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THE AGE OF PROSECUTIONS

Before the mid-sixteenth century, trials for witchcraft usually took place in ecclesiastical courts,
but ecclesiastical officials also urged secular magistrates to assume jurisdiction over the offense,
as permitted under English common law and later under statute law in 1542-1547 and
1563-1705. This is the purpose of the argument and structure of the Malleus
Maleficarum, and a number of scholars have suggested that the fifteenth-century process of
state-building in the duchy of Savoy and the Swiss Confederation, for example, and the
consequent introduction of new legal procedures and centralizing authorities, contributed
substantially to the prosecution of the new crime of witchcraft. After the mid-sixteenth century,
witch trials took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, partly as a result of the new and
wider powers acquired by secular courts in both Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe as a
consequence of the Reformation. A second consequence of the Reformation was the particular
prevalence of trials for witchcraft in areas that were religiously divided. Many fewer trials
ocurred in areas that were 
religiously or politically centralized and homogeneous. This suggests that prosecutions for
demonic magic and witchcraft often occured along the local fault-lines of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century confessional, political, and juridical conflict.  Although gender differences
among those accused and tried varied from place to place, overall approximately four women
were tried for witchcraft for every man who was charged. Only in France was the proportion of
men greater than that of women.9 Of the women,
unmarried or widowed older women whose neighbors suspected them of causing harm to people
or property were most frequently accused, tried and convicted. Witchcraft was also thought to
run in families, especially from mother to daughter, and to be prevalent in certain occupations,
not often, as once was thought, that of midwife, but in those of lower domestic servants.10

The distribution of accusations and prosecutions for witchcraft was not uniform throughout
Europe, nor were the same legal procedures used everywhere. Prosecutions in continental Europe
proceeded according to the romano-canonical inquisitorial legal procedure, which usually
required for conviction either the identical testimony of two eyewitnesses or a
confession.

Torture was used to obtain a conviction when the accused refused to confess and substantial
other evidence pointed to the likely guilt of a suspect. Confessions made under torture had to be
repeated away from the scene of the torture, the confession becoming one further--and clinching
--piece of evidence. Continental witch trials usually focused on the offence of idolatry, that is,
homage to and pact with the devil. English common law prohibited the use of torture, but since
1542 witchcraft had been a statutory crime in England. There were several large-scale
prosecutions for witchcraft in some areas of England and in the seventeenth century in some of
England's North American colonies as well. In England, the prosecutions usually focused on the
harm (maleficium) allegedly caused by the witch, and it is probable that in popular belief
throughout Europe the harm thought to have been caused by those accused of witchcraft was the
initial stimulus of the accusation before a magistrate. Once the charges brought the accused into
the judicial machinery, however, other aspects of the general theory of demonic magic and
witchcraft might be invoked and applied by officials more learned and familiar with the
theoretical literature.11

-notes-

9The most reliable discussions are those of Merry E.
Wiesener, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993) Lyndal
Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern
Europe (London, 1994); Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 257-286; James Sharpe,
Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550-1750 (Philadelphia, 1997),
169-199, and Clark, Thinking with Demons, 106-133.  The literature is exhaustively
reviewed by Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century
Representations (London-New York, 1996), and Marianne Hester, "Patriarchal
Reconstruction and Witch Hunting", in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 288-306.
The otherwise very interesting study by Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion: The
Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor,
1995), has been criticized for what some reviewers consider its uncritical feminist
perspective.

10On the midwife problem, see D. Harley, "Historians
as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch," Social History of Medicine 3
(1990), 1-26, and the further references in De Ridder-Symoens, "Intellectual and Political
Backgrounds," esp. 51-2.

11The best study of the idea is that of Clark,
Thinking with Demons. For the earlier period, see the seminal work of Richard
Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Learned and Popular Culture,
1300-1500 (London and Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1976).