Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting
The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities Page 4 Wolfgang Behringer
The Age of Witch-Hunting thus seems pretty congruent with the era of the Little Ice Age. The peaks of the persecution coincide with the critical points of climatic deterioration. Witches traditionally had been held responsible for bad weather which was so dangerous for the precarious agriculture of the pre-industrial period. But it was only in the 15th century that ecclesiastical and secular authorities accepted the reality of that crime. The 1420ies, the 1450ies, and the last two decades of the fifteenth century, well known in the history of climate, were decisive years in which secular and ecclesiastical authorities increasingly accepted the existence of weather-making witches. During the "cumulative sequences of coldness" in the years 1560-1574, 1583-1589 and 1623-1630, again 1678-1698 (Pfister 1988, 150) people demanded the eradication of the witches whom they held responsible for climatic aberrations. Obviously it was the impact of the Little Ice Age which increased the pressure from below and made parts of the intellectual élites believe in the existence of witchcraft. So it is possible to say: witchcraft was the unique crime of the Little Ice Age.
The witch-hunts of the early modern period were continuously accompanied by discussions about theological interpretations and natural reasons of meteorological events (Alber/Bidembach 1562; Weyer 1563; Sigwart 1602; Schopff 1603; Hossmann 1612; Sigwart 1613). Although the theological discussions followed their own logic, I would like to suggest that the discussion about witchcraft influenced the emerging science of meteorology. During the last three decades of the fifteenth century, the question regarding the possibility to influence the weather by means of witchcraft counted among the most prominent topics of demonology. The Malleus maleficarum propagated the idea that hailstorms could be caused by witches though only with the help of demons and the permission of God. Opponents of these ideas, like Ulrich Molitoris in his famous and often reprinted De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus, though containing the first woodcuts of weathermaking witches, flatly denied the posssibility of artificial influence on the weather. Since this topic was the center of Molitors argumentation, his treatise could be seen as one of the first printed books about weather. It is important to notice that the new science of meteorology emerged in the context of an ardent theological and demonological debate about the origins of the weather. In the beginning of the 16th century this debate was shaped by an Opusculum de sagis maleficis of the nominalist theologian Martin Plantsch at the university of Tübingen who excluded demons from meteorology (Plantsch 1507).
When early meteorological treatises like the Nurenberg book Von warer erkantnus des Wetters (Of true knowledge about the weather), avoid any allusion to witchcraft and the demonological debate this provides an implicit comment on the ongoing demonological debate. This publication of an otherwise little known author, Leonhard Reynmann, contributed with its 17 reprints since 1505 enormously to the secularisation and rationalisation of the topic. In Nuremberg with its strong humanist patriciate the possibility of weathermaking witches was traditionally ridiculed. Though the Imperial City like Swiss or Italian City republics owned a considerable rural territory, nobody was burned there for suspected witchcraft during the 15th and 16th centuries. The councillor Willibald Pirckheimer ridiculed dominican Inquisitors and witch-beliefs in his satires. His friend Albrecht Dürer produced woodcuts treating the topic as a secularised subject for presenting attractive naked women, and even the Poet Hans Sachs exposed witch-belief as a bad dream or demonic illusion without material reality.
Two out of thirteen chapters in Reynmanns book, which since 1514 was simply titelled Wetterbüchlein (weather book), discussed exclusively the natural causes of thunder- and hailstorms. While preachers of all denominatios talked into the 18th century about demonic causes of climate, they mostly denied the possibility of witchcraft (Dilherr 1652; Ganshorn 1672; Stoeltzlin 1692). After the age of the Witches Hammer a tradition of exclusively secular explanations tried to find an escape from the dangerous paradigm of scapegoating by simply neglecting demonological items. The lesson to be learned in the sixteenth century that only God or nature were responsible for major changes of the climate, seems still of actuality in our time where in the eyes of many ecological sins substituted the moral sins of the confessional ages. From the era of the Little Ice Age we should learn the danger of agitating eschatological fears connected with climatic changes.
