5: The Witchfinder Aesthetic, from Early Modern Pamphlet to Warhammer

Tess Watterson, @tesswatty, University of Adelaide

The title ‘Witch Hunter’ evokes an immediate image for fantasy players/fans: he has varied assemblages of a long leather coat, belts, and ammunition, and one consistent accessory – The Witch Hunter Hat. Sold as LARP gear and re-enactment gear alike, the Witch Hunters Hat is a fantasy adaptation of the capotain hat of the 16th and 17th centuries and has its own place in popular imagination. The witch hunter and his hat are a very non-medieval archetype that is very normalised in medievalist spaces, especially video games. Fantasy witch hunters are an infusion of many ideas (like wild west, gunslinger, outlaw, puritan, leather, and more), likely springing first from Robert E. Howard’s 1920s pulp fiction character, Solomon Kane, an Elizabethan puritan monster hunter.

The most well known “witch hunter” of the historical record is Matthew Hopkins, Witch Finder General. However, Hopkins was effectively an “amateur detective” in the 17th century, who titled himself ‘general’ with no context, and only lived to age 27. The popular visual image of him is from his own witch-hunting pamphlet. The big names in witch persecution that were actually temporally closer to the Middle Ages are figures more like Kramer and Sprenger, Reginald Scot, or even King James VI. They represent far less aesthetically appealing figures for fantasy violence, but these were the authors of (almost medieval) witchcraft treatises. The concepts of a witch hunter ‘class’ in fantasy games is thus misleading, implying men like Hopkins represented an organised profession. Witch finding, particularly at the very end of the Middle Ages and start of the Early Modern period, was conducted more by communities, neighbours, or church groups, than by individual (or institutional) violently trained men. Less cool, more insidious.

The witch hunters of fantasy films are aesthetically in line with the filmic grimdark medievalism trend, such as Vin Diesel in the Last Witch Hunter or Nicolas Cage in Season of the Witch. Films seem to have kept puritan hats to era-appropriate historical texts (usually not fantasy), like the 1968 Witchfinder General. Though, inversely, James Purefoy’s 2009 version of Elizabethan Solomon Kane has a bit of the grungy/gritty medievalism flavour.

In the world of roleplay games, however, the fantasy witch hunter thrives. CRPG Warhammer’s witch hunters are a playable class: state-sanctioned, usually “Templars”, lone mercenary types that are proficient with violence (especially a pistol and rapier). The game lore frames them as grim, zealous, and disliked, but their violence is edgy and cool (and very cosplay-able). In TTRPG Warhammer lore, there is even a “Hammer of the Witches” text written by a witch hunter character named Wilhelm Hasburg. Hammer of the Witches is the common translation of the title of the real Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise written by German Heinrich Kramer in the 1480s.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ’s witch hunters are NPCs: soldier inquisitors sanctioned by the Church (and some rulers). They are framed as thugs and fanatics who are largely disliked, but with whom the PC works when needed—that is, their violence becomes acceptable if the common enemy is uglier (The Crones). The Witcher 3’s journal entry on witch hunters describes them as “bloody butchers” who are capitalising on chaos. This depiction both frames witch hunters as real commanders of a force, and implies that only evil opportunists engaged in such practices.

The flattening of later ideas back into the medieval is often reflective of a desire to relegate anything uncomfortable to a pre-modern past. With witch trials, it seems we also prefer to think of cloaked

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cardinals and pistol-wielding hunters as persecuting the innocent, as opposed to grappling with stories of everyday people, often betraying neighbours due to beliefs that modern audiences disparage as superstition. But fantasy witch hunters are also made into cool, dark, anti-heroes to play. What image does this create of the witches they hunt? If magic is a real threat, the witch hunter's meaning is changed. This narrative obscures the complexity of community contexts in a historical period of widespread sociocultural instability and change, and has the potential to subtly reshape ideas about the real history of the witch trials.

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