Free The Enemy Within by John Demos

our knowledge of reproductive biology and the mechanics of contraception to control procreation. And we manage environmental productivity through a parallel combination of science and technology. How different the lives of our pre-modern forebears! For them procreation was always a matter of deep randomness and mystery—the work of “providence,” nothing less. The connection between sex and pregnancy was but partially understood, if not mis understood; for example, widely prevalent opinion rated the menses as the most likely time for a woman to conceive. Individual families and whole communities struggled constantly to maintain a delicate reproductive balance. A dearth of newborn children, or an epidemic that struck at the young with particular force, could threaten group survival into the future. And so could an excess—by creating too many mouths to feed, from too-scarce resources. On the environmental side, much depended on the success of the annual harvest. In some years there was plenty, in others want; and whatever made for the difference was largely beyond the reach of human contrivance.
    Thus, in one life sector after another, fertility was all—with uncertainty, anxiety, a fear of failure, as its regular accompaniments. No wonder the links from fertility to witchcraft ran so deep and spread so wide. And no wonder the witch-craze years coincided with the climatic period of the so-called Little Ice Age and with what historians of northern Europe now describe as both a severe demographic squeeze and a widespread “crisis of subsistence.”

Community. How did witchcraft reflect the shapes and structures of community life?
    The most common venue for European witchcraft was a rural village of perhaps 100 households, covering a territorial expanse of a dozen square miles—with a traditional peasant economy and largely self-sustaining, but also in some regular contact with its nearby surroundings. The single, most striking aspect of everyday experience in such a place was sheer social density. All families and all individuals were directly known to one another; life proceeded at every point on an up-close, face-to-face basis. Witchcraft, too, was up close and face-to-face. Accusations were almost never directed toward strangers; instead, the culprit would likely be a neighbor, would certainly be an acquaintance, and might even be an erstwhile friend. Where so much else was personal, suffering and victimhood would logically have a personal cause: she did it, he made it happen—not fate, or environmental mischance, or vast social and economic forces.
    â€œPanic” outbreaks, in attaining a much larger scale, followed a different pattern. The setting for many of these was not a peasant village, but rather a town or a small city. Such was true during the craze period in southern and central Germany, where most of the major witch-hunting centers were places of considerable size (perhaps 1,000 households, plus or minus) and at least partially urban character (including some involvement with commerce as well as agriculture). There accusations would begin to spiral by outgrowing the level of personal animosity. Strangers were often accused; indeed, this was key to the spiraling. Whereas the social density of village life might breed an initial round of suspicions but then limit their spread, the somewhat looser structures of the town could actually encourage panic episodes. Accusations would multiply where, and because, the element of personal connection was less likely to serve (sooner or later) as a source of restraint.
    Meanwhile, still further out along the same spectrum, the truly large cities of the period—London and Paris, for example—saw relatively few witch trials of either the ordinary or the panic type. In their case, experience was so impersonal and diffuse that the old forms of ad hominem suspicion could hardly take hold. Rapid population turnover, the differentiated