Tag Archives: Witchcraft

Windows on witchcraft in Early Modern Switzerland

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Startscreen AAEB (detail)

The history of criminal law deserves more attention here. However, dealing with witchcraft makes me uneasy in view of the prejudices coming into view and the need to correct the bias of popular views of witches and sorcerers. A few days after spotting a newly digitized archival series with acts concerning witchcraft trials in Early Modern Switzerland I saw an installment of a National Geographic tv series on witchcraft which convinced me a sober but telling representation of this subject is indeed possible. Coping with biases and prejudices is perhaps inevitable for this subject! Studying the impact of legal and illegal violence and injustice is certainly a part of doing legal history.

Recently the Archives de l’Ancien Év6eché de Bâle (AAEB) in Porrentruy launched the project Crimes et châtiments for the digitization and transcription of trial records. Thanks to detailed repertories the dossiers and trials have become very much accessible. The project contains some 160,000 digitized pages from 1491 to 1797, occupying 25 meters in the holdings of the AAEB. No wonder the sheer scale of this project led to the use of computerized transcription with Transkribus. In this post I will look at various aspects of this Swiss project, and I will look how it can contribute to more insight into witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Of course I will also look at some of the latest developments around Transkribus.

An archive on the move

The German log and name of the AAEB

Let’s start with a look at the AAEB itself. The history of its holdings is decidedly interesting. The website of the AAEB is accessible in German and French. The German version for the digitized records at Transkribus alerted me to the nature of the old diocese Basel, and the main website gives much further information in the form of a general sketch, a timeline for the diocese, a timeline for the locations of the diocesan archive and references to scholarly literature. The diocese Basel was a prince-bishopric (Fürstbistum, principauté épiscopale), meaning the bishop exercised both ecclesiastical and secular power. To complicate things, some territories were part of the Holy Roman Empire. In the wake of the Reformation which started quite early in Basel the bishop moved to Porrentruy in the Jura region near the French border. Interestingly, the cathedral chapter went to Freiburg im Breisgau, and later on it came to Arlesheim. This peculiar geographic and legal position led to impact coming from two directions. The French Revolution hit a part of the prince-bishopric, as did the secularisation of German ecclesiastical territories in 1803 for the other parts. For the part of the diocese closest to France you can even distinguish three periods between 1792 and 1815. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna added further changes to the geographic extent and status of the diocese Basel.

In 1792 the bishop had to flee from Porrentruy when French troops occupied the town. A substantial part of the diocesan archive was transferred to Vienna. The canton Bern asked the Austrian government to return these records, and in 1817 they were stored at the town hall of Bern. In 1842 these records were reunited with the parts that had remained at Porrentruy. Between 1898 and 1963 the archival collections – archival collections of some former religious institutions in the old diocese Basel had meanwhile been added – were kept again at Bern; from 1940 they were kept at the state archives of Bern. In 1979 the Francophone canton Jura was newly formed which agreed in 1985 with the canton Bern to the foundation of a private institution for the AAEB to prevent a splitup of materials. The cantons Basel Land (1997) and Basel Stadt (2008) joined its governing body, too.

To say the least, I was genuinely surprised about the present location of the old diocesan archive of Basel. It would take much space here to refer here in any detail to institutions in Basel where you might find more materials, such as the university library in Basel, with digitized manuscripts at the portals e-manuscripta and e-codices, and also some relevant digitized records for the diocese Basel at SwissCollections, the state archives of the canton Basel Land in Liestal, and the city archives of Basel, a bit confusingly named the Staatsarchiv Basel Stadt. Luckily there is an online repertory Kirchliche Bestände in schweizerischen Archiven for finding ecclesiastical archival collections in Swiss holdings. At Porrentruy you can find also the Archives cantonales jurassiennes (ArCJ).

Focus on sorcery in Switzerland

Startscreen of the AAEB Transkribus website

Faithful readers here are used to my generous sprinkling wih links to online references, but the short notice about the project of the AAEB in September 2024 at the Swiss history portal infoclio contains a fair number of links, too, and its enumeration of subjects for which the digitized records and transcriptions contain important information can scarcely be bettered. The AAEB is home to some 1,300 meter archival records in its holdings. The 25 meters included in the project Crimes et châtiments is a relatively small part of it. The inventories of the AAEB can be searched online on a separate platform with a search interface in German, French and English. The AAEB provides you also with a concise overview of its holdings (État des fonds, 2024 (PDF, French), but you can also use the dynamic tree overview at the inventories platform. You may want to search for literature in the online catalog of the AAEB´s library with some 15,000 items, accessible as part of the RBNJ portal for the Réseau des bibliothèques neuchâteloises et jurassiennes. This catalog can easily filter for digitized publications, for example for the edition by Joseph Trouillat of the Monuments de l’histoire de l’ancien évêché de Bâle (5 vol., Porrentruy 1852-1867).

The records on sorcery in the tree view of the AAEB's archval plan

The État des fonds makes it clear the digitized trial records stem from the main série B created in the eighteenth century for the socalled temporalia, the secular records of the old diocese Basel, the principauté. The inventory numbers B 168/14 to B 168/19 of the subseries Sorcellerie – Criminalia in sortilegiis, veneficiis et maleficiis have been digitized and (partially) transcribed. These six blocks cover the period 1546 to 1670, with a clearly higher frequency of cases between 1602 and 1621. With 42 cases in 1611 and 1612 this period had the highest number of cases (B 168/16).

The second digitized series are the procédures criminelles (AAEB, Principauté / Justice / PCrim) which covers the period 1461-1797, however, with only a few records from the fifteenth century. With 22 meters this is the most voluminous part of the project. The finding aid points you to some relevant records in other series, too, which have not (yet) been included in the digital project. The third series brings you the sentences in criminal trials, preserved in the Criminal-Bücher – Registres des sentences en matière criminelle, 1656-1792 (AAEB, Principauté / Codices / sous-série 205A to 205F). Five volumes with sentences remain; volume 205E covering the years 1767 to 1788 has been lost. For the record I would mention here Cod. 207 to 297, a series of protocols with appeals in civil cases from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It pays off to read the notes for each series and subseries of this project, and to check also other parts of the section for Justice.

In my view it is important not to jump without much ado to the digitized archival records of the AAEB, but to see and acknowledge first of all their archival context, the limits in time and space and possible lacunae in the record series. The clearest gaps are the absence of trial records after 1670, and the lack of sentences in criminal trials before 1656. At its Transkribus subdomain the AAEB gives a most useful general overview of the records included in the project and how to navigate to them. Not every record has already been transcribed. The AAEB created a list for the nearly one thousand persons – mainly women (92 percent) – put to trial. The database with more information than displayed in the list view can be downloaded in the Excel format, too. A useful tool, too, is the word list (abécédaire) of (legal) terms occurring in the witchcraft trials, but surely more terms deserve explanation. The AAEB presents a page with some examples of phenomena associated with witchcraft and particular steps in trials with links to the records. The German version of this page is more detailed and refers to different cases. Both the French and the German version of a concise PDF offer a summary view by Jean-Claude Rebetez of witch hunts in Swizerland from the fifteenth century onwards.

Tracing and judging sorcery

Before discussing the merits of his summary we should finally look at the digitized archival records and the accompanying transcriptions. By now you might still detect my hesitation in dealing with witchcraft. Frankly the very tv documentary series Witches: Truth behind the trials, seemingly separating the interpretations of what happened in six countries entirely from the historical records, is to blame for my awareness. No trial records come into view. To five European countries (England, Ireland, France, Germany and Sweden) the Salem witch hunt in Massachusetts of 1692 has been added. The Dutch Republic and Switzerland are not dealt with.

Each installment of this series gives ample space to comments by scholars as a kind of running commentary on re-enacted scenes shown in slow motion with almost no sound. Quite often only darkly looming forests are shown, thus adding gloom to stories already themselves sufficiently sad and tragic. It distracts attention from the often most sensible views of the contributing scholars. For me personally a revealing aspect is the role of church ministers in the Salem and Sweden episodes. The very authority of the persecutors in the English episode – with the infamous selfstyled witchfinders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne – was most questionable. The start of the Salem hunt at the very moment of the absence of the English governor of Massachusetts, away to England to receive a new charter for the state as a foundation of political and legal insttutions, is also remarkable. I sorely miss any attempt to show the work done to reach the interpretations offered. For me showing some part of their research, a view of historians at work searching, transcribing and thinking, would make things much more lively and interesting. Apart from repeating some recurring elements of the European witch hunts the most obvious omission is the lack of a sustained attempt at a comparison of events in the various countries.

A view of a document at the AAEB with a transcription

Surely trial records have their own bias, silences and tacit understandings which need to be detected and explained. Historians as the late Natalie Zemon Davis have taught how important the argumentative power of a narrative is in a legal context. The three digitized series of the AAEB at Transkribus can be approached in two ways; the search interface has three languages. Using the Explore option leads you to either a browsing window (Documents) or to the archival hierarchy where you can navigate the three record series (B 168, Cod. and PCrim). You will need this search way in particular when no transcription is yet provided. With the Search window you can enter a free text search, with as an advanced option the use of fuzzy search at three levels. In my browser the advanced options were even nicely translated into Dutch. The search results can be filtered using the documents list on the left side. You can adjust your view to show only text, only images or both text and image. By clicking on a result with an image you arrive at the image and its transcription. With the View in document button you can start navigating within a document.

It would be strange to single out here any case or record as exceptional or regular without thorough knowledge of these rich resources concerning nearly one thousand cases. Having online access to both trial records and sentences gives substance to the possible reconstruction of events. It is most helpful to have access to both ordinary criminal trials and trials concerning witchcraft and sorcery. This enables a wider approach to events and their context, and it helps to view better the changes in the way courts dealt with specific cases.

In his brief article Jean-Claude Rebetez gives some firm ground for further study. He mentions some seminal documents and works from the fifteenth centiury which prepared minds for the persecution of suspect people. He clearly indicates how the Constitutio Carolina was the main source for procedure in criminal cases. Rebetez mentions the number of 110,000 European witchcraft cases, 10,000 of them from Switzerland. For the cases heard in the prince-bishopric of Basel no modern monograph exists. He points to differences in individual territorial units (Vogteien, bailliages). The religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants could be more marked in politically fragmented regions. The AAEB database of victims helps you very much to spot local differences.

Rebetez mentions also as important factors behind the witch hunts the centralisation of power, the background of wars and civil wars and the impact of the Little Ice Age (1550-1750). Theological views of magic and withcraft, too, changed over the centuries. Only few authors such as Johannes Wier and Balthasar Bekker questioned the belief in witches fundamentally. In the Renaissance period men increasingly marked popular practices as superstitions. Learned works such as the Démonomanie des sorciers of Jean Bodin (1580) prepared their minds to detect sorcery and witches more readily. In particular women with a weaker social position were in danger of being singled out as potential witches which had to go to trial. Judges were eager to frame women’s behaviour using suggestive questions from views biased against women. Added to all these matters were the terror and actual use of torture and the threat of cruel executions. In his most useful nutshell sketch Rebetez could perhaps have stressed the fact the Basel records still have to be studied in their full width and context. On the website the AAED mentions the division between a Catholic and a Protestant part of the Jura as one of the themes open for further research. Rebetez finally notes the variety of disciplines investigating this subject, each with its own qualities and perspectives, yet another reason to stay aloof from monolithic interpretations.

Some closing remarks

Logo Dutch national mnument for witches

In the week I prepared this post news came the foundation for a national Dutch monument to commemorate the Early Modern witch hunts choose the town Roermond in the province Limburg as the location for a monument, to be revealed in 2026. The foundation Nationaal Heksenmonument choose Roermond because of events in 1613 and 1614 which led to the execution of eighty women. Other possible locations were ‘s-Heerenberg where a witch was burnt alive in 1605, and Oudewater, known for its Heksenwaag (weighing house), mentioned here ten years ago in my post Weighing the witches at Oudewater. In my 2015 post Breugel;s bewitching legacy I pointed already to the event in 1605 at ‘s-Heerenberg. Both posts contain more remarks about the difficulties of dealing in a sensible way with witchcraft and its imagery; you will find also references to some scholarly literature and websites.

Among the public transcription models of Transkribus 35 models are marked as German. Only one of them stems from Switzerland, a model for the council notes of the city Zurich in the eighteenth century created by the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich. I could not quickly find information at the AAEB website on the specific use of any public model. By the way, lately a glitch at the Transkribus portal had removed the search function for the more than hundred public models. Luckily things could be repaired rapidly.

For me the importance of this project is the chance to look not only at archival records with transcriptions concerning witch trials, but having at hand also other records of criminal procedures and access to court sentences. The diocese Basel had an interesting location within Europe as a part of the Holy Roman Empire close to France. It invites historians and the general public to look again at the long history of prejudices and violence against women. It calls for caution in pinpointing decisive causes and monocausal explanations. European history is characterized by the multiple interplays of peoples and their views and actions, and it is a mistake to picture Early Modern Europe as a completely unified continent in most aspects.

Perhaps as interesting as the wave of the witchcraft craze is the slow disappearance of witch trials, with again various possible explanations. As long as legal records can contribute to understanding the history of witchcraft and the way women were treated by the law legal historians will have to deal with this part of their field. It will help them to perceive the limits of justice, the powers of injustice and the stories of outright violence. In fact we had better not leave it only to other research fields less closely connected with law and justice.

Bruegel’s bewitching legacy

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Detail of a print by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Saint James visiting the magician Hermogenes (detail) – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Exhibitions sometimes make you hesitate to visit them at all. Will they only confirm what you already knew or suspected, or will they offer you food for thought and send you in new directions? Since September 19, 2015 you can see at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, a museum for the history of Christian art in the Low Countries, an exhibition about images and the imagination of witches. Bruegel’s Witches focuses on drawings, prints and paintings by the great Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (around 1525-1569). The exhibition credits Bruegel with creating in a few works the very stereotype of witches, looking as a woman with wild hairs and flying though the air on a broom. In is very best tradition the museum looks also at Bruegel’s contemporaries, shows earlier images of magicians and sorceresses, and it follows the impact of Bruegel’s imagination through the centuries. In 2016 the exhibition will be put on display at the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges.

This month Museum Catharijneconvent also shows the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, University Library, ms. 32), the most famous medieval manuscript in the holdings of Dutch libraries. This manuscript with vibrantly illuminated pages from the early ninth century is only rarely shown in public, and even scholars seldom are allowed to look at it. If you have your doubts about the Bruegel exhibit, you should come at least for the Utrecht Psalter.

Witches in context

At the Catharijneconvent, a former hospital and convent of the Knights Hospitaller, Christian art is always presented within the context of other expressions of Christian life and practice. In this exhibition, too, you will find objects from daily life and criminal justice, and also books. A particular resource used here are the so-called Wickiana, some 430 illustrated newsletters from the sixteenth century collected by the Swiss protestant vicar Johann Jacob Wick (1522-1580) who also wrote a chronicle about events in Zürich. The Zentralbibliothek in Zürich has digitized the Wickiana. This source is not only a form of communicating news, but it offers also a window to popular culture and protestant views of culture and life. The Wickiana shows the use of images and relate also to the perception of all kind of events and elements of culture at large. From the perspective of book history they belong to the category of pamphlets, or even more precisely to the Einblattdrücke. On my website for legal history I have created an overview of digitized pamphlet collections. Wick’s collection contains also many of his own coloured drawings.

The exhibition shows materials bearing directly on the way courts dealt with witches. There is for example a copy of Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis rerum criminalium (Antverpiae 1556). You can look at archival records from the castle Huis Bergh in ‘s-Heerenberg from 1605 about a trial against Mechteld ten Ham who was accused of sorcery (available online [Archief Huis Bergh, inv. no. 7268]). Interesting is also the so-called schandhuik, the “cover of shame”, from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, an object designed to parade infamous women. Among the books on display is also a treatise by the Jesuit Martin Antonio Delrio (1551-1608), Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Lovanio 1599), a book dealing both with the theological interpretation of witchcraft and with the role of judicial courts. Delrio was a humanist scholar, a nephew of Michel de Montaigne and a friend of Justus Lipsius. It prompted me to look at the number of books dealing with witchcraft and demonology signalled by the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) in St. Andrews. The USTC gives you hundreds of titles, and you find of many works several editions. By the way, the book of De Damhouder appeared also in Dutch and French. The USTC is one of the portals indicating also access to digital versions of these works.

Firing the imagination

When you visit the exhibition at Utrecht, you can view the works of art, artefacts, books and pamphlets using a summary guide (Dutch or English), use an audio tour or dive into a fine classical exhibition catalogue. Walking through the rooms and corridors of this exhibition can thus be a rather normal contemporary museum experience, or you can choose a multimedia approach to submerge yourself into the dark world of Early Modern imagination. However strong images and imaginary worlds may be, they combined with the forces of churches and courts to create images of women. Even when they escaped from outright persecution women had to cope with very powerful unfavorable representations of their gender. Imagination, perspectives on gender and anxieties were part and parcel of the period which saw the growing impact of real and imagined magic and sorcery. The role of courts in dealing with witchcraft surely did not always do credit to law and justice.

This exhibition at Utrecht is visually attractive and seduces you to some extent to revel in the imagery of witchcraft, but there is a sober and more disconcerting reality behind which should not be lost out of view. Malcolm Gaskill’s volume Witchcraft. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, etc., 2010) has been translated into Dutch in 2011 by Nynke Goinga [Hekserij, Een kort overzicht (Rotterdam 2011)]. I seldom condemn books or translations, but this translator succeeds in utterly missing the crux of the matters under discussion. Many translated sentences sound strange as if she did not understand at all the subject of this book. Alas witchcraft as a historical subject will remain open to the fascination of those people searching for sensation and esoteric phenomena. There is too much at stake around this subject to leave it to thrill seekers and freaks. However, such statements do not make it easier to face the challenges to deal with this complex subject, starting with the oceans of publications about witches and sorcerers. We need the powers of deep thinking and applying all of the (legal) historian’s crafts to do justice to this aspects of Early Modern history. If this exhibition convinces you at least of the value of this conclusion, your visit will be fruitful.

De heksen van Breugel / Bruegel’s Witches – Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent, September 19, 2015-January 31, 2016, and Bruges, Sint-Janshospitaal, February 25 to June 26, 2016

A postscript

Klaus Graf pointed in one of his latest 2015 posts at Archivalia at the online version [PDF, 200 MB] of the dissertation by Renilde Vervoort: “Vrouwen op den besem en derghelijck ghespoock.” Pieter Bruegel en de traditie van hekserijvoorstellingen in de Nederlanden tussen 1450 en 1700 [“Women on brooms and similar ghostly things”. Pieter Bruegel and the tradition of witchcraft iconography in the Low Countries between 1450 and 1700] (Nijmegen 2011).

Saving threatened archival collections

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Banner Endangered Archives Project

The postscript to my recent post about the exhibition on Roman crime at Nijmegen helped me to find the subject of this post. In this postscript I mentioned the decision of the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam not yet to give back the items on view at its Crimea exhibition to the lending museums in Ukraine. This post introduces you to an initiative to save archival collections worldwide threatened either by material deterioration, poltical situations or simply by the ongoing progress of modernization in the country or region where they are located. The British Library has set up the Endangered Archives Project (EAP) on a truly massive scale with the aim of digitizing archival records and manuscripts in a few hundred (!) projects. On September 7, 2014 the completion of several projects was announced at the accompanying Endangered Archives blog. Within two months, between July and September, a million images has been added to the online results of EAP, enough reason for me to look a bit more closely to this audacious project and its composing elements.

On my blog the British Library received a few years ago criticism for its policies concerning the digitization of British newspapers. Last year I expressed some disappointment at the low number of digitized legal manuscripts at the British Library, but this time the library shows itself as a most generous cultural institution. The EAP portal is accessible in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic.

Safeguarding cultural heritage in situ and in virtual space

The EAP spans the world in a awe-inspiring way. Among the most interesting aspects is for example the fact that researchers and institutions themselves can apply for grants, often starting with a pilot project. The BL provides a framework to support projects. There is no grand scheme of the British Library dictating the goals and direction of general progress. Typically, EAP does not focus on national archives unless they are in dire need of support, and such projects will not cover all materials under the aegis of EAP. Items documenting the pre-industrial history of a country are the first to come under consideration for new projects. The grants support university projects as well as independent scholars. Of course EAP has contacts with the International Council on Archives and UNESCO’s Memory of the World program.

The EAP has created five regions for the projects supported by the EAP: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. Let’s start with a look at the overviews of each region to spot projects which touch directly upon law, government and administrations. In the second part of this post other projects with law, the judiciary or other aspects of legal matters constitute a major aspect.

In the overview for Africa you can find for example EAP 607, a project for the preservation of Native Administration records between 1791 and 1964 held at the National Archives of Malawi. The Matsieng Royal Archives in Lesotho were the subject of EAP 279, where a wide variety of documents and records has been digitized. Colonial history looms large in a number of African projects, for instance in EAP 474, a pilot project for the preservation of pre-colonial and colonial document at Cape Coast, Ghana. In EAP 443 nineteenth-century documents for the Sierra Leone Pubic Archives have been digitally preserved, thus saving the history of a British Crown colony and the impact of slavery, to mention just a few aspects.

For the Americas, too, one can pint easily to projects aiming at preserving documents and records concerning the history of slavery and colonialism. EAP 184 started to support the preservation of records of the African diaspora in the archives of the Cuban province Matanzas. The material condition of these records decays rapidly. In Peru EAP 234 aimed at saving the colonial documentation within the holdings of the Sociedad de Beneficencia de Lima Metropolitana, with records reaching back to 1562. 100,000 notarial records at Riohacha and the peninsula La Guajira in Colombia documenting an important entrepôt of Caribbean and Central American trade are at the centre of EAP 503. Hurricane Ike in 2004 was only the last threat to archives with govermental records in Grenada which resulted in 132 reordered and digitized volumes (EAP 295).

The number of EAP projects in Asia is much larger than for the Americas. I could not help feeling particularly interested in some projects concerning Indonesia because of its link with Dutch history. EAP 229 and EAP 329 are two related projects dealing with endangered manuscripts in the province of Aceh on the island Sumatra. The digitization of nearly 500 manuscripts helps preserving the cultural and intellectual history of this region. The Dutch fierce attacks on Aceh during the nineteenth century were already a threat to this history, as was the devastating tsunami in 2008. A substantial number of the digitized manuscripts in this project contain texts on Islamic law.

Tavamani document - EAP 314

Legal history is a central element in EAP 314, a project for the digitization of Tamil customary law in Southern India. The documents of village judicial assemblies between 1870 and 1940 are the subject of this project of the Institut Français de Pondichéry. You can follow this project at its own blog Caste, Land and Custom – Tamil Agrarian History (1650-1950), where you can find also an overview of other relevant EAP projects for India. The recent huge increase in digitized materials within EAP is to a large extent due to the 750,000 images of some 3,000 books printed before 1950 in eight public libraries in Eastern India near Calcutta which have been digitized within EAP 341. The number of EAP sponsored projects in India is really large. On my legal history portal Rechtshistorie I had already put a number of links to digital libraries in india, but EAP brings substantial additions to my overview.

Although I am woefully aware that I skip here a lot of interesting projects in Asia I would like to mention at least two European projects. EAP 067 is a project to digitize extremely rare materials, mainly from the twentieth century, about the Roma’s in Bulgaria, including not only ethnographic and musical items, but also for example a manuscript of a history of the gypsies. Keeping these materials at all was often dangerous for the Roma during the communist period in Bulgaria. A second project deals with the results of archaeological excavations between 1929 and 1935 in the Kyiv region of Ukraine (EAP 220).

For those worrying about the length of this post it might be a relief to read that within EAP there has been only one project from the Oceania region. In EAP 005 the Australian National University created inventories of materials at the Tuvaluan National Archives. This group of islands in the Pacific is in acute danger of being flooded.

Preserving the history of law, customs and government

The project concerning the preservation of manuscripts written in the Vietnamese Nôm script between the year 1000 and the twentieth century in EAP 219 is an example of documents threatened by sheer memory loss. The Nôm script went out of use around 1920. For decades teaching this script had been forbidden. The Ecole Française d’Extreme Orient in Hanoi had collected materials before 1954, but no proper inventory had ever been made, and the present storage conditions are poor. The 1,200 surviving manuscripts offer information about laws, courts, imperial decrees and land ownership, Within EAP 272, a project for ephemera and manuscripts in Nepal, a number of manuscripts all dating around 1808 contain legal texts.

Drafting a list of EAP collections with materials concerning legislation, jurisprudence, courts and other legal institutions is not an easy thing to do. The EAP website allows simple and advanced searches at item level, but as for now you cannot search for a particular subject or theme at the collection level. This is certainly a blemish, but not an impossible situation. A search for laws shows you only a few projects, but for EAP 144 you get directly a number of digitized manuscript from this project for Minangkabau (Sumatra) manuscripts. Anyway you can retrieve a list of all 240 projects; the short descriptions can be expanded. You can also search for projects using an interactive world map. Browsing the various projects is no punishment, but an object lesson in appreciating the rich varieties of human culture.

Projects with legal aspects are no exception. Using the tag Governmental records at the EAP blog helped me in tracing some relevant projects. EAP 688 is a new project for digitizing deed books from the Caribbean island Saint Vincent during the slavery era (1763-1838). EAP 561 aims at creating inventories of and digital versions of records for landownership in imperial Ethiopia. At Accra, Ghana, witchcraft trial records will be digitized (EAP 540). A project to make inventories of court and police records from the period 1820-1960 and digitize some of them has been successfully executed in Gambia (EAP 231). Ecclesiastical records from colonial Brazil are the subject of EAP projects such as EAP 627 leading to the digital archives at Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies created by the Vanderbilt University.

Several projects deal with manuscripts from Mali. Not only in Timbuctu a vast number of manuscripts is still present. Last year the threat of massive destruction of this unique legacy by terrorists became a very real menace; a post on this blog informed you about initiatives for their safeguarding and digitization. Following a pilot project (EAP 269) the projects EAP 488 and EAP 490 focus on manuscripts kept privately by families at Djenné, a treasure trove as important as Timbuctu. Some 4,000 manuscripts are now known against two thousand at the start of these projects. In yet another project at Djenné photographs are being digitized (EAP 449).

Luckily, there is more!

Often I apologize at the end for the length of my contributions, but this time I am happy to point to the links section of the EAP portal which will bring you to a nice number of projects all over the world for the digital conservation and presentation of rare and endangered manuscripts and records. You might be tempted to say that the efforts of the Endangered Archives Project can deal only with a limited number of projects, but luckily the British Library is not the only cultural institution and research institute to look beyond the borders of a country. Often these institutions have to face the threats of budget cuts, and a political climate in favor of focusing on projects which benefit solely the own nation, or they even have to fall back to provide only fairly basic services.

The British Library and all involved in similar projects deserve the gratitude of scholars, of peoples and countries whose cultural heritage is or will be rescued thanks to them. Scholars should be encouraged to look beyond their own culture and national history in order to perceive its peculiarities much sharper and to understand its importance in greater depth. Let’s hope such arguments can convince those responsible for setting cultural agendas and developing research strategies with lasting results. Digitization will be one step in a much longer process, and no doubt digital retrieval and presentation will change its outlook as has been the case already since the earliest uses of computers by historians and lawyers alike.

A postscript

In 2015 Maja Kominko edited a volume of articles commemorating the efforts within the EAP, From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme (2015), also available online. The digital version of this book has even embedded audiofiles.

Weighing the witches at Oudewater

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Heksenwaag, Oudewater

The Heksenwaag, Oudewater – image Geschiedkundige Vereniging Oudewater, http://www.geschiedkundigeverenigingoudewater.nl/

This month the walking historian marches again! In July I visited the tiny town of Oudewater, a city in the southwest corner of the province Utrecht. In the beautiful old city of Oudewater the historic Heksenwaag, the Witches Weigh-House is not to be missed. However, in fact I did almost overlook it due to the fact that in my memory the building was much larger. As a kid I had visited the Heksenwaag, and I even received the certificate stating my weight was normal. Coming back to this town things seemed different, but the degree of change was really surprisingly low. Afterwards I could not help questioning what I had seen and doubting my assumptions and conclusions. Moreover, the Heksenwaag is not just a building which any tourist has to visit, but it is a veritable Dutch lieu de mémoire. It links directly to the history of European witchcraft and the ways law and justice dealt with this phenomenon. The results are interesting enough to include in this post which has as its second focus the perception of Oudewater’s history.

Hard facts and shallow assumptions

The scales in the Heksenwaag, Oudewater

In De canon van Nederland, “The canon of Dutch history”, the Heksenwaag at Oudewater is connected to emperor Charles V. He is said to have granted Oudewater in 1545 a privilege to weigh persons suspected of witchcraft and to issue certificates of normal weight. The vogue for historic canons in the Netherland has led to several regional canons. In the canon for the southwest corner of Utrecht the story of the Heksenwaag is strongly qualified. Legend had preserved a tale of Charles V doubting in 1545 a witch trial at Polsbroek where a woman had been weighed and found too light. He ordered a second weighing at Oudewater, showing her to have a weight of 100 pounds, which saved her, As a sign of gratitude for the correctness of the staff at the weigh-house he granted the privilege. However, there was no weigh-house at all in the village of Polsbroek. The scene of the false weighing could have been the town of IJsselstein. There is no trace of any privilege from 1545 for Oudewater.

Where do we find sources on the medieval and Early Modern history of Oudewater? This very question does bring you quickly to sources touching upon legal history. Joost Cox published in 2005 for the Foundation for the History of Old Dutch Law a repertory of Dutch medieval city charters with grants of specific rights, bylaws and ordinances, the Repertorium van de stadsrechten in Nederland (The Hague 2005). At the accompanying website you will find only lists of cities and dates. With some caution Cox traces such a charter for Oudewater said to be given in 1257 by Hendrik I of Vianden, bishop of Utrecht from 1249 to 1267 (Cox, p. 190). The Institute for Dutch History has recently digitized the major modern editions of medieval charters for the county of Holland and the diocese of Utrecht. The Oorkondenboek van het Sticht Utrecht tot 1301, S.Muller Fz. et alii (eds.) (5 vol., Utrecht 1920-‘s-Gravenhage 1959) does contain an item for this charter (OSU III, 1428) which shows a short reference in a chronicle as the ultimate source of all later information. The chronicle places the gift of a city charter in 1257. Some later authors misread the chronicle and placed it in the year 1265. Nevertheless the city of Oudewater prepares the celebration of 750 years Oudewater in 2015. A celebration in 2007 would have been equally justifiable…

Map of Oudewater by Jacob van Deventer, around 1557

Map of Oudewater by Jacob van Deventer, around 1557

The remarkable insistence on some presumed historical facts in the history of Oudewater comes in a different perspective when looking at a number of events that most certainly determined its history. During a war between the bishop of Utrecht and the count of Holland Oudewater was severely damaged during a siege in 1349 (see for example the Divisiekroniek of Cornelius Aurelius (Leiden 1517) fol. 212 recto). Oudewater held a strategic position a the junction of the rivers Linschoten and Hollandse IJssel. In 1281 the bishop of Utrecht pledged Oudewater and some other possessions for 6000 livres tournois to the counts of Holland (OHZ IV, 1938 (1281 January 24)). The bishops of Utrecht never were able to repay this sum, and thus Oudewater remained until 1970 a town in Holland. On June 19, 1572, Oudewater was captured by Adriaen van Zwieten, and it became one of the earliest cities in Holland to side with William of Orange. On July 19, 1572 Oudewater participated with sixteen other cities in the first independent session of the States of Holland at Dordrecht, a landmark in the long struggle of the Low Countries with Spain, the Eighty Years War that lasted until the Westphalian Peace (1648).

Oudewater 1575

Engraving by Frans Hogenberg of the atrocities in Oudewater, 1575 – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, collectie Historieplaten Frederik Muller – see http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/

The change of sides in June 1572 and the presence of Oudewater at the historic session in Dordrecht a month later had undoubtedly been noted by the Spanish authorities in the Low Countries. The locations of Dutch cities had been chartered quite recently by Jacob van Deventer, the cartographer charged by the Spanish king Philipp II with a large-scale cartographical project. The surviving maps have been digitized in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. When Spanish forces approached Oudewater in August 1575, an ultimatum was sent urging the city council to surrender. By sheer misfortune this ultimatum was not properly understood. On August 7, 1575 the city was set to fire and many citizens were ruthlessly murdered. Only the church of St. Michael’s and a monastery did escape the devastations. These events clearly affected also the survival of historical records. With much support from nearby cities such as Gouda Oudewater was quickly rebuilt. The results of this building campaign are still visible in the center of the city which looks indeed rather unified if you look closely enough. The destruction of the original buildings, and presumably also of many historic records, explains the tendency to stick to some acclaimed stories and events. Archival records concerning Oudewater can in particular be found at the Regionaal Historisch Centrum Rijnstreek in Woerden and at Het Utrechts Archief in Utrecht. The survival of written records plays a role, too, in the project of Sophie Oosterwijk and Charlotte Dikken on the floor slabs of St. Michael’s at Oudewater.

Of witches, historians and tourists…

Perhaps I had start here better with stating my relative unfamiliarity with the history of witchcraft. As a historian I have kept this subject on purpose on a safe distance, but in the end there is no escape from it, in particular because the subject of persecution and trials is not far away from the main territories of legal historians.

Debunking some part of history is nothing special, nor is it my aim to expose any mystification. Others have done this thoroughly for the Witches Weigh-House. Under the pseudonym Casimir K. Visser the exiled German journalist and historian Kurt Baschwitz (1886-1968) published the study Van de heksenwaag te Oudewater en andere te weinig bekende zaken (Lochem, [1941]; online at the Dutch Royal Library). Baschwitz pointed to an inspection in 1547 of the weights used at the weigh-house, a fact adduced by earlier historians, but actually a normal procedure which says nothing about any special use. He notes the careful avoidance in the certificates of any reference to a belief in witches, witchcraft, sorcery and similar things. Baschwitz referred to Johannes Wier (around 1515-1588), the famous Dutch physician who fought against superstitions, Wier did not mention Oudewater at all in his 1563 treatise De praestigiis daemonum nor in his De lamiis (1577). Both books were often reprinted and appeared in translations. Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), too, did not credit Oudewater with any special role in his famous book De betoverde weereld (1691). Baschwitz published in 1963 his great study Hexen und Hexenprozesse. Die Geschichte eines Massenwahns und seiner Bekämpfung (Munich 1963). Hans de Waardt reviewed the historiography concerning Oudewater and witches in his article ‘Oudewater. Ein Hexenwaage wird gewogen – oder: Die Zerstörung einer historischen Mythe’, Westfälische Zeitschrift 144 (1994) 249-263 (online (PDF) at the Internet Portal Westfälische Geschichte). De Waardt wrote his Ph.D. thesis on sorcery and society in the province of Holland, Toverij en samenleving in Holland, 1500-1800 (diss. Rotterdam; The Hague 1991).

For the study of Johannes Wier Dutch readers can benefit from the marvellous recent study by Vera Hoorens, Een ketterse arts voor de heksen : Jan Wier (1515-1588) [A heretic physician for the witches, Jan Wier (1515-1588)] (Amsterdam 2011). On Balthasar Bekker Johanna Maria Nooijen published in 2009 “Unserm grossen Bekker ein Denkmal”? : Balthasar Bekkers ‘Betoverde Weereld’ in den deutschen Landen zwischen Orthodoxie und Aufklärung (Münster 2009).

It might be useful to mention the special website of the main Dutch historical journal Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden / Low Countries Historical Review where you can search online in the issues from 1970 to 2012. As for searching literature for European history you will no doubt gain information and insights at the portal European Historical Bibliographies maintained by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. A number of current historical bibliographies presented at this portal can be consulted online. For the history of the city and province of Utrecht you can use the online bibliography at SABINE which in a number of cases provides also links to digital versions of articles and books.

Researching the history of witchcraft

When it comes to studying the history of witches and witchcraft I must confess to start at almost zero. It is years ago that I read a monographic study on witchcraft, and this particular study, Lène Dresen-Coenders, Het verbond van heks en duivel : een waandenkbeeld aan het begin van de moderne tijd als symptoom van een veranderende situatie van de vrouw en als middel tot hervorming der zeden [The pact of witch and devil: an Early Modern fallacy as a symptom of a changing situation for women and as a means to reform morals] (diss. Nijmegen; Baarn 1983) did not convince me at all. Perhaps I was simply wrong in choosing to read this book with its overlong title and its hypotheses which still seem to me farfetched. In fact I kept away from a whole group of Dutch historians doing maatschappijgeschiedenis, “history of society” who favored studies of minorities to detect changes in mentality. Any exclusive focus still makes me frown, but the history of mentalities and cultural history in general is of course fascinating and most valuable.

If I was to start nowadays doing research on this theme I would look first at such fine guides as the section on Hexenforschung at the German history portal Historicum.net. Klaus Graf is the moderator of a useful mailing list on witchcraft research. You can also point to a succinct thematic bibliography provided in Dresden, the Dresdener Auswahlbibliographie zum Hexenforschung, which unfortunately has not been updated since 2004. In Tübingen the Arbeitskreis interdisziplinärer Hexenforschung sets an example of bringing several disciplines together. Unfortunately Jonathan Durrants’ online Witchcraft Bibliography was not available when writing this post. Older literature up to the end of the twentieth century can be found for example in a bibliography preserved at a website of the University of Texas. For Flanders Jos Monballyu (Kortrijk) has created a fine online bibliography and a selection of relevant sources concerning witch trials. He has written many studies about witches and traced many criminal sentences concerning them in Flemish archives. The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection is most useful with its bibliography and digital library.

In American history the Salem Witch Trials (1692) offer a fascinating window on early American society. You can find many documents online, in particular at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project (University of Virginia), at Douglas Linder’s Famous Trials website and at a portal dedicated to the events in 1692 with a digital collection of books and archival records. The perceptions of behavior and the attempts at dealing with such behavior in courts of justice, not to forget the changing perceptions of justice, are among the elements which make the persecution of witches, witchcraft and sorcery interesting for legal historians.

Of course these examples can be multiplied, but this would far exceed the boundaries of a blog post. Here I have sketched only the outlines of things worth exploring further. I called Oudewater a Dutch lieu de mémoire. In the book series Plaatsen van herinnering sofar five volumes have appeared since 2005 which follow for my country – albeit somewhat belated – the example of Pierre Nora’s seminal Les lieux de mémoire (3 vol., Paris 1984-1992). This interest in historical places and the ways events are remembered at particular places help us to remember history and legal history, too, happened to people in particular times and places, and not just somewhere as a part of a supposed or real historical process. Even a small building in a dreamlike preserved old town can relate to larger events. The scenic old streets of Oudewater was the scene of some very real events, but they are the background, too, for a very stubborn tradition of perceived history. The living memory and the construction or even invention of (parts of) history related to a particular place tell us the fascinating history of the uses of history, changes in perceptions and the construction of identity in time and space.

One of the things that make me uneasy in writing about witchcraft is the sheer proliferation of literature on this subject. Many scientific disciplines occupy themselves with sorcery and witchcraft and its history. It is very easy to miss a whole range of interpretations stemming from a particular corner or country. The road of using bibliographies is long. Sometimes it seems attractive to take a shortcut which in the long run does not bring you much further. Legal history should pay due attention to colored perceptions and distortions of historical facts and events in order to keep an open eye for its own pitfalls, shortcomings and blind corners.