Political, Social, Economic or Religious?

Jealousy and revenge and disputes
1. “beggars who were denied charity were likely to accuse their ungenerous neighbours of witchcraft”
2. 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”
3. "The trials normally emerged out of complex disputes within local communities”
4. -“Trials often began with a dispute among neighbours that escalated into an accusation of witchcraft”
Historians
1. The Age of Religious Wars 1559-1715 by RS Dunn
2. France in the 16th Century by Baumgartner
3. Early Modern European Society by Henry Kamen
4. Witch craze by L Roper
5. The Long European Reformation by P.G. Wallace
6. Years of Renewal – European History 1470-1600 John Lotherington
7. 17th Century Europe 1598-1700 Thomas Munck
8. 17th Century Europe DH Pennington
9. Witches & Neighbours R Briggs
10. The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe BP Levack
Safe, a way to provide scapegoats
1. "Politically and socially safe"
2. “Authorities were confronted with the overwhelming, urgent needs of a rural world suffering hunger disease and death”
3. Caused by peasants suspicions about “sick cows, outbreaks of hail, mysterious insects and various diseases”
4. “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
5. Peaks in witch hunts “coincided with periods of famine, pestilence, extreme religious tension, wartime carnage or revolutionary upheaval
Malleus Maleficarum
1. Judges more willing to prosecute: "“Because they were much more certain of the presence of evil”
2. Caused people to acknowledge witchcraft
3. “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
1. “combined with widespread popular view on the efficacy of magic & learned assumptions associating witchcraft with heresy”
2. -“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”
3. “fed on popular & elite anxieties”
4. Trevor Roper: “it was the social consequence of renewed ideological war and the accompanying climate of fear”
5. "There were usually sudden outbursts of fear, resulting in mass accusations, confessions and prosecutions”
Women as weak and evil
1. "The gendered assumption that associated women with evil endured”
2. women as: “prey to the Devil’s wiles”
3. “female lust could undermine social and religious order… could destroy Christendom itself”
4. “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
1. "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
1. The act of fealty to Satan immediately transformed witchcraft into heres
2. "In destroying witches, the zealots were also destroying superstition & heresy”
3. "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
1. "Sorcery became politicised"
2. Larner:Politicians sought to exercise an increasing moral authority”
3. Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn: "accused Protestants of witch-craft in order to consolidate the return to Catholicism that he had engineered
Confused boundaries
1. “ecclesiastical boundaries, areas of legal jurisdiction, lordship and political boundaries rarely coincided, a confusion that left its mark on the witch hunt”
2. “The very fragmentation of political and legal authority in Germany made it possible for panics to get put of hand”
3. North and west Germany was “much larger, less fragmented political units than in the south and the west”
4. "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
1. "There was nothing amongst dominant ideas of the time which could erode the concept of the witch
Judicially and socially disorganised
1. “The very fragmentation of political and legal authority in Germany made it possible for panics to get put of hand”
2. There was nothing amongst dominant ideas of the time which could erode the concept of the witch”
3. 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”
4. Levack: "the most uncontrolled fashion were the courts concerned were both secular and local"
5. "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”
6. "Local determination to eliminate witchcraft was strengthened rather than weakened by the intervention of ‘higher’ judicial authorities

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