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Thank You! That, in turn, inspired Lutheran authorities to up their witch-hunting game still more. Witch investigations were time-consuming and expensive. But the payoff could be worth it. After all, what clearer way was there to quantify the fight against Satan than a big bonfire bodycount?
The research by Leeson and Russ shows that religious competition did, indeed, spark witch hunts. In addition to collecting data on religious battles, they amassed a dataset of more than 43, witchcraft prosecutions in nearly 11, separate trials.
Sure enough, in places and periods where confessional competition was fierce, witch hunts intensified. Witch trials were also greater and more frequent in Germany and Switzerland, where religious contests were most heated. Tellingly, the slaughter subsides after , when the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to religious wars by establishing the geography of Catholic and Protestant monopolies and mandating tolerance of mainstream sects of Christians, regardless of official religion.
That drop-off occurred well before the last gelid gasp of the Little Ice Age swept the area in the late s. The infamously savage Spanish Inquisition executed no more than two dozen alleged witches; Portugal put to death around seven.
The analysis explains why witch hunts took off in certain geographical areas and never really took hold in others. But why were Germans and their neighboring regions so much more spooked about witches than other Europeans in the first place? Before the s, Europeans generally believed in magic. Sicilians told of gaggles of alluring women with the hands and feet of animals, while Norwegians shared their world with earth trolls.
There was no pan-European agreement on who witches were and what exactly they did, assuming they even believed in witches at all. Many cultures lacked this concept entirely. There were a scattering of witch trials in the early Middle Ages—many of them mob violence—but the accused confessed to notions derived from their local folklore, says Hutton.
Then, all across Europe, accused witches began recounting strikingly similar activities. They murdered children and rode wooden implements smeared with a flight-enabling ointment made of the fat of a murdered baby. They traveled by night to secret witch confabs in which they communed with the Devil, gatherings of a vast, coordinated Satanic sect. So where did this witch stereotype come from? Scholars point to the traveling friars in the Valais area of the Swiss Alps in the s, who had been dispatched to combat heresy.
As they traveled from town to town in this mountainous region at the intersection of Germany, France, and Switzerland, these preaching friars absorbed and transmitted popular fears. Eventually, they brought word back to religious and secular officials who documented these stories. A slew of theologians began publishing demonology handbooks and guides to exterminating witches, firming up notions of what the witchy do. For instance, that horrible baby-fat spell is straight out of Malleus Maleficarum The Hammer of Witches.
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Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Grace Sherwood: The Witch of Pungo. Loftus, Elizabeth. Religious Tolerance. Related Articles. Coping With Coulrophobia or the Fear of Clowns. Understanding Xenophobia, the Fear of Strangers. How Religion Can Improve Health. The 12 Best Aromatherapy Candles of Are You Afraid of Halloween? The 11 Best Incense Sticks of
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