The witch-hunt of the 16th and 17th centuries was an organized effort by authorities in many countries to destroy a conspiracy of witches thought to pose a deadly threat to Christian society.    According to these authorities, witches were numerous, armed with magical powers, and in conscious alliance with Satan.

Thus witch-hunting must be separated from the belief in witches or magic, or that an evil witch is attacking you with the evil eye.
These beliefs are commonplace, almost universal.   The belief that witches are not just individual villains but conspirators and a huge collective threat is a distinguishing feature of the early modern witch hunt.

Witch-hunting was not an enterprise of the Middle Ages.   The public enemies feared at this time, and often suppressed by the authorities were heretics, religious subversives.    Some of these might be accused of maleficia, evil magic, but the stereotyped witch and the idea of the witch conspiracy hardly existed before 1450.

A rough chronology of the witch-hunt.
 

• 14th c.:   A very few people accused of making a pact with the devil.   The famous case of the Knights Templar.   Some intellectuals were speaking of heresy, sorcery, and devil-worship as being inevitably connected, but few people were charged with or tried for such crimes.
• 15th c.:   There was a gradual increase in the prosecution of witches, most for simple sorcery.   But the idea that witches and sorcerers were evil because of their pact with the devil was gaining more currency among theologians and lawyers.  The witch, they said, was a conscious enemy of all of Christian society.    The Hammer of Witches, a manual for hunting witches, and a very misogynistic document, was written by German inquisitors.
• early 16th c.:   New law codes, such as Charles V's Carolina (1532), included laws against witches.    But there few prosecutions under these laws.
• 1560-1660:   After 1560, many people were accused of witchcraft -- not just maleficia (sorcery) but of demonic conspiracy, gathering in sabbaths, etc.  Special legal techniques and torture were used to gain convictions.    There were large scale witch-hunts, where suspects were forced to implicate others. (Details in class.)
• 1660-:   Large hunts began to die off in western and central Europe.   In marginal areas, they continued (Poland, Massachusetts).   By the end of the 18th century, the last few official prosecutions of witches had ended.

The oldest explanation:   The conspiracy was real.   But was there no conspiracy before 1300 or after 1800?

The common 18th century explanation:  the superstition of ignorant common people.   There are also problems with this explanation.

In the 19th century, anti-clerical historians using newly-available archives viewed the whole witch-hunt as a cynical fraud instigated by church authorities for profit.    There are a number of problems with this theory:   lay courts did most of the prosecution, and the profits were hardly that great when most accused were poor.

Another 19th century explanation originated with Jules Michelet:   the witch religion was practiced by peasants, who were holding onto paganism in defiance of the authorities.  Margaret Murray developed this theory further in the 20th century and for a while it was dominant; she wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article.

(A detailed discussion of Murray in class.)

A major weakness in the pagan-remnant, peasant-religion theory of witchcraft is that there is no good evidence that witches did gather in groups.

Later 20th century theories have looked to the social and economic tensions of the time (which admittedly were very great).
Alan McFarlane believed the introduction of a capitalist ethic of individual responsibility was responsible.   Village communities had formerly supported the old and indigent, but now tried to dump their responsibilities for such people as old, isolated women.   These tensions resulted in accusations of maleficia against these women when disaster struck their neighbors.    There are numerous problems with this theory, including the question:   where did the idea of the conspiracy come from?

It's common to believe that certain people have the "evil eye" or other sorcerous powers.   But why should this become an important accusation to fling around?   It isn't a common accusation now and didn't seem to be common in the 13th c. either.
But even if the accusation is made, the next step, to connect the witch with a Satanic conspiracy, is unique.   And even the accusers  McFarlane found in Essex, England, were not interested in making this charge.

Factors that made a hunt possible.

The successful prosecution of witches, even a few individuals, depends on the existence of appropriate judicial tools and the willingness of the authorities to use them.

1.  Tools widely available in the 16th c., when the hunt took off, included Roman law, the inquest, and torture.   Individuals did not have to take personal responsibility for making the accusation; judges had a lot of power to pursue investigation; and accused persons could be forced to implicate others.

Comparison of prosecution rate in Scotland and England, one with Roman law and using torture, the other not, is instructive.

2.  Belief in the witch conspiracy among authorities was necessary before they would devote time and energy to rooting it out.

16th century Europe was a place where religious conflict had destroyed the unity of society, and where true religion was under obvious threat.    Informed, sincere belief in the true religion was being strictly enforced.   And it was widely assumed by the moral leaders of society that any dissent or even any falling away from prescribed morality was not just ignorance, or rusticity, or normal human failings, but symptoms of Satan's great power over the fallen world.

Infanticide as evidence of a pact with the devil.

Women of course were far more often accused as witches, for they had traditionally been seen as the more sinful sex.   Perhaps there was a perceived threat from single women, too.   There were many who were unmarried or widowed, and the traditional haven for them -- the nunnery -- was not meeting the need for institutionalization even in Catholic countries.

How the leaders of society could introduce the idea of the witch conspiracy as an explanation for the ills of society can be seen in the case of Scotland, as outlined by Christina Larner.   James VI, familiarized with the idea of the witch conspiracy during a visit to Denmark, began to see threats to his own rule as evidence that the conspiracy in Scotland.   His efforts resulted in witch trials and hunts becoming a fairly routine part of life in Scotland.

What brought it to an end?

Criticism of the unfairness of witch trials were constant through the period of the witch-hunt.   They had little influence, in part because even the critics believed in sorcery and were afraid of it.

However, eventually, the hunts themselves were seen as more threatening than the threat that they were supposed to counter.  In the late 17th century, as part of a less zealous search for stability, the authorities became unwilling to track down the accomplices of the accused, or even to reject the accusations of those brought before them.    As the leaders of society rejected the theory of satanic conspiracy, it eventually did become a superstition of the common people -- at least for a while.

The witch-hunt, like the great wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, was symptomatic of a turbulent, insecure society.   We will see later how and why European society regained enough composure that it felt it could do without the witch-hunt.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.