Reading Heupers: The Witchcraft Texts. An Analysis of Eight Years of Oral Interviews

Abstract Engelbert Heupers’s ‘folktales’, collected in the 1960s, form the second largest collection in the Netherlands. Although they relate to ‘superstition’, they should be regarded as fragments of oral history, albeit on legendary subjects, rather than legends, or even memorates. They were told as genuine memories. Especially the witchcraft texts, analysed here, referred to past events and some were corroborated by newspaper reports. Heupers’s work suffered from his supervisor’s lack of knowledge of or interest in legends. The reminiscences were influenced by press reports on witchcraft which persuaded some people to remain silent or only divulge commonplace information about the subject. There was a striking difference between Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant interviewees. Local witchcraft texts need to be understood as a patchwork of stories which sometimes enabled the identification of a witch and a reconstruction of historical events.