Name: Witchcraft: Crash Course European History #10
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T02:30:55.000Z
Duration: 15 min 33 s
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Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So, in the first episode of this series, we talked about the significance of the year

Remember, that was the year Joan of Arc was burned to death for heresy and witchcraft

because the English were so bewildered that a teenage peasant girl could lead the French

army to victory that they decided she had to be a witch and a heretic.

And, you know, it was pretty bewildering that a random peasant girl somehow basically became

for a time the most important general in the most important war of the fifteenth century.

That said, just to state the obvious: Joan of Arc was not a witch.

But just as she benefited from superstitions and prophecies about mystically powerful women,

she was ultimately destroyed by fears of witchcraft and dark magic.

For the past four episodes, the world has been turned upside down in the century after

The Reformation, Commercial and Agricultural Revolutions, and Counter-Reformation were

each in their own way shaking social, and economic, and political, and religious structures.

Perhaps some witches could explain that turmoil.

INTRO So, for most of European history, and indeed

for most of world history, people believed in unseen powers that operated across their

Objects from nature could be healing or poisonous, working in unknown ways.

Like, Queen Elizabeth once received a ring that was supposed to protect her from the

Most towns had shamans, a “wise” man or woman, a wizard, a sorcerer, or another resident

who knew about potions, and poultices, and charms.

And look, Queen Elizabeth never got the plague, so it was easy to conclude that sometimes,

As one bishop wrote in 1552, “When we be in trouble, or sickness, or lose anything,

we run hither and thither to witches or sorcerers, whom we call wise men, . . . seeking aid and

Other wise men could use eclipses, or sunspots, or comets and various natural phenomena to

Like, earthquake tremors in Istanbul in 1648 for instance, were said to foretell the murder

of the sultan two months later, All these shamans, and fortune tellers, and

special healers were widely depicted in the many books now streaming from the printing

press—with stories that often strayed from reality.

The reading public seemed to revel in tales of witches: their special witches' rites,

their antics and adventures, their sexual perversions, and their attacks on (and corruption

Jean Bodin was a famed and influential jurist who wrote about sovereignty—that is, the

nature of state power and authority—in this age of new monarchy and governmental consolidation.

He also famously wrote about witches and demonology in the vernacular so that a large group would

And I think it's important to note Bodin because his work underscores that in the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries high-minded political theory of government and the everyday world

I think this can be one of the great empathy barriers in history--it can be hard for some

of us to imagine a world where it was almost universally assumed that the hand of God and

the hand of the Devil were constantly shaping events both large and small.

But one of the discomforting things about humanity is the role luck or fate or however

you consider it plays in our lives, and we all have a desire for life to be a story that

Saying “Everything happens for a reason” is one way of doing that; saying, “Witches

In some ways, history itself is an attempt to tell a story that makes sense--we're

trying to find narratives amid an endlessly complicated web of forces and choices and

So I hope thinking about that can help you empathize a bit.

But back to witches: Art is another place we see a lot of witchcraft.

In grand baroque paintings, you can find devils, serpents, old hags, and other signs of evil

Like, in Rubens' massive painting "Madonna on the Crescent Moon," featured at the altar

of the Cathedral of Freising, the entire left third displays devils, and demons, and the

And "Council of the Gods," one of Rubens' celebratory works on the life of Marie de

Medici, depicts a witch-like figure at the extreme right.

And it's important to note that Rubens was working from images that had already been

around for a long time, in the form of black and white engravings of the devil and witches

So we know ideas about witches were plentiful.

The Bible doesn't say much about them, though there is this prominent statement in Exodus

22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Popular culture, however, drew on pagan mythology, full of wily sorceresses and enchantresses

using love potions and charms to work their magic.

And people saw woodcuts of witches in flight or they heard about magicians on flying coats

or carpets or they went to healers and unexpectedly died.

But again, we look for stories that make sense, and it makes sense that a healer with their

medicinal potions, might also have access to poisonous or other dangerous potions.

So there were a few lines from the Bible, a growing collection of scary stories through

the Middle Ages, and then came Heinrich Kramer's Witches' Hammer (Malleus Malificarum) in

Kramer was a Dominican monk whose book was amazingly popular--for over a century, it

was the second bestselling book in Europe behind only the Bible, and the book argues

that Satan, due to the fact the Apocalypse is coming, has “caused a certain unusual

heretical perversity to grow up in the land of the Lord--a heresy, I say, of Sorceresses,

since it is to be designated by the particular gender of which he [Satan] is known to have

The book goes on to describe in detail the many evils of these mostly female practitioners

of witchcraft, and to advocate all-out war against them.

These days, Kramer's book reads like aggressively misogynistic fantasy fiction--he writes that

women are “defective in all the powers of both soul and body” and claims that witches

were, among many other things, practicing cannibalism and causing male impotence.

Because of course if you have magical powers, that's how you're going to use them.

But at the time, Witches' Hammer was tremendously influential.

The book was first approved, then disapproved by religious authorities.

But as Europeans engaged with pagan practices, Kramer's witchcraft manifesto gave them

Amid the religious, economic, and social challenges of these stressful centuries, the hunt for

It's really important to understand that the idea of witchcraft felt to many Christians

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Witchcraft: Crash Course European History #10

vulnerable

majority

disorder

sense