From Magic to Maleficium: The Crafting of Witchery in Late Medieval Text
Paper by Rochelle E. Rojas, Duke University
Since its birth, the Christian church has been bedeviled by magical beliefs and practices. While this tension did not manifest its virulence until the witch hunts of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the theoretical shift in notions of magic and heresy, which enabled its materialization, began in the thirteenth century. As the connection between magical practices and diabolical pacts was formed, a concept of witchcraft as necessarily heretical emerged. Fueling this definition were notions of maleficium, or evil deeds, and the shifting ascription of sorcery from male to female. A decisive text which marked a turning point in demonological thought is the Formicarius by the Dominican Johannes Nider, composed circa 1435. Nider's work connected magic with maleficium and women in a single text, an approach copied in the Malleus Maleficarum half a century later. The question driving my research is: How did the Formicarius forge the links between magic, and maleficium, and women? Further, what role did the gendering of witchcraft have in wedding it to diabolical practices, and therefore, heresy? I approach Nider's text through a careful reading, situating it within the demonological corpus in which it was composed, and I seek to analyze the connections between his anecdotes of maleficium and the susceptibility of women. Examining his gendered paradigm and descriptions of maleficium, I argue that once witchcraft was feminized, a diabolical pact became necessary in magical practices, as it was inconceivable for women to exert power without external, and demonic, assistance. Indeed, as magic morphed into female witchcraft it likewise became inherently heretical. This paper will elucidate the importance of the interdependency among maleficium, gender, heresy and church doctrine in the cauldron of witch fears which bubbled forth in the late middle ages and boiled over in the early modern world.
