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Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Depth study: The Witchcraze in Southern Germany c.1590–1630 — belief, crisis, the course of the hunts and their checking

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on popular belief, economic pressure and weather, the Thirty Years War, the fee system, the speed of the hunts, children, the most powerful contemporary attack on the trials, their checking from above and explanations of their intensity.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Who and when

What forms did popular belief take in the region?

Key term

Which economic pressures preceded the great Franconian hunts?

Who and when

How did the weather feature directly in accusations?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What forms did popular belief take in the region?

    Model answer

    Villagers used blessings, charms and counter-magic, feared weather-making above all, and located the witches' gathering on local heights such as the Heuberg in Swabia.

  2. 2

    Which economic pressures preceded the great Franconian hunts?

    Model answer

    Repeated harvest failure in an exceptionally cold run of years, the currency debasement and inflation of the early 1620s, plague and the burdens of war all struck the region within a single generation.

  3. 3

    How did the weather feature directly in accusations?

    Model answer

    Late frosts and hailstorms that destroyed vines and grain were blamed on witches raising storms, and demands for trials frequently followed immediately after a ruined harvest.

  4. 4

    What was the relationship between the Thirty Years War and the peak of the hunts?

    Model answer

    The hunts of 1626 to 1631 coincided with the war's devastation of Franconia, and the arrival of Swedish armies in 1631 ended them by destroying the authority of the prince-bishops who ran them.

  5. 5

    How did the fee system corrupt the process?

    Model answer

    Judges, notaries, executioners and gaolers were paid for each case and the property of the condemned could be confiscated, so those conducting the trials had a direct financial interest in continuing them.

  6. 6

    What made these hunts spread so much faster than ordinary witchcraft cases?

    Model answer

    Torture applied to obtain lists of accomplices produced denunciations in every direction, so the hunts stopped looking like village quarrels and became self-generating panics that eventually reached the elite.

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