Towards an alien community of dancing witches in early seventeenth-century Europe *

This paper explores descriptions and images of witches’ dances from the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries, when these dances became common in visual media. This marked a transformation of witchcraft from extremely malicious actions carried out in the service of the Devil, into a wholly alien community whose dancing also identified witches as governed by lust, uninhibited frenzy and hardened zeal. Images of witches’ dances were integral to an exclusionary strategy that sought support for the prosecution of witches as a grave threat to Christian societies, and did so by stimulating disgust, intense distrust and even terror in their viewers.