Witch Burning in Reformation Germany

by Sandra Miesel

Rationalists cite witch-burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and Catholic bigotry. The neopagan revival, with 200,000 adherents in America alone, brought new attention to persecution stories. Some claim a holocaust of nine million witches burned by the Inquisition, including their pagan forebears.

Meanwhile, radical feminists charge that suppressing witchcraft deprived medieval people of alternative medicine and estranged them from Earth wisdom. Some also claim witches were midwives being persecuted by male physicians.

Recent academic research has largely demolished both the old Enlightenment certainties and the new neopagan theories. Witch hunts peaked in the 17th century. Catholics and Protestants hunted witches with comparable vigor. The best current estimate is that 30,000 to 50,000 suspected witches were killed between 1400 and 1800, twenty percent of whom were male. The majority of cases happened after the Reformation began, in the context of local political upheaval.

Catholic canon law stipulated that believing in witches was heresy as early as the ninth century. The bloody suppression of heretics in the High Middle Ages culminated in the establishment of the formal office of the papal Inquisition.

Witch-hunters’ manuals multiplied, notably the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1486 by Dominican inquisitors with “experience.” It was a vicious tract, depicting women as the sexual playmates of Satan, declaring: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” The Malleus started no new witch panics, but was freely used by later writers, Protestant and Catholic alike.

Three-quarters of all witchcraft trials took place in the Catholic-ruled territories of the Holy Roman Empire, while Portugal, Spain, Italy and eastern Europe saw few. Local factors, not religious loyalties, determined the severity of witch persecutions. Prosecuting “physical harm” alone as England and Scandinavia did, yielded fewer victims than prosecuting diabolism (Scotland and Germany) or white magic (Lorraine and France). Unlimited torture in Germany induced more confessions than the sleep deprivation tactics in England. More women than men numbered among the accusers, as well. Witches were not only burned, but beheaded or drowned.

Witch hunting could be endemic or epidemic. Small panics tended to target poor, obnoxious persons whose removal the rest of the community applauded. Some were prostitutes, beggars or petty criminals. The worst examples of large panics occurred in Germany, where unlimited use of torture (in defiance of imperial law) produced an ever-expanding wave of denunciations. To object was to court death.

The longer a panic lasted, the higher was the proportion of male and wealthy victims. Confessing “without torture” in Germany meant without torture that drew blood. Nearly all who underwent this broke, even the blameless.

A few brave men spoke up for justice. in 1563, Johann Weyer, a Protestant court physician, drew attention to the cruelty of the trials and the mental incompetence of many of the accused. The Jesuit confessor to the witches burned in Mainz in 1631, Friedrich Spee, declared them innocent. Another Jesuit, Cornelius van Loos, witnessed the horrors of trials in Trier, and was imprisoned and banished for opposing it. (The latter two died tending plague victims.)

After a 20th century unmatched for bloodshed, we dare not condemn the sins of early modern Europeans. Our capacity to project enormities on the enemy “Other” is as strong as ever. Beware!