RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Witchcraft
sions which brought witches under the judgment of the Inquisition, and enlarged the powers of the inquisitors upon the basis of the close relationship between witchcraft and heresy (the text of the bull isin G. Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, Leipsic, 1869, ii. 222-225). Supplementing these directions there was put forth under the Dominican inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer a great work directing the process of inquiry into witchcraft, viz., the celebrated Malleus maleficarum (Cologne, 1489, and very frequently thereafter), the title of which notes as a peculiarity that the practise of leaguing with the devil was charged principally upon women. The first book shows the proof of the occurrence of the offense and its detestability according to Deut. xviii. and Lev. xix.—xx., and cites Augustine, St. Thomas, and experience. The second book continues along the line of experience and directs in the methods of detecting, dismissing, and curing the evils. The third book introduces the matter of trials and punishments. While the ordinary tribunals are competent, the union of heresy and witchcraft makes the inquisitors’ duty plain, and there is no need to wait for an accuser; the witnesses need not be named; a counsel for defense was not necessary, indeed if such a one were too zealous he might be suspected of complicity in the offense; instruments of torture are suggested. The authority most quoted by this book is the Formicartus of Johann Nider (d. 1488), dependent upon Wisd. Sol., vi. 6.
Thus a few centuries before the Reformation, in part under direct stimulus from the popes, there was a great increase of belief in witches and of prosecution of those charged with the offense. Modern apologies for the bull of Innocent VIII. miss the mark altogether in
bility and view of the chain of deliverances from
Private the papal chair, including those of
Discussion. Alexander VI., Julius II., Leo X., and Hadrian VI. That the sponsors for
the Reformation made no point of opposing specifically the attack upon witchcraft even in the countries evangelized rests upon the general background of conception of such possibilities as existed in the minds of the ministry during the last two centuries prior to the Reformation. The Elector August of Saxony included in his criminal code of 1572 as a capital offense “ that anyone should forget his Christian faith and make an agreement with the devil.” Wachter speaks of the epidemic of witchcraft which broke out in Germany at the end of the fifteenth century, and resulted in the prosecution of thousands of unfortunates; and when the spread of the epidentic into France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and England is taken into account, the victims coming not only out of the Catholic but out of the Protestant Church, the estimate of many thousands is not beyond bounds. Not the least guilty part of the process was the secularizing of the trials, i.e., the turning of the trials over to the civil power, which took place in Protestant countries at the end of the sixteenth century. The earlier dependence upon “Ttalian habit and teaching ” continued, and the conception was fostered by the makers of the confessions as a part of orthodox belief, while among
2. Official Responsi-
the masses of the people the superstition had the strongest hold. Among the Roman Catholic theorists who sought to justify the experiences of the witch trials by philosophical principles were Jean Bodin (Magorum demonomania, Basel, 1579), Peter Binsfeld, the suffragan bishop of Treves, the Jesuit Martin del Rio of Antwerp (Disquisitiones magice, Louvain, 1599), and Georg Stengel of Ingolstadt (d. 1651, De judiciis). On the Protestant side the subject was discussed by the Heidelberg physician Thomas Erastus (Repetitio disputationis de lamiis seu strigibus, Basel, 1578); James I. of England (Demonologie, Edinburgh, 1597), and especially Benedict Carpzov (Practice nove .. . rerum criminalium, Leipsic, 1635).
In recent times Protestants and Roman Catholics have joined in showing the unreality at the basis of this series of conceptions. It is due to the work of
a Bonn professor of medicine, C. Binz, 3. Individual that a series of Protestant opposers of Opposition. witch trials have become known as in past centuries exerting their powers in this direction. Thus the Lutheran Johann Weiler (d. 1588) wrote the oldest Latin treatise against the practise of trying witches (De prestigiis demonum, Frankfort, 1566), and he had several doughty followers during the sixteenth century. Similarly the German Protestant John Ewich, physician at Bremen (1584), Johann Georg Gédelmann, professor of law at Rostock, and Augustin Lerchheimer, professor at Heidelberg (Christlich Bedencken und Hrinnerung von Zauberer, Heidelberg, 1585, new ed., Strasburg, 1888), as well as the English Reginald Scot (d. 1599; The Discovery of Witchcraft, London, 1584, reprint, 1886), energetically opposed the burning of witches. The Arminian preacher J. Greve, of Arnheim in Holland (Tribunal reformatum, 1622), was another forerunner of the Jesuits Tanner and Spee. Tanner’s Theologia scholastica appeared in 4 vols., Ingolstadt, 1626, and Spee’s book was five years later, both protesting against the prosecution of the witches. The same cause was espoused at the end of the seventeenth century by Balthasar Bekker (De Betoverde Wereld, Leeuwarden, 1691), and at the beginning of the eighteenth by Christian Thomasius (Theses de crimine magie, Halle, 1701).
The century of the Aufklérung was not quite free from official execution of witches on German or German-Swiss territory. In Wurzburg in 1749 occurred the burning of the nun Marie Renate
Singer, in Memmingen in 1775 the be-
4. Super- heading of Anna Maria Schwigelin, stition and in 1782 that of the serving-maid Abolished; Anna Géldi at Glarus. Since then the Survivals. dreadful epidemic seems to have died out, at least from European lands.
But in Roman Catholic Middle and South America prosecution for witchcraft has survived almost to the present. Execution by burning for the alleged crime was visited upon a woman at Camargo in Mexico in 1860, upon a woman and her son in San Juan de Jacobo in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in 1874, and upon a woman, after frequent castigation, in the market-place of a city of Peru in 1888. That this should be the case under Roman Catholic domination is not surprising when it is recalled that a
Witchcraft