Witchcraft and the Occult, 1400-1700
Ulrich Molitor and the depiction of evil
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Coinciding with the spread of printing technology and hence the ready availability of books illustrated with woodcuts, the popularization of learned ideas about witches owed a great deal to the images in trial pamphlets and in some of the vernacular demonological treatises.  Whereas the Malleus maleficarum was not translated into Latin until the eighteenth century, the work of Ulrich Molitor appeared in both Latin and the vernacular, went through many editions, and was vividly illustrated.

Ulrich Molitor was a professor at the University of Constance, in the town that was the scene of some of Kramer's witch trials.  His classic work, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, was originally published in about 1489 at Strasbourg and Reutilingen.  There were at least thirteen Latin editions and three German, all printed before 1500, quite apart from later editions. The early copies are usually illustrated with six or seven woodcuts, closely copied in successive editions.  The tradition of illustrating the text was continued by later authors, most notably Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (1626).

This work was written in the form of a discussion between Molitor, Archduke Sigismund of Austria, and Conrad Schatz, the chief magistrate of Constance; it was designed to remove the doubts and objections raised by Sigismund concerning the existence of witchcraft.

The quarto edition published at Reutilingen by Johann Otmar, not before 10 January 1489, includes a woodcut of two witches being taken by a demon to a sabbat. All are mounted on a cleft stick and the
witches? heads have taken on animal form. This is the earliest printed picture of witches in flight.  [see below for the version in another edition]  The position of Molitor and Kramer was opposed by Samuel de Cassini, Questione de le strie (Pavia? 1505), who denied the identification of witchcraft as a heresy and argued that the Inquisitors themselves were guilty of heresy because of their belief in the night flight of witches.  Also included in this edition is an illustration of a witch inflicting disease with a bow and arrow, which appears to be inverted.

The edition printed at Cologne by Cornelis de Zierikzee, in about 1500, includes a celebrated woodcut of two weatherwitches who are standing over a cauldron and producing a storm and a woodcut of a witch embracing the devil.

Also in this edition, we are shown flying witches whose heads are transformed into those of animals, a male witch riding a demonic wolf [sic!], and a rather domestic-looking witches' feast.

 

An edition of 1544, entitled Hexen Meysterei, contains eight distinct woodcuts, some of them repeated.

 

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