The height of the witch craze in Europe occurred between roughly 1560 and 1630, but the decline and eventual disappearance of witchcraft trials transpired in a much more disjointed fashion chronologically and geographically. Several historiographical explanations exist to account for this demise, and emergent cultural and intellectual trends throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provide a context through which to understand these changes. The rise of the mechanistic world view of Descartes, Newton, and others posed a problem for witchcraft because prevailing natural interpretations of previously unexplainable events established a schema into which witchcraft could not easily be assimilated. Greater religious toleration and the acceptance of religious pluralism in many places allowed diverse beliefs to coexist within the same social milieu and thus fears of witchcraft diminished. However, it should also be noted that although the trials themselves ceased, a general belief in witchcraft, especially among commoners, did not. This points to a gradual shift of the import that the notion and term “witch” carried in popular consciousness. The category and terminology surrounding the idea of the witch lost a great deal of cultural cachet during the seventeenth century among the elites in charge of its prosecution and devolved into broader associations with superstition. I intend to critique four historians’ approaches to the problem of witch trial decline and the growing gap between the elite opinion regarding witchcraft “superstitions” and the commoner continuation of belief largely devoid of its legal implications.
In his analysis of the decline of witchcraft, Brian Levack asserts that new legal safeguards and procedures regarding the prosecution of witches accompanied the edification and centralization of the nation-state. In keeping with his overarching thesis that the centralization of authority actually contributed to a decrease in witch trails and helped to restrain more zealous local authorities, Levack argues that new legal protections beginning in the early seventeenth century made it more difficult for authorities to prosecute for witchcraft. He cites four major changes contributing to a decline of witch trials: greater judicial centralization, limited or forbidden use of torture, greater necessity of evidence for conviction, and better legal defense allocated to those accused of witchcraft. According to the new judicial world view, far fewer people were actually capable of being witches. Skepticism grew among elites, but at first this skepticism did not extend to a belief in the authenticity of witchcraft. Rather, it entailed judicially specific skepticism of the efficacy of torture to extract true confessions and to greater doubt concerning the adequacy of evidence presented in the majority of trials. Even while authorities in the early seventeenth century grew more skeptical of the presence of a vast conspiracy of witches, its reality as a crime remained.
This new skepticism was accompanied by a redefining of the term “witch” to narrow its meaning and grant it less power. Johann Weyer, for example, distinguished witchcraft from “magicians, evil-doers, enchanters, and poisoners” all of whom might be charged with witchcraft by less discerning prosecutors. He explained witchcraft as a natural phenomenon and, through textual exegesis and linguistic analysis, claimed that the Biblical witch from the heavily quoted Exodus 22:18 did not directly correlate to those accused of witchcraft in the early modern era. Similarly, John Webster argued over a century later that witches were better classified as “Deceivers, Cheaters, Counteners, and Imposters” and that natural explanations could be employed to explain the persistence of these beliefs. A greater emphasis on natural explanations to describe seemingly supernatural events coincided with this growing skepticism. During the seventeenth century, the intellectual outlook of European elites inclined toward more empirical, materialistic, and scientific visions of the universe, and this has historically been regarded a common justification for the decline of witchcraft trials. There are two problems with this approach. One is that, according to Levack, the rise of this world view came several decades after the worst of the witchcraft prosecutions had already subsided. The other is that, within the time frame of the decline, the “scientific” world view embraced far more natural philosophies than simply the materialistic. Neoplatonism, for example, still exerted a great deal of intellectual influence as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it much more readily accommodated occult and esoteric ideas. Only the mechanistic weltanschauung would not incorporate witchcraft, and according to Levack, it had not yet ascended to prominence.
Levack acknowledges the problem of chronology and does not specify precisely when the trials came to an end, leaving a very broad time frame for decline—beginning in some places as early as 1600 and not in others until the 1670s. This implies not only that new scientific and philosophical ideas diffused at different rates in different regions but also that the abatement of the importance of witchcraft as a categorical notion depended largely on cultural factors in specific regions. In the case of England, for example, Marion Gibson contends that controversy surrounding particular witchcraft trials caused a hesitance to prosecute on the part of the judiciary. Gibson refers to J.A. Sharpe and recounts a more precise chronology than Levack, tracking skepticism via the decline of witchcraft pamphlets through the 1620s and 1630s. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, published in 1621, was the last until 1643. However, Gibson claims that the reduction of pamphlets led to a decrease in witch trials though it seems just as likely that declining elite interest in witchcraft hastened the demise of the pamphlet. From the chronological information provided, the two appear to have ebbed simultaneously. In either case, witchcraft simply did not hold the cultural or judicial currency for prosecutors it once possessed.
Owen Davies answers some of Gibson’s lingering questions in his acknowledgment of the fact that witchcraft declined at different rates in different geographical areas for distinct reasons. For Davies, the growing cultural divides between rural and urban spaces most greatly affected long term witchcraft trends. Particularly, the lack of an agricultural lifestyle in urban settings and different levels of contact with livestock may have had an impact on the subsiding trials. Davies attests to the utilitarian nature of the peasant version of witchcraft, noting that nearly half of all witchcraft cases in rural Surrey involved livestock and humans as opposed to less than a third in the comparable urban setting of Southwark, implying that rural accusations still revolved around the hexing or cursing of animals. However, this seems to be a broad assumption because Davies never defines the degree to which urban environs differed from their rural counterparts before the Industrial Revolution. A complete dichotomization of rural and urban settings had not yet occurred in the seventeenth century, and it would not be until industrialization that a substantial divorce arose.
The more convincing aspect of Davies’ argument is his contention that the constant flux of people in and out of cities comprised the greatest difference between rural and urban landscapes: families lived for generations in rural peasant communities whereas cities had a higher turnover rate of inhabitants. This lack of communal cohesiveness made it far more difficult for the type of internal feuds that oftentimes typified witch hunts. The idea that witchcraft ran in families lacked cultural significance in cities where multigenerational contact and continuity was not often the norm.
Davies is also very careful to note, as Levack and Gibson imply, that the decline in witchcraft prosecution does not necessarily indicate an absence of witchcraft belief. He notes numerous accounts of common witchcraft belief throughout nineteenth century England and in France, in one particular incident, as late as 1968. Of course, by this time the trials had long since subsided, and these existed as folk explanations of unusual activities devoid of illicit meaning. This pertains to physical objects as well. Horseshoes, for example, once held specific significance for witchcraft deterrence, but later seem to have dissolved into general superstitious belief. By the time dangerous witchcraft beliefs came to be regarded as innocuous superstitions by the elites, witchcraft prosecutions waned. Later elite contempt for the explanatory power of witchcraft likely contributed to the Enlightenment view of witchcraft as a simple superstition since this was the most immediate and contemporary form of belief educated elites encountered among common people.
Given that the concern for witchcraft diminished in the legal sphere throughout the Enlightenment, why was there a continued acceptance of witchcraft among commoners? It is possible that we see a return to pre-trial era modes of discourse about witchcraft, and the meaning that this term carried may have reverted back to "illusions and phantasms." While it may not have contributed directly to the decline in witchcraft trials, the “disenchantment” of the world throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost certainly contributed to a decline in the acceptance of witchcraft among the educated elite. Among the commoners, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra concurs with Davies and surmises that a more stable domestic life and a less precarious agricultural system affected witchcraft beliefs because misfortune no longer required a supernatural explanation. This was reserved for “personal” justification of events—beneficent experiences were attributed to God, whereas maleficent ones could still be blamed on witches. However, as the witch hunts decline, this had little bearing on “impersonal” explanations of the mechanistic, material universe.
In conclusion, it was largely the elite perception of witchcraft that underwent a substantial change throughout the seventeenth century. Peasant understanding of its nature continued as it had for generations while a growing skepticism, informed by new ways of thinking about the natural world, issued from elites. This change was gradual and not until science ceased to encompass occult ideas did a marked decline occur. In a sense, just as elites made the crime of witchcraft more serious in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they also made it less serious throughout the mid to late seventeenth. The shifting zeitgeist of the time period is reflected in the morphing terminology used to define and describe witchcraft, in the greater legal protection afforded to the accused, in the waning of pamphlet publications in England, and in increasing distinctions between rural and urban life. For these reasons, among others, witchcraft trials decreased throughout the seventeenth century.
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