Brunaburh
Banned
I'm still looking for a reliable source saying how you can divided the HRE between catholics and protestants and what percentage of the population were of each confession.
But the numbers I provided show that the Witch Trials was at a very large majority a German tradition (the HRE being in majority German) and that Protestants countries outside the HRE killed a far greater numbers of witches that catholic countries, both in numbers and even more per capita. Small Great Britain and small Scandinavia executing more witches that far greater France, Iberia or Italy.
The table you rely on in wikipedia is not really evidence of anything. It is cited to a book, which looks to be a decent source, but we don't know whether it is a table copied wholesale from the book, a user's attempt to take statistics from the book and display them for wikipedia's readers, or a patchwork of bits from the book and things users have added later on. Really, don't base your opinions on wikipedia. I write the damn thing, and I don't.
The table is wrong on the British Isles for a start, it underestimates the deaths in Scotland by a factor of 3,, and it groups regions senselessly. England had around 5 times the population of Scotland and between a quarter and a sixth of the witch killings, Ireland had the same population and almost none. Within Scotland, the Gaelic-speaking area had almost no deaths. Wales had much lower numbers per capita than England, but not as low as Ireland. So what purpose is served by grouping these areas in the table? What about the HRE? How much more variability is shown there?
Did you notice the massive list of incidents I posted in which the Catholic authorities of German-speaking regions killed several hundred people at a time? The biggest incidents of mass-killings were carried out by Catholics in Germany, especially in the 17th century when the prime movers were Prince-Bishops. The fact Germany had Catholic polities in which the death rates were much higher than anywhere else in the world, like the Prince-Bishoprics of Bamberg, Wurzberg and Trier, show that classifying witch hunts as a Protestant phenomenon is simply wrong. I can recommend this book to read about them:
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4
The fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was a period of witchcraft prosecutions throughout Europe and modern scholars have now devoted a huge amount of research to these episodes. This volume will attempt to bring this work together by summarising the history of the trials in a new way - according...
books.google.co.uk
There were Protestant areas that witch-hunted fervently, and ones which did not, just as there were Catholic areas which fervently witch-hunted, and ones which did not. Attempting to suggest that this was a religious division is facile, it is a phenomenon which occurred within the Christian world as a whole as a response to both modernisation and social stress.
And once again, be careful relying on wikipedia. It led me to this book, but I didn't trust it til I had read the source.
Last edited: