Charms in German judicial acts of the 16th–17th centuries: pragmatics of language variation

The paper proposes a linguistic analysis of interrogation files from witch processes of the late 16th — the first half of the 17th centuries in Germany. It focuses on documents that include charm texts as core evidence against those accused of witchcraft. Charms formulae were largely recorded in judicial acts as additional corroborative material evidence of socially dangerous practices by a given group of individuals. However, before charm texts found their way into interrogation files as official evidence, local offices had had a hard and long time to both standardize their judicial practices and normalize the paperwork. The transition to the national language standard initially caused massive confusion as court officers would spontaneously switch from Standard German to the local dialect in their paperwork. This competition between Standard German and local dialects gave rise to medial diglossia, with the choice of a given linguistic variant contingent on a variety of factors. In many cases, witchcraft trial materials would be sent to law faculties of universities or to higher jurisdiction courts of imperial cities for legal assessment of the offenders' testimony. This made it necessary for court recorders, instead of putting the evidence down directly in the local dialect, to translate it into the established official bureaucratese. The most intricate task was for the recorders to translate the defendants' replies and the charms' formulae, naturally given in the local dialect. The paper describes the phenomenon of code-switching as evidenced in court records featuring charms as their structural elements. In gathering the data, the focus was on the Low German dialect area and the last phase of the Early New High German period.