The European witch trials
Perhaps 50,000 people, most of them women, are executed for an impossible crime.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 190 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Prosecutions peak between about 1560 and 1630, concentrated in fragmented territories of the Holy Roman Empire and in regions of religious competition, and largely absent where central courts controlled procedure. Torture produced confessions and named further suspects, which is how single accusations became panics. The trials were not medieval — they belong to the same period as the Scientific Revolution, which is one of the more uncomfortable facts about it.