Sceptical Voices: Ending the Era

Abstract

So far we have encountered a fluid conceptualization of the witch, in myriad guises, which contrasts sharply with the prevailing ecclesiastical orthodoxy that appropriated the witch as fundamentally evil. This ambiguity lies at the very heart of the doubt and confusion as to the true nature of a witch and of witchcraft and the appropriation of supernatural power, to which the authors examined in this chapter contributed greatly. The publication of anti-witchcraft literature in Poland fell into two main periods. The first, between 1639 and 1647, was dominated by the influential Poznań publishing house of Wojciech Regulus (Krzysztof Opaliński’s tutor) which published Spee’s Cautio Criminalis in Poland in 1647, several years after publishing the anonymous work Czarownica powołana, A Witch Denounced (1639), regarded by some as a polonized version of the Cautio. Some even claimed that Regulus himself was its author,¹ and in the same year he published Daniel Wisner’s Tractatus brevis de extramagi lamii veneticis. It took more or less another hundred years for sceptical works to find another voice (at least from the works extant or mentioned). However, in between these periods many synodal decrees and pastoral letters were also published, and two such documents approved by Bishop Kazimierz Florian Czartoryski were distributed posthumously in 1682.