![]() ![]() ![]() They were "real" as much as anything else (moreso, people believed), but in the case of witchcraft, these forces were designed to wreak havok and obstruct order. To say evils such as witchcraft were "supernatural" to Early Modern people does not mean they were things beyond explanation, but rather things that were the product of influence from the enchanted world of God and the Devil's beyond which permeated the material world and drove it all from behind the scenes. They were more emotional, brought to it by suffering and confusion, with no guiding light but a faith in God. ![]() People living then, lacking accessible scientific explanations and driven by a fierce religious identity and dependence upon faith for hope and answers, were more prone to fantastical explanations such as witches to explain these extraordinarily-rough times. Baroque Germany was a place of chaos, fear, and infertility. Trevor-Ropers classic work The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which I was quite enjoying. In the midst of this was the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the battles between Catholics and Protestants, culminating in the rampaging Thirty-Years War from 1618-1648. Cold winters arrived in Europe like never seen before, ravaging crop yields and causing famine, leading peasant populaces to cry out for a malevolent scapegoat. The Little Ice is theorized to have really begun in Europe perhaps around the 16 th century, not long after the 1486 publishing of the great witch-hunter and witch-prosecutor's manual: The Malleus Maleficarum (or, the "Hammer of Witches"), written by a Catholic Inquisitor of Germany's Holy Roman Empire – Heinrich Kramer. ![]()
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