The Corrector

A bishop, a scholar, and a moral arbitrator, Burchard of Worms was a man of many roles, but it's his monumental work of church law, the Decretum, that may reveal folk beliefs about magic that persisted well into the eleventh century. This episode brings you the story of The Corrector and the folk magic of early medieval Europe.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:18 Intro
• 2:07 Burchard
• 6:39 The Corrector
• 12:38 Some Women
• 16:38 Conclusion
• 19:07 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben. Just a quick heads-up before we get started, this episode acknowledges the existence of sex. Listener discretion is advised. And with that, let’s get on with the show.

Intro
If you recently celebrated New Year’s, depending on how you celebrated, the eleventh-century scholar Burchard of Worms may have a bone to pick with you. As he wrote:

Have you done what some do on the first of January (that is on the eighth day after the Lord’s Nativity)—who on that holy night wind magic skeins, spin, sew: all at the prompting of the devil beginning whatever task they can begin on account of the new year? If you have, you will do penance for forty days on bread and water.

A bishop, a scholar, and a moral arbitrator, Burchard of Worms was a man of many roles, his legacy forever entwined with the fabric of medieval church law. In an age of ecclesiastical reform and growing political tension between church and state, Burchard’s work transcended his own context, influencing generations of church authorities and shaping the moral landscape of medieval Europe. His life offers a lens into the complexities of church governance, morality, and social order in medieval Europe, but it’s his monumental work of church law, the Decretum, that may reveal folk beliefs about magic that coexisted with Christian doctrine in Europe well into the eleventh century.

Burchard
Born sometime around 965 in what is now modern Germany, Burchard was the son of a wealthy and noble family—a lineage that afforded him opportunities for education and ecclesiastical advancement. In 998, his elder brother, Franco, was appointed Bishop of Worms, a significant diocese at the crossroads of imperial and church power, and his sister, Mathilda, later became the abbess of a local monastery. As a boy, Burchard was sent to a monastic school to be trained as a priest. Though he was educated as a cleric, his tutor, the Archbishop of Mainz, also instructed Burchard in “noble behavior” and oversaw his early ecclesiastical career. By the year 1000, Franco had died, and Burchard was appointed Bishop of Worms in his brother’s stead. As bishop, Burchard inherited both spiritual responsibilities and the task of overseeing a region rife with civil and religious disputes. His tenure would define the bishop’s role as both a pastoral guide and a legal arbitrator.

Burchard’s commitment to education and reform began to take shape early in his time as bishop. Understanding that the clergy needed clear guidance to navigate the complexities of canon law, he set out to compile a comprehensive legal text that would clarify ecclesiastical rules and ensure their uniform application across Christendom. This project would consume nearly two decades of his life, culminating in his most enduring contribution: the Decretum. Completed around 1020, the Decretum was a 20-book collection of canon law that addressed a wide array of topics, from ecclesiastical discipline to the moral conduct of both clergy and laity. Burchard’s aim was clear: to provide an authoritative reference for church leaders grappling with questions of sin, penance, and governance. For example, Burchard devoted significant attention to issues of sexual morality and marital conduct, cataloging sins in painstaking detail and prescribing corresponding penances. His work captures the anxieties of a church struggling to assert control over both the public and private lives of its members.

As Burchard codified church law, he implicitly asserted the church’s autonomy in matters of moral and spiritual judgment, a stance that would fuel conflicts between popes and emperors for centuries. Yet, Burchard himself was a pragmatist, aware of the delicate balance required to maintain peace and order in his diocese. His leadership in Worms exemplified the careful diplomacy necessary for a bishop navigating the dual demands of spiritual care and political reality. Despite his towering intellectual achievements, Burchard had his share of controversy. His meticulous legalism and moral rigor won him both admirers and detractors. Some accused him of overstepping his role, of trying to legislate morality in ways that infringed upon personal freedom. Others praised him as a saintly figure, a shepherd who cared deeply for the souls in his charge. Of course, Burchard wasn’t writing in a vacuum. He lived in a period when the Holy Roman Empire’s influence on the church was at its height, and debates over clerical celibacy, simony (the buying and selling of church offices), and the investiture of bishops by lay authorities were beginning to simmer. Burchard’s Decretum addressed these issues head-on, laying the groundwork for later reform movements, including those of Pope Gregory VII and the broader Gregorian Reforms of the eleventh century.

The Corrector
Perhaps the most famous section of Burchard’s Decretum is Book 19, sometimes called The Corrector, this is a penitential guide that laid out confessional questions and penances for a wide variety of sins. Here, Burchard’s meticulous approach to categorizing human behavior reflects both his legal mind and his pastoral concern. He believed that proper penance was not merely punitive but also redemptive, a way to restore the sinner’s relationship with God and community. Not only is The Corrector a fascinating glimpse into the development of penance and penitential practice, it may also offer a glimpse into pre-Christian beliefs and practices that persisted in medieval Europe. In chapter five of The Corrector, Burchard urges bishops to warn their flocks against consulting with magicians to divine the future, writing:

Have you consulted magicians and led them into your house in order to seek out any magical trick, or to avert it; or have you invited to yourself, according to pagan custom, diviners who would divine for you, to demand of them the things to come as from a prophet, and those who practice lots or expect by lots to foreknow the future, or those who are devoted to auguries or incantations? If you have, you will do penance for two years on the appointed feast days.

Likewise, he warns about observing the phases of the moon, writing:

Have you observed the traditions of the pagans, which, as if by hereditary right, with the assistance of the devil, fathers have ever left to their sons, even to these days, that is, that you should worship the elements, the moon or the sun or the course of the stars, the new moon, or the eclipse of the moon, that you should be able by your shouts or by your aid to restore her splendor, or these elements (be able) to succor yourself, or that you should have power with them? Or have you observed the new moon for building a house or making marriages? If you have, you will do penance for two years on the appointed fast days…

Of course, many pre-Christian holy sites, like springs, wells, rivers, and groves, were later venerated by the Christian population, who came to associate them with various saints. While this practice was often tolerated by church authorities, provided the rites didn’t appear to be too pagan, Burchard urges bishops and priests to crack down on this practice, writing: 

Have you come to any place to pray other than a church or other religious place which your bishop or your priest showed you, that is, either to springs or to stones or to trees or to crossroads, and there in reverence for the place lighted a candle or a torch or carried there bread or any offering or eaten there or sought there any healing of body or mind? If you have done or consented to such things, you will do penance for three years on the appointed fast days…

Similarly, while the use of herbs for healing was allowed, the words and thoughts offered while gathering them ought to be fitting for a Christian. Burchard condemned the collection of medicinal herbs when done “with evil incantations, not with the creed and the Lord’s Prayer.”

In fact, Burchard’s text calls out a number of folk practices thought to be evil, asking:

 Have you made knots, and incantations, and those various enchantments which evil men, swineherds, plowmen, and sometimes hunters make, while they say diabolical formulas over bread or grass and over certain nefarious bandages, and either hide these in a tree or throw them where two roads, or three roads, meet, that they may set free their animals or dogs from pestilence or destruction and destroy those of another? …Have you ever believed or participated in this perfidy, that enchanters and those who say that they can let loose tempests should be able, through incantation of demons, to arouse tempests or to change the minds of men? …Have you done what many do? They scrape the place where they are accustomed to make the fire in their house and put grains of barley there in the warm spot, and if the grains jump (they believe) there will be danger, but if they remain, things will go well… Have you done what some do when they are visiting any sick person? When they approach the house where the sick person lies, if they find a stone lying nearby, they turn the stone over and look in the place where the stone was lying (to see) if there is anything living under it, and if they find there a worm or a fly or an ant or anything that moves, then they aver that the sick person will recover. But if they find there nothing that moves, they say he will die… Have you believed what some are wont to believe? When they make any journey, if a crow croaks from their left side to their right, they hope on this account to have a prosperous journey. And when they are worried about a lodging place, if then that bird which is called the mouse-catcher… flies in front of them, across the road on which they go, they trust more to this augury and omen than to God. If you have done or believed these things, you should do penance for five days on bread and water…

Some Women
While many of the practices Burchard’s Corrector condemns were thought to be practiced by both men and women, many of Burchard’s penitential questions focus on women’s practices in particular. In one passage, he gives an example of folk magic done while spinning and weaving cloth:

Have you been present at or consented to the vanities which women practice in their woolen work, in their webs, who, when they begin their webs, hope to be able to bring it about that with incantations and with the beginning of these the threads of the warp and of the woof become so mingled together that unless they supplement these in turn by other counter-incantations of the devil, the whole will perish? If you have been present or consented, you will do penance for thirty days on bread and water.

In addition to weaving, The Corrector associates women with casting love spells and cursing men, writing:

Have you believed or participated in this infidelity, that there is any woman who through certain spells and incantations can turn about the minds of men, either from hatred to love or from love to hatred, or by her bewitchments can snatch away men’s goods? If you have believed or participated in such acts, you will do penance for one year in the appointed fast days… Have you done what some adulteresses are wont to do? When first they learn that their lovers wish to take legitimate wives, they thereupon by some trick of magic extinguish the male desire, so that they are impotent and cannot consummate their union with their legitimate wives. If you have done or taught others to do this, you should do penance for forty days on bread and water…

As his warnings continue, Burchard begins to venture into what might well be a priest’s kinky fantasy, asking:

Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take off their clothes and anoint their whole naked body with honey, and laying down their honey-smeared body upon wheat on some linen on the earth, roll to and fro often, then carefully gather all the grains of wheat which stick to the moist body, place it in a mill, and make the mill go round backwards against the sun and so grind it to flour; and they make bread from that flour and then give it to their husbands to eat, that on eating the bread they may become feeble and pine away. If you have (done this), you shall do penance for forty days on bread and water.

In fact, nearly a dozen penitential questions begin with one of the following: “Have you done what some women are wont to do?… Have you done what some women, filled with the discipline of Satan are wont to do?… Have you done what some women do at the instigation of the devil?… Have you done what some women, filled with the boldness of the devil are wont to do?” While some scholars have suggested that early modern witchfinding manuals like the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum are responsible for establishing a link between women and witchcraft, it’s certainly possible to find precedent in Burchard’s Corrector. However, it’s worth noting that, while the Malleus and later manuals insist that witches are real and most likely to be women, The Corrector imposes penalties for those who believe in witchcraft at all. That is, according to Burchard, the very belief that magic or witchcraft might be real is itself a heresy.

Conclusion
Burchard of Worms died in 1025, but his influence endured long after his passing. The Decretum became a foundational text for medieval canon law, studied and referenced by generations of clerics and scholars. Its themes of moral accountability, the redemptive power of penance, and the church’s role as both spiritual guide and legal authority resonate even today.

It’s unclear whether the beliefs and practices described in Burchard’s Corrector were widespread. Prescriptive documents like law codes and penitential manuals present the world as it ought to be, not as it is. However, The Corrector can still offer us fascinating insights into medieval theology, morality, and the socio-cultural framework of the time. It highlights the theological emphasis on sin, repentance, and salvation in medieval Christianity and demonstrates the belief in the church’s role as a spiritual healer, with clergy acting as “medics” to cure the soul. Burchard’s specificity regarding sins and penances for women provides insight into gender dynamics and the role of women in religious life. Finally, The Corrector underscores the centrality of the church in shaping medieval life, revealing its role in offering both spiritual guidance and societal regulation.

In the grand tapestry of medieval history, Burchard of Worms stands out as a figure who bridged the worlds of law, theology, and pastoral care. His life and work remind us that even in the midst of political upheaval and societal change, the quest for justice, morality, and spiritual healing remains a timeless endeavor. Burchard’s legacy is not merely one of legal texts and ecclesiastical reforms; it is the story of a man who sought to bring order to a chaotic world, one soul at a time.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about The Corrector and early medieval magic, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and now Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.