Images of witches have appeared in various forms throughout history—from evil, wart-nosed women huddling over a cauldron of boiling liquid to hag-faced, cackling beings riding through the sky on brooms wearing pointy hats.
In pop culture, the witch has been portrayed as a benevolent, nose-twitching suburban housewife; an awkward teenager learning to control her powers and a trio of charmed sisters battling the forces of evil. The real history of witches, however, is dark and, often for the witches, deadly. History Behind the Legend. Early witches were people who practiced witchcraft, using magic spells and calling upon spirits for help or to bring about change.
The witch roused Samuel, who then prophesied the death of Saul and his sons. Witch hysteria really took hold in Europe during the mids, when many accused witches confessed, often under torture, to a variety of wicked behaviors.
Within a century, witch hunts were common and most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted. Between the years and , up to 80, suspected witches were put to death in Europe.
Around 80 percent of them were women thought to be in cahoots with the Devil and filled with lust. Germany had the highest witchcraft execution rate, while Ireland had the lowest.
For more than years, the book sold more copies of any other book in Europe except the Bible. As witch hysteria decreased in Europe, it grew in the New World, which was reeling from wars between the French and British, a smallpox epidemic and the ongoing fear of attacks from neighboring native American tribes. The tense atmosphere was ripe for finding scapegoats.
Probably the best-known witch trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts in The Salem witch trials began when 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris and year-old Abigail Williams began suffering from fits, body contortions and uncontrolled screaming today, it is believed that they were poisoned by a fungus that caused spasms and delusions. Tituba confessed to being a witch and began accusing others of using black magic. On June 10, Bridget Bishop became the first accused witch to be put to death during the Salem Witch Trials when she was hanged at the Salem gallows.
Ultimately, around people were accused and 18 were put to death. In Virginia , people were less frantic about witches. In fact, in Lower Norfolk County in , a law was passed making it a crime to falsely accuse someone of witchcraft.
More than a hundred years later, she was exhumed by opportunistic Victorian gravediggers and her bones — unusually large for a woman living in the early 18th century — were later put on show at the Empire exhibition in Glasgow. For Marxist theorist Silvia Federici, author of the seminal Caliban and the Witch , the witch-hunts were the last volley in the defeat of artisan peasants and the rise of capitalist wage labour. Hartmut Hegeler, an activist German pastor, wants his nation to come to terms with the estimated 25, women murdered in its particularly bloody witch persecution.
We must recognise injustice in the past, otherwise we will not recognise injustice today. The clergy and intellectuals began to speak out against the trials from the late 16th century. Johannes Kepler in could only by the weight of his prestige keep his mother from being burned as a witch. The Salem witch trials were a brief outburst of witch hysteria in the New World at a time when the practice was already waning in Europe.
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. Barstow 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.
Ruiz spoke to an audience of more than eighty history department alumni and guests. Watch his lively and engaging presentation. Skip to main content. Chapter The Protestant Reformation. Search for:. The Witch Trials Between the 15th and 18th centuries in Europe, many people were accused of and put on trial for practicing witchcraft. Witch hunts tended to correspond with ecological disasters and crop failures, along with the accompanying problems of famine, inflation, and disease.
When the going got tough, witches made for a convenient scapegoat. But a recent economic study pdf , which will soon be published in the The Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society, proposes a different explanation for the witch hunts—one that can help us understand the way fears spread, and take hold, today. This alternative theory comes down to market competition — between churches.
The study views the Catholic and Protestant churches as competing firms, each in the business of supplying a valuable service: Salvation. As competition for religious market share heated up, churches expanded beyond the standard spiritual services and began focusing on salvation from devilry here on earth.
Among both Catholics and Protestants, witch-hunting became a prime service for attracting and appeasing the masses by demonstrating their Satan-fighting prowess. Russ, an economist at Bloom Intelligence, a big-data analysis firm. This concept goes a long way toward explaining not just why witch-hunting mania exploded in Europe, but also why it took hold where it did.
Namely, in Germany. Until the s, the Catholic Church had claimed a monopoly on religion. By nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the door of his local Catholic Church in , Luther was acting as an early consumer protection bureau of sorts, blasting the Catholic church for exploitative practices.
Per usual, the Pope declared Luther a heretic and banned the Ninety-five Theses. This decentralized structure made enforcing Catholicism and rooting out Protestantism much trickier. Plus, Luther had a hometown advantage. Before long, a slew of German princes had flipped over to Lutheranism—enough that, by , they were powerful enough to force the Emperor to decriminalize Lutheranism. The name of this agreement, the Peace of Augsburg, belies its result.
With Lutheranism now officially given the green light, violence broke out across the Holy Roman Empire, as princes fought to force their faith on neighboring territories. As a result, Germany became the bloodiest battleground in the Catholic-Protestant contest.
With Catholic-Protestant rivalries now out in the open, officials had to boost the appeal of their brand to religious consumers by providing more services.
0コメント