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Something was rotten in the German village of Langenburg. Or was it someone?
The year was 1672. On Shrove Tuesday, Eva Kustner, the miller's daughter, had gathered up freshly baked sweets provided by her mother. She had then delivered some to a neighbor, Anna Fessler. Such exchanges marked the central event of the holiday, a gesture that reinforced family and neighborly ties. But these particular ties had terrible consequences. Hours after consuming one of the cakes, Fessler, a new mother in apparently robust health, was overcome with pain. Soon she was dead.
That was the beginning of an unhappy episode that played out in more distress and death. Centuries later, it would become the preoccupation of Duke history professor Thomas Robisheaux.
"I never wanted to write about witchcraft," says Robisheaux '74. His graduate-school mentor at the University of Virginia, Erik Midelfort, had helped establish witchcraft and witch-hunting as a mainstream topic for early-modern historians back in the 1970s. Robisheaux wasn't inclined to work in the shadow of his mentor. But he had come to notice how little historians understood about women, especially peasant women, in the early-modern period: "And one of the places you look for rich material about women for this period is trial records, especially witch trials," he says. The subject of this witch trial, Anna Schmieg, Eva Kustner's mother, promised a rich line of research.
During fifteen years of research, Robisheaux sifted through government and church records, eyewitness recollections, and an autopsy report to flesh out the lives of Anna Schmieg and the people around her. He spent endless hours in the regional archives, housed in a castle, to piece together individual lives; visited libraries to read through contemporary legal and medical tracts; and took a month to hike the area, with the aim of sharpening his sense of the landscape. He calls the book that resulted, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village, a "micro-history." The small setting of Langenburg serves as a model of broad cultural trends—and an avenue into understanding a traumatized society.
"These were societies that were fragmented and localized," he says. "Most people in Europe had no general sense of events on a large scale across a kingdom or even over a province. But they took into their lives the bigger trends, the trends that historians might talk about for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The other thing about micro-history is that, as a technique, it works best for events that come before a court or an inquisition. You can see in the protocols, in the interrogations, the semblance of a popular voice."
If Robisheaux's work has a detective-story quality, the plot was hatched—or cooked—in the kitchen of the miller's wife. The mill still exists, though in a rundown state. Robisheaux and his wife visited it a couple of years into his research; as they were looking it over, a voice called out, "You know, a witch used to live there!" That voice turned out to belong to the woman who owned the mill and was renovating it as a dwelling. Robisheaux says he was stunned to see the persistence of the story after more than 300 years.
Seventeenth-century millers were seen as little better than rogues or thieves, existing on the margins of society, along rivers or streams at a village's edge. Hans Schmieg, who collected black cats, was suspected of using sorcery to repair and protect the millwheels in their daily operation. Maybe the millwheels were functioning smoothly. The agricultural economy, though, was in a freefall. When crops failed or soldiers destroyed the fields, local supplies dried up, and prices for grain and bread soared, feeding community resentment. But governments fixed prices for grain and—in a coupling of welfare-state mentality and Christian morality—required that millers take care of neighbors first. Profit-minded millers resisted such rules, often choosing to sell grain supplies out of the territory.
Hans Schmieg's transgressions involved more than rules-bending. In one incident, he assaulted the count who happened to be his patron and lord. But his wife, Anna Schmieg, was the more mysterious figure. A refugee from war and plague, she had lost her parents early and was sent off to relatives as a domestic servant. She was, as Robisheaux describes her, an eternal outsider and a tenacious survivor. "Anna spent her formative years among villagers thrown on their own wits and meager resources to survive."
In Langenburg, she was known for drinking to excess, insulting her peers at the local tavern, and threatening to kill a neighbor's cattle when they grazed on her property. She was thought to engage in whispered conversations with the devil. She was also very protective of her husband—to the point of lashing out at the count's steward when he fined Hans for illegally selling a cow. The steward would label her "this well-known good-for-nothing woman" who was given to wine along with "quarrels, brawls, shocking curses, swearing, and blasphemous insults of all kinds."
An inherent aspect of village life was "a culture of slander and assault that was highly developed," says Robisheaux. "If you didn't stand up when somebody insulted you, you invited more attacks. Or if you didn't answer a charge, gossip would start that, hey, you might actually be guilty. Women were good at this. They had to be.
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