The devil’s power to delude

about witchcraft and magic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No record of council meetings was kept in Rothenburg until 1664, when popular pressure for greater openness forced the councillors to lift the shroud of secrecy from their gatherings. However, even after 1664 the meeting minutes recorded only the decisions made by the council and not the deliberations by which they were reached. The often detailed testimonies elicited from the women, children and men of the lower orders who became involved in witchcraft cases, which frequently give us a real sense of their personalities, emotions and discursive strategies, thus stand in ironic contrast to the silence of the councillors who judged their cases, whose personal opinions about witchcraft and influence on individual witchcraft cases were never recorded and whose reasons for resolving cases in particular ways were never stated explicitly. We can, however, draw conclusions about elite belief with reasonable confidence from other sources. The opinions written by jurists and, occasionally, clerics for the councillors on particularly problematic witchcraft cases are most important in this regard, as they set case-specific advice in the context of wider demonological and jurisprudential thinking about the crime of witchcraft and usually cited the legal or theological texts on which their conclusions were based. Jurist Georg Christoph Walther also wrote a twenty-nine-page treatise to better inform the councillors about witches and their activities in September 1652. These jurists and clerics were council appointees whose religious affiliation and educational and social background had to be acceptable to the councillors for them to acquire their positions in the first place, and their advice was frequently followed by the councillors in specific witchcraft cases. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the beliefs about witchcraft they expressed in their opinions reflected a similar spectrum of beliefs held by the councillors themselves. We can also establish the broader framework of elite beliefs about beneficient witchcraft and popular use of magic from council 2