Joseph Hansen (26 April 1863 – 29 June 1943)[1] was an influential German historian of witchcraft persecutions, and an archivist in the city of Cologne, where at the age of 80 he was killed, along with his wife, by the bombs of World War II.
[9] Writing in 1965, Carlo Ginzburg refers to the "fundamental investigations of J. Hansen, more precisely, have demonstrated how the image of diabolical witchcraft, with all its appendages... was developed between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries largely through the efforts of theologians and inquisitors... All this... has been documented exhaustively...
[14] Historians Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters refer to Hansen as "the great archivist of Cologne" and consider his two works the most important scholarship from the turn of the century.
Molinier "the best expert on the inquisition in the south of France" who confirmed that archives used by Lamothe-Langon can no longer be found (nicht mehr aufzufinden sind).
But most fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century writers who joined in the witchcraft debate seem to rarely, if ever, use the Latin "sabbatum" or vernacular derivatives thereof.
In a 2002 reprint of the same passage from the 1976 work by Kieckhefer, the citation of Russell is removed and replaced with a broad statement: "The Lamothe-Langon texts are now generally regarded as fakes.
A citation that helps explain the serendipity is not included in the 2002 reprint but appeared in 1976: "Cohn and I both based our discoveries in large part on the biographical data in [Richard] Switzer's book of 1962.
Further on, Cohn again qualifies his initial statement and concedes yet another trial from the list did happen, "In 1329, the inquisitor of Carcassonne did sentence a monk to life imprisonment for practicing love magic..."[23] Cohn doesn't provide his source for this "love magic" trial but it can be found in Quellen where Hansen cites the work of HC Lea and Lea includes the entire 1329 sentence reprinted in the original Latin.
[24] The 1329 sentence refers to...multas et diversas daemonum conjurationes et invocationes... and frequently uses the same Latin synonym for witch – sortilegia – found on the title page of Nicolas Rémy's work from 1595 where it is claimed that 900 persons were executed for sortilegii crimen.
[26] Hansen notes that he verified Lea's transcription of the 1329 sentence in the archives at Paris: befinden sich in der Pariser Nationatalbibliothek Msc.
"[29] Whereas Kieckhefer claims his skepticism is based in "anachronisms in the reports," Cohn seems to suggest the opposite: appearances of authenticity in Lamothe-Langon's accounts could be indicators he was selectively culling details from proper sources.
Institutional partisans or those historians of witchcraft who share an affinity with the bottom-up view of Jakob Grimm, and oppose the top-down view of W.G.Soldan [de] might have reason to highlight any potential embarrassment to Hansen due to his focus on the culpability at the top—the "kirche und staat" (church and state)-- and his selection and compilation of the surviving written record on the subject which almost exclusively comes from those sources.
Cohn considers these confessions extracted under torture to have contained, at least on some occasions, a certain amount of real belief, but which he quantifies as a mere "grain of truth" while "the rest came from the imagination of certain inquisitors bishops and magistrates, who used and abused the inquisitorial procedure to obtain all the confirmation they needed.