Circling the Devil: Witch-Doctors and Magical Healers in Early Modern Lorraine

Abstract

Any truly rounded picture of witchcraft must incorporate the ways in which certain people established their claims to be able to read — or detect — witchcraft, the ends to which they applied that capacity, and the role that books played in their world. Here, as elsewhere, there are good reasons to move away from the traditional concern with persecution as such, in order to look in greater detail at the complex world of village suspicions, threats, and counter-magic. Witchcraft can then be envisaged as much in terms of therapy as of personal animosity; in many if not most cases, the point of such a diagnosis was to open the way to a cure. The Lorraine cases on which this analysis is based cannot be assumed to be typical of Europe as a whole, yet the duchy was an area of quite intense legal prosecutions, so the very slow maturation of most cases (an important point for the general argument) is rather striking, while the details do seem congruent with those from other parts of Europe. There are even stronger reasons for believing that the mental universe of the inhabitants of villages and small towns in this region must be broadly similar to that across large parts of the continent. If, as the evidence from witchcraft trials suggests, they saw the world as permeated by hidden powers and lines of force, then that is highly significant for our understanding of both their thought and their behaviour.¹