How come witch trials occurred widely in some Catholic countries (France, Poland-Lithuania, Catholic provinces in HRE) but not others (Spain, Ireland)? I used to think it was merely a Protestant phenomenon, but there were still some Catholic countries with witch trials.
>>18006483>sourceless map
>>18006483It's mainly just due to pre/pseudo christian folklore in each region. Iberia and Ireland had their concepts of "witch like" beings be either good or non human respectively. I don't know really anything about Russian folklore so can't moment on them
>>18006483There was no witch trials in Ireland.
>>18006483>How come witch trials occurred widely in some Catholic countries (France, Poland-Lithuania, Catholic provinces in HRE) but not others (Spain, Ireland)?For the most part, witch trials were numerous when the courts overseeing them were secular.In proddie countries of course all trials were secular, since there was no overarching religious authority.In catholic countries it depended on whether the church saw it as a worthwhile effort to wrest back jurisdiction over this stuff away from the plebs.Where their authority was strong, they went for it.In very troubled places, they didn't bother.France with the huguenots and Poland with pestilence and the deluge absolutely did not warrant the political capital of the church to be invested into witch trials rather than high politics.Worth mentioning that the polish witch trials were explicitely illegal by church law, but the law was openly flouted for decades.
>>18006483Literate people document, illiterates like Iberians or Russians do not. /thread
No witches in Spain.
>>18006483The official position of the Catholic church through the Middle Ages was there were no real witches and accusations of witchcraft were usually just the result of feuds (that's actually a bit of an over-simplification, but captures the gist). Of course, folk belief in witches was still almost ubiquitous.Then the Reformation cut off large swathes of Europe from the oversight of Rome. In heavily Protestant areas the religious hierarchy was taken over by people who weren't necessarily uneducated, but didn't care much for traditional church dogma and were fervent to the point where they almost prized irrationality as a true expression of faith. Words like 'doubt' and 'scepticism' were not in their mental vocabulary, so when someone made an accusation of witchcraft they were inclined to treat it with the utmost seriousness. In less heavily Protestant areas, the Catholic clergy felt they had to bend towards the extreme minority or come off as soft on devil-worshippers in the eyes of the peasantry.The persecutions and counter-persecutions of religious dissent also fuelled the paranoia. In most places the hunt for witches was less about the actual fear of devil worshippers and more about the very real problem of recusant Catholics/Protestants hiding in the midst of their perfect religious utopia. The height of the witch craze occurred at a point when Catholics and Protestants were already inflicting extreme violence on one another; compared to the slaughter of the Thirty Years War, the witch trials were just a drop in the ocean of blood.So it was not Protestantism per se that caused witch trials, but the clash between Protestant and Catholic that saw people using accusations of witchcraft as another way of getting at people they suspected of having Catholic/Protestant sympathies. And with every 'witch' discovered, the hysteria spread.
>>18008861It's also worth noting that the majority of witch trials in England were instigated by just one man: Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed 'Witchfinder General'.He went about England during the English Civil war identifying 'witches' and then seizing their property upon conviction. With secular authorities busy, he had almost a free hand to torture his victims into confessing (theoretically illegal in England); he's estimated to have killed over three hundred people in this way. A very good example of how the chaos of war and religious conflict could be exploited by the unscrupulous for their own gain.
>>18006483Because your asspulled map sucks balls>>18006507fpbp
>>18006483>How come witch trials occurred widely in some Catholic countries>Poland-LithuaniaThere were barely any witch trials in Poland, your map is shit.
>>18009390There were large numbers of witch burnings in the (Protestant) Duchy of Prussia which was a Polish fief for much of the peak witch burning era. Hell, legal witch burnings happened in Prussia into the 1810s.And anyway, while the PLC was a Catholic kingdom, with a Catholic king, it had religious freedom and a large Protestant minority.
>>18006483witchhunting wasnt a big thing in PLC or at least it wasn't a big thing in the parts of the country that weren't infested with Germans or other protties. Germans, especially protties, were the only Euros who lost their minds over it. Catholic priests were too busy fucking boys to care.
Different cultural perceptions of magic
>>18006483Germany is explaind by a shizo who wrote a book on witches and faked a papal bull to give it validity.
>>18006483you can't control witch movements 100% now can you? I guess they just fled from Germany when it got too hot
>>18008861Note that the custom of burning people susected of witchcraft was present among pre-Christian Germanic peoples. Charlemagne banned it but >Of course, folk belief in witches was still almost ubiquitous.
>>18010872>Note that the custom of burning people susected of witchcraft was present among pre-Christian Germanic peoples.No? Women were recognized among them to generally possess magical powers, plenty of stories of seers, oracles, sacrificers etc. Custom among viking was to lift a woman up over a door to see the future. Every woman was a witch.
>>18010888https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Paderborn>The law is particularly noted for the way it also condemned to death "anyone who, blinded by the Devil, heathenwise should believe a person to be a witch and maneater, and should on that account have burned him or eaten his flesh, or given it to others to eat." It is part of the goal of rejecting the existence of witches and that burning them was considered a pagan custom.
>>18006483Possession is a devils game.Reading the bible here and now - it looks like "God's" a supposedly a fan of blood-magic.Must have been having a bit of a chuckle when they wrote that....
