Metz 1519: Agrippa defends a woman accused of witchcraft

In 1518 Agrippa settled in Metz, a free imperial city in Lorraine, with an official post: advocate, syndic and orator of the city. It was the role of a jurist serving the civic government, charged with drafting documents, delivering speeches and defending the interests of the community. It was in this capacity, in 1519, that he became involved in a witchcraft trial that has become one of the best-known and most honourable episodes of his life.

The Woippy case

The accused was a peasant woman from Woippy, a village just outside Metz. Some neighbours had denounced her, and the main argument against her was that her mother had once been condemned and burned as a witch. The trial was conducted by the Dominican inquisitor Nicolas Savin, who considered that descent sufficient proof. The woman had been imprisoned and tortured, according to procedures then considered normal in trials for sorcery, in which a confession extracted through pain counted as decisive proof.

The intellectual climate favoured severity. For little more than thirty years the Malleus maleficarum had been circulating, the manual published in 1486 or 1487 that systematised the hunting of witches and that many inquisitors used as a guide. In several regions of central Europe trials were multiplying, and an accusation founded on reputation and kinship could be enough to lead to the stake.

Agrippa's arguments

Agrippa intervened in defence of the accused with legal and theological arguments. First he contested the value of descent: even granting that the mother had been guilty, baptism cancelled any bond with the sin of others, and no one could be condemned for the fault of a parent. He also argued that the procedure was irregular and that the testimony of neighbours, driven by grudges, carried no weight.

The clash with Savin was bitter. Agrippa accused the inquisitor of acting out of ignorance and cruelty, while the Dominican regarded him as a defender of heretics. Thanks also to the intervention of the city's church authorities, the woman was finally released. Agrippa thus won a rare victory in an age when accused women seldom found anyone to speak for them.

The dispute over Saint Anne and his departure

In the same months Agrippa took sides in another controversy. The French theologian Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples had argued that Saint Anne, mother of Mary, had married only once, against the tradition of her threefold marriage. Agrippa defended this thesis in a treatise on the monogamy of Saint Anne and publicly confronted some of the clergy of Metz. Together these quarrels earned him powerful enemies, and early in 1520 he left the city.

The Woippy episode matters because it shows an Agrippa far from the legendary portrait of the fearsome magician. He was, on the contrary, one of the first jurists to challenge openly the logic of witchcraft trials. Later his pupil Johann Weyer, a physician and author of the De praestigiis daemonum, would develop an even broader critique of the persecution of witches, recognising in his master a forerunner of that battle for humanity and common sense.