THE PROCESS OF TRANCE, HEAVENLY AND DIABOLIC APPARITIONS IN JOHANNES NIDERS FORMICARIUS* Gbor Klaniczay

Johannes Nider (1380-1438) is a frequently mentioned but rarely studied ecclesiastical writer and reformer of the first half of the fifteenth century.1 After entering the Dominican order in 1402 in Colmar, he studied in Cologne then, between 1422 and 1426 at the University of Vienna where he returned at the end of his life as the Dean of the Faculty of Theology.2 He took part in the Council of Constance, and subsequently became a leading representative of the Dominican observance,3 in 1428 he was elected Prior of the Convent of Nuremberg, in 1429 he was sent as a new Prior to reform the

The first version of this study was presented at a conference in Claremont on Trance in 1996, organised by Nancy van Deusen. The written version is the result of my work at the Bellagio Study Centre of the Rockefeller Foundation, where I had the opportunity and the privilege to be Fellow for a month in 1996. While at that moment my enquiry upon Johannes Nider and his role in the origins of the concept of the witches Sabbath was discussing a fairly unexplored agenda, the seven years during which this study remained unpublished have witnessed a real explosion of studies concerning both Johannes Nider and the fifteenth-century beginnings of witch-hunts. In the course of various workshops, conferences or individual consultations I had the opportunity to discuss my study with my colleagues working on similar themes, and benefit from their comments and criticism. I wish to thank especially the helpful suggestions of Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsky, Peter Burke, Nancy Caciola, Don Handelman, Sabine von Heusinger, Brian Patrick McGuire, Martine Ostorero, va Pcs and Werner Tschacher. I must thank Judith Rasson for helping to revise the English of the text. When, finally, the present publication possibility presented itself, I have tried to update my references and cite the most recent studies, but I decided to leave the general line of my arguments unchanged. While it may have lost some of its novelty, I hope its insights still preserve their validity. This material will be part of my forthcoming book entitled Sainthood and Witchcraft.
1

On Nider see K. Schieler, Magister Johannes Nider aus dem Orden der Prediger-Brder. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte des fnfzehnten Jahrhunderts. (Franz Kirchheim, Mainz, 1885); cf. the entry by Eugen Hillenbrand, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlaxikon. vol. VI, pp. 971-978; in the past years important new studies have appeared on him: Margit Brand, Studien zu Johannes Niders Deutschen Schriften (Istituto Storico Domenicano, Roma, 1998); the partial edition and commentary of the Formicarius by Catherine Chne, in Limaginaire du sabbat. dition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c. 1440 c.), runis par Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Kathrin Utz Tremp, en collaboration avec Catherine Chne. Cahiers Lausannois dhistoire mdivale, 26 (Lausanne, 1999), pp. 99-265; Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437. Studien zu den Anfngen der europischen Hexenverfolgungen im Sptmittelalter, Aachen, Shaker, 2000; Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons. Witchcraft Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, University Park, Pennsylvania, 2002.

Isnard Wilhelm Frank, "Hausstudium und Universittsstudium der Wiener Dominikaner bis 1500", Archiv fr sterreichische Geschichte 127 (1968), pp. 214-215; Paul Uiblein (ed.), Die Akten der Theologischen Fakultt der Universitt Wien (1396-1508), (Wien, 1978), vol. I, pp. 115. William Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order (New York, 1973), vol. II, pp. 262-267.

2 convent in Basel. He was one of the influential opinion-leaders of the Council

of Basel, a prolific writer and polemicist, author of several successful treatises. His most popular work, probably inspired by the controversies at the Council of Basel, was the Formicarius finished between 1436 and 1438.4 This vast panorama of contemporary religiosity shows the ant-heap as a model of human society. Nider follows here the bee-hive metaphor of a distant Dominican precursor, Thomas of Cantimpr ( 1270) Bonum universale de apibus,5 and he selects his parallel metaphor with the help of the biblical proverb (Ex. 6,6): Vade ad formicas o piger: considera viis eius! Disce sapientiam. The dialogue between Theologus and Piger constitutes a rich collection of exempla.6 It is divided into five books each consisting of 12 chapters: the first deals with rare good deeds and examples, the second with conceivably good revelations, the third describes false and misleading revelations, the fourth the merits of the perfect ones, finally the fifth the tricks of the witches. We encounter saints and heretics, visions, revelations, possessions and simulations, high virtues and deadly sins, miracle-workers, magicians, sorcerers and witches. The wide range of this spectrum, encompassing good and evil in the same moral and analytical framework represents an important innovation which might account for its great popularity. The Formicarius is preserved in 27 manuscript copies (now in Vienna, Basel, Munich and Wiesbaden)7, three incunabula editions 1470/73, 1480 and 1484, each of about 300 copies (the one published in Cologne, 1480, was reprinted in facsimile, the one of 1484 was published in Augsburg)8 and in the subsequent two centuries there were five further editions (1516 and 1517, Strasbourg; 1519, Paris; 1602, Douai; 1692,

4 5

Schieler, Magister Johannes Nider, pp. 372-381; Bailey, Battling Demons, p. 153.

Thomas de Cantimpr, Les exemples du Livre des abeilles, ed. Henri Platelle (Brepols, Turnhout, 1997). On this model cf. Bailey, Battling Demons, p. 98. Beatrice Galbreth, "Nider and the Exemplum - A Study of the Formicarius", Fabula. Zeitschrift fr Erzhlforschung 6 (1963), pp. 55-72. Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi (Romae ad S. Sabinae, 1975), vol. II, pp. 500-515; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 108-120; Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 83-107.
8 7 6

Cf. Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum, II, 429-501; the reprint: Johannes Nider, Formicarius. Einfhrung: Hans Biedermann (Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz, 1971); Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 107-117.

3 Helmstedt).9 The impact of Formicarius was strengthened by the fact that some

parts of it related to dreams, visions, apparitions and witchcraft were inserted into his commentary on the Ten Commandments, which was finished about the same time as the Formicarius and became even more widely read than his other work. The Praeceptorium divinae legis i.e. Tractatus de decem praeceptis became a real bestseller, it had seventeen printed editions before 1500, six before 1472.10 The importance of Formicarius can be best illustrated by the fact that it was one of the principal sources for the most important demonology handbook of early witchhunts, the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Krmer (Institoris) and Jakob Sprenger.11 This is why modern historiography if it dealt with Nider at all, it was principally interested in his description of early fifteenth century Swiss witchcraft prosecutions.12 There has been much less attention dedicated to the equally colourful parts dealing with late

I have used the Helmstedt edition, which appeared under the changed title De visionibus ac revelationibus; the cited page numbers refer to this volume.
10

Hain, Repertorium, II, 11780 ff.; John Dahmus, Medieval German Preaching on the Ten Commandments: A Comparison of Berchtold of Regensburg and Johannes Nider, Medieval Sermon Studies, 44 (2000), pp. 37-53.

Andr Schnyder (ed.), Malleus Maleficarum von Heinrich Institoris (alias Kramer), unter mithilfe Jakob Sprengers aufgrund der dmonologischen Tradition zusammengestellt (Gppingen, 1991); Gnter Jerouschek (ed.), Malleus Maleficarum, 1487. (Hildesheim, 1992); Malleus Maleficarum, tr. by Montague Summers (London, 1928, repr. Blom, New York, 1970); of its impact cf. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung um Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901, repr. Olms, Hildesheim, 1963), pp. 360-410; Peter Segl (ed.), Der Hexenhammer. Entstehung und Umfeld des Malleus Maleficarum von 1487. (Bhlau, Kln/Wien, 1988); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers. Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London, 2002), pp. 32-57. Hansen, Quellen, pp. 88-99; translated and commented in English, together with the Praeceptorium: Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland (Philadelphia, 1939), vol. I, pp. 259273. Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (California University Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976); Arno Borst, "Anfnge des Hexenwahns in den Alpen", in idem, Barbaren, Ketzer und Artisten. Welten des Mittelalters (Mnchen, 1988), pp. 262-286.repr. in : Andreas Blauert, Ketzer, Zauberer, Hexen. Die Anfnge der europischen Hexenverfolgungen (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 43-67. this is where I quote it from; Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Einaudi, Torino, 1989); English tr. Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. tr. by Raymond Rosenthal (Pantheon, New York, 1991), pp. 69-86.. this is where I quote it from; Andreas Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen. Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Junius, Hamburg, 1989), pp. 3236, 56-59; most recently Michael Bailey, "The Medieval Concept of the Witches' Sabbath", Exemplaria 8 (1996), pp. 419-439; idem, Battling Demons, pp. 29-54; the critical edition of this famous fifth book is being currently prepared by Catherine Chne in the study centre of Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani at the Universit de Lausanne, parts of it are already published in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 99-265.
12

11

4 medieval visionary religion.13 In what follows, I should like to examine a

theme which returns to the original conceptual scheme of Nider, who was interested in the juxtaposition of heavenly and diabolic visions, and insisted that they should be examined in the same broad framework. One of the common features of these two forms of establishing communication with the supernatural is that they both rely upon trance, ecstasy, or religious rapture. The ambivalent assessment of trance became a crucial constituent in the changing evaluation of mystical visionary sainthood and of witchcraft in the fifteenth century, so the way Nider deals with this subject in his work deserves special attention. Let me enumerate his principal examples. Before having a closer look at these famous cases, we have to stop for a moment, for a critical assessment. What is the status, what is the claim of these stories to reality? I have already mentioned that there are scholars who consider the Formicarius yet another collection of exempla and we know that this genre is as much subject to the rules of folklore as to the requirements of truthfulness.14 Nider himself also repeatedly calls his stories exempla, yet, these stories seem to be quite different from classical thirteenth and fourteenth century types of exempla, filled with pastoral objectives and rooted in folkloric stereotypes. In the turmoil of the Basel Council, in the midst of this accelerated supermarket of information, most of Niders work gives rather the impression of sensitive journalism, though incontestably it contains some old-type exempla as well. Naturally it would be very important to trace the factual background of these stories, but unfortunately I have no possibilities for doing this for the moment.15

Werner Williams-Krapp, "'Dise ding sint dennoch nit ware zeichen der heiligkeit'. Zur Bewertung mystischer Erfahrungen im 15. Jahrhundert", Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 80 (1990), pp. 6171; Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale aufflliger Frauen in Mittelalter und Frhneuzeit. (Artemis & Winkler, Zrich, 1995), pp. 25, 66, 89-93, 96, 114, 252-256.; Dyan Elliott, The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality, in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York Medieval Press Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 141-174; this issue is included into Michael Baileys recently published enquiry, Battling Demons, pp. 91-117. Cf. Claude Brmond - Jacques Le Goff - Jean-Claude Schmitt, L'exemplum. Typologie des sources du moyen ge occidental 40. (Brepols, Turnhout, 1982).
15 14

13

Several Swiss historians are currently working now to trace these tracks, and they are certainly better placed and more competent to do this work. I should refer here to the recent and forthcoming studies by Kathrin Utz Tremp, indicated in the article by Bernard Andenmatten -- Kathrin Utz Tremp, "De l'hrsie la sorcellerie: l'inquisiteur Ulric de Torrent OP (vers 1420-1445), et l'affermissement de l'inquisition en Suisse Romande",

5 Even without this undoubtedly crucial inquiry, Niders stories merit an

examination as specific narratives, which earned unusually great attention in their age and had a tremendous impact. The types of religious behaviour described in them became models for posterity.

NIDER'S STORIES In Book Three of Formicarius, "On False and Imaginary Visions" (de falsis et illusoriis visionibus), we find the motif of simulated ecstasy recurring time and again as one of the most deceptive of the phenomena associated with "false prophets". Nider begins his long list of examples with a story related by a fellow inquisitor, Nicolaus of Landau. A certain "fraticellus seu semi-beghardus"16 living in the town of Bern acquired considerable notoriety by throwing about stones and pieces of wood in his house at night, making the kind of racket that haunting ghosts would make. Then he started telling people that they could expect to receive a revelation from some spirit, though he could not say whether good or evil. He shut himself up in his room, "changed his voice and started moaning and groaning, pretending that he was the spirit of a deceased local notable. Then he started answering the questions of the curious, as if the spirits themselves were answering."17 He even collected money to be able to undertake

Zeitschrift fr Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 86 (1992), pp. 72-74; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Ist Glaubenssache Frauensache? Zu den Anfngen der Hexenverfolgung in Freiburg (um 1440), Freiburger Geschichtsbltter 72 (1995), pp. 9-50; eadem, Waldenser, Widergnger, Hexen und Rebellen. Biographien zu den Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg im chtland (1399-1430). Sonderband der Freiburger Geschichtsbltter (Freiburg, 1999); Catherine Chne managed to identify several of the persons mentioned in the Formicarius, Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 221248. Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture. With special emphasis on the Belgian scene (Octagon Books, New York, 1969); Jean-Claude Schmitt, La mort d'une hrsie: l'Eglise et les clercs face aux bguines et aux bgards du Rhin suprieur du XIVe au XVe sicle. (cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1978). As for Beguines in Bern cf. Kathrin Utz Tremps study to be published in vol. IX. of Helvetia Sacra IX: Die religisen Laiengemeinschaften des Mittelalters (Beginen, Begarden), Kanton Freiburg, Stadt Freiburg, cf.. Andematten and Utz Tremp, "De l'hrsie la sorcellerie, p. 75; on Nicolaus of Landau, cf. Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, p. 56; on the activity of Burginus around 1409, ibid., p. 202.
17 16

"mutata voce verbis gemebundis, ac si anima esset alicujus defuncti, in civitate bene noti, responsa sciscitantibus dedit, asserendo se animam esse cujusdam nuper defuncte persone". Formicarius, III/1. p. 288 (unless otherwise stated, the translations are my own); the episode is analysed by Nancy Caciola, Spirits Seeking Bodies: Death, Possession and Communal Memory in the Middle Ages, in The Place of the Dead: Death and

6 pilgrimages to earn indulgences for the got what he deserved. Burginus, another "beghardus seu fraticellus mere secularis", who lived in the diocese of Constance, withdrew from the world to live the life of an ascetic recluse. His followers watched in awe as, lost in prayer and contemplation, he received revelations ("Alas", notes Nider, "false revelations, received from the Evil Spirit who appeared to him in the form of the Angel of Light").18 Then, as if he were St. Anthony or Pachomius, he started preaching a new rule for anchorites. He was burned at the stake by the Inquisition for his "fanatical impudence". Very likely, the group of Swabian heretics against whom Nider levelled the traditional charge of participation in orgies19 were likewise Beguines and Beghards: "They say that in the heat of male-female copulation, when the cold light of reason fades and man becomes a beast, they find the marvels of contemplation and exquisite ecstasy."20 Nider adduces a number of further examples of the group's depravity, which more or less repeat the Inquisition's established topoi in connection with the heresy of the Free Spirit.21 They declare themselves to be beyond the reach of sin; they strip naked at their gatherings to pray and take communion (the practice, Nider notes, is akin to those of the Adamites22, and is meant to show that they have no sense of guilt or deceased. After a while, however, his

activities grew suspicious; his clients started inspecting him, exposed the hoax, and he

Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter marshall (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), pp. 66-86, at pp. 69-73.
18

"orationi & contemplationi multum, ut videbatur, incubuit, & in his revelationes, sed heu illusorias, a maligno spiritu sub similitudine angeli lucis habere coepit", Formicarius, III/2. p. 303. Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons. An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (Basic Books, New York, 1975); cf. my Orgy Accusations in the Middle Ages, in Eros in Folklore, ed. by Mihly Hoppl and Eszter Csonka-Takcs (Akadmiai Kiad, European Folklore Institute, Budapest, 2002), pp. 38-55.

19

20

"in fervore coitus maris cum femina, ubi... ratio absorbetur, & homo bestiis assimilatur, supremam contemplationem & raptum excellentissimum dicunt consistere." Formicarius, III/5. p. 338.

21

Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (The University of California Press, Berkeley/ Los Angeles, 1972).

Ernst Werner, "Die Nachrichten ber die bhmischen 'Adamiten' in religionsgeschichtlicher Sicht" in, Thea Bttner -- Ernst Werner, Circumcellionen und Adamiten. Zwei Formen Mittelalterlicher Hresie (Akademie, Berlin, 1959), pp. 73-141.

22

7 shame, nor any carnal desire); they boast that the men regularly sleep with

the virgins of the confraternity, and never touch them. By way of debunking their claims, Nider tells of a sixty-year-old virgin that he knew who "lost the first flower of her virtue at their gatherings.... They say that during their love-making and lavish feasts, which they indulge in whenever they can, they receive singular revelations with the assistance of the devil. And--as if the light of these revelations had come from some good spirit--they are seduced by these visions into joining the sect, and nothing can dissuade them."23 Trance of diabolic origin--or at least of questionable origincould be found even within the walls of Church establishments in the high Middle Ages. Nider recounts the story of a thirteen-year old boy as told to him by the Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Kalteisen. The boy was sent to attend the Dominican school at s-Hertogenbosch. "Once when he entered the monastery garden, he saw something white on a leaf of one of the plants. Without making the sign of the cross, he plucked the leaf, and swallowed it, and so rashly swallowed a dreadful devil." Almost immediately, he fell into a trance, his body immobile and unresponsive to every external stimulus ("rapi eum fratres viderunt et privari omnibus exterioribus sensibus corporis"). The boy's ecstasy was disturbing in its aftermath. When he came to, he started speaking Latin and French fluently (he had not known a word of either language); he quoted Biblical passages by heart, worked miracles, and had visions and revelations. Some credulous and lighthearted women believed that Gods spirit appeared there, where, in fact, the devil found a dwelling ("nonnulle femine qui cito credunt et leves sunt corde satis putabant adesse Dei spiritum, ubi dyabolus locum habebat). The Dominicans looked on all this with the utmost suspicion; they did not believe in an uncouth novice making such enormous progress in so short a time. With the help of the Sacred Host, they managed

23

"Districtum scio, ubi virgo quaedam (si bene memor sum), prope sexagenaria primo florem perdidit pudicitiae in consilio malignantium tali... In actibus namque venereis, & in epulationibus quas faciunt, ubi possunt, splendidis, dicuntur opere Daemonis quasdam revelationes raras habere. Quibus illecti tales, velut boni spiritus illuminationibus, multae impersuasibiliter adhaerent.", Formicarius III/7. pp. 350-351.

8 to expose the hoax: "in reality", all this whom they then managed to exorcise.24 Disturbing ecstatic states of this sort--as Piger reminded his mentor--occurred mostly in the lives of holy women of "high repute". These women would "lose all sense of the external world, and, by force of their interior devotion, fall into a profound ecstasy. I myself have witnessed an occasion when a woman, listening to a sermon on the love of Christ, let out loud shrieks and moans before the eyes of all the congregation, as if unable to control her overwhelming love for Christ. Most educated people consider demonstrations of this sort to be mere simulation."25 Though Nider himself shares this reservation, he reminds his pupil not to judge too hastily: "The effects of heavenly love (as the godly Dionysius teaches us) are not less powerful than those of human love, but are, in fact, more so. We see this by the fact that just thinking of the Beloved is enough for one to become delirious, and fall to sighing, moaning, weeping, singing and crying out loud."26 "But we should not be surprised", adds Nider, "if thoughtful men of experience give very little credence to the actions of these women, for they have an inclination to evil, have no perseverance when it comes to doing good, and have an unquenchable thirst for spurious fame."27 Nider gives a number of examples to validate his sceptical view of female visionaries. He knew a Dominican nun who lived a life beyond reproach before she proved to be the work of the Devil,

24

Formicarius, III/1. pp. 290-292; on Heinrich Kalteisen, see Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 171-172; later, in 1452 he became Archbshop of Nidaros (Trondheim) in Norway, cf. the entry on him in Norsk Biografisk Leksikon, ed. by Einar Jansen (Oslo, 1934), pp. 30-33. "Vidi aliquando & audivi saepius feminas, ut videbantur satis bonae famae, rapi, quantum visu perpendi potuit, ad interiora ab externis sensibus, quasi ecstasin quandam ex devotione paterentur. Vidi insuper aliam, quae in publica praedicatione alicujus de Christi charitate audit sententi, coram omnibus clamorem quendam elatum extulit, quasi non valeret amorem sui pectoris ad Christum, clausum, ut antea retinere. Et tamen multis literatis tales pro fictis habebantur." Formicarius. III/1. pp. 292-293. "Divinus amor (ut divinissimus docet Dionysius), non minores in quibusdam sed maiores habet effectus amore humano, quem constat rapi ad dilectum cogitationibus, et sese exprimere in gemitu, singultu, fletu, cantu et clamoribus." Formicarius. III/1. pp. 294-295.

25

26

27

"ne mireris, si prudentes & experti de quarumdam feminarum actibus fidem habeant modicam, quas flexibiles ad malum, inconstantes ad bonum, & pronas valde ad vanam gloriam esse agnoscunt." Formicarius. III/1. p. 293.

9 entered the order, and immediately thereafter. When, however, she heard

in this reformed convent of the extraordinary lives lived by the saints of old, she was overcome with the desire to be considered one of them. "She feigned ecstasy and pretended to have received revelations, though she had had neither experience, as she admitted later in the presence of her superior... In acts of pure simulation, she began to cry out joyfully for all to hear, and then fell to the floor, pretending to be beside herself in ecstasy."28 A similar tale was narrated to Nider by Conrad, a fellow Dominican preaching in the Rhineland, about a woman renowned for her holiness: During the sermon, "she uttered cries of rejoicing before all the multitude; but she did this, as she later confessed, not from a surfeit of love, but from a vain desire for attention."29 Another famous incident occurred just before the Council of Constance, in the small nearby town of Radolfzell. The saintly recluse living in the town "often lay prostrate in a state of ecstasy, and when she came to, described the secret revelations that she had received.... One day, they started spreading the news that the five wounds of Christ would appear on her hands, feet and side on a particular day."30 A great throng of the curious gathered for the occasion; they found the recluse lying on the floor of her cell, "motionless in her rapture, and quite beside herself" (velut in rapto, immobilis, fatua), but the stigmata failed to appear, to the great consternation of all those who'd believed in the woman's enigmatic teachings and revelations (deliramentis et ejus revelationibus). Among those present was Heinrich von Rheinfelden ( 1433), a Dominican friar and "professor of theology", who took advantage of the occasion to

28

"revelationem finxit & ecstasin, quam nunquam habuit, ut mihi coram suo Superiore propria fassa est... publice mere ficta clamare coepit voce alta & in jubilo; vel, cadendo in solum, effingere raptum vel mentis excessum." Formicarius. III/1. pp. 293-294; The mentioned Dominican friar must have been Konrad von Preuen ( 1426), a militant representative of Dominican observance. On him cf. Eugen Hillenbrand, "Die Observantenbewegung in der deutschen Ordensprovinz der Dominikaner", in Kaspar Elm (ed.), Reformbemhungen und Observanzbestrebungenim sptmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. (Berlin, 1989), pp. 227-229; Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, p. 33. "coram cunctis clamare quasi in jubilo coepit. Quae fassa est... quod illud non ex charitatis fervore, sed tantum fecisset ex inani gloria". Formicarius. III/1. pp. 294.

29

30

"Ostenderat autem se predicta femina saepe numero jacere, velut in ecstasi & in raptu ecstatico. Ex quo reversa & expergiscens, suis postmodum secreta, quae non noverat, dicere solebat... certa die, quae nominabatur, quinque Christi stigmatum insignia, in manibus, pedibus, & in corde feminae certitudinaliter apparerent". Formicarius III/11. pp. 391-393.

10 preach a fire and brimstone sermon about the dangers of believing in

"foolishness" of this sort. Not much later, the fraudulent woman (ipsa fictrix) and an associate of hers were obliged to appear before an ecclesiastical court; here she retracted her claims, and repented of her sins. The best known story of this type is that of Magdalen of Fribourg (Magdalena Beutlerin). In the order of the Poor Clares she became famous for her frequent raptures (extaticis visionibus ac a sensu alienationibus).31 In some cases she claimed to have been raptured "corpore et anima" to the extent of physically disappearing for several days. During such an occasion, in 1429, at the feast of Saint Ursula and the 11000 martyr virgins she disappeared and could not be found either inside or outside of the convent. The sisters thought at first that she had escaped from the convent following some diabolic inclination, or that she was wandering in the woods with excessive ascetic motivations. Then, the same day, in the sanctuary of the church of the convent the sisters found suddenly a letter "fallen from the sky", written by Magdalene with her own blood. In this she announced her rapture: In the name of Lord Jesus Christ, our Creator, Saviour and Beholder, I announce you that he received me and put me to a place in the town where no one can find me...but I have not left you for ever, when Christ, my only support in this great misery would request it, you would see me again... but do not look for me for you cannot find me.32 (Magdalene may have been hiding somewhere in the sanctuary during this time33). She was found four days later, lying lifeless in front of the sanctuary. She came to herself after another three days, then

Formicarius III/8. pp. 361-365. the quotations below are from this long passage; cf. Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? pp. 91-93; Peter Dinzelbacher--Kurt Ruh, "Magdalena von Freiburg", in: Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon. vol. IV, pp. 1117-1121; Elliott, The Physiology of Rapture, pp. 169171.
32

31

"In der Ehre Gottes Jesu Christi, unseres Schpfers und Erlsers und Erhalters, so knde ich euch da mich Christus hat empfangen und hat mich gesetzt an einen solchen Ort der Stadt, wo ich beraubt bin alles zeitlichen Trostes, wo ich keinen Menschen sehe. .. Ich bin aber nicht von euch fortgegangen. Sondern wann es Jesus Christus, meine einzige zuverzicht in diesem groen Elend, will, so werdet ihr mich noch lnger sehen... Ihr sollt mich nicht mehr suchen, denn man kann mich nicht finden." Ed. by: Wilhelm Schleuner, "Magdalena von Freiburg. Eine pseudomystische Erscheinung des spteren Mittelalters", Der Katholik, 87 (1907), pp. 109-110; cf. Wilhelm Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe des Mittelalters 1100-1550. (WBG, Darmstadt, 19722), pp. 525, 814; Formicarius III/8, p. 361. Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? p. 92.

33

11 asked for something to write with, and inhabitants of the convent to reform their life.34 Magdalene's most famous action was to pronounce a prophecy before Christmas 1430 that she would die at the following Epiphany. She said her devoted followers could assist at this spectacle and thereby escape the tortures of Hell. Subsequently she refused food for seventeen days, then after receiving the Eucharist she fell in trance and confirmed her prophecy another time. The news attracted a great attention, was honoured by the presence of various secular and ecclesiastic notabilities, urban authorities, and also some representatives of the sceptical point of view: a certain Magister Paulus who was a professional doctor, and also Niders personal envoy, a certain Frater Johannes, who subsequently provided a detailed description of the event. On the appointed day a large public came to the convent church for witnessing the event. She inclined her head on the breast of another Clarisse sister, she immediately fell intoreal or fictitiousecstasy, and thus she lay for a while. As the bystanders were curious whether she was dead or alive, the doctor publicly touched her pulse and confirmed that she was still alive. Then, in a strange coarse voice, unlike the virginal one she had before, she uttered a loud cry 'To the sarcophagus!'. This was executed, but she remained alive. The impatient crowd was quickly losing faith. Finally she arose from the sarcophagus in front of the crowd and asked for food. She hoped to save face by referring to a new revelation which would have revealed that the divine intentions had changed and she would be left alive. Though her immediate followers continued to believe in her, her broader fame was ruined. What do you think of the prophecy of this woman? Piger asks his master, was it from God or from the Devil? Or did it have natural causes? Or was it mere acting?35 It might be worthy to note that this account is not only biassed but also truncated: it omits the immediate continuation of the story, when allegedly her stigmatisation occurred. Another description of these events exists in a brief biography of her, in a new epistle she urged the

34 35

Oehl, Mystikerbriefe, p. 526.

"Quid ergo sentis de praefato vaticinio istius mulierculae. Num Deo fuit, Demone, vel natura, vel ab arte talia fingente?" Formicarius III/8. pp. 362-364; Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? p.93.

12 preserved in the manuscript containing two of her mystical writings, Die

Goldene Litanie and the Erklaerung des Vaterunsers.36 In this description the same series of events is narrated in a rather positive, hagiographic tone, describing that she finally got out of the sarcophagus because she had been insistently asked to do so by the Provincial of the order, and the following day, when the Passion of Our Lord was read and at the end of it, when they read, All things are complete; Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, she cried out O woe, woe, how my foot pains me! and her foot was shown to those who stood by. Then a wound broke out on her foot, from which fresh blood ran out on to the ground, and the same thing happened to her hands. This was seen by the people who had been sent by the city council as witnesses. This biography then adds a series of subsequent marvellous raptures, yet it also reports that, despite these miracles, Her holy, blessed life was scoffed at and denied by many sinful people, and it was often taken as a sign that she was a sorceress.37 Let us look at a few further examples described by Nider. The stories presented so far derive from a relatively limited milieu, from the religious life of fourteenth and fifteenth century South German and Swiss towns. But the phenomena of vision and ecstasy had been examined by Nider in a much broader circle, let us see how far his attention extends. As for diabolic possession, he returns to the problem in his Fifth book dealing with the witches and their deceptions (de maleficis et eorum deceptionibus). Among half a dozen of examples there is one that might be related to the pupil at sHertogenbosch: a seventeen-year-old girl in Cologne swallowed the devil in the form of a fly, and she became instantly possessed.38 The devil "twisted every member of her

36

They have been discovered and studied by karen Greenspan, Erklaerung des Vaterunsers: A Critical Edition of a Fifteenth Century Mystical Treatise by Magdalena Beutler of Freiburg. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1984; an excerpt of this biography is translated by her and included into the collection edited by Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Medieval Womens Visionary Literature (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986), pp. 350-355. Petroff, Medieval Womens Visionary Literature , pp. 354-55. Formicarius V/2 (quomodo fiant obsessiones hominum a demonibus), pp. 527-538; V/11. pp. 641-644.

37 38

13 virgin body", and would not leave her Stuffel, a Dominican professor of theology. 39 The most famous trance-description of Nider is not related to female visionaries but to witchcraft. The subject itself is the well-known belief concerning women who go out for a nightly flight with the goddess Diana. This myth is continuously attested from the early Middle Ages on. Penitential handbooks of the medieval church have been condemning this belief since the instructions of Regino of Prm of 906, taken up in the Decretum of Burchard of Worms as stemming from the Synod of Ancyra of 314, and later incorporated with the name Canon episcopi in the Decretum of Gratian and widely disseminated through this channel. According to the text some wicked women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves, in the hours of the night, to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain nights. ... Wherefore the priests throughout their churches should preach with all insistence to the people that they may know this to be in every way false and that such phantasms are imposed on the minds of the faithful and not by the divine but by the malignant spirit.40 The early medieval Church considered the belief in these women riding in the air with Diana in the night as until he was exorcised by Gottfridus

39 40

"membris omnibus virginei contusis, exiit Daemon". Formicarius V/11. pp. 642-643.

"... sceleratae mulieres retro post Satanam conuersae, daemonum illusionibus et phantasmatibus seductae, credunt se et profitentur nocturnis horis cum Diana paganorum dea et innumera multitudine mulierum equitare super quasdam bestias, et multa terrarum spacia intempestae noctis silentio pertransire, eiusque iussionibus uelut dominae obedire, et certis noctibus ad eius seruitium euocari ... sacerdotes per ecclesias sibi conmissas populo Dei omni instantia predicare debent, ut nouerint hec omnino falsa esse, et non a diuino, sed a maligno spiritu talia phantasmata mentibus fidelium irrogari." in: Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis libris duo de synodalis causis... ed. F. W. H. Wasserschleben (Lipsiae, 1840), p. 355; cf. Decretum Magistri Gratiani, hrsg. von E. Friedberg (Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1922), 1030-1031; English tr. Alan C. Kors, Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700. A Documentary History (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1972), p. 29, second revised edn. 2001, p. 62; for a more detailed analysis of this tradition cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 89-91; Werner Tschacher, Der Flug durch die Luft zwischen Illusionstheorie und Realittsbeweis. Studien zum sog. Kanon Episkopi und zum Hexenflug, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung zur Rechtsgeschichte 116, Kan. Abt. 85 (1999), pp. 225-276; cf. still Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception, tr. by Jnos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge University Press/ditions de la Maison des Sciences de l`Homme, Cambridge/Paris, 1988), pp. 78-103.

14 an erroneous superstition like the beliefs in strigae in general.41 Yet,

despite the interdictions, these mythological constructs survived in various forms in legends, literary creations and in folklore (Herodiada, Dame Habonde, Satia), and as Carlo Ginzburg has convincingly shown,42 they became constitutive elements in the complex mythology of the witches sabbath at the end of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the fifteenth century reversal of the negative ecclesiastical attitude to the unconditional acceptance of the possibility of such nightly flights with the devils help was the consequence of and a further stimulus to the emerging witch-persecutions. This change took place precisely in the 1430s, the very period when the Formicarius was conceived. It can strike us as slightly suspicious that Nider presents the well-known story as something that indeed happened to his own preceptor, and only later refers to his related readings in the field of canon law. He describes how a "vetula dementata" claimed to be carried through the air on a night-ride with Diana and accepted the request of the Dominican friar to be present at this occasion. Then she sat in a large bowl (cubella) used for kneading dough positioned on a bench, she rubbed herself with her ointment, uttered magic incantations, whereupon her head leaned back, and she fell asleep almost immediately. She apparently had some "demonic dreams" in the company of "Domina Venere", when she exploded into joyful jubilation, fluttered her hands and her whole body with violent gestures. She fell off the bench together with her cubella, badly hitting her head, then she lay in deep sleep for some hours. When she awoke, she was told that she had not been on a ride with Diana. She became very

E. Blum, Das staatliche und kirchliche Recht des Frankenreichs in seiner Stellung zum Dmon-, Zauberund Hexenwesen (Paderborn, 1936); Dieter Harmening, Superstitio. berlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters. (Schmidt, Berlin, 1979); Valerie I. J.Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991).
42

41

Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 89-108.

15 confused when all the witnesses confirmed that her body was seen to

remain motionless in the room all the time.43 Nider also refers to the other well known medieval version of the nightly flying women, to the legend of St. Germanus who unmasks the demons coming for the nightly presents prepared for these women, a myth also well known from the Golden Legend by James of Voragine.44 The same mythological circle, leading ultimately to the formation of the concept of the witches sabbath, is represented by the legend of the exercitus furiosus (Wtendes Heer). The Fifth Book of Formicarius does not forget to mention the thirteenth century notes of William of Auvergne in this respect: Nider points out that the nocturnus exercitus .. animae defunctorum can appear to the just and to the evil as well.45 After having reviewed these motifs concerning the (real or simulated) ecstasy of late medieval mystics and various cases of possession by the devil let us see what ecstatic motifs are reported by Nider concerning witches. His information about the doings of witches is said to be first-hand. One group of sources is constituted by the records of the early witch trials allegedly conducted by the judge Peter, castellan of Blankenburg in the Simmental, in the neighbourhood of Bern. The trials were held between 1392 and 1406, and Judge Peter of Bern asserted having had many witches of both sexes burned at the stake, and of having obliged others to flee from the canton

43

Formicarius. II/4. p. 200; cf. Hansen, pp. 89-90; Lea, Materials, pp. 260-261; same story also in the Praeceptorium: ibid. p. 271; see now the detailed analysis of this story by Catherine Chne in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 204-220.

Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda aurea, vulgo historia Lombardica dicta, ed. T. Graesse, (Vratislaviae 1890, Osnabrck, 1965); Iacopo de Varazze, Legenda Aurea, cap. 139, edizione critica a cura di Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Galuzzo, Sismel, 1998), pp. 689-694; For this particular episode see. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants (Gallimard, Paris, 1994), pp. 44, 208. Formicarius. V/1; p. 525; in cap. 10 and 11 of the first Praeceptum in the Praeceptorium Nider comments several other motifs from De universo by Guillaume d'Auvergne: the legend of Mons Veneris, Werwolf beliefs, women, who "in quator temporibus extasim per daemonem patientes" cf. Lea, Materials, pp. 265-271; on William of Auvergne and the " exercitus furiosus " see Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 115-145. more recently: Wolfgang Behringer, Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: eine Geschichte aus der frhen Neuzeit (Piper, Mnchen, 1994).
45

44

16 of Bern."46 Nider's other source was a contemporary of his, the Dominican

inquisitor of Autun, who had reformed the convent at Lyon, and who had also had more than his share of dealings with witches. I will come back to the novel nature of Niders description concerning this new sect, which, with its murder of infants, sacrilegious denial of God and alliance with the Devil, seemed much more dangerous than the previous lone, isolated sorcerers.47 From the point of view of the phenomenon of trance, four manifestations deserve a mention: animal metamorphosis, ecstatic flight, preparation of magic potions and unctions, and finally the witches Sabbath as the place of the alliance with the devil. The capacity for metamorphosis into animals is attributed to the first representative (primus actor) of the witch sect of the Bern region, to Scavius, who could flee from his persecutors in the shape of a mouse (his name also merits attention: did it mean perhaps that he was a leper?).48 It was a disciple of Scavius, called Hoppo, who made, in his turn, a master of witchcraft (in maleficii magistrum) Scaedeli, this strange archaic-looking sorcerer presented in such a detail by Peter of Bern to Johannes Nider. He lived in the village of Boltingen, near Lausanne. Scaedeli had the ability, together with his master, to transfer one third of anyones crops to his own land, to cause hail, lightning and ravaging wind and to use lightning for killing human beings. He was also able to cause the sterility of animals and men, he could enrage horses by simply touching their bridle, he could tell the future, and when someone tried to capture him, he emitted a horrible smell and it

"qui multos utriusque sexus incineravit maleficos, et alios fugavit e territorio dominii Bernensis". Formicarius V/3; p. 543. old; excerpts from the parts of Formicarius to be discussed below are published by Hansen, Quellen, pp. 91-99; Lea, Materials, pp. 261-264; the long time accepted identification of this judge with Peter of Greyerz was recently put in question by Catherine Chne, Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 224-227.
47

46

Borst, "Anfnge", Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen, pp. 17-19. argues for the hypothesis that Nider could have reinterpreted the reports of judge Peter in the light of the new witch-stereotypes, spread in the 1430s. ibid. pp. 56-59. This hypothesis was suggested by Borst: "Anfnge", p. 52; on late medieval attitudes to lepers cf. Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature. (Cornell U. P., Ithaca-London, 1971); the role of the figure of the leper in the formation of new witch stereotypes: Ginzburg, Ecstasies. pp. 33-62.

48

17 was said that he could get from one place to another through the air.49

Though it was not related here immediately to the other elements of witchcraft mythology, this reference to this capacity of flying is a valuable indication of a new belief of increasing popularity. However, besides the confession of the invocation of the devil, obtained with torture, Scaedeli does not convey any further elements that could be related to trance.50 The stories concerning the preparation of a magic unction, also mentioned in the story on the vetula dementata, who used it for flying with Diana, could perhaps give us useful additional indications in this matter. The witches of the Simmental "confessed" to having murdered their own children, digging buried infants out of their graves, and stealing unbaptised new-borns from their sleeping parents' sides in order to cook their flesh: From the solids of this material we make a certain unguent that is useful for our desires, arts, and transformations. From the liquids we fill a container, and from this, with a few additional ceremonies, anyone who drinks immediately becomes a member and master of our sect."51 This potion, with its magical powers to work an instant conversion to the devil, is mentioned also in the more detailed account of the witches' rituals furnished upon the rack by a young man accused of witchcraft (his wife, who was likewise tortured, denied the charge with her last breath). "Afterwards he drinks from the aforesaid flask; and, this done, he forthwith feels himself to conceive and hold within himself an image of our art and the chief rites of our sect".52 His confession, as reported by Nider, tells us that the witches gathered in church on Sunday morning before the blessing with the holy water: they denied Christ, their Christian faith, and the Catholic Church, and swore to follow the devil, whom they called magisterulus. This embryonic account of the witches' sabbath, however, does not contain a number of the key

"de loco in loco per ara, ut putabant, transineare", Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 152, 170, 251; Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 393-394,405-406.
50 51

49

Formicarius . V/3. p.544. and V/4. pp. 554. and 559.

Formicarius . V/3. p. 546; Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 154-155; English tr. in KorsPeters, Witchcraft in Europe, 2nd edn., p. 157. Formicarius . V/3. p. 547; Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 156-1557 English tr. in KorsPeters, Witchcraft in Europe, 2nd edn., p. 158.
52

18 elements associated with the concept: the ecstatic flight in the night; the

feasting and orgies; dancing; and indiscriminate copulation.53 Nider's account suggests that he himself was uncertain as to whether all this actually took place, or was just a figment of the witches' imaginations. Judge Peter told him the story of his own encounter with witchcraft: After he had already given up his office as judge, the witches avenged themselves on him by pushing him off a flight of steps in the dead of night. He was found the next morning, bruised and bloody.54 Nider adds an explanation: "We needn't believe that Peter was physically pushed off the steps by some witches who were not there; it was very much the present demons conjured up by the witches' rites and sacrifices that led to Peter's fall".55 The reasoning can more or less be followed up to this point. But how should we interpret the assertion that demons deceive the witches, and only in the imagination of superstitious persons give them the impression of being present. But, then, how were they capable of precipitating Peter down the stairs? It is by the impact on the imagination of the witches that the demons can evoke the sensation of being absent or present.56 Who is exploited and deceived by the other here, is it the superstitious layperson by the witch and the demon, is it the demon by the witch or the witch by the demon? It is no wonder that the lazy disciple, Piger puts the insistent question again twenty pages further, whether these demons act in phantasia or realiter?57 We can clearly perceive that Nider himself is struggling with these unresolved alternatives. This undecided judgement is seen in his explanation of ecstasy and trance as well.

53 54 55

Cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies. p. 71. Formicarius, V/7. pp. 590-592.

"Nec tamen credere debes, Petrum... manibus maleficarum, quae in castro non erant, corporaliter per gradus projectum, sed maleficarum sacrificiis vel cerimoniis allecti Daemones praesentes illud praecipitium fecerunt Petri", Formicarius, V/7. p. 595; Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 196-199.

56

"Et ut mentes maleficarum deciperent, in imaginatione superstitiosum hominum, effecerunt ut sibi viderentur praesentes esse...Daemonis impressione in imaginatione malificorum factum est, ut absentia velut praesentia cernerentur." Ibid. Formicarius . V/9. p. 613.

57

19 Piger keeps asking the Theologian just how much credence

we can give to things that appear to us in trance, in dreams, and in visions. Nider relies in his answer upon the scholastic theory58 of the interpretation of dreams: he discusses lengthily the different ways of seeing by the bodily and the spiritual eyes. He distinguishes between the practical intellect destined to perceive lower, earthly matters and the speculative intellect directed to grasp eternal, superior subjects. The varieties of the imaginationes somnii could be influenced by various natural impulses. It could count e.g. for such an internal natural cause, if the dream provides a mental (animalis) reflection of what one has seen awake, of if the physical condition of the body (being hungry or sated, the balance of the bodily humours) could be the cause of a dream. The astrological impact of the stars could be considered as an external natural cause. If someone is looking for supernatural messages in dreams, this person should deduce first the natural factors and consider only that what remains unexplainable by these causes. But even then a serious problem remains. Having carefully isolated the supernatural, spiritual elements of the dreams, one has to examine them, and consider whether they originate from God, or from the master of deception, that is from the devil.59 After rather lengthy scholastic sophistry, Nider writes as follows: There are certain "false visions" which are relatively easy to recognise: deception that has its roots in greed and avarice (ex avaritia); visions due to demonic possession (possessi per Daemonem); and visions due to an over-active fantasy (per phantastica luminaria).
60

Often all we have to guide us is our instincts, our discretio spirituum: it is our intuitive recognition of the difference between spirits that enables us to recognise the presence

58

Maria Elisabeth Wittmer-Busch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum im Mittelalter. (Medium Aevum Quotidianum, Krems, 1990), pp. 141-171; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Rver au XIIe sicle, in I sogni nel Medioevo. Seminario Internazionale, Roma, 2-4 ottobre 1983, a cura di Tullio Gregory (Ateneo, Roma, 1985), pp. 291-316; Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992). Formicarius. II/3-4, pp. 187-198. Formicarius. III/1. p. 287.

59 60

20 of evil, for "Satan himself goes disguised as an angel of light" (2 Cor.

11, 14), and the devil and his demons seek to deceive people by appearing to them "sub specie boni".61 It is hard to tell the difference between the various kinds of--natural and supernatural--causes, and one is always being caught off guard: "Certain human beings, St. Augustine tells us (Civ. Dei., lib. 24, cap. 23) can at will do with their bodies some things that others find utterly impossible to imitate and scarcely credible to hear. For some people can actually move their ears, either one at a time or both together.... Certain people mimic and render so expertly the utterances of birds and beasts, as well as of any other human beings, that it is impossible to tell the difference unless they are seen. Some people produce at will without any stench such rhythmical sounds from their fundament that they appear to be making music even from that quarter. From my own experience I know of a man who used to perspire at will. Certain people are known to weep at will and to shed a flood of tears." 62 And Nider continues to cite Augustine by way of illustration: There was a presbyter named Restitutus, who could fall into a trance whenever he wanted to, and "and lie still exactly like a dead man. In this state he not only was completely insensitive to pinching and pricking but at times he was even burned by the application of fire and felt no pain except afterwards from the wound".63 There are thus people, "who have it in their nature to be easily alienated from their five

61 62

Formicarius. II/5. pp. 209-10.

"Anima enim unius dominium habet in corpus suum, quod alteri esset impossibile, ut B. August. lib. 24. de Civitate Dei probat, cap. 23. ... Nonnulli, ut volunt, de corpore fingunt, quae alii nullo modo possunt, & audita vix credunt. Sunt enim, qui & aures movent, vel singulas, vel ambas simul. ... Quidam voces avium, pecorumque, & aliorum quorumlibet hominum sic imitantur, ut nisi videantur, discerni omnino non possint. Nonnulli ab imo, sine pudore, ita numerosos, pro arbitrio, sonitus edunt, ut ex illa etiam parte cantare videantur. Ipse sum expertus, sudare hominem solere, cum vellet. Notum est, quosdam flere, cum volunt, atque ubertim lacrymas fundere." Formicarius. III/8. pp. 365-366; English tr. by Richard Levine in Saint Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1988), vol. IV, pp. 390-391. "jacebat similis mortuo ut non solum vellicantes atque pungentes minime sentiret, sed aliquando etiam igne ureretur admoto, sine ullo doloris sensu, nisi postmodum ex vulnere." Formicarius. III/8. p. 366; Augustine, The City, p. 391.

63

21 senses, and the rest of us can wonder whether they are able to do all this on

their own, with the connivance of the devil, or with the help of the good angels." 64 Nider's reflections are a faithful mirror of the uncertainties voiced in the theological debates of the time. What he set out to do in Formicarius is to explain a phenomenon that very much preoccupied churchmen at the time of the Council of Basel. To understand the historical impact of Nider's accounts and scepticism, we need to consider them in the light of the historical and anthropological literature dealing with the process of trance.

SAINTS, SHAMANS AND DEMONIC POSSESSION Considered against the background of theoretical literature on trance and ecstasy65, Nider's narratives contain a number of motifs which incline us to compare these descriptions of the trance-states of late medieval visionaries with models of that "most archaic of ecstasy techniques", shamanism.66 In what follows, it is in no way implied that the religious phenomena represented by late medieval mystics should be classified into any kind of broadly defined shamanism, the confrontation intends rather to point out certain common traits among them for elaborating a broader historical typology of types of contact with the supernatural. The most instructive case-description by Nider in this respect is the one of the young Dominican novice of s-Hertogenbosch. The boy was thirteen at the time of his

64

"Tales igitur, qui se corporeis sensibus faciliter per naturam possunt alienare, mira in conspectu aliorum, aut propria industria, aut Daemonum versutia, aut bonorum Angelorum ministerio possunt efficere". Formicarius. III/8. 367.

The entry on extase in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualit (henceforth: DS), (Beauchesne, Paris, 1961), Vol. IV, pp. 2045-2189; Ian M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Sanctity and Possession in the Later Middle Ages (Univ. of Michigan Ph.D. thesis, 1994); eadem, Wraiths , Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture, Past and Present 152 (1996), pp. 3-46.; eadem, Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (2000), pp. 268-306; Barbara Newman, Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century, Speculum 73 (1998), pp. 733-770.
66

65

Mircea Eliade, Le chamanisme et les techniques archaques de l'extase. (PUF, Paris, 1951).

22 first public trance, described by Nider. This is about the age at which in

Siberian shamanism a young candidate shaman is first called, during a shamans dream, to join the company of older shamans for taking up the role ascribed to him by his destiny.67 The function of the initiatory "shaman sickness" is the "acquisition of knowledge". In the case of the Dominican novice it was also the trance that gave the young boy his knowledge of French and Latin and his insights to the Bible, as well as his power to work miracles and receive revelations. The Dominicans interpreted these capacities as originating from possession by the devil. But possession is, in fact, not so far away from the shamans trance as one would guess at first sight. Although there is no consensus about this issue, some anthropologists have indeed argued for a close relationship between shamanism and possession. Mircea Eliade and Luc de Heusch tried to distinguish shamanism by stressing the fact that shamans are able to use the trance technique in a routine manner, unlike magicians who are first possessed and can only subsequently can act as masters of spirits. Ian M. Lewis, on the other hand, building on Shirokogoroff's classical account of Tungus shamanism, has convincingly shown that the initiatory "shaman sickness" is a form of possession, and that even the subsequent states of trance routinely generated for ritual occasions with the traditional shamanic tools (drums, dance, and drugs) have analogies in the processes of controlled, recurrent, self-induced possession.68 Though a basic difference between the two phenomena persists, while the possessed suffers the intrusion of a foreign spirit into his/her body, and the shamans trance is an active exercise of the capacity of the soul to go out for a journey, the two phenomena are linked in their resorting to the process of trance.69

Lauri Honko, "Role-taking of the shaman", Temenos 4 (1969), pp. 26-55; Anna-Lena Siikala, The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman. FF Communications 220 (Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki, 1978), pp. 330-341. Eliade, Chamanisme ; Luc de Heusch, "Cultes de possession et religions iniciatiques de salut en Afrique", Annales du Centre d'tudes des Religions Bruxelles, 1962; S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London, 1935); Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. pp. 49-57.
69 68

67

Let me reproduce here a written comment to my study by Don Handelman (Hebrew University, Tel Aviv). Given that in trance a person is other than himself, trances could be compared in terms of whether the person is

23 This second interpretation could shed some light on Nider's late

medieval account. The first initiatory trance of the teenager-prophet, which meant for him the "acquisition of knowledge", a period of incubation, was regarded by his fellow monks, and perhaps also by himself, as an instance of demonic possession. According to Niders account the triggering cause of the trance was the boy's inadvertent swallowing of the white "something" (the motif of swallowing the devil might have originated from an anecdote of Gregory the Great, who described the story of a nun swallowing the devil with a piece of lettuce.70) The subsequent recurrence of minor ecstasies of the possessed young novice, his miracles and his prophecies could be regarded as instances of putting to use in routine ways the capacities acquired in the course of the first trance. This pattern is not unfamiliar for anthropologists dealing with the phenomena of shamanism in tribal societies. Before going on to see how far the categories of shamanism might apply to other religious phenomena discussed by Nider, we need to briefly address two other questions. Can we speak, in however fragmentary a form, of the presence of shamanism in Europe during the high Middle Ages? And if this is the case, can we show any correlation between shamanism and the religious ecstatics of the time, or, on the other side, the emerging late medieval witchcraft beliefs? As for the first question, a number of significant research results have been published on the subject in recent years. After discovering and analysing the shamanistic beliefs of the benandanti of Friuli, who were tried as witches in the

present or absent from himself. In the instance of the soul journey the person is present, but elsewhere, traveling, and perhaps still in contact with those at the site of his body. In the instance of possession, the person is absent, extinguished or taken over by someone, some force that has intruded in the body/person and taken over. In the relationship between shamanism and possession agency seems to be at issue. The sahamn seems to be one who has the agency to travel; the possessed no longer controls his action. Shaman sickness is a form of possesison which intrudes into the shaman his success (with help) of extruding this intrusion returns agency to him, enabling him to travel. Controlled, recurrent, self-induced possession is then the deliberate use of agency to enable shamanic traveling.
70

Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi, 1, 4; cf. Frederick C. Tubach, Index exemplorum. FF Communications (Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki, 1969); Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? p. 222; Niders heavy reliance upon the Dialogues of Gregory the Great is analysed by Bailey, Battling Demons, p. 98.

24 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,71 Carlo Ginzburg published another

wide-ranging synthesis on the origins of the witches' sabbath myth.72 Taking account of the reactions to his book on the benandanti, he gives a comparative analysis of all that we know about the activities of their European counterparts (kresnik73, tltos,74 calusari75, donni di fuora,76 etc.): their spirit journeys, shamanistic activities, fertility battles, and contacts with the dead. Though our concrete data for all these figures date no further back than early modern times, it is highly unlikely that medieval European villages should have known nothing about these or other kinds of benevolent cunning folk. Ginzburg also explores the belief systems of medieval Europe for more farreaching traces of shamanism. Pointing to the nocturnal rides of women with the goddess of the night, and to the practice of communicating with the dead, he speaks of a "Celtic substratum" of European mythologies.77 On the other hand, the journeying soul's metamorphosis into an animal--as exemplified, for instance, by Paulus Diaconus's Gunthram legend,78 by Odin's metamorphosis in the Ynlingasaga79, and the werewolf

71

Carlo Ginzburg, I Benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. (Einaudi Torino, 1966); English tr.: The Night Battles. Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore--London, 1983). Ginzburg, Ecstasies.

72 73

Maja Bokovi-Stulli, "Testimonianze orali croate e slovene sul Krsnik-Kresnik", Metodi e ricerche, N.S. 7 (1988), pp. 32-50.

Gbor Klaniczay, "Shamanistic elements in Central European Witchcraft" in Shamanism in Eurasia. Edited by Mihly Hoppl (Herodot, Gttingen, 1983), pp. 404-422; an amplified version: in idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power. The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, tr. by Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990) Mircea Eliade, "Some Observations on European Witchcraft", History of Religions 14 (1975), pp. 149172; Gail Kligman, Clu: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981) Gustav Henningsen, "The Ladies from Outside: an Archaic Pattern of the Witches' Sabbath", in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, (eds.), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990), pp. 191-217.
77 78 76 75

74

Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 89-152, esp. pp. 106-107.

Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards; transl. by William Dudley Foulke, ed., intr. by Edward Peters (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1974), III, 34, pp. 147-148; Hannjost Lixfeld, "Die Guntramsage (AT 1645 A). Volkserzhlungen und Alter Ego in Tiergestalt und ihre schamanistische Herkunft", Fabula, 13 (1972), pp. 60-107; cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 151-152.

25 concepts80 found in the Slavic, Baltic, German and Mediterranean cultures--

he traces back to the "shamanistic substratum" of European mythology. He divides these shamanistic beliefs--presumably mediated by the Scythians, and reinforced, from time to time, by more direct Eastern influences--into two types: the male variant, characterised by ecstatic fertility battles; and the female variant, characterised by the communication with the dead.81 Besides the scheme elaborated by Carlo Ginzburg, one should mention a second recent attempt to reconstruct this archaic layer of European witch beliefs, the books and studies written by va Pcs.82 She gives a more scrupulous comparative analysis of Central and South East European sorcerers, cunning people and folk mythological beings (szpasszony, vila, mora, zmej, rusalia, etc.) than anybody before her. She discovered another important domain of popular belief systems which played an important role in the formation of the concept of the witches sabbath, that of the ambivalent fairy-mythologies. And these same comparative investigations have also led her to important new statements concerning the relationship of Hungarian tltos beliefs and Siberian shamanism. Instead of relying upon a set of remote and far-reaching analogies, the approach suggested by va Pcs, following the footsteps of Gza Rheim,83 lays a greater stress upon more concrete historical contacts and borrowing, namely upon the influences coming to Hungary from the neighbouring Slavic peoples and from all other peoples on the Balkan peninsula.84

Walter Baetke, Yngvi und die Ynglinger. Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung ber das nordische "Sakralknigtum", Sitzungsberichte der Schsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Ph.-hist. Kl. Bd. 109/3 (Akademie, Belin, 1964)
80 81 82

79

Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 138-139, 153-154. Ibid. pp. 243, 257.

va Pcs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe, FF Communications N. 243. (Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki, 1989); eadem, Between the Living and the Dead. A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (CEU Press, Budapest, 1998)

Rheim Gza, Magyar nphit s npszoksok /Hungarian folk beliefs and folk customs/ (Budapest, 1925); idem. "Hungarian Shamanism", in idem ed. Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences. (New York, 1961), vol. III, pp. 131-169. va Pcs, "Hungarian Tltos and His European Parallels", in Uralic Mythology and Folklore, ed. by Mihly Hoppl and Juha Pentikinen (Budapest--Helsinki, 1989), pp. 251-276.
84

83

26 As a result of this research, va Pcs made an attempt to set up a new

typology of dual shamanism present in the Baltic, Old Slavic, Central European and Balkan regions. Relying upon the reconstruction attempts of Roman Jakobson, V.V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov85, she suggested comparing the struggle between Perun and Volos in Slavic and Baltic mythologies to the shamanistic antagonism of a fiery/heavenly monster and a watery/netherworldly one. She documented a number of forms reflecting this antagonism in the folk mythologies of Eastern Europe. These motifs seem to provide a meaningful explanation for the two classes of shamanistic sorcerers observed by Carlo Ginzburg, for the duality of male sorcerers fighting for fertility and female seers assuring communication with the world of the dead. In addition, the researches of va Pcs offer new explanations as to how these mythological elements could have merged into early modern witchcraft beliefs.86 In the light of all this, it is conceivable that certain modified, "Christianised" shamanistic beliefs and shamanistic practitioners were indeed a part of the popular religion of the high Middle Ages in various regions of Europe. Having made this assumption--which is likely to be controversial for a long time to come--let me return to the second question: can we show any correlation between these vague traces of shamanism and the ecstatic visionaries of the late Middle Ages, and respectively, between shamanism and the emerging stereotype of the "witches' sabbath"? As regards the second part of the question, it was exactly this correlation that Carlo Ginzburg and va Pcs set out to show: the nocturnal flights, the ecstatic elements in the witches' revelry, the metamorphosis into animal, the communications with the dead were all

85 Roman Jakobson, "The Slavic God 'Veles' and His Indo-European Cognates" Studi linguistici in onore di Vittore Pisani (Brescia, 1969), vol. II, pp. 579-599; V. V. Ivanov - V. N. Toporov, "Le mythe indo-europen du dieu de l'orage poursuivant le serpent: reconstruction du schma", in changes et communications. Mlanges offerts Claude Lvi-Strauss l'occasion de son 60me anniversaire, ed. Jean Pouillou - Pierre Maranda (Mouton, Paris - La Haye, 1970), vol. II, pp. 1180-1206. 86

va Pcs, "Le sabbat et les mythologies indo-europennes", in Nicole Jacques-Chaquin--Maxime Praud, eds.: Le sabbat des sorciers XVe-XVIIIe sicles (Jrome Millon, Grenoble, 1993), pp. 23-31; eadem, "A kgy, a mennyk s a tehenek. Ketts samanizmus s boszorknysg Kzp-DK-Eurpban" /The snake, the thunder and the cows. Dual shamanism and witchcraft in Central and South Eastern Europe/, in: A tradicionlis mveltsg tovbblse. Az V. magyar-jugoszlv folklrkonferencia eladsai. Bp. 1991. nov. 1-3. Folklr s tradci VII. (MTA, Nprajzi Kutatintzet, Budapest, 1994), pp. 89-101; eadem, Between the Living and the Dead.

27 ingredients originating from the fairy mythology and the "shamanistic

substratum", salvaged to find their way into the medieval demonological stereotype of the witches alliance with the devil. The first part of the question, however, is unanswered as yet. In his recently published book, entitled Saints or witches? The fate of notorious women in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern Times, Peter Dinzelbacher raises the question: "Can we carry Ginzburg's thesis a bit further, and interpret not only certain elements of witchcraft, but even mysticism to be a fresh variant of Eurasian shamanism?"87 Without really examining the possibility, however, he summarily rejects the idea, noting that significant analogies notwithstanding, the notion of a correlation would require that we show the existence of a historical continuity between the late medieval visionaries and the ancient Germanic religion. Alas, says he, there is no trace of mysticism in all the Early Middle Ages. As I see it, however, we could try to find a more general, typological correlation, one whose point of departure is the role that the possessor of supernatural power, the sorcerer figure, plays (or is thought to play) in his/her own community. Contemplating the issue in this light, we could discover considerable typological similarities between shamanism and the Christian cult of saints. In both cases, we are dealing with a mechanism for warding off misfortune and influencing the supernatural based on placing the community under the protection of a patron living in its midst, a person with supernatural power to protect it from outside harm and work miracles on its behalf. This feature of the cult of the saints was emphasised by Peter Brown.88 Operating with the categories of the Anglo-Saxon school of anthropology, primarily as found in Edward

87

"Man knnte die These Ginzburgs weiterspinnen und nicht nur einen Teil des hexerischen Tuns, sondern auch der mystischen Phnomene als jngere Sonderformen des eurasischen Schamanismus interpretieren". Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? p. 293.

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981); idem, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity", in idem, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, 1982), pp. 103-152.

88

28 Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande,89 Brown

shows that the cult of the miracle-working saints in the Christian communities of late antiquity gradually came to overshadow the techniques for warding off misfortune customary at the time, namely, the contemporary forms of accusations concerning magic and witchcraft.90 With powers received "from above", the spectacular ability to cast out devils, and the positive example of his/her godly life, the saint simply "stole the show". He/she simply won over the audience of the traditional experts of magic matters, so that people lost interest in previous methods of averting misfortune which were based on discovering "the enemy within",91 and on "cleansing" the community by finding scapegoats and hunting for witches. To see the relevance of Peter Brown's work for our understanding of the cult of saints in the late Middle Ages, there is one more thing that we need to keep in mind. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, the cult of the saints was based on miracles worked by the deceased saint's relics: the charismatic "holy man" of late antiquity referred to by Brown only survived as a literary construct, the idealised subject of legends. From the twelfth century on, however, a perceptible change set in. The movements for religious revival, the orthodox and heterodox personifications of the vita apostolica, as well as itinerant preachers of unimpeachable orthodoxy of the likes of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Norbert all tended to reawaken the sense of the holy man's supernatural authority in the popular mind,92 this is well exemplified by the public miracles St. Bernard worked in 1146-47 in Cologne.93 With the advent of the mendicant

Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937); Peter Brown, "Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages", in: Mary Douglas, (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (Tavistock, London, 1970), pp. 17-45.
90

89

On these accusations see A. A. Barb, "The Survival of Magic Arts", in Arnaldo Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963), pp. 100-125.

Witches are described as "traitors within the gates" by Philip Mayer "Witches", in: Max Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery. Selected Readings (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 45-64.
92

91

Cf. my article Religious Movements and Christian Culture. A Pattern of Centripetal and Centrifugal Orientations, in my The Uses of Supernatural Power, pp. 28-50.

Historia miraculorum S. Bernardi in itinere germanico patratorum, Patrologia Latina (PL), 185 coll. 385410; Epistula ad magistrum Archenfredum, ibid. coll. 410-416; Pierre-Andr Sigal, L'homme et le miracle dans la France mdivale (XIe-XIIe sicle), (Cerf, Paris, 1985), pp. 18-20.

93

29 orders in the thirteenth century, living a than alter Christus, "another Christ". The new, bureaucratised form of sanctification, the canonisation trial life of holiness became a realistic--in

fact a recommended--goal. St. Francis of Assisi was seen by his associates as no less

monopolised by the Holy See94 contributed to provide sainthood with transparent criteria, on the other hand it diminished the possibility of autogestion in this matter. Local germs of a cult could rarely grow in these circumstances into full-fledged, approved, canonised sainthood.95 The status of sainthood became thus, paradoxically, more and less accessible at the same time. In consequence of all this, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were more and more candidates for sainthood who deliberately prepared themselves for this glory, they lived as if they had just stepped out of the Golden Legend.96 And this was not only and not even principally the aspiration of certain individuals, the saints were surrounded by a closer and a wider group of admirers (confessors, disciples, fellow monks, friars, nuns, whole courts or cities) who started to venerate them as saints already during their lives, and hoped from them miraculous protection in the midst of natural, political and social calamities of the later Middle Ages.97 These self-appointed charismatic figures were more and more frequently called "living saints" (sante vive)98 by the community. Most of them were female visionaries of

94

Andr Vauchez, La saintet en Occident aux derniers sicles du moyen ge. D'aprs les procs de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (cole franaise de Rome, Roma, 1981), English tr. by Jean Birell, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997). According to the statistics of Vauchez, between 1198 and 1431 71 canonisation investigations were started by the papcy to the initiative of local church hierarchies, and less than half of these, 35 reached canonisation still in the Middle Ages, idem, La saintet, 71; to all this a large number of local cults should be added, which did not even make it to achieve an official investigatio in their case.

95

Vauchez, La saintet, pp. 420-426; cf. my "Legends as Life-Strategies for Aspirant Saints in the Later Middle Ages", in my The Uses of Supernatural Power, pp. 95-110.
97

96

These utilitarian and at the same time communitarian aspects of late medieval sainthood have recently been stressed by Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century. Private Grief and Public Salvation (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London, 1995)

98

Gabriella Zarri, "Le sante vive. Per una tipologia della santit femminile nel primo Cinquecento", Annali dell' Istituto Storico Italo-germanico in Trento 6 (1980), pp. 371-445; Le sante vive. Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra '400 e '500 (Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino, 1990); cf. Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen ? pp. 119-125.

30 the likes of Angela of Foligno (12481309), St. Claire of Montefalco (1268-

1308), St. Bridget of Sweden (1303-79), and St. Catherine of Siena (1348-80). "Living saints" were the chief actors on the local religious scene from the end of the thirteenth century on.99 In Nider's Formicarius, too, we find them, though the author does not recognize them as such. And yet there is no doubt that Magdalen of Fribourg and the stigmatised ascetic of Radolfzell could be classified as living saints. Nor is Nider so much of a sceptic that he does not adduce his own examples of "good" mystics. He recounts a conversation he heard when he was still prior at Nurnberg, at the meeting of the German Electors and the Emperor Sigismund in 1428. The Chancellor began to pay homage publicly to "the holy memory" of Catherine of Siena who had not yet been canonised then. He read aloud a part of her legend written by Raymond of Capua, noting "how many sinners this virgin had managed to convert in Italy".100 On hearing this, the ambassador of the Prince of Savoy started to recount the miracles worked in Gaul by the Mother General of the Poor Clares, Colette de Corbie (1381-1447), how this "domina tantae sanctitatis" lifted her arms in supplication and converts sinners and unbelievers for all the world to see.101 Nider also mentions here two famous preachers of the age, St. Vincent Ferrer102 and St. Bernardino of Siena,103 referring to them as God's new "prophets".104

More on the sources concerning these saints in Vauchez, La saintet ; Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London, 1985); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1987).
100

99

Formicarius, IV/9. p. 483; Raymundus de Capua, Vita Sanctae Catharinae Senensis. Legenda maior. AA SS Aprilis Tom III, Venezia 1738. coll. 584-959. Formicarius, IV/9. p. 484; v.. Pierre de Vaux, Vie de Soeur Colette. Intr. transcr. et notes par Elizabeth Lopez (Publications de lUniversit de Saint-Etienne, 1994); Elizabeth Lopez, Culture et saintet. Colette de Corbie (1381-1447). (Publications de lUniversit de Saint-Etienne, 1994),

101

102

Cf. P. Sigismund Brettle, San Vicente Ferrer und sein literarischer Nachlass, Vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen, 10 (Mnster, 1924). Franco Mormando, The Preachers Demons. Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago - London, 1999). Formicarius, IV/9. p. 486.

103

104

31 The Formicarius also mentions several local examples: Adelheid of

Mulberg, revered "by all Basel as a living sanctuary" (vivo sanctuario)105; and Buken, the sancta foemina living the life of a recluse near the house of the Teutonic Knights, about whom Nider tells an anecdote meant to illustrate that "there are those who use their gifts to benefit others", and it is best to heed what they say. He tells of a churchman called Nicolaus who joined the ranks of the pilgrims from the area who sought out Buken to solicit her advice on matters spiritual and practical. Buken asked him where he lived; on hearing that it was by the church, she warned him that a catastrophe was about to strike the people living in that part of the town. The priest--who himself recounted the story to Nider--soon rued the fact that he did not heed her warning, for soon thereafter a great fire swept through that part of town, and burned his house down, along with three hundred others.106 Historians in the last few years have noted the cult of "living saints" that developed in the high Middle Ages, and have analysed the novelty of this form of holiness (the motif of their mystical marriage to Christ, the extreme asceticism of their fasting, their self-mortification, visions, and revelations)107, but have been hesitant to assert the conclusion that we see here, in fact, a radically new form of the cult of saints. After a hiatus of several hundred years, we again find religious communities grouped around the person of a saint with supernatural powers and in direct touch with God, the model suggested by the Book of Prophets, the Gospels, and the classical legends of the saints. What is so new here is not primarily the relationship between the charismatic leader and his/her immediate followers: we encounter this also in the early Middle Ages, and in the monastic communities and religious movements of the eleventh to the

Formicarius, II/1. p. 163; about her see Sabine von Heusinger, Johannes Mulberg OP ( 1414). Ein Leben im Spannungsfeld von Dominikanerobservanz und Beginenstreit. Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Dominikanerordens, Neue Folge Band 9 (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2001), p. 6.
106 107

105

Formicarius, II/2. pp. 183-184.

Vauchez, La saintet; pp. 427-446; idem, Les lacs au moyen ge. Pratiques et expriences religieuses (Cerf, Paris, 1987), Bell, Holy Anorexia; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; eadem, "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages", in Michel Feher et als. (eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Zone, New York, 1989), Part 1. pp. 160-219; eadem, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, New York, 1991)

32 thirteenth centuries. The novelty in the high Middle Ages was a change

generated by the Christian laity of the time, who seem not to have been satisfied with access only to the relics of their dead patron saints; they also wanted "living saints" in their midst. This being so, the stage was set for the would-be saint to become--in Aviad Kleinberg's apt Biblical allusion--"a prophet in his own country".108 It is at this point that the remote analogy of shamanism becomes useful. In both cases, the benevolent possessor of supernatural powers lives within the community and serves its interests. In both cases, contact with the supernatural is achieved in the form of a trance, of ecstasy, and can serve either the needs of the community at large (with revelations, prophecies, telling the future, and the foretelling of catastrophes), or the solution of more concrete, individual problems (as in the case of cures). In both cases, the journey the soul undertakes during the ecstasy can lead through the land of the dead, and can expose the entranced person not only to good spirits, but also to the danger of attacks from evil ones. We even find parallels among the means used by the "living saint" on the one hand, and the shaman, on the other, to establish and safeguard their prestige within the community. Both had to produce some visible evidence to corroborate the accounts of their doings in the spirit world. Nider's catalogue of the peculiar things that he knew to have happened to people in a trance--sweating, crying, calling out, fainting, groaning, seizures, heightened sexuality--show it to have been a phenomenon akin not only to demonic possession, but also to a shaman's public trance. The public, the followers, demanded some visible physical evidence of these soul journeys. Shamans--and their Central-European counterparts--were wont to show off the wounds received in the course of battles waged in the spirit world, and display the bruises from the blows they had endured.109 There is some scattered medieval evidence about the corporeal signs of what happened to visionaries while in trance. In

108

Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country. Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London, 1992). Klaniczay, "Shamanistic", p. 141.

109

33 Bede's Ecclesiastical History, for instance, we read of Furseus, the

eighth century abbot, whose vision of the afterlife left him with scars on his shoulders, the evidence of burns suffered in the fires of Hell.110 In Niders lifetime, around 1424, there was a female visionary living in Bourg-en-Bresse in France, who boasted of having saved a number of souls from perdition, and would show the scars of the burns she had suffered in the course of her rescue missions to Hell.111 In Nider's stories, it is only Judge Peter who bore the corporeal tokens of a supernatural adventure, but this was his encounter with witches, and a somewhat different matter.112 More significantly, Nider's accounts include references to stigmatization, that most original of the medieval mystics' physical manifestations. The miraculous appearance of stigmata, the mortal wounds of the suffering Christ, on a living saints body, was surrounded by intensive doubts and passionate debates after the famous case of St. Francis, because this astonishing bodily proof was usually acquired during secret, solitary meditations. 113 St. Francis received his wounds during his ecstatic vision at Mount Alverna, accompanied only by Friar Leo, and the stigmata became known to the public only two years later, after his death.114 St. Catherine of Siena was also stigmatised during her solitary prayer in front of a crucifix in

Beda Venerabilis, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, III, 19, (The most recent edition: Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (eds.), Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford Medieval Texts (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981).
111

110

Joseph von Grres, Die christliche Mystik (Regensburg, 1836), III, 668; Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London, 1952). Cf. above N. 51.

112 113

Pierre Debognie, "Essai critique sur l'histoire des stigmatisations au Moyen Age", tudes Carmlitaines 21.2 (1936), pp. 22-59; Johannes M. Hcht, Von Franziskus zu Pater Pio und Therese Neumann. Eine Geschichte der Stigmatisierten (Pattloch, Aschaffenburg/Stein am Rhein, 1974); Andr Vauchez, Les stigmates de saint Franois et leurs dtracteurs dans les derniers sicles du moyen ge, Mlanges de l'cole franaise de Rome, 80 (1968), pp. 595-625;

Ottavian Schmucki, The Stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi: A Critical Investigation in the Light of Thirteenth-Century Sources, (The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, New York, 1991); Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l'invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Einaudi, Torino, 1993); Arnold Davidson, Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or, How St. Francis Received the Stigmata, in C. A. Jones, P. Gallison, A. Slaton, Picturing Science, Producing Art, London, 1998, pp. 101-124; Giovanni Miccoli, Considerazioni sulle stimmate, in Atti della tavola rotonda, Assisi, 1997, pp. 13-39, also published in Franciscana, 1 (1999), pp. 101-121.

114

34 the Chapel of St. Christian in Pisa, in 1375, and to modestly hide this

privilege, she obtained the favour from Christ to make her wounds invisible.115 Other late medieval cases of stigmatisation were also described to have occurred during the night, secretly, in full separation from the outside world.116 As the story of the thwarted recluse of Radolfzell shows, Nider regards such accounts of stigmatisation with considerable scepticism. Besides his own reservations, however, the description of this unsuccessful process of stigmatisation also betrays a significant difference from earlier such events, and offers a good illustration of the new social dimensions of the status of the "living saint". The recluse makes a public announcement of the impending mystic event, and goes into a trance to await its coming--under the inquisitive eyes of the assembled would-be witnesses. She challenges fate and takes the risk of incurring public ridicule, desperate as she is to establish her supernatural status within a sceptical community. The chance she took has much in common with Magdalene of Fribourg's physical disappearance for days on end while in "ecstasy", her inviting an audience to witness her self-predicted death, and finally the public ostentation of her bleeding stigmata, (if we credit to the above quoted hagiographic account about it). We see the same kind of motivation at work in the case of the old woman who greased herself with witch's ointment before the eyes of the incredulous Dominicans, to lend weight to her testimony of engaging in night flights with Diana. The more doubt there was in people's minds as to things spiritual, the more the religious public of the fifteenth century demanded visible and publicly verifiable evidence of the miraculous and of the supernatural, and the ecstatic saints tried, in some measure, to satisfy this new demand. Thus it was that the stigmata, the visible, outward signs of true bodily identification with the suffering Christ, came to be considered as the most convincing pledge of mystical union with Him. As such, it was something to which

115 116

Raimundus de Capua, Vita Sanctae Catharinae Senensis, col. 910.

Cf. my recent study. Le stigmate di santa Margherita dUngheria: immagini e testi, Iconographica. Rivista di iconografia medievale e moderna, 1 (2002), pp. 16-31.

35 most fifteenth-century "living saints" aspired,117 and which Nider's

Magdalene of Fribourg was also proud to have attained.118 The requirement that mystical experience be substantiated with physical evidence--the desire for that " bloodiest likeness" (allerbltigiste glicheit) as the fourteenth-century Beguine, Elsbeth von Oye, called the finality of self-castigation in her autobiography119--was self-contradictory when related to the traditional notions of the nature of trance. Trance, which is the most significant outward sign of ecstasy in shamanism, as in Christianity, can be described as follows: The soul of a person in trance is alienated from his/her body (ecstasim id est mentis excessum, as they put it from the twelfth century on; Nider, as we have seen, uses this same expression120); it is carried away (rapta) into a higher sphere, where it comes into direct contact with the world of the supernatural. The unconscious body--usually inert, but possibly shaken by convulsions, as if possessed--is insensible to all outside physical stimuli; as for the visionary experiences during the ecstasy, that is a "secret" on which the community's only information is his own subsequent report. The trouble was that anyone could simulate the immobility--or convulsions--of the classical state of trance (as Nider points out repeatedly); the religious "public" of the early fifteenth century wanted additional concrete proof. With their own eyes they wanted to witness the spontaneous appearance of stigmata on the hands and feet of the zealous nun lying inert in her cell. They wanted the doctor to keep his fingers on Magdalene's pulse, and report whether her life really was ebbing away at the selfprophesied time. And with their own eyes they wanted to see the old woman ride away with Diana.

117

Zarri, "Sante vive" presents several such fifteenth century saints is detail: Stefana Quinzani, Osanna Andreasi, Caterina da Racconigi, Lucia da Narni. Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe. p. 521. Peter Ochsenbein, "Leidensmystik in dominikanischen Frauenklstern des 14. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Elsbeth von Oye", in Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (ed.), Religise Frauenbewegung und mystische Frmmigkeit im Mittelalter (Bhlau, Kln/Wien, 1988), pp. 353-372. esp. 361-366.

118 119

120

Hugo de Sancto Victore, In hierarchiam coelestem, 3, 2, PL 175, col. 983c. cf. DS, col. 2113; for Nider cf. N. 28.

36 Within the framework of the traditional shamanistic system of

beliefs, it would not have occurred to anyone to simply laugh at the old "witch"--who, by Nider's own account, had been in a regular state of trance--for claiming that "only" her soul had been away. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, credible statements or confessions of personal experiences would have been sufficient grounds for accepting the reality of a soul journey, and for passing sentence on a benandante, a tltos, or a devil-worshiper witch. The unsettled climate of religious debate of the first decades of the fifteenth century, however, called for something else: the physical substantiation of such supernatural experiences. One might think that this would have been a process conducive to the eventual triumph of rationalism. In fact, it was just the opposite. I am convinced that it was precisely this inordinately critical attitude that led, in these very decades, to the rejection of the early medieval dogma formulated in the Canon episcopi to the effect that the actual, physical flight of witches was no longer considered to be an impossibility. It was in order to come up with evidence sufficient to satisfy the hypercritical that the early modern courts put such pressure on the accused that there was little they would not confess to on the rack. The "evidence" thus extracted did much to fan the overall climate of anxiety into the full-blown hysteria of the early modern witch hunts. Nider himself stands on the boundary of the two traditions. His reason inclines him to represent the sceptical, rational point of view; but time and again in Formicarius, he confesses his uncertainty, and suspends his critical faculty. In sum, the work as a whole is a concrete step toward bringing mystical experience and demonic visions, sanctity and witchcraft to a new kind of common denominator.

DISCRETIO SPIRITUUM Since Nider was not alone with his hesitations, but very much on the contrary, he fitted very well into the set of contemporary debates concerning the supernatural, for a better understanding of his ideas I have to review this context briefly. Two kinds of traditions have to be invoked here: the growing animosities against late medieval living

37 saints manifesting themselves in visions and revelations, and the

theological treatises responding to this malaise. As for the former, the birth of suspicion,121 the historiography of the past decade has provided us with a series of detailed studies in this matter. A brief enumeration can illustrate the earlier history of the phenomena described by Nider. In the late thirteenth century, urban religious culture was torn by passionate quarrels with heretics and unexpected fervour caused by new religious upheavals. The trial of the Guglielmites in Milan in 1300 was the firs serious blow against the female version of the new mendicant ideal. In the course of this it was decided to burn the earthly remains of Guglielma, a female prophet who died in 1282 and claimed to be the daughter of the Czech King, Ottacar Pemysl I, and the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Her followers, lead by a female pope called Mayfreda Pirovano were burnt as well.122 An unusual from of mystical betrothal was claimed by Margherita, the companion of the North Italian heretic leader, Fra Dolcino, burnt at stake in 1307: she asserted that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit (sui asserunt eam esse gravidam de Spiritu Sancto); a similar claim was voiced by Prous Boneta, the southern French Beguine during her trial in 1324.123 In 1310, the Vallonian Beguine, Marguerite Porte, author of the Miroir des simples mes, was burnt at the Place de Grve.124 In 1318-19, in the

Andr Vauchez, "La nascita del sospetto", in Gabriella Zarri (ed.), Finzione e santit tra medioevo ed et moderna (Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino, 1991), pp. 39-51.
122

121

F. Tocco, "Il processo dei Guglielmiti" Real Accademia dei Lincei, memorie della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, Rendiconti, 5 Series 8 (Roma 1899), pp. 309-342, 351-384, 407-432, 437-469; Marina Benedetti (ed.), Milano 1300: I processi inquisitoriali contro le devote e i devoti di santa Guglielma (Scheiwiller, Milano, 1999); Stephen Wessley, "The Thirteenth-century Guglielmites: Salvation through Women", in Derek Baker, (ed.), Medieval Women, SCH Subsidia (Blackwell, Oxford, 1978), pp. 289-304; Dinora Corsi, "Dal sacrificio al maleficio. La donna e il sacro nell'eresia e nella stregoneria", Quaderni medievali, 30 (1990), pp. 8-62; Marina Benedetti, Io non sono Dio. Guglielma di Milano e i Figli dello Spirito santo. (Edizioni Biblioeca Francescana, Milano, 1998).

Raniero Orioli, Venit perfidus heresiarcha. Il movimento Apostolico-Dolciniano Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Studi Storici, pp. 193-196 (Roma, 1988), 284-287.; Bernard Gui, Manuel de l'Inquisiteur (Belles Lettres, Paris, 1978); the testimony of Prous Boneta was edited by W. May, in J. H. Mundy et al., Essays in Medieval Life and Thought (New York, 1955), pp. 3-30.
124

123

Romana Guarnieri, "Il movimento del Libero Spirito: I. Dalle origini al secolo XVI, II. Il "Miroir des simples mes" di Margherita Porete, II. Appendici", Archivio italiano per la storia della piet, 4 (Roma, 1965); Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages. A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (203), to Marguerite

38 canonisation trial of Saint Clare of Montefalco a Franciscan friar voiced

severe doubts concerning the arma Christi miraculously found in the heart of Clare after her death. His accusations sound familiar: simulated piety, disguised gluttony behind the ascetic fasting, the heresy of the Free Spirit behind the apparent exemplary orthodoxy, mental illness and epilepsy behind the mystic raptures.125 The widely known presence of these suspicions is also attested by some of the spiritual leaders of these religious women: Henry Suso (1295-1366)126 or Venturino da Bergamo (1304-46)127 who had serious worries that the extreme practices of self-torture and flagellation could eventually lead to simulated sanctity.128 The most acclaimed mystical saints of the second half of fourteenth century, Saint Bridget of Sweden129 and Saint Catherine of Siena130 had to confront this set of suspicions as well. All this was in their case, however, supplemented by a much more important conflict, the Great Schism, where both living saints used their charismatic authority to put pressure on the pope to return to Rome.131 The amplification of such mystical interventions into ecclesiatical politics made the debates concerning the

Porete (1310), (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984); Giovanna Fozzer, Romana Guarnieri and Marco Vannini (eds.), Lo Specchio delle anime semplici, (San Paolo, Milano, 1994).
125

Enrico Menest (ed.), Il processo di canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco (Regione dell'Umbria/"La Nuova Italia" Editrice, Perugia/Firenze, 1984), pp. 435-436; cf. Vauchez, "La nascita del sospetto". Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with two German sermons, (Paulist Press, New York/Mahwah, 1989); cf. Ochsenbein, "Leidenmystik".

126

127

Dinora Corsi, "La 'crociata ' di Venturino da Bergamo nella crisi spirituale di met Trecento", Archivio Storico Italiano 147 (1989), pp. 697--747; Jeffrey R. Hamburger, "The Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden." Sacred Image East and West (Champaign--Urbana, 1995), pp. 162-170, now also in his The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (Zone Books, New York, 1998), pp. 279-315. Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe, pp. 183-196. Auke Jelsma, "The appreciation of Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), in the 15th century" in Elisja Schulte van Kessel, (ed.), Women and Men in Spiritual Culture. XIV-XVII. Centuries. A Meeting of South and North (Netherland's Government Publishing Office, The Hague, 1986), pp. 163-176; Tore Nyberg, Introduction, in Marguerite Tjadel Harris (ed.), Brigitta of Sweden. Life and Selected Revelations. tr. by Albert Ryle Kezel, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, 1990), pp. 13-51; Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? pp. 26-28.

128 129

130

Timoteo M. Centi: "Un processo inventato di sana pianta", in: Idem (ed.), S. Caterina fra i dottori della chiesa (Firenze, 1970), pp. 39-56; cf. Bell, Holy Anorexia, pp. 23-25, 194; Vauchez, "La nascita del sospetto", p. 44.

131

Peter Dinzelbacher, "Das politische Wirken der Mystikerinnen in Kirche und Staat: Hildegard, Brigitta, Katharina", in Dinzelbacher - Bauer, Religise Frauenbewegung, pp. 265-302.

39 authenticity of revelations a central problem in the times of the Great

Schism (1378-1417). In two, then three concurrent papal courts the weapons of biting polemics had been directed mostly against the prophets and visionaries of the other party. A good example in this respect is Ursula of Parma (1375-1408), subsequently beatified, who made an attempt to mediate between the two popes, and thus end the Schism. She first made a pilgrimage to Rome and visited Boniface IX, then she paid a visit to Clement VII in Avignon. The cardinals of the latter accused her of witchcraft. Ursula answered with dignity: I do not rely upon the malefices of the devil, but implore heartily the blessing of Lord Jesus Christ to your souls, and a sudden earthquake also helped her to be cleared of the infamous charges.
132

Nider also begins the series of

false apparitions in the third book of Formicarius by deploring that Petrus de Luna i.e. Benedict XIV, one of the three rival popes before the Council of Constance, put a crazy confidence into the prophecies in his favour.133 All this is well summed up by Bernardino of Siena: We are filled with prophecies up to being sick of them (Vaticiniis usque ad nauseam repleti sumus).134 This background provides some explanation for why the revelations of Saint Bridget stirred such a debate even after her death.135 After three popes (Gregory IX, 1377; Urban V; Boniface IX, 1391) declared them orthodox, they became the subject of a lengthy discussion at the Council of Constance (1414-18), again two popes (John XXIII, 1415 and Martin V, 1419) declared them to be canonical, but the debates were stirred up again at the Council of Basel (1431-1443). A commission headed by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada had to clear Bridget of the charge of having made 123 statements

132

"Maleficiis diaboli non utor, sed beneficiis Domini nostri Jesu Christi pro animarum vestrarum salute fungor", Simon de Zanachiis, Vita, 1, 225. in AA SS, Apr., 1, col. 727; cf. Grres, Die christliche Mystik, vol. I, pp. 453-454; Richard Kieckhefer, "The holy and the unholy: sainthood, witchcraft, and magic in late medieval Europe", The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994), p. 360; Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? p. 112.

"in praedictam Prophetiam fatue confidens", Formicarius II/1. p. 287; cf. Andr Vauchez, "L'glise face au mysticisme et au prophtisme aux derniers sicles du Moyen Age", in idem, Les lacs pp. 259-265.
134

133

De inspirationum discretione sermo III, in: S. Bernardini Senensis Opera Omnia (Quaracchi/Florence, 1959), vol. VI, p. 267.

On these debates see Rosalyn Voaden, Gods Words, Womens Voices. The Discernement of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York Medieval PressBoydell Press, Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 73107.

135

40 of heretical nature. Although the sainthood and the revelations of

Catherine of Siena, patronised by the mighty Dominican Order, were much less problematic, her canonisation still met unexpected obstacles. Tommaso Caffarini tried in vain to provoke an official investigation (Processo castellano). It was only the patriotism of the Siennese pope, Pius II, which in 1461 superated the adversities concerning her canonisation.136 Around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, holy women like Dorothy of Montau (1347-1394)137 or Margery Kempe (cca 1373-1439)138 had to face continuous harrassment, imprisonment, and charges of heresy. In France debates were stirred by the visions of Constance de Rabastens (1384-85) and Marie-Robine (1398), and these debates had been renewed around the strange prophecies of Jeanne-Marie de Maill (1331-1414) at her 1415 canonisation trial in Tours.139 Having contemplated all this, one should not marvel at the success of Joan of Arc ( 1431). She relied upon the charismatic power of female sainthood, which she used as a real weapon of war. At the same time she had to face charges of heresy and witchcraft besides being revered

136

M.-H. Laurent, (ed.), Il processo castellano (Milano, 1942); Iuliana Cavallini - Imelda Foralosso (eds.), Thomas Antonii de Senis "Caffarini": Libellus de supplemento, Legende prolixe virginis beate Catherine de Senis (Edizioni Cateriniane, Roma, 1974); Sabine von Heusinger, Catherine of Siena and the Dominican Order, in Siena e il suo territorio nel rinascimento. Renaissance Siena and its territory, ed. Mario Ascheri (Edizioni il Leccio, Siena, 2000), pp. 43-51.

137

Elisabeth Schraut, "Dorothea von Montau: Wahrnehmungsweisen von Kindheit und Eheleben einer sptmittelalterlichen Heiligen", in Dinzelbacher and Bauer (ed.), Religise Frauenbewegung, pp. 373-394.

138

The Book of Margery Kempe, fourteen hundred & thirty six; a modern version by W. Butler-Bowdon, intr. by R. W. Chambers (Cape, London, 1936; Devin-Adair, New York 1944); Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim. The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Cornell U. P., Ithaca, 1983); Rosalyn Voaden, Beholding Mens Members: The Sexualizing of Transgression in The Book of Margery Kempe, in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York Medieval Press Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 175-191; eadem, Gods Words, 109-154. Vauchez, Les lacs au moyen ge, pp. 278-279; Hlne Millet, coute et usage des prophties par les prlats pendant le Grand Schisme dOccident, in: Les textes prophtiques et la prophtie en Occident (XIIe-XVIe sicle), sous la dir. dAndr Vauchez (cole Franaise de Rome, Roma, 1990), (= Mlanges de l'cole Franaise de Rome, 102 -- 1990), pp. 425-455 ; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsky, Constance de Rabastens: Politics and visionary experience in the time of the Great Schism, Mystics Quarterly, 25 (1999) # 4, pp. 147-168.

139

41 as a prophet and a saint. The whole of contemporary Christianity was divided

over the question of whether her revelations were of an angelic or diabolical nature.140 These debates gave a new vigour to a theme of theology traditionally discussed since New Testament times, the discernment of spirits (discretio spirituum).141 If one examines the medieval cases, one can see very well that the topic itself became popular whenever the guardians of ecclesiastical dogma were confronted with external, marginal or even lay authorities who tried to make reference to independent sources of the divine wisdom: prophecies, revelations, visions and apparitions. The validity of these new sources of divine authority could not be adjudicated by traditional arguments of authority or rational reasoning. It had to be decided upon by a complicated casuistic mixed with intuition. Alii datur per spiritum sermo sapientiae, alii sermo scientiae, alii discretio spirituum. (1 Chor. 12,8).142 After the solidification of early Christian dogmatics in the work of Origen, this kind of problem presented itself with the visions among Egyptian monks and hermits of the third and fourth centuries, this is why Johannes Cassianus (c360-430) devotes such an attention to the problem of the discretio spirituum (and his relevant writings kept on being used until the late Middle Ages).143 The problem was again discussed by two founding fathers of medieval Latin Christianity, Augustine and Gregory the Great,144 and became a frequently debated

Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. (Knopf, New York, 1981), pp. 96-116; William A. Christian, Jr.: Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981), 188-191; Sabine Tanz, Jeanne dArc. Sptmittelalterliche Mentalitt im Spiegel eines Weltbildes (Bhlaus Nachvolger, Weimar, 1991); Deborah A. Fraioli, Joan of Arc. The Early Debate (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2000).
141

140

Andr Vauchez, "Les thologiens face aux prophties l'poque des papes d'Avignon et du Grand Schisme", in: Les textes prophtiques, pp. 577-588. ; cf.. Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen ? pp. 251-25. Franois Vanderbrouke, "Discernement des esprits", DS Vol. III, pp. 1254-1266; Gnter Switek, "Discretio spirituum" Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Spiritualitt, Theologie und Philosophie 47 (1972), pp. 3676. Conlationes, I, 16-22; II.

142

143 144

Augustinus, Confessiones, 9, 24, De civitate Dei, 4, 122; 11,8; 16; De doctrina christiana 5,8; 10,19; Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Iob, 4, 162.

42 topic among various representatives of of St. Victor.146 These traditions gained a new vigour at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the newly founded university of Vienna (1365) became one of the principal centres of these discussions.147 Nider does mention these debates: "vidi magnos Theologie Doctores fecisse de instinctibus, vel de discretione spirituum tractatus",148 and his words refer in fact to two of the most famous works written in this subject: the "De IV instinctibus" of Heinrich von Friemar149 and the treatise of the leading intellect of the new theological faculty of the Vienna University founded in 1384/85 the "De discretione spirituum" by Heinrich von Langenstein (Henricus de Hassia) (1325-1397), who moved there from Paris and finished his treatise in 1388. 150 The popularity of the treatise by Heinrich von Friemar, and its early German translation can be credited to its simple and easily perceivable structure. He distinguishes four instincts or rather dispositions: 1) divine; 2) angelic; 3) diabolical; 4) natural. Each one of these is to be recognised by further combination of triple or quadruple clusters of indices. The divine instinct for instance is to be detected in 1) the sequel of Christ, 2) humility, 3) the turning from the outside towards the inside, internal values, and 4) the inclination for the wealth of virtues. The four angelic indices provide twelfth century religious reform

movements who had a mystical sensitivity, such as Bernard of Clairvaux145 or Richard

145 146

Bernhardus Clarevallensis, Sermo de discretione spirituum, PL 183, col. 602.

Richardus de Sancto Victore, De gratia contemplationis ("Benjamin minor"), IV-V; PL 196 coll. 155-183; the medieval evolution of the concepts is well presented by Elliott, The Physiology of Rapture, pp. 151-156. Franz Gall, Alma Mater Rudolphina 1365-1965. Die Wiener Universitt und ihre Studenten (Wien, 1965); Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 280-282. Formicarius. II/5. p. 210.

147

148 149

Adolar Zumkeller -- Robert G. Warnock, Der Traktat Heinrichs von Friemar ber die Unterscheidung der Geister. Cassiciacum 32 (Wrzburg, 1977).

150

Konrad Josef Heilig, "Kritische Studien zum Schrifttum der beiden Heinriche von Hessen" Rm. Quartalschr. 40 (1932), pp. 105-176; Thomas Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein Unterscheidung der Geister lateinisch und deutsch. Texte und Untersuchungen zu bersetzungsliteratur aus der Wiener Schule (Artemis, Zrich-Mnchen, 1977), the list of the Mss.: pp. 21-26; Caciola, Discerning Spirits, pp. 346-353; Anna Morisi Guerra, Il silenzio di Dio e la voce dellanima. Da Enrico di Langenstein a Gerson, Cristianesimo nella storia 17 (1996), pp. 393-413.

43 similar positive drives, whereas the twice four indices of the diabolical

instinct represent a systematic negation and antithesis of the divine and the angelic indices. Finally, the ambivalent group of natural instincts is characterised in itself by a similar antagonism (divided into two triads) between the opposed tendencies of natura and gratia.151 Even this short outline can indicate that it was Friemars popular classification which served as a point of departure for Nider in the development of his own taxonomy of dreams and apparitions. Heinrich von Langensteins work, however, apparently made an even a bigger effect upon him. Nider mentions his name with the true reverence of a disciple: "recolendae & sancte memoriae Mag. Henricus de Hassia, sacrae paginae professor".152 The starting point of Heinrich von Langenstein was fairly similar to that of Nider; his treatise, written in 1382-83 had been provoked by contemporary debates around prophecies and revelations which, made him decide to compile and analyse a list of the relevant ecclesiastical authors on the discretio spirituum. A decade later, in a pamphlet written in 1392 against the most controversial visionary authority of his age, Telesphorus of Cosenza (Invectiva contra quemdam eremitam de ultimis temporibus vaticinantem nomine Telesphorum), he could make a more concrete use of these arguments.153

151

I rely in this outline of Friemar treatise upon the account of Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, pp. 5-

9. Formicarius I/10; p. 123; if one tries to measure the impact of the work of Hebry of Langenstein, it is worth mentioning that two out of its four oldest manuscript copies belonged to the Dominicans at Basel and Nuremberg, i.e. precisely those two convents where Nider had been prior for some time. It in the Carthusian monastery of Nrdlingen, that an early German manuscript was preserved, containing the oldest translation of the treatise by Heinrich von Langenstein, and also the one of Heinrich von Friemar. More than this, this same Ms. also contains a popular German language work by Johannes Nider: 24 goldene Harfen. cf.- Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, pp. 27-31; Brand, Studien zu Johannes Niders deutschen Schriften, pp. 65-66.
153 152

The De discretione spirituum could have relied in this upon the work of Rudolf of Biberach De septem itineribus aeternitatis, written sometime between 1345 and 1360, cf. Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, pp. 3637; Biberach is published in A. C. Peltier, S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia (Paris, 1866), vol. 8. pp. 393-482; his second pamphlet on Telesphorus is published in H. Pez, Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus, (Augsburg, 1721), vol. I, pp. 505-564; cf. Vauchez, Les thologiens; Millet, coute et usage des prophties; Morisi Guerra, Il silenzio di Dio, pp. 396-399.

44 The treatise of Heinrich von Langestein consists of fifteen chapters.

It begins with a lengthy scholastic taxonomy of spirits (five internal, seven external, four substantial spirits, the effects of which are complemented by five further dispositions which take their origins from the natural or moral condition of the individuals). We hear of the disturbed balance of body humours, (excessus humoris), of the impact of the stars, of marvellous imagination originating from the excessive workings of fantasy. As we have already seen, this set of categories was nearly completely adopted by Nider in his Formicarius, as well as the following warning of Heinrich von Langenstein: we should be on our guards and not believe immediately and easily those homines spirituales, who plunge into their fantasy and contemplation while working, and perceive in anything that occurs to them, even unwillingly, the supernatural operation of good or bad spirits.154 Heinrich von Langenstein could be at the origin of the triple distinction made by Nider of natural causes or influences stemming from good or bad spirits. In connection with this, the Vienna theologian mocks with a sarcastic tone the crazy and credulous people who suspect with every natural occurrence the supernatural manifestation of God or that of good or bad spirits. He protests against this attitude, and he admonishes with passion reliance upon humana ratio. For it is very hateful in the eyes of God, if the man proceeds in a foolish manner, rationally and indiscreetly, because man denies thus his human condition, since God gave him reason...155 Still, when he comes to a more concrete distinction between good or bad spirits we have to observe with some embarrassment that he is still a child of his age: his strategy for the evaluation of supernatural phenomena seems to be rather naive. He suggests for instance basing our interpretation upon the type of things and animals appearing in the visions: if it is a snake, a scorpion, a pig or a raven, the vision certainly came from an

154

"Patet ergo non esse cito et leviter credendum homini spirituali, qui laborat continue phantasiando et contemplando, quod in omnibus impulsibus quos sentit vel in omnibus, quae ei quasi inopinatae occurrunt, a bono vel malo spiritu supernaturaliter moveatur.", Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, pp. 58-60. "ne homo in fatuam deducatur credulitatem et aestimationem de se et de continua circa se supernaturali actione dei et spirituum bonorum vel malorum."; "Quia hominem fatue, irrationabiliter et indiscrete procedere est deo valde odibile; cum hoc sit maxime repugnans conditioni humanis, cui deus dedit rationem..." Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, pp. 62, 68.

155

45 evil spirit, but if it were a dove or fire, it originated from a good spirit.156 The treatise provides a detailed interpretation of the various manifestations of visionary and prophetic religiosity. He deplores various errors of the recently converted, such as intolerance, exaggerated asceticism and overdone eagerness for supernatural signs (cap. 3, 101-120), a desire for fame (cap 4, 19-27) and consequently the danger of pride (cap. 4. 32-39). He labels the striving for revelations and unusual miracles is labelled as modus temptandi deum (cap. 4. 81-82), and he suggests approaching God in a human manner rather than with the will or the belief of falling into ecstasy.157 In the second half of the treatise Heinrich von Langenstein aligns a number of authorities from Aristotle, Saint Paul, Cicero (hinted at with the Somnium Scipionis), Cassianus (named erroneously Cyprianus), passing through Augustine, Gregory the Great, to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor. After reviewing these varied and interesting arguments, however, the conclusion he arrives at is rather meagre: if we have any doubts, whether a vision or a miracle is coming from a good spirit, we should above all consider, which degree of the ecclesiastical hierarchy it is coming from...158 This conclusion provides a good illustration what great difficulty contemporary theologians encountered whenever they had to decide such questions. After the treatises discussed in Vienna we should turn to the debates at the University of Paris, where two important theologians, both chancellors of the University contributed to this subject. First it was Pierre d'Ailly, who wrote a passionate treatise against the "false prophets" (where he essentially aimed at the vogue of astrological prophecies, so it is somewhat outside of our objective here).159 The most prolific writer a cloud, or a lamb, we can be sure that

156 157

Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, p. 62; cf. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, p. 349.

"aliqui tam volunt vel credunt rapi in deum, ut in factis eorum obmittant viam et modum procedendi humanum.." Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, p. 76. "Cum ergo de visionibus alicuius aut miraculis dubitatur, an a spiritu bono sint, considerandum est, quem statum aut gradum in ecclesiastica hierarchia habeat vel habuerit...", Hohmann, Heinrichs von Langenstein, p. 114.

158

Petri dAilliaco de falsis prophetis tractatus I-II, edited as an appendice in Opera omnia Johannis Gersonis. ed. L. Ellies du Pin, I Antwerpiae, 1706, coll 489-510 and 511-603; on this series of debates at the Paris University, also extending to the problem of superstition, see Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider,

159

46 in these matters was his successor as Jean Gerson (1363-1429).160 chancellor of the University of Paris,

His first treatise concerning the subject, the De

distinctione verarum visionum a falsis, was written around 1401.161 Gerson provides an acute exposition of the problem: the reason why one should pay so much attention to whether a prophecy or revelation has angelic or diabolical origin is that "Satan himself goes disguised as an angel of light" (2 Co, 11,14). The theologian has to find the golden middle way between two bad extremes, scepticism refusing revelations altogether and credulity accepting dreams and fantasies of the mentally disturbed. According to Gerson, those who profess true revelations should be adorned by the same five virtues that were possessed by the Virgin Mary, that is humility, discretion, patience, truthfulness and love. On the other hand it is highly suspicious if visionaries publicise their revelations with curiosity and pride instead of humility. It is also to be observed attentively whether the said seers are willing to accept the advice of the more experienced with discretion of whether they have the patience to wait without grumbling and rebelling until the Church gives full credit to the message received by them. And, finally, there should be a careful investigation, whether the revelations in question are in accordance with the fundamental verities of Catholic faith, whether true divine love transpires through them.162

pp. 270-273; the treatise is probably not from the period between 1372 and 1395, as was conventionally held, but from between 1410 and 1415, cf. Francis Oakley, Gerson and sAilly: An Admonition, Speculum 40 (1965), pp. 74-79.
160 161

Cf. James L. Connolly, John Gerson, Reformer and Mystic (Librairie Universitaire, Louvain, 1928).

Opera omnia Gersonis, ed. Ellies du Pin, 1, pp. 43-59; new edition by Palmon Glorieux: Jean Gerson, Oeuvres Compltes, Glorieux (Descle & Cie, Paris, 1973), vol. III, pp. 36-56. (with the caput Nos I refer to the previous one and with the page numbers to the latter, where caput numbers are no more preserved); English translation and analysis in Paschal Boland, The Concept of Discretio Spirituum in John Gerson's "De Probatione Spirituum" and "De Distinctione Verarum Visionum a Falsis" (The Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C. 1959); new translation in, Brian Patrick McGuire (ed. tr.), Jean Gerson. Early Works (Paulist Press, New York-Mahwah, 1998), pp. 365-378 ; cf. Christian, Visions and Apparitions. pp. 192-197; Dyan Elliott, Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc, American Historical Review 107 (2002), pp. 26-54 (this insightful recent analysis goes in many points further and deeper than my description here, written six years ago since my considerations point to the same direction, I decided to leave them unaltered here, as an alternative approach of the same perspective).
162

Gerson gives a synthetic overview of these considerations at the end of his treatise, De distinctione... 6, 98.

p. 56.

47 Reading the complex argumentation of Gerson, one can feel

that his theological awareness is struggling with an undeniable attraction to mystical sensibility; it is not by chance that he dedicated so much polemical attention to the works of Ruysbroeck.163 What may have disturbed Gerson was the frequent reliance upon bodily metaphors within mysticism, for such associations may have seemed to him to limit the infinity of God. This is why he grumbled with so much insistence about those naive women, who turn towards God or the saints with sensual passion rather than real sincere love.164 Gersons specific attention to female spirituality may have been motivated by various factors. His close relationship with his five sisters, his supervision of their religious careers and the eventual anxieties concerning his own role might have been some of these.165 Another motivation could have been provided by the contemporary debates concerning the revelations of a pious woman, Ermine of Reims ( 1396), about the authenticity of which Gerson was personally asked by the prior of the abbey of Saint-Deny of Reims, Jean Morel, around 1401 or 1402. 166 Gerson wrote a cautiously positive assessment on Ermine, but he changed his mind in the subsequent decades, in later writings he demarcated himself from his earlier fascination with such mystic women.167 Besides the theological and biographical reasons, however, one can also detect in Gersons writings the clichs of a well routinised animosity against women: he

163 164 165

Mgr. A. Combes, Essai sur la critique de Ruysbroeck par Gerson (Paris, 1945-1948). De distinctione... 6, 75.

Brian Patrick McGuire, Late medieval care and control of women: Jean Gerson and his sisters, Revue dhistoire Ecclsiastique, 92 (1997), pp. 5-37.

Judicium Joannis Gersonii, doctoris et cancellarii, de vita sanctae Erminae, ed. Ellies du Pin, t. I, pp. 8386 ; English tr. in McGuire, Jean Gerson, pp. 244-249 (Brian Patrick McGuire dates the letter to 1408); Franoise Bonney, Jugement de Gerson sur deux expriences de la vie mystique: les visions dErmine et de Jeanne dArc, Actes du 95e Congrs national des socits savantes (Reims, 1970), Philologie et Histoire, t. II.: Champagne et Pays de Meuse (Paris, 1975), 187-195; Entre Dieu et Satan. Les visions dErmine de Reims ( 1396) recueillies at transcrites par Jean le Graveur, pres. ed. et trad. par Claude Arnaud-Gillet. Prf. dAndr Vauchez (SISMEL Edizioni del Galuzzo, Firenze, 1997), pp. 21-27;
167

166

For an analysis of the complex background of Gersons hesitations concerning female mystics, see now Elliott, Seeing Double, pp. 39-44.

48 was the first theologian to introduce the topoi of misogynous discourse into the

debate on revelations, so popular in French literary circles of the age. To illustrate the unreliability of false apparitions, his examples always target the typical mistakes of religious women. One of these is the "non-acceptance of expert advice", where he exemplifies the case with an "arrogantly stubborn" female visionary, a certain married woman in Arras. Gerson narrates that she got ultimately worn out by her extreme ascetic practices and after having finished her severe fasting she always started devouring food gluttonously. But what was even more scandalous for Gerson is that she did not allow herself to be dissuaded from this practice by any kind of wise arguments.168 The errors of the Beguines and Beghards were also exemplified by the writings of a woman, the "subtle" books of Marie de Valenciennes (who might be identified with Margaret of Porete).169 Gerson was asked to take positions again during the debates around the revelations of Saint Bridget at the Council of Constance. In his new treatise, in De probatione spirituum (1415),170 after proposing a catchy little verse about the rules of circumspect investigation (Tu quis, quid, quare, cui, qualiter, unde require171), and after retelling again the scholastic quadruple classification of revelations coming from God, good spirit, evil spirit and (in a "rational" or in an "animal" way) from a human being,172 he arrives again and again at the problem represented by religious women. In connection with the kind of persons professing revelations he stresses that sudden religious passions may lead to specific dangers especially with adolescents and

168

De distinctione... 6, 45-47. Eventually we can detect here an allusion to Catherine of Siena - cf. Vauchez, Les lacs, p. 273.

As supposed by Vauchez, Les lacs, p. 273; cf. MacDonnell, Beguines and Beghards, pp. 367-368, Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, pp. 68-84.
170

169

Gerson, Oeuvres compltes. ed. P. Glorieux, Vol. IX. Oeuvre doctrinale pp. 177-184. 458-476 ; Dyan Elliott argues convincingly, that Gerson is basically reworking the treatise defending the inspiration of Bridgets revelations by her confessor Alphonse of Pecha, and reversing its arguments with an ad feminam twist, Elliott, Seeing Double, p. 36.

De probatione..., 6, 19; p. 180. ; Dyan Elliott explores the origins of Gersons investigating techniques : the inquisition concerning sanctity in canonisation trials and the questions suggested for the confessions, as described in Raymond of Peaforts Summa de paenitentia, Elliott, Seeing Double, p. 43.
172

171

Ibid. 12, p. 184.

49 women, whose ardour is excessive, wanton, capriciously changing,

uninhibited and therefore utterly suspect.173 As for the public of those revelations, Gerson warns about the responsibility of confessors and spiritual directors. Do not applaud such a person, do not praise her, do not venerate her as a saint worthy of revelations or miracles. Stand in her way rather, scorn her heavily, show her disdain.174 And finally, when the way of life of the visionary comes into question, it is again the relationship of women and confessors which remains the only problem to be discussed, with some vicious remarks on women who can have no satisfaction to their eagerness for seeing and talking, not to speak of touching.175 Speaking with Apostle Paul: women... led on by all kinds of desires, who are always wanting to be taught, but are incapable of reaching a knowledge of the truth. (2 Tim, 3, 7). The De examinatione doctrinarum (1423)176, Gersons third treatise on the matter, is the most sarcastic about uncultivated, illiterate women (idiotas, ac sine litteris mulierculas): Teachings coming from women, especially sayings and writings concerning higher things, are much more suspect than those coming from men... Why, because they are more easily seduced, they themselves are restless seducers, and they ignore divine wisdom. For it is a different thing to chat about things coming into ones fantasy, and again a different thing to preach about the Holy Scriptures.177 According to Gerson already Jerome disapproved of those who wanted to learn from women what is originally taught by men. For what would happen... if these women would start adding visions to visions, and start professing as great miracles or divine

173

"praesertim in adolescentibus et foeminis, quarum ardor est nimius, avidus, varius, effrenis, ideoque quspectus." De probatione..., 7, 22, p. 180. "non applaudas tali personae, non obinde laudes eam, non mireris quasi sanctam dignamque revelationibus atque miraculis. Obsiste potius, increpa dure, sperne eam..." De probatione 9, 32-33, p. 181. "habet insatiabilem videndi loquendique, ut interim de tactu silentium sit, pruriginem". De probatione, 11, 50-51; p. 184. Gerson, Oeuvres compltes, Vol. IX, p. 458-476. "... omnis doctrina mulierum, maxime solemnis verbo seu scripto, reputanda est suspecta... et multo amplius quam doctrina virorum. .. Quare? quia levius seductibiles, quia pertinacius seductrices, quia non constat eas esse sapientiae divinae cognitrices. Aliud etiam est garrire quae venerint ad phantasiam; aliud, de Scripturis sacris proferre sermonem." De examinatione, 2; pp. 468-469.

174

175

176 177

50 revelations, those things that are merely the product of a disturbed brain,

troubled by epilepsy, congelatio, or by other kind of melancholy.178 Gersons qualifications seem to follow the general line of the negative judgements and misogynous topoi of medieval ecclesiastical public opinion concerning women.179 Yet, in the turmoil of early fifteenth century Parisian debates, stirred up by the querelle des femmes in connection with the Roman de la Rose,180, this classification becomes somewhat blurred: instead of joining the misogynous party, Gerson made here a nicely argued statement on Christine de Pizans side.181 Considering this, his anti-woman statements have to be evaluated strictly in the context of the discussions concerning the evaluation of female visionary sanctity, and here it can be observed that the arguments of Gerson really brought about an important transformation.182 His concern with feminine mystical spirituality was a will to control and contain. His importing mysogynous arguments on the field of spiritual discernment (which he may not have endorsed in debates on vernacular literature) could be rather characterised as a strategic rhetorical device. In any case he brought about an influential setback to the general tendency of late medieval Christianity which saw in the saintly female mystics the most appropriate mediators of divine and supernatural messages. As we have seen, Nider represented very similar opinions to the ones of Gerson on this matter. Though he did not directly refer to Gerson in the Formicarius,183 there was a copy of the De probatione spirituum in the library of the Basel Dominican

178

"Culpat Hieronymus eos, qui, proh pudor, a foeminis discunt quod viros doceant. Quid si talis sexus apposuerit ... visiones quotidie super visiones addere, laesiones quoque cerebri per epilepsiam vel congelationem aut aliam melancholiae speciem ad miraculum referre, etc., nihil denique dicere nisi vice Dei sine medio revelantis..." De examinatione, 2, p. 467. Marie-Thrse D'Alverny, "Comment les thologiens et les philosophes voient la femme", Cahiers de Civilisation Mdivale 20 (1977), pp. 105-131 ; R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 1991). Christine de Pizan, Le dbat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris, 1977).

179

180 181

Contre le Roman de la Rose, in Gerson, Oeuvres compltes. ed. P. Glorieux, Vol. VII, 1, pp. 301-16, McGuire, Jean Gerson, pp. 378-398. Dyain Elliott also underlines that we cannot find this same ad feminam attitude in the writings of Heinrich von Friemar, Heinrich von Langenstein and Pierre dAilly, Elliott, pp. 30-31.
183 182

This curious lack has been pointed out by Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 166, 454.

51 convent184 and the spiritual kinship between the works of the two

theologians is also illustrated by the fact that their works are frequently linked in fifteenth-century manuscripts. For instance, in a manuscript compiled around 1440, presently kept in Budapest, three treatises by Gerson, among which is the duodecim consideraciones super spirituum probacione, are bound together with one of the most misogynous writings of Nider, entitled De lepra morali.185 There is another point where the treatises of Gerson give a new direction to debates concerning apparitions: he provides a theoretical formulation to late medieval objections against recent cults of sainthood and revelations. It would be onerous and vain, if the new and new visions immensely multiplying in our age would all be considered truthful divine revelations. For like this our faith and religion, which God intended to keep according to Augustine in a short and concise form, would become even lengthier than the Old Testament. Already Master Henricus de Hassia186 of venerable memory warned us that the number of canonisations should be limited. And another reason should also be mentioned: the multitude of Christian believers, who turn their curious eyes and ears towards these apparitions which are all the more attractive as they are recent, meanwhile omit the study of the Holy Scripture. Speaking with Seneca, they do not learn the necessary, they study only what is superfluous.187 These arguments, formulated in the context of the debates over the canonisation of Saint Bridget, are still counterbalanced in Gersons writing by circumspect and cautious final

184 185 186

Gerson, Oeuvres compltes, vol. IX. pp. xii. Hungarian Szchnyi National Library, Cod. lat. 379; ff. 94-183, and ff. 198v-206.

Clear reference that Gerson knew well Heinrich von Langenstein, who might have been one of his teachers, when he was still in Paris "Onerosum quippe esset, ne dicamus vanum, visiones super visiones in immensum multiplicatas debere recipere tamquam ab ore Dei prolatas, ac proinde certissima fide credendas. Sicque demum nostra fides nostraque religio quam Deus, teste Augustino, voluit sub paucissimis contineri, redderetur plus, absque ulla comparatione, quam lex vetus onerosa. Hinc clarae memoriae magister Henricus de Hassia comprimendam esse tot hominum canonizationem scripsit. Hinc alia ratio sumitur, quod omisso divinarum Scripturarum studio magna christianorum pars ad has visiones, ideo placentiores quia recentiores, converterent oculos et aures prurientes; sicque necessaria nescirent, quia juxta Senecae verbum, supervacua didicissent." De probatione..8, 28-29. p. 181.

187

52 conclusions concerning the apparitions of St. Bridget: it would be as

dangerous to approve them altogether as to disapprove.188 The ambivalence of his judgement, already exemplified by his changing opinion on Ermine of Reims, is again epitomised by one of his ultimate writings, shortly before his death. Surprisingly, he defended, despite all his previous reservations concerning female revelations, the prophecies of Joan of Arc. It might have been precisely this ambivalence which led to the lasting debate: was it really Gerson who wrote the short treatise on De mirabili victoria cuiusdam puellae in 1429 (or an earlier treatise entitled De quadam puella), or were these writings forgeries from the times of the 1450-56 rehabilitation trial?189 If we assume that the De mirabili victoria treatise was really Gersons own work, the trap-like nature of the discernment argumentation becomes apparent from its effects. However much Gerson would have desired to apply his critical criteria for arriving this time at a positive judgement, his expert opinion was not respected. While there is ample evidence that the judges of Rouen made use of his three former treatises in this matter, there is no trace of the use of the two positive treatises.190 More than this: Gersons cautiously positive argumentation was triumphantly turned upside down, the defence was inverted into attack by the treatise of an anonymous Paris cleric, entitled De bono et malino spirito, also written in 1429, classifying Joans revelation as clearly originating from the evil spirit.191

188

"est autem utrobique, vel in approbatione, vel in reprobatione, periculum." De probatione..., 5. 11-12. p.

179. De puella Aurelianensi, in Gerson, Oeuvres compltes, vol. IX. pp. 661-665; cf. J-B. Monnoyeur, Trait de Jean Gerson sur la Pucelle (Paris, 1930), p. 19; doubts on his authorship are voiced by Dorothy G. Wayman, "The Chancellor and Jeanne d'Arc", Franciscan Studies 17 (1957), pp. 273-303, who considers rather an earlier treatise on Joan, entitled De Quadam Puella, generally attributed to Heinrich von Gorckheim, as Gersons own work (both texts are appended to this article, pp. 296-303); these doubts are shared by Fraioli, Joan of Arc, pp. 22-44; against this assertion: Georges Peyronnet, Gerson, Charles VII et Jeanne dArc: La propagande au service de la guerre, Revue dhistoire ecclsiastique, 84 (1989), pp. 343-48; convincing additional arguments in Elliott, Seeing Double, pp. 50-53. Karen Sullivan, The Interrogation of Joan of Arc (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London, 1999), pp. 33-34.
191 190 189

Nol Valois, Un nouveau tmoignage sur Jeanne dArc: Rponse dun clerc parisien lapologie de la pucelle par Gerson (1429), Annuaire-Bulletin de la Socit dhistoire de France, 43 (1906), pp. 161-79; cf. Fraioli, Joan of Arc, pp. 159-72; Dyan Elliott analysed the antiphonal nature of the treatise, Seeing Double, pp. 48-50.

53 In the list of the sources of the ideas of the Formicarius one should

equally mention several Swiss or German promoters of Dominican observance for a fuller panorama. While an important group from among the Dominicans, led by their general Master, Raimund of Capua (who was actually one of the initiators of the Dominican observance) was striving to get Catherine of Siena canonised, another group of the Dominicans formulated a similar or even harsher judgement on the phenomena of female religiosity. An example of this was the activity of the famous Dominican inquisitor of Basel, Johannes Mulberg (1350-1414), the brother of the saintly woman Adelheid Mulberg mentioned by Nider192, who started such an intensive series of preachings in 1400 against the large local community of Beguines (numbering approximately 350 or 400 members) that it soon led to severe debates about them and ultimately in 1411 to their complete expulsion from the city.193 In the 1420s it was the Saint Catherine convent of Dominican sisters in Nuremberg which became one of the centres of the Dominican observant movement. Between 1425 and 1428 its spiritual director was Eberhard Mardach. One of his preserved epistles, written in 1422 to one of his spiritual daughters, entitled Sendbrief von wahrer Andacht, provides an authentic picture of the hardening judgement concerning female religiosity. He thinks those nuns are on the wrong path who constantly fall into ecstasy (gezuckt werden), constantly see the suffering Christ, and lose all external senses, so that they do not see, nor hear, nor feel anything (oft also ingezogen von allen aussern sinnen, das sie nihtz sehen, noch hren, noch empfinden.). One should not constrain divine grace in such a manner, one should not believe in the apparitions seen under such conditions.194 The immediate successor of

192 193

Cf. above N. 104.

Georg Boner, "Das Predigerkloster in Basel von der Grndung bis zur Klosterreform, 1233-1429" II. Teil. Basler Zeitschrift fr Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 34 (1935), pp. 107-259; Brigitte Degler-Spengler, "Die Beginen in Basel", Basler Zeitschrift fr Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 69 (1969), pp. 5-83. 70 (1970), 29-118; Schmitt, La mort d'une hrsie, pp. 152-161; Hans-Jochen Schiewer, Auditionen und Visionen einer Begine. Die Selige Schererin, Johannes Mulberg und der Basler Beginenstreit. Mit einem Textabdruck, in Die Vermittlung geistlicher Inhalte im deutschen Mittelalter. Internationales Symposium, Roscrea 1994. ed. Timothy R. Jackson, Nigel F. Palmer, Almut Suerbaum (Niemeyer, Tbingen, 1996), pp. 289-317; von Heusinger, Johannes Mulberg. Williams-Krapp, Dise ding sint dennoch nit ware zeichen der heiligkeit, pp. 61-71.

194

54 Mardach as the prior of the Nuremberg convent, as we have already

mentioned, was no other person than Johannes Nider himself, so he certainly had firsthand knowledge of these ideas.195 Dominican observance kept its concern for the discipline of female visionary religiosity throughout the first half of the fifteenth century; we can find an ample series of references to this problem and to the initiatives of Nider and his predecessors in the representative overview by Johannes Meyer (1485), prepared in 1468, entitled Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens.196 We have already touched upon the biggest scandal which occurred in the history of female visionaries, in the years immediately preceding the birth of the Formicarius: the apparitions and the military victories of Joan of Arc in 1429 and 1430 and her capture and condemnation in 1431. Whatever the evident political biases of the infamous Pierre Cauchon and the other judges of the Pucelle could have been, it is obvious that they were acting according to the circumspect logic of the sceptical point of view outlined above. They wanted to hear about signs (signa) that were also accessible to others besides the visionary herself. This is how Joan came to describe the scene where Saint Michael was allegedly also seen by Charles VII when he leaned to him ("Sire, vela vostre signe, preney lay") and offered him the crown, to convince him ultimately of the truthfulness of Joans apparitions.197 And these signa were interpreted by the judges as very contradictory: has the archangel ever made a bow in front of a human being be it even Virgin Mary?198 From the fact that Saint Catherine and Saint Marguerite allegedly embraced and kissed her they drew the conclusion: it could only

195

He describes several anecdotes concerning the reform of the St. Catherine convent. Cf. Formicarius, III, 3, pp. 307-310; cf. Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 51-54; Bailey, Battling Demons, pp. 1819.

Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ed. by B. M. Reichert, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Dominikanerordens in Deutschland, 2-3 (Harrasowitz, Leipzig, 1908-9); recently analysed by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Reformation of Vision: Art and the Dominican Observance in Late Medieval Germany, in his The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 427-467.
197

196

Jules Quicherat, Procs de condamnation et de rhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc (Jules Renouard et Cie, Paris, 1861), 5 vols; new edition: Pierre Tisset, Procs et condamnation de Jeanne d'Arc (Paris, Klincksieck, 19601971), Vol. I, p. 136, vol. II, pp. 56, 74, 123.; cf. Christian, Visions and Apparitions. pp. 188-194; Ansgar Kelly, "The Right to Remain Silent: Before and After Joan of Arc", Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 992-1026; Sullivan, The Interrogation. Tisset, Procs, vol. II, p. 214 ; Sullivan, The Interrogation, pp. 61-81.

198

55 be disguised evil spirits with whom she made a sacrilegious pact.199 This is

why her accusers tried to inculpate her with invocation of spirits and magical activities (which they had to drop subsequently)200, then they insistently tried to get her confession concerning the fairy tree where she used to play as a child in Domrmy, hoping to extract her a kind of statement concerning witchcraft or women riding in the air. Joan asserted to have heard of such things, and said that this witchcraft (sorcerie) generally happened on Thursdays, and she even joked about it: dont be afraid, I will not fly away201 The diabolic origin of Joans apparitions seems to have been confirmed by the fact that the prophet self-consciously opposing her judges could not be qualified as humble, and her leaving home without permission, her amazon-like behaviour, male attire and of course the obscene English gossip about her showed her morals in an unfavourable light. Good morals and humility are completely missing here, the two characteristics of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit, according to Gregory the Great we hear from Philibert, Bishop of Coutances,202 a very similar way of approaching apparitions with Heinrich von Langenstein and Jean Gerson. The Council of Basel, where Joan would have liked to appeal, naturally knew quite a lot about her trial, in fact, not less than nine judges or other participants of her trial took part for shorter or longer periods in the council.203 Based on the report of one of them, Lic. Theol. Nicolaus Amici, i. e. Nicaolaus Lami, Rector of the Paris University between 1426 and 1429, Johannes Nider gives us a detailed account on Joan deifying herself and appearing in male attire, but, significantly enough, he does not speak about

199 200 201

Tisset, Procs, vol. II, pp. 192, 208-210; Sullivan, The Interrogation, pp. 33-41. These charges are enumerated by Kieckhefer, "The holy and the unholy, p. 382.

Tisset, Procs, vol. I, p. 178, II.p. 85-86, 163; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 97; Warner, Joan of Arc, p. 111; cf. also Madeleine Jeay, "Clercs et paysans au XVe sicle: une relecture de l'pisode de l'arbre aux fes dans les procs de Jeanne d'Arc", in Marie-Claude Dspoez-Masson (ed.), Normes et pouvoirs au Moyen Age (CERES Montral, 1989), pp. 146-163 ; Sullivan, The Interrogation, pp. 1-21.
202 203

Tisset, Procs, vol. I, p. 318.

About the intention to send an appeal: Quicherat, Procs, vol. II, pp. 4-5. Testimony of Isambard de Pierre cf. Heinz Thomas, "Jehanne la Pucelle, das Basler Konzil und die "Kleinen" der Reformatio Sigismundi", Francia, 11 (1983), pp. 319-338.

56 her in the row of false apparitions, but rather in the chapter dedicated to

witches and their deceptions.204 Joan would have stated of herself that she has Gods angel as her familiar, but according to a large number of interpretations and examinations of most learned men, this was judged to have been rather a malign spirit, and consequently secular justice had been instructed that the spirit and the witch (maga) under its influence should be burnt.205 This was perfectly in line with the conclusion of the treatise against Joan by the anonymous Paris clerc, who spoke about heresy with sorcery involved in her case.206 The judges of Rouen did not manage to prove the charge of witchcraft or the alliance with the devil, so Joan was finally sentenced with the charge of heresy. The infamous inscription on her stake summarised the stream of insults of the English party rather than the results of the inquisitorial investigations: Joan, who called herself the Maid, a liar, pernicious deceiver of the people, sorceress, superstitious, blasphemer of God, defamer of the faith of Jesus Christ, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoker of demons, apostate schismatic and heretic.207 In any case, four years later one of the opinion leaders of the Basel Council, Johannes Nider, does not hesitate to call her a witch. This could have become a generally accepted opinion at the council, where Nider read out several passages from the stories of the Formicarius to the participants.208 A similar opinion is echoed by the secretary of Amadeus VIII, Prince of Savoy, elected as

204 205

De maleficis et eorum deceptionibus.

"fassa est, se habere familiarem Dei angelum, qui judicio literatissimorum virorum judicatus est esse malignus spiritus ex multis conjecturis & probationibus, per quem spiritum velut magam effectam ignibus per publicam iustitiam consumi permiserunt." Formicarius V, 8. p. 600-602. Elliott, Seeing Double, p. 50.

206 207

Quicherat, Procs, Vol. IV, pp. 459-460; English translation quoted from Charles T. Wood, Joan of Arc and Richard III (Oxford UP, New York/Oxford, 1988), p. 281. About the readings, cf. Pierrette Paravy, "Faire Croire: Quelques hypothses de recherche bases sur l'tude des procs de sorcellerie du Dauphin au XVe sicle", in Faire croire. Modalits de la diffusion et de las rception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe sicle (Table Ronde, Roma, 1979), (cole franaise de Rome, Roma, 1981), pp. 119-130, esp.. p. 124; Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider, pp. 85, 329-332, 469; about the importance of the Council of Basel for influencing common opinions cf. Borst, "Anfnge", Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen.
208

57 Felix V to be the Pope of the Council, Martin Le Franc, who mentioned Joan

of Arc in his Champion des Dames, written around 1440-1442. The chapter on Jehanne la Pucelle is in the immediate neighbourhood of that on the witches (Des faicturires).209 It must have been at the Council of Basel that Nider heard the other two stories related to the case of Joan of Arc. A German imitator of the Pucelle, initially calling herself Claude, also preached her prophecies in male attire. She was taken into custody by the Cologne inquisitor, Heinrich Kalteisen, with the charge that she performed miracles with magical crafts.210 The inquisition indicted the two Paris prophetesses, who like Joan, asserted to have been sent by God, also velut magae et maleficae. One of them, who admitted to have been seduced by the angel of Satan, got off with a milder sentence, but the more stubborn one was sentenced to death by burning.211 The borderlines between heavenly and diabolic apparitions were becoming more and more uncertain, to the point of vanishing completely. Let us examine, how this evolution was influenced by the early witchcraft prosecutions which occurred precisely in the vicinity of the Council of Basel, in the Swiss and Alpine valleys, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

Arthur Piaget, Martin Le Franc, prvt de Lausanne. (Lausanne, 1888), with the text of the poem. The part on witches is also edited by Hansen, Quellen, pp. 101-104; new edition by Robert Deschaux in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 439-452; cf. Lon Barbey, Martin Le Franc, prvt de Lausanne, avocat de lamour et de la femme au XVe sicle, (ditions Universitaires de Fribourg Suisse, Fribourg, 1985); Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen. pp. 30-32, 148-149. mira ... fecisset, que magica arte videbantur fieri, Formicarius, V/8. p. 599. cf. Hansen, Quellen, p. 458; Andr Vauchez, "Jeanne d'Arc et le prophtisme fminin des XIVe et XVe sicles" in idem Les lacs, pp. 285286; Elliott, Seeing Double, pp. 52-53.
211 210

209

Formicarius, V/8. p. 602.

58 THE LIVING SAINT AND THE NEW SABBATH There is a general consensus in historical research that scattered medieval maleficium accusations had been exchanged for massive and epidemic witchcraft prosecutions from the moment when, sometime in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, traditional witchcraft notions amalgamated with the more recently coined mythology of the diabolic witches sabbath. This dangerous set of beliefs presented witches (who were suspected until then principally of solitary evil activity) as members of a new organised sect (novas sectas et prohibitos ritus- as Pope Alexander V called them in 1409).212 Joseph Hansen gave the following definition of this new kind of witchcraft: they are principally women, who make a pact with the devil, to harm humankind with his help, they are organised into heretical sects, they participate regularly with his help on the witches sabbath, they get organised into a heretic sect, they regularly participate in the witches sabbath presided over by the devil during the night, they come to these meetings flying in the air with the help of the devil, and they commit there infamous sexual acts with the devil.213 Since historical research has recognised the importance of this early fifteenth century mutation, there are constant debates about the relative importance of the various factors that have contributed to this change. It remains a widely popular explanation that witches inherited the principal elements of the witches sabbath from the inquisitorial stereotypes formulated in the persecution of medieval heretic movements, and later on the Knights Templars, also accused of infamous black masses and pacts with the devil.214 The relationship of the Waldensians with witches also seemed evident from the fact that in the fifteenth century MYTHOLOGY OF THE WITCHES'

His letter to Ponce Fougeyron, inquisitor in Southern France: Hansen, Quellen. p. 16; cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 68-69.
213

212

Joseph Hansen, "Inquisition und Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter", Historische Zeitschrift 81 (1898), pp. 385-432. loc. cit. p. 386; cf. Blauert, Ketzer, Zauberer, p. 11. Most recently cf. Cohn, Europes Inner Demons.

214

59 vauderie became one of the well diffused designations of diabolic

witchcraft.215 The influence of these factors has been considered recently on a wider historical scale, taking also account of the possible sources of diabolic witch-beliefs in the fourteenth century stereotypes formulated in the persecution of other late medieval scapegoats such as lepers or Jews.216 Though one cannot share any longer the idea of a linear descent of witch beliefs from the anti-heretic inquisitorial stereotypes, unexpected support was recently provided for the more ancient thesis. The detailed analysis of several hundred of early fifteenth century witch-trials in Switzerland, Dauphin and Savoy, and their comparison with trials in the same region against Waldensians, who withdrew to the Alpine region in the later Middle Ages, or other heretics in these places, provided a large new set of data as to what effect these latter had upon the emerging new type of diabolic stereotypes of the witches sabbath.217.

215

Like in 1459, in Arras, during one of the most dreadful early persecutions, cf. Hansen, Quellen, pp. 467, 476, 556, 569; cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 72; cf. Franois Mercier, L'enfer du dcor. La Vauderie d'Arras (1459-1491) ou l'mergence contrarie d'une nouvelle souverainet autour des ducs Valois de Bourgogne (XVe sicle), Thesis at Universit Lyon II-Lumire, 2001.

216

Important recent works in this respect: Robert I. Moore, The Formation of the Persecutive Society. Power and Defiance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987); Frantiek Graus, Pest-Geiler-Judenmorde. Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit. Verffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Institut fr Geschichte 86 (Gttingen, 1986); Hanna Zaremska, Les bannis au Moyen Age (Aubier, Paris, 1996); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton UP, Princeton, N.J, 1996). These factors are brought into contact with the problem of witchcraft stereotypes by Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 33-86.

Jean Marx, L'inquisition en Dauphin. tude sur le dveloppement et la rpression de l'hrsie et de la sorcellerie du XIVe sicle au dbut du rgne de Franois Ier (Honor Champion, Paris, 1914); more recently Grado G. Merlo, Eretici e inquisitori nella societ piemontese del Trecento (Claudiana, Torino, 1977); Borst, "Anfnge"; Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen; Andematten and Utz Tremp, "De l'hrsie la sorcellerie: l'inquisiteur Ulric de Torrent OP, cf. Note 15; Pierrette Paravy, De la chrtient romaine la rforme en Dauphin. vques, fidles et dviants (vers 1340-1530), (cole franaise de Rome, Roma, 1993), I-II; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser, Wiedergnger, Hexen und Rebellen. Biographien zu de Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg im chtland (1399 und 1430) (Freiburg Schweiz, 1999); eadem, Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Freiburg im Uechtland (1399-1439), Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 18 (Mnchen, 2000) ; Wolfgang Behringer, How Waldensians became witches, to be published in Gbor Klaniczay and va Pcs (eds.), Demons, Spirits and Witches, CEU Press, Budapest, forthcoming; and various pieces of the Cahiers Lausannois dHistoire Mdivale, dits par Agostino Paravicini Bagliani: Catherine Chne, Juger les vers. Exorcismes et procs danimaux dans le diocse de Lausanne (XVe-XVIe s.), (Lausanne, 1995); Martine Ostorero, Foltrer avec les dmons. Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers de Vevey (1448), (Lausanne, 1995); Eva Maier, Trente ans avec le diable. Une nouvelle chasse aux sorciers sur la Riviera lmanique (1477-1484), (Lausanne, 1996); Sandrine Strobino, Franoise sauve des flammes? Une Valaisanne accuse de sorcellerie au XVe sicle (Lausanne, 1996).

217

60 Another important source of the concept of the witches sabbath could

have been that in the trials, which started to multiply towards the end of the fourteenth century, traditional accusations of maleficia were more and more interpreted according to the language of demon-invocations of black magic, as represented in the proliferating genre of exotic magical handbooks.218 And finally, as a third factor in the evolution of the diabolical elements in the witches sabbath, various popular mythologies are taken into account, like the hypothesis of shaman and fairy beliefs that we have already dealt with. The information provided by Nider is especially valuable for two reasons. It is in his accounts that we can find one of the first descriptions of the secret meetings of the infant-devouring, witch-grease-fabricating, sacrilegious and devil-worshipping witchsect. And, on the other hand, the broad panorama of the Formicarius allows us to place these phenomena into the broader context of other religious manifestations of this age, indeed, this is also Niders own purpose. One might expect that the first group of explanations of the origins of witches sabbath, the one relying upon anti-heretic inquisitorial stereotypes, would find considerable support in his descriptions. Indeed, the descriptions of the ecstatic orgies and feasts of the libertine heretic sect, depriving the sixty-year-old virgo of her virginity, though Nider does not relate them to the witches sect described in another chapter of his book, could provide as many interesting insights to the creation of the new image of the witches sabbath as the alleged accounts of Judge Peter of Berne, or the Dominican inquisitor of Autun.219. Nevertheless, it is hard to understand why Nider, who provides a lengthy account on the

Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials (with a detailed series of data of European witch trials until 1500), pp. 106-147; idem, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), pp. 151-200; idem, "The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic", American Historical Review 99 (1994), pp. 833-836; idem, Forbidden Rites. A Necromancers Manual in the Fifteenth Century (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits. Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Sutton Publishing, 1998). Cf. above N. 46; as to the identity of the Dominican inquisitor of Autun (inquisitor eduensi), designed erroneously as the inquisitor of Evian by Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 69, cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 231-232; Tschacher, Der Formicarius de Johannes Nider, pp. 175-177.
219

218

61 Hussites,220 the Adamites and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, does not

dedicate, besides a flimsy mention,221 a single line to the Waldensians. It is all the more curious, because in Fribourg, in the year of 1430, i.e. exactly at the same time, when the spectacular ecstasies of Magdalene Beutler were followed with so much attention by Nider, there were great persecutions and trials against the Waldensians, directed by the same inquisitor, Uldry de Torrent, who later became reputed for his relentless persecution of witches around 1438, in the region of Vevey and Neuchtel).222 If one scrutinises Niders explanations from the angle of the second hypothesis, that of ritual magic leading to the new diabolic mythology of the sabbath, one can find useful indications as well. The witch figure presented in the greatest detail, Scaedeli, also subjected to torture, does not confess the newly coined stories of the witches sect, but rather the traditional ones of the lone sorcerer operating through black magic: lizards buried under the threshold causing sterility, the prince of the demons conjured by incantations, a black chicken the neck of which is cut at the crossroad which is subsequently thrown in the air.223 Nider also mentions another magician, a strange monk of the Schottenkloster of Vienna, who conjured up the devil with the help of libros daemonum de Necromantia, and later repented of this horrible sin.224 One can read here equally different recipes of love-magic,225 even concrete attempts at its exercise.226 But the descriptions provided by Nider on the witches sabbath are in no relation with all of these, they stand apart rather by virtue of their shocking otherness.

220

I cannot enter into the discussion of the complex relationship of Nider with Hussitism (he was the Hussites specialist, legate of the Basel Council, who dedicated several treatises to them). Cf. . Schieler, Magister Johannes Nider, pp. 269-341; there is a detailed discussion of this issue in Bailey, Battling Demons, pp. 57-64. Formicarius III/10. p. 386.

221 222

Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen, pp. 36-50; Andenmatten and Utz Tremp, "De l'hrsie"; Utz Tremp, Waldenser and Quellen. "certis verbis in campo principem omnium Demoniorum imploro, ut de suis mittat aliquem, quia me designatum percutiat. Deinde veniente certo Daemone, in campo aliquo viarum pullum nigrum immolo, eundem in altum projiciendo in arem..." Formicarius, V/5. p. 560. Formicarius, V/4. pp. 551-552; Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 164-166; Tschacher, Der Formicarius de Johannes Nider, pp. 173, 401-402; Bailey, Battling Demons, pp. 39-41. Formicarius, V/5, pp. 567-569.

223

224

225

62 As for the third hypothesis on the origins of the new witchcraft

mythology, that of the impact of traditional motifs of folk beliefs, one can also discover in Niders book an episode which offers an authentic description of the operation of the workings of the traditional village opponents of witches, diviners, the cunning folk named by Nider, in characteristic manner also malefica. They divine from melted lead, and try to make the alleged witch suffer by symbolic means. Nider, however, does not recommend this forbidden, superstitious manner to confront the witches harm, one should rather die than turn to such practices, or rather one should turn to licit means of the mediation by the saints.227 One can also discover traditional sorcery, related to promoting or diminishing fertility, in the accounts of Scaedeli.228 As for the most important such element, the shamanistic motifs of metamorphoses into animals or the ecstatic flight, besides the isolated episode of Scabius turning into a mouse or the sceptical story of the foolish old woman imagining to ride with Diana, one can find no such accounts in Nider concerning the witches themselves. All in all, Nider provides no decisive proofs of either of the competing explanations of the origins of the witches sabbath. Let us now examine whether the rich array of new sources recently explored on the witchcraft prosecutions in early fifteenth century Alpine regions would give us more information. The most important of these new sources is the treatise of a secular judge, Claude Tholosan , entitled Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores manifesti ignorantibus fiant, which is dated to around 1436,229 and is based on the several hundreds of witch trials in the region of Brianon, in

226 227 228 229

Formicarius, I/2. pp. 65-66. Formicarius, V/4. p. 548; ; Lea, Materials, I, p. 268; Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 158-164. Cf. N. 46-47.

Ed. by. Pierrette Paravy, "A propos de la gense mdivale des chasses aux sorcires: le trait de Claude Tholosan, juge dauphinois (vers 1436)" Mlanges de l'cole franaise de Rome 91 (1979), pp. 333-379. (German transl. in Blauert, Ketzer, Zauberer, pp. 118-159); repr. in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 355-437; an excerpt in English in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 2nd edn., pp. 162-166.

63 Dauphin.230 The treatise entitled Errores Gazariorum, written by an

unknown Savoy cleric, has been known for a long time, but it turned out only recently that it was written earlier than Hansen supposed, i.e. around 1450, in fact it was produced exactly in the period in question here, around 1437.231 And finally, there is a third important source that gives a report of the same phenomena, the report of the Luzern chronicle writer Johann Frnd about the witch-hunts in Wallis between 1428 and 1430.232 Finally, Carlo Ginzburg has recently argued for the inclusion in this same dossier of a remote contemporaneous source, which would relate the evolving witch beliefs of Central Italy to the Alpine region. The witchcraft persecutions stimulated by the fervent preaching of Bernardino of Siena in 1428 can be proved to have taken information about this new sect precisely from the rumours originating from Piemont.233 From these documents, which have recently been compared with the statements of Nider in various excellent analyses,234 one can get a much more detailed picture of the frightening features of the recently appearing witchessect.

230

A part of these trials is edited by Hansen, Quellen, pp. 539-544; analysed by Marx, L'inquisition, pp. 3243; Paravy, De la chrtient, pp. 783. ff. with statistic evaluation: between 1424 and 1446 out of 258 accused (83 men and 175 women), 151 were sentenced to death.

231

Hansen, Quellen, pp. 118-122; modified datation with a recently discovered new Ms.: Paravy, "A propos", pp. 334-335; cf. Blauert, Frhe, pp. 62-65. the denomination "gazari" refers probably to Catharists cf. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 72; new edition by Martine Ostorero and Kathrin Utz Tremp, in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 267-337; an excerpt in English in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 2nd edn., pp. 159-162.

"Bericht des Luzerner Chronisten Johann Frnd ber die Hexenverfolgung im Wallis", Hansen, Quellen, p. 533-537; new edition by Kathrin Utz Tremp, in Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 23-61.
233

232

San Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari, ed. P. Bargellini (Roma, 1936), pp. 607-608, 758, 784; Cohn, Europe's, pp. 49-50; Ginzburg argued Bernardinos reference to Piemont rumours: Ecstasies, pp. 299, 310; the most important document of this trial: Domenico Mammoli, Processo alla strega Matteuccia di Francesco, 20 marzo 1428 (Todi, 1983); Marina Montesano, Supra acqua et supra ad vento . Superstizioni , malefizia e incantamenta nei predicatori francescani osservanti (Italia, sec. XV), (Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Roma, 1999), pp. 132-152; Mormando, The Preachers Demons, pp. 52-107; important critical corrections to this work by Letizia Pellegrini, Predicazione osservante e propaganda politica: a partire da un caso di Todi, in La propaganda politica nel basso Medioevo, Atti del XXXVIII Convegno...Todi, 14-17 ottobre 2001 (Spoleto, 2002), pp. 511-531; cf. Dinora Corsi, Figlia di un demonio minore La stregoneria nei processi toscani del Quattrocento, in Scrivere il Medioevo. Lo spazio, la santit, il cibo. Un libro dedicato ad Odile Redon, eds. Bruno Laurioux and Laurence Moulinier-Brogi (Viella, Roma, 2002), pp. 249-261. Paravy, "A propos"; Blauert, Frhe Hexenverfolgungen, pp. 50-70; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 69-73; Bailey The Medieval Concept; idem, Battling Demons; Limaginaire du sabbat; Martine Ostorero, The Concept of the

234

64 The judge Claude Tholosan regularly extracted confessions from

the accused about the act of the alliance with the devil, i.e. about their apostasy. His description of the rite of swearing allegiance to the devil (a rite to which Nider, too, refers) is gleaned from these confessions: "They stand in a circle and put a pot in the middle. The devil urinates in it, they drink it, and then bend backwards for the purpose of totally abjuring their faith in Christ." The novice then "draws a cross on the ground for the purpose of dishonoring Jesus Christ...; he stomps on it three times with his left foot, spits on it thrice, urinates on it, and then defecates on it; he then turns his bared bottom toward the east, thumbs his nose, and spitting once more, says: `I deny you, prophet!'"235. The obligations that a witch incurred with this iuramentum fidelitatis are detailed in seven commandments in the Errores Gazariorum putting an evil spell on all marriages, etc.).236 The devilTholosan tells usappears at these rituals "in the form of a man and/or a number of animals"237. From the more verbose documents of the witch trials that Tholosan held in Brianon after 1436, we learn that the devil is a man dressed in black, whose "eyes burn like coal and are as big as a calf's; his tongue hangs to the ground, his legs are bowed, his toes are black". He is a Saracen with red hair, a young white man, a white child, a black cat, a black dog, a black pig or a black cock.238 (murdering children,

Witches Sabbath in the Alpine Region (1430-1440).Text and Context to be published in Klaniczay and va Pcs (eds.), Demons, Spirits and Witches forthcoming. "... et subvertendo aliquod vas quod ponunt in circulo facto per eos in terra, ubi eciam mingit dyabolus, de quo bibunt, et demum suppinant, intencione quod sic totaliter recedunt a fide Christi..."; "faciat crucem in terra in dispectu Jesu Christi... et super crucem ter ponat pedem sinistrum et ter expuat de super et mingat et extercoret et culum nudum ostendat versus solis ortum et faciat figam cum digitis et expuendo dicat 'ego te renego propheta'...", the first half of the quotation comes from the treatise Ut magorum the second part from a trial steged by Tholosan in 1438, but the treatise itself also contains a very similar description. Paravy, "A propos", p. 355; .cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 365-367, 400-401;almost the same description is to be read in the sentence of a trial presided over by Tholosan in 1436: Marx, L'inquisition, p. 36, and a third trial in 1437. Hansen, Quellen, p. 541.
236 237 238 235

Hansen, Quellen, p. 119. Paravy , "A propos", p. 356; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 364.

"habebat occulos grossos, admodum occuli bovis, scintillas igneas emittentes, et habebat linguam extra hoc longam versus terram,... et habebat tibias curvas et articulos pedum nigros", Marx, L'inquisition, p. 34, the other references ibid. pp. 33-36.

65 In the same collection of documents, we find one instance when

the various demons were arranged into a sophisticated symbolic system. Jubertus de Bavaria, who was sentenced in 1437, had three devils appear to him regularly: Luxoriosus, who appeared in the form of a lovely twelve-year-old virgin, and "slept with him and had her pleasure of him at night"; Superbus, a middle-aged man dressed in black; and Avarus, an old man dressed in tattered clothes but whose purse was full of gold.239 Johann Frnd's account mentions not just "black animals", but bears and rams as well.240 We learn that witches meet with the devil not just at the ritual gatherings, but whenever they conjure him up; he also appears on his own initiative as well. He visits the witches imprisoned in dungeons, and punishes them if they betray him. There were some whom he promised to get pregnant, on the odd chance that they would be set free; "in reality", he blew them up with the wind till they died.241 While Nider tells us very little about how the devil actually conducted the witches' sabbath, the contemporary sources give the new mythology in all its variety. Tholosan's account is a unique balancing act between the scepticism of the Canon episcopi,242 and the folkloristic wealth of confessions that he himself had had a hand in extracting under torture. On the one hand, he emphasises that the witches' notion that they have physically (corporaliter) gone off to an assembly (synagoga) is an "illusion" suggested by the devil in their sleep; on the other hand, he puts every bit of information available on the matter in his tract. He describes how on Thursdays and Saturdays, the witches go off to their conclave on magic wands greased with the ointment made of children; though at times they ride on a broom or on the backs of wild animals. Once at the witches' sabbath, they kneel to the devil, kiss him on the lips, and have intercourse with him. His body is as cold as ice (frigidum sicut glacies). They have intercourse with demons and with one another, sometimes in an "unnatural way" (contra naturam). Then they kill children--at times their own--who have been brought there to make ointment of,

239 240 241 242

"cum illo de nocte dormiebat et delectabatur et habebat rem delectabilem", Hansen, Quellen, pp. 540-541. Hansen, Quellen, p. 534. "et inflavit eam vento sic quod credidit crepari", Marx, L'inquisition, p. 41. Cf. N. 40. This aspect is analysed with Tholosan by Paravy, "A propos", p. 357.

66 cook them and eat them, or make drink, make music and dance in circle.243 The court records confessions made in Tholosan's presence are even more detailed. Witches, we learn, use black or chestnut horses and rabbits to get around. They fly as swiftly as the wind. Sometimes they gather on Tuesdays as well. The devil has been known to place his stamp on a witch's body. When they dance in circles, the head devil keeps time on a drum; their merrymaking comes to an end when the cock crows.244 In Frnd's chronicle, we have the devil "bear them from one place to another throughout the night".245 It is the Errores Gazariorum that echoes most precisely the century-old topoi about the Black Mass of heretics. Here, the pledge of fealty to the devil is sealed with a kiss on the devil's behind (in culo vel ano),246 and the orgy takes places in the ritual form familiar from the old sources: "The presiding devil cries out that the lights be extinguished and yells `Mestlet, mestlet. After they had heard this command they join themselves carnally, a single man with a woman, or a single man with another man, and sometimes father with daughter, son with mother, brother with sister, and the natural order is little observed."247 So we have here, the suddenly chrystallising imagery of the witches sabbath, and we know many more details of it than reading only the book of Nider. Let us now examine, whether we have been provided with new elements which could be put in relation with the above mentioned threefold explanation of the origins of the witches sabbath. maleficent powders and ointments out

of them. The devils then open all kinds of dwellings to them, where they can eat and

243 244 245 246

Paravy, "A propos", pp. 356-357; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, pp. 364-366. Marx, L'inquisition, pp. 36-39. "der bs geist sy nachtes umbe trug von einem berg uff den andern", Hansen, Quellen, p. 536.

Hansen, Quellen, p. 119; the same motif with Martin Le Franc: "Veans le dyable proprement/Auquel baisoient franchemewnt/Le cul en signe d'obissance", Hansen, Quellen, p. 102. Hansen, Quellen, p. 119; Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 290 ; Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 2nd edn., pp. 160-161.

247

67 Besides the topoi of the Black Mass, a few additional instances

advocate the relationship of this new mythology with the inquisitorial stereotypes used in fighting medieval heresies. Such is the secrecy of the witches sect, underlined not only by Tholosan, Frnd and the Errores Gazariorum, but also by Nider,248 and also by the heretics who come to mind when we hear of the school of witches from Frnd, where they pronounce sermons, follow an elaborate liturgy, and coin plans to take power over the Christian world.249 As for the second hypothesis, that of the influence of the late medieval beliefs related to the ritual black magic, one could refer above all to the above-quoted detailed rituals of the ceremonial of apostasy. There are other motifs as well, such as the frequently occurring cases of the invocation of the devil, appearing in the trials of Dauphin,
250

the use of a liber de nigromantia,251 or the outspoken reference of the

Errores Gazariorum to a written contract with the devil, which has to be signed with the blood of the witch taken from his/her left hand.252 From the point of view of the shamanistic parallels, Ginzburg in his recent analysis of these same sources considered the detailed description of the witch's magic flight to their sabbath to be the most significant. We must note, however, that it has yet to be proved how far precisely this motif of the colorful confession made by Matteuccia di Francesco before she was burned at the stake in 1428 in Todi--she told of rubbing herself with an ointment made of fat and blood from a vulture, a bat and a small child, and of going off to Benevento to the witches' congregation held at the old walnut tree either in the form of a fly, or on the back of the devil Lucibello, who appeared in the form

According to Nider, if they can, they kick into the cross", Formicarius, V/3. p. 545; Bailey justly stresses this aspect.
249 250 251 252

248

Hansen, Quellen, pp. 535-537; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 36. Marx, L'inquisition, pp. 33-34, 43. Hansen, Quellen, p. 540.

Hansen, Quellen, p. 121; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 296 ; I have analysed this issue in the broader framework of medieval use of writing in my critures saintes et pactes diaboliques. Les usages religieux de lcrit (Moyen ge et temps Modernes) (co-authored with Ildik Kristf), Annales HSS, 56 (2001), pp. 947-980.

68 of a billy goat253--can be attributed to borrowing from the beliefs of the Alpine

communities. Hwever indirect the influence, and however fragmented the tradition from which all this was gleaned, there can be no doubt that the soul-journey-like motif of the witches' ecstatic flight, the notion of a witches' ointment, and the metamorphosis of the soul's leaving the body in some animal form all hark back to what Ginzburg has called the "shamanistic substratum" of European culture. The moment the first witch was said to have flown off to the first meeting, the flight of the soul became the leitmotif of the entire witch mythology. We can detect fewer direct influences in the notion of the chief devil setting the pace of the witches' dance by beating his drum;254 and in the notion of devils assuming the form of animals like the bear or the ram. In the same vein, we find Johann Frnd--and the witch trials he describes--linking the notion of werewolves with the notion of witches, and accusing the witches of changing into wolves and plundering the flocks, both sheep and goats.255 Though the belief in werewolves is undoubtedly shamanistic in origin,256 this accusation has more to do with yet another type of explanation concerning the development of large scale witch panics, namely, the everyday economic issue of their having become identified as the cause of the community's agricultural setbacks. This part of the Errores Gazariorum has received less attention to date than the above morbid accounts of the witches' sabbath; and yet, the book gives a detailed formulation of what was probably the "enemy within" clich of the later Middle Ages. It is, we read, the witches who are to blame "if there is more mortality in the towns and villages of a particular region, and there is very bad weather in areas near by"257: they have strewn their powder made of "children's innards" and poisonous animals into the air from the

253 254 255 256

Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 136; Pellegrini, Predicazione osservante, pp. 514-518. This motif appears in a trial directed by Tholosan, in Marx, L'inquisition, pp. 36-39. Hansen, Quellen, 535; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 36.

Roman Jakobson -- M. Szeftel, "The Vseslav Epos", in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings. IV, Slavic Epic Studies (Mouton, The Hague-Paris, 1966), pp. 301-379. ; L. Harf-Lancner, "La mtamorphose illusoire: des thories chrtiennes de la mtamorphose aux images mdivales du loup-garou", Annales E.S.C., 40 (1985), pp. 208-226; Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 153-155, 174.

257

"hec est ratio, quare in aliquibus villis et villagiis unius regionis est mortalitas, et in aliis circumvicinis viget maxima aris intemperies", Hansen, Quellen, p. 120; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 292.

69 mountain tops. When there is a storm, "they gather in the mountains to break

the ice... and with the devil's help, and using their magic wand, they whisk the ice through the air, and ruin with it the crops on the lands of their enemies and neighbors."258 The motivations of everyday life are assumed to motivate witches as well. As the author of the anonymous tract sees it, the devil is most likely to attract those who "can't live in peace with their fellow men, and have acquired too many enemies." Another likely group of candidates are those who have grown poor through a profligate life, but don't want to give up their immoderate life style: these the devil lets loose "in the homes of the powerful among the clergy, nobility, and burghers, where they find plenty of wine and food... and there they can eat and drink until midnight."259 This storehouseraiding variant of the witches' sabbath--common also in descriptions originating among Hungarian villagers260--has a central place in Johann Frnd's account as well. He explains how the witches use "base matter" (bos materye) to replace the wine stolen from the cellars, and gives a detailed account of what makes people turn to witchcraft. The evil one promises them wealth and power, and the ability to avenge themselves on those who have wronged them: "He relies on people's vanity, avarice, covetousness and malice, on all the things that make a man turn against his fellow man."261 The documents of the trials held in the Dauphin echo these charges: there, the accusation was poisoning the neighbor's well.262

"tempore tempestatum sunt de mandato diaboli multi congregati in montibus ad frangendum glaciem...et portant glaciem tempore tempestatum misterio diabolico per arem, mediante etiam baculo ad destruendam possessionum fertilitatem inimicorum suorum ceterumque vicinorum.", Hansen, Quellen, p. 120; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 294..
259

258

"ducit eos ad domos potentum prelatorum, nobilium, burgensium et aliorum, in quorum domibus scit cubaria et vinum voluntati et desiderio eorum convenientia... persistentesque in illis usque ad medium noctis ...postquam satis comederunt et biberunt, unusquisque ad propria revertitur.", Hansen, Quellen, p. 121; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 296.
260

Gbor Klaniczay, "Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of Popular Magic," in AnkarlooHenningsen , Early Modern, pp. 250-251; idem, "Le sabbat racont par les tmoins des procs de sorcellerie en Hongrie", in Jacques-Chaquin--Praud, Le sabbat, pp. 232-234.

261

"berwint er dieselben mnschen durch hofart, durch gitigkeit, nid, ha und viegentschaft, die ein mnsch gegen sinem ebenmnschen treit." Hansen, Quellen, p. 534; cf. Limaginaire du sabbat, p. 32. Marx, L'inquisition, p. 39.

262

70 No sign of the fantastic tales told under torture here! What is reflected is

the reasoning of the traditional witch hunters of the villages--clerics, midwives, fortune tellers--or rather, the moralising strain of this reasoning: the propensity to project the image of the collective enemy, the violators of the community's economic and social cohesion. Analysing Nider's report, particularly the accusations levelled against Scaedeli, Arno Borst called attention to the social strains behind witch hunts,263 an approach known as the "sociology of accusations",264 and popular particularly among Anglo-American researchers. Focusing on the social conflicts behind the witch trials does not detract from the explanatory force of the factors we have been discussing until now (the Church's persecution of heretics, the belief in black magic, and the shamanistic elements of popular mythology). What it does is calling attention to the system of beliefs in terms of which misfortune was explained, and to the social rituals that served to ward it off. The appearance of massive witch trials that gripped Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages indicates the growing dominance of the belief that misfortune was due to human agency, and that these agents possessed supernatural powers. Seen in this light, the fact that--in the course of the Alpine witch hunts of the 1430s--witches were scapegoated for the community's fertility problems, personal and agricultural in terms more dangerous and frightening than ever before, must seem as significant as the roughly simultaneous finalisation of the mythology of the demonic witches' sabbath. The new terms described a witch who was no longer motivated by the familiar, personal interests of the traditional spellmonger and purloiner of cow's milk; the new witch belonged to an organised sect, which pillaged and looted with the devil's help, had effective potions, and poisoned and destroyed everything. These potions were not love potions, to fire desire or to make impotent; these witches killed babies, their own and others' (in the mother's womb, in the parents' bed); the practices they engaged

263 264

Borst, "Anfnge".

Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. A Regional and Comparative Study (New York/Evanston, 1970); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1971); John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan. Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, Oxford - New York, 1982)

71 in were not just immoral, they were the witches themselves the devil's concubines. It might seem that I have strayed far from my topic, the question of how Johannes Nider views the state of trance in his Formicarius, and what effect his explanations had on the subsequent practice of witch hunts. The digression has been deliberate: it is the sociological and anthropological theories of witchcraft which will show us the correlations between everything that Nider said about late medieval visionaries, the state of trance, and witches. Recalling what we said above about the analogy between the religious function of the ecstatic saints of the high Middle Ages and the communal functions of shamans or other workers of "white magic", we shall see how this late medieval interpretation of the witch as the devil's associate fits in the picture. The revoltingly negative role assigned to the witch was an integral part of the same cultural and religious re-evaluation that gave the "living saints" their growing prestige: it was all part of the growing faith in human mediators and personifiers of supernatural power. It was a typological correlation that would have far-reaching consequences. It impacted the mythologies that had grown up around visionary female saints, on the one hand, and devil-worshipping witches, on the other. Some astonishing analogies developed between these two sets of categories in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with borrowing in both directions. There was a kind of mirror effect between the two poles of the supernatural pantheon, due to their being, in some sense, the two sides of the same coin. The mirror effect operated also because of the ambivalence that soon blurred the distinction between the two, as recent research has shown. The projection of the angelic vision on the diabolical, and vice versa, and the subsequent enrichment of the motifs of both, has just begun to be studied. (For example: Christ and Satan appearing in human form; the eroticism involved in the love felt for both: embracing, touching, kissing (the stigmata, the lips, the behind); physical regular, perverse, ruthless orgies, and

72 union with the Heavenly Bridegroom in ecstasy, and its orgasmic pleasure,265

the obscene details of copulating with the devil; heavenly and satanic pregnancy; the tokens of betrothal to the Heavenly Bridegroom as compared to betrothal to Satan; rings, stigmata, the witch's stamp; heavenly and demonic feasts, dancing).266 Johannes Nider's Formicarius illustrates that one source of the analogies could certainly have been the fact that the people who dealt with the visions of the saints, their miracles and revelations, were the same people who dealt with the mythology of the witch's sabbath. In the fifteenth century, hagiography and demonology grew on the same tree. The interest relating these two poles can be clearly observed in the work of the late medieval theologians discussed here: besides Nider one could also refer to his important precursor, Jean Gerson, who, besides his works related to mystical theology, and to cautiously acceptable or suspicious female visionaries, dedicated several treatises to the problems of superstition and witchcraft (De diversis diaboli tentationibus, Contra superstitiosam diem observationem, Contra errores magicae).267

Let us, in conclusion, consider once again the issue: how far can we "credit" Nider's Formicarius--and the cults, disputations and persecutions of the first half of the

James Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (Harcourt, Brace & Co./Kegan Paul, New York/London, 1925), pp. 137-157; the orgasm of Marie Bonaparte is mentioned in connection of the transverberations of Teresa of Avila by Georges Bataille, L'rotisme, in idem, Oeuvres compltes (Gallimard, Paris, 1976), vol. 10. pp. 218-258, loc. cit. 220-222; cf. Bynum, Holy Feast; eadem, Fragmentation and Redemption.
266

265

The parallel of these two mythologies has been analysed recently by Marcello Craveri, Sante e streghe (Milano, 1980), Bell, Holy Anorexia, Zarri, "Sante vive"; Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? --- in connection with the latter a number of thoughful objections have been made by Kieckhefer, "The holy and the unholy", pp. 368-373; I myself have drawn attention to this same binary opposition between saints and witches in my "Hungary: The Accusations and the Universe of Popular Magic", p. 234, and "Miraculum und Maleficium. Einige berlegungen zu den weiblichen Heiligen des Mittelalters in Mitteleuropa" in Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1990/91, pp. 224-252; and Miraculum and Maleficium: Reflections Concerning Late Medieval Female Sainthood, in Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. by R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbtteler Forschungen Bd. 78. (Harrasowitz, Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 49-74.

Franoise Bonney, "Autour de Jean Gerson. Opinions des thologiens sur les superstitions et la sorcellerie au dbut du XVe sicle", Le Moyen Age 77 (1971), pp. 85-98; Wolfgang Ziegeler, Mglichkeiten der Kritik am Hexen- und Zauberwesen im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Bhlau, Kln/ Wien, 1973); Jean-Patrice Boudet, Les condamnations de la magie Paris en 1398, Revue Mabillon, N.S., 12 (73), 2001, pp. 121-157 ; J. Vronse, Jean sans Peur et la fole secte des devins: enjeux et circonstances de la rdaction du trait Contre les devineurs (1411) de Laurent Pinon, Mdivales, printemps 2001, pp. 113-132.

267

73 fifteenth century--with the fact that the side in the saints-witches dichotomy? While in medieval times, the saint had been the main actor on the religious scene of Europe, the ambiguities of the first half of the fifteenth century led to half of Christendom completely repudiating this cult. Witches, on the other hand, gained in significance right up to the seventeenth century; the witch was, without a doubt, the star of early modern Europe's supernatural pantheon. Let us recall the functional similarities and differences between the cult of saints and witch hunts from the point of view of their explaining and/or warding off misfortune. We might say that while in the Middle Ages the saint's power to protect the community seemed the more attractive solution to misfortune (witness the mushrooming of local cults and of "living saints"), early modern Europeans preferred to try to ferret out from their midst those who, for personal gain and with diabolical help, had caused them harm, and tried to turn the scales by burning the scapegoat at the stake. We have here two very different, though by no means exclusive systems. We know that witch trials were not unknown in medieval times,268 and many a saint was credited with having protected the faithful from the spells of magicians and witches.269 On the other hand, the cult of saints lived on in modern times, and grew more vigorous, and in Catholic countries people continued to turn to the saints and their relics to counter the works of witches.270 It was a conflict-fraught moment indeed when, at the end of the Middle Ages, a time when belief in witchcraft was on the rise, a "living saint" was called upon to deal with the new kind of witch. In the canonisation proceedings of scales were perceptibly tipping to one

Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, Ithaca/London, 1972); Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials; Cohn, Europes Inner Demons. H. J. Magoulias, "The Lives of Byzantine Saints as Sources of Data for the History of Magic in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries A.D.: Sorcery, Relics and Icons", Byzantion, 37 (1967), pp. 228-269; Dorothy of Montau heals maleficia in two of her posthumous miracles: Richard Stachnik, Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorotheas von Montau von 1394 bis 1521 (Kln-Wien, Bhlau, 1978), pp. 108-109, 473-474. cf.. Kieckhefer, "The holy and the unholy", p. 359.
270 269

268

Such cases are analysed by Jean-Michel Sallmann, Chercheurs de trsors, jeteurs de sorts. La qute du surnaturel Naples au XVIe sicle (Flammarion, Paris, 1986); idem, Naples et ses saints l'ge baroque (15401750), (PUF, Paris, 1994)

74 St. Bridget of Sweden, we read that it suicide).271 The two systems of accounting for misfortune coexisted in villages in late medieval and early modern times. Among the traditional "removers" of a witch's curse we find archaic, shamanic magician figures such as the benandante and the tltos, patrons of the community with supernatural powers, who, as I have tried to show272, resorted to the same mechanisms of averting misfortune as the saints. But when they were seduced into taking part in the fight against witchcraft, when they, too, were expected to help unmask the traitors within the community, rather than dealing with distant evil spirits, when they began themselves to join those who accused the witches there was a change in their supernatural authority. Soon, they would hear the charge: "Whoever has the power to cure, has the power to harm".273 We have come full circle. If we can accept my contention that the late medieval "living saints" were the "heirs" to whom the white-magic-making shamanic functions had passed, and if we also recall that all this happened at a time when the fear of diabolical witches was on the rise, then it will be evident why the late medieval visionaries achieved such an equivocal reception. The same process of re-evaluation led to the rise of both "living saints" and witches. This, however, was true only as regards their credibility as supernatural operators. As for the historical processes we can observe, saint and witch moved in two diametrically opposed systems. The system of the former, for all its last moments of glory, was on the verge of disintegration; the system that the latter, the witches, moved in--to say nothing of the witch hunters--was on the rise. More was her prayers that freed a priest on

the verge of madness from a love spell (and from the witch herself, who committed

271

Isak Collijn, ed. Acta et processus canonizationis beatae Birgitte (Uppsala, 1924-31), p. 513. cf. Goodich, Violence, pp. 64-66. Tekla Dmtr, "The cunning folk in English and Hungarian witch trials", in Venetia Newall (ed.), Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century. Proceedings of the Centenary Conference of the Folklore Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), pp. 183-187; Willem de Blcourt, "Witch doctors, soothsayers and priests. On cunning folk in European historiography and tradition", Social History 19 (1994), pp. 285-303. cf. N. XX

272

273

75 and more often, the living saints met witchcraft. Nider's Formicarius balances precariously on the verge of this transformation. Alhough he is skeptical of "false, simulated visions", he seldom mentions the matter of their "Satanic origin", and turns with veneration to "real" visions and "real, living saints". He derides his contemporaries for believing in the flight of witches, but believes that witches murder children. He does not rule out the possibility that the Viennese Benedictine who had practiced black magic would be pardoned, like Theophil. And he still has not made the connection between the orgiastic ecstasy of heretical sects and the orgies of witches. His close successors will.274 He is unable to create order on the chaotic and conflict-riddled late medieval religious scene, but his considerable efforts already pave the way to the synthesis on witchcraft that the Malleus Maleficarum of two generations later would be. All this goes a long way toward explaining why Nider's tract is more successful and more popular than the more colourful and sensationalist accounts of his witch-hunting contemporaries. the fate of Joan of Arc: they found

themselves pushed from one system into the other. One man's miracle is another man's

274

New light is shed on this process is now by the recent monograph by Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers.