early modern witch trials

early modern witch trials, a series of persecutions for alleged witchcraft conducted in Europe and the Americas from the 15th to the 18th century. This period covers the end of the late Middle Ages and the subsequent early modern period. During the era of the trials, witchcraft was increasingly regarded not only as the malevolent use of supernatural or occult power but also as an anti-Christian form of Satanism involving veneration of the Devil. Historians have estimated that during this time nearly 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft, of whom between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, the majority of them women. This period of persecution has been given such labels as the “Great Witch Hunt” and the “Witch Craze.”

Origins

A belief in witches, in the sense of humans who can harm others through occult or supernatural means, is found throughout the world. In some societies, the threat of witchcraft has been considered a fairly minor concern, one that can be countered by simple rituals and procedures such as the wearing of amulets. In other instances, however, belief in witchcraft has led to witch trials, in which a community attempts to identify harmful witches so that it may punish them for their alleged misdeeds. Sporadic persecutions of individuals accused of cursing others can be found throughout medieval Europe, but these witch trials did not evolve into major hunts nor integrate claims of nocturnal Devil worship, developments that would only emerge in the 15th century, as the Middle Ages came to a close.

Many of the elements that would be integrated into the early modern stereotype of the witch nevertheless existed in earlier periods of European history. Conspiracy theories about secretive groups of malefactors who met at night to engage in nudity, cannibalism, and incest had existed since the Roman period, and in the early centuries of the Common Era, these theories had been directed at the secretive Christian movement. In the Middle Ages various Christian writers added Satanism—the worship of the Devil—to their fears of dangerous nocturnal groups. These conspiracy theories were then projected onto religious minorities, including both Jews and those Christian sects, such as the Waldenses, that the dominant Roman Catholic Church deemed heretical. Such fears helped to fuel and legitimize the persecution of these groups.

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Further influences on early modern witch stereotypes came from European folklore. Various medieval sources attest to a broad popular belief that the spirits of certain individuals might leave their sleeping bodies at night to meet with supernatural entities—sometimes flying to their spectral rendezvous. An additional, more literate influence on these early modern stereotypes would be ceremonial magic, the use of rituals to command spirits (often demons) to do a magician’s bidding. Late medieval clergy were often highly concerned about this practice, which they labeled necromancy, and came to believe that it relied on a pact made with demonic entities.

In the early 15th century these medieval tropes began to coalesce into the stereotype of the Satanic witch. Such witches were imagined not only as malevolent individuals who cursed others but also as having gained this ability through pacts made with demons or the Devil. They were further thought to travel, sometimes by flight, to the witches’ sabbath, a nocturnal gathering where they venerated Satan or other demons and engaged in infanticide, cannibalism, and sexual orgies. Historians have demonstrated that this synthesis occurred principally in a series of trials that took place in the western Alps during the 1420s and ’30s, and it was from this region that the new notions of Satanic witchcraft would be exported across European Christendom and ultimately to the American colonies, lending fuel to the proliferation of witch trials.

Two key factors helped promote the new conspiracy theory to an international audience. The first was the Council of Basel (1431–49), which brought many ecclesiastical figures to the Alpine region, exposing them to these developing ideas. The second was the appearance of demonological literature, which could be disseminated widely among literate Europeans thanks to the 15th-century invention of the printing press. These demonological works, such as Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (“The Anthill,” completed 1438) and Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches,” c. 1486), promoted fears of a Satanic conspiracy and were often used as guides by those investigating accusations of witchcraft.

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Many of these demonological texts also outlined methods for rooting out Devil-worshipping witches. One of the most notable methods, later called “swimming,” entailed casting an accused person into water. If the suspect sank, it was taken as evidence of their innocence, and they would be rescued. If they floated, it was assumed that the sanctified water had rejected them and thus indicated that they were a witch. Demonological literature of the 16th century widely debated the efficacy of this practice, demonstrating that there were many differences of opinion among those writing on the subject. Some writers such as Dutch physician Johann Weyer and English author Reginald Scot expressed strong criticism of the trials, even if they did not reject the existence of witchcraft itself.

Changes in European legal systems during this period also contributed to the rise of early modern witch trials. Many countries had introduced the inquisitorial procedure, whereby officers of the court were tasked with investigating purported crimes. To demonstrate guilt in cases of serious offenses, this procedure usually required either two witness statements or a confession, and this led to the implementation of torture as a means of extracting confessions. Torture, or at least the threat of it, had a major impact on the proceedings of the witch trials, since it not only encouraged accused people to admit to things they were innocent of but also made it more likely that they would name others as accomplices. This latter factor made it easier for an accusation against a single person to swiftly spawn a larger local witch hunt.

Social impact

Historians estimate that during the early modern period nearly 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchery, of whom 40,000–60,000 were executed. Most were strangled and then had their bodies burned at the stake, although in England and the English colonies the favored method of execution was hanging. Such prosecutions and executions were not evenly distributed geographically—some areas were heavily affected and others barely touched. The largest witch hunts took place in an area of west-central Europe encompassing Switzerland, several French principalities, and German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Certain other parts of Europe, such as Ireland, saw almost no witch-hunting at all. Even neighboring regions could display major differences: in terms of the conviction rate, Scotland’s witch trials were considerably more severe than those in England, for instance.

Women bore the brunt of the witch trials, making up more than three-quarters of all the accused across Europe. Contributing to this tendency were engrained cultural stereotypes, statements made in the demonological literature, and women’s greater involvement in tasks such as food preparation and midwifery—roles that left them vulnerable to accusations of hexing if someone nearby fell sick or died. At the same time, women were not disproportionately affected everywhere: in Finland men and women were accused in roughly similar numbers, whereas in Iceland, Estonia, and Russia men were more commonly accused of and executed for witchcraft. Age could also be a pertinent factor in accusations, with older people also comprising a disproportionately high percentage of the accused.

The concerns animating the early modern witch trials could vary from one social class to another. For the political elite and the educated clergy, the social ills and disintegration of the period—in short, whatever seemed uncontrollable—were the fault of Satanic forces in the world. Through witch hunts, however, control of those forces seemed obtainable. A good example of this elite fear can be seen in the case of the Scottish king James VI—as James I of England, he would commission the King James Version of the Bible in 1611—who in 1597 published his own antiwitchcraft treatise, Daemonologie.

By contrast fears of a Satanic conspiracy do not appear to have been widely adopted among poorer sectors of society. For the lower classes, witchcraft as cursing—in Latin, maleficium—often constituted a much more pressing fear. Most witchcraft accusations in this period were initially driven not by theological or demonological concerns but by mundane problems arising from internal communal tensions or explanations of misfortune. Individuals looking for someone to blame when their family members fell ill or livestock perished turned to witchcraft accusations as a rationale or a means of revenge. Typically, it was only when literate investigators became involved, and began applying threats or torture to the accused, that stories of Satanism and witches’ sabbaths were forthcoming. Again, however, there was regional variation in how these Satanic elements were integrated into the investigations: in England, Denmark, Norway, and Russia, accounts of diabolist gatherings never became a common element of the trials.

Modern historians agree that witchcraft as an organized religion did not exist among early modern Europeans and that the vast majority of those accused of being witches were innocent. However, certain historians have considered the possibility that some of the accused might have genuinely attempted to curse their neighbors, particularly within a society in which hexes were generally deemed efficacious. In other cases the accused might have engaged in ritual or religious practices that accusers interpreted as witchery. The best-known example of this misidentification came from Friuli, in northeastern Italy, during the 16th and 17th centuries. Ecclesiastical investigators associated with the Inquisition brought to trial members of the benandanti, individuals who believed that their spirits ventured forth at night to defend the community’s crops from spiritual attack. However, the Inquisitors rejected the benandanti’s explanations of their nocturnal visions and insisted that they were actually Satanic witches venturing forth for diabolical gatherings. This instance reflects the way that many literate investigators across Europe reinterpreted popular beliefs through the conspiracy theories found in demonological literature.

Decline

The witch trials declined in frequency during the late 17th and the 18th centuries. As with the trials’ origins, their falloff stemmed from multiple factors. An important element was growing elite skepticism, not about the existence of witchcraft itself, but rather about whether witchcraft could be satisfactorily proven in a court of law. New rules for judicial procedure demanded higher standards of evidence, and there was increasing concern about the validity of torture. Acquittals in witchcraft cases increased, courts became more reluctant to initiate prosecutions, and higher judicial authorities repeatedly stepped in to end regional witch hunts they felt had gone too far. After the trials themselves died out, governments during the 18th and 19th centuries began to modify or repeal laws that criminalized witchcraft.

The end of legally sanctioned witch-hunting did not, however, erase all fear of witchery. Anxieties about curses continued to permeate many European and Euro-American communities into the 20th century, occasionally resulting in violence against the accused. Such beliefs were nevertheless pushed ever farther from the mainstream, in part because of growing societal disbelief in witchery as a whole, improved social security and health care, and the judicial punishment of those making or encouraging witchcraft accusations.

Legacies

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The 19th and early 20th centuries saw growing scholarly debate about the causes of the witch trials. These early scholarly perspectives can be divided into two camps. The first, sometimes called the rationalists, saw the trials as evidence of social delusions exploited by elites. The second camp consisted of the romanticists, who believed that in early modern Europe there really had been a witchcraft religion, either Satanic or pre-Christian in nature, that Christians targeted during the trials. The intensification of careful academic research from the 1960s onward largely dismissed both perspectives, the rationalist for being overly simplistic and the romanticist for lacking any basis in reality.

The mid-20th century saw new social and religious movements take an interest in early modern witch-hunting, interpreting the subject according to their own requirements. In Britain the romanticist belief in an early modern witchcraft religion inspired the formation of Wicca, a form of modern Paganism whose practitioners claimed to be continuing this ancient tradition. Other occultist religions, such as forms of modern Satanism, similarly drew upon the imagery of early modern witch belief from at least the 1960s onward. Subsequently, the 1970s saw American second-wave feminist writers such as Andrea Dworkin adopt the early modern witch trials as evidence for the patriarchal oppression of women. These feminist interpretations often framed the trials as a “gynocide” and promoted the greatly inflated estimate, borrowed from 18th-century scholarship, that they had claimed nine million victims.

The early modern witch trials have also inspired many modern theatrical works, novels, and films. This material has spanned various genres, from horror (e.g., Witchfinder General [1968] and The Witch [2015]) to comedy (e.g., I Married a Witch [1942] and Hocus Pocus [1993]). Much of the cinematic and literary material about the witch trials has been produced in the United States, resulting in a disproportionate focus on the 1692–93 trials at Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers, Massachusetts), which were a late and comparatively small manifestation of early modern witch-hunting. Probably the best-known portrayal of the Salem trials is Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which has been adapted twice for the cinema. An allegorical critique of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s attempts to identify alleged communists throughout American society, the play contributed to the popularization of the term witch hunt to characterize the persecution of people not for crimes they have committed but rather for beliefs they hold or for things they are wrongly accused of having done.