• "Let there be no mistake: Decker has not produced
a nostalgic apology for the Church, for he works historically in
the best sense, by seeking the foundation of historical judgment
in the only place he can find it, in empirical fact. In place of
the ‘Black Legend,’ he has not erected a ‘rosy
legend.’. . . The last witch was burned in Rome in 1572, just
a few years before the first true avalanche of trials overtook Germany
and France around 1590, and well before the witch craze reached
its high point with many thousands of victims, in the period between
1626 and 1631, but not in Italy or on the south side of the Alps,
and not influenced by the Roman Inquisition, but rather in the territories
of the Holy Roman Empire."
—Thomas Brechenmacher, Tagespost, on the German edition
|
Witchcraft and the Papacy:
An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the
Roman Inquisition |
| |
Rainer Decker
Translated by H.C. Erik Midelfort |
| 256 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 15 figures, 2 maps, 1 table |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2747-3 • $45.00 |
| Studies in Early
Modern German History |
| November 2008 |
 |
When Rainer Decker was researching a sensational seventeenth-century
German witchcraft trial, he discovered, much to his surprise,
that in this case the papacy functioned as a force of skepticism
and restraint. His curiosity piqued, he tried unsuccessfully to
gain access to a secret Vatican archive housing the records of
the Roman Inquisition that had been sealed to outsiders from its
sixteenth-century beginnings. In 1996 Decker was one of the first
of a small group of scholars allowed access. Originally published
as Die Päpste und die Hexen, Witchcraft and
the Papacy is based on these newly available materials and
traces the role of the papacy in witchcraft prosecutions from
medieval times to the eighteenth century. Decker found that although
the medieval church did lay the foundation for witch hunts of
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the postmedieval papacy,
and the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, played the same kind of
skeptical, restraining role during the height of the witch-hunting
frenzy in Germany and elsewhere in Europe as it had in the trial
that was the initial focus of his research. Witchcraft and the
Papacy overturns a large body of scholarship that confuses the
medieval papacy with its markedly skeptical successors, and that
mistakenly portrays
the papacy as fanning rather than quelling the flames of the witchcraft
mania sweeping northern Europe from the mid-sixteenth century
onward.
Rainer Decker is the Director of the Department
of History at the Secondary Teachers’ Training Institute in
Paderborn, Germany. H. C. Erik Midelfort is professor
of religious studies and history at the University of Virginia,
author of Exorcism and Enlightenment, and the translator
of Wolfgang Behringer’s The
Shaman of Oberstdorf (Virginia).
|
