ABSTRACT
The prosecution of witches in early modern Europe is usually viewed inmonolithic terms. We commonly refer to the European witch-hunt or witch-craze of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are legitimate reasons for viewing the pursuit of witches in this general, comprehensive fashion. The various ecclesiastical and secular authorities who prosecuted witches from Spain to the Baltic and from Scotland to Transylvania were in a sense participating in a common enterprise: the destruction of a particularly dangerous heresy and form of rebellion that had spread throughout Europe. The intensity of their campaign varied greatly from place to place and from time to time, but their reasons for prosecuting witches, the charges they brought against them and the methods they used to discover them had a great deal in common. In a certain sense, therefore, there was a large hunt or campaign that began in the fifteenth century, became much more intense in the second half of the sixteenth century, reached a peak around 1600 and then slowly declined in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is this large, pan-European hunt that has been the main focus of this book so far.
