Witchcraft Narratives

Hans Gackstalt was a six-year-old boy who started to tell stories about how he, his mother and several other members of the community flew to witch Sabbaths.   Like the Godless Children that Roper talked about, this young boy was believed by the town council and eventually this tale eventually led to the prosecution of both the boy and his mother, Magdalina.  I still cannot understand how old men believed a story of a six-year-old boy over the testimony of his mother.  I also cannot believe that if Hans had not wavered between the story being true and having the story be told to him by an older boy named Peter, the trail could have had disastrous consequences.  A reason that the council believed him was because they thought that such a young child could not come up with such a story unless it had actually happened to him.  But even at such a young age Hans probably would have heard about witches and what they supposedly did, especially from the older boys in the community.  It makes sense that Hans would make this story up in order to gain popularity among his peers, because he must have thought he sounded so cool and worldly.  However, his story had disastrous consequences. 

It is astonishing that the thumbscrews and lashing were used on Hans because these were adult punishments.  I think this is much to severe a way to attempt and try and pry information out of someone so young, and it would have only frightened and confused them even more.  The punishment that Magdalina had to suffer through was also quite atrocious for there were only the stories her son told and unsubstantiated rumors. 

The author repeats often that even if Magdalina were not a witch she still would have been considered a bad mother, which would also have been terrible.  This would have been mostly because a woman’s main jobs was to take care of the house and to raise her children correctly, which apparently she did not do if her son was telling these types of stories.  The thing I found most interesting about this whole reading was that only the mother, and not the father, was blamed for Hans’ behavior.  I am not sure if this was because he was so young and therefore still associated with his mother, or if this still would have been the case if the boy had been a teenager.