Men, Emotions and the Sickbed in a Sorcery Trial from Seventeenth-Century Germany

Some early modern Europeans believed that illness was caused by an act of harmful magic perpetrated against a sufferer by another person. This attribution of magical blame was not inevitable, however, although historians’ understanding of the social and emotional dynamics of the process by which illness might be linked to bewitchment remains patchy. This article deepens our understanding of this ‘witch-making’ process and how it was gendered through in-depth analysis of a seventeenth-century German sorcery trial involving two urban craftsmen. It explains how two men who had previously had a socially intimate relationship reached a point at which one began to suspect the other of bewitching him into ill-health. It also establishes when and why the moments of greatest social and emotional tension were reached between the men and their families. This article argues that the sickbed constituted a particularly important temporal stage and spatial context in this process. As a site of bodily suffering, caring expectations and practices, and intense emotions, it required visitors and caregivers to manage their interactions carefully to maintain peace between neighbours. In the trial examined here, those efforts failed.