Language of Witchcraft

During the Salem witchcraft trials, Betty Parris and the other witnesses used the conventions of witchcraft when called to testify. Mary Warren accused Ann Pudeator of "biting me, pinching me, sticking pins in me and choking me." Mary Walcott said Sarah Wilde "did most grievously torment me by pricking and pinching me and [...] almost choke me to death."

Mary Beth Norton has noted the first confessions by Abigail Hobbs didn’t use such ritualized language. Instead, she used phrases then common to describe attacks by the Abnaki. Abigail accused her mother, Deliverance, who did use the approved language of witchcraft in hopes of leniency.

Carlos Ginsburg has described a similar progression in language in Friuli, a region in northeast Italy. When priests first noted the existence of pagan agricultural rituals in the 1500s, the accused tried to explain what they were doing.

The priests didn’t understand them, because they had been trained to believe in different causes. From their continued questions, the Friulians realized the answers they needed to give. With time, they may even have adopted some of the practices expected by their prosecutors.

The language of witchcraft had been developing for decades. In 1425, Bernardino Albizeschi began preaching in the countryside to revive the Catholic faith. The Franciscan, now Saint Bernardino of Siena, railed against Jews and witches.

In 1487, a Dominican codified beliefs in the Malleus Maleficarum that witches were aided by Satan. Heinrich Kramer described the forms witchcraft could take. The Roman Catholic Church condemned his work because the church claimed there were no such things as witches. Belief in them was the work of the devil.

The Spanish Inquisition was still rooting out vestiges of Judaism and Islam. The Papal Inquisition was concerned with Protestants, pagans, and heresy.

Kramer’s work gained credence through the activities of Charles V, the Hapsburg grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. He introduced uniform laws into the Holy Roman Empire of Austria in 1531. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina defined witchcraft as a serious crime to be investigated by secular courts using torture and punished by fire.

The man most active in exorcizing demons within German-speaking lands was Francesco Maria Guazzo. In his Compendium Maleficarum of 1608 the Ambrosian brother wrote, "the attendants go riding flying goats, trample the cross, are made to be re-baptised in the name of the Devil, give their clothes to him, kiss the Devil's behind, and dance back to back forming a round."

Notes:
Essex County, Massachusetts. Records of the Salem trials are available on a University of Virginia website; spelling modernized for readability.

Ginsburg, Carlos. I Bernandanti, 1966; translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.

Guazzo, Francesco Maria. Compendium Maleficarum, 1608, quotation from Wikipedia article on "Witches' Sabbath."

Norton, Mary Beth Norton. In the Devil’s Snare, 2002, from review by Jill Lepore, The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.