Witchcraft and Crises in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1450-1692: Introduction to a series with Richard Tomczak

Woodcut of witches flying

In the early modern Atlantic World, witchcraft was woven into the fabric of cultural beliefs, traditions, and behaviors. At the core of the witch-trials was the prominent belief that the physical, material world intertwined with that of the spiritual. This belief in divine and evil intervention in the material world played an integral role in the harm associated with witchcraft. People used this intervention to explain the unexplainable: sickness, environmental phenomenon, and unusual beliefs or rituals deemed heretical.

As a result, witchcraft trials provide a window into the psychological tensions that infiltrated early modern European and colonial American communities. Trial records shed light on their fears and aspirations, their social relationships, religious beliefs, ideas of gender, and perhaps most importantly, why certain groups of people have been targeted for trespassing outside the constructed social boundaries of the community. These were not simply superstitious people that went through fits of hysteria and hallucinated that the Devil stalked their village. We need to understand them as people making sense of their world and use the external factors that impacted their worldview to understand witchcraft accusations.

It is no surprise, then, that the most dramatic witch-hunts took place during times of acute crisis. To be sure, witch-trials were never spontaneous events. In Europe, several critical external factors contributed to the psychological tensions of early modern communities. The Reformation and subsequent Thirty Years War (1618-1648) ravaged central Europe and subverted long held beliefs in the Christian faith. The “Little Ice Age,” (1500-1700) precipitated widespread famine and crop failure.  Three successive waves of Plague from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries decimated European communities, indiscriminate of social status and cultural prestige.

There is similar evidence that witchcraft trials in America followed a similar pattern. The mid-seventeenth century crisis of the Puritan faith—the debilitating decline in church membership—undermined the entire New England colonization project. While declining membership in New England congregations eventually led to the Halfway Covenant, a divide between the generations of hardline, disciplined Puritans and younger, American born individuals—largely uninterested in the initial exodus from England—led to intense political and social factionalism. More importantly, decades of brutal warfare and raids against Native American communities challenged their mission to settle the New World. To the north, the French threatened to invade New England and convert them to the Catholic faith (or so the Puritan ministers claimed).

There is no doubt that these larger trans-Atlantic transformations put pressure on early modern communities. What is perhaps more striking, however, is an examination of witchcraft accusations at the village level and how people utilized witchcraft to explain the mundane phenomena taking place around them. In depositions and court testimonies, we find an ever- expanding web of mini-crises that people reported on a daily basis. Indeed, village folk rarely mentioned larger catastrophes when they made witchcraft accusations. Instead, accusations spawned from what today we would describe as general misfortune or neighborhood quarrels: the death of a milk cow, butter not churning, beer not fermenting, unexplained pain, the death of a loved one, or a failed harvest.  For in the life of everyday people in early modern Europe and colonial America, these general misfortunes were in fact crises. The people that claimed to experience witchcraft were living at a subsistence level existence. The things they produced they needed to survive. The rare surplus was surrendered to the lord, congregation, or increasingly sold at the market to pay taxes. In short, it was a matter of life and death, and the witch stood in between them and survival.

The Pact between witch and the Devil

Moreover, people genuinely feared magic that could harm them. By the fifteenth century, clerics, theologians, and scholars had linked witchcraft to diabolism, or devil-worship.  They asserted that witches gained their powers directly from the Devil himself.  Diabolic witchcraft meant that an individual had given themselves over to the power of the Devil, usually in the form of a Pact, and channeled powers granted to them by the Devil to cause their neighbors harm. This almost always meant that the accused had met the Devil, usually at night in a remote location, denounced God and agreed to serve him. The transformation of the witch required this profaned agreement, in which the individual had to fornicate with the Devil to demonstrate their devotion. Other accusations included rituals, such as killing livestock, saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or, shockingly, sacrificing an infant. Once the witch did these things, they would be invited by the Devil to the Witches’ Sabbath, a gathering of other witches. At these events, they fornicated with the Devil and performed rituals that supposedly enhanced their powers. Accusations from people who have claimed to witness such events, and Church doctrine, stated that witches could fly to these gatherings on poles or brooms, or they could transform into a beast and travel there that way. Once the witch had done these things, they received supernatural powers from the Devil directly. Their powers could vary based on many different factors.  Witches performed maleficia (misfortune) against their neighbors. They also did more sinister deeds, such as droughts and famine.

In sum, during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, most people in Europe and the American colonies feared witches and the crises they could cause through their unholy marriage with the Devil. For village folk and colonists, general misfortune was much more than a trivial hardship. Indeed, for them, it could often be explained as an attack on their very well-being and posterity from diabolic power. The essays that follow all investigate the ways in which people sought to explain their world through witchcraft. Each takes a unique approach and examines specific characteristics of accusations, from English folklore to the gender arrangements Puritans brought with them to the New World. Our hope is that as a collection, these essays will shed light on the diverse ways in which people internalize crises and the world around them.

A circle of demons and witches

Further Reading:

• “The Experience of Bewitchment” by Robin Briggs
• “‘Weather, Hunger, and Fear’ Origins of the European Witch-Hunt in Climate, Society, and Mentality” by Wolfgang Behringer, in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge
• “Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex” by Alan McFarlane, in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas
• “The Demonization of Medieval Heretics” by Norman Cohn, in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge
• The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe by Brian Levack