Witch Politics in Early Modern Europe (1400-1800) (PDF)

Why does an entire society believe that there are witches who must be burned? What roles did the emerging 'state', the professions of clerics and jurists, and the public involved play in each case? And how could this project be finished?

From a sociological point of view, the findings of recent international research on witches provide a model of a more general, highly ambivalent, 'pastoral' attitude, according to which a shepherd has to care for the welfare of his flock as well as for its erring sheep.

• The first main part describes the clerical initial situation, which developed the 'Dominican' demonological model of witchcraft on the basis of the still dominant magico-religious mentality in the 15th century.
• A model, according to the second part of the book, which then in the course of the 16th century in Western Europe increasingly fell into the hands of the not so innocent jurists. From there it developed into a legal witch persecution that realized the early European witch model from the village witch to the mass persecutions to the late child witches.
• The third part describes how witch persecutions slowly became less important towards the end of the 17th century as a general witchcraft 'politics' game in the transition from a confessional state to a (court) 'civil service' state.

The author
Prof. Dr. Stephan Quensel is a lawyer and criminologist. Until his retirement in 2002, he was a professor in the Department of Resocialization and Rehabilitation in the Sociology program at the University of Bremen.


The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.