The Witch in the Courtroom: Torture and the Representations of Emotion

Abstract

In extending the perspective developed through studies on witch trials in Lutheran regions (e.g. Württemberg), the chapter emphasizes the difficulties besetting the attempts to use local witch-trial records stemming from intense, mostly Catholic witch-hunts, to recover the emotions of the persons involved. This chapter argues first that we do not find emotions in the records, but representations of emotions. Second, it cannot be neglected that torture, interrogation, confession and the respective representations of emotion were intrinsically tied together in a threefold legal, religious and political sense. Third, witch-hunts generated different kinds of source material providing us with different perspectives on the lost world of past emotions (e.g. trial records from local courts; records from appeal courts; secret letters of the accused) with their inherent problems of interpretation. Fourth, courts with legally trained assessors formed a certain kind of emotional community. Certain semantics determined the norms of the emotional habits of the accused as well as the judges. Finally, further research into the emotional norms, narratives or labels of alleged witches has to move from appreciating local trial records as ‘windows’ onto lost emotions of the past.