Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Political, Social,
Economic or Religious?
- Jealousy and revenge and disputes
- “beggars who were denied
charity were likely to accuse their ungenerous
neighbours of witchcraft”
- Witch denunciations “arose out of antipathies
and grievances within the local community.
Petty suspicions, jealousies & gossip led to the
victimisation of individuals & eventually to their
prosecution”
- "The trials normally emerged out of
complex disputes within local
communities”
- -“Trials often began with a dispute
among neighbours that escalated
into an accusation of witchcraft”
- Historians
- The Age of Religious
Wars 1559-1715 by RS
Dunn
- France in the 16th
Century by Baumgartner
- Early Modern European
Society by Henry Kamen
- Witch craze by L Roper
- The Long European Reformation by
P.G. Wallace
- Years of Renewal – European
History 1470-1600 John
Lotherington
- 17th Century Europe
1598-1700 Thomas Munck
- 17th Century Europe
DH Pennington
- Witches &
Neighbours R Briggs
- The Witch Hunt in Early
Modern Europe BP
Levack
- Safe, a way to provide scapegoats
- "Politically and
socially safe"
- “Authorities were confronted with the overwhelming, urgent
needs of a rural world suffering hunger disease and death”
- Caused by peasants suspicions about “sick
cows, outbreaks of hail, mysterious insects
and various diseases”
- “the Spanish were well supplied with scapegoats
in the form of Jews & so they had less use for
the stereotype of the witch” whereas in Germany
there was a lack of
- Peaks in witch hunts “coincided with periods of famine, pestilence,
extreme religious tension, wartime carnage or revolutionary
upheaval
- Malleus Maleficarum
- Judges more willing to prosecute: "“Because they were
much more certain of the presence of evil”
- Caused people to acknowledge witchcraft
- “The Inquisition & the judge could now
run a trial according to the textbooks &
the realities of the crimes being
investigated mattered less and less”
- Fear and belief in witchcraft
- “combined with widespread popular view on the efficacy of
magic & learned assumptions associating witchcraft with
heresy”
- -“If belief in diabolical pact allowed prosecutors to try
individual women without any evidence of maleficia, the
concurrent belief in the witches’ Sabbath made possible
extensive & deadly hunts”
- “fed on popular & elite anxieties”
- Trevor Roper: “it was the social
consequence of renewed ideological war
and the accompanying climate of fear”
- "There were usually sudden outbursts of fear,
resulting in mass accusations, confessions and
prosecutions”
- Women as weak and evil
- "The gendered assumption that
associated women with evil endured”
- women as: “prey to the Devil’s wiles”
- “female lust could undermine social and religious
order… could destroy Christendom itself”
- “Women were most likely targets for suspicion …
they were spiritually weaker”
- “A witch-believing peasantry ready to make accusations; a learned
demonology which absorbed the popular idea of maleficium into
Devil worship; the dissemination of that demonology through printing;
a judicial revolution and the use of torture; with local, secular courts
ready to be caught up in hysteria-these were the preconditions for the
witch craze”
- Enthusiastic witch hunters
- "Extreme distress & disorder seem to have
been less effective in producting panics than
the presence of a few enthusiastic and
powerful witch hunters”
- Social and political phenomenon”
- "an out-growth of social,
religious, economic and
political tensions"
- Witchcraft as heresy
- The act of fealty to Satan immediately
transformed witchcraft into heres
- "In destroying witches, the zealots were also
destroying superstition & heresy”
- "When officials were anxious about heresy,
particularly in regions such as South-Western
Germany where confessional districts often
overlapped, persecution could be harsh
- Political tool
- "Sorcery became politicised"
- Larner:Politicians sought to exercise an
increasing moral authority”
- Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn: "accused Protestants of
witch-craft in order to consolidate the return to Catholicism that he had
engineered
- Confused boundaries
- “ecclesiastical boundaries, areas of legal
jurisdiction, lordship and political boundaries
rarely coincided, a confusion that left its
mark on the witch hunt”
- “The very fragmentation of political and
legal authority in Germany made it possible
for panics to get put of hand”
- North and west Germany was “much larger, less fragmented
political units than in the south and the west”
- "When officials were anxious about heresy, particularly
in regions such as South-Western Germany where
confessional districts often overlapped, persecution could
be harsh
- Little opposition
- "There was nothing amongst dominant ideas of the time
which could erode the concept of the witch
- Judicially and socially disorganised
- “The very fragmentation of political
and legal authority in Germany made it
possible for panics to get put of hand”
- There was nothing amongst dominant ideas of the time which
could erode the concept of the witch”
- Witchcraft was the crimen exceptum, the exceptional
crime, warranting the suspension of normal
procedures. Rules on evidence, disinterested juries and
the reliability of witnesses were ignored”
- Levack: "the most uncontrolled fashion were
the courts concerned were both secular and
local"
- "Instead of leading to greater restraint and caution
in witchcraft prosecutions, such as often resulted
from the intervention of central authorities, this
practice usually had the opposite effect”
- "Local determination to eliminate witchcraft was strengthened rather
than weakened by the intervention of ‘higher’ judicial authorities