Talk:Witch trials in the early modern period

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Witch's tests
Please see new article Witch's tests. I've had a go at tidying, but it needs a better title and more comprehensive content. Thanks, Jonathan Oldenbuck (talk) 15:09, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * turned into a redirect. --dab (𒁳) 09:50, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

"Sexual humiliation torture was used, such as forced sitting on red-hot stools with the claim that the accused woman would not perform sexual acts with the devil."

A red-hot stool? What is that? It is very abstract.

In the Execution section: "The frequent use of "swimming" to test innocence or guilt means that an unknown number also drowned prior to conviction."

What is the source of that? People didn't drown - they had a rope attached and dragged up from the water. It a myth.

Fightdane (talk) 18:22, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Article focus
This article is about the witch trials in the Early Modern period. Yes, there can be some amount of background material, but for some reason, this article seems to attract giant excurses into barely related topics. This is not the European witchcraft article. Nor is it the Witch-cult hypothesis article. It does not deal with witchcraft as such, but with the very specific topic of the persecution of supposed practitioners of witchcraft between 1450 and 1750. Fringe speculations about pagan remnants in European folk magic are entirely misplaced here, because such pagan remnants would be, well, remnants, exhibiting continuity throughout the Middle Ages, where the witch-hunts which are the subject of this article are a new development which arises more or less suddenly in the late 15th century. Whatever the role of pagan continuity in European folk magic, it has nothing to do with what this article is about. This is what the European witchcraft article is supposed to address. --dab (𒁳) 09:50, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree. Also this article is almost identical to the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Early_Modern_Europe. Should the articles be combined and this article deleted? --ZARguy (talk) 06:47, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Ok this is just weird. I made the comment above after following this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_million_witches and arriving at a page almost similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Early_Modern_Europe but with a few extra paragraphs and one or two deleted paragraphs, but not the same article. After posting this comment and going back to the article it is the same article. Following the original link also brings me to this article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Early_Modern_Europe). So confusing. --ZARguy (talk) 06:53, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Early_Modern_Europe) is a redirect to Witch trials in THE (my upper case)Early Modern Period, so hopefully they should be the same. Why someone has done a redirect from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_million_witches to this page I am not sure as nine million witches is not, I would have thought, a common search question. Edmund Patrick –  confer 07:09, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * But I actually saw another page. I remember just quickly comparing the index there was a paragraph 1.1 to 1.4 and 2.1 to 2.4 in the article that I saw, while this one has paragraphs 1.1 to 1.2 and 2.1 to 2.5. It's not really important, I just don't understand it. Could it be there was a page on witch trials in early modern europe which was substantially similar to this page and that it was deleted or redirected right after I followed the link? Sorry, I'm new to Wikipedia and still learning the ropes. --41.135.74.160 (talk) 07:19, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

the point is that I created a nine million witches article at one point to cover this misconception, but later decided it shouldn't be a standalone topic but merged into the history of the reception of the European witch-hunts.

As this article now stands, it is bizarre. It is supposed to be about a serious historical topic, yet it prefers to dwell on fringe issues like Shamanism, witch-cult, and feminist and neopagan ideology. These are all valid topics, but they do not belong here. We have a fair witch-cult hypothesis article. It is enough to make brief mention of it here. It is also rather telling that the author pushing this material is more interested in discussing Shamanism on this page than in sitting down and writing an actual page dedicated to European Shamanism.

I honestly tried to be accommodating towards Midnightblueowl's blatant, single-tack neo-witch perspective. But enough is enough. The attempts to turn all articles remotely related to this editor's topic of interest into apologist pieces defending their personal convictions is not acceptable. Yes, there are a number of neopagan scholars who think the witch-hunts were somehow sparked by a medieval witch-cult. This is a fringe theory, and it has its own article. This article, however, is about a serious and notable topic of early modern European social and legal history, and it must not be side-tracked by such marginalia. Let alone be turned into a propaganda piece advocating them. --dab (𒁳) 11:55, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

proving innocence
it seems a little bit one-sided to only have a paragraph about the way witch-craft was 'proven' (by torture and such) and not have a corresponding paragraph about the way the accused could prove their innocence. i'm thinking along the lines of: -weighing a witch to see if she wasn't unusually light (thanks to lacking a soul) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater -if a witch didn't float she would be pulled back in (rather than drown, as is the popular conception) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal#Ordeal_of_water -etc

there's mention in the text that a large number of witch-trials did not end in a conviction. so it would be nice to have some elaboration on that: how did those accused managed to get acquitted? Selena1981 (talk) 23:46, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

The Bull of Innocent VIII
In Beginning of the witch hunts during the 15th century, the "Witch-Bull of 1484" is interpreted as refering amongst other things to abortion, and contraception. Whereas there is no reason to dispute the first point, the second is not so straightforward ( as "contraception" in its modern sense does not involve "hindering men from performing the sexual act"). That part should be explicited, rewritten, or otherwise, the bull contradicted. --Askedonty (talk) 20:25, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Date range for the trials
Someone has listed Thurston 2001 p. 1 as the source for the date range of the trials. I own Thurston 2001 (Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose). There is nothing on page one about the date range for the trials. Was this an honest mistake, or did someone just fake a source citation in order to make their information "pass muster," here? This is the kind of situation which makes Wikipedia seem like a fairly untrustworthy source. Someone needs to cite a good source for this.

Athana (talk) 16:17, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Math Mistake or Mis-translation?
"Based on records of the 29 year period 1569 to 1589"

1589 – 1569 = 20

BijouTrouvaille (talk) 16:18, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Gunnar Heinsohn
It seems to me that giving an extended paragraph to the Heinsohn theory is completely overblown WP:UNDUE. Also, this Heinsohn thing is incorrectly filed under "gender conflict", while the gist here is "macroeconomic" and misogyny doesn't enter into it.

If I understand correctly, this is a "proposal" concocted in 1982 (but still elaborated upon in 2004) to the effect of "an interpretation of the European witch-hunts of early modern times as pro-natalist re-population policy of the then dominant Catholic Church after the population losses the black death had caused". In essence,
 * "let's repopulate Europe by killing off all our midwives; towards this end, we will come up with a giant conspiracy theory that throws basic Church tenets on heresy and witchcraft out of the window. We will do this so we can colonise the New World and trigger a population explosion that will us allow to kickstart the Industrial Revolution. We lay the theological groundwork for our nefarious plan now, AD 1450, because as teh Church we like to play the long game, and we don't care if it doesn't come to fruition for another century or two, especially as we have no other more urgent crisis (such as antipopery or reformers) on our hands at all."

If the argument is that this was an incidential consequence of the witchhunts it would still be kooky (let's see some kind of solid evidence that killing all midwives will in fact lead to increased population growth because clearly, their contribution towards contraception far outweighs their prevention of complications at birth and infant mortality, and allowing that, let's see some evidence that the 100 or so people killed every year in all of Europe made any appreciable dent in the population of midwives). But the suggestion that it was all a "pro-natalist" conspiracy is so far around the bend that I doubt we should mention this at all.

Fwiiw, Heinsohn is a complete kook, who rejected Velikovsky's chronology because it wasn't drastic enough and came up with a better version arguing that the clueless Egyptologists are off by fully two millennia of "phantom history". He is obsessed with genocide, birth control and population explosion, and he simply used the witch-hunts as a quarry for "support" of his overarching theory he was going to argue anyway.

What I am saying is that the Heinsohn theory is so far into WP:FRINGE territory that it should at the most be briefly mentioned as an alternative view without significant support, but more likely it would be more reasonable to just drop it entirely. --dab (𒁳) 08:56, 15 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I agree, a brief mention is sufficient. Prior to your edit it was massively WP:UNDUE.--  SabreBD  (talk ) 09:11, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

New edits
Hello everyone, I've just added some edits about the Little Ice Age's effects on the witch trials in the "Causes of the trials" section under the subsection "Socio-political turmoil". Please let me know if there's anything I should clarify or expand on. Also, I'm afraid I might have been a little argumentative with my edition of the last sentence, "Miguel (2003) argues that witch killings may be a process of eliminating the financial burdens of a family or society via elimination of the older women that need to be fed, and an increase in unmarried women would enhance this process." I added the second clause of the sentence in order to clarify why Miguel's argument is important to the rest of the paragraph, but that addition might be considered an argument. Let me know what you think; I could get rid of it and just leave the Miguel (2003) argument and hope that readers make the connection themselves. Maggiep (talk) 17:16, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Seems acceptable to me though I have yet to read the referenced work. Edmund Patrick – confer 17:25, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Class Conflict
The theory proposed and quoted by Marvin Harris isn't correctly referenced (Harris, 205) After obtaining this book for essay research, this quote was nowhere to be found on this page. Would like a correction as this quote would be useful for my college essayWitch_trials_in_the_early_modern_periodMarmalademoll (talk) 00:30, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Update: I've since obtained the correct reference for this quote. I will edit it now for other usersMarmalademoll (talk) 00:55, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Messy, trying to organize chronologically
This article is messy, messy. Some of this will always be the case due to messy over-large subject, but nonetheless there is (was) an incredible amount of repetition within (tried to fix a lot). I am attempting to re-organize along these lines: 1. Chronological, especially tracking trials. There are great records saved and available free online by Limborch (1692) HC Lea, Charles Molinier (1880), Joseph Hansen (1901), GL Burr. We could first try to list these chronologically with a brief description, and well before we get to all the quarreling between the various opinionated writers of 20th c. monographs. 2. Little or no "folklore" speculation on this page please. The trials were organized, conducted, and recorded by the powerful first two "estates of the realm"-- the church and the state. With power should come accountability, at least from the historian. These trial records began being treated as something of a gold mine by folklorists during the last quarter of the 20th c. hoping to uncover the views of the "illiterate masses," but that is not really the title/subject of this article. It seems folklorists should have a separate article for their careful extrapolations (we hope) regarding an understanding of the popular view of witchcraft as it seems to emerge from those who were tortured or felt compelled to bear witness against their neighbors. Jakob Grimm did us all a wonderful service sitting down in front of female storytellers and listening and writing down their stories. Those are great tales and other than the occasional appearance of a witch, they seem to bear little resemblance to the unimaginative sadism of H Kramer or the other Dominican Inquisitors. We also don't have any way of dating the origins of the volk tales (hence the folklorist interest in the trials?)-- for all we know they could have originated in the 18th c. But Grimm's main argument with the so-called "rationalist" WG Soldan seems to have been the question whether the various magic elements originated on German soil, or showed an ancient Greek and Roman influence. Grimm was a German nationalist who wanted to claim these as homegrown. Lewismr (talk) 21:15, 17 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Messages here go to the bottom. Your rather bold edit left the article in strange formatting. I'd go slowly and provide edit summaries for small steps. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:25, 17 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Please: bold the topic in the article, and restore some more lead. Better edit signed in. The regular look for a new message at the bottom, - took me a while to find your post. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:10, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Malleus Maleficarum
"Malleus Maleficarum was printed 13 times between 1486–1520, and—following a very curious 50-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant Reformation—it was printed again another 16 times, following the Council of Trent (1574–1669)" This sentence is entirely structured to insinuate that Malleus Maleficarum was influential amongst Catholics and rejected by Protestants. Why mention the Council of Trent (and dated wrong too)? There were plenty of things going on in these years that the resurgence of printing could be said to 'follow', so unless the Council of Trent has some relevance by making some comment on the publication there is no need to mention it. What is more directly worth mentioning, however, is the fact that the Church banned the book in 1490 and the Spanish Inquisition disputed it in 1538. 82.25.113.167 (talk) 09:14, 12 May 2020 (UTC)


 * You don't agree that it is "curious" that, of 29 printings, there was a 50 year pause in the middle that occurred 1520-1574? And you sincerely feel there were "plenty of things things going on" at that time equally significant? Wow. Ok. Well, it would seem to me that influence from the Malleus Maleficarum fairly closely correlates to times and places where it was re-printed most often, along the Rhine, exactly where we find the vast burnings and highest fatalities for those accused of witchcraft, including in many cases Protestant regions, although in this particular geographic area there was about a 2x higher fatality rate for Catholic regions (see 3rd chapter of HC Erik Midelfort's study from 1971).


 * You misunderstand the date range (tho perhaps that is my fault for not structuring it more clearly?) which refers to printings of the Malleus, not the Council of Trent. From what I've been able to determine, the latter council has no mention at all of witchcraft. Silence is significant, of course, and is not the same as denouncing the theology forwarded by H. Kramer, or re-affirming the canon Episcopi that H. Kramer and other Dominicans attempted to overturn. But I think you and I are in agreement that the theological shift attempted by H. Kramer and other Dominican Inquisitors always remained CONTESTED and, some papal bulls and zealots notwithstanding, was never fully embraced by the Catholic church.


 * Protestant vs Catholic is a seductive binary but it is not nearly detailed enough to explain the course that witchcraft prosecutions took and we also cannot shy away from stating things plainly due to concern of offending one side or the other.
 * Those executed (80% women +/-) do not have institutional representation and that is all the more reason we need to work hard to represent them and get things right.
 * Lewismr (talk) 15:45, 12 May 2020 (UTC)


 * With regard to the Rhineland, I want to mention Jesuit Friedrich Spee who seems to me the most significant Catholic insider view and it is noticeable that by that time/place (Cologne/1631) Spee was writing, he seems to be reticent to criticize the theological views forwarded by H. Kramer and instead mostly focused on problems with procedure. This can be contrasted to some of the other critics from Protestant regions during the Counter Reformation who could more directly denounce Kramer's theology, for instance Weyer (Lutheran, see letter to J Brenz) and Reginald Scot (cites Calvin) + other skeptics among the English and Dutch (Calvinists). The latter were most often sparring by name with writers from Catholic regions like Bodin and N. Remi. But then, to further complicate things, Scotland also has to be reckoned with. Lewismr (talk) 16:31, 12 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your response, I appreciate hearing more behind the reasons for your choice of wording. Indeed, I quite agree that 'Protestant vs Catholic is a seductive binary' and my reason for commenting was exactly because I felt like this binary was being created implicitly in your original wording. It certainly sounds like that wasn't your intention, so I'm glad that the current edit rectifies that to a degree. What's more, you rightly point out that my edit didn't so much remove that 'seductive binary' but attempted too much to flip it the other way. As you point out, correlating the pause in printing with the Protestant Reformations is perfectly valid, and I ought not to have questioned that specifically. I think it's more that the word 'curious' here seems unnecessarily vague and 'leading' for an encyclopedia. That the pause is related to the reformations is clear enough, but I think what I was trying to say is that religious upheaval of this time was so vast and varied that there are multiple possible factors that could contribute to and explain this correlation (all probably linking to the reformations for sure).


 * The greater issue was that the previous wording dated the entire second print run in relation to the Council of Trent which had the potential danger of overstating the role of the Council as the reason behind the resurgence in printing. Its silence might well be significant, but that alone doesn't explain the resurgence. I prefer the new wording you have employed which benefits from mentioning the council's silence (beforehand it was unclear why it was being mentioning at all).


 * Basically, the hint of insinuation that the word 'curious' brought combined with the unexplained mention of the Council of Trent had suggested to me an underlying anti-Catholic/pro-Protestant interpretation, whether this was intended or not. Representing those victims without institutional representation is absolutely an important consideration in the study of witchcraft, but it is not an excuse to be careless towards other historical bias' (which, I think, is exactly your point anyway). The new edit as a result of this discussion, I hope you'll agree, seems clearer and much-improved (your edit that is, not my one before that!) Thank you! 82.25.113.167 (talk) 11:48, 24 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much for your wonderful reply and for your prompting and helpful suggestions to improve this article. It makes me very happy that you and I have found agreement regarding such a complex subject.  I certainly hope you will continue to work as an editor on this topic and many other related topics here! Lewismr (talk) 16:27, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

AfD for Similar Page
Recently a page, Witch-hunts Around the World, was created that seems redundant to this article. An AfD discussion is being held here: View AfD. AnandaBliss (talk) 23:03, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Argumentation conflict
«Miguel (2003) argues that witch killings may be a process of eliminating the financial burdens of a family or society, via elimination of the older women that need to be fed,[83] and an increase in unmarried women would enhance this process.»

Is there a problem in argumentation by Miguel (2003) when a claim is made that, on the one hand, older women were being eliminated, so as to eliminate financial burdens, while on the other hand, an increase in the number of unmarried women enhances the process. The issue at hand is that the word "enhance" detracts from comprehension, perhaps "contribute to" would be better. 2001:14BA:2BFD:2100:5149:6421:B344:521B (talk) 08:24, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Pendle Witch trials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendle_witches — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:6B05:2301:C95C:6431:694A:850C (talk) 20:26, 8 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm not convinced that the Pendle witch trials warrant their own section; if they are to be singled out, would it be preferable to put them in a subheading under 'Peak of the trials: 1560-1630'? Dibleopard (talk) 15:57, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree, I do not understand why the need for this section. If anything would it led to others needing to be included. Edmund Patrick – confer 16:54, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

14th c. section should be removed
One document included a word that centuries later would be on the title of an unrelated book about witch hunts? Really? IMO, it's not relevant and should be removed.

Given that it was 14th c., it was most certainly a sentence for heresy, not the "witchcraft" as it was understood later, in times of witch trials. 176.214.206.199 (talk) 16:37, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Malleus Maleficarum: Banned in 1490 claim?
Under the 1486: Malleus Maleficarum section (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period#1486:_Malleus_Maleficarum) we can find the following claim:

"The theological views espoused by Kramer were influential but remained contested, and an early edition of the book even appeared on a list of those banned by the Church in 1490.[36]"

This claim is not substantiated; neither by the reference cited, nor by the Malleus Maleficarum article, nor by any other source I can find. In fact, even the claim that a list of books banned by the Church seems unsubstantiated as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum wasn't started until 1560, with some early lists starting to show up in 1527. Although the Church undoubtedly did have prohibitions prior to that, I can find no references to official lists, or records that the Malleus Maleficarum ever featured on one of them.

The cited source, footnote [36] references: Jolly; Raudvere; Peters, eds. (2002). Witchcraft and magic in Europe: the Middle Ages. p. 241.

Here is a link to a preview of the book, with the cited page included: https://books.google.com.fj/books?id=5f5GcD1FwZYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=malleus&f=false

As you can see, there is no mention of books being banned at all from the source. In fact, it seems as though the book was actually granted a papal bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, granting (or confirming) the authority of the author to prosecute witchcraft in Germany.

The original claim should be appropriately supported or removed entirely. As it is, it has an air of revisionism in favor of the Church. RenardSouriant (talk) 19:55, 14 February 2024 (UTC)