Gather The European Witch Craze Of The 16th 17th Centuries Author Hugh R. Trevor-Roper Readable In Version

too opinionated, and far too academic in narration,
All notes are solely from Chapter, . . the only section unfraught with endless citations and runon sentences,



" There can be no doubt that the witchcraze grew, and grew terribly, after the Renaissance, "

"For in the Dark Age, there was at least no witchcraze, There were witch beliefs, of course a scattered folklore of peasant superstitions : the casting of spells, the making of storms, converse with spirits, sympathetic magic, Such beliefs are universal "

" In theth century St. Boniface, the English Apostle of Germany, declared loudly, that to believe in witches and werewolves is unchristian, In the same century Charlemagne decreed the death penalty for anyone who, in newly converted Saxony, burnt supposed witches, Such burning, he said, was a 'pagan custom', "

"John Nider wrote what has been called the 'the first popular essay on witches', Formicarius, the 'AntHeap', and was based principally on confessions of Swiss witches collected by a Swiss magistrate, Peter of Berne, "

"In the next hundred years some famous inquisitors were busy in the Alpine valleys, . . in, according to the Malleus, the inquisitor of Cuomo burntwitches, all of whom confessed to sexual intercourse with incubi, . . "

" The witch craze would always be associated particularly with the highlands, "

"Either the Jew or the witch will do, but society will settle for the nearest, The Dominicans, an international order, hate both but whereas in the Alps and the Pyrenees they pursue witches, in Spain they concentrate on Jews, "

"With Jews and Moors on their hands, the Spanish inquisitors had very little time for witches, and so they have won glowing tributes for their 'firmness' and 'temperate wisdom' in this respect.
"

"In medieval Hungary, witches were sentenced, for a first offense, to stand all day in a public place, wearing a Jew's hat, Witchcraft was one of the charges often made against the Jews, "

"Judicial torture had been allowed in limited cases by Roman law but Roman law, and with it its judicial torture, had been forgotten in the Dark Ages.
"

" . Witches' confessions do not, at first, appear before secular tribunals, but only before the tribunals of the Inquisition, In other words, they were only obtained by the courts who used torture, "

"Switzerland had to wipe out whole villages to keep them down, . . Travellers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of stakes stakes to which Nicholas Remy was sending them, . . Remy was a cultivated scholar, an eleganr Latin poet, . . having sent we are told two to three thousand victims to the stake, . . "

"The most ferocious of witchburning princes, we find, are also the most cultured patrons of contemporary learning, Heinrich Julius, Duke of Brunswick, . . was skilled in mathematics, chemistry, natural science, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, . . In his lifetime, says a chronicler, Lechelnholze Square in Wolfenbuttel looked like a little forest, so crowded were the stakes, . . "

"Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg of Wurzurg was partcularly active in his reign ofyearshe burntpersons, including his own nephew,Catholic priests, and children ofwho were said to have had intercourse with demons.
"

"In Cromwellian England the's saw an outbreak of books repudiating witchtrials, "

"If the last witchburning in Europe was in Catholic Poland in, that was an illegal act witchtrials had been abolished in Poland in, "



. I read this book to clue me up on the Witch Craze so I could teach it at Alevel, and clue me up it did, The reason I didn't give itis that it's contextually vague, By that I mean it takes for granted that you are aware of everything to do with the context surrounding the craze, and I wasn't, However, if you read it in conjunction with a textbook and are prepared to hit Google up to find out who the hell the Albigensians are and cetera then it's worth a read.
What a brilliant thing when a book about the persecution of witches hits you at just the right time in your life, Is it coincidence or is the supernatural soliciting of Hecate The book discussed what about society made it so anti witch, Turns out, just the usual suspicion of other that go against the norm and targeting women as a scapegoat for male insecurity over their power and status on this earth.
That said the hype for persecution seems to be caught up in the catholicism/protestantism struggle,

I like this guy that wrote it because he doesn't jump to extreme ends of things, which is easy to do, but questions narrow ways of thinking and doesn't come to obvious conclusions.
It felt quite reassuring in a world where everything is becoming increasingly hyperbolic,

He does this by emphasizing how reason and logic are not self contained, independent systems of permanent validity but totally context related, At the time, the supernatural was part of the belief system and is it wrong to use our belief system today to vilify and dramatize the past

A good read i picked up from my favorite book shop.
Will return soon! After reading the Stacy Schiff's book on the Salem witch trials I wanted to read something about the European witch executions,dozen "witches" were

executed in Salem, But it is estimated that as many as,were executed in Europe,

A couple of significant quotes: "What then is the explanation of those confessions, and of their general identity When we read the confessions of sixteenth and seventeenthcentury witches, we are often revolted by the cruelty and stupidity which have elicited them and sometimes, undoubtedly, supplied their form.
But equally we are obliged to admit their fundamental “subjective reality, ” For every victim whose story is evidently created or improved by torture, there are two or three who genuinely believe in its truth, This duality forbids us to accept single, comprehensive, rational explanations, "

"Thus, if we look at the revival of the witchcraze in thes in its context, we see that it is not the product either of Protestantism or of Catholicism, but of both.
. . "

Source: Unknown A rich account of the phenomenon, placing it in its social, political and religious context and roots, Excellent book. I mentally thank the author for not employing a marxist lens in his analysis on the contrary, I strongly recommend this book, This a short volume, a kind of long essay with chapters, which details very clearly the origins of the witchhunts of theth andth centuries,

The exploits of Matthew Hopkins in England, are well known, Betweenandhe had more thenpeople put to death, What is less well known is that thiswas of only about,killed in total in England betweenand, In other words, witchhunting in England was not widespread, not compared to other parts of Europe, Witchhunting generally seems to have sprung up at times of religious uncertainty or economic depression, so it is unlikely to be coincidence that Matthew Hopkins committed his evil deeds during the English Civil War,at a time when parliament were particular sensitive to Charles I suspected catholicism, and when many people suffered as a consequence of war.


Widespread persecution of witches originated in mainland Europe, in theth century, as the Catholic church sought to overcome the heretical Albigensians of Languedoc and the Vaudois of the Alps.
The Dominican order was founded to combat these heretics, and was successful in evangelizing both Alpine and Pyrenean valleys, Yet pagal customs lingered. The new heresy of witchcraft was a means by which the Catholic church sought to stamp out the casting of spells and the making of magic, InPope John XXII authorized the full use of inquisitorial procedure of witches, and so began the wholesale persecution that would last more than three centuries

TrevorRoper explains in detail the religious origins of witchcraft, and the way in which witchery became a front for the murderous exploits of religious conformists.
As the back of the book says:

"The European WitchCraze is a stunning picture of intellectual and social life in the grip of a collective psychosis.
".