900 wards essay

Goodare

Introduction = Witchcraft did not happened even though early modern Europeans believed that it did.

Fourfold concept of witchcraft

demonic witch

village witch

folkloric witch

envisioned witch

Identify witches = identifying the enemy within

Magic = “Magic was a set of traditional beliefs and ritual practices that helped people to understand the unusual forces in the world, and to achieve practical ends by seeking to manipulate those forces.”

Religion = a system of belief in God, and of organised, public rituals, run by a professional staff, designed to propitiate God. This operated for the spiritual and material benefit of believers, and provided believers with an altruistic code of conduct by which they should behave towards other humans.

Superstition = term used by the educated to describe popular beliefs or rituals of which they disapproved. These could be pre-Christian survivals, or medieval practices that had been superseded by the Protestant Reformation or by parallel movements of Catholic reform. Sometimes these were seen as harmless or silly, like modern superstitions; but not always. The word ‘superstition’, as we have seen, literally meant an unnecessary extra belief.

Elite: Whether churchmen or laymen, one can discuss ‘intellectuals’ as those who created and disseminated the most sophisticated knowledge. . . The ‘elite’, however, was a broader group than the intellectuals: it included the political rulers themselves and social groups attached to them. Rulers included not just kings and great nobles but also local landlords, who often ‘ruled’ their tenants directly using their own seigneurial courts.

Popular: the beliefs of the common people – those who worked for a living, and were often not far from the margins of subsistence.

The concepts of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ belief, though essential, denote the ends of a spectrum rather than two wholly separate belief systems.

Goodare: Chronology of the Concept of Witch in Europe

Before 1400

Formation of a Persecuting Society (heresy not witchcraft)

Political magic (sorcery/necromancy)

Knights Templar

Alice Kyteler

1400-1435

San Bernardino of Siena (old lady witches)

Magic at the Savoy court (Michael Dishypatos)

Feugeyron and the Inquisition

Waldensians and Vaudoises

1435-1485

“New Sect” of witches (Nider)

Sabbat/Synagogue

Devil teaching the illiterate

Infancticide/Hailstorms

1486

Malleus Maleficarum

Situating witchcraft in the village

1486 -1500

Combined not fused

Two stages

1435-1486

1486

Levack

Document 8 (Canon Episcopi) Witchcraft as Delusion

Document 9 (Aquinas) There is no such thing as a free spell

Document 10 (Kyteler) See Goodare

Document 11 (Eymeric) Worshipping Demons