The Catholic Church During The Middle Ages And Through The Seventeenth Centuries

In the mid-seventeenth century there was a great increase in the number of witchcraft accusations, more precisely in a little country located in southern Europe called Malta. At this time in Europe there was a system of tribunals, a court of justice, created by the Catholic Church called the Roman Inquisition (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). According to Caramel Cassar, the purpose of these tribunals at first was to keep the Catholic faith alive and to eliminate the spread of the Protestant faith (Carmel. 1993: 316-317). Unfortunately at the start of the seventeenth century the Catholic Church had a bigger

The Catholic Church during the early 16th Century was rooted throughout Europe. The Church influenced every country and its respective monarchs through the Church’s wealth and power. The Catholic Church placed a tight hold on the general populace with individuals who went against the Church being branded as heretics and excommunicated. The wealth and power of the Church eventually caused the quality of the clergy to deteriorate. Priests became corrupt and subjected to their physical desires. They frequented taverns, gambled and kept mistresses. The reputation of the clergy were horrid as the general populace was relieved that “their priest [kept] a mistress” because it “[secured] their wives from seduction” The knowledge of the clergy degenerated as well as they were no longer required to learn and teach the Holy Scriptures because the Church dictated their actions. The pinnacle of the Church’s corruption was the sale of indulgences. An indulgence was the “extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment” sold by priests as a temporary relief from sins. The indulgences were then sold to the general populace for money as the monetization of a priest’s services. Johannes Tetzel was a prominent preacher of indulgences who relied on the money from the sales to subsidize the rebuilding of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. The corrupt sales did not go unnoticed as Martin Luther, in an effort to stop the corruption of the Church, posted the 95 Theses on the door of a Castle

The books thesis is based on why a person was accused of being a witch and the relative circumstances thereof. Marital status, sex, community standing, wealth, and relationships with others all play an important part of a person chances of being accused of being a witch.

The author’s purpose in writing this article was to inform the reader of the rise and decline of witch prosecutions, along with their lasting effects on the society. The author’s central argument is that historians do not usually focus on

During the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, thousands of individuals were persecuted as witches. It was thought that these individuals practiced black magic and performed evil deeds, the deeds of the devil. This all happened during a time of great change in Europe, during the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the consolidation of national governments. They were persecuted for a variety of reasons, but three major ones were religious reasons, social prejudices, and the economic greed of the people. Religious leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin influenced the ideas of their followers. Religion dominated the time period and it’s easy to see how many opinions

The large-scale witch-hunts that occurred from 1638 to 1651 gathered momentum via major happenings in the political, societal, and religious domains developing at the time. Individuals who had either political, religious or economic power in society, also known as elites, together had absolute control over the pursuit and prosecution of individuals who partook in witchcraft. The clergy played a crucial role in the witchcraft prosecutions and were slower than the state and localities to desert their beliefs in the reality of witches as the prosecution of witchcraft was, in their eyes, an effective tool to eradicate social deviance. Though local authorities and the Parliament did contribute to the witch-hunts significantly, without the kirk of Scotland declaring and encouraging this sanction on witchcraft, both other parties would not have taken the actions they ultimately did. This essay will provide a brief description of events that took place from 1638 to 1651 and then utilize evidence from a multitude of sources to argue that the religious elites were the most influential of these forces during the witchcraft prosecutions that occurred in the 1640s.

From the 1400’s to the 1800’s, around forty thousand individuals were executed for witchcraft, most of which occurred throughout central Europe. Constant religious and political upheaval caused elites to attempt to harness control over populations, which led to multiple laws being passed in regards to witchcraft. Torture was allowed and women and children were called to testify in the court room. Individuals who were seen to be outcasts on the outer edge of society were immediately targeted and easily suspected of sorcery. The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663 gives its readers an inside perspective of the many different attitudes that existed towards witchcraft at the time. Because 17th century Brunswick townspeople were driven by deep Christian beliefs, they greatly feared all forms of magic, thinking them to come from the devil. Yet despite these fears, they did not completely reject witchcraft as they often sought out purported “witches” for magical solutions.

Were the witch-hunts in pre-modern Europe misogynistic? Anne Llewellyn Barstow seems to think so in her article, “On Studying Witchcraft as Women’s History: A Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions”. On the contrary, Robin Briggs disagrees that witch-hunts were not solely based on hatred for women as stated in his article, “Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community”. The witch craze that once rapidly swept through Europe may have been because of misconstrued circumstances. The evaluation of European witch-hunts serves as an opportunity to delve deeper into the issue of misogyny.

When the group of girls were acting strange and got accused of being witches, everyone started pointing fingers. There was the paranoia that any person could be a part of a conspiracy that was created by the devil caused false accusations to be spread around. This paranoia was used to make false accusations on many innocent citizens because people were trying not to take the focus away from themselves. There was research that was done on those that were accused and what it showed was that most of the accusations were against middle-age women who had few or no children and were widowed. The accused witches “were of low social position, and because of some domestic conflicts, they were accused of other crimes and were considered abrasive” (Brinkley, 86). by other people around them. Once a person was accused of being under the influence of the devil, which is a big offence, they would start to be treated differently from the rest. It wasn’t the actual presence of Satan that caused this chaos, but the anxiety and fear of him that did.

The evidence of witchcraft and related works has been around for many centuries. Gradually, though, a mixture a religious, economical, and political reasons instigated different periods of fear and uncertainty among society. Witchcraft was thought of as a connection to the devil that made the victim do evil and strange deeds. (Sutter par. 1) In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth century, the hysteria over certain causes resulted in prosecution in the Salem Witch Trials, European Witchcraft Craze, and the McCarthy hearings. These three events all used uncertain and unjustly accusations to attack the accused.

The 1486 Malleus Maleficarum set up the precedent for the witchcraft craze, which came to its prime in the mid 16th century, during the Renaissance period. Though the Malleus was not the only factor in this craze, as Margaret Sullivan notes, ‘it made no discernable impact… for nearly half a century’ , it, with a number of other social factors, provided a wealth of information to witch hunts and hunters. This treatise further established several of the basic ideas essential to the identification of witches such as the identification of witches as largely women; through the treatise’s continual argument that women were of gullible and carnal nature the text further advocated ideas of fear and hatred in regards to women.

In the 16th century, different societies with distinctive social and common religious views have assisted in the harsh treatment towards witchcraft. The accounts in Salem provided its reasoning on the unexplainable acts and questions being associated with the devil producing an execution of hanging. Whereas in Europe implemented its action of persecution and torture on the influential publication of Nicole's Remy and Jean Boldin. Depending on the social and religious components in a particular community, contributes to how one perceives a witch and how they will communicate and administer the participant of witchcraft.

Witch hunts blazed across Europe over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries not just killing innumerable innocent people, but stripping women of much of the power they had once held, and changing society's perceptions of women all together. The economic hardships, religious rivalries, and troubled politics of the time made accusing your neighbors of witchcraft convenient. Where there was war and poverty, or merely bad luck, peasants would assume witchcraft and rush to blame an old, defenseless woman in trials which involved unbelievable cruelty and horrible sadism. As religion and the Catholic Church began to complement and perpetuate the increasing hysteria, European society as a whole could do nothing but

Women were the primary targets of witch hunts, a craze that gripped medieval Europe between the 1600’s to the 1700’s. Women’s bodies and sexuality were repressed due to it’s dangerous threat to the medieval society. Women’s bodies were tortured and mutilated to prove the authenticity of witchcraft. The evolution of the witch throughout the 1600’s to the 1800’s, changed the perceptions of elderly women and witchcraft into the modern times.

The rise of witchcraft persecutions in Europe in the period c1540-c1660 can be explained by religious divisions which resulted in religious leaders imposing their authority and reinforcing their faith. Due to the Reformation and Counter Reformation, much of Europe was divided by religion, some countries and states being conflicted within themselves, leading to religious leaders being left vulnerable, unstable and in need of reasserting their power and religious authority. A prime example of this was the Auto de fe in Spain where at Longrono in 1610, ten witches were sent to death, attracting a crowd of up to 3000 people and becoming a public demonstration of the power of the Catholic Church as show shown in this image1. Included in the Auto de fe were not only witches but other minorities also such as Protestants2, Jews and Muslims, showing the