The World of the Witches: Confessions and Conflicts

Abstract

The previous chapter set the historical and historiographical contexts for introducing the trial records and testing them against selected theories. In this chapter, I shall introduce statistics drawn from the Wielkopolska sample (with the clear proviso that they ought not to be extrapolated to represent any geographical notion of Poland). I will also sketch the chronology and geography that emerge, the evolution of the definition of the crime of witchcraft and identify the demographics of the accused. This will enable us to examine how the paradigms of the witch were defined, whether there was a composite, recognized body of attributes, ascribed to the ‘witch’, to see how people negotiated belief systems and also to lay the basis for investigating any correlation between narratives and details found in the trials and in the printed sources examined in later chapters. The trial narratives reveal features common to the majority of European witchcraft trials, which emerged through accepted vocabulary, narratives and sequences of events, of which the judiciary and the accused often seemed to have been aware and co-authored. However, secondary narratives also emerged, revealing histories of abuse, misfortune, quarrels within the community or families and details of other crimes, which provide a prism through which to view early modern life.