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the crimes perpetrated by witches and the measures that should be taken against them. These works were designed to create alarm about witchcraft , so that political and legal officials would take the problem seriously and act strongly to suppress witchcraft and to punish anyone involved with it. The demonologists cited many cases of contemporary witchcraft and referred to many trials and executions. For a long time, these demonology books and pamphlets served as the primary record of the whole witchcraft episode in European history. Generations of historians, philosophers and critics, appalled at the bigotry , superstition, ignorance and violence contained in demonological texts, have condemned this genre of literature and have looked at the witchcraft crisis in Europe with horror and disdain. The belief in witchcraft, and the resultant accusations, trials and executions for this crime have served as a prime example of human folly caused by religious hatred and obscurantism. Witchcraft was probably the first area of ‘‘social’’ history to interest historians, who otherwise were concerned with the development of more ‘‘rational’’ aspects of society such as politics and political institutions.1 Witchcraft has attracted broad interest. Visual, literary and dramatic artists as well as filmmakers have explored the witchcraft phenomenon in various ways. Most laypersons know that witches were burned at the stake in this period. For academics, witchcraft has crossed over many disciplinary boundaries. Literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists and religious specialists have all studied aspects of this complex problem. While rejecting the content of demonological works, scholars who worked with this material often regarded the accounts of accusations, investigations, trials and punishments of witches as accurate historical reports. This led to a significant qualitative and quantitative misunderstanding of the witchcraft episode in early modern Europe. Because of the severity of most of these texts, many historians assumed that any person accused of witchcraft was helpless before a court, and virtually assured of being brutally tortured, forced to confess to horrific imaginary crimes and hustled off to be burnt alive at the stake. If this were the case, and the demonologists’ ‘‘statistics’’ on the number of witches that existed and the numbers of executions that were carried out were at all accurate, then hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions of innocent people were destroyed in this legal juggernaut. The historical picture of witchcraft in Europe has been refined in the last generation. Since the mid-1960s, many scholars have published 2 / The Crime of Crimes books and articles that examine the complex and fascinating phenomenon of witchcraft in early modern Europe. The nature of popular religious culture and the possible function of witchcraft beliefs have been examined. Social and statistical studies have revealed much about the patterns of accusations of witchcraft and the number of trials that actually took place in specific areas. The scale of the ‘‘witch craze’’ has been, through this research, reduced considerably. In many jurisdictions, not very many people were tried or punished for witchcraft, and many of those accused of the crime were punished with lesser penalties than death or released with no punishment at all. Furthermore, witchcraft and the whole area of the occult, including astrology, alchemy, hermetic magic and pagan folklore have been integrated into the complex world of social, political and intellectual change in this period. Views on the Renaissance and Reformation have had to change considerably, at least partly in response to findings in this area of study. Witchcraft has been portrayed as an important aspect of Reformation culture, and part of the confrontation between popular and elite culture that is held to be a central ingredient of the intellectual dynamic of the period. But scholarly approaches to the demonologists have not changed very much at all. The study of demonology has not been in vogue, as scholars have prefered to examine aspects of popular society and religious culture. Demonology works are generally read unsympathetically by modern readers, when examined at all. An air of contemputous scorn is common when discussing their distasteful content. Furthermore, most scholars still confine themselves to a well-trod demonological road, starting with the Malleus Maleficarum, and jumping to Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers, James I’s Daemonologie, de Lancre’s L’incredulité et mescreance du sortilege, and so on. Most historians have regarded the demonologists as spokesperson for widely held elite views. Another important aspect of most works in this field, both older and more recent, is that the historians of this phenomenon have regarded the demonologists who wrote the...

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