When the Swedes entered Bamberg in February, 1632, they encountered a scene of horror. For two decades the Hochstift had been the scene of one of the most ferocious witch-hunts in history, one that claimed perhaps as many as a thousand lives. Our treatment of the witch-hunts in Bamberg must here be brief, but at the outset several points of clarification are in order. The phenomenon of witchcraft per se is not our concern here. Few of those accused seem to have had any genuine interest in the magical arts. The records in Bamberg reveal very little about any sort of “magic folk culture” other than the widespread assumption among people at all levels of society that there was such a thing as magic and that it could be efficacious. The trials were largely the product of a system of inquisitorial justice, in which the indiscriminate use of torture and unquestioned acceptance of denunciations obtained on the rack and in the lye bath drove the process forward. Our concern here will be with the ideological and institutional implications of the trials and what the “witch-craze” in upper Franconia can tell us about the larger questions of reformation and the development of the state.

In his survey of the witch trials in southeastern Germany, Wolfgang Behringer noted certain patterns that seem common to the region. The major trials occurred within a very narrow time frame, lasting from roughly 1560 to 1630.