Richard Landes wrote:
> this is old and very tired polemic: the middle ages are a long meandering
> thru periods where the church and the "seculars" exchanged these techniques
> of scapegoating and persecution -- to try and pin the blame on the seculars
> here really gets us nowhere in understanding the phenomenon, partly by
> turning off all those who feel the church does bear significant late
> medieval responsiblity for the paranoid and voilent discourse about witchcraft.
Dear Richard,
you are absolutely right, and there is no reason to excuse the church especially since it
was a strictly ecclesiastical élite who put up the hole stereotype and set off the first
wave of persecution in the 15.th. century.
It is however very odd to hear - even among historians - still the opinion that witch-persecution
is a phenomenon of the 'dark' Middle-Ages and that the Church is responsable to a 100% for it.
(You can also find the 'weaker' error that Catholic church is to blame while the Lutherans and
Calvinists/Zwinglianists stopped the persecution - which is just not true either.)
And as the mail of Carlos Sastre (below) shows, the Church did in fact sometimes take quite
a critical position towards witch-persecution in the Early Modern period.
But I do agree with you that the polemic is not only very old, but also very tired.
And of course far too many-layered to be discussed in an e-mail... So I won't go any
further.
Carlos Sastre wrote:
> Concerning this question, it is very illuminating to read that -at
> least in Spain- when a woman was accused of witchcraft she desperately tried
> to be put in the hands of the "Santa Inquisicion", because she knew it was
> her only chance to scape from a hard punishment. (J.M. BLAZQUEZ MIGUEL,
> *Eros y Tanatos. Brujeria, hechiceria y supersticion en Espanna", Toledo, 1989)
Dear Carlos,
thank you for the very nice story told by BLAZQUES MIGUEL. I'll try to find the book.
> Another interesting question is how the image of the witch was
> built. Caro Baroja and other scholars believe that classical poetry had
> something to do in this process; and literature 'infected' reality.
This opinion is shared by many authors. Cohn (COHN, NORMAN, Europe's Inner Demons,
London 1975) stressed the fact that some of the elements of the Sabbat (nocturnal reunion,
whorship to a/the demon, homagium etc.) have since antiquity been the basis of almost
every marginalisation and are to be considered as literal tradition.
On a more general level, Dieter Harmening has shown that almost the whole area of
superstition - also the one attributed to "folklore" by medieval and early-modern
writers - emerges from a very intellectual concept. (HARMENING, DIETER. 'Superstitio'.
Überlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen
Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters. Berlin 1979.)
This brings us back to Georges Duby who didn't accept any pure popular creation of culture.
(George Duby, La vulgarisation des modèles cuturels dans la société féodale. In: Niveaux
de culture et groupes sociaux. Paris/La Haye 1967 S. 33-50)
For him, culture is something created only by the élite, in monasteries an at courts, and
by a processus of simplification sinks to lower regions of society, where it can be
transformed and from where it can even rearise in a fairly different look and be considered
as popular where in fact its origins always laid in the upper-classes.
A good introduction gives: GILOMEN, HANS-JOERG. Volkskultur und Exempla-Forschung.
In: Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche. Hg. Joachim Heinzle.
Frankfurt am Main 1994.
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