36 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



states that in the sixth year of the reign of the Pope Martin (i. e., 

 in 1423) the belief that certain women and men were wont to 

 transform themselves into cats and kill children was quite preva- 

 lent in Eome, and relates the case of a man who, having been 

 harmed in this manner by a woman in his neighborhood, had her 

 arrested and brought to the Capitol, where she exclaimed aloud, 

 " If I only had my salve, I would travel off." Hartlieb, who was 

 present, had his curiosity greatly excited by this remark, and would 

 have gladly given her the salve to see what she could do with it. 

 But a doctor, in whom the spirit of scientific investigation was less 

 strongly developed, stood up and said that she ought not to have the 

 salve, since there was no knowing what mischief the devil might 

 devise. The woman was then condemned to be burned, and Hart- 

 lieb witnesed the execution, although he evidently regretted that 

 she was not permited to try the experiment of salving and saving 

 herself with witches' ointment. If it be true, he adds, that old 

 women can transport a man through the air on a calf or a he-goat, 

 there is no doubt that the devil has to do with it. In this connec- 

 tion he raises the query why there are so many more witches than 

 wizards. To this question, he says, the " masters " or inquisitors 

 reply that woman being, as a rule, more frivolous and credulous, 

 is therefore more accessible and amenable to Satan than man. How 

 enormous and atrocious this disproportion of the sexes was may be 

 inferred from the witchcraft prosecutions at Schongau and Wer- 

 denfels in Bavaria from 1589 to 1591, where, of one hundred and 

 fourteen persons condemned to be burned or beheaded, one hun- 

 dred and thirteen were women. The true explanation of this strange 

 and shameful phenomenon is the false and contemptuous concep- 

 tion of woman growing out of the ascendency of ascetic and scholas- 

 tic ideas in the mediaeval Church. In the eyes of tli religious celi- 

 bate woman was the personification of seduction, and had been from 



the Augsburg nun, Clara Hatzerlin, who made a business of copying manuscripts. She is 

 chiefly known as the compiler of a Liedcrbuch, now in Prague, a collection of poems, some 

 of which are decidedly indelicate, and prove that the cloistered virgins of that time were 

 not prudes. Riezler prints in the appendix to his volume an extract from Ilartlieb's work, 

 taken from the Heidelberg manuscript ; indeed, the whole of it should be published as a 

 valuable contribution to the witchcraft literature of the fifteenth century. Interesting is 

 the use of Unglauben (unbelief) for AbcrgJiuhcn (superstition) in the title. The latter woid 

 was first introduced into the German language by Luther, who as a schismatic and heretic 

 felt the need of a nicer discrimination between heresy, superstition, and sorcery, which the 

 Catholic Church had hitherto lumped together as forms of unbelief and lapses from the 

 true faith due to the seductions of Satan, the arch apostate. The reformer fully believed 

 in the existence of pacts with the devil, but refused to admit dissent from the doctrines 

 and renunciation of the authority of the papal hierarchy as proofs of a covenant with hell. 

 The neologism Aberglaube is the memorial of this protest, so interesting historically and 

 theologically. 



