Black and white myths and the not so clear-cut facts

Unlike the talkative and humorous book on vampires mentioned recently, Rita Voltmer's Hexen. Wissen was stimmt (Herder) is succinct and to the point. It is short - just 128 pages - and practically layouted in two colours to make it easy to find and understand the information you need. In that sense, it's an exemplary example of how to communicate the current knowledge of a historical topic.

A majority of the book focuses on debunking a number of myths, misperceptions and manipulations. Voltmer exposes and confronts each of them with a short overview of current knowledge and explains the practice and thinking of contemporary experts and laymen of the early modern period.

Typically, the myths are very clear-cut, but the facts are not. However, in many cases we are familiar with the myths from comics, novels or movies about witches or from e.g. feminist neopaganist literature. But precisely our familiarity with the more or less fictional constructs about witches and the witch hunters is all the more reason why Voltmer's book is a welcome chance to disseminate a more correct understanding of the subject.

Some of the myths concern the pretty fantastic claims that several millions were accused of witchcraft and executed, that it was a medieval phenomenon, that the persecutions were largely of a misogynistic nature, that a witch was easily identifiable as either an old hag with warts or as a sexy midwife with red hair etc. etc.

Although debunking some of the more ridiculous myths about the torture - as seen in e.g. torture museums - it is quite unpleasant to read about this aspect of the judicial procedures against serious crimes like witchcraft. Voltmer provides a brief explanation of the views that justified the procedures, namely concerning the transcendent aspect of the torment, because the court was not only fighting the witch, but also the Devil by saving the witch's soul from eternal damnation.

Voltmer also questions the simplified explanations that have been provided for the whole phenomenon, yes, she even debunks the construction 'witch hunt'. For the purposes of this blog, it is particularly interesting to note that the Enlightenment (itself a construct) did not expose the witch hunt as a miscarriage of justice, and that it was not disbelief in witchcraft or fear of witches that stopped the witch hunt, but rather other concerns like e.g. considerations concerning the judicial use of torture. She also discards with the simple way of opposing rationalism and belief that is still so common, but not very useful when applied to history, cf. also my posts on the rationality of the past.

Finally, people might think that there is no witch hunt today, but Voltmer reminds us that, although not a witch hunt per se in the Christian sense, around the world, e.g. in some parts of Africa, people are still being persecuted for various sorts of witchcraft or magic, including vampirism!

However, Voltmer is worried that the historians who are researching the history of the early modern witch hunt may suffer the fate of a Don Quijote fighting wind mills in their attempt to put an end to all the popular myths, manipulations and conspiration theories about witches that are prevalent in movies, novels and the media in general. Hopefully, her book will be read and help fight the common myths. I heartily recommend it to anyone who needs a brief, but precise overview of the subject.

The rationality of the strange past

I would like to quote a few passages from the foreword and introduction to a popular book I am currently reading: Strange Histories: The trial of the pig, the walking dead, and other matters of fact from the medieval and Renaissance worlds by Darren Oldridge (Routledge, 2005). The passages express a view on understanding the rationality of people in the past that I can wholeheartedly agree with. It is a similar understanding that is my own ultimate aim in studying the subject of this blog, the Magia Posthuma:

"As historians have often noted, our failure to comprehend the beliefs of people in the past is a measure of the distance that separates us from them. It is the very strangeness of these ideas - from a modern perspective - that makes them worth looking at. If we can begin to understand why a French judge warned people about demonically possessed apples in 1602, we might start to unravel the intellectual context in which he lived." (p. ix)

"This book will argue that concepts like 'superstition' and ignorance do little to help us understand the vanished world of the witch of Rothenbach. On the contrary, they actually prevent us from seeing that world as it probably was: a community of men and women who were no less reasonable and well intentioned than we are. It is not only simplistic to view these people as hysterical: it also denies their humanity. To regard them as irrational is no less insulting - or mistaken - than to view African tribespeople as 'savages'. The idea that the pre-modern world was befogged with superstition also separates us from the past." (p. 2)

"When something appears to be strange, this often means it is outside our normal experience. It is strange to put a pig on trial, to execute a dead man, or to attempt to conjure a spirit. By the samme token, an idea may seem strange if it is unfamiliar. (---) If familiarity is one measure of strangeness, another is 'making sense'. Many strange beliefs strike us as nonsensical. It is not only unusual to acquit a suspected criminal because she can carry a hot iron for six paces; it also seems absurd. (---) 'Common-sense' judgments reflect the prevailing beliefs of particular communities, which often differ from one another. Ideas can be regarded as rational if they are consistent with prevailing knowledge. When we are familiar with the dominant assumptions of a certain culture - such as our own - we tend to regard the behaviour of people who act in conformity with these assumptions as perfectly sensible; when we have little understanding of the beliefs of another society, many of the acts that routinely occur within it may strike us as absurd." (p. 3-4)

"Can the dead walk? Most people in medieval Europe believed they could, and orthodox Christians assumed this would happen en masse at the time of the Last Judgment. Can witches fly? Even the most trenchant opponents of the persecution of witchcraft in sixteenth-century Europe believed this was possible. Just like us, the people who accepted these things relied on a body of knowledge to help them evaluate the facts of the world, and just like us, they inherited this knowledge from the culture in which they were born. Viewed in this light, the way to understand the events at Rothenbach in 1485 is to become acquainted with the cultural context in which they took place. Such episodes were not absurd. They only appear irrational today because our 'given reality' has changed." (p. 4)

I intend to return to Oldridge's book in a later blog entry.