Top 10 Things You Probably Never Knew About Witches
As the phrase ‘witch hunt’ still shows, the Witch Craze of the early modern period is now an infamous byword for superstition, hysteria and irrational cruelty. Yet witch beliefs and persecutions remain surprisingly misunderstood. When people talk about ‘witch burning Puritans’ for example, they wrongly assume that Puritans killed more witches than did High Anglicans or Catholics, whilst witches were almost never burned in England or America. The same goes for ‘medieval superstition’. The Middle Ages had far fewer witch accusations or deaths than the time of Shakespeare or Charles II, or indeed the Ancient Romans. Finally, although the British Witchcraft Act of 1736 outlawed official witch persecution, popular beliefs and popular violence ran on – and on, and on… Well into the twentieth century alleged witches were still in danger of their lives in Britain, Europe and North America.