ABSTRACT
Betokening the negativizing maternal capacity with which she had evidently suckled demonic children, her severed breasts served some model of popular justice, one motivated perhaps by a collective psychological dread of witches constructed as evil mothers. The centrality of the maternal role in feeding her child, in ensuring its physical survival, is countered by the centrality of the alleged witch’s role in accomplishing just the opposite. While there are a few depictions of the early modern German witch in the act of stealing milk and some accounts of poisoning and contamination of wine and cheese, the most frequent witch portrayals are of weather-makers, the hags who tossed tempests in order to destroy crops, fruit and livestock. Published in Strassburg in 1517, the book contains sermons against witchcraft that were delivered in the Lenten season of 1508. In this illustration, the artist has borrowed compositional elements from the Vintler version.
