“Es war einmal eine alte Hexe...” – The Witch: between Stereotype and Historical Reality

This article aims to explore the relationship between the stereotype of the witch identified in the Saxon fairy tales of the nineteenth-century Transylvania, and the image of the accused in the witchcraft trials which occurred in early modern cities of Sibiu and Brașov (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). In order  to  highlight this perspective of analysis, I selected two types of sources which I consider particularly useful for my research. Firstly, I chose to rely on seven Saxon fairy tales which present the witch as a secondary character, identified in Joseph Haltrich's collection of fairy tales,  entitled Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen, published in 1854. Secondly, I examined fifteen court records selected from the National Archives of Sibiu (Hermannstadt, Nagyszeben) and Brașov (Kronstadt, Brassó) from the years 1692-1785. By drawing a parallel between the two images, I want to outline the discrepancies between the stereotype and  the  historical  reality, aiming, at the same time, to identify the factors which contributed  to the portrait of the witch that has been perpetuated over time in fairy tales. Furthermore, such an analysis may allow one to observe to what extent literature can be considered a document. Taking into consideration that this direction of research did not  receive  the regional historians’ attention, I consider the initiative favourable in covering a historiographical gap.

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