From its beginnings, the Christian Church has taken a suspicious attitude towards laughter, which was considered blasphemous, even heretical. Beyond this one-dimensional view, recent research has shown that medieval, early modern, and “enlightened” so-called cultures of laughter (Lachkulturen) or “communities of laughter” (Lachgemeinschaften; Werner Röcke / Hans Jochen Velten) embraced popular and elite elements. Cultures of laughter united permitted expressions of cheerfulness with discredited forms of laughter—for example, laughter aimed at aggressively denying the ruling norms and authorities; crude, coarse, mocking, gloating, carnivalesque or parodying laughter. On one side, laughter helped to cope with fears, it served as a strategy or a resource of resilience. On the other side, it produced anxieties, and it served as a political instrument used to dishonour, incriminate, and degrade.
On many levels, the devil and his demons, magic and witchcraft were interlinked with laughter. Fairy tales, folk tales, fazetias, spiritual plays, carnival plays, farces, sermon exempla or parodies, even the 16th century Faust books—these genres refused to treat the demonic occult in exclusively grave fashion. All over Europe, demons and witches served both as objects of entertainment and as themes of instruction and didactics. This paved the way for mockery and satire. „Laughing with demons“ went together with „thinking with demons“ (Stuart Clark). Laughing in disbelief even helped to deny the material and physical existence of demons and their human servants, the witches. „Laughing with demons“ could transform into „thinking without demons“.
Despite their relevance, witchcraft research has continued to neglect the magical cultures of laughter, due to its long-standing focus on demonology, sensational pamphlets, and trial records. These text formats propagated and documented witch-hunting and hardly ridiculed the respective phenomena. In this perspective, a witch’s laughter in court or before the stake was no more than a proof of her or his guilt. At the same time, even mainstream demonologists employed strategies of storytelling and narratives to transport their moral and theological messages by means of entertainment (Gerhild Scholz-Williams, Lyndal Roper).
Sometimes it remains hard to tell where obsessive demonology ended and entertainment and lust of horror began. Laughing with demons and witches, thus, served as a resource of resilience for coping with anxieties. Moreover, medieval and early modern scholars, poets, writers, painters and engravers made the devil, (supposed) witches and their occult arts, but especially those who believed in these supposed phenomena, the target of ridicule, parody and satire. In early modern women’s satires, the figure of the female witch served as an example of the deeply rooted wickedness of women (Emma Louise Brucklacher). By the time of Reginald Scot (1584) and Cornelius Loos (1592), followed inter alia by Abbé Laurent Bordelon (1710), satires ridiculing the belief in magic and in the witches’ sabbath became the anti-demonological argument par excellence (Ismael del Olmo, Rita Voltmer). In the sense of prodesse et delectare, early modern physicians argued that a harmful excess of black bile, which disturbed the humoral balance and caused melancholy and diabolical temptations, could best be exorcised with cheerfulness. Anti-demonology in the guise of satire and parody could thus become a remedy against the devil himself.
The international and interdisciplinary conference is open to scholars from the fields of history, medicine, literature, art history, ethnology, and sociology. It aims to investigate the ambivalent functions of laughter in the discourses of magic and witchcraft that spanned Europe and its colonies in North and Latin America. It wants to make magical cultures of laughter between Antiquity and the Present visible. The presentation of master or doctoral theses in progress is also welcome. The following issues may be addressed:
- Laughter in the context of witchcraft accusations and in court (as a resilience strategy / indication of guilt)
- Laughing with demons and witches as a strategy of relief or coping
- Parody, satire, and mockery as an anti-demonological argument
- comical / satirical / parodic representations of devils and witches in literature / on stage / in pamphlets / in arts (entertainment)
- cheerfulness and laughter as remedies against melancholy and so-called “devilish temptations”
We invite everybody interested in the topic of “magical cultures of laughter” or in the presentation of a master or doctoral thesis, to send a proposal, a CV and an abstract of the paper planned (only one page) to Rita Voltmer (voltmer@uni-trier.de). The deadline is October 31, 2023. The organizing team will inform you in due time whether your proposal has been accepted. We also invite all interested listeners to participate.
The conference is organised in cooperation with the DFG-funded project "Resilience and Criminal justice: The Persecution of Witchcraft and Sexual Deviances in Western Territories of the Holy Roman Empire (15th -17th c.)” (Director: PD Dr. Rita Voltmer) as part of DFG Research Group 2539 "Resilience - Phases of Societal Upheaval in Dialogue between Medieval Studies and Sociology" (University of Trier). For more information see https://for2539-resilienz.uni-trier.de.