Valais witch trials

The Valais witch trials consisted of a witch-hunt including a series of witch trials which took place in the Valais (the prince-bishopric of Sion, today part of Switzerland) beginning in 1428. The Valais witch-hunt is the first of the systematic campaigns which would become much more widespread in the decades to come, initiating the period of witch trials in Europe.

The persecutions started in French-speaking Lower Valais and spread to German-speaking Upper Valais and to nearby valleys in the Western Alps. They subsided after six to eight years (c. 1434/6), but the phenomenon spread further afield from here, to Vaud, Fribourg, Neuchatel and beyond.

Although occasional burning of witches () is recorded in Switzerland since the beginning of the 15th century, the Valais trials of 1428 are the first event in which the accusation of sorcery leads to a systematic persecution with hundreds of victims executed.

The main contemporary account of the event is the short report by Johannes Fründ of Lucerne, written in c. 1430, possibly on the request of Christoph von Silenen, at the time castellan in Siders. It is extant in two version, one in Lucerne (Zentralbibliothek BB 335, pp. 483-488), the other in Strasbourg (BNU Ms. 2. 935, ff. 162-164). The Lucerne version is older, and a probable autograph. This is the oldest known account of the incipient systemantic witch-hunts of the 1430s to 1440s. A critical edition was published along with four other early texts on the topic by Ostorero et al. (1999).

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