Between the Devil and the Host

Michael Ostling’s splendid study of witchcraft in early modern Poland (the first book on the subject in English) fills a wide gap in the rapidly growing field of witchcraft studies. Ostling’s achievement is two-fold. In Part I, entitled ‘History’, he provides an illuminating analysis of Polish witchcraft prosecutions, in which he constructs a social profile of the accused, establishes the grounds for suspicion and formal accusation, charts the chronology and intensity of the prosecutions, and describes the judicial procedures used in the trials. In the second and third parts, entitled ‘Religion’ and ‘Demonology’ respectively, he analyses popular and learned witch beliefs, employing the techniques of cultural studies and the anthropology of religion. The book is based on the records of seventy-seven town courts (there were about 1,250 towns in all), which tried 455 individuals for witchcraft. Of these, 245 are known to have been executed, although the actual number was probably higher. On the basis of this data, Ostling projects a figure of 2,000 executions for the entire kingdom of Poland over the course of some 250 years. This estimate, which is in line with that of recent Polish scholarship, offers a corrective to the widely cited figure of 10,000 executions advanced by the historian Bohdan Baranowski in 1952. When the size of the early modern Polish population is taken into account, Ostling’s figures further diminish the reputed harshness of Polish witch-hunting. Moreover, the percentage of prosecutions that resulted in executions (about 65 per cent overall) was only slightly higher than the average for Europe as a whole. It was higher than in England, Finland, and New England but significantly lower than in many German ecclesiastical territories. On the other hand, the percentage of Polish witches who were women was exceptionally high, approximating to that in Essex, England, and the bishopric of Basel. This high percentage should be attributed to Polish women’s involvement in activities that led to suspicion of their performing maleficent magic, not the misogyny of demonologists

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