Witch Hunts

The term witch hunt refers to the accusation, interrogation, trial, and punishment of people suspected of using witchcraft to harm people, livestock, or crops. Witch hunts are also known as witch trials. In present-day Korean, the term is also widely used figuratively for a situation in which a group of people turns on someone without justification.

Background

The Old Testament forbids divination and sorcery (Deuteronomy 18:10–11). Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," is reported to have been frequently cited in later centuries as a basis for punishing witches. For a long time, however, the medieval Catholic Church did not regard witches as actually existing. It held that belief in witches was a superstition arising in dreams or hallucinations through the deception of the devil. Punishment of those who believed in magic is said to have been limited to public shaming. This attitude changed significantly in the late fifteenth century with the appearance of an official papal document and a manual for witch trials.

Development

• 1484: On December 5, Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull (a formal papal document) Summis desiderantes affectibus. The bull acknowledged the existence of witches and sorcerers in the German lands. It also confirmed, in the pope's name, the authority of the inquisitors (church judges who investigated charges of heresy) Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger to investigate them. This took place some thirty years before the Reformation.
• 1486: The Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches") was published in Speyer, Germany. It was written by Kramer, with Sprenger listed as coauthor. The book is divided into three parts: it refutes clergy who denied the existence of witches, describes the kinds of witchcraft and the means of countering them, and advises judges on how to interrogate and punish witches. The book subsequently came to serve as a manual of sorts for witch trials. The word maleficarum in the title is a Latin feminine form, and the title is therefore regarded as revealing from the outset the authors' view that women were more susceptible to temptation.
• c. 1560 – c. 1630: This was the period with the greatest number of accusations and trials. It coincided with the post-Reformation era, when Catholic and Protestant regions were each consolidating their confessional identities and religious conflict was at its most intense. Witch trials were held in both Catholic and Protestant regions, and scholars differ on which side was more severe. Some studies also indicate that in Spain, where the Inquisition was powerful, executions were not as numerous as in other countries.

Consequences and Influence

At one time, claims that millions of people had been executed were widely circulated. Since the 1970s, however, as research based on trial records has accumulated, the estimates have fallen considerably. Today scholars generally estimate that roughly 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed in Europe between 1450 and 1750. Most of those accused are known to have been women. The witch hunts have since endured in memory as a classic example of mass hysteria in which fear and prejudice lead to the victimization of innocent people.

Assessment

Researchers do not attribute the witch hunts to a single cause. Instead, they regard them as the result of several factors acting together: religious conflict, social instability such as crop failures and cold weather, judicial procedures that used torture to extract confessions, and accusations among neighbors. One interpretation holds that in late fifteenth-century Germany, as the climate grew colder and crop failures and famine followed, people blamed witches.

Some critical accounts portray the witch hunts as a systematic slaughter of women by Christian Europe. More recent research, by contrast, places the number of victims lower and views the witch hunts as involving both Catholics and Protestants, as well as both ecclesiastical and secular courts. For this reason, some scholars have pointed out that accounts attributing responsibility solely to a single confession or institution are inconsistent with current scholarship.