To cut a long story short, next semester I will, as part of my British culture class, do a lesson about religion, and include a section on the history of religion in Britain, and how Christianity is viewed both positively and negatively. For the negative part, I'll mention things like the Crusades, Witch Trials, Inqusition, and so forth. I'm tempted to even show The Chart of Bad-History fame. I want to talk about how it's both seen today, and what actually happened. But my MA was in Modern History, not Early Modern History, so I'm not sure my understanding of witch trials is actually very accurate, so I'd like others to comment.
Firstly, I have a few maps I found on Google Images that show the amount of witch-trials in different areas, but I'm not sure how accurate they are, such as https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257/lawstatejudges/europebig.jpg and http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/objects/262/268312/art/figures/KISH334.jpg. They lack detail, but I do need something simple.
Secondly, my understanding. Now, these are Chinese students and this is just part of the lesson, so I need to give a simple explanation, but I still want to be accurate. In the early Middle Ages, belief in witchcraft was very common, especially in the north-east of Europe. The Church tried to tell people it wasn't real, but it didn't work. Over the late Middle Ages, as loads of terrible things happened, like the Black Death, people were looking for someone to blame for their problems. They started to blame more and more things on minorities like Jews, Roma and people with unusual religious beliefs. The Church began to hunt people with unusual religious beliefs. This search for people to blame, combined with the Church's teaching on how bad things were the fault of Satan, led to the Church believing in Witches too. After the Reformation, there were lots of wars and arguments about religion. Belief in witches increased a lot, as well as vampires and werewolves, and people began to accuse people they disliked, especially women, of being witches. This was most common in places where the government was weak and there were lots of wars, like Germany and Scotland, while in peaceful areas with strong governments like Spain, it was much rarer, because either people didn't believe in witches, or they had fairer trials where people could prove they weren't witches. In England some people were killed for being witches, but not as many as in Scotland. However, the King of Scotland, who was obsessed with witches, became King of England as well, so it still has some impact on English culture (for example, Macbeth). Protestant areas generally killed more witches than Catholic areas, but this is less important than whether the areas were peaceful and had a strong government.
How accurate do you think my explanation is? As I said, it unfortunately has to be simple, but I still want it to be accurate. I've drawn it from what I've seen of historians' views of the Witch Trials, but as I said, this isn't my area, so I might not have a very good understanding of the views of the historians who study this.
You're right to point to a connection with the strength of civil and ecclesiastical authority: killing was far more prevalent where both were weak. In fact I'd take the Catholic Church largely out of the equation: fear of witchcraft was a folk phenomenon often exploited by unscrupulous rulers or rogue clerics rather than sanctioned by the Church proper, savouring as it did of pre-Christian superstition and descent into mob passion beyond ecclesiastical control. The greatest persecutions occur in the century after 1550, precisely the time of religious conflict following the Reformation, and worst along the fault-lines between Catholic and Protestant. The earlier cases had been sporadic local panics: this was something entirely different, peaking as Galileo strove to complete his work. I would reverse the chronology and start from the proposition that as a large-scale phenomenon this wasn't at all medieval, but was as modern as the telescope. That might raise eyebrows and provoke curiosity, in addition to challenging the widespread misconception about timing.
The mtholyoke.edu map seems the better, though I would extend the pink area eastward into Germany and relegate Hungary to the lesser persecutors. The ablongman.com map seems to grossly understate the toll in Germany, France and Switzerland: I'm trying to figure out if it's meant to be per million, but that doesn't really work either.
If you're going to speak of witchcraft in Europe, you should not miss Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of Witches"), which was first published in 1487 and won endorsement in the Papal Bull of 1484 (Summis desiderantes affectibus).
However, the Malleus was not universally lauded, with many scholars at the time viewing it as a degenerate medieval throwback. It did, however contribute to the witch-hunt craze of the time.
In Spain, witchcraft was initially considered to be under the secular authority, not the Inquisition, which tended to view accusations of witchcraft with disdain. There was, however, a major witch-hunt in Navarre 1610. Some attribute this more to the influence coming from France, where across the border they conducted a large witch-hunt in 1609.
Did the Reformation change attitudes toward witch-hunts? Yes and no. There was less enthusiasm by Protestants but no condemnation of it. Witch-hunts continued and in many places with support of the new reformed authorities.
Diarmaird MacCullough speaks of a northern-southern Europe divide when it came to attitudes and concerns about the afterlife, and on the focus of penance. This is something that is worth thinking about when you teach non-Christians about the Reformation.
The first map is taken from Robin Briggs' book Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. He has two maps in the beginning of his book, about which he writes:
This map and the more detailed one opposite are manifestly defective in several respects. The German situation was so complex that it has largely defeated me, while in the absence of any reliable data I have left Poland - known to be an area of significant persecution - as a blank. Anyone who has tried to make a map of this type will realize that the information does not readily lend itself to representation in this form.
Briggs is one of the most reliable and important historians of early modern witchcraft of the last 20 years. You may want to at least read the introduction of his book, as well as the introduction and conclusion to Brian Levack's Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe.
