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Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (review)

2007; Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pgn.2008.0031

1832-8334

Liam Connell,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

Reviewed by: Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany Liam Connell Roper, Lyndal, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006; paperback; pp.xiv, 362; 66 b/w illustrations; RRP US$20.00; ISBN 0300119836. The study of witchcraft in Early Modern Europe has become an industry and continues to grow. Nevertheless, Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany demonstrates that there are still many questions unanswered. The book is based upon the archival trial evidence and confessions that survive. But as Roper writes in the preface, 'this book is not just about trials for witchcraft'. The book also explores the psychological framework through which witchcraft [End Page 220] beliefs were structured in Baroque German art, literature, theology, philosophy and law. Witch Craze aims to investigate the 'fantasy, envy and terror' of witch hunting in Baroque Germany. The scope of Roper's inquiry is from mid-fifteenth century, through the worst excesses of witch-hunting in the early seventeenth century and concludes with a discussion of how witch-hunting gradually came to an end in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. The book is broken into four sections: 'Persecution', which details the Baroque cultural landscape and legal mechanisms used to prosecute witchcraft; 'Fantasy' and 'Womanhood' which are the heart of Roper's inquiry into the fears that drove witch-hunting; and finally 'The Witch', where she explores the decline of witch trials in the eighteenth century. This is possibly the most surprising part of the book, as Roper demonstrates how resilient witch beliefs truly were. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the gendered nature of witch beliefs. Until the 1980s, the groundbreaking studies of witches and witch-hunting all but ignored the fact that most accused witches were female. This oversight was sharply corrected by a number of feminist historians who interpreted early modern witch hunting as thinly-veiled women-hunting and misogyny inspired from above. However, the greater number of female accusers than male suggests that we need a more complex understanding of the effect of gendered concepts within witch trials. This is exactly what Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze vividly provides. This is achieved best in the central chapter of the book, 'Fertility', in which Roper shows how 'the terrors, anxieties and dependence that childbed brought lay at the heart of the witch craze.' Roper demonstrates how vulnerable early modern Germany was demographically, recovering from a series of armed conflicts and the 'mini ice age'. There was a need to replenish human costs from both, yet resources were scarce and overpopulation would prove just as dangerous. There was an immense pressure, therefore, on women to reproduce – those lucky few who were economically and socially secure enough to do so. Fertility and childbirth were thus experiences that generated intense anxiety. Roper tells us that 'half of all babies died before they reached the age of one'. But there was also an aspect of childbirth that is remote to us – the lying-in period. In the lying-in period, the new mother remained confined to her bed for six weeks after birth, in which the only people who had access to her were the lying-in maid and a series of friends and relatives. Roper demonstrates how this scenario was ripe for witchcraft accusation. The tension in such a scene is palpable: the new [End Page 221] mother reliant on the lying-in maid to provide food and drink to help the mother and her baby thrive, the invited women who provided gifts and had to behave appropriately toward the mother and baby at all times, the mother herself who had to respond graciously to her visitors, and everyone present wondering who was not invited. Roper carefully reconstructs a number of witchcraft accusations that were connected to the lying-in chamber. Perhaps most noteworthy of all, the lying-in chamber was also a distinctly women-only space. Roper thus shows that witchcraft was a clearly gendered experience, but not simply in 'male vs. female' terms. It is necessary to separate the fears of the accusers and the spheres of life from which...