Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 December 10

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December 10

Legal system of early, 15th century Italy

I'm reading about witch trials in Italy, particularly those that began in the early 15th century. What's so interesting is how Christianity fundamentally changed, from denying witches were anything more than superstition, to actively persecuting women, many of whom were trying to help the people in their community. Instead of being rewarded with recognition and support, these women were murdered instead, often with the full support of religious, legal, and secular authorities, whose only evidence against the accused were allegations based on hearsay, and statements obtained from torture or threats of torture. In at least one famous case, a woman who was burned at the stake, was accused of helping women with their love lives, providing relief from abusive domestic partners who beat them, and helping women get abortions. Fast forward to today, and it looks like the right wing conservative movement is, in some sense, continuing the old tradition of witch trials in new forms by legislating against women in red states throughout the US. And they are doing it using the same justification of religion.

The literature doesn't seem to explain how and why Christianity fundamentally changed to support these acts of terrorism. The only thing our articles say is, "Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition. Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility of collaboration with devil(s), resulting in a person obtaining certain real supernatural powers." Is it the case that this lapse of reason and centuries of persecution can be laid at the feet of Aquinas, or is there something else at work here? Reading the extant trial transcripts of the time, shouldn't more blame be placed on the legal system that allowed these trials to take place? And, isn't this fundamentally a warning about the dangers of not having a clearly demarcated separation between church and state? Why then, doesn't the literature on the subject even discuss this issue? Viriditas (talk) 21:31, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Without specifically addressing many of your points, I would observe that Christian Old and New Testament scriptures and other well-regarded theological writings are long, complicated, and contain many apparent contradictions – not surprising as they comprise many different (and largely fictional) works written and/or compiled by different people in different times and places for different motives, and have been extensively purpose-selected, edited, and changed in the course of copying and translation.

Thus anyone wanting to find support for their own views, such as the 'necessity' of maintaining male social dominence over women, can find passages that they can twist to their purpose. The mistranslated OT verse "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (the actual word may originally have meant someone who poisoned a well) has been ample justification for some of the self-serving persecutions you mention. "Christianity" can mean almost anything anybody wants it to. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.215.44 (talk) 22:22, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Understood, but perhaps I need to focus on the heart of my question: where does it discuss the subject of the concept of the separation of church and state in relation to witch hunting and witch trials? That’s what I’m looking for in terms that the reference desk can address. Another aspect of this question might also involve the history of the concept itself and whether the architects of the idea considered the impact of witch trials on their thinking about keeping religion and government separate. Viriditas (talk) 22:25, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

The turning point was the papal bill Summis desiderantes affectibus, which formed the approval (on request) for the book Witch Persecution for Dummies (a bestseller better known under the Latin title Malleus Maleficarum). I don't think we should seek the blame for witch trials in a legal system that in general, for all kinds of crimes, accepted a confession under torture as a legal proof of guilt. The approval of witch hunting by God's vicar on Earth allowed an already common superstition to become mainstream. See also this article: "How Early Churches Used Witch Hunts to Gain More Followers".  --Lambiam 22:59, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Martin Luther and James Madison are considered the modern architects of the separation of church and state. Did either of them discuss the history of witch hunting or witch trials in their work? According to your link up above, there is a tenuous connection. Your link says that witch hunting was a response to the Protestant Reformation. Viriditas (talk) 23:09, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

For whatever little it might be worth (definitely not a Reliable Source, since chatbots scouring the web are notoriously unreliable), this is what Microsoft's "Copilot" chatbot told me:

"Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation, held complex and evolving views on witches and witchcraft. Here are some key points:

"Luther shared the common superstitions of his age, believing in the widespread use of sorcery and black magic1.

"He perceived the devil to be an active force and saw witches, like gypsies, Turks, and Jews, as accomplices of Satan in his ultimate battle against Christ1.

"His view of witches was defined by his theology1.

Luther’s aggressive approach toward witches intensified from the late 1530s1.

"His attitudes did vacillate. Occasionally he demanded that witches be burned at the stake, while other times he insisted on their admonition and conversion1.

Luther’s thoughts and writings reflect the evolving view of his times, thus remaining ambiguous1.

"It’s important to note that the prosecution of witches during Luther’s time depended on the legal perceptions of the individual feudal lord, and not on their denomination1. So, while Luther did express beliefs in witchcraft and at times called for severe punishments, he did not organize witch hunts2. His views should be seen within the context of the broader cultural and religious beliefs of his era.

1 worms.de

2 alaturka.info" —— Shakescene (talk) 00:29, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Hmm it is an interesting question and I lol'd when I saw it. Hard to answer based on sources though. The part that I am fairly certain someone could source: there was no concept of separation of church and state, zero nada nothing. Nor any concept of human rights. While my expertise is France not Italy, feudal law would have prevailed there also; everyone* had a lord except the king, and *he* could be bossed around by a pope using the threat of excommunication.

• Ok, most people. There were free tradespeople and charter cities and Barbary pirates starting about then, and there had always been outlaws and masterless men turned bandit. But I think this is mostly true, as over-simplifications go.

The other thing you have to understand is that a devout priest in that period would definitely have considered it more important to save a soul than a life.

I want to blame the Wars of Religion-- speculation starts here -- but I don't know whether Italy had a significant Protestant presence and even the French Revolution, I don't think, was about religion as much as an emphatic rejection of the whims of kings. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had a lot to say about no more retroactive laws, for example. I am guessing that the separation of church and state appeared in American ideology because so many early immigrants were religious refugees. I am thinking of Calvert, the Quakers and the conversos.

more semi-informed guessing on an earlier version of the question: The legal system that these things happened under would have been Church law and it might be worth considering the Catholic Church in terms of where it would have been in terms of its organizational life-cycle. Almost certainly very late-stage, right? So very rigid thinking couple with some paranoia and a strong propensity to defend a comfortable status quo? Given the right mental furniture, this could probably lead to seeing an uppity female who is unwilling to settle down and perform as chattel breedstock as clearly evil and in need of sharp correction to protect the community from her dangerous ideas and possibly save her soul. And would certainly have thought burning her at the stake a fine way to accomplish this, since if she was innocent she would go to heaven.

Hope that helps. Clearly I have thought way too much about this, lol. Elinruby (talk) 23:51, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Witch trials in the early modern period:

In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America.[1] Between 40,000 and 60,000[2][3] were executed. The witch-hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630,[4][5] during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors,[6] and women made formal accusations as much as men did.[7] Magical healers or 'cunning folk' were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused.[8][9] Roughly 80% of those convicted were women,[10] most of them over the age of 40.[11][12][13] In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake.

[...]

Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition.[14] Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility of collaboration with devil(s), resulting in a person obtaining certain real supernatural powers.[15]

[...]

In Italy a new development occurred when accusations of diabolism gradually became more common and more important in prosecutions, although they were still less common than trials for sorcery.[20] Records of witch trials from this century also lacked extensive descriptions of meetings of witches.[21]

[...]

Witch trials were still uncommon in the 15th century when the concept of diabolical witchcraft began to emerge. The study of four chronicles concerning events in Valais, the Bernese Alps and the nearby region of Dauphiné has supported the scholarly proposal that some ideas concerning witchcraft were taking hold in the region around western Switzerland during the 1430s, recasting the practice of witchcraft as an alliance between a person and the devil that would undermine and threaten the Christian foundation of society.[25] The Perrissona Gappit case tried in Switzerland in 1465 is noted for the thoroughness of the surviving record.[26][27]

[...]

This time period also coincided with the Council of Basel (1431–1437) and some scholars have suggested a new anti-witchcraft doctrinal view may have spread among certain theologians and inquisitors in attendance at this council as the Valais trials were discussed.[28] Not long after, a cluster of powerful opponents of the Canon Episcopi emerged: a Dominican inquisitor in Carcassonne named Jean Vinet, the Bishop of Avila Alfonso Tostado, and another Dominican Inquisitor named Nicholas Jacquier. It is unclear whether the three men were aware of each other's work. The coevolution of their shared view centres around "a common challenge: disbelief in the reality of demonic activity in the world."[29]

Nicholas Jacquier's lengthy and complex argument against the Canon Episcopi was written in Latin. It began as a tract in 1452 and was expanded into a fuller monograph in 1458. Many copies seem to have been made by hand (nine manuscript copies still exist), but it was not printed until 1561.[30][31][32] Jacquier describes a number of trials he personally witnessed, including one of a man named Guillaume Edelin, against whom the main charge seems to have been that he had preached a sermon in support of the Canon Episcopi claiming that witchcraft was merely an illusion. Edelin eventually recanted this view, most likely under torture.

[...]

The most important and influential book which promoted the new heterodox view was the Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer begins his work in opposition to the Canon Episcopi, but oddly, he does not cite Jacquier, and he may not have been aware of his work.[34] Like most witch-phobic writers, Kramer had met strong resistance by those who opposed his heterodox view; this inspired him to write his work as both propaganda and a manual for like-minded zealots. The Gutenberg printing press had only recently been invented along the Rhine River, and Kramer fully utilized it to shepherd his work into print and spread the ideas that had been developed by inquisitors and theologians in France into the Rhineland.[35] The theological views espoused by Kramer were influential but remained contested, and an early edition of the book even appeared on a list of those banned by the Church in 1490.[36] Nonetheless Malleus Maleficarum was printed 13 times between 1486 and 1520, and — following a 50-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant reformations — it was printed again another 16 times (1574–1669) in the decades following the important Council of Trent which had remained silent with regard to Kramer's theological views

[...]

Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions. In Catholic Spain and Portugal for example, the numbers of witch trials were few because the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions preferred to focus on the crime of public heresy rather than the crime of witchcraft, whereas Protestant Scotland had a much larger number of witchcraft trials. In contrast, the witch trials in the Protestant Netherlands stopped earlier and they were among the least numerous in Europe, while the large-scale mass witch trials which took place in the autonomous territories of the Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany were infamous in all of the Western world,

[...]

There had never been a lack of skepticism regarding the trials. In 1635, the authorities of the Roman Inquisition acknowledged its own trials had "found scarcely one trial conducted legally".[44] In the middle of the 17th century, the difficulty in proving witchcraft according to the legal process contributed to Rothenburg (German) following advice to treat witchcraft cases with caution.[45]

[...]

In Italy, an accused witch was deprived of sleep for periods up to forty hours. This technique was also used in England, but without a limitation on time.[66]

[...]

In general, there seems to have been less witch-phobia in Spain and the papal lands of Italy in comparison to France and the Holy Roman Empire.[82]

[...]

Italy has had fewer witchcraft accusations, and even fewer cases where witch trials ended in execution. In 1542, the establishment of the Roman Catholic Inquisition effectively restrained secular courts under its influence from liberal application of torture and execution.[87] The methodological Instructio, which served as an "appropriate" manual for witch hunting, cautioned against hasty convictions and careless executions of the accused. In contrast with other parts of Europe, trials by the Venetian Holy Office never saw conviction for the crime of malevolent witchcraft, or "maleficio".[88] Because the notion of diabolical cults was not credible to either popular culture or Catholic inquisitorial theology, mass accusations and belief in Witches' Sabbath never took root in areas under such inquisitorial influence.[89]

[...]

Various suggestions have been made that the witch trials emerged as a response to socio-political turmoil in the Early Modern world. One form of this is that the prosecution of witches was a reaction to a disaster that had befallen the community, such as crop failure, war, or disease.[90] For instance, Midelfort suggested that in southwestern Germany, war and famine destabilised local communities, resulting in the witch prosecutions of the 1620s.[91] Behringer also suggests an increase in witch prosecutions due to socio-political destabilization, stressing the Little Ice Age's effects on food shortages, and the subsequent use of witches as scapegoats for consequences of climatic changes.[92]

[...]

The convents were closed during the Protestant Reformation, which displaced many nuns. Many communities saw the proportion of unmarried women climb from less than 10% to 20% and in some cases as high as 30%, whom few communities knew how to accommodate economically.[101] Miguel (2003) argues that witch killings may be a process of eliminating the financial burdens of a family or society, via elimination of the older women that need to be fed,[102] and an increase in unmarried women would enhance this process.

There is also Witch trials in Italy which starts with The Witch trials in the Italian states of present-day Italy are a complicated issue.

When I recently read some of the articles about witchcraft, I remember that in some region and period (which?), it was the civil authorities who prosecuted instead of the churches.

--Error (talk) 01:22, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I was specifically referring to the early cases connected to the influence of Bernardino of Siena (1380–144). Viriditas (talk) 08:47, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

You may find this article of interest: "Nocturnal Journeys and Ritual Dances in Bernardino of Siena" (pdf).  --Lambiam 09:40, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 09:43, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Update: looking into this, several writers maintain that it was not the legal system that was at fault, but the medical establishment, who helped target woman healers for persecution due to competition. I don't know how scholarly this claim is, but Barbara Ehrenreich writes a bit about it, as do other feminists. Viriditas (talk) 09:40, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Witch trials in the early modern period again:

In 1973, two American second-wave feminists, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, published an extended pamphlet in which they put forward the idea that the women persecuted had been the traditional healers and midwives of the community, who were being deliberately eliminated by the male medical establishment.[117] This theory disregarded the fact that the majority of those persecuted were neither healers nor midwives, and that in various parts of Europe these individuals were commonly among those encouraging the persecutions.[118] In 1994, Anne Llewellyn Barstow published her book Witchcraze,[119] which was later described by Scarre and Callow as "perhaps the most successful" attempt to portray the trials as a systematic male attack on women.[120]

Other feminist historians have rejected this interpretation of events; historian Diane Purkiss described it as "not politically helpful" because it constantly portrays women as "helpless victims of patriarchy" and thus does not aid them in contemporary feminist struggles.[121] She also condemned it for factual inaccuracy by highlighting that radical feminists adhering to it ignore the historicity of their claims, instead promoting it because it is perceived as authorising the continued struggle against patriarchal society.[122] She asserted that many radical feminists nonetheless clung to it because of its "mythic significance" and firmly delineated structure between the oppressor and the oppressed.[118]

There is another section after that.

--Error (talk) 12:22, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

In reaction to that and other quoted passages above, I would note that a sizeable proportion of those historically prosecuted in Europe for witchcraft (or for heresy where witchcraft was the underlying 'offense') were in fact male. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.215.44 (talk) 15:55, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Looks like their early work wasn't rigorous, but since the 1970s, there's been a lot of other research, apparently. Leigh Whaley revisited it in 2011 in Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800, as did Donatella Lippi and Dommizia Weber in 2012. They are all academic historians, not political activists. Looking at their work, they haven't rejected the premise, but rather have provided additional evidence that wasn't available before. I realize this is still considered controversial for various reasons. Viriditas (talk) 19:22, 11 December 2023 (UTC)