514 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D, 1204-1517.
from its mountain fastnesses, where it had been confined for the half of a millennium.
In Austria, the fortunes of the Waldensianswere more or less interwoven with the fortunes of the Hussites and Bohemian Brethren. In parts of Northern Germany, as in Brandenburg in 1480, members of the sect were subjected to severe persecutions. In the Lowlands we hear of their imprisonment, banishment and death by fire.^
The mediaeval horror of heresy appears in the practice of ascribing to heretics nefarious performances of all sorts. Tlje terms Waldenses and Waldensianism were at times made synonymous with witches and witchcraft. Just how the terms Vauderie, Vaudoisie, Vaudois, Waudenses and Valdenses came to be used in this sense has not been satisfactorily explained. But such usage was in vogue from Lyons to Utrecht, and the papal bull of Eugenius IV., 14-40, refers to the witches in Savoy as being called Waldenses. ^ An elaborate tract entitled the Waldensian Idolatry ,3 — Valdenses ydolatrce, — written in 1460 and giving a description of its treatment in Arras, accused the Waldenses with having intercourse with demons and riding through the air on sticks, oiled with a secret unguent.
§ 59. Witchcraft and its Punishment.
Perhaps no chapter in human history is more revolting than the chapter which records the wild beljef in Ayitnhcraft^and the merciless punishments meted out for it in Western Europe in the century just preceding the Protestant Reformation and
iFredericq, 1. 26, 50, 351 sqq. ; 501 sq., 512 ; II. 263 sqq. ; III. 100. This author, I. 367 sqq., gives a sermon by a canon of Tournay against Waldensian tenets, wliich was much praised at tlie time. A French translation by Hansen, Quellen, p. 184 sq.
2 See the bull in Hansen, QueUeJi, p. 18, and an extended section, pp. 408 sqq., on the use of the term Vmulerie for witchcraft. In the 14th century it was used to designate the practice of unnatural crimes, just as was the term Bougerie in France, which, at the first, was applied to the Catharan heresy.
8 This document is given in part by Fredericq, III. 94-109, and in full by Hansen, pp. 149-182. Its details are as disgusting as the imagination could well invent.
§ 59. WITCHCKAFT AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 515
the succeeding century. ^ In the second half of that century, the Church and society were thrown into a panic over witchcraft, and Christendom seemed to be suddenly infested with a great company of bewitched people, who yielded themselves to the irresistible discipline of Satan. Tlie mania spread from Rome and Spain to Bremen and Scotland. Popes, lawyers, physicians and ecclesiastics of every grade yielded their assent, and the only voices lifted up in protest which have come down to us from the Middle Ages were the voices of victims who were subjected to torture and perished in the flames. No, Reformer uttered a word against it. On the contrary, Luther was a stout believer in the reality of demonic agency, and pronounced its adepts deserving of the flames. Calvin allowed the laws of Geneva against it to stand. Bishop Jewel's sermon before Queen Elizabeth in 1562 was perhaps the immediate occasion of a new law on the subject. ^ Baxter proved the reality of witchcraft in his Certainty of the World of Spirits. On the shores of New England the delusion had its victims, at Salem, 1692, and a century later, 1768, John Wesley, referring to occurrences in his own time, declared that "giving up witchcraft was, in effect, giving up the Bible."
In the establishment of the Inquisition, 1215, Innocent III. made no mention of sorcery and witchcraft. The omission may be explained by two considerations. Provision was made for the prosecution of sorcerers by the state, and heretical depravity, a comparatively novel phenomenon for the Middle
1 Lempens pronounces the prosecution of witchcraft the greatest crime of all times, das grosste Verbrechen alter Zeiten. Witches were called /ascinarei, strigimagce, lamice, phytonissce, strigoi, streges, maleficai, Gazarii, that is, Cathari, and Valdenses, etc. For the derivation of the German term, Hexe, see J. Francke's discussion in Hansen, Quelle?!, pp. 615-670.
2 In Protestant Scotland the iron collar and gag were used. The last trial in England occurred in 1712. A woman was executed for witchcraft in Seville in 1781 and another in Glarus in 1782. Dr. Diefenbach, in his Aberglaube, etc., attempts to prove that the belief in witchcraft was more deepseated in Protestant circles than in the Catholic Church. Funk, Kirchengesch., p. 419, Hefele, Kirchengesch., p. 522, and other Catholic historians take care to represent the share Protestants had in the persecution of witches as equal to the share of the Catholics.