Witchcraft & the papacy : an account drawing on the formerly secret records of the Roman Inquisition
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Witchcraft & the papacy : an account drawing on the formerly secret records of the Roman Inquisition
(Studies in early modern German history)
University of Virginia Press, 2010
- : pbk
- Other Title
-
Die Päpste und die Hexen : aus den geheimen Akten der Inquisition
Witchcraft and the papacy
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-251) and index
Originally published: Darmstadt : Primus Verlag , c2003
Description and Table of Contents
Description
When Rainer Decker was researching a sensational seventeenth-century German witchcraft trial, he discovered, much to his surprise, that in this case the papacy functioned as a force of skepticism and restraint. His curiosity piqued, he tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a secret Vatican archive housing the records of the Roman Inquisition that had been sealed to outsiders from its sixteenth-century beginnings. In 1996 Decker was one of the first of a small group of scholars allowed access. Originally published as Die Papste und die Hexen, Witchcraft and the Papacy is based on these newly available materials and traces the role of the papacy in witchcraft prosecutions from medieval times to the eighteenth century. Decker found that although the medieval church did lay the foundation for witch hunts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the post-medieval papacy, and the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, played the same kind of skeptical, restraining role during the height of the witch-hunting frenzy in Germany and elsewhere in Europe as it had in the trial that was the initial focus of his research. Witchcraft and the Papacy overturns a large body of scholarship that confuses the medieval papacy with its markedly skeptical successors, and that mistakenly portrays the papacy as fanning rather than quelling the flames of the witchcraft mania sweeping northern Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onward.|Based on newly available materials, this traces the role of the papacy in witchcraft prosecutions from medieval times to the eighteenth century. Decker contends that the post-medieval papacy played a restraining role at the height of the witch-hunting frenzy
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