Publication details
Wolves, Poisons, Cloven Hoof: Cultural Exchanges and the Origins of the Witches' Sabbath Imaginations
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | During the first half of the 15th century, imagery about bizarre diabolical rites, usually included by modern historians under the term Witches’ Sabbath, emerged rapidly in the western Alpine and Subalpine regions. Since this imagery combined the 13th- and 14th-century beliefs about antinomian heretic sects with fears of harmful magic and with folklore motives, they became a frequently discussed topic in the historiography of late medieval culture, especially in the field of historical anthropology. This paper attempts to view the synthesis of motives, from which the Sabbath imagery emerged, as result of cultural exchanges projected on two levels: the social level (communication between specific social groups and institutions, for example preachers and their auditoria, or investigators and deponents) and the level of interfaces between different discourses and literary genres (inquisitional trials, heresiological treatises, exempla etc.). Particularly, the paper will discuss two essential and probably closely interrelated sources written in the region of western Alps between 1430 and 1440: The report on the witch trials in Valais by the chronicler Hans Fründ, and the anonymous treatise Errores Gazariorum. It will attempt to identify the cultural resources, or types of resources, which authors of both texts employed for their descriptions of the alleged diabolical rites. It will proceed with the question, how the meaning of the motives, which can be found in older sources and seen as cultural topoi, change, once their context is shifting. Finally, some assumptions will be made about whether or to which extend specific types of cultural exchanges can be perceived as patterns determining the emergence of the Witches’ Sabbath imagery in general. |
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