The Advent Of Child-Witches Summary

Lyndal Roper adduces an appropriate amount of evidence to substantiate the claim that the advent of child-witches was due to a shift in the cultural zeitgeist. Specifically, this shift in public opinion moved away from the notion that adolescent dreams were innocuous, and towards the idea that they were evil. Roper suggest that this evolution of reasoning symbolized a newfound cultural understanding of where evil originated. Imaginings, or dreams, as it happens, was now the provenance of evil. Children who were limned as cognitively defective in this manner represented evil, and were unsurprisingly the subjects public obloquy. In discussions surrounding child-witches, one contentious issue was attempting to explain these wicked children. On
the one hand, Catholics often imputed these children with fraternizing with the devil. On the other hand, Protestants, who were more skeptical of how prevalent these alleged occult forces were, indicted Catholics with manufacturing yet another casus belli to justify more exorcisms. Roper, in fact, notes that Protestants were inclined to view the whole hubbub as the product of Catholic machinations. One Protestant, according to Roper, even suggested that Catholic clergy might have compelled young children into making false confessions, lest they suffer dire consequences.

Roper, at this point, wisely qualifies the multi-faceted issue of child-witches as something less about a manichean duel between Protestants and Catholics, and more about a united push against perceived evil.
Indeed, child-witches were almost universally characterized as puerile evil, unmoored from any anchorage to proper behavior. This unruly disposition, emblematic of a typical child-witch, was evidenced in a plethora of allegedly demonic behaviors. First, child-witches were caught sullying their parents bed with occult powder that prevented them from having children. Second, ritualized blood-drawing was de rigueur among child-witches as it was among one of the prerequisites needed to join the Devil’s clan. Third, licentious and lewd behavior was indicative of child-witches as they became notorious for premature sexual activity. For instance, a case arose once of a ten year old boy who sexually violated his sixteen month old sister; oddly enough, one’s introduction into this fraternity of child-witches, Roper claims, is often described as a “seduction”. In conjunction with the aforementioned louche identifiers of a child-witch, are the no less debauched “anal themes”, as Roper calls it, that characterized the typical child-witch. According to Roper, child-witches were known to unload a potpourri of filth that plagued whoever came within range of the grime, which was often an ill-made concoction of excrement and dirt. For these reasons, Protestants and Catholics
were less worried about their inter-denominational disagreement, and more concerned with how to resolve this immediate dilemma.

In order to redress the pressing issue of child-witches, Roper argues that it is imperative to understand what insecurities plagued the everyday citizen.
One primary insecurity that Roper focuses on is that of sexual potency, and more specifically the case of child-witches attacking the sexual vitality of their parents. Often times, as Roper points out, parents unable to have children attributed their ailments to the demonic activities of their children putting diabolic powder in their beds. Maria Steingruber and Martin Steiner fit this general narrative, first their sexual impotence, then their is an explanatory gap, and then their devilish child fills that gap. Skeptical of this loose reasoning, a jurist in the Augsburg child-witches cases named Christian Friedrich Weng thought this bed powder was most likely just part and parcel of being poor and unhygienic. Despite Weng’s best efforts to deconstruct this thought-process, anecdotal evidence of parents regaining their sexual potency after removing the powder, reigned supreme. From these cases, it seems as though people sought evidence to reaffirm their existing prejudices of what caused their ailments, rather than seriously considering arguments to the contrary, as provided by Weng. Children’s actions, which were inspired by adolescent thought and imagination, were scapegoated for inexplicable shortcomings to this
effect.

Here, Roper provides a microcosm for the overarching theme of her article: how fear was rooted in an unmistaken fear of the unknown in general and in children’s imaginations in particular. Generally people were ignorant about what exactly disabled them from producing offspring, but cultural fears about children allying themselves with the Devil, and undermining reproduction, provided a ready explanation. Overall, Roper proportions her assertions to the available evidence and makes for convincing argument as to why children were imputed as machinating witches.