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In Our Time
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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©Getty Images/Hulton|Archive
WITCHCRAFT
Read audience reactions to this edition of In Our Time.
In 1486 a book was published in Latin, it was called Maleus Mallificarum and it very soon outsold every publication in Europe bar the Bible. It was written by Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican Priest and a witchfinder.
"Magicians, who are commonly called witches" he wrote, "are thus termed on account of the magnitude of their evil deeds. These are they who by the permission of God disturb the elements, who drive to distraction the minds of men, such as have lost their trust in God, and by the terrible power of their evil spells, without any actual draught or poison, kill human beings."
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" says Exodus, and in the period of the Reformation and after, over a hundred thousand men and women in Europe met their deaths after being convicted of witchcraft.
Why did practices that had been tolerated for centuries suddenly become such a threat? What brought the prosecutions of witchcraft to an end, and was there anything ever in Europe that could be truly termed as a witch?
Contributors
Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex
Lyndal Roper, Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford and author of Witch Craze (Yale University Press, 2004)
Malcolm Gaskill, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge
Recommended reading:
Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches by Malcolm Gaskill (Fourth Estate, 2001)
Malcolm Gaskill also has a forthcoming book titled Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. It will be published in April 2005 by John Murray
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RELATED LINKS
BBC Religion: what is Wicca?
BBC Religion: teenage witches
BBC Religion: paganism
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