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MIT 21H 912 - Study Notes

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WEEK 4 INTRODUCTION TO READINGS Documents on witchcraft persecutions (1486-1631) Between about 1560 and about 1670, witch-hunts werecommon throughout Christian countries, in Catholic andProtestant communities alike. They have been studied interms of religious change during the Reformation andCounter-Reformation; the spread of state authority intoremote local areas; tensions within local communities;changes in thinking about the place of women in society;and new ways of thinking about the place of the poor insociety, which in turn led to new conflicts between richand poor. In the Holy Roman Empire alone, there were 30,000trials between 1560 and 1670. And in the area we now call Europe, about 100,000 people were put on trial forwitchcraft, of which about 30,000 were executed. While reading the following selections, keep in mindpossible distinctions between what townspeople or peasantsthought they were doing when they practiced or accusedothers of practicing witchcraft, and what state authoritiesthought they were doing. Historian Richard Horsley hasargued: “Left to themselves, the peasants may well havelynched a few suspects—such as the two Austrian womenburned for ‘causing’ a hail storm in 1675—but they wouldnever have produced the great witch hunts in which hundredsof thousands were burned.”1 WEEK 4 QUESTIONS Documents on witchcraft persecutions 1 Richard Horsley, “Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of theAccused in the European Witch Trials,” Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory, vol. 9, no. 4 (Spring 1979), pp. 693-694.1. Why, according to Bodin, was the persecution of witchesvital to state authority? 2. On the basis of these documents, did the persecution ofwitches also harm state authority? 3. How did the witch-hunts and trials in the town of Bamberg perpetuate themselves? 4. On what grounds did Friedrich Spee, author of the lasttext, criticize witch-hunting? 5. How well do the texts reflect the information in the table “Witch Trials in Selected


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MIT 21H 912 - Study Notes

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