The Burning Times
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The Burning Times is a 1990 USA feminist documentary about witchcraft, and the witchcraft trials that swept Europe in the 15th-17th centuries.[1] The movies makes an estimate of a total of 9 million witches burned, admitting that this is a "high" estimate but quoting no alternative numbers.[1] Scholarly "high" estimates range around 200,000 to 400,000, with estimates around 60,000 more common.[verification needed]
Criticism
The movie is inaccurate in other respects, placing Trier in France instead of Germany, dating a stone cross there that is recorded to have been erected in 958 AD to 1132 AD without further explanation, calling it a "symbol of a new religious cult that was sweeping across Europe" while the first bishop of Trier, Saint Agritius, died in 333, and Athanasius in 335 praised how well-established the Christian faith had become in the Trier bishopric under Agritius.[1] Thus, the movie presents a hypothesis of an organized pagan counter-culture opposing Christianity, the very conspiracy theory forwarded by the Early Modern witch-hunters themselves. Until Christianity came along, women were the keepers of traditional spiritual wisdom, midwives and organizers of fertility festivals.[1]
Robert Eady, a member of the Catholic Civil Rights League in Canada, has cited the film in a complaint to broadcast regulators, quoting "it took the Church two hundred years of terror and death to transform the image of paganism into devil worship, and folk culture into heresy." [1] Eady describes the documentary as propaganda intended to represent the Christian Church as "a wicked, patriarchal, misogynist institution" (Eady's words.)[1]
References
External links
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