Witch trials in the early modern period

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Prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft reached a highpoint from 1580 to 1630
during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, when an estimated
50,000[1][2] people were burned at the stake, of whom roughly 80% were women,[3][4]
and most often over the age of 40.[5][6][7][8]

Contents
1 Medieval background
1.1 Christian doctrine
1.2 A branch of the inquisition in southern France
1.3 14th century
1.4 15th century trials and the growth of the new heterodox view
1.4.1 1486: Malleus Maleficarum
2 Peak of the trials: 1560–1630
3 Decline of the trials: 1650–1750
3.1 Sporadic witch-hunts after 1750
4 Procedures and punishments
4.1 Evidence
4.2 Interrogations and torture
4.3 Punishments
5 Estimates of the total number of executions
6 Causes and interpretations
6.1 Regional differences
6.2 Socio-political turmoil
6.3 Catholic versus Protestant conflict
6.4 Translation from the Hebrew: Witch or poisoner?
6.5 1970s folklore emphasis
6.6 Functionalism
6.7 Feminist interpretations
6.8 Male and Female conflict and reaction to earlier feminist studies
6.9 Were there any sort of witches?
7 Witch trials by country or region
8 See also
9 References
9.1 Footnotes
9.2 Bibliography
10 Further reading
11 External links
Medieval background
Christian doctrine
Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the existence
of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition.[9] 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.[10]

Dominican Inquisitors and the Growth of Witch-phobia

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.[11]
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 did
not survive, and one historian working in 1880, Charles Molinier, refers to the
surviving records as only scanty debris.[12] Molinier notes that the inquisitors
themselves describe their attempts to carefully safeguard their records, especially
when moving from town to town. The inquisitors were widely hated and 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.[13] This would be all the more true of those accused of
witchcraft. Difficulty in understanding the larger witchcraft trials to come in
later centuries is deciding how much can be extrapolated from what remains.

14th century
In 1329, with the papacy in nearby Avignon, the inquisitor of Carcassonne sentenced
a monk to the dungeon for life and the sentence refers to... multas et diversas
daemonum conjurationes et invocationes... and frequently uses the same Latin
synonym 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.[14]

15th century trials and the growth of the new heterodox view
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, and 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.[15] 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."[16]

Nicholas Jacquier's lengthy and complex argument against the Canon Episcopi was
written in Latin. It began as a tract in 1452 and was expanded into a fuller
monograph in 1458. Many copies seem to have been made by hand (nine manuscript
copies still exist), but it was not printed until 1561.[17][18][19] Jacquier
describes a number of trials he personally witnessed, including one of a man named
Guillaume Edelin, against whom the main charge seems to have been that he had
preached a sermon in support of the Canon Episcopi claiming that witchcraft was
merely an illusion. Edeline eventually recanted this view, most likely under
torture.

Title page of the seventh Cologne edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, 1520 (from
the University of Sydney Library). The Latin title is "MALLEUS MALEFICARUM,
Maleficas, & earum hæresim, ut phramea potentissima conterens." (Generally
translated into English as The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their
heresy as with a two-edged sword).[20]
1486: Malleus Maleficarum
The most important and influential book promoting the new heterodox view was the
Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer begins his work in opposition to the
Canon Episcopi, but oddly, he does not cite Jacquier, and may not have been aware
of his work.[21] Like most witch-phobic writers, Kramer had met strong resistance
by those who opposed his heterodox view; this inspired him to write his work as
both propaganda and a manual for like-minded zealots. The Gutenberg printing press
had only recently been invented along the Rhine River, and Kramer fully utilized it
to shepherd his work into print and spread the ideas that had developed by
inquisitors and theologians in France into the Rhineland.[22] The theological views
espoused by Kramer were influential but remained contested, and an early edition of
the book even appeared on a list of those banned by the Church in 1490.[23]
Nonetheless Malleus Maleficarum was printed 13 times between 1486 and 1520, and —
following a 50-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant
reformations — it was printed again another 16 times (1574–1669) in the decades
following the important Council of Trent which had remained silent with regard to
Kramer's theological views. It inspired many similar works, such as an influential
work by Jean Bodin, and was cited as late as 1692 by Increase Mather, then
president of Harvard College.[24][25][26]

It is unknown if a degree of alarm at the extreme superstition and anti-witchcraft

views expressed by Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum may have been one of the
numerous factors that helped prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation.

Peak of the trials: 1560–1630

The period of the European witch trials, with the largest number of fatalities,
seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630.[27]

Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or
Protestant regions. However, the intensity of persecutions had not so much to do
with Catholicism or Protestantism as such, as there are examples of both intense
and less intense witchcraft persecutions from both Catholic and Protestant regions
of Europe. In Catholic Spain and Portugal for example, the numbers of witch trials
were few because the Spanish and the Portuguese Inquisition preferred to focus on
the crime of public heresy rather than witchcraft, whereas Protestant Scotland had
a much larger number of witchcraft trials. In contrast, the witch trials in
Protestant Netherlands stopped earlier and were among the least numerous in Europe,
while the large-scale mass witch trials which took place in the autonomous
territories of the Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany were infamous in all
of the Western World, and the contemporary writer Herman Löher described how they
affected the population within them:[28]

The Roman Catholic subjects, farmers, winegrowers, and artisans in the episcopal
lands are the most terrified people on earth, since the false witch trials affect
the German episcopal lands incomparably more than France, Spain, Italy or
Protestants.[28]

The mass witch trials which took place in Southern Catholic Germany in waves
between the 1560s and the 1620s could continue for years and result in hundreds of
executions of all sexes, ages and classes. These included the Trier witch trials
(1581–1593), the Fulda witch trials (1603–1606), the Eichstätt witch trials (1613–
1630), the Würzburg witch trial (1626–1631), and the Bamberg witch trials (1626–
1631).

In 1590, the North Berwick witch trials occurred in Scotland, and were of
particular note as the king, James VI, became involved himself. James had developed
a fear that witches planned to kill him after he suffered from storms while
traveling to Denmark in order to claim his bride, Anne, earlier that year.
Returning to Scotland, the king heard of trials that were occurring in North
Berwick, and ordered the suspects to be brought to him—he subsequently believed
that a nobleman, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, was a witch, and after the
latter fled in fear of his life, he was outlawed as a traitor. The king
subsequently set up royal commissions to hunt down witches in his realm,
recommending torture in dealing with suspects, and in 1597, he wrote a book about
the menace that witches posed to society, entitled Daemonologie.[29]

The more remote parts of Europe, as well as North America, were reached by the
witch panic later in the 17th-century, among them being the Salzburg witch trials,
the Swedish Torsåker witch trials and, somewhat later, in 1692, the Salem witch
trials in New England.

Decline of the trials: 1650–1750

Further information: Protests against early modern witch trials
There had never been a lack of skepticism regarding the trials. In 1635, the
authorities of the Roman Inquisition acknowledged its own trials had "found
scarcely one trial conducted legally".[30] In the middle of the 17th century, the
difficulty in proving witchcraft according to the legal process contributed to the
councilors of Rothenburg (German) following advice to treat witchcraft cases with
caution.[31]

Although the witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-
17th century, they continued on the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies.
In the Nordic countries, the late 17th century saw the peak of the trials in a
number of areas: the Torsåker witch trials of Sweden (1674), where 71 people were
executed for witchcraft in a single day, the peak of witch hunting in Swedish
Finland,[27] and the Salzburg witch trials in Austria (where 139 people were
executed from 1675 to 1690).

The 1692 Salem witch trials were a brief outburst of witch-phobia which occurred in
the New World when the practice was waning in Europe. In the 1690s, Winifred King
Benham and her daughter Winifred were thrice tried for witchcraft in Wallingford,
Connecticut, the last of such trials in New England. Even though they were found
innocent, they were compelled to leave Wallingford and settle in Staten Island, New
York.[32] In 1706, Grace Sherwood of Virginia was tried by ducking and jailed for
allegedly being a witch.[33]
Rationalist historians in the 18th century came to the opinion that the use of
torture had resulted in erroneous testimony.[34]

Witch trials became scant in the second half of the 17th century, and their growing
disfavor eventually resulted in the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.

In France, scholars have found that with increased fiscal capacity and a stronger
central government, the witchcraft accusations began to decline.[35] The witch
trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches
were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed
from established legal statutes".[36]

During the early 18th century, the practice subsided. Jane Wenham was among the
last subjects of a typical witch trial in England in 1712, but was pardoned after
her conviction and set free. The last execution for witchcraft in England took
place in 1716, when Mary Hicks and her daughter Elizabeth were hanged. Janet Horne
was executed for witchcraft in Scotland in 1727. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 put an
end to the traditional form of witchcraft as a legal offense in Britain. Those
accused under the new act were restricted to those that pretended to be able to
conjure spirits (generally being the most dubious professional fortune tellers and
mediums), and punishment was light.[37]

In Austria, Maria Theresa outlawed witch-burning and torture in 1768. The last
capital trial, that of Maria Pauer occurred in 1750 in Salzburg, which was then
outside the Austrian domain.[38]

Sporadic witch-hunts after 1750

In the later 18th century, witchcraft had ceased to be considered a criminal
offense throughout Europe, but there are a number of cases which were not
technically witch trials, but are suspected to have involved belief in witches at
least behind the scenes. Thus, in 1782, Anna Göldi was executed in Glarus,
Switzerland, officially for the killing of her infant—a ruling at the time widely
denounced throughout Switzerland and Germany as judicial murder. Like Anna Göldi,
Barbara Zdunk was executed in 1811 in Prussia, not technically for witchcraft, but
for arson.[citation needed] In Poland, the Doruchów witch trials occurred in 1783,
and the execution of two additional women for sorcery in 1793, tried by a legal
court, but with dubious legitimacy.[citation needed]

Despite the official ending of the trials for witchcraft, there would still be
occasional unofficial killings of those accused in parts of Europe, such as was
seen in the cases of Anna Klemens in Denmark (1800), Krystyna Ceynowa in Poland
(1836), and Dummy, the Witch of Sible Hedingham in England (1863). In France, there
was sporadic violence and even murder in the 1830s, with one woman reportedly burnt
in a village square in Nord.[39] In the 1830s, a prosecution for witchcraft was
commenced against a man in Fentress County, Tennessee, named either Joseph or
William Stout, based upon his alleged influence over the health of a young woman.
The case against the supposed witch was dismissed upon the failure of the alleged
victim, who had sworn out a warrant against him, to appear for the trial. However,
some of his other accusers were convicted on criminal charges for their part in the
matter, and various libel actions were brought.[40][41][42]

In 1895, Bridget Cleary was beaten and burned to death by her husband in Ireland
because he suspected that fairies had taken the real Bridget and replaced her with
a witch.

The persecution of those believed to perform malevolent sorcery against their

neighbors continued into the 20th century. In 1997, two Russian farmers killed a
woman and injured five other members of her family after believing that they had
used folk magic against them.[27] It has been reported that more than 3,000 people
were killed by lynch mobs in Tanzania between 2005 and 2011 for allegedly being
witches.[43]

Procedures and punishments

Evidence
Peculiar standards applied to witchcraft allowing certain types of evidence "that
are now ways relating Fact, and done many Years before." There was no possibility
to offer alibi as a defense because witchcraft did not require the presence of the
accused at the scene. Witnesses were called to testify to motives and effects
because it was believed that witnessing the invisible force of witchcraft was
impossible: "half proofes are to be allowed, and are good causes of suspicion".[44]

Interrogations and torture

Various acts of torture were used against accused witches to coerce confessions and
cause them to provide names of alleged co-conspirators. Most historians agree that
the majority of those persecuted in these witch trials were innocent of any
involvement in Devil worship.[45] The torture of witches began to increase in
frequency after 1468, when the Pope declared witchcraft to be "crimen exceptum" and
thereby removed all legal limits on the application of torture in cases where
evidence was difficult to find.[46]

In Italy, an accused witch was deprived of sleep for periods up to forty hours.
This technique was also used in England, but without a limitation on time.[47]
Sexual humiliation was used, such as forced sitting on red-hot stools with the
claim that the accused woman would not perform sexual acts with the devil.[48] In
most cases, those who endured the torture without confessing were released.[49]

The use of torture has been identified as a key factor in converting the trial of
one accused witch into a wider social panic, as those being tortured were more
likely to accuse a wide array of other local individuals of also being witches.[49]

Burning of three witches in Baden, Switzerland (1585), by Johann Jakob Wick

The burning of a French midwife in a cage filled with black cats

Punishments
A variety of different punishments were employed for those found guilty of
witchcraft, including imprisonment, flogging, fines, or exile.[50] The Old
Testament's book of Exodus (22:18) states, "Thou shalt not permit a sorceress to
live".[51] Many faced capital punishment for witchcraft, either by burning at the
stake, hanging, or beheading.[52] Similarly, in New England, people convicted of
witchcraft were hanged.[53]

Estimates of the total number of executions

The scholarly consensus on the total number of executions for witchcraft ranges
from 40,000 to 60,000[54] (not including unofficial lynchings of accused witches,
which went unrecorded but are nevertheless believed to have been somewhat rare in
the Early Modern period).[55] It would also have been the case that various
individuals would have died as a result of the unsanitary conditions of their
imprisonment, but again this is not recorded within the number of executions.[56]

Attempts at estimating the total number of executions for witchcraft have a history
going back to the end of the period of witch-hunts in the 18th century. A scholarly
consensus only emerges in the second half of the 20th century, and historical
estimates vary wildly depending on the method used. Early estimates tend to be
highly exaggerated, as they were still part of rhetorical arguments against the
persecution of witches rather than purely historical scholarship.

Notably, a figure of nine million victims was given by Gottfried Christian Voigt in
1784 in an argument criticizing Voltaire's estimate of "several hundred thousand"
as too low. Voigt's number has shown remarkably resilient as an influential popular
myth, surviving well into the 20th century, especially in feminist and neo-pagan
literature.[57] In the 19th century, some scholars were agnostic, for instance,
Jacob Grimm (1844) talked of "countless" victims[58] and Charles Mackay (1841)
named "thousands upon thousands".[59] By contrast, a popular news report of 1832
cited a number of 3,192 victims "in Great Britain alone".[60] In the early 20th
century, some scholarly estimates on the number of executions still ranged in the
hundreds of thousands. The estimate was only reliably placed below 100,000 in
scholarship of the 1970s.[61]

Causes and interpretations

The Witch, No. 1, c. 1892 lithograph by Joseph E. Baker

The Witch, No. 2, c. 1892 lithograph by Joseph E. Baker

The Witch, No. 3, c. 1892 lithograph by Joseph E. Baker

Regional differences
There were many regional differences in the manner in which the witch trials
occurred. The trials themselves emerged sporadically, flaring up in some areas but
neighbouring areas remaining largely unaffected.[62] In general, there seems to
have been less witch-phobia in the papal lands of Italy and Spain in comparison to
France and the Holy Roman Empire.[63]

There was much regional variation within the British Isles. In Ireland, for
example, there were few trials.

The malefizhaus of Bamberg, Germany, where suspected witches were held and
interrogated: 1627 engraving
There are particularly important differences between the English and continental
witch-hunting traditions. In England the use of torture was rare and the methods
far more restrained. The country formally permitted it only when authorized by the
monarch, and no more than 81 torture warrants were issued (for all offenses)
throughout English history.[64] The death toll in Scotland dwarfed that of England.
[65] It is also apparent from an episode of English history, that during the civil
war in the early 1640s, witch-hunters emerged, the most notorious of whom was
Matthew Hopkins from East Anglia and proclaimed himself the "Witchfinder General".
[66]

Italy has had fewer witchcraft accusations, and even fewer cases where witch trials
ended in execution. In 1542, the establishment of the Roman Catholic Inquisition
effectively restrained secular courts under its influence from liberal application
of torture and execution.[67] The methodological Instructio, which served as an
"appropriate" manual for witch hunting, cautioned against hasty convictions and
careless executions of the accused. In contrast with other parts of Europe, trials
by the Venetian Holy Office never saw conviction for the crime of malevolent
witchcraft, or "maleficio".[68] Because the notion of diabolical cults was not
credible to either popular culture or Catholic inquisitorial theology, mass
accusations and belief in Witches' Sabbath never took root in areas under such
inquisitorial influence.[69]

The number of people tried for witchcraft between the years of 1500-1700 (by
region) Holy Roman Empire: 50,000 Poland: 15,000 Switzerland: 9,000 French Speaking
Europe: 10,000 Spanish and Italian peninsulas: 10,000 Scandinavia: 4,000[citation
needed]

Socio-political turmoil
Various suggestions have been made that the witch trials emerged as a response to
socio-political turmoil in the Early Modern world. One form of this is that the
prosecution of witches was a reaction to a disaster that had befallen the
community, such as crop failure, war, or disease.[70] For instance, Midelfort
suggested that in southwestern Germany, war and famine destabilised local
communities, resulting in the witch prosecutions of the 1620s.[71] Behringer also
suggests an increase in witch prosecutions due to socio-political destabilization,
stressing the Little Ice Age's effects on food shortages, and the subsequent use of
witches as scapegoats for consequences of climatic changes.[72] The Little Ice Age,
lasting from about 1300 to 1850,[73] is characterized by temperatures and
precipitation levels lower than the 1901–1960 average.[74] Historians such as
Wolfgang Behringer, Emily Oster, and Hartmut Lehmann argue that these cooling
temperatures brought about crop failure, war, and disease, and that witches were
subsequently blamed for this turmoil.[75][76][77] Historical temperature indexes
and witch trial data indicate that, generally, as temperature decreased during this
period, witch trials increased.[77] Additionally, the peaks of witchcraft
persecutions overlap with hunger crises that occurred in 1570 and 1580, the latter
lasting a decade.[76] Problematically for these theories, it has been highlighted
that, in that region, the witch hunts declined during the 1630s, at a time when the
communities living there were facing increased disaster as a result of plague,
famine, economic collapse, and the Thirty Years' War.[78] Furthermore, this
scenario would clearly not offer a universal explanation, for trials also took
place in areas which were free from war, famine, or pestilence.[79] Additionally,
these theories—particularly Behringer's —have been labeled as oversimplified.[80]
Although there is evidence that the Little Ice Age and subsequent famine and
disease was likely a contributing factor to increase in witch persecution, Durrant
argues that one cannot make a direct link between these problems and witch
persecutions in all contexts.[80]

Moreover, the average age at first marriage had gradually risen by the late
sixteenth century; the population had stabilized after a period of growth, and
availability of jobs and land had lessened. In the last decades of the century, the
age at marriage had climbed to averages of 25 for women and 27 for men in England
and the Low Countries, as more people married later or remained unmarried due to
lack of money or resources and a decline in living standards, and these averages
remained high for nearly two centuries and averages across Northwestern Europe had
done likewise.[81] The convents were closed during the Protestant Reformation,
which displaced many nuns. Many communities saw the proportion of unmarried women
climb from less than 10% to 20% and in some cases as high as 30%, whom few
communities knew how to accommodate economically.[82] Miguel (2003) argues that
witch killings may be a process of eliminating the financial burdens of a family or
society, via elimination of the older women that need to be fed,[83] and an
increase in unmarried women would enhance this process.

Catholic versus Protestant conflict

Further information: Counter-Reformation
The English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper advocated the idea that the witch trials
emerged as part of the conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Early
Modern Europe.[84] A 2017 study in the Economic Journal, examining "more than
43,000 people tried for witchcraft across 21 European countries over a period of
five-and-a-half centuries", found that "more intense religious-market contestation
led to more intense witch-trial activity. And, compared to religious-market
contestation, the factors that existing hypotheses claim were important for witch-
trial activity—weather, income, and state capacity—were not."[85]

Until recently, this theory received limited support from other experts in the
subject.[86] This is because there is little evidence that either Roman Catholics
were accusing Protestants of witchcraft, or that Protestants were accusing Roman
Catholics.[86] Furthermore, the witch trials regularly occurred in regions with
little or no inter-denominational strife, and which were largely religiously
homogenous, such as Essex, Lowland Scotland, Geneva, Venice, and the Spanish Basque
Country.[87] There is also some evidence, particularly from the Holy Roman Empire,
in which adjacent Roman Catholic and Protestant territories were exchanging
information on alleged local witches, viewing them as a common threat to both.[87]
Additionally, many prosecutions were instigated not by the religious or secular
authorities, but by popular demands from within the population, thus making it less
likely that there were specific inter-denominational reasons behind the
accusations.[88]

The more recent research from the 2017 study in the Economic Journal argues that
both Catholics and Protestants used the hunt for witches, regardless of the witch's
denomination, in competitive efforts to expand power and influence.

In south-western Germany, between 1561 and 1670, there were 480 witch trials. Of
the 480 trials that took place in southwestern Germany, 317 occurred in Catholic
areas and 163 in Protestant territories.[89] During the period from 1561 to 1670,
at least 3,229 persons were executed for witchcraft in the German Southwest. Of
this number, 702 were tried and executed in Protestant territories and 2,527 in
Catholic territories.[90]

Translation from the Hebrew: Witch or poisoner?

It has been argued that a translation choice in the King James Bible justified
"horrific human rights violations and fuel[ed] the epidemic of witchcraft
accusations and persecution across the globe".[91] The translation issue concerned
Exodus 22:18, "do not suffer a ...[either 1) poisoner or 2) witch] ...to live."
Both the King James and the Geneva Bible, which precedes the King James version by
51 years, chose the word "witch" for this verse. The proper translation and
definition of the Hebrew word in Exodus 22:18 was much debated during the time of
the trials and witch-phobia.[92]

1970s folklore emphasis

From the 1970s onward, there was a "massive explosion of scholarly enthusiasm" for
the study of the Early Modern witch trials.[93] This was partly because scholars
from a variety of different disciplines, including sociology, anthropology,
cultural studies, philosophy, philosophy of science, criminology, literary theory,
and feminist theory, all began to investigate the phenomenon and brought different
insights to the subject.[94] This was accompanied by analysis of the trial records
and the socio-cultural contexts on which they emerged, allowing for varied
understanding of the trials.[93]

Functionalism
Inspired by ethnographically recorded witch trials that anthropologists observed
happening in non-European parts of the world, various historians have sought a
functional explanation for the Early Modern witch trials, thereby suggesting the
social functions that the trials played within their communities.[95] These studies
have illustrated how accusations of witchcraft have played a role in releasing
social tensions or in facilitating the termination of personal relationships that
have become undesirable to one party.[95]

Feminist interpretations
Main article: Feminist interpretations of the Early Modern witch trials
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, various feminist interpretations of the
witch trials have been made and published. One of the earliest individuals to do so
was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, a writer who was deeply involved in the
first-wave feminist movement for women's suffrage. In 1893, she published the book
Woman, Church and State, which was criticized as "written in a tearing hurry and in
time snatched from a political activism which left no space for original research".
[96] Likely influenced by the works of Jules Michelet about the Witch-Cult, she
claimed that the witches persecuted in the Early Modern period were pagan
priestesses adhering to an ancient religion venerating a Great Goddess. She also
repeated the erroneous statement, taken from the works of several German authors,
that nine million people had been killed in the witch hunt.[96] The United States
has become the centre of development for these feminist interpretations.[97]

In 1973, two American second-wave feminists, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre

English, published an extended pamphlet in which they put forward the idea that the
women persecuted had been the traditional healers and midwives of the community,
who were being deliberately eliminated by the male medical establishment.[98] This
theory disregarded the fact that the majority of those persecuted were neither
healers nor midwives, and that in various parts of Europe these individuals were
commonly among those encouraging the persecutions.[99] In 1994, Anne Llewellyn
Barstow published her book Witchcraze,[100] which was later described by Scarre and
Callow as "perhaps the most successful" attempt to portray the trials as a
systematic male attack on women.[101]

Other feminist historians have rejected this interpretation of events; historian

Diane Purkiss described it as "not politically helpful" because it constantly
portrays women as "helpless victims of patriarchy" and thus does not aid them in
contemporary feminist struggles.[102] She also condemned it for factual inaccuracy
by highlighting that radical feminists adhering to it ignore the historicity of
their claims, instead promoting it because it is perceived as authorising the
continued struggle against patriarchal society.[103] She asserted that many radical
feminists nonetheless clung to it because of its "mythic significance" and firmly
delineated structure between the oppressor and the oppressed.[99]

Male and Female conflict and reaction to earlier feminist studies

An estimated 75% to 85% of those accused in the early modern witch trials were
women,[3][104][105][106] and there is certainly evidence of misogyny on the part of
those persecuting witches, evident from quotes such as "[It is] not unreasonable
that this scum of humanity, [witches], should be drawn chiefly from the feminine
sex" (Nicholas Rémy, c. 1595) or "The Devil uses them so, because he knows that
women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such
agreeable provocations."[107] Scholar Kurt Baschwitz, in his first monography on
the subject (in Dutch, 1948), mentions this aspect of the witch trials even as "a
war against old women".

Nevertheless, it has been argued that the supposedly misogynistic agenda of works
on witchcraft has been greatly exaggerated, based on the selective repetition of a
few relevant passages of the Malleus maleficarum.[108][109] There are various
reasons as to why this was the case. In Early Modern Europe, it was widely believed
that women were less intelligent than men and more susceptible to sin.[110] Many
modern scholars argue that the witch hunts cannot be explained simplistically as an
expression of male misogyny, as indeed women were frequently accused by other
women,[111][112] to the point that witch-hunts, at least at the local level of
villages, have been described as having been driven primarily by "women's
quarrels".[113] Especially at the margins of Europe, in Iceland, Finland, Estonia,
and Russia, the majority of those accused were male.[114]

Barstow (1994) claimed that a combination of factors, including the greater value
placed on men as workers in the increasingly wage-oriented economy, and a greater
fear of women as inherently evil, loaded the scales against women, even when the
charges against them were identical to those against men.[115] Thurston (2001) saw
this as a part of the general misogyny of the Late Medieval and Early Modern
periods, which had increased during what he described as "the persecuting culture"
from which it had been in the Early Medieval.[116] Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto
Steiger, in a 1982 publication, speculated that witch-hunts targeted women skilled
in midwifery specifically in an attempt to extinguish knowledge about birth control
and "repopulate Europe" after the population catastrophe of the Black Death.[117]

Were there any sort of witches?

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common belief among
educated sectors of the European populace was that there had never been any genuine
cult of witches and that all those persecuted and executed as such had been
innocent of the crime.[118] However, at this time various scholars suggested that
there had been a real cult that had been persecuted by the Christian authorities,
and that it had had pre-Christian origins. The first to advance this theory was the
German Professor of Criminal Law Karl Ernst Jarcke of the University of Berlin, who
put forward the idea in 1828; he suggested that witchcraft had been a pre-Christian
German religion that had degenerated into Satanism.[119] Jarcke's ideas were picked
up by the German historian Franz Josef Mone in 1839, although he argued that the
cult's origins were Greek rather than Germanic.[120]

In 1862, the Frenchman Jules Michelet published La Sorciere, in which he put forth
the idea that the witches had been following a pagan religion. The theory achieved
greater attention when it was taken up by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who
published both The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches
(1931) in which she claimed that the witches had been following a pre-Christian
religion which she termed "the Witch-Cult" and "Ritual Witchcraft".

Main article: Witch-cult hypothesis

Murray claimed that this faith was devoted to a pagan Horned God and involved the
celebration of four Witches' Sabbaths each year: Halloween, Imbolc, Beltane, and
Lughnasadh.[121] However, the majority of scholarly reviews of Murray's work
produced at the time were largely critical,[122] and her books never received
support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials.[123] Instead, from her early
publications onward many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her
"factual errors and methodological failings".[124]

We Neopagans now face a crisis. As new data appeared, historians altered their
theories to account for it. We have not. Therefore an enormous gap has opened
between the academic and the 'average' Pagan view of witchcraft. We continue to use
of out-dated and poor writers, like Margaret Murray, Montague Summers, Gerald
Gardner, and Jules Michelet. We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present
solid research, preferring sensational writers who play to our emotions.

—Jenny Gibbons (1998)[112]

However, the publication of the Murray thesis in the Encyclopaedia Britannica made
it accessible to "journalists, film-makers popular novelists and thriller writers",
who adopted it "enthusiastically".[125] Influencing works of literature, it
inspired writings by Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves.[125] Subsequently, in 1939,
an English occultist named Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a
surviving group of the pagan Witch-Cult known as the New Forest Coven, although
modern historical investigation has led scholars to believe that this coven was not
ancient as Gardner believed, but was instead founded in the 1920s or 1930s by
occultists wishing to fashion a revived Witch-Cult based upon Murray's theories.
[126] Taking this New Forest Coven's beliefs and practices as a basis, Gardner went
on to found Gardnerian Wicca, one of the most prominent traditions in the
contemporary pagan religion now known as Wicca, which revolves around the worship
of a Horned God and Goddess, the celebration of festivals known as Sabbats, and the
practice of ritual magic. He also went on to write several books about the
historical Witch-Cult, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft
(1959), and in these books, Gardner used the phrase "the burning times" in
reference to the European and North American witch trials.[127]

In the early 20th century, a number of individuals and groups emerged in Europe,
primarily Britain, and subsequently the United States as well, claiming to be the
surviving remnants of the pagan Witch-Cult described in the works of Margaret
Murray. The first of these actually appeared in the last few years of the 19th
century, being a manuscript that American folklorist Charles Leland claimed he had
been given by a woman who was a member of a group of witches worshipping the god
Lucifer and goddess Diana in Tuscany, Italy. He published the work in 1899 as
Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. Whilst historians and folklorists have
accepted that there are folkloric elements to the gospel, none have accepted it as
being the text of a genuine Tuscan religious group, and believe it to be of late-
nineteenth-century composition.[128]

Wiccans extended claims regarding the witch-cult in various ways, for instance by
utilising the British folklore associating witches with prehistoric sites to assert
that the witch-cult used to use such locations for religious rites, in doing so
legitimising contemporary Wiccan use of them.[129] By the 1990s, many Wiccans had
come to recognise the inaccuracy of the witch-cult theory and had accepted it as a
mythological origin story.[130]