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Laws and Guidelines concerning the Prosecution of Witchcraft, Late Twelfth Century to 1885

This chapter examines the legislative foundations of witchcraft trials. In early modern legal systems that were cobbled together as boundaries shifted, empires expanded and incorporated new populations, and overlapping jurisdictions bumped up against each other, it could be unclear which authority should hear a case or what legal statute should pertain. In the particular instance of witchcraft, the range of jurisdictions was particularly broad, since it was one of the rare crimes that could fall under either secular or spiritual authorities. Even when jurisdictions were sorted out and the relevant legal statutes were clear, in some venues the authorities might find ways to avoid prescribed legal norms. This disregard for the letter of the law, particularly in sentencing, appears to be a factor in the relatively small number of trials and low execution rate of accused witches in the Ukrainian regions under both Polish-Lithuanian and Russian rule. It is with the legal history of this region, the eastern Ukrainian territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that the chapter begins, before turning to Muscovite Russia, and finally, the Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.