Euro Civilization: The Phenomenon of the Witch-Craze - Essay Example

Exam 2 How could you explain the phenomenon of the witch-craze and what does it tell us about the relationship between elite and popular culture, the confessional state, and the breakdown of community in early Modern Europe The so-called "Witch Craze" in Europe lasted about two hundred years from 1450-1650. While it involved a specific belief that all magic involved a pact with the Devil, and the subsequent legal sanctions became more and more severe, the Witch Craze also reflected wider trends within society. A number of the elite were effected by the spread in the idea that witchcraft was in fact involved in any form of magic. Thus Pope Boniface VIII was tried posthumously for apostasy, murder and sodomy. The Templars were tried as Devil-Invoking heretics. Anyone who could actually read so-called witchcraft texts was often suspected of being in league with the Devil merely because they were literate. Thus the elite were in some way condemned by the spread of a popular culture of fear regarding witchcraft. The "Caroline Code", the basic law code of the Holy Roman Empire (1532) imposed heavy penalties for witchcraft. As society became more literate (due mostly to the invention of the Printing Press in the 1440s), increasing numbers of books and tracts fuelled the witch fears. More people were becoming literate, books were cheaper to print and thus became available in greater numbers and were within reach of more of the population. Witchcraft was thus more likely to occur within the logic of the Witch Craze mindset. A sense of community, both within the wide context of countries and within local areas, was starting to break down because of the growth in a peculiar kind of paranoia. In 1630 the nuns of Loudun provided an interesting view of the Witch Craze and the extremes to which it could go. The nuns conspired to accuse Father Urbain Grandier of witchcraft by faking symptoms of possession and torment. They feigned convulsions, rolled and gibbered on the ground, and accused Grandier of indecencies. Grandier was convicted and burned at the stake. But after his death, and thus after the plot had succeeded, the symptoms of the nuns only grew worse, and they became more and more sexual in nature. This shows the degree of mania and insanity present in such witch trials. Community had often broken down into a series of groups that were always suspicious of others and afraid of being accused themselves. The breakdown of community reflected the wide rift that occurred during the period between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics often accused Protestants of witchcraft, such as when the Jesuits pursued them in Austria for a hundred years after 1560. Protestants in turn did the same, such as occurred during Henry VIII's reign in England in the 1500's. Thus "witch" was used convenient label that could be used as a tool against one's enemies, political, cultural or personal. 2) Language itself-as I have so often mentioned- is a primary source of information about its author's attitudes towards phenomenon described. Do a literary deconstruction of Las Casas' language by making two lists of metaphors- one for Spaniards, the other for Indians- as these appear in his text. It is the tension between theses two sets of images which creates the dynamism in this text. Pay special attention to gender as you do this. Who is masculine, who is feminine and what are the implications thereof Consider the following section from Los Casas' description of the Spanish treatment of the Indians in Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies (1542): Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during tla! past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons. Breaking this section down into the various imagery (both metaphors and similes) used to describe the Spanish and the Indians. The Spanish are described as "like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days". The Spaniards are described as masculine animals that are acting in a purely instinctive, violent manner. He continues with a repetition of the original image, but then continuing with the very human characteristics of what the Spanish have done. Thus "like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples" as the Spanish move across the countryside. In contrast the Indians are seen as a "sheepfold" and as "meek outcasts". These are feminine images and suggest, while the Los Casas is sympathetic to their plight, that he sees them as somehow helpless in the fact of the Spanish onslaught. The animal imagery is eventually reversed as he continues to describe how the Spaniards treat the Indians: And also, those lands are so rich and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, that our Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say "than beasts" for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares. So now the Indians have become "beasts" and "excrement", at least as a way of criticizing the fact that this was the way that the Spanish treated them. The language of Los Casas constantly flows between several different intentions: he wants to describe the sadistic cruelty of the Spanish, but ends up describing the Indians in a terrible way to show how the Spanish treated them. At times the reader might see the Indians in the same terms such as the effectiveness of the language. Read More