Europe's inner demons

From the beginning, the Centre’s work was designed on a multidisciplinary basis; and while the research was being done and the books written, the various authors constantly exchanged ideas and information with one another. As a result, while each book in the series belongs to a single discipline and is the work of a single author, who alone carries responsibility for it, the series as a whole is coloured by the experience of inter-disciplinary discussion and debate.

The enterprise was also designed on an international scale. Although this has been a British project in the sense that it was sponsored by a British university and that 95 per cent of its finance was also British, the people who did the research and wrote the books came from several different countries. Indeed, one of them was a Frenchman who worked in Paris throughout, another a German who worked in Berlin. Everything possible was done to exclude national bias from a study which might all too easily have been distorted by it.

The work was financed throughout by the Columbus Trust. It was originally made possible by massive donations to the Trust from Mr David Astor, the late Lord Sieff of Brimpton and Sir Marcus Sieff, and the Wolfson Foundation, promptly followed by further most generous contributions from Mr Raymond Burton, the Rt. Hon. Harold Lever, Mr I. J. Lyons, Mr Hyam Morrison, Mr Jack Morrison, Sir Harold Samuel, the American Jewish Committee, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, Inc., and the William Waldorf Astor Foundation. Archbishop Ramsey, Sir Leon Bagrit, Lord Evans of Hungershall and Messrs Myers & Company also showed their goodwill to the enterprise by giving it financial assistance.

Since the Centre came into existence many people have devoted a great deal of time and energy to one or other of the various financial and advisory committees associated with it. They include the chairman of the Columbus Trust, the Rt. Hon. the Lord Butler of Saffron Walden; two successive Vice-Chancellors of the University of Sussex, Lord Fulton of Falmer and Professor Asa Briggs; the Hon. David Astor, Professor Max Beloff, Professor Sir Robert Birley, Professor Patrick Corbett, Professor Meyer Fortes, Dr Robert Gosling, Mr Ronald Grierson, Professor Marie Jahoda, Dr Martin James, Professor James Joll, the Rt. Hon. Harold Lever, Professor Barry Supple, Dr John D. Sutherland, Professor Eric Trist, Professor A. T. M. Wijson, Mr Leonard Wolfson and the then Registrar and Secretary of the University, Mr A. E. Shields, who acted as the secretary of the Centre’s Management Committee. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support and counsel they have so willingly given.

The series also owes a great deal to the devoted service of the late Miss Ursula Boehm, who was the administrative secretary to the Centre from its inception until her death in 1970.

Norman Cohn

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

This book began as an enquiry into the origins of the great European witch-hunt. It ended as something wider. It argues that the stereotype of the witch, as it existed in many parts of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is made up of elements of diverse origin, and that some of these derived from a specific fantasy which can be traced back to Antiquity. The essence of the fantasy was that there existed, somewhere in the midst of the great society, another society. small and clandestine, which not only threatened the existence of the great society but was also addicted to practices which were felt to be wholly abominable, in the literal sense of anti-human.

The fantasy is preserved in a literary tradition, which can be traced through many centuries in the polemical tracts of theologians and the tales of monastic chroniclers. The story of its transmission in the literate strata is a curious one, and it is told here for the first time. Nevertheless, that is not the book’s main theme. The fantasy changed, became more complex, down the centuries. It played an important part in some major persecutions; and the way in which it did so also varied. Sometimes it was used merely to legitimate persecutions that would have occurred anyway; sometimes it served to widen persecutions that would otherwise have remained far more limited; in the case of the great witch-hunt it generated a massive persecution which would have been inconceivable without it. In pursuing its history one is led far beyond the confines of the history of ideas and deep into the sociology and social psychology of persecution.