In contrived circumstances, Sergeant Mike Jennings thinks of Isobel Dodgson, publishers’ assistant, aspiring author and the witness he is interviewing informally, as an “unlikely corn-goddess,” a woman to give direction to “a potential [in Mike] that lay like unsown ground.” When Mike thinks this, the reader is nearing the end of John Fowles’s “The Enigma,” published in the collection The Ebony Tower (1974), but there will be no resolution to the case under investigation, the unexpected disappearance of a conventional Conservative back-bench MP. Instead, the story concludes with Mike and Isobel enjoying the “tender pragmatisms of the flesh.”

The stories collected in The Ebony Tower are exercises in what was soon to become known as postmodern fiction. While Fowles did not have the literary foundation to be as audacious as Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy (1987), “The Enigma” is an early attempt anti-detective story. In it the untested solutions to the MP’s disappearance offered by Isobel reveal the choices available to detective fiction writers. Fowles’s refusal to decide between them, leaving the enigma unresolved, is helped by his own rather odd choice to have Mike’s professional and rational request to dredge a secret pool on the MP’s estate for a body refused out of hand. The influence of Celtic myths that pervades the whole collection can be seen in the irresolution, the love story, the potential drowning in a hidden pool, and Dodgson as the unlikely corn goddess. That influence can be seen, too, throughout the collection. In the final story, “The Cloud,” Annabel, a companionably married mother to two girls, is described by her friend Peter, a recently-single father, as a mother goddess.

At first glance, the descriptions corn goddess and mother goddess might seem positive. The Ebony Tower present its readers with many apparently strong female characters: Diana and Anne in “The Ebony Tower”; Guildelüec and Guilliadun in “Eliduc”; Isobel in “The Enigma”; and Annabel and her sister Catherine in “The Cloud”. “Eliduc” is a retelling of one of the Lais, itself a collection of Brythonic stories, written down by Marie de France in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Fowles compares the importance of Marie de France to literature to that of Jane Austen 650 years or so later. All of the female characters are sexually liberated to use the language of feminism when Fowles’s collection was published. It seems, therefore, that Fowles was a conscious and productive ally of feminists.

It is, however, over fifty years since the stories were first published and perhaps thirty years since I first read them. Now my overwhelming impression of the collection is of a writer trapped within the confines of his own sexism. Maybe this has always been noted as a problem with Fowles’s writing, but I have not taken that much interest in it until now. The corn goddess and mother goddess descriptions exemplify this sexism and highlight how positive female characters, those promoted by some within feminism today, have a darker aspect that can be used to keep women in place in a patriarchal society.

Women in The Ebony Tower (1974)

Mike Jennings interviews Isobel Dodgson across a considerable stretch of “The Enigma” as they walk from her house over Hampstead Heath to a tea shop. The details of the disappearance and subsequent investigation, including interviews of many more knowledgeable and, if the MP had been murdered, likely suspects, are crammed into a little over half of the pages. The walk across the Heath happens on “an unbearably sultry and humid Thursday”; when else would a classic love story begin? We learn that Mike falls for Isobel “at once, in the door of the house in Willow Road.” She is a male writer’s fantasy: “A small girl, a piquant oval face, dark brown eyes, black hair, a simple white dress with a blue stripe in it; down to the ankles, sandals over bare feet ….” That is what Mike notices and, in isolation, that is reasonable enough for a detective story that is about to evolve into a love story. Yet, almost all of the male characters in Fowles’s stories constantly appraise and objectify the women around them; the exceptions are the two male characters in “Poor Koko” simply because that is essentially a two-hander about a crime told from the victim’s side. Peter’s ascription of mother goddess to Annabel is framed by his further observations that her eyes “toyed, teased, smiled; and never quite gave. … a smashing pair of tits, that dress last night.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Mike wonders if Isobel is wearing anything beneath that long dress and what her naked body might look like, neither of which is pertinent to the interview, the rehearsal of literary solutions to the disappearance or even falling in love. What Annabel thinks of Peter or Isobel of Mike are not of interest to Fowles in the slightest.

Everywhere they are found in religions, the corn goddess and the mother goddess symbolise fertility, the one through harvest, the other through motherhood and creation. Fertility presumes sex but not sexualisation. That sexualisation would be proper in the mouths and imaginations of men that a writer wants to characterise as sexist or misogynistic, but Fowles is not trying to present most male characters in The Ebony Tower in this way. Mike falls in love with Isobel even though he strays into lustful thoughts; Peter envies Annabel’s husband Paul for his relationship with her, more-or-less acknowledges that his girlfriend Sally is there for his own vanity, and tries to be a good father.

Elsewhere, David Williams, artist, art critic, biographer, contented husband and father, resists Diana and is then relieved that she rejects him when he presses her to have sex. Similarly, Eliduc is relieved when his Breton wife Guildelüec discovers Guilliadun, his English lover, “dead”, revives her, advises that she and Eliduc separate to allow him to marry Guilliadun, and proposes a life of cloistered religious virtue as a resolution for herself, thus removing any impediment to Eliduc’s future happiness. David and Eliduc are saved from themselves by women who stand with and as virtue in this collection of Fowles’s stories. Fowles’s women are reduced to mere cyphers, the Other in the service of male characters rather than rounded characters in their own right. Hence, Catherine, Annabel’s grieving sister, gives herself to Peter without giving of herself or an explanation why she would give in to him.

It is telling that Fowles does not adopt Marie de France’s alternative title for “Eliduc”. In the lay, Marie tells her listeners (for it would have been spoken or sung out loud) that its title should be “Guildelüec and Guilliadun”, a statement that Fowles retains in his version. That title is more accurate because the story is of two women who are the victims of Eliduc’s duplicity and sinfulness. In his persistence with the original title, Fowles, for all his introductory praise of Marie, effectively silences the female poet and blurs the emotional lives of the women as told by her. Male scholarship has retained the original title and forced readers to focus on the man and his need for redemption of his sins (lust, broken promises, murder and adultery).

It is also telling that Fowles imagines that Marie de France was a young woman when she wrote her lay down. The lays have been dated to between 1160 and 1215, a period of 55 years during which any of the several potential candidates put forward as Marie de France would inevitably have been young women. Equally, they may have written them at a later point in their lives. Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, for example, was about fifteen in 1160 but in her early 50s when she died in 1198. Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey, seems to have been born after her half-sister Emma. That means she would have been born after 1140, making her also a young woman in 1160; she was much older when she died in about 1215, the latest that scholars think the lays could have been written down. It is not clear why women recording Breton lays which were clearly circulating among minstrels before they put pen to paper had to have been young when they did so, especially when Fowles was in his late forties when he published his own version. The resolution to the problem created by Eliduc’s adultery, choosing to separate from an unfaithful husband and enter the intellectually stimulating and emotionally soothing life of the cloister, seems to be one borne of age and experience rather than youth and fantasy, as does the alternative title offered by Marie de France. Fowles’s suggestion that a young woman likely wrote down the lay reflects his own narrow fantasies about women that are repeated throughout other stories in his collection.

The corn goddess becomes the barefooted cook

John Fowles does try to engage positively with the second-wave feminism of his day, but in typical male fashion. His female characters play significant roles in each of the plots of The Ebony Tower. In this sense they are brought to the fore with a consistency that Fowles’s male contemporaries did not always achieve. In their youth, these female characters might seek fulfilment in travel, artistic expression and promising sex lives, but their fate is to become objectified by men as paragons of impossible virtue and removed to the domestic when they become mothers, at which point they may only retain glimpses of their former selves, as Annabel does in “The Cloud”, but in crudely sexualised ways. Peter’s description of Annabel as a mother goddess is an overblown way of saying she conforms to the male fantasy of stay-at-home mother and dutiful, companionable wife who is still a bit sexy. That is why he really envies Paul, Annabel’s husband; he possesses the kind of wife Peter lacks. A put-upon woman, Annabel is no mother goddess in any meaningful sense; her spiritual power, if she should have any, is nullified.

The comfortable domesticity of the thwarted middle-class woman also beckons for Isobel Dodgson, the unlikely corn goddess. Her literary aspirations and the evident intellectual qualities with which Fowles endows her will be crushed by her life with a man whose only focus is her body and his own domestic bliss. So much for the potential he possesses that will remain unsown ground. At the end of the story, the corn goddess is reduced to the “barefooted cook finally and gently persuaded to stand and be deprived of a different but equally pleasing long dress (and proven, as suspected, quite defenceless underneath, though hardly an innocent victim in what followed).” In one sentence, Isobel becomes a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom by way of the reluctance of a lady that a man is required to dismantle. All that second-wave feminism has achieved is for Isobel to decide not to wear knickers, a perversion of sexual equality – hardly bra-burning radicalism. Where is the imperious, giving goddess? Where the earnest, intelligent, forward woman of the “interview”? Out of context, Isobel’s forthcoming doom could be read as a critical commentary on the treatment of women in a patriarchal society. In the context of the collection, however, it is simply a male fantasy of womanhood in which goddess can be added to cook, lady and whore. That misappropriation by certain men is the dark side of the capricious corn goddess worshipped for her ability to provide sufficient food year on year and feared for her ability to waste lives in hunger, malnutrition and starvation.

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Links in the following list are for your benefit. I don’t receive any benefit from reproducing them.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1987)

John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (1974)

Image Credit

Photograph of the 1975 Panther paperback edition of John Fowles, The Ebony Tower, from my own library.

Two kinds of baba (old woman) are referenced in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave (1962): Baba Yaga; and the Harvest Baba. Early in the novel, before they fall in love, Wanda tells Jacob that Baba Yaga lives in the clouds above the mountains, not the one on which Jacob is enslaved but those in the distance “at the world’s end where no man walked and no cow grazed.” She describes Baba Yaga as “a witch who flew about in a huge mortar, driving her vehicle with a pestle.” Her broom, she says, “was larger than the tallest fir tree, and it was she who swept away the light of the world.” By contrast, Wanda tells Jacob that he resembles the men of the holy pictures hanging in the chapel in the valley. The scene is set for the conflict between superstition and spiritual rigour that dominates the novel.

Not long after Wanda has described Baba Yaga to Jacob, he is brought down from the mountains by his owner, Wanda’s father, to help with the harvest. This is his first introduction to the villagers as a community. There are grumblings that he might be the cause of the poor harvest despite the annual rituals performed by the peasants. These rituals are many. The villagers prayed “to the image of the Virgin and the old lime trees which commanded the rain spirits”; pine branches were set among the furrows to lure the rain; the ancient wooden rooster in the village was wrapped in green wheat stalks and saplings, paraded around the lime trees in a dance and doused with water; the unsanctified bones of suicides were begged for rain. The crop also had to be protected from the wicked babas who lived in the stalks and the evil dziads (old men) who lived in the tips. At each stage of the harvest these tiny creatures fled from one furrow to the next until finally they hid in the unhusked kernels which had to be thrashed thoroughly to crush the very last baba. Only then would the crop be safe.

As the harvest neared completion, the women gathered in the fields, the girls wearing wreaths. Under the eye of the bailiff, the girls drew lots to see who would cut the last sheaf of grain and become a baba herself. She did not share the fate of her pre-Christian predecessors, drowned as scapegoats for the community. Instead, she was wrapped in stalks and paraded from hut to hut on a cart in a joyous procession. The following night she danced with this year’s rooster, chosen from among the village boys. By now the baba was disguised as a witch, her face was smeared with soot, and she had acquired a broom on which she pretended ride to the witches’ sabbaths. An effigy of the baba, so well formed that it seemed alive, was paraded to the stream, scolded, spat upon and thrown into the water. It was hoped it would carry misfortune to the Vistula and out into the sea.

Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga remains an enigmatic character. In his collection of German mythology, Jacob Grimm occasionally ventures into Slavic, Romance, Celtic and other branches of mythology, religion and folklore, but he does not discuss Baba Yaga. Singer might, however, have known the work of folklorists like Oskar Kolberg and Alexander Afanasyev, Grimm’s contemporaries in Poland, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe in which Baba Yaga was known. He may well have known the work of Ivan Bilibin or others who illustrated collections of folktales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps he had also heard “The Hut on Hen’s Legs,” the ninth movement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), although the famous walking hut was not mentioned by Wanda in her description of the witch. The comprehensive range of Polish and Jewish folklore that suffuses The Slave suggests, however, that he did not need to reach as far as the nineteenth-century folklorists to gather it together.

Nonetheless, Singer’s assumption about the longevity of the comprehensive Baba Yaga myths seems to be misplaced. The witch Baba Yaga cannot be placed with certainty in 1648, the year of the Khmelnytsky Massacres that lead to Jacob’s slavery. The Iaga Baba of the Russian lubki (cheap woodcuts) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to be more of a shamanic or satirical figure rather than a witch, although, to paraphrase Andreas Johns, that cultural designation may well have given her appearance in these lubki its currency. This earlier version lacks the mortar, pestle and broom that characterise her in Wanda’s description, and she did not live in a hut that walked on chicken legs.

Johns’s observation that there are similarities between Baba Yaga and Holda/Holle/Perchta take us back to the elflocks discussed in the last article on folklore and superstition in The Slave. It is a reminder that these witch-like characters were often corrupt versions of pre-Christian goddesses and good-folk. In other parts of Slavic Europe, bleeding into the worlds of non-Slavic neighbours, variants of Baba Yaga are given much more positive names, the most common being “Forest Mother”.

Harvest Baba

The early mention of Baba Yaga in The Slave sets the tone for the later descriptions of the celebrations that occurred in Wanda’s Christian community at the end of the harvest. In translation, “baba” rather than “(old) woman” is used and the tiny babas living on the stalks of the corn are described as wicked. Their counterparts, the dziads (old men), are also given in Polish rather than English and called evil. The reader is meant to read the entire set of harvest rituals and celebrations as superstitious, even pagan, and as the product of fear masked by merry-making.

Jacob Grimm makes a few references to different babas in Slavic folklore. In a discussion of a custom found in Spain and Italy, that of tying up an old woman at Mid Lent and sawing her in half, Grimm notes that the North Slavs follow the same custom which they call bábu rézati (“sawing old granny” in James Steven Stallybrass’s English translation). Grimm suggests that this custom may be identical to that of carrying out and drowning Death followed elsewhere in Europe and that the Romance and Slav peoples replaced the giant Winter in this practice with a goddess or old woman (baba) in their own. Grimm adds as evidence the practice in Meissen and Silesia of creating the straw figure to be carried out and sawn in half in the shape of an old woman. Preferring the hypothesis put forward by Michał Frencel (Michael Frentzel; 1628-1706) that the straw woman represents Winter/Death, Grimm rejects the idea put forward by the fifteenth-century priest and chronicler Jan Długosz that this straw woman is Marzanna and she is a harvest-goddess. The basis of this rejection is semantic: Grimm proposes that Marzanna is a name derived from the various Slavic words meaning “to freeze”.

Grimm’s summary of Długosz’s conjecture offers an interesting detail of relevance to Singer’s description of the harvest celebrations in Wanda’s community. Długosz reported that in some parts of Poland the people remembered annually the order of King Mieszko I (c. 930-992) that all the idols in his newly Christian realm were to be broken up and burned. The people commemorating their pagan past sang mournful songs as they processed to the local marsh or river bearing images of Marzanna or Ziewonia (a West Slavic goddess of wild nature, forests, hunting and the moon). At the marsh or river, the images were ceremonially drowned. In Singer’s novel, although at a different time of the year, the image of the baba, made of straw, is similarly set adrift to drown.

Earlier in his Deutsche Mythologie, Grimm noted the existence of the zolota baba whom Ignaz Johann Hanusch / Ignác Jan Hanuš equated with Lada, the golden dame. Lada was a Slavic goddess whose worship in the spring was forbidden by fifteenth-century Christian homilists. Two other early writers, the Polish scholar Maciej Miechowita (1457-1523), following the work of Długosz, and the English diplomat-poet Giles Fletcher (c. 1548-1611), following Sigismund von Herberstein (1486-1566), wrote of the Zlota baba / Slata Baba. To Miechowita, the Zlota baba was an idol, aurea anus et vetula, worshipped by the peoples in Scythia, bordering Vyatka, in Russia. Vetula simply means old woman, but anus can mean hag, sibyl or sorceress as well old woman. Thus, for Miechowita, the idol was “a golden sibyl or old woman,” hence Hanusch’s equation with Lada. Fletcher confirms that sibyl is meant in his account, although he ascribes the Slata Baba or “golden hagge” to the Samoyeds and claims that it is represented on maps and in descriptions as a rock in the form of an old woman consulted as an oracle by a pagan priest. The only such rock he could find was located at the mouth of the River Ob, in Siberia; it delivered “ominous coniecturings about the good, or bad speed of their iourneies, fishings, huntings, and such like.” These practices of the Samoyeds he dismissed as “sorceries”.

Tantalisingly and too briefly, Grimm also told his readers about spirits that attacked crops in Slavic Europe. There was a field-spirit who paced through the corn, but what it did is left unsaid. Among the Muscovites, it was feared that a demon walked through ripe crops in the guise of a mourning widow. It broke the arms and legs of the workers if they did not immediately fall to the ground at the sight of it. The influential linguist Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1612-1653) informed his readers that the bark of a certain tree could heal those injured. The Slavs feared the corn-wife, too. She would make statements that one had to contradict, presumably to protect the crops. Alternatively, one had to recite and repeat the Lord’s Prayer backwards. She was called pshipolnitza in Russian, dziewanna or dziewice in Polish, and polednice / poludnice or baba among the Bohemians.

Dziewanna is a variant of Ziewonia, the Slavic goddess whose image was ceremonially drowned according to Długosz, but it can also mean mullein, often considered an agricultural weed despite its medical properties and iconographic connection to the Virgin Mary. In Grimm’s list of Slavic names for the corn-wife, Dziewanna is presented as a synonym of baba. The fear of weed-choked crops finds expression in the belief in tiny, wicked babas who need to be thoroughly removed by action and ritual. That dziewice (maidens) are co-opted to help and, in Singer’s telling, need to be transformed into babas and set afloat to be drowned reinforces the connections between fear and belief. Noon (polednice) or at least the excessive heat that it represents could also impact the growth of crops and needed to be mitigated by any means.

Wicked Babas in The Slave

Babas are ubiquitous in Slavic folklore and, like elves and wights, they possess an ambivalent character; they can be good or bad, depending on who has encountered them and in what circumstances. When they are bad, like Baba Yaga and the Harvest Baba, they cause harm to people or their crops and they need to be driven away. But it seems that Christians, whether kings, priests, scholars or diplomats, were responsible for accentuating the wickedness of the babas. Nonetheless, many harvest rituals survive in Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries. The leaving the last sheaf to be ritually cut, making corn dollies and sculptures, processing around the village, celebrating with food and drink, music and dance, and the blessing of the great and good. While antisemitic animosity towards Jacob thrums through the harvest scenes, it is the product of ignorance and superstition. Once the harvest is done, he is incorporated into the festivities, despite his reluctance. Relief has overcome the irrational fears of the villagers so dependent on agriculture for their basic needs.

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Links in the following list are for your benefit. I don’t receive any benefit from reproducing them.

Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, Respublica Moscoviae et Urbes (1630)

Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591; fasc. ed., 1966)

Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythologie, vols. 1, 3 and 4; trans, from the fourth ed., James Steven Stallybrass (London, 1883)

Sigismund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum commentarii (1549)

Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (2004)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave, trans. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cecil Hemley (1962)

Image credit

Photograph of the front cover of the 1978 UK reprint of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave, from my own library.

In The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer describes Wanda and her peasant neighbours, both men and women, as wearing elflocks. The term might refer to simple tangles in the hair that had not yet been brushed out or the idea that elves or fairies had been playing mischievously but not sinisterly with the hair while the person was sleeping. Given the setting of the novel and Singer’s Polish origins, however, he may have meant something more specific, the Polish plait (plica polonica) that was popular in parts of central Europe until the nineteenth century. While it may have had origins in the medical condition plica neuropathica, of which matted hair was symptomatic, the Polish plait accrued folkloric meaning and treatments which were implied in Singer’s use of them.

The Polish plait in folklore

In 1830, the Polish physician Marian Florian, Ritter von Ogończyk Zakrzewski, published Medizinisch-literärische Geschichte des Weichselzopfes. Ein Versuch, “an attempt” at a medico-literary history of the “Vistula plait” (named for the longest river in Poland). Ogończyk Zakrzewski wanted to trace the emergence and spread of the medical condition and located a range of sources that took him back to the Middle Ages. These sources told of folk medical practices to cure the disease. The following of Ogończyk Zakrzewski’s many observations about folkloric practice were reported by Jacob Grimm in a footnote to the chapter concerning wights and elves in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835 and later editions):

its cure also is accomplished with superstitious ceremonies. In Podlachia the elftuft is solemnly cut off at Easter time and buried. In the Skawina district about Cracow, it is partially cropped with redhot shears, a piece of copper money tied up in it, and thrown into the ruins of an old castle in which evil spirits lodge; but whoever does this must not look round, but hasten home as fast as he can.

This footnote comes towards the end of a discussion about the character of elves. In this discussion, Grimm reminds his readers that Dame Holle was known for entangling someone’s spinning or hair. While Holle’s origins remain obscure, one of her other names, Holda, suggests that she may well once have been a beneficent deity or creature. In the early eleventh century, however, Burchard of Worms transformed her into a witch (strigam Holdam; the witch Holda) in his recension of the canon Episcopi (first recorded in the canon law collated by Regino of Prüm a century earlier). Like the Roman goddess Diana who appears in Regino’s original record, Holda was said to lead a nocturnal wild hunt of demons in the shape of women riding on beasts. According to the canonists, some human women believed that they, too, could join this wild hunt.

To be clear, we do not know of any cases in which women did claim to ride with Diana, Holda or the deities added by other canonists. If such cases had occurred, the women would have been punished lightly because the wild hunt was believed by theologians to be a delusion created by the Devil, with God’s permission. While the belief in the hunt was sometimes condemned as worse than pagan, it was a test of faith that endangered only the souls of the women who made the claim and anyone who believed them.

By the early nineteenth century, Frau Holda had evolved into an ambiguous character with tangled hair. In Grimm’s discussion of elves, Dame Holle forms the bridge by which he moves from “the morbid oppression felt in sleep and dreaming” of being ridden by the Devil to “the nightelf, the nightmare.” The nightmare, Grimm notes, knots the hair of men and the manes of horses, or chews through them. Grimm includes Ogończyk Zakrzewski’s Weichselzopf and the elflocks mentioned in Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606) among the names given to the results of the nightmare’s mischief.

In another footnote to the discussion of wights and elves, Grimm tells us that the Polish wieszczyce is given as a synonym of Weichselzopf in volume 6 of Samuel Bogumił Linde’s Słownik języka polskiego (1807-14). Grimm adds that “vulgar opinion ascribes it [the plait] to the magic of a wieszczyca wise woman, witch.” Linde, however, provides a broader range of definitions of wieszczyca: prophetess, gadabout, and creatures who caused nightmares. These creatures were the incubus (itself Latin for “nightmare”), mara, ghost or spectre, elf, demon and hag.

The well-attested association of elflocks with malevolence and the nightmare does not, however, seem to interest Singer. For him, the elflock is symbolic of a superstitious, enchanted time in Polish history, when old traditions and beliefs competed with Christian ones as ways of understanding and coping with an uncertain world.

Elflocks in Romeo and Juliet

The term elflock appears sporadically in English literature. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1590s), Mercutio’s lengthy description of Queen Mab’s influence on dreams claims:

…. This is that very Mab

That plats the manes of horses in the night

And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,

Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.

(Act 1, Scene 4, lines 93-96)

The elflocks here are more than tangles. They are baked into the hair, implying that they are difficult to remove and that misfortune will strike the person whose hair was then untangled. This is consistent with descriptions of the Polish plait and the need to treat it carefully lest worse illness follow. But there is a dilemma for the dreamer. Wearers of foul sluttish hair were vain, yet retention of the elflocks on waking would diminish their looks, according to the fashion of the time in England. The misfortune caused by brushing them out, however, would be a further punishment for their vanity or acting on their sluttish dreams.

These elflocks also confirm the malevolent nature of Queen Mab. As Mercutio’s description proceeds, Mab becomes more sinister. In her anger, she blisters the lips of ladies who dream of kisses. The plaits in the horses’ manes hint at nightmares. The elflocks bind those with foul sluttish hairs to unkemptness. When Romeo interrupts Mercutio’s speech, Mab has transformed into the malevolent night-hag who presses her sleeping victims when she rides them. The sexual innuendo reaches its peak in this terrifying moment when the sleeper is awake but cannot move. The hag-ridden maids lie on their backs and the hag Mab “learns them first to bear / Making them women of good carriage.” The maids are ridden in dreaming as they will be by their lovers or husbands. This image fits with two sets of interpretations about the elusive fairy Queen Mab. The first is that she is sluttish in her ways, Mab being a name that could signify this in Shakespeare’s time; the second, that she is an elderly hag. She very much resembles Dame Holle.

About 250 years later, elflocks appear in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Brontë includes them in the description of Mr Rochester’s appearance as a fortune-telling gypsy woman. “Her” face was a “strange one. It looked all brown and black; elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin ….” While the gypsy’s appearance did not trouble Jane, the elflocks underscore the idea that she possessed uncanny abilities. Brontë’s pairing of the elflocks with a brown and black face in Mr Rochester’s gypsy disguise also echoes the antisemitic, anti-Slav sentiments of the Enlightenment.

The plica polonica as curiosity

In the Enlightenment, Polish plaits were regarded as a curiosity. The eighteenth-century traveller Hester Piozzi (also known by Thrale, her first husband’s surname) recorded of the specimens she saw among the Elector of Saxony’s treasures at Dresden:

but a plica Polonica took much of my attention; the size and weight of it was enormous, its length four yards and a half; the person who was killed by its growth was a Polish lady of quality well known in King Augustus’s court; it is a very strange and a very shocking thing.

Piozzi’s shock was shared by contemporary travellers to Poland who observed people with plica polonica. These travellers occasionally described customs regarding the plait but ascribed its prominence primarily to poor hygiene or sometimes illness rather than local fashion. Such observations served to distance civilised “western” travellers from uncivilised Slavs. For the same reason, Polish plaits became synonymous with Jewish “plaits” (sidelocks or pe’ot) among travellers, underscoring the antisemitic tropes of superstition and filthiness rather than describing the pe’ot accurately as outward respect for Scripture. By the nineteenth century, plaits were sometimes cut forcibly from their Christian owners in Poland in an effort to impose modernity and good personal hygiene.

It was at about this time that nightmares, the hags of riding dreams and witches, all associated with elflocks in Linde’s Poland, were brought together in art and music. In 1781, Henry Fuseli painted the first of his nightmares in which a sleeping woman is accosted by an incubus and a nightmare. The woman’s hair is untidy if not matted into elflocks. The association of hag-ridden dreams with the Devil was reaffirmed in stories like that of the creation of Giuseppe Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G Minor, commonly known as the “Devil’s Trill” (mid-late eighteenth century).

Wanda and Jacob

Singer does not labour the various connotations of elflocks. They number among the array of folkloric references he deploys to show that early modern Jews and Christians alike could be superstitious in the face of uncertainty and fear. One does not have to understand every single reference to appreciate this point. Whether Singer meant it to or not, however, the similarity between Wanda’s elflocks and Jacob’s pe’ot offers a symbolic bridge across the divide between the Slavic and Jewish cultures recreated in the novel. Unfortunately for the couple, it could only be crossed in death.

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Links in the following list are for your benefit. I don’t receive any benefit from reproducing them.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

François Guesnet, “Body, Place, and Knowledge: The Plica polonica in Travelogues and Experts’ Reflections around 1800,” UCL Discovery; final version, in Central Europe 17 (2019), pp. 54-66

Jacob Grimm, “Chapter XVII: Wights and Elves,” Teutonic Mythologie, vol. 2; trans. from the 4th ed., James Steven Stallbrass (1883)

Samuel Bogumił Linde, Słownik języka polskiego vol. 6 (1807-1814; edition consulted 1860)

Marzena Marczewska, “Kiedy choroba była gościem – o językowym obrazie kołtuna w przekazach ludowych,” in Piotr Zbróg (ed.), Współczesna polszczyzna w badaniach językoznawczych. Od języka w działaniu do leksyki (2011), pp. 87-108

Marian Florian, Ritter von Ogończyk Zakrzewski, Medizinisch-literärische Geschichte des Weichselzopfes. Ein Versuch (1830)

Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany vol. 2 (1789)

William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1606)

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1590s)

Simon Young, “The Mab of Folklore,” Gramarye 20 (2021), pp. 29-43

Image credit

Photograph of the front cover of the 1978 UK reprint of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave, from my own library.

Singer was born in Poland in 1902 and died in Florida in 1991. His earlier novel, The Magician of Lublin (1960) was adapted for film in 1979, with Alan Arkin in the lead role, while the short story “Yentl the Yasheva Boy” (1963) was the inspiration for Barbara Streisand’s musical Yentl (1983).

The Plot

Like many of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novels, The Slave deals with existential and spiritual crises suffered by Jews in early modern Poland. It tells the story of Jacob, a Jewish scholar who survives the Cossack massacres of Polish Jews during the Chmielnicki (or Khelnytsky) Uprising of 1648. He is sold as a slave to a Christian peasant farmer with whose daughter, Wanda, he falls in love. Their burgeoning, illicit love is interrupted when Jacob is ransomed by leaders of his former community and taken back home. Once there, dissatisfied with his life, he follows a dream back to Wanda. He finds her ill at her father’s house and they leave to avoid the laws against Jews sleeping with gentile women and Christians converting to Judaism, both of which were capital offences.

The story picks up again when Wanda has transformed into mute Sarah, Jacob’s Jewish wife, and they arrive in Pilitz. Wanda/Sarah is pregnant and the neighbours’ suspicions about her identity are confirmed when she gives herself away and confesses to her deception during labour. She dies in childbirth and is given a humiliating “donkey burial”, the child is handed to another Jewish couple until its religion can be confirmed, and Jacob is arrested. He escapes and rescues his new-born child.

The novel concludes with Jacob’s return to Pilitz after almost twenty years. He wants to take Wanda’s remains back to the Holy Land where he has been living and where their son Benjamin Eliezer had become a lecturer at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. God - or fate - has other plans: Jacob dies and is buried with Wanda.

Superstitious worlds

The Slave is beautifully written and the story poses many questions: about God and fate; about faith and religion; about the accretion of laws that are non-sensical when confronted with love; about sin and the human condition. But my interest here is in witchcraft, folklore, the supernatural, the preternatural and the superstitious. They permeate the novel without overwhelming it.

Thus, we learn of Wanda and her Christian community’s knowledge of hostile imps, derisive and familiar spirits, elflocks, demons, werewolves, trolls, Kobalt the devil who spoke with his belly, the Polonidca who chased ignorant peasants to sickness, the Dizwosina (a terrifying succubus from Bohemia), the Skrzot, vampires, a beggar that came to Lippica and sired five monsters on women, the wicked Babas, the evil Dziads, and hobgoblins. We are told of the procession of the village girl chosen to cut the last sheaf of grain and become a symbolic Baba who was disguised as a witch and danced with the year’s symbolic rooster; the story of the black field with black grain; and tales of vampire owls disguised as cats and witches’ mares galloping through darkness on their evil errands. Wanda instils in Jacob a fear of creatures who endangered travellers out of doors at night. They might be confused by the King’s Daughter, filthiest of all witches, and shoved into a bog; or enticed off the highway by Ygereth, queen of the demons, Machlath, her attendant, and Shibta, who broke the necks of newborn infants, to fall asleep until they defiled themselves with wet dreams; or driven mad by Zachpulphi, Jejknufi and Michiaru. Such nighttime travellers ought to beware the demonic, fire-eating Lillies with their bat wings who lived in the shadow of the moon and in tree trunks, and avoid the springs and rivers polluted by Shabriry and Briry.

As Sarah approached the moment of childbirth, Jacob felt that sorcery lay all around him. When she was Wanda, she had consulted the village witch, Maciocha, and knew that she would not live long. She performed her own apotropaic magic in secret. She wore on her throat a piece of meteorite; she took the shell of a newly hatched chick, mixed it with dried horse manure and frogs’ ashes, and drank the concoction in milk; and she sat naked on a pot in which mustard seed was burning, allowing smoke to enter her.

Jacob, fearing for his wife’s health, wavered in his faith and resorted, reluctantly, to his own magic to protect Sarah from she-devils, both Jewish (Lilith) and Christian (Shibta, Ygereth, Machlath and the Lillies), and the Evil Eye. He placed the Book of Creation and a knife under Sarah’s pillow, sourced a talisman from a scribe, and bought an amulet, a bracelet said to ward off the Evil Eye. Sarah’s Jewish birth-attendants performed their own superstitious rituals. They supplied her with concoctions: the milk of a bitch mixed with honey; and pigeon droppings in wine. They deployed the tip of a lemon used at Succoth and a coin blessed by pious Rabbi Michael of Zlotchev. With a long piece of string, they attached Sarah’s wrist to the door of the Ark; it broke, a bad omen.

These many references to superstition and magical beliefs, presented much as they are above as lists, are scattered over just a few pages of what is a very short novel. They conjure a world in which the preternatural was accepted by both Jews and Christians as providential or a test or a punishment, and supernatural creatures might or might not have power and dominion. Wanda/Sarah finds no contradiction between her old Christian faith, her new Jewish one and her familiar superstitious magical culture. Superstition is to be embraced or guarded against as needed. For Jacob, superstition is a temptation to be rejected but it affords the possibility of control and comfort in desperate times.

There is much here to unpack and discuss. Singer never interrupts his readers with crude interjections explaining the superstitious references. Either the reader will know the superstitious world created by Singer because they are immersed in Polish or Jewish culture or they will be able to bridge the cultural gaps by recognising the similarities between the creatures and practices in the novel and ones that they themselves know. Sometimes, however, some research deepens the understanding of both the novel and the superstition that is provided by Singer, especially for a historian of witchcraft. For my part, therefore, I want to share what I have discovered about the creatures and practices on which Singer has drawn. The next newsletter will, therefore, be about elflocks.

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The links are to current Penguin editions of the books in the UK. I don’t receive any benefit from reproducing them.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of Lublin, trans. Elaine Gottlieb and Joseph Singer (1960)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave, trans. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Celia Hemley (1962)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” originally published in Short Friday and Other Stories (1963); reprinted in Collected Stories (1984)

Image credit

Photograph of the front cover of the 1978 UK reprint of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave, from my own library.

St Walburga (c. 710-777 or 779) was the daughter of the Anglo-Saxon nobleman St Richard the Pilgrim (d. 720) and, by tradition, St Wuna of Wessex. She was sister to the saints Willibald (c. 700-c. 787) and Winibald (c. 702-761), and her uncle was St Boniface (c. 675-754), apostle to the Germans. The siblings joined St Boniface in his conversion of the Germans and established a double monastery, one that housed both monks and nuns (separately) at the same site, at Heidenheim am Hahnenkamm. Willibald was also appointed bishop of Eichstätt by Boniface. Almost a century after her death, in 870, Walburga’s remains were translated to the cathedral in Eichstätt where Willibald is also buried. At about the same time, on 1 May, possibly also in 870, Walburga was canonised. Her feast day is 25 February, the day on which she is said to have died, but the day of her canonisation was also celebrated in the Middle Ages. Through Walpurgisnacht, Walburga has become a person in whom traditional, pagan and Christian beliefs and practices have been preserved.

One of the oldest representations of Walburga is found in the Hitda Codex of the eleventh century. It shows the Abbess Hitda, who had commissioned the Codex, offering it to Walburga, her patron. Walburga holds a stylized stalk of grain, as she does in some later representations. On the basis of this image, Pamela Berger has suggested that Walburga became a Christianisation of the pagan Grain Mother, who was represented in the corn dollies made at harvest time. Walburga herself became associated with the fertility of the land and pregnant women. In one story about Walburga, she was saved from evil forces which were pursuing her by a peasant farmer who hid her in a sheaf of grain. This story became symbolised by the making of corn dollies by peasant farmers. Whether or not this transformation of a goddess into a saint was undertaken consciously at a social, folkloric or theological level or evolved over time, the idea that a saint whose canonisation was celebrated on 30 April and 1 May, days long associated with fertility and abundance, took on older pagan attributes is compelling.

It is interesting, too, that the eve of Walburga’s canonisation, Walpurgisnacht, is also the night on which pagans banished the evils of winter in anticipation of the joys of spring. The old world was burned away in fires – and continues to be so across much of Central and Northern Europe in variations of Walpurgisnacht rituals. It is not clear, however, when Walpurgisnacht became associated with the banishment and destruction of witches and other demonic forces.

In 1603, Johann Coler wrote of Walpurgisnacht:

On the eve of the Feast of St. Philip and St. James, sorcerers are accustomed to practice many devilish tricks to offend the people. In response, housewives use wild garlic, tallow, flour, and honey. They chop the herbs into small pieces, add the honey, and let the livestock eat it. And it has been found to be very effective. If it rains on the eve of St. Walpurgis Night, or if it is thundery that night, the common man hopes for a good year.

What Coler’s sources were, and how old the beliefs he recorded were, we do not know. By the time the witch persecutions were well underway, however, housewives were believed to be able to repel the sorcerers’ devilish tricks against their livestock by feeding their animals with an effective recipe, beginning “three days before or three days after the Feast of the St Philip and St James,” which fell on 1 May. Rain and thunder on Walpurgisnacht were also believed to be auspicious. It was also the time when Wunderweizen (miracle wheat) might appear. These peasant rituals were forgivable, given the people’s simplicity, says Coler, because there were always shoots of corn in the field at this time of year. Presumably, Coler meant to suggest that the precarity of the growing season was always a time of understandable anxiety for farmers.

The next significant reference to Walpurgisnacht came in 1668. It was included in the subtitle of Johannes Praetorius’s compendium of witchcraft and the uncanny:

Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, oder ausführlicher geographischer Bericht von den hohen trefflich alt- und berühmten Blockes-Berge: ingleichen von der Hexenfahrt und Zauber-Sabbathe, so auff solchen Berge die Unholden aus gantz Teutschland Jährlich den 1. Maij in Sanct-Walpurgis-Nachte anstellen sollen; Aus vielen Autoribus abgefasset und mit schönen Raritäten angeschmücket sampt zugehörigen Figuren; Nebenst einen Appendice vom Blockes-Berge wie auch des Alten Reinsteins und der Baumans Höle am Hartz

Performance on the Blocksberg; or a detailed geographical report of the high, excellent, ancient, and famous Blocksberg: likewise of the witches’ procession and magic sabbaths, which the evil spirits from all over Germany are said to hold annually on such mountains on 1 May, St. Walpurgis Night; compiled from many authors and adorned with beautiful rarities, together with accompanying illustrations; besides an appendix about Blocksberg as well as the Old Reinstein and the Bauman’s Cave in the Harz Mountains

The Blocksberg is more commonly known as the Brocken, a mountain of uncanny phenomena, like the Brocken Spectre, which has long fascinated people. By the time Praetorius published his collection, the witch persecutions were over in Germany. There had not been any major bouts of witch-hunting for about a generation, although isolated witchcraft trials were prosecuted occasionally. Walpurgisnacht was now part of folk tradition as the night on which witches gathered on the Brocken to celebrate their sabbaths.

In his Faust (written in fragments and parts between 1790 and 1831), Goethe assumes that witches gathered on the Brocken at Walpurgisnacht. No doubt, he was inspired by his own trips up the Brocken in 1777, 1783 and 1784. Goethe’s was such a compelling image that Felix Mendelssohn used it as the basis for his cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgisnacht; 1831). There have been many references to Goethe’s version of the witches’ sabbath since, in music, art and literature. It would be inaccurate, however, to assume that Walpurgisnacht as the time at which witches gathered predates the witch persecutions of the early seventeenth century. Even though he was writing as the major witch persecutions were gathering pace in Germany, Coler referred specifically to sorcerers, not to sorceresses or witches, and only mentioned their tricks, not their collective, heretical worship of the Devil. He dismissed the idea of magical attack as mere peasant superstition.

It is also unclear what the inhabitants of Eichstätt might have made of their saint, a woman whose tomb had excreted a healing oil in their own cathedral for many hundreds of years, becoming so closely associated with witches. Between 1617 and 1631, the prince-bishopric of Eichstätt had experienced one of the most intense witch persecutions of the early modern period. It had a very small population, perhaps between 5000 and 6000 people, yet almost 300 people, mainly women are known to have been tried and executed as witches in little more than a decade. The persecution was traumatic for those whose neighbours and friends, mothers, wives and daughters, even husbands, fathers and sons, were taken to the Galgenberg to be burned to death. These “witches” met in local places and never travelled much beyond the borders of their town. Under torture, they could not imagine flying off to meet with witches at such a far-flung place as the Brocken Mountain.

It turns out, therefore, that the association of witches with Walpurgisnacht might be an early modern invention, drawing together older folk practices, perhaps rooted in pagan rituals that had been partially forgotten and adapted to new purposes.

Read more

Pamela C. Berger, The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985)

Johann Coler, Calendarium Perpetuum, et Libri Oeconomici (Wittenberg: Paul Helwig, 1603)

Jonathan Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I and Faust, Part II, trans. David Constantine (London: Penguin, 2005 and 2009)

Johann Praetorius, Blockes-Berges Verrichtung (Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main: Johann Scheibe and Friedrich Arnst, 1668)

Listen while you read

Felix Mendelssohn, Die erste Walpurgisnacht, performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Reingau Music Festival, 2014

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I’ll be talking on “The Devil’s Trill: Tartini and Paganini in a Disenchanted World”. If you’re a member of the Historical Association, you can book via their website. If you’re not a member, join the Association. It is a great place to deepen your knowledge of history.

https://www.history.org.uk

Who accused Walpurga Hausmännin?

It is tempting to assume that Walpurga Hausmännin was accused by neighbours who feared her magical powers and believed themselves, their family members or their property to have been bewitched by her. That is the popular readding of early modern witchcraft cases. The long list of murders, physical harm, killing of animals and conjuring up of hail confessed by Hausmännin would seem to confirm that she had a reputation for witchcraft. But that is not the case. The report does not say that any individual made an accusation against her. The structure of the report reveals that she was responding to the leading questions of an interrogatory and the threat or use of torture. The report notes at one point that she was, indeed, “questioned under torture”.[3]

In the extant questionnaires used by interrogators of witches in Germany, like the interrogatories used by the Eichstätt witch commissioners, there is usually a question asking about the killing of children.[4] Female witch-suspects tended to have a ready supply of potential victims at this point because pregnancy, lying-in, childbirth, post-partum care and childcare were female concerns. Experienced mothers and newly-wed women participated in the reciprocal care given to their neighbours at each stage of pregnancy, childbirth and the early years of infancy; they did so alongside licensed midwives and lying-in maids. Infant mortality was high for all sorts of reasons and infant deaths through miscarriage, complications in labour and illness were common. At this point in an interrogation in which torture was used a witch-suspect had already confessed to her heresy and apostasy. To avoid further torture and perhaps bring the interrogation to its fatal conclusion, female suspects tended to recycle actual experiences of infant death as acts of witchcraft. That is certainly what happened in Eichstätt.[5]

Where the witch-suspect was a midwife, she had many more such experiences to draw upon as she would have attended almost all births in a parish over many years. The scale of Walpurga Hausmännin’s seemingly murderous activities represented her actual practice in Dillingen and other parishes she might have served. She had been a licensed midwife for nineteen years. Her confession lists the deaths of forty-one infants and two new mothers. That is a large number for any witch-suspect. In contrast, she only harmed one other woman and one man, killed the livestock of eight neighbours (all within the last three years before her arrest), and conjured hail, ineffectively, three times, all just months before her detention. When asked, under the threat of torture, what harm she caused as a witch, child deaths naturally came to her mind. It was a simple process to take a real death and add a diabolical motive that could never be proven in order to answer the questions and avoid more torture. Only her soul was at risk in doing so.

It may be that there was an accusation by a neighbour that led to Walpurga Hausmännin’s arrest that has been omitted from the report. It is more likely, however, that she was denounced as a witch by other suspects under torture. Interrogators seeking to root out a witch sect spent most time and effort on getting the suspects before them to name their accomplices. After all, in the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire, like the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, heresy was the crime; a witch did not need to have committed any felony to be punished by burning. Nonetheless, the Consitutio criminalis Carolina of 1532, according to which the judges and jury of the town court of Dillingen sentenced Hausmännin to death, focused on felonies caused by witchcraft.[6] As in Eichstätt thirty years later, the authorities of the prince-bishopric went for a comprehensive approach to the crime of witchcraft, viewing it as both a heresy and a felony. The most famous example of a witch being asked to name his accomplices is that of Johannes Junius, a mayor of Bamberg. In a letter to his daughter, he explained how he was forced to name accomplices street by street or face further torture. That is how large-scale chain-reaction witch hunts escalated, through denunciations made under torture rather than accusations made by members of a community.

Hausmännin’s punishment

Walpurga Hausmännin’s punishment went beyond the ecclesiastical one for heresy and the secular one for harming or murdering people with witchcraft. Like most people who were condemned to death for capital crimes, Hausmännin was led from the town to the place of execution seated and tied to a cart. It is likely that the parishioners of Dillingen were ordered to hear the confession, watch the procession and attend the burning. Along the way, however, Hausmännin’s body was mutilated. It was torn with red-hot irons in specific places (breasts, arms and left hand) at specific points along the route to the place of execution. At the place of execution, her right hand was cut off.

Mutilation was rare in executions for witchcraft but was sometimes done to emphasise a witch’s crimes. Cutting off Hausmännin’s right hand was ordered solely because she was a licensed midwife. This is why her story was newsworthy. In Malleus maleficarum (1486), Heinrich Kramer had claimed that midwives would remove newborn infants for magical purposes and in many ways Walpurga Hausmännin’s confession confirms the stories he tells. It has been shown, however, that very few of the thousands of midwives who were licensed across Europe found themselves accused of this crime.[7] Midwives were trusted by their communities and the authorities that licensed and monitored them. In some places, they could administer baptism if a baby seemed about to die, and in others they could withhold assistance to a single mother in labour to force her to name the husband (thus potentially removing the charge of the child from the parish to an individual). Midwives could confirm virginity and, in cases of witchcraft, search for the devil’s or witch’s mark on the body. If a midwife was denounced and condemned as a witch, therefore, her case was shocking, undermining faith in the authorities as much as the position she held. That is why Hausmännin suffered such a brutal and horrific sentence and why her case was reported.

Conclusions

Walpurga Hausmännin was not a typical witch. She may have been a poor widow by 1587, but for much of her life she had been a respected and valued neighbour in Dillingen, licensed by the town council to administer her skills to pregnant women of all ranks, from the wives of chancellors to the poorest of women. Had she had any taint of immorality or exceptional sin, had it been rumoured that she was a witch, she would not have lasted long as a midwife; there were plenty of opportunities to remove an untrustworthy woman from this post. It was Hausmännin’s respectability and the exceptional punishment meted out on her that made her case newsworthy. Sensational stories were as much a staple of early modern reportage as they are of journalism now, and we should not read them as the truth of a matter like witchcraft.

[1] “82. Judgement on the Witch Walpurga Hausmännin,” The Fugger News-Letters, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. Pauline de Chary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), pp. 107-114.

[2] Question 25, Appendix 1 “The Interrogatory of 1617,” in Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 257.

[3] “82. Judgement on the Witch Walpurga Hausmännin,” The Fugger News-Letters, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. Pauline de Chary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), pp. 107-114, here, p. 111.

[4] For example, Question 67, Appendix 1 “The Interrogatory of 1617,” in Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 260.

[5] Chapter Six, “Health,” in Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 181-198.

[6] “Bestimmungen der Constitutio criminalis Carolina, 1532,” in Wolfgang Behringer (ed.), Hexen und Hexenprozesse (2^nd ed.; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), pp. 123-124.

[7] David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch,” Social History 3 (1990), pp. 1-26.

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Sources

We know about Hausmännin’s case because it was reported in a handwritten newsletter collected by Octavian Secundus Fugger (1549-1600). Fugger had these newsletters bound and, over time, they have been published in various editions in the original German and in translation. Some of the reports, like that of Hausmännin’s confession, judgement and execution, have been published separately in other collections.[2] This collection and publication history presents some problems for the historian.

Not all witchcraft cases were reported either in handwritten newsletters, the printed newssheets that were popular in the sixteenth century and evolved into broadsheets, or the longer pamphlets. Often, the cases were simply curiosities. The first English witchcraft pamphlet, The Examination and Confession of certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex (1566) tells the reader about a phenomenon – witchcraft prosecution – that had only been possible in England since 1563 and was still relatively rare elsewhere in Europe.[3] The case of the Hatfield Peverel witches was therefore novel – news – and people were curious to know about it. Hundreds more people were accused, tried and executed in Essex, although less frequently than one might assume, but only the most sensational cases, such as those in 1582 in St Osyth, were deemed newsworthy.[4]

Other cases had a local interest. Dillingen was capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, a state in its own right within the Holy Roman Empire and distinct from the Imperial Free City of Augsburg. The Fugger family’s base was in Augsburg, but they remained Catholic after the Reformation and had strong ties to Catholic rulers in the Empire, among whom was the Prince-Bishop of Augsburg. In 1587, the prince-bishop was Marquard von Berg (1528-1591). The other three reports of witchcraft cases in Octavian Fugger’s collection of newsletters came from Schwabmünchen, also in the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, all before Marquard von Berg’s death in 1591. No other local news was reported in the newsletters between 1587 and 1590; it is all international, coming from as close to home as Strasbourg and as far away as “New Spain” and Japan. It is interesting that the four reports of witchcraft get progressively shorter as this curiosity in them seems to lessen. Hausmännin’s case is detailed over several pages whereas the last report is one short paragraph lacking names, crimes or any other pertinent detail.[5] A more prodigious collector of handwritten newsletters, Fugger’s near contemporary Johann Jakob Wick, tended to focus even more closely on local news. Again, the witchcraft reports in his collection come from places like Zurich, where he was a canon, and Geneva, also in the Swiss cantons.

Hausmännin’s confession was also sensational. She detailed the reasons why she was seduced by the Devil, the pact, the witches’ sabbath, her acts of sacrilege, and numerous murders and acts of harm against her neighbours. According to the report others were accused of holding a witches’ sabbath, but if they were also tried and executed, their confessions were not deserving of report.

All of this means that the writer of the newsletter made a choice to report Walpurga Hausmännin’s case in detail just as Octavian Fugger made a choice to keep the report and bind it with others. We cannot, therefore, assume that anything about Hausmännin as a witch or her confession or her fate was typical. Nor can we assume that the writer of the report was either diligent or comprehensive. He may have edited, abridged or misreported elements of the case.

Writing the newsletter

The first question to ask is how the writer acquired the information. Confessions were read out before the condemned was executed, so he may have simply reported what he heard. The structure and detail of the newsletter suggests that this is unlikely. It seems more likely that one of the judges and jurymen of the court of the town of Dillingen lent him a copy to use. We know, however, that he then edited out some of the detail. Two paragraphs report eight and thirteen child killings simply by listing one of the parents. Presumably, this was to avoid repetition of very similar detail. A judge and jury would expect to hear all pertinent information in order to effectively pass judgement.

Extracting a confession

But how did Walpurga Hausmännin come to give such a long, damning confession? From my work on Eichstätt, another prince-bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire, it is clear to me that she was subjected to leading questions asked in strict order and punctuated by effective torture whenever she refused to answer, contradicted herself or tried to retract her confession, either in part or in its entirety. This process would have taken several days, weeks, months or, at the height of the German witch persecutions in the 1610s and 1620s, even years.[6]

The strict order of the Eichstätt interrogatory (legal questionnaire) begins with questions about the accused and the moral character of her parents and herself. This sets the scene for the question about when, not if, she became a witch. At this point in the hundreds of interrogation transcripts I have read, the accused always denied being a witch and torture was always necessary. In Eichstätt, torture ranged from showing the instruments of torment (first the thumbscrews, then the strappado) to placing the accused witch’s thumbs or body in them to actively using them, sometimes in novel ways. Eventually, all the accused witches confessed to being a witch and gave the detail required. As in Hausmännin’s confession, they sometimes set the seduction in the context of an immoral or sinful act, often recycled from their earlier answers to questions about sex before or outside of marriage. The widowed Hausmännin claimed that thirty-one years ago she arranged to meet with Bis im Pfarrhof, a servant of the man for whom she was cutting corn, for sex. This happened at night and it seems she was paid in the form of a dodgy half thaler. When the time came, it was the Devil who appeared to Hausmännin in the form and clothing of the servant and who gave her the worthless coin. We have no reason to assume that Hausmännin would lie about the basic facts of the event, that is, prostituting herself or, at the very least, committing fornication with Bis. Under torture, people do tell true stories, manipulating them to the needs of the questioner. That is the only way to effectively avoid more torture.

To be continued next week …

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[1] “82. Judgement on the Witch Walpurga Hausmännin,” The Fugger News-Letters, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. Pauline de Chary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), pp. 107-114.

[2] For example, “The Judgement of a Witch,” in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (eds.), The Portable Renaissance Reader (rev. ed. 1968; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 258-262.

[3] The Examination and Confession of certaine Wytches in Marion Gibson (ed.), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 10-24.

[4] W. W., A true and just Recorde in Marion Gibson (ed.), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 72-124.

[5] “122. Fear of Witches in Suabia,” The Fugger News-Letters, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. Pauline de Chary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), p. 156.

[6] On the persecutions in Eichstätt, see Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

About me

I’m Jonathan Durrant, a historian of witchcraft and gender. I was born in Chelmsford, Essex, and grew up, for the most part, in a village next door to Great Wenham, Suffolk. If you have read something about English witchcraft history, you will know that very many English witches were tried at Chelmsford and that the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, was born in the village of Great Wenham, where his father was the vicar of the Church of St John. But I knew neither of these facts until after I had graduated from university. Witchcraft history was then a hidden history, even from those of us who lived where prosecutions had been numerous, and not a part of mainstream British heritage or culture.

I only encountered witchcraft during my history degree at Westfield College, University of London. In 1988, I won the college’s Caroline Skeel Essay Prize for a piece attempting to answer the question why early modern witches were mainly women. At the core of this essay stood the case of Walpurga Hausmännin. Historians’ interest in this case was piqued then not because they were interested in witchcraft but because it was reported as a curiosity in the handwritten newsletters collected by Octavian Secundus Fugger (1549-1600). Octavian was a scion of the Fugger family of Augsburg which enjoyed a great deal of wealth in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through their banking and mercantile interests across Europe and the New World. The report into Hausmännin’s trial and execution is the first and by far the longest of four witchcraft reports in the extant Fugger newsletter collections. These witchcraft cases took place between 1587 and 1590, Hausmännin’s in Dillingen, the others in and around Schwabmünchen, places close to Augsburg; none, however, was part of a wider craze or persecution. Much of what I had to say in 1988 was speculative as there were few other accessible primary sources concerning witchcraft and only a limited scholarly historiography.

How times change – and how rapidly! By the time I returned to university in 1992, to study for an MA in Women’s History at Royal Holloway, a great deal more scholarship was underway. After the MA, Lyndal Roper supervised my doctoral thesis “Witchcraft, Gender and Society in the Early Modern Prince-Bishopric of Eichstätt”. My main interest was in reconstructing the lives of women and men in early modern Catholic Germany through the confessions of witchcraft forced from them through leading questions and extreme forms of torture. They proved to be a valuable resource for social, cultural and gender history. Where else other than in witchcraft interrogations did ordinary women and men reveal the intimate details of their lives?

That thesis became Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007), which you can read for free via Brill’s website. Since then, I have written on various aspects of witchcraft history in academic journals, book chapters and encyclopedia entries. I was co-editor, with Michael Bailey, of the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft (Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2012). I have also published in The Conversation and Desperta Ferro Arqueología e Historia, and appeared on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour in 2001 talking about the kiss of shame and in the “Witches” episode of Tony Robinson’s Gods and Monsters TV series (2012). In the Autumn of 2024, I devised and led the Historical Association’s short course “Witchcraft, Werewolves and Magic in European History”, which I taught with Jan Machielsen, Laura Kounine, Juliette Wood and Lisa Tallis. This course grew out of my undergraduate teaching at various universities since 1998.

Currently, I am writing a book on witchcraft in world history. This has been a large project, taking me far from my comfort zone of the early modern world. It has challenged everything I thought I knew about witchcraft and its history. I’m no longer sure that I can even define “witch” or “witchcraft” with certainty. I have also accumulated too much research to weave into the 80,000 words of the book. Hence this newsletter. It is a place to explore ideas and stories that go beyond the simplistic arguments and theories that underpin much popular history about the subject.

About this newsletter

The newsletter is firmly a miscellany. I will divide the main posts into case studies (on Tuesdays) and research insights (on Thursdays), but there will be no systematic structure by time or space or theme. Babylonian laws may sit alongside persecutions in West Africa or Asian folklore or the more familiar European witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Occasionally, I will post additional material about what I’m writing about or what I’m thinking, especially if witchcraft is in the news.

For now, all the posts will be free. In the background, however, I will be working on some content for paid subscribers. Keep reading for updates.

Please do feel free to comment on the newsletter posts, ask questions, suggest theories, correct my mistakes.

More shortly,

Jonathan

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