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Emotions in the History of Witchcraft 1st Edition Laura Kounine
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The Value of Emotions for Knowledge Laura Candiotto
Kant on Emotions: Critical Essays in the Contemporary Context (New Studies in the History and Historiography of Philosophy Book 8) 1st Edition Mariannina Failla
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions includes work that redefines past definitions of emotions; re-conceptualizes theories of emotional ‘development’ through history; undertakes research into the genesis and effects of mass emotions; and employs a variety of humanities disciplines and methodologies. In this way it produces a new interdisciplinary history of the emotions in Europe between 1100 and 2000.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14584
Laura Kounine • Michael Ostling Editors
Emotions in the History of Witchcraft
Editors Laura Kounine
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton United Kingdom
Michael Ostling
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona USA
Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotion
ISBN 978-1-137-52902-2 ISBN 978-1-137-52903-9 (eBook)
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Frans Hals, Malle Babbe or The Witch of Haarlem (detail), 1633
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
A cknowledgements
This book originated in a conversation over coffee—a conversation made possible by an Early Career International Research Fellowship at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne and by the Centre for the History of European Discourses (now Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), University of Queensland. Further collaborations on the theme of ‘Witchcraft and Emotions’ were made possible by the generous support of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne and the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The editors would like to thank those institutions, and in particular Ute Frevert, Charles Zika, Kiran Sande, Phil Almond, Peter Cryle, and Karin Sellberg.
1 Introduction: ‘Unbridled Passion’ and the History of Witchcraft 1
Michael Ostling and Laura Kounine Part I In Representation 17
2 Fear and Devotion in the Writings of Heinrich Institoris 19 Tamar Herzig
3 The Cruelty of Witchcraft: The Drawings of Jacques de Gheyn the Younger 37 Charles Zika
4 Satanic Fury: Depictions of the Devil’s Rage in Nicolas Remy’s Daemonolatria 57
Laura Kounine
5 Tyrannical Beasts: Male Witchcraft in Early Modern English Culture 77
E.J. Kent
The Witch in the Courtroom: Torture and the Representations of Emotion
‘So They Will Love Me and Pine for Me’: Intimacy and Distance in Early Modern Russian Magic
n otes on c ontributors
Edward Bever is a Professor of History at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury and the author of The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life. He has also published numerous shorter works on early modern witchcraft and popular magic.
Robin Briggs is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests have been in the social and religious history of France between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and the history of European witchcraft. He is currently writing a general study of north-western Europe over a very long time span. Major publications include Early Modern France, 1560–1715 (1977, revised ed. 1998), Communities of Belief (1989), Witches and Neighbours (1996, revised ed. 2002), and The Witches of Lorraine (2007).
Sarah Ferber is Professor of History at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her books include: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (2004) and Bioethics in Historical Perspective (2013). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal Preternature. With legal scholar, Adrian Howe, she researches the ways in which modern law and medicine address acts of violent exorcism.
Malcolm Gaskill is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (2000); Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (2001); Witchfinders (2005); and Witchcraft: a Very Short Introduction (2010). His most recent book is Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (2014). Currently, he is working on a case study of witchcraft accusations in the Connecticut Valley in the 1640s and 50s.
Peter Geschiere is Professor of African Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and co-editor of the journal Ethnography. Since 1971 he has undertaken historical-anthropological field-work in various parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa. His publications include The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa (1997), Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009), and Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in Comparison (2013).
Tamar Herzig is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Tel Aviv University, where she also serves as Director of the Curiel Institute for European Studies. Her books include Savonarola’s Women (2008) and Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman (2013). She has also published numerous articles on fifteenth and sixteenth-century demonology and on the prosecution of witches in early modern Italy.
E.J. Kent is a graduate of the University of Melbourne who now works as an Independent Researcher. Her research into masculinity and witchcraft in the early modern Transatlantic English world has been published as Cases of Male Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1692–1592 (2013), as well as a variety of articles. She is currently pursuing research on masculinity in the Salem witch trials, and in ideas of evil in early modern English culture.
Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book is Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013). She is also the author of Autocracy in the Provinces (1997), and of Cartographies of Tsardom (2006). She has co-edited four volumes of essays on subjects ranging from Muscovite visual culture to the cultural history of Russian Orthodoxy. Her current work uses visual sources to understand Russia’s early modern imperial expansion.
Laura Kounine is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex, and was previously a research fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She is the co-editor of Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (2016) and author of the forthcoming Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany
Charlotte-Rose Millar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her book, The Devil is in the Pamphlets: Witchcraft and Emotion in Early Modern England is forthcoming in 2017. She is also the author of numerous works on
witchcraft, diabolism, emotions and sexual practices in early modern England and has won two prizes for her published work.
Michael Ostling is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, The Honors College of Arizona State University, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland. He is the author of Between the Devil and the Host (2011) and the editor of the forthcoming Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits (2017). He also writes about ethnobotany, popular culture, and critical pedagogy.
Rita Voltmer is Senior Lecturer and researcher in Medieval and Early modern History at the University of Trier. Her books include Wie der Wächter auf dem Turm (2005), Hexen. Wissen was stimmt (2008), and Hexen und Hexenverfolgung in der Frühen Neuzeit (2012, with Walter Rummel). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters and has curated several exhibitions on the topic of witchcraft. Current research interests include European and transatlantic witch hunts; the history of criminality and poverty; and the cultural transmission/ translation of knowledge.
Charles Zika is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His interests lie in the intersection of religion, emotion, visual culture and print in early modern Europe, and focus on pilgrimage, communal integrity, natural disaster and witchcraft in this period. His most recent books include The Appearance of Witchcraft (2007); The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death & Disaster (2012, with Cathy Leahy and Jenny Spinks); and Celebrating Word and Image 1250–1600 (2013, with Margaret Manion).
Laurel Zwissler is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Central Michigan University, and author of the forthcoming Cosmologies of Interconnection (2017). She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto in the Centre for the Study of Religion and the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies. Her ethnographic work focuses on global justice activists and investigates contemporary interrelations between religion, gender, and politics, relating these to theoretical debates about empirical and ideal roles of religion in the public sphere. She is now building on this work with ethnographic research within the North American fair-trade movement.
l ist of f igures
Fig. 3.1 Jacques de Gheyn II, Three Witches in an Archway, c. 1600–1610, pen and brown ink, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1923 (1278.779–3)
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 3.3
Fig. 3.4
Fig. 3.5
Jacques de Gheyn II, Witches at Work in an Arched Vault, 1604, pen and brush with brown and grey ink, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Jacques de Gheyn II, Witches’ Kitchen, 1604, pen and brush with grey and brown ink on grey paper, Staatliche Museen Berlin, inv. 3205
Jacques de Gheyn II, Witches Cooking Body Parts, pen and brown ink, brown wash and black chalk on buff paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Jacques de Gheyn II, Attributes and Creatures of Witchcraft, c.1610, pen and brown ink, black chalk on buff paper. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris
Fig. 3.6 Andries Stock (?) after Jacques de Gheyn II, Preparation for a Witches’ Sabbath, c.1610, engraving. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1925 (1658–3)
Fig. 3.8 Cornelis Engebrechtsz and Workshop, Lamentation with Donors & Saints, c.1510–15 (with kind permission of the Archbishop of Southwark, London. Photo credited to Imran Sulemanji)
Fig. 4.1 Hans Baldung Grien, Three Witches (New Year’s Sheet), 1514. Albertina, Vienna
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Fig. 4.2 Georg Pencz, illustration for Hans Sachs, Das Feinstselig Laster, der heymlich Neyd (Nuremberg, 1534). (From The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1500, 3:965) 59
Fig. 10.1 Accused witch Joan Prentice engaging in a blood pact with her familiar, Bidd. Anon., The apprehension and confession of three notorious witches (1589), title page and sig. B1v 179
Wiem, ze to grzech jest wielki, wiem, ze wszelkie czary Szkodliwe, ale zal mój nie ma zadnej miary.
I know witchcraft is harmful, that in practicing it I fall Into great sin, but there’s no limit to my bitter gall.
Szymon Szymonowic, Sielanki, 1614
In Thomas Dekker’s Witch of Edmonton (1658), Mother Sawyer is a quarrelsome old woman, ‘shunned/And hated like a sickness’.1 But she is no witch, until the hatred of her neighbours drives her to become one:
L. Kounine, M. Ostling (eds.), Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52903-9_1
Some call me witch, And being ignorant of myself, they go About to teach me how to be one, urging That my bad tongue—by their bad usage made so— Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn, Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.2
Insulted by a neighbour, she curses him (impotently, her malediction not yet empowered by the Devil). The neighbour beats her and leaves her bleeding, and in the desperate fullness of her rage against a cruel world, she invokes ‘some power, good or bad’ to ‘Instruct me which way I might be revenged/Upon this churl.’ When she declares her willingness to ‘give this fury leave to dwell within/This ruined cottage’ of her ageing body, the Devil appears in the form of a dog. He promises her his love and the power of revenge in exchange for her soul, and Mother Sawyer, not yet a witch when she had been beaten for witchcraft, becomes a witch in fact.3
Scholars of witchcraft are rightfully reluctant to equate fictitious depictions of witchcraft with the actual practices of accused witches or their accusers.4 And yet the depiction of Mother Sawyer’s trajectory towards diabolism closely parallels stories from the trials of accused witches. For example that of Mengeatte Grand Jacques in Lorraine, of whom a witness recalled that ‘she wished she could be a witch for two hours to do as she wanted’—in order to harm those who wrongly called her witch.5 And Dekker’s play well illustrates the central conundrum of any attempt to recover a history of emotions from literature or from trials: witches were identified by their negative emotions, but these negative emotions were themselves inspired by suspicions or allegations of witchcraft.
Witchcraft is a crime of ‘headie and unbridled passion’, an overflowing of ‘bitter gall’ with ‘no limit’.6 Witches are ‘fit to burst from enormous resentment’, or ‘exasperated with a wrathfull and unruly passion of revenge, or transported by unsatiable love’.7 Witch trials themselves unfold as dramas of emotional expression and repression, wherein the ‘unbridled passions’ on view belong to accusers, witnesses, and officers of the court—such as the bailiff who, according to the testimony of one accused witch, ‘with gruesome and shocking torture took out his anger on me’.8 Jurisprudential convention required accusers to present their case in coolly dispassionate language, such as when Stanisław Gałek, in early eighteenth-century Poland, assured the court that his accusation arose ‘not out of hatred, or rancour, or spite, or wrath … but because of the
facts and the truth’.9 But such accusations arose from almost unbearable grief and fear—at the loss of a cow or a child or one’s sexual potency, at the notion that one’s neighbour could be responsible for that loss. Meanwhile accused witches, under conditions ranging from intimidation at best to prolonged and brutal torture at worst, tried to maintain their emotional composure. But not too much composure—rant and rave and they proved themselves full of the ‘unbridled passion’ expected of witches, but if they failed to shed remorseful tears they displayed a culpable dispassion. As was noted in the record of a witch trial in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, which took place in 1616, ‘the prisoner, with her behaviour, without shedding a single tear, cheekiness, and lack of fear’ should not be let out of prison, even though she had confessed to nothing.10 Witches were either all too emotionally human or inhumanly cool under pressure, and were damned either way.
As Lyndal Roper has recently noted, ‘witchcraft is fundamentally about physical harm caused by emotions … [W]ishing evil may well actually have caused harm, for emotional conflicts can make people ill’.11 However, the challenge for historians is to untangle whose emotions caused what harm: the accused witch, whose envy induced illness; or the accuser, torturer, and executioner, driven by grief or fear to dunk an alleged witch in the local pond, hang her from the strappado, or burn her at the stake. While curses or the evil eye might lead to a witchcraft victim’s sickness, the emotions of accusers and magistrates indubitably have led to the deaths of thousands of alleged witches. Roper has argued that ‘without an understanding of the emotional dynamics of witchcraft, we cannot comprehend the intensity and bitterness of the witch trials’.12 The unbridled passions discoverable in the history of witchcraft might belong primarily to the accusers.
The present volume attempts to take on this challenge, discriminating between the several emotional registers that both promise to illuminate and threaten to obscure any account of emotions in the history of witchcraft. Part I, ‘In Representation’, explores discourses about the emotional lives of witches. These chapters focus on the witch imagined, depicted, and contested in authoritative and influential works of demonology and visual art. Tamar Herzig revisits the notorious Malleus maleficarum, among the earliest and most reprinted of demonological manuals. Through an examination of the full corpus of works by its author Heinrich Institoris, Herzig complicates the standard reading of the Malleus as misogynistic rant: she shows that for Institoris the ungovernable emotionalism of women leads in
one direction towards witchcraft, in another, towards sainthood. Charles Zika offers a detailed case study of a small set of prints and sketches by Jacques de Gheyn II, using these to explicate a Europe-wide visual script, drawing on humoral theory, which locates the affectless cruelty of witches as the flipside of the Virgin’s mercy and compassion. In contrast, Laura Kounine’s provocative reading of Nicolas Remy’s Daemonolatria, one of the most influential demonological texts during the height of the witch craze, turns away from the alleged emotions of female witches to depictions of their supposed master, the Devil, whose rage and jealousy drove people—both men and women—to witchcraft. Finally, E.J. Kent examines the male witch in old and New England, showing how his depiction is modelled on and reflects seventeenth-century concerns about masculine tyranny. Together, these four chapters integrate representations of witchcraft into contemporaneous theories of the emotions and of gender.
Part II, ‘On Trial’, would seem to move from representation to reality, from literary or visual or intellectual history to the history of experience. Rita Voltmer’s chapter on torture immediately dashes any such naïve hope, as she calls into question the possibility of recovering ‘authentic’ emotions from witch-trial records, arguing that these represent carefully constructed emotionological scripts, intended to justify the brutality of early modern courts. The other four chapters in this section express a cautious hope that trial records might provide a window onto the actual emotions of accused witches and their alleged victims. Valerie Kivelson resituates the often beautifully romantic love spells deployed by Muscovite women as part of a larger discourse negotiating relationships of hierarchy and dependency in a harsh feudal society where beatings and torture were routine. Robin Briggs draws on his decades-long immersion in the witch-trial records of Lorraine to consider the emotional landscapes of entire villages: the disruptive love that could move a woman to bewitch, the overwhelming grief that engendered suspicion, the hatred and fear necessary to overcome peasant solidarity and trigger formal accusations before courts of law. Michael Ostling looks to accounts of demon lovers in Polish witch trials to find evidence for marital affection in the least likely of places. Finally, Charlotte-Rose Millar makes use of a very full corpus of English witch-trial pamphlets to highlight the emotional underpinnings of what is often understood in terms of legal contract or theological covenant—the witches’ pacts with their familiar devils. Taken together, these five chapters emphasize the problems and prospects of mining the trial records to reconstruct early modern emotions.
Part III, ‘In the Mind’, turns inward, seeking explanations for the phenomenon and experience of witchcraft in the workings of the mind. Edward Bever takes an approach grounded in neurobiology and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that anger, hatred, and jealousy can trigger strong stress reactions in those to whom they are directed—reactions culturally explained as witchcraft. Peter Geschiere’s comparative ethnography of Africa and Europe explores the complex therapeutics of practices related to witchcraft: the gossip that turns grief or rage into an actionable accusation, allowing one to mediate and express the dangers of intimacy. Sarah Ferber’s contribution historicizes psychological approaches, juxtaposing nineteenth-century classifications of witchcraft as delusion, twentieth-century historiographies of the emotional childishness supposedly revealed in the witch trials, and twenty-first-century legal cases of exorcism assault. Together, these three chapters provide an overview of psychological approaches to witchcraft and the emotions while also subjecting such approaches to critique.
This leads us towards a reflection on our own emotions about the emotions discovered in the history of witchcraft. Part IV, ‘In History’, moves from the history of emotions to the emotions of history: the uses of the past for the arousal and maintenance of emotional dispositions today. For at least the last two centuries, memorializations of the witch trials have been deployed to inculcate outrage against their perpetrators—a moving target ranging from fanatical priests to scheming medical doctors to patriarchy in general. While such memorializations often depend on tendentious, ahistorical readings of the past, the emotions they arouse are no less real or powerful. Laurel Zwissler’s case study explores this issue sensitively, through an ethnographic analysis of contemporary pagans and the emotions aroused through remembrance of the ‘Burning Times’. Finally, Malcolm Gaskill’s Afterword reflects on the importance of getting the history of the emotions of witchcraft right, and provides some recommendations towards that goal.
M odels for the h istory of e Motions
While the chapters fall neatly into the categories above, they also draw extensively on each other across such neat divisions. To take just one example, Geschiere’s interest in the therapeutics of counter-magic (Part III) places him in conversation with Briggs (Part II), who in turn speaks to Kounine (Part I) through their shared focus on the demonologist Nicolas
Remy. Indeed, the chapters could have been ordered entirely differently to bring out different sets of connections. Below, we examine the chapters in this volume through the framework of the burgeoning literature on the history of emotions. This has a twofold purpose: first, to show how the history of emotions can provide guidance into examining the emotions in witchcraft; and second, to explore the ways in which scholars have approached emotions in witchcraft in order to provide further avenues for the history of emotions.13 As befits a young field, the history of emotions has proven fertile ground for the production of neologisms, and its theoretical elaboration has proceeded through the delineation of multiple overlapping, rival terms—emotives, emotionology, emotional regimes, or practices, or communities or arenas.
Emotives
William Reddy has perhaps done more than any other to shape the field of the history of emotions, with his highly influential work on ‘emotional regimes’ and in particular ‘emotives’. Reddy’s term ‘emotives’ denotes gestures and speech acts at once ‘descriptive and performative’, both reflecting and constructing emotional experience.14 This productively ambiguous term can be used in a variety of ways. On the one hand, emotives are the words used to translate ephemeral, inchoate feelings into stable, public, analysable (and thus historical) emotions: they facilitate the ‘attempt to feel what one says one feels’.15 The term thus clarifies the process of coming to feel particular emotions by having a language in which to express them—a process explored especially in Zwissler’s ethnography of the motivating anger cultivated by contemporary pagan activists, Millar’s discussion of the affection and rage expressible through devil familiars, and in Ostling’s and Kivelson’s exploration of love magic.16 Kivelson also takes the term ‘emotive’ in a different direction, exploiting its affinity with the linguistic category of performatives. Just as performative speech acts such as promises or baptisms ‘do things in the world’, so to with emotives: they are words and gestures with effects beyond their semantic meaning. Kivelson comments that ‘This eureka moment [that words are actions] comes as no surprise to anyone who studies witchcraft.’17 Historians and anthropologists of witchcraft have long known that a muttered malediction can bring illness or death, and that even unspoken emotions do harm: as John Aubrey argued long ago, ‘the glances of envy and malice do shoot also subtilly; the eye of the malicious person does really infect and make
sick the spirit of the other’.18 A witch’s curse or angry glance can be explicated in terms of such emotives; it expressed her rage or envy and induced answering feelings in her victim, with real-world consequences ranging from the victim’s illness to the witch’s death at the stake. Although he does not use the term, Edward Bever’s account of the ‘neurobiology of emotional aggression’ can be recast in terms of emotives in this extended sense.19
Emotionology and Emotional Regimes
Emotionology (a term whose coinage in 1985 marks the arrival of the ‘history of emotions’ as a coherent discipline) denotes ‘the attitude or standards that a society … maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression [and] the way that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct’.20 The rival ‘emotional regime’ covers similar territory, but emphasizes the workings of power—emotional regimes uphold and are upheld by wider discourses of gender, class (or estate), and ethnicity (or nation).21 Both terms intend to bypass the problems involved in historicizing internal emotional experience in favour of theories about emotion, representations of emotion, emotional discourses, and norms.
The ‘unbridled passion’ through which witchcraft has been imagined constitutes one such emotionological tradition: quite independently of whether any witch ever felt such passion, the theory that she did so shaped demonological discourse and the assumptions of magistrates presiding over witch trials. An inverted version of the same emotionology informed the historiography of witchcraft from the late eighteenth century well into the twentieth. Historians have resembled demonologists precisely in their preferences for accounting for witchcraft in terms of emotional excess, but this excess has belonged to the demonologist and magistrate rather than the accused witch. Enlightenment theories of witchcraft have sought explanations for the ‘witch craze’ in the ‘sadomasochistic fantasies and infanticidal impulses’ of demonologists.22 As Sarah Ferber shows, such an attitude towards the emotions of witchcraft is fossilized in the classificatory systems of contemporary law, psychology, and even library science— the Dewey Decimal system places witchcraft together with ‘delusions’ in ways which prejudge its rationality while also keeping it safely distant from conceptually relevant categories such as ‘Christianity’.23 Laurel Zwissler explores a different preservation of a similar emotionology among feminist
activists and contemporary pagans, who use it to stoke their own resistance to the cold anti-emotionalisms inherent to monotheism and patriarchy.24
Despite their outdated adherence to the notion of the ‘Burning Times’ as a genocide directed against women, Zwissler’s pagans have a point. For decades now, feminist historians have read misogynist demonology as a sort of inverted mirror, a flipped image by which one can reconstruct early modern patriarchal standards of female emotional comportment. Sigrid Brauner, for example, reverse-engineered the femmes fatales of Hans Baldung Grien’s artwork and the gynophobic bombast of the Malleus maleficarum to discover the ‘proper’ emotional range of the ideal German woman: subdued, self-contained, keeping a civil tongue in her head, maintaining, with the help of her husband’s benign oversight, a check on her natural female tendency to emotional outbursts.25 Nor was this mere emotionology, mere theory. As Louise Jackson has argued, witch trials and stories of witch trials enforced emotional norms: as an anti-model for loving mothers, dutiful wives, chaste and modest widows, ‘the witch was a warning to women as to what would happen if they behaved in a way which could be counted as subversive’.26 ‘The witch defined the virtuous woman in the negative’, holding up ‘a dark mirror to feminine quietude’.27
There can be no doubt that the imagination of the witch’s emotional excess was profoundly gendered. A seventeenth-century Polish critique of the witch trials explains that witches tended to be women because they are ‘full of affect and unchecked passion’.28 But the same notion was widespread in contexts entirely divorced from the witch trials, such as in the sermons of the Polish historian-priest Szymon Starowolski: ‘If [women] love someone, they love without measure. If they hate someone, their hatred and wrath is measureless; when they begin to be good, they become saints.’29 Although Starowolski might have borrowed this commonplace from the Malleus maleficarum (which copies it from Johannes Nider’s Formicarius), he more likely took it from Seneca: ‘a woman either loves or hates, there is no third’.30
Several chapters in the present volume seek not so much to contest the feminist reading of gendered emotional regimes as to qualify and complicate it. Tamar Herzig’s radical rereading of the Malleus in the light of Institoris’s reverence for embodied female piety demonstrates that he took quite seriously both sides of women’s alleged emotionalism—‘ unrestrained emotionality was essentially a female trait; but it could turn contemporary women not only into wicked witches, but also into reincarnated Christs’.31
At the other end of the book, Zwissler notes an ironically similar valorization of female emotionalism among Progressive-era feminists and some of their twenty-first century sisters, for whom ‘women’s stronger emotionality makes them more authentic, wise and positioned to govern justly’.32 Charles Zika provides close visual reading of several works by Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, to suggest that he depicts not his own understanding of the practices of actual witches but of those alleged witches’ deluded fantasies. We are thus usefully reminded that opponents of the witch trials such as Johannes Weyer and Reginald Scot preserved the Malleus’ sense of emotionally overwrought female witches while robbing them of any claim to diabolism or holiness, rendering them merely melancholy and entirely powerless.33 E.J. Kent’s comparison of the language used to describe male witches and male tyrants shows that men, too, could be envisioned as emotionally out of control, though the emotions unleashed tended to be pride and wrath rather than envy or spite.34 Finally, Laura Kounine’s emphasis on the ‘inconsistency and fragility inherent in the category of the “witch”, the “feminine”, and the “masculine”’ in Remy’s Daemonolatria shows that, at least among those demonologists in close contact with actual witch trials, the abstract emotionological gender classifications tend to blur and crumble.35 In practice, both emotions and gender norms tend to overflow the neat categories into which demonologists and historians try to confine them.
Emotional Practices
So far we have mostly explored the representation of emotions; we turn now to their embodiment in practice. Cognitive scientists and neurobiologists continue to debate about the number and nature of the ‘basic emotions’, which are presumably universal and uniform across the human species.36 Smiling, weeping, and blushing may be universal physiological expressions of emotion, typically experienced as uncognized and involuntary. However, the frequency, distribution among genders or age groups or classes, and appropriateness to specific situations or relations—indeed the meaning and practice—of smiling, weeping, or blushing vary widely across time and culture. So too with emotional practices more generally. Emotions are both internal, private, ahistorical feelings we have and external, public, historically embedded actions we do: smiling or weeping expresses but also incites emotion in culturally variable ways. Emotions thus bridge Cartesian gaps between the body and language, between the
longue durée of human evolution and the discontinuities and sudden shifts of human history. They are ‘both physical and mental; they are expressed in words but they also have a physiological component’.37 As Monique Scheer suggests in a foundational article, emotions have a history because they are practices, shaping and shaped by the embodied habitus of specific cultures, discourses, and regimes of power.38
Although the term ‘emotional practice’ is new, scholars of witchcraft have been describing such practices and their effects for nearly eighty years. E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) is best remembered for defending the rationality of witchcraft belief—a defence that made possible its serious study in the intervening decades.39 But it is easy to forget that this rationality had an emotional motivation. Witchcraft turns the indifferent natural world, with its meaningless coincidences, into a social world peopled by others towards whom one might feel and act. The victim of witchcraft gained, not just an explanation, but an enemy: a person towards whom to direct one’s anger and fear; a person to punish or from whom to seek reparation. Through the complex procedures of divination, accusation, denial, confession, and apology typical of many witch-believing traditional societies, both ‘victim’ and ‘witch’ could express and resolve otherwise unavowable conflicts and hatreds; in Jacqueline van Gent’s words, witchcraft and magic ‘provide people with the discourse and the ritual practice to express socially unacceptable emotions’.40 Evans-Pritchard’s insight came into the historical study of European witchcraft via the work of Alan Macfarlane, who explicated English witchcraft accusation in terms of ‘charity refused’. Householders, at once guilty for refusing charity to a beggar-woman and resentful of her envious request, projected their guilt and resentment outwards onto the woman who incited it, constructing her as a witch.41 Lyndal Roper has, influentially, brought Macfarlane’s account of projection into the bedchamber and especially into the emotionally charged atmosphere of childbed: she contends that young women’s fear of the post-menopausal bodies of older women, and the envy such older women were assumed to bear against the young and fertile, ‘provided the emotional fuel of the witch craze’.42 Perhaps most explicitly, the devil familiars which populated English witchcraft pamphlets, as discussed by Millar in this volume, can be seen as physical manifestations of such projected and externalized emotions: not only were they devils from hell sent to the witch to tempt her, they were also external embodiments of witches’
internal thoughts and desires, sent from her to act out those desires and thoughts in the world.43
Peter Geschiere discovers similar therapeutics in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century Cameroon, South Africa, and rural France. His chapter emphasizes that such emotional practices must be grasped holistically, within their total context. This might complicate neat understandings of the emotions of witchcraft, but will ultimately deepen our understandings of why witchcraft beliefs were—and continue to be—so powerful. As Geschiere notes, ‘One way or another, the full weight of the context has to be taken into account if we want to understand people’s obsessions and anxieties.’44 In the present volume, Briggs depicts the generation and management of emotion accomplished in early modern Lorraine through witchcraft suspicion, accusation, and counter-magical assault. Meanwhile, suspected witches could internalize their alleged abilities, ‘empowering them to turn their emotions of the moment into actions, aligning their psychic life with a version of external reality’.45 We have returned to the world of The Witch of Edmonton, in which suspicion of witchcraft could incite the suspect to come to believe herself a witch.
In a rather different way, Kivelson and Ostling explore the emotional practices associated with love magic in early modern Muscovy and Poland. Surprisingly, they find it has little to do with love. In a now classic essay, John Winkler described the ancient Mediterranean emotionology of love as ‘a diseased state’, a ‘pathology’ or ‘mental disturbance’—and related this emotionology to ancient Greek love and curse magic. In ways tantalizingly similar to Macfarlane’s model of witchcraft accusation, the user of love magic himself felt burning pangs of desire and lust, but through the spell he (it usually was a he) projected these desires onto the love object, thus ameliorating his own passion.46 In Poland and Muscovy, one finds very similar spells used for a very different purpose: despite their language of burning love and insatiable desire, they were usually used to seek mere kindness—to soften the edges of brutal feudal hierarchies. Love magic performs emotional work, but the emotions involved have little to do with love.47
Emotional Communities and Emotional Arenas
And yet accused witches did sometimes speak of love, seemingly sincerely. That they did so in the context of interrogation under torture raises issues both methodological and ethical. Pioneering work in the emotional history
of witchcraft has focused on this queasy nexus of invaluable source material and its abominable context of collection. Lyndal Roper’s now classic Oedipus and the Devil relied on close readings of interrogations under torture to reconstruct the love lives of early modern German women.48 Similarly, Diane Purkiss has controversially suggested that
Some of the stories told by accused witches may have been stories which perhaps could not be told until released by the court procedure, stories that expressed a powerful mixture of memory and desire, stories that could be paradoxically liberating, though told under terrible duress.49
In this sense, the torture chamber constitutes what Mark Seymour has recently dubbed an ‘emotional arena’, a place or occasion (like a church, a wedding-feast, a funeral, a seedy motel) that evokes and makes possible the expression of particular emotions appropriate to it—emotions that might not otherwise ever find expression.50 Ostling’s chapter, for example, takes advantage of this model to hear words of love and longing in the confession of a seventeenth-century accused witch about her demon lover.51 Rita Voltmer, in her important and impassioned contribution, hears in such testimony nothing but the voices of the torturer, the magistrate, the scribe.52 For Voltmer, the court comprised what Barbara Rosenwein has called an ‘emotional community’, a social group defining and defined by the ‘modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore’.53 Scribal convention and the interests of the court ensured that those emotions allowed to enter into the historical record conformed to accepted demonological scripts predetermining the emotions expressed by the accused witch. She could be appropriately spiteful, appropriately cold-hearted and dry-eyed, appropriately contrite and repentant after confession, but these represented emotions provide no window into the witch’s heart—on the contrary, they are just as much emotionological, just as much mere representations, as are demonological treatises or works of art.54 To pretend otherwise is to allow the torturer to get the final word, erasing the accused witch utterly and finally. Although most contributors to the present volume come to different conclusions, Voltmer’s warning about the value of tortured testimony must be kept constantly in mind. Malcolm Gaskill has recently emphasized that in witch trials, as in few other early modern sources, we hear the ‘expressions of feeling made by humble people’.55 The temptation (indeed the duty) to heed such expressions is very strong indeed, but so is the responsibility to hear them right—
to avoid mistaking the ventriloquized voices of torturers, magistrates, and demonologists for the authentic expressions of the people. We enter into this tangled forest in trepidation and with care, aware that the stakes are high in every sense.
n otes
1. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, Witch of Edmonton [1658], Act 2 scene 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. The Witch of Edmonton draws on an actual case, as depicted in Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet Wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer [1621]. But as Marion Gibson has argued, such pamphlets bent and distorted trial testimony to their own polemical ends. See Gibson, ‘Understanding Witchcraft?’ For further discussion of the problems and prospects of using pamphlets for witchcraft history, see Millar’s chapter, this volume.
8. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A209 Bü 144, Anna Murschel 1598–1600, 6r.
9. Wawrzeniecki, ‘Proces o czary’. For discussion of this and similar oaths, see Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, 70–1.
10. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A209 Bü 999, Anna Müller, 10 December 1616, 3r. See also the discussion in Zika’s and Voltmer’s chapters, this volume.
11. Roper, The Witch, 112.
12. Confino et al., ‘Forum: History of Emotions’, 74.
13. For useful entries into this rapidly growing field, see e.g. Boddice, ‘Affective Turn’; Matt and Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History; Plamper, ‘History of Emotions’, 237–65; Plamper, History of Emotions; Sullivan, ‘History of the Emotions’, 93–102.
14. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling; Sullivan, ‘History of the Emotions’, 96.
15. Reddy, in Plamper, ‘History of Emotions’, 240.
16. See Chapters 7, 9, 10, 14 of this volume. INTRODUCTION: ‘UNBRIDLED
17. Kivelson, this volume, 132.
18. Aubrey, Miscellanies, 242.
19. Bever, this volume; see also Bever, ‘Witchcraft Fears’; Bever, Realities of Witchcraft. Bever’s analysis builds on but goes further than classical anthropological accounts such as Cannon, ‘“Voodoo” Death’; Lester, ‘Voodoo Death’. But it should be noted that his neurobiological model updates even older explanations of witchcraft, such as Francesco Maria Guazzo’s contention that the faculty of imagination can excite ‘fear or shame or anger or sorrow, and these emotions so affect a man with heat or cold that his body either grows pale or reddens, and he consequently becomes joyful and exultant, or torpid and dejected.’ See Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum [1626], bk. 1 ch. 1.
20. Stearns and Stearns, ‘Emotionology’, 813.
21. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling.
22. Haliczer, ‘The Jew as Witch’, 148–9; see also Trevor-Roper, ‘European Witch-craze’, 153–4. In its extreme form, this position has found few adherents among historians for many decades, and has been entirely untenable since Nicholas Spanos’s devastating critique: see Spanos, ‘Witchcraft in Histories of Psychiatry’. Nevertheless, it remains alive and well in popular accounts.
23. Ferber, this volume. Note that the Library of Congress system follows Dewey on this point; most materials on early modern European witch trials being classified in BF (Psychology) rather than in such other possible categories as BL (Religion and Mythology), BR (Christianity), GR (Folklore), or HV (Criminology).
24. Zwissler, this volume.
25. Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews
26. Jackson, ‘Witches, Wives, and Mothers’, 314.
27. Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 152.
28. Anon., Czarownica powołana [1639], 37.
29. Starowolski, Swiatnica Panska [1645], 471.
30. Bailey, Battling Demons, 51. See also Institoris, Malleus maleficarum [1487], ed. Mackay, vol. 2, 116 (Latin original in ibid., vol. 1, 285); and Herzig’s chapter, this volume. On the commonplace construction of women’s emotionalism outside the context of witch trials, see Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Women; Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, 1–48.
31. Herzig, this volume, 30. For a tantalizingly similar understanding of women’s greater ‘openness’ to both demons and God among contemporary Pentecostals, see Lawless, “The Night I Got the Holy Ghost”.
32. Zwissler, this volume, 254.
33. Zika, this volume.
34. Kent, this volume.
35. Kounine, this volume, 70.
36. See discussion of the voluminous literature in Bever’s chapter, this volume. See also Elster, Strong Feelings
37. Confino et al., ‘History of Emotions’, 70. This bridge-building potential of emotions—between mind and body, cultural studies and cognitive science, neurobiology and history—forms a leitmotif of the programmatic literature. See e.g. Elster, Strong Feelings, 4, 98–114; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling.
38. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’
39. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, esp. 63–83.
40. Van Gent, Magic, Body and the Self, 193.
41. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 196. For a refreshingly non-Freudian account of how emotions such as envy can generate beliefs, which in turn generate new and more comfortable emotions such as indignation or anger, see Elster, Strong Feelings, 34, 108–11.
42. Roper, The Witch, 112.
43. See Millar, this volume.
44. Geschiere, this volume.
45. Briggs, this volume, 138.
46. Winkler, ‘Constraints of Desire’, quotations at 82, 84. For an update and partial critique of Winkler’s model, see Frankfurter, ‘Social Context of Women’s Erotic Magic’.
47. Kivelson, this volume; Ostling, this volume.
48. Roper, Oedipus and the Devi.
49. Purkiss, ‘Sounds of Silence’, 82.
50. Seymour, ‘Emotional Arenas’.
51. Ostling, this volume.
52. Voltmer, this volume.
53. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions’, 842.
54. Voltmer, this volume.
55. Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft, Emotions and Imagination’, 174.
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Señora Vallejo’s hand went out, but there flashed from the eyes of Anita Fernandez a warning, and the hand was withdrawn. The caballero arose and tendered the handkerchief again, to have Señora Vallejo turn her back and face the girl.
“Perhaps, Anita dear, we should return now,” she said. “Evening approaches, and there will be a fog rolling up the valley.”
“As you please, Señora Vallejo.”
The girl turned from the creek and started walking up the slope. The caballero stood in the path before her, determined. Anita Fernandez stopped, and seemed to look through him and at the mission beyond. From the adobe wall hurried Pedro, the giant neophyte, who had been watching and feared an affront to the women.
“You are being annoyed, señorita?” he asked.
“How could that be?” she demanded, laughing lightly. “There is none here to annoy me, unless it be Señora Vallejo.”
“I beg your pardon, señorita. I thought I heard someone speak.”
“’Twas but the distant barking of a coyote, Pedro. You may follow us to the guest house, if you wish. I will give you something for your little girl.”
They started toward the caballero again and for a moment it seemed that they must recognise his presence. But Anita Fernandez had a subterfuge to prevent that. Just before reaching him, she turned aside, and the others followed.
“I must speak to the padre about the neophytes allowing rubbish to collect so near the mission,” she said. “It always should be burned. Look at the stuff here!”
She pointed to the caballero’s cloak, and with one tiny foot she kicked scornfully at the guitar. Then she swerved back toward the path again, and the others followed her toward the plaza. The caballero picked up the guitar and pressed his lips to the place where her foot had struck, knowing well that Señora Vallejo was watching him, though she pretended not to be.
He looked after them until the girl and woman had passed around the end of the adobe wall and Pedro had gone to his own hut. Darkness was gathering rapidly now; lights appeared in the buildings; before the door of the storehouse sat a circle of men, talking and laughing, sipping bowls of wine. Sitting on the ground, his back against a rock, the caballero watched the scene.
“A beautiful woman,” he mused. “Proud, spirited, kind though she does not suspect it, naturally intelligent, very much to be desired.”
One by one the lights in the buildings disappeared. The men before the storehouse crept away to rest. A fray called to a neophyte standing guard. And then there was no noise save for the singing of the breeze through the orchard, and the distant howling of a coyote.
Presently the caballero arose and picked up his guitar, and crept up the slope until he reached the adobe wall. He followed it to the end of the plaza; made his way slowly through the darkness to the guest house. There he stationed himself below an open window and began playing softly. Several minutes he played, knowing a neophyte stood a score of feet away, watching; and then he began to sing a love song of Old Spain, a song of strong men and fair women. Between two verses he heard the voice of Señora Vallejo.
“Anita, child, do you hear?”
“Yes, Señora Vallejo,” the girl replied, clearly. “The coyotes are growing bold again. One is howling now beneath my window.”
CHAPTER V
TWO GOOD SAMARITANS
It is a matter of history—that big rain of a certain year. The torrents poured from the sky at an unexpected time until the country was drenched and tiny streams swollen, and watercourses that had been dry were turned into turbulent yellow floods that carried on the surface brush and grass and logs from the hills, menacing many a rancho, undermining huts and adobe houses, ruining wells.
Returning from his ineffectual serenade, the caballero observed that the stars were disappearing, but believed it was because of a fog that came from the sea. As he reached the place where he had picketed his horse and built his fire, a drop of water splashed on his cheek. At the most, he anticipated nothing worse than half an hour’s shower, and so he merely built up his fire and put some dry moss and grass to one side under his cloak, and prepared to sleep on the ground.
He slept soundly after his long journey and the unexpected events of the past two days. He awoke to find the fire out and a chill in his body, to find that water was flowing down the slope about him, and the ground but a sea of mud, with the torrent continuing to pour from the sky.
It was not more than midnight and the storm gave no indication of ceasing. The caballero stood up and threw aside his sodden cloak, picked up guitar and sword and pistol, and left the camp to hurry in the direction of the mission orchard.
It was so dark he could see nothing, and he could not locate a path. Roots half washed from the ground tripped him, water flowed down
the back of his neck. On and on he stumbled, until he ran against the orchard wall. He managed to get over it, carrying his property, and searched for a place where the trees would shield him partially from the storm.
He came to a giant palm and crept close to the bole where the wind drove the rain against him, but where it was not quite so bad as in the open. And there the caballero stood, hour after hour, gradually getting colder and more miserable, hugging his guitar under one arm and his sword under the other.
Dawn came, a grey dawn that made the world look dismal. He left the semi-protection of the palm, went over the wall, and hurried back to his camp. His horse was standing with back to the tempest, his head hanging low, his tail tucked between his legs. Water was pouring down the slope; the dry grass he had gathered was drenched; the little creek was a roaring torrent rushing down the valley toward the sea.
The caballero was cold, hungry, miserable. Across the plaza he could see smoke pouring from the chimneys, and to his nostrils came the odour of food being prepared. The mission bells rang. Neophytes left their huts to hurry toward the chapel. Señor Lopez came from the storehouse and went to the guest house, carrying a huge umbrella made from skins, and there Anita Fernandez and Señora Vallejo joined him and walked across the plaza to the church beneath the protecting parasol. A fray was placing stepping stones in the mud before the chapel door.
“I must have a fire!” the caballero remarked, to nobody in particular.
He walked some distance up the swollen creek, until he came to a ledge of rock, and there he found some dry grass; but there was no possibility, of course, of using the glass-button again, since the sun was not shining. He collected a quantity of the grass and fired into it with his pistol, but no spark caught. Again and again he fired, without success, finally ceasing in disgust.
He went back and stood near the horse, looking up at the heavens. The clouds were black, ominous; there was no decrease in the
volume of water that poured from the sky There was no place near where he could make a dry camp. And it was fire he needed—fire at which to warm himself and dry his clothing and cook another rabbit, if he could kill it.
For the remainder of his life he remembered that day and the two following. Such misery he never had known before, nor knew afterward. Now he crept into the wet orchard; now he braved the open on the slope. At times he ran back and forth beside the raging creek, trying to warm his blood by the exertion. Men and women of San Diego de Alcalá went about their business, but none gave him attention.
Each hour seemed a day and each day a lifetime. His clothing was soaked, his boots covered with muddy clay. He stood beside the horse and looked at the mission buildings and at the smoke pouring from the chimneys until he could bear to look no longer. Once he heard a child laugh, and the laugh plunged him into the depths of despair.
He rattled the coins in his purse. Worthless they were here in San Diego de Alcalá; and he would have traded them all for five minutes of bright sunshine.
He began to grow desperate. Playing the game as the men and women of the mission played it, they could not recognise his presence; so he decided to walk boldly into the storehouse, to warm and dry himself there, ignoring them as they ignored him. He would take what food he desired, and throw money in payment for it down on the counter, and walk out. They would have to recognise him to prevent it.
The caballero laughed wildly as he reached this decision and started up the slope toward the plaza. He reached the door of the storehouse and tried the latch, but the door was locked, for Señor Lopez had seen his approach. He tried a window, and found that locked also. He went to the guest house, to find the door fastened there.
For a moment he considered raiding one of the Indian huts, sword in hand, but his pride came to him then; and he walked back down the slope, his face flushed with shame because of what he already had done. He would last it out, he determined! If he died of the cold and misery, then he would die, but he would fight the battle alone without any help from those of the mission.
And then he remembered the presidio.
Fool, not to have thought of it before! He laughed again, this time in relief, as he put saddle and bridle on his horse, and then, waving his hand in derision at the group of mission buildings, he galloped toward the bay. There was the presidio only six miles away, where a caballero could get food and wine and have companionship while he dried his clothes before the roaring fire!
He rode like the wind along the highway, facing the storm as it blew in from the sea, his horse running gladly, plunging down wet embankments, splashing through the mud, wading streams where there had been no water twenty-four hours before. Up the road toward the structure on the crest of the knoll, the caballero forced his steed. Before the gate stood a sentry with a musket on his arm. The sound of laughter came from the barracks-room, and it carried cheer to the caballero’s heart. Smoke poured from the chimney, the odour of cooking meat was in the damp air.
The sentry’s musket came up and his challenge rang out. Through the gate the caballero could see an officer standing in the door of the nearest building.
“Your business?” the sentry demanded.
“Take me to your commanding officer! Call an Indian to care for my horse!”
The sentry’s cry was answered. A corporal came running across the enclosure, an Indian at his heels. They stopped short when they saw the caballero; the Indian looked frightened, the corporal grinned.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I want to see your commanding officer,” the caballero said. “I have had enough rain without waiting here for you to make up your mind.”
“Dismount and follow me,” the corporal said.
The Indian went forward and took the horse by the bit. A muddy and bedraggled caballero got stiffly out of the wet saddle and paced through the sticky clay to the door of the barracks-room. The officer was still standing there; he had scarcely moved.
“I want food, wine, a chance to dry my clothing and get warm,” the caballero said. “There seems to be a superabundance of rain just now at San Diego de Alcalá.”
“Did you ask hospitality at the mission?” the lieutenant wanted to know.
The caballero’s face flushed as he met the other’s eyes.
“Your manner,” he replied, “tells me you know of my reception at the mission. I did not look for the same sort of reception here. I have a pass from his excellency that should command respect.”
The caballero handed over the pass, which was wet, and the officer glanced over it.
“The pass is regular, caballero,” he said, “except that it does not name you. It cannot, therefore, have weight with me.”
“Do you mean to say you will not extend the ordinary hospitality of the road?”
“In a few words I can tell you where this presidio stands regarding yourself,” the lieutenant answered. “Your recent boast concerning an estimable young lady is well known, Captain Fly-by-Night. Also is your general reputation. Soldiers, ordinarily, welcome a man of your ilk, if he is merry and given to gambling, even if he cheats with the cards. But Señorita Anita Fernandez stands in the relation of daughter of our company, señor. Not a man of the post who would not die for her. And when the priests and people of the mission decide you are beneath their notice, we of the presidio stand with them, even though in other matters the mission and the presidio are as far apart as north and south.”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed, caballero. In regard to the pass—so far as I know, it may have been stolen. I’ll stand any consequences that may come from refusing to honour it.”
They faced each other while a man could have counted ten, the eyes of neither flinching, hands clenched, breath coming in quick gasps, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Like lightning the caballero’s mind acted then.
He looked into the future and into the past, considering things of which the lieutenant did not know. And in that instant of time he decided that it would be the honourable thing to accept a slight now for the good that might come from it later.
“You refuse me hospitality?” he asked again. “I do, señor.”
“There may come a time when I shall call you to account for it, officer.”
“You cannot taunt me into a quarrel, caballero. It was expected that such would be your method when you found yourself ostracized, and it was agreed that none would accommodate you. An officer of standing, moreover, does not fight with an adventurer who lives by his wits and his ability to insult women and swindle men.”
The caballero choked in sudden rage and his hand went toward the hilt of his sword. But thoughts of the future came to him again, and he took a step backward and swept off his sombrero in a stately bow.
“For the time being, it shall be as you say, officer,” he said. “But do not doubt that there will be a reckoning, and when it comes I shall take the matter into my own hands, not hand you over to courtmartial for ignoring his excellency’s pass.”
He turned his back and started toward the gate.
“A moment, caballero,” the lieutenant called. “While we have decided not to hold intercourse with you in a social way, it does not follow that
you are entirely ignored. There are alert eyes about you, señor And treason has a merited reward!”
“May I ask your meaning?”
“Leave a picketed horse long enough, señor, and he’ll throw himself with his own rope. I trust my meaning is clear?”
“As clear as the sky at present, señor,” the caballero replied. “I shall recommend to his excellency, when next I greet him, that he place an officer with brains at San Diego de Alcalá!”
He sprang to the saddle and spurred the horse cruelly. Back along the road toward the mission he urged the animal at utmost speed, careless of the treacherous ground and of what a stumble might mean. Once more he reached the slope before the mission, and picketed the horse. He stacked the saddle and bridle together, got his guitar from a corner by the orchard wall and put it with them, and covered all with his cloak. Then he started up the slope, walking swiftly.
He had but a remnant of his pride left and did not think it necessary under the circumstances to conserve that. He went around the end of the wall and splashed across the plaza, scarcely looking at the neophytes and frailes. Straight to the church he went, opened the door, and entered. He made his way to the chapel. There was sanctuary; there none could molest him without special order; and here he stubbornly decided to remain.
But there was no warmth, no food, no drink. A couple of candles glowed. A padre knelt. Two neophytes were at work patching a hole in the wall. The caballero paced back and forth in the narrow aisle, listening to the beating of the storm outside, wondering whether a fray would speak to him and offer relief.
The neophytes went out, and in time the padre followed. The caballero did not speak as he passed, for he felt that the other would not answer. He wondered whether the entire world had turned against him. He contrasted his present condition with the hospitality he had received at Santa Barbara and San Fernando, and in the adobe house of Gonzales at Reina de Los Angeles. He longed for
the companionship of the aged Indian at San Luis Rey de Francia, for his poor hut and coarse food and hard bunk.
And then his pride returned to him in a surge. He would seek sanctuary in no chapel where his presence was not welcomed by all!
Out into the rain he went again, across the plaza, down the slope to where he had picketed his horse. Back and forth he ran to warm his blood. The sky darkened, the night came. He saw the lights in the buildings again, and the odours of cooking food almost drove him frantic. In the guest house, someone was singing. He guessed that it was Señorita Anita Fernandez.
He spent that night in the orchard under the big palm, shivering because of the cold and his wet clothes, miserable because of his hunger, and when the dawn came, and the storm had not abated, he went back to the horse with an armful of dry grass he had found in the corner by the orchard wall.
Bravado came to him now. He took the guitar from beneath his cloak, and, standing out on the slope where all could see, he played and sang at the top of his voice.
Still it rained, and the creek grew broader, flooding the highway and threatening the plaza wall. The caballero sat on the muddy ground, his cloak over his head, huddled forward, grim, awaiting the end of the rain.
“The poor man!” observed Señora Vallejo, watching from a window of the guest house.
“He has brought it upon himself,” Señor Lopez reminded her “Had he returned when I warned him he would have been in comfort somewhere along the highway long since.”
“If the rain could but wash his soul as it does his body!” sighed Anita, standing closer to the big fireplace.
“The man will die,” Señora Vallejo said. “His clothing is soaked, and he cannot build a fire and cook food.”
“Perhaps it will teach him a lesson,” Lopez snarled. “We must watch; he may try to break into the storehouse to-night.”
“Listen! He is singing again,” Anita called.
“Oh, the man has courage enough!” Lopez said. “They tell a thousand stories of his daring The men at one of the missions were going to whip him down the highway once, and he sang them out of it. Moreover, he got them to play at cards, and finally went down the highway with a drove of mules loaded with goods he had won.”
“You are certain all the stories are true?” the girl asked.
“More stories are true than you may be told, señorita. It is best not to ask too much,” Señora Vallejo put in; and she frowned a warning at the storekeeper.
They sat down to the evening meal, to a table loaded with food as if for a feast. The man down on the slope was still singing.
“Perhaps he will go away after the storm,” Anita suggested. “He will be too miserable to remain.”
“And when the story gets up and down El Camino Real, he will be forced to leave the country,” Lopez added. “He is the sort of man who cannot stand ridicule.”
Darkness descended swiftly that night, and down beside the swollen creek the caballero, now downhearted, tried to think of some expedient that would make his lot better. When the lights were burning brightly in the guest house, he took his guitar and slipped across the plaza, to stand beneath Anita’s window again and play and sing. The howling of the wind almost drowned his voice, and he doubted whether those inside could hear. Once the giant Pedro walked within a dozen feet of him, but did not speak, and the caballero knew that he was being watched.
He crept into the orchard again, and for a time slept on the wet ground because of his exhaustion, and as he slept the rain pelted him and water dripped upon him from the fronds. Awaking to face another dawn, the third day of the downpour, his face and hands were tender from the continual washing of the water, and his hunger had become a pain.
The rain ceased about midday, but the sun did not come from behind the clouds. Behind a jumble of rocks half a mile up the valley, the caballero removed some of his clothes and wrung the water from them as well as he could before he put them on again. He scraped the clay from his boots; and searched beneath the rocks until he found a small quantity of dry grass and sticks, getting them ready for his fire when the sun should shine.
But the drizzle continued, and the sun did not show its face. The caballero stood beside the creek and watched the rushing stream, one arm around the neck of his horse. Less than a hundred feet away neophytes were toiling to strengthen the adobe wall where the water had undermined it, a couple of frailes giving them orders; but none spoke to the caballero or looked his way.
Again night came. He sat on a rock at the edge of the creek, thoroughly miserable, hoping that the sun would shine on the morrow, that he’d be able to kill a rabbit for food. He thought he heard someone splashing through the mud, and looking around, saw a dark shape approach.
Something struck the ground at his feet, and he saw the dark shape retreat again. The caballero took a few steps and picked up a package; he tore away the wrapper—and found flint and steel!
The caballero chuckled now and hurried to the pile of dry grass and twigs he had collected. Soon the welcome blaze sprang up. He threw on more fuel, stretched his hands to the fire, spread his cloak to dry. He was too busy now to speculate as to the identity of his benefactress; for he had guessed that it was a woman who had befriended him, else a gowned fray, and he doubted the latter.
The fire roared, and the caballero stood near it, first facing the blaze and then letting it warm his back, while the steam poured from his wet clothes. The fire was good, but he needed food also—he would have to wait for morning for that, he supposed.
Another sound of someone slipping on the wet ground, and the caballero whirled around and looked up the slope. But there was silence, and he did not hear the sound again. Once more he faced
the fire, and presently the sound of footsteps came to him, and this time he did not turn.
The steps stopped, retreated, and he felt sure that he heard a bit of laughter carried to him on the rushing wind. He waited an instant, then walked slowly up the slope toward his horse. He came upon another package. Hurrying back to the fire, he opened it. There was a roast leg of mutton, a bottle of wine, cold cakes of wheat-paste, a tiny package of salt, a jar of honey!
With the roast leg of mutton in his hands he did not stop to wonder as to the good samaritan who had left the package there. He ate until the last of the roast had been devoured; drank deeply of the invigorating wine; stored honey and cakes and salt away in his cloak, and then he sat before the fire thinking the world considerably better than it had been an hour before. Now and then he chuckled, and his eyes were sparkling.
For, when he had gone to pick up the second package, he had carried a brand from the fire to light his way, and he had seen footprints in the soft clay.
They had not been made by Señora Vallejo, for he had noticed three evenings before down by the creek that the feet of Señora Vallejo were not of the daintiest. Neither had they been made by some Indian woman from one of the huts, since those women always wore moccasins.
They had been made by two tiny shoes with fashionable heels, such as might have been imported from Mexico for the daughter of a wealthy rancho owner!
CHAPTER VI VISITORS
The fire died down for lack of fuel, until only a small bed of coals remained to glow like a great red eye in the black night. There was no moon. The caballero, warm and dry, had spread his cloak on the ground and was stretched upon it, half asleep, listening to the rushing of the creek and the screeching of the wind that swept up the valley from the sea.
He sensed the presence of human beings near him, and without changing his position on the cloak he let his right hand slip slowly along his side until it gripped the butt of his pistol. And there he remained, trying to pierce the black night with his eyes, ears strained to catch the slightest sound.
His horse snorted in sudden fear; the caballero gripped the pistol tighter, half minded to spring to his feet, yet declining to do so for fear it might be some prowling neophyte attempting to frighten him and carry a tale back to the huts in the plaza of how the caballero had been stricken with fear in the night.
“Señor!” The warning hiss seemed to come from a great distance, borne on the raging wind. He knew it was an Indian who spoke; and the inflection of the single word expressed that the speaker was merely trying to attract his attention, not threatening, not warning of some imminent peril.
The caballero rolled over slowly and sat up, yawning behind his hand, like a man displeased at an interruption. Though every sense was alert, there was nothing in his manner to indicate to a watcher
that he had been startled or that the unknown voice out of the night had carried fright to him.
He looked across the bed of coals, and saw nothing. He glanced at either side, but no leering face came from the blackness, no dark form slipped toward him, knife in hand to attack, or finger on lips to caution silence. The horse snorted again.
“Señor!” Once more the hiss, and it seemed nearer.
“Well?” the caballero demanded, half angrily and in a questioning tone.
“It is a friend who would aid you.”
A handful of dry grass and leaves remained near the fire; now the caballero arose slowly, picked up the fuel and took a quick step toward the glowing coals.
“Not that, señor!” came the sudden warning. “Guards about the mission will see!”
The caballero hesitated, not knowing whether to treat the man in the darkness as friend or foe. Then he laughed lightly and dropped the grass and leaves.
“Approach, then, so I may see you!” he commanded.
He heard someone slipping through the mud. Gazing across the bed of coals he saw an Indian face come from the darkness, just the bare outline of a face half seen in the night—thick black hair bound back from the forehead, two piercing eyes, an aggressive chin. The Indian stooped so that the reflection from the dying fire illuminated his features for an instant.
At the point of speaking, the caballero felt his tongue seem to grow paralyzed. Beside the face of the Indian another had appeared—and another—another, until six faces peered at him from the darkness and six Indians squatted in the mud on the other side of the bed of coals.
“We have come, señor,” the spokesman said.
“That is plainly to be seen.”
“At first we were not sure, and then word came to-day by a runner from an old man at San Luis Rey de Francia, who said he had given you lodging for a night, and, also, we saw how you were treated by the people of the mission and the presidio. So we came.”
“And now—?” the caballero asked.
“What is your wish, señor? In a cañon five miles away there is a comfortable camp, and if you desire we’ll guide you to it.”
“I am of the opinion I’d much rather remain where am.”
“We do not understand your ways, señor, yet we trust you. If it is your desire to remain here beneath the mission walls, undoubtedly you have some good reason. But you must have a camp, señor— shelter and food and drink—and those of the mission will give you none.”
“You speak truth there,” the caballero admitted.
“Thinking, perhaps, you may decide to remain near the mission, we carried with us material for your camp. We can pitch it for you beside the creek in a very short time, señor. When the dawn comes, those of the mission will find Captain Fly-by-Night in a comfortable teepee, with skins for his bed, an abundance of food and wine, cooking vessels, a heap of fuel. Every night one of us will fetch fresh meat and other food, and hear what you may have to say in the way of orders.”
“This kindness will be the death of me,” said the caballero.
“We cannot do too much for Captain Fly-by-Night. We may build your camp?”
“I always accept what Heaven provides. On the level spot half a hundred feet from the creek would be an acceptable place.”
The six Indians bowed before him and merged into the darkness. Chuckling to himself, the caballero sank back on his cloak and listened, but he did not release his grip on the butt of his pistol. Sounds came to him through the night from a short distance away— muttering voices, flapping skins, the squashing of wet moccasins in
the mud. Half an hour passed, and then he heard the voice of the spokesman again:
“Señor ”
“Well?”
“The camp is prepared; everything is ready. It is best that we slip away before being heard or seen. At midnight each night some one of us will visit you, señor, and bring provisions. And now—is there anything you would command this night?”
“Nothing. You have done well, it seems.”
“You will be guarded, señor. There are friends of Captain Fly-byNight inside the mission walls, but they must move carefully.”
“I should think so.”
“Everything is in the teepee, even to food for your horse. The fire is laid before it, and you have but to strike flint and steel. Adios, señor.” “Adios!”
The Indian’s face disappeared again, the caballero heard the slipping steps retreating, another fragment of language, and then silence except for the rushing wind and the roaring creek.
For half an hour he waited, smiling, fumbling at his pistol, listening, and then he got up and stepped away from the bed of coals to be swallowed up in the darkness. He was taking no chances with the unknown, however Step by step, and silently, he made a wide circle and approached the teepee. Standing beside it he listened intently, but heard nothing.
Before the crude habitation was a heap of dry grass and wood, as the Indian had said. He sent sparks flying among the fuel, fanned them to a blaze, and waited back in the darkness a few minutes longer. Then he hurried forward and threw back the skins from the door of the teepee.
The work had been well done. Boughs were on the ground, skins spread upon them. In a corner was a jug of wine, another of water, a quarter of mutton, a quantity of wheat-paste. Two rabbits, skinned
and cleaned and spread on forked sticks, were beside the mutton. A dirty, ragged blanket, folded, was against the wall.
There was no fear of treachery in the heart of the caballero now As quickly as possible he got his cloak, sword and guitar, and carried them into the teepee; he found grain and hay where the Indians had left them—near the fire—and carried a generous amount to his horse. Then he returned to the teepee, threw himself upon the blanket facing the fire, and slept.
Slept—and awoke to find the bright sun beating down upon his face, that the creek had fallen until it was scarcely more than its normal size, that neophytes and frailes were at work again repairing the base of the abode wall, and that now and then one of them looked with wonder at the teepee that had been pitched during the night.
“Curiosity will do them good,” the caballero mused.
It was a royal meal he prepared that bright morning. Steaks of mutton, one of the rabbits he broiled over a bed of coals, cakes of wheat-paste were made, and, sitting out where all could see, the caballero ate his fill and washed down the food with wine so rich and rare that he knew no Indian had taken it from his own store. It was good mission wine such as no Indian possessed unless he had purloined it in a raid.
He stretched a skin and poured half the water on it for the horse, for that in the creek was not yet fit for drinking. He gave the animal another measure of grain and wiped his coat smooth with a skin, and polished the silver on saddle and bridle, singing as he worked so that his voice carried to the plaza.
At an early hour he observed a neophyte ride away in the direction of the presidio, to return within a short time with the comandante. In the plaza the officer held a consultation with a fray, looking often at the teepee down by the creek, and then the man in uniform stalked down the slope, swaggering and twirling his moustache. The caballero arose as the other approached.
“It appears that you have a habitation, Captain Fly-by-Night,” the lieutenant said.
“As a temporary refuge, it will do.”
“The manner of your getting it is mysterious, to say the least. Teepees do not sprout overnight from the mud.”
“Yet it came during the night, señor.”
“From whom?”
“That is a question concerning myself, officer.”
“Perhaps it concerns others at San Diego de Alcalá. The frailes at the mission seem to know naught of it.”
“There are many things the frailes of the mission do not know,” the caballero replied. “There are things, also, unknown to the soldiers of the presidio.”
“You are over bold to say it, señor. Is your hand so strong that you can throw secrecy and pretence aside?”
“When you speak of secrecy and pretence, officer, I do not know your meaning. It is my own business how I acquired a habitation and food. I am a man of resource, señor. And are you not afraid that you’ll be ostracized if you are observed speaking to me?”
“It is a part of my business to investigate suspicious characters,” the lieutenant said.
“Have a care, officer! The score I hold against you already is a heavy one!”
“Your presence here, and your manifest determination to remain, are annoying, señor.”
“Were you at your post at the presidio, it would not annoy you, allow me to say.”
“Those of the mission——”
“I have been given to understand, señor,” the caballero interrupted, “that I do not exist for those at the mission. As for yourself, if you seek hospitality I have none to offer you. Suppose you give me the pleasure of your absence.”
“Señor!”
“Señor!” the caballero mocked, sweeping sombrero from his head and bowing low
The comandante snarled in sudden rage and his blade leaped half from its scabbard. Taking a step backward, the caballero put hand to hilt again, and waited. Thus they faced each other beside the creek, while frailes and neophytes watched from the wall, expecting the two men to clash. But the rage died from the officer’s face, and he snapped his sword back in place again.
“You are a clever rogue, Captain Fly-by-Night,” he said. “Almost you taunted me to combat. An officer of his excellency’s forces cannot stoop to fight with such as you.”
“You fear such a thing, perhaps?”
“Señor!” the officer cried.
He looked for a moment at the smiling face of the caballero, ground his teeth in his rage, whirled upon his heel, and strode away up the slope, anger in the very swing of his body. Before the teepee the caballero picked up guitar and began to play and sing.
Mud flew from beneath the hoofs of the comandante’s horse as he galloped back toward the presidio. Frailes and neophytes resumed their work. Two hours passed—and then there appeared two soldiers, mounted, who stopped at the plaza, spoke to the frailes, handed their horses over to Indians, and strolled down toward the creek.
They did not approach near the teepee, nor did they seemingly give the caballero more than a passing glance. Yet he knew that he was to be under surveillance, that he would be watched by these men night and day, others from the presidio relieving them from time to time. And he expected guests at midnight!
