Why Some Men and Not Others? The Male Witches of Eichstätt

The chapter is based on a paper given at the conference Witchcraft and Masculinities in the Early Modern World, University of Essex, 21-23 April 2006. Like the other chapters in the collection, it argues that the existing explanations for the number of men arrested and executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe are inadequate and that we should instead look to the judicial processes during which many of them were named. The chapter takes the example of Eichstätt where a particularly vicious witch persecution took place between 1617 and 1631. Only about 15% of the 240-270 people exceuted for witchcraft there were men and yet some of those men named 200 or more of their male neighbours as witches. Why were these alleged accomplices not then arrested? And, more importantly, why did a handful of them end up tied to the stake?