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Abstract

The early modern period experienced extensive witch hunts, a strange and brutal phenomenon fueled by the religious, political, and economic upheavals of the early modern period.  The pamphlets that emerged out of the witch hunts, much like their predecessors during the Reformations, shaped, informed, and reflected public fears and social and religious perceptions about witches and a very real fear of the active Christian Devil in the world. This pamphlet dating from around 1630 reflects several tropes common in the genre and demonstrates the nature of popular beliefs about witches. The image, and many others like it, portrayed the witches at a diabolical sabbath as controllers of nature and animals who gathered naked for demonic and sexual purposes to do the Devil’s bidding. The image reveals common beliefs about witches’ activities, including flying, controlling the weather, cooking human children, and having sexual relations with the Devil and his minions.

Broadsheet “See How the Satanic Witches Gather” (c. 1630)

Source

Source: Broadsheet, anonymous author, image based on an engraving by Nicolaes de Clerck, c. 1630.
British Museum 1880,0710.574, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1880-0710-574

British Museum

Doris Gruber, “Der Hexensabbat: Zeitgenössische Darstellungen auf illustrierten Flugblättern,” MA Thesis, der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Institut für Kunstegeschichte (Graz, 2013).

Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 

Abaigéal Warfield, “The media representation of the crime of witchcraft in early modern Germany:  an examination of non-periodical news-sheets and pamphlets, 1533-1669,” PhD thesis for National University of Ireland Maynooth, Department of History, 2013. 

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Fourth edition. London : Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2016.

Broadsheet “See How the Satanic Witches Gather” (c. 1630), published in: German History in Documents and Images, <https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/ghdi:image-5355> [March 28, 2025].