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Witchcraft, Nostalgia, and the Rural Idyll in Eighteenth-Century Germany

In 1747, over a hundred years after the witch craze had ended, Magdalena Bollmann found herself accused of witchcraft. Bollmann came from the village of Alleshausen in what is now part of Württemberg, high on the plateau by Lake Federsee, a flat, brooding landscape dotted with pilgrimage churches and ruled by the Praemonstratensian monks of the Abbey of Obermarchtal. Bollmann was not the first to be accused of witchcraft in this particular outbreak of witchcraft trials. By the time the accusations against her were heard, four women had already been burnt as witches, and three more would meet their deaths before the episode was over, seven women in a population of barely 500 people.1 It was extraordinary for such a large outbreak of witchhunting to occur so late: this was the period of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment. Even the executions did not put an end to it. Just nine years later, three more women in the neighbouring village of Brasenberg were tried for witchcraft, escaping burning only because the village mayor and the advisory jurist declared the evidence inadmissable and so brought the trials to a halt.2 At about the same time as these horrific trials, a young monk from the monastery of Obermarchtal was enjoying his early literary successes. Sebastian Sailer (1714–71) is hardly a name to conjure with outside Swabia. But Sailer played a not-insignificant role in the development of German literature that reached its apogee in the late eighteenth century: he knew the Enlightenment poet and translator of Shakespeare Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), who hailed from nearby Biberach and who lived there between 1760 and