The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature

The Disenchantment of Magic:
Spells, Charms, and Superstition in

Early European Witchcraft Literature
MICHAEL D. BAILEY
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/111/2/383/40715 by guest on 17 September 2020

IN 1917, IN A LECTURE IN MUNICH on “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber first ar-
ticulated his notion of “the disenchantment of the world,” later also incorporated
into his seminal Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He presented disen-
chantment as a hallmark feature of modern Western society, which had come into
full vigor with the Protestant Reformation. Initially Weber described this develop-
ment, in relation to science, as entailing primarily the conviction that “there are no
mysterious incalculable forces” and that “one need no longer have recourse to mag-
ical means in order to master or implore spirits.” Later, and rather more evocatively
in relation to religion, he described it as a historical force that had progressively
“repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin.”1 Weber’s as-
sertions were hardly uncontroversial, and they have been challenged repeatedly in
the century since they were first made.2 Nevertheless, the basic notion of disen-
chantment remains very influential on many academic disciplines’ understanding of
the modern world. Magic and cultural perceptions of the magical occupy a critical
place particularly in sociological and anthropological conceptions of modernity, and
issues of “magical thought” and “superstition” in opposition to “scientific rational-
ism” frame discussions not only of the modern West but of instances in which West-
ern modernity confronts the traditional beliefs and practices of other world cultures.3
This article was first presented, in a rather different form, at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities
Forum in 2004. My thanks to all the participants in the forum for their comments. For valuable readings
since then, I thank Patrick Barr-Melej, Christopher Curtis, Sara Gregg, Paul Griffiths, Daniel Hobbins,
David Hollander, Laura Mielke, Edward Muir, Leonard Sadosky, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Matthew Stan-
ley. I am also grateful to Michael Grossberg, Robert Schneider, the editorial staff of the AHR , and
several anonymous readers for their criticisms and suggestions.
1 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), 129–156, quotes from 139; Weber, The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; repr., London, 1992), 61. On the dating of the
Munich speech, see Wolfgang Schluchter, “Excursus: The Question of Dating of ‘Science as a Vocation’
and ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ ” in Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds., Max Weber’s Vision of
History: Ethics and Methods (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), 113–116.
2 A succinct critique of the use of “disenchantment” to frame modernity is found in Owen Chadwick,
The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), 258.
3 Peter Pels, “Introduction: Magic and Modernity,” in Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic and
Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 1–38, discussion of Weber
on 26–29. Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford,
2004), offers a cogent account of how discourses of magic, especially scholarly ones, are employed to
fashion modernity. On the centrality of disenchantment, he notes that all “dominant [modern] theories
of magic have as their objective an insistence that the modern subject conform to an emphatic disen-
383
384 Michael D. Bailey
Historians of European magic and witchcraft have also engaged, sometimes

overtly but often tacitly, with the themes Weber identified and encapsulated as “dis-
enchantment.” Keith Thomas in particular, in his groundbreaking Religion and the
Decline of Magic, made only passing reference to Weber directly but took up the
essentially Weberian theme of the degree to which religion (of the more modern,
reformed variety) displaced magic from European society. Far from eliminating all
magic in the world, however, Thomas concluded that by eradicating the “magical”
practices of the medieval church, Protestantism in England actually promoted con-
cern about witches and popular reliance on cunning folk, astrologers, and other types
of common magicians.4 Following this line of argument, historians have since pushed

generalized disenchantment back to progressively later points in European history—
the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, even nineteenth-century industrial-
ization. Most recently, historians of the modern period have begun to engage directly
with, and further problematize, Weber’s analysis by arguing that certain magical
beliefs and systems of thought not only endured into the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries but were in fact essential elements of European modernity.5
An underlying issue plaguing any attempt, save perhaps for the modern period,
to historically examine key issues entailed in disenchantment—the emergence of
putatively purer “modern” religious sensibilities compatible with scientific rational-
ism out of earlier, supposedly muddled “magical” systems—is the fact, now widely
recognized, that the categories of “religion” and “magic” in their current forms are
almost entirely creations of the post-Reformation era.6 Some historians of early
modern Europe, however, now present an at least quasi-Weberian analysis of certain
shifts toward more modern mentalities in the area of ritual during that period. They
have also returned to locating the critical force behind these shifts in the Refor-
mation. Protestant authorities, they contend, largely abandoned the view that real
efficacy or presence of power was inherent in ritual acts and began to assert the
notion of ritual as mere symbolic signification or representation. This process was
most clearly evident in Protestant sacramental and above all eucharistic theology,
chantment” (13). Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford, 1997), 177–178, notes
Weber’s “lingering influence” on most modern typologies of religion, magic, and ritual. Talal Asad,
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 2003), states that disenchant-
ment remains “a salient feature of the modern epoch” (13), even while later calling the interpretive value
of the term into some question (48). For an example of the interrelation of magic and modernity outside
the West, see Gyan Prakash, “Between Science and Superstition: Religion and the Modern Subject of
the Nation in Colonial India,” in Meyer and Pels, Magic and Modernity, 39–59.
4 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), esp. 25–112.
5 R. W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World,’ ”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 475– 494, reprinted in Scribner, Religion and Culture
in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden, 2001), 346–365; Roy Porter, “Witchcraft and Magic
in Enlightenment, Romantic, and Liberal Thought,” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft
and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Philadelphia, Pa., 1999), 191–282, esp.
255–273. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chi-
cago, 2004), esp. 10–11 on the centrality of Weberian disenchantment for studies of modern European magic.
6 Styers, Making Magic, 25–68; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of
Rationality (Cambridge, 1990), 4–24. Rich discussion of some of the issues and implications inherent in this
development can be found in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chris-
tianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md., 1993), esp. 1–54; also Asad, Formations of the Secular, esp. 21–66.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2006

The Disenchantment of Magic 385
but it also played out in many areas of ritualized activity.7 While there is no denying
the significance of the Reformation in terms of ritual and more general religious
developments in European history, there is also considerable danger in positing a
single period of relatively sudden, dramatic change, especially when the modern
analytical categories employed are largely rooted in Reformation-era debates.8
In regard to historical conceptions of magic, shifting notions about the inherent
qualities of various kinds of ritualized, magical actions need to be disentangled from
the immediate context of the Reformation. In the century prior to the eruption of
Protestantism, reformist impulses already animated many clerical authorities, feed-
ing increased concern about proper religiosity, lay piety, and putative superstition.9

A number of these authorities became particularly troubled by the common spells,
charms, healing rites, and other simple ritualized acts widely used by laypeople and
also by many clerics.10 Fearing that these rites entailed at least tacit invocation of
demons, authorities judged them to be erroneous and therefore superstitious. In this
they followed long-standing Christian conceptions of the potentially demonic nature
of virtually all magic. New this time, however, was the degree to which established
theories were applied to questions of common practice and belief, and the level of
concern these practices now generated. The first half of the fifteenth century, in
particular, saw a rash of tracts and treatises produced on the question of supersti-
tion.11 Here, however, the focus is on the treatment of common spells and charms
in early witchcraft literature.
7 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 147–223, with discussion of We-
ber’s influence on 185–186.

8 Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory
(Princeton, N.J., 2001), 164 –247, offers a bracing critique of how modern conceptions of “ritual” and
“religion” developed in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.
9 Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 213–259, remains
an excellent introduction; also Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), esp. 38– 48.
More recently, see Christopher M. Bellitto, Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day
One to Vatican II (New York, 2001), esp. 102–118; Scott H. Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The
Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville, Ky., 2004), esp. 1–35. More focused is Krzysztof
Bracha, “Kritik an den Glaubens- und Verhaltensformen und an der Aberglaubenpraxis im kirchlichen
reformatorischen Schrifttum des Spätmittelalters,” in Paweł Kras and Wojciech Polak, eds., Christianity
in East Central Europe: Late Middle Ages (Lublin, 1999), 271–282; and Bracha, “Der Einfluß der neuen
Frömmigkeit auf die spätmittelatlerliche Kritik am Aberglauben im Reformschrifttum Mitteleuropas,”
in Marek Derwich and Martial Staub, eds., Die “Neue Frommigkeit” in Europa im Spätmittelalter (Göt-
tingen, 2004), 225–248.
10 On this “common tradition” of magic in the Middle Ages, see Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 56–80; Karen Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,”
in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages (Philadelphia,
2002), 3–71, 30–53.
11 For an overview focused mainly on influential Latin treatises, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of
Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–1958), 4: 274 –307; Françoise Bonney, “Autour
de Jean Gerson: Opinions de théologiens sur les superstitions et la sorcellerie au début du XVe siècle,”
Le Moyen Age 77 (1971): 85–98; Jan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and
France: Text and Context of Laurens Pignon’s “Contre les devineurs” (1411) (Leiden, 1998), 137–153;
Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437/38: Studien zu den Anfängen der eu-
ropäischen Hexenverfolgungen im Spätmittelalter (Aachen, 2000), 269–291. On the numerous German
vernacular catechetical texts dealing with superstition from this period, see Karin Baumann, Aberglaube
für Laien: Zur Programmatik und Überlieferung spätmittelalterlicher Superstitionenkritik, 2 vols. (Würz-
burg, 1989). For Spain, see Fabián Alejandro Campagne, Homo Catholicus, Homo Superstitiosus: El
discurso antisupersticioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII (Madrid, 2002). On a single major treatise,
that of the Heidelberg theologian Nicholas Magni of Jauer, see Adolph Franz, Der Magister Nikolaus
Magni de Jawor: Ein Beitrag zur Literatur- und Gelehrtengeschichte des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg
im Breisgau, 1898), 151–195. Those who read Polish (I do not) should also consult Krzysztof Bracha,

As important studies by Stuart Clark and Walter Stephens on late medieval and
early modern witchcraft treatises have shown, authorities often deployed the idea of
witchcraft as a tool for dealing with basic ontological and epistemological problems
of their age.12 They employed this concept at least partially to resolve dilemmas of
uncertainty raised by common spells and other ritual acts. By the early fifteenth
century, witchcraft connoted far more—for authorities, at least—than just the per-
formance of simple malevolent magic (maleficium). Witches were now constructed
as surrendering themselves entirely to demons, entering into pacts with them, and
worshiping them as members of diabolical sects that gathered secretly to devour
babies, desecrate sacraments, partake in sexual orgies, and perform terrible rites.13

The explicit (and horrific) association of witches with demons removed all doubt
about the essential nature of their acts. In establishing witchcraft as clearly diabolical
in nature, authorities were particularly concerned to strip any effective agency from
the simple ritual acts that witches employed. The words witches uttered or the ges-
tures they performed could not directly cause magical effects; nor did these formulas
have inherent power to bind or compel demons to cause those effects. Rather,
witches’ access to and control over demonic power was made to rest entirely on an
explicit pact with Satan.
In addressing witchcraft and explicating both the nature of witches’ power and
the rites by which they might appear to work that power, authorities were also obliged
to address the nature of many common healing and protective rites, both official
ceremonies and formally approved practices as well as more fully popular impro-
visations often derived from these—those rites of power that Keith Thomas evoc-
atively, although anachronistically, labeled the “magic of the medieval church,” and
which David Gentilcore more accurately described as constituting a complex “system
of the sacred” that permeated premodern European society.14 As with witchcraft,
authorities again denied any real effect to rites themselves. True agency was either
covertly demonic (a frightful possibility) or legitimately divine. Even more than de-
mons, however, divinity could never be compelled or coerced by human acts. Thus
ritual forms again became meaningless; so long as intent was good and proper faith
was maintained, God should respond. Yet not only did this fly in the face of wide-
spread common beliefs that perceived many church rites, as well as spells and charms
based on them, to be automatically efficacious, but it also could be thought to un-
dermine a critical point that witchcraft theorists sought to make: that people should
Teolog, diabeł i zabobony: Świadectwo traktatu Mikołaja Magni z Jawora De superstitionibus (1405 r.)
(Warsaw, 1999).
12 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997);
Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002).
13 Focused studies on this period are Andreas Blauert, Frühe Hexenverfolgungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei-
und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989); Martine Ostorero, “Folâtrer avec les demons”:
Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers à Vevey (1448) (Lausanne, 1995); Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani,
and Kathrin Utz Tremp, eds., L’imaginaire du sabbat: Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430
c.–1440 c.) (Lausanne, 1999).
14 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 25–50; David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The
System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992). A strongly Weberian reading
of this system is Lutz Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious
Communities (University Park, Pa., 1998), 101–125.

eschew questionable rites, even if their intent was good, and employ only the long-
approved rituals of the church.
Theorists of witchcraft did not resolve these dilemmas in the course of the fif-
teenth century. Indeed, as the literature on witchcraft grew more developed and
thorough, the problems of properly understanding and categorizing common spells
and charms became more complex. Not only did authorities frequently seem to main-
tain the virtually automatic effectiveness of official ceremonies, but even the most
severe opponents of witchcraft still argued for the permissibility of various unofficial
rites. Issues of the effectiveness, and appropriateness, of spells and charms, church
ceremonies, and sacramentals, as well as the sacraments themselves, continued well

into the early modern period.15 Arguably the two greatest monuments of fifteenth-
century witchcraft literature were Johannes Nider’s Formicarius [Anthill], the most
extensive and influential of several early tracts and treatises on witchcraft produced
in the 1430s, and Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus maleficarum [Hammer of Witches], the
most important late medieval witchcraft treatise, written in 1486.16 Both men were
members of the Dominican order, which was famous for its pastoral and inquisitorial
activities and was in each of these roles deeply involved in investigating and shaping
common beliefs and practices.17 Both were also largely conservative in their thought,
grounded in the Thomism of the thirteenth century rather than newer intellectual
systems such as nominalism that were developing in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Thus they indicate how growing concerns over spells, charms, and po-
tential witchcraft were rooted in long-established interpretations of Christian belief.
Moreover, the two men shared a direct connection, as Kramer drew heavily from and
expanded upon Nider’s earlier accounts.18
Although these works were written in the fifteenth century and reflect a particular
strain of thought within that century, insights derived from careful attention to this
material carry broad implications for how historians and scholars in other disciplines
conceive and periodize a major aspect of Western Europe’s development toward
modernity. Processes identifiable as “disenchantment”—notably the conceptualiza-
tion of much magical and religious ritual as merely symbolic rather than directly
effective—were evident already in the fifteenth century, and indeed earlier, and thus
15 See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic ; Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch; and several
essential articles collected in R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation
Germany (London, 1987), 1–16, 17– 47, 257–275, and Scribner, Religion and Culture, 275–365.
16 On Nider, see Tschacher, Der Formicarius; Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy,
and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, Pa., 2003). On the Malleus, see Günter Jerouschek
and Wolfgang Behringer, “ ‘Das unheilvollste Buch der Weltliteratur’? Zur Entstehung- und Wirkungs-
geschichte des Malleus Maleficarum und zu den Anfängen der Hexenverfolgung,” in Günter Jerouschek
and Wolfgang Behringer, eds., Der Hexenhammer: Malleus Maleficarum (Munich, 2000), 9–98; Hans
Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief
(Manchester, 2003). Although traditionally Jakob Sprenger is listed as coauthor with Kramer, there is
strong evidence that Kramer was the chief, probably the sole, author. See Peter Segl, “Heinrich Institoris:
Persönlichkeit und literarisches Werk,” in Peter Segl, ed., Der Hexenhammer: Entstehung und Umfeld
des Malleus maleficarum von 1487 (Cologne, 1988), 103–126; Jerouschek and Behringer, “Das unheil-
vollste Buch,” 31–37.
17 On the interrelation of these roles, see Christine Caldwell, “Dominican Inquisitors as ‘Doctors of
Souls’: The Spiritual Discipline of Inquisition, 1231–1331,” Heresis 40 (2004): 23– 40; also Christine
Caldwell Ames, “Does Inquisition Belong to Religious History?” AHR 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 11–37,
esp. 17–24.
18 Tschacher, Der Formicarius, 22; Jerouschek and Behringer, “Das unheilvollste Buch,” 13; Broedel,
The Malleus Maleficarum, 21.

nothing like Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” or any concomitant lurch to-
ward modernity should be bound exclusively to the impact of the Reformation. Crit-
ically, locating some “disenchantment” prior to the Reformation helps to decouple
these processes from modern conceptions of “magic” and “religion” that are prod-
ucts of Reformation-era debates. They are instead revealed to be deeply enmeshed
with medieval Christian beliefs about the nature of superhuman powers, whether
those of demons or of divinity, and the means by which human beings might interact
with, supplicate, or attempt to direct such power.19 Yet the tensions and uncertainty
regarding this interaction evident in fifteenth-century witchcraft treatises, and es-
pecially in their treatment of spells, charms, and other superstitions, reveal a height-

ened concern with these issues and indicate much of the manner in which they would
continue to provoke and inform debate throughout the Reformation and at least
until the Enlightenment.20 The fifteenth century was therefore an important con-
necting juncture between “medieval” and “early modern” concerns, and the disen-
chantment it reveals was not a sudden break with or rejection of earlier magical
thought, but a development within it that illuminates continuing concern and debate
over magical operations into the modern era.
WHEN CONFRONTING COMMON SPELLS AND CHARMS, or any other potential superstition,
clerical authorities in the fifteenth century, as throughout the Middle Ages, were
concerned above all to correct errors and provide clarity, for in the theological par-
lance of this period, superstition entailed improper belief and improperly under-
stood ritual acts.21 Yet whatever efforts authorities made to define superstition in
the abstract, the often ambiguous nature of actual practice eluded their attempts at
certain categorization. They were aware of, and deeply concerned about, these am-
biguities, which touched on profound tensions within essential issues of Christian
belief, namely the ways in which humans could, and could not, interact with super-
natural forces, demonic or divine, and the real meaning of the ritual forms in which
that interaction was frequently cloaked.22 The category of witchcraft, as constructed
19 On antique conceptions of such interaction, see Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the
Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

20 A detailed study of the concept of superstition in the context of Protestant thought is Ernst Saxer,
Aberglaube, Heuchelei und Frömmigkeit: Eine Untersuchung zu Calvins reformatorischer Eigenart (Zurich,
1970). On superstition into the Enlightenment, see William Monter, Ritual, Myth, and Magic in Early
Modern Europe (Athens, Ohio, 1983); Martin Pott, Aufklärung und Aberglaube: Die deutsche Frühaufklä-
rung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik (Tübingen, 1992). While Monter links superstition to the issue
of witchcraft, Pott exposes Enlightenment thinkers’ reliance on classical descriptions of superstitio and
especially deisidaimonia (esp. chaps. 2–3).
21 Virtually all late medieval authorities followed the definition of superstitio given in the thirteenth
century by Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2.2.92.1–2, in Summa theologiae: Latin Text and English
Translation, vol. 40: Superstition and Irreverence, ed. and trans. Thomas Franklin O’Meara and Michael
John Duffy (New York, 1968), 2–8. On the origins and earlier use of the term, see Dieter Harmening,
Superstitio: Überlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aber-
glaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1979). Baumann, Aberglaube, 1: 260, indicates late medieval
authorities’ heavy reliance on earlier scholastic and patristic authors.
22 On medieval conceptions of the supernatural, and the distinct category of the preternatural, see
Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Witchcraft and the Sense-of-the-Impossible in Early Modern Spain:
Some Reflections Based on the Literature of Superstition (ca. 1500–1800),” Harvard Theological Review
96, no. 1 (2002): 25–62. Here I intend “supernatural” in the commonly understood modern sense, not
the technical medieval one.

by authorities at this time, allowed them to define a number of malevolent magical

practices as definitively demonic (all witchcraft, in this sense, was inherently super-
stitious, although not all superstition was necessarily witchcraft). The intense di-
abolism that informed authorities’ developing concept of witchcraft entailed the
strong denial of any possible direct effectiveness in the spells or other ritualized
performances of witches. Convinced that the power of demons lay behind all acts of
witchcraft, clerical authorities worked aggressively to promulgate this point and to
disabuse the common laity of any notions to the contrary.23
Johannes Nider’s Formicarius includes a story that illustrates the confusion sur-
rounding common spells that so concerned authorities, and their deployment of the

concept of diabolical witchcraft to achieve clarity. Although Nider assured his read-
ers of the absolute veracity of all the examples he presented in this work,24 the tale
is too perfect, and may well have been entirely invented. Nevertheless, it encapsu-
lates Nider’s vision of the dangers inherent in commonly used spells and charms, and
the message of warning he sought to impart. Sometime in the 1430s, in the southern
German diocese of Constance, a man suffering from an injury to his foot visited a
friend, a laywoman skilled in healing. Nider named her “Seriosa,” so we will call her
Ernestine here. She was not the first source of relief to which this man had turned.
Believing that witches had caused his injury, he had tried numerous cures, including
some remedies that church authorities deemed illicit, yet nothing could overcome
the initial bewitchment. At last he came to his friend for help. She made the sign
of the cross over him, whispered certain words, and immediately his foot was
healed.25 Impressed by her power, yet not recognizing how she had actually cured
him, he asked what “incantations” she had used. At this point the acerbic Ernestine
began to chide her friend: “Whether from weak faith or feebleness,” she addressed
him severely, “you don’t adhere to the holy and approved rites of the church, and
you often use spells and forbidden remedies to heal yourself.” Such spells drew on
the power of demons, she warned, and while they might sometimes cure his physical
injuries, they always damaged his immortal soul.26
This is a story rife with uncertainty. The injured man appears sure that he was
bewitched, but we are not told how he knows this. Various means were available in
late medieval society for determining when witchcraft was present, and there were
a range of popular experts, witch doctors, and cunning folk who could identify
witches. These practices, too, were full of uncertainty, and—given the strife that
could arise once accusations of witchcraft began to circulate within a community—
fraught with danger.27 While the man was certain of the cause of his suffering, he
23 The clearest study of the imposition of elite concerns about diabolism onto more common concerns
about maleficium in the late medieval period remains Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their
Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley, Calif., 1976).
24 Johannes Nider, Formicarius, ed. G. Colvener (Douai, 1602), prologue (unpaginated).
25 Ibid. 5.4, 356–357.
26 “Tunc statim infirmus curatum se sentiens, scire voluit in remedium futurorum quid carminationis
virgo applicasset. Quae respondit: Vos, mala fide vel debili, diuinis et approbatis exercitiis ecclesiae non
inheretis, et carmina ac remedia prohibita crebro vestris infirmitatibus applicatis; idcirco raro in corpore
et semper in anima per talia laedimini.” Ibid., 357.
27 Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New
York, 1996), 169–218; Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003),
62–65, 111–112.

had no clear idea how to rectify his situation, trying a number of illicit cures, the
“spells and forbidden remedies” of further witchcraft. Only when these failed did he
finally turn to his friend Ernestine.28 Uncertainty persisted, however, as he did not
realize, or properly recognize, what she did for him. She cured him by making the
sign of the cross and silently saying the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, yet he assumed
that she had performed some spell or incantation. She then informed him, in no
uncertain terms, of the actual nature of the power she had employed, of the con-
demned nature of the cures to which he had turned in the past, and of the spiritual
harm he had suffered as a result.
In correcting her friend, Ernestine was made to stand in for theorists of witchcraft

and other witch-hunting authorities, a fact that carries significant irony, since if she
did in fact represent a real person living in the early fifteenth century, she almost
certainly would have been a local healer or cunning woman and would have run some
risk of being identified as a witch herself.29 Yet in the text, she was made to deliver
with confident certainty a basic message that Nider and other theorists of witchcraft
sought to convey regarding the spectrum of spells and charms available in late me-
dieval Europe: that many of those rites were in fact diabolical witchcraft as author-
ities understood and constructed it. Witches could cure illness, heal, and relieve
suffering, but all their acts, regardless of effect, were inherently evil because the
operative power behind them was demonic.30 Authorities were deeply concerned
that people who believed themselves to be bewitched in some way not turn to further
witchcraft for relief. As Nider stressed in Formicarius, “rather a person should die
than agree to such things.”31
Witchcraft theorists were obsessed with the notion that the laity tolerated and
actively patronized practitioners of common magic, who were, in their perception,
witches. By submitting to the devil, worshiping demons, and engaging in diabolical
sabbaths, witches damned themselves, and by performing maleficium they harmed
others; but perhaps their foulest act, in the minds of clerical authorities, was that by
deceiving others about the true nature of witchcraft and tempting them into seeking
the aid of witches, they corrupted innocent Christian souls. Horrific images of de-
based carnality and uncontrolled aggression, especially toward infants, proliferated
in treatises on witchcraft, as well as in sermons and other forms of propaganda about
witches. These served to cast witchcraft emphatically as the inversion of all proper
moral order and to warn people against any toleration of suspected demonic ac-
tivities in their midst.32 Most laypeople surely understood at least the basic nature
28 Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, 259, describes how recourse to multiple forms of supernatural
aid was quite common.

29 On the relationship of cunning folk to accused witches, see Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 122–123;
Davies, Cunning-Folk, 2–17; Willem de Blécourt, “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning
Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,” Social History 19, no. 3 (1994): 285–303, esp. 288–296.
30 Nider, Formicarius 5.3, 352, and 5.6, 371; Nider, Preceptorium divine legis 1.11.x (Milan, 1489) (no
pagination).
31 “Immo potius homo mori deberet quam talia consentire.” Nider, Formicarius 5.3, 352–351 (mis-
numbered for 353).

32 On witchcraft and infanticide, see Richard Kieckhefer, “Avenging the Blood of Children: Anxiety
over Child Victims and the Origins of the European Witch Trials,” in Alberto Ferreiro, ed., The Devil,
Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell (Leiden, 1998), 91–109.
On carnality, the fullest consideration is now Stephens, Demon Lovers (although I think he overemphasizes
the centrality of demonic sex in intellectual constructions of witchcraft). Stuart Clark, in “Inversion, Misrule
and the Meaning of Witchcraft,” Past and Present 87 (1980): 98–127, and more fully in Thinking with Demons,
has demonstrated how essential the notion of inversion was to the concept of witchcraft.

of demonic menace as the church depicted it. They did not, however, seem to connect
familiar practices with this menace, or they viewed possible involvement with demons
far less seriously than did clerics. Common discourse about interactions with su-
pernatural or occult forces typically reflected care and hesitancy about engaging with
such power, but also some casualness, evidenced by claims that most laypeople did
not well or fully understand the specific nature of the operations involved or the
powers invoked.33 According to the early-fifteenth-century Franciscan preacher Ber-
nardino of Siena, for example, the entire city of Siena stood in peril because of its
citizens’ unconcerned acceptance of the many “witches” known to inhabit the re-
gion.34

To clarify and justify their concerns, authorities stressed supposedly direct ev-
idence of the diabolism that witchcraft entailed. For example, in his Buch aller ver-
botenen Künste [Book of All Forbidden Arts], the German courtier Johannes Har-
tlieb claimed to have personally uncovered such diabolism. In 1447, he was ordered
by the duke of Bavaria to investigate a woman who supposedly professed the ability
to summon storms and hail, one of the major evils attributed to witches in southern
German and alpine lands. Under his questioning, she admitted that, to obtain this
power, she had denied God, Mary, and all the saints, as well as her baptism and the
other sacraments, and that she had given herself “life and soul” to three devils.
Thereafter, she needed only to call these devils, and they would raise hailstorms
wherever she desired.35 Johannes Nider, too, presented an account of a (male) witch
who directly confirmed the demonic nature of his powers, also with reference to
storm-raising. Captured by authorities, he confessed that he would go with an ac-
complice to an open field and there implore the “prince of all demons,” the devil,
to send a lesser demon. The witch would immolate a black fowl at a crossroads and
throw it into the air as an offering, and the demon would then cause hail and lightning
to strike at his command.36
Like Ernestine, the woman in Hartlieb’s account spoke to confirm the message
that authorities sought to impart. As for Nider’s weather-working witch, he sup-
posedly confessed to a magistrate who had captured him, who then reported this
story to Nider. Assuming that Nider did not simply invent the tale or recast it whole-
sale in his retelling, certainly the judge could have extracted a confession that suited
his own purposes as an authority bent on stressing the demonic nature of much
33 Bengt Ankarloo, “Witch Trials in Northern Europe, 1450–1700,” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart
Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (Philadelphia, Pa., 2002),
53–95, 58.
34 A translation of the sermon appears in John Shinners, ed., Medieval Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader
(Orchard Park, N.Y., 1997), 242–245; original Italian in Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo
di Siena, 1427, ed. Carlo Delcorno, 2 vols. (Milan, 1989), 2: 1002–1040. Nider knew of and admired
Bernardino; Formicarius 4.9, 311–312. On Bernardino and witchcraft generally, see Franco Mormando,
The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chi-
cago, 1999), 52–108.
35 Johannes Hartlieb, Das Buch aller verbotenen Künste, des Aberglaubens und der Zauberei, ed. and
trans. Falk Eckhard Graf (Ahlerstedt, 1989), 46– 48.

36 Nider, Formicarius 5.4, 358. Although he was the earliest authority to address the frequent as-
sociation of witchcraft with women, Nider often related examples of male witches. See Michael D. Bailey,
“The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages,”
Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002): 120–134; Bailey, Battling Demons, 48–52.

common magic.37 Interestingly, elsewhere in Formicarius, Nider related how this

same witch supposedly prevented a married couple from having children over the
course of several years. In this account, no overt diabolism was present; the man cast
the spell simply by burying a lizard under the threshold of the couple’s dwelling,
although since the accused in this case had already been deemed a witch, Nider was
certain that demonic power was somehow in operation.38 Amid the doubt and con-
fusion that authorities seem to have faced, and which they certainly feared, regarding
the nature of many common magical practices, the figure of the witch, forced either
in reality or in exemplary accounts to confess the explicitly demonic basis of her (or
sometimes his) power, was made to be reassuringly definitive.

THE PRESENCE OF DEMONIC POWER behind most forms of magic was a long-established
fact in Christian thought, deriving from the earliest church fathers.39 Late medieval
witchcraft theorists simply stressed this point in the face of perceived common un-
certainty or lack of proper understanding. Yet in their discussions of the power be-
hind magical acts, they also had to define how humans could access and manipulate
that power. Here too they addressed, in an even more nuanced way, the function and
real effect of the rites involved. And here too they removed from ritual actions,
however complex or simple, any direct operative power. Such a conclusion was rel-
atively unproblematic when applied to witchcraft or other magical actions that au-
thorities sought to denigrate and condemn, but matters became more complicated
when authorities turned to approved ecclesiastical or other rites that they wished to
valorize, or at least not vilify. While they still maintained that rites had no inherent
operative or directive force, they were nevertheless deeply concerned that the proper
forms of these rites be maintained, for improper forms could entail dangerous su-
perstition.
Even when it was agreed that “magic” functioned through demonic power, how
did a spell draw on that power? Common people either thought little about such
issues or found it expedient to claim disinterested ignorance when questioned by
authorities. Learned clerics, however, pondered the matter at length, and not just
those who sought to condemn magical practices. Medieval necromancers, learned
and literate magicians who were mostly clerics, practiced complex forms of ritual
magic and readily admitted to invoking and exploiting demonic power.40 They main-
tained, however, that they were in no way subservient to demons, but commanded
and compelled them by virtue of the powerful rituals they employed. Most clerical
authorities argued strongly against this position, claiming that any invocation of de-
37 On ways in which Nider may have reinterpreted earlier reports, see Blauert, Frühe Hexenverfol-
gungen, 57–59.
38 Nider, Formicarius 5.3, 350.
39 The most influential patristic treatment of demons was that given by Augustine, chiefly in his De
doctrina christiana, De divinatione daemonum, and De civitate dei, esp. books 8–10. Thomas Linsenmann,
Die Magie bei Thomas von Aquin (Berlin, 2000), devotes several chapters to the Augustinian background
of Aquinas’s thought; see esp. 73–98.
40 On medieval necromancy, see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 151–175; more fully, Richard
Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park, Pa.,
1998).

mons involved some degree of supplication and implied at least a tacit pact.41 Witch-
craft theorists, focusing on the very simple rites of common magic, stressed explicit
pacts that were necessarily prior to any magical activity. In 1437, the same year Nider
wrote much of his Formicarius, Pope Eugenius IV issued a statement on witchcraft
in a directive to papal inquisitors, declaring that witches worshiped demons and
entered into formal, often written pacts with them “so that by a single word, touch,
or sign they might perform whatever harmful magic they desire.”42 Similarly, Nider
recounted how witches might raise storms by stirring water with a broom. This action
had no direct effect, either to raise the storm or to compel demons to do so. Rather,
demons responded to this sign because of binding pacts that had existed between

them and witches since time immemorial.43
In this way, witchcraft theorists radically disempowered the simple ritual actions
involved in the performance of various kinds of common magic that they perceived
to be diabolical witchcraft. Not only did these rites have no causative force, they had
no necessary directive effect on the agents (demons) that did cause the magical
result. They merely signified the witch’s desire. Seeking always to argue that witches
were utterly subservient to demons, authorities had every reason to denigrate and
dismiss the simple rites that supposed witches performed. Matters necessarily be-
came more complex, however, when authorities addressed various rites that they
sought to validate and maintain. Aside from explicating the horrific nature of witch-
craft itself, most theorists also sought to clarify how people might properly respond
to the threat that witches represented. Certainly this was the case with Nider, whose
Formicarius was mainly a collection of instructive stories, moral exempla intended
for use in sermons delivered to the laity.44 As noted already, he warned that under
no circumstances should people have recourse to further witchcraft to remedy be-
witchments. Instead, they should turn to the church and such remedies as prayer and
penance, the sign of the cross, meditation on the passion of Christ, pious attendance
at church rites and ceremonies, or pilgrimage to saints’ shrines.45
While such approved rites often closely resembled magic spells and charms in
their effects and even in their formulas, for medieval authorities the two systems
were entirely distinct and dramatically opposed in the most important way possible.
Prayers and approved blessings drew on divine power, while magic spells relied on
41 The most influential authority in this regard was the late-fourteenth-century Catalan inquisitor
Nicolau Eymeric. See Michael D. Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic
in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 76, no. 4 (2001): 960–990, 971–976.
42 “[ . . . ] et in signum desuper chartam scriptam vel quid aliud tradunt, cum ipsis obligatoria, ut solo
verbo, tactu vel signo malefica, quibus velint, illis inferant sive tollant [ . . . ].” In Joseph Hansen, ed.,
Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (1901;
repr., Hildesheim, 1963), 17.
43 “De hoc etiam infra dicetur non autem faciunt ista immediate maleficorum opera actione propria
et immediate, sed talia fiunt per demones qui uisis maleficiis immediate ex pacto dudum cum maleficis
a principio mundi et tempore ueteris idolatrie habito sciunt qualem effectum debent ad intentionem
maleficorum procurare. Ut exempla gratia: Scopa quam malefica intingit in aquam ut pluat non causat
pluuiam, sed demon talibus visis qui, si deus permiserit, potestatem habet in omnia corporalia, et in
aerem, uentos, et nubes, ut statim talia procuraret et causare ualeat. Maga siquidem signum dat per
scopam, sed demon illud procurat et agit ut pluat per demonis actionem.” Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.v.
44 Bailey, Battling Demons, 99–101.
45 Nider, Formicarius 5.4, 356, and 5.6, 370; also Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.x.

demons.46 Yet authorities treated both systems similarly in this sense: if the rites of
witches played no part in compelling demons to respond, still less could sanctioned
rites, although laudable, compel divine power. These rites, too, were merely signs.
In some cases, notably the sacraments, God responded because of a covenant (or,
in language that could appear shocking when surrounded by demonological argu-
ments in treatises on magic, superstition, or witchcraft, a “pact”) with the church.47
More often he responded out of mercy, not because of the performance of some
specific rite but because of the internal moral state of the person seeking divine
help.48 Nider, for example, related a long account of a secular judge, Peter of Bern,
who conducted numerous witch trials in the early 1400s. He was immune to the power

of the witches he hunted because he diligently protected himself with the sign of the
cross, but more basically because he always “acted in good faith.” One morning he
failed to make the sign of the cross when he arose, and he was almost immediately
struck down and injured by witchcraft. Nider explained, however, that Peter was
wrathful that day, and may even have cursed in the name of the devil.49 Thus his
vulnerability to witchcraft was due to his spiritual state, not simply his failure to
perform a ritual act.
Nider made the unessential nature of even official ritual clear when he discussed
exorcism as a means to counteract bewitchment.50 Given that witchcraft functioned
through the power of demons, many bewitchments could be undone by driving off
the demons responsible for inflicting them. This was a power that Christ had prom-
ised to the apostles and all faithful Christians in the Gospels.51 Nider made clear that
even informal acts of exorcism performed with faith could be as effective as the
formal church rite that clerics performed “ex officiis.”52 Such basic rejection of the
essential importance of specific ritual forms probably contributed to authorities’ will-
ingness to countenance many unofficial rites used against witchcraft. Nider, for ex-
ample, approved of such practices as ringing church bells to protect crops from
storms.53 He also accepted and essentially recommended in Formicarius a counter-
rite revealed by a witch under interrogation. To disperse hailstorms raised by witch-
craft, one could recite this formula: “I adjure you, hail and winds, by the three nails
of Christ, which pierced the hands and feet of Christ, and by the four evangelists,
Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that you should fall dissipated into water.”54
46 The importance of the distinction is stressed by Richard Kieckhefer, “The Specific Rationality of
Medieval Magic,” AHR 99, no. 3 (June 1994): 813–836.

47 Nicholas Magni of Jauer, Tractatus de superstitionibus, University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 78,
fol. 58r.
48 Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.gg; based on Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2.2.96.4, 80–84.
49 Nider, Formicarius 5.7, 380–381. For a fuller account of Peter’s witch-hunting activities, see Arno
Borst, “The Origins of the Witch-Craze in the Alps,” in Borst, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics,
and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago, 1992), 101–122.
50 Nider, Formicarius 5.6, 370; Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.x.
51 Matthew 12:26–28, Luke 8:29 and 9:42.
52 Nider, Formicarius 5.6, 372; also Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.nn. Heinrich Kramer drew a similar
point in Malleus maleficarum 2.2.6, Nachdruck des Erstdruckes von 1487 mit Bulle und Approbatio, ed.
Günter Jerouschek (Hildesheim, 1992), fols. 85v–86r.
53 Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.pp; also Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2.7, fol. 91r. On the protective
power of church bells, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 31.
54 “Adiuro vos, grandines et ventos, per tres Christi diuinos clauos qui Christi manus et pedes per-
forarunt, et per quatuor euangelistas sanctos Matthaeum, Marcum, Lucam, et Ioannem, ut in aqua
resoluti descendatis.” Nider, Formicarius 5.4, 358.

Christian thinkers had debated the significance of specific ritual directed toward
an omnipotent and omniscient God since the earliest days of the church, and in the
early medieval period, ecclesiastical officials had frequently accommodated them-
selves to unofficial and even pagan rites, so long as these were purged of any overtly
demonic elements and were made to reflect Christian faith.55 Thus the struggles of
late medieval witchcraft theorists to come to terms with the nature and function of
various rites must be understood as part of a long tradition running through Christian
history, as well as the result of specific debates about the nature of common magical
operations and the potential threat of superstition developing in the fifteenth cen-
tury, largely in the context of witchcraft. Seeking to clarify the absolute demonic

nature of witchcraft, authorities aggressively stripped all power from the simple rites
performed by supposed witches. Against witchcraft they sought to recommend the
power of official Christian rites such as prayer, blessings, or the sign of the cross.
While they frequently stressed that formulaic rites could not compel divine power,56
they certainly did not want to devalue these rituals to the extent they had the rites
of witches. Authorities also accepted a number of unofficial rites or practices by
which the faithful could counteract demonic witchcraft. Again their underlying po-
sition was that God responded to pious intent, not specific ritual formulas. Yet they
remained deeply concerned about the particular forms these rites took, for while
God responded to true faith, an improperly enacted ritual could allow demonic
forces to intrude regardless of the intent of the person performing the rite.
The essential element that made any spell, charm, or other formula illegitimate
and illicit, all authorities agreed, was the invocation of demonic rather than divine
power. Yet such invocation could be tacit or unintended as well as express, making
reliable judgments on particular practices difficult to render. This dilemma of dis-
cernment is evident in Nider’s account of the lay healer Ernestine.57 In his relation
of events, Ernestine delivered a reassuringly confident categorization of what had
taken place. The injured man initially sought relief through illicit means that im-
periled his soul. Ernestine healed him using the divine power of prayer and the sign
of the cross. Yet the man could not tell the difference. In fact, many common spells
and charms incorporated the sign of the cross, along with other gestures and phrases
drawn from official ecclesiastical rites, and even the explicitly demonic rituals of
learned, necromantic magic might include liturgical elements.58 Ernestine also em-
55 Most detailed is Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.,
1991), although Flint focuses too much on an oppositional dynamic between Christian and pagan prac-
tices that was probably not so strongly perceived by contemporaries. On this, see Karen Louise Jolly,
Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). See also Kieck-
hefer, “Specific Rationality,” for criticism of Flint’s inattention to the contemporary distinctions that
were made regarding the nature of the power—divine or demonic—perceived to underlie different rites.
56 Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.gg; also Nicholas Magni of Jauer, De superstitionibus, fol. 27r; Heinrich
Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2.6, fol. 86v. The ultimate source was Aquinas, Summa theologiae
2.2.96.4.
57 Discernment of demons and demonic activity in general was a major issue for late medieval au-
thorities; see Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2003), 274 –319. Caciola focuses more than I do on the nature of church control in these areas,
especially its gendered quality, and she draws useful comparisons to witchcraft.
58 On liturgical elements of common spells, best is Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Tra-
ditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 266–287. On liturgical elements of
necromancy, see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 70–74, 160–161, 166–168; Kieckhefer, Forbidden
Rites, 3, 13–17.

ployed the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, albeit spoken silently so that her friend was
unaware of what she had said. A problem for authorities would have been to de-
termine whether she fully understood her own words, and whether she had delivered
them correctly in Latin. Even a slight change in a verbal formula, intentional or
inadvertent, could corrupt a wholesome prayer into a demonic invocation.59
While late medieval witchcraft theorists frequently expounded the seemingly
“disenchanted” view that ritualized actions lacked any real power to coerce or direct
supernatural forces, they could not entirely abandon the notion that improper rites,
or improperly performed rites, carried dire consequences. At one point in his writ-
ings, Nider discussed certain healing spells and charms commonly used by old

women. He recognized that these procedures closely resembled approved blessings
and exorcisms. Such actions, he concluded, were inherently legitimate and could
readily be permitted to trained clerics, but among the uneducated laity the danger
of error and demonic infiltration was too great to allow.60 Here was a straightforward
admission that rites seeking to call on divine power for permissible ends could be
fatally corrupted if their forms were mangled. Here was also a straightforward re-
sponse to such complications surrounding conceptions of ritual practice—deploying
the coercive power of the church to restrict to itself all such activity. This was a course
increasingly taken in the fifteenth and subsequent centuries. Yet the uncertain status
of ritual power persisted. As theories of witchcraft became more developed, the
confusion would only grow more pronounced.
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM WAS THE MOST EXTENDED AND INFLUENTIAL treatise on witch-
craft composed in the fifteenth century. While it repeated many examples and re-
iterated many conclusions from earlier treatises, it was also the fullest consideration
of witchcraft thus far produced.61 Its chief author, Heinrich Kramer, delved more
deeply than many previous authorities into the nature and function of witchcraft,
church rites, and the many common spells and charms that seemed to hover between
them. The result was by no means greater clarity. Like all late medieval witchcraft
theorists, Kramer feared that many common spells might be witchcraft in disguise.
He repeated standard prohibitions against including strange words or unknown
names in spells or charms, for these could signify compacts with the devil. Those who
used such spells might be entirely unaware of their true character, and the results
59 “Questio xxvi vtrum licitum sit per carmina scripta uel uerba sacra benedicere infirmos homines
uel iumenta [ . . . ] Respondet Thomas 2.2, ubi supra, quod sic septem conditionibus seruatis. Una est
ut uideatur ne uerba aliquid contineant quod pertineat ad inuocationes demonum expressas uel tacitas.
Secunda ne contineant ignota nomina [ . . . ] Tertia ne materia uerborum aliquid falsitatis contineat
[ . . . ] Sexta ut in alligatione prolatione uel scriptura diuinorum uerborum respectus solum habeatur
ad sacra uerba et ad intellectum eorum.” Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.gg.
60 “Questio xxvii unde ortum habeant benedictiones et carminationes quas uetule hodie super in-
firmos et uiri quidam faciunt? Respondetur quod principium horum fuit sanctissimum, sed sicut omnia
demonis instinctu deprauantur mediantibus demonibus et malis hominibus [ . . . ] Sicuti etiam hodie
literatos et sacre theologie doctores noui qui infirmos uisitantes similia uerba egrotis applicauerunt non
solum demoniacis.” Ibid. 1.11.hh.
61 On the lack of originality in the Malleus, see Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern
Europe, 2nd ed. (London, 1995), 54 –55. In contrast, Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum, makes the Mal-
leus’s originality a central theme.

achieved could be wholly beneficial, but the corrupting power of demons remained.62
Thus Kramer echoed Nider and other earlier authorities by arguing that no one
should seek to relieve bewitchment by recourse to other witches.63 Like Nider, he
recommended ecclesiastically sanctioned remedies such as prayer, confession, the
sign of the cross, and exorcism, and he was particularly strong in advocating the use
of sacramentals such as holy water, consecrated salt, and blessed candles to combat
witchcraft.64 Nevertheless, he also maintained that the means by which faithful Chris-
tians might protect themselves from demonic forces extended beyond the “remedies
of the church.”65 He thus entered into a detailed analysis of the nature and effec-
tiveness of many ambiguous rites, and he offered complicated conclusions.

One of the more involved analyses of magical rites in the Malleus focused, like
Nider’s tale of Ernestine and her injured friend, on a man afflicted by bewitchment
in his foot. A merchant from the German town of Speyer was traveling through the
region of Swabia. One day, as he walked with two local servants, a woman ap-
proached. The servants warned that she was a well-known witch and he should de-
fend himself with the sign of the cross, but he was obstinate and refused, whereupon
he felt tremendous pain in his left foot, so that he could barely walk. After three days
of suffering, a local healer was called, who examined the merchant, but only after
swearing that he would not employ witchcraft to cure him. The healer first deter-
mined that the injury was in fact due to witchcraft by pouring molten lead into water
and observing the shapes that formed. He proceeded to visit the merchant for three
days, touching the foot and saying certain words over it. On the third day, the injury
was cured.66
Kramer stated flatly that this healing rite did not entail witchcraft. Nevertheless,
doubts remained about the particular power or “virtue” used to identify and remove
the bewitchment.67 The healer maintained that he was able to divine the presence
of witchcraft from the behavior of molten lead because of the nature of lead itself
and certain astral forces imbued in the metal, but the degree to which astral bodies
could impart occult power to earthly items was a point of considerable debate in this
period.68 Many authorities maintained that much astral magic was simply a screen
for demonic operations, since it frequently involved the recitation of secret words
or ceremonies that might tacitly invoke demons. Kramer himself noted that astral
magic was often merely demonic magic in disguise.69 Nevertheless, all authorities
62 Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 1.2, fol. 10r; 2.1.16, fol. 76r; 2.2.6, fol. 86v.
63 Ibid. 2.2, fols. 76v–77r.
64 Ibid. 2.2.1–3, fols. 79v–83v, and 2.1, fols. 43v– 45r. Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum, 152, notes
that sacramentals “provided the most consistently reliable protection against witchcraft” described in
the Malleus.
65 “In contrarium est quod sicut deus et natura non abundant in superfluis, ita non deficiunt in neces-
sariis, quare et necessario fidelibus contra huiusmodi insultus demonum sunt data non solum remedia
preseruatiua.” Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2, fol. 76v. “Aliis vero duobus modis vltimis tollere ma-
leficium potest esse vel licitum vel non vanum secundum canonistas et quod tollerari possunt vbi remedia
ecclesie prius attemptata, vt sunt exorcismi ecclesie, suffragia sanctorum implorata, ac vera penitentia,
nihil effecissent.” Ibid., fol. 77v.
66 Ibid., fols. 78v–79r.
67 “Sed qua virtute maleficium fugauit et species rerum in plumbo causauit sub dubio relinquitur.”
Ibid., fol. 79r.

68 Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 131–133.
69 Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 1.2, fol. 10r–v. Similarly Nicholas Magni of Jauer, De superstitionibus,
fols. 52v–53v and 54v; Hartlieb, Buch aller verbotenen Künste, 38.

admitted that astral bodies could impart some special properties to mundane ma-
terials. Only a few lines before he raised doubts about the nature of the action of
the lead, Kramer had stated that if the lead’s response was due purely to astral
influence, the rite would be “blameless and very commendable.”70
The real cause for concern in the healer’s actions was the nature of the healing
rite once witchcraft had been identified. No natural power, Kramer argued, could
fully remove a bewitchment, and the healer had, in fact, made no pretense of ef-
fecting a natural cure, instead speaking certain ritual words over the foot. Were this
rite intended to implore divine aid, the healer should have admitted the possibility
that it might be ineffective, since God could not be compelled. Yet this man, Kramer

noted, was certain that his actions would produce results. Moreover, the fact that
he had performed the ritual of speaking over the foot on three consecutive days was
ominous. Authorities frequently stressed that divine power did not need to be sup-
plicated in any particular formulaic fashion.71 That this healer followed such a pre-
cise formula caused Kramer to suspect demonic agency. He accepted that the man
had probably not formed an express pact with the devil, yet he could not allow that
the healing rite might, by any inherent power, have compelled demons to act. That
the rite did appear to produce results therefore indicated a tacit pact, and while the
healer was no witch, Kramer still judged him guilty of heresy and superstition.72
As already noted, the fear of tacit pacts with demons had always been central to
Christian authorities’ concern about common spells and charms. For witchcraft the-
orists of the fifteenth century, this concern supported their basic notions about the
essential emptiness of ritual acts—that demons always responded because of a pact
and not because of any effect of rites themselves—but also stood in some tension
to this notion, causing authorities to lavish attention on the specific forms of various
rites, as Kramer did above, attempting to discern whether they might tacitly invoke
demons. While this tension was by no means fatal, it was problematic, leading many
authorities, like Nider, to suggest that only trained clerics be allowed to perform
certain rites because of the possibility of dangerous corruptions in their forms.
Kramer, too, addressed such issues, but proved fairly tolerant of a number of com-
mon rites. At one point, in fact, he repeated Nider’s story about Ernestine healing
her friend’s foot with the power of prayer and then condemning the other remedies
the man had tried. While this tale could be taken to indicate that all spells and
charms, aside from official prayers, should be rigidly proscribed because of the dan-
ger of demonic corruption, Kramer asserted a different interpretation. Ernestine
(again made to play the role of a theologian) had judiciously banned only illicit spells
70 “Et hoc quod saturni influxum super plumbum tanquam ex eius dominio causatum allegauit ir-
reprehensibilis extitit et potius commendandus fuit.” Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2, fol. 79r. Similarly
Nicholas Magni of Jauer, De superstitionibus, fols. 40v, 61r; Hartlieb, Buch aller verbotenen Künste, 80.
71 “Quinto ne spes habeatur in modo scribendi aut ligandi aut in quacumque huiusmodi vanitate que
ad diuinam reuerentiam non pertineat, quia alias omnino iudicabitur superstitiosum.” Kramer, Malleus
maleficarum 2.2.6, fol. 86v; following Nider (Preceptorium 1.11.gg) and ultimately Aquinas (Summa theo-
logiae 2.2.96.4).
72 “Potius videtur quod per aliquid pactum adminus tacitum cum demone initum hoc practicauerit,”
and later “Non tam suspectus quam vt manifeste deprehensus adminus licet non super expresseum
initum cum demone pactum tamen super tacitum iudicatur et tanquam pro coniuncto habere et penis
adminus in secundo modo sententiandi infra contentis, sed puniri debet cum abiuratione solemni.”
Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2, fol. 79r.

and conjurations; legitimate ones existed and should be permitted to the laity to
combat witchcraft.73
Kramer discussed such spells and other rites at various points in the Malleus,
sometimes leaving the precise nature of their operation unexplored, but sometimes
attempting to explicate it in detail. For example, when women in German lands
suspected that a cow had been drained of milk by witchcraft, they would hang a milk
pail over a fire and strike it, and the witch responsible for the theft would feel the
blows. Likewise, if a cow was injured by witchcraft, it could be brought into a field,
usually on a feast day or holy day, with a man’s breeches or other “foul thing” (im-
mundum) placed over it, and beaten with sticks. It would then go to the door of the

person who had bewitched it, identifying the malefactor.74 Kramer was quite clear
that these rites functioned through demonic agency. Always ready to betray his ser-
vants, the devil was perfectly happy for witches to be identified in these ways. The
rites were not illegitimate, however, because those performing them merely ex-
ploited demons; they did not honor or worship demons in any fashion, nor did they
form any pact with them, express or tacit.75 Rather, albeit with diabolical complicity,
these rituals seemed to exert some real force of compulsion over demons.
Kramer’s impulse to associate some seemingly direct efficacy with certain ritu-
alized acts applied to divine operations as well as demonic ones. For protection from
hailstorms, for example, he reiterated the rite discussed by Nider, in which hail was
adjured by the wounds of Christ and by the four evangelists to fall as water.76 He
also recounted another ritual. After hail had begun falling, three hailstones should
be thrown into a fire while the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the opening words of
the Gospel of John were recited. The sign of the cross should be made in the four
cardinal directions, “the word was made flesh” repeated three times, and finally “by
the words of this gospel may the tempest be dispersed” said thrice. Kramer main-
tained that this ritual conjuration was “entirely proper, nor should it be judged with
suspicion.”77 Of course, the invocation of divine power provided the main operative
force of the rite, but he explicitly concluded that casting hail into the fire, while
secondary, was not entirely ineffectual, since those performing the rite thereby in-
dicated their desire to destroy the works of the devil. Thus it was more effective to
perform this rite while throwing hail into fire than while casting it into water, because
73 “Gratia hiuis exempli queritur an non alie benedictiones et carminationes seu etiam coniurationes
per exorcismos habeant efficaciam cum hic videantur reprobari? Respondetur quod hec virgo non rep-
robauit nisi illicita carmina cum illicitis coniurantionibus et exorcismis.” Ibid. 2.2.6, fol. 86r.
74 Ibid. 2.2, fol. 79r.
75 Christians were not forbidden all interaction with demons; as noted above, all the faithful were
believed to have some power to exorcise demons. The critical distinction for authorities was that the
faithful should interact with demons only in such a way as to “command or compel” them (“imperando
seu compellendo”), never to “solicit” them: Nider, Preceptorium 1.11.kk; similarly Nicholas Magni of
Jauer, De superstitionibus, fol. 48r.
76 Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2.7, fol. 91r.
77 “Lapilli enim tres ex grandine in ignem sub inuocatione sanctissime trinitatis proiiciuntur, oratio
dominica cum angelica salutatione bis aut ter adiungitur, euangelium Johannis, In principio erat verbum,
cum signo crucis vndique contra tempestatem ante et retro et ex omni parte terre subinfertur. Et tunc
cum in fine replicat trinies verbum caro factum est et trinies ex post dixerit per euangelica dicta fugiat
tempestas ista. Subito, siquidem tempestas ex maleficio fuit procurata, cessabit. Hec verissima experi-
menta, nec suspecta iudicantur.” Ibid., fols. 90v–91r. “Experimenta” was a common term for the rites
of ritual magic, and particularly necromantic conjurations (Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 23).

fire would destroy the hail more quickly.78 While one could construct a rationale that
hurling hail into fire was still an essentially empty sign indicating to God an intensity
of pious wrath against the devil, thus resulting in a more rapid deployment of divine
power, Kramer’s bald statement that one form of action was more effective than
another seems perilously close to asserting that the particular form of this ritual
exerted real force.
A final example will serve to highlight Kramer’s complicated, often convoluted
position regarding ritual invocations of supernatural power. Authorities frequently
had difficulty drawing confessions from suspected witches, for the devil would exert
his power to keep them silent. As a means of proof, Kramer recommended that

judges “conjure” suspects to weep, for a true witch would be unable to cry, although
she might feign it by smearing her face with spittle. Placing his hands on the suspect’s
head, the judge should recite the following formula: “I conjure you by the bitter tears
shed on the cross by our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, for the salvation of the world,
and by the ardent tears of the most glorious virgin Mary, his mother, spread over
his wounds at evening, and by all the tears that all the saints and elect of God have
shed in the world, from whose eyes all tears have now been dried, that insofar as you
are innocent you shed tears, but by no means if you are guilty.”79 Shortly thereafter,
Kramer noted that inquisitors in German lands had also had success with placing bits
of blessed wax in holy water, invoking the trinity, and forcing suspected witches to
drink from this mixture three times. The witches would then break their silence and
confess.80
Kramer would have perceived in these actions divine power operating through
the invocation of holy names and the application of sacramental elements. Yet there
is cause for confusion. Why was a man who argued against the need for any specific
ritual in invoking divine power so careful to present an exact and fairly complex
verbal formula? Why was physical contact, the laying on of hands, required? And
what, exactly, was being “conjured” here? A demon restraining a guilty witch from
confessing might legitimately be exorcised, but here the accused was conjured to
weep only if she was innocent.81 In the case of the holy water and wax, why did a
man who elsewhere condemned a rite specifically because it was employed a certain
number of times here prescribe having the suspect drink three times? There would,
of course, be responses to such challenges. The laying on of hands was often de-
scribed in the Bible, particularly in terms of healing and casting out spirits.82 The
triple application of the holy potion could be characterized as complementing the
78 “Respondetur utique per alia sacra verba proiiciens autem intendit diabolum molestare dum eius
facturam per inuocationem sanctissime trinitatis destruere conatur. Ad ignem potius quam ad aquam
proiicit, quia cicius dum resoluuntur.” Kramer, Malleus maleficarum 2.2.7, fol. 91r.
79 “Coniuro te per amorosas lachrymas a nostro saluatore domino Iesu Christo in cruce per salute
mundi effusas, ac per ardentissimas lachrymas ipsius gloriosissime virginis Marie matris eius super vul-
nera ipsius hora vespertina sparsas, et per omnes lachrymas quas hic in mundo omnes sancti et electi
dei effuderunt, et a quorum oculis iam omnem lachrymam abstersit, vt inquantum sis innoxia lachrymas
effundas, si nocens nullo modo.” Ibid. 3.15, fol. 107r.
80 Ibid., fol. 108r.
81 One could suppose that Kramer feared the presence of a demon exerting its power to prevent an
innocent suspect from weeping, and so the conjuration was directed at this entity, but this would still
not necessarily cause the freed suspect to commence weeping, as the conjuration explicitly intended.
82 For example, Christ in Mark 5:23 and 6:5 and in Luke 4:40– 41, and various apostles in Mark 16:18
and Acts 8:18 and 28:8.

invocation of the trinity. Yet none of these explanations would entirely alleviate the
underlying tensions about the efficacy of ritual and the function of ritual forms ev-
ident here.
IN IDENTIFYING MAGICAL ACTS WITH DEMONIC POWER, and in their attempts to clearly
distinguish the rites of demonic magic from legitimate rituals directed toward God
and divine power, late medieval witchcraft theorists engaged with long-standing el-
ements of medieval Christian thought. They did so, however, with a mounting in-
tensity that had not been seen for centuries, arguably since late antiquity.83 This was

at least partly because they increasingly confronted the issue of superstition as a
practical problem rather than a purely theoretical theological issue, uncovering and
attempting to explicate specific instances of potentially confused belief and ques-
tionable practice mainly in the area of commonly used spells and charms. This ap-
proach reflected the pastoral “theology of piety” developing especially in German-
speaking lands in the fifteenth century.84 If witchcraft theorists were themselves not
always the most profound theological thinkers, many leading theologians in this pe-
riod were focusing on similar issues, including magic and superstition, and dealing
with specific instances of practice rather than grand abstractions.85 The concerns
these men demonstrated, and their focus, derived from major religious and eccle-
siastical developments. Particularly in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of
1215, the medieval church had sought to define and enforce correct belief among the
faithful in Europe far more assiduously than it had previously. Through the insti-
tution of structures as diverse, although ultimately closely related, as legal inqui-
sition, sacramental confession, and pastoral preaching, the church in the late Middle
Ages became increasingly involved in investigating and controlling common beliefs
and practices.86
The intensity of authorities’ concerns surely also rested on the growing fear of
demons and the devil in the later Middle Ages. This general development has never
been fully explained, but its manifestation in many areas of late medieval religious
culture is apparent, particularly in terms of a growing preoccupation among clerical
authorities to discern demonic activity in areas such as spirit possession, mystical
83 On early medieval confrontations between Christian practice and pagan superstitions, see Flint,
Rise of Magic, but also Jolly, Popular Religion. Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul,
A.D. 481–751 (Leiden, 1995), 154 –206, argues strongly that little real pagan practice unaccommodated
to Christianity persisted after the seventh or eighth century.
84 On “Frömmigkeitstheologie,” see Berndt Hamm, “Frömmigkeit als Gegenstand theologie-
geschichtlicher Forschung: Methodisch-historische Überlegungen am Beispiel von Spätmittelalter und

Reformation,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 74 (1977): 464 – 497; Hamm, “Von der spätmittel-
alterlichen reformatio zur Reformation: Der Prozeß normativer Zentrierung von Religion und Ge-
sellschaft in Deutschland,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1993): 7–82, esp. 18–24; Hamm, “Nor-
mative Centering in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology, and
Iconology,” Journal of Early Modern History 3, no. 4 (1999): 307–354, 325–330. Baumann, Aberglaube,
1: 201–202, does not use this term but stresses the desire to create a “theologia practica” and extend
scholastic theology to a wider audience evident especially among what she labels the “Vienna school”
of late medieval authors concerned with superstition.
85 Daniel Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval
Tract,” AHR 108, no. 5 (December 2003): 1308–1337, esp. the chart on 1336–1337.
86 For one approach to this broad subject, see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and
Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004).

experience, and magical activity with less ambiguity than they had previously al-
lowed.87 Moreover, fifteenth-century authorities concerned with the operation of
demonic power, and thus magical practices, were compelled to understand that op-
eration within a much more rigid and precise system of scholastic demonology that
had developed since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Demonic activity in the
world was now conceived as strictly limited by the accepted laws of essentially Ar-
istotelian physics.88 Probing more deeply and with new rigor into demonic action and
its supposed manifestation in any number of potentially superstitious common spells,
charms, and other rites, authorities clearly pressed the limits of traditional ap-
proaches to understanding the workings of demonic, and concomitantly divine,

power in the world.
Attempting to reinforce their construction of witchcraft as utterly and absolutely
diabolical, late medieval witchcraft theorists emphasized traditional Christian doc-
trine that magic operated through demonic agency, not any inherent power in the
spell or the human spell-caster.89 They thus reveal an element of “disenchantment”
buried at the heart of medieval notions of “magic” itself. Yet they also reveal the
dilemma that such disenchantment presented to Christian thinkers, since it impinged
on “religious” as well as “magical” rites. For all that Protestantism constructed a new
theology of religious ritual, still throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
this tension endured. Indeed, while Protestant authorities regarded the medieval
church as profoundly superstitious, their basic definition of superstition as deformed
or misdirected worship was essentially medieval, and they remained deeply troubled
by what R. W. Scribner so aptly termed the “twilight-zone” of spells, charms, and
potential superstitions that lay between entirely legitimate ecclesiastical rite and
wholly condemned demonic witchcraft.90 It would be left to the Enlightenment to
shift the terms of debate decidedly, reconfiguring superstition as an irrational rather
than an improper act. “Magical” rites were no longer condemned because they rep-
resented a perverse redirecting of “religious” devotion toward demons rather than
toward the deity. Instead they were derided, along with much formally “religious”
87 Baumann, Aberglaube, 1: 318–321, notes but does not extensively analyze the particularly demon-
ized nature of late medieval concern over superstition. On general fear of the devil, see Jeffrey Burton
Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 295–296; Robert Muchembled, A
History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 2003), 20–21.
On growing concerns with spirit possession and the discernment of spirits, see Barbara Newman, “Pos-
sessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,”
Speculum 73, no. 3 (1998): 733–770; Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 274 –319; Elliott, Proving Woman, 264 –
296.
88 The most probing study of this development has been Stephens, Demon Lovers. While he con-
centrates on conceptions of demonic bodies and demonic sex, the ramifications of this development were
far broader.
89 Peter Brown, “Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity: From Late Antiquity into the Middle
Ages,” in Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London, 1972), 119–146, esp. 131–
138, although as Brown points out, in late antiquity Christian authorities tended to deemphasize human
participation in magic, while late medieval witchcraft theorists focused strongly on human agents, if not
human agency.
90 R. W. Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Refor-
mation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 1 (1984): 47–77, 71. Saxer, Aberglaube, makes clear the
degree to which Calvin’s notion of superstition, based on ancient and patristic sources, was similar to
that of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Catholic reformers, and even to that of medieval scholastic
theologians, although he of course located superstition in the world very differently than they did.

ritual, as silly and nonsensical.91 Thus the elaborate parsing of proper and improper
rites and the convoluted considerations of how they might or might not interact with
supernatural entities that had plagued centuries past suddenly became unnecessary,
at least for those who considered themselves enlightened.
The fifteenth century was, then, neither an end nor a beginning in terms of “mag-
ical thought” or “disenchantment” in Europe. It was, instead, part of a profoundly
gradual transition whereby foundational Christian beliefs about the functioning of
religio-magical rites shifted ultimately to the enlightened rejection (never fully re-
alized in the eighteenth or subsequent centuries) of all “magic” and much traditional
“religion.” Yet within that slow shift, the fifteenth century was an important moment,

for in it we can see the strands connecting concern about witchcraft and superstition
back to earlier medieval doctrines of magic and demonic power, as well as the newly
heightened tensions and energies that would fuel these concerns in the coming early
modern age. Studies of late medieval Europe are often dominated by overarching
paradigms of autumnal waning or, more actively, prolonged crises leading finally to
the Renaissance and Reformation.92 Conversely, some scholars have stressed the
enduring vitality of traditional medieval beliefs and practices into the fifteenth cen-
tury.93 Growing concerns about witchcraft, common spells, and superstitions, how-
ever, illustrate how new dynamics and tensions emerging in this period (neither so
extreme nor so sudden as to warrant the term “crisis,” perhaps) interacted within
long-standing Christian beliefs and helped drive authorities toward new models of
thought and understanding, even as they sought to preserve, reassert, or reaffirm
traditional ones.
While the arguments, concerns, and conclusions of witchcraft theorists used to
be relegated to the fringe of European history, we now know how central demo-
nological thought was to numerous areas of intellectual activity, certainly in the early
modern period.94 Indeed, many scholars are coming to argue that witchcraft, magic,
and magical thought remain integral aspects even of Western modernity. Never-
theless, authoritative denial and intellectual dismissal of magic have been salient
features of modern Western culture for several centuries. This “disenchantment,”
whether given that label or not, continues to be viewed essentially in terms of emerg-
ing skepticism and repudiation of magical beliefs.95 Even when Weberian arguments
are recast in more nuanced and specific terms, such as conceptions of ritual oper-
ations, scholars still tend to seek defining moments of change in which old systems
were substantially rejected. Yet elements of disenchantment existed already within
premodern European conceptions of magical and other ritual operations. The his-
torical processes of disenchantment, therefore, cannot be understood solely in terms
of rejection of magical beliefs motivated by forces external to magical thought,
whether Protestant theology, scientific rationalism, or Enlightenment philosophy.
91 Pott, Aufklärung und Aberglaube, 100–124; Campagne, Homo Catholicus, 100–112.
92 Overview and trenchant criticism of these models in Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning
to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4, no. 1 (2000): 85–125.
93 For example, Bernd Moeller’s classic “Frömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500” (1965), translated
as “Religious Life in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Gerald Strauss, ed., Pre-Reformation
Germany (London, 1972), 13– 42; more recently Duffy’s magisterial Stripping of the Altars.
94 Most thoroughly demonstrated in Clark, Thinking with Demons.
95 Styers, Making Magic, esp. 38– 44; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History
(Cambridge, 2004), 165.

Magical beliefs were themselves, in the tensions and ambiguities they produced, an
important force driving European culture along a trajectory of disenchantment.96
The fifteenth century—itself not a point of radical rupture, but a critical juncture
when many older, medieval systems and structures can be seen to shift noticeably
toward more modern forms—reveals how the long history of magic in Europe is an
important element of the putatively modern narrative of disenchantment.
96 On belief as a historical force, see Thomas Kselman, “Introduction,” in Kselman, ed., Belief in
History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), 1–15.

Michael D. Bailey is an Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University.
His research focuses on late medieval religious culture, particularly magic and
other heterodox beliefs and practices. Among his books are Battling Demons:
Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (2003) and a broad his-
torical survey, Magic and Superstition in Europe (forthcoming). His current
project, of which this article represents a part, explores rising concerns over
superstition in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and how such
concerns reflected and shaped categories of religious understanding. He re-
ceived his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he studied with Robert
Lerner, Richard Kieckhefer, William Monter, and Edward Muir.

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The Disenchantment of Magic:

Spells, Charms, and Superstition in

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Historians of European magic and witchcraft have also engaged, sometimes

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ber’s influence on 185–186.

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The Malleus Maleficarum, 21.

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Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

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by authorities at this time, allowed them to define a number of malevolent magical

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aid was quite common.

numbered for 353).

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trans. Falk Eckhard Graf (Ahlerstedt, 1989), 46– 48.

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common magic.37 Interestingly, elsewhere in Formicarius, Nider related how this

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Medieval Magic,” AHR 99, no. 3 (June 1994): 813–836.

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Ibid., fol. 79r.

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and Acts 8:18 and 28:8.

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geschichtlicher Forschung: Methodisch-historische Überlegungen am Beispiel von Spätmittelalter und

Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004).

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(Cambridge, 2004), 165.

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