Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer, who had been authorized
by papal bull in 1484 to suppress witchcraft in the
Rhineland. Witch-hunting, hitherto a local and spasmodic
phenomenon, was thus given official backing and legal re-
spectability throughout Christendom, and the learned
flocked to take part in the arguments about the nature of
witchcraft and the danger it posed. James VI of Scotland,
before he became JAMES Iof England, took a close interest
in several Scottish witch trials and wrote his credulous
Daemonologie (1597) on his conclusions. In England the
Cambridge theologian William Perkins contributed A Dis-
course of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608) to the
Protestant side in the debate. These are however slight
tracts compared with some of the Roman Catholic text-
books published on the Continent, such as the lawyer
Nicolas Rémy’s Daemonolatreia (1595).
Outbreaks of witch mania occurred at different times
in different countries and with varying degrees of ferocity
from the 15th to the 17th century, but they can broadly be
linked to periods of social or religious turmoil. Thus
southern Germany and Switzerland remained fertile
ground for the witch-hunters as first the Reformation and
then the Counter-Reformation swept across the area;
Lutherans and Calvinists on the one side and Dominicans
and Jesuits on the other strove to outdo each other in the
pious zeal with which they pursued suspects. Institutional
misogyny in both Church and State meant that the vast
majority of the accused were women, as it was agreed
among male clergy and lawyers that women’s feeble minds
and dangerous sexuality rendered them far more suscepti-
ble than men to the Devil’s wiles. However, even the
wealthy and educated and small children could fall foul of
the witch-hunters’ standard accusations of making a pact
with the Devil, harming neighbors, and bizarre sexual
practices. With torture routinely employed, confessions
were easily extracted and a near 100% conviction rate
achieved. In many of the worst-afflicted areas, such as the
Rhineland, Savoy, and Switzerland, outbreaks of witch
mania saw hundreds of people burnt at the stake—al-
though in some jurisdictions enlightened secular rulers
were able to curb the worst excesses of the clergy. In Italy
the scepticism of the humanist intelligentsia created a cli-
mate of opinion generally unfavorable to witch mania: An-
drea ALCIATI, for instance, regarded witches as deluded
and therefore as subjects for medication rather than pun-
ishment, while Pietro POMPONAZZIconsidered that igno-
rant people ascribed to witchcraft natural phenomena that
they did not understand. However, even here, in the late
16th century in Friuli, the Inquisition mobilized to con-
duct some well-documented inquiries into the activities of
the benandanti, adherents of a rural cult whose practices
the inquisitors condemned as witchcraft.
The few courageous sceptics and those who objected
to the barbaric methods used by the witch-hunters had to
battle against not only the apparatus of the Church and
civil authority but also biblical texts such as Exodus 22.18
(“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”); they also had to
be careful that their arguments against the operations of
demons through witchcraft did not slip (or be interpreted
as slipping) into the heresy of Sadduceeism, the denial of
the existence of spirits. Most influential among the scep-
tics was Johann Weyer, whose De praestigiis daemonum
(1563) maintained that the activities to which witches
confessed were delusions caused by demons or morbidity.
Weyer’s book and The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by
his English follower Reginald Scot were both burnt by
civil or ecclesiastical authorities.
See also: ANTISEMITISM
Further reading: Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons:
The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford,
U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999); Carlo Ginzburg, The
Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul and Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983; repr.
1992); Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt
in Scotland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981; repr. Edin-
burgh: John Donald, 2000); ∼, Witchcraft and Religion: The
Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford, U.K. and New York:
Blackwell, 1984); Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunt in Early
Modern Europe (New York and London: Longman, 1987);
Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch Craze of the 16th
and 17th Centuries (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin,
1969); Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witch-
craft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leyden,
Netherlands: Brill, 2003).Witte, Pieter de (Pietro Candido) (c. 1548–1628)
Netherlands painter
Born in Bruges, from about 1570 Witte was active in Flo-
rence, Rome, and Volterra (hence the Italian form of his
name “Pietro Candido”). In 1586 he arrived in Munich
where he worked beside Frederik Sustris on the decora-
tion of the Antiquarium, the first museum of antiquities to
be built in modern times, which was itself destroyed dur-
ing World War II. From 1587 he worked on the decora-
tions of the grotto court, also at the ducal palace. In 1588
he executed a Martyrdom of St. Ursula for the Michael-
kirche and in 1620 painted the high altarpiece at the
Frauenkirche. He also designed series of tapestries of the
Months and the life of Otto of Wittelsbach. Highly praised
by the painter Joachim von Sandrart for his versatility, he
incorporated both Venetian and Tuscan elements in his
mannerist style and remained dominant in Munich until
the arrival of Rubens’ style in Bavaria in 1619.Wittenberg A capital city in Saxony, on the River Elbe.
First mentioned in the 12th century, Wittenberg was
granted its municipal charter in 1293 and became the cap-
ital of the Ascanian dukes and electors of Saxony until
1423, when it passed to the house of Wettin. Wittenberg55004 4 WWiittttee,, PPiieetteerr ddee