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Strangely enough, there were many Medieval theologians who also thought, as Scot did, that Witches couldn't cause any harm – yet many insisted the accused Witches should be prosecuted and burned anyway.¹ Ulric Molitor was one such. These writers really confuse most historians, who are often unable to make sense out of such a stance. Is it skeptical? Or is it superstitious? It is, at the least, irrational – why punish someone for a crime which can't be committed? Why burn someone for cursing a cow or causing a storm, when no one is capable of making such a spell work? And, the historians wonder, how could the Medieval Churchmen think such a person was a Witch, if they didn't believe the Magic to be effective?

Most historians just throw up their hands at this point, and attribute all such silliness to the general irrationality of the era. This is one of the reasons why the height of the Witch-trials is so mystifying, coming as it did during the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance. But a few writers, such as Erik Midelfort, get close to a solution. Midelfort's book (Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562-1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations) is to Germany what Macfarlane's is to England: an in-depth study of the Witch trials within a carefully-defined area and within proscribed temporal limits: "… we shall examine in detail," he says, "the evolution of witchcraft trials and witchcraft theory in a restricted region of Germany," and through a restricted time period of about 120 years.²

Even the evidence for this restricted region is enormous, so he had to choose which trials to study in detail. In large measure, his decision boiled down to looking for the lost needle in the portion of the haystack where the light was best: "good sense dictated studying only the larger witch trials. More information is available for larger trials, and their dynamics were distinctly different from those of small cases." Large ones were characterized by "mass denunciations" and an "element of sheer panic not manifested in the smaller, intermittent trials."³ This might imply that the small trials were not motivated by panic, and that the "causes" deduced for the large ones simply will not be relevant to the small ones, but Midelfort does not raise this issue. At any rate, even after the big trials ceased, small ones with one or two defendants continued for a long time afterward. Whatever stopped the large ones was irrelevant to the small ones. Though he has explained, to his satisfaction, the dynamics of the large trials, his reasoning obviously cannot be applied to the smaller ones.

"Large" trials, in Midelfort's categorization, were those which resulted in twenty or more executions in one year – sometimes there were well over a hundred executions from a single trial. Seventeen or eighteen such trials occurred in the area studied, between 1562 and 1684. Of these, fourteen have good information available. Midelfort also "briefly" examined all other trials with ten or more defendants.⁴ So the smallest trials – characterized by the least amount of panic, and therefore likely to contain the greatest amount of actual data on Witches – went unexamined.

Thus, his study is biased toward the dynamics of trials characterized by panic, with little actual substance. If Midelfort is able to accurately describe the causes and effects of panic, the particular trials he studied might well make sense. But panic will not explain the smaller trials, which, even by Midelfort's admission, had an entirely different dynamic.

According to Midelfort, the central idea of Witchcraft is not the Sabbat, as Lea and Notestein claim. It's the pact, the agreement between a Witch and the Devil. According to Lea and Notestein, Witchcraft couldn't exist (that is, the concept of Witchcraft couldn't exist) until the concept of the Sabbat did. This explains, in their view, why the Witch trials began when they did; they couldn't happen at all before Witchcraft had been imagined, and Witchcraft couldn't be imagined until the Sabbat was.

Midelfort's argument is similar, but differs on this one point: it is the concept of the pact, not the concept of the Sabbat, which matters.⁵ He, too, uses this to explain the timing of the trials – Witchcraft couldn't be imagined, and therefore prosecuted, prior to the invention of the idea of a pact. But his formulation also addresses the troubling question of how someone could believe Witches to be harmless and yet also believe they should be killed.

In Lea's formulation, it makes no sense to prosecute someone merely for attending a Sabbat, if attendance at the Sabbat does no one any harm – which is one of the reasons why, in Lea's view, the prosecution of Witches is "irrational" (quite apart from the unreality of the Sabbat itself). Why execute someone for committing no harm? But as Midelfort points out, many of the theologians said Witches deserve death for their malice. They would cause harm, if they could; and they honestly believe they do cause harm; and they actively try to, through their spells and other incantations. The pact is an outward sign of their desire to harm, and it is the manifestation of their promise to Satan to try to cause harm. The Sabbat is of importance only in so far as it is one of the ceremonies at which a pact is sealed.

It's important to make a distinction between the ecclesiastic and the secular authorities, a point which is quite blurred in the understanding of most people, and even in the understanding of many historians. The secular courts were concerned with harm. That's why things like "causing death by magic" have been crimes for thousands of years. But the ecclesiastical courts cared about thought. This is, to a great extent, the source of the differences between the German trials studied by Midelfort – which were driven by religious concerns – and the English trials studied by Macfarlane – which were mostly in the hands of secular authorities. The various Christian churches were trying to enforce an orthodoxy of belief and ideas – that was, for example, what the Holy Office of the Inquisition was all about. So a concern with the malice of a Witch was certainly within the purview of the Church, and the Church would certainly feel justified in prosecuting Bad Thoughts. (As has been mentioned, the term "Church" is being used for convenience' sake. The Lutherans and other Protestant groups were every bit as vicious and fanatic in trying, torturing, and executing Witches as were the Catholics, particularly in Germany.)

This is still not enough to explain the Witch trials, though, because people other than Witches might well feel anger and malice. Why were only Witches prosecuted so fiercely for it? Midelfort's partial answer is the pact, the agreement with the Devil. Witches not only feel malice, they also intentionally align themselves with Satan in an attempt to act upon that malice. Still, it's valid to ask why even this is sufficient to justify such stunningly cruel treatment by ecclesiastical authorities. Since aligning oneself with the Devil does no harm to anyone but the Witch herself, surely her punishment of eternal damnation after death will be enough. Midelfort doesn't quite explain why the pact should have been thought to justify torture and death, and indeed is rather mystified about why the trials began. The idea of a pact explains the interest of the Christian churches, but not the extreme violence; and, in any case, it must still be determined where the pact-idea itself came from.

Midelfort's timing on the origin of the pact-idea is wrong, anyway. Though he claims it to be a late Medieval concept, its germs go back at least as far as the book of Isaiah: "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement."⁶ Why, exactly, this idea came to be of such a pressing concern in sixteenth century Germany remains to be adequately explained. (For a summary of this writer's theory - to be explored in more depth in future research - see "What Caused the Witchhunt?")

Midelfort turned his attention to a different problem. Why and how would the trials stop? Certainly, malice didn't cease. Nor did the Church stop disliking malice. Nor did the Church change its opinion about the possibility of forming a pact with the Devil. Why, then, didn't the trials continue indefinitely?

This is a particularly vexing problem because of the way trials were handled on the Continent, as contrasted with their conduct in England. As Macfarlane showed, torture in England was very minimal – no more than in the average murder trial, and so light by the standards of the day that it was not considered to be torture at all. But in Europe, torture of the most gruesome kind was used to force accused Witches to name accomplices, who would then also be tortured to gain the names of more accomplices, ad infinitum. Midelfort is among those who believe torture explains the content of all the confessions – "I found that the legal torture practiced by the witch hunters sufficiently explains confessions of ritual activities among witches without concluding that they actually took place"⁷ (unfortunately, he does not explain the basis for his "finding") – which means the process he describes should, in theory, continue until everyone possible has been accused, has been tortured, has confessed, has named yet more "accomplices," and is dead. The process should be unstoppable. Yet stop it did. Though there are cases of literally hundreds of accused Witches being executed within a very short space of time, it was uncommon for entire villages to be wiped out (though this did occasionally happen); and, not only did each individual chain-reaction trial grind finally to a halt, but also these large panic trials eventually ceased altogether.

Midelfort theorizes there was a "crisis in confidence" which stopped the trials. As the process ground on, accused Witches would begin to name people who couldn't possibly be Witches – including leading citizens, government officials, or even Church officials, or other people who simply didn't fit the Witch stereotype. When enough non-stereotypes were named, people began to doubt the effectiveness and accuracy of the techniques used for identifying Witches. They began to realize the real dangers of using torture as a tool to extract confessions. They began to doubt the accuracy of the system, and then began to oppose it. Thus, support for the system vanished, and the system itself fell apart.⁸ The dangers of torture were finally realized, by people who really should have thought about it much earlier.

But this contradicts the historical sequence. As stated previously, a ban on torture came after the trials were already declining. People did not stop using torture because they'd lost confidence in its ability to identify Witches. They stopped looking for Witches long before they decided to ban torture.

And Midelfort's own data contradicts his hypothesis. Some of the first people accused in many of the chain-reaction trials he describes are people who don't fit the Witch stereotype of poor, ugly, old women. Often, among the first people accused were men, or wealthy people, or young people – sometimes even children. Indeed, the stereotype of the poor, ugly old woman-witch didn't even exist until people like Weyer and Scot began promulgating it late in the sixteenth century – and they were the people who opposed the Witch trials. The stereotype was created specifically to ridicule the trials: look, Scot and Weyer said, the accused Witches are really just helpless, ugly old women, not worth killing. Where the stereotype held sway, it argued against the trials.⁹

These are not the only serious problems with Midelfort's analysis. Though his ideas try to explain why the trials stopped, he is completely stumped as to why they began. Malice has been around for a long time; why didn't the Church make such a violent point of it sooner? Nor can his formulation explain why Witches were found – and, sometimes, gave voluntary confessions – in situations where there was no torture used, threatened, or implied. Nor does he explain why a "crisis in confidence" in one location wouldn't lead people to question torture's usefulness in nearby areas: though village "X" came to realize torture was not a proper tool, the adjacent village "Y" used it soon after, and so did "Z" a century later, as if no one discussed the problem with anyone else. "X" might even have a relapse in later years.

Nor is it true that the dangers of torture were unconsidered before being brought to the fore by a "crisis in confidence." The writings of jurists and theologians are full of exactly this concern, that people might be forced under pain to confess to crimes they did not commit. Safeguards – insufficient ones, it is true, but safeguards nonetheless – were instituted, from the very beginning. As evidenced by their own writings, the jurists' view of the usefulness of torture did not change appreciably until long after the Witch trials ceased. Jurists did not stop Witch-trials because they suddenly realized the uselessness of torture. They remained convinced of the effectiveness of properly-applied torture for a long time after they stopped prosecuting Witches.

Furthermore, Midelfort intentionally studied only the largest trials, the ones in which there was the most sense of unthinking panic and fear. Not surprisingly, he concluded Witch trials were driven by panic and fear, since that's the overriding feature of large trials. Yet the vast majority of trials – as clearly shown both by his data and by Macfarlane's – were small trials in which one or two people were accused, chain reactions didn't happen, and in general the procedures went off with no sense of panic, and, in many cases, no torture.

And lastly, Midelfort's analysis completely avoids the question that most interests the current study: What were the thoughts of the accused Witches?

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¹ H.C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562-1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1972, p24.

² Midelfort, p7.

³ Midelfort, p8.

⁴ Midelfort, p9.

⁵ Midelfort, p14-16, p20, and p234 n56.

⁶ Isa 28:15.

⁷ Midelfort, p1.

⁸ Midelfort, p93-94.

⁹ This also contradicts the theories of some modern feminist writers, who want to depict the Witch trials as being, at root, a "war" by men in power against European women. In fact, though, the popularity of this idea helps to hide what was actually going on.

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6. Nothing Happened