Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and HistoriographyOxford Handbooks Online
Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
Valerie A. Kivelson
The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America
Edited by Brian P. Levack
Print Publication Date: Mar 2013
Online Publication Date: May
2013
Subject: History, European History, Early Modern History (1501 to
1700)
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578160.013.0021
Abstract and Keywords
This article discusses the history of Russian witchcraft trials, which were characterized by a high percentage of
men among the accused, relatively infrequent discussion of diabolism, and harsh, inquisitorial legal procedures.
The distinctive political, religious, and social history of Russia in the early modern period, its relative cultural
isolation, the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, and the inescapable pressures of social hierarchy, bondage, and
dependency, all left their imprint on the trials.
Keywords: witchcraft trials, witchcraft prosecutions, Orthodox Christianity, social hierarchy, bondage
1648 Vasilii Pavlov, a military man in the service of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, came to the court of the governorgeneral of the frontier fortress town of Belev to denounce his bondsman for working magic against him. The
accusation was framed as a humble petition—as convention dictated—addressed directly to the tsar from his
suppliant ‘slave’:
IN
To Sovereign, Tsar, and Grand Prince Alexei Mikhailovich, your slave Vaska, son of Andrei Pavlov,
petitions.
In this year, 1648, my bondsman, Ivashka Ryzhei, threatened in the presence of my [other] bondsman,
Gavrilko Filipev, saying ‘if my master is ever mad at me for any reason, then I will stand in the threshold or
wherever, and say [a spell], and he will be able to do nothing to me. And as to the female sex, whomever I
want, even if it is a boiarinia (mistress/noblewoman), my spells will cause [her] to fall in love with me.’
The horrified master took what he saw as appropriate steps:
So I beat him and ordered him to write what he had boasted of in front of my bondsmen. He wrote it out with
his own hand in the presence of people, my peasants. Merciful sovereign, tsar and grand prince…have
mercy on me, your slave. Order, sovereign, that my man Ivashka Ryzhei be questioned and his criminal
letter taken as evidence.
In many ways, this case typifies the prosecution of witchcraft in Muscovite and early imperial Russian courts.
Initiated by petition, denunciations very often grew out of domestic tensions or hostilities between masters and
serfs, slaves, or other dependents. They were normally heard in secular courts, overseen by the tsar or the central
(p. 356) chancelleries in Moscow or, later, Petersburg. The charges usually involved acts of material or physical
harm (maleficium, or, in Russian, porcha, literally, ‘spoiling’) or the magical alteration of emotions. Nearly threequarters of cases that reached the courts identified men rather than women as practitioners of harmful magic. The
tsar’s courts took such charges very seriously. The accused in this case, Ivan Ryzhei, was interrogated,
undoubtedly with torture, and found guilty as charged. Because it was discovered that he possessed written texts
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of the spells his master had described, the verdict was clear-cut. The sentence, issued in the name of the tsar,
demonstrates just how egregious an infraction he had committed. The orders from Moscow to the local governor
read:
When you get this, announce his criminality before many people and order him beaten with a knout and
give him to Vasilii Pavlov [his master, who had brought the suit]. And here is Ivashko’s criminal writing sent
back to you with this order. Order his criminal writing burned on his back, so that henceforth no one would
dare write such criminal spells.1
Witchcraft trials in Russia are not only intriguing in their own right but also invite comparisons with those that took
place in Western and Central Europe. Russian witchcraft trials were characterized by a high percentage of men
among the accused, relatively infrequent discussion of diabolism, and harsh, inquisitorial legal procedures. The
distinctive political, religious, and social history of Russia in the early modern period, its relative cultural isolation,
the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, the inescapable pressures of social hierarchy, bondage, and dependency,
all left their imprint on the trials.
20.1 Witchcraft in Law and Legal Process
The courts of the Muscovite tsars conducted trials of witches which, at the most general level, resembled those of
many of their European counterparts, with cases initiated from below but prosecuted from above by administrative
officials, for the most part in secular courts. Chronologically, formal trials started in the early seventeenth century.
Prosecution continued apace through the 1740s, and trailed off only in the 1760s, during the reign of Catherine the
Great.
The Russian Orthodox Church condemned sorcery and witchcraft, identified variously as koldovstvo, vedovstvo,
charovanie, vorozhba, or chernoknizhestvo, as ‘devilish’ and hazardous to Orthodox Christian souls, but for the
most part religious authorities left the task of prosecution to secular courts. Suspects were identified by
denunciations submitted against them by members of the community, and then were harshly (p. 357) investigated
by provincial officials or by officers of the central administration in Moscow. Courts of law were of a piece with the
administrative infrastructure; in the seventeenth century the town governor served as chief administrator,
enforcer, investigator, interrogator, and presiding judge. Moscow kept close watch on the performance of
governors, and witchcraft cases, like all other major investigations, required incessant reference to Moscow for
instructions on how to proceed. These exchanges left a dense documentary record tracking the conduct of trials.
Most witchcraft cases were eventually transferred to one of the central chancelleries. In the seventeenth century
they were usually brought to the Chancellery of Military Affairs (Razriadnyi Prikaz). In the eighteenth century
secular jurisdiction over witchcraft cases shifted primarily to the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, the investigative bureau
responsible for sniffing out all forms of sedition, while some cases made their way to ecclesiastical courts under the
Holy Synod. These institutions too left extensive paper trails. None of these legal venues allowed for the presence
of lawyers—who did not exist in Russia until much later—or any form of representation for the accused.
As in Continental Europe, interrogators routinely employed torture as a mean of eliciting testimony. Russian law was
not hampered by the requirements of Roman law that deemed confession ‘the queen of proofs’ or stipulated the
kinds and qualities of evidence necessary for conviction. Instead, torture was regarded as a practical way to
uncover hidden information about undiscovered crimes or unnamed accomplices. Although lawmakers and judges
voiced some concern that excessive torture might kill and thereby silence their witnesses, they expressed no
moral qualms or real doubt about the validity of torture as a route to establishing the truth. Administered in special
torture chambers (zastenki), interrogative torture consisting of beating, suspension from the strappado
accompanied by more beating (with or without weights attached to the feet), burning with fire or with hot iron
pincers, and, rarely, water being poured on the head. Not only those charged with witchcraft were subject to
torture; anyone else implicated during the interrogation process would be arrested and could be brought to the
torture chamber if the testimony warranted such a step.
Russian law regarding witchcraft developed in fits and starts, and no single position or definition emerged. The
openness and multiplicity of the crime were matched by a chronic uncertainty in the law. Muscovite law operated in
a grey area between the great efforts at legal codification, which produced the law codes of 1550, 1589, 1606, the
imposing Ulozhenie Law Code of 1649, and the New Statute Code of 1669, and an endless series of ad hoc
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decrees, issued in response to particular problems, directed towards individual officials or regions, and only poorly
integrated into general practice. These decrees might repeat what was in the codified law, add to it, or directly
contradict it.
Until the enactment of the New Statutes of 1669, codified laws contained no explicit legislation concerning
witchcraft, so presiding officials necessarily invoked various tangentially related regulations when prosecuting
such cases. These prove revealing with regard to how officials categorized witchcraft or what they understood to
constitute the essence of the crime. Trial records refer to articles on blasphemy, treason, (p. 358) banditry,
patricide, and murder of a superior. The episodic decrees censured the practice of witchcraft on equally
heterogeneous grounds, denouncing it sometimes as a manifestation of criminal banditry (in decrees of 1555 and
1671, and again in the New Statute Code of 1669) or, elsewhere, as a more spiritual offence, along with blasphemy,
impiety, or revelry (in decrees of 1649, 1653, and 1677). The wide variety in approaches indicates that ideas about
witchcraft remained amorphous, without a single unifying conceptual or definitional core. Only under the
Westernizing, reforming ruler Peter the Great did Russia import passages from the Carolina and condemn
witchcraft as potentially, but not necessarily, involving a pact with the devil. Peter’s Military Articles (1715) and
Naval Articles (1720) incorporated this possibility into a newly formalized definition of witchcraft. His codes were
immediately published and disseminated, and were adopted in courts of all kinds, including ecclesiastical courts.
Even after Peter’s legal reforms, however, other approaches to witchcraft and other codes of law remained
operative, thereby continuing a pattern of murky ambiguity in the condemnation and prosecution of magic. Secular
and church courts vied for jurisdiction, and a new strain of scepticism regarding the powers of witches, and
particularly regarding the authenticity of those claiming to be possessed, ran alongside the equally novel
condemnation of witchcraft as Satanism. The sceptical position finally triumphed in a series of decrees issued
under the Enlightenment ruler Catherine the Great. A synodal decree of 1772 prohibited further trials of witchcraft,
opining that the whole business should be considered a matter of charlatanry rather than of magic. This put an end
to the formal prosecution of witchcraft as a felony, but lesser courts continued to hear charges of witchcraft and to
investigate possession cases right through to the early twentieth century, administering small fines or even short
jail sentences. While educated elites, like their European counterparts, came to adopt an attitude of derisive or
indulgent condescension towards the ignorant superstitions of the narod, the folk, popular belief remained
animated and continues to provide fodder for ethnographers and folklorists to this day.
Medieval chronicles document sporadic episodes of violence against suspected witches as early as the eleventh
century, and suspicions and accusations of witchcraft plagued the courts and persons of the rulers from the late
fifteenth century onwards, but no trial records survive before the early 1600s. This absence may reflect the
disappearance of sources, particularly those from before the devastating fire of 1626 that devoured most of the
official archives, but more likely few actual trials had been conducted prior to the seventeenth century. With the
consolidation of the tsarist state under the Romanov rulers after 1613, a confluence of factors—an expanding
judicial–administrative presence, a growing state ambition to control society at its most minute levels, and a series
of official decrees prohibiting witchcraft and prescribing legal processes and punishments—created a fertile
environment for a real increase in witchcraft prosecution.
If the source record has survived in representative numbers, as seems likely, Russian courts tried relatively few
cases, and the total number of executions fails to impress those familiar with European death tallies. Records
survive for about 230 trials, involving some 490 individuals in the seventeenth century, and approximately the (p.
359) same for the following century. Of those tried in the seventeenth century, about 15 per cent met their deaths
at the hands of the court, while only a handful of people were executed in the eighteenth century. Seventeenthcentury executions took various forms: hanging, beheading, and, in a minority of cases, burning. Some laws
specified that female felons were to be buried alive, with their heads exposed, and were to be left to die a slow
death, but, in fact, several of the few women who were executed went to the flames instead. The majority of those
convicted of witchcraft endured lesser punishments. After surviving the ordeal of investigative torture, almost all
suffered punitive beatings, with either bastinadoes or the knout, the infamous Russian leather whip. If they were
judged to have inflicted serious physical harm through their magic, they might suffer the severing of a hand or a
foot, or, as in the case of Ivan Ryzhei, have the text of their spells set on fire on their flesh as a palpable lesson to
the general public. Subsequently, many convicted witches were exiled to the remote frontiers, where the men were
registered as soldiers or peasants and put to work to defend the borders of the tsardom or to feed the tsar’s
subjects. The wives or husbands of the convicts and any children who were still minors travelled at state expense
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to join the exiles in their new places of perpetual banishment. Others were released back to their former positions in
life, but under the watchful eyes of their families, masters, or neighbours, who were obliged to sign sureties
guaranteeing their good behaviour. Tsarist decrees enumerated ever harsher penalties for repeat offenders, and
the deterrent appears to have been effective, at least to the point that few recidivists appear in the surviving
records. One elderly fortune-teller mentioned that she had served two earlier stints of penance and reeducation in
a convent, but otherwise few of the accused make repeat appearances in the archives.
20.2 Conceptions of Witchcraft: Absent Demonology
Just as the law was inconsistent in its definitions of, and responses to, witchcraft, so the theology and general
conceptualization of witchcraft were ambiguous and amorphous. Neither the treatises of ecclesiastical elites nor
the accusations and confessions of ordinary people contained any consistent demonology. While unclean spirits,
demons, and even Satan himself make appearances, there was no effort either from above or below to tie up the
loose ends into a systematic theory of magic or to represent witches as enjoying any particular relationship with
the devil. Internal evidence suggests that most magic was tacitly understood to work by analogy or homology.
Spells normally invoked the power of likeness (‘as a log withers in the fire, so may my master wither; as a corpse
feels no pain, so may my tooth not ache’), or called on the personified avatars of emotional states to visit their
power on their target (‘Go, woe, and make that slave of God pine for me’). With the simple ingredients of an herbal
pharmacopeia, (p. 360) practitioners invoked the immanent powers of plants’ familiar names (heartwort for heart
problems; Mary-Mother-of-God plant for childbirth-related issues) or of their appearance (a red root for blood flow;
a heart-shaped flower for heart disease).2 Supernatural beings also entered in the mix: incantations invoked the
assistance of relevant saints and Christian intercessors, demons, spirits, and ‘unclean’ or ‘unknowable forces’, and
even, rarely, of Satan, with these assorted supernatural agents promiscuously jumbled together, heedless of their
widely varying origins, genres, registers, and valences. Spells addressed to devils and demons treated them as
submissive agents, carrying out the bidding of the practitioner, not as dreaded embodiments of evil or as
manifestations of the ‘Enemy of Mankind’.
Russian theorists and theologians expressed little interest in formulating a coherent demonology, so the absence of
such a programmatic understanding among the broader population is not at all surprising. Conclusions about
popular magical practice derive largely from the accusations and confessions of the accused and from spell books
and ingredients introduced as material evidence in court. Confessions are notoriously slippery forms of evidence,
given the combination of torture and leading questions that could distort the testimony. Nonetheless, trial
transcripts give reason to believe that suspects were given quite free rein in their testimony, so long as they
answered the questions that the court considered most relevant. Judges questioned their suspects to determine:
who taught them their witchcraft, whom had they taught, whom had they bewitched, and what kind of witchcraft
they practised. Never in the seventeenth century and only occasionally in the eighteenth century, after the Petrine
legislation, did judges ask leading questions in the demonological mode commonly endorsed by European judges,
such as ‘when did you make a pact with the devil?’
20.3 Characteristics of the Accused
What rendered an individual vulnerable to witchcraft charges? What traits or behaviours raised suspicions and
impelled Muscovites to lodge accusations in court? People of absolutely every social standing participated in early
modern Russia’s lively world of witchcraft and magic, up to and including the tsar himself, the women of the royal
court, and pre-eminent churchmen, boyars, princes, and princesses. Denunciations for witchcraft were most
commonly exchanged among social equals or directed down the social scale, towards social inferiors. In the
eighteenth century, the arrow of accusation tipped slightly, and A. S. Lavrov even argues that instances of
upwards accusation came (p. 361) to dominate.3 While elites regularly consulted with magical practitioners and
employed their services, more humble people were commonly identified as the purveyors of those services, and
simple townspeople, serfs, and slaves were most harshly persecuted. Men were more likely than women to be
brought to trial. Three quarters of those prosecuted for witchcraft or magic were male. Among those of lower
standing, non-Russian and non-Orthodox subjects of the empire were at slightly higher risk. Tatars, Cheremis (a
Finnic people, also called Mari), Latvians, or Lithuanians, and non-Christians (Muslims, or animists) found
themselves susceptible to accusation, especially if they lived in close proximity to Russians. For the most part,
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however, the magic practised by non-Christians was understood as different from Russian magic. Non-Russian
sorcerers were usually termed volkhvy, an ancient word employed to describe pagan seers or biblical magi.
Another group at high risk included individuals who seem to have merited the charges, that is, people who were
reputed to dispense some form of magical assistance, as healers, prognosticators, or providers of spells, and those
who threatened or boasted publicly about their powers. In a society with essentially no professional physicians
trained in what passed for scientific, Western-style medicine, the bulk of the population had no choice but to rely
on the power of the clergy and prayer or to turn to the services of healers.4 Healers ranged from a friend,
neighbour, or family member who happened to know of a soothing tea, a curative plant, or an incantation that had
proved efficacious in the past, to specialists who accrued large stocks of roots and herbs, collected books of
spells, and attracted clientele from a wide area. Desperate clients confessed to consulting such people in order to
heal their children from disease, win the love of their husbands or masters, or restore family members from the
torment of spirit possession. Healers might enjoy the confidence of their patients until a cure went awry, at which
point the slur of witchcraft might arise, particularly if money had changed hands. A number of healers found
themselves accused of causing illness by sprinkling salt at crossroads or casting spells on the wind, and then
charging to cure the conditions they themselves had caused. Muscovites did not articulate or observe any clearcut divisions between good and evil or white and black magic, but few cases of benign magic or successful healing
were brought to court, and the death penalty was reserved for those charged with magical murder or treason.
(p. 362) 20.4 A Male Majority
It would be convenient to argue that more men than women practised magic or healing, and to explain the gender
disparity among the accused in that way. Since just about everyone seems to have practised or employed magic
in some form or other, however, it is hard to establish a gender breakdown of the general pool of practitioners and
their clients. Only those who were identified in court documents are visible, which brings us to the puzzling male
majority among the accused. Prescriptive sources might lead us to expect instead an association of witchcraft with
women. For instance, clerical treatises dwelled disapprovingly on the tendency of women to invite witches into their
homes to cure their children, suggesting that this was seen as a particularly female proclivity. Linguistically, it must
be significant that the term baba, meaning elderly lower-class woman, also connoted ‘witch’. Nonetheless, the
evidence of the courts indicates that men were the ones more often charged, whether or not they were more
actively engaged in casting spells or indulging in other forms of magic.
The frequency with which men or women practised or employed magic in the population as a whole remains
impossible to quantify by gender, but other characteristics and behaviours help to explain the preponderance of
men among the accused. First, charges frequently targeted individuals perceived as insubordinate or defiant of
accepted hierarchies, uppity troublemakers like Ivashka Ryzhei, who had the temerity to try to win any woman he
wanted, even his landlord’s wife. While women certainly found ways to express defiance, their movement in the
world was generally so constrained that they had fewer venues in which to do so.5 Muscovy and early imperial
Russia were profoundly hierarchical societies, in which everyone was subject to and bound to serve and obey
others, whether within the family, the serf- or slave-owning household, the village or town collective, the regiment,
the church or monastic order, or the tsarist administration. All of these levels of domination and subordination were
clear and manifest to all, established by law and reinforced by practice. Those who did not fit in an obvious way
disturbed the harmony of the communities they encountered. Wandering people, people without assigned masters,
people with no identifiable place of residence drew the suspicion of both the authorities and the general public.
Outsiders whose fit in the social hierarchy was uncertain were vulnerable to the suspicion of witchcraft or of other
misdeeds, which helps to explain the non-negligible presence of non-Russians among the accused.
Strangers, however, were not the only ones at high risk. Another noteworthy subset of accusations reflected the
same preoccupation with social stability, but targeted, by contrast, the most intimate of insiders: family members,
in-laws, household servants, or domestic slaves. These cases record the anxieties of commanding officers,
masters, (p. 363) husbands, or sons-in-law who feared and suspected the curses and spells of rebellious
inferiors. Fathers accused their sons of betraying filial piety through egregious acts of witchcraft. Landlords and
estate bailiffs feared the magical retribution of angry serfs and slaves. Tsars interpreted challenges to their rule as
acts of sorcery.
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Subaltern figures apparently shared their masters’ and patrons’ view of magic as a medium through which social
order could be managed and enforced, but of course they addressed it from the other end of the stick (or knout).
The masters were right to be suspicious: a significant number of surviving spells and courtroom confessions reveal
that magic was directed upwards from below towards the powerful. Spells were imagined as a way of navigating
and ameliorating the conditions of subordination. While those in charge feared that their servants and dependants
might use spells to bewitch, harm, or kill them and their loved ones, the accused confessed more commonly to
adopting magical means to alleviate the violence or mitigate the hardship of their subordination. Stratification and
hierarchy were universally understood and accepted as natural, but the terms on which they were enacted were
constantly disputed. Magic was deployed when fathers and masters exceeded the tolerable norms of patriarchal
governance. By the same token, accusations of magic served to rein in the rebellion of noncompliant subordinates.
The fierce inequities of hierarchy played out in interestingly different ways for men and women. While all
Muscovites were subordinate to someone—even the tsar was expected to serve God in humility and piety—women
generally answered to fewer masters. Men enjoyed greater licence to move about the realm, whether trading
goods or looking for employment, fulfilling the biddings of their masters, going on pilgrimage, or serving the tsar in
various capacities. In these movements, they encountered more opportunities to clash with more layers of
authorities, and risked more occasions to incur accusations of witchcraft. Women by and large stayed at home,
serving husbands, fathers-in-law, or masters. They wandered into fewer settings where suspicions of witchcraft
might arise. Their circle of contact was more constrained, and those cases against women that did come to court
bear traces of the more intimate context that produced them. The charges of witchcraft levelled against women by
their immediate superiors often carried more emotive charge and revealed more ferocious levels of domestic
violence than the rather more impersonal charges brought against men by their superior officers or business rivals.
Literacy factored into witchcraft accusations as another element freighted with gender-specific implications. In a
society distinguished by its extremely low literacy rates, the power of writing was closely controlled by Church and
state. In the wrong hands, rampant literacy might threaten the ability of the established authorities to control the
written word. Hence, numerous cases emerged from bureaucratic–administrative circles, from low-level
functionaries, monks and village priests, government clerks, or bailiffs and managers on provincial estates who had
mastered the dangerous skills of reading and writing and might produce and disseminate seditious literature, forged
documents, blasphemous texts, or magical spells. A sizeable number of the accused drew suspicion because they
were known to collect pieces of paper or (p. 364) little notebooks covered with ‘unknown writing’. Literacy was
nearly exclusively a male prerogative, and hence the correlation between literacy and magic placed far more men
than women at risk of accusation.
Russian Orthodoxy also contributed to a less gendered and, in particular, less female, understanding of witchcraft.
Orthodox teachings and assumptions about women, witchcraft, the body, and sex differed sufficiently from
common wisdom throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe to render the Western Christian logic of witchcraft
inapplicable, and to make the association of women with witchcraft unnecessary or even unlikely. For instance,
affective, sensory connections with the divine were generally valued above learned, rational theology, levelling the
spiritual playing field for men and women. Although Eve was the target of lavish condemnation in Russia as in the
West, sexual desire was not associated particularly with Eve or her daughters; all humans were assumed to suffer
from this lamentable weakness. Celibacy, though admirable, was not considered the only pious path, and the
married clergy served as an acknowledgement that allowances must be made for flawed mortals. Orthodox
readings of the Fall of Man reflected the general preoccupation with order and hierarchy by stressing the couple’s
shared defiance of God’s commands over their sexual transgression. More to the point, sexuality was not woven
into the mythology of witchcraft, so whether sexual desire was considered in gendered terms or not, it figured little
in the image of a witch.6
20.5 Witchcraft Scholarship in Russia and the Soviet Union
The study of witchcraft in Russia reflects in microcosm the tumultuous and often painful cultural and political history
of that country in the past several centuries.
Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people who studied witchcraft often invested the topic with potent
and dangerous significance. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalists, reformers, and radicals, like
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many of their counterparts throughout Europe, went out to ‘the folk’ to collect their beliefs, stories, and practices,
and they drew highly political conclusions about the condition of the national soul from the material they collected.
As a rule, ethnographers and folklorists working in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that the
peasants could be read as timeless repositories of an ancient and authentic heritage. They read magical practices
as continuing an unbroken tradition of archaic Slavic paganism, which, they claimed, (p. 365) ran unchecked
alongside and beneath a thin veneer of Orthodox Christianity.7 The militantly atheist and determinedly rationalist
Soviet regime took a very different tack: research and publication on the topic ground to a halt after the Revolution
of 1917 and began again, tentatively, only in the late 1970s. Since 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
publication has picked up apace, but necessarily still bears the imprint of a seventy-plus-year hiatus.
Culturally, for Russians and those who study its history, Russia’s relationship with the rest of Europe has long been
an animating question, and it remains a problem of urgent concern as Russians define themselves in the wake of
the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian thinkers have agonized over the question of whether they are part of Europe,
or, if not, whether their unique socio-cultural formations were inferior to those of the West, or, perhaps, morally and
ethically superior. From its very inception, the study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials was swept into the general
urge to compare Russia with a mythologized and homogenized vision of an imaginary West. Comparison with
European witchcraft and witch-hunts, often argued in strongly polemical tones, forms one major axis along which
research on Russian magic and witchcraft has developed.
Historians, as opposed to ethnographers, began publishing on the topic of Russian witchcraft and magic only in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, and made their first major contributions in the early decades of the twentieth,
just prior to the Revolution. Once they discovered that their ancestors too had tried and executed witches in the
early modern era, the comparative significance of that discovery took on pressing importance and drove the
historical study of Russian witchcraft in several unproductive directions. By the time Russian researchers took up
the subject, burning witches was understood to be a cruel, misguided practice. Thus, various scholars tried to
assess how Russian trials and punishments measured up to a Western template, in order to assess Russia’s
relative moral standing. Here the evidence posed a troubling dissonance between the story told by the numbers
and that told by the records of the trials. The total numbers of recorded trials that survive is relatively small,
surprisingly small given the size of the population. Records of a meagre five hundred trials survive from the
century and a half between 1611 and the 1760s, while the population reached roughly ten million in 1700. The low
numbers spawned three disparate and mutually contradictory conclusions: first, that Russia’s persecution was
milder than Europe’s, indicating an admirable tolerance of folk practices and non-doctrinal beliefs; second, that
Russia must necessarily have launched a full-blown witch-hunt (to keep up with its more civilized neighbours!), and
therefore thousands of trial records must have been lost; or, third, given the weaknesses and institutional
inadequacies of the Russian Church and state, that witches were dispatched unceremoniously by local, extra-legal
(p. 366) collectives, on manorial estates or by community lynch mobs, thus leaving no trace in the written record.
The imputed ‘mildness’ of Russian witch-hunting does seem to be borne out at least quantitatively: the arguments
maintaining that vast numbers of records have vanished or that witches were treated to rough community justice
do not hold up under scrutiny. If many trials had occurred but were not preserved in the central archives,
provincial archives would contain records of at least some of the missing cases, but those provincial archives that
survive hold few, if any, cases not preserved in Moscow. Thus the central archival holdings represent more or less
complete material on all formal trials of witches. As for informal or local justice, the claim is, on the face of it,
implausible: the Russian regime was notorious for its ambition to monopolize all judicial power and to control
behaviour throughout its realm to an extraordinary degree. Although much of this ambition remained merely
aspirational, lynch mobs and unauthorized killings would inevitably have provoked investigations and produced
reams of paperwork to record their findings. Violent assaults on suspected witches were investigated and
prosecuted in the nineteenth century, once witchcraft was no longer judged a felony in official courts, but no such
investigations for unsanctioned killings survive from earlier eras, when accusers could still be certain of receiving a
hearing in court. Extra-legal solutions were simply not necessary, given the courts’ willingness to address
witchcraft charges. As for manorial justice, the numerous cases brought by landlords against their own peasants
and slaves demonstrate that judges and litigants alike acknowledged the jurisdiction of the tsar’s courts over
matters of witchcraft. The low numbers, though undoubtedly incomplete, seem likely to reflect a genuinely small
number of trials.
On the other hand, the self-congratulatory claim to ‘mildness’ shatters when the particulars of Russian legal
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process come into focus. N. Ia. Novombergskii, the real founder of historical witchcraft studies in Russia, observes
in the introduction to his publication of trial materials, ‘This struggle [against witchcraft] was [carried out] with no
less cruelty than in western Europe: in the struggle with witches, Muscovite Rus’ suffered the same general
terrorizing investigation, torture, and public burning of those convicted of witchcraft.’8
The Russian Revolution put a stop to all research on witchcraft and related subjects. The field was preserved in
amber in its pre-1917 state through most of the Soviet era. The Bolshevik regime and its later Soviet incarnations
frowned upon research into religion and other forms of ‘superstition’. In 1929, for instance, a book on folk healing
was condemned as a ‘most pernicious book’, ‘in no way differentiating itself from prerevolutionary ethnographic
literature created by agents of tsarism, lackeys of the (p. 367) bourgeoisie and the nobility’.9 The prohibition of
such research amounted to more than a discouraging academic environment: in 1930–1, dozens of leading
humanists engaged in the study of medieval Russian history and culture were arrested and sent to hard labour
camps in connection with the so-called ‘Academic Affair’. Among others, L. V. Cherepnin, a young specialist on
medieval sources who had recently published a serious article on Muscovite witchcraft, was arrested and sent to
the camps in the Russian north for several years. He was one of the lucky ones, in that he survived and returned
to a long and distinguished life of scholarship in Moscow—but he never again returned to such risky topics.10 Not
surprisingly, research into such dangerous areas ceased for almost forty years.
Only in the 1960s and 70s did a handful of scholars take the first tentative steps back into the area of popular
religion, mostly under the protective guise of something else. In 1965, for instance, A. I. Klibanov published a study
of popular religious sectarianism, a slightly safer topic when cast as a branch of the history of radicalism and
protest. His further studies of popular utopian movements appeared in series such as ‘Scientific-atheistic literature’
under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences.11 Archeologists, perhaps granted somewhat greater licence
because of the material base of their research, began to delve into the history of Slavic paganism in the early
1980s. Philologists entered the field a bit later, contributing valuable works on the border between linguistics and
folklore. The ethnolinguist N. I. Tolstoi, for instance, published influential articles on Slavic and Baltic folklore, which
included material on magic and witchcraft.12
(p. 368) For the most part, until the early 1990s, historical research within Russia moved in patterns quite distinct
from those in the West. A small number of Western scholars were working on witchcraft-related topics right through
the years of the Cold War, and some limited intellectual dialogue crossed the divide. Most significant of the works
produced in the Anglo-American literature was Russell Zguta’s article, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century
Russia’, which appeared in the American Historical Review in 1977.13 Zguta’s analysis garnered much attention
both from specialists studying witchcraft in other areas of the world—in whose bibliographies his article figures as
the citation of choice on Russian witchcraft—and from colleagues gingerly touching on the subject in the Soviet
Union. Zguta’s examination of published court cases isolated two salient axes of difference between Muscovite
trials and those prosecuted in the courts of Europe: the majority of accused witches were male, and the devil was
imagined to play a very limited role in their work.
As perestroika began to take effect and the ideological holds of Marxism–Leninism and Scientific Atheism relaxed
their grip, scholars from a variety of disciplines edged into the newly accessible field of study. For the most part,
the terrain was occupied by ethnographers, along with ‘archeographers’, a hybrid specialty of ethnographer–
philologist who hunted for rare books and manuscripts in remote villages, and catalogued and described them in
their cultural context. These fieldworkers were gratified to find that the pre-revolutionary traditions of popular belief
in spirits, magic, and witchcraft remained alive and well in the post-Soviet countryside.14 In short, they took up their
pre-revolutionary predecessors’ work right where it had been cut short.
The resurgence of interest in folk practices, spirituality, and popular belief lends an aura of liberation and triumph to
the work taking shape in the post-Soviet era. Field research has turned up evidence of remarkable survivals of
beliefs and practices despite the repression and disruption of the twentieth century, and of newly minted occult
practices that take advantage of the world of twenty-first century possibilities offered by globalization and the
Internet.15 Yet inevitably this post-Soviet boom bears the mark of (p. 369) the seventy-year stasis. Deprived of
ongoing cross-fertilization with the international scholarly community, the first efforts to renew the study of
witchcraft and folk belief dove in where late nineteenth and early twentieth-century methods and findings had left
off. Most significantly, as A. V. Chernetsov notes, recent Russian publications often lack the rigorous historicism
that would allow them to differentiate beliefs and practices of one period from another.16 With the techniques of late
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
imperial ethnography in mind, Russian philologists and ethnographers are often highly attuned to regional,
geographic variation, but tend to show little interest in exploring issues of change over time. The temptation to read
evidence from the last century or last week into the distant past, to assume a timeless continuity in peasant belief,
continues to win adherents.
In the very last years of the Soviet Union, a new generation of more historically minded scholars began to work in
the history of Russian witchcraft. In Moscow, an active circle coalesced in the 1990s, although the first salvo may
have come from Novosibirsk, where, in 1987, N. N. Pokrovskii found a notebook of magical spells from 1734 and
published an analysis of it in a journal, tellingly titled ‘Scientific Atheism, Religion, and Current Times’.17 Since the
late 1990s, Russian scholars have produced an explosion of articles, edited collections, source publications, and
monographs too numerous to review here individually. One of the first of this new boom to appear was O. D.
Zhuravel’s study, The Motif of the Pact with the Devil in Old Russian Literature. The book concentrates on literary
representations of the satanic pact, which the author traces back through early medieval Slavic translations to
Byzantine sources. From those imported beginnings, the motif took root within Russian culture, as evident in a
spate of indigenous reworkings of the idea as an important plot element in saints’ lives, miracle tales, and in the
popular fiction that began to develop in manuscript culture in the early modern period. Turning to trial evidence,
Zhuravel’ shows that the concept of the satanic pact had spread beyond a narrow circle of literate clerics and
cultured elites, and had begun to make incremental inroads into popular imagination by the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.18
The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed an energetic push to republish old classics on witchcraft
and has also produced a crop of new studies of witchcraft and magic, both within Russia and its former subject
states and outside of it. (p. 370) A. V. Chernetsov and A. A. Turilov’s examination of the mysterious ‘Rafli’, a
prohibited prognosticatory text that evoked much concern and grave censure among Muscovite churchmen,
paints a rich picture of the intellectual and textual world of early modern Russian writers. A. L. Toporkov extends
this work on the literary traces of early modern magic with his studies of the literary tropes, poetic forms, biblical
and more ancient pagan borrowings, and uses of spells. His publications present large numbers of spells that
survive in spell books, in trial records, or interleaved into other kinds of texts such as herbals or books of healing.
A. B. Ippolitova’s ‘ethnobotanical’ study of the various herbs and plants named in spells and herbal remedies
identifies the plants, catalogues their uses, and speculates on the nature of the cures and of the magic powers
invested in them.19
Two important monographs analyse eighteenth-century trial records, each from a very different angle. A. S. Lavrov
presents a deeply researched account of witchcraft in the formal conventions of the law and in the actual process
of prosecution. His Witchcraft and Religion in Russia situates early eighteenth-century trials of witches in a
broader context of popular religiosity and attempts at its regulation. Capturing a sense of popular belief and
practice is always a challenge, all the more so given the limitations of early modern Russian sources, but Lavrov
succeeds admirably. By situating witchcraft as one among many explicitly religious matters, however, Lavrov’s
approach yields an unintended side effect: the religious framing pre-empts the still-open question of whether or not
witchcraft and magic fell into the realm of religion in the eyes of contemporaries. E. B. Smilianskaia treats witches,
blasphemers, and heretics all together, but she considers the applicability or meaning of the category of ‘spiritual
crime’ in each context. Her analysis, built on an impressive archival base, emphasizes the everyday worldly
worries and tribulations that underlay the use of magic in its social context. Her psychological acuity, along with
her vivid writing, brings to life the experiences of the men and women who populate her case studies.20
During the late Soviet years and into the post-Soviet period, Anglo-American authors working in the area of Russian
magic for the most part adhered to the ethnographic–folkloric approach established before the Revolution.
Noteworthy among these works are Linda Ivanits’ compendium and efficient discussion of Russian folk beliefs, and
Andreas Johns’ psychologically informed analysis of Baba Yaga, the (p. 371) classic Russian fairytale witch. The
most important recent publication in the field, Will Ryan’s magisterial survey of magical beliefs and practices
throughout Russian history, The Bathhouse at Midnight, draws on many disciplines, combining ethnography,
philology, folklore, and history, and has had a major impact across international boundaries. The book appeared in
English in 1999 and in Russian translation in 2006, making quite a splash in both incarnations.21
Other Western works in related areas include Faith Wigzell’s book on fortune-telling since the eighteenth century,
and Eve Levin’s elucidation of the porous line separating religion from magic, prayer from incantation, and
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
Christianity from its various opposites. Claudio Sergio Ingerflom elucidates the importance of magic in fueling
popular rebellion. My own work on seventeenth-century trials also explores the centrality of magic in Muscovite
political thought, using witchcraft as a lens for better understanding the assumptions, values, and practices of
Muscovite culture, society, politics, and law. Building on Zguta’s observations about the inverted gender profile of
Russia’s accused and the absence of systematic demonology, my research explores the implications of these
findings.22
A particular branch of witchcraft literature concerns the phenomenon of spirit possession, which shared many
common characteristics with manifestations found throughout the world, but which took on particular Russian
colouring. Christine Worobec’s 2001 monograph, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons, traces changing
understandings of the phenomenon of ‘shrieking’ or demon possession (klikushestvo or besoderzhimost’) across
four centuries. Possession figures in few early modern trials, but appears prominently in saints’ lives, miracle tales,
and iconography. It remained a noteworthy phenomenon in Russia through the early twentieth century, and seems
to be enjoying a renaissance in post-Soviet Russia. Worobec’s book still holds pride of place as the definitive work
on possession in Russia, but recently other scholars have been venturing into the field.23
At present, the old political divides are no longer operative, and the circulation of scholarly works, speeded along
by the marvels of Internet technology, is producing far (p. 372) more fruitful intellectual exchange. Happily, it no
longer makes sense to separate two streams of ‘Russian’ and ‘Western’ scholarship, and the kinds of questions
addressed in the literature are broadening, departing from the constraining tracks of earlier historiography. In a
2010 article on ‘Law and Religion in Muscovite Russia’, for instance, Boris Uspenskii makes witchcraft the revealing
focus of his exploration of the essence of Muscovite law, and argues, in conversation with scholars from all over,
that the crime of witchcraft was feared primarily as a form of physical or material harm, rather than as a threat to
the immortal souls of Orthodox Christians.24
Emerging from the forced hibernation of the seventy years of Soviet rule, the study of witchcraft has awakened at
an auspicious time, when scholars of European witchcraft are welcoming comparative studies of witchcraft in other
parts of the globe. A new generation of post-Soviet scholars is bringing fresh questions to bear on familiar and on
newly discovered sources. Trained in both Russian and European traditions, equally at home in the Russian
archives and at international scholarly forums, fully conversant with Russian and Western languages and
literatures, these historians, philologists, and ethnographers are producing work at a level that promises to bring
Russian witchcraft into engaged and productive conversation with witchcraft research writ large.25
20.6 Conclusion
A finite number of comparative questions have preoccupied scholars of Russian witchcraft, which has produced
some good work but overall has constrained the field of inquiry and shut off the possibility of exploring less
conventional aspects of the problem. Both as a vehicle for understanding Russia itself and for illuminating the
phenomenon of witchcraft comparatively, Russian witchcraft study is poised on the brink of tremendous
breakthroughs. As the topic opens out more organically in the coming years, it promises fresh insights into the
inner workings of Muscovite and imperial society. Among many possible directions, it offers access to the normally
inaccessible realms of domestic life, affective experiences, somatic and physical states. Explorations of attitudes
towards the body expressed by judges, torturers, and (p. 373) executioners, and embedded in spells and magical
rituals may allow Russianists to engage with themes in the history of the body, so fruitfully developed in other
literatures. The intellectual and theological dimensions, the gendered context and assumptions, the changing role
of social status in a time of rapid cultural transformation, all of these themes are ripe for analysis.
The Russian example provides an ideal control group to counterpose to more familiar European histories of
witchcraft belief and persecution. Russia offers a case study of a European Christian society practicing a different
variant of Christianity, an anomaly in the expected gender distribution, a culture fully immersed in witchcraft and
magic but largely uninterested in witches’ connection with Satan. As Russianists will benefit from a more nuanced
and carefully differentiated sense of what witchcraft connoted in the ‘West’, the introduction of a fully fleshed out
Russian literature into the general corpus of witchcraft scholarship will add depth and richness to our general
understanding of the phenomenon of witchcraft.
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
Further Reading
Ivanits, Linda J., Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY, 1989).
Kivelson, Valerie, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY,
forthcoming).
Lavrov,A. S., Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii: 1700–1740 gg. [Witchcraft and Religion in Russia: 1700–1740]
(Moscow, 2000).
Levin, Eve, ‘Dvoeverie and Popular Religion’, in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox
Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (Dekalb, IL, 1993).
Levin, Eve, ‘Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia’, in Samuel H.
Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb, IL,
1997), 96–114.
Levin, Eve, ‘Healers and Witches in Early Modern Russia’, in Yelena Mazour-Matusevich and Alexandra S. Korros,
eds, Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects (Leiden, 2010), 105–33.
Lindquist, Galina, Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in Contemporary Russia (New York, 2005).
Novombergskii, N. Ia., Slovo i delo gosudarevy, ii: Materialy. Prilozhenie Koldovstvo v Moskovskoi rusi XVII-go
stoletiia [Material. Appendix: Witchcraft in Moscovite Russia of the XVIIth century] (Moscow, 2004).
Ryan, W. F. The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (University Park, PA, 1999).
Smilianskaia, E. B. Volshebniki, bogokhul’niki, eretiki: narodnaia religioznost’ i ‘dukhovnye prestupleniia’ v Rossii
XVIII v. [Witches, Blasphemers, Heretics: Popular Religiosity and ‘Spiritual Crimes’ in Eighteenth-Century
Russia] (Moscow, 2003).
Toporkov, A. L. Zagovory v russkoi rukopisnoi traditsii XV–XIX vv.: istoriia, simvolika, poetika [Spells in Russian
Manuscript Tradition of the 15th–19th centuries: History, Symbolism, Poetics] (Moscow, 2005).
Toporkov, A. L. and Turilov, A. A., eds, Otrechennoe chtenie v Rossii XVII–XVIII vekov [Forbidden Reading in
Russia of the XVII–XVIII Centuries] (Moscow, 2002).
(p. 374) Uspenskii, Boris, ‘Pravo i religiia v Moskovskoi Rusi’ [Law and Religion in Moscovite Russia], in E.I.
Pivovar, ed., Rossica/Rusistika/Rossievedenie (Moscow, 2010), 194–286.
Worobec, Christine D. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2001).
Zguta, Russell, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 1187–
207.
Zhuravel’, O. D., Siuzhet o dogovore chelovekom s d’iavolom v drevnerusskoi literature [The Plot Motif of the
Pact with the Devil in Old Russian Literature] (Novosibirsk, 1996).
Notes:
(1) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) [Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents],
Moscow, fol. 210, stolbtsy razriadnykh stolov, Prikaznyi stol, st. 567, ll. 202–6.
(2) A. B. Ippolitova, Russkie rukopisnye travniki XVII–XVIII vekov: issledovanie fol’klora i etnobotaniki [Russian
Herbal Manuscripts of the Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries: Research in Folklore and Ethnobotany] (Moscow,
2008).
(3) A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii: 1700–1740 gg [Witchcraft and Religion in Russia: 1700–1740]
(Moscow, 2000).
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
(4) Eve Levin, ‘Healers and Witches in Early Modern Russia’, in Yelena Mazour-Matusevich and Alexandra S.
Korros, eds, Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects (Leiden, 2010),
105–33.
(5) W. F. Ryan, ‘The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?’ Slavonic and East
European Review, 76 (1998), 49–84.
(6) Valerie Kivelson, ‘Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy: Sin and Virtue in Cultural Context’,
in John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk, ed., Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine
(Toronto, 2006), 100–25.
(7) S. Maksimov, Nechistaia nevedomaia i krestnaia sila [Unclean, Unknown, and Christian Force] (St Petersburg,
1903). See also A. N. Afanas’ev, Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu: spravochno-bibliograficheskie
materialy [The Slavic Poetic Visions of Nature: Material for a Bibliographic Guide], ed. T. A. Agapkina, V. Ia.
Petrukhin, and A. L. Toporkov (Moscow, 2000).
(8) N. Ia. Novombergskii, Koldovstvo v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII veka [Witchcraft in Muscovite Rus of the XVIIth
Century] [Materialy po istorii meditsiny v Rossii (Material in the History of Medicine in Russia), v. 3, pt. 1] (St
Petersburg, 1906), rpt. Slovo i delo gosudarevy, ii: Materialy. Prilozhenie: Koldovstvo v Moskovskoi Rus XVII-go
stoletiia [Material. Appendix: Witchcraft in Muscovite Russia of the XVIIth century] (Moscow, 2004).
(9) Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1/2 (1931), 59–60; quoted in L. N. Vinogradova, ‘Put’ v nauke ot ‘serebrìanogo veka’
fol’kloristiki do epokhi ‘velikikh preobrazovanii’ [Path of Scholarship from the ‘Silver Age’ of Folklore Studies to the
Epoch of ‘The Great Transformation’], in E. N. Eleonskaia, Skazka, zagovor i koldovstvo v Rossii: sb. Trudov
[Folktales, Spells, and Witchcraft in Russia: Collected Works], ed. L. N. Vinogradova (Moscow, 1994), 17.
(10) L. V. Cherepnin, ‘Iz istorii drevnerusskogo koldovstva XVII v.’ [From the History of Old Russian Witchcraft of
the Seventeenth Century], Etnografiia, 2 (1929), 86–109. His biography is documented inV. D. Nazarov, ‘Lev
Vladimirovich Cherepnin’, in G. N. Sevost’ianov and L. T. Mil’skaia, eds, Portrety istorikov: Vremia i sud’by, i:
Otechestvennaia istoriia (Moscow, 2000), 285–303. For a brief biography of a contemporary of Cherepnin’s, the
ethno-folklorist E. N. Eleonskaia, see Vinogradova, ‘Put’ v nauke’. On Cherepnin in the Academic Affair, see
Akademicheskoe delo, 1929–1931 gg.: dokumenty i materialy sledstvennogo dela, sfabrikovannogo OGPU [The
Academic Affair, 1929–1931: Documents and Materials from the Investigation Fabricated by the OGPU], ed. Zh. I.
Alferov and V.P. Leonov (St Petersburg, 1993–8), ii, pt. 1, pp. xxxi–xxxiii.
(11) A. I. Klibanov, Istoriia religioznogo sektantstva v Rossii, 60-e gody XIX v.–1917 g. [History of Religious
Sectarianism in Russia from the 1860s to 1917] (Moscow, 1965); Klibanov, Religioznoe sektantstvo v proshlom i
nastoiashchem [Religious Sectarianism in the Past and Present] (Moscow, 1973). By the late 1980s and 1990s,
the atmosphere had changed significantly, allowing Klibanov to publish an edited collection, Russkoe pravoslavie:
vekhi istorii [Russian Orthodoxy: Milestones of History] (Moscow, 1989); and his single-authored Dukhovnaia
kul’tura srednevekovoi Rusi [Spiritual Culture of Medieval Rus’] (Moscow, 1996).
(12) Archeologists: T. V. Nikolaeva and A. V. Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amulety-zmeeviki [Old Russian Snake
Amulets] (Moscow, 1991); B. A. Rybakov, Iazychestvo drevnikh slavian [Paganism of the Ancient Slavs]
(Moscow, 1994); philologists: N. I. Tolstoi, Ocherki slavianskogo iazychestva [Essays on Slavic Paganism]
(Moscow, 2003); interdisciplinary contributions:R. A. Simonov, A. A. Turilov, A. V. Chernetsov, Drevnerusskaia
knizhnostʹ: estestvennonauchnye i sokrovennye znaniia v Rossii XVI v., sviazannye s Ivanom. Rykovym [Old
Russian Literary Culture: Natural Scientific and Occult Knowledge in Russia in the 16th Century, associated with
Ivan Rykov] (Moscow, 1994).
(13) Russell Zguta, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, American Historical Review, 82 (1977),
1187–207; and his ‘Was there a Witch Craze in Muscovite Russia?’ Southern Folklore Quarterly, 41 (1977), 119–
28.
(14) Archeographers: I. V. Pozdeeva and E. B. Smilianskaia, eds, Mir staroobriadchestva [The World of Old Belief]
(Moscow, 1992);E. B. Smilianskaia and N. G. Denisov, Staroobriadchestvo Bessarabii: knizhnostʹ i pevcheskaia
kulʹtura [Bessarabian Old Belief: Book Culture and Singing Culture] (Moscow, 2007).
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
(15) On the question of persistence and invention, see Faith Wigzell, ‘The Dreambook in Russia: Persistence and
Popularity’, History Workshop Journal, 48 (1999), 114–32; Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in
Contemporary Russia (New York, 2005).
(16) See A. V. Chernetsov’s review of A. L. Toporkov’s,‘Zagovory v russkoi rukopisnoi traditsii’ [(Spells in the
Russian Manuscript Tradition], Drevniaia Rus. Voprosy medievistiki, 3(41) (2010), 85–104. Toporkov, however,
brings a clear awareness of historical specificity to his work, as do Chernetsov himself and most of the authors
listed below.
(17) N. N. Pokrovskii, ‘Tetrad’ zagovorov 1734 goda’ [A Notebook of Spells of 1734], in Nauchnyi ateism, religiia i
soveremennost (Novosibirsk, 1987), 239–66.
(18) O. D. Zhuravel’, Siuzhet o dogovore chelovekom s d’iavolom v drevnerusskoi literature [The Plot Motif of
the Pact with the Devil in Old Russian Literature] (Novosibirsk, 1996). An analysis of a fully developed satanic
case is presented in A. T. Shastov, ‘Iakutskoe delo o koldune Ivane Zheglove’ [The Iakustsk Trial of the Witch Ivan
Zheglov], in Obshchestvennoe soznanie, knizhnost’, literatura perioda feodalizma (Novosibirsk, 1990), 83–8.
(19) On Rafli and The Gates of Aristotle, see A. L. Toporkov and A. A. Turilov, eds, Otrechennoe chtenie v Rossii
XVII–XVIII vekov [Forbidden Reading in Russia, XVII–XVIII centuries], (Moscow, 2002); A. A. Turilov and A. V.
Chernetsov, ‘Otrechennaia kniga Rafli’ [The Forbidden Book Rafli], Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, 40
(1985), 260–344; A. L. Toporkov, Zagovory v russkoi rukopisnoi traditsii XV–XIX vv.: istoriia, simvolika, poetika
[Spells in Russian Manuscript Tradition of the Fifteenth-Nineteenth Centuries: History, Symbolism, Poetics]
(Moscow, 2005). A useful guide to the subjects of spells is: V. L. Kliaus, Ukazatel’ siuzhetov i siuzhetnykh situatsii
zagovornykh tekstov vostochnykh i iuzhnykh slavian (Moscow, 1997). Ippolitova, Russkie rukopisnye travniki
XVII–XVIII vekov, op. cit.
(20) Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii; E. B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki, bogokhul’niki, eretiki: narodnaia
religioznost’ i ‘dukhovnye prestupleniia’ v Rossii XVIII v. [Witches, Blasphemers, Heretics: Popular Religiosity
and ‘Spiritual Crimes’ in Eighteenth-Century Russia] (Moscow, 2003).
(21) Linda J.Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY, 1989); Andreas Rainer Bormann Johns, Baba Iaga, the
Ambiguous Mother of the Russian Folktale (New York, 2004); W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in
Russia (University Park, PA, 1999); Ryan, Bania v polnoch’: istoricheskiĭ obzor magii i gadanii v Rossii (Moscow,
2006); Ryan, ‘The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?’ Slavonic and East
European Review, 76 (1998), 49–84.
(22) Faith Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender, and Divination in Russia from 1765
(Cambridge, 1998);Eve Levin, ‘Dvoeverie and Popular Religion’, in Stephen K Batalden, ed., Seeking God: The
Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (Dekalb, IL, 1993), 31–52; and Levin,
‘Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia’, in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy
Shields Kollmann, eds, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb, IL, 1997), 96–114;
Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY,
forthcoming).
(23) Christine D. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL,
2001);Ekaterina Mel’nikova, ‘Otchityvanie besnovatykh: praktiki i diskursy’ [Exorcizing the Demon-possessed:
Practices and Discourses], Antropolicheskii Forum, 4 (2006), 220–63.
(24) Boris Uspenskii, ‘Pravo i religiia v Moskovskoi Rusi’ [Law and Religion in Muscovite Russia], in E.I. Pivovar, ed.,
Rossica/Rusistika/Rossievedenie (Moscow, 2010), 194–286. Operating on a far more abstract and highly
theoretical hermeneutic plane, A. L. Iurganov’s recent book, To Kill the Devil: The Path from the Middle Ages to
Modern Times, situates Muscovite demonology in a narrative of modernization; A. L. Iurganov, Ubit’ besa: put’ ot
Srednevekov’ia k Novomu vremeni (Moscow, 2006).
(25) For example, working on Ukrainian witchcraft, Kateryna Dysa, ‘Orthodox Demonology and the Perception of
Witchcraft in Early Modern Ukraine’, in Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler, eds, Friars, Nobles and Burghers—
Sermons, Images and Prints. Studies of Culture and Society in Early-Modern Europe. In Memoriam István György
Tóth (Budapest, 2010), 341–60; and her Witchcraft Trials and Beyond: Trials for Witchcraft in the Volhynian,
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Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography
Podolian and Ruthenian Palatinates of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (Budapest, 2011).
Valerie A. Kivelson
Valerie Kivelson is Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her newest
work, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Russia will be published in 2013. She is the
author of Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006) and Autocracy in the
Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century (1997), and co-editor of several volumes, including,
with Joan Neuberger, Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
Oxford Handbooks Online
Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
Michael Ostling
The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America
Edited by Brian P. Levack
Print Publication Date: Mar 2013
Online Publication Date: May
2013
Subject: History, European History, Early Modern History (1501 to
1700)
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578160.013.0019
Abstract and Keywords
This article discusses the history of witchcraft in Poland. There were at least 867 known witch-trials and at least 558
accused witches in the Polish Crown between 1511 until the abolition of witchcraft as a capital crime in 1776. Given
the preliminary state of scholarship on Polish witch-trials, and the poor state of the Polish archives – nearly 80 per
cent of the records of the Central Archives of Old Records were deliberately burnt by the Nazis in the dying days of
the Second World War – these numbers must be treated as minimum figures only.
Keywords: witchcraft prosecutions, witch trials, witches
the summer of 1674 the court of Słomniki, a small town north of Kraków in southern Poland, heard accusations of
‘witchcraft and dew-gathering’ against the peasant woman Krystyna Gajowa Danielecka. Tied hand and foot and
dunked in the river, Krystyna ‘could not sink, but floated to the other side’, failing the water ordeal. Interrogated
under torture (suspension from the strappado three times, twice with the application of hot irons), she confessed to
nothing, but blamed one Dorota Pilecka for her misfortunes. Sometime previously, Dorota had come to her house
asking for butter; Krystyna gave it and received some peas and turnips in return, from which moment ‘everything
spoiled’: her butter stank and there were worms in her cheese and milk.
IN
As a result of Krystyna’s denunciation, the village court of Kalina Wielka brought Dorota Pilecka to trial. Before the
assembled commune of land-holding peasant men and the lord of the manor, a series of witnesses brought forth
their suspicions: Dorota washed cattle in herbal decoctions; she collected manure, grass, and soil from the
hoofprints of other people’s cattle as they went out to pasture; she always showed up when cows were calving,
ostensibly to borrow a bit of flour or lard but really to steal the afterbirth; she had been seen collecting herbs in the
cemetery, mixing these cemetery-herbs into her posy to be blessed at the feast of ‘Our Lady of the Herbs’ (15
August, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary); she owned a dried bat. In general, ‘people say that she must know how
to do something’. Under such a weight of evidence, Dorota was turned over to the Słomniki town court for
interrogation under torture. Pulled three times and burned with hot irons, she never confessed but was
nevertheless pronounced guilty: she had ‘practised all sorts of witchcraft and enchantment with herbs’, and had
offended against the First Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not have other gods before me.’ Krystyna (p. 319)
Danielecka was beheaded. To punish Dorota’s more serious crimes, the Słomniki court sent to Kraków for an
executioner to burn her properly at the stake.1
The executions of Krystyna and Dorota constitute just two of many hundreds of such executions for witchcraft in
the Commonwealth of the Two Nations of Poland and Lithuania—a vast and diverse state in the early modern era,
stretching from the Baltic to the trans-Dnieper steppes, and comprising most of the territory of present-day Poland,
Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. We know of at least 867 witch trials and at least 558 accused witches under the
Polish Crown between 1511 until the abolition of witchcraft as a capital crime in 1776, and a much smaller number—
ninety-seven trials, of which twenty-seven included death sentences—in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Given the
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
preliminary state of scholarship on Polish witch trials, and the poor state of the Polish archives—nearly 80 per cent
of the records of the Central Archives of Old Records was deliberately burnt by the Nazis in the dying days of the
Second World War—these numbers must be treated as minimum figures only. A total of perhaps two thousand
witches burnt, while undemonstrable, seems likely.2
No single set of small-town trials can hope to embody all the themes and issues of hundreds of trials over three
centuries, and indeed the two Słomniki trials of 1674 lack many central motifs encountered elsewhere in Poland.
We hear of no verbal curse against neighbours—‘eat a devil!’ or ‘you won’t live to enjoy the profit from this field’.
We find no burial of ‘disgusting things’—ashes and bones and toads, or the whole rotting head of a mare—under a
threshold or in a child’s bedchamber, bringing sickness and death. Neither Krystyna nor Dorota travelled to the
witches’ feast at Łysa Góra (Bald Mountain), to dance with demon consorts while the rare male witch provided
music played on a hoe, a needle, or a foxes’ tail; in northern and western Poland in the late seventeenth century,
the Bald Mountain motif had become so common that many witchcraft confessions devolve into long lists of
denunciations, naming the other witches seen at the feast. At Słomniki, neither Krystyna nor Dorota enjoyed the
services of the demon-familiars found in witch trials throughout central Poland and eastwards into Ruthenia. Hybrid
creatures, part Christian devil, part Slavic house spirit, part ghost of an unbaptized baby, such diabły or latawcy or
złe duchy (devils, flying ones, evil spirits) could be sent to strangle a cow or push a neighbour into the lake to
drown; they also flew in and out of the witches’ hovel, their tails sparking fire, bearing stolen grain or milk or
treasure.
In many respects, however, the Słomniki trials are typical. Like perhaps 92 per cent of the accused Polish witches,
both Krystyna and Dorota were women—an identity so (p. 320) close that the Polish word baba, like its Russian
cognate, can connote ‘old village woman’, ‘cunning woman’, and ‘witch’. Like most, they were village serfs or
commoner inhabitants of the small agrarian towns sprinkled throughout the Polish countryside (the large cities of
the Commonwealth—Kraków, Gdańsk, Warsaw, Poznań, Lublin, Lwów—all recorded witch trials, but in
disproportionately small numbers). Krystyna seems to have been a widow while Dorota was the wife of the village
cobbler; both were caught up in the relationships of petty borrowing and lending, the reciprocal food and labour
exchanges, which could so easily lead to the conflict and envy expressed in witchcraft accusations. Krystyna
allegedly received her own power to bewitch through accursed food, a common motif blurring the distinction
between perpetrator and victim, witch and bewitched. Like many suspected witches, Krystyna was dunked in the
river—an ancient Slavic practice still resorted to, albeit illicitly, right into the mid-nineteenth century, despite
repeated ecclesiastical condemnation of the practice from the early seventeenth century onwards.3
Like many accused witches in early modern Poland, Krystyna and Dorota only came to trial after many years of
gradually consolidated reputations for sinister, suspicious behaviour. Krystyna had gathered dew—that is, she had
taken the life-giving moisture from fields of grain or (more likely), from pastureland on the village common,
metonymically transferring the dew’s fecundity to her own fields and milch cows. Dorota stood accused of a series
of rituals, all also tending to increase the milk production of her own cattle at the expense of others. So central was
milk-theft to Polish conceptions of witchcraft that a woman could come under suspicion simply because ‘she has
plenty of butter from just one cow’; conversely, the husband of another accused witch attempted to prove his
wife’s innocence by declaring ‘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”.’ It would be misleading to treat this dairy obsession
in purely nutritional terms, or to derive it from a superstitious ignorance of Pasteur. In the early modern Polish
popular cosmology, a cow’s yield of milk represented a central moment in what Lyndal Roper has called ‘the
economy of bodily fluids’: it provided both an ‘objective’ index of a household’s prosperity and a symbolic index of
its health and well-being. The witch was, above all, an over-consumer of these limited goods: she stole milk and the
health it symbolized while her neighbours, their cattle, their fields, and their fat juicy babies, dried up and shrivelled
away.4 Hence the stereotypical rhyming spell of Polish witches, attested to in dozens of trials: ‘Biorę pożytek, ale
nie wszytek’—‘I take the profit, though not the whole thing.’
(p. 321) Moreover, most of the Słomniki witches’ suspicious activities constitute excesses or inversions of the
ordinary counter-magic practised by any conscientious housewife. Krystyna gathered dew from communal fields—
others protected their cattle, or restored stolen milk, with holy water or with water gathered from a running river
before sunrise. Dorota washed her cows with herbs blessed at the feast of Our Lady of the Herbs—so did everyone
else. The only difference is that Dorota, allegedly, gathered some of her herbs in the cemetery. Witches differed
from their neighbours not through special knowledge or ability, but through little illicit departures from common folk
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
practices. And yet one woman’s ‘recovery’ of her cow’s lost milk must have looked, to an outsider, very like
another woman’s ‘theft’—one might say that the best defence is a good offence. It follows that, while milk magic
was widely practised, few practitioners thought of themselves as milk-thieves—as witches. The imagined activity of
thieves generated the real activities of protectors and recoverers, and the imagined rituals and spells of thieves
generated, through inversion, the real rituals and spells of their adversaries. Thus one finds a characteristic
paradox of the Polish witch trials: despite the lack of self-identified witches, there was always plenty of quite real
evidence for the practice of witchcraft.
Finally, the outcome of the Słomniki trials is typical. Like perhaps two-thirds of accused witches before town courts
in Poland, Krystyna and Dorota were sentenced to death—nearly always, as with Dorota, by burning alive at the
stake.
18.1 Law and Practice
Criminal justice in the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth presented a mosaic of overlapping courts and
jurisdictions, each with its own legal traditions and norms. Only in the Grand Duchy, where the Third Lithuanian
Statute of 1588 assigned jurisdiction over witch trials to the noble palatinate courts, do we find clear, though illenforced, norms for the prosecution of witches. In the Polish Crown, witches could be tried before manorial courts,
village courts, ecclesiastical courts, even the special Cossack tribunals of eastern Ukraine or the guild courts of
large cities: in 1670, the baker’s guild of Bydgoszcz heard accusations that a member had mixed ground bones
from a hanged thief into his flour, seeking thereby to increase sales.5 Witchcraft cases involving the desecration of
the Eucharistic host could be referred to regional noble courts or to the Crown Tribunal at Lublin; however, the
statutory law guiding such noble courts took so little notice of witchcraft that the word appears not at all in the first
five volumes of the Volumina Legum, the great compendium of Polish law. Not (p. 322) until the state sought
belatedly to regulate witch trials in the 1670s did Polish statutory law become relevant to witch trials in the
country.6
Ecclesiastical courts tried women variously described as incantatrices, sortilegae, or mulieres antiquas
throughout the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth. Such women allegedly made amulets from roots,
divined with wax and lead, or (an especial concern of the ecclesiastical courts, in Poland as in the West), made
use of holy water, chrism, and blessed candles for this-worldly ends. However, cases involving magic constituted
less than 1 per cent of church-court trials in this period; Joanna Adamczyk, who has recently provided a thorough
study of these trials, finds them to exhibit a ‘relatively minimal interest in the problem of magical practices’.7 Only in
the seventeenth century, when de facto jurisdiction over criminal witchcraft had decisively shifted to the secular
courts, did the Catholic Church hierarchy take a strong interest in witchcraft. In a concerted campaign beginning in
the 1630s and intensifying through decades of polemical publications, the Church denounced the excesses of
secular courts and the bloody-mindedness of secular judges, described disparagingly as ‘analphabetic hillbillies’
and as ‘legal ignoramuses who can hardly recite the Lord’s Prayer’.8 Drawing on the text of a parliamentary
constitutio of 1543 (an act which, however, had never been ratified or enacted into law), the bishops of northern
and western Poland issued a series of pastoral letters and synodal decrees in the first four decades of the
eighteenth century, insisting that witch trials be returned to church-court jurisdiction, and threatening secular
magistrates with ecclesiastical censure.9 With the partial exception of the diocese of Włocławek, where Bishop
Krzysztof Antoni Szembek intervened personally in several town-court witch trials in the early eighteenth century,
this ecclesiastical campaign seems to have had little effect on the behaviour of secular town courts—the courts
before which some 80 per cent of accused Polish witches were tried.
Although ecclesiastical court records mention a trial before the secular town court of Poznań as early as 1434, the
earliest clear cases come from Gdańsk in 1501 and Waliszew, a suburb of Poznań, in 1511, where a vetula
accused of magically spoiling the brewing of beer was burnt at the stake.10 The code of Saxon law employed by
Polish (p. 323) town courts called for death at the stake for maleficium, a position strengthened in the midsixteenth century when the Kraków jurist Bartłomiej Groicki translated selections from the Carolina into Polish,
including its provision of capital punishment for any magic resulting in harm to persons or property.11 Nevertheless,
throughout the sixteenth century secular witch trials remained rare and rarely resulted in execution. The accused,
often semi-professional cunning women, confessed to milk-theft and love magic but also to healing with herbs and
prayers, finding lost or stolen items, and laying protective blessings on cattle and on brewing beer. They were
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
punished with fines, oaths of apology, or banishment: where they received a capital sentence, this was often for a
combination of crimes. A witch sentenced to decapitation in Poznań seems to have worked as a procuress, while
two women eventually burnt in Kalisz for demon-assisted milk-theft first came to the court’s attention for vagrancy,
robbery, and prostitution.
By the early seventeenth century, noble and burgher attitudes towards witchcraft had shifted decisively. A notation
in the village-court records of Klimkówka traces this shift in attitude: in 1611 the village’s noble owner reminded the
court that ‘concerning witch-craft…the law commands that if [a witch] should threaten, she must be punished with
death’.12 Three years later, the little-known petty nobleman Stanisław Ząbkowic published his translation of
Kramer’s Malleus maleficarum—the earliest vernacular translation of this seminal work of demonology.13
Meanwhile, notions of witchcraft as a species of blasphemous treason entered Polish jurisprudence through the
influence of Continental legal scholars such Joos de Damhouder and Benedict Carpzov, whose writings nudged the
local Polish version of Saxon law in the direction of Western inquisitorial norms.14 A rare crime in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth century, confined largely to the northern and western palatinates of Wielkopolska and Royal
Prussia, witchcraft was becoming a topic on everybody’s mind; according to the polemical pamphlet The Witch
Denounced, ‘one hears about witch-trials more than (p. 324) about any other subject’.15 Over half the Polish
witch trials (and over half the executions) occurred in the seventeenth century; after 1650, such trials became
nearly as common in southern Poland (Małopolska) as in the north and west. Between 1648 and 1660 the country
was devastated by a series of disasters: Cossack uprising, Russian invasion, peasant jacquerie, and, above all,
the catastrophic Swedish war known to Polish historiography as the Deluge. The last quarter of the seventeenth
century, when the countryside had begun to recover demographically but not economically, saw the peak of the
witch trials and executions: perhaps a quarter of the total. Moreover, though most trials continued to be initiated
through accusation and to feature just one or a few suspects, the half-century 1675–1725 saw an increase in
intensive witch-hunts and chain-reaction trials.
Table 18.1 Intensive Witch-Hunts in Poland
Town
Region
Number of Trials
Fordon
Wielkopolska
60
Grodzisk
Wielkopolska
5
Kleczew
Wielkopolska
21
Łobżenica
Wielkopolska
?
Nieszawa
Wielkopolska
Nowe
Płońsk
Number Executed
Dates
?
1675–1711
20+
1700–1720
41
1682–1700
c. 30
1675–1700
12+
?
1698–1722
Royal Prussia
18
?
1701–1719
Mazowsze
16
26+
1699–1713
By far the bloodiest outbreak of witch panic occurred in the small town of Kleczew in central Wielkopolska. As
Tomasz Wiślicz has ably shown, the Kleczew court became a magnet for witchcraft cases, drawing in suspects
from villages and small towns within a 15 kilometre radius.16 To understand the mechanisms underlying the
Kleczew witch-hunt we must briefly consider its opposite: the everyday, ordinary trials before Polish village courts.
Village-court witch trials differed radically from the trials before town courts. Testimony before a village court could
function as a sort of pre-trial hearing, as with the proceedings against Dorota Pilecka before her trial in Słomniki. In
general, however, village courts functioned on a model of restorative justice, the court focusing not on who was
wrong but on how to set things right. Wiślicz has shown that of fifty-three village-court witch trials from 1529 to
1766, the great majority ended with sentences of a small fine, an oath of expurgation, or a court-enforced apology
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
and reconciliation between accuser and accused. Village courts could level corporal punishments such as
flogging, and (with the manor’s permission), might order the banishment of a troublesome witch—as when the court
of Iwkowa ordered a succubita (p. 325) to depart the village territory ‘before sundown’.17 But village magistrates
could not legally adjudicate capital crimes. To permanently eradicate a dangerous witch from their midst, a village
community had to send the accused to the Saxon law court of a nearby town.
This consideration helps to account for several features of that large proportion (about two-thirds) of town-court
witch trials originating in villages. Because the nobility 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 the lord of the
manor—Dorota Pilecka was sent to the Słomniki town court only after her master, Pan Michał Oraczewski, had
heard the village-court testimony against her and chose to proceed. The appearance of class warfare discernible
in some Polish witch trials derives in part from this juridical situation: a peasant witch simply could not come to trial
unless her manor-lord himself had reason to take village suspicions seriously—often because he or his family had
themselves become victims of the witch. However, once the lord of the manor had become convinced of a
suspected witch’s guilt, his active cooperation often assured her conviction. He covered the costs of magistrate,
scribe, and executioner, sending his serf to the town for trial or even inviting the court to the manor, putting them
up as his guests while they tried the case in situ. A nobleman who paid for a local town court to come to his
property expected, and often got, the verdicts and sentences he was looking for; the popularity of the Kleczew
court among the petty nobility of central Wielkopolska, even where the courts of other small towns were sometimes
nearer at hand, correlates with that court’s willingness to accede to such noble desires for conviction. On the other
hand, the need for manorial cooperation tended to inhibit witch panics or chain-reaction trials: when an accused
witch denounced collaborators from another village, the serfs belonging to another manor, it could often prove
impossible to bring these newly suspected witches to justice.18
To thoughtful observers the local, small-town witch trials of the late seventeenth century could appear as thinly
legitimated lynchings; but without a strong central government little could be done to stop them. Over a third of the
Polish witch trials, and two-fifths of the executions, occurred in the eighteenth century, primarily in its first quarter.
The Catholic Church hierarchy had been campaigning against the trials for decades; now the state also tried, albeit
ineffectually, to intervene. The Assessory Court, an organ of the Royal Chancellery exercising limited appellate
oversight over the Saxon-law judiciaries of royal towns, attempted to regulate witch trials in 1673, forbidding smalltown magistrates from hearing cases for ‘sacrilege, sorcery, or malefice’. However, royal rescripts in 1703, 1727,
and 1740, and repeated decrees of the Assessory (p. 326) Court in 1749, 1750, and 1768 had almost no effect.
Despite draconian penalties, on paper, against offending magistrates, such directives of the weak central
government remained unenforceable so long as local nobility supported the witch trials.19 Such support began to
erode by the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time educated Poles were increasingly embarrassed
by the Western perception of their Commonwealth as backward and superstitious. Rampant witch-burnings formed
part of this unsatisfactory image: in a mid-century polyglot dictionary, the Professor of Polish at Leipzig could
complain that ‘en Pologne on brûle les sorciers souvent sans aucune inquisition’.20 The noble leaders of Poland’s
late-blooming Enlightenment could not abide continued witch trials in the country. At the reforming parliamentary
session of 1776, King Stanisław August proposed a constitutio abolishing judicial torture; it passed unanimously,
together with an amendment ‘forever abolishing the penalty of death in cases of witchcraft’.21 The crime of
witchcraft had been legislated out of existence, although scattered reports of dunkings, assaults, or even lynching
of suspected witches continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The milk-theft motif remains
current even today: in 2004, the Kraków regional court ordered a woman to apologize after publicly accusing her
neighbour of spoiling the milk in the udders of her cows.22
18.2 Progress and Prospects
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Polish folklorists, like their compeers elsewhere in Europe, looked to witch
trials in search of the timeless, essential genesis of their nation as preserved in the practices of the common folk. In
witch-trial testimony they found both remnants of pre-Christian Slavic religion and antecedents for present-day
superstition, evidence either way for just such a substratum of ahistorical national culture. Early on, the brilliant
Ryszard Berwiński critiqued this folkloric approach, insisting instead on the derivative, foreign provenance of most
Polish witchcraft beliefs. Berwiński portrayed the Polish witch as a ‘cosmopolitan, not born or raised in this or that
country, but conceived at the cross-roads between this temporal and the everlasting world’: an image that fits well
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
with recent models placing witch trials at the conjuncture of transnational and local, literary and oral, elite and
popular (p. 327) worldviews.23 Nevertheless, it was the ahistorical, essentializing folklorists who hunted down and
published a great many trial records, preserving these from the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Oskar
Kolberg’s vast but disorganized survey of Polish folklore, together with pre-war articles from the folklore journals
Wisła and Lud, remain valuable resources for the historian of Polish witch trials.24
In contrast, nineteenth-century Polish historians paid witchcraft little mind. A few deployed witch trials to illustrate
the deficiencies that had led to the partition of the Commonwealth by its imperial neighbours at the end of the
eighteenth century: thus Józef Łukaszewicz could inveigh against ‘the obscurantism of the Jesuit schools’ filling up
the nobility with superstitious nonsense, thanks to which one finds witch trials on ‘nearly every page’ of the early
modern Polish court records. But the same author used witch trials to impugn the partitioning powers: the
prosecutions were ‘bred in Germany and were brought to our country along with the barbaric Magdeburg Law’.25 In
contrast, the legal scholar Jósef Rosenblatt examined the Polish witch trials as evidence for a judicial system in
disarray, but he also found, in texts like the Witch Denounced, proof that some early modern Poles stood up for
tolerance against the superstitious fanaticism of the times.26 Although witch trials remained marginal to Polish
historiography of this period, the parameters for twentieth-century discussion of the subject were thus set: witch
trials represented the worst, most backward aspects of the pre-Partition era; witch beliefs derived from external
sources and were thus not essentially Polish; though Polish witch trials were comparatively mild, they inspired great
works of sceptical toleration representing the best, most progressive characteristics of the nation. This tendency to
invidious comparison proved remarkably stable right into the twenty-first century, informing brief but influential
essays by such well-known historians as Janusz Tazbir and Maria Bogucka. Even Małgorzata Pilaszek, despite
having analysed more Polish trials and chronicled more Polish executions than any previous researcher, insists
that the Polish witch prosecutions were ‘among the least intensive of the entire continent’, constituting ‘only a pale
reflection of events in the West’.27
Bohdan Baranowski’s Witch-Trials in Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries, the first and until very recently the
only monograph on the Polish witch trials, shared this tendency to compare Polish mildness to the ‘millions’ of
witches burnt in Germany. But it added a second contrast: between the progressive, socialist, atheist present and
the superstitious, feudal, fanatical past. Published in 1952 at the height of Poland’s brief (p. 328) Stalinist phase,
and written by an author committed to legitimating the new regime by creating a black legend of the system it
replaced (between 1950 and 1953 Baranowski collaborated on a series of publications exposing the intolerance,
fanaticism, and brutal despotism of the Catholic Church and the Polish nobility), Witch-Trials depicted the Polish
prosecutions as a product of ‘Popish politics and the Inquisition’ wedded to class warfare: the nobility used
witchcraft accusation to eliminate uppity serfs, ‘the bold fighters, male and female, for the rights of the peasant
masses’.28 For Baranowski, the ‘gloomy superstition’ of witchcraft stood for all that was cruel, ignorant, and savage
in the Polish past, and he systematically exaggerated the scope of the persecutions to bolster his dark vision of
that past. His assertion that 10,000 witches were burnt in Poland, and a further 5,000 lynched (an assertion widely
cited in Western scholarship until very recently, after the French resumé to Witch-Trials) derives entirely from this
dark vision: Baranowski simply multiplied the number of towns in early modern Poland by an arbitrary four trials per
town, then doubled the resulting product.29 Although he edited a valuable collection of the early witch trials in
Kalisz,30 and later wrote useful histories of everyday life in early modern Poland, Baranowski’s legacy will remain
his systematic, long-influential misrepresentation of the Polish witch trials.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Stanisław Salmonowicz surveyed the scholarship on Polish witchcraft and
found little to like—Baranowski’s dubious synthesis; Janusz Tazbir’s brief programmatic corrective to that
synthesis; a few scattered archival studies of limited ambition.31 Much has changed in the intervening years.
Although the scholarship on Polish witchcraft remains young, recent work has broadened its scope enormously
and provided a firm footing for future research. Tomasz Wiślicz’s research on village courts and on the great
Kleczew witch-hunt has already been noted; he has also begun an investigation into popular demonology as
expressed in exorcism narratives.32 The tireless Jacek Wijaczka has produced a stream of regional and thematic
studies, and his monograph on Ducal Prussia demonstrates the similar trajectory of witchcraft prosecution in this
erstwhile fiefdom of the Polish Crown: a late peak of trials in the last three decades of the seventeenth century;
women constituting about 85 per cent of the accused.33 Kateryna Dysa’s important Witchcraft Trials and Beyond
focuses on the understudied Ruthenian regions of the Crown. Despite a persistent early modern stereotype of
Ruthenia as a nest of witches (such that a seventeenth-century (p. 329) Polish–Latin dictionary glossed saga as
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Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice
both czarownica and Rusiianka, ‘witch’ and ‘Ruthenian woman’), Dysa’s study confirms that the magistrates in this
region showed little interest in eradicating witches. Acquittals were common, sentences mild: of 189 witch trials in
the period 1600–1800, Dysa finds just thirteen executions.34 Finally, two book-length monographs on Polish witch
trials have recently appeared. Brief consideration of these books will demonstrate that the scholarship on Polish
witchcraft has come of age, while also suggesting directions for future research.35
More than half a century after Baranowski’s Witch-Trials, Małgorzata Pilaszek’s massive Trials for Witchcraft in
Poland has brought the study of witchcraft in Poland into the twenty-first century. Strongly grounded in the
broadest survey of Polish archives so far undertaken—Pilaszek perused or sampled the criminal records of twentynine towns scattered throughout Poland, and made use of the published records for several dozen more—
Pilaszek’s book marks a new era in Polish historiography.36 Her cautious analyses of this large database and her
appreciation for the social and legal forces driving the witch trials present a decisive departure from Baranowski’s
inflationary speculations: after Pilaszek, it should no longer be possible to dismiss witch trials as the tragic result of
‘feudal fanaticism’. Importantly, Pilaszek has introduced recent Anglo-American social history to a Polish scholarly
audience—and she has theoretical contributions to export in return. As has been standard since historians
discovered the anthropology of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Pilaszek reads the witch-trial records as evidence of
interpersonal conflicts, but she goes further. Bringing this conflict model into conversation with the cognitive
linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Pilaszek finds parallels between the spells and curses of a
quarrelsome woman, generating suspicions; the malicious gossip and slander of neighbours, generating
accusations; and the formal witch trials that generate convictions. All are verbal attacks with real-world
consequences, all are permutations of the master metaphor of ‘argument as war’. As Katarzyna Mączarka, an
accused witch before the Poznań court, declared: ‘nie byłyby czary bez gwary’—‘there would be no witchcraft
without squabbling’.37
With its historiographically sophisticated presentation of a rich and variegated body of archival source material,
Pilaszek’s work will remain the point of departure for research into Polish witch trials into the foreseeable future.
However, as Pilaszek acknowleges, her study takes little interest in the subjective experience of witchcraft or its
basis in folk cosmology and popular Christianity. My own Between the Devil and the Host, which reflects a
background in religious studies and the anthropology of (p. 330) religion, attempts to fill some of the gaps left by
Pilaszek’s work. On the basis of a survey of 254 trials from over eighty towns and villages, I cover much the same
ground as Pilaszek’s study: surveying the social dynamics that motivated accusations of witchcraft, the legal basis
for prosecution, and the judicial procedures that transformed village suspicions of magical milk-theft into
abominable crimes. However, I also read the trial records as documents illuminating the history of Christianity in
early modern Poland. On the one hand, witches and victims described the activities of szata…