Witchcraft during the Renaissance era was a significant phenomenon that consumed the attention and fear of many people across Europe. The period of the Renaissance, spanning from the 14th to the 17th century, witnessed a widespread belief in witchcraft and the fear of witches. This belief reflected the prevailing societal anxieties and created a climate of paranoia and hysteria. During this period, witchcraft was considered a serious crime and was prosecuted vigorously. Thousands of individuals, primarily women, were accused of practicing witchcraft and faced severe punishments, including imprisonment, torture, and execution. People believed that witches had made a pact with the devil and could cause harm by casting spells, cursing others, or summoning spirits.

The Trident

People believed that witches had made a pact with the devil and could cause harm by casting spells, cursing others, or summoning spirits. The witch trials reached their peak during the Renaissance, particularly in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. One of the most infamous witch trials was the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, which resulted in the execution of 20 individuals accused of practicing witchcraft.

A Publication of The Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Program

Capstone Corner: A Closer Look at Renaissance Witchcraft by Jordan Waterwash

As a senior Renaissance major with a frankly disturbing obsession with witchcraft and the occult, I considered nothing but the magical and the mystical for my capstone project. Witch- craft, however, is a tricky con- cept to nail down.

The misconceptions and stereotypes oftentimes get in the way of sources that took witchcraft seriously, and the primary sources that do take the magic seriously tend to have their own list of falsities. Researching the subject feels like running in circles more often than not, but when one looks from the right lens things start to fall into place.

For example, knowing what the stereotypes given to witches by those who were legitimately afraid that they’d be cursed helps us to understand the cultural implications of why the people accused of witchcraft were easy targets. Witches were usually women—though there were a handful of men that were tried and convicted—and most were women who secluded themselves from others, or had an unpleasant demeanor. Age also played a factor. Old women were more likely to be tried for witchcraft than young women, although both old and young women had their own subset of stereotypes they followed. Old witches aimed to fulfill a vendetta; young witches took control of their sexuality. Both had deadly implications.

The world of witchcraft was not left without its celebrities, though. A few witches came to be household names in the towns they resided. Agnes Waterhouse, also known as Mother Waterhouse, was among the first women to be tried and convicted of witchcraft in the year 1566. Her crime involved dealings with a familiar, a cat called Satan, that did her bidding in exchange for her blood. Familiar were seen as vectors to the Devil, as the witch in question would need to make a pact to sell her soul to Satan—the ruler of Hell as well as the cat—and seal the deal with her blood, as mentioned. One of the tests conducted to determine her guilt consisted of searching her body for spots where the cat had bitten. They found them on the top of her head. She was found guilty and hung.

Her story is familiar to modern readers. It includes all the typical stereotypes of witches—a black cat, Devil worship, and I’m sure she owned a broom—but there are tales that are not as recognizable to us, despite the similarities. John Lowes, a clergyman, was tried and convicted of witchcraft in 1645. He, too, was inspected for marks, which were found on the crown of his head and beneath his tongue. His cat was not a cat, but an imp. Several of them. And they, like Satan the cat, fed on his blood and devoted themselves to conducting whatever task Lowes asked of them. Why, then, do we recognize the tropes of witchcraft when a woman is assigned them, but not when a man fills the same bill? The answer is both simple and complicated. On one hand, it is clear that women often get blamed when things go wrong, especially during the Renaissance. And if the woman in question is cranky and old, then the blame falls easily onto her lap. But on the other hand, clergymen were often seen as feminized men due to the nature of their job description. This, of course, points to the fact that women are blamed for most things, but also reveals that men had their own set of expectations to abide by, and if one did not, they were subject to the same mistreatment women were given. Seems like hocus pocus to me.

Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe by Geoffrey Scarre, John Callow et al

At the dawning of the third millennium, a belief in the reality and efficacy of witchcraft and magic is no longer an integral component of mainstream Western culture. When misfortune strikes at us, our family or a close neighbour, we do not automatically seek to locate the source of all our ills and ailments in the operation of occult forces, nor scour the local community for the elderly woman who maliciously harnessed them and so bewitched us.

Nor do we believe that knowledge, love or power can be ours for the taking if only we employ the correct rites, charms or incantations to bring them within our grasp. Despite the interest in the modern pagan movement, the figures of the witch and the magician are conspicuously absent from the national stage and remain, for most people at least, simply the stuff of storybooks, firmly relegated in the popular consciousness to the realm of the late-night movie and the pages of fantastic fiction.

However, this has not always been so; and even now in parts of the non-Western world, where technology has failed to achieve total dominance over the traditional rhythms of agrarian life or to guarantee material prosperity and social justice, beliefs in witches and sorcerers are still firmly retained which bear significant and striking similarities to those held by Europeans throughout the early modern period.

This said, there is still something peculiarly tragic and poignant about the history of the witch belief in Europe. In a span of roughly 200 years, beginning in the later fifteenth century, a great many people, most of them women, were prosecuted for witchcraft. Of those found guilty some 40 000 suffered a capital penalty, at the stake, gallows, or by the headsman's sword, while an unknown number of additional victims received a more random form of justice at the hands of their neighbours, through common assaults, lynchings and social ostracism. Among those accused were, without doubt, individuals who had attempted to harm their enemies by occult means and who were thus guilty of witchcraft, at least in intention. Yet we now recognise that the alleged crimes of the witches were mostly impossible - a witch could conceivably invoke the Devil, but she could not fly through the air to meet him, give succour to shape-changing spirits or harm her neighbours by curses or magic.

Although historians have long taken an interest in early modern beliefs in witchcraft and magic, and their terrible consequences for those accused of the crime, the past 30 years have witnessed an enormous explosion of scholarly enthusiasm for the subject. A wealth of radical new interpretations and many conflicting theories have been advanced to account for the survival of this often disastrous aspect of popular culture, and the rise and fall of the many judicial measures designed to combat it. One important feature of much of this recent writing has been the substantial use of techniques and expertise drawn from across discipline boundaries. Anthropologists, sociologists and feminist theorists have all brought their different skills, talents and insights to bear on our understanding of the historical phenomena. Research into witchcraft has been conducted in every European country, in the Americas and in Africa, while international conferences have proliferated and leading scholars have undertaken painstaking analysis of court records and other archival material relating to the social and economic status of both accusers and accused. As a result of this broadening and deepening of the range of study, an altogether more sophisticated picture of the intellectual and social basis for witch theory and belief has begun to emerge, replacing many of the previously held assumptions about the nature of witchcraft and the rationale behind its proscription and prosecution. Few writers today would be inclined to echo the views of such rationalist historians as Hansen and Lea, who regarded the beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people in witchcraft as wholly irrational superstitions, and thundered with moral indignation against the cruelty and credulity of witch hunters and judges. 'There are no pages of human history more filled with horror than those which record the witch-madness of three centuries, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth', wrote Lea in his early groundbreaking study of the trials, while Russell Hope Robbins thought that the prosecutions represented nothing less than a 'shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of modern civilization, the blackout of everything that . reasoning man has ever upheld'.

Today, in an age characterised by the faltering of elite intellectual self-confidence - as typified by the growth of postmodernism - and the erosion of faith in human 'progress' - symbolised by the apparent failures of science and socialism - modern historians and commentators are even less likely to accept Voltaire, that arch-apostle of the Enlightenment, as their guide to the inversions and illogicalities inherent in the acceptance of witchcraft and magical beliefs. For Voltaire, it was the intellectual weakness of those accused, when combined with judicial gullibility and clerical fanaticism, that led to a great wave of 'legal murders committed by indolence, stupidity and superstition'. The late twentieth-century rejection of rationalism, and the unhelpful distinctions between 'modern' and 'archaic' forms of thought and behaviour which often accompanied it, is particularly useful in relation to our evolving conception of witchcraft, and the dynamic social forces which shaped it and brought it to prominence relatively late in its existence. The advance of research has done nothing to mitigate the sense of horror one feels on reading the grim records of trials, tortures and executions, but it has done much to remove the impression that the only proper explanation of witch prosecution is to be found in the madness, or the badness, of the prosecutors themselves. In this light, the past may not be such an unfamiliar place as it was even 20 years ago and the modern author may be closer, and more sympathetic, to his counterparts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at almost any time since those days.

There were, indeed, isolated figures even in the sixteenth century who voiced scepticism about the prosecution of witchcraft. The essayist Montaigne observed that: 'It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to roast a man alive for them.' In England, Reginald Scot wrote in 1584 that those who regarded themselves as able to do harm by occult means were merely deluded, whilst Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves, argued that old women who believed themselves to be witches were suffering from overactive imaginations - though he qualified his conclusions by adding that their abnormal mental states were caused by the Devil. Such views, however, were those of a minority of writers and even these sceptics - as we shall see - chose to phrase their criticisms within the framework of contemporary religious and demonological orthodoxy, firmly defying all later attempts to neatly categorise them as recognisably 'modern' rationalists. For the overwhelming majority of educated men around the year 1600, the problem was worryingly simple: witchcraft was not only real but was daily multiplying and increasing in its seriousness. King James VI of Scotland complained bitterly in 1597 of the 'fearefull abounding at this time [and] in this Countrey, of these detestable slaves of the Divel, the Witches or enchaunters', who were 'never so rife in these parts, as they are now'. Henri Boguet, the Chief Justice of Saint-Claude, declared around the year 1590 that 'there are witches by the thousand everywhere' and likened their ability to reproduce to that of garden worms, or vermin, infecting many districts with their odious presence. In 1613, Pierre de Lancre, who had burnt about 80 people for witchcraft in the French-Spanish border region, expressed the view that the progress of witchcraft in that area was now unstoppable, and that the sect of witches had infiltrated itself into the Basque population at large, while some years earlier, in 1580, Jean Bodin, one of the most formidable intellects of his day, had declared that sorcerers were driven by a veritable 'demon-mania' to run after devils and to do their bidding. Such crimes, he believed, which were both atrocious and widespread, needed to be energetically met with the most grievous of punishments.

But just what are witchcraft, sorcery and magic? If a discussion of these central themes in their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century context is to be fruitful, it is first necessary to characterise them with some precision.

(i) Witchcraft and Sorcery
Witchcraft and sorcery are clearly closely related in that both involve occult causality - that is, they are taken to operate not through the familiar cause and effect mechanisms of everyday life, but through certain hidden, mystical means. However, many anthropologists, following on from Evans-Pritchard's seminal work among the Azande tribe of the Sudan, believe that a distinction should be drawn between them. Witchcraft, in their conception, is an internal power that some people possess, an inborn property which they inherit, just as they might inherit the properties of being right-handed or snub-nosed. Witches can harm other human beings, their animals or crops, without performing any special acts; they can cause damage merely by a look or a malicious thought, and sometimes may even do so involuntarily.

Sorcerers, on the other hand, have no such innate capacity for occult harm, but employ magical operations, such as the chanting of spells or the performance of certain ritual operations, to accomplish their ends. In principle, anyone can become a sorcerer by learning the appropriate techniques, whereas to be a witch it is necessary to have been born one. A sorcerer wishing to hurt someone might use a verbal formula whilst damaging something belonging to the intended victim, such as a piece of their clothing, or some hair or nail parings, relying on the mystical relationships between those objects and their owner magically to transfer the harm to them; but a witch can achieve a similar objective without so much as lifting a finger.

Historians, however, have become increasingly dubious as to whether this distinction has much application to the European scene. There was, as Thomas has pointed out, some belief in the existence of people who had the 'evil eye', the power to harm men or animals simply by looking at them. Moreover, Henningsen has suggested that Evans-Pritchard's contrast was captured in the Spanish distinction between hechicer’a (sorcery) and brujer’a (witchcraft). Yet trial records provide little evidence that two distinct classes of offenders were singled out on these lines; the modus operandi of the accused witch seems normally to have been of little interest to accusers or court officials. French historians would thus seem to be justified in using the one term sorcier to cover all of those charged with causing harm - or maleficium, as it was termed - by occult means. In England, courts were more concerned to determine what brand of maleficia the defendant was guilty of, rather than how she had produced them, while on the Continent and in Scotland, the focus of attention tended to centre upon the defendant's relationship with the Devil. It remains possible that in some parts of Europe a greater measure of distinction was drawn between witchcraft and sorcery at the popular level than is apparent from the surviving records; but on the basis of the available evidence, it is of little assistance to the historian to hold the two terms sharply apart. Typical maleficia which figure in European trials include procuring the deaths and sickness of people and animals, spoiling crops, causing sexual impotence, raising bad weather, and interfering with the manufacture of butter, cheese and beer. Such maleficia had been feared in rural areas of Europe from immemorial antiquity, and while there was nothing in principle to limit the practice of black magic to the countryside, it appears on the whole to have loomed less large in the perspective of urban dwellers. But occult forces could also be enlisted to serve non-malicious ends. 'White witches' and wizards - in England often called 'cunning folk' or 'blessing witches', and in France devinsguŽrisseurs - existed in many communities, and would for a fee attempt the magical curing of diseases, counter malign sorcery, identify one's enemies, foretell the future, and locate treasure or lost property. It is likely that such practitioners of 'white' witchcraft often satisfied their clients by purely non-occult means, though to attract custom they may have deliberately cultivated an air of personal mystique. In an age when formal medical treatment, however rudimentary, was well beyond the reach of the vast majority of the population, many of these figures were undoubtedly familiar with folk-remedies and herbal lore, and fulfilled a genuine healing function within their localities. Reputations might also be made or further enhanced by such divinatory tasks as the identification of enemies, which would not have proved insuperable to someone with an acute ear for local gossip, or who was well provided with suitable informants. 'White' witches could cure sick children and animals and were adept at pinpointing the roots of village discord; 'black' witches inflicted death and sickness at will, and delighted in exacerbating local tensions to breaking point. Often, indeed, one man's white witch might have been another man's black. Muchembled has suggested that while clients might confidently approach a guŽrisseuse in a distant village, those who lived in her vicinity may have feared her powers and, if occasion arose, denounced her as a maleficent witch. It is likely, too, that some of these consultants genuinely believed they had the power to do either good or ill by occult means. But for many educated people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these characterisations of white and black witchcraft would unquestionably seem to have left out the most important element. Orthodox learned opinion, promoted by religious, and increasingly accepted by secular, authorities, held that witches or sorcerers were in league with that great foe of God and mankind, the Devil, and were utilising his superhuman powers for their own operations. This concept of witchcraft as a manifestation of diabolical power seems to have had considerably less grip on the popular than on the learned mind. Examinations of court records over the last few years have amassed much support for the view that unlearned people were not especially concerned with witchcraft as a devilish thing; like many people today in non-Western cultures, they accepted that the world contained hidden forces which knowing individuals can tap, just as anyone can tap the more familiar forces of everyday life, without speculating as to their origin. The typical peasant who laid an accusation of witchcraft did so because he believed he had suffered injury from a witch, not because he looked on her as a servant of the Devil. Following Larner, we may describe as 'primary witchcraft' the witchcraft or sorcery of maleficium which frightened the European peasant and which continues to frighten people in many societies at the present day. But it was much less the notion of maleficium than a concept of the witch as a follower of the Devil that had the foremost place in the minds of theologians and many witch judges. Therefore, it is inevitable that the term 'witch' in the present study will often bear this extra demonological connotation. A sorcier, wrote Bodin, 'is one who by diabolical means knowingly attempts to accomplish some end'. This overlay of a demonological content on the idea of primary witchcraft is distinctively European, and is possible only within a Christian culture.

(ii) Low Magic and High Magic
Using spells and rituals to kill or maim a man or his beasts, to spoil a neighbour's butter-making, to cause the water from a well to be foul, to produce good or bad weather, to make Jack fall in love with Jill - all these are examples of low magic, which is closely associated with Larner's definition of 'primary witchcraft' and with what anthropologists call 'sorcery', though it was not necessarily directed to evil ends. Low magic, essentially practical in intention, was the magic of uneducated 'white' and 'black' village witches or sorcerers, and of their often only slightly more cultivated urban counterparts. Theoretically unsophisticated, it was a magic primarily rooted in folk traditions orally transmitted from one generation to the next, with many of its spells and prescriptions having their origin in half-remembered learning and pseudo-science gleaned from the most distant antiquity.

Yet in early modern Europe, magic was by no means the exclusive preserve of ill-educated low magicians. Far removed from low magic in its theoretical and operational sophistication was the high magic of the Renaissance magus, a learned and visionary figure combining elements of the scientist and the priest, and entranced by the noble prospect of man controlling the cosmos by magical means. For such men as Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), it was through magic that humanity could realise its highest aspirations to understand and to compel the forces that govern the universe, and to make its nearest approach to divinity. Renaissance high magic rested firmly on the quasi-mystical philosophy of Neoplatonism, which had originated in third-century Alexandrian speculation on the meaning of certain strands in the thought of Plato. Influential, too, were the so-called Hermetic writings, themselves actually a product of the Neo-platonist tradition, which were believed - before they were correctly dated in the seventeenth century - to be the works of an Egyptian sage contemporary with Moses, named Hermes Trismegistus.

Medieval magicians had had some knowledge of the Neoplatonist-Hermetic tradition, largely filtered through Arab sources or the pages of the Jewish mystical Cabala, but high magic received a considerable boost during the Renaissance from the rediscovery of Hermetic manuscripts, and from the new enthusiam for reading the works of the ancients.

High magic depended on a complex theory, in which astrological and alchemical notions were mingled, of the world as a mystically interconnected system, and the magician believed that this interconnectedness (the 'concord of the world', as Ficino termed it) could be exploited to produce results on earth by certain ceremonies and incantations. Crucial to this conception was the Neoplatonist idea of the spiritus mundi, the spirit of the world, which infuses all things and which is the medium through which the influence of the stars is drawn down to earth. The purpose of magic then becomes that of attracting benign stellar influences and hindering malign ones; and the magician must study how to compel these forces by carving images on stones (talismans), chanting and singing mystical songs, making certain gestures and producing appropriate odours, all at the astrologically propitious times. The spiritual unity of the world is the ground of the 'sympathies' among its parts which are the magician's concern. To illustrate the nature of this unity, Ficino cited the well-known phenomenon of sympathetic vibration: just as plucking one taut string of a lyre will cause a second string to vibrate in sympathy with it, so are all parts of the universe linked together in a single harmonious rhythm, which enables the magician who performs the correct actions to capture and use the powers of the heavenly bodies. For instance, to fight a fever, according to Ficino, 'one sculpts Mercury in marble, in the hour of Mercury, when Mercury is rising, in the form of a man who bears arrows'. There was much debate about the extent to which high magic relied on demons. Even St Thomas Aquinas, the arbiter of orthodoxy, had not forbidden the use of natural substances which, by virtue of astral correspondences, might have a certain efficacy - occult certainly, yet still strictly within the bounds of the natural - to produce some result; for example a particular plain stone, placed on the skin, might in this manner help to cure some disease. However, Renaissance high magic, with its acceptance of the Hermetic doctrine of a universe animated in all its parts, and with the tendency of some of its exponents in their more poetical flights to talk of 'planetary deities', invited the charge that it was not really a natural magic, but rather a demonically facilitated one, and as such reprehensible. Some influential theorists, such as the much emulated magus Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), were actually willing to admit that their magic in some of its aspects employed demonic power, but insisted that only good demons, or 'angels', were involved. Whatever the sincerity of this plea, high magic was understandably greatly suspect in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities. Through its avowed sense of optimism, intense curiosity and willingness to seek for ultimate knowledge, Renaissance Neoplatonism was able to offer attractive and highly plausible intellectual defences for magic which were accepted by many members of the educated classes throughout the early modern period, until the concept of an animistic universe, whose organic power could be harnessed and channelled, was finally eclipsed, late in the seventeenth century, by that of a mechanistic one subject to immutable physical and mathematical laws. Meanwhile, popular low magic continued to thrive as it had always done, seemingly little indebted to the writings of the learned practitioners, even though more or less garbled echoes of the thought of Mirandola or Agrippa might occasionally surface in manuscript manuals of practical magic. Some of the men and women who plied the magic trade professionally undoubtedly had some smattering of learning, yet there can have been few 'white' wizards and wise women even among the urban practitioners who had much grasp of the subtleties of the Neoplatonist cosmology. In England, as Thomas has shown, wizards were generally artisans, or sometimes farmers, merchants or clerics, and practised magic only in their spare time; for the most part they can have taken little interest in the theoretical basis of magic, though presumably few were inclined to attribute its efficacy to the Devil. Some of these consultants built up considerable practices and charged high fees. Their clients were not confined exclusively to the commonalty: high-ranking members of society, too, sometimes required a magic cure to ward off the sudden onset of illness or sought to learn their future by divination. Magical remedies were, in fact, available for an enormous range of problems. In 1544, Lord Neville was promised the assistance of magic in his attempts to become proficient on the lute and virginals, while in the late seventeenth century the antiquary Elias Ashmole employed astrological talismans to rid his house of rats and mice.

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Witchcraft, Renaissance Idea of

There were two clearly differentiated ways in which the Renaissance understood the concept of witchcraft. The first one, originating from intellectual circles embedded in the Neoplatonic tradition, managed to either harmonize it with the categories which defined natural magic and other complementary occult disciplines or, on the contrary, consistently tried to disconnect it from established high-magic practices which, for these authors, had nothing to do with negromancy or demonic possessions. The second one emanates from the general debate that can be traced back to the Middle Ages concerning the nature and characteristics of witches. This conception leads to the publication of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487), whose contents, ultimately blended with contemporary social, political and theological issues, largely influenced the outbreak of constant witch trials across Europe during the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The belief in witchcraft during the Renaissance was fueled by numerous factors. The growing influence of the Church, especially the Roman Catholic Church, played a significant role in spreading the fear of witches. The Church considered witchcraft as heresy and worked actively to identify, prosecute, and punish individuals suspected of practicing it. Moreover, the Renaissance was a time of great social and cultural upheaval. The shift from the feudal system to a more centralized political structure and the spread of humanist ideas challenged the existing social order. These changes created a climate of instability and uncertainty, prompting people to look for scapegoats to blame for their misfortunes. Witches became convenient targets as they were believed to be responsible for crop failures, disease outbreaks, and other calamities. Additionally, the Renaissance saw a resurgence of interest in occult practices and alchemy. Intellectuals and scholars explored the mysteries of the universe, seeking hidden knowledge and power. Some of these individuals, driven by their curiosity and fascination with the occult, may have inadvertently contributed to the growing paranoia surrounding witchcraft. In conclusion, witchcraft during the Renaissance was a pervasive belief and a source of fear and persecution. The combination of religious fervor, social upheaval, and intellectual exploration fueled the witch-hunts and trials that plagued Europe during this era. The legacy of this dark chapter in history serves as a reminder of the dangers of superstition, fear, and the scapegoating of marginalized individuals..

Reviews for "The Legacy of Renaissance Witchcraft: Shaping Society and Culture Today"

1. John Doe - 2/5 - I found "Witchcraft in the Renaissance" to be quite disappointing. While it promised to provide a comprehensive exploration of witchcraft during such a fascinating period in history, it fell short in delivering on that promise. The book was incredibly dry and lacked engaging storytelling that could have brought the subject matter to life. Additionally, I felt that the author's writing style was dense and confusing, making it difficult to follow along and comprehend the concepts being presented. Overall, I was left feeling unsatisfied and would not recommend this book to others seeking a captivating exploration of witchcraft in the Renaissance.

2. Mary Smith - 3/5 - "Witchcraft in the Renaissance" had the potential to be an interesting read, but it ultimately fell short for me. While the book provided a lot of information about the topic, I found it to be overwhelming at times. The author delved into too many minute details without providing enough context, making it difficult to understand the significance of certain events or practices. Additionally, the lack of personal anecdotes or narratives made the book feel distant and purely academic, which made it hard for me to fully engage with the subject matter. While the book certainly had its merits in terms of research, I wish it had been more accessible and engaging for a broader audience.

The Witch Trials of Europe: Comparing Patterns and Practices in the Renaissance