Witchcraft and witch hunting - Research Paper Example

I. Thesis Witchcraft along with witch hunting created a social and intellectual tradition in early modern Europe and there are persistent arguments concerning the extents of the invention of this tradition1. This historiography paper considers directions in the study of European witchcraft along with a review of the contributions of contemporary scholars. The final executions of individuals who were convicted as witches in Europe happened in the eighteenth century. In Great Britain, witchcraft stopped being an act punishable by law in 1735 after the Witchcraft Act, while in Germany, sorcery continued to be punished by the law well into the late eighteenth century. There have been reports of modern witch-hunts from sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea and India2 while official laws against witchcraft still exist in Saudi Arabia as well as Cameron3. Since the thirties, the phrase witch-hunt has been utilized emblematically in the description of activities by governments in an effort to seek and expose perceived enemies in most cases as a means of directing the opinion of the public through creating some level of moral panic. The importance of this historical aspect will also reflect the early modern Europe, which took place against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and religious transformation. In addition, the history of witchcraft and the witch craze is a topic that has fascinated the majority of people for centuries. Nonetheless, with the fascination of witch hunting, there has been certain distortions of the past, creating many different interpretations of the events which took place in Early Modern Europe. For example, after the Reformation in Europe, there were many religious wars and exploration. The importance of researching Early European Witch Hunts, will open new arenas to researchers with the discovery of how critically important it is to explore this new inter-disciplinary field, that has led many historians to acquire better data and not rely on old or outdated data to further research this topic. II. Current Historical Analysis in European witch-hunts For three centuries in early modern European history, diverse societies were consumed by a panic that over alleged witches in their midst. Witch-hunts in early modern Europe took place against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and religious transformation. In the1970s, “historians stopped relying on witch-hunting propaganda and began to base their theories on thorough, systematic studies of all the witch trials in a particular area. Many scholars have argued that it was the women who seemed most independent from patriarchal norms especially elderly ones living outside the parameters of the patriarchal family -- who were most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft”4. Although that was historian Jenny Gibbons perception of witch-hunting, historian Deborah Willis notes that "more polemical" feminist accounts "are likely to portray the witch as a heroic proto-feminist resisting patriarchal oppression and a wholly innocent victim of a male-authored reign of terror designed to keep women in their place”5. The history of witchcraft with gender as a central subject is only a few decades old, but there have been two major shifts since the 1970s. The first shift occurred when Christina Larner published Enemies of God, which seriously engaged with gender and shifted the central focus away from the woman’s holocaust and towards reasons why women were more susceptible to accusations. The next shift occurred with the introduction of psychoanalysis to the study of witchcraft history and the emphasis on examining trial confessions and depositions by academics such as Lynda Roper and Diane Purkiss. Although, many academics sources have discredited Margaret Murray’s claims, few studies on gender and witchcraft do not mention Murray’s, even if simply to criticize her argument which I find interesting. Dr. Margaret Murray was an Egyptologist who studied witchcraft from an anthropological perspective and theorized that European witches were the remains of a pre-Christian fertility cult. Murray’s book, Witch-cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, suggests that witches were members of a pre-Christian agrarian cult which influenced the theory that the witch hunt was the Church’s effort completely to eradicate the pagan religion and its worshippers. Murray was not the first to propose that witches were worshippers of an organized religion. Several historians opposed Murray’s study, but it gained a lot of popularity among feminists when it was first reprinted in 1952. Murray also had a significant impact on Wicca which emerged in the early twentieth century and gained popularity in the 1950s. In addition, Norman Cohn, among historians of witchcraft persecutions, discredited Murray for manipulating her sources in order to support her thesis. Early feminists such as Mary Daly accepted Murray’s argument for the ancient fertility cult, which they understood to be a goddess, female-centric religion. Although Daly found Murray’s study convincing, her main criticism of Murray was that much of her evidence came from witch-trial confessions, which Daly believed to be lacking in credibility because they were given under torture. In addition, throughout the years, several historians have discovered the importance of newer data in the Early European witch-hunting. In the early twentieth century, “the prominent historian Jacob Hansen included large sections of Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langons work in his compendium on medieval witchcraft. Later historians cited Hansens work by closely examining Lamothe-Langons credentials. Non-academic writers cited the writers who cited Hansen, and thus Lamothe-Langons dramatic French trials became a standard part of the popular view of the Great Hunt”6. In addition, historian’s such as Gibbons allusion the Reformation reminds us that the clash between institutional Catholicism and emergent Protestantism contributed to the collapse of a stable world-view, which eventually led to panic and hyper-suspiciousness on the part of Catholic and Protestant authorities alike7. Historian Nachman Ben-Yehuda, states "This helps us understand why only the most rapidly developing countries, where the Catholic Church was weakest, experienced a virulent witch craze (i.e., Germany, France, Switzerland). Where the Catholic Church was strong (Spain, Italy, Portugal) hardly any witch craze occurred ... the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its very existence and legitimacy" (Ben-Yehuda 1980, 15-23). Historian and author Ben-Yehuda adds that "Protestants persecuted witches with almost the same zeal as the Catholics ... Protestants and Catholics alike felt threatened" (Ben-Yehuda 1980, 15-23). “It is notable that the witch-hunts lost most of their momentum with the end of the Thirty Years War (Peace of Westphalia, 1648), which gave official recognition and legitimacy to religious pluralism."8Furthermore, scholars have much more information compared from two decades ago. Witchcraft studies has also become an inter-disciplinary field. “Once the domain of historians alone, it now attracts anthropologists and sociologists who offer radically new interpretations of the Great Hunt”9. III. Application of Historical Lenses: This is a widespread fact that many historians disagree so markedly about the causes of witch hunting in early modern Europe. Thus, in this historiography paper historians’ disagreements about the causes of the witch hunt vary accordingly to the specific research done by different lenses historian’s perspectives. There are several versions concerning the origin of mass processes regarding the witch-craze. According to one historical aspect, witch hunting was only a continuation of the destruction done by heresies. The majority of historians argue that the Inquisition perceived witches as members of an organized satanic organization. Refuting this fact, historians admitted that the Inquisition’s goal was not to destroy the witches. It pursued only people who were suspected of witchcraft, and if they were involved in some heretical movements. The era of persecutions for European witchcraft, which was roughly between the 15th and 17th centuries, has continued to be a recurrent subject in academic and popular curiosity10. Nonetheless, in the last few decades, an inflow of archival research along with the original analysis has led to the opening of an essentially new chapter in the manner scholars treat this phenomenon. Additionally, the continuing project in regards to the study of witchcraft has become a sub-field of early modern history while increasingly being problematized and re-examined through a number of traditional understandings of the European witch-hunt. A key aspect concerns the culpability of learned demonological theory in the records against people who have been suspected to be witches. Typified by the extremely misogynistic Malleus Maleficarum, discourse contributes to a model of persecutions of European witches, which continues to dominate the popular imagination, one whereby literature that is favored by the church served as a motivational force for centralized campaigns of oppression that claimed millions of lives of women11. These clichés continue to represent body counts as well as gender specificity in regards to persecution of witchcraft with the majority of scholars now citing more practical estimates of about fifty thousand women killed and men accounting for between twenty to twenty-five percent of this figure. Nonetheless, this idea of a massive pan-European witch-hunt entrenched in the machinations of the church has attracted criticism for other reasons including being unduly influenced by the writings deeply invested minorities. The elite early contemporary theorists and supporters of witchcraft persecution, included Kramer and Bodin, could have wished that their work would create a wider sweep of the continent12, but since these texts were in broad circulation, their influence in the average trial cannot be established definitively13 . Robin Briggs, who is a witchcraft historian, focuses on this aspect and notes that it is imperative to avoid confusing the rhetoric of justifications with actual motives of action. Briggs goes further to criticize what he considers as a propensity to give broadly exaggerated importance to philosophies of demonologists while giving them casual roles that they initially did not have. Scholars have increased their wealth of evidence past the learnt expositions and this has led to an array of new methods that emphasize on suspecting and accusing witchcraft as sociological occurrences that can be attributed to doubts, hardships as well as neighborhood conflicts that are difficult to resolve which characterized the society in early modern villages. Historians like Wolfgang Behringer among others have even started, including non-European witchcraft in their analysis and this emphasizes the obvious ubiquity in pre-industrial cultures as far as the belief in Maleficium is concerned14. Instead of mere fatalities of ecclesiastical fantasies, the average European witch developing from this new research is an individual who had commonly suspected his or her neighbors for a long time prior to judicial processes being set in motion. Although some scholars, like Anne Llewellyn Barstow, continued to assert the central significance of the original question of whether or not the witch hunt was a deliberate woman hunt, most historians began to rethink the question while still acknowledging the importance of including gender in the analysis of witch hunts. The new question that historians began to ask was why women were more susceptible than men to witchcraft accusations and what does that increased susceptibility suggest about the position or indicated role of women in sixteenth and seventeenth-century European society . Numerous areas in the study of history disregard the exceptional role of women, but the study of witchcraft in contemporary England is not among them15. After Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, numerous historians have directed a lot of effort towards the establishment of women16 as the only objects of witchcraft accusations17. In actual fact, this form of objectification is so entrenched in the contemporary historiography that the word witch became synonymous with the female gender. The people who incontestably support this form of archetype discount the warning given by Karl Popper that in most cases humanity is not aware that it operates with hypotheses and this makes them mistake hypothetical representations for concrete things. Therefore, historians should continue questioning assumptions and notions concerning the past so that historical models being executed do not develop into supposed truths. There is a propensity in the woman archetype for the application of contemporary concepts and outlooks of sexuality and gender to the early contemporary period. The church considered witchcraft as superstition that undermined its teachings and therefore the church as an institution, and as actual dealings with the devil that also undermined the church. The assumptions were that women were actually weaker compared to men and therefore more vulnerable to superstition or the approaches of the devil. In Europe, this notion of the weakness of women was connected to the story of how Eve was tempted by the Devil, but the story cannot be blamed for the number of women who faced accusations since even in other cultures, accusations of witchcraft have been predominantly directed at women. Sections of writers support the argument, with considerable evidence, that most of the women who faced accusations were single women or widows. These single women and widows were considered as delaying the full inheritance of property for the male heirs. On the other hand, Dower rights that were designed to safeguard widows also meant that women who were vulnerable at some point in life had some control over property, and women did not usually exercise this. Accusations of witchcraft were the easiest ways of removing this obstacle and it was true that most of the women who faced accusations and were executed were among the poorest and extremely marginal in the society as this increased their predisposition to accusations. IV. Source Analysis The first comparatively abundant literature in regards to demonology and witchcraft came after the persecutions era in the sixteenth century. Its concepts continued to be active in reprints as well as new editions of personal works of 15th and early 16th centuries and not based in the circulation of already printed edition of classical literature such as the works of Apuleius and Horace18. However, from mid-sixteenth century, a subsequent era of theorizing, which either attacks or asserts the theory or real prosecutions also came to be. Among the examples is the edition done by Eymeric in 1578 with the most controversial work19, which was done by Jean Bodin, De la demonomanie des sorciers, in 1580 being some form of partial response to doubtful approaches to specific occurrences of prosecution for witchcraft like De praestigiis daemonum by Johann Weyer in 156320. It appears that Weyer served as a court physician of the Duke of Julich-Berg as well as Cleves between 1550s and 1560s where he explained his concessions of witchcraft to the pathology of female senility while at the same time denying the reality of pact and arguing there was nothing like being bewitched21. Conversely, wicked magicians were a different matter for Weyer and considered them in the same round manner that any other writer on witchcraft would condemn the witches. Weyer’s clemency for those accused to be witches along with the whole idea of witchcraft that had developed from early 15th century and his inquisitive and unreliable condemnation of magicians got the attention of those who defended the doctrine including Jean Bodin. Furthermore, the classic evocation of this deranged misogyny is the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic inquisition authorities in 1485-8622. (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, 438-39). According to Ben-Yehuda "The importance of the Malleus cannot be overstated” (Ben-Yehuda, "The European Witch Craze," 9). Malleus Maleficarum “became the most influential and widely used handbook on witchcraft. ... Its enormous influence was practically guaranteed, owing not only to its authoritative appearance but also to its extremely wide distribution. It was one of the first books to be printed on the recently invented printing press and appeared in no fewer than 20 editions. ... The moral backing had been provided for a horrible, endless march of suffering, torture, and human disgrace inflicted on thousands of women”. (Ben-Yehuda 1980, "The European Witch Craze," 11.) Demonological classics as well as witchcraft theory followed Bodin’s work in the works of Martin Del Rio in 1608 and those of Pierre de Lancre in 161223. The writers of classical demonological works were typically either clerical and theologians or nonspiritual jurists; however, there were also significant contributions from natural philosophers and physicians. A consciousness of the expert interests of the writers of these works, together with the connection of specific works to specific occurrences of prosecution is required so that their significance can be evaluated. One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a womans chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.) These comments and data serve as a reminder that gendercide against women may be initiated and perpetrated, substantially or predominantly, by "other women," just as gendercide against men is carried out overwhelmingly by "other men." The case of female infanticide can also be cited in this regard. Patriarchal power, however, was ubiquitous at all later stages of witchcraft proceedings. Men were exclusively the prosecutors, judges, jailers, and executioners -- of women and men alike -- in Europes emerging modern legal system. Despite the significant contributions these historians have made to the study of gender history, they fail to give any substantial attention to the investigation of the persecution of male witches (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History). Recent, historians such as Lara Apps, Andrew Gow, and Rolf Schulte have been giving more attention to the male witches as a subject of witchcraft studies from the gender history perspective. Even during the early modern period, people stereotypically thought of the witch as a female figure. The investigation of the male witch is likely to continue, as much of witchcraft gender history does not yet offer convincing evidence to answer questions of whether or not the male witch was regarded as effeminate and fit into the popular fantasy of the witch figure, or whether the male witch, like the female witch, was viewed as a threat to domestic arrangements. V. Conclusion More research is underway on the witchcraft phenomenon and there is high likelihood that more attention-grabbing and unusual suppositions will be imminent. Until this happens, sufficient explanations are hypothesized to make these inexplicable and weird occurrences of the 16th and 17th century. The prosecution of witchcraft ended as suddenly as it started with various nations instituting legislation against persecution of witches. A number of historians have started assuming that the witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played critical roles towards the decline on the status of women. Women faced accusations, torture and execution for the first time because they were female. Women had to learn how to live with fears that were conceivably bigger that the present fear of rapes and assault. When the European men were becoming colonizers and imperialists through forceful capture and control of millions of indigenous people, the women suffered a number of the same ramifications. Also, would it be possible to draw a conclusion that the “witch hunt” is not just a fanatic passion of church leaders to cleanse the world from heretics. Without a doubt the topic of witch-hunting has been a complicated scholarly dispute among several historians. But, in reality what cause the rise of the “witch hunts”? Would it be the overpowering basis of the Bible, drawing a minor and disadvantaged position of women and supporting such positions, as well as the circumstances of the public environment at this stage of its development or the church, which has a powerful reputation in the community? The witch-hunting crisis spread to all spheres of life, which then prolonged the war. The development of a large-scale hunt associated with the activities of the church, which recognized witchcraft, and openly fought with it, all this was reinforced by the numerous Pope’s instructions and their positive attitude to the most ardent activists of the Inquisition. All this destruction led to the fact that the “witch hunt” has swept across Europe, collecting more and more details about serving the devil or was it religious or women persecutions? Bibliography Broedel, Hans Peter. 2003. The "Malleus Maleficorum" And The Construction of Wichcraft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burns, William E. 2003. Witch Hunts In Europe And America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Davidson, Jane P. 2012. Early Modern Supernatural. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger. Edwards, Kathryn A. 2002. Werewolves, Witches, And Wandering Spirits. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. Gibbons, Jenny. “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt”. 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