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EARLY CHARGES AND PUNISHMENT

As the general ideas of late medieval and early modern Europeans concerning the nature of
witchcraft and the necessity for punishing it were first laid out in comprehensive detail in the
work of thirteenth-century theologians and canon lawyers, they slowly came to the attention of
the inquisitors "of heretical depravity" in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Canon law
doctrine had emphatically stated that such inquisitors could not legitimately investigate demonic
magic or witchcraft "unless [these practices] clearly savored of heresy." The standard teaching
commentary on this part of canon law, written by Johannes Andreae at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, explained that "clearly savoring of heresy" meant that those accused before
the inquisitors had to be convicted of "praying at the altars of idols, offering sacrifices,
consulting demons, eliciting responses from them, or associating with known heretics in order to
predict the future by means of the improper use of the consecrated host or wine." Pope John
XXII spelled out these conditions in a letter issued in 1326, and Nicolas Eymerich
discussed them in his massive handbook for inquisitors, the Directorium Inquisitorum, in
1376, a widely used and influential work that was printed several times in the early sixteenth
century and later with an elaborate commentary by the jurist Francisco Peña.3

In France around 1300 and in England around 1400 (and later in the middle of the fifteenth
century), charges of demonic magic and witchcraft figured in a number of trials involving
prominent political figures associated with the royal family and the royal court. The seriousness
with which these charges were taken, as well as the publicity of the cases themselves, suggested
a new sense of apprehensiveness about the vulnerability to demonic injury at the highest levels of
society.4 In 1322, the recidivist sorcerer Cecco d'Ascoli
was burned in Florence. The sorcery trial of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324-25 is an
important instance of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of a continentally trained local bishop,
Richard Ledrede, to introduce charges of sorcery and witchcraft into a local property dispute.5 Similar individual cases also
occurred later in the fourteenth century, notably in Paris in 1390-91 and again in 1398.

DOCUMENTING WITCHCRAFT

In the first half of the fifteenth century there appeared an increasing number of literary accounts
of the offense of witchcraft and of witchcraft trials in lower reaches of society that were
sanctioned by legitimate magistrates, chiefly in what is now southeastern France and western
Switzerland. One of the earliest and most widely circulating of these accounts was contained in
the theological tract by Johannes Nider, the Formicarius, written and circulated at the
Council of Basel in 1435.6

-notes-

3The relevant texts from canon law, as well as the
decretal of John XXII and a large relevant section from Eymeric's Directorium are
translated in Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1750
(Philadelphia, 1972; second edition forthcoming). On Eymeric, see Edward Peters, "Editing
Inquisitors' Manuals in the Sixteenth Century: Francisco Peña and the Directorium
Inquisitorum of Nicholas Eymeric," The Library Chronicle 60 (1974):
Bibliographical Studies in Honor of Rudolf Hirsch, William E. Miller and Thomas G.
Waldman, with Natalie D. Terrell, eds., 95-107, and Agostino Borromeo, "A proposito del
Directorium Inquisitorum di Nicholas Eymeric e delle sue edizioni cinquecentesche,"
Critica storica 20 (1983), 499-547.

4On the general problem, see William R. Jones, "Political
Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe," The Historian 34 (1972), 670-687; H. A. Kelly,
"English Kings and the Fear of Sorcery," Medieval Studies 39 (1977), 206-238; Edward
Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia, 1978), all with further
references.
 
5L. S. Davidson and John O. Ward, ed. and trans.,
The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler (Binghamton, NY, 1993).

6A relevant passage from the Formicarius is
translated in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 102-104. The debate about the
transformation of earlier ideas of magic and sorcery around the turn of the fifteenth century is
discussed in Arno Borst, "The Origins of the Witch-Craze in the Alps," in Borst, Medieval
Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages, Eric Hansen, trans. (Chicago,
1992, 101-102, and by Borst's student Andreas Blauert, in Frühe Hexenverfolgung. Ketzer-,
Zauberei- und Herxenprozesse des 15.  Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989), as well as in the
important collections of studies edited by Blauert, Ketzer, Zauberer, Hexen. Die Anfänge der
europäische Hexenverfolgung (Frankfurt, 1990), which contains the German version of
Borst's essay, and Robert Muchembled, Magie et sorcellerie en Europe. There are a
number of research centers devoted to the study of early European sorcery and witchcraft, one of
the most impressive of
which is the series Cahiers lausannois d'histoire médiévale, which has published
important studies by Sandrine Strobino, Françoise sauvée des flammes? Une Valaisianne
accusée de sorcellerie au XVe siècle (Lausanne, 1996), Marine Osterero, "Folâtrer avec
les démons": Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers à Vevey, 1448 (Lausanne, 1995), and Eva Maier,
Trente ans avec le diable: Une nouvelle chasse aux sorciers sur la Riviera lémanique
(1477-1484) (Lausanne, 1996). In Germany there is the important AKIH (Arbeitskreis
Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung), founded at Stuttgart in 1985 and immensely productive of
individual studies and conference volumes since. See Wolfgang Behringer, "Witchcraft Studies
in Austria, Germany and Switzerland," Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 64-95. For
the Low Countries, see M. Gijswijt-Hofstra, "Recent witchcraft research in the Low  Countries,"
in Historical Research in the Low Countries, N. C. F. Van Sas and E. Witte, eds. (The
Hague, 1992), 23-34.