Medieval Witch Hunts

Monty Python. The expert of all things witchy.

Everyone’s heard someone say something along the lines of, “If I’d lived in the Middle Ages, I’d have been burned as a witch.”

Because everyone typically knows two things:

1. The Middle Ages were one big witch hunt, until the Renaissance/Enlightenment arrived and everyone returned to sanity.

2. Witches were burned alive, traditionally at the stake.

 1. The Middle Ages were one big witch hunt, until the Renaissance/Enlightenment arrived and everyone returned to sanity.

Before we get started, let’s talk about when exactly the Middle Ages were. It’s a little tricky, since we’re talking about all of Europe in an age without telephones or TV, so it wasn’t an era of mass media. However, a good rule of thumb is that the Middle Ages started around the year 460. The Renaissance kicked off in Italy in the 1300s and spread so that the entirety of Europe was out of the Middle Ages and fully into the Renaissance for all of Continental Europe by the 1460s (and by 1500 even the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia had gotten in onto the Renaissance boat).

This is important because the Malleus Maleficarum -- “The Witches Hammer,” was written in 1487. It’s a work of two German Renaissance authors. Why is the  Malleus Maleficarum  important? Because it argued against the conventional wisdom from the Middle Ages that witches didn't exist.  In 785 the Council of Paderborn explicitly made it illegal to believe in witches. The Canon Espiscopi (10^th century Church Law) declared,

“Whoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or worse, or transformed into another species or likeness, except by God Himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond a doubt an infidel.’”

To be sure, magic was believed to exist, but anyone could do magic – magic was wearing a charm, or the knowledge of a recipe for a magic potion. Magic was not the ability to change shape, to fly, or to magic something into existence. That was ancient superstition, and anyone who believed in such things, to the medieval mind, was confused and in need of Christianity.

Marc Carlson of the University of Tulsa has compiled a list of witch trials in Italy, and the earliest witch trial he could find in the Middle Ages is in 1320. Technically it was charges of idolatry, heresy, and Invocation (the summoning of a deity or the supernatural), not “witchcraft” but “Invocation” is a witchy-ish charge. Still, that was 1320, very late in the Middle Ages, and this was in Italy, where the Renaissance was already kicking off. Giotto di Bondone was winding down his career as an artist, having just putting the finishing touches on the Stefaneschi Triptych (if you followed art history that would be a big deal. For everybody else, Giotto is known as the first Renaissance painter).

When did most witch hunts happen, then, if not in the Middle Ages? Mostly during what’s called "the Renaissance." You might have heard of it. Witch hunting continued though the “Age of Rationalism” and for the most part ended about in the middle of the “Age of Enlightenment” (in Europe at least).

Witch trails actually got off to a pretty slow start. Through the 1400s there were a couple in fits and starts, but after the Malleus Maleficarum was published things started to take off – especially in its home country of Germany. Germany had a bit of witch-hunt mania from 1561 through 1670. That's not to say that the Malleus Maleficarum was responsible for all the witch-hunting hoopla all by itself -- there were a lot of good political reasons to have witch hunts too. It was a lot easier to get rid of someone by claiming they were a witch (which could be quite hard to disprove) than via other means. I'm not going to go into Germany's history of the period, that's a lot more than I can tackle in this little essay.

In 1612 England had her Pendle Witch Trails, where 10 people were executed for witchcraft. The famous American Salem Witch Trials were from 1692–93 (for context, René “I think, therefore I am” Descartes had already died, forty-three years previously. Isacc Newtons “Apple Incident” had happened 27 years before the last year of the trial).

The last official Witch Trial in Europe, the Doruchów Witch Trial, happened in 1793, in Poland. 14 “witches” were killed for making a noblewoman ill. I'm sure it totally had absolutely nothing to do with the political upheaval of the Second Partition of Poland and the Polish nobility being all jittery because Russia was carving up their holdings. Because they were way too cool to let that work them into a frenzy.

2. Witches were burned alive, traditionally at the stake.

Witches were occasionally burned alive. Witches were also hung (England and America’s preferred method), strangled (Scotland seems to have been a fan), or drowned (Scandinavian countries). Suspected witches could also be pressed (crushed under weights to gain a confession -- which sometimes resulted in the death of someone later from resulting injuries). Often after they had been killed via other means, their bodies were then burned. 

As well as being killed, sometimes convicted witches were instead punished with forced labor, excommunication, and/or imprisonment. Examples of this could be people who confessed while being pressed, but who had good excuse, or "bought" their way out of death by naming the person who made them be a witch. The "I only did it because so-and-so made me be a witch! It's because of their magic!" defense.