Witch Hunts
Overview
The 1500-1600s saw a surge in witch hunts across Western Europe. Reasons for the upswing vary but most scholars point to the clash of cultures between the Catholic Church, which dominated daily life in Western Europe, and the rebirth of intellectualism and individualism of the Renaissance.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze why witch-hunts began in Europe in the 16th century.
- Evaluate the impact of witch hunts on European society in the 16th century.
- Evalute the similarities and differences between witch trials in Western Europe and Russia.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Johannes Kepler: German mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution
Malleus Maleficarum: 1487 book written by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer about how to idenify and try witches
Witch Hunts in Context
Examine the image above, the burning question should be, what drove this society to do these acts to individuals in the 16th to 18th centuries? It would have been very difficult to watch a person slowly burn alive, all the while a crowd was onlooking and in some cases cheering. This was a member of the community, someone that had a standing and was known by people. This scene would have been very difficult to both watch and participate in. So the question is, what drove people in the 16th to 18th centuries to burn members of their communities at the stake? Individual cases might vary, but there was a deeper social and political change that was happening during this time period.
Often in modern history, it becomes a short hand to refer to witches as short hand for a society that was suspicious of itself and willing to hurt or endanger the members of its community. The 16th century becomes one of the clearest examples of the divisions within a society that was willing to hurt themselves, but this isn’t the only example. In the 20th century, deep political divisions in the United States created McCarthyism that has been often cited as a witch hunt as well. Other sociologists and historians reference the early 21st century’s fear of Islam in the United States as another case of witch hunts. These cases of witch hunts and trials demonstrate that there is a deep fear of something within a society and that people are attempting to make sense of their world while having an extreme amount of anxiety and fear of an imagined other. The attempt to make sense of this changing world is important because oftentimes individuals are attempting to relieve their own pressure and make sense, but because of the complications of their situation, the only solution they arrive at is to hurt an innocent victim in the process.
This is very important to note about the 16th century, because while witchcraft might have been in use, there was a deep-seated fear and anxiety of a changing world. It is important to put together the fundamental changes that the 16th century brought forward and how that would have impacted the European mindset and society. Take for example the rise of Protestantism. Previously in European history, there were clear rules about why the king of a country was the king, simply because God told the Pope that an individual should be king. This was straightforward and easy to understand. Yet, Protestantism changed this model. With Luther asking the question, why is the Pope in charge, should there even be a Pope? That question had a secular consequence. Now individuals had a very difficult question to ask, why was their king? If you were a Protestant, do you follow a Catholic king? Why? If you are a Catholic, do you follow a Protestant governor? This type of questioning meant that individuals had a very deep problem of trusting their neighbors or their communities. Before most communities of Europe were unified under the banner of Catholicism. With the introduction of Protestantism, how can you trust your neighbor if they are of a different religion than you? The wars and distrust of Catholics and Protestants would eventually come to a boil in the Thirty Years War and other religious conflicts of the 17th century. Yet, it is here that it is important to put the idea of witchcraft. How can you trust your neighbor if they are of a different religion? How can you explain the world now, if things are different inside of your community if something goes wrong?
On a local level, this becomes more in focus of the individual. If you were a farmer, and your crops failed, but your neighbor’s crops didn’t. Why? Of course there are complex scientific reasons for this, but people of the 16th century were pre-scientific revolution and did not have the ideas to support those points. Individuals would look at one another and understand that there was a reason, but they did not have the scientific underpinning to explain, instead there was distrust and feelings of negativity towards their neighbors. As with every community, there is complex social engagements of reputation and standing inside the community. This would have also had a part to play with why individuals would have made charges against one another. Individuals seeking opportunities would accuse others who had lands that would then be up for sale for very cheap prices.
The result of the witch trials of the 15th to 18th centuries casts a long legacy that should be examined and mined, instead of a moment in time that has no relationship to society, but instead, as a window into what happens when a society is at a fracturing point. These moments have happened in the past and demonstrate key moments of social breakdowns and potentially the ability to avoid those in the future.
The witch trials in the early modern period were a series of witch hunts between the 15th and 18th centuries when across early modern Europe, and to some extent in the European colonies in North America, there was a widespread hysteria that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as an organized threat to Christendom. Those accused of witchcraft were portrayed as being worshippers of the Devil, who engaged in sorcery at meetings known as Witches’ Sabbaths. Many people were subsequently accused of being witches and were put on trial for the crime, with varying punishments being applicable in different regions and at different times.
In early modern European tradition, witches were stereotypically, though not exclusively, women. European pagan belief in witchcraft was associated with the goddess Diana and dismissed as “diabolical fantasies” by medieval Christian authors.
Background to the Witch Trials
During the medieval period, there was widespread belief in magic across Christian Europe. The medieval Roman Catholic Church, which then dominated a large swath of Western Europe, divided magic into two forms—natural magic, which was acceptable because it was viewed as merely taking note of the powers in nature that were created by God, and demonic magic, which was frowned upon and associated with demonology.
It was also during the medieval period that the concept of Satan, the Biblical Devil, began to develop into a more threatening form. Around the year 1000, when there were increasing fears that the end of the world would soon come in Christendom, the idea of the Devil had become prominent.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the concept of the witch in Christendom underwent a relatively radical change. No longer were witches viewed as sorcerers who had been deceived by the Devil into practicing magic that went against the powers of God. Instead they became all-out malevolent Devil-worshippers, who had made pacts with him in which they had to renounce Christianity and devote themselves to Satanism. As a part of this, it was believed that they gained new, supernatural powers that enabled them to work magic, which they would use against Christians.
Why? Why did Western Europe suddenly experience a radical shift in how it discussed and evaluated witches? Why, in short, did they occupy so much attention in Western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Historians frequently cite a major turning point in Western Europe: the arrival and spread of the European Renaissance. While the Renaissance did not outright denounce or diminish the teachings of the Catholic Church, it did promote questioning, new lines of thinking, and a break with roughly one thousand years of feudalism--a social structure in which the power and influence of the church over most of Western Europe was certain. By the 1500s, the Renaissance had spread so far that the Catholic Church feared its grip on Western Europe was sliding. Thus, they supported, if not outright initiated, public hunts for witches and sorcerers--people who were often social outcasts, misfits, irreligious, or pagan.
This quest to identify and remove witches received a public boost in support in the late 1400s when German authors Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer released their book, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches). The book openly stated three cardinal ideas: 1): witches exist; 2): they can be identified by certain behaviors; and 3): even a common man can identify them. It became enormously popular overnight. Part of the popularity arose from its association with the Catholic Church itself. Sprenger and Kramer were both sanctioned inquisitors of the Catholic Church--men who were "experts" in identifying and trying witches. Proof of this status was in the front of their book where a papal bull, signed by Pope Innocent VIII, appeared. Both authors used the papal bull as evidence of the Pope's support of their book, probably inaccurately. Nevertheless, the book helped set in motion a horrible witch-hunt among friends and neighbors.
While the witch trials only really began in the 15th century, with the start of the early modern period, many of their causes had been developing during the previous centuries, with the persecution of heresy by the medieval Inquisition during the late 12th and the 13th centuries, and during the late medieval period, during which the idea of witchcraft or sorcery gradually changed and adapted. An important turning point was the Black Death of 1348–1350, which killed a large percentage of the European population, and which many Christians believed had been caused by evil forces.
Beginnings of the Witch Trials
While the idea of witchcraft began to mingle with the persecution of heretics even in the 14th century, the beginning of the witch hunts as a phenomenon in its own right became apparent during the first half of the 15th century in southeastern France and western Switzerland, in communities of the Western Alps.
While early trials fall still within the late medieval period, the peak of the witch hunt was during the period of the European wars of religion, between about 1580 and 1630. Over the entire duration of the phenomenon of some three centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 100,000 people were executed.
The Trials of 1580 – 1630
The height of the European witch trials was between 1560 and 1630, with the large hunts first beginning in 1609. The Witch Trials of Trier in Germany was perhaps the biggest witch trial in European history. The persecutions started in the diocese of Trier in 1581 and reached the city itself in 1587, where they were to lead to the deaths of about 368 people, and as such it was perhaps the biggest mass execution in Europe during peacetime.
In Denmark, the burning of witches increased following the reformation of 1536. Christian IV of Denmark, in particular, encouraged this practice, and hundreds of people were convicted of witchcraft and burned. In England, the Witchcraft Act of 1542 regulated the penalties for witchcraft. In Scotland, over seventy people were accused of witchcraft on account of bad weather when James VI of Scotland, who shared the Danish king’s interest in witch trials, sailed to Denmark in 1590 to meet his betrothed, Anne of Denmark.
The sentence for an individual found guilty of witchcraft or sorcery during this time, and in previous centuries, typically included either burning at the stake or being tested with the “ordeal of cold water." Accused persons who drowned were considered innocent, and ecclesiastical authorities would proclaim them “brought back,” but those who floated were considered guilty of practicing witchcraft, and burned at the stake or executed in an unholy fashion.
Decline of the Trials
While the witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued to a greater extent on the fringes of Europe and in the American colonies. The clergy and intellectuals began to speak out against the trials from the late 16th century. Johannes Kepler in 1615 could only by the weight of his prestige keep his mother from being burned as a witch. The 1692 Salem witch trials were a brief outburst of witch hysteria in the New World at a time when the practice was already waning in Europe.
Witch Trials and Women
An estimated 75% to 85% of those accused in the early modern witch trials were women, and there is certainly evidence of misogyny on the part of those persecuting witches, evident from quotes such as “[It is] not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, [witches], should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex” (Nicholas Rémy, c. 1595) or “The Devil uses them so, because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations.” In early modern Europe, it was widely believed that women were less intelligent than men and more susceptible to sin.
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. Many modern scholars argue that the witch hunts cannot be explained simplistically as an expression of male misogyny, as indeed women were frequently accused by other women, to the point that witch hunts, at least at the local level of villages, have been described as having been driven primarily by “women’s quarrels.”
Barstow (1994) claimed that a combination of factors, including the greater value placed on men as workers in the increasingly wage-oriented economy, and a greater fear of women as inherently evil, loaded the scales against women, even when the charges against them were identical to those against men. Thurston (2001) saw this as a part of the general misogyny of the late medieval and early modern periods, which had increased during what he described as “the persecuting culture” from what it had been in the early medieval period. 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.
Witch Trials in Russia
Witch trials in Russia took a very different course from those held in Western Europe. The Catholic Church in Western Europe promoted the idea that witches and sorcerers had made a direct pact with the Devil; and encouraged peasantry to be on their guard, and on the watch for witches and sorcerers. They should be eliminated in the eyes of the church.
In contrast, the Russian Orthodox Church held no such belief, and made no encouragement to the peasantry to spy and accuse their neighbors. Instead, the church believed sorcery and witchcraft to be a form of paganism. Paganism, which promoted the belief in many gods, stood in direct opposition to Christianity. To ensure that Orthodoxy was a core feature of a unified Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church asked Tsar Ivan IV to outlaw witchcraft in all forms in the mid-1500s.
Under Tsar Ivan IV, witchcraft and sorcery were outlawed. However, the tsar stopped short of instituting a death penalty for witchcraft. He instead asserted that individuals accused of witchcraft be tried before a secular court—a surprising move for Ivan IV who is remembered better by his nickname, “Ivan the Terrible.”
A far more surprising turn-of-events occurred in Russia under the “gentle” Romanov tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich, in the mid-1600s. Under social and religious pressure, the tsar instituted a death penalty for anyone found guilty of practicing sorcery.
From the mid-1600s to the turn of the eighteenth century, Russia tried roughly one hundred people for witchcraft. Again, events in Russia stand in stark, surprising contrast to those in Western Europe. Most of the accused in Russia were men. Perhaps because of the status of men in Russian society and their association as healers. Of the accused, only a handful were found guilty and executed. Although part of the Russian record of their witch trials during this era is incomplete due to a fire, historians speculate that less than twenty people were executed during the Russian witch trials—a far different story than what occurred in Western Europe where witch hangings and burnings were celebrated as public spectacle. By the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had reached Russia and witch trials disappeared entirely.
Attributions
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Agnes_Sampson_and_witches_with_devil.jpg
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