In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America. Between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, almost all in Europe. The witch hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630,Thurston 2001. p. 01. during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors, and women and men made formal accusations of witchcraft. In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake, the traditional punishment for religious heresy.
Magical healers or 'cunning folk' were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused. Roughly 80% of those convicted were women, most of them over the age of 40."Menopausal and post-menopausal women were disproportionally represented amongst the victims of the witch craze--and their over-representation is the more striking when we recall how rare women over fifty must have been in the population as a whole." Lyndal Roper Witch Craze (2004)p. 160mostly in the Holy Roman Empire, the British Isles and France, and to some extent, in the European colonies in North America; largely excluding the Iberian Peninsula and Italy; "Inquisition Spain and Portugal, obsessed with heresy, ignored the witch craze. In Italy, witch trials were comparatively rare and did not involve torture and executions." Anne L. Barstow, Witchcraze: a New History of the European Witch Hunts, HarperCollins, 1995.
Medieval background
Christian doctrine
Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition."Clearly, there was an increase in skeptical voices during the Carolingian period, even if we take into account an increase in surviving sources." Behringer, "Witches and Witch-hunts: a Global History", p. 31 (2004). Wiley-Blackwell. Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility of collaboration with devil(s), resulting in a person obtaining certain real supernatural powers."Christian theology underwent a major shift of attitude only during the 13th century. In his Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas (1255–74) not only confirmed Augustine's semiotic theory, according to which spells, amulets or magical rituals indicated a secret pact with demons but gave the impression that sorcerers, through the support of the devil, could physically commit their crimes." Behringer, "Witches and Witch-hunts: a Global History", pp. 35–36 (2004). Wiley-Blackwell. Christians as a whole were not of the belief that magic in its entirety is demonic, for members of the clergy practiced crafts such as necromancy, the practice of communicating with the dead. However, witchcraft was still assumed as inherently demonic, so backlash to witches was inevitable due to the collective negative image.
A branch of the inquisition in southern France In 1233, a papal bull by Gregory IX established a new branch of the inquisition in Toulouse, France, to be led by the Dominicans. It was intended to prosecute Christian groups considered heretical, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians.Charles Molinier, L'Inquisition dans le Midi de la France au XIIIe et au XIVe siècle, étude sur les sources de son Histoire (1880), p. ii. The Dominicans eventually evolved into the most zealous prosecutors of persons accused of witchcraft in the years leading up to the Reformation.
Records were usually kept by the French inquisitors, but the majority of these records did not survive, and one historian who was working in 1880, Charles Molinier, refers to the surviving records as only scanty debris.Molinier (1880), p. 6 Molinier notes that the inquisitors themselves describe their attempts to carefully safeguard their records, especially when they were moving from town to town. The inquisitors were widely hated and they would be ambushed on the road, but their records were more often the target than the inquisitors themselves [plus désireux encore de ravir les papiers que porte le juge que de le faire périr lui-même] (better to take the papers the judge carries than to make the judge himself perish). The records seem to have often been targeted by the accused or their friends and family, wishing to thereby sabotage the proceedings or failing that, to spare their reputations and the reputations of their descendants.Molinier (1880), p. xvi–xviii. This would be all the more true for those who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Difficulty in understanding the larger witchcraft trials which were to come in later centuries is deciding how much can be extrapolated from what remains.
14th century There was no concept of demonic witchcraft during the fourteenth century; only at a later time did a unified concept combine the ideas of noxious magic, a pact with the Devil and an assembly of witches for Satanic worship into one category of crime.Darren Oldridge (ed), The Witchcraft Reader, 22 Witch trials were infrequent compared to later centuries and a significant proportion of them were held in France. 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 papacy of John XXII was another engine for witchcraft accusations. There were also a significant number of trials in England and Germany. The charges were generally mild. Diabolism, believed to involve nocturnal orgies and traditionally linked to accusations of heresy, was a very rare charge in the witch trials. After 1334 the political dimension of witchcraft accusations disappeared, while the charges remained mild. The large majority of trials until 1375 were in France and Germany. The number of witch trials rose after 1375, when many municipal court-adopted inquisitorial procedures and penalties for false accusations were abolished. Prominent centres of witch prosecutions were France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. In Italy a new development occurred when accusations of diabolism gradually became more common and more important in prosecutions, although they were still less common than trials for sorcery.Richard Kieckhefer, Witch trials in mediaeval Europe, in Darren Oldridge (ed), The Witchcraft Reader, 25-35 Records of witch trials from this century also lacked extensive descriptions of meetings of witches.Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, 186
In 1329, with the papacy in nearby Avignon, the inquisitor of Carcassonne sentenced a Carmelite friar called Peter Recordi to the dungeon for life. 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.HC Lea, A History of the Inquisition, Vol. III (1922), p. 455, 657. Lea includes the entire 1329 sentence reprinted in the original Latin. A Francophone writer and contemporary of N Remy, Lambert Daneau, considers "sortilegus" to have been shortened to become the French "sorcier" De Veneficis Quos Olim Sortilegos (1575), p. 14 and sorciers was the term used in the title of another contemporary Jean Bodin in an anti-witchcraft work written in French in 1580. Bodin, De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1598 edition) He was accused of using love magic to seduce women and of invoking Satan and sacrificing a butterfly to him.
Lamothe-Langon Earlier works on witchcraft often placed a large number of stereotypical witch trials in southern France in the early fourteenth century. This is the result of Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, who published Histoire de l'inquisition en France in 1829. He described a sudden outburst of mass witch trials ending in hundreds of executions, and the accused were portrayed as the stereotypical demonic witch. He purported to extensively quote in translation from inquisitorial records. His book proved influential. Joseph Hansen included large excerpts from the book, though Lamothe-Langon's sources could not be found at the end of the nineteenth century. Through reuse by other writers, Lamothe-Langon's work established the view that witch hunts suddenly began in the late Middle Ages and implied a link with Catharism. 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. Kieckhefer notes that an 1855 publication of a summary inventory from inquisitorial records from Carcassonne did not match with Lamothe-Langon's work at all. Besides, the language and stereotypes in the supposed records were anachronistic. Lamothe-Langon also had a track record of forging several genealogies about his ancestry, and his political motive was shown by his polemics against censorship. By the time that historians rejected his work, it was already firmly entrenched in the popular image of witchcraft.Christa Tuczay, The Nineteenth Century: Medievalism and Witchcraft, in Jonathan Barry, Owen Davies, Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, 55-56Richard Kieckhefer, Witch trials in mediaeval Europe, in Darren Oldridge (ed), The Witchcraft Reader, 29
15th century trials and the growth of the new view on witchcraft
Witch trials were still uncommon in the 15th century when the concept of diabolical witchcraft began to emerge. The study of four chronicles concerning events in Valais, the Bernese Alps and the nearby region of Dauphiné has supported the scholarly proposal that some ideas concerning witchcraft were taking hold in the region around western Switzerland during the 1430s, recasting the practice of witchcraft as an alliance between a person and the devil that would undermine and threaten the Christian foundation of society. The Perrissona Gappit case tried in Switzerland in 1465 is noted for the thoroughness of the surviving record.
The skeptical Canon Episcopi retained many supporters, and still seems to have been supported by the theological faculty at the University of Paris in their decree from 1398. It was never officially repudiated by a majority of bishops within the papal lands, nor even by the Council of Trent, which immediately preceded the peak of the trials. But in 1428, the Valais witch trials, lasting six to eight years, started in the French-speaking lower Valais and eventually spread to German-speaking regions. This time period also coincided with the Council of Basel (1431–1437) and some scholars have suggested a new anti-witchcraft doctrinal view may have spread among certain theologians and inquisitors in attendance at this council as the Valais trials were discussed.Thurston 2001. p. 67,77. Not long after, a cluster of powerful opponents of the Canon Episcopi emerged: a Dominican inquisitor in Carcassonne named Jean Vinet, the Bishop of Avila Alfonso Tostado, and another Dominican Inquisitor named Nicholas Jacquier. It is unclear whether the three men were aware of each other's work. The coevolution of their shared view centres around "a common challenge: disbelief in the reality of demonic activity in the world."Matthew Champion, Scourging the Temple of God Parergon (2011) 28.1 pp. 9–10.