Witchcraft politics (Hexenpolitik) across the sea. A new entangled history of early modern England and the Holy Roman Empire.

‘Witchcraft politics (Hexenpolitik) across the sea’ is a collaborative project that will close a longstanding gap in our understanding of witchcraft and witch-trials in early modern England and the Holy Roman Empire. Until well into the late-20th century, the historiography of English witchcraft suggested a myth of English exceptionalism compared to witch-trials and witchcraft beliefs in ‘continental’ Europe. These ways of thinking were based not just on England’s island geography and sense of identity but also on England’s post-Reformation development into an allegedly homogenous Protestant nation state. This apparent separation between England and ‘continental’ Europe has hindered historians from gaining a deeper understanding of early modern witchcraft beliefs and the gendered episodes of judicial witch-persecution these beliefs helped to cause.
Our project is based on two key ideas. First, we argue that Great Britain and Ireland were not sealed off from the rest of Europe by their island status; the seas around them and their ports and coastlines functioned rather as dynamic sites for the maritime transfer of people, things, and ideas, effecting the dissemination and exchange of ideas about the devil, witchcraft, and magic. Second, we argue that comparisons based on modern ‘national’ cartographic boundaries are of limited value for the early modern period. Instead, England and the Holy Roman Empire will be approached as areas of political, judicial, and confessional diversity, with different levels of social, political, and judicial activity operating within and across regions in both polities.
The project team will analyse demonologies, witchcraft pamphlets, and a range of other printed texts from the early modern period and use detailed case-studies of key regions and towns based on extensive manuscript archive materials. We will identify the key channels through which ideas about witchcraft, witch-trials, and the devil were transmitted within and between England and the Holy Roman Empire, to establish a dynamic sense of how important such cultural exchanges were for wider developments in European demonological thinking. We will also undertake the first systematic comparison of witchcraft beliefs and witch-trials across the two polities to establish their similarities and differences, using our new model of Hexenpolitik (witchcraft politics). This model situates beliefs about magic, witchcraft, and the devil in specific socio-political and regional contexts, and looks at how the political and religious priorities of key local actors shaped the decision-making processes to instigate or restrain witch-persecution in various chosen localities.
The project team will disseminate its findings through a series of work-in-progress conference papers and workshops, a project conference, academic articles, a co-authored monograph, and a digital map. The project findings will produce a richer comprehension of the regional diversity and geographic complexity of the entangled witchcraft histories studied. They will also counter the unhelpful historiographical (and political) tendency to see the histories of England and Europe as separate and help inform current public debates about gendered forms of oppression by offering a more nuanced account of the gendering of early modern witchcraft politics.