The 15th through 17th centuries saw a wave of “witch hunts” break out across the Western world: the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, the 1428 Valais Hexen hunts in what is now Switzerland, and the myriad persecutions in Scotland and Ireland after the passage of the Witchcraft Acts of 1563 and 1586 (respectively) are only a few of the many witchcraft-related uproars that plagued Europe and America.
The idea of witches had been present in folklore all the way back to the time of the ancient Romans. But a persecution on this scale hadn’t occurred before across nations. What could have prompted these 300 years of deadly witch hunts? A new study published in the journal Theory and Society seems to have pinpointed the source of this outbreak of witchcraft panic. And as it turns out, the culprit for the deadly craze is none other than Johannes Gutenberg. No, the famed German inventor was not some master of the occult. But his most notable invention, the printing press, is what helped the massive spreading of a new theory of witchcraft in the 15th century, according to this study.
One particularly damaging mass-produced book—a text called Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican friar—reshaped how the Western world saw the practice of witchcraft. As the study writes, this new line of thinking “depicted witchcraft as conspiratorial activity against godly society and not simply mischief by village sorceresses, pagans, or ignorant peasants.”
More than just crafting a conspiracy theory, Malleus Maleficarum—which translates to “The Hammer of Evil-Doers”—also served as “the first printed guide for witch-hunters” Read more
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