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Witchcraft was formally categorized as a crime in the Holy Roman Empire in the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina in 1532. The Holy Roman Empire consisted of a number of autonomous states, both Protestant and Catholic who all had their own laws and regulations, and the witchcraft persecutions, therefore, varied considerably.
The Malleus Maleficarum, [a] usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, [3] [b] is the best known treatise about witchcraft. [6] [7] It was written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institor) and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1486.
The Inquisition within the Roman Catholic Church had conducted trials against supposed witches in the 13th century, but these trials were to punish heresy, of which belief in witchcraft was merely one variety. [6]
Discussing the early Roman Catholic Church's demonisation of pagan deities, Merrifield states that the Church continued propagating a form of polytheism through the "cult of the blessed dead", the veneration of saints and martyrs, throughout the Middle Ages. Discussing the ritual use of Christian relics, he also looks at votive offerings that ...
[149] [146] [150] During his first official tour of Italy (389–391), the emperor won over the influential pagan lobby in the Roman Senate by appointing its foremost members to important administrative posts. [151] Theodosius also nominated the last pair of pagan consuls in Roman history (Tatianus and Symmachus) in 391. [152]
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. [90]
European belief in witchcraft can be traced back to classical antiquity, when magic and religion were closely entwined. During the pagan era of ancient Rome, there were laws against harmful magic. After Christianization, the medieval Catholic Church began to see witchcraft (maleficium) as a blend of black magic and apostasy involving a pact ...
The Canon Episcopi has received a great deal of attention from historians of the witch craze period as early documentation of the Catholic church's theological position on the question of witchcraft. The position taken by the author is that these "rides of Diana" did not actually exist, that they are deceptions, dreams or phantasms.