Legislating the witch: a genealogy of juridical thought

Abstract

Long before the prosecution of individuals for witchcraft was rendered a legal impossibility in the states of modern Europe, the judicial and executive institutions of those states and their precursors were decisive in both legitimating and moderating, facilitating and constraining the detection, trial, and execution of alleged witches. If we are to impute more than unresolved cognitive dissonance to this paradoxical relationship of the apparatus of state to the perceived reality and threat of witchcraft, then the preconditions and contextual factors predicating that relationship bear investigation. This paper identifies genealogical traces of criminological, political, social, and religious thought embedded within several pivotal bodies of early-modern law pertaining to witchcraft, and attempts to infer the cultural, institutional, and textual sources and conditions from which they derive.