Europe's inner demons

Finally there were the midwives and the practitioners of folk medicine. Infant mortality was very high — and who had better opportunities than midwives for killing babies? No doubt they often did kill them, through ignorance or ineptitude. But that was not the explanation that came to people’s minds; and it is striking how often the village midwife figures as the accused in a witchcraft trial.

As for the practitioners of folk medicine, they were obvious suspects.⁽⁴³⁾ In an age when scientific medicine had hardly begun, and when professionally qualified doctors were in any case seldom available to the peasantry, the countryside produced its own medicine men or medicine women. These people were not necessarily charlatans; many of them used herbal remedies, and also techniques of suggestion, that had real therapeutic value. But some also used the techniques of magic, such as spells; moreover, their art often included divining whether a sickness was due to maleficium

, and if so, applying counter-magic. Not surprisingly, such “white witches”, male and female alike, were apt to be perceived as simply witches. After all, if a person endowed with supernatural powers failed to cure a sickness or prevent a death, might that person not actually have caused the affliction? To disappointed patients and their relatives it must have seemed obvious enough.^*** Many “witches”, under torture, confessed to using herbs, roots, leaves and powders to harm man or beast; and although that proves nothing as to their guilt, it does suggest that they were at home in folk medicine.

Such were the women whom their neighbours most easily came to think of as witches — but how did the women think of themselves? Did they feel themselves to possess some supernatural power for evil? Or were they outraged at the accusation? The answer is that both situations could occur.

The Lucerne material includes, in addition to the depositions of the accusers, some statements by the accused. Thus is 1549 Barbara Knopf of Mur was accused by several neighbours of bewitching and killing cattle, and of crippling and blinding human beings. Arrested and taken to prison, she denied every accusation and added — in the words of the magistrate — that “she had done nothing, only she had a nasty tongue and was an odd person; she had threatened people a bit, but had done nothing wicked. She desired to be confronted with those who said such things about her and she would answer them....⁽⁴⁴⁾

That is how a woman arrested on a charge of maleficium usually reacted, when no torture was used. These answers have the ring of truth. There is in fact no reason to suppose that most women accused as witches regarded themselves as such.

But some did. As we have seen, maleficia really were practised; some women really did try to harm or kill people or animals, or to destroy crops or property, by occult means. These things had been done since time immemorial and they were still being done during the great witch-hunt — indeed, in some remote and backward regions they are still being done today. And it is not difficult to think of one category of women who must always have been particularly tempted by such practices. “Wise women” or “white witches”, who felt able to perform cures by supernatural means, must also have felt able to inflict harm by supernatural means; and some of them certainly did attempt the latter as well as the former. In the Lucerne material, the “wise woman” Stürmlin may or may not have intended to inflict impotence on the young man who had jilted her daughter and married another.⁽⁴⁵⁾ But less ambiguous cases have also been recorded. In a trial in Fortrose in Black Isle, north of Inverness, in 1699, a woman boasted of her power to harm as well as to heal; thereby accusing herself, it seems, quite voluntarily. The evidence reads as follows: