526 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1617.
says, ill a convent of nuns and vain was his effort to put a stop to it.
Experts gave it as their opinion that " the new sect of witches" had its beginning about the year 1300.^ But the writers of the 15th and 16th centuries were careful to prove that their two characteristic performances, the flight through the air and demonic intercourse, were not illusions of the imagination, but palpable realities.^ To the testimonies of the witches themselves were added tlie ocular observations of church officials.^ Other devilish performances dwelt upon, were the murder of children before baptism, the eating of their flesh after it had been consecrated to the devil and the trampling upon the host.* One woman, in 1457, confessed she had been guilty of the last practice 30 years.
The more popular places of the weekly sabbats were the Brocken, Benevento, Como and the regions beyond the Jordan. Here the witches and demons congregated by the thousands and committed their excesses. The witches went from congregation to congregation as they pleased^ and, according to Prierias, children as young as eight and ten joined in the orgies.
Sometimes it went hard with the innocent, though prurient, onlookers of these scenes, as was the case with the inquisitor of Como, Bartholomew of Homate, and some of his companions. Determined to see for themselves, they looked on at a sabbat in Mendrisio from a place of concealment. As
1 Ista secta strigiarum. So Bernard of Como, who was followed by Nicolas Jacquier, Prierias, etc. Hansen : QueUen, pp. 282, ;319.
2 Turrecremata, the Spanish dogniatician and canonist, dissents from the opinion that the flying women were led by Diana and Ilerodias, on the rational grounds that Diana never existed and Ilerodias probably w;is never permitted to leave hell.
^ See the realistic language of Jacquier, Prierias, Bartholomew of Spina, etc. QueUen, p. 136, etc.
* Jacquier, Widman of Kemnat, Barthol. of Spina, etc., QueUen, pp. 141, 234, 327, sq.
^ Valdenses ydolatrcz, QueUen, pp. 157, 165. The poet Martin le Franc, secretary to Felix V., in his Champion des dames, about 1440, speaks of 10,000 witches celebrating a sabbat in the Valley of Wallis. Six hundred of them were brought to confess they had cohabited with demons. QueUen, 99-104.
§ 59. WITCHCRAFT AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 527
if unaware of their presence, the presiding devil dismissed the assembly, but immediately calling the revellers back, had them drag the intruders forth and the demons belabored them so lustily that they survived only 15 days.^ The forms the devil usually assumed were those of a large tom-cat or a goat. If the meeting was in a building, he was wont to descend by a ladder, tail foremost. The witches kissed his posterior j)arts and, after indulging in a feast, the lights were put out and wild revels followed. As early as 1460, pictures were printed representing women riding through the air, straddling stocks and broomsticks, on goats or carried by demons. In Normand}^ the obsessed were called broom-riders — scobaces.^ Taught by demons, they made a salve of the ashes of a toad fed on the wafer, the blood of murdered children and other ingredients, which they applied to their riding sticks to facilitate their flights. According to the physician, John Hartlieb, who calls this salve the " unguent of Pharelis " — Herodias — it was made from seven different herbs, each gathered on a different day of the week and mixed with the fat of birds and animals.^
The popularity of the witch-delusion as a subject of literary treatment is shown by the extracts Hansen gives from 70 writings, without exhausting the list.^ Most of thewriters wei-e Dominicans. The TF^^(?Aes^a77^wer_wa^rintedJnJnal^ editions, issued 13 times beroreT520 and, from 157j|:-1 fifiO, 1^ times. The most famous of these writers in the earlier half of
1 The incident is told by that famous witch-inquisitor, Bernard of Como, in his De strigiis. Hansen : Qiiellen, pp. 279-284.
2 From scoba, meaning broom. So in tlie tract Errores Gazariorum seu illorum qui scobam vel baculum equitare probantur, Quellen, pp. 118-123.
3 QiieUen, p. 131 sq. This medical expert declared that women and men were often turned into toads and cats. When such a cat's paw was cut off, it was found that the foot of the suspected witch was gone. With his own eyes, this mediseval practitioner says he saw such a woman burnt in Rome, and he states that many such cases occurred in the papal metropolis. Hartlieb was medical adviser to Duke Albert III. of Bavaria. His Buck aller verbotenen Kunst, Unglaubens u. d. Zauberei, was written 1456.
* Hansen devotes 60 pages of his Quellen to the title, date and authors of the Malleus. An excellent German translation is by J. W, R. Schmidt : Der Hexenhammer, Berlin, 3 vols., 1906.