The Persecution Of Witches In The 1500's

Witch hunts blazed across Europe over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries not just killing innumerable innocent people, but stripping women of much of the power they had once held, and changing society's perceptions of women all together. The economic hardships, religious rivalries, and troubled politics of the time made accusing your neighbors of witchcraft convenient. Where there was war and poverty, or merely bad luck, peasants would assume witchcraft and rush to blame an old, defenseless woman in trials which involved unbelievable cruelty and horrible sadism. As religion and the Catholic Church began to complement and perpetuate the increasing hysteria, European society as a whole could do nothing but

From the 1400’s to the 1800’s, around forty thousand individuals were executed for witchcraft, most of which occurred throughout central Europe. Constant religious and political upheaval caused elites to attempt to harness control over populations, which led to multiple laws being passed in regards to witchcraft. Torture was allowed and women and children were called to testify in the court room. Individuals who were seen to be outcasts on the outer edge of society were immediately targeted and easily suspected of sorcery. The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663 gives its readers an inside perspective of the many different attitudes that existed towards witchcraft at the time. Because 17th century Brunswick townspeople were driven by deep Christian beliefs, they greatly feared all forms of magic, thinking them to come from the devil. Yet despite these fears, they did not completely reject witchcraft as they often sought out purported “witches” for magical solutions.

The Trial of Tempel Anneke reveals a disgusting trend of society’s attitude towards witchcraft in early modern Europe. It exhibits a sick double standard that displays a society that offers no true justice and demonstrates outright inequity. It is also a depressing display of extreme negligence and hypocrisy. Suspected witches were not able to secure a fair trial due to their social disposition or lack thereof. Harnessing the power of witchcraft in the eyes of society was a clear indication of a pact made with the Devil and those who did so represented power and dark knowledge. Their blind way of thinking becomes so massively ingrained in the ideology of society that eventually paved the way for the emergence of witchcraft’s clear role as the universal scapegoat. The trial and recordings illustrate an early modern European ignorance and flawed methodology.

Were the witch-hunts in pre-modern Europe misogynistic? Anne Llewellyn Barstow seems to think so in her article, “On Studying Witchcraft as Women’s History: A Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions”. On the contrary, Robin Briggs disagrees that witch-hunts were not solely based on hatred for women as stated in his article, “Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community”. The witch craze that once rapidly swept through Europe may have been because of misconstrued circumstances. The evaluation of European witch-hunts serves as an opportunity to delve deeper into the issue of misogyny.

For more than two hundred years, individuals were persecuted as witches throughout the continent of Europe, even though the witch hunt was concentrated on Southwestern Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Poland, and parts of France. In a collective frenzy. witches were sought, identified, arrested, mostly tortured, and tried for a variety of reasons. The total number of witches tried exceeded 100,000 people. This essay is supposed to identify three major reasons for the witch craze in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe.

The Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692 of the Salem Witchcraft, is familiar to scholars, readers, and students. The mass witch-hunt of 1692 is where some communities experienced a short-term outbreak of accusations that involved less than a handful of citizens. Many of the residents that had been accused were most likely related to each other. Most of the witch victims fit under the common characteristics of the seventeenth-century beliefs about witches, making it very stereotypical. Richard Latner’s main focus of this article is to closely study the spread of allegations made in 1692 to help us get a better understanding on the witch-hunt. It was also to learn about the reasons why it had an outbreak, which quickly came to an end.

Witch hunts are infamous throughout in history. A barrage of witch hunts happened around the time of the colonization of the New World. Most particularly, the Salem Witch Trials which showed how much people were influenced. The majorities of the accused were women because of being unmarried, childless, widowed, and had reputations in their communities for assertiveness and independence. The Salem witch trials brought forth the idea of the “social strain theory”: which is defined as “The Salem witchcraft scare may have reflected social tension that found their outlet through an attack on people perceived as outsiders” (Faragher 51). It was mass hysteria that made this Witch Hunt in their community. Surprisingly, witch hunts still happen today.

The large-scale witch-hunts that occurred from 1638 to 1651 gathered momentum via major happenings in the political, societal, and religious domains developing at the time. Individuals who had either political, religious or economic power in society, also known as elites, together had absolute control over the pursuit and prosecution of individuals who partook in witchcraft. The clergy played a crucial role in the witchcraft prosecutions and were slower than the state and localities to desert their beliefs in the reality of witches as the prosecution of witchcraft was, in their eyes, an effective tool to eradicate social deviance. Though local authorities and the Parliament did contribute to the witch-hunts significantly, without the kirk of Scotland declaring and encouraging this sanction on witchcraft, both other parties would not have taken the actions they ultimately did. This essay will provide a brief description of events that took place from 1638 to 1651 and then utilize evidence from a multitude of sources to argue that the religious elites were the most influential of these forces during the witchcraft prosecutions that occurred in the 1640s.

Witchcraft accusations in the sixteenth and seventeenth century saw a dramatic increase in the sheer amount of accused witches that were tried and executed. “Between about 1450 and 1750 maybe 40,000 of Europe’s inhabitants, most of them women, were executed, many of them by burning at the stake, as witches.” (Sharpe 65) The vulnerability of society to so blindly accuse others of witchcraft stemmed from not knowing about certain types of illnesses or why horrible things sometimes occurred. Some accusations were brought about for the social gain by the ‘bewitching’ of one’s child, such as in the case of Anne Gunter. Using the case of Anne Gunter, we can identify some of the reasons that the English people were accused of witchcraft.

Witch hunting was the persecution and possible execution of individuals considered to be ‘witches’ loyal to the devil. It was an all too common occurrence from 1603-1712 all over Europe. However in order to understand why this happened the context must be taken into account. It was a time of change, the Renaissance - the rebirth of culture, ideas and attitudes to living. The Reformation had also only been implemented in England in the last 80 years back from 1603, when it had previously been catholic for centuries. The English civil war from 1642 to 1651 is argued to have played a part in the intensification of the witch hunts in England due to the peak in executions whilst it was on going. Some historians have taken the view that in time of crisis certain groups can be victimised like in wars, famine, disease outbreaks and changes in society structure.

The Original Witch-Hunt     When the modern American thinks of witches or wizards, his or her mind typically conjures up images of old, green, warted individuals with pointed hats and flying brooms. This, however, was not true in the case of New England during the 17th century. In fact, the people accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, during this time were mostly young individuals with natural skin tones, fashionable hats of their time, and brooms simply for cleaning purposes.  Instead of basing accusations on these key physical characteristics, the people of Salem Village based them on various social constructs and religious standards. Furthermore, the causes of the all the occurrences in the village have not been wholly determined.

Even though The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 was one of the most well-known witchcraft trials over the world, the idea of witchcraft stretches over a long period of time and spreads throughout the world. One of the earliest known witch hunts according to (witchcraftandwitches.com) were in the mid 15th century, where Pope Innocent VII claimed that Satanists in Germany were meeting with demons, casting spells that destroyed crops and aborting infants, and he complained that the clergy were not taking the “threat” of witchcraft seriously enough. So Pope Innocent VII asked two inquisitors of a Catholic Church to publish a full report on

The author’s purpose in writing this article was to inform the reader of the rise and decline of witch prosecutions, along with their lasting effects on the society. The author’s central argument is that historians do not usually focus on

In the mid-seventeenth century there was a great increase in the number of witchcraft accusations, more precisely in a little country located in southern Europe called Malta. At this time in Europe there was a system of tribunals, a court of justice, created by the Catholic Church called the Roman Inquisition (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). According to Caramel Cassar, the purpose of these tribunals at first was to keep the Catholic faith alive and to eliminate the spread of the Protestant faith (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). Unfortunately at the start of the seventeenth century the Catholic Church had a bigger

The witch-hunt that blazed a trail across Europe (and indeed the world) over the 15th to 18th centuries stripped women of much of the power they had historically held. Not 100% of all accused Witches were female but 75% to 90% of accused witches in Europe were in fact women (Levack, 1987, p.124).