ABSTRACT
Witches as black-clad, broomstick-riding, ugly old hags dominate Western representations in movies, stories, and especially at Halloween. Popular misconceptions hold that systematic, massive European witch hunts, trials, and executions happened during the Middle Ages. Although medieval thinkers contributed intellectual and legal ideas that helped develop the concept of witchcraft, the large-scale witch hunts belong to the early-modern period, comprising both the Protestant Reformation and the humanist Renaissance. The sheer volume of scholarly work on the witch phenomenon in postmedieval periods attests to that. Numerous scholarly opinions abound as to the reasons for the witch hunts that developed sporadically from 1430 on and reached their apex between 1560 and 1650. This chapter addresses the mistaken attribution of the early-modern witch hunts to the Middle Ages, while simultaneously chronicling the development of the image of the witch from antiquity to the seventeenth century.
