Post by sophiamiller on Sept 19, 2023 20:30:51 GMT
The Devil, whose central role in witchcraft beliefs made the Western tradition unique, was an absolute reality in both elite and popular culture, and failure to understand the prevailing terror of Satan has misled some modern researchers to regard witchcraft as a “cover” for political or gender conspiracies. The Devil was deeply and widely feared as the greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life, family, community, church, and state. Witches were considered Satan’s followers, members of an antichurch and an antistatic, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a “counter-state” in the early modern period. If witchcraft existed, as people believed it did, then it was an absolute necessity to extirpate it before it destroyed the world.
Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Even though the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were skeptical of accusations of witchcraft, the period 1300–30 can be seen as the beginning of witch trials. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries, but with great inconsistency according to time and place. By 1435–50, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIII’s publication in 1484 of the bull Summist desiderates affectual (“Desiring with the Greatest Ardor”) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus malefic arum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers.
The “hunts” were not pursuits of individuals already identified as witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The process began with suspicions and, occasionally, continued through rumours and accusations to convictions. The overwhelming majority of processes, however, went no farther than the rumor stage, for actually accusing someone of witchcraft was a dangerous and expensive business. Accusations originated with the ill-will of the accuser, or, more often, the accuser’s fear of someone having ill-will toward him. The accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather than by priests, lords, judges, or other “elites.” Successful prosecution of one witch sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to the years from the 1590s to 1640s. Very few accusations went beyond the village level.
Three-fourths of European witch hunts occurred in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland, areas where prosecutions for heresy had been plentiful and charges of diabolism were prominent. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. There were additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though the differences between the folklore of the Europeans and Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. In Mexico the Franciscan friars linked indigenous religion and magic with the Devil; prosecutions for witchcraft in Mexico began in the 1530s, and by the 1600s indigenous peasants were reporting stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor differences. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch hunts had already abated in Europe, though a peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 1668–76 bore some similarity to that in New England. Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts) continue to draw much attention from American authors, they were only a swirl in the backwater of the witch hunts. The outbreak at Salem, where 19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of political authority. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and Hungary took place as late as the 18th century.
The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. The theological worldview—derived from the early Christian fear of Satan and reinforced by the great effort to reform and conform that began in 1050—was intensified again by the fears and animosities engendered by the Reformation of the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of personal piety (the individual alone with his or her Bible and God), which enhanced individualism while downplaying community. The emphasis on personal piety exacerbated the rigid characterization of people as either “good” or “bad.” It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological tendency to project negative intentions onto others. Moreover, just as the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent, so did they provoke resistance and fear. Sermons and didactic treatises, including “devil books” warning of Satan’s power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Both Protestants and Catholics were involved in the prosecutions, as the theology of the Protestant Reformers on the Devil and witchcraft was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Catholics. More differences existed among Protestants and among Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions.
Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important a role as religion in the witch hunts. Local courts were more credulous and therefore more likely to be strict and even violent in their treatment of supposed witches than were regional or superior courts. Crude practices such as pricking witches to see whether the Devil had desensitized them to pain; searching for the “devil’s mark,” an oddly-shaped mole or wart; or “swimming” (throwing the accused into a pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her) occurred on the local level. Where central authority—i.e., bishops, kings, or the Inquisition—was strong, convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch hunts to obtain money or power.
The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in Western history when capital punishment and torture were most widespread. Judicial torture, happily in abeyance since the end of the Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. The latter was the greatest evil of the system, for a victim might be forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming others, creating a long chain of accusations. Witch trials were equally common in ecclesiastical and secular courts before 1550, and then, as the power of the state increased, they took place more often in secular ones.
Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that resulted from the strictness of its rules. It investigated whether the charges resulted from personal animosity toward the accused; it obtained physicians’ statements; it did not allow the naming of accomplices either with or without torture; it required the review of every sentence; and it provided for whipping, banishment, or even house arrest instead of death for first offenders. Like the Inquisition, the Parliament of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely restrained the witch hunts. After an outbreak of hunts in France in 1587–88, increasingly skeptical judges began a series of restraining reforms marked by the requirement of “obligatory appeal” to the Parliament in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive and dangerous.
The decline of witch hunts, like their origins, was gradual. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. The legal use of torture declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat from religious intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s to 1640s). The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th century of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal worldview encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed skepticism; increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication set the stage for social acceptance of this changing outlook.
Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch hunts are as difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The theory best supported by the evidence is that the increasing power of the centralized courts such as the Inquisition and the Parliament acted to begin a process of “decriminalization” of witchcraft. These courts reduced the number of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the notion of witchcraft in France and other countries.
Explanations of the witch hunts continue to vary, but recent research has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible value. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. Moreover, the evidence does not indicate a close correlation between socioeconomic tension and witchcraft, though agrarian crises seem to have had some effect.
One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. No satisfactory explanation for the preponderance of women among the accused has appeared. Although the proportions varied according to region and time, on the whole about three-fourths of convicted witches were female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. The malevolent sorcery more often associated with men, such as harming crops and livestock, was rarer than that ascribed to women. Young women were sometimes accused of infanticide, but midwives and nurses were not particularly at risk. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced. Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus malefic arum. Resentment and fear of the power of the “hag,” a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. Folklore and accounts of trials indicate that a woman who was not protected by a male family member might have been the most likely candidate for an accusation, but the evidence is inconclusive. Children were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft.
In the long run it may be better simply to describe the witch hunts than to try to explain them, since the explanations are so diverse and complicated. Yet one general explanation is valid: the unique character of the witch hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries.
Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Even though the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were skeptical of accusations of witchcraft, the period 1300–30 can be seen as the beginning of witch trials. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries, but with great inconsistency according to time and place. By 1435–50, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIII’s publication in 1484 of the bull Summist desiderates affectual (“Desiring with the Greatest Ardor”) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus malefic arum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers.
The “hunts” were not pursuits of individuals already identified as witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The process began with suspicions and, occasionally, continued through rumours and accusations to convictions. The overwhelming majority of processes, however, went no farther than the rumor stage, for actually accusing someone of witchcraft was a dangerous and expensive business. Accusations originated with the ill-will of the accuser, or, more often, the accuser’s fear of someone having ill-will toward him. The accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather than by priests, lords, judges, or other “elites.” Successful prosecution of one witch sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to the years from the 1590s to 1640s. Very few accusations went beyond the village level.
Three-fourths of European witch hunts occurred in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland, areas where prosecutions for heresy had been plentiful and charges of diabolism were prominent. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. There were additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though the differences between the folklore of the Europeans and Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. In Mexico the Franciscan friars linked indigenous religion and magic with the Devil; prosecutions for witchcraft in Mexico began in the 1530s, and by the 1600s indigenous peasants were reporting stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor differences. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch hunts had already abated in Europe, though a peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 1668–76 bore some similarity to that in New England. Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts) continue to draw much attention from American authors, they were only a swirl in the backwater of the witch hunts. The outbreak at Salem, where 19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of political authority. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and Hungary took place as late as the 18th century.
The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. The theological worldview—derived from the early Christian fear of Satan and reinforced by the great effort to reform and conform that began in 1050—was intensified again by the fears and animosities engendered by the Reformation of the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of personal piety (the individual alone with his or her Bible and God), which enhanced individualism while downplaying community. The emphasis on personal piety exacerbated the rigid characterization of people as either “good” or “bad.” It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological tendency to project negative intentions onto others. Moreover, just as the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent, so did they provoke resistance and fear. Sermons and didactic treatises, including “devil books” warning of Satan’s power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Both Protestants and Catholics were involved in the prosecutions, as the theology of the Protestant Reformers on the Devil and witchcraft was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Catholics. More differences existed among Protestants and among Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions.
Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important a role as religion in the witch hunts. Local courts were more credulous and therefore more likely to be strict and even violent in their treatment of supposed witches than were regional or superior courts. Crude practices such as pricking witches to see whether the Devil had desensitized them to pain; searching for the “devil’s mark,” an oddly-shaped mole or wart; or “swimming” (throwing the accused into a pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her) occurred on the local level. Where central authority—i.e., bishops, kings, or the Inquisition—was strong, convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch hunts to obtain money or power.
The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in Western history when capital punishment and torture were most widespread. Judicial torture, happily in abeyance since the end of the Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. The latter was the greatest evil of the system, for a victim might be forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming others, creating a long chain of accusations. Witch trials were equally common in ecclesiastical and secular courts before 1550, and then, as the power of the state increased, they took place more often in secular ones.
Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that resulted from the strictness of its rules. It investigated whether the charges resulted from personal animosity toward the accused; it obtained physicians’ statements; it did not allow the naming of accomplices either with or without torture; it required the review of every sentence; and it provided for whipping, banishment, or even house arrest instead of death for first offenders. Like the Inquisition, the Parliament of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely restrained the witch hunts. After an outbreak of hunts in France in 1587–88, increasingly skeptical judges began a series of restraining reforms marked by the requirement of “obligatory appeal” to the Parliament in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive and dangerous.
The decline of witch hunts, like their origins, was gradual. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. The legal use of torture declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat from religious intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s to 1640s). The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th century of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal worldview encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed skepticism; increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication set the stage for social acceptance of this changing outlook.
Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch hunts are as difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The theory best supported by the evidence is that the increasing power of the centralized courts such as the Inquisition and the Parliament acted to begin a process of “decriminalization” of witchcraft. These courts reduced the number of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the notion of witchcraft in France and other countries.
Explanations of the witch hunts continue to vary, but recent research has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible value. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. Moreover, the evidence does not indicate a close correlation between socioeconomic tension and witchcraft, though agrarian crises seem to have had some effect.
One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. No satisfactory explanation for the preponderance of women among the accused has appeared. Although the proportions varied according to region and time, on the whole about three-fourths of convicted witches were female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. The malevolent sorcery more often associated with men, such as harming crops and livestock, was rarer than that ascribed to women. Young women were sometimes accused of infanticide, but midwives and nurses were not particularly at risk. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced. Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus malefic arum. Resentment and fear of the power of the “hag,” a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. Folklore and accounts of trials indicate that a woman who was not protected by a male family member might have been the most likely candidate for an accusation, but the evidence is inconclusive. Children were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft.
In the long run it may be better simply to describe the witch hunts than to try to explain them, since the explanations are so diverse and complicated. Yet one general explanation is valid: the unique character of the witch hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries.