the detail of that. So, yeah, no, I haven't strayed too far from my sources just because they're so amazingly rich, basically.
- [49:58]
B
Yeah. With this kind of treasure trove, why would you ever go anywhere else? I cannot wait to read this new book. And this idea of really getting at the relationship, the male. Male friendship of, like, artisan class people are, you know, like blacksmith and a wheelwright. I can't wait to hear that. I'm going to love to read that. So thank you. Keep going. Yeah. All right. Allison Rollins, thank you so much for joining me today. It was an absolute delight.
- [50:30]
C
Thank you. Me, too. Nice to talk about these things again.