In the sixteenth century, the Dutch doctor and 'human rights defender avant la lettre' Jan Wier was one of the first to protest against the persecution of witches. His biographer Vera Hoorens wonders whether he did this out of compassion for the innocent women or whether Wier secretly also had other motives.
Jan Wier, born in Grave (near Nijmegen), published the book De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1563 in Basel. (“On the Deceptions of the Devil”). It was a vehement indictment of the practice of burning, drowning and otherwise torturing innocent women who were labeled 'witches'.
It is striking that Wier used progressive psychological and medical arguments for this. According to him, torture only led to false confessions and women who had behaved strangely in the first place suffered from psychological delusions (and so did the people who believed in magic and witchcraft). All in all, Wier condemned the witch hunt as a 'great stain on Christianity'.
Because of his strong resistance to the witch persecution, De Praestigiis Daemonum the most important book in the European witchcraft debate. Both proponents and opponents could not ignore his work. To this day, many human rights and health organizations are named after this heroic witch defender. His defense of the innocent persecuted women was gallant and with his arguments Wier was ahead of his time.
Hailstones
But was Wier primarily concerned with human rights and defending defenseless women? His biographer, the Leuven social psychologist Vera Hoorens, writes in the freely accessible ('open access') historical journal BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review that he had a different purpose in the first place. Wier was especially a supporter of the Reformation and used his indictment against the witch persecutions to attack the Catholic Church head-on.
In the summer of 1562, huge hailstones destroyed much of Germany's crops. Witches were held responsible for the damage and persecuted en masse in 1562 and 1563. Just then, De Praestigiis Daemonum. . appeared But Wier, according to Hoorens, had already started writing it at least five years earlier, when witch persecutions took place on a much more limited scale. Wier could not have foreseen the unprecedented witch persecution of five years later.
Also, many parts of the book are not about witches at all, but about things like fake spirits, cheating exorcists, contrived miracles and popes who practice magic. If Wier wanted to defend the witches, you would expect Heinrich Kramer – the author of The Witches' Hammer (Malleus maleficarum, 1487), in which he explained which methods of torture were most effective in coercing—quoting and debunking—witches. But according to Hoorens, Wier hardly ever does that. His most important quotes come from the early church father Augustine (354-430 AD), who also laid some theoretical foundations for the later witch hunts.
Historical coincidence
Other quotes also don't exactly make Wier's work a consistent anti-witch-persecution book. He attacks both proponents and opponents of witch persecution. According to Hoorens, the many subjects that Wier discusses form one whole as a general indictment against the Roman Catholic faith. In his book, Wier does not so much fall for proponents of the persecution of witches, but especially Catholics. at. Like other proponents of the Reformation, he mainly refers to the Church Fathers, as representatives of the young, as yet uncorrupted church. With 'deceptions of the devil' Wier was referring to the entirety of abuses within Catholicism.
Wier's religious beliefs have always been unclear. But according to Hoorens, there are many indications that he was a supporter of the Reformation. Wier certainly felt genuine sympathy for the witches. But according to Hoorens, their defense was not his only and certainly not his most important objective. It was primarily a means of bolstering his indictment against the corrupt Catholic Church.
Even in his own day – and still is – Wier was seen above all as a passionate defender of women persecuted as witches. The publication of the book during the heyday of the witch persecution was crucial for this. The persecutions simply drew public attention. Only a few noticed the actual anti-Catholic character of De Praestigiis Daemonum on. According to Hoorens, the fact that Wier became such a prominent figure in the witch debate is at least partly a historical coincidence.