Browsing by Author "Robisheaux, Thomas"

This dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.

Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.

In both medicine and theology, the early modern period was one of flux, characterized by Reformation and Revolution. Scholars tend to analyze shifts in natural philosophy and theology separately. This dissertation brings them together to question how early modern Christians understood their own bodies and souls, the diseases to which they were prey, and the physicians and medicine that treated them.

In doing so, it highlights one influential group of thinkers who addressed these questions: late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheran physicians, theologians, and natural philosophers in the so-called Wittenberg Circle. As shown in chapter one, out of inter- and intra-confessional debates in theology, the study of anatomy, and the study of the soul building on the long Aristotelian De anima commentarial tradition, Lutheran thinkers helped create a field of study called anthropologia. Enshrined in the basic curriculum for all students, including physicians, theologians and philosophers, this discipline endeavored to synthesize the fundamental findings of anatomy, philosophy, and theology to explain the nature of human bodies and souls. Building on the intellectual background sketched in chapter one, the second chapter shows how Lutheran physicians attempted to understand bodies and disease in light of this system of thought. To do so, they called on two principal sources of authority: the Bible and medical theory. Following this overview of basic intellectual commitments, the thematic chapters three and four trace evolving notions of (1) the physician as healer of body and of soul, an imitator of Christus Medicus and (2) the spread of learned ideas about body and soul in vernacular literature, and the way patients should understand and cope with their own sicknesses of body and soul.

This dissertation builds on a wide body of academic Latin and popular vernacular sources, from theological and medical treatises to sermons, commentaries, and devotional literature. It highlights the influence of Philip Melanchthon’s commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, and those of his students and friends, as well as the influential writing of the prominent Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert. In books of prayer, sermons, and biblical commentaries that treat disease and healing, Lutheran pastors and theologians utilized academic medicine and theology to console patients and to popularize pious understandings of body, soul, and medicine. Together these sources reveal a set of beliefs about the relationship of body and soul and their relationship to material and spiritual forces that permeated every level of society.

This dissertation is a study of lordship and its expression through the Catholic League army's institutions during the early years of the Thirty Years War. It draws on letters, reports and other chancery documents from the Bavarian State Archive to examine how duke Maximilian I of Bavaria [r 1597-1651] and his officers re-negotiated their respective command privileges within the army so as to better accommodate each other's practices of lordship through its operations. In exchange for their continued investment in his military power the duke's officers, that is, his military contractors, bargained to preserve, and then expand, customary lordly prerogatives within their commands.

More broadly the dissertation argues that Maximilian's negotiations with his contractors reflected deeper struggles among the Holy Roman Empire's nobilities over how to incorporate their own lordship within the evolving structures of the imperial state. Nobles who fought in Maximilian's service staked their wealth and landed power on his success in securing a preeminent position relative to the monarchy and, with it, their own place among the empire's governing elite.

In the process the dissertation probes and questions the role historians have usually assigned military contractors within wider processes of state-formation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and, in particular, the Holy Roman Empire. It views contractors not as profiteering mercenaries who pursued war for gain at the state's expense, but rather as elites who sought to invest in modes of power-sharing that would preserve and strengthen their military role in governance.

As a saint with no biblical or historical basis for her legend, St. Anne could change radically over time with cultural and doctrinal shifts even as her status as Mary's mother remained at the core of her legend and provided an appearance of consistency. "Mother, Matron, Matriarch: Sanctity and Social Change in the Cult of St. Anne, 1450-1750" takes issue with the general view that the cult of St. Anne in Northern Europe flourished in the late Middle Ages, only to wither away in the Reformation, and advances a new understanding of it. It does so by taking a longer view, beginning around 1450 and extending to 1750 in order to show how St. Anne's cult and the Holy Kinship elucidated long-term shifts in religious and cultural mores regarding the relationships between domesticity and sanctity, what constituted properly pious lay behavior, and attitudes towards women (in particular older women). Materials used include vita, devotional texts, confraternal records, sermons, treatises, and works of art across the time period under investigation. After a definite period of decline during the mid-sixteenth century (as evidenced by lower pilgrimage statistics, confraternity records, and a lack of text production), St. Anne enjoyed a revival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholicism in a "purified" form, reconfigured to suit new religious and social norms which emphasized patriarchal authority within the household and obedience to the Catholic Church among the laity. In this context, St. Anne became a humble, pious widow whose own purity serves as proof of Mary's Immaculate Conception, and whose meek devotion to her holy daughter and grandson exemplified properly obedient reverence for the laity.

*Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*

This dissertation analyzes the development of legal strategies to restrict “wastefulness” or “prodigality” during the economic crises of the long sixteenth century in Southwest Germany, as the state, community and small town families struggled to preserve family and household resources. Using local, state, and imperial court trials of “spendthrifts” from early modern Württemberg, the thesis shows that prodigality laws provided litigants with a flexible, multifaceted tool to prevent reckless financial mismanagement. Once laws began to criminalize wastefulness in the mid-sixteenth century, lawmakers, litigants, and judges used this concept to intervene in family affairs and brand heads of households as legally incompetent. Although litigants largely applied spendthrift laws against male heads of households, family members and the authorities also challenged women with property, accusing them of squandering precious family resources and transgressing gender- and class specific standards of proper household management. The new legal and social culture of thrift and wastefulness not only had profound consequences for gender- and class-based norms of economic behavior but also transformed those economic norms into prerequisites for legal personhood. Finally, the thesis suggests ways in which early modern guardianship and spendthrift laws shaped wider concepts of citizenship, rationality, disability, and deviance, pointing to long-lasting influences that shaped state policies in Germany into the twentieth century.