Male Witches in the Duchy of Lorraine

Abstract

Men were often found on trial for witchcraft in the Duchy of Lorraine, comprising some 28 per cent of the suspects for whom trial documents survive. Altogether, between 500 and 600 men probably faced such charges, with no perceptible change in the male-female balance over the period of the major persecution: there is such an abundance of information about a large sample of them that even a lengthy chapter in my recent book had to omit a great deal.¹ These figures should be understood with reference to the broader contours of the Lorraine persecution, as described in that book. In the sixty years between, approximately, 1570 and 1630, the ducal officials probably oversaw around 2000 trials, full records for some 400 of which still survive. When set against a population of around 300,000, this stands out as one of the most intense persecutions in Europe — at a level only exceeded, among territories of any size, in the neighbouring Duchy of Luxembourg and in the Electorate of Cologne. Apart from one set of trials in the late 1620s that produced at least 50 victims, there was no concentrated witch-hunt in Lorraine, so these trials were distributed widely in both time and space. The legal system in use essentially followed French practice, but there was no appeal to a higher court; torture was routinely employed, and produced a conviction rate of 79 per cent in the fully recorded cases, with very little difference by gender.