Often healers were seen as witches with magical powers to cure or poison people. In fact healers referred to themselves as having magical, beneficial powers. But treating someone for sickness was dangerous when life and death were seen as being God's will; treating humans was acting AGAINST God. The control of reproduction was evil, so midwives were particularly targetted by witchhunters.
Country healers used herbs in treatments, including birth control. In fact the hallucinogenic effects of some herbs may be the origin of flying witch stories. [Over time, medical treatments left the hands of country healers and was taken over by university men].
But the devastation caused by the 1348-9 Black Death, when 1/3 of Europe’s population died miserably, focused on witches as plague-spreaders. Strangers were accused of destroying the Christian kingdoms via magic and poison: Jews, lepers, Moslems, witches.
Englishman John Wycliffe (c1330-84) and his Lollards opposed the Pope's right to appoint men to church offices, not kings. In 1377 Wycliffe appeared before the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London; the Pope decreed against him and his teachings were condemned at Oxford. Yet Wycliffe continued to attack the church's beliefs and practices, encouraging the Peasants' Revolt 1381.
A religious reformer in Prague, Jan Hus (1369-1415), insisted that he was a loyal Catholic, but he and his team were called heretics. To heal this wound, Hus and 300 supporters were invited to Basel to present pleas to an Ecumenical Council in Constance 1414-8. After 2 months, moderates were absorbed back into the Catholic Church, whilst extremists remained outside.
The Ecumenical Council of 1431-7, in Basel cathedral, was called to re-deal with the Hussite challenge. But fear of heresy never died, so these heretics laid the ground work for what followed decades later. The church panicked; heresy and dissension were everywhere.
Earlier Christians believed that witches worked in isolated, small groups, misguided victims of pagan superstitions. But later C15th scholars theorised that witches created a Satanic Conspiracy. If all witches worked together in an organised, murderous way, they’d be deadly enemies.
Large scale trials were in Germany, Switzerland, Scotland and France. In the southern, solidly catholic countries, Italy and Spain, witch trials were relatively rare. Presumably this was because the Spanish Inquisition had been more committed to rooting out apostasy, heresy, crypto Judaism & Islam. The Spanish Inquisitors were sceptical of the witchcraft craze, and anyhow the Spanish Inquisition worked under the aegis of the Spanish crown, not the Catholic Church.
Centres of witch trials and murders
Press to see A for Arras and L for Lucerne
What were the critical witch documents? Thomas Aquinas (d1274) was too early but he laid the intellectual basis for witchcraft trials. Flagellation of Heretics (1458) was written by Dominican Nicholas Jacquier who proved that witches were evil and HAD to be defeated. Another book on approved torture methods was Formicarius c1476, by Dominican scholar Johannes Nider.
Then a Papal Bull where Pope Innocent VIII clearly recognised the Christian crisis and the highest authority in the Catholic Church thought the witchcraft threat was serious! In this 1484 Bull, papal licence was given to particular inquisitors eg Pope Innocent licensed friars-theologians Henricus Kramer and Jacobus Sprenger as Inquisitors.
Women weren’t targeted in Pope Innocent’s words. Only in the next book were women identified as morally vulnerable to Devil Seduction. Hammer of Witches/Malleus Maleficarum (1486) was written by the very German monks that Pope Innocent had licensed: Kramer & Sprenger! Should witches’ lives be spared, if they confessed? No, because of the Church's beliefs about the Devil's manipulations!
Malefice meant nothing could save the cursed women, not even their innocence. This was true even though it was the religious judges who’d ordered executions, while the secular authorities ensured the killings.
The late C15th document The Question of Witches discussed nocturnal flights where the Devil moved witches, passing them through doors which opened magically. Judges knew that because witches flew to meetings at night, and had to be back in bed before their spouses woke at dawn. So they travelled huge distances on flying broomsticks.
Witches on a broomstick and a stick,
pamphlet 1451, artsy
A familiar was a demon that assumed any animal shape eg toad, dog or black cat, and given to a witch as an attendant. The familiar was a grotesque creature of fantasy which subsisted by sucking blood from a witch's body. During her trial a witch was searched for teats by which she fed her familiar, proving her guilt!
Witches regularly went to orgiastic assemblies called Sabbaths. The witches flew in at night, usually meeting in a churchyard. The Sabbath was presided over by the Devil where the witches were bound to him in a pact. The Devil warned witches against reverting to Christianity and promising them a finer paradise than the Christian heaven. Then they all danced erotically in a circle, until the Devil copulated with each witch and they flew home again, without spouses ever knowing.
pamphlet 1451, artsy
A familiar was a demon that assumed any animal shape eg toad, dog or black cat, and given to a witch as an attendant. The familiar was a grotesque creature of fantasy which subsisted by sucking blood from a witch's body. During her trial a witch was searched for teats by which she fed her familiar, proving her guilt!
Witches regularly went to orgiastic assemblies called Sabbaths. The witches flew in at night, usually meeting in a churchyard. The Sabbath was presided over by the Devil where the witches were bound to him in a pact. The Devil warned witches against reverting to Christianity and promising them a finer paradise than the Christian heaven. Then they all danced erotically in a circle, until the Devil copulated with each witch and they flew home again, without spouses ever knowing.
1608, The Scotsman
Witchhunt madness could spread like fire. In Arras in Nth France, a Franciscan hermit who was about to be burned as a witch in 1460 was tortured to name all the people he’d seen at the witches’ Sabbath. Then the inquisitor of Arras, along with 2 important Dominicans, tortured the people named by the Franciscan. These people named further participants at the Sabbath, and so the burnings grew.
Eventually the Duke of Burgundy in Brussels demanded to see all trial evidence. The existence of the Sabbath was vigorously debated, but not even the church leaders were unanimous. So the Duke sent his deputy to be present at ALL tortures. Clearly the inconsistent sentences at these trials reflected the confusion in the judges’ minds, so the Duke commanded that all arrests and tortures immediately cease!
A separate issue was that witches had to kill unbaptised babies because the women were cannibals with an insatiable craving for young flesh. And witches needed young flesh to mix their magical potions, using it to help them fly and to remain silent under torture.
Anything could be attributed to maleficium: harmful storms, human and animal sickness, infertility and marital discord. Friction between village neighbours could lead to accusations of witchcraft eg a husband having an affair. But a witchcraft accusation was stronger IF the accused was a sharp-tongued older woman with unusual physical features. If she worked in midwifery, even more so!
By the 1490s peasants who suspected their neighbours of harming them found the authorities were prepared to hear complaints. The judges might have had the purest religious motives yet the claims made by the witchhunters and the extracted confessions had little to do with reality. Were those called witches the most marginal people of 1490s society: epileptics, psychotics, elderly widows, Cathars?
12 witnesses in Lucerne in 1502 reported accusations against a mother and daughter who were making the villagers and cows sick. That the mother was a midwife provided the neighbours with both motive and method. Lucerne Council had both women burned!
Frightening art emerged. See Albrecht Durer paintings eg Witch Riding a Ram Backwards c1493 & Four Sorcerers 1500. Durer’s apprentice, Hans Baldung Grien, depicted naked, plump, young women romping at sabbaths eg Departing for the Sabbath 1510 and Two Witches Tampering with Weather c1512. Hieronymous Bosch painted hell in Hay Wagon and Garden of Earthly Delights 1510. In the Temptation of St Anthony triptych 1500, the witchcraft was clear.
Witchhunt madness could spread like fire. In Arras in Nth France, a Franciscan hermit who was about to be burned as a witch in 1460 was tortured to name all the people he’d seen at the witches’ Sabbath. Then the inquisitor of Arras, along with 2 important Dominicans, tortured the people named by the Franciscan. These people named further participants at the Sabbath, and so the burnings grew.
Eventually the Duke of Burgundy in Brussels demanded to see all trial evidence. The existence of the Sabbath was vigorously debated, but not even the church leaders were unanimous. So the Duke sent his deputy to be present at ALL tortures. Clearly the inconsistent sentences at these trials reflected the confusion in the judges’ minds, so the Duke commanded that all arrests and tortures immediately cease!
A separate issue was that witches had to kill unbaptised babies because the women were cannibals with an insatiable craving for young flesh. And witches needed young flesh to mix their magical potions, using it to help them fly and to remain silent under torture.
Anything could be attributed to maleficium: harmful storms, human and animal sickness, infertility and marital discord. Friction between village neighbours could lead to accusations of witchcraft eg a husband having an affair. But a witchcraft accusation was stronger IF the accused was a sharp-tongued older woman with unusual physical features. If she worked in midwifery, even more so!
By the 1490s peasants who suspected their neighbours of harming them found the authorities were prepared to hear complaints. The judges might have had the purest religious motives yet the claims made by the witchhunters and the extracted confessions had little to do with reality. Were those called witches the most marginal people of 1490s society: epileptics, psychotics, elderly widows, Cathars?
12 witnesses in Lucerne in 1502 reported accusations against a mother and daughter who were making the villagers and cows sick. That the mother was a midwife provided the neighbours with both motive and method. Lucerne Council had both women burned!
Frightening art emerged. See Albrecht Durer paintings eg Witch Riding a Ram Backwards c1493 & Four Sorcerers 1500. Durer’s apprentice, Hans Baldung Grien, depicted naked, plump, young women romping at sabbaths eg Departing for the Sabbath 1510 and Two Witches Tampering with Weather c1512. Hieronymous Bosch painted hell in Hay Wagon and Garden of Earthly Delights 1510. In the Temptation of St Anthony triptych 1500, the witchcraft was clear.
History.com
Witch-hunts finally ended, not because of rejection of the supernatural, but because those involved doubted the court evidence. It was not decriminalised in England until 1736 and in Scotland until 1821.
Read Cohn, Norman Europe’s Inner Demons in Medieval Christendom. Chicago, 2000; and Reginald Scot Discovery of Witchcraft: Theories Behind Medieval Witch Hunts.
Read Cohn, Norman Europe’s Inner Demons in Medieval Christendom. Chicago, 2000; and Reginald Scot Discovery of Witchcraft: Theories Behind Medieval Witch Hunts.
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