European Reformations and Witch Hunts – Christian Misogyny & Religious Madness

Introduction

 Prior to the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church’s position on witchcraft, as enunciated within the Canon Episcopi, was that it was a relatively harmless illusion, incapable of directly affecting natural phenomena.[1]  Witchcraft was still, according to the widespread belief underpinning the Canon Episcopi, an evil offense worthy of admonition and exile, but the later belief, that it posed an immediate threat to natural phenomena, had yet to arise amongst the superstitious crowds of Christendom.[2]  The former position was eventually overturned, and in the first few decades of the fourteenth century, largely as a result of Pope John XXII’s issuance of his Super Illius Specula, which authorized the Inquisition to vigorously prosecute witches [3] – witches, predominantly female,[4] were hunted down, beheaded, burned, drowned, strangled, and slaughtered in the thousands.[5] This barbarism aimed primarily against women reached a fever-pitch within the bloody Thirty Years War (1618-1648) between Catholic and Protestant Christians,[6] and it is estimated that by the end of this religious war, as many as half a million people had been executed on charges of witchcraft.[7]

This essay will briefly examine and discuss a number of ways in which both the Protestant Reformation (1517)[8] and the Catholic-Counter Reformation (1545-1648)[9] encouraged witch hunting in Europe. It will be argued that although these Reformations did contribute largely to the increase in both the severity and zeal with which witch hunts were conducted during these centuries, the primary culprits were religion and superstitious ignorance, just as they continue to co-conspire to commit the same atrocities in overtly religious and superstitious countries like modern Saudi Arabia.[10]  It will be argued that the spike in witch hunts during the period in question can be accounted for by placing religion at the foundation of the examination, upon which various social, political and possibly even meteorological contributing factors may be seen as exacerbating influences.


 Academic Approaches

 Numerous scholars from a variety of academic fields have offered various explanations for the increased intensity of witch hunting from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in Europe.  Scholars such as Foucault (1961), Szasz (1970), and Senter (1947), for example, have produced a variety of hypotheses based upon a psychological-psychiatric model, arguing, variously, that this phenomenon can be explained by examining the mental states of the perpetrators and/or the victims.  Trevor-Roper (1967), a scholar with one of the most eclectic approaches to the examination of witch hunting in Europe during these centuries, employs a scapegoat hypothesis, which holds that the predominantly female victims of witch hunts were mere scapegoats for the strife faced by Europeans during the period under examination. Other scholars (White, 1913; Thorndike, 1941; Rattansi, 1972; Ben, 1971; Hansen 1975) have argued that the increase in witch hunting can be explained by a superstitious and ignorant misunderstanding of a pre-scientific revolution, which saw some of the first modern attempts at chemistry and other sciences that appeared to a religious and credulous population as magical witchcraft. Further still, other scholars (Nelson, 1975; Currie, 1968; Shoeneman, 1977) have sought to put forth social, political and personal gain models, arguing that the ‘witch craze’ received so much attention that some saw it as a personally and politically profitable avenue for gain, thereby adding impetus to the already fervent persecution of women and men accused of witchcraft.   Finally, a small handful of scholars, amongst whom are included Lewis (1971), Trevor-Roper (1967) and Nelson (1975), argue that the inferior status of women was a causal factor in the fervent witch hunts of early modern Europe.

There may be elements of truth in each of the approaches evinced above, as well as those omitted, but the answer may also lie in a more eclectic approach, one that incorporates not only the spur given to the witch hunts by both the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, but by all of the factors mentioned above, which, to varying degrees, may have watered the seeds of religious ignorance in a more general sense.  Historian Keith Thomas concurs with this proposition, saying: ‘But religious beliefs as such were a necessary precondition of the prosecutions’.[11]


 The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony.[12] One of the principle doctrines of Luther’s Reformation was Sola Scriptura (‘by scripture alone’), which held that the Bible was the sole and supreme authority on all matters pertaining to doctrine and practice.[13]  This principle acted as a driving force which resulted in Bibles being printed in local vernaculars and as an eventual result, increased literacy rates across Europe.[14] This increase in literacy, coupled with the prior advent of the Gutenberg Printing Press in the 1450s,[15] meant that literature of all kinds could be widely disseminated across the European continent.[16] The proliferation of this new media technology meant that treatises which encouraged the hunting and prosecution of witches, such as Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (Eng. Hammer of the Witches), published in 1487,[17] were, for the first time, being widely published, and the increased propagation of such literature may have also contributed to the general belief amongst a relatively newly literate laity that witchcraft was becoming an increasingly widespread problem.  This proposition ties in with the psychological-psychiatric model, for if such was in fact the case, then the influence of such media over the mentality of an already superstitious and fearful mass of believers would have probably been quite significant.


 Luther’s German Translation of Exodus 22:18 – “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”.

The majority of the victims of the witch hunts in Europe were women.  According to Barstow: ‘women were overwhelmingly victimized: on average 80% of those accused and 85% of those killed were female’.[18]

It is no secret that the Bible itself is a wellspring of religious misogyny, from Genesis to Paul’s Epistles – but on top of the pre-existing misogyny that formed the foundation of such gender-focussed persecutions, Luther’s German translation of the Bible, specifically, his translation of Exodus 22:18, was probably another factor which contributed to the zealous witch hunts launched largely against women.  The source of Luther’s translation is found amongst a textual tradition known to biblical scholars as the ‘Textus Receptus’, and this textual tradition forms the foundation of the King James Bible.[19] This dubious textual tradition, which, with regards to the Hebrew Bible, drew upon the Greek Septuagint,[20] translated the Hebrew noun כשף [21] (‘kashaph’ – Eng. ‘evil doer’/ ‘sorceress’? The precise meaning is unknown)[22] in Exodus 22:18 to ‘witch’/‘sorceress’ (Gk. ‘pharmakis’).[23] The King James Version of Exodus 22:18 was thus rendered: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.[24]

Luther, following the textual tradition that almost a century later would serve as the foundation of the King James Bible, translated the Hebrew ‘kashaph’ from the Greek ‘pharmakis’ into the German ‘zauberninnen’ (Eng. witches).[25]  It is, therefore, reasonable to argue that the Luther’s German translation of ‘pharmakis’ into the local vernacular of the people was a protagonist in the largely female-focussed witch hunts of early modern Europe. If such happens to have been the case, then it goes some way to vindicating the hypothesis of scholars who have sought to attribute the inferior status of women as a causal factor in the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. Add to this translation the newly contrived doctrine of ‘Sola Scriptura’, and the conditions would have been ripe for the persecution of witches, for the Bible, the perceived supreme authority of Christian doctrine and practice commanded such barbarism in the local vernacular of the people.


 Heresy and Witches

 The word ‘heresy’ stems from the Greek αἵρεσις (‘hairesis’),[26] and it originally connoted a self-chosen, or freely adopted opinion.[27] The meaning of the word was first co-opted and arguably perverted by early Christians.[28]  From approximately the second century onward, heresy came to connote wrong belief, and within the exclusivist theology of the Christian religion, this was associated with concept that the Devil is a deceiver and causes people to fall prey to wrong beliefs, or heresies.[29]

The schismatic Reformations in Europe made heresy a prevalent and widely discussed issue, playing a pivotal role in the Thirty Years War.[30] That heresy came to the surface of the consciousness of Christians in Europe at this time is a matter of little dispute, and that witchcraft was branded heretical is also a fact supported by primary historical sources of the time – such as the aforementioned Malleus Maleficarum, an excerpt of which reads:

And those who try to induce others to perform such evil wonders are called witches. And because infidelity in a person who has been baptized is technically called heresy, therefore such persons are plainly heretics.[31]


Further, Monter comments:

‘Continental witch-trials were almost invariably heresy trials as well as trials for malign sorcery, which makes them different both from the English and from virtually all of the non-European societies which have been studied by anthropologists’.[32]


This association of witchcraft with heresy in Europe may have led to a rise in witch hunts due to the boiling accusations of heresy that were being launched at members of competing confessions of Christianity, and it may well be the case that “witches” were not so much a façade as Trevor-Roper has suggested,[33] but both, or either, an external social or internal psychological drive for consistency in an environment fuelled with a feverish religious zeal to prosecute and persecute “heretical enemies” of the “one true” confession of faith, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or “witches”.  It is of interest here to note that in areas unaffected by Protestantism, like Spain and Italy – that is to say – in areas unaffected by the heresy-focusing dissonance between Protestantism and Catholicism, witch hunts and trials were far less frequent.[34]  To put it in simpler terms, the public obsession with heresy inspired by the split in Christendom could have inspired authorities and the public at large alike to strive for consistency by persecuting heresy wherever they found it, and if the proliferation of literature on witches brought this form of heresy to the public’s attention, then it is only natural that this heresy would have received widespread attention at a time when heresy was in the forefront of people’s minds.


 The Catholic Reformation in Bamberg

 The Catholic Reformation, sometimes referred to as the Counter-Reformation, [35] was a comprehensive initiative by the Catholic Church to ebb the tide of Protestantism which was sweeping across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[36] It began with the Council of Trent in 1545 and ended with the close of the Thirty Years War in 1648.[37]  Friedrich Forner has been held to be the architect of the Catholic Reformation in Bramberg, Germany.[38] His literary accomplishments were vast, but his Panoplia Armaturae Dei (Eng. Panoply of the Armor of God probably received the most attention.[39] Panoplia Armaturae Dei was a series of 35 sermons published in 1626 primarily concerned with the threats posed to Catholics by witchcraft and magic.[40] Forner viewed the proliferation of witchcraft to be the Devil’s last desperate attempt to destroy the Catholic faith, considering that the evil heresy of Calvinism had been largely defeated in the first stages of the Thirty Years War.[41] Thus, Forner’s perception of witchcraft was heavily tied into his eschatological beliefs about the ‘End Times’, which was, for obvious reasons, prevalent during the period of the Thirty Years War.[42] Clark notes:

‘Forner listed the thirteen sins that unleashed demons and witches on errant Catholics (Sermons XII-XIII), and the twenty-four pieces of ‘armour’ that would protect them (Sermons XIV-XXXV)’.[43]


Forner’s sermons were being read by preachers in Sunday and feast-day addresses, and within approximately a year of their publication a third wave of witch hunts, trials and executions ensured in Bamberg.[44] The persecutions of [predominantly] women believed to have been witches in Bamberg were described by Trevor-Roper as having been the worst and most brutal of their time.[45]

The religious insanity in Bamberg was so extreme that it inspired Prince-Bishop Johann Georg Fuchs Von Dornheim to oversee the construction of a “witch prison”, within which was a torture chamber adorned with the relevant biblical passages.[46]  The religious authorities and the faithful and frightened laity in Bamberg were so completely seized by this superstitious frenzy that they executed judges they believed were too lenient on “witches” and even the mayor of Bamberg, Johannes Junius, who was put to death on charges of witchcraft.[47]  This panic, it may be intimated, was probably further intensified by the works of the Froner, who has been variously dubbed the ‘”spiritus rector” of the witch hunts, a “ferocious witch-damner,” and the “mortal enemy of heretics and sorcerers”’[48], and who was also one of the primary protagonists of the Catholic Reformation in Germany.


 Climate Change and Witch Hunts

One historical hypothesis that may possibly mitigate, to some degree, the influence of the European Reformations on the increased severity and intensity of witch hunts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is the ‘Little Ice Age Theory’.  Proponents of this theory argue that climate change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced meteorological phenomena that had never been witnessed by the people living at the time [49] – like the River Thames in London freezing over between the years 1558-1603,[50] along with the freezing over of Alpine Lakes.[51] On top of these unusual weather phenomena, the climate change is alleged to have occasioned relatively poor, and occasionally completely barren, harvests.[52] These rare climate conditions, scholars like Pfister and Behringer argue, coincided with the previously established belief that witches could affect weather. Behringer comments:

‘The resumption of witch-hunting in the 1560s was accompanied by a debate on weather-making, because this was the most important charge against suspected witches’.[53] Further, Brooke, employing the scapegoat hypothesis, states:

Emerging literatures are demonstrating that not only grain prices fluctuated with climate, leading to subsistence crises, but that early modern Europeans found a scapegoat for their troubles in the form of “weather-making witch”: the great witch hunts of the early modern period exactly bracket the second stage of the Little Ice Age.[54]


Conclusion

Whether the weather changes assisted in an increase in witch hunts in the early modern period or whether it was the result of a number of ideological, political, or social factors associated with the European Reformations, one thing seems abundantly clear: religion was not merely a catalyst, it was the primary perpetrator. Where might Europeans have drawn their delusional paranoia regarding the perceived threat of the supernatural forces guided by witches if not from religion?  Who were the primary propagators of the religious belief in the threat of the demonic and evil forces possessed by witches? They were the clergy, the scholars of the Church, like Kramer, Sprenger, and Froner – men who in their capacity as leaders of the Church spread the fear of witches amongst a religious population who were trained from birth to believe without question.  Voltaire once quipped; ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities’, and such a poignant statement appears entirely applicable to the witch craze of the early modern period in Europe. Thus, although there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, created an environment in which heresy took centre stage, and that Luther’s doctrine of ‘Sola Scriptura’ led to dogmatic interpretations of the Bible, which further exacerbated the problem – the culprit upon whose shoulders rests the largest portion of blame for the increase in brutal and predominantly misogynistic witch hunts from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, is the superstitious ignorance inherent within religion itself.



End Notes
  1. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca, 3rd , New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2008, p. 50.
  2. Canon Episcopi, cited at: http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/witch/canon.html, accessed on 2nd April, 2016.
  3. Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present, Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007, p. 122.
  4. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, London: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1995, p. 23.
  5. Nacham Ben-Yahuda, Problems Inherent in Socio-Historical Approaches to the European Witch Craze,  ‘Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion’, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), 328.
  6. Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, p.787.
  7. Ibid.
  8. John M. Murin (ed.), Paul E. Johnson (ed.), James M. McPherson (ed.), Gary Gerstle (ed.), Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), Norman L. Rosenberg (ed.), Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, Belmont: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2009, p. 32.
  9. Lawrence G. Lovasik, St Joseph Church History, New Jersey: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation, 1990, p. 133.
  10. Terrence D. Miethe & Hong Lu, Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 63.
  11. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, London: Penguin Books, 1971, cited at: https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=Ww1uMe7Dj2MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Religion+and+the+Decline+of+Magic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwijsODw7-zLAhUHj5QKHRUTDFoQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=necessary%20precondition&f=false, accessed on 1st April, 2016.
  12. Simon McCarthy-Jones, Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 40.
  13. Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2001, pp. 85-86; Mark Greengrass, The Theology and Liturgy of Reformed Christianity, cited in: R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 6: Reform and Expansion – 1500-1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 104.
  14. Peter Matheson (ed.), Denis R. Janz (ed.), A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. 5: Reformation Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010, p. 134.
  15. Joseph Needham and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 1.1: Paper and Printing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 316.
  16. Candice Goucher and Linda Walton, World History: Journeys from Past to Present, New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 238.
  17. Donald S. Swenson, Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction, 2nd Ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, p. 250.
  18. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, London: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1995, p. 23.
  19. Stanley E. Porter, Language and Translations of the New Testament, cited in: J.W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 197.
  20. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1993, p. 5.
  21. ‘Kashaph’ – Hebrew: Bible Hub, cited at: http://biblehub.com/hebrew/3784.htm, accessed on 2nd April, 2016.
  22. Ibid.
  23. M.W. Knox, The Medea of Euripides, cited in: T.F. Gould and C.J. Herington, Yale Classical Studies, Vol. XXV: Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 214; John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 133.
  24. The Bible, Exodus 22:18, KJV.
  25. John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 133.
  26. ‘Heresy’, Greek, Bible Hub, cited at: http://biblehub.com/greek/139.htm, accessed on 3rd of April, 2016.
  27. Ibid.
  28. See Irenaeus’ Against the Heresies, dated to around 180 CE: Margaret M. Mitchell (ed.) and Frances M. Young, The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 1: Origins to Constantine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 419.
  29. Ben Witherington III, The New Cambridge Bible Commentary: Revelation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 247; Claire Taylor, Heresy in Medieval France: Dualism in Aquitaine and the Agenais, 100-1249, Suffolk: Cromwell Press, 2005, p. 81.
  30. Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 26.
  31. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, (trans. Montague Summers), New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007, pp. 2-3.
  32.   William Monter, The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects,  ‘The Journal of Interdisciplinary History’, Vol. 2, No. 4, Psychoanalysis and History (Spring, 1972), p. 445.
  33. Peter T. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ, Witch Trials, p. 12, cited at: http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/witch_trials.pdf, accessed on 1st April, 2016.
  34. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, London: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1995, p. 94.
  35. The Counter-Reformation, Encyclopedia Britannica, cited at: http://global.britannica.com/event/Counter-Reformation, accessed on 1st April, 2016.
  36. Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 1.
  37. Lawrence G. Lovasik, St Joseph Church History, New Jersey: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation, 1990, p. 133.
  38. William Bradford Smith, Friedrich Förner, the Catholic Reformation, and Witch-Hunting in Bamberg, ‘The Sixteenth Century Journal’, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), p. 115.
  39. Ibid. pp. 115-116.
  40. William Bradford Smith, Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia 1300-1630, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2008, p. 173.
  41. Ibid. p. 126.
  42. Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007, p. 225; Ken Kurihara, Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany, London: Routledge, 2016, p. 157.
  43. Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 454.
  44. Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, William Monter, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, London: The Athlone Press, 2002, p. 27.
  45. Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, Reformation, and Social Change, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1967, p. 146.
  46. William E. Burns, Witch Hunts in Europe and America, London: Greenwood Press, 2003, p. 17; Jeffrey B. Russell, Brooks Alexander, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans, 2nd Ed., London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 86.
  47. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca, 3rd , New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2008, pp. 187-188.
  48. Bradford Smith, Friedrich Förner, the Catholic Reformation, and Witch-Hunting in Bamberg, ‘The Sixteenth Century Journal’, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), p. 115.
  49. Wolfgang Behringer, Climate Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities, ‘Climate Change Journal’, 43 (1999), Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 335.
  50. Mark Levene (ed.), Rob Johnson (ed.) and Penny Roberts (ed.), History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure, Tirril Hall: Humanities E-Books, LLP, 2010, p. 69.
  51. Ibid.
  52. Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller, Munchen: Polity Press, 2007, p. 132.
  53. Wolfgang Behringer, Climate Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities, ‘Climate Change Journal’, 43 (1999), Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 339.
  54. John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 451.


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