What are the social and religious factors that explain the harsh responses to witchcraft?

Study of Fifteenth Century Criminal Records Reveals the Origins of the Witch-Hunt

A dark but iconic moment in U.S. history, the Salem witch trials of 1692, are taught in American schools to educate students about religious extremism and the judicial process. But the origins of witchcraft prosecution can be traced back to Europe centuries prior, when pre-Reformation courts showtime induced criminals to acknowledge to heresy and witchcraft to exert social control through displays of harsh and often tearing punishment.

Laura Stokes is an Assistant Professor in Stanford'due south Department of History, whose work has mostly focused on the origins and prosecution of witchcraft in fifteenth century Europe. Her Ph.D. dissertation, which chronicled the rise of such persecution also as its linkages to developments in judicial torture, has now been revised into a volume, Demons of Urban Reform: The Rise of Witchcraft Persecution, 1430-1530.

Focusing on case studies from the European cities of Basel, Lucerne, and Nuremburg, Stokes' piece of work examines the legal underpinnings of witchcraft persecution as well as the religious and esoteric influences that fueled information technology. Considering how and why the three cities in question took different paths with regard to witchcraft persecution, Stokes highlights how the concept of witchcraft as a legally condemnable criminal offense emerged from the intersection of faith and indigenous conventionalities in magic, superstition and necromancy. Her piece of work sheds light on how social and religious forces are capable of breeding persecution, informing how we should consider the persecution of witches as it exists today in diverse parts of the world.

How did you lot become interested in the history of witchcraft prosecution?

LS: I beginning encountered the history of witchcraft equally an undergraduate at Reed College, as I searched for a topic for my senior thesis. I was interested in the social dynamics of persecution and in deviance as a constructed category. That thesis turned out to be the opening of a door rather than a finished project in itself. Witchcraft persecution is a very complex historical phenomenon, the understanding of which requires i to be versed in three forms of constabulary (both in theory and practice), theology and religious history, equally well every bit a wide array of political and social phenomena. After ten more years of report, I was ready to write a book on the subject area.

What is significant about the stardom y'all make between "witchcraft" and "diabolic witchcraft?"

LS: Diabolic witchcraft is a specific, historical concept. It is the one that drove the early on modern European witch hunts, and as such is justly infamous. Witchcraft, when broadly defined, is a concept which appears in nearly every human being society. Witches are still persecuted in the globe today, oftentimes with extreme violence. If historians are to take annihilation to offering to this pressing human rights issue, they need to find a mode to brand the specific experience of Europeans pertinent to the rest of the world. Viewing the European phenomenon with a broader lens is part of this procedure, and it turns out also to enrich our understanding of European witchcraft. The assumption that diabolism was the defining feature of early on mod witchcraft blinds us to the not-diabolic, ethnic concepts of witchcraft that lay at the roots of the persecutions.

Lucerne, Basel and Nuremberg serve as the instance studies in Demons of Urban Reform. What led to you to focus on those particular cities?

LS: The book deals with an early on phase of European witchcraft prosecution and, for this reason, about of the potential case studies come from the Swiss region. The phenomenon of the diabolic witch and the early modern practice of witchcraft prosecution originated in the region of what is today western Switzerland around the twelvemonth 1430. From that geographical origin, the beliefs and practices that fueled both prosecutions and witch hunts spread most effectively from 1 region to side by side regions. Although rumors of the "new sect of the witches" appears to have inspired isolated witch hunts in such far flung places every bit Arras in northern France, nigh of the fifteenth century witch trials took identify in a fairly narrow geographical region.

Witch-hunts did non be in Europe earlier the mid-fifteenth century. What conditions fostered the concept of the witch-chase?

LS: Over the course of about two centuries, European clergy went from condemning witchcraft beliefs as "superstitious" to sharing them and elaborating them into the concept of the diabolic witch. Why did this happen? In part, it was due to the influence of magic within clerical circles, where esoteric cognition derived in role from the Arabic earth was cobbled together with quasi-magical elements of pop religious do to create the fine art of necromancy.

The popularity of necromancy among the narrow upper crust of learned men contributed to their belief that magic was likely to be real, and provided the textile for fears of secret assail. These fears were especially stiff amongst the high clergy during the fraught years of the nifty Western schism, when two popes vied for control of Europe. The schism was resolved in the early fifteenth century, but left a profound dispute over the seat of power within the church building. Meanwhile, the development of the medieval inquisitions had led to the creation of guides for the discovery and persecution of heresy. These guides, in the manner of medieval religious writing, aimed to systematize knowledge and to explain how patently quite disparate elements fit within a unmarried, coherent Christian worldview. In and then doing, the manual writers merged together heresy, village magic, popular fears of witchcraft, and the demonic elements of clerical necromancy.

What new insight have yous gleaned in because the persecution of witchcraft from a legal, rather than religious or purely social, standpoint?

LS: Persecution is a phenomenon which can take place inside religious, social, or legal spheres, equally well as across them. Prosecution is the detail prerogative of the legal appliance. By examining the persecution of witches through the lens of legal prosecution and within the context of prosecution generally, my work highlights the persecutory nature of early modernistic criminal prosecution.

It is the similarities, not the differences, between witch trials and other criminal trials that are most instructive in this regard. This is of importance to historians of witchcraft, who accept often examined the witch hunts as an exception inside early modernistic criminal justice. It is of importance to contemporary observers of police force every bit well, because it was in combating that persecutory tendency of early modern justice that the modernistic legal protections of the private arose. Given that our modern organization is also prone to lapse into persecutory paths, information technology is useful to know how the persecutory tendencies of the onetime arrangement were facilitated, that we might better fight their intrusion into our own criminal justice organization.

You describe witchcraft prosecution every bit ebbing and flowing during the menstruation of 1430 to 1530. Is this prove of the importance of social control in pre-Reformation cities?

LS: The ebb and flow of witchcraft prosecution is not so much evidence for the importance of social control, every bit information technology is bear witness that both social control and witchcraft prosecution were driven past the same forces.  That social command was of import to pre-Reformation cities has been long understood by historians of the urban communes, and indeed is seen every bit one reason that early Reformation innovations in social control were largely urban experiments.

What is interesting nigh the relationship between social control and witchcraft prosecution in my work is that they follow the same trends, that both appear to be expressions of a zeal for reform within the ruling circles of the cities. The waxing and waning of that zeal had many causes, some of which are lost to the historian. Amongst these is without a doubt some measure of the natural flux of generations, by which young people oft take more in common (in their temperament) with their grandparents than with their parents. Ane crusade which I have been able to trace in the book is the process by which a unmarried, spectacular upshot can crusade a social panic, resulting in a renewed zeal for moral and social control.

The book opens with a summary of a trial that took place in Lucerne, where you depict how a secular, urban court had a man who was accused of theft tortured until he likewise confessed to a charge of diabolic witchcraft. Could you lot aggrandize on this apparent paradox between a secular court and manufactured heresy?

LS: This is one of the puzzles that caught my fascination early on in this project. I had fabricated the assumption that heresy prosecution was the prerogative of the church, at least until the Reformation. Yet although the example which opens the book is remarkable in many ways, it is far from unique in this attribute. These urban courts did non accept many practical limitations on their prerogative to prosecute misconduct, and they often crossed the line into matters which are usually seen as falling within the jurisdiction of the medieval church courts: spousal relationship, sexual misbehavior, blasphemy, and even false belief.

This line crossing is of interest in part because it could, though surprisingly only occasionally, be a cause of straight conflict between the urban government and the local bishop. It is as well of involvement considering it follows quite closely the contour of ebb and flow discussed above. This sort of instance was a manifestation of the same secular championing of moral and social control that and then characterized Reformed cities a few decades subsequently.

What kinds of primary resources informed your agreement that many admissions to witchcraft were induced by torture?

LS: The details of criminal process are difficult to tease out from fifteenth-century sources. In each city I had quite different sources, each with its own set of flaws. For Basel I had details of the costs for interrogation and torture in the expense records, but shifts in recording practices elide these for decades at a time. For Lucerne, I have even fewer direct references to torture, merely these are programmatic: they are statements about the outlay for the personal and process of torture generally and make clear that, at a certain signal, torture became a regular part of criminal interrogations.

The best records exist for Nuremberg, where the detailed city council minutes describe every unmarried case in which torture was directed or allowed, albeit quite tersely. I have used the records from Nuremberg to analyze the transformation of torture practise across the late fifteenth century.

You mention that while ii of your city instance studies - Lucerne and Basel - shared similar ethnic ideas of witchcraft in the fifteenth century, the following years would see witch-hunts and persecution become much more than pronounced in the sometime. How did this come up to exist?

LS: In the almost bones analysis, two primal elements are necessary for witchcraft prosecution: accusations and a legal system willing to pursue them. The shared indigenous ideas of witchcraft in Lucerne and Basel gave rise to accusations in both places. People believed in the existence of wolf-riding, storm-raising, milk-stealing, child-killing witches, and that conventionalities led to specific accusations of witchcraft.

In Lucerne, the urban authorities accustomed and pursued the accusations of witchcraft brought by the populace. They clearly shared the beliefs of their rural subjects and urban neighbors. In Basel, past contrast, urban regime had long been resistant to prosecuting witchcraft. They suspected their rural subjects were rather likewise credulous, and they ultimately labeled witchcraft accusations superstition. Several factors influenced this difference between the two urban elites.

1 was the relative social proximity of the elites in Lucerne to the residue of the populace: the council was large and inclusive, comprising almost a tenth of the urban population during the fifteenth-century witchcraft persecutions. The Basel council was smaller and more than exclusive. Although the guilds were represented in the council, in do councilors were drawn from a narrow circle of elite families. Some other factor which should non be forgotten is the presence of a young and vigorous humanist university in Basel, founded in the fifteenth century. The men who ruled Basel did not share the witchcraft fears of their subjects, and although they pursued witchcraft accusations when it was politically expedient to them, they ceased to pursue them once their power was sufficient to brand it unnecessary.

Immigrants and foreigners in Lucerne were often the target of accusations of witchcraft; was this insider/outsider dynamic in relation to witchcraft, characteristic of Lucerne but? Equally a ways of control, how did information technology gain prominence and credence and how has it developed since?

LS: The best evidence on late medieval and early modern communities generally leads me to suspect that the sort of insider/outsider dynamic which tin can exist demonstrated in Lucerne was a common occurrence throughout Europe. This does not mean, of course, that all witchcraft suspects were outsiders. It does mean that a failure to integrate fully into a new community was a potentially deadly problem.

Social integration, whether one was built-in into a given community or arrived at that place as an immigrant, was absolutely vital to early mod people. The mechanisms of social control were fundamentally a means of ensuring such integration, and were often targeted at eliminating foreign modes of apparel, play, trip the light fantastic, and mores.

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Source: https://shc.stanford.edu/news/research/historian-investigates-history-witchcraft-prosecution

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