Who Burned the Witches?
by Sandra Miesel – August 8, 2009 Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics. Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. (Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak.) Writing history that way was simple: Historians catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else’s religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government. The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” But a clamor of new voices has since reopened the controversy. Members of the growing neopagan revival – 200,000 strong in America today – claim witches burned during the great witch-hunt as their martyred for
There is an interesting article by Sandra Miesel on the blog EndrTimes which discusses the Inquisition, the “Burning Times” and the often exaggerated numbers of victims who perished during the “witch craze”. It provides a lot of historical context to the Inquisition and the Malleus’ roll in prosecuting those of accused of witchcraft. I highly recommend giving it a read. What follows are excerpts from the text of that article; Meanwhile, witch-hunters’ manuals multiplied, most notably the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1486. Its authors, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, were experienced Dominican inquisitors who had burned 48 witches in one diocese alone and had obtained a papal bull approving their mission. Reversing the old principle of the Canon Episcopi, Sprenger and Kraemer proclaimed that not believing in the reality of witches was heresy. Witches regularly did physical as well as spiritual harm to others, they wrote, and allegiance to the devil
For years, feminist scholars have argued that witch hunts were inspired by a reactionary, misogynistic church. But new scholarship, like Lyndal Roper’s “Witch Craze,” reveals that the real villains were the neighbors. – – – – – – – – – – – – By Laura Miller for Salon online Magazine Feb. 1, 2005 | It’s hard to imagine a more nightmarish experience than being at the center of a classic witch trial: accused of obscure misdeeds by your neighbors, defending yourself against the looking-glass-world logic of the authorities, suffering an escalating course of torture designed to “loosen your tongue” — and at the end of it all, the gallows, the block or the stake. Witch hunts lie at the dark heart of Western culture, so much so that they’ve become synonymous with any kind of vicious, dogged and irrational persecution, from McCarthyism to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s. No wonder the history of the original European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become p
