The Burning Times - an engraving by Jan Luyken of women being burned as witches or heretics
"What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable
punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable
calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of
nature, painted in fair colors...The word woman is used to mean the
lust of the flesh, as it is said: I have found a woman more bitter
than death, and a good woman more subject to carnal lust...Women are
naturally more impressionable...Women are intellectually like
children...She is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many
carnal abominations...Therefore a wicked woman is by her nature
quicker to waver in her faith, and consequently quicker to abjure the
faith, which is the root of witchcraft..."
- Malleus Maleficarum
The "Malleus Maleficarum" was written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in 1486. Sprenger and Kramer were both members of the Dominican Order and were Inquisitors for the Catholic Church’s inquisition against heretics. Heresy in this sense was an error in understanding and of faith in the Catholic religion, ultimately discernible by God alone.
On December 5, 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had issued the famous "witch-bull" to Kramer and Sprenger in response to their asking for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft. This papal bull would be used as the preface for the "Malleus Maleficarum." The Summis desiderantes affectibus recognized the existence of witches and gave full papal approval for the Inquisition against witches and gave permission to do whatever necessary to get rid of them, thus opening the door for the bloody witch hunts that ensued for centuries.
During the ensuing "burning times," approximately 40,000 executions occured over 250 years in Europe, the largest quantity of which occurred in Germany. One small town in Germany lost their entire female population to the flames.
In Wurzburg, a series of burnings claimed a horrific list of victims,
none of whose names survive:
"Three play-actors".
"Four innkeepers".
"Three common councilmen of Wurszburg".
"Fourteen vicars of the Cathedral".
"The burgomasters lady" (The wife of the mayor).
"The apothecarys wife and daughter".
"Two choristers of the cathedral".
Gobel Babelin, "The prettiest girl in town".
"The wife, the two little sons and the daughter of councillor
Stolzenberg."
Baunach, "The fattest burgher (merchant) in Wurzburg".
Steinacher, "The richest burgher in Wurzburg".
The Seventh burning
"A wandering boy, twelve years of age".
"Four strange men and women, found sleeping in the
market-place".
The thirteenth/fourteenth burning
" A little maiden nine years of age".
" A maiden still less (than nine)".
" Her (The little girl's) sister, their mother and their
aunt".
" A pretty young woman of twenty-four".
The eighteenth burning
"Two boys of twelve".
"A girl of fifteen".
The nineteenth burning
" The young heir of the house of Rotenhahn", aged nine.
A boy of ten.
A boy, twelve years old.
Although most heretics were women, a great many men were also taken, tortured, and put to death. This is a letter from one such victim at the notorious Bamberg in Germany; a poignant epitaph to one of Europe's most hideous crimes:
"Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head - and God pity him - bethinks him of something."
"And then came also - God in highest heaven have mercy - the executioner, and put the thumbscrews on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood spurted from the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from my writing. Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up on the ladder. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end. Eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony."
The author of this letter, Johannes Junius, did indeed confess to being a witch, and in August of 1628, was burned at the stake. He managed to send his final letter to his daughter, which ended by saying:
"Dear child, keep this letter secret, so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden...Dear child, pay this man a thaler...I have taken several days to write this - my hands are both crippled. I am in a sad plight. Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more."
text from www.paganlibrary.com/witch_hunting/persecution-modern_anc...
and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
Comments and faves
proudwoman96, omikami, jforars, LitterART, and 18 other people added this photo to their favorites.
rosewithoutathorn84 (57 months ago | reply)
Ever since I learned of the Inquisition and the European witch-hunts, far grislier than their counterpart in Salem, I learned that evil really did exist if people could do this to each other. Knowledge of these events at a young age also imbued in me a strong mistrust of authority, especially conservative, religious authorities.
As far as I'm concerned, the Vatican will never wash its hands of the thousands it allowed to be tortured and murdered. Next to the Holocaust, the burning of witches and other "heretics" is probably the worst crime against humanity in recorded history.
It still gives me nightmares, too.
samuelducanada (54 months ago | reply)
It isn't fair to only blame the Catholic Church for the witch craze, although the Church of that era deserves quite a bit. Although Pope Innocent VIII bears much responsibility, much of the Church (at least originally) was reluctant to allow the fanatical Dominicans to initiate persecutions.. The "Witch Bull" rebukes some bishops etc. in southern Germany for insisting that only those areas specifically mentioned in earlier documents were open to those inquisitors' witch hunts.
These two Dominicans apparently had to forge the approval of a German university to get this far, and less than 10 years later the Church banned the book. Somehow this did not stop the (mostly secular) authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, from using this book (and even materials from the opposite heretical side!) as justification for witch hunts. It is true, however, that things got worse; more and more Catholic and Protestant churchmen wrote in favour of witches' existence and their execution during the 16th and first part of the 17th centuries.
Two major eras were the late 1500's, when Calvinism supported witch hunting in Switzerland, Scotland and Protestants brought it to England, while new Lutheran areas often targeted Catholics and other Protestants. The worst execution rate on record is that of German, Protestant Bern against the French-speaking Catholics of the countryside Bern owned, the Pays de Vaud; thus there was a social and religious dimension to the hunts. Again, in the 1620's and 30's German, most prominently re-Catholicized areas of Germany, initiated the second big wave of witch hunts, including the Prince-Archbishop who presided over Bamberg's trials.
It is also true that the Church in the Middle Ages banned the persecution of witches, saying that they did not exist and that belief in them was a pagan belief. Later on, before the Reformation, over time some of the scholarship written from the 1200's on was later perverted into the demonology of witch hunts by the Protestants and Catholics that were both heirs to the medieval, Western European Church.
One of the most prominent members of the Church to write against this horror was a Jesuit called von Spee in the 1630's who was shocked by his experiences as a confessor to condemned witches. Also of note, Johan Weyer said in the 1560's that while there were witches, they were not those old women being burned as ones. Partly as a result, no one was burned in the Netherlands as a witch after 1600, and no more trials apparently happened there after 1610.
Also, Eastern Orthodox Europe, as well as Ireland, had no witch hunts; the ones in England, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and parts of Italy (mostly more centralized countries with more legal rules) were much milder and briefer than those in Scotland, Switzerland, a lot (though not all) of Germany, and France. Witch trials began (and stopped) much later in some countries than others.
Sorry for this long post. I know what you mean; as a little kid I spent time reeling in the horror of what I read about this, and had terrible nightmares about it. I still can't bear too think of it much.
samuelducanada (54 months ago | reply)
P. S. I like that your Flickr name is the famous description of Catherine Howard.
rosewithoutathorn84 (54 months ago | reply)
It's so cool that you recognized the Catherine Howard reference!
Thanks for all that background - I never knew a lot of that. I did know that the Reformation was the cause behind many burnings and executions - the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants probably account for a great percentage of the executions. I just intended the picture as a memorial for all victims of such persecutions as well as the Inquisition.
LitterART (53 months ago | reply)
Dark times for witches . . .
NEW SPECIAL & EXCLUSIVE GROUP!
Beyond the city walls lay unpredictable encounters with wild things, including other humans. Hans Peter Duerr argues that for the medievals the boundary between wilderness and civilization was permeable and often-crossed, like a low fence. In the country, at least, invitations to the wild lay at every turn. Strange animals roamed there, and at night the vast panorama of the skies opened up. Even the blossoms of the yew tree under which one might fall asleep were mild hallucinogens. An afternoon's nap might turn into a trip to the Venus Mountain. But now the animals the yews and the vastness of the night are gone, and the Venusberg is the stuff only of opera. Sometimes the wild is deliberately eradicated, as for example when our civilization deliberately chopped down the ancient world's sacred groves. The wild potentials that remain are pushed behind what Duerr describes as a solid, steep prison wall.
Lit.: Hans Peter Duerr (1985), Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell (trans. Felicitas Goodman)
Please add your photo to the group www.flickr.com/groups/647530@N23/
and feel free to invite other people or to add more “Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization”-pics!
Gazapo.Feral [deleted] (53 months ago | reply)
Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Metaphysical leper colony, and we'd love to have your photo added to the group.
gipas76 (52 months ago | reply)
Ciao, sono amministratore di un gruppo chiamato civiltà sepolte. Ci farebbe piacere aggiungere le tuo foto al gruppo.
pendlehillwitch (50 months ago | reply)
ouch!
Victor Anwar (45 months ago | reply)
Great exchange of history...
¨¨C¨¨ (44 months ago | reply)
What I think it's the most terrible fact about all that is: so many centuries later, we still find people who think like that somehow...
AthenaGoodRosa (40 months ago | reply)
this makes me so mad and angry. But I think that when we channel that anger with our intelligence we can dog reat things, and get as far as our voices been heard, things are chanign and will continue to change
up for change!
Meldelen (30 months ago | reply)
Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Martyrium: Female Martyrs, and we'd love to have this added to the group!
bramptonbryan (30 months ago | reply)
The Luyken image comes from a collection on the persecution of Christian martyrs, from the early church to the Mennonites and Anabaptists, which he etched for the second edition (1685) of Tieleman van Braght's "Martyrs' Mirror". No connection with witchcraft accusations.
The "Malleus Maleficarum" is widely cited for various reasons. There's a bad translation into English by the very strange Montague Summers. It's by far the most misogynistic of the demonological tracts. It went through plenty of editions. However, it had little influence in most of Europe -- never accepted in Rome, never translated into English, etc. -- and Kramer wrote it after his witch-hunting expedition had failed.
This list of cases is taken from Charles Mackay, "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions," Vol. 1 (1850). He gave as his source a catchpenny periodical published by a Calvinist divine and cartographer, Eberhard Hauber, from 1738 to 1745. Regardless of whether the statements are correct, they are clearly atypical. Würzburg, like some other German territories, experienced a short but intense "witchcraze" in the early 17th century.
The persecution of supposed witches was not a medieval phenomenon. It was a modern phenomenon, taking off during the 16th century, when newly powerful secular states created laws to prosecute witchcraft.
The prosecutions were not, for the most part, encouraged by the Catholic Church. They mainly took place in states where the government was not entirely secure. English prosecutions were at their height under Elizabeth I, whose main interest was preventing Catholic plots and invasions. Those monarchs who realistically aspired to absolute power, such as Charles I and Louis XIV, regarded such prosecutions as a dangerous and divisive nuisance.
Using the words "witches" and "heretics" as simple synonyms confuses matters, even though the Catholic Church did gradually rationalize the prosecution of some sorts of accused witches in terms of heresy. Accusing someone of heresy assumed that there was a belief system, consciously held. People accused their neighbours of harming children or cows, not of holding occult beliefs.
Real "heretics" tended to embrace their martyrdom, as the road to eternal bliss. Neither actual practitioners of magic nor those accused of witchcraft did any such thing.
The Catholic Church had no particular interest in those who were accused of witchcraft by their neighbours. It was only the deliberate invocation of the Devil, for magical purposes, that was of interest to the Inquisitions. Real and obvious heretics such as Protestants were the target.
It was secular courts that persecuted "witches", not ecclesiastical courts. Thus, the Portuguese Inquisition sent only six condemned witches to be executed by the secular authorities during the whole of its existence.
As for the idea that the prosecutions were intended to persecute women, that simply fails to explain why more men were prosecuted in some countries, or why some people rather than others. It is also necessary to find an explanation for the prominence of womenb as accusers, without simply turning such women into passive puppets.
Obviously, there was misogyny built into early modern stereotypes, though rather less than we suppose. Clearly, as with lynching, many who were not actually attacked by their neighbours were intimidated by the possibility.
Nevertheless, to call the execution of some 30,000 women and 10,000 men "Next to the Holocaust..... probably the worst crime against humanity in recorded history," is dangerously facile. Take away the German panics, and spread the cases across all of Europe and across 250 years.
Worse than the Crusades? Worse than the slave trade? Worse than the Wars of Religion? Worse than the American campaign against native peoples? Worse than the Belgian Congo? Worse than the American invasion of the Philippines? Worse than Stalin's gulag? Worse than the Japanese invasion of Manchuria? Worse than Rwanda?
The "Burning Times" narrative is identity politics masquerading as history.
maria michaela marasigan (24 months ago | reply)
Wow i learned so much about witch-hunt and it makes me so scary.......