lia-witchcraft

[lia-witchcraft]

Every Catastrophe Needs a Culprit

The impending climate emergency necessitates an intersectional approach to understanding which, and why, particular groups will suffer. This is required as the situation evolves in the face of collective apathy, due to the seemingly isolated and geographically peripheral evidence of disaster. By presenting a historical analysis of the Little Ice Age as a climatic disaster and identifying its impact upon social cohesion with specific respect to European witch trials, this paper identifies how damage to the social edifice is ultimately expressed through violent, superstitious reactions towards those who exist outside of the norm. The research draws upon both documentary data such as annals, non-instrumental diaries, and witchcraft databases, as well as non-specified data such as harvest dates and quality, and tree ring or thermal and wetness indices. From this, a pattern of correlation between abnormal climatic events and the resulting economic-hardship, and social upheaval emerges, centring women’s history within a global historical event. By taking an approach centred around environmental history, macrophenomenon such as religion and war are contextualised.

[lia-witchcraft]

An extract from my work on the positioning of witches as enemies of society.

Religion also enabled witches to be positioned as enemies of society as a whole both with regard to their direct impact upon crop failures and harvests but also as an enemy of organised religion, central to the lives of early modern people. Keith Thomas shares this view, arguing that “if witches were conceived of in continental fashion [as a] devil-worshipping sect […] it [became] plausible to regard them as enemies of society in general."[1] By portraying meetings of witches as inverted versions of village festivals and ceremonies, centered around sacrifice, sexualized, and removed from God, witches were explicitly seen as the antithesis of a moral Christian life. [2]

[1] Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. New York: Scribner. p.560

[2] Briggs, R. (2013). Witchcraft and the Local Communities: The Rhine-Moselle Region. In B. P. Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. p.162

#witch hunts #little ice age #witchcraft #witch trials #history #weather magic #witches #witchblr #witch hunting

[lia-witchcraft]

Christoph Schorer's Chronicle of the Town of Memmingen

1589                     

On 20 May the weather was terrifying / and people thought they would all perish.

1590                     

In that year many wicked persons were burned at the stake in the surrounding land.

It was a warm summer / and everything ripened well.

1592                      

On 28 March Hans Kleiber Metzger's grown daughter hanged herself in the house of her father. She was put in a barrel and sent downriver.

On 27 March the night was light / and the heavens open. We saw many things like that, also on 11 and 12 April that year.

On 3 July the sun was seen bloody red.

On 3 December a woman in Worningen gave birth to a child with two heads and 4 hands. It was brought to the town hall on the fourth of December / and was depicted by master Abraham Werlin the church warden / who was a painter.

1593                     

A hot and dry summer / and the crickets ate everything in the fields / resulting in a surge in prices.

On 19 July when people were going to church / they saw here three suns and a rainbow.

20 October people saw the heavens opening.

1594                      

On 29 July at 5 and 6 in the afternoon there were two terrible thunder storms / In Steinheim lightning struck the farm of Juncker Lutz von Freyburg / burning a cow and two calves.

Blom, P. (2019). Nature's Mutiny. London: Picador.

#witch hunts #witch trials #little ice age #paleoclimatology #witchcraft #history #witches #weather magic #witchblr

[lia-witchcraft]

Die Pluemen der Tugent (“The Flowers of Virtue”)

The didactic poem was written in 1411 by the district magistrate of the count of Tyrol, Hans Vintler. It was based on an Italian treatise about virtues and vices and raises interesting questions about the moral quandaries facing sceptics of witchcraft.

Vintler's poem both condemns the superstitious act of performing weather magic, as well as condemning any belief that this magic was effective.

It therefore raises this question: would Vintler condemn a ‘witch’ for superstitious practices, or her accuser for believing her to have cast magic at all?

Heiduk, M., Herbers, K., & Lehner, H.-C. (2020). Prognostication in the Medieval World: A Handbook. De Gruyter.

#the little ice age #history #little ice age #witchcraft #witch trials #weather magic #witches

[lia-witchcraft]

The Writings of Wouter Jacobszoon

Previously the abbot at a monastery in Gouda, Jacobszoon left the region for Amsterdam in the wake of anti-Catholic sentiments. His diary written in 1572 illustrates that while the abbot had no preoccupations with witchcraft, the weather was central to his every thought.

"During this time, the weather was bitter cold. Everything froze and became hard. It hailed, it snowed, and cutting winds were whistling from All Souls Day [November 2] to now [in March]. The good Lord, we learn from this, wants to show us thus how much we have gone astray, but the people did not change and behaved as if they were his enemies. Like wolves and lions they attacked not only men of the cloth but also simple folk, good country people and everyone they found."

This demonstrates that even in those who did not consider witchcraft within their worldview, the weather remained entirely central to their spiritual reality.

#the little ice age #little ice age #witchcraft #history #paleoclimatology #witch trials #witches #weather magic

[lia-witchcraft]

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[lia-witchcraft]

The Classification of Weather Magic Pt.2

In his work Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials Horsley produces an analysis of the Austrian Lucerne cases.

Horsley identifies three main categories of accusation. Those accused of bewitching (people and/or witches), those accused of maleficent magic (sorcery), and evidence of beneficent magic (such as healing, diving, love magic, herbal, and weather making).

Within that third sub-category, Horsley identifies that 6 of the accused are specifically accused of weather making. Roughly a third of the accused,

Additionally, within the category of 'accused of maleficient magic', three of the accused are specifically associated with the summoning of hail. Two of the accused are also associated with weather making, while the third is not.

Horsley says in particular about weather magic

"Although it occurs in less than a quarter of the cases, the most frequent accusation for sorcery in the Lucerne area was for hail-making, which caused damage to crops. However, there are nearly as many cases in which the accused women are said to have predicted or caused rainstorms which seem not to have been harmful in any way. To the peasants, the prediction or causing of these storms appears to indicate the unusual power of the accused rather than any skill in sorcery."

Certainly again the cases at Lucerne highlight the doctrine of the demonologists, the influence of the Church. Peasants themselves do not appear to assume those capable of beneficent magic must inherently partake in maleficent magic. The same woman who cured a disease did not inherently cause it, and the same woman who brought the rains did not inherently bring the hail.

#history #witchcraft #weather magic #witch trials #witch hunting #paleoclimatology

[lia-witchcraft]

Horsley, R. A. (1979, Spring). Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials.

It is worth noting, in regard to the Lucerne material, that all of the healers/diviners who were accused of witchcraft were women, whereas nearly all the others who were not being accused - even though they may have been involved in the same illegitimate magical healing, or may have conversed with the dead or worked counter magic - were men.

#witchcraft #witch trials #weather magic #history #witches

[lia-witchcraft]

The Sources of Popular Witch Beliefs and Accusations

Historians have developed four main lines of analysis to explain the sources of popular witch beliefs and accusations: social-psychological, structural-functionalist, cultural-linguistic, and realist.

The Social-Psychological approach treats witch beliefs as some sort of collective psychopathology or cognitive malfunction. Susceptibility to 'primitive' magical thinking, the desire to account for misfortune, and projection of guilt are among the suggested explanations.

Structural–Functionalist interpretations generally incorporate one or more of the social-psychological explanations above into a theory of social scapegoating in which other, ‘real’ social tensions were sublimated into witchcraft suspicions. Wider ideas such as the breakdown of communal society and socio-economic developments are core to this.

Cultural–Linguistic explanations seek to account for witch beliefs in terms of their place in the total matrix of beliefs that made up the culture and the structural imperatives of language and narrative that shape thought. It asserts that the only historical ‘reality’ that can be legitimately investigated is the beliefs themselves.

Realist explanations are based on historians’ traditional assumption that there was an objective reality in the past, independent of what was said and written about it, that can be partially reconstructed from the record. This view determines the extent to which the beliefs and accusations in the historical record reflected things people actually did and experienced as critical to a full understanding of early modern witchcraft.

Summarised directly from the work of Edward Bever, Popular Witch Beliefs and Magical Practices.

#witchcraft #witches #witch trials #history #witch hunts

[lia-witchcraft]

The Classification of Weather Magic Pt.1

This is the first post of a number exploring the classification of weather magic within trials; its evolution, its meaning, and its purpose.

I will begin with an excerpt from Scarre and Callow's "Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th-Century Europe" that explores the motivation for accusing witches of particular crimes.

Whilst there was some debate about the meaning of the term 'heresy', in the course of the fourteenth century it became largely accepted that the making of demonic pacts fell within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. This brought magic within its purview, and in the fifteenth century, [...] Inquisitors began to press the charge of diabolic pact even against unsophisticated village practitioners of maleficent magic.

This demonstrates that in order to gain jurisdiction over the peasantry's trials against witches and to remain in keeping with the Church's condemnation of "lack of real religion and faith in God", the categorising of accusations in such a way to suit the Inquisition was paramount.

This links to weather magic specifically because weather magic falls within the traditional description of "sorcery" or "primary witchcraft", unrelated explicitly to the devil. Thus, Church notions were superimposed on popular, traditional ideas at trials for maleficent magic.

Scarre and Callow continue specifically that

[...] in trials at Todi (1428) and Cologne (1456), the emphasis was diverted from the original charges, respectively, of love magic and weather magic, to fresh ones of using an ointment made from dead infants and of diabolism.

The disconnect between peasant-led lynchings and the official hunt for an organized cult of Satan by the Inquisition throws into question how represnetative data highlighting accusations of weather magic was of the actual peasant psyche compared to the motivations of the Church.

#witch trials #witchcraft #weather magic #paleoclimatology #little ice age #witches #The Classification of Weather Magic

[lia-witchcraft]

Ulrich Molitor's “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus”

Published in 1489, three years after the Malleus Maleficarum, Molitor's dialogue-formatted treatise takes the stance that considered witchcraft to be an illusion.

The De Lamiis centres issues of the weather far more than the Malleus. Dialogues 1 and 13 within the De Lamiis, as well as several woodcuts deliberate over the issue of weather magic, while only one section of the Malleus raises the issue of climate.

Amy Ghilleri's work Ulrich Molitor's “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus”: Purposes for the publication of a new witchcraft handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the contents of the De Lamiis contrasted against those of the Malleus Maleficarum.

Ghilleri writes

"With God's permission a witch may cause hailstorms and harm men. A critical component of this section is the issue of permission. [...] as without God's permission such diabolical activities would not be possible. The witch herself would not be the one to cause a storm, but rather a demon would be responsible. Both would be acting in line with the wishes of God."

In this way, the De Lamiis connects the writings of clergymen attributing bitter climates to the will of God, and the trials of women accused of weather magic.

In the eyes of the clergy, the pursuit of humans to be made culpable were lamentable displays of the lack of real religion and faith in God.

It explicitly spells out the dialogue between the two bases of documentary data. The religious skeptic and the witch-phobic fanatic, united in their attempts to find a culprit for the catastrophes around them. For the sceptic, man's sin, and for the fanatic, those existing outside the norm.

#malleus maleficarum #little ice age #history #witch trials #witchcraft #paleoclimatology

[lia-witchcraft]

In the 17th Century, winter scapes emerged as an artistic trend in countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands. Return of the Hunters, painted in 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, typifies the genre.

Its valley-view of ice skaters and drifts was originally commissioned as one of a set of seasons. Replicated in prints, the ijsgezicht (ice view) genre of Bruegel's work is one of many works recording the bitter period. Hendrick Avercamp and Adriaen van de Venne are among those best known in the genre.

Other works such as Wenceslaus Hollar's etchings of winter fashions, Romeyn de Hooghe's Kolf player on the ice, and Adriaen Matham's pleasing little skating owls.

#little ice age #the little ice age #history #pieter bruegel the elder #hendrick avercamp #adriean matham #winter scene

[lia-witchcraft]

Your project sounds VERY interesting! My Witchstorian heart loves things that explore the intersections between major historical events and concurrent popular thought on witchcraft. Just did a whole project exploring the history of witchcraft-related law in Western Europe and the US last year, which definitely included a lot about witch trials, so I'm PRIMED for this. Definitely following for updates!

I'm so glad you are as interested as I am! Any insights or recommendations would be really appreciated.

[lia-witchcraft]

Pleased is an understatement to discover the use of Daniel Schaller’s writings in both Philipp Blom’s “Nature’s Mutiny” as evidence of the Little Ice Age, as well as Stuart Clark’s “Witchcraft and Magic in Early Modern Culture” regarding the proper response to witchcraft.

Pastor Daniel Schaller argued that "the end of the world and the Last Judgment / are no longer far and distant / but are close by, in front of the door."

#little ice age #witchcraft #daniel schaller

[lia-witchcraft]

Oster, E. (2004, Winter). Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(1), 215-228.

"Historians often base their arguments in the very specific context of relationships in a certain place and time, an approach that can often be extraordinarily fruitful. In this spirit, studies of witchcraft trials often rely on explanations revolving around psychological factors in the population. This paper argues for mindfulness about potential economic macrofoundations of historical events. The witchcraft trials suggest that even when considering events and circumstances thought to be psychological or cultural, key underlying motivations can be closely related to economic circumstances."

#little ice age #paleoclimatology #history

[lia-witchcraft]

Ruddiman's Climate Thesis

Earth’s climate is largely determined by the amount of sunshine reaching the planet, and how it then interacts with the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The amount of sunshine is determined by the orbit and axis of the earth. The interaction of these two factors has resulted in a roughly 100,000-year cycle of warming and cooling for almost 2.5 million years.

The concentration of greenhouse gases is more variable, but still followed a natural cycle. Until 8,000 years ago.  

In the case of Methane, the growth and decay of vegetation in relation to solar radiation created a roughly 22,000-year cycle.

In the case of Carbon Dioxide, volcanic eruptions, and the reaction of rainwater against exposed rocks, a 100,000-year cycle was again created.

Up until 8,000 years ago, these cycles created interglacial periods punctuated by ice ages. This period is known as the Pleistocene.

Ruddiman argues that the disruption of a climate primed for another ice age was the result of two human innovations: farming and herding. Forest clearing and burning, the methane production of cattle, among other factors, broke the cycle.

Thus, the period of steady climate known as the Holocene is in fact an “anthropogenic phenomenon”.

So, the little ice age? What broke this period of relative stability?

I will explore further ideas in a later post, but Ruddiman’s answer is one that provoked much surprise and debate:

The drop in both carbon dioxide that facilitated the LIA was due to the decimation of the native peoples in America. 90-95% of the population, in fact.

Natural vegetation replaced the worked fields of the native peoples, and young trees in particular absorb carbon dioxide faster than older ones. The withdrawal of carbon dioxide from the air temporarily reversed the long-term warming trend.

This thesis compliments the work of other historians in the field. Not only does it highlight the truly catastrophic scale of the decimation of the Native Americans, but in Daniel Headrick’s words it demonstrates that “humans cannot escape the blame for influencing the climate of the seventeenth century any more than we can today.”

Read Daniel Headrick's work for an overview of Ruddiman's theses and their relationship with the work of Geoffrey Parker. See also this article by Ruddiman himself for a more in-depth analysis.

#little ice age #paleoclimatology #ice age #climate history

[lia-witchcraft]

Welcome to my blog!

Over the next two months, I will pursue research that unites climate history and the study of witchcraft as part of an undergraduate research scheme with my university.

The aim of this project is to explore to what extent there is a connection between the height of the European witch trials between 1580–1630 and the extreme weather conditions occurring across the continent as a result of the phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age., ultimately answering the question “what was the impact of the Little Ice Age upon the European witch trials?”

The hypothesis is that the Little Ice Age (LIA) wrought havoc with agriculture, the base of Europe’s economic system, and as a result both the widespread economic hardship and the freak climatic events caused strife in the social cohesion of early modern society.

The damage to this social edifice was ultimately expressed through violent, superstitious reactions towards those who clearly existed outside of the norm within society; older, poorer women without families to protect them.

The response to natural catastrophe has been and continues to be morality- I aim to demonstrate the wider impact of climate upon society through one small window.

This blog will function as a place for me to share interesting articles, outline the theses involved in a topic intersecting economic and social history, and to provide updates on the progress of the work.

I can’t wait to get started. Asks are open.

-Dee

#research #undergrad research #history #little ice age #the little ice age #witchcraft #witch trials