This is our story
You must have heard this slogan: we are the granddaughters of those witches who were not burned at the stake. Unfortunately, we inherit to the same extent from people who hunted witches, denounced them, sent them to torture or “only” watched everything, sometimes with great delight. Baranowski’s book makes us aware of this very clearly. The researcher, with his characteristic sharpness of language, does not hesitate to call the former laws superstition – and yet they were believed so much … How will we talk about our contemporary regulations and beliefs? Do we have enough empathy not to blindly justify systemic violence?
The ethnographer himself does not pose the above questions directly, but I think that the reader or the reader will want to ask them at a later chapter. They may wonder to what extent the witch-hunts involved some universal drive for violence. Baranowski devotes quite a few pages from the first chapters to pointing out that it was German folklore and legislation that gave the impulse to kindle the pyres in Poland. Justify his compatriots? You will find that it is far from there. Perhaps you will ask why this wave of terror actually only affected women? You will find many different hypotheses in the newer literature, author of Processesit will allow you to read between the words that, in part, because they did not have power. And the atmosphere was favorable – the economy was bad, someone must have been to blame for it. What was the role of the Catholic Church? Key, as in the entire culture and politics of that period.
In Trials of Witches, Baranowski analyzes written sources from the 17th and 18th centuries, pamphlets, legal writings, chronicles, as well as dissertations analyzing issues related to black magic. He tries to understand where all the “scientific knowledge” about the Sabbaths and witchcraft came from. Out of misunderstanding or ill will? He points to the political aspects of mass witch trials. He writes about lynchings that were carried out on alleged witches in the 19th century.
Before you read books about folk beliefs
Hunting for witches is one of Baranowski’s earliest books, the oldest of those already published by Replica. The first concerns the subject of folk beliefs related to magic and demonology. He wrote it shortly after his habilitation, if I’m not mistaken, having behind him the first ethnographic interviews with the then inhabitants of the province. In this text, however, it is limited to the analysis of historical sources, without linking them to 20th century folklore. That is why it is a great introduction to Polish folklore – after all, what we call folklore today has its roots in the 17th century, often in court culture and, at the same time, in church teachings.
Baranowski wrote a popular science text. Profound, expressive, non-violent, but stigmatizing her. He focused on the 17th and 18th centuries, but notes that the first witch was sentenced to death in 1511, near Poznań. He recalls the stories of the last witches martyred in Poland, for example Krystyna Ceynowa from Chałupy (1836). The last act of lordship on the witch he mentions took place three years before his text was first published, in 1946. He does not write about a special stove for smoking people built in the first half of the 17th century in the Bishop’s Duchy of Nysa – perhaps this fact was not yet known to historians.
Our favorite witch and devil ethnographer did not know, of course, how the history of witches would turn out in the 21st century. So I can add that their tourist value has been recognized. Sometimes they come across protest slogans. It also happens that people try to honor them posthumously, as in Słupsk, where the name of Trina Papisten (Katrin, nee Zimmerman) was given to a roundabout, and its story has been told in the Witches’ Tower for some time.
Baranowski’s book is an ideal starting point for people who want to become deeply interested in the subject of magic and demonology in Polish or Slavic folklore. Thanks to the analysis of written sources from the era, it shows how much German culture had a great influence on folk beliefs, including fairy tales and legends that were characteristic of it, which grew into legislation. Baranowski has no illusions as to the native nature of the folklore understood in this way. Nor to its apolitical nature.
