Magic, Witchcraft and the Witch Craze

Two Threats to Authority

  • Magic and skepticism posed threats to authority.
  • Magic: operational view of the world, sympathy/antipathy, power of words.
  • Religious ritual as ceremonial magic, natural magic.

Europe in the Era of the Reformation

  • Magic and witchcraft were significant.
  • 15th-17th centuries: Magic as a learned activity.
  • Witch: someone with innate powers.
  • From the 15th century onwards: new model of witchcraft.
  • Magic vs. witchcraft.

Magic

  • Natural magic (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa): Philosophy of Natural Magic, pp. 38-9
  • Magic and humanism: Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
    • Translations of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts.
    • Recovery of the mystical writings of Hermes Trismegistus.
    • Cabala: from Jewish scholars in Spain to the rest of Europe.
  • Paracelsus (1493-1541)
  • Popular magic: fusion of Christian, pre-Christian, and non-Christian ideas.
  • Theologians begin to identify folk magic with demonic magic.
  • Church ambivalent on natural magic.

The Witch-Hunts

  • Dark magic, or harmful witchcraft, or maleficium.
  • The new witch: predominantly female, member of heretical sect, pact with the devil.
  • Image originated in Swiss witch trials in the early 15th C
  • Demonology: Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy as with a two-edged sword)
    • Science of demons and witches.
    • Written by Dominican monk Heinrich Kramer.
    • Offered a new image of the demonic witch.
    • Encouraged secular judges to try for witchcraft.
    • Emphasised connections between witchcraft and women.
  • Witch trials increase after 1560
  • Reformation and Counter-Reformation: the desire for orthodoxy.
  • Witch trials 1400s-1750: c. 100,000 individuals accused; c. 40,000 executed
  • No difference between Catholic and Protestant witch hunts

Explaining Witch-Hunts

1) Context of the late medieval and early modern Christian Church
2) Authority of the church and of the state combined into the “confessional state” (Historian Christina Larner)
3) Popular and folk magic become demonic magic
4) Charity model of witchcraft accusations: historians Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas
5) Connections between witchcraft accusations and women
6) Historian Margaret King connects witchcraft accusations to larger numbers of women entering the mainstream of intellectual discourse

The Decline of Magic and Witchcraft

  • Local critics:
    • Local Protestant universities: divine providence, not witchcraft
    • Skeptics question accuracy of biblical passages on witchcraft
  • Parlement of Paris:
    • The need for new standards of proof and hard evidence