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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 ...
Reprint of the title page of George Sinclair's Satans Invisible World (1685), one of the many tracts published in Scotland arguing against sceptical views of witchcraft. Prosecutions began to decline as trials were more tightly controlled by the judiciary and government, torture was more sparingly used and standards of evidence were raised. [37]
This was also the penalty for a first offence of using witchcraft to "discover hidden treasure, ... or stolen goods, or to provoke unlawful love"; for a second such offence, it was life imprisonment. [11] The last prosecution under the 1586 act was the 1711 Islandmagee witch trial. [12] Nobody is known for certain to have been executed under ...
Andrea Alciato was skeptical of allegations of witchcraft, which he said was more easily believed by theologians than jurors. [30] Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1519) believed that witchcraft was merely superstitious delusion. [31] Montaigne (1580) objected to witchcraft on the basis of skepticism concerning the trustworthiness of the senses. [32]
The sex of witches in outbreak witchcraft cases in New England from 1620 to 1725 recorded a whopping 156 accused females, with only 49 males in the list. [7] In New England alone, at least 344 people were accused of witchcraft between the same years listed above in total, making seventy-eight percent of that group women who had been accused of ...
The Witchcraft Act 1563 introduced the death penalty for any sorcery used to cause someone's death. The Witchcraft Act 1603 reformed the law to include anyone to have made a Pact with Satan. Jurist Sir John Holt by Richard van Bleeck, c. 1700. Holt greatly helped eliminate prosecutions for witchcraft in England after the Bideford witch trial.
The final act, the Witchcraft Act 1735, led to prosecution for fraud rather than witchcraft since it was no longer believed that the individuals had actual supernatural powers or traffic with Satan. The 1735 act continued to be used until the 1940s to prosecute individuals such as spiritualists and gypsies. The act was finally repealed in 1951 ...
Witchcraft in early modern Wales was common, and superstitious beliefs and rituals were involved in everyday life. Accusations, trials, and executions were significantly fewer in number than in England, Scotland and other parts of Europe, with only 37 prosecutions in Wales during this time period. [1]