Witch trials in the early modern period

Until 1330 the trials were linked to prominent figures in the church or politics, as victims or as accused suspects, and more than half took place in France, where it was the usual way of explaining royal deaths in the direct Capetian line.

The sentence refers to ... multas et diversas daemonum conjurationes et invocationes ... and it frequently uses the same Latin synonym as a word for witchcraft, sortilegia—found on the title page of Nicolas Rémy's work from 1595, where it is claimed that 900 persons were executed for sortilegii crimen.

Academics continued to rely on Lamothe-Langon as a source until Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer showed independently in the 1970s that the alleged records in Histoire de l'inquisition were highly dubious and possible forgeries.

[31][32][33] Jacquier describes a number of trials he personally witnessed, including one of a man named Guillaume Edelin, against whom the main charge seems to have been that he had preached a sermon in support of the Canon Episcopi claiming that witchcraft was merely an illusion.

[citation needed] The most important and influential book which promoted the new heterodox view was the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487 by clergyman and German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, accompanied by Jacobus Sprenger.

[16] It is unknown if a degree of alarm at the extreme superstition and witch-phobia expressed by Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum may have been one of the numerous factors that helped prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation.

Such accusations targeted individuals suspected of curses, causing ailments or crop failures, reflecting deep-seated anxieties about hidden malevolent forces within rural communities.

Returning to Scotland, the king heard of trials that were occurring in North Berwick, and ordered the suspects to be brought to him—he subsequently believed that a nobleman, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, was a witch, and after the latter fled in fear of his life he was outlawed as a traitor.

[58] In the 1830s, a prosecution for witchcraft was commenced against a man in Fentress County, Tennessee, either named Joseph or William Stout, based upon his alleged influence over the health of a young woman.

[76] The scholarly consensus on the total number of executions for witchcraft ranges from 40,000 to 60,000[2][3] (not including unofficial lynchings of accused witches, which went unrecorded but are nevertheless believed to have been somewhat rare in the Early Modern period).

[citation needed] Notably, a figure of nine million victims was given by Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1784 in an argument criticizing Voltaire's estimate of "several hundred thousand" as too low.

[87][88] It is also apparent from an episode of English history, that during the civil war in the early 1640s, witch-hunters emerged, the most notorious of whom was Matthew Hopkins from East Anglia and proclaimed himself the "Witchfinder General".

[92] The number of people tried for witchcraft between the years of 1500–1700 (by region) include: Holy Roman Empire: 50,000 Poland: 15,000 Switzerland: 9,000 French Speaking Europe: 10,000 Spanish and Italian peninsulas: 10,000 Scandinavia: 4,000.

[97] Historians such as Wolfgang Behringer, Emily Oster, and Hartmut Lehmann argue that these cooling temperatures brought about crop failure, war, and disease, and that witches were subsequently blamed for this turmoil.

[95] Problematically for these theories, it has been highlighted that, in that region, the witch hunts declined during the 1630s, at a time when the communities living there were facing increased disaster as a result of plague, famine, economic collapse, and the Thirty Years' War.

[citation needed] The English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper advocated the idea that the witch trials emerged as part of the conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Europe.

[108] Furthermore, the witch trials regularly occurred in regions with little or no inter-denominational strife, and which were largely religiously homogeneous, such as Essex, Lowland Scotland, Geneva, Venice, and the Spanish Basque Country.

[112] It has been argued that a translation choice in the King James Bible justified "horrific human rights violations and fuel[ed] the epidemic of witchcraft accusations and persecution across the globe".

In 1893, she published the book Woman, Church and State, which was criticized as "written in a tearing hurry and in time snatched from a political activism which left no space for original research".

[118] Likely influenced by the works of Jules Michelet about the witch-cult, she claimed that the witches persecuted in the Early Modern period were pagan priestesses adhering to an ancient religion venerating a Great Goddess.

[119] In 1973, two American second-wave feminists, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, published an extended pamphlet in which they put forward the idea that the women persecuted had been the traditional healers and midwives of the community, who were being deliberately eliminated by the male medical establishment.

[124] She also condemned it for factual inaccuracy by highlighting that radical feminists adhering to it ignore the historicity of their claims, instead promoting it because it is perceived as authorising the continued struggle against patriarchal society.

[citation needed] Nevertheless, it has been argued that the supposedly misogynistic agenda of works on witchcraft has been greatly exaggerated, based on the selective repetition of a few relevant passages of the Malleus maleficarum.

[138] Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, in a 1982 publication, speculated that witch-hunts targeted women skilled in midwifery specifically in an attempt to extinguish knowledge about birth control and "repopulate Europe" after the population catastrophe of the Black Death; this view has been rejected by mainstream historians.

[139] The historian of medicine David Harley criticised the notion of the midwife-witch as a prevalent type of victim of witch hunts and commented on Heinsohn and Steiger as belonging to a set of polemicists who misportrayed the history of midwifery.

[140] Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common belief among the educated sectors of the European populace was that there had never been any genuine cult of witches and all of those people who were persecuted and executed as such were innocent of the crime of witchcraft.

[citation needed] Murray claimed that this faith was devoted to a pagan Horned God and involved the celebration of four Witches' Sabbaths each year: Halloween, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh.

[144] However, the majority of scholarly reviews of Murray's work produced at the time were largely critical,[145] and her books never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials.

[150] In the early 20th century, a number of individuals and groups emerged in Europe, primarily Britain, and subsequently the United States as well, claiming to be the surviving remnants of the pagan witch-cult described in the works of Margaret Murray.

The first of these actually appeared in the last few years of the 19th century, being a manuscript that American folklorist Charles Leland claimed he had been given by a woman who was a member of a group of witches worshipping the god Lucifer and goddess Diana in Tuscany, Italy.