Joachim Guttejahr – A Sorcerer as a Repeat Offender from the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Because historiography has for decades maintained that in witchcraft trials in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, it was mainly women who were accused, little attention has been paid to men accused of practising harmful witchcraft. For this reason, we know very little about the gender ratio in each country and the circumstances in which the man was the main accused in a witchcraft trial. Thanks to the fortunately preserved source material, this article can trace the course of the trial in which one of the main defendants was Joachim Guttejahr, a Mennonite living in the village of Olszanica in then Ducal Prussia. We learn about the circumstances under which he was accused and the charges against him. We know the testimonies of witnesses, thanks to which we can also shed light on the everyday problems of the Mennonite villagers in the Kwidzyn starostwo at the beginning of the seventeenth century.