It is easy to be unsettled when
looking at some of the images of cannibalism from early European woodcuts.
Images of people roasting children on a spit or boiling them in a pot are even
more disturbing. In today’s society, with nonstop violence seemingly everywhere,
those images still haunt us. Try and imagine what the people of that earlier
era would feel when they looked upon those images. Most people could not read,
but the images that they saw resulted in a type of mass hysteria with friends,
neighbors, and even family members slinging accusations of witchcraft. The
stories that were spread seemed to fit in with what was known about witches. “The
meal provided occasion for witches to meet, the leftover flesh was used to make
the witches’ salve, the bones were ground to form the witches’ powder, and the
broth became the water witches stirred to raise storms (Roper 72).
The
confessions of the accused also helped to solidify the public’s fear of witches
eating babies. Torture was used to bring out these confessions, but even after
confessions were made, there was rarely any evidence that cannibalism was performed.
After Margaretha Minderlin admitted, under torture, that she sold dug up bodies
of children to sell to Jews, the council exhumed the bodies of the children
that she supposedly sold, but all three were intact. “The absence of physical
evidence could not prove that the Devil had not, by means of some glamour, made
it appear that the corpses had been exhumed and enable her really to sell them
(Roper 76).
Do you
think that the woodcut images of the times contributed to the public’s perception
that witches were consuming human flesh?
You bring up a lot of good points. I think that the woodcuts did have a significant impact on how people reacted to the witch-hunts. As we look at them more and more in class, they seem to similar to that of political cartoons, though the woodcuts might have been taken much more seriously (we just don't know). When we think of how art has such an influence on society, even today, I think it would be incredibly accurate to say that woodcuts influenced people during this time as well.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the woodcuts did have an effect on the perception of witches in early modern Europe. There would have been little visual imagery for the peasantry to imagine witches as during the time period and any that would have been available would have had an impact on the psyche of the population.
ReplyDeleteBecause there were a lot of people who were illiterate during this time period, wood cuts and images were a way for people to understand what was going on. I believe woodcuts had a effect on society and how they portrait witches. Clearly in most images witches were doing some type of odd activity that was out of the norm and was looked down upon by society.
ReplyDeleteImages certainly went a long way with spreading rumors or misconceptions about so called witches. We see things like this all the time, the woodcut essentially served as propaganda against witches. As we talked about in class the drama and awesomeness of the images served as a sort of fuel to the witch-hunts fire.
ReplyDelete