WITCHCRAFT IN BAVARIA. 39 



Another still more fervid zealot of this work was thfe Jesuit 

 Jeremias Drexel, court preacher of Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria 

 from 1615 to 1638. He was somewhat celebrated as a pulpit orator, 

 and waxed eloquent in describing injuries done to crops and kine 

 and human beings by the maleficence of witches. " Thousands of 

 this hellish brood have been burned at the stake," he exclaims, 

 ''and shall we accuse their judges of an unjust sentence? Never- 

 theless there are such extremely frigid (frigidissimi) Christians, 

 who are unworthy of this name, and who resist with might and 

 main the extirpation of this crew, in order, as they say, that, for- 

 sooth, the innocent may not suffer. Oh, out upon these enemies 

 of the divine honor! Does not the Holy Writ expressly command, 

 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live? I appeal to God's behest 

 and call, as loud as I can, on bishops, princes, and kings to destroy 

 with fire and sword this worst of human pests." 



Duke Maximilian I was in many respects a remarkable man, 

 with uncommon keenness of intellect, strong sense of duty, untir- 

 ing energy, deep religious feeling, and rare appreciation of the fine 

 arts, but these superior qualities did not prevent him from being a 

 fanatical witch persecutor. This perversion of so many excellent 

 endowments was due chiefly to his early education. His preceptor, 

 Johann Baptist Tickler, a theologian who had dabbled in law, was 

 the author of a book entitled Judicium generate de pcenis malefi- 

 carum, magorem et sortilegorum utriusque sexus, in which the 

 combined erudition and casuistry of the jurist and the divine are 

 used in justification of the utmost rigor in punishing sorcery and 

 sortilege. In 1589, when the prince was only seventeen years of 

 age, he was commissioned by his father, Duke Albrecht V, sur- 

 named the Magnanimous, to witness and report the torture and burn- 

 ing of alleged witches at Ingolstadt, and his letters, now preserved 

 in the Bavarian archives, reveal an amount of crass credulity and 

 callousness of soul in the presence of human suffering wholly in- 

 consistent with the good sense and susceptibility for which this 

 youth was otherwise distinguished. With such a preparation for 

 the performance of his duties as sovereign, it is no wonder that his 

 reign, extending from 1597 to 1651, should embrace the period of 

 Bavarian history in which the greatest number of witch prosecu- 

 tions occurred, and the proceedings were most systematically and 

 relentlessly conducted by both secular and ecclesiastical tribunals. 

 The duke pursued this course with greater energy and persistency 



devourinpj children. He was also held in high repute as an exorcist, and in 1 569 cast ten 

 devils out of Anna Bernhauserin, a servant in the famous Fugger family at Augsburg. The 

 tenth devil, however, proved to be a very obstinate one, and was expelled only in the pres- 

 ence and by the aid of the wonder-working image of the Virgin at Altotting, near Munich. 



