Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland

by

Michael Ostling

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Centre for the Study of Religion

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Michael Ostling, 2008

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 Abstract

Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland

Michael Ostling
Ph.D., 2008
Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

This dissertation draws on two sets of sources. First, a database of 179 trials and 355 accused

witches, drawn from all over the territory of early modern Poland (excluding Lithuania), and dating from

1511 to c. 1770. Second, literary sources including anti-demonological polemic, legal treatises, guide-

books to rural economy, sermon collections, humanist and Jesuit poetry, and popular ribald literature.

Part 1 puts the witch-trials into their social, economic, and legal context. It attempts a

characterisation of the social position of accused witches: they were usually married peasant-women, poor

but not destitute. It traces increasing number of witch-trials in the late 17th century in response to the

economic and demographic crises of the mid-century. It also shows how legal practice tended to encourage

high execution rates but to discourage the spread of witch-trials through chain-accusation.

Part 2 examines the ways that ordinary peasant magic, directed against imagined witches, provided

the conceptual building blocks for the alleged crimes of witches. The accused inverted or exaggerated their

own practices to create the confessions of malefice, night flight, and the meeting at Bald Mountain. In this

part I also examine the use of Christian sacraments in witchcraft; the Tridentine context of intense

Eucharistic devotion promoted accusations and confessions about the desecrated Body of Christ.

Part 3 examines the figure of the Devil in the Polish witch-trials. The devil bore strong resemblance

to folkloristic house-spirits, and to the untimely dead, especially unbaptized children. Polish witches

imagined themselves making pacts not with the Prince of Darkness but with a nature-spirit or imp. Accused

witches "indigenized" elite motifs of demon-sex; turning them into stories of the nurture provided to house-

spirits.

Witchcraft is an imaginary crime, but witches are real people: they are people who have come to be

imagined by others in their community, and often by themselves, as practitioners of the imagined crime of

witchcraft. This dissertation explores the various ways by which witchcraft was imagined in early modern

Poland. In particular, it pays close attention to the self-representations of accused witches, as they

attempted, in their confessions under torture, to preserve the integrity of their imagined selves.

ii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation's many faults derive entirely from the shortcomings of its author. Whatever good it
contains, however, must be attributed in large measure to the many people whose generosity and
intelligence helped shape and guide the research and the writing. Thanks are due, above all, to my
supervisor Jonathan Pearl, who read the entire draft, in numerous states of roughness, and offered deeply
necessary encouragement at all stages. The other members of my committee, Janice Boddy, Juri Kivimae,
and Nick Terpstra provided advice at every stage. Lyndal Roper subjected the entire work to a very
thorough critique, at once generous and stern, and has encouraged me to rethink many arguments. Sarah
King, David Pearly, and Laurel Zwissler read and gently critiqued whole chapters. Conversations with
Stuart Macdonald, Malgorzata Pilaszek, and Dace Veinberga have also been of great value. Tomasz
Wislicz and Jacek Wijaczka selflessly shared portions of their unpublished notes and archival material,
without which large sections of the work would have been much impoverished. My Latin benefited
enormously from the help of Mark Crane and Anna Kubicka. The librarians of the Sekcja starodrukow of
the Polish National Library, the Petro Jacyk Resource Centre, and the Interlibrary Loan department of the
University of Toronto Library were unfailingly helpful: I would particularly like to thank Candice Cheung
and Ksenya Kiebuzinski. My son Kosma helped me make the map and some of the more complicated
figures. For other favors, large and small, I would like to thank Marilyn Colaco, Carol Canzano, Fereshteh
Hashemi, Irene Kao, Shuk Bing Wong and especially Barbara Mainguy of the Centre for the Study of
Religion; Dorota Rogowska and Andrzej Dakowski of the Polish-American Fulbright Commission;
Zdzislaw Cieszkowski and Kinga Strycharz-Bogacz of KUL; P. Thomas Reddy of ARSI; as well as
Marilyn Bluestein, William Burley, Karen Cheatham, Robert Fehrenbach, David Frankfurter, Joe Goering,
Scott Grunow, Rainer Henrich, Agnieszka Karolczuk, Pamela Klassen, John Kloppenborg, Bozena
Krawiec, Karolina Kuczmierowska, Tony Michael, Gisela Mutter, James Rovira, Walter Stephens, Tamara
Trojanowska, Amanda Wagner, and Johannes Wolfart. I received financial support during the research and
writing stages of this dissertation from an American Council of Learned Societies dissertation fellowship, a
Fullbright fellowship, and a University of Toronto Humanities Centre fellowship. My family, and
particularly my wife Dorota, have endured my long hours and short temper with remarkable forbearance.
The work is dedicated to her, and to my parents.

in
Table of Contents

Abstract ii
Acknowledgments iii
Figures, tables, and maps v
Glossary
A. Historical terms vi
B. Demons and devils ix
Note on translations xii
Introduction 1
Part 1: The crime of witchcraft in early modern Poland
Chapter 1.1: Historiography 17
1.1.1: Historiography and background 17
1.1.2: Numbers and sources 29
Chapter 1.2: Society and Law 41
1.2.1: Development of the witch-crime 44
1.2.2: Attempts at reform 62
1.2.3: The iron century 74
Chapter 1.3: Who were the witches? 86
1.3.1: Religion and ethnicity 92
1.3.2: Age and marital status 95
1.3.3: Estate 98
1.3.4: "Occupation" 100
1.3.5: Gender Ill
Chapter 1.4: The long road to the stake 129
1.4.1: Suspicion, accusation, calumny 131
1.4.2: From accusation to trial 146
1.4.3: Before the court 157
1.4.4: In the torture chamber 177
1.4.5: Denunciation 188
1.4.6: Verdict and sentence 200
Chapter 1.5: Mechanisms ofjustice 215
1.5.1: Accusatory jurisprudence 215
1.5.2: Expense 217
1.5.3: Judicial dependence 220
1.5.4: Conflicting jurisdictions 224
1.5.5: The crime of crimes 228
Part 2: A pluralistic universe
Chapter 2.1: Healing and harming 236
2.1.1: Introduction 236
2.1.2: Practical magic 240
2.1.3: The circulation of moisture 265
2.1.4: Bald Mountain 286
Chapter 2.2: Stealing the sacred 299
2.2.1: The tools of the church in the hands of witches 301
2.2.2: The Eucharist in the witch-trials 322
2.2.3: Sacrament and incarnation 331
Chapter 2.3: Sacrifice and crucifixion 351
2.3.1: Introduction 351
2.3.2: Piety and passion 355
2.3.3: Host magic and the inversionary imagination 363
2.3.4: Broken bodies 370
Chapter 2.4: Piety in the torture chamber 381

IV
Part 3: Devil in the details
Chapter 3.1: Our good powers of evil 400
3.1.1: Introduction 400
3.1.2: A candle for the Devil 407
3.1.3: The devil from Krzemiefi 423
Chapter 3.2: Demon Lovers 465
3.2.1: Introduction 465
3.2.2: Accommodation and resistance 478
3.2.3: Appropriation and expression 490
3.2.4: Indigenization of the demon lover 499
Chapter 3.3: Translating the devil 520
Conclusions: The cosmopolitan indigene 537
Appendix A: The Lublin trials 545
Appendix B: Herbal lore 588
Appendix C: Spells 615
Appendix D: The crimes of witchcraft 624
Appendix E: Places 628
Appendix F: Names 630
Appendix G: Sources 633
Works Cited
Primary Sources 639
Secondary Sources 647

Figures Tables, and Maps

Frontispiece: A demon in the form of a bird xiii
Figure l.l.A: Town-court trials by region 36
Figure 1.2.A: Incidence of witch-trials and of numbers accused 42
Figure 1.2.B: Trials and numbers accused (1641-1740) 43
Figure 1.4.A: Numbers of accused per trial 194
Figure 1.4.B: Accusations and denunciations in the Ch^ciny trials of 1665 196
Figure 1.4.C: Accusations and denunciations in the Nowy Wisnicz trials of 1688-1689 197
Figure 1.4.D: Judicial execution and other penalties 202
Figure 1.5.A: Deputation 221
Figure 2.1.A: An old woman selling herbs 251
Figure 2.1.B: The analogical structure of spells 262
Table l.l.A: Witch-trials with accusations of host-theft 325
Table 2.2.B: Types of accusation and uses of the host 327
Table 3.2.A: Accused witches confessing to sexual relations with demons 478
Map: Witch-Trials in Poland, 16th-18th centuries after p. 675

v
Glossary
estates, the ekonom acted essentially as a sort
A. Historical terms
of tax-farmer. Cf. arendarz.
arendarz. Leaseholder and manager of a noble
estate, acting as agent for its absentee noble floren, dukat, talar, zloty polski. A unit of
master. Cf. ekonom. currency fixed at a nominal value of 30
groszy. However, a real, golden floren could
baba. A polysemous term, ranging in meaning
be worth almost nine times that amount by
from "woman" through "old or village
the 18th century, due to inflation and the
woman, to "village healer" or "cunning
devaluation of silver and copper coin.
woman," to "witch."
folwark. Manor-farm dependent on serf-labour,
burmistrz. From German burghermeister. Chief
and usually geared to the export trade in
administrator of a city or town.
wheat and rye. The dominant economic
chalupnik. "Cottager." Poor peasant owning formation in the Korona, 16th-18th centuries.
only his own cottage and small garden, and
gromada. Lit. "collective." The legitimate
working for wages at the folwark or in other
inhabitants of a village, in practice the adult
peasants' fields.
male householders, who collectively enforced
chora_zy. Lit. "standard-bearer." A knightly title local order, maintained public areas, and so
in medieval times, this had become an on. Represented in dealings with the manor or
honorary and ceremonial office by the 16th the courts through their spokesman, the soltys
century. or wojt.
cwiertnia. A unit of dry-measure. One quarter of grosz. A unit of currency, worth 3 szelaj>i,
a korzec. Like all early-modern l/30th of a floren or zloty, and l/48th of a
measurements, the cwiertnia featured extreme grzywna.
regional variation; a typical cwiertnia might
grzywna. 1. A sum of 48 grosze. 2. Injudicial
have been approximately 75-80 litres.
practice, a financial penalty, paid variously to
czesnik. Lit. "cellarmaster." In the early modern the court, to the wronged party, to the feudal
period, a minor honorary and ceremonial lord, or to the church.
office.
juridicii. Noble-owned suburbs, especially of
dukat. See floren. larger cities such as Krakow, Lublin, and
ekonom. A usually nobleman manager of a Warszawa. As private lands, these were not
village or folwark, acting in the interests of subject to city-court Saxon-law jurisdiction,
its absentee landlord or leaseholder. On royal nor to the guild regulation of manufacture
and trade.
kasztelan. In the medieval period, keeper of a krupiec. A unit of agricultural dry measure,
grod or castle. In the early modern period, an more or less equivalent to a bushel.
important office of senatorial rank.
Ian. A unit of agricultural land-measure, ranging
klech. A minor church functionary such as a by region from around 16 hectares to perhaps
choir-master, organist, or parish school 27 hectares. Nominally the standard size of a
teacher. Desperately poor but relatively well peasant farmstead; by the mid-17th century
educated, the klechy served as an only well-off peasants disposed of a full Ian.
intermediary between elite and peasant
lawnik. A grand-juryman in Saxon-law cities,
culture. At least some of the sowizdrzai
elected to a term usually of one year (but
satires were written by klechy.
often re-elected year after year). Judged
kmiec. A peasant in possession of sufficient land criminal cases, together with the presiding
to support his household. Kmieci usually wojt.
were wealthy enough to have house-servants,
pan / pani. "Lord / Lady" or "Sir / Madame." A
and to support one or a few resident
title and term of address for the szlachta, also
komornicy who fulfilled the kmiec's
often used in courtesy when addressing or
serfdom obligations at the folwark.
referring to well-off burghers.
komornik / komornica. 1. In villages, a poor
panszczyzna. Serf labour obligations on the
peasant with lifetime rights to room and
demesne farm or folwark, usually expressed
board in the home of a kmiec or zagrodnik,
in terms of days of labour per week.
working in their landlord's fields or fulfilling
pisarz. Lit. "writer." 1. Court scribe and record-
his serfdom obligations at the folwark. 2. In
keeper. 2. Minor ceremonial honorary office,
towns, a lodger or house-servant.
like czesnik.
korzec. Unit of dry measure equal to four
podstaroscie. Under-starosta or deputy starosta.
cwiertnie. Approximately 315 litres, with
As the starosta was often essentially an
regional variations.
absentee leaseholder of royal lands, bis
Korona: "The Crown." The part of the Polish-
functions as judge and administrator were
Lithuanian Commonwealth over which the
often executed by such an appointed deputee.
elected monarch was king rather than Grand
Duke (as he was of Lithuania). Synonymous, rajca. City counsellor. In most towns, elected by

usually, with the term "Poland," the Korona and from among the town elite. The

comprised Poland proper (Wielkopolska, burmistrz was chosen from among the rajcy.

Malopolska, Royal Prussia, and Mazowsze); Rzeczpospolita. The Commonwealth of Poland

and the nearer Ruthenian provinces (Rus and Lithuania.
Czerwona, Podole). After 1565, it also
Sejm. The Polish-Lithuanian Parliament, made
included the far south and east Ruthenian
up of the Senat (Senate) and the Izba
provinces (Ukraina, Woryh).

vii
 Poselska (House of Emmissaries); the highest tynf or tymf. A devalued coin with a nominal
legislative body in the Commonwealth. The value of 1 floren. Made mostly of base
general legislative sessions of the Sejm metals, its introduction precipitated the
walny (plenary Sejm) are distinguished from: inflation of the mid-17th century.
the Sejm konwokacyjny (Convocation
wojewoda. Often translated as "palatine." A
Sejm), called to elect a new king; the Sejm
high senatorial office, ranked below only the
koronacyjny (Coronation Sejm) at which the
kasztelan of Krakow. Many of the
elected king is crowned; and other extra-
wojewoda's functions as administrator of a
ordinary parliamentary sessions. Emmissaries
wojewodstwo or province had eroded by the
to the Sejm were elected at the regional
16th and 17th centuries, but they remained
sejmiki or "dietines."
important dignitaries.
soltys. Village headman; representative of the
wojt. Often translated, somewhat misleadingly,
village in dealings with the manor or the
as "bailiff." 1. In the 16th-18th c , this was a
courts; spokesperson for the village
town office of somewhat less prestige than
gromada.
that of burmistrz or rajca. Usually elected
sowizdrzal. A garbled translation of the German by the town's citizens or appointed by the
Eulenspiegel or "Owl-mirror;" the term for a town-counsel for a short term, the wojt was
genre of popular, often ribald verse which the chief magistrate in criminal matters and
forms an important source for early modern presided over a court composed of himself
Polish beliefs about witches and devils. and a small number (varying from city to
city) of lawnicy or grand-jurymen. 2. In some
starosta. The king's local representative on
villages, the equivalent of a soltys.
Crown lands, usually operating as an
absentee lease-holder; head of the wozny. A minor court functionary or guard.
staroscinskie courts which tried civil and
zagon. A small area of land, something less than
criminal cases among the nobility.
200 square meters. Sufficient land for a
stolnik. Lit. "tablemaster." A minor ceremonial garden but not for grain cultivation.
honorary office.
zagrodnik / zagrodnica. A peasant owning only
szelqg. Unit of currency: 1/3 of a grosz, l/90th his own home and a small plot of land, barely
of afloren. sufficient for subsistence. Better off than
chalupnicy and komornicy, poorer than
szlachcic / szlachcianka. Nobleman /
kmieci.
noblewoman. See szlachta.
zloty. See floren.
szlachta. Nobility. The political class of the
Noble Commonwealth of Poland and
Lithuania.

talar. See floren.

viii
 inkluz. A treasure-hauler, hatched from the egg
B. Demons and Devils
of a rooster.
bies (pi. biesowie). Pre-Christian term for an evil
Jas (var. Jasiek, Jasieneczek, Jacek; lit. "Jack").
spirit of some kind, used more or less
By far the most common name applied to
synonymously with diabei or czart.
demon-familars or devil-lovers in the Polish
Especially associated with Ruthenian devils,
witch-trial confessions. Also the usual name
as in the Sejm piekielny, where we find
for the male lover (together with the female
"Bies, the Ruthenian devil" and "Dietko (i.e.
Kasia, Kaska, Kasiunia) in folk love-songs
didko), brother to the Biesy."
and ballads.
boginka, lit. "little goddess." Also mamunia,
dziwozona. A female, baby-stealing demon; jedza. Cognate to the Baba Jaga of east Slavic

sometimes the ghost of an infanticidal fairy-tales, and a rare synonym for witch. A

mother. malignant, female forest demon.

chochlik. Usally imagined as a minor, kaduk. A devil or demon, found e.g. in

mischievious demon or imp. Gdacjusz's dictionary. According to

Chmielowski, the herb Rosiczka "preserves
chowaniec (pi. chowancy; var. hodowaniec). Lit.
one from kaduks."
"the hider," a treasure-hauler or house-
demon. klobuch. Term for an evil spirit and treasure-
stealing spirit in Warmia and Mazury still in
cmuk. A treasure-hauling demon.
the 19th century.
czart (pi. czarci, czartowie). Pre-Christian term
kobol (var. chobold, kobold, koltek). From
for an evil spirit of some kind, used more or
German kobold, possibly mixed, in the
less synonymously with diabei. Briickner
variant koltek, with the Baltic cawx, kaukas,
considers the term to have been derived
kautek. A minor demon; usually a treasure-
from kret, mole.
hauler.
diabei (pi. diabli, diablowie; var. diabol, diyabel,
latawiec (pi. latawcy; var. lathalec, latalec; lit.
djabel, etc.). Like the English devil, from
"flying one"). Used in literary sources to
Latin diabolus. Fallen angel, infernal spirit
translate incubus. Multivariant minor demon
of evil.
understood variously as a fiery bird or flying
didko (pi. didkowie; var. diedko). From the serpent, a demon of storms or whirlwinds, a
same root as Polish dziadek (grandfather, seductive youth, the ghost of a suicide, or
ancestor) and dziad (ancestor, but also the ghost of an unbaptized child. Often a
hobo), a term meaning both devil and house- treasure-hauler or house-demon. Cognate in
spirit in Ruthenia. many respects to the zmei (zmai, zmii) of
East and South Slavic folklore, to the
dziwozona, lit. "strange wife." See boginka.
Estonian puuk or pisuhand, and to the
 Latvian pukis—thence also to the Germano- pursued by lightning. Cf. latawiec,
Scandinavian/JwcA: ox pug or pooka. niechrzczeniec, skrzat.

mamunia. Lit. "little mother." See boginka. skrzat (pi. skzratowie, var. skret, skryat,
skrzatek, skrzytek). From German skratt, cf.
merkuriusz. Mercury (both the planet and the
Estonian kratt, though the name has also
god), used occasionally by elite authors as a
been derived from the Polish verb skrzeczyc,
synonym for a demon or devil.
"to screech," or from skrzyc siq, "to give off
niechrzczeniec (pi. niechrzczehcy; lit.
sparks, to flash." A minor demon, often
"unbaptised one;" cf. poroniec). The spirit
conceived of as a bird flying in the storm;
of an unbaptized infant, turned into a
often a treasure-hauler or house-demon.
demon.
strzyga (f.) and strzygon (m.) (from Latin strix,
nocnic or nocnica (pi. nocnice). Night terror, striga—screech-owl, vampiric night-demon,
nightmare, variously conceived of as a
and witch). As usually used in Polish, this
demon, a disease or a mental state.
term denotes a revenant blood-sucking
Especially associated with night-terrors of
ghost, that is, a vampire.
young children, in contrast to the more
szatan (pi. szatani, szatanowie). A devil or
erotic night-disturbances of youths and
demon. In Polish this is usually not the
adults.
proper name Satan, but rather a countable
planetnik (var. chmurnik, oblocznik, lit. "cloud- noun, like devil.
being"). Sometimes imagined as a storm-
topielec (pi. topielcy, topielcowie, var. utopiec;
bringing demon analogous to a latawiec or
lit. "drowner, drowned one"). Water-demon
niekrzczeniec; sometimes a human being
or spirit of a drowned man; sometimes a
who can fly and move storm clouds away
from one area onto another, protecting his generic demon with the water-association

friends and harming his enemies. In this largely absent.

latter variation, analogous to the South- uboze (pi.; var. pi. uboze_ta; lit. "poor one"). A
Slavic stuhac or zduhac, which is in turn house-demon and treasure-hauler. The
closely related to the famous Friulian primary term for house-demons through the
benandanti. 15th century; the latest use of term is
Rozdzienski 1612.
pokusnik (var. pokus; lit. "tempter") A synonym
for devil. With czart and diabel, the most zmora. Closely related etymologically and in
common name applied to devils or demons meaning with English nightmare, German
in the Polish witch-trials. mahre, French cauchemar, Ruthenian
hihomora. Sometimes identical to a nocnic
poroniec (lit. "stillbirth, miscarriage"). An
or night-terror; sometimes to the sexual
unbaptized still-born baby or aborted foetus,
incubus or succubus. In Polish folklore most
imagined as a demon who is constantly
 usually a living person who strangles or
sucks blood from others as they sleep; cf.
strzyga, strzygon, who does the same after
death and is thus a vampire.

zmij. A rare term for a demon in Poland, where

the feminine variant zmija denotes a
venomous serpent, zmij or its variants are
common terms for the flying, dragonlike or
serpentine treasure-hauler in many
neighbouring Slavic cultures.

XI
Note on translations
Unless cited from an English-language source, all translations from Polish and Latin, and the very few from
other languages, are my own. Many of the Latin translations benefited enormously from the help of several
collaborators; this is especially true of the longer translated Latin passages in Appendix A. In translating
the Polish of trial testimony I have attempted to preserve as much of the original flavour as possible; this
includes run-on sentences, frequent unmarked shifts from first to third person, and other idiosyncrasies. Old
Polish printed texts, like English texts from the same period, feature irregular capitalization conventions; I
have preserved this in the translation.
For primary sources (manuscripts, but also all printed work originating before 1800), I provide the
text in the original language either as a footnote or, for longer passages, in a parallel column. In
transcribing Polish and Latin texts, whether from manuscripts or printed works, I have made very minimal
changes: I have substituted commas (,) for the slashes (/) of early texts, and digraphs for logographs (e.g.
"sz" for "13"); and I have expanded scribal abbreviations ("Lublinensis" for "Lublin*"). I have not
preserved the "open a" accent mark (a) in some 16th-century texts, but have otherwise made no
modernizations to orthography. However, it should be noted that I take passages of many early texts from
modern editions or secondary sources, some of which have modernized orthography.

xn
For Dorota, and for my Parents

A devil or demon in the form of a bird.

Detail from an illustration in the Bible of Jan Nicz
Leopolita, Krakow 1561. Matthew 15:22: "Zmihiy sie
nademna^ Panie synu Dawidow: abowiem corka moia
okrutnie od czartostwa bywa drqcznona [Have mercy on
me, Lord, Son of David; for my daughter is cruelly
tormented by deviltry]."

xui
Introduction
On the eve of Rogation Sunday, 1511 (May 24), "vetula combusta [est] in campo extra

oppidum Valischewo"—a witch was burnt in the fields outside the town of Waliszew or

Chwaliszewo, suburb of Poznan. Thus is described the earliest known execution for

witchcraft in Poland. We have no record of the trial itself, and very few details of the accused

witch's crime. We do know that she stood accused of having ruined several breweries

through her craft—presumably, taking later trials as our guide, by causing the fermenting

mash to spoil. This information comes down to us via the acta of a defamation suit in the

Poznan ecclesiastical court: a citizen of Chwaliszewo had told a canon of the Poznan

cathedral about the recent witch-burning; the clergyman responded that all the burghers of

Chwaliszewo should be similarly burnt. In court, the canon explained that he had only been

joking, and the case was closed (#1, Waliszew 1511).1

In 1761, two and a half centuries after the execution of the nameless Waliszew woman,

one of the last witch-trials in Poland paints a starkly different picture of witchcraft. The court

of the tiny, privately-owned town of Kiszkowo was invited to the village of Gorzuchow at

the request of that village's owners, the noble Szeliski brothers. The Kiszkowo wqjr or

magistrate, three town-counselors, the court scribe, two executioners and an apprentice

executioner were roomed and boarded in Gorzuchow at the Szeliski brothers' expense, while

they heard the accusations against five women of the village. By the end of the trial, ten

1
Witch-trials included in my database (that is, the great majority of the witch-trials discussed in this
dissertation—see 1.1.2 for a discussion of the scope of this database), are cited by a database reference
number, and also usually by place and year of trial. For full reference to the sources of the trial text (both
secondary sources and, wherever known, archival signiatures), consult Appendix G: Sources.
2
Important Polish terms are defined in the Glossary.

1
 • Introduction •

women stood condemned of a long list of outrages and abominations, ranging far beyond

simple malefice. According to the court's verdict, the accused witches had "forgotten the

Fear of God," renounced their baptism and "bound themselves to the devil," with whom they

engaged in "spoleczehstwo" [association, i.e. sex]; they had met at "Lysa gora [Bald

mountain]," had "stolen the Most Holy Sacrament from various churches, burnt it to make a

powder, which they sprinkled in pig-sties and various dishonourable places, and had shed a

second time that Most Holy blood, shed once for the ransom of the human nation by the

Saviour of the world;" they had made bewitchments from the head of a mare, from vipers,

snakes, the paw of a wolf, and buried these in various places to destroy people and cattle;

they had, worst of all "buried two Eucharist hosts in a mare's skull under the stairs of the

manor, and another two under the threshold of the dining room," in order to destroy the

health of their feudal masters' and their families. Accordingly, all ten were burnt at the stake

at the border of the village (#172, Kiszkowo 1761).

During the two-hundred fifty years separating the Waliszew trial of a single woman and

the Kiszkowo trial often, the character of Polish witchcraft, and, more drastically, of Polish

witch-trials, had changed. A rare but not unknown crime in the early 16th century had

become, in the somewhat exaggerated terms of the anti-witch-trial pamphlet Czarownica

powolana, the topic of every conversation: "one hears about it more than about any other

subject"4 (1714 [1639] f. 3). From being a matter of divination, herb-craft, the preparation of

amulets and love-charms, and at worst the magical spoiling of beer or milk by semi-

"zapomniawszy Bojazni Boskiej"; "a przywia_zawszy sie_ do czarta"; "Najswiqtsze Sakramenta po koscioiach
kradly, na proszki palily po roznych chlewach i roznych miejscach nieuczciwych siekly, krew
Przenajswiqtsza^z kommunikantow, raz na okup ludzkiego narodu przez Zbawiciela swiata wylana^ drugi
raz toczyly"; "komunikanty dwa w szkapiej glowie pod wschodami we dworze, drugie dwa pod progiem
ida^c do stolowej izby zakopaly."
4
"o zadney materyey wie_cey nieuszlyszysz"

2
 • Introduction •

professional cunning-women (Koranyi 1927a p. 17; Bylina 1990 pp. 41-42, 45), it had

become a much more nefarious business, and the accused ceased to have any recognizable

relationship to the cunning crafts. Instead they were ordinary town or village women who

came to be suspected of, and to confess to, the wildest crimes: spiteful and gratuitous

malefice against cattle, humans, children; the raising of storms to destroy crops in the field

and cause famine; feasts at Bald Mountain, with dancing to music played on a hoe or a

plough or a foxes' tail; pacts with the devil consummated in sex, theft and desecration of that

defining emblem of triumphant post-Tridentine Catholicism, the Body of Christ in the

wheaten wafer of the Eucharistic host. Instead of trials of a single woman for a specific crime

of malefice, one finds trials of two or four or more: the crimes, the criminals, and the victims

multiplying through the injudicious application of judicial torture. By the late 18th century,

the carefully defined and circumscribed vetula of ecclesiastical-court procedure had been

replaced entirely, it seems, by the terrifying czarownica of the popular imagination.

But these transformations of the imagined witch, and the attendant transformations in

the consequences borne by those accused of witchcraft, should not blind us to deep and

pervading continuities. In some contexts, such as the peasant-run village courts of south-

eastern Malopolska, one can find little difference between early and late accusations or the

resulting trials. The neighbours of one Zubek accused him in 1582 for causing "great harm in

regards to the dying cattle"5 (#10, Wara v. 1582); similarly, the soltysof Klimkowka accused

Fenna wife of Iwan Fenio of harming his horses, cattle, and mash for the distillation of vodka

(#133 Klimkowka v. 1702). Both trials ended with the accused providing formal and public

oaths that they had done and would do no witchcraft.6 Even trials before town courts, which

5
"wyelka szkode strony bidla sdichana"
6
The magical quality of such judicial oaths is discussed in 1.4.6 below.

3
 • Introduction •

form the main subject of the present study, changed less in character or size than is

sometimes appreciated: right through the whole period, most trials involved one or two

accused witches, and most began with relatively straightforward accusations of malefice. In

the 18th century as in the 16th, a witch was above all a woman who could harm through

magic. The witches of the 15th and early 16th century most often stole or spoiled milk in the

udders, or spoiled fermenting beer. While this second crime has faded from view, the close

association of witches with milk-theft or milk-spoiling continued right through the entire

period and into the 19th, 20th and even 21st centuries. Rites to protect cattle and milk from

witches, recorded in the late 19th and late 20th century, differ little from analogous rites in

the 17th century and earlier (for examples of these later rites, see e.g. Slomka 1929 p. 205;

Lehr 1982 p. 140). As recently as March 9, 2004, the Krakow district court required one

Anna B. to apologize to Jerzy M., for having "publicly attributed to him paranormal

influence over the milk-production of cows;" that is to say, she accused him of bewitching

her cattle to steal their milk (Gazeta Wyborcza, 2004 p. 2).

The present study concerns itself with both the transformations and the continuities in

the Polish imagination of the Polish witch—and in the judicial treatment of women to whom

the label of "witch" came to be ascribed. The work is organized into three Parts, each with

several chapters and sub-chapters. Part 1 deals with prosaic matters: historiography, sources,

the law, demographics, the character of Polish witchcraft as it emerges in texts both judicial

and literary. Chapter 1.1 concerns the historiography of witchcraft in Poland; in this section I

also discuss my sources and the nature and limits of my database. Chapter 1.2 gives an

overview account of the development and course of witch-trials, together with an account of

the law and of attempts—eventually successful—to reform it. Chapter 1.3 looks at the

7
But see trials #13, #22, #30. #50, #70, #79, #132, #142, #146.

4
 • Introduction •

gender, age, marital status, and other characteristics of both actual Polish accused witches

and their literary representations. Chapter 1.4 takes the reader through the many steps

between suspicion and death at the stake. Finally, Chapter 1.5 provides a summary of this

material, with some suggestions concerning the relationships between social and legal factors

and the incidence of witch-trials.

Part 2 examines the imagined practices of witches, in the context both of the real

practices of their accusers and of the normative teachings of the Church. Chapter 2.1

compares the malefice attributed to witches with the "superstitious" and "medical" practices

of ordinary peasants, townspeople, and petty-nobility: witchcraft was sometimes imagined as

an inversion of these practices, sometimes as their illegitimate extension or improper use.

The chapter also explores the processes by which accused witches developed their

confessions from the modification and elaboration of motifs and assumptions shared by all

members of the society. Such a vocabulary and "grammar" of witchcraft allowed any

accused witch, under torture, to produce quite detailed confessions without special

knowledge or leading questions. Chapters 2.2 and 2.3 examine the relationship between

witchcraft and Christianity, with specific reference to the common accusation that witches

stole the Eucharistic host for their magical purposes. Against a deeply conservative popular

Christian practice, shifting elite views rendered any given peasant activity sometimes pagan,

sometimes diabolical, sometimes superstitious, at last merely "folksy" and ignorant. But

although popular Christianity always lagged behind the Christianity of clerical elites—so that

this year's superstition or witchcraft was often enough last year's orthodoxy—it was not

static. The horror invoked in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, among peasant and priest

alike, by the desecrated Body of Christ, bespeaks the success of Catholic Reformation in the

5
 • Introduction •

countryside: witches confessions may be read as inverted expressions of post-Tridentine

Catholic piety. In 2.4,1 develop some of theoretical and historiographical issues raised by

popular Christianity and its demonization as witchcraft.

Part 3 explores the imagined relations between witches and devils. Drawing on folklore

studies and comparative literature, I argue that, in demonology but perhaps especially

through witch trials and confessions, indigenous Polish house-spirits and nature spirits did

indeed take on the shape and form of the Christian devil. But interestingly, and to a degree

not matched elsewhere in Europe, the process was reciprocal: the Polish devil came to be, in

many respects, a sort of house-spirit himself. In Chapter 3.1 we see how pre-Christian

notions of house-spirits and visiting ancestors came to be assimilated to Christianity in the

15th-18th centuries. However, the status of these beings remained ambivalent and unstable;

the house-spirit is diabolized, the devil domesticated, and both assimilated to Christian

notions of Purgatory and Limbo. Chapter 3.2 looks closely at those trials where accused

witches confessed to sexual relations with their devil-masters. It transpires that the character

of the demon-lover, the accused witches' relations with him, and their constructions of

themselves in terms of these relations, are considerably more complex than might be

expected from theories of demonology which take sex with the devil as a paradigmatic

example of elite, male imposition onto popular, female consciences. Chapter 3.3, and the

Conclusion, consider wider questions of translatability, comparison, and the interpenetration

of cosmopolitan and local worlds.

• •$• •

A few words may be in order concerning the temporal, spatial, and thematic scope of

this study. In time, it covers what I have loosely called the "witch-trial era," that is to say the

two and a half centuries between the Waliszew trial of 1511 and the abolition of witchcraft as

6
 • Introduction •

a crime in 1776. Most of the material (both trials and texts) come from the shorter period,

approximately 1610-1740, which spans the height of witch-trials and of intellectual interest

in witchcraft in Poland. However I have not hesitated, where necessary, to range far out of

this temporal range. In 2.2 and 3.1 especially I have made considerable use of anti-

superstition literature from the early and middle 15th century, while in several chapters I

have supplemented the fragmentary evidence from witch-trials by making reference to

folklore and ethnography from the 19th and 20th centuries. This latter move has its dangers,

but these are outweighed by the benefits. A passing reference to elderberry in a trial from

1650, for example, can only be interpreted in the context of folkloric materials from the late

19th century, and theological texts from the early 15th century (see 3.1.2). In this as in many

comparable cases I have made the reasonable assumption that practices attested centuries

before and centuries after the witch-trial era might have existed in similar form during that

time-period.

In space, the study encompasses the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, the so-called

Korona or Crown. From the late-14th century this kingdom was in dynastic union with the

Grand-Duchy of Lithuania, while from 1569 until its partition by Russia, Prussia and Austria,

the two states were constitutionally joined together as the "Most Illustrious Commonwealth

of the Two Nations (Najjasniejsza Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow). " The territory of this

vast country included, through most of the witch-trial period, the lands of present-day

Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus; large portions of present-day Latvia and Estonia

were held as fiefs over a shorter period. On the other hand, much of what is now western and

north-western Poland (Silesia and western Pomerania) were not associated in any way with

7
 • Introduction •

the Kingdom of Poland since medieval times. Despite the presence in those territories of

large populations speaking Polish or related Slavic dialects, these territories are not

considered in the present study. Indeed a major fault of earlier works on witchcraft in Poland

has been the anachronistic inclusion of Silesian materials (Baranowski 1952; and see critique

in Pilaszek 1998, Tazbir 2001b). So far, no Polish scholarship has uncovered anything

comparable to the mass-panic at Neisse in Silesia in 1651-1652, in which 188 people were

executed; and in general the Silesian trials and Silesian legal structures seem quite different

from those of Poland (Lambrecht 1995 pp. 344-346). Similarly, I do not consider the territory

of Ducal or East Prussia, a fief of the Polish Crown through much of the 16th and 17th

century which, however, excercised nearly total independence over most of this period.

Although I applaud the recent efforts of Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian scholars to

rediscover the history of the multinational Commonwealth as something distinct from and

larger than the national histories which have dominated over the last two centuries (see

especially Andrzej Kamihski's programmatic account, 2000), I have concentrated on Poland

alone, in isolation from Lithuania and to a lesser degree from Ukraine. It makes good sense

to treat the political culture of the Commonwealth as a single culture of the szlachta or

nobility; indeed the szlachta of the whole commonwealth felt themselves bound together as a

multi-ethnic natio Actively originating in the Sarmatian nation described by Herodotus.

However, the legal history, and even more the social history and folklore, of the various

regions remains distinct, and I have not found it useful to attempt a synthesis of Lithuanian

witch-trials with those in Poland. The legal status of witchcraft in Lithuania was very

different than in Poland: jurisdiction over witch-trials was given to the noble staroscinskie

8
In fact the commonwealth encompassed at least three major "nations"—the Ruthenians, ancestors to modern
Ukraina and Belarus, alongside the Poles, Lithuanians, and numerous minorities (Jews, Germans,

8
 • Introduction •

and wojewodskie courts by the Second Lithuanian Statute of 1564, whereas in Poland nearly

all witch-trials were prosecuted before the Saxon-Law courts of cities and towns. Manorial

courts were also more common in Lithuania.9 The legal history of witchcraft in the two

Nations of the commonwealth really only comes together at the moment when witchcraft

ceased to be a crime: the declaration of the Sejm in 1776 which banished witchcraft as a

capital crime in Poland was immediately extended to include Lithuania (Sawicki 1951-1952

vol. 1 part 2 p. 38; Michalski 1996).

On practical rather than methodological grounds, this study also gives only cursory

attention to Ukraine, for which the records are mostly lacking and for which I do not have the

requisite languages. Although I consider several trials in which the defendents were

ethnically Ruthenian and religiously Orthodox or Greek Catholic, most of these come from

the mountains south and east of Krakow, in a region that had been politically Polish for

centuries, or from "Red Ruthenia"—the Ruthenian-speaking region around Lwow which had

been conquered by the Polish king Kazimierz the Great in the 14th century, and which was

well integrated into the Polish legal system. Farther Ukraine and Wolyn, which were

transferred from Lithuanian to Polish suzerainty only in 1569, remained socially, religiously,

and legally distinct; nevertheless I have not hesitated to discuss a few trials from this region

which were appealed to the Crown Tribunal in Lublin. Finally, and again for practical

Armenians, Scots, Italians, Tatars, Karaites, and Gypsies, in approximately that order).
9
The literature on witchcraft in pre-partition Lithuania (which includes modern Belarus) remains scanty. See
Pilaszek 2002a for a survey of what little is known; of older works in Polish, see Sochaniewicz 1922;
Jodkowski 1931. Pilaszek found 113 trials between 1552-1771; about half the records are from from
Samogitia (Zmudz). Most trials had one or two defendants. For other areas with important ethnic, historical,
or institutional ties to Poland, see Lambrecht 1995 (Silesia); and Madar 1993, Kahk 1993, and Kivimae
2003 (Estonia); Latvia appears to still be lacking a good study. In an important article, W. F. Ryan has
recently contested the traditional view that Russia and eastern Ukraine avoided the witch-trial era (Ryan
1998; cf. Zguta 1977b, 1977c; Kivelson 1991, 1995); however, as Ryan partially acknowledges (pp. 81ff.),
most of the examples of witch-trial that he adduces more closely resemble medieval western trials of ritual
magicians than they do the typical European witch-trials of the 16th or 17th century.

9
 • Introduction •

reasons rather than otherwise, I have paid only slight attention to trials in Mazowsze and in

Royal Prussia: see section 1.1.2 for discussion. Accordingly, the great bulk of the material

comes from what might be called the central regions of Poland proper: Wielkopolska in the

north and west, Malopolska in the south and east.

Finally, a word considering subject matter. This is a study of witchcraft and witch-trials

in Poland. Although the definition of witchcraft is never stable, and it is not always clear

what should count as a witch-trial, who should count as a witch, I have chosen to pay almost

no attention at all to the very rich topic of "high magic" in Poland. Such natural magic,

practiced by elite, learned men as opposed to unlettered women, has seemed to me

sufficiently different from witchcraft as to form a separate field of study. On high magic in

Poland, especially at the manorial and royal courts, see Kuchta (1928), Szczucki ed. (1974),

and Bugaj (1976). Brzezihska (1996) provides an exellent study of love magic at the Polish-

Lithuanian royal court.

• *x* •

My methodological stance and theoretical concerns in this dissertation may be best

characterized by a juxtaposition of quotations from the two scholars who have had the

greatest influence on my thinking about religion and culture.

On the one hand, Jonathan Z. Smith opens his Imagining Religion with a famously

radical, albeit characteristically gnomic passage. Reflecting that humankind has, for the

entirety of its discoverable history, imagined all manner of gods, demons, cosmologies and

so on, Smith notest that neverthelesse we have had

only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order,
reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religion.
That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human
experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one
criterion or another, as religious—there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation
of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts

10
 • Introduction •

of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the
academy (1982 p. xi).

I understand Smith to be insisting that, as "religion" is a category invented by scholarship in

order to facilitate the comprehension, originally by European Christians, of religious

"others," scholarship is free to formulate the definition and boundaries of the category in

whatever ways seem most likely to best serve this task of comprehension. Religion is not out

there everywhere; it is, rather, a construction imputed to events, people and behaviors as a

hermeneutical tool or explanatory device.

Smith's relocation of the category "religion" from the world to the imagination implies

freedom, but it also implies responsibility—especially in conjunction with our awareness of

the category's colonial pedigree. Because the category is ours to construct rather than to

discover, it behooves us to construct it in such ways as to distort as little as possible the

imagined realities (the "religions") of the people we study. This brings me to my other

quotation, or rather dictum, from Clifford Geertz. Geertz asserts that while recent scholarship

has been fascinated with the "representation of 'The Other' (inevitably capitalized, inevitably

singular)," our task must be to understand "'others,' uncapitalized and plural." (Geertz 2000

pp. 95-96). That is, while "religion" was invented so that Christians could understand

Buddhism, Judaism, "primitive religions" and so on, a more fruitful and less distortionary

approach is to try to understand what Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and the various other

indigenes of the world are doing, and why. Scholars must ask the historiographical questions

about the conditions under which categories such as "religion" and "witchcraft" were

developed, and the uses to which such categories were put. But we cannot allow an interest in

discourse or in representations to overshadow the central interpretative task—which is to

understand the lives and actions of historical others.

11
 • Introduction •

It is a central contention of this study that the opportunities and problems created by

treating religion as an imagined category can very fruitfully be brought over into the study of

witchcraft. Witchcraft, too, is an imagined category, in a double sense. It is an imagined

category not just because of the fact, often noted, that from the secular Enlightenment

perspective of the academy it describes an "impossible crime", and that therefore all

"witches" were not witches in fact, but the objects and victims of a complex process of

labeling and representation. Like religion, it is also the product of second-order reflection,

comparison, and generalization by which both early modern demonologists and modern

historians and anthropologists organize and categorize diverse folk-cultural behavior and

beliefs from all over the world. As with religion, witchcraft has come in, recently, for

criticism insofar as the European category, imposed elsewhere, has led to distortion and

confusion rather than increased understanding (e.g. Rasmussen 1998; cf. Geschiere 1997).

And as with religion (or any other categorization of human culture, belief, or behavior),

scholars find themselves balanced between, on the one hand, self-conscious awareness of the

category's constructed nature and fascination with the mechanisms of representation by

which it is attributed to persons, and on the other with the concern to understand those

persons themselves, "as they actually were (or are)."

Wherever I use the term "witch" to refer to a real person rather than a fictional

character, motif of folklore, or demonological construct, the term should be read as meaning

"accused witch" or "suspected witch." The witch is a category of the imagination: there are

no real witches, in Poland or elsewhere, except insofar as that role is succesfully ascribed to

persons through processes of formal and informal labelling. "A witch cannot do what he is

supposed to do and has in fact no real existance" (Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937] p. 119).

12
 • Introduction •

While "religion" is a category constructed through comparison and categorization of real,

concrete behaviours, dispositions, artifacts, and utterances—albeit behaviours and utterances

often understood, by the scholar, to be directed toward or related to imaginary, supernatural

beings—witchcraft is constructed from the very beginning. It is a category of the imagination

both within the indigenous and within the academic context. This rather elementary, indeed

banal truth, if taken seriously, creates complex problems of interpretation, and complex

responsibilities on the scholar of witchcraft. Unlike gods, demons, angels and similar beings,

questions about the ontological status of whom scholars may fruitfully postpone or set aside

while studying beliefs or behaviours related to them, the witch, as a category related to

persons, must be rejected as the first step of any serious interpretation of witchcraft. The

witch is imagined, but the consequences, for real people imagined by their community to be

witches, are all too real. Accordingly, the study of witchcraft differs from the study of most

other religious phenomena, in that it begins with a rejection, a denial (rather than a

bracketing or a disregard) of the reality of the category, or of its application to persons.

Earlier generations of scholars have responded to this imaginary status of the witch, the

impossibility of her crime, by treating witchcraft beliefs as the perfect example of the

dangers of ignorance, fanaticism, religion in general and Christianity in particular. Those

who developed and propogated the imagined category of witchcraft were understood as

delusional, bitter fantacists, or as dangerously ignorant superstition-mongers, or as cynical

instrumentalists shielding their attempts at social control, or their oppression, exploitation, or

extermination of groups (heretics, the elderly, women, the peasantry in general) behind the

pretext of the battle against Satan. One can appreciate the sincere moral outrage of this brand

of scholarship, while also noting its tendency to demonize the demonizers—in particular its

13
 • Introduction •

use in anti-Catholic polemic and in the construction of the "primitive" (see 1.1.1, 1.2.2,

1.4.3). Moreover, with its programmatic attempt to allocate blame for what we see as gross

injustice, such scholarship tended to focus on specific texts (such as the Malleus

maleficarum) or on specific groups or insitutions (the Inquisition, or the Jesuits, the Church,

ignorant secular judges), or specific causal factors (misogyny, modernization, state-

formation) in ways that segregated witchcraft beliefs and witch-trials from the totality of

early modern European culture and religion. In reaction to such tendencies, Stuart Clark has

recently called for the "dissolution of the demonologist:" there was no such person; rather

demons and witches entered into public discourse at every level and in a bewildering variety

of ways (Clark 1997 p. vii).

More perniciously to my mind, the tendency to attribute witchcraft belief to insanity,

fanaticism, or cynicism absolves the scholar from any serious attempt to interpret, or to

understand, the experiences of the parties involved in witch-trials, both as accusers and as

accused. We end up, again, studying the construction of the "Other" rather than the lives of

others.

However, a countervailing tendency in recent years—to treat the imagined witch as a

dark reflection by which we might glimpse the real, true, underlying religion of the common-

people—carries equal dangers; and to my mind these methodological and ethical dangers

have been less thoroughly explored (but see Purkiss 1998, chapters 1-2). The complex

quadrangulations between the imagined category of religion, the imagined category of

witchcraft, representations of both, and actual human beings, is further complicated when

one realizes that for intellectuals (and judges) in early modern Europe, witchcraft was a

category of religion—witches were either diabolical heretics, or unreformed pagans, or at the

14
 • Introduction •

very least hopelessly superstitious, very partial Christians. Scholars have sometimes, in

effect, agreed with the demonologists while reversing the value-judgements: "witches" really

were bad Christians, and this is a good thing. As Purkiss has insisted, such a treatment of

accused witches does not respect them as persons—such respect must, minimally, imply an

attempt at understanding—instead it depersonalizes and "others" them in a new way. The

demonized witch becomes the heroine or martyr or forerunner of causes she almost certainly

would neither understand nor endorse; the pedestal is substituted for the stake. Others, while

refraining from discovering paganism in the witch-trials, have agreed with early modern

elites at least insofar as they treat the peasantry's Christianity as fragmented, magical,

ignorant, or superstitious.

A second theme of this dissertation, pursued especially in parts 2 and 3, is to develop a

critique or a problematization of these sorts of position. Educated elites and reformers were

perfectly correct in pointing out that much of rural Christianity was at variance with orthodox

doctrinal norms. From a purely historical point of view they were also correct, though less

often than they believed, in attributing those characteristics of rural religion which they

labelled as "superstitious" or "magical" or "Satanic" to a syncretic residuum of pre-Christian,

pagan practice. But they were neither correct nor incorrect in asserting that those who

partook of such practices were themselve therefore pagan. Or to put the same point

otherwise, the secular scholar of religion cannot adjudicate, and should not take sides, in

what is essentially a theological question about what counts as true Christianity. We may

note the use of such socially ascribed labels, we may attempt to evaluate whether accused

witches and others who thought and acted like them understood themselves to be Christian,

and what this might have meant to them. But from the standpoint of the secular study of

15
 • Introduction •

religion, theological categories such as "true Christianity" "pure Christianity" or "correct

religion" have no determinate meaning. Without access to a transcendent Authority, the

secular student of religion must treat the self-identification of practitioners as authoritative.

As Charles Stewart has shown in his important study of folk-demons and Christian

devils over two millenia of Christianity in Greece, "pagan" folk tradition can live alongside

and intermingled with Christianity for a very long time. He thus finds it necessary to

reformulate "Christianity" as everywhere syncretic and synthetic, nowhere "pure"—or rather,

its pure form is an ideal construction realized no-where (Stewart 1991). In Poland and

elsewhere, scholars have rather too often agreed with the judgement of the demonological, or

pastoral, or anti-superstition literature which contrasts rural religion with this imaginary ideal

type, and found the former necessarily wanting. By treating both Christianity and witchcraft

as equally imagined categories, I hope in this work to provide a more nuanced, less

evaluative account of their interactions. I do this through analysis of Polish trials, Polish

customs, Polish texts, but I think the conclusions will have relevence to studies of

Christianity elsewhere in Europe or the world.

16
Part 1.
The crime of witchcraft in early modern Poland.
Chapter 1.1: Historiography

1.1.1: Historiography and background

As elsewhere in Europe, the historiography of witchcraft in Poland has its roots in

Enlightenment critique of what was initially an all-too-recent past. For Soldan (1843)1 or

Michelet (1939 [1862]) or Gage (1893) the bloody and fanatical persecution of innocent

women by a cruel and backwards (and usually Catholic) church represented everything that

rational, liberal policies intended to do away with. Simultaneously the most dramatic and

most titillating example of all that was wrong with the past, the "great witch hysteria"

justified present programs of reform and future dreams of the secular state: witch-persecution

served as an inverted emblem for the ideology of progress. In order for witch-trials to fulfill

this emblematic role, for them to symbolize irrational fanaticism to liberal rationalists, they

had to be pervasive, innumerable, and utterly lacking in a rationality of their own; 19th

century historians had not yet learned to find symbol and function in such primitive survivals

of the Dark Ages. Accordingly, for Michelet "The clergy had not stakes enough" to execute

the witches. "They were brought to trial en masse, condemned on the slightest pretext. Never

was such lavish waste of human life" (1939 [1862] pp. ix, xi). This stereotype of massive,

unmotivated, senseless cruelty was to prove remarkably long-lived.

1
The anti-clerical and anti-Catholic tone of Soldan's work was increased and emphasized in the 2nd edition,
ammended by his son-in-law Heinrich Heppe (1880).
2
Estes (1984 pp. 136-139) summarizes this historiographical stance of rationalist disdain; see also Monter
1972; Trevor Roper 1967 pp. 97-101. For the problems of interpretation such a stance creates, see especially
Clark 1997 pp. 180-182 and passim.

17
 • Chapter 1.1 •

Poland produced no Soldan or Michelet in the 19th century, but the mood of those

scholars who touched on witch-trials was similar—with a twist. The Commonwealth of

Poland and Lithuania ceased to exist as a sovereign state in the three partitions of the late

18th century, and Polish historians of the long 19th century were preoccupied with the search

for the causes of this catastrophe. A popular and not entirely unjustified theory placed the

blame on the backwards, superstitious, unreformable ruling class of Poland-Lithuania, the

szlachta, and on their doctrinaire Jesuit teachers (Wierbicki 1979 p. 6). Smugly secure in a

xenophobic Catholicism which looked upon the Protestant West as decadent and on the

Orthodox East as barbarian, the szlachta came to Enlightenment far too late; enamoured of

their medieval freedoms and noble privileges, they resisted the necessary reform of the state

and allowed their homeland to be divided among the enlightened despots of Austria, Russia,

and Prussia. This view of the Polish past, primarily critical of the political culture of the

szlachta, connected that culture closely with the triumphalist Catholicism of the mid-17th

century onwards, and above all with the Jesuits. Although witch-trials did not become the

pivotal trope around which 19th century Polish intellectuals organized their critique of the

past, such discussion of witchcraft as did occur came filtered through the framing

representation of a piously ignorant, superstitious and cruel ruling class.

3
Polish historiography in the 19th and early 20th century was divided between the"optimistic" Warszawa
school, which, in contrast to the "pessimistic" Krakow school, refused to blame the Polish nation for the
disaster of the Partitions. However, both schools saw the 17th and early 18th centuries as disastrous, and
largely blamed the Jesuits for this state of affairs—the difference is that the historians of the Warszawa
school emphasised the considerable progress of Enlightenment in the later 18th century, just prior to the loss
of national sovereignty (see especially Smolehski 1979 [1891). On Polish historiography in general, see
Wandycz 1992; on its anti-Jesuit character, see Tazbir 2001c pp. 387-398. Already in the mid-19th century,
Berwihski declared the Polish witch-trials to be the fault of the Jesuits (1984 [1854] pp. 173-178).
4
Concerning the rhetorical nature of Polish Enlightenment critique of the Sarmatian period, see Czeslaw
Hernas's insightful comments in Wkalinowym lesie (1965 pp. 75ff.). On the Polish Enlightenment critique
of superstition, carried out largely by ordained priests such as Hugo Kollataj or the Jesuits Jan and
Franciszek Bohomolec, see Wijaczka 2005 pp. 43-47; Wozniak 2004; the classic, polemical account
remains Smolehski 1979 [1891] pp. 105-158.

18
 • Historiography •

Thus Josef Lukaszewicz, the great 19th-century historian of Wielkopolska, inveighed

against "the obscurantism of the Jesuit schools" thanks to which one finds witch-trials on

"nearly every page" of the early modern Polish court-records (1869 pp. 74-75; cf. Berwihski

1984 [1862] vol. 2 pp. 177-179). Thus the didactic tone of Olszewski's study of witch-trials

in Mazowsze (1879), a work not so much of history as of admonition. Thus, too, the earliest

and most peculiar contribution to 19th-century scholarship on witchcraft: the anonymous,

supposedly "eye-witness account" of the last witch-trial in Poland, in 1775 in the village of

Doruchow ("X. A. R." 1835; reprinted in Tazbir ed. 1994 pp. 144-153, 2002 pp. 104-109;

#175). This riveting description—of the dunking of the witches in a nearby pond, where they

fail to sink because of their full skirts; of the witches' imprisonment in the manor's grain

cellar, in sauerkraut barrels; of the stake being constructed even before the magistrate had

been summoned to the village; of the drunken and complicitous judges and executioner from

nearby Grabow; of the torture, by night, of the naked witches, by means of an iron rake or

harrow, because of which torture three of them died; of the lord of the manor presiding over

the whole affair to ensure that harsh justice be done; of, finally, the mass burning of eleven

women at the stake—this powerful story serves as an indictment of the religious and

scientific ignorance which made it possible, and which was finally disappearing "under the

benevolent rays of enlightenment" (#175; quotation at Tazbir ed. 2002 p. 109). It is also

fictitious. Janusz Tazbir has shown that the entire eye-witness account was a literary creation,

possibly by the notorious falsifier Konstanty Majeranowski (Tazbir 1966). Many 19th

century and indeed 20th-century scholars have accepted this account without protest, despite

its obvious shortcomings, because it fit so well with their preconceptions of what witch-trials

looked like.5

5
E.g. Baranowski 1952 p. 68. In response to Tazbir, Baranowski pointed out in 1971 (p. 429) that a witch-trial

19
 • Chapter 1.1 •

A second, largely separate historiographical stream emerged in Polish scholarship with

the publication of Ryszard Berwihski's two-volume Studies in folk magic, enchantment,

witchcraft and superstition in 1854. Originally a romantic "friend of the folk" associated with

the folklore journal Przyjaciel ludu and looking to the peasantry for the roots of true

Polishness, Berwihski was so disillusioned by the failures of 1848 that he swung to the

opposite extreme, concluding that the Polish common folk had no culture of its own—it was

all a hodgepodge of borrowed classical and clerical superstition (Fischer 1946). Witchcraft

became the chief proof of this contention in Berwinski's study, which assiduously traced

Polish demons, witches, vampires, and even the herbs used to protect oneself against all of

these, to their sources in Aquinas or Pliny. Although Berwinski's project could not possibly

succeed, it stands as an important corrective to those later studies which found a pagan god

behind every Polish devil. Berwihski seems to be the first modern scholar to have looked

closely at the Czarownica powolana or at Chmielowski's Nowe Ateny. Although he misread

the former and lampooned the latter, they became standard sources for later writers.

None of these later writers accepted Berwinski's thesis: rather the opposite. Throughout

the later 19th and early 20th century, the focus and motivation of most Polish scholarship on

witchcraft was folkloric. Folklorists discovered in witch-trials fragments of practices and

beliefs still current among the peasantry; they looked to these trials for proof of the longevity

did in fact occur around this time before the Grabow court. But Michalski has shown that the record
Baranowski cites—it comes from the Kalisz grod courts, and concerns a conflict between the burghers of
Grabow and one Przybylowski, the noble representative of the town's absentee leaseholder—gives a quite
different account of the trial. The Grabow burghers complained to the noble court that Przybylowski had
removed the wqjt and several jurymen from office, for having sentenced six (not 14) women to death for
witchcraft without sufficient evidence. The date of the trial is unknown but seems to have been several years
prior to the burgher complaint, and the implication seems to be that the burning did not take place
(Michalski 1996 pp. 93-94, citing AGAD, Akta grodskie Ostrzeszowski rel. obi. 15). Tazbir has reprinted
the fictional account of the Doruchow trial in his two studies of historical fictions (1994, 2002), the latter of
which summarizes recent credulous use of the trial in popular histories (pp. 103-104). Although he cites

20
 • Historiography •

of current belief. Oskar Kolberg rounded out his unparalled discussion of 19th century

witchcraft and demon beliefs in the Poznan region with long excerpts of a manuscript study

of historical witchcraft (Klepaczewski n.d.), with several excerpts from previously published

trials, and with an abridged edition of the Czarownica powolana (DWOKvol. 15 [1882]).7

Aleksander Bruckner drew repeatedly on that work and on the Sejmpiekielny (1622 [1615];

1903), to illustrate the mixed Christian and indigenous provenance of Polish demons and

devils (e.g. 1895,1985b [1924] pp. 296-315). Most of the witch-trial transcripts or fragments

published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were published by and for folklorists,

above all in the folklore journals Wisla and Lud.& Although most of these authors seemed

more interested in the trials as sources for tidbits of folk-belief than as historical events in

their own right, their diligence has preserved a great many descriptions and transcriptions of

records now lost. This folkloristic stream of Polish witchcraft scholarship culminated in a

series of still-valuable studies by the great legal historian Karol Koranyi (1926, 1927a,

1927b, 1928a, 1928b, 1928c, 1930). For reasons that are not clear to me, the folkloristic

study of early modern Polish witchcraft stopped rather abruptly—in fact not long after

Sochaniewicz called for its expansion and systematization (1926).

The first and so far only attempt to provide a historical synthesis of witchcraft in Poland

came after the war, in the works of Bohdan Baranowski—above all his Procesy czarownic w

Tazbir's 1980 article in German, which discusses the Doruchow trial, Levack treats it as real and as having
occured in 1775 (2006 p. 227).
6
1 discuss both of these works in great detail below.
7
Oskar Kolberg's massive study of" folk customs, ways of life, speech, tales, proverbs, ceremonies,
superstitions, games, songs, music," collected in 60 volumes and covering every region of pre-partition
Poland, remains an invaluable source for the study of Polish folklore. I have used the 20th century re-
edition, published by the Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze from 1961 to 1985, originally under the
editiorship of Julian Krzyzanowski. Kolberg is cited by the abbreviation DWOK (= Dziele wszystkie Oskara
Kolherga) and by vol. and page number.

21
 • Chapter 1.1 •

Polscew XVII i XVIII wieku (Witch-trials in 17th and 18th century Poland, 1952).

Baranowski's work deserves far less credence than it has received both in Poland and in the

West, where it is cited often at second or third-hand on the basis of its four-page resume in

French. And yet Baranowski also deserves more recognition than he has recently been

accorded by Polish authors, who have called his work "worthless" and "a failure" (Bogucka

1997 p. 187; Karpinski 1995 p. 21). His publication of the early witch-trials in Kalisz

(Baranowski ed. 1951) remains a valuable source; as does his anthology of trials from Warta

and elsewhere (Baranowski and Lewandowski eds. 1987 [1950]). Approached with care,

Procesy remains a useful source of historical anecdote. But it does indeed fail at the level of

analysis. Baranowski interpreted the witch-trials through a vulgar materialist framework that

found an unholy alliance of church and szlachta at the source of the peoples' misfortunes.

In this Stalinist version of 19th century positivism, Polish witch-trials had found their

historian.10 Witch-hunts, or "the gloomy superstition" as Baranowski calls them, were a

8
E.g. Bruchnalski 1901; Buczak 1910; Kaczmarczyk 1901, 1907, 1910; Karlowicz 1887 (which summarizes a
great many previously described or published trials); Klarner 1902; Rafacz 1918; Semkowicz 1900;
Siarkowski 2000 [1879]); Sochaniewicz 1922; Wawrzeniecki 1895, 1897,1899, 1926a; 1926b.
9
See note 19 below.
10
"Stalinist" is not too strong a word for Baranowski's historiography. Although Polish scholars have crititized
his work on methodological grounds, they have not paid too close attention to its political context.
Baranowski went far beyond the lip-service to historical materialism that characterized all published
historical work in Poland from roughly 1949-1956. In fact, Baranowski was an important architect and
popularizer of a conception of the Polish past that ratified the Stalinist view of history, and he never
repudiated this historiographical position. Over the course of just three years, Baranowski authored or
editted several works of popular scholarship intended to to legitimate the new regime by painting the worst
possible portrait of what had preceded it. A book on the Counter-Reformation in Poland, intended as part
one of a series on "The Vatican and Poland," exposed the Church's opposition to science, encouragement of
witch-persecution, and defense of of the "threatened feudal order" (1953). Editorial projects, all meant for
popular consumption, emphasized the same points. Baranowski editted and provided an introduction to a re-
edition of Wladyslaw Smolensky's positivist Wiaraw zyciu spoleczenstwa polskiego w epoce jezuickiej
(1882; Baranowski ed. 1951), a pamphlet comparable, in its polemical rejection of a largely invented past, to
19th-century English studies of the Inquisition. With W. Lewandowski he editted the source anthology
Nietolerancja i zabobon w Polsce w wieku XVII i XVIII ["Intolerance and superstition in 17th- and 18th-
century Poland"] (1950); as mentioned, this is in fact quite useful, though its title rather gives away the
purpose for which it was compiled. Another source anthology, Upadek kultury w Polsce w dobie reakcji
katolickiej XVII-XVIIIw. ["the collapse of culture in Poland in the age of Catholic reaction, 17th-18th
centuries"], with Lewandowski and J. S. Piajkowski (1950), selects the worst examples of ecclesiastical

22
 • Historiography •

product of "Popish politics and the Inquisition," but even more they represent the last raging

battle of the Church and of feudalism against emerging modernity (1952 pp. 10-11). "It was

convenient to get rid of the more energetic and rebellious elements [of the peasantry] under

the cloak of witch-trials" (p. 24); or again, among the victims were "most certainly the bold

fighters, male and female, for the rights of the peasant masses, people who entered into the

futile battle against the power of feudal oppression" (p. 39). The spectacle of burning witches

diverted "the attention of the deluded populace from [...] their grievances and exploitation"

(Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 p. 221; cf. Baranowski 1952 p. 169). Baranowski and

Lewandowski carefully annotated the witch-trials anthologized in their sourcebook of

"intolerance and superstition" (1950), in such a way as to demonstrate that early modern

supporters of the "gloomy superstition" in Poland were forerunners of the programmatic

enemies of Stalinist Poland: the nobility and the church, of course, but also "rich peasants"—

i.e. the kulaks attacked by Stalinist ideologues for their resistance to collectivization (e.g.

1987 p. 181; # 57, Warta 1678). Both witchcraft and witch-persecution were primarily

instruments of class-warfare in its feudal stage: szlachta used witch-accusation to get rid of

uppity serfs, while peasants, used magic as part of their "quiet battle" against the feudal

master (Baranowski 1952 pp. 35, 37).

Such vulgar Marxist use of the witch-trials for rhetorical purposes mirrored and made

use of the Enlightenment discourse on witchcraft of the late 18th and 19th centuries. In

particular, Baranowski drew on Wladyslaw Smolenski's history of the late-18th century

Polish Enlightenment (1979 [1891), which chronicled the lycanthropy, vampirism, and

writing from the time, while accepting at face value the rhetorically florid Enlightenment critiques of
Kollqtaj or Bohomolec. Polozenie chlopow u schylku Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej ["The situation of the
peasantry at the end of the Noble Republic"] (Baranowski, Libiszowska and Rosin eds. 1953) sets the
groundwork for what Slusarska (1998) has called the "black legend" of the early modern Polish village.

23
 • Chapter 1.1 •

rampant superstition to which the Jesuits had reduced the Polish republic.1 Like Soldan or

Michelet, Baranowski's history of witchcraft served to demonstrate both the triumph of the

"rise of reason" in the 18th and 19th centuries and the necessity of that triumph. As in

Western Europe, witch-trials came to stand as the emblem for all that was wrong, cruel,

ignorant and savage in the Polish past.

Historical accuracy is the first casualty of such a rhetorical orientation to the past, not

least because such an orientation requires that the rhetorical nature of the sources themselves
IT

must be disregarded. Baranowski treated the Satyry of Krzysztof Opalihski or of bishop

Ignacy Krasicki14 as if they provided transparent windows on the past. When the former

writes—
Kiedy wiosna nastajri, a deszcz ustal w maju, When Spring comes, but there's no rain in May,
Czarownice przyczyna.. Zdechl wol jeden, drugi, The witches did it. A steer dies, and a second
Albo tam co z przychowkow, czarownice wina_. Or some calves: blame the witches.
(Opalinski 1650 Satyra 3 w . 62-64; 1953 p. 25)

—this is presented as the actual process by which woman came under suspicion, and when

the latter writes—

Ujajvszy gromnice. Taking the Mary-candle in hand

Palil lawnik z burmistrzem w rynku czarownice. The mayor and juryman burnt a witch in the square
Chca_c jednak pierwej dociec zupemej pewnosci But wanting first to make sure of her guilt
Plawil ja_na powrozie w stawie podstaroscie. The under-magistrate first dunked her in the pond

11
Smolenski also authored the brief article on witchcraft in Poland in the Encyclopedia Orgelbranda).
Smolehski paid less attention than he ought to the fact that two of the primary figures of the Polish
Enlightenment, the brothers Jan and Franciszek Boholomec, were themselves Jesuits, while most of the
others—Hugo Kollataj, Ignacy Krasicki, Jozef Zaluski—were priests or bishops; Baranowski passed over
this issue in silence.
12
This explicitly anticlerical function of witchcraft scholarship continued well into the twentieth century, with
such works as Putek's repeatedly revised and expanded Medieval gloom: customs, superstitions, fanaticism,
cruelty and social oppression in Poland (1956 [1935]), or Pikulski's series of vignettes depicting the
"bloody insanity" of the Polish witch-trials, published in the state-sponsored anti-clerical magazine Fakty i
Mysli (Pikulski 1960a, 1960b, 1960c, 1962, 1963). Such works of course have no worth as scholarship, but
they are invaluable indices of the context of opinion and assumption against which scholarship takes place.
13
Krzysztof Opalihski (1610-1656), wojewoda of Poznah and later collaborator with the invading Swedes,
wrote satires against, among other things, superstition and hypocritical piety (1650). An edition of Spee's
Cautio criminalis (Poznan 1647) was dedicated to Krzysztof and his brother Lukasz by its publisher and
their former tutor, Albertus Regulus.
14
Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) bishop of Warmia and later arch-bishop of Gniezno, satyrist and frequent
contributor to the Polish Enlightenment journal, the Monitor.

24
 • Historiography •

(Krasicki 1954 [c. 1781] p. 67)

—this is meant to represent standard judicial procedure. Baranowski recognized as only

slightly exaggerated the wonderful vitriol of Serafin Gamalski, Franciscan Provincial of

Wielkopolska. In his posthumous Spiritual Admonitions to Judges, Investigators, and

Prosecutors of Witches, a polemic against secular witch-trials published by the Jesuit

Academy in Poznah, Gamalski wrote:

Nieslychac po inszych Panstwach, y Nacyach, o tak One doesn't hear, from other States and Nations, of
gejstych excessach, y nagrygch, a raczey bezprawnych such frequent excesses, and peremptory, or rather
exekucjach, nasza tylko w tym nieszczqsliwa Polska, unlawful, executions—only in our unhappy Poland,
ktorey w krotce borow y lasow na stosy nie stanie, a which soon will lack groves and forests for stakes, and
podobno tym pre_dzey po Miastach Miasteczkach, y in Cities, Towns and villages, there will be too few
wsiach ludzi niebqdzie, na podniecenie tych pozarow. people left to serve as fuel for those fires.
(Gamalski 1742 p. 7; cf. Baranowski 1951a; 1952 pp. 61-63)

One can commend the acerbic hyperbole of the 17th and 18th-century polemicists; they

painted witch-trials in the blackest colors in order to awaken, in their readers, a sense of

urgency; in order to right what they saw as a terrible wrong. But such hyperbole is no virtue

in the historian. Baranowski systematically and intentionally exaggerated wherever he could,

assuming death sentences where none were recorded, or treating denunciations as prima facie

evidence of further trials.16 For example, although he acknowledged that the records of the

Praszka trial of 1665 (#65) provided direct evidence for the burning of three accused witches,

nine or ten "or very possibly, considerably more" were interrogated, and we can assume, he

15
Concerning Gamalski, see Kantak 1933; Baranowski's later article (1951) is entirely dependent on Kantak for
biographical details. Baranowski also identifies Gamalski as the author of the anonymous Wodka
Zelixierem, a satire on drunkenness which includes a critique of witch-trials. He does this on the basis of
what he sees as strong similarities between it and Gamalski's Przestrogi duchownym. The argument for this
identity, however, depends also on his assumption that to write against witch-trials was an extremely
dangerous occupation, so that one can hardly imagine two people doing so, around the same time and using
similar themes—an extremely weak claim.
16
Pilaszek has shown at least one of Baranowski's citations of archival documents to be incorrect, and has
suggested that it and others may be falsified (2002 p. 104, concerning AGAD Warta sig. 48 ff. 101, 177).
Although Baranowski is systematically and purposively misleading on a number of points, I don't think he
deliberately falsified these archival records. His whole pattern of interpretation is one of exaggeration,
misplaced emphasis, tendentious readings, but not actual falsification. However, his footnoting is
extraordinarily sloppy—I have detected at least three mis-citations to documents that do, nevertheless,

25
 • Chapter 1.1 •

asserts, that far more than three went to the stake (Baranowski 1962 pp. 11-12). This

tendentious rounding upwards of all evidence led Baranowski to his most absurd claim, that

some 10,000 witches were judiciary executed in Poland during the late 16th through 18th

centuries, with another 5,000 to 10,000 lynched (1952 p. 30). This claim must be evaluated.

The asserted lynching on a massive scale may be dismissed out of hand: Baranowski

provides no evidence for it, nor have I found any elsewhere.17 The famous figure of 10,000

witches burned may be dismissed almost as quickly. Baranowski reached this figure, which

he admits very frankly to be an extrapolation from limited evidence, by the following

procedure. He multiplied the number of towns in early modern Poland (c. 1250) by an

arbitrarily derived four trials per town. The resulting figure (5000) is then multiplied by

two—this being the equally arbitrary, and unquestionably wrong, average number of witches

condemned per trial. Thus: 10,000 witches burnt in Poland.18 Statistics of this kind should

exist—and I suspect that the problematic citations to the Warta archives found by Pilaszek fall into this
category. See also note 18, below.
I am aware of not a single recorded lynching of a witch in pre-partition Poland. Lynching of witches did
occur with fair regularity in 19th-century Russia and Ukraine (Worobec 2001) and occasionally in 20th-
century Poland (Schiffmann 1987; see also Pilaszek 1998 p. 86 n63). Larner has argued that lynching of
witches was almost unknown in early modern Europe, when judicial trials were an option, but appears after
the abolition of witchcraft as a crime (1984c p. 46).
Baranowski arrived at these averages, according to his own account, by a survey of the available published
work (by his citations, this seems to be primarily Lasocki 1933 and Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947), and on
thorough surveys of the court records of nine towns: Brzeznica, Dobra (sieradzka), Kalisz, Pajqczno,
Praszka, Radziejow, Szczercow, Uniejow, and Zagorow, and on samplings of the records of Nowe (pruska),
Opatowek, Sieradz, Shipca, Turek, and Wielun (1952 p. 29 n. 17; cf. Pilaszek 1998a p. 82). With the
exception of Nowe these are all in the area of central and southern Wielkopolska. However, of Baranowski's
132 citations of his own archival material, 38 are to the six Kalisz trials of 1580-1616 which he had
published in Baranowski ed. 1952, 28 to the eight Warta trials of 1678-1691 published in Baranowski and
Lewandowski eds. 1950, and six to the Szczercow trial of 1716 also published in Baranowski and
Lewandowski eds. 1950 (trials #7, #11, #12, #13, #21, #22, #78, #82, #83, #85, #86, #94, #95, #109, and
#145). When we eliminate citations to defamation suits in Turek, Opatowek, and Zagorow (which Pilaszek,
correctly, insists must not be treated as witch-trials—see section 1.1.4 below); to an infanticide trial in
Zagorow in which the accused admitted to killing her baby at the suggestion of "the tempter [pokusnik];"
and to the records from Warta which Pilaszek has shown to be false (see note above), we are left with only
three clear new trials: #177 (Szczercow, n. d.; AGAD Szczercow sig. 2 ff. 173v-174) cited 5 times; #179
(Nowe n. d.; Arch. Gdansk dz. 332 no. 22) cited 6 times; and #176 (Radziejow n. d. ; AGAD Radziejow
sig. 15 ff. 344-346) cited four times. There is also an indeterminate number from Warta (AGAD Warta sig.
46 ff. 218, 222,446; sig. 48 ff. 207,209, 215, 215, 219v, 222, 228). These last, as well as two more
references to trials in Szczercow and Opatowek (AGAD Szczercow sig. 2 f. 198; Arch. Miesk. Lodz,

26
 • Historiography •

require no comment, and have rightly been rejected by all recent Polish discussions of

witchcraft. Malgorzata Pilaszek, in particular, has systematically demolished Baranowski's

claims (1998; in English 2002b).191 will return to the vexed question of numbers, and how to

estimate them, below.

As I have been arguing, the early historiography of witch-trials in Poland closely

resembles the early historiography of witch-trials in Germany or France or the British Isles.

But whereas the approach to witchcraft in Western Europe and North America changed

radically in the early 1970s, leading to an explosion of witchcraft studies that has gathered

momentum over the last three decades, no comparable development has occurred in Poland.

The anthropologically and sociologically nuanced scholarship initiated more or less

simultaneously by Thomas (1971), MacFarlane (1970), Monter ed. (1969), Midelfort (1972),

and Ginzburg (1983 [1966])—work which changed the framework of debate so quickly and

radically that Trevor-Roper's polemical "European witch-craze" (1967) seemed

Opatowek sig. 1 ff. 193-195) give too little context to determine whether a witch-trial or something else
(e.g. a defamation suit) is cited, and Baranowski's pattern of innaccurate or misleading citation does not
give us cause for confidence. If we make the reasonable assumption that he would have made some use of
material if he had found it, we must conclude that he found no witch-trials in Brzeznica, Dobra, Paje_czno,
Praszka, Sieradz, Turek, Uniejow, Wielun, and Zagorow, just one each in Radziejow and Nowe, and a
possible trial in Opatowek. (However, he later published a trial from Praszka (1964) and mentions a trial
from Uniejow (1981 p. 27); and we know of trials in Turek from other sources—Wyporska 2003, but also
Milewski 1848, known to Baranowski.)
We are left with the following peculiar conclusions: Although he could not find any trials at all in
several of the towns whose records he perused, and this in a region he took to be particularly riven with
witch-panic, he assumed an average of four trials per town—an average that is not in fact supported by his
own evidence. Furthermore, Baranowski posits a peak for witch-trials in the first quarter of the 18th century,
although his own evidentiary base is concentrated in the late 16th through late 17th centuries. Finally, he
posits a nearly automatic death sentence for accused witches, although of the 15 trials he studied in any
detail, nine end in the stake, three in banisment, and one in acquittal (he provides no sentence for two).
Western scholarship, in contrast, has been surprisingly willing to accept, with only occasional and partial
qualification, this extremely high figure for witches executed in Poland—a figure that would put Poland at
the centre of the witchcraze. Those who have cited, with only occcasional and partial reservations,
Baranowski's claim that 10,000 witches were burnt in Poland (pp. 30, 180), include the works of eminent
historians as well as textbooks or books of reference: Davies 1982 vol. 1 p. 197; Monter 1983 pp. 144-145;
Levack 1987 pp. 20, 195; Muchembled 1993b p. 75; Barstow 1994 pp. 67,181; Bechtel 1997 p. 548;
Greengrass 1998 p. 277; Maxwell-Stuart 2001a p. 86. Lamer (1984c [1980] p. 44 n28) seems to be the

27
 • Chapter 1.1 •

anachronistic just a few years after publication—found no echo whatsoever in Polish

scholarship. Between the publication of Baranowski's monograph in 1952 and a promising

recent spate of articles and book-chapters, the only work of scholarship to seriously analyze

witch-trials in Poland was Tazbir's "Procesy o czary" (1978). But that article, important

though it was for its cautious critique of Baranowski's numbers, for its account of

ecclesiastical and humanist opposition to witch-trials, and perhaps above all for being

translated into German (1980) and thus providing a western-language counterbalance to the

French resume of Baranowski's work, does not go beyond standard sources from the early

twentieth century.

The above-mentioned wave of recent and very recent articles includes those by Ostling

(2005a, 2005b), Pilaszek (1998a, 2002a, 2002b, 2005), Salmonowicz (1994a, 1994b, 2000),

Szkurlatowski (1997a, 1997b), Uruszczak (1994), Wijaczka (2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b,

2004c, 2005), Wislicz (1997a, 2001 ch. 5, 2004a, 2004b), Wyporska (2002, 2003), and

Zigner (1998). These bode well for the future of Polish witch-craft studies; however, most

are very limited in scope and ambition, and none so far have produced anything like a new

synthetic analysis of the phenomenon—although Pilaszek's work promises much in this

direction. Most of this new scholarship preserves the older tendency to treat witchcraft and

witch-trials in terms of pathology or backwardness rather than as a religious-cultural

phenomenon with its own symbolic logic. There remains in recent Polish scholarship the

failure that Robin Briggs has identified with the older Western scholarship: a "refusal to

accept that fantasy is a genuine experience" (Briggs 1996 p. 38). The merit of the present

study, I would suggest, lies in my willingness to treat seriously witch beliefs, confessions,

earliest Western historian to cite Baranowski's numbers; however, she found them doubtful. To be fair, the
French summary of Baranowski's work does not explain the methodology by which he attained his figures.

28
 • Historiography •

accusations, and behaviours: not indeed to treat them as "true" but as sincere, coherent, and

integrated with wider religious and cultural concerns.

Such an appreciation for the imaginative dimension of Polish witchcraft should not,

however, be itself overly imaginative. After the account above of the fantastic construction of

Polish witch-trial historiography on rather slender evidence, it behooves me to give an

account of my own evidential basis and of the sorts of conclusions that can, and cannot, be

drawn from it.

1.1.2: Numbers and sources

In a series of popular articles, the essayist Przemyslaw Ogrodzinski asked "how many

witches were burnt, per capita" in Poland and in neighboring countries? (1974). He proposed

that the resulting rough percentages might be treated as indices showing, in inverse relation,

the degree to which a given nation was "progressive" in the early modern period. Needless to

say, he found Poland, by such an index, to surpass England, France, and especially Germany

by a considerable margin. Although no serious historian has wanted to put things quite so

baldly, the discourse concerning the numbers of witches burnt in Poland partakes very

considerably of such competitive comparison. Tazbir (1978, 2001) and Bogucka (1995

p. 191) have been concerned to defend their vision of Poland as the "state without stakes;"

but even Baranowski believed that the Polish trials, numerous though he thought they were,

paled besides the hundreds of thousands he assumed to have been burnt in the Empire (1952

pp. 9, 31, 169).20 Few have taken heed of Karlowicz's admonition, in the first attempt at a

20
Moreover, Germany was the source of the witchcraft trope in Poland (1952 p. 18)—a proposition which,
while not untrue, enabled Baranowski both to leaven his critique of the Polish past with a pinch of
xenophobic scapegoating, and to indulge in the compulsory anti-German ideology of the immediate post-
war which justified the Soviet "liberation" of Poland and the annexation of Silesia. Cf. Lukaszewicz, writing

29
 • Chapter 1.1 •

synthetic account of the witch-trials in Poland, that without a systematic archival survey "we

have no right to adjudicate whether and to what degree the persecution of witches in Poland

was greater and more zealous, or less and more mild, than elsewhere" (Karlowicz 1887

p. 222).

Unfortunately, the possibility of such a survey has all but disappeared since

Karlowicz's day, due to the catastrophic losses suffered by Polish archives during World

War II. In addition to the ordinary wartime losses, which were considerable, the Nazis

deliberately burnt the Central Archives of Old Records (AGAD) and other archives, as a

punitive measure during and after the Warsaw Uprising. Some 1.6 million volumes, or 80%

of the AGAD holdings, were lost. The scope of the tragedy was increased by the fact that

most of the towns of the former Russian partition had turned over their pre-partition records

to AGAD during the interwar years (Stebelski 1964, Tomczak 1980). Cities, (e.g. Kielce) and

whole regions, most notably Mazowsze, lost the greater portion of their recorded history, so

that one now must rely on secondary sources, sometimes of dubious quality, published before

the war.21 Whole categories of document—for my purposes, most grievously, the records of

the Crown Tribunal in Lublin—were utterly destroyed. Regions such as Wielkopolska, the

records of which were better preserved, faired very badly in the war as well: two thirds of the

Poznah archives, for example, were lost (Wijaczka 2003a p. 38; Cieslak and Trojanowska

1997 pp. 144-145; Tomczak 1980 pp. 80-81). Even without the massive losses during the

war, the archival record was never very good. Mikolajczyk notes that in the comparatively

in the different context of anti-German feeling during the Prussian partition: witch-trials "bred in Germany
and were brought to our country along with the barbaric Magdeburg Law" (Lukaszewicz 1869 vol. 1 p. 76).
21
For example, my discussion of rather numerous trials in Mazowsze around the turn of the 18th century relies
on two sources: Olszewski's brief study of trials in Wyszogrod (1872) and Lasocki's study, part of a family
history published in a heraldry periodical, of the trials in Plonsk (1933). All other post-war discussions of
witch-trials in Mazowsze are based on these same two sources, which does not prevent Baranowski from
labelling that region as a centre of the Polish witchcraze (1952 p. 30; 1963 p. 96).

30
 • Historiography •

well-preserved Krakow archives, all criminal-court records are lacking for 1634-1678, while

preserved court books often meticulously record evidence but lack the verdict, or the

sentence, or both (1998 p. 16). Both the massive losses and the fortuitous survivals of

significant records doom any attempt at systematic statistics. The case of Kleczew, very

thoroughly analyzed in a recent article by Tomasz Wislicz (2004a; 2004b in English),

illuminates the problem well: between 1624 and 1738 the Kleczew court heard 47 trials, with

a total of 131 accused and at least 92 executed—while only one trial is recorded from

neighboring towns in the same period (Wislicz 2004b p. 67). If one considers that the jury-

court books of Kleczew, preserved from 1594 to the end of the 18th century, make no

mention of witch trials, and that the Kleczew trials are all recorded in a separate, special

criminal register separately preserved in the collections of the Poznah Society of Friends of

Science, one realizes how fragile and artifactual our understanding of the Polish witch trials

must be. If this register had not survived, our picture of witch trials in the entire region would

be radically different. Other towns known to have experienced numerous trials include

Checiny, Grodzisk, Lobzenica, Nowe, Turek, Wagrowiec —while neighboring

towns might have few or no trials. The extraordinary variation in the intensity of witch-

persecution from town to town, coupled with the accidents of archival survival, render all

extrapolations of witch-trial numbers open to the charge of rank speculation. Another

Five trials, at least 34 accused, and at least 3 executed in 1665-1666. See Wijaczka 2003a, and figure 1.4.B
below.
Five trials and at least 20 executed in the period 1700-1720 (Mikolajczyk 1998 p. 36).
34 women and 2 men executed in the period 1650-1700, out of a total of 164 women and 17 men accused
(Wijaczka 2005 p. 60; 2004c pp. 17-30). However, Wijaczka's definition of accusation is wider than my
own: he includes denunciation.
According to Malgorzata Pilaszek; personal communication.
12 trials and 38 accused between 1648 and 1667 (Wyporska 2003 p. 46).
Wijaczka 2005 p. 34, citing Hockenbeck 1894, asserts that the Wajrowiec court tried "many" accused
witches between 1578 and 1741; Wijaczka gives some details for five trials and 11 executed (2 men, 9
women), in the period 1728-1741.

31
 • Chapter 1.1 •

Kleczew might be discovered at any time. One can understand the attitude of some scholars

(Pilaszek 1998; Bogucka 1995 p. 191) who have foresworn the attempt to estimate the

numbers of witches tried in Poland, or to offer statistics of any kind.

The present study makes no pretence at being the archival survey called for by

Karlowicz.28 Nor does it attempt a quantitative characterization of the Polish witch trials in

any serious way. Nevertheless I do try to make various quantitative statements of a relative

kind, and to do so I require a relatively large database of trial records. I try to discover, for

example, not how many witches were burnt in Poland, but what the typical execution rates

were, what percentage of the accused were women, or old, or peasants, and so on. In the

absence of reliable absolute numbers, all such qualitative statistics (if I may be permitted to

use such an oxymoronic term) are themselves unreliable. But I am convinced that, used

cautiously and with constant qualification, they do help to give a sense of things, to provide

orientation, point to tendencies. Moreover, and more importantly than as a resource for

statistical manipulations, a large database provides me with the comparative data so

necessary for even the most qualitative characterizations of Polish witchcraft, if those

characterizations are to be anything more than anecdotal.

The database, comprised of 179 trials and a total of 355 accused witches, includes the

great majority of witch-trials discussed in any detail in secondary literature, from

Lukaszewicz's work of the 1830s to the present.29 This secondary literature is of enormously

variable quality. At one end, it includes the entire criminal record for a given town and range

28
Malgorzata Pilaszek's doctoral dissertation, soon to be defended at the University ofWarsaw, can make some
claim to attempting such a survey (although as noted above Pilaszek has foresworn quantitative analysis on
principle). My own archival researches were limited to the Lublin court records and, with the exception of
some marginal cases and defamation suits, they resulted in the discovery of just one new trial (#42, Lublin
1644; see also Ostling 2005b).
29
The full list of trials, with the secondary and (where known) archival sources of each, is given in Appendix G:
Sources.

32
 • Historiography •

of years, carefully edited and published (e.g. Uruszczak ed. 2003 for Nowy Wisnicz 1629-

1665; Syganski 1917 for Nowy Sa^cz 1652-1684), or the invaluable village court records

included in the Starodawne Prawa Polskiego Pomniki series (Grodziski ed. 1967; Lysiak ed.

1965, 1971; Plaza ed. 1969; Vetulani ed. 1957, 1962-1963). Equally valuable have been the

full published records of all the witch-trials from a particular archive (e.g. Zakrzewska-

Dubasowa ed. 1947 for Lublin 1627-1732; Baranowski ed. 1951 for Kalisz 1580-1616).

Polish historical and folklore journals usually include a section of "Materials," and many of

these over the years have published the full texts of one or a few trials, more or less

fortuitously discovered (e.g. Kaczmarczyk 1901, five trials in Nowy Wisnicz 1688-1689;

Dydek 1968, one trial in Rzeszow in 1718). Such sources, however, rarely give any reliable

indication of what came before or after the published trial. Close paraphrases of the trials for

a given town or region, with extensive quotation, have also been very useful (e.g. Wijaczka

2003a, trials in the Swiqtokrzyskie region).

However, other trials included in the database derive from rather fragmentary

discussion in the secondary sources—this is especially though not exclusively true of some

of the older published materials. 19th-century historians, as noted already, tended to speak

loosely of witch-trials appearing on "nearly every page" of the court-books they studied—

while actually citing or quoting extremely few examples. Most of the trials mentioned in

Putek's sensationalistic polemic against the Polish church are far too vague to be relied upon;

accordingly I have not included, for example, his un-cited claim that forty witches were burnt

in W^growiec. On the other hand, I have seen fit to use his description, consisting primarily

of quoted passages from the original documents, of the Raciajz trial of 1719 (#152).

33
 • Chapter 1.1 •

Accordingly, I have included in the database only those descriptions of trials in which

the historian has provided specific information, and I have included only that information

that comes either from direct quotation of trial documents or their very close paraphrase (I

have not, however, required that the authors of these early works provide precise signatures

and folio numbers of the documents cited: this was not yet the norm at the time; many of the

documents they drew on had not yet been catalogued in any systematic way; and in any case

a great amount of the archival documents used in these pre-war studies no longer exist). Even

where such marks of reliability are provided, I have not always included the trial in the

database: for example, Karol Milewski's account of a trial in Turek in 1648, although resting

on what is presented as extensive quotation of archival records, has struck me as having too

literary a language to be quite believable (Milewski 1848 pp. 345-347). The trial did take

place (see Wyporska 2003), but as I have no reliable details as to its contents, it has been

excluded. Przybyszewski's recently reprinted effort includes the trial of Franciszka

Golebiowska in Gostyn, 1773 (1999 [1932] pp. 60-62), which if real would be among the

latest in Polish history: Przybyszewski however provides no citation, and his primary

interests as an occultist and novelist inspire little confidence; it, too, has been excluded.30 I

was unable to obtain the full text of Lasocki's important study of the witch-trials in Plonsk at

the beginning of the 18th century (Lasocki 1933), and so have only included those trials

Lasocki discusses in the first part of the article (trials #120-#122, #126, #130, #141, Plohsk

1699-1708). Similarly, I was unable to obtain the records of the Muszyna court, published by

Piekosinski (1889), which contain, I believe, more witch-trials than are included in the

current database (#81, Muszyna 1678, after Bogucka 1958; #173, Tylicz 1763, after Koranyi

30
Already in 1926, Jan Stanislaw Bystron dismissed Przybyszewski's earlier work as amateurish and
sensationalist, comparing it unfavorably with Julian Tuwim's equally amateur, but much more careful study

34
 • Historiography •

1928a and Wijaczka 2005). I have not seen Adamczewska's article on witchcraft in the

Sieradz region (1963), or Wojcieszak's article on witch-trials in Opalenica (1987).

Mikolajczyk's statistical study of punishment in early modern southern Poland cites

many witch-trials, but does not provide enough detail to be included in the database

(Mikolajczyk 1998). Similarly, while I make extensive use of Wislicz's careful statistical

analysis of the very numerous Kleczew witch-trials (2004a, 2004b), I do not include most of

these trials in the database since Wislicz does not provide detailed information for each

individual trial. However, Wislicz very kindly provided me with the full text of all those

Kleczew trials in which the Eucharist played a factor, and these are in the database (#68, #96,

#108, #112, #158, Kleczew 1669-1730; see 2.3.4 below).

Finally, I came across some trials too late to include them in the database. These

include most of the rich materials published in Monumenta Historica Dioceseos

Wladislaviensis, vol. 5 (1885); the trial of Gertruda Zagrodzka (Biecz 1555; Mikolajczyk

2004); the trials of Dorota Paluszka (Gniezno 1619) and Zofia Radziszewska (Uniejow 1731)

discussed by Pilaszek (2005); and a large number of trials discussed by Wijaczka in recent

articles (2003b, 2004b, 2004c, 2005). I have made some use of some of these trials in the

discussion, but have not included them in the calculations of execution rates and the like.

After a long hiatus, the search for and analysis of witch-trials in Poland is rapidly gaining

steam: Pilaszek, Wislicz, Wyporska and especially Wijaczka have brought to light a great

deal of new material in the last few years, and most of these scholars promise more such

works in the future. It is my hope that the database presented here will be outdated within the

next decade.

(Tuwim 1960 [1923]; Bystron 1926).

35
 Chapter 1.1

This database useful for

Fig. l.l.A: Town-court trials by region
some sorts of statistical
150
generalization, but is useless or
100
misleading for others. For

example, out of the total of 179

50-H

trials considered, only a small

a ^
fraction (18 or about ten percent) MalopolskaWielkopolskaMazowsze Prusy
Krblewskie
Near
Ruthenia
Other

B Trials • Defendents
are from Mazowsze (see figure

l.l.A).'Nothing at all can be concluded from this. It would be as specious for me to assert

that there were few witch-trials in Mazowsze as it was for Baranowski to conclude, on the

basis of Lasocki's article on the trials in Plohsk (1933) that the area distinguished itself in

witch-panic at the turn of the 18th century (1952 p. 30, 1963 p. 96). Similarly, a comparison

of the numbers for Wielkopolska and Malopolska, on the basis of this database, might be

misleading. There are good reasons to agree, on the basis of qualitative evidence, with the

traditional view that witch-trials were more numerous, and included more accused witches

per trial, in the west and north than in the south and east. However, the regional distribution

of records summarized in Figure l.l.A owes more to the greater concentration of folklorists

in and around Krakow in the 19th and early 20th century, than to conditions in the 17th or

18th centuries. Or again, the discussion of village trials, confined almost entirely to the

Carpathian foothills south and east of Krakow, has to do both with the better-kept village-

31
Figure l . l . A shows town-court trials and defendants, sorted by region. It does not include trials before
village courts (most of which are from Malopolska) and it does not include trial #63, Che_ciny 1665d—
which, with its exceptional number of defendants and total lack of capital sentences, would have strongly
distorted the data.

36
 • Historiography •

court books in those regions and with editorial decisions of the Starodawne Prawa Polskiego

Pomniki series of published court records.

With these caveats firmly in mind, what sort of general picture of the Polish witch-trials

can be gleaned from the trials of my database? The remainder of this and the following

sections will be devoted to the development of such a general picture, drawing both on the

database and on the contemporary literature of witchcraft in the hope that the two sorts of

sources, brought into confrontation with each other, might give us some provisional glimpses

of the way things were.

As noted already, recent Polish historians have forborne with good reason to estimate

the number of witch-trials, or of accused witches executed, in early modern Poland. Tazbir

has hazarded a total number of witches executed in the range of two-thousand (1978 p. 140);

Bogucka (1995) and Pilaszek (1998a) confine themselves to the critique of Baranowski, but

offer not even the roughest estimates to replace his. Bogucka has gone so far as to declare

that there is no point in trying to estimate the numbers, since any estimate will be speculative

(1995 p. 191). Such a perspective, to my mind, will not do. The available archival records

and the state of research in Poland, lamentable as they are, are really not so very much worse

than were, for example, the English records at the time of Thomas's Religion and the decline

of magic. Thomas noted then that "firm statistics for the extant of witchcraft prosecutions are

out of the question, and the historian has to content himself with a reasonable guess" (1973

p. 430). But one cannot refrain from making this guess: it makes a difference to even the

most qualitative interpretation of the phenomenon, whether witch-burning were an everyday,

an intermittent but not extraordinary, or a rather rare event. One cannot even begin to create

37
 • Chapter 1.1 •

an explanatory schema until one knows, to within an order of magnitude at least, what the

numbers are likely to have looked like.

Contemporary literature is no guide at all in such an inquiry. On the one hand,

demonological tracts, from the Malleus forward, paint a picture of witches everywhere and of

an indifferent or complacent judiciary unwilling to face this overwhelming threat (Maxwell-

Stuart 2001a p. 31; Pearl 1999). As the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trimethius put it: "I do

not know whether even a tiny village can be found where there are not witches [...]. Yet how

rare it is that an inquisitor or almost any magistrate avenges such open insults to God and

nature" (Antipalus maleficiorum, 1555 p. 295; after Clark 1997 p. 240). Even in Russia, with

its relative lack of witch-trials and its quite different demonological tradition, a mid-18th c.

bishop could complain that "there is hardly a home in the city or surrounding villages

without instances of satanic activity" (Bishop Porfirii of Suzdal', quoted after Worobec 2001

p. 36). Polish demonology, undeveloped though it was, follows the same pattern, as will be

shown in the next section.

If demonologists rhetorically multiplied witches while discounting the actions of courts,

their opponents exaggerated in the opposite direction. As we have seen, the hyperbolic

statements of Baranowski and of his 19th century anti-clerical forebears derive, ironically,

from the largely clerical critiques of secular witch-trials in the 16th and 17th century. Bishop

Kazimierz Florian Czartoryski wrote loosely of a trial in which the timely intervention of a

priest saved twenty women from the stake (Czartoryski 1705 f. 12v)—a number of accused

which, if true, would make it the largest known witch-trial in Poland. Serafin Gamalski

warned that the endless Polish forests will soon not suffice for the production of stakes to

burn witches (1742 p. 7). Obviously neither demonology nor anti-witch-trial satire can be

38
 • Historiography •

used in any way to calculate the numbers of witch-trials in Poland, although they are of pre-

eminent importance in understanding perceptions of the phenomenon.

My own estimate would be in the range of two to three thousand accused witches sent

to the stake between 1500 and 1776, in the Polish Korona excluding Ukraine. This is rather

more than proposed by Tazbir, and considerably less than suggested by Baranowski. In

comparative perspective, it would justify the perception that witch-trials were relatively

numerous in Poland, but would also mean that, over a very large territory, there were not

more than a few such trials every year. With some important exceptions such as Kleczew and

its environs in the last two decades of the 17th century, one cannot speak of a witch-craze.

Taking under consideration only trials before town courts—village courts could not

execute, and my evidence for other sorts of court is too small for any kind of

generalization—I have evidence for 161 trials, 329 accused, and 172 known to have been

executed. If we remove the anomalous trial #63 in Che_ciny of 19 accused and none

executed, we have 310 accused, 172 executed: a ratio of about 1.8 accused per person

executed and of 1.1 executed per trial (compare Baranowski's 2 victims per trial). The trials

come from 66 towns fairly evenly scattered over Wielkopolska and Kujawy, Malopolska, and

nearer (Red) Ruthenia. This yields an average of 2.4 trials per town—a more or less

meaningless average considering the enormous variations: from just one in many places to

the numerous trials in Che_ciny, Nowy Wisnicz, or Poznah. The estimate does not, however,

This last figure is a minimum value. Indubitably some indeterminate but sizable portion of the trials for which
the sentence is uknown—68 or some 20% of accused known accused—were sent to the stake. In addition, in
at least one case (#34, Chelmno 1638, which was probably in fact three separate trials over the course of one
year) even the number of executed is unknown, and in this case I have preferred the smallest possible
number. Our knowledge of the trials in Chelmno comes from accounting records of city-council expenses:
these include payments associated with the prosecution of witch-trials. Records for August 17 record the
costs for burning nine witches. Further costs for burning witches in 30 July and 11 December appear to be
separate trials. We can speak with confidence of at least 11 witches burned , but higher numbers are entirely

39
 • Chapter 1.1 •

seem too high: many of the towns for which the database includes just one or two trials (e.g.

Turek, Lobzenica, Nowe) are known to in fact have seen several more trials, while other

towns not included in the database (Grodzisk, Wajrowiec) are known to have seen several

trials as well.

I will refrain from multiplying these averages by the total number of towns in Poland,

as Baranowski does. But it does seem clear that if one finds 161 trials and 172 executed in

just 66 towns, that a wider survey might reasonably expect to find more, in roughly similar

proportions. Given the large number of chartered towns in the early modern Korona, a

number of victims in the range of 2000-3000 over some 250 years is not at all unreasonable.

If my sample of trials is too small to generate any worthwhile estimation of the total

number of trials, let alone of condemned and executed witches, it is sufficiently broad, I

think, to provide a reasonably accurate picture of the character and course of witch-trials in

Poland. The following chapters will provide this picture: first, through a general chronology

both of trials themselves and of writing about them (literary and legal); second, through a

look at the demography of accused witches; third, through a step-by-step account of a witch's

route—from suspicion and accusation to verdict and sentence—to the stake.

possible. Further costs recorded in earlyl639 appear to be carry-overs from these trials in 1638, but that too
is not certain.

40
Chapter 1.2: Society and law
Although my sample of trials can provide only the very roughest of estimations concerning

the total number of witches burnt in Poland, or their regional distribution, it provides a much

clearer, and probably quite trustworthy, picture of the chronology of witch-persecution. A

graph of both trials and accused, plotted by quarter-century from 1501 to the abolition of

witchcraft as a crime in 1776, describes an almost perfect bell-curve. From just a few trials in

the 16th century, the number of trials and accused rises sharply through the 17th century,

peaking with 52 trials and 101 accused in the last quarter of that century. The 18th century

sees a decline in both trials and numbers of accused, although there are more of both in the

last quarter recorded than in the period 1601-1625—providing ample motivation for the

Enlightenment polemic which immediately precedes the abolition of witchcraft by decree of

the Sejm. A wider sample would certainly modify these numbers; but the general trend is, I

think, largely correct.1

Whereas Baranowski asserted that 4% of all executed witches met their fate in the 16th

century, 46% in the 17th, and a full 50% in the 18th (1952 p. 29), the present analysis locates

the main period of witch-trials rather earlier: 5% of accused witches in the 16th century,

67.6% in the 17th, and 26.5% in the 18th.2 A finer-grained charting of the main century of

witch-trials strengthens the impression that the last quarter of the 17th century saw both the

1
The 16th-century data is too fragmentary to be very reliable, while the 18th-century numbers should be
amended upwards in light of Wijaczka's recent survey of trials from the 1720s-1775 (Wijaczka 2005).
However, an amended database would also include Wijaczka's discussion of the numerous Lobzenica trials
in the late 17th century (2004c), and a more complete account of the Kleczew trials of 1624-1738 (Wislicz
2004a), with the effect of preserving the curve depicted.
2
The statistical distribution of trials is similar: 16 (9%) in the 16th century, 113 (64%) in the 17th, and 47
(27%) in the 18th.

41
 • Chapter 1.2 •

greatest number of trials and the largest ratio of accused to trial—that is, the largest average

trial size. The three decades 1671-1700 account for a third of all trials, a third of all witches

accused, and slightly more than a third of all witches executed, during the 250 years of witch-

trials.3 After a peak in the 1690s, both trials and numbers of accused slope off quite steeply.

100

90

80

70

60
• Trials
50
H Accused
40

30

20
• •
II
10
3 3 m-
0
1 1 2 2
Ft
1501- 1526- 1551- 1576- 1601- 1626- 1651- 1676- 1701- 1726- 1751-
1525 1550 1575 1600 1625 1650 1675 1700 1725 1750 1775

Figure 1.2. A: Incidence of witch-trials and of numbers accused.

It should be noted that, with the possible exception of the Kleczew region in the last

quarter of the 17th century, witchcraft never constituted a popular crime in Poland. It was

always much rarer than other crimes, even than other serious crimes. Between 1652 and

1684, the court of Nowy Sa^cz heard a total of 81 serious cases, ranging from banditry, to

This period probably accounted for considerably more executions than is indicated here, since 31 of the 71
unknown sentences come from the same period—and it is quite likely that a majority of these were death
sentences. The apparent bulge in accused witches in the decade 1661-1670 is somewhat misleading: 19 of
the 30 accused here come from the single, exceptional trial of the peasant-women in Jan Tarlo's properties
near Ch^ciny (#63, Chexiny 1665), of whom 12 were acquitted and the others sentenced with fines or other
minor penalties.
4
This and the next figure include data from four trials for which I have only approximate dates. #78 occurred at
some point in the last quarter of the 17th century, #85 in 1679 or before; #175 probably a few years before
1775, and #178 in the first two decades of the 18th century

42
 • Society and law •

arson, to collaboration with the invading Swedes. Just one of these cases, involving just one

woman, was for witchcraft (#70,1670): the great majority (59 cases or 73% of the total) were

for banditry or major theft (Syganski 1917). Similarly, out of 46 serious trials tried before the

Nowy Wisnicz court between 1629 and 1665, just three were for witchcraft (Uruszczak ed.

2003 p. 10).

Figure 1.2. B: Trials and numbers accused (1641-1740)

50
45
40
35
30
• Trials
25
H 1 Accused
20
15
• • •
10
5
0 , Iran— , l — , l — , run— , In i i f , l - w i , I 1 1 , • 1— ,
1641- 1651- 1661- 1671- 1681- 1691- 1701- 1711- 1721- 1731-
1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740

However, if we shift focus to serious crimes committed by women, the picture changes

somewhat. In Nowy S3.cz, the single case of witchcraft between 1652 and 1684 was one of

just five serious crimes committed by women: the others being for incest and infanticide

(Syganski 1917). In Nowy Wisnicz, the three trials for witchcraft between 1629 and 1665

contrast to just three other trials of women: for murder, church robbery, and infanticide

(Uruszczak ed. 2003 p. 10). In Lwow between 1550 and 1699, seven women stood trial for

witchcraft, of a total of 56 female criminals (mostly thieves and prostitutes). But of the

twelve women whose crimes were serious enough to deserve the death sentence, three were

43
 • Chapter 1.2 •

witches, four were convicted of infanticide, and the others of theft, bigamy, murder, and

church-robbery (Karpihski 1995 table 23). The picture that emerges from these statistics is

that witchcraft was always a comparatively rare crime, but that, among serious crimes

committed by women, it was the most common after infanticide (cf. Briggs 1996 p. 262).

1.2.1: Development of the witch-crime in Poland

Before the 16th century, all recorded trials against sortilegae took place before episcopal

courts.5 The Synod of Poznah, which attempted a comprehensive reform of lay superstition,

decreed the following in 1420:

Excommunicamus et anathematizamus omnes We excommunicate and anathematize all sorcerers,
sortilegos, qui per invocationem demonum vel res who, by the invocation of demons or use of sacred
sacras sortilegia exercent f...] things, practice sorcery f...].
(Heytzmann ed. 1877 p. 248; cited after Rubin 1955 p. 140).

As the synodal decree makes clear, the church was above all concerned with what it

regarded as the superstitious mis-use of ecclesiastical objects such as holy water and blessed

candles. 14th-century sources speak of "incantrices" and "vetulae" who pick herbs and roots,

prepare amulets, divine with wax and lead. Church courts in the 15th and early 16th centuries

dealt with those cases that came before them, but were not particularly interested in tracking

down or punishing witches. Most cases are from small towns, especially the household

servants and cooks of clergymen (Bylina 1990 pp. 41-42).6 The sentences meted out to these

witches bear a close resemblance to what we find later in village-court cases: small fines in

5
Recent surveys of early Polish witchcraft (e.g. Bylina 1990, Zigner 1998) are largely based on Koranyi's work
(primarily 1927a), and all such studies depend on the same relatively small corpus of ecclesiastical court
cases collected by Ulanowski (1902, 1908).
6
Although women with access to church materials continued to be prominent as folk healers in the early
modern period, their predominance in early records is probably a result of the ecclesiastical nature of the
early sources: clergy were more likely to know about the practices of their servants than of less intimate
members of their flock. The 15th century also features a number of ecclesiastical court cases for defamation,
in which a woman or her husband brought the parish priest to trial for having accused her of witchcraft from
the pulpit (Koranyi 1927 p. 9).

44
 • Society and law •

money or in beeswax; public penance such as walking barefoot and bareheaded in procession

from church, then lying at the church door, naked to the waist, and declaring their guilt

(Zigner 1998 p. 99).7 However, the sources also make clear that, at least in theory, witches

could be tried before secular courts already in the 15th century, and could be sentenced to

death. In 1430, one Piotr Zawarty sought a divorce in the consistory court because his wife

Jadwiga "sortilegia exercuit." She had been condemned to death, presumably in secular

court, but had been spared at the intercession of others. We find a similar pattern in the trial

of Dorota of Zakrzewo near Poznan in 1476, and, quite late, in the trial of Dorota Durczyna

and Dorota Skoczowa in Poznan, 1535 (Koranyi 1927 p. 21; Ulanowski ed. 1902 pars. 1016,

1389, 1837). The anonymous witch burnt in Waliszew in 1511 was not, then, the first to be

sentenced to death; rather, she is the first for whom we have a record that this death sentence

was carried out. Nor, from the record as we have it, does that case seem to have been

exceptional in any way: the Poznan canon who insulted the people of Waliszew, saying they

should all be burnt just as they had recently burnt a witch, was joking. The insult intended,

most likely, was that the people of Waliszew were equally superstitious as their burnt

witch—not that they were cruel or unusual for having burnt her.

In fact, Polish town law demanded death by the stake for the crime of witchcraft from

its very inception. Polish towns, and some villages, were founded on the model of medieval

German (Saxon) law, most often in the variants called Magdeburg law and Chelmno law.

This legal tradition was quite separate and autonomous from the tradition of Polish law

7
In fact, town-courts meted out such sentences, albeit infrequently, right through the era of witch-trials.
Elzbieta Sieczconka, a peripheral figure in the Nowy Wisnicz witch-trial of 1662 (#55), was sentenced to
elaborate public penance for three Sundays. In 1772, and thus at the very end of the Polish witch-trial era,
the smith Sobestyan hired "Machiavellians [Machiawelow]" to make it appear that his neighbour Maryanna
was a witch. The wojt-court of tiny Krzyzanowice sentenced Sobestyan to kneel at the church door, arms
outstretched, during the Summa, to lie cruciform on the floor during the elevation of the Host, to apologize

45
 • Chapter 1.2 •

practiced in the noble grod and staroscinskie courts, and of the canon law practiced in

episcopal and consistory courts. The Sachsenspiegel—the 13th-century law-book that (much

modified, revised, and variously interpreted) formed the basis for Polish town law—

stipulated death at the stake for sorcery (Jaskier 1635a bk. 2 art. 13).8 However, this stark

ruling, which certainly was not followed with any consistency in the late medieval period,

should be read rather as a formula setting down methods for carrying out the death penalty:

Bartlomiej Groicki's gloss on it, which also cites the anti-Hussite Edict of Wielun of 1424,

states simply that "Schismatics from the Christian faith are to be burnt. Magicians or

poisoners should meet the same death" (Groicki 1559a; 1953 p. 199). In the context, this

means little more than that magicians convicted for a sufficiently serious magical crime are

to be burnt rather than hanged or beheaded: it specifies the manner in which the death penalty

ought to be carried out.

The understanding of witchcraft as a capital offence came to be strengthened but also

qualified in the Carolina, the early modern law-code of the Holy Roman Empire. The

Carolina distinguished between malefice and harmless magic: practitioners of the former

deserved capital punishment, of the latter, lesser sanctions {Carolina 1532 art. 109). The

Carolina was to have a strong influence on Polish town law, via the writings of the Krakow

jurist Bartlomiej Groicki. Groicki's translation of selected articles from the Carolina lays

down the conditions under which a suspected practitioner of harmful magic may be sent to

torture:

Dowod przeciw czarownikom i tym wszytkim, ktorzy Evidence against sorcerers and against all those, who

publicly at the door of the church after Mass, and to donate six large beeswax candles to the church
(Siarkowski 2000 [1879] pp. 93-94).
8
Polish 16th-18th c. town courts used Mikolaj Jaskier's Latin translation (1602 [1535), Pawel Szczerbic's
Polish translation (1610 [1581]) and, probably most often, Bartlomiej Groicki's selection of the more
important parts of the Speculum, his Artykuty prawa magdeburskiego (1558; 1954) and his commentary,
summary, and guide to them, the Porzqdek sqdow (1559a; 1953).

46
 • Society and law •

sie. z czarnoksie_stwy a z gusty obchodza^. make use of black magic and superstition.

Gdy siq pokaze, izeby kto takowych rzeczy innego If it should be shown that someone wishes to teach
chcial uczyc abo ze komu tym grozil, a temu, ktoremu another these things or that someone should threaten
grozono, zeby sie_ sta_d co zlego przydalo, abo tez zeby another with them, and that because of this something
w tym podejzrzanym sie, bye pokazal slowy, should befall the person thus threatened, or if the
obyczajmi, postawa, i inszymi sprawami, ktore si? w suspect should demonstrate by word, practices, or
takowych ludziech najduja_, a ktorych takowi ludzie other things, which are found among such people, and
uzywaja^ a zeby sie, tym oslawil, takowemu kazdemu which such people make use of, and if they be known
shisznie ma bye o to wina dana i za takimi znaki moze for this, such a person ought to be accused and may be
bye i na mejee, skazan; poniewaz takowe wszytkie sent to torture on the basis of these signs, because all
umieje_tnosci, ktore sa,przeciwko Panu Bogu—i tez such abilities, which are opposed to the Lord God (nor
ludziom chrzesciahskim nie przystoi, zeby im sie, iz is it decent for Christian people to have doings with
nim obchodzic mieli—maja_byc prawem them) are to be answered by the law, and sternly
zapowiedziane i srogo karane punished.
(Groicki 1559b art. 24; 1954 p. 117).

Groicki's translation of this section of the Carolina—as also, more importantly, his

general attempt to reform Polish Saxon law on the model of the modernizing jurisprudence of

the Empire—is an important moment in the development of Polish jurisprudence concerning

witchcraft. Although it had always, technically, been a capital crime, witchcraft is here for

the first time defined as a secular crime of magical harm. Despite his mention of witchcraft

as "opposed to the Lord God," Groicki emphasizes malefice and the proofs sufficient to send

an accused witch to torture. Witchcraft is the crime of harming others magically, and the

signs of such harm are, above all, that someone should first threaten magical harm and that

such harm indeed later befalls the person threatened. Witches may have characteristic "signs"

or words by which they may be recognized (the "devil's mark" might be implied here,

although that is far from clear). A person may be accused on the basis of such signs or by

public reputation as a witch. However, there is no mention of a pact with the devil, or of the

anti-society of witches, or even of renunciation of God: witchcraft is a secular crime because

it causes harm to people and property through specific magical acts.

Throughout 16th century, European states promulgated laws to increase the penalties

for witchcraft and to define it more securely as a secular crime. A law of Electoral Saxony in

47
 • Chapter 1.2 •

1572 asserted that any one who has anything to do with devil is to be "condemned to death

by fire." (Midelfort 2002a p. 117). The Elizabethan witchcraft statute of 1563, and the statute

of the Scottish Parliament in the same year, set the stage for intensified witch-trials in those

countries. Characteristically, these edicts emphasized the changing perspective of witchcraft,

as a crime of laese maiestatis, a sort of treachery against God and the state, rather than as a

crime of magical harm.

There is no equivalent edict or decree in Poland.9 Scholars used to think that the

parliamentary Constitutio of 1543, which attempted to regulate the border between church

and secular court jurisdiction, could be treated as such a decree. Although, as is universally

recognized, this constitution in fact explicitly reserved jurisdiction over witch-trials to the

ecclesiastical courts, a sub-clause stating that "in cases where the witchcraft caused harm to

anybody, the secular courts have the right to intervene and to inquire into the crime" has been

supposed to have opened the gates to secular trials. In fact nothing like this sub-clause can be

found in the constitution, which states very briefly that "the ecclesiastical court also has

jurisdiction over witchcraft, superstition, perpetual rents on church property, leases, land-

donations..."10 (PC vol. 2 p. 252; Sawicki 1954 pp. 85-86). and so on through a long list of

more pressing matters concerning conflict between noble and church land-holdings and rents.

Witchcraft is not mentioned again anywhere in the constitution. As I have shown in detail

elsewhere (Ostling 2005a), the mistaken belief that the Constitutio of 1543 gives secular

9
Malgorzata Pilaszek has suggested that the Edict of Wieluh provided the basis for the treatment of witchcraft
in Poland as crimen laesae maiestatis, and therefore as a matter of public law (2005 p. 125). I find this
implausible, if only because the Polish law of royal decrees and parliamentary konstytucje so rarely had any
effect on the Magdeburg law of the city courts.
"Jeszcze do sajiu duchownego przyshiszaja^czary, gusla, czynsze wieczne koscielne, ziemskie a doczesne,
widerkoffy, poswiqtne [...]." On the complex history of this Constitutio, including its somewhat garbled
translation into Latin by Przyhiszki in 1554, its division into short snippets in the legal digests of Herburt
(1563) and Januszewski (1600) and its inclusion in reconstructed form in the Volumina legum or standard
compendium of Polish law, see Balzer 1903 pp. 90-98; Sawicki 1954 pp. 54-82; VC vol. 2 pp. 242-243).

48
 • Society and law •

courts jurisdiction over maleflce seems to have arisen from a late-19th-century misreading of

Herburt's Statuta Regni Poloniae (1563 p. 253), whereby portions of the Constitutio were

conflated with an entirely unrelated law of 1505, placed by Herburt on the same page.11

Moreover, although it was taken up as part of the law of the land in legal digests such as

Herburt and eventually in the Volumina legum (1859 [1732] vol. 1 p. 283), the Constitutio

was never ratified by the Sejm. Finally, it was never intended to affect the autonomous

Saxon law courts of the towns, but was instead a compromise between the nobility and the

church concerning, above all, legal jurisdiction over agricultural land and over the peasantry.

There is, then, no decisive moment or decree whereby witchcraft became a secular

crime in Poland, punishable in the secular courts. Rather, we have a slow but accelerating

inclination by secular courts to hear witch-trials, an inclination guided, it may be said, by

concepts or attitudes developed in the West rather than by new legal theories or decrees

originating from any of the multifarious organs of Polish law. How and when, we might

therefore ask, did the western witch-craft stereotype enter Polish social and legal

consciousness?

• «$• •

In 1614, the otherwise little-known Stanislaw Zabkowic published in Krakow his Polish

translation of the Malleus maleficarum, together with the Formicarius of Johannes Nider and

11
This misreading, which I trace to a brief magazine article by one Niemirowski (1878 p. 62), was repeated by
Olszewski the next year (1879 pp. 485-486) and picked up uncritically by Gloger, by whom it was
diseminated in his widely read Encyclopedia staropolska (1972 [1900] vol. 2 p. 267, the source of the
quotation above)—thence to Zdrojkowski (1949 p. 116), Baranowski (1952 p. 83); Bugaj (1976 p. 134),
Tazbir (1978 p. 163), Wozniakowa (1990 p. 128) and others.
It was in fact a temporary compromise document, based nearly word for word on the Correctura statutorum
et consuetudinum Regni Poloniae of 1532 and on the decree of the Piotrkow church synod of 1542, both
attempts at resolving long-standing conflicts between the church and szlachta (Sawicki 1954). However, the
Sejm of 1543 only agreed to the Constitutio on the condition that it be re-examined at the next session of the
Sejm—this re-examination never occurred and, from the formal legal perspective, the Constitutio ceased to
bear the force of law two years after its proclamation.

49
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Ulrich Molitor's Dialogi de lamiis etphitonicis mulieribus. Under the title Hammer against

Witches, the Magistrate's Procedure concerning witchcraft, also methods to protect oneself

from them and to cure oneself of bewitchment, in two parts. A tome not only worthy of human

knowledge, but also in agreement with the teaching of the universal Church,14 Zabkowic

published a work that established most of the main points of the western witch-stereotype:

the overwhelmingly feminine character of witchcraft and its root in unbridled lust; the

particular hatred of witches for children; and the essence of witchcraft in the devil-pact and

in the renunciation of God.

Earlier historians of witchcraft have, not implausibly, seen the publication of this book

in Poland as a turning-point. Baranowski suggests that it claimed immediate popularity and

has a causal relation to the efflorescence of witch-trials in the 17th century (1952 p. 48).

Certainly its publication does stand at the beginning of what was to prove a strong trend

throughout the 17th century for more and more frequent trials (see Figures 1.2.A, 1.2.B

above). True, too, that a purely literary history of witchcraft in Poland might compare

The Malleus maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, written primarily by the Dominican Inquisitor Henryk
Kramer Institoris but always attributed as well to his Inquisitorial partner Jacob Sprenger (orig. 1482) is
frequently looked upon in modern scholarship as the foundational document and program of the European
witch-trials (e.g. Brauner 1995, among many others). For current re-appraisals that nevertheless accord the
Malleus a central place see Stephens 2002, Broedel 2003. Other recent scholars have tended to call into
question the centrality and overwhelming authority of the Malleus: Clark has asserted that over-reliance on
this single, early, and in some ways exceptional work has distorted modern witchcraft scholarship,
especially in its discussion of gender (1997 p. 116 and elsewhere); Pearl has noted the far greater authority,
in Catholic countries, of Del Rio (Pearl 1998). As in Zabkowic's translation, many Latin editions of the
Malleus printed it together with Nider's Formicarius (1480; a shorter demonological tract largely in
agreement with the Malleus) and Molitor's Dialogii (1497; a somewhat strange pairing, as on many
important issues such as the nature of incubi or of night flight, Molitor takes a much more sceptical tone
than do his predecessors).
Mlot na Czarownice Postepek Zwierzchowny w czarach, takze sposob uchronienia sie ich, y lekarstwo na nie
w dwoch czesciach zamykaiqcy. Xiega wiadomosci ludzkiey nietylko godna y potrzebna, ale y z naukq
Kosciola powszechnego zgadzaiqca sie. Zabkowic dedicated his translation to his patron, Janusz Ostrogski,
wojewoda of Wolyn and kasztelan of Krakow. For no apparent reason, Zabkowic omitted the first book of
the Malleus; he also makes various, usually small, changes or comments to the text—for this reason when I
quote the Malleus I have usually provided translations both of the original (usually after Summers; Kramer
and Sprenger 1970) and of Zabkowic's Polish. Lewandowski's recent popular edition (1992) omits

50
 • Society and law •

Zabkowic's complaints about judicial indifference to witchcraft with the supposed fanaticism

of the judiciary shortly thereafter. Zabkowic begins the preface to his translation of the

Malleus with a lament against the "widespread mistaken supposition" that "witchcraft is

nothing, and can bring no harm to anyone." Because of this mistaken supposition, which

"more than any other must be uprooted from human thought," "magistrates (to whom the

punishment of crime belongs), become lukewarm in the punishment of witch's ungodliness,

so that witchcraft, unpunished, becoming habitual among evil people, from day to day

multiplies and grows more" (1614 £2).15 This lamentable habit of magistrates to look the

other way in face of the growing threat posed by witches had finally been corrected just a

few decades after Zabkowic's Mlot, and perhaps, one might argue, because of it. Again

attending only to literary sources, we find the anonymous author of the Czarownica

powolana or "Denounced witch," a work to which we have already had some cause to allude,

explaining in the preface to his own work his reasons for publishing:

Czazu woyny owoynie: czasu powietrza, o smierci: In times of war, about war: in times of plague, about
czasu glodu, o chlebie: czasu pozarow, o ogniach death: in times of famine, about bread: in times of
ludzie radzi rozmawiaia_. A [...] temi czasy nasza conflagration, about fire people choose to converse.
Polska niezwyczaynie zage_scila sie_ na ksztah pozarow And [...] in these times our Poland has become
Czarownicami, lubo prawdziwemi, lubo nmiemanemi: extraordinarily dense with the conflagration of
tak, isz naposiedzeniu y schadzkach zwyczaynych o Witches, either real or alleged, to such a degree that at
zadney materyey wiqcey nieuszryszysz, iako o table or at ordinary gatherings one hears of no other
Czarownicach. subj ect than of Witches.
{Czarownica powolana, "Przemowa O Przyczynie tego pisanie [Preface concerning the Reasons for writing],"
1714 [1639] p. 3).

It is always difficult to determine the influence of books on action, and scholars are

notoriously inclined to exaggerate such influence. What we do know is that while the anti-

Zabkowic's dedication and the works of Nider and Molitor. I have made use of both the 1614 original in the
Biblioteka Narodowa in Warszawa, and of Lewandowski's edition.
15
"szerza_c sie, omylne mniemanie"; "ze czary nic nie s% i przez nie ludzie zadney szkody popadac nie moga_"; "
z umyslow ludzkich wykorzeniac barziey potrzeba" ; "Szerz^c si$ abowiem to omylne mniemanie w sercach
ludzkich, sprawuie ze urzaji (ktoremu wszelkie zbrodnie karac nalezy) do karania czarowniczey
bezboznosci oziebrym sie stawa, a ona dla niekarnosci, w zwyczay zlych ludzi wchodza^c, co dzien wietsze a
wietsze pomnozenie bierze"

51
 • Chapter 1.2 •

witch-trial Czarownica went through two more editions in the 17th and early 18th century,16

Zabkowic's Mlot was not republished, nor does it appear ever to have sold very well.

Zabkowic's Polish translation of the Malleus was listed in the will of the goldsmith Szymon

Piotrkowczyk, who served on the Lublin jury-court from 1626 to his death in 1633 —

although never in any trials for witchcraft. It was one of the few books he owned (Toroj 1997

p. 135ff.; Riabinin 1928a pp. 48-61).17 The Lublin bookbinder Stefan Terepka, at his death,

owned "ten copies of the Hammer of witches each for twenty four groszy" (Toroj 2000

p. 88). It appears never to have been very popular, however, and it is likely that the ribald

"sowizdrzalskie" literature, sold in cheap additions at trade-fairs and parish feasts, ultimately

had a greater influence on the literate and semi-literate (see below).

At any rate, no argument that the western theory of witchcraft came to Poland with the

Mlot can possibly be maintained. Much earlier, and well before trials had become at all

regular in Poland, a peculiar and extraordinary poem makes clear that the Western theory

was already well-known. Wit Korczewski's mid-16th century Rozmowy Polskie, Lacinskim

iezykiemprzeplatane [Polish conversations, with Latin intermixed], an early example of

Polish popular verse, presciently foreshadows the contrasting approaches secular and

ecclesiastical authorities were to take in the following centuries. The relevant passage

deserves quotation in full.

16
Bishop Kazimierz Florian Czartoryski's Mandatum against excesses in witch trials (1669) recommends the
Czarownica, together with Spee, as moderate guides to the prosecution of witch-crimes. This
recommendation, repeated in the several re-editions of the Mandatum, must have contributed to the
Czarownica'1?, popularity. Re-published in Poznan,1680 and in Gdansk, 1714, on both occasions together
with the Instructio circa judicia sagarum (about which see Tedeschi 1983, and below).
17
Of course, the Latin original was also available in Poland, and learned judges may have prefered this to
Zabkowic's translation. Maisel has found the Malleus in the possession of two citizens of Poznan in the 16th
century, including the town scribe (1963 p. 212). The Lublin doctor Adam Maier also owned the book, in an
edition of 1582 (Toroj 1997 pp. 108ff.). However, he was a highly educated bibliophile, with a collection of
368 books on a very wide range of subjects—it is of course not known what he thought of the book, or
indeed if he had read it.

52
 • Society and law •

A baba, which may mean an old woman or more specifically a cunning-woman, greets

her manor-lord (the pan in the text), but declines to greet herpleban [parish priest] against

whom she is angry. This, it transpires, is because she has been under ecclesiastical censure

[klatwa] for a quarter-year.19 The pan asks why:

BABA BABA
Izem troch$ czarowala, 950 Because I did a little witchcraft,
Gdym dziewkq za maz dawala: When I gave my daughter in marriage:
Cliche, izeby jej nie bijal, I wanted her groom not to beat her
A izby sie. nie upijal, And for him not to get drunk
Bo wie_c ci pijani chlopi For when a peasant-man drinks
Radzi strojq. dziwne fochy. 955 He easily loses his temper.
A drugajn rzecz uczynila: And I did another thing,
Strychowim oczy zkazila; I blinded the beggar-man
Ale mu to nie nie wadzi; But this won't hinder him
Rychlej mu da pieniqdz kazdy, People will give him more money
Widza^c tejego lichotq, 960 When they see his misfortune
Ktora^ cierpi prze slepotq. That he suffers from blindness.

PAN PAN
Coz jeszcze powiesz drugiego What else do you have to say
Z tego rzemiesla twojego? About this craft of yours?

BABA BABA
W wilijX swiqtego Jana On the Eve of St. John's Day
Doitam mleko ze zwona, 965 I milked a church-bell
Ale telko jeden szkopiec, But I only got one pail-full,
Bo mi nie chcialo wie^cej ciec. Because more didn't want to come out.

PAN PAN
A powiesz co wie_cej jeszcze, And will you say anything more,
Cos zbroila na tym swiecie? What mischief have you done in this world?

BABA BABA
Nie mam przed plebanem skrzatwy, 970 I won't say anything in front of the priest,
Bo sie. boje_ wiqtszej kla/twy. Because I fear even greater censure.

PAN PAN
Nie klalwyby, babo, godna, You don't deserve censure, old hag
Ale stosa drew a ognia! But a pyre of wood, and fire!

BABA BABA
A Boze uchowaj ognia! God defend me from fire!
A ja za cie_ proszq Boga, 975 And I'll pray to God for you,
Zawzdy poj$ trzy pacierze, I'll always recite three Our Fathers
By cie. Bog potwierdzil w wierze, So that God will confirm you in faith,

18
"Egzemplarzow Mlotow na czarownice dziesie_c, taksa po groszy dwadziescia cztery kazdy."
19
The term klqtwct, literally "a curse," is ambiguous when applied to ecclesiastical punishment: popular usage
does not distinguish between excommunication, interdict, or even mere admonition. Thus I have translated it
simply as "censure.'

53
 • Chapter 1.2 •

By tak zyl, jako przodkowie, That you might live, like your forefathers
Oni cnotliwi panowie. Virtuous lords that they were.

PAN PAN
Co mi twoja za modlitwa? 980 What can your prayer be to me?
A tys juz u czarta wszytka! You're given over to the devil!
Podz do piekla na swe miesce [sic], Go to your place in hell,
Juz ciq wiqcej shichac nie chce_. I don't want to listen to you any more.
(Korczewski 1553 part 2 w . 950-983; 1889 pp. 70-71)

As this text demonstrates, secular fear of witchcraft was well established by the mid-

16th century. Although the Pleban treats the Baba's actions as superstition, and wishes to

reform her using the tools of church discipline, the Pan understands her to be a witch, guilty

of love magic, malefice, and milk-theft, drawing her powers from a pact with the devil, and

deserving to be removed from human society by burning at the stake. We do not yet have, in

this text, any mention of the witches' sabbat or of flight; we do have the beginnings of what

was to become the standard secular understanding of witchcraft—that even relatively minor

acts of malefice were proof that a witch had renounced God and given herself over to the

devil, that she had rejected the norms of godly human society, and must be removed, through

death, from that society. Similar sentiments appear to be at work in an early notation in the

village-court records of Klimkowka, before any witches were tried there: in 1611 the manor-

lord reminded the court that "concerning witch-craft, [...] the law, by his decree, commands

that if such a one [a witch] should threaten, she must be punished with death"20 (Lysiak ed.

1965, item 72).

16th-century Polish intellectuals were in constant contact with their Western

counterparts, members of the "Republic of Letters" that characterized the humanist

movement. Noble or well-off burgher families sent their more intelligent sons to study in

Padua or Wittenberg, while an essential part of the political education for young noblemen

54
 • Society and law •

consisted of travel to Italy, France, and the courts of the German principalities. Clerics

studied the demonology of Aquinas and Augustine; later the Jesuits, so important in the

Catholic reconquest of Poland, brought with them the reforming demonology of Del Rio.

Given the central position witchcraft held in the scientific, political, and historical discourse

of intellectual Europe (Clark 1997), it is pointless to hold a single text responsible for the

importation of modern demonology into Polish intellectual or literary life. However, the

importation of demon-theory into law, with its far more closed and conservative corpus than

that of the general intellectual milieu, may be more precisely traced.

A likely source for the changes of the attitudes of secular courts to witchcraft were the

writings of Western jurists. According to Koranyi, the Praxis rerum criminalium of the

Flemish jurist Jodocus Damhouderius (1601 [1554]), was introduced into Polish

jurisprudence by Groicki in the mid-16th century (Koranyi 1927c). In the absence of any

indigenous manual of criminal law (the greater part of the Saxon law deals with civil

matters), Damhouder's text came to exercise an important influence on Polish criminal

practice, turning it in the direction of western inquisitorial norms (Zdrojkowski 1949 pp. 116-

117; Koranyi 1955 p. 430; Mikolajczyk 1998 p. 179; Uruszczak ed. 2003 p. 13). Damhouder

categorized witchcraft as a species of offence against the Divine Majesty (cap. 61, de crimine

laesae Maiestatis divinae, § 90-143), and treats it very harshly. At cap. 61 § 115, he provides

a detailed description of the sabbat: Witold Maisel has suggested, quite plausibly, that this is

the source for the developed sabbat concept as it appears in Polish trials (1963 p. 211). A

later important influence on Polish jurisprudence in general, and legal attitudes towards

witchcraft in particular, was Benedict Carpzov's guide to the Saxon Law in the Holy Roman

"strony czarow [...] prawo dekretem swym nakazalo garlem karac, gdzieby sie grozila ktora ta, co ja^na garlo
sa_dzono."

55
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Empire (1635). Unlike the earlier Carolina, Carpzov's Practicae novae imperialis Saxonicae

rerum criminalium had absorbed the attitudes of the Western demonological tradition: it

treated witchcraft as a crime of state not of action, a question of loyalty to God rather than of

specific acts of maleficium. Witches were "tools of the devil" and "enemies of the human

race," who, having entered into the devil pact, desire only the destruction of others (Carpzov

1635 part la qu. 48, "de crimine sortilegii;" cited after Uruszczak 1994 p. 193). The

Chelmno jurist Jakub Czechowicz, in his late, posthumous Praktyka kryminalna, based the

long section on witchcraft largely on Carpzov's work, along with Bodin, Berlich, and the

Malleus (1769 pp. 196-210, Zdrojkowski 1949 pp. 54-57).21

• •$• •

I have suggested that notions of the witches' sabbat and the devil-pact may have

entered into legal discourse via influential western texts of criminal law, such as

Damhouder's Praxis rerum criminalium (1601 [1554]) and Carpzov's Practicae novae

(1635). To the extent that town magistrates internalized this material and expressed it in their

interrogation of accused witches or in verdicts against them, legalistic perspectives on the

witch-crime could filter their way into popular culture. However, this could never have been

a very effective method for the dissemination of witchcraft knowledge. With the exception of

a few times and places, such as Kleczew in the last quarter of the 17th century, witch-trials

were rare and scattered events. It is difficult to see how jurisprudential stereotypes of the

witch could have informed popular discourse in a town like Nowy Sajcz, which saw just one

witch-trial over the course of three decades (Sygahski 1917). And yet the trial of Elzbieta

21
Czechowicz's work was written in the 1740s, but was not published until well after his death. It has
sometimes been mentioned as an example of the late flowering of Polish demonology. However,
Zdrojkowski has demonstrated that it was not only entirely derivative, but was also entirely ignored (1949
pp. 117-121).

56
 • Society and law •

Stepkowicowa (#70, Nowy Sajcz 1670) includes a wide range of both elite and popular

witchcraft concepts. Elzbieta confessed to pouring out wash-water to cause magical harm; to

gathering dew to spoil the crops; to the possession of human remains which she used to cause

a plague; to taking a carriage driven by devils to Bald Mountain, where she danced to fiddle

music provided by devil-musicians. It seems unlikely that all or most of this material could

have been fed to her by the presiding judges.

A more likely source for much of both "popular" and "elite" witchcraft knowledge

were the ribald verse dramas, moralizing satires, and picaresque adventures known to Polish

literary historians as "literatura sowizdralska."22 Most of the literature usually included in

this genre was written in the first few decades of the 17th century but, despite being

condemned and placed on the Index by the bishop of Krakow Marcin Szyszkowski in 1617

(Hernas 1998 p. 132), it enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the 17th and 18th

centuries. Sold in cheap editions at fairs and markets, and especially at the odpusty or church-

fairs where local townspeople and peasantry might also have been able to enjoy a dramatic

performance of a sowizdraiski play, these works were especially well suited to work as

conduits of cultural materials in both directions, from "elite" to "popular" and vice versa.

Moreover, many of the most popular works in this genre featured demons, devils, and

witches as central characters. The Sejm piekielny straszliwy [horrible Parliament of Hell]

which depicts an assembly of devils reporting to Lucifer concerning their work against the

human race, must be considered one of the best-sellers of the 17th and 18th centuries in

The term derives from Sowizdrzal or Sowizrzal or Sowirzalius, a popular pseudonym for the usually
anonymous authors of the genre. It is a corruption of Sownociardlko, which translates Eulenspiegel or Owl-
Glass, the traditional hero of a cognate genre in German literature

57
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Poland; it went through at least twelve editions between c. 1615 and 1807. Other popular

works in the genre with strong themes of witchcraft and demonology include the Postqpek

prawa czartowskiego [the devils' law-case], depicting a lawsuit brought by Lucifer against

God to win back his promised sovereignty over sinning human souls, after Christ had

"stolen" them from him;24 the Peregrynacja dziadowska [hobo's pilgrimage], which recounts

the adventures of several beggars, including some who self-identify as witches; the drama

Nqdza z Biedq z Polski idq [Poverty and Wretchedness leave Poland], featuring the titular

personified demons of misfortune as they travel through the countryside; and the Synod

klechow podgorskich [Synod of the klechy of the Podgorski region], a more serious affair at

which the klechy (church-organists, parish school teachers, and other minor church

functionaries) gather to air their grievances against the church authorities, but also to

complain about the superstitious practices of their parishioners.27 As a rough measure of the

popularity and availability of these works, one might note that the Lublin bookbinder

Wawrzyniec Latowicki, at his death in the 1630s, left seventeen copies of the Postepek

23
The Sejm piekielny was based to some extent on the moralizing "devil-books" popular in Germany in the
same period (on which see Roper 1994 pp. 156ff.), but was more directly indebted to the Postepek prawa
czartowskiego (see next note). First edition c. 1615,1622, 1628, c. 1695 (two printings), 1752,1807, plus
four 17th-century editions of uncertain date and one undated early 18th. c. edition. Badecki comments of the
1628 edition, "the surviving pages of the unique Ossolinski copy display numerous stains from the hands of
the eager readers of this brochure" (Badecki 1925 p. 321). Bruckner's edition of 1903, which I follow, is
based on the edition of 1622.
24
First published 1570 at the press of the Calvinist humanist and translator Cyprian Bazylik, who may also have
been the author. Unlike the other works mentioned here, the Postepek was a sophisticated work of prose.
The "Devil's law case" of the title refers to the case brought by Lucifer and his cohorts before the heavenly
court, when they were cheated by Christ out of their rule over human souls. The same theme was explored,
with clear borrowings from the Postepek, in a diabolical "Intermedium" to Jakub Gawatowic's drama of the
death of John the Baptist (1619; 1961).
25
First published in 1614, printed together with Peregrinacya Mackowa, also by Januarius Swizralus [sic]. I
have used Lewanski's edition, in vol. 3 of his Dramaty staropolskie (1961); this is based on the 1614
edition. There is also a unique copy of an edition from 1616, which includes numerous small changes. A
possible author is the nobleman Jan Dzwonowski, who used the pseudonym Januariusz Sowizrzalius in his
Statut, a satire of judges and lawyers.
6
First ed. c. 1624 and certainly before 163 3, at least twelve editions to 1818.1 use the text in Lewanski ed.
1961, which follows the earliest known copy.
27
First published 1607. There is one surviving copy of an edition from c. 1611, and another from c. 1647.

58
 • Society and law •

prawa czartowskiego, eight of the Synod klechow podgorskich, six of the Peregrynacja

dziadowska, and one of the Sejm piekielny (Toroj 2000 pp. 47-60).

An advantage of the sowizdralski genre for an exploration of early modern Polish

attitudes is that it bridges the vexed dichotomy between "elite" and "popular." The traditional

view among Polish literary historians has been to read these works as the product of a

"disenfranchised inteligentsia" of partially educated, plebeian writers whose robust

skepticism and embodied ribaldry stands in opposition both to refined noble literature and

orthodox ecclesiastical writing (Grzeszczuk 1966, 1970; Hernas 1998 p. 131). Certainly

many of the sowizdrzalski writers must have been klechy, that is to say unbenificed,

underpaid minor church functionaries such as parish school teachers, choir-masters, and

organists, sometimes drawn from the peasantry or from the plebeian classes of towns. Such

semi-educated men took part in peasant and plebeian culture, and there are clear influences

of peasant oral traditions in the literature. Indeed, some klechy who lived in close proximity

to poor peasants and beggars in the church alms-house or tavern (Augustyniak 1989 pp. 17,

23-24); providing a familiarity with the marginal members of society in such works as the

Peregrynacja, with its panoply of hobos, cunning-women, and mountebanks.28 The

sowizdrzal literature functioned, in part, as a kind of ethnography diseminating peasant and

plebeian notions to the elite, and thus preserving them for modern readers as well.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to resist the suggestion that their basic ideological

stance was "anti-feudal" or anti-Catholic. The klechy of the Synod klechow podgorskich

8
In the Synod klechow, the gathered klechy complain that:

Nike_dy tu po prawdzie nam nie fundowano, Truly they often provide us no funds,
Ledwie nam i w szpitalach mieszkac nie kazano They nearly tell us to live in the alms-house
{Synod klechow 1607, w . 174-175; Grzeszczuk ed. 1966 p. 198).
According to Surdocki, minor church functionaries did in fact often live in the alms-house, in close

59
 • Chapter 1.2 •

express Counter-Reformation frustrations at the old peasant women who attempt to steal

sacramentalia for witchcraft; similarly, the satire against the superstitious ruses by which

beggars trick their marks, in the Peregrynacja dziadowska, reflects orthodox Counter-

Reformation concerns rather than, as has been suggested, Protestant or proto-Enlightenment

views.

In an important essay, Janusz Tazbir has questioned whether the sowizdrzal authors

were always or usually plebeian; he finds good textual evidence for a noble provenance in

some sowizdralski texts (Tazbir 1986c). More systematically, Urszula Augustyniak has

critiqued the ideologically motivated categorization of these texts as "urban" or "plebeian."

For Augustyniak, neither their form nor subject matter clearly mark this literature as a

product of authors of any particular social origin, and it was certainly consumed by readers at

all social levels. As nearly all this literature was published anonymously, post-war scholars

such as Stanislaw Grzeszczuk were able to assign the social origin of the authors according

to perceived ideological orientations, so that some texts came to be labelled as noble or

Jesuit, others as the true, plebeian sowizdrzal literture (Augustyniak 1989 pp. 7-12). This

tendency to divide the texts, on textual grounds alone, into the "truly plebeian" vs. all others,

"results in a concentration on demonstrating fundamental differences and conflicts between

burgher culture, plebeian culture, and noble culture—which is in total disagreement with our

knowledge of the realities of that era" (Augustyniak 1989 p. 12). On the contrary, there are

important continuities between satirical, court, and Jesuit literature. Augustyniak assumes

that since this literature was indeed popular, it reflects the "attitudes and expectations" of its

wide readership (ibid. p. 16). With Augustyniak's broader definition of sowizdrzalski

proximity to the hobos and paupers who figure in the Peregrynacja and other sowizdrzalski works (Surdocki
1990,1992).

60
 • Society and law •

literature in mind, one might also include in this category such early works as Wit

Korczewski's Rozmowy polskie (1553, above), as well as the later successful Jesuit

adaptations of the popular sowizdralski form to spread their own catechetical messages—e.g.

the anti-superstition drama Guslarze (1640).29 Many of these works display both a good

folkloristic knowledge of peasant practices, and a critique of those practices, intermixed

seamlessly with notions and models drawn from elite, western, or classical literature.

The source of Polish town-court attitudes toward witchcraft cannot be ascribed to any

single book or author. Intellectual currents from the West certainly affected Polish elite

attitudes, as shown in the work of Korczewski, or in the Mlot or the Postepekprawa

czartowskiego, by the mid-16th century at the latest. The literary evidence that we have is

slight, but is enough to show that for at least some among the learned, the witch had become

in the 16th century something more than a cunning-woman or enchantress. The sowizdrzalski

texts of the early 17th century depict a wide variety of witches, cunning-women, devils, and

demons; moreover the popularity of this literature and its wide dissemination in oral form—

in dramas at church feasts, for example—help explain the wide currency of such notions as

the witches' sabbat or the devil-pact in 17th-century Poland. At the same time, this literature

often depicts peasant and plebeian practices for the purpose of satire or censure, and the

depictions are accurate enough from what we know otherwise to suggest that sowizdrzalski

texts both produced and reflected popular notions.

In the long run, probably more important for the prosecution of trials were the legal

theories of Carpzov and Damhouder, describing witchcraft as a crimen exceptum, a form of

treason, and a crime that could be prosecuted under relaxed rules of judicial procedure

29
This drama was included in a collection of Jesuit school plays, entitled Bachanalia, czyli Dyalogi z
intermedyami, reprezentowane w teatrach szkolnych, wjedno opus zebrane, now lost. It is known to us only

61
 • Chapter 1.2 •

because of its horrendous nature. Such judicial attitudes met, starting in the 17th century,

with increasing popular fear of witches, and with an over-all increasing tendency of town

courts, following the inquisitorial model, to mete out harsh and exemplary justice for all

crimes. By the early 17th century, witchcraft had become well established as a secular crime,

tried in secular town courts, and punishable by the stake.

1.2.2: Attempts at reform

Such an understanding of the crime of witchcraft did not, however, go uncontested. From the

1630s, Polish ecclesiastical writers began a campaign against secular witch-trials that was to

continue through the 18th century, albeit with little apparent effect until very late. From

around 1670, this clerical opposition to the abuses of witch-trials gained strength from a

parallel effort, on the part of the Royal Assessory Court, to reform and rationalize the

practice of small-town courts: this effort, as well, made almost no difference to the practice

of those courts before the late 18th century.

The Polish ecclesiastical opposition to witch-trials was part of the Europe-wide clerical

worry that people were suffering in the courts (Clark 1997 p. 518); the sort of worry that led

to works such as Spee's Cautio criminalis (1631). However, despite the sharp bite of its often

wonderful rhetoric, it was not a dis-interested protest against cruelty or ignorance. Church

authors attacked secular cases against witchcraft, above all, because such cases ought to be

tried in ecclesiastical courts—the primary conflict was over jurisdiction. Moreover, the

arguments against secular witch-trials were also arguments for the ecclesiastical courts' right

to try heretics—that is, Protestants—a right that had been abrogated by the famous

Confederation of Warsaw of 1573. The Catholic attack on witch-trials was, thus, also a

from its description, including several long extracts, in Juszynski's Dykcyonarzpoetow polskich of 1820.

62
 • Society and law •

Counter-Reformation attack on the religious freedoms that Protestant nobility (and, in

practice, Protestant burghers) had enjoyed in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The first and fiercest attack on secular witch-trials was the anonymous Czarownica

powoiana, published in 1639 in Poznan. Although the authorship of the Czarownica remains

in dispute,30 several of its motifs and some of its style point to a Jesuit author.31 It is difficult

to determine how widely the Czarownica was read; however it was re-issued in 1680 and

again in 1714, and was clearly read, at least, by other opponents of witch-trials, who repeat

its themes.

The jurisdictional focus of the Czarownica is apparent already in its preface, where the

author writes:

[N]asi starzi a pobozni przodkowie Polacy y Krolowie Our elders, pious ancestors, Poles and Kings [...], for
[...], na ochrone sumnienia [sic] swoiego postanowili, the preservation of their consciences decided on this
y Constitutia. tosz co y oni, ieszcze scisleysza. matter, and bound themselves to it strictly with a
obwarowali. Masz o tym iasna. Constitutia, na walnym Constitution. You have this set out clearly in the

30
Published in 1639 by Albertus Regulus (in Polish, Wojciech Krolik). Regulus had been a teacher at the
Lubranski Academy in Poznan, where among his other pupils he taught Krzysztof Opalinski, whose Satyry
(1650) later lampooned witchcraft beliefs in Poland. Berwinski (1984 [1862] vol. 1 pp. 82-104) thought the
Czarownica was a standard work of demonology, and misread its purpose of opposing witch trials.
Olszewski (1879) took it to be a translation of Spee's Cautio criminalis (1631), an interpretation made
plausible in that the same publisher did soon after publish Spee (1647), with a dedication to Krzysztof
Opalinski and his brother Lukasz. However, Rosenblatt (1883 pp. 56-60) demonstrated that the Czarownica
powoiana is neither a translation nor a paraphrase of Spee, although Koranyi is not satisfied with
Rosenblatt's assertion that the author of the Czarownica was unfamiliar with Spee's text (1927b p. 139; see
also Salmonowicz 1961 pp. 218-221). Koranyi has compared the Polish text of the Czarownica with Daniel
Wisner's Tractatus brevis de extramagis lamiis, veneficis [etc. ], also published in by Regulus in 1639, and
also dedicated to the Opalinski brothers (1927b). Although Koranyi demonstrated that the two authors share
a general outlook as well as some passages of text, and that they must have known each other's texts, the
two works are differently organized, have some different concerns (Wisner does not discuss superstition),
and have decidedly different styles, suggesting to Koranyi that they may not share authorship. Koranyi
suspects that Regulus himself may have authored the Czarownica (1927b pp. 138-145). Nevertheless Bugaj
(1976 p. 150) considers Wisner to be the author of the Czarownica, and this also seems likely to Jan Sojka
in his article on Regulus (1977 pp. 212-213). I have made use of the Polish National Library (BN XVIII.
2.296) copy of the 1714 edition, which lacks Regulus' dedication of the work to the burmistrzowie of
Koscian and Grodzisk. DWOKvol. 15 pp. 284-315 provides an abridged version of the text. See also BP
vol. 29 pp. 111-112; vol. 14 pp. 531-532.
31
An anecdote in the Czarownica concerning a woman deceived by the devil into not trusting the Jesuits (qu.
13, p. 79), along with other references to the good works of the Jesuits, is so characteristic of contemporary
Jesuit propaganda (see e.g. the materials collected in Kazahczuk 1991, now in a more scholarly format in the
same scholar's edition of Jurkowski 2004 [c. 1715]) as to strongly suggest an author from that order—which
consideration eliminates the layman Regulus though possibly not Wisner, a former econom, doctor of
philosophy and candidate for the doctorate in church and secular law (Sojka 1977 p. 212).

63
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Seymie Krakowskim, za Zygmunta Starego, roku Constitution of the plenary Sejm, in the time of
Panskiego 1543 ktora od slowa do slowa tak brzmi Zygmunt the Old, year of our Lord 1543, which stated
f...] Nad to sa^dowi Duchownemu podlegly wroszki, word for word proclaims: [...] And furthermore, [the
czary, czarnokziejstwa, czynsze Koscielne [... ] following] are under the jurisdiction of Clerical
{Czarownica 1714 [1639] pp. 9-10). courts: divination, witchcraft, black magic, Church
rents [...].

Accordingly,

Nie mowze tedy malowany Juristo, nie masz nic Therefore do not say, painted Jurist, that there is
wprawach Polskich o Czarownicach, iako ie saxlzic, y nothing in the Polish law concerning Witches, how to
iako z niemi poste_powac. Niemasz nic! bo odsa_dzono judge them or proceed in their cases. There is nothing!
Swieckich Sqdziow od takich sajiow [...]. Czytay ieno because Secular Courts were excluded from such
Herburta tit. Spiritualis, y Januszewskiego tit. judgements [...]. Read Herburt's entry under
Czarownica. A nic mow ze zwyczajnie iuz urz^d Spiritualis, or Januszewski on the Witch. And do not
Swiecki Czarownice sa^dzi, malo dbaia^c na Constitute say, that customarily the Secular Office judges
choc Seimu walnego: Quo iurel Witches, caring little for the Constitution of the
plenary Sejm. By what law?

Following the Czarownica, a litany of ecclesiastical authors cited the Constitution of

1543 to protest the lawless secular courts. In his Mandatum pastorale [.. . ] de cautelis in

processu contra sagas adhibendis, the bishop of Wloclawek Kazimierz Florian Czartoryski

explicitly recommended the Czarownica powoiana, and reminded the secular courts that "in

the Statute of the Crown, A. D. 1543 the Law was established, that trials concerning Witches,

and enchantments, belong to the Clerical office and to its judgements"32 (1669; cited after the

edition of 1705, ff. 12, 22-22v). The Franciscan provincial Serafin Gamalski, as well, cited

the Constitution of 1543 to the effect that all trials concerning "noxias artes daemonorum,,

belong to the ecclesiastical court (1742 p. 10).

As noted, the Bishop of Wloclawek issued a pastoral letter in 1669 against the abuses of

secular witch-trials. This was re-issued several times over the next several decades (1682,

1688, 169?, 170?, 1705, 1732), was translated into Polish, and was usually appended to a text

called the Instructio circa judicia sagarum. This Instructio, in turn, was translated into Polish

as the Roman Instruction, or legal brief, concerning courts and trials, How they are to be

"w Statucie Koronnym Roku p. 1543 Prawo iest o tym postanowione, iz sprawy, strony Czarownic, y guslow,
do urzqdu Duchowniego, y iego uznania nalezq" (italicization in the original).

64
 • Society and law •

formulated and implemented, against Witches. In both Polish and Latin form, this

instruction was to enjoy at least nine editions in Poland between 1670 and 1739, often in

combination with Czartoryski's pastoral letter, and in at least one instance, with the

Czarownica powolana?* The Polish editions of this work did not advertise its origin—as an

internal document of the Roman Inquisition. Circulated in manuscript from 1624 if not

before, and published in abridged form several times in the 17th century before finally being

issued as a pamphlet in Rome under the title Instructio pro formandis processibus in causis

strigum, sortilegiorum, at maleficiorum, the text has been described as the "fullest and most

eloquent expression of the Roman Inquisition's cautious and mild approach to witch-trials"

(Tedeschi 1983 p. 188).

These textual salvos were followed, in the 18th century, by a series of pastoral letters

and synodal decrees in nearly every diocese of the Commonwealth: Krakow (1711); Wilno

(1717,1744); Poznan (1720, 1738, 1739); Luck (1722, 1726); Kamieniec (1724); Wloclawek

(1727);35 Plock (1733), Gniezno (1743) and Chelmno (1745)—all of which cited the

Constitution of 1543 (Karbownik 1988 pp. 68-71; Aleksandrowicz 1976 p. 9; Wijaczka 2005

pp. 41-42). Intensive lobbying by the bishops of Wielkopolska resulted in changes to the law

Instrukcya rzymska, abo postepekprawny, o sqdach y processach, Iako maiq bydz formowane, y wydawane
przeciw Czarownicom.
The publishing history of this text is complex, and I am not at all sure that I have sorted it out satisfactorily.
The Latin text was published in Krakow in 1670; Poznan 1680 (appended to the Czarownicapowolana);
Gdansk 1682; Gdansk 1696; Krakow 1705 (together with its Polish translation and with Czartoryski's
Mandatum in Latin and Polish); Wilno 1731; Lwow 1732 (with the Mandatum). The Polish translation was
published in 1688 (n. p.); twice again before 1705; in 1705 (Krakow: Krzysztof Domanski); and 1739
(Poznan: J. K. M. Koll. Soc. Jesu). I have used the National Library copy of the 1705 edition (BN. XVIII.
1.7370), which includes the Instructio in Latin and Polish, Czartoryski's pastoral letter in both languages,
and a Latin "Notandum" in which he recommends Spee's Cautio criminalis and the Czarownica powolana
as the best guides to trying witches. On its publishing history, see BP vol. 18 p. 588; however, BP does not
list the edition of 1739. For its publishing history outside Poland, see Tedeschi 1983.
Krzysztof Antoni Szembek, bishop of Wloclawek (or Kujawy and Pomorze, as the diocese was also known),
was particularly active in combatting witch-trials in his diocese. Several of his personal interventions in
specific trials are preserved inMHDWvol. 5 (1885) pp. 10-15; 59-68. This material came to my attention
too late to be included in the database.

65
 • Chapter 1.2 •

in the 18th century: in 1703 August II decreed that town and village courts in the Kujawy

diocese could not try women for witchcraft until they had been first examined in the

ecclesiastical court; the dioceses of Plock and Chelmno received similar rulings from

August III in 1727 and 1740, respectively (Karbownik 1988 p. 174; Zdrojkowski 1949 p. 56;

Wijaczka 2005 pp. 22-23; Rafacz 1933 p. 563).36 These decrees called for extremely harsh

penalties against town or village judges who should dare to dis-obey them: fines of 1000 zl.

for town magistrates, and the death penalty for village court judges (Karbownik 1988 p. 174;

Sawicki ed. 1951-1952, vol. 1 p. 2 pp. 243-244). Despite this fact, they were for the most part

entirely ignored. I know of only one clear example of a court turning over a case against

witches to the ecclesiastical court, albeit under strong pressure: in 1749, the office of the

Royal Chancellor denied the right of the Kowalewo court to try witches, and required them to

send a case to the court of Bydgoszcz; furthermore, the Bydgoszcz court was instructed to

turn the case over to the church court after an initial investigation (#169, Kowalewo 1749).

Moreover, these decrees applied only within the diocese to which they were granted. The

arguments of defense counsel in some late trials in Malopolska, that their clients' case should

be sent to the ecclesiastical court, were not based on those rescripts, which had no force of

law in the south (e.g. #164, Krakow 1737).

Scholars often mistakenly date the Chelmno decree to 1745, when it was published as part of the Chelmno
synodal decrees; however, according to Rafacz, who cites it after Royal Chancellory records, it was issued
in 1740 (Rafacz 1933 p. 563).
For example, the court of tiny Kiszkowo tried two peasantwoman for witchcraft, and killed one of them
during torture in 1716. In response, the Gniezno consistory court levied heavy punishments against the town
and its officers: all the town counsellors were fined 10 marks each and required to lie in the cross-position
on the church-floor during the summa for all Sundays and Holidays of an entire year. The court was also
declared ineligible to hear such cases in the future. The accusers, the noble Pan Rudnicki and his wife, had
to pay 40 marks to the Kiszkowo alms-house, to kneel in church for five Sundays during the summa, and to
return a cow and other belongings of the deceased accused to her family. The torturor was whipped
(Wijaczka 2005 p. 34; Aleksandrowicz 1976 p. 10). Nevertheless, this same court willingly took on the trial
of the Gorzuchow witches four decades later—one of the largest witch-trials in Polish history.

66
 • Society and law •

In fact, despite the assurance with which the Czarownica author derides town-court

judges for flouting the clear law of the land, it is he and his ecclesiastical followers, rather

than city magistrates, who were ignorant of the law. Strictly speaking, until the royal decree

of 1703, the Constitution of 1543 had nothing whatever to do with town-court jurisprudence.

Not only was the Constitution never fully ratified, but it was never intended to apply to the

city courts. Like so many other legal-religious decrees of the 16th and early 17th century,

including the Confederation of Warsaw, the 1543 Constitution was part of the battle between

szlachta and Church over the extent of noble freedoms; it paid no attention at all to the

autonomous, independent structures of Saxon Law which regulated the lives of townsfolk.

And the Saxon law, as noted earlier, had always set down death as the penalty for witches.

However, beginning around 1670, the Royal Assessory Court [nadworne sa^d asesorski]

began to attempt the reform of small-town witch-trials. This court, ostensibly in charge of

conflicts between the city-counsels of Royal towns and the king's representative or starosta

for those towns, had by the mid-17th century become, more or less by default, the most usual

court of appeal from the decisions of Royal town courts (Wozniakowa 1990 p. 28; Pilaszek

2005 p. 114). Noble or ecclesiastical courts could also send appeals there, but were not

obligated to do so. The magistrates of the Assessory Court included the holders of high legal

office in the Royal court: two Assessors, the Chancellor of the Crown, and the Referendary

of the Crown, who was also the head of the Referendary Court [sajd referendarski]

(Wozniakowa 1990 pp. 28, 46). The Assessory Court was something of a jurisprudential

curiosity: although its magistrates, as officers of the Royal Chancellery, were well-trained in

38
A brief, solid discussion of the battle between church and szlachta over jurisdiction is Wisner 1983.
39
All of its archival records, some 546 volumes covering the period 1537-1794, were destroyed in by the Nazis
in 1944 as part of their retaliation against the Warsaw Uprising (Wozniakowa 1990 pp. 1-15). Accordingly,

67
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Polish Law (the law used in grod-courts and starosta-courts, regulating civil and criminal

order among the szlachta), they were called upon to hear appellate cases from the town

courts, which used Saxon (Magdeburg or Chelmno) Law. It was thus the only legal forum in

which principals such as those enshrined in the Constitution of 1543 could be applied to the

separate tradition of town law.

In 1668, the accused witch Anna Ofiarzyna appealed to the Assessory Court, which in

its decision required the city court of Lqczyca to consult the higher court in all future witch-

trials (#68; Rafacz 1933 p. 562, 564). In 1670, the Grand Chancellor of the Crown and

Primate of Poland Archbishop Mikolaj Prazmowski decreed that witch-craft cases before

small-town courts must be sent on to the more expert secular courts of larger cities (Tazbir

1978 p. 173; Rafacz 1933). In a precedent-setting appellate decision of 1672, the Assessory

court drew on Prazmowski's edict to demand that the court of Krzywin henceforth send its

witch-craft cases to larger towns (Rafacz 1933 pp. 562-563).40 The next year, in response to

two trials in Klodawa—one against the Jew Mojzesz Nassonowicz, for desecration of the

Eucharist, and another against five accused witches, (of which one died as a result of torture,

one committed suicide in jail, and three went to the stake), the Assessory court issued a more

general ordinance. Noting that the Klodawa court too easily "sive christiani [...] sive Judaei

ad mortem condemnare," it forbade that court henceforth from judging cases of "crimen tarn

ratione sacrilegii, quam veneficiorum sive maleficiorum" (#73, Klodawa 1673).41 Invoking

its own recent decision of 1672, Prazmowski's edict of 1670, and lauda or edicts of the

all recent studies are based on scattered documents of various kinds, or on pre-war studies such as the
excellent essay by Rafacz (1933).
40
Karbownik (1988 p. 72) Wozniakowa (1990 p. 129), and Zdrqjkowski (1949 p. 56), have suggested that the
Assesory Court decision of 1672 asserted the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts over witch-trials. This
seems unlikely, as the ordinance of the same court in 1673 (see below) makes no mention of ecclesiastical
courts.

68
 • Society and law •

sejmiki of the Poznan, Kalisz, and Sieradz palatinates, the court decreed that small towns

may not issue death-sentences against Jews or Christians for such crimes, but must instead

send them on to larger towns with more expert magistrates. The accused should be provided

with defense counsel. Moreover, courts should make their judgements

non ad simplicem accusationem seu delationem, sed not on the mere basis of accusation or denunciation, but
probationibus et documentis sufficientibus super rather by proof and sufficient evidence concerning the
commisso scelere habitis cogniscant, trutinant, et commision of the crime they are to examine, weigh,
iuxta dispositionem iuris decidant and in like manner decide the disposition of justice.
(Wozniakowa 1990 pp. 338-340, after AGAD, Archiwum Radziwillow z Nieborowa (akta nie uporzqdkowane
nr 52) s. 261-266).

In addition, in such cases execution should be postponed for three days after the sentencing,

to allow time for reflection.

This ordinance, like the rescripts granted to the northern Polish dioceses, had almost no

effect on small-town witch-trials; most small town courts likely remained entirely ignorant of

the ordinances'existence. The three decades after the issuance of this ordinance belong to the

most bloody phase of the Polish witch-trial era. In the absence of any mechanism for the

oversight of small-town courts, and with no method for the enforcement of its ordinances, the

Assessory court could only intervene with specific courts in response to specific appeals.

Moreover, as Pilaszek has argued, its authority over the courts of private towns—the

majority of medium and small towns in Poland—was practically non-existent (Pilaszek 2005

p. 122). Eighty years after the ordinance which ostensibly forbade small-town courts from

trying witches, the Assessory court intervened again, in response to a case in Przemysl. The

court of Przemysl was not to engage in trials for "sacrilegii, veneficii seu maleficii sagarunf

but was instead to send such cases "ad maiores civitates palatinus Russiae, praecipue

Wozniakowa 1990 pp. 338-340, after AGAD, Archiwum Radziwillow z Nieborowa (akta nie uporzqdkowane
nr 52) s. 261-266; also Rafacz 1933 pp. 562-564, after the no longer extant Akta sa_du asesorskiego, ms. 399.

69
 • Chapter 1.2 •

Leopoliensem," where the wojt and jurymen could be expected to possess a better legal

education (Rafacz 1933 p. 565).

However, by this time, the tide had clearly begun to turn against witch-trials. A

convoluted case in Krakow and Oswie^cim in 1752 cannot, perhaps, be taken as typical: the

principal accused witch was a noblewoman, and the town of Oswie^cim was the private

property of the bishop of Krakow, p. Francziszek Lodzihski, podczaszy of Zator, suspected

the impoverished young szlachcianka Magdalena Dobielska of having won his son's

affections through love magic. The girl's alleged peasant accomplice, one Malgorzata

Kobialczyna, was tried before the town court of Oswie^cim, and sent to the stake. Magdalena

sought sanctuary in a Dominican nunnery, from which Lodzihski removed her by force. He

kept her imprisoned in the Krakow town-hall, but she appealed to the Krakow grod-court,

which turned the case over to the episcopal court. This court not only dismissed all charges,

but also required Lodzihski to pay Magdalena an indemnity of two-hundred zloty.

Furthermore, having become thus alerted to the actions of the Oswi^cim court in the trial of

Malgorzata, the bishop of Krakow charged it with overstepping its jurisdiction, and fined the

city counsel 50 zl. (#169-170, 1752).

By the latter part of the 18th century all Polish elites—ecclesiastical, jurisprudential,

intellectual and noble, as well as the emerging bourgeoisie of the larger towns—were

opposed to witch trials.42 But the near total lack of an effective central authority, the

continuing near-autonomy of petty or middling nobility on their own estates or in their

private towns, and the autonomy of these town courts themselves except insofar as they were

42
In 1765 prominent figures of the Catholic Enlightenment such as Ignacy Krasicki and Franciszek Bohomolec
founded the journal Monitor to, among other things, further the fight against what its publishers saw as
ignorance and superstition. A major contribution to this critique was Jan Boholomec's dismantlement of the

70
 • Society and law •

beholden to their noble overseer, meant that the opinions of bishops or of the noble jurists in

the Assessory court, or of Warsaw intellectuals, had very little effect on witch-trials. As

Levack has shown through his study of Scotland, together with comparative examination of

France, Italy and Spain, central authorities nearly always worked to limit witch-trials (Levack

2002 pp. 218-223; cf. Soman 1992; Pearl 1998); but such a central authority was noticeably

lacking in the waning years of the Noble Republic. In 1768, the Assessory Court forbade

deputation of town-court magistrates to villages, and required village-owners to bring all

cases before the noble grod courts or to the Saxon Law courts of larger towns (Wijaczka

2005 p. 42; after Rafacz 1932 p. 8, VL vol. 7 p. 280). If enforced, this edict would have

effectively ended village witch-trials. There had been no executions for witchcraft in larger

towns for decades at this point: the last death sentence of which I am aware in a major city is

that of Andrzej Bochehski, for signing a pact with the devil, in Poznari in 1722 (#155); the

last conviction before a regional center was in Pyzdry, 1740 (#166).43 The grod courts,

meanwhile, were bound by the Konstytucja of 1543 (and by this date may be expected to

have been aware of this fact). However, this edict failed to prevent, for example, the trial

before the royal town court of Grabow of at least six women, at some point in the early 1770s

(#179)—the mass trial later fictionalized in the "eyewitness account" of Majeranowski

(1835).

However, as Tazbir and others have noted, the women convicted of witchcraft and

sentenced to the stake in Grabow may very well have escaped execution; certainly their

judges were punished. In fact our only record of this trial comes from the grod-court records

idea of the devil, the witch, and the vampire, in his Diabel w swojej postaci (1775-1777; abridged in DWOK
vol. 7 pp. 260-337). For a good brief survey of the Polish Enlightenment in English, see Grochulska 1982.
43
However, four women were burnt in the medium-large city of Nowe, in Royal Prussia, in 1747, after having
first been examined by an ecclesiastical court (Wijaczka 2005 p. 23).

71
 • Chapter 1.2 •

of a quarrel between the townspeople of Grabow and a certain Przybylowski, representative

or agent of the Grabow starosta Michal Radziwill. Among Przbylowski's actions to which

the burghers took exception was his decision to remove the Grabow wojt and jurymen from

office, "for the good of the town, since they, unskilled and having no education [...] ordered

six women, alleged witches, to be burnt without sufficient proof'44 (Akt grodzkich

ostrzeszowskich rel. obi. 15; cited after Michalski 1996 p. 94).45 Assessory Court rulings

could not prevent witch-trials; local noble officials could, and their attitudes were beginning

to change.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support Baranowski's contention (1952 p. 68) that

the Grabow case became known throughout Poland, or led directly to the abolition of witch-

trials. But similar trials will have been known to members of the reforming Sejm and the

new, centralized Permanent Council (Rada Nieustajajca) which, unlike the toothless

Assessory Court, did have some chance of enforcing a ban on witch-trials.46 At the Sejm of

1776, King Stanislaw August proposed a konstytucja abolishing the obtaining of confessions

through torture. Apparently quite spontaneously, the kasztelan of Biecz Wojciech

Kluszewski proposed an amendment to this konstytucja, removing death sentence "in cases

of malefice and witchcraft. " 47 The konstytucja was passed unanimously and without the

usual three-day deliberation. It stated in part:

"dla dobra samego miasta, kiedy nieumiej^tnych i zadnego oswiecenia nie maja_cych [...] szesc kobiet
czarownicami mianowanych, bez przekonania dostatecznego spalic kazali. "
The Grabow trial continues to be debated. The debate can be traced through the following: Baranowski and
Lewandowski 1987 [1950] p. 154; Baranowski 1952 p. 68; Tazbir 1966; Baranowski 1971 p. 429; Tazbir
ed. 1994; Michalski 1996 pp. 93-94; Wyporska 2002; Tokarska-Bakir 2001; Tazbir 2001b, 2002. Tazbir
notes, correctly to my mind, a marked unwillingness among some scholars to forego the sensationalism of
the original "eyewitness report."
Concerning the complex politics of judicial reform during the Sejm of of 1773-1776, reforms which were
combined with the processes of the First Partition of Poland between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, see
Michalski 1958.
"in causis maleficii i czarow"

72
 • Society and law •

Wedlug teyze samey reguly wszystkie Sa_dy, y All Courts and magistrates are to conform themselves
subsellia sprawic siq maia_ in causus maleficii y according to this same regulation in cases of malefice
czarow, w rozs^dzeniu ktorych, poenalitatem smierci and witchcraft, in the verdicts of which, we forever do
na zawsze znosiemy. A ta cala ustawa ma sie. away with the penalty of death. And this whole decree
rozciajac y na Wielki Xie_stwo Litewskie. applies as well to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
(VL vol. 8 pp. 882-883, quoted after Sawicki 1951-1952 vol. 1 part 2 p. 38) 4 8

Together with removal of torture, this decree put an end to legal witch-trials in Poland.

Andrzej Mlodziejowski, Kanclerz of the Korona, in a speech ending the Sejm session,

declared: "at last these trials for witchcraft, with their horrible consequences disgraceful to

the human race, will have no place in our nation"49 (quoted after Michalski 1996 p. 90).

Stanislaw August celebrated the Constitutio with the minting of a commemorative medal

(ibid.). Michalski suggests that the abolition of torture was accomplished easily in Poland

because it was not part of the legal tradition of the noble legislators: the grod-courts at which

the szlachta were tried did not use torture. It therefore carried no legal prestige or precedent

in noble circles. The small-town courts involved in witch-trials had no prestige at all, and

were, as we have seen, the butt of satire (1996 pp. 96-97).

The formal abolition of witchcraft as a capital offence did not of course mean that

people ceased to recognized their neighbors as witches. Nor does it mean that suspected

witches ceased to be brought before the courts: small-town and especially private-town

courts remained largely unreformable, and it would not be surprising if research were to

uncover scattered trials in the period after 1776. However, the "enlightened despots" of the

partitioning powers which eliminated Poland as a country in 1795 all had abolished the crime

of witchcraft during the 18th century; and all favored far more centralized and rationalized

judicial systems than had the loosely structured Noble Republic. So also did Napoleon, who

The full constitutio may be found in Diariusz sejmu ordynaryjnego pod zwiazkiem konfederacyi generalnej
obojga narodow agitujqce sie, Warszawa 1776, pp. 431-432; reprinted in VL vol. 8 pp. 882-883). Michalski
1996, upon which I base this section, gives a detailed analysis of the statute, its genesis and historiography.

73
 • Chapter 1.2 •

instituted his law code in large areas of Poland during the Duchy of Warsaw period (1807-

1815). Nevertheless, witch-craft related criminal and civil trials, if not witch-trials proper,

continued to occur throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, most recently, as already noted, in

2004.50

1.2.3: The iron century

As has been shown, a general legal and intellectual history of the period does little to

illuminate the steady rise of witch-trials in the 17th century, nor the acceleration of this rise

in the second half of that century. To be sure, some tendencies, notably the general decline of

legal culture and the retreat into a pious and xenophobic Catholicism by the great masses of

the szlachta, may help to explain some aspects of the Polish witch-trials. Certainly the late-

blooming movement for legal reform, and its near total lack of enforcement until late in the

18th century, as also the isolationism and obscurantism of the political classes, again until

very late in the 18th century, help to explain why witch-trials lasted so much later in Poland

than they did in, say, France or Scotland. Such factors help to explain the slow rate of decline

in witch-trials in the 18th century, but do little to explain the large number of trials in the

previous century.

Poland may have produced such curiosities as Chmielowski's Nowe Ateny in 17545 or

Czechowicz's Praktyka kryminalna in 1769, but the former simply follows Del Rio and other

"juz sprawy o czarodziejstwie tych okropnych i hanbiacych ludzkosc konsekwencyj w naszym narodzie miec
nie majaj'
50
Soldan asserts the occurance of a trial in 1795 near Poznafi; the evidence for this trial is, however, scanty
(1911 [1843] p. 332, following Scholtz 1830 p. 120; see also Wijaczka 2005 p. 56). But there continued to
be trials for defamation, or for attacking an alleged witch, or otherwise touching on witchcraft, throughout
the 19th and into the 20th centuries. On trials in the 19th and 20th centuries for defamation involving
witchraft, or for attacking an alleged witch, see Koranyi 1930; Schiffman 1987; Wijaczka 2005 pp. 51-57;
Tuwim 1960 [1923] p. 427 n. 5.
51
Vols. 1 and 2 originally published in 1745-1746; reprinted with small changes, together with vols. 3 and 4 in
1754-1756.1 have used the single-volume Wydawnictwo Literackie edition of 1968, which unfortunately

74
 • Society and law •

Jesuit sources, while the latter, as Zdrojkowski has insisted, had little or no influence (1949

pp. 117-121). Nor should such intellectual factors be exaggerated: the basic elements of

Western witchcraft theory were well known to educated Poles already in the later 16th

century, when witch-trials were still an extreme rarity. Legal culture certainly declined in the

17th century, but it had probably never reached a very high state of excellence beforehand, if

Groicki's complaints in the Porzqdek sqdow are to be given credit. Legal texts or

commentaries such as those of Damhouder provided a foundation for trials and influenced

the sorts of questions magistrates asked; they do not correlate closely, however, with a

sudden rise in the numbers of trials. The basic developments of the judicial revolution which

made torture the "queen of proofs" and which introduced some measure of inquisitorial

practice into Polish jurisprudence, indubitably set the stage for trials, but did not cause the

trials to occur.

Intellectual life, too, declined very decidedly after the 16th century Golden Age: but the

humanists and reformers of that age had always been a minority—nor is it obvious that they

would have cared very much about the plight of their peasantry. A figure such as Mikolaj

Rej, Protesant, humanist, exponent of the Golden Age literary culture, thought of his serfs as

little more than livestock (Hernas 1965 vol. 1), while it was Counter-Reformation preachers

such as Piotr Skarga, or pragmatic and decidedly non-humanist agriculturalists such as Jakub

Kazimierz Haur, who advocated treating the peasantry with some measure of humanity. And

those who would wish to find the cause for Polish witch-trials in the fanatical Catholicism of

the later 17th century would do well to remember that very nearly the only consistent

reproduces considerably less than half of the original. However, since this edition indicates the pagination of
the original in marginal notes, I have cited according to this original pagination. The 1968 edition contains
all of Chmielowski's material on witchcraft.

75
 • Chapter 1.2 •

defenders of witches, from 1639 onwards, were clergy, and that their main text was a

document derived from the Roman Inquisition.

Where intellectual history proves insufficient, socio-economic history may prove more

determinative of the course of events. In the following few pages, I give a very general

account of the historical situation, with special attention to the peasantry and inhabitants of

smaller towns. The picture that emerges, from around 1600 to the early 18th century, is one

of steady decline and increasing poverty, punctuated by periods of horrible violence, famine,

plague, and even greater poverty. This goes some way, I think, to explain the rise of witch-

trials in the same period.

• «$• •

The term "second enserfment" or "second serfdom" is used to characterize the agrarian

economies of Europe east of the Elbe, which from the 15th century saw a steady decline in

the rights and status of peasantry (Topolski 1985 p. 128). In Poland in the late middle ages,

peasants enjoyed considerable self-government and freedoms. The Piotrkow Statute of 1496

removed most of these rights: peasants could not leave their land or villages, could not

change their profession, move to another farm, or sell agrarian products without the

permission of their pan or his representative.52 Especially outside royal and church lands,

free peasantry came to be exceptional. Characteristic of the 16th and 17th centuries is the

growth of the folwark or demesne farm, created by the noble landowners via the take-over of

commons and fallow land and the purchase or confiscation of the fields previously belonging

52
Except where otherwise noted, the general description of peasant history offered here is based on Kort 1992
pp. 53-66, which is dated but sufficient for present purposes. In English, Topolski's ideal-typical model of
the folwark economy as part of the developing capitalist world-system, Zytkowicz's general characterization
of the agrarian economy in Poland and neighboring regions, and Samsonowicz's and Ma^czak's overview of
political-economic developments in the region in the early modern period (all in Ma_czak et al. eds. 1985)
collectively provide a good introduction to the developments described below. On the complex

76
 • Society and law •

to the soltys or wqjt, the peasant head of a village. These farms, geared above all to the export

of grain for the Western European market via river-traffic and the Gdansk port, established

an agrarian economy of resource extraction and monoculture. The folwark labor supply came

from the serf labor obligations (panszczyzna) of the peasantry, who had to support

themselves from the produce of their own lands, while also providing field labor to the

demesne. Although it is now accepted that panszczyzna never wholly supplanted rents and

wage labor, and that, in those regions outside the Vistula basin and therefore inconvenient for

the mass export of grain, rent-based land tenure continued to be quite common, serfdom

became the norm for most of the peasantry of central Poland.

These serfdom obligations became increasingly onerous over the course of the 16th

through early 18th centuries, as noble land-owners and leaseholders strove to maximize the

profit from the export of grain (the price of which declined throughout the 17th and early

18th century). In 1518, a hniec with one Ian of land was expected to provide one day of labor

per week on the folwark. By the mid-16th century this had grown to around three days per

week, by the late 17th century, to five-six days per week or even more. Obviously a peasant

working nearly every day on the folwark would have no time at all to work his own fields,

from which after all he was expected to feed himself, his family, and his livestock (including

the oxen with which he plowed the folwark fields). In fact, land-holding peasants supported

one or several komornicy (lit. "chamberpersons," lodgers), who provided the serf-labor on

the folwark and left the kmiec free to work his own fields.

At the same time that their feudal labor obligations were increasing, propertied peasants

found their own lands (from which they had now to support both themselves and their

historiography of the "second enserfment," see Aston and Philpin eds. 1985; and the bibliographical note in
Wandycz 2001 p. 304.

77
 • Chapter 1.2 •

komornicy) inexorably decreasing. At the end of the 15th century, a typical peasant holding

was reckoned at one Ian, approximately 16 hectares. Over the course of the next two

centuries, this holding shrank to one half or even one quarter Ian. Moreover, many peasant

households didn't even have this much. A peasant with a quarter-Ian of his own was still

considered, in the early 18th century, "pemorolny"—fully-farming; in other words he could

support his household from the produce of his own fields alone. But an increasing proportion

of the peasantry was made up of those whose land could not support them, and who had to

supplement their income with wage labor on the folwark or on the lands of a kmiec. These

"gardeners" (zagrodnicy) with a small field of their own, "cottagers" (charupnicy) with only

a hut and a tiny garden, and the afore-mentioned "lodgers" or komornicy lived in a hierarchy

of poverty, at the very bottom of which were the czeladnicy and parobey, landless laborers

working on contract for a place to sleep, board, and a tiny wage, and lacking even the life-

time guarantee of lodging enjoyed by komornicy. In the late 17th century, over half the

inhabitants of peasant households were servants or komornicy of various kinds. Some three

quarters of wealthy peasant households had servants, but even poorer landed peasants often

had at least one servant (Kopczyhski 1998 p. 205). Even the best-off kmiec was deeply poor,

but the internal differentiation of the peasant estate provided ample opportunity for the

jealousies and envy upon which witchcraft accusations depend.

The peasants' plight worsened throughout the period of witch-trials in Poland. Peasants

worked more, on less land and with fewer options for improving their lot. With the

stagnation of city and town development from the early 17th century, itself caused in part by

the increasing emphasis on noble-controlled grain export at the expense of other kinds of

trade or industry, surplus peasantry had no-where to go. Declining grain prices meant that

78
 • Society and law •

even those peasants who still had something to sell could get less for it than previously.

Spiraling inflation throughout the 17th century especially, together with the szlachta's

absolute unwillingness to increase its own nominal tax burden of two grosze per Ian, meant

that the burden of paying for the central government which benefited them so little fell

increasingly on the peasants. At the same time, the government's need for tax revenues

increased rapidly due to the near-chronic warfare of the 17th and early 18th centuries: the

rokosze or noble rebellions of 1606-1609 and 1665-1666, the campaigns against the Swedes

and Muscovites in Livonia at the beginning of the 17th century, the disastrous Muscovite

campaigns of 1609-1611 and 1617-1618, the Swedish wars of the 1620s, more or less

continual skirmishes and border wars against the Turks and Tartars, the Great Northern War

of early 18th century, and, above all, the cascading series of Cossack uprising, peasant

jacquerie, Russian invasion, and Swedish occupation that characterized the middle decade of

the 17th century. As a result of all this, peasants who already paid twenty times their early

16th-century tax in 1650, paid fifty times that tax in 1661 (Wyczanski 1991 pp. 290-291).

And they paid this tax, as already noted, despite having less land and more people to feed.

The more or less gradual deterioration of peasant and small-town life in Poland was

punctuated by disasters of various kinds. Unpaid soldiers returning from the Russian

campaign, and later during the Potop and Swedish wars, formed roving bands that looted the

countryside. To pay them off, the Crown regularly devalued the zloty, a policy which

contributed to spiraling inflation; this culminated in 1660 by a flood of devalued silver coin

(the famous "tymfs" named for the overseer of the crown mint, Andrzej Tymff); a real "red"

zloty made of gold came to be worth, not its nominal value of 90 szelajji, but as much as 800

79
 • Chapter 1.2 •

szel^gi. Waves of epidemic disease swept through the country: in 1621-1625 and again in

1628-1631 (Muszynska 1996 pp. 282-283).

None of these earlier problems can compare, however, to the total disaster of the mid-

n t h century. In 1648, the Cossack leader Bohdan Chmielnicki (or Khmelnytsky) rebelled

against Polish Catholic overlordship, the Cossacks quickly over-ran Ukraina, Woryn, Rus

and large parts of Malopolska. The massacres of Jews, Catholics, and townspeople in general

that followed in the wake of the Chmielnicki uprising have been attributed to rioting

peasantry rather than the Cossacks themselves—in any case they spread untold destruction

throughout the south-east. Chmielnicki called upon Russian aid in 1654, and between that

time and 1660 Russian armies plunderd much of Lithuania, Wolyn, Ukraine, and eastern

Malopolska. The Transylvanian prince Gyorgy Rakoczi invaded with a small army in 1657,

wandering at will through Malopolska, Mazowsze, and Ruthenia. Most crushingly of all, in

1655 the Swedes under Charles X Gustavus invaded, occupying or destroying most of the

cities and towns of central Poland over the next year and laying waste to the countryside. The

Polish army disintegrated, king Jan Kazimierz fled to Lwow and thence into Austria. The

spirited defense of the monastery at Jasna Gora in Czejstochowa, with its miracle-working

image of the Virgin (together with the unprecedented brutality of the Lutheran Swedish army

towards the Catholic Poles), sparked a national uprising which eventually managed to drive

out the Swedes. Nevertheless, the Potop or "Deluge," as the Swedish invasion is called,

together with the other disasters of the period 1648-1660, put a decisive end to an already

declining era of relative prosperity. Although recent historiography has tended to complicate

the old consensus whereby the Potop was treated as the main cause for all subsequent

80
 • Society and law •

political and economic decline (Muszynska 1996 p. 275), there can be no doubt at all of its

momentous effects especially on the lives of peasants and the inhabitants of small towns.

In fact, recent reservations about population loss during the Potop only serve to

emphasize the increased economic pressures brought upon those who survived it. Older

mortality estimates, reaching as much as 3.5 million or more than a third of the country's

population (Wyczahski 1991 pp. 290-291), have recently given way to much lower estimates:

records of people going to communion at Easter in the Sandomierz archidiaconate show a

drop of only 3% from 1646 to 1676 (Kowalski 1996 pp. 257-270). However, the economic

impact of the war and its aftermath was enormous: in approximately the same region, the

number of kmiec-owned farms dropped from 814 to 175 between 1615 and 1663—a loss of

over 78%. Moreover, the average size of these farms shrank from half a Ian to a quarter-Ian.

Finally (again, in approximately the same region) the amount of grain sown between 1652

and 1661 dropped from 1810 korcy to 677 korcy, a mere 38% of the prior productivity rate

(Guidon 2004 pp. 222-223). In other regions as well, the population did not drop nearly so

much as has been assumed, while the agrarian economy collapsed. The well-kept records of

the lands belonging to the Bishop of Krakow show the amount of grain sown between 1644

and 1668 to have dropped by more than half (Muszynska 1996 p. 284). At the same time,

peasant landholdings decreased drastically, in some places by as much as 56%. Ruined and

desperate after looting by the Swedes and requisitions by their own armies, peasants sold

their land to the Church or to the better-off nobility—thus increasing the size of folwarks,

while decreasing both the numbers of kmieci and the size of the landholdings of those

kmieci, from half a Ian to a quarter-Ian or less (ibid. pp. 285-287). Meanwhile, despite the

53
A measure of grain. Like all other early modern Polish measures, the korzec varied enormously from place to
place and time to time: it may have been approximately 50 kilograms.

81
 • Chapter 1.2 •

decreased area of land under cultivation and the decreased productivity of cultivated land, the

wheat export of 1662 was almost as high as in best pre-war years (Muszynska 1996 p. 285).

The tendency toward larger folwarks, smaller and fewer peasant farms, and more zagrodnice,

chahipnice or entirely landless peasants, was greatly accelerated by the mid-century disaster,

while the demographic collapse which would have taken some economic pressure off the

survivors, has been shown to be much less than previously supposed.

To sum up: after the disaster of the 1650s, there were nearly as many people in rural

areas, but with less land available, in smaller plots; there was less grain sown and harvested,

but about the same amount exported as previously. There was less money, and what there

was had been devalued; but taxes had doubled. Around the same time, serfdom obligations

on the folwark rose to five or six days a week, or more. What had already been a precarious

existence became nearly unbearable. The pressures and tensions in village life must have

been enormous.

The Deluge accelerated rather than caused the tendency toward pauperization in the

Polish countryside. Its destructive effect on towns, and especially on the network of smaller

and medium-sized towns which had seemed to show such promise in the late 16th century,

was total, and for the most part permanent. Maria Bogucka has summarized the Potop losses

of urban centres: in Wielkopolska in 1661, the number of vacant houses in cities and towns

was greater than 50%—and this despite the fact that so many houses had been burnt or

otherwise destroyed. A inventory of royal towns in 1665 found that between 1659 and that

year, anywhere from 14% to 88% of houses had been destroyed: in Pyzdry, for example, only

59 houses remained out of 230 before the war. In Mazowsze, some 78% of all town and city

homes were destroyed; Plohsk was reduced from 130 to just 21 buildings. In Malopolska,

82
 • Society and law •

some 60% of buildings were destroyed; many towns, including formerly important centres

such as Sandomierz or Nowy Sa^cz, were destroyed almost utterly. Of especial interest to the

present study, in light of the numerous trials conducted there in 1665, is the destruction of

ChQciny: from a city of 327 houses in 1629, just 34 remained after the Deluge (Bogucka and

Samsonowicz 1986 pp. 339-432). Once-important regional centres such as Biecz nearly

faded from view (Kaleta 1956); smaller towns ceased to function at all. Kleczew, for

example, a "medium-sized" town in the 16th century, had a population of perhaps 500 in

1673 (Wislicz 2004b p. 66, and n. 3); Wyszogrod, with a population of some 2,500 in 1550,

shrank to some 600 souls after 1650. The percentage of urban to village inhabitants dropped

from around 26% in the late 16th century, to perhaps 18% in 1662 (ibid. pp. 361-362).54

Since cities, and especially smaller towns, had been gradually declining already because of

the general turn of the Polish economy toward agricultural export, most of these towns never

recovered their former importance. Townspeople continued to enjoy the rights and privileges

of Magdeburg law. They continued to have their own courts and, despite very considerable

oversight from their noble owners or leaseholders, some measure of self-government.

Nevertheless, with their wooden buildings, little in the way of trade or handicrafts, low

literacy, and a largely subsistence agricultural economy, small and medium-sized towns

came to differ little from villages, and townspeople, in their practices and mentalities,

differed little from the surrounding peasants.55

These estimates assume the large loss of life in villages that has just been critiqued. Since village populations
remained relatively high, the drop in percentage of town populations in relation to village populations will in
fact have been substantially greater than suggested here.
The Polish experience of the 17th century crisis is, of course, a local variation on the general 17th century
crisis of Europe as a whole—a century that saw the Thirty-Years War, the English Civil War and Dutch
Revolution, rising taxes and spiraling inflation nearly everywhere. On the period in general, see e.g. Aston
ed. 1965; Parker and Smith eds. 1978. Piotr Wandycz provides an overview of the 17th century crisis in East
Central Europe (2001 pp. 77-104). Chapter 8 of Brigg's Witches and neighbors (1996) is a careful

83
 • Chapter 1.2 •

• *l* •

The general description of urban and rural decline offered above accounts, in general,

for the rising number of witch-trials: it does not, however, provide a causal explanation of

specific trials. This point bears repeating. The decline in peasant livelihoods and the

corresponding increase in village tensions over the course of the 17th century helps explain

the statistical increase in witch-accusation, but it is not, in any straightforward way, a cause

of any specific accusation. Because we tend to think of witchcraft as unreal, and therefore as

something in need of special explanation in ways that, say, murder or theft do not require, it

can be very tempting to treat such statistical correlations as causal relations: witch-accusation

becomes an "escape valve" for social tensions, or a "scapegoating mechanism" entirely

accounted for by the economic situation. This is a mistake. Just as theft and murder increase

statistically during times of poverty, and yet each specific act of theft or murder has its own

motivations in very specific circumstances and narratives, so too with witch-accusation. Each

specific witch was accused for specific crimes against her neighbors or her manor-lord, and

each accusation was grounded in very specific circumstances of reputation, interpersonal

relations, and evidence. The nearly unbearable pressures faced by many villagers in late-17th

century Poland meant that they were more likely than at other times in history to encounter

the sorts of misfortune often attributed to witchcraft—children and cattle dying, fields ruined,

milk spoiled, health destroyed. It also meant that such misfortunes were more disastrous than

they had been in earlier times: a household with one cow is more strongly affected by its

sudden death than is a household owning a dozen animals. So the circumstances favoring

witch-accusation were increased, and such accusations, and trials, increased correspondingly;

application of the social and economic upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries to the phenomenon of
witch-trials in Europe as a whole.

84
 • Society and law •

but the general situation never caused the specific accusation. This crucial issue is explored

further in section 1.4.1. First, however, we must attend to a more basic issue: who were the

Polish witches?

85
Chapter 1.3: Who were the witches?
In his Disquisitiones magicae Martin Del Rio criticized Johannes Weyer for distinguishing

scrupulously among such terms as sagae (wise women), venefici (poisoners), malefici

(harmful magicians), incantores (enchanters), striges (night-flying witches), and lamiae

(vampiric or child-devouring witches)—as if these made a real difference (Del Rio 1632 Bk.

5 § 16, Maxwell-Stuart ed. 2000 pp. 224-225). Del Rio was right: by the 17th century, most

of these terms and more had been absorbed into the general category of the witch, and were

used by most authors interchangeably. Their literal meanings preserved clues to the building

blocks from which the early modern witch had been constructed—she was a wise woman, a

poisoner, an evildoer, an enchantress, a blood-sucking child-stealing night-demon associated

with screech-owls. But a work of demonology, or a trial record, could refer to a woman as a

striga without thereby implying vampirism or night-flight, and could speak of a venefica

whose magical crime had not involved the use of poisons.

In Poland, for the most part, the vocabulary of witchcraft was more restricted. Clerical

authors spoke of guslarki and zabobonice—cunning-folk and superstition workers—

categorizations which they insisted must be kept distinct from czarownice or witches. In trial

records we find, in Latin, mostly malefica and venefica, although at least one trial document

refers to a suspected witch as a succubita (#18, Iwkowo 1602). In Polish the suspect was

nearly always simply a czarownica, more rarely a guslarka or a baba—a term that otherwise

means "old woman" or "village woman." Quite often records do not apply a category-word

to the accused at all, but only speak of her crimes: maleficium, veneficium, immissio

daemonum; or simply "using witchcraft [bawienie si? czarami]."

86
 • Who were the witches? •

In contrast, what might be termed the lexicographic demonology of early modern

Poland displays a marked tendency to mix and equate terms for witches with terms for

demons of various sort—the witches thus become demonized quite literarally. Athough this

material should not be treated as very important, it does demonstrate the fluid conceptual

boundaries between labels attaching to persons and those attaching to demons; it also gives

us some indication of the contours of the Polish night-witch. For example, the Jesuit

lexicographer Grzegorz Knapiusz, in his massive Thesaurus Polono-Latino-Graecus, defines

the female "night-demon" nocnica as "shade,1 night-groper, noon-tide demon, child's

bogeyman, night terrors. " 2 This is list of supernatural creatures, most more or less equivalent

in their primary function as personifications of bad dreams. But if we follow Knapiusz's

cross-reference to przypoludnica3 we find the synonyms "Czarownica. Wiedma seu

Latawica," that is to say "witch, hag, flying demon" (Knapiusz 1632, quoted after

Wisniewska 2003 pp. 242-243). This last term, a rare female variant of the male latawiec,

could be used as a translation oisuccubus, just as latawiec translated incubus (Chmielowski

1754 vol. 3 p. 208; see chapters 3.2 and 3.3), but it could also signify a being of almost

bewildering variety, both witch and demon; a creature whose essence seems to lie in her very

indeterminability:

Bywam ptakiem, zwierz^ciem, kotka, abo sowa_, Sometimes I'm a bird, an animal, a cat, or an owl,
W nocy wielka, niewiasta,, co mi smiercia, zowa_. At night a huge woman, who is called death.
Kto mie, ujzrzy w pohidnie, to przypoludnica,, If you see me at noon, I'm & przypoludnica,
A pod wieczor zas wiedna, abo latawica,. But in the evening I'm a wiedma or a latawica.

1
Cma. Now used only in the sense of "moth," and, idiomatically, as "swarm" in phrases such as cma ludzi "a
whole bunch of people." In 16th-17th century Polish it more usually meant "shadow" or "darkness. "
"cma, omacnica, v. przypohidnica, straszydlo dziecinne, strachy nocny"
3
Noon-tide demon. In one version or another, the noon-tide demon is distributed throughought Mediteranean
and Slavic folklore. Psalm 91:6 has its "destruction that wastes at noonday," the daemonium meridianum of
the Vulgate. Eusebius's psychologizing demonology associated it with the lassitude and boredom which
could distract a monk from contemplation, hence its popular modern usage as a metaphor for clinical
depression. In contemporary Slavic folklore, the przypoludnica and its equivalents, personified as women,
bring sun-stroke or head-aches to field workers at their mid-day rest (Podgorska and Podgorski 2005
pp. 362-367).

87
 • Chapter 1.3 •

{Peregrynacja 1614 w . 858-861; 1961 p. 173)4

In other sources the poludnica or przepoludnica could translate Greek ephialtes—also

usually understood as a succubus/incubus and bringer of nightmares ( (Rostafinski 1900 vol.

2 p. 510; after a late 15th-century manuscript); or the child stealing lamia ( (SSP, after

Muszyhski 1968 p. 213); or, by metaphorical extension from both of these, a prostitute (SSP;

after Bruckner 1893 p. 16). Similarly, Ursinus' early 17th-century grammar-text equates the

already encountered nocnica to Latin strix, in all its meanings: screech owl, vampiric night

demon, and witch. In so doing, Ursinus assimilates the local entity into the classical

framework: "Strix—the night screech-owl, nocnica, a bird as the ancients describe it: great,

grey, with an owl's head and claws, with breasts like a bat. From this it is also a nickname for

witches, who are called wiedmy, because they turn into such a bird and suck the blood of

children. The people of Ruthenia avere this strongly to this very day, and by certain speeches

drive nocnice away from women in labor"5 (Ursinus 1619, quoted after Wisniewska 2003

p. 245; cf. Pliny, Historia naturalis 8.22; Cohn 2000 [1975] p. 162; on exorcism of nocnice,

see 2.2.1). As a final example, the termjedza with which Wujek translated the lilith of Isaiah

34:14 (Wujek 2000 [1599]; the Vulgate uses lamia, the KJV screech-owl, the NRSV lilith

once again) is otherwise a forest-demon and night-witch (cognate to the east-Slavic baba

jaga), or, already in the 17th century, a "very bad woman"6 (Knapiusz 1621-1632; cited after

Wisniewska 2003 p. 114), a meaning it retains today. Otwinowski used the same term to

4
1 suspect, in fact, that Knapiusz's entry is based on this passage: note the appearance in both of the rather rare
form wiedma.
5
"Strix—Nocny puhacz; nocnica, ptakjako go starzy opisujq, wielki, siwy, sowiego Iba i paznogci, cyckowaty
jako niedoperz. Sta^d przezwisko maja. czarownice, ktore wiedmami zowia^ ze sie_ w takiego ptaka
odmieniaja^ i krew z dzieci ss% O tym mocnie i po dzis dzieh w Rusi trzymaja^ i pewnymi przemowami od
poloznic nocnice odganiaja^. "
6
"kobieta bardzo zla"

88
 • Who were the witches? •

translate the Eumenides in his Polish rendition of Metamorphoses bk. 4 v. 428 (Ovid 1638,

cited after Wichowa 1990 p. 171).

These examples give us some notion of the range and overlap and ambiguity of the

Polish night-witch, as its associations and connotations interconnected with local and

classical demons, with prostitutes, with screech-owls. Similar questions of ambiguous

categorization will be important in Part 3 of this work, when we examine the relationships of

the devils in Polish witch-trials with Christian devils, pre-Christian demons, and fairy-folk.

Turning now from the contemporary categorizations of the imagined witch to the actual

categorization of actual witches—that is, real people successfully so labelled—one might

hope to find a simpler or at least clearer picture. A vain hope: as we will see, contemporary

stereotypes of the witch interacted with actual witches in complicated ways.

• •$• •

In his Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot described stereotypical witches as

"women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poor,

sullen, superstitious, and papists" (1964 [1584] bk. 1 ch. 3, p. 29). Polish anti-witch-trial

literature echoes Scot, noting that a reputation for witchcraft attaches, illegitimately, to "old

women with ugly faces"7 (Instrukcya 1705 [1688] f. 15). Popular Polish literature, like its

western counterparts, regularly shows the witch to be poor, ugly, and old. The ribald

Peregrynacja dziadowska presents "witches" as poor beggar-women using their pretended

powers to dupe gullible matrons out of a few groszy or a crust of bread (1614 w . 744-813;

1961 pp. 170-171); or as lame, delusional drunks sitting by the hearth at the alms-house and,

consumed by envy, dreaming of the day they can take magical revenge on their betters (1614

w . 786-809; 1961 pp. 171-172).

89
 • Chapter 1.3 •

Despite a near consensus in literary sources, it is not at all clear from trial records

themselves that accused witches would have fit the stereotype. With a very few exceptions,

they would nearly all have been what Scot would call "papists;" by the definitions at least of

ecclesiastical authors they were necessarily superstitious; and they were very nearly all

women—an important fact to which we shall return. But were they old, widowed, ugly, lame,

and destitute? Historians of European witchcraft used to accept this image of the witch more

or less without qualification, particularly as it fit so well with their explanatory models of the

witch-hunts as attacks on eccentrics or deviants (Horsley 1979); on surplus women or

dangerously liberated widows (Monter 1977; Brauner 1995), on beggars asking for charity

and inciting guilt in those who refuse it (Thomas 1973; MacFarlane 1972). But recent

scholarship has complicated the picture. Midelfort's pioneering study of the German trials

found that the stereotype of old poor widows fit well enough for small trials, but tended to

break down during the major witch-panics characteristic of south west Germany: in these,

gender and age tended to even out, while economically the accused tended, if anything, to be

slightly better off than their accusers (Midelfort 1972, 2002a). This is perhaps not so

surprising, as during these panics the ordinary social tensions that ordinarily gave rise to

witchcraft accusations tended to be over-ridden by other mechanisms such as chain-

denunciation. But it is now argued for some regions of Europe that even in ordinary witch-

trials, the accused failed to typify the stereotype of the widowed beggar. In Scotland, for

example, Lauren Martin argues that accusations occurred between "relative social equals,"

and that these were for the most part, not beggars or the very poor but "middling peasants"

and the wives of craftspeople (2002 p. 75). Already in the early 1980s, Christina Larner

asserted that the average witch was a "married middle aged woman of the lower peasant

7
"stare Niewiasty, y Szpe_tne na twarzy. "

90
 • Who were the witches? •

class." Moreover, though Larner appreciated the attraction the witch-role could hold for the

very poor, and insisted on the part played by patriarchy on preferentially labeling women as

witches, she approached with deep skepticism all attempts to characterize the witch as a

statistical category of marginalization (1981 pp. 94-102, quotation at p. 98). Marianne

Hester, in explicit dialogue with Horsley's depiction of the witch as old cunning-woman, and

despite her own commitment to a reading of witch-trials as a mechanism of patriarchal social

control of women, noted that in England at least half the accused witches were married, and

most did not appear to be independent or rebellious or otherwise overtly threatening (Hester

1988; cf. Hester 1996). P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, commenting on Scot's characterization of

witches and others like it, reminds us that although the witch was "presented in popular print,

as well as in learned demonology, as the opposite of desirable womanhood," this is a literary

trope. "We must therefore beware taking literally every instance which seeks to portray the

witch as old, ugly, and marginalized. Such descriptions formed an essential part of the

propaganda; they were not intended to provide readers or listeners with a likeness drawn

from life" (Maxwell-Stuart 2001a p. 63, emphasis added).

Who, then, were the Polish accused witches, as presented in actual trials and as

imagined in literary texts? I consider first, briefly, questions of religious affiliation, estate,

wealth, marital status, age and occupation. The crucial feature shared by the vast majority of

witches—their female gender—requires careful interpretation and is discussed last. Most of

the data in this section depends on my database of 179 trials from the years 1511-c. 1775. As

already signaled, this database is in some ways artifactual; the information that can be

extracted from can do no more than point out trends and probabilities. The reader is urged, in

91
 • Chapter 1.3 •

particular, to use the statistics and percentages of the following several pages as qualitative

indications of the probable state of affairs, rather than as quantitative measures.

1.3.1: Religion and ethnicity

With the exception of some of the accused in the Lublin trials and in the mountain villages,

as well as at least one accused witch in Kujawy (#163, Barcin 1735), all the accused witches

considered in this study were Catholic and Polish. The collective representation of the witch,

however, frequently incorporated the notion that witches were foreign, both religiously and

ethnically. In his influential Lives of the Saints, Piotr Skarga listed black magic among the

crimes typically practiced by Jews (30 march (Simon of Trent) par. 6; 1881 vol. 3 p. 350).9 In

Worek Iudaszow, Sebastian Klonowic's versified catalog of criminality, the Lublin poet and

court-scribe briefly discusses witchcraft and divination as characteristic crimes of Cyganie or

Gypsies (1960 [1600] p. 94).10 Literary and, to a lesser extent, popular images of the devil

portrayed him as a German, and therefore a Protestant (Tazbir 1986a; and see 3.1). This

tendency carries over into, for example, the characterization of German Protestant academies

as schools of witchcraft in the Czarownica powolana (1714 [1639] qu. 1 pp. 26-27); or

Marcin of Klecko's assertion that the Protestant churches of Poznah were the site of Bald

Most of the inhabitants of Klimkowka and its environs, the records of which form the main basis for my
characterization of village-court witch-trials, were Ruthenian and therefore Orthodox or, later, Greek
Catholic (## 24, 32, 79, 89, 90, 132, 133,134); the same is true of Wara (#10). The witches of Zablotowo
were Orthodox (#53), while the noble couple jailed for witchcraft in Zaslaw may very well have been
Catholic (#165). The accused in the Lublin trials came, in some instances, from deep within Ruthenia or
even Ukraina; however in many cases they seem to have been Catholic. Anna Swedycka of Stary Sol (#80,
Lublin 1678) was probably Greek Catholic, as may also have been the accused in trials #87 and #161—
although in the latter their feudal master was certainly Catholic.
9
Cf. 2.3.3 below. See now also Teter's brief discussion of Jewish midwives as witches in Polish anti-Semitic
literature (Teter 2006 p. 74).
10
See also the decree of the bishop of Chelmno of 1759 "concerning cunning-people and Gypsies" [o
wieszczkach i Cyganach]," forbidding practices such as divination and folk blessing; Wijaczka 2005 p. 32.
Although the accused witch Anna Swedycka denounced an accomplice for "enchanting and gypping"—

92
 • Who were the witches? •

Mountain (1607 p. 87; see also 2.1.4). However, this trope is entirely absent from the trial

records I have seen, unless one can find it in the accusation against the Bydgoszcz baker Jan

Bialy that he mixed into his bread-dough the bones of executed thieves and herbs purchased

from "a thin German woman,"11 (#69, Bydgoszcz 1670). The supposition, common in many

witch-believing societies, that the magic of foreigners is stronger and more dangerous than

the home-grown variety,12 finds expression in the employment, by the Zawadzki family in

Wolyh, of the son of a local Tatar mullah to enchant their rivals (#165, Zaslaw 1739), or in

the Mytko family's recruitment of a "Vallachian"13 as part of their concerted magical attack

on the Podgorski brothers (#161, Lublin 1732; and see Appendix A).

However, the only religio-ethnic stereotype to have any real traction in both elite and

popular conceptions of the witch is their association with Ruthenians, here understood widely

as the whole of non-Polish, non-Catholic Slavs in the vast eastern regions of the

Commonwealth. Well before witch-trials came to be common in Poland, Klonowic

characterized Ruthenia as a land "ruled by poison and enchantment" (Roxolania (1584 v.

1563, 1996 p. 112).14 Nearly a century later, Jakub Kazimierz Haur suggested in his popular

"licza^c i cygani^c", by which she seems to mean divination—she does not suggest that the accomplice was a
Gypsy in fact (#80, Lublin 1678).
11
"chuda niemka"
12
For example, it seems to be a general feature of African sorcery beliefs that neighbors have the stronger and
the more malevolent magic. See e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1967 (concerning Zande views of Dinka magic);
Geschiere and Fisiy 1994 (on Bamileke views of Maka witchcraft) and Bastian 1993 p. 157 n. 6 (on Igbo
beliefs about the magic of other regions of Nigeria).
13
"woloszka." The people of Moldavia and the peasantry of Transylvania, both of which counries had close
historical ties with Poland, were called Wotochy (Vlachs, Vallachians). But the Carpathian mountain
shepherds, whose settlements ran deep into Polish territory, were also of Vallachian origin; although by this
point most spoke one or another Slavic dialect.
14
Despite the ethnographic pretensions of this Latin poem, in which Klonowic describes his travels through the
Ruthenian regions bordering his native Lublin, the witch he portrays owes more to classical sources than to
anything he is likely to have encountered on his journey:

93
 • Chapter 1.3 •

Sklad abo Skarbiec that anyone who does not believe in witchcraft "should be sent to live

deep in the Ruthenian regions," and they will soon witness it with their own eyes (1693

p. 449).15 Chmielowski, alluding to Del Rio's anecdote of a German witch who brought forth

milk from a hole in the wall,16 says "Podole, Ukraina, Rus, and especially Vallachia have

many such milking-holes"17 (1754 vol. 3 p. 241).18 Among the evidence against the house

servant Paprocka, her accuser adduced that her mother "must have taught her something; she

was in Ruthenia too and the fama publica concerning her, is that she is a witch"19 (#143,

Krakow 1713). According to Knapiusz's Polish-Latin dictionary, the Polish for "saga" was

"czarownica" or "Rusiianka" (1621; cited after Mejor ed. 1996 p. 152).

Considering the multi-ethnic, multi-religious character of the Polish-Lithuanian

commonwealth, it is not surprising that ethnic and religious stereotypes should be

incorporated into the image of the witch. What does surprise is that they should have been so

incorporated to so little an extent. Most of the trials considered in this study took place in the

central, Polish areas of the Commonwealth; nevertheless even in such areas there were

"foreigners" aplenty: Germans (Protestant or otherwise) in western Wielkopolska and

Philtra, veneficium Russis dominantur in oris, Poison and enchantment rule Ruthenia
Est quoque sagarum Russica terra ferax. The Ruthenian lands swarm with witches.
Vidi ego decrepitas volitare per umbram Here I saw old hags, flying in the dark
Et vidi volucres tempore noctis anus. I saw old women flying by night.
Vidimus e sudo pluvias deducere caelo I saw how enchantresses, from the blue sky
Incantrices carmine saepe suo. Called down rain with their muttered verses
Fulmina cum ventis et mixta tonitrua nimbis, Lightning, whirlwind, hail, thunder and rain
heu, segeti grando carmie iussa nocent. Thrown by a curse, to destroy the fields of grain.
Klonowic, Roxolania (1584 w . 1563-1570, 1996 p. 112).
15
The Sklad abo skarbiec, an encyclopedic guide to every aspect of manor-management, was a very
considerably expanded version of Haur's earlier Oekonomia Ziemianska (1675). It went through 11 editions,
and held pride of place in rural noble libraries throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries (Partyka 1994).
The first major monograph on this work is Piotr Kowalski's Theatrum swiata wszystkiego (2000a).
16
He cites Del Rio Lib. 29, 12. There is no 29th book of Del Rio's Disquisitiones, and I have been unable to
locate the anecdote.
17
"Wiele takich Podole, Ukraina, Rus, a naybardziey Woloszczyzna ma wydoynic"
18
See also Dunczewski's close paraphrase of Chmielowski (1759 f. H2; cited after Baczko and Hinz eds. 1975
p. 54), and Tazbir's comments on the general belief in Ruthenian witches (1978 p. 163).
19
"musiala i ona czego nauczyc, ta tez w Rusi byla i fama publica o niej, ze czarownica jest. "

94
 • Who were the witches? •

Kujawy, Scots in Lublin, Armenians in Lwow, Gypsies and Jews widely scattered through

the whole region. And yet they figure very little in trials or in literature. Even the stereotype

of the Ruthenian witch owes a great deal, one suspects, to the quite correct observation that

the Orthodox church accommodated pre-Slavic popular practices to far greater a degree than

did its Catholic neighbor. To the Jesuit eye of Chmielowski or the humanist eye of Klonowic,

some Ruthenian popular practices may have seemed quite pagan indeed. But this stereotype

too, even in regions where Catholic (Polish) and Orthodox or Greek Catholic (Ruthenian)

populations mixed and intermingled, plays a very minor part in actual accusations or

testimony. Religious or cultural "others" tended to be accused of other things (heresy for

Germans, ritual murder for Jews). The processes by which one came to suspect, and

ultimately to accuse, a neighbor of witchcraft, depended on the regular social intercourse of

members of an in-group with each other: in practice though not always in theory, witches

were the enemy within (cf. Cohn 2000 p. 147).

1.3.2: Age and marital status

The records rarely provide sufficient data to determine the age or marital status of accused

witches. Husbands may be mentioned, or are more rarely called in themselves for

questioning; more rarely still does an accused witch or a witness give any indication of age.

Of the 355 accused witches in my database, I have reliable evidence for the ages of only 71,

and the marital status of 183. This evidence is nearly always indirect.20 Unmarried women

20
It has sometimes been possible to infer an accussed witch's marital status from lexicographic evidence (e.g.,
the -owa and —owka ending to surnames or occupation names indicating that a woman is "wife o f her
husband—"Szewcowa" is "the wife of the szewc, thus "cobbler's wife). However, such a method must be
used with considerable caution. Of a woman whose name contains -owa we know only that she has been
married, but not whether she may now be a widow; moreover, such suffixes are not applied consistently, and
some surnames regularly don't take them. From lexigographic evidence, Barbara Grzeszowka ought to be
the wife of Gregorz. In fact she was married to Mikolaj Skowronka—Grzegorz may have been a previous

95
 • Chapter 1.3 •

are quite often described as such, as are widows. In the former case, but not the latter, I have

treated the marital status as indicative also of age: peasant-women married in their twenties,

so an unmarried woman must be young (or otherwise exceptional, in which case this would

probably be mentioned, and it is not), whereas young or middle-aged widows were hardly

infrequent. Occasionally, a woman was given the epithet stara, "the old" (e.g. "old Dorota"

#172, Kiszkowo 1761); others were habitually referred to as baba in the records (e.g. #112,

Reina Bartoszowa, Kleczew 1693)—a term that has connotations of superstition and

sometimes beggary, but which also always implies old age. Regina Lewczykowa, although

still married and working, must have been rather elderly, since her brother, a witness on her

behalf at her trial, put his own age at 70 (#118, Lublin 1698). The Lobzenica court initially

tortured one Barwa "lightly," on account of her age (#110, Lobzenica 1692). In the same trial

Katarzyna Derlina testified that she had been married for forty years, which would make her

at least 60—quite old by the standards of the time; Oryszka, who put her own age at 50,

thought of herself as "quite old" (#87, Lublin 1681). If we understand age culturally rather

than in terms of some absolute numerical standard, than any woman who had been married a

long time or who had seen her children grown to adulthood would be thought of as old. By

this standard, Hlacholicha, married for 23 years and the mother of seven surviving children,

will have been treated as an old woman by her neighbors (#87, Lublin 1681).

Of the 72 women whose approximate age is known to me, 29 (40.3%) were "young,"

11 (15.3%) were "middle-aged"—a category here meaning, roughly, married with non-adult

children—and 32 (44.4%) were "old." Of the 183 women for whom I have some indication

husband (#60, Che_ciny 1665a). Similarly, the -owna ending, ("daughter o f ) may indicate a young,
unmarried woman; however, it can also be relational. For example Regina Kusiowna may be thus labelled
only because she is referred to, in the context of her sentence, as the daughter of Petronela Kusiewa (#172);
it does not necessarily follow that she has no husband and no entirely different surname in other contexts.

96
 • Who were the witches? •

of marital status, 76 (41.3%) were unmarried, just 30 (16.4%) were married, 59 (32.2%) were

widowed. A further 18 (9.8%) were either married or widowed; a woman who mentions her

children but not her husband, for example, falls under this category. These statistics suggest

that most accused witches were either young and unmarried or old and widowed: however,

they are deeply misleading. Both youth and age, maidenhood and widowhood, were

departures from what might be thought of as the "default" status of women in early modern

Poland—which was that of a married mother. Most records make no mention of a woman's

age or marital status, and when they do, it is often because this status was a departure from

the norm. For example, in the trial often women in Kiszkowo (#173, 1761), one is called old,

two are the unmarried daughters of accused witches, but there is no mention at all of the age

or marital status of the other seven—who quite likely were middle-aged and married. The

same is quite likely true for a large portion of the 283 witches for whom I have no indication

of age, and the 172 for whom I have no data on marital status.

This intuition—with the large gaps in my data, it can be little more than an intuition—

that the majority of Polish accused witches were married and middle-aged, is born out by a

few regional studies. According to Wijaczka's study of the witch-trials in the Swietokrzyskie

region, most were married, with few accused widows (2003a). Tomasz Wislicz's intensive

study of the Kleczew trials reveals a few older witches, a few young witches (including a ten

year old girl, and the 15-year-old Marjanna discussed in 2.3.3); but most appear to be married

adults (2004b p. 73). According to Andrzej Karpinski, of the 78 women accused of

witchcraft in Poznan, Lwow and Lublin, 80% were married (1995 pp. 319-320). Actual

accused witches, as opposed to their literary or folkloric representation, appear to have quite

usually been ordinary married women, in the prime of life.

97
 • Chapter 1.3 •

1.3.3: Estate

It should come as no surprise that the great majority of witches were peasants and

townspeople, and that of the latter, most were commoners: the wives of petty craftsmen and

traders. Of the 294 accused witches whose estate is known, 214 or 73% were peasants, 74 or

25% townspeople, and 6 or 2% szlachta.21 The nobility never found themselves a primary

target of witchcraft accusation anywhere in Europe.22 In Poland it was functionally

impossible for a noblewoman to be tried for witchcraft: among other things, she was immune

from imprisonment without due process, and from interrogation under torture. Neither the

town magistrates before whom witches were tried, nor the Magdeburg Law which guided

those magistrates, had any jurisdiction over nobility. If the Konstytucja of 1543 governing

church-court jurisdiction was taken seriously (and there is no evidence that it ever was,

except by clerical polemicists), it would very clearly have given jurisdiction over noble

witches to ecclesiastical courts: but the szlachta, despite its piety and despite all the successes

of Counter-Reformation, never ceded back to the Church the de facto immunity from

ecclesiastical jurisprudence it had won in the mid-16th century. Although noblewomen made

frequent use of witches' services (e.g. #87, #161) or even dabbled themselves, especially in

love-magic, (#65, #170; cf. Czarownica 1714 [1639] p. 29; Brzezinska 1996), they rarely

The percentage of peasantry should be corrected upward, since it is strongly probable that most of the 61
accused for whom I was unable to determine estate, belonged also to that class. Compare Wijaczka's
analysis of the accused in Kleczew between 1682 and 1700: 60% were peasants and 40% were townsfolk
(Wislicz 2004b p. 73). The relatively high percentage of townsfolk might plausibly be explained by either or
both of two factors: first, the smallness of Kleczew and the surrounding towns from which the accused
came, in which the distinction between commoner townsfolk and peasantry was negligible; second, the
tendency in intense witch-hunts, of which late- 17th century Kleczew is our only clear Polish example, for
accusations to spill over into categories usually exempt.
Partial exceptions to this rule might be the highly political trials against alleged preternatural assassins in Ivan
the Terrible's Muscovy (Zguta 1977b; Ryan 1998), and the similar intrigues in 1590s Scotland which
sparked the witch-persecution in that country (Maxwell-Stuart 2001b)

98
 • Who were the witches? •

paid the price for such activity. With the exception of a few women whose noble status was

considered sufficiently doubtful by the courts to be ignored (the cunning-woman and

procuress Anna Chociszewska, #8, Poznan 1582; the beggar-woman Regina Wierbicka, #84

Bochnia 1679) the only szlachta I know of to have been punished in any way for witchcraft

were a married petty noble couple and their associate, jailed by the Crown Tribunal for the

magical attack they attempted against the owner of the village leased to them (#165, Zaslaw

and Lublin 1656). As we have seen, when a quite powerful nobleman attempted to punish a

poor noble maiden of solid pedigree for the love-magic she had worked on his son, things

went poorly for him, and he had to pay the wronged maiden an indemnity of 200 zloty (#170,

Krakow 1758).

Of accused townswomen, most belonged to the plebian order; they were the wives of

petty craftspeople or traders (e.g. Dorota Pilecka, cobbler's wife, #75, Slomniki 1674);

house-servants (e.g. Maryna, #27, Lublin 1627); or marginal women of the suburban slums

(such as Zofia Baranowa, #39, Lublin 1643). There are a few exceptions. In Lublin, the

coach-maker's wife Regina Sokolkowa, accused of witchcraft and abortion, appealed to the

Assessory Court; the appeal would have succeeded, had she not run away before its favorable

decision reached Lublin (#56, Lublin 1661). In Bydgoszcz, the three-times widow Katarzyna

Paprocka, owner of a house and involved in money-lending, would most likely have

succeeded in her appeal had not a letter arrived from Chehnno implicating her in witchcraft

there (#33, Bydgoszcz 1638).

Usually, however, accusations against women of prosperous or established family were

unlikely to succeed. When in 1768 the Lublin wojt Jozef Kurowski attempted to block the

election of Karol Kreps as his successor, by spreading the rumor that "His honor Mr. Kreps

99
 • Chapter 1.3 •

killed someone in the Rrejpiecki forest, and His Wife is involved in Witchcraft," the

strategy backfired. Kurowski was compelled to retract his assertions, and to apologize for

"frivolously and inconsiderately" [frivoli et inconsiderate] accusing his colleague (APLublin,

AMLublin sig. 184 (Consularia) ff. 34-36). Accusation against high-ranking women could

act as a brake on witch-prosecutions. When in 1702 accusations of witchcraft in Plonsk

began to affect the wives of city-councilmen on the one hand, and of petty nobility on the

other, the enthusiasm of that court for prosecuting witches came to be dampened (Lasocki

1933 pp. 7-8; citing AMPlonsk sig. 3 ff. 85-87). The court, which had executed 11 women in

four trials in the period 1699-1701 (#120, #121, #122, #126, #130), did not see another case

until 1708 (#141)—and in that later case the chastened court freed the accused on the

warranty of six witnesses.

1.3.4: "Occupation"

The great majority of accused witches were, as has been shown, peasantwomen; a smaller but

significant number were commoner townswomen, most often from smaller towns. In neither

of these categories does it usually make sense to speak of the women having a specific

occupation—which is not to deny that such women were constantly occupied. Although

townswomen played an important role in the economy as small-traders, distributors of their

husband's craftwork, piece-workers, or stall-holding retailers in the bazaar (Karpinski 1995),

little evidence for such economic activity appears in the trials. The economy of smaller

towns, especially in the later 17th and 18th centuries, differed little from that of villages; like

their village counterparts, most commoner townswomen will have been occupied with such

tasks as agricultural work in the fields and gardens, tending and milking cattle, preparing and

2
"Imc. Pan Kreps w Lesie Krejrieckim zrozbiial, a Zona lego Czarami sie_ bawi"

100
 • Who were the witches? •

preserving foodstuffs (notably butter, farmer-cheese and other dairy products, beer, and

bread), weaving cloth from flax or wool and making and mending clothing, bearing and

raising children, and in general running a household in which most everything had to be done

by hand. Desperately difficult though such work must have been, it was approximately the

same sort of work for the great majority of peasantwomen and small-townswomen, so that

women were not differentiated from one another by occupation. We know in scattered cases,

usually from the accused's maritonym, that this or that peasantwoman belonged to the

household of a village craftsman—a wheelwright's widow or daughter (#22, #26); a

carpenter's, or a mason's, or a weaver's wife (#22, #70, #82). Some few others were the

daughters, wives, or widows of more important village personages such as the soltys or

village headman (#92, #132), smith (#105, #112, #145), innkeeper (#82, #107); or miller

(#140). One can detect no pattern in these affiliations, though they do add substance to the

suggestion that accused witches were not always, nor even usually, from the margins of

peasant society.

In fact, our findings all point in the other direction. Just four accused witches are known

to have been milk-maids (Jadwiga and Anastazja, #71 Je_dzrej6w 1671; Maryna and her

daughter Ewa, #122 Plohsk 1699); a further six were shepherdesses (Katarzyna, #94 Warta

1685; Marianna Czubata, Kaszka Pastuszka, and Regina Owczarka #96 Kleczew 1688;

Marjanna and Katarzyna, #172 Kiszkowo 1761). Considering their social marginalization as

some of the poorest of the poor, their ample opportunity to perform malefice against milk and

livestock, and the reputation for magic accorded shepherds in both Poland (e.g. DWOK vol.

19 pp. 211-212; Baranowski 1965 pp. 116-117) and elsewhere in Europe (Monter 1997,

Behringer 1998), it is somewhat surprising there were not more.

101
 • Chapter 1.3 •

Similarly, beggars, hobos, vagabonds, and other marginal people do not figure nearly so

often in trials as one might have supposed. During the annual rugowanie in Iwkowo village

in 1602, it was found that:

sie. nie pokazalo nic nieprzystojnego na zadnego nothing improper was imputed to any neighbor. Only that
sajsiada. Tylko u Krzysztofa na Witowskim drabka at the house of Krzysztof at Witowski a vagrant woman25
(tak srychac), iz sie. czarami bawi. Prawo nakazalo, ( a s one hears) is making use of witchcraft. The court
aby ten gospodarz w domu jej nie chowal i z decrees that that farmer not keep her in his house, and
rnqzern jej do zachodu slonca pod winEtpanska. m a t along with her husband she must leave before
grzywien dziesie_c, a prawu trzy grzywny ob sundown, under penalty of 10 grzywny to the manor and 3
incompletionem ad solvendum succubitum. (#18, t 0 t n e court should the succubus not be sent away.
Iwkowo 1602).

Wawrzyniec "the hobo" figures among the accused in a large trial at Pyzdry (#151,1719);

similarly with Barwa "from the poorhouse" in Lobzenica (#110, 1692). Because of the

polysemy of the word baba, it is possible that some of the women referred to as such were

beggars at the church door {baby koscielne), although I have found no clear examples. In

Szadek, a self-styled witch-finder accused most of the beggarwomen of that town of

witchcraft; after an initial investigation, however, her accusations were rejected and she

found herself accused of disturbing the peace and sentenced to banishment (#47, Szadek

1649).27

The wandering thief and prostitute Barbara of Radom seems to have supplemented her

income with milk-magic; she was arrested for theft and vagrancy, but burnt as a witch (#7,

24
Rugowanie,ox sqdy rugowe was practiced mostly in older established villages in Malopolska. It consisted of
an annual open village-court session during which all householders could bring forward complaints, usually
relating to adultery or similar breaches of morality, against their neighbors.
25
"Drabka." This word, never common, is recorded only with the meaning oidrabina (ladder) in the standard
period dictionaries. I take it here to indicate the feminine of drab, which means mercenary foot-soldier and,
by extension, swindler, hobo, worthless person, petty criminal.
26
Unless one counts witches denounced but not brought to trial, such as "Kaska Baba w Szpitalu [Kaska the
poorhouse baba], denounced in #166, Pyzdry 1740, or possibly the nameless "Baba Zgiewartowa [Baba
from Giewartow] denounced in #68, Kleczew 1669. But even in these examples, the putative beggarwomen
are single members of a long list of denounced witches, most of the others of whom have no clear
connection with begging or poverty.
7
The original accused appear to be beggars primarily on the evidence of the nicknames given to some, such as
"Ewa Wielka pod kosciolem [Ewa the Large under the church]" and Barbara Ratuszna [Barbara of the town-
hall]. It is not certain that all twenty-one accused were beggars. The original accuser, Sabina Bartlowa,

102
 • Who were the witches? •

Kalisz 1580). The beggarwomen Maryna Mazurkowicowa and Regina Wierzbicka may or

may not have engaged in petty maleflce for pay; but they really did, apparently, steal an

infant child in the hope that the child's presence would increase people's charity toward them

(#84, Bochnia 1679).28 Certainly beggars and vagabonds were not above resorting to the

sorts of ruses celebrated and satirized in the Peregrynacja dziadowska. The suggestion that

she could heal or, if not placated, could cause harm, would increase a beggar's chances of

receiving alms. For some beggars, however, such strategies proved fatal.

Other accused witches cannot be classified as beggars in the strict sense, but were

rather poor village-folk who borrowed rather more than they lent, and who sometimes

underwrote this imbalanced reciprocity with the hint that they might be persuaded to cause

preternatural harm (e.g. Katarzyna Mrowczyna, #115 Stajszewo 1695). With their social

vulnerability, their perhaps too-apparent envy, and with the exchange of food providing

ample opportunity for sending witchcraft, such women were obvious candidates for

appealled her sentence of banishment to the Krakow High Court, which reduced it to an apology and church
penance.
This is a fascinating and extremely convoluted trial. The court originally charged the beggarwomen with
stealing the child with the intent of selling it to the Jews, in accordance with the typical narrative of ritual-
murder trials (see also ch. 2.4). Regina, from her own testimony, was noble-born, and her autobiography as
recounted in testimony paints the picture of an inexorable decent from petty respectability to desperation:
She sold her share in in the family property after the death of her brother, then served as a noble attendent in
various households, each time moving on to a worse and lower position. She had lost her most recent
position, it appears, on suspicion of practicing love-magic against her patron; unable to find work after this
termination, she was reduced to begging.
For example, in Bydgoszcz in 1656 (#54), a "baba" came begging for bread to the house of Szymonowa
Szotka, the baker's wife. Once admitted into the home, however, the beggar told Szymonowa that she was
possessed and that she, the beggar, had come to unbewitch her with blessed water, bread, and coal.
Unfortunately, Szymonowa took her possession all too seriously and began to scream and yell, rolling her
eyes. The baba attempted to leave but the possessed woman followed her into the street; a crowd quickly
gathered and demanded that the baba finish what she started. Somebody struck her with a staff, and she was
taken to jail where she died of her injuries, a presumed witch.
The record of these events comes from witness statements two years after the fact, during a defamation
trial in 1658. Szymonowa and her husband accused Jadwiga, wife of the town scribe Stanislaw Wujtowicz,
of assisting the nameless "baba" in her phony exorcism. Wujtowicz sued Szot for defamation; his wife had
only tried to calm Szymonowa after she began to show signs of possession. Witness reports conflicted, but
in the end Szot had to apologize publicly and vow never to repeat his accusations under penalty of fifty
lashes.

103
 • Chapter 1.3 •

witchcraft accusation. And yet, once again, one is struck by the impression that such

"obvious" witches were not the most common: that the great majority of accused witches

were, socially speaking, entirely ordinary peasant housewives.

None of the occupations discussed above appear often enough in the records to indicate

any predisposition towards witchcraft accusation. However, there are two social positions or

types of work that do show up often enough to warrant some additional comment. These are

the position oi komornica or lodger in a (relatively) well-off peasant household, and of

dziewka or house-servant in the manor. The two positions resemble each other. Both involve

women extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation from their kmiec or noble master (and

thus also to the jealousy and suspicion of his wife, her mistress); both have constant access to

the home, while not quite belonging to it; both were involved in the preparation of the food

by which witchcraft was so often sent against its victims; both positions, though more secure

than that of a beggar, involved constant occasions for envy coupled with almost no prospect

at all of ever acquiring the things envied. A komornica made a poor match indeed for the son

of a landholding peasant, while the peasant house-servants in the manor could not even

dream of marrying into the family. We should expect, therefore, rampant envy on the one

hand, and desperate attempts at love-magic on the other. To be more precise, we should

expect, and do indeed find, what is functionally equivalent to such envy and love-magic: the

suspicion of it on the part of accusers.

Some five accused witches were komornice in the homes of peasants at least marginally

better off than themselves. In Warta (#83, 1678) the komornica Zofia allegedly buried

enchantments, including the entire carcass of a cow, in the garden of her landlord Adam

Podsiadly. She had previously warned him at one point "Remember, Adam, as long as I

104
 • Who were the witches? •

remain with you, all will be well; just as soon as I leave, you'll be ruined. " Zofia seems to

have been attempting to maintain her position, while Adam's accusation may be seen in

terms of his resentment of a person he did not want about the house, or his guilt in attempting

to drive her out of what was theoretically a position guaranteed for life.

Female house-servants in the manor or at the homes of the town patriciate, of which we

have some 14 examples, had both more cause for envy and a less secure position. As

outsiders in the home, and as go-betweens between the village and the manor, they could

become conduits for peasant enmity toward the village lord, or could be perceived by him as

such. p. Stanislaw Breza, owner of Wajsosze near Kleczew, seems to have become paranoid

about the ill-will of his villagers toward his family after the death of his young son. Although

his repeated prosecutions resulted, finally, in the deaths of 10 women of Wa^sosze and Slesin

(Wislicz 2004b pp. 75-76), his accusations centred around the house-servants who had access

to his son's bedchamber and who had allegedly planted defiled Eucharists in the bedchamber

floor (#96,#108; see also 2.3.3-2.3.4). The large Kiszkowo trial also features two house-

servants, who had the necessary access to the manor to bury the Eucharist and a mare's head

under the stairs (#172, 1761). In another trial, the cook and nanny Anna was accused by her

lord of attempting to "introduce deviltry" into her mistress's food; she confessed to doing this

because her mistress refused to feed her pork (#109, Warta 1691). Although it is not quite

true that witchcraft constituted a "quiet battle" of the peasants against their noble exploiters

(Baranowski 1952 p. 37), it could certainly express peasant resentment; conversely,

noblemen such as Stanislaw Breza could come to perceive themselves as beleaguered by

their magically powerful serfs.

"Pamiqtaj, Adamie, poki ja tu u ciebie b^dq, b^dziec dobrze, jak od ciebie wynijdq, wniwecz si$ obrocisz. "

105
 • Chapter 1.3 •

Another risk, real or suspected, was that house-maids or cooks would attempt love-

magic against their masters. This will have most likely taken place after that master, or his

son, had sexually exploited the maid, giving her some basis to hope a more permanent

relationship might be possible. This seems to be what happened to Zofia Filipowicowa, cook

and head-servant to p. Pawel Podlodowski; she recounts in great detail her increasingly

desperate attempts to recover the favor of her master—attempts that, in the estimation of his

brother, eventually resulted in p. Pawel's death (#37, Skrzynno 1639; see also Appendix A).

Similarly, the servant Zofia Janowska attempted to gain the favorable attentions of her

patrician widow employer, who regularly beat her (#148, Rzeszow 1718). When young,

female, impoverished noble lodgers fell in love with their host's eligible son, the parents of

the besotted or at any rate lusty heir also prefered to suspect love magic, and thus to forestall

a socially disadvantageous marriage (#65, Praszka 1665; #170, Krakow 1752).31

A final "occupation" must be mentioned: that of cunning-woman or folk healer. With

the exception of a few cases, all early (#2, #3-4, #7, #13, #21), none of the accused Polish

witches can be unambiguously labelled as a cunning-woman. They were accused of

witchcraft, not of cunning, and the spells and rituals they confessed to were, for the most

part, of the sort that most peasant-women could know, or could construct out of common

materials. Although the evidence is nearly always insufficient to show that a given woman

was or was thought of as cunning, it is often sufficient to show that she was not. Accordingly,

we must reject, in the Polish case, the influential thesis put forward by Horsley, that a

"substantial number of the accused" in European witch-trials were cunning-women or folk-

healers (1979 p. 712).

1
In both the trials mentioned, charges against the noble maidens were eventually dismissed, while their peasant
accomplices went to the stake.

106
 • Who were the witches? •

However, we must also reject, I think, the counter-thesis advanced by Blecourt, that

cunning-folk were rarely accused of witchcraft (1994). Although he marshalls impressive

evidence (from his own research but also from Macfarlane 1970, Briggs 1991, and others) to

show that cunning-folk are rare among accused witches, and although he is quite right to

insist that the accused were accused of witchcraft not of cunning (pp. 288-293), Blecourt

problematically insists that cunning-folk formed a clear category of specialist healers, quite

easily distinguished from witches by "legislators, clergy, and even people without a formal

education" (pp. 296-298, quotation at p. 296). Whether or not this is true of Western

Europe, it does not fit the Polish material. "Cunning" was neither a full-time job nor a

clearly defined social role in early modern Poland. Barbara of Radom, for example, who

admitted that she hired herself out to bless cattle against witchcraft and whose wide, detailed

knowledge of several elaborate spells and rituals make one of our best examples of a

cunning-woman, was originally arrested for vagrancy, theft, and prostitution (#7, Kalisz

1580). Like the beggar-healers of the Peregrynacja dziadowska, and like the nameless

beggar-exorcist whose actions instigated the trial of Jadwiga Wujtowiczowa in Bydgoszcz

(#54, 1658), Barbara evidently used her secret knowledge to eke out a living primarily earned

otherwise. But even established cunning-woman practiced their craft on a very part-time

basis and for very little income: Apolonia Porwitka, a married townswoman who sold herbs

to apothecaries, was sought out for love magic and especially for spells to fix witch-spoiled

32
1 think it does not fit. Certainly at the literary level, authors such as Del Rio understood the difference
between healing magic and harmful magic. But his theology of the implicit pact was designed, in part, to
erase this difference; as Clark has forcefully argued, a great deal of what we now read as "demonological"
literature was intended to tar cunning-folk with the same brush as diabolical witches (1997 Part 4: Religion).
Blecourt acknowledges that "the boundaries between private care, neighbourly help and public reknown
may have been rather fuzzy" (1994 p. 296) but then immediately proceeds to specify the characteristics of
the recognized expert cunning-person. My own impression, from the Polish material but also from the
scholarship on Western witchcraft, is that this "fuzzy" category of general knowledge formed a continuum

107
 • Chapter 1.3 •

beer, and who had "good luck in blessing cattle and other things, the Lord be praised" —and

whose counter-magical spells are among the most elaborate recorded from the Polish witch-

trials (see Appendix C item 20), received in return for her services such items as a bowl of

flour, some cabbage and a little meat, or some cloth to make a shirt for her child (#13, Kalisz

1593).

Cunning-folk of wide reputation did exist—Wojciech Kozielek travelled a considerable

distance, for example, to visit the folk-exorcist Jakub Motai (#118, Lublin 1698, and see

3.1.3). The Lublin JewNech Abrahamow requested that the cure of his insane daughter

effected by an "old woman-diviner [baba wruszka]" when doctors and surgeons had all

failed, be written into the Counsel court records (1743, APLublin AMLublin sig. 172 ff. 58v-

59).34 They could function as witchfinders, as when Tomasz Borarczyk consulted a

planetarka to learn who had bewitched and murdered his brother, and on the basis of her

advice accused Katarzyna Mrowczyna of the crime (#115, Stajszewo 1695). An analysis of

spoken incantations recorded in witch-trials reveals an important qualitative distinction

between most magical utterance, which followed a simple formula, and the much more

elaborate spells involving etiological myths from the life of Jesus or the Virgin Mary: by this

criterion Dorota Gnieczkowa (#2, Poznan 1544), Anna of Zabikowo (#3, Poznah 1544),

Apolonia Porwitka (#13, Kalisz 1593) and Dorota of Siedlikow (#21, Kalisz 1613) are the

only clearly defined cunning-women for whom I have record. More often we find women or

men with a reputation for some expertise only marginally greater than that of their neighbors,

and not qualitatively different. Witnesses complained of Dorota Lysakowa, for example, that

encompassing very nearly the whole of peasant society, with both acknowledged witches and acknowledged
cunning-folk as rare exceptions.
33
"Powiedziala tez, ze ma chwala Bogu do zegnanie bydla i innych rzeczy szcze_scie. "

108
 • Who were the witches? •

she had done magic all her life, "healing some, harming others, using all sorts of methods—

splinters, herbs, and other things"35 (#62, Chexiny 1665). Others might be known for a

limited range of spells, such as Katarzyna Wroblowa, whose bad advice on love magic got

her and her client burnt for witchcraft and sacrilege in Rzeszow (#148, Rzeszow 1718; see

2.2.3 below). The church-organist's wife Katarzyna of Wojnicz claimed limited abilities in

divination and healing jaundice and head-ache, but specialized in the exorcism of nocnice or

night-terrors (#58, Nowy Wisnicz 1662). Others had reputations, in a small way, for healing

cattle (e.g. #42), or children (e.g. #22, #58, #80).

Polish cunning-women possessed no clear, defining characteristics to distinguish them

from their neighbours.36 They lacked even a distinctive name. The terms used by modern

folklorists and their informants—such as mqdra (wise-woman), znachorka (knowing-

woman), wieszczka (seeress)—do not appear in the trial records. Nech Abrahamow's

wruszka—diviner, enchantress—is the only example of its kind that I have found, and is

recorded late in the witch-trial era (1743). The polysemic term baba could mean anything

from "old woman" to "peasant-woman" to "beggar-woman" to "cunning-woman" to "witch,"

and was usually and usefully ambiguous between these meanings. In the early 16th century,

medical doctors despairing of treatment sometimes suggested that their patients consult

It is not clear why he wanted this information to be put into the records—perhaps to guard the cunning-
woman against later accusation as a witch; perhaps to register publicly that his daughter had been cured.
"jednym ludziom naprawiala, a drugim psowala, roznych sposobow zazywaja_c na to, drzazg, ziol i innych
rzeczy. "
The suggestion of some folklorists and ethnographers studying 19th-20th century Poland—that cunning-folk
were understood to be those women (and some men) who possessed and made use of devils, or demons, or
"second souls" or the spirits of the dead, for their healing rituals and divinations—cannot be very easily
applied to the witch-trial data. Many witches were accused of, and confessed to, making use of the services
of devils, but this was a standard ingredient of the witch-stereotype. Although in several cases the
characteristics of these devils, their relationship with the witch, and the uses to which they were put, do in
fact resemble the later folklore of demon-using cunning-women, the evidence is so thoroughly intermixed
with elements of diabolism that a determination, on these grounds alone, that such women were or were
thought to have been cunning-women would be very rash indeed. In any case the mere presence of a demon

109
 • Chapter 1.3 •

"mulieres antiquas" (Ulanowski ed. 1902 par. 1835)—probably a Latinization oibaba or a

variant on vetula, which can also mean cunning-woman, old woman, or witch. The

Czarownica author speaks of zabobonice or "superstition-workers," apparently his own

neologism by which to distinguish such women from czarownice or witches (1714 [1639]

p. 5). However, he applies the term not only to folk-healers and experts but to everybody

who performs any sort of folk-magic or superstition; all peasant-women would be

zabobonice on this definition. Similarly, the terms guslarka and guslarz cannot be

unambiguously distinguished either from witches on the one hand or from ordinary peasant

"superstition-practitioners" on the other. Although women who had some vague reputation

for healing magic did come to be suspected of witchcraft, the correlation between accused

witches and cunning-folk in a strong sense—established healers of wide reputation—is very

weak.

This survey of accused witches' occupations has, for the most part, shown that there is

little correlation between such occupations and suspicion as a witch. The only discernable

patterns are both, in their way, misleading. Beggars form a tiny but identifiable fraction of

accused witches; lodgers and house servants a considerably larger portion. The significant

numbers of the latter—something like 19 out of 315 accused witches, but a larger fraction of

those witches for whom an occupation is known—together with their over-determined

position as outsiders with access to the home and family, might tempt one toward a theory of

witchcraft accusation in which marginal, unmarried, young or widowed women play the

primary role. Such a tempting theory must be resisted, however, from what we know in other

ways: that rather more accused witches were married peasantwomen, far fewer were

or house-spirit in the home, such as many women will have understood themselves to enjoy, never implied
that such women were cunning. This complex issue is discussed further in 3.1.2-3.1.3, below.

110
 • Who were the witches? •

komornice or house-servants, and that their accusers were more often neighbors than their

manor-lords.

Another lesson to take from this survey has to do with who is missing. No midwives

appear at all—and midwifery was one of a very few recognized and habitually named female

occupations.37 The occasional accused witch appears to have worked as a nanny or caretaker

for children (e.g. #109, Warta 1691), but this, too, is rare. There are no wet-nurses, nor the

lying-in maids recently placed at the centre of the psychology of witchcraft by Lyndal Roper

(1994). This, despite the fact that in Polish learned demonology as in its western

counterparts, the role of midwives in stealing infants for the devil is prominent, and that

accusations often focus on malefice toward children. This despite the fact as well, that the

folk demonology which informs accusations puts great emphasis on the vulnerability of

children. Although concern for the safety of children, and the perceived enmity or

indifference toward them that marked a witch, are important features of the Polish witchcraft

complex, these concerns have no causal relationship to the occupations of actual accused

witches.

1.3.5: Gender

The overwhelming majority of accused witches in Poland were women. Moreover, the

stereotype of the witch, at every level of discourse, was female; in humanist courtly poetry as

in popular satire, in Protestant sermon and Catholic homily, in compendia of home remedies,

in historical chronicles, in legal discourse, the witch was a woman. The pervasive misogyny

37
Midwives appear extremely rarely in all criminal court documents, usually as expert witnesses in cases of
rape or infanticide (Karpiriski 1995 p. 98). The "mulieres" who inspected Zofia Baranowa when she claimed
to be pregnant belong in this category (#39, Lublin 1643). Concerning the persistent, entirely untenable
myth that accused witches in Europe were often midwives, see Harley 1990; Briggs 1996 pp. 277-281.

Ill
 • Chapter 1.3 •

of early modern Polish society, which differs very little in this regard from society in the

same period in the West, seems like an obvious cause of witchcraft accusation. In this

section, I want to argue that although gender correlates very strongly to accusation in

Poland—indeed the correlation is stronger than any others so far discussed—this correlation

should not be confused with causation. Accused witches were nearly always women, which

does not mean that they were accused because they were women. Rather, the sorts of evil

witches were imagined to do, the sorts of quarrels and conflicts lying behind witchcraft

accusation, and the activities through which witchcraft was "given" to their victims, were all

associated with women. The strongly gendered imbalance of power in early modern Poland

made women natural targets for accusation, but was not a directly causal factor in witch-

trials. Just as the trials were not a sort of covert class-warfare (although the accused were

overwhelmingly peasants, and this correlation expresses class tensions), so too they

expressed gendered conflict but should not be construed as a campaign against women.

Witch-hunting was not woman-hunting.

In the cycle of intensive prosecutions before the Kleczew court between 1682 and 1700

that have been so closely analyzed by Tomasz Wislicz, just 3 of the executed were men; 61

or 95% of those sent to the stake were women (2004b pp. 90-91). In Poland as a whole, men

were occasionally sent to the stake, but witchcraft was very clearly a female crime, in theory

and practice. The female witches and cunning-women of the Peregrynacja dziadowska—

"Guza" the fortune-teller, "Chroma" the drunken and hate-filled beggar, "Zwoniczka" the

seller of love-magic potions, "Labajka" the ineffective cunning-woman, "Latawica" the

demonic, night-flying witch —are paired not with male sorcerers but with males who make

their living otherwise: "Wilkolek" frightens people into giving him food by pretending to be

112
 • Who were the witches? •

a werewolf, but the other male beggars use more standard methods such as simulating

blindness or singing hymns at pilgrimage centres {Peregrynacja 1614; 1961). Those beggars

represented as engaging in malefice, stealing milk, or having dealings with demons, are

exclusively women.

Nearly all the accusations against men are exceptional in some way. Men came to be

involved in witch-trials by association, as collaborators or beneficiaries of witchcraft who

had not, however, taken part in the actual practice.38 Other men stood accused of having
on

hired witches, either for their own purposes or at the request of their feudal masters. A

peculiarity of larger trials is the accusation of a single man, along with several women: the

man, characteristically, stands accused of providing music for the dances at Bald Mountain;
40
this theme also features prominently in denunciations of men (see also 2.1.4).41 Another,

Mikolaj Nachbar was accused rather of adultery with an accused witch than with practicing witchcraft
himself (#17, Wschowa 1601). Other men also found themselves defendents in witch-trials, without actually
being accused of witchcraft themselves. The fluid boundary between witness and defendant in early modern
Polish trials meant that husbands of accused witches could be interrogated, sometimes under torture, for
their suspected complicity in their wives' crimes. Jan Sczecina came to trial along with his wife and
daughters. While they were accused of witchcraft and arson, he was accused of arson only (#50, Turek
1652). The husband of Marianna Berbelska, who encouraged her young daughters to steal the host, was
sentenced to flogging—presumably for having failed to prevent his wife's crime (#167, Pacanow 1741).
Mikolaj Skowronka was arrested and dunked along with his wife Barbara Grzeszowna, although only she
had been accused of witchcraft. Although he floated, he does not appear to have been treated as a witch at
any point; he testified as a witness on his wife's behalf, saying he has never had any cause to suspect her of
witchcraft (#60, Chqciny 1665a).
The unfortunate Steczek Koczan (#87, Lublin 1681) and Kazimierz Kmarynski (#161, Lublin 1732) acted as
go-betweens, hiring or paying accused witches at the behest of their noble masters. Mikolaj Janiszewski
(also #161) appears to have simply been a witness to some of the alleged witchcraft at the Mytko court; this
did not save him from being tortured in Lublin. The bakers' guild court of Bydgoszcz tried the baker Jan
Biafy for making use of the magical services of a female witch, a "thin German [chuda niemka]" to increase
the sale of his bread—but he was not himself accused of witchcraft. The guild court sent the trial on to the
Bydgoszcz town court, which fined Biary's accuser 30 grzywne for defamation (#69, Bydgoszcz 1670).
Adam Jarpianka (#52, Zba^szyn 1664b); Jan Papieznik (#110, Lobzenica 1692); Wawrzyniec Dziad ( (#151,
Pyzdry 1719). This is most likely the main crime of Eich (#51, Zba^szyh 1664a), and of Jan Kostera, (#88,
Zbajszyn 1681).
In the Bochnia trial of 1679, one Jan Jaczek was denounced for playing the hoe (#84). Marjanna of Tuliszkow
denounced Kazimierz of Kleczew and Maciek of Lychen, who played the fiddle and the "baki" at the sabbat
(#96, Kleczew 1688). Anna Szymkowa saw "some peasant man [chlop jakis]" playing the hoe at Bald
Mountain, but she didn't recognize him (#153, Nieszawa 1721). Among the ten alleged witches denounced
by Chrystyna Jabhiszewska (#166, Pyzdry 1740) we find one Yanek, who provided music for their revels.
Typically, the man thus denounced is only one of a large number denounced, the rest being women. Tomasz

113
 • Chapter 1.3 •

very rare context that finds men in "witch-like" trials is that of the formal, written cyrograph

or devil pact. However, these trials belong to the tradition of Dr. Faust and Pan Twardowski;

the courts seem to recognize the distinction, and treat the accused differently than in most

witch-trials.42 Finally, in village trials a man sometimes stands accused, as a consequence of

men's juridical responsibility for their wives;43 the gender distinction also seems less marked

in Ruthenia.44

If we exclude all the men involved only marginally or problematically in witch-craft

accusations, and if we confine our perspective only to town-court trials in Poland proper,

then the overwhelming gender-imbalance of accused witches becomes even more apparent:

we are left, in fact, with just four trials against a total of five men.45 It was not impossible for

Wislicz has noted that the percentage of men denounced in the Kleczew trials was much higher than the
percentage of men accused (22% as opposed to 5%): however, the denounced men were most frequently
accused only of providing music (2004b p. 79).
Thus Andrzej Bochenski (#155, Poznah 1722) was sentenced to church penance for his first pact with the
devil; however, the court sentenced him to decapitation when he repeated the offence. Toward the very end
of the witch-trial era, the peasant Wojciech Jakubowski was tried and hanged for a variety of offenses,
including "having signed himself over to devils, and giving them some blood from the middle finger of his
hand [iako siq diablom zapisal i dal im krwi z palca srzedniego od rejci]" (#174, Belzyce 1774).
For example, although Iwan Huba accused his neighbor Iwan Niemczak of witchraft, it was Niemczak's wife
who was sentenced to a warning punishment of 30 lashes (#79, Klimkowka 1678). Antoni Tuciak and his
wife Franciszka together stood accused of malefice agains their neighbor Matijasz Kozicki, killing two of
his cattle (#168, Jazowsko 1748); Antoni had to pay apound of wax to the church, and a fine to the manor
and to the court. Village courts, emphasizing restorative justice rather than punishment and treating the
household as a juridical unit, were less likely to single out the female witch. Nevertheless, in the majority of
village-court trials, the named accused is a woman.
This finding, though tentative, is consistent with the prominence of male sorcerers in Russian and Ukrainian
folklore (Ivanits 1989). Josko Ylkowycz and Antoni Ylkowycz accuse one Zubek of doing a great deal of
harm concerning the deaths of cattle ("wyelka skode strony bidla sdichanya")—the method of this harm is
not specified, but can only be witchcraft (#10, Wara 1585). In the manorhouse trial of three peasants in
Zablotowo, near Halicz, no important distinction can be found between the man Kulik and his two female
associates Olexina and Halka. All three make use of a "didko" to murder their manor-lord's child; all three
met "at the border" to plot further malefice (#53, Zablotowo 1656).
Jan Baran came to trial for stealing the host during communion. The trial may be called a "witch-trial" only in
that Jan explicitly denied witchcraft to be the purpose of theft—a denial that sealed his fate ((#40, Nowy
Wisnicz 1643, and see 2.2.2 below). Sebastyan Prembecki and his accomplice, one Mierwinski, stood
accused of stealing the genitalia of a hanged man for beer magic ((#164, Krakow 1737). They received
defense counsel, who argued that the case should be turned over to the ecclesiastical courts. Sebastyan
denied having done witchcraft, and in the end was sentenced to whipping and banishment, while Mierwinski
was removed from the role of citizens. It is difficult to say whether the mild course of their trial owes more
to their gender or to the place and time—by the early 18th century, the Krakow court regularly provided
defendants with counsel, and rarely levied the death penalty. The trials of Gregorz Klecha and Mateusz

114
 • Who were the witches? •

a man to stand accused of witchcraft in early modern Poland, nor for that accusation to result

in a guilty verdict and a sentence to the stake—but such instances were extremely rare.

Depending on how we choose to count, the proportion of female to male accused witches in

early modern Poland was between around 94% and 98.5%—a percentage higher than

anywhere else in Europe, though comparable to the extremely high gender imbalance in

some other European regions, such as Hungary or south-west Germany (Levack 2006

p. 142). Why should this have been so?

It would not be difficult to provide a catalogue of Polish literary and homiletic literature

demonstrating the close conformity of male Polish educated attitudes with those of their

western contemporaries, on the subject of women.46 Women are seen to be stupider, more

passionate, unable to control themselves, more dangerous, above all more sharp-tongued than

men. For the preacher Szymon Starowolski, (d. 1656), the female of every animal is worse

than the male: in some cases, as with the lioness, this means also that she is fiercer and more

dangerous. "So also, among humankind, the woman is always worse than the man"47

(Starowolski 1682 pp. 470; cited after Wisniewska 2003 p. 13). Starowolski continues:

[P]ospolicie bialoglowy nie umieja_ miary w zyciu i Usually women don't know how to maintain
obyczajach zachowac, ale sie_ naklaniaja^ abo na t$, abo moderation in their lives and customs, but instead
na owe. strong. Gdy kogo miluja^ mihija^bez miary, incline either to one side or to the other. If they love
gdy kogo nienawidza^ nienawidza^ i gniewaja^ sie_ bez someone, they love without measure, If they hate
miary, kiedy poczna^ bye dobrymi, takze az swiejymi someone, their hatred and wrath is measureless; when

Kleszka, both of Wielki Kozmiri (#104, 1690a; #111, 1692), are more obviously witch-trials proper.
Grzegorz Klecha, by his surname one of the minor church functionaries associated with ribaldry, poverty,
loose morals, and the supernatural, was originally arrested on an unrelated accusation. When he escaped the
bonds that had held him, without appearing to cut the ropes, he came to be suspected of witchcraft. Under
torture, he confessed to the standard litany of sabbat-m&ected witchcraft in Wielkopolska: malefice against
livestock, attendence at Bald Mountain where he was attended by a female "darling" named "Jaskowa" (a
feminization of the common devil-name Jas), and so on. He was burnt at the stake. Mateusz Kleszka was
apprehended while tying strings between the pews at church, just before Mass. Notably, he claimed to be
doing this at the behest of female kin. Under torture, he too confessed to attendence at Bald Mountain, and
to renouncing God, the Virgin and the Saints.
46
Such a task is made the easier through the excellent work of Halina Wisniewska (2003) and Elzbieta Elena
Wrobel (2002), from whom I draw much of the following material. See in particular Wiesniewska 2003
pp. 111-119.
7
"Tak tez i miejizy ludzmi zawsze gorsza jest bialoglowa nizeli me^zczyzna. "

115
 • Chapter 1.3 •

zostaja. (Ibid. p. 471). they begin to be good, they become saints.

This trope of woman's inability to moderate both her love and her hate, her virtue and

her vice, originates with John Chrysostom (Maclean 1987 pp. 20-27), but is also found, for

example, in the Malleus (pt. 1 qu. 6; 1970 p. 41); it is repeated endlessly, with variations, in

Polish literature. Fredro says that "Reason rules a man; affect, a woman, both in her loving

and her hating"48 (Fredro 1664; cited after Wisniewska 2003 p. 112). The image finds its way

also into literary images of witches. Szymon Szymonowic, humanist poet and dean of

Zamoyski's famous Akademia at Zamosc, combined local with classical tropes to depict the

Polish witch in his Sielanki (1964 [1614]).49 The wronged wife oiSielanka 15, driven to

witchcraft out of jealousy and rage while her husband cavorts with his new young mistress, is

modelled on Medea, while the lustful old widow oiSielanka 18, seducing a young peasant

through enchantment, resembles Pamphile of Apuleus' Golden Ass. For Szymonowic,

witchcraft is above all something women do because of their excess of love, lust, and

jealousy; it is a crime of passion. Szymonowic pairs witchcraft [czary] and a lack of

moderation [bez zadnej miary] in a series of rhymed couplets that form the refrain of

Sielanka 15; the wronged wife repeats, with variations and with increasing hysteria, as she

prepares to destroy her husband and his mistress:

Wiem, ze to grzech jest wielki, wiem, ze wszelkie czary I know it's a great sin, I know all witchcraft
Szkodliwe, ale zal moj nie ma zadnej miary. Is harmful, but my resentment has no measure.
(Szymonowic 1614, 15 w . 21-22; cf. w . 29-30, 35-36,41-42,47-48, 53-54, 59-60, 65-66, 71-72).

Since female emotion, and its potential harmful effects, "have no measure" and cannot

be regulated by women themselves, male authors insisted that women must be controlled by

their husbands. The constant theme in sermons, both Catholic and Protestant, showed the

48
"Rozum m^zczyzna^ bialoglowa^ afekt tylko rza_dzi, oraz kocha, oraz nienawidzi"
49
Szyszkowski traces most of the witchcraft in the Sielanki to the Idylls of Theocritus and to Virgil's Eclogues
(1913 pp. 128-129).

116
 • Who were the witches? •

wife as weaker and stupider than the husband, as "immature in understanding" (Wrobel

2002 pp. 121-122; quotation is from Skarga 1600 p. 180). Therefore, for her own good as

well as for the good of society, she must be ruled by her husband. Preachers reminded their

flocks that Eve came from Adam's rib—not from his head, as if she should lead, nor from his

foot, as if she should be totally abased or enslaved—rather to stand at his side, "under his

hand and protection" (Wujek 1584 p. 118, after Wrobel 2002 p. 128). This strongly

paternalistic conception of the husband's role—a conception formalized in town law

(Riabinin 1934 p. 30)—-could occasionally shield a woman from the full force of the law.

When two sisters-in-law accused one another of witchcraft in 1709, the court of Szczekociny

fined their husbands for "not knowing how to shut their wives' mouths [zonom g$by

nieumieli zawierac]" (Siarkowski 2000 [1879] p. 93). More often however, the principle that

a man is responsible in law for his wife did nothing to stop witch-accusations or trials. The

husband's authority under the law could also work against an accused witch. The husband of

Elzbieta Stepkowicowa, a burgherwoman to whom the court had assigned a defence

advocate, waived the advocate's suggested appeal of her case to the Castle Court in

Krakow—thus consigning his wife to torture and eventually, to the stake (#70, Nowy Sq.cz

1670).51

"niedorosla w rozumie"
Mikolajczyk's study of crime and punishment in southern Poland suggests that in Polish town law, gender
very rarely played any role in determining the punishment for crimes. On the contrary, town decrees often
emphasized their application to both men and women, speaking of "kazdy i kazda"—"each man and each
woman." Nevertheless, in practice, laywers often argued for mitigation of punishment for female clients, on
the basis of their weaker will; and this not infrequently led to slightly milder sentences for women
(Mikolajczyk 1998 p. 114). A rare instance of such consideration in witch-trials may be found in #47,
Szadek 1649b (which is not, however, properly a witch-trial, as it concerns a case for defamation against a
would-be witchfinder who, using what she claimed to be a magical belt, accused a large number of the
beggar-women of Szadek as witches). The Krakow appeals court, taking into account what it calls the
"incontinence of the female sex [niestatecznosc plci bialoglowskiey]," reduced her original punishment of
whipping and banishment to a series of public apologies in Church, rites of penance during Mass, and
several sessions in the town stock.

117
 • Chapter 1.3 •

If women were seen as unable to control their affect, still less were they thought to be

able to control its expression. Literary men, whether clerical or lay, thought quarrelsomeness

and malicious gossip to be the cardinal sins and chief characteristics of the female gender.

Formally, women could not serve as witnesses in court, because their word was considered

unreliable, influenced by gossip or malice (Karpihski 1995; Groicki 1559a; 1953 pp. 131-

132, 135).52 Women were thought to be given to endless and vituperative loquacity, so that a

husband should act deaf to avoid quarrels in the home (Wrobel 2002 pp. 123-124); the good

wife was defined as that woman who had overcome her "natural tendency to gossip and

obloquy" (ibid. p. 127). In an Easter Monday sermon, the Jesuit preacher Aleksander

Lorencowic went so far as to claim that Jesus' post-Resurrection appearance to Mary and

Martha rather than to the apostles could be explained by this female weakness: as incorrigible

gossips, the women would spread the Good News faster (Lorencowic 1671 vol. 2 p. 7). In

another homily, with Salome's dance and the beheading of John the Baptist as his initial text,

Lorencowic provides us with a rich panorama of Biblical misogyny and its early modern

Polish interpretation (1671 vol. 1 pp. 7-12). From Salome, that "obscene female [wszeteczna

bialaglowa]," he turns to the Whore of Babylon—a "horrible witch [szkaradna czarownica]"

who drinks the blood of the saints—and thence to the debate of the three wise men in Esdra

3.3 concerning whether monarchs, women or wine are the strongest power on earth.

Lorencowic notes that his sermon concerns only "dishonorable [nieucziwe]" women, and

then launches into a breathtaking flight of rhetorical exegesis:

52
In practice, women's testimony was quite frequent, in witch-trials and in other matters. Especially for cases of
alleged infanticide, women served as expert witnesses to determine whether the baby had been born dead
(Karpihski ibid.). They also examined suspects who claimed to be pregnant, and therefore exempt from
torture (Karpihski 1995; Groicki 1559a; 1953 pp. 195, 214; see also #42, Lublin 1642).
53
Wrobel quotes a satirical work from the end of the 17th century, and a funeral sermon for the aristocratic
Anna Lubomirska, 1639. Both draw on a saying attributed to King Alphonso of Aragon, that a wife should
be blind, a husband deaf.

118
 • Who were the witches? •

Ta gniewem, zloscia^ y krole holduie, y wina w With her wrath and fury, she ["Woman"] subjugates kings,
iad obraca, y lwy okruciehstwem przechodzi, y and turns wine into venom, and surpasses the lion in
nad smoki iadowitsza, i nad niedzwiedzie gorsza, cruelty, more malicious than the dragon, worse than the
y nawet same przemoze czarty. Non est ira, super bear; she can even triumph over devils.54 There is no anger
iram mulieris. Omnis malitia, est nequitia worse than a woman's wrath. The greatest wickedness is
mulieris, mowi Pismo (Eccle: 25). Lecz the wickedness of woman (Sirach 25: 23,17). 55 But indeed
mianowicie Bog sam wyrazyl srogosc y God himself expressed the harsh cruelty of such a one,
okrudienstwo iedney z takowych, kiedy ono przez when through Jeremiah he warned his people to fear an
Jeremiasza przestrzegl lud swoy, aby sie_ bali enraged female dove: beware in the face of the fierceness
rozgniewaney golqbice: Cauete a facie irae of the dove, and in the face of the Lord's fierce anger (Jer.
columbae, a facie furoris Domini (ibid. p. 10). 56
25:28)"'

The dove, Lorencowic acknowledges according to standard exegesis of the time, stands

here for the Assyrian queen Semiramis, but Semiramis herself symbolizes female wrath in

general. Although a dove

pazurow nie ma, drapac nie umie, y wszytka has no claws, cannot scratch, and [seems] gracious to all,
laskawa: nie wierz, iezeli gole_bica sproszna, don't believe it. If a dove is obscene, dishonorable, you'll
nieuczciwaz, doznasz, iz ona bqdzie lwica^, find that she can be a lioness, a bear, a viper, and her
niedzwiedzica^ zmijaj y iey zlosc, iad, pomsta, wrath, venom, vengeance, cruelty, represent all the
okrucienstwo, stanie za wszytkie plagi, gniewy, y plagues, wrath, and fervor of God. [Judah will be made
zapalczywosci Boze: Afacei irae columbae; a desolate] in the face of the fierceness of the dove, and in
facie furoris Domini; iako mowi Duch Swiqty; the face of the Lord's fierce anger, as the Holy Ghost
Nequitia mulieris, omnem plagam videbit cordis says. The wickedness of women, any plague, but the
(Eccli. 25) (ibid. p. 10). plague of the heart! (Sirach 25:17-18).57

What women lack in physical and mental strength, they made up for, the rhetoric has it, in a

verbal facility and a sharpness of tongue that could approximate the fury of God himself.

Insofar as witchcraft was, as a magistrate of Warta called it, a "an offence committed by

unbridled tongues"58 (Pilaszek 1998a p. 83; 2002b p. 105), it was by that fact also a

particularly female crime.

Lorencowic alludes to the common proverb "Where the devil fails, send a woman. "
The Vulgate numbering (which I have used here) differs from that of the NRSV: "There is no [...] anger
worse than a woman's wrath" is Sirach 25:15. The KJV and its descendants entirely lack "The greatest
wickedness is the wickedness of woman" but preserve a line that closely follows it: "Any wickedness, but
not the wickedness of a woman!" (NSRV 25:13 = Vulg. 25:19).
56
The Vulgate reading of what more recent translations give as the "sword of the oppressor" or "fierceness of
the oppressor" as "fierceness of the dove" gave rise to the exegetical tradition that the Assyrian banners bore
images of doves, in honor of Queen Semiramis. The mistranslation arizes from the similarity, in Hebrew, of
yonah, the present active participle of "to oppress" (so, "oppressor"), and the unrelated yonah as "dove." I
am grateful to John Kloppenborg for explaining this to me.
57
Lorencowic here runs together the end of v. 17 with the beginning of v. 18, creating evident nonsense. His
basic point, however, is clear enough.
58
"Nie uchamowany w je^zyku wystQpek. "

119
 • Chapter 1.3 •

Female vituperation, far from expressing and so relieving or reducing a woman's

tendency to malice, was thought to actually increase and strengthen malice. Jakub Kazimierz

Haur, in his discussion of women's illnesses, drew on contemporary zoological theory to

explain menstrual cramps as caused by the "unbridled wrath, nagging, peevishness, and

impatience" of some women; "good, quiet, and modest" women, he claimed, experience

them much less or not at all. Just as vipers and lizards contain no poison until they produce it

when enraged, so women would not suffer painful periods if they had not been, themselves,

their "occasion and cause"59 (Haur 1693 tr. 25 p. 434; cf. p. 387). The practice of nagging

and gossip increased and encouraged a woman's natural propensities in this direction. Rather

than releasing tensions, as modern hydraulic metaphors might lead us to imagine, such

practices, if not curbed and domesticated by a wise and forbearing husband, led to the further

development of ill humours in the body—humours suggestively compared to poison.

As we have been discussing, both secular and clerical discourse rendered the married

woman as a quarrelsome gossip, barely held in check by the combined forbearance of her

wiser, stronger, and more taciturn husband. This moderating influence ended when the

husband died before his wife, as he so often did. In Poland as elsewhere in Europe, society

looked upon widows with deep suspicion. As widows, women found themselves for the first

time enjoying a considerable independence from fathers or husbands. A widow could remain

in that state, or she could choose a new husband, this time without familial consent.

Townswomen could dispose of inherited real property as they wished (although, at least

formally, they only inherited one fourth of their husband's property, the rest being reserved

for the children). They could, and often did, run their late husband's business, and widows of

59
"niepohamowaney zlosci, skrz^tne, zrzedne, y niecierpliwe"; "dobre, ciche, y skromne" ; "okazya y
przyczyna"

120
 • Who were the witches? •

guild-members had a sort of provisional membership allowing this continuation of the family

business. Despite formal legal prohibitions, widows could and did represent their own

interests in court (Riabinin 1934 p. 30; Karpinski 1995 pp. 24-27, 66-67; Wrobel 2002

p. 152; Wisniewska 2003 p. 132; Glowacka 2006 pp. 143-146).60

This independence, outside the normative channels of male control, combined with the

older woman's real or perceived experience and therefore practical knowledge, the lessening

of her "feminine" characteristics after menopause, but with her sharp tongue and unbridled

emotionality continuing unabated, made the widow seem an intensification of all the worst

qualities discursively ascribed to women more generally, with few of what were thought of

as their compensatory good qualities (Monter 1977 pp. 133-134; Roper 1994). Noble or

patrician widows were criticized for being domineering or lustful for young men: as already

noted, Szymonowic pairs the malicious witch of Sielanka 15 with the unnaturally lustful

widow of Sielanka 18. Village widows, or old village women in general, came to be thought

of as experts in those non-physical arts by which, having lost the feminine guile of youth,

they now controlled or took vengeance on their neighbors. According to the Jesuit

lexicographer Grzegorz Knapiusz, the word "baba" had four distinct but closely inter-related

meanings: old woman, grandmother, midwife, and "superstitious old woman, who heals not

The picture of married women as home-bound and dependent, upon which the dichotomy of the independent
widow depends, masks the real and considerable independent economic activity of townswoman—at least
below the social level of the patriciate. Karpihski's research on women in the larger cities of early modern
Poland has uncovered a world of petty merchants in the bazaar selling fish, butter, baskets, and the like; a
world in which not only widows but wives and sisters of guildsmen were licensed to sell their husbands'
wares; an active grey (non-guild, non-licensed) and black market in which women played a prominent role;
and female dominance in areas such as brewing. As well, women monopolized the professions of midwifery
and care of the sick (Karpinski 1995 pp. 60-61, 66-67, 98, 132; cf. Glowacka 2006 for a brief, similar
portrait of female economic activity in a small town). Poorer townswomen of course worked outside the
home, often as house-servants (Karpinski asserts that most house-holders of large cities had at least one
female servant; ibid. p. 86) or in less honorable trades, and peasantwomen worked as house-servants in the
homes of kmieci or at the manor, as cowherds and shepherds, and in the fields—but this work provided little
scope for independence of or domination over men.

121
 • Chapter 1.3 •

by witchcraft, but by invented ceremonies"61 (1632, after Wisniewska 2003 p. 136).

Although Knapiusz scrupulously discriminates between the superstitious "baba" and the

witch proper, others perceived no such difference.

Daniel Naborowski (1573-1640), poet to the magnatial court of the Calvinist

Radziwills, listed the features of the "baba" in a poem that loses none of its cultural

significance for being an exercise in humanist hyperbole:

Babo bez ze_bow brzydka, babo nieszcze_sliwa, Toothless old woman, ugly and unhappy,
Babo niewdziexzna, babo cnocie nizyczliwa, Displeasing old woman, a stranger to virtue
Babo pelna zdrad, babo pelna niesfornosci, Old woman full of treachery, indecent old woman
Babo zwodnico dawna, babo szczyra zlosci, Ancient seducer, old woman full of wrath
Babo, ktora przedawasz panienki cnotliwe, Old woman, who sells virtuous maidens,
Babo, ktora namawiasz me_zatki wstydliwe, Old woman, who induces modest wives to sin,
Babo niemilosierna, ktorajad wydawa, Old woman without mercy, who gives out venom,
Babo, na ktorej skorajak zaba chropawa, Old woman, with rough froglike skin,
Babo smrodliwa, pebia plugastwa wszelkiego, Stinking old woman, filled with every filth
Ktora o nikim slowa nie rzeczesz dobrego, Who never has a good word for anyone at all,
Przekle_ta babo sama, co przeklinasz ludzi, Accursed old woman, yourself cursing others,
Babo, ktora, czart zawsze na cnotliwych budzi, Old woman, whom the devil arouses against the virtuous
Pijanica wierutna, zamtuzie wytarty, Rank drunkard, worn-out bordello,
Ktora cycem obwislym karmisz mlode czarty, Nursing young devils at your drooping tits,
Babo sekutna, ktora swoim czarowaniem, Quarrelsome old woman, who with your witchcraft
Przechodzisz i Medeq, i Cyrce, mym zdaniem, Outdoes Medea and Circe, in my opinion
Babo, ktoras niegodna, ze cie_ ziemia nosi, Old woman, unworthy to walk the earth,
Kiedy cie_ z kwasna, twarza. sam diabel roznosi, Carried instead, by the sour-faced devil himself62
Babo, ktoras siq nigdy grzechow nie kajala, Old woman, who has never confessed her sins
Anis tym suczym okiem na nie nie plakala, Nor cried contritely, your eyes dry of tears63
Babo, ktora gdy puscisz wiatr z zadu sprosnego, Old woman, who, farting from her foul behind
Pukasz wlasnie jak z dziala gnojem nabitego Barks like a cannon loaded with manure

Skryj siq, sprosny babsztylu, powietrzna zarazo! Hide yourself, obscene old hag, infectious vapor!
Skryj sie_, wieku naszego nieszlachetna zmazo, Hide yourself, ignoble blemish of our age!
Ktoras swiatu znajoma sprawami brzydkimi, Who, known to the world only for your nasty deeds,
Przechodza^c i Taide_ wszeteczehstwy swymi. Outdoes Taida with your obscenities.
(Naborowski 1965 175-177; quoted after Wisniewska 2003 pp. 137-138)

The poem hardly requires comment. The baba embodies every evil; she is ugly, dried up,

useless, aggressive, quarrelsome, smelly, obscene—and she practices magic and nurses devil

familiars. We have returned to the witch-stereotype we started with in Reginald Scot's work;

"baba zabobonna, co lekuje nie czarami, ale zmyslonymi nabozefistwy. "

62
"sour-faced" does not adequately translate "z kwasna^ twarza;" which phrase in Polish makes clear that the
devil is doing something he'd rather not.
63
Her eyes are "sucze"—bitchlike. This is almost certainly a printer's error for "suche"—dry.

122
 • Who were the witches? •

but we are not, perhaps, very much closer to an understanding of the relationship between

such imaginary representations and the actual practice of witch accusation and trial.

• «$• •

What connection can be made between the pervasive misogyny of early modern Polish

culture, on the one hand, and the overwhelming disproportion of female accused witches to

males? Is witch-hunting women-hunting after all?

Such a question, at least in its this simple formulation, is ill posed. It suggests that the

constellation of images and meanings that make up the representation of the witch, as also

the elaborate system of cultural and legal practices by which ascription of witchcraft is made

to attach itself to a particular accused woman, may be read as mere ideological masks and

instruments respectively of a more general project to control and punish women as such.

Assumptions and stereotypes about the nature of women informed every stage of a

witch-trial, from suspicion through sentencing. The assumption that women are dangerous

when not controlled underlies sabbat-complex of motifs, wherein women fly away from the

inhabited regions, over the border, over the wall, to disport themselves as they please on the

margin between the human and demonic world. Women's supposed quarrelsomeness relates

closely to the witch's sin of maledictory cursing. Women's supposed frivolity and spite

helped explain how they could endanger their eternal souls merely to avenge themselves on a

neighbour. Nevertheless, these gendered stereotypes cannot be treated simplistically as the

cause of the trials. Sigrid Brauner has argued that any attempt to derive the witch-trials from

the generalized misogyny of Christian civilization must fail: while Christian misogyny goes

back at least to Paul, the emergence of the gendered witch occurred in a specific time and

place (Brauner 1995 pp. 13-14). Stuart Clark, in an influential argument, has noted the

central methodological problem of treating witchcraft accusation as a means by which to deal

123
 • Chapter 1.3 •

with anomalous women—who are variously anomalous because they are too rich, or too

poor, or sick, or brash, or beggars, or inheritors of property. Witchcraft in such accounts

becomes a "means" of punishing such women—as if it were not also, and previously, a

category of the imagination.

[T]he most pressing issue raised by the gender of witches concerns the relationship between
what it meant, inside witch-accusing cultures themselves, to accuse someone of being a witch,
and the wider conditions—let us call them 'social' for the moment—that from an external
perspective seem to have produced 'accusable' people. [...] The various "social" arguments
explain how certain women become marginalized and thus susceptible to being accused of
crimes, but not what this meant, and not why this crime: why accusations should have
concerned witchcraft, rather than some other crime (Clark 1997 pp. 107-108).

The representation of women as quarrelsome, as wrathful, as unable to control their

loves and their hatreds, their jealousy and envy and lust, made them particularly susceptible

to witchcraft accusation—in Poland, indeed, they were very nearly the only people so

accused. Witchcraft was, at the folk level even more than in literary materials, a crime

associated almost entirely with women. But to say this is not at all the same as to say that

witchcraft was an expression of misogyny. Not all women were thought of as witches, even

if nearly all accused witches were women. Accused witches were so accused not because

they were women, but because they were witches—the distinction must be maintained even

though witchcraft, to some degree, may be understood as the quintessence of all that was

thought to be worst about the female gender. The representation of the witch, and its

correlation with the representation of the sharp-tongued, shrewish, obstinate woman, tell us a

good deal about early modern Polish gender attitudes; however, the relation becomes

problematic if treated as strictly causal, or as running only in one direction—from "real"

social attitudes and power relations to the "imagined" crimes of witchcraft. The men and

women who accused women of witchcraft were influenced by their gender-attitudes, but the

accusation is not a mere expression or result of such attitudes. Even some scholars who have

124
 • Who were the witches? •

favoured a strong relation between "witch-hunting" and "woman-hunting" have cautioned

against attributing explanatory power to the relation: for Christina Larner "the pursuit of

witches was an end in itself;" patriarchy and the concern for moral conformity are qualifying

contexts, but not causes of this pursuit (1981 p. 102; cf. 1984a). The relationship between

gender and accusation is correlative rather than causal. As Clark argues:

If, for example, witches are to be seen primarily as the (female) scapegoats for (male)
communal anxieties and failings, then it only matters that "witch" was one of the labels to
apply to women in early modern cultures, not that anyone should have signified something
real, objective, and socially expressive when applying it (Clark 1997: 109).

In fact, as Clark shows, demonologogical literature was not particularly interested in

gender, and was conspicuously less vehement in its misogyny than any number of other

genres, such as the querelle desfemmes. With the exception of what Clark calls the

"overstudied" Malleus, many of the principal authors of demonology paid little attention to

gender (ibid. pp. 116-117). For Del Rio for example, the practitioners of demonic magic were

usually referred to by male (that is, ostensibly gender-neutral) terms. Although

demonologists indeed assumed that women rather than men will be witches, they usually

assumed rather than explored the gender-structure underlying this imbalance: it was not an

assumption, according to Clark, constructed for the most part by demonology.64

As in the West, a low opinion of female intellectual capacity informed both those who

feared and hated witches, and those who saw them as mere deluded women. Indeed, as Clark

(1997 pp. 117ff.) has noted, the defenders of witches were rather more willing to dwell upon

female inadequacy: for such authors, precisely because women were so foolish and gullible

64
Susanna Burghartz, in an exemplary case-study, has compared the gendering of witch-accusation in two
neighboring jurisdictions in the 15th-16th century, and has shown that the female-gendered witch was
overwhelmingly the product of popular stereotype. In Lucerne, where the secular authorities tried witches,
90% were women. In Laussane, where trials were undertaken by episcopal inquisition, just 38% were
women. This implies that the statistical bias toward accusing women was a result of popular, rather than

125
 • Chapter 1.3 •

they should be pitied rather than feared. The anonymous author of the Postepekprawa

czartowskiego, for example, depicts witchcraft as the work of ignorant women, "accustomed

to believing in enchantments, in herbs, in words, in just about anything" because they "have

neither natural understanding nor knowledge of sacred scripture 5 (Postqpek 1891 [1570]

pp. 114,120). Gamalski warned judges to weigh carefully whether an alleged act of

witchcraft really occurred, or came rather "from frivolous thinking, from curiosity, from a

mixture of fantasy, melancholy, and hypochondria"66 (Gamalski 1742 p. 11); although he did

not here attribute these emotions to women, they were all stereotypically female. More

explicitly, the author of the Czarownica powolana devoted a chapter to the question "Why

are there more female Witches than male"67 (1714 (1639) q. 3, p. 35), and answers his own

question according to the usual schema. Like Starowolski, he acknowledged the occasional

saintly woman, and notes that Poland, Litwa and Rus all came to be baptized through the

effort of Christian princesses; however, these were exceptions. Women in general are

asserted to be more credulous than men, too curious, light minded, over-passionate, led

astray by the imagination, and "of imperfect judgment" (Czarownica 1714 [1639] qu. 3

pp. 36-37). Women sometimes practice superstition without thereby sinning since they do

such practices "out of their small and frivolous understanding." Superstitions are as

numerous as grains of sand in such women, so that "one can hardly find a single woman,

even among the pious, who has not at one time or another, out of ignorance, met with and put

learned belief: secular authorities tried those who were accused, without reference to demonology—church
authorities were interested primarily in heresy (Burghartz 1992).
"biale glowy, ktore rady wierzycie w gusla, w czary, w ziola, w slowa, w leda co" "w nich niemasz rozumu
przyrodzonego ani nauki pisma swi^tego. "
"z lekkomyslnosci, z ciekawosci, z pomieszaney fantazyi, melancholii, hipokondryi"
"Czemu wie_cey bialychglow anizeli me_sczyzn Czarownic?"
"rozsqdku niedoskonalego"

126
 • Who were the witches? •

her faith in" superstitious practices (ibid. p. 5).69 The Instrukcya also notes that "women have

a predilection for superstition"70 but that this must be distinguished from witchcraft properly

so called (1705 [1670] f. 15v). And where the femality of witches is mentioned at all in trial

verdicts (and such mention is rare), it is brought forward as an ameliorating circumstance.

Sabina Bartlowa, who had wrongly accused twenty-one women of witchcraft and was herself

sentenced to banishment, had her sentence reduced to public penance in consideration of "the

inconstancy of the female sex"71 (#47, Szadek 1649).

It would be easy—and a distortion of the situation—to over-emphasize the influence of

representations of the female witch on the occurrence of actual accusation. In an important

sense, the gender of accused witches was over-determined. A focus on representations, or on

marginalization, or on social control of deviance, goes some way to explaining the gender of

witches, but cannot explain why, in direct contrast to the representation, most accused

witches were married, not too old, and relatively well off—or at least no poorer than their

neighbors.

This seeming disjunction between the social position of accused witches and their

marginalized gender is better explained by returning, at this point, from the history of

representation to the concrete situations out of which accusations arose. As Eva Pocs has

argued, concerning the Hungarian trials, and as Lauren Martin has shown for the Scottish

trials, witchcraft accusation developed out of the networks of interdependence and

neighborly conflict endemic to village life, and these were not only specifically female

spheres—child-rearing, food-preparation and borrowing, illness and healing with

9
"Ba y czasem bez zadnego grzechu bywaia^ bo z malego i miaikiego rozsa^dku pochodza/' "ledwo ktora_
znalesc, choc pobozna^ ktoraby niemi [zabobonami] przynamniey na czas, y zniewiadomosci, nie tra^cila, y
iem wiary nie dala. "
70
"Bialeglowy sklonne sa_ do zabobonow"

127
 • Chapter 1.3 •

accompanying small-scale magic; haggling with its potential for quarrels and intimidation—

but also spheres in which married, non-marginalized women took the active part (Pocs 2003

pp. 374-376; Martin 2002 pp. 84-87; cf. Briggs 1996 pp. 265-271, 276). Pocs suggests that a

minority of witchcraft accusations were directed against cunning-women, who did indeed

tend to be marginal and elderly; however, the great majority followed currents of village

rivalry and tension among working, house-holding women (ibid. p. 377). It was women who

visited their neighbors to borrow or lend the foodstuffs through which witchcraft was so

often passed, women who milked the cows and made the cheese and butter so intimately

associated with the milk-thieving activities of witches, and women who took steps to protect

the cattle from such attack. It was women who helped each other out and sought each other's

advice over the healing of their children, and thus women who were blamed when things

went wrong. Moreover, where men could resort to physical violence to resolve quarrels,

women were more likely to fight with words—especially with the curses which could

retrospectively be re-interpreted as the casting of a spell. In the next section, we will examine

some of the ways that specific women came to be suspected of specific acts of witchcraft;

which processes had rather little to do with the misogynistic fulminations of Polish

humanists.

"niestatecznosc plci bialoglowskiey"

128
Chapter 1.4: The long road to the stake
Earlier studies of witchcraft in Poland, like similar studies of witchcraft elsewhere,

envisioned a short and direct road from suspicion of witchcraft to death at the stake. A

woman who fell under the slightest suspicion of dealings with the devil—anyone who was

strange, or non-conformist, or who had been seen doing or saying something peculiar, or who

had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or associated with the wrong people, or who

was unlucky enough to have been denounced by an accused witch under torture, or who had

acquired, deservedly or not, the wrath or jealousy or spite of neighbors—would be accused as

a witch. Such accused women were dunked; having floated they were sent to torture, where,

broken at the rack, they confessed what the court expected them to confess, perpetuated the

witchcraze by denouncing a wide circle of neighbors, and went to the stake. Departures from

this pattern were taken as exceptions to the rule or were explained away: the accused was of

high status, or the trial took place in an atypical region, such as eastern Malopolska.

From what has already been written, it should be clear that this picture is misleading. It

is part of a discourse tracing, in Poland, as far back as the Czarownica powolana (1639): a

discourse originating with Catholic clergy bent on decrying the ignorance and excesses of

secular courts; a discourse later taken up, ironically, by successive waves of Enlightenment,

positivist, and Marxist critics of the fanatical Catholic church. In all versions, the depiction

achieves literary eloquence, at the cost of historical nuance, by reversing the signs:

magistrates, who ought to be wise, impartial, guardians of justice and order, become

ignorant, venal, cruel, disseminators and executors of a bloodthirsty ideology; witches,

symbols of evil and disorder, perpetrators of the most ghastly crimes, heartless tormentors of

129
 • Chapter 1.4 •

innocent children, become themselves emblems of innocence. Feared for their supernatural

power to harm, they are in fact helpless victims of the courts' very real power to torture and

kill.

Despite the simplicity of this depiction, and despite the various agenda to which it has

been put, it bears saying that in some places, at some times, it contains considerable

verisimilitude. In the villages and small towns of Wielkopolska, Kujawy, and perhaps

Mazowsze in the last decades of the 17th century, it did not take much to become suspected

as a witch. In these same regions, and especially where the accused were tried in their

villages by town courts brought there at the expense of the village owner, torture really was

nearly automatic, the resulting death sentence a near foregone conclusion . In a place like

Kleczew and its environs, where 64 persons were accused of witchcraft, 59 sent to torture,

and at least 40 (83% of known sentences) sent to the stake between 1682 and 1700, one

really does find something approaching runaway witch-panic and an out-of-control,

persecuting town court (Wislicz 2004b p. 71). The Kleczew court broke every rule of torture,

and one gets the sense that the accused witches confessed so quickly in part because they

knew denial to be pointless (see 1.4.4 below). Yet even in a place like the Kleczew

neighborhood, a woman such as Anastazja Kaczmarka of Zlotkow could be denounced

numerous times over two decades, before finally coming to trial and to the stake in 1700

(Wislicz 2004b p. 90). This example of a widely reputed witch surviving so long near the

epicentre of the largest documented witch-hunt in Poland illustrates an important point: the

road to the stake was not always straight, or short, or predetermined. In fact it might be more

accurately imagined as a twisting and often-branching path, with numerous forks, some

leading away from execution. In this chapter we walk down that road, noting the various off-

130
 • Road to the stake •

turns, and in the process reviewing the process by which, despite these off-turns, so many

Polish women were judicialy transformed from suspects, to defendants, to the condemned

and executed.

1.4.1: Suspicion, accusation, calumny

Ever since Jadwiga Macowa came to Zofia Skrzyneczka's house asking for onions, Zofia's

cows stopped giving milk [pozytek, "profit"] and the calves dried up and died. Accordingly,

Zofia accused Jadwiga: "Thus I ascribe guilt to nobody except to that same Jadwiga

Macowa, and I ask for justice from her"1 (#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). Similarly, Katarzyna

Mrowczyna, a cowherd and widow, came begging "often and often" to the door of the

prosperous kmiec Wojtech Zloch. On one occasion he said to her: "the devils bring you here

so often." Soon after, five of his cows lost their calves, and his steer broke its leg (#115,

Stajszewo 1695). The Thomas-MacFarlane hypothesis, that witchcraft accusations resulted

from an outward projection of the guilt engendered by refusing charity, has largely been

rejected (Barry 1996); in any case it applies only to such modernizing and Reforming areas

such as England where concepts of charity were undergoing rapid change (MacFarlane 1970

pp. 174, 205-206; Thomas 1973 pp. 560-567; on charity in early modern Poland, see

Augustyniak and Karpihski eds. 1993). But we see something like this mechanism here and

in a handful of other trials (e.g. #118, Lublin 1698, discussed in 3.1.3), wherein a better-off

peasant refuses charity or some other favor to someone who they know can make moral

demands of them, or where they give the charity ungraciously. However, no unconscious

psychological mechanism need be brought into discussion; the accusers themselves, quite

explicitly, located the occasion and motivation for bewitchment in these exchanges. They

1
"Ja tedy winy nikomu nie daiq tylko tey Jadwidze Macowey y prosz? z niey sprawiedliwosc. "

131
 • Chapter 1.4 •

were perfectly cognizant of having trespassed on neighborliness; the ensuing misfortune

therefore had a clear and obvious source. In accusing the witch they were not clearing

themselves of guilt but asserting that the revenge was radically disproportionate—an

example, perhaps, of the "unchecked passion" thought to be women's greatest fault.

Witchcraft hidden in food was not always part of begging behaviour; it was woven into

the constant minor exchanges that characterized village sociability, and especially the

interactions between women. Krystyna Danieleczka, under torture, attempted to deflect the

accusation onto one Bartlomiejowa Pilecka, who had given her peas and turnips in exchange

for some unsalted butter. Ever since, everything had gone to rack and ruin: her butter spoiled,

and there were worms in her cottage cheese (#74, Slomniki 1674). Others came under

suspicion for having publicly cursed or threatened their accuser, who subsequently suffered

misfortune, sickness, or the death of cattle or a family member. The komornica Zofia

threatened her landlord, Adam Podsiadly: "Remember, Adam, as long as I am with you all

will be well, but if I leave you will be ruined. " When he fell sick, therefore, he knew

exactly where to look for the cause of his illness (#83, Warta 1678). According to witnesses,

Dorota of Siedlikow told Maciej Gorczyca "devils will possess you if I wish it"4 (#21, Kalisz

1613). Such a situation exactly parallels the conditions set out by Groicki for the prosecution

of witchcraft (1955b art. 24; 1954 p. 117; see 1.2.1 above).

In the examples given above, suspicion arose from a simple correlation: misfortune

befell somebody soon after they had quarreled with or had been threatened by someone else;

or they fell sick after accepting a gift, most often of food. The suspected witch need not have

possessed, and often did not possess, any particularly "witchlike" features: she need not have

2
"cz^sto i gqsto"
"Pamiqtaj, Adamie, poki ja tu u ciebie bqd$, bqdziec dobrze, jak od ciebie wynijdq, wniwecz siq obrocisz. "

132
 • Road to the stake •

a reputation for cunning nor need she have done any of the sorts of things that witches are

supposed to do. In other cases, however, witnesses and accusers based their suspicions on

more concrete evidence or on reputation.

Lamer (1981 pp. 98-99) and Demos (1982) note that women could develop a reputation

for witchcraft over an extremely long period before coming to trial. This was true in Poland

as well: the peasant Maciej Stryjak accused his neighbor Dorota Lysakowa of having done

magic all her life, "healing some, harming others, using various means—splinters, herbs and

other things"5 (#62, Che_ciny 1665). Regina of Stawiszyn came under suspicion, in part, by

having lived for a time with the recently burnt witch Marusza before moving to Kalisz (#22,

Kalisz 1616); she also knew how to heal cattle and children. However, while a reputation for

cunning often contributed to the case against an accused witch, it seems rarely to have

sufficed for accusation or initial suspicion: for that, some concrete act of witchcraft was

necessary. Cunning-women played, after all, an integral role in peasant medicine (and in

manor and town medicine as well), and despite elite literature painting all folk-healers as

witches, most potential accusers treated them as witches only inpotentia. For an accusation

to be lodged against someone with a reputation for cunning, they had to have done

something—or have been thought to have done so. And since the actions that could bring

suspicion of malefice onto a cunning-woman were essentially the same as those that brought

suspicion on women with no prior reputation in that direction, such reputation seems to have

played rather a minor part in initial accusation, although it could help to make such

accusation stick.

4
"opqtajX ci§ diabli, kiedy b^dQ chciala. "
5
"jednym ludziom naprawiala, a drugim psowala, roznych sposobow zazywajac na to, drzazg, ziol i innych
rzeczy"

133
 • Chapter 1.4 •

One can find only loose hints of a pattern in the sorts of activity that could bring

suspicion of witchcraft onto a woman. Some activities, such as gathering dew before dawn,

were well-known stereotypical witchcraft techniques: the gathered dew brought prosperity,

usually in the form of milk, to the witch while removing it from the fields and cattle of the

neighbor whose dew was stolen (e.g. #74, Slomniki 1674). Similarly, gathering herbs before

dawn, especially on the miedzy or borders between neighboring fields, could be part of milk-

stealing magic (e.g. Jadwiga Gruchowa, who was caught gathering herbs in the fields before

dawn on Easter morning (#63, Ch^ciny 1665)). However, folk-medicine also very often

called for herbs gathered before dawn, so that such activity could often be legitimate (see

2.1.2-3 below). Less easily explainable activities included the gathering of grass or earth

from the hoof-prints of cattle, also as a means of stealing the cattle's milk. Although the

villagers of Obrazowice had, according to themselves, suspected Regina Frakowa of

witchcraft for a long time, they brought no formal complaint until she was seen gathering

something before the manor cattle-barn, and later picking something from the path the cows

took to pasture. This, together with the fact that she refused to show what she had collected,

was the immediate cause of their accusation against her (#127, Slomniki 1700). Similarly, the

Nowy Wisnicz juryman Walenty Chmielowski accused Justina Sukienniczka of witchcraft

when she was seen stealing manure from his cow, who had just given birth—yet another

technique of milk-theft magic, although such manure theft was also part of rituals for

regaining one's own stolen milk (#101, Nowy Wisnicz 1689; and see 2.1.3).

Others were found selling or in the possession of suspicious magical objects, such as an

Easter loaf filled with manure (Fajfarowa in #63, Checiny 1665) or dried snakes (#39, Lublin

1643); or they were caught in the act of stealing such objects, including a live human baby

134
 • Road to the stake •

(#84, Bochnia 1679). Human remains from the gallows could not be used for other than

nefarious purposes (#5, Poznah 1559; #19, Kielce 1605; #27, Lublin 1627; #164, Krakow

1737); stolen Eucharist hosts could be used for good, but their theft was itself a crime against

God (see 2.2-2.3). However, ownership of suspicious objects—herbs, candle-wax from the

church, pots of strange ointment—more often emerged later in the process, either as an

allegation by witnesses or as the result of a formal search of the accused witch's lodgings.

Similarly, witnesses and accusers often alleged that an accused witch had buried bones or

other enchantments on their property to cause magical harm; however, although accusers did

often find such buried objects, they rarely caught the witch burying them. The ascription of

such material evidence to a particular accused witch was based on ex post facto reasoning

and did not form the basis for initial suspicion.6

Activities of more obviously malicious intent also could incite accusation. Matyasz

Kozicki brought his new neighbors Antoni and Franciszka Tuciak to trial before the village

court of Jazowsko when they swept garbage over the village border into his field; soon after,

two of his cows died (#168, Jazowsko 1748). In 1631 the Lublin townswoman Pani

Michalowa washed her child in herbs to heal it of consumption (suchota—lit. "dryness"). She

sent a servant girl to pour the wash water out at the cross-roads, thus removing the sickness

from child and from community, but the servant seems to have poured it out instead in a

nearby street. A neighbor came to complain: "What has your servant girl done to me, she

poured some sort of Witchcraft out in front of me," upon which Pani Michalowa "grabbed

6
See however trial #29, Nowy Wisnicz 1632. Krzysztof Wlodarczyk claimed to have seen Regina Golcowna
hiding a kerchief full of enchantments in his house; this caused him to fall sick, and his cattle and fields to
yield poor harvests. He produced the object before the court: it was full of "some sort of material mixed it
seems with ashes and bones of some kind, very disgusting [jakies materie mieszane jakoby z popiolem i
kosciami jakimis, bardzo plugawe]." Regina withstood all six sessions of torture without confessing: in view
of this fact, and considering that Krzysztof owed Regina money, and all his witnesses were kin, she was
acquitted.

135
 • Chapter 1.4 •

the girl herself and began to punish her, saying I didn't tell her to pour it out [there], but

beyond the Senate lands."7 Pani Michalowa explained herself before the court: "By the will

of Pan Michal I went to Pani Deczowska, who advised me to buy a szelqg's worth of beef

from a yearling cow, and to boil it with herbs in a new vessel, and wash the child in the water

three times, and then pour our the water at the cross-roads; she said she'd done the same for

her own daughter [...]. I didn't do it for witchcraft, but out of need" (APLublin, AMLublin

sig. 207 (Consularia) f. 320).

Pani Michalowa deflected what could have become a serious accusation in various

ways: she immediately punished her servant, in front of the accuser; she stated to him what

her intentions had been and how they had gone awry; she admitted the whole before the town

counsel, noted that her own husband had approved of the action, and explained that she had

learned of this procedure from another respected woman of the town, who had tried it herself

with good results. She was at pains to make clear that she had no special knowledge, and that

the key act of potential witchcraft—pouring out the sickness-bearing water in the city rather

than outside the community—was unintended. Nevertheless, had the victim wished to lodge

a formal complaint, or had Pani Michalowa's reputation been worse than it seems to have

been, or had she been less astute in justifying herself to the court, things could have ended

very badly. Elzbieta Stepkowicowa of Nowy Sa^cz, similarly accused of pouring wash-water

out near a neighbor's house, reacted with a defamation case against the accuser, demanding

proof or an apology. The accuser did provide proof (or at least witnesses): despite the help of

7
"co mi wasa dziewczyna wyrza_dzila wylala iakosz Cary przed mie, a ona porwawszy dziewczyne tez pocela ia^
karac, mowia^c niekazalam ia aby wylewa, tylka za senatami." It is not clear to me what "za senatami" is
intended it to mean—I have taken it to mean beyond the noble-owned Lublin suburbs (juridicii), that is,
entirely outside the town.
"Isz ia na instantia^Pana Michala chodzilam [...] do Paniey Deczowskiy, ktora [...] radziela miey aby kupila
za szel^g mie^sa Jalowiczego, i z zielem we dzbanku nowym uparzyc to, y omyc dziecie do trzech razow, y

136
 • Road to the stake •

legal counsel, her defamation case quickly turned against her, and she was burnt at the stake

(#70,NowySaczl670).

Other activities tending to incite accusation included nearly anything that failed to

conform to the norms and standards of village life. Recent popular accounts of the witch-

trials that treat witchcraft accusation as a tool of social control, and especially as a tool for

the control and disciplining of women, rather miss the point: both because this function

appears rather rarely, most accused witches being fully integrated into their society; and

because the instrumental reading makes difficult any attempt at insider explanation. Accusers

of witches were not trying to police the borders of the acceptable, they were trying to keep

themselves safe from witchcraft. Nevertheless it is true that early modern Polish peasant

society, like most peasant societies the world over, was deeply suspicious of strange

behavior, and one available explanation for strange behaviour was that it represented a ritual

of witchcraft. Regina Frakowa, already mentioned above, confirmed the suspicions against

her when she was seen running "naked," in a nightshirt only, through her garden (under

torture, she explained that she had been attempting a ritual she had learned as a child, to get

rid of fleas) (#127 Slomniki 1700). The house-maid Regina of Mlotkowo was accused by her

peasant master when, awakened by a strange noise, he found her awake and fully dressed

well after midnight (#110, Lobzenica 1692).

Nearly any activity at all could lead to an accusation of witchcraft. But such a

formulation, while not untrue, is misleading: the list of potentially suspicious activities can

be expanded more or less ad infinitum, but most of these activities remained merely

suspicious unless combined with inexplicable misfortune visited upon the accuser or his or

potym wylac na krzyzowe drogi, powiadziacz to zem ia tesz to czyniia corce swoiej [...] nie dla czarow ia to
czynielam ale dla potrzeby. "

137
 • Chapter 1.4 •

her household. Women begged and borrowed every day; they picked herbs, performed rituals

to protect their cattle from milk-magic, came home from the tavern late at night; they poured

wash water out at the cross-roads or elsewhere (an exorcising or apotropaic behaviour found

nearly the whole world over); they threatened and cajoled and upbraided their neighbours:

indeed, according to the constant complaint of moralizing preachers, they cursed their

neighbours to the devil almost without respite (Gdacjusz 1644; 1969 p. 325). For any such

activity to become the proximate cause of an accusation of witchcraft, it had to co-occur with

a number of other factors: sudden or inexplicable misfortune, a prior animosity between the

accuser and accused, a long ambivalent reputation. Bringing formal accusations against a

neighbour was a serious, expensive, and uncertain business; such steps were not taken

lightly. Even the most blatantly malevolent activity could be overlooked or discounted,

perhaps warded off with a prayer or counter-magic, without it were confirmed by subsequent

misfortune. In the village of Ostrowite, Regina Skotarka approached Blazej Chahipnik,

plucked a leaf from a tree and chewed it, circled him once and went away quickly; she also

told him "you weren't a cripple, but now you will be."9 Even such an incident would

probably have been passed over, had not Blazej indeed gone lame, and lost twenty goats and

two steers to sudden illness within the space of a week (#68, Kleczew 1669).

All this is to say that witchcraft accusation did not, in most cases, proceed from

suspicious action to confirming misfortune, but rather the reverse. A person experiencing

sudden misfortune looked around for likely agents of that misfortune, and if they had

recently quarreled with a neighbor, or been threatened, or taken food from them, or seen the

neighbor doing something strange, and if that neighbor already fulfilled some of the

stereotyped attributes of a witch (most saliently by being of the appropriate gender), then an

9
"nie bytes kaleka_, a toz teraz bedziesz"

138
 • Road to the stake •

accusation was likely to follow. Most of the evidence against accused witches, including

their various suspicious activities, was recorded not as part of the initial statement of

accusation but as part of witness testimony: the central fact of such testimony was nearly

always misfortune suffered by the witness, the accuser, or their kin, while the rest of the

evidence consisted of circumstantial indications that this or that specific woman, rather than

some other, had caused the misfortune.

Such an account of the mechanism of witchcraft accusation, as an inexplicability-

evading process by which accidents were rendered meaningful, is of course standard in the

literature on witchcraft—it traces back to Evans-Pritchard's dictum that "the notion of

witchcraft explains unfortunate events" (1965 [1937] chapter 4). And yet this account, too,

can be misleading, in that it implies a populace always ready and willing to consign their

neighbors to the flames over a broken leg or a sick cow. Unlike the Azande, early modern

Polish peasants did not explain all misfortunes by witchcraft, nor could they: unlike Zande

accusations, Polish accusations of witchcraft did not end, usually, in reparations of various

minor kinds, but in death at the stake. Accusers knew this perfectly well, and for the most

part did not lightly send their co-villagers to such a fate.

Thus the satirist's image of an ignorant and bloody-minded populace must be treated as

satire, not as a true characterization:

Upal pola wysusza, lub zaleja_ deszcze, A drought dries the fields, or rain comes to flood them,
Nie zrodzi sie_, az czary glosza_usta wieszcze. Nothing will grow, until a diviner finds the witch.
Krowy mleka nie daj'% nie zrobi sie_ maslo, Cows give no milk, butter refuses to churn,
Koh zachorzal, wol chromie, niebo gromem trzaslo, The horse is sick, the steer lame, lightning strikes,
Wicher wali budynki, drzewa sciele w lesie, A gale blows over buildings, and fells trees in the forest
Czary to [...] It's witchcraft [...].
(Wodka 1729, after Baranowski 1952 p. 62).

In fact, and in sharp contrast to the opinions of both contemporary satirists and some modern-

day scholars, Polish peasants could be extremely circumspect in their accusations of witches.

139
 • Chapter 1.4 •

It simply is not the case that they were willing to attribute every misfortune to the local

witch. At least, whatever they may have thought privately, or grumbled to friends, they were

not willing to make such suspicions public or official, or to swear on a crucifix and thus take

responsibility for their words onto their own souls, except where they felt quite certain. Even

when an accusation reached the formal stage, peasant accusers tended to hedge their

assertions with endless qualifications and demurrals. Wojtek Zloch, already encountered

above, was quite sure that Katarzyna Mrowczyna caused his cattle to bear stillborn calves

and his bull to break its leg, because this happened just after he had cursed her for begging.

However, he was willing to suppose that his many other problems might have other causes.

"Other misfortunes have befallen me, but I could not swear that Mrowczyna caused them.

Concerning the cattle and the steer however, [I'm] ready to give my oath"10 (#115, Stajszewo

1695). When the Lobzenica court asked the gromada of Mlotkowo for its collective opinion

of the witches accused by some of the peasants of that village, the soltys Szymon Gutnecht

provided an answer that is a masterpiece of nuanced circumspection:

[M]y nic a nic przeciwko tym niewiastom nie We have nothing but nothing against these women,
mamy, a to my o co posaxlzac mieli, bo nie wiemy although indeed we have good reasons to accuse
przez co ta na nas kle_ska spadla, czy li przez Boga, someone, but we don't know why such catastrophes have
czy li przez zlych ludzi, coze mamy na kogo befallen us, whether from God or from evil people—what
mowic, kiedy nie wiemy, tylko to nam dziwno, ze can we have to say against anybody, since we don't know
nigdzie bydlo nie zdychalo wkolo tylko u nas, ourselves, although we do wonder why cattle don't die
zesmy siq z tego zniszczeli. Te niewiasty sie_ kiedy anywhere nearby, only among us: we've been ruined by
z nami wadzily ani nam odgrazary, ani tez co zlego this. These women have never quarreled with us or
kiedy o nich albo by je gdzie powolac miano o threatened us, and we've never heard anything bad about
czarostwo nie sfyszeliszmy. Instygatora zadnego them, or that they've been denounced for witchcraft. You
na nie mi^dzy nami nie masz, lica tez zadnego na won't find any accuser against them among us, we don't
nie nie mamy, oprocz co tam na te, Regina Kotarski have any evidence against them either, except what
powiedzial. (#110, Lobzenica 1692). Kotarski said about Regina.

0
"Takze dzialo mu sie_ wiqcej szkody, ale na te_ nie moze przysiaA zeby ta Mrowczyna to czynila. Co zas
wedhig krow i wohi jego, na to swiadek Wojtek Zloch gotow swoja_przysie_ga_podeprzec." The Polish text
here switches from what is presented as a close paraphrase of Zloch's actual words in the first sentence, to
the court-scribe's comment in the second.

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 • Road to the stake •

We should take seriously such qualifications on the part of accusers and witnesses,

which among other things demonstrate how seriously they could take the act of swearing,

and the sin of swearing falsely. Very nearly every witness in the trial of Regina

Lewczykowa—both the witnesses for the plaintiff and for the defense—refused to say

anything specific about her potential witchcraft, restricting themselves to such

circumlocutions as "I don't know about that, whether the accused Lewczykowa is supposed

to have practiced witchcraft, although this year Jakub Gloch, who is here with us as a

witness, complained to me that the servant girl of that same Lewczykowa milked his cow in

the field, from which time that cow didn't want to give any more milk, so that he had to sell

it; and I don't know about that, whether she is supposed to have bewitched this here

Kozielek. " ! In the end, even her accuser confined himself to reporting the co-occurrence of

her curse and his illness (#118, Lublin 1698). Such testimony, and such nuanced and

qualified accusations, should not be explained away as the result of legal formulae. They

indicate instead the serious reservations accusers and witnesses could have concerning

accusations of witchcraft. Such reservations contributed, along with other factors to be

discussed below, to a general unwillingness to bring witchcraft accusations to court. They

also indicate the degree, after formal accusations were lodged in court, to which accusers and

their community depended on the magistrate not only to mete out justice but, perhaps more

importantly, to determine the truth of the accusations through the witch's extracted

confession. Witnesses could give equivocating evidence in part because they shared with

magistrates a conviction that the true determination of guilt lay in torture, and in the accused

11
"Nie wiem tego zeby obwiniona Lewczykowa miala sie. czarami bawic, atoli skarzyl mi si$ tego lata Jakub
Gloch, ktory to znami iest na swiadectwo, iz dziewka teyze Lewczykowey krowQ mu wydoila na polu, od
ktorego czasu krowa wincey mleka dawac nie chciala, asz ia_ musial przedac, y tego niewiem zeby miala
tego Kozielka oczarowac."

141
 • Chapter 1.4 •

witch's reaction to it. The truly innocent would withstand it, while the guilty would confess.

The first and most decisive fork in the road to the stake, therefore, lies here, in the decision of

self-identified victims of witchcraft to bring their accusations to the court of law rather than

to seek the many other possible forms of redress, such as asking the accused to heal the

illnesses she had caused. After this decision had been made, accusers committed themselves

to the accused witch's guilt, while also maintaining reservations in expectation that the court

would succeed in confirming accusation through confession—as, so often, it did.

• *X* •

I should not want to give the impression that early modern Poles were reluctant to call

one another "witch," or to grumble and complain and gossip about the malicious and

potentially malevolent powers of their neighbors. Quite the contrary: although informal

gossip has not usually made its way into court records and thus into history, there is

considerable good evidence that, in village and town and city, people were willing and eager

to ascribe the label of witchcraft to each other all the time. What they were reluctant to do—

because of the expense involved, because of the danger to their soul from a false accusation,

because, probably, of a general distrust of the courts—was make a formal accusation and

initiate a formal trial. Informal accusation of witchcraft was integral to village and town life,

part of the ordinary discourse especially of women. But such informal accusation rarely

progressed to the stage of a formal witch-trial.

Informal accusations of witchcraft happened all the time. These could range from

simple insult to a more pointed admonition: "witch" could function as a symbol of everything

improper, everything opposite to proper female social behaviour, but it could also indicate

that a specific woman really was thought to be, or to be acting like, a witch. One might

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 • Road to the stake •

compare the contemporary use of insults such as "slut;"—sometimes this is just a general

insult, borrowing from socially sanctioned sexual roles to denigrate the target, and not to be

taken literally (just as "bitch" does not literally mean that the insulter thinks the insulted is a

female dog); but sometimes it is a more concrete and specific allegation characterizing the

perceived behaviour of the woman receiving the insult. It would not always be clear to the

insulted person, or to the audience, to which purpose the insult is being used—and this

ambiguity of insults, the deniability, on the part of the insulting party, that the insult was

meant literally, is an important feature of such allegations. For example, when a certain

Lopatkowicowa exclaimed before the Nieszawa court in 1716, "in this Town of Nieszawa

there's not a single honest thing, only Whores and Witches, excepting only Pani Kowalska"

(Pilaszek 1998a p. 85), the court seems to have understood the rhetorical nature of her

exclamation. But in other cases, especially when declared publicly, such insults were taken

seriously as at least potential preliminary accusations, or as serious attacks against reputation.

A suit for defamation was likely to follow.

Such defamation trials are extremely frequent in Polish town and village records. In

village court records, which lacked both the formal structure and the serious consequences of

town trials, it is not usually possible to distinguish between accusations of witchcraft,

brought by the victim of witchcraft, and defamations suits brought by the accused. This

distinction is much clearer in town records. Defamation proceedings were heard before the

normal wojt-court or the counsel-court responsible for public order, rather than the

extraordinary court (indicium bannitum) that in many towns tried serious crimes; complaints

of defamation were recorded into the ordinary court books rather than the acta maleficorum

12
"[...] w tym Miescie Nieszawie nie masz Nic pocciwego, tylko Kurwy a Czarownice, oprocz iedney tylko
Paniey Kowalskiey"

143
 • Chapter 1.4 •

in which trials for major theft, murder, or witchcraft were set down. Malgorzata Pilaszek,

who has lately insisted on the important distinction between defamation cases and witch-

trials proper, suggests that the former, often, were not trials at all but simply the recording of

a protest, on the part of the defamed, into the public record. Such a formal and public protest

functioned as a means for the defamed party and her family to clear her name; it was part of

the complex means by which early modern Poles preserved and maintained their most

important possession, their public reputation and honour (Pilaszek 1998a pp. 83-87; 2002b

pp. 107-111; 2005 p. 113).

A person's good name, his or reputation and all that went with it—trustworthiness,

dignity, public standing—was, in Poland as elsewhere in early modern Europe, the principal

coin in which symbolic capital was calculated. Like actual coin, it was guarded jealously. A

public but informal accusation of witchcraft was a double attack on reputation: if not quickly

counteracted it both damaged one's good name and left the way open for the accusation to be

formalized. A poor fama communis was recognized even in the early ecclesiastical-court

trials as important evidence against the bewitched (Bylina 1990 p. 44; citing Ulanowski ed.

1902 items 465, 1574; 1908 item 202). In acting decisively against even the suggestion of

witchcraft—which together with the imputation of prostitution constituted the most serious

and the most common slander against female reputation—women and their kin hoped to

maintain reputation and to prevent the accusation from becoming more serious.

Lublin town-records roil with such accusations and counter-accusations, such attacks

on character and resulting protestations, most of which never turned into witch-trials. An

exchange between two commoner women of the Lublin suburbs quarrelling over a matter of

petty trade in 1650, may be taken as typical: Olexina Czesna yelled "whore, Witch, you went

144
 • Road to the stake •

to old village women for Enchantments" to which Janowa Latowska replied "you're the

Same. [...] you're more a whore than I am"13 (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 210 f. 144v).

Witnesses to such quarrels often showed the circumspection characteristic of early modern

Polish court testimony: "I don't know if they called each other Witches, I don't know if [the

Sodanskis] called Nowinska a whore, because I came at the end of the quarrel"14 (APLublin,

AMLublin sig. 61 (Consularia) ff. 119-120).

Defamers could be fined or imprisoned for frivolous accusation of witchcraft, as

happened to Zofia Siciarka, who accused Tomasz Gabonski of bewitching her trade in sieves

(Nowy Wisnicz, 1622, in Kaczmarczyk 1907 p. 330). However, even when such quarrels

descended into violence—as when one woman called another an "old hag, a witch!" and the

other "punched her in the gob"15 (Lublin 1640; APLublin AMLublin sig. 109 f. 139v; quoted

after Wisniewska 2003 p. 114)16—the disturbance usually ended with apologies. Even more

serious and specific accusations quite often stopped at the level of a hearing before the

Council-court—essentially, as Pilaszek suggests, an airing of grievances rather than a trial. In

1680, a neighbour accused the Lublin burgherwoman Katarzyna Janowa Karwacka of being

a witch, saying that she "sent her son to the gallows to gather the ropes that fall from the

gallows, from [hanged] thieves." According to a witness, the accuser showed up drunk at the

Karwacki household, and forcibly searched the home for suspicious things, but found

nothing. Our whole knowledge of the affair comes from Karwacka and her husband, and

13
"kurwo Czarownico chodzilas do baby po Czary do wsi na co iey Pani Janowa odpowiedziala tiesz takas
Sama. [...] odpowiedziala ato ty kurwa nizli ia. "
1
"skoczywszy ztrzewikich z nogi zrzuciwszy grozila mu, y malo go wgebe. nie uderzyla, niewiem czy
zadawali sobie czarostwo Niewiem tym, czyli zadawli Nowinskiey kurrestwo, bom ia ius na koniec swaru
przyszedl"
15
'"A tobie, co do tego, babo, czarownico!' i inne slowa niepoczciwe. Bylinczyna dala onej w gqbq, mowiajs,
'A dowiedziesz mi tego," ze Janowa Kowalka alias Laweczka zdjawszy trzewik, z nogi wytrza_sala onej. "
16
Wisniewska gives the date of this exchange as 1640 (p. 284) and 1692 (p. 288). The earlier date is almost
certainly the correct one.

145
 • Chapter 1.4 •

witnesses on their behalf, who registered their protest before the Council to publicly affirm

and uphold the reputation of Katarzyna (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 226 (Consularia) ff. 477-

477v).

1.4.2: From accusation to trial

As mentioned, no precise demarcation between witch-trial and defamation-suit can be

discovered in village court records, which consist usually in a brief account of the conflict

together with the court's decision and sentence. Strict distinctions between accuser and

accused, or plaintiff and defendant, were rare, nor did they much matter: since village courts

functioned on a model of restorative justice, the court tended to focus not on who was wrong

but on how to set things right. Frequently the sentence consisted in fines against both parties,

with the warning of much more dire consequences should either side renew their accusations.

Thus when in 1697 one Kaska and her mother-in-law Oryna accused each other of

witchcraft, the court fined Oryna two grzywny for her suspected enchantments, but also fined

Kaska one grzywna, for having attacked her mother-in-law, and required her to apologize. If

either were to raise the issue again, they would be fined twenty grzywny—a fortune to a
17

peasant—and fifty lashes (Lysiak ed. 1965 item 1092).

The whole emphasis of the workings of the court tends toward this outcome of conflict

resolution and social re-integration. In this sense Polish village courts fulfilled functions

similar to those provided by Zande poison oracles or the other sorts of micro-political

conflict-management systems of much African witchcraft accusation: providing a mechanism

for the management and resolution both of intellectual conflicts (providing explanation for

7
Concerning defamation procedings in village law, including public insulting accusations of witchcraft, see
especially Staszkow 1960, Laszewski 1994.

146
 • Road to the stake •

misfortune) and of social conflicts (providing mechanisms for the recreation of neighborly

amity). But whereas African witchcraft accusation provides both means of resolution through

re-integration, and means of resolution through dissolution, the splitting up social units, this

second option was not usually open to Polish village courts.18 Although the Iwkowo village

court could tell a vagabond and suspected "succubita" to, in effect, get out of town by

sundown ((#18, Iwkowo 1602, and see 1.3.4 above), and village courts may have had limited

ability to impose banishment, they could not usually force the expurgation of incorrigible

sources of conflict. A hypothesis, which can be little more than suggested here, is that

accusations went to town courts when the ordinary mechanisms of village court

reconciliation failed. Another hypothesis, again only suggested, is that the relative paucity of

village courts in some regions, notably much of Wielkopolska, might help to account for the

greater incidence of witch-trials in those regions.

I cannot pursue either of these hypotheses here, and only present them as avenues for

future research. The following brief analysis of village-court trials is meant, instead, to

highlight a different point: the effect of judicial practices, as much as or more than social or

cultural or religious contexts, in the determination of the characteristics of witch-trials. To

my mind the best demonstration that witch-trials took on the character they did primarily

because of legal procedure—above all torture—rather than because of the influence of

demonology, fanaticism, or ignorance, may be gleaned by looking, for comparison, to these

village-court witch-trials.

18
1 am, here, deliberately simplifying the rich African ethnography on witchcraft, and ignoring the bulk of
recent Africanist work, which tends to locate witchcraft accusation in colonial and post-colonial contexts,
and which tends to emphasize the discontinuities embodied in witch-cleansing movements rather than the
homeostatic functionality of stable accusation mechanisms (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff eds., 1993).
Despite its numerous blindspots and shortcomings, I find the classical structural-functionalist formulation of
the sociology of witchcraft (as expounded for example in Marwick 1967) to be a useful ideal-type model for
thinking about some aspects of village witchcraft in Poland.

147
 • Chapter 1.4 •

It is not yet well understood to what degree village courts could act autonomously of

the manor; no doubt szlachta involvement varied widely. Wyczanski has cautiously

suggested that village courts may have combined power in the hands of a manor-appointed

wojt and jurymen acclaimed by the village gromada; a court so constituted would

theoretically combine the will of both pan and peasant collective (Wyczanski 1992 pp. 218-

219). Haur recommends that, insofar as they do nothing against the interests of their lord,

village courts should be allowed to manage village affairs with minimal interference (Haur

1693 pp. 224-265). Unlike town courts, village courts could not legally mete out capital

sentences, and unlike town courts, they had no tradition of torture. But the greatest difference

between them lies in their intentions and orientation—not just in witch-trials but in all

criminal cases brought before them. Whereas town courts, influenced by Roman Law,

emphasized exemplary punitive justice, traditional village law nearly always attempted

restoration of order, and restitution for harm done.19

Thus when the soltys of the village of Los, speaking for the entire gromada or village

collective, complained to the Klimkowka village court concerning the witchcraft practiced by

the wife of Lukacz Grylas, the court decreed that "Lukaczka Grelaczka is to give her oath,

My analysis of witch-trials in village courts is based primarily on a reading of the complete published records
of several villages in the area to the south and east of Krakow, published in the series Starodawne Prawa
Polskiego Pomniki. These are: Iwkowa (Plaza ed. 1969), Jazowsko (Grodziski ed. 1967), La^cko (Vetulani
ed. 1962-1963); Klimkowka (Lysiak ed. 1965); Wara (Lysiak ed. 1971); and Zawada (Vetulani ed. 1957).
The editors of the series took care to include villages of several types: they are variously owned by the
bishop of Krakow, a monastery, a member of the middling szlachta, and the great magnatial Potocki family.
However, with the exception of Klimkowka and the handful of surrounding villages under its village-court
jurisdiction, there were extremely few witch-trials in most of these courts; accordingly, I focus on the dozen-
odd trials and trial-like proceedings in Klimkowka from 1600-1762. It is worth noting, however, that of the
1255 entries in the Klimkowka court books, just 14 concern witchcraft. By comparison, there are 118 cases
concerning "quarrells, shouting matches, disagreements, tiffs" (of which 1 is also about witchcraft) and 29
concerning slander (of which 6 about witchcraft (most are about property). Concerning village law in
general, see Kutrzeba and Mankowski eds. 1938; Zdrojkowski 1968. On witch-trials before village courts,
see also Staszkow 1958, Wislicz 1997a.

148
 • Road to the stake •

that she has done no harm to anyone, and will do no harm. " 20 After giving her oath, she is to

be free of all slanderous suspicion, under penalty of a 20 grz. fine (#24, Klimkowka 1618).

Even more impressive is the collective ritual of accusation and expurgation that the

Klimkowka village court facilitated for itself and nearby Kunkowa, during a season of dearth

in 1668. In both villages, the entire community was accusing one another of "great harm in

the village, partly from witchcraft, partly from thievery, so that there is no profit from the

cattle. " 21 Accordingly, all male heads of household were to gather publicly, and publicly

swear for themselves, their families, and their servants, that they engaged in no witchcraft

and knew of no one who did (Lysiak ed. 1965, items 691-692).

Typically in village cases, the court imposed penalties of public apology and a small

fine, with a much steeper fine or more serious penalties should the quarrel between accuser

and accused be renewed. Antoni Tuciak paid a pound of wax to the church, 1 grzywna to the

manor, and Vi grzywna to the village court, for sweeping garbage onto a neighbor's field

without first making the sign of the cross over it to remove malevolent intent. But should

either side renew their quarrel, the penalty would be 50 lashes (#168, Jazowsko 1748). The

Klimkowka court threatened extremely high fines, together with whipping, in cases of

renewed witchcraft or renewed accusation: fines of 1 grz. or less jumped to 10, 20, even 30

grz., together with 50 or 60 lashes of the whip, should the quarrel be renewed (#24, 1618;

#32, 1636; #79, 1678; #90, 1683; #132, 1702; see also Lysiak ed. 1965 items 775 and 1092,

Klimkowka 1677, 1697).22 In all these cases, the point of the apology and oath of denial is to

"ze sie ma Lukaczka Grelaczka oprzysiaj; sama, jako zle komu nie czyniela albo nie bedzie"
"wielka szkoda we wsi, cze_scia^przez czary, cze_scia_ przez zlodziejstwo, gdyz od bydla pozytku nie maja_. "
This threat of a future, much harsher punishment is standard in the trial literature for Klimkowka and
elsewhere, including cases that have nothing to do with witchcraft (see e.g. Grodziski ed. 1967 item 167 or
indeed passim).

149
 • Chapter 1.4 •

ritually effect social harmony; the point of the threatened future fine is to impose such

harmony should the ritual prove insufficient.

Real recidivism seems to have been rare, and these threats of severe punishment remain

only threats. One case does provide us, however, with an indication of how village courts

may have dealt with recidivism, and how a persistent reputation for witchcraft might

eventually have lead village leaders to seek more permanent redress against suspected

witches.

The complaint comes from Kaska, widow to Danko, former soltys of Klimkowka. At

some previous time, not recorded in the Klimkowka court books, Danko had stood warrant

for a certain Olena Baniaska, taking his oath that she was not a witch. He died the next week.

Moreover, the accused "walked among other peoples' fields during the holiday, at dawn,

providing the credible impression of witchcraft"23 She was fined 10 grz., a very high fine for

a village court; more importantly, the court declared that should she provide any future

occasion for suspicion, "she will be sentenced to death as a blatant witch"ZH (#134,

Klimkowka 1702c). Such a threat of execution in case of renewed suspicion was typical of

town-court acquittals (see 1.4.6, below). In the village court context, where capital sentences

could not be imposed, its meaning must be different: should she re-offend, the village court

or village gromada would request of their manor-lord that her case be sent on to a town court

for fuller investigation. Ominously, the court assumes that the result of such an investigation

will be death.

Baranowski, as we have seen, assumed that witch-trials formed part of the class-

struggle between the manor and peasantry. Manor-lords used the judicial arm to remove

2
"po cudzych polach w swi^to z rana chodzila, daja^c podobienstwo do czarow. "
24
"za oczywista, czarownicq garlem sa_dzona"

150
 • Road to the stake •

rebellious or unruly peasants, and used the example of their deaths to terrify would-be co-

conspirators. Peasants, for their part, attempted magical revenge against their noble

exploiters, or they employed the implied threat of magical harm to negotiate some modicum

of respite (1952 pp. 35-37; and see 1.1.1, above).

It is true that the szlachta are very frequently the accusers in witch-trials: in Kleczew

between 1682 and 1700, this is true in half the cases (20% accusers are peasants, 29% are

townsfolk, 2% are clergy, and the remaining 49% are gentry). However, in the same period

and place, gentry comprised just 1/3 of those claiming to have been the targets of malefice

(34%) peasants, 26% townsfolk, 7% clergy, 33% szlachta) (Wislicz 2004b pp. 75-76). In

Poland as a whole, I don't have enough reliable data to determine the proportion of noble

accusers. They were not uncommon, and even when, as was more usual, the accuser was a

peasant, the court often noted that he spoke on behalf of or with the permission of his noble

master. However, in Poland as a whole as at Kleczew, nobility were not the most usual

targets of witchcraft. Malefice against humans figures as a central accusation in 67 trials, but

in just 17 of these (25%>) was it the manor-lord or his family that had been attacked.

Moreover, the manor-lord or his family were the sole victims in just seven trials: in the rest

both he and other members of the community over which he presides had been injured by the

witch. Similarly in cases where the primary accusation was malefice against livestock or the

magical theft of milk, very frequently the victims are both the manor and peasant neighbours.

Two implications of this dis-correlation follow. First, cases were more likely to be

brought to court when a manor-lord or his family was the target. Secondly, the manor-lord

sometimes took the role of accuser even when he was not the target—that is, he took on this

25
E.g. #120, Plohsk 1699; #127, Slomniki 1700; #139, Wyszogrod 1703.

151
 • Chapter 1.4 •

role on behalf of the peasant victims, his serfs. It lay in the interest of manor-lords, as of the

noble leaseholders, agents, or ekonomy who ran folwarks and villages for their absentee

landlords, that the village community and village economy run smoothly. There were few

advantages for a manor-lord in bringing one of his serfs to trial: he lost her labour, and he

had to bear the sometimes very considerable court costs. Without under-estimating the

disdain in which many early modern noblemen held their peasant subjects, and the extremity

of those subjects' exploitation, I do not find class-warfare in the trial records; instead I find

something of the pragmatic paternalism expressed in Jakub Kazimierz Haur's advice to noble

village administrators: "The peasant must be kept in fear, but also in favour: his lord must

know, concerning each, how he is getting along, and whether he maintains his life in

modesty" (1693 p. 42). With some exceptions, peasant and noble accusers seem to have

collaborated closely in the effort to rid the community of a threat to its social harmony and

economic productivity. When village-court sanctions, or the less formal threats or counter-

magic failed to deal with a suspected witch, her master facilitated, or at least agreed to, her

trial in a town court. Considering that serfs could not stand trial in town courts without, at

very least, the complicity of their lord, the real surprise is that we do not find a higher

percentage of accusing nobility (see also 1.5.1-1.5.2, below).

• ••• •

After a witch had been accused, and after the accusation had been taken sufficiently

seriously that her manor-lord became involved, she was likely to undergo the ordeal by

water—the infamous "swimming" or "dunking" of witches (in Polish, plawienie). For

26
E.g. #61, ChQciny 1665b; #77, Sandomierz 1675; #82, Warta 1678, #85, Warta c. 1679; #86, Warta 1679;
#123, Pyzdry 1699; #153, Nieszawa 1721.

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 • Road to the stake •

example, when townspeople of Slesin brought to the attention of Pan Wojciech Breza the

suspicious doings of his serf Marjanna, "doubt and suspicion grew in His Honour concerning

these things, and he ordered her to be dunked. Once, twice, a third time, she floated like a

duck on the surface [of the water]. " 28 On the basis of this evidence, she was brought for trial

to the Kleczew court (#96, Kleczew 1688; I examine this trial in detail in 2.3.4). Although

Baranowski thought dunking was practiced in most or "even all" witch-trials (1952 p. 91),

and Berwinski considered it the most characteristically Polish of witch-trial related practices

(1984 [1854] vol. 1 pp. 96-97) the sources do not support this contention. Dunking was

certainly widespread, but was not universal: I have reliable records of dunking in only

sixteen trials (#7, #43, #60, #61, #62, #74, #83, #85, #88, #96, #110, #125, #135, #140, #178,

#179). Although dunking was sometimes ordered by the court and administered by the

executioner, more often it seems to have been an extra-judicial procedure carried out at the

behest of a village's lord, perhaps to test whether it was worthwhile to bring the accusation

before a court of law—and will therefore have not always been noted in court records.

Dunking belongs to the pre-trial and semi-formal procedures of witchcraft accusation; it was

not usually part of accepted legal procedure. Nevertheless, it should be noted that small-town

courts accepted the evidence of dunking, and used it to justify bringing an accused witch to

torture.

Arab travelers of the 12th and 13th centuries described dunking among the Volga

Bulgars and in Kievan Rus. These mass dunkings, usually of all the women in a given area or

village, appear to have been a practice aimed at ending famine, plague, or above all, drought

27
"Chlopa trzeba trzymac w grozbie, oraz y w laskawosci: wiedza_c o kazdym iako si$ rza_dzi y sprawuie, iesli
swoie zycie wskromnosci zachowuie. "
28
"Jgmosci uroslo dubium i suspicya kolo tych rzeczy, kazal ja_plawic. Jako kaczka plywala po wierzchu, po
raz, po drugi, po trzeci. "

153
 • Chapter 1.4 •

(Wroblewski 1961-1962 p. 337; Zguta 1977a pp. 222-223). In the 18th and 19th centuries,

Ukrainian women were forced to carry water in pails to the village border, or were stripped

naked, tied thumbs to toe, and dunked, to end drought (Zguta 1977a pp. 227-229; see also

Worobec 2001 pp. 99, 236). Regarding such practices, Bishop Zahiski of Kiev warned that

"landholders who, seeing a drought, dunk women or make them carry water to the borders,

sin mortally"29 (Zahiski 1766; cited after Wijaczka 2005 p. 46). Stanislaw Duhczewski seems

also to have had this ancient Slavic practice in mind when he wrote:

[DJawny jest zwyczaj, ze gdy dhigo deszczu [Tjhere is an old custom, that when much-needed
potrzebnego nie bywa, baby ze wsi biora, do rain fails to fall for a long time, the old women of
plawienia, ktore boja_c sie_ zatona_c i nie konfiduja_c w the village are taken to be dunked; and they, fearing
tym czartowskiej pomocy do czarow udaja^ sie_ i to sink and not trusting in the devil's help, busy
deszcz prowadzaja^. themselves with witchcraft and make the rain come.
(Duhczewski 1759, no. 12; cited after Rosenblatt 1883 p. 47)

Such collective dunkings illustrate the deep and long-lasting Slavic notion that women are

responsible for the good functioning of the agricultural cosmos, and above all for the

circulation of moisture upon which the fertility of fields, cattle, and humans all depend (see

2.1.3). They should be understood, however, as a sort of penance or ritual ordeal rather than a

test for witchcraft—although they could potentially lead to witch-trials. Nevertheless, they

must be carefully distinguished from the semi-judicial dunking of individual women, to test

whether they are witches.

The basic procedure of dunking can be described briefly, from a fascinating trial

brought to light by Jacek Wijaczka (2004a; #110, Lobzenica 1692). Five accused witches

were dunked at their own request; they all floated, but complained that this was the

"Gospodarze, ktorzy widza_c suszq, aby deszcz byl, plawia, niewiasty, lub wode_ na granice_ nosic kaza_—ciezko
grzesza,."
30
In 1675 a certain Pan Zeleski dunked all the women in his villages on account of epidemic disease among
cattle, sheep and horses. He wished to proceed to trial, but was persuaded to desist by his wife (Kalowski
1723 pp. 19-20; quoted after Baranowski 1952 p. 91).

154
 • Road to the stake •

executioner's fault: he had, in the words of one of the accused, "pulled on the rope. " In an

earlier trial in the same town, the accused complained that the executioner "didn't let loose

the rope, and held them up, and kept them up in the water with his staff'32 (#103, Lobzenica

1690). The owner of Lobzenica, kasztelan Jan Korzbok La^cki, devised a test to counter such

complaints: he ordered the executioner to tie the hands and feet of an innocent boy and girl,

to see if they would float as well. If they sank, they were to be dragged out quickly, and

given vodka against the chills. They did float, as did several other children tested in the same

way—nevertheless, the Lobzenica witches were brought to torture, confessed, and four were

sent to the stake.

From this description we learn a number of things. In contrast to the stereotype of

dunking, by which the innocent sink and drown, while the guilty float and are burnt, the

accused were held by a rope and quickly pulled out if they started to sink. Moreover, accused

witches sometimes themselves requested to be dunked, having more faith in the power of

water to proclaim their innocence, than in the court to discover it (cf. #88, Zba^szyn 1681).

The accused were bound hand and foot, and probably stripped naked as in the known cases

of collective dunking, although this is not specified in any trial document I have seen.33

31
"poci^gal stryczkiem."
"powroz nie popuszczal i onych zatrzymywal, i dr^giem podnosil w wodzie. "
33
Compare #74, Siomniki 1674. Krystyna Danielecka, despite "being bound hand and foot, she could not sink,
but swam [or floated] freely to the other side [tedy tunax nie mogla, ale do brzegu bqda.cz zwiajzana za rqce i
nogi, przyplywala dobrowolnie na druga. stronej." Baranowski suggested that witches were not stripped
naked in Poland, but floated abecause of their voluminous woolen skirts (Baranowski and Lewandowski
eds. 1950 p. 150; Baranowski 1952 p. 92; 1963 p. 116). This assumption of the fully clothed witch, which as
far as I can tell he cannot have gotten from any of the trials he looked at closely, almost certainly derives
from the fictional "eye-witness account" of the trial in Doruch6w (#175; "X. A. R." 1835; Tazbir 1994).

155
 • Chapter 1.4 •

Finally, perhaps on account of the flat position in which they were lowered into the water,

accused witches did tend to float.34

The Lobzenica trial also demonstrates that peasant-women tended to trust the dunking

oracle in general, even though they might contest its judgment in their own particular case.

Barbara Grzeszowna floated when dunked, "because I hadn't eaten all day"35 (#60, ChQciny

1665). Katarzyna Ratajowa floated because she was lying on a little barrel (#125, Lublin

1700). Such trust in dunking was shared by some among the nobility, as seen in Jan Breza's

dunking of Maryanna, discussed above. It was also trusted by some courts: in its verdict

against Krystyna Danielecka, the Slomniki court cited the fact of floating when dunked as the

main evidence against her (#74. Slomniki 1674).

Perhaps no other semi-judicial practice illustrates so well the futility of ecclesiastical

and high-court attempts at reform. The Czarownica devotes a chapter to the question
I T

"Whether it is allowed for proof or evidence to swim witches'"' (1714 [1639] qu. 7, pp. 51-

57). The answer, of course, was negative: although ignorant village judges, and their even

worse manor-lords might think otherwise, the practice was universally condemned: by canon

law, the decrees of the 4th Lateran Council, Del Rio, and the laws of the Empire. Dunking

could not to be found in "God-fearing" countries such as Italy, Spain, or France, but rather

came to Poland, along with heresy, from Germany (1714 [1639] p. 52). The Krakow castle

appeals court dismissed a case from Pilica, which had brought several women to torture on

the basis of "/eves et levissimas" accusations. The women had been brought to torture on the
34
See also Wladyslawiusz's early 17th-century verse about a woman whose execution by drowning, for
poisoning her husband, failed when she failed to sink—thus sparing her life but making her suspect as a
witch (Badecki ed. 1948 p. 104; cited after Wisniewska 2003 p. 246).
35
"bom caly dzien nie jadla. "
36
Katarzyna had been dunked at some time in the past, together with several other women. One wonders
whether this was part of a collective dunking such as has been discussed above, rather than a witch-trial. See
the full text of her trial in Appendix A.

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 • Road to the stake •

basis of having floated when dunked, but, the appeals court declared, such a practice was

derived not from law but "diabolica suggestione" and condemned by secular and canon law.

Accordingly, the accused women were to be freed and acquitted absolutely, not even

required to make the customary oath of innocence (#43, Pilica 1645). Dunking was also

strongly condemned in bishop Florian Czartoryski's pastoral letter (1705 [1669] f. 22). The

anonymous Wodka zelexierem satirized the practice, telling a story in which first all the

women of the village, then all the children, and finally the manor-lord himself, his own child,

and the executioner, were all dunked, and all floated (1729 no. 113; cited after Baranowski

1963 p. 117). Jedrzej Zahiski, the reforming enlightenment bishop of Kiev, wrote a tract

against the "mistaken" and "superstitious" practice of dunking (1766). Despite these repeated

and emphatic condemnations, dunking continued to be practiced well into the 18th century,

and even later.

1.4.3: Before the court

Suspicion of witchcraft could remain mere suspicion for many years. In towns, it could be

the subject of public slanders and the resulting protestations of innocence which pepper

town-court books, and which very rarely proceeded any further. In villages, it could be

resolved at the village court level, and end with an apology or a small fine. When brought to

the attention of the manor-lord, he could, without involving town courts or a formal trial of

any kind, banish his subject or impose minor punishments such as whipping. He could also

7
"Iesli sie_ godzi dla proby albo doswiadczenia czarownice plawic. "
38
Forced dunking of peasant-woman in the late 18th and 19th centuries was no longer a method of proof but
rather, as already recorded of the Volga Bulgars in the 12th century, an attempt to end drought. In the late
18th century, the ekonom of Zagosc had all the women of the village dunked; those who floated were taken
aside and beaten "until rain comes"—it came the next day (Karlowicz 1887 p. 219; citing Wodzicki 1883
pp. 260-262). During the dry summer of 1872 [sic], the vice-wo/Y of Dzurow tried to force all the women of

157
 • Chapter 1.4 •

refrain from pursuing the case, leaving the peasantry to make do with counter-magic, or with

informal sanctions such as threats or a beating. He could have the suspect dunked, and at

least in principle the matter could end there, with evidence of the accused's innocence—in

fact, dunking seems nearly always to have confirmed her guilt. However, insofar as we now

have any record of the matter at all, this is nearly always because the manner-lord took the

problem sufficiently seriously, or was himself sufficiently suspicious of the alleged witch,

that he brought the witch to trial with a formal accusation before a Saxon-law town court.

The majority of Polish witch-trials took place before the courts of small or medium-

sized towns, presided over by a wqjt who was expected to have some knowledge of the

Saxon Law, and two or more jurymen chosen from among the respectable citizenry of the

town. What were such courts like, and what sort of justice might be expected from them?

Baranowski paints a picture of a courthouse set up in a barn or other handy structure, and of

the accused witch thrown upon the mercy of a band of illiterate, drunken, sadistic simpletons,

terrified by her diabolical powers and utterly ignorant of legal procedure (1952 pp. 102-108).

As will be shown below, this picture contains some truth, but as a general portrait of all

small-town courts it cannot be treated seriously. Malgorzata Pilaszek has commented upon

the close attention to proper procedure in towns such as Nieszawa (1998a pp. 85-86; 1998b).

Similarly, Marian Mikolajczyk has written positively of small-town judges' ability to take

into account numerous factors and circumstances, and to shape their verdicts and sentences

accordingly (1998 p. 169). My own reading of the records reveals a wide range of attitudes

and competence, from the near foregone conclusion of guilt in the Kleczew trials, to the

that town to strip naked, be tied hand and foot, and thrown into the river to end the drought. Along with his
main collaborators, he was sentenced to several months in jail (Rosenblatt 1883 pp. 63-64).

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 • Road to the stake •

carefal consideration of evidence and of witness statements in towns such as Chexiny and

Nowy Wisnicz.

Baranowski's characterization of small-town courts loses much of its force when

situated, as it should be, within a tradition of rhetorical disdain. This tradition, always

partisan, stretches from mid-16th century texts on judicial reform, through the ecclesiastical

critics of secular witch-trials (who emphasized the ignorance of lay judges to bolster their

jurisdictional claims), to the 19th-20th century attacks, variously positivist or Marxist,

against pre-Enlightenment obscurantism. Thus, although the instruction that the magnate

Katarzyna Mniszchowa gave to the court of her private town in the 18th century—that it

should conduct itself "not drunkenly, but sober; on the table in the court chamber one should

find not a quart of spirits or a mug of mead, but a crucifix and the Saxon law"39 (Pawlik 1915

vol. 1 p. 15; quoted after Baranowski 1952 p. 102; cf. Grochowska 1989 pp. 72-73)—should

be treated seriously as an expression of real concern over the quality of small-town jurists, it

should also be taken with a grain of salt. Its reception and use in the literature must be treated

yet more cautiously: Mniszchowa's statement is not the unmediated observation of a

concerned citizen, or not only that; it is also an allusion, a moment in discourse. In a work

devoted entirely to bringing order to what he saw as the chaos of Polish jurisprudence,

Groicki had already complained that in small towns "one or two drunken sentrymen"

supervise the torture of suspected criminals, and that people are poked at, pulled and burned

for the sake of a crumb of "rotten property" (Groicki 1559a; 1953 p. 190). Nearly two

centuries later, the anonymous anti-liquor pamphlet Wodka zelixierem conjoined the trope of

the drunken judge with that of the unjustly accused witch:

"nie po pijanu, ale po trzyzwu, na stole w urze_dowej izbie nie kwarta gorzalki lub konew miodu, ale
krucyfiks i Sakson bye ma. "

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 • Chapter 1.4 •

Co czary saj? nie zgadnq. choc trzezwi sqdziowie, What is witchcraft? Even sober judges can't guess
Po czym znac czarownice.? i zas wodka powie? Who is a witch? Can vodka make that test?
(Wodka 1729 no. 107; quoted after Baranowski 1952 p. 102).40

Ecclesiastical critics of witch-trials portrayed small-town or village magistrates as

credulous simpletons rather than as irresponsible drunks. The author of the Czarownica

powolana suggests that only "legal ignoramuses, and village judges, who can hardly recite

the Lord's Prayer and who've barely heard of the Lord's commandments" l could accept the

dunking of accused witches (Czarownica 1714 [1639] qu. 7, p. 52). Similar talk of "simple"

and "uneducated" magistrates appears in August IPs rescript of 1703; in the pastoral letters

of Bishop Antoni Szembek of 1727, and in the documents of the diocesan synod of Plock in

1733, under Bishop Andrzej Zahiski (Sawicki ed. 1951-1952 vol. 1 part 2 pp. 244-245;

Tazbir 1978 p. 174; see also Karbownik 1988, 1998). Szembek wrote of "imperfect judges,

inexpert not only in law but often not even able to read" who, without consulting

ecclesiastical courts as the law demands, send women to the stake on the basis of "suspicion,

or defamation, of old women's mutual quarrels and squabbles, or any sort of tall tale or

exclamation of the possessed"42 (Szembek 1885 [1727] p. 16). In his Przestrogi duchowne

(which was dedicated to bishop Szembek), Serafin Gamalski returned to the sharp language

of the Czarownica powolana. Small town judges are "hillbillies, simpletons, who can barely

The author may not have been alluding here to Groicki; it is enough that both he and Groicki looked into a
common source, most likely the Bible. The rhetorical trope equating injustice with drunkenness among the
judiciary derives from Isaiah 5:20-23: "Ah, you who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for
light, and light for darkness [...]. Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine, and valiant at mixing drink, who
aquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!"
"nieukow prawnych, y sqdziow wieyskich, co drugi y pacierza niedobrze umie, a o BOzym przykazaniu
ledwo slyszal"
"niedoskonali se_dziowie, nie tylko wprawie nie biegli, lecz cze_sto czytac nie umiej^cy." "z szczegolnej tylko
suspicyi, albo oslawienia, z babskich zobopolnych klotni i swarow, czy tez jakiejkolwiek powiesci i
wywolywania zmyslonych [...] op^tanych. "

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 • Road to the stake •

read a prayer-book;" some of them "don't even know the alphabet"43 (Gamalski 1742 ff. 12-

12v).44

Enlightenment critics of what they (and we their progeny) constructed as the medieval,

backwards, cruel and ignorant times from which they were struggling to free themselves,

drew upon such legal and clerical critiques with little regard for their original provenance,

purpose, or context, and with less regard for their truth value. Jerzy Michalski considers

contempt for small town courts to have been au courant among the educated reformers of

Stanislaw August's court (1996 p. 98, cf. Rafacz 1933 pp. 559-560). Included among the

reasons for the abolition of witch-trials by the Sejm of 1776, one finds the comment: "And

should such delicate material, refuted by the philosophers and enlightened of Europe, be

resolved by such ignorant people [small-town judges], who can't even read or write?"45 (VL

vol. 8 p. 567; quoted after Michalski 1996 p. 98; cf. idem 1958 p. 184). The anonymous 19th-

century author of the fictionalized Grabow trial of 1775 also depicted the judges as ignorant

drunks {Przyjaciel 1835; reprinted in Tazbir ed. 1994). In Poland, as throughout Europe,

witch beliefs and witch trials came to be the stick with which enlightenment and progress

beat the ignorance of the past, including "the church" which had in fact provided so much of

the original rhetoric of critique. Baranowski stands squarely in this tradition, and shares its

blind spots: he consistently reads Gamalski and the Czarownica as if they were unmediated

historical reports, and portrays them as the daring works of non-conformists rather than as

"Ruralistowie, prostaczkowie, ledwie na dzienniku czytac umieiajsy" "drugi podobno y litery niezna"
On the basis of similarities in content if not in style, Baranowski has asserted (1951a) that Gamalski also
wrote the Wodka z elixierem. The assertion is not implausible, but the claimed similarities are really not very
great. For one, the Przestrogi duchowne complains about the ignorance and credulity of magistrates, but
makes no mention of their drunkenness.
I czyliz tak delikatna materia, przez filozofow i oswiqconych w Europie w naturze swej negowana, tak
grubym i ciemnym ludziom, pisac nawet i czytac nieumieja^cym, powinna przychodzic do rezolucji?"

161
 • Chapter 1.4 •

what they were: works fully approved and recommended by the Church hierarchy, and

regularly reprinted in ecclesiastical presses.

The point of the foregoing is not to defend the small-town courts or the judges who

presided over witch-trials, but to create the context for a more objective evaluation of them.

Unquestionably, the quality of jurisprudence in the Polish hinterlands was never high,

throughout the witch-trial period. Unquestionably accused witches fared better at the more

educated and scrupulous courts of the larger cities, which in fact had lower torture and

execution rates for all crimes than did smaller centres (see 1.5.3, below). But it is deeply

simplistic to look for the cause of witch-trials, or of their bloodiness, in the ignorance or

fanatacism of small-town judges. The same historians who consider these magistrates to have

been very nearly unlettered, suppose them to have been strongly influenced by their close

reading of the Malleus maleficarum.41 It is also worth noting that learned magistrates did not

always, or even usually, treat accused witches with greater care than did their more

provincial colleagues. Their on the whole milder treatment of accused witches is not an

Baranowski must have known this to be the case. Even Jerzy Putek's rabidly anti-clerical Mroki
sredniowiecza, one of Baranowski's main secondary sources, acknowledged church opposition to and
criticism of secular witch-trials (1956 [1935]) p. 259.
In fact, it is highly unlikely that most or even any of them had read the Malleus. Much more probably, their
exposure to Western demonology will have come via the works of Damhouder or Carpzov, both popular in
early modern Poland (see 1.2.1, above). Recently Pilaszek has argued that town courts both possessed and
used the law books at their disposal (Pilaszek 1998b). Polish 16th-18th c. town courts used Mikolaj Jaskier's
Latin translation (1602 [1535), Pawel Szczerbic's Polish translation (1610 [1581]) and, probably most often,
Bartlomiej Groicki's selection of the more important parts of the Speculum, his Artykufy prawa
magdeburskiego (1558; 1954) as well as his commentary, summary, and guide to them, the Porzqdek sqdow
(1559a; 1953). The Artykufy, which is not a true translation but rather a collection of selected citations and
glosses, enjoyed ten editions between 1558 and 1649, with an additional edition in 1760. It was usually
published together with the Porzqdek, the Ten postepek (a collection of extracts from the Carolina; 1559b;
1954), and an alphabetical Rejestr to all three works (from 1567). Some edition of Groicki's work was
found in ten of the thirty-four book inventories from Lublin burgher testaments, 1591-1649, analyzed by
Elzbieta Toroj (1997): by comparison, Szczerbic's translation of the Speculum Saxonum was found in three
collections during the same period, and some edition of Jan Cervus Tucholczyk's guide to the Saxon Law
(1540), in five.
Brauner (1995 p. 20) and Midelfort (2002a p. 117) have argued that the legal requirement of the Holy Roman
Empire, that university law professors be consulted in witchcraft cases, introduced learned demonology into
those trials and excacerbated them considerably.

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 • Road to the stake •

effect of scepticism or enlightnement or altruism; instead it must be attributed to two quite

unrelated factors: their in general greater care for the procedural niceties of the law; and their

greater autonomy. Big city courts did not need to worry, as did small town or private-town

courts, about the wishes of the plaintiff; who was often enough simultaneously their own

feudal master or an influential neighbour (see 1.5.3, below).

• «$• •

Despite a considerable literature on the history of Polish town law (Koranyi 1955;

Bukowska 1971; Maisel 1971; Borkowska-Bagiehska and Lesihski eds. 1995; Plaza 1997,

and see 1.2.1 above), town judicial practice continues to be poorly understood.

Mikolajczyk's recent archival studies of sentencing and punishment (1998) and of the right

to a defense (2001) in selected towns of southern Malopolska have demonstrated that

reliance on normative literature or on the comparatively well-studied courts of larger towns

does not create a realistic picture of early modern Polish urban jurisprudence. As

Mikolajczyk would be the first to insist, his own studies highlight the large variations in

practices both between towns and over time—thus, in this area, one generalizes at one's

peril. Zdrojkowski already noted many decades ago that there was no established procedure

of criminal law in Poland, and despite the standardizing influences of works such as

Groicki's Porzqdek or Damhouder's Praxis, courts were for the most part quite free to

develop their own local versions of the Saxon law (Zdrojkowski 1949 p. 14). In addition, the

relatively short terms of service for most magistrates and jurymen, and the part-time, more or

less amateur nature of the work, ensured that even within a given town and over a relatively

short period of time, no strong tradition of practice could usually establish itself. In most

courts, especially of smaller towns, the only really permanent employees were the scribe and

163
 • Chapter 1.4 •

the executioner—the latter often shared among several small towns or borrowed, at

considerable expense, from the nearest larger city (Zaremska 1986).

Large towns had two courts. The indicium consulare or city-counsel court, composed of

members of the city-counsel (consules, rajcy) and, usually, the burmistrz (burghermeister or

mayor), presided over public disturbances and all matters touching on the orderly operation

of the city. It also, at least in theory, was the first court of appeal from the lower indicium

advocatiale (or indicium scabinale, or iudicium ordinarium), which I have translated

somewhat awkwardly as wojt-court. This lower court was composed of an advocatus or wqjt

(chief magistrate), who was expected to be expert in law, and from two to four scabini

(lawnicy or przysie^zni), which we may regard, roughly, as grand-jurymen.49 Scabini, usually

appointed by the city-counsel, served terms of one year, although it was not at all uncommon

to serve multiple terms. The wojt-court had jurisdiction over various minor matters and over

serious criminal cases—although this distinction was not always respected by the higher

court. Both courts kept their own separate sets of records.

In a town such as Lublin, the wojt-court sat three times a year, for periods of two

weeks. Serious criminal matters occuring outside these time-periods were dealt with by a

specially constituted iudicium criminale neccessarium bannitum, an "official extraordinary

criminal court" made up of the wqjt and from two to four jurymen. Records for these serious

trials were often kept in a separate criminal register (the Acta maleficorum, Acta nigra or

Criminalia).5Q Such serious cases, including most cases of witchcraft, were heard in the

49
It has become the practice of some Polish historians to translate wqjt as "baillif' and lawnik as "assessor."
Whatever the historical justification for the use of these terms, I have found them more confusing than
otherwise.
50
This is true especially of larger towns such as Poznari and Lublin, although the Krakow court did not keep
separate Criminalia before the 18th century. Some smaller towns, such as Kleczew, also kept these separate
records. To the despair of historians, they quite often include only the testimony of the accused and
witnesses, without the court's verdict (Kutrzeba 1928 p. 255). Pilaszek (1998a) has suggested that, because

164
 • Road to the stake •

torture chamber, in the presence of the wojt and jurymen, the pisarz (scribe), and of course

the executioner.51

Formally, a town-court's jurisdiction was very narrow, restricted to crimes committed

by its own citizens and plebeians, or to public disturbances by outsiders (travelling

merchants, visitors during fairs, vagabonds, wandering thieves and whores) within the city

limits. Jews, often though not always living in separate suburbs (either noble-owned juridicii

or, more often, on Crown land—in Lublin, for example, the Jewish suburb was Podzamcze,

"under-castle," near the starosta's castle and under his protection) were technically exempt,

as were gentile inhabitants of the private noble-owned suburbs. Still less did town courts

have any jurisdiction over the enserfed peasants of even the nearest farms and villages; and

of course they had no authority whatsoever over szlachta or members of the clergy.

In practice, however, such sharp distinctions get blurred. The Lublin court, for example,

readily tried inhabitants of its suburbs (e.g. #39, Lublin 1643, and several of the public

disturbances discussed above): the noble owners of such suburbs will usually have been quite

happy to allow the city court to maintain the peace for them. Despite clear law assigning

jurisdiction over Jewish communities to wojewoda-courts and to the King, and despite

frequent appeals, town courts sometimes accused and tried Jews for host-desecration or ritual

murder and for other crimes (Trojanowska 1995, and see extensive discussion in Chapter

2.3). The noble grod courts intended to maintain order in rural areas were ill-equipped to deal

these criminal registers contained no information relevent to the ownership or inheritence of property, the
courts regarded them as of little import after a few years, and often discarded or destroyed them.
51
This brief account of court structure and practice is based for the most part on the court of Lublin as
characterized, primarily, by Riabinin (1928b) and Tworek (1965 pp. 88-90).

165
 • Chapter 1.4 •

with many serious crimes (among other things, they lacked torture chambers), so rural people

accused of such things as banditry were regularly brought in to the local city court 52

• •> •

Throughout the period of the witch-trials, Polish Saxon-law town courts displayed a

curious mixture of accusatory and inquisitorial law. Despite the considerable influence of the

Roman-law inquisitorial model, as disseminated in the works of Groicki, Damhouder, and

Carpzov, witch-craft cases continued to be treated as private or civil suits. Although, once

initiated, they were usually investigated and prosecuted by the magistrates of the court or by

the court-appointed instygator, they required, with few exceptions, a private accusation by a

private citizen in order to commence. Such private accusation began when a person appeared

before the court and made a formal, accusatory oath, outlining the suspect's crimes. The oath

of the peasant Stanislaw Galek, acting in the name of his manor lord p. Tomasz Milewski,

may be taken as a model:

Ja Stanislaw przysie_gam Panu Bogu Wszechmoga.cemu I Stanislaw swear to the Omnipotent God, one in
w Trojcy S-tej jedynemu, iz ja nie z zadnej nienawisci, Holy Trinity, that, not out of hatred, or rancor, or
ani rankoru, albo z jakiej zawzie_tosci lub gniewu, ani spite, or wrath, and not having been persuaded, nor
namowiony, ani przeplacony, ani przenajqty, al z samej paid nor hired [to make this accusation], but because
rzeczy i prawdy Anne_ i Zofia, obwinione poprzysi^gam, of the facts and the truth, I [accuse] the accused Anna
ze one sq. prawdziwe czarownice. Jegomosci naszemu i and Zofia, and swear that they are true witches. They
Jejmosci uczynily na zdrowiu, skaleczyly, otrury i tak attacked the health of our manor Lord and Lady, they
wielu zlosci poczyniry, bydla czarami psowary, czego wounded them, poisoned them and caused them so
sa_ doswiadzczenia. Jezelim nieprawdziwie przysiqgam, much harm, spoiling their cattle with witchcraft, for
pomsty Boskiej i strasznego Sa_du na siebie zaciaj»am, which there is evidence. If I have sworn falsely, I call
aby mnie Pan Bog moj na duszy i na czele i na God's vengeance and terrible Judgment upon myself,
wlasnym mieniu moim karal, wiecznie potejiil. that the Lord God might punish my soul, and my
body, and my property, and damn me forever.

52
They were either turned over to city courts from the grod or staroscinskie courts, were brought in by the
nobility of the area, or, in the exceptional case of Lublin, turned over to the town court from the Crown
Tribunal (Mikolajczyk 1998 pp. 186-192, discussing Nowy Sa^cz and Zywiec; Laszkiewicz 1988, discussing
Lublin). For example, all of the trials in the Lublin court book APLublin, AMLublin sig. 143, with the
exception of the trial of Regina Zaleska (#42, Lublin 1644), are trials for banditry brought to the Lublin
court by the Crown Tribunal. Similarly, of 81 cases in Nowy Sa_cz between 1652 and 1684, 30 are for
banditry, and most of the rest involve crimes from outside the city, brought in to the Nowy Sa_cz court by the
nobility of the area (Syganski 1917). The large number of banditry cases in these and other cities, nearly
always resulting in the death sentence, accounts in part for the high execution rates noted for such cities.

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 • Road to the stake •

(#153, Nieszawa 1721; cf. the nearly identical oath in #123, Pyzdry 1699).

Such an oath is at once an accusation, a presentation of evidence or testimony, and a

form of evidence itself. For a judicial system in which oaths of expurgation could take the

place of sentencing (see 1.4.6, below), and where oaths of warranty could, albeit rarely in

witchcaft cases, suffice to free an accused criminal, the accusatory oath must be counted as,

already in itself, initial evidence that honorable community members suspected the accused

of witchcraft. The formulaic denial of "hatred, rancor, or spite" will not have satisfied the

accused, who understandably prefered to consider the accusation against them to be hate-

inspired calumny: Helena Suchorska of Szadek considered herself to have come to trial

"occasione verborum calumniosorum" (#30, Szadek 1632); Regina Hancowa of Sambor

insisted, flipping the formula of the oath against itself, that she had been accused "out of

anger, venom and hatred against her"53 (#35, 1638). Courts were not always convinced by

accusers' disclaimer of ulterior motive (see e.g. #29, Nowy Wisnicz 1632). Nevertheless, the

formulaic denial had an important defining function: the accusation is not a private

expression of hatred but a public statement of suspicion: the accused is thereby declared to

have a bad reputation. Importantly and somewhat paradoxically, this evidence of bad

reputation provides a bridge by which the purely private, civil accusatory case against a

witch came simultaneously to be a public case, investigated and pursued by the court-

appointed instygator (inquisitor or procurator).

Under the accusatory model of jurisprudence, a trial could not be initiated by the court

alone acting in the public good: the case had to be brought before the court by a private

accuser, the plaintiff. There were exceptions: a witch could be brought in on account oifama

publico, with no private accuser—as when Zophia Janowska came to the attention of the

167
 • Chapter 1.4 •

court after rumours spread concerning her theft of the Eucharist (#148, Rzeszow 1718, and

see 2.2.3). Similarly, in cases of public disturbance, or where the accused was caught in

flagrante delicto, the town instigator or public prosecutor could bring charges against her

without waiting for a private accusation: this seems to have been the case in #46, Szadek

1649, where the weaver-woman Katarzyna publicly boiled a cheesecloth during Easter Mass.

In larger towns, the role of the instigator grew through the 17th and 18th centuries as

courts more and more adapted the model of Roman Law, with its inquisitorial procedure.

Mikolajczyk argues that because of this shift in practice the role of the plaintiff diminished,

so that even if he were to withdraw his accusations, the instigator could still impose a

sentence. Nevertheless, he argues, in smaller centres the role of the accuser remained central

throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, not only for the initiation of trials but for their

continuation as well (Mikolajczyk 1998 pp. 140-142). Even in so large a town as Lublin, the

instigator played a sporadic role: he is central to cases such as that of Maryna and Jadwiga

(#27, 1627), who appear to have been caught stealing the bones of hanged criminals; but is

absent elsewhere. The Nowy Wisnicz court assigned a councilman to play the role of

instigator (Uruszczak ed. 2003 p. 13). The ambiguous role of this officer may be illustrated

by a case in Ch^ciny: although the initiating accusation came from a private party, the court

was able, on its own initiative, to call in two further suspects denounced by the original

accused, and the town instigator presented final arguments, asking that all three be burnt

(#61, 1665b, and see 1.4.5 below). Throughout the witch-trial period, most Polish town

courts maintained some admixture of the old, private model and the new inquisitorial model:

most often this meant in practice that trials were initiated through private accusation but then

taken over, more or less entirely, by the court. However, in many cases no formal instigator

53
"ze zlosci, jadu i nienawisci przeciwko niej. "

168
 • Road to the stake •

appears to have been present: the court as a whole took responsibility both for investigating

the crime and passing judgment. Inquisitorial practice, with its investigative magistrate, its

court-initiated trials, and its rejection of the old model of private accusation, never took full

hold in Polish town law, where an uneasy admixture of the old Magdeburg practice and the

reforming tendencies coming from the West continued throughout the witch-trial period

(Uruszczak 1994).

On her side, the accused witch could very rarely rely on the assistance of a defense

attorney. Serafin Gamalski decried what he thought to be a common maxim, that the crime of

witchcraft is "exceptional, and excludes Advocates"54 (Gamalski 1742 p. 20v). However, it

would be more correct to say that few accused criminals of any kind received defence

counsel in the period. A few courts assigned defense counsel routinely—and in those courts

accused witches were also assigned counsel: Mikolajczyk notes the considerable activity of

the Nowy Sajcz advocate Wojciech Abramowski, who defended Elzbieta Stepkowicowa (#70,

Nowy Sq.cz 1670). In Krakow those accused of any crime could usually rely on defense

counsel from the late 17th century onward (as in #143, #147, #164, Krakow 1715, 1717,

1737); but in most small centres advocates for those accused—of any crime—were rare or

unknown (Mikolajczyk 2001 pp. 397-401 ).55 In Lublin, the only accused witch to have

received defense counsel was Regina Lewczykowa (#118,1698); however, she had the

advantage that her feudal lord Stanislaw Szczuka, who took a personal interest in the case,

was Referendary of the Crown and thus a high court judge in his own right. Although there is

no direct indication of his having done so, he was in a position to demand the enforcement of

54
"Je exceptis, y Adwokatow exkluduia.- "
55
Interestingly, the presence of defense counsel bore little relation to social position. In Nowy Sa^cz, most of the
accused who benefitted from the help of an advocate were plebeians or peasants (Mikolajczyk 2001 pp. 400,
410).

169
 • Chapter 1.4 •

the Assessory Court's ordinance of 1672, which required accused witches to be provided

with defense counsel. Like the other stipulations of this ordinance, it appears to have had no

effect except in such exceptional cases (Rafacz 1933 p. 564; Pilaszek 2005 p. 123; see also

1.2.2 above).56

• <$• •

After the formal accusation against an alleged witch, she was allowed to respond to the

accusations in a responsio. Alternatively, the court first heard from witnesses, after which the

accused responded to their allegations face to face, in a confrontatio. Although witness

testimony and the accused's responsio or confrontatio were both, in theory, discrete episodes

of the trial procedure, in practice they tended to blur into other episodes: witness testimony

following immediately after the accusation could be, in effect, an extension of the accusation,

while the defendant's response could segue unceremoniously into the initial, benevole (that

is, without torture) round of interrogation. Moreover, both could be skipped: some trials

proceeded more or less directly to interrogation.

Very rarely, the testimony of witnesses sufficed to set an accused witch free. When two

witnesses swore that one Katarzyna Stokowcowa knew no witchcraft, the court parolled her

into the care of her husband, who staked his entire property as warranty of her innocence

(#62, Che^ciny 1665). In the same town a year later, when witnesses could only repeat vague

rumors or denied any knowledge of Anna Puchalina's theft of the host, her case appears to

have been dismissed57 (#66, Chqciny 1666). More often, however, in cases that had

It is not likely in any case that defence counsel would have changed the course of many witch-trials. Within
the mixed Roman and Saxon system of jurisprudence, their role was extremely limited, especially in
comparison to that of the instigator or of the inquisitorial magistrate. Where present, they primarily limited
themselves to presenting circumstantial considerations which might lessen the severity of sentences, or to
formal jurisdictional arguments for the case to be dismissed (Mikolajczyk 2001 pp. 406-407).
The record breaks off after these witness statements, so we don't in fact know the eventual outcome.

170
 • Road to the stake •

proceeded as far as a formal accusation, the court preferred to go through with the full

interogatory procedure, usually including torture. For example, although the court of

Sandomierz freed the widow Jadwiga Kryczka on the strength of her oath and that of three

male witnesses, that she had never done any witchcraft, this was only after she had

maintained her innocence during torture (#77, Sandomierz 1675). Although several

neighbors came to the defense of the shepherdess Katarzyna, saying "this shepherdess, whom

they accuse, is not guilty to my mind of anything and I accuse her of nothing and I know

nothing [incriminating] about her,"58 she still had to undergo four rounds of torture, the

fourth with fire, before she was acquitted (#94, Warta 1685).

Witness testimony could also be recorded before a trial can be said to have formally

begun. One of our fullest records of witness testimony conforms to this model. Dorota

Pilecka, of the village Kalina Wielka, had been denounced as a witch by Krystyna

Danielecka two weeks previous (#74, Slomniki 1674a). As a result of this, she was brought

before her village court, presided over by her manor lord, but with a representative of the

Slomniki court present as well. There, before the assembled kmieci, the case against her was

built one witness at a time. Andrzej Stej>osz had heard from his servant girl that Dorota

"censed [with herbs] among his cattle, as they returned from the field"59 and that she washed

cattle with herbs and had hidden the placenta [mieyscze] of a calf. The miller Jan

Januszowicz saw her gathering herbs once in the evening, and "people said of her, that she

must surely know how to do something or other. " 60 Krzysztof Kostowny had heard from his

children that she took earth from the hoofprints of his cattle as they went out to pasture, and

that she collected manure. Stanislaw Cyrulik had heard that she digs up herbs, and has some

"ta owczarka, na ktora^ skarza^ mnie nic nie winna i nie skarz^ na nia_ i nie wiem nic do niej. "
"kurzela miqdzy jego bydlem, gdy szlo z pola. "

171
 • Chapter 1.4 •

knowledge of enchantment. Adam Pajajczek asserted that she gathered herbs in the cemetery

and mixed them with the herbs to be blessed at Matka Boska Zielna (Our Lady of the Herbs,

August 15). Another Krzysztof said that she gathered grass and sticks as she drove the cattle

out to pasture, and that she had a dried bat in her home which she claimed to be only for luck

at playing cards. On the basis of this testimony Dorota was sent the same day to the court in

Slomniki. The court asked the gromada three times to confirm their accusations, which they

did: Dorota was tortured, admitted nothing, but on the basis of her neighbors' testimony, and

the previous denunciation, was sentenced to burn at the stake (#75, Slomniki 1774b).

What is perhaps initially notable in this testimony is its mildness. Except for the

somewhat sinister suggestion that Dorota mixed herbs from the cemetery into her wreath of

blessed herbs—an action that can hardly be understood otherwise than as an attempt to

borrow the Virgin's healing power for malefice—all of the witnesses described only rumors,

most often second hand (from "the servant girl" or "the children" or "people") that Dorota

made use of some of the standard methods of milk-theft magic: gathering herbs at special

times, washing and censing other people's cattle, gathering soil or grass from hoofprints. In

the rural economy such milk-theft was of course quite serious, but it is rare for an accused

witch to come to trial on that basis alone.

However, what stands out to the discerning eye in the testimony against Dorota Pilecka,

is her neighbours' absolute solidarity in testifying against her. As already noted, early

modern Polish peasants were, on the whole, extremely reluctant to bear false witness under

oath; in most trials, although the victims and sometimes their kin provide strong statements

against the accused, most others qualify their testimony with endless circumlocutions. Here,

although the witnesses deflected much of the responsibility for their testimony off of

60
"mowili na niq, iz ona musi umiec co. "

172
 • Road to the stake •

themselves by referring to children and servants, they are all in perfect agreement that the

accused is a witch. This was collectively confirmed both before and after torture, when the

gromada spokesman reconfirmed the testimony "both of men as also of women;" and when

she was sentenced to burning, "the whole gromada was content with this Decree. " Witness

testimony may have provided little concrete evidence of worth, but it bore eloquent witness

to Dorota's reputation in her village, and it was to this, rather than to concrete events or

evidence, that the court responded.

The responsio or confrontatio was a more formulaic affair, with a more or less foregone

conclusion. Although the court may not, by this point, have decided that the accused was

guilty, it would nearly always have already decided that the accusations merited bringing the

accused to interrogation under torture. Sometimes the accused tried to explain away the

testimony against her by admitting to some of the actions but interpreting them as harmless;

this rarely satisfied the court (see, for example, the responsio of Zofia Philipowicowa,

Skrzynno 1639, in Appendix A). Such a course of action nearly always proved unfortunate,

as the court was sure to ask for more detail first under benevole interrogation, and then with

torture. But even where the accused stood firm in her denial, torture was at this juncture

nearly inevitable. The example of Katarzyna Mrowczyna may stand for many others (#115,

Stajszewo 1695). Confronted with the testimony of the principal witnesses against her,

Katarzyna denied all. Threatened with torture, she again denied all and "in no manner nor in

any thing wished to admit her wrath. " Warned that if she did not cooperate she would

"suffer, according to the law, what the law demands" she responded that "she is innocent,

"tak z mqszczyzny iako y tez y bialychglow"

"ktorym Dekretem wszystka gromada contentowala si?"
"zadnym sposobem zadnej rzeczy zlosci swojej wyznac nie chciala"

173
 • Chapter 1.4 •

and has no evil spirit with her. " 64 Warned a third time of torture, she again declared her

innocence, but added, "however if the court knows that she is a witch, then the court is to do

with her as they understand nececessary and as they wish themselves. " The confrontatio

moved smoothly from denial through initial interrogation, to the repeated threat of torture,

and finally to its application.

• *X* •

Formally, and often in practice, the decision to send the accused to the torture chamber

required an official ruling of the court (Uruszczak ed. 2004 p. 10). At this point we find

another juncture in the road to the stake. Before torture local noblemen or clerics could

intercede on the behalf of the accused, sparing her both torture and, with the confessions

elicited under torture, death at the stake: after such intercessions accused witches would be

sentenced to lighter punishments such as banishment (#37, Skrzynno 1639, and see 1.4.6

below).66 It was also at this stage, after the initial interrogation but before the commencement

of torture, that appeals usually took place. Appeal was rarely sought, and more rarely

granted, in Polish witch-trials, but where it it was granted it was usually successful: the

appellate courts treated witchcraft with great mildness.

The appellate court for royal towns was the Superior Court of the German Law at the

Krakow Castle, the court which in the 16th century included such luminaries as Bartlomiej

Groicki among its magistrates (Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 p. 156). However, in practice

appeals could go to any number of courts: in eastern Malopolska and Ruthenia, to the Royal

64
"podhig prawa to cierpiec, co prawo kaze." ""iz jest niewinna i zadnego ducha zlego nie ma przy sobie. "
5
"Jednak jezeli sa_d wie, ze ona jest czarownica^ to sa_d ma z nia_czynic, jako rozumieja^i sami chca."
66
In Krakow in the early 18th century, the Arch-Confraternity of the Lord's Passion interceded for, and gained
the freedom of, some women accused of witchcraft (Kracik and Rozek 1986 pp. 112-113). This
phenomenon demands further research; as far as I can tell it was quite exceptional.

174
 • Road to the stake •

Tribunal at Lublin and thence to the Lublin wojt-court; to the court of the nearest larger

town; even to the noble grod-courts (e.g. #33, Bydgoszcz 1638; see also Pilaszek 2005

pp. 124-127).). According to Malgorzata Pilaszek, the towns of Wielkopolska already

treated the Crown Assessory Court as their appellate court in the early 17th century; this

came to be the main court of appeal from Malopolska as well, as the Krakow Castle Court

fell into desuetude in the later 17th century (Pilaszek 2005 p. 114). Already in 1665, for

example, we find the case of Regina Sokolkowa being appealled from Lublin to the

Assessory Court (#56, Lublin 1665).

Pilaszek asserts that appeals, if granted in witch-trials, would "in a certain sense

threaten the existence of the community" insofar as they would necessitate continued

association with a person already labelled by that community as a threat to neighborliness

(2005 p. 113). To my mind this overstates the case, and ascribes an exceptionalism to

witchcraft vis-a-vis other crimes that the sources do not justify. I agree with Pilaszek that

communities that had steeled themselves to formally accuse a woman of witchcraft had

usually committed themselves already to her guilt, so that reintegration of the accused into

the community would be extremely difficult; however, acquittals or dismissals were not

unknown in witch-trials, and they do not seem to have threatened the existence of the

community. Appeals in witchcraft cases were rare, but so were appeals of other serious

crimes.

Pilaszek bolsters her argument by claiming that the rarity of appeal in witch-trials was exceptional: Polish
town courts readily agreed to appeal in trials for other serious crimes (2005 p. 113). This claim, however,
rests entirely on Groicki's opinion that courts cannot refuse the right to appeal (Groicki 1954 [1558]
pp. 217-218)—n. b . , Groicki himself was an appeals-court magistrate. However, as Mikolajczyk has shown
for sentencing and punishment (1998) and the right to defense counsel (2001), Groicki's normative
statements give no reliable guidance to the actual practice of jurisprudence in early modern Poland.

175
 • Chapter 1.4 •

Where appeal was granted, this was almost always to the advantage of the accused.

With two exceptions, all of the appeals brought to the Superior court of Krakow resulted in

aquittals, dismissals, or oaths of innocence.68 Those exceptions were exceptional: Agnieszka

Kruczka of Radoszyce ran away before her appeal could be heard, and thereby gave the court

reason to doubt her innocence (#36, Radoszyce 1638); Anna Markowa's case, from Biecz,

was remitted to the episcopal court, which returned the case to the Biecz magistracy, ending

in a death sentence (#41, Biecz 1644). Similarly, the Assessory Court upheld Regina

Sokolkowa's appeal of the accusations against her in Lublin, but when she ran away the

Assessory court reversed its decision and acceded to the Lublin court's sentence of the stake,

in absentia (#56, Lublin 1661; see also 1.2.3 above, and Ostling 2005a pp. 99-100). Appeal,

then, was a rare but important turn-off from the road to the stake.69

#17, Wschowa 1601, #30, Szadek 1632, #43, Pilica 1645 all ended with dismissal. In #35, Sambor 1638, and
#46, Szadek 1649a, the court required an oath of innocence. #38, Koryczany 1643, was an appeal, by the
accused's feudal lord, of the acquittal she had received at the village court level—despite her noble master's
protestations, the court upheld this verdict of innocence. #47, Szadek 1649b, is properly a case of
defamation: the accused had originally been the accuser, labelling some twenty Szadek beggar-women as
witches and initially convincing the town instygator to bring them to trial. When she could bring no proof,
the case turned against her and she was sentenced to whipping and banishment, which sentence she
appealled. The appeals court reduced her sentence to a series of penitential actions in church, a public
apology, and several sessions in the town stocks.
It is difficult to gain even a rough idea of the frequency of appeal, in part because it is by no means always
clear what should be counted in that category. Fore example, in her article on appellate witch-trials, Pilaszek
considers most of the Lublin court trials to have been appeals. This is not obvious to me. The trial of Regina
Sokolkowa (#56, Lublin 1661) is an appeal, albeit from the Lublin court to the Assessory court. Although in
the cases of Regina Zaleska, Maryna Bialkowa, and Katarzyna Rataiowa (#42, 1644; #59, 1664; #125,
1700), the accused appear to have undergone some initial investigation in small towns near the place of the
crime, their cases came to the Lublin town court via the Crown Tribunal because of its nominal jurisdiction
over blasphemy: all of these trials turn on theft of the Eucharist (see also 2.2-2.3 below). I find no evidence
in the text of the trial of Anna Swedycka (#80,1678) that this was an appellate case. #87 (1681) and #161
(1732) may have been appeals of some kind (in #87, for example, the accused witches had already
undergone an initial trial in the village of Sokolowka, overseen by jurymen of nearby Oleszko (now Olesko
in Ukraine). But the appeal, if any, is of the civil case among noble families proceeding alongside the
witchcraft case. In both these trials witches were hired by Ruthenian szlachta to attack other nobles; the
resulting noble proceeding came to the Crown Tribunal in Lublin, and the peasant witches were sent to the
Lublin court for interrogation—which explains the lack of any verdict in these two trials. Ironically, Pilaszek
overlooks the one indubitable appeal to the Lublin court, that of Regina Lewczykowa, appealed from the
court of tiny Goraj (#118, 1698).

176
 • Road to the stake •

1.4.4: In the torture chamber

The great Renaissance legal reformer Bartlomiej Groicki, echoing a standard admonition

going back as far as the ancient Digest of Roman jurisprudence, cautions that too much faith

should not be put into confessions under torture: some hardened criminals will withstand any

amount of pain without confessing, while others, including the innocent, will confess to

anything to avoid torture, and will implicate others (Groicki 1559a; Koranyi 1953 p. 191;

Digest 48.18.1.23 after Peters 1985 p. 34).70 Nevertheless, like the Roman magistrates

Groicki was paraphrasing, and like most legal writers and magistrates in Europe in the early

modern period, Groicki assumed torture to be an essential procedure for the investigation of

crime. As Peters has shown, the judicial revolution of the early modern period, which did

away with judicial ordeal and set the standards of evidence extraordinarily high, ironically

created a situation in which torture became the primary investigative tool for the rationalized

magistracy (Peters 1985). Raising the status of confession to "the queen of proofs," while

rejecting many other types of evidence as insuficient, untrustworthy, or circumstantial, the

new theories of inquisitorial judicial procedure associated with the rediscovery of Roman law

made torture one of the main instruments of law.

This is not to say that everyone accused of witchcraft was tortured: as noted, courts at

least formally had to justify turning suspects over to torture by a separate decree. Moreover,

during the free testimony which preceded torture, the court "admonished" suspects

repeatedly to tell the whole truth, "and not to give her body over to be tormented by

Cf. the opinion of the Krakow appeals court concerning the women tortured without evidence in Pilica.
Torture cannot be relied on because people "under torture sometimes confess to things they had never even
thought of [in torturis bywaja^cey powiedaia^c, czasem sie_ do tego, o czym nigdy nie myslili, przyznawaiaj"
(#43, Pilica 1645).

177
 • Chapter 1.4 •

torture"71—a somewhat disingenuous warning, since in witch-trials at least those who did

confess "the truth" of their crime were usually tortured in any case.
79

Out of the 329 accused witches before town courts in my database, there are clear

indications of just 210 (about 64%) having been sent to torture. On the other hand, only 58

(16%) were definitely not tortured, and there are good reasons to assume that the torture rate

was rather higher.73 It would be helpful to compare this rate of torture to the incidence of

torture for other capital crimes in early modern Poland; however, at present there are no

reliable comparative data on the subject. Hanna Zaremska, in her study of the early modern

Polish executioner, suggested that torture was nearly always administered (1986);

unfortunately this assertion rested in part on the supposition that the term "free testimony

[zeznanie dobrowolne]" and its cognates in trial records refered simply to the free repetition

or confirmation of testimony after torture. Marcin Kamler has shown this assumption to be
71
In the trial of Regina Zaleska in Lublin, for example (#42, 1644), the accused was warned a total of five times
to "confess the truth," before she was turned over to the torturer:
Monita ut verum fateatur et ne corpus suum Admonished to confess the truth, and to not give over
tormentis cruciari permittat. [...] her body to be tormented by torture. [...]
Monita iterum atq iterum de edisserenda veritate. Admonished again and again to confess the truth. She
Nihil agnovit. [... ] testified nothing. [... ]
Tandem ligata per Lublinensim adversorem et At last, bound by the Lublin executioner, and again
iterum quasita et praemonita nihil fassa. [...] questioned and warned, she confessed nothing. [...]
Monita iterum atque iterum ut Veritatem fateatur Admonished again and again to confess the truth, she
Nihil fassa. [... ] confessed nothing. [... ]
Post modum per Lublinensim adversorem monita After which, warned by the Lublin executioner not to
ne corpus suum tormentio cruciam permittat et give her body over to torment and pain and to tell the
Veritatim edisserat Nil agnovit. truth she testified nothing.
Cf. the other Lublin trials in Appendix A: #27, #59, #80, #87, and #125. In Nowy Wisnicz, the court
admonished Justyna Rabiaszka "not once but more than a dozen times [nie raz ale kilkanascie razy]" before
sending her to torture (#101, Nowy Wisnicz 1689).
72
Village courts did not have the facilities, or the need, for torture, since they did not try capital cases.
73
Of those not tortured, none were sentenced to death, while of those submitted to torture, 151 (72% of those
tortured) were sentenced to death. Considering that a minimum of 172 accused witches were sentenced to
death in town trials, and that capital sentences were rare without torture, an additional 21 accused witches, at
minimum, may be presumed to have been tortured. This would give us a total of 231, or 70%, of accused
witches sent to torture. Such proportions can be compared to those calculated by Kamler in his study of
torture in Krakow, Poznan, and Lublin (1988). 79% of those tortured suspects were sentenced to death,
while just 36.7% of suspects who confessed freely without torture were similarly sentenced. Kamler's study
excluded witch-trials: presumably the relatively high rate of execution without torture that he finds may be

178
 • Road to the stake •

unfounded (1988 p. 113). His own study of 2,462 accused from Krakow, Poznan, and Lublin

(a study which excludes trials for witchcraft), concludes that the incidence of torture was

quite low—around 19% of those accused (ibid. p. 115). However, this statistic suffers from a

variety of methodological shortcomings. First, the records are from principal cities, of which

it is generally suspected, although at present without strong quantitative evidence, that the

incidence of torture was rather less than in medium-sized or smaller centres: for example,

every accused offender brought before the criminal court in Nowy Wisnicz went through all

six stages of torture (Uruszczak ed. 2003).74 Secondly, Kamler's data-set includes all alleged

offenders in Poznan, including those standing trial for relatively minor theft, whereas for

Lublin it includes only those standing trial for serious offences (this is because of the

differing record-keeping conventions of the two cities). Not surprisingly, only 7.4% of the

accused in Poznan were tortured, while 63% of those in Lublin underwent torture—an

incidence not too different from what I have calculated for witch-trials.75

Torture took place in the torture chamber, situated in most Polish towns in the basement

of the town hall. Smaller towns had no such separate chamber—indeed, they often enough

had no town hall—and improvised a space in some other cellar or barn. Trials deputed to

villages similarly improvised a torture chamber, again most usually in a barn. The town

scribe and at least two members of the court were present during torture; the latter asked the

accounted for by crimes such as murder or infanticide, where torture could be deemed unnecessary in the
presence of a free confession.
74
The assumption that small-town and medium-town courts tortured more freely is indirectly supported by their
much higher execution rates, which have been carefully analyzed by Mikolajczyk (1998).
75
The Lublin statistics are further distorted, as Kamler himself notes, by the great cycle of trials against bandits
in the 1640s—all of whom were tortured. Moreover, most serious cases tried by the Lublin court were
remitted to that court by the Crown Trybunal, and this remission was often done with the express purpose of
making use of the Lublin town court torture facilities. Hubert Laszkiewicz has shown, on the base of his
study of the Lublin courts between 1650 and 1716, that 80% of Lublin wojt-court cases were for theft, and
the majority of serious cases brought before that court (Laszkiewicz includes witch-trials in this category)
came to the Lublin court via the Tribunal (Laszkiewicz 1988). On the basis of Laszkiewicz's data, I have

179
 • Chapter 1.4 •

questions and were also responsible for ensuring that the torture proceed according to the

law. This law envisioned three sessions of "pulling," and, if necessary, an additional three

sessions of pulling with the application of fire—either red-hot iron or the flame of a candle,

usually to the victim's side or behind the knees. "Pulling" could mean one of two procedures:

the victim could have her hands tied behind her back and attached to a rope, which was

pulled up to force her arms up and back (the strappado); or she could be tied to a ladder or

rack and have arms and legs pulled in opposite directions. Records are usually vague on this

point, usually mentioning only apalus torturarum—which could indicate either procedure.

Pulling torture was administered primo, secundo intensius, tertio intensime; burning with fire

followed the same order. The victim of torture testified both during the torture itself and

immediately afterwards; formally at least such testimony was not valid unless confirmed

benevole outside the torture chamber, usually the next day, before the full court. Pregnant

women were excluded from torture (Karpihski 1995; Groicki 1559a; 1953 pp. 195, 214)—a

fact which some accused witches used to their advantage (e.g. Maryna Bialkowa, #59, Lublin

1664).

I have found little evidence to support the claims of Baranowski and others, that the

torture and other humiliating practices visited upon accused witches were different in kind or

in intensity to what was standard practice in other criminal trials. Witches were not regularly

shaven "above and below;" nor were they stripped naked; examination of the witch's body

calculated an adjusted Lublin wq/Y-court incidence of torture to be about 9.5%—comparable to the rate in
Poznan.
76
The oft-repeated claim (Baranowski 1952 pp. 101-103, Dydek 1968 p. 389) that witches were stripped and
shaven, derives from the famous Discription of customs in the reign of August III, by the nobleman-priest
Je_drzej Kitowicz. Kitowicz asserts that in small-town courts, during interrogations of witchcraft but also of
common theft, the executioner "first shaved [the accused] of all hairs, wheresoever those ornaments cover
people's nature, saying, that the devil hides in those hairs and keeps the witch or wizard from confessing,
and, hidden in the hair, he suffers for him or her [golili im na sam przod wlosy, wszqdzie, gdziekolwiek te
ozdoby i zaslony natura ludziom data, powiadajajs, iz we wlosy diabel sie_ kryje i niedopuszcza czarownicy

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 • Road to the stake •

to search for the "devil's mark" was almost unknown in Poland. Accused witches do not

seem usually to have been kept in barrels or stocks while in prison, still less during
no

interrogation—although there is some evidence for such a practice in the 18th century;

lub czarownikow wyznania, i ze ukryty we wlosach, za niego lub za nia^cierpi]" (Kitowicz 1985 [1840]
p. 136). He also says that accused is stripped naked, with just a small cloth covering the genitals, during
torture (ibid.). However, Kamler has noted that Kitowicz, for all his powers of observation in other areas of
life, is not a reliable source for the practice of torture in early modern Poland (Kamler 1988 p. 107), and in
fact it seems probable that his account, which he presents as a description of practice, derives rather from the
normative legal literature. Both the Malleus (Bk. 3 qu. 15) and Del Rio (1608 Bk. 5, sec. 9; 2000 p. 218)
recommend the shaving of witches; although the practice is opposed in the Instrukcja rzymska (1705 ff. 6,
17v) and by a decree of the Holy Office in 1591 (Tedeschi 1983 p. 186 n73). The question whether
criminals should be shaven before torture was common in legal literature in contexts entirely separated from
witchcraft. Groicki, following and citing Damhouder's influential Praxis rerum criminalium, stated that
some thieves are shaven to remove the possibility of hidden "czary" by which they might resist torture, but
these are thieves, not witches, and Groicki neither recommended nor discouraged the practice (Groicki
1559a; 1953 p. 196; after Damhouder 1601 [1554] cap. 37 sec. 22, p. 76). Shaving of criminals appears to
have been rare, and the few cases I know of all have to do with male, non-magical crime, rather than
witchcraft. (Koranyi mentions three such cases: robbers in 1595 resisted torture until shaven, at which time a
crust of bread was found hidden in the armpit of one. A murderer in Sanok was similarly shaven. Bandits
being tried in Lublin resisted torture "because they were well defended with enchantments [bo byli dobrze
czarami obwarowani]," until "their heads and beards were shaven [glowy i brody ogolili]" (Koranyi 1926
p. 17, quoting Miczinski 1618 p. 16; see also Zaremska 1986 pp. 36-43.) There does seem to be a
correlation between such shaving and trials against Jews for ritual murder or host-desecration: here it
functions as a deliberate humiliation and profanation of Jewish beards. Kolberg, following the antisemitic
Proces kriminalny o niewinne dziecie^ recounts that the accused in a ritual murder trial in Sandomierz had
their beards shaven without soap, and a cross scratched into their foreheads (DWOK vol. 20 p. 285;
Zuchowski 1713; see also Miczinski 1618, above). Although the trial records often complain that an accused
witch "slept" during torture, I have encountered no instance where such a witch is then shaven to remove
her resistance. As for the suggestion that witches were stripped naked during their questioning, one might
note as a counter-example the accused witch in Tylicz (#173, 1763), who, during questioning, wore her
young daughter's shirt over her sheepskin coat because, she said, she was cold. (According to Koranyi, she
was in fact trying to use the symbolic power of her innocent-maiden daughter, embodied in the shirt, to
support her own innocence (1928a p. 22).) The accused witch Elzbieta Stepkowicowa, searched for a
signum diabolicum, was found to have no pubic hair—for which circumstance she could give no satisfactory
account (#70, Nowy Sa.cz 1670). Certainly this would have been noticed before had she been previously
stripped bare, let alone shaven!
Elzbieta Stepkowicowa (#70, Nowy Sa.cz 1670) was searched for such a mark at the court's initiative (see
previous note); when accused witches first confessed to having been given a mark by their devil lovers, in
the form of a scratch, this scratch was then examined by the court (#153, #154, Nieszawa 1721; #158,
Kleczew 1730).
Baranowski (1952 pp. 98-101), following Koranyi (1928a, 1928b) and Wawrzeniecki (1895, 1897 p. 647),
has claimed that accused witches were usually kept in barrels to prevent their touching the ground or
otherwise making use of their powers. This supposition traces back to the fictional account of the Doruchow
trial, which describes the accused witches being kept in empty sour-kraut barrells prior to torture
(Majeranowski 1835; Tazbir ed. 2002). Such a practice, or something like it, seems to have occurred, but
there is no evidence to suggest that it was the normal or general practice, as Baranowski suggests. In at least
one trial (#94, Warta 1685), the accused was blindfolded in court, and had been kept in the stocks before-
hand. Aside from this somewhat equivocal evidence, I know of only two mentions of witches kept in barrels
or stocks: Ewa Dombrowska was thrown into a barrell covered with a cloth by her accusers and with her
manor-lord's permission, while awaiting the arrival of the magistrates from Barcin (#163, Barcin 1735);

181
 • Chapter 1.4 •

there is no evidence to suggest that they were placed on a table annointed at its four corners

with holy oil, their feet not allowed to touch the ground.

I know of no instances of witches being tortured using methods other than pulling and

burning, although both methods admitted of very considerable variation in intensity and

duration. This is not to say, however, that the formal procedures of torture were always

observed. The court of Lobzenica seems to have been particularly brutal: during her first

round of torture, the accused witch Anna was hung for fifteen minutes, and burnt; and she

was subjected to a total of four sessions of torture. In the same trial, Barwa "from the

poorhouse [z szpitalu]" was first tortured "lightly" on account of her age; but during her

second session of torture Barwa was burnt with sulphur on her elbows, shoulders, breasts,

and knees (#110, Lobzenica 1692). Other courts may have been equally brutal but less

meticulous in their record-keeping: at least two accused witches died during or immediately

after torture (Katarzyna of Ilowiec, #6, Poznah 1567; an unnamed witch of Klodawa, #73

1673) while a further two seem to have committed suicide in prison, presumably to avoid

further torture (another un-named witch of Klodawa, #73 1673; and Zofja Straszybotha, Lodz

while Agnieszka Szymkowa was kept in stocks in her prison cell, from which treatment she died (#159,
Innowroclaw 1731). Both these accounts come from churchmen and are collected in the Monumenta
Historica Dioceseos Wladislaviensis; their context is therefore the ecclesiastical campain against the abuses
of secular witch trials, which was gaining momentum at just this time. The Synods ofPoznan (1720), Plock
(1733), Poznan (1738) and Zmudz (1752), as well as pastoral letter of Bishop K. Antoni Szembek of
Kujawy, 1727, decried throwing witches into stocks or barrels between sessions of questioning (Koranyi
1928a p. 8); the text of the Plock Synod suggested that this practice was standard (Sawicki ed. 1951-1952
vol. 1 part 1 p. 244). In the near total absence of evidence apart from this ecclesiastical testimony, one is left
to wonder whether this was a standard practice passed over in silence in court records, whether it was an
exaggerated charge on the part of ecclesiastical authors, or whether it was an occasional practice, possibly
restricted to the small towns of Wielkopolska in the early 18th century. More research is necessary before
the "witch's barrell" can be decisively rejected, or accepted, as part of Polish witch-trials.
Baranowski 1952 p. 101. The Malleus advocates that witches not be permitted to touch the ground (pt. 3 qu.
8); while the Czarownicapowolana (1714 [1639]) qu. 7 p. 53, treats such procedures as superstitious
judicial practices forbidden by canon law. The Czarownica author appears to have been paraphrasing John
Gratian's 12th-century Decretum on this point. Baranowski's reading may be influenced by Berwihski's
treatment of this passage the Czarownica (1984 [1862] pp. 99-100); Berwinski mis-reads it under the
influence of Kitowicz (1840 vol. 1 p. 233ff.).

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 • Road to the stake •

1652). Torture sessions seem usually to have not lasted very long, although their duration is

rarely recorded. Nevertheless Gamalski's assertion of torture lasting for "two hours, three,

half a day"80 must be taken with a grain of salt (1742 f. 13): Anna's torture for fifteen

minutes, noted above, seems to have been recorded because it lasted so long.

Accused witches could display extraordinary courage and fortitude under torture. Anna,

whose brutal torture has already been described, said to the court: "kill me, shoot me, I have

nothing on my conscience, look through the record-books of the court, wherever you wish,

[to see] whether I've been denounced before or I'm mixed up in anything, you'll find

nothing. " 81 She maintained her innocence for three more sessions of torture, and was

eventually acquitted by the court, whereas all her co-accused were sent to the stake (#110,

Lobzenica 1692). Paraszka Hlacholicha maintained her innocence through six sessions of

torture, saying after the third: "You can pull me apart into pieces; I don't know and won't say

any more; I don't have any more to tell." (#87, Lublin 1681). We find similar fortitude

among other accused witches before the Lublin court, e.g. Regina Zaleska (#42, 1644), or

Katarzyna Hutkowa and Anna Woitaszkowa (#59, 1664).

Such declarations are something more than the anguished cries of the innocent. We

must resist the sort of Lord of the Flies interpretation of judicial torture, whereby it strips

humanity from both victim and executioner, reducing both to the level of brute beasts.

Culture does not disappear in the torture chamber; Paraszka Hlacholicha, declaring her

intention and ability to withstand torture, was drawing on cultural assumptions about torture

as ordeal. As Stuart Clark has argued, if torture was "seen even by those tortured as a proof

80
"malo dwie, albo trzy godziny, malo pol-dnia"
81
"zabijcie mnie, zastrzelcie, nie mam nic na sie_, patrzcie po ksiejach w sa^dzie, gdzie sie_ warn podoba, jezelim
jest powolana albo w czym zamazana, nie znajdziecie. "
82
Despite her acquittal, her manor-lord banished her from the village.

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 • Chapter 1.4 •

of innocence as well as of guilt, in which God either gave or withheld the resolution to

withstand according to the truth of the matter, then we should beware of thinking of it solely

in secular and ultimately negative terms as simply a piece of sadistic barbarism" (Clark 1997:

592; cf. Cohn 2000 p. 233). Like dunking, which as we have seen was sometimes requested

by the accused witches themselves, torture provided an opportunity to decisively prove one's

innocence. When the Nowy Wisnicz court sent Regina Smalcowa to torture despite her

denial of any wrong-doing and the paucity of evidence against her, it remarked that this was

" so that the [torture] might make clear the evidence for the court, and also so that Smalcowa,

if she is innocent, can clear herself. " 83 In fact she withstood all six rounds of torture without

confession, and was acquitted (#99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688).

One notes, in this respect, a strong difference between the behavior of tortured accused

witches in, for example, the Lublin and Nowy Wisnicz trials, on the one hand, and those of

Kleczew, on the other. We have seen the extraordinary fortitude of some of the accused in

Lublin. In contrast, most of the accused witches in Kleczew began to confess almost

immediately; moreover, they often confessed quite quickly not just to the malefice of which

they had been accused, but also to feasting at Bald Mountain, consorting with devils, stealing

and desecrating the Body of Christ in the form of the Eucharistic host. It is unlikely that the

difference lies in the brutality of torture; the Lublin executioner, used to extracting

confessions from highway robbers and brigands, will hardly have exercised milder torture

than the Kleczew executioner used. The difference lies rather, I would suggest, in different

assumptions about the role of torture. The victims of torture in Lublin had some faith in the

system, and some hope that, through resolute declaration of innocence, they would be set

free. As Clark suggests, they shared with their judges and tormentors a belief that the truly

"aby sajiowi mogly obiasnic documenta, a taz Smalcowa, iezeli niewinna, aby sie oczysciela. "

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innocent would be able to withstand the pains of torture. Such a faith would have been

misplaced in Kleczew (as, no doubt, in many other towns); during the massive cycle of

witch-trials there in the last quarter of the 17th century, it must have become clear to many

that belief in one's own innocence availed little. Bereft of faith in torture as a divinely

regulated ordeal, the accused before the Kleczew court attempted to reduce the pains of

torture as much as possible by confessing quickly.

Indeed, juridical practice included a loophole. The very resistance and fortitude under

torture which could be, and in courts like that of Lublin sometimes was, taken as indication

of innocence, could in cases of witchcraft be taken as proof of guilt. Witches were said to be

unable to cry (Malleus pt. 3 qu. 15; Bodin 1587 bk. 4 ch. 1; cf. the "dry-eyed old woman" of

Daniel Naborowski's poem, in 1.3.5); or they made use of herbs and powders to dull the pain

of torture (Carpzov 1635 part. 3 qu. 125 no. 67); or they resisted torture with the aid of devils

(Koranyi 1926). Such indicia of guilt were strongly opposed by the church: the Instructio

romana explicitly condemned the notion that witches cannot cry (Instrukcya rzymska 1705 f.

17v); and the Polish legal scholar Daniel Wisner, commenting on Bodin, argued that great

pain can have the effect of blocking tears (Wisner 1639; cited after Koranyi 1927b p. 138). In

the 18th century, Gamalski polemicised against the notion that resistance to torture could

itself stand as proof of witchcraft (1742 p. 13v). Nevertheless, some Polish courts did treat

such indicia seriously: in Nowy Wisnicz, the magistrates pointedly inquired of Regina

Wojciechowska how she could have "slept" during torture (#99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688c); the

verdict of the Muszyna court against Anna Dudzicha listed as evidence of her witchcraft that

she had been insensible to the pain of burning during torture (#81, Muszyna 1678). If it were

4
This is not to say that they confessed to everything indiscriminately. As we will see in chapter 3.2.2, even in
Kleczew accused witches attempted to maintain some control over their self-image through selective and

185
 • Chapter 1.4 •

widely known that magistrates took resistance to torture as proof of witchcraft, the

willingness of accused witches to withstand torture must have been severely undermined.

Rarely, in Poland, do we find such resistance attributed to herbs or powders, despite the

popularity of this notion in neighboring Lithuania85—although Regina Wierzbicka allegedly

felt no pain because an un-named woman had provided her with a special powder (#84,

Bochnia 1679). Much more commonly, insensibility to torture was interpreted as evidence

that the accused witch enjoyed diabolical assistance. Agnieszka Rosmika had several devils

hidden about her person, preventing her confession (#142, Zbajszyn 1708); Dorota of

Mruczyn had a devil hidden in her shirt (#124, Fordon 1700); while Barbara Karczmarka's

torture-resisting devil hid behind her left knee (#162, Pyzdry 1732). Only when Katarzyna

Mrowczyna's devil Michal "flew out from her armpit yesterday, where it had been during the

first session of torture,"86 was she finally able, as she explained, to confess to her crimes

(#115, Stajszewo 1695). However, when the Lobzenica court asked the accused witch Barwa

how she withstood the pain of torture without crying, she answered against the court's

demonological expectations: her resistance came from Jesus Christ, "to whom she

recommends her soul and to whom she prays, day and night in the prison"87 (#110, 1692).

• *J* •

qualified confession narratives.

The Lithuanian Statutes of 1468, 1529,1566 and 1588 bear witness to the conviction that thieves and other
criminals could withstand torture by means of herbs known to them; the earliest of these laws calls for the
death penalty against such a "zeljenin" or "herbalist" (Koranyi 1926 p. 16). However, these decrees are only
loosely related to witchcraft, and refer to the methods believed to be practiced by common criminals. Polish
and Magdeburg law lacked these specific provisos of the Lithuanian statutes, although similar beliefs
prevailed in the Korona: church robbers tried in Lublin in the early 18th century were allegedly instructed
by their leader to drink the milk of a sow to resist pain during torture (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 48 f. 816).
"Powiada, iz wczora od niej spod pachy duch Michal wylecial, jako byla na pierwszych torturach. "
"ktoremu si$ ona w wiqzieniu tego we dnie i w nocy poleca sie. i modli. "

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 • Road to the stake •

The centrality of torture to witch-trials cannot be over-stated: in important respects,

torture created the witch-trial era in Poland as elsewhere in Europe. Without torture there

would still have been accusations of harmful magic, of milk-theft, of children and cattle

stricken with illness, of healing magic gone wrong. There would also, most likely, have been

judicial or popular execution of accused witches, just as there were and are in many witch-

believing cultures the world over where torture is not employed. But without torture, the

primary accusations of malefice could not have been transformed, as they so often were, into

the more nefarious confessions of diabolism and radical evil. Sigrid Brauner sums up the

effect of torture on the creation and maintenance of the imagined witch: "witches with the

diabolical powers described in the trial records did not exist. Instead, they were created in a

complex social process as those on trial were forced under interrogation and torture to

assume the very identities of which they were accused" (Brauner 1995 p. 10). Witchcraft and

witches were produced in the torture chamber.

In Chapter 2.1.4 we will return to this issue, showing how initial accusations of

relatively mild malefice could change shape under torture into darker crimes—from milk

magic to murder, from causing the illness of a single neighbour to plotting the destruction of

the entire community. In Chapters 2.3 and 3.3 we will also strive to complicate our

conceptualization of the discourse created in the torture chamber. Following the work of

Lyndal Roper and Dianne Purkiss especially, I suggest that the process does not resemble the

uni-directional imposition of elite representations onto passive female subjects depicted by

Brauner; instead, and despite the overwhelming imbalances of power and agency at play in

the context of torture, accused witches were able to turn its impositions in their own

187
 • Chapter 1.4 •

directions; they were able, partially and fragmentarily, to compel the confessions wrung out

in torture to resemble their own stories of themselves.

These are themes, however, for later chapters. Here I want to explore another effect of

torture in witch-trials—its effect not on the content of confession but on the creation of

further trials. I refer, of course, to the practice of chain-accusation or denunciation of others

as witches, under torture. Without denunciation, there are witch-trials; denunciation makes

possible a witch-hunt, or even a witch-craze—although, as we shall see, this rarely occurred

in Poland.

1.4.5: Denunciation

I have translated the Polish term "powolanie" as "denunciation." It is a key term in the

scholarship of Polish witchcraft, ever since the anonymous author of the Czarownica

powolana—"The denounced witch" chose it as the title of his anti-witch-trial treatise and as

the main focus of his scathing critique.

After reviewing the evidence for the sabbat and, in standard demonological fashion,

affirming that devils have the ability to transport people through the air, the Czarownica

author asserted that nevertheless the "banquets, dances, obeisances to the devil, and other

disgusting things unworthy of mention"88 reported by witches were most usually dreams or

fantasies created by the devil during sleep. On waking, the women tells others about their

fantastic flight and festivities:

Czego potym oble_dna_ fantazia, swoia_ upewnione For which reason, they cannot deny their mistaken
zaprzec nie mogaj y owszem dobrowolnie przed fantasy, and indeed they testify together freely before
sa_dem wyznawaia. spolnie y osoby pewne znaiome the court, and denounce certain other acquaintences,
powolywaia^c, ktore im ich fantaza^ oble^dna^ y sam whose [presence at the banquet] their mistaken
diabel nieprzyiaciel ludzki glowny, spiqcym mocno fantasy, and the devil, humankind's main enemy,
wyrazil. Dla tegoz nie bardzo bespiecznie sobie impressed strongly on them as they slept. For which

1
"bankietow, tancow, poklonow diabhi, y innych plugastw niegodnych wspomienia"

188
 • Road to the stake •

se_dziowie postejmia^ gdy na takie proste zeznanie reason judges do not proceed very safely, when, on
czarownic, lubo dobrowolnie, lubo przez kwestiye the basis of such bare testimony of witches, either
wyme_czone, uwierzywszy one na smierc zkazuiq, given freely or tormented out of them during
niemaiaj; innych shisznych na nie dowodow interrogation, believing them, they condemn them to
(Czarownica powolana 1714 (1639) q. 2 p. 31). death without any better evidence.

Variations of this assertion entered the standard repertoire of those who opposed

secular witch-trials. Krzysztof Opalinski put the matter succinctly in his Satyry:

Kaza^ tedy niewinna. babq wzia^c i mexzyc, They arrest and torture an innocent old woman
Az ich z pietnascie wyda. Ciajmie kat i pali, Til she betrays fifteen. The executioner burns and pulls her
Az powie i powola wszytkie, co ich we wsi. Til she tattles and denounces the whole village.
(Opalinski 1650 Satyra 3 w . 65-67; 1953
p. 25).

The anonymous author of Wodka zelixierem provided a similar view:

Jedn3.bior3.na mejci, ta dziesie_c powola, One is put to torture, she denounces ten,
Z tych zas kazda powolac tylez drugie zdola And each of these denounces ten more yet again.
{Wodka 1729; quoted after Baranowski 1952 p. 63).

Serafin Gamalski, giving a spin to the still-current Polish proverb "where the devil fails, he

sends a woman," suggested that Satan uses one real witch to multiply the number of

innocent women sent to the stake. "However, one should not so quickly put one's trust in the

yapping of an old woman; and indeed one must believe, that such a one who has renounced

the true God and the very essence of truth, and who has become a daughter of the father of

lies, or a wife to the father of tricksters, will never tell the truth"90 (1742 pp. 15v-16).

Modern scholars of Polish witchcraft have themselves put rather too much trust in the

rhetoric of Gamalski and the Czarownica. For Baranowski, the most frequent method by

which a new trial began was through denunciation of a tortured witch; "at least one third" of

executed witches came to trial through denunciation (1952 pp. 88, 114). His main example of

this mechanism is the cycle of trials in Nowy Wisnicz in 1688-1689 (#97-#102), which he

"gdzie sam diabel niemoze, tarn babe, posyla." On the history and variations of this proverb, see
Krzyzanowski 1958.
"Zaczym nie zaraz trzeba wierzyc paszczekuiajsey babie, y owszewm to wierzyc trzeba, ze ta prawdy
niepowie, ktora sie_ Boga prawdziwego, y samey istoty prawdy zaparla, a stala siq corka^ oyca klamcow, albo
zona^ oyca zmylnikow. "

189
 • C h a p t e r 1.4 •

claimed to be "no exception" (ibid.). Following Baranowski, Edward Potkowski suggested

that every trial led to new trials, and that through the mechanism of denunciation "a few to a

dozen or more" came to be accused in each trial (1970 pp. 250-252). In what follows, I will

want to question this supposition. But I should first point out that it is not too different from

the views of Western scholars of Western witchcraft not so long ago, before Salem or the

mass panics of late 16th-century southern Germany came to be understood as anomolies

rather than the norm. It bears repeating that the historiography of withcraft over the last

fourty years has seen a steady diminishment of reliably reported mass-trials, and an

increasing concentration on the "unspectacular everyday persecution" of witches in small-

scale trials (Burke 1993 p. 441).

• •$• •

Unlike other abuses of the court, such as the water-ordeal, denunciation was fully

accepted by secular law. The Carolina considered it to provide probable cause for consigning

a person to torture; Benedict Carpzov thought it was the best such indicium (Carolina art. 31;

Carpzov 1635, pars Ilia, qu. 122 no. 60-69; both after Uruszczak 1994 p. 200). Despite

reservations, it was also accepted by such authorities as Del Rio (bk. 5 sec. 3; 2000 pp. 194-

198). Nevertheless, many magistrates distrusted denunciation. So far as I can gather, the

Lublin court never acted on the denunciations extracted by its own executioner. The Superior

Court of the Krakow Castle, in several decisions, dismissed evidence from denunciation as

deriving either from hatred or from the pains of torture (#17, Wschowa 1601; #35, Sambor

1638; #43, Pilica 1645; see also Pilaszek's discussion of these same materials, 2005 p. 115).

As shall be shown, even smaller courts often declined to bring in women denounced under

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 • Road to the stake •

torture, though their reasons for so refraining might often have been more practical than

jurisprudential.

Denunciation is an entirely different process than accusation. In accusation, free

persons freely bring a complaint to the court, and may obligate themselves thereby to paying

expenses or facing fines should the complaint prove false or frivolous. In denunciation a

woman bound to the implement of torture and under extreme duress, provides the names of

other witches in the neighborhood. These differences in circumstance account largely for the

difference in character. As we have seen, accusation was comparatively infrequent and was

marked by a focus on very specific allegations. By contrast, denunciations, in those trials

where they occur, could be profligate and wild, multiplying out along lines of resentment or

suspicion or envy to encompass ever greater numbers.

We must also distinguish sharply between denunciation proper, wherein a woman is

brought to trial entirely or primarily because she had been denounced by another accused

witch, and the quite separate concept of reputation. Anyone who had ever been denounced

was thereby made suspect, and this suspicion could, months or years later, contribute to an

accusation against them. The Kleczew court sentenced Jadwiga Wieczorkowa of Szyszynko

to death entirely on the basis of denunciation by two previously burnt witches, without any

additional evidence and without a confession under torture (Wislicz 2004b p. 74). However,

others could be denounced numerous times without ever coming to trial, such as the apparent

cunning-woman Reina Wajtrobina of Rostoka (ibid. p. 79), or could be denounced repeatedly

over very long periods, such as Anastazja Kaczmarka of Zlotkow, who had a twenty-year

record of repeated denunciations during the worst of all known Polish witch-hunts, before

finally coming to trial in 1700 (ibid. p. 90). Regina of Stawiszyn came to be accused, in part,

191
 • Chapter 1.4 •

because she had moved recently to Kalisz to get away from Stawiszyn, where her reputation

was damaged by her association with one Marusza, recently burnt in that town (#22, Kalisz

1616). Previous denunciation could also weigh heavily in the evidence of a witch accused

independantly of that denunciation. The case against Katarzyna Mrowczyna (#115,

Stajszewo 1695) was sealed when two local noblemen testified that she had been denounced

in one nearby village six years previously, and in another village just a few weeks before. On

the verge of allowing the well-off burgherwoman Katarzyna Paprocka to appeal her case, the

Bydgoszcz court reversed itself and sent her to torture upon receiving information that she

had just been denounced in the large trial at Chelmno (#33, Bydgoszcz 1638; #34, Chehnno

1638). When Anna Wsz^dybelka maintained her innocence through three sessions of torture,

the Tuliszkow court wished to dismiss her case—however, the instigator produced evidence

that she had been denounced by one Helena Macieykowa in nearby Grzymiszew more than a

dozen years previously: on the strength of this Anna's daughter was brought to torture,

denounced her mother, and they both went to the stake (#92, Tuliszkow 1684). Conversely,

accused witches could point to their never having been denounced as implicit evidence of

their innocence, as did Anna and Katarzyna during torture before the Lobzenica court (#110,

Lobzenica 1692).

In Poland as in the West, large-scale denunciation is often associated with the sabbat

motif: it was by seeing other women at the sabbat that one knew them to be witches. Not all

large-scale denunciations involved the sabbat, however: already in 1544, Dorota Gnieczkowa

denounced seven other women under torture—though none of these seem to have come to

trial (#2, Poznah 1544). Anna Swedycka denounced eleven people, but only added the bald

mountain motif near the end of her confession: previously she had denounced the others

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 • Road to the stake •

either for various sorts of minor magic or as collaborators in her crime of preturnatural

murder (#80, Lublin 1678). All the really large-scale denunciations involved the sabbat—

but, again as in the West, such massive denunciations occur in a minority of cases. I have

reliable data for denunciation in only 36 of 161 town-court trials, or about 22%. Although

this statistic is indubitably too low,91 it is noteworthy that in eleven of these trials only one to

three others were denounced, while only in twelve trials were ten or more people

denounced—as many as 27 in one example to be discussed below.

Moreover, large-scale denunciation very rarely resulted in large-scale arrests: while, in

cases where one or two women were denounced, it was quite common for these to be

subsequently brought to trial, the same is not true in the large-scale denunciations. Of eight

denounced by Anna Szymkowa and Zofia Pejiziszka (#153, Nieszawa 1721) just one came to

trial; often denounced by Elzbieta Stepkowicowa (#70, Nowy Sq.cz 1670), none came to

trial. The cunning-woman Marusza Nowacka denounced a total of 25 people, of whom none

appear to have come to trial (#86, Warta 1679); Anna Ratajka methodically listed at least 20

people from surrounding villages, remarking (perhaps sarcastically?) "that these Witches are

nearly everywhere"92 (#123, Pyzdry 1699): only three of those denounced came to trial. Also

in Pyzdry, Anna Stelmaszka denounced nineteen women; none of those she denounced were

brought to court either immediately or in the large trial before the same court the following

year (#160, #162, Pyzdry 1731-1732). Even in Kleczew, our only really good example of a

witch-panic, where the sabbat motif appeared in every trial, where testimony often devolved

into a mere list of names, and where denounced witches were quite likely to be brought

immediately into trial or to be tried soon after, at least three people were denounced for every

91
For many trials my data is insufficient to determine whether denunciation took place, and in fact I am certain
that it did not in only 32 cases.

193
 • C h a p t e r 1.4 •

one who stood trial (Wislicz 2004b p. 78). Between 1682 and 1700, 62 persons were accused

but 224 were denounced before the Kleczew court.

This is not to say, however, that denunciation had no effect. The tendency toward larger

trials which, more than any other factor, increased the number of women accused of

witchcraft in the later 17th century, must to some extent been the result of denunciation. This

tendency is however very modest: trials of single witches remained the most common

throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, while the trials of six or more remained extremely

rare over the same period. But we see an important increase of trials involving two to five

Figure 1.4.A: Numbers of accused per trial

30

25

20

15

10

D_ n n m.
1501- 1526- 1551- 1576- 1601- 1626- 1651- 1676- 1701- 1726- 1751-
1525 1550 1575 1600 1625 1650 1675 1700 1725 1750 1775

D 1 I 2 1 3 - 5 116-10 B11+

witches, and this is at least in part a result of the increased judicial demand for denunciation

under torture.

There are several reasons for the lack of follow-through from denunciation. Probably

the most important was practical and procedural: if the denounced woman was enserfed to a

neighbouring nobleman, she could not be turned over to the court without his permission.

'item jest tych Czarownic nie malo prawie wszqdy. "

194
 • Road to the stake •

More often than not, in such cases, the denounced woman's lord preferred not to turn her

over to the court, unless he or his own villagers already had reason to suspect her. However,

it also seems likely that, as denunciations multiplied beyond all sense and beyond any basis

in suspicious activities, both magistrates and nobility tended to treat them with less and less

trust. This would help explain the greater tendency to arrest in cases where the accused

denounced just a few people.

Figures 1.4. B and 1.4. C detail two great cycles of witch-trials and the role played by

denunciation in each. The first set of trials is (#60-#63), occurred before the court of Ch^ciny

over a short period of time, from June 25 to July 16 1665. The second set of trials, (#97-

#102), occurred before the Nowy Wisnicz court between August 13 1688 and April 15, 1689:

however, the trials in 1689 bear no clear relation to those that went before: the "craze" if we

wish to call it that, lasted from August 13 through September 15 1688 (recall that this is the

cycle of trials cited by Baranowski to illustrate the domino-effect of denunciation).

A. In Chqciny, the first trial is of the normal kind: a single private accuser, in this case a

townsman, accuses a single woman of witchcraft. Barbara Grzeszowka is brought to court,

dunked (she floats because "all yesterday I didn't eat a thing"93), and is sent to torture. Her

husband is also dunked (he also floats), and testifies on her behalf. The records provide no

verdict, but in all probability the case was dismissed.

"bom wczora caly dzien nie jadla."

195
 • Chapter 1.4 •

Figure 1.4.B: Accusations and Denunciations in the Ch^ciny Trials of 1665 (##60-63)
 • Road to the stake •

Figure 1.4.C: Accusations and denunciations in the Nowy Wisnicz trials of 1688-1689 (##97-102)
 • Chapter 1.4 •

B. The next day, the Chqciny court is deputed to the village of Skiby, where one Ewa

Krucka is accused by the peasant Wojciech Roznowski, on behalf of or with the permission

of p. Wojciech Gorzechowski, the village's leaseholder. The original accusation has to do

with magical milk theft. During torture, Ewa denounces a total of 26 women and one man,

from seven nearby villages and towns. Of these, two are brought in imediately for

interrogation, and are eventually sentenced to burning along with Ewa. They do not

denounce anyone.

C. The next week, the Che^ciny court is deputed to Fanislawice. The peasant Maciej

Stryjak accuses Dorota Lysakowa, on the basis of her long reputation as a witch (despite this

long reputation, she had not been denounced by Ewa Krucka). Dorota, before torture,

denounces 21 women of whom she has heard that they flew to Bald Mountain. Only two of

these women (Kiemlina and Klysowa, both of Malogoszcz) overlap with the list of women

denounced by Ewa Krucka, but despite this double denunciation, neither of these two are

brought to trial. However, two others denounced by Dorota are brought to trial; one of these

(Elzbieta Cackowa) herself denounces three women, of which one (Agnieszka Kapuscina)

had also been denounced by Dorota. Furthermore, the Chexiny instigator, apparently wishing

to tie up some loose ends, brings in for questioning a further seven women: of these, two had

been previously denounced by Ewa Krucka, two by Dorota Lysakowa, one (the

aforementioned Agnieszka Kapuscina) by Dorota and by Elzbieta Cackowa; the other three

were previously unmentioned by anyone. No verdict is recorded, but Dorota, Elzbieta, and

Katarzyna Kapuscina are all subjected to torture: it seems likely that all three were executed.

D. Possibly motivated by the large number of denunciations emerging from the

previous two trials, the wojewoda of Lublin Jan Tarlo decides to have all the women in the

198
 • Road to the stake •

collection of villages he owns in the area, or at least all those in any way suspected of

witchcraft, be tried at once. However, none of these women had been denounced in the

immediately previous trials. The Ch^ciny court moves to Chelmce, the central village of

p. Tarlo's local properties, and interrogates a total of 19 women. Four of them are tortured,

and a further two taken with the executioner to Ch$ciny for further questioning (there is

however no further record of this questioning). However, quite obviously in deference to the

will of p. Tarlo, most are only questioned freely. In this quite extraordinary trial, which

provides a great deal of material concerning folk-healing and milk-protection practices,

twelve are acquitted, four are given fines in the range of 8-20 grzywne (364-960 grosze); one

is sentenced to thirty lashes; the fate of the two who went to Checiny is unknown, but it

seems unlikely they were executed. Nobody is denounced.

I will refrain from recounting the cycle of trials in Nowy Wisnicz in equal detail, and

refer the reader to Figure 1.4.5.3. However, it provides a similar picture: large numbers

denounced but with very little effect either in terms of the denounced coming to trial, or

being executed. In Checiny, over the course of just two weeks and excluding the trial at

Chelmce, a total of some 54 women were accused or denounced. Of these, 13 are actually

brought to trial, 6 are tortured, and only three are definitely executed (although probably all

six of those tortured were executed). Only 7 women come before the court because of

denunciation, and of these, at least two (but probably four) are sent to the stake. What

appears at first sight to be a true witch-panic, on inspection is nothing of the kind.

Similarly, in Nowy Wisnicz, the initial private accusation of three women (a mother

and her two daughters) results, over the next month, in the denunciation of thirty-three other

women and three additional trials. However, just four of those denounced come to trial, and

199
 • Chapter 1.4 •

just two of them are sent to the stake. Again, denunciation simply does not result, usually or

even often, in domino-trials or large scale witch-hunts.

1.4.6: Verdict and sentence

After torture and the confession it so often elicited, the court pronounced its verdict and

sentence. In these verdicts one finds recorded the official attitude concerning witchcraft—

although it should be kept in mind that the language of court decisions was highly formulaic.

The Pyzdry court cited Exodus 22:17 in its sentence against Chrystyna Jabhiszewska (#166,

Pyzdry 1740). The Slomniki court condemned Dorota Pilecka for having trespassed the First

Commandment, "Thou shalt not have other gods before me"94 (#75, Slomniki 1674; cf. #153,

Nieszawa 1721). The Nowy Wisnicz court decreed of Jadwiga Talarzyna "that since she

opposed God, and wishing to liken herself to Him, dared to fly through the air, and also

caused harm to the property of poor people, therefore she is to be burnt alive at the border"95

(#98, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). However, most courts confined themselves to a list of the

accused witch's crimes, or to noting that she had confessed; or they simply provided the

sentence, with little or no elaboration. Much more often than not, this sentence was death at

the stake.

Of 330 accused witches before town courts,96 173 or about 52.5% were sentenced to

death. However, calculated out of 262 known sentences, the rate of execution is 66%.

94
"Nie b^dziesz mial bogow cudzych przedemna,".
95
"ze sie Bogu sprzeciwiala y chciala Je^nu podobna_bydz, wazyla sie latac po powietrzu, ludziom ubogiejn
szkody w dobytkach czynic, za to tedy naznaczona iest smierc teize Talazyney, aby byla na granicy zywo
spalona."
96
1 have included in this figure #115, Stajszewo 1695, which was tried before a manorial court but shares most
of the features of a town court trial.
97
Probably a slightly smaller number were actually executed; sentencing and actually carrying out of the
punishment are two separate issues. For example, Mikolajczyk's study of sentencing in Malopolska shows a
regular trend of some 2-5% of those sentenced to death not being executed, for one reason or another: this

200
 • Road to the stake •

This is quite high, and would almost certainly be higher if the data were better—in many of

the cases for which I have no sentence, there are good reasons to suppose that the accused

was executed. Nevertheless, it is a far cry from the 90% execution rate assumed by

Baranowski (1952 p. 117); it is however higher than the average of some 47% that Levack

has proposed for Europe as a whole, excluding the Holy Roman Empire (2006 p. 22)." In the

most bloody period of witch-trials that we know of, the Kleczew trials of the last two decades

of the 17th century so carefully analyzed by Wislicz, just 40 of 64 accused were sent to the

stake, yielding an execution rate of 62.5% of all accused, but 83% of known sentences. It is

extremely unlikely that the execution rate across Poland and throughout the witch-trial period

will prove higher than for this brief period of intense witch-hunting in Kleczew, which we

have been treating as our benchmark of the worst and most ruthless trials in Poland. In fact,

looking only at the period 1676-1700, the execution rate out of known sentences before town

courts was nearly identitical to what Wislicz found for the Kleczew region in approximately

the same period: 57 of 69, or 82.6% (see figure 1.4.D). The rate for the period immediately

figure does not include death sentences commuted to some other sentence (1998). The only witch-trial of
which I am aware in which a death sentence was definitely not carried out is that of Regina Sokolkowa (#56,
Lublin 1661). She ran away while her case was being appealed to the Assessory Court, and was sentenced to
death in absentia. It seems likely, as Michalski has persuasively argued, that the death sentences against the
six women in the Doruchow trial were never carried out (#175, Grabow 177?; Michalski 1996).
The calculation of execution rates depends, of course, on how one counts. For example, Wijaczka (2003a
p. 71) notes that only 17 of over 100 accused in the trials he studied in the Swiqtokrzyskie region were sent
to stake—around 15%. But he counts as "accused" everyone who was denounced during trial, whether or
not they were even brought in for questioning. My own calculation, based on the materials provided in
Wijaczka's article, shows a somewhat different picture: between 11 and 18 executed, out of just 43
accused—thus an execution rate of 25-42% (the wide range of estimated numbers executed derives from
four trials (#19, #60, #63, and #66) for which it is not clear whether some or all of the accused were
executed). Moreover, if we exclude the exceptional trial #63, with its large number of accused, we get
between 11 and 16 executed out of just 24 total accused, with an execution rate of 46-66%—a far higher rate
of execution than Wijaczka's method of counting would suggest.
The strong regional variation in the Empire, where most scholars agree that something like half of all
witchcraft prosecutions took place, results in an over-all execution rate of something like 50%, but with
rates as high as 81% in Kiel over 150 years, and as low as 4.5% (3 of 65 accused) in Rothenburg. The
highest reliably calculated execution rate over a reasonably long period of time is for the Pays de Vaud: 90
of 102 witches over a period of 93 years (Levack 2006 pp. 22-23). Of course, execution rates in particular
places over short periods could be very high indeed.

201
 • Chapter 1.4 •

previous is much lower, at 53%, but this has largely to do with the anomolous trial #63, with

its 19 accused witches and lack of execution: without that data the execution rate for 1651-

1675 becomes 72%. The first quartile of the 18th century, although considerably less bloody

in absolute numbers, displays a similar rate of execution at 80.5%.

1501- 1526- 1551- 1576- 1601- 1626- 1651- 1676- 1701- 1726- 1751-
1525 1550 1575 1600 1625 1650 1675 1700 1725 1750 1775

• Executed 0 Other Punishment D None • Unknown

Figure 1.4.D: Judicial execution and other penalties

This rate of execution, shockingly high though it may seem to us, must be compared to

the general rate of execution in early modern Poland, for other crimes. Mikolajczyk's recent

work has shown that these rates varied quite strongly from town to town, but were high

everywhere. The execution rate in Krakow between 1551 to 1634, for all crimes, was 68.4%

(Mikolajczyk 1998 p. 188).101 However, the Krakow court books include many cases of

relatively minor theft or similar minor crimes. In smaller towns, which tended to record

serious crimes in separate record books and which also tended to hear more cases from

100
Figure 1.4. C shows sentences for town, manorial, and other courts, but excludes village trials.

202
 • Road to the stake •

surrounding villages than did the busy Krakow court, execution rates were usually but not

always rather higher: 75.5% inNowy Sa.cz (1579-1684); 90.5% in Zywiec (1581-1625,

1671-1790, where, however, the bulk of trials were against highland bandits) but just 65.3%

in Miechow (1571-1747) (Mikolajczyk 1998 pp. 186-188). In large towns, where execution

rates as a whole were lower, the execution rates for serious crimes could be very high:

Kamler's study of 1,793 known sentences from Lublin, Krakow and Poznan (all from

approximately 1550-1650) reveals that, of male criminals, 91% of bandits, 99% of

murderers, 100% of arsonists, 100% of sodomites, 87% of counterfeiters, 82% of rapists,

74% of church-robbers, and 76% of bigamists were sentenced to death; of female criminals,

100% of arsonists, infanticides, counterfeiters, and bigamists, and 87% of homicides, were

executed (Kamler 1994 and 1995, tables 1-2). These figures, when compared to those for

witchcraft, tend to suggest that it was not always or automatically treated in the same

category of very serious crime as were arson, banditry, or murder.

A capital sentence for witchcraft nearly always meant burning at the stake, in

conformance to the Saxon Law and pan-European norms. Out of 172 known capital

sentences, only 13 involved some other sort of death, and most of these are exceptional in

various ways.104 Some accused witches died in prison from the injuries sustained during

After a cesura in the Krakow records between 1634 and 1678, the sentencing in that city became much
milder: averaged over the whole period 1551-1795, execution in Krakow was around 23%.
Kamler's study excluded witch-trials.
Comparing the execution rates for witchcraft to those for theft, by far the most commonly tried crime in
early modern Poland, shows that witchcraft was treated more seriously than theft but less seriously than
arson or murder. In Kamler's study, of 956 known sentences against men for theft, 47% were executed; just
17% of female thieves were executed—however, this probably reflects the fact that theft by women was, on
the whole, of smaller items and unaccompanied by violence (Kamler 1994 and 1995, Tables 1 and 2).
Defendants whose involvement in witchcraft was marginal (e.g. Katarzyna Poruczniczkowa, #55 Nowy
Wisnicz 1659) or doubtful (e.g. Maryna Bialkowa, Lublin 1664, accused primarily of host-theft) could be
beheaded. Anna Chociszewska, clearly accused of witchcraft, was beheaded in deference to her noble birth
(#8, Poznan 1582). The two men accused of signing their souls to the devil received non-standard sentences:
Andrzej Bochefiski was beheaded; Wojciech Jakubowski, hanged (#155, Poznan 1722; #174, Belzyce
1774).

203
 • Chapter 1.4 •

torture or from the horrible conditions of the prison itself (Katarzyna of Ilowiec, #6 Poznan

1567; anonymous witches in Klodawa (#73,1673) and Kleczew (#112,1693); still others

took their own lives to avoid further torture or the stake (e.g. Zofia Straszybotha, #48 Lodz

1652; the second anonymous Klodawa witch (#73, 1673)).105 Of those burnt at the stake, a

few also had their punishment exacerbated, if that is possible, by additional tortures: in

Rzeszow, Zofia Janowska's hand was cut off and nailed to the city gates, for having touched

the body of Christ; her accomplice Katarzyna Wroblowa who had encouraged the host theft

had her hands burnt with sulphur (#148, Rzeszow 1718; cf. #40, #123, #139).

All other executed witches died by burning at the stake. Court records go into no detail

about this punishment, and the best efforts of later scholars (e.g. Wawrzyniecki 1926b) are

based on speculation or on the fictionalized description of the Doruchow trial. Nevertheless,

it is clear that burning at the stake had a more ritual function even than is usual of early

modern punishments. The stake was reserved for certain types of crime: according to

Groicki, sorcerers, poisoners, and apostates deserved the stake (Groicki 1559a; 1953 p. 199);

in practice the punishment was extended as well to "sodomites," counterfeiters, church-

robbers, and arsonists (Kamler 1994 p. 27). With the exception of arson, which is clearly a

case of the punishment fitting the crime, what unites these crimes is the concept of treachery

or treason. Sodomites, according to conceptions of the time, betrayed the natural law;

counterfitters committed treachery against the very idea of a law-governed state; apostates

and church-robbers betrayed the one true faith. This was also true of witches, but their

association with poisoners reveals a different understanding: like poisoners, and unlike

murderers or bandits, witches killed in secret and by stealth; they killed dis-honorably,

105
Cf. #80, Lublin 1678: Anna Swedycka, asked why she had dug a ditch in her prison cell, responded "I dug
the ditch so that I could be buried alive in shit, I dug it so that I would die [dul dlatego wykopala zebym sie_

204
 • Road to the stake •

denying their victims even the right to a fair fight. Death at the stake was the worst and most

shaming of capital sentences; it promised a foretaste of hell and seemed to imply, since the

body was utterly destroyed and the ashes scattered, that the victim would not take part in the

general resurrection of the flesh. Burning at the stake was usually specified to take place "na

granice"—at the border of the village or town, and so also symbolized a total eviction of the

evil-doer from the body-politic.

Where we find lesser punishments than death at the stake, this is often not because the

court gave a lighter sentence, but because of intercession on the part of the accused by noble

parties, lay or clerical. Often these are the owners of the town or village of the court, or the

feudal masters of the accused. Mikolajczyk hints that courts may have not infrequently levied

harsh punishments in full expectation that such an intercession would take place—especially

in small towns (1998 p. 175; see also Kamler 1994 pp. 37-38). However, such intercessions

were rare in witchcraft trials. The case of Zofia Philipowicowa provides an excellent, but

exceptional, example of such an intercession: after damning evidence from numerous

witnesses, and indeed from her own confession, several clerical and lay dignitaries interceded

on her behalf—including, finally, her feudal lord, who was also the plaintiff: she was not

brought to torture, but was sentenced to whipping and exile (#37, Skrzynno 1639; see full

text in Appendix A). Often, however, such lightened sentences were still executions; the

difference being that a shaming death such as hanging or drowning is reduced to decapitation

(Kamler 1994 p. 26). In witch-trials, the pain and shame of burning at the stake could be

reduced by previous decapitation (see e.g. #55, Nowy Wisnicz 1659; #173, Tylicz 1763;

#174, Belzyce 1774).

byla zywcem zakopala w gnoy, dlategom siQ zakopala zebym zginela]."

205
 • Chapter 1.4 •

Others seem to be beheaded before burning because of their cooperation with the court

(e.g. Jadwiga Macowa jr. (#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688)) or because they played only a small

role in the crime (e.g. the go-between Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna (#148, Rzeszow 1718).

But the courts were capable of quite nuanced justification of a lesser punishment. Regina

Frakowa, who had confessed to malefice against people and animals, milk theft, malefice

against crops, and night flight to the sabbat, was provided the mercy of decapitation before

her body was burnt at the stake. The court judged her to have worshipped the devil, without

however having rejected God. Having failed to love God with all her heart, and to love her

neighbor as herself, Regina nevertheless "had not entirely abandoned the true God, but had

begun to invoke other gods at the border, where she sinned"106 (#127, Slomniki 1700).

Of non-capital sentences, the most frequent were whipping, usually public; banishment

from the town or village; or, most usually, both of these together. Collectively, such

sentences account for 22 of 267 known sentences (excluding village trials)—or just over 8%.

The number of lashes is very rarely mentioned, although one girl appears to have received, or

at least been sentenced to receive, 200 lashes by the Wyszogrod court (#138, 1703);107 and

Malgorzata Magierska was condemned to 150 lashes in Nowy Wisnicz (#137, 1703)—very

considerably more than the 10 to 60 lashes Kamler considers to have been usual (1994 p. 27).

However, we may assume the numbers to have been mentioned at all precisely because they

were exceptional; most witches condemned to the lash presumably received something like

30 lashes, as did Regina Kociczana (#63, Chexiny 1665). In keeping with early modern

notions, shared by court and criminal alike, that the shame of public censure equalled or

106
"ieszcze nie we wszystkim znala sie_ odstapic od prawdiwego Boga, ale iuz inszych bogow poczynala
wzywac na granicy, gdzie grzeszyla"
7
It is not clear to me whether the girl sentenced to this whipping is the same as one Anna, aged ten, whose
crime had been the creation of magical multi-colored mice from pear-leaves.

206
 • Road to the stake •

exceeded mere physical pain, the punishment of public whipping could be ameliorated by

being administered in private, in the torture chamber, by the court bailif or wozny (Kamler

1994 p. 27): this is probably how we should understand the "chastisement" to which Zofia

Baranowa was sentenced in Lublin (#39, 1643).

Similarly, banishment could involve the mere decree that the accused must leave the

town and its environs on pain of death, or it could have a shaming, ritual character

(Laszkiewicz 1989 p. 141). Such a humiliating "wyswiecenie," in which the convict was

paraded out of the town in a torchlit procession, was the most severe punishment a village

court could meted out. Haur recommends it, as an alternative to the death penalty, for

infanticides (1693 p. 238), and we find it applied, also as an alternative or lightening of the

death penalty, in a very few witch-trials (e.g. #37, Skrynno 1639). Something of the force of

this shaming punishment may be garnered from an insult recorded in the account of a public

disturbance in Lublin in the 1650s: "Shit-head, banished woman, they banished you from the

city, whore, ass-wiggler, you were paraded from Krakow by torchlight, and you'll soon be

kicked out of Lublin in the same way"108 (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 107 f. 445; cf. a similar

insult from the 1730s, sig. 49 f. 338). Laszkiewicz suggests that banished criminals often

returned undetected to larger towns (1989 p. 142), but this could only have been true of

thieves or prostitutes enjoying a network of support in the criminal underworld; convicted

witches would not likely be welcomed back by anyone. The future of a woman so banished

must have been bleak indeed; with her reputation ruined, a stranger wherever she went, her

options would in effect be restricted to prostitution or begging.

• •$• •

108
"Gnojek, wygnanka, ciebie wygnaniono z miasta, murwa, kolywaszka, z Krakowa wyswiecano i z Lublina
niedhigo ci$ wyswieca.."

207
 • Chapter 1.4 •

The distinction between verdict and sentence, never very clear in the practice of Polish

town courts, becomes even more blurry when we examine acquittal. For the court to set an

accused witch free did not necessarily imply that it had found her innocent of the charges.

Mikolajczyk distinguishes between acquittal proper and the much more frequently

encountered dismissal from the court or disinclination to levy a punishment: this was done in

cases of mitigating circumstances, the good reputation of the accused, the willingness of third

parties to stand warrant, or with the proviso that the accused provide an oath that they will

not commit the crime again (1998 pp. 170-171). There are few clear examples of a full

acquittal in the records of Polish witch-trials. Even in the case of Regina Lewczykowa, under

the watchful eye of her manor-lord the Crown Referendary Stanislaw Szczuka, and despite

its declared intention to definitively establish either Regina's guilt or her innocence, the

Lublin court eventually confined itself to considering her oath before the crucifix to be

sufficient—almost but not quite a verdict of acquittal (#118, Lublin 1698). The same court,

despite officially finding Katarzyna Hutkowa and Anna Woytaszkowa innocent of magical

manipulation of the Eucharist, required them to witness the beheading of their co-accused,

Maryna Bialkowa (#59, Lublin 1664). In similar vein, the village court of Klimkowka

dismissed the accusations against one Pawliczka for lack of evidence, but nevertheless

sentenced her to twelve lashes as a warning (#89, Klimkowka 1682).

Dismissal thus did not imply exoneration, but rather the inability of the court to find

sufficient evidence for a verdict. It certainly did not imply that the court had acted wrongly in

any way. A woman brought before the court through denunciation but later acquitted was not

fully cleared of wrongdoing: Anna Mizerka, though dismissed to go free when her denouncer

withdrew her denunciation, was told by the court told to thank God for any pain she suffered

208
 • Road to the stake •

under torture "as she provided occasion for it, through her superstition-working"10 (#93,

Tuliszkow 1684). Dismissed or acquitted witches did not cease to be suspect, and the fact of

previous involvement in witch-trials could be used against them at a later time.

Although, once brought to trial, an accused witch could never fully remove the

suspicions against her, she could mitigate them to a very large degree by making an oath of

innocence or expurgation. Oaths of innocence had featured prominently in the witch-trials

before episcopal courts of the 15th and early 16th centuries (Koranyi 1927a pp. 21-22, 24;

Ulanowski ed. 1902 par. 1574), and were standard in village-court trials right into the 18th

century. Though much rarer in the capital cases before town courts, they were often

prerequisite to dismissal from those courts: at least 17, and probably more, of the 45 accused

witches dismissed or acquitted in town trials, were required to make an oath of innocence.

Oaths were even more common in village trials, featuring in six of fourteen village trials.

Such an oath served several functions simultaneously. Where, as was often the case, the

accused had to find a number of respectable witnesses to swear her innocence, these both

stood warranty for her and demonstrated that some of the community thought her innocent:

any further quarrel with the accused would thus be a quarrel, as well, with important male

community members. Thus, for example, Barbara Drozdakiewiczowa cleared her name by

finding six witnesses to swear that "she is unable to harm anyone: their health, their children,

their profit, or anything else"110 (#141 Plonsk 1708). Regina Smalcowa was freed on oath

from the charge of witchcraft, but was to be kept in prison until she could find four men to

swear with her (#99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). Warranty of this kind, where it could be

"cokolwiek na torturach ucierpiala na za to Panu Bogu podzi^kowac, gdyz sobie okazyia_byla dla swoich
guslow"
"niemoze szkodzic nikomu na zdrowiu na dziatkach na dobytku na innych rzeczach. "

209
 • Chapter 1.4 •

achieved, demonstrated that the community accepted the innocence of the accused, and that

she could be reintegrated into society.

Secondly, the oath of innocence restored right relations between the accuser and the

accused or between the alleged witch and her supposed victim, assuring that the former

would not perform any more malefice against the latter, and that he in turn would seek no

further redress from her. In this context, in fact, town courts came to resemble village courts,

with their emphasis on restorative justice and the continuing good working of society. As in

village trials, the court sometimes required the accuser to listen to the oath publicly, and thus,

in effect, to publicly accept the alleged witch's declaration of innocence; accuser and accused

were then required to live thereafter in amity. The Belzyce court required Valentia

Zgielczyna to stand "voluntarily [dobrowolnie]" and listen to the public oath of

Stanislawowa Mistalowa, whom Valentia had accused of magically spoiling her relations

with her husband. Mistalowa, standing at the church door after Sunday Mass, swore "that she

had done nothing evil, nor arranged anything to harm Zgielczyna or her husband, such that

they had poor relations with each other and everything goes wrong, nor did she send any

such witchcraft"111 (#15, Belzyce 1598). In its decision concerning the appeal of the case

between Regina Hancowna and Stanislaw Bogdanowic of Sambor, the Krakow high court

required Regina to swear before the image of the Crucified Christ that she "had never used

any witchcraft, nor through witchcraft harmed the present plaintiff or his wife, their health or

their property;" both sides were thereafter to leave their quarrel in "perpetual silence"

(#35, Sambor 1638). Such a public avowal of innocence, proclaimed in church or before a

111
"yak zadney rzeczy nie uczynila zley ani przyprawila takowey, ktoraby rzecz miala skodzicz teyze
Zgielczyney y mezowi yey, ze mieszkania nimas miedzy nimi y snadz sie wsytko zle dzyeye, ani takowych
nie slala."

210
 • Road to the stake •

crucifix, and accepted as legitimate by the court, had the character of a performative

utterance: by the properly constituted declaration of innocence, the accused became innocent,

legally and socially. The accuser, in publicly hearing and accepting the oath, bound himself

to accepting its contents; in a manner analogous to the social miracle of the Mass, by which

enemies exchanged the pax and bound themselves to mutual forgiveness, an accuser and the

accused committed themselves to amnesty. All quarrels and conflicts were publicly dis-

avowed, and could never again be publicly acknowledged under penalty of fine. After Polaga

Karlowa swore "that she had done no harm to anyone, and will do no harm in the future, "

the Klimkowka court declared "let nobody cast doubt upon [her innocence], under penalty of

a fine often grzywny to the manor" (#32, Klimkowka 1636). In village trials especially,

the legal oath of innocence fulfilled the social function, so important to village communities

the world over, of resolving conflict and restoring neighbours to neighborliness.

A strong savour of the medieval ordeal remains in the expurgatory oaths of the witch-

trials. We have already seen how seriously people could treat the act of swearing (1.4.1):

oaths of expurgation were not taken lightly, nor demanded frivolously. Some sense that such

oaths were understood as an imposition can be gleaned, for example, from the Krakow

court's appellate reversal of the of the Pilica court's verdict against several alleged witches:

they were to be set free, without even an oath required of them (#43, Pilica 1645). Similarly,

Andreyowa Orlowa's accuser freed her from the oath of expurgation imposed by the Belzyce

court, and they voluntarily exchanged assurances of reconciliation (#14, Bejiyce 1598). In a

later Belzyce trial for love-magic and adultery, the wayward wife Katarzyna Stanislawowa

112
"teraznieyszemu actorowi i zenie iego na zdrowiu y dobrach czarami nieszkodzila y zadnych czarow nigdy
nie zazywala"a
113
"jako ona nikomu zle nie czynila ani na potym czynic i szkodzic bqdzie." "Ktorej zaden wymawiac nie ma
pod winq. panska. grzywien dziesiqc"

211
 • Chapter 1.4 •

was subjected to a sort of oracle. The Belzyce magistrates allowed her to return to her

husband's household after swearing to live in harmony with him, but she also had to prove

the harmlessness of the "enchantments" she had used:

[T]ego doswiadczayacz thy gusla dane sza psza, [A]s proof these enchantments were given to a dog, and
ktore jeslis mu gusla beda skodliwe y to sie pokaze, if it is shown that they are harmful or if any harm befalls
czi s rekoymie opisani tes furmanke Katharzyne that beast, Katharzyna the carter's wife and those who
maya do kazni ossadzicz y na nie instigowacz y are written as her guarantors are to be imprisoned in the
gardlem ya skaracz, skoro yedno w tey bestiey ta sie dungeon, and she is to be investigated and punished with
skoda stanie, a thy rzeczy oddane sza pszy przy death; and those things were given to the dog in the
czleku przysieglym piszasrskim Marczinie dla presence of the sworn notary Marczin for better
lepsey wiary w tym (#16, Belzyce 1600). assurance in this affair.114

In the model trial of Regina Lewczykowa, after hearing testimony from several witnesses,

the Lublin court resolved the case through what amounted to judicial ordeal. The court turned

the issue into one of perjury: had Regina lied, in her previous testimony, when she denied

doing witchcraft? "The accused said that neither she herself, nor some other person

subordinate to her is guilty of sending an evil spirit against Woiciech Kozielek, and that she

does not know how to do any witchcraft"—which satisfied the court. "May this case now be

helped by God and by the Passion of Jesus Christ. [...] Because the testimony in question

was given by the accused Lewczykowa with her husband in front of the judge, and taken

down by the noble Wirzbicki, minister of the court, this testimony will prevail in the present

case" (#118, Lublin 1698; see also Appendix A). Because the oath was made properly,

before duly appointed court witnesses as well as before God, it would "prevail," be

considered decisive and sufficient.

However, it was recognized that oaths of expurgation could be false, or could be

falsified by future actions. Although the accuser and the community were bound, by a

suspected witch's oath, to forget their suspicions and return to civil relations with her, all the

212
 • Road to the stake •

more so was the suspected witch bound to cease practicing witchcraft. Many oaths of

expurgation emphasized futurity: the accused witch denied previous malefice, but more

importantly, promised to practice no malefice in the future. Paradoxically then, oaths of

expurgation cleansed the accused of suspicion and imposed amnesty, but also set the

conditions for future suspicion. A woman who committed witchcraft after having sworn

denial proved herself utterly without honour or fear of God, indeed she proved herself to be a

witch. In Belzyce, which as we have seen made extensive use of expurgatory oaths in the

cluster of witch-trials at the turn of the 17th century, this was made explicit:

[T]akowy abo takowa, ktora jus w tym podeyrzana [S]uch a man or woman who has already been
byta a tego sie odprzysiegala, a potym, w tym suspected [of witchcraft] and has made an oath of
przeswiatczona by byla, abo sie czo okazato, takowy denial, and is later convicted, or some [evidence]
kazdy ma bydz spalon, gdy sie swiadectwo shisne arises, such a one is to be burnt, if the evidence is
okane. sound.
(Decree following #15, Belzyce 1598b; Klarner 1902 p. 468).

Similarly, should Regina Smalcowa's oath prove false, she "will be immediately

imprisoned and punished with death, without any respect"115 (#99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688).

Zofia Filipowicowa, who confessed to love-magic but whose death-sentence was transmuted

to banishment, was made to swear to make no further attempts at malefice against her former

manor-lord: "And if I ever give voice to any word of threat, or if some harm should befall

them, then I am without any mercy whatsoever to be punished by death, so help me Lord

God and his Holy Passion"116 (#37, Skrzynno 1639; and see Appendix A). Oaths of

expurgation thus pre-emptively cleared the court of any procedural wrong-doing; should the

accused prove recidivist, they could be punished immediately and without legal niceties.

Moreover, the ritual power of oaths should not be discounted; a woman who swore before the

114
Compare a similar situation, though not a formal oath or ordeal, in #54, Bydgoszcz 1658. A suspected witch
threw some bread out of her prison window; a dog ate the bread and died. This was taken as strong evidence
of the suspect's guilt.
115
"tedy zaraz bqndzie do wie_zie_nia y na garle karana bez zadnego respektu. "

213
 • Chapter 1.4 •

cruxifix to perform no more witchcraft might well have understood her life and afterlife to

depend on faithfulness to this promise.117

Insofar as they were successful (that is, accepted by the court, by the accused witch, and

by her community) oaths of expurgation ritually restored the accused to her status quo ante

from before initial suspicion; she was re-defined as an ordinary village woman. The road to

the stake, in these few instances at least, turned about on itself and returned to its starting

point.

116
"co iesliby kiedy slowem iakiem sie ozwala, przegrazaia_c, abo uczynkiem na nie sie pokazalo, tedy bez
wszelakiego milosierdzia mam bydz na gardle karana tak mi Panie Boze pomz y swiqta meka_ lego. "
117
On the magical power of oaths to end threat of witchcraft in a very different cultural context, see Parkins
1985.

214
Chapter 1.5: Mechanisms of justice.
Our tour of the road from suspicion to the stake has demonstrated that this road was not

always short or straight. A suspected witch was not always accused; an accused witch not

always brought to trial; a defendant in a trial for witchcraft not always tortured. Nor did the

tortured always confess, nor were those who confessed always convicted; finally, sentences

were sometimes lessened or mitigated or simply not carried out. None of these many

exceptions should detract from our understanding of what was nevertheless the rule—after a

trial for witchcraft was successfully initiated, it did much more often than not end in death at

the stake for the accused witch. However, these exceptions or side-roads do complicate that

rule to a very considerable degree, and they require from us an appreciation for the

particularities of individual trials. It remains to briefly set out some general conclusions. In

the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the following question: to what degree, and in

what ways, did social and jurisprudential factors ameliorate or exacerbate the numbers of

witch-trials in Poland? What factors tended to limit witch-trials, and what factors tended to

increase them?

1.5.1: Accusatory jurisprudence.

Baranowski has suggested that the accusatory, private model of Polish Saxon law would have

strongly limited the number of trials in Poland (1952 p. 84). Mindful that they could

themselves be punished should the court find the accusations groundless, victims of

witchcraft would refrain from bringing accusations to court unless they were convinced of

the justice of their case. Norman Cohn has made a similar argument, suggesting that the

215
 • Chapter 1.5 •

Medieval lex talionis effectively ruled out witch-trials, which do not appear until this system

was replaced with the inquisitorial model (2000 [1975] pp. 215-217).

Both Cohn and Baranowski overstate the case. In Poland (as in Scotland or France) the

inquisitorial model of jurisprudence never fully replaced older accusatory procedure: most

trials were initiated by a private accuser, and this did set important limits on the spread of

trials. However, fear of reprisal or court fines could not have been a very important limiting

factor, although it may have prevented frivolous cases. With the exception of village trials,

with their emphasis on restorative justice and on the reparation of good neighborly relations,

such punishments levied at wrongful accusers are extremely rare. Some town cases at the

hazy border between witch-trial and defamation suit could result in a fine levied against the

accuser (e.g. #35, Sambor 1638). More rarely still, a case deemed frivolous by the court

could result in sanctions against the accuser. For having accused Anna Mizerka on the flimsy

basis of another witch's denunciation, the Tuliszkow court sentenced Stanislaw Tyczka to

pay five grzywny to the parish church, five to the manor, and to lie cruciform at the foot of

the crucifix during six Sunday masses (#93, Tuliszkow 1684b).1 However, by the 17th

century, town law had moved so far in the direction of the inquisitorial model that, although

it never quite instantiated that model in a pure form, the role and responsibility of the original

plaintiff was everywhere substantially reduced. Right through to the end of the witch-trial

period, town law remained "private" at least in the important sense that lawcases had to be

initiated by a plaintiff; only very rarely, as in some of the later trials in the Nowy Wisnicz

1
Cf. the late, interesting case of Sobestyan Zimny, of Kryzanowice near Pificzow, in 1772. When his brother
Blazej fell ill, Sobestyan hired travelling "Machiawelowie"—apparently charlatans who included witch-
finding among their abilities—to falsely accuse Marjanna Wozniakowa of witchcraft. She and her mother
cleared their names through an oath of innocence before the gromada; Sobestyan was sentenced to church
penance, public apology at the church door, and a fee of beeswax candles (Siarkowski 2000 [1879] pp. 93-
94; after Archiwum Diecezjalne w Kielcach sig. IIPK-XV/2, Akta wojtowskie Krzyzanowic 1528-1772 f.
454-454V).

216
 • Mechanisms of justice •

cycle of 1688-1689, do we find the court instigator accusing witches at his own initiative. As

we have seen, this plaintiff-driven model of jurisprudence will have severely limited the

number of trials; in particular, it meant that village witches had to attract the suspicion of

their manor-lord or his representative before peasant accusations against them could receive

an airing in town-courts. However, as Uruszczak has suggested, Polish Saxon-law

jurisprudence had become "mixed" to the extent that, once the trial commenced, the

instigator or the magistrate largely took over responsibility for the investigation of the crime.

With the exception of model trials such as that of Regina Lewczykowa (#118, Lublin 1698),

plaintiffs had little role to play after his or her initiating propositio or accusation. Their

responsibility should the accused be found innocent was reduced correspondingly. Town

courts would in any event not be very eager, or able, to levy punishment against the szlachta

accusers of witches who had come under the court's jurisdiction only by the sufferance of

those very accusers; the same is true, if to a lesser extent, for peasant accusers who had the

support and patronage of their manor-lord. A general distrust of the courts, as well as

structural inaccessibility to them, must have limited accusations from peasants and the

poorest of townsfolk, but the nobility and upstanding townsfolk who usually brought

accusations against witches do not seem to have feared penalties in case their accusations

proved unjustified.

1.5.2: Expense

Bringing in a trained and licensed executioner (without whom there could be no legal judicial

torture, let alone the execution that so often followed) cost a great deal. Maria Bogucka has

suggested that consideration of this expense might have acted to discourage witch-trials in

villages and in small towns, which usually did not maintain their own executioner (Bogucka

217
 • Chapter 1.5 •

1995 p. 178). Although small towns often made arrangements to borrow the executioner

from larger municipalities when needed, they had to pay the costs of travel (Zaremska 1986

pp. 24, 29-30; see e.g. #92 and #93, Tuliszkow 1684). Other small or medium-sized towns

with torturers of their own became centres to which neighboring towns were in the habit of

sending their capital cases, including witchcraft cases. The court of Nowy Wisnicz heard

cases from the towns of Bochnia, Lipka, and Wojnicz, as well as the surrounding villages

(Uruszczak ed. 2003), while at least part of the explanation for the large number of witch-

trials in Kleczew has to do with the tendency of neighboring towns such as Kazimierz,

Slesin, and Wilczyn to send their witchcraft cases to the Kleczew court (Wislicz 2004b

p. 68). But in such cases as well, the refering town would be expected to bear the costs.

Village and manor courts, of course, could not hear capital cases at all, and had to either send

the accused to a town, paying for the trial and also for the accused's upkeep in prison, or

bring the executioner and representatives of the court to their own village. Both options cost,

and again this may have provided a motivation for village or small-town courts to content

themselves with the lesser punishments available to them without torture or an executioner—

notably whipping and banishment.

Jakub Kazimierz Haur, for example, insists that manor-lords should bring serious

criminals to town courts, where their crimes can be punished properly. For Haur such

criminals include murderers, arsonists, bandits, thieves on a large scale, practitioners of

incest, "blatant adulterers," church robbers, counterfeiters, "harmful and evident Witches,"2

kidnappers, and "godless women who do away with their babies" (Haur 1693 p. 225).

However, although such people should in principle be executed "as an example for others,"

218
 • Mechanisms of justice •

Haur acknowledged that this route is not always in keeping either with the Christian virtue of

mercy or with the lord's interests in keeping costs down. Women guilty of infanticide, in

particular, ought to be treated with mercy, and therefore only whipped out of the village by

the entire gromada, and banished for life. Adulterers may be handed over to town courts, if

the dziedzic wishes "to pay for the Law," but whoever "does not thirst for blood"3 ought to

administer a milder punishment at the manor or village court level (Haur 1693 pp. 237-238).

We have some fragmentary evidence that Haur's normative suggestions reflect actual

practice. A small-town court in Rus sentenced a young infanticide to whipping and

banishment, despite the town administrator's wish for a harsher sentence. As he explained in

a letter to the town's owner, "the townspeople here absolutely did not want to send for the

executioner, or to pay for him"4 (Grochowska 1989 p. 72). Similarly, in Nowy Wisnicz the

court chose not to execute a young townswoman accused of malefice and magical healing:

Ta zas Malgorzata obwiniona lub na takie wielkie Considering the great evidence and testimony [against
documenta i swiadectwa zashizyla to aby byla karana her], the accused Malgorzata deserves the punishment
wedhig swych uczynkow iednak sa_d ma respekt na jej to fit her deeds. However the court has respect for her
rodzicielke. i krewnych oraz y koszt mieiski, gdyzby mother and kin, and for the cost to the town, as an
zaraz trzeba bylo po executora na niq poslac, saji executioner would have to be sent for, [therefore] the
ieszcze iey przedhiza w tey sprawie, jednak powinna court puts off [such punisment] in this case; however
zasiesc w wie_zenie za krate. do piatku a potym w she should sit in prison behind bars until Friday, and
pia^tek powinna otrzymac purtorasta plag w ratuszu then should receive 150 strokes of the lash in the
rozgami, a na potym gdyby miala ludziom na zdrowiu town-hall. And if later she is found to harm people's
szkodzic [...] iuz nie plagami, ale tak iako tych karz% health [...] she will be punished not by the lash, but as
ktore ludzi czaruiaj ognie_m bqdzie karana (#137, those who do witchcraft are punished, by fire.
Nowy Wisnicz 1703).

In this case, concern for the cost of execution forms just one of a complex group of

motivations, including the reputation of the girl's mother and consideration of her age. It

does not seem likely that cost considerations would usually have formed a significant factor

2
"Cudzoloznik nieskryty;" "Czarownica szkodza^ca i dowodna." The latter phrase alludes to Groicki's
insistence, following the Carolina, that only witches guilty of actual malefice should be brought to torture
(1559b art. 14; 1954 p. 117).
3
"Biala glowa bezbozna ktoraby dziecie, stracila;" "dla przykladu innych;" "na Praw koszt lozyc;" "kto krwi nie
pragnie."
4
"mieszczanie tutejsi zadnq. miara^ po kata posylac i na niego lozyc nie chcieli"

219
 • Chapter 1.5 •

in town trials once these were underway; however, in village cases, such considerations must

have played an important and negative role in the decision to bring a case to town at all.

1.5.3: Judicial dependence

However, if considerations of cost probably reduced the total number of capital witch-trials

in Poland, by the same token such considerations will have tended to increase the execution

rate for those cases which were brought to trial. Small towns, having paid to bring an

executioner, will have expected him to produce results.5 This is even more the case for the

common scenario of noblemen paying both the executioner and the wojt and jurymen from a

nearby town to come to his village, stay as his guests, and try a women he had accused, or

who had been accused by one of his serfs with his permission. Moreover, noblemen could, to

a certain extent, choose which town court they prefered to hear their case, and would

presumably attempt to bring in a magistrate and executioner whom they could count on to

provide the prefered verdict (Baranowski 1952 p. 78).6 Such pre-selection of a compliant

court, together with the magistrate's strong tendency, in a society structured by networks of

patronage, to favor the manor-lord's side, had predictable effects on the course of justice.

Figure 1.5.1 contrasts those town trials that took place in the town court-house itself,

with those trials which were thus "deputed"—that is, wherein at the request and expense of a

local nobleman, the court sent a few members, together with the executioner, to the village

owned by that nobleman. The Assesory Court ordinance of 1673, and the belated decree of

5
The executioner himself may also have been motivated to produce confessions: the Chehnno financial records
indicate that he was paid extra, in that town, for such services as building the stakes (#34, Chefano 1638;
Biskup 1961 pp. 149-151, after Arch Tor. syg. 322, nos. 502, 506, 522).
6
This may have been the case in Kiszkowo in 1761 (#172), where, according to Dydek, the noble brothers
Szeliscy tried to get their case tried first in Gniezno, then in nearby Pobiedziski, before finally finding the
justice they sought in Kiszkowo. Since, however, Dydek bases this claim only on "local tradition," it cannot
be taken too seriously (1858 p. 103).

220
 • Mechanisms of justice •

1768 forbidding deputation to villages, were largely aimed against this system, for obvious

reasons: a nobleman who paid for a local small town

court to come to his property expected, and often got, the

Figure 1.5.A: Deputation
128
verdicts and sentences he was looking for (see also

1.2.2).

Of the 112 town trials for which my data permits

analysis, 39, or a little more than a third, were deputed to Trials Defendants Death

I Deputed • Not Deputed H Unknown

villages. But the deputed trials account for 106 (45%) of

the defendants, and 74 (55%) of the executions. On the other hand, they account for only 7

(26%) of the acquittals. Deputed trials averaged 2.9 defendants and 1.9 executions per trial,

whereas non-deputed trials averaged 1.7 defendants and just 0.8 executions: in other words,

deputed courts sent on average twice as many accused witches to the stake per trial. We may

also express this trend in terms of the percentage of accused witches executed: deputed courts

executed accused witches at a rate of 83%, compared to 68.5% for non-deputed courts (See

Figure 1.5.A).7

Wislicz describes a particularly egregious example of the abuses to which deputation

could lead. In 1691 the noble brothers Pawel and Martin Zbierzchowski invited the wqjt and

jurymen of the notorious Kleczew court to their village of Szyszynko, to try Jadwiga

Wieczorkowa and another woman who had bewitched the accusers' mother. After the initial

interrogation, the court dismissed the case for want of evidence. However, the Zbierzchowski

brothers "demanded from the court that [the accused] be put to torture, taking all

This figure, like many others in this and previous chapters, excludes the data from trial #63, Che_ciny 1665.
This trial is so large and so exceptional that its data would significantly skew the results.

221
 • Chapter 1.5 •

responsibility for the sentence on Jadwiga Wieczorkowa. " Although Jadwiga confessed to

nothing during torture, the court decreed that "the above-mentioned gentlemen takes all

responsibility for your [Wieczorkowa's] fate before Our Lord Crucified and relieves the

court of any responsibility. Thus such a sentence is passed on you, that you be burnt with

fire. " 9 Wislicz rightly insists that this trial amounted to a thinly disguised legitimation of

murder (Wislicz 2004a p. 51; 2004b p. 82).

Similarly, small-town courts enjoyed far less independence from their noble neighbours

than did the courts of larger towns: indeed, many smaller towns were the private property of

the szlachta.10 The distinction between private and royal towns is less than one might

suppose: the starosta who held the lease over small royal towns could treat them very nearly

as his own property. In either case, local nobility could bring strong pressure to bear on

small-town court magistrates; insofar as such local nobles were also the accusing parties in

witch-trials, the magistrates would be inclined to find the accused guilty. Despite the dejure

independence of the magistracy, which allowed, for example, the court of tiny Kroscienko to

refuse to proceed against a townswoman accused of witchcraft brought by the starosta of

Czorsztyn (#25, Kroscienko 1622), smaller town courts often acceded to local wishes. Small

and medium-sized towns account for 45% of the witch-trials known to me, but 61% of

executions; although smaller and larger towns tried comparable average numbers of accused

"za_dali od urze_du, aby [oskarzone] mogly bye na mejri zdane, osobliwie Jadwige, Wieczorkowa^ na sumnienie
swoje biora^c"
9
Tedy ichmoscie wyzy pomienieni biora^ cie_ na sumnienie swoje przed figure Mejsi Panskiej i sa_d owd
wszystkiego uwalnia. Tedy dekret takowy jest na cie_ wydany, abys byla ogniem spalono."
10
Small and medium towns accounted for some 88% of all towns in Poland in the 16th-18th centuries; some
two thirds of towns in the same period were private (Bogucka and Samsonowicz 1986 p. 400; see also
Bogucka 1982). The two categories overlap to a considerable degree, although there were both small royal
towns and quite large private towns (for example, Rzeszow, property of the magnatial Lubomirski family).
After the drastic decline of many larger towns during the mid-17th century catastrophe, many once-
important regional centres were reduced to the size of the smallest towns. However, it seems that towns such
as Che_ciny or Bochnia retained something of their erstwhile autonomy, as compared to towns which had

222
 • Mechanisms of justice •

per trial (2.17 vs. 1.94), the average number sent to the stake per trial was nearly twice as

high in the smaller towns (1.46 vs. 0.75). The execution rate of smaller towns was 74.5%, as

compared to 53.6% for larger towns.11

Taken together, the data presented above suggests a similar situation, in Poland, to the

pattern recently outlined by Brian Levack and Stuart Macdonald for the witch-trials in

Scotland (Levack 2002; Macdonald 2002a, 2003). In contrast to Christina Larner's

influential interpretation of witch-trials as a tool of the centralizing state (Lamer 1981),

recent work has made plain that most Scottish trials were run by local elites. Whereas the

execution rate in the centrally managed trials was something like 50%, it ran as high as 95%

in the more common locally run trials (Levack 2002 p. 217). The nominal independence of

town magistrates and jurymen, and their rights under Saxon law, made the Polish courts

importantly different from the Scottish commissions of justiciary; nevertheless the influence

of local elites on these courts was considerable. We see this clearly, for example, in the

totally different character and outcome of trial #63 to the other trials in Chexiny in the same

year: the sudden focus on superstition rather than malefice, and sentences of small fines

rather than the stake, cannot be explained by a sudden change of heart among the Che_ciny

always been small and dependent. (See Appendix E for a list of the towns in the database, categorized by
size before 1650, ownership status, and region).
11
In this paragraph, I compare the data of what I have called small and medium towns, against that of what I
have called regional and principal cities. The differences are less dramatic, but still significant, if one
removes the anomolous very large (principal) towns from the equation: an execution rate of 60% for
regional centres, compared to 74.5% for small and medium towns. It should be kept in mind, however, that I
have more records for regional centres (66 trials and 140 defendants) than for any other category of town.
This may indicate that such towns tried more witches; it may also be an artifact of the data, as the records of
such towns tend to be both better kept and better studied. Mikolajczyk's very thorough statistical analyses of
verdicts and sentences in selected southern-Polish cities make clear that small-town courts relied more
heavily on the death penalty than did larger courts, long into the 18th century. However, he is not sure that
this is true for the 16th or early 17th centuries. Although the statistics show higher execution rates in small
towns during the earlier period as well, the figures are somewhat artifactual: in the earlier period small-town
courts tended only to record the trials for more serious crimes—that is, the crimes for which the death
penalty was reserved. Moreover, in some of the courts Mikolajczyk analyzes, such as Zywiec and Nowy

223
 • Chapter 1.5 •

magistrates; rather, they responded to the wishes of the powerful nobleman Jan Tarlo, whose

serfs the accused were (see trials #60-63, Ch^ciny 1665, Figure 1.4.B, and 1.4.5 more

generally). Despite exceptions and qualifications, the szlachta could and did use local small

town courts, especially deputed courts, as instruments of their own village administration.

1.5.4: Conflicting jurisdictions

Most of those tried before small-town courts (and all cases before deputed courts) were

enserfed peasants. Because the szlachta maintained almost proprietary rights over their

peasant subjects, a serf could not stand accused before a town court without at least the tacit

permission of her manor-lord. As I argued in section 1.4.2, the appearance of class-warfare

discernable in the Polish witch-trials derives in part from this juridical situation: it is not that

witches were especially prone to attacking their manor-lords, or that the szlachta were more

superstitious, more keen to accuse than were the peasantry—it is just that, until the manor-

lord came himself to suspect a woman of witchcraft, or came at least to treat his subjects'

suspicions seriously, there were few mechanisms by which she could come to trial. Village

courts could and did try witches, not necessarily with the active participation of the manor,

but absent the manor's agreement they could levy no punishment greater than a fine,

penance, or an apology. Therefore, most peasantwomen accused of witchcraft before a town

court may be assumed to have been suspected of witchcraft by their manor-lord or his

representative, even in those many cases where the formal accuser was a fellow peasant.

And, for the reasons already enumarated, a woman suspected or accused by the noble-man

who had paid for the town court to travel to his village to try her, was likely to be found

Sa.cz, a great many of the trials were for banditry and highway robbery, crimes for which the death penalty
was more or less automatic (1998 p. 192; see also Syganski 1917).

224
 • Mechanisms of justice •

guilty by that court. If anything, we should be somewhat surprised at the numerous

exceptions—17% of the women accused in deputed trials were acquitted, sentenced to lesser

punishments, or otherwise set free. All this is to say, once again, that the most crucial step on

the road to the stake is the first one: once a community, or a nobleman, decided that a

woman's reputation for witchcraft was sufficiently serious to warrant trial, they were

committed to a procedure whose probable outcome they knew and hoped for. An accused

witch, too often, was a witch condemned.

One corrollary to this pattern is perhaps less obvious. The same factors which tended to

increase the execution rate of accused witches in the countryside would simultaneously tend

to limit the number of witches who came to trial, and the ability of trials to spread by

denunciation. A nobleman could only bring to trial suspected witches under his own

jurisdiction—his own serfs. Peasants could only successfully accuse women of their own

village or its immediate vicinity, subjects of their own manor-lord. Because noble patterns of

land-tenure were characterized by small holdings of just a few villages or small towns,12

peasants must often have experienced themselves to be victims of malefice cast by a nearby

neighbor belonging to a different feudal master. The sorts of quarrels and envies and tensions

that led to witchcraft accusation knew no jurisdictional boundaries; a woman just down the

road, or a few fields over, or frequently encountered at the inn, would often belong to a

different manor-lord. From the legal point of view, such a suspected neighbor might as well

have been the citizen of a foreign country: unless the peasant victim could persuade her pan

There were also, of course, the vast latifundia of the so-called magnates, senatorial families such as the
Koniecpolscy, Lubomirscy, Opalinscy and Radziwittowie. Such latifundia could include hundreds of
villages and numerous towns, some, such as the Lubomirskis' Rzeszow or the Zamoyski "capital" of
Zamosc, quite large; however, in central Malopolska and Wielkopolska, such very large concentrations of
property were rare. A topic for further research might explore the reasons for what appears to be a relative
rarity of witch-trials in these large properties, which amounted to miniature states within the state. One

225
 • Chapter 1.5 •

to persuade the suspect's pan to allow her to be brought to trial, nothing at all could come of

such suspicions.

Indubitably, for the sake of neighborliness or because his subject's bad reputation

reflected on his own, such a neighboring manor-lord must often enough have acceded to his

neighbour's wish for a trial. But just as often, neighbouring manor-lords or leaseholders will

have seen little reason to turn over their tenants for prosecution. Wojciech Breza was able to

bring thirteen women to trial, and ten to the stake, only because eight belonged to his own

estate, while five belonged to an associate of his in Slesin—none of the very numerous others

who were denounced in this cycle of trials came before the court (Wislicz 2004b pp. 75-76).

Especially after the demographic convulsions of the mid-17th century, enserfed peasant

subjects constituted a land-owner's most valuable property. While he or she would be eager

to rid their own villages of witches who had attacked the manor or other serfs, they need not

always have agreed with neighbors that the problems on the neighbor's property could be

traced to one of their subjects. Anna Markowa, a peasant-woman whose successful appeal of

a village-court conviction went first to the town court of Biecz and thence to the Superior

Court in Krakow, was assigned a defense advocate who argued before the Biecz court that, as

Markowa was the serf not of the noble plaintiff but of another noblewoman (who did not

choose to agree that her subject was a witch), the court should have no jurisdiction over her

(#41, Biecz 1644; Pilaszek 2005 p. 115). This was a common defense for other crimes as

well: defense counsel (where granted) regularly argued that if the accused were the serf of

might reasonably expect—but does not find—intense and bloody witch-hunts in these latifimdia such as
characterized the small principalities of the Empire (Midelfort 2002a pp. 114-115).
13
This argument was sufficiently convincing for the Biecz court to send the appeal on to Krakow, which court
remitted the case to an ecclesiastical court most likely because clergy had been involved in the interrogation
of possessing devils, on which this case turned. However, the case returned from the ecclesiastical court to
the Biecz town court, and in 1645 Anna was sentenced to death.

226
 • Mechanisms of justice •

someone other than the plaintiff, he or she could not be subject to the jurisdiction of town

courts (Mikoiajczyk 2001 p. 407). More often, such jurisdictional quarrels would have

prevented a trial from ever starting.

For a nobleman to accuse his neighbour's subjects of witchcraft could also be

construed, by that noble neighbour, as an attack on his own property and honour. Manor-

lords could go to considerable length to protect their subjects, although whether their

motivations were economical, a matter of protecting their serfs as they would protect their

other livestock, or rather a matter of preserving honour, it is hard to say. When Stanislaw

Zakrzewski, owner of part of village of Cwiklina, accused two serfs belonging to the owners

of the other half of the village, they actively intervened in the trial. After having admitted

nothing during the first day's torture, the accused were held overnight in the manor of

accuser. During the night, the Cwiklihski brothers raided their neighbor's manor, and one of

them fought his way into the chamber where the accused were being held. Barring the door

behind him he said to the witches:

nie boy sie_ gdysz ia mam kij y nie puszcze^ nikogo do don't be afraid, because I have a stick and I won't let
ciebie gdysz mam nusz do obrzniqcia postronkow y anyone get at you, and I have a knife to cut your
usiadlszy z czarownica. ani Urze_du chce puscic ani ropes. And sitting down with the witch, he would not
tesz kata samego (#121, Plorisk 1699). allow the Court nor even the executioner to come in.

Nevertheless, Zakrzewski seems to have had greater influence over the court, and the

two witches were eventually burnt at the stake over their masters' protests. Pilaszek notes

that feudal lords not infrequently protested, via the noble grod-courts, against the verdicts of

town courts which had sentenced their labor force to the stake. When the accused witch had

practiced her malefice outside the holdings of her own master, he often chose not to believe

the charges of witchcraft coming from neighboring nobility against his subjects (Pilaszek

2005 p. 132). Pilaszek adduced two complaints to the grod-courts of Wielkopolska by

227
 • Chapter 1.5 •

szlachta unhappy with their neighbour's illegal prosecution of alleged witches under their

jurisdiction. In one, Wojciech Kowalewski and his wife complained to the Poznan court that

Szymon Chylihski, lord of the village Przyborowa, refused to try his serf Helena Ratajka,

known in the entire district (according to the plaintiff) as a witch. In the other, Dorota

Zegocka, staroscina of Konih, protested to the Konih grod that one Franciszek Skarzyhski,

leaseholder to a portion of her husband's estates, had put two women to torture as suspected

witches despite her request that he put off such a trial in her husband's absence. The courts of

all the neighboring towns declined to take the case, not wishing to fall out of the staroscina's

favor. In both cases, jurisdictional conflicts between gentry worked to limit the possibility of

trial (Pilaszek 2005 pp. 132-134). Such conflicts would also severely limit the mechanism of

denunciation. As we saw in section 1.4.5, of a dozen or more women denounced by a witch

under torture, often just one or two, or none at all, were brought to trial. I lack sufficient

evidence for a strong argument, but I suspect that in most such cases the others were subject

to different manor-lords (cf Pilaszek 2005 p. 134, Wislicz 2004b p. 78).14

1.5.5: The crime of crimes in Poland

Summarizing both his own research and a great deal of recent work by others (notably

Soman 1992, Briggs 1989 pp. 13-14, 45-46; cf. as well Pearl 1998; Macdonald 2003), Bryan

Levack has recently developed a strong critique of the influential theory tying witchcraft to

state formation and centralization. Scholars such as Christina Larner (1981, 1984b) and

Robert Muchembled (e.g. 1985, 1993a, 1993b) treated witch-trials as a means by which the

centralizing, bureaucratizing absolutist state could abrogate to itself judicial and

• However, Wislicz suggests that in the Kleczew area, the noble owners of the various villages usually
acquiesced to trial of their denounced subjects (pp. 83-84). If true, this may explain the exceptional intensity

228
 • Mechanisms of justice •

administrative tasks previously performed by local gentry; they also used the trials as a

means to undermine rural culture, "disciplining" the peasantry to become citizens of a

modern state. Under such theories, we should expect few trials in the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth, with its radical decentralization of power, its near total absence of a central

bureaucracy, and its strong tradition of local noble autonomy. However, as Levack shows,

these theories do not accord well with what we find. Levack acknowledges that the takeover

of witch-trials by secular courts across most of Europe in the 16th century increased the

number of cases, while the spread of torture and the inquisitorial procedure greatly increased

conviction rates. But trials were not, for the most part, run by central authorities: on the

contrary central authorities nearly everywhere acted to restrain the trials. Where they did so

successfully, as in Spain and Italy under Inquisitorial administration, or France under the

Parlement of Paris after 1604, conviction rates remained low, and chains of denunciation

rare. Trials were more frequent, and more bloody, where central state power was weak: "it

was the failure of the state to control local authorities and to supervise local justice, that led

to the great prosecutions of the seventeenth century" (Levack 2002 pp. 215-223; quotation at

219).

Until the very late 18th century, nowhere in Europe did the state fail more abjectly to

supervise local justice than in Poland. With its ideology of Sarmatian freedom and its

political culture of gminowiadtstwo (local-community self-government), the szlachta political

class resolutely resisted all attempts at centralization, or even of effective national

government.15 Noble grdJ-courts or staroscinskie courts, nominally beholden to the central

government, were run locally and, in any case, did not deal with witch-trials. Episcopal

of the Kleczew witch-hunt.

229
 • Chapter 1.5 •

courts, which were quite centrally regulated by an organization bitterly opposed to secular

control of witch-trials, never succeeded in regaining jurisdiction over witchcraft. Saxon-law

courts, especially those of private towns, operated largely without oversight; the Assessory

Court attempts to reform or regulate small-town courts met with no success before the mid-

18th century. Pilaszek has argued against the popular image of the drunken and incompetent

small-town judge (1998b), a position I share and which I have also attempted to resist here:

despite pressures from the community, most small-town courts attempted to seek justice, and

did not always accede to the desires of local elites (see 1.4.3, above). Nevertheless, it is very

clear that justice, in early modern Poland, was entirely local, administered by men who for

the most part shared the concerns and fears of the local community.

Paradoxically, it was in small village-courts, with their restorative-justice paradigm,

and the very largest cities, that witchcraft accusations and trials maintained their medieval

character longest, with courts focusing on specific acts of malefice and assigning fines,

whipping or relegation as penalties. In the large cities and in the similarly very mild appeals

courts, such an approach may be ascribed to the jurisprudential caution exercised by learned

magistrates influenced more by Groicki and the Carolina than by popular demonology.

Moreover, in appellate cases especially but also in the first-instance cases brought to city

courts from their noble-owned suburbs or from surrounding villages, the magistracy of large

cities could display more autonomy vis-a-vis noble plaintiffs than could the courts of smaller

towns, so dependent on the good will of their noble neighbors. But both village and large-

town trials were the exceptions; the great majority of the accused were peasants or plebeians,

tried before quite local magistrates.

15
On Polish-Lithuanian szlachta political culture, see especially Kaminski 1983, 2000; Cynarski 1969, 1992,
and Ochman-Staniszewska 1994.

230
 • Mechanisms of justice •

In the absence of central regulation, we find in Poland what Levack would lead us to

expect: scattered but quite numerous trials, high execution rates, and a tendency for witch-

trials to continue long after they had been become a thing of the past in such centralizing

states as France. But what we also find might be less expected: a near-absence of major

witch-panics, or of run-away chain-reaction trials. The same extreme localism that made

reform impossible also discouraged the spread of trials: a nobleman's near-autonomy on his

own property, and vis-a-vis his own serfs, entailed his total lack of rights over his neighbor's

subjects.

• *X* •

Witchcraft, traditionally, has been understood as the "crime of crimes:" a crimen

exceptum so dastardly that the courts were justified, indeed duty-bound, to overlook the

ordinary rules of procedure, the requirements for good evidence and trustworthy witnesses, in

pursuing its prosecution and eradication. Demonologists espoused an uncompromising attack

against the clear and present danger posed by the witchcraft conspiracy; law-books,

following the Malleus, allowed testimony in witch-trials from people ordinarily excluded as

witnesses, such as neighbors with a known grudge against the accused, or kin of the accuser,

or women. Accused witches were tortured brutally until their testimony conformed with

notions of witchcraft preconceived in the minds of their fanatical judges. A recognizable

complex of attitudes and practices—an ideologically predetermined crime, more or less

arbitrarily selected victims (that is, people accused of the crime), a guilty verdict more or less

assumed, suspicion and rumor accepted as evidence, and association as grounds for guilt, a

general public complicit or cowed into cooperation with the courts—has come to be called a

"witch-hunt" on the basis of this archetypical example, and has been found analogically in

231
 • Chapter 1.5 •

the Stalinist show-trials, the McCarthy hearings, and the procedures of the contemporary War

on Terror.

This popular picture contains many grains of truth. Respected jurists did allow

numerous exceptions to standard procedure on the grounds that witchcraft was a species of

treason, and subject therefore to the relaxed rules of evidence allowable in treason cases. The

standard legal formula that evidence of guilt must be "as clear as the noonday sun" found its

reversal in Bodin's injunction that, in witchcraft trials, the witch should not be acquitted

unless the accuser's calumny is "clearer than the sun" (1995 [1580] bk. 4 ch. 5 p. 218).

Procedures such as the water ordeal or "swimming," in the period of European witch-trials

already banished from ordinary jurisprudence for hundreds of years, continued to be

countenanced and introduced into evidence in witch-trials. In certain times and places—

North Berwick in the 1590s, the Bamberg and Wiirtsburg prince-bishoprics in the late 16th

and early 17th centuries, Salem 1692, Kleczew in the last quarter of the 17th-century—the

merest suspicion could indeed lead, in remarkably short order, to execution for witchcraft.

And yet we have learned, over the last three decades of witch-trial scholarship, to treat

with suspicion much of this narrative of witchcraze. As I have already noted, the tendency

begun by Keith Thomas (1973) and exemplified recently by Robin Briggs (1996) has lead us

to concentrate on what Peter Burke has called the "unspectacular everyday persecution" of

witches (1993 p. 441). Jonathan Pearl, looking at France, has shown that their

contemporaries saw the more rabid demonologists as eccentric radicals; that Bodin in fact

insisted on extraordinarily high standards of evidence in witch-trials, and that Muchembled's

model of a centralizing state using witchcraft persecution to tame and discipline the

countryside cannot be maintained—in fact the central authorities consistently acted to

232
 • Mechanisms of justice •

restrain witch-hunting (1998). Alfred Soman, also studying France, has noted the care with

which the Parlement of Paris treated cases of witchcraft, and its uneasiness with the loose

evidentiary practices of the lower courts (1992); Levack, as we have seen, has described

similar dynamics at work in Scotland (2002). John Demos, examining colonial American

witch-trials other than the outbreak at Salem, has found a pattern wherein a given woman

might build up a reputation for witchcraft over decades, frequently appearing before the

courts, before ever being convicted (1982). In these studies and others, witchcraft emerges

not so much the crime of crimes as a crime like any other, treated seriously but not

fanatically by the courts.

One might also approach this problem from the other side, as it were. Witchcraft was

not, after all, the only crime for which the accused were habitually tortured—torture was the

"queen of proofs" for all serious criminal offences, in all regions where the Roman Law

came to dominate jurisprudence in the 16th century (Peters 1996). Nor was it the only crime

treated as an "offence against God's law," or the only crime to characterized by very high

execution rates. It was one of a very few capital crimes—the others being infanticide and

abortion—characterized by a strong tendency toward female defendants. This, together with

our contemporary perspective that it was not a "real" crime at all, does make it significant:

nevertheless, as argued above, the gendering of witchcraft accusation cannot be understood

as part of a general campaign against women.

The execution rates for witches ought to be compared, not to our contemporary ideas of

justice, but to the overall execution rates for that particular place and time. Put into such a

context, the high percentage of death sentences for accused witches may be seen as part of

the over-all tendency toward harsh, exemplary punishment associated with the judicial

233
 • Chapter 1.5 •

revolution of the 16th-17th centuries (Larner 1984; Mikolajczyk 1998 p. 185; Peters 1996;

Salmonowicz 1997 pp. 127-142; Uruszczak 1994 pp. 194-195).

Early modern law makes no clear distinction between what we might be inclined to see

as naturally contrasting categories of crime: those that are religious and ideological and those

that are social and "real." Despite the rhetorical uses to which the term "witch-hunt" has been

put in the 20th century, witchcraft was not a "thought crime" in the early modern period. It

must be remembered, once again, that witches were accused of and tried for witchcraft: for a

crime of magical harm. As a violent and harmful attack on others, witchcraft was just as

social a crime as murder—which itself, in transgressing the 5th commandment, was a also a

sin and a religious crime. Uruszczak, in the introduction to his edition of the criminal-court

books of Wisnicz Nowy, goes so far as to assert that the primary law followed in that court

was the Decalogue: invoked not only against "moral" or "religious" crimes such as

witchcraft and adultery but also against theft, banditry, and murder (Uruszczak 2003). The

formula contra iura tarn Divina quam humana appears in verdicts for all sorts of criminal

offences, most of which we would not now categorize as religious. (Mikolajczyk 1998

pp. 18-19; cf. Maisel 1963 p. 36). In a society that treated social peace as a fragile miracle,

even ordinary non-supernatural squabbling between neighbors could be treated as "an

offense against the Lord God,"16 as in a verdict of the village court of Jazowsko in 1731

(Grodziski ed. 1967 item 92).

For Rodney Needham, taking up a theme from the work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl,

witchcraft in certain societies is a "social fact." It simply was the case, "just as real, and also

just as normal an aspect of everyday life, as are turnpikes to us" (1978 p. 25). As murderers

were tried for murder, and thieves for theft, witches were tried not for their gender (though

234
 • Mechanisms of justice •

the crime was strongly gendered), nor their heresy (though heresy was part of the crime of

witchcraft), nor for nonconformity or insubordination, nor as part of the class struggle. They

were tried, instead, for witchcraft, a serious, but in many ways rather ordinary crime. In the

next section, we will look more closely at what witchcraft was understood to be.

16,
'Obraza Pana Boga."

235
 • Mechanisms of justice •

More often than not, in such cases, the denounced woman's lord preferred not to turn her

over to the court, unless he or his own villagers already had reason to suspect her. However,

it also seems likely that, as denunciations multiplied beyond all sense and beyond any basis

in suspicious activities, both magistrates and nobility tended to treat them with less and less

trust. This would help explain the greater tendency to arrest in cases where the accused

denounced just a few people.

Figures 1.4. B and 1.4. C detail two great cycles of witch-trials and the role played by

denunciation in each. The first set of trials is (#60-#63), occurred before the court of ChQciny

over a short period of time, from June 25 to July 16 1665. The second set of trials, (#97-

#102), occurred before the Nowy Wisnicz court between August 13 1688 and April 15, 1689:

however, the trials in 1689 bear no clear relation to those that went before: the "craze" if we

wish to call it that, lasted from August 13 through September 15 1688 (recall that this is the

cycle of trials cited by Baranowski to illustrate the domino-effect of denunciation).

A. In Checiny, the first trial is of the normal kind: a single private accuser, in this case a

townsman, accuses a single woman of witchcraft. Barbara Grzeszowka is brought to court,

dunked (she floats because "all yesterday I didn't eat a thing"1), and is sent to torture. Her

husband is also dunked (he also floats), and testifies on her behalf. The records provide no

verdict, but in all probability the case was dismissed.

"bom wczora caly dzien nie jadla. "

195
 Figure 1.4.B: Accusations and Denunciations in the Checiny Trials of 1665 (##60-63)

( Private accuser J ( Court accuser (imligator)J Accused witch, not I Denounced as a witch
Accused Mitch, tortured
tortured
burnt at the stake +
Jud.M^j uiusiclLi of Checiny Denunciation -=•;;:: ;;;
Barbara Grusielka of Checiny
Effective denunciation —
Matczykowa of Checiny
2nd Matczykowa of Checiny Accusation

A. Checiny, June 25 Piekarka of Checiny ,/

Czwartoszowa of Checiny Babionka of Fanislawice
[ Franciszek Stefalkowicz j Paruch (m.) of Brzegi Zychowa of Fanistawice
Paruchowa of Brzegi Jadwiga Muzykowa of Fanislawice
Smazowska of Fanistawice Szczepankowa of Fanislawice
I Barbara Grzeszowka | Porzuchowa of Zajaczkowo Kowalowa of Fanislawice
C. Fanistawice, July 3
Mackowa of Zajaczkowo Kotowa of Fanislawice
Catkowa of Zajaczkowo \ Maciej Stryjak J Drozdowa of Zajaczkowo
Wojciechowa of Zajaczkowo Warkowa of Zajaczkowo
B. Skiby, June 26
Janowa of Zajaczkowo Soltysowa of Zajaczkowo
( Wojcieeh Roznowski J Ml/// Kiemlina of Matogoszcz l)»riila I >sakuwa (t?) Opaliiicowa of Malogoszcz
Klysowa of Matogoszcz Pastulina of Wesota
Kotkowa of Matogoszcz Elzbieta Cackowa of Wesola
l'.vm kriu-ku t Kortara (village unknown) Tomkowa of Wesola
Wumunska (village unknown) ri/liic»»C'ackima(t'.'j Agnieszka Kapuscina of Wesola
Marcinowa of Gniezdziski
Martiiii \V\ra/.kn«H t Maryna Wyrazkovva (of Skiby?)
^ n v k a K.ipuiun.i Bajorkowa of Gniezdziski
M a n n a Wnuknwi t
Maryna Wnukowa of Polichno Kalnr/\iia Kapuscina (t?) Kotowa of Gniezdziski
Zofia Kuklina of Galezyce
Kulawina of Gniezdziski
Katarzyna Stokowcowa of
Galgzyce Zofia Kuklina Katarzyna Kapuscina of Gniezdziski
Kulawina of Galezyce
Potowniowa of Galezyce Katarzyna Stokowcowa
tukaszowa of Rykoszyn
Porzuczkowa of Galezyce Plebankowa (village unkown)
Adamowa of Galejyce Jadwiga Praw^cka
Katarzyna Pawconka D. Chelmcc, July 16
Franciszkowa Dziedzicowa
r*
P. Jan Tarlo

Slunisl.iw ( /.ijilinski
JT
19 women, of which most acquitted,
fined, or freed on oath. 4 tortured.
 Figure 1.4.C: Accusations and denunciations in the Nowy Wisnicz trials of 1688-1689 (##97-102)

C. Niepolomice, Sep. 2

Kcgina Wojcierhim *ka t Regina Wojciechowska of Ktaj

Zofia Figlowa of Ktaj Rcgina Smaleowa Regina Smaleowa of Ktaj
Katarzyna Brzoscyna (v. unknown) Dudzina of Chehn
Zofia of Bochnia
(Jadvviga?) Strachowa of Lapczyca Soltyska of Bochnia
Zofia Szkatulina of Lapczyca Soltyska's daughters
Lipionka of Chehn Strachowa of Moszczenica
Woicika of Stanislawice Zofia Szewcowa of Targowisko
Tacickaof Bochnia Zofia's husband
A. Lapczyca, Aug. 13 B. Niepolomice, Aug. 26
Katarzyna Janoska of Ksia.znice Zofia's daughter
Wojciech Ma.cka Zofia Chwastkowa of Gierczyce Szymon Krol I laga Piekarczykowa (v. unknown)
-j Zofia Skrzynecka Katarzvna Michnowa of Buczvri Regina Mauczyna of Olchawa
Zofia Szczepanka (of Buczyn?)
Jadwiga Talarzyna of Ktaj Jadwiea Talar/.vna t
Jadw igaJVIacun :i sr. t
E. Nowy Wisnicz, Feb. 11
jlailwiga Maciwu jr. t
Zofia Macowa (Zofia?) Szewcowa (of Lapczyca?) [ Walenty Chmielowski j
D. Nowy Wisnicz, Sep. 15
Stogowna of Lapczyca
Regina Janaskowa of Lapczyca Regina Mauczyna
burnt at the stake t Swiatowna of Moszczenica Anna Krzywdzyna fust\na Kabiaszka Snkicnniczka t
Denunciation -=r: Cieleciarka of Moszczenica (of Bochnia?)
Regina Kanina of Bochnia suburbs
Effective denunciation Maryna browarka of Buczyn
F. Nowy Wisnicz, April 15
Accusation I j Dorota Ka_cka (village unknown)
Krzemionka (village unknown) gromada of Poreba
r )
Denounced as a witch
\IIIKI I annowa ofToie bu
Accused witch, not Accused witch, tortured 1
tortured Private accuser
 • Chapter 1.4 •

B. The next day, the Ch^ciny court is deputed to the village of Skiby, where one Ewa

Krucka is accused by the peasant Wojciech Roznowski, on behalf of or with the permission

of P. Wojciech Gorzechowski, the village's leaseholder. The original accusation has to do

with magical milk theft. During torture, Ewa denounces a total of 26 women and one man,

from seven nearby villages and towns. Of these, two are brought in imediately for

interrogation, and are eventually sentenced to burning along with Ewa. They do not

denounce anyone.

C. The next week, the Ch^ciny court is deputed to Fanislawice. The peasant Maciej

Stryjak accuses Dorota Lysakowa, on the basis of her long reputation as a witch (despite this

long reputation, she had not been denounced by Ewa Krucka). Dorota, before torture,

denounces 21 women of whom she has heard that they flew to Bald Mountain. Only two of

these women (Kiemlina and Klysowa, both of Malogoszcz) overlap with the list of women

denounced by Ewa Krucka, but despite this double denunciation, neither of these two are

brought to trial. However, two others denounced by Dorota are brought to trial; one of these

(Elzbieta Cackowa) herself denounces three women, of which one (Agnieszka Kapuscina)

had also been denounced by Dorota. Furthermore, the Ch$ciny instigator, apparently wishing

to tie up some loose ends, brings in for questioning a further seven women: of these, two had

been previously denounced by Ewa Krucka, two by Dorota Lysakowa, one (the

aforementioned Agnieszka Kapuscina) by Dorota and by Elzbieta Cackowa; the other three

were previously unmentioned by anyone. No verdict is recorded, but Dorota, Elzbieta, and

Katarzyna Kapuscina are all subjected to torture: it seems likely that all three were executed.

D. Possibly motivated by the large number of denunciations emerging from the

previous two trials, the wojewoda of Lublin Jan Tarlo decides to have all the women in the

198
Part 2:
A pluralistic universe
A ktora ma te przyprawki, jachac na granice
Powinna, gzlo, w ktorym chodzi, wywrocic na nice.
Masciami sie_ nasmaruje, a na ozog wsie_dzie,
Srzednim oknem wyskoczywszy, na granicach be_dzie.
Tam po polach i po miedzach czary zakopuje,
Sobie pozytki przywodzi, drugim ludziom psuje.
Whoever has the herbs, to go to the border
Should turn her shirt inside out,
Smear herself with ointments, hop on a broomstick
And jump out the window, right to the border.
They bury enchantments in the fields and the boundaries,
Chapter 2.1I Bringing profit to themselves, but to others harm.
Healing and harming —Sejm piekielny 1622 w . 872-877; 1903 p. 47.

2.1.1. Introduction

What constituted witchcraft in early modern Poland? We have already seen the legal

definitions: for Groicki in the 16th century witchcraft constituted provable magical harm—

and we have seen how this emphasis on magical malice gave way, in legal literature, to

witchcraft as treason or laesae majestatis divinae. The author of the Czarownica, in keeping

with his concern to distinguish witchcraft from superstition, crime from misdemeanour,

offered a definition focusing on malefice and sacrilege:

Czary z obelzeniem Maiestatu Bozego y rzeczy Witchcraft takes place with offence against the
swiqtych, iemu nalezytych, a z szkoda^blizniego, lubo Majesty of God and holy things belonging to him, and
na maie_tosci, lubo na zdrowiu bywaia.. A zabobony with harm to one's neighbour, either his possessions
bez [sic] tych dwuch rzeczy y przymiotow bardzo or his health. Whereas superstition, which also often
zrych cze_sto bywaia_. occurs, lacks these two things and very evil
characteristics.
{Czarownica 1714 [1639] p. 5)

Chmielowski equated witchcraft specifically with malefice, as against the wider

category of "black magic" which, for him, included such things as divination:

Maleficium albo czary sa_ iak species pod Maleficium or witchcraft is as a species under black-
czarnoksie_stwem, nie ku czemu innemu ordynowane, magic, intended for no other thing, but only for the

236
 • Healing and harming •

tylko ku szkodzeniu ludziom. harming of people.

(Chmielowski 1968 [1746] vol. 3 p. 233)

These definitions seem relatively straightforward. Moreover, as the epigraph to this

chapter makes clear, popular and widely available printed literature of the early 17th century

described the basic methods and behaviours of witches. A witch uses herbs for her craft; she

engages in inversionary practices ("turns her shirt inside out"); she uses an ointment and a

broomstick to fly to the witches' meeting at "the border," and by means of buried

enchantments, she steals "profit" from others for her own good. All of these themes turn up

again and again in the trials, suggesting that the author of the Sejm piekielny had an accurate

understanding of popular notions of witchcraft.

And yet, in practice, it was extraordinarily difficult to know who was a witch, what

counted as witchcraft. Witches used herbs—so did everyone: from basic household remedies

known to any housewife, to the more complex recipes of cunning-folk, to the expensive

imported herbs such as pepper and ginger favoured by elite doctors, herbs were the basic

ingredient of medicine. Witches stole milk from neighbours—ordinary peasantwomen

engaged in counter-magic, protecting the milk of their cattle; to the outsider, or to the victim

of counter-magic, it looked identical to the magic attributed to witches. Witches met at night

at the border, where they danced and feasted—ordinary peasantwomen met in the fields at

night, for example on St. John's Eve, where they danced and sang.1 Witches offended God

As I will not be returning to this issue, a brief discussion of elite attitudes toward peasant midsummer
activities may be appropriate here. The decrees of the early 15th century Synod of Poznah condemned the
common people for worshipping the pagan demons Alado, Yesse, and Polelu at Pentacost; this decree was
adopted by subsequent provincial synods, such as that of Ruthenia (Heytzman 1875; Sawicki 1957).
Variations on this theme occur in several early 15th century sermons; in a manuscript hagiography, and in
Jan Dtugosz's chronicle—whence they became established members of the supposed pre-Christian Polish
pantheon. The Postqpek includes the devils Hejdaz, Hala, Ilelu, and Polelu (1570; 1891 pp. 97, 102); and
Chmielowski asserts that the pre-Christian Poles worshipped "Diana" and the idols "Lada, Boda, and Leli"
at Lysa Gora in the Swiejokrzyskie mountains (1754 vol. 2 pp. 323-324). After a great deal of 19th century
speculation on these supposed gods or demons, Bruckner destroyed them totally, demonstrating that these
"gods" were simply nonsense exclamations in the refrains of folk-songs—it is as if English commoners

237
 • Chapter 2.1 •

by making illicit use of sacred things—so too, in the eyes of reforming churchmen of both

Catholic and Protestant camps, did ordinary peasantwomen with their blessed candles against

thunder, their blessed herbs against illness, their stolen water from the baptismal fonts;

indeed most of the "witches" of the Sejm piekielny or the Postqpekprawa did little more than

ordinary peasant sacramental magic. Witches worshipped and made offerings to the devil—

ordinary peasantwomen took care not to offend the house-spirit, whom they fed with milk or

groats (see chapters 3.1-3.2). Despite widespread and relatively stable popular assumptions

about the nature of witchcraft, and despite somewhat narrower but also quite stable elite

assumptions, it was difficult to separate witchcraft from the indispensable practicalities of

everyday village or small-town life. Ordinary practical knowledge blended imperceptibly

into the more specialized knowledge of cunning-folk, and both could, depending on

perspective and context, look very much like witchcraft.

In this and the following two chapters, I explore this problem of discernment, of

definition, of naming. We have already seen that to become a witch meant to acquire a social

were accused of worshipping the demons "Hey" "Nonny" and "Nonny-no." (1892 p. 572; 1895; 1985a
[1918] pp. 74-75; 1985b [1924] pp. 225-226). For a recent, partially dissenting opinion, see Lowmianski
1984 pp. 677-681. Similarly, 15th-17th century church decrees forbade the Sobotha or bonfire dancing at St.
John's Eve. The Poznan synod condemned such meetings for the occasion they gave to fornication (Sawicki
1957 p. 203); Stanislaw of Skarbimierz considered them to be pagan dances (1979 vol. 2 p. 89; Olszewski
2002 pp. 183-185); "pagan customs and dances before fires and trees [pogahskie zwyczaje tancow i
obrze_dow przy ogniach, drzewach]" were also forbidden in bishop Maciejowski's reforming pastoral letter
(Maciejowski 1630 [1601]; after Nasiorowski 1992 p. 204). In the 16th century the Catholic Marcin of
Urze_dow and the Protestant Mikolaj Rej treated midsummer dances as occasions to give "worship and
prayer to the devil [diabhi czesc a modle. czynia_c]" or for "great acts of witchcraft and error [nawiqtsze
czary, btQdy]" (Marcin 1595 pp. 31-32; Rej 1556 f. 228v). However, the humanist poet Jan Kochanowski
defended midsummer dances as traditional, pious, and innocent in his Piesn swiqtojariska o sobotce (1952
[c. 1585] esp. w . 13-20; p. 296); other pastoral poets did the same (see Bystron 1960 pp. 61-63). In a
sermon, the Catholic historian and Krak6w canon Szymon Starowolski fully Christianized midsummer
bonfires, interpreting them as memorials to the conversion of Poland, when Mieszko the first freed the
nation from "satanic slavery [niewola szatanska]" by submitting to baptism on St. John's day, and then
burned the pagan idols in great bonfires (Starowolski 1648 vol. 1 p. 485; cited after Korolko 1999 p. 503). It
should be noted that, despite seeming parallels between midsummer dances and the witches' meetings at
Bald Mountain, and despite the similarity between the terms sobotka and sabbat (which second term was
not used in Poland), the two were never equated except in the vague rhetorical way we find, for example, in
Rej (above). See also the discussion oibylica in Appendix B.

238
 • Healing and harming •

and legal status: quite independent of any "real" characteristics a woman might possess, or

any activity she might or might not have engaged in, she was a witch insofar as she was

thought to be such by her neighbours, her manor-lord, or the court. Reputation, suspicion,

allegation, accusation, conviction ascribed, with ever-increasing social force and specificity,

the status of "witch" to this or that real person. Formally speaking, a witch was always and

only that person to whom the label "witch" had come successfully to be attached. Such an

account, however, leaves out the content: it gives us a pragmatics of witchcraft, but no

semantics—what was meant by the accusation? What did the label "witch" entail?

On these questions there was no consensus. Although the label "witch" was used by

everybody, at every level of society, this does not mean that it meant the same thing to

everybody, or was treated by all with equal seriousness. Whether a given activity will have

been labelled as "witchcraft," or instead as superstition, or medicine, or even prayer,

depended very largely on who was doing the labelling. For reforming clergy, many of the

activities not only of old peasant-women, but even of their less educated parish priests, could

be called diabolism err paganism or witchcraft. But these same clergymen, in their quarrels

with secular authorities over jurisdiction, could reproach the latter as being incapable of

distinguishing true witchcraft from ignorant superstition. Protestant reformers consigned the

whole of traditional Catholicism to the category of witchcraft, which prompted 17th-century

Catholics to be more careful than their forebears had been, making very fine distinctions

between pious practice, excusable excess, forbidden superstition, and damnable witchcraft.

On the secular side of things, noble attitudes for the most part more closely resembled those

of the peasantry than of the clergy; though, as we have seen, noble manor-lords and burgher

magistrates had largely assimilated western European notions of witchcraft as the "crime of

239
 • Chapter 2.1 •

crimes" at a time when peasants were more likely to treat it as simple malefice. Treating

witchcraft as a serious threat to order that must be ruthlessly extirpated, nobles and burghers

also, from time to time, made use of women they understood to be "witches" for their own

purposes. Peasants, meanwhile, had their own fine distinctions, their own problems of

perspective: what one person saw as entirely legitimate protective and counter-magical

activity might look, to her neighbour, very much like aggressive witchcraft. The power to

heal implied the power to harm; a blessing could hide a threat; a compliment could carry with

it the evil eye; and the social exchanges, the small gifts and favours that constituted and

maintained village sociability, were also the media through which malefice was "given" to its

victims.

Accordingly, in this set of chapters I attempt to tease out the various strands of meaning

that, to different people or groups, constituted the labels "witch" and "witchcraft" in early

modern Poland. As in previous chapters, I do this by paying attention both to texts and to

trials, and looking for the patterns and commonalities while also treating seriously the

conflicts and differences. "Witchcraft," was not a single label with a single meaning, but

rather a series of overlapping categories and oppositions, and these categories and

oppositions, in turn, took up their place and their meanings in the context of overlapping

theories of the world. Witches and witchcraft existed as part of a pluralistic universe.

2.1.2: Practical magic

In 1600, a thief stole some 50 grzywne (80 zlote) from the city coffers of Biecz. The city

counsel took the following actions to recover the stolen funds: they arrested and questioned

under torture one Maciej Mazurek, who died during interrogation without revealing the

location of the stolen money; they commissioned and paid for the singing of two masses;

240
 • Healing and harming •

they sent to Krakow, at great expense, for the learned "doktor Fontan astrolog;" at much less

expense, they consulted a village cunning-woman, paying her in pepper and ginger; they

consulted an Orthodox priest or monk from Jaroslaw, who apparently had some reputation as

a diviner; they consulted a "mater diabolica" in other words, a witch (Buczak 1910). These

actions exemplify the pluralistic world in which the councilmen lived: they were willing to

try all options, including some we would classify as practical (interrogation of the suspected

thief), religious (the masses, and possibly the consultation with the Orthodox holy man), and

magical. Under the magical category we may make further subdivisions: between "high" or

"natural" magic (the Krakow astrologer), "superstition" (the village diviner) and "diabolical

witchcraft" (the mater diabolica). But from the point of view of the council itself, all its

actions were practical, instrumental steps in the attempt to recover the stolen city funds.

This is not to say, however, that the Biecz city-counsellors made no distinctions

between the various methods used. To say that they hoped and expected that the magical

methods of the cunning-woman or the "mater diabolica" would prove effective, is not to say

that they did not understand such methods to be magical. The example of the Biecz city

counsel demands that, for the purpose of interpretation, we set aside our own notions of the

distinction between the practical-instrumental and the magico-religico-symbolic. While the

counsel knew that sponsoring a mass was an entirely different sort of activity from torturing

a prisoner, and both were different from consulting the stars or throwing wax on water, the

distinctions were not between the real and the supernatural, or the practical and the symbolic.

Questions of efficacy did indeed enter into debates, at all levels, about the nature of magic

and witchcraft and superstition and prayer, but the answers proposed to these questions were

2
Similarly, in 1452, the city counsellors of Poznan made use of a cunning man to recover stolen city funds
(Bylina 1990 p. 43; after Ulanowski ed. 1902 item 1252).

241
 • Chapter 2.1 •

not our answers. As Stewart Clark has argued with such force, interpretations of early

modern witchcraft and demonology can hardly even begin until we set aside our own notions

of scientific efficacy. As Clark insists, "magic is not, essentially, anything; it is what, in

particular cultural settings, it is construed to be" (997 p. 216). To attempt an interpretation of

early modern Polish magic, we must discard modern distinctions between magic and nature

without thereby discarding the notion of magic itself—it was a local category, with local

definitions and limits which we will want to discover.

In the realm of medicine and healing the mixture of what we might now characterize as

"science," "religion" and "magic," is especially evident. This is also a realm in which locally

constructed delineations between indigenous versions of these categories were contested and

discussed. Jakub Kazimierz Haur's long tractate on healing provides a fascinating glimpse

into the Polish version of what David Gentilcore (1992) has called "medical pluralism:" a

practical, popular medicine that mixes learned and village remedies, empirical and symbolic

cures, a medicine that comes perilously close to what reform-minded churchmen would not

hesitate to call superstition and magic.3 To the modern eye, it is difficult to see how some of

Haur's cures differ from the sorts of things that could bring serious suspicion on a village

cunning woman. One should rub a dried tooth taken from a corpse on one's own aching

tooth, which will immediately die and can then be easily extracted. A woman can prevent

excessive blood-flow during her periods by tying a red string around her toe—a clear case of

3
The Polish literature on witchcraft has treated Haur simplistically as an exponent of Sarmatian obscurantism
and superstition (e.g. Baranowski 1952 pp. 49-50; Wijaczka 2005 p. 24). The anthropologist Piotr Kowalski
has provided a more nuanced reading in his recent major study of Haur's writings (2000a), where he notes
that witchcraft forms a very minor theme in Haur's encyclopaedic guide to early modern rural life. In fact,
although one can find mentions of witchcraft throughout Haur's chapters on medicine, the Skarbiec contains
no separate chapter on witches or witchcraft. In a single paragraph of the long seventieth chapter of Tractate
24 (concerning heretics, Protestants, Jews, and natural philosophers) Haur briefly mentions the numerous
"Witches, Black-Magicians, and Character-Writers [Czarownicach Czarnoksiejznikach, y Harakternikach]"
of which one hears tell—only to point out that the only protection against such people is the Catholic
Church (1693 p. 427).

242
 • Healing and harming •

ligature, and suggestive of the uses to which strings are put in some of the Polish trials. If a

couple is having difficulty conceiving, the woman should observe on what branch of what

tree a swarm of bees lands. She should take the branch, burn it, and drink the ashes with

spring water, morning and night, "while participating in Marital association."5 Epilepsy

(understood as a disease with natural causes including drunkenness, apprehension, or

fright—though it could also be a sign of demon-possession) may be ameliorated with various

herbs such as mistletoe and linden, but also by drinking a powder of dried bear or wild boar,

taken in mare's milk; alternatively one may drink the powdered heart of a human corpse, in

wine with sulphur. Similarly, madness (also caused more often by natural causes than by

possession) may be calmed if one can manage to kill a black cock, split it in half while still

warm, and tie it to the madman's head, keeping it on for twenty-four hours6 (Haur 1693 pp.

435-436, 385-386, 398-399).

Of course, our modern perception of some of these procedures as magical or

superstitious can give no guidance to their early modern categorization. Definitions of magic

as "mistaken science" or "inefficacious instrumentality" are inadequate, as they fail to

capture intra-cultural distinctions between the natural and the preternatural, or between the

permitted and the forbidden (see further discussion of this point at 2.2.1, below). However,

there can be no doubt that some of Haur's remedies come perilously close to actions and

materials classified at the time as magical, for example the use of dried and powdered animal

4
The 15-year-old Marjanna of Tuliszkow tied a string from her underwear to the hands of the Virgin Mary in
the church of Slesin. In the context of her recent loss of virginity, or possible rape, this may have had as its
purpose something similar to Haur's remedy for menstrual flow (#96, Kleczew 1688; and see chapter 2.3.3).
Mateusz Kleczka was caught in the act of tying strings to the pews in church before Sunday mass; under
torture he explained that his kinswoman had asked him to do this, so that "people and children should die
[co bqdajudzie i dzieci marli]" (#111, Wielki Kozmin 1692). Of course, ligature is one of the best and
widest attested forms of magic throughout Europe, from classical times onward (see e.g. Winkler 1990).
5
"przytym zazyc Malzehskeiy spolecznosci"
6
"Czarna Kokosz na dwoie rozerzec, y puki ieszcze ciepla, copre_dzey na GIOWQ zewszystkim iako iest
przylozyc y przywinaA aby tak spokoynie do 24. godzin zostawalo."

243
 • Chapter 2.1 •

products, or in particular of human body parts. Haur seems to have been aware of this, and

prefaces the tractate on medicine with a long title that protests somewhat too much:

O Lekarstwach Gospodarskich, Z Domowych zebranych Concerning Farmers' Medicine, collected from

Ingredientiey Ludziom, ile od Miast, Miasteczek, y Household Ingredients for People, who are far from
Lekarzow odleglym, o roznych chorobach, chorych, do Cities, Towns, and Doctors, concerning various
uzytku y poratowania zdrowia wielce shiza.ce, y do illnesses, serving greatly for the use of the ill and
wiadomosci potrzebne: uchodza_c aby sie. Ludzie for saving health: admonishing People lest they
Guslami, Czarami, y roznemi Balamuctwy, a z make use of Witchcraft, and Superstition, and all
niebezpieczenstwem, me tylko zdrowia ale y Duszy kinds of Nonsense, to the peril not only of their
niebawili, a samych Chrzesciahskich sposobow y health but of their Souls, and that they should use
remedia od PANA BOGA nadanych zazywali. only methods and remedies from the LORD GOD.
(Haur 1693 p. 379).

In this and similar passages,7 Haur seeks to establish a safe middle ground for the

home-remedies he recommends. They are different from the expensive medicine of city

doctors; they can be put together, for the most part, from readily available materials, by an

ordinary nobleman farmer or his wife. They are different, as well, but complementary to, the

remedies of the Church (about which more below). But most crucially, they are, he insists

somewhat strenuously, natural, and must be distinguished sharply from the "Satanic, Pagan,

and non-Christian procedures and methods, by which many People, in vain, lose both their

health and their Soul"8 (1693 p. 380).

What sorts of Satanic, Pagan, and non-Christian procedures does Haur have in mind

here, how do they differ from his own "Household Medicines that are certain, and proven in

7
A prefatory paragraph continues in the same style: "I write about this material, so that simple Village Folk
should protect their health from every danger, and that they should not make use of any old sort of forbidden
Superstition, and Whispers, and Spells, and Blessings, and, and old-wives' tales, in short that they take no
part in Witchcraft, and Humbug, and Nonsense, which find amongst themselves Satanic, Pagan, and non-
Christian procedures and methods, by which many People, in vain, lose both their health and their Soul, and
pass away from this World. And so, that they shold use Household Medicines that are certain, and proven in
their effects [Dla tego o tey materyey pisz$, aby si$ Ludzie prosci Wieyscy, wszelkiego uchronili na
zdrowiu niebespieczehstwa, aby si? ladaiakiemi, y zakazanemi Guslami, Septami, Zaklinaniem,
Zazegnaniami, Wiedzbiastwy, y zadnemi zgola niebawili Czarami, ani Poczwarami, y Balamuctwy, ktore w
tym miqdzy niemi znayduia^ siq Szatanskie, Poganskie, a nie Chrzescianskie poste_pki, y sposoby, przez co
wiele Ludzi marnie, nietylko na zdrowiu, ale tez y na Duszy ginie, y z tego Swiata schodzi. Wie_c, zeby
pewnych, y dowodnych w swoich dolegliwosciach Domowych uzywali Lekarstw]" (Haur 1693 pp. 379-
380).
8
"[...] Szatanskie, Poganskie, a nie Chrzescianskie postejpki, y sposoby, przez co wiele Ludzi marnie, nietylko
na zdrowiu, ale tez y na Duszy ginie [...]"

244
 • Healing and harming •

their effects"9 (ibid.)? To understand this material we must be careful to make several

different sorts of distinctions, along several different axes of difference—natural vs.

supernatural, Satanic vs. Christian, expert knowledge vs. common knowledge, effective

medicine vs. vain superstition or quackish charlatanry. Along this last axis, we must also take

care to distinguish between our own, residually scientistic understanding of what really

works and why, and keep any judgements we might make on this score quite separate from

our understanding of what was thought to be effective and natural, what illusory and vain, at

the time. Finally, after making these distinctions, we must in part discard them, recognizing

that all these distinctions were contested, unstable, and often enough poorly understood or

simply ignored. Part of the great value of a work like Haur's lies in its rather muddled

character: his insistence on separating his own recommended practices from those of

cunning-folk or witches rings all the louder insofar as he knows that not everyone would

agree. In this as in other ways, he reflects the pluralistic, pious and practical, superstitious

and devout and worldly character of his readership—and it should be kept in mind, here, that

some edition of the Sklad or of Haur's earlier Oekonomia ziemianska featured in nearly every

rural manor (Partyka 1994).

Milk

Something of the difficulties we encounter in making such distinctions, and the dangers

of making them too rigid, may be gleaned from a brief consideration of the rituals and

techniques surrounding milk production and processing. For reasons to be explored in the

next section, every aspect of dairy production was set about with anxiety, and it was the locus

of innumerable techniques for increasing or preserving a cow's yield, and keeping the milk

9
pewne, y dowodne w swoich dolegliwosciach DomoweLekarstwa"

245
 • Chapter 2.1 •

itself from spoiling. The fermenting processes by which milk turns to buttermilk [maslanka],

curds, farmers' cheese, and butter, were and are tricky and un-amenable to perfect control

even in modern hygienic conditions. The same is true of the fermentation of grain for the

making of beer or distilled spirits—another area which attracted very considerable ritual

activity as well as many of the early accusations of witchcraft (#1, #13, #22, #30, #50). An

older generation of scholarship assumed that it was for these reasons that early modern

peasants, ignorant of Pasteur or of antiseptic procedures, made such a close connection

between spoiled milk and witchcraft (e.g. Baranowski 1965 p. 127ff.). Witchcraft accusation,

once again, is treated not as the consequence of a positive theory of the world but as the

result of an absence—of ignorance.

Such a stance is neither hermeneutically useful nor does it conform to the evidence we

have. In the first place, the modern attribution of accusation to ignorant dissatisfaction over

spoiled milk mirrors attitudes expressed by early modern intellectual elites—who, it need

hardly be said, were as thoroughly ignorant of the germ theory as were the peasantry:

Krowy mleka nie daja_, nie zrobi sie_ maslo, [...] The cows give no milk, or it won't turn to butter, [...]
Czary to [...] It's witchcraft [...]
{Wodka z elixierem 1729, after Baranowski 1952 p. 62)

More to the point, there is no good reason to suppose that people whose livelihood depended

on a steady supply of milk were unaware of the need for hygiene and care in the preparation

of dairy products. Rather, in Malinowskian fashion, they used magic as a supplement to

empirical practices, knowing full well that milk could spoil despite the best technique and the

greatest care. Or, put better, their distinction between natural and supernatural techniques

differs from our own. Haur's own prescription for proper milking and for the storage of dairy

is a perfect example of such a seamless mixture of "magic" and agronomy:

[G]dy Krowy stana. na doiwo w Piekarni uwia^zane When the cows stand to be milked in the Dairy-barn,

246
 • Healing and harming •

przy zlobie, trawa_ abo karmia, iaka. nalozonym, w tied to the manger with grass or feed placed in it, first
przod one pokropic Woda_ swie_cona^ potym wygrzac sprinkle them with holy Water, then warm a [decoction
swie_conego ziela, ktore iuz powinno bydz w of] blessed herbs, which should be ready prepared in a
naczyniu gotowe, y wymiona ich czysta. wymyc y vessel, and wash their udders, drying them with a clean
powycierac chusta,, dopiero wedhig zwyczaiu try cloth, only after this should they be milked, three times
razy na dzien doic. a day according custom.
We Wtorki, y we Czwartki, tymze swiqconym On Tuesdays and Thursdays, cense all the Cows in
zielem, wszytkie w Piekarni okurzaja_Krowy: w the Dairy-barn with these same herbs: in Summer, store
Lecie, w chlodnym mieyscu chowaia, mleczna, aby milk in a cool place, so that it can sour slowly, the
siq z wolna z siadalo, te zas naczynia z Mlecznem, vessel containing the Milk should be uncovered
lepiey zeby nieprzykrywano dla pary; byleby to because of vapor [that is, to allow vapor to escape], but
mieysce, bylo takowe, zeby sie_ na mleczno nie should be in such a place that dust doesn't fall into the
kurzylo. milk.
(Haur 1693 p. 64).

Similarly, milk pails should be cleaned within the hour with clean water, heated with blessed

herbs and nettles, and left to dry in a warm oven: otherwise they will spoil the next batch of

milk (ibid.).

One could, if one wished, go through these recommendations line by line and,

according to one or another standard, classify each one according to whether it belongs to the

realm of "magic," "science," or "religion." Sprinkling the cattle with holy water might be

religious (or superstitious or magical for a Protestant), the clean cloth and the hot water for

washing the udders "scientific," under which category we might also put the boiling of the

milk pails and even perhaps the nettle-—which might not unreasonably be supposed to have

antiseptic properties. Censing with blessed herbs might, again, count as magic or religion,

although the smoke might have a hygienic effect and therefore be scientific, and the days

chosen—especially Thursday, the stereotypical day for witches' gatherings, the visits of

house-demons, and other nefarious rites, seems magical. Such an exercise is, however,

misguided insofar as our goal is to understand Haur and his world. Whatever distinctions we

might make are not the distinctions he makes. For Haur, none of the techniques are magical;

instead, he brings religious material into complementary combination with customary

247
 • Chapter 2.1 •

practice and worldly common-sense, so as to form an effective set of legitimate techniques,

recommended because they work.

However, setting aside our own distinctions is only the first step. For it must be

recognized that, even within Haur's frame of reference, not everyone would agree that all the

techniques he espoused were entirely legitimate. To restore the production of a cow whose

milk has been spoiled through witchcraft, Haur recommends washing the cow's udders, as

well as all the vessels and tools used in dairy production, in a decoction of manure and

burdock (lopian, Arctium lappa L.); this will cause the offending witch to "tremble and

itch"10 until she undoes her spell (1693 p. 469). Although no witch-trials mention the use of

burdock to such a purpose, the basic method of cooking milk-pails to cause pain to the witch

was common (e.g. #7, Kalisz 1580; #61, Chexiny 1665; #76, Przeclaw 1675). The nettle for

cleaning milk-pails appears in the trial of the cunning-woman Jagna of Zabikowo, who

combined it with beeswax and blessed bread to fix witch-spoiled milk (#4, Poznan 1549).

More than a century later, Anna Krzywdzina denied witchcraft against others' cattle, but

admitted that she knew something about the care of her own cattle and their milk: "give the

cows biaie zielo with bread so that the milk sours properly; I collected barwinek to get it

blessed, but not for witchcraft, and I censed the cattle with it on Thursdays, [...], to get good

profit from the cows"13 (#100, Nowy Wisnicz 1688d). Despite Haur's strenuous insistence

that the care of cattle and milk-production should be done "with the Lord GOD," and his

warning that one must "perform no sort of superstition in all this: better to be a simpleton

among the superstition-workers [guslarki] than, as an expert, to give over one's Soul to

10
"truchlec i swe_dzic si$ b^dzie"
11
Probablypostqp, Bryonia alba L., which see in Appendix B.
12
Periwinkle, Vinca minor L.
13
"zaday bialego ziela z chlebejn, to sie mleko bendzie zsiadalo; barwinek na swiqce_nie zbierala, ale nie na
czary y tern kadzielam krowy we czwartki [...] ze pozytek od krowy miala."

248
 • Healing and harming •

danger" (Haur 1693 p. 65), his methods are very nearly identical with those that appear in

witch-trials. Depending on context, intention, and minor details or variations, the same or

very similar techniques could be understood as good animal husbandry, as cunning or

superstition, or as witchcraft.

Herbal lore

A similar ambiguity, ranging between Christian piety, medicine, superstition and

witchcraft, bedevils the early modern Polish attitude toward herbs and knowledge of them.15

In a tradition dating back at least to the apocalyptic text 1 Enoch (2nd. c. BCE), when the

fallen angels taught their female lovers the nature of herbs, witches were known to be

masters of herb-craft (see 3.2.1, below). In the Peregrynacja dziadowska, a witch explains

her power to heal and harm: "For I know all the herbs, which grow in the meadows"16

(Peregrynacja 1614 v. 755; 1961 p. 170). In the Sejm piekielny, a devil boasts of the women

he has corrupted toward witchcraft:

Poczynilem w dobrych niewiast wielkie czarownice. I've turned good women into great witches.
Nauczylem charakterow, znaja_nasze ziola; Teaching them symbols, they know our herbs as well;
Radszej ida. na granice, nizli do kosciola. And go oftener to the border than to church.
(Sejmpiekielny 1622 w . 851-853; 1903 p. 46)

Unquestionably, Polish witches were imagined to make use of herbs in their magic, and

many accused witches confessed to such uses of herbs. Dorota of Siedlikow, for example,

confessed that she transformed herself into a milk-stealing cat by means of "witches'

herbs"17 (#21, Kalisz 1613). Both elite and trial sources associated mandrake or its various

"z Panem BOGIEM"; "Guslow na to niiakich nieczynic, lepiey bydz u guslarek [sic] prostaczk^, anizeli w
tym biegh\be_da_c podac Dusze_ swoie_ w niebezpieczenstwo." This is a rather mild version of a formulation
common to demonological discourse throughout Europe, and attributed to Chrysostom: "better to die in
piety with God than be healed by the Devil's magic" (Clark 1997 p. 513).
A complete list of all herbs mentioned in the witch-trials known to me, and most herbs mentioned in early
modern Polish herbals as used by or effective against witches, may be found in Appendix B.
"Bo ja znam wszytkie ziola, co po lakach rosta."
"czarowne ziele"

249
 • Chapter 2.1 •

1 Si

local substitutes with "magic-using women and baby who associate with devils" (Falimierz

1534 ff. I.86v-87; cf. the nearly identical comments in Marcin of Urzqdow 1595 p. 201).19

However, herbal knowledge was hardly confined to "witches," however defined, nor to

cunning women; herbal medicine was very nearly the only sort of medicine there was. The

accused witch Apolonia Porwitka claimed before the court that apothecaries bought herbs

from her: "I made no use of witchcraft, only of herbs, which I picked with other women and

the apothecaries bought them from me" (#13, Kalisz 1593)—a claim that recalls the

wonderful wood-cut from Falimirz's herbal of 1534 (see Figure 2.1.A). Haur's home

remedies, both for people and livestock, consist almost entirely of herbs, and the Jesuit

Benedykt Chmielowski provides a long list of effective herbs against witchcraft. The great

Renaissance herbal-manuals of Marcin of Urzedow (1595) and Szymon Syreniusz catalogued

the effects of many hundreds of herbs: although a large proportion of both books reflects the

classical tradition of Pliny and Diascorides, they also pay attention to local Polish herbs (see

Appendix B). At all levels of society herbs were believed to have medicinal properties,

including the property of protecting against misfortune, witchcraft, and the devil.

In the mid-14th century, a parish questionaire for the Wloclawek diocese inquired as to

the presence of vetulae who dig up roots to make amulets (Bylina 2002 p. 191; Plezia 1979

p. 87); and in the late middle ages, reforming theologians such as Mikolaj of Jawor

condemned such herbal amulets as superstitious (Bracha 1999 ch. 7). However, on the whole

the late-medieval Polish church took a more moderate position: those herbs which had been

blessed in church and carried in faith to protect against misfortune did not offend against

"niewiasthe czarowne i baby z diiably si$ obieraja_ce"

19
On the problematic identification of the "mandrake" in early modern Poland, seepokrzyk and postqp in
Appendix B.
20
"nie bawilam sie_ jodno ziolkami, co je u mnie aptekarze kupowali rwajc je z drugimi niewiastami."

250
 • Healing and harming •

orthodox Christianity (Bylina 2002 p. 191; Plezia 1979 p. 87). In the early modern period,

Syreniusz, Haur, and Chmielowski recommended such an amulet of boze drzewko (lit. "god's

little tree; Artemesia abrotanum L., southernwood), as an excellent protection against

witchcraft and misfortune (Syreniusz 1613 p. 370; Haur 1693 p. 455; Chmielowski 1754 vol.

3 p. 259). What had been condemnable superstition was re-figured as pious practice.

Figure 2.1.A: An old woman selling herbs. From Stefan Falimirz's herbal compendium
O ziolach y o moczy gich, Krakow 1534, f. IV60v.

The counter-Reformation church went quite far to accommodate and appropriate folk

herbalism: herbs were blessed at the church on the Octave of Corpus Christi, sometimes on

Pentacost (called zielone swiqtki, "the green holiday"), and above all on the feast of the

Assumption of the Virgin Mary, commonly called "Our Lady of the Herbs" in Polish

251
 • Chapter 2.1 •

(Rostafinski 1922; cf. Scribner 1987 p. 33 on identical practices in Catholic Germany).

According to Rostafinski, such blessed herbs were used primarily to protect against

malevolent witchcraft (1922 p. 33); this remained the case in the Polish countryside right into

the later 20th century (Lehr 1982). In the programmatic text of Catholic reform in Poland,

bishop Maciejowski's Epistola pastoralis, parish priests are grudgingly permitted to

distribute blessed herbs insofar as these were blessed "not superstitiously, or for satanic

purposes, [but] toward the health of spirit and body" (1630 f. G2v; after Nasiorowski 1992

p. 203). Similarly, in the Synod klechow podgorskich, blessed herbs and holy water are

explicitly exempted from a long list of church materials that one is forbidden to give to

witches {Synod Klechow 1607 art. 18; Grzeszczuk ed. 1966 pp. 224-225). By the time we

reach Chmielowski, blessed herbs and their use against witches and the devil have been

entirely Christianized:

Racya, czemu si$ ziela i kwiatow czart lejca, The reason why the devil fears herbs and flowers is this, that the
iest ta, iz Pan Chrystus zowie si? Flos Lord Christ is called the Flower of Nazareth, the Lily of the
Nasarenus, Lilium Convallium; ze Matka Valley, and his Most Holy Mother, when buried, was showered
Nays: pogrzebiona, kwiatami be_dqc with flowers, so that [on the feast of her Assumption] each Year
obsypana, ze ziele swie_ci co Rok Kosciol the Church of God blesses herbs, giving them power against
Bozy, daia^c im moc na czary i czarty. witchcraft and devils.
(Chmielowski 1754 vol. 3 p. 260)

Thus the use of herbs could be grounds for suspicion of witchcraft, but could also be a fully

orthodox method to protect oneself or one's cattle from witchcraft. As the accused witch

Jadwiga Kryczka, who was eventually acquitted, noted in her own defence, the use of herbs

need not imply witchcraft; herbs, she asserted, are good for people and animals (#77,

Sandomierz 1675).

It is difficult to determine, from the outside, when a woman's knowledge of herbs will

have been seen by her contemporaries as expert or extraordinary or sinister, as opposed to the

21
"non superstitiose, nee ad sathanicas, [sed ad] animeque et corporis sanitatem benedictione"

252
 • Healing and harming •

ordinary household knowledge passed down from mother to daughter or given as advice

from neighbour to neighbour. Accused witches characteristically denied having any greater

expertise than their neighbours. Zofia Baranowa, who sold herbs as a side-line but does not

otherwise appear to have been a cunning-woman of any sort, said "the herbs, how they are

called I don't know" (#39, Lublin 1643). Similarly, Marusza Nowaczka, who admitted to

having washed her manor-lord in herbs for his health, disclaimed knowledge of the names of

the herbs (#86, Warta 1679); however, the same woman later described her recipe for a love-

magic bath, providing us with one of the longest lists of herbs we have from the Polish witch-

trials. When the court asked Barbara Jewionka whence she knew the ingredient herbs for a

love-magic bath, she responded: "Just like other people use herbs, so do I. Besides, people

bless all sorts of herbs"22 (#55, Nowy Wisnicz 1659). This was both an attempt at self-

exculpation and a statement of fact: herbs blessed at Our Lady of the Herbs or on the octave

of Corpus Christi were a Church-approved sacramental intended for the "health of body and

soul;" they were integrated into medicine, folk-religion, and counter-magic at every level,

and it was not at all clear or obvious when their use constituted superstition or witchcraft or

cunning.

Thus whether the use of an herb was "magical" or medicinal, witchcraft or piety,

depended on all sorts of factors independent of the herb itself. According to witnesses, the

accused witch Dorota Pilecka gathered herbs at the cemetery and mixed them in with her

other herbs to have them blessed at Our Lady of the Herbs. Other witnesses spoke of her

gathering herbs suspiciously in the evening (#75, Slomniki 1674). Jadwiga Mackowa

Admitted to gathering "barwinek" (Vinca minor L.; periwinkle) and giving it to cows for

better milk, then bringing the leftovers to the church to have them blessed. But she gathered

"Jako ludzie zazywaj% tak tez i ja. Wdyc rozne ziola swi$ca_"

253
 • Chapter 2.1 •

the herb "in the meadows, not on the field borders,"23 a factor that she clearly thought ought

to exculpate her from the suspicion of witchcraft (#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). To gather herbs

before dawn was suspicious, both because it seemed to be done in secret and it could be

combined with the gathering of dew and moisture which characterized maleficient milk-theft

(e.g. #63, Chcjciny 1665; #101, Nowy Wisnicz 1688; #150, Wyszogrod 1718). And yet a

semi-elite writer such as Haur could insist that the herbs he recommends against witchcraft,

such as boze drzewko, koszyczko, ruta, trqdownik, and panny Mariey wloski "are to be

collected before the rising of the Sun"24 and eaten raw, for their counter-magical powers to

be fully effective (1693 p. 455). Jadwiga Ghichowa was apprehended by a neighbour for

collecting herbs on the border of his field, on Easter morning, and there were also rumours

that she stayed up all night on the eves of major holidays, washing her cattle and pouring the

wash-water out at the cross-roads; this is why her cows gave such good milk. Jadwiga denied

the allegations and the rumours, but admitted to collecting the herbs biedrzeniec, driakiew,

and czysciecz to feed her cattle: this protected them from witchcraft and disease (#64,

ChQciny 1665). Did such action constitute witchcraft or counter-witchcraft, milk-theft or its

protection? The question allows of no determinate answer; imagined witches and the real

peasants (and noblemen) who sought to protect themselves from such imagined witches used

the same materials, often in the same ways.

A common language
In Chapter 1.2.2,1 discusssed the literary sources from which accusers and magistrates

might have drawn some of the behaviours and characteristics they attributed to witches. I

23
"A tam ia na lajcach nie na miedzy"
24
"Te Ziola maia^byc zbierane przed samym wschodem Slonce"

254
 • Healing and harming •

also suggested that many of these texts might better be understood as reflecting common

notions; they are not so much sources of the stereotypical witch as reflections of that

stereotype. Indeed, no literary or learned source need be or, I think, should be posited for

most of the characteristics of the imagined witch in Poland. Much of the uniformity, the

sense of pattern discoverable in Polish witch-trial confessions, derives not from a common

core of sources so much as from a common set of assumptions, tropes, metaphors, and

structural relations, out of which both accusers and the accused could generate ever novel,

but simultaneously always similar, accusations and confessions.

In accusations, in the accuseds' protestations of innocence, and in confessions, it is

usually clear that most people knew a great deal about what witches were supposed to do,

and even how they were supposed to do it. Accusers and magistrates spoke formulaically of

the witch having "harmed people in their health and in other things, especially their cattle"

(#107, Brzesc Kujawski 1691). The accused, with equal regularity and not always in

response to such a statement, protested that they have "never practiced witchcraft, never

harmed anyone, neither their health nor their cattle" (#125, Lublin 1700). Sometimes such a

statement could serve as an oath of expurgation, as when Barbara Drozdakiewiczowa cleared

her name by finding six witnesses to swear that "she is unable to harm anyone: their health,

their children, their profit, or anything else"27 (#141 Plohsk 1708). In confessions,

meanwhile, the same themes comes up, now of course affirmed rather than denied, and often

with additions and elaborations: "I've harmed cattle with a powder, which the bedamned

devil gave me, both in the manor-herds and the village herds, for I sprinkled everything with

"ludziom na zdrowiu i na innych rzeczach szkodzily, osobliwie na bydle"

"Czaramim sie_ nigdy nie bawila, nikomum nigdy ani na zdrowiu, ani na bydle nie szkodzila."
"niemoze szkodzic nikomu na zdrowiu na dziatkach na dobytku na innych rzeczach."

255
 • Chapter 2.1 •

that powder"28 (#68, Kleczew 1669). Taken together, these statements demonstrate little

more than that all parties to witch-trials shared common assumptions about the targets of

malefice: the health of human beings and cattle. But one can find common assumptions,

common patterns, at a considerably finer level of detail as well.

For example, let us return to the accusations against Jadwiga Macowa, already

mentioned briefly above. She was alleged to have fed the herb barwinek (Vinca minor L.,

periwinkle) to her cows. She admitted this, but insisted that the herb had been gathered "on

the meadow, not on the field-border"29 (#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). Barwinek is to this day a

common ingredient in the herb-garlands blessed on the feast of "Our Lady of the Herbs" and

fed to cattle, or made into a tea with which to wash their udders, in order to increase milk

production and protect against witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140; Niebrzegowska 2000 p. 101,

Kohler 1993 p. 79). Jadwiga recognized, and denied, the central thrust of the accusation: not

that she had fed her cows barwinek (as most of her neighbours probably also did as well), but

that she had gathered the herb at the field borders. This is what witches do: rather than collect

such herbs on the meadow, the commons, as all are allowed and even expected to do, she

collects it on or near other peoples' fields, to steal the productivity of those fields and of the

cattle who graze on them, and transfer it to her own cattle. Knowing; like her accusers, the

sorts of things that witches are supposed to do, she was able first to deny doing such things,

and later to confess to them: under torture, Jadwiga confessed to saying "I take the profit

from all the borders."31

28
"jam szkodowala proszkiem na bydle, ktory mi dawal czart przeklqty, tak na Panskie, jako i na wiejskie, bom
wszystko posypowaly tym proszkiem"
29
"na lajcach nie na miedzy"
30
For example, Regina Kijowa confessed that to have good cream, one should take weeds from several gardens,
boil them in water, wash the cow's udder's with the resulting decoction, and pour out the rest on the road
(#63,Chqcinyl665).
31
"[0]d wszystkich granic biore_ pozytek."

256
 • Healing and harming •

Accused witches developed their confessions out of something at once more basic and

more flexible than a finite set of standard cliches. Rather than, or in addition to, a

"vocabulary" of standard tropes and cliches, accused witches and their accusers were

proficient in what might be thought of as a "grammar," a set of assumptions and structural

oppositions by which they could generate infinite variations on the general themes of

witchcraft. Under torture, accused witches did not, or did not only, parrot back to their

interrogators what they thought was expected of them, they did not follow a script. Instead,

they took up basic elements of belief and improvised on them, added to them, elaborated,

inverted, and modified them in ways that were not dependant on, and which cannot be taken

as evidence for, knowledge of a unified body of stereotypes.

This dynamic of variation and improvisation within the bounds of a vocabulary and

grammar of witchcraft may be detected in the verbal spells recorded in witch-trials. These

spells may be divided into two classes. First, there are relatively elaborate etiological

narratives, often drawing on scenes from the life of Christ or the Virgin Mary. These are

confined to the few trials of evident cunning-women, and are discussed in 2.2.1, below.

Second, one finds brief utterances accompanying ritual actions, and conforming to a

relatively rigid analogical structure. These were the basic spells both of actually practiced

folk-magic and of attributed, imagined witchcraft. In his Outline of a theory of practice,

Pierre Bourdieu described the capacity of the Kabyle, during legal debate, to produce entirely

novel proverbs that were nevertheless perfectly traditional, accepted as such because they

made use of and reproduced the fundamental structures and oppositions and assumptions of

the Kabyle worldview (1977). A similar pattern is detectable in the spells confessed to or

attributed to Polish witches: many must have been quite novel, and many, indeed, were

257
 • Chapter 2.1 •

probably made up on the spot by accused witches under torture, but they conformed to a

traditional and expected set of structures.

This consideration introduces an important element of uncertainty into our interpretation

of the witch-trial confessions. Accused witches who describe spells may have been

confessing to things they really had done, or to things they had heard of other people doing,

or to things that it was generally known that witches do: to know a spell does not mean that

one has used the spell or intends to do so. A great deal of magical knowledge was

widespread. Just as today everybody "knows" that magicians say "abracadabra" and "hocus

pocus," so in early modern Poland everybody "knew" that witches say "biore_ pozytek, ale nie

wszytek [I take the profit, but not the whole thing]" to steal the cream and good milk from

the udders of their neighbours' cattle, leaving only thin whey (I have found some variation of

this phrase in five trials: #11, #61, #63, #97, #127). People "knew" this to be the case

independently of whether or not anyone had ever really said these words. Knowing this, an

accused witch could reproduce this spell while confessing under torture, or could modify it,

transforming it into a spell not of theft but of recovery—explaining that they took "nothing

from others, only what is mine, the profit and the whole thing [pozytek i wszytek] as it was

before"32—profit which had previously been stolen by a witch (#11, Kalisz 1584; cf. #61,

above). But they could also range far from this basic theme of milk theft and protection,

producing spells for a wide variety of purposes.

The content of the spells recorded in Polish witch-trials is remarkably diverse, though

some common phrases and symbols do crop up across a wide geography and over nearly two

hundred years. The structure of these spells, however, is remarkably consistent over the same

32
"nie pragnq cudzego jego swego wlasnego, aby mi sie_ pozytek i wszytek jako pierwszy byl do bydle_cia
mojego wrociel."

258
 • Healing and harming •

place and period. Again, this does imply that there was a secret society of witches (or of

cunning women) passing down and regulating magical knowledge. More plausibly, it implies

that those who found themselves obliged, under torture, to describe what witches do, did so

by drawing on a common body of folklore, a common repertoire of symbols, a common

cultural logic of metaphor and analogy. This logic, the generative grammar of magic, allowed

accused witches to create or imagine spells and rituals whether or not they had ever used

such a procedure, and whether or not it had ever been taught to them. Just as native speakers

of English easily create new, correct sentences in that language every time they speak or

write, so any "native speaker" of the general idiom of Polish peasant culture could generate

"correct"—in the sense of plausible, right-seeming—magical procedures, either in daily life

or in the torture chamber.

I have collected most of the reasonably well-described spells from the Polish witch-

trials in Appendix C. I have already described several of these spells, and will have cause to

describe more in further chapters; therefore I will only adduce a few, here, to illustrate this

common structure.

A. For love:

Item taz nebozka pani Zawadzka nauczyla mie_ Pani Zawadzka taught me to let a drop of blood fall
abym krwie swoiey upusciela z palca serdecznego a from my heart-finger, into a drink, and give it to his
w trunku iegomsci pic dawala, mowia^c takowe honor to drink, saying the following words: Just as I
slowa: iako ia niemoge_ przez swoiey krwie, tak ty cannot live without my blood, so you christened and
krczony mianowany Janie nieozesz bydz bezemnie. called Jan, cannot live without me.
(#37, Skrzynno 1637)

B. Also for love. A woman washed her body and mixed the water with the hearts of

pigeons, then gave it to the prospective lover, reciting:

Jak ci^zko golebiowi bez pary, tak tez jemu cie_zko Just as it is hard for a pigeon without his mate, so let it
bez zony. be hard for him without a wife.
(#148, Rzeszow 1718)

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C. For good fortune in the brewing and selling of beer. Take soil from an anthill and

place it on the field-border, reciting:

Boz^moc^, aby sie_ tak do niej ludzie nawrocieli By God's power, let people turn toward me, just as these
jako siq i wy nawracacie do swego gniazda. ants turn and return to their nest.
#22,Kaliszl616.

D . To destroy buildings. Take soil or dust from a whirlwind and sprinkle it on the

buildings, reciting:

[J]ak to siq wywrocilo, tak sie one Just as [this soil] has toppled over, so will [these houses] topple
wywroca_. over.
(#39, Lublin 1643)

E. To destroy the fertility of fields.

Poloz dwa jaja kokosze na miedzy, aby rola Place two chicken eggs on the field border, so that the fields
byla tak gola, jak te jaja, a jaja otocz w will be as bare as those eggs, and roll the eggs in [hot?] ashes,
popiele, aby zboze zniszczalo, jak niszczeja^ so that the grain will be destroyed, as the eggs are destroyed in
w popiele jaje te. the ash.
(#139, Wyszogrod 1705)

F. To cause a person pain.

Pal$ to ususzone liscie jesionowe. Here I burn dried ash-tree leaves.

Jako liscie splone_lo, ani zostawilo Just as they burn, and leave no ash,
Popiohi, bodaj sie_ w nim serce tak palilo! So let his heart burn within him!
(Szymonowic 1614, Sielanka no. 15)

Taken together with the other spells collected in Appendix C, as well as more

fragmentary evidence from other trials, a number of themes emerge. Pigeons are associated

with love, ashes with destruction or infertility, soil with whatever it has come in contact with.

What comes out with especial clarity, however, is the shared structure of these spells, which

all take the form "Just as A is to B, so also let C be to D." The last spell reproduced above is

especially interesting in this regard: it comes not from a trial but from a pastoral poem by the

humanist poet Szymon Szymonowic. He derived the action of burning the leaves from

Theocritus' Idylls, only replacing the laurel-leaves of the Hellenistic poem with indigenous

jasion or ash (Szyszkowski 1913 p. 128). However, the form of the spell conforms precisely

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 • Healing and harming •

to those in the trials—suggesting that an implicit knowledge of the grammar of spells was

shared at many levels of Polish society.

It should be noted that the analogical structure of these spells implies, not imitation and

contagion in the Fraserian model, but difference. As Stanley Tambiah noted in his classic

critique of the Fraserian theory of magic, the analogical structure of magic implies not

relation but the absence of relation—it asks for, hopes for, exhorts, demands the creation of a

relation which is seen to be lacking (Tambiah 2002 [1973]). Scientific analogy takes the form

A:B::C:D, where D is the explicandum that the analogy attempts to explain. For example (it

is Tambiah's example), in the analogy sound: echo :: light: reflection, "reflection" is the

thing to be explained, and by analogy with echo it is explained: just as sound is a wave-form

vibration which can rebound off a surface and cause echo, so light is (found by the analogy to

be usefully understood as) a wave-form vibration which can bounce off a surface to cause

reflection. The relatively well-understood wave-mechanics of sound and echo are used to

suggest an explanation for the cause of a similar-seeming light and reflection—a relation

which, in this case, is substantially correct. The analogy has produced knowledge (Tambiah

2002 pp. 345-346).

The analogogical structure of magical formulae, Tambiah insists, is totally different.

Like the analogies used in rhetoric or propaganda, the magical analogies do not proceed by

finding similarity but by finding difference, and "evoking" or "arguing for" or "exhorting"

similarity. They are rhetorical not scientific. Thus in the propagandistic relation father :

children :: employer : workers, the suggestion is that workers should treat their boss as a

child does or is taken to treat his or her father—with respect, obedience, affection, and so on.

But the analogy would not be made if employees did in fact so treat their employer; the

261
 • Chapter 2.1 •

argument from such an analogy implies that one of the hoped for relations is absent or amiss.

A relation of similarity is not found but is asserted, in the hope that it will come to be. In a

Zande spell, for example, the araka creeper is used to cure leprosy: the structure is falling

leaves : growth :: falling extremities : leprosy. Here the fourth term stands in a relation of

opposition to its analog, and also in a relation of opposition to what is hoped for. Araka

creepers' leaves fall off and then the plant grows more; peoples' hands fall off and then they

die. The spell exhorts a different outcome, which may be paraphrased as "Just as the araka

creeper drops leaves and then grows, so let the sick person drop extremities and then

(nevertheless) grow." The analogy may be re-written as falling leaves : growth -falling

extremities : (growth). The term in parenthesis is the exhorted outcome, while the

parentheses themselves indicate that the real or current relation is understood as one not of

similarity, but of contrast.

The Polish spells adduced above all conform to this analogical structure, as summarized

in the formulae below:

A B C
blood Zophia pigeon target ants customers
necessary • (necessary) needs mate (needs mate) return to nest (come to buy)

D E F
soil houses egg-shell fields leaves heart
' (topples over) bare ' (bare) burn up ' (burn up)

Figure 2.1.B: The analogical structure of spells

Despite the very wide diversity of aims and materials used, and the considerable range

in time and space of these spells, they all conform to this structure. Blood is necessary to live,

but Zophia is very clearly not necessary in Pan Jan's life—this is the situation she hopes to

remedy. Ants return to their nests, but so far customers do not come to the bread-stall in

262
 • Healing and harming •

sufficient numbers. Egg-shells are bare and smooth, but the fields are full of growing grain—

the worker of the egg-spell intends to remedy this situation. And so on. In each case the

hoped for effect is the opposite of current reality. I refer the reader to Appendix C, where it

should be clear that most of the spells can easily be read under this rubric of rhetorical

analogy.

It has not been my intention to suggest that the structure of Polish spells and Zande

spells are similar because of some universal or necessary structure of magical analogy.

Tambiah seems to come close to asserting something like this, but it is enough to compare

Zande with Trobriand magic, as Evans-Pritchard did in an early paper (1967 [1929]) to see

that such an assertion cannot hold. In 2.2.1,1 will look at the narrative spells of Polish

cunning-folk, which exhibit a totally different underlying structure. The point of

uncovering this simple and flexible structure of Polish spells is, once again, to explain how

accused witches and others could produce well-formed, plausible spells ad libitum, on the

spot, and often under conditions of horrible pain.

• •$• •

Because a basic knowledge of herb-craft was common to nearly all accused witches, as

also presumably to their accusers and even their judges; because everyone, from peasant-

women to Jesuit preachers to humanist poets, knew more or less what a spell was supposed

Nor do I wish to assert, as Tambiah does explicitly, that the rhetorical or persuasive or exhortatory nature of
such magic saves it from strictures of irrationality. Tambiah is right to place these spells in the category of
speech acts which, by definition, can be felicitous or infelicitous, but not true or false: magic is not mistaken
science, and is not intended as science at all. But whereas most ritual speech-acts affect the moral or social
universe, and thus can be effective (felicitous) insofar as the community accepts them as such, both Polish
and Zande magic aims to affect the physical world as well. It attempts not to persuade just oneself, or others,
but the world, that D will be to C as B is to A. Practitioners expect magic to work, to be effective in the
world. Some part of the early modern demonological critique of magic as "vain practice" may be traced to
the recognition, by sophisticated thinkers of the time, mat in this respect magic did indeed differ from other
sorts of ritual such as the sacraments, with their intended effects on social and spiritual status. Magic, at
least popular magic, implied a causality ruled out by the science of the time (Del Rio 1632 [1608] bk. 3 pt.
2; Clark 1997 p. 281).

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

to look like, and could therefore produce grammatically correct examples of spells in poetry

or under interrogation; because the blessing of herbs against witchcraft, the filtering of milk

against its theft, the whipping of cattle with Easter palms, the bathing of the sick and the

pouring out of wash-water at the cross-roads or the river were all items in a repertoire of

"natural" medicine, counter-magic, and folk-Catholicism—a repertoire, again, common with

small variations at every level of society—because of all these commonalities, it is not

necessary or indeed useful to suppose that accused witches had special knowledge of any

kind. They were not usually cunning-women nor even people of much magical reputation; on

the contrary, most were ordinary women with ordinary knowledge. The women accused of

witchcraft shared the same knowledge about witchcraft as their accusers. They were accused

not because of special knowledge but because of the uses they were thought to make of that

knowledge. Both accusations and confessions were built out of a shared store of assumptions,

oppositions, and analogies, forming a language out of which both ordinary women in their

minor magic and counter-magic, and witches in their actual spells of revenge or their

imagined rites of destruction, could perform endless variations.

Moreover, most of this language was shared, as well, by the men and women of small

towns, the commoners and to a lesser extant the patricians of larger towns, and the petty

nobility of the countryside. Augustyniak emphasizes the continuities between plebeian,

patrician, courtly, and Jesuit literature (1989 p. 12; seel.2.2 above); Zakrzewski has insisted

that what he calls folk-religion [religia ludowa] encompassed not only peasants, but also the

people of small towns and the petty szlachta (Zakrzewski 1995 pp. 126-127; cf. Bylina 1990

p. 39). As Stuart Clark has insisted, we must distinguish between the perception, expressed

and cultivated by elite reformers, that a vast gap separated popular from elite religion, and

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 • Healing and harming •

the reality of a thoroughly mixed practice (1997 p. 443). Elites were in constant

communication with the masses, constantly exchanging information with them in a two-way

process. Moreover, a simple model of "elite" and "popular" ignores the vast in-between: the

"middle class" of the semi-educated whose beliefs and practices comprised a thorough

mixture of the two. In Poland, such a middle class would include most parish priests; the

majority of townspeople, including the magistrates, scribes and jurymen involved in witch-

trials; perhaps the better-off kmieci who could send their sons to the parish school for a

smattering of Latin and arithmetic; and the greater portion of the landed szlachta?A

Despite Haur's protestations that the herbs and medicines, the dairy-hygiene and home-

remedies recommended in his work bear no resemblance of any kind to the superstitious,

ignorant, and damnable methods of cunning-women or witches, we should recognize that to a

very large degree both made use of the same language, and inhabited the same cosmos. The

world of meanings within which both Haur and peasant-women made their way was not,

perhaps, so pluralistic as I have originally suggested. The next section explores some of the

basic structures of this universe; understanding its underlying assumptions will help us

understand how witchcraft was imagined to be motivated, and how evidence of its effects

could be discovered and thought about.

Tu lezy slawna wiedma i spomniec ja_ z groza^

Ktora, jak z krowy, mleko doila z powroza
Here lies a famous witch, frightful to recall,
Who milked a rope as if it were a cow.
2.3.1 —Wespazjan Kochowski, Nieproznujqce proznowanie
The circulation of moisture 1859 [1684] p. 309.

As a representative of this last category we might take Jan Chryzostom Pasek, the minor Mazowian nobleman
whose famous Memoirs serve as a window into the world of the late 17th century petty szlachta. He picked
up some Latin, some facility with classical allusion, and a deep Counter-Reformation piety from his Jesuit
schooling, but in most other respects he lived in the same symbolic universe as his serfs.

265
 • Chapter 2.1 •

In her analysis of witch-confessions and witch-craft beliefs in Augsburg, Lyndal Roper

speaks of an "economy of bodily fluids." Infants are dried up, the milk sucked from or stolen

from their mother's breasts constituting a reversal of proper nourishment roles. Post-

menopausal, "dry" women unnaturally suck away fluids naturally belonging to, and needed

by, the young and fertile (Roper 1994 pp. 207-209). Witchcraft, in large part, consists of the

excessive and illegitimate consumption of fertility and fortune, symbolized primarily in terms

of milk. Such an analysis assumes the notion of the "limited good"—that there is only so

much fortune, or prosperity, or fertility to go around, and one can not acquire more than

one's share except by stealing it from others. In this section I will analyse Polish witchcraft

belief and practice in terms of the limited good, in particular in terms of a limited supply of

moisture figured as rain or dew or milk. I will also develop what might be called the

"paradox of witchcraft"—the fact that everybody knows what witches do, and many people

experience the effects of their malefice, although nobody admits freely to being a witch.

The notion of limited good, closely related to that of "moral economy," was first

proposed by the anthropologist George Foster (1965) to explain what he saw as universal

features of peasant cosmology and economy: suspicion and envy and social sanction against

the more prosperous, with a corresponding disinclination to improve one's lot in relation to

neighbours; a disposition to work less in response to increased yields, rather than to benefit

from them in the marketplace.35 The notion may be summarized in the formula that "all profit

is gained at someone else's loss" (Austen 1993 p. 92). Recent work on the limited good

includes especially Michael Taussig's Devil and commodity fetishism and related works

35
The "limited good" of 1965 is a cultural concept; cf. Foster's earlier formulation, which derives the same
notion from economic rationality in the peasant situation where "the pie is constant in size." "The (
consequences of this situation are apparent: if someone is seen to get ahead, logically it can only be at the
expense of others in the village. The traditional division of the pie is being upset, and the rights of all are
potentially threatened" (Foster 1961 p. 177).

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 • Healing and harming •

(Taussig 1980; 2002 [1977]): the Columbian peasants who gain unnatural and ultimately

unsatisfying wealth through the devil pact or through the baptism of money bear a close

resemblence to the Polish witches whose prosperity also comes through the assistance of a

prosperity-stealing devil (see 3.1, below). The limited good also manifests itself in the

extremely widespread collection of practices and beliefs associated with the evil eye.

Witches and others envy the young or rich or healthy or beautiful, and curse them with the

evil eye. Accordingly, these fortunate ones (or their parents) protect themselves by symbolic

acts of uglification, by alms-giving, and by ritual self-deprecation. Both the witch (or

imagined witch) and the victim (as self-diagnosed) share the same assumption: the

exceptionally healthy enjoy that health at the expense of someone else being sickly, the

especially beautiful have borrowed their beauty from the hideous; the fat from the lean; the

rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unlucky, and so on.

Raymond Kelly's ethnography of the Etoro of Papua New Guinea provides an

illuminating account of the relationship between witchcraft and a limited-good cosmology

(2002 [1976]). The Etoro have what Kelly calls a "tragic" view of human existence: people

have a limited supply oihame or life-force, which they must use up to impart fertility to

gardens, to conceive children, and to cause boys to grow into manhood. The slow loss of a

man's life-force, through heterosexual sex to produce children and through homosexual sex

with teen boys to grow them into men, eventually and inevitably results in his old age,

decrepitude, and death. Such loss oihame is regrettable but accepted as necessary, insofar as

it is productive of children, men, and garden produce. Women, through sex, are the agents of

a man's loss of virility, but their sexual activity is justified in that it tends to the production of

children. However, a woman who demands more sex than necessary, thus draining her

267
 • Chapter 2.1 •

husband of life, or the young man who takes semen from other young men, thus stunting

their growth for his own profit, are personifications of evil. Everyone consumes, and

everyone contributes to the loss of hame, but a witch is someone who over-consumes, taking

more than his or her share at the expense of others.

The early modern Polish equivalent of hame was the moisture and fat which, at several

levels and in several ways, nourished the body, the family, and the fields. Witches were

above all those who stole moisture, either out of spite as when they "dried up" or "withered"

a neighbor, or in order to seek illegitimate prosperity, as when they stole the "profit" of their

neighbour's dairy production. Whereas a central method of healing rituals involved drinking

tinctures, washing in herbal decoctions, and being smeared with various ointments, that is,

having moisture added to oneself, a central method of maleflce was to dry up the victim:

characteristic ailments so caused included "suchota" (lit. "dryness). As in the West, witches

stole fat, juicy babies and burnt them; they kept the rendered fat for themselves to make

witches' ointment; but used the dry ash or powder as a maleficient poison: the witches of

Bochnia sprinkled a a burnt and powdered niewiniqtko [innocent one, infant] on the fields

while reciting "let the years be dry as this powder is dry; let no rain fall and no grain grow"37

(#84, Bochnia 1679).38 Indeed, in Poland, the sprinkling of dry powders was a characteristic

method of malefice, and was almost never associated with medicine or healing (cf. Del Rio

2000 p. 118; 1609 Bk. 3 pt. 1 q. 1; who believes witches use powders both to harm and to

heal). Dorota Gnieczkowa reported a spell for spoiling marriage involving the ashes of an

Suchota is now the common Polish term for tuberculosis, but in the witch-trial period its semantic range
seems to have been considerably wider and less precise,
"bodaj suche roki byry, jak ten proch, bodaj deszcze nieprzechodzily i zeby si$ nic nie rodzilo."
Cf. the drought-causing dried infant in #81, Muszyna 1678. The motif of witches' ointment made from
roasted babies was known in Poland already in the 15th century (Ulanowski ed. 1902 item 1574).

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 • Healing and harming •

owl (#2, Poznan 1944a); Malgorzata Magierska was accused of causing a rash [osutka]

with a powder of burnt snakes and lizards (#137, Nowy Wisnicz 1703); and similar powders

of dried lizards, snakes, vipers and toad were allegedly sprinkled in Kleczew to cause illness

among humans and cattle (#68, 1669; #96, 1688). Another Kleczew witch sprinkled a

powder of human hair on the lady of the manor (#158, Kleczew 1730). More commonly, the

drying and burning aspect of ashes was combined with the general maleficient power of the

dead. The earliest Lublin witches stood accused of burning human bones to make a powder

with which to destroy a hated neighbour (#27, Lublin 1627); similar allegations arose in

ChQciny (#62, 1665) and Kleczew (#96, 1688). Sometimes the malignant effect of the

powder or ash is not clearly related to the removal of moisture (e.g. #39, #107, #109, #112,

#153), but often this connection is clear and explicit. As in Bochnia (above), the dry powder

could "dry" the fields, destroying the crops: this was accomplished in a trial at Wyszogrod

with a powder of mushrooms and "burnt" dew (#150, 1718). Similarly, Katharzyna

Kozimihska confessed to rolling eggs in hot ashes at the border of a field, so that the field

will be as bare as the egg is bare, and the crop destroyed as the (potentially fertile) egg is

destroyed in the ash (#139, Wyszogrod 1705; see also Appendix C item 16).

The petty-szlachta Zawadzki family hung a bag of live mice in their chimney and dried

them to make a powder, with which they attacked their landlords (#165, Lublin 1739).

Drying could also be accomplished by collecting something from the victim—most often soil

from his or her footprints—and drying it in or above or under the fire. The cunning-woman

Dorota Gnieczkowa claimed to have been attacked by a witch who buried her foot-print soil

under the fireplace and covered it with a piece of aspen-wood (#2, Poznan 1544a); similarly,

39
osutka or rash derives from the verb osuc (to sprinkle). It refers both to the sprinkling of pustules on the skin,
and, as here, to the sprinkling of powder which caused them. There may be some semantic blurring as well
between osuc and osuszyc (to dry up, to dry out).

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

Zofia Philipowicowa dried such soil in the hearth, also with bits of aspen-wood, ostensibly to

make Jan Podlodowski burn up with desire for her—instead he dried up in the more literal

sense, and died (#37, Skrzynno 1639; see also Appendix C items 1 and 5; and osika in

Appendix B). Dried and powdered manure, used to destroy cattle, might have had a similar

symbolic import, drying the animals from which it came (#153, Pyzdry 1719). Indeed, one

could use the term "to dry someone up" as a synonym for maleficient witchcraft in general,

as when Zofia Philipowicowa allegedly asked her fellow house-maid to "ususzyc [dry up]"

her manor-lord's brother. In the Sejm Piekielny, the demon Lelek, who is represented as the

particular servant of witches, explains his activity in the world: "If I can, I take a person's

soul / If I can't, I dry up his body"40 (1622 w . 1173-1174; 1903 p. 57).41

Contemporary sources understood the drying activities of witches within the context of

the limited good, as moves in a zero-sum game by which the moisture stolen from others

accrued to the witch. The Jesuit preacher Aleksander Lorencowic captured this notion aptly,

writing that with the devil's help a witch can make "mine, which was as healthy as can be,

slowly dry out and wither, while the other swells up" 42 (Lorencowic 1671 vol. 1 p. 154). This

elite characterization fits neatly with commoner conceptions: Zofia Skrzyneczka suspected

witchcraft when her cow stopped giving milk, and the calves "dried up [uschly]" and died

(#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). Although witches could and did dry up their victims from pure

"Jesli mogq, postaram sie_ o jego duszq / Ktorej jesli nie dostane_, wzdy cialo wysusz^"
Compare also similar practices from Russia: soil was gathered from around footprints of cattle or people and
hung in the chimney for malefice; similarly, hair was stolen and attached to the chimney with clay (Ivanits
1989 p. 104). Indeed drying seems to have been the central metaphor for witchcraft in Russia (ibid. pp. 65-
68). Consider this revealing statement of an old woman just after the outbreak of klikushestvo (demon-
possession) in 1898:
What can I tell you? They say there are no sorcerers now. In the cities they don't believe in
them. Then why is it, I say to you, that a person buys a cow from another and [the cow]
begins to dry up? Or a maiden when she marries is healthy, but after the wedding ceremony
she begins to dry up, and everything dries up [... ] She becomes bewitched [... ] it happens
quite frequently! (Quoted after Worobec 2001 p. 66).
"moy, co byl zdrowiusienki, pomahi wysycha, wiqdnieje a drugi puchnie."

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 • Healing and harming •

spite, as in many of the examples above, more often the goal was to obtain profit at anothers

loss. In such cases, cattle were by far the most common victims of drying, as witches took

from them their "profit" of rich milk and cream, leaving only whey. Thus the characteristic

utterance attributed to witches: "I take the profit, but not the whole thing."

Milk, again

The most characteristic activity of Polish witches, according to the common people's

conception, was the theft of milk from the cattle of their neighbours. The victim's cows

suddenly gave less and less milk, or milk of poor quality or milk mixed with blood, while the

witches cows produced pail after pail of rich, creamy milk. The "profit" of the victim's cattle

had been transferred into the cattle of the witch. This is one of the oldest, and most long-

lasting, of Polish witchcraft beliefs. Milk-theft appears in bishop's court documents from the

15th and early 16th century (trials in Wieluh 1476, Gdansk 1483, Plock 1501 (Koranyi 1927a

pp. 14-15; Ulanowski ed. 1902 par. 845; 1908 pars. 202, 897; see also Szyszkowski 1913 pp.

121-122), while as recently as 2004 a man was accused by his neighbour of milk-theft—he

took her to court for defamation, and she apologized (Gazeta Wyborcza 2004). Although

most actual trials were for more serious offences such as causing sickness or death, milk-

theft magic or milk-protection magic is a regular part of confessions as well as of witness's

testimony. So central is this practice to Polish witchcraft, that one accused witch had, as

evidence against her, the fact that she had in her possession at the time of arrest 12 pails of

milk with thick cream, from only three cows (#81, Muszyna 1678). When denouncing

another woman as a witch, Dorota of Siedlikow pointed out that "she has plenty of butter

from just one cow,"43 implying that it most be stolen through witchcraft (#21, Kalisz 1613).

Conversely, The husband of another accused witch tried to prove his wife's innocence by
43
"ma masla dose po jednej krowie"

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

claiming "I have nine cows, but I don't have even a drop of milk, and my wife always used

to say, 'they call me a witch, even though I have to buy cheese'"44 (#98, Wisnicz Nowy

1688b).

Not only was milk-theft a primary activity of witches, but it was also, according to both

demonology and confessions, a primary motivation. Women were tempted to become

witches when their cattle lost their milk; it was on such occasions, characteristically, that the

devil appeared to offer his pact {Malleus pt. 2 qu. 1 ch. 1; Summers ed. 1970 p. 96; Zabkowic

1612 [Lewandowski ed. 1992] p. 34). Dorota of Siedlikow's devil promised her butter (#21,

Kalisz 1613); a certain Katarzyna tempted Agnieszka Stelmaszka to become a witch,

promising her "milkiness [mleczno—i.e., lots of milk]" (#160, Pyzdry 1731). Similarly,

when Regina Wierzbicka saw milk flowing from a staff owned by her associate Borucina, the

latter told her that "the devil makes that milk; when you give yourself over to him, you'll also

have such milk"45 (#84, Bochnia 1679).46

The mixture of economic and symbolic value placed on cows and their milk shows

clearly in the testimony of a peasant in Jazowsko, whose cow had been stolen, before the

village court in 1667: "I had only one cow which like a mother provided for myself, my wife

and my children; we ate only what she produced"47 (Grodziski 1967 item 12 pp. 37-38). On

this point peasants and their masters were in full agreement. Haur wrote that God, in his

goodness, had created cows to feed the poor (1693 p. 51). He reproached milkmaids and

cowherds for their coarseness: cows must be treated gently, as in Germany, where, according

44
"ia ma_m krow dziewie_c, a odrobiny nabiahi nie majn, a zona zawsze mowiela: a to mowia. na mnie_, ze ia
czarownica, a musze_ ser kupowac"
45
"to diabol robi to mleko, kiedy mu siq be_dziesz oddawala, to be_dziesz tez tak miala"
46
Cf. DWOKvol. 7 pp. 78-81, reporting beliefs from 19th c. Malopolska: a main result and motivation of the
pact, made on Thursday of a new moon, was to increase milk-production at the expense of one's neighbors.
47
"tylko jedne. krowq mialem, ktora mie_ i zone, mojq, i dziatki jako matka chowala, bosmy sie. tylko ma. zywili"

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 • Healing and harming •

to Haur, they are indulged like children, petted, spoken to mildly, and sung to while being

milked (ibid. p. 53). Every peasant household should have a cow, "without which one cannot

live"48 (ibid. p. 44). Further, in a chapter given over wholly to dairy, Haur comments that

milk is not only good and pleasant to eat, but is also "greatly useful in many medicines;"49

fresh milk especially can be used to cure wounds, skin blemishes, and interior conditions

(ibid. pp. 64, 66). Milk was not only an important source of nutrition (and in peasant

households especially, the principal source of protein), but had a central place in the

symbolic world as well. The dairy-yield of its milch-cow served as both an "objective" and a

symbolic index of a household's well-being. Here one might note that, although most peasant

households kept several head of swine, and these constituted an extremely important source

of protein, lard, and cash (Wyczahski 1969 p. 140), malefice against swine figures hardly at

all in the Polish witch-trials: I know of just one rather marginal example (#162, Pyzdry

1732).50

Milk-theft, as understood and experienced in early modern Poland, was a real harm—it

robbed especially the poor of one of their most important assets and sources of nutrition. But

"bez ktorey zyc niepodobno"

"na rozne lekarstwa iest wielce przygodny"
I have not explored psychological or psychoanalytical motives for the symbolism of milk here, although these
are obvious enough—the peasant of Jazowsko, it will be recalled, explicitly compared his milk-giving cow
to a human mother. Other interpretations are also possible: Diane Worobec has suggested that the
"supposedly insatiable desire [of witches] for cow's milk and cheese" suggests a tendency to bestiality in the
Russian and Ukrainian imagined witch (Worobec 2001 p. 97)—a suggestion I find unconvincing. At the
folk-level, one might recall here that ancestor-spirits, house-demons, and tutelary snakes were
characteristically offered milk (see 3.1); at the level of popular Catholicism, the imagery of the Blessed
Virgin nourishing both her child and her Church with her milk might not be irrelevant. A Jesuit anecdote for
use in sermons brings together cow's milk and human milk as nourishing substances vulnerable to magical
attack: pilgrims to Krak6w offered to buy breast-milk from a young wife. She agreed, but at her husband's
advice substituted cows milk. The husband followed the pilgrims, who went to a corpse hanging at the
gallows, and poured the milk into his mouth, upon which the corpse cried out, "O dishonest woman, you
have fooled and betrayed us! [Niepoczciwa bialoglowo, to zes nas oszukala i zradzila!]." Feeding the milk
to the corpse was supposed to have caused plague in the city, but since cows-milk was substituted, there was
a plague among the cattle-herds instead (Kazanczuk 1991 pp. 34-35; Jurkowski 2004 [c. 1715] pp. 249-250;
who attributes it to the mid-17th century Jesuit preacher Stanislaw Bronikowski. In fact the same story was
told much earlier, with Jews as the culprits, in the anti-Semitic tracts of Miczihski (1618) and Mojecki
(1589); see Tuwim 1960 [1923 pp. 46,432).

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

it was more than this: the popularity, the frequency, and the persistence of this imagined

crime has to do with its perfect articulation of the limited-good cosmology which also

informed most other aspects of the Polish imagination of witchcraft. Moisture was

appropriated in the form of dew, which in turn caused the cattle to lose their moisture, their

udders to dry up. The dried up cattle, their profit stolen, metaphorically represented larger

problems such as sickness in the household or generalized misfortune, so that milk theft

figures often even in those trials where it is not a central allegation. The uncontrolled loss of

milk stood for loss and misfortune more generally. One can hardly find a better symbolic

image of the "drying out" represented and caused by witchcraft than that given by a cow near

Opatow, which leaked milk from its tail and hooves, wasting away instead of nourishing the

household.51 But the drying up of cattle was not just symbolic, it was understood quite

literally. When Agnieszka Frabczyna caused Szczejsna Komornica's cow to go to

Agnieszka's barn for milking, the latter understood that this was witchcraft. She warned

Agnieszka: "Fear God, and don't dry up my cow"52—after which the cow stopped going to

Agnieska's barn (#140, Szczekociny 1706). Milk-theft stood simultaneously for itself and for

a larger system of crimes and misfortunes.

Witches could steal milk in a large variety of ways. Suspicion fell on those who visited

a barn in which a calf had just been born, or who attempted to steal such items as the

afterbirth or manure from a cow that had just given birth (#75, Slomniki 1674; #101, Nowy

Wisnicz 1689). Other accused witches gathered herbs from the fields or the field-borders

where cattle graze, again usually before dawn. Regina Kijowa admitted to having heard that

to get lots of cream, one should pick the weeds from several gardens, boil them, wash one's

51
1 take this image from Baranowski (1952 p. 143), who cites APLodz, AMOpatow sig. 1 f. 193 as his source.
As with many trials cited by Baranowski, he does not give a date or any other details.
52
"sie_ boy Boga, aby mi iey nie susz."

274
 • Healing and harming •

cow's udders in the decoction, and pour the wash-water out on the road (#63, Che_ciny 1665;

cf. the testimony of Jadwiga Ghichowa from the same trial). They also gathered the grass and

soil where cattle had walked out to pasture, especially at the first pasturing in Spring (e.g.

#75, Slomniki 1674; #98 and #100, Nowy Wisnicz 1688). It was in reference to such

practices that the Sejm piekielny speaks of witches—

Kiedy bydlo idzie z pola, przed nim umiataja_, Sweeping before the cows, when they come home
A z cudzej obory do swej barlogu dostajg.. Bringing milk to their lairs from the barns of strangers.
{Sejmpiekielny 1622 w . 892-893; 1903 p. 48)

—and it was against such practices that peasantwomen beat the cattle with Easter palms, or

caused them to step over a scythe or an axe on their way out to pasture.

However, the most common way to steal milk was to steal moisture, and the most

common way to restore stolen milk was to restore moisture. In both cases, which tend to

blend into each other, the "moisture" most often used to this effect was dew. We have

already seen that witches were imagined to collect dew and herbs before dawn, especially at

holidays. In the 15th century it was already supposed that dew-gathering on Midsummer's

morning was intended to steal milk (Bruckner 1985b p. 310), while in a 19th-century account

the dew collected on Pentecost morning transforms itself into milk (DWOK vol. 15 pp. 112-

114). Merely to be up and around, particularly in the fields, of an early summer morning,

could be grounds for suspicion of witchcraft. Witnesses against the burgherwoman Justyna

Rabiaszka Sukienniczka claimed to have seen her gathering dew in the fields around dawn,

while her daughter was alleged to fetch water from the river before dawn even in the

summer, when morning came so early (#101, Nowy Wisnicz 1689). Olena Baniaska "went

about in other people's fields in the morning on holidays, giving the appearance of

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

witchcraft"53 (#134, Klimkowka 1702). Regina Frakowa admitted that she gathered dew to

"sprinkle cows,"54 smearing it on their horns, feet, and bellies (#127, Slomniki 1700). Anna

Wiazowa was similarly accused of gathering dew and reciting "I take the profit, but not the

whole thing;" but she managed to deflect blame by explaining that she had gathered dew and

sprinkled her cattle to undo the malefice of witches (#63, Chexiny 1665).—I will return to

this case at the end of the chapter.

Water and related liquids had a double symbolism: imbibed or bathed in, they restored

the moisture, counter-acted the drying that was understood to characterise witchcraft. But

water also purified and cleansed; it was meant not only to be collected but also dispersed,

taking illness and misfortune and enchantment away with it. Witchcraft entailed the

unnatural and excessive loss of water; counter-magic, and healing more generally, involved

the proper circulation of water in its double aspect as drink and as the medium for washing.

Water was also, of course, the principal symbolic element in baptism: in a double dialectic,

baptism borrowed a basic, perhaps universal symbolism of water and washing to

sacramentally purify initiates of original sin and demonic influence; folk practices re-

borrowed the symbolism of baptism to legitimize and give added power to rituals of

purification. Healing rituals often combined exorcistic motifs with cleansing: according to

testimony from a witch accused on the basis of her association with one Marusza, who had

recently been burned, Marusza washed sick children to exorcise them of "klobuchy," and

then poured the water out in front of the house (#22, Kalisz 1616). Malgorzata Magierska

washed a child in holy water; although in her trial this was said to have caused the child to be

seriously ill, the original intention must have been curative (#137, Nowy Wisnicz 1703).

53
"po cudzych polach w swiqto z rana chodzila, dajaj; podobienstwo do czarow."
54
"krowy kropic."

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 • Healing and harming •

Jadwiga Macowa made explicit the symbolic connection between water and milk, when she

gave children curative or exorcistic baths in buttermilk (#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688).

Similarly, many rituals to protect cattle from withcraft, or to return the "profit" to them

after it had been destroyed by witches, made use of the assumption that to add water was to

counter-act the drying activity of witches. Cattle were sprinkled with holy water (#3, Poznah

1544; #21, Kalisz 1613, #99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688) to protect them from witchcraft or cleanse

them of its effects. They could also be washed from head to tail in water taken from a

running source, such as a river (#11, Kalisz 1584), from a place of magical potency, such as

the mill-wheel (#55, Nowy Wisnicz 1659),55 or from a well, before sunrise (#50, Turek 1652;

#101, Nowy Wisnicz 1689). Jadwiga Ghichowa was accused of washing her cows all night

before major holidays, and then pouring out the water on the roads (#63, Ch^ciny 1665).

Similarly, Katarzyna Korzynina admitted that "at the advice of others, when my cow stopped

giving milk, I washed it in holy water and herbs, and, having washed it, I told a peasant-man

to pour the wash-water out at the cross- roads or into the Wisla"56 (#20, Krakow 1611). Here

all the elements are present: holy water as both a sacramental with sacred and apotropaic

power, water as a medium of cleansing and of returning moisture to something that had

become dry; dispersal of the illness or witchcraft in a way that ensures it is not passed on to

neighbours—at the crossroads or into running water. A healthy economy of bodily fluids

implied a steady flow, with neither too much fluid being gathered—which would constitute

witchcraft—nor too much leaking away—the problem of witchcraft victims. In practice, the

According to the Sejm piekielny, un-Christian peasants "send their apprentices under the mill, for water [pod
mlyn po wode, czeladz wysylajaj" (1622 w.. 868; 1903 p. 47). However, thoroughly Christian peasants still
used mill-water to un-bewitch milk in the late 20th century (Lehr 1982 p. 141). In #65, Praszka 1665, a bath
in mill-wheel water was part of a campaign of love-magic.
"za rada, ludzi, gdy jej krowa mleka nie dawala, omiwala ja_ swie_con% woda_ i z zielem omiwszy, kazala to
chlopu wylac na krzyzowa_ drogq albo do Wisly."

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

distinction between adding moisture to one's own cattle to restore their lost health, and

adding it to one's own cattle to steal a limited good from others, could become very blurry

indeed. It was also relational: what I experience as counter-magic might look, to my

neighbour, very much like witchcraft, especially if I am stealing back what is "rightfully

mine" from him.

the paradox of witchcraft

To protect milk from spoiling or being stolen by witchcraft, early modern Polish

women employed a wide arsenal of ritual measures, taken from a diverse symbolic range. In

addition to those rites which depended upon washing cattle or otherwise adding moisture to

them. Cattle were fed the herbs blessed at "Our Lady of the Herbs" or other holidays; these

herbs could be given to them raw, with bread, in a tea, or as part of the liquid used to wash

them (see above, and Appendix B for numerous examples). Milk could also be filtered

through blessed herbs (#63, Chexiny 1663; cf. Niebrzegowska 2000 pp. 101-103 for the

identical practice in the late 20th century); or through other blessed objects, notably "blessed

cheese" (#61, Checiny 1665b); a cheesecloth boiled during Easter Mass (#46, Szadek 1649);

blessed bread (#4, Poznan 1549); even through the stolen Eucharistic host (#42, Lublin 1644;

#59, Lublin 1664; see 2.2.2 below). In a ritual involving symbols of purity and also, one

suspects, implicit allusion to the Virgin Mary whose breasts gave nourishing milk without sin

or stain, a premenstrual virgin could stand on one side of the threshold in a white shirt, the

milkmaid with her pail on the other, and the milk was filtered through the shirt and over the

threshold (#61, Ch^ciny 1665b).

However, more aggressive measures were sometimes necessary. Cattle were made to

step over a scythe as they went out to pasture for the first time in Spring, so that a would-be

278
 • Healing and harming •

milk thief would be cut by this axe. Milk could also be filtered through or across an axe or

scythe or knife or a heated horseshoe; e.g. Katarzyna Kapuscina confessed that "against

enchanted milk I was taught to heat a scythe in the fire and lay it on top of the cheesecloth,

and filter the milk through this"57 (#62, Checiny 1665; cf. #85, Warta c. 1679; #140,

Szczekociny 1706; for similar rites in the 19th century see Slomka 1929 p. 205; DWOK vol.

7 p. 89). Such rituals explicitly attacked the attacking witch. She would cut or burn herself

when she attempted to steal the milk, or, if she had already stolen it, she would be cut or

burnt and would undo her spell. Similarly, Haur recommended washing witch-spoiled cattle

in a decoction of burdock and manure, which would make the guilty party "tremble and
CO

itch" until they had undone their magic (1693 tr. 28 ch. 3, p. 469). In the aggression and

willingness to cause harm of these countermeasures to witchcraft, one can see that the line

between apotropaic magic and spiteful malefice begins to blur.

Witches plucked grass from the hoof-prints of cattle to steal their milk, and hung soil

from hoofprints or footprints in the chimney to "dry up" their victims. In a precise inversion

of these practices, the accused witch Jadwiga Macowa the younger testified that:
matka moia krowy kadziela y gdy sie iey mleko my mother taught me to cense the cows, and when their
zepsowalo, to nie_m piec oblepiala; po tern kilka milk spoiled, to plaster [soil or grass from their hoofprints]59
razy chodziela do potoku y wody nosiela, cicaski onto the stove, then she went a few times to the brook and
obmywala, takze kamyki z potoku nosiela, a brought water, and washed the cow's teats, she also brought
palela ie pod krowa. y mnie powiedziala, ze to stones from the brook and burnt them under the cow, and
dla lepszey smietany, torn ia sie tez matce she told me that this is for better cream, I saw my mother
przypatrowala; bylo to tego postu. [...] Matka doing this, it was during Lent of this year [...] Mother also
mnie nauczyla stop krowich wyrzynac y niemi taught me to yank up [the herbs or grass] from the cows
kadzic na to, zeby mleka dawaly; takze ziele hoofprints, and cense them with it, so that they should give
miewala rozne (#97, Wisnicz Nowy 1688). more milk; she also had various herbs.

57
"dla uroku mleka nauczono mnie sierp rozpalic i nad powa_zka_polozyc, mleko cedzic."
58
"truchlec i swe_dzic sie. b?dzie"
59
Jadwiga does not specify what her mother pasted or stuck to the stove, but in the context of her whole
testimony it seems most likely that she meant soil [ziemia] or grass [trawa]. It cannot be herbs or incense, as
they don't have the same gender as the pronoun.

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

Was this witchcraft or counter-magic? The washing in running water and the censing with

blessed herbs would usually be categorized as counter-magical; the plucking of grass from

the footprints, and the drying in the stove, would seem to be witchcraft (cf. the maleficient

drying of footprint soil in #37, Skrzynno 1639). But, at least on Jadwiga's telling of it, her

mother seems to have plucked grass from the footprints of her own cattle: the subsequent

drying in the stove can then only be understood as an attempt to dry up the witch who was

drying up the cattle—malefice in the name of healing one's own cattle.

Similarly, consider the following ritual aimed at the restoration of stolen milk:

one steals manure from the cattle of the suspected witch on a Thursday morning. A portion of

this manure is put into an eggshell, along with milk and yeast. One then boils a cheesecloth

over a fire of wood gathered at the suspect's homestead, and filters the milk mixture, together

with milk from one's own cows, through this boiled cheesecloth. Finally, one adds the herb

wrotycz60 to the filtered milk, while saying "By the Virgin Mary's power and the power of all

the Saints, I take back my profit, that it should return to me just as this wrotycz returns"61

(#61, Che_ciny 1665b, from the testimony of Maryna Lazarcowka Wnukowa). Although this

ritual was presented by the accused witch, quite sincerely, as an attempt to regain witch-

stolen milk, all of its elements adhere very closely to the popular conception of how witches

themselves stole milk. The neighbour who caught Maryna attempting to steal manure or

wood from his homestead, and who would know herself not to be a witch, would not hesitate

to accuse Maryna herself of witchcraft.

Because the leaves of wrotycz (tansy, Tanacetum vulgare L.) turn back toward the stem, it is used in Polish
magic as a restorer or returner; indeed, "wrotycz" is related the verb wrocic or return. See discussion in
Appendix B.
"Panny Maryi mocaj Wszystkich Swiqtych etc. biore_ swoj pozytek, zeby sie_ nawrocil do mnie, jako tak
wroticzka nawraca"

280
 • Healing and harming •

Milk-protection and milk-restoration rituals were indubitably really practiced, to greater

or lesser degree, by all peasant households. While the more elaborate spells may have been

passed down from mother to daughter, the basic rituals were the common property of all

peasants, male and female. Everybody fed their cattle crumbs from the Christmas Eve

oplatek (a blessed wafer shared by everyone present at the Christmas Eve feast); everybody

gave their cattle blessed herbs to eat (and teas made from boiled blessed herbs to drink) at

prescribed times of the year; everybody sprinkled their cattle with holy water at the first

pasturing in spring; most hung blessed herbs in the stable or over the barn door. More

elaborate practices, such as washing the cattle in a decoction of blessed herbs through the

night of Holy Saturday, or censing them with the smoke of burning herbs, were also,

unquestionably, very common—many of these practices are still common today, or have died

out only in the last few decades. Central to my argument is the fact that no sharp line of

demarcation can be made between 1) protecting one's cattle from milk-theft; 2) recovering

the milk production of one's cattle, after it has been stolen or spoiled by a witch; 3)

increasing the profit of one's own cattle, ostensibly without stealing the profit from others;

and 4) harmful milk theft. All these activities blend imperceptibly into one another, so that

one cannot speak clearly of "white magic" versus "black magic" or of "defence" versus

"offence." One woman's "recovery" of her cow's lost milk must look, to an outsider, very

like another woman's "theft"—one might say that the best defence is a good offence. It

follows from this that, while milk-magic was widely practiced, few or no practitioners

thought of themselves as milk-thieves—that is, as witches. People were constantly doing all

sorts of magic—without there being any actual witches to do it against. The imagined

activity of thieves generated the real activities of protectors and recoverers, and the imagined

281
 • Chapter 2.1 •

rituals and spells of thieves generated the real rituals and spells of their adversaries. As

Favret-Saada has commented of a similar situation in modern France, "It is very likely that

no one [...] throws spells, which does not prevent people from being hit by them" (1989 p.

43).

If this picture of magic and counter-magic is correct, several interesting implications

follow. First, we have another source for what I have been calling the "common language" of

witchcraft confession. How does a person—whether accuser or confessing accused w i t c h -

know what real witches do? Easy: they take the their own practices—the justified, legitimate,

defensive spells—and invert them to make them unjustified attacks or thefts. This is

especially easy in that counter-magical rituals are already inversions of the imagined rituals

of witches. Secondly, it seems plausible that a great deal of magical practice must have

constantly been taking place, without anyone ever having to think of themselves as a witch.

This is not to say that nobody ever really tried to steal their neighbour's milk; on the contrary

this must have been attempted very often. But it could always be rationalized as defence, or

as recovery, or as attempted reparation for milk previously stolen. Accordingly, there could

be a great deal of witchcraft going on, without the necessity of any witches. Such counter-

magical practice will have often been observed, and, since it so closely resembled the alleged

practice of witches, and since the observer would never think of themselves as a witch, this

would provide a great deal of the evidence for witchcraft suspicion and accusation. Here,

again, witches are found to be imaginary, but the imaginary witch produces real action,

which in turn provides more evidence for imaginary witches. In such a context, it would be

very easy to find constant, real evidence of witchcraft, and to know quite precisely what

witches do.

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 • Healing and harming •

Burial and disorder

The circulation of moisture was not, however, the only means or result of witchcraft. In

the interest of completeness, I will here describe one other means of witchcraft in early

modern Poland—that of burying "witchcraft substances." I will put off describing the third

popular method, that of "giving" or "sending" devils, to Part 3 of this work.

Witches were widely believed to bury various items in order to cause illness or death.

Such items included animal or human bones (#22, Kalisz 1616; #33, Bydgoszcz 1638; #62,

Che_ciny 1665c; #96, Kleczew 1688; #98, Nowy Wisnicz 1688b; #99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688c;

#154, Nieszawa 1721b); items from a coffin or tomb (Pasek 1968 [c. 1690] p. 406); worms,

toads, or lizards (#96, Kleczew 1688; #97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688a; #172, Kiszkowo 1761); the

head or even the whole body of a mare or a cow (#21, Kalisz 1613; #83, Warta 1678; #96,

Kleczew 1688; #172, Kiszkowo 1761); or, at a rather different symbolic register, the Gospel

(#80, Lublin 1678) or the crumbled and desecrated Eucharistic host (see 2.3.2). The drying

powders already discussed could also be buried rather than sprinkled (#84, Bochnia 1679).

They were buried under the threshold of houses, where people would step over them, or of

barns, to harm cattle; they could also be buried in the garden to destroy its produce, under a

person's bed to effect their death; under the stable to kill cattle and horses; under beer-vats to

spoil the fermentation process. Perhaps most often, or at least most stereotypically, such

items were buried under the liminal miedza or field-border which figures so prominently in

Polish folk-practices: the Sejm piekielny describes witches "burying witchcraft in the fields

and on the field-borders / Bringing profit to themselves, spoiling things for others"62 {Sejm

"Tarn po polach i po miedzach czary zakopuje / Sobie pozytki przywodzi, drugim ludziom psuje."

283
 • Chapter 2.1 •

piekielny 1622 w . 876-877; 1903 p. 47). Here, as also in Haur, such buried items were

referred to simply as "witchcraft [czary]" (1693 p. 455).

Although such buried items could be target-specific—as when Regina Czubatka

confessed to burying a dead sheep-dog to destroy her manor-lord's flock of sheep (#96,

Kleczew 1688)—more often there is little pattern to be found. In fact lack of pattern is the

point: contemporaries in both texts and trials emphasized not only that the things buried were

"disgusting [plugawe]" but that they were mixed together, disorganized, disorderly: Haur

describes such witchcraft-substance as "any old garbage" [ladaiakie smieciska]" 1693 p.

455). Such a disgusting mixture of things which ought to be kept apart was intended to cause

similar mixture, confusion, befuddlement, disharmony in the victim or in his or her

household. In a trial before the Nowy Wisnicz court, for example, the plaintiff produced the

"bundle of disgusting things" which had caused "our household to have no health, nor profit

from the cattle, nor good weather in the crops." The court examined this bundle, and "saw

some sort of material, very mixed up, with ashes and some kind of bones, very disgusting"63

(#29, Nowy Wisnicz 1632). Similarly, Krzysztoph Luzar suspected witchcraft when he found

"some sort of disgusting things"64 buried in his barn (#14, Belzyce 1598).

Andrzej Szyjewski has proposed that traditional Slavic understandings of illness usually

fell under either of two broad categories: postrzal or a sudden sharp pain; and koltun, a

generalized disharmony in the person and in the household, symbolized by the tangled hair or

elf-locks (koltun) which are the external symptom of internal problems ((Szyjewski 2003 p.

203; cf. Moszyhski 1967 p. 216). Although the term koltun appears only in two, relatively

late trials—Ewa Knafiowa sent a "koltun" in beer (#151, Pyzdry 1719); Zofia Pe^dziszka

63
"wqzelek" [full of] "plugawe rzeczy"; "Sa_d widzial jakies materie mieszane jakoby z popiolem i kosciami
jakimis, bardzo plugawe."
64
"nieyakie rzeczy plugawe"

284
 • Healing and harming •

sprinkled "koltun" in a powder (#153, Nieszawa 1721a)—the general effects such as marital

and household disharmony, and a general messy mixedness in the body and mind, appear in

earlier trials as the result of the mixed and messy buried witchcraft.65

It is possible here to discern a structural opposition between such buried witchcraft and

the methods used to protect against witchcraft. Protective amulets, it will be recalled, were

usually carried hung about the neck, and the protective herbs recommended at all levels of

education as effective means against witchcraft were hung above openings: in windows,

above the doorway to the home, above the entrance to the cattle-barn. Crosses and holy

images hung above doorways or above beds; the witchcraft and filth were buried below these

locations. The blessed protective herbs were associated with freshness and cleanness; their

scents were for the most part sharp and cool, minty or bitter: although the hanging herbs were

dry, they retained symbolic wetness in having been gathered in the dewy pre-dawn, and in

having been sprinkled with holy water. The "filth" of witchcraft, in contrast, was buried

under precisely those sorts of places that herbs hung over; it attacked from below, they

protected from above; it polluted, they cleansed. This structural opposition should not,

perhaps, be over-emphasized—"witchcraft" could also be hidden in a houses' thatching, and

The correlation of matted hair with witchcraft, often taken to be particularly characteristic of Polish
superstition, appears in fact to have appeared rather late in Poland. In a case for adultery with possible love-
magic, in Lublin 1650, the daughter of the accused Urszula Franoszka testified that "I also have no
knowledge that [my mother] practiced witchcraft, except that I saw her once with a koltunka [Czarow takze
zadne wiadomosc nie ma oprudz isz widzialam ia^raz z kohunkaj" (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 215
(Consularia) f. 71v): this appears to be a reference to a cunning-woman recognisable by her matted hair. In
his memoirs of 1670, the foreign agent Ulryk von Werdum reported the widespread "chalton" or plica
among the Poles. "Like a felt hat" completely covering the head, it caused horrible head-aches, but
removing it could cause blindness. He also reported that this disease had come to Poland, from the Tatars
and Cossacks, only in recent decades (Gintel ed. 1971 vol. 1 p. 293). However, by the time of Haur's
writing, the koltun or plica polonica as he called it, was recognized as a specifically Polish disease: Haur
devotes a chapter to the koltun, its cure, and its causes: it can be acquired from bad water, or spoiled blood,
or through inheritence or contagion, but "it is caught most often, supposedly, from Witchcraft; the Jews used
to be suspected of spreading it, but as they suffer from it as well, there's little more to say on that subject"
[trafia sie_ a podobno naybardziey z Czarow; byly otym na Zydow suspicye, ale ze y oni toz cierpia^ trudno o
tym wie_cey co pisac]" (1693 pp. 418-419).

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 • Chapter 2.1 •

protective magic could operate from below, as when cattle stepped over a sickle on their way

out to the fields. Nevertheless, this opposition of above and below, cleanliness and filth does

seem to have been operative, and to have been understood at the time. Haur, for example,

says that the "garbage" found buried under the threshold should be dug up and placed among

the cleansing herbs such as babka and boze drzewko, thus neutralizing their evil power (1693

p. 455, and see Appendix B).

Wiem, wide czartow w piekle i gdzie drudzy siedza^,

Oni tez o mnie, jak siq radzq, wiedza_.
We czwartek siq schodzimy na roztajnych drogach,
Wiqcej chodze, na glowie anizli na nogach.
I know many devils in hell, and where others sit
They also know about me, I make sure of that.
On Thursdays we get together, at the cross-roads,
2.1.4: Walking there not on our feet, but mostly on our heads.
Bald Mountain —Peregrynacja dziadowska 1614 w . 772-775; 1961 p. 171.

Of course, the discourse of witchcraft in Poland, both literary and in trials, was not only a

discourse of consumption and over-consumption, of drying and pouring out, of burying and

uncovering. It was also about sex with devils and demons; about acts of ritual desecration—

the murder of babies, the murder of the innocent Infant in the Eucharistic host; about dances

at the "border" or at "Lysa Gora"—"Bald Mountain." In Chapter 2.3 we will have occasion

to explore the developed stereotype of the witch as sacrilegious anti-Catholic; in 3.2 we will

examine the complexities of the witch's relation with her demon lover. In this section, I

provide a brief over-view of the witches' meeting as it emerges in Polish witch-trials, and

suggest that it can, in part, be understood in terms of the organizing metaphors of

consumption and moisture.

As early as 1854, Ryszard Berwinski treated the sabbat in Poland as evidence for the

foreign provenance and utter cosmopolitanism of Polish witchcraft. "We find here," he said,

286
 • Healing and harming •

"as in other times, among other nations, always the same superstitions"—the same ointments

and powders, the same adoration of the devil, the same parody of church ceremony

(Berwinski 1984 [1862, 1st ed. 1854]). The literary history of early modern Poland would

seem to bear out this claim. As noted (1.1.3) the developed sabbat motif may have entered

into Polish jurisprudential consciousness via Damhouder's description of it (1601 [1554] cap.

61 sec. 115). However, as the above quotation from the Peregrynacja shows, the motif was

already, by the early 17th century, well-attested in Polish popular literature. In sources as

diverse as Marcin of Klecko's anti-Protestant Procy na ministry i na wszystkie heretyki

(1607), Gamalski's Przestrogi (1743), and the ribald Peregrynacja and Sejm Piekielny

(1622), the witches' meeting at Bald Mountain figured as a scene of ritual inversion,

marginality, and carnivalesque orgy. As in the West, the sabbat provided, better than any

other aspect of witchcraft, a coherent constellation of inversionary motifs with which to think

about order, society, and the Church.

The key to any interpretation of the sabbat-motif lies in its inversionary structure: "we

walk there not on our feet, but mostly on our heads" (Peregrynacja 1614 v. 775; 1961 p.

171). For the author of the Sejm, witches fly to ^graniccC—the border or margin—by

"turning their shirts inside out"66: the inversion of clothing facilitates passage to the meeting

which is itself a festival of inversion (Sejm 1622 v. 873; 1903 p. 47).67 This structure of

"gzlo, w ktorym chodzi, wywrocic na nice"

Possibly the witnesses who testified against Regina Fralcowa, that she had run about "naked" in a nightshirt,
believed her to have been attempting a literal enactment of such inversion—though it is not recorded that the
nightshirt was inside-out (#127, Slomniki 1700). Such an interpretation would help to explain the comment
by the noble Pan Kawecki at her trial: "The matter at hand is not harm, whether she harmed through
witchcraft any thing at the manor or among the peasantry: the only issue is the honor of God. Is it not proof,
that she was seen naked and has sworn to this, which is against human nature [nie o zadna_ szkode_, zeby
miala szkodzic czarostwem swojem w czemkolwiek dworowi albo gromadzie, tylko o sam honor Boski
potrzeba sie. ujmowac. Czy to nie dokument, ze nago ja_ widzieli i poprzysie_zona jest, co jest przeciwko
naturze czlowieczej [...]]." Kawecki appears to have been attempting to guide the trial in the direction of

287
 • Chapter 2.1 •

inversion, the sabbat as the opposite of all that is good, or right, or sacred, or orderly,

imparted to it a flexibility of function well-suited to every sort of satire or moralizing

discourse. As Stuart Clark has insisted, "Devils and witches turned particular things upside-

down in particular ways. It was up to their audiences to explain the choices and interpret the

meanings by reading into each individual performance an actual or symbolic inversion of a

traditional form of life" (1997 p. 81).

For the Catholic polemicist Marcin of Klecko (in a pamphlet suggesting that the

Confederation of Warsaw, which extended legal tolerance to Protestants in Poland, had been

ratified by a sejmik or dietine of devils), Bald Mountain was the Lutheran church in Poznah.

"Several dozen witches confessed under torture that several hundred devils danced with

them, at Bald Mountain in Poznan; know then in what manner that [Protestant] Church was

sanctified, by a Parliament of witches and devils" (Marcin of Klecko 1607 p. 87). Jakub

Kazimierz Haur, in a comment that has been repeatedly misread to depict him as a rabid

demonologist, used the Bald Mountain motif instead for gentle satire. In saying that "one

need not search the world for bald mountain, for wherever there's a Tavern, there bald

Mountain is as well"69 (1693 pp. 157-158), Haur meant no more than that the dancing,

drunkenness, and other disorderly behaviour frequently encountered in taverns and inns

might be likened to the imagined excesses of the witches' gathering. Other Catholic authors

used descriptions of the sabbat to imagine and reflect upon the nature of heresy and apostasy.

The Czarownica author, despite his conviction that the sabbat was nearly always an illusion

Bald Mountain: he succeeded in doing this, and at her second torture Frakowa confessed to flying "to the
border."
6
"co kilka dziesia_t czarownic na mejcach wyznalo, ze z nimi kilka set dyablow, na Lysey gorze w Poznaniu
tancowalo, weycie, znac iakoscie ten Zbor poswie_cili, ze sobie tarn czarci Seym z czarownicami uczynili."
69
"[...] iey podobno szukac po swiecie niepotrzeba, bo gdzie Karczma, tarn prawie y lysa Gora."
7
The comment figures in a chapter not on witchcraft but on the proper regulation of village taverns and the
dangers of over-drinking (tr. 7 ch. 4).

288
 • Healing and harming •

and fantasy, sometimes created by the devil, sometimes by the witches' own melancholy

(1714 [1639] pp. 31, 57-58), nevertheless described the gathering of witches as a heretical

anti-mass: witches renounced God, Mary, and the saints, their baptism and all other

sacraments; they enter into "indecency [wszeteczenstwo]" with devils, sacrifice newborn

babies to him, and steal the Holy Sacrament for their satanic rites (ibid. p. 26). Chmielowski,

to whom we owe the most complete Polish account of the sabbat, repeats all these motifs but

also develops more detailed theological and moral meanings in his description of the

sabbat's most minute details: the witches' feast includes no bread (because it is a figure of

the Body of Christ) and no salt (because it is used to bless holy water) (1754 vol. 3 p. 241).

By 1613, at the latest, the sabbat-motif1 had also begun to crop up in a limited way in

witch-trials: in that year Dorota of Siedlikow confessed under torture that she had been

carried away by her devil Kasparek to a "marsh [kal]" where there were six other women and

three devils—small, black, hairy beings dressed in red, with the heads of dogs. They danced,

drank beer, and ate meat, but the beer was bad and the meat smelled rotten (#21, Kalisz

1613). From this modest beginning, the sabbat motif grew to become one of the most

common components of witch-trial confessions; it appears, centrally or marginally, in 46 of

the trials in my database, making it the best-attested element of confession for which I have

record. Because of the fragmentary nature of many of my records, it is difficult to say just

how prevalent the sabbat-motif became; but during the peak period of witch-trials, in the last

quarter of the 17th century, it figures in 53% of those trials for which I have accurate records

of accusation and confession.

I use the term sabbat in this and other chapters because of its wide currency in the scholarship of witchcraft.
However, it should be kept in mind that the term was not used in Poland. Witches had "gatherings
[schadzki]" or, most frequently, were simply said to attend "Lysa Gora [Bald Mountain]."

289
 • Chapter 2.1 •

For Del Rio, attendance at the sabbat could be taken as sufficient evidence of the devil-

pact, and justified the death penalty (1632 [1609] bk. 5 sec. 16; 2000 p. 235). Attitudes of

this kind could turn reports of the sabbat, and of the people there in attendance, into a

"multiplier" generating large witch-panics such as those of the Basque lands or southern

Germany (Pearl 2006). Despite clerical opposition—the Czarownica complains of judges

trusting the testimony of the servants of Satan (1714 p. 58), and the bishop of Poznan Teodor

Kazimierz Czartoryski warned that "if someone is accused of having attended a satanic

gathering, no faith should be placed in this according to the canons of the church (1739, cited

after DWOK vol. 15 p. 262)—we see the beginnings of a similar trend in Poland. In the

Kleczew trials, for example, confession often devolved into a mere list of participants at Bald

Mountain; the same is true of several other trials especially in Wielkopolska, and might help

to account for the marginally larger average number of victims per trial in that region than in

Malopolska or elsewhere. But, as we saw in 1.4.5 and 1.5.4, structural factors usually limited

the spread of this kind of denunciation in Poland.

The sabbat of the confessions is a much simpler, more modest affair than anything

found in demonology; it also encompassed very considerable variation. Most often it

included a modest feast, with dancing to music provided either by human musicians or by

devils. The Czarownica author, describing the witch's fantasies of the sabbat, writes that at

these festivities someone "played beautiful music on a hoe, as it were the Harp of David"

(1714 [1639] qu. 8 p. 58). Despite the Czarownica author's mocking of what he believes to

be the mere fantasy of deluded women, this motif does appear repeatedly in confessions

describing the sabbat. Men, as noted in 1.3.5, figured in witch-trials largely as musicians at

Bald Mountain, where they played not only the hoe but also the plough, the needle, the
72
"na radle gra, by na Arfie Dawidowey pi^kna muzyka"

290
 • Healing and harming •

moustache, the foxes' tail, and other unlikely instruments (#51, #52, #84, #88, #96, #110,

#112, #153, #166).73 At other times, the musicians were devils (#70, #152). Although

witches were often provided with a diabolic dance-partner, they never confessed to

indiscriminate orgy: at most they lay with their devil-lover "like a wife with her husband."

Nowhere have I found any hint of the kiss on the anus, incest, or infanticidal cannibalism, or

other elements of the developed demonological fantasy (see 3.2).

The feast could be very modest indeed. At Raciajz, Anna Cwierciaczka said there were

just two devils present—the fiddler and one other—and the feast consisted of pancakes that

one of the witches had brought with her (#152, Raciaz 1719). Sometimes the food was good:

the witches of Lobzenica enjoyed good meat and beer (#110,1692), while at Slomniki the

party was lubricated with good beer and vodka (#127, Slomniki 1700). At the witches'

gatherings outside of Kleczew, they "ate and drank well" but had to bring the beer

themselves, from the tavern (#68, Kleczew 1668). However, often the food and drink was

spoiled or rotten (#21, Kalisz 1613) or, like fairy-food, turned into pig-shit or other

unappetizing substances at dawn (#104, Kozmin Wielki 1690). Even the most elaborate

sabbat account of which I am aware (#140, Szczekociny 1706) consisted of little more than a

rich feast, with some suggestion of a fairy-encounter: at the mill in Zdanowice "angels

danced, and there was a great light, and that old woman of Zdanowice was wrapped in a

golden cloth;"74 and there were noodles, roast capons and roast pigeon to eat, served on

dishes of silver and gold.

The most famous Bald Mountain in Poland is Lysica or Lysa Gora in the

Swi^tokrzyskie [Holy Cross] mountains, site of an early Benedictine monastery containing a

7
A connexion between this motif and the pan-European legend of human musicians captured by the fairies to
play at their revels should not be overlooked; see e.g. MacCulloch 1921 pp. 234-238.
74
""we mtynie u nas anieli tancowali, i iasnosc wielka byla; w poscieli zlocisty te_ babe_ ze Zdanowic uwiiali"

291
 • Chapter 2.1 •

relic of the True Cross. Scholars are still divided on the question whether pre-Christian

practices at this site carried over into Medieval and early modern collective memory

(Ga^ssowski 1968; Bylina 1988). Babia Gora [old-women's mountain], a peak in the Beskidy

mountain range near the headwaters of the Wisla, also derives its name from supposed

assemblies of witches on its summit. But the numerous Bald Mountains of literature and

folklore, as well as those which appeared in the confessions of accused witches, were usually

local hills or other locales. "Bald Mountain" functioned simply as the Polish term for the

sabbat or assembly of witches, and did not always imply a summit of any kind: Gamalski, for

example, calls the witches' meetings "bald-mountainings [lysogornice]" (1742 p. 17).

Kazimierz Koranyi, in his still unsurpassed study of Bald Mountain based on a survey of the

Kleczew witch-trials, notes that the term could be applied to almost any location; my own

research confirms Koranyi's findings. Although often enough Bald Mountain was some local

hill, it could be anywhere at all: at a neighbouring village or near a bush; in a castle, a

basement or a barn78; or simply someone's home.79 Bald Mountain could be a place or object

bearing some residual association with paganism (such as an oak tree or grove, or a standing

willow, or a stork's nest) with the devil (the willow again, the mill, the cross-roads, under

the gallows, at the Jewish cemetery81), or with orthodox Christianity (near or on top of the

parish church). Perhaps most frequently, the location suggested wilderness or marginality:

Elzbieta Stepkowicowa called the location of her devil-meeting "Chelm"—an archaic term meaning "hill"
(cf. English holm) and an extremely frequent element in Polish toponymy (#70, Nowy Sa_cz 1670). In #51,
Zb^szyn 1654, the location of the sabbat was called both Lysa Gora and "Gora Koguta [Mount of the
Rooster]. Near Che_ciny, witches met at "Kozlowa Gora [Goat Mountain]" (#61 and #62, Che_ciny 1665).
The Nowy Wisnicz witches were said to meet at "Sikornik" or again at "Chelm" (#97 and #98, Nowy
Wisnicz 1688); while the witches near Brzesc Kujawski met at "Bratowo" (#156, Brzesc Kujawski 1723).
'6 E.g. #50, Turek 1652; #96, Kleczew 1688.
7
E.g. #96, Kleczew 1688.
|8 E.g. #108, Kleczew 1691; #158, Kleczew 1730; #160, Pyzdry 1731.
E.g. #42, Lublin 1643 (although the term "Lysa gora was not used in this trial); #162, Pyzdry 1732.
0
E.g. #140, Szczekociny 1706.
'E.g. #166, Pyzdry 1740.

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 • Healing and harming •

Bald mountain was in or past the forest,82 on the lake shore, in the marsh,83 beyond the

village, or, most generically, "at the border [na granicy]" (Koranyi 1928c pp. 60-61). Lysa

gora could even imply an activity rather than a location; in at least one trial the term appears

to function as a euphemism for intercourse with the devil (#151, Pyzdry 1719).

Witches did not always fly to Bald mountain: Zofia Baranowa went in a dream (#39,

Lublin 1643); others went in carriages or buggies driven by devils in livery (#70, Nowy Sajsz

1675; #110, Lobzenica 1692). However, night flight was a well-known stereotypical attribute

of witches by the mid 17th century, when it figures in public insults. Agnieszka Szostakowa

brought a complaint of defamation against Zofja Kolasina, who had said that she "was a

witch and flew on a broom"85 (#76, Przeclaw, 1675). Haur reported that horses, in contrast to

cattle, are rarely enchanted, "supposedly, because Witches don't ride to bald Mountain on

Horses, but on Broomsticks"86 (1693 bk. 28 ch. 3, p. 472). In its verdict against Jadwiga

Talarzyna, the Nowy Wisnicz court singled out night-flight as the symbol of her contempt for

God's law: "since she defied God and attempted to be similar to him, daring to fly through

the air and cause harm to poor peoples' property, therefore that same Talazyna is sentenced

to death"87 (#98, Nowy Wisnicz 1688).

When accused witches did confess to flight, it could be without any apparent vehicle

(#61), or on "devils wings"88 (#62), or on brooms and sabres (#84). The main means of flight

to the Bald Mountain, however, was by means of witches' ointment: this could be made from

dew (#127, Slomniki 1700), from elderberry flowers (#84, Bochnia 1679), or from a mixture

82
E.g. #39, Lublin 1643; #114, Wyszogrod 1693; #128, Wyszogrod 1700.
83
E.g. #21,Kaliszl613.
84
E.g. #53, Zablotow 1656; #68, Kleczew 1669; #97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688.
85
"jest czarownicEi i na ozogu jezdzi"
86
"snadz podobno dla tego ze Czarownice nie Konmi do lysey Gory, ale na Ozogach iezdzaj'
87
"ze sie Bogu sprzeciwiala y chciala Jejnu podobna^ bydz, wazyla sie latac po powietrzu, ludziom ubogiqm
szkody w dobytkach czynic, za to tedy naznaczona iest smierc teize Talazyney"
88
"diablie skrzydla"

293
 • Chapter 2.1 •

of vermin with dairy-products: in another version, the ointment used in Bochnia was made

from butter and white cheese mixed with herbs, snakes, and birds (#84), while the ointment

used in Nowy Wisnicz consisted of "various herbs, dairy, cheeses, butter, also reptiles,

snakes, and birds"89 (#98; cf. Koranyi 1928c pp. 63-64). A pattern thus emerges whereby the

witches' ointment is, at least in part, the same thing as witches' riches—an over-abundance

of the symbolic goods of moisture: dew, cheese, milk, butter. Confessing witches knew what

witches were supposed to steal, and applied this knowledge to their accounts of the witches'

sabbat.

I would like to end this section with a brief sketch of the development of Bald

Mountain motifs from common knowledge, and from inversion or exaggeration of the more

prosaic imagined activities of witches. My point is not to discount the importance of

demonological speculation in the development of the Bald Mountain stereotype, nor to

discount the alternative possibility, associated with Ginzburg and his followers, that it

represents deep and ancient patterns of interaction with the dead. The first position is

inarguably true. Cohn's reconstruction of the trajectory of Sabbat stereotypes from ancient

slanders against Christians and Jews through polemics against medieval heretics, to the

developed withcraft stereotype, remains the best account of the development of the witches'

sabbat, and is unassailable in its scholarship (Cohn 2000 [1975]). The Ginzburgian thesis is

considerably more problematic, but has ushered in programs of study that have found clear

traces of fairy-belief, of cults of the dead, or fertility ritual in "sabbat" accounts over a wide

area (Ginzburg 1983, 1990 for north-eastern Italy; Henningsen 1993 for Sicily; Behringer

1998 for the northern Alps; Pocs 1989 for Hungary and neighbouring Slavic areas). As will

be seen in part 3,1 think a similar interpretation is not entirely out of place in the Polish case.
89
"z ziot roznych, z nabialow, serow, masla z gadziny, wezow, ptastwa"

294
 • Healing and harming •

However, considerable detail about the sabbat could be generated out of the "common

language" of witchcraft that this chapter has explored.

Among those interrogated during the exceptionally large, but also exceptionally mild

trial of all suspicious peasant-women enserfed to Jan Tarlo (#63, QiQciny 1665), a certain

Anna Wiajzowa was accused of milk-stealing magic. Specifically, she had allegedly been

seen in the most typical action attributed to Polish witches: gathering herbs before dawn in

the meadows, muttering "I take the profit, but not the whole thing [biore_ pozytek, ale nie

wszytek]." Anna denied any wrong-doing; she had gathered dew, but this was to repair the

spoiled or bewitched milk of her own cattle: "I went around collecting water because of an

enchantment, when my cream didn't want to separate out and sour properly, and with this

water I sprinkled the milk and recited three Hail Maries."90 As we have seen, the difference

between witchcraft and ordinary activity turns on intention: witches gather dew to steal other

peoples' milk, while good peasant-women gather dew to restore the vitality and health of

their cattle, after they had been bewitched. Witches, as everybody knew, said "I steal the

profit, but not the whole thing;" good peasant-women recite the Hail Mary. Anna Wiajzowa's

activity, at least as she represented it, was both pious and practical; it made use of the

orthodox prayer for the legitimate purpose of protecting one's household from harm.

Because in this trial there was no use of torture, and because Jan Tarlo appears to have

wanted only to suppress some of the more egregious superstitious practices on his estate, the

matter stopped here. Quite possibly members of the court might not have been persuaded that

her activity had been so pious as represented; quite possibly, too, her neighbours may not

have been fully persuaded of her good intentions. Nevertheless, her activities had not been, in

"dla uroka chadzalam po wode_, kiedy mi sie_ smietana nie chciala zsiax i robic, ktora^ woda^pokrzepilam
mleko i trzy Zdrowas Mario zmowila."

295
 • Chapter 2.1 •

this instance, judged sufficiently suspicious to proceed further: Anna Wiazowa was

dismissed without punishment of any kind. However, things could have turned out very

differently. In two trials just a few weeks earlier, before the same court, similar allegations of

milk-theft had led to interrogation under torture, during which the theme of dew-gathering

underwent expansion, elaboration, and improvisation. Elzbieta Cackowa confessed that with

her fellow witches she gathered dew in the fields and meadows and poured it into barrels at

Goat Mountain (Kozlowa Gora, the local variant of Bald Mountain). This was done out of

malice, to cause drought, but also, it is implied, out of greed—the goodness or vitality or

"profit" in the dew was collected and hoarded by the witches (#62, Chqciny 1665). Ewa

Krucka went even further. Like Anna Wiajzowa, she had originally admitted to a spell which

was an exact inversion of the witches' spell of milk theft. She picked herbs and washed her

cattle's udders in them, reciting:

Nie biore_ ja nic wiqcej tylko swoj pozytek od I'm taking nothing more than the profit of my own
swoich krow, smietana do pasa, serwatka do stop, cows, cream up to my waist, whey up to my feet,
mleko do kolan. milk up to my knees.
(#61,Ch$cinyl665)

However, under torture this became, as with Elzbieta Cackowa, a story of the witches' sabbat

and of dew-theft for drought. But now any sense of consumption or hoarding—which,

though anti-social and harmful has an at least comprehensible motivation—has been replaced

entirely with pure spite and wanton caprice. Witches, she explained, gather dew in barrels to

stop the rain, because they dislike flying in the rain (#61, Chqciny 1665).

It is possible from the testimony of these three trials, to construct a four-stage schema

turning on common assumptions about the nature of moisture and its uses, and reflecting

creative improvisation on this theme.

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 • Healing and harming •

1. Anna Wiazowa's and Ewa Krucka's self-representations. Legitimate, conscientious,

practico-religious use of dew and meadow-herbs, in combination with Christian

prayer, to protect herself and her household from witchcraft, or to undo the results of

witchcraft.

2. The accusations against Anna Wiajzowa. Illegitimate theft of dew, in combination

with the universally known, characteristic spell of witches, in order to steal the cream

and good milk from other people's cattle. This is the typical folk-view of witchcraft

as anti-social over-consumption of a limited good.

3. Elzbieta Cackowa's confession. Criminal theft of dew, in combination with the

motifs of flight and Bald Mountain. Now the stolen moisture affects not just cattle but

the weather as well, threatening the crops and the livelihood of the collectivity. The

basic theme of anti-social over-consumption remains in place but is expanded and

deepened: the dew is collected by the collectivity of witches to bring profit to

themselves, at the expense of the village community.

4. Ewa Krucka's confession. Radically evil, transgressive theft of dew for no good

reason. The witches steal dew and rain out of mere spite and thoughtlessness, because

these life-giving substances, upon which the village economy and life itself depend,

happen to be inconvenient to witches in their unproductive, pleasure-seeking flight on

broomsticks.

All four accounts depend, for their comprehensibility, on a common cosmology of the

limited good and of moisture—figured as dew, rain, and milk—as the principal carrier of that

good. The two interrogation accounts turn on elaboration of and improvisation on the basic

stereotype of the milk-stealing witch. They do not replace this stereotype with another—the

297
 • Chapter 2.1 •

malefice-witch with the sabbat-witch, the popular witch with the demonological witch—so

much as expand upon its basic theme and follow things to their logical conclusion. Ewa

Krucka's version, in particular, appears to be unique—at least I have not found anything like

it in other trials. And yet, clearly, she developed her version of what witches do with dew by

drawing upon well-known themes and motifs. The Polish sabbat could be, in part, nothing

more than a creative modification of the basic tropes and assumptions of early modern Polish

cosmology.

• ••• •

In this chapter, I have set out a sort of folk-cosmology which goes a long way, I think,

to explain witchcraft accusations and confessions in Poland—or at least to make them

comprehensible, amenable to interpretation. However, this account has been impoverished—

not to say lopsided and distorted—by a programmatic neglect of Christianity. Whatever else

the accusers and victims of witchcraft may have been, and whatever other habits of thought

shaped their actions and gave them meaning, they were also all Christian. The cosmology of

the limited good, the language of witchcraft, was part of, or was mixed with, the language

and the cosmology of the Church, and no account of witchcraft in Poland can be complete

without an exploration of this master discourse of the place and period. The "Christianity" of

Polish witchcraft, and the interpretative problems it raises, are the subjects of th next two

chapters.

298
 Naydziesz takie zle ludzie, co Sakrament swie^ty
Zydom i czarownicom, w usciech swych przeiejy,
Przedaia^, bezboznicy, cialo i krew Panska^
Uie^ci do pienie_dzy chciwoscia^ szatanskq..
O zakamial^ serca, lakomstwo bezecne!
O nieszcz^sny rozumie i kupiectwo niecne!
Czemu targuiesz tego za mamy pozytek,
Ktorego iest kropla krwie drozsza niz swiat wszytek?
You'll find such evil people, who sell the holy Sacrament
To Jews and witches, having taken it in their mouths,
They sell the body and blood of the Lord: godless ones
Seized by a Satanic greed for money.
O rock-hardened hearts, indecent hunger!
Unlucky understanding, ignominious trade!
Why do you trade, for a vain profit
That, of which one blood-drop is worth more than all
Chapter 2.2 the world?
Stealing the sacred —Sebastian Klonowic, Worek Iudaszow (1600)

The beginnings of the narratives are nearly identical. A woman makes confession, either at

Easter in her own parish or, rather more often, at the annual church fair (odpust) of some

nearby parish, participation in which brought special indulgences. At confession, she failed

to mention her intention of stealing the communion wafer, the Body of Christ—and has thus

already involved herself in the mortal sins of incomplete confession and communion without

true absolution (Skarga 1939 p. 193; i?Cpart 2 ch. 3 pars. 56-57; Trent sess. 13 canon 11; cf.

1 Cor. 11:27-29). She attends mass, approaches the altar, and receives the host into her

mouth from the hands of the priest (not touching it with her own hands—another mortal sin).

But she does not swallow it: instead, after reciting the Our Father (with its deceptively simple

and deeply problematic request that God provide us with both His Incarnate Son and the

temporal needs of our fleshly bodies—"Give us this day our daily bread"),2 she spits the host

Chapter 2.2 and 2.3 would be much thinner, and a good deal less interesting, if not for the magnificent
generosity of Dr. Tomasz Wislicz, who made available to me his transcripts of the Kleczew trials of 1669,
1688, 1691 and 1693 (Trials #68, #96, #108, #112), and Koranyi's manuscript copy of the Kleczew trial of
1730 (#158). Any shortcomings in the interpretation of these trials are, of course, mine alone.
1
1600p.29;1960p.l39w. 1-8.
2
See RC Part 4 Sec. 2 ch. 4 pars. 1-3, 9-10, 18-21; 1985 pp. 529-530, 533-534, 537-539, and 2.2.1 below.

299
 • Chapter 2.2 •

into her kerchief or shawl and leaves the church. From here, accounts diverge. Some women

take the stolen Eucharist home and use it to protect their cows from the milk-thieving

schemes of witches. Others use it for love magic, or to gain favour in a court case. Others sell

it to the Jews, who require the Body of Christ for their own sinister purposes. Still o t h e r s -

witches themselves—throw it to pigs to create hail and storms, mix it with burnt frogs and

vipers to create a poison, bury it enclosed in the rotting skull of a dead mare to bring death

and disease to her feudal lord. Finally, a few re-enact the Passion by whipping and stabbing

the host until it bleeds again "that most Holy Blood, shed once for redemption of the human

race by the Saviour of the world"3 (#172, Kiszkowo 1761). The task of this chapter and the

next is to interpret these narratives, which exist both in demonological and anti-Semitic

polemics, in the verdicts of judges and in the testimony, both voluntary and extracted under

torture, of accused witches. We will want to discover what they can tell us both about the

beliefs and practices of the accused witches themselves, and of their accusers and judges: a

key question will be to what degree these two groups diverge in their attitude toward what in

early modern Poland is most often called "The Most Holy Sacrament."4

"krew Przenajswiejsza^ [...] raz na okup ludzkiego narodu przez Zbawiciela swiata wylana_"
4
Not only accused witches and Jews stole (or rather, were accused of stealing) the host. The chronicle of the
Benedictine cloister in Poznah records the incident of a nun who failed to make a full confession before
communion. Fearing for her soul lest she receive the Host unabsolved, she removed it from her mouth into a
kerchief, and kept it under her pillow. Later, in great turmoil of mind, she threw the kerchief and host into
the fire. She made a full confession and undertook severe penance, and die, absolved in 1621 (Schneider-
Wawrzaszek et al. eds. 2001 p. 83). This tale was recorded only several decades later, and, whether it
occurred or not, has somewhat the shape of an exemplum or legend. It also bears a close resemblance to a
tale of host-theft by an unabsolved Spanish man in the early eighteenth century (Chatellier 1997 p. 145). It
would be interesting to know whether any of the host thefts resulting in trials originated out of a similar
combination of embarrassment in being seen to not commune and fear of communing in a state of mortal
sin.

300
 • Stealing the sacred •

I u samych chrzescianow miasto dobrej wiary,

Pelno naszych zabobonow, wsz^dy gusla, czary.
Zwlaszcza kiedy uroczyste wielkie swie_to maja^
Wiele naszych powinnosci w ten chas odprawiaja..
Zwlaszcza na on$ wilia^ gdy sie Chrystus rodzi,
Takq. chwale_ odprawuja^, ktora sie_ nam godzi.
And among Christians, instead of good belief,
One finds superstition, enchantment, witchcraft.
Especially when they celebrate a holiday,
They fulfill many of our obligations at such times.
Especially on that Eve, when Christ was born,
2.2.1: Their worship is more agreeable to us.
The tools of the church __Sejm piekieiny i 6 2 2 w. 854-859; 1903 p. 46

From the early 15th century on, Polish synodal decrees display a constant preoccupation with

the protection of sacramentalia, especially baptismal water and chrismation oil, from the laity

and especially from women. Following the similar recommendations of the Fourth Lateran

Council, provincial synods in Poznan (1420), Plock (1501), Luck (1519), and Przemysl

(1641) directed clergy to carefully guard baptismal water from mis-use. The synod of

Chelmno, in 1583, intructed priests to guard baptism water and chrysmation oil "ne ad ilia

manus Sacrilega pro exercandis sortilegiis extendatur," while the Gniezno statutes of 1602

directed that baptismal fonts be kept covered and padlocked when not in use (Kuczyriska

1981 p. 55; Kracik 1990 p. 191; Potkowski 1970 p. 95; Szkurlatowski 1997 p. 46).

This perceived need to prevent what at least the higher clergy understood as abuses of

the sacraments and sacramentalia derived, ironically, from the very success of

Christianization. Christian holy materials such as holy water, blessed herbs, and Easter palms

had replaced older, pagan items as the mainstays of household magic by the 15th century

(Bylina 1990 p. 47). Sprinkling of blessed ash in fields at Ash Wednesday, sticking Palm

Sunday palms into the soil of the fields on Holy Saturday, to drive away vermin; carrying

blessed candles around the house on the Purification of the Virgin Mary (already popularly

called "Matka Boska Gromnicza"—Our Lady of the Thunder—after the "Thunder-candles"

301
 • Chapter 2.2 •

blessed at this feast; compare the English "Candlemass") to protect against lightning—such

customs were well enough established to be condemned by learned clerics (Bylina 1990 p.

40; Bruckner 1895 pp. 320-321; Stanislaw of Skarbimierz 1979 vol. 2 p. 86; on similar

customs and critiques in Germany, see Scribner 1987 pp. 32-38). Most of these practices

continued through the early modern period and some can be found even today. Stanislaw

Kracik understands the anti-superstition literature of the 15th century as struggling to replace

"pagan" amulets with "Christian" sacramentalia. This overstates the case: in fact the

superstition literature strongly denounced the mis-use of sacramentals for magic.

Nevertheless, recommendations such as that of Mikolaj of Jawor, that women should replace

their whispered spells during the gathering of herbs with recitations of the Our Father (Kracik

1990 p. 191, cf. Bylina 1976 p. 156), are suggestive of the process by which popular culture

assimilated official Christianity to its own needs. More than a century ago, Aleksander

Bruckner already insisted that "one cannot speak of any strictly pagan remnants" in the

superstitions attacked by 15th-century reformers; " they have mixed entirely" with

Christianity (Bruckner 1895 p. 318).

Despite or because of the real success in Christianization accomplished during the 15th

century in Poland, the same period saw an intensive, largely textual attack on residual

paganism and on the superstitious use of the sacramentals (Bylina 1999; 2002 pp. 171-193;

Kloczowski 1990). Theologians such as Stanislaw of Skarbimierz and Mikolaj of Jawor

attacked superstition and set out the basic principles by which it could be distinguished from

true piety (Bracha 1999; Bylina 1978; Olszewski 2002; Stanislaw of Skarbimierz 1978;

1979); a Hussite influence early in the century also tended toward condemnation of folk

Catholicism (Bruckner 1892).

302
 • Stealing the sacred •

The critiques of these Catholic reformers were, of course, appropriated and expanded

during Poland's brief Reformation. What had been pagan or ignorant in the 15th century

became, in the 16th, pagan, ignorant—and Catholic. Mikolaj Rej, the most eloquent of the

early reformers, lampooned those Christians who thought their faith required of them that

they jump into a mud-puddle on Easter Monday, and beat each other with switches on Easter

Tuesday (Bruckner 1895 pp. 324-325)—practices already condemned in the Synod of

Poznah (Sawicki ed. 1957 p. 201). Similarly, for Rej, as for the 15th-century writers on

superstition, the blessing of Marian candles against thunder could only be a "mistaken and

pagan hope"5 (Rej 1556 ff. 304v-305; cited after Korolko 1999 p. 190).

Criticism of this kind presented a problem for the Catholic Reformation in Poland. On

the one hand, the Catholic Reform sought to achieve a thoroughgoing a monopoly over the

sacred realm, and to cleanse the church of the sort of excesses which provided Protestants

with such excellent ammunition. On the other hand, the continuing attraction of the Catholic

faith, especially among the common folk, lay above all in its rituals of protection and

exorcism. What we find, then, is a double move in late 16th and 17th century Catholicism in

Poland: toward austerity and toward exuberance, toward both the disciplining and the

accommodation of folk practices.6

Christian cunning

However, the folk practices which the Counter-Reformation church sought either to expunge

or to accommodate were deeply integrated into Church ceremony—a fact sometimes rather

overlooked by those who would assert the semi-pagan status of the early modern Polish

5
"nadzieje pogariskie a omylne"
6
1 am, for the moment, remaining at the level of texts; ignoring the fact that Catholic reform was largely
ineffective in Poland; most rural parish priests continued to live more or less as they had before (Kracik
1982, Kowalski 2004).

303
 • Chapter 2.2 •

peasant. What little we know about cunning-practice makes it clear that most cunning magic

borrowed liberally from the church: cunning-women's "spells" (which they called

"zegnania" or blessings—the same term was and is used for the act of crossing oneself) were

made up in large part of sprinkling holy water, censing or bathing in blessed herbs, and

recitations of official Church prayers. For example, Dorota of Siedlikow's ritual for blessing

cattle against witchcraft consisted of sprinkling them with holy water while reciting "In the

name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, by the Virgin Mary's power and the help of All

the Saints."7 A ritual to help a baker sell his bread at market consisted of sprinkling the bread

with holy water; the client should then go to church and recite "by the Virgin Mary's power,

the help of All [the saints], let bad people turn away from me, and good people turn toward
Q

me, in the Name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit" (#21, Kalisz 1613). Some variation

of the formula "By God's power, the Virgin Mary's power and the help of all the saints"

turns up in at least nine trials (#2, #3, #11, #13, #21, #22, #50, #61, #63), and in fact is found

in identical form in Polish village healing spells at the turn of the 20th century (Jagus 2002

pp. 90-102). Indeed our best evidence that Christian prayer formulae were well known to the

women of small towns and villages in the 16th and 17th centuries comes from the testimony

of such cunning-women or of ordinary women practicing "gusla" of various kinds—

officially illegitimate blessings or apotropaic rituals incorporating Christian symbols.

Gusla, from which guslarka is derived as its female agentival noun, is an

untranslatable, ambiguous, and polysemous word, intending everything from witchcraft

through magic more generally to superstition. When Haur warns that it is "better to be a

simpleton among the superstition-workers [guslarki] than, as an expert, to give over one's
7
"W Imiq Ojca i Syna i Ducha S. Panny Mariej moca^ i Wszystkich Sw. moca/'
8
"Panny Mariej moca^ Wszystkich pomoca^ zeby si$ zli ludzie od siebie odwrocili, a dobrzy si? nawrocili w
Imie. Ojca i Syna i Ducha S."

304
 • Stealing the sacred •

Soul to danger"9 (Haur 1693 p. 65), it is not clear whether the term should be understood to

refer to witches, to recognised folk-experts, or to those village women who know somewhat

more than their neighbours but who do not otherwise form anything like a distinctive class.

Authors such as Haur often use the compound phrase "czary i gusla"—witchcraft and

enchantment—in which the two terms are more or less synonymous; a similar usage can be

found in the trials (Haur 1693 pp. 335, 379; Sejm piekielny 1622 v. 855; 1903 p. 46; #25,

Kroscieriko 1622; #26, Borek 1624). Just as czary were sometimes conceived of as a physical

object, such as the buried bundle of disgusting things which caused sickness or spoiled milk

and beer, so also with gusla (#13, Kalisz 1593; #15, Belzyce 1600; #30, Szadek 1632). In

contrast, ecclesiastical writers used the term gusla, like the term zabobon, to distinguish

between criminal witchcraft and ignorant superstition. Bishop Kazimierz Florian Czartoryski

insisted that secular courts must consult with the church to determine whether an alleged

crime "should be acknowledged as true witchraft, or rather only superstition [gusla], and vain

understanding, and deception"10 (1705b [1688, in Latin 1669] p. 44). A similar need to

distinguish between criminal witchcraft and ignorant superstition motivated the Czarownica

powolana and Gamalski's Przestrogi duchowne. I will return to these texts in 2.2 below.

In other words, one can find little in the way of consensus as to what counted as

cunning, nor on who should be thought of as an expert in its use. On the whole, secular

authors and secular courts tended to collapse gusla or zabobony into witchcraft or czary, and

treat it as a crime—but these same authors (especially Haur) and the magistrates of these

courts, made use of techniques and materials which, in the judgement of reform-minded

9
"lepiey bydz u guslarek [sic] prostaczkq, anizeli w tym biegla^ b$da_c podac DUSZQ swoi? w
niebezpieczenstwo,"
10
"iezeli wystqpek uznaie bydz czarowaniem wlasnym, czyli tez nie iest, abo tez same gusla, y prozne
rozumienie, i zawiedzienie"

305
 • Chapter 2.2 •

clergy, were unambiguously superstitious (that is, gusla). These writers, in turn, habitually

condemned superstition, but also condemned secular courts for their failure to distinguish

between superstition and witchcraft.

The difficulty inherent in such a distinction might be illustrated by the case of

Katarzyna of Wojnicz, wife of the a church organist, who specialized in exorcising nocnice

or night-terrors (#58, Nowy Wisnicz 1662). Her method involved an inversionary recitation

of the Hail Mary: "You are not hailed, you are not full of grace, the Lord is not with you,"11

and so on. Not surprisingingly, her accuser and the court treated this as a blasphemous

recitation "of satanic inspiration," and Katarzyna was sent to the stake as a witch. But she

had confessed her exorcistic method to the court without any hint that she thought it was

blasphemous or anti-Christian—as indeed, for her, it was not. The prayer was directed, after

all, not to Mary but to the demons—they are not hailed, are not full of grace, are not blessed,

and so fall under the healer's power and can be driven out. What appears to be a satanic

prayer was intended as a proclamation that demons have no share in the protection or mercy

of God.

For theologians, the distinction between superstitious abuse (cunning or magic) and

orthodox devotion (religion)—the distinction between spell and prayer—often depended

neither on the form nor even the intention, but rather on the attitude of the practitioner. To

recite the Our Father a multitude of times, or as part of a cycle of rosary devotions, is licit

and praiseworthy—and this is true even if in doing so one asks for temporal things such as

preservation of health. But the same actions undertaken with the conviction that in

themselves they will actually compel God, are magical and idolatrous—and this is true even

11
"Nie pozdrowiona, nie laski pefaia, nie Pan z toba_, nie blogoslawionas. I tak wszystkQ "Zdrowa^ Mariaj'
12
"z instictiej szatanskiego"

306
 • Stealing the sacred •

if the intention is praiseworthy, such as the shortening or lightening of a soul's torment in

Purgatory. The difference may be expressed in terms of grammatical mood: a prayer is

subjunctive and hortatory, magic takes the imperative (Fraser's indebtedness to Christian

theological traditions in his classification of magic and religion is very clear here). But it

does not at all follow that actual practitioners of what clergy and judges understood to be

magic understood their own practices under such a classification; most cunning women

probably understood their work to be more a matter of nudging or urging supernatural

powers rather than compelling them, insofar as they gave the matter consideration at all—and

the recorded spells bear this out.

As we have seen, both the real spells of ordinary women and the usually imaginary

spells of witches turned precisely on such subjunctive urging. The spells of cunning-women,

which often featured a much more elaborate narrative structure, nevertheless display for the

most part a similar prayerful mood. In passing, they also display very considerable

knowledge of Gospel and Apocryphal stories about the life of Jesus; one might even say that,

insofar as a cunning-women form a distinct group at all, it is through this narrative

knowledge and its expression in enchantments (or prayer).

One example of such an extended prayer will suffice here (for others, the reader is

referred to Appendix C items 22-32). To remove enchantments from the mash of fermenting

beer, Apolonia Porwitka used the following long recitation, with its allusions to Jesus's

expulsion of the money-changers from the Jerusalem temple (Matt. 21:10-13; Mark 11:15-

Cf. Gentilcore (1992 pp. 131-132): southern Italian healing spells also depended on what Gentilcore calls a
"narrative nucleus," usually from the life of Christ, around which the prescription is structured. See also the
15th-c. spells incorporating narratives from the life of the Virgin Mary, in Bruckner (1895 pp. 331-332).
More generally, Evans-Pritchard noted long ago that where magic is owned by a specialized group who

307
 • Chapter 2.2 •

Swiadlam Boza_ moca_, panny Mariej moca_ i By God's power, by the virgin Mary's power and by the
wszystkich swiqtych pomoca^ ozminq i help of all the saints, I have commanded winter grain and
jarzyne_ swiem tu przyrok i urzeczenie i te this spring grain, and I admonish here this hex and
robaki z tej piwnice od tego piwa i statkow, i enchantment and these bugs from this cellar, from this beer
tego gospodarze i gospodyni, i wszelakiego and from these [brewing] vessels, and [from] the master
statku ich, wszystko zle i te robaki i te gusla and mistress [of the house] and all their vessels, [I expell]
jezliby przy tym piwie i zlosci ktore by tu everything evil and all bugs and charms if they be in this
bely zlem. Potem: Najswiqtsza Panno Maria beer and all evil things if there be here anything evil.
wzywa Cie, ku sobie grzeszna, ne_dzna abys Later: Most Holy Virgin Mary I call you to myself, a
raczyla do Swego Najmilszego Syna miserable sinner, [asking] that you might intercede with
przyczynic, aby to Pan Jezus do tego piwa your Most Beloved Son, so that the Lord Jesus might drive
albo wina z tej piwnice raczyl prziemic i out and behumble the bugs from this beer or wine and
usmierzyc te robaki jako lieczmierniki from this cellar, as he behumbled the money-changers
usmierzyl gdy o jego zdrowie stali, przez when they attacked his health, that through the power of
moc Boga Wszechmoga^cego aby przepadby Almighty God they might be swallowed up by the earth. In
ziemie. W Imi$ Ojca i Syna i Ducha S. po the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, three
trzykroc. times.
(#13, Kalisz 1593)

17th-century anti-superstition literature made no distintion between such healing spells

and more nefarious uses of church materials. Nor, with the exception of narrowly focussed

writings such as the Czarownica, did it usually distinguish between witchcraft, cunning, and

ordinary peasant superstition. The Sejm piekielny, quite possibly written by a minor church

functionary and certainly reflective of orthodox post-Tridentine doctrine, complained of

"witches" who, on Great Saturday before Easter, "cense their possessions with blessed fire,

and send the apprentice to seven churches for holy water"14 (1622 w . 884-885; 1903 p. 47).

The witches who would do such a thing were rather cunning women or even ordinary

villagers, in fact the verse accurately describes a rituals undertaken, for good luck or to

protect against witchcraft, in the 16th and the 19th centuries (#4, Poznah 1549; DWOK vol.

53 p. 392). Indeed, most of the actions attributed to "witches" in the sowizdrzalski literature

amounted to the ordinary practices of ordinary peasantwomen. Perhaps in part because of the

derive their prestige from their magical knowledge, it tends to incorporate detailed etiological myth, the
narrative spells of Polish cunning-women vs. the more or less improvised spells of ordinary peasantwomen
compares well to Evans-Pritchard's morphological analysis of Zande medicine-man magic on the one hand,
with its rigid formulae and myths, and the flexible and improvised magic of ordinary Azande, on the other
(Evans-Pritchard 1967 [1929]).
"Wzia^wszy ognia swie^conego, dobytek nim kadzi / Do siedmi kosciolow kaze po wode. czeladzi."

308
 • Stealing the sacred •

semi-clerical authorship of much of this literature, witches appear in it to use church

materials more than anything else in their craft:

Jednej kaze_, aby strze_pkow w kosciele dostala I tell one girl, to get strips of cloth from the church
Od chorqgwi, od obrusow, by przy sobie miala: From the banners, the altar-cloth, however she can
"Jako ludzie kupa^ chodza. za tymi strzej>kami, "Just as people follow those banners in crowds,
Tak za toba^bqda^ chodzic, ba, i dyabli sami!" So will they follow you—the devils as well!"
[...] [...]
TrzeciEt ucze_, chce-li, zeby mtodzienca miala, A third I teach, if she wants to get a man,
Zeby wlosow z jego glowy, jak moze dostala: To steal some hair, somehow, from his head.
"K temu wosku z krzcielnej swiece, a swieczke. udzialaj "Also some wax from a baptismal candle, mix it
Z onych wlosow, ktora, sobie w czwartki zapalaj; with the hair to make a candle, burn it on Thursdays;
Poki ono swiatlo bqdzie u ciebie gorzalo, As long as that candle burns
Poty sie. mu serce bqdzie ku tobie pre_galo." So long will his heart yearn for you."
(Sejm piekielny 1622 w . 962-965, 972-977; 1903 p. 50)

Such uses of sacramental materials for love-magic would have been understood as

sinful by all concerned—which is not to say that they were not practiced. But distinction

between orthodoxy and magic, between prayer and spell, was often much less clear. There

was a wide grey area about which Christians could legitimately disagree with one another.

For example, Article 18 of the "Declaration of the general synod of the klechy of the

Podgorze region"15 distinguishes between those sacramental objects which may be

distributed from the Church, and those which may not:

Aby sie zaden nie wazyl czarownicom dawac z Let nobody dare give wax from the church, strips
kosciola wosku, strzqpkow, wody krzcilnej, mchu [torn from the altar-cloth], baptismal water, moss
z dachu, kosci trupich, rdze ze dzwonow, oprocz from the roof, the bones of corpses, rust from the
wody swiqconej, kropidla, ziela, bylice; bo tych bells, except for holy water, sprinkling [of holy
wszystkich rzeczy uzywaja. na zepsowanie water], herbs, mugwort. For they use all these things
dobytku, na ostroczenie malzenstwa, na to spoil property, to spoil marriages, to entice
opsypowanie dzieweczek, takze mlodziencow. maidens and also young men.
(Synod Klechow 1607 art. 18; Grzeszczuk ed. 1966 pp. 224-225; emphasis added)

While beeswax, altar-cloth rags, and baptismal water can only possibly be used for witchcraft

when taken from the church, holy water and blessed herbs are legitimate sources of divine

aid that may be used to protect oneself and one's homestead against demons or witchcraft.

The distinction (which is taken directly from bishop Maciejowski's pastoral letter of 1601),

15
'Konstytucyje walnego synodu klechow podgorskich"
u

309
 • Chapter 2.2 •

seems rather arbitrary, and points, again, to the tension within the church between

accommodation and critique of commoner piety.

Accommodation and critique

In Poland, post-Tridentine indoctrination of the laity focussed on the rote memorization of

doctrinal formulae, accompanied by a hyper-scrupulous attention to the proper performance

of rituals (Kracik 1973 pp. 16-19; 1990 p. 195). Archbishop Bernard Maciejowski's famous

Epistola pastoralis (1630 [1601]),16 which set the program for the Catholic Reformation in

Poland, enjoined parish clergy to teach the catechism every Sunday, and, in sermons, to

concentrate on moral issues (Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 195-198). Folk tales and anecdotes of

dubious morality were to be scrupulously avoided. At the yearly priestly visitation to his

parishioners' homes at Christmas-time, the priest should examine their knowledge of the

Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Credo, and the Church Commandments, and should ensure

that they know how to cross themselves properly (ibid. p. 205). Maciejowski also attempted

to bring lay use and abuse of sacramentalia and other para-liturgical items under control.

While acnowledging that they may be used, according to the standard formula, "for the

health of the body and spirit," great care must be taken lest they be used superstitiously or

be given to "sathanicas" (Maciejowski 1630 f. G2v, after Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 202-203).

All jocularity, noise, and wickedness must be eliminated during their administration, and

they must be received with modesty, order, concentration, and piety (ibid.).

16
The letter was written in 1601 when Maciejowski was bishop of Krakow, and originally only applied to that
diocese. When Maciejowski became arch-bishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland, it was extended to the
whole country, and was included in the texts of the provincial synod of Gniezno of 1628, published 1630
(Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 9-11).
17
"animeque et corporis sanitatem." See Scribner 1987 pp. 38-39 on the use of this ambivalent phrase in pre-
Reformation Germany.

310
 • Stealing the sacred •

However, at the same time, Jesuit preachers drew on a large body of fairy-tale-like

anecdotes in their sermons (Kazahczuk 1991; Jurkowski 2004); they also specialized in

dramatic parades, often centering around the Eucharistic host (2.3.2, below). The church

encouraged pious devotion to images of the Virgin Mary or to the Passion of Christ, but also

attempted to control such devotion—without much success. In the 17th-18th century, in the

Krakow diocese there were 27 officially sanctioned miracle-working images, of which 22

depicted the Virgin Mary. There were also 98 unofficial imagiones gratiosae of which 65

showed the Virgin Mary, 12 showed Christ, and 16 had various saints (Kumor 2002 vol. 4

pp. 571-576; see also Wislicz 1999). Images of the crucified Christ, at cross-roads and at

field-borders, exorcised the landscape and claimed it for the Catholic Church; but they could

also become the object of folk-cult outside the control of, and therefore disapproved by, the

clergy and szlachta. Klonowic complains that:

Bez pozwolenia starszych po swiecie sie_ Without their masters' permission [peasants] wander
kra^, about,
Boze mejki na polach powroslami wiaza_. Tying God's Passion with straw ropes in the fields.
(Klonowic 1600 p. 48; 1960 p. 177)

while both Haur (1693 p. 88) and the Czarownica (1714 [1639] p. 28) suggest that such

crucifixes are the object of the wrong kind of devotion.

The opposing tendencies toward control of the sacred and purification of the church, on

the one hand, and toward accommodation or even encouragement of folk devotion, on the

other, created in the post-Tridentine Polish church a profound ambivalence.18 If

Protestantism brought about, as Roper puts it, a "desomatization of the spiritual" (1994 p.

177), so that the sacred was no longer something to be touched, held, carried, imbibed or, in

its malevolent aspects, something that takes over and ravishes one's body, for Catholics

18
Of course, a similar ambivalence may be found elsewhere in Europe at the same time. Gentilcore's study of
"the circulation of the sacred" in early modern southern Italy remains the best case study of this dynamic
(Gentilcore 1992).

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 • Chapter 2.2 •

spirituality remained profoundly embodied. Catholic writers were well aware that this bodily

aspect of their faith remained, for many, one of its most attractive features; accordingly, in

strong contrast to the 15th-century anti-superstition writers intent on a thorough

spiritualization of the faith, Counter-Reformation reformers could not reject wholesale the

embodied rites of their flock—attachment to which rites had to a large extent ensured the

loyalty of that flock against the temptations of Reform. As Scribner has said in a similar

context, "the church's commitment to a sacramental view of religion made any hard and fast

distinction between 'religion' and 'magic' almost impossible" (1987 p. 15). The Catholic

church could not and did not wish to condemn ritualism wholesale, but nor could it

countenance uses and abuses of church materials and prayers in ways that it increasingly

viewed as superstitious, vain, and possibly diabolic.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this ambivalence more evident than in the pacierz: the Our Father

or Lord's Prayer. The prayer itself could be used in a spell-like way,but its words also

pointed to the great difficulty in distinguishing spell from prayer. Zofia Philipowicowa

recited the Lord's Prayer three times over a specially prepared loaf of rye-bread, which she

then baked to divine whether her manor-lord would die (#37, Skrzynno 1639), and the

cunning woman Dorota Gnieczkowa prefaced her own thief-finding rituals with three Our

Fathers, three Hail Maries and a Credo (#2, Poznan 1544). Agnieszka Szostakowa, an alleged

cunningwoman who won her case of defamation against those who called her a witch, was

rumoured to have advised others to protect their beer against harmful magic by donating a

shilling to the Church and reciting seven Our Fathers in memory of the seven joys of the

Blessed Virgin (#76, Przeclaw 1675).

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 • Stealing the sacred •

Such uses of the Our Father may seem obviously magical and superstitious, although

the use in beer-protection is already ambiguous: might not the Lord's Prayer function here

exorcistically, as it was meant to do? To complicate this question, it must be noted that

churchmen acknowledged the temporal efficacy and suitability of the Lord's Prayer. Even

the strongly reform-minded Stanislaw of Skarbimierz, in the 15th century, grudgingly

allowed "that one may read the Lord's Prayer and the Symbol and give them to others as a

medicine. One must do this with care, however, so as to give no occasion to any sort of

superstition"19 (Olszewski 2002 p. 191). Three hundred years later, after the Polish flirtation

with Protestantism, Serafm Gamalski was prepared to be more generous:

Modlitwy takze niektore przyla_czone do Some prayers, appended to natural medicaments,

medykamentow naturalnych, nie s% zakazane, y are not forbidden, and indeed are benificial, for it
owszem pozyteczne, bo cze_sto bywa ze rzeczy often occurs that efficacious things have no effect
skutecznieysze bez pomocy Boskiey, skutku swego without Divine help. [...] And prayers by
nie miewaia,. [...]. Y same modlitwy bez applikacyi themselves, without the application of natural
srzodkow naturalnych do Niebieskiego Medyka means, adressed to that Heavenly Medic the
Boga Wszechmog^cego dobre s% byle byly cum Omnipotent Lord, are good, so long as they are
sola spe, &fiducia in Deum. made with faith alone, and trust in God.
(Gamalski 1742 pp. llv-12)

Thus, when the accused witch Zofia denied any knowledge of witchcraft by declaring

"I don't know how to do anything except the Our Father" (#83, Warta 1768) she was not

setting up a distinction between magic and religion, nor between demonolatria and

Christianity. Rather, she was claiming that the only spell she knows is the one officially

sanctioned by the church. For Zofia, as for other early modern accused witches in Poland, the

Our Father and other standard prayers were thought of as formulae of power that could be

invoked to bring health or ward off harm. The post-Tridentine Catholic church struggled to

encourage knowledge and use of such prayers, while guarding against what it saw as their

abuse.

19
"Fateor, quod potest Oratio Dominica legi et Symbolum, dum medicina alicui porrigitur, id tamen caute
agendum est, ne superstitioni detur occasio aliqualis."
20
"Bo nie umiem nie, tylko pacierz."

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 • Chapter 2.2 •

Indeed the text of the Our Father itself became a locus classicus for discussion of the

distinction between superstition and piety. The Roman Catechism provided a quite lengthy

commentary on the fourth petition of the prayer: "give us this day our daily bread." Because

this catechism was influential in Catholic-Reformation Poland, and because, unlike the works

of theologians, it might be known to peasants and small-town judges, its commentary

deserves careful consideration.21

Our first parents in that first state did not need clothes, nor a house for shelter, nor weapons
for defence, nor medicine to restore health, nor the many other things which are necessary to
us for the protection and preservation of our weak and frail bodies. [... ] Occupied in the
cultivation of that beautiful Garden of Paradise, their work would have been always blessed
with copious delicious fruits, their labour never frustrated and their hopes never disappointed.
With the Fall, this state of affairs came to its end:

All things have been thrown into disorder and have undergone a sad deterioration. Among the
evils which have followed upon that primeval transgression, it is not least that our heaviest
cost and work and toil are frequently done in vain. This is either because the crops are
unproductive, or because the fruits of the earth are destroyed by noxious weeds, by heavy
floods, by storms, hail, blight, and drought. Thus is the entire work of the year often quickly
reduced to nothing by the inclemency of the weather or the sterility of the soil (RC part 4 sec.
2 ch. 4 pars. 4-5; 1985 pp. 530-531)

The teaching of the Roman Catechism on the text "Give us this day our daily bread"

shows the church's, and indeed Christianity's, ambivalence toward "the world." It is

permissible, we are told, to pray for the things of this life, for the preservation of our bodies,

but only insofar as such preservation better enables us to achieve our ultimate end, "the

kingdom and glory of our Heavenly Father." We thus pray for worldly things only insofar as

these are necessary to "achieve divine blessings." In doing so, "we should propose to

In this and the next chapter I have prefered the Tridentine or Roman Catechism over more sophisticated
works of theology or even the decrees of the Counsel of Trent themselves, because the Catechism was the
only source to which peasants, and to a lesser extent their small-town judges, would have been exposed.
Maciejewski's pastoral letter, which may be treated as the charter for Catholic Reformation in Poland,
enjoined parish priests to use the Tridentine Catechism and the sermons of Skarga and Wujek as the basis
for their own sermons and education of the people. Similarly, the bishop of Krakow Marcin Szyszkowski in
1621 suggested that parish priests read a page of the Tridentine Catechism in place of a sermon each Sunday
(Kracik 1976 pp. 251-252). In citing the Roman Catechism, I have used part, chapter and paragraph
divisions instead of page numbers to facilitate easy comparison between editions. I consulted the recent
(1985) English-language edition edited by Bradley and Kevone.

314
 • Stealing the sacred •

ourselves nothing but God and his glory." (i?Cpart 4 sec. 2 ch. 4 pars. 1-2; 1985 pp. 529-

530). There is a great danger, here, of failing to pray "as we ought" (ibid. par. 3, quoting

Romans 8:26), nevertheless it is possible to distinguish between licit and illicit petitions:

To discern what petition is good and what the contrary, a sure criterion is given by the
purpose and intention of the petitioner. To pray for temporal blessings as if they constitute
one's supreme good and to rest in them as the ultimate end of our desires, seeking nothing
else—this, unquestionably, is not to pray as we ought (ibid. par. 3).

The legitimacy of a prayer, or of other uses of Christian words and objects, depends on the

intention and attidude of the petitioner. This seems clear enough, but becomes hopelessly

tangled once one attempts to apply it to actual cases.

Del Rio contrasts the pious use of holy objects to the vain and forbidden use of the

same, principally as a function of the sort of hope and trust placed in them; if this is

mechanical the user is presumptuously attempting to control God, and the object is either

ineffective (vain) or, if effective, this is a result of the implicit pact and the preternatural

work of demons.22 If, however, such things as "the relics of saints, the wax images of the

agnus Dei, the Gospel of St. John," are worn "out of simple reverence" rather than out of an

Much of early modern Catholic sacramental ritual, deemed by all practitioners as pious and devout, would be
understood as "magical" under those modern folk-theories of magic which categorize it, in various ways, as
illegitimate physical instrumentality. In particular the sacraments, which operated ex opere operato,
independently of the spiritual well-being or intent of the officiating priest, seem to be magical in this sense:
in contrast the efficacy of the sacramentalia, such as blessed herbs and holy water—which were in fact much
more often used for what contemporaries called "magic" than were the sacraments proper—depended on the
spiritual state of the user and thus might now be seen as "religious" insofar as we equate religion with
spirituality, magic with instrumentality. This apparent ironic inversion, by which the officially religious
sacraments such as baptism "worked" instrumentally and automatically, and officially semi-magical ritual
such as crossing oneself or using blessed salt worked, if at all, only insofar as it was done with a proper
attitude of trusting faith in a higher power—should make us reconsider the sources and genealogies of
contemporary definitions of magic. Frazer's surprisingly persistent tripartite division of world orientations
according to magic, religion, and science is a direct descendent, not only of Protestant critique of Popish
mummery, but indeed of Catholic critique of ignorant peasant superstition. Frazer's definition of magic as
mistaken instrumentality, as action believed wrongly to have causal effects in the world, as opposed to
religion which attempts similar ends through the suplication of supernatural beings, is a near-direct
modernization of Del Rio's discussion of "vain practices." For Del Rio, seemingly magical action can only
be effective in either of two ways—when it is properly religious, as in humble prayer, answered by God, to
ward off sickness or danger or demons; or when the efficacious agent is a demon bound to the practitioner
through an explicit or implicit pact. The common people's belief that their chanted spells, or amulets, or
gestures, work in and of themselves, does nothing but prove their ignorance of true causation.

315
 • Chapter 2.2 •

attempt to magically influence one's luck, this is pious and praiseworthy: the resulting good

fortune will, then "be supernatural and must be attributed to the kindness of God" (Del Rio

1633 bk. 1 ch. 4 qu. 4; Maxwell-Stuart ed. 2000 p. 59). The speaking of a prayer, but also the

use of other church items such as thunder-candles, blessed herbs, or holy water, was

"magical" or "pious" according to the intention of the user; theologians especially

condemned the use of sacred things with the intention to affect temporal ends. Amulets—

including those amulets, probably the majority, which include sacred objects such as words

from the Gospels or a wax Agnus Dei—are superstitious, vain and sinful insofar as they are

understood to bring luck or protection from drowning or fire. But the same objects do in fact

protect a person from evil spirits. And insofar as evil spirits are the bringers of bad luck,

death by drowning, and fire, such objects do in fact protect against them—see, for example,

the arguments of Gottschalk Hollen justifying the use of Eucharistic rogations to protect

fields from vermin and hail (below). It was a sin to use sacramentals and sacraments for

temporal healing of the worldly body. On the other hand, as Lorencowic reminds his

audience, citing Augustine, all sins of the body are symptoms of sins of the spirit

(Lorencowic 1671 vol. 2 p. 190). And since sacraments and sacramentalia were expressly

intended for the cure of souls, the distinction between temporal and spiritual healing could

become very blurry indeed—we have already seen that Gamalski approved of prayer in

addition to or in place of natural medicine; and Maciejowski acknowledged that

sacramentalia could be used "for the health of the body and soul." Secular authors such as

Jakub Kazimierz Haur, as well,, despite his frequent warnings against superstition,

recommended the remedies of the church as the best medicine for temporal ailments.

Because during illness "the hunting Satanic Ensnarer"23 lies in wait for every soul, one
23
"mysliwy Lowczy Szatanski"

316
 • Stealing the sacred •

should, in addition to temporal medicine, "strengthen and preserve oneself with the Holy

Sacraments, according to the Faith of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and Christian

custom"24 (1693 p. 434).

There is, then, a sort of theological Catch-22: insofar as a person wears an amulet with

no intention of thereby receiving luck or protection from harm, they will receive luck and

protection; if, however, such protection is their reason for wearing the amulet, it will not

provide it or will provide it by demonic and mortally sinful means. It is not necessary, I

would argue, to characterize the common people as materialistic or primitive or animistic or

ignorant, to appreciate that they were unlikely to follow the subtleties of such arguments.

They wore their fragments of the gospels or their Agnus Dei out of an undifferentiated desire

both for the grace of God and for good fortune in their day-to-day undertakings.

No wonder some Catholic reformers could come to have an almost obsessive concern

for the purity of ritual, prayer, and sacramentals, attempting to cleanse them from any

temporal taint. No wonder too, that this quest for purity proved impossible. Stanislaw

Brzezahski reminded parish priests that "diabolus est simia operum DEI," or in the Polish

phrase, "where the Lord God builds a Church, the devil builds a chapel,"25 sneaking

superstition into every custom and ceremony of the church. (1717 f. 24). The Czarownica

author polemicized against "crosses, holy words, pious prayers" used illegitimately: "Such

words are spoken toward the Devil's honor, although in themselves pious, because he has

hidden his nooses and his words in holy things and in Sacraments, as a fisherman baits his

"wedhig Wiary Swiqtey Katolickiey Rzymskiey, y obrze_du Chrzescianskiego S. Sakramentami, umocnic sie_
y ubespieczyc potrzeba."
"diabolus est simia operum DEI. Polacy to thimacza^ tak, Gdzie Pan BOG Kosciol buduie tarn diabet
kapliczkq stawia, iakoz nam to Plebanom pospolstwa Pasterzom naywidocznieysza rzecz iest, iz we
wszytkie zwyczaie zycia y obrze_dow Katokickich mi^dzy krnajbrnym pospolstwem niesza diabel swoie tez
zabobony."

317
 • Chapter 2.2 •

hooks [...] to fool pious people and to defame the Majesty of God and of holy things"

(Czarownica 1714 [1639] pp. 28-29). And yet the same author, a little later, lists as

legitimate means against demons and witches, such materials as holy water and the Agnus

Dei, "because the church blesses them for this purpose"27 (ibid. pp. 82-83). Less scrupulous

authors such as Chmielowski, despite his indebtedness to Del Rio, approved a long list of

ecclesiastical medicines against witchcraft, effectively overturning the sort of careful

distinctions attempted by Maciejowski or the Czarownica author:

Dalsze na czary y czartow moze bye remedium Further remedies against witchcraft and devils include
Palmy swiexone na kwietnia^Niedzielej nosic na Palms blessed on Palm Sunday; carrying on one's
sobie sklad Apostolski, Swiqtych obrazki person the Apostles' creed or blessed images of the
swiqeone; woda_ siq kropic swiexona. w Sobotq Saints; sprinkling on oneself water blessed on Easter
Wielkanocna^ albo Swiaiecznaj Grana od Saturday; grana from the Paschal, that is candles,
Paschahi, alias swiecy, co w Wielka. co Rok which are blessed every Year on on Great Saturday;
swiqea. Sobotej wianki z Monstrancyi; Ewangelie garlands [of herbs] from the Monstrance; the Gospel
noszone, albo gdzie przylepione, czterych of the four Evangelists carried on oneself, or attached
Ewangelistow (1746 vol. 3 p. 260). somewhere.

Ordinary Christians, needless to say, could not be expected to distinguish the precise border

between superstition and piety, if even the most educated priests could not reliably make the

distinction (cf. Scribner 1987 pp. 38-39).

• *l+ •

We have been reviewing Christian prayer formulae in the spells of witches, Christian

symbols in their practices or alleged practices, Christian blessed objects, above all the

sacramentalia of the Church—chrism, blessed herbs, the Marian "Gromnica" candles against

lightning, holy water—both as protection against witches and demons, and as essential

components in accused witches' magical arsenals. We looked at the deeply ambivalent

relation of the Church to what ecclesiastical authors sometimes thought of as mere

26
"krzyze, slowa swiqte, modlitwy nabozne" "Takowe slowa, na czesc diabhi mowia^ choc same przez si$
swiatobliwe, bo on wrzeczach swi$tych, iako w Sakramentach swoie hasla y sidla zasadzil, iako rybak pod
pastwa^ wqdy, na snadnieysze ludzi oszukanie, na obelzenie Maiestatu Bozego y rzeczy samych swiqtych
27
"bo ia_ na to Kosciol swie_ci."

318
 • Stealing the sacred •

"superstition"—ignorant and incorrect practices to be corrected through teaching—and

sometimes condemned as witchcraft. The tension between, on the one hand, defending

Catholic use of such materials, against Protestant claims that they amounted to so much

magic, and on the other defending the sanctity of church materials against magic and

witchcraft, can be seen especially in the work of Martin Del Rio. The extremely subtle

distinctions—the difference between trusting in God and demanding something of him, in

hoping (as a Christian should) and attempting to compel (a mortal sin, and also a vain

practice effective, if at all, only through the help of demons)—such distinctions were lost on

the general populace, and probably too even on most lower clergy, who continued to hand

out Mary Candles against thunder, to ring the church bells against hail, to sprinkle holy water

liberally wherever anyone or anything needed to be blessed, and to administer the host

against illness and possession. Learned Catholic distinctions between pious and orthodox

uses of the Church materials and their impious abuse as superstition or witchcraft,

distinctions which rested on subtle adjudications between hope and assurance, intention and

interior state, were not designed for easy application to actual pastoral practice.

If the Church's attitude toward lay use of sacramentals was ambivalent, its attitude

toward lay use of the Eucharist was at once much more straightforward and more

problematic. On the one hand, the sin of sacrilege was easier to define and condemn in clear

terms than were the sins of superstition. To use the host for any sort of extra-ecclesial

practice, one first had to steal it; and this theft of the sacred, sacrilege in the strict sense, was

a mortal crime irregardless of the thief s intended aims, knowledge or ignorance of Church

doctrine, or interior state. At the beginning of 15th century, the Silesian theologian Mikolaj

of Jawor strongly condemned the illicit or superstitious uses of the Eucharist (Bylina 1978 p.

319
 • Chapter 2.2 •

141), while desplaying more flexibility toward those practices, equally categorized by him as

illicit and superstitious, which made use of holy water or blessed candles (ibid. pp. 144-

Whereas the discourse around superstition and magic, in Poland as in the West, allowed

for considerable variation and gradation of opinion within broad limits, the discourse

concerning the Eucharist was non-negotiable. Within what Miri Rubin has called "the

economy of the Eucharist" (1990 pp. 334-342) all clergy shared an interest in maintaining the

church's monopoly. The great Catholic Reformation Jesuit preacher Piotr Skarga, whose

work will be discussed later in this chapter, considered the priestly transformation of bread

and wine into divine Body and Blood to be the raison d'etre of the clergy: following

theological trends from as early as the 13th century (Rubin 1990 p. 36) he asserts that all

other sacraments can be performed, in extremis, by laymen and even women: only the

Eucharistic consecration absolutely requires a priest (1939 pp. 146-149; cf. RC part 2 chap. 6

par. 34; 1985 p. 326). Ryszard Gansiniec, surveying medieval western European attitudes

toward the popular uses of the Eucharist, considers the only objective difference between

diabolical superstition and Christian miracle to be that in the latter, a priest wielded the

Eucharist (Gansiniec 1959).29

Other early anti-superstition authors, such as Stanislaw of Skarbimierz, don't mention the host at all—
perhaps assuming that condemnation of such practices goes without saying; similarly, Bishop
Macierowski's Epistola pastoralis, in many respects the founding document of the Catholic Reformation in
Poland, condemns the superstitious abuse of sacramentalia (chapter 19, "De Sacramentalibus,
Caeremonialibusque et abusu illorum tollendo," but makes no corresponding condemnation of abuses of the
Eucharist (Macierowski 1630 ff. G2v-G3, E4-F2; after Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 202-203,217-218).
See also Gansiniec 1959; Gentilcore 1992 p. 130; Price 2003, ch. 3. All, in different ways, treat the
ecclesiastical condemnation of, and anxiety over, Eucharistic magic as part of a struggle for access to
supernatural power. The instrumentalist or economistic cast of these authors' arguments should not be taken
too far. Price, in particular, over-emphasizes the instrumentalist nature of clerical monopoly over the
Eucharist. It may well be that the medieval and early modern laity as a whole had a better appreciation than
these authors do for the Durkheimian notion that sacrality requires and is created by prohibition: even those
who chose to steal the host for magic must have known that the thing stolen would be of considerably less
supernatural power if its use were not so closely regulated.

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 • Stealing the sacred •

On the other hand, the very same characteristics of the Eucharist which required its

close regulation and restriction by the church—its character as God incarnate, its

overwhelming power, far outstripping all other sacraments and sacramentalia—were

characteristics that the church was eager to describe and promulgate. Exempla literature from

the high Middle Ages, when the doctrines of Transubstantiation and Real Presence were

becoming institutionalized, encouraged belief in the miraculous temporal powers of the

Eucharist, especially against illness. At the same time, clergy attempted to maintain a

monopoly and discourage abuses; this was difficult insofar as the prohibited practices and the

didactic miracles demonstrating Eucharistic power were practically identical (Rubin 1990 pp.

336-339). Emphasis on the miraculous powers of the Eucharist, not only as spiritual food but

also as protection against fire, flood, illness of every kind, and of course as the best and truest

protection against evil spirits, became even more important in the Counter-Reformation. In

Poland, as in France (Walker 1982), the miraculous powers of the Eucharist were the

Catholic church's most potent item of propaganda against the Reformed and their symbolic,

commemorative and decidedly non-miraculous Lord's Table. Partly in reaction to the

Eucharistic controversies of the early 16th century, the Catholic Reformation saw a

thoroughgoing affirmation and indeed expansion of high medieval Eucharistic piety, and a

dogmatic reassertion of the full scope of Eucharistic miracles and graces.

Thus the church could not, as with other superstitions, scoff against extra-ecclesial use

of the Eucharist as ineffective; instead, it could only denounce such uses as sinful and

criminal. Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his collection of exempla which was so important in

propagating the doctrine of Real Presence in the 13th, made this point somewhat

unintentionally in his famous story of the woman who, at the advice of a wandering witch,

321
 • Chapter 2.2 •

stole the Host to improve her listless cabbage-patch. This sin brought down divine

punishment, but the cabbages did improve: "it became a torment to me as well as a remedy

for the cabbages, as the devil can witness" (Caesarius 1929 [1223-1224] book 9 ch. 9).

I will return to these issues below. The point to emphasise, as we encounter the Polish

witches stealing the host for magic, is that their belief in its supernatural power need not be

understood as some "primitive" borrowing of a high-cultural thing of power for popular,

materialistic ends. Quite possibly, Polish witches believed that the Eucharist was efficacious

in healing and protection from evil for the same reason their priests thought so: because it

contained the Body and Blood of Christ. To determine whether this is so, and what such an

interpretation might signify about Polish popular Christianity, will require both a close

reading of particular trials and the interpretation of those trials in the context of miracle

stories, host-desecration legends and accusations against Jews, and the general climate of

Eucharistic piety in 17th and 18th century Poland. Host-stealing is of interest to me not only

because it is a rather frequent accusation in Polish witch-trials, but also because it illuminates

the relationship—the points of agreement, but also points of conflict, misunderstanding, or

category confusion—between elite and popular Catholicism in the post-Tridentine era.

2.2.2: The Eucharist in the witch-trials.

Sacrilege of consecrated wafers crops up with surprising frequency in the Polish witch-trials.

The trial of Regina Zaleska in Lublin in 1644 is the earliest Polish host-theft trial of a witch,

for witchcraft,30 that I know of. Synodal decrees of the period already warned parish priests

to guard the host against "maleficas mulieres;" however, although the peasant-woman

30
The trial of Jan Baran in Nowy Wisnicz in 1643 (#40) came a year earlier, but the court displayed no interest
at all in the nature of his intended witchcraft, only insisting that "czary" were indeed his purpose in
attempting to steal the host.

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 • Stealing the sacred •

Jachna, who stole the host in a handkerchief in 1450 and was punished with a severe, life-

long penance by the Gniezno episcopal court, presumably intended to use it for magic, this is

not mentioned in her trial (Bylina 2002 pp. 129-130). Legends of Christian women stealing

the host to sell to the Jews were known in Poland at least from the late 15th century. Between

1556 and 1639 there were as many as seventeen host-profanation trials against Jews,
•3 1

accompanied by a voluminous anti-Semitic literature. By the mid-17th century, the stage

was set for legends of Jewish host-theft and desecration to combine with actual Eucharistic

magical practices, engendering the first trials of host-stealing witches. Certainly both courts

and the common people understood there to be only two reasons to steal the host: for ritual

desecration in a re-enactment of the Passion (either by Jews or, later, by witches at Bald

Mountain) or for witchcraft.

The accusation of host-stealing also occurs outside of witch-trials, but witchcraft is

never far from people's minds in such circumstances. The first questions asked by courts of

host-thieves were "for what witch-craft did you steal it?" and "Did you sell it to the Jews"—a

precise summation of the two motivations considered likely. Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna,

implicated as an accomplice in a witch-trial in Rzeszow involving the Eucharist, was asked

by the court "Whether you yourself ever stole Holy Communion, and whether you sold it to

the Jews, or to some witch"32 (#148, Rzeszow 1718). Church robbers tried in Lublin in 1739,

most likely intending only to steal the saleable silver church ornaments, appear to have

knocked over the ciborium containing the consecrated hosts, and some of these went missing.

The court asked them, under torture:

31
Wqgrzynek 1995 pp. 58-59. Eight trials are confirmed in court records, two have mentions in court records
but it is not clear whether a trial took place (as opposed to, for example, an accusation or a riot); seven have
no basis in the records and may be the inventions of the anti-Semitic pamphlets which are their only known
source.
32
"7-mo Jezeli tez ona sama nie ukradla kiedy Communiej S i zydom, albo ktorej czarownicy nie przedala."

323
 • Chapter 2.2 •

4to. Wziqte te osm poswiexonych czyli wie_cey Fourthly, those eight or more consecrated Hosts that
Hostyi, gdzie podzial, y na iaki pozytek obrocil, na where taken: where did he take them, and to what
iakie czary, y czyli szkodliwy co komu te czary, profit, for what witchcraft, and was this witchcraft
czyli nie. 5to. Na ktorym mieyscu, z ktoremi harmful to anyone, or not. Fifthly, in what place,
osobami tych zabranych Hostyi Zazywal, czyli ie with which persons did he use those acquired Hosts,
khil albo nie, y kto o tym wi^cej zwiedzial whether he stabbed them or not, and who else knew
(APLublin, AMLublin sig. 50 (Advocatalia) ff. 502- about this.
503).33

But not only the courts assumed the worst in such cases. Fellow church-goers also

treated any suspicious behaviour surrounding the taking of communion as an attempt to steal

the Eucharist for witchcraft. In Wyszogrod, a woman observed her neighbour coughing the

host into her hand, and began to yell: "And you, what did you spit the Lord God out of your

ugly face for, to what end?"34 (Olszewski 1879 p. 497; possibly this is the same as trial

#149). Before the woman could be apprehended, she had swallowed the host—nevertheless

this became the beginning of a witch-trial. In Nowy Wisnicz in 1643, one Jan Baran knelt

after taking communion and coughed into his hand: when a fellow church-goer, observing

this, accused him of sacrilege, he quickly put it back into his mouth, swallowed, and,

insisting that "I didn't do it for witchcraft,"35 left the church. Jan Baran's attempted assurance

that he was not a witch proved ill-judged, becoming the central piece of evidence in the

formal accusation brought against him soon after: his very denial proved his real intentions.

His hand which had touched the host was cut off, and he was burnt at the stake (#40, Nowy

Wisnicz 1643).

Of the 154 trials in my database for which the precise accusations are known, twenty-

two (or some 14%) include theft of the consecrated host among the accusations (see Table

2.3.A). Although they start somewhat late, the trials extend throughout the Polish witch-trial

period, and indeed the Kiszkowo trial of 1761 (#172) is one of the last, and one of the largest,

33
Two of the three robbers were Jews, a fact which prejudiced their case.
34
"A tys na co Pana Boga wyplunela z gqby, na cos ty uczynila."
35
"nie na zadnem czary to uczynilem"

324
 • Stealing the sacred •

witch-trials in Poland. The trials are scattered throughout the Korona, are diverse in

character, and cannot be connected to each other causally. The smaller cluster of three trials

in Kleczew in 1688-1693 is more revealing of court dynamics: the first two share a single

accuser, the nobleman Wojciech Breza, who nearly destroyed his tiny village of Wa^sosze in

the effort to weed out the witches who had killed his son with a poison made from the

Eucharist (Wislicz 2004b pp. 75-76; I discuss one of these trials extensively in 2.3.4, below).

When the manor-lord of a nearby village accused a servant-girl of malefice against his

children, the court will have known to ask about the Eucharist as well, and received the

expected answer.

Ref# Year Place of Trial Region Naiue(s) of accused

#40 1643 Nowy Wisnicz Malopolska Jan Baran
#42 1644 Lublin (Opole Lubelski) Malopolska Regina Zaleska
#59 1664 Lublin (Miastkow Mazowiecki) Malopolska (Mazowsze) Maryna Bia&owa and others
#61 1665 Che.ciny Malopolska Ewa Krucka and others
#62 1665 Che_ciny Malopolska Elzbieta Cackowa and others
#66 1666 Che.ciny Malopolska Anna Puchalina
#68 1669 KJeczew Wielkopolska Regina Matuszka and Regina Stokarka
#96 1688 Kleczew Wielkopolska Marjanna of Tuliszk6w and others
#108 1691 Kleczew Wielkopolska Zofia Balcerka and others
#112 1693 Kleczew Wielkopolska Reina Bartoszowa and the girl Gierka
#123 1699 Pyzdry Wielkopolska Anna Ratajka and others
#78 1680s-90s? Warta Wielkopolska Anna Przybela
#125 1700 Lublin Malopolska Katarzyna Rataiowa
#139 1705 Wyszogrod Mazowsze Katarzyna Koziminska
#145 1716 Szczercow Wielkopolska Ewa Mierztycanka and Zofia Kowalowna
#146 1717 Brzesc Kujawski Wielkopolska Zofia Marchewka
#148 1718 Rzesz6w Rus Czerwona Zofia Janowska and others
#149 1718 Wyszogrod Mazowsze ?
#151 1719 Pyzdry Wielkopolska Agnieszka Rokocina and others
#158 1730 Kleczew Wielkopolska Marjanna of Oporowko
#161 1732 Lublin (Podole) Malopolska (Podole) Katarzyna Kmarynska and others
#167 1741 Pacanow Malopolska Marianna Berbelska Marianna Maniusca
#172 1761 Kiszkowo Wielkopolska Petronela Kusiewa and others
#173 1763 Tylicz Malopolska Oryna Pawliszanka

Table 2.2.A: Witch-trials with accusations of host-theft

The trials may conveniently be divided into two types, based on the nature of the

initiating accusation. In what I will call primary crimes, theft of the host is either the main, or

one of the main crimes contained in the formal accusation that initiates a trial: the woman

comes to trial, above all, for having stolen the host. Where host-theft was a secondary crime,

it emerges during torture, always in conjunction with a whole series of other crimes and

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 • Chapter 2.2 •

transgressions. This division is especially useful in that, although based on a formal criterion,

it points toward juridical, symbolic and even theological differences between the two trial

types. Where theft of the host was a primary crime, its intended use was either unknown or

was some minor magic: to bless the milk of one's cows, love magic, or magic to curry the

favour of others. In contrast, in trials where host-theft is a secondary crime, it is just one

component of what might be called a "demonological complex" of transgressive behaviours:

desecration of the host; major, whole-community malefice (such as magic to bring hail,

drought, or plague); malefice against humans (especially children) and livestock (especially

cattle); renunciation of God, Mary, and the Saints; baptism into service with the devil

consummated with diabolical sex; and the sabbat at Bald Mountain.

Primary-crime host-theft trials are mostly confined to the south and east of the Korona:

two exceptions to this, both from Kleczew, have special characteristics discussed below. In

contrast, host-theft as a secondary crime among other acts of malefice and diabolism occurs

in Wielkopolska and western Mazowsze, with one case in Ch^ciny in north-central

Malopolska (#61). This regional division should not be delineated too strongly; the

demonological complex was hardly unknown in Malopolska, but it does not appear to have

usually been associated with theft and desecration of the host in that region.

I have no information about the further accusations, other than host-theft, for trial #167 (Pacanow 1741), so I
don't know whether that trial might not have developed aspects of the "demonological complex" as it
progressed. In the other direction, my material for three other trials is either based on the verdict alone
(#172) or is too fragmentary (#145, #146) to determine whether host-theft should be considered the primary
or secondary crime—although everything suggests that in all three cases it was probably the latter.

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 • Stealing the sacred •

# Region Accusation Magic Malefice Sentence

$abbat complex
humans and

crops or for

Desecration

Presence of
of the host
Secondary

milk, bees

in trial
droughts
livestock
Primary

Healing,

Love or

Against

Against
favour
#40 Malopolska • stake, hand first cut off
#42 Malopolska • •? acquitted?
#59 Mp., Maz. • • beheaded
#61 Malopolska • • • stake
#62 Malopolska • • unknown
#66 Malopolska • unknown
#68 Wielkopolska • • • • stake
#78 Wielkopolska • • • stake
#96 Wielkopolska • • • • stake
#108 Wielkopolska • • • stake
#112 Wielkopolska • • • stake
#123 Wielkopolska • • • • stake, hands first burnt with sulphur
#125 Malopolska • acquitted?
#139 Mazowsze • • • stake, hands first burnt "to the wrists"
#145 Wielkopolska ? ? • • • stake
#146 Wielkopolska ? ? ? ? ? • stake
#148 Rus Czerwona • • stake, hands first burnt
#149 Mazowsze ? 9 ? 9 9 • stake
#151 Wielkopolska ? ? • • stake
#158 Wielkopolska • • • stake
#161 Mp., Podole • • unknown
? ? ? ? ? 9
#167 Malopolska • stake
#172 Wielkopolska 9 ? • • • stake
#173 Malopolska • ? 9 ? ? ? ? 9 beheaded

Table 2.2.B: Types of accusation and uses of the host

Although the trials for host-theft and witchcraft all come from city and town courts

operating within the framework of Magdeburg law, one notes a difference in their judicial

antecedents. Witch-trials featuring host theft as a secondary crime are, from a legal

perspective, identical to those which do not have this feature. By the time an accused witch

had confessed to stealing the host or using it for malefice, she would, after all, have already

been sent to judicial torture because of other accusations of malefice. Host theft and

desecration confirmed, in the eyes of the court, the depth of the accused witch's depravity,

and could lead to aggravation of the sentence by burning the hands of the witch who had

"dared to touch the Most Holy Sacrament with her hands"37 (#123, see also #148). But in

such trials, host-theft in itself did not alter the legal nature of the case.

"iz si$ ona r^koma wazyla dotykac Najswiqtszego Sakramentu."

327
 • Chapter 2.2 •

In contrast, there are indications that town courts were not fully persuaded of their

jurisdiction over the primary crime of sacrilege. All of the Lublin trials for sacrilege originate

elsewhere, and come to the city court by way of the Royal Tribunal in Lublin, which

regularly sent criminal cases not involving nobility to the Lublin court. Although, with the

exception of Trial #42 (Lublin 1644), there is no good indication that these trials should be

understood as appeals—no previous court or previously given testimony are mentioned—it

seems likely that small town courts, local gentry, or possibly even grodzkie noble courts, sent
ID

the cases on to the Tribunal out of uncertainty as to how to deal with them. We find a

similar pattern in other towns. When rumours of Zofia Janowska's host-theft for love-magic

came to her parish priest in Rzeszow, she and her accomplices were first shut up in the castle

and examined by the podstaroscie, before being turned over to the extra-ordinary (bannitwn)

mixed town court (#148). A similar trajectory characterizes the host-theft case tried in

Pacanow, sent there by the starosta of Stopnicka (#167). The ChQciny court tried Anna

Puchalina for host-theft at the direct request of her parish priest, a circumstance that must

have alleviated any worry of transgressing on the jurisdiction of episcopal courts (#66); the

same is true in Kleczew in 1691 (#112). The trial of Regina Matuszka in Kleczew is the

exception which proves the rule. Her accuser and manor-lord brought her to trial primarily

because of malefice against his livestock; however, he mentioned rumours that she had also

stolen the Eucharist the previous year, avoiding prosecution because she had bribed the

38
From 1670 the Crown Tribunal's jurisdiction over the Arian (Socinian) heresy was expanded to include
"crimes against the Majesty of God [kriminaly przeciwko Maiestatowi Boskiemu]" such as "Sacrilegii
Judaici" or Jewish host-profanation. But already in the 1630s, noble resistance to ecclesiastical attempts to
regain jurisdiction over blasphemy led to the placing of that crime under the Tribunal's jurisdiction
(Wajsblum 1939 pp. 91,97). Although, properly speaking, this jurisdiction only covered accusations against
the nobility or Jews (and although town courts nevertheless did try Jews for sacrilege and blood libel) I find
it not unreasonable to suppose that noble accusers might have sometimes chosen to bring such cases,
involving peasants, directly to the Tribunal, which then turned them over to the Lublin wojt-court according
to the procedures described by Laszkiewicz (1988,1989).

328
 • Stealing the sacred •

podstaroscie with gifts of hens and honey: thus Matuszka's host-theft did not become a

concern for the town court until it had been coupled with malefice. The honey, it should be

noted, came from Matuszka's own hives, the fertility of which had been enhanced by her

placing the Eucharist among the honeycombs (#68).

Finally, there is a difference in sentencing. In three of the primary crime trials, the

accused appear to have been acquitted (in none of them do we actually possess an actual

verdict of acquittal); and in one, the accused host-thief is beheaded—the "lightest" and least

shaming of capital sentences. In contrast, all of the secondary crime trials end at the stake.

However, outside Lublin, which shared with other big cities a notable lenience in sentencing,

most sentences for primary and secondary host-theft are the same: the stake, sometimes with

the addition of burning or cutting off the hand that touched the host.

• <$• •

Piotr Skarga, the great Jesuit preacher and, in Tazbir's phrase, "Champion of the Polish

Counter-Reformation" (Tazbir 1993), followed Tridentine norms in expounding the

Eucharist as both sacrifice and sacrament. As sacrifice, the Mass re-enacted Christ's self-

sacrifice in the Passion and crucifixion, through which he redeemed humankind; as

sacrament, it was the supernatural "fount of all good and all heavenly gifts" (Skarga 1939 p.

176)/*and cure for every spiritual ill (compare the Roman Catechism [RC] part 2 ch. 3 par.

47, which Skarga is evidently following here). Its character as sacrament, as the Most Holy

Sacrament upon which all the others depend, is itself dependent on its character as sacrifice

I have used an English translation for Skarga's Eucharistic sermons (Skarga 1939). Unfortunately, this edition
does not specify their original provenance. Probably most of Skarga's texts concerning the Eucharist,
discussed below, are from his Kazania o Siedmi Sakramentach Kosciola S. Katolickiego (1600), but some
might also be from earlier works, such as the Pro Sacratissima Evcharista (1576) or the Siedem Filarow Na
ktorych stoi Katolicka nauka oprzenaswiqtszym SAkramencie (1582) I regret extremely that I have not been
able to trace these texts to their original works.

329
 • Chapter 2.2 •

and thus as re-enactment of the Passion. It produces redemption through repetition of the

original act of redemption: "every time we sacrifice to Him His own Passion, we renew His

Passion, for our own absolution"40 (Skarga 1881 [1579] vol. 3 p. 158; 12 March). Only

insofar as the Eucharist is a true sacrifice does it truly contain the body and blood of Christ,

present in the world, and only through this fact of renewed incarnation and passion is it so

effective—indeed the source of all sacramental effectiveness (1939 [1600] pp. 4,179,182).

The late-17th century Jesuit preacher Aleksander Lorencowic makes a similar point. In a

sermon for Maundy Thursday, Lorencowic follows John Chrysostom in treating the

Eucharist as an extensio incarnationis. In every mass, the mystery of the Incarnation is

repeated in the bread; the mystery of the Passion, in the wine (1671 vol. 1 p. 148).

The distinction between primary-crime and secondary-crime host-theft corresponds, I

would like to argue, with the theological distinction between the Eucharist as Sacrament (that

is, as an effective source of grace and benefits) and as Sacrifice (that is, as renewal and

reminder of the Passion). Women who used the host for healing their cows or to protect their

milk against witchcraft made use of the Sacrament's supernatural efficacy against the devil

and his minions. Judges who accused witches of treating the host with contempt and cruelty

reflected the flip-side of devotion to the Eucharist as Sacrifice—a furious rage against Jews,

heretic and witches who would dare to treat the Body of Christ with insolence.

40
"ilekroc mu ofiarq m^ki jego ofiarujemy, tylekroc sobie m^k$ Jego, na odpuszczenie nasze, wznawiamy."

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 • Stealing the sacred •

O iako skuteczne na uleczenie chorob dusznych te

kawalki, te drobinki Nayswie_tszego sakramentu,
ktore z rak Kaplanskich odbieracie y pozywacie.
O how effective in the cure of spiritual illnesses are
these little pieces, these crumbs of the Most Holy
Sacrament, which you receive out of the hands of
2.2.3J the Priests, and consume.
Sacrament and i n c a r n a t i o n — —Berard Gutowski, Kazania Na Niedziele calego
the magical Eucharist. Roku (1696)41

In 1497, the episcopal court of Wloclawek tried a priest from Gdansk for providing laypeople

with consecrated hosts for use in treasure-finding magic (Ulanowski ed. 1908 item 553)—a

practice apparently common enough throughout Europe at the time to require its

condemnation at the Council of Florence in 1517 (Rubin 1990 p. 340, after Mansi 1901 vol.

35 c. 7 p. 235: "Contra clericos qui sacramenta maleficiis impartiunt"). Polish Eucharistic

magic and piety were fully integrated into wider European trends.

In her magnificent study of the Corpus Christi festival in high-medieval Western

Europe, Miri Ruben has shown how the Eucharist came, in the 13th-15th centuries, to be the

centrepiece of Christian worship, devotion, and doctrine, the bulwark and justification of

clerical privilege, and the "hinge around which things revolve" (Rubin 1990 p. 353). The 4th

Lateran Council in 1215 confirmed the doctrines of Real Presence and Transubstantiation

which had been developing in the medieval schools; devotionally, the new feast of the Body

of Christ, together with other paraliturgical practices and devotions, became central features

of lay religious practice. This new prominence of the Eucharist brought about and was

accompanied by two countervailing trends. On the one hand, "magical" use of the host,

always present in Christianity, gained new popularity: the Eucharist became a sort of arch-

relic, access to which could bring about healing of sickness, protection from misfortune, and

41
P. 193; quoted after Drob 1981 p. 115. Gutowski was head of the Polish province for the Reformed
Franciscans.

331
 • Chapter 2.2 •

every sort of grace. On the other hand, new emphasis on the divinity really present in the

Eucharist engendered a deep anxiety among theologians that such relic-like use of the host

(to speak nothing of "magic" and "superstition") showed insufficient respect and awe for the

Lord God. Late medieval sermons inveighed against those who arrive at church just in time

to see the Elevation of the host, and benefit from its magic, and who left immediately

afterwards—sometimes to catch another Elevation at the next church down the street (Bylina

2002 pp. 99-100). Practices such as the use of the host as a cure for blindness, or sewed into

one's clothes as an amulet against misfortune, which had been reported without

condemnation by earlier churchmen such as Augustine and Gregory the Great (Gansiniec

1959 pp. 83-84, 98), came to be regarded as superstition or worse. The Eucharistic ordeal

came to be forbidden, but the new exempla extolling the Real Presence, such as legends of

the host transforming into flesh and blood in the mouth, were identical to old accounts of the

effects of the Eucharistic ordeal (Rubin 1990 pp. 336-337). A twelfth-century churchman

complained that ostensibly good Christians treated their Lord "like Jews or pagans" stealing

his body and hiding it in the pig-sty to prevent sickness of pigs (Gansiniec 1959 p. 86), a

statement that should probably be read as a polemical reductio ad absurdum against actual

uses of the Eucharist in veterinary medicine.42

One can glean an idea of how difficult it could be to adjudicate between vain practice

and church ritual, between Eucharistic magic and Eucharistic devotion, by looking at the

practice of field rogations. In these, clergy and people processed around the fields, carrying

42
In late 17th-century Austria, Abraham a sancta Clara records that witches throw the Host into pigsties as a
means of bringing rain and hail to destroy the crops (Gansiniec 1959 p. 113; following Soldan), and among
the crimes of the Kiszkowo witches in 1761 one finds that they cast the burnt powder of the Eucharist into
pigsties and other "dishonourable places [miejsce nieuczciwe]" (#172). The allusion to the parable of pearls
before swine is obvious enough, and raises the question of whether the host ever was used to cure pigs—as
it indubitably was used to cure cattle and sheep, both of which species were present at the Nativity. On
veterinary uses of the stolen Eucharist, see Monter 1997, esp. pp. 390-392.

332
 • Stealing the sacred •

the sacrament in a monstrance to ward off pestilence, hail and thunder, flood, fire, and

drought. In Germany, Eucharistic rogations became so popular by the 15th century that

provincial synods found it necessary to limit them to Corpus Christi, its octave, and

emergencies such as fire and flood (Rubin 1990 pp. 291-292, 335, 341; Kieckhefer 1989 pp.

79-80; Gansiniec 1959 p. 94). However, a late-15th century German theologian defended

such practices, reasoning that, since devils by God's permission bring hail and

thunderstorms, so the faithful might defend themselves against the devils' work with that

greatest defence against Satan, the Eucharist (Gansiniec 1959 p. 93, citing Gottschalk Hollen,

1497, f. 21).43 In the Malleus, Sprenger and Kramer acknowledged that some consider this

practice superstitious, but asserted that in fact it is effective, acceptable and part of Church

tradition (Zabkowic 1992 [1614] pt. 2 ch. 7, p. 220). In Poland, despite being forbidden in

Maciejowski's Epistola pastor alls, (Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 203-204), rogation continued to

enjoy wide popularity. The distinction between vain practices for temporal ends and pious

self-protection from the evil one, between superstition and devotion, was extremely difficult

to make in practice. Preachers and missionaries found themselves caught between a desire to

promote Eucharistic devotion, and an equal need to protect it from over-exposure, dishonour,

or any hint of magic.

Post-Tridentine Catholicism saw reaffirmation of the full scope of medieval Eucharistic

devotions, and the addition of new ones; at the same time, the church sought ever stricter

regulation of access to the Eucharist. Partly in reaction to the sharply anti-Eucharistic

43
Gottschalk's argument deserves quotation in full: "Dubitatur utrum per sacra averba licet contra grandines seu
tempestates procedure. Respondetur quod sic. Certum est inim, quod demones, grandines, fulmina et
tempestates deo permittente procurare possint: unde licite demonum versuciis resistitur, cum aliquis
resistere potest, hanc enim ob causam universaliter vel communiter in ecclesia campane cnotra aurum
pulsantur, ut per tubas deo consecratas demones recedant a suis maleficiis, cum etiam populus excitatus
deuam contra tempestates invocat. Et ob hanc causam cum eucharistie sacramento et sacris verbis ad auram
sedandam proceditur ex antiquissima consuetudine ecclesiarum in Germania."

333
 • Chapter 2.2 •

theology of Zwingli and Calvin (and in Poland, of the Antitrinitarians), the Catholic

Reformation put the Transubstantiated Body and Blood at the centre of theology and

practice. Communion, previously annual for most lay parishioners, was to be frequent—

although the Church also laid down strict, even impossible conditions for the reception of the

host: purity of soul, purity of intention, concentrated devotion, and so on. The new order of

Jesuits especially promoted the Forty Hours Devotion to the host, and made of the Eucharist,

displayed in lavish monstrances, a central feature of urban and rural missions. Confraternities

of the Sacred Sacrament, given over entirely to lay devotion to the host, sprang up in urban

centres, including Krakow where it was organized under the active patronage of Piotr Skarga

(Evennet 1999 [1951] p. 60; Rubin 1990 pp. 354-356; Chatellier 1997 p. 142). The Host

came at the same time to be closely regulated. Jerzy Radziwill, the reforming bishop of

Krakow, attempted in 1594 to concentrate the Corpus Christi pageant in the city into an

orderly procession featuring a single Eucharist from the royal chapel. He worried that the

unruly crowds of parishioners, each parish with its own Host, mixing and jostling during the

great procession, brought "little honour to the Venerable Sacrament" (Zaremska 1978 p. 33;

cf. Zika 2003b on similar concerns in 15th-century Germany).

The cult of the Eucharist came early to Poland, where it found fertile ground. Bishop

Nanker of Krakow introduced the feast of Corpus Christi into Poland in 1320; by the 15th

century the Corpus Christi procession in Krakow, and the even larger procession on the

octave from Krakow to the Body of Christ church in the Kazimierz suburb with its

miraculous host, were the most important and elaborate public festivities in the capital.

Everyone from the monarch to the most humble apprentice took part (Zaremska 1978). The

miraculous bleeding hosts at the Carmelite sanctuary of the Body of Christ in Poznah

334
 • Stealing the sacred •

attracted pilgrims from all over Wielkopolska, Mazowsze, and Royal Prussia, and even from

distant Rus and Hungary. Tomasz Treter, following a no-longer extant miracle register for

the years 1493-1604, records some 370 miracles attributed by pilgrims to these wonder-

working hosts. According to Jacek Wiesiolowski, in the 15th and early 16th century the

miraculous Eucharists and the church that housed them rivalled or even surpassed

Czqstochowa as a focus of pilgrimage and miraculous healing; some 21% of these pilgrims

were peasantry (Wiesiolowski 1992).44

As elsewhere in Catholic Christendom, the Jesuits played a leading role in promoting

Eucharistic devotion. Between 1565 and the end of the 16th century, the new Jesuit schools

and gymnasia for noble children staged thirty-three Eucharistic plays, and set up elaborate

paraliturgical Eucharistic processions at Corpus Christi (Okoh 1970 p. 78; Okoh ed. 1992).

The Jesuit Marcin Laterna's Harfa Duchowna [Spiritual Harp], a devotional guide for laity

and clergy alike, and one of the most popular publications of the Polish baroque,45 included a

long section "concerning the Very Most Praiseworthy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of

the Lord Jesus collected from the Scriptures and the Doctors of the Church,"46 and a long

section on spiritual communion (Laterna 1585 pp. 228-240, 518-525; after Cieslak 2000 p.

33; see also Misiurek 1994 vol. 1 pp. 165-174). Stanislaw Kostka (1650-1668), a Jesuit

novice who became the paradigmatic Polish Counter-Reformation saint, was fed the

Indubitably the flurry of host-profanation publications in the late 16th and early 17th century led to (or
reflected) renewed interest in the miracle-working Eucharists, but the loss of miracle registries for this
period means we only know of a few dozen miracles from 1661-1679 and 1727-1731, with a few scattered
mentions for the whole first half of the 17th century (Wiesiolowski 1992). In 1648 a townsman of Kobylin
willed 50 zl. to his parish church, 100 zl. to the town confraternity of the rosary, smaller sums to a few
monastic churchs, and a full 300 zl. to the Poznan sanctuary of the Body of Christ—a clear indication of its
continuing popularity (Lukaszewicz 1869 vol. 1 p. 72).
According to Stanislaw Cieslak, the Harfa Duchowna enjoyed seven editions between the first in 1585 and
Laterna's death, a total of twenty-five before the end of the 17th century, and as many as sixty by the mid-
19111 century. Cieslak considers it to have been used wherever people could read: among nobility, burghers,
and peasants (2000 p. 30).
"o Przenajchwalebniejszym Sakramencie Ciala i Krwi Pana Jezusa z Pisma s. y z Doktorow Koscielnych
zebrana"

335
 • Chapter 2.2 •

Eucharist by angels while he lay mortally sick in his lodgings in a Protestant household in

Vienna. After receiving it, the Virgin appeared to him with the Christ Child, and laid the

child on his bed to comfort him. He recovered fully from his illness (Skarga 1881 [1579] vol.

11 pp. 202-203; November 13 pars. 13-24).

Piotr Skarga, whose sermons for Sundays and Holidays were, it should be remembered,

recommended in bishop Bernard Maciejowski's famous Pastoral Letter as an acceptable

source-book for parish priests insufficiently educated to put together a proper post-Tridentine

sermon of their own (Kracik 1976 pp. 251-252), 7 put a Eucharistic stamp on the entire

Polish Catholic revival. In addition to his early polemical works defending Catholic

Eucharistic doctrine against the Calvinists (1576,1582), he wrote a long devotional work

about the Forty Hours Devotion (1600),48 and a total of twenty-four sermons on the Eucharist

for clerical and lay audiences.49 In his decidedly popular Lives of the Saints, considered by

Jakub Kazimierz Haur to be an indispensable item in any manor library, (1693 p. 170) and

the absolute best-seller in Poland through the 17th and early 18th centuries (Partyka 1994),

Skarga returned again and again to the theology of the Eucharist.50 Because of the

Kazania Na Niedzieley Swiqta calego Roku, 1st edition 1595, eight subsequent editions to 1792; the 1609
edition and most subsequent editions include his Kazania o Siedmi Sakramentach [Sermons on the Seven
Sacraments], originally published in 1600. Kracik's inventory of parish libraries in the Nowa Gora diaconate
of the Krakow diocese for the 17th and 18th centuries found copies of Skarga's sermons in four parishes.
This number is rather small, but is more than any other book except the Bible, Skarga's own Lives of the
Saints, the sermons Szymon Starowolski, and of the Reformed Franciscan Provincial Franciszek
Rychlowski. According to Kracik, priests' private libraries probably played a more important role than
parish libraries in determining what was actually read or used in sermons (1976, pp. 260-269).
"Na modlitwach 40 godzin o jakkajtolwiek potrzebq," included as part 2, pp. 1-219 of the first edition of his
Kazania o Siedmi Sakramentach Kosciola S. Katolickiego (1600), and appended in shortened form to other
later works.
In the above-mentioned collections of sermons na niedziele i Swiqta calego roku and o Siedmi Sakramentach,
(which were often published together from 1609 on)—and possibly elsewhere.
Skarga discusses the doctrine of the Real presence, usually in special doctrinal appendices, in the lives of St.
Basil (Jan. 1, pt. 2, par. 3 [1881 vol. 1 pp. 61-62]); St. Hillary (Jan 14, pt. 2 par. 3 [1881 vol. 1 pp. 197-
198]); St. John Chrysostom (Jan. 27 pt. 2 pars. 3-6 [1881 vol. 1 pp. 349-351]); St. Ignatius (Feb. 1 pt. 2 par.
I [1881 vol. 2 p. 17]); St. Gregory the Great (March 12 pt. 2 par. 3 [1881 vol. 3 p. 157]); St. Leon I (April
II pt. 2 par. 5 [1881 vol. 4 pp. 140-141]); St. Anselm (April 17 pt. 2 par. 5 [1881 vol. 4 p. 202]); St.
Gregory of (May 9 pt. 2 par. 2 [1881 vol. 5 pp. 169-170]); St. John of Damascus (May 11 pt. 2 pars. 3-5

336
 • Stealing the sacred •

tremendous authority and popularity of Skarga's writing, as well as its considerable

eloquence, his concern for a strictly correct Catholic doxology of the Eucharist, shaped and

sharpened in polemics with Calvinist and Antitrinitarian opponents at the turn of 17th

century, had a lasting influence well after Protestantism had ceased to be a force in Poland.

Among Skarga's voluminous writings on the Eucharist, his comparatively brief

discussion of the benefits of the Sacrament is of most interest for present purposes. "All our

benefits, blessings, and happiness" declares Skarga, "find their source in this most intimate

union with Christ" (1939 p. 179). When Christ took on our "corruptible human body" He

used it for our benefit in every way. Not only did he, in incarnate form, work miracles, heal

the sick, and exorcise devils, he also "subjected [his body] to the keenest humiliations,

suffering, and death to redeem us from perdition. He finally left it for us here on earth in the

Holy Eucharist to be ever at our disposal, that we might obtain through it every help, spiritual

and temporal" (Skarga 1939 p. 182). These crumbs of divinity on earth are the best of

medicines:

There are foods which expel poisons from the body. The heavenly bread of Christ preserves
us against all sin and evil. There is no reason for sickness where the power of this food is
permitted to become effective (ibid., p. 183).

The are also a source of fortune, in all senses of that word:

When the Ark of the Covenant was placed within the house Obed-edom, the man forthwith
was overwhelmed with abundance and happiness. And when David, beholding his subject's
prosperity, had the ark carried into his home, he in turn was enriched with every blessing.
How much greater and more valuable than the Ark of the Covenant is the Blessed Sacrament!
(Skarga 1939 pp. 185-186, translation slightly modified).

In this sermon as well as in his sermon advocating frequent communion, Skarga closely

followed recommendations set out in the Roman Catechism (1985 part 2 ch. 3 par. 54, with

citations to Mt. 8:14, 9:10, 9:20-21; Lk. 10:38) drawing a comparison between Eucharistic

[1881 vol. 5 pp. 195-197]); St. Epiphanius (May 18 pt. 2 pars. 3-5 [1881 vol. 5 pp. 275-276]); St. Bernard
(August 20 pt. 2 par. 4 [1881 vol. 8 p. 269]); and St. Augustine (August 28 pt. 2 pars. 24-26 [1881 vol. 8 pp.
381-382]).

337
 • Chapter 2.2 •

benefits and Jesus' miracles during his earthly ministry. If the mere touch of the edge his

garment sufficed to cure fever, exorcise demons, make the crippled to walk and the blind to

see, how much greater miracles might not be possible when one enters into that much more

intimate contact of taking the flesh of Christ into oneself (Skarga 1939 pp. 186-187, 210).

Skarga was not of course the only Polish Catholic Reformation preacher to enumerate

the benefits of the Eucharist. Others could be equally eloquent. In the later 17th century, his

fellow Jesuit Aleksander Lorencowic emphasized the power of the Eucharist against spiritual

enemies, in his sermon for Maundy Thursday already mentioned above:

Ale nie tylko smakuie, ale dziwna^ moc daie ten But not only is this food delectable; it also provides a
pokarm. Dla tego zowie go cze_sto chlebem Anielskim, strange strength. For this reason it is often called
z zydowskiego Panem fortium, robustorum; ze ten Angelic bread, from the Jewish bread of strength, of
Sakrament Przenaswie_tszy, sil y mocy dodaie, health, for this Most Holy Sacrament gives strength
przeciwko wszelakim pokusom y nieprzyiaciolom and power against every kind of temptation and
dusznym. Jest to ten pokarm bronia^ i mieczem, ktory spiritual enemy. This food is a defense and a sword,
iest wszystkim nieprzyiaciolom straszny (Lorencowic and it is terrible to every enemy.
1671, vol. l,p. 149).

• <$• •

To what degree did this "Eucharistic turn" in Polish theology and devotion come to

characterize the Christianity of the lower orders, and in particular the woman among them:

the plebeians of cities, the largely agricultural near-peasants of small towns, the peasant serfs

and servants from whose ranks came most of the defendants in witch-trials? As always, our

difficulty lies in the sources. Confraternities were formed in villages and small towns, but

they were for the most part formed only in the 18th century; they leave very few traces of any

activity, and the impression is that they lapsed into inactivity as soon as whatever upwelling

of zeal that led to their formation was removed (Wislicz 2001 pp. 65-67). People living in the

near hinterland of urban centres flocked in to take part in and observe the spectacle of Corpus

Christi processions; this will have been true in particular where—as in Krakow, Lublin, and

338
 • Stealing the sacred •

Wilno, but also in smaller centres such as Pultusk—the Jesuit schools organized their

spectacular paraliturgical dramas to accompany the procession. Quite probably, in Poland as

in Italy, the host displayed in a lavish monstrance formed the centerpiece of Jesuit rural

missions (Gentilcore 1992 pp. 68, 71). But before the mid-18th century these missions were

rare in Poland, where the Jesuits concentrated their work among the szlachta, against the

Protestants in larger towns (including Lublin), and among the Orthodox Ruthenians to the

East and the still semi-pagan Baits of the Livonian backwoods (Wislicz 2001a pp. 35-38; cf.

Chatellier 1997 p. 89 on the 18th c. as the "golden age" of rural missions). Those writers who

deigned to note the Polish peasantry at all consistently emphasized an overwhelming rural

ignorance of even the rudiments of Christianity. This attitude is partly rhetorical, partly due

to ideological blinders, but it makes this sort of source almost wholly useless for the study of

the religious worldview of those populations from which accused witches came (see 2.4).

In this situation, the best sources for determining the religious outlook, not only of the

accused witches, but of their fellow peasant and plebeian women, comes from the trials

themselves. What emerges from the testimony of women accused in primary-crime host-theft

trials is a thoroughly Christian attitude toward the host. The women refer to the host as "the

Lord Jesus," and they often take the time to say their prayers, after stealing it but before

leaving the church. They have as good an understanding of the Eucharist as source of grace,

benefit, and healing as does Skarga, as good an appreciation of its efficacy against devils as

does Lorencowic, but they do not see that their use of it implies disrespect or desecration of

the holy. Zofia Janowska, a house-servant in Rzeszow who stole the host at the advice of a

cunning-woman in order to gain the love, or at least the consideration, of her abusive

widower master, even confessed her intent to steal the host during her pre-communion

339
 • Chapter 2.2 •

confession (the priest advised her not to steal it). Maryna Bialkowa made no attempt to deny

that she had stolen the host for milk-magic, apparently not seeing anything wrong in this, and

Regina Matuszka saw no harm in stealing the host for her beehives, saying, "It's true, but I

did good, I gave wax to the church" (#167).51 Most accused witches, however, including

Regina Matuszka, understood the legal if not the theological dangers involved in host-theft

well enough to do it outside their own parish, in the context of a church fair where they might

more easily go unnoticed.

Let us take a close look at two primary-crime host-theft trials to see what uses the host

was put to, and what this tells us about the women who used it.

• *l* •

I. (Trial #59, see full text in Appendix A).

In 1664 the Crown Tribunal remitted a case of host-stealing and magic to the Lublin criminal
court, as it had already done in 1644 in the trial of Regina Zaleska (Trial #42). This time no
Tribunal representative is recorded as having been present, although the Tribunal did take part
in the formulation of the eventual verdict and sentence. We have no record of the prehistory
of this case, previous to its remittance to the Lublin court, and cannot even be sure where the
accused was from.52 The circumstances of the original accusation are unknown, although it
seems likely that Maryna Bialkowa, the accused, came under suspicion after she had too
freely discussed the uses to which she put the Eucharist with her neighbor Katarzyna
Chudkowa and others. Maryna is never called a witch in the trial record (in contrast to Regina

"ze jest prawda alem czyniela dobrze, dawala do kosciola wosku." Polish bee-keepers were still stealing the
host for their hives into the 19th century (DWOK vol. 7 p. 116). Caesarius of Heisterbach attests to this
practice in 13th-century Germany in his exemplum concerning "bees who built a shrine for the body of the
Lord"(1929 [1223-1224] book 9 ch. 8). As with the exemplum of the cabbages, it displays a profound
ambiguity: the woman sinned in stealing the host for her bees, but this became the occasion for a miracle,
and the practice did have the hoped-for effect: "the Lord gave His blessing to all their work." As creators of
sweet honey for humans and wax for church candles and votive offerings, bees partake of the sacred in
Polish folklore, and even in grammar. Alone of the animal kingdom, bees, like human beings, "pass away"
instead of merely "dying" [umrzec instead of zdechnqc]. Sebastian Klonowic, in his verse classification of
crimes and their consequences, placed theft from beehives alongside sacrilege and church robbery, and
observed that the punishment for such a crime is fire (1600 p. 11; 1960 p. 103).
According to the trial record, Maryna Bialkowa was from Kamionka—the name of dozens of villages in
Poland. However, she stole the host from the church in Miastkow. The village of Kamionka some 25
kilometres directly to the north of Lublin (nine k. west of Lubartow), is about 15 kilometers south-east of
Miastkowek—however, Litak (1991) records no parish church in Miastkowek in the 18th century, and it is
doubtful that there would have been one earlier. More likely Maryna was from Kamionka in southern
Mazowsze, north of Zelechow and 15 k. east of the tiny town of Miastkow; I have marked this latter
Miastkow on the map.

340
 • Stealing the sacred •

Zaleska), and her sentence of beheading—considered the mildest and least shaming of capital
sentences, and common for female thieves in Lublin—suggests that the court treated her more
as a thief than as a witch.
Maryna, wife of Adam Bialek of the village of Kamionka was interrogated September 4 1664
for stealing the host. She freely admitted to having done so. Her aunt, Anna Woitaszkowa,
had advised her to get the Most Holy Sacrament, wrap it in a kerchief, and filter the milk of
her cows through the resulting magical cheesecloth. While filtering the milk, she was to recite
"you won't take this milk, you witches." Maryna made confession at the church in Miastkow,
but she didn't tell the priest during confession that she planned to commit sacrilege soon after.
Maryna seems to appreciate that this failure to confess a planned, imminent mortal sin is itself
a grave sin. After confession she "accepted the Lord Jesus, and having recited [her] prayers,
left the church." She put the host into a small box, wrapped it in a kerchief, and took it home.
Over the next three Sundays, she filtered her cows' milk through it, and afterwards, at the
advice of her aunt, she threw the kerchief into the fire.
All this took place three years previous to the time of trial. Last year, she had visited her
neighbor Katarzyna Chudkowa, and saw something wrapped up in a kerchief on the table.
When she asked what it was, Katarzyna responded "You know full well what it is." Maryna
thereupon told Katarzyna the method of protecting one's milk from witches—it seems
probable that this indiscretion led to Maryna's arrest.
Maryna claimed to be pregnant and therefore exempt from torture. After being examined by
women "knowledgeable in these things," who declared her not to be pregnant, she was
tortured three times by stretching and three times with fire. She added nothing at all to her
testimony.
On the 9th of September Katarzyna Chudkowa was brought in for questioning. She admitted
voluntarily that Maryna had advised her and another woman to filter milk through die
sacrament, but she never tried it. Katarzyna was also subjected to all six stages of torture, but
she kept to her story: She was innocent; Maryna had accused her "out of wrath;" she would
not denounce anyone else because she did not want to "take anyone's [death] on her soul."
On the same day, Maryna's aunt Anna Woitaszkowa, whom Maryna had implicated as her
teacher in Eucharistic magic, was brought in for questioning under torture. Before torture, she
said: "Maryna Adamowa accuses me unjustly, hoping to buy [her own acquittal] with my
body. Do whatever you want; torture me, afflict me; she tells tales about me out of wrath. I
didn't teach her that [enchantment], and I didn't do it ever myself." This spirited woman did
not change her story in any way, maintaining her innocence through all six stages of torture.
More than a month later, October 15, Maryna Bialkowa was beheaded; Anna Woitaszkowa
and Katarzyna Chudkowa were required to be present at the execution—presumably as a
warning—after which they were, "by the judgement and decree of the Tribunal, dismissed to
be free."

• <$• •

II (Trial #148).
In 1718, Zofia Janowska, orphan and house-servant to the widower Szastak, townsman of
Rzeszow, hoped to marry him despite the fact that he ignored her when he wasn't beating her.
When she confided her worries to one Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna, the latter agreed to help
her by contacting Katarzyna Wroblowa, a citizen of the Rzeszow suburb of Pobitny with a
reputation for love magic and other minor witchery. Zofia paid Koczanowiczowna eighteen
grosze, a not inconsiderable sum, to act as go-between.
At Wroblowa's advice, Zofia made confession at the Franciscan church. During confession,
she informed the priest of her intention to steal the host. He told her not to; nevertheless she
was admitted to communion. After taking the host into her mouth, she spat it into a kerchief
and quickly left—a fact noticed by witnesses. Zofia showed further poor judgment (or

341
 • Chapter 2.2 •

naivete) in telling a friend of her deed. Gossip about the deed spread quickly, first among
serving-girls, and then also among their mistresses.
Katarzyna Wroblowa took the stolen host, still wrapped in the kerchief, and mixed with
Zofia's spittle, and rinsed it in cold water. She instructed Zofia to divide this water into three
parts, and administer them to her master in his drink or food, while reciting one of the
subjunctive analogous incantations characteristic of Polish spells: "Just as a crowd gather's
around the communion, so let him gather around me, Christened and called Zoska."53
It didn't work. According to a witness, Zofia later complained that
[D]alam jej tynfa, a nic mi to nie pomaga i Szastak I gave her atynf,and it doesn't help at all. Szastak
mi nie mowi, ani o mnie mysli, jak byl zly przed doesn't speak to me or think about me, as wrathful
tym, tak i teraz jest, ona mnie upewniata: jak mu to as he was before, so he remains. She assured me: if
zadasz w jedzeniu albo w piciu, juz siq nie bqdzie w you give him [the potion] in his food or drink, he
nikim kochal tylko w tobie, poki siq z toba, nie will love nobody but you, until he takes you as his
ozeni, a on mnie i wczora pobiel kijem, darmom wife, but he beat me yesterday with a staff, and I
sobie tynfa straciela" paid a tynf'for nothing.54
She sent for Katarzyna Wroblowa a second time, but the latter refused to come because the
rumors of Zofia's host-theft had become rife. The Rzeszow parish priest, Michal Kuklinski,
made a formal accusation against Zofia on the basis of these rumors, that is by "Delatio per
famam publicum" or "accusation by public reputation." Zofia and her accomplices were
imprisoned in the Rzeszow castle, and a special court composed of the castle's podstaroscie,
the burmistrz of Rzesz6w, and the wqjt began to interrogate the prisoners and witnesses. This
special court, properly an appeals court of the highest officials of the town and the king's
representative, demonstrates that the crime was being taken very seriously. After the bishop of
Przemysl recommended a thorough investigation, the case was transferred to the more
customary mixed rajcy-wqjt mixed court at the city hall, which tried serious crimes.
Over a period of two weeks, the court interrogated each woman separately, three times each,
without torture. The accused admitted everything; nevertheless, at the end of this period they
were sent to torture. Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna and Katarzyna Wroblowa were both pulled
three times and burnt three times. As with Maryna Bialkowa, Katarzyna Wroblowa hoped to
avoid torture by claiming to be three months pregnant, but "expert and wise women"55
examined her and denied this claim. Zofia Janowska, however, was pulled thrice and, in
contravention of the procedures of Magdeburg law and unusually for a court in a city of this
size, was burnt five times. The court obtained no new evidence during torture.
Possibly because the case had attracted the attention of important church and royal officials,
and indeed of the whole town, the sentences were exceptionally harsh and exemplary.
Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna, who had only acted as a go-between and had not handled the
sacrament, was first beheaded and then burnt. Katarzyna Wroblowa first had both hands burnt
in the torture chamber, and was then burnt alive at the stake. As for Zofia Janowska, the court
decreed:
aby ta rejta prawa Zofiej kucharce [...] uciqtej jej that her right hand be cut off in the place of torture,
bylo in loco supplici i na bramie dla tak bezboznych and nailed to the city gate as a reminder for to all
excessantow upamietania gwozdziem przybita byla, such godless transgressors; after her hand is cut off,
po ucie^ciu zas rejci, zywo na stos drew powinna bye she should be thrown alive on a pyre of wood and
wrzucona i spalono zywo. burnt alive.

53
"Jak do tej komuniej ciszba, tak i do mnie kszczonej mianowanej Zoski, zeby byla ciszba"
5
A tynf or tymf, named after the royal minter Andrzej Tymff who produced them, was a coin struck from
inferior metal; with the nominal value of a zlotowka, it was in fact worth considerably less. See Chapter
1.2.3, above.
55
"biegle i mqdre niewiasty"

342
 • Stealing the sacred •

• *X* •

Maryna Bialkowa used the Eucharist to protect the milk of her cows from witches. She

saw nothing wrong with this, and advised her neighbours to do the same. Although she knew

very well that in stealing the host she was handling, in her own words, "the Lord Jesus," she

appears to have had few qualms in doing so: her intended ends were good, and even the

means not too distant from practices tolerated by the clergy, at least at the parish level. Did

not preachers proclaim that the host was "a defence and a sword, and it is terrible to every

enemy"—and were not witches and devils the enemies of both humankind and the Lord?

Parish clergy were known to themselves make use of the weapons of the church, including

the Mass itself, against the depredations of witches. In Kleczew in 1669 (#68), Regina

Stokarka confessed under torture to having killed a number of cattle with a powder given her

by the "bedamned devil" [czart przeklejy]." The local priest's own herd, however, was

protected from her malefice. "One of our parish priest's cows died through our witchcraft; he

would have had more killed, but he had his cattle driven into the church-yard, he performed a

holy Mass and sprinkled the cattle with holy water; that helped him—else more of his cows

would have died." Why should ordinary villagers forgo the protections afforded by the

church?

I suspect that the protection of milk and cattle against witchcraft was the most common

motivation for primary-crime host theft. Just as milk-theft or milk-spoiling, as well as the

bringing of sickness to cattle, were by far the most common accusations against witches,

protective counter-measures were among the most common recorded instances of

"superstition." Regina Zaleska, a not particularly successful part-time cunning woman who

56
"Ksiqdzu plebanowi naszemu zdechla krowa przez nasze czary, wi^cy by mu bylo zdechlo, lecz nagnac kazal
bydlo na cmentarz, mial Msza_ s. i kropiel bydlo, to mu pomoglo, boby mu bylo wiqcej zdychalo."

343
 • Chapter 2.2 •

asked her own young son to steal the Eucharist in Opole Lubelski during his first communion

(Trial #42, Lublin 1644),57 appears to have intended it for some form of milk-protection

magic. She had been hired in the past to un-bewitch enchanted milk and butter, reciting "By

God's power, by the Lord God's help, [send] the enchantment onto a belt, onto a goat,"58 but

this spell, by her own admission, "had, like usual, not helped at all."59 Presumably she hoped

for better results with the Eucharist. Eucharistic magic represented an escalation or

intensification of the invocations of God, blessed herbs and holy water made use of

universally with tacit church approval, and advocated, as a practice amenable to God, by

such elite writers as Haur (1693 pp. 64-65). The very fact that malefice using the host in

secondary-crime trials was so often directed at cattle, might arguably point, by inversion, to

its actual popularity in veterinary magic.

Filtering milk through the Eucharist can also be understood as an exaggeration or

extension of similar practices using blessed (but not consecrated) bread. In Poznah in 1544,

Jagna of Zabikow recommended letting one's cows walk over the table-cloth at which bread

was blessed at Easter, as well as washing them in holy water and blessed czysciec (Stachys

L., woundwort) to protect their milk against witches. At her second trial in 1549, the same

cunning-woman advocated the filtering of witch-spoiled milk through blessed bread to

restore its natural quality and abundance (#4). When Katarzyna the weaver boiled a

cheesecloth outside church during Easter mass (#46, Szadek 1649) she most likely also

57
Through three pullings and two burnings by the Lublin executioner, Zaleska alternatively denied having
ordered her son to steal the host, and declared a willingness to confess all so as not to make a perjurer of
"that unfortunate son of mine [ten syn moj nieszszqsny]." She was acquitted. Compare trial #167, Pacanow
1741, in which Marianna Berbelska sent her two young daughters (the elder was 11 years old) to steal the
host during first communion. She did so at the request of a townswoman of Stopnica, Marianna Maniusca—
for what purpose I don't know. Berbelska and Maniusca were both sent to the stake; Berbelska's daughters
and husband were sentenced to whipping. In Normandy in 1684, two shepherds induced a boy to steal the
host at first communion, for sheep-protection magic (Monter 1997 p. 591).
58
"Boza moca_ Pana Boga pomoca^ na pasa na kozke_ urok"
59
"to postaremu nic niepomoglo"

344
 • Stealing the sacred •

intended to draw on the power of the Eucharist to protect and increase the milk of her cows.

Similarly, the feeding of stolen Eucharists, baked into pancakes, to one's cows (as Krystyna

Matysowna, herself under judicial torture for selling the Eucharist to the Jews of Sandomierz

in 1639, accused her neighbour Anna of doing (APKielce, AMSandomierz sig. 10 ff. 373,

376v; after Wijaczka 2003 p. 29; WQgrzynek 1995 p. 88; Guidon and Wijaczka 1995), is an

extension of the practice, still standard today, of mixing the crumbs of the blessed Christmas

Eve wafer into livestock feed.61 Although the anonymous clerical author of the half ribald,

half serious Synod klechow podgorskich treats this as witchcraft—

Co wzdy jeszcze nabozne troche, bialeglowy, Women, even those who are quite devout,
To wzdy nimi czarujaj, karmia^ nimi krowy Bewitch with the opiatki, feeding them to cows.
(Synod klechow 1607 w . 198-201; in Grzeszczuked. 1966 pp. 198-199).

—it will have been an entirely standard practice. Together with the practice of putting hay

under the Christmas Eve tablecloth and later feeding this hay to the cattle, sheep, and horses,

the extension of the ritual exchange of opiatki from the family circle to its animals had,

indubitably, "magical" content, in the sense that it is expected to effect temporal benefits:

She was accused of witchcraft but appealed the case to the Magdeburg Law appellate court in Krakow,
explaining that her actions were "not to harm anyone, but out of ignorance [na niczyie uszkodzenie, ale
zniewiadomosci]." The appellate court found in her favour—essentially agreeing with her implied
distinction between witchcraft and superstition, czary and gusty—and she was set free after swearing an oath
of expurgation.
It also resembles the practice of administering beneficial herbs to cattle by baking them into pancakes. Regina
Woyciechowska of Klaj testified without torture that she fed her cows the herb kopytnik (Asarum
europaeum L.) baked into pancakes, to increase their yield of milk (#99, Wisnicz Nowy 1688; according to
Kaczmarczyk 1901 p. 312,, this herb was still used in the 19th century to make milk more creamy). In the
same trial, Regina Smalcowa denied doing any witchcraft, but admitted that "placki robielam z swieconym
zielejn zeby krowki mleka dawaly, a torn slyszala z matek starszych [I used to make pancakes with blessed
herbs, so that the cows would give milk, and I heard about this from old mothers]" (#99, Wisnicz Nowy
1688). Fajfarowa of Swierczowa admitted without torture to baking a large ceremonial pancake or kolacz at
Christmas and feeding it to her cows, to increase their milk (#63, Che_ciny 1665). Barbara of Radom put an
intriguing twist on this general practice: she fed a little of each dish from the Christmas Eve feast to the
cattle, as is still done today, but declared this to be a sort of pre-emptive sacrifice to witches: "I hereby feed
all witches and witch-children with this food; if you don't get it now don't come here through the whole
year [wszystkich czarownic i czarowniaj: na te_ karmia, na ktorajesli nie bqdziecie, abyscie przez cary rok u
mnie nie bywaty]" (#7, Kalisz 1580). As early as 1409, the synod of Le_czyca condemned priests who go
from house to house to bless pancakes, instead of singing Mass (Kracik 1990 p. 190). On the similar
practice in pre-Reformation Germany, see Scribner 1987 p. 44.

345
 • Chapter 2.2 •

health and fortune to the herd. But it also, arguably, was a performance of social integration,

and an expression of the insight, in agricultural communities, that (as Bossy has commented

in another context), religion involves "the extension of social relations beyond the frontiers

of merely human society" (1985 p. 13). Maryna Bialkowa and others who stole the host for

their cattle or bees, for the milk and honey in which peasant good fortune were measured,

crossed a line recognized not only by the church and the courts, but by most other peasants

and small town agriculturalists—their accusers. But their action was fully in keeping with the

symbolic logic, if not the law, of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine.

• •$• •

Zofia Janowska's crime more obviously transgresses Christian norms, under any

definition of Christianity. The aims of love magic were to bring about states of lust which

were themselves sinful: it was an invitation or even a coercion to mortal sin. To make use of

the flesh of Christ, born without sin from the Immaculate Virgin—herself innocent of all sins

but especially, in pious imagination, of the sins of the flesh—for such carnal ends was to

involve the sacred in the profane in a particularly distasteful way. Nevertheless, Eucharistic

love magic was practiced, or thought to be practiced, all over Europe. The Italian

demonologist Paulus Grillandus considered it to be particularly common, and very simple:

one held the host in one's mouth while kissing the object of one's desire. Benedykt

Chmielowski, who cites Grillandus by way of Del Rio, records this crime of Eucharistic

eroticism in the same passage as host-malefice causing drought, as an ingredient of witch's

ointment along with the corpses of still-born children, and as a gift to the devil—a context

indicating that for him, and perhaps for clerical authors in general, Eucharistic love magic

346
 • Stealing the sacred •

was as bad as the worst desecrations (1968 [1746] vol. 3 p. 245; Del Rio bk. 6 ch. 2 sect. 1

qu. 1 no. 23; bk. 3 p. 1 qu. 3 [1633 pp. 933, 363, 365]).

In Poland as elsewhere, love magic blurred indistinctly into malefice, depending as it

did on a deeply disturbing manipulation of the passions and the will (Winkler 1990;

Brzezihska 1993). Neither the court nor her accuser nor the witnesses in the trial of Zophia

Philipowiczowa made any clear distinction between love magic and malefice or poisoning:

Pawel Podlodowski accused Zophia explicitly of having brought about his brother's death

through her unrelenting series of love spells and philtres (#37, Skrzynno 1639). Even from

the point of view of the lover, who one might suppose to have wished only the best for the

object of her desires, love magic has a distinct connotation of threat. Katarzyna Wroblowa,

the cunning woman who advised Zofia Janowska in Rzeszow, had reportedly won her own

husband with a spell nearly identical to one of those used by Zofia Philipowiczowa some

eighty years previously. Having washed herself "of all her dirt" she gave her beloved a drink

of the resulting wash-water mixed with the hearts of pigeons, symbolic love-birds throughout

Europe, while reciting the following: "just as it is hard for a pigeon without his mate, so let it

be hard for him without a wife."62 This can be read as a conditional sentence: If he does not

choose her as his wife, he will suffer. This inseparable admixture of malefice and love magic

is even clearer in the case of Zophia Philipowiczowa, whose version of the spell seems to

imply that its target has the choice of loving her or dying.

Accordingly, love magic using the Blessed Sacrament met with the harshest sanctions,

as the sentences in the Rzeszow trial show clearly. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to

lump Eucharistic love magic together with Eucharistic malefice. The latter may or may not

have been actually practiced, and appears to be generated for the most part through the
62
"cate z brudu"; "jak ci^zko goiqbiowi bez pary, tak tez jemu ciqzko bez zony"

347
 • Chapter 2.2 •

cognitive and rhetorical mechanism of inversion and the judicial practice of torture.

Eucharistic love magic, in contrast, certainly was practiced, and its symbolic logic is not an

inversion, but rather a mis-application, a particularization, of the fully orthodox effects and

aims of communion. In normal preparation for communion, Christians confessed their sins,

and committed themselves to reconciliation with, and forgiveness of, anyone to whom they

lived in a state of wrath or inimicability. The kiss of peace, for many commoner Christians a

central moment of the Mass, ritualized this social and indeed sociable aspect of Eucharistic

devotion. Despite Catholic-Reformation efforts to emphasise the vertical love of God rather

than the horizontal love of neighbour effected and expressed by the Mass, communion and

the Eucharist itself remained powerful symbols of amicability (Bossy 1983; 1985 pp. 57-75).

Moreover, devotion to the Eucharist as such could serve as a paradigmatic example of

devotion and love, by analogy to which love magic could operate.

Zofia Janowska's ritual use of the Eucharist recalls, in one direction, common tropes of

love magic in Poland: the use of bodily fluid (here Zofia's spittle), the rinsing (a

handkerchief with the host and spittle taking the place of the more usual rinsing of the body

or of underclothes), the resulting wash given in food or drink. In the other direction it recalls,

in explicit analogy, the Eucharistic devotion encouraged in theology and in practices such as

the Forty Hours devotion. Her incantation depends on this constellation of associations, and

testifies to their currency: "Just as a crowd gathers around the communion, so let him gather

around me, Christened and called Zoska." Importantly, this incantation is not Katarzyna

Wroblowa's invention, but appears to be conventional: around 1732 in distant Podole, Pani

Aleksandrowa Mytkowa is alleged to have used a nearly identical formula to influence the

outcome of litigation over land being tried before the Crown Tribunal in Lublin (Trial #161).
63
"Jak do tej komuniej ciszba, tak i do mnie kszczonej mianowanej Zoski, zeby byla ciszba"

348
 • Stealing the sacred •

At the advice of a "baba" brought in from a distant village, she crumbled stolen hosts, mixed

them with flour and made pancakes. The method evokes some forms of milk magic as

described above, but Pani Mytkowa's aims are more in line with love magic: she intended to

give these pancakes as a gift to the noble judges of the Commonwealth's highest court.64

While mixing the batter, she recited (according to peasant witnesses themselves accused of

participation in an alleged large-scale, coordinated, magnate-sponsored campaign of

witchcraft against the Tribunal and against the Mytkos' opponents in the lawsuit): "Just as

people crowd around the Most Holy Sacrament, in the same way let their graces the lord

deputies of the court show favour in our cases."65 Another witness gives a slightly different

version: "just as a great crowd comes to communion, in the same way let all the Tribunal

[that is, all the judges of the tribunal] be favourable to my mistress."66 All three versions of

this incantation, despite minor variation, depend on and testify to the popular conception of

the Eucharist as an ultimate object of devotion, a thing people want to be near to and to

"crowd around."

The sin of love magic, then (aside from the not inconsiderable sin of using the

immaculate Body of Christ to satisfy the barely acceptable, even within matrimony,

concupiscent needs of the Christian's fallen body), was to mis-apply this universal

amicability and focus it inappropriately on a single person. Nevertheless, even here one can

not speak of a purely instrumentalist borrowing of the sacrament's sacred power. Eucharistic

love magic does not simply "borrow" the host as thing of power; it makes use of its specific

symbolism within a specific, Christian system of symbols, and is incomprehensible outside

64
However, pancakes \placki] could be associated with love magic as well, as when pancakes containing
unspecified herbs were given to the victim love-magic in Praszka (#65, Praszka 1665).
5
"Iak do Nayswiqtszego Sakramentu ludzie cisna. sie, tak zeby na nas ichmc. deputaci sa_dowi panowie laskawi
w sprawach naszych byli"
"[I]ak wielka cizba do kommunii bywa, tak zeby caty trybunal byl laskaw na pania, moie_."

349
 • Chapter 2.2 •

of that Christian system. Eucharistic love magic will have been understood by all concerned

as a crime and a sin—but it was a Christian sin.

350
 Grzechy czarownic sa_ oprocz niezliczonych trzy
naypryncypalnieysze: Apostasia a DEO, Sodomia
& sacrilegium.
The sins of witches are innumerable, but the principal
ChaDter 2 ^ * three are these: Apostasy from God, Sodomy, and
sacrilege.
—Benedykt Chmielowski, Nowe Ateny, albo Akademia
the desecrated Eucharist Wszelkiej Sciencyipelna (1746), vol. 3 p. 247.

2.3.1. Introduction

Trials for Eucharistic magic are relatively simple to interpret. Although a large store of

folkloric material must be brought to bear to render them intelligible, and although the

adjudication of their status within Christianity depends on rather fine points of method and

definition, the facts themselves have a solidity unusual to witch-trials. The accused, usually,

probably did steal the host (and where she did not, her steadfast denial could suffice for

acquittal) and she did so more or less for the reasons given either by witnesses or by the

accused herself, often voluntarily before torture. The record requires interpretation, but not

much meta-interpretation; testimony is surely tendentious but probably not fabricated.

Secondary-crime host theft trials, wherein the accused witches admit to torturing the

Lord Jesus under the guise of the Eucharistic bread, to stabbing the wafer until it bleeds,

giving it to devils at Bald Mountain, throwing it to pigs or burying it under a village cross to

cause drought, present their own, rather different and more difficult, interpretative problems.

Assuming, as humanist historians must, that Bald Mountain has no physical existence and

that one cannot cause a wheaten wafer to bleed, we are left to interpret not actions but

fantasies, not real (although magical) rituals but the imagined rituals of an imagined

diabolical sect. The central question then becomes: whose fantasies, whose imagination?

According to some ways of thinking, this simplifies rather than complicates the

interpretative task. If our goal is to understand the imaginative world of the accused witches

351
 • Chapter 2.3. •

themselves and their fellow peasants, there is nothing, in a sense, to interpret. The testimony

does not reflect their own worldviews, but is instead read off, under circumstances of

excruciating pain, from a demonological script. This script, in turn, like sabbat accounts in

general, is predicated upon structural and rhetorical processes of inversion: it exemplifies

John Bossy's dictum that to know what witches do, and how the devil was worshipped "one

needed only to know what true religion was, and turn it inside out" (Bossy 1985 p. 137; cf.

Clark 1997 pp. 43-79). Witches desecrated the host, or drew blood from it or fed it to pigs,

because such actions were the opposite of all that is good and right.

As Norman Cohn demonstrated decades ago, variations on this theme, incorporating the

torture and stabbing of babies to obtain blood which is then mixed into the flour for the host

or for matzoh, are extremely ancient. First applied to Christians and their mis-understood

"love feast," and subsequently taken up by Christian polemicists against Montanists,

Bogomiles and Cathars, they are part of a "traditional stock of defamatory cliches" (Cohn

1975 p. 56; see also Price 2003 pp. 32-36, 43-50). Just as blood-libel trials against the Jews

tell us nothing at all about Judaism but a great deal about their Christian accusers, the

inversion narratives of Bald Mountain tell us about the imaginations of the judges and

possibly of the demonological manuals which those judges may or may not have been

exposed to: they cannot tell us much about the accused witches themselves.

The basic demonological script of ritual inversion is well set out in the mid-18th

century encyclopaedia by the Jesuit Benedykt Chmielowski.

[C]zarownice wyrzekaia. si? wiary, Chrystusa Witches renounce their faith, renounce the Lord Christ,
Pana, Naysw: Matki, Aniola Stroza, Swiejych His Most Holy Mother, their Guardian Angels, taking
Pahskich, czarta sobie odta^d za stroza henceforth the devil [czart] as their guardian. They take
obieraia^c. Spowiedz czynia^ dla oka tylko confession with only with an eye to stealing the host,
swie_tokradzka_, Nayswie_tszy Sakrament pluia^ spitting and stamping on the Most Holy Sacrament. [...]
depcza^. [...] Bior% z kosciolow rozne rzeczy i They take various things from churches and use them
ich niegodziwie na wzgardzie zazywaia_. [...] indecently and with contempt. [...] They make a holy
Msza. swi$ta_ czartu akkomoduia^ iemuz sie_ Mass for the devil [czart]; submitting to him, [and

352
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

submittuiq. nigdy nie adorowac Naysw: promising] never to adore the Most Holy Sacrament, but
Sakramentu, Obrazy i kosci Swiqtych szarpac, to rip, scratch, and spit on Images and relics [lit.: bones]
drapac, pluc; krzyz, sol, ziola swie_cone nie of the Saints, and to treat indecently crosses, blessed
uczciwie traktowac. [...] Hostyq Naysw: salt, and blessed herbs. [...]. Obtaining the Most Holy
dostawszy iey lub podczas Komunii, lub Sacrament either during Communion, or by stealing,
wykradlszy, w oczach diabla depcza^ [...] they stamp upon it before the devil.
(Chmielowski 1968 [1746] vol. Ill pp. 242-243).1

Just a few years previous to this characterization of witchcraft, Serafin Gamalski's

Przestrogi duchowne rather precisely captures the contemporary epistemological argument

against giving credence to the testimony of accused witches under torture:

W niczym niebqdaj; winna, do wszytkiego si$ Guilty of nothing, she confesses to everything, and
przyznaie, y to spiewa, o czym iey (co sie_ sings out those things which they have stuffed into her
niegodzi) przed torturami glowe_ nabili, albo head before torture (which is dishonorable). This is
examinatorowie, albo siepacze, albo kat, albo done either by the examining judges, or by the
warta, lub publiczny oglos, a podobno y sami executioner and his assistants, or the guards, or the
Spowiednicy, nierozumnie pytaiajs sie. voice of the public, or even, one hears, by Confessors,
penitentow, ich nauczaiq. i do dalszego klamstwa who, incompetently questioning penitents, teach them
impet daia^. and give them further occasion to lie.
(Gamalski 1742 pp. 14v-15)

Gamalski compellingly exposes our historical difficulty. Can anything at all of, for

example Anna Ratajka's testimony discussed below, be treated as originating, in any useful

Although Chmielowski puts particular, perhaps particularly Polish, emphasis on host-desecration, his
inversion account of the sabbat is fully cosmopolitan and traditional. The Malleus notes witches' habit of
stealing the host "for the greater offence against God;" (Za_bkowic 1614 p t 1 ch. 2; Lewandowski ed. 1992
p. 81). Martin del Rio follows Nicholas Jacquier in claiming that witches stole communion hosts, holding
them unswallowed in their mouths, so as to later offer them to the demons; the whole company then
tramples the Host underfoot (Del Rio 1633 [1608] bk. 2 qu. 16 p. 173; Jacquier 1581 p. 58: "aut denique
communione sumpta sacram hostiam, in ore asservatam, et extractam, daemoni oblatam;" see also Del Rio
bk. 5 sect. 16, 1633 p. 779). The bulk of Chmielowski's account of witches and witchcraft comes from Del
Rio's Disquisitiones magicae (1608), as he states himself. However, Chmielowski attributes large parts of
the passage here quoted to the guide for confessors written by the Polish Jesuit Woiciech Tylkowski (1690),
and to an unnamed work of the German Jesuit Georgius Vogler (presumably his catechism and confessional
of 1628). Tylkowski's chapter on witchcraft itself relied on Vogler (BP vol. 31 p. 472). This whole passage
is strikingly similar to the description of the sabbat from the manuscript confession manual of the Jesuit
missionary in Brittany, Julien Maunoir (1606-1683): "the priest [...] threw down the crucifix and struck and
mishandled it, and did the same to the images of Our Lady and the saints. They crucified a little child"
(Maunoir, "Mysteria iniquitatis. La Montagne," 1641; cited after Chatellier 1997 p. 163). Although
Chatellier assumes this to be Maunoir's original work, it seems probable that it and Vogler (and thus
Chmielowski) share an identical, presumably Jesuit, source. I have not been able to identify this, although it
is not, as I had originally supposed, Del Rio.

353
 • Chapter 2.3. •

sense, in her own beliefs and worldview? Or is it all a matter of interpellation and suggestion

by the judges, the public, the priest?2

To interpret witch-trial testimony in this way is, I want to argue, to do a disservice to

the accused witches, who had their own imaginative lives and who were, after all, perfectly

capable of creating inversion narratives of their own. They might too, I suggest, have their

own ideas about "what true religion is": in which case their inverted accounts might reveal to

us—albeit through a glass, darkly—something about their relation to and understanding of

their faith. In this section, while paying considerable attention to elite discourse, I will also

want to show that witches' accounts of their mistreatment of the Eucharist should be taken as

some of the most direct, if inverted, evidence of popular Christian devotion that is available

to us. This is true because, I will suggest, the testimony of witches accused of host-

desecration is their own co-creation—it is not merely the product of leading questions—and

in fact in at least one instance it goes considerably farther than the investigating judges could

have expected or imagined.

As in the previous section, we will first look at the theological and devotional

background to host-desecration beliefs: the understanding of the Eucharist as a re-

The sacrament of confession certainly could spread elite views into popular culture, and possibly could have
influenced the sort of testimony given under torture. To take an example from outside Poland, Fr. Julien
Maunoir's confession manual, mentioned above, gives detailed descriptions of Satan's appearance, the
witches sabbat, etc., and through leading questions and exhortations (such as "you must conceal nothing
from me, I know more about it than you think") shapes the confession, and thus so some degree the
conscience of the penitent, in conformity with these formulae (cited after Chatellier 1997 p. 163). Although
accused witches certainly would have had access to a confessor before going to the stake, it is not at all clear
to me that they would normally have had such access before or between bouts of torture. However, the
records we have of two trials in the Wloclawek diocese described by Koranyi (1928a pp. 7-8, trials #163,
Barcin 1735, #159 Piaski Brzeskokujawskie 1731) originate from the reports of the accuseds' confessors—
who are, however, by this date and in that diocese, deeply critical of witch-trials: see chapter 1.2.2. As for
Vogler's confession manual, which appears to have been similar to that of Maunoir, it seems unlikely that
this will have been used by ordinary parish clergy. It may have been used during Jesuit rural missions, but
recall that these missions were extremely rare in Poland proper before the mid-18th century.

354
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

instantiation of Christ's self sacrifice in the cross, and the corresponding view of those who

torture or humiliate the host as participants in the Passion.

2.3.2. Piety and Passion

Polish Catholicism of the 17th and 18th centuries was deeply Christocentric, with a strong

emphasis on the Passion.3 Polish baroque religious poetry (a genre, it should be noted, almost

totally confined to noble and magnatial court circles) took the Passion of Christ as a central

theme, and even political verse, from the Zebrzydowski rokosz at the beginning of the 17th

century to the Confederation of Bar on the eve of the destruction of the noble

Commonwealth, made use of the Passion narrative, with a suffering Nation in the place of

suffering Christ (Stre^ciwilk 1981). Devotional literature, from the early 16th-century Raj

duszny [Paradise of the soul] to Laterna's r Harfa Duchowna [Spiritual Harp], included

prayers to "all the parts of the body of the Lord Jesus under torment" and meditations on the

Five Wounds (Cieslak 2000 p. 37; Misiurek 1994 vol. 1 pp. 54-56, 165-174; Wojtyska 1981

pp. 62-63). Hours of the Passion, popularized in the Harfa Duchowna and by Confraternities

of the Lord's Passion, traced the events from the Agony in Gethsemane to the Cross (Laterna

1598 pp. 376-378; Cieslak 2000 p. 37, Wojtyska 1981 pp. 62-63). In music, monophonic

vernacular "Bitter Laments [Gorzkie zale]" are a specifically Polish form dating from the late

17th century, performed during Lenten vesper services and in paraliturgical devotions

(Wojtyska 1981 p. 67). Passion Plays featured lamentations by Mary modeled on folk funeral

dirges (Stre^ciwilk 1981 p. 115). The piety of Polish female saints (it should be noted, nearly

all aristocratic, monastic, and under the spiritual guidance of Jesuit confessors) was focussed

3
It also was and remains, of course, deeply Marian. The intensive devotion to Mary can, to some degree, be
understood as an extension of the devotion to Jesus: in most miraculous images of Mary, and certainly in the
most important ones such as Ostra Brama, Studzianna or Czqstochowa, she is accompanied by the Christ
Child.

355
 • Chapter 2.3. •

almost entirely on the Passion: the early 17th-century Benedictine St. Magdalena Mortqska is

described as meditating on the suffering of Christ unceasingly for three years (Wojtyska

1981 pp. 65, 75).

From the 15th century, cycles of the Passion formed the most popular theme of church

murals, so important to the religious life of the illiterate (Bylina 2002 p. 79).The very

landscape bore testament to the Passion piety: the ubiquitous Marian shrines shared space

with crucifixes (colloquially termed "God's Passions [Boze Mejri]) at roadsides and cross-

roads, property boundaries, and in the centres of villages.4 These were interspersed with the

peasant-carved, decidedly folkloric "Anxious Jesus,"5 figures of a tired, thorn-crowned Jesus

resting on a rock with his head in his hands; such figures were extremely popular in rural

areas from the 15th century (Bylina 2002 pp. 157, 161, and figures 52, 53, 61, 62, Gintel ed.

1971 p. 296, Wojtyska 1981 pp. 62, 70). On a grander scale, local Ways of the Cross and,

from the late 16th century, kalwarie—Calvaries complete with a hill of the cross and built

edifices recreating the site of the crucifixion—came to compete with Marian shrines as

centres for pilgrimage. The first of these, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska to the west of Krakow,

was founded by the magnate Mikolaj Zebrzydowski at the turn of the 17th century, and was

quickly imitated by similar centres throughout the Korona and Lithuania (Wojtyska 1981 p.

65; Urban 1959 pp. 253-254; Wislicz 1999).

This focus on the Passion is inseparable from Eucharistic devotion. From the 15th

century, rural parishioners were reminded of the intimate connection between Host and

Passion by murals of the suffering Christ in the niche where consecrated hosts were kept

(Bylina 2002 p. 80). The elevation of the Host in Mass, usually a joyous occasion, was met in

4
In Kleczew in 1730, the accused witch Marjanna of Oporowko testified to burying the host "under God's
Passion [pod Boza^meJkaJ" in Jaksice to cause drought (#158).
5
"Jezus Frasobliwy"

356
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

special vesper liturgies with vernacular hymns about the suffering of Christ, sometimes

accompanied by self-flagellation (Wojtyska 1981 p. 66). Mystical visions of the Christ child

in the Eucharist, either as a beautiful little boy or as dismembered and bloody meat sacrificed

for our sins—propounded in didactic exempla during the development of the doctrine of the

Real Presence, and so important a part of the 14th- and 15th-century female spirituality

recently brought to prominence by Caroline Walker Bynum6—were known in Poland at least

from the 15th c. from Mikolaj of Blonie's collection of sermons for Sundays and holidays

(1494; Szostek 1978 p. 300).7 The Corpus Christi procession organized by the Jesuit

academy in Wilno in 1633, half theatre, half liturgy, featured a tableau of "Charlemagne, the

Pope, and the Little Child in the Host:"8 a visual representation of Charlemagne's legendary

vision, when observing the poor taking communion at Paderborn, that "each one took a

beautiful little Child into his mouth"9 (Procesyja 1633; cited after Okon 1970 p. 96). The

identification of the Eucharist with the Passion is so close that, in a trial in Szczercow in

1716 (#145), the court asks the accused why she stole "God's Passion."

Such identification of the Eucharist with the suffering body of Christ had its dark side.

Although intended to focus the Christian believer's attention inward, on his or her own

personal responsibility, as a fallen sinner, for the suffering of incarnate Divinity, it could also

focus outward as rage against those who dare to scorn the Eucharist. In Poland as in France,

the Corpus Christi procession brought into sharp focus the differences and antagonisms

between Catholic and Protestant. Franco Franco, one of the very few noble Protestants ever

6
Caesarius of Heisterbach 1929 [1223] bk. 9 ch. 2, bk. 9 ch. 42; Bynum 1984 p. 189; 1987 pp. 60, 67, 246;
Kieckhefer 1984 p. 171; Price 2003 pp. 31-32; Rubin 1990 pp. 343-344.
7
According to Trajdos, Mikolaj of Blonie was a principal proponent of Eucharistic theology at the Krakow
Academy (1992 p. 158).
8
Karolus i Papiez z Dzieciatkiem w Hostyjej"
9
"kozdy piejaie Dzieciajko do ust bral"

357
 • Chapter 2.3. •

judicially executed during Poland's "Reformation episode," came to trial not for heresy but

for disrespecting the Eucharist (Tazbir 1993; cf. Tazbir 1986 p. 179).10 But Eucharistic rage

found its main target in the Jews, constantly represented by both clergy (Skarga 1881 [1579]

vol. 3 pp. 343-351)11 and secular authors (Klonowic 1600 pp. 29; 1960 p. 138; Haur 1693 pp.

216-221, not to mention numerous polemics given over entirely to anti-Semitism—e.g.

Mojecki 1589, Miczyhski 1618, Zuchowski 1713) as the murderers of Christ and of young

innocent Christian children, Christ's image. Corpus Christi could become the occasion of

anti-Semitic riots, as in Lwow in 1636 (Ga^siorowic 1994); however, host-desecration and

ritual murder accusations came especially around Easter, with its intensive focus on the

Passion and its unfortunate conjunction with Passover. Desecration of the host and blood

libel are closely linked: both are attempts to re-enact the Passion of Christ through a renewed

attack on His body—either literally in the transubstantiated Host or metaphorically in the

person of a pure and innocent child. Together, they are a dark reflection of the heightened

Eucharistic devotion and Christocentrism of late medieval and Tridentine Catholicism.

Visions of the Eucharist as beautiful baby or as bloody and dismembered flesh, killed for

humanity's sins, inspired devotion but also a desire for revenge. Blood libel and host

The history of the uses played by the Eucharist in Poland, its ability to focus and excacerbate
Catholic/Protestant antagonisms,deserves closer attention than it has so far received. Marek Wajsblum's pre-
war study of the Arian Registry [Regestr Arianismi] at the Crown Tribunal, which makes extensive use of
Tribunal records now lost, demonstrates that litigation against Protestant nobility for real or imagined
profanation of the Host became an important Counter-Reformation tool in the later 17th century (Wajsblum
1939 pp. 316-336). Some idea of the political tensions embodied in the Most Holy Sacrament may be
gleaned from the following anecdote. During a session of the Crown Tribunal in Lublin, a bell could be
heard ringing outside in the town square—it was the bell proceeding a priest carrying the host in a viaticum
to a sickbed. Upon hearing this, all the deputies doffed their caps and fell to their knees; all but one, a
Calvinist. For thus profaning the host, and despite his noble status and immunity as a deputy of the court, he
was sentenced on the spot to decapitation. The sentence was transmuted, after tempers had cooled, to a term
in prison (ibid.).
March 30, "Mexzenstwo pachole_cia Szymona Trydentskiego, od zydow um^czonego [the martyrdom of the
little boy Simon of Trent, tortured by the Jews]." In the appendix to this saint's day, Skarga records a blood
libel against the Jews of Punia near Wilno, who are supposed to have killed and bled a young Christian girl
in 1574, and he repeats the standard trope that the Jews escaped punishment by bribing corrupt Christian
officials (1881[1579] vol. 3 p. 348).

358
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

desecration trials serve, then, not only as indices of anti-Semitism or of ethnic hatreds, but

also of the spread and penetration into the Christian populace of Eucharistic piety.

Hanna Wejjrzynek traces the blood libel to the development of the cult of the Body of

Christ in the 13th century; early accounts of Jewish profanation of the host and its miraculous

indestructibility are inseparable from the numerous Christian miracles and visions in the

same period which served to establish the Real Presence and justify the new holiday of

Corpus Christi. In the 13th-15th centuries both the desecration legends and the

accompanying Eucharistic miracles are especially associated with the Carmelite order, which

also helped introduce this ideological complex to Poland (We_grzynek 1995 p. 27-30; Trajdos

1992 pp. 157-163). As the feast of Corpus Christi and accompanying Eucharistic devotions

came to Poland, so did profanation legends and, much later, trials.The chronicler Jan

Dhigosz, friend to the Observant Franciscan provincial John Capistrano, a notorious Jew-

baiter whose sermons had instigated blood libels and pogroms in Silesia, records the first

instances of Jewish profanation of the host in Poland. These accounts, which are not verified

in trial records, have the character rather of miracle stories: they expose simultaneously the

iniquities of the Jews and the tremendous power of the Eucharist. According to Dhigosz, an

anti-Jewish riot in Krakow in 1407 started when the Jews attacked a priest carrying the

viaticum to the sick. In 1399, the Jews obtained and tortured a host, piercing it with knives

until it bled: the miraculous aftermath, discussed below, led to the cult of the bleeding

Eucharist of Poznah (Dhigosz 1975 p. 312; 1981 p. 308; W^grzynek 1995 pp. 47-49).13

12
There was in fact an anti-Jewish riot in Krakow in 1408; but the ensuing trial records make no mention of
host profanation or ritual murder.
13
Dhigosz's versions of these events were written under the influence of the host-profanation and ritual murder
trials in neighbouring Breslau and elsewhere in Silesia in the mid-15th century: the Silesian trials were well
known in Poland, and their instigator, John Capistrano, visited Krakow at Dhigosz's invitation immediately
after the Silesian trials (W^grzynek 1995 pp. 34,49).

359
 • Chapter 2.3. •

Actual trials against Jews for profanation of the host began in Poland only in 1556 in

Sochaczew in Mazowsze: this first trial took its impetus from the active involvement of the

papal nuncio Aloisius Lippomano, who was visiting nearby Lowicz at the time. Despite

repeated royal proclamations forbidding ritual murder and host-profanation trials, and

reminding local courts that Jews were under the jurisdiction of palatinate (wojewodzkie)

courts, W^grzynek records 16 more host-profanation trials between 1556 and 1660 (ibid. p.

59; see also Tazbir 1986b).14

Anti-Semitic profanation trials did not, as We^grzynek suggests, fade away after the

mid-17th century, to be replaced by ritual murder trials, a development she attributes to the

triumph of Counter-Reformation and secure establishment of the Eucharistic cult (1995 p.

165). Whether or not the clergy found themselves no longer in need of profanation trials—a

dubious supposition even within its functionalist frame of reference, considering that cults

are not only established, but also maintained through ritual expression of attack upon them

by an Other—secular authorities continued to express anxiety over the vulnerable Body of

Christ in the Eucharist, and prosecute His tormentors. In 1663, the Crown Tribunal in Lublin

sent the Jew Pinkas of Tomaszow to the Lublin city court, and thence to the stake, for buying

a ciborium containing the Eucharist (Guidon 1996 p. 302, citing APLublin, AMLublin sig.

140 ff. 179-179v, 193-193v). In 1669 the monk Murzynkowicz was tried at the

archiepiscopal court in Lowicz, for selling hosts to Jews between 1662 and 1669 (Guidon

1996 p. 302). We have already encountered the trial in 1739 of three church robbers, two

Jews and a Christian, suspected of stealing the host both for witchcraft and for profanation

(APLublin, AMLublin sig. 50 (Advocatalia) ff. 502-503). In 1741, Paulus Czabay and leek

14
Of these, only 9 are preserved in trial records. This figure does not include ritual murder trials, which
We_grzynek treats separately.

360
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

Jochymowicz were accused of stealing the host from a village church "for the Jews for the

Day of Judgement"15 (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 50 (Advocatalia) ft 922-931).16 A wave of

anti-Semitic accusations of Eucharist profanation, associated with the mid-century Potop,

culminated in a series oilauda and sejmik instructions of the szlachta in wojewodztwo after

wojewodztwo—1664 (Rus), 1665 (Czernihow) 1669 (Le^czyca), 1670 (Kujawy), 1670

(Rawa) 1670 (Prusy Krolewskie). In these declarations, the nobility demanded expulsion of

the Jews if (or in some cases because) they "they commit that abomination, the sacrilegious

theft of the Most Holy Sacrament"17 (Guidon 1996 pp. 302-303).

The most famous miraculous host in late medieval and early modern Poland was the

bleeding host of Poznan, in the Carmelite church of the Body of Christ in Poznah. Its

foundational legend deserves close attention, as it sets the basic shape of all later profanation

trials of Jews, and, I think, of Christian witches as well. The earliest documents concerning

the foundation of this church in 1402 allude to a miraculous host but do not mention its

profanation by Jews. By the late 15th century the story had become so well-known and

standardized that Jan Dhigosz and Michal of Janowiec could describe it independently of

each other (Dhigosz 1981 p. 308; Belcarzowa ed. 1980 p. 60; W^grzynek 1995 p. 48). 16th-

century chroniclers such as Maciej Miechowita and Marcin Kromer followed Dhigosz's

story; in 1583 the miracle received its first full-length treatment in the Historyia o dziwnym

znalezieniu Ciala Bozego [History of the wonderful finding of the Body of Christ] by the

pseudonymous Tomasz Rerus; while Tomasz Treter's illustrated Sacratissimi Corporis

15
"na zydow na sa^dny dzieri"
16
1 have not seen this document, but quote it after Riabinin's annotated card-index to the Advocatalia, available
in APLublin. In Riabinin 1928a p. 20, he refers to what must be the same case as being recorded at f. 293 of
AML sig. 50—presumably this should be f. 923
17
"to horrendum Przenajswie^szego Sakramentu sacrilegium popelnic"

361
 • Chapter 2.3. •

Christi Historia et Miracula of 1609 was translated into German and Polish (1663)

(W^grzynek 1995 pp. 49-52; EKvo\. 31 pp. 310-311).18

In its developed form, the Poznan host-desecration legend closely resembles similar

stories from Paris in 1290, Breslau in 1451 (the trial presided over by John Capistrano) and

in Sochaczew in 1556. A poor Christian woman who worked for a Jewish family is

persuaded to steal three hosts on Friday, 15 August (at once the day of Christ's Passion and

the Assumption of the Virgin Mary). She wraps them in a kerchief and brings them to her

masters.19 The Jewish elders gather in the basement of a dwelling, where, in order to

"execute their wrath on the body of Lord Christ," they lay the hosts on a table and pierced

with knives until they bled. A blind Jewish woman present at the torture converted to

Christianity and gained her sight. The Jews became afraid and tried to destroy the hosts by

burning and dropping them into a toilet and a well—to no avail. They threw them out into a

ditch outside the Poznan walls. Next Sunday, just as the Eucharist was elevated in all the

churches of Poznan, the three desecrated hosts also rose up, upon which cows grazing nearby

knelt down in worship, a motif already known to Caesarius of Heisterbach in the early 13th

century. The young son of the city cowherd found the hosts suspended in the air and

notified the bishop, and the place where they were found became a miraculous pilgrimage

centre, and the site of the Carmelite Church of the Body of Christ. By 1540 more than a

hundred miracles had been attributed to the bleeding hosts, and after a Reformation lull the

18
Wiesiolowski (1992) suggests cautiously that T. Rerus might be an abbreviation of TREteRUS, and that
Tomasz Treter might thus be the author of both the 1583 and 1609 accounts of Poznan miracle. See
We_grzynek 1995 pp. 52-54, 182 for other literary treatments of the Poznan story.
19
The motif of the female Christian servant doing the actual theft was established early and is extremely stable
across Europe; see e.g. Price 2003 p. 37. Its deployment by Counter-Reformation polemicists in Poland to
depict the dangers of interconfessional intimacy has recently been explored by Magda Teter, 2006 pp. 72-
79.
20
"wykonac [...] wscieklosc nad cialem Chrystusa Pana"
21
1929 [1223-1224] book 9 ch. 7, "Of the body of the Lord which was stolen from a church and its place of
concealment revealed by oxen in a field."

362
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

site became popular again in the late 16th century (Wiesiolowski 1992). In 1620, the table

upon which the hosts had been stabbed was found, still stained with blood: the site of the

hosts' torment became a Chapel of the Most Holy Blood of Jesus Christ, and miraculous

powers are still to this day attributed to the water from the well into which the bloody hosts

had been thrown (Wejrzynek 1995 pp. 48-57; Lukaszewicz 2000 [1838] vol. 2 pp.207-210,

257; Bojarski 2005ba).22

2.3.3. Host magic and the inversionary imagination

To get an initial indication of how one might tease out a picture of the symbolic world of

accused witches in secondary-crime trials, and the place of the host within that worldview, in

spite of and by means of'the inversion narratives they co-produce with their tormentors, let us

take a brief look at the manner in which the host is used for malefice, and the sorts of

malefice it is allegedly used for.

Witches accused of using the host most often either bury it (in bed-chambers to cause

illness to humans, in stables to kill cattle, in fields to cause drought and crop-failure), or

make it into a powder with which they sprinkle their victims.

Both procedures—burying and sprinkling a powder—are standard in Polish witch-trials

using other materials such as the head of a mare, human and animal bones, wood from a

coffin and materials from the gallows, as well as toads, snakes, and other "gadzina

[reptiles]"—and in fact the host is usually combined with some or all of these materials in

malefice. In Kiszkowo in 1761, hosts are placed in a mare's head (#172); in Kleczew, they

are combined with vipers and snakes (#68), the ashes of a burnt cat (#158), or pigs' brains, a

mare's head, reptiles and vipers, and little red bugs (#108). These procedures link the
22
Lukaszewicz excerpts the story from Kazimierz Miedzwiedzki's 1772 Polish translation of Treter; this is the
source of the quotation.

363
 • Chapter 2.3. •

"drying" or "withering" theme and the burying or disordering theme, both so important in

Polish witchcraft accusations (2.1.3) with desecration, as the host is defiled by association

with the ashes of vipers, cats and similar "filth." Both forms of defilement are well attested in

demonological sources. Already in the 14th century, Jews in France were accused of

poisoning wells with a mixture of herbs, blood, urine, and the Eucharist (Rubin 1990 p. 341);

like so much of Jewish host-desecration stereotype, this is carried over into the discourse of

witchcraft. The Malleus records an anecdote that combines the themes of burying,

defilement, and Eucharist as Christ-child. A witch stole the host and buried it, together with

frogs and other things, in ajar in her stable. However, the next day a field worker, passing

by, heard "a voice as of a crying little child," and the witch was caught (Zabkowic bk. 1 ch.

5; Lewandowski ed. 1992 pp. 80-81).24 Chmielowski notes that witches use "the Most Holy

Sacrament, by God's permission, and holy Oil" for their ointment, mixed with the corpses

of stillborn children (1968 [1746] vol. 3 pp. 243-244). The trial testimony appears, then, to be
Oft

a simple reflection of demonological tropes.

However, it is possible to discern the possibility of an indigenous discourse of host

magic through the mirror of malefice, that is, through its inverted description in host-

desecration trials. Where the targets of Eucharistic malefice can be identified, these are most

often children (#78, #145 #96, #108, #112), cattle (#145, #139, #68, #158), and crops

"glos jakoby dziecie_cia placza^cego"

According to Price (2003 pp. 55-56) this incident took place in Mainz in the 1380s, and so considerably
predates the Malleus.
"Nays: Sakramentu (Deo permittente) y Oleiu swiqtego do tegoz zazywaia,."
I should perhaps note here that neither demonologists nor accused witches were structuralist automatons; both
were capable of critical reflection on the mechanisms of the inversion. Theological reflection concerning the
destructive consequences of receiving the eucharist unworthily, for example, drew on medical discourse
concerning the radically different consequences of the same medicine in different circumstanances, and on
biblical precedents. The Roman Catechism notes, following 1 Sam. 5:1-12, that the same Ark of the
Covenant which had brought blessings to the Israelites, brought disaster to the Philistines (RC part 2 ch. 3
par. 56).

364
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

through the creation of drought (#123, #78, #61, #158)—although sometimes the targets are

less specific, as when Agnieszka Rokocina confessed to making a powder of the stolen

sacrement, with which to poison "property and people"27 (#151, Pyzdry 1719). The first two

of these are of course, primary targets of malefice in general; the third is rare in Poland, so

the correlation of crop-destroying magic with the Eucharist deserves careful attention.

Children were targets of Eucharistic malefice in five of the trials. Anna Ratajka (#123)

was originally accused of maleficient murder of her neighbours' children, before she

confessed to helping steal and torture the Eucharist, and to poisoning her own child and

giving its soul to the devil (cf. #78, Warta c. 1680; #112, Kleczew 1693). In the opposite

direction, Maryna of Tuliszkow first confessed to theft and torture of the Eucharist, and then

added that this tortured Eucharist was used to kill the young son of her manor-lord, Wojciech

Breza (#96, Kleczew 1688); three years later, the same court tried another serf of the same

master, again originally for host-theft but also, after torture, to "spoil" [zepsuc] various

noblemen's children (#108, Kleczew 1591). Children and Eucharists are closely identified, as

we have already seen: in theology and iconography which emphasized the Christ-child in the

host; in the symbolic equivalence of host-desecration and ritual murder in the accusations

made against Jews; in the constellation of inversion stereotypes relating murder and

cannibalism of children to mistreatment of the host. Of course torture, murder, sacrifice, and

cannibalism of young children, as well as their use to make witches' powder and witches'

ointment, are mainstays of demonology and folklore, and do not always or even usually

appear in conjunction with the Eucharistic motif. Possibly, however, the two are connected

27
"dobytek y ludzie"
28
The best general account of the "defamatory cliche" of infant cannibalism, from the first century into
medieval times, remains Conn's Europe's inner demons (2000 [1975], chs. 1, 3-4). See now also David
Frankfurter's Evil incarnate, which carefully compares similar imaginations of monstrous evil across

365
 • Chapter 2.3. •

positively as well as negatively. None of the primary-crime host-trials I know of mention the

healing of children; however, Stanislaw of Skarbimierz condemned, in the 15th century, the

healing of feverish children using the manubrium, closely associated with the Host. Jacek

Wiesiolowski surmises persuasively that the large proportion of children among those

miraculously healed or saved from drowning by the Poznan Eucharists may be related to the

motif of the Christ Child in the Host (1992 p. 157). The inversion narrative of malefice

against children with the host may reflect, then, a tradition of healing children with the

incarnation of the Christ Child.

A similar argument can be made concerning confessions of Eucharistic malefice against

cattle. Katarzyna Kozimihska confessed to stealing the host to bury in the barn to kill cattle

(#139, Wyszogrod 1705), as did Marjanna of Oporowko (#158, Kleczew 1693), who also

mixed the crumbled host with the ashes of a burnt cat. Regina Stokarka implicated her co-

accused, Regina Maruszka, of killing cattle with a powder of the Sacrament mixed with burnt

vipers and snakes (#68, Kleczew 1669). Women intending real malefice may very well have

really used such methods, either on the principle that what can heal can harm, or through an

implicit logic bringing down the wrath of God in the place of a desecrated host, rather than

on the person who desecrated it. Nevertheless, the connection with Eucharistic veterinary

magic is obvious enough: the accused may be understood to have been inverting what they

knew concerning the apotropaic use of the host to protect cattle.

cultures (2006). See also Charles Zika's comparison of woodcuts depicting the cannibalistic witches' feast,
with extremely similar woodcuts depicting the feasts of Brazilian "cannibals" (Zika 2003a).
The motif of witches'ointment mixed with murdered children or stillbirths might also be related to the early
Medieval practice, condemned by Burchard of Worms, of burying dead baptized children with a Eucharist—
apparently as a viaticum for a child who died to early to receive communion (Rubin 1990 p. 335). If this is
true, the diabolization of the practice follows a similar trajectory as I have suggested might underly the
stereotype of witches casting the host into pigstyes to cause bad weather.

366
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

Finally, the Host is buried in the fields to bring drought, or is sprinkled on crops to

destroy them. As noted, malefice against crops is rare in Poland, despite the considerable

emphasis given to it in demonology. Excepting host-desecration trials, I know of only six

clear examples of crop or drought magic in Poland (#84, #165, #181, #150, #50, #31). Of

these, three share a tentative thematic association with Eucharistic magic in that the

implement of drought-creation is a dead and dried-up child (#84, #165, #181).

Chmielowski, following Grillandus and Del Rio, declares that witches crumble the Host

and bury it in the fields to prevent bad weather (1754 vol. 3 p. 245]). Despite the positive

outcome attempted, he understands this as an abuse of Eucharistic efficacity. Gansiniec

records numerous examples, from Germany, Italy and Switzerland, of the crumbled host

being sprinkled on crops to strengthen and protect them (1959 pp. 102-103). We have already

mentioned the ambivalence inherent in the exemplum of the cabbages fertilized with the

Body of Christ, as also the conflicting views of churchmen concerning Eucharistic rogations

of the fields to protect them from bad weather, but also from the depredations of witches and

demons. Del Rio enumerates, in his list of forbidden popular errors, the practice of sprinkling

the Eucharist in the fields to rectify or protect against maleficent destruction of the harvest

An extremely unusual trial in Bochnia (#84, 1679) began with suspicion that two beggar-women, last seen
with a missing infant (a "niewiniajko," literally a "little innocent"), had sold it to the Jews for ritual murder.
As the trial progressed this theme was dropped or rather transformed: the child was murdered, burnt, and, at
the request of a wealthy Canon of Krakow who hoped to increase the value of his own grain, used to destroy
the fields and cause drought on the other side of me Wisla. While sprinkling this powder on the fields, the
witches recited "bodaj suche roki byry, jak ten proch, bodaj deszcze nieprzechodziry i zeby sie. nic nie
rodzilo [Let there be dry years, like this powder is dry; let the rain not come, so that nothing will grow]." In
the small mountain town of Muszyna in 1678 (#181), Anna Dudzicha is rumoured to have swung a dead
child around her head every time rain-clouds appeared, driving the clouds away. Since this same witch is
accused of possessing latawcy, and since latawcy can both take the form of dead children and can cause
drought (as well as thunderstorms) wherever they are, the connection to Eucharistic magic in this case must
be treated as very tenuous at best (see chapter 5).

367
 • Chapter 2.3. •

(bk. 6 ch. 2 sec. 1 qu. 1 no. 23; 1633 p. 933).31 Del Rio's co-Jesuits, more than a century

later, displayed the Eucharist and instructed the populace in devotional exercises, in order to

bring rain to drought-stricken Bavaria (clouds appeared before five Our Fathers and five Hail

Maries had been completed, and it rained for several days). The missionaries did this as an

alternative to the "futile superstition to which some of the inhabitants were given" to break a

drought (Chatellier 1997 pp. 102-103). Might not these "futile superstitions" have been the

similar in form, but unauthorized, burying of a Eucharist in the fields? It seems likely that the

rhetorical structures of witchcraft confession made, of a Christian but extra-ecclesiastical

ritual to bring rain, an anti-Christian ritual to cause drought.

This thesis seems even more likely when we attend to the details of the testimony

concerning drought and weather magic with the host. As mentioned already, Marjanna of

Oporowko buried her stolen Host under "Boza mejca"—the "Passion of Christ" or field

crucifix between Jaksice and Oporowko—a strange place to desecrate the host, and more

likely an unauthorized addition to standard fertility rituals incorporating these crucifixes

(#158).32 In three trials, (#151, #123, #78) the Host was stolen during the feast of the

Assumption of the Virgin Mary, or Our lady of the Herbs. This is a feast of considerable

ecclesiastical accommodation to popular needs, during which herbs were blessed for

medicine, to protect the house from evil influences, and for the benefit of livestock and

crops: the "blessed herbs" that appear time and again in witch-trial testimony had been

brought to the church and blessed by the priest on this day. Stealing the host on this particular

31
"Item si, ut sterilitatis agrorum maleficium tollant, hostiam sacram comminuant, & tritam in pulueres
spargant per hortum vel agrum." Concerning this practice, Del Rio cites Hollenus, Grillandus and Caesarius
ofEisterbach.
32
Haur might have had something like this in mind when he complained of "suspicious people, who practice
superstition and witchcraft [ludzie podeyrzani, ktrorzy na pewne gusla, y czary [...] zazywaiaj' at field
crucifixes, offending God thereby (1693 p. 89).
33
Refered to as such in the trials: "Matka Boska Zielna [Mother of God of the Herbs]" or "Najswie^tsza Panna
Zielna [the Blessed Virgin of the Herbs]."

368
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

day, and then burying it or sprinkling it in the fields seems, prima facie, like fertility magic

rather than malefice. Although I have classified all these instances of host-malefice as

secondary-crime host theft cases, and although in all of them the revelation of host theft to

cause drought emerges only under torture and usually in the context of the sabbat and

diabolism, it is not improbable that they either did in fact steal the host for fertility magic, or

were reporting, in inverted form, a well-known ritual practice.

The analysis of host-malefice presented here suggests that many of the maleficient uses

of the host, recorded both in trial testimony and in demonology, might be distorted

reflections of actual practices of beneficial or healing magic. Where witches kill children

with the host, this reflects the particular suitability of the Eucharist, envisioned so often as

the Christ Child, for the miraculous healing of children. Burying the Host in barns and

stables to kill cattle reflects practices, known from primary-crime trials, of Eucharistic

veterinary, especially associated with cattle. Finally, burying the host to cause drought or hail

and destroy crops reflects actual practices wherein the Host protects crops from drought and

hail.

There is a danger, in analysis of this kind, of turning every act of malefice into

something beneficient. This is not my intention. I do think the analysis, at the least, lends

plausibility to the thesis that Eucharistic healing was widely practiced in Poland, and that this

healing leaves traces in diabolized witch-trial testimony. However, I do not wish to maintain

that the diabolization itself is solely an elite imposition, or that the accused themselves were

incapable of making their own inversions. Healing magic is always ambivalent, as we have

seen: to increase the productivity of one's own cow is to decrease that of one's neighbour; to

bring rain to one's own fields is to cause drought somewhere else. It is not at all improbable

369
 • Chapter 2.3. •

that the peasantwomen under trial themselves believed the Eucharist, used improperly or by

the wrong person, could cause the inverse of what, in other circumstances, were its "natural"

functions of healing and benefit.

2.3.4. Broken bodies

Let us take a closer look at two trials where Eucharistic malefice is accompanied by

particularly flagrant desecration, raising particularly difficult questions of interpretation.

Both trials took place in villages to which the town court has been invited by the owner or

manager; both exhibit the typical features of such deputized trials in Wielkopolska: the

sabbat; large-scale denunciation of other women; an almost forgone sentence of death at the

stake. Nevertheless, neither trial can be reduced to the reiteration of a stereotype or the

playing out of a cultural script: above all, the unique sensibilities of the main accused, in each

case, render such easy reduction impossible. Host theft and even the pact or the sabbat are

elements of discourse, endlessly repeated, but they are also the building blocks out of which

unique individuals create their unique narratives. Although I use these trials to make general

points about the Eucharist in Polish belief and practice (and not only in witchcraft belief and

practice), the narratives presented here, like those in the section on primary-crime host theft,

are as important for how they differ from standard models as for their conformance to such

models.

The trial of Marjanna of Tuliszkow (Trial #96, Kleczew 1688).

In 1688, Pan Wojciech Breza, owner of the village of Wajsosze, brought Marjanna of
Tuliszkow to the court in nearby Kleczew because she was "under suspicion concerning
witchcraft."34 Marjanna, who the court record describes as a maiden some 15 or 16 years old,
had recently gone into service as a komornica to one Jqdrzej, a peasant tenant in Wajsosze and
so a subject of Pan Breza.
Marjanna had been caught in the church of Slesin, a small town near Wajsosze, in the act of
tying some "raw thread from her underwear"35 to the hands of statues of the Virgin Mary and

34
"podejrzana wzglqdem czar."
35
nicie surowe ze spodnych rzeczy

370
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

St. John (most likely St. John the apostle, to whom Jesus had commended the care of his
mother at the crucifixion). Jan Swiec of Slesin, together with some unnamed women,
confronted her and asked her what she was doing this for. While Swiec was untying the string
from the statues' hands, Marjanna volunteered an extraordinary story. The story comes to the
trial record at third hand: from Marjanna to Jan Swiec, who told it to Pan Breza, who related it
to the Kleczew court as part of his accusation. She is said to have said that:
za niajm diabel chodzil, pzymuszaja.c ja_ do a devil is following her, compelling her to
communicaty z soba.. Tak ze gdy z druga^ communication [i.e. intercourse] with him. Also
dziewczyna. za piecem sypiala, przyszedl do niej when she slept with the other servant-girl behind the
kazal jej umknax, a sam wlazl w possrzodek miqdzy stove, the devil came to her and ordered her to
nie mowia^c umkniej sie. be.de. ja tu spal." scootch over, and he crawled in between them,
saying, scootch over, I'm going to sleep here.
The same devil came to her when she was watching over her master's fishing nets at the lake.
The "tempter [pokusnik]" pointed at her with a whip, and told her to follow him home. He
had the legs of a stork.
Marjanna appears to believe herself to have been involuntarily initiated into witchcraft or a
pact: on the road from Tuliszkow to take up service in Wa.sosze, she met with a certain
Regina who was a short time later burnt as a witch in Piotrkowice; Regina told her "that
you'll have things good, and don't you forget it."36 In later testimony Marjanna elaborates this
tale: Regina had bought her a glass of spirits at the inn in Slesin during her journey to
Wajsosze, and told her to drink it to the dregs; she did so, and immediately "that tempter on
stork's legs"37 appeared. Later still, under torture, she relates that this same witch and a third
woman, Katarzyna of Lychyh [or Lichen], who lives in Slesin, tempted her saying "you'll
have things good, just join with us two together, and I got married to that tempter behind the
old tavern past Slesin, and those two women were present"38
To return to the chronology of the trial: Jan Swiec told all this to Pan Breza, whereupon
"doubt and suspicion grew in His Honor concerning these things, and he ordered her to be
dunked. She floated like a duck once, twice, and a third time,"39 and was therefore brought to
Kleczew to be tried.
Under first torture Marjanna confessed to attendance at Bald Mountain, which is sometimes in
Piotrkowice and sometimes in the town square in Slesin. She denounced the aforementioned
Katarzyna of Lichen and Regina of Piotrkowice, both of whom have diabolical husbands; also
Kazimierz of Kleczew and Maciek of Lichen who play music at Bald Mountain; the
shepherdess of Mikoszyn, Jadwiga of Leszyn (who taught her to make poisonous powders
from burnt frogs, lizards and vipers); and the cobbler's wife of the town of Kazimierz, who
asked Marjanna to perform malefice against her sister. She also denounces Regina Czubatka
of Wa_sosze, in the testimony which merits this trial's inclusion in this chapter:
Czubatka niewiasta powolana od niej z Wa.sosz This Marjanna denounced the woman [Regina]
powolana od niej zeznala ta Marjanna na nie., Czubatka of Wa.sosze, testifying that when we were in
gdysmy byry w Kosciele w Slesynskim obiedwie, the Church in Slesin together, I went to confession and
spowiadarym sie. i kommunik[owary] kazala mi took communion; she told me to take the Most Holy
nieznacznie Naswiqtszy Sakrament z ust, jam tak Sacrament unobtrusively from my mouth; I did this
uczynila i ona nieznacznie w chuske. zawine_la i and she unobtrusively wrapped it in a kerchief and
wzie_la, niebawia.c sie. poszlym do domu do took it; without waiting around we returned home to

"ze bqdziesz miala dobrze, zebys tego nie zapomniala." The phrase "you will have things good," appears over
and over in the narratives of becoming a witch: Marjanna's interlocutors will most likely have understood
perfectly well what was implied.
37
"pokusnik ten na bocianich nogach"
"bqdziesz sie. miala dobrze tylko przystan do nas obiedwie wespol i bralam slub z tym pokusnikiem za starym
goscincem za Slesinem byly obiedwie przytym."
"Jgmosci uroslo dubium i suspicya kolo tych rzeczy, kazal ja^plawic. Jako kaczka plywala po wierzchu, po
raz, po drugi, po trzecif...]."

371
 • Chapter 2.3. •

Wa^sosz za brodem w boru jusz odwinajwszy go z Wa_sosze. On the other side of the ford, in the woods,
chustki, klola go na rqku czy spylka. abo igla^ az she unwrapped it from the kerchief and began to stab
siq cud wielki sie_ stal, ze krew ciekla i chustke it with a pin or needle, until a great miracle took place:
zbroczyla krwia,, potym sis dziecie maluskie blood trickled [from the host], and the kerchief was
nagie stalo na rqku jej i zaplakalo serdecznie i soaked with blood, then a little tiny child, naked, stood
zalosnie, potym zniknelo, nie wiem gdzie siq on her hand and wept heartily and mournfully, and
podzialo. Potym one. chuste_ zwina_wszy do kupy then it disappeared, I don't know where. Later she
obwiajzala nycia_ i potym te_ chustkq zwyniona. w wrapped up that kerchief with a string and wrapped it
posciel wlozyla do dworu naniowszy synowi J.M. in the bed-linen in the manor-house of the youngest
Pana Brezy, ktorego dobrze przyprawila o smierc, son of His Grace Sir Breza, which child she led to its
nie kto inszy tylko ona. Zeznala to ta dziewczyna, death—no one else but her. This girl [Marjanna]
kiedy by JM Pan Breza kopal tarn kqdy syn jego testified, that if His Grace Pan Breza were to dig there,
legal, wielkie by tam dziwy nalazl i czary srogie, where his son lies, he would find a great many strange
gadzyn rozmaitych zmyjowe, wejzowe i rozne things and horrible bewitchments: various reptiles,
instrumenta czarownic. vipers and snakes, and instruments of witches.
She also testifies to having danced, drunk and feasted at Bald Mountain, and slept with a
devil, "but the devil was cold."40
At her third torture (no second session of torture is mentioned), Marjanna denounces a long
list of people from several villages and towns. Those from Wa_sosze (the aforementioned
Regina Czubatka, her daughter Marjanna Czubatka, and Kaszka, shepherdess for the manor's
flock)41 were immediately brought in as co-accused in Marjanna's trial, while those from
Slesin were later brought to trial by a citizen of that town at Pan Breza's urging (Wislicz
2004b p. 76). Marjanna confirmed again that she stole the host to poison Pan Breza's son, but
makes no further mention of her vision of the baby in the sacrament.
The court now brought in Regina Czubatka for interrogation. She admitted nothing through
three sessions of torture, but instead "slept during torture."42 Held in the stocks overnight, she
broke down the following day: she had buried a mare's head under the manor-house
threshold; she had poisoned Pan Breza's son with nuts (!), she was married to a devil named
Jasio; she had killed the priest in Slesin. Marjanna stole the host from the Slesin church during
Easter communion. Moreover, "the one and the other [Marjanna and Czubatka, probably in
confrontation face to face before the court] testified concerning the Most Holy Sacrament and
poison, that it happened as previously testified. And Czubatka testified that having rinsed the
bloody kerchief, she threw it into the fire."43
The remaining testimony is less relevant to our present concerns. Marjanna was tortured a
fourth time, Regina Czubatka twice more, her daughter Marjanna, twice. Denounced by
Regina and Marjanna, two shepherdesses of Wajsosze, Kaszka Pastuszka [Kaska the
shepherdess] and Regina, are brought in for interrogation under torture. The bulk of the
remaining testimony consists of denunciations of other witches—especially Kaszka Kusa of
Slesin. All accused admit to attendance at Bald Mountain, sex and feasting with devils,
malefice against Pan Breza's horses and sheep using buried objects such as a mare's head, the
corpse of a sheepdog, pigs brains and hooves. Marjanna Czubatka killed one Tomek, a local
peasant swain, when he courted another girl instead of her. All the accused agree to the
maleficient slaying of Pan Breza's son, but the means differ: for Kaszka Pastuszka this was
accomplished with a powder of human bones and wood from a coffin. Regina Czubatka and

40
"ale diabel byl zimny"
41
Marjanna here in fact denounces "Zofia," but in all later testimony the Wajsosze shepherdess is either
nameless or is called Kaszka [Kaska]. Although there may have been two such shepherdesses, I have
assumed that there is just one, and that Marjanna mis-spoke herself here.
42
"spala na mejcach"
43
Jedna druga, wymawiary okolo Naswiqtsz. Sakram. i trucizny, ze sie. tak wlasnie stalo. Item zeznala ta
Czubatka, ze tq chustke okrwawiona. oplokawszy wylala na ogieh." This sentence can be interpreted as
suggesting that Regina poured the water from rinsing the kerchief, rather than the kerchief itself, onto the
fire, although I think the latter interpretation is more likely.

372
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

Marjanna of Tuliszkow, however, confirm again that they "stabbed the Most Holy Sacrament,
and hid this Most Holy Sacrament in the bed-linen of His Honor Pan Breza's son."44
Nobody mentions the vision of the baby in the Eucharist again, nor does the court refer to it in
its verdict (which speaks only of the "terrible sins [straszne grzechy]" of the withes) in which
it consigns all five women—Marjanna of Tuliszkow, Regina and Marjanna Czubatka, Kaszka
and Regina the shepherdesses—to the stake.

The Pyzdry Trial of 1699 (Trial #123).

In 1699 Tomasz Orchechowski, the ekonom of the village of Wierzbocice in central
Wielkopolska requested the wqjt court of nearby Pyzdry to the village, in order to try one
Anna Ratajka for witchcraft. The trial begins with a formal oath of accusation against Anna
by three male peasants of the village.
Ja, Kazimierz, Szymon, Piotr, Przysie_gam Panu I, Kazimierz, Szymon, Piotr, Swear to the Lord
Bogu Wszechmoga_cemu w Troycy Swie_tey Almighty God, One in Holy Trinity, that this laborer
Jedynemu: Isz ta pracowita Anna z teyze Wsi Anna Ratajka of this same Village of Wierzbocice is
Wierbocic Ratajka jest prawdziwa i Jawna a true and Brazen Witch, whose fate I take on my
Czarownica, kt6ra_biore_ na sumnienie swoje, a co conscience, and I do this not out of wrath, nor of
czynie. nie z gniewu, nie z nienawisci, nie z hatred, nor of rancour, nor from having been bribed
zawziqtosci, nie z namowy, nie z przenajexia, ale z or persuaded, but only from knowledge and for
samej wiadomosci i sprawiedliwosci. I cokolwiek justice. And whatever [misfortune] has befallen me
mnie siq i inszym ludziom z tego stalo siq, tylko and other people was caused only by her. That she
przez niq. Jako i Syna mego o smierc przyprawiela. brought about the death of my Son. And so that this
A ze ta moja prawdziwa i nieomylna jest przysiqga, should be my true and unmistaken oath, I accuse
tqz Annq Ratajkq po pierwsze, powtore, i potrzecie Anna Ratajka once, twice, a third time, and take
poprzysie_gam y na sumnienie swoje biore_. Z tego [her fate] on my conscience. I promise to give an
wszystkiego na strasznym Sa_dzie Boskim rachunek account of this [act of accusation] at the terrible Day
dac obiecujq. Tak mi pomosz Panie Boze of God's Judgment. So help me Almighty God, and
Wszechmoga^cy i jego niewinna Me_ko. his innocent Suffering [or Passion].
From the verdict, we know that both Kazimierz and Szymon lost their young sons to
malefice—it is not clear whether Piotr also lost a son or only swore in solidarity with his
neighbors.
On the basis of this accusation, Anna Ratajka was put to torture. She admitted nothing, but
cried out "Most Holy Virgin Mary—Most Holy Sacrament—[Miraculous] Image of
Studzianna!" And later: "Have mercy, for the sake of the Most Holy Virgin and the Most
Holy Sacrament."45 However, at her second session of torture that same evening, Anna
confessed to witchcraft, which she had learned from Jagna Lakomianka of Wierzbocice, who
presented her to szatan, with whom she took part in a wedding against her will. And they
forbade her to mention Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
There follows, during this second and a third session of torture, a cascading series of
denunciations of all the witches Anna had met at Bald Mountain, in the direction of Kalisz, at

44
"kloly Nasw. Sakrament, ten Nasw. Sacram. wlozyly w posciel synowi JMPana Brezy."
45
"Najswiqtsza Panno Mario—Najswie_tszy Sakramencie—Obrazie Studzienski." "Zmihrjcie siq nad
Najswi^tsza, Pannq. i nad Najswie_tszym Sakramentem." The "Image of Studzianna" is a reference to the
miraculous image of the Virgin Mary of Studzianna (Matka Boska Studzianska) seated at table with Joseph
and the baby Jesus. A pilgrimage centre from the 17th century, Studzianna is a small village on the Pilica
river (Zaleski 1988).

373
 • Chapter 2.3. •

the sabbat ["na Sobocie"].46 From Wierzbocice itself, she denounced the aforementioned
Jagna [or Jagata] Lakomionka, Kaska [Katarzyna] Laniionka, Brodzina [Regina] Korfunka
and her komornica Ewa, Bieta and her daughter, and Tereska, servant girl to Kazimierz. From
four other local villages she denounced a total of fourteen additional women and one man,
and admitted that "there are many witches almost everywhere."47 Of these, Jagata, Katarzyna,
and Brodzina are eventually brought to trial and sentenced alongside Anna Ratajka. Several
pages of the trial are missing, so we do not know why the other Wierzbocice women
denounced—Brodzina's komornica Ewa, Bieta and her daughter, and the servant-girl
Tereska—escape accusation. The women from other villages not under the rule of Tomasz
Orzechowski were essentially immune from trial by the Pyzdry court without the permission
or invitation of those villages' owners or leaseholders.
During these same sessions of torture, Anna Ratajka also admitted to a number of crimes of
malefice: she killed a cow and some pigs, and her colleagues persuaded her to bring her own
child to Bald Mountain. She sprinkled it [no gender is specified] with a powder, it died, and
she gave it to a devil who took its soul. However, far worse than Anna was Jagata (who, it
transpires, is Brodzina's daughter and is referred to also as Jagata Korfunka). She "Stole the
Lord Jesus at the church fair in Biechow, and whipped [Him—i.e. the host] all the way to
Bald Mountain, so that the blood flowed [from it]" 8 The host was made into a powder, with
which Jagata caused drought and destroyed the crops in the fields.
The court's verdict lists the witches' crimes: the killing of Szymon's and Kazimierz's sons,
the maleficient murder of several calves, horses, and pigs, the making of witch's powder from
a dead-man's shirt and frogs burnt to ash, attendance at Bald Mountain. The court pays
special attention to the matter of the stolen and desecrated hosts and the devil pact, in terms
more fervent than are usual in Polish witch-trial verdicts:
A co wiejksza opisac, straszliwa wymowic, And what is more, and terrible to relate and describe
Niebo i Ziemia si$ le_ka i drzey, Najswie^tszy (Heaven and Earth tremble and are afraid), [Jagata
Sakrament Ciala i Krwie Chrystusowej na Korfunka] stole the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body
odpuscie w Biechowie dwie lecie na and Blood of Christ two years ago during the church fair
Najswie_tsza_ Panne, Nawiedzenia ukradla, na in Biechow at the Feast of the Annunciation to the Most
proszek spalila, ktorym plon w zbozach Holy Virgin; she burnt it into a powder, with which she
odeymowala. Dose straszliwa i to nie mniejsza destroyed the fruits of the harvest. Quite terrible and no
Boga Tworce. i Odkupiciela swego, takze Panny less a crime, both Anna and Jagata renounced and
Najswiqtszej Matki Chrystusowej, w ktorey abandoned God, their Creator and Redeemer, also the
wszystka nadzieja kazdego, i wszystkich Most Holy Virgin, Mother of Christ, in whom everyone
Swiqtych tak Anna jako y Jagata odprzysie^gly, places all his hope, and all the Saints; and caring nothing
odstejnely y cale Boga o Zbawienie swoje nic a and nothing for God or for Salvation, forsaking Heaven,
nic niedbajajc, z Nieba kwitowary, Diablow they took Devils, traitors and swindlers of Humankind,
sobie, zdrajce. i obhidnikow Ludzi za as their protectors, listened to their treacherous counsel,
opiekunow obrary, ich rady zdradliwey had doings [i.e. sex] with them, and did everything that
shichaly, z nimi sprawe, miary i przestawaly i to the devils' demanded of them."
wszystko, co im diabli kazali, czynify.
Anna Ratajka, Jagata Korfunka Lakomionka, Brodzina Korfunka and Katarzyna Laniionka
were sentenced to death at the stake. Because Jagata Korfunka had "dared to touch the Most

46
This is the only instance I know of from the Polish witch-trials that the witches' meeting is referred to as a
sabbat. The inflection of "Sobota" here—locative rather than accusative of time—indicates that Anna means
a place rather than Sobota the day of the week (Saturday). Later, in the verdict, the court describes the
witches meeting as "Sobotka"—the term for the all-night bonfires and dancing on St. John's Eve, June 23.
47
"Item jest tych Czarownic nie malo prawie wsze_dy." One of the witches denounced is "Baykowa Rybaczka."
This should probably be translated as "The wife of Bajek the fisherman" but could also mean, if we read
"baykowa" as an adjective, "the fairy-tale fisherman's wife": a possible indication that Anna though up or
made up as many names as she could to please the court.
4
Jagata Korfunka "kradla Pana Jezusa na Biechowie na odpuscie i smagala na Lysy gorze asz krew plyneta."

374
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

Holy Sacrament with her hands"49 the offending extremities were first coated with tar and
sulfur, and burnt.

• •$• •

Both in Kleczew and in Pyzdry, as well as in Kiszkowo in 1761 (#172), the witches

torture the host and make it bleed. Like the Jews in host-profanation trials, they "execute

their wrath on the body of Christ the Lord" in the most direct manner possible, through his

body incarnate in the communion wafer. They also attack Jesus in an indirect manner,

through malefice against little innocent children (usually boys), personifications of the baby

Jesus. Does this testimony admit of interpretation, or is it entirely a matter of elite

imagination and inversion?

Marjanna of Tuliszkow's testimony is extraordinary and possibly unique; this does not

detract from its historical significance. Tomasz Wislicz, noting her freely given account of

the devil on stork's legs who has been following her and forcing her into sexual acts, has

suggested that she may have been mentally disturbed (2004b p. 74). This is certainly

possible, although hardly necessary. Perfectly sane early modern Polish women and men

reported encounters with various sorts of demons and devils all the time, not only when

compelled to do so under torture; we may feel compelled to interpret these encounters

psychologically, or symbolically (or both), but they will have seemed perfectly real to their

tellers and audience. In any case, the possibility of mental disturbance does not preclude the

possibility of interpretation. Let us take a closer look at her narrative. The devil on storks legs

and the repeated acts of coerced intercourse are either reflections of real incidents or of her

own real fantasies and anxieties ("real' in that not imposed upon her, from outside, under

interrogation): she supplied this information before ever coming to court, without torture, and

"iz sie_ ona rejcoma wazyla dotykac Najswiqtszego Sakramentu."

375
 • Chapter 2.3. •

she appears to have been attempting some ritual alleviation or expiation of this problem with

the help of the Virgin Mary, when she was apprehended in Slesin.

Marjanna came to the attention of the court via her attempt at some sort of magical or

ritual act involving a thread from her underwear tied to the hands of images of the Virgin

Mary and St. John in the church in Slesin. The source of the thread suggests the possibility of

love magic.50 In the trial at present under consideration, the question of the threads is quite

forgotten under the pressure of later and more scandalous testimony. She had been followed

by, and forced into sex with, a devil with the legs of a stork: once when she was in the

exceptionally vulnerable position of watching over fishing nets, alone, at the Wa^sosze lake,

another time in what should have been a place of safety, her bed behind the stove where she

slept with another girl. In subsequent testimony it transpired that she was fifteen or sixteen

years old, and had recently gone into service in Wa^sosze. It is not clear to me whether she

worked at Pan Breza's manor or was a servant (komornica) in the home of a landed peasant;

certainly her status—female, young, landless, very poor, an outsider with no local allies or

kin—is nearly as low as possible. The only way to sink lower would be to lose her virginity,

her single possession of any value. And this she did lose, or claimed to have lost, when, alone

on the road to her new place of work some weeks prior to the trial, in a spacebar excellance

of transition, lack of status, and insecurity, she fell in with a woman later burnt as a witch,

who got her drunk, gave her a devil in the bottom of her glass of vodka, and then watched

while the devil had sex with her behind the tavern outside Slesin.

Compare Zofia Philipowiczowa's use of "a string from my underwear [powrozek od gaci]"in love magic—
not, however, in church (#37, Skrzynno 1639, and see Appendix A). In 1692 Mateusz Kleszka of Nowe
Miasto was tried for tying a thread between the pews of the church. He did so at the request of his cousin
Milczanka, who told him that "this tangle of threads that you will tie in the church, is so that people and
children will die [ten kl^bek nici na to obsnujesz w kosciele, co be_da_ludzie i dzieci marli]."

376
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

How shall we interpret this? As fantasy? As anxious worry about what could happen,

combined with an even greater worry that she might want it too? As a retelling, in symbols,

of an actual traumatic event—seduction or rape while on her journey, perhaps facilitated by

the witch of Piotrkowice acting as a procuress? Might not the strange ligature she made in

church, with a specific piece of thread attached specifically to the hand of the Blessed Virgin,

be an attempt on Marjanna's part to regain, or reclaim, or perhaps just preserve, her own

virginity? There is no way to prove any such theory, and I advance these suggestions very

tentatively, as mere plausibilities. The court, at any rate, took little interest in any of this but

considers the story, together with the fact that Marjanna floated when dunked, sufficient to

bring her to torture.

Marjanna then told her story of having, with Regina Czubatka, stolen and tormented the

host. The account of stealing it in a handkerchief is entirely standard, but what follows is

not—at least not in witch-trials. Regina stabbed the host until it bleeds, and then a little

child—obviously the Baby Jesus—appeared, cried mournfully, and disappeared. Marjanna's

own words signal the sort of source material she drew on for this account: "And then a great

miracle took place." The little baby appearing in the host recalls the visions of medieval

saints, seeing the baby Jesus in the Host, either as a beautiful little boy or as bloody and

dismembered flesh, slaughtered for our sins. It recalls the extremely popular exemplum

concerning Gotteschalk of Volmarstein, recorded by Caesarius of Heisterbach (1929 [1223-

1224] book 9 ch. 2; cf. also bk. 9 ch. 42). During the consecration at Christmas Mass,

Gotteschalk found in his hand "no longer the appearance bread, but a most glorious infant,

377
 • Chapter 2.3. •

indeed, Him who is most beautiful in form compared with the sons of men on whom also

angels desire to look."51

As noted above, Marjanna might very well have known of such visions through

exempla in sermons or from Corpus Christi floats. At the same time, vision of the baby Jesus

recalls and indeed is identical to a specific incident of Jewish host-profanation accusation

Marjanna will have had no way of knowing about: in Passau in 1478, Jews and a Christian

thief were accused of stabbing a communion wafer until it transformed into a young boy

(Price 2003 p. 37, after Hsia 1988 p. 56).52 Closer to home, her vision might possibly be

related to the miraculous Poznan hosts: Treter mentions a demon-possessed girl in the 16th

century who was instructed by a vision of "a most sweet little boy" to seek exorcism at the

Carmelite sanctuary of the Body of Christ (Wiesiolowski 1992 p. 151, after Treter 1609).

Finally, Marjanna's vision recalls Skarga's paraphrase, in the Zywoty swiqtych, of John

Chrysostom's 24th homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians:

Temu Ciahi [...] trzej Krolowie w jaselkach sie_ The three Kings kneeled down before this same
poktonili, z wielkim strachem i bojazniaj a ty je Body, in the manger scene, with great fear and awe;
widzisz nie w zlobie, ale na oltarzu, nie u Dziewicy and you see it, not in a manger, but on the altar, not
na ramionach, ale u kaplana ((Jan. 27 pt. 2 par. 5 in the arms of the Virgin, but in the hands of the
[1881 vol. 1 p. 350]; see also Jan. 6, Feast of the priest.
Three Kings, par. 13 [1881 vol. 1 p. 120]).

The bulk of Marjanna's further testimony, and that of the other unfortunate women of

Wa^sosze whom she denounced, followed more or less standard scripts: the malefice against

children and cattle, the malefice against others out of spite, attendance at Bald Mountain and

so on. The desecrated host is part of this picture, but it is not the focus of the court's

51
Skarga tells a considerably abbreviated form of a similar miracle in his Life of St. Gregory the Great (March
12 par. 23 [1881 pp. 148-149]).
52
Cf. also Skarga's sermon, following Athanasius of Alexandria, of Jews torturing an image of Christ, from
which miraculous, healing blood flows (Zywoty swiqtych, November 20; 1881 vol. 11 pp. 308-313).
53
"najslodszy chiopczyk"

378
 • Sacrifice and crucifixion •

inquiries: although the court seeks and obtains repeated confirmation, from Marjanna and

Regina, that they stole the host, made it bleed, and hid it in Franciszek Breza's bed-linen to

kill him, the crying baby in the host was never mentioned again. The Kleczew court sought to

judge a witch for witchcraft, not a Christian visionary. Whatever leading questions may have

brought Marjanna to speak of stealing the Eucharist in the first place, her account of the

mournfully lamenting Christ-child must be treated as her own; it is extraneous, going well

beyond what the court may have been seeking. Might not Marjanna, who emerges from all

this as a devout if disturbed young girl, have drawn upon the symbolism of the innocent

child, crying and bleeding, to mourn her own loss of innocence?

• *l* •

Anna Ratajka's testimony, both concerning the desecration of the Eucharist and in

general, is, in its way, more difficult to interpret than that of Marjanna of Tuliszkow. If the

details of Marjanna's testimony stand out as anomalous or unique, Anna Ratajka's testimony

displays a near perfect conformity to the "demonological script." This presents us with

particular difficulties. Her trial could almost be used as the type sample of a "classical,

continental" witch-trial, starting with a concrete and limited accusation of malefice at the

village level against a single woman and quickly expanding, via the sabbat trope and through

the mechanism of denunciation, into a large-scale trial involving four women, accused of

collective malefice against the whole community, diabolism, and profanation of the host.

Nevertheless Anna Ratajka's relation to the Eucharist is her own: it displays a singular

devotional attitude quite at odds with the narrative of diabolism into which it comes to be

shaped.

379
 • Chapter 2.3. •

In great need of spiritual strength while undergoing torture, Anna cried out for help to

"the most blessed Virgin Mary, the Most Blessed Sacrament, the [holy] Image of Studzieri!"

"Have mercy, by the Most Holy Virgin and the Most Holy Sacrament."54 This is precisely

what the Host is for, to give strength in a moment of spiritual danger: in this case, bearing

overwhelming pain, but also attempting to resist the mortal sin of bearing false witness.55

Anna's invocation of the Eucharist might specifically refer to the miraculous Eucharists of

Poznah, just as her invocation of the Blessed Virgin refers to a specific holy image; however,

more likely this is an invocation of the Most Holy Sacrament as such. In subsequent torture,

her spirit now broken, Anna described the alleged sacrilege of her co-accused Jagata

Korfunka: she "stole the Lord Jesus during the church fair [odpust] in Biechow and whipped

it all the way to Bald Mountain, until blood flowed from it."56 Such a statement is, I

maintain, best understood as an expression of Anna Ratajka's own deep devotion to the

Eucharist, already displayed in her initial testimony. It is what she imagined once it was

demanded of her, in effect, to describe the most horrible thing she could think of. Execration

of the host is thus not just an inversion of orthodox Christianity; it is an inversion of

Ratajka's own Christian belief and thus a testimony to her faith.

54
"najswiqtsza Panno Maryo, Nayswiqtszy Sakramencie, Obrazie Studziehski [...] Zmihijcie sie, nad
Najswiqtsza^ Paring i nad Najswiqtszym Sakramentem!"
55
Ratajka's invocation of the Holy Sacrament may also be a form of oath. Compare the testimony of Katarzyna
Ratajowa (Trial #125, Lublin 1700), who believed herself to be the victim of a frame-up: "For God's sake I
don't know, have mercy on me that I don't know, those others here made it up [narobily] although they did
it themselves, remember that, by the Holy Sacrament."
5
"kradia Pana Jezusa na Biechowie na odpuscie i smagala na Lysy gorze az krew plynela."

380
 Moi laskawi panowie, prosze_ nie kazcie juz cielska
mego drqczyc, gdyz jakom Pana mojego dzis
przyjmowala, ten mi niechaj przy smierci mojej ze
mna^ be.dzie, wie_cej nie powiem tylko com
powiedziala i z tym na smierc ide_.
My gracious sirs, please do not require my body to
be tormented anymore, since I accepted my Lord
today [i.e., I took communion]; let Him be with me
at my death; I will say no more, only what I've
already said, and I go with that to my death.
ChiiDtCr 2.41 —Anna Przybela, who had confessed to stealing the
. Eucharist, before her third session of torture
Piety in the torture chamber (#78, warn c. i680).
A long-standing problematic in the study of European witchcraft has to do with the relation

of alleged witches to Christianity. Few scholars treat seriously the old-fashioned thesis, itself

merely a revision of demonological motifs, that witches and witchcraft represent the

remnants of a still-active underground pagan or pre-Christian religion. But the anti-thesis is

equally unsatisfactory: as evidence accumulates that the men and women accused of

witchcraft held a variety of beliefs and assumptions, and performed a variety of practices,

deeply at variance with mainstream Christianity, it becomes difficult to maintain that the

witch-trials were merely a product of clerical fantasy, the accusations mechanically produced

from a discourse of inversion and binary opposition. Witch-trials bring into focus, then, a

central problem in the historiography of early modern Christianity in general: to what extent,

and in what sense, were the common people "Christian?"

As a way into this problem, one could do worse than to explore the writings of the late

Robert Scribner. No recent scholar explored the interface between clerical and lay

Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, with such sensitivity. Scribner rejected simplistic

and apologetic Protestant (or Enlightenment) historiographies which saw Reformation as a

matter of expelling "the magic of the medieval church" (1993 p. 480; cf. Thomas 1973 pp.

27-57) . He traced the "magical" and "enchanted" elements of the early Protestant worldview

381
 • Chapter 2.4 •

(ibid. pp. 482ff.; 1997; 1987 pp. 323-353), and his exploration of the sacramental system of

traditional Catholicism problematized any easy equation of Catholic ritual to magic. Scribner

showed that for the pre-Reformed church, sacraments and sacramentals formed a multi-axial

system, tending both to the salvation of the soul and to the care of the moral person and the

body. In their exorcistic functions, sacraments safeguarded the soul against the devil, but also

protected the body against the devil's destructive work in a universe understood as filled with

supernatural power: the result was that their was a "thin line between the liturgically

acceptable and the magically unacceptable" practices, and a real confusion, even among the

elite, about where to draw the line between prayer and spell (1987 pp. 34, 38-39). Properly

performed sacraments were automatically efficacious (ex opere operato) but this mechanical

efficacy was officially held to apply only to the sacraments' soteriological function:

"extending this notion to the other features of a sacrament would have brought it perilously

close to a form of 'magic'" (1993 p. 479). For example, baptism "effected in the supernatural

sphere that which [it] symbolized by [its] signifying performances in the natural;" in

performing its symbolic cleansing of the body, it purifies the soul of original sin. But it also

has or was thought to have "inner-worldly" benefits for the body, since health and fortune

were in part effects of freedom from the Devil—thus blurring the distinction between

religion and magic (ibid. p. 478). On the other hand, the sacramentals such as holy water,

blessed salt, and Candlemas candles, which were officially only efficacious insofar as they

were used in good faith (ex opere operandis), did not "slide over into the field of magic"

except insofar as they were used apotropaicly against demons and misfortune, or were treated

as objects with sacred power in their own right, or were used instrumentally for this-worldly

ends (ibid. p. 480)—precisely the most common uses of the sacramentals, as Scribner well

382
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

knew. Scribner's work on the cosmology inherent in the sacramental system is especially

valuable in that he pays close attention to the mixedness of things, the "confused and

confusing syncretism" of early modern Christianity (1986 p. 685), and the failure of practices

to line up easily according to divisions such as "popular" vs. "elite" or even "clerical" vs.

"lay."

In all of this, I am in close agreement; indeed, much of chapters 2.2 and 2.3 has

consisted in the application to Polish materials of models first layed out by Scribner

(especially 1987 pp. 17-48). So, what is the problem? Although Scribner recognized and

emphasized the blurred boundaries between "magic" and "religion" (and at least sometimes

sees both terms as sufficiently problematic as to require scare-quotes), he nevertheless

proceeded confidently to separate the two: magic is this-worldly instrumental action; religion

(or Christianity) is action oriented toward salvation. Despite his sensitivity to

historiographical problems, Scribner seemed not to notice that his working definitions of

magic and religion derived directly from partisan and polemical texts from the period he

studied. He quoted Valerie Flint's definition of magic—"preturnatural control over nature by

human beings, with the assistance of forces more powerful than they"—and religion—

"recognition by human beings of a supernatural power on whom they are dependent, to

whom they show deference and are obligated" (1993 pp. 476-477; Flint 1991 p. 3). But he

did not seem to notice that Flint's contrast derives directly from Fraser, while Fraser's

definitions themselves derive from Enlightenment reworking of Protestant polemic, which

itself is largely dependent on the sort of distinction between "vain practice" and true piety

which so exercised Catholic theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas onward—and which was

central to the theological discourse around witchcraft. Despite his sensitivity to mixture and

383
 • Chapter 2.4 •

ambiguity, Scribner ends up doing what Hildred Geertz famously accused Keith Thomas of

doing in his Religion and the Decline of Magic: "taking part in the very cultural process he is

studying" by interpreting the early modern magic (or religion) in terms and through

categories that themselves developed out of early modern discourse on magic (Geertz 1975 p.

74).

As a result, Scribner's description of popular religion ends up re-inscribing it with

characterizations taken from its early modern (Catholic and Protestant) critics. At the

analytical level, if not at the level of description or practice, he assumes that one can

distinguish between the "purely spiritual" use of sacramentals for salvation, as against their

"instrumental, magical" application for temporal gain (1987 p. 41). The usefulness of his

characterization of the pre-disenchanted world as a cosmos pulsing with demonic angelic

powers, so that the ecclesiastical blessing of sacramentals consists largely of their exorcism,

is mitigated by tacit assumptions that such a cosmos is not quite Christian—he speaks of it as

a form of "animism" (ibid. p. 37). Analytically, then, one can distinguish, in popular

devotions, between "the joy on sharing in religious ritual life, or as instrumental means of

applying the sacred power conferred by ritual action" (ibid. p. 44, emphasis added). And,

although Scribner makes no value judgments, it is clear that he considers only the first of

these purposes to be a Christian one.

I take such a view to be theological and normative rather than historical: it assumes that

one can know what "true Christianity" is, in comparison to which peasant Christianity is

adulterated, semi-animistic, or a materialist mis-application of true Christian materials. This

is to side with the anti-superstition theologians of the 15th century, the visitation records of

the 16th and 17th, the rural missions of the 18th century, which again and again compare

384
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

their own deep faith with the near pagan, indifferent, and utterly ignorant countryside. Even

if we recast such claims in terms more complimentary to peasants and plebeians, by speaking

of their preference for the concrete, their peasant humanism, their practical orientation, we

have not escaped the early modern clerical discourse but will instead be partisan participants

in that discourse, inevitably involving ourselves thereby in such dichotomies as (male) spirit

vs. (female) flesh, spiritual vs. worldly, eternal vs. temporal, upper body vs. lower body, and

of course religious vs. magical. Although we may assign more positive values to the second

terms of each pair, and so admire the embodied, temporal, practical minded, materialist

peasantwoman as against the enervated, idealist, repressed, fanatical priest or demonologist,

we will not have escaped the basic parameters of the discourse: we will still be viewing the

Polish peasantry, and Polish peasant-women in particular, through clerical and aristocratic

eyes.

By way of conclusion to Part Two of the dissertation, I wish to provide a brief critique

of the historiographical stance which finds accused witches innocent of diabolism but guilty

of superstition. Such a stance, whatever value-judgements it might or might not carry,

continues the discourse of demonology, under which accused witches can be either guilty or

ignorant, Satanic or residually pagan. These are false choices—the more so in that much of

our best evidence for a deep and relatively orthodox Christianity among commoner women

in early modern Poland derives from the testimony of witch-trials.

The rhetoric of paganism

In the introduction to his extraordinary Owczarnia w dzikimpolu [Sheep-fold in the savage

field]—a setting of the Roman Catechism to verse for easy memorization by the peasantry,

the parish priest Stanislaw Brzezanski asserts that under the ruthless exploitation of their

noble lords, the Catholic peastantry of Ruthenia "have become so un-used to the Lord's

385
 • Chapter 2.4 •

Church, that they have nearly turned back into pagans"1 (1717 f. 5v). To make his point, he

recounts an anecdote, ostensibly from his own experience as a pastor, of a peasant who

cannot name the three persons of the Trinity, getting only as far as the Father and the Son

(1717 ff. 6-6v). In both form and content the anecdote resembles stories told throughout

Europe over many centuries, by priests and parsons despairing at the ignorance of their

parishioners—and like these other stories, it must be taken with a grain of salt. A 14th-

century English preacher spoke of a shepherd who, examined concerning the Trinity,

answered "the father and the son I know very well, for I tend their sheep; but I know not that

third fellow; there is none of that name in our village" (Thomas 1973 p. 165). In mid-17th

century Brittany, the Jesuit Julien Maunoir complained that "So great an ignorance reigned in

that island [of Ushant...] that one could barely find a dozen persons with knowledge of the

mysteries of the Trinity and of man saved by God, and of the Ten Commandments" (quoted

after Chatellier 1997 p. 36). Other Jesuit missionaries complained that the mission in Naples

was "little inferior to the vocation of the Indies" (1651; quoted after Gentilcore 1992 pp. 67-

68); or that the peasants just outside Rome know "no other God than the sun" (1561, quoted

after Chatellier 1997 p. 94)—sentiments echoed by Protestant home-missionaries, such as

Henry Holland when he called the rural English "meere Gentiles, and Pagans in religion"

(quoted after Clark 1997 p. 512).

In Poland and surrounding areas, priests and pastors expressed a similarly low view of

peasant Christianity. Martinus Masvidius, the translator of the Lutheran catechism into

Lithuanian in 1547, stated of the Lithuanian peasantry that "that among a hundred I would

not find a single one, who could tell me even a single word of the Lord's commandments, or

"[...] ni czasu, ni przywodu, ni przykladu ni majac z politycznych swych rza^izicielow y Panow, nie tylko
pogni^bial, ale y podziczal, y odwyki od Kosciola Bozego tak, iz ledwie nie w pogan sie. ius obrocil."

386
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

who could recall two words of the Lord's Prayer" (Bruckner 1979 p. 50). A precisely similar

sentiment was expressed some four decades later by the Bishop of Zmudz, Melchior

Giedroyc, as also by the Jesuit missionaries in their reports (ibid. pp. 113-115). A 13th-

century Papal legate to the diocese of Wroclaw complained that the laity could give no

account whatsoever of their faith: however true this statement may have been at the time, it

was repeated for the next several centuries (Bruckner 1904 p. 90). At a synod of the

Wloclawek diocese in 1628, bishop Andrzej Lipski reported that during his visitation of

villages and towns few knew the Lords Prayer, the Hail Mary or the Apostle's Creed, and

fewer still knew the Ten Commandments. A few years later in the same diocese, bishop

Maciej Lubienski claimed that "Many are to such a degee ignorant of the fundamental truths

of the faith, that among the people many adults don't know how to cross themselves, recite

the Lord's Prayer, make confession, [...] and those who know the more important mysteries

of our faith [...], especially the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, are exceptions"2

(Chodynski ed. 1890 pp. 196, 202; cited after Rubin 1955 p. 136). Returning to the popular

trope of the ignoramus trying to understand the Trinity, the French courtier Francois-Paulin

Dalerac repeated in his memoirs an anecdote told him by the a Missionary of St. Lazarus

(better known as the missionaries of St. Vincent de Paul), who missionized the Polish

countryside in the late 17th century. He claimed that before their mission, rural Poles had not

so much as heard of the Holy Trinity. He explained the trinity by analogy to a candle, made

up of tallow, wick, and flame, a unity in three parts. After the villagers had assured the

missionary that they had understood his lesson, he asked the brightest young man present to

"Wielu do tego stopnia nie zna podstawowych prawd wiary, ze wsrod ludu sporo jest doroslych, ktorzy nie
potrafia^przezegnac, Modlitwe_ Pariska, odmowic, nie wiedzajak sie_ spowiadac, do rzadkosci naleza. tacy,
ktorzy znaj3.przykazania Boze i koscielne, a wyja^tkowo kto rozumie, bodaj tak jak siq podaje, wazniejsze
wiary naszej tajemnice, zwlaszcza Trojcy Przenajswiqtszej i Wcielenia"

387
 • Chapter 2.4 •

explain the analogy, to which he replied that the Holy Trinity "is a candle'" (Dalerac 1700 p.

185).

The stereotypical image from reforming pastors and from missionary reports, of the

people's complete ignorance of God and the Sacraments, makes these texts unreliable indices

of popular piety (Burke 1978 p. 208; Gentilcore 1992 p. 68). As the examples just adduced

demonstrate, one finds nearly identical complaints both from places where they are probably

justified and from places where they are indubitably false. There are good reasons to believe

that the backwoods peasantry of Lithuania was indeed still half-pagan in the 16th century;

but the "sun" supposedly worshipped by the peasants outside Rome was probably a gilded

monstrance bearing the Host, and the missionaries admitted that it was worshipped by

reciting the Lord's Prayer and the Angelic Salutation (Chatellier 1997. pp. 94-95).The

ignorance was largely rhetorical: just as it is not quite true that the people are "as wretched as

animals," with barely a crust of bread to their names (Brzezahski 1717 f. 5), so too their total

ignorance of Christianity is the effect of the writer's hyperbole. For Protestant reformers

seeking to weed out the vestiges of Catholicism, now re-interpreted as idolatry, it was natural

to exoticise the rural religion of the people as paganism or worse (Strauss 1975, 1978;

Purkiss 1996 pp. 152-154). But rural Jesuit missionaries, or reforming pastors such as

Brzezahski labouring to impose the rigors of Tridentine Catholicism onto their "savage"

flock, were equally tempted to depict the countryside as a virtually pagan hinterland, a

heathen, untamed space analogous to the newly opened up missionary territories of Asia and

the Americas. This rhetorical exxageration of peasant ignorance has not always been

appreciated by modern scholars, who are still sometimes inclined to suggest that the

3
"C'est une chandelle"

388
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

Christian peasantry Europe knew as little about the religion they professed as did "the

heathen of the Far East or Far West" (Chatellierl997 p. 93).4

However, the ignorance and paganism of the European peasant was not only a product

of rhetorical construction—it originated, as well, from real differences in religious concern.

Brzezahski's perception of paganism among his flock derives primarily from his own

ritualistic hyper-scrupulosity: one peasant-woman is a pagan and a heretic for having inserted

the phrase "holy ghost" into the Hail Mary; others are "superstitious" because of the way

they cross themselves, while those who kneel improperly during prayer are likely candidates

for demon-possession, so "[D]evils often request of Exorcists" we are told, "that they might

be allowed to enter into those who kneel on just one knee in in church"5 (1717 f. 23).

The perception of pagan ignorance is also the product of Brzezahski's dogmatic

perspective. His nearly pagan peasant interlocutor is, to Brzezahski's standards, hopelessly

ignorant because he can't correctly name the persons of the Trinity (and "concerning the

Sacraments, remedies, and other teachings of the Church, don't even ask"),6 and yet the

peasant's speech is full of piety: he hopes, for example, that "the Lord God will bring lighter

serfdom-obligations,"7 so that he will have time to spare for the care of his soul (ibid. f. 6). In

fact, what Brzezahski and others like him often took to be ignorance or paganism, must have

There is a wide but extremely uneven literature on the degree to which the early modern European peasantry
were Christian—uneven because there remains no consensus as to what should count as evidence. For
variations on the view that the peasantry remained more or less pagan as late as the 18th century, see e.g.
Delumeau 1996 [1971]; Strauss 1975, 1988 p. 195. For this view in relation to Poland, see e.g. Tazbir 1986a
p. 152. Even scholars who emphasize the Christianization of the peasantry continue to characterize this
Christianization as shallow and non-internalized: Stanislaw Bylina, for example, while acknowledging the
universal participation in Christian ritual by the end of the Middle Ages, insists that such participation need
not imply "profound reception of Christian concepts or values" (1992 p. 4). One wonders what sort of
evidence could possibly be adduced to demonstrate such "profound reception," or whether such integrated
Christian piety could be found in any era, in Poland or elsewhere.
5
"czarci zwyczaynie z ope_tanych prosza^ sie u Exorcystow aby im pozwalali wstej>owac w tych, ktorzy na iedno
kolano kle_kaia_ w kosciele"
6
"O Sakramentach a pogotowiu o inszych dalszych naukach Katolickich ani pytay"
7
"Pan Bog da ke_dy lzeysza^ robocizn^"

389
 • Chapter 2.4 •

been little more than confusion or uncertainty concerning what even the most devout and

knowledgeable Christians acknowledged to be difficult mysteries of the faith. Concerning a

"pagan" among his parishioners who could not understand the doctrine of the resurrection of

the flesh, since bodies rot after death, Brzezahski commented: "many of the parishioners, in

pagan fashion, hold to similar hidden infidelities against the articles of Holy

Doctrine"8(Brzezahski 1717, f. 26v).

Our justified misgivings concerning the rhetorical construction of the pagan peasant

should not blind us to the fact that clerical writers perceived themselves to hold profoundly

different notions of Christianity than did the laity for whom they were responsible. Stewart

Clark, after surveying the wide and varied literature of pastoral reform, suggests that the

differences between clerical and secular opinion have usually been overstated.

Nevertheless,"whatever the real state of cultural exchange and consensus in these matters, it

was at least the perception of clerics that there was not merely a difference of opinion

between them and their flocks but a huge chasm" (Clark 1997 p. 443). This perception of

difference is itself important, and does reflect demonstrable differences in the beliefs,

practices and emphases of Christian peasants and the Christian clerics who wrote about them;

what it does not demonstrate is that such peasants were un-Christian.

Peasants who knew the Lord's Prayer very well and who recited it frequently, or who

knew what sorts of herbal decoration were appropriate for Corpus Christi, the Green Holiday

(Pentacost), and Our Lady of the Flowers, or who knew that the sign of the cross could

protect them from devils, demons, and ill-fortune of all kind, need not have known the details

of the salvation narrative to which they adhered. Indeed, they were not really encouraged to

"wiele [z parafian] po pogansku trzymaia^ rozne niedowiarstwa skryte przeciwko roznym Wiary Swiqtey
artykulom"

390
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

have any such deeper understanding: the Catholic Reformation church made very clear that

the Church, and the Priest, were intermediary between the laity and salvation. Contemporary

scholars are a little too easily inclined to describe this attitude as one of ignorance,

practicality, or passivity—-it could just as easily be thought of as pious humbleness before the

majesty of the Church. Even sympathetic scholars of early modern Polish popular religion

have been quick to describe the Christian peasant as someone who "lacked even a normal

interest in what he believed," learning just enough to attain the "supernatural and temporal

ends which he required" (Kracik 1973 p. 14). From the largely Protestant perspective of even

modern Catholicism, by which religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a matter

of personal faith and the search for meaning rather than tradition, ritual, and celebration,

early modern Polish peasants do seem to be practitioners of "empty ritualism" or "practical-

instrumental" (and therefore "magical" or "pagan") religion. But these were not the

definitions of Christianity under which they operated themselves, and to judge them by such

standards is anachronistic and misleading.

A good deal of the recent work in religious studies concerns the problems raised by

exporting concepts and terms developed in the history of Christianity—belief, the

supernatural, magic, scripture, even "religion" itself—into other religions (or whatever they

are to be called). Witchcraft, especially, can be a problematic export. Some Africanists have

rejected the term as systematically misleading in the African context: for example, the

activities and abilities glossed as "witchcraft" by anthropologists are often understood to be

legitimate, indeed necessary attributes of powerful people in Africa (Parkin 1985; Geschiere

9
From a very large and growing bibliography, see especially Asad (1993); Ruel (2003 [1982]); and Smith
(1998). A discussion of these issues which was important for my own argument has been their application to
the category of "Hinduism;" see Narayanan 2000 and other essays in the same volume of the Journal of the
American Academy of Religion.

391
 • Chapter 2.4 •

1997; Goody 1970; Hallen and Sodipo 1997). In a classic essay, Julian Pitt-Rivers showed

how Spanish assumptions about the metamorphosis of witches into animals led to a total

misunderstanding of nagualism in Central America: whereas the witch's appearance as an

animal, as something she is not, exposes her character as a liar and a servant of the Prince of

Lies, a Mayan who transforms into his nagual form has thereby taken on his true character,

his true being—it is the human form which is false (Pitt-Rivers 1970). The point of these and

of similar studies has been that Christian or post-Christian ("secular") notions, such as the

primacy of scripture, or the privileging of "faith" over "empty ritual," "spirit" over "law,"

have profoundly distorted our interpretations of the non-Christian religions of the world.

In this section, I have wanted to suggest, as it were, that distortion begins at home. Post-

Reformed Christianity forms the "background religion" of the contemporary academy,

shaping assumptions, providing categories, suggesting the sorts of questions to be asked.

Moreover, according to this form of Christianity, Christianity is an ideal type which can

never be realized in practice under conditions of the Fall: in this sense, no church embodies

the Invisible Church; all Christians are a little bit pagan. As the great church historian Jerzy

Kloczowski put the problem in his discussion of the degree of "Christianization" in Medieval

Poland: "the ideal of a truly Christian community has never been attained and is indeed

unattainable" (2000 p. 20). In this sense, no one has ever been a Christian, just as, indeed, to

quote Paul's letter to the Romans: "There is none righteous, no, not one" (3:10). Indeed one

finds a tension, in discussions of Christianization in Poland as elsewhere. According to what

might be called the juridical-exorcistic understanding of Christianization, the devil was

defeated and Poland became Christian all in one moment with the baptism of Mieszko

{Czarownica 1714 [1639] p. 36; Kracik 1990 p. 188). The other understanding might be

392
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

characterized as "deep Christianization," and sees a populace as beeing Christian only insofar

as it has fully accepted and integrated the true message of the Gospel. Such Christianity, of

course, has never been tried, so that while scholars of various eras speak of this or that

period—the 15th century attacks on superstition; the 16th century reformations, the 17th

century confessionalization and consolidation, 18th century missionization of the

countryside—as moments of achievement in the history of Christianization, it is never

ultimately achieved. Christianization is a "process without end," a total but exceedingly

gradual transformation not only of exterior practices but of the entire interior person.

According to this model, Europe achieved Christianization only by the end of the 19th

century, if at all (Milis 1986). These two models might be combined, to produce the Christian

version of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: just as baptism initiates salvation and makes it

possible, but also leads to a lifelong deepening of faith and constant struggle against the

forces exorcised in baptism, so too at the historical level: the "baptism of the nation" is only

the first step in a centuries-long struggle against residual paganism.

What should be clear at this point is that the historical judgements going into this sort of

account are intertwined with, indebted to, and ultimately indistinguishable from theological

judgments: the history thus recounted, for all its scholarship, is a sort of sacred history.

Recent important anthropological work about "Christianization" of non-Christian peoples

(Meyers 1999, Kiernan 1994; Robbins 2004) has stressed the spacial and temporal metaphors

by which Christianity both breaks away from and maintains ties with the previous religion,

which becomes a meaning-producing "other," the thing being escaped from, a shadow-

religion always ready to re-seduce the potential backslider from Christian rigor. Missionaries

spoke pessimistically in terms of Christianity being "put on like a new robe over a soiled

393
 • Chapter 2.4 •

body;" a superficial, outward veil inadequately covering an unchanged heathen interior

(Kempf 1994 p. 111). Ethnographers often echo this sort of language while inverting the

value signs, treating Christianity as a veil that, thankfully, does not fully hide the traces of

prior, "authentic" tradition. Joel Robbins has noted how Christian assumptions, worked out

in different ways in both secular anthropology and in the Christianity of newly Christianized

groups, make it all too easy to ignore, or neglect, or look past such people's Christianity, in

search of the presumably more interesting remainders of paganism which underlie it (2004

pp. 27-34). Again, without belabouring the point, I want to insist that the basic assumptions

that make such an interpretive move seem both easy and natural derive from Christianity

itself and its persistent self-perception as a religion constantly just emerging from paganism

or idolatry.

• •$• •

Scholars must resist this tendency to take on the categories of polemical Christian

theology when examining the Christian past: this is especially true for those areas, such as

Poland, which somewhat pride themselves on the "recentness" or "shallowness" of their

conversion—a conversion that took place at least nominally over a thousand years ago, and

which has profoundly shaped all institutions ever since. By resisting the pull of these

assumptions, we see Polish witchcraft in a different light. Cunning-folk did not "use"

Christianity for their own ends; rather they were Christians who tried to heal their neighbours

in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Ordinary peasants did not perform a thinly

Christianized magic; rather, they protected themselves from Christian devils by means of

Christian holy objects. Even those witches who confessed to the most radical rejection and

abomination of Christianity—who worshipped the devil, or who trampled the Eucharist and

394
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

threw it to pigs—may be seen, in fragmented hints and inversion narratives, in their

involuntary cries under torture, beseeching the Virgin for help, in their strategic reticences, as

pious Christian women.

Of course, I do not want to suggest that every use of the Host was pious, or that

everyone who used it had a deep appreciation for its sacramental character and effects. For

some, surely, it can have been little more than a source of power, no more meaningful or holy

than any other source. It would be ridiculous to argue that the man tried for church robbery in

Nowy Sa.cz in 1639 was acting in a Christian manner when he supplemented his good luck-

amulet (a handkerchief containing "a piece of blessed sausage, a piece of blessed bread and a

piece of blessed ham, [...] not for witchcraft, but because it works well to carry [such a

thing] for luck") ° with a second amulet of seven freshly stolen consecrated communion

wafers (Wislicz 2001 p. 173, citing AP Krakow sig. AD 67 (Nowy Sacz) f. 271). Pani

Alexandrowa Mytkowa, baking the Eucharists into pancakes to sway the Tribunal to her side

in property litigation, displays an equal disregard for Christianity, under any definition of that

term. And it is impossible to rule out that some of the uses for the host reported under torture

in secondary-crime trials, as poison for children and livestock, as a means of bringing hail

and drought, might not have some basis in actual practice. Ritual transgression and inversion

of the holy is not always a fantasy, and it need not always indicate good knowledge of or

appreciation for the thing being transgressed.

However, only by accepting the possibility that accused witches thought of themselves

as good Christians, can we understand their action as something other than ignorant

superstition; only then can we catch a glimpse of what they thought themselves to be doing.

"kawalek kielbase swiqconej, chleba swi^conego i szoldra swi^cona, co nie na zadne czary nosil, ale ze to
powiada dobrze nosic dla szcze_scia."

395
 • Chapter 2.4 •

Christian women such as Maryna Bialkowa who stole the host for what theologians would

describe as "temporal" ends were disobeying the rules of the church; in this institutional

sense, clearly, they were bad Christians. But in their own terms, it is hard to see how their

actions bespeak a semi-pagan or adulterated Christianity. On the contrary, I would make so

bold as to say that the trials in which host stealing forms the primary crime are one of our

best sets of data to show a deep, committed, if not fully orthodox, Christianity among the

early modern Polish peasantry and commoners in towns. Regina Zaleska, who most probably

did ask her son to steal the host, appears to have been a somewhat amateur cunning-woman

who had tried her hand at the healing of horses and the removal of witchcraft from butter and

milk. Both she and Maryna Bialkowa made use not of secret practices but of information that

was "in the air"—both in the sense that it was more or less common knowledge and in the

sense that it followed easily, could readily be extracted, from standard church teaching about

the Host as a defence against misfortune and the diabolic. Regina Matuszka in Kleczew stole

the host not only for personal profit, but also to increase the production of wax from her

honeycombs that she could donate to the church. Even Zofia Janowska and Pani

Alexandrowa Mytkowa, using the Eucharist for love or favour, were drawing upon its

symbolism of reconciliation: their sin, it could be said, lay in attempting a particularistic

application of what Bossy has called "the social miracle of the mass" (1985 pp. 57-75).

Those trials which centred around an alleged witches' sabbat are most easily read as

inversions of, travesties of, what is right and good: God exchanged for Satan, the kiss of

peace replaced by the kissing of the devil's anus, abuse and torture of the host taking the

place of its proper veneration and adoration. This world turned upside down is extensively

explored in elite demonology, almost to the exclusion of ordinary maleficent magic; a

396
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

conclusion often taken from this fact is that trials featuring these inverted structures are

essentially top-down, elite impositions on popular culture, the accused witches reproducing,

in their testimony under torture and through leading questions, what their interrogators want

to hear. Under such assumptions, it follows that these trials can tell us a great deal about elite

attitudes, but very little about popular witchcraft or popular Christianity. Chmielowski's

account of the sabbat, cribbed from half a dozen western demonologists, makes clear that the

orgiastic, devil-worshipping, Eucharist-profaning witch is a cosmopolitan product of the

discursive habits, as well as the reading and citation practices, of elite authors.

Nevertheless, the elite discourse is not so totalizing as to fully exclude the voices of the

accused witches themselves, who, after all, were themselves perfectly able to produce and

reproduce fantasies of transgression and sin through a discursive structure of binary

opposition and inversion. The extraordinary testimony of Marjanna of Tuliszkow points to

her folkloristic, but nevertheless deep, and indeed orthodox, Catholic faith. We don't know

what sort of question, whether leading or not, elicited her initial description of the Christ

Child appearing from the stabbed and mistreated host; we do know that her answer went

beyond whatever might have been wanted: the court never returned to this incident, though it

does ask to what maleficient purpose the desecrated host was put.

Marjanna's confession points both to devotion to the Host as the body of Christ but also

devotion to Jesus as the innocent child. It might not be too far a stretch to suppose that this

young girl, away from home for the first time and deeply disturbed by the place of transition

she found herself in—adolescent, in a new and hostile home, possibly the object of

somebody's unwanted (or ambivalently wanted and feared) carnal interest, possibly raped or

induced into prostitution on the road from Tuliszkow to Wa^sosze after having been made

397
 • Chapter 2.4 •

drunk by a chance acquaintance, might have seen in the "heartily and mournfully crying"

little child, stabbed and bleeding (as she may have been "stabbed" and have bled in sexual

attack), a deeply meaningful metaphor of her own plight. If this interpretation is too far-

fetched (as I am inclined to think it might be), it remains to interpret what she saw and did, or

thought she saw and did or chose to report having seen and done, and we cannot do this

sufficiently by reference to the demonological script forced upon her. At the very least, and

for whatever psychological purposes of her own, Marjanna bears testimony to the infiltration

of Eucharistic images from exempla, sermons, and even perhaps the visions of mystics and

saints into the religious life of the very lowest levels of Polish society, and their co-optation

into their symbolic worlds. Even Anna Ratajka's testimony, seemingly so scripted, should be

read in light of her evident devotion to the Eucharist as an inversion not just of elite attitudes,

but of her own attitude as well.

Both types of Eucharist-stealing witch-trial, far from demonstrating, on the one hand,

the parasitic animistic beliefs of a somewhat materialistic peasantry, and on the other hand,

the obsessions of the elite, give us the most direct evidence we have that Polish common-

women of the 17th and 18th centuries had absorbed, and adopted as their own, post-

Tridentine devotion to the Eucharist. The very names by which the accused denote the

Eucharist give some indication of their beliefs and attitudes. For the court scribes, the

Eucharist is most often simply the "Most Holy Sacrament," although the verbose Pyzdry

court describes it as "the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ" (#123). The

accused witches, for their part, expressed a variety of titles for the Eucharist that collectively

indicate a deep knowledge of Eucharistic piety and doctrine. The Szczercow witches, asked

by the court why they stole "God's Passion" [Boza Meka]," answer that they stole "The Lord

398
 • Piety in the torture chamber •

God [Pan Bog]" for malefice (#145). For both Maryna Bialkowa in Lublin and Anna Ratajka

in Pyzdry, the host is simply "the Lord Jesus [Pan Jezus];" for Anna Przybela in Warta, it is

"my Lord [Pan moj]" (#78). Marjanna of Oporowko displays a considerable knowledge of at

least the terms of Catholic doctrine in testifying that she stole "Boze Przemienienie [God's

Transubstantiation]" (#158, Kleczew 1730). Clearly, and in strong contrast to the endless

complaints of Catholic Reformation descriptions of peasant ignorance, something of elite

Eucharistic doctrine was getting through to the women accused of witchcraft. Anna

Przybela's extraordinarily eloquent speech to her judges and tormentors in Warta (#78,

quoted as the epigraph to this chapter), indicates that among the very women accused of, and

testifying to, the worst excesses against the Most Holy Sacrament, one can find clear

expressions of deep and fully orthodox understandings of the graces brought about by

consumption of the body of Christ. Reina Bartoszowa Misiakowna, wife of the blacksmith of

Popielowo (#112), testified that "I couldn't see [the Host] when it was elevated" during

Mass"11 after she had sold her soul to the devil—an attribute of witches still repeated in 19th-

century folklore (DWOK vol. 7 p. 78; cf. Gentilcore 2002 p. 100). Appearing in testimony

from a tiny village in the late 17th century, it indicates the importance of devotion to the

elevated host already in this period.

For Maryna Bialkowa as much as for Piotr Skarga, the Eucharist is a true fragment of

the Incarnation—she calls it, matter-of-factly, "The Lord Jesus": for both, too, it is the best

defence against spiritual harm. For Anna Ratajka, or for Marjanna of Tuliszkow, as much as

for Benedykt Chmielowski, execration of the Host is the worst possible sin: in confessing to

it, they are not just participating in elite discourse but also, paradoxically, making a

confession of faith.
11
Nie widzialam kiedy go podnoszono"

399
Part 3
Devil in the details
PieJ<ny-c diabel niemiecki i foremny, sztuczny,
Jedno nazbyt powazny, a do tego buczny.
Wloski zas foremniejszy, jedno za pieszczony,
Do tego barzo slaby na dalekie strony.
Polski dobry i sprawny, a do tego smialy
I na kiopot cierpliwy, i na ne^dze trwafy.
Your German devil's handsome and attractive, contrived,
But not very serious, and vain besides.
The Italian devil's yet more handsome, but spoiled
And very weak when far from home.
The Polish devil is able and bold
Chapter 3.1'. Patient in trouble, tenacious in poverty.
Our gOOd powers Of evil —Nqdza z Biedq z Polski idq, 1624 w . 467-472 (1966 p. 634).

3.1.1. Introduction

I borrow the title of this chapter from the title of an article that appeared in the Polish edition

of National Geographic while I was doing my research in Poland ("Nasze dobre zle moce,"

Pol 2004). This brief, popular essay, accompanied by images of the carved wooden devil

figurines common to Polish folk-art, asserted that in Poland, in contrast to other Christian

cultures, the devil is an ambiguous figure of fun—an easily fooled foil for the clever peasant

in legends, or, as in the epigraph to this chapter, himself the embodiment of peasant tenacity

and cunning. It also suggested that the Polish devil was only lightly Christianized: in his

imagery, his function, and his place in the social imagination, he was closer to a nature spirit

or tutelatory ancestor than to the infernal Prince of Darkness.

The National Geographic article summed up a long and respectable tradition of Polish

scholarship, ranging over folklore studies and anthropology to literary studies and history, in

which it is suggested that the Polish devil is importantly different from devils elsewhere, and

400
 • Good powers of evil •

that these differences help to account for differences in the Polish attitude towards evil or

towards witchcraft. In this and following chapters, I will attempt to complicate this picture. I

will want to question the often-encountered assumption that Christianity made evil demons

out of previously beneficent sprites and fairies. Sprites and fairies are ambivalent and

potentially dangerous in most cultures, and this seems to have been true in Poland as well. I

will also want to challenge the view that the Christian aspect of these devils lies on the

surface only, a veil thrown lightly over the underlying pagan reality. On the contrary, I

suggest, there is no methodologically defensible mechanism whereby one might separate the

"Christian" from the "non-Christian" aspects of the Polish devils. Finally and most

importantly, I will want to examine the ways in which particularly Polish imaginations of the

devil interacted with imaginations of the witch in trials and in literature. When accusers, the

accused, witnesses and magistrates spoke of "devils" [diabli, czarci] and "evil spirits" [zle

duchy], what did they mean?

• •$• •

In the mid-19th century, the folklorist Kazimierz Wojcicki asserted that in legends and

tales, the Polish peasant always fools the Polish devil (1842 vol. 3 pp. 185-189; cited after

Rozek 1993 p. 188). Although later authorities such as Aleksander Bruckner warned against

the romantic tendency to treat the foolish or comic devils of Polish legend as particularly or

typically Slavic, and noted that the motif is already present in early Christian apocrypha

(1903 pp. 115-116), much subsequent scholarship has failed to heed this warning. An

authoritative encyclopedia article on Slavic demonology speaks of the "especially

ubiquitous" motif, among the Slavs, of the easily fooled devil (Wroblewski 1961-1962,

p. 337). Michal Rozek, in his survey of the devil-motif in Poland, follows Wojcicki's lead

401
 • Chapter 3.1 •

uncritically: "Our native devil is a playful demon-sprite, sometimes a mischievous imp, but

altogether, a sympathetic creature" (1993 p. 188). With specific reference to the early modern

period and to witch-trials, Janusz Tazbir has spoken of the "weakness" of Polish demonology

in the Reformation period; a weakness grounded, he suggests, in the relative youth of Polish

Christianity (1986a p. 148; cf. Karpihski 1995 p. 321). Elsewhere the same author notes the

ludic and ridiculous quality of the Polish devil, in strong contrast to the devil as a figure of

fear (1978 p. 158; 1986a p. 157; cf. Bylina 1990 p. 42; 1992 p. 167; Bracha 1996 p. 256).

Maria Bogucka, careful and astute historian though she usually is, has made the most

sweeping generalizations concerning the Polish devil, and has suggested explicitly that his

mild nature helps to account for what she takes to be the mild course of witch-trials in

Poland. For Bogucka the devil "was domesticated in Poland; he did not terrify anybody and

was even ridiculed (1996 p. 176)." This reduction of the devil to a comical figure dressed

either in Polish or foreign (usually German or Swedish) garments, that is, a figure set in

everyday reality and thus not very terrifying, is an interesting trait of the Polish imagination

in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. It differed markedly from the imagination of people in

Western Europe, where Satan had clearly cut demonic features, [where he was] an ominous

demon very dangerous to people, a really powerful ruler of hell" (ibid. p. 188).

There is a good deal of truth in these characterizations of the Polish devil, as we will

see. What they lack is an appreciation for the subtleties of categorization and comparison, of

terminology, of levels of discourse. It is not always clear that a "devil" is meant when a

"devil" is spoken of, nor that Western devils were so uniformly horrific in comparison to the

Slavic trickster. Nor is it clear that the duped devil of legend or the cowardly devil of popular

ribald verse translates in any straightforward fashion to a non-frightening devil in other

402
 • Good powers of evil •

registers of the social imagination, such as theology or the confessions of witches. In his

study of the Franciscan Berard Gutowski, for example, Janusz Drob notes that one can find

no trace whatever of the popular ambivalent devil. In Gutowski's collected sermons, the

devil is always and only an infernal tempter, animated by an unquenchable hatred for

humankind (Drob 1981). It may be true, as Szperling suggested nearly a century ago, that one

has here to do with class differences between a peasant devil who may be benevolent or

malicious according to how he is treated, and an elite devil as the "incarnation of evil"

(Szperling 1912). However, it is difficult to maintain a clearly marked distinction between

elite and popular devils, or clerical and lay devils. Gutowski's orthodox treatment of the devil

as enemy of humankind, in his sermons, does not imply that in other contexts he or people

like him might have treated the devil otherwise, as Jesuit preachers sometimes did.1 A related

motif of "cowardly devils" ranges across elegant courtly poetry and ribald literature.2

Conversely, the popularity of "foolish devil" folk-tales does not imply that the devil held no

1
A story attributed to the Jesuit Stanislaw Bzowski (1567-1637), found in an 18th c. manuscript collection of
stories to be used in sermons, tells of a devil who worked for a poor peasant for three years. He promises not
to harm his human master, or take his soul, so long as the man does not wash or shave through the entire
period. Despite numerous temptations, the man holds up his end of the bargain, and is saved (Kazahczuk ed.
1991 pp. 56-57; Jurkowski 2004 [c. 1715] pp. 276-278). Kolberg later collected the exact same story as a
peasant folk-tale (DWOK vol. 10 pp. 221-222, among other versions)—as nice an illustration of the
circulation of narratives between "elite" and "popular" levels as one could ask for.
2
In her religious allegory "Forteca od Boga wystawiona" [A fortress built by God], the aristocratic poet
Elzbieta Druzbacka depicted a council of devils at which the lesser demons want, above all, to avoid trouble
or any open conflict with God:
[... ] my zyczymy szczerze [... ] we frankly wish,
Zaniechac wojnq z panem wszystko moznym To avoid a war against the omnipotent Lord
I ty siedz cicho, panie Lucyperze [...] Lord Lucifer, please don't make a fuss [...]
(Druzbackal752; quoted after Matuszewski 1899 pp. 230-231).
Matuszewski traces this theme to Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1580), popular in Poland
through Piotr Kochanowski's translation of 1618. But one can find cowardly devils in earlier Polish
literature. In the anonymous Postepekprawa czartowskiego [The Devil's law-case], the minor devils
Latawiec and Farel are driven from the infernal parliament because they are too afraid to challenge, at the
heavenly court, Christ's redemption of the fallen human race (1570; Benis ed. 1891 pp. 19-20). In the Sejm
piekielny straszliwy [Horrible Parliament of Hell], an extremely popular poem based closely on the
Postqpek, Latawiec is similarly an exile from Hell, who must make a living among human beings (1622;
Bruckner ed. vv. 986ff.). This latawiec, or at least beings by the same name, will make freqent appearances
in the following chapters; see the long quotation in 3.2.4 below.

403
 • Chapter 3.1 •

horror for the Polish peasant of the 17th century: Marj anna's devil-suitor, who followed her

about on his stork legs and forces his attentions upon her, does not seem to have been a

figure of fun (see 2.3.3, above).

Most anecdotes and legends concerning devils in the 19th-20th centuries do, indeed,

emphasize his mischievous and relatively harmless character (Rybkowski 1903; Lehr 1982

pp. 118-120). Legends of the devil fooled by a young peasant man or an old peasant woman,

who takes advantage of the devil's powers to gain riches but manages to keep his or her soul,

are peppered throughout the sixty-eight volumes of Kolberg's folklore compendium ( e.g.

DWOK vol. 3 p. 153, vol. 8 pp. 143-176, vol. 9 pp. 12-13, vol. 14 pp. 43, 210, 224-247, vol.

15 p. 226, vol. 19 p. 220). However, as early 20th-century folklorists have been more

assiduous to point out than have the historians who draw on their work, the foolish or

mischievous devil represents just one aspect of a complex and polyvalent character. Adam

Fischer, whose important and influential study of the Polish devil formed the basis for Tazbir

and Bogucka's comments, writes of an ambivalent devil, derived from the mixture of the

"one-time friendly house-spirit," the terrifying Christian devil of the early Middle Ages, and

the "weak and comic" devil of the late Middle Ages (1926 p. 209). Julian Krzyzanowski,

whose work on the motif-index for Polish folklore provided him with an extremely wide

comparative perspective, noted that folk-tales of threatening or frightening devils were rare

in Poland; nevertheless, Polish tales of the easily fooled devil belong to a rich and Europe-

wide genre that includes, for example, the comic devil of Machiavelli's Belfagor

(Krzyzanowski 1965 pp. 81-82).3

3
In his systematic classification of folk tales, Krzyzanowski lists 43 variants of the "stupid monster or devil"
motif (1963 vol. 2 pp. 9-25, Aarne motif ## T 1000-1199).

404
 • Good powers of evil •

One example of this multivariant and common folk-tale trope may stand in for the rest.

It derives from the Facejcye Polskie, a collection of Polish and foreign anecdotes first

published around 1570.4 An old widow was worried how to get her harvest in, since with the

loss of her husband and with her advancing years the work was too much for herself and her

servant. The devil appears, and offers to help with the harvest in return for her soul; the

woman agrees that if this "szatan" can complete the three tasks she will assign him, her soul

will belong to him. First she commands him to bring in the produce from the fields and store

it in her barns; second, to gather, chop up, and stack a supply of firewood to last through the

winter. The devil completes these tasks without difficulty, and asks what the third task will

be:

A baba, ze sie, byla po rami rzepy objadla, pierdnie And the woman, who had eaten radishes that
(za laska. mowia^c) glosem wielkim i rzecze dyjabhi: morning, farted (pardon the expression) with a great
"Dyjable, co rychlej ten pierdziel porwi a ukre.c z voice, and said: "Devil, catch that fart as fast as you
niego powroslo; jesli tego nie uczynisz, to com ci can and twist it into rope. If you can't, our deal is
obiecala nic ze wszytkiego." Dyjabel, ze w tej off and you'll not have my soul!" The devil, who
szkole nie bywal, gdzie by pierdelowe powrosla had never gone to that school where they teach how
robiono, pomknaj od baby, bo tez dalej czego to twist ropes from farts, departed from the woman,
czekac nie mial. for he could expect to get nothing from her.
(Facecye 1903 [1624] pp. 148-149; quoted after Krzyzanowski 1958 vol. 1 p. 39)

In comic literature at least, a poor old widow—the stereotypical candidate for the devil-

pact and witchcraft—could make use of the devil's services without endangering her soul.

Despite her pact with the devil, she does not become his servant: quite the reverse. With her

wits about her, she manages to get the szatan to harvest her crops (a significant point, as a

typical activity of folk-devils is the gathering of agricultural wealth, albeit not always only

from their owners' fields) and then she wiggles out of her contract. In a back-handed

4
The oldest surviving edition is from 1624; Bruckner editted and published the text of this 17th century edition
in 1903.

405
 • Chapter 3.1 •

compliment to female cunning, the author of the anecdote concludes that "the female nation

is always shrewd; they can dupe the devil himself'5 (ibid.).

The motif of the easily fooled devil represents just one aspect of the devil as depicted in

early modern Polish literature and folk-lore. It is, moreover, a motif or genre popular all

across Europe from the late Middle Ages onward—and a motif which co-existed comfortably

with witch-trials. Two other, related aspects of the Polish folkloric devil deserve closer

attention, as they are both more unusual in comparative perspective, and more closely related

to the devils that appear in the confessions of accused witches. First, it was not infrequently

asserted that the people worship, or venerate, or at least propitiate, the devil—such assertions

were made not only of witches, who do so by definition, but of the common people in

general. Second, one finds the notion both in early modern literature as well as in 19th-20th

century folklore, that at least some of the devils so venerated were of non-infernal origin: the

terms "diabel," "czart" and "szatan" denote not only Satan and his minions but also a variety

of less determinate beings. The two notions are closely related, as the "devil" said to be

worshipped or propitiated appears, on examination, often enough to more closely resemble a

nature spirit or house-demon than a fully orthodox devil. The next two sections of this

chapter are taken up with these two notions, of devil-veneration and of non-infernal devils,

and with the complexities that these notions introduce into our interpretation of the Polish

witch-trials.

5
"[B]abi narod zawzdy chytry, ze i szatana rozumu maja_."

406
 • Good powers of evil •

Y dragie nie wierza^ aby tak byl n^dzny Diabel abo

potepiony, ale przemozny y sczesliwy Duch, ktory
ie wszelkiego scze_scia nabawic moze, zaczem y
herezia_pachn3.
And others don't believe that the Devil is really so
vile or so damned, but is rather a powerful and
fortunate Spirit, who can provide every happiness;
such people smell of heresy.
3.1.2: A Candle for the Devil —Czarownicapowolana 1714 (1639) p 4.

Devils in the Polish witch-trials were dressed as noblemen, as fancy gentlemen from town, as
ft 1

Germans, as army officers (see Tazbir 1986a; and Valk 2001 for the similar pattern in

Estonia). But they were also, quite often, dressed in red—a colour perhaps associated with

the fires of hell, but more immediately with the red clothing and caps of gnomes or sprites.8

A witness in the trial of Justyna Rabiaszka Sukienniczka testified that Justyna's daughter had

bragged "nothing will happen to my mother, because she spends every night at home [i.e.,

not in the jail], drinking wine and mead with some gentleman dressed in red"9 (#101, Nowy

Wisnicz 1689). The devil-lovers at Bald Mountain often "dressed in Red"10 (#104, Kozmin

Wielki 1691; #123, Pyzdry 1699), or could combine the red colour of fairies with the

foreignness of Germans: Anna Stelmaszka was introduced to a "tempter" dressed "in the

German style, all in Red"11 (#160, Pyzdry 1731). We will want to return to this issue in

6
E.g. Marjanna of Oporowko's Jan dressed as a German officer (#158, Kleczew 1730); cf. also #70, Nowy
S^cz 1670; #84, Bochnia 1684; #110, Lobzenica 1692.
7
E.g. Elzbieta Stepkowicowa rode to Lysa Gora in a carriage driven by "devils dressed as hajduks [diabli po
hajdacku]" (#70, Nowy Sa^cz 1670). The hajduks were an elite infantry, originally of free peasants,
introduced by king Stefan Batory on the Hungarian model; magnatial courts also liked to dress some of their
servants in the hajduk's colorful livery.
8
The terms "krasnolud" and "krasnal," which refer to nature spirits and may be translated as both as "red
people" (in reference to their red caps) and "pretty people," do not seem to have been current in the early
modern period—at least I have not encountered them in the trials. But the color symbolism was already
present. On red as the colour of Slavic "demons," see Moszyhski 1967 vol. 2 pt. 1 pp. 623-624.
9
"ze nie bejidzie moiey matusi nic, bo ona kazdego wieczora w domu bywa, a pije wino miod z iakiemsi pajiem
w czerwieni."
10
"chodzi w Czerwieni."
11
"po Niemiecku w Czerwoney Barwie."

407
 • Chapter 3.1 •

chapter 3.2. Here, I want to explore the notion hinted at in these descriptions: that witches

"worshipped" or "venerated" not a devil, but a fairy—or perhaps both at the same time.

Witches worship and give honour to the Devil. This notion was central to the legal and

demonological theories that had transformed witchcraft from a crime of malefic action into a

crime of status: being a witch meant being a servant of the devil, and thus a heretic and a

traitor to God (Damhouder 1601 [1554] cap. 61, de crimine laesae Maiestatis divinae, § 90-

143; Peters 1978 pp. 138-178 traces the development of this transformation in the late

Middle Ages). The pact with Satan was also central to the theology and science of demonic

magic: magic could not possibly be efficacious except insofar as it was carried out by a devil,

with whom the witch had either an explicit or an implicit pact (Del Rio 1609 bk. 2 qu. 4;

2000 pp. 73-77). In Poland, Mikolaj of Jawor's influential tractate De superstitionibus set out

the standard theological position at the beginning of the 15th century: it is illicit to deal with

or make use of demons in any way (Bylina 1978 p. 137; Bracha 1999 pp. 95-96). In Polish

witch-trials, it was also assumed that witches entered into pacts with the devil, whether out of

spite, or despair, or simply for worldly gain. The demon-pact features, centrally or otherwise,

in twenty trials known to me; in twenty-eight trials alliance with the devil was solemnified

through sexual intercourse; while in thirty-four trials the accused witches made use of

demonic helpers or familiars.12 Verdicts formulaicly denounced the convicted witch for her

treasonous offense against the Lord and her renunciation of God, the Blessed Virgin, and all

the Saints—even, sometimes, in trials where association with the devil had not formed part of

the accusations or confessions (e.g. #46, #68, #75, #127, #140, #164). It is against this

background of the pact that the Czarownica author, in the epigram above, claims

ecclesiastical-court jurisdiction over witch-trials: insofar as those who "don't believe that the
12
See Appendix D. Concerning sex with the devil, see 3.2, below.

408
 • Good powers of evil •

Devil is really so vile or so damned [...] smell of heresy," witchcraft is a religious crime of

heresy and not just a secular crime of malevolent harm.

However, the same author had also, it will be recalled, condemned all superstitious

practice whatsoever as devil-worship: even prayer, insofar as it is used for temporal ends, is

"spoken toward the devil's honour"13 (1714 [1639] p. 29; and see 2.2.1). This and similar

statements must complicate our understanding of what Polish texts mean when they speak of

the common people worshipping devils. The Czarownica author cannot possibly be

understood as intending a strong equivalence between demonic witchcraft and superstitious

folk-practice—a main point of his polemic is that these are not the same thing. And yet he,

and many others, describe both activities as devil worship.

When Marcin of Urze_dow asserted that the women of south-eastern Poland, in lighting

Midsummer's Eve bonfires, "give worship and prayer to the devil,"14 this is not intended as a

literal description of devil worship (1595 pp. 31-32). Marcin means little more than that such

activity, tending as it does to direct a person away from the pure worship of God, is pleasing

to the Devil. Dancing around a bonfire is "devil worship" in roughly the same sense as

communists used to assert that this or that innocuous activity was "objectively" fascist—it

aids and abets the devil, whatever its intention. Even those folk dances with no pagan

connotation could be described as "devil worship" or "devil parades" in that they encouraged

sins of the flesh (Kowalczykowna 1985; Bylina 2002 pp. 188-189; Tazbir 2000b). For the

same reasons, drunkenness was regularly and rhetorically ascribed to the devils' influence

(Janow 1932; Postqpek 1570; 1891 pp. 102-103; Sejm 1622 w . 1032ff.; 1903 pp. 52-56). In

the ecclesiastical-court records of the 15th and early 16th century, any crime whatsoever, not

13
"Takowe slowa, na czesc diabhi mowiq,"
14
"diabhi czesc a modlq czynia^c"

409
 • Chapter 3.1 •

just witchcraft or heresy but also theft or murder or adultery, was regularly said to have been

committed "ex suasu diabolico" (Koranyi 1927a p. 6). Later, secular-court verdicts often

described similar "secular" crimes as "offences against God" (see 1.4.6). Indeed, one can

take the impression from some texts that any activity, insofar as it falls short of perfect

sainthood, is equivalent to the devil-pact:

[K]azdy ktory grzeszy (mowi Augustyn) dusze_ swa_ Everyone who sins (says Augustine) sells his soul to
Dyabhi zaprzedaie, wziajwszy od niego miasto the devil, taking from him, in place of payment, a
zaplaty, nikczemna^ obrade, tey doczesney rozkoszy contemptuous part in temporal pleasure.
(Wujek 1573, p. 689).

In milder form, the Czarownica author made a similar point when he compared

superstitious folk, who fail to put their full trust in God, to "a certain Ruthenian who went to

church with two candles. He lit the better candle before the Royal gate [to the altar, in the

iconostasis]; the other candle, of indifferent quality, he lit and placed in the corner, saying I

sacrifice one that [God] might do me good, the other that [the devil] might do me no harm"15

(Czarownica 1714 [1639] p. 78). This is just one version of a still-popular Polish proverb:

"one candle for God, and one for the devil"16 or "Serve God, but don't offend the devil."17

The proverb dates from the 15th century if not earlier, and the anecdote is often told, not of

an ignorant Ruthenian but of King Wladyslaw Jagiello, who is supposed to have lit a candle

before the image of Jesus, but two before the image of the devil, in the Carmelite chapel of

the Body of Christ at Poznah (Sarnicki 1587 p. 343; after Lukaszewicz 2000 [1838] vol. 2

p.211). 18

15
"Jako on Rusek co ze [sic] dwiema swieczkami, chodzil do cerkwie. Jedne. co krasneysza^BOgu przed
wrotami Carskiemi zapalona^ stawial, a druggy lada iaka_ w k^cie dla diabla, mowia^c uni sacrifico utprosit,
alteri ne noceat."
16
"Swieczka dla Boga, a diabhi ogarek."
17
"Shiz Bogu a diabla nie gniewaj." Cf. Birkowski 1620 vol. 2 p. 59: "We would like to be in God's grace,
while not offending the devil [Radzi bychmy i u Bogu laski mieli, i diabla nie gniewali]."
18
Variants of this proverb are or have been popular in Russia and Greece as well, suggesting perhaps that it
comes to Poland from that country's Orthodox neighbours. In Russia one says "Bogu molis', a cherta ne
gnevi," or "Boga liubi, a cherta ne draznF (Ivanits 1989 p. 43); in Greece: "We light one candle to the saint,

410
 • Good powers of evil •

So there is an important sense in which "superstition," or ordinary worldly pleasure, or

indeed any temporal, prudential, calculating behaviour of any kind, may be thought of as

devil worship. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that, at least sometimes, when

early modern Polish texts speak of peasant devil-worship, they mean precisely that.

Moreover, there are good reasons to suggest that, with suitable qualification, such texts are

quite correct.

• •$• •

As early as the 17th century, some Western observers of the Polish-Lithuanian

commonwealth thought that they knew that the commoners of that country honoured or

worshipped, or at least did not sufficiently despise, the devil. The Jacobean dramatist Thomas

Heywood, in his Hierarchy of the blessed angells, asserted that

In John Milesius any man may reade

Of Diuels in Sarmatia honored,
Called Kottri, or Kibaldi; such as wee
Pugs and Hob-goblins call. Their dwellings bee
In corners of old houses least frequented,
Or beneath stacks of wood: and these conuented,
Make fearfull noise in Buttries and in Dairies;
Robin good-fellowes some, some call them Fairies.
(Heywood 1634 pp. bk. 9 p. 574)

This remarkable verse, prescient though it may be in its comparative demonology,

requires some interpretation. One must first realize that by "John Milesius" Heywood means

Johannes Meletius, that is to say the 16th-century Polish Lutheran printer Jan Malecki, who

spent most of his adult life in Ducal Prussia where he wrote a brief account of the Baltic

Prussians and neighbouring peoples (Pompeo 2000). Once this context has been made clear,

then one may better understand the reference, in the verse, to "Sarmatia"—this is not the

but two to the demon" (Stewart 1991 p. 160). For a detailed account of the proverb and its variants in Polish,
see Krzyzanowski 1958 vol. 1 pp. 87-89.

411
 • Chapter 3.1 •

ancient sub-branch of the Scythians mentioned by Herodotus, but rather the fictional meta-

nationality adopted by the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, and by

extension, the region of that commonwealth. So Heywood is saying that Malecki asserts that

throughout the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the people honour "Devils," called kottri

or kibaldi, which are equivalent to the English hob-goblins, pucks, and fairies.

Heywood in fact provides quite a faithful reading of Malecki's text. Malecki had

written:

Eaedem gentes [BoruBi, Samogitae, Lithuani, These people, [the Prussians, Samogitians, Lithuanians,
Ruteni et Livones] colunt spiritus quosdam Ruthenians and Livonians], worship visible spirits,
visibiles, qui lingua Rutenica Coltky, Graeca which in the Ruthenian language are called Coltky, in
Coboli, Germanica Coboldi, vocantur. Hos Greek Coboli, and in German Coboldi. They believe
spiritus credunt habitare, in occultis aedium these spirits to live in dark places of the house, or in
locis, uel in congerie lignorum, nutriuntque eios wood-piles; people feed these spirits sumptuously with
laute omni ciborum genere, eo quod afferre food of every kind, because they believe that they
soleant, nutritoribus suis frumentum ex alienis secretly steal grain from the storehouses of others and
horreis furto ablatum carry it to those who feed them.
(Malecki 2004 [1551] p. 237).

Malecki reported further that the Samogitians worship and bring offerings of food to a demon

whom "they believe to have its home under elderberry bushes"19, and that they keep a snake

in the corner of their huts, for good fortune (ibid. pp. 236-237). Nor was he the only person to

comment on such species of devil worship in Sarmatia. Pietro Duodo, Venetian emissary to

the court of Zygmunt III in 1592, reported back to the Venetian Senate that in Lithuania and

Samogitia the people are still pagan, worshipping "un serpente picciolo di color nero" who is

fed milk from a bowl set on a small stool in the middle of the chamber. He was also told

that in these same parts there are:

alcuni demoni, per tirar piu facilmente gli demons who, in order to more easily seduce people to
uomini al loro falso culto, si fanno tanto their false cult, enter into close intimacy with them:
famigliari, che li servono nel coltivar le terre e they serve people in the cultivation of the fields and in
negli altri affari domestici; il che sebbene pare other domestic affairs. Even though this would appear
incredibile, pure lo affermano persone degne di to be incredible, it is affirmed by persons worthy of
fede. trust.

19
"Is sub arbore Sambuco domicilium habere creditur."
20
On house spirits as snakes in Lithuania, see also Bruckner 1979 pp. 121-124.

412
 • Good powers of evil •

(Alberi ed. 1862, series 1, vol. 6, p. 333).

Malecki's Coltky and Coboldi are the German kobolds and the Prussian-Lithuanian

cawx or kaukas, or the north-east Polish kauteh or koltek, well-known to folklorists. In the

19th-20th century, these are minor demons or nature spirits, who, if induced to live in the

home, bring fortune to it by, among other things, stealing grain or small-change from ones'

neighbours. They appear as birds or snakes or small old men in red hats, and they are

sometimes believed to be the ghosts of unbaptized children (Bruckner 1979 pp. 56-57, 213;

£ W 0 ^ vol. 40 pp. 67-68).

None of this might seem relevant to witchcraft in Poland. Lithuania became officially

Christian only in 1387, and Samogitia (lower Lithuania) not until 1413: for once, the

stereotype of the backwoods Samogitians as near pagans, well into the 16th century or even

later, seems well-founded. Certainly neither Malecki nor Duodo suggest that such explicit

demon-worship could be found in Poland proper. And yet every aspect of the Samogitian

demons may also be found in Poland, from the 15th right through to the early 20th century, if

not later.

Even the detail of house-spirits in the form of snakes, which must have appeared so

sinister to anyone with the Biblical serpent in mind, repeats itself in attenuated form in
") 1
Poland. However, one finds a clearer example in Malecki's statement that the Prussians
"worship" a devil who lives under elderberry bushes. More than a century before Malecki,
21
Throughout the Slavic region, treasure-hauling demons are often imagined as snakes or serpents, and in many
regions the same term is used for both (Wroblewski 1961 p. 336; Szyjewski 2003 pp. 188-189). In the
Zamosc region south-east of Lublin in the 19th century, a house with a snake was considered lucky. One
should not kill such a snake, or one's own children could die, and one's cows could lose their milk. When
children eat, especially kasza or noodles with milk, the snake often comes out from its hole and shares the
meal with them (DWOK vol. 17 pp. 145-146). Such snakes also often live in the barn with the cows; they
increase the cows milk-production and protect them from witches. In return, they sometimes take milk
themselves, winding up a cow' hind leg and drinking direct from the udder (ibid., cf. Klonowic 1584 vv.
505-570; 1996 pp. 52-55). The tradition of snakes who drink the milk of cows goes back to Pliny, and was
well-known to medieval and early-modern Encyclopedists, including Haur (p. 328) and Chmielowski (vol. 1
p. 602). This classical motif seems to have met and mixed with indigenous folklore in the Slavic countries.

413
 • Chapter 3.1 •

precisely the same complaint was made of the Polish peasantry by the Krakow canon and

theologian Stanislaw of Skarbimierz, in his sermon de superstitionibus:

Alii cum sambuco quaedam faciunt credendo Still others do something with elderberry, believing,
ipsis non obesse incantationes; sed hi sciant, quod that thanks to this no enchantments can harm them,
nulla incantatio potest nocere habentibus fidem Let them learn that no enchantment can harm those
rectam. who have correct faith.
Stanislaw of Skarbomierz c. 1415; quoted after Olszewski 2002 p. 188).

Nor is this a matter of a practice attacked in Poland in the 15th century, and in "backward"

Samogitia or Prussia only in the 16th. In fact, the same or similar treatment of elderberry as

the abode of demons continued in Polish folk tradition well into the 19th and even 20th

centuries. Kolberg noted a wide variety of folk-medicinal practices which depended upon the

propensity of elderberry demons to take whatever was offered them, including especially

sicknesses or misfortunes of various kinds. Mothers would leave a sick child under a lilac

bush, so that its ailment would be taken by the demon, and the wash-water from healing

baths was poured out at the base of elderberry bushes, to be absorbed by "the evil one who

lives under the bush." On the other hand, one must never burn elderberry branches, as this

would release all the illnesses and misfortunes which had been stored up in the bush (DWOK

vol. 7 p. 169, vol. 15 p. 153; vol. 17 pp. 155, 163; vol. 34 pp. 183-184; Kolbuszewski 1895;

Lehrl982pp. 116-117).

Although I have not found elderberry demons mentioned explicitly in the witch-trials,

some trial testimony can only be interpreted in the context of such a belief. For example, the

cunning-woman Zmudzina helped a young wife experiencing discord with her husband:

according to a witness "Zmudzina heated water in a pan and told [her client] to carry the

water to the elderberry bush,"22 presumably to send her troubles away (#16, Belzyce 1600).

Similarly, the accused witch Anna Rydzyriska told her client to pluck elder in the cemetery,

22 «,
'ta Zmudzina zgrzala garnuszek wody y kazala yey niescz do krzaka bzowego."

414
 • Good powers of evil •

bring it home, say "With the help of God, with the help of Our Lady Mary, I ask you

elderberry [...] to get rid of the problem"23 (#50, Turek 1652).

Most important for the present study, however, are the demons (or spirits, or gnome-

like house-genies) alleged to live in the home, to be "worshipped" and fed by the woman of

the house, and to bring prosperity or good luck to her. Early traces of such demons refer to

them as skrzatki (from the German skratt, a forest demon or sprite) or as uboze (a possibly

collective term, meaning "the poor ones"—either the poor departed dead, or the godling-

patrons of the poor). Later the term uboze faded from use, to be replaced by such terms as

plonek or cmuk or latawiec; skrzat remains a popular term for sprites or brownies or gnomes.

15th-century clerics understood that the spirits they called demones were thought of, by

the common people, as house-genies or ancestors. An anonymous author whose work was

copied by Michal of Janowiec at end of 15th c. complained that the common people light

bonfires or candles on the eve of Maundy Thursday so that the visiting spirits of their

ancestors can warm themselves at these fires24—a practice also condemned by the Orthodox

clergy of Kievan Rus in the 11th and 12th centuries (Belcarzowa 1981 p. 57; Bruckner 1895

p. 322; 1985b p. 308; Bylina 1993 pp. 78-79; 2002 p. 177; the still-current practice of placing

candles on the graves of ancestors at All Souls, so that the whole graveyard looks like a

carpet of little flames, is a Christianized continuation of the ancient practice.). The earliest

surviving Polish-Latin dictionary (c. 1420) lists vbosze as the Polish for Latin manes or

penates (Urbahczyk 1962 item 360, p. 25);25 while the Polish gloss to a Latin-German

23
1 take this text from Wyporska's English translation of the trial (2004 pp. 50-51); accordingly, the original
Polish is unavailable to me. In Wyporska's text, the bush in question is lilac. I am certain that this is a
mistranslation: bez is now usually lilac, while elderberry is czarny bez; however, in the early modern period
bez always meant elderberry. See bez in Appendix B for further discussion.
24
"[I]tem dicunt [...] quod anime ad ilium ignem veniant et se illic calefaciant."
25
This dictionary, the "Tridentine vocabulary," was found in a codex originating with Aleksander Piastowicz,
son of the duke of Mazowsze and bishop of Trent from 1424 to 1444. On linguistic and historical grounds,

415
 • Chapter 3.1 •

dictionary of around 1500 speaks of "lares familiares skrzathkovye, which we call little

people"26 (Erzepki 1908 p. 95). Both dictionaries clearly link the uboze or skrzatek with

notions of ancestor-spirits and house-genies. A gloss on a text of 1466, speaking of "lemures,

fantasmata manes," explains that these are "infernal spirits, fantasms, vbozq" (Bruckner

1893 p. 25). A mid-14th century Benedictine sermon manuscript which follows but adds

considerably to Stanislaw of Skarbimierz's sermon de superstitionibus, describes the worship

accorded such spirits:

Nonnulli sunt qui non lavant scutellas post There are not a few, who don't wash their bowls after
cenam feria quinta magna et feriali ad dinner on Great Thursday, so as to feed the spirits
pascendum animas vel alias que dicuntur otherwise called ubosshe, foolish ones, believing a
vbosshe, stulti credentes, spiritus corporalibus spirit to require things of the flesh, whereas it is written
indigere cum scriptum est Spiritus camem et "A spirit has neither flesh nor bones." Others leave
ossa non habet. Aliqui remittunt remanencias ex remainders on purpose in their bowls after dinner, as it
industria in scutellis post cenam quasi ad were to feed these spirits or rather those demons who
nutriendum animas vel quoddam demonium are commonly called ubosche, but this is laughable, for
quod vocatur wr vbosche, sed hoc rediculo the vain and the foolish often imagine that this food
plenum est, quia putant sepe stulti et vani, hoc which they left was consumed by the aforesaid
ipsum quan remanserunt a dicto vbesche comedi ubesche, (whom they nurture for the sake of good
quod fovent propter fortunium, sed turn fortune), but then often a puppy comes along, and when
frequenter veniens catulus ipsis nescientibus illas nobody's looking, devours these leftovers.
reliquias devorat.
(Bruckner 1895 p. 345).28

A sermon for Easter Monday from the same manuscript suggests that such offerings of

food were made not only on calendrical holidays such as Maundy Thursday, but every

Thursday: "Some offer sacrifices to demons which are called uboschye, leaving them leftover

Urbanczyk believes its author to have probably been a cleric from Mazowsze, which, together with the use
of the same word by Rozdzienski in southern Silesia (1612, see below), would indicate that the term uboze
was known across a wide area of Poland.
"Lares familiares skrzathkovye, quos nos vocamus maly ludzye"
"animas infernales, vidzydla, vbozaj'
Bruckner's document was a manuscript of the Saint Petersburg Library, sig. Latin I Quarto no. 244; originally
from the library of the Benedictine monastery of the Holy Cross in the Swie^tokrzyskie mountains; quotation
at f. 143v. The sermon, on the Holy Trinity, is a close paraphrase and extension of Stanislaw of
Skarbimierz's sermon de superstitionibus, from the second decade of the 15th century. The original,
however, does not name the uboze, though it does cover much the same ground:
Nonnulli sunt, qui non lavant scutellas post caenam feria quinta magna ad pascendum animas.
Stulti, credentes spiritus corporalibus indigere, cum scriptum sit: "Spiritus carnem et ossa non
habet". Si ergo carnem non habet, corporalibus pasci non indiget. Aliqui dimittunt
remanentias ex industria in scultellis, tunc post caenam quasi ad nutriendum animas; quod est
erroreum. (Stanislaw of Skarbimierz 1979 [c. 1415], p. 90).

416
 • Good powers of evil •

food from dinner on Thursdays"29 (Bruckner 1895 p. 341; ms. f. 89). Bruckner explains this

quite plausibly: at the Spring and Fall Zaduszki (Maundy Thursday in Spring, All Souls in the

Fall), one left food and light for all the returning ancestors, whereas the house-spirit, the

special ancestor who looks after the household, should be fed weekly or daily (ibid,

p. 320ff.).

Textual sources from the period of the witch-trials are clearly indebted to this tradition

of the 15th century anti-superstition literature. The author of the Postepek must have read

some version of Stanislaw of Skarbimierz's de superstitionibus; his comment that peasants,

especially women, "recite prayers to the devil's honour [.. ], giving offering on Thursdays

after dinner, leaving out food eaten by who-knows-whom in the night," closely follows the

15th century antecedents (1570; 1891 p. 117). The Sejmpiekielny, which in many passages

amounts to a versified version of the Postepek, cleverly inverts the motif of offering food to

the uboze or "poor one." The devil "Nocny Lelek" (night-jar or goatsucker, a nocturnal bird

associated with milk-theft and witchcraft throughout its European range),31 explains that

"they don't give food to the poor [ubogiemu] on Thursdays, instead, with their unwashed

dishes, they leave it all for us" 32 {Sejmpiekielny 1622 w . 1161-1162; 1903 pp. 56-57).

Although neither text condemns such activity very strongly, the object of such offering is no

longer an ontologically unspecified demon or the ancestral uboze: it has become a devil, and

the woman who give offerings to it are giving offerings to devils.

"Aut demonibus sacrificia offerunt que dicuntur vboschye, remanentes seu derelinquentes eis residuitates
ciborum quinta feria post cenam."
"mowi czartu ku czci modlitwy, miece swoje wlosy na ogieri, ofiary czynia^c we czwartek po wieczerzy,
zostawia potraw i zjada to w nocy nie wiem kto."
In the Worek Iudaszow, Klonowic associates the dark of night with the lelek, the latawiec, and two other
creatures with diabolic connotations, the bat and the screetch-owl (Klonowic 1600 p. 74, 1960 p. 229; see
also 3.4 below).
Przeto warzy ubogiemu we czwartki nie daj\ tak z naczyniem nie pomytym, to dla nas chowaja."

417
 • Chapter 3.1 •

At the same time, however, other texts show the development of the house-spirit in

other directions. The Czarownica explicitly locates Thursday food-offerings among the

superstitions: they are ignorant misdemeanors, not crimes requiring punishment. The author's

tone in discussing them is mocking rather than condemnatory: "They also don't look into

mirrors at night, nor wash the dishes after Thursday dinner. Why? They know, I also know

but I won't say"33 {Czarownica 1714 [1639] p. 6). This can hardly be the devil-worship he

had condemned as the heretical heart of witchcraft just two pages previously.

Another, rather different text, which contains the last known use of the term uboze,

shows how the ancestor-spirit who guards the house had developed into a gnome or sprite

helping out with an artisan's tasks. In his versified treatise on metallurgy and smithcraft, the

Silesian blacksmith Walenty Rozdziehski gives his version of the pan-European folklore

motif of helpful brownies or kobolds, best known from Grimm's "Shoemaker and the Elves."

Small men come to the smithy to help with with the work:

Pokusy te, uboza takie wie_c bywaty, Those tempters, uboza came often [to the smithy]
Ktorym zawzdy u pieca malego stawiali For whom, next to the hearth, one always leaves
Jadlo na noc w sobotq tam, kqdy kowali. Food for Saturday night, when they came to work.
Ubozym je kuznicy pospolicie zwali, Smiths call them uboze, and think they are holy
Wiele o nich, za swie_te je maja_c trzymali. They have many beliefs concerning them.
(Rozdzienski 1612 w . 1472-1476; 1948 p. 64).

Thus, by the time of the witch-trials, the demons or ancestors "worshipped" by the ignorant

peasantry had become, on the one hand, infernal devils, on the other they had become

harmless sprites or gnomes. As will be shown more fully below, their activity of protecting

the home and bringing it good luck had also been modified; now, as Malecki says of the

"Sarmatian" coboldi, the fortune they bring to their owners is always stolen, and so gained at

another's expense.

33
"Takze w nocy nie zaglajiac wzwierciadlo, misek we czwartek po wieczerzy nie myc. Dla czego? oni wiedza^
ia nie powiem choc wiem."

418
 • Good powers of evil •

We should resist, however, the tempting interpretation that while clerical or reforming

authors made the house-demon into an orthodox devil, laymen such as Rozdzienski

preserved its status as a benevolent fairy. In fact, all texts depict these beings beings

ambiguously. For the Czarownica author, despite his earlier condemnation of demonolatria,

can pass over food offerings to a demon with little more than a smirk; Rozdzienski, just

before he calls the uboze "holy," also calls it apokus—that is a tempter or devil.

In fact, the house-spirit was probably ambivalent from the very beginning, so that we

are led astray insofar as we understand it to have been a benevolent creature "demonized"

under Christianity. For Aleksander Gieysztor, the pre-Christian house-spirits were "friendly

and helpful [...] members of the family" (1982 pp. 233-234). Stanislaw Bylina qualifies this

description, distinguishing between the benevolent dead, the ghosts of those who lived and

died well and who become domowiki or house-ghosts or friendly visitors at the Spring and

Fall zaduszki, and the angry dead, killed violently or before their time, drowned or struck by

lightning. These latter are also shown hospitality when they visit, but out of fear rather than

veneration (Bylina 1992 pp. 23-25; 1993 pp. 75-76; cf. Lowmianski 1979 p. 151; Szyjewski

2003 p. 211). The demonization of the house-spirit, then, would consist essentially in its

association with the devil and with the ghosts of the angry dead (Cf. Ivanits 1989 pp. 50, 62,

175, who claims that the originally benevolent domovoi in Russia came to be mixed with the

devil and with the unclean dead).

To my mind this provides too clear a division between the good and the bad: while

indubitably the souls of the improperly killed or improperly buried would be feared, it does

not follow that the domowik was originally or simply benevolent. From what we know about

ancestor veneration in other cultures, the beings so venerated are very rarely unqualifiedly

419
 • Chapter 3.1 •

good or friendly. Bruckner sees this as having been the case among the pre-Christian Slavs

as well: rather than an originally benevolent "member of the family" who becomes

demonized, one finds a being who cares for the household but is envious of the living; such a

being was always ready to take offence. As for the visiting ancestor spirits, these were "nice,

but dangerous guests" (Bruckner 1985b p. 296). Accordingly, their Christianization, as well

as their transformation into mischievous but helpful sprites or gnomes, need not have been

such a large transformation after all.

One way by which the visiting spirits did assimilate to orthodox Christianity—or by

which Christianity conformed itself to them—was their merging with the concepts of souls in

purgatory or limbo (Bylina 1992 pp. 128-129). As elsewhere in Europe, prayer for the dead

at All-Souls replaced or merged with the previous visits by dead souls during Zaduszki (ibid,

p. 124). In Poland penitential spirits were most often understood to serve out their penance as

wandering spirits on this earth.35 Purgatorial souls are not so far from devils, so that even the

beneficial house-spirit living behind the stove was, by the 19th century, called a "devil" not

just by priests but by the peasants themselves (DWOK vol. 17 p. 202; Fischer 1926 p. 205).

See e.g. Middleton 1967 pp. 59-61; Parkin 1985a p. 5; Hutton 2002 pp. 27-28.
Thomas Aquinas admitted that some souls serve their purgation on earth rather than in purgatory (Bylina
1992 p. 119, citing Le Goff 1981 p. 365), but he, and Polish authors who followed him, were unhappy with
the popular images of souls in purgatory wandering the world and appearing to the living—something they
can only do with God's permission (Stanislaw of Skarbimierz 1979 vol. 2 p. 87; Bylina 1992 p. 128). Later,
less careful or less philosophical writers embraced the popular notion of purgatory on earth, with its
dramatic potential to incite lay piety. Stanislaw Brzezannski listed as evidence for the immortality of the
soul "that so many Saints of God, and other spirits, both saved and condemned, appear after death [ "iz tak
wiele Swiqtych Boskich, y innych dusz, tak zbawionych, iako y potej>iencow, pokazuia_ siq po smierci"]"
(Brzezanski 1717, f. 27). Jesuit anecdotes meant to be used in sermons were full of such ghosts, such as the
spirit condemned until Judgment Day to live in the well of the Dominican monastery in Krakow (Kazanczuk
ed. 1991 pp. 69, 130; quoting Kwiatkiewicz 1695, who follows a chronicler of the early 17th century). To
Haur, the fact that "the souls of the dead, doing penance, or held in Purgatory [dusze zmarrych, pokutuia_ce,
abo gdy sa_ w Czyscu zatrzymane]" appear often to people on earth, frightening them and asking for spiritual
aid, was so so well-attested in books and by numerous eye-witness accounts, that he need not discuss it
further in his own work (1693 p. 433). The popular conception of purgatorial penance as something carried
out after death but in this world, finds literary expression in the legend of Pan Twardowski.'The Polish
Faust," having called upon the Virgin Mary for mercy just as Satan was carrying him off to hell, was
banished to the moon, there to do penance until doomsday. His figure can be seen at the full moon (Kuchta
1926).

420
 • Good powers of evil •

Nor is purgation so far from fairyland—as Katherine Briggs has shown for English materials,

fairies and the realms of the dead blended imperceptably one into the other in the early

modern period (Briggs 1970). The "devils" worshipped by Polish peasant-women, then, may

from the very beginning have been beings of indeterminate status, betwixt and between,

neither good nor bad—and this ambivalence need not be a product of incomplete

Christianization. The oft-repeated assertion that the devil or demon or snake is kept in the

corner of the hut, or that its food is left in the corner, once again speaks to his ambivalent

status as honoured guest and as demon to be exorcised. The corner of the house farthest from

the door, is the place of honour for guests, but it is also the location of icons or blessed

images with their exorcistic function (Dzwigol 1999 p. 271; Pelka 1987 pp. 25-26). Recall

too that the ignorant peasant of the proverb lit his candle for the devil "in the corner."

I have tried to trace here the trajectory by which ancestor-spirits and house-genies

mixed and blended with nature sprites and with purgatorial penitent ghosts, and these in turn

with devils, so that a term such as "devil" might mean any of these things or all of them at

once. I am not at all sure I have succeeded in this task: the texts are brief, fragmentary, and

ambivalent; they are from different regions, from different sorts of people (the probably

Calvinist author of the Postqpek, the probably Jesuit author of the Czarownica, the Catholic

but somewhat folkloristic voice of the Sejm piekielny) nor do they provide a uniform theory

or point to a clear progression. Perhaps an opposite, retrogressive method can complement

the story told here. What we can be sure of is that by the mid-19th century a thorough

blending of at least these four categories had been accomplished. One of Kolberg's

informants from the Krakow region informed him that apotqpieniec ("condemned one,

damned soul") is born with a devil inside: after his death his soul (or this devil?) wanders the

421
 • Chapter 3.1 •

earth, frightening people so that they will exorcise it with prayer—this prayer then works like

prayers for the dead in purgatory, and helps thepotqpieniec achieve salvation (DWOK vol. 7

pp. 55). Similarly, the cunning woman Resia Fra^siowa of Kurnik made use of the spirits of

the "the drowned and the hanged" in her healing rites: the Hail Maries she recited as part of

these rites were for their benefit, and they reciprocated by healing the patient. In general,

according to Kolberg's collaborator Klepaczewski, who interviewed Fra^siowa, cunning-

people have their power because "helpful devils, that is people who died in sin and are

condemned to penance on this earth, inhabit them." Frajsiowa made clear that such devils

could be evil, but need not be: recalling an associate of hers who had died many years

previously, she commented that "Marynka had only good devils; for that reason she also

went to church" (DWOKvol 15 pp. 117-118; 135, 142).

When, then, we encounter "devils" in the the Polish witch-trials, we must exercise some

caution. The being so labelled may be the benevolent house-spirit or house-demon, often

identified with an ancestor, who protects the household and farm from harm; or the morally

ambivalent treasure-hauler or grain stealer, who similarly provides prosperity to the

household but does so at the expense of others; or a purgatorial ghost, exacting its vengeance

on the living; or, finally, the Christian devil—whose assistance in this world always comes

with a heavy price in the next. Most often, it is some combination of several of these.

422
 • Good powers of evil •

Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro

de li angeli che non furon ribelli
n6 fur fedeli a Dio, ma per se fuoro.
Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,
ne lo profondo inferno li riceve,
ch'alcuna gloria i rei avrebber d'elli

They now commingle with the coward angels,

the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
nave cast
3.1.3. them out, nor will deep Hell receive them—
even
T h Tip *1 f K" ' ' ^ e w i c ked cannot glory in them.

(or Satan in Goraj) —Dante, Inferno 3.39-44 (Mandelbaum trans., 1982)

In August of 1698, the peasantwoman Regina Lewczykowa, of the small village Chrzanow in

the southern end of the Lublin wojewodztwo, appeared before a indicium bannitum composed

of three Lublin jurors. She stood accused of having bewitched her neighbor, Wojciech

Kozielek, by sending demons into his body. I have had cause to mention Regina's case a

number of times; in this section, I will go through her trial step by step while relating it to

wider themes of devil-servants and possession.

Regina conformed in many ways to the stereotypical witch of both early modern

discourse and recent scholarship; in other ways she diverged sharply from that stereotype. At

the time of her trial, she was old, even very old by the standards of the day—although she did

not mention her own age, the court records the age of her brother, who testified on her behalf,

as seventy years. Another witness mentioned Regina's long residence in Chrzanow: "I

moved to Krzanow [sic] twenty long years ago, and this woman was already there;" while a

third witness said "She's lived with us in the village from old times."37 Moreover, Regina

was known to have a sharp tongue, as both her own testimony and that of witnesses make

clear. However, in other ways Regina does not fit the pattern of the old, dangerous, woman.

36
"iam iest przychodnia do Krzanowa iusz to lat 20, a tq bialqglowQ zastalam."
37
"Miqszka u nas we wsi za dawnych czasow."

423
 • Chapter 3.1 •

She was happily married to her second husband, Bartlomiej Lewczyk, with whom she had

lived for "quite a few years." Nor can she have been desperately poor: together with her

husband she owned several head of cattle and some horses, and supported a servant-girl.

Finally, she was not a marginal member of the community but instead a respected elder who

had little difficulty finding friends and kin to testify on her behalf. Most likely it was the

weight of this testimony, together with the failure of her accuser to assemble a countervailing

body of inculpating evidence, that ultimately swayed the Lublin court to acquit Regina of any

wrong-doing.

However, and despite her apparent good standing in the community, Regina's case

might have turned out very differently if not for a historical coincidence. She had the

exceptional good fortune to find herself a subject of the nobleman and jurist Stanislaw
I D

Szczuka (c. 1654-1710), leaseholder of Chrzanow. Szczuka had studied law at Krakow,

finishing his studies with a practicum at the Crown Tribunal in Lublin. He then entered the

service of King Jan III Sobieski, first as his secretary and, from 1684, as regens of the Crown

Chancellory. Here his duties included responsibility for the legal correctness of all

documents issued from the chancellory. In 1688 Szczuka was promoted to the office of lay

referendarz for the Crown.39 In this role he headed the Referendary Court which oversaw

appellate cases from royal lands; he also sat on the Assessory Court which heard appeals

from town courts. It was this Assessory Court that had, in an ordinance of 1673, required that

small-town courts refer witch-trials to the courts of larger towns, and had demanded greater

care and caution in the prosecution of witches (1.2.2). Although Szczuka was not involved in
38
Grochowska (1989) does not list Chrzanow among the properties owned, leased or administrated by Szczuka.
However, he did own a few towns and villages in the Lublin region, and leased several more; Chrzanow
may be understood to have been included in a klucz or collection of villages administrated by Szczuka.
39
Information concerning Szczuka's carreer is taken from Grochowska 1989 and Zielinska 2004. Concerning
the office of referendarz, see Wozniakowa 1990.

424
 • Good powers of evil •

the ordinance of 1673, he would certainly have been familiar with it. Finally, Szczuka was

the starosta of Lublin, and as such the local representative of the king and the head of the

staroscinski court in the Lublin castle. Although the councils and courts of large cities like

Lublin, secure in their royal charters and Saxon-law rights, could act with considerable

independence, Szczuka's opinion was certainly something to reckon with. It was because of

Szczuka's insistence that Regina's case came to the Lublin court at all, after an initial trial in

the small town of Goraj, near Chrzanow. The Lublin court records no sentence from the

Goraj trial—Lewczykowa almost certainly appealed before being put to torture, so that the

jurymen of Goraj never came to a verdict—it also seems likely that the appeal came about, or

was granted, through Szczuka's intervention. Throughout her trial the Lublin court

maintained a high, even ostentatious, concern for proper procedure and careful sifting of

evidence; one gets the impression of an institution very much on its best behaviour. The court

provided Regina with a defence advocate, Jan Kompalski, and proceeded with the utmost

attention to form. Records of the testimony collected in Goraj were made available to

Kompalski, and this evidence, together with new testimony from the interested parties and

their selected witnesses in Lublin, forms the whole basis of the trial; nobody was put to

torture. Quite exceptionally for a witch-trial, as indeed for any serious criminal trial, the court

freed Regina on the warranty of her husband and kinsmen, during the long recess between

the initial hearing on August 11th 1698, and the final depositions on December 20 of the

same year.

This recess itself shows the court's extraordinary attention to procedure: the court

wishes to accommodate the grape harvest in Chrzanow, and also

ex quibus quoniam sufficienter super facto because from [the testimony from Goraj] the court did not
inculpatae Reginae Lewczykowey obiecto succeed in sufficiently informing itself concerning the
informari nequit necessariuam esse ante omnia deed done by the accused Regina Lewczykowa, it is

425
 • Chapter 3.1 •

inquisitionem sufficientiorem propter necessary above all that an investigation, with the purpose
meliorem iudicii sui informationem per of better and more sufficient information of the court, be
utramque partem deducendam idque per conducted by both sides, and by persons familiar with, or
personas tarn criminis obiecti, quam et vitae eyewitnesses of, both the criminal act and the life of the
ante actae inculpatae Lewczykowey, gnaras accused Lewczykowa before that act, as well as [persons
testesque oculatos, ac rei gestae notitiam familiar with] the events relating to the accuser, toward
habentes delatori videlicet ad probandum either clear proof of the crimimal act of the above-
obiectum crimen citatae vero ad expurgandam mentioned, or to the justification of her innocence,
innocentiam suam.

Later, in presenting its verdict, the court speaks of its "honest consideration and

deliberation concerning all the circumstances, both of law and of action." I know of no

other witch-trial in Poland, least of all a trial against a peasantwoman, where the court takes

such care with the evidence, and takes such care to show its care for the evidence—this

surely proceeds from the jurymen's good understanding that they were themselves being

judged by one of the highest ranking jurists in the land, and the man before whom appeals

from their own court would be heard.

To return to the trial itself. The initial testimony of Regina and her accuser before the

Lublin court provided an excellent picture of the way a witchcraft accusation can develop

from a relatively trivial village quarrel. Regina showed herself to be a woman of imposing

personality in her account of the incident that led to her accusation:

Niewiem zka_d na mnie ta opinia naslania zlego I don't know where this opinion about me, of sending an
duch a na Woiciecha Kozielka, t$ jednak evil spirit against Woiciech Kozielek, comes from;
nieshisznie do mnie przyczynq sobie czyni, iz although he improperly gives the reason, that the field,
gdy pole przez ktorem wiqc bez wszelkiei through which I used to drive my cattle without any
przeszkody za oica iego bydlo wpole problem in the time of his father, he now has fenced and
wyganiala, po smierci tegosz oica zagrodzil y forbidden to cattle-driving. I wanted to bring my cattle
wype^dzac zabranial. lam bydlo chciala pe^dzic, through, but he got in the way and wouldn't allow it. I
a on zastapiwszy niedopuscil, iam rzekla: said: Why [are you doing this] to me Woitys, after all I
czemu mi ty Woitys, wszakem go tqdy used to bring them this way. He answered: but now
przedtym ganiala. On rzekl: ale teraz ziez you'll eat a devil if you drive them this way. I said: eat
diabla wpope_dzisz, iam odpowiedziala: him yourself, since you're younger; after that I didn't
ziedzzego ty bos ty mlodszy, potyn nie herd my cattle that way, but another way. A year after
ganialam tamt^dy, ale ktor^dy indziey. W rok this quarrel, something started to hurt in his legs, I don't
po tych naszych poswarkach poczqlo go po know what, and right away he took a suspicion of me,
nogach niewiem co lamac, zaraz on wziaj na and in Gorai, at the market-fair, he wounded me
mnie suspycya_y w Goraiu na jarmarku cie_szko severely. Later he was at Tomaszow [Lubelskie], when
mie_ poranil. Byl potym w Tomaszowie, ke_dy the priest exorcised [him] he said: I can't stand to look at

40
"per omnes circumstantias tam iuris quam facti probe discussis et examinatis"

426
 • Good powers of evil •

go x. exorcyzmowal mowil: nie moge. na tie. you, and the priest said, I can't help him when nothing is
patrzyc, a xdz exorcysta powiedzial, ze iamu speaking [i.e., so long as the possessing spirit doesn't
nie poradze. kiedy nic nie gada, ienakze ia speak—see Wojciech's testimony below]. However, as I
iakomi Bog miry cale niewiem cobymu to bylo love God, I don't know at all what was supposed to be
y ktoby na niego to przepuscil, ani tez ia bo ailing him or who sent it against him, and also I don't
zadnych czarow nieumiem, gdybym umiala tob know any witchcraft at all, if I did I'd know what to do
ym sobie poradzila kiedy mie. tak wiele razy when they stole from me so many times, from my rooms
kradli wkomorach y koniach iako wiadomo and my horses, as my neighbours know well, and of
sa.siadom y owszym temusz Woiciechow noe course I wouldn't have reason to wish ill of this same
mialam za co zle zyczyc, ktory mi zginiona. Woichech, who found my lost mare.
klacz wyszukal.

Wojciech Kozielek responded:

Ja nate. bialajlowe. nie instryguiq, aby ona miala I don't accuse this woman of sending [an evil spirit]
na mnie cale naslac, ale to poszlo z zabronienia against me at all, but it started with the forbidding of the
wygonu, ktory sobie bez moie pole uczynila. cattle-driving, which she did through my fields. When I
Gdym iey tedy zabranial rzekla mi, pamie.tai ze forbade her she said to me: Remember Woitek, you
Woitku ze tego niepozyesz pole, obaczysz co won't enjoy the profit of this field,41, you wait and see
sie. wkrotce stanie. Tego ia nie uwazal, what will happen. I took no notice of this, and I went
poszedtem do domu, potkawszy matke. moie. home; meeting my mother [Regina] said to her: Tell that
rzekla iey: mowcie temu Woitkowi zeby mi Woitek not to forbid me from driving my cattle [through
wygonu nie bronil, bo tego nie pozyie pole y his field], because he won't get any profit from it, and
npatrzy sie. kazdy iego biedy. Matak gdy mot to everyone will see his misfortune. When my mother told
powiedziala rzeklem diabol sie iey boi, wszak me this I said the devil himself is afraid of her , after all
ma na mie_ prawo y pana tarze sie. przegrazala y she has the right against me, and she threatened the lord
przed Anna, Golacka^ Marcinem Klichem, [of the village] in the presence of Anna Golacka, Marcin
Marcinem Dubielem. Wrok po tych Klich, and Marcin Dubiel. A year after this quarrel,
poswarkach gdym szedl po wybieranaiu when I went out and about the village to collect the
podymnego po wsi, zakhilo mie. cos bardzo w hearth tax, something pained me very much in the leg
noge. zekrza, zarazem pocza.1 chorowac, and lower back. Right away I started to be ill; I made my
obieralem sie, do Dzikowa tarn ida_c wdrodze sie. way to Dzikow, while going there, on the road it spoke
odezwalo bezemnie, ale namieyscu nic, potym through me, but at the place [i.e., when I got to
bylem w Tomaszowie. Tam sie. slysze. odezwal, Dzik6w], nothing; later I was in Tomaszow. There, I
y na nie. powiedal, ze naslala, alem ia tego nie hear, it/he spoke and said about her, that she had sent it
slyszal, bom przy sobie nie byl. Kapal mie. [into me], but I didn't hear any of this, because I was not
potym na Pilaszkowicach Jakub Motai in myself. Jakub Motai bathed me later in Pilaszowice in
wziolach y tam nie bylem przy pamiqci, ale herbs, and there I wasn't conscious but a person who
czlek zeznal, kty byl przy tym., Magdziak. was there, Magdziak, testified [as to what took place
Teraz zas przechwala sie. na roznych ludzi, iako there]. Now moreover she brags about various people, as
to na Stanislawa Kiszke. y na brata mego Macka about Stanislaw Kiszka or about my brother Maciek
(slyszal to Maciey Dubiel w domu iey) tymi (Maciey Dubiel heard her [say it] in her home), saying:
slowy: klocicie mie. niewiedziec o co, ale gnije bother me about anything at all, but both one and the
ieden be_dzie y drugi. other will rot.
Pytany o coby obwiniona. Reine. w Goraiu Asked for what reason he wounded the accused
ranil wglowe., respondit: wlazla mi w oczy nie Reina [sic] in the head while in Gorai, he answered: She
moglem na nie. patrzyc y tam sie. lusnia. dostalo, slithered into my sight and I couldn't stand to look at
ale ia nie wiem kto ia. uderzyl, bo zas w her, and there she got it with a cartwheel linch-pin, but I
Pilaszkowicach odezwalo sie. przezemnie, ze to don't know who beat her, because in Pilaszkowice it was
nie ia, ale zry duch uderzyl. said through me that not I, but an evil spirit beat her.

41
niepozyieszpola: the sentence is ambiguous; it could mean that the field will give him no profit, or that he
won't live to see its profit—I tend toward the latter interpretation.

427
 • Chapter 3.1 •

Taken together, these two opposing depositions provide one of our most complete

accounts of the development of a witchcraft accusation, the village dynamics that facilitate it,

and the cursing incident which, in retrospect, comes to understood as the moment of

bewitchment. We also see the symptoms of possession, as locally understood, and the steps

taken to exorcise the demon and return the witchcraft victim to health. We will examine each

of these aspects of the testimony below, unpacking the dense meanings—explicit, implied,

and unintentional—which inform the ascription of malefice to a village woman, and the

means available to her for deflecting it.

First, we see the personalities of the accused witch and her accuser. While these

particular personalities belong to the particular actors involved in this trial, one is tempted to

generalize from them. Regina is a strongly independent older woman, not afraid to fight for

what she understands to be her traditional rights, or to demand respect from those who are

younger than her. If we are to believe Wojciech's testimony, Regina encouraged at least the

suggestion of a reputation for malicious powers, bragging that whoever quarrels with her will

come out the worse for it. At the same time, she had always been careful not to cross certain

lines. She insisted adamantly on her ignorance of witchcraft, and proved her point with a bit

of pragmatic logic: if she knew how to bewitch people she would certainly have bewitched

the people who stole her horses; and she would not have bewitched Wojciech, who found her

lost mare. This line of reasoning made perfect sense to some of her fellow-villagers, who

repeated variations on it in their testimony before the court. Jakub Rozek asserted: "I know

she doesn't practice any witchcraft, lots of [bad] things have happened to her, thieves robbed

her, they ransacked her store-rooms, and yet she didn't use any witchcraft, in any way, to

428
 • Good powers of evil •

prevent this; nobody has complained against her about witchcraft."42 Jan Wiajsek pointed out

that Regina had not avenged herself through witchcraft against known and blatant wrongs

done to her: "I don't know whether that woman is supposed to have practiced magic, [...] of

course it happens that along with a neighbour I beat up her husband, and after all she didn't

do anything to me."43

The accuser Wojciech, on the other hand, seems not to have been very popular. Despite

the refusal of most witnesses to commit themselves to any strong assertions before the court,

one gets the sense that they felt Regina's quarrel with Wojciech to have been justified. At

issue was the wygon or cattle-road, a thin bit of field by which Regina and others drove their

cattle from the village out onto common pasture-land. Although treated as common property,

it in fact belonged to Wojciech, and his decision to fence it in and put it under cultivation

must have been inconvenient to many people.44 Regina's threat, as reported by Wojciech,

was to say in effect that his attempt to improve his own fortunes at the expense of tradition

and of his fellow villagers—his anti-social and indeed witch-like behaviour—would end

poorly: "Remember Woitek, you won't enjoy the profit of this field, you wait and see what

will happen." Moreover, Wojciech was responsible for collecting the hatedpodymny or

hearth tax. While collecting this tax a full year after his quarrel with Regina, that is, while

carrying out a task that he knew to be anti-social, and while feeling the full weight of his

neighbours' disapproval, Wojciech suddenly felt a sharp pain in his leg; he realized

retrospectively that this must have been caused by the ill-will, and the curse, of Regina the

"wiem ze sie_ zadnymi czarami nie bawi, bywaly przypadki na nie_ rozne, kradali ia_ ztodzieie, komory hipali a
przciq tego zadnym sposobem czarowniczym nie dochodzila, nikt sie_ tesz na nie_ o czary nigdy nie skarzyl."
"nie wiem zeby sie_ ta bialaglowa miala bawic czarami, [...] owszem trafilo mi sie_ zem z iednym sa^siadem iey
mqza pobil, a przeciq mi nie nie uczynila."
Such wygony were a common point of contention in villages, as their frequent mention in the volumes of the
Prawo wiejskie attest.

429
 • Chapter 3.1 •

year before. She had told him to eat a devil; he must have done so, and the sharp pain in his

leg was the result of demon-possession.

In Regina's telling of the incident, Wojciech had cursed her first, saying "you'll eat a

devil, if you drive your cattle this way." She responded in kind: "Eat him yourself, since

you're younger." This would have been an entirely standard exchange of insults, as the

witness Jan Sykula makes clear: "With this Kozielek, I heard from people how she quarrelled

with him about the wygon, that he forbade her to drive her cattle through, and that she

showered him with bad words, however whether she's supposed to have sent an evil spirit

against him, that I don't know."45 The court, finally, agreed that evil words had been spoken

by both parties, and that Wojciech "was himself the author of a threat and of improper

words."46 The central question of the trial became, then, when is a curse just a curse, and

when is it an act of witchcraft?

Giving devils, cursing, and possession

Witches could send devils into their victims in a number of ways. Perhaps the most

popular method was to put a devil into food (cf. Roper 1994 p. 188). Agnieszka Draganka

sent "deviltry [diabelswto]" into her victims in bread (#131, Wyszogrod 1701); Chrystyna

Jabhiszewska used a cooked chicken (#166, Pyzdry 1740); Zofia Marchewka sent a devil into

the wife of her accuser in some cooked kasza (#146, Brzesc Kujawski 1717); and Katarzyna

the shepherdess "gave demons" 7 to Wojciech Rosa in a cheese (#94, Warta 1685). The

manor-servant Gertruda sprinkled crayfish with a special powder, and gave them to her

45
"Z tym Kozielkiem slyszalem od ludzi iakoby sie o wygon bez ktory bronil iey bydla ganiac poswarzyla y
onemu laial zlemi slowy, zeby iednak miala na niego zlego ducha naslac niewiem."
46
"verum ex occasione denegatae perpratum vulgo wygon eiusdem Kozielek expulsionis pecorum
comminationis eiusdem ac improper•ationis dicto actori arguiter esse rea. "
47
"zadanie demonium"

430
 • Good powers of evil •

master's children to eat; by this means she "inserted a devil into the child" (#112, Kleczew

1693). Katharzyna Koziminska sent seven devils into her victim in an apple (#139,

Wyszogrod 1705), while Zofia Pe^dziszka fit twelve devils into a parsnip she gave to her

manor lord, causing his illness and misfortune (#153, Nieszawa 1721).

Accusers did not always specify the means through which a devil had been sent. The

cook and nanny Anna was accused of "introducing deviltry"49 into the wife and children of

her noble master, presumably in food (#109, Warta 1691). Blazej Chalupnik of Ostrowite

accused Regina Stokarka of "inserting a devil"50 into his wife, who became possessed, while

he himself went lame (#68, Kleczew 1669). Devils sent against a victim need not be intended

for malefice: Jadwiga Koza confessed "that we inserted four szatany into his honour Pan

Jan"51 to make him fall in love with their client, the poor noblewoman Anna Droszowska

(#65, Praszka 1665).

The "sending" or "giving" or "inserting" of devils or "deviltry" was so characteristic a

method of bewitchment that it often seems to have been used as a synonym for bewitchment

as such. In a very few cases, the devil thus sent is imagined as a visible being; a spirit with a

form and a name who does various forms of mischief; or a physical beings who attacks

physically. The devil that the girl Maryanna found at the bottom of a glass of vodka became a

very real creature, who followed her around on his stork-legs (#96, Kleczew 1688, and see

2.3.3). Anna Cwierciaczka described the devil she sent into her victim as a peasant dressed in

black, named Michal (#152, Raciaz 1719); while Zofia Balcerka confessed to making her

devil into a wolf, which attacked cattle (#108, Kleczew 1691; see also 3.1.3, below). But

48
"przysadziela diabla do dzieciencza"
49
"pozakladac diabelstwo"
50
"przysadziela diabla"
51
"zesmy przysadzili do jegomosci pana Jana szatanow czterech"

431
 • Chapter 3.1 •

more often, when victims spoke of being "given" devils or of having devils "sent" against

them, there is little sense that this implies possession by a spirit: bewitchment and possession

become synonymous. Thus for example the burmistrz of Plonsk accused two milkmaids of

"giving deviltry"53 to his wife, and swore before the court that they "bewitched my wife and

sent Devils, so help me God"54 (#122 , Plonsk 1699). In village and small-town witchtrials

the distinction between being bewitched and being possessed, between "giving witchcraft

[zadanie czary]" and "giving devils [zadanie diablow]," blurs into indistinction (as in #79,

Klimkowka 1679; #95, Warta 1687). One sees this clearly in Stanislawowa Mistalowa's oath

of expurgation: she swore "that she did no evil thing, nor was she the cause of such a thing,

which might harm Zgielczyna and her husband [...] nor did she send such a thing"55 (#15,

Belzyce 1598).

In general, then, "possession" by a devil was indistinguishable from witchcraft more

generally. The targets are the same—neighbours, children, livestock—and the effects are

similar. The possessed are struck ill, and their household economy suffers an analogous

ailment, with crops growing poorly, cattle dying or giving poor milk, and all business

ventures suffering misfortune. Thepostrzal (shooting pain, lumbago) that Andrzej Szyjewski

has identified as a typical culture-bound illness in traditional Slavic culture (Szyjewski 2003

p. 203; cf. Moszynski 1967 p. 216) is also descernable in the testimony of those into whom

devils had been sent: When Wojciech Kozielek suffered a sudden pain in his leg, he realized

that Regina Lewczykowa's curse that he should "eat the devil" had finally taken its effect

52
According to Kolberg, this was true also in the 19th century, when villagers treated the same two terms
{zadanie czary and zadanie diablow) as synonymous (DWOK vol. 16 p. 99).
53
"zadanie diabelstwa"
54
"zone, mojq. oczarowaly y Diablow naslaly tak mi Panie Boze dopomoz"
55
"yak zadney rzeczy nie uczynila zley ani przyprawita takowey, ktoraby rzecz miala skodzicz teyze
Zgielczyney y mezowi yey, ze mieszkania nimas miedzy nimi y snadz sie wsytko zle dzyeye, ani takowych
nie slala."

432
 • Good powers of evil •

(#118, Lublin 1698); and others claimed to have been made lame by witch-sent devils (e.g.

#68,Kleczewl669).

A final potential symptom of devil-possession was that one might oneself become a

witch. We have seen this already in the case of Maryanna, who was first possessed by a

devil-youth on the road to Wajsosze, and subsequently became a witch (#96, Kleczew 1688).

Similarly, Zofia Balcerka testified that she was taught witchcraft by Pizdanka who gave her

vodka, something immediately happened to her: to become a witch is thus analogous to

becoming bewitched (#108, Kleczew 1691). In other cases, a woman first possessed by

devils came herself to "possess" devils, in the sense that she owned them as her servants

which she could send against others. Regina became a witch, and got her devil, when she

accepted bread from her co-accused Katarzyna Derlina, who, for her part, received her devil

in a cake of butter from a Jewish woman (#110, Lobzenica 1692). In the same trial Katarzyna

Blachowa got her devil in flour returned to her after she had lent it: it first turned into a bird,

"like a big chicken;"56 then into a tempter dressed like a German, but with chicken legs: they

had sex and she became a witch. Zofia P^dziszka also accepted butter from a neighbour, and
en

"she must have given me something in that butter," because a devil appeared to her soon

afterwards, they made a pact, and she became a witch (#153, Nieszawa 1721a). Katarzyna

Mrowczyna confessed that some six years ago, she had taken a zgrzebie58 from a certain

Szelka, who had just been burnt as a witch. She found a small article of wood wrapped in the

zgrzebie, and admitted that "it might be, that by accepting that zgrzebie from that witch at

"jako kur wielki"

"i w tym masle musiala mi cos zadac."
zgrzebie: an amount of short hairs of linen or hemp left over in a zgrzebio (carding comb) from carding the
fibers in preparation for spinning. This left-over can also be spun.

433
 • Chapter 3.1 •

that time she might have gotten something, but she doesn't know about that."5 After further

interrogation she confessed that "she received from Wszielka a spirit in the zgrzebie, which

spirit Sielka called Marcin; that's what she said and she learned from her how to bewitch.

And she confessed, that she got that spirit Marcin in the zgrzebie, and later he became like a

black peasant."60 It was this and another devil, which she acquired later, that she sent against

Grzegorz Borarczyk; they tripped him into a river and held him under until he drowned

(#115, 1695).61

Such devils (or such witchcraft) were most often given in food, but contemporaries

agreed that they could also be imparted by a curse. Jakub Kazimierz Haur claimed, quite

wrongly, that possession by demons was an almost unknown phenomenon in Spain, France,

Italy, and other "Christian lands," and that western visitors to Poland were amazed at the

numbers suffering from demon-posssesion. The reason for this plague of possessions in

Poland, according to Haur, was the "constant cursing and unbridled malediction" of his

countrymen (1693 p. 456). One should interpret Haur to be making here a moral rather than a

theological or metaphysical assertion. He is not saying much more than that people should

not curse one another so often; certainly he does not mean that every curse is an act of

witchcraft, or that every curse causes possession. But, as I have had cause to argue more than

once in this dissertation, it is often neither useful nor possible, when interpreting early

modern Polish texts, to insist on a strict differentiation between the rhetorical and the literal,

59
"I to przydaje, iz mogla przez takie zgrzebie odbieranie od tej czarownicy na ten czas czego dostac, ale nie
wie o tym."
60
"od Wszielki dostala w [zjgrzebiach ducha, ktorego Sielka nazwala Marcin; tak jej powiedziela i od niej sie_
czarzyc nauczyla. Zeznala, iz tego ducha Marcina w zgrzebiach dostala, ktory potym sie_ stal jako czamy
chlop."
61
In Russian folklore, witchcraft is often passed on in this way."Dying witches and sorcerors might also imbue
a stick or other inanimate object with their strength so that an unsuspecting passerby, thinking the stick was
harmless, would pick it up and immediately become a witch." (Ivanits 1989 p. 119; Worobec 2001 p. 90).
"ustawiczne przeklenstwa i niepohamowane zlorzeczenia"

434
 • Good powers of evil •

the moralistic and the ontological. Haur mostly means that cursing is bad or unseamly, but he

also means that it can and does cause real people to really become possessed by a devil.

The dangers and the popularity of cursing were a frequent theme of sermons and satire

in early modern Poland. In an homily for the third Sunday in Lent, the Jesuit Aleksander

Lorencowic developed an extended metaphor of the the tongue as the devil's weapon: every

evil word is a devil falling from the mouth (Lorencowic 1671, vol. 1 p. 124). However, in

asking "does not such a one have Beelzebub in him?" of all who use bad words, tell

"dishonorable jokes" or sing "obscene songs" —Lorencowic shows that the possession of

which he speaks is a metaphor for sin more generally (Lorencowic 1671, vol. 1, p. 124).64

The Silesian preacher Adam Gdacjusz, writing in Polish, also complained of constant

malediction and cursing (Gdacjusz 1644, 1969 p. 325). The anonymous author of the

Postqpekprawa czartowskiego suggested that in Poland people invoke the devil at almost

every utterance (1891 [1570] p. 100). In the ribald drama Nqdza z biedq z Polski idq,

"Szatan" notes that if he could really take everyone who was ever cursed to Hell, he would

have more than he could carry:

Jeden mowi: "By cie_ wzial!" abo: "w cie. One says: "the devil take you!" or "Let devils go into you."
wlecieli!" There would always be something to take, if we had the
Byloby zawsze co brae, bysmy wozy mieli. carts to carry it all.
(Nqdza z Bieda. 1624 w . 421-422; 1966 p. 633)

"nieuczciwe zarty"; "plugawe piosnki"; "nie ma Belzebuba wsobie?"

Ultimately this is not a sermon about the devil or about possession, but about that favourit theme of the
Jesuits and of post-Tridentine reform, the need for frequent confession. The devil's main office is not to
cause cursing and evil words, but to seal up the tongue against confessing (ibid. pp. 121-122). Compare
Berard Gutowski's sermon for the same feast, with its similar metaphorical treatment of possession and
exorcism.'The Saviour wished to show that this man possessed in body is the representation of a person
possessed in their soul. Sin is a great demon, says Saint Chrysostom. And Caesarius Arelat asserts, that
however many sins a person has, so many does he have devils also [Chcial Zbawiciel pokazac, ze ten na
ciele opQtany byl wizerunkiem czlowieka na duszy opQtanego. Peccatum est magnus daemon, mowi
Chryzostom Swiejy. A Caesarius Arelat przydaie: ze ile w sobie ma czlowiek grzechow, tyle diablow]"
(Gutowski 1696 p. 102). Gutowski's point is the same as Lorencowic's: the cure for sin is confession and
penance, but the devil makes these hard to perform (1696 pp. 101-109).

435
 • Chapter 3.1 •

In the same text, an old woman chases away the titular Ne^dza and Bieda (Poverty and

Dearth) with an outburst of maledictory eloquence: "To the demons with you, infernal old

hag. [...] Eat a devil, you whore!"65 (1624 ww. 165, 185; 1961 pp. 622-623).

To suggest that someone eat a devil was—and indeed remains—a common insult;

usually indicating nothing more than the expression of ill will.66 During the public brawl in

the Lublin streets already discussed in chapter 1.4.1 above, Pani Sodanska the Smith's wife

told her rival to "eat a hundred devils."67 (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 61 (Consularia) f. 121).

Witnesses describing a verbal quarrell in the Jazowsko village tavern spoke of the instigator

"feeding [the innkeeper] devils, as many as four-hundred"68 (Grodziski ed. 1967 item 281).

In these cases, as surely in most others, to "feed someone devils" meant no more than to

upbraid and curse someone.

However, ill-will and ill-words could always imply more than disapproval, and could

have more than psychological effects. Wrath was a thing, like a poison, with real and

material effects: just as a spider became more poisonous in proportion as it was enraged, so a

woman's wrath, sent against a victim in food or verbally, through the expressed wish that the

victim eat the devil, could cause real harm (see 1.3.5). It was not always treated

metaphorically, or rather, judgment as to the metaphorical or real sending of devils was made

retrospectively, according to subsequent experiences. This is how Wojciech interpreted his

possession: Regina's sharp words had clearly upset him at the time, but it was not until he

suddenly went lame a year later that he came to understand them as a real and effective curse.

65
"Wqdruj do wszystkich skrzablow, piekielny kozubie [...]. Zjesz diabla, paskudnico!" The term skrzabel used
here is not listed in any dictionary—it appears to be a portmanteau hybrid oiskrzat (imp, sprite) and diabel
[devil].
66
Concerning this insult in the wider European context, see cf. Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogue, book 5 ch.
26 (1929 vol. 1 pp. 353-354). On "eating the devil" in Polish folklore and literature, see Bruckner 1985b
p. 297.
67
"bodajzes ziadl sto diablow"
68
"poczaj go diablami karmic do czterechset"

436
 • Good powers of evil •

Elite and popular, clerical and lay opinion concurred that devils could go into people

and possess them, and that witches were a frequent though proximate cause of such

possession. Although a ritual perfectionist such as Stanislaw Brzezahski considered

possession to be a result of even minor mis-steps in worship (1717 f. 23; see 2.4), other

clerical authors pointed to witches as the source of devil-possession. The prominent

Dominican preacher Fabian Birkowski affirmed that "witches can send their devils into a

person and cause him to be possessed"69 (Birkowski 1620; quoted after Wisniewska 2003

p. 243). For Lorencowic, the devil gets into people physically by means of "leaves," "infernal

old women," and "herbs and baths"70 (1671 vol. 1 p. 79; Zebrowski 1981 p. 42).

The records of miraculous cures, mostly of noblewomen and maidens, at Marian

sanctuaries such as Lagiewniki, Piejcoszow, and CzQstochowa, included numerous instances

of possession through witchcraft—such as "the noble-maiden Joanna Mokronowska,

daughter of the standard-bearer of Plock, by means of her governess' witchcraft possessed

and most cruelly tormented by five thousand devils"71 (Kalowski 1723, quoted after

Baranowski and Lewandowski eds. 1950 p. 124; see also #41, Biecz 1644). These more elite

possessions differ from most accounts in witch-trials in that the victims were most often

female, usually young, and symptoms of possession had a strong erotic element: for the

closely patrolled and controlled sexuality of noble or patrician maidens, possession played

the role taken up by hysteria in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Unlike most victims of

possession in the witch-trials, for whom the attack of a devil meant sickness, pains in the

back, mis-adventure, or death, the maidens seeking help at Marian sanctuaries complained of

"czarownicy moga^naslac czarty swoje w czlowieku i sprawic, aby go opqtali"

70
"listki," "piekielne baby," and "ziele i wanny."
71
"panna Joanna Mokronowska, chora^zonka plocka, przez czary mamki swojej od pi^ciu tysiqcy diablow
opqtana i okrutnie drqczona"

437
 • Chapter 3.1 •

fits, wild behaviour, or unbridled sexuality. One might compare Katarzyna Mrowczyna,

who sent water-demons to "trip" her victim and drown him in the river (#115, Stajszewo

1695), to the maiden Katarzyna who, after nearly drowning in a mill-pool in 1707, was

possessed by the water-imps or drowned souls residing there and for many months "ran about

screaming in the villages and forests, lured by thepokusy" n (Zlotnicki 1772, quoted after

Baranowski and Lewandowski eds. 1950 pp. 127-128). Elite and popular views agreed that

possession was caused by witch-craft or by demons; where the two views largely diverged

was on the question of what sorts of ailment possession caused, and what to do about it.7

Exorcism

To return to the trial of Regina Lewczykowa. Wojciech, having suddenly experienced

sharp pains in his legs and back, interpreted these to be caused by Regina's curse when she

had told him to eat a devil the previous year. However, he did not immediately accuse her or

bring her to trial; instead he first sought to be freed of his devil through traditional healing

practices. First he went to the small town of Tomaszow Lubelskie to be exorcised by the

priest. Accounts differ as to what happened there. According to Regina, the priest could not

or would not perform an exorcism. Perhaps he did not recognize Wojciech to be possessed in

For example, "a maiden of the burgher estate [panna jedna stanu miejskiego]" was possessed by a devil in the
form of a "handsome foreign batchelor [urodziwy kawaler cudzoziemski]," with whom she ran off to live in
sin for four years. She was freed from his influence at Lagiewniki (Kalowski 1723, afer Baranowski and
Lewandowski eds. 1950 p. 26). It is difficult to avoid the interpretation that this is a retroactive re-shaping of
the maiden's youthful sexual adventures, whereby these become the result of diabolical influence, so that
she can, with the Virgin Mary's sanction, regain her female honour, and redefine herself as sexually pure
and marriagable.
"po wsiech i lasach z krzykiem od pokusy wodzona"
Robin Briggs, among others, has noted the class and gender divide between "classical" demon-possession
with its sensuality and theatricality, and the demon-caused ailments of most witch-trials (Briggs 1996
pp. 388-392). I know of only one clear example of a Polish witch-trial in which the victim, a well-off matron
of Bydgoszcz, was possessed in this classic sense: she began screaming and thrashing about when informed
by a beggar-woman exorcist that she had been possessed (#54, Bydgoszcz 1658). On the exorcism of this
sort of possession in early modern Poland, see Zakrzewski 1995 pp. 146-147; and the materials collected in
of Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 124-132.

438
 • Good powers of evil •

the traditional sense—this is one possible interpretation of his reported comment that "I can't

help him when nothing is speaking."75 According to Wojciech, however, he fell into a trance

at Tomaszow ("I was not in myself'76), and the spirit spoke; confirming that Regina had

caused his misfortune.

Either way, the more or less orthodox exorcism by a priest apparently didn't work,

because Wojciech next traveled quite far (some fifty kilometres) to Pilaszowice just over the

border in Lithuania, to be bathed in herbs by the specialist Jakub Motai. The journey, of

rather more than a day's walk in one direction, indicates that Wojciech had begun to take his

possession very seriously. From the testimony of Wojciech's companion Stanislaw Kiszcza it

appears that he made the journey at the command (perhaps just with the permission) of the

podstaroscie, that is to say, of p. Stanislaw Szczuka's local representative in Chrzanow. The

conflict between Regina and Wojciech had begun to attract the attention of the authorities.

Bathing and washing, in herbs or with other materials, was a standard healing practice

of cunning folk; however, ordinary housewives also made use of the practice, as did official

or semi-official exorcists of the Church (see 2.1.2-2.1.3).77 Indeed the "leaves, herbs and

baths" condemned by Lorencowic as vehicles facilitating diabolic entrance into the body

were, more likely, the folkloric exorcistic practices common to village healers. Such village

exorcism enjoyed wide popularity, despite ecclesiastical condemnation and threats of

exorcism (Czartoryski 1705b p. 21v). Healing baths and washing combined the exorcistic

symbolism of Christian baptism with the universal symbolism of water purification upon

which baptism rituals themselves depend. Since they also made use of herbal decoctions, the

75
"iamu nie poradze_ kiedy nic nie gada"
76
"nie bylem przy sobie."
77
In the 19th century, exorcism at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska incorporated such ritual bathing (DWOK vol.
pp. 53-54).

439
 • Chapter 3.1 •

question to what degree they should be understood as "ritual," and to what degree "practical-

medical," is more or less moot; certainly in the early modern period or even later, most

practitioners would make little distinction between washing away physiological sickness and

washing away witchcraft or demons. Nevertheless, although other sorts of ailment could be

healed by such baths, the purificatory and baptismal symbolism made them especially

important for folk exorcism.

In the 18th century, newborn babies of noble family were bathed with butter and

blessed herbs over several days, to protect them against witchcraft and demons—a sort of

prophylactic exorcism clearly indebted to the baptismal ritual (Kitowicz 1985 [1840] p. 66).

For such baths, those who could afford to might very well have hired a semi-professional

cunning-person. Dorota of Siedlikow, for example, the unmarried miller's daughter who, by

her own testimony, knew a great deal about healing with blessed herbs and holy water, was

accused by her co-defendant of bathing children in the herbs oczyna, szanta, macierzanka

and dziewanna (#21, Kalisz 1613, and see Appendix B: Herbs). Similarly, the accused witch

Anna Swedycka testified that "Blonarka heals children, she bathes them in herbs"78 (#80,

Lublin 1678). Again, such bathing may have been intended to heal an illness or to exorcise a

demon: the distinction is not usually made. For example, the accused witch Regina testified

that her mentor, Marusza, who had been recently burnt for witchraft in Stawiszyn, washed a

sick child to heal him of "klobuchy"—evil spirits conceived of as the cause of his illness.

While bathing the child, she pressed a piece of pine-wood to his side and said "klobuch,
7Q

klobuch, jump out, in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, come out,"

later pouring the water out in front of the house: nevertheless the child died (#22, Kalisz
78
"Blonarka liczy dziedzi, kajpie ich w ziolach."
79
"klobuchu klobuchu, sklobuc si? ty w Imiq Ojca i Syria i Ducha Swi^tego wychodzcie"

440
 • Good powers of evil •

1616). Such rituals have persisted until recent times: in the Lublin region in the 19th century,

women still bathed their children in herbs to heal them from sickness and from night-terrors;

the bath-water was then thrown out into a stream, onto a strange dog, on the road, or onto an

elderberry bush, so that the devil who lived underneath it could absorb the sickness (DWOK

vol. 17 pp. 162-165).

As was so often the case, ecclesiastical authors were unwilling to acknowledge the clear

relations between the bathing rituals they condemned and church rituals they condoned and

recommended. For Protestants, with their sweeping rejection of all ritual, this was not so

difficult: the radical Protestant polemicist Marcin Krowicki juxtaposed and dismissed both

orthodox aspersion and folk bathing in a single pungent line: "Sprinkling and washing aren't

from Christ [...], but were thought up by the pagans, who worship devils"80 (Krowicki 1560

p. 72). Catholic writers, however, could not so easily do away with such rituals. The

Czarownica author inveighed against superstitious bathing rituals to remove witchcraft, a

practice he suggests is especially popular in White Ruthenia. The victim of witchcraft is

bathed in water filtered through a sheet, an exorcism is performed, then "various grains,"81

powdered bones, and small stones are dropped into the water: such practices are condemned

by the church and are themselves worthy of punishment at the stake (1714 [1639] qu. 13,

p. 77). He also condemned "bathing the bewitched person and whipping them over the whole

body with a switch of rosemary or marjoram, asserting that this is the scourge of demons, [..

] and why not a switch of nettles, or birch?"82 (ibid. p. 79). But the same author, quite

disingenously, proceeds to tell the story of a pious pregnant woman who protected herself

"Kropienie albo omywanye iest nie od Krystusa, [...] ale od poganow zmyslone, ktorzy Diably chwala/'
81
"rozne zboza"
82
"kapia^c w wannie uczarowanego, smagac go rozmarynowa^ abo maioranowa. rozsczka^ [sic] wsze_dzie po ciele,
twierda^c ze to flagellatio daemonum, a czemu nie pokrzywa^ abo nie brzezina^" The marjoram here
mentioned (maioran in the Polish) might be some other herb: see Appendix B: Herbs.

441
 • Chapter 3.1 •

and her unborn child from the devil using various holy objects, including regular baths in

blessed herbs. She once forgot to put her crucifix back on (which she had removed during

such a bath), and the devil attacked her, killing the child (ibid. p. 83).

The devil from Krzemien

Wojciech could relate nothing about his healing bath in Pilaszkowice, where once

again, by his own account, he lost consciousness. However, his friend Stanislaw Kiszka had

accompanied him on his journey, and testified before the Lublin court concerning what had

happened there:

zrozkazania p. podstarosciego poszedlem znim I went with him to Pilaszkowice, by the command of the
do Pilaszkowic, ke_dy siq chtop Jakub Motai podstaroscie, when the peasant Jakub Motai attempted
podial tegosz diabla zniego kaj>iela_ wygnac. W to drive that devil out of him by means of a bath. In that
teyze kapieli poczejo sie_ bez niego tymi slowy bath it began to speak through him in these words: Ah,
odzewac, a babo z Krzemienia, nie mialem ci ia old woman of Krzemien, I didn't have any business for
tu sprawy a baby, popusc mie_, powiem, iam nie you here, ah, old women, release me, I say, I'm not from
zpiekla, alem nie krzceniec. Pytali go tarn hell, I'm an unbaptized soul. People asked him there
ludzie o zguby swoie, ale on odpowiada, ze ia about things they had lost, but he answered, that I don't
niewiem tylko ten co zpiekla, to tesz mowil, ze know, only one from hell [knows that sort of thing], and
ta Lewczykowa przekupila mie. tu u baby he also said, Lewczykowa bought me here, from a
krzemienieckiey. woman of Krzemien.

Kiszka's testimony appears to have had no effect on the outcome of the trial: no other

witness confirmed or even alluded to it, nor did the magistrates comment on it in any way. It

seems probable that, under the watchful eye of Stanislaw Szczuka, the Lublin magistrates

were reluctant to show credence toward the utterances of a demoniac undergoing an

exorcism from a Rufhenian cunning-man. After hearing Kiszka's testimony, as well as that of

several other witnesses for both sides, they concluded that there was insufficient evidence for

Regina's supposed act of witchcraft, and they dismissed the case on the basis of her oath of

exculpation (see the full text of the trial in Appendix A).

442
 • Good powers of evil •

Despite its inconsequence for Lewczykowa's trial, I find Kiszka's brief statement to be

among the most interesting texts from the entire corpus of Polish witch-trial testimony. In a

few sentences, he raises serious questions about the ontological status of the "devil"

possessing Wojciech Kozielek. By extension, he raises questions about all the other devils

encountered in other witch-trials. Whether these were familiar imps or demon lovers,

witches' servants or their masters, they were not always "devils" as the term is usually

understood—they were not always from hell, nor were they, in the understanding of the

accusers and accused and witnesses of witch-trials, always enemies of the human race. They

could be bought and sold, acquired from others, borrowed; they could be the fairy-like beings

inhabiting the fields and forests, or the barns and attics of peasant cottages; they could be the

souls of unbaptized infants, or purgatorial souls condemned to wander the earth, and

simultaneously, they could display the features of the pre-Christian house-demons or

ancestor-spirits who brought luck and prosperity to the homestead if treated well, misfortune

if dishonoured. In his possessed, ecstatic state in Pilaszowice, Wojciech Kozielek voiced an

utterance which drew on widespread assumptions about the nature, status, and function of

devils. The remainder of this chapter will explore the ramifications of this utterance.

• •$• •

People came to listen to Wojciech's devil, and asked it questions about things they had

lost. This testifies to a common notion: that devils or witches' familiars are especially good at

finding lost objects.83 The Postqpek author complained that some witches carry "subservient

83
See also a case (not for witchcraft) in Tamopol, 1731, published by Semkowicz 1900 (1900 pp. 390-391), in
which a devil was consulted to find buried treasure. Cf. this function of demoniacs in 19th century Russia:
"Like their Western European counterparts, Russian demoniacs were believed to be clairvoyant and thus
could advise peasant girls about future husbands and could help others purchase healthy animals, find lost
objects, or identify thieves" (Worobec 2001 p. 79).

443
 • Chapter 3.1 •

spirits in jars, believing that they get oracles from them" (Postqpek 1570; 1891 p. 115), and

it does indeed appear that some cunning-people attributed their divinitory powers to such

spirits. Dorota of Siedlikow, the unmarried miller's daughter whose testimony depicts a

budding carreer as cunning woman, claimed to own a demon named "Kasparek" who helped

her find lost or stolen items (#21, Kalisz 1613). Similarly, people came to ask questions of

the ghost of a church organist who haunted the Benedictine cloister of Poznah in 1636; this
Of.

went on for some time, until the abbess came to suspect that "this spirit has horns," and it

was exorcised by the Jesuits (Schneider-Wawrzaszek et al. eds. 2001 pp. 88-89).

These examples already suggest a fluid boundary between various sorts of penitential

ghost and devils—a boundary more or less ignored by the common folk despite ecclesiastical

attempts to keep the categories distinct. Wojciech's demon, in an unparalleled discourse of

folk-demonology, sought also to delineate the difference between beings such as himself and

devils "from hell." He had no knowledge of lost things, as he did not belong to the class of

devils who have such knowledge: "I'm not from hell, I'm an unbaptized soul." Moreover, he

positioned himself as very much the servant of his witch, rather than her master—to the

extent that he could be bought and sold: "Lewczykowa bought me here, from a woman from

Krzemien." I will first take up this notion of devil servants who can be bought and sold, and

then return to the question of the devil as unbaptized soul.

Chmielowski described witches' demon-servants in a passage that unwittingly

combines orthodox demonology with local notions:

Miewaia. Czarownicy czartow familiares, alias Witches have familiares, alias familiars,
poufaiych, konfidentow, shiza^cych sobie w interessach, confidants, serving their interests, reporting

"demones paredri, to jest czarci poshiszni w szklenicach, [...] maja_c za to, aby jaka^ wiezdzbe. z nich mieli"
85
In the 1930s, the folklorist Kalistrat Dobrjanski visited a cunning-man (and, in his own understanding, devout
and pious Christian) who consulted a hodowaniec in his attic to make his divinations and diagnoses
(Dobrjanski 1934 p. 118).
86
rogata ta dusza"

444
 • Good powers of evil •

w reportowaniu nowin, w obiawieniu rzeczy news to them, revealing secrets, which [devils]
sekretnych; ktorych trzymaiq. w katach domowych, albo they keep in the comer's of their homes, or as it
riiby w pierscieniu, alias inkluzow, deklaruia_c im dusze_ where in their breasts, alias inkluzy, swearing
swoia^ albo obiecuia_c Mszy swie_tey nie shichac, nigdy their souls over to them, or promising not to hear
prawdy nie mowic. Do takiey ushigi nie moze bydz the holy Mass or to never speak the truth. To
czart sprowadzony, tylko per pactum explicitum albo such work a devil can only be summoned by an
implicitum y przez obietnice. iemu rzeczy iakiey explixit or implicit pact, and by promising him
niegodziwey. Takie czarta konserwowanie iest cie_zkim some sort of indecent thing. To keep such a devil
grzechem; ani moze bye dana absolucya, poki czart 6w is a heavy sin, and cannot be given absolution,
familiarny nie be_dzie relegowany [...]. until that familiar devil is sent away.
(Chmielowski 1754 vol. 3 pp. 237-238)

Despite its perfectly standard and orthodox theology of the devil-pact, one notes the parallels

between this passage and Malecki's account of the devils "worshipped" in Sarmatia: the

devil is kept in the corner of the home, and serves as an oracle and as an "inkluz"—that is, a

treasure-hauling spirit.87 One also notes, in contrast to most of Chmielowski's account of

witches and devils, the relative mildness of this passage: keeping such familiar spirits is, to

be sure, a "heavy sin," but is not an abomination or horrible crime—one gets the impression

that Chmielowski himself is aware that such devils belong to a lesser and less dangerous

category, and that the witches who keep them require confession and penance rather than the

stake.

Devil-servants of this kind are quite common in the Polish witch-trials, in all regions

and from the earliest period until quite late. In the next chapter I look more closely at the

"demonization" of these devils, their transformation into sexual beings who seduce their

witches. Here I note only their activities as prosperity-bringers or as errand-runners: in most

of these cases, their activities closely resemble those of the treasure-hauling skrzatkowie or

latawcy who in so many respects represent a survival of the pre-Christian house-demon:

sometimes they are even labelled with these names.

87
Koranyi (1930) recounts a court case fro m the 1920s in which a peasant man assaulted his father in an
attempt to wrest from him his inkluz, so that his farm would prosper.

445
 • Chapter 3.1 •

In one of the earliest trials, Dorota Gnieczkowa explained how to increase the milk-

production of one's cattle by stealing the milk from others. One boils milk and pours it out at

the door to the dairy-barn, reciting "Lucek [i.e. Lucifer], bring such milk to my cows, that I

might have milk to my knees, cream to my ankles"88 (#2, Poznan 1544a). This is a variation

of a milk-increasing ritual found elsewhere (#61, Ch^ciny 1665b, and see 2.1.3 above), but it

attests that the notion of a prosperity-bringing demon was known early in the witch-trial

period. The thief, prostitute and part-time cunning-woman Barbara of Radom also admitted

to having a diabel who brought her things (#7, Kalisz 1580). Eva Lenartka denounced others

for having a "latawiec in the attic"89 who brings them money (#86, Warta 1679); while

Marianna Karabinka had a latawiec who flew out of her chimney with sparks in its trail, and

brought her things (#85, Warta c. 1679).90 The wife of the Klimkowka wqjt brought a

defamation suit against a villager who had said she "gets things from devils" (1677, Lysiak

ed. 1965 item 775). Much more serious were the consequences for the accused witch Anna of

Zelazno, who complained bitterly that, ever since youth, "they've called me a witch and said

I had a devil who helps me work." She had aroused such suspicions because she worked

hard, "for which reason I've earned my bread, but they say that a devil brings it to me"91

(#110, Lobzenica 1692).

In these trials, for the most part from Wielkopolska or central Malopolska, the devil-

servant bears important resemblence to treasure-bringing demons of various kinds, but its

origins are not usually made clear. In trials from eastern Malopolska, from the culturally

"Lucku, przynies mi to do mych krow, aby bylo mleko do kolan, smiotana do gloznow"
89
"latawiec na gorze"
90
The sparking tail is a feature of latawcy and the various Slavic and Baltic treasure hauling demons such as the
Russian fme/', the Estonian pisahand, or the Latvian pufyis, and the verb "skrzyc sie_, to spark" used here, is
sometimes related to the name of the treasure-hauling skrzatek.
91
"Prawda, ze mi za mlodosci mowiono zem czarownica i ze mi diabel w pracy pomagal." "przez to chleb sobie
zarabiala i mowili, diabel jej to nosi."

446
 • Good powers of evil •

Ruthenian southern mountains, and from Ruthenia, the witches' devil is often more clearly a

servant who can be bought and sold, borrowed, and stored in the house in case of need. In

these same trials, the devil-servant is "sent," not in the somewhat abstract sense by which

"sending devils" and "sending witchcraft" are equivalent descriptions of malefice, but quite

literally, as one might send an apprentice on an errand. In a trial in Zablotowo near Halicz,

the peasant Kulik confessed that the accused witch Olexina sent him to a healer to get some

medicine, but he came back with a "chowaniec in a jug." This chowaniec (also called

Didko, a Ruthenian term for both the devil and the house-spirit, derived from d'ed',

grandfather, ancestor) ran about in Olexina's hovel. Kulik later sent it into the manor of

Stanislaw Karski, owner of Zablotow, where it killed his daughters (#53, Zablotowo 1656).

Anna Swedycka, whose devil Iwan has a Ruthenian name, sent him to kill the wojt of Lublin.

"I bewitched his late honor the wojt of Lublin so that he would die, so that I could get peace

from him; I sent a devil to strangle him at the fourth hour afternoon in the city hall in the

court-chamber" (#80, Lublin 1678). Similarly, when the Lublin court interrogated the

Ruthenian women Oryszka and Paraszka, who had been hired by the nobleman Mikolaj

Mnichowski to kill his rival in a property dispute, witnesses claimed that Paraszka owned a

devil named Ihnatek. This devil was supposed to have strangled p. Michal Popiel, the

plaintif s stepson. However, Paraszka denied this under torture, saying "I'm not guilty of

anything. Oryszka is guilty, the devil was hers." In fact there is some suggestion that

Paraszka merely "borrowed" the devil from Oryszka: the court asked at one point "What did

"Posylala mnie Olexina po lekarstwa do lekarki, ja jej przyniosl z bialego Potoka od lekarki chowanca w
zbanku."
PTTF.

447
 • Chapter 3.1 •

Hlacholicha give Oryszka, for having borrowed the devil [diabel] Ihnat Zahorowski [...] and

what did she borrow the devil for?"94 (#87, Lublin 1681).

In 1678, young Fenna Dudzianka ran away from her husband, because she couldn't

stand her quarrelsome mother-in-law Anna Dudzicha. Her husband Fedor came to fetch her

back from where she was staying with kin:

[P]6jdz do domu po dobrej woli, bo matka po ciebie Come home of your own good will, otherwise my
poszle chowancow alias latawcow; o czym gdy mother will send chowancy alias latawcy to fetch you.
usfyszala, rzekla me_zowi: nie darmo wczorajszej nocy When she heard this she replied to her husband: Not
cos mnie brae chcialo, zaledwiem siq mogla without reason did something try to take me last night,
przezegnac. W tym Fedor Dudzik wymowil: I barely managed to cross myself. Fedor Dudzik
zaledwom matki uprosil, ze po ciebie nie poslala replied: I had just asked my mother to send chowancy
chowancow. (#81, Muszyna 1678) to fetch you.

Anna Dudzicha already had a reputation as a witch—among other rumours, it was said that

the current drought was caused by a dried-up dead child, which she had hung in her doorway

to keep the rain-clouds away. Later, the court made a search of her house to find her

latawiec; it is probable that they meant to find its physical manifestation as the baby's corpse.

The most spectacular account of a devil servant comes from the complex trial before

the Crown Tribunal between the Mytko and Pogorski families. This trial also illustrates the

intricate interweaving of a number of motifs: the devil as servant, the devil as unbaptized

child or still-birth, and symbolic equivalence of Eucharistic hosts with innocent children. As

will be recalled from Chapter 2.3.2, the Crown Tribunal in Lublin sent several serfs of the

Mytko family to the Lublin city court to be interrogated under torture. According to his

testimony, Pan Mytko had sent the carter Kazimierz Kmarynski to hire the witch Michalicha,

and also required him to quarter her in his own home. At the trial, Kazimierz described what

Michalicha was alleged to have done:

[R]az grzmialo strasznie, ta baba wyszedszy na Once it thundered horribly, and that baba went outside
podworze, poczeja rozmawiac z kimsi, iam tego and began to converse with someone; I didn't see this

94 p T m

448
 • Good powers of evil •

nie widzial, ale zona moia widziala, ze przed ta_ but my wife saw that something like a man stood
baba^ cos iak mqszczyzna stalo, y rozmawiali z before that baba, and they were talking with each
soba_. Potym przyszedzszy ta baba rzekla: o iuz other. Later, coming back in, that baba said, "Oh, the
nie zyie patron panow Pogorskich, szedl, prawi, lawyer for their graces the brothers Podgorski is dead;
podpily do gospody, ukladl sie na lozku trunek sie he went -the devil says— drunk to the inn, he lay
w nim zaiaj y umarl. Wkrotce potym przeiezdza down on the bed, the drink did its thing in him and he
szlachcic z Lublina pytala sie go i. m. pani died. A little after that a nobleman from Lublin comes
Mikolaiowa Mytkowa co tarn imci panie w along; her grace pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa asked
Lublinie srychac, odpowiedzial szlachcic: chwala him, what news of the ladies in Lublin; the nobleman
Bogu dobrze wszyscysmy sie zdrowo roziachali, answered: praise be to God I left them all healthy; her
spytala sie po tym i. m. pani Mytkowa a partron i. grace pani Mytkowa asked him after this: and the
m. panow Pogorskich zdrow? odpowiedzial z lawyer for their graces the brothers Pogorski, are they
laski Bozey, zdrowem sie z nim roziachal, potym well? He answered, by the grace of God, I left him
za to diabel chcial tey babie leb urwac, mowiax healthy, after which the devil wanted to tear off that
po co miq ty tarn posylasz, poniewasz tarn mocna woman's head, saying, what did you send me there
y szeroka ieszcze o milq nie dopuszcza mie do for? Because strong and wide95 won't let me within a
niego. (#161, Lublin 1732) mile of him.

The list of questions to be put to the defendants in this trial include the following:

"whether they used the corpses of the dead, or stillborn babies [potyrczeta] and what did they

use them for;" and further, "Whether they made any sort of offerings to devils, or whether

someone else [made such offerings] in their presence, and what did they offer: children or

something else, and what happened to that offering [...] and how many such offerings of

children to the devil were made."96 Later in the trial, Kazimierz's wife Katarzyna testified

that the witch Justyna Michalicha Asuwalicha, together with Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa,

dug up a fetus to use in their bewitchment of the Pogorski brothers, p. Mytkowa is said to

have said: "for this stillbirth which we have dug up, give the devil the child of Pani

Mikolaiowa's sister [that is, her daughter-in-law's sister's child]"97 (#161, Lublin 1732).

Arguably, one may detect in this testimony, as in that of Fenna Dudzianka in Muszyna,

the convergence and mixture of two traditions regarding witches' treatment of infants. The

95
"Mocna i szeroka." This peculiar sentence, otherwise unintelligible, makes some sense in the context of the
testimony of Zofia Baranowa, who refers to the Virgin Mary as "szeroka" or "the wide one" (#39, Lublin
1643; see chapter 3.3.4). The devil seems to be saying, contrary to his original testimony, that Pan Brzyski
was under the protection of the Virgin Mary and thus safe from attack. I have no insight as to why the
Virgin Mary would have this epithet, or how it should be interepreted.
9
"iezeli cial umarlych albo potryczaj: zazywali, y na co zazywali. [...] Iezeli ofiary iakowe diablom czynili,
albo przy nich kto inszy, y co ofiarowali, czyli dzieci, czyli co inszego, y co siq stalo z ta^ ofiara. [...] ywiele
ofiar takich bylo diabhi z dzieci."
97
"za te potercze. cosmy wykopaly odday diabhi dziecie^ siostry pani Mikolaiowey."

449
 • Chapter 3.1 •

first, western tradition, which has already been treated at length in chapter 2.2.3, holds that

witches sacrifice infants to Satan for a variety of theological reasons: as innocents, they

typologize the baby Jesus; as unbaptized souls, they are under Satan's rule in any case, and

so are not yet defended from such treatment by God; as the objects, in good Christian society,

of the greatest love and care, their mistreatment by witches represents the ultimate inversion

of Christian and indeed natural law. The second, local tradition, treats dead infants as the

unnatural dead, therefore as a species of evil whose powers can be harnessed for malefice;

this tradition also makes use of the physical remains of dead infants, as also of their coffins

or soil from their graves, as particularly potent variants of the human remains, coffin

splinters, and grave-soil used in malefice more generally (e.g. #19, Kielce 1605; #27, Lublin

1627; #84, Bochnia 1679; #96, Kleczew 1688; #165, Lublin 1739).98 The Lublin court knew

about the digging up of stillbirths, presumably from testimony taken prior to the interrogation

for which we have a record. They also know about the use of a devil, and assume that he will

have been offered infants in return for his supernatural attacks on the Pogorskis. The woman

under interrogation, a Ruthenian peasant, seems to accept the use of stillbirths as a normal

element of malefice—in later testimony it transpires that the stillbirth was burnt and made

into a powder, which p. Mytkowa was to sprinkle on the legs of the judges of the judges in

the Crown tribunal. In Chapter 2.3.2,1 suggested tentatively that there may be connection

between the magical use of babies and the magical use of the Eucharist, which features so

prominently in this trial. However, the trial of Regina Lewczykowa gives us a clue that the

stillborn children had quite another purpose: they were identical to, or the source of, the devil

Ichnatek who was sent to murder the Pogorski's lawyer. The convergence between the

9
17th century Muscovite accused witches, according to their trial testimony, used earth or rocks removed from
graves, and thereby invoked the power of the impious dead and unbaptized children (Ivanits 1989 pp. 93-94;
after Eleonskaia 1917 pp. 28-29; 1928 p. 937).

450
 • Good powers of evil •

cosmopolitan and the local notions comes with the words the Katarzyna attributes to the

Alexandrowa Mytkowa: "for this poterczq which we have dug up, give the devil the child of

Pani Mikolaiowa's sister." The statement incorporates western demonological notions of

child-sacrifice with the Slavic notion of dead infants as demons: because one unbaptized

baby has been dug up—and thus, as it were, removed from the devil's realm—another must

be provided in its place. Child sacrifice is not, here, the abominable devil-worship depicted in

demonology; rather it is a more straightforward economic transaction. One child is given for

another. i

Non-Infernal Devils

Pawel Gilowski, a theologian from Malopolska who, over a long carreer, moved from

Catholicism through Lutheran and Calvinist positions to Antitrinitarianism, inveighed against

what he took to be a common view: that demons and devils each have their own special place

and function:

Aczkolwiekci pisza^ o tym wiele ich, iakoby mieli Although indeed many write concerning these, as if
podzielic sobie provincie, miasta, domy, ossoby y they are to have divided up amongst themselves
miesca, iako a dzym y komu mieliby szkodzic, y provinces, towns and homes, people and places, each
doswiadczenim wiela siq to doznalo, bo widani sa_ harming its own thing or person, and experience gives
ziemscy skryatkowie, domowe ubozeia, lesni credence to this view, as one finds earthly
satyrowie, wodni tocowie, gome iqdze, powietrzni skryatkowie, household ubozeta, forest satyrs, tocowie
duchowie, rozmaici geniuszowie, morscy of the waters, iedze in the mountains, spirits of the air,
lewiatanowie, na insulach rozmaite obhidy ktorzy various geniuses, the leviathans of the sea, various
wszyscy rozmaicie szkodza. ludziom, a na czas tym phantasms on islands, all of which variously harm
ktorzy im sluzaj albo iakiekolwiek z nimi umowy people, or, sometimes, for those who serve them, or
maia^ y zabobony, tedy im szcze_scim cielesnym na who have with them any sort of pact or superstitions,
wszem dobrym ushiguiaj o tych pisze Augustyn for these they provide temporal happiness and good
swie_ty w ksiejach o prorokowaniu albo zgodzie things, as Augustine writes in the books concerning
dyabelskiey, takiez Ieronymus in Comment: super prophecy and the diabolic pact, also Jerome in his
Ephe: Cap: 6. Commentary on Ephesians, chapter 6.
(Gilowski 1579 ch. 5 art. 5, ff. 161-16W).

Although Gilowski appears here to be contesting learned views, he provides a catalog

of folk-demons and nature spirits such as the skryatkowie (skrzaty, here apparently

451
 • Chapter 3.1 •

understood as underground spirits), ubozqta (house-demons), tocowie (i.e. topielcy, water-

sprites or the spirits of the drowned), and iqdze (j$dze, female spirits of the wild, cognate to

the Russian Baba Jaga). This suggests that in fact he was contesting a tradition primarily

found among the folk. To my mind, his insistence on a single infernal category as against

localized and specialized demons, each associated with a specific natural realm, indicates that

he is working in the context of some early version of a creation story well attested in 19th-

20th century Slavic folklore:

Lucyper, the prince of darkness, thrown into hell after his battle with God, fell from heaven
together with nine choirs of angels (which became evil spirits) in the form of a very fine rain.
Many of the drops of this devil-rain fell on earth, and wherever they landed, immediately in
that place an evil spirit took up its abode, compelled to remain in that place until the day of
judgement (DWOK vol. 7 p. 40)."

A common feature of these stories is the insistence that some of these devils, those who

never made it to hell, are ambivalent or potentially good. A Silesian informant insisted that

"there are good utopki and bad. The good ones help people, carry hay for them, protect them

from danger, storms, and hail" (Simonides and LigQza 1973 p. 58). 19th-c. peasants

sometimes reported that they could distinguish between the more common terrestrial devils,

and the rarer and more dangerous infernal devils (Fischer 1926 p. 203). A related source of

non-infernal, and so ambivalent or good devils in 19th-20th century Polish folklore are the

various sorts of purgatorial spirit serving out their penance on earth: recall, from the previous

section, the cunning-woman Marynka who "only had good devils."

Unbaptized demons

Cf. nearly identical stories from late-19th century southern Malopolska (Fischer 1926 pp. 199,201; after
Swie_tek 1893 p. 453); mid-20th century Silesia (Simonides and Lige_za 1973 pp. 57-58); 19th-century
Russia (Ivanits 1989 p. 134), and 20th century Estonia (Valk 1994 pp. 316-317). Valk suggests that some
version of the legend relating the fall of the demons with the origin of forest spirits or fairies is known
across Europe (Valk 1994 p. 315, and references there), and it has the Stith Thompson motif-number V236
(see also Krzyzanowski 1963 vol. 2 p. 173). However widespread the motif may be, it seems especially
popular and well attested in Slavic and neighboring regions.

452
 • Good powers of evil •

And so we return to that most enigmatic statement of Wojciech Kozielek's devil: "I'm

not from hell, I'm an unbaptized soul"—iam nie zpiekla, jam nie krzceniec. The term nie

krzceniec (more usually written as a single word: niechrzczeniec) could be used literally to

mean any unbaptized person, such as an adult pagan or Jew, as in a sermon by Marcin

Bialobrzeski (1581 p. 143) where he reminds the congregation that without baptism one

cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. More often, however, as clearly here, the term meant an

infant who had died without baptism, as in the Catechism by the the same author (1566

p. 186). In this second meaning, it was closely associated with witchcraft and demons: a

15th-century manuscript herbal, for example, lists nyeskrzczenecz as the Polish vernacular for

Mandragora officinarum, the characteristic herb of witchcraft (Rostafihski 1900a item

810).100

Although anyone who had died suddenly or violently or in sin, such as a suicide, had

the potential of becoming a demon-ghost on earth, this was especially true of unbaptized

infants. There is a perceptable tendency for this category of bad-death to subsume all the

others. For example, Haur asserts that "concerning the Topielec, who inhabits Rivers, doing

harm to People and drowning Cattle, one should know that his nature comes from a pregnant

Woman who has drowned"101 (Haur 1693 p. 100). Here the topielec, understood variously as

a water-sprite, a kind of demon, or as the soul of a drowned man, becomes the soul of an

In pan-European folklore the mandrake is likened to a little man, sometimes a child, and is the most
characteristic herb used by witches. In Poland, real mandrake root was rare, but its various substitutes have
been treated as children; for example the herb przestqp or postqp (Bryonia alba) is, according to more recent
Slavic folklore, sometimes fed or washed with milk like a little baby. This same herb has the characteristics
of a treasure-hauling demon or house-spirit; it brings its owner increased prosperity, especially increased
dairy milk See the entries for pokrzyk and przestqp in Appendix B: Herbs.
"O Topielcu wiedziec trzeba, ktory zwykl w Rzekach panowac y szkody w Ludziach czynic, y Bydla rozne
topic ze iego natura pochodzi z Bialeyglowy brzemieney gdy utonie"

453
 • Chapter 3.1 •

unborn infant killed by its suicide mother.102 Similarly, in later folklore, both a suicide

maiden or her unbaptized child could become the mamuny or boginki who avenge themselves

on the living by stealing any infant children not yet protected by baptism (Bruckner 1985b

p. 318; Lehr 1982 pp. 127-129).

John Bossy has explored the central place of baptism in pre-Reformation Christianity.

Baptism was the crucial sacrament for integrating the newly born infant, not only into the

Church and into the ranks of the saveable, but into society. Indeed, in traditional Christianity

to be capable of salvation is to be social: through baptism one becomes integrated into the

network of kinship relations through which the benefits of Christ's atoning sacrifice were

understood to flow (Bossy 1973; 1985 pp. 14-19). The unbaptized, not having been thus

integrated into society, were undomesticated, wild, foreign; indeed, in a sense, inhuman. One

senses the outrage and despair of parents whose dead infants were thus relegated to the anti-

social margin. In a trial for incest between first cousins, the woman's mother insisted

strongly that when she baptized the dying child of the incestuous union, the veins behind his

ear were still pulsing faintly. Although a suspiciously large number of other witnesses

insisted on the same point, the parish priest denied church burial since the infant "had not

been perfectly baptized"103 (Jazowsko 1732, Grodziski ed. 1967 item 95).

Although post-Tridentine Catholicism removed much of the "horizontal" focus on

kinship from baptism, it preserved the notion that the unbaptized, un-exorcised infant had not

become a member of the Church and could not be saved. Provincial synods and pastoral

letters reminded parish priests that, like heretics, dualists, and suicides, stillbirths and

102
The ethnographer Urszula Lehr found precisely the same belief among the peasants of southern Malopolska
in the 1970s (1982 pp. 120-122). According to Bruckner, the beautiful rusalki or water-nymphs of
Ruthenian folklore were also often associated with unbaptized children, to the extent that the term rusalka
came to be synonymous withpoterczat or stillbirth. (1985b p. 308; cf. Worobec 2001 p. 71).
103
"nie jest doskonale ochrzczone."

454
 • Good powers of evil •

unbaptized infants could not be granted Christian burial on hallowed ground. Instead they

were to be buried in the fields or under one of a Boze Mqka—the field and roadside

crucifixes encountered in previous chapters (Kracik 1990 p. 192; Maciejowski 1630;

Nasiorowski 1992 p. 207).104 They were thus ritually and spatially set outside the borders of

society and of the church. The crucifix placed over their bodies (the same crucifix which was

so popular at crossroads and borders in general, as protection against the evil spirits

associated with such places) may be understood simultaneously as an expression of grudging

hope for their salvation and as an exorcism: like the stake through the vampire's heart, it was

meant to keep their soul from wandering or harming others. In practice they were also buried

under lone-standing oaks and lindens—both holy trees (the linden, sacred to the merciful

Virgin Mary, seems a particularly apt and symbolically rich choice of burial-place) but both

also associated with paganism, demons, and ghosts, so that it was often necessary to sanctify

and exorcise such trees by attaching to them a holy image of Mary, or a small chapel. In

1673, in the parish of Milowka in the Zywiec region, after several peasants saw a large

number of ghosts or spirits, presumably of unbaptized children, kneeling in prayer before an

old crucifix, the parish priest caused a church to be built on the site (Udziela 1910).105 In folk

practice as in orthodox theology, where the doctrine of the limbus infantium (limbo, literally

In an infanticide trial in Nowy Wisnicz in 1658, the mother confessed to burying the child herself at the
riverbank. She did this, however, not to hide her crime—she claimed that the child died naturally—but to
save the costs of burial, "since we know that such children are not buried in the cemetary, but under a
crucifix in the fields [gdyz to wiemy, iz takowych dzieci nie chowaja_ na cmyntarzu, ale pod Boza^ me_ka_ w
polach]" {Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae ff. 188v-189; quoted after Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 194-195).
Compare Kolberg's account of the extraordinarily rich and complex symbolism of a linden tree outside the
village of Modlnice, the site of many buried infants. Under the tree were buried "various strangers, soldiers,
suicides, people who died suddenly, as well as still-births and children who died unbaptized. Accordingly,
the folk of the area believe strongly that that place is haunted by condemned souls." The villagers believe
the small chapel under the linden to have been "pagan or Arian" (neither is at all likely), further associating
the location with the demonic. And yet, the same villagers believe this old linden tree to have grown from
the linden-wood staff of St. Wojciech, missionary to the Prussians and symbol of the victory of Christianity
over paganism: accordingly they have placed an image of the saint under the tree (DWOK vol. 7 pp. 59-60).
N. b . : the legend of a sacred linden tree growing from a saint's staff is more usually associated with St.
Stanislaw (see e.g. Brzezariski 1717, f. 27; Karoli 1896 p. 498).

455
 • Chapter 3.1 •

the "threshhold of the infants") remained sufficiently undefined as to allow some hope that

unbaptized infants might escape damnation, their place was at the borderland between the

demonic and the sacred, the wilderness and the domesticated.

Since failure to properly baptize an infant had such disastrous consequences, both

priests and the laity paid extraordinary attention to this sacrament. Already in the 15th

century, miracle-registers at pilgrimage sites described dying babies who had revived just

long enough to receive baptism, and therefore salvation (Witkowska 1984 pp. 190-194); such

stories also appear in 17th-18th century Jesuit sermons.106 The very first injunction of the

decrees of an early Poznah synod (c. 1420) was to remind the laity that even women can

perform the baptismal sacrament in case of need, and can baptize just the top of the head of

the emerging baby if it appears to be in danger of dying (Sawicki 1957 p. 200). The Council

of Trent, the Roman Catechism, and episcopal pastoral letters repeated these injunctions:

although baptism should be carried out by a priest, in case of emergency it could be done by

any Christian layman. In the absence of a man, a woman could do it, and if no Christian

women were present, then a heretic, "or even a Jew, a Turk, or the crudest pagan, with no

belief in baptism" could carry out the rite, and it would be considered valid so long as such a

person, himself damned, said the formula correctly and with the intention of "doing what

Christians do"107 (quotations from Brzezahski 1717 f. 36, who follows Trent session 7 can.

According to the chronicles of the Jesuits at Krosno, when in 1672 a priest cameto the bed of a dying child
too late because he had been officiating at a mass for the feast of St. Ignatius, he proceeded with the
baptism, all the while castigating St. Ignatius for consigning a soul to damnation. The child revived, was
christened Ignatius in the saint's honour, and went on to become a novice of the society (Kazahczuk 1991
pp. 74-75). Jesuit tales also described what could happen if a child was allowed to die unbaptized: when a
negligent mother (or possibly an infanticide) was reluctant to confess in church that she had let her child die
without baptism, the corpse of the infant rose from its grave and visited the mother. Under the pretense of
trying to nurse, it bit her breast painfully, and repeated such visits until she made her confession
(Kwiatkiewicz 1706 p. 945; cited after Kazanczuk 1991 pp. 71-72).
"nawet Zyd, Turczyn, y owszem poganin naygrubszy o chrzcie niewierza_c" "byle tylko mial intencya^ to iest
umysl uczynic to, co czynia^ Chrzescianie"

456
 • Good powers of evil •

de consec. dist. 4 ch. 24; cf. Roman Catechism 1985, part 2, ch. 1, pars. 24-25; Maciejowski

1630 ff. E-Ev; Nasiorowski 1992 pp. 210-211).

When one considers the degree to which the Tridentine reforms concentrated on the

consolidation of Catholic ritual efficacity, and on the reservation of sacramental power to the

clergy, these almost ecumenical gestures towards laywomen and heretics seem quite

extraordinary. In the context of hyper-scrupulous ritualism that characterized the Catholic

Reformation in Poland, so that even crossing oneself incorrectly could be a sign of paganism,

baptism could be done almost anywhere, with almost any material. So long as the liquid used

contained water, it need not be holy or even clean, and it could be some adulterated substance

such as wine. One could wash whatever part of the infant was available, using only enough

water to wash the smallest finger. In an era of ever-elaborating ritual, the emergency baptism

was simplicity itself: "I baptize you in the Name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost,

Amen"108 (Brzezanski 1717, ff. 38-39).

Such attention to practical exigency points to the Catholic Church's real concern that,

as Brzezanski puts it, not a single soul in the whole world should be condemned eternally out

of ignorance of the baptism ritual"109 (ibid. f. 35v). But it also suggests the pressures exerted

by the laity who wanted to ensure that their children should not be turned into demons. The

same impulse drove anxious parents to insist on a second baptism in the church, in case there

had been any mistake in the emergency baptism.l Some indication that the church was

responsive to lay anxiety about demon-children may be found in Opatovius's Tractatus de

sacramentis, in which he considered whether an infant could be baptized by throwing it into

108
"Ja ciebie krzcze_ w Imie Oyca y Syna y Ducha Swiqtego, Amen."
109
"aby ani iedna nigdy dusza na calym swiecie, przez niedostatek tey nauki wiecznie nie zginela"
110
Ecclesiastical writers discouraged this tendency, but also made provision for it in a formula of conditional
baptism (Kracik 1990 p. 194; Maciejowski 1630 f. E-Ev, cited after Nasiorowski 1992 p. 211; Brzezanski
1717, f. 36v-37).

457
 • Chapter 3.1 •

a river or well. He ruled that such a baptism was forbidden (as it killed the child), but would

be sacramentally efficacious if the baby was still alive at the moment it came in contact with

the water (1642 p. 116, after Kracik 1990 p. 195). Kracik sees this as an example of empty

ritualism and casuistic scrupulosity; it may be, however, that Opatovius had a better

understanding of the plight of unmarried mothers than does his twentieth-century co-

religionist, and hoped to provide them a way to save the soul of their innocent offspring even

as they damned their own.111

Once again I turn, despite the risks involved, to 19th-20th century folklore in order to

better understand our late 17th-century trial. We have already seen that the cawx or koltek

that Malecki believed the Sarmatians to worship, and which hid in the attic and brought them

treasure, was in later years understood as an unbaptized child. In Ruthenia, the navb or navie,

originally a term for the afterlife in general or its inhabitents, had by the 19th century become

the mischievious and dangerous mavky, unbaptized demon-children (DWOK vol. 31 p. 98).

The theme of the latawiec or skrzat or poterczq, as a bird chased by the storms and by

lightning is widespread throughout Poland and Ukraine (Kolbuszewski 1896 p. 160;

Moszynski 1967 p. 399): as a damned soul, it is chased by St. Elijah or St. Michael, or by the

111
Haur inveighed against frivolous women who, having fallen into sinful carnality, redouble their sin and
"offend against God, doing away with their innocent children [potym marnie z obraza Boza zatraci dziqciq
swoie niewinne]"111 (Haur 1693 tr. 21 ch. 14 p. 333). This is the usual double standard, for these same
unwed mothers would be ostracised if the baby survived, and the baby itself faced a life of ill-treatment.
Synodal decrees forbade parish clergy to church unwed mothers, essentially putting a religious seal on their
inability to re-integrate into society (Kracik 1990 p. 202). Young women who had been seduced or raped,
and who did not choose to live out their days as an outcast, had the option of abandoning the baby (the
Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Krakow took in more than twelve-hundred abandandoned infants between
1600 and 1612), or she could kill the newborn. The accused witch Anna Stelmaszka, for example, confessed
that, that many years previously, she had become pregnant. Wanting to be still considered a maiden, she
strangled the newborn and pretended it died of itself (#160, Pyzdry 1731). Despite extremely harsh
punishments for infanticide, including burning at the stake, burying alive, and drowning, infanticide was by
far the most common violent crime for which women were tried in court. Morever, due to the high rate of
natural infant mortality (a fatality of perhaps 35% of live birth before the age of one), infanticide was rarely
detected, and the criminal records represent a tiny proportion of actual cases. (Kamler 1986; Karpihski 1995
pp. 186,191,328-333).

458
 • Good powers of evil •

planetnicy who carry storm-clouds from place to place. However, the latawiec may also be a

shooting star—so that when one sees such a star one should say a prayer for the child's

condemned soul.112 It can itself be assimilated to zplanetnik or to the similar zmij, who

usually is understood to attract drought rather than storms. Kolberg recorded extensive

material concerning the latawiec-as-unbaptized child in Malopolska; some of this discription

closely resembles his account of the skrzat:

Such a still-born child sometimes changes into a latawiec. This is a sort of phantom-bird
flying beneath the clouds when apianetnik is pulling the cloud. If one should see such a
latawiec, one should neither walk nor ride faster, nor hold one's breath, nor pick up the hems
of one's skirt, for it will fall between your legs. Walking slowly, one should listen carefully
whether it is saying anything, for it can speak and it likes to do so. The latawiec falls to earth
together with the lightning, and it is happy to meet someone on the road, for then it can cry
out persistently "chrztu, chrztu! [baptism, baptism!]." If a wise person hears this, a person
who is aware, they stand and answer the latawiec in these words: "I baptize you in the name
of God; if you are a boy, you will be Adam, and if you are a girl, you will be Eve."113 Then
they bless the latawiec with the sign of the holy cross, and from that time the latawiec, having
been saved, no longer appears nor makes any sound, and it disappears (DWOK vol. 7 pp. 60-
61).114

In the end, Regina Lewczykowa was acquitted of the accusations against her, of

immissio demonum, "sending a demon," into Wojciech Kozielek. This does not relieve the

historian from attempting to understand what such immisio demonum is supposed to have

meant to the accused, her accuser, their neighbors and judges. Stanislaw Kiszka's testimony

should not be privileged over that of the other witnesses, who regularly called the demon in

question zty duch [evil spirit] or a diabel. But neither should his testimony be ignored, in

particular since nobody appears to have found it peculiar. The evil spirit or devil that

112
On the latawiec as shooting star, see especially 3.2.4, below. This local, Slavic folk belief must surely owe
something to Biblical notions as well, e.g. Luke 10:18: "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of
lightning."
113
"Ja ci$ chrzcze_ imieniem Boskiem; jak-es chlopiec, to be_dziesz Jadamem; a jak-es dziewczyna, to b^dziesz
Jewa_."
114
Still in the late 20th century, according to the ethnographic work of Urszula Lehr, villagers near Nowy Sajcz
believed that unbaptized children attracted floods and lightning, which uncovered their unmarked graves. If
such an infant is found it must be washed, aspersed with holy water, and buried properly; if the infant cannot
be found one should go to the place where its cries are heard and recite: "Jakes panna, to niech be_dzie Anna
/ Jakes pon to niech bqdzie Jon [If you are a maiden, be named Anna / If you are a man, be named Jon]"
(Lehr 1982 pp. 132-133).

459
 • Chapter 3.1 •

Kozielek experienced, first as a sharp pain and then as a sort of stupor, was, according to

what he said while being exorcised, simultaneously an unbaptized child, a being which had

been bought by Lewczykowa from a woman in the small town of Krzemieh some time

previously. It was not from Hell, and therefore its status was ambivalent; it could serve its

master and harm others, it need not only do harm.

In the 18th century, Chmielowski noted that "simple people call [shooting stars]

latawcy or diabiy, because in their simplicity, ignorant of the causes of things, they impute all

extraordinary things either to GOD or to the devil"1 5 (1754 vol. 1 pp. 163-164). In fact, of

course, he got things exactly wrong. It was the Church that insisted that whatever was not

done naturally must be done by God or, with God's permission, by the Devil, there being no

other allowable options. The "simple people" had a considerably more complex cosmology.

Their "devils" were devils—that is what they called them, and we must take this labelling

seriously. But they were many other things besides: helpers about the home, protectors of

fortune, thieves of other people's grain or milk, errand-boys. Despite clear pre-Christian

roots in the ancestor spirits of the Slavs, and despite the close resemblence, so presciently

noted by Heywood, to the "pugs and hobgoblins" of England, these were not, however,

"pagan" in any meaningful sense. They had been Christianized, if not always in the manner

hoped for by the Church—not just as devils, but as purgatorial spirits or as the wandering

souls of unbaptized infants. Peasant attitudes toward these "pre-Christian nature spirits"

show, not the "shallowness" of Christianity that some historians have found in them, but the

contrary: a profound internalization of the Church's doctrine of limbo, and of the sacrament

of baptism. Stanislaw Kiszka's report of the words of the devil from Krzemien attests to the

115
"prosci ludzie latawcami, albo diablami nazywai% ktorzy w prostocie swoiey causas rerum nie wiedza^c,
wszystkie rzeczy extraordynaryine albo BOGU, albo diabkt imputuia/'

460
 • Good powers of evil •

common people's understanding that baptism was the gateway to society, to personhood, and

to salvation: extra ecclesia non est salus.

• •$• •

The "devils" and "demons" and "evil spirits" of early modern Poland, like those

recorded in more recent folklore studies or ethnography, multiply into a bewildering array of

forms and functions and types. There are skrzatki, the name indubitibly borrowed from the

Germanic forest skratt although now sometimes related to Polish "skrzeczec" (screech) or

"skrzyc siq ("flash, throw out sparks"). These are underground gnomes dressed in red, or

they are bedraggled little birds seeking shelter from the rain, or they are devils, or unbaptized

children: they bring good luck to the farm, or they steal treasure from neighbors. There are

the essentially similar choboldy and cmuki; there are inkluzy, a devil one can hatch for

oneself from the egg of a rooster; there are latawcy—variously spirits of the whirl-wind

(dust-devils), unbaptized infants, purgatory ghosts, treasure-haulers, drought-causing

serpents, storm-bringing little birds, or meteorites, or demon-lovers; there are the friendly

domowiki or chowancy who tend the farm and look after livestock; the topielcy or utopcy,

water-imps, themselves the spirits of drowned men or children, who seek to drown others;

there are the female jqdze, cognate to the east Slavic Baba Jaga and sometimes synonymous

with witches; przypoludnice, noon-time demons who cause sun-stroke; mamki or boginki or

dziwozony who steal young children and replace them with odmience or changelings; there

are the rusalki so beloved by the Romantic poets and painters—beautiful maidens of the

riverside who lure young men to their deaths; there are the planetnice, sometimes demons but

sometimes living human beings, who carry the clouds from place to place, bringing rain to

461
 • Chapter 3.1 •

their friends and hail or thunder to their enemies; there are the zmory who cause nightmares

or suck blood, and the similar strygi and strzygoni, wqpierzy or wampiry, revenant dead who

attack the living.116 To make things more complicated, and as befits such personalizations of

the marginal, none of these creatures are ontologically stable. In origin and appearance and

function they combine and recombine unsystematically: "vampires" sometimes comb out the

tangles in horses' manes, like a good house-ghost; "house-spirits" sometimes attack. The

cultural connections reach in every direction: to the brownies and pucks and nysse of German

and Scandinavian and English folk religion, to the domovoi and zmei of the East and South

Slavs; to the Germanic skratts and kobolds; Roman strigae; classical and Biblical satyrs and

fauns and goat-demons; pre-Christian Slavic ancestor spirits, both good and bad; not to

mention the Christian devils, limbo-infants, or purgatorial ghosts with which they are perhaps

most often identified. From the common people's point of view, even in a single region and

at a given time, a single named being such as a latawiec can be the ghost of a suicide, an

unbaptized baby, a meteor, a drowned man, a devil from hell, a spirit of the wind, a treasure-

bringing demon—or some combination of any or all of these (Baranowski 1981 pp. 115-116;

see also 3.2.4).

Thus, any attempt to provide a clear or straightforward categorization of the various

folk-demons and devils of early modern Poland must fail. Insofar as one's aim is to give a

faithful depiction of the actual understandings of actual people, rather than an artificial

abstraction, one must honour the fact that these understandings were themselves imprecise

and contradictory. Folkloristists have sometimes resembled Christian demonologists in their

116
1 have given only a partial list of Polish "demons" here; see also the glossary. Dzwigol (1999) analizes fifty-
five names of house-spirits from Orgelbrand's mid-19th c. Polish dictionary. Two recent popular
publications, Podgorska and Podgorski 2000, 2005, provide an exhaustive, but uncritical and ahistorical,
catalog of Polish demons.

462
 • Good powers of evil •

attempts to impose an order, a categorization, onto the messy, shifting, inconsistent,

idiosyncratic jumble of concepts, images, and labels which characterize peasant religion, and

peasant demonology especially. Paradoxically, a rigorous and precise account of Polish

demons must be vague and indeterminate if it is to capture the vague and indeterminate

nature of the beings one is attempting to describe—for the Polish demons are nothing if not

ontologically ambiguous. Many recent scholars of Polish folk demonology have fallen into

methodological absurdity, treating testimony as "mistaken" when it fails to conform with the

scholars' predetermined categorizations (as if those categorizations have any value apart

from their fidelity to the sources, which can never, in this sense, be mistaken); or taking the

indeterminancy of the various named demons as evidence for the fading and degeneration of

folk-beliefs (Baranowski 1981 pp. 114-115, 314-315; Pelka 1987). On the contrary, this

ambiguity and indeterminacy seems to have always been a feature of folk-demonology.

Bruckner noted long ago the tendency of folk demons to "flow into one another" (1985b

[1928] p. 218). Similarly, Moszyhski dissolves folk-demons into mere names, around which

bundles of motifs unsystematically adhere."Specific demonological motifs almost never

belong exclusively to just one demon; rather, the motifs wander quite freely" (Moszyhski

parti vol. 2 par. 494). m

117
Ontological ambiguity seems to be a common cross-cultural feature of demons and fairies, whose nature it is,
as personifications of marginality and capriciousness, to have no essential or determinate nature. Linda
Ivanits notes the amorphous tendencies of Russian devils, which tend to blend with forest-spirits, water
spirits, the souls of the impious dead, or with the helpful house-demons (1989 p. 38 and passim.). Ulo Valk,
despite his intention to demonstrate a stable, Christianized devil-figure in Estonian folklore, succeeds
instead to show that the Estonian devil-motif is intricately interwoven with house-spirits and treasure haulers
(Valk 2001). Farther afield, Charles Stewart's account of the exotika in contemporary Greece, which I have
already had cause to cite a number of times, is the best recent exploration of this ambiguity (Stewart 1991).
See also Benson Saler's classical account of nagual among the Quiche of Central America: within a single
village the naguals are described variously as spirit animals, signs of the European Zodiac, Mayan calendric
animals, Catholic patron saints, and witches' familars (Saler 1967). In southern India, the peey can be the
ghosts of the prematurely dead (especially suicide girls), or as inhuman demons, or as minor tutelatory gods,
or even as avataras of the major Hindu deities such as Visnu or the Devi, or, among Indian Christians, as
Christian infernal devils (Caplan 1985). Even in relatively well-structured cosmologies, fairies and demons

463
 • Chapter 3.1 •

What are the consequences of this variability for the historian of witchcraft in Poland?

They are, first, that we must read the texts carefully: devils might not be devils, or rather,

since they are always what they are called, they might not be devils in the sense that we

expect. A second consequence follows: witches who confessed to having dealings with the

devil may not have understood themselves to be having the sorts of dealings we have come to

expect from reading Del Rio or the Malleus. In this chapter, I have focussed on the folkloric

and pre-Christian background, or on those cases where the ambivalent status of the devil is

tolerably clear. In the next chapter, I turn to the more complex question of the devil in

confessions which appear, at first glance, to follow the elite script of demonology: a pact,

submission to the devil, sex as a symbol of loyalty to the devil and as an act of inversionary,

"diabolical" perversion. Might not these devils, as well, have had hidden nuances,

unexpected characteristics? If they do, we must rethink what the accused witches, in

confessing to such acts, understood themselves to have been confessing.

are not only capricious in themselves but also in their refusal to abide within demonological categories. The
zayran of northern Sudan, for example, are well-integrated into the Quranic category of jinn, but there is
strong disagreement between men and women as to whether they are shawatin (black jinn or devils) or the
neutral red jinn (Boddy 1988).

464
 Widma, oczami wartowana tyh\,
Co rosq z kwiatow na smietane. cyrka;
Je_cza^ca w gorze nieochrzczona dusza;
Latawiec, gwiazda, co kobiet wysusza,
Litosc i twroge_ budza. na przemiany.
The witch, with eyes in back,
Who gathers dew from flowers to make cream;
The unbaptized soul, wailing in the sky;
Latawiec, the shooting star, who withers women
Chapter 3.2: Incite terror and pity by turns.
Of woman wailing for her demon Severyn Goszczynski. ZamekKaniowski, 1828,
lover. w . 271-275

3.2.1: Introduction

In his essay "The pinch of destiny: religion as experience, meaning, identity, power,"

Clifford Geertz asks what ought to be a central question of any interpretative social science

that takes seriously both the autonomy of individual thought and the social construction of

the self. Paraphrasing the cultural psychologist Andy Clark, Geertz asks, "Where does

culture stop and the rest of the self begin?" (Geertz 2000: 204). The question is necessarily

un-answerable, but it is important to ask nevertheless, if we are to maintain a truly dialectical

interpretative framework that refuses both a simplistic model of individual autonomy and the

collapse of the subject into a figment of discourse.

This problematic becomes especially acute in the interpretations of those subjectivities

recorded under conditions of strongly asymmetrical power. Few contexts can be more

asymmetrical than that of the witch trial and the interrogation under torture, in which

powerful urban men imposed their definitions of witchcraft, religion, and criminality onto

illiterate peasant-women. And yet, even in the extremity of this impossible situation, the

accused witches often found ways to express their own beliefs and worldviews, and assert or

maintain their identities, shaping their testimony as a mixture of stereotyped or "scripted"

demonological tropes on the one hand, and narratives of their own on the other. In this way,

465
 • Chapter 3.2 •

they were sometimes able to shape the witch stereotype to express individual concerns; they

also took up elements from literate, pan-European witchcraft motifs and shaped them,

whether intentionally or otherwise, in ways that made them fit local, indigenous conceptions.

By their emphases, their silences, their willingness to confess to certain things and extreme

reluctance to confess to others, their additions and modifications, the accused witches

translated demonological stereotypes into their own idiom, and fashioned or maintained

identities decidedly at odds both with elite constructions of witchcraft and with the

considerably vaguer conceptions of their semi-literate judges.

It would be an exaggeration to state that the accused witches thereby sustained an

autonomous subjectivity in the modern conception: in part because such a conception, with

its refusal of the dialectical construction of the self in relation to culture and its understanding

of the lonely, self-legislating subject, is itself an imagined construct, never realized

anywhere; in part because its application to an early modern peasantwoman is thoroughly

anachronistic—she would not want to be such a subject even if she could understand what

that entailed. Nor can it be averred that an accused witch, impelled under torture to admit to

so much of what she herself will usually have held despicable, sustained even that relational

and partial, thoroughly encultured self-understanding that she had possessed before the

ordeal of interrogation and torture. Although it is impossible to know how much of the

identity imposed upon her and then accepted "freely" after torture she accepted in fact into

her self-image, there can be little doubt that this self-image had been radically transformed in

the process. But such transformation is not the same as obliteration. Despite all the dreary

repetition of motifs in Polish witch trials (motifs that often can be found almost without

modification right across Europe and in the New World) individual and local concerns are

466
 • Demon lovers •

also detectable—and these are found not by subtracting the stereotypes and examining some

putatively individual remainder, but precisely by observing how the stereotypes are mixed,

qualified, and reflected upon in the trial testimony. Polish witches were not swallowed up

and subsumed into the categories of witchcraft; they did not become mere figments of

discourse but, taking on or accepting parts of that discourse, they amended it and made it

their own.1

In this chapter I attempt to tease out something of the subjectivity, something of the

refusal and re-orientation of discourse undertaken by accused witches in Poland, by looking

at a single motif: that of diabolical copulation. As elsewhere in Europe and its colonies,

witches in Poland were imagined to promise not only their souls, but their bodies as well, to

the lustful attentions of devils. As elsewhere in Europe and its colonies, this motif of sex with

the devil receives considerably less attention in actual trials than in literary demonology, but

does, nevertheless, constitute an important element in many confessions. And, as has been

shown to be true for example in Germany (Roper 1994) and in Scotland (Purkiss 2001),

individual accused witches could and did take this most intimate imposition of elite

categories and build from it a narrative of their own lives: they could use it to reflect on,

create, and express their self-understanding.

I will examine one trial (#39, Lublin 1643) wherein the accused witch, Zofia Baranowa,

takes up the trope of diabolical sex and uses it to express her dissatisfaction with her current

abusive husband, and her abiding affection and yearning for her late first husband. Arguably,

Marjanna of Tuliszkow's account of demonic stalking and ravishment (#96, Kleczew 1688,

discussed in 2.3.3), accomplished a similar reflection about her life and about real or

1
Concerning the construction of the self in witch-trials, see especially Sabean 1985; Roper 1994, Purkiss 1996,
2001; and brief discussion in Briggs 1996 pp. 384-388.

467
 • Chapter 3.2 •

imagined events of her recent past. But such thorough appropriation of the motif of diabolical

sex must have been rare, and the bulk of the chapter deals with much more fragmentary

testimony. This leads in two directions. First, to a consideration of the manner by which

many Polish witches managed to uphold a self-image of sexual propriety while

simultaneously confessing to diabolical sex: it happened but they didn't enjoy it. Second, the

interpretation of Baranowa's trial and of others where the accused confessed to taking

pleasure in demonic sex leads me away from the question of subjectivity and into what I

would like to call indigenization: the process by which accused witches assimilated elite

conceptions of devils and demons into local categories, and thereby transformed them. I

suggest, in contrast to "acculturation" models under which peasant beliefs come to be

colonized by and subsumed into elite categories, that in Poland the elite categories underwent

a reciprocal modification into local forms. The "devil" with whom some Polish witches

admitted to having sexual relations was not always, I suggest, a devil at all—at least not a

devil in senses that could be accepted or even recognized by the theologically orthodox.

The interpretation of witch-trial testimony of this kind requires extreme delicacy. One

must avoid performing a sort of latter-day demonology by taking the testimony at face value,

ignoring the overwhelming pressures on accused witches to testify in certain ways and to

conform to certain motifs; but one must also avoid an opposite danger, that of silencing these

remnants of women's voices by treating them exclusively as products of a discourse over

which the accused witches had no control.

• •$• •

468
 • Demon lovers •

The Judeo-Christian tradition of sexual relations between human women and angels or

demons begins with the account, in Genesis, of the generation of giants before the flood:

"When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them,

the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they

chose. [...] The giants were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons

of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them" (Gen. 6:1-2, 4,

NRSV, translation slightly modified). The original intention of this passage is obscure;

however the Septuagint, in several versions, translated bene ha ,elohim not as "sons" (moi) of

God but as "angels" (dyysX,ou)of God (Wevers 1993 pp. 75-76). Other Hellenistic Jewish

sources, such as Jubilees 5.1 and Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews 1.3.1, follow this

tradition of interpretation, and interpret the giants as the offspring of angels "accompanying

with" human women. The pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch, an important source for early

Christian accounts of the fallen angels, expands upon this narrative in a way that relates it to

the origins of witchcraft and magic:

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born
unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw
and lusted after them, and said to one another: "Come, let us choose us wives from among the
children of men and beget us children."
[-]
And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself
one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught
them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with
plants. (Enoch 6.1-2, 7.1).2

In the City of God, Augustine rejects this whole tradition of interpretation. For

Augustine, the "sons of God" are the generation of Seth, who, he asserts, lusted after the

daughters of the generation of Cain. However, he continues:

Nevertheless it is the Testimony of Scripture (which tells us nothing but the truth) that angels
appeared to men in bodies of such a kind that they could not only be seen but also touched.

2
1 have relied on R. H. Charles' translations of Jubilees and Enoch, with his excellent notes (Charles 1917a,
1917b).

469
 • Chapter 3.2 •

Besides this, it is widely reported that Silvani and Pans, commonly called incubi, have often
behaved improperly towards women, lusting after them and achieving intercourse with them.
These reports are confirmed by many people, either from their own experience or from the
accounts of the experience of others, whose reliability there is no occasion to doubt. Then
there is the story that certain demons, whom the Gauls call Dusii, constantly and successfully
attempt this indecency. This is asserted by so many witnesses of such a character that it would
seem an impertinence to deny it. Hence I would not venture a conclusive statement on the
question whether some spirits with bodies of air (an element which even when set in motion
by a fan is felt by the bodily sense of touch) can also experience this lust and so can mate, in
whatever way they can, with women, who feel their embraces (15.23).

Augustine thus introduced the theme of diabolical sex on the basis, not of Biblical exegesis

or theological speculation, but of a sort of ethnographic interpretation of Roman (silvani),

Greek (pans) and Celtic (dusii) nature spirits. He incorporates these into his general schema

under which all pagan supernatural beings are Christian devils.

Theologians after Augustine displayed little interest in the topic until Aquinas took it up

in the Summa theologicae, as part of his project to harmonize scriptural narratives of

embodied angels and demons, with Aristotelian categories of spirit and matter.3 Aquinas

concludes that angels, as purely spiritual beings, do not possess material bodies: they can,

however, assume bodies, "not for themselves, but on our account." These assumed bodies are

of condensed air, which angels and demons can shape and manipulate (1.51.2; 1945 pp. 493-

494). After quoting the City of God 15.23, Aquinas goes on to his famous theory of the

demonic generation of children:

Still if some are occasionally begotten from the union of demons, it is not from the seed of
such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose,
as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they
take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says, so that the
person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man. (1.51.3; 1945 p. 497).4

For medieval philosophers following Aquinas, the nature of angelic and demonic

bodies, their interactions with humans sexually or otherwise, and the possibility and

3
Walter Stephens (2002) discusses in great detail Aquinas's theological motives for developing the theme of
diabolical sex.
This mechanism of demonic generation had already been put forward by Augustine, De Trinitate 3; cf.
Malleus pt. 1 qu. 3; 1970 pp. 22-23.

470
 • Demon lovers •

mechanism of procreation, became standard problems against which to prove one's skill at

scholastic dialectic (Stephens 2002 pp. 58-61; cf. Clark 1997 p. 190). For a writer such as

Ulrich Molitor, who discusses the issues in relation to such loci classici as the generation of

monsters or of the magician Merlin, this is primarily an intellectual exercise and an attempt

to clear up what he perceives as popular errors (Molitor 1614 [1497] pp. 449-451).5 The

Malleus Maleficarum of Henrich Kramer, however, accomplishes a profound shift. Sex takes

central stage as both the most hideous crime and the primary motivation of witches."All

witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. [...] Wherefore for the sake

of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils." {Malleus pt. 1 qu. 6; 1970 p. 47).6 In

Genesis and its derivatives, it was the demons who lusted after women: now they merely take

advantage of the insatiable lust of the women themselves. Kramer himself noted this shift in

emphasis; it is central to what he understood to be the new crime of witchcraft:

But the theory that modern witches are tainted with this sort of diabolic filthiness is not
substantiated only in our opinion, since the expert testimony of the witches themselves has
made all these things credible; and that they do not now, as in times past, subject themselves
unwillingly, but willingly embrace this most foul and miserable servitude {Malleus Pt. 2 qu. 1
ch. 4; 1970 p. 111).7

Moreover, in contrast to earlier, and most later, demonologists, who depicted the sexual

assaults of devils as an affliction and a torment (Caesarius of Heisterbach 1929 book 5;

Stephens 2002 p. 101; Pearl 2006), Kramer insisted that devils can "so bring together the

active and passive elements, not indeed naturally, but in such quality of warmth and

temperament, that he seems to excite no less a degree of concupiscence" than can a natural

5
Zabkowic's Polish translation of the Malleus (1614) also includes Polish renderings of Nider's Formicarius
and Molitor's Diologus de lamiis etphitonicis mulieribus, following the popular practice of publishing these
texts as appendices.
6
Zabkowic's translation of the Malleus does not include pt. 1, and so does not include this passage.
7
Compare the same passage in Zabkowic's translation: "Terazniejsze zas czarownice, ze tej sprosnosci
szatanskiego podlegajaj ich wlasne swiadectwa wiare_ czyniq. i te sprawy swoje podobne bye nam pokazuja^
nie jako po ten czas dzialo poniewolnie, ale dobrowolnie, i z che_cia_ sie_ na brzydkie upodobanie szatahskie
podajac" (Zabkowic 1612 Pt. 1 ch. 4; Lewandowski ed. 1992 p. 71).

471
 • Chapter 3.2 •

man {Malleus pt. 2 qu. 1 ch. 4; 1970 p. 114). Women did not submit to the erotic attentions

of devils in order to gain the powers of malefice; rather, they perform acts of malefice

because this is a condition, imposed by devils, for their continued erotic attentions.9 As Erik

Midelfort has commented, the Malleus depicts witchcraft "almost exclusively as a crime of

female lust" (2002a [1981] p. 115).

After the Malleus, no work of demonology could be complete without a discussion of

diabolical sex—although, as noted, most did not treat it with the same emphasis or indeed

obsession. Perhaps ultimately more influential than his controversial insistence on extreme

female concupiscence, was Kramer's categorization of diabolical sex as one of the four

principal sins of witches, along with renunciation of the faith, the devil pact, and the sacrifice

of infants {Malleus Pt. 1 qu. 2; 2000 pp. 20-21).10 This basic schema, of witchcraft as a

matter of apostasy or idolatry and of demonic sex as the token or seal of that idolatry, came

to be standard in the following centuries. The general trend of elite demonology from the

Malleus onward, to define witchcraft as a type of treason against God rather than harm

against one's neighbour—as a violation of the First Commandment rather than an

instantiation of the sins of wrath and envy (Bossy 1988)—was accompanied by the

supposition that diabolical sex sealed the diabolical pact. As a bride submitted sexually to her

new husband and thus consummated the marriage contract, so a witch consummated her pact

Zabkowic excises this passage, calling it "hardly necessary to know [do wiedzenia malo potrzebne]" and
"offensive to innocent ears [niewinnym uszom obrazliwe]" (1614 pt. 1 ch. 4; Lewandowski ed. 1992 p. 78).
9
Stephens points out that papal bull Summis desiderantes of 1484 also located diabolical sex as the raison d'etre
of witches and the source of their power: "It has recently come to our attention, not without great pain to us,
that [...] many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their salvation, and straying from the Catholic faith,
have transgressed with incubus and succubus demons" and have therefore gone on to perform innumerable
acts of malefice against man, beast, and fruit of the field. (Innocent VIII; quoted after Stephens 2002 p. 55).
10
"Let us likewise consider that, for the propagation of their treachery, they are required to perform four actions
in particular, to wit: to renounce the Catholic faith, in whole or in part, by the most sacrilegious oaths; to
devote themselves body and soul [to the devil]; to offer up unbaptized children to that same Evil One, to
indulge constantly in diabolical filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons—and
would that all these things were completely untrue and could be said to be made up!" {Malleus Pt. 1 qu. 2,
quoted after Stephens 2002 p. 56, translation slightly modified; cf. Summers ed. 1970 pp. 20-21).

472
 • Demon lovers •

with the devil by submitting sexually to him. With variations, this sexual aspect of witchcraft

can be found even in those authors (such as Del Rio, 1633 bk. 2 qu. 15; 2000 p. 89) who

otherwise pay little attention to it. In Poland, as we have already had cause to mention,

Chmielowski considered the three principal sins of witches to be apostasy, desecration of the

host, and "Sodomia"—by which he must mean diabolical sex (1746 vol. 3 p. 245; see 2.3

above). In his introduction to the Mlot, Zabkowic makes diabolical sex the last and worst of

witches crimes:

a nakoniec iawnie z szatany przymierze wzia_wszy z And finally, they openly take up alliance with
nimi bezpiecznie obcuia^ biesiaduiaj y (co az szatany and shamelessly associate with them, feast,
brzydko wspomniec) z nimi spolkowanie cielesne and (what is ugly even to mention), take part in
odprawuia, (Zabkowic 1614 f. 5). carnal intercourse with them.

Even the author of the Czarownica powolana, who thought most women accused of

witchcraft were either innocent or were mere zabobonice (superstition-workers) and not true

czarownice, admitted the existence of true witches and described their crimes in terms

closely reminiscent of the Malleus:

Naprzod herezya^ bo wiele z nich nic nie trzymaia, o Firstly, heresy, for many of them don't believe in
wiecznym pote_pieniu czartowskim, ani temu wiary the eternal damnation of the devil, nor give any
daia^ zeby mial bye takim nqdznikiem, raczey faith to [the proposition] that he is such a rascal,
wielmoznym wszego dobra dawca^ ile tym ktorzy z but rather [take him to be] a wealthy provider of
nim przestaia^ y przy nim wiernie stoia_. Potym everything good to those who associate with him
wyrzeka siq Boga y wiary jego, wyrzeka sie, Krztu § y and stand by him loyally. Next, they renounce
innych swia_tosci (jakiemi samiz takiego rzemiesla God and their faith in him, and renounce their
ludzie przyznali) a do diabla miasto BOga przystaia^ holy Baptism and other holy things (as some
slubuia_c mu nieodmienna. wiarq do smierc, z cialem y practitioners of this craft have admitted), and
z dusza_ mu sie_ odlecai^c za wieczne niewolniki [...]. adhere to the devil instead of to GOd, vowing
Po czwarte bluznia^ BOga y nature, jego unchanging faith in him unto death, fleeing to him
przenaswiej:sza_ Czlowiecza^ takze Matkejego body and soul as his eternal slaves: [...]. Fourth,
blogoslawiona. z Swi^tymi jego. Pia_ta popemiaia. they blaspheme GOd and his most holy Human
swiqtokradctwo, kradna_c rzeczy swiqte, iako nature, also his blessed Mother and his Saints.
Naswiqtszy Sakrament, y inne rzeczy swiqte, Fifth: they commit sacrilege, stealing things holy,
zazywaia^c ich do swoich przeklqtych zabobonow. such as the Most Holy Sacrament and other
Szosta zazywaia. wszeteczehstwa brzydkiego z sacred things, using them for their damned
czartami. superstitions. Sixth: they indulge in gross
{Czarownica Powolana 1714 [1639] p. 26). indecency with devils.

Only after this list does the author turn to the question of malefice, which is his seventh

point, and which for him includes the sacrifice of infants. Thus the fundamental constellation

473
 • Chapter 3.2 •

of traits that make up the witch-stereotype—apostasy, the diabolical pact, diabolical

intercourse, desecration of the things of the church, and malefice—was well established in

elite Polish discourse by the early 17th century, accepted even by those who opposed the

excesses of witch-trials. In fact, as will be shown in chapter 3.4 below, notions of sex with

demons can be found in 15th-century sermons and medical literature which constitutes some

of the earliest written work in Polish, and the connection of these notions with witches and

witchcraft had been accomplished already by the late 16th century. The point to made here is

that by the period of widespread witch-trials in Poland, educated Poles already knew that sex

with the devil constituted one of the most heinous—but also one of the "principal"—crimes

of witches.

• *l* •

What is the relationship between this literary stereotype of diabolical sex and the beliefs

and experiences of actual accused witches: what is the relationship between the discourse

carried on among scholars and polemicists, on the one hand, and the confessions of witches,

on the other? This question requires refinement into two correlative questions. First, does the

literary discourse have any echo in the oral traditions, the folklore, of the peasants or small-

town burghers who constitute both the main accusers and, overwhelmingly, the accused, in

witch-trials? Did "the people" believe in human intercourse with devils, and did they take

this to be a common or typical activity of witches? Second, what is the causal relationship of

elite discourse to the confessions, under torture, of accused witches? Did the accused, under

the ministrations of the torturer and via leading questions, take part in what Ronnie Po-Chia

Hsia (1992) has called, in relation to blood-libel trials, a "bloody ethnography;" helping to

474
 • Demon lovers •

construct and confirm a stereotype that was foreign and repugnant to them? Or, on the

contrary, did the accused share some version of the stereotype, so that torture forced them to

take on an identity they recognized as applicable to others, if not to themselves? Where does

demonology stop and the rest of the self begin?

In the historiography of witchcraft scholarship, one can discern two general stances

regarding the relation of diabolical sex in elite discourse and in trials. One is to take seriously

the accounts, in both demonology and confessions, of wild demonic sex, but to naturalize

these accounts. For the authors of the Malleus, female sexuality was both the essence and the

proximate cause of witchcraft. 19th century romantics preserve the structure but reverse the

signs: for Jules Michelet "the sorceress" is a beautiful, openly sexual young woman,

punished for daring to transgress the prudish limits of an anti-sexual Church. Margaret

Murray and her followers understood demonology to be a critique of actual existent, though

non-diabolical, sexual orgies and fertility rituals of a clandestine pagan religion in the

European countryside (Murray 1921; 1963 p. 104). Some contemporary neo-pagan scholars

persist in seeing the accused witch as a sexual rebel; confessions to diabolical sex are the

faint and twisted traces, filtered through the misogynist assumptions of judges, of real

practices or at least of real fantasies (e.g. Shuck 2000). Among recent historians, scholars

such as Hans Peter Duerr and G. R. Quaife treat confession accounts of diabolical sex as

fantasy, but they suggest that these fantasies often originated with the accused witches

themselves rather than with their judges. For Quaife, fantasies of ravishment by an

overpowering devil may have grown out of peasant-women's' unsatisfactory sex-lives (1987,

pp. 101-105). Duerr goes so far as to speculate that witches' ointment may have been, among

other things, a "lubricant" for broomsticks and other substitute phalluses (1989 pp. 4, 148). In

475
 • Chapter 3.2 •

considerably subtler form, scholars such as Lyndal Roper and Diana Purkiss have applied

psycho-analytic concepts to confessions of diabolical sex, and have suggested that they could

at least occasionally arise out of attempts, by accused witches, to work out the meanings—

erotic and otherwise—of their own lives (Roper 1994; Purkiss 2001).

In sharp contrast, most contemporary scholarship treats the construction of the "woman

wailing for her demon lover," the sex-crazed witch, as something imposed, fully formed and

stereotyped, from learned, male, elite culture onto women of the populace. It is a projection

of the "fevered fantasies" of celibate monks onto the bodies of women (Trevor-Roper 1967);

or it is the forcible embodiment of an imaginary inversion, a dark mirror-image, of the newly

emerging ideal of the chaste, subservient wife (Brauner 1995 pp. 20-24; cf. Muchembled

1993a). Sigrid Brauner, in particular, takes Quaife to task for a historiographical version of

blaming the victim: he repeats the demonological pattern by taking male fantasies of sexual

assault and projecting them onto the accused witches (1995 p. 21). Walter Stephens, the most

recent exponent of this school, sums up its main points eloquently: "The idea that witches

copulated with demons was characteristic of scholarly fantasies about witchcraft, while it

was foreign to the oral imagination of the illiterate village and countryside" (Stephens 2001

p. 154). Further, "witchcraft theory [and theory about sex with devils in particular]

represented the forcible imposition of literate ideas about spirituality and corporeality over a

popular culture" in which such distinctions were not important. Although opponents of

witch-trials such as Johann Wier, and Reginald Scott dismissed accounts of sex with demons

as old wives tales or the heated imaginations of irrational, unlettered womenfolk, most

modern scholars locate the heated imagination and the irrationality in the elite, literate writers

on witchcraft. "We now know that such [sexual] narratives were never told independently of

476
 • Demon lovers •

physical and psychological torture, and that they were constructed dialogically through

defendants' responses to standardized leading questions collected in formularies, or

handbooks of interrogation." (Stephens 2001 p. 156). n

This view allocates the blame where it belongs, surely: it also has the unintended

consequence that, in researching and studying that most female of early modern crimes, we

still talk mostly about men. To attempt to discover what women themselves thought of

demon-sex would be misguided; since their statements about sex with the devil where forced

out, through leading questions under torture; they had nothing to do with the woman's own

belief structure and everything to do with the beliefs and fantasies of the torturer and judges.

Women, we are told, have nothing to say—at least nothing recoverable, nothing that comes

from themselves; they also, apparently, have no erotic fantasy life of their own. To talk about

sex with devils, then, is to talk about demonology as an early modern literary male discourse;

women, once again, are silenced. A praiseworthy refusal to participate in the violence of

representation, by which confession under torture constructs the erotic witch, becomes a

refusal to talk about accused women or their experience at all. To treat confessions of

diabolical sex as only the "production, in the mouths of the persecuted, of the fantasies

gradually elaborated by their persecutors" is, as Roper notes, to ignore the real concerns and

subjectivities of the women confessing (1994 p. 230).

11
Stephens takes this argument further in his Demon lovers (2002). Focussing on the Malleus, Stephens
suggests that Kramer's obsession with sex, and his insistance that witches testify credibly to a real
experience of demonic copulation, is a gigantic project to prove, on the bodies of witches, the reality of
demons and therefore of angels and of God. Stephens suggests that late medieval and early modern
intellectuals had nagging doubts as to the reality of the spiritual world, and the extraction of demon-sex
confessions under torture was an attempt to allay these doubts through testimony concerning the most direct
possible experience of really existing demons: "Sex is the ultimate proof of reality" (2002 p. 65). Thus
Stephens agrees with Stuart Clark (1997) that demonological accounts of diabolical copulation constitute
scientific inquiry into the causal efficacity of preternatural beings, but he adds to this, as it were, an
experimental component. This bold thesis succeeds in its account of the Malleus and of Kramer, but fails, I
think, in its larger ambition to characterise the witch-trials as a whole. In particular, it is not generally the
case that judges and interrogators in actual trials took particular interest in diabolical sex.

477
 • Chapter 3.2 •

3.2.2: Sex in the trials. Accommodation and resistance

With these concerns in mind, let us turn to an examination of actual trials in Poland. Sexual

relations with devils could form the primary accusation in a witch-trial, as in Marjanna of

Tuliszkow's extraordinary narrative

of a demonic stalker (#96, Kleczew Name Year Place Sentence

#8 Anna Chociszewska" 1582 Poznari Beheaded
#21 Dorota of Siedlikow 1613 Kalisz Stake
1688, discussed in 2.3.3), or they Gierusza Klimerzyna Stake
#39 Zofia Baranowa 1643 Lublin Whipping
#44 Regina Boroszka 1645 Poznan Stake
could be volunteered, as in the #51 Anna Arpiankab 1654 Zba.szyn Stake
Two others Stake
#68 Regina Skotarka 1669 Kleczew Stake
confession of Zofia Baranowa (3.2.3, #84 Maryna Mazurkowicowa 1679 Bochnia Stake
Regina Wierbicka Stake
below). Most often, however, #96 Marjanna of Tuliszkow 1688 Kleczew Stake
#98 Iadwiga Talarzyna 1688 Nowy Wisnicz Stake
Michalkowa
accounts of such relations emerged #104 Grzegorz Klecha (m.) 1690 Wielki Kozmin ?
#105 Zofia Kowalka 1690 Wielki Kozmin Stake
#106 Jadwiga Gedkowna 1690 Wyszogrod Stake
gradually during interrogation under #108 Zofia Balcerka 1691 Kleczew Stake
Regina Jedrzejka Mackowa Stake
Jagna Stake
torture, as a stereotypical component #110 Barwa or Barbara 1692 Lobzenica Stake
Katarzyna Blachowa Stake
Regina Stake
of either the pact or the sabbat. It #111 Mateusz Kleszka (m.) 1692 Wielki Kozmin ?
#112 Giertruda or Gierka 1693 Kleczew Stake
should be noted, however, that #115 Katarzyna Mrowczyna 1695 Stajszewo Stake
#119 Sobkowa 1698 Wyszogrod ?
One other woman ?
diabolical sex, while present in a #123 Anna Ratajka 1699 Pyzdry Stake
#139 Katharzyna Koziminska 1705 Wyszogrod Stake0
#149 Two or more womenb 1718 Wyszogrod Stake
large number of trials, is rarely a #151 Yagnieszka Kazimierzowa 1719 Pyzdry Stake
#152 Anna Cwierciaczka 1719 Raciaz Stake
#153 Anna Szymkowa 1721 Nieszawa Stake
central concern of either the accused Zofja Pedziszka Stake
#154 Agata 1721 Nieszawa Stake
Agnieszka Jakobka Stake
witches or their interrogators #158 Marjanna of Oporowko 1730 Kleczew Stake
#160 Anna Stelmaszka 1731 Pyzdry ?
As an element of pact #162 Barbara Kaczmarka 1732 Pyzdry Stake
#172 Petronela Kusiewab 1761 Kiszkowo Stake
Nine others Stake
1
narratives, diabolical sex was often #176 One or more women" n.d. Radziejow ?
#179 One or more women'1 n.d. Nowe ?
"Denied sexual relations with her latawiec.
only hinted at. Jadwiga Gedkowna, •Data from decretum only.
°Hands burnt before stake, for having handled the Host.
d
Data fragmentary.
Table 3.2.A: Accused witches confessing to sexual relations
with demons
Cf. Maxwell-Stuart 2001a p. 68, who claims that this is true across Europe.

478
 • Demon lovers •

young and unmarried, encountered the devil in a manner that recalls a folktale. Caught by a

thunderstorm while out in the fields, she fell to the ground in terror. Too frightened even to

recite the Our Father, she instead gave her soul over to the devil, who immediately appeared

in the form of a "youth [mlodzian]" who embraced her, but his hands were cold (#105,

Wyszogrod 1690). Zofia Pedziszka admitted only to meeting with a devil-peasant in woods,

who gave her some bilberries and then hit her in the shoulder. Her co-accused Anna

Szymkowa later gave her a kitten that was cold to the touch, which she refused and pushed

away. Nevertheless, in its sentence, the Nieszawa court charged that both Zofia and Anna

had "had intercourse and association with devils" (#153, Nieszawa 1721 a). Anna

Stelmaszka became a witch at the urgings of a shepherdess, who promised her plenty of milk

and a "handsome husband [Mai Grzeczny]." A short while after, the shepherdess introduced

her to this "tempter [pokusnik]," who was dressed "in the German fashion, all in Red."14 Sex

is not mentioned but is implied insofar as the tempter is to be her "husband" (#160, Pyzdry

1731).

One of the accused in the village of Rozdrazew, interrogated by the court of Wielki

Kozmin in 1690, confessed under torture that she had "her own Jasiek, I had a wedding with

him, four years ago. Old Dyska gave me that Jasiek, she said to me: you'll have things good,

just marry him. He visits me and has lain with me, but he's cold as ice (#105, Wielki Kozmin

1690).15 Katarzyna Mrowczyna, a cowherd and occasional beggar originally accused of

sending devils to drown a neighbour as he walked near the river, admitted under torture to

having acquired a devil in a "zgrzebie"—a clump of linen fibres left over in a carding-

13
"z niemi konwersowaly, obcowaly"
14
"po Niemiecku w Czerwoney Barwie"
5
"Mialam swego Jaska, powiedziala, mialam z nim wesele, juz temu cztery lata. Dyska stara oddala mnie
Jaskowi, mowila mi: bqdziesz miala dobrze jeno mu slubuj. Bywalci u mnie i legal zemna^ ale byl zimny
jako lod."

479
 • Chapter 3.2 •

comb—from a witch who had been burnt five years previous. Her devil's name was Marcin

and he turned into a "black peasant [czarny chlop]." After a second round of torture, she also

admitted that she had christened herself to service with this devil, that she had renounced

God and the Virgin Mary, and that "once that spirit Marcin lay next to her and had relations

with her like a husband with his wife, but his member was cold" (#115, Stajszewo 1695).16

The house-servant Regina received her "Jan" from one of her co-accused witches. They

had unpleasant sex because he was cold to the touch, and he beat her for not providing him

with work to do (#110, Lobzenica 1692). In the same trial, Barwa "from the alms-house," an

indigent widow, provided a good example of the transition from denial to acceptance of elite

demonological categories accomplished in the interrogation process. She withstood two

rounds of pulling and burning with sulphur without crying out, and when questioned on this

point, artfully inverted the court's speculation that demons contributed to her fortitude. On

the contrary, her strength came from Jesus, "into whose protection she had placed herself,

and to whom she prayed day and night in the jail."17 Nevertheless, a third round of torture

broke Barwa's will, and she admitted to receiving a "pokusnik" from another witch three

years previous, in a crust of bread. He had sex with her that very night, but "he had a cold

one." In the large trial in Yarocin in 1719, Jagnieszka Kazimierzowa confessed that a

"czart" in the form of a monk named Jan, had appeared to her in the forest and "possessed

[opqtal]" her. He promised to give her things "and to serve her until death," and they "had

bald Mountain"19 together once in one place, once in another (#151, Pyzdry 1719): here Bald

Mountain—Lysa Gora—seems to be a euphemism for sex.

"przy niej ten duch Marcin raz lezal i z nia_ obcowal jako ma_z z zona,, ale uczynek byl zimny."
7
"ktoremu sie_ ona w wie_zieniu tego we dnie i w nocy poleca sie_ i modli."
18
"zimny mial."
19
"y do samey smierci shizyc." "mieli lysa_ Gore_."

480
 • Demon lovers •

In all of these accounts, sex plays a rather marginal role. The devil, most often named

Jas or Marcin, appears at a time of crisis in the forests or in the fields, or is given to the witch

in an object of some kind. Thus, as we have seen (3.1.3), becoming a witch is itself a form of

bewitchment, as Jagnieszka Kazimierzowa was "possessed" by her Jan. There is a strong

folk-tale quality to some of these narratives; the manner in which the demon appears at a

moment of crisis or despair, promising safety and riches, exactly parallels the foolish devils

of legend. Sex consummates the pact, which is understood as a wedding, but it is not

enjoyable because the devil is icy to the touch: There is none of the lasciviousness of some

demonology: sex is referred to euphemistically, as a mere "embrace," or "relations" or,

peculiarly, "bald mountain." As Briggs has said, "sexual possession of witches by the Devil

at the moment of apostasy was almost exclusively an expression of power, involving pain

rather than pleasure" (1996 p. 385).

Of course, it is in the context of the Bald Mountain or sabbat motif that we expect, and

find, the most frequent descriptions of diabolical sex. Polish accused witches never confessed

to attending the sabbat except under torture, strongly suggesting the elite provenance of the

motif. And yet, as will be shown, confessing witches added their own coloration to these

accounts.

The testimony of Regina Stokarka before the exceptionally cruel Kleczew court

exhibits the process by which an accused witch could come to confess to the sabbat.

Originally accused of malefice against goats and cattle, of causing her peasant accuser Blazej

Chalupnik to become lame, and of sending a devil into his wife, Regina's confession, given

after what the court records as "two or three hours" of torture, refers to none of this malefice

but instead to attendance at Bald Mountain, apostasy, and diabolical sex:

20
Cf., on this point, Gentilcore 2002: 105-106; Kieckhefer 1976 p. 36, 3.1.1 above.

481
 • Chapter 3.2 •

[Na tysej gorze] jadamy, pijemy smaczno, At bald mountain we eat, we drink tasty things, we
ta[n]cujemy, plachta. piwo nosiemy z karczmy. dance, we bring beer in a sack21 from the tavern. A
Diabol ze mna jako i ma.z lezy. devil lays with me, like a husband.

[Matuszka] kazala mi siq odrzec Naswie_tszy Panny, Matuszka told me to renounce the Blessed Virgin,
mowiela do mnie nie wspominaj Pana Boga i she said to me don't mention the Lord God and the
Naswietszy Panny, bqdziesz miala inszego Pana i Blessed Virgin, you'll have a different Lord and he
tak prqtko przystapiel, pil z nami i ta[n]cowal. showed up so quickly, he drank with us and danced.
Spalam z nim jak wla[s]nie z me.zem, jako pofaioci I slept with him just like with a husband, when
przyszlo to mie. oblapil i poszedl precz, kiedym sie_ midnight came he embraced me and went away,
spowiadala, to mie. bil, ale miq nigdy nie uraniel, ja when I confessed [in church] he beat me, but he
mu sie. piejsnie modlila moj Jasienieczku swiejy, to never wounded me, I prayed to him prettily "My
on zniknaj i nie bil mie. (#68, Kleczew 1669). blessed Jasienieczek22" and he disappeared and
didn't beat me.

This is about as explicit as sabbat narratives get in Polish trials. As has been noted, the

feast at Bald Mountain, as recounted in confessions, lacks many of the features attributed to

it in both Polish and Western demonology (2.1.4). Transvection is rare; there is no chief devil

but only a variety oipokusniki or czarty, sometimes not even referred to as such; there is no

kissing the devil's anus or report of malefice done, and although there may be desecration of

the Host there is no Black Mass; and the "orgy" is altogether a rather prim affair. Instead one

finds a modest feast with beer and white bread and chicken, dancing, and "weddings" with

the attendant demons (Koranyi 1928 p. 68). Thus Anna Szymkowa married her Bartek, who

dresses as a nobleman, at Lysa Gora, and subsequently "had business with my devil" (#152,

Nieszawa 1721).23 Barbara Kaczmarka, who attended a "meeting [shacka, i.e. schadzkaY at

a fellow witch's cottage, confessed to having married there herpokusnik Jan. He was a "poor

dog [pies ubogi]" dressed in black, with horse hooves, and Barbara slept between him and

her human husband in their marital bed (#162, Pyzdry 1732). Anna Ratajka wedded her

szatan "against her will [pomimowoli];" later in her testimony she denounced one Tereska

Kazimierzowna (who was not charged) for having a "sweetheart [polubieniec]" who "dresses

The Polish plachta means a large piece of sack-cloth or a sheet, often used to wrap up and carry a load of
straw or flax or the like—clearly it could not be used to carry beer. I have not found any alternative use of
the term that would render this sentence more sensible.
Jasienieczek is an extreme diminuitive of Jas, itself a diminuitive of Jan.
"z djablem moim mialam sprawe.."

482
 • Demon lovers •

in Red [chodzi w Czerwieni]" (#123, Pyzdry 1699). Even the rare male witch fit himself into,

or was made to fit into, this schema. Grzegorz Klecha, originally arrested on other grounds

but accused of witchcraft because he magically escaped his bonds, confessed to attendance at

Bald Mountain, where he was assigned a "sweetheart [polubienica]" named Jaskowa (a

feminization of the traditional Jas), whom he wed."She was young and dressed in red, with a

crown, because in that place they mostly dress in red, and wear crowns" (#104, Wielki

Kozmin 1690).24

Most accused witches offered the barest confession of diabolical sex, as part of the

general sabbat complex, and did not elaborate on it in any way. This true for example of

Zofia Balcerka, Regina Mackowa, and the servant girl Jagna (#108, Kleczew 1691), who

admitted the mere fact of sex with devils. The accused witch Sobkowa confessed before the

court of Wyszogrod to having as her "husband, a Lieutenant Devil," while her co-accused

married one Marcin (#119, Wyszogrod 1698). Marjanna of Oporowko, whose piety we have

already had cause to notice (2.3.3, 2.4), may have been alluding to female mystics' marriage

to Christ when she confessed to marrying her "Jan" with a ring of blood from her pricked

finger (#158, Kleczew 1730). Maryna Mazurkowicowa drank from a pewter cup at the

sabbat, and later had sex with a "starosta diabel"—a devil with the rank or appearance of a

noble starosta (#84, Bochnia 1678). Often we find not even a euphemistic mention of sex—

as "business" or "association" or "intercourse"—nor even of "marriage;" instead accused

witches confess only to being assigned a "sweetheart [polubieniec]" to dance with at the

feast. Regina Matuszka confessed to dancing with such a "Jas" at Lysa Gora, but did not in

"Mioda byia w czerwieni i w koronie, bo tam najwiQcej w czerwieni chodza_ i w koroniech."

"mqza, Porucznika Diabla."

483
 • Chapter 3.2 •

any other way imply that they had sexual relations (#68, Kleczew 1669). Jadwiga

Talarzyna danced with a "bridegroom [pan mlody]" at the sabbat; interestingly, he was

named Michalowski, more or less the same as her human husband, Jan Michalek (#98, Nowy

Wisnicz 1688). Gierusza Klimerzyna (#21, Kalisz 1613), and Anna Cwierciaczka (#152,

Raciaz 1719) give similarly reticent confessions of sex.

There are several important things to note about the fragments of narrative recorded

above. First, the beings with whom the witches dance and copulate are decidedly folkloric,

and only ambivalently diabolical. Referred to as a "diabel" or "czart" or "pokusnik," but also

as a "poor dog" or simply as a "sweetheart," and with common peasant names such as

Marcin, Kasparek, or Jas (this last being the stereotypical name for the young peasant hero of

folk love songs)27 they are dressed as peasants or noblemen or army officers, or as Germans,

"all in red." This theme of red clothing, together with the near absence of terms or

descriptions that would suggest a frightening or majestic being, points at least speculatively

in the direction of the krasnoludki ("little red people;" gnomes or sprites, but also assimilated

to skrzatki or koltki) of later Polish folklore. We will return to this problem below.

Second, diabolical sex at the sabbat is not the indiscriminate orgy, the wild libidinous

outpouring of chaotic transgression envisioned in demonology and visually depicted with

such aesthetic verve by Hans Baldung Grien or by the Polish Jan Ziarnko. On the contrary

it is nearly always referred to as a "wedding," and sometimes this is all the mention it gets.

In Malopolska, even this is usually missing. In the most complete account of Lysa Gora from that region,
Elzbieta Cackowa danced to the music of hoes and shields, but mentions no demonic partner in the dance,
no pact, and no sex (#62, ChQciny 1665).
27
According to Wislicz, of the 48 "devils" described in the Kleczew trials between 1682 and 1700, 31 were
named Jan, Janek, or Jas.
28
Ziarnko (c. 1575-c. 1630), a burgher of Lwow, spent his entire artistic career in Paris. He etched the famous
representation of the sabbat that served as a frontispiece to the 1613 edition of Pierre de Lancre's Tableau
de I'inconstance des mauvais anges. There is extremely little literature on Ziarnko, but see Sawicka 1938,
and a brief discussion in Zika 2003a.

484
 • Demon lovers •

Indeed, what little attention sex receives may be owed largely to the association of sex with

marriage. Although the pact, in demonology, is often understood as an anti-baptism or as an

oath of fealty, in Polish trials it is almost always interpreted as an affinal relationship. The

witch gives herself to her diabolical "bridegroom" precisely as a women gives herself, body

and soul, to her terrestrial husband: after which it is entirely natural that she should say, with

Regina Stokarka, that she "slept with him as with my husband" (#68, Kleczew 1669). Sex is

the consummation of the pact with the devil, just as sex with one's husband consummates

and makes irrevocable an ordinary marriage. When Polish accused witches found

themselves forced to confess to sex with devils, they did so in a way that maintained their

self-image as decorous and upstanding women, confining sex to the marital relationship.

Third—and this is the aspect of their testimony I want to focus on here—the very

reticence of Polish witches on the subject, their refusal to go into detail even where it might

have hastened the end to torture, may in itself be understood as an act of resistance and as an

attempt to maintain a prized aspect of their self-identity. Lyndal Roper has noted the relative

willingness of accused witches in Augsburg to confess to—identify with or recognize in

themselves—the most extreme forms of maleflce: envy and its destructive potential were

things they could understand and accept as part of themselves. Roper contrasts this to the

tendency in these same confessions to deny sex with devils, to minimize the number of times

they had engaged in sexual intercourse, or to reduce this number at the free confession after

29
Lauren Martin (2002 pp. 79-82) makes a similar assertion concerning Scottish witch-trials, against Christina
Lamer's claim that the pact represented a "standard feudal relationship."
30
It should be noted that the courts, too, seem sometimes to have understood the pact as a marriage. In those
trials for which only the courts decretum (verdict and sentence) is available to me, two refer to "vice
[niecnota]" and "relationship [spoleczenstwo]" with devils as part of a standard catalog of crimes associated
with the sabbat (#51, Zbajszyn 1654; #172, Kiszkowo 1761), while the third condemns the actions of an
unspecified number of witches for "giving themselves in diabolical marriage and participating in relations of
the flesh [oddanie w malzehstwo czartowskie i spolecznosci cielesnej zazywanie]" (#149, Wyszogrod
1718).

485
 • Chapter 3.2 •

torture (1994 pp. 204, 216, 221 n. 18).31 Roper's insight is comparable to the Polish cases:

women who confessed to desecrating the Host, bringing storms or draughts to their village,

and killing their neighbours' cattle and children, said as little about diabolical sex as was

strictly necessary.

Dorota of Siedlikow, for example, admitted before torture to a number of cunning

practices, malefice with buried bones, and the possession of a szatan named "Kasparek" who

helps her find lost objects; under torture she confessed to sex with this szatan, but then

attempted to revise the story. Kasparek tried to lay with her and "strangle [dusic]" her, but

she recognized him by his cold hands and made the sign of the cross, whereupon he flew out

the window (#21, Kalisz 1613). Other accused witches, again and again, emphasised that

their diabolical trysts were unpleasant: like Dorota, they focussed on the icy coldness of their

demon lovers. We have encountered this trope in most of the narratives above: while Jadwiga

Gedkowna, perhaps out of modesty, spoke only of her devil's "cold hands," and Zofja

31
"Even when conviction was a certainty, these accused witches still tried to minimize the extent of their sexual
involvement with the devil" (Roper 1994 p. 216).
2
The denial or minimalization of sex is part of a wider pattern of minimizing participation in the sabbat at Bald
Mountain. As Roper has noted of accused witches in Augsburg (1994 pp. 215-216), many confessions
display a strong tendency to resist participation in the sabbat—even where other crimes have already been
admitted more or less willingly, and even when the accused must have known that they had already
confessed to enough to send them to the stake. For example, Regina Wierbicka of Prqdocin, who had
already confessed to love magic, making potions, and kidnapping a baby to make malefic powder from its
corpse, steadfastly denied full participation in the sabbat "at the border," as she calls it. She did fly there on
a broom, but unlike her co-accused, did not fly all the way but landed in the fields. Her mentor in witchcraft
upbraided her for for not sufficiently annointing herself, and she had to be carried the rest of the way:
Regina clearly wished to portray herself as an unwilling and half-hearted witch. At the border, she met a
black "djabel" dressed as a German, who punched her in the face. He gave her scrambled eggs, which fell
out of her mouth when she called on die Blessed Virgin. The other witches tore off her blessed szkaplerz and
flew off without her, leaving Regina to walk home—a journey of three days—whereupon she immediately
went to church and payed for a mass out of penance (#84, Bochnia 1679). But the denial or minimalization
of sex is analytically distinct from the denial or minimalization of the sabbat, and can occur separately.
Regina Matuszka (#68, Kleczew 1669) confessed immediately to participation at the sabbat during her first
torture, but only admitted to having "danced" with her "Jas." On the other hand, Zofia Baranowa (#39,
Lublin 1643), admitted without torture to a long and intimate sexual relationship with a devil, but her
participation in the sabbat was limited to seeing it from afar, and she refused to join in the dances (see
below).

486
 • Demon lovers •

P^dziszka received an ambiguously symbolic ice-cold kitten, other witches repeatedly refer

to their devil's "cold one" or "cold member" or "cold nature."

Despite the contention in the Malleus—that demons can satiate the lusts of human

women by creating a body "in such quality of warmth and temperament, that he seems to

excite no less a degree of concupiscence" than can a natural man {Malleus pt. 2 qu. 1 ch. 4;

1970 p. 114)—Polish accused witches emphasized their devils' icy nature, and thereby the

extreme unpleasantness of their sexual relations. In maintaining such a distinction, Polish

accused witches made use, consciously or not, of a trope derived from the elite discourse.

This claim that the devil's penis and semen are cold and give pain rather than pleasure, is

taken from demonological discussions (De Lancre 1612 p. 179, cited after Quaife 1987

pp. 98-99, Stephens 2002 p. 101; Remy 1595; Del Rio 1633 bk. 2 qu. 15, 2000 p. 90)33—

although these demonological discussions themselves derive, at least according to the writers

themselves, from witchcraft confessions in France and the Basque lands. The notion was

familiar to Chmielowski, who writes that the bodies (of condensed air or borrowed from dead

men) with which devils seduce women, "are cold, because GOD does not allow the devil to

warm them" (Chmielowski vol. 3 p. 213).34 It is not possible to reconstruct how a village

woman of Mazowsze or Wielkopolska came to know these elite or Western conceptions of

the Devil's sexual organs: here as so often one is tempted to attribute such knowledge to the

unknowable leading questions of her examiners. What is clear, however, is that she

appropriated the motif and used it to her own ends. In doing so, accused witches held on to

their honour as women and (as many of them were) as wives. As mere sinners, they seem to

33
Del Rio, in the passage cited, disagrees with these conceptions; he claims that if a demon wishes to do so, he
can keep semen warm, but when there is no intention of generation nor need to deceive his human lover, he
pours out a cold substance.
3
"sq. zimne, bo mu rozgrzac BOG nie pozwala"

487
 • Chapter 3.2 •

be saying, they had fallen to temptation in committing crimes of wrath and envy and, at the

sabbat, of gluttony, but they had maintained control over their lust: they would confess to

being witches, but not whores.

It is relevant, here, to recall that the two most common and most severe insults against a

woman in this period were kurwa and czarownica: whore and witch (Riabinin 1934 p. 18).

Often combined—as when a woman in the early 18th century declared that "in this Town of

Nieszawa there is Nothing decent, only Whores and Witches, excepting only Pani

Kowalska"35 (AGAD Nieszawa sig. 19 f. 189; quoted after Pilaszek 1998a p. 85)36—they

nevertheless carried different semantic freight. Neither insult should be understood as a

concrete accusation, but neither were they "mere" insults. Calling a woman a whore did not,

usually, amount to accusing her of actual acts of prostitution, but neither was it an empty

"w tym Miescie Nieszawie nie masz Nic pocciwego, tylko Kurwy a Czarownice, oprocz iedney tylko Paniey
Kowalskiey"
Compare the trial of the respectable burgherwoman Elzbieta Stepkowicowa, which began as a defamation suit
initiated by Elzbieta against Katarzyna Nowinkowa, who, in street, "bewhored me and called me a witch
[nakurowowala mi i czarownica nazwala mnie]" (#70, Nowy Sa^cz 1670). The Lublin court-books are filled
with complaints concerning public exchanges of insults between women, in which kurwa and czarownica
figure prominently. In 1637 or 1638, one Olexina Czapnicka yelled publicly to Panna Janowa: "whore,
witch, you go to the villages, to the old women for witchcraft, to which Miss Janowa replied: and you are
the same [kurwo czarownico czodzilas do baby po Czary do wsi na co Pani Janowa odwowiedziala jestes
taka Sama]" (APLublin, AMLublin sig. 210 f. 144v). When in 1640 a patrician woman of Lublin chastised
Janowa Laweczka the Smith's wife for having insulted and quarrelled with some noble house-guests, the
latter replied "and what's that to you, old village-woman, witch [A tobie, co do tego, babo, czarownico!],
upon which both removed their shoes and began to hit each other in the face with them (APLublin,
AMLublin sig. 109 f. 139v, quoted after Wisniewska 2003 p. 114). Witnesses to a public brawl between
Sodanska the smith's wife and Nowinska, wife of a merchant, described them later in court as having "given
each other witchcraft [and] given each other whorishness [zadawali sobie czarostwo [...], zadali kurrestwo]"
(APLublin, AMLublin sig. 61 ff. 119-120 (1713)). For other, similar exchanges of insults, see APLublin,
AMLublin: sig 210 ff. 338 ("you whore of [the suburb] Czwartakow [ty kurwo czwartawska]"), sig. 210 f.
379 ("whore, your thing is in [the primarily Jewish suburb and slum of] Podzamcze [kurwo, twoja rzecz na
podzamcze]"); sig. 211 f. 288 ("whore, you ate devils while I ate godly apostles [kurwa, ty objadlas sie_
diablami a ia apostolami bozymi]"); sig. 107 f. 445 ("shithead, banished-woman, they chased you from the
town, whore, sway-butt (?), you were paraded out of Krakow with candles and soon you'll be chased out of
Lublin [Gnojek, wygnanka, ciebie wygnaniono z miasta, murwa, kolywaszka, z Krakowa wyswiecano i z
Lublina niedhigo ciq wyswiecaj"); sig. 226 f. 57v ("kurwo, czarownico, widmo [whore, witch, hag]"); sig.
226 f. 477v ("ta kurwa, czarownica [that whore, that witch]"); sig. 50 f. 227 (in Latin). The complaints
arizing from such public insults, registered before the city-council (rada miejska) rather than before the
wqjt-court that investigated witch-trials, rarely resulted in a formal trial, but rather ended with a public
apology and warning (Riabinin 1928b p. 10).

488
 • Demon lovers •

statement with no meaning outside the function of insulting itself. To call a woman a whore

was to assert that she acts like a whore, or rather, that she acts as whores were understood or

imagined to act. This might imply that she sleeps around, or that she flaunts her assets in an

immodest manner, or it is ascribes to her other, ancillary traits of the imagined whore:

lewdness, drunkenness, vulgarity, slovenly house-keeping, the keeping of bad company, and

so on. The same can be said of the insult "witch." It need not (and usually did not) imply

actual acts of magic, but may be taken to have implied that the woman insulted was

quarrelsome, envious, spiteful, impious. While the one insult implies an excess of sociality,

an indiscriminate mixing of self with others in a manner that undermines personal honour,

the other implies anti-social behaviour but, concedes that the object of the insult has a certain

power. The frequent combination of the two insults might best be interpreted, not as

equivalence but as complimentarity: to call a woman a whore and a witch is to impute to her

both of these constellations of negative traits; this does not suggest that, in the popular mind,

the one implied the other. Thus, when Polish accused witches, under torture, confessed with

relative willingness to the crimes of witchcraft, but made every attempt to deny the

accusation of diabolical sex or, if that failed, to make clear that it was unwilling and un-

enjoyable, they were staking their claim to a partial share of the honour they had lost through

the process of the trial. At the point in the proceedings when such confessions were made,

there was usually no possibility at all that the accused would escape sentencing as witches

and burning at the stake; they could still, however, avoid declaring themselves to be whores.

The resolute refusal to declare one's own guilt in the face of unimaginable pain, or,

where this proved impossible, to modify that guilt in certain directions via selected emphasis

of demonological tropes, may be best read not as an attempt to save one's own life but rather

489
 • C h a p t e r 3.2 •

to save the meaning of that life; to preserve one's subjectivity and to ensure that one will be

remembered aright (Cf. Purkiss 1996 p. 145). If the trope of demon-sex was indeed, as

Stephens argues, usually a forced imposition on accused witches, this does not mean that

they were powerless to resist or to modify, to deflect, the implications of this imposition.

They gave themselves sexually to devils, but they did not do so willingly; they refused to be

subsumed into the discourse of overwhelming female lust.

3.2.3: The Trial of Zofia Baranowa. Appropriation and self-expression

Thus far, I have been suggesting that accused witches could turn aspects of elite discourse

against itself: they could take up the motif of the cold diabolical phallus and use it to counter

the motif of the hyper-sexual witch. In doing so, they managed to some extent to defend what

they would probably have thought of as their virtue—their sexual propriety as wives or

widows or maidens. But this must have been a decidedly partial defence of the self: although

these accused witches managed to avoid total subsumation into the demonological "script,"

they preserve (or at any rate express) very little outside of that script.

I now turn to a rather different case, one that raises different questions and demands a

different sort of interpretation. Whereas, in the confessions discussed above, diabolical sex

was just one aspect of a complex of crimes associated with witchcraft, in the case of Zofia

Baranowa it formed the main theme. Whereas the other accused witches expressed

something like individual subjectivity through their selective resistance to the demonological

stereotype of diabolical sex, Zofia Baranowa explores her own life narrative through these

stereotypes, to the apparent consternation of her interrogators. Whereas the other accused

witches tried to avoid or minimalize the erotic content of the pact motif, Zofia Baranowa

490
 • Demon lovers •

embraced it, and made it her own. This is an extraordinary and in many ways exceptional

trial, but that, it need hardly be said, takes away none of its interest.

Trial of Zofia Baranowa, Lublin 164337

On October 19 1643, the Lublin wqjt Wojciech Sawicki, accompanied by one juryman,
interrogated one Zofia Baranowa "sortilegii inculpata." Zofia was a marginal woman in many
ways: she lived outside the city walls with her commoner husband Wojciech Baran, but could
often be found at the brothel kept by the Lublin executioner.38 It is not clear whether she
worked there or simply chose the brothel as a place to drink—for Zofia spent most of her time
drunk, as she admitted several times in her testimony. Thus she can not have enjoyed a high
reputation. Moreover, she was a stranger in Lublin, having been born in Rus, "near Lwow in
Stary Grodek,"although her testimony is recorded in quite standard Polish and she was
certainly Catholic—and thus ethnically Polish. Zofia had come to be imprisoned "ad
instantiam instigatoris officii consularis Lublinensis"—that is, by the request of the official
instigator of the Lublin city council, rather than, as was more usual, by a private accusation.
Considering her possible prostitution and unquestionable alcoholism, she may have originally
been arrested for some sort of public disturbance or other public crime; the precise original
accusation is not, however, recorded.
The court questioned Zofia in the torture chamber under the town hall, but did not put her to
torture. Asked where she had learned witchcraft, she answered "I don't know how to do
witchcraft, except for spells [zmuwki] which I use when a brewer-woman asks me, if there are
problems with her barrells and buckets, and that is to aid in the brewing." Asked how many
other witches there are in Lublin, she answered "I don't know, I don't know any." She did
admit, however, to selling herbs, including the poisonous pokrzyk, , snake venom, and snakes
themselves—the last to players at dice as a luck charm. She also brought a snake to the
"house of vanity" kept by the executioner, "for ointment."40 She appears to have had some
reputation and practice as a cunning-woman.
Abruptly, however, and without any apparent provocation, Zofia's testimony took a strange
turn:

Itemfassa, izem obcowala kilka lat bez me_za sama She also testified, that I've had relations for a few
nie wiem zkiem, a ten com znem obcowala iest years without my husband, with someone else I
zimny iak trup y smierdzi. A to bylo po smierci myself don't know who, and this man with whom
m^zowey, a niegada do mnie y zmqzem nie mam I've had relations is cold like a corpse, and smells.
obcowania tilko zniem, a cieplo tilko And this was after the death of my [first] husband,
powierzchowne od niego, y lada kiedy mie. wie_c and he doesn't speak to me, and I don't have
tra_cil w bloto, a tego niepowiedalam przed relations with my [current] husband, only with him,
kaplanem, bo mi zakazal. and he is is warm only on the surface, and at any
time he knocks me into the mud, and I didn't make
confession to the priest about this, because he
forbade me to.

37
All quotations over the next several pages are from this trial (#39, Lublin 1643). The full text of the trial is
provided in Appendix A.
38
Brothels under the direction of the executioner, often in his prison in a tower of the town wall, near the gate,
or as in Lublin near the public baths, were legal, but made up only a small percentageof the sex trade. The
executioner's prostitutes, for the most part, were recruited from women previously charged with illegal
prostitution in an unlicensed brothel or on the street (Zaremska 1986; Karpinski 1995 p. 336).
39
Possibly mandrake, as the name pokrzyk (lif'scream") suggests. However, the same term was used for
belladonna or deadly night-shade, among many other possibilities. See Appendix B.
40
Snakes and their venom were an important part of learned medicine. Haur recommends a powder from the
liver of a snake or adder, against snakebite, consumptions, plague, fever, and stomach complaints. The more
poisonous the snake, the stronger the medicine (Haur 1693 pp. 401-402).

491
 • Chapter 3.2 •

Itemfassa, isz ia piie. gorzalke. y miedzy ludzmi z She also testified, that I drink vodka, and when I'm
niem y ia go widze., a on mi$, ludzie go niewidza^, a with him among people I see him and he sees me,
tak chodzi iako moi majz niebosczyk [sic], a kazal but others don't see him. And he walks like my late
mi sie. nazwac pawlem dlatego izem miala brata husband, and he told me to call him Pawel because I
Pawla. A ten tak zemna. dhago obcuie. iakoby y majz. had a brother named Pawel. And he's had relations
with me for a long time, as if he were my husband.
Itemfassa, isz mi sie. kazal maczac za ten czlonek She also testified, that he told me to stroke his male
me_ski y widzialam nasienie na re_ku swych. organ and I saw his seed on my hand.
Itemfassa, izem byla zniem brzemienna^ potym mie. She also testified, that I was pregnant by him, later
cos pottuklo y co wiedzec gdzie sie. podzialo. something hit me and who knows where it [the
fetus] went.
Itemfassa, izem miewiala zniem sprawe. wdrodze y She also testified, that I've had business [i.e. sex]
wgaiu, aiam sama legla, a to wtakiei postaci bylo with him on the road and in the grove, and I lay
jako niebosczyk Szydlowski moi ma.z, re.ce ma down myself [that is, she was not forced], and he
szpetne y rogi brzytkie, kudlata glowa. was in the shape of Szydlowski, my dead husband,
he has hideous hands and ugly horns, and curly hair.
[...] [...]
Itemfasa, isz odprawiwszy zemna. rzec cielesna. She also testified, that after doing the thing of the
tedy co wiedziec ke.dy sie. podzial. flesh with me, who knows where he went [i.e., he
disappeared immediately afterwards].
Itemfassa, isz nizeli do mniei przystal tedy mi sie. She also testified, that before he started coming to
przysnil tento Pawel w postaci Stanislawa me, he appeared to me in dreams, that Pawel in the
Szydlowskiego, me.za mego y mowil mi: umkniei shape of Stanislaw Szydlowski, my husband, and he
mi sie_, a iam mu powiedziala, wszakes ty umarl, said to me: move over, I said to him, but you died!
owo rzekl: eye, nie frasui sie. ieszczem ci ia zyw, a He said: Tsk, don't worry, I am still alive to you,
dlatego mi sie_ pokazal w postaci m^za mego, bom and he appeared to me in the shape of my husband,
wtym me.zu swym kochala. because I loved that husband of mine.
Itemfassa, isz bywal u mnie w miesia.cu podwa She also testified, that he was with me during the
razy, wewtorek, we czwartek y teraz wten czwartek, [last] month about two times, on Tuesday, on
wtedym niseli kiedym byla w domu nierzajinem, u Thursday and now this last Thursday, before I was
mnie byl y obcowal ze mna. cielesnie ten Pawel y on in the brothel, he visited me and had carnal relations
mi roskazal do mistrza, bo mie. byl maz pobil. Aten with me, that Pawel, and he told me to go to the
Pawel nigdy mi nic nie daie. executioner [in the brothel], because my husband
had been beating me. And that Pawel never gives
me anything.
[...] [...]
Itemfassa, isz dla tegom obcowala ztem Pawlem, She also testified, that I had relations with that
bom przyniewolona wzie_la ztem mezem moiem Pawel because I married my current husband
teraznieszem y niesmakowala go sobie. against my will, and he wasn't to my taste.
Itemfassa, isz ten Pawel skoro y kury zapialy, She also testified, that as soon as the the hens [sic]
cowiedziec gdzie sie. podzial, a ten Pawel takze crowed, who can say where that Pawel disappeared
oczu niemial iako y moi ma.z niebosczyk, ktoremu to, and Pawel didn't have eyes like my previous
oko bylo wybito iedno, a drugie wyplynqlo, a husband, who had one eye knocked out, and the
nozdrza niemial. other poured out, and he didn't have nostrils.41
[...]
Itemfassa, isz zawsze na gorzalce piial ze mna. ten She also testified, always that Pawel drank liquor
Pawel y zawsze abo si? skiem poswarzylam, albo with me, and always I either quarrelled with
mie. kto pobil. A on miq dla tego uczyl zebym zlosci somebody, or somebody beat me up. And for that
tym wyrza_dzala, kiedy mie. kto pobil, albo mie. reason he taught me how to make trouble for those
palaial y kazal mi wiec y zapalac y osypac domy, who beat me up or cussed me out, and he told me to
iednak iam tegom nie czynila. Akazal mi brae na light houses on fire and sprinkle them, however, I
osypanie ziemie co wicher wykre_ca, mowia.c iak to didn't do this. And he told me to gather soil which
sie. wywrocilo, tak sie one wywroca^ y brala ia te. had been spun in a whirlwind for sprinkling, saying:

41
Baranowa's grotesque description of the eyes seems to refer to her late husband, but more probably relates to
the devil Pawel—as the description of nostrils certainly does.

492
 • Demon lovers •

ziemie. co wicher wykre_cil y ma.m ia. w domu w just as [this soil] has toppled over, so will [these
worku, iednak iesczem nikogo nie oszula. Pytana houses] topple over, and I gathered that soil from a
jak przymawiala do tego. Odp: isz tak mowila: whirlwind, and I have it in a sack at home, however
Pawle, wywroc to Pawlowa. moca.. I haven't sprinkled anyone with it yet. Asked what
she said during such an act she answered: that I
said: Pawel, topple this over by your Pawelish
power.

The court, perhaps perturbed at the direction Zofia's testimony was taking, postponed further
questioning to the following day, and arranged for a medical doctor, "his excellence Albert
Samborskf to attend when the court reconvened. On the following day Zofia reported, in
response to questioning, that she slept well, but that "Later, something fell, like a bench and
when I said 'Jesus' it grabbed me by the eyes and commanded me to stick myself with a
needle."42 She reiterated some of her previous testimony, but added that Pawel had required
her to renounce the Most Holy Sacrament, and furthermore:

isz mie roskazal wyrzec naswietszej Panny, ktora. that he commanded me to renounce the most holy
zwal Szeroka^ takse y Szerokiego, iednakem sie. ia Virgin, whom he called "the Wide Woman" or "the
nie wyrzekla y chcial zebym mu sie. zapisala. A Wide Man." However, I didn't renounce her, and he
p. Boga nazwal Szerokiem. Item recognovit, isz wanted me to sign myself over to him. He called the
chcialam si? iusz wyrzec, alem nie data sie Lord God "the Wide Man." She also testified, that I
namowic. A tu w wi?zieniu bez malam sie, m? [sic] even wanted to renounce them, but I didn't allow
nie oddalam y mowilam mu iesli wynid?, tedyc sie. myself to be persuaded. And here in the prison, I
oddajn. very nearly gave myself over [to him], aind I said, If
I get out of here, I'll give myself over [to you].
Itemfassa, zem si? Panny Naswietszei zapszala She also testified, that I denied the Blessed Virgin,
czego zahii? z serca takze y p. Boga wyrzeklam si? which I regret from my heart, and I also renounced
y mowila czartowi: iusz si? p. Boga wyrzekam, a the Lord God, and I said to the devil: Now I've
teraz sie. tobie oddaie, a to na ten czas bylo kiedy renounced the Lord God, and now I'll give myself
gorzala na p. Goraiskiego gruncie. over to you, and this was during the time that there
was the fire on the grounds of Pan Gorajski.
Itemfassa, isz po tym wyroku przyimowala She also testified, that after this pact [wyrok] I took
Naswi?tszy Sacrament, iednak przed kaplanem tego the Most Blessed Sacrament; however, I didn't
wyroku nie powiedala. confess to this pact before the priest.
Itemfassa, isz mi ten czart obieczowal zem si? z She also testified, that this devil promised that with
niem miala miec dobrze, iednak nigdy mi nie nie him I'd have things good, however he never gave
dal, owszem mie pobil, pothikl y dla niego ludzie me anything, but he beat me, hit me and sometimes
nie czasem pobili. because of him others beat me.
Pytana gdzie z tym czartem bywala? odp: isz Asked where she met with this devil she answered: I
bywala zniem w gaiu czasem y dwa razy nadzien. A met with him in the grove, sometimes twice in one
bywal we wtorek, we czwartek y we szrod?, to iest day. And he was there on Tuesdays, Thursdays and
na nowiu y na schodzie y dla niego mieszkalam Wednesdays, that is at the new moon and the full
wniezgodzie z m?zem, ktory lubo mie. pobil iednak moon,43 and for his sake I lived in disagreement
mialam moc, bo mi ten czart sily dodawal. with my husband, who liked to beat me, however I
had strength, for that devil gave me strength.
She also testified, that when I was in the house of ill
Itemfassa, isz gdym byla w domu nierza.dnem u repute,at the executioner's, that devil was with me
mistrza, tedy ten czart natenczas zemna. w takowei during that time, in the shape of my late husband.
postaci iako moi ma_z niebosczyk. Also, I saw in a dream as if music was playing,
Item widywala przez sen iakoby grano za

"Potym spadlo cos iak lawka y gdym mowila Jesus, porwalo mi? za oczy y roskaziwalo mi, abym si? igla.
zakhila."
43
1 have translated "na schodzie" as "at the full moon." This is not a meaning I have found in any dictionary,
but, since "na schodzie" means "at the end [of a year, season, day, etc. ]" and is placed here in opposition to
"na nowiu" which means "at the beginning" but specifically "at the new moon," I think the translation is
sound.

493
 • Chapter 3.2 •

Kokotowskiem na tem mieiscu ke_dy groby s$. beyond Kokotowskie, near the graves of the dead,
umarrych, a to miesce [sic] iest za borem na pustem and that place is beyond the forest on a deserted
placu i niedalego od pahskiego, gdzie widzialam open space, not far from the lord's fields,44 where I
chlopy y niewiasty chodzaj; do kola, a iam patrzyla saw peasant-men and women walking in a circle,
na nich y Pawel ten czart byl przy mnie zka_d miq i and I watched and Pawel, that devil was with me,
wie_c do domu odprowadziwszy odszedl do tychze and after he escorted me back home he went to
ludzi. A na tym mieiscu zawsze ci ludzie bywali those people. And those people were always in that
kiedy ten czart u mnie byl. A mnie iakby cos tam place when the devil was at my house. And
zanioslo gdzie grano w szurmy y w dudy, a wszyscy something, as it were, carried me there, where they
byli pod piormi, iednak nic nie pili, tilko tancowali, played on fifes and bagpipes, and they were all
a to sie dzialo z wieczora y niedhigo te tonce trwaly drunk,45 although they didn't drink anything, only
y gdy mnie prosila do siebie tedym ia nie szla. danced, and this happened in the evening and the
dances didn't last long, and when they invited me to
join in, I didn't go there.

Two days later, on October 22nd, the court asked Zofia whether she "stood by her confessions
during torture. She replied, that I do not stand by them, and anything I said was confessed
from fear."46 The court accepted this argument, and, noting formulaicly that "probationes in
criminalibus debent esse luce meridiana clariores" chose to sentence her only for her trade in
snakes and herbs. The sentence, of flogging, is one of the mildest known to me for any town-
court witch-trial, and has suggested to at least one scholar (Karpihski 1995 p. 322) that the
court assumed Zofia to have been insane.

Confronted with such a narrative, by turns intimate and bizarre, what options are open

to us as readers and interpreters, and what responsibilities? In the first place one must note

the close correspondence of the text, both as a whole and in many details, with both the

demonological motif of demonic sex and with more folkloric accounts of devil pacts. One

might note, for example, parallels between Zofia's testimony and that of Abigail Brigs, in

Suffolk in 1645. Just as he did to Zofia Baranowa, the devil appeared to Abigail Brigs,

shortly after the death of her husband, in the shape and appearance of that husband, and lay

with her, promising to in her late husband's voice that "I will be a loueinge husband to you."

She consented to his attentions, and he promised to help her gain revenge on her enemies, but

It is not clear what Zofia can have meant by "panskiego"—that is, something belonging to some "lord." I
have resisted a theological reading, which seems out of place here: she probably means the fields belonging
to a particular noble land-owner, perhaps Pan Rozwadowski, owner of the grove she had mentioned earlier.
45
1 have translated "pod piormi" as "drunk," as seems required in the context. This uncommon phrase,
translatable literally as "under the feathers," usually means "under [someone's] protection"—as we would
say "under someone's wing."
46
"iesli stoi przy tym co zeznala na me_kach. Odpowiedziala, iz nie stoiq, a cokolwiekiem powiedziala, tedy to
wszytko ze strachu zeznalam." Although this passage seems to suggest that Zofia was tortured, her reply and
further comments in the sentence make clear that by "during torture" the court here had in mind that she was
questioned in the torture chamber and under threat of torture.

494
 • Demon lovers •

"she found Satan a liar." (Ewen ed. 1929 p. 300; see discussion in Quaife 1987 p. 103). It

would not be too difficult to adduce similar confessions from all over Europe. Zofia's

narrative, then, though heartfelt and seemingly sincere, is a more than twice-told tale.

Seen from this perspective, there is almost nothing original or, one might want

therefore to say, individual, about Zofia's testimony. (Moreover, what is original seems

entirely opaque to analysis, as when Baranowa mentions having "lived for a while on

Szpitalna street, in the hut of Zablocka, and only frogs go into that hut.")47 Nearly everything

can be found elsewhere, either in the elite demonological discourse, in Slavic or Polish

folklore, or both. At a time of crisis, the devil appears to a woman. As in England (Abigail

Brigs, above) or Russia (Ivantits 1989 p. 43), the crisis has to do with the death of the

woman's husband, and the devil appears in that husband's guise. He treats her roughly,

throwing her into the mud. He is cold, and smells of the grave. He demands sex, including

transgressive sexual practices such as manual stimulation, and he forbids her to make

confession to the priest. He appears suddenly, most often on Thursdays—the day of the

sabbat, but also the day on which 15th-century Polish housewives fed their house-demons—

and he disappears just as suddenly, always before the crowing of the roosters to herald the

dawn. His appearance, with "hideous hands and ugly horns and curly hair," is entirely

standard across Europe; his lack of nostrils is a local detail, belonging to spefically Polish

devil folklore—nearly three centuries later, folklorists found this to be a typical feature of

Polish devils (Fischer 1926 p. 204). Zofia was a perfect target for such a devil, being

"zamieszkala na Szpitalnei ulice na hahipie Zablockiei, a do tei chahipy iedno zaby leza^."
Compare #9, Poznan 1582, in which Anna Chociszewska explains that her latawiec, unlike most, does not
"lie with women and throw them out of bed and beat them [jako wie_c czqsto latawcy z drugimi legajX i
wyrzucaja_ wie.c takowe bialeglowy z lozka i bijaje];" cf. also the rough treatment to which Dorota of
Siedlikow's szatan subjected her, or the "monk" Jan who punched Jagnieszka Kazimierzowa in the arm
(#21, Kalisz 1613; #151, Pyzdry 1719).

495
 • Chapter 3.2 •

dissatisfied in marriage and drunken and, moreover, as she says, exceptionally quarrelsome,

so that she was always getting into fights. He provided her with tools to revenge herself on

those who wrong her through acts of malefice. She gathers soil from a whirlwind and

sprinkles it on houses, making use of the analogical structure so typical of Polish spells: "Just

as this soil has toppled over, so too these houses will topple over." The spell moreover makes

use of a whole series of implicit meaings: in Polish as in English whirlwinds are also "dust

devils" and can be the physical instantiation of a demon (Moszynski 1967 vol. 2 pt. 1

pp. 470-485; cf. the devil "Wicher" or "whirlwind" in the Sejm piekielny (1622 v. 808ff;

1903 p. 45)); gathering of soil—from the graves of infants (Ivanits 1989 pp. 93-94; cf. 3.1.4

above), from anthills (e.g. #22, Kalisz 1616; #33, Bydgoszcz 1638; #86, Warta 1679), from

the hoof-prints of cattle (2.1.3; cf. Moszynski 1967 vol. 2 pt. 1 pp. 294-295)—to make use of

the power of whatever the soil has been associated with, is standard in Polish and wider

Slavic witchcraft lore; sprinkling of powders, associated with the "drying" action typical of

Polish malefice, is, again a standard practice (see 2.1.3). The devil's names for God and the

Virgin Mary, "Szeroki" and "Szeroka," seem idiosyncratic, but the latter is repeated by

another devil in a trial some 90 years later.49 Zofia's devil demands that she renounce God,

the Virgin Mary, and the Eucharist, and to pledge herself to him; he visits her in jail and

attempts to silence her testimony. Finally, she testifies to an attenuated version of the sabbat,

which she viewed at a distance.

During the interrogation of Ruthenian witches hired by the noble Mytko family to attempt the malefic murder
of p. Brzyski, lawyer before the Trybunal Koronny for the Mytko's rivals in a property dispute, the peasant
Kazimierz Kmarynski testified that the devil had not succeeded in the attempted murder because, in its own
words"mocna i szeroka [strong and wide] won't let me within a mile of him." This trial is separated from
that of Zofia Baranowa by 89 years, and many miles (although both Zofia and the accused in the later trial
are from Ruthenia), but it appears that in both cases szeroka is a diabolical euphemism for the Virgin Mary.

496
 • Demon lovers •

Zofia's narrative, both in over-all structure and in many detail, follows standard motifs:

almost none of the story originates with her. But it would be a great mistake to assume,

thereby, that she had nothing o/herself to say. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter,

one does not discover the individual by subtracting discourse and examining whatever is left

over: people express their subjectivity, to themselves as to others, through the motifs and

structures available. This is as true of witchcraft confessions as it is, for example, of the

sonnet form in poetry, where both a rigid structure and a time-worn collection of metaphors

do not prevent new poets from expressing new, individual, and sincere protestations of love.

For Zofia Baranowa's testimony is, above all, a love story—a story she tells to herself

as much as to her judges. Too much attention to the bizarre details of demonic sex—the

missing nostrils, the horns, the body cold like a corpse; too much attention to questions of

origin—the balance between learned demonology and popular folklore in Baranowa's

testimony, comparisons to similar tropes from Germany or Russia or Scotland; all the work,

in short, of interpretation and analysis, should not distract one from the singular fact that this

testimony of an apparently insane herbalist contains one of the very few first-hand

expressions of marital or romantic love from an early modern Polish common-woman. In her

excellent study of the Christian family in early modern Poland, Elzbieta Wrobel bewails the

impossibility of knowing anything about peasant and commoner love-relationships, for lack

of sources (2002 p. 130). Ironically, Baranowa's strange testimony may be among the best

sources we have.

"[A]nd he appeared to me in the shape of my husband, because I loved that husband of

mine." In its pathos and naivite, this simple statement demands of the reader a commitment

to an ethics of interpretation. It requires an acknowledgement: that whatever else Zofia

497
 • Chapter 3.2 •

Baranowa's testimony might represent and whatever uses we may put it to, whether to trace

the infiltration of demonological tropes into folk belief or to provide an early date for motifs

recorded by Kolberg three centuries later, it is, first, an extremely personal statement, by a

particular person, trying to make sense of her own life. Although her Pawel is violent, rough,

and in many ways disappointing—as, perhaps, her husband Stanislaw Szydlowski had

been—he is above all a reminder of that husband. For his sake she "lives in disagreement"

with her current, abusive husband Wojciech Baran. Pawel helped Zofia to withstand

Wojciech's beatings: "however I had strength, for that devil gave me strength." At Pawel's

urging she made the momentous decision to leave her abusive marital home and take up

residence at the brothel (perhaps, permanently, as an employee—however, this is not clear).

Through Pawel's urging she refused to have sex with Wojciech: "and I don't have relations

with my husband, only with him." In contrast to most narratives of diabolical sex (and

despite Pawel's coldness, smell, and horrid appearance) she had sex with him willingly and

often: "I've had business with him on the road and in the grove, and I lay down myself. And

he was in the shape of Szydlowski, my dead husband, he has hideous hands and ugly horns,

and curly hair ..." It is impossible, and misguided, to try to separate the "diabolical"elements

in this narrative from the personal elements: they run together seamlessly. Zofia's narrative is

not a diabolical script peppered with personal reflections, nor a personal introspection

diverted unwillingly into demonological channels. The narrative forms a whole, at once

"scripted" and deeply personal. As Lyndal Roper has said in a similar context, of a witchcraft

confession itself simultaneously intimate and standardized:

[...N]arratives in which people try to make sense of their psychic conflicts usually involve
borrowing a from language which is not at first the individual's own. We might say that
coming to understand oneself can involve learning to recognize one's feelings in the terms of
a theory, psychoanalytic or diabolic, which one might not originally have applied to oneself,
and it can also entail a kind of violence (Roper 1994 p. 206).

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 • Demon lovers •

The accused witches discussed in 3.2.2, above, maintained some remnant of their

subjectivity, and of their self-respect, by resisting selected motifs of the pact or sabbat

stereotype: they played down its sexual aspect, and made clear that the sex had been

unwilling and unpleasant. In contrast, Zofla Baranowa appropriated the stereotype in toto,

including especially its sexual aspect, and took it up as a structuring framework for her own

life-story. Diabolism, and diabolical sex, became what Roper would call a "theory" by which

Zofia recognized and justified her hatred of the abusive Wojciech Baran, and her love for the

late Stanislaw Szymkowski. This theory also gave her strength to resist her husband's

beatings, comfort in a fantasy sex-life, and self-justification for her constant drunkenness and

her visits to the Lublin brothel.

In both this section and the last, we have assumed, for the most part, that the stereotype

of diabolical sex derives wholly from the elite discourse. We have noted certain local aspects

of the devils involved—their red clothing, or lack of nostrils, or the way they could be

acquired from a fellow witch in a crust of bread or a clump of flax-fibres—but we have

assumed that the sex comes from demonology, even if the devils do not. This assumption will

be re-examined, and found wanting, in the following section.

3.2.4: A warm nature: indigenization of the demon lover

In a passage already quoted above, Walter Stephens asserts that "the idea that witches

copulated with demons was characteristic of scholarly fantasies about witchcraft, while it

was foreign to the oral imagination of the illiterate village and countryside" (Stephens 2001

p. 154). This scholarly fantasy had a number of motivations, as discussed above; nevertheless

the central point of of the fantasy (or, to speak less judgmentally, of the construction), from

499
 • Chapter 3.2 •

at least the Malleus onward, was rather simple and practical. Nearly all theologians, of every

confession, agreed that witches could not perform the acts they and their commoner accusers

asserted them to perform, except with the assistance of demons. Most of the herbs, and all of

the spells, enchantments, signs, rituals, and amulets allegedly made use of by witches, were

so much superstition and ignorant nonsense, with no possible causative force. Insofar,

therefore, as witchcraft worked at all—insofar as people and cattle died, crops withered, and

so on—this could only be the work of demons, whose preturnatural abilities could

accomplish all this and more, with God's permission. The notions of the explicit and implicit

pact are a direct consequence of this theological syllogism: witchcraft does have real effects,

these effects cannot be caused by the spells attributed to witches, therefore they must be

caused by demons working in such a way as to seem to be the witches' servants (though they

are really their masters). Sex is a corollary, since the witches must be supposed to be giving

something in exchange for this demonic assistance: Chmielowski puts the matter delicately

when he says that a familiar spirit can only be summoned by "promising him some indecent

thing"50 (1754 vol. 3 p. 238). Worked out most thoroughly and authoratively in Book II of

Del Rio's Disquisitiones, the theology of the pact commanded the consensus, with variations,

of all the early modern demonologists, Catholic and Protestant, including those who opposed

the indiscriminate prosecution of witch-trials (Clark 1997 pp. 466ff).

All this is uncontroversial, indeed incontrovertable. But it does not suggest, as Stephens

seems to think, that concepts of demonic assistance in witchcraft were foreign to "the oral

imagination of the illiterate village and countryside" (2001 p. 154). It is true that, in contrast

to theologians although probably not in contrast to most townspeople or szlachta or indeed

"Do takiey ushigi nie moze bydz czart sprowadzony, tylko per pactum explicitum albo implicitum y przez
obietnic? iemu rzeczy iakiey niegodziwey."

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 • Demon lovers •

the less educated of the clergy, villagers in Poland as elsewhere in Europe did think that a

great deal of what witches could accomplish took place ex opere operato, without the need

for any mediating intervention of demons. This does not imply, however, that notions of

demonic assistance must, in themselves, be solely elite constructions, or that their appearance

in confessions must be a sign of elite colonization of the popular imagination. In Poland, the

association of witches with demonic assistants was well established at every level of

discourse; the same is true, for example, in England with the widespread belief in witches'

familiars.51 Recall that in Poland the terms employed to describe bewitchment include
cry

"sending witchcraft," "sending deviltry," and "sending devils." There is no basis for seeing

the latter phrase as more elite than the former; in fact they are all used interchangeably, as

synonyms. Recall, too, peasant accusers and witnesses often described the effects of malefice

as "possession" by devils, healable by excorcism—even where the malefice-caused illness

displayed few or no features of possession as usually understood. Recall, finally, that in 3.1

we asserted that the "devils" thus sent for malefice, or otherwise employed, might better be

understood as house-demons or fairies, more leprechaun than Lucifer. Although diabolical

sex may be an elite imposition, the notion of demonic helpers was wide-spread and entirely

popular, and did not necessarily imply, in the popular mind, that the owners of such helpers

were witches.

With all this in mind, let us examine, briefly, three trials that combine, more clearly

than heretofore, the motif of diabolical sex with that of the folkloric or fairy-like devil.

1. The self-avowed cunning woman Dorota of Siedlikow admitted before torture to

ownership of a szatan named Kasparek, who helped her find lost items. Under torture, she
51
Stephens remarks the English conception of demons as assistants and companions rather than as masters of
witches, and attributes it to the lack of judicial torture in that country (2002 pp. 103-104).
2
"naslanie czarow," "naslanie diabelstwa," "naslanie diablow [czartow, biesow, etc. ]."

501
 • Chapter 3.2 •

elaborated her narrative in directions we have come to expect, but also in other ways.

Kasparek is small, black, and hairy [kosmaty], dressed in red, with the head of a dog, and his

hands are cold. As discussed in 3.2.2, Dorota at first confessed to having had sex with her

szatan for two hours, but later revised this story and spoke of having driven him away with

the sign of the cross. As is typical in a pact narrative, Kasparek promised Dorota butter and

money in return for her subservience; but he continued: "boil millet groats with milk, and

you will have things well in my company."53 Later in her testimony, having confessed to

attendance at the sabbat, Dorota testified that in making witches ointment she had the help of

a latawiec who gave her a feather (#21, Kalisz 1613).

2. Katharzyna Koziminska, a married peasantwoman from Drwalow near Wyszogrod,

confessed to having her own diabel named Stanisiek (a diminuitive of Stanislaw), whom she

had acquired a year or so previous from one Eapina Tomkowa.

Przynioslam go do domu y dawalam mu mleka, I brought him home and gave him milk, I hid him
chowatam go za kominem na gorze, przez noc behind the stove, up high, he went away during the
odszedl, o ktorym y nikt nie wiedzial. Ten diabel tego night, which nobody knew. That devil wanted from
chcial odemnie, abym go miala za me_za, a on mnie me, that I treat him as a husband, and he promised to
obiecal nosic majsi, kaszq y czego my be_dzie potrzeba, bring me flour, kasza, and whatever I might need, but
ale my nic nie przyniosl. Chcial ten diabel ze mna_ he brought me nothing. That devil wanted to have
miec spolecznosc, ale jakby mnie co mowilo odrzuc relations with me, but its as if something said get rid
tego diabla od siebie, i znowu spowiadalam sie_ na of that devil, and so again I confessed before the priest
swieta, Anne_ przed ksie_dzem z tegoz, kazal shizyc mi on St. Anna's day about this, and he told me to serve
Panu Bogu ale nie diabhi. Przyszedl w zapusty znowy the Lord God and not the devil. The devil came to me
do mnie diabel i mowil mi tak: no, bedzieszze ze mna_ again on carnival Tuesday [zapusty, the last day of
mieszkala, czy nie, jam odpowiedziala: lee diable carnival] and he said: well, are you going to live with
odemnie, i tak mowil: P6jde_ do tej Tomkowej. me or not, I said: get away from me, devil, and he
Przyszedl do spichrza: no chcesz mi sie_ poddac, czy said, I'll go to Tomkowa. He came to me in the
nie, jam powiedziala: lee diabla odemnie, i powiadaja^ pantry: Well, are you going to submit to me, or not, I
ludzie, ze byl pies czarny w chahipie, gdzie ja said, get away from me, devil, and people say, that
mieszkam" there was a black dog in the hut where I live.
(#139, Wyszogrod 1705).

3. Agnieszka Jakobka, who came to trial through the denunciation of Anna Szymkowa

in the immediately previous trial, confessed under torture to a demon lover, named Michal,

"jagielka z mlekiem warzyla i bqdziesz sie. przy mnie miala dobrze"

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 • Demon lovers •

who "dressed in red"54 He lived in her head (presumably she means in her hair; this is a

relatively common motif), but left recently, thus enabling her to confess before the court.

They had had sex, and although he promised "lots of good things," "to this point in time he's

given me nothing."55 This confession, unremarkable so far, took an interesting turn after

Agnieszka had undergone torture for the third time:

[P]owtarzam, zem jest czarownica, ozeniona z I repeat: I am a witch, married to a devil. His name is
dyabtem. Imie mu Michal, on tez mnie dal imie Michal, and he gave me the name Hanka. He is a
Hanka. On jest ubogi chlop prosty. Ja na niego simple, poor peasant. I had to work to support him. He
musialam robic. Obiecowal ci on mnie wiele, a promised me a whole lot, but so far he's not given me
jesczcze mi nic nie dal. Ja mu dawac musialam a thing. I had to give him milk to drink. We used to go
zrec mleka. Na lysy gorze za Szpitalem together to bald mountain, beyond the village of
bywalismy. W glowie mi siadal, obcowal ze mna. Szpital. He sat in my head, he had intercourse with me
dwa razy w izbie na ziemi, jak ma^z z zona,. O tym twice, in my chamber, on the floor, like a man with his
maz moy nie wiedzial, bo wtedy na strozy bywal. wife. My husband didn't know about that, because he
Kochala ja tego dyabla, y on tesz mnie kochal. was standing guard56 at the time. I loved that devil and
Mialam w nim wielkie upodobanie, bo natura he loved me as well. I took great pleasure in him, for
jego ciepla byla (#154, Nieszawa 1721b). his nature [i.e. penis] was warm.

All three accused witches describe a reciprocal relation with their devils. The devil

provides (or at least promises) wealth or butter or grain or "good things," while the witch

provides her soul, symbolized by sexual submission. So far this is entirely standard. But in

these confessions, the witch also provides her devil with food, and this is food of a specific

kind: milk, or in the case of Dorota, milk cooked up with millet groats. Katharzyna adds the

detail that she hid her devil "up high, behind the stove," while Agnieszka, extraordinarily,

asserts that her Michal gave her great erotic pleasure, "for his nature was warm." We will

want to return to this statement; for the moment, however, the salient feature of these

confessions is their common theme of providing their devils with milk.

Now milk, by itself but especially boiled with groats, is the food given to domowiki—

house-demons—in return for their work in maintaining and increasing the prosperity of the

54
"w czerwieni chodzi."
55
"wiele dobrego;" "do tego czasu jeszcze mi nic nie dal."
5
Male peasant householders stood night watches in rotation, primarily to guard against fire (Korta 1992 p. 73).

503
 • Chapter 3.2 •

household. This is a simple act of reciprocity: house-demons maintain the productivity of

milch-cows and of the grain in the fields, and they take in return a portion of the resulting

produce. This reciprocal relationship between house-demons and women, who are

responsible for maintaining the relationship by preparing and providing the food offerings on

Thursdays, prevails across the entire Slavic world, as also among the Baits. In folklore

collected by 19th-century ethnographers they are often combined with the (possibly

originally distinct) treasure-hauler class of demons, who increase one's prosperity by stealing

from neighbors. A typical feature of treasure haulers is their transferability—like

Katharzyna's Stanisiek, they can be acquired or purchased from others. And of course, as

already discussed in Chapter 3.1, they typically live behind the stove (like Stanisiek), and

they are often called latawcy (like Dorota's Kasparek). They appear as a small hairy man, as

a cat, or snake, or, especially under the title of latawiec, "the flying one," as a bird (cf.

Wroblewski 1962 p. 336)—note that Kasparek gave Dorota a feather.58

Kasza or groats (of barley, buckwheat, wheat, and millet) were and are a staple food in Poland, but their
central importance had largely been replaced by bread in the early modern period, and more recently, by
potatoes. However, their old importance continues to be recognized in ritual. A special dish of wheaten
groats sweetened with raisins is still eaten today at Wigilia (Christmas Eve), the holiday that more than any
other preserves numerous features of early Polish religion. According to Bruckner, among the "pagan
survivals" detectable in early modern popular piety was the baptism feast for kin and kumy (god-parents);
this feast featured a ceremonial dish of kasza (1957 vol. 1 p. 268). Both Wigilia and baptism are feasts of
kinship, and of course, even if one does not accept that cult of house-demons is the survival of an ancestor
cult, both house-demons and unbaptized souls are a sort of supernatural kin. Cf. Russian folk traditions,
according to which the domovoi are fed kasza without salt (Ivanits 1989 p. 170).
There is some scattered evidence, not by itself very convincing, that demon-helpers of trials were often
envisioned as birds, especially chickens or roosters. Katarzyna Blachowa of Falimierzyce testified that a
woman now dead, some time previous, had returned to her borrowed flour, which first turned into a bird,
"big like a chicken [jak kur wielki]", and then into apokusnik dressed in German clothes, with a feather in
his cap, but with chicken legs."He immediately attempted to persuade me to be submit to him [Zaraz mnie
namawial, abym mu powolna byla]" (#110, Lobzenica 1692). Compare the testimony of the Ruthenian
witch Anna Swedycka, who had a devil-servant named Iwan: "The chickens which sat in front of me on the
cart, when I was taken to Stary Sol, were czarci who had changed themselves into little birds" [Kurzy co
przedemna^ si^dzieli nawozie, kiedy miq wieziono do Starey Soli byli to czarci y przemiejnialy si? w ptaszki]
(#80, Lublin 1678). Zofia of Sumierzyce, possibly a cunning woman, who was implicated and dismissed in
the trial of Regina Dereciowa (#22, Kalisz 1616), saw "szatany in the form of roosters standing on the stove
[kokotow szatanow na piecu]" when she was in labor: both the location (the stove) and the circumstance
(child-birth) suggest some variety of latawiec or nocnic. In relation to this, it should be noted that latawcy,

504
 • Demon lovers •

It seems clear that the supernatural beings described in these three trials were not, in the

minds of the accused witches testifying, infernal devils as usually understood. Whatever their

judges might have thought, and whatever they might themselves have come to be convinced

of over the course of the trial, they initially understood themselves as standing in a

relationship to entities whose origin and function was not entirely diabolical, whose actions

were beneficient, and whose position was rather subservient than the reverse. This is not to

say, of course, that the beings in question weren't "really" devils but instead were "really"

house-demons: as constructions of the imagination (both social and individual), they were

really whatever they were thought of as being. As we saw in the previous chapter, this ends

up meaning that for the accused witches, and quite possibly also for their judges, they were

really both devils and house-demons—that the images, functions, and relationships implied

by both were inextricably mixed.

This view of things raises the question whether the erotic content of these confessions,

especially of the last one, belongs to the devil or to the domowik. In "colonizing" popular

conceptions of house-demons, did the elite discourse of infernal incubi sexualize them, or did

it encounter a sexual motif already there? In the remainder of this section, I wish to argue for

the latter option, taking as my starting point the term latawiec used by Dorota of Siedlikow to

describe her demonic companion, and the "warm nature" Agnieszka Jakobka attributes to her

demon lover. From this extremely thin basis I will want to propose, not, absurdly, that every

Polish witch who confessed to diabolical sex "in fact" had in mind sex with a local fairy or

especially insofar as these are the souls of unbaptized children, usually take the form of a bird, while house-
demons in general are also often birds. See e.g. DWOK vol. 15 pp. 25-27 concerning a skrzat who appears
during storms as a bedraggled, rain-drenched chicken: if you let it into your house and feed it, it will reward
you by stealing grain from others. Moszyhski finds the motif of the human soul as bird, especially the dead
infant as bird, well attested throughout Wielkopolska, Malopolska, and western Ruthenia (1967 vol. 2 pt. 1
p. 735).

505
 • Chapter 3.2 •

imp, but rather, that the elite conception of diabolical sex met with, mixed with, and was

influenced by an indigenous tradition of demon lovers.

• «$• •

In the previous chapter, we encountered the term latawiec (lit., "flying one") as the

most common name for the ghosts of unbaptized infants who, in bird form, as a shooting star,

or combining these as a fiery bird with a tail of sparks, flee before the thunderstorm crying

chrztu, chrztu!—"baptism, baptism!" But the same name, and sometimes the same

ontologogical status and appearance as an unbaptized infant, attaches to treasure-hauler

demons, who fly in through the chimney with their stolen grain or money. Thus for example

Marusza Nowaczka, in denouncing her neighbors under torture, claimed that "Ewa and

Lenartka have a latawiec in their attic, who brings them money, and they fly to Bald

Mountain and dance" (#86, Warta 1679).59 More to the point, latawiec is the term used, in

Polish demonology as in sermons, catechisms, and commentaries on the Bible, to translate

Latin succubus and incubus (see further discussion in 3.3, below).

It would be wrong to make too much of the this term. I have found it used in only five

trials (#8, Poznah 1582; #21, Kalisz 1613; #81, Muszyna 1678; #85, Warta c. 1679; #86,

Wartal679) and is unambiguously connected with sexuality only in the trial of Dorota

already discussed (#21). Moreover, it is only one of a long list of terms for house-demons or

treasure haulers, most of the others of which do not have any sexual implication; and in most

trials where accused witches confess to diabolical sex they use terms such as diabel, czart, or

pokusnik. There is no evidence that the term latawiec has a particularly ancient or pre-

Christian pedigree. In its oldest recorded variants from the late 15th century, it already

59
"Ewa i Lenartka maja. latawca na gorze, co im pieniqdzy dodawa i na Lysa^ G6re_ lataja^ i tancuja/'

506
 • Demon lovers •

implies a sexual devil or a nightmare, while the early term for benevolent house-demons is

ubozq. Nevertheless, a careful examination of the available textual evidence, in combination

with data from confessions and with ethnographic material, suggests that the constellation—

of functions, appearances, abilities, and imagined origins—subsumed under the label

latawiec constitutes a demon found, with surprisingly little variation, right across eastern

Europe from Bulgaria to Estonia. Although those accused witches who do not use the term in

their confessions cannot be supposed to have thought themselves accused of sexual relations

with a latawiec, they may very well have understood their czart or pokusnik as sharing many

of his features.

Linda Ivanits recounts a Russian folk creation-myth recorded in the late 19th century in

the Tula region. This story combines the theme of nature spirits originating as devils who

never reached hell (already encountered in 3.1 above) with an account of the "letuchie,

ognennye zmei [flying, fiery serpent]" who visits and seduces lonely women."The devils that

the Archangel Michael defeated didn't all fall to the earth. Some didn't reach the earth, and

they remained to fly about in the air as serpents. One such serpent fell into the habit of

visiting a certain peasant woman. He'd fly to her house, scatter sparks about the yard, take

his wings off and stick them under the roof, and go into the house to amuse himself with the

woman." A passing gypsy stole these wings, and refused to return them until the zmei

promised to cease visiting the woman (Ivanits 1989 pp. 156-157). This is one version of what

Ivanits calls a common trope. "Folk tradition abounded in narratives about the visits of such

serpents to village women, and, in some places, it was believed that a falling star signalled

the approach of such a demon to a village" (Ivanits 1989 p. 43). They usually visit widows or

women whose husbands are absent, and often take the form of the dead husband (Ivanits

507
 • Chapter 3.2 •

1989 p. 43)—a consideration suggestive of Zofia Baranowski's Pawel, who, through his

association with whirlwinds, might be described as a spirit of the air.

W. F. Ryan, who mentions this motif very briefly in his monumental study of Russian

magic, considers it to be a late import from the learned, Western incubus tradition (Ryan

1999 p. 135). I find this implausible, or at least incomplete: the incubi of the West are spirits

of condensed air but are not flying serpents, and the folk origination tale is deeply

unorthodox. If an incubus becomes a latawiec, he becomes considerably modified in the

process.

This is well illustrated by an episode from the life of the Belorussian petty-nobleman,

Calvinist, and local official Teodor Jewlaszewski (1546-1604). Writing toward the end of his

life in West Ruthenian (Old Belorussian) with many Polish borrowings, Jewlaszewski

recalled an encounter in his youth with what he calls a naTaBec [latawiec] and his doctors

later diagnosed as an HHKy6yc [incubus]; his narrative corresponds perfectly with the Russian

folktale of the letuchie zmei recorded three centuries later. In 1566, while travelling through

an area ravaged by plague, Jewlaszewski stopped for the night in a barn.

Zobaczylem o samem switaniu ognistego czlowieka Right at dawn, I saw a fiery person in the chamber,
w izbie, do ktorego skorom sie_ porwal, on tez and when I lunged at him, so too did he step
wystej>owal ku mnie i szedl wo posrodek izby; towards me in the middle of the chamber; I grabbed
porwatem z zapasa noz i uderzylem w niego, a on a knife from my belt and struck him, and he,
znikna^wszy, znow sie. w tymze k^cie ukazal i znowu disappearing, appeared again in the corner and
szedl do mnie—jam czapka, na niego rzucil i approached me again. I threw my hat at him and
otwarlem okno. Dzieh zaczai siq robic, a to zginelo. opened the window. Day began to break, and he
disappeared.
(Jewlaszewski 1860 pp. 14-15; cf., in Belorussian, Eulashouski [Jewlaszewski] 1983 p. 34 )

Jewlaszewski feared that this fiery person represented the plague, and that he might now be

infected. He confided this fear to an old noblewomen living nearby, who anwered:

"nie boj siq, to nie powietrze:" a ukazawszy mi "Have no fear, it is not the plague." And showing
przez okno swqj domek niedaleko bqda_cy, me through her window a small house not far away,
powiedziala mi jeszcze: "widuje, ja zawsze jak she told me further: "I often see how a latawiec

508
 • Demon lovers •

latawiec przychodzi do onej tarn gospodyni" (ibid.), visits that farmwife."60

For the rest of his life, Jewlaszewski was troubled with nightmares and suffocating sensations

when sleeping, which his doctors recognized as an HHKy6yc [incubus].

Already in the late 16th century, then, in a context that we might characterize as semi-

learned, latawiec was associated with incubus, in both senses of the latter term: as a ravisher

of women and as the cause of night-terrors. He is a "fiery" person, and he visits peasant-

women at night.

To return to contemporary ethnography, and to the wider Slavic world. Ivanits notes

that the motif of the zmei branches out and combines with others, so that no precise

delimitation of the zmei can be made. For example, leshii (forest-spirits) also visit women in

the form of a flying serpent; and leshii themselves are sometimes imagined as unbaptized

children (as is latawiec) or assimilate to devils on the one hand and to house demons

(domovoi) on the other, and so on (1989 pp. 70, 81). Fiery serpents are also said to aid

witches in stealing milk from their neighbors' cattle (ibid. p. 109), a practice also of domovoi,

which by the 19th century can also be devils or the vampiric souls of dead sinners (ibid,

p. 175).

Kazimierz Moszynski, casting a wider net over the whole Slavic world, compares

Polish latawiec with the zmej61 of Belarus, Russia, and Bulgaria, the zmaj of the southern

Slavs, and the Slovenian skrat. In all cases this is a shooting star, understood as the visible

sign of a fire or wind demon returning to a witch, his lover or wife, and bringing with it

money or grain. He is thus a type of treasure-bringer, and is explicitly associated with

I have used Ciemniewski's Polish translation of Jewlaszewski, but have also consulted the original Old
Byelorussian to confirm that the term latawiec here is not an artifact of translation.
Writing in Polish, Moszynski transliterates Cyrilic differently than does Ivanits. Of course his zmej is her
zmei, but, since I do not have the expertise to re-transliterate his other terms, I have left this term unchanged.

509
 • Chapter 3.2 •

witches. In the region of Zamosc in the mid-19th century, a shooting star was a "devil,

bringing someone money; he is recognized by his fiery tail" (DWOK vol. 17 p. 74). In most

of these places a shooting star may also be an unbaptized infant (Moszyhski 1967 vol. 2 pt. 1

pp. 463-465). Moszyhski goes on to note that house-demons in most of these areas steals

grain and "often have the appearance of a bird" (ibid. pp. 668ff.). But in Bulgaria and among

the south Slavs, the zmaj is also a more imposing figure: a dragon who rides the stormcloud,

he abducts young women in the guise of a beautiful youth; he is hot and drying, and where he

rests no rain will fall, so he causes droughts by co-habiting with a local witch (ibid. pp. 464,

635, 653).63

Nearly identical figures are found among the Baits and Finnic peoples to the north of

Poland. The Estonians have several treasure-bringing demons, such as the puuk (cognate to

English, Germanic, and Scandinavian puck ox pug), the kratt (cf. the German forest-spirit

skrat, the Polish house-demon and treasure-bringer skrzat, and the afore-mentioned

Slovenian skrat), and the pisuhand, described as a "fiery being shooting in the sky " who

brings money or grain to its owner (Valk 2001: 194). Closer to Poland, the Latvianpukis

(again cognate to puck) is also a a treasure bringer and a fiery flying dragon (Dace

Veinberga, personal communication).

Finally, In Poland, latawiec is the devil of the whirlwind (cf. Zofia Baranowa's

"Pawel"); he is a shooting star and thus an unbaptized child (Siemienski 1842 p. 347; cited

after Pelka 1987 p. 49),64 and he is also the spirit of the wind or storm in the form of a bird,

Kolberg here follows a study undertaken by Jozef Ghizihski, originally published 1856.
Recall, from the last chapter, the witch Anna Dudzicha who caused a drought with the help of her latawiec,
which at the same time was envisioned as the corpse of an unbaptized child (#81, Muszyna 1678).
Cf. the testimony of of the cunning woman Demka Zemola, from the region of western Mazowsze at the turn
of the 20th century, for whom all stars are the souls of small children, while a falling star is a "dyabel"
which must be quickly baptized (Kolbuszewski 1896 p. 163).

510
 • Demon lovers •

an owl, or a raven (Pelka 1987 pp. 19-20, 49-50). He is associated with the seduction of

women. Pelka's questionaire concerning "spirits of the air" which bring storms or drive away

rain, administered in the countryside of the Lublin and Rzeszow districts in the 1960s and

'70s, obtained an extremely wide range of answers. In the Lublin district, 56% of those

questioned thought such spirits were penitential ghosts (suicides (22.8%), unbaptized

children (13.6%), various other sinners (19.7%)), while the remainder thought they were

"devils," "rebellious angels" or "evil spirits" (Baranowski 1981 pp. 115-116).65 For Pelka

and Baranowski, this extreme polysemy is unsatisfactory; it is the result of "confusion" and

is evidence for the fading of folk traditions in the in the 20th century, so that several entities

which had originally been distinct come to be mixed together (Baranowski 1981 pp. 172,

314-315). In light of the comparative data from elsewhere, however, this conclusion seems

unwarranted: although folk demons are very fluid—so that it is senseless to try to establish

the essential identity of a latawiec—the complex of unbaptized child, shooting star, treasure

bringer and seducer of women seems quite stable over a wide area.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, then, the latawiec combined a range of motifs. Although

many of these seem mutually contradictory, the combination of precisely these same motifs

in the related zmei and zmai and skrat of neighboring Slavs, or in the pufris and and pisuhdnd

of the Baits and Estonians, give preliminary support to the contention that this is neither an

accidental concatenation of features nor a "mistake" or "confusion" caused by the fading of

folkoric knowledge in modern times. On the contrary, Polish literary sources in the 16th and

early 17th century show a lively awareness of the mixed nature of latawiec, which disturbs

5
Cf. Moszynski's map showing the distribution of beliefs concerning devils or spirits struck by lightning:
although a distribution pattern is evident, the regions in which such a spirit is a "diabel" or "czart" are
thoroughly intermixed with those in which such a spirit is a stillbirth, unbaptized child, or latawiec
(Moszyhski 1967 vol. 2 pt. 1 p. 736).

511
 • Chapter 3.2 •

them and which they attempt to resolve in a variety of ways. In fact, with the exception of the

shooting-star motif, all of latawiec's later features are already present in early modern texts.

Pawel Gilowski discussed latawcy in a passage of his reformed Katechizm. He

attempted to defend their theological status, following Augustine, as infernal devils devoted

to seduction, against what he considers to be local supersitious accretions. Like his

discussion of topielcy and ubozeta (see 3.1.3) this should be read as an anti-syncretic attempt

at purifying doctrine. He does not quite succeed in this. Although witches live with latawcy

"in obscenity," they do this not for the sex, or for malefice or out of a perverse hatred of God,

but because of the grain their demons provide for them:

Tak tez wiadomosci o Latawcach, ktore Incubos Also concerning Latawcy, which, if taking the
mqszczysa, obhidq, Succubos niewiescia^ nazywaia^ illusory shape of a man are called Incubos, if that of
co to zacz sa^ ci Latawcy dobrze iest wiedziec: [...]. a woman are called Succubos: it is good to know
Przetoz okazuie sie_ miedzy obhidami tez what these Latawcy really are. [...]. Therefore [this
mlodziencem, ktory sie. zaleci iakowey creature] appears, among other deceits, as a youth,
bialeyglowie, zwlaszcza do nierza^du chciwy, ktorq. who recommends himself to some woman,
sobie zblizni y tak siq sobie obowi%za_ nie bez especially one desirous of debauchery, and it
upominkow, ize potym z soba, miewaia_ sprawe_ befriends her and binds her, not without gifts, to
nierza.dnaj albo tez w ossobie panny iakiey cudney enter into debauched relations with it, or also, in the
me_zczyzne_ takiez oszuka [...]. Pisze Augustyn person of a wonderful maiden, they also deceive
swie_ty o tych Latawcach lib de Civit: Dei 15 Cap: men [...]. In De Civitate Dei bk. 15 ch. 23
23. tymi slowy: Pospolita, mowi, ies powiesc Augustine writes the following concerning these
doswiadczona od wielu, ieszczze od tich ktorzy tego Latawcy: There is a common tale, testified by many,
sami doswiadczyli, albo byli mogli sami including some who witnessed it themselves, or
doswiadzczy, o ktorych powiesci wajpic nie godzi might have witnessed it, which tale is not worthy of
siq, ize sa_ Latawcy nagrawacze biarychglow, ktorzy doubt, that there are Latawcy, who heat the lusts of
sprawy grabe miewaia. z niewiastami, o ktorych women, and have crude relations with females, of
sprawach wiele ich twirdzilo, tak ize temu miesca which cases many are affirmed, but one should not
niedawac iest wielkie ghipstwo, wszakze co o nich [thereby] fall into great stupidity; for the things
plota. ludzie, zeby Latawcy mieli wychodzic z rumoured about them by the people, that Latawcy
dziatek z grobow, ktore w zywocie z matkami are supposed to come out of little children in their
umieraia^ y pochowane bywaia^ toe babki wymysl a graves, where the child died in the womb along with
obmowka szatahska, aby chytrosc iego nie byla its mother and was buried—this is an old wives tale
wiadoma. and slander of satan, that his cunning should not
become known.
[...]
Chowaia^c tez niektore czarownice albo y gusiarze te Some witches and cunning-folk keep these latawcy,
latawce, a zywia^ z nimi w tey sprosnosci, ale dla and live with them in obscenity, but they do this for
pozytkow swoich doczesnych, ktore maia^ od nich, their temporal advantage, which they gain from
ktorzy indziey kradna_c pienia^dze y zboze, do nich these demons, who, stealing money or grain from
przynosza_, na ich pot^pienie duszne. (Gilowski others, bring it to them, to the damnation of their
1579 ch. 5 art. 5, ff. 161v-162v). souls'.

512
 • Demon lovers •

The anonymous author of the Postepekprawa czartowskiego, a highly educated

humanist with a refined prose style and a sophisticated Protestant theology, also attempted to

sort out latawiec's functions and status. This text operates in three distinct registers: as an

allegorical narrative of Satan's fall and battle with humanity (comparable, in some ways, to

Milton); as theological and demonological polemic; and as a satire of human foibles and

superstitions. In the first register, latawiec is depicted as a pitiable devil, too timid to oppose

God, who for this reason is exiled from Hell to wander on earth as an exile—this alludes to

the standard demonological speculation that incubi constitute the lowest order of infernal

being,66 but it might also refer to the popular legends in which latawcy or topielcy are fallen

but not infernal angels. In the second register, of theology, the Postepek author insists on the

illusory nature of latawiec as a sexual demon:

Ten Latawiec tula sie_ po swiecie mie_dzy ludzmi, ale This Latawiec wanders the earth among people,
mu tego Bog nie dal, aby mogl wziqc prawdziwe wanting to keep company with them, but the Lord
cialo, tylko obhidne bierze, w ktorym nie moze nic God did not allow him to have a real body, only an
poczaji ani zaszkodzic nikomu ani tez tez pomoc, illusory one, in which he can do nothing: neither
acz nam wiele powiadaja^ aby mial przekazac harming anyone nor helping them either, although
ludzkiemu malzenstwu. Ale temu kazdy majlrzy nie many have told us that he spoils human marriages,
wierz. Obhidy to wszytko sa^ Jucabus i Succabus, But this no wise man believes. Only illusions are all
bo duch nie moze sie_ plodzic wedhig przyrodzeni ai those Jucabi and Succubi, for a ghost cannot
rozumu i boskiej sprawy (Postepek prawa conceive child according to nature, and reason, and
czartowskiego 1570; Benis ed. 1891 p. 20).67 God's law.

Finally, the Postepek author, like Gilowski, identifies latawiec as a minor house-dwelling

demon, the servant of witches. His reference to "groping" also suggests the nocnica oxzmora

who gropes and frightens children in the dark:

[... W] cieniach siq chowa, jako nietoperz abo kret. He hides in the shadows like a bat or a mole. Old
Uzywaja^ tez jego poshig baby i wszytkie women and all witches make use of his services,
czarownice i rozmowy z nim miewaja_ w cieniu tak, conversing with him in the shadows, so that neither
iz jeden drugiego nie widzi, jedno pomaca (ibid. sees the other but only feels the other by groping,
pp. 100-101).

66
See e.g. Malleus pt. 1 qu. 4; Summers ed. 1970 p. 29.
67
Cf. a similar passage at p. 101, which also denies the diabolic conception of Merlin.

513
 • Chapter 3.2 •

Two ribald satyres of the early 17th century, both of which were to enjoy numerous

editions throughout the 17th century and into the eighteenth, took up these themes from the

Postepek. The Sejm piekielny (1622) which depicts Satan's council on the model of the

Polish-Lithuanian Sejm (Parliament), is closely indebted to the Postepek. The earlier

Peregrynacja dziadowska or "Hobos' Travels," possibly by the same author, pays less

attention to latawiec, but also treats him as a treasure-bringer and grain-stealer. Neither text

emphasises his sexual activities, although these are perhaps implied in the speech of the

witch Latawica, explaining the source of her powers:

Jakos mam i z latawcem swe porozumienie, For I have an understanding with a latawiec.
Bo tez on swe odmienia wlasne przyrodzenie. He also can change his nature at will;
Choc jest duchem powietrznym, bierze na sie_ cialo Although a spirit of the air, he can take on a body
ObJudne, czego mu przyrodzenie nie dalo. Of illusion, which nature never gave him.
Czyni wielkie poshigi, kto go o to prosi, He is a great helper: to whomsoever asks
Ze on z cudzej spizarnie do niego przynosi. He brings food from other people's pantries.
{Perygrynacja 1614 w . 862-867; Levanski ed. 1961 pp. 173-174).

The fuller description in the Sejm Piekielny imagines latawiec as a slave to his human

hosts. As in the Postepekprawa, he is an exile from Hell; his food, his habitation behind the

stove, and the services he renders mark him clearly as a house-demon:

Prosze., panie Luciferze, nie racz Twa mosc Please, lord Lucifer, do not be surprised.
dziwic: I have had to live somehow among human beings.
Musialem si? miqdzy ludzmi jako tako zywic. For you, Your Grace, chased me from your presence,
Wszakescie mi$ Waszmosc byli od siebie wygnali, Like a pitiable tramp, I don't know where to go.
Nieboraczek zfrasowany ani wiem, gdzie dalej.
[...]
Mamci wprawdzie u dobrych zon mlecznej kasze I get, it's true, plenty of groats and milk from good
dosyc, wives,
Ale im tez za to muszq ludzkie dobra nosic. But in return I must provide them with human goods.
Musze. w cudzej stodole groch i pszenice. kruszyc, In the barns of strangers I thresh peas and wheat,
Czasem nabiore. tak wiele, nie moge. sie. ruszyc; Sometimes I collect so much I can hardly move.;
Pieniqdzy, gdzie moge. dostac, abo ukrasc komu— Or money, if I find some, or steal it from someone—
Kqdy mieszkam, tarn pozytek musze. czynic w Wherever I live, I must bring profit to the household,
domu. And even so I must constantly hide myself from
A jqszcze sie. ludzi musze. ustawienie chronic, people,
By mie. nie dali obiesic—ktozby mnie mial bronic? Lest they hang me—and who would defend me?
Ja nieborak miejsca niemam, ni w piekle, ni w I am a tramp with no home, neither in Hell nor
niebie, Heaven,
Bog mnie nie chce, wyscie tez wygnaliz od siebie. God doesn't want me, you've also chased me away.
Jeszcze czasem inni bracia na mie. natrzaskajaj What's more, sometimes my fellow devils shoot me
Piorunem, lyskawicami i ogniem ciskaja.. Striking me with thunder, lightning and fire,

514
 • Demon lovers •

Az nieraz uciekaj^c oparze_ sie_ kasza^. So that, fleeing, I spill my kasza porridge and get
burned.

W dymie siadam, ukopce. sie_, nigdy sie_ nie myjej I sit in the smoke, buried in cinders, I never wash;
Jasnosci nigdy nie widze_, tylko w nocy latam, Nor ever see the light, flying only at nighttime,
A we dnie siedzqc na izbie, to biesagi latam, In daytime I sit in the chamber, patching up the
A kiedy grzmi, to mi pod nos smrodza^ kurza_ grain-sacks,
zielem. And when it thunders, they stink me up, censing the
house with herbs.

Wolalbym na starosc mieszkac tu z Miloscia^ In my old age I'd rather live here with Your Grace
Wasza^ Than in a box behind the chimney, though they feed
Nizli w pudle za kominem, choc mi? karmia. kasza_. me groats.
(Sefm Piekielny 1622; Bruckner ed. 1903 w . 986-989, 994-1003, 1014-1015).

We have surveyed, at considerable length, the characteristic! of latawiec in the folklore and

ethnography of the last two centuries, and in early modern Polish texts. We have found that

both agree to a surprising extent. In folklore, latawiec combines an array of features and

functions: he is a youth who ravishes women and "dries" them with his fiery warmth,

sucking up their vitality; he is a fiery bird or fiery snake who flies through the air shedding

sparks; he is a being of uncertain provenance, sometimes a devil sensu strictu, but sometimes

a penitent ghost, an unbaptized infant, or a rebellious angel who did not fall into Hell; he is

assimilated to benevolent house-demons, but more often to the more ambivalent treasure-

bringing demons who increase one's prosperity only by reducing that of one's neighbors, just

as a witch achieves her high milk-yields by stealing the milk of neighboring cattle. He brings

the storm-cloud with its hail and lightning, but he diverts benificient rain-clouds away.

Textual sources from the early modern period repeat several of these features even as they

often labour to deny or restrict some of them. Latawiec is an exile from hell, the lowest and

most pitiful of devils. He is indeed an incubus, seducing women, but is also a house-demon, a

treasure-bringer, and the ghost of an unbaptized child. Neither Gilowski nor the texts derived

515
 • Chapter 3.2 •

from the Postepekprawa czartowskiego describe him as a fiery bird or snake, but

Jewlaszewski does emphasize his fiery nature.

Two more confession narratives need to be quoted briefly. One establishes the

presence, in witch-trial confessions, of latawiec as a fiery bird who brings treasure and is

identified with the ghosts of the unbaptized; the other displays an extraordinary

correspondence with Gilowski's text. Both show that accused witches could be well aware of

the local demonological options before them when shaping their confessions.

A witness in the trial of Marianna Karabinka accused her of filtering milk through a

scythe on a Thursday; that same evening "something flew out of her house, leaving sparks in

its trail."68 It seems to be implied that the milk-filtering ritual had milk-theft as its purpose,

while the fiery bird flew out to accomplish this task of milk theft. The court refered to the

bird as a latawiec; Marianna first denied both the filtering and the fiery bird, but after torture

she replied "and even if that latawiec was in my home, what of it? In whatever home there

has been an unbaptized child, you'll often find a latawiec." (#85, Warta c. 1679).69 There is

no sex in this narrative. Marianna used the limbo-child aspect of latawcy to deny her

witchcraft; if he was there at all, it is only because some previous tenant of the house

committed had infanticide—it had nothing to do with her.70

Anna Chociszewska, accused of witchcraft and of procuring, confessed to having had a

latawiec since she was twelve years old. She, rather than the court, introduced the term. It is

68
"z domu jej cos wylecialo i skrzylo sie_ zatem"
69
"ze chocby ten latawiec byl w moim domu, coz z tego bywalo, ze kandy dziecie. bywa niechrzczone, tarn
latawiec przebywa w tym domu."
70
Cf. the devil who haunted a house in die predominantly Protestant town of Oksza for three months in 1649. It
claimed to be haunting the house to avenge the blood of innocent children spilled by the wife of a doctor,
the previous tenant of the house, who had performed abortions, and it demands that the bodies of dead
infants, which were buried in pots under the stove, be dug up and given a proper burial. The Protestant
inhabitents of Oksza refused to indulge in such "pagan" practices, resorting instead to fasting and prayer,
and the devil finally left them alone (Bruchnalski 1901; cited after Wijaczka 2003 pp. 66-67).

516
 • Demon lovers •

not clear whether the latawiec brought her treasure or demanded a pact; he seems to be a
71

companion who "eats with her, and drinks whatever she is eating and drinking" When the

court asks whether the relation involves sex, Anna displayed a remarkable understanding of

the range of associations this entity could generate:

[N]ie miewa z nim takiej sprawy cielesnej, zeby z I don't have any relations of the flesh with him, I
nim legala, jako wie_c czqsto latawcy z drugimi don't lie with him, as many latawcy lie with women
legaja_ i wyrzucaja. wiex takowe bialeglowy z lozka i and throw them out of bed and beat them. Also she
bijaje. Item zeznala, gdy jeszcze nieboszczyka confessed, that when I still had my late husband, he
me_za swego miala, przychadzal tez do niej, ale maz [the latawiec] also came to her, but my husband
o tern nie wiedzial, a wszakze z nim nie legala, bo te didn't know about that, however I never lay with
dzieci ktore miala, z mejzem swym splodzila72 (#8, him, because the children that I have I conceived
Poznan 1582). with my husband.

Her latawiec came into being in exactly the manner Gilowski was at pains to deny in his

chatechism. When, as a young girl, she told her mother of the latawiec'?, visits, her mother

immediately
jachala do Wajrowca i dala sobie ciotke_ jej rode to Wajrowiec and had her aunt Hanna
Janeczkowa, Hanne_ wykopac, ktora, bylo brzemienna. Janeczkowa exhumed, who had been buried pregnant,
pochowano, ale juz bylo pozno, bo juz siq byla but it was too late, for she had already decayed,
roztoczyla (ibid.).

In conjunction with Gilowski's text and with with the other confessions discussed in

this section, these two confessions establish clearly that the three aspects of latawiec: as

treasure bringer or house-spirit, as unbaptized child, and as demon lover, are not the result of

recent confusion or combination. Already in the 16th century, all three—and their

combination, were well established. Latawiec is both more and less than an incubus; one sees

71
"jada z niaj pije to co ona je i pije."
72
Anna's further testimony, following immediately on the passage quoted above, throws somewhat into doubt
her insistance that she never had sex with her latawiec. It also raises tantalizing questions about the degree
to which a woman of Anna's position might have known about or absorbed elite discussions of the demonic
generation of abnormal children. She testified: "It's true, [the latawiec] told her, that she was to have a
deformed child, and she did, he is still alive, for he has six fingers on one hand, and he is the miller's
assistant in the mills belonging to his lordship the wojewoda of Poznan [Wszakze jej powiedzial, ze miala
miec chlopca ulomnego i miala go, ktory jeszcze zyw jest, bo ma u jednej reki szesc palcow, ktory
mrynarczykiem jest w mryniech pana wojewody poznahskiego]."

517
 • Chapter 3.2 •

why the term was chosen to translate incubus, but also to what extent that translation

transformed the latter.

• •$• •

It is important to reiterate what I have been attempting in this section. Here, as

throughout the chapter, my intention is to capture something of the beliefs, imaginings, and

above all experiences of accused witches. I have wanted to reject the approach of many

scholars which, through what might charitably be characterized a misguided scrupulosity,

banishes accused witches themselves from the study of witch-trials, rendering them mere

figments of elite discourse. But I have also wished to avoid the opposite approach, which

makes of witch-confessions primarily a source for folklore and a basis for the recovery of

popular, or even pre-Christian or archaic, religious forms. Neither approach, as Roper has

noted (1994 p. 234), treats the witches themselves seriously. Yet in this section, I have

treated confession texts as the point of departure for a long digression into both folk-lore and

elite (or at least literary) discourse. Nevertheless, the purpose has been interpretation of the

confessions: folklore and texts serve as context to render the confessions sensible, rather than

the reverse. I have no interest in establishing what latawiec is in fact—a question absurd to

ask and impossible to answer; instead I have explored the construct of latawiec as a way of

exploring, and opening up, the mixed and hybrid nature of early modern Polish devils. I have

attempted to make plausible the contention that Polish accused witches, in confessing to sex

73
Peasant witches were not the only women seduced by latawcy in early modern Poland. The Carmelite mystic
Anna Maria "Teresa of Jesus" Marchocka (1603-1652), noble daughter of the starosta of Czchow and author
of the first autobiography by a woman in the Polish language, recalled how, as a young girl, she had the
habit of rising very early and praying in a grove. Her mother became suspicious that she might "have an
assignation with a latawiec [miala namowe. z latawcem]," and ordered that she be followed (Marchocka
1752 pp. 12,26). I quote this passage after a brief article by the pseudonymous "B. J. K. z Gniezna" (Lud
vol. 11 (1905) pp. 403-404). I have not seen the recent edition of Marchocka's autobiography (1939); an
English translation, by Ursula Phillips, is said to be forthcoming.

518
 • Demon lovers •

with a devil, need not have imagined themselves to be confessing to sex with a diabolical,

anti-Christian being. On the contrary, they may often have understood themselves (and in a

handful of cases demonstrably did so understand themselves) to be confessing a relationship

which, though prior to interrogation not usually part of their se//~-conception, was a well-

established and well-understood option. Accused witches such as Dorota of Siedlikow,

Katharzyna Kozimihska, and Agnieszka Jakobka, and possibly others such as Zofia

Baranowa, confessed to sex with what they usually called a devil, but this lexical identity

obscures rather than reveals the substance of their imagined relationship. Although these

confessions were extracted under torture, they did not accomplish the erasure of popular

conceptions and its replacement with elite discourse. Polish accused witches confessed to sex

with the devil, but the devil they admitted to having sex with was, I assert, an indigenized

one, a domesticated member of the peasant household. Any evaluation of the meaning of

demon lovers in early modern Poland must take into account that the lover in question was

not, usually, understood to be a principal of evil. Instead, he was something far more

ambivalent: part nature spirit or fairy, part house-demon or ancestor, part treasure-hauling

fetish.

519
 Szlo dwoch w nocy z wielk^ trwoga.
Az pies czamy biezy droga.
Czy to pies?
Czy to bies?
Two walked by night in great dread
When they saw a dog on the road ahead
Is it a dog?
Or a devil?
y-ii > ^ <* —from A. E. Odyniec and J. Slowacki,
" * " "Nie wiadomo co, czyli romantycznosc"

Translating the Devil (Odyniec 1832, P. 90)

"The devil often makes of himself an Incubus or succubus, alias (as they call it here in

Ruthenia) a latawiec or latawica."1 This quotation, from Chmielowski's 18th-century

encyclopedia (1753 vol. 3 p. 208), takes latawiec to be the local, vulgar term for the

universal, Latin term incubus. When someone "here, in Ruthenia" says latawiec, they are

"calling"—denoting, refering to—a specific, determinate entity by its local name. There is no

important difference, Chmielowski assumes, between this vulgar expression and the educated

Latin. Although the literal meanings of both words differ markedly from one another

{latawiec from latac, "to fly," so "the flying thing;"incubus from incubo, "to lie over, lie

upon," hence "he who lies upon women"), their reference is identical. They pick out and

point to the same creature.

And yet we have already seen that such direct translation is impossible, that it carries

with it connotations not intended by the translators. Gilowski complained against the

"stupidity" of the people, who believe latawcy originate as the souls of unbaptized infants.

Yet this stupidity of the people was an artifact of Gilowski's own attempt at translation: the

people think latawcy are unbaptized souls, while Gilowski knows that incubi—which he

translates into Polish as latawcy—are not. If there is a mistake, it lies with the learned scholar

rather than with the people. It is Gilowski's combination of interpretatio antiqua and
i <,
'Czart nie raz si$ czyni Incubum, albo succuhum, alias (iak tu zowia, na Rusi) latawcem albo latawica.."

520
 • • Translating the devil •

interpretatio Christiana, by which a local entity becomes equivalent to the silvani and pans

discussed by Augustine and thence to the incubi developed in later theological speculation,

which makes this local description false and supersitious. However, to speak of Gilowski as

mistaken and "the people" as correct is to reify the "folkoric" latawiec over against the

learned incubus, and so again to miss the point. Both are constructs, neither has anything

resembling the sort of objective referent by which one might say, without too much worry

about mistranslation, that a mallum is ajabiko is an apple. Every translation is an

interpretation and a compromise. This is not to say that we have here to do with radical

incomensurability; it is the case, however, that each translation choice carries with it a whole

host of unintended consequences. In this chapter, we explore the problems and effects of

translation, taking latawiec as our primary example.

The term latawiec or its close variations can be traced back to some of the earliest texts

in Polish, and is associated in its earliest mention with incubi and succubi. A collection of

manuscript sermons from the Augustinian house in Krakow, dated 1477, associates the term

lathalecz with devils of carnal sin:

Hec videns diabolus qui inimicus spiritualis humano generi est [in margin: lathalecz] qui
specialius laborat in his peccatus sodomiticis [...:] accubus, incubus, succubus, cacodemon,
calodemon. (Czaykowski and Los eds. 1907 p. 324).

A manuscript herbal from 1472, written by a canon of Krakow, includes under the

section on ailments, the entry "efialtes—latawecz, poludnycza duszy [ephialtes—latawecz,

noontide demon]" (Rostafinski 1900 vol. 2 p. 510). Poludnicza duszy refers to the widely

distributed mid-day demon of Slavic and Mediterranean folk-demonology, causer of

sunstroke but also, in Greece for example, stealer of infants (Stewart 1991); while the Greek

term ephialtes maybe understood either as an incubus or as the cause of nightmares.

Similarly, Jan Falimirz's Renaissance herbal compendium mentions latawiec as the cause of

521
 • Chapter 3. 3 •

bad dreams in a discussion of the virtues of diamond, which "helps against Latawcy and

other apparitions" and "drives away vain dreams (1534 f. IV 46v).

By the 16th century the equation of the Polish word latawiec to the Latin words

succubus or incubus had been clearly established. In the Latin-Polish dictionary appended to

his commentary on Saxon law, Jan Cervus of Tuchola writes: "Succubi, sunt demones qui

sub specie muliebri viris subijciuntur, vt incubi qui mulieres ineunt. Lathalci" (Cervus 1540

p. 323v).3 Later in the same century, as we have seen, Gilowski and the author of the

Postepek used latawiec to the same purpose. While the Postepek treated latawiec as a real

demon with an illusory body, the natural magician and ex-Jesuit Stanislaw Poklatecki

insisted, like Gilowski, on the reality of corporal contact with latawcy. Book 5 of

Poklatecki's tract against ritual and demonic magic is devoted to the refutation of Agrippa,

Wier, and Cardanus, who, to his mind, "in their books on demons, declare overhastily that all

writings and tales of latawcy are inventions and fairy-tales" (Poklatecki 1595; quoted after

Rosenblatt 1883 p. 25; see also Bugaj 1976 p. 147).4 On the contrary, Poklatecki insists,

"latawcy are evil spirits from the lower levels of the satanic species, who, taking on

2
"przeciw Latawczom y inszem widzeniom pomaga" and "sny prozne odpa_dza;" cf. Siennik 1568 p. 324; after
Tuwim 1960 p. 348: Diamond "drives away vain dreams [sny prozne odpa_dza]." Of course, the term
incubus itself sometimes denotes a nightmare (a bad dream and/or the demon who causes such a dream), as
in the diagnosis given to Teodor Jewlaszewski by his doctors (above). Del Rio equates incubus with
ephialtes, Spanishpesadilla, and French coquemar [modern French cauchemar], the latter two of which
have the modern meaning nightmare (Disquisitiones bk. 4 ch. 3 qu. 6; 2000 p. 176). Notably, the association
of latawiec with non-sexual nightmares is not sustained in later texts or in trials: in old Polish one hears of
nocnice ("night terrors," discussed elsewhere in this dissertation), and zmory (which cause nightmares but
also suck blood, like a strix or lamia, and are usually female). The modern Polish term for nightmare is
koszmar, from the French.
3
Concerning this dictionary, see Karplukowna 1973. The term "Lathalci" became "Lathalcy" in the edition of
1542, and "Latalcy" in the edition of 1558.
"w ksie_gach swych o czarciech z pospiechem pisza,, ze basnia. i zmysleniem bye mienia^powiesci i pisma
wszystkie o latawcach." I have not read Poklatecki's work, which according to Bugaj treats witchcraft only
incidentally, focusing on "high" ritual magic. Rosenblatt (1883) discusses Poklatecki briefly and includes
some excerpts from his Pogrom. Czarnoksiqskie bledy, latowcow zdrady i alchemickie falsze (1595), while
Bugaj analyzes this text and gives a solid account of what little is known about him (1976 esp. pp. 82-84,
143-147).

522
 • • Translating the devil •

themselves unreal bodies invented from air, in the character of a man or of a woman,

associate uncleanly in carnality with people" (ibid.)-5

The Catholic Poklatecki, Reformed Gilowski, and probably also the Reformed author

of the Postepek might disagree with each other on certain points of demonology. However,

they all fully integrate the term latawiec into the pan-European learned discourse concerning

the reality ofincubi, the possibility and manner of their interactions with humans, and the

problem of the generation of human progeny from a demon father. They all fully identify the

entity denoted by the term latawiec with the entity denoted by the terms incubus and

succubus in the standard texts on the subject, such as Augustine and Aquinas. Similarly, as

we have already seen, Zabkowic used the term latawiec consistently to translate the very

numerous references to incubus in the works of Kramer and Nider and Molitor (1614). It

would seem then that we may treat latawiec simply as the Polish word for incubus.

But latawiec was something else in Poland before it came to be integrated into

translations of or commentaries on learned Latin texts. The process by which latawiec came

to translate incubus is permanently irrecoverable, but texts such as the anonymous

Augustinian sermon, with its lathalecz scrawled in the margin next to incubus, imply that

Polish writers cast about for a local entity whose features, to some extent, corresponded to

the features attributed to the incubus in Latin discourse. Such correspondence, however,

could never be total, not only because it is unlikely that Polish or Slavic folk demonology

should contain a being identical in every respect to a being whose features were shaped over

a long process of Western European and Mediterranean demonological speculation, but also

because even in the learned Latin discourse entities such as incubus never came to possess a

5
"latawcy sa_ duchowie zli z rodzaju szatanskiego posledniejsi, ktorzy nieprawdziwe ciala lecz zmyslone z
powietrza na si$ biora^c w postaci m^skiej albo bialoglowskiej z ludzmi w cielesnosc nieczysto obcuja.."

523
 • Chapter 3. 3 •

determinate set of stable, agreed-upon features. Thus the translation involved a partial

correspondence, and the entity chosen to take up the semantic burden of incubus carried with

it a remainder, as it were, from what it had been before. This "remainder" did not disappear

once the integration of the entity into learned discourse had been accomplished; on the

contrary, meanings and connotations carried over from the folkloric remainder come to

adulterate and infect the "learned" definition, while conversely learned concerns and

controversies come to color the "folkloric" definition. Insofar as the Polish term came to be

accepted as a translation of the Latin, both were permanently changed. It is rather as if, in

English-language demonological discourse and trial literature, incubus had come to be

regularly translated as imp or puck or brownie.

Against this characterisation of the effects of translation or of syncretism, it could be

argued that through learned processes of delineation and specification, the folkloric elements

of a term could be worn away or marginalized to the point of triviality, so that analysis of

original meanings comes to be a mere exercise in etymology. Such an argument might hold

some merit at the high abstract plane of elite theological discourse, although even there I am

not at all sure that it does. But when we are concerned to analyse the conceptions of accused

witches, or their noble accusers, burgher judges, or semi-peasant parish priests, such an

argument is of course quite irrelevent.

• *l* •

Some inkling of the complexities involved in the trajectory by which incubus became

latawiec may be gleaned from a close reading of Marcin Bielski and of other Polish authors

who, instead of relating to scholastic or post-scholastic demonology, use latawiec to render

Biblical terms.

524
 • • Translating the devil •

Martin Bielski's humanist history of the world, Kronika tho iesth Historya Swiata

(1564) uses the term latawiec to describe the "sons of God" who engendered the giants in

Genesis 6:4—the starting point ever since Augustine and indeed since 1 Enoch for

discussions of demonic sexuality:

Z iego [Kaima] thez narodu wyszli ludzye wielcy From Cain's nation also came great people, Giants
Obrzymowie mocni a waleczni, [... ] ciyniax strong and valiant, [... ] who worked harm in the
rozmaite zlosci na swiecie (Iozephus pisze iz sie z world (Josephus writes that they were conceived
Latawcow poczeji). (Bielski 1564 p. 4v).6 from Latawcy).

In his exegesis of the book of Revelation, Mikolaj Rej commented on the fall of

Babylon in Rev. 18. After the ruination of Babylon, it becomes:

mieszkanie y straz kazdego ducha nieczystego, y "a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul
kazdego pthaka brzydliwego. Tu malo wykladu trzeba, bird." Here little explanation is needed, since we see
gdzyz o thym srychamy y widamy, iz w takich ruinach and hear of such things, that those little devils that we
a w tych mieyscach opustoszaJych owi dyabelkowie call latawcy (which lead folk here [in Poland],
co ie latawcami zowiemy ktorzy tu proste ludzi a o knowing little of God, astray from their faith, tricking
Bogu malo wiedza.ce obhidnosciami swemi a them by their deceptions and cunning) commonly like
chytrosciami swemi z wiary zwodzq, a nagrawaia^ tarn to visit and inhabit such ruins and abandoned places,
pospolicie radzi mieszkaia. y przebywaia.. Przy tym tez Here also bats, owls, screech-owls and other foul birds
niedoperzowie, sowy, puchacze y inne ptactwo of the night and of darkness commonly take shelter,
brzydliwe nocne a ciemne tham sie pospolicie rado
chowa (Rej 1565 p. 148).

Bielski refers to the first book of the Christian Bible, Rej to the last. But the two texts

are intimately connected in traditional exegesis. The ruination of Babylon in the Book of

Revelations closely follows the much more vivid prophecy in Isaiah (13:19-22) and the

closely related ruination of Edom (Is. 34:11-15).7 Rej alludes to these passages of Isaiah,

6
Bielski refers in this passage to Josephus, who mAntiquites 1.3.1, following Jubilees 5.1-9, describes the
progenitors of the Giants as angels. For a detailed account of the medieval and early modern exegesis of the
giants of Genesis, see Stephens 1989.
7
Another allusion to Isaiah 13 and 34, possibly indebted to Rej, may be found in Klonowic's WorekJudaszow.
Klonowic describes the night-time as "When the night-jar flies, and the winged mouse / Night-crows,
Latawcy, and horned owls [Gdy sie. rusza. lelkowie, y myszy skrzydlate: Nocni Krucy / Latawcy / y Sowy
rogate]" (1600 p. 74; 1960 p. 229). A sermon by the Franciscan provincial Berard Gutowski alludes to the
ruins of Babylon as a human heart turned toward the world :
Komu zas bardziey swiat, wczasy, y delicyie Whoever prefers this world, leisure, delicacies, his
smakuia^ w sercu jego nie Duch Sw., ale nocna heart is not the home of the Holy Spirit, but rather,
iaka sowa, albo puchacz piekielny, czart mowie_ like a night owl or infernal screetch owl, the
przeklQty, gospodq sobie zapisal. damned devil himself I say, has made his abode.
(Gutowski 1696 p. 180; Drob 1981 p. 115).

525
 • Chapter 3. 3 •

when he expands the "foul spirits" and "foul birds" of Revelation (spiritus immundi and

volucres immundae in the Vulgate) to include owls, bats, screech-owls, and latawcy. For it is

in Isaiah that one meets the ostriches, hyenas, and jackals, the hawk and the hedgehog, the

wild-cats, the vultures and owls and screech-owls, and, more to the point, the goat-demons

who inhabit the ruins of Babylon and Edom.

The Malleus draws an equivalence between these goat-demons, on the one hand, and,

via Greek pan, the incubi of theology.

To the same effect is the gloss on Isaiah 13 , where the prophet foretells the desolation of
Babylon, and the monsters that should inhabit it. He says: Owls shall dwell there, and Satyrs
shall dance there. By Satyrs here devils are meant; as the gloss says, Satyrs are wild shaggy
creatures of the woods, which are a certain kind of devils called Incubi. [...]. Similarly,
blessed Isidore, in the last chapter of his 8th book, says: Satyrs are they who are called Pans
in Greek and Incubi in Latin. And they are called Incubi from their practice of overlaying
[incumbens], that is debauching (Malleus pt. 1 qu. 3; 1970 p. 24, translation slightly
modified).

Thus Isaiah is made to speak of the sexual demons who are the lovers of witches, the same as

those who engendered the Giants (as Bielski says Josephus says), the same as those who live

in all ruins, not only of Babylon but in Poland as well (as Rej says)—that is, incubi, that is,

latawcy. The incubi of the time before the flood are the same as the incubi of the end-times,

and they are both the same as the incubi who, in early modern Poland, hide in ruins, fly about

with screech owls and bats, and associate sexually and otherwise with witches.

So says the gloss. But: let us review. Bielski is mistaken. Josephus did not say that

latawcy engendered the giants, nor that incubi nor even daemonia did so; he says, following

the Septuagint, that angels (dyysX,ou) did so—an interpretation rejected by Augustine and by

Screech-owl in KJV, jedza (a Slavic female demon of the forest, whence "Baba Jaga") in Wujek's translation,
this is lamia in the vulgate and With in the original. Screech-owls orpuchacze are intimately associated with
witchcraft in the whole European tradition, such that the two can be synonymous as in Latin, Italian and
Spanish (strix, streghe, striga). Lamia of course also came to be a synonym for witch, while With, originally
a baby-stealing demon in Hebrew and Mesopotamian folklore, came in later rabbinic speculation to be
Adam's first wife and the personification of female evil. Thus the association of witches with incubi can, to
the eye of faith at least, be found already in Isaiah.

526
 • • Translating the devil •

the Vulgate.9 Revelation 18 speaks of demons and unclean spirits and winged things, not, as

Rej suggests, of latawcy. Isaiah describes various sorts of unclean bird, the female demon

lilith, and the se'irim [he-goats, wild goat, goat-demons, hairy ones],10 translated in the

Septuagint as daimonia, in the vulgate aspilosi [hairy ones], satyrs in the KJV. Wujek,

translating the Vulgate, renders pilosi with what a appears to be his own neologism,

kosmacze [hairy ones]. Augustine spoke not oiincubi but of pans and silvani and drusii, and

so on.

The point is not to privilege the older texts. I do not want to take the Biblical beings as

"real," with its transformations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Polish the result of a series

of mistranslations. To even speak of mistranslation is to miss the point—that point being the

mere fact of the translation itself. Each translation was an act of comparative ethnography, an

attempt to gloss not just a foreign term but also the being referred to by that term, in terms of

the local and the known. Some translations, such as the vulgate pilosi, tended to caution and

a literal translation; others, such as goat-demons of the NRSV, have the advantage of highly

technical philology and biblical archeology. But most translations were simultaneously

interpretation and appropriation, so that Greek and Celtic and Hebrew and Polish demons

become associated the one with the other. Thus the fiery bird and treasure-hauler of popular

Polish religion, a being associated with the family (as an unbaptized infant, but also via the

remnant ancestor cult of house-spirits) and with the home, comes to be equated to the hairy

goat-demon, symbol of the desert, of ruination and chaos: and both these essentially popular

demons meet in the abstracted, theologized incubus, that spirit with a body of condensed air

who takes advantage of women's overwhelming lust to lead them to damnation.

9
Molitor also cites Josephus as having said that the giants came "from the intercourse of latawcy with women
[z spolecznosci latawcow z bialymiglowami]" (1614 p. 417).
10
1 have relied on Wildberger's recent commentaries on Isaiah (1997, 2002) to interpret these passages.

527
 • Chapter 3.3 •

Wolfgang Behringer, analysing the mixture of Christian demonology with local

conceptions of fairies and revenant dead in the visions of the 16th c."shaman" Chonrad

Stoeckhlin, writes that

the Christian idea of demons fitted seamlessly together with the popular belief in malevolent
spirits, even though a certain 'surplus' of popular notions was left over, which stuck out
beyond the tight contours of Christian theology [...]. The Church tried to trim away these
'excesses' (thes 'superstitions' in the literal sense of the word), in order to preserve a basic
faith in harmful demons (Behringer 1998 p. 95).

One finds such an attempt to "trim" the latawiec into the parameters of the incubus in

Gilowski's catechism, and to a lesser degree in the Postepek. Other texts, such as

Poklatecki's Pogrom or Zabkowic's translation of Kramer and Nider and Molitor, take no

notice at all of local meanings and thus see no need to purge latawiec of those meanings. But

most of the texts described here, and all of the trial testimony, are more ambiguous: latawiec,

and indeed also hies, diabel, czart, pokusnik and all the other terms used to describe the

entities encountered by witches at the sabbat, in the forest or in their chamber, is a composite

character, a mixture so seemless of Christian demons with local spirits that neither witch, nor

judge, nor poet, attempts to delineate where one begins and the other ends. The theologically

naive small-town magistrates who judged most Polish witch-trials never inquired as to why

Dorota of Siedlikow's szatan asked for milk porridge, the food of house-demons, or why

Katharzyna Kozimihska hid her diabel in the house-demon's traditional place behind the

stove, or whether the warm nature of Agnieszka Jakobka's "Michal" might not imply the hot

and drying, woman-withering latawiec rather than incubus, that cold spirit of the air whose

illusory body God does not allow to become warm. Nor did anyone ever seem to ask why the

devils at the sabbat always dress in red. Indifferent to these subtleties, they did not "trim"

popular conceptions down to their proper Christian cores. We should follow this lead. A

given szatan was not a house-demon, pure and unchristianized, but neither was it a

528
 • • Translating the devil •

theologically orthodox infernal devil. It was neither and both; it was itself, a mixture whose

mixedness is perceived by modern scholars and, in a different way, by the occasional

reforming theologian or critic of superstition, but not by the witches and judges for whom it

was a real, living being. This mixing goes both ways: if house-demons undergo a process of

diabolization, devils are domesticated.

• •$• •

I have concentrated, in this chapter, on latawiec because of his central place in the early

modern Polish literary tradition and his association with the incubus and with unbaptized

children. But a similar analysis could be done of the other devils (or demons, or fairies, or

imps) encountered in the Polish trials. The anonymous 15th century "Sermon of a Polish

Hussite," studied by Bruckner, condemns "sortilegiantes" who ask, immediately after the

birth of a child, "quid natum est, an masculus velfemina" and do this to protect the newborn

"ab infirmitate que vocatur wlgariter nocznicze" (ff. 140v-141; after Bruckner 1892 pp. 574-

575). The educated and reforming author understands nocznicze (lit."night-ones, little night

things") to be an illness of newborn infants, but to the village women whom he describes as

sortilegiantes they seem to be demons: in effect the preacher condemns the women for

misrecognizing a natural infirmity as demonic possession. The ambiguity need not be

resolved: we still use terms such as nightmare or cauchemar—originally demons cognate to

the Polish mara, zmora, marzanna—to denote the condition or illness or affliction of bad

dreams or night-terrors. In the late 17th century the ontological status of such nightmares

remained ambiguous; the accused witch Katarzyna of Wojnicz, it will be recalled, healed

children suffering from nocnice by addressing them with an inverted version of the Hail

529
 • Chapter 3.3 •

Mary (#58, Nowy Wisnicz 1662; see 2.2.1).11 Similarly, it is hard to say whether the

klobuchy exorcised in Kalisz should best be understood as demons or as illness (#22, Kalisz

1616). The general indifference with which accusers, the accused, and magistrates equated

the "sending" or "giving" of witchcraft [czary] with the "sending" or "giving" of devils

[diabfy, czarty, etc. ] points in the same direction: at the popular level no very great effort

was usually made to distinguish between illness, the symptoms of witchcraft, or demons and

devils. The devils of the confessions refused categorization: they were big tough peasants

who hid behind the witch's knee or in her hair; they were an evil influence given in food,

appearing suddenly as a fiery bird, or a wet chicken, or a little man with the head of a dog, or

a monk, or a German. Any attempt to insist on a particular categorization, to fix these

demons with a singular meaning and form, was doomed to failure.

Folklore, like demonology, is a science of categorization. One wishes to find and

establish the name and function and appearance and status of each different demon; to

specify them, fix them with a meaning. History and ethnography, on the other hand, should

The term nocnica displays the same degree of polysemy as latawiec—indeed the exploration of latawiec's
many facets carried out over the last few chapters could just as well have been performed on nocnica. For
example, the Protestant courtier and poet Walerian Otwinowski, translating Ovid's Metamorphoses into
baroque Polish, renders "Noctem noctisque deos Ereboque chaoque / convocat et longis Hecaten ululatibus
orat" as "Nocy, y nocnych Bogow, na pomoc wzywai^c; / Y piekla, y podziemnych cieniow zworywai^c; /
Hekacie dJugim swoim wyciem sie_ modlela." A modern English translation from the Latin is "and
summoning up Night and all his gods, / that dwell below in Erebus and Chaos, she called upon the goddess
Hecate / with long-drawn ululations;" while a literal translation of Otwinowski's Polish might run "The
night, and night-time gods, invoking for help; / And calling on hell, and the underground shades / [Circe]
Prayed to Hekate with a drawn-out howl" (Ovid 1914 [c. 8] bk. 14 vv. 404-405; Otwinowski trans. 1638
p. 574; Martin trans. 2004 bk. 14 w . 572-575). Otwinowski appended a gloss to these verses, explaining
that "Night and night-time gods" should be understood "Hekate, and infernal Pluto. Or to speak plainer:
Circe invoked the szatany of the night, those that the witches call nocnice [Hekaty, y Plutona piekielnego.
Abo iawniey mowia^c: wzywala Cyrce szatanow nocnych, ktore czarownice nocnicami zowiaj" (Otwinowski
1638 p. 576). Similarly, Wojciech Chroscihski, in his Polish translation of Ovid's Heroides, makes Medea
lament that Jason has left her despite all her arts, and despite the help of "straszne bladey Hekaty nocnice"
[pale Hekate's fearsome nocnice]" (Chroscihski 1733 [1695] p. 167). Thus the pagan gods Hecate and Pluto,
as well as their infernal minions, come to be the nocnice which, in the interpretation of most folklorists and
by most evidence, are very minor child-frightening demons—nightmares or bogeys. Whether this effects a
powerful demonization of nocnice or, on the contrary, the trivialization of Hecate and Pluto, is a point open
to argument.

530
 • • Translating the devil •

strive for faithfulness to the source rather than for precision. Or more exactly, a precise

account of the beliefs and experiences of witches and their accusers, a rigorous account,

requires vagueness and indeterminacy—because these beliefs and experiences are

themselves vague and indeterminate. Polish witches had sex with devils, but what these

devils were differs from trial to trial, witch to witch, even, for a single accused witch, from

moment to moment as she fit her testimony to what seemed to be required while also

struggling to maintain her self respect and a self-image she could live with. The devils thus

constructed refuse to fit into comfortable categories.

• »J» •

Ever since Ginzburg's pioneering study of the witchcraft beliefs among the Friuliani of

north-eastern Italy began to draw the attention of historians outside Italy (1983 [1966]), it has

become less and less possible to treat the devils and other characters peopling witchcraft

confessions as the product of Christian fantasies only. Ginzburg discovered that the

"witches" prosecuted by the Roman Inquisition in this area were in fact benandanti. Men and

women marked out by having been born with a caul, they were destined to fly out at night

four times a year to engage in aerial battles with witches and to thereby ensure the fertility of

the crops. He traced the long process by which inquisitorial prosecution "diabolized" this

agrarian cult; transforming the benandanti into witches and their night-battles into the

witch's sabbat. After Ginzburg, other scholars have found similar formations elsewhere:

Henningsen showed that the witch's meetings in Sicily were originally visitations from the

12
The benandanti are, in their function and activity, closely related to the stuhac or zduhac of the neighbouring
southern Slavs; and these, in turn, are cognate to the planeticy or obloknicy (lit. "cloud-people") of Polish
folklore. Suchplanetnicy, usually understood as living humans with a special function, but sometimes as
demons or the ghosts of the untimely dead, carry the storm-clouds about—away from good people or from
their friends, but sometimes toward those who have offended them. However, I have found little or no trace
of the planetnicy in the accusations or confessions in Polish witch-trials, even in those few that incorporate
weather-magic.

531
 • Chapter 3.3 •

fairy-like "ladies from outside" (1993); Klaniczay discovered "shamanistic elements" in

Hungarian witch-trials (1984); and Behringer, as mentioned above, explored the visions and

journeys of the German "shaman" Chonrad Stoeckhlin as expressions of beliefs in the

travelling revenant dead (1998). While these studies have made limited claims about the

mixedness of witchcraft beliefs with underlying cults of the dead or of fairies, others have

gone further. Eva Pocs, (with great erudition but also with what I consider to be a

problematic willingness to analyze mixed and confusing beliefs into discrete "layers)

interprets the witchcraft confessions and demon-possessions in Hungary and Slovakia in

terms of medium-like contact with the dead and with fairies (1999). She draws on Ginzburg's

own later work, in which he has claimed to find "an underlying Eurasian mythological unity"

(Ginzburg 1990 p. 267), what Strauss has called an "autochthonous and independent [...] age

old oral heritage" (1991 p. 135) of shamanism, animal metamorphosis, and mediation

between the living and the dead (Ginzburg 1990 p. 267; Strauss 1991 p. 135). In doing so, in

privileging underlying, hidden paganism in what are ostensibly more or less Christian

confessions, Ginzburg comes to resemble the Inquisitors whose interrogations of the Friulian

peasantry form the source-material for his scholarship (cf. Scribner's comments on Ginzburg,

Scribner 1991).

If we are to avoid such retroactive ratification of the inquisitorial point of view—as I

think we must for both ethical and methodological reasons—we must accept witchcraft

confessions in all their dissatisfactory mixedness. We may look for hidden meanings, or

folkloric traces, but must read these in conjunction with the surface narratives of devil-pact

and diabolical sabbat. But even at this surface level, it is not difficult to see strong overlays

of fairy-belief, or of belief in contact with ghosts of various kinds, in witch-confessions from

532
 • • Translating the devil •

all over Europe. Norman Cohn, despite his adherence to a model by which the sabbat-

stereotype developed from a standard set of defamatory cliches against heretics and

outsiders, noted that some of the demons of early witch-trials were clearly fairies—

sometimes even named "Robin Goodfellow" (Cohn 2000 [1975] pp. 137-141,159, 170-171).

P.G. Maxwell-Stuart has recently pointed out that the "little master of the witches" in

Johannes Nider's early and influential Formicarius is no-where refered to as the Devil, and

might better be understood as a fairy of some sort (2001a p. 19). Erik Midelfort has

emphasised the plurality and fluidity of supernatural beings in pre-Reformation Germany,

and characterizes the 16th century as an era of "demonization of the world" whereby such

creatures came to be consolidated into more-or-less orthodox devils (2002b p. 242; cf.

Scribner 1993, 1997).

Surprisingly, the best comparative examples of mixed and blurred devils and fairies

come from the British Isles—perhaps these are simply the best studied. Katherine Briggs

noticed decades ago that in Scottish witch-trials, the devils to whom witches make their pact

often resembled both fairies and, what amount to the same thing, the spirits of the untimely

dead (Briggs 1970 pp. 85-88). Even earlier, J.A. MacCulloch showed that Scottish witches

understood themselves to receive their "devil's" mark, and their powers, from fairies (1921

pp. 234-238). In an important recent article, Stuart Macdonald has shown that in confessions

in Fife, "instead of the details we would expect in a portrait of the great enemy of God and

humanity, what we find are elements than in places are suggestive of a fairy or elf (2002a

p. 46; see also Martin 2002 p. 83; Maxwell-Stuart 2001a p. 27). From the elite point of view,

spiritual beings could only be angelic or demonic; James VI insisted that visits to fairyland

were in fact "delusions of the devil" (Demonologie bk. 3 ch. 5; after MacCulloch 1921

533
 • Chapter 3. 3 •

p. 240). However, the common people seem to have tended to assimilate devils to fairies,

rather than the reverse.

Through a survey of this Scottish material alongside folklore and witch-trial sources

from England, Emma Wilby has shown convincingly that the witch's familiars that are so

important in British witchcraft (and which so closely resemble the little devils of many Polish

trials) bore close relations to fairies. In appearance, function, and sometimes even in name

(imp, puckling, Robin), they bore greater resemblance to fairies and hobgoblins than they did

to the devils of theology or of standard Christian imagery (Wilby 2000 pp. 286-288).

Descriptions of the first encounter with familiar-devils at a time of distress resembled

folktale motifs of the fairy-encounter, and even the witch's pact or contract bore similarities

to the behaviours non-witches undertook to "please the fairies." And, as in Poland, witches

tended to feed their familiars with milk (ibid. pp. 288-290). Despite elite insistence that

witches consorted with infernal devils, in the popular view a witch had to do with "a fairy

which could be a familiar which could be a devil which could the the Devil" (ibid. p. 302).

The close similarities of this British situation to what I have been describing in Poland

should not blind us to the important differences. In England, elite literary sources insisted

that fairies are devils (more rarely, they insisted that fairies should be distinguished from

devils). In Poland, there was never, at the elite level, any literary separation of fairy and

devil: from the very beginning, literature treated the named supernatural beings believed in

by the common people as species of devil. There was no Polish equivalent of Thomas the

13
William Bradshaw, in A plaine and pithy exposition of the second epistle to the Thessalonians (1620 p. 123)
considers "Goblins, Fayries, walking Spirits etc." to be diabolical phenomena characteristic of Catholic
periods. In contrast, John Webster in The displaying of supposed witchcraft (1667, p. 287) "allowed for
'middle creatures' who 'because of their strange natures, shapes and properties, or by reason of their being
rarely seen have been and often are not only by the common people but even by the learned taken to be
Devils, Spirits or the effects of Inchantment and Witchcraft'" (both quoted after Clark 1997 pp. 239, 361).

534
 • • Translating the devil •

Rhymer, no Midsummer Night's Dream—and therefore, also, no Hierarchie of the Blessed

Angells. Indeed, Polish literature paid no attention to non-diabolical Slavic spirits until the

Romantic period; previous literature, such as the Postepek or the Sejm Piekielny, always

treats all such beings as devils. But it does not polemicize on this point. There was no elite

tradition of fairies against which reforming clergy could react, and therefore no insistence on

the issue, and few attempts at precise definitions.

English-speaking demonologists and theologians insisted strongly and frequently that

entities such as imps and pucks and goblins and fairies and elves and leprechauns were

"nothing but" devils, that they were devils in fact. But such a statement is very different from

the process which took place in Poland, whereby a native "folkloric" term comes to

substitute for and translate a theological term. To say "X is Y" is to acknowledge the prior

assumption of their difference. It is to say that in spite of popular or ignorant misconceptions,

entities believed to belong to different categories in fact belong to just one category, and that,

again despite these misconceptions, the non-demonic features alleged to obtain in the popular

category in fact do not so obtain, since the category does not exist. The theological category

thus comes to encompass the popular category, without remainder—this, at least, is the

rhetorical intention of statements such as "fairies are in fact demons" or "the gods of the

Pagans are devils." With the partial exception of Gilowski, Polish ecclesiastical authors did

not follow such a polemical procedure. The substitution of latawiec for incubus was not an

assertion of this sort, as it does not include the necessary context of assumed difference.

Precisely because terms like brownie or puck remained, in English, distinct from terms like

incubus or devil, the latter terms preserved, for the most part, their theological senses and

were not fully integrated into folk conceptions of nature spirits and sprites. In Poland, on the

535
 • Chapter 3. 3 •

contrary, a preference for translation into local terms, substituting local demons for

"theological" ones, mixed the meanings of both. Translating the devil meant, above all,

combining the devil with local notions of grain-stealers, unbaptized ghosts, and house-

demons, and neither the Christian nor the indigenous being ever came to dominate in this

inextricably combined entity.

536
 Nie sa_ to narodowe, rodzima, wyobraznia, uksztalcone
postacie, ale sa_kosmopolitki; nie w tym, lub owym kraju
urodzone i wychowane, ale splodzone na drodze rozstajnej
pomie_dzy swiatem doczesnym a wiecznym z ojca
wojuj^cego kosciola i z makti ciemnoty.
Witches are not characters developed from our own,
national imagination; rather they are cosmopolitans, not
born or raised in this or that country, but conceived at the
cross-roads between this temporal and the everlasting
world; their father the church militant, ignorance their
mother.
Conclusions. —Ryszard Berwihski, Studia o guslach, 1984 [1854] vol. 2
The cosmopolitan indigene. p. 181.

This dissertation stands at the triple crossroads of Polish cultural and religious history

(in general); anthropology of religion and witchcraft; and the amorphous interdiscipline of

witchcraft studies. But each of these fields, themselves, has been recently interested in the

interplay between international and local, centre and periphery, colonial and indigenous.

A trend of Polish historiography over the last few decades has focussed on its re-

integration with general European history, as against earlier emphases on Polish

exceptionalism. Although the authors of some of this work have wanted to maintain and

highlight Polish difference, particularly Polish achievements such as religious tolerance and

democracy, others have worked to establish the basic comparability of Polish history to the

history of Europe as a whole. Janusz Tazbir, the grand old man of early modern Polish

history and long-time editor of Renaissance and Reformation in Poland [Odrodzenie i

Reformacja w Polsce], stands as an ambivalent example of both trends: in works such as

Okrucienstwo w nowozytnym Europie (2000) he continues the championing of Polish

exceptionalism initiated by his State without stakes (1973), while at the same time in his

numerous articles on the Polish reception of western notions and the western reception of

Polish notions, he has sought to demonstrate that for many centuries Polish culture was

537
 • Conclusions •

inextricably linked with Western Europe (e.g. essays collected in Tazbir 2001). Within

political and economic history, the late Antoni Mg.czak rejected traditional insistence on the

unique trajectory of the "noble democracy" (1993). Instead, he consistently sought points of

comparison between Poland and such states as Scotland or Denmark (1995; cf. Majczak et al.

eds. 1985) and developed pan-European models to understand systems of informal power

(1998, 2000). Within religious history, a central theme of the publications associated with the

East-Central Europe Institute has been the degree to which Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and

Hungary were shaped by medieval Catholicism, Protestantism and Counter-Reformation—

experiences these regions shared with Western Europe but not with the Orthodox East (e.g.

Bartmifiski and Jasinska-Wojtkowska eds. 1995; Urbanczyk ed. 1997; Kloczowski ed. 1997,

1999; Instytut 1999). In most of this recent work, which incidentally is closely associated

with the integration of Poland into NATO and the European Union, the point has not been to

insist on the identity of Polish historical trajectories with those of Western Europe; rather, it

has been to re-situate Polish history as a variation on a theme, as one of the many

permutations of general Western European history, to be studied and taught alongside other

such permutations such as the history of Spain or Scotland or Sweden. In other words, Polish

and neighbouring historians across a wide array of sub-disciplines are beginning to

concentrate on the ways in which local concerns and notions and movements interacted with,

integrated with, assimilated to, but also opposed or reacted to more general trends of

European history.1

Recent witchcraft scholarship displays a similar tension between the international and

the local, and between the general and the particular. While most scholars recognize

In addition to the works cited above, see for social and cultural history the festschrift for Tazbir (Bylina ed.
1997), and the multi-author volume Society and culture: Poland and Europe (Bogucka ed. 1995). For
political and economic history, see Ma_czak 1995 and Ma_czak et al. 1985.

538
 • Conclusions •

important local variation, the very coherence of a tradition of scholarship with witchcraft as

its object depends on some generalizable, commensurable notion of what should be included

in the category.

Within the anthropological literature, a tendency to reject the category of witchcraft as a

colonial imposition which masks difference or creates false impressions of similarity (e.g.

Rasmussen 1998) seems to be giving way to a renewed interest in commonalities and

commensalities. Older models contrasted European mass-persecution of witches against the

supposedly functional "magical equilibrium" of, for example, African witchcraft (to borrow a

term from Geschiere 1997 p. 269 n. 40). Newer work has often focussed on the witch-craft

eradication movements of contemporary Africa (Apter 1993; Geschiere 1994, Green 1997).

In conjunction with the opposite tendency within European scholarship to focus on

"everyday" persecution of witches, witch-related practices and beliefs in the two continents

are coming to seem increasingly comparable. A major focus of contemporary anthropological

scholarship on witchcraft (primarily in Africa, but also elsewhere) has been the use of the

imagined witch to negotiate between local and international systems of power, and to manage

or resist the transition to global, capitalist modernity (essays in Comaroff and Comaroff eds.

1993; Geschiere 1997; essays in Clough and Mitchell eds. 2001, especially Clough 2001,

Meyer 2001; for qualified criticism of this perspective, see Green 1997; Sanders 2003). As

happened in Europe in the early modern period, cosmopolitan, learned, and often textual

imaginations of witchcraft have come together with local, usually oral understandings, and

the results have often been an intensification of witchcraft fears and persecutions. However,

as also in Europe, the results have also been intensely local, with major variations between

regions (see e.g. Geschiere 2001); and they have been replete with unintended consequences

539
 • Conclusions •

(see especially Meyer 1999). A suggestion coming out of this recent work, but as yet not

satisfactorily explored or provided with empirical evidence, is that intense witchcraft

persecution occurs not at the centre or the periphery but in the "hinterland," the interactive

and conflicting area—spatial, social, economic and conceptual—wherein a cosmopolitan,

modern system comes into contact with local and traditional communities (Austen 1993;

Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Frankfurter 2005; Thoden von Velzen and Wetering 2001).

Although the comparative element in most of these works has not so far been very well

argued,2 they do provide a model for thinking about witchcraft beliefs as at once local and

global, and about the problematic interaction between these two registers.

Within the field of European witchcraft studies more specifically, there has in recent

years been considerable interest in the ways that "canonical" assumptions about witchcraft

and witch-trials played out on the margins of Europe. Since the publication of Ankarloo and

Henningsen's influential Early modern European witchcraft: Centres and peripheries (1993

[1987]), historians of European witchcraft have also been taken up with problems of the

interactions between centre and periphery, metropole and hinterland. The studies in that

volume from such marginal areas of Europe as Iceland, Sicily, Hungary, or Estonia

challenged monolithic accounts of the witch-persecution by demonstrating extreme regional

variety both in belief and practice: to mention just one example, they showed that a majority

of the "witches" in many of these areas were male. At the same time, the volume offered a

2
Excellent though some of these works are within their own field, they have characteristically failed in their
attempts at comparison through a lack of serious engagement with the historical scholarship (in this way,
perhaps, the unqualified borrowing from anthropology by some earlier historians of witchcraft has been
revenged). This is especially true of Austen, who seems not to understand that modernization in Europe was
a diverse and strongly regional process. There is also some tendency to choose those European historical
accounts (such as Muchembled's) which fit the model, over those which are widely accepted by
contemporary historians of European witchcraft (for the definative critique of Muchembled, see Pearl 1998).
Frankfurter (2005), which ranges across an extremely wide temporal and spacial landscape, attempts a more
careful and nuanced comparative model than the previous literature has offered.

540
 • Conclusions •

unifying model of centre and periphery, under which what we take to be typical of European

witchcraft is, instead, characteristic of a central core (more or less France, Switzerland, and

Germany), with greater and greater variation on the theme as one proceeds into the political,

cultural and economic periphery. Moreover, these peripheral variations tend to decrease with

time, so that, although they arrive late, "typical" witch persecution and "typical" beliefs such

as the sabbat do eventually make their appearance in the periphery. Witch-trials and

demonology may be seen as part of a hegemonic colonizing discourse that reaches out from

the European centre to influence the borderlands; but this discourse is also modified and

indigenized in the process.

Ironically, it is sometimes difficult to decide at which level of discourse, the "elite' or

the "folk," one finds a more uniform imagination of witchcraft. On the one hand, one finds

an elite discourse, sustained by and for members of the "republic of letters" which, because

of shared assumptions as well as a shared heritage of classical texts, was extraordinarily

uniform across Europe and its colonies. Stuart Clark's Thinking with demons, one of the main

sources for this dissertation and the unparalleled inquiry into the pan-European discourse on

witchcraft, has shown its surprising stability across confessional lines, legal systems, and

political regimes. Poland played no part in this conversation as Clark describes it (Polish is

probably one of the very few European languages he cannot read), but Polish demonology

certainly did absorb Western models with only minor changes. The Czarownica powolana is

almost certainly independent of Spee's Cautio criminalis, but its arguments are similar

because its concerns, its assumptions, its theology are similar, and because it draws on the

same sources for its discussion.

541
 • Conclusions •

On the other hand, local folklore could also exhibit strong uniformity at the folk level.

One need not follow Ginzburg's tracing of the sabbat to a pan-Eurasian shamanistic complex

to note the very wide similarities in the imagination of the witch cross-culturally. The

imagination of the witch as an insatiable over-consumer of limited goods ranges right across

the world (e.g. Apter 1993; Austen 1993, Geschiere 2001; E. Goody 1970; Jackson 1999;

Pradelles de Latour 1995; Kelly 2002; Forge 1970). The vampiric night witch is a near-

archetype, a "synthetic image" in Needham's useful phrase (1978). Details such as the owl as

a night-flying witch-bird may owe something, in Europe, to the classical heritage with its

lamiae and strigae, and to the Biblical heritage with its screech-owls disporting with goat-

demons in the ruins of Edom; but one finds very similar imaginations in Africa (Parkin 1985;

Pradelles de Latour 1995; Jackson 1999; pp. 312-314; Apter 1993 p. 117).

Indeed, nearly every feature of the Polish imagined witch can be found elsewhere:

desecration of the host, the preoccupation with milk, the attacks against children; the burial

of vermin under the threshold to cause illness. The use of treasure-hauling demons or spirits

to steal grain from neighbours, which seems to be a typically Slavic or Balto-Slavic motif;

was already reported by Virgil in the Eclogues a few decades before Christ, and receives

discussion in Augustine (Virgil 1999 [c. 35 BCE] 8.98; Augustine 2003 [c. 413] 8.19). Even

so specific and local a practice as the use of foetus-ghosts for malefice or to find treasure, a

practice and belief seemingly so dependent on Christian understandings of baptism, finds

extraordinary parallels in, for example, sorcery as practiced in northern India (Dwyer 2003

pp. 63-64).

In this dissertation, I have wanted to integrate discussion of the Polish imagination of

the witch into the wider European and indeed world context. Against studies that emphasized

542
 • Conclusions •

Polish exceptionalism, tolerance and "mild" witch-hunts (Tazbir 1978; Bogucka 1997), I

have wanted to show that the Polish village quarrels which lead to accusations, the Polish

trial process, and Polish sentencing habits were fully comparable to the rest of Europe.

Against the countervailing assumption, largely a product of mis-readings of Baranowski,

that Poland experienced an exceptionally intense period of witch-trials and witchcraft fears, I

have wanted to show that this too is incorrect. With the multiplication of excellent studies

from all over Europe it is becoming increasingly difficult to point to any region as "typical;"

however, it seems clear that the Polish state of affairs, with infrequent trials in most places

and a few areas of intense witch-persecution; with local persecution despite the attempts of

central authorities to reign it in; with clerical misgivings about the abuses of witch-trials

despite the religious basis of much of the witch-image, is not too different from that of the

rest of Europe.

At the religious and cultural level, too, I have wanted to show both the cosmopolitanism

and the indigenous character of Polish witch-trials. Demonological tropes of Bald Mountain

or of the desecrated host differed little from such tropes in France or Alsace or the Catholic

areas of Germany; demonological tropes of diabolical sex and the devil's pact are

comparable to such motifs in Protestant Europe as well. But there were also important

differences. The intensely Eucharistic character of the Polish Counter-Reformation, perhaps

exacerbated by the extremely troubled history of Catholic relations with the large Jewish

population of the Commonwealth, meant that host-magic and host-desecration played a

particularly important role in the Polish witch-trials. And the complex character of Polish

demons meant that sex with the devil need not be sex with the Devil.

543
 • Conclusions •

Ultimately, however, I have wanted to show, not only how the Western imagination of

witchcraft played out and became localized in Poland, but how individual accused witches

imagined their own stories. By "imagining witchcraft" I have wanted to denote the

stereotypes and "synthetic images" by which accusers, judges, theologians and poets

imagined the witch as terrifying Other; but I have also wanted to explore the ways in which

the accused imagined and re-imagined themselves, in resistance to such stereotypes but also

by and through them. Witch-trials are very nearly our only source for the voices of early

modern Polish peasant-women, the only place where they talked about themselves. Those

voices were not given willingly; on the contrary they were compelled through unimaginable

torture. Accused witches were forced to say specific things about themselves; they were

forced to declare themselves to be the worst kind of criminal, guilty of the worst

abominations. Nevertheless, through and under and around the "demonological script," they

told their judges a great deal that was true, or that at least bore some resemblance to what

they wished to think about themselves. They managed to talk about love and loss; they

managed to express resentment and spite but also yearnings, fears, fantasies of their own;

they displayed themselves, often, to be people of great courage and assertiveness. Many, as

well, imagined and represented themselves as women of deep Catholic piety—and they did

this through the very act and in the words of rejection of that piety. In imagining witchcraft in

early modern Poland, the accused witches imagined themselves, and it is something of this

self-representation that, above all, I have wanted to convey in this dissertation.

544
Appendix A
Witch-trials from the Lublin court records, 1627-1732
This appendix includes the full text of all the witch-trials written into the Lublin court-books, with the exception
of the trial of Regina Sokolkowa in 1661, for love-magic and suspected abortion (#56). That trial is exceptional
in many ways: it was argued before the City Counsel Court rather than the wqjt-court. The greater part of the
trial record consists in arguments for and against its appellation to the royal Assessory Court, and in the
decisions of the appelate court: very nearly the whole is in Latin. I discuss this trial briefly in Ostling 2005a p.
100.
The appendix consists in trials found in the Lublin town-court records—a category distinct from trials
conducted in Lublin or by the Lublin town court. Only two of the trials below (#27, #39) consist wholly of
proceedings of that court. The trial of Zofia Filipowiczowa (#37) took place entirely before the court of the
small town of Skrzynno; for reasons that are not clear, the plaintiff in that trial requested that its record be
copied into the Lublin books. The trials of Regina Zaleska (#42) and Maryna Bialkowa (#59), and Katarzyna
Ratayowa (#125) all involving sacrilege of the Eucharist as well as witchcraft, came to the Lublin city court by
way of the Royal Tribunal, which often turned over cases in this way. In all these cases at least some initial
investigation took place previously before small-town courts near the locations of the original crimes. However,
the Lublin trials do not have the character of appellate cases; rather, the small town courts sent the cases to the
Tribunal, and thence to the Lublin court, because of the element of sacrilege. Anna Swedycka (#80) also came
to the Lublin court by way of the Tribunal; in her case it appears that there was no first trial in Stary Sol, nor is
there any suggestion of sacrilege: her aristocratic master seems simply to have preferred the Tribunal to other,
nearer courts. The case of Regina Lewczykowa (#118) comprises the only clear appeal; her master, who
happened also to be the Referendary of the Crown and thus a high-court judge himself, appealed her case from
the court of tiny Goraj. Finally, two sets of records (#87 and #161) are not properly trials at all: these consist
entirely of the testimony under torture of both accused peasant witches and peasant witnesses in cases against
noble defendants proceeding simultaneously before the Tribunal. As the Tribunal had no torture chamber of its
own, the szlachta being exempt, it sent these witnesses to the Lublin court, together with a long list of questions
for them to answer. The Tribunal records, unfortunately, are lost.

With the exception of trial #42, which was transcribed from the archival records by myself, all the trials
below were transcribed and published by Miroslawa Zakrzewska-Dubasowa, the first post-war director of the
Lublin archives, in her Procesy o czary w Lublinie w XVII i XVIII w. (1947). I have checked her transcriptions
against the originals and have found in every case that her reading is good and careful. Trial #42 was recorded
in the Acta Maleficorum for May 20 1644 to Oct. 11 1647, (APLublin AMLublin sig. 143), which document
was returned to the Lublin archive from the Belarussian SSR only in the 1960s. I did not find any other trials
missed by Zakrzewska-Dubasowa, although there are a number of records touching on witchcraft in various
ways that she did not include in her work; some of these are discussed in chapter 1.1.
All translations from Polish are my own. For several of the more difficult Latin passages, I received very
substantive help from Anna Kubicka and Mark Crane, for which I am deeply grateful. In transcribing and

545
 • Appendix A •

translating the trials, I have made minimal changes to the original text, limiting myself for most part to the very
occasional addition of punctuation and paragraphing to improve clarity, and the expansion of scribal
abbreviations. Missing terms are supplied in square brackets; troublesome translations are discussed in
footnotes. Originally Latin text is marked by italicization.

#27. Maryna and Jadwiga 1627

APLublin, AMLublin 141 (Criminalia) ff. 198-204; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 11-13.

Cast.
Jadwiga Accused witch, Lublin townswoman.
Maryna, wife of Albert (i.e. Wojciech) the cook Her house-maid and co-accused.
Father Jan Jesuit priest implicated by Jadwiga
Jakubowa Cobblers wife, neighbour of Jadwiga.

Done in Lublin under the town-hall, in the customary place of torture, Great Wednesday [March 31,
1627]. Jadwiga, accused ofmalefice, was lead into the place of torture at the behest of the inquisitor and first
questioned by the wojt-court whether she practiced witchcraft. She answered that she did not practice it. Asked
whether she ordered her house-maid1 to go get the bones of a corpse; she responded: I didn't order that. I've
never done any sort of witchcraft. Maryna, wife of Wojciech the cook.2 Asked whether she stood by her
testimony, or whether she had testified against this Jadwiga out of wrath. She answered, that I spoke the truth, I
brought her the bones of a corpse, and she burnt them, this I saw with my own eyes, and what I testified before,
I stand by all of it. At length Hedwigis [i.e. Jadwiga], admonished not to give over her body to torment, but
rather to voluntarily admit and tell everything. She answered: I don't know anything about any witchcraft.
Bound to the torture-post? Asked whether she sent her house-maid to the neighbour for beer. She
answered: I didn't send her.
Pulled once she testified the following: I didn't send her to get corpse's bones ever; as I live, I've never
practiced witchcraft; I don't know anything for God's sake.
Pulled a second time. She testified: Father Jan the Jesuit, who visits criminals, told me to go to the
executioner to get a skull; but the executioner said: I don't have any. Asked: where did the priest tell her to try
to get the skull, she responded, in our house, when he listened to my husband's confession.
Pulled a third time, she testified: I didn't send her for corpse's-bones. That Maryna told me, I'll go get
some soil from a grave and I'll sprinkle it on the cobbler's wife's doorstep, so that people won't be able to stand

1
komornica: In villages, a komornica was a lodger with ideally guaranteed lifelong rights to room and board in
exchange for work in the fields or home. In a city, a komornica was rather a house-maid, as I have translated
the term here, although she could be a lodger.
2
Maryna is "Alberti Coci consors." I have translated this as "wife of Wojciech the cook" taking Cocus as an
occupation rather than a surname. This may be incorrect. Some 145 Italians lived in Lublin between 1583
and 1650 (Tworek 1965 p. 83), Albert Coci may have come from this group. Laszkiewicz, for example,
records a Zofia Coci in a later criminal trial (1989 p. 146).
palus torturarum: otherwise not described in any way. Either a rack or, more likely, the strappado.

546
 • The Lublin Trials •

the sight of her.4 Also she testified, that that Maryna brought a calf-bone to the house, which I took to the
Franciscans,5 but I never told her to get any bones.
Maryna is brought in. Asked whether she stands by her testimony. She answered: I brought her the bones
of a corpse, and she burnt them. I saw it with my own eyes. I brought her a calf-bone, the shin-bone of an arm,6
and a skull. Jadwiga, asked whether Maryna brought her the bones of a corpse, answered: she brought me a calf,
which I took to the Franciscans, but I never told her to bring those bones; she did it on her own to make trouble
for Jakubowa, the cobbler's wife. Also she testified: I burnt hoops on the stove. Finally she testified: I burnt
those bones, and Maryna took the ashes herself and I don't know where she went with them. Asked what sort of
bones they were, she answered, I burned two anklebones, and the third was flat.
Burnt with fire, she testified: I burnt the bone, but Maryna took the ashes and there's no telling where she
went, because she often said to me: mistress, I'll take care of that cobbler's wife, just give me some money for
shoes, I'll make some trouble for that cobbler's wife, so that people won't stand to look at her. And Maryna and
the cobbler's wife hated each other.
Then Maryna was brought in, and answered the questions put to her by the officers present in these words:
Jadwiga told me to get the corpse's bones and she burnt them. Jadwiga, asked why she poured wash-water out
on the road. She answered: I poured it out because everyone in the house got sick, and a woman taught me
about that once, when I bought firewood from her. Finally Hedvigis was dismissed from torture.
Done Thursday before the first Sunday after Easter [April 8].
The accused having been brought forth from their cells, the instigator of the court made his final
argument against Hedvigis and Marina, criminally convicted as witches [maleficae] and sorceresses
[veneficae] by their own acknowledgements and confessions, asking generally that the full extent of law and
justice be applied to them, according to prescribed common law1 and that they be put to the ultimate
punishment of death, as is fitting, and to be burnt up by fire as was their own wish made by them orally.
After the prosecutor's making of his proposal in this way, the witch [malefica] Jadwiga was asked whether
she stands by the things she testified to under torture. She responded that she stands by them. Asked whether
she burnt a corpse's bones and whether she ordered Maryna to bring them to her. She answered: I burnt them,
and I myself brought them to the house, so that Maryna could arrange trouble for the cobbler's wife. Asked
what sort of hoops she burnt and to what end, she answered: I burnt the hoops from a little barrel that was
falling apart: not for any witchcraft.

4
This idiom may more simply be translated as "so that people will hate her."
5
Bernardyny: the term comes from the church of St. Bernardin in Krakow, and refers to the Observant
Franciscans, not to the Cistercian Bernardine nuns as in the West.
6
I.e., a tibia.
7
iuris communis: this could also be translated as "universal law."
No such wish or request appears in the record as we have it. It is not clear to me whether the instigator is
referring here to some actually stated wish, or whether he is rather suggesting, in effect, that "they asked for
it."

547
 • Appendix A •

The judgement of the official extraordinary criminal court is that the accused witches [maleficae]
Hedwigis and Marina did use enchantments and sorcery in order to harm others. Since this has been clearly
established, both from testimony and from confessions, for this reason these same witches [veneficae], who have
offended against both divine and human law (lest crimes, which owe a public restitution to the public good,
should go unpunished), they are to suffer the punishment of whipping by the executioner, and are to expelled
from the city in perpetuity; if indeed they should attempt, through whatever manner or by whatever path to
enter into the city, it is decreed that they should then irremissibly suffer capital punishment™ immediately.

• *l* •

#37. Zofia Filipowiczowa 1639

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 38 (Advocatalia) ff. 113-116; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 13-20. Note: although
the case took place in Skrzynno in 1639, it was written into the Lublin wqjt-court books in 1640 or 1641.

Cast.
Zofia Filipowiczowa or Philipowiczowa Primary accused witch, housekeeper to Jan
Podlodowski in Kozyce.
Anna Wiotezczyna or Wietezczyna Manor-servant in Kozyce, witness and co-accused.
Iewa of Ziemaki Manor-servant in Kozyce, witness and co-accused.
Lucia of Wola Manor-servant in Kozyce, witness and co-accused.
P. Anuska Zawadzka Deceased, implicated as teacher of witchcraft.
Possibly the former housekeeper at Kozyce.
P. Pawel Podlodowski or Podlodowsky Owner of Rykow and Zofia's accuser.
P. Ian (i.e. Jan) Podlodowski Deceased brother of Pawel Podlodowski, owner of
Kozyce.
Iagnieczka Fierleiowka Manor-servant and cook in Kozyce, witness.
P. Zabielska Possibly a noble resident of Kozyce manor.
Jadwiga Latoskowa, wife of Janusz An alleged witch from the village of Zawady.
Bakowski and Golqbiowski Servants, possibly courtiers, of P. Jan Podlodowski.
P. Jan Kulesza Courtier or noble servant of Pawel Podlodowski.
LukaszBrewka Wqjt of Skrzynno.
Jan Kobza
Wawrzyniec Kobzik
Marcin Okrutny
Stanislaw Sliwowski Jurymen of Skrzynno.
Stanislaw Hutnik
Tomasz Frankowicz City Councillors of Skrynno.
Matias (Mateusz) Zobulsky Notary of the Skrzynno court.

The noble Jan Kulesza, on behalf of his generosity Pawel Podlodowski, brings forward a certain
document to be inserted into the records. Before the civil court of Lublin, appearing in person, the noble Jan
Kulesza of the district ofPodlasie, attendant to his generosity Pawel Podlodowski, and on behalf of the same,

iudicium criminale necessario bannitum: this common formula simply indicates court instituted or specially
constituted at any time other than the ordinary thrice-yearly court sessions. Most serious criminal matters,
including most witch-trials, were tried before such courts.
10
poena colli: "punishment of the neck." Together with the Polish equivalent, (kara gardla, "punishment of the
throat") this is capital punishment of any kind: it need not mean hanging or beheading as the idiom might
suggest.

548
 • The Lublin Trials •

his lord, brings to this court an authentic document, as written below, produced out of the records of the village
ofRykow; requesting, he easily accomplished, that it [the document] was received into the records of this
present court and was included in them as final and unassailable. And this, which by the permission of the
present court in accordance with its rights, has been attached to its writs and requests before the court, from
which nobody may remove the records; this authentic document, received and inserted into the records of the
present court by this same court, its contents written word for word follow, thus:
Done in the village ofRykow, Friday namely the 15th of July 1639. At the request of his honour Pan
Pawel Podlodowski, the office of the wojt of the abbatial town ofSkrzynno,11 that is the honourable Lukasz
Brewka, wojt, with his jury-men Jan Kobza, Wawrzyniec Kobzik, Marcin Okrutny, Stanislaw Sliwowski, in the
presence of Stanislaw Hutnik and Tomasz Frankowicz, city counsellors and citizens of the above-mentioned
abbatial town ofSkrzynno, for the interrogation and judicial investigation of the true testimony of the witches,
concerning various acts of witchcraft and superstition [gusly], for which Zofia Philipowiczowa, together with
her helpers, has been put into prison in the village ofRykow, belonging to his honour, the same above-
mentioned Pan Pawel Podlodowski; having arrived [in Rykow] the criminal court opened officially by rule of
law. Before this court, his honour that same above-mentioned Pan Pawel Podlodowsky, accused
Philipowiczowa, also present in person, thus: she, being a housemaid to his honour Pan Ian Podlodowski, of
noble memory, my brother by birth12 in Kozice, for a considerable time busying herself with great acts of
witchcraft and superstition [czary i gusly], together with other superstition-workers [guslice], by all this
witchcraft and her strange incantations, brought my brother to his death. And not contenting herself with this,
by similar devilish tricks [dyabelskie fortele] she has for some time attacked my health, and with her
superstitions [zabobony], has so crippled my buildings and fields that nothing at all goes right for me, and she
has also taught other witches and superstition-worker among these properties [of mine]. To which, of course,
Philipowiczowa claimed ignorance to every single word, and of course she said I didn't do anything in the
world like that; if there was anything at all, and that very little, I only did what people have taught me, toward
my own prosperity, therefore until further deliberation Philipowiczowa is returned to the jail. Others
superstition-workers, accused together with her and also kept in the jail, were brought before the court for a
better understanding [of the case], and gave the following testimony.

First Iagniczka Fierleiowka of Kozyce testified. When Philipowiczowa served his honour, the late Pan Ian
Podlodowski, I prepared food in her company; I saw once when Philipowiczowa rinsed her natural parts (alias)
in a tin mug with beer in it, and at that time the dead [Ian] was eating breakfast. She, having rinsed her shirt of
that filth13 in the beer, she brought that beer to the table of his honour, and I saw the beer in that very mug

11
Skrzynno belonged to the Cistercian monastery of Sulejow.
12
Ian Podlodowski is his full brother, "brat rodzony." The contrast is to "brat cioteczny," aunt-brother or first
cousin.
13
Ona wyplukawszy koszule swoie zonego plugastwa wpiwo: Together with the preceding sentence, the clear
implication is that Zofia had rinsed a menstrual rag, rather than a shirt, in the beer. However, later Zofia
admits to having rinsed a shirt [gzlo] under her armpits [pod pachami], while uttering a spell about sweat
rather than other bodily efluvia. Compare a church-court trial in Wloclawek, 1487, in which one Anna was
accused of trying to kill her husband by giving him "menstrua sua" to drink (Koranyi 1927 p. 12; Ulanowski

549
 • Appendix A •

before him on the table, but I don't know whether he drank it. Secondly: I saw once how Philipowicowa [sic]
tied a string to her ringer and let out some blood from it above a large glass mug into beer, later I saw how his
honour himself drank that beer. Thirdly: She had some sort of black earth in a kerchief; she told me to dig a
hole in the hearth, and she poured [the black earth] into the hole, saying something to herself, and she told me to
cover it up with clay and to burn pieces of aspen firewood on that place. Fourthly: I saw how, in the chimney,
she often hung some bits of wood from a thread on an aspen-wood stick, and she told [me] to cense [myself]
under those bits of wood. Fifthly: She buried some aspen-wood in the hearth and she told me to cover it up with
clay and burn [the fire] on it. Sixthly: When she had to do something, and also before noon she said some sort
of prayers.14 Seventhly: I saw a lock in her possession, it hung from a door-hitch in the period when she worked
for the dead man, and she used it to lock her chamber when she went outside.15
A second [woman] Anna Wiotezczyna of Kozyce [testified]: Philipowicowa sent for me once and said to
me: when will you be able to dry up16 Pan Pawel Podlodowski, I didn't say anything to that, another time when
Philipowicowa came to me she sat at my feet and put her head on my lap, saying: Wiotezczyna, when will Pan
Pawel take notice of Iewa;17 says I to her what do you mean, she says cut a corner off the chimney and a corner
off the oven and from the lintel above the door, then the devils will take him within the year. Also another time
she baked bread on purpose and she stuck ears of grain into it and put it in the oven with the ears in it, and she
spoke something over the bread, but I don't know what and I asked her what it was for; she answered so that the
master would deal well with me.
Third: Iewa from Ziemaki: when Philipowicowa's chest was taken to his honour after the death of the
dead man, she asked my advice whether I should do something to Pan Pawel so that he wouldn't exploit my
misfortune, I answered her: I heard also this from the late [Pani] Zawadzka, that if you cut off the corner of a
black oven and place it on the place18 through which the smoke goes, he won't outlive the year. Also another
time during the fast, Philipowicowa had water heated for her to wash herself, the water stood from Friday to
Saturday with blessed herbs in it; she washed herself in it for two whole hours on Saturday and the girl warmed
it with two pails [of hot water].
Fourth: Lucia from Wola attested. I used to wash Philipowicowa's kerchief, and when, once, his honour
Pan Ian Podlodowsky rode to Krakow, Philipowicowa told me to bring her some small pieces of aspen wood.
After she cut them up into small pieces, she told me to stick them to the oven and burn them in that place, and

ed. 1908 par. 600). There is a similar case in Poznan in 1514 (Koranyi 1927 p. 13; Ulanowski ed. 1902 par.
1691).
14
pacierze: Although the term most usually means the Lord's Prayer, it may also mean any prayer or spell.
15
The witness speaks of an "odumorkowe" lock—this word is obscure, and may be a garbling of some variant
of odumarty—from the dead; that is, inherited. The significance of this lock is not clear to me. It may only
indicate that Filipowiczowa had something to hide, although locks could have magical powers: among the
accusations against Anna Mizerka in Tuliszkow in 1684 (#93) we find that she put a lock against the barn of
her accuser, apparently to take a symbolic ownership of the barn's contents and in this way to steal the profit
from his cows.
16
ususzyc: literally "to dry up," the word can mean "to wither" and thus, in the context of witchcraft, to kill.
17
na Iewq wiedziat Zofia seems to wish to soften Pan Pawel's disapproval of Zofia's implied romance with Pan
Ian, by getting him involved with the maid Iewa.
18
polednie: I have not identified this word, but it is clearly a part of the hearth or chimney.

550
 • The Lublin Trials •

when they weren't stuck well she made me fix them so they would stick better. She did this two times in my
presence, and when his honour [Pan Jan] returned from Krakow, Philipowiczowa said, you see, he had to return
quickly, because these bits of wood brought him back. Once I also saw Philipowicowa hang a small piece of
wood, smaller than a cane, from a cane of aspen wood on a thread in the fireplace, and she censed herself
underneath it. I asked her what she did this for, she said, because of yearning: so that his honour might return
home as soon as possible. She also baked bread with the stalks of rye baked into it, I don't know for what
purpose, and later she gave that bread to the poor at church.
In opposition [to the above testimony], the accused Philipowicowa formally testified of her own free will:
The late Mrs. Zawadzka, it would be ten years ago taught me to get the heart of a pigeon, dry it, powder it, and
give it to his late honour Pan Ian in a drink, so that he would be friendly toward me; I gave that pigeon's heart
to his honour to drink, and his house servants and I myself ate the boiled [heart] and drank it, sharing it half and
half with his honour, and saying the following words: just as a male pigeon cannot live without his female
pigeon, so let it be that you, christened and called Ian, can't live without me, christened and called Zophia. Also
that same, late Mrs. Zawadzka taught me to let a drop of blood fall from my heart-finger [ring-finger], into a
drink, and give it to his honour to drink, saying the following words: Just as I cannot live without my blood, so
you christened and called Ian, cannot live without me.
Thirdly she testified: That same Anuska Zawadzka taught me to tie a stick of aspen wood in the fireplace
on a string from [my] underclothing19 so that he would have a yearning toward me. That same Anuska taught
me to yank the horseshoe from his horse, or the earth from under its [or his] feet, when his honour Pan Pawel
rode to visit us in Koszyce, so that he would be friendly toward me, and Jagnieszka the cook buried that earth in
the fireplace and as she stuck it there I spoke these words: "just as you, christened and called Pawel, cannot be
without this soil, so also don't be without myself, christened and called Zophia."
Fourthly: Mrs. Zabielska hired a witch [czarownica] from the village of Zawady, Jadwiga Latoskowa, and
brought her to Kozyce. They told that witch to take blessed herbs and holy water, I wasn't in the house at the
time, only Zabielska, in my name told that witch to say the following: Mrs. Philipowocowa told you to ask that
you come with me to her in Kozyce and wash her [in the blessed herbs and holy water], because the master has
a bad will toward her, she [Latoskowa] is to be given a few zlotych and seeds. And then she told the late [Pan
Jan's] servants, Bakowski and Gole_biowski, to apprehend her, saying that Philipowicowa is a witch, and I never
had any dealings with her, and when the late [master's] horse and many other things were stolen, she
[Zabielska] brought that Latoskowa, Ianusz's wife, to Kozyce, and she was supposed to dry up the ne'er-do-
well [pacholek] who stole the horse and other things, but the late Pan [Ian] forbade it saying, they wouldn't give
me back those stolen things until they kill him.20 Full of anger because they brought that witch to Kozyce,

19
napowrozku odgaci: a powrozek is a string or even a small rope rather than the sort of thread from which
even very course underwear might be made, so it is not clear what might be meant—perhaps a laundry-line
on which underwear had hung to dry.
20
This long sentence, while giving a good indication of the close approximation of written testimony to speech
as spoken, is almost impossible to make sense of in its original form. It may be reconstructed as follows:
"While I was away, Pani Zabielska tried to frame me. She hired a the witch Jadwiga Latowskowa, and told
her in my name that I had asked for her to come, to bathe me in blessed herbs and holy water so that I might

551
 • Appendix A •

wanting to doom me through a falsehood, I sent for Wietezczyna, saying to her: dear Wiotezczyna, please, I ask
you, if you know how to wither [things], wither Zabielska, because she has done me a great mischief, bringing a
witch to me in Kozyce; I'll buy you a shawl [rantuch] if you do that for me. Wiotezczyna said: I don't know
how. And I said to that, God save us, she's thin enough. And as for the shirt that I rinsed under my armpits,
that's just something Anuska [Zawadzka] taught me, and she told me to say the following words: just as I
cannot be without my sweat, let not the man christened and called Jan be able to be without me, christened
Zophia. Wiotezczyna taught me to bake bread. The first bread was baked and a it had a little dent in it; I sent for
Wiotezczyna asking her whether it was baked well: she said the master will die. In response I cussed her out,
saying better that you yourself be killed! How is the bread supposed to know about the death of my benefactor?
She went away crying, and saying I'll die if I'm to die. I said an Our Father to that bread, and three Hail Maries,
and I put three ears [of rye] into it, with the idea that if they burn he will die. Iewa, however, taught me: when I
was washing myself I started to weep, complaining about his honour Pan Pawel. She said to me the following:
Dear benefactress, don't worry; you could do something to him since he did you such a great mischief. I said
what and how? and she told me: cut off the corner of a blackened oven and put it behind the beam where the
smoke goes through; then he won't live out the year. But I answered her: It would be even worse if he died:
who would take pity on my poverty? Concerning the lock, Anuska gave it to me, and she spoke to it the
following words: the one called Ian will not be ill-willed toward the one christened Zophia, until the one
christened and called Lukasz21 rises up and opens this lock. And she locked it, and later she gave it to Jagna
who locked her chest with it, now I don't know what has happened to it.

From this voluntary testimony the wojt-court of Skrzynno, with its jury, agreeing, that the above-
mentioned witches, confessing in part, do not wish however to confess most [of their crimes], therefore at the
request of the instigator and the inclination of the plaintiff party, in order to elicit greater truth, they are
condemned to interrogation [under torture]. Two jury-men were chosen from among [the jury-bench], together
with the court scribe, in order to listen to this interrogation or torture. And when Philipowiczowa was given
over to the carrying-out of the above mentioned [questioning] against Philipowiczowa and her other, above-
mentioned accomplices; to be tortured by the executioner of justice, respectable people came forward to
intercede strongly, particularly persons of the clergy and of the order of equestrians,22 requesting that this
horrendous sentence might, out of the kindness of the court, be changed over into a milder sentence, the which
intercession was referred to his honour Pan Pawel Podlodowski himself, who left it up to the better and higher
judgement of the court. Because of these so very earnest intercessions from the above-mentioned noble lord
Podlodowski, plaintiff in this case, [the court], without contradicting its sentence, after mature deliberation
moderately, that Philipowiczowa, who by the sentence of this court of Skrzynno had been sentenced to death,

find favor with Pan Ian. She paid the witch, ostensibly by my order, and then she told Bajcowski and
Golqbiowski to arrest me as a witch. But I never had any dealings with Latowskowa; on the contrary, when
Pan Ian's horse was stolen, it was Zabielska who wanted to hire Latoskowa to dry up the thief, but Pan Ian
forbade this."
21
She seems to mean St. Lukasz (St. Luke)—with the meaning that P. Ian will be kind to her until the general
resurrection.
22
equestris ordinis: the szlachta often compared itself to the equestrian estate of Roman antiquity.

552
 • The Lublin Trials •

that is, that she was to be burned in fire by the ministers of justice (for by such incantations many people are
brought to ruin), is [instead], together with her above-mentioned accomplices Eva and Lucia (excepting
Wiotezczyna of Kozyce, whom the court finds innocent of this crime), is heretoforward and in perpetuity to be
chased out, paraded out with torches,23 and banished from the property of his honour Pan Podlodowski. First,
however, so that further, similar crimes should not become widespread, in order to frighten others,
Philipowicowa together with Ewa and Lucia, are to be tied to a post in the centre of the village and beaten with
switches by the executioner of justice, personally, in the presence of the court. And after having been banished
from the village, if Philipowicowa or any of the other convicts should later be found living or secretly lodging
on this ground or within ten miles roundabout, by advise or assistance acting for evil either through themselves
or through subordinate persons, they are without law or mercy to be punished by death and by fire wherever
and under whosesoever jurisdiction they are found, without fail. [To which the accused] registered [their
agreement] by those present, and in particular Philipowiczowa (who is also to repeat her bodily oath publicly at
the wojt-court of Skrzynno): for the safety both in health and in property, servants and possessions of his
honour Pan Pawel Podlodowski, of all his goods, movable and immovable, sums of money, debts, clothes,
jewels, savings, wherever and in whatever manner held, on pain of the above mentioned death, [sworn] in a
manner most sufficient.

After this [whipping] was carried out on the accused in the prescribed manner by the executioners of
justice assigned to this case, according to the instructions of the court, the same Philipowiczowa, along with the
mentioned executioner of justice in Rykow, was brought to Skrzynno publicly among a meeting of many men,
and she, presently arriving at the normal location of the office of the wqjt of Skrzynno, having satisfied the
sentence brought forth in Rykow, she made her oath before the image of the crucified Christ, in the manner
prescribed by the notary, with two grand-jurymen presiding, as she had previously done [in Rykow] in the
manner which follows:
I, Zophia Philipowiczowa, swear to the Lord God Almighty, one God in Holy Trinity, that I will not harm
his honour Pan Pawel Podlodowski with any bewitchments, nor his home, nor his servants and subjects, nor any
enemies of mine. And if I ever give voice to any word of threat, or if some harm should befall them, then I am
without any mercy whatsoever to be punished by death, so help me Lord God and his Holy Passion. When all
the aforementioned was completed, the same Paulus Podlodowsky asked that it be inscribed and recorded into
the records of the advocatial [i. e. wojtj court, which was granted. Matias Zobulsky, the sworn notary of
Skrynno, affixed the seal with his own hand.

• •}• •

wiswiecone: This refers to the escorting of a banished person out of the village in the evening, by a parade
with torches or candles. Because of the humiliation involved, this was considered a more severe sentence
than simple banishment.

553
 • Appendix A •

#39. Zofia Baranowa 1643

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 140 (Criminalia) ff. 50-51, 60-64v; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 20-26. Note: In
the court books the sentence appears earlier, at ff. 50-51; whereas the testimony appears at ff. 60-64v. I have
restored them to their chronological sequence.

Cast.
Zofia Baranowa Commoner of Lublin suburbs, accused witch.
Albert [Wojciech] Baran Zofia's husband.
Pawel Zofia's diabolical companion.
Pawel Zofia's brother, seemingly deceased.
Stanislaw Szydlowski Zofia's first husband, deceased.
P. Rozwadowski A local nobleman.
Zablocka A woman of Lublin.
Albert (i.e. Wojciech) Samborski Doctor of medicine.
Albert (i.e. Wojciech) Sawicki Wojt of Lublin.
Mikolaj Szwayko
Jakob Smaga
Piotr Zakulski Jurymen of Lublin.

Done under the Lublin town-hall, in the prison, at the instance of the instigator of the office of the city-
council of Lublin, in the presence of the honourable Albert Sawicki, wojt, and Mikolaj Szwayko, juryman of
Lublin. Monday, the day after the feast of saint Luke the Evangelist [19 October] A. D. 1643. By remittance of
the office of the Lublin city council, the woman named Sophia wife of the townsman Albert Baran, Lublin
inhabitant of the Lublin suburbs is lead into the place of torture, and questioned because she is accused of
sorcery [sortilegia]. Where did she learn witchcraft? She answered: I don't know how to do any witchcraft,
except enchantments,24 which I use when a brewer-woman asks me, for the destruction of her barrels and
buckets, and that is to aid in the brewing.25
She also testified: the herbs, how they are called I don't know, and the snake I found with children in the
grove, when they were playing and coming back from the little woods owned by his honour Pan Rozwadowski,
and I've made use of snakes now for six years and sold their venom for sixty groszy, etc.
She also testified, that I was born near Lwow in Slony Grodek.
She also testified, that the dice-players asked me for a snake, for luck. Asked why she went to the
executioner, to the house of vanity (brothel) with a snake, she answered: for ointment.
Asked how many witches there are in Lublin she answered: I don't know, I don't know any.
She also testified, that she didn't show the mandrake-root26 to anyone, and she doesn't know where it is
now.
She also testified, that my husband beat me, so that I wouldn't make use of those snakes.

zmuwki: things spoken, utterances.

25
She must mean "for the destruction of spoiling factors in the barrels and buckets" or "for the purification of
the barrels and buckets." Compare the spell for driving out "bugs" from brewing vessels given by the Kalisz
cunning-woman Apolonia Porwitka (#13, Kalisz 1593; see also chapter 1.2).
26
pokszyk: or properly pokrzyk, "the screamer." Mandrake does not grow in Poland, and pokrzyk usually refers
to deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna L.); however, there are many other possibilities for the identity of
this herb: see the entry for pokrzyk in Appendix B.

554
 • The Lublin Trials •

She also testified, that I had sexual relations [obcowala] for a few years without my husband, with
someone else 1 don't myself know who, and this man with whom she had sex is cold like a corpse, and smells.
And this was after the death of her [first] husband, and he doesn't speak to me, and I don't have sex with my
husband, only with him, and he is warm only on the surface, and at any time he knocks me into the mud, and I
didn't tell [make confession to] the priest about this, because he forbade me to.
She also testified, that I drink vodka, and when I'm with him among people I see him and he sees me, but
others don't see him. And he walks like my late husband, and he told me to call him Pawel because I had a
brother named Pawel. And he's had relations with me for a long time, as if he were my husband.
She also testified, that he told me to stroke [maczac] his male organ and I saw his seed on my hand.
She also testified, that I was pregnant by him, later something hit me and who knows where it went.27
She also testified, that I've had business [i.e. sex] with him on the road and in the grove, and I lay down
myself,28 and he was in the shape of Szydlowski, my dead husband, he has hideous hands and ugly horns, and
curly hair.
She also testified, and when I was here in the prison, something fell, like your carriage-whip.
She also testified, that after doing the thing of the flesh with me, who knows where he went.29
She also testified, that before he started coming to me, he appeared to me in dreams, that Pawel in the
shape of Stanislaw Szydlowski, my husband, and he said to me: move over, I said to him, but you died! He said:
Tsk, don't worry, I am still alive to you, and he appeared to me in the shape of my husband, because I loved that
husband of mine.
She also testified, that he was with me during the [last] month about two times, on Tuesday, on Thursday
and now this last Thursday, before I was in the brothel, he visited me and had carnal relations with me, that
Pawel, and he told me to go to the executioner,30 because my husband had been beating me. And that Pawel
never gives me anything.
She also testified, that when I went before the priest to confess, Pawel appeared to me and didn't let me
say anything before the priest.
She also testified, that I went with him to drink liquor, and at night I didn't fear him, although he appeared
to me and walked with me.
She also testified, that I had relations with him because I married my current husband against my will, and
he wasn't to my taste.
She also testified, that as soon as the hens [sic] crowed, who can say where that Pawel disappeared to, and
Pawel didn't have eyes like my previous husband, who had one eye knocked out, and the other poured out
[wyprynelo], and he didn't have nostrils.31

27
That is to say, the fetus disappeared or was stillborn.
28
ia iam sama legla: the implication being, I think, that she was not forced.
29
That is to say, he disappears immediately afterwards.
30
do kata: that is, to the brothel. In Lublin as in many other Polish cities, the executioner also ran me only
officially licensed brothel.
31
The second part of the sentence appears to relate to her husband, but it must relate to Pawel. An absence of
nostrils is an often-recorded attribute of the devil in 19th-c. Polish folklore.

555
 • Appendix A •

She also testified, that that devil [diabol] Pawel came to me twice a month around New Moon, on
Tuesday, on Thursday and on Wednesday.
She also testified, that a certain woman taught me, to eat bread and brush my hair, and to say these words
to the devil [diabei]: "ash-tree bread," and I did this.32 But when I did this and spoke in that way, he
immediately spat on me and hit me in the face. And at that time he showed himself to me on top of the huts in
the manor of the lord of Lublin,33 dressed in golden chains, and he said to me: Come with me to Lwow. When I
didn't agree, he spat on me and hit me in the face.
She also testified, when I didn't allow myself to get drunk, something always happened to me, sometimes
I was beaten.
She also testified, that the woman who told me to comb my hair and eat bread, is dead.
She also testified, Pawel was with me most often in the woods belonging to Pan Rozwadowski, and I
wasn't afraid of anything, even though once I was shot at in those woods to keep me from gathering firewood.
She also testified, I would [gather wood] for hours, and nothing bothered me.
She also testified, I lived for a while on Szpitalna street, in the hut of Zablocka, and only frogs go into that
hut.
She also testified, that Pawel drank liquor with me.
She also testified, that Pawel always drank liquor with me, and it always happened that I either quarrelled
with somebody, or somebody beat me up. And for that reason he taught me how to make trouble for those who
beat me up or cussed me out, and he told me to blow over34 houses, and light them on fire and sprinkle them
[with magical substances], however, I didn't do this. And he told me to gather soil which had been spun in a
whirlwind for sprinkling, saying: just as [this soil] was toppled over, so will [these houses] be toppled over, and
I gathered that soil from a whirlwind, and I have it in a sack at home, however I haven't sprinkled anyone with
it yet. Asked what she said during such an act she answered: that I was to say: Pawel, topple this over by your
Pawelish power.
Finally, further inquiries, on account of certain considerations, were postponed until the next day
She also testified, that this devil [czart] told me to call him Pawel.
She also testified, that this devil [diabol] came with me35 although I didn't call him.
Done in the prison under the city-hall of Lublin, in the presence of the honourable Albert Lewicki, wojt,
his excellence Albert Samborski, doctor of medicine, Jakob Smaga andPiotr Zakulski jurymen of Lublin,
Tuesday after the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist [October 20] A.D. 1643.

iasieni chleb, a tak czynie. My best efforts have not sufficed to discover sense in this sentence. Jasion or
Jesion is Fraxinus excelsior L., the common ash tree. Zofia may be, in some garbled fashion, describing a
ritual involving the wood or leaves of ash, combined with bread—but this is not at all clear. See also the
entry for jasion in Appendix B.
It is not clear who she can be referring to: Lublin, a royal city, had no resident "lord." Perhaps she means the
starosta or his representative in the Lublin Castle.
wiec: I have not identified this word, but in the context it must be a variant of wiac, blow (of wiatr, wind).
Presumably, to the prison.

556
 • The Lublin Trials •

Lead into the torture-chamber, the above-mentioned witch [malefica] asked how she had slept answered I
slept well, I was tired. Later something fell, like a bench and when I said "Jesus" it grabbed me by the eyes and
commanded me to stick myself with a needle. Asked, whether she heard a yell of some kind, she answered, I
didn't hear any such thing, only there was a rasping noise near her shirt.36 Asked, for how long has she lived
with this devil [czart] Pawel, she answered, since immediately after the death of my late husband; I always used
to go with Pawel to the woods of Pan Rozwadowski, and there he did indecent things with me, but he smelled
like a corpse and was ugly, and when I grabbed him by his male member, I saw his seed on my hands.
She also testified, that before I had an understanding with that devil [czart], he came to me at night and
commanded me to renounce the Most Holy Sacrament.
She also testified, that he appeared to me on the roof of a house at the manor of the lord of Lublin, in
golden chains.
She also testified, that he commanded me to renounce the most holy Virgin, whom he called The Wide
Woman or the Wide Man.37 However I didn't renounce her, and he wanted me to sign myself over to him. He
called the Lord God "the Wide Man." She also testified, that I even wanted to renounce them, but I didn't allow
myself to be persuaded. And here in the prison, I very nearly gave myself over [to him], and I said, if I get out
of here, I'll give myself over [to you].
She also testified, that I denied the Blessed Virgin, which I regret in my heart, and I also renounced the
Lord God, and I said to the devil [czart]: Now I've renounced the Lord God, and now I'll give myself over to
you, and this was during the time that there was the fire on the grounds of Pan Gorajski.
She also testified, that after this decree381 took the most Blessed Sacrament; however, I didn't confess to
this decree before the priest.
She also testified, that this devil [czart] promised that I was to have things well with him, however he
never gave me anything, but he beat me, hit me and sometimes because of him others beat me.
Asked where she met with this devil [czart] she answered: I met with him in the grove, sometimes twice in
one day. And he was there on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Wednesdays, that is at the new moon and the old
moon,39 and for his sake I lived in disagreement with my husband, who liked to beat me, however I had
strength, for that devil [czart] gave me strength.
She also testified, that when I was in the brothel, in the house of the executioner, that devil [czart] was
with me during that time, in the shape of my late husband.
Also, I saw in a dream as if music was playing, beyond Kokotowskie, in that place where there are the
graves of the dead, and that place is beyond the forest on a deserted open space, not far from the lord's [lands],
where I saw peasant-men and women walking in a circle, and I watched and Pawel, that devil [czart] was with
me, and after he escorted me back home he went to those people. And those people were always in that place

36
tilkopo koszalce harmot iakis byt The translation assumes that the unidentified word harmot is a variation of
charkot, "a rasping sound."
7
Szeroka or Szeroki: compare #161, Lublin 1732, in which the devil or demon Ihnatek complains that his
intended victim was protected by "mocna i szeroka"—the strong and wide one.
8
wyrok: usually means verdict or decree. Zofia uses the word here to mean a formal pact with her devil.
na schodzie: old moon meaning here, full moon.

557
 • Appendix A •

when the devil [czart] was at my house. And something, as it were, carried me there, where they played on fifes
and bagpipes, and they were all as if drunk40 although they didn't drink anything, only danced, and this
happened in the evening and the dances didn't last long, and when they invited me to join in, I didn't go there.
She also testified, that I brewed herbs for women for various ailments, and while making these medicines
Pawel was with me.
The verdict concerning Zofia, accused of witchcraft [sortilegia]. The official extraordinary criminal
41
court took place in Lublin, under the city hall of Lublin, Thursday after the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist
[October 22] A. D. 1643.
The woman by name of Zofia, wife of the honest Albert Baran, inhabitant of the suburbs of Lublin,
accused of sorceries [sortilegiorum], is lead from the prison under the city-hall. Questioned by the court
whether she stands by the testimony she gave under torture. She answered, that I do not stand by it, and
whatever I said was confessed out of fear.
The present Lublin wojt-court revokes any confessions extracted from the above-mentioned woman
accused of sorcery [veneficio], from before she was to be tortured up to the present, and does not acknowledge
any of them, or rather it asserts that these confessions were given out of great fear of undergoing a constant
regimen of torture that [would have been] beyond what could be born, and that nothing clear and evident can be
clearly discerned or gathered from these confessions, according to common law. Evidence in criminal matters
ought to be clearer than the noon-day sun.42 For these and other reasons the court decrees that the same accused
be chastised43 for her heedless presumption in her eating and displaying of snakes and herbs, sometimes
preceded by incantations, and [the court] decrees that after her castigation, she will be pronounced free. If,
however, she is brought to the court or to trial in future in any way for these same things, and convicted in her
name, this present decree, against such excesses, order and imposes that she should suffer capital punishment.44

#42. Regina Zaleska 1644

APLublin, AMLublinsig. 143 (Criminalia) ff. 122-132.

Cast.
Regina Zalewska or Zaleska Accused witch.
Jakub Her son.
Mikolaj Pejcala Regina Zalewska's first husband.
Anna Zaleska Regina Zalewska's step-daughter, deceased.

40
Baranowa says they were all "pod piormi," literally "under the wing," an idiom usually implying protection
or patronage—but in the context this seems to mean "drunk" or perhaps "merry."
41
iudicium criminate necessarium bannitum: this simply means that the court met for this particular case,
outside the period of its ordinary session.
42
Probatione in criminalibus debent esse luce meridiane clariores: more literally, "evidence in criminal matters
should be as bright as the light of noon"—but the former translation of this legal formula is honoured by
tradition.
43
The exact manner of chastisement is not specified, but it a punishment of whipping is probably meant.
44
poena colli: see note 10, above.

558
 • The Lublin Trials •

Duliczowa or Dulewiczowa Associate of Zalewska implicated in witchcraft,

deceased.
Albert Lewicki Wojt of Lublin.
Mikolaj Szwayko,
JanEkkier Jurymen of Lublin.
Promnicki Prosecutor and representative of the Crown
Tribunal.

Testimony ofRegina Zalewska, accused of Witchcraft [Veneficium].

Done in Lublin, in the public Prison under the Lublin town-hall, in the presence of the Honourable
Albert Lewicki, Wojt, and Mikolaj Szwayko, Juryman of Lublin, with also the Learned party Promnicki,
Inquisitor of Justice of the General Royal Tribunal of Lublin. The day after the feast of Saint Jadwiga the widow
and chosen one45, year as above [October 16, 1644].
By the mandated Decree and by the Remission of the Ordinary Court of the General Royal Tribunal of
Lublin, Regina by name is brought into the customary place of torture, in the presence of her son, Jakub.
Asked what her husband is named.
She responded: Mikolaj Pejcala.
Asked: Who gave her over to judgement, and why.
She responded: I don't know.
She also testified: that the townspeople of Opole brought me to Lublin because those townspeople were
summoned.
Asked how many sons she had.
She answered: That I have also another son, who is the oldest, on the water.46
After which Jakub, the son of that very [Regina], testified.
That my mother said did you confess [your sins] and I answered: I confessed. After which she said to me.
When you go up [for communion], bring the most holy sacrament to me, and when the priest gave me the most
holy sacrament then I let it drop from my mouth but a boy of the priest's took it with his bare hand and gave it
to another boy, on his hat, right after this I was caught and put in prison.
The same Jakub questioned. Whether he made his confession at that time.47
He responded, that I did not make my confession.
He also testified, That I dropped the most holy Sacrament [from my mouth] on purpose, however I meant
to take it in my hand.
At length, because of certain considerations, the carrying out of torture was put off to the next day.
Tuesday, the feast-day of St. Luke the Evangelist [October 18].

Viduae et electae: It is not clear what may be meant by "electae"—perhaps only that St. Jadwiga had been
elected abbess of her convent.
I.e., he is a sailor or, more likely, a raftsman on the Wisla.
The question is whether he confessed before taking the sacrament; not, whether he confessed upon being
caught. In Polish, the term spowiedz, confession, refers only to the church sacrament and not to confession
in court.

559
 • Appendix A •

In the presence of the Honourable Albert Lewicki, wojt, and Jan Ekkier, juryman of Lublin, then also the
knowledgeable Promnicki, instigator of justice of the General Royal Tribunal of Lublin, Regina Zaleska by
name, brought into the customary place of torture, she with her son Jakub, who responded to interrogation.
That my mother ordered me to bring her the most holy sacrament.
Asked also: Why, in Opole, did he say these things of his mother's aunt.
He responded: that my mother told me not to tell on her, and I was sorry for her.
After which the above-mentioned mother of the same was questioned. Whether she worked divination
concerning the horses which were lost48 in Kazimierz.
She responded: That with the late Duliczowa I healed by laying coal on a sieve, and I stuck a needle into
a crust of bread.
Asked. Whether she practiced witchcraft.
She answered: I didn't practice it.
Admonished to confess the truth, and to not give over her body to be tormented by torture.
She answered I know nothing about anything, and I didn't tell my Son to do the things which they are
accusing me of. To whom Jakub her son said. That you did so tell to bring it, and I wouldn't have done that, if
you hadn't ordered me to.
After this the same Jakub, son, was asked how many times he had taken Holy Communion.
He answered: Only once.
The same confessed the same Jakub.
That on Thursdays some women came to my mother, with Iastkowa.
Admonished again and again to confess the truth. She testified nothing.
At last, bound by the Lublin executioner, and again questioned and warned, she confessed nothing.
Asked whether the most holy sacrament fell from her mouth in Kazimierz.
She answered. That wasn't me but my step-daughter Anna Zaleska, who is dead.
Bound to the to the implement of torture she asked for mercy, adding this; that I'm not guilty of anything
and that unfortunate son of mine denounces me unjustly; please, for God's sake, have respect and concern for
my old age because I don't feel [guilty] in anything.
Admonished again and again to confess the truth, she confessed nothing.
After which, warned by the Lublin executioner not to give her body over to torment and pain and to tell
the truth she testified nothing.
Pulled once. She testified: That I didn't tell my son to do what they are accusing me of. To which her son
said: you did so tell me to.
Pulled the second time, she testified. That I didn't order my son to do that and I didn't practice
witchcraft, only once with Duliczowa who is already dead.
She also testified. That I suppose I went to that Dulewiczowa once, unfortunately.

48
byly poginely: either the horses were stolen or lost, and divination was used to find them, or they died, and
divination was used to determine the witch responsible.

560
 • The Lublin Trials •

She also testified. That although I'm not guilty and although I didn't order [him to do anything] for God's
sake, but now all is in vain and I accept [the guilt] for my son who denounces me unjustly.
Asked to what end she told him to do it.
She answered. I don't know to what end because I didn't ask him to.
She also testified. That I was going to keep it but I don't know how.
Also. I learned from Duliczowa how to remove enchantments from butter saying "By God's power, by
the Lord God's help, [send] the enchantment onto a belt, onto a goat" and she spit, but this, like usual, didn't
help at all.
Pulled a third time, more intensely.
She testified: For four years I've healed milk a little, but like usual, this didn't help at all, although who
else can heal better, [or, although someone else can heal better].
Warned again and again to tell the truth.
She testified. Although I didn't order him to do that, I take [the guilt] on myself.
She also testified. That I've healed milk for four years. At last, before fire should have to be applied, she
was warned to confess the truth and not give over her body to be tormented.
She said I'm not guilty of anything, I hope to God.
Burnt with fire. She testified. That I didn't tell my son to bring me the most holy Sacrament, and he
accuses me without cause.
Burnt a second time. She testified: OK I ordered him, what am I supposed to do?
Asked what she wanted to do with the most holy Sacrament she Responded. That I don't know, that son
of mine accuses me. Which she repeated a great many times.
At last she was dismissed from torture. She testified. That my son accuses me, I don't know for what
reason. Let God punish that bad child.
Which woman by order of the Court of the General Royal Tribunal of Lublin is dismissed from prison.

#59. Maryna Biatkowa 1664

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 140 (Criminalia) ff. 395-398; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 54-57.

Cast.
Maryna Adamowa Bialkowa Peasant-woman of Kamionka, accused of sacrilege.
AdamBialek Maryna's husband.
Anna Woitaszkowa Maryna's aunt and co-accused.
Katarzyna (or Kaska) Pawlowa Chudkowa (or Chutkowa) ...Maryna's neighbour and co-accused.
Pawel Chudek or Hutek Katarzyna Chudkowa's husband.
Iagna Osielkowa Implicated in the crime, she ran away before the
trial.
Marcinowa Jonczykowa,
Gwaszkowa Iendrzejowa Other women implicated, not brought to trial.
Zachariasz Eylich Under-wqjt of Lublin
Maciej Kiykowicz

561
 • Appendix A •

Mikolaj Kieremowicz
Martin Swiwicz
Alexander Bilowicz Jurymen of Lublin.

Done in the public prison under the city hall of Lublin, in the presence of the honourable Zachariasz
Eylich, under-wojt of Lublin, Maciej Mathias Kiykowicz and Mikolaj Kieremowicz, grand-jurors of Lublin,
Thursday following the feast of St. Giles the abbot [September 4], A. D. 1664. By the decree and remittance of
the most illustrious Royal Tribunal of Lublin, Maryna, wife ofAdam Bialek of the village ofKamionka was lead
to the place of torture, along with her husband.
Asked by the court what she had been arrested for, she answered, that my aunt Anna Woitaszkowa told
me to get the Most Holy Sacrament and to filter milk through it, saying, "you won't take this milk, witches." I
did this. I went to the church in Miastkow; first I made my confession, but I didn't say [what I planned to do] at
confession. Having confessed I accepted The Lord Jesus, and having recited my prayers I left the church, took it
from my mouth and put it into a little box and then into a kerchief, and I went back home. I filtered milk
through it. That third person, Katarzyna wife of Pawel Hutek, last year also brought the Most Holy Sacrament
in a kerchief, which she put on the table. When I came and asked her what the kerchief lying on the table was,
she answered "you know full well what it is" she said, and what my aunt taught me, I then told her, but she had
already done that, because I committed this sin four years ago, and she, just last year.
She also testified that my aunt told me to burn that kerchief after having filtered milk through it. I used it
to filter milk for three Sundays, and then I burnt it.
At length, because she swears to God that she is pregnant, by order of the illustrious [Royal] Tribunal
the implementation of torture is postponed until tomorrow, until the claims of the accused could be examined.
Later. Saturday on the eve of the feast of the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary [6 September], the accused
having been inspected by women knowledgeable in these things, who decided that the aforementioned
Adamowa is not pregnant, the woman under examination testified: That Marcinowa Jonczykowa and
Gwaszkowa Iendrzejowa knew about this deed.
Bound by the executioner and admonished to tell the truth and not to allow her body to be tortured with
torment, she confessed nothing more. Tied to the torture post, the same woman testified the same way as above,
adding nothing, nor taking anything away.
Pulled the first time. She testified that what I've already testified is the truth, I know nothing more, I have
no more to say.
Pulled the second time more intensely, she said, shouting: I know nothing more, I have no more to say,
for God's sake have mercy.
Pulled the third time, most intensely, she said I don't know, by God, I didn't do anything else. My aunt
taught me to do it; Kaska did the same thing last year.
Burnt with fire on both sides she testified nothing more. Burnt a second time she confessed nothing
further. Burnt a third time she confessed nothing further. At last she was dismissed from torture. She approved
her previous confessions, saying: I stand by everything and I am ready to die with this confession.

562
 • The Lublin Trials •

Recorded thus. Done in the public prison under the Lublin City Hall, in the presence of the honourable
Zachariasz Eilich, sub-delegate, Mathias Kiykowicz, Martin Swiwicz and Alexander Bilowicz, grand-jurymen of
Lublin, Tuesday, the day after the feast of the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary [9 September], a. D. 1664. By
order of the illustrious Royal Tribunal, Catharina wife ofPaulus Chudek of the village ofKamionka was lead
into the place of torture. Examined by the court she testified voluntarily that Marina Adamowa Bialkowa, when
she came to my house around three years ago, said in my presence, that she had things good, when she filtered
milk through The Most Holy Sacrament, and I told the same thing to another neighbour, Iendrzeiowa
Gwaszkowa, but I never tried it, and neither did Gwaszkowa.
Admonished to confess the truth, and to not permit her body to be tortured with torment, she said: that I
didn't do that, I'm innocent by God.
Bound to the torture post, and pulled the first time by the executioner, she said: I didn't have it [the
Eucharist] ever, I didn't use it, I'm innocent, that woman testified against me out of wrath.
Pulled a second time, more intensely, she said, shouting: I'm innocent for God's sake, I beg you.
Pulled a third time most intensely she said: I'm innocent, have mercy on me a sinner, I didn't have it.
Burnt with fire on both sides she said: I'm innocent, I don't want to take anyone's death onto my soul.49
Burnt a second time, she said: I didn't use it, I didn't have it.
Burnt a third time she testified nothing further. At last she is dismissed from torture, and approved of her
previous confessions.
Afterwards, Anna Woitaszkowa was led in and examined. She said: Marina Adamowa accuses me
unjustly, hoping to buy [her own acquittal] with my body. Do whatever you want, torture and afflict me, she
tells tales about me out of wrath. I didn't teach her that [enchantment with the Eucharist] and I didn't do it ever
myself. I only found out that she did it from Katharzyna Chutkowa, when she was arrested.
She also testified: Marina Adamowa also denounced someone else before, a certain Iagna Osielkowa,
who ran away from the property [to which she was enserfed] before her [i.e., before Marina was arrested].
Admonished to tell the truth and to not permit her body to be tortured, she said: I'm innocent; do
whatever you want; have mercy; I don't know anything about anything.
Bound by the executioner she said: I never lived with her, I didn't know much about any of this. Have
mercy on me, I suffer unjustly, I didn't teach her and I didn't know what she was up to.
Bound to the torture-post, and pulled the first time she said: I won't say anything, because I don't know
anything, I'm innocent.
Pulled a second time more intensely she said, shouting: I don't know, I don't know, take care for the sake
of Jesus Christ, have mercy, I'm innocent.
Pulled a third time, most intensely, she said: I don't know, I'm innocent, have mercy.
Burnt with fire on both sides, she said: have mercy, I won't say anything, I know nothing.
Burnt a second time she said: I'll go innocently into that other world.

Nie chce brae na swoie duszq nikogo: Literally, I don't want to take anyone on my soul: I don't want to be
answerable before God, by bearing false witness, for someone else's misfortune or death.

563
 • Appendix A •

Burnt a third time, she said: Unjustly, unjustly, by God's mercy I beg you.
At last, taken down from torture, she said: Unjustly, unjustly I suffer, have pity.
Wednesday, the day of the feast of St. Jadwiga, the widow and chosen one [15 October] a. D, 1664. By
the decree and permission of the illustrious Royal Tribunal, Marina Bialkowa was beheaded in the presence of
Anna Woytaszkowa and Catherina Pawlowa, after which beheading, they, judged innocent, by the judgement
and decree of the Tribunal, are dismissed to be free.

#80. Anna Swedycka 1678

AML 144 (Criminalia) ff. 69-73; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 57-60.

Cast.
Anna Swedycka Accused witch, commoner of Stary Sol.
P. Karol Gohichowski Nobleman, plaintiff against Anna Swedycka.
P. Gohichowska His wife, deceased.
Szeptyczka or Septiczka or Sczeptycka Principle woman denounced by Anna.
Terlecka
Tychowska
Lysa
Lisia of Bilice (same as Lysa?),
Blonarka, wife of the old orthodox priest Walek of Stary Sol,
Solska, widow of the present orthodox priest of Stary Sol,
Dobrzanska, wife an orthodox priest,
Walkowa, wife of Walek the weaver,
Kruszynska, burgher-woman of Sambor,
Anna Miklaszewska, niece of Szeptycka Other women denounced by Anna.
P. Bericz or Birecki An alleged accomplice, apparently a nobleman.
P. Gabriela Bieracka or Birecka His wife, denounced by Anna.
Jozef the tailor A man whose child Anna claims to have healed.
Iwan Anna's devil.
Hawrylo Szeptyczka's devil.
JanRaphang Wqjt of Lublin.
Ignacy Kompalski,
Mikolaj Jakubowski,
Mikolaj Mlodecki Jurymen of Lublin

Done in the prison under the town-hall in the presence of the honourable Jan Raphang, wqjt, and Ignacy
Kompalski, Mikolaj Jakubowski, and Mikolaj Mlodecki, jurymen of the Lublin court, Wednesday after the
second Sunday in Lent, [March 9] a. D. 1678.
Recorded thus. By decree and permission of the court of the [Royal] Tribunal of Lublin, Wednesday after
the second Sunday in Lent, year as above. At the request and disposition of the plaintiff, the noble Carolus
[Karol] Goluchowski ofGoluchow, cup-bearer ofDobrzyn; Anna Swedyczka, inhabitant of the suburbs of the
town of Stary Sol was admonished by the civil court not to give over her body to be tortured but to testify

pocillator. podczaszy or cup-bearer. A low-level honorary and ceremonial title in the 16th-18th centuries.

564
 • The Lublin Trials •

voluntarily concerning the interrogation questions and the points brought forth by the party of the accuser.
She testified nothing, and at length was bound by the executioner.
Pulled the first time, intensely, she testified that Septiczka heals people52 and rides around gypping.53 The
servant girls removed my handcuffs. To the child of Jozef the tailor, land-agent54 for their honors the monastic
maidens of Sandomierz,551 gave pivonia seeds and stags-horn [sumac].56
Asked why she had dug a ditch, she answered, I dug the ditch so that I could be buried alive in shit, I dug it
so that I would die.
Pulled a second time more intensely, she testified, that I've never made use of witchcraft and I don't know
any witches and I've never been to any counsels,57 and I don't know any of them, unless I were to tell mere
nonsense tales.
Pulled a third time most intensely, and admonished by the court to tell the truth, she testified nothing
except, that Szeptyczka heals people and rides from manor to noble manor, but what she does I don't know.
After this she testified, under threat of fire, that Szeptyczka practices witchcraft. Terlecka also practices
witchcraft and also heals people. I don't know Bebicz;581 don't know anything concerning the passing away
from this world of her grace Pani Gohichowska, and I didn't give her any cause to die.
After this, having recovered, she testified: I am and was a witch [czarownica]; Septyczka bewitched her
grace Pani Gohichowska; I too was at the counsel when Szeptyczka bewitched her grace Pani Gohichowska.
Birecki59 rode to Szeptyczka for bewitchments, requesting that devils [diabli] might strangle her grace Pani
Gohichowska.
Asked for how long she has practiced witchcraft, she answered: around ten years. They call my devil
[diabel] Iwan, to whom I've promised myself; he was with me a week ago in the prison.
The words were required to be repeated a second, a third, a fourth time, that Birecki rode to Septyczki.
Some cloth had disappeared from the bleaching vats of the bleacher; he rode to Septyczka and she brought him
the [lost] cloth, for which he gave her eight zloty. Pan Birecki gave me ten zloty after I sent the devils [diablow]
against Pani Gohichowska. They call Szeptycka's devil Hawrylo.
Tychowska and Lysa of Stychoi,60 Blonarka, wife of Walek the pop of Stary Sol, 61 the widow of the Stary
Sol pop, on Bald Mountain in Stary Sol, there we had our counsels. Kruszynska the Sambor burgherwoman,

51
instigator. It is not clear whether the questions were provided by Pan Karol Gohichowski or by the instigator,
court prosecutor under the inquisitorial model.
52
liczy: the term implies both healing and enchanting.
53
cyganiqc: literally "gypsying, acting like a gypsy. Here the term seems to mean divining or fortune-telling.
54
gospodarz: Usually having the meaning "farmer," I take it here to make more sense with the meaning of the
person who runs a farm or folwark—an ekonom or land-agent.
55
pannie zakonne sendomirskie: the Benedictine sisters, who had a cloister in Sandomierz from 1615.
56
Concerning these herbs, see Appendix B under "piwonia" and "jeleni rog."
57
anim na radzie zadney nie bywala: Together with the testimony below, "I too was at the counsel [bylam przy
radzie y ia] this suggests a line of questioning about the witches' sabbat. However, the two passages could
as easily be translated: "I never went to anyone for counsel" and "I too counselled Szeptyczka."
58
Probably this should read Bericz, identical to the Birecki mentioned below.
59
Identical, most likely, to the aforementioned Bebicz/Bericz.
60
Word crossed out in the record.

565
 • Appendix A •

Septyczka's niece Anna Miklaszewska and that [woman] were with us at our counsels on Bald Mountain. I
bewitched his late honor the wojt of Lublin so that he would die, so that I could get peace from him; I sent a
devil to strangle him at the second hour afternoon in the city hall in the court-chamber.
She also testified that the wife of Pan Birecki, Gabriela also practices [witchcraft] like Septycka. She's
been to Bald Mountain. Szeptyczka and Bieracka [Birecka] and I were the cause of Pani Goiuchowska's death.
I tore a rooster apart and placed it on [her] left breast to cause a great illness, and I buried the Gospel of St.
John at the cross-roads. I read it. I can read a little. The chickens which sat in front of me on the cart, when I
was taken to Stary Sol, were devils [czarci] which had changed themselves into little birds.
At length dismissed [from torture], she testified repeatedly , that a devil [diabel] helped me dig the ditch,
that I might be suffocated alive, concerning the rest, she approved of everything she had testified when pulled
the third time, saying, that I am prepared to confirm this by death, a devil [diabol] began to saw off my hand-
cuffs. Iwan, with whom I had conference, is young. Which is the tenor of the present record.
The official criminal court session took place in Lublin on Saturday, the day before third Sunday in Lent
[12 March] a. D. 1678.
By decree and permission of the general court of the Royal Tribunal. Wednesday after the second Sunday
in Lent, [March 9], in the year specified above, Anna Swedycka was lead from the prison under the city hall to
the chamber under the city hall, and before she had been given over to the executioner to be burned,
admonished to confess the truth of her own free will, she testified: I exonerate Pan Birecki and Pani Birecka,
they are innocent, I took nothing from them, only Sczeptycka I denounce; Lisia62 of Bilice is a witch, she has
already been sentenced to death. The pop's wife Dobrzanska is guilty of nothing, the same goes for the wife of
Walek the weaver, and Blonarka of Stary Sol; I denounce the old widow of the pop; I denounce Kruszynska;
Tychowska does not practice witchcraft but she is a matchmaker,63 Dobrzanska does not practice witchcraft.
At length, in the place of suffering, before the pyre which had been built by the executioner out of logs of
wood, admonished, she testified: I denounce Szeptyczka a second, a third time; I absolve Pan Birecki and Pani
Birecka; I denounce Lisia as a witch; I absolve Dobrzanska; Blonarka heals children: she bathes them in herbs.
The old pop's widow heals children, but she is dead; Pani Szeptyczka's niece, whether she practices witchcraft
or not, I didn't see, it is under doubt, however, said [Swedycka], what the aunt does, so likely does the niece. In
the end she was placed alive on the pyre built of wood by the executioner, was set aflame, and thus taken from
life. Which is the tenor of the present record.

• •$• •

popadia Walkowa: a pop can be either an Eastern Orthodox or a Greek Catholic priest; in this region it was
more likely the latter.
Same as Lysa, above?
The implication being, I believe, that she uses divination in her matchmaking and is thus a cunning-woman.
In loco supplicii: this formula usually means "in the torture chamber," but the pyre would not, of course, have
been built in such a place.

566
 • The Lublin Trials •

#87. Oryszka, Paraszka Hlacholicha and Steczek Koczan 1681

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 130-138; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 60-66.

Cast.
Stefan or Steczek Koczan of Sokolowki Carter, also a village-court official. Serf to P.
Galecki.
Oryszka or Oryska of Ozydow Accused witch, serf to P. Myszkowski, kasztelan of
Belz.
Paraszka Hlacholicha of Przewloczna Accused witch, serf to the powerful magnate P.
Stanislaw Koniecpolski, kasztelan of Krakow.
Ihnatek Zaborowski A devil belonging to Oryszka, borrowed by Paraszka.
P. Barbara of Lipniki Plaintiff, noblewoman.
P. JerzyPopiel Her step-son, co-plaintiff.
P. Michal Popiel Jerzy Popiel's father, husband of Barbara, murdered
by witchcraft.
P. Cetner Starosta of Lwow, murdered by witchcraft.
P. Klodnicki Another nobleman, murdered by witchcraft.
P. Galecki (or Gale_cki, Gale_ski) Another nobleman, also an alleged target of malefice.
Mikolaj Mnichowski Nobleman alleged to have hired Oryszka and
Paraszka to murder P. Michal Popiel.
P. Kotelnicki Nobleman who took part in the first trial in
Sokolowka.
P. Radwanski Noblemen who took part in the first trial in
Sokolowka.
Zawisza Podstaroscie of Oleszko.
Albert (i.e. Wojciech) Rogulski Observer for the Lublin Wqjt court.

The testimony of the imprisoned Koczan, Oryszka, and Hlacholicha.

Done in Lublin in the prison below the city hall, in the presence of the noble instigator of the courts of the
Crown Tribunal,, and officers of the civil wqjt office, and indeed also of general ministers of the Crown, with
honest Albertus Roguski as observer for these offices,65 Thursday after the feast of the nativity of the Blessed
Virgin Mary [September 11] 1681.
Turned over by decree by the court of the crown tribunal of Lublin, [the case] between the instigator of
the tribunal court and the accusers, the noble Barbara of Lipniki, widow remaining [after the death of her
husband] Michael Popiel, and the noble George Popiel, step-son of the above named, as the plaintiffs, and the
peasants Paraszka Hlacholicha of the village of Przewloczna, subject to the illustrious Stanislaus Koniecpolski
ofKoniecpole andBrody, palatine [i.e. wojewoda/ ofPodole, and also Oryszka of Ozydow village, subject to
the illustrious and magnificent Myszkowski castellan [i.e. kasztelan/ of Belz, summoned by the noble Nicholas
Mnichowski to deal with the noble aforementioned Popiel. On Thursday after the feast of Saint Giles the abbot
[September 4] of the current year, these troublesome witches [veneficae] were judged andfound guilty of being
co-conspirators, and in the same judgement of having committed the above-mentioned unspeakable crimes.
Final judgement in the trial was suspended since, when summoned, the noble Mnichowski deemed that in order

The sentence is far from clear. Albertus Roguski, with his epithet honestus, is a citizen of Lublin; he appears
to be acting as an observer or assistant [apparitor] for the Lublin wqjt court during this interrogation, which
is otherwise run largely by the Crown Tribunal.

567
 • Appendix A •

to ferret out and elicit a clearer truth of objective fact, it would he necessary for the aforesaid imprisoned
Hlaholicha and Oryszka to undergo a bodily interrogation, as also the peasant Koczan. He turned over first
Koczan, then Oryszka, and finally Hlacholicha to the present civil Lublin court, for this same bodily
interrogation, which would include the application of fire.
Led to the torture chamber Stephan Koczan, before being tortured, was questionedfreely [benevole] from
the list of questions"* noted below, written up by the plaintiff and supplied by the prosecutor, the tenor of which
is such.
List of questions needing to be inquired into truly from the accused prisoners that is from Steczek [Stefan]
Koczan, wozny67 of Sokolowki, Hlacholicha of Przewloczna, Oryszka of Ozydow, by decree of the Crown
Tribunal destinedybr torture. The list of questions put to Koczan:
1. Whether Koczan went on the behest of his grace Pan Mnichowski to Hlacholicha in Przewloczna during
the feast of the True Cross,68 and arranged for her to do away with his grace Pan Michal Popiel, also how she
did she do away with him, and when?
2. Whether his grace Pan Mnichowski ever visited Koczan, and what he arranged with him?
3. Whether Koczan knew by what sort of death his grace Pan Popiel died; also, by what sort of death did
his grace the starosta of Lwow, and also his grace Pan Klodnicki died.
4. Whether he or his first wife practiced witchcraft, for how long had he practiced it; whether he knows
whether these witches did away with or bewitched anybody else ?
[Questions] to Oryszka. 5. Whether Hlacholicha taught her, what she taught her, and for how long has she
practiced it?
6. What did Hlacholicha give Oryszka, for having borrowed the devil [diabel] Ihnat Zahorowski in the
house of her sister during the feast of the True Cross in Ozydow, and what did she borrow the devil for?
7. Whether his grace Pan Mnichowski had ever visited Oryska in her home, why did he come, what did
she take [from him] in return, and who was with him?
8. Whether his grace Pan Mnichowski ever visited Hlacholicha in Przewloczna. Why did he go there?
Who did he send? How many times was he there? Whether he gave her anything?
9. Whether Hlacholicha sent a devil to do away with his grace Pan Popiel and others. Who else did she
kill?
10. Who did away with his grace Pan Cetner, starosta of Lwow? Was it Oryszka or Hlacholicha?
11. What do they give to the devil for these services, how do they invoke him, from whence and from
what places?

Interrogatoria or "punkty" were lists of written questions, prepared beforehand, to be put to the accused in
criminal trials. They do not feature in most witch-trials (at least, they are not recorded), but seem to be
common in those trials remitted by the Crown Tribunal to the Lublin Wojt-Court.
wozny: an attendant or minor court functionary. As is made clear below, Steczek was as it were deputized to
be an official observer at the original trial of Paraszka in Sokolowka.
praznik Czeznoho Cresta: Here and below, this phrase is in Ruthenian. It refers to the Feast of the True Cross
(or, the Exultation of the Cross), September 14 in the Julian calendar.

568
 • The Lublin Trials •

12. Whether Hlaholicha had the will [desire, intention] to send [a devil] against his grace Pan Galecki,
czesnik69 of Kiev; by whose orders, and how many devils did she plan to send?
13. Whether they know any other witches, where [do these others] live and what sort of witchcraft do they
practice?
14. Why did she run away during the journey, and who helped Hlaholicha?
15. How did the leg-irons fly off of Koczan's legs, and who helped him in this?
16. Why did Koczan run away, and where did he hide for not a small time?
17. Who helped her dig a hole near the torture chamber.70
18. Whether devils visit them in the torture chambers.
19. Whether she knows other witches, and where they have their gatherings [schadzki].
The man being questioned [i.e., Koczan] responded: By the orders of his grace Pan Galqcki and his grace
Pan Popiel I was present during the torture in the village of Sokolowka, in the presence of their graces Pan
Kotelnicki and Pan Radwanski, and Zawisza, under-starosta from the court of Oleszko, from Oleszko and the
court of that same Oleszko, and the office of Sokolowka, also two jurymen of Przewloczna, two jurymen of
Kadhibiski, which belongs to his grace Pan Galecki [sic], and many other people of various [social] estates,
when his grace Pan Galqski [sic] hit me twice in the back, so that I would listen as an official,71 and then later
testify before the court what Hlaholicha and Oryszka had testified under torture. I heard then, when Hlaholicha
was brought to torture, when she was asked where she learned how to bewitch, she answered, from Ozydowska
[i.e., from Oryszka] from the property of his grace Pan Myszkowski, castellan of Belz. And I heard this from
the mouth of Hlacholicha [sic], that his grace Pan Mnichowski rode to visit her twice, and leaving his horses in
the orchard with a boy, he sent his servant for her, and this was concerning Pan Klodnicki, and he gave her five
zloty and two bushels [krupce] of grain, because he was trying to arrange for Pan Klodnicki to be done away
with. I also heard, that Pan Mnichowski urged Hlaholicha to do away with his grace Pan Popiel, promising her
thirty zloty if she should succeed. After the torture, when they were being brought to the Trybunal [in Lublin],
and I was with them as carriage-driver, when we went through the village of Przewloczna belonging to his
grace Pan Galecki, and I ordered them to be blindfolded, when she was blindfolded Hlaholicha said to me out of
wrath: Remember that things will be bad for you as well and that's how it did turn out, and I heard, that she
Hlaholicha has a devil named Ihnatek Zahorowski. When she was asked where she hides her devil she
answered: in Stupiscze; also asked how she had access to him, she answered, that I give him a penny72 when I
have need of him 73 . Asked whether his wife knows how to do witchcraft he answered: I've lived with my wife
for thirty-odd years, and never seen or suspected anything like that from her. To the same list of questions,
indeed he testified nothing [more]. At length, handed over to the executioner, bound, and admonished not to

69
czesnik: literally more or less "cellar-master," was in the early modern period a relatively minor honorary and
ceremonial title.
70
katusz: literally "place of the executioner," so torture-chamber. However, from the context, it seems that the
prison-cell must be meant.
71
jako general: P. Galecki appears to have appointed Koczan as his representative in the trial.
7
Lit. "grosz czylny." I have had no success identifying the word czylny.
73
In these two sentences, Koczan is reporting Hlacholicha's previous testimony.

569
 • Appendix A •

give over his body to be tortured, and to testify the truth, he answered: I stand by what I have said, I don't know
anything about anything else and I don't feel guilty in anything.
Pulled the first time he testified nothing except as above. Concerning Pan Mnichowski, concerning Pan
Klodnicki, concerning witches, my wife has never practiced witchcraft and I was only present during the torture
of Hlaholicha and Oryska, as an official.
Pulled a second time more intensely he responded: I'm not guilty of anything, my soul to the Lord God.74
I wasn't present, I don't know [any of them], and I don't know anything except what I said the first time; and I
never spent any time with any of them and I've never been in Pan Mnichowski's manor.
Pulled the third time most intensely, and at length with fire having been applied thrice, he testified: I don't
feel guilty in anything at all, I've served distinguished noblemen since I was young, I always served well and
fulfilled my duties, I don't know about anything, do whatever you want with me freely, I don't know anything
at all except what I said the first time.
At last dismissed from torture he testified nothing further than what is written above, with this addition: I
would have said even without torture if I had seen something with my own eyes; nor have I had any association
with those witches; I've always served the Lord God, and people, in a decent way.
A second time, by the same above-noted decree of the Tribunal court, Oryska was led into this place of
torture; [Oryska] was warned to voluntarily testify truly before she might be tortured. She responded to the
which in this form. They call me Oryszka. I'm from the village of Ozydowa. The Tartars took away my
husband. I'm fifty years old. I don't know how to do witchcraft, and Hlaholicha denounced me unjustly. I'm
already quite old, and I've never practiced witchcraft, nor did I teach Hlaholicha, nor did I admit to anything [at
the trial] in Sokolowka, because I'm innocent, I don't feel myself to be guilty in anything at all; what am I
supposed to say; let Hlaholicha take [my fate] on her soul.
At last given over to the executioner, bound, and pulled the first time and to the same list of questions, to
all the questions she responded: I don't know Pan Mnichowski, I never took anything from Hlaholicha, I don't
know any witches, nor do I know any witchcraft myself, I'm already old; I've never practiced witchcraft. That
Hlaholicha denounced me out of wrath and ill-will, because we've quarrelled before.
At last, pulled a second time she answered: I don't know about anything, at any time. I never leant a devil
[ to Hlaholicha], because I've never done such things and I've never practiced witchcraft; and I didn't admit to
anything in Sokolowka.
Thereupon, pulled a third time most intensely and afterwards burnt with fire, to the same list of questions
she testified nothing: I didn't know Pan Mnichowski, I was never at his place, I'm not guilty of anything. I've
never practiced witchcraft; I have no dealings with devils and never have had.
Burnt a second time with fire more intensely, and afterward a third time most intensely, to the same list of
questions she testified nothing except this: I'm not guilty of anything, Hlaholicha denounced me out of wrath,

This sentence cannot really be translated. The word used, "winien" means both "guilty" and "owing," so
Koczan may be understood as saying " I'm guilty of nothing, I owe nothing except my soul, which I owe to
the Lord God."

570
 • The Lublin Trials •

because we had quarrelled, I was never guilty of anything, I go from this world innocent. At last dismissed
[from torture] she testified nothing except as above.
After this, in the third place, Paraszka Hlacholicha was lead in; before torture she answered thus,
voluntarily: I am from Przewloczna; I've been married now twenty three years; I have seven children; I've
never practiced witchcraft; I've only practiced midwifery.75 What I said in Sokolowa [sic] I now confirm: that
Pan Mnichowski came to visit me once with his servant and his boy, and that via Koczan he gave me five
zloty—that is he ordered that Oryszka be given four zloty and one zloty to me, together with a bushel of barley
and a bushel of rye, with the intention that whoever of us were more able should send [witchcraft or a devil]
against Pan Popiel. And Oryszka sent the devil Ihnat Zahorowski.
At length given over to the executioner, bound, and admonished not to permit her body to be tortured, she
responded: Pan Mnichowski and Koczan are driving us from this world; concerning Pan Cetner and Pan Popiel,
I don't know, Koczan and Pan Mnichowski are the guilty ones, as the Lord God is my witness, I've never
practiced witchcraft and I don't practice it now.
Pulled the first time she testified: Pan Mnichowski and Koczan are the cause of the whole thing, and the
reason the world is going to pot, Oryszka too. Asked how she came to know Oryszka she answered, when we
were sitting [in jail] before, Oryszka admitted that she knows how to send [witchcraft or devils].
Pulled the second time more intensely, [she testified] nothing.
Pulled the third time most intensely, [she testified] nothing: You can pull me apart into pieces; I don't
know and wont say anymore; I don't have anything more to tell.
At length, burned with fire administered first intensely, a second time more intensely, a third time most
intensely, she testified: I'm not guilty of anything. Oryszka is guilty, the devil was hers; she called it
Zahorowski, and she blamed everything on Oryszka.76
Afterwards, dismissed [from torture], she testified: I'm ready to confirm until death what I've testified
now, and nothing more.

• <$• •

#118. Regina Lewczykowa 1698

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 379-281, 391-394; Zakrewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 66-72.

Cast.
Regina Lewczykowa Peasant-woman of Chrzanow, accused witch.
Barthalomaus orBartlomiej Lewczyk Regina's husband.
Mathias or Maciej Lewczyk A kinsman, relation unclear.
PaUlus or Pawel Cykula of Krzemien Regina's brother.
Joannes or Jan Sykula of Krzemien A witness, possibly Pawel Cykula's son.

75
tylkom babila: an intriguing and ambiguous statement. It could mean almost anything: that she practiced the
common minor magic and herbcraft of all old women; that she practiced semi-professionally as a cunning-
woman; or that she was an acknowledged midwife.
The last clause shifts abruptly into the voice of the scribe, describing or paraphrasing Hlacholicha's
testimony.

571
 • Appendix A •

Albertus or Wojciech (also Woitek, Luczek) Kozielek Peasant and tax-collector (most likely sortys) of
Chrzanow, Regina's accuser.
Anna Golacka or Galecka,
Marcin Klich,
Martinus or Marcin Dubiel,
Maciey Dubiel (possibly Wojciech Kozielek's cousin),
Stanislaus or Stanislaw Magdziak,
Jakub Gloch,
Joannes or Jan Wia^cek,
Jacobus or Jak6b Rozek,
Stanislaw Kiszka Witnesses, peasants of Chrzanow.
Jak6b Motai of Pilaszowice A folk-healer and exorcist.
P. Stanislaus (Stanislaw) Szczuka Powerful nobleman, referendarz of the Crown,
starosta of Lublin and Warka, owner or leaseholder
of Chrzanow, feudal master to both accuser and
accused.
P. Jakub Kompalski Regina's defence attorney, assigned by the court.
Nikolaus (Mikolaj) Jakubowski
Joannes (Jan) Dobrogoszcz
Melchior Dobrogoszcz Jurymen of Lublin
Wirzbicki Lublin court scribe.

The extraordinary criminal court takes place court in Lublin on the Monday following the feast of St.
Laurence protomartyr, anno Domini 1698 [August 11, 1698], in the presence of the honourable and faithful
representatives of the law Nicolaus Jakubowski, Joannes Dobrogoszcz, Melchior Dobrogoszcz, grand jurors of
Lublin.
On the authority of the permission of his magnificence Pan Stanislaus Szczuka, referendary of the Crown77,
starosta of Lublin and of Warka78, the peasantwoman Regina—by her first marriage Kozlowa, and at present,
by her second marriage, Lewczykowa—subject of the village ofKrzanow belonging to the above-mentioned
magnificence Szczuka, being suspected of the act of sending demons [immissio daemonii] into the peasant
Albert Kozielek, subject of the same village ofKrzanow, and on the authority of a subpoena summoned before
the Lublin court, being freely questioned [i.e., without torture], to begin with testified thus:
I don't know where this opinion about me, of sending an evil spirit [zry duch] against Woiciech Kozielek,
comes from; although he improperly gives the reason, that the field, through which I used to drive my cattle
without any problem in the time of his father, he now has fenced and forbidden cattle-driving [through it]. I
wanted to herd my cattle, and he, standing in the way, wouldn't let me through. I said: Why [are you doing this]
to me Woitys, after all I used to drive them this way. He answered: but now you'll eat a devil [if] you drive
them. I said: eat [the devil] yourself, since you're younger; after that I didn't herd [my cattle] that way, but
another way. A year after this quarrel, something started to hurt in his legs, I don't know what, and right away

referendarius or referendarz koronny: the lay referendarz of the Korona, together with his ecclesiastical
colleague, presided over the Referendary Court, which heard appeals from royal lands, and participated in
the Assessory Court, which functioned semi-officially as the highest appeals court for towns; he was thus
one of the highest magistrates of the Commonwealth.
Stanislaw Szczuka, referendary of the Crown 1688-1699, starosta of Lublin 1687-1710, d. 1710 (Klaczewski
and Urban eds. 1991 no. 325, Chlapowski et al. eds. 1992 no. 908; see also Grochowska 1989 and Zielinska
2004). Previously he had served as regent of the Greater Chancellory of the Crown, responsible for the
correctness of legal documents and records. He thus had very extensive legal experience.

572
 • The Lublin Trials •

he took a suspicion of me, and in Gorai, at the market-fair, he wounded me severely. Later he was at Tomaszow
[Lubelskie], when the priest exorcised [him] he said: I can't stand to look at you, and the priest said, that I can't
help him when nothing is speaking;791 however, as I love God, don't know at all what was supposed to be
ailing him or who sent it against him, and also I don't know any witchcraft at all, if I did I'd know what to do
when they stole from me so many times, from my chambers and my horses, as my neighbours know well, and
of course I wouldn't have reason to wish ill of this same Woichech, who found my lost mare.
However, the peasant Albertus Kozielek,for the information of the court, questioned freely testified in this
way:
I don't accuse this woman of sending [an evil spirit] against me at all, but it started with the forbidding of
the driving of the cattle, which she did through my fields. When I forbade her she said to me: Remember
Woitek, you won't enjoy the profit of this field,80 you wait and see what will happen. I took no notice of this,
and I went home; meeting my mother she said to her: Tell that Woitek not to forbid me from driving my cattle
[through his field], because he won't get any profit from this field, and everyone will see his misfortune. When
my mother told me this I said the devil himself is afraid of her,81 after all she has the right against me, and she
threatened the lord [of the village] in the presence of Anna Golacka, Marcin Klich, and Marcin Dubiel. A year
after this quarrel, when I went out and about the village to collect the hearth tax,82 something pained me very
much in the leg and the lower back. Right away I started to be ill; I made my way to Dzikow, while going there,
on the road it spoke through me, but at the place [i.e., when I got to Dzikow], nothing; later I was in Tomaszow.
There, I hear, he spoke and said about her, that she had sent it [into me], but I didn't hear any of this, because I
was not in myself. Jakub Motai bathed me later in Pilaszowice in herbs, and there I wasn't conscious but a
person who was there, Magdziak, testified [as to what took place there]. Now moreover she brags about various
people, as about Stanislaw Kiszka or about my brother Maciek (Maciey Dubiel heard her [say it] in her home),
saying: if you bother me about anything at all, both one and the other will rot.

Asked for what reason he wounded the accused Reina in the head while in Gorai, he answered: She
slithered into my sight and I couldn't stand to look at her, and there she got it with a cartwheel linch-pin, but I
don't know who beat her, because in Pilaszkowice it was said through me that not I, but an evil spirit [zry duch]
beat her.
During the commencement of the present trial there is on one side, the peasant Albertus Koziolek, accuser,
and on the other side, in the company of her husband, the peasant-woman Regina, from her first marriage
Kozielkowa, from her second and present marriage Lewczykowa, accused of sending demons [immissio
daemonii] into the accuser. The parties are present in person.

I.e., so long as the possessing spirit doesn't speak? Compare Wojciech's own testimony, below.
niepozyiesz pola: the sentence is ambiguous; it could mean that the field will give him no profit, or that he
won't live to see its profit—I tend toward the latter interpretation.
diabol iey boi: An extremely interesting comment, relating perhaps to the popular adage that old women are
more crafty even than the devil.
podymny: an unpopular tax levied against all inhabited homes.

573
 • Appendix A •

Before proceeding, the criminal court assigns the noble Jakub Kompalski as advocate for the above
mentioned defendant, by the authority of the present decree; the advocate is in possession of the depositions of
the plaintiff.
After assigning the above-mentioned advocate, having read the testimony given freely both by the accuser
and by the above-mentioned [accused], and also having read [the report] of the jurymen of the court ofGoraj,
in which this same matter was well considered and all the circumstances earlier weighed, because from [all of\
this the court did not succeed in sufficiently informing itself concerning the deed done by the accused Regina
Lewczykowa, it is necessary above all that an investigation, with the purpose of better and more sufficient
information of the court, be conducted by both sides, and by persons familiar with, or eyewitnesses of, both the
criminal act and the life of the accused Lewczykowa before that act, as well as [persons familiar with, or
eyewitnesses of] the events relating to the accuser, toward either clear proof of the criminal act of the above-
mentioned, or to the justification of her innocence. Taking into account the time of the grape-harvest,83 the
court, with the agreement of both sides, sets as the term for the investigation and for the bringing of witnesses
the Monday after the feast of St. Matthew the apostle and evangelist [September 22] of the now current year,
after which term the court will not take into account in law [any evidence or witnesses] brought forth. On the
authority of the present decree the court declares that the accused Regina Lewczykowa should [be released] on
the warranty of the peasants: Barthalomaus Lewczyk her spouse, Mathias Lewczyk and Stanislaus Magdziak,
until the ending of the above-assigned term for the carrying out of the investigation, both sides agreeing to this
warranty.

Saturday, eve of the feast of St. Thomas the apostle [December 20] 1698. Witnesses for the side ofLuczek
Kozielek.
1. The peasant Stanislaus Kiszcza, serf of the village ofChrzanow, by his previous oath thus testified on
bended knee thus testified: I don't know that, whether the accused Lewczykowa is supposed to have practiced
witchcraft, although this year Jakub Gloch, who is here with us as a witness, complained to me that the girl84 of
that same Lewczykowa milked his cow in the field, from which time that cow didn't want to give any more
milk, so that he had to sell it; and I don't know that, whether she is supposed to have bewitched this here
Kozielek, or send an evil spirit [zly duch] against him, only that when it spoke through him already in the
seventh year,851 went with him, by the command of the podstaroscie to Pilaszkowice, when the peasant Jakub
Motai attempted to drive that devil [diabel] out of him by means of a bath. In that bath it began to speak through
him in these words: Ah old woman of Krzemien, I didn't have any business for you here, ah old women, release
me, I say, I'm not from hell, I'm unbaptized.86 People asked him there about things they had lost,87 but he
answered, that I don't know, only one from hell [knows that sort of thing], and he also said, that Lewczykowa
bought me here, from a woman from Krzemien.

3
There was a limited amount of grape cultivation for wine in the Lublin region at this time. In 1697 there was a
small winery attached to the meadery and beer-brewery in Podzamcze (Riabinin 1934: 10).
dziewka: probably servant-girl or komornica, less likely a daughter.
85
I.e., in 1697?
86
iam nie zpiekla, diem nie krzceniec: That is: I'm not from hell; rather, I'm the spirit of an unbaptized infant.
7
Devils were commonly understood to be able to locate lost or stolen items.

574
 • The Lublin Trials •

Second, the peasant Martinus Dubiel, also a serf of the village ofKrzanow, having sworn the oath on
bended knee testified thus: I don't know whether that accused Lewczykowa is supposed to have practiced
witchcraft. She's lived with us in the village from old times, and nobody complains about her of that, however
concerning the matter at hand, I heard from people that it happened like this: through the wygon 88 of this
Kozielek's father that Regina drove her cattle just like other people did; Kozielek, taking over the farm after his
father forbade driving cattle that way, she said: I'll bring my cattle back home, but everyone will see your
misfortune, however I don't know whether she bewitched him or not.
Witnesses on the part of Regina Lewczykowa.
1. Paulus Cykula, brother of the accused, 70 years of age, of the village ofKrzemien, having sworn the
oath on bended knee testified thus: You never hear about that woman being mixed up with any kind of
witchcraft [czary], and no one complains about her, also whether she is supposed to have bewitched that
Kozielek or sent an evil spirit [zry duch] against him I don't know.
Second, the peasant Joannes Wiqcek of the village ofKrzanow having sworn the oath on bended knee thus
testified: I don't know whether that woman is supposed to have practiced magic, also nobody complains of her
concerning that, of course it happens that I with a neighbour beat up her husband, and after all she didn't do
anything to me. As to that man Kozielek with whom she quarrelled about the wygon and as people say that she
answered him I don't know whether she bewitched him or whether she sent a devil [diabel] against him.
Third, the peasant Jacobus Rozek, serf of the village ofKrzemien, having sworn the oath on bended knee
testified thus: I've known this woman for a long time, and I know she doesn't practice any witchcraft, lots of
[bad] things have happened to her, thieves robbed her, they ransacked her store-rooms, and yet she didn't use
any witchcraft, in any way, to prevent this; no-one has complained against her about witchcraft. With this
Kozielek, about what she's supposed to have quarrelled I don't know, and I don't know whether she's supposed
to have let in, or sent an evil spirit [zby duch] against him, but that's not like her, she's a friendly sort.
Fourth, the peasant Ioannes Sykula, serf of the village ofKrzemien, having sworn the oath on bended knee
testified thus: that I don't know about any scandals concerning that woman, and I don't know, whether she
knows how to bewitch or not, none of the neighbours complain about her, that she's supposed to have done
anything bad against anyone. With this Kozielek, I heard from people how she quarrelled with him about the
wygon, that he forbade her to drive her cattle through, and that she showered him with bad words, however
whether she's supposed to have sent an evil spirit [zly duch] against him, that I don't know.
Third, on the part of Kozielek, the peasantwoman Anna Gaiecka, serf of the village ofKrzczanow, having
sworn the oath on bended knee testified thus: I moved to Krzanow twenty long years ago, and this woman was

wygon: a path or wide space between fields through which cattle are herded from the village out onto the
common pasture; also the place at the edge of the village where individual cows are gathered in the morning
to be herded out onto the common field. The act of thus herding cows is also called wygon, and the word is
used in this meaning earlier in the testimony. In the context, it makes most sense to suppose that a portion of
the fields of the Kozielek family has traditionally been used as a wygon out onto the common pasture, and
Wojciech Kozielek is attempting to narrow it to the width of an ordinary miedza or margin between
neighbouring fields—too narrow for herding cattle. This, together with his role as tax-collector and possibly
as soltys, accounts for his evident unpopularity.

575
 • Appendix A •

already there, I know, that nobody's accused her of any kind of bad things or about witchcraft. But I did hear
from her, when she quarrelled with Kozielek about the wygon, that she said: everyone will see his misfortune,
but I don't know whether she sent an evil spirit [zly duch] against him or not.
Fourth, on the part of that same Kozielek and of the accused Lewczykowa [a peasant]89 of the village of
Krzczanow having sworn the oath on bended knee thus testified: I don't know anything bad about that woman,
and I don't know whether she might know how to bewitch, but my girl told me five or six years ago, that the
girl of that Lewczykowa milked my cow in the field, after which it lost its milk and I sold it, but I don't know if
Lewczykowa might have also bewitched this Kozielek, whether she is supposed to have bewitched him, or sent
an evil spirit [zly duch] against him.
During the session of the present court, on the one side, the accuser Barthalomaus Kozielek, and on the
other, the accused wife of the peasant Lewczyk, all serfs of the village ofKrczanow [are present]. Both sides are
present in person. In the unchanged period of bringing forth witnesses in the case of the sending-in of demons
[this testimony was indeed gathered]. During the extraordinary official criminal trial, after having read the
testimony in this case, both the earlier testimony from the town ofGoraj, as also the new testimony in the
presence of this our own court, all testified under oath, so that the light of truth might show the deed done, and
after honest consideration and deliberation concerning all the circumstances, both of law and of the action,
including the testimony and attestations of the neighbours of the same suspect concerning the aforesaid actions;
out of which, considering that they did not accuse [her] of sending demons or of using incantations against the
peasant Albert Kozielek or any of his family, it was judged to be the case that the same Kozielek, in refusing the
driving out of the cattle through the meadow (vulgo wygon), was himself the author of a threat and of improper
words.
For this reason the court, moved by these reasons, finds that the defective judgement on the giving of false
testimony cited earlier should be made right, and [the court] will decide whether the accused Regina
Lewczykowa along with her husband Barthalomaus Lewczyk gave false testimony in her deposition.90 The
accused said that neither she herself, nor some other person subordinate to her is guilty of sending an evil spirit
[zly duch] against Woiciech Kozielek, and that she does not know how to do any witchcraft; her husband
indeed that he doesn't know his wife to have bewitched Woiciech Kozielek, and for the whole time they have
lived together, for quite a few years, he has never noticed her doing anything like witchcraft
May this case now be helped by God and by the Passion of Jesus Christ. After which the court will give its
judgement on the case. Because the testimony in question was given by the accused Lewczykowa with her
husband in front of the judge, and taken down by the noble Wirzbicki, minister of the court, this testimony will
prevail in the present case. For this reason the same court, having considered the aforesaid, makes and

The scribe seems to have forgotten to write in the name of the witness. From the context, this must be the
aforementioned Jakub Gloch.
The theme of false testimony appears for the first time here, near the end of the trial. Either this is a question
brought forward from the earlier trial in Goraj or, more likely, the court is refraining the charge: having
established that Wojciech caused the argument, the only remaining question is whether Regina lied in
denying that she sent a demon into him.

576
 • The Lublin Trials •

pronounces [Regina] free. By the authority of the present decree, he is to compensate the expenses incurred
and paid by each side in the case.

#125. Katarzyna Ratajowa 1700

APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 483-487; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 72-74.

Cast.
Catharina (Katarzyna) Ratajowa Peasantwoman, accused witch.
Sophia (Zofia) Kistyniowa Peasantwoman, accused witch.
P. Zbygniewski Nobleman, plaintiff against Katarzyna Ratajowa.
Ie_drzejowa Rataiowa Peasantwoman of Wierzbica, apparently not kin to
Katarzyna.

Done in Lublin in the prison under the town-hall, Saturday the day after the feast of the visitation
[annunciation] of the Blessed Virgin Mary [July 3] 1700.
On the authority of the decree of the [Royal] Tribunal [concerning the case] between the nobleman
Zbygniewski, plaintiff, and thepeasantwomen Catharina Rataiowa and Sophia Kistyniowa, [which decree was
made, or which case was tried] on the eve of the feast of the visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary [July 1], the
court descended to the torture chamber to interrogate the imprisoned woman mentioned below.
The peasantwoman Catharina Rataiowa first interrogated freely [i.e. without torture] to the list of
questions provided [by the court] answered thus:
I've never had any association at all with any witch. That woman who is in prison here with me used to
drink sometimes at my place, because I was at the tavern92 and sometimes she brought grain in exchange for the
drink. Someone tattled to her husband about this. She thought that her husband got the information from me, so
she quarrelled with me a few times together with her mother and with Iqdrzejowa Rataiowa, so that it ended
with a beating, because she beat me with an oar in the middle of the road, and later, out of wrath, she pretended
to people that I had given her the Most Holy Sacrament after communion. I've never practiced witchcraft, I've
never harmed anyone, neither their health nor their cattle.
To the second [question]. Neither have I ever done any witchcraft, nor do I know any witches, and I don't
know anything about them.
To the third [question]. I didn't take confession in Urzqdow, because our parish belongs to Bobow, and
the things she says about me never happened.
To the fourth [question]. Nor have I done any enchantments [guslow], nor have I ever practiced them, nor
did anyone persuade or advise me [to steal the host], because I didn't do it.
At length, given over to the executioner, and bound, and admonished not to give over her body to be
tortured, to the same list of questions, pulled the first time intensely she responded thus.

91
Presumably Wojciech Kozielek.
92
Bom ia na szynku byla: Katarzyna appears to have worked at the tavern or brewery, or perhaps simply was
known for her home-brewing.

577
 • Appendix A •

To the first [question]: For God's sake I don't know anything. I don't know any enchantments [guslow],
I've never spoiled anybody's cattle, nor harmed any people. No-one has ever taught me any enchantments
[guslow] and I don't know how to do any. I've never harmed anyone, in any way.
To the second [question]: I didn't send any [bewitchments] and I don't know about any; those three who
have conspired against me are making things up about me unjustly. That woman who was with the husband
who is now my husband, when a few of us were dunked, she floated, but she is dead,93,I was lying on a little
barrel, which is why I didn't sink, the other Rataiowa, Ie_drzej's wife, also floated, she lives in Wierzbica, we
have the same master.
To the third [question]: I never did it; its all from the pretending of that young woman, who denounced
me out of wrath. She arranged with that Iqdrzeiowa, who floated when we were dunked, out of wrath they told
tales against me, and they got a host from somewhere, I don't know where, but I saw it when they brought it
before the manor-lord and later, before the priest.
To the fourth [question]: Nobody induced [me to do it], because I didn't do it; what I knew and what I
know I'm telling honestly.
Pulled a second time more intensely: For God's sake I don't know. Rataiowa Iqdrzeiowa, who floated,
she persuaded that young woman, and the mother94 of that young woman, who together, most likely, stole the
Most Holy Sacrament and then blamed it on me. I didn't know about it, up until they brought me before the
priest with their falsehoods. When we were dunked there was a whole lot of women, but only two floated: one,
who is dead, and the second is Ie_drzeiowa Rataiowa, and I was lying on a little barrel.
Pulled a third time, most intensely. For God's sake I don't know anything more. It's hard to give an
answer when you don't know. Honestly I don't know. I saw that communion host, but all broken up into
crumbs, when that mother, and her daughter who wasn't arrested, brought it before the manor-lord, and he sent
for me because of their falsehoods, that I was supposed to have done it, but I didn't do it.
Burnt the first time, intensely: For God's sake I don't know, have mercy on me that I don't know, those
others here played some trick, although they did it themselves, remember that, by the Holy Sacrament.
Burnt a second time, more intensely: For God's sake I don't know, I didn't do anything ever. Those three
did it themselves, and what they did it for I don't know. I've never known, and still don't know, any other
witches.
Burnt a third time, most intensely: For God's sake I don't know where they got that host, or what for, I
don't know about any witches, only that those three brought the host, whether for witchcraft or not I don't
know. Rataiowa Ie_drzeiowa floated that time when we were dunked, and that second woman who is dead, and I
was lying on a little barrel, because they dunked us in the creek.
At last, dismissed [from torture], she confirmed the following formally: I don't know anything more,
those same three, Rataiowa Ie_drzeiowa, the mother and that young one, where they got those crumbs from I
don't know and what they used them for I don't know; they blamed it all on me because of our quarrel.

93
umarla: since this verb always indicates a natural death, the woman being spoken of cannot have been burnt
at the stake.
94
mac used here rather than the usual "matka:" the connotation is strongly pejorative.

578
 • The Lublin Trials •

• •:••

#161. Kazimierz Kmarynski, Katarzyna Kmarynska, Mikolaj Janiszewski and Justyna

Michalicha 1732
APLublin, AMLublin sig. 48 (Advocatalia) ff. 1254-1261; 1282-1288; Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 75-85.

Cast.
Casimirus (Kazimierz) Kmarynski Peasant, implicated in witchcraft.
Catherina (Katarzyna) Kazimierzowa Kmarynska Peasant, Kazimierz's wife, implicated in witchcraft.
Nicolas (Mikolaj) Janiszewski Peasant, also associated in witchcraft.
Justyna Michalicha Asuwalicha of Lysowka Accused witch.
Iwanicha of Perehorynce Another alleged witch, apparently dead at the time of
the trial.
Mielniczka Another alleged witch, not among those interrogated.
Ichnatek Michalicha's devil
Lukiian A peasant in the village of Mytki.
The Pogorski brothers Noblemen embroiled in a dispute over land with the
Mytko family.
P. Brzyski Lawyer for the Pogorski brothers at the Crown
Tribunal.
P. Mikolay Mytko Ruthenian nobleman alleged to have hired the
witches.
P. Mikolaiowa Mytkowa His wife.
P. Alexander Mytko Father of Mikolay.
P. Alexandrowa Mytkowa Mikolay's mother, Alexander's wife.
Witwicki or Witwiecki A courtier of the Mytko family.
Stanislaus (Stanislaw) Szafranski Lublin wqjt.
Antonius (Antoni) Muradowicz,
Albertus (Wojciech) Jelinski Lublin jurymen.
Stanislaus (Stanislaw) Groznicki Notary of the Lublin wqjt-court.
Stanislaus (Stanislaw) Bychawski Prosecutor of the Crown Tribunal.
P. I. Morsztyn Starosta of Sieradz and Marshall of the Crown
Tribunal during the first session of interrogation
P. W. M^cinski Marshall of the Crown Tribunal during the second
session of interrogation.

Monday, eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, anno Domini 1732 [June 23].
In the presence of those law-abiding lords, adhering to the remission by the decree of the Crown Tribunal
of Lublin. Saturday before the feast of St. John the Baptist [June 21] in the current year 1732. [The case is
between] the noble brothers Pogorski and the imprisoned Casimirus and Catherina, spouses to each other, as
well as the above-mentioned Nicolas. The prisoner Casimirus Kmarynski, led [before the court], in freely given
responses, testified to the list of questions provided by the Tribunal court, which [list] follows here immediately
in this way.
List of questions for the testimony to be received under torture from the peasants Casimirus and
Catharina, married to each other, as well as Nicolas, by the wish of the decree of the Trybunal, Saturday, after
the octave of the feast of the most holy Body of our Lord Christ [June 21], in the year 1732 written down in full.

579
 • Appendix A •

First. Whether they did any sort of witchcraft against their graces the Pans Pogorski, or against anyone
else, whether to harm health and life, or to harm fortune [i.e. property], in short why did they do it, and in what
places or houses.
Second: At whose inducement and command did they do this witchcraft, who was with them, and what
other old women95 or other persons helped in it, and took part in that witchcraft, and who knew about them, and
whether they used the corpses of the dead, or the corpses of still-births,96 and what did they use them for.
Third. Whether they used any holy things in their witchcraft, or consecrated hosts, and if they did use
them, who brought the hosts, what did they do with them and for what purpose, where was the witchcraft sent,
who brought it and who sent it.
Fourth. Whether they made any sort of offerings to devils, or whether someone else [made such offerings]
in their presence, and what did they offer: children or something else, and what happened to that offering, and
against whom was it done, and how many such offerings of children to the devil were made.
Fifth. Who paid the old women, who sent for them, who brought them, and to what purpose?
Sixth. Whether there were any conversations [verbal: sex is not implied here] with devils, and whether the
devils were sent against someone, and who ordered them [the witches or the devils: context is unclear], and in
whose presence this took place.
Seventh. Who wrote on little cards,97 so that they could be used for witchcraft, and from whom did
Kazimierzowa [i.e., Katarzyna] have these cards, and who read them.
I. Morsztyn, starosta ofSieradz, M\arshalT\ of the C[rown] T\ribunal\ ofL[ubliri]. And he responded thus
to the first point of the list of questions. We didn't do any witchcraft; it was just that his grace Pan Mikolay
Mytko sent for an old woman, and that only so that she should inform them how the legal case would go for
them, and they commanded that that old woman should be quartered with me; and that old woman was from
Lysowka near Zinkow, to whom was given payment in kind [ordynarya] at the court of his grace Pan Mytko the
elder—rye, wheat, a big slab of pork fat; I carted this payment back to Lysowka along with her; that same old
woman came back to Kosarynce, because that old woman, having accepted a devil [czart], she attacked the
lawyer for their graces, the brothers Pogorski, and that was for this reason: Once it thundered horribly, and that
old woman went outside and began to converse with someone; I didn't see this but my wife saw that something
like a man stood before that old woman, and they were talking with each other. Later, coming back in, that old
woman said, "Oh, the lawyer for their graces the brothers Podgorski is dead; she says, he went, drunk to the inn,
he lay down on the bed, the drink did its job in him, and he died. A little after that a nobleman from Lublin
comes along; her grace p. Mikolaiowa Mytkowa asked him, what news of the ladies in Lublin; the nobleman
answered: praise be to God I left them all healthy; her grace pani Mytkowa asked him after this: and the lawyer
for their graces the brothers Pogorski, are they well? He answered, by the grace of God, I left him healthy, after

95
baby: a baba may be an old woman generally, especially an old peasant-woman, or more specifically a
cunning-woman or witch. The term is used very frequently in this trial. Not wanting to pre-judge the matter,
I translate it consistently with the neutral "old woman."
potyrczeta: This may mean the bodies of still-born children or fetuses from miscarriages, or more widely any
unbaptized infant corpse.
97
kartki: This may mean playing cards or divination cards, or simply small pieces of paper.

580
 • The Lublin Trials •

which the devil wanted to tear off that woman's head, saying, what did you send me there for? Because "strong
and wide"98 won't let me within a mile of him.
To the second [question] he responded: I've already said, above, that his grace Pan Mikolay Mytko sent
for that old woman, my wife was present at the time. I don't know this [personally], but the whole village
knows about it. Whether they used the bodies of the dead for witchcraft, I don't know, nor do I know about any
stillbirths.
[Concerning] the third [question] he generally knows nothing.
[Concerning] the fourth, he also knows nothing.
To the fifth [question] and to the sixth: As I've said, his grace Pan Mikolay Mytko sent for that old
woman, and he was supposed to pay her for that.
To the seventh: My wife said that that old woman is supposed to have had a conversation with the devil,
but I wasn't present and I don't know what they talked about, but she [my wife] said that that old woman sent a
devil against the lawyer for their graces the brothers Podgorski. I don't know about any cards, except this, that
when I carted that old woman [from her home] Pan Mytko gave me a card giving us free passage, so that no one
would stop us on the road.
The same prisoner, pulled the first time, testified: to the first point of interrogation: Jesus Mary, I already
said that that old woman bewitched the lawyer for their graces the brothers Podgorski, so that the legal suit
should go their way.
To the second [question]: By the request of Pan Mikolai Mytko my wife visited Pani Mytkowa. To the
remainder of the question he was ignorant of everything.
To the third [question] he was universally ignorant of everything.
To the fourth he responded: I didn't see that; too bad; I'm supposed to make things up and tell them.
To the fifth [question]: Pan Mytko paid, and sent for that old woman, but his deputy brought her.
To the sixth, he is ignorant of everything.
To the seventh, similarly he responded with ignorance.
Pulled a second time. The same prisoner responded similarly to all points and questions, as he had during
the first pulling. Pulled a third time, and fire having been applied, the same prisoner testified to all points, in
conformance and concordance with his freely given testimony, and [with his testimony given during] the first
and secondpullings.
The second prisoner, Catharina, wife of the prisoner Casimirus, testified to the first point of interrogation
in voluntary testimony: Her grace Pani Mytkowa pisarzowa99 brought that old woman from Lysowka to bewitch
his lordship the lawyer for their lordships the brothers Pogorski, that is to say, his grace Pan Brzyski, so that a
devil [bies] would strangle him, saying: once the devil [bies] strangles him, we can squeeze out the Pogorskis
from the land beyond the Dniestr. And they gave that old woman three red zloty for that service, concerning
which I know perfectly well.

98
"mocna i szeroka." Recall that Zofia Baranowa had called the Virgin Mary "Szeroka [wide]" in her
testimony.
99
pisarzowa: wife of the pisarz or scribe. In this context, the term scribe refers to an honorary, ceremonial title.

581
 • Appendix A •

To the second [question]. By the orders of his grace Pan Mikolai Mytko that witchcraft was done by the
old woman Katarzyna Michalicha Asuwalicha of Lysowka, and there is a second old woman in Soroka but I
don't know what she is called. It is true that they used human corpses for their witchcraft, although the nanny100
of her grace Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa, along with Pani Mikolajowa Mytkowa, dug up a still-born child on
the land of a peasant named Lukiian in Mytki.
To the third [question]. That is true, I was there myself when Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa pisarzowa,
calling me in, in the presence of that old woman who had come to do witchcraft, untied a kerchief and took a
host from it and gave it to her nanny, the nanny took the host and mixed it with flower in a little pot, and recited
these words: "just as a great crowd comes to communion, in the same way let all the Tribunal be favourable to
my mistress."
To the fourth, she responded: Pani Alexandrowa Mikolajowa said to that old woman the witch: for this
stillbirth which we have dug up, give the devil the child of Pani Mikolaiowa's sister.
To the fifth [question]: Pan pisarz101 Aleksander Mytko paid those old women for this, giving one of them
forty zloty, the other he gave fifteen red zloty.
To the sixth [question]: That old woman who lived with us chatted with her devil thus: "Ichnatek, she
says, so what? Did you do [what you were supposed to do] in Lublin?" The devil answered: "He got drunk, he
says, Pan Brzyski, I climbed onto his face and strangled him, and Pan Mytko gave [money] for prayers for him
and for his servants.
To the seventh [question]: Pan Mikolay Mytko wrote to that old woman the witch, that she should act and
make it so that all the evidence belonging to their lords the brothers Pogorski, should disappear.
The same prisoner, pulled the first time, testified to the first point of interrogation: The witchcraft was
[directed against] Pan Brzyski and against their lordships the brothers Pogorski, and the witchcraft was done in
Mytki by Pani pisarzowa Mytkowa along with some old women.
To the second: By orders of Pani Mytkowa, but there were more than six old women involved: one from
Soroka, the second from Perehorynice, the third from Mie_dzyboza, the fourth from Lysowka, others from
Mohylow; they used both human bodies and stillbirths for this; as I said above, everything happened in that
way.
To the third: Pani Mytkowa the elder herself used communion hosts for this, she gave them to her nanny,
the nanny mixed them with flour, they baked pancakes from this and brought [the pancakes] here to Lublin.
To the fourth: Except for the child that the sister gave to the devil, I don't know anything else.
To the fifth: Pan Alexander Mytko sent for the old women and paid them, and Witwicki brought them.
To the sixth: That old woman who stayed with me, she chatted with her devil, sending it against Pan
Brzyski.

mamka: this word most often means "nanny," but can also mean "aunt"—neither meaning fits the present
context very well. The women meant appears to be an old servant or companion to P. Alexandrowa
Mytkowa—perhaps she had at one time served as a nanny.
pisarz: scribe or notary. In this context, the term refers to an honorary, ceremonial title.

582
 • The Lublin Trials •

To the seventh: Pan Mikolay wrote, [asking that] the devil would hide the papers belonging to their
lordships the brothers Pogorski.
The same prisoner, pulled a second time, testified, conforming in all things to the letter, on every point,
the same as when she was pulled the first time, adding nothing and taking nothing away.
Pulled a third time and fire having been applied, she responded to all points in concordance [with what
she had testified] when pulled the first time, second time and third time.
The third prisoner, Nicolaus Janiszewski, in freely given testimony, responded to the first point of
interrogation: It is true that their lordships the brothers Pogorski were bewitched, and in particular, his grace
Pan Brzyski, lawyer in the Tribunal, to which purpose many old women were brought in: one, a Walachian,
from Soroka, Iwanicha from Perehorynce, the third one pretended that a devil [bies] had strangled his grace Pan
Brzyski.
To the second, he answered: This all happened on orders from her grace Pani Mytkowa the elder herself,
and Pan Mytko himself; only courtiers were present during this bewitchment, like Witwicki and others. But
there were five old women present during this bewitchment: one from Mie_dzyboze, a second, Mielniczka from
Malczewice, a third from Satanowa, a fourth, the Walachian from Soroka, and the fifth, a noblewoman from
Perehorynce. I heard that they used dead people for this witchcraft, and I know that the nanny of Pani Mytkowa
the elder took earth from graves.
To the third: Kazimierzowa, who was just tortured, told me that Pani Mytkowa, when she was in Bar, it
will be a year ago come St. Anthony's day, by the orders of the old women, the witches, brought back from
there a communion host and gave it to her nanny, and the nanny is supposed to have mixed it with flour and
baked pancakes from it, and send [the pancakes] here to Lublin.
To the fourth: And I also heard from that same woman, that they were to have sacrificed / offered children
to the devils, but I wasn't present at that; and they did all of this for the sake of witchcraft.
To the fifth: Pani Mytkowa paid the old women, and she sent for them, but the podstaroscie102 from
Koszarynce brought them.
To the sixth: The old women said that that is how it is supposed to have happened.
To the seventh: Pani Mytkowa wrote those cards to the old woman, and the old woman gave it to
Kazimierzowa, and people found the others at the court.
The same prisoner, pulled the first time, testified to the first point of interrogation: Their graces the
brothers Podgorski and their lawyer his grace Pan Brzyski were really bewitched.
To the second: At the inducement of Pan Mytko and Pani Mytkowa; present at this [doing of] witchcraft
were Witwiecki and the nanny; they used not only the bodies of dead people, but also whatever they could use
they did use, and they also used stillbirths.
To the third he responded: And they used the Eucharist for this, and her grace Pani Mytkowa brought the
hosts herself, and they mixed it into pancakes, to be brought to the Trybunal.
To the fourth: They did whatever they could; they offered children to the devil.

102
podstaroscie: Here, probably a low court official or an assistant to P. Mnichowski.

583
 • Appendix A •

To the fifth: Pani Mytkowa sent for them and she paid them, but Witwicki and the podstaroscie from
Koszerynce brought them.
To the sixth: Pani Mytkowa wrote the card, I don't know anything more.
Pulled a second time, the same prisoner questioned [again], responded to all points with sufficient
conformity [to his previous answers]. The same prisoner, questioned separately, responded uniformly to all the
points of interrogation. Pulled a third time and with fire applied during the third pulling, he testified similarly.
And this much they set down, which is the tenor of the present records.
Saturday, on the eve of the feast of St. Bartholomew the apostle [August 23] a. D. 1732.
In this same record. Done in Lublin in the prison under the city hall, to the prisoners destined to be
tortured, in the presence of the honourable lords of justice, and of course also the honourable Stanislaus
Szafranski, wojt of the present city, Antonius Muradowicz, Albertus Jelinski, grand-jurymen, and also the noble
Stanislaus Groznicki, notary to the wqjt-court of the city ofLublin, as well as the noble Stanislaus Bychawski,
instigator [prosecutor] of the court of the Crown Tribunal of Lublin. Before these lords of justice, the prisoner
Iustina Michalicha having been lead, by the authority of the decree of the court of the Crown Tribunal of
Lublin, Thursday before the feast of St. Bartholomew the apostle [August 21], in the year now current, 1732,
testified in freely-given testimony to the list of questions provided by court of the Tribunal, which list of
questions follows uninterruptedly as follows. The list of questions for the testimony to be received under torture
concerning the person of the peasant woman Michalicha to the same list of questions, extended by the court of
the Tribunal by decree of the Tribunal.
First: Who sent for her, telling her to go to Mytki and Kosaryhce to perform witchcraft; and what was this
witchcraft needed for?
Second: Who paid her to do witchcraft, and who was she told to bewitch?
Third: Who told her to send devils, and who paid for it, and promised [to pay her] more, and who did she
send the devils against, and for what reason?
Fourth: Whether she used consecrated hosts for her witchcraft, who got them from the church; what did
they do with the hosts?
Fifth: Whether she used corpses and stillbirths for witchcraft, and who brought them to Lublin, and who
told other witches to come to Mytki to do witchcraft?
Sixth: Who told her to place the devil before them, which she sent, and what did they tell him [the devil]
to do?
W. Mecinski, Marshall of the Crown Tribunal. And indeed, [she testified] to the first point of
interrogation: Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa came for me herself, with Kazmirycha [Kazimierzowa, i.e.
Katarzyna] who has already been tortured here. When they came the first time, it was only about children,
because at that time [her] children were sick; after having talked with me, she rode back the way she'd come.
The second time, however, when they sent the podstaroscie for me, when I went to Kosaryfice, to Pani
Mikolaiowa Mytkowa to perform witchcraft, when I arrived, Pan Mikolay Mytko himself spoke to me like this:
"My dear little woman, could you, he says, work things in such a way as to send a devil [bies] against Pan

584
 • The Lublin Trials •

Brzyski. I answered: "A soul is taken easily, but not so easily returned." But Pan Mytko answered: don't you
worry yourself, we've already gotten permission from the priest.
To the second: Pani Aleksandrowa Mytkowa paid me for this, she gave me one red zloty and a tynf,104,
and two quarter-korce105 of grain: wheat and barley, and this was so that we should bewitch Pan Brzyski.
To the third: Both their lordships Mytko ordered [me] to send devils against Pan Brzyski, both Pan
Mykolay Mytko, and his wife, and also Pan Alexander Mytko, because he spoke to me these words: "If you, my
dear little woman, kill Pan Brzyski, I'll give you a mare, whichever one you choose from my herd."
To the fourth: They said among themselves, that Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa, during the feast of St.
Anthony in Bar, took with her a communion host, and Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa's nanny is supposed to have
mixed it with flour; I myself saw with my own eyes, that she mixed something together in a pot, but I didn't
notice [that it was the host]; they recited the following words: "Just as people crowd around the Most Holy
Sacrament, in the same way let their graces the lord deputies of the court show favour in our cases."
To the fifth: I don't know them to have used people's corpses for witchcraft, but Pani Mikolaiowa
Mytkowa herself, when we were feasting together, told me that they were using more than one old woman for
this [witchcraft]; you know, she told that old woman to dig up a stillbirth, and Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa
herself, with her nanny, having dug [it] up, gave it to Pan Mikolay Mytko himself, who took it to a old woman
in Walachia, but I don't know the name of that old woman; but it's enough [to say], that that old woman made a
powder out of that stillborn baby; she kept half for herself and gave half to Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa, for her
to sprinkle on the legs of the judges; and Pan Mikolay Mytko took that powder to Lublin.
To the sixth: Pan Mikolay and Pani Mikolajowa Mytkowa told [me] to ask the devil what he did with Pan
Brzyski in Lublin. The demon [bies] answered, standing before me: "he says, I was in Lublin, Pan Brzyski came
in drunk, and I strangled him.
The same prisoner, during the first pulling, testified, to the first point of interrogation: By my conscience
and on my soul, Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa sent for me, for me to send a devil [diabel] against Pan Brzyski, to
take his soul from him.
To the second: Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa paid me for everything.
To the third: Pan Mikolay and Pani Mikolaiowa, together with their whole court, told me to send devils
against Pan Brzyski. Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa paid me.
To the fourth: I only heard, that Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa is supposed to have done that, but I didn't do
it myself, and she took the host from the church.
To the fifth: I don't know about any corpses, only about stillbirths: that Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa used it
and dug it up. Pan Mikolay Mytko took the witchcraft [understood here as a substance] made from those
stillbirths to Lublin.

latwo duszq wziaty, ale trudno iey wrotyty: This phrase, in strongly polonized Ruthenian, appears to be a
proverb.
tynf'or tymf. nominally equivalent to a zloty or floren, the tynf'was a devalued coin mixed with base metals.
That is to say, half a korzec: probably approximately 160 litres, a half-bushel.

585
 • Appendix A •

To the sixth: The old woman Iwanicha, who taught me that, is already dead in Iwanichy, but I only told the
devil to do an Echo.106 It strangled Pan Brzyski, and everything that I said before their lords the deputies [to the
Crown Tribunal] and testify here, it's all true.
Pulled a second time she testified: to the first point of interrogation: Benefactress, save me, help! I've
already said, that Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa and Pan Mikolay Mytko, they sent for me to go to Kosaryhce, to
send a devil against Pan Bryski, to strangle him.
To the second: Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa paid me for this; she gave me a red zloty and a tymf, and Pan
Alexander Mytko himself promised me a mare from his herd. But when it didn't turn out as they wanted, and
the devil didn't strangle Pan Brzyski, all the Mytko lords and ladies were angry with me.
To the third: Pan Mykolay Mytko and Pani Mykolaiowa Mytkowa herself told me to send the devil against
Pan Brzyski.
To the fourth: Kazimierzowa told me, that Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa, during [the feast of] St. Anthony
in Bar, took a host in her kerchief, her nanny mixed it with flour in a little pot. I really saw that, but I didn't do it
myself. Only the nanny recited: Just as a crowd goes to the Most Holy Sacrament, so also let the lords
[deputies] of the court and the lawyers be favourable to us.
To the fifth: I don't know whether they used corpses or not; I only know that they did use stillbirths, they
took them to Walachia, to an old woman, Pan Mykolay Mytko himself [took it there]. The old woman made
them a powder, and they were to sprinkle this powder on the legs of the lords of the court.
To the sixth: Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa ordered me to bring the devil to stand before me, but Pani
Mikolaiowa Mytkowa herself was present for this, and saw that devil, and [all of] this was to kill Pan Brzyski.
Pulled a third time: Pan Mikolay Mytko an Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa and Pan Mytko the chora^zy109 sent
for me to Kosaryhce, and asked me to send a devil against Pan Brzyski, to kill him.
To the second: Pani Alexandrowa Mytkowa paid me for this, because Pani Mikolaiowa didn't have
anything to pay with.
To the third: I've already said, that Pan Mikolay Mytko and Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa and Pani
Alexandrowa and Pan Alexander himself promised to give me a horse for this.
To the fourth: I heard about it, and I was present there, but I didn't do it myself.
To the fifth: That is supposed to have happened three years ago, but Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa told me
about it only last year.
To the sixth: For God's sake I've already said that Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa told me to bring that devil
before her; when it stood before us Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa saw it; she and I together sent the devil against
Pan Brzyski, to kill him.

ale ia tylko Echo kazalam uczynic diablu: I have no idea what Michalicha means by this; perhaps a scribal
error is involved.
107
Dobrodzieienku: Benefactress, i.e. Mother Mary.
108
gwaltu!: literally this means "rape!," but it is also an exclamation meaning, more or less, "I'm being
attacked!"
109
chorqzy: standard bearer. A knightly title in medieval times, this had become an honorary and ceremonial
office by the 16th century.

586
 • The Lublin Trials •

Fire having been applied the first time: She responded in conformance with the freely given testimony, and
[the testimony given during] the first, second and third pullings, with this addition to the sixth point: I told the
devil to appear before me, so that Pani Mikolaiowa Mytkowa would believe, that I had sent it to Lublin to kill
Pan Brzyski.
Fire having been applied the second time, she likewise testified uniformly to all the points as above.
Likewise, after fire was applied a third time, she responded similarly to the words as above. And this much she
confessed to, which is the tenor of the present record.

587
Appendix 8
Herbal lore and witchcraft in Poland, 16th-18th centuries

In this appendix I have listed and described all of the following:

1. herbs and other botanical materials (notably woods of various kinds) mentioned, for any reason whatsoever,
in the early modern Polish witch-trials;
2. herbs and woods alleged in early modern Polish written sources to be characteristically used by witches;
3. herbs and woods recommended in early modern Polish written sources to protect oneself from witches.
Combining these three categories in such a way makes possible some comparisons: in particular, it goes
some way to determining the degree of overlap between elite learned herbology (which mixed local knowledge
with classical sources such as Pliny and Dioscorides), and folk herbalism. It also allows a comparison of many
of the herbs mentioned by accused witches with herbs still common in 19th-20th century Polish folk medicine
(Budziszewska 1993; Jagus 2002); in Polish folklore more generally (Fischer 1937; Karwicka 1973; Moszyriski
1967 part 1 vol. 2 pp. 211-229, 326-330, 516-537; Niebrzegowska 2000); and in the garlands of herbs still
blessed in the late 20th century and used to protect against preturnatural milk theft (Lehr 1982). Whereas
Berwinski (1984 [1862] vol. 2 pp. 74-90), and to a lesser degree Rostafmski (1896) believed that most Polish
folk-herbal knowledge derived, via the Church, from classical sources, the data in this appendix suggests both
considerable overlap and considerable divergence between learned sources and folk practices. However, no
systematic attempt at correlating early modern with contemporary or classical folklore has been attempted. Still
less have I attempted a cross-cultural analysis, though readers familiar with both elite and folk herbology of
other European countries will recognize many parallels.

The sources for this appendix are, first, the trials themselves. Of literary sources, I have used especially
Haur (1693); Chmielowski (1754), and the several early modern herbals analyzed and catalogued in Jozef
Rostafinski's magnificant Zielnik czarodziejski (1896): Spiczynski 1542, Crescentyn 1549, Siennik 1568,
Marcin of Urzqdow 1595; Syreniusz 1613; Sekrety 1698 [1695], Wiadomosc 1769 [1766], Kluk 1798 [1777]. no
I have consulted the original texts of Syreniusz and to a lesser extent Marcin of Urzqdow: for the rest I am
dependent on Rostafinski's descriptions or on other secondary sources, e.g. Spolnik 1993. A few other early

Rostafmski attempted to catalog all herbal superstitions: however, as he treated as "superstition" any use of
herbs whatsoever which did not accord with the accepted medical pharmocopeia of the turn of the 20th
century, he listed very nearly all of the 16th-18th century herbal remedies under this category. The great
majority of these "superstitions" have not proven relevant to the present study. Rostafmski very rarely
provides quotations, accordingly most, but not all, of the direct quotations of early modern herbals comes
from my own reading of the originals. Rostafmski also examines Haur and Chmielowski; however I have
usually, though not always, referred to the originals of these sources.

588
 • Herbal Lore •

modern sources are drawn upon unsystematically: e.g. the Czarownicapowolana (1714 [1639]), and Falimirz's
O zioiach (1534), which last Rostafinski did not examine.111
Identifying the herb meant by a common name—often a common name no longer extant or now used for
some other hert>—has been an especial challenge.112 Here Rostafinski has again been of great use (1896, 1900a,
1900b), as has Kohler (1993). Rostafinski's own binomials are, however, often no longer current, and to update
these, as also to find English-language equivalents, I have relied above all on two online resources: the Flora
Europaea database of the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh (http://rbg-web2.rbpe.org.uk/FE/fe.html) and
Liber Herbarum II. The incomplete reference guide to herbal medicine, created and maintained by Erik
Gotfredsen
(www.liberherbarum.com/Index.htm).
The entries below conform to the following rubric, with some departures as needed:

Early modern Polish common name or names, contemporary Polish name, if different (literal translation, if
important; Latin binomial; English common name). Discussion of modern uses, or difficulties in
identification. Mention and use in literary sources. Mention and use in trials. Cross-references.

An alphabetical index of Latin botanical binomials may be found at the end of this appendix.

agrest (Ribes uva-crispa L.; gooseberry). According to Udziela (1595 p. 392), the leaves and branches of agrest
"will keep witchcraft and magic from entering the home"113 if hung in the door and windows. Not
mentioned in trials.

babka (lit. "old woman"; Plantago lanceolata L. or Plantago maior L.; ribwort plantain or common plantain).
Still very popular in folk medicine for a wide variety of ailments and as a general tonic. Haur (1693 tr. 26
ch. 1 p. 455), specifying PI. lanceolata, recommends its use against witchcraft. In trial #62 (as "babiczka")
used in malefice against cattle.

barwinek (Vinca minor L.; small periwinkle). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb
garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). Still used in folk medicine, e.g. in
healing baths, to increase milk in cattle, and to protect humans and cattle from witchcraft (Niebrzegowska

111
However, Spiczinski (1542) and Siennik (1568) are founded closely on Falimirz's work, and all three consist
largely of translated excerpts from Western herbals. Marcin of Urze_dow's herbal is generally recognized as
the first truly Polish work of this genre.
112
1 am not at all certain that I have always succeeded in meeting this challenge, nor that it is possible to do so.
Common names vary from region to region and in time, and often overlap. The various possible
identifications of a given common name are usually discussed in the body of the entry: for some particularly
difficult and illustrative examples, see the entries for czarto-ploch, maruna, and pokrzyk. However, even
quite securely identified common names often can refer, if rarely, to other herbs: e.g. boze drzewko may be
Arctium lappa L. (burdock); dziewiqcsil may be Inula helenium L. (elecampane) lubcz may be Hedere helix
L. (common ivy); and szanta may be Nepeta cataria L. (catnip) (Wijaczka 2003a p. 53; Kohler 1993 pp. 68-
72).
113
"czary, gusla, w domu nie dopuszcza"

589
 • Appendix B •

2000 p. 101, Kohler 1993 p. 79). In #97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688, fed to cows, left-overs blessed at church; for
milk-increase and protection against witchcraft. In #100, Nowy Wisnicz 1688, the accused witch Anna
Krzywdzina (who was not tortured, and appears to have been acquitted), confessed that "I gathered
barwinek to have it blessed, but not for witchcraft, and I used it to cense my cattle on Thursdays, but I only
did this once, to have good profit from those cows."114 See also rozchodnik.

bez (Sambucus nigra L.; elderberry). The term bez now refers to lilac {Syringa ssp.); elderberry is czarny bez,
"black lilac," sometimes called diabli bez, "devil's lilac." The bez referred to in witch trials, anti-
superstition literature, and folklore is always elderberry, and Syreniusz, under the heading bez, describes
elderberry rather than lilac (1613 p. 1504). Elderberry is associated with fairies or demons throughout
northern Europe (see e.g. Briggs 1970 p. 87; Bruckner 1979 p. 212): according to the humanist
ethnography of Jan Malecki, the Prussians and Samogitians worship a a demon whom "they believe to have
its home under Sambucus trees"115 (2004 [1563] p. 236). Stanislaw of Skarbimierz, in an early anti-
superstition sermon, wrote "Still others do something with elderberry, believing, that thanks to this no
enchantments can harm them. Let them learn that no enchantment can harm those who are of right faith"116
(c. 1415; cited after Olszewski 2002 p. 188). In Polish folklore bez is ambivalent: honored for its healing
properties (especially for tooth-ache) but feared for the devil or evil spirit who lives under it. Sicknesses
can be transferred to elderberry, which absorbs them, as when the water from a healing bath is poured out
at the base of an elderberry bush, or when a koltun is buried under it (DWOK vol. 7 p. 169, vol. 15 p. 153,
vol. 17 pp. 155, 163, vol. 34 pp. 183-184; Wroblewski 1961 p. 336). Cutting or burning bez releases these
stored-up sicknesses and so brings misfortune or disease (Kolbuszewski 1895; Lehr 1982 pp. 116-117). In
#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688a, the witch's ointment for flying to the sabbat is made from elder flowers. In #16,
Belzyce 1600, the cunning-woman Zmudzina helped a young wife experiencing discord with her husband:
according to a witness "that Zmudzina heated water in a pan and told [her client] to carry the water to the
elderberry bush,"117 presumably to thereby send her troubles away. Similarly, the accused witch Anna
Rydzynska (#50, Turek 1652) confessed to using elderberry for marriage-harmonization magic. She told
one Wozna to remove the elderberry bush from near her home to end her domestic troubles. In later
testimony, she says that she had told Wozna to pluck elder in the cemetery, bring it home, say "With the
help of God, with the help of Our Lady Mary, I ask you bez [... ] to get rid of the problem" (Wyporska
2003 pp. 51-52, from which I take the Turek material, renders bez as "lilac"—this is incorrect).

bez hebd {Sambucus ebulus L.; dwarf elder). It is not clear whether the lignum Ebuli recommended by Haur
(1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) as a remedy for witchcraft is a reference to this plant (but see Rostafihski, 1896 p.
13), since in context he seems to be referring to a mistletoe of some kind growing on willows: "Lignum

"barwinek na swie^cejiie zbierala, ale nie na czary y tejn kadzielam krowy we czwartki, ale tylko raz sobie to
czyniela, ze pozytek od krowy miala."
115
"Is sub arbore Sambuco domicilium habere creditur."
116
"Alii cum sambuco quaedam faciunt credendo ipsis non obesse incantationes; sed hi sciant, quod nulla
incantatio potest nocere habentibus fidem rectam."
"ta Zmudzina zgrzala garnuszek wody y kazala yey niescz do krzaka bzowego."

590
 • Herbal Lore •

Ebuli, in salice crescentisr In the same paragraph he is speaking of various mistletoes and other parasitic
plants. Not mentioned in trials.

bez koralowy (Sambucus racemosa L.; red-berried elder). A common shrub in southern Poland, growing wild
and in gardens. Ingredient in a recipe reported in Haur (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 453) for removing witchcraft-
induced impotence (see details under janowiec). Not mentioned in trials.

biale ziolo. See postep.

biedrzeniec {Pimpinella spp., especially P. saxifraga L.; burnet saxifrage). A common herb still used in folk
medicine (Jagus 2002; Moszynski 1967 p. 222). Chmielewski recommends its use in cattlefeed, against
theft of milk by witchcraft (1754 vol. 3 p. 404). In #63, Ch^ciny 1665, the accused witch Jadwiga
Gluchowa admits to collecting biedrzeniec on the morning of Corpus Christi, along with driakiew and
czysciecz, and feeding them to her cattle to protect against disease.

bieleri, szelej Although the term bieleh or bielun is now used for Datura stramonium L. (thorn-apple or
jimsomweed), Syreniusz (1613 p. 1364) considers the term to be synonymous with szalaj or szelej, which
he also calls by what has become its common name today, lulek. This is Hyoscyamus niger L. or henbane.
Today, the term szalej usually refers to Cicuta virosa L., cowbane (see e.g. Jagus 2002 p. 136; Moszynski
1967 p. 227). Although these three herbs are not at all similar, they are all highly poisonous, while Datura
and Hyoscyamus are also both hallucinogenic and anesthetic, so it is not unlikely that their names should
overlap. Following Syreniusz, it seems most likely that the bieleh and szelej mentioned in trials were both
Hyoscyamus (cf. Rostafinski 1896 p. 8). According to the "Sekrety bialeglowskie" attributed to Albert
Magnus, a talisman of bielun made men more attractive to women (1698 p. 236). In #2, Poznah 1544a,
bielen is used together with dziewi^ciorg, ruta, and pi^cpiers for love magic. In #11, Kalisz 1584, szelej is
carried on the person, with nawrot, as a talisman to attract good-will or friendliness. Similarly, in #21,
Kalisz 1613, it is carried on the person to encourage the love of one's husband; here it is called "bielony
szelej" and thus combines the terms "bieleh" and "szelej." The common assertion in western semi-popular
histories of witchcraft, that witches' ointment contained Datura as its active ingredient, receives no support
from the testimony of Polish witch-trials.

bobrownik, now bobownik (Veronica beccabunga L.; water speedwell: possibly also Veronica anagallis-
aquatica L.; brooklime). Still a common diuretic herb in Poland. In #86, Warta 1679, bobrownik was
mixed with koczanka, macierzanka, and the barks of brzoza, olsza, osika, and sosna, and boiled in three
kettles of well-water drawn on a Saturday, to improve marital relations.

boze drzewko, panny Mariey drzewko (lit. "God's little tree," or "the Virgin Mary's little tree;" Artemisia
abrotanum L.; southernwood, lad's love). A vermifuge, tonic, and stomachic herb, still very widely used in
folk medicine and magic in the 19th century (Kohler 1993 p. 64). Syreniusz (1613 p. 370), Haur (1693 tr.
26 ch. 1 p. 455), and Chmielowski (1754 vol. 3 p. 259) recommend it as an amulet against witchcraft. The
Lekarstwa (1564 p. 157) and Syreniusz (1613 p. 370) also recommend a bath of boze drzewko, to repair a

591
 • Appendix B •

witch-spoiled marriage; to this purpose it may be scattered over the marital bed (Syreniusz, ibid.). Haur's
directive that it be collected before sunrise (1693 p. 455) echoes a common theme of witchcraft accusation
and folklore. Haur also describes two recipies using boze drzewko. 1: boiled with krzyzownik and used to
bathe the victim of bewitchment, then given with beer to drink, "also carried on the person, in the shoes,
but not under bare feet, Witchcraft disappears, and is destroyed into Hell"118 (ibid. p. 455); 2: make a
mixture of boze drzewko, ruta, and again krzyzownik, boiled in vinegar; when fed to cattle, with a little
bit of it sprinkled in their eyes, this mixture will remove bewitchment from them (ibid. tr. 28 ch. 3 p. 470).
According to the testimony of her daughter, the accused witch Jadwiga kept boze drzewko and rozchodnik
in jars (#97, Wisnicz Nowy 1688a). In #63, Che.ciny 1665, it is said to be good for sleep—a belief in
accordance with Kluk (1778 vol. 2 p. 222), but not with Syreniusz, for whom boze drzewko under the
pillow acts as a strong aphrodisiac (1613 p. 370).

brzoza (Betula pendula Roth, and Betula pubescens Ehrh.; silver or white birch). Birch twigs were used to
make brooms, while saplings were used to clean chimneys—forming two potential associative links with
witchcraft. Further, boys traditionally whipped girls with birch switches on Easter Monday (Smigus
Dyngus), while girls beat boys the following day; there is therefore an erotic and, from the Church's point
of view, pagan connotation to this tree. In Wielkopolska, there is or was some slight association of the tree
with the dwelling place of the spirits of dead maidens, somewhat akin to the Ruthenian rusalki, who also
live in riverside brzozy. Nevertheless, Easter palms were often made from brzoza, and thereafter had
healing powers. Green branches were (and are) used in some regions to decorate the house at Pentacost
(Zielone Swiatki, "the green holidays"), Corpus Christi, and St. John's Eve, and they were blessed on the
feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Matka Boska Zielna "Mother Mary of the Herbs"). Like lipa
and leszczyna, it is said to have sheltered the Virgin Mary during the flight into Egypt (Niebrzegowska
2000 pp. 114-115). Cowherds sometimes beat their cattle with broza switches, to protect against witchcraft,
and Haur recommends its use in a medicine to remove bewitchment from humans (see details under
janowiec) and horses: cense the horse with brzoza, mirrh, frankincense, and cow-dung, then ride it to water
without looking back or speaking to anyone, and wash it in the water (Haur 1693 tr. 28 ch. 2 p. 472). The
facetious reference to "birch excorcisms [brzozowe exorcizmy]" in the Czarownicapowolana (1714 [1639]
qu. 1 p. 27) concerns a schoolmaster's use of birch switches to discipline his Catholic wards, who had been
led astray by a Lutheran student adept in black magic. Birch bark was part of the recipe for a love magic
bath, together with several other herbs and barks, in #86, Warta 1679 (see details under bobrownik).

bukwica (Betonica officinalis L.; betony, bishop's wort). Udziela (1591 p. 53) and Chmielowski (vol. 1. 646,
vol. 3 p. 259) both following Pliny, recommend as a protection against witchcraft. Syreneusz recommends
planting it near the home to protect the house from witchcraft (1613 p. 1250). Not mentioned in trials.

bylica, byliczka, beliczka (Artemisia vulgaris L.; mugwort). An extremely important herb, toward which the
early modern Polish herbalists expressed a complicated relationship. Falimirz says "it keeps deviltry away,

118
"takze nosic przy sobie, wobuwie slac, ale nie pod bose nogi, Czary zgina^ y zniszczeia_ do Piekla."

592
 • Herbal Lore •

if you cense with it in the home"119 (Falimirz 1534 f. 19v; cf. Spiczinski 1542 cap. 1.1). According to
Syreniusz it is good for fertility and eases labor, but by the same token can cause miscarriage if used too
early. Syreniusz repeats verbatim Falimirz's advice to hang it in the home against witchcraft—especially if
so hung on St. John's Eve; it can be also be taken internally or worn as an amulet against witchcraft; and
censing the home with the smoke of blessed bylica protects against lightning (1613 pp. 721, 725-726).
Marcin of Urze_dow has a more ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, "If bylica is hung above gates, doors,
entryways, and windows, then witchcraft will do nothing to that home, nor harm any person, who carries
the herb on his person."120 Further, it "drives witches away from the cows in their stables."121 On the other
hand, it was a pagan herb dedicated to Artemis. Pagan women decorate their homes with it on Midsummer
night (St. John's Eve), and at this time they also lit bonfires, danced, and sang, "giving worship and prayer
to the devil."122 "Women in Poland to this day don't want to give up this pagan custom, for they make the
same sort of offering with this herb, hanging it [in their homes] and making belts for themselves of it."123
(1595 pp. 31-32). The anonymous author of the Czarownica powolana demarcates a nuanced
differentiation between "supersitious" and "pious" uses of bylica. "Wearing a garland of bylica on St.
John's Eve, to preserve oneself from headache for the coming year" is superstition; however, "houses, and
the entranceways of houses, are decorated devoutly with bylica from olden times, and garlands worn in
sign of celebration, according to Scripture: Luke 1:14 'Many will rejoice at his [John's] birth'"124 (1714
[1639] qu. 1, p. 22). A similar, much more folkloristic Christianization of bylica may be found in the
folktale that bylica and lopian gained their healing powers when John the Baptist's decapitated head fell
among them (DWOK vol. 7 pp. 128, 130). Chmielowski asserts that all types of bylica, by which he means
all species of Artemisia, protect against witchcraft, but that A., alba (i.e., A. vulgaris), is the best for this
purpose (vol. 3 p. 259). See also its apotropaic use in combination with piwonia. A decoction of byliczka
and krzyzowe ziele was used to bathe children suffering from consumption (#22, Kalisz 1616). Concerning
its use in combination with other herbs to protect cows against witchcraft, see czarnysz.

bylica czerwona {Artemisia campestris L.; field southernwood). Haur (tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) recommends against
witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

cebula, cebula zamorska (Scilla maritima L., syn. Urginea maritima L.; sea onion, sea squill). Both Marcin of
Urzqdow (1595 p. 280) and Syreniusz (1613 p. 865) recommend cebula zamorska to protect the home
against witchcraft. "Cebula" denotes the ordinary onion (Allium cepa L.). Thus when Chmielowski (vol. 3

119
"oddala dijabelstw, gdy be_dziesz nia_ kadzil w domu"
120
"gdy [bylica] bqdzie wisiala nad wroty, drzwiami, fortkami, okny tedy onemu domu czary nic nie uczynia^
ani czlowiekowi zadnemu zaszkodzenia, ktory nosi ze sobaj'
121
odpqdza czarownice od krow w stajni".
22
"diabhi czesc a modlq czynia_c"
23
"Tego obyczaju paganskiego do tych czasow w Polszcze nie chca^ opuszczac niewiasty, bo takiez to
ofiarowanie tego ziela czynia^ wieszaja^c, opasuja^c sie. niem"
124
"w Wigiliq. Sw. Jana wieniec z bylice nosic, aby glowa przez rok nie bolala [jest zabobonem], choc ziolmi
bylica^ zdawna stroiono domy, i wrota domowe swia_towbliewi, y w wiencach chodzono na znak wesela,
podhig Pisma: Wiel siq ich bqdzie weselilo z narodzenia iego, Luc 1"

593
 • Appendix B •

p. 259), writing that "the doctor Dioscorides recommends hanging Scilla, that is cebula, on one's doors to
protect against witchcraft,"125 he is mistaken or vague. Not mentioned in trials.

czarnysz. I have identified czarnysz, mentioned in two witch-trials and nowhere else, with what is now called
czarnusza (and is already so called by Syreneusz, 1613 p. 479)—that is ~Nigella sativa L.; black seed, fennel
flower. However, it might just possibly be the poisonous czerniec polny (Actaea spicata L., baneberry), or
czarne ziele {Pulsatillapratensis Miller, syn. Pulsatilla nigricans Storck; Pasque flower); or something
else. A decoction of czarnysz, together with mikolajek, piolun, and an unnamed yellow-flowered herb,
was used to wash the pots used in beer-making to protect against spoiling or malefice (#22, Kalisz 1616);
the same trial mentions a decoction of czarnysz and odczyn to protect beer against malefice. In #21, Kalisz
1613, cows washed in a decoction of czarnysz, otszyna (i.e. oczyna or odczyn), prosny kwiat, and
byliczka to "fix"them or protect them against witchcraft.

czarto-ptoch. Lit. "devil-chaser." This term and its cognates occurs throughout the Slavic world to designate
any number of herbs or plants used to drive away the devil; these are mostly plants of a spiny or thorny
nature, and therefore symbolically apotropaic (Moszynski 1967 p. 308). Of plants called czarto-ploch in
Poland, Moszynski lists Onopordon acanthium L. (poploch; scotch thistle) Eryngium sp. (see mikolajek),
and Carlina acaulis L. (see dziewi^csil). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends czarto-ploch against
witchcraft; since he also calls it morsus diabli, he probably had in mind Succisa pratensis Moench. (devil's
bit scabious, czarcikqs or czarcie zebro, which see). Berwinski (1984 [1862] vol. 2 p. 83) takes czarto-
ploch to be a mushroom: the poisonous Russula emetica is, in fact, sometimes called czarto-ploch, and is
very closely related to the golajbek brzozowy recommended by Haur, which see. Not mentioned in trials.

czarownik, czarnokwit, niewiescie psiny (lit. "magician, black-bloom, women's nightshade"; Circaea
lutetiana L.; broadleaf enchanter's nightshade). Named in both Polish and Latin for its association with
black-magic. Used by Circe to change men into beasts, according to Syreniusz (1613 p. 735). Despite these
associations, not mentioned in witch-trials.

czartowe lajno; smrodzieniec (lit. "devil's dung" or "the stinking one;" Ferula assafoetida L.; asafoetida,
devil's dung). Haur (1693 p. 452) and Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259), recommend against witchcraft. Not
mentioned in trials.

czartowe zebro, ziebro diable, also Swie_tego Piotra ziele, komonica, rysina, czarcikes {Succisa pratensis
Moench. syn. Scabiosa succisa L. syn. Scabiosapraemorsa Gilib.; devil's-bit scabious). The devil bit this
useful herb in Paradise, in a vain attempt to prevent humans from using it, hence its epithets czarcike_s,
morsus diaboli, or devil's-bit in English (Marcin of Urzqdow 1596 p. 296; Syreniusz 1613 p. 885; cf.
Grieve). Siennik (1568 f. 242v) says that "succisa seu morsus diaboli" cooked and salted, should be given
to cattle against witchcraft. In #62, Chexiny 1665, the accused witch Dorota Lysakowa confessed to
digging up a number of herbs, including dziewi^ciosil and czarcie zebro (as "ziebro diable")and "at the

"Scille, alias cebule. Dioscorides medyk przeciw czarom we drzwiach radzi zawiesic"

594
 • Herbal Lore •

new moon washing the cows with them, and giving them some to drink." This is clearly a formula for
increasing the milk-output of the cattle, though in the context it seems to be suggested that this is to spoil
milk (as Lysakowa goes on to confess to doing). In the same trial, the accused witch Elzbieta Cackowa
admitted to bewitching one Parczewski, making him ill with the ashes of burnt human bones. To get well,
he must "heat up the herb diable ziebro, and wash himself in it."127

czosnek (Allium sativum L. or Allium vineale L.; garlic or field garlic). Haur recommends "Alium rubrum,
Polny Czosnek [field garlic]" against witchcraft (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455). He must mean Allium vineale L.
(czosnek winnicowy, field garlic) or some other species of wild garlic. For its apotropaic use against milk
theft, see gorczyca. In #99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688, the accused witch Regina Woyciechowska admitted only
that she had attempted to heal calves suffering from mouth sores with a mixture of garlic, manure, pepper,
and grease.

czysciec, czysciecz (lit. "cleaner, purgatory;" Stachys spp.; woundwort). An emetic and expectorant; by
association therefore also apopotraic or useful in expurgating enchantment—as it continued to be in the
19th c. (DWOK vol. 15 p. 117; Kohler 1993 p. 76). In #3, Poznah 1544b, cattle were washed in czysciec
and holy water to undo a milk-thieving enchantment. In #13, Kalisz 1593, blessed czysciec and mikolajek
were used to protect beer against malefice or spoiling. In #63 (Chqciny 1665), as "czysciecz," used with
driakiew and biedrzeniec to protect cattle from disease.

dajb (Quercus spp.; oak) An oak (as also a brzoza or a wierzba) standing alone in a field may mark the burial
place of a murder victim or unbaptised child; for this reason it may be haunted and is a likely target for
lightning. Large, old oaks (as also lipa) often have a small chaple, a cross, or a holy image hung on them:
this simultaneously excorcises them of pagan/diabolical spirits and appropriates the pre-Christian sacrality
of the trees. According to Crescentiis (1549 p. 466), devils fear the smoke of burning oak leaves. Haur
(1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 pp. 452,455) recommends oak leaves and wood to ward off witchcraft; however, he also
says that witches use a staff of oak to make men impotent (ibid. p. 453). Ingredient in two anti-witchcraft
recipes recorded by Haur (see details under dzwonki Panny Maryi and paproc, respectively). In #86,
Warta 1679, a decoction of oak ashes, soil from an anthill, and pioluii was suggested to be used as a
healing bath to un-bewitch horses.

driakiew. The identification of the driakiew mentioned in trial #63 is uncertain. The word, from Greek
theriaca, could mean a medical mixture or panacea of some kind (as in Chmielowski vol. 3 p. 260), or one
of as many as twenty different herbs (Syreniusz 1613 p. 1262). Rostafinski assumes that driakiew or
dryakiew refers to Scabiosa columbaria L. (drakiew gole_bia, pigeon's scabious) or Centaurea scabiosa L.
(chaber drakiewnik, greater knapweed). However, it could also be dryjakiew podrgryziona (Scabiosa
succisa L; see czarcie zebro). In #63, Chexiny 1665, it is used with biedrzeniec and czysciec to protect
cattle from disease.

126
"na nowiu krowki myc, i dac im tego poic"
127
"wygrzesc ziela diablego ziebra i tym sie, omywac"

595
 • Appendix B •

durant. According to Rostafinski 1896, durant is synonymous with wrotycz, which see. However, dorant and
orant are both synonyms, in German, for Origanum vulgare Koch (oregano or wild marjarom, see
majeran). Haur (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 453) says that to unbewitch an enchanted person, one should take a
large amount of the patient's urine, place it in a pot with a "good handful of the Herb called Durant "128
and, covering it tightly, place it over a low fire. The offending witch or sorcerer will have no peace until
they come in person to return their victim to health. Quite likely Haur had no clear idea what herb was
indicated in this recipe. Not mentioned in trials.

dyptan {Dictamnus albus L.; dittany). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends against witchcraft. Not
mentioned in trials.

dzi^giel {Angelica archangelica L. and Angelica sylvestris L.; Angelica, Archangel). According to Spiczinski
(1542 cap. 24b, and Siennik (1568 p. 157), dzie_giel protects both the person who carries it and the home it
is found in against witchcraft. It is still recommended to this purpose in the mid-18th century (Kalendarz p.
49, after Wijaczka 2005 p. 19). For Syreniusz it is a general apotropaic: against witchcraft; poison; plague;
frogs, lizards, salamanders and similar vermin; night-terrors and evil dreams, etc. (1613 pp. 90-95). It can
also be either an aphrodisiac or an anti-aphrodisiac, depending on when and how it is taken (ibid. pp. 94,
98). Not mentioned in trials.

dziej;ielnica or lubszcza (Laserpitium siler L. or Laserpitium latifolium L.; laserwort or broad-leaved

sermountain). According to Syreniusz (1613 p. 106), an amulet of the root of this herb, if dug up under the
sign of Sagittarius or Gemini, protects humans and cattle against witchcraft. Lubszcza has no relation to
lubczyk (lovage), as Berwihski believed; however, Renaissance authors did identify both with the ancient
Ligusticum of Dioscorides and Pliny (Andrews 1941 p. 515). Not mentioned in trials.

dziewanna (Verbascum spp., especially V. densiflorum Bertol.; Mullein). Still a popular folk medicament for a
variety of ailments. The chronicler Jan Dhigosz considered this herb to be named after an alleged pre-
Christian goddess Dziewanna, the Slavic equivalent of Greek Ceres; we also find the female devil
Dziewanna in the Postepek prawa czartowskiego (1903 [1570] p. 97 ). However, Bruckner has shown that
the etymology has gotten reversed: Dhigosz named his invented pagan goddess after the herb (1985a p. 41;
1985b p. 227).129 Siennik recommends drinking a tincture of dziewanna flowers "for all who fear
witchcraft; they will be protected"130 (1568 p. 237). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259), citing Apuleius,
recommends dziewanna against witchcraft. In #21, Kalisz 1613, a decoction of dziewanna, szanta,
macierzanka, and otszyna (i.e. oczyna) was used to bathe children and the sick—still a common use in the
19th c. (Kohler 1993 p. 78). See also knafliczka.

128
"garsc dobrq. Ziela nazwanego Durant"
129
The oft-repeated assertion, that Marcin of Urzqdow similarly treated Dziewanna as a pagan goddess (e.g.
Pog6rska and Pogorski 2005 p. 177), is mistaken. Kolberg, following Berwihski, mis-quoted Marcin's
comments concerning the association of Diana with bylica (Artemisia spp.) as a statement about the goddess
and herb dziewanna (DWOK vol. 17 pp. 324-325; Berwihski 1984 [1862] p. 85). In fact, Marcin makes no
reference to paganism or goddesses in his description of dziewanna (1595 p. 298-299). See bylica, above.
no "Qdyby s j ^ J^Q b a j CZarow, pij te_ wodkq, a ba^dz przepieczen."

596
 • Herbal Lore •

dziewifciornik, dziewifciorg {Parnassia spp., especially P. palustris L.; grass of Parnassus). With its name
containing the magic number nine, this plant is widely regarded among the Slavs for its magical properties.
Unfortunately, it is less clear what plant the name refers to. Spolnik considers it to be a species of
Parnassia, but notes that the term has also refered to plants in the Marchantia and Eupatorium genera
(1993 p. 53). Whatever the species refered to, it is considered aphrodisiac in herbals from the 15th
century— possibly because, if it is P. palustris, its leaves are shaped like hearts (Marcin of Urze_dow 1595
p. 136; Spolnik 1993 p. 53; Moszyriski 1967 p. 215 ). According to Syreniusz (1613 p. 591), a mixture of
dziewie_ciornik and matki bozej wloski mniejsze protects against witchcraft and enchantment. In #2,
Poznah 1544a, the herb is called dziewi^ciorg and was used together with with bielen, ruta, and pi^cpiers
in love magic.

dziewiecsil, dziewi^ciosil (lit. "nine strengths;" Carlina aucalis L.; stemless carline thistle). An important herb
in Polish and Slavic folk medicine (Moszynski 1967 p. 229). According to Spiczihski (1542 cap. 100b),
Dziewiecsil and urocznik, placed in the cradle, protect young children "from the evil enchantments of old
women and from other frights, and causes them to fall asleep without crying."131 Concerning its use in love
magic, combined with other herbs, see przytulia. As dziewie_ciosil, it is combined with diablie ziebro for
milk-magic (#62, Chqciny 1665); see diablie ziebro for details.

dziurawiec. See dzwonki Panny Maryi.

dzwonki Panny Maryi (Hypericum perforatum L.; Saint John's Wort). Now usually called dziurawiec (lit.
"perforated one," as in the Latin) or swie_tojahskie ziele (St. John's Wort); the traditional name means "the
Virgin Mary's little bells." Still a popular medicine for a wide range of complaints (see e.g. Moszynski
1967 p. 214; Jagus 2002 p. 132). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb garlands used to
protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). According to DWOK (vol. 7 pp. 46-47), it was used by
19th-century midwives to protect against infant-stealing demons, and its use for this purpose was still
reported in the late 20th century (Lehr, op cit., p. 129). Praised by early modern herbalists for the protection
it affords against witchcraft. Syreneusz (1613 p. 828) writes that "when carried on one's person or used to
cense the home, it protects against witchcraft, enchantments, and satanic mischief, whence it is called fuga
daemonium."132 Haur recommends its use against witchcraft (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1; p. 455) and records two
anti-witchcraft recipes using this herb (ibid. p. 452): the first calls for asafoetida (see czarcie lajno), seeds
of wyzlin, leaves of dajb, and powdered pink coral, all mixed up in oil of Hypericum; the second calls for
seeds of Hypericum, wyzlin, and gruszyczka, mixed in wine. Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends
dziurawiec against witchcraft, citing Pliny and Diascordes to this effect, and also calling the herb fuga
daemonum. Not mentioned in trials.

"zachowywa je od zlego urzeczenia bab i od innych strachow, a czyni je ize bez placzu rady usypiaja.."
"czarom, guslom i naigrawaniom sie_ szatahskim sa_przeciwne, nosza_c je przy sobie, a zta_d zowi% siej Fuga
daemonium. Takze kurza_c nim po domu"

597
 • Appendix B •

golajbek brzozowy (Russula betularum (Hora) Romagn. syn. Russula emetica var. betularum; no English
common name). This is the "Fungus rubrus, sub betulis crescentis" recommended by Haur (1693 p. 455) as
protection against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials. See also czarto-ploch.

gorzcyca, gorczyca (Synapis spp.; mustard). The cunning-woman Dorota Gnieczkowa described a charm for to
protect cattle from milk-theft (#2, Poznan 1544a). Take egg, gorczyca, and honey, make a cross on the
cow: the cow will be protected so long as the gorczyca and the honey sweet (#2, Poznan 1544a; see also
item 9 in Appendix C). Similarly, the prostitute and accused witch Barbara of Radom described a spell
using gorzcyca, czosnek, mlecz and tar, rubbed on cows' horns to protect their milk from theft. If a witch
were to steal the milk, it would stink with these strong-smelling substances (#7, Kalisz 1580; see item 10 in
Appendix C). Kolberg recorded a very similar apotropaic ritual in 19th-century Malopolska, using
"blessed" garlic, onion, and parsley (DWOK vol. 7 p. 89).

grab (Carpinus betulis L.; hornbeam). In one of the earliest well-documented witchtrials in Poland, the
cunning-woman Dorota Gnieczkowa confessed to making crosses from grab, klon, and wia_z, and placing
them under a beer-brewing vat or the threshhold, together with frankincense, myrrh, and gold blessed at
three masses. A prayer then requests that the beer (or the house) will be pure, as the Most Holy Virgin is
pure (#2, Poznan 1544a).

gruszyczka (Pyrola spp.; wintergreen). Ingredient in an anti-witchcraft recipe recorded by Haur (1693 p. 452);
see details under dzwonki Panny Maryi. Not mentioned in trials.

hyzop, now jozefek (Hyssopus officinalis L.; hyssop). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends against
witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

imbir (Zingiber officinale Roxburgh; ginger). A rare, expensive, imported spice, known to learned medicine but
unavailable to most "witches." However, the accused witch and probable cunning-woman Katarzyna of
Wojnicz was found to have small amounts of ginger, saffron and pepper in her home. She confessed to
healing jaundice with a decoction of ginger, nine heads of nettles (pokrzywa), and sweet-flag (tatarskie
ziele).

janowiec (Genista spp., probably G. tinctoria L.; janowiec barwierski; dyer's broom). According to Haur (1693
tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 453), if a witch has made someone impotent using a staff of dajb, the following method will
return the victim to health: take twigs of brzoza, bez koralowy and janowiec, tie them together to make a
broom, and set this broom on the floor. "Let the bewitched Patient urinate on this broom or bunch of twigs,
and the Bewitchment will disappear and be destroyed, and will no longer harm the body."133 Not mentioned
in trials.

jasion, jesion (Fraxinus excelsior L.; common ash). In Szymonowic's Sielanki (1614, no. 15), the witch burns
dried jesion leaves in a spell intended to cause the victim's heart burn in the same way. In trial #39, Lublin

133
"a na tq mietle_ abo chrost, niech Patient oczarownay vryne_ swoie. puszcza, a tak owe zginq. y zniszczeia^
Czary, y daley ciahi szkodzic nieb^daj"

598
 • Herbal Lore •

1643, Zofia Baranowa confessed to doing a ritual of some kind involving jasion and bread; but it is not at
all clear what the ritual was meant to accomplish.

jeleni rok, jeleni rog (Rhus typhina L., sumac or stag's horn). For its use in a healing procedure of some kind
(#80, Lublin 1678), see piwonia.

jemiola (Viscum album L., mistletoe). Marcin of Urzqdow's ascription to the Ruthenians and Tatars of
mistletoe-practices closely resembling those of the ancient Druids is somewhat suspect (1595 p. 389; cf.
discussion in Moszyhski 1967 pp. 531-532). However, jemiola was used in modern times in Bialorus and
northwest Poland to remove koltuny, the elf-locks which are both symptom and cause of bewitchment and
disease (Moszynski 1967 p. 216). Siennik recommends putting jemiola in cradles to protect against night-
terrors (1568 p. 187). Haur (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1, p. 452) describes a method to make a "Balsam" for curing
witchcraft-caused ulcers and sores: it calls for four parts dog-fat, eight parts bear fat, and 12 parts chicken
fat, mixed with jemiola which grew on a leszczyna. It should be left to sit in the sun for two months. He
also recommends the jemiola growing on oaks and lindens (ibid. p. 455; see dajb, lipa). Not mentioned in
trials.

klokotowe drzewo, ktokotka, klokoczyna (Staphylea pinnata L.; bladdernut). According to Crescentiis, the
fruit of klokoczyna protect their carrier from lightning and witchcraft ( 1549 p. 470). The Czarownica
powolana condemns as superstitious the placing of this wood into beer mash, to protect the beer from
bewitchment (1714 [1639] qu. 1, p. 22). Not mentioned in trials.

klon (Acer spp.; maple). For its use in beer-protection magic, with wia.z and grab, see grab.

knafliczka. According to Rostafinski, this is a synonym for dziewanna, which see. Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 260)
recommends bathing with this herb, carrying it on one's person, or keeping it in the home, as a "remedium"
for witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

koczanka, kocanka (Helichrysum arenarium Moench; dwarf everlast). A common herb used still today as a
tonic. In #86, Warta 1679, koczanka is used in love magic, together with bobrownik, macierzanka and the
bark of several trees (see details under bobrownik).

koniczyna (Trifoliumpratense L.; clover). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the herb garlands blessed on
the octave of Corpus Christi or on Matka Boska Zielna ("God's mother of the Herbs," Assumption of the
Virgin Mary, August 15), and used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). Effective against
witchcraft, according to the Sekrety (1698 p. 232). Not mentioned in trials.

kokornak (Aristolochia clematitis L.; birthwort) According to Rostafinski (1896 p. 32), most authors did not
distinguish kokornak from various species of Polygonatum (Solomon's seal) nor from Corydalis cava
Schweigger et Koerte (bird-in-a-bush). Haur recommends this herb against witchcraft (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p.

599
 • Appendix B •

455). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259; following Spiczinski 1542 cap. 13 M.; Syreniusz 1613 p. 649), asserts
that "when one censes with this herb, devils flee."134 Not mentioned in trials.

kopytnik (lit. "hoof-herb;" Asarum europaeum L.; Hazelwort, European ginger). In the late 20th century, an
ingredient in the blessed herb garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140); also used
for cattle, horses and humans in 19th century (Kohler 1993 p. 65; cf. Moszyhski 1967 pp. 213-214, 221).
The accused witch Regina Woyciechowska baked kopytnik in pancakes, and gave it to her cows for better
milk (#99, Nowy Wisnicz 1688).

koszaciec, now kosaciec (Iris spp.; iris). For its alleged use as a substitute for mandrake, see pokrzyk. Not
mentioned in trials.

koszyczko (Verbena officinalis L.; verbena, vervain). According to Siennik (p. 185), following classical
sources, this herb is especially strong against witchcraft; cf. Syreniusz 1613 p. 847; Haur 1693 tr. 26 ch. 2
p. 455, and Chmielowski vol. 3 p. 259 to the same effect. Syreniusz also considers it an antidote to love-
magic (1613 p. 850). On the other hand Otwinowski, in his translation of Ovid, describes it as a a principal
herb used by witches (1638 p. 265, cited after Wichowa 1990 p. 71). Not mentioned in trials.

koztek (Valeriana officinalis L., valerian). Haur (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) lists it among the "proven Herbs
against Bewitchment."135 Cf. Sekrety 1698 p. 222 to the same effect. Not mentioned in trials.

krzyzowe ziele, krzyzownik, lit. "cross-herb, the crossed one." Probably Polygala vulgaris L.; milkwort.
However, according to Rostafihski, krzyzownik has also referred to Senecio vulgaris L.; groundsel (1896 p.
79), as well as to various species of Cruciferae (Brassicaceae) and Crucinella. Haur describes two anti-
witchcraft recipes using krzyzownik and other herbs:see details under boze drzewko. In #22, Kalisz 1616,
the accused witch Zofia admitted to bathing children suffering from consumption in a decoction of
krzyzowe ziele and byliczka.

laskawiec. Lit., roughly, "graceful one" or "favor-maker." Unidentified, although Rostafinski (1900b p. 179)
records laskawiec as a variant name for zaje^cze uszki (Bupleurum falcatum L. or B. longifolium L., hare's
ear), in which case it may be identical to urocznik, which see. In #65, Praszka 1665, used in love magic
with ostudziec.

lebiodka, lobiodka (Origanum vulgarum Koch or Origanum marjorana Koch; wild oregano or marjoram—see
also majeran polny, durant). The Sekrety (1698 pp. 322, 325) and Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259)
recommends against witchcraft. Concerning its use in love magic, combined with other herbs, see
przytulia.

leszczyna (Corylus avellana L.; hazel, hazelnut). Favorable to the Virgin Mary, because (as is also said of
brzoza and lipa) it hid her from Herod's soldiers during the flight into Egypt. Lightning won't strike it

"tern zielem kadzax, czarci uciekaja."

"na Czary doswiadczone Ziola"

600
 • Herbal Lore •

(Niebrzegowska 2000 pp. 114-115, 133). Haur notes that it is effective against witchcraft, both in itself and
with the jemiota which has grown on it (1693 tr. 26 ch. lp. 452). Not mentioned in trials.

Ieczywrz6d (Opoponax chironium (L.) Kock.; Hercules all heal). Censing with this herb can repair witch-
spoiled marriages, according to Syreniusz (1613 p. 232). Not mentioned in trials.

lenek panny Maryi, len Matki Boskiej (Lit. "the Virgin Mary's flax;" Linaria vulgaris Miller; Common
Toadflax; now called lnica pospolita). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb garlands
used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140); still widely used in both folk and official
medicine in the early twentieth century (Moszynski 1967 p. 226). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends
its use against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

lilia (Lilium candidum L.; white lily). Lilia placed in a bowl and covered with the skin of a milch-cow, will
cause all the neighboring cows to lose their milk, according to the Sekrety (1698 p. 226). Not mentioned in
trials.

limoiza. Attempts to identify this herb have not met with success. My best guess is that this might be a garbled
rendition, either by the accused witch or the recording scribe, of "zimolza" or "zymolza," old Polish names,
according to Rostafinski, for what is now called "wiciokrzew suchodrzew" (Lonicera xylosteum L.;
European fly honeysuckle or dwarf honeysuckle), which is poisonous. The accused witch Hanna
Czelczonka confessed to using it as an abortificant (#23, Kobylin 1616). She testified: "I gave maidens an
herb, which they call limoiza, that spoils the fetus, so that they won't bear children. To Zaleski's pretty
lover, I gave limoiza, maruna biala, seed of marchew, and red roza. With these also I can destroy the
fetus of whomever I want."136

lipa (Tilia spp., linden). A tree strongly associated with the Virgin Mary, who took shelter under it. It protects
the home from lightning, and is the site of various miracles, especially Marian apparitions (see e.g.
Niebrzegowska 2000 p. 86). Figures of Mary are often carved of this wood, and wonder-working Marian
images (including the Black Madonna of Cze_stochowa) are painted on lipa boards. According to Haur, the
mistletoe that grows on linden trees is an effective specific against witchcraft (see jemiola). Not mentioned
in trials.

loczydlo (Thapsia garganica L.; Drias plant). See tapsia.

lopian {Arctium lappa L.; burdock). A popular medicinal and apotropaic herb among the Poles and other Slavs,
according to Moszynski (1967 pp. 223-224; 326). Where witchcraft has been spoiling milk of one's cattle,
Haur recommends washing the cows udders, as well as all vessels and tools used in milk and dairy

"Zielam dawala dziewicom, ktore zowia^ limoiza psujqc plod, zeby dzieci nie rodzily. Przystojnej milosnicy
Zaleskiego, dalam rodz^cej limoizy, maruny bialej, siemienia marchwianego i czerwonej rozy. Tern tez
zepsuje plod komu chcq"

601
 • Appendix B •

production, in a decoction of lopian and manure. This will make the witches who have been causing the
trouble "tremble and itch"137 (1693 tr. 28 ch. 3, p. 469). Not mentioned in trials.

lubczyk {Levisticum officinale Koch; lovage). Although the names lovage, lubczyk, Ukrainian lyubystok,
German Liebstockel derive from the Latin Ligusticum apium (Ligurian celery), they also all imply love—it
is unclear weather the medicinal/magical function developed from the folk etymology or vice versa. In the
late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr
1982 p. 140). The St. John's Day wreaths that maidens, until recently, set to float on streams so that their
future husbands could catch them downstream, were sometimes made from lubczyk and macierzanka,
because of their alleged aphrodisiac properties (Niebrzegowska 2000). According to Syreniusz it calms
marital trouble (1613 p. 245), but is also ingredient in love-magic (pp. 245-246); Siennik (p. 179)
recommends wrotycz to counter the love-magic of lubczyk. Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 404) recommends
feeding it to cows to protect from milk-theft. Despite the elite consensus concerning lubczyk's aphrodisiac
properties, as well as its erotic associations in modern folk practices, I have not found it mentioned in trial
testimony.

macierzanka, maciezanka (Thymus serpyllum L.; also other sp. of Thymus; thyme). Concerning its romantic
associations in contemporary ritual, see lubczyk; it is also used in modern times in childbirth folk-
medicine, for both women and cattle (Kohler 1993 p. 77; Budziszewska 1993 p. 93; Rostafinski 1900 vol. 1
p. 289), and is an ingredient in the blessed herb garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982
p. 140). Haur lists macierzanka as a remedy for witchcraft (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455), as does Chmiewlowski
(vol. 3 p. 259). Used with bobrownik, koczanka, and the bark of several trees for love magic (#86, Warta
1679; see under bobrownik). Concerning its use, together with other herbs, in healing baths (#21, Kalisz
1613), see dziewanna.

majeran polny (Origanum marjorana Koch; marjoram—but see maruna and lebiodka).The Czarownica
powolana describes and condemns as superstitious a folk excorcism involving "bathing the bewitched
person and and whipping them over the whole body with a switch of rozmaryn or maioran, asserting that
this is the scourge of demons—and why not a switch of nettles (pokrzywa), or of birch (brzoza)?"138 (1714
[1639] qu. 13, p. 79). Not mentioned in trials.

marchew (Daucus carota L.; Wild carrot, Queen Ann's Lace). Its seeds help in childbirth (Kluk 1778 vol. 2 p.
262). Used in combination with other herbs as an abortificant in #23, Kobylin 1616 (see details under
limoiza).

maruna, maruna biaia. A difficult herb to identify. For Rostafinski (1896) and Spolnik (1993) this is
Pyrethrum parthenium Smyth (feverfew) in the early modern period. As a folk-term, however, it has also
been used for Tanacetum vulgare L. (tansy, see wrotycz), Chelidonium majus L. (celendine), and

137
"truchlec i swqdzic sie_ be_dzie"
138
"kajna^c w wannie uczarowanego, smagac go rozmarynowa, abo maioranowa^ rozsczka^ [sic] wsze_dzie po
ciele, twierda_c ze to flagellatio daemonum, a czemu nie pokrzywq. abo nie brzezinaj'

602
 • Herbal Lore •

Origanum marjorana Koch; (marjoram, see majeran). Recommended in the Sekrety (1698 p. 325) against
witchcraft. Used in #23, Kobylin 1616, in combination with other herbs as an abortificant (see details under
limoiza, see also marchew)—a use that relates to the contemporary uses of feverfew and tansy to ease
childbirth.

miarz, mistrzownik (Peucedanum ostruthium L., syn. Imperatoria ostruthium L.; masterwort). According to
Syreniusz, this herb has been used by the Chaldaeans, the Medes, the Arabs, the Jews, and now by "evil
and non-God-fearing Christians [...] for evil and to harm others and to bring eternal damnation on
oneself'139 (1613 p. 123). It brings agreement and friendship to those who carry it on their person, though
Syreniusz reminds the reader that this is a false friendship. Not mentioned in trials.

miechunka (Physalis alkekengi L.; ground cherry). The Sekrety (1698 p. 353) recommends this herb against
witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

mieczyk (Irispseudacorus L., yellow flag). For its alleged use as a substitute for mandrake, see pokrzyk. Not
mentioned in trials.

mikotajek (Eryngiwn campestre L.; field eryngo or sea-holly). Aphrodisiac, according to Falimirz (1534 p. 68,
cit. after Sp61nik 1993 p. 56; cf. Spicziriski 1542 cap. 108a; Syreniusz 1613 p. 682). According to
Syreniusz (1613 p. 681) and Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) it may be used as an amulet against witchcraft.
With czysciec, blessed, used to protect beer (Kalisz 1593, #13). With odczyn, used in herbal bath for love
magic (#22, Kalisz 1616); mentioned in the same trial as an ingredient (with czarnysz, piohiii, and a
yellow-flowered herb) in a decoction used to wash the pots from beer-making and thereby to protect
against spoiling or malefice (#22, Kalisz 1616). See also czarto-ploch.

milosna (Reseda luteola L.; weld). Antidote to love magic, according to Syreniusz (1613 p. 124). Not
mentioned in trials.

mirnik, now swierzabek bulwiasty (Chaerophyllum bulbosum L.; turnip-rooted chervil). Antidote to witchcraft
caused sickness, according to Syreniusz (1613 p. 365). Not mentioned in trials.

mlec" (Sonchus spp.; sow thistle, milk thistle; possibly also Taraxacum vulgare (Lam.) Schrank; dandylion).
Concerning its use in combination with other herbs to protect cattle from milk-theft, see czosnek.

modrzew (Larix decidua Miller; common larch). Haur (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) recommends modrzew sap
among the things one should "have ready, in order to heal bewitchment."140 Not mentioned in trials.

nasiezrzal or nasi^zral (Ophioglossum vulgatum L.; adder's tongue). The etymology of this word is uncertain,
but Bruckner derives it from "na sie_ zrzec"—"look at each other" (cited after Spolnik 1993 p. 53). Spolnik

"od zlych a Pana Boga sie. nie boiajsych chrzescijan [...] do zlego i szkodzenia inym, a sobie zatracenia i
potepienia wiecznego"
"miec po gotowiu, aby niemi Czary leczyc".

603
 • Appendix B •

asserts that it is described as an aphrodisiac only in the 19th century; however, in a trial of 1659, it is
ingredient in love magic (see details under przytulia).

nawrot (Alchemilla vulgaris L.; ladies mantle). According to Rostafihski, nawrot is the aphrodisiac
dziewie_ciornik blotny (Parnassia palustris L.; grass of Parnassus: see dziewi^ciornik). However, Kohler
(1993 p. 62) records nowrotek and nawrotnik as regional variants of przywrot, przewrotek, i.e. a species of
Alchemilla. In the 19th and 20th century, przywrot is an ingredient in blessed herb garlands, and is used to
protect cattle from witchcraft (Kohler ibid.; Lehr 1982 p. 140). In #11, Kalisz 1584, the "incantatrix"
Elzbieta confesses to carrying an amulet of nawrot and szelej on her person, so that others will be friendly
toward her.

oczyna, odczyn, now przelot. (Lit. "undoer;" Anthyllis vulneraria L.; kidney vetch). Concerning its use in
combination with other herbs to protect cows from witchcraft ((#22, Kalisz 1616), see czarnysz.
Concerning its use, together with other herbs, in healing baths (#21, Kalisz 1613), see dziewanna. With
mikolajek, used in herbal bath for love magic (#22, Kalisz 1616).

olsza, olszyna (Alnus glutinosa L. or Alnus incana L.;,alder). Associated with the devil, and, if growing near a
river-bank, with topielcy—the demon-ghosts of the drowned—because of its blood-like sap and red bark.
However, according to Haur, where rooks nest in olsza trees, "there no witchcraft nor enchantment can
cause harm"141 (1693 tr. 21 p. 335).This bark was part of the recipe for a love magic bath, together with
several other herbs and barks, in #86, Warta 1679 (see details under bobrownik). In #46, Szadek 1649, one
Katarzyna was brought before the court for boiling a cheesecloth next to an olsza tree during Easter mass.
The ritual is not explained but was presumably meant to protect the milk filtered through this cloth from
theft through witchcraft.

orlik (Aquilegia vulgaris L.; columbine). Restores male sexual potence lost through witchcraft, and is a good
amulet against witchcraft (Syreniusz 1613 pp. 902-903). Chmielowski (1754 vol. 3 p. 404) recommends
giving orlik to cows to prevent witches from stealing their milk. According to the Kalendarz of 1750, a
person who carries orlik on their person cannot be bewitched (p. 49, after Wijaczka 2005 p. 19). Not
mentioned in trials.

osina, osika, osice, osa (Populus tremula L.; trembling aspen). A bad tree. Judas hung himself from this tree.
Unlike the brzoza (or in other versions, the lipa, the leszczyna), the osika feared to bend down its branches
to hide Mary from Herod's soldiers during the flight into Egypt; for this reason it has trembled in fear ever
since. It is the first place lightning will strike in a storm. Nevertheless, its wood is apotraic against ghosts,
devils and witches and is used for the stakes with which one destroys an upior or strzyga; compare the
similar beliefs in Russia (Ivanits 1989 pp. 102, 105; see also Moszynski 1967 vol. 2 p. 530). A witch used
two staffs of this wood to spoil a love affair, so that the man would be "as bitter to her, as this this aspen is

tam czary zadne i gusla szkodzic nie moga^

604
 • Herbal Lore •

bitter"142 (#2, Poznan 1544). The same accused witch reports a maleficial spell based on aspen's trembling:
"Let her tremble, just as this aspen trembled when it still had leaves."1 3 Its bark was part of the recipe for a
love magic bath, together with several other herbs and barks, in #86, Warta 1679 (see details under
bobrownik). In #37, Skrzynno 1639, Zofia Filipowiczowa hung a branch of osica from a thread from her
undergarments, and hung it in the fireplace so that the man she loved "would yearn for me."144

ostudziec. Unidentified, though Rostafihski lists the similar ostudka as the Polish term for the genus Podolepis.
Lit. "the cooler-downer," although according to Bruckner "ostudzic" may mean "to defame, to make ugly,"
thus "to scandalize, compromise, seduce." Thus in the Sejm piekielny, concerning the counsels of cunning-
women: "how to sprinkle a young man, to compromise [ostudzic] a girl"145 (1622 v. 794; 1903 p. 44). Used
together with laskawiec for love magic (#65, Praszka 1665).

panny Mariey wloski, Matki Bozej wloski (Lit. "Hair of the Virgin Mary," "Hair of the Mother of God;"
Asplenium ruta muraria L. (wall rue), A. trichomanes L. (maidenhair spleenwort), Adiantum capillus-
veneris L. (black maidenhair fern), or Poly'trichum commune Hedw. (common haircap)—most likely the
first). Haur (tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) recommends against witchcraft, collected before dawn and eaten raw.
Mixed with dziewi^ciornik, it dispells witchcraft and enchantements (Syreneusz 1613 p. 591). Not
mentioned in trials.

paproc {Dryopteris filix-mas, syn. Aspidium filix-mas (L.) Sw.; male fern—also other fern spp). The mystical
fern-flower, blooming for just one hour at midnight of St. John's Eve, looms large in 19th-20th century
Polish folklore (see e.g. DWOK vol. 15 pp. 64-65; vol. 17 pp. 152-153); however, it finds little echo in the
witch-trials. Haur (tr. 26 ch. 1 pp. 454-455) describes a recipe to remove witch-induced fever: the root of
paproc mixed with ashes of dajb, vodka, and blood from the left ear of a puppy (male for a man, female for
a woman). Haur also recommends the paproc Felix against witchcraft (ibid). The cunning-woman
Agnieszka of Zabikowo reported as hearsay that paproc, when thrown under a vat of enchanted fermenting
beer, caused the vat to burst and reveal the source of the enchantment—buried human bones (#4, Poznan
1544).

piecpiers, now piqciornik (lit. "five breast;" Potentilla reptans L.; creeping cinquefoil). In #2, Poznan 1544a, it
is used together with bielen, dziewi^ciorg, and ruta for love magic.

piolun (Artemisia absinthium L.; wormwood). For its use with other herbs in beer-protection magic, see
czarnysz. In #63, Chqciny 1665, it is used in a spell very similar to the one recorded in the trial of a
different witch that same year, with different herbs (see under wrotycz): If the milk of one's cattle spoils,
"take cow manure and urine and put it in an eggshell, put piohin in another shell, rinse a cheesecloth and

"bajiz jej tak gorzki, jako ta osa jest gorzka"

Daj sie_ tak trzqsla, jak siq ta osica trzqsla, poki belo liscie na niej"
"aby go te_skno bylo do mnie"
"Jedno mlodziehca osypac, dzieweczkq ostudzic."

605
 • Appendix B •

pour [the milk or the contents of the shell] onto it, it will stop spoiling ." In #86, Warta 1679, a decoction
of piohin, dqb ashes, and soil from an anthill is recommended to heal bewitched horses.

piwonia (Paeonia offininalis L.; peony). Still used in folk medicine for wounds and rashes, and for menstrual
problems (Niebrzegowska 2000 p. 144). Marcin z Urzqdowa (pp. 758) recommends placing it in cradles
against enchantment and night terrors, as does Syreniusz (1613 p. 787), and the Wiadomosc (1769 p. 75).
Spiczihski (1542 cap. 161h) recommends censing the possessed with piwonia seed. For the Wiadomosc
(1769 p. 75) it may be worn as an amulet by children against kaduki (folk demons; possibly night-terrors in
this context); and the Sekrety recommends it against witchcraft more generally (1698 p. 229). Chmielowski
(vol. 3 p. 260), citing Pliny 25.4, recommends "paeonia nigra" as an herb disliked by the devil (in fact
there is no mention of peony at 25.4, and no mention of "paeonia nigra" anywhere, but at 25.10 Pliny does
recommend paeonia "against the illusion practiced by Fauni in sleep"). A calandar of 1750 recommends a
wine-tincture of piwonia and bylica, because "this herb chases away witchcraft and all enchantments"147
(Kalendarz p. 49; cited after Wijaczka 2005 p. 19). Anna Swedycka testified that she gave piwonia seeds
and jeleni rok to a child, as part of an otherwise undescribed healing procedure (#80, Lublin 1678).

plomyk or Baaras. Rostafihski (1896 p. 56) identifies plomyk as Lychnis chalcedonica L. (Jerusalem cross),
but see below. Chmielowski (vol.3 p. 259; cf. vol. 1 p. 638), citing Josephus bk. 7 ch. 27, says this herb
grew under the northern wall of Jerusalem, and is an effective antidote to witchcraft and demonic
possession. According to Josephus, its leaves glow in the dark, and fly away if one wishes to pluck them—
hence Chmielowski's translation of the herb as plomyk—"little flame, will-o'-the-whisp." Chmielowski
appears to be unaware that the herb in question was usually interpreted in the early modern period to be
mandrake, although Syreniusz makes the connection very clearly (1613 p. 1378). See pokrzyk.

pokrzyk or pokszyk. Lit. "the screamer," this is properly Mandragora officinarum L. or mandrake, which is
supposed to scream when uprooted. However, mandrake does not grow in Poland (though the dried root
may have been imported), and both the term and the folklore attaching to mandrake have been applied to
local herbs: usually Atropa belladonna L. (belladonna or deadly nightshade, pokrzyk in modern Polish).
According to Moszyhski, both mandrake and belladonna were sometimes cultivated, pulled up with a
scream and, fed milk and dressed as a child, used as treasure-hauling demons or inkluzy (1967 part 2 vol. 1
p. 337; cf. Lehr 1982 p. 139, and see postep). In this context, a 15th-century gloss of mandrake as
"nyeskrzczenecz" or unbaptised child is relevent (Rostafinski 1900a item 810)—recall that in Polish
folklore and witchcraft, an unbaptised child was often understood as a demon who brought treasure to the
household. For Falimirz, pokrzyk is associated with "magic-using women and baby who associate with
devils;"148 (1534 ff. I.86v-87; cf. the nearly identical comments in Marcin of Urztjdow 1595 p. 201). Both
Falimirz and Marcin of Urze_dow insisted that the root sold to foolish women as pokrzyk, in the form of a

"gnoj bydle_cy i urynq w skorupe. zakopac, i piohinu kawalek w drugi wlozyc, powajzke, wyphikac i na to
wylewac, to siq naprawi"
147
"czary i wszystkie gusla czarownic odegnie to ziele"
148
"niewiasthe czarowne i baby z diiably sie. obieraja^ce"

606
 • Herbal Lore •

human being, is usually a specially prepared and carved root of mieczyk. Syreniusz gives the fullest
version of this view:
There exists a stupid supposition among the folk, that the roots of pokrzyk grow in the shape
of a person, the male as a man, the female as a woman. And they are so convinced of this by
tricksters and mountebanks, that they cannot be persuaded otherwise: paying dearly for those
pokrzyki, sold by those same [mountebanks], which they buy for witchcraft and enchantment.
And they refuse to believe that these are not the roots of pokrzyk, but of przestej), or
mieczyk, or wodna trzcina, or koszaciec. Those mountebanks and tricksters of the people
carve the likeness of either sex in the root. And where they want hair to grow, they bury it for
twenty days in grains of millet or barley, then, digging it up, they carve and form the shape of
a person, carving hair on the head, the chin and the groin with a sharp knife. And they fool the
simple folk, telling them of the difficulties and dangers by which they dug up the pokrzyk,
and where it grows, that is under the gallows, from the urine of those hung there (Syreniusz
1613 p. 1378).149

In Tymbark near Nowy Sa^cz, 1509, one Mikolaj Barika made his oath on the crucifix that neither he nor his
wife nor kin, now or in the past, had ever used "herba mandragorae alias pokrzyk" for "medicine or
malefice" (Urban 2005 p. 181). The cunning-woman Apolonia Porwitka, under interrogation for witchcraft
in Kalisz, denounced the executioner's wife as a witch who keeps pokrzyk in her drawer (#13, Kalisz
1593). Zofia Baranowa (#39, Lublin 1643) was accused, among other things, of possessing or selling
"pokszyk." See also koszatka, mieczyk, plomyk, przestep or postep. and wodna trzcina.

pokrzywa (Urtica dioica L. or Urtica urens L.; stinging nettle). Still widely used medicinally, for rheumatism,
jaundice, and other complaints. Pokrzywa which had grown through a fence could be added to enchanted
milk, along with bees-wax and blessed bread, in order to remove the enchantment (#4, Poznan 1549). A
decoction of pokrzywa, tatarskie ziele and imbir used to treat jaundice in #58, Nowy Wisnicz 1662. See
also rozchodnik.

postawne ziele. Identity uncertain—possibly Tordylium officinale L. (common hartwort) or some other species
of Tordylium. Used as an amulet to protect children from bewitchment, from night terrors, and from evil
dreams (Syreniusz 1613 pp. 144-145). Not mentioned in trials.

"Jest mniemanie, a ghipie, mie_dzy ludem, jakoby pokrzykowe korzenie mialo rose na ksztalt czlowieczy,
samiec mejzczyzny, a samica bialejglowy. I sa_ tak w tym od mataczow i szalbierzow utwierdzeni, ze sie_ od
tego nie daja_ odwiesc: dosyc drogo te pokrzyki na czary i gusla, ktore im z tymze sprzedaja,, placate. A ne
chca_ prawdzie wierzyc, ze to nie pokrzykowe korzenie, lae przestejsowe albo mieczykowe, albo wodnej
trzeiny, albo koszatcowe. Wyrzynaja. postac obojej plci czlowieczej ci machlerze i oszukacze ludzi. A gdzie
wlosy miec chca^ tam ziarko prosciane albo je_czmienne przez dni dwadziescia zakopuja^ potem zas,
wykopawszy, obrzezuja, i formuja^postac czlowieczy wlosy na glowie, na brodzie i w lonie nozykiem
ostrym formuja^c. I udaja^tym ludziom prostym, powiadajax, z jakajrudnosciaj niebezpieczehstwem te
pokrzyki wykopuja^, na jakich miejscach i z czego rosna^ to jest pod szubienicami, gdzie z moczu tych, ktore
wiesza^ rosna_."

607
 • Appendix B •

postrzal, now nawloc {Solidago virgauera L.; goldenrod). The Virgin Mary marked postrzal as a cure for
postrzal or lumbago. One should wash in a decoction of it (#4, Poznan 1544b).

postej), korzeri postfpowy, przestej), biale ziolo {Bryonia alba L.; white bryony). According to Lehr's
informants in the late 1970s, witches grow poste_p in their gardens, and feed it to neighbors' cows to take
away their milk (Lehr 1982 p. 139); on the other hand, it is also fed to one's own cattle to improve dairy
production (Kohler 1993 p. 65). One of Kolberg's informants combined these themes: witches cense their
cattle with przestej), which draws the milk of other cattle, but also of mice, cats, rabbits and so on: the
result is an increase in the quantity of milk but a decrease in its quality (DWOK vol. 7 p. 78). See also
Moszyhski's comments on postqp and pokrzyk in Slavic folklore (under pokrzyk, above). For Haur, it
helps against witchcraft (1693 p. 383). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259), citing "recent doctors [swiezych
medykow]", recommends wearing this this herb around the neck, as a talisman against witchcraft. The
accused witch Anna Krzywdzina confessed to using biale ziolo to help her milk sour properly instead of
spoiling (#113, Nowy Wisnicz 1688; ace. Lehr 1982 p. 123, biale ziolo is a synonym forpostep). The
"diabel" allegedly boiled in holy water by Agnieszka Szostakowa, to repair her witch-spoiled beer-mash,
might also have been poste_p. See also its supposed use as a substitute for pokrzyk.

prosny kwiat. The flower of proso {Panicum miliaceum L.; millet) or of wroble proso or rostrzyk, which see.
Concerning its use in combination with other herbs to protect cows against witchcraft, see czarnysz.

przytulia {Galium spp., probably Galium verum as in Syreniusz p. 1412; Lady's Bedstraw). With its name
recalling the verb przytulic (to cuddle, to snuggle) this herb makes an obvious choice for love magic. In
#55, Nowy Wisnicz 1659, a love-magic bath was decocted from przytulia, sankta, segiecz, nasi^zral,
dziewi^csil (as dziwiexsiol), lebiodka, and ruta.

przywrot. See nawrot.

psinka {Solarium nigrum L.; garden nightshade). Still used in folk medicine (Jagus 2002 p. 135). Chmielowski
(vol. 3 p. 259), following classical sources, recommends an ointment made from the seed of this herb as a
cure for bewitchment. Not mentioned in trials.

rqczka Pana Jezusa, now storczyk. (lit. "Lord Jesus's hand" after the shape of the root; Orchis conopsea L.
syn. Gymnadenia conopsea R.Br., or other Gymnadenia spp.; fragrant orchid). Chmielowski recommends
"ra^czki Pana Jezusa seu palma Christi" against witchcraft (1752 vol. 3 p. 259; cf. Spiczihski 1542 cap.
213h; Syreniusz 1613 p. 765). Not mentioned in trials.

rosiczka {Drosera rotundifolia L.; sundew). According to Kolberg, the peasantry of the Krakow region in the
19th century hung three garlands of rosiczka in cattle barns—one in the barn itself, one above the
threshhold, and one under the manger, to protect the cattle for malefic milk-theft {DWOKvol. 7 p. 90).
According to Syreniusz, rosiczka is good against poison, to strengthen the spirit in old people and to get rid
of a dead fetus in a pregnant woman. It also "quiets the szatany in possessed people, if worn around the
neck; likewise worn around the neck it changes enemies into friends, and in every enterprise brings fortune,

608
 • Herbal Lore •

when worn around the neck " (1613 pp. 331-332). Chmielowski, vol. 3 p. 259, says that blessed rosiczka,
"according to Botanists or Herbalists, removes the effects of witchcraft"151 (vol. 3 p. 259);" it also
"preserves one from kaduks "152 (vol. 1 p. 645). "Kaduk" is a rare term for the devil or demon (Rybkowski
1903); see also discussion under piwonia. Not mentioned in trials.

rostrzyk, now wroble proso (Lithospermum arvense L.; field gromwell). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259)
recommends against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials, unless may be identidfied with the prosny kwiat
(which see) of trial #21, Kalisz 1613. See details at czarnysz.

roza (Rosa spp., probably R. canina L., wild rose). Used in combination with other herbs as an abortificant: see
under limoiza.

rozchodnik (Sedum acre L.; common stonecrop). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb
garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). Popular for medicinal/magical care of
cattle in the 19th century (Kohler 1993 p. 75). The Sekrety notes its use in witchcraft, most likely milk-
magic, in combination with pokrzywa or barwinek (1698 pp. 221, 223, 328).153 The accused witch
Jadwiga Mackowa kept rozchodnik and boze drzewko in a jar, according to the testimony of her daughter
(#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688a). The accused witch Katarzyna of Wojnicz, wife of the church organist and
quite probably a cunning woman, had an ointment of rozchodnik mixed with butter: this was found in her
home and presented in court as evidence (Nowy Wisnicz 1662, #58).

rozmaryn (Rosmarinus officinalis L.; rosemary). Mentioned as part of a folk excorcism in the Czarownica
powolana.; see details under majeran. Not mentioned in trials.

rumianek (Matricaria chamomilla L.; chamomile). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb
garlands used to protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259)
recommends against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

ruta (Ruta graveolens L.; rue). In the late 20th century, an ingredient in the blessed herb garlands used to
protect cattle from witchcraft (Lehr 1982 p. 140). In Polish folk-tradition, the bride's wedding garland was
woven from ruta, and there is an associated belief in its aphrodisiac qualities (see Bruckner 1979 p. 90 and
references there). That this tradition is very old may be seen from a printed "village song" of 1543,
describing a married woman who "has covered her hair, she's a maiden no longer, she has woven her
garland of rue"154 (Bruckner 1985b p. 312). Considered aphrodisiac for women, but harmful for pregnant
women, by Marcin of Urzqdow (p. 270), Syreniusz (p. 529; both cited after Spolnik 1993 p. 55), and Haur
(1693 p. 437). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends ruta against witchcraft, citing Aristotle.
Recommended by Haur either by itself (tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) or with krzyzownik and boze drzewko, to

150
"szatany w opqtanych ucisza, noszone na szyi, nosza^cym na szyi zamienia nieprzyjaciol w przyjaciol, we
wszystkich zawodach daje szcz^scie, noszony na szyi"
151
"wedhig Botanikow, albo Zielopisow czarom effekt odbiera"
152
"od kaduka prezerwuie"
153
1 am dependent here on Rostafihski 1896 p. 61, which unfortunately provides no details.
154
"Wlosy skryla, panna_ byla / ruciane wianki rada wila"

609
 • Appendix B •

remove bewitchment from cattle (see details under boze drzewko, and cf. Siennik 1568 p. 157b). In #2,
Poznan 1544a, it is used together with bielen, dziewi^ciorg, and pi^cpiers for love magic. Also used in
#55, Nowy Wisnicz 1659, in combination with several herbs for a love-magic bath (see details under
przytulia).

ruta polna. Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) writes that "Naturalists recommend Molii or rata polna against
witchcraft."155 Syreniusz (pp. 1430-1431) identifies as ruta polna the herb now called dymnica polna
(Fumaria officinalis L.; fumitory); however, ruta polna is also a somewhat uncommon name for dzwonki
panny Maryi, which see. Whether Chmielowski had one of these in mind is not clear ; what is clear is that
he identifies ruta polna with the legendary Molii or Moly used by Odysseus to resist Circe's enchantments
(Od. 10.302-306; Pliny 25.8). See also smaglica.

sadliczka According to Rostafiski 1896, this may be Echium plantagineum L., (now zmijowiec babkowaty;
salvation jane), or three species not present in Poland: Rubia peregrina L. (wild madder); Cruciata taurica
(Pall, ex Willd.) Ehrend.; and Fibigia clypeata (L.) Medik.). Syreniusz notes that there is little agreement
about the types of sadliczka; following Dioscorides, he says it "drives away all sorts of witchcraft, whether
harmful to people or to cattle, if hung in [barn] doors or the doors of homes"156 (1613 p. 558). Not
mentioned in trials.

segiecz. Properly dziegiec, a tar-like liquid destilled from birch-bark and used in folk medicine into the 20th
century. See brzoza. Concerning its use in love magic, combined with other herbs, see przytulia.

smaglica (Alysum spp.; alysum). Syreniusz (1613 pp. 552-553) identifies this herb with Moly, and recommends
it as an antidote to poisonous witchcraft, following Pliny. Not mentioned in trials. Concerning the term
Moly, see ruta polna.

smloth, smlod. Identity uncertain. According to Syreniusz (1613 pp. 146-147) this is Seseli aethiopicum, now
Peucedanum cervaria Lap. (gorysz siny, much-good). It might also be some other species of Peucedanum:
P. oreoselinum (L.) Moench., (gorysz pagorkowaty, mountain parsley), P. palustre Moench. (gorysz
blotny, marsh hog-fennel or milk parsley), or even Daucus carota L. (marchew; common or wild carrot)—
among several other possibilities all more-or-less resembling the parsleys. In #5, Poznan 1559, smloth used
with zebrzyca to protect the house and in the brewing of mead. However, according to Syreneusz, smlod
and zebrzyca are synonymous; he recommends this herb for impotence and barreness in humans and cattle
(1613 pp. 146-149).

smrodzieniec. See czartowe lajno.

sosna (Pinus spp., pine). The accused witch Regina of Stawiszyn (#22, Kalisz 1616) used small pieces of pine
wood to exorcise "klobuchy" (evil spirits of some kind; "klobuk" still refers to minor demons in

155 ,
'Molii albo Rut? polna. zalecaia_Naturalistowie na czary"
156
"Czary wszelakie, tak ludziom iako y bydfu, szkodliwe, odpe_dza, na wrotach abo na dzwiach domowych
zawieszona."

610
 • Herbal Lore •

Mazowsze) from children. She pressed a piece of pine to the child's side and said "klobuch, klobuch, jump
out, in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, come out"157 and then poured the water out
in front of house. But the child died. Pine bark was part of the recipe for a love magic bath, together with
several other herbs and barks, in #86, Warta 1679 (see details under bobrownik).

swi^tego Piotra ziele. See czartowe zebro.

swi^tej Helzbiety ziele, lit. "St. Elizabeth's herb;" unidentified. Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends
against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

szaktak (Rhamnus cathartica L.; buckthorn). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 260), citing Dioscorides, recommends
hanging branches of szaklak in entryways to protect against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

szalwia {Salvia officinalis L.; sage). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends szalwia against witchcraft. Not
mentioned in trials.

szanta, santa, sankta (Marrubium vulgare L.; horehound). A common herbal medicine, especially for coughs,
from ancient times to the present. Haur recommends censing infants and children with santa and wrotycz,
morning and night, for "driving away night-demons and every other misfortune"158 (1693 tr. 25 ch. 10 p.
448). Chmielowski (vol. 3 p. 259) recommends against witchcraft. Concerning its use, together with other
herbs, in a healing bath (#21, Kalisz 1613), see dziewanna. Concerning its use in love magic, combined
with other herbs, see przytulia.

szelej. See bielen.

tapsia, now swinia wesz or szczwol (Conium maculatum L.; fool's parsley, poison hemlock). This seems to be
the herb described only as Tapsia by Chmielowski, and recommended as "effective against devils " 159
(1754 vol. 3 p. 259). However, he may have intended loczydlo (Thapsia garganica L.). Neither is
mentioned in trials.

targownik (Trifolium montanum L.; mountain clover). Mentioned, without a specific use, in #21, Kalisz 1613.

tatarskie ziele, tatarak (Lit. "Tatar's herb," because brought to Europe by the Tatars; Acorus calamus L.;
sweet flag). A decoction of tatarskie ziele, pokrzywa, and imbir used to treat jaundice in #58, Nowy
Wisnicz 1662. Concerning its alleged use as a substitute for mandrake, see pokrzyk.

tr^downik (lit. "leprous one"; Scrophularia nodosa L.; English). Covered with small bumps or warts, for
which reason it is used medicinally in 20th-century Ruthenia for warts, moles and rashes (Moszyhski 1967
part 1 vol. 2 p. 215). Haur (tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455) recommends "scrofularia tr^bownik, " collected before dawn
and eaten raw, against witchcraft. Not mentioned in trials.

"klobuchu klobuchu, sklobuc sie. ty w Imiq Ojca i Syna i Ducha Swie_tego wychodzcie"
"zpe_dzenie nocnic, y na insze wszelakie zle przypadki"
"przeciw czartom skuteczna"

611
 • Appendix B •

trybula (Anthriscus cerefolium (L.) Hoffman; garden chervil). Protects cattle from witchcraft (Chmielowski
vol. 3 p. 404). Not mentioned in trials.

urocznik (Lit. "enchanter;" Bupleurum longifolium L.; long-leaved hare's ear). For its use together with
dziewiqcsil to protect infants from enchantment, see dziewi^csil. See also taskawiec.

wia_z (Ulmus spp.; elm). For its use in beer-protection magic, with klon and grab, see grab.

wierzba (Salix spp.; willow). A favorite haunt of devils in Polish folklore. On the other hand, Polish Easter
palms are made from pussy willows, and these, once blessed, form a standard defense against witchcraft
and devils (see e.g. Chmielowski 1754 vol. 3 p. 260; Malleus pt. 2 cap. 7 s. 262; Bracha 1999 p. 149). Not
mentioned in trials.

wodna trzcina {Phragmites communis Trin.; common reed). For its alleged use as a substitute for mandrake,
see pokrzyk. Not mentioned in trials.

wrotycz, wroticzka {Chrysanthemum vulgare Bernh., syn. Tanacetum vulgare L.; tansy—but see maruna and
durant). In former times a medicinal and culinary herb, now considered poisonous. The word wrotycz
suggests "return" (wr6cenie)—a function also suggested by some of its recorded uses. According to
Siennik (1564 p. 179), one can bathe in wrotycz to counter-act the love magic of lubczyk; cf. Spiczinski
1542 cap. 247b to similar effect. Marcin of Urze_dow recommends censing children in wrotycz against
misadventure or accident; this advice is repeated by Haur (see under santa). In #61, Che_ciny 1665, it is
used in magic for recovering witch-stolen milk: one takes manure from the cows of the suspected witch on
a Thursday morning, and puts a portion of this manure into an eggshell, along with milk and yeast. One
then boils a cheesecloth over a fire from wood gathered at the suspect's homestead, and filters the milk
mixture (together with milk from one's own cows?) through this. Finally, one adds wrotycz to the filtered
milk, while saying "By the Virgin Mary's power and the power of all the Saints, I take back my profit, that
it should return to me just as this wrotycz returns"160 (cf. Kohler 1993 p. 77 for a closely similar use in the
19th century).

wrzodowe ziele (Sisymbrium sophia L.; flixweed). Protects cattle against malefice (Chmielowski 1754 p. 404).
Not mentioned in trials.

wyzlin (Antirrhinum spp., probably A orontium L.; lesser snap-dragon). Syreniusz (1613 p. 594) says of this
herb that "Some, that is to say superstition-believers, think that anyone who wears the head and seeds of
this herb around the neck, against the bare skin, will be protected from all harmful witchcraft. And he will
have the love and good favour of the authorities and courts, and of all people."161 Haur also recommends it

"Panny Maryi moca^ Wszystkich Swie_tych etc. biore_ swqj pozytek, zeby sie_ nawrocil do mnie, jako tak
wroticzka nawraca"
"Rozumieja^ niektorzy a ile guslowierni, ze ktoby tego ziela glowki z nasieniem na szyi zawieszone, na
golym ciele nosil, czary zadne nie moga^mu szkodzic. Do tego milym i przyjemnym go czyni. Od
zwierzchnosci urze_du i wszystkich ludzi przyjazh i milosc bqdzie mial."

612
 • Herbal Lore •

against witchcraft (1693 tr. 26 ch. 1 p. 455); it is also ingredient in two anti-witchcraft recipes recorded by
Haur (see details under dzwonki Panny Maryi). Not mentioned in trials.

zapaliczka (Ferula communis L.; giant fennel). According to Syreniusz, a powerful aphrodisiac, which can be
used to remove bewitchment-caused sexual incapacity from a married couple (1613 p. 181). Not mentioned
in trials.

zebrzyca. According to Rostafihski, this is the same as smlod czarny, that is Bupleurum fruticosum L.,
(shrubby hare's ear); however, see discussion at smlod. According to Syreniusz, zebrzyca helps ease labor
difficulties in cattle and humans (1613 p. 148). Used, together with smlod, in beer magic and to protect the
house (see at smlod). Compare also urocznik. laskawiec.

zlotoglow (Lilium martagon L.; martagon lily). Keeps evil spirits from the house, and, carried on the persion,
can free the possessed from their demons (Sekrety 1698 p. 232). Not mentioned in trials.

• •$• •

Binomial index to Appendix B

The annotation "see" before a keyword indicates that the indexed binomial is discussed under that keyword, but
that the binomial might not denote the same species as the Polish keyword under which it is discussed. For
example, the entry:
Mandragora officinarumh.... see pokrzyk
indicates no more than that the pokrzyk mentioned in witch-trials may be identified with Mandragora (but also
wiihAtropa belladonna and Bryonia alba, among other possibilities) and that this problematic identification is
discussed under the keyword "pokrzyk." It should not be read as indicating that M. officinarum L. and pokrzyk
are identical.

Acer spp klon Artemisia absinthium L pioiuri Chelidonium maj'us L see maruna
Acorus calamus L tatarak Artemisia campestris L. ..bylica czerwona Chrysanthemum vulgare Bernh. ...wrotycz
Actaea spicata L see czarnysz Artemisia vulgaris L bylica Cicuta virosa L. see bielen
Adiantum capillus-veneris L. Asarum europaeum L kopytnik Circaea lutetiana L czarownik
see panny Mariey wloski Aspidium filix-mas (L.) Sw paproc Conium maculatum L tapsia
A Ichemilla vulgaris L nawrot Asplenium spp. . see panny Mariey wtoski Corydalis cava Schweigger et Koerte
Allium cepa L see cebula Atropa belladonna L see pokrzyk see kokornak
Allium spp czosnek Betonica officinalis L bukwica Corylus avellana L leszczyna
Alysum spp smaglica Betula spp brzoza Cruciata taurica Ehrend see sadliczka
Alnus spp olsza Bryonia alba L postcp Cruciferae (Brassicaceae)
Angelica spp dziengiel Bupleurum see krzyzowe ziele
Anthriscus alcatum L. ..see laskawiec, urocznik Crucinella spp see krzyzowe ziele
cerefolium (L.) Hoffman trybula Bupleurum fruticosum L see zebrzyca Datura stramonium L see bielen
Anthyllis vulneraria L oczyna Bupleurum longifolium L urocznik Daucus carota L marchew
Antirrhinum spp wyzlin Carlina aucalis L. Dictamnus albus L dyptan
Aquilegia vulgaris L. orlik see dziewiecsil, czarto-ploch Drosera rotundifolia L. rosiczka
Arctium lappa L lopian Carpinus betulis L grab Dryopteris filix-mas paproc
Aristolochia clematitis L kokornak Centaurea scabiosa L see driakiew Echium plantagineum L see sadliczka
Artemisia abrotanum L boze drzewko Chaerophyllum bulbosum L mirnik

613
 • Appendix B •

Eryngium campestre L. Origanum marjorana Koch Salvia officinalis L szahvia

see mikotajek. czarto-ploch see lebiodka, majeran, maruna Sambucus ebulus L. bez hebd
Eupatorium spp see dziewieciornik Origanum vulgarum Koch Sambucus nigra L. bez
Ferula assafoetida L czartowe lajno see durant, lebiodka, majeran
Sambucus racemosa L. bez koralowy
Ferula communis L zapaliczka Paeonia offininalis L piwonia
Scabiosa columbaria L. see driakiew
Fibigia clypeata (L.) Medik. see sadliczka Panicum miliaceum L. ...see prosny kwiat
Scabiosa praemorsa Gilib.
Fraxinus excelsior L jasion Parnassia palustris L. see czartowe zebro
Fumaria officinalis L see ruta polna see dziewieciornik, nawrot Scabiosa succisa L.
Galium spp przytulia Parnassia spp see dziewieciornik see czartowe zebro, driakiew
Genista spp janowiec Peucedanum ostruthium L miarz Scilla maritima L cebula zamorska
Gymnadenia spp. see rijczka Pana Jezusa Peucedanum spp see smloth Scrophularia nodosa L tredownik
Helichrysum Phragmites communis Trin. wodna trzcina Sedum acre L rozchodnik
arenarium Moench koczanka Physalis alkekengi L miechunka Senecio vulgaris L see krzyzowe ziele
Hyoscyamus niger L see bielen Pimpinella spp biedrzeniec Sisymbrium sophia L wrzodowe ziele
Hypericum Pinus spp sosna Solanum nigrum L psinka
perforatum L. .dzonki Fanny Maryi Plantago spp babka Solidago virgauera L postrzal
Hyssopus officinalis L hyzop Podolepis spp seeostudziec Sonchus spp see mlec
Imperatoria ostruthium L miarz Polygala vulgaris L. ... see krzyzowe ziele Stachys spp czysciec
Iris pseudacorus L mieczyk Polygonatum spp see kokornak Staphylea pinnata L klokotowe drzewo
Iris spp koszaciec Polytrichum commune Hedw. Succisa pratensis Moench.
Larix decidua Miller modrzew see panny Mariey wloski ....see czarto-ploch, czartowe zebro
Laserpitium spp dzi^gielnica Populus tremula L osina Synapis spp gorcyca
Levisticum officinale Koch lubczyk Potentilla reptans L picepiers Syringa spp see bez
Lilium candidum L lilia Pulsatilla nigricans StOrck see czarnysz Tanacetum vulgare L.
Pulsatilla pratensis Miller see czarnysz see wrotycz, maruna
Lilium martagon L zlotogiow
Pyrethrum parthenium Smyth, see maruna Taraxacum vulgare (Lam.) Schrank
Linaria
see mled
vulgaris Miller... lenek panny Maryi Pyrola spp gruszyczka
Thapsia garganica L loczydlo
Lithospermum arvense L rostrzyk Quercus spp d$b
Thymus serpyllum L macierzanka
Lonicera xylosteum L see limoiza Reseda luteola L mitosna
Tilia spp lipa
Lychnis chalcedonica L see plomyk Rhamnus cathartica L szaklak
Trifolium montanum L targownik
Mandragora officinarum L. ... see pokrzyk Rhus typhina L jeleni rok
Trifolium pratense L koniczyna
Marchantia spp see dziewieciornik Ribes uva-crispa L agrest
Ulmus spp wiqz
Marrubium vulgare L szanta Rosa spp roza
Urginea maritima L. cebula zamorska
Matricaria chamomilla L rumianek Rosmarinus officinalis L rozmaryn
Valeriana officinalis L kozlek
Nigella sativa L seeczarnysz Rubia peregrina L see sadliczka
Verbascum spp dziewanna
Onopordon acanthium L. Russula betularum (Hora) Romagn.
golsjbek brzozowy Verbena officinalis L koszyczko
see czarto- ptoch
Russula emetica var. betularum Veronica spp bobrownik
Ophioglossum vulgatum L. nasiezrzal see czarto-ploch, golqbek brzozowy Vinca minor L. barwinek
Opoponax Ruta graveolens L ruta Viscum album L jemiola
chironium (L. ) Kock. ... leczywrzod
Orchis conopsea L. .. rqczka Pana Jezusa Salix spp wierzba Zingiber officinale Roxburgh imbir

614
Appendix C.
Rituals and spells from Polish witch trials
In this appendix I have collected most of those magical rituals and spells which are described in any detail in the
Polish witch-trials; however, the collection is far from exhaustive. When gathered together in this way, the
"implicit grammar" of the spoken spells becomes especially evident, as does the distinction of these spells from
the more elaborate (and usually more explicitly Christian) ritual utterances of the semi-professional cunning
folk. The spells are categorized, roughly, by purpose, except for the cunning spells which are grouped together
at the end.

I. For love, luck in business, or to gain the good will of others.

1. Several love-magic rituals, all to maintain or regain the love of the victim. It appears that the nobleman Jan
Podlodowski had had an affair with his chief house-maid Zofia Philipowicowa. He later rejected her, however,
and she embarked on a ritual campaign to regain his favour. She also tried to gain at least the good will of
Pawel Podlodowski, Jan's brother, who appears to have strongly disliked her.
[N]ieboszka pani Zawadzka, iest temu lat The late Pani Zawadzka, it would be ten years ago
dziesiec nauczela mie. abym gole_biego serca taught me to get the heart of a pigeon, dry it, powder it,
dostala, ktore ususzywszy, a starszy dawala pic and give it to his late honor Sir Jan in a drink, so that he
niebozczykowi iegomsci panu Ianowi, aby na would be friendly toward me; I gave that pigeon's heart
mie. byl laskaw, dawalam to serce golebie to his honor to drink, and his house servants and I
iegomci pic y czeladz iegomsci y ia sama myself ate the boiled [heart] and drank it, sharing it half
warzone iadalam y pila napol rozdzieliwszy sie. z and half with his honor, and saying the following
iegosci% a mowia.c te sloa iako niemoze golab words: just as a male pigeon cannot live without his
bez gole_bice tak ty krczony mianowany abys female pigeon, so let it be that you, christened and
niemogl Ianie bezemnie krczoney mianowaney called Ian, can't live without me, christened and called
Zophiey. Item taz nebozka pani Zawadzka Zophia. Also that same, late Mrs. Zawadzka taught me
nauczyla mie. abym krwie swoiey upusciela z to let a drop of blood fall from my heart-finger [ring-
palca serdecznego a w trunku iegomsci pic finger], into a drink, and give it to his honor to drink,
dawala, mowia.c takowe slowa: iako ia niemoge. saying the following words: Just as I cannot live
przez swoiey krwie, tak ty krczony mianowany without my blood, so you christened and called Jan,
Janie nieozesz bydz bezemnie. Tertium cannot live without me. Thirdly she testified: Anuska
recognovit: nauczyla mie. Anuszka uwiajzac kiey [Zawadzka] taught me to tie a stick of aspen wood in
osciowey w kominie na powrozku od gaci aby the fireplace on a string from [my] underclothing so
go teskno bylo do mnie. Nauczyla mie. tez taz that he would have a yearning toward me. That same
Anuska gdy byl iegomosc pan Pawel przyiechal Anuska taught me to yank the horseshoe from his
do nas do Koszyc wyrypna.c iego podkowke. abo horse, or the earth from under its [or his] feet, when his
ziemie. gdzie on stal aby na mie. byl laskaw y honor sir Pawel rode to visit us in Koszyce, so that he
zakopala to na ogniskou Jagnieszka kucharka a would be friendly toward me, and Jagnieszka the cook
gdy zalepiala ziemie. te. mowilam te slowa: iako buried that earth in the fireplace and as she stuck it
nie mozesz krczony mianowany Pawle przez tey there I spoke these words: "just as you, christened and
ziemie tak przezemnie krczoney mianowaney called Pawel, cannot be without this soil, so also don't
Zophiey niebadz. be without myself, christened and called Zophia."
(#37, Skrzynno 1639, from the testimony of Zofia Philipowicowa. Slightly different versions of these
rituals are also provided by several witnesses in the trial.)

615
 • Appendix C •

2. For love magic. A woman washed her body "of all her dirt [cale z brudu]; and having mixed the wash water
with pigeon hearts while reciting the spell given below, she gave it to her prospective lover to drink.
Jak cie_zko gole_biowi bez pary, tak tez jemu ciejzko Just as it is hard for a pigeon without his mate, so let
bez zony. it be hard for him without a wife.
(#148, Rzeszow 1718, from the testimony of Katarzyna Wroblowa)

3. For love magic. A stolen Eucharist wafer, mixed with the spittle of the practitioner, was placed in a
handkerchief and rinsed in cold water. This water was then divided into three parts and administered in food to
the target of the magic, while reciting:
Jak do tej komuniej ciszba, tak i do mnie Just as a crowd gather's around the communion, so let
kszczonej mianowanej Zoski, zeby byla ciszba. him gather around me, christened and called Zoska
(#148, Rzeszow 1718, from the testimony of Zofia Janowska and witnesses)

4. To influence the judges in a civil trial. The accused and her associates, including a wealthy noblewoman
who has hired them to act for her, mix stolen Eucharist wafers into dough, make pancakes, and offer these
pancakes to the judges of the Crown Tribunal. While mixing the dough, they recite:
Iak do Nayswiqtszego Sakramentu ludzie cisnq. sie, Just as people crowd around the Most Holy
tak zeby na nas ichmc. deputaci sa_dowi panowie Sacrament, in the same way let their graces the lord
laskawi w sprawach naszych byli. deputies of the court show favour in our cases.

Another witness gives a slightly different version of the spell:

[I]ak wielka cizba do kommunii bywa, tak zeby Just as a great crowd comes to communion, in the same
caly trybunal byl laskaw na pania_ moie_. way let all the Tribunal be favourable to my mistress.
(#162, Lublin 1732, from the testimony of Iustina Michalicha and Katarzyna Kmarynska)

5. Anti-love magic (possibly to spoil an engagement or a love-affair). The witch had two staffs of aspen-wood,
which she pointed away from each other, saying:
Tak sie_ obroc od niej wszytka^ mysla^ wszytka. Turn away from her with all your thoughts, all your
wiara^ jako to drewno obracam, a ba^dz jej tak faith, as this wood is turned away, and be to her as
gorzki, jako ta osa jest gorzka. bitter as this aspen wood is bitter.
(#2, Poznan 1544, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

5. Anti-love magic and its cure. A witch had turned a man and wife against each other, by burning an owl and
sprinkling its ashes on their shoes, reciting:
Tak bajlz przeciwna, izby tak wolal na ci$ twoj ma_z, Be so contrary, that your husband will yell at you,
jako na sowe_ wolali ptacy et e contra. just as birds yell at an owl, and vice versa.

To undo this magic, the cunning woman took holy water from three churches, plus the herbs dziewiqciorg,
bielen, ruta, andpiqcpiers (see Appendix B: Herbs). Presumably giving this mixture the husband to drink, she
recited:
Tak sie. nawroc do swej zony, jako swie_ci apostoli Turn back toward you your wife, as the apostles
do Pana Boga i wsyscy swie_ci etc. turned toward the Lord God and all the saints, etc.
(#2, Poznan 1544, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

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 • Spells •

6. For good fortune at the market. Make a stake out of wood that grows in an anthill, and set it in the grain on
the wagon. Also carry a piece of the wood on one's person. Take also the "long white worm [robak bialy
dhigi]" called the king from the anthill, and keep it in ajar. Finally take holy water from seven churches and
sprinkle the wagon and the horses with it (#4, Poznah 1549, from the testimony of Agnieszka of Zabikowo)

7. For good fortune in the selling of beer. Take part of an anthill, go out to the field borders and say:
Boza^ moca., aby si? tak do niej ludzie nawrocieli By God's power, let people come to her just as you
jako sie_ i wy nawracacie do swego gniazda. [ants] return to your nest.
(#22, Kalisz 1616, from the testimony of Regina of Stawiszyn)

II. Milk magic

8. To steal the milk from other people's cattle and transfer it into one's own cattle. Boil milk, and while
pouring it out before the door to the barn, recite:
"Lucku, przynies mi to do mych krow, aby bylo Lucek [i.e., Lucifer], bring this to my cows, that their
mleko do kolan, smiotana do gloznow" might be milk to the knees, cream to the ankles.
(#2, Poznafi 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

9. To protect one's cows from milk-theft. Mix egg, mustard, and honey, make a cross with this mixture on the
cow, and recite:
Czarownico, drzewiej ty mej krowie uzytku nie Witch, you cannot steal the profit from my cow,
odymiesz, alez s niej swiqty Bozy krzyz symiesz, a until you remove from it this holy cross of God, and
odejmiesz miodowi miedzwnosc, gorczycy take from the honey its honeyness, from the mustard
gorzkosc, izbyc tak bylo przeciwno moje bydle_, its bitterness; and let it be that my cattle are against
jako przeciwna czarownica z cudzoloznica. you, just as a witch or the adulterous lover of a pop
popowska, milosnica. milemu Bogu, Pannie Maryjej. [Eastern Orthodox priest] is against the good Lord
In nomine Patris etc. and the Virgin Mary. In the name of the Father, etc.
(#2, Poznan 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

10. To prevent witches from stealing the milk from one's cattle. Four times in the year, take milk thistle (or
possibly dandelion), mustard, tar, and garlic, makes a paste of them, and smears this paste between the horns of
all her milch-cows, while reciting:
Czarownice i czarowniqta nie odyjmujcie mojego Witches and witch-children, you won't take away
trojga pozytku [smiotanki, srwatki, i mleka] bo warn my triple profit [cream, whey, and milk] for you
tak be_dzie smierdzialo i brzydko jak o ta gorczyca z will stink disgustingly just like this mustard mixed
inszymi rzeczy zmieszana. with these other things.
(#7, Kalisz 1580, from the testimony of Barbara of Radom)

11. To undo the milk-stealing magic of a witch. Take water from the river, while reciting the text below. Then
return home and wash the cattle in this water, from head to tail, while again reciting:
Pana Boga milego moca^ Panniej Mariej i By the power of the good Lord God, and the help of
Wszystkich Swiqtych pomoca_nie pragnq cudzego die Virgin Mary and All the Saints I don't desire
jego swego wlasnego, aby mi si? pozytek i wszytek [anything] from others, only what is mine, that the

617
 • Appendix C •

jako pierwszy byl do bydle_cia mojego wrociel. profit and all should return to my cattle as it used to
be.
(#11, Kalisz 1584. From the testimony of Elzbieta wife of Jakub)

12. To increase the milk production of ones milch-cows, at the same time denying that this action is meant to
steal the milk from other people's cattle. Pick herbs, wash the cows' udders in them, and recite:
Nie biore_ ja nic wie_cej tylko swoj pozytek od I'm taking nothing more than the profit of my own
swoich krow, smietana do pasa, serwatka do stop, cows, cream up to my waist, whey up to my feet,
mleko do kolan. milk up to my knees.
(#61, Che_ciny 1665b, from the testimony of Ewa Krucka of Skiby)

13. For retrieving the milk-producing capacity of one's own cattle, after their milk has been stolen by a
witch. Steal manure from the cattle of the of suspect on a Thursday morning, put part of this into an egg-shell
with holy water and yeast. Then, make a fire from splinters taken from the homestead of the suspected witch,
and boil a cheesecloth over this fire. Then add the herb wrotycz (Tanacetum vulgare L.; tansy—the Polish
common name suggests "return" [wrocenie]), and recite:
Panny Maryi mocaj Wszystkich Swie_tych etc. biorq By the Virgin Mary's power, the [help] of All the
swoj pozytek, zeby sie_ nawrocil do mnie, jako tak Saints, etc., I am taking my profit, that it may return
wroticzka nawraca. to me, just as this wrotycz returns.
(#61, Che_ciny 1665b, from the testimony of Maryna Lazarcowka Wnukowa of Polichno)

14. For the same purpose, from the same trial. In May, take five types of grain, boil it, and give the resulting
broth to the cattle to drink, reciting:
Niechaj sie_ tak twoj pozytek nawraca do mnie i do mego Let your profit return to me and to my cattle,
bydla, jako siq to zbozysko do stodory mojej nawraca. just as this grain returns to my barn.
(#61, Che_ciny 1665b, from the testimony of Maryna Lazarcowka Wnukowa of Polichno

III. Malefice.
15. To cause a drought and destroy the grain in the fields. The witches gather splinters of wood (possibly, as
is common in Polish witchcraft, from a coffin—but this is not specified) and make a powder of them. They then
sprinkle this powder on the fields, while saying:
Bodaj suche roki byly, jak ten proch, bodaj deszcze Let there be summers as dry as this powder, let no
nieprzechodziry i zeby sie_ nic nie rodzilo. rain fall and let no thing grow.
(#84, Bochnia 1679, from the testimony of Maryna Mazurkowicowa)

16. Another spell to destroy the fertility of cultivated fields.

Poloz dwa jaja kokosze na miedzy, aby rola byla tak Place two chicken eggs on the field border, so that
gola, jak te jaja, a jaja otocz w popiele, aby zbozethe fields will be as bare as those eggs, and roll the
zniszczalo, jak niszczeja_ w popiele jaje te. eggs in [hot?] ashes, so that the grain will be
destroyed, as the eggs are destroyed in the ash.
(#139, Wyszogrod 1705, from the testimony of Katharzyna Koziminska)

618
 • Spells •

17. To cause a flood. The practicioner sat on roof of her hut, sprinkled water from a watering can onto the
ground and the roof-beam, and recited:
Diable, czarcie biorq cie. na pomoc, dopomozze mi, Devil, demon, I call on you for help, assist me, that
zeby byla powodz a na naszem sucho, zeby byl there might be a flood, but dry on our [property],
urodzay. and good weather.
(#97, Nowy Wisnicz 1688. From the testimony of Jadwiga Macowa)

18. To destroy buildings. Gather soil which as been spun in a whirlwind, and sprinkle it on to a building, while
reciting:
[J]ak to sie. wywrocilo, tak sie one Just as [this soil] has toppled over, so will [these houses]
wywroca.. topple over.
(#39, Lublin 1643, from the Testimony of Zofia Baranowa)

19. To prevent malicious gossip. The accused witch Agnieszka sliced a piece of bread, put it on the face of her
dead husband, and said:
jako ten umarly nie gada, tak i panstwo aby nie Just as this dead man doesn't chatter, so let people
gadalo not chatter.
(#62, Chexiny 1665c, from the testimony of Agnieszka Kapuscina)

20. To dry or wither a person. The witch collected soil from the victim's footprints, buried under the fire and
covered it with a circle of aspen-wood, reciting:
Daj sie_ tak trzqsla, jak sie. ta osica trze_sla, poki belo Let her shake, like this aspen shook, when it still
liscie na niej. had leaves.
(#2, Poznah 1544, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

21. To harm a person. This spell, couched in the refined Polish of a humanist pastoral poem, nevertheless
closely follows the structure of the spells from trials.
Pale, to ususzone liscie jesionowe. Here I burn dried ash-tree leaves.
Jako liscie splonqlo, ani zostawilo Just as they burn, and leave no ashes,
Popiohi, bodaj sie. w nim serce tak palilo! So let his heart burn within him!
(Szymonowic 1614, Sielankano. 15).

IV. Cunning narratives of healing and divination

These spells have a different symbolic structure than those above. Many are long and elaborate, and are based
on the recital of Biblical or apocryphal myths concerning the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary, while the
shortest consist of little more than invocations of God, the Virgin, and the saints. The practitioners of these
spells seem all to have been established cunning-women.

22. For seduction. Recite at dawn:

Witajze zarze [...] idz-zez mi do tego Filipa, Welcome, dawn. Go for me to this Filip, tear his
roztargniej-ze mu jego serce, izby nie mogl ni pic, heart apart, so that he can neither drink, nor eat,
ni jezdz bez niej, izby nie mial woli ni do dziewki, without her, and so that he might desire neither
ni do wdowy, ni do zadnego stworzenia, jedno do maiden, nor widow, nor any other creature, except
samej Lucji In Nomine Patris. only Lucja. In Nomine Patris.

619
 • Appendix C •

(#2, Poznan 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

23. To discover a thief. The witch sang three Our Father's, three Hail Mary's, and one Credo. She then poured
wax onto water while reciting:
Poszla bela mila Panna Maryja, zetkal je sam As the beloved Virgin Mary was walking along, she
syn bozy. -Gdzie idziesz matuchno moja mila? - met the son of God. "Where are you going my dearest
Ide_ moj miry synu zamawiac tego zlodzieja, Mother?" "My dear son, I am going to enchant that
ktory uczyniel zlosc tejto Pani. -Zamawiaj thief, who has done ill by this here lady." "Enchant her,
panno czysta swoja,moc% boska.mocaj pure virgin, by your power, by the power of god, by the
wciornkich swie_tych pomoca. i moja_ moca^ izby help of all the saints, and by my power, so that the
tak stale bylo ten czlowiek, ktory wziaj ludzka. person who stole a person's hard-earned wealth should
cie.zka.robote_. W imie Ojca i Syna i Ducha appear here." In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
swiejego. Spirit.

The thief appeared, but admitted to nothing. The witch therefore instructed her client to sponsor three masses in
honour of the Blessed Virgin; meanwhile, she took a handful of salt and recited the following:
Zlodzieju, gdzie idziesz? Wroc siq zasie. Boza. Thief, where are you going? Turn around, by God's
moc% Panny Maryjej moca_, wsciornkich Power, the Virgin Mary's power, and the help of all the
swiqtych pomoca_, izby tak ciqzko bylo twojej saints, and let things be hard with your power, your
mocy, twoim stawom, twojej trojej dziewie_csile, joints, your three-times-nine strengths, your desires, as
twoim za^dzam, jako tym je_ncom cie_zko, ktorzy it is hard for those captives, who sit in captivity and
w jqstwie siedza. i ktorzy z tego swiata ida. na on. who are leaving this world for the next. In the name of
W imie, Ojca, i Syna, i Ducha Swie_tego. the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
(#2, Poznan 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

24. To help a baker sell his bread in the marketplace. The witch sprinkles the bread with holy water, and
tells the baker to bring it to church and recite three times, while sprinkling with holy water:
Panny Mariej mocaj Wszystkich pomoca^ zeby sie_ By the Virgin Mary's power, the help of All [the
zli ludzie od siebie odwrocili, a dobrzy sie_ nawrocilisaints], let bad people go away from you, and good
w Imie. Ojca i Syna i Ducha S." people come, in the Name of the Father and Son and
Holy Spirit.
(#21, Kalisz 1613, from the testimony of Dorota of Siedlikow)

25. To help bread sell well. The baker is to go church and recite the prayer below, three times, while sprinkling
the baked loaves with holy water.
Panny Mariej moca^ Wszystkich pomoca^ By the Virgin Mary's power, the help of All [the saints],
zeby sie_ zli ludzie od siebie odwrocili, a let evil people turn away from me, and good people turn
dobrzy sie_ nawrocili w Imie. Ojca i Syna i toward me, in the Name of the Father and Son and Holy
Ducha S. Spirit.
(#21, Kalisz 1613, from the testimony of from the testimony of Dorota of Siedlikow)

26. Against hail and fire. When the hail-storm appears, take three beads, and recite:
Burzo, wstajesz Boza.mocaj, Panny Maryjej moca^ Storm, let up by God's power, the Virgin Mary's
wszyskich swie_tych pomoca^ z Boskiego power, the help of all the saints, with God's
dopuszczenia. Zamawia ciebie mila Panna permission. The Virgin Mary, saint Mary Madgalene,
Maryja, swie_ta Maryja Magdalena, swie_ta Anna i saint Anne and the Son of God himself command you:
sam Syn Bozy, izby szla w puste lasy, w puste go into empty forests, empty mountains, empty places,
gory, w puste dziedziny, gdzieby nikomu nic nie where it might harm nobody. In the name of the

620
 • Spells •

zaskodzilo. W imiq Ojca, i Syria i Ducha Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (Fire is
Swie_tego. (Ogieii takusmierzyc): Ogniu, nie zarz vanquished thus): Fire, cease to smolder by God's
siq Boza^moca^ Panny Maryjej moca^ wszyskich power, the Virgin Mary's power, and the help of all
swiejych pomoca^ idz w ship, ni zaszkadzaj Boza. the saints, go into a pillar, do no harm, by God's
moca^ etc. Cos zawziah cos ochynal, w imiQ Ojca, power, etc. Whatever you've burnt, whatever you've
etc., aby nie zaszkodziel, jako Pannie Maryjej taken, in the name of the Father, etc., let it not be
panienstwo jej nie zaszkodzilo. Niechaj sie_ harmed, just as the Virign Mary's virginity was not
ochyna^ Panny Maryjej wlosy, Panny Maryjej harmed. Let the Virgin Mary's hair, the Virign Mary's
plaszcz, aby nie zaskodzil. cloak, protect it, that it not be harmed.
(#2, Poznan 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

27. Two more spells against storms or fire.

(Burze_ tak roznosi): Na Poznaniu stoi stol, na (A storm is sent away thus): In Poznan there stands a
nim mila Panna Czysta swego syna rozwila. table, on that table the Immaculate Virgin unwraps her
Tako siq ta burza rozwin na bory, na lasy, na son [of his swaddling clothes]. So let the storm unrap
puste dziedziny, na jeziora, na biota, gzieby [i.e., disperse], to the woods, to the forests, to empty
nikomu nie zaszkodzila, ni jaremu, nie places, to lakes, to marshes, where it will harm nobody,
ozimiemu. W imi$ Ojca, etc. neither the spring grain nor the winter grain. In the name
(Ogien tak zegna): Stoj, ogniu, w niebiosa of the Father, etc.
siq bij, na ziemiq tak sie upokoj Boza. moca^ (Fire is enchanted thus): Stand, fire, fly up to heaven,
wciornkich swiejych pomocaj jako si$ fall down into the earth, becalm yourself by God's power
upokoila Syna Bozego mejca. In nomine and the help of all the saints, as the Passion of the Son of
Patris, etc. God was becalmed. In the name of the Father, etc.
(#3, Poznan 1544b, from the testimony of Anna of Zabikowo)

28. To protect fermenting beer-mash from enchantment. Take myrrh, frankincense and gold, get them
blessed at three masses (1 for God, one for the Virgin Mary, one for John the Baptist). Take also some wood of
maple, hornbeam and elm, get these blessed, and make crosses from them, bury all these under the beer-vat or
under the threshhold, reciting the following prayer:
Klenie, odklin, grabie, odgrab, wiajzie, odwiajz Maple, dispell; hornbeam, release; elm, untie all
wsztki skazy, wszytki zle uczynki od mego domu, corruption, all evil deeds from my home, that my
izby tak byl czyst moj dom od wszego zlego, jako home might be as without stain of any evil, as the
Czysta Panna byla czysta, kiedy swego milego syna Immaculate Virgin was without stain, when she
porodzila w czystosci przez bolesci. Bo trzej swiqci bore her good son in purity and pain. Let there be
anjeli za moim domem, trzej swiqci apostoli przed three holy angels behind my home, three holy
moim domem, a trzej swie_ci za domem, Pan Bog apostles before my home, three saints behind my
wszechmoga_cy [z] swoja, mila, matuchnq. w home, the omnipotent Lord God with his good
czystosci nad moim domem. Coz sie_ tym swie_tym mother above my home. Just as it is with the saints
w niebie stanie, to mnie grzesznemu z moim in heaven, so let it be with me, a sinner, and my
zbozym. (I mowic klada^c te krzyzyki): Znami? grain. (And say this while placing the crosses): Sign
krzyza swie_tego, kladq cie_ do swego dobrego, izby of the holy cross, I place you here toward my
tu nie postalo nigdy nie zlego. W imiq Ojca etc. benefit, that nothing evil ever happen here. In the
name of the Father, etc.
(#2, Poznan 1544a, from the testimony of Dorota Gnieczkowa)

29. To remove enchantments from the mash used in fermenting beer or vodka. First, wash all the pans and
vessels used in the brewing with boiling millet, a shuttlecock, a spoon, and dishwater, recite:
Swiadlam Boza. moca^ panny Mariej moca, i By God's power, by the virgin Mary's power and by the
wszystkich swiejych pomoca^ ozmine, i help of all the saints, I have commanded winter grain and

621
 • Appendix C •

jarzynq swiem tu przyrok i urzeczenie i te this spring grain, and I admonish here this hex and
robaki z tej piwnice od tego piwa i statkow, i enchantment and these bugs from this cellar, from this beer
tego gospodarze i gospodyni, i wszelakiego and from these [brewing] vessels, and [from] the master
statku ich, wszystko zle i te robaki i te gusla and mistress [of the house] and all their vessels, [I expell]
jezliby przy tym piwie i zlosci ktore by tu everything evil and all bugs and charms if they be in this
bery zlem. Potem: Najswiqtsza Panno Maria beer and all evil things if there be here anything evil.
wzywa Ci$ ku sobie grzeszna, nqdzna abys Later: Most Holy Virgin Mary I call you to myself, a
raczyla do Swego Najmilszego Syna miserable sinner, [asking] that you might intercede with
przyczynic, aby to Pan Jezus do tego piwa your Most Beloved Son, so that the Lord Jesus might drive
albo wina z tej piwnice raczyl prziemic i out and behumble the bugs from this beer or wine and
usmierzyc te robaki jako lieczmierniki from this cellar, as he behumbled the money-changers
usmierzyl gdy o jego zdrowie stali, przez when they attacked his health, that through the power of
moc Boga Wszechmoga^cego aby przepadry Almighty God they might be swallowed up by the earth. In
ziemie. W Imie_ Ojca i Syna i Ducha S. po the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, three
trzykroc. times.
(#13, Kalisz 1593, from the testimony of Apolonia Porwitka)

30. Against the chills or a cold. To "bless and heal [zegnac i lekowac]" a cold, the healer spits on her hands,
holds them in the smoke (of burning blessed herbs or incense?), and rubs them on the chest and belly of the
patient, reciting thrice:
Boza^mocaj Panny Mariej pomocaj By God's power, the Virgin Mary's help, the help of All
Wszystich Swiejych pomoca^ w Imie_ Boga the Saints, in the name of God the Father the Son and the
Ojca i Syna i Ducha S. dziewie_c urazow. Holy Spirit, [against] nine ailments.
(#21, Kalisz 1613, from the testimony of from the testimony of Dorota of Siedlikow)

31. Two methods for healing a sprain, whether of a person or livestock.

Witecz tak zegna: Kiedy mily Pan Jezus po swiatu For sprain one prays like this: When the dear Lord
jezdzil na swoim swiqtym osiolku z swiejym Jesus rode about the earth on his blessed donkey,
Piotrem, swie_tym Pawlem, Syna Bozego osiel with St. Peter and St. Paul, the Son of God's donkey
wytkna.1 sobie nozke_. "Swie_ty Pietrze, lekuj miry sprained [or twisted] its ankle. "St. Peter, heal [the
gospodynie." "Nie umiem." "Swi^ty Pietrze, swiqty donkey], my dear sir." "I don't know how." "St.
Pawle, naucze_ ja was. Niechaj sie_ zstajti kazdemu Peter, St. Paul, I'll teach you how: In every
krzczonemu i bydhi zyla ku zyle, krew ku krwi, christened one and all cattle, let vein attach to vein,
mozg ku mozgu, mie_so ku miesu, Boza_ mocq, milej blood to blood, brain to brain, flesh to flesh, by
Matuchny mocaj wszystkich swie_tych pomoca_." God's power, the dear Mother's power, and the help
of all the saints."
(#3, Poznafi 1544b, from the testimony of Jagna of Zabikowo)

Szczesnaz to byla chwila, kiedys ty, mila panno, It was a happy moment when you, dear virgin,
swego syna poczqla i porodziela. Tak dzis bajlz conceived and bore your son. So let today be a
szczesna chwila, kiedy j a pocznq lekowac happy moment, when I begin to heal this sprain.
wywinienie. Kiedy miry Pan Bog wszechmogajcy When the dear omnipotent Lord God rode about the
jezdziel po swiatu na swoim osielku, tedy mu earth on his donkey, his donkey twisted its ankle.
osielek wywinal nozke_. I rzekl mily Pan swie_temu And the dear Lord said to saint Peter and saint Paul,
Piotrowi i swiqtemu Pawlowi: "Lekujcie mojemu "heal my donkey's ankle." "Dear Master, we don't
osielkowi nozkq." "Miely Gospodynie, nie know how." "Saint Peter, saint Paul, I'll teach you.
umiemy." "Swi^ty Pietrze, swiejy Pawle, nauczeja By my power, by the power of my dear mother, let
was. Niechaj sie_ staj)i moja_ moca^ mojej milej matki bone attach to bone, joint to joint, blood to blood,
moca. kosc ku kosci, staw ku stawu, krew ku krwi, skin to skin, as it was before.
skora ku skorze, jako przed tem bylo.
(#4, Poznan 1549, from the testimony of Jagna of Zabikowo at her second trial)

622
 • Spells •

32. Healing spells from a Jesuit satire against cunning-women. The close similarity between the literary
spell reproduced below and some of the actual spells from trials is quite impressive. Compare in particular the
opening line of this spell with that of Jagna' second spell against sprain, above.
Szczqsliwa ta matka byla, Happy is the mother,
Co tego Fra^czka rodzila. Who gave birth to this man Fra_czek
Poszedl ci byl mily Krzysztofor, Good [St.] Christopher went out walking
Wzia_wszy siekierq i topor. Taking an axe and a hatchet
Napotkala go osoba A person met him on the track
I pytala sie_ w te slowa: And in these words he asked
Doka_d idziesz, Krzysztoforze? Where are you going, Christopher?
A coz ci po tym toporze? And what is that hatchet for?
A to ide_ do Frajczka, I'm going to Fra_czek
Ktorego trapi gora.czka: Who suffers from the fever.
Ratuj go we wszystkiej mocy, Save him by every power
Az zaraz z niego wyskoczy. And it will quickly leave him.
Niech to bolenie Let his pain
Wypadnie w golenie, fall into his knee,
Z golenia w piqty, from his knee to his heel
Daj to, Panie Swiely. Grant this, Holy Lord.
Ajezeliurok, And if it's an enchantment
Niech wyleci za rok, Let it fly away around the corner.
Ajezeligosciec, And if it's rheumatism
Niech uleci w paznokiec, Let it go into his fingernail
A z paznokcia w ziemie., And the fingernail into the ground
Na trzy sa^zenie. Three fathoms down.
W irnie, Ojca i Syna, i Ducha Swie_tego, In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Niech nie trapi wszystko zle Fra^czka chorego. Let the sick man Fra_czek not suffer from anything.
(Guslarze 1640; quoted after Juszyfiski 1820 vol. 1 p. 391).

623
Appendix D: The Crimes of Witchcraft

This appendix provides a rough indication of the incidence and types of crime of which alleged witches were
accused. Many accusations involved numerous and diverse allegations, and the focus of trials changed as
witnesses came forward or, especially, during interrogation under torture. The crimes confessed to often had
only tangential relationship to the original accusations, while the formal verdict of the court often selected just
the most pertinent of the many crimes described in confessions.
To capture something of this complex situation, the categories below indicate two sorts of alleged
activity. "Primary Crimes" (I) are those activities that figure in the original accusation and in the early
testimony of witnesses; in this category I have also included activities to which the accused admitted, more or
less freely, before or without torture. These are the alleged activities which led to the trial. "Secondary Crimes"
(II) comprise those activities confessed to during or after torture, insofar as these depart from the primary crime;
some late witness-testimony coming later in a trial or in response to earlier confessions; and the crimes listed in
verdicts.
Neither categorization admits of much precision. Because of the fragmentary nature of many records, and
the ambiguity of even the best-preserved records, a degree of arbitrariness is inevitable in a list of this sort.
Nevertheless, it does help to clarify some patterns, such as the frequency with which original accusations having
to do with milk or sickness give way to more sinister confessions of murder, host-desecration, and the sabbat.

I. II.
Protection., Healing and Divination 60 10
Protection 18 1
Protection azainst Natural Phenomena 4_ 0
Protection against storms and hail Trials ## 2,3,81 3 0
Protection against fire Trial # 3 l 0
Protection azainst Malefice 14. 1_
Protection against malefice Trials ## 7,55,58 3 0
Protection against milk theft Trials ##2,3,7,11,46,48,59,62,63,83,85,99 11 1
Healing 33 8
Unspecified Healing 7 0
Unspecified Healing Trial #8 1 0
Healing Humans and Animals 12 1
Healing Humans Trials ## 3,4,9,22,33,58,83,86,127,136 10 0
Healing Cattle Trials##3,13,42,58,63,75,127 5 2
Healing Horses Trials ## 42,86 1 l
Healing Other Livestock Trial # 68 1 0
Healing Things 75 5
Healing Milk Trials ## 4,20,21,42, 50, 58, 61,62,63,127 6 4
Healing Beer Trials ## 2, 5, 7,13,22, 58, 76,164 8 1
Healing Distilled Liquor Trial # 13 1 0
Divination 7 1
Divination Trials ##2,5,21,30,55,58,63, 143 7 1
Other Cunning Arts 2 0

624
 • Crimes of Witches •

Selling Herbs Trials ## 39,81 2 0

Favor 21 3
Love Magic Trials ## 2,3,4, 5,16,21,37,50, 55,56, 65,84,86,106,
110,148,170,171 16 3
Business Magic Trials ##4,21,69 3 0
Gambling Magic Trials ## 39,75 2 0
Court Magic Trial # 161 1 0

Malefice 130 69
Unspecified Malefice 11 1
Unspecified Malefice Trials ## 6, 8,17,18, 35, 36,43,47, 60, 90,140,141 11 l
Malefice against Humans and Livestock 90 39
Malefice asainst Humans 60_ 18
Malefice against Humans Trials ## 15,16,26,27,29,32,33,37,39,50,58,62,63,65,
68,78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87,92,94, 97, 107,
108,110, 111, 115, 118,120,122,125,127, 131,
137,141,146, 151, 153,154,161,166,170, 171,
172 38 10
Malefice against Manor Lord Trials ## 12,37,53,77,82,85,86,95,96,108,109,112,
153, 154, 158, 172 13 4
Malefice against Children Trials ## 53,78,92,96,97,108,109,112,123,137,141,
165 9 4
Malefice against Livestock 30 21
Malefice against Cattle Trials## 10,22,25,29,53, 68,75,77, 78, 85, 88,92,93, 96,
97,98,100,104,107, 108,109,110,112,115,123,
125,127,133,139,151,153,158,162,168,172,
173 22 14
Malefice against Horses Trials ## 68,86,88,96,104,133,158,159 5 3
Malefice against Sheep Trials ## 68,96,160 2 1
Malefice against Other Livestock Trials ## 68,78,151,162 1 3
Malefice against fertility and production 27 J2
Malefice asainst Milk 13 __6
Malefice against Milk Trials ## 29,38,61,62 2 2
Milk Theft Trials ## 2,7,11,13,21,38,46,61, 63,81,97,100,127,
150 11 4
Malefice against Crops 6_ 10
Malefice against Crops Trials ## 29,31,48,50,52,62,84,88,89,97,104,110,123,
127,139,150 6 10
Malefice against Beer and Distilled Liquor 8_ 3
Malefice against Beer Trials ## 1,13,22,50,79,142 4 2
Malefice against Distilled Liquor Trials ## 30,70,132,133,146 4 1
Malefice against whole community 2_ 10
Causing Epidemic Disease Trial#70 0 1
Causing drought, floods, or hail Trials ## 52,62, 70,78, 81, 97,98, 104,143,154,158 2 9
Actions associated with Witchcraft 68 26
Actions associated with Milk Theft and Malefice. but also sometimes with healing 19 7
Gathering Cattle Leavings Trials ## 75,97,98,100,101,127 5 1
Gathering Dew Trials ## 61, 62, 63,70, 74, 97,101,127,150, 173 5 5
Gathering Herbs Trial # 63 1 0
Field Walking Trials ## 48,49, 63, 89, 98, 134 5 1
Pouring Out Wash Water Trials ## 20,63,70 3 0
Other Suspicious Actions Trials ## 110,127 2 0
Ownership or Theft 15 7
Of Ointments Trials ## 50, 53, 58, 61, 85, 98,101 2 5

625
 • Appendix D •

Of Powders Trials ##39,53,109,112 3 1

Of Human Remains Trials ##5,7,19,27,69,70,164 6 l
O f O t h e r Objects Trials ## 19,39,75,143 4 0
Malefic Techniques 34 13
S e n d i n g Witchcraft Trials ## 29,78,79,107,109,131,151 6 1
Sending Devils Trials ## 15,21,41,65, 68, 80, 87, 94, 112,115,118,122,
139, 146,152, 153,161,165,176 15 5
Possession Trials ##41, 54,68,94,118,151,153 5 2
Burying Enchantments Trials ## 12,14,21,22,29,33,62,83,96,98,154,172 8 4
Use of Infants and Stillbirths Trial# 84 0 1

Religious Offenses 30 41
Tools of the Church 27 13
Ritual action in Church Trials ##96,98, 111 3 o
Ritual action during Holiday Trials ## 46,49,63,102,134 5 0
Mis-use of Sacramentals Trials ##2,4,58,75,76,97,137 6 2
Theft o f t h e H o s t Trials ## 42, 59, 62, 66, 68, 78, 96, 108,112, 123,125,139,
145,146,148,149,151, 158,161, 167,172,173... 13 11
Blasphemy and Similar 3 28
Blasphemy Trial #58 1 0
Offense against God Trials ## 46,75,81,98,127,140,164 1 6
Renunciation of God, BVM, Sts. Trials ## 33,39,51,57,68,104,108, 111, 112,115,146,
151,153,154 1 13
Desecration of the Host Trials ## 62,68,96,112,123,139,151,158,172 0 9
Demonolatria 24 124
Relationship with Devil [si 12 70
Pact with Devil Trials ## 21,33,39, 51, 52, 57,78,96, 106,119,123,139,
146,149, 151, 155, 158, 166, 172,174 3 17
Sex with Devil Trials ## 21,39,44,51,68, 84,96, 98,104,105,106,108,
110, 111, 112,115,139,149,151,152,153,154,
158,160, 162,172,176,179 2 26
Devil Helper or Familiar Trials ## 2,7, 8,21,28, 39, 50, 53, 71, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87,
98,101,104,105, 108,109,110, 111, 115, 120,124,
139,142,145,151,153,154,160,162 7 27
Sabbat and Related 12 54
A t t e n d a n c e at L y s a G o r a Trials ## 21,39, 50, 51, 52, 53,61,62, 65,68,70,78, 80, 84,
86, 88,92,96,97,98,99,104,105,108,110,111,
112,114,115,119,120,123,127,128,140,144,
146,151,152,153,154,156,158, 160, 162,172 7 43
Musician at Lysa Gora Trials ##52,104,110,151 l 3
Night Flight Trials ##50,61,62,76, 84,98,120,127 3 5
Metamorphosis Trials ## 21,50,138 l 2
Child-Sacrifice Trial #123 0 1

Reputation and Judicial Tests 54 _9

Reputation 36 3
Public Reputation Trials ## 62, 63, 74,75, 85, 89,100,115,127,134,143,15812 0
Assoc, with Convicted Witches Trials ## 22,50,60,100,161 5 0
Denounced in the Past Trials ## 33,50,70,92,115 2 3
Denounced, current or preceding trial
Trials ## 33, 50, 61,62, 75, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100,108, 109,
110,112,123,151,162 17 0
Judicial Tests 18 6
Floated when Dunked Trials ## 7,43,60, 61,62, 74, 83, 85,88,96,110,125,135,
140,178,179 16 0
Insensible to Torture Trials ## 81,84,96,99,162 0 5

626
 • Crimes of Witches •

Devil's Mark Trial# 70,153 0 2

Magical Escape from Stocks Trials ## 104,151 2 o
Auxilliary to Witchcraft 16 0
Accomplice Trials ## 26,37, 50, 54, 55, 59,112,148,164,167 10 0
Hiring Cunning Woman Trials ## 16,26,148 3 0
Hiring Witch Trials ## 87,161,165 3 0
Non-Magical Crimes 13 4
Sexual 7 1
Adultery Trials ## 16,17 2 0
Procuring / Assisting Adultery Trials ## 8,13 2 0
Prostitution Trial # 7 l 0
Abortion Trials ##23,56,148 2 1
Other 6 3
Non-Magical Murder Trials ## 55, 84,148 2 1
Infanticide Trial #160 0 l
Non-Magical Poisoning Trial # 55 l 0
Arson Trial #50 0 1
Kidnapping to Sell to the Jews Trial # 84 1 0
Ordinary Theft Trials ## 7,12 2 0

627
Appendix E: Places
This Appendix lists the size, status, and location by region of the towns (and a few villages) before whose
courts alleged witches were tried. Note the following:
1. The actual trial often took place in a village, which could be a considerable distance from the town from
which the officers of the court were summoned.
2. The "size" of the town is based on its size at the end of the 16th century. As discussed in 1.2.3, most towns
experienced considerable decline in the 17th century, and some shrunk rapidly as a result of the catastrophes
of the 1650s: Wyszogrod, for example, listed here as a "Regional" city with 2,500 inhabitents in the 16th
century, had shrunk to perhaps 600 after 1650.
3. "Status" indicates ownership. Noble-owned private towns ranged from minor near-villages owned by
middling szlachta, to important regional centres owned by the great magnatial families; e.g. Rzesz6w, owned
by the Lubomirskis. Royal cities also ranged from the very small (with leaseholders almost indistinguishable
from private noble owners) to important towns with a strong sense of their Saxon-law rights and freedoms.
Church-owned towns could attach to bishoprics (e.g. Kielce, Tylicz, and Muszyna, all the property of the
bishop of Krakow); to cathedral chapters (e.g. Waliszew, property of the Poznah capitulum) or to Cystercian
or Benedictine monasteries (e.g. Je_drzejow, Koprzywnica, Krzywin, Skrzynno).
4. "Region" provides a very rough location, and should not be confused with smaller geographical units such as
wojewodstwo (palatinate) or ziemia (land). Within a region such as Wielkopolska, there are large historical
differences between Wielkopolska proper (the Poznan area) and its eastern and southern borders, such as
Kujawy or the Sieradz wojewowdzwo (see Map after p. 699).

Place Trial(s) Size Status Region

Barcin 163 Small Noble Wielkopolska
Belzyce 14, 15,16, 174 Small Noble Malopolska
Biecz 41 Regional Royal Malopolska
Bochnia 84 Regional Royal Malopolska
Borek 26 Small Noble Wielkopolska
Brzesc Kujawski 107,144,146,156 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Bydgoszcz 28, 33, 54, 69 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Che_ciny 60, 61,62, 63,66 Regional Royal Malopolska
Chelmno 34, 64,91 Regional Church Royal Prussia
Dobczyce 31 Medium Noble Malopolska
Fordon 124 Small Royal Wielkopolska
Goraj 118 Small Noble Malopolska
Grabow 175 Small Royal Wielkopolska
Inowroclaw 159 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Iwkowa 18 Village Malopolska
Jadowniki 117 Village Malopolska
Jazowsko 168 Village Malopolska
Jqdrzejow 71 Regional Church Malopolska
Kalisz 7,11, 12, 13,21,22 Regional Royal Malopolska
Kielce 19 Medium Church Malopolska
Kiszkowo 172 Small Noble Malopolska
Kleczew 68,96,108,112,158 Medium Noble Malopolska

628
 • Appendix D •

Place Trial(s) Size Status Region

24, 32, 79, 89, 90,132, 133,
Klimk6wka 134 Village Malopolska
Klodawa 73 Medium Royal Malopolska
Kobylin 23 Medium Noble Wielkopolska
Koprzywnica 157 Medium Church Malopolska
Koryczany 38 village Malopolska
Kowalewo 169 Small Royal Royal Prussia
Krak6w 20,143,147,164,170 Principle Royal Malopolska.
Kroscienko 25 Small Royal Malopolska
Krzywin 72 Medium Church Wielkopolska
Lqczyca 67,135 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Lobzenica 57,103,110 Medium Noble Wielkopolska
Lodz 48 Small Church Wielkopolska
27,39,42, 56, 59, 80, 87,
Lublin 118,125,161,165 Principle Royal Malopolska.
Muszyna 81 Small Church Malopolska
Nieszawa 153,154 Medium Royal Wielkopolska
Nowe 179 Medium Royal Royal Prussia
Nowy Sa.cz 45,70 Regional Royal Malopolska
Nowy Wisnicz 29,40, 55, 58, 97,98,99, Medium Noble Malopolska
100,101,102,137
Oswiecim 171 Regional Royal Malopolska
Pacanow 167 Medium Noble Malopolska
Pilica 43 Medium Noble Malopolska
Ploiisk 120,121,122,, 126,130,141 Small Royal Mazowsze
Poznaii 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 8 , ,9,44,155 Piinciple Royal Wielkopolska
Praszka 65 Small Noble Wielkopolska
Przeclaw 76 Small Noble Malopolska
Pyzdry 123,151, 160, 162,166 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Raciaz 152 Small Church Mazowsze
Radoszyce 36 Small Royal Malopolska
Radziejow 176 Medium Royal
Rzeszow 136,148,178 Regional Noble Ruthenia
Sambor 35 Regional Royal
Sandomierz 77 Regional Royal Malopolska
Skrzynno 37 Small Church Malopolska
Slomniki 74, 75,127 Medium Royal Malopolska
Stajszewo 115 Village Royal Prussia
Szadek 30,46,47 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Szczekociny 140 Small Noble Malopolska
Szczerc6w 145,177 Medium Royal Wielkopolska
Tuliszkow 92,93 Small Noble Wielkopolska
Turek 49,50 Medium Church Wielkopolska
Tylicz 173 Small Church Malopolska
Uniejow 113 Medium Church Wielkopolska
Waliszew 1 Small Church Wielkopolska
Wara 10 Village Ruthenia
Warta 78, 82, 83, 85, 86,94,95, Regional Royal Wielkopolska
109
Wielki Kozmin 104,105,111 Regional Noble Wielkopolska
Wschowa 17 Regional Royal Wielkopolska
Wyszogrod 106,114,116,119, 128, Regional Royal Mazowsze
129, 131,138,139,149,
150
Zablotow 53 Village Ruthenia
Zba_szyn 51,52,53,88,142 Small Noble Wielkopolska

629
Appendix F: Names
Index of accused witches by name
This index lists all named witches from the database. The list excludes 25 trials, and at least 68 accused witches,
for whom I have no name recorded. Names are crosslisted with the reference number, place, and year of the trial
in which they appear. The list includes only the names of accused witches, excluding people denounced but not
brought to trials, as well as witnesses, accusers, or other participants in the trial.
A great many of the records provide only given names (e.g. Agata), apparent surnames that are probably
nicknames or epithets (e.g. Wawrzyniec Dziad, "Wawrzyniec the hobo"), or maritonyms based on the
husband's name (e.g. Agnieszka Jakobka, "Agnieszka wife of Jakob;" Lukaczka Grelaczka, "the wife of Lukasz
Grylas"). Therefore, the list is alphabetized according to first names, but includes surnames and nicknames, as
well as variations in spelling, where significant. The abbreviation "m." after a name denotes a man.

Adam Jarpianka (m.) 52 Zba_szyn 654 AnnaNowaczka 162 Pyzdry 1732

Adamkowa 120 Plonsk 699 AnnaofBlaszkowa 82 Warta 1678
Adwiga 15 Belzyce 598 Anna Ofiarzyna 67 L^czyca 1668
Agata 154 Nieszawa 721 AnnaPannowa 102 Nowy Wisnicz 1689
Agnieszka Draganka 131 Wyszogrod 701 Anna Piela or Pielowa 63 Cheeiny 1665
Agnieszka Jakobka 154 Nieszawa 721 AnnaPrzybela 78 Warta c. 1676
Agnieszka Kapuscina 62 Cheeiny 665 AnnaRatajka 123 Pyzdry 1699
Agnieszka Kociolowa 63 Cheeiny 665 AnnaRydzynka 50 Turek 1652
Agnieszka Kruczka 36 Radoszyce 638 Anna Stelmaszka 160 Pyzdry 1731
Agnieszka Mazurek 178 Rzeszow c. 710 AnnaSwedycka 80 Lublin 1678
Agnieszka Michalowska 31 Dobczyce 634 Anna Szymkowa 153 Nieszawa 1721
Agnieszka Szymkowa 159 Inowroclaw 731 Anna Trynczanka 15 Belzyce 1598
Agnieszka Strycharczanka 28 Bydgoszcz 630 AnnaWiazowa 63 Che_ciny 1665
Agnieszka Pekoszka 178 Rzeszow c. 710 Anna Wiotezczyna 37 Skrzynno 1639
Agnieszka Pawlikowa 63 Cheeiny 665 Anna Woitaszkowa 59 Lublin 1664
Agnieszka Rosmika 142 Zbajszyn 708 AnnaWozna 50 Turek 1652
Agnieszka Rokocina 151 Pyzdry 719 Anna Wszedybelka 92 Tuliszkow 1684
Agnieszka Szostakowa 76 Przeclaw 675 AnnaZelazna 9 Poznan 1582
Agnieszka Trabczyna Antoni Tuciak (m.) 168 Jazowsko 1748
orFrabczyna 140 Szczekociny 706 Apolonia Olbinska 151 Pyzdry 1719
Agnieszka Ziembina 38 Koryczany 643 Apolonia Porwitka 13 Kalisz 1593
Anastazja 71 Jedrzejow 671 Apolonja Strycharka 28 Bydgoszcz 1630
Anastazja Kaczmarka X Kleczew 700 Banaszka Piechowa 172 Kiszkowo 1761
Andrzej Bochehski (m.) 155 Poznan 722 Barbara or Barwa 110 Lobzenica 1692
Andrzeyowa Orlowa 14 Belzyce 598 Barbara Drozdakiewiczowa... 141 Plonsk 1708
Anna 109 Warta 691 Barbara Farina 88 Zba^szyn 1681
Anna 110 Lobzenica 692 Barbara Grzeszowka 60 Cheeiny 1665
Anna 138 Wyszogrod 703 Barbara Jewionka 55 Nowy Wisnicz 1659
Anna Arpianka 51 Zba_szyn 654 Barbara Kaczmarka 162 Pyzdry 1732
Anna Cwierciaczka 152 Raciaz 719 Barbara Kadzionka 128 Wyszogrod 1700
Anna Chociszewska 8 Poznan 582 Barbara of Radom 7 Kalisz 1580
Anna Czelczonka 23 Kobylin 616 Berbelski 167 Pacan6w 1741
Anna Dudzicha 81 Muszyna 678 Chrystyna Jabluszewska 166 Pyzdry 1740
Anna Grzeskowa 88 Zbajszyri 681 Czapczanka 28 Bydgoszcz 1630
Anna Grzesiowa Puchalina .... 66 Chqciny 666 DorotaBartlomiejowaPilecka.75 Slomniki 1674
Anna Krzywdzina 100 Nowy Wisnicz 688 Dorota Gnieczkowa 2 Poznan 1544
Anna Leniwa 50 Turek 652 Dorota Lysakowa 62 Chqciny 1665
Anna Maciejowa Sieczczyna 5 Poznan 559 Dorota Markowa 26 Borek 1624
Anna Mark6wna 26 Borek 624 Dorota of Mruczyna 124 Fordon 1700
Anna Markowa 41 Biecz 644 Dorota of Siedlikow 21 Kalisz 1613
Anna Matuszka 159 Inowroclaw 731 Dorota Piwkowa 49 Turek 1652
Anna Mizerka 93 Tuliszkow 684 Dorota Sierczyna 136 Rzeszow 1703

630
 • Names •

Dorota"the old" 172 Kiszkowo 761 Katarzyna 94 Warta

Dorota Wojciechowa 25 Kroscienko 622 Katarzyna 172 Kiszkowo
Dorota Znojkowa 63 Ch^ciny 665 Katarzyna 172 Kiszkowo
Dzwonczycha 132 Klimkowka 702 Katarzyna Blachowa 110 Lobzenica
Eich(m.) 51 Zba_szyn 654 Katarzyna Derlina 110 Lobzenica
Elzbieta Jakubowa 11 Kalisz 584 Katarzyna Kapuscina 62 Checiny
Elzbieta Cackowa 62 Ch^ciny 665 Katarzyna Kmarynska 161 Lublin
Elzbieta Sieczconka 55 Nowy Wisnicz 659 Katarzyna Kociolowna 63 Che_ciny
Elzbieta Stepkowicowa 70 Nowy Sa^cz 670 Katarzyna Koczanowiczowna 148 Rzeszow
Ewa 37 Skrzynno 639 Katarzyna Korzynina 20 Krakow
Ewa 122 Plonsk 699 Katarzyna Krzywonoska 156 Brzesc Kuj awski
Ewa Dombrowska 163 Barcin 735 Katarzyna Kurdyszanka 113 Uniejow
Ewa Janowa 82 Warta 678 Katarzyna Kutrowa 109 Warta
Ewa Klimkowa 114 Wyszogrod 693 Katarzyna Laniionka 123 Pyzdry
EwaKnaflowa 151 Pyzdry 719 Katarzyna Michalicha
Ewa Krucka 61 Cheeiny 665 Asuwalicha 161 Lublin
Ewa Mierzytcanka 145 Szczercow 716 Katarzyna Mrowczyna 115 Stajszewo
Fafarowa or Fajfarzyna 63 Che_ciny 665 Katarzyna Musialkowa 151 Pyzdry
Fenna 133 Klimkowka 702 Katarzyna of Ilowiec 6 Poznan
Franciszka Tuciaczka 168 Jazowsko 748 Katarzyna of Mlotkowo 57 Lobzenica
Franciszkowa Dziedzicowa 62 Cheeiny 665 Katarzyna of Wojnicz 58 Nowy Wisnicz
Giertruda or Gierka 112 Kleczew 693 Katarzyna Paprocka 33 Bydgoszcz
Gierusza Klimerzyna 21 Kalisz 613 Katarzyna Pawlowa Hutkowa
Grzegorz Klecha (m.) 104 Wielki Kozmin 690 (orChudkowa) 59 Lublin
Halka 53 Zablotow 656 Katarzyna Pawconka 62 Che.ciny
Helzbieta 26 Borek 624 Katarzyna Poruczniczka 55 Nowy Wisnicz
Helena Suchorska 30 Szadek 632 Katarzyna Ratayowa 125 Lublin
Heliasowa 19 Kielce 605 Katarzyna Swiercowa 63 Che_ciny
Iadwiga Talarzyna Katarzyna Stokowcowka
Michalkowa 98 Nowy Wisnicz 688 orStokowcowa 62 Cheeiny
Iagata Korfunka 123 Pyzdry 699 Katarzyna Wieczorkowa 71 Je.drzej6w
Iwan Niemczak (m.) 79 Klimkowka 678 Katarzyna Wroblowa 148 Rzesz6w
Jadwiga 27 Lublin 627 Katharzyna Kozimiriska 139 Wyszogrod
Jadwiga 71 J^drzejow 671 Kawina 63 Checiny
Jadwiga Bozkowa 63 Che_ciny 665 Kazimierz Kmarynski (m.).... 161 Lublin
Jadwiga Ciemna 88 Zba_szyh 681 Krystyna Flanderka 88 Zba_szyn
Jadwiga Gtuchowa 63 Checiny 665 Krystyna GajowaDanielecka..74 Slomniki
Jadwiga Gedko wna 106 Wyszogrod 690 Kulik(m.) 53 Zablotow
Jadwiga Kasprowicz6wna Lucja 37 Skrzynno
Prawe.cka 62 Checiny 665 Lukaczka Grelaczka 24 Klimkowka
Jadwiga Koza 65 Praszka 665 Lizowska 165 Lublin
Jadwiga Kryczka 77 Sandomierz 675 Malgorzata 124 Fordon
Jadwiga Mackowa 26 Borek 624 Malgorzata Blachowa 172 Kiszkowo
Jadwiga Macowa jr 97 Nowy Wisnicz 688 Malgorzata Kobialczyna 171 Oswie.cim
Jadwiga Macowa sr 97 Nowy Wisnicz 688 Malgorzata Magierska 137 Nowy Wisnicz
Jadwiga Sczecinina 50 Turek 652 MagdaSobkowa 105 Wielki Kozmin
Jadwiga Wieczorkowa X Kleczew 691 Magdalena Dobielska 170 Krakow
Jadwiga Wujtowiczowa 54 Bydgoszcz 658 Margoska Natanczyna 147 Krakow
Jagna 108 Kleczew 691 Marianna Berbelska 167 Pacanow
Jagna of Zabikowo 3 Poznaii 544 Marianna Karabinka 85 Warta c.
Jagna of Zabikowo 4 Poznan 549 Marianna Maniusca 167 Pacanow
Jan Baran (m.) 40 Nowy Wisnicz 643 Marianna Wawrzynowa 82 Warta
Jan Bialy (m.) 69 Bydgoszcz 670 Marjanna Bartoska
Jan Kostera (m.) 88 Zba_szyn 681 Ordyncyna 121 Plonsk
Jan Papieznik (m.) 110 Lobzenica 692 Marjanna Czubatka
Jan Sczecina (m.) 50 Turek 652 orCzubata 96 Kleczew
Justyna (Justianna) Marjanna of Fordon 124 Fordon
Rabiaszka Sukienniczka.... 101 Nowy Wisnicz 689 Marjanna of Oporowko 158 Kleczew
Kaszka Pastuszka Marjanna of Tuliszkow 96 Kleczew
orOwczarka 96 Kleczew 688 Marusza Lukasza 12 Kalisz
Katarzyna 16 Belzyce 600 Marusza Nowaczka 86 Warta
Katarzyna 46 Szadek 649 Maryska 51 Zba_szyri

631
 • Appendix F •

Maryanna Alexina Soltyska....92 Tuliszkow 1684 Sabina Bartlowa 47 Szadek 1649

Maryanna Kazimierka 120 Plonsk 1699 Sebastyan Prembecki (m.) 164 Krakow 1737
Maryanna Pawlowa 162 Pyzdry 1732 Sidorowa 63 Cheeiny 1665
Maryjanna 172 Kiszkowo 1761 Sobkowa 119 Wyszogrod 1698
Maryna 122 Plonsk 1699 Sobkowa 120 Plonsk 1699
Maryna 27 Lublin 1627 Stanislawowa Mistalowa 15 Belzyce 1598
Maryna Bialkowa 59 Lublin 1664 Steczek (Stefan) Koczan (m.)..87 Lublin 1681
Maryna Jaworkowa 129 Wyszogrod 1700 Stefan Rewak (m.) 90 Klimkowka 1683
Maryna Jozwowa Glowacka. 121 Plonsk 1699 Szperkowa 91 Chelmno 1684
Maryna Lazarcowka Teresa Sczecinianka 50 Turek 1652
Wnukowa 61 Cheeiny 1665 Wawrzyniec Dziad (m.) 151 Pyzdry 1719
Maryna Mazurkowicowa 84 Bochnia 1679 Wojciech Jakubowski (m.)....174 Belzyce 1774
Maryna Piela or Pielowa 63 Cheeiny 1665 YagnieszkaKazimierzowa....l51 Pyzdry 1719
Maryna Wyrazkowa 61 Cheeiny 1665 Zawadzka 165 Lublin 1739
Mateusz Kleszka (m.) Ill Wielki Kozmin 1692 Zawadzki(m.) 165 Lublin 1739
Mierwinski (m.) 164 Krakow 1737 Zofia 22 Kalisz 1616
Mikolaj Janiszewski (m.) 161 Lublin 1732 Zofia 83 Warta 1678
Mikolaj Skowronka (m.) 60 Che.ciny 1665 Zofia 145 Szczercow 1716
Nicolaus Nachbar (m.) 17 Wschowa 1601 Zofia Adamowa Kuklina 62 Che_ciny 1665
Olena Baniaska 134 Klimkowka 1702 Zofia Balcerka 108 Kleczew 1691
Olexina 53 Zablotow 1656 Zofia Baranowa 39 Lublin 1643
Oryna Pawliszanka 173 Tylicz 1763 Zofia Bojadlkowa 105 Wielki Kozmin 1690
Oryszka or Oryzka 87 Lublin 1681 ZofiaBykowa 109 Warta 1691
Paprocka 143 Krakow 1713 Zofia Czerkowa 178 Rzeszow c. 1710
Paraszka Hlacholicha 87 Lublin 1681 Zofia Dwurniczka 178 Rzeszow c. 1710
Pawliczka 89 Klimkowka 1682 Zofia Filipowiczowa 37 Skrzynno 1639
Petronela Kusiewa 172 Kiszkowo 1761 Zofia Janowska 148 Rzesz6w 1718
Pietrowa 82 Warta 1678 Zofia Kistyniowa 125 Lublin 1700
Polaga 32 Klimkowka 1636 Zofia Konstancja 31 Dobczyce 1634
Regina 110 Lobzenica 1692 Zofia Kowalka 105 Wielki Kozmin 1690
Regina 116 Wyszogrod 1697 ZofiaLucyna 178 Rzeszow c. 1710
Regina Boroszka 44 Poznan 1645 Zofia Macowa 97 NowyWisnicz 1688
Regina Chawlozowa 22 Kalisz 1616 Zofia Marchewka 146 Brzesc Kujawski 1717
Regina Czubatka 96 Kleczew 1688 Zofia Pazdryakowa 140 Szczekociny 1706
Regina Dereciowa 22 Kalisz 1616 Zofia Szymkowa 172 Kiszkowo 1761
Regina Dominiczka 162 Pyzdry 1732 Zofia Tomaszowa 107 Brzesc Kujawski 1691
Regina D worakowa 63 Cheeiny 1665 Zofia Zapiguzowa 63 Cheeiny 1665
Regina Frakowa 127 Slomniki 1700 Zofja P^dziszka 153 Nieszawa 1721
Regina Golcowna 29 NowyWisnicz 1632 Zofja Straszybotha 48 Lodz 1652
Regina Grzybowa 63 Cheeiny 1665 Zubek(m.) 10 Wara 1582
Regina Hancowna 35 Sambor 1638 Zuzanna Jewionka 55 NowyWisnicz 1659
Regina Je_drzejkaMackowa... 108 Kleczew 1691 Zuzanna Rozyna 150 Wyszogrod 1718
Regina Katarzyna
Mauczyna 100 NowyWisnicz 1688
Regina Kijowa 63 Cheeiny 1665
Regina Kociczyna 63 Cheeiny 1665
Regina Korfunka 123 Pyzdry 1699
Regina Krolowa 63 Cheeiny 1665
Regina Kusiowna 172 Kiszkowo 1761
Regina Lewczykowa 118 Lublin 1698
Regina Matuszka 68 Kleczew 1669
Regina Owczarka .....96 Kleczew 1688
Regina Pazdryakowa 140 Szczekociny 1706
Regina Sramina 172 Kiszkowo 1761
Regina Skotarka 68 Kleczew 1669
Regina Smalcowa 99 NowyWisnicz 1688
Regina Sokolkowa 56 Lublin 1661
Regina Wierbicka 84 Bochnia 1679
Regina Wojciechowska 99 Nowy Wisniczl688
Regina Zaleska 42 Lublin 1644
Reina Bartoszowa
Misiakowna Kowalka 112 Kleczew 1693

632
Appendix G: Sources of Trials
This Appendix serves as a cross-reference for all of the trials discussed in this dissertation. Trials are referenced in the text of the dissertation by number, place,
and year (e.g. #26, Nowy Wisnicz 1632). Using this Appendix, the reader may trace such references both to their published source (if any) and their archival
source (if known). So, e.g., #26 gives Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 41-46 as the published source, and Arch. Diecezjalne w Tarnowie, Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae
sig. LN XXIII ff. 37v-44 as the archival record. Wherever possible, I have standardized the abrreviations for archival records according to the following model:
APTown-name, AMTown-name, where AP stands for "Archiwum Panstwowe [State Archive]" and AM stands for "Acta miasta [Town Records]." For example,
the record "APLublin, AMLublin sig. 141 (Criminalia) ff. 198-204" indicates that the trial in question may be found on folios 198-204 of Criminalia or criminal-
court records of Lublin, in record-book number 141 of the Lublin Town Records, in the State Archive of Lublin. However, there are numerous departures from
this standard model.
My own contact with most of these records, with the exception of the Lublin records, was through published material, some of it quite old. Many of these
records are no longer extant; many do still exist but are no longer in the archives originally cited; some were not yet catalogued at the time of original citation;
some were catalogued, but have been re-catalogued according to new archiving schemata in the intervening years. With the exception of the Lublin records
(which were most recently re-catalogued in the 1990s), I have made no attempt to update the signiatures or folio-numbers of the archival sources.

Abbreviations
AGAD Archiwum Glowne Akt Dawnych
AKM Archiwum Kurii Metropolitalnej wKrakowie
APMK Archiwum Panstwowe Miasta Krakowa
APMP Archiwum Panstwowe Miasta Poznania
APP Archiwum Publiczne Potockich
BJ Biblioteka Jagiellonska, Krakow
PAN Polska Akademia Nauk
PTPN Poznanskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciol Nauk
WAP Wojewodzkie Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie
SWPM Sa_d Wyzszego Prawa Miejskiego; in APMK.

# Year Place Print Source Archival Source

1 1511 Waliszew Ulanowski 1902 case #1660.
2 1544 Poznan Woronczak 1972 pp. 50-55; Lukaszewicz 1838 vol. 2 p. 275; APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 474 ff. 83v-86v.
DWOK vol. 15 pp. 240-241.
3 1544 Poznan Woronczak 1972 pp. 55-56; Maisel 1963 p. 213. APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 474 ff. 88v-89.
4 1549 Poznan Woronczak 1972 p. 57. APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 474 f. 148v.

633
 • Appendix G •

# Year Place Print Source Archival Source

5 1559 Poznan Lukaszewicz 1838 vol. p. 123-124; DWOK vol. 15 pp. 239-40; APMP, AMPoznan, Acta Criminalia no. 475 f. 22.
Maisel 1963 p. 213.
6 1567 Poznan Maisell963p.213. APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 475 f. 43v
7 1580 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 13-23. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. 1 IT. 9-15
8 1582 Poznan Maisel 1963 p. 213. APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 475 IT. 216-218v
9 1582 Poznan Maisel 1963 p. 213. APMP, AMPoznan, Criminalia sig. 476 f. 40
10 1582 Wara Lysiaked. 1971 item 262.
11 1584 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 24-26. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. sig. 1 If. 4344.
12 1587 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 27-29. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. sig. 1 ff. 67-68.
13 1593 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 30-38. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. sig. 1 ff. 102v-107.
14 1598 Belzyce Klamerl902p.468. Uncatalogued Belzyce wojt-court records
15 1598 Bel/yce Klarnerl902p.467. Uncatalogued Belzyce wojt-court records.
16 1600 Belzyce Klarner 1902 pp. 468-469. Uncatalogued Belzyce wojt-court records
17 1601 Wschowa Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 pp. 160-161. SWPM 1-27 ff. 1283-1285.
18 1602 Iwkowa Plaza ed. 1969 item 284.
19 1605 Kielce Wijaczka2003 p. 38; Shanser 1982 p. 32.
20 1611 Krak6w Kracik and Rozek 1986 p. 111. WAP K 267 ff. 13-14
21 1613 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 39-55. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. sig. 1 ff. 176-182.
22 1616 Kalisz Baranowski ed. 1951 pp. 56-66. AGAD, AMKalisz A. Deer. sig. 1 ff. 191-194.
23 1616 Kobylin Baranowski 1952 pp. 129-130; Lukaszewicz 1869 vol. 1 p. 74.
24 1618 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, item 145.
25 1622 Kroscienko Rafacz 1918. Castr. Crac. Rel. vol. 47 ff. 1955-1956.
26 1624 Borek Lukaszewicz 1869 vol. 2 pp. 38. Uncatalogued Borek town records.
27 1627 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 11-12. APLublin, AMLublinsig. 141 (Criminalia) ff. 198-204.
28 1630 Bydgoszcz Malewski 1936. Manuscript excerpt of lost AMBydgoszcz 1630-1672, excerpted in Bibliotheca
Bernardina sig. 211, p. 44.
29 1632 Nowy Wisnicz Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 41-46. Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae, Arch. Diecezjalne w Tarnowie, sig. LN XXIII
ff. 37v-44.
30 1632 Szadek Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 p. 161. SWPM 1-31 f. 381.
31 1634 Dobczyce Baranowski 1952 pp. 41, 79; Ulanowski ed. 1921 vol. 1 p. 333;
Wislicz 1997a.
32 1636 Klimkowka Lysiaked. 1965, item 399.
33 1638 Bydgoszcz Janiszewska-Mincer 1963 pp. 110-124. Biblioteka PAN w Korniku ms. 1037, Causa Contra Paprocka ratione veneficii
1638.
34 1638 Chelmno Biskup 1961 pp. 149-151. Arch. Torun sig. 322 items 502,506, 522..
35 1638 Sambor Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 p. 161. SWPM 1-31 f. 381.
36 1638 Radoszyce Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 p. 163. SWPM 1-31 ff. 1156-1157
37 1639 Skizynno Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 13-20. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 38 (Advocalalia) ff. 113-116.
38 1643 Koryczany Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970j>p. 163-164. SWPM 1-32 ff. 286-288
39 1643 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 140 (Criminalia) ff. 50-51,60-64v.
40 1643 Nowy Wisnicz Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 98-102 Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae, Arch. Diecezjalne w Tarnowie, sig. LN XXIII
ff. 102v-105
41 1644 Biecz Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 pp. 164-165; Pilaszek2005 pp. 117- SWPM 1-32 ff. 464-465; APKrakow/Wawel, A. Dep., sig. 6 f. 129-140
119.
42 1644 Lublin Ostling 2005. APLublin, AMLublin (Criminalia) sig. 143 ff. 122-132.

634
 • Sources •

# Year Place Print Source Archival Source

43 1645 Pilica Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 p. 165. SWPM 1-32 ff. 567-569
44 1645 Poznaii Lukaszewicz 1838 vol. 2 p. 323; DWOK vol. 15 p. 89.
45 1646 Nowy Sacz Syganski 1917 p. 457. Uncatalogued Nowy Sacz records.
46 1649 Szadek Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 pp. 165-166. SWPM 1-32 ff. 818-819.
47 1649 Szadek Bukowska-Gorgoni 1970 pp. 166-167. SWPM 1-32 ff. 819-821.
48 1652 Lodz Zand 1929 pp. 58-59. AGAD, AMLodz sig. 5/6 ff. 181v-182v.
49 1652 Turek Wyporska 2003 p. 46.
50 1652 Turek Wyporska 2003 pp. 46-53. APPoznan, AMTurek sig. 1/30 ff. 14v-21v.
51 1654 Zba_szyn Adamczyk 1938 p. 85. AMZbazyfi, no sig. given.
52 1654 Zbqszyn Adamczyk 1938 pp. 85-86. AMZba_szyn, no sig. given.
53 1656 Zablotow Semkowicz 1900 pp. 386-390. Ks. Gr. Halicz vol. 147 ff. 1963-1967.
54 1658 Bydgoszcz Malewski 1936 pp. 80-81. AMBydgoszcz sig. D I, 6 ff. 141ff.
55 1659 Nowy Wisnicz Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 212-240. Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae, Arch. Diecezjalne w Tamowie, sig. LN XXIII
ff. 204-227v.
56 1661 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 26-54. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 169 ff. 120-121,122v-123v, 124-127,264v-268v,
277v-280,337-339v, 342,345v-346v; sig. 109 ff. 284-286,288-290v.
57 1662 Lobzenica Wijaczka 2004 p. 170. APBydgoszcz, AMLobzenica sig. 11 ff. 13v-15v.
58 1662 Nowy Wisnicz Uruszczak ed. 2003 pp. 241-260. Acta maleficiorum Wisniciae, Arch. Diecezjalne w Tarnowie, sig. LN XXIII
ff. 228-242.
59 1664 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 54-57. APLublin, AMLublin (Criminalia) sig. 140 ff. 206-208.
60 1665 ChQciny Wijaczka 2003 pp. 39-40. BJ ms. 5476, Prothocollon actorum civilium officii consularis civitatis
Chencinensis, 1613-1680, f. 41.
61 1665 Che^ciny Wijaczka 2003 pp. 40-45. BJ ms. 5476, Prothocollon actorum civilium officii consularis civitatis
Chencinensis, 1613-1680, ff. 41v-43.
62 1665 Che^iny Wijaczka 2004 pp. 45-50. BJ ms 5476, Prothocollon actorum civilium officii consularis civitatis
Chencinensis, 1613-1680, ff. 43-44v.
63 1665 Che_ciny Wijaczka 2003 pp. 50-55. BJ ms. 5476, Prothocollon actorum civilium officii consularis civitatis
Chencinensis, 1613-1680, ff. 45-46v.
64 1665 Chehnno Biskup 1961 pp. 149-151. Arch. Tor. sig. 322, item 506
65 1665 Praszka Baranowski 1962. AGAD, AMPraszka sig. 2 ff.76-83
66 1666 Ch^ciny Wijaczka 2003 pp. 56-58. BJ ms. 5476, Prothocollon actorum civilium officii consularis civitatis
Chencinensis, 1613-1680, ff 46-56v.
67 1668 Leczyca Rafacz 1933 pp. 562, 564. Arch. Gdansk sig. 717 f. 147
68 1669 Kleczew None. PTPN ms. 859 (Kleczew Criminalia 1624-1738) ff. 106-1 lOv, cited after T.
Wislicz's typed transcript.
69 1670 Bydgoszcz Malewski 1936 pp. 80-81. AMBydgoszcz., Advocatalia for 1670, no sig. or ff. given.
70 1670 Nowy Sa_cz Syganski 1917 pp. 457-458; Uruszczak 1994 pp. 196-203. Acta maleficorum m. N. Sac/, APKrakow, acta depositaria sig. 116, ff. 399-419.
71 1671 Je_drzejow Karwowskil892p. 198.
72 1672 Krzywin Rafacz 1933 p. 562.
73 1673 Klodawa Rafacz 1933 pp. 562, 564; Wozniakowa 1990 pp. 339-340. Akta sadu asesorskiego no. 399, unpag.; AGAD, Arch. Radziwillow z
Nieborowa (akta nie uporzadkowane no. 52), Prejudykaty sa_dow zadwornych
ff.. 261-266.
74 1674 Slomniki Siaikowski 2000 p. 84-85. AMSlomniki, no sig. specified.
75 1674 Slomniki Siaikowski 2000 p. 85-87. AMStomniki, no sig. specified.
76 1675 Przeclaw Kryczynski 1932. AMPrzectaw, no sig. specified.

635
 • Appendix G •

# Year Place Print Source Archival Source

77 1675 Sandomieiz Wijaczka 2003 pp. 55-56. APKielce, AMSandomierz sig. 11 ff. 77v-78,88.
78 c. 1680 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 193-194. AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 ff 529-533
79 1678 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, item 797.
80 1678 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 57-60 APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 69-73.
81 1678 Muszyna Bogucka 1958; Piekosinski 1889 p. 361.
82 1678 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski eds. 1950 pp. 179-181. AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 ff. 134-135.
83 1678 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski eds. 1950 pp. 181-183; AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 ff. 441-442.
Baranowski 1952 p. 144.
84 1679 Bochnia Kaczmarczyk 1910. Acta iudiciorum criminalium anni Domini 1676 [...] iurati Bochnensis
conscripta, ff. 63-95.
85 c. 1679 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 950 pp. 183-185. AGAD, AMWarta 46 IT. 456-457
86 1679 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 185-189. AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 ff. 437-439.
87 1681 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 60-66. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 130-138.
88 1681 Zba_szyn Adamczyk 1938 p. 86. AMZba_szyn, no sig. specified..
89 1682 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, items 849-850.
90 1683 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, item 890.
91 1684 Chelmno Biskup 1961 pp. 149-151. Arch. Tor. sig. 322 item 522
92 1684 Tuliszkow Wawrzeniecki 1926. loose-leaf archival records found among Kalisz records.
93 1684 Tuliszkow Wawrzyniecki 1926. loose-leaf archival records found among Kalisz records.
94 1685 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 189-190. AGAD, AMWarta sig 46 ff. 291-292.
95 1687 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 190-191. AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 f. 290
96 1688 Kleczew None. PTPN ms. 859 (Kleczew Criminalia 1624-1738) ff. 146-151; after T. Wislicz's
typed transcript.
97 1688 Nowy Wisnicz Kaczmarczyk 1901 pp. 303-309. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
98 1688 Nowy Wisnicz Kac/marczyk 1901 pp. 309-312. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
99 1688 Nowy Wisnicz Kac/inarczyk 1901 pp. 312-316. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
100 1688 Nowy Wisnicz Kaczmarc/yk 1901 p. 316. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
101 1689 Nowy Wisnicz Kaczmarczyk 1901 pp. 316-321. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
102 1689 Nowy Wisnicz Kaczmarczyk 1901 pp. 321-322. Acta nigra maleficorum Wisniciae ab anno Domini 1665 [etc.] 13-34.
103 1690 Lobzenica Wijaczka 2004 p. 162. APBydgoszcz, AMLobzenica sig. 11 f. 533.
104 1690 Wielki Kozmin "S.X." 1844. AMWielki Kozmin. No sig. specified..
105 1690 Wielki Kozmin Lukaszewicz 1869, p. 76; DWOK vol. 15 p. 246.
106 1690 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 pp. 493-494,497-498.
107 1691 Brzesc Kujawski Olszewski 1879 pp. 491-493. AGrodzkie Brzesc sig. 4
108 1691 Kleczew None. PTPN ms. 859 (Kleczew Criminalia 1624-1738) ff. 138-145v; after T. Wislicz's
typed transcript.
109 1691 Warta Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 191-193. AGAD, AMWarta sig. 46 ff. 136-138
110 1692 Lobzenica Wijaczka 2004 pp. 163-170. APBydgoszcz, AMLobzenica sig. 11 ft 570-578,584-588v.
111 1692 Wielki Kozmin DWOK vol. 15 pp. 243-244; Gagacki 1839. AMWielki Kozmin, no sig. specified.
112 1693 Kleczew None. PTPN ms. 859 (Kleczew Criminalia 1624-1738) ff. 112-114v; after T. Wislicz's
typed transcript.
113 1693 Uniejow Baranowski 1981 p. 27.
114 1693 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 500.
115 1695 Stajszewo Guidon 1961. Bib. miejski w Bydgoszczy sig. 111.158.
116 1697 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 499.

636
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117 1698 Jadowniki Baranowski 1952 p. 79; Ulanowski ed. 1921 vol. 1 p. 299.
118 1698 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 66-72. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 144 (Criminalia) ff. 379-381, 391-394.
119 1698 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 501.
120 1699 Plonsk Lasocki 1933a pp. 4-5. AMPlonsksig.3ff.40-41.
121 1699 Plonsk Lasocki 1933 pp. 6-7. AMPtonsk sig. 3 ff. 45v-46.

122 1699 Plonsk Lasocki 1933 p. 7. AMPtonsk sig. 3 ff. 47v-48.

123 1699 Pyzdry Tripplin 1852 vol. 3 pp. 267-274; Rosenblatt 1883 pp. 14-19. AMPyzdry, Decreta Criminalia cum Inquisitionibus ab Anno 1699 ad Annum
1757ff. 1-2.
124 1700 Fordon Koranyil928ap.26.
125 1700 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 72-74. APLublin, AMLublin ff. 483-487.
126 1700 Plonsk Lasocki 1933 p. 8. AMPIohsk sig. 3 ff. 55v-56
127 1700 Slomniki Siarkowski 2000 [1879] pp. 87-90. AMSIomniki, no sig. specified.
128 1700 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 500.
129 1700 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 493.
130 1701 Plonsk Lasocki 1933 p. 8. AMPtonsk sig. 3 ff. 69-70.
131 1701 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 498. AMWyszogrod sig. 5.
132 1702 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, item 1126.
133 1702 Klimkowka Lysiaked. 1965, item 1138.
134 1702 Klimkowka Lysiak ed. 1965, item 1156.
135 1702 Leczyca Rafacz 1933 p. 568. Arch. Gdansk sig. 717 f. 343
136 1703 Rzes/ow Dydek 1968 p. 386. APRzeszow, AMRzeszow sig.. 166 ff. 1001-1008.
137 1703 Nowy Wisnicz Kaczmarczyk 1907 pp. 330-331. AMNowy Wisnicz 1701-1712, no sig. specified.
138 1703 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 497.
139 1705 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 pp. 506-509. AMWyszogrod sigs. 5 and 7, no page # given.
140 1706 Szczekouny Siarkowski 2000 [1879] pp. 87-92. AMSzczekociny, no sig. specified.
141 1708 Plonsk Lasocki 1933 p. 8. AMPtonsk sig. 3 ff. 170v.
142 1708 Zbajszyn Koranyi 1928a p. 29.
143 1713 Krakow Kracik and Rozek 1986 p. 112. WAP, not clear what sig. or f.
144 1715 Brzesc Kujawski Olszewski 1879 p. 500.
145 1716 Szczercow Baranowski and Lewandowski 1950 pp. 201-203. AGAD, AMSzczercow sig. 2 f. 134-136
146 1717 Brzesc Kujawski Olszewski 1879 p. 502. AMBrzesc Kujawski, sig. 4 f. 222.
147 1717 Krakow Kracik and Rozek 1986 p. 113. WAP, sig. and ff. not specified.
148 1718 Rzeszow Dydek 1968 pp. 393-401. APRzeszow, AMRzeszow sig. 168 vol. 12 ff. 475-488
149 1718 Wyszogrod Olszewski 1879 p. 501.
150 1718 Wsszogrod Olszewski 1879 pp. 496-497.
151 1719 Py/dry Rosenblatt 1883 pp. 12-14; after Tripplin 1852 vol. 1 pp. 273 ff. AMPyzdry, no sig. specified.
152 1719 Raciaz Putek 1956 pp. 240-243. Tarnowski library doc. 6409
153 1721 Nieszawa Wawrzeniecki 1897.
154 1721 Nieszawa Wawrzeniecki 1899.
155 1722 Poznan Berwinski 1985 vol. 2 p. 126; DWOK vol 15 pp. 83-84 n. 2.
156 1723 Brzesc Kujawski Olszewski 1879 p. 500.
157 1724 Koprzywnica Wijaczka 2003 p. 62; Guidon and Rucinski 2000, p .116.
158 1730 Kleczew None. PTPN ms. 859 (Kleczew Criminalia 1624-1738), ff. 659-667; after K. Koranyi's
handwritten transcript. Kindly made available by T. Wislicz.

637
 • Appendix G •

# Year Place Print Source Archival Source

159 1731 Ino Wroclaw Koranyi 1928a pp. 7-8; after "Relatio Plebani Piascoviensis,"
MHDWvol. 5 no. 13, pp. 37-40.
160 1731 Pyzdry Tripplin 1852 vol. 3 pp. 278-282. AMPyzdry, "Decreta Criminalia cum Inquisilionibus Annor. 1699-1757", ff. 6-7.
161 1732 Lublin Zakrzewska-Dubasowa 1947 pp. 75-85. APLublin, AMLublin sig. 48 (Advocatalia) fT. 1254-1261,1282-1288.
162 1732 Pyzdry Tripplin 1852 vol. 3 pp. 282-283. AMPyzdry, "Decreta Criminalia cum Inquisitionibus Annor. 1699-1757", f. 8-
10.
163 1735 Barcin Koranyi 1928a p. 7; MDHWvoX. 5 (1885) no. 15 pp. 58-59.
164 1737 Krakow Rosenblatt 1883 pp. 20-22. Protocollum [etc.], 1736-1740, lib. 395
165 1739 Lublin Siarkowski 2000 [1879] pp. 105-109. AMZaslaw, found by R. Rulikowski in llanski family archive.
166 1740 Pyzdry Rosenblatt 1883 pp. 9-12; Tripplin 1852. AMPyzdry; sig. and ff. not specified
167 1741 Pacanow Wijaczka 2003 p. 58; Wisniewski 2000 [1929] p. 252.
168 1748 Jazowsko Grodziski ed. 1967 item 201.
169 1749 Kowalewo Rafacz 1933 p. 568. Akta kanclerskie 8 pp. 5-7.
170 1752 Krakow Kracik and Rcvek 1986 p. 114. AKM,AOfl85pp 72,1)2-116,150-151.
171 1752 Oswiecim Kracikand Rozek 1986 p. 114. AKM, AOf 185 pp. 72, 112-116,150-151.
172 1761 Kiszkowo Dydynski 1858 pp. 101-103. AMKiszkowo, verdict only.
173 1763 Tylicz Koranyi 1928a p. 22; Wijaczka 2005 p. 38; Piekosinski 1889
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174 1774 Berzyce Klarner 1902 p. 469.
175 c. 177? Grabow Michalski 1996 pp. 93-94; Tazbir 1966,1994,2002; AGAD, Akt grodzkich ostrzeszowskich rel. obi. 15.
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176 n.d. Radziejow Baranowski 1952 pp. 107,159, 161,167. AGAD, AMRad/ie|ov\ sig 15 f. 344-346..
177 ad. Szczercow Baranowski 1952 pp. 90, 100,105, 116. AGAD, AMSztzercow sig 2 If. 173v-174.
178 c. 1710 Rzeszow Dydekl968p.386.
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675
 Czestochowa 67 Nowy Wisnicz 89 Waliszew 23
Dobczyce 87 Olesko 111 Wara 97
Dobra 42 Opatowek 48 Warka 44
Fordon 5 Opole Lubelskie 60 Warta 49
Gniezno 17 Oswi^cim 86 Wieluri 59
Goraj 72 Pacanow 81 Wojnicz 92
Grab6w 53 Pajeczno 63 Wschowa 38
Grodzisk 22 Pilica 77 Wyszogrdd 19
Grybbw 103 Piiiczow 75 Zabtotow 112
Grzymiszew 34 Piotrkow 56 Zagorow 29
Inowroclaw 10 Piekosz6w 68 Zamowiec 78
Jadowniki 90 Ptock 18 Zastaw 110
Jarocin 32 Ptorisk 16 Zawada 91
Jazowsko 101 Praszka 62 Zba.szyn 20
Jedrzejow 74 Przeclaw 84 Zywiec 99
Kalisz 47 Przemysl 98
Kazimierz Dolny 58 Pyzdry 28
Kielce 69 Racial 12
Kiszkowo 13 Radoszyce 65
Kleczew 25 Radzlejbw 14
Klimkowka 104 Rawa 52
Klodawa 27 Rzeszow 85
Kobylin 46 Sambor 106
Konin 30 Sandomierz 71
Koprzywnica 76 Sieradz 54
Kowalewo 7 Skarszewy 1a
Kozmin Wielki 40 Skrzynno 57
Kozminek 41 Slesin 26
Kroscienko 107 Slomniki 83
Krzywin 31 Shipsca 24

Map 2
O Major city Poland / Lithuania border

• City with
v n
Region borders

^
Rivers

® Principal cities 0

© Regional centres 9

(V *
O Smaller cities •
Ifi

o Small towns »
a ,? * >
r
° Villages * A
if
B
$ b
® Cities and villages with trials " r
9
5 I Pilgrimage and Exorcism Sites

Map by Michael Ostling and Kosma Jozwiak