Forgotten Victims from the Age of Atrocity

so welcome back to this makeshift lecture theatre a small corner of County Durham that is serving today as part of Gresham College there's maybe something fitting about this because our subject in this last lecture of this series on religious atrocities in the age of the Reformation is about victims who were denied the limelight who didn't receive the full onstage treatment in their own time one of the features of atrocities that we've seen again and again is that not all victims are equal some only a few really of those who died untimely deaths in the 16th and 17th centuries died in just such a way that their deaths were useful to their contemporaries and their successors those deaths could be made into myths they helped to populate the world with heroes and villains to warn successive generations against lowering their guard or to train them in self sacrificial virtue or indeed to remind them of why some truths could never be compromised meanwhile most of the dead were passed over in silence because no one or not enough people had a point that they wanted to use them to make Stalin supposedly said that a single death is a tragedy and a million as statistic but neither is an atrocity not until somebody makes it one by deciding who needs to be celebrated who needs to be blamed and what lessons the survivors and successors of the dead should draw and as we've seen throughout this series the making of atrocities never stands still some fade into memory like this and Bartholomew's Day Massacre other atrocities that were once terrifying become the stuff of jokes like the Spanish Inquisition but in this final lecture I want to look at atrocities that have made the opposite journey the victims whose sufferings were neglected in their own time but whose memories become more significant as the years of past some of these we've already noticed for example very few Christians in the 15th or 16th century were troubled by the executions of thousands of Jews and Christian eyes Jews by the Spanish Inquisition while the same tribunals execution of dozens of Protestants became notorious it's only in modern times that that balance has been redressed but today I want to focus on two other cases contrasting and maybe also connected these are the stories of the Anabaptists and the witches the Reformation of the sixteenth century is conventionally the process by which some European Christians became Protestants while others stayed Catholic but Protestant was a big and quarrelsome category as well as the major coherent groups that emerged from the system the Lutheran's the Calvinists there were a great many smaller splinter groups of dissenters who modern historians tend to call the radical Reformation and who at the time were lumped together rather inaccurately under the umbrella term Anabaptists these were a very eclectic set of groups but the conviction that they shared was that Martin Luther's Reformation hadn't gone far enough that Luther and his allies had settled for superficial changes to the church when in fact nothing less than a wholesale remaking of Christian society was called for these groups read the New Testament saw that it described the church as a small select group of dedicated believers surrounded by a hostile pagan world passionately dedicated to Christian living sharing everything that they owned with each other rejoicing in persecution filled with the power of the Holy Spirit which manifested itself in visions prophecies miracles and fired by the expectation of Christ's imminent return and then they compared that biblical vision to the Church of their own times and they found it utterly unrecognizable and so in different ways they set about trying to recreate that original vision as best they could the name Anabaptist came from one of the most fundamental concerns that united most of the radicals not all of them this was that the practice of baptism the fundamental Christian sacrament of initiation had become hopelessly corrupt the New Testament only ever describes the baptism of adults who have made a conscious and deliberate profession of faith never of infants or children although it does with unhelpful ambiguity talk about whole households being baptized still this idea of believers baptism made intuitive sense to the radicals how could you be part of a select passionate group of Christians unless you deliberately chosen to join it and what ritual other than a baptism would be sufficient to mark the shattering conversions than the radicals themselves that experienced but if there was one thing on which all Christians agreed and surprisingly this is something which as far as I know has never been seriously challenged by any Christian sect if there was one thing on which everyone agreed it's that baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime event it is as unrepeatable as birth itself so if you are baptized as an adult and from 1525 onwards some radicals began to do this you are necessarily renouncing and denouncing the event that happened when you were a newborn when a priest sprinkled you with water and mumbled some Latin words that was not it could not be a true Christian baptism and so you were necessarily saying that most of the so-called Christian society around you in fact consisted of unbaptized heathens Martin Luther himself no less than any of the others whereas of course to that majority you looked as if you were desecrating this once-in-a-lifetime sacrament by a farcical repetition of it hence the label Anabaptist it literally means a rebaptised it's a term for people who have chosen to put themselves beyond the pale so this isn't simply about a dispute over the correct age at which baptism should be administered the heart of the radicals of view of baptism was choice some would choose baptism as believing adults and others would not so the very notion of Christendom of a universal or a National Church to which everybody belongs by default became an impossibility Christians on this view were bound to be a sub group in all likelihood a small minority sedulous Lee separated from the godless society around them so you can perhaps see where the majority left behind the Catholics and the more conventional Protestants would feel not only insulted but also threatened the radicals were questioning the whole nature of Christian society it was a deeply frightening thing to do in a world which took for granted the idea of the body politic of the fundamental unity knitting Society together and nor did it end with Babson for example many radicals refused to swear oaths on the grounds that a strict reading of the New Testament forbids it but swearing oaths was an indispensable part of life in pre-modern Europe refusing to swear your oath was like refusing to sign your name or to provide your identity would be today it made it impossible for anyone else to do business with you or to trust you if that still sounds a little abstract then consider the apocalyptic violence which some radicals embraced the so called peasants war the huge rural rebellion which convulsed German in 15-20 four to five wasn't driven by Protestant radicals but it did have some very visible radical leaders and they ended up as scapegoats for the whole affair people who had wanted to turn a spiritual and Theological revolution into a political and social one - the rebellion was defeated apocalyptic peasant risings usually are but one of the effects of the defeat was to radicalize the survivors surely Christ's return and their vindication was near if only they could keep the flame burning or pour oil on it and see how far they could make it spread the results was the event which in its own time became the best-known atrocity of the age the story which for well over a century made the Western German city of Minster interim into a byword to scare children in 1532 the city's pastor and several of its leading citizens were converted to anabaptism like-minded believers from across the region converged there and succeeded in taking over the city's government a Dutch Baker named Yan Malthus prophesied that Minister was the new Jerusalem to which Christ would imminently return over a thousand adults accepted baptism they threw the bishop out and began to muster an army the bishop laid siege to the city in 1534 and Malthus was killed in a suicidal sortie early on in the siege but one of his comrades a tailor named yeonbok Olson was now proclaimed king within his besieged Jerusalem he set about building the new world private property was abolished including the property relationship known as marriage polygamy was legalized Buckle 'then himself led the way by taking 16 wives when one of them crossed him he apparently beheaded her himself in public the sense that all households were dissolved and the buckles and himself was the city's father was reinforced by his insistence that he himself would choose the names of every newborn child after a year-long siege of the city was finally over run buccal 'then and his fellow prophets were tortured and executed the divots in which their bodies were displayed still hang from the cathedral tower and the city became a tale of horror which showed why fanatics and enthusiasts could never be given an age you could still find preachers well over a century later on the other side of Europe who were referring simply to minister without needing to explain what they meant like all the best atrocities the memory kept burning as so often however the atrocity mongers were fighting the last war after the Minster debacle a handful of Anabaptist bitter Enders did continue with sporadic terrorist attacks but most Anabaptists took the catastrophe as eloquent proof that buckle s'en and his disciples had gone disastrously wrong the future of Anabaptism was symbolized by a very different figure the Dutch priests menos Simons who was radicalized by his brother's death during the battle for minster early in 1536 Simon's abandoned his priesthood and sought a new baptism but he would be an Anabaptist of another kind the Mennonite movement that he founded wouldn't preach revolution and war but withdrawal and pacifism the Mennonites didn't speak for everyone even the Mennonites themselves rapidly splintered into a Disney dizzying array of different groups but from the mid 15 30s most of them had one thing in common they for swore violent revolution they aimed to create pacifist self-governing communities which asked nothing more of the world around them than to be left alone and so of course in return they were persecuted with unrelenting fear and hatred as the success Muenster we know of over 2,000 anabaptists executed as heretics or blasphemers in Europe before 1560 almost double the number of mainstream Protestants who were burned for heresy although the radicals were of course far less numerous Catholic Bishops and regime's persecuted anabaptists especially in Germany Austria and the Netherlands after all from the Catholic point of view they were heretics just like other Protestants but Protestant governments of most stripes were equally energetic in pursuing them German Anabaptists were no less liable to be persecuted in Lutheran than in Catholic territories Martin Luther insisted as he respected freedom of belief but that it was his duty to punish blasphemy that's a distinction without a difference the very first executions for anabaptism that we know of took place in the Protestant Canton's of Switzerland so did the most notorious single killing the execution of the Spanish radical Miguel Servetus in Geneva in 1553 notorious chiefly because of John Calvin's starring role in the proceedings it wasn't especially controversial at the time Calvin who was aware that Servetus was notorious and that the world was watching him carefully canvassed opinion from a wide range of Protestant theologians and they agreed with him that Servetus both deserved death and had to be silenced the execution was as much a political as a legal and an ethical decision Calvin was well aware that Catholics used the bogeyman of minister and of radicalism to discredit more conservative reformers like himself in order to convince Christendom that he stood for scholarly moderate pious reform drawing a clear line between himself and the radicals was an urgent necessity and one better way to draw it than in their own blood in fact the more a Protestant country proclaimed that it was moderate the more enthusiastically it persecuted Anabaptists a succession of English kings declared themselves to be reasonable and moderate and religion and they produced the body counts to prove it during the late 1530s dozens of suspected Anabaptists most of them Dutch immigrants were executed by Henry the eighth and his reformist chief minister Thomas Cromwell a fact which Hilary mantel I'm afraid chose to leave out of her recent account the King Edward the sixth aggressively Protestant government stopped executing people for loyalty to the Pope but it did burn to Protestant radicals as heretics the last burnings for heresy in England took place in 1612 under King James the first king who glory din his reputation for learning and for religious inclusion and if the burnings stopped thereafter persecution didn't the English Civil War and Republic in the mid 17th century brought radical groups to this country on a new scale the most hated and feared of them being the Quakers who believed neither an infant nor adult baptism they rejected the entire sacrament as an empty ritual they also rejected all hierarchies and churches preached a terrifyingly extreme equality and generally not absolutely embraced pacifism they claimed to have Christ dwelling within them to such an extent that in some sense they actually were Christ notoriously the Quaker preacher James Naylor Road into Bristol in 1656 as his companions cast their cloaks on the road and sang hosannas Nayla was prophetically claiming that christ's ministry was continued through him that was the spirit in which his wife wrote him a letter saying thy name is no more to be called to James but Jesus but for virtually everyone else in England this was the most outrageous blasphemy naylor was controversially spared execution but he was branded had a whole board through his tongue with a hot iron and was sentenced to two years hard labor he died not long after his release after king charles the second's restoration in 1660 the crackdown on Quakers became systematic those years were long remembered by them as the great persecution although the only actual executions were in Puritan New England like the Mennonites before them the Quakers experienced persecution which totally intensified as their behavior became less threatening the community's own records have it that over 10,000 Quakers suffered imprisoned during the period from 1660 to 1689 and over 300 died in prison only after 1689 did they find a grudging toleration like the Anabaptists the Quakers only found one place where they were truly free that is the American colonies especially the Quaker founded colony of Pennsylvania which also became an Anabaptist refuge very few people outside the persecuted communities of radicals saw any of this as an atrocity the commemoration and celebration of these waves of sufferings was left entirely to the persecuted communities themselves communities which didn't often have easy access to printing presses or indeed the settled security needed to produce substantial books in the later sixteenth century while Protestants and Catholics were producing weighty martyr books anabaptists were only managing occasional short pamphlets often their stories were handed down by word-of-mouth with motor illogical songs being a regular part of the communities I won't attempt to sing one but I will show you one of these early books the sacrifice of the Lord first published illegally in 1562 a tiny 16 mil copy smaller than your hand which then ran through at least 12 editions in Dutch during the rest of the century this expanded one dates from 1578 as you can see from the fancy dual color title page it was a relatively luxury Edition but it wasn't until the more peaceful days of the later 17th century that the definitive Anabaptist Martyrology was produced the martyrs mirror a Dutch production but with universal coverage tracing the tradition of non-violent Christian defines and suffering from the apostles to their own time here I'm showing you the 1685 Edition for the simple reason that it was sumptuously Illustrated and these pictures drawings produced with all the vivid humanity of the Dutch Golden Age became an important part of its appeal there are great many burnings such as this mass execution in Salzburg in 1528 there are more idiosyncratic deaths such as this drowning from 1550 to or there are dignified but unsparing depictions of torture in this one from 1570 the fix him if that's the right word could almost be in a rapture of prayer her eyes fixed on heaven even her feet lifted off the ground there are interrogation scenes like this one which visually contrast the simple innocence of the Anabaptist to the roughs and the ornaments of his persecutors or there are vivid depictions of the moment of arrest you can feel the movement in this image of the Baker suddenly spotting his inquisitors at the door others show the ingenuity of anabaptists remaining faithful under persecution such as this group who put to sea together to worship in a boat and then there's this one the most famous of all the iconic story of dark realms who in 1569 was arrested as an Anabaptist in his native Gelderland in the netherlands according to the story he escaped from the bishops prison with a rope that he'd made from rags and fled across a frozen pond to escape a guard pursued him but where the half starved an unencumbered fugitive had been able to cross safely his heavily armed pursuer fell through the ice whereupon villains turned back and pulled the man from the water saving his life but the delay of course meant that the other pursuers caught up with him he was reared and executed by burning on the 16th of May 1569 that tale of peace mercy self-sacrifice and love for enemies summed up everything that anabaptists aspired to be it became and it's remained much treasured he's still celebrated in his hometown there's been a novel about him this image in particular has become ubiquitous amongst anabaptists endlessly recycled indeed so familiar that it's spoofed affectionately as well as revered this statue to him was erected in Canada only a couple of years ago it's a sign of how well the martyrs mirror tradition has endured amongst Anabaptist communities a german language edition of the book was published in pennsylvania in 1749 it was the largest book published in pre-revolutionary America an English edition eventually appeared in 1837 for generations it was the book along with the Bible that Mennonites and others claiming the Anabaptist heritage aspired to have in their homes it was and still is often given in Mennonite households as a wedding present a little gruesome for that occasion you might think but a marker of what it meant to be a Christian home to pass that memory on to the next generation it's still in print along with various abridged versions and study guides since that first age of persecution ended these communities have treasured these stories and the identity of peaceful blameless suffering that they've given to them they've not used those stories to foster hatred or revenge but to teach the community that this is what their faith means it is perhaps one of the most harmless things one can do with an atrocity story and I hate to cast a shadow on it but even this can have a poisonous consequence the in this sense if your community's identity is built around the unjust sufferings that your forebears innocently endured then you may be inclined to write out the parts of your history which don't fit with your myth or even to take your own status as persecuted innocence so much for granted that you don't consider the possibility that sometimes the jackboot may be on the other foot in modern times various inheritors of the pacifist tradition of the radical Reformation have been less assiduous in adhering to that than they may wish to remember in Britain during the First World War a great many Quakers refused to bear arms or in some cases to serve in the military at all as a matter of conscience that was their legal right nevertheless many of them suffered considerable victimization and in some cases lengthy terms of imprisonment as a result that witness is now celebrated by British Quakers the fact that more than half of the Quakers conscripted by the British Army during that war nevertheless chose to serve in arms is forgotten American Quakers rightly celebrate how thanks to them the United States has permitted conscientious objection since its founding they tend not to celebrate the most recent Quaker president of the United States that famous peacenik Richard Nixon the seventh-day adventists another more recent radical Protestant grouping of American origin which is also nowadays firmly committed to pacifism nevertheless in its early days sent a substantial number of his young men as volunteers for the Union Army in the American Civil War as it seemed to them that was a struggle whose righteousness meant that scruples about violence could be must be set aside in the First World War the seventh-day Adventists in Germany split bitterly over the subject the majority deemed patriotism more important than peace even the Mennonites the original radical pacifists were not immune in 1929 persecution of german-speaking Mennonites in Soviet Ukraine sent over 10,000 refugees fleeing West the cause of these innocent suffering Germans was taken up by the ascendant Nazi Party who were quick to point the finger at what they called the Judeo Bolshevism they managed to persuade the German government to accept 4,000 of the refugees a series of films depicting their sufferings were made from 1933 onwards as in this 1941 re-release of a film originally made in 1935 now retitled the village in the Red Storm the posters make a contrast between the stoic Aryan villagers and their persecutors that hardly needs to be explained naturally under these circumstances some Mennonites went beyond mere gratitude to their protectors to willingness to fight against the form the forces of godlessness that threatened to overwhelm all of christened this is a rare photo of an all Mennonite squadron in the vivan SS when the Nazis occupied Mennonite majority towns in Ukraine in 1942 they were greeted as liberators tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered near the Mennonites appellants I don't mean to imply that the Mennonites share disproportionately in the blame for these atrocities simply to say that if you always think of yourself as the innocent victim you can lose sight of the possibility that in another time and another place you may also be guilty and that brings us to our other our final set of atrocities during the 16th and early 17th century a few thousand Europeans were executed for heresy 80% or more of the victims were men and those killings were vigorously contested at the time for and against but during the same period perhaps 10 times as many people somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand were executed for a very similar crime witchcraft but in this case around 80 percent of the victims were women and at the time not much more than a murmur was heard about it yet these neglected killings have resonated louder and louder down the centuries to the extent that nowadays they seem to us a defining event of the year this long ago collective atrocity has become an important part of our culture the story of the atrocity that is the great witch hunt to use a contentious term is a story about us as well as about them Europeans had for centuries before this believed that some people were witches that is that they harnessed supernatural powers to harm others in the medieval era this witchcraft was usually understood as happening on quite a small and local scale it was often associated with marginal misfit figures in rural communities cranky malevolent or eccentric loners often poor or elderly people who had very little real power or security and who therefore might useful even appealing to attract a reputation for uncanny powers after all if a beggar woman comes to your door you might well turn her away but if you believe that she's a witch then you probably won't dare for her this was a dangerous game to play because the church did not approve of magic malevolent or otherwise but nor did it generally pursue such characters with any particular zeal most of them could expect to die in their beds most but not all of these so-called witches were women in parts of Scandinavia male witch is more common we still don't really understand the origins of this pattern in which witchcraft was seen as predominantly but not exclusively female it's of course the mirror image of the situation with most mundane crime that itself may be a clue malicious men were assumed to inflict harm on people through physical violence whereas women it was thought needed to be more creative you can link this to the fact that the stereotypically female means of committing a murder in this period was poison which like witchcraft were required cunning and knowing your way around a kitchen rather than bodily strength or physical courage but until the late 15th century witchcraft was rarely dealt with by the law and very rarely led to execution legal interest and the rate of killing men began to climb and in the 16th century both of them skyrocket the peak of witch hunting was the late 16th and early 17th centuries and it was very unevenly spread both Catholic and Protestant territories did it they used different theological justifications to reach similar results but some territories like Spain saw very little witch hunting these tended to be places with strong centrally managed legal systems which were good at resisting local pressure even England falls into this category a place where there were certainly hundreds of witchcraft executions but probably less than a thousand over the entire period and the acquittal rate of those who were accused under the various English witchcraft act was over 80 percent this reflects the persistent legal problem that it is difficult to prove that somebody is guilty of an imaginary crime the fact that the only real mass witch hunts in England took place in the midst of the Civil War of the 1640s proves the point at that stage the central legal system is breaking down other places took a much darker turn he's tended to be small or decentralized territories whose courts were liable to be overwhelmed by political or popular pressure for example Scotland where King James the sixth conviction that he and his new wife had survived an attempt to sink their ship with weather magic in 1590 produced a mass purge with the king himself presiding at trials but the real heartland of the European witch hunt was a strip a hundred or so miles wide either side of the River Rhine embracing eastern France Western Germany running all the way from the Netherlands to the Canton's of Switzerland where there were waves of panic about witches who supposedly spread plague it's in these lands that the mass purges most often took place where dozens of suspects might be executed together and those purges had a different flavor from the low-level cases of village malice a village level people might be accused of petty harm like putting a curse on the neighbor's cow in the mass purges the charges were more of heresy of gathering in covens of night to practice foul rituals of devil worship cannibalism and of course illicit sex it was cases like this where suspects were burned like heretics in England by contrast convicted witches were hanged like common criminals the fear of this vast hidden diabolical conspiracy gripped people who otherwise look like sober rational and moderate philosophers and jurists a few individuals spoke out against it mostly suggesting that it was going too far only very rare voices wondered whether rich witchcraft really existed at all exactly why this surge in executions took place at that time and in those regions remains mysterious but one promising thread of historical exploration is worth mentioning which is that this story and the story of the persecution of Anabaptists were tied up with each other anabaptists were often described as devilish both for their doctrines and their behavior their steadfastness under torture could from the outside look like the devil's work so did some of their behavior in Amsterdam in February and 1535 during the height of the Minster crisis a group of Anabaptists seven men four women burned their clothes in an upper room in Amsterdam and then ran out naked into the street proclaiming whoa and claiming to be preaching what they called the naked truth when they were forcibly dressed after their arrests they tore their clothes from their bodies they wanted to be rid of the rags which Adam and Eve had donned in Eden and which symbolized the corruption of fallen humanity but to outsiders this looked like a coven of witches two years later a Dutch Anabaptist was burned as a witch in the records her crime was initially given as a dull baptism but that was scratched out and replaced with witchcraft the leap from Auntie Anabaptist paranoia to witch panic was all too easy the Anabaptists secret meetings didn't help nor did the persistent rumors about nudity and unconventional sexual morals rumours that were largely but not completely baseless worst of all was the Anabaptists roof baptize infants and their practice of rebaptised in convert because baptism was for most Christians the primary means by which the devil is cast out of an infant it seemed all too obvious that the anabaptists were on the devil's side he'd fit neatly into rumors that which is met at their Sabbath's to sacrifice and feast on the bodies of the unbaptized babies born from their own depraved social excesses adult baptisms only made matters worse since everybody knew that the devil forced which is to renounce Christian baptism and to accept his own diabolical parody of it and to have new devil parents instead of godparents by the mid 16th century the categories of which and Anabaptist were becoming blurred in 1562 in the southern german town of recent attack a clandestine Anabaptist meeting was discovered shortly afterwards a freak summer hailstorm did terrible damage to crops in the area and the periods first really major witch panic followed in which at least 63 men and women were executed charged not only with weather magic but also with robbing infants of their baptism it was a hinge moment as witchcraft prosecutions accelerated across Europe so prosecutions of anabaptists begin to dry up good Christian people found themselves assaulted on all sides and didn't trouble too much to distinguish one variety of the devil's minions from another and then quite suddenly it stopped in the third quarter of the 17th century witchcraft prosecutions dried up dramatically across Europe not because of any change in the law the old laws tended to remain on the books long after they stopped being used but because of a change in the climate a hit still mysterious but it's plain that stories that had once seemed terrifying began to seem ridiculous and that even as ordinary people continued to believe in witches as much as they'd ever done lawyers and churchmen were suddenly scrambling to distance themselves from this kind of fanaticism one freak exception to this proves the rule the most notorious single episode of witch hunting nowadays is the panic that swept the Massachusetts town of Salem in 1692 to 3 leading to 19 hangings and at least six other deaths this is the site where the actual hangings took place one of the reasons that this became so notorious is not only that it was the only major panic of this kind in North America but that by the 1690s it was an aberration a grisly fluke event triggered when village tensions had met unstable local political situation an economy where secular government had just taken over control from a more theocratic Puritan leadership and was flailing around trying to apply the blunt methods of the law to solve what had traditionally been theological and pastoral problems but what really sets the Salem trials apart is the response to them there was open opposition to the proceedings even at the time some of those opponents being caught up in the purge itself while the colony's establishment closed ranks to defend the trance in 1695 a local Quaker published a book denouncing when he was put on trial for this a jury acquitted him in 1697 Samuel Sewell one of the judges involved in the trials publicly apologized for what he'd done a number of the jurors subsequently did the same as did some of the accusers something which to my knowledge had never happened following a witch trial before a trickle of other books followed legal petitions to overturn the convictions which were eventually resisted but finally in 1711 nearly 20 years after the fact 22 of the convictions were overturned by the colonies government and over 500 pounds of compensation was paid to the survivors and to the families of the Dead that didn't extend to everyone petitions to extend the pardon were renewed the matter was only finally fully settled in 2001 when the state's governor proclaimed everyone convicted or suspected in the purge to have been innocent long before then the Salem witch trials had become a cultural touchstone the list of novels plays films inspired by or referring to them is dauntingly long there are even two operas in the 1890s an enterprising Salem silversmith even tried to cash in on the enduring fascination with the story how successful these were at the time I don't know but they sell for about around one hundred and twenty dollars each and eBay now the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem his great-great-grandfather was one of the trial judges indeed he was the only one who stood by his actions to the end of his life Hawthorne changed the spelling of his name he dropped in the W as a young man in order to distance himself from that shameful history his famous 1835 story of loss of faith Young Goodman Brown is set in the midst of the trials Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a story about Salem Henry Wordsworth Longfellow wrote a play about it the trials even surface in the horror stories of HP Lovecraft and of course above all in 1952 Arthur Miller's play The Crucible used an impressively close and detailed account of the trials as a polemical metaphor about Senator Joe McCarthy's House Committee on American activities the plays been filmed twice this 1996 version had a screenplay by Miller himself and as that shows the plays along outlasted its immediate political context Miller turned witch-hunt into a generic label for fanatical pursuit of an imaginary crime without regard for natural justice a term which has been embraced with particular enthusiasm by the United States his current president as his case might indicate the memory of the witch hunts has now largely been cut adrift from the historical record this has become a free-floating atrocity of use to almost anyone to take a slightly more respectable example here is what the best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code has to say on the subject I should say I borrowed this from a neighbor I don't have a copy of it in my house myself during 300 years of witch hunts the church burned at the stake an astonishing five million women he says that is not by any means the novel's most ridiculous historical claim but notice two things about first the number he says five million witches a number that is roughly a hundred times larger than it should be but that claim is actually comparatively modest the canonical number of deaths often cited by modern accounts the witch trials is 9 million a number first produced by the German Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Christian Voigt in the course of an argument with Voltaire in the 1780s Voltaire estimated the number of witchcraft executions at several hundred thousand which is high but not a bad stab at the question given the information available to Voigt then used some heroic back of envelope calculations to question our number he extrapolated from the 40 executions which he countered in one German principality in the 1570s and 80's he assumed that that rate of execution had held constant across the whole of Europe for 11 centuries and produced a figure of 9 million four hundred and forty two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four executions the calculation was ridiculous but the numbers stuck usually rounded down to nine million for romantics for early women's rights campaigners for many others the figure was too appealing to question and may be the primary reason for its appeal his plane in the other evidently fourth part of dan brown's claim that these deaths were the work of the catholic church when in fact they were shared by protestant and catholic jurisdictions and were usually the work of secular legal systems rather than of churchmen given that the best-known trials in Salem were plainly the work of Puritans this recurrent insistent that the witch trials were a Catholic conspiracy is surprising or rather it's a sign of how much some strains of modern thought want or need to have atrocities which they can hang around Catholicism's neck this is of course only one of many anti-catholic myths which this book recycles the nine million figure was picked up and given fresh respectability by Margaret Murray the British archaeologist folklorist and feminist whose theories about the history of witchcraft were widely taken seriously in her time even though they've subsequently been proven to be entirely baseless support for wildly inflated numbers of witchcraft executions also came from Nazi Germany which welcomed the notion that German women representing authentic Aryans folk wisdom had been slaughtered by a Christian Jewish conspiracy cheerleaders pressed the case in books like this one which repeated the nine million number the SS in one of its lesser-known activities actually conducted some of the first thorough research of trial records incidentally helping to prove that the real number of executions was far lower even so the notion that there were nine million or at least many millions of executions has become one of those zombie statistics that lumbers on no matter how many times it's knocked down which of course is a sure sign that a number has an appeal beyond the merely fact in addition to its regular use in anti-catholic or more broadly anti ecclesiastical rhetoric the image of the witch as victim was of course most seriously taken up by 20th century feminism after all of whether we're talking about millions or merely tens of thousands the execution of enormous numbers of women for an imaginary crime is a fact that deserves feminist attention the modern scholarship which has traced the deep currents of misogyny behind the phenomenon is of course but of course both correct and hugely important my point today that was simply to underline how far the which as a cultural figure has changed even in the children's fiction where she's taken refuge there's been a reversal within living memory the Wicked Witch as the default figure has vanished Roald Dahl's Scandinavian inflected version is maybe the last really substantial figure in that can and she's been replaced by a succession of comic even heroic witches the 20th century's best-known wicked witch in l frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz had to be reinvented as a heroine in Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel wicked and a hugely successful musical based on it in all of this notice that the gender signification of the word witch has subtly shifted it was once a predominantly feminine category but it's now exclusively so such that in JK Rowling spot of us witch and wizard are simply used as equivalent feminine and masculine labels the idea that this label which one which was once shameful and indeed lethal should be claimed and owned by feminists has been and remained a hugely powerful it is not true that the women executed for witchcraft in the 16th century belonged to an underground tradition of knowledge or to a pre or anti-christian matriarchal religion which was systematically targeted by the church although it is true that if such tradition had existed the church would have targeted but true or not the idea is too good to let go of and in these postmodern times reinvention is good enough in 1968 a group of New York feminist radicals formed a group called which the initials stood for the women's international terrorist conspiracy from hell they protested Richard Nixon's Nour inauguration they disrupted a bridal fair in part by releasing boxfuls of white mice into the event they interrupted a Senate hearing and population control one of their regular campaign chants ran nine million women burned as witches if you're a woman one of their early pamphlets declared and dare to look within yourself you are a witch you make your own rules a series of local groups calling themselves covens were established some changed the meaning of the acronym to more anodyne alternatives like women inspired to tell their collective history a name which shows how that imagined past matters which as an organization fizzled out in the 1970s but a group claiming the name was reestablished in Chicago in 2015 often quoting this phrase from a 2015 novel by Tish thorn as the movements new slogan the resurgent groups throne itself enthusiastically into America's culture wars so as the self-proclaimed witch his battle with the man who claims to be the victim of history's greatest witch hunt historians should perhaps simply accept defeat gracefully and leave the subject to the mythmakers this is what atrocities of for to be recruited to fight today's battles but I can't quite bring myself to leave the many women and the rather fewer men who died for no very good reason to the mercies of modern recruiting sergeants women like these the famous pendel witches from Lancashire ten of whom were hanged in 1612 weren't the active agents of the devil that their accusers thought they'd caught nor were they secret pagan cultists or political campaigners or proto feminists or symbols of anyone or anything what they were we don't really know apparently a group of people caught up in local family rivalries swapping accusations trading in small-scale magic until a chance series of events caught up with and they were killed they don't owe us anything nor would they recognize the many ways that we've used their memory if we want to claim that memory but I hope we can at least try to remember them rather than merely invent them to suit ourselves perhaps even we might be able to let them rest in peace you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 38,272

Rating: 4.8782792 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, education, lecture, public, london, debate, academia, knowledge, Religion, History, Religious History, History of Religion, Religious Atrocities, Religious War, witchcraft, Anabaptist, radicals, Munster, Westphalia, Jan Bockleson van Leiden, Menno Simons, Mennonite, pacifism, Michael Servetus, John Calvin, James Nayler, The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror, Dirk Willems, Hans Baldung Grien, Samuel Sewall, Salem, Lois the Witch, The Crucible, Margaret Murray

Id: UNh7OwdcZVk

Length: 53min 57sec (3237 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020