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Witchcraft, Primary Sources, WITCHCRAFT AS A GENDER DISPARITY - Coggle…

- - - - "The Roman Inquisition was an organ of the Curia, and was presided over by the Pope"
        
        "A strong, centralised institution, it reached beyond the Papal States and assumed responsibility for the prosecution of all types of heresy"
        
        Official name was the "Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition"
      - "Theologians since the late middle ages had defined as a heresy involving apostasy from the faith and devil worship"
      - "During the first years following its establishment, the Roman Inquisition was mainly concerned with curtailing Protestantism and did not invest significant efforts in devising a defined policy towards witchcraft."
      - "In another bull of 1587, Sixtus charged inquisitors with punishing 'simple' spells, formerly prosecuted in episcopal courts. The bull signaled a hardening of Papal policy against unorthodox practices."
      - "Nonetheless, scattered witchcraft cases tried by inquisitorial, episcopal, and secular courts led to capital punishments in Rome (1559 and 1572), Siena (1569), Lucca (1571), and Bologne (1577 and 1579)."
      - "From the mid-sixteenth century, the Roman Inquisition was activethroughout central and northern italian sttaes with the exception of the republic of Lucca [...] in the Kingdom of Naples, which belonged to the Spanish Crown, two Inquisitional tribunes operating by the late sixteenth century: one presided over the Neapolition bishop, and the other headed by the delegate of the Holy Office in Rome"
      - "Roman Inquisition's treatment of witchcraft within the broader context of the Church's efforts to refashion Catholicism." p.262
  - - - Roman Inquisition done via the state courts and with "state interest"
        "Witch hunting in Italy, where most historians contend that the development of the modern state began, had much in common with the prosecutions that took place in Spain. In Italy, as in Spain, most witchcraft prosecutions came under the control of the Inquisition, and as in Spain the judicial record is one of almost astonishing restraint. The main point to be made here is that it was in the courts of the Roman Inquisition that inquisitorial procedure was perfected, and where the interest of the state in prosecutions was most boldly asserted. Yet that highly developed procedure, as John Tedeschi has shown, worked constanty in favour of the accused witch”.
    - - Duni
        https://www.academia.edu/44442040/Witchcraft_and_witch_hunting_in_late_medieval_and_early_modern_Italy?email_work_card=view-paper
        
        How to cite :- Matteo Duni. 20 Dec 2019, Witchcraft and Witch Hunting in Late Medieval and Early
        Modern Italy from: The Routledge History of Witchcraft Routledge
        https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003010296-6
        
        "While Inquisitors were responsible for the great majority of trials overall, and were more active in the first phase of the witch-hunt (c.1420s-1520s), secular judges - appointed by the rulers or governments of the different Italian states - took the lead from the early seventeeth century, especially in terms of the death sentences. Inquisitors were appointed by the authorities of the Catholic organisations they came from, namely the Dominican and Franciscan orders, up until 1542. From that year, following the reorganisation of the Catholic Church's repressive appartus, they were appointes by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, as the central institution of the prosecution of heresy in the Italian Peninsula was called."
        
        In the 1510s, the Alpine valleys between Lombardy and Trentino were the epicenter of particularly harsh hunts, such as those in the territory of Como (between thirty and sixty executions in 1513–14, but some accounts relate as many as three hundred) and those in the Valcamonica (between sixty-two and eighty in 1518–19) – all at the hands of inquisitors.
        
        The latter were likewise responsible for brutal campaigns in the 1520s, beginning in Lombardy, in the rural district of Varese (Venegono Superiore, seven executions in 1520) and in the mountainous Valtellina (forty trials and seven executions, 1523).7 This wave of persecution extended south of the Po River, to Mirandola in the region of Emilia, where the southernmost mass witch hunt in the Peninsula took place in 1522–23 (sixty trials and ten executions).8 Scholars have speculated that witch hunting may have reached such high levels in this period due to the impact of the Italian wars, the almost uninterrupted series of conflicts from 1494 to 1530.
        
        While the disrupting effects of prolonged warfare possibly contributed to worsen the witch hunt in some cases, they do not seem to have been its major cause, since trials and executions had reached significant numbers years before the wars and, in any case, did not increase noticeably in some of the areas most affected by the fighting (from Tuscany to Lazio and Campania). The single most influential precipitating factor is more likely to have been the high level of religious zeal of Dominican inquisitors. Forming a vast and well-connected network, they mobilized to fight the witches as both judges and demonologists, exchanging information that helped them write several tracts on the topic as well as guide their endeavors in an apparently coordinated series of witch hunting campaigns closely following one another
        
        Scholars have speculated that witch hunting may have reached such high levels in this period due to the impact of the Italian wars, the almost uninterrupted series of conflicts from 1494 to 1530. While the disrupting effects of prolonged warfare possibly contributed to worsen the witch hunt in some cases, they do not seem to have been its major cause, since trials and executions had reached significant numbers years before the wars and, in any case, did not increase noticeably in some of the areas most affected by the fighting (from Tuscany to Lazio and Campania).
        
        The spread of ideas and movements inspired by the Protestant Reformation in the Peninsula prompted the institution of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1542 and the subsequent refocusing of the inquisitors’ action on Protestant “heretics”
        
        Following the Council of Trent (concluded in 1563), the new policy of the church emphasized the need of reforming the religious beliefs and practices of the Italian people. While this goal certainly required the uprooting of magic, it was pursued neither by discouraging belief in it nor by treating harshly those who used it, but by redirecting their demand of supernatural protection towards church-sponsored alternatives. p90
        
        Italian Courts
        “it began early, took place almost exclusively north of the present-day region of Tuscany, only rarely reached the mass dimensions it had in northern Europe, and was mostly the work of church courts. This last point requires some explanation. The Inquisition shared with secular justice the responsibility of trying heretics, as magicians and witches were considered to be, because heresy was a crime which both church and state courts could prosecute (a crime of “mixed jurisdiction”, as jurists called it), and also because criminal law mandated that harm provoked by witchcraft be punished by the civil magistrate” p.82
  - - - "This period also saw the renewal of organized witchhunting and anti-heretical rhetoric, which increasingly associated heretical groups and satanic witch cults."
    - - "Then, overnight as the cardinals were sleeping in their cells, della Rovere and Borgia spoke with each of the cardinals (except de' Conti, Barbo, Carafa, da Costa, Piccolomini, de Margarit, and some say Zeno) telling them that if they gave their votes to Cibò, they would receive many benefits."
  - - - "In Lausanne, on the other hand, witchcraft prosecution was controlled by the episcopal inquisition, for whom heresy and demonolatry were major concerns, and only 38 percent of those prosecuted were women. Thus, a learned construction of witchcraft appears actually to have ameliorated the gender bias inherent in popular assessments of maleficium"
        
        "While heresy may have been more or less gender neutral, superstition certainly was not: for centuries, superstition and magic had been conceived as particularly feminine vices, and for theorists who constructed witchcraft principally around notions of maleficium, this tradition informed witches’ gender."
  - - - ... and, by extension, their political cohesion."
- - - - Reports
        
        Alan Macfarlane Report http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/witch_asa_1.htm
        
        In Boreham between 1560 and 1603 witches were accused of killing one child and making one man ill.
        
        Witches were accused in Essex courts of burning down a particular barn, nearly blowing down
        a particular house, and sinking a particular ship
        
        To a limited extent the answer lies in the nature of the injury
        
        There was also an emphasis on the strangeness of an event: for instance when a huge tree suddenly fell down on a windless day; or when a normally clean woman 'was on a sudden so filled with Lice, that they might have been swept off her cloaths with a stick', especially when the lice were 'long, and lean, and not like other Lice' (Pamphlet, 1645, p. 23)
        
        Witchcraft explained only individual misfortunes, not general phenomena such as major climatic changes or the burning down of a whole town
        
        Plague was infrequently blamed on specific witches; thus in the three sample villages, years of high mortality in the parish registers did not coincide with an increase in supposed deaths by witchcraft.
        
        Nor does it seem to have been death at childbirth that was automatically blamed on witches. Of 233 deaths by witchcraft recorded at the Assizes, only seven are known to have been those of infants under three months old.
        
        Hatfield Peverel, nine out of ten of those supposedly bewitched to death were adults.
        
        Witchcraft was the result of needing to distract and to blame witches on misfortunes
        
        'that fewe or none can (nowadaies) with patience indure the hand and correction of God. For if any adversitie, greefe, sicknesse, losse of children, corne, cattell, or libertie happen unto them; by and by they exclaime uppon witches' (Scot, 1584, p. 25).
        
        'I heare of much harme done by them: they lame men and kill their cattle, yea they destroy both men and children. They say there is scarce any towne or village in all this shire, but there is one or two witches at the least in it' (Gifford, 1593, sig. A4v).
        
        When people blamed witches they did it not out of mere ignorance, but because it explained why a certain misfortune had happened to them, despite all their precautions
        
        Thus we have an account of a woman who could not have success with her butter; she tried feeding the cows on better food, tried scalding her butter pans, and finally, in desperation, used the old counter-witchcraft charm of sticking in a red-hot horseshoe. The butter came (Pamphlet, 1582, sig. E8V).
        
        A very complex, yet vital, problem is whether people suffered some misfortune and then looked round for a witch, or whether they disliked a person and then blamed subsequent misfortunes on him.
        
        There is evidence for both processes, but the more normal form seems to have been for the quarrel to precede the injury, for the suspicion to be present before the accident.
        
        The stress throughout the account is on neither the strangeness nor the painfulness of the injuries, but rather on the social relationship preceding the injury. It would seem, therefore, that the key to understanding Essex prosecutions does not lie primarily in the amount of pain and in explanations of suffering current in Elizabethan villages, but rather in strains between villagers.
      - Website
        
        Parliament
        https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
        
        During the 16th century, many people believed that witchcraft, rather than the workings of God's will, offered a more convincing explanation of sudden and unexpected ill-fortune, such as the death of a child, bad harvests, or the death of cattle.
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Sorcery was blamed for the incidence of plague
        
        Peaks of prosecution were reached in the last years of the 16th century, where there was particularly poor harvests, bubonic plague and a fear of war
    - - Reports
        
        Alan Macfarlane http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/witch_asa_1.htm
        
        Evident from the three-village study that only a small proportion of the many accidents in an Elizabethan village were interpreted as the result of the evil will of a neighbour.
        
        However, In Boreham between 1560 and 1603, 351 deaths occurred during this period, including the one child and one man ill statistic, with no accused
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Trials still occurred in periods free from war, famine or pestilence
  - - - Articles
        
        Lipscomb History Extra (22/05) https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/history-witches-facts-burned-hanged/
        Women (70-80%) and men accused, women thought to be spiritually weaker and more vulnerable to "diabolic persuasion"
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Ehrenreich and English
        Regarded suppression of witchcraft as, above all, the male suppression of women healers
        
        Church thought that only men should be allowed to practise medicine
        
        HOWEVER pressure for prosecution often came from the peasantry itself
        
        Misogyny played a role in witchcraft
    - - Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Does not account for the substantial minority of men as witches
  - - - Articles
        
        Lipscomb History Extra (22/05) https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/history-witches-facts-burned-hanged/
        Witches were feared and believed among high and low status
        "Lord chief justice Anderson noted in 1602: “The land is full of witches… they abound in all places” – not as a symbol or figure of fun, but as a deadly threat to life, livelihood and divine order."
        Witchcraft prosecuted by the state, and states that the witchcraft trials were because of the law against witches
        James I published Demonology in 1597
      - Archives
        
        Parliament Archives
        https://archives.blog.parliament.uk/2020/10/28/which-witchcraft-act-is-which/
        
        The first was An Act against Conjurations, Witchcrafts, Sorcery and Enchantments passed by Henry VIII in 1541. In this act, magical practices which were disruptive or caused harm to the realm were seen as a crime punishable by death and forfeiture of goods and chattels.
        
        This Act aimed to outlaw magic with ‘unlawfull intente or purpose’ and the named examples in the Act show this, such as to ‘waste consume or destroy any person’ or ‘provoke any persone to unlawfull love’.
        
        The 1541 Act was repealed by Henry’s son Edward VI in 1547
        
        The 1562 Act against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts and the famous 1603 Witchcraft Act, moved witch trials away from church courts into ordinary courts.
        
        The 1562 act also amended the terms of punishments to distinguish between minor and capital offences and introduced a two-strikes-and-you’re-out system.
        
        James I’s 1603 Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealing with evil and wicked Spirits clearly defined witchcraft, and its relationship to the devil, in order to determine what it actually is and a suitable punishment
        
        James I’s Daeomonologie was printed in 1597, and included an in-depth look at magic and necromancy (part 1), witchcraft and sorcery (part 2) and spirits, ghosts and spectres (part 3).
        
        This book was part of a larger debate around the existence of witchcraft, opposing more sceptical texts such as Reginald Scot’s 1584 book The Discovery of Witchcraft.
      - Websites
        
        Tudor Times
        https://www.tudortimes.co.uk/guest-articles/james-i-and-witchcraft-1
        
        Denmark was one of the most vicious witch hunting countries in Europe, and during his stay James I heard whispers that neither storm had been an accident: they were the result of a witchcraft conspiracy that had aimed at nothing less than the murder of the king and his bride.
        
        From that moment, James was inspired with a witch hunting fervour so extreme – and so dangerous – that it would wreak terror across his kingdom.
        
        Upon returning to Scotland, James had no fewer than seventy of his subjects rounded up on suspicion of bewitching his fleet and that of his new wife. He personally superintended the interrogation of many of the suspects, including the ringleader – a 'wise woman' named Agnes Sampson.
        
        It transpired that she had repeated the very words that had passed between James and Anne on their wedding night – words that no other mortal soul could possibly have known. If James needed any further proof that witches existed, this was it. He sent Agnes straight to the flames.
      - Malleus Maleficarum (1486)
        "The first method is when witches meet together in the conclave on a set day, and the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance."
        "that she is to make certain unguents [ointments] from the bones and limbs of children, especially those who have been baptized"
        
        Enforced the religion aspect of witches, that they were connected with the devil
        
        "One is a solemn ceremony, like a solemn vow."
        This is almost playing on the sanctity of marriage that was felt at that time, like its an evil marriage
        
        "Choose whom you wish from these young men, and he will take you for his wife. And when she said she did not wish or any of them, she was sorely beaten and at last consented, and was initiated according to the aforesaid ceremony"
  - - - Reports
        
        Alan Macfarlane http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/witch_asa_1.htm
        
        A very complex, yet vital, problem is whether people suffered some misfortune and then looked round for a witch, or whether they disliked a person and then blamed subsequent misfortunes on him.
        
        There is evidence for both processes, but the more normal form seems to have been for the quarrel to precede the injury, for the suspicion to be present before the accident.
        
        The stress throughout the account is on neither the strangeness nor the painfulness of the injuries, but rather on the social relationship preceding the injury. It would seem, therefore, that the key to understanding Essex prosecutions does not lie primarily in the amount of pain and in explanations of suffering current in Elizabethan villages, but rather in strains between villagers.
        
        Witchcraft prosecutions, we have seen, usually occurred between village neighbours
        
        The following are some of the motives suggested either by confessing witches or by their accusers in the 1582 Assize trial.
        
        The witch acted because she was: refused the nursing of a child; refused a loan of 'scouring sand'; refused 12d. refused 12d. for her sick husband; denied mault at the price she wanted; refused a 'mess of milk'; denied mutton.
        
        Motives of a single witch, Joan Robinson, we see that her various acts of witchcraft were precipitated by the following acts of her neighbours: she was denied an implement for making hay, the hire of a pasture, the sale of a pig, a cheese, a pig she had been promised, and payment for goods 'at her own reckoning'.
        
        They almost always arose from quarrels over gifts and loans, when the victim refused the witch some small article, heard her muttering under her breath or threatening him, and subsequently suffered some misfortune.
        
        ‘we may see how experience, and the very confessions of witches, agree that the merciful lenders and givers are preserved of God, and unmerciful and covetous Nabals are vexed and troubled of Satan' (Haweis, 1844, p. 224).
        
        Thus it begins to seem as if it was those who offended against the ideals of a cooperative society by refusing to help their neighbours who found themselves bewitched.
        
        Essex writer in 1656
        
        "God hath given it as a strict Command to all men to relieve the poor" he told his audience, then he quoted from Leviticus that "Whosoever hearkeneth not to all the Commandements of the Lord to do them (whereof relieving the poor is one) the Lord will send several crosses and afflictions, and diseases upon them, as followeth in the Chapter" and continued that "therefore men should look into the Scriptures, and search what sins bring afflictions from Gods hand, and not say presently, what old man or woman was last at my door, that I may hang him or her for a Witch; yea, we should rather say, Because I did not relieve such a poor body that was lately at my door, but gave him harsh and bitter words, therefore God hath laid his Affliction upon me, for God saith, Exod. 22.23. If thou any way afflict widows, and fatherless, and they at all cry unto me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath shall wax hot against thee" ' (Ady, 1656, p. 130).
        
        It was considered necessary to shun overtures of friendliness on the part of suspected witches, for gifts of food might be the vehicle of witchcraft. In 1579 a witch bewitched two neighbours in gifts of a drink and an apple-pie.
        
        Suspected witches were often those who went round inquiring about their neighbours' health.
        
        To break with a neighbour, there must have been considerable difficulties in an Elizabethan village. There was no code to which he could appeal for justification; Christianity still upheld communal values. But through the mechanism of the witchcraft laws, and the informal channels of village opinion, support in a dispute over neighbourly obligations was given to the bewitched person rather than to the witch, who had, in fact, suffered under the older social ideals.
        
        Thus it could be argued that the emotion that lay behind witchcraft accusations arose largely from discord within individuals, within people who felt the demands of the old communal values and the power of the old sanctions, while also realizing the practical necessity of cutting down, or re-directing, their relationships.
        
        Since some Essex villages seem to have been free from accusations, it is clear that witchcraft was not the necessary or only solution to such a conflict of neighbours in a village
        
        Thus, of 460 cases of bewitching property or persons tried at the Assizes, only fifty occurred between villages; the rest were within the village.
        
        Although witches were thought of as quarrelsome and unpleasant people they were not usually formally accused of other offences.
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        A community that prosecutes witches […] clarifies and reinforced its moral boundaries
        
        Even though it was subconscious and people did not actively strive to reaffirm moral values, the system of ideas which people drew themselves from have been created as a result of the society's need to clarify its own identity by defining its moral limits
  - - - Reports
        
        Alan Macfarlane http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/witch_asa_1.htm
        
        From the Assize records we, know that, of 117 persons whose marital status was given, 40 per cent were widows.
        
        Of fifteen women whose marital status we know in the three sample villages, only one was unmarried, while eight were widowed.
        
        Coroners' inquisitions on five imprisoned witches in 1645 show them to have been aged 40, 'about 50', 70, 70, and 'about 84' years, respectively.
        
        Tracing individuals in local records also suggests that older women, that is women over about 50 years of age, were more powerful witches, though it was believed that they tried to impart their witchcraft to their young children.
      - Websites
        
        Parliament Website
        https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
        
        Formal accusations against witches – who were usually poor, elderly women – reached a peak in the late 16th century, particularly in south-east England.
  - - - Reports
        
        Alan Macfarlane http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/witch_asa_1.htm
        
        The distribution of prosecutions shows no obvious correlation with Puritan Centres or with Roman Catholic strongholds.
        
        Nor does a detailed study of church attendance and the religious formula of wills in the three sample villages show any marked relationship between religious attitudes and attitudes to witchcraft.
        
        Hatfield Peverel, none of the ten women presented between 1584 and 00 for not attending church were suspected witches. In fact it was recognized by contemporaries that witches might be outwardly godly people; those 'which seemed to be very religious people, and would constantly repair to Sermons near them' might be witches (Stearne, 1648, p. 39).
      - Website
        
        Parliament
        https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
        
        During the 16th century, many people believed that witchcraft, rather than the workings of God's will, offered a more convincing explanation of sudden and unexpected ill-fortune, such as the death of a child, bad harvests, or the death of cattle.
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Absence of evidence that Catholics normally prosecuted Protestants or conversely
        
        Trials happened in places with little inter-denominational strife (e.g. Essex, Lowland Scotland)
    - - Website
        
        Parliament
        https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
        
        Witchcraft, a perceived facility to summon evil spirits and demons to do harm to others, was linked to religion to the extent that the medieval Church had powers to punish those who dabbled in magic and sorcery. Its priests were able to exorcise those who had become possessed by malign spirits.
      - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Both Catholics and Protestants found it useful to tar their opponents with the brush of witchcraft in order to demonstrate their own Godliness, 'witchcraft' was likened to 'heresy'
  - - - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Witches were too poor to provide rich pickings
        
        Wealthier people who were accused were not immediately ransacked due to confiscation and some cities rejected confiscation altogether
        
        "very unlikely that financial greed played much of a part in stimulating prosecutions"
    - - Books
        
        Scarre - Witchcraft and Magic
        
        Notorious witch-hunter Balthasar Ross at Fulda was motivated by the hope of gain
        
        Convicted witch's possessions were subject to confiscation by the state or civic authorities
- - - - "There is in fact no serious evidence for the existence of such a sect of Devil-worshipers anywhere in medieval Europe"
        
        "Cohn also demonstrates that people were punished for these fantasized crimes only where the authorities deemed it expedient to eliminate a certain group from society."
    - - "The classic example of an increasing willingness on the part of some authorities to act against people accused of witchcraft is the bull Summis Desiderantes Affectibus published by Innocent VIII in 1484."
  - - - "So does my observation that Spain's largest outbreak of witch-hunting occurred after, rather than before, the Inquisition's crise de conscience of 1609-14, and that it affected the northern regions that the Holy Office was sometimes unable to control satisfactorily"