The Journal of the Archivist of the Unseen
An illustrated historical panel connects the Würzburg witch trials with the 1324 Kilkenny case.
Written at Faulkenmire, in the German stacks, on a still night, with the smell of woodsmoke in a room that has no hearth.
There is a wing of Faulkenmire I have learned to enter only by day. Tonight it would not wait for me. I came down after supper to find the door to the German stacks standing open and the smell of the room changed. The usual camphor and old paper were there, and under them, faint as a memory, woodsmoke. On the reading desk lay a thin octavo, an English translation printed in Philadelphia at the turn of the last century, open to a letter written in August 1629 by the chancellor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg to a friend. I have read it before. I read it again, and I have not slept.
The facts first, careful reader, for they are terrible enough without ornament. Würzburg, in Franconia, was a Catholic prince-bishopric of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled from 1623 by Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, who meant to make it a godly and obedient state. It stood on a confessional frontier, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. A single trial took place in 1625. Then, in 1626, a frost destroyed the vine harvest on which the region lived. Suspects were tortured, confessed to raising the frost by sorcery, and named others. The persecution that followed did not end until 1631.
Its engine was simple, and that is what frightens me. A special commission conducted the trials and set aside the limits on torture laid down in the imperial criminal code, the Carolina of 1532. Under torture, the accused confessed; having confessed, they were made to name their accomplices at the sabbath; the named were arrested and tortured in their turn. Each confession produced new names, and each name a new confession. The first arrested were mostly poor women. But a machine fed by names cannot respect rank, and in time it took canons and vicars, councillors, a noble page, physicians, students, and the Prince-Bishop’s own nephew, Ernst von Ehrenberg, who was beheaded and burned.
The numbers are uncertain, and I will set them down with their uncertainty. A list preserved in an eighteenth-century compilation records 157 people executed in the city in twenty-nine burnings between 1627 and early 1629, and it says itself that it is incomplete. Historians estimate some 219 executions in the city and around 900 across the whole territory under Ehrenberg. Most victims on the list are not named but described: a strange man, a wandering boy twelve years of age. Among the confirmed dead are at least forty-nine children under twelve, many from the Julius hospital’s orphanage and school.
And so to the letter on my desk. The chancellor writes that the affair has started up afresh, that four hundred remain under suspicion in the city, that the richest and most prominent of the clergy are already executed. He reports that children of three and four years, three hundred of them, are said to have had dealings with the Devil, and that he has seen children of seven to fifteen put to death. In a postscript he records, as plain report, that on a hill near the city the Devil in person, with eight thousand followers, had held an assembly and said mass before them. What chills me is not his credulity. It is his tone. He is not a monster. He is a busy official, writing to a friend about a crisis at work.
This is where Würzburg meets my two studies of Kilkenny. In 1324 Dame Alice Kyteler was accused of keeping a demon and holding night meetings, and when the case grew dangerous she had the wealth and connections to flee. Her maidservant, Petronilla de Meath, did not; she was flogged until she confessed, named her mistress, and was burned. Three centuries later, in Franconia, the same logic ran at a scale Kilkenny could not have imagined: confession under pain, the naming of others, and fire for those who could not run. The difference, I think, is that in Würzburg no one could run, and in the end not even the rich.
It did end. Families of the powerful accused petitioned the Imperial Chamber Court and the Emperor, who in 1630 condemned the proceedings. The Jesuit Friedrich Spee published his Cautio Criminalis anonymously in 1631, arguing that confessions under torture are worthless and that denunciations of accomplices can multiply suspicion without limit. Tradition holds that Spee heard the confessions of the condemned at Würzburg, though he himself said only that he had walked women to the fire “in various places”; I treat his presence there as probable, not proven. Ehrenberg died in July 1631, and that autumn Swedish troops under Gustavus Adolphus took the city. The burnings stopped.
Before I left the room I closed the book and set my hand flat on its cover for a moment, as one does at a graveside. The smell of smoke was gone. On the desk, where the book had been, lay a sheet of paper I had not brought, ruled into columns for names, and every column empty.
— A.U., Faulkenmire
Catalogue References
Field Study No. XI — The Woman Who Was Never Burned: Dame Alice Kyteler
Field Study No. XII — The One Who Could Not Run: Petronilla de Meath
Further Studies
Behringer, W. (2004). Witches and witch-hunts: A global history . Polity Press.
Levack, B. P. (2016). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (4th ed.). Routledge.
Roper, L. (2004). Witch craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany . Yale University Press.
Spee von Langenfeld, F. (2003). Cautio criminalis, or a book on witch trials (M. Hellyer, Trans.). University of Virginia Press. (Original work published 1631)
Editions and reprints vary; verify details against a library catalogue.
Uncatalogued
Some fifty miles to the east, in Bamberg, in the summer of 1628, a burgomaster named Johannes Junius wrote a letter to his daughter from his cell, and I have begun to look for it.
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