Witch Hunts in the Western World
Brian A. Pavlac
Number of quotes: 55
Book ID: 287 Page: 4
Section: 4B
Even the leaders of the Christian Church taught for many centuries that people claiming to be witches were deluding themselves. This teaching changed by 1400, beginning the witch hunts in western Europe. For most Christians, it changed back again by 1800, helping to end such hunts.
Quote ID: 7321
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: x
Section: 3A2A,4B
*John’s Note: A common accusation against believers in post-apostolic times: (p.12)cannibalism
incest
eating blood
secret meetings
haters of mankind b/c refusal to sac. to gods/emperors
Christians made those accusations against believers through the centuries: p. 35 top, p. 58 middle, p. 92 top*
Quote ID: 7320
Time Periods: 2347
Book ID: 287 Page: 30
Section: 3A2A
Ordeals were more complicated tests of pain to prove innocence. The ordeal of hot iron meant a hot iron bar must be carried a certain number of paces without being dropped. Of course, the hands would be burned, but after a set of days, if the hands were healing properly, the accused was declared innocent. If the accused’s wounds became infected, however, confirmation of guilt and punishment followed. Another common ordeal was that of cold water, also called “ducking” or “swimming” a suspect. Authorities would test suspects by putting them in a blessed body of water. Often the accused would be bound, right thumb to left toe, left thumb to right toe, in order to prevent swimming to stay afloat (see Illustration 8). If they sank, the “holy” water embraced them, and examiners should pull the innocents out before they drowned. If they floated, though, the divine rejected them. They might be executed on the spot, or, more commonly, turned over for trial.
Quote ID: 7322
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 31/32
Section: 3A2
Because “orthodoxy” was the standard of belief set by religious authorities, a heresy defied established order. At the start of any argument about belief, however, it was often unclear which side would wind up as orthodox and which as heretical. Once the structures of discipline had decided the orthodox position, though, authorities marginalized and eliminated heretics as best they could. In Christian society, political authorities cooperated with ecclesiastical authorities in criminalizing, persecuting, and punishing heretics. This joint persecution had especially taken place as Christianity defined itself in the fourth through sixth centuries in fights over the Trinity. The orthodox victory over Gnostics and others was so complete that no significant religious persecution by Christians took place for centuries.
Quote ID: 7323
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 32
Section: 3A2A
Excommunication barred someone from receiving the Sacraments, such as Baptism and the Eucharist, or Christian burial. Excommunication also removed legal protections, making someone literally an “outlaw.”
Quote ID: 7324
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 34
Section: 3A2A,4B
One medieval explanation for the sudden rise in heretics was to blame the Devil. The Christian hierarchy denounced heretics with the classic accusations of secret meetings involving human sacrifice, cannibalism, and unnatural sex orgies.
Quote ID: 7325
Time Periods: 2347
Book ID: 287 Page: 34/35
Section: 3A2A,4B
Heresy quickly became associated with supernatural, even magical, properties. One of the first mentions of heresy took place in France in 1022. In the town of Orleans, King Robert II “the Pious” of France tried a group of heretics who allegedly met in secret, conjured demons, held orgies, killed babies that were thereby conceived, and then burned their bodies into blasphemous food. To punish the heretics, the king had them burned alive in a cottage.Pastor John’s note: Look Up
Quote ID: 7326
Time Periods: 2347
Book ID: 287 Page: 36
Section: 3A2A,3A4C
The pope encouraged armies from the North of France to invade the South, granting permission to kill heretics at will and confiscate lands and possessions. The ruthlessness that ensued is characterized by the story of the town of Beziers. When the crusaders were about to attack the town, some of them worried that orthodox Catholics who lived there among the Cathar heretics might be killed by mistake. Their commander reportedly said, “God would know His own,” so everyone was killed –God lifting good Catholics to heaven and damning bad heretics. The victorious French kings integrated the region under their royal authority in alliance with the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Quote ID: 7327
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 36
Section: 3A1
By the twelfth century, though, Roman law codes began to be reintegrated into the legal jumble that had followed the destruction of Rome. Protolawyers were impressed with the organization and argumentation behind the Roman law codified in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the last great Roman law code, collected in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian. They reintroduced Roman methods.
Quote ID: 7328
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 287 Page: 37
Section: 3A2A
Fourth was the trial, often quick and simple because a confession required no proof. Throughout this procedure, the defendant had serious disadvantages. An accused had no right to legal representation, no right to keep silent so as not to self-incriminate, and no right to see or challenge evidence or bring defense witnesses. The lex talionis, shared by Roman law and Germanic laws, should have helped protect the innocent, but inquisitors tended to ignore that particular principle.
Quote ID: 7329
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 38
Section: 3A2A
Gratian’s codification of canon law in 1140 had banned torture by the Church, but it was being used again in less than a century. A number of circumstances brought torture into play. Roman law, which had been rediscovered and revived, accepted torture as part of criminal investigation (although ancient Roman torture had usually been limited to slaves).PJ: But remember Pliny’s letter
Quote ID: 7330
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 287 Page: 42
Section: 3A2A
The Dominican priest Bernard Gui was perhaps the most famous inquisitor. Gui was active as inquisitor in Toulouse from 1307 to 1324, rising to be Bishop of Tuy. He himself reported he had burned 548 people and had ordered eighty-eight dead bodies dug up so he could properly punish corpses of the heretics.
Quote ID: 7331
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 51
Section: 3A2A
The large collection of principalities organized under the Holy Roman Empire suffered the worst witch-hunting in Europe. Perhaps as many as three in four of all victims came from that ramshackle political structure, described by Voltaire as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Quote ID: 7332
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 58
Section: 3A2A
As Luther aged, his stories and fears of witches became stronger. Luther wrote several sermons against witches and endorsed the execution of at least four witches at Wittenburg during 1541. Fear of diabolism, therefore, only increased among Lutherans.
Quote ID: 7333
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 61
Section: 3A2A
In 1575, in the province of Salzburg, a parish priest fell victim to the fears of witchcraft. People were looking for someone to blame for many recent thunderstorms. They found a candidate in the bad-tempered seventy-year-old Eva Neidegger, who cooked for the pastor, Rupert Rambsauer of Bramberg by Mittersill. She had already been denounced in 1573, only to gain her release on bail. The next year, though, new storms brought more demands for her arrest. Under torture with thumbscrews, she implicated Pastor Rupert, who was said to have twice caused hail inside a closed room. An ecclesiastical court defrocked him for using the Mass to raise storms. Handed over to the secular court, both pastor and cook were burned on the pyre on March 13, 1575.
Quote ID: 7334
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 61
Section: 3A2A
Chonrad Stoeckhlin, a self-proclaimed witch finder, provoked another hunt in Augsburg. This so-called Shaman of Oberstdorf wanted to prove his abilities and so accused Anna Enzensbergerin in 1586. He soon, ironically, became caught up in a wave of persecutions. As the number of accused reached several dozen people, a female relative implicated him.. . . .
Altogether, the trials held at Rettenberg dealt harshly with two dozen women, while the accused men escaped condemnation, except for the unfortunate Stoeckhlin. He and the twenty-four women were executed.
Quote ID: 7335
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 64/65
Section: 3A2A
After the 1590s, the waves of persecution in Trier slacked off for a few years. Protestants continued to identify the superstitious aspects of magic with the rituals and sacramentals of Roman Catholicism. This position merely hardened Roman Catholics, who used the insult “protestant” against those who did not believe that witches were a real danger.. . . .
The hunting began in April 1611 when the seventy-year-old Barbara Rufin was arrested for desecration of a Host. While she sat in prison, accusations of her witchcraft reached the authorities.
. . . .
She also named accomplices. Freed from torture, she tried to renounce her confession, but authorities tortured her again until she “freely” admitted her witchery. On May 16, the executioner first beheaded her with a sword and then burned her corpse. The authorities also confiscated her property.
The circle of witches expanded outward from Barbara Rufin. After Michael Dier (or Dirren) witnessed her execution and protested her innocence, officials arrested, tortured, convicted, and executed him.
Quote ID: 7336
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 67/68
Section: 3A2B
The hunts in the prince-bishopric of Bamberg can serve as a detailed example of this wave by ecclesiastical territorial rulers. Already in 1507 a legal reform call the Bambergensis had ranked crimes of religion as the most heinous.. . . .
John Godfrey’s successor, John George II Fuchs von Dorrnheim (r. 1623-1632) gained the nickname Hexenbischof (“Witches-Bishop”). The centerpiece of his reign was a thorough hunt for witches. His principality’s law allowed the confiscation of witches’ property. This encouraged the bishop to strike at the upper classes, who possessed most of the wealth.
. . . .
Those brought in for investigation could suffer torture only with the personal consent of the bishop, but that permission he usually gave freely.
. . . .
John George’s assistant bishop, Frederick Forner, wholeheartedly supported his superior. Forner wrote a manual for experts and gave more than thirty sermons to instruct the common people about the danger of witches and how to protect themselves. Regular participation in the sacraments was essential, of course. Sacramentals, such as holy water, sacred bells, or consecrated oils, were useful too. Calling on the help of a guardian angel, making the sign of the cross, venerating relics, praying to saints, calling on the Blessed Virgin Mary, and fasting were recommended. Amulets containing snippets of scripture likewise offered aid to the worried.
Quote ID: 7337
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 68
Section: 3A2A
Officials first examined Junius on June 28, 1628. They found on him a “Devil’s Mark” shaped like a four-leaf clover. Two days later, they began the torture sessions. First came thumbscrews, then legscrews, and finally the strappado. The scribe-recorder to these sessions wrote that the investigators noted how Junius felt no pain. Junius likewise refused to admit any witchcraft, blasphemy, or other criminality. Investigators found his endurance under torture and refusal to confess to be unnatural. On July 5, they actually convinced him to confess while not under torture. He admitted to having sex with a demon. He also confessed that he had used a magic powder to kill his own horse, but not his children (as he said the demon had instructed him). Then the authorities marched Junius through the streets of Bamberg, to induce him to identify more witches. When his list seemed too short, they hoisted him on the strappado again.. . . .
He wrote his daughter that his confession was “sheer lies and inventions, so help me God. For I was forced to say all this through fear of the torture that was threatened beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; no matter how pious he really is, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes….”[8] The bishop gave him the special grace of being decapitated with a sword before they burned his remains on August 6.
Pastor John’s note: Typical confession
Quote ID: 7338
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 69
Section: 3A2A
Accusations against the important councilor G. H. Flock provided a turning point in this hunt. Flock fled to Nuremberg, but his wife Dorothea Flockin then became ensnared in the investigation. Flock and his relatives tried to secure her release by appealing both to Emperor Ferdinand II (r.1616-1637) and to the pope. Both these important people wrote letters in support of Flockin. The bishop, however, rushed her trial and had her executed before the letters could arrive.
Quote ID: 7339
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 70
Section: 3A2A
His treatise verified witchcraft as one of the worst of all crimes, a crimen exceptum. Carpzov himself was a witch hunter, who declared that mere supposition was as good as solid evidence to permit torture. Interestingly, he thought that only Christians could be witches, since he saw witchcraft as a form of apostasy from the true faith. Carpzov’s notoriety for hunting was so great that another contemporary believed Carpzov had signed death warrants for more than 20,000 people.
Quote ID: 7340
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 72
Section: 3A2A
As proof of such a diabolic contract, the Calvinists popularized the Devil’s Mark. Demonologists invented the Mark as a tangible sign left by the Devil of his compact with the witch, partly to provide physical evidence that could be used in court. The only other evidence was the Devil’s black book, in which people signed their names, but that corroboration never could be found.
Quote ID: 7341
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 77
Section: 3A2A
The idea of witches having little or no weight had been suggested by some strixologists to explain how little broomsticks could carry them through the air. The town of Oudewater had a scale that was normally used to weigh sacks of grain or wheels of cheese. The town began to weigh people as a way to help protect them from witch accusations. Town officials used their scale to certify that most people weighed as much as they were expected to. For a fee, the weighed persons could then have documented proof that they were not a witch, and they could show this documentation as they traveled to more hostile territories.
Quote ID: 7342
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 81/82
Section: 3A2A
After this miserable case, the witch hunts were over within the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Shortly afterwards, in 1806, the Empire itself collapsed. Between 1400 and 1806, tens of thousands of innocent persons had died for the supposed crime of witchcraft.
Quote ID: 7343
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 83
Section: 3A2A
While the hunts lasted, however, the kingdom of France experienced enough hunts to make its death toll second only to the Holy Roman Empire.
Quote ID: 7344
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 88
Section: 3A2A
Under torture, Robert implicated a local prostitute, Deniselle of Douai, and a poet, Jean la Vitte. Under torture, Deniselle also named Jean as a witch. The poet tried to resist confessing by cutting out his own tongue, but the authorities finally got him to name the first two, and others. He soon died in his cell.
Quote ID: 7345
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 89
Section: 3A2A
He asserted that as much as a third of the population of Christendom were witches. On May 9, 1460, the authorities burned five people, including Deniselle. Several individuals tried to retract their confessions before burning, proclaiming that they had been promised simple penance in return for their confessions.
Quote ID: 7346
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 92
Section: 3A2A
Remy’s judges often had the children of witches stripped naked and flogged while they watched their parents burned. But Remy worried that lenience would allow the children to carry on diabolic crime. He preferred to execute them, first applying red-hot tongs and then burning them alive or even crucifying them. Suicides of accused witches facing such punishments merely proved their guilt, allegedly being driven to such extremes by demons.
Quote ID: 7347
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 93
Section: 3A2A
Judge Boguet, although he noted the superficial appearance of innocence, found the woman to be a witch. Her rosary had a defective cross, and she never cried during confession.
Quote ID: 7348
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 98
Section: 2D3B
As early as 1491, a convent in Le Quesnay near Arras allegedly overflowed with possessed nuns. The nuns had hysterical fits, made animal noises, and spoke in tongues, until one nun was identified as the controlling witch. The number of such cases increased after the Reformation.
Quote ID: 7350
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 99
Section: 2D3B
People who were allegedly possessed showed various symptoms, which exorcists were supposed to note as proof of genuine possession. Common markers of possession included speaking in tongues, foreign languages, or strange voices and revealing secret knowledge such as distant or future events or examples of other people’s sins. The body underwent fits, contortions and ecstasy, rigidity and catatonia, bouts of unusual strength, and loose sexual behavior. The possessed might be insensible to pain (tested by pricking) or twisted with agony. Some even claimed to observe the possessed levitating. The possessed usually shrank back at displays of sacred objects, prayers and biblical readings.
Quote ID: 7351
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 101
Section: 3A2A
Scholars at the University of Paris, at least, sensibly declared in 1620 that testimony by demons, even under exorcism, should never be accepted, since the Devil was, of course, a liar.
Quote ID: 7352
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 101/102
Section: 2D3B
In the autumn of 1632, however, Mother Jeanne and more than two dozen other nuns again began to act possessed: speaking in tongues, writhing their bodies as if in pain or ecstasy, and reacting against sacred objects and words.
Quote ID: 7353
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 102
Section: 3A2A
The death of Grandier did not end the possessions. Mother Superior Jeanne slowly recovered through several exorcisms over the next three years. During that time she set an example of holiness in resisting possession, going on tour to show her hand marked with the names of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Francis de Sales, who, she said, had defeated the demons. Many other nuns, however, continued in their possessed behaviors.Pastor John’s Note: Donna - Illustration 8, Illustration 12
Quote ID: 7354
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 110
Section: 3A2A
Some accused victims managed to hang themselves, although officials would sometimes blame the Devil or other witches for abetting such suicides. To add insult to injury, accused persons, found innocent or not, had to pay for the costs of their imprisonment, examinations, and even executions. In 1596 Janet Wishart and Isabel Crocker received bills for the peat, coal, tar, and barrels to burn them in, as well as the cost of the stake.
Quote ID: 7355
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 113
Section: 3A2A
In 1590, a local magistrate suspected Geillis (or Gilly) Duncan, who had earned a local reputation as a healer. He arrested her for witchcraft and tortured her with “pilliwinks” and the cords around her head that he rattled violently. Gilly eventually confessed and accused others, who were themselves then tortured.An old woman, Agnes Sampson (or Simpson), was implicated in the next wave of confessions. Her previously honored position as a cunning-woman had led people to call her Grace Wyff or the Wise Wife of [the district of] Keith. King James himself examined her in his palace of Holyrood, after officials had already found the Devil’s Mark on her nude, shaved body. They tortured Sampson with the witch’s bridle, a device that kept the mouth open with four prongs. They also used the cords, twisted tightly around her limbs. From pain, prodding, and sleeplessness, she finally confessed.
Quote ID: 7356
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 117/118
Section: 3A2A
Witches also were not normally burned to death in England, as on the Continent. The most common and usual method of execution was hanging. Hanging could be quite unpleasant, since before the nineteenth century it involved slow strangulation. The “drop” method of hanging, which killed with a sudden fall and breaking of the neck, was not invented until long after the witch hunts were over. The strangulation method could take several minutes of struggling by the victim, depending on how efficient the hangman was with knots. Such “dancing” amused the large crowds that attended public executions. The dying also usually groaned, urinated, and defecated before they ceased moving. After a hanging, the dead body frequently remained hanging on the gibbet as a display. Several executed corpses hanging in various states of decomposition decorated the gallows, as an object lesson in the power of the law.
Quote ID: 7357
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 118
Section: 3A2A
An accusation often followed from an act of unkindness or lack of charity.
Quote ID: 7358
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 119
Section: 3A2A
Just as with the Devil’s Mark, though, any odd blemish could serve as a Witch’s Mark, and many English examiners looked for them among women’s genitalia.. . . .
To expose the guilty, the witch would be placed under watch or kept isolated until a familiar showed up looking for nourishment. Of course, that meant any living creature appearing in a jail cell, from a rat to a moth, might be labeled as the evil spirit familiar.
Quote ID: 7359
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 122
Section: 3A2A
This hunt also used evidence from children to an unusual degree to gain convictions. A woman named Joan Cunny stood convicted on the evidence of her eleven-and nine-year-old illegitimate grandsons.
Quote ID: 7360
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 122/123
Section: 3A2A
Reginald Scot, an English gentlemen who believed in witches but saw the terrible affects of hunts, published The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584.. . . .
He asks, since such “mischeefes as are imputed to witches, happen where no witches are; yea and continue when witches are hanged and burnt; [why] then should we attribute such effects to that cause, which being taken awaie, happeneth neverthelesse?”{4}.
. . . .
He also imputes some of the excess fear of witches to the false magic tricks of papists, by which he meant rituals of Roman Catholicism.
. . . .
King James VI of Scotland and England classified Scot with the ancient Sadducees, ancient Jewish contemporaries of Jesus who denied both the afterlife and spiritual beings such as demons or angels. The king ordered all copies of Scot’s book burnt. He wrote his own book, Demonology (see page 113), partly as a response to Scot.
Pastor John’s note: King James
Quote ID: 7361
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 123/124
Section: 3A2A
The official clergy after the Reformation discouraged the idea of demonic possession. They considered exorcism either too Calvinist or too Roman Catholic or too magical, being thus both heretical and treasonous. The official exorcism ritual was a twisted version of the conjuration of demons (or vice versa). Some Protestants saw Satan luring good Anglicans back toward popery through such possession. Likewise, under Roman Catholic exorcism, the demons professed to be in league with the Protestants.
Quote ID: 7362
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 124
Section: 3A2A
When the “Boy of Burton” had been about to go to a prayer meeting one day, he felt himself struck down. As the boy’s symptoms of pain in the stomach and vomiting increased, together with unusually pious behavior, the physician, family, and friends blamed witchcraft.
Quote ID: 7363
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 127
Section: 3A2A
In the summer of 1616, a more cautious king overturned the conviction of witches based on evidence from children. The “Leicester Boy,” thirteen-year-old John Smith, had blamed his possession on several local women. Nine were hanged and one would die in prison before King James happened to pass through the area and stopped to investigate. As with Anne Gunther, his careful personal questioning led the boy to confess fraud. James had several other women released and he harshly rebuked Judges Winch and Crewe. The lessons of this fraud helped expose those of the “Bilson Boy,” William Perry, in 1620. A Roman Catholic priest had helped prep his faked possession, including the trick of passing blue urine with the aid of an ink bottle.
Quote ID: 7364
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 145
Section: 3A2A
The witch hunts eventually ended in Britain, once and for all. In 1682, England killed its last witch, Alice Molland of Exeter, convicted of murdering three people. In America, the last witches hanged were at Salem in 1692. Seven men and three women were hanged and burned at Paisley, Scotland, in 1697, for causing the possession of eleven-year-old Christine Shaw. One final Scottish execution was Janet Horne in 1727, who was convicted of using her daughter as a flying horse to travel. The Devil’s sloppy shodding of Janet’s daughter as a pony accidentally made the daughter lame, too. They burned the senile mother in a tar barrel. By that time, the total of British citizens executed as witches numbered at least fifteen hundred.
Quote ID: 7365
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 146
Section: 3A2A
From the end of the seventeenth and into even the nineteenth century, crowds periodically formed to accuse and test a witch, usually by swimming. In one notorious case from 1751, a mob in Long Marston attacked John and Ruth Osborne for allegedly making cows and people sick. The mob tracked down the couple from their sanctuary in a church, dragged them to a local pond, and threw them in. Ruth Osborne drowned, while members of the mob kicked and beat John Osborne to death. The government, by this time, feared the disorder of the mob more than the maleficia of witches. Authorities hanged the mob’s ringleader for the crime of murder. Bridget Cleary in Clonmel, Ireland, died from burns in 1894 after her family and friends tried to force a possessing fairy out of her by holding her over a turf fire. Authorities sentenced most of those involved to hard labor.
Quote ID: 7366
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 150
Section: 3A2A
The Spanish Inquisition is notorious as one of the most cruel efforts ever carried out by Christians. It is also often misunderstood. The Spanish Inquisition was unique to Spain. It was not medieval; indeed, it had nothing to do with the Middle Ages but rather lasted through much of the early modern period. Although it did carry out much of the witch-hunting, its main effort was to guarantee that every subject in the kingdom was a faithful Roman Catholic. The Spanish Inquisition acted on behalf of the rulers in Spain, not the pope in Rome.
Quote ID: 7367
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 151
Section: 3A2A
Its first leader, Tomas de Torquemada (b.ca.1420-d. 1498), had risen to be confessor to Queen Isabella. Appointed by the king as Inquisitor-General, Torquemada could boast of thousands of burnt heretics.
Quote ID: 7368
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 151
Section: 3A2A
They relied on neighbors to inform on each other. Because slaves of convicted heretics won freedom, they had great incentive to testify against their masters. Children of heretics could win mercy for their own crimes by turning in their parents.
Quote ID: 7369
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 152
Section: 3A2A
For physical punishments, the convicted were “abandoned” to the royal government. Punishments ranged from fines, slavery in the galleys, and banishment, to burning, known in Latin as the infamous actus fidei or auto-de-fe in Spanish (auto-da-fe in Portuguese and the preferred English spelling), or “act of faith.” The auto-da-fe was the most elaborate and ritualized way of burning heretics. The pomp and ceremony included chanting, singing hymns, processions, and public recitation of the crimes in the vernacular language so that the audience clearly understood the horrible acts.
Quote ID: 7370
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 156
Section: 3A2A
In Catalonia from 1618 to 1620 about a hundred people were executed, until the authorities grew tired of the hunt and sentenced the responsible witch-finder himself to the galleys.
Quote ID: 7371
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 287 Page: 157/158
Section: 3A2A
Perhaps the greatest strixologist to come out of these hunts was Martin Del Rio (or Delrio; b. 1558-d. 1608).. . . .
Del Rio became convinced of the reality of witches, an opinion he expounded upon in his book Disquisitiones magicarum libri sex (“Six Books of Magical Discourses”) first published in 1599 and 1600.
. . . .
The fifth book gives advice for judges, recommending that torture be limited to only three sessions and requiring a free confession to be obtained within a day. Any judge who did not condemn witches to death, Del Rio maintained, would himself commit a deadly sin.
Quote ID: 7372
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 165
Section: 3A2A
Pope Leo X d’Medici in his bull Honestis (“Of Honesty”) in 1521 ordered inquisitors to use excommunication and interdict against those who hindered the hunts for witches.
Quote ID: 7373
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 165
Section: 3A2A
One of the great promoters of early hunts was the famous preacher Bernardino of Siena (b.1380-d.1444), who was made a saint only six years after his death. During the 1420s, though the Roman Curia suspected him of heresy because of his fanatical encouragement of venerating the Eucharist and crucifixes. Perhaps to distract from his own suspicious practices, Bernadino started to preach against witches. He convinced his listeners to accuse, investigate, and burn witches at the stake. Called to account in Rome in 1427, Bernadino managed to avoid being punished and turned the situation to his advantage by sparking a witch hunt there.
Quote ID: 7374
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 287 Page: 175
Section: 3A2A
Norway’s most famous witch, Anne Pedersdotter, burned in 1590. Her husband, Absalon Pederson Beyer, a learned Lutheran minister in Bergen, may have pushed reforms too far for the liking of his parishioners, who went after him through his wife.. . . .
In 1670, the quarrels of wife Lisbet and her husband Ole Nypen with their neighbors in Trondheim culminated in a trial for witchcraft. The charges against each other were ludicrous, including that Lisbet had cursed one woman’s eyebrows to grow so long that she could not see and had caused another woman’s husband to have female breasts.
Quote ID: 7375
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes