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. In general, there seems to have been less witch-phobia in
Spain and the papal lands of
Italy in comparison to
France and the
Holy Roman Empire. There was much regional variation within the
British Isles. In Ireland, for example, there were few trials. 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. The death toll in Scotland dwarfed that of England. 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". 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. 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". 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. The number of people tried for witchcraft between the years of 1500–1700 (by region) include: 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.
Socio-political turmoil '' of Bamberg, Germany, where suspected witches were held and interrogated: 1627 engravingVarious 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. For instance, Midelfort suggested that in southwestern Germany, war and famine destabilised local communities, resulting in the witch prosecutions of the 1620s. 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. is characterized by temperatures and precipitation levels lower than the 1901–1960 average. Scholars 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. Historical temperature indexes and witch trial data indicate that, generally, as temperature decreased during this period, witch trials increased. 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. 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. 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, and an increase in unmarried women would enhance this process.
Catholic versus Protestant conflict 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. 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." Until recently, this theory received limited support from other experts in the subject. This is because there is little evidence that either Roman Catholics were accusing Protestants of witchcraft, or that Protestants were accusing Roman Catholics. Furthermore, the witch trials regularly occurred in regions with little or no inter-denominational strife, and which were largely religiously homogeneous, such as
Essex,
Lowland Scotland,
Geneva,
Venice, and the
Spanish Basque Country. 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. 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. 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. 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 (
məḵaššêp̄āh) in Exodus 22:18 was much debated during the time of the trials and witch-phobia.
1970s folklore emphasis From the 1970s onward, there was a "massive explosion of scholarly enthusiasm" for the study of the Early Modern witch trials. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Feminist interpretations Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, various
feminist interpretations of the witch trials have been offered 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". 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. 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." 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. 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. 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, 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". Especially at the margins of Europe, in Iceland, Finland, Estonia, and Russia, the majority of those accused were male. 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. 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.
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; this view has been rejected by mainstream historians. The historian of medicine David Harley criticised the notion of the midwife-witch as a prevalent type of victim of witch hunts and commented on Heinsohn and Steiger as belonging to a set of polemicists who misportrayed the history of midwifery.
Were there any sorts of witches? Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common belief among the educated sectors of the European populace was that there had never been any genuine
cult of witches and all of those people who were persecuted and executed as such were innocent of the crime of witchcraft. However, at this time, various scholars suggested that there had been a real cult that had been persecuted by the Christian authorities, and it had pre-Christian origins. The first person 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. 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. 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". 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. However, the majority of scholarly reviews of Murray's work produced at the time were largely critical, and her books never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials. Instead, from her early publications onward many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her "factual errors and methodological failings". 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". Influencing works of literature, it inspired writings by
Aldous Huxley and
Robert Graves. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ==Witch trials by country or region==