La prova mistica dell’acqua fredda. Diritto tradizionale, diritto dotto e stregoneria (secc. XVI-XVII)

The swimming test - already widespread in the most varied cultures and in different ways in Antiquity - remained common in most countries of Eu-rope, especially Central and Eastern Europe, even in the Modern Age. German universities and their professors led a strong polemic of high culture against the usual use in witchcraft trials. The essay examines the problem through the inter-pretation of a vast treatise of the sixteenth-seventeenth century - by lawyers, can-onists, theologians and physicists - noting the technical-juridical problems in the encounter between low oral culture and high written culture, and underlining the passage from medieval ‘ordeal’ to ‘mystical test’ in the Modern Age.