Witches' day, Witch-hunt in Northern Europe

Résumé du document

From the early 13th century to the late 18th there were several witch-hunts conducted in Europe and North America. The term "witch-hunt" refers to the indictment and sometimes the condemnation of so-called "witches". The Great European Witch-hunt mainly took place between 1450 and 1750, but the phenomenon was not constant over said time period and we can clearly distinguish four main periods. Between 1420 and 1520 we observe the beginning of the witch-hunt. The next period (1520-1560) was less eventful while the following one (1560-1630) was the highest point of the prosecutions of witches and the years between 1630 and 1770 showed a steady decline. During this time period, the Church tried to control theological issues as well as the lifestyle of the people. While the Inquisition was meaningful in this respect, the setting up of witch-trials was also an indicator of this ideology. The two main charges that were posed against the witches were the practice of maleficia and the worship of devils.

Extraits

[...] This fear could not have also grown as much without the support of an important legal arsenal: ecclesiastical courts substituted by secular courts, decrees passed in the objective to maximize repression, etc. These are the characteristics that we find moderated in the Northern countries and they can explain this relative softness of repression. Contrasts among the various Scandinavian countries, even though they remain small, made it possible to stress new aspects of witch-hunting such as roles of the human networks in the development of the hunt and prosecution concentrated over crisis periods which were contained, thanks to legal tools preserving the victims of the hunts. [...]

[...] This the electronic version of Marko Nenonen, Nevertheless, a less important prosecution in Northern Europe In spite of these “natural” characteristics and these ancestral traditions of shamanism, which could have easily lead to a large witch-hunt in these regions, it is quite surprising to observe the statistics and to discover that the victims of witch-hunts were less numerous than in the other parts of Europe. After having given the degree of this difference, we will explain why the prosecutions were less important in Northern Europe. [...]

[...] In addition, the execution-rate differs among the different countries. In the statistics presented by Brian Levack, the European average was 47 percent. However, this study does not include any data on Germany, where the execution-rate was 75 percent in certain areas. The execution rate was lower in Scandinavia than in the rest of Europe. We can count between 1000 and 2000 executions out of the 3000 prosecutions. In Finland, this rate was even much lower with 16 percent of witches executed. This assertion should be moderated. [...]

[...] This essay presents the witch-hunt process through a Nordic perspective. In order to facilitate the understanding of this paper, the focus will be on four countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. A focus on the particularities of this Nordic pattern must be made in order to try to explain why it did occur. These Nordic countries do not need to be grouped together; differences between them did exist and these differences enable us to understand even better the witch-hunt in northern Europe Roman laws forbade the denunciation of other persons under torture. [...]

[...] Witches' day Witch hunt in Northern Europe WITCHES' DAY Witch-hunt in Northern Europe From the early 13th century to the late 18th there were many witch-hunts in Europe and North America. The term “witch-hunt” refers to the indictment and sometimes the condemnation of so-called “witches”. The Great European Witch-hunt mainly took place between 1450 and 1750, but the phenomenon was not constant over the course of its occurrence and we can distinguish four main periods. Between 1420 and 1520 we can observe the beginning of the witch-hunt. [...]