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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 ...
In England, witch trials were conducted from the 15th century until the 18th century. They are estimated to have resulted in the death of perhaps 500 people, 90 percent of whom were women. The witch hunt was at its most intense stage during the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the Puritan era of the mid-17th century. [1]
There were also witch-hunts during the 17th century in the American colonies. These were particularly common in the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. The myth of the witch had a strong cultural presence in 17th century New England and, as in Europe, witchcraft was strongly associated with devil-worship. [3]
Prior to the 16th century, Witchcraft-- i.e. any magical or supernatural practices made by mankind -- was often seen as a healing art, performed by people referred to as the cunning folk. It was later believed to be Satanic in origin [ 1 ] and thus sparked a series of laws being passed and trials being conducted, with it becoming a capital ...
Potts has been described as an "active and selective reporter"; [8] he omits significant details of court procedure in the early 17th-century English legal process, such as that all indictments were initially submitted to a grand jury, whose task was to decide whether there was a prima facie case against the accused before the prisoners were taken into the courtroom to be tried by the petty ...
Titled "The Book of Magical Charms," "Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft" and "The Commonplace Book," each of these three texts is handwritten in archaic Latin and English and currently are ...
By the 3rd century AD, the Lex Cornelia had begun to be used more broadly against other kinds of magic deemed harmful. [17] The magicians were to be burnt at the stake. [16] Persecution of witches continued in the Roman Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of Christianity as the Roman state religion in the ...
During the 20th century, interest in witchcraft rose in English-speaking and European countries. From the 1920s, Margaret Murray popularized the 'witch-cult hypothesis': the idea that those persecuted as 'witches' in early modern Europe were followers of a benevolent pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. This has been ...