This post is brought to you by my current non-fiction read, Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial The Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700, which I've been nibbling through all year, with some assistance from Witchcraft by Charles Williams. Without more ado: Here are some things you might not have known about the history of witches and witch trials...
1. Witch hunts and executions were NOT a medieval phenomenon
Throughout the European Middle Ages, official church policy actually strongly discouraged witch trials and accusations of witchcraft! The rationale for this was simple commonsense: discourage belief in witchcraft, and fewer people will want to practice it. You can see this attitude, for instance, in the twelfth century chronicler Ernoul's account of a crusader army lynching a presumed witch on their way to the disastrous battle of Hattin: "I must tell you about an incident involving the men of the host, even though it seems foolish and the Holy Church has forbidden people to believe it." This commonsense attitude only began to change with the publication in 1486 of a controversial new book, the Malleus Maleficiarum or Hammer of Witches, which took the whole idea of witchcraft way too seriously and touched off a spate of witch trials throughout the 1500s and 1600s - not the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance.Â
Yet, in the popular imagination, witch hunts are firmly associated with the Middle Ages. Not because it's true, but because everyone thinks of the Renaissance as a time of enlightenment and progress, while everyone thinks the Middle Ages were a time of superstition and brutality. So, obviously, the witch trials couldn't have happened when they actually happened - they had to have been medieval, right?
2. Witch hunts were NOT a patriarchal tool of oppression against women.
"We are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn" is a feminist T-shirt slogan that reimagines the witch hunts as a way for patriarchal society to repress strong women, but the truth is a lot more nuanced. Let me acknowledge upfront that the Renaissance saw a lot of vile invective poured out against women - case in point, John Knox's 1558 diatribe The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, or the dozens of equally poisonous works cited by Arcangela Tarabotti in her 1654 masterpiece, Paternal Tyranny. It's also true that across southern and western Europe, many more women were executed as witches than men, and most of these women were older widows. This, however, arguably happened not because this demographic was seen as a threat, but because in a patriarchal, misogynistic society, women who had no husband or father to look out for them were uniquely vulnerable to malicious accusations...a huge volume of which were also made against men, many of whom - for example the French nobleman and serial killer Gilles de Rais - were executed. In fact, on the borders of the continent - Scandinavia, the Balkans, and Russia - longstanding traditions of male shamanism meant that in these regions, more men were executed for witchcraft, than women!Â
3. Not all the people prosecuted as witches WERE in fact innocent.
The helpful herbwoman accused of witchcraft is a common trope, but the truth is that among the thousands of people tortured into false confessions, there were definitely plenty of people who, like Gilles de Rais actually had acted with full malice aforethought. I'll also mention that certain specific crimes were considered both legally and culturally to be a form of witchcraft, and one of those specific crimes was poisoning. In fact, on three separate occasions during the reigns of Henry VI and James I in England, and Louis XIV in France, authorities uncovered conspiracies in which high-ranking nobles hired poisoner/witches to attack their enemies and promote their own political interests. Similarly, in central Europe there was a bizarre form of witchcraft known as "greasing", which involved smearing animals or buildings with specially formulated ointments which the practitioners believed would spread the dreaded Black Death - the plague which wiped out between 30-50% of the entire population during the fourteenth century and recurred periodically thereafter. Although "greasing", like many other forms of witchcraft, didn't actually work, it was still a pretty disturbing expression of homicidal intent.
4. Some authorities DID write and speak against the witch trials
Some Renaissance writers and authorities did, in fact, take after their more level-headed medieval forbears. Johann Weyer was a Dutch physician and demonologist who, although he believed in the existence of demons, maintained that they could only create illusions. If they could only create illusions, then witchcraft was not actually effective, and if witchcraft didn't actually work, then anyone who claimed to practice it was simply mentally disturbed. One of Weyer's books, published in the mid-1500s, convinced the German town of Bremen to put a stop to witchcraft trials altogether. In Navarre, the Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias reviewed thousands of witchcraft trials that had taken place from 1609-1610 and bluntly concluded, "I have not found the slightest evidence from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has actually occurred." The Spanish Inquisition, in fact, was generally a world leader in stopping the witchcraft trials. Another Dutch minister, Balthazar Bekker, wrote an even more influential book in 1695, The World Bewitched, which drew on Cartesian thought to argue that the devil wasn't real and neither was witchcraft. His views on demons got him in hot water with the church authorities, but his book proved influential nevertheless, influencing authorities across Germany - historically the epicentre of the witch trials - to put a stop to the practice altogether.
5. The Salem witch trials, bad as they were, helped make witch trials impossible for the future
In America, the Salem witch trials of 1692-3 resulted in the deaths or executions of 25 people. While this event has justly become a cautionary tale about mass hysteria, injustice, and religious extremism, it was orders of magnitude less lethal than the similar witch hunts that happened in Europe a century earlier, of which the Salem trials were a colonial offshoot. What made the Salem trials unique in the history of witch trials was the rapidity with which the New England community repented of them. In 1696-7, just four years after the trials, the authorities who had prosecuted them, including the jurors who had returned the guilty verdicts, officially took the blame and asked forgiveness for "the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his Instruments". This must have been pretty revolutionary, to recognise that Satan had indeed been at work in the community...not among the accused "witches", but among their accusers. A public fast of penitence was proclaimed and by 1711 the guilty verdicts had been officially overturned and financial compensation issued to the families of the deceased. Between Bekker's Enlightenment arguments, and the public repentance of the Salem community, the age of witch trials was ended across most of Europe.
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