Laura Stokes

Lucerne is a lake town, built on the shores of the Reuss river where it enters Lake Lucerne beneath the snowy peak of Mt. Pilatus. In the fifteenth century, as today, images of the city frequently depicted the Kapellbrucke — the covered wooden bridge which stretches across the river near its mouth — and the tower, the Wasserturm, which anchors it midstream. The Wasserturm served double duty as a watchtower to guard the mouth of the Reuss and as an interrogation and torture chamber. Around the same time that the Kapellbrucke was built, during the wars of the late fourteenth century, the citizens of Lucerne built an outer wall, fortifying the steep hill called the Musegg that rises behind the city. Beyond the wall, the steep descending slope of the hill was pasture. With their high vantage, the towers on the Musegg wall made excellent lookout points for fire in the city or for enemies without.1

Over a hundred years ago, Cologne archivist Joseph Hansen essayed an answer to the question of the origins of witch hunting in Europe.1 Hansen argued that the late medieval Inquisition essentially invented the witch doctrine: the idea of the diabolic witch who had forged a pact with the Devil and sealed it with her flesh, who flew through the night to the witches’ sabbath, was the sworn enemy of ordinary society, and together with an invisible legion of other witches exercised her undying malice through individual acts of evil magic. This witch doctrine was expressed clearly in Heinrich Kramer’s infamous Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, but had already coalesced in trials and demonology by 1440. Although Hansen’s thesis has been much revised and the roles of popular ideas and secular courts have since been emphasized, an examination of the events between 1420 and 1440 lends much strength to his contention. Three interrelated events in particular, in the western Alpine region, bear exami...

The old city of Nuremberg is built on the banks of the Pegnitz river, surrounded by thick, high walls. The cityscape, now as then, is dominated by the Kaiserburg, the imperial fortress at the apex of the hill that rises on the left bank. Nuremberg straddles the usually sleepy river, covering it with many bridges. At the beginning of the fifteenth century these bridges were wooden, and when the Pegnitz flooded during the spring thaw they were sometimes damaged or even destroyed by the rushing water. The late fifteenth century witnessed a transformation of the bridges of Nuremberg. By the end of the century many of the city’s main bridges were solid and stately structures, with stone arches resting on pillars in the river.1 The rebuilding of the bridges of Nuremberg was only a small part of the creative and constructive energy of the city on the threshold of the early modern era. This was the golden age of Nuremberg, which was one of the preeminent cities in the empire. The city was p...

The practice of criminal justice as it developed over the fifteenth century on the long threshold between the medieval and the early modern was increasingly severe. Legal and social historians have recognized that both levels of prosecution and degrees of punishment were generally on the rise during the period. A close examination of this increasing judicial severity for Basel, Lucerne, and Nuremberg reveals for each cityjudicial severity for Basel, Lucerne, and Nuremberg reveals for each city a unique periodic pattern within the overall escalation of prosecution and punishment. These periodic waves of persecution were common in late medieval cities and seem to be the means by which city governments sought to master criminal behavior.1 By analyzing the details of this pattern of criminal justice decade by decade we can identify the relationship between ordinary criminal prosecution and the origins and development of witchcraft prosecution. As the death penalty advanced in the late medieval urban communes, the re-imagining of magical crimes proceeded apace.

The early modern witch craze could never have taken place without crucial transformations in elite attitudes toward magic that opened the ears of judges to popular witch fears. The groundwork for these transformations was laid during the generations of social upheaval and papal schism that followed the Black Death, but the turning point came with demonological innovations in the early fifteenth century. These innovations coincided with a revolution in criminal justice that armed judges with powerful tools for extracting all manner of confessions at a time when they were increasingly disposed to lend credence to the accusations of the populace against suspected witches.

Abstract: This essay explores the earliest full-blown witch hunts in central Europe, in lands around the western Alps. It explores the trials, and the early demonological literature that the trials produced, as well as potential causes and future lines of inquiry.