Anna Göldi

Anna Göldi was a Swiss domestic servant who had spent her working life in other people's houses. In 1782, employed in the household of a physician and magistrate in the canton of Glarus, she was dismissed after a dispute, and shortly afterwards pins were found in the milk and bread given to a daughter of the house. She was pursued, taken, questioned under torture, and beheaded.

The date is what makes the case notorious. This is 1782. Mozart was writing operas. The American revolution was ending. Enlightened Europe had spent two generations congratulating itself on having left witch trials behind, and here was a Protestant canton executing a servant over pins in a child's food.

The authorities knew how it looked, and the paperwork shows them managing it. The word witchcraft was kept out of the formal charge. She was condemned as a poisoner, on a charge framed in ordinary criminal terms, though the substance of the accusation, the harm worked invisibly by a dismissed servant, was exactly what a witchcraft accusation had always been. Contemporaries were not fooled. The case was denounced across German-speaking Europe almost at once, and it is from this episode that the term judicial murder entered wide circulation.

She confessed under torture, as people do, and retracted afterwards, as people do.

For two centuries Anna Göldi was a local scandal and a symbol. In 2007 and 2008 the case was reopened as a political matter in the canton of Glarus, and in 2008 the cantonal parliament formally rehabilitated her, declaring the 1782 proceedings a miscarriage of justice. It is a rare thing. Very few of the people executed in the European witch trials have ever been the subject of a formal exoneration by the authority that killed them, and most never will be, because the courts that convicted them no longer exist and the names are lost.

The description of her as the last person executed for witchcraft in Europe should be handled with the care the atlas gives to any superlative. It is the standard phrase and it is defensible, but it depends on definitions: on whether a case tried under a poisoning statute counts as a witchcraft execution, which cuts against her being counted at all, and on how one treats later reported killings in eastern Europe whose documentation is thin or disputed. Historians differ, and the atlas records the claim as contested rather than settling it.

What is not contested is the shape of the case, and it is the shape that connects 1782 to the present. A servant with no standing loses a dispute with the household that employs her. Something goes wrong in that household. The blame attaches to her because she is the person it can safely attach to. That sequence does not belong to the early modern period. It is the sequence still being documented today.