ABSTRACT
This chapter looks only at Protestant Europe – that is, at England, Scotland, and Scandinavia, along with parts of Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Low Countries. Secular courts in many parts of Protestant Europe imposed punishments for ecclesiastical offenses such as blasphemy, and used methods of punishment for many offenses that were outgrowths of religious rituals of confession, although increasingly punitive in nature. Though education was nowhere universal, slowly an increasingly large share of the population in Protestant Europe attended school at least enough to be able to read. The consequences of having a child out of wedlock varied widely across Protestant Europe by region, social class, the situation in which the woman had become pregnant, and other factors. Other than in Sweden, the devil in Protestant Europe led far more people to witchcraft than to bestiality. Witchcraft was not a question of what one did but of what one was.
