Linnea de Gouges

Witch Hunts and State Building in Early Modern Europe Linnea de Gouges

The formidable witch hunts in Early Modern Europe (ca. 1500-1700) have been subject to a vast number of studies and speculations regarding their causes. In this book, they are connected with the increasingly authoritarian state apparatuses which were being consolidated during the actual time period, and explained as efforts by the state and church authorities to divide and conquer rebellious peasant populations. In the early 16th century, the German peasant war shook the foundations of the emerging German states and their aristocratic and clerical leaders, threatening to abort the development of centralized states in Europe and supplant them with confederal sociopolitical structures. The witch hunts in the subsequent two centuries are explained as a decisive campaign to put an end to the rebellious and often times revolutionary peasants, a campaign which succeeded to an increasing extent through new scientific discoveries and the development of vast military resources in the hands of the Early Modern States. With the new enlightened ideas in the late 17th and 18th century, the mania for hunting down witches faded into history, as the centralized European states consolidated their hegemony. This book will be of great relevance for the student of Early Modern history, as well as for the general reader who takes an interest in the massive persecution of Europe's "outsiders" in an era when superstition was rampant and people were easily scared by religious propaganda in the form of the "Devil threat."