Protests against early modern witch trials

What it is

Across Europe, courts tried numbers of people for witchcraft between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside the trials ran a steady current of complaint against them. This page is about that opposition: the arguments of jurists, physicians, churchmen and neighbours that the hunts were unlawful, needlessly cruel, theologically wrong, or misinformed about what was really going on. The critics were not all disbelievers. Some accepted that witchcraft existed and still doubted that the cases in front of a court were genuine. The objections are usually sorted into four kinds: legal, ethical, theological and sceptical.

Where it comes from

Prosecutions stretched from the fifteenth century into the eighteenth, and criticism came early, much of it from inside the church. Martin LeFranc wrote in 1440 that God's sovereignty ruled out real witchcraft. Antonino, archbishop of Florence, who died in 1459, called popular witch beliefs foolishness and required those who held them to repent. Ulrich Müller, writing as Molitoris in 1489, used the older church text known as the Canon Episcopi against common ideas about witches. Legal complaint followed: Andrea Alciato in 1515 and Johann Weyer in 1563 both warned that confessions extracted under torture were unreliable.

How it is done

Opponents worked through whatever institutions they had. They wrote opinions and treatises, advised town councils, and examined accused people when a parliament asked them to. Some preached or published against the hunts. In Catalonia a Jesuit handed a written protest to the viceroy in January 1619, and after a woman was arrested that November, jurists put their names to a document arguing for her innocence. Neighbours could act as well: after a French witchfinder was killed in a quarrel, local people petitioned the king to pardon his killer, saying the dead man had been a fraud.

What it is for

The aim was often narrow and practical: to stop one prosecution, spare a named person, or keep a court from acting on thin evidence. The council of Rothenburg ob der Tauber was advised to handle witchcraft cases with caution, and in 1652 the jurist Georg Christoph Walther argued in a case concerning two accused women that they should be set free unless proper legal process found them guilty. Other critics aimed wider and argued that the hunts as such were unlawful or unchristian. Some wrote for princes and courts; others spoke for neighbours who suspected an accuser of seeking money.

Who does it

Objections mostly came from people with standing. Andrea Alciato and Johann Georg Gödelmann wrote as jurists, Symphorien Champier, Johannes Weyer and Pierre Pigray as physicians, Friedrich Spee and Cornelius Loos as churchmen, and bishops such as Antonino of Florence and Antonio Venegas de Figueroa also joined in. A learned man might be called on by a court, as Pigray was when the French Parliament asked him to look at several accused people. Householders and neighbours took part too, particularly where a travelling witchfinder was thought to be profiting from the trade.

Peoples and places

The surviving record is largely German, Italian, French and Catalan. Rothenburg ob der Tauber gives a documented instance of councillors weighing caution. In Catalonia the argument that followed Caterina Freixa's arrest in November 1619 drew in fourteen jurists connected with the Generalitat, among them Joan Pere Fontanella; their signed defence of her is described as marking the beginning of the end of the hunt in that region. A French dispute in 1460 shows a community siding with a man who had killed a witchfinder. Italian churchmen carried much of the theological case.

What people believe

Two positions sat side by side. One denied that witchcraft could happen at all: LeFranc held that God's sovereignty excluded it and that confessing witches were deceived by the devil's illusions, while Reginald Scot in 1584 made a similar argument and cited John Calvin repeatedly. Molitoris and Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio allowed that witches existed but rejected the popular picture of what they did, following the Canon Episcopi. Others looked for natural causes. Symphorien Champier pointed to illness, Antonio Venegas de Figueroa warned against mistaking madness for sorcery, and Johannes Weyer blamed an imbalance of the humours.

How scholars and sceptics see it

The protests are commonly grouped by kind: legal, ethical, theological and sceptical. Friedrich Spee's 1631 argument that no empirical evidence stood behind the allegations, even where the accused confessed, belongs to the evidential line. Johannes Weyer's account of accused women as deluded and unwell has been treated as a forerunner of modern psychiatric thinking. The Roman Inquisition's 1635 acknowledgement that barely one trial had been conducted legally is read as an admission from within the system. Attention also falls on the fact that many critics still accepted witchcraft and attacked only the proof offered in court.

Compare and confuse

Critics differed over what exactly they were denying. Molitoris and Ponzinibio granted witchcraft in principle and rejected only the popular account of it, following the Canon Episcopi. LeFranc, Scot and Samuel Harsnett went further and denied the thing altogether, while Cassini and Montaigne questioned the logic or the evidence of the senses rather than the devil. Agrippa called the belief a superstitious delusion. Alciato remarked that allegations were easier for theologians to accept than for jurors.

Law and persecution

Procedure gave the strongest ground for objection. Alciato in 1515 and Weyer in 1563 argued that confessions forced by torture might be false, and Gödelmann in 1591 attacked improper methods of trial. In 1635 the Roman Inquisition itself conceded that hardly a single trial had been run lawfully. Walther's 1652 opinion for Rothenburg ob der Tauber turned on process: absent a proper finding of guilt, the two accused women should be released without punishment. In Catalonia the defence signed by fourteen jurists was meant to keep Caterina Freixa from a death sentence.

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Good reading and sources

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