The Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century 271through worshipping the devil and used those powers to
injure their neighbors. The community could be pro-
tected only by burning witches alive.
In this case, ordinary people shared the concerns of
the intellectual elite. Accusations of witchcraft tended
to multiply in waves of hysteria that convulsed entire
regions. Many of those denounced were no doubt
guilty of trying to cast spells or some other unsavory
act, but the victims fit a profile that suggests a general-
ized hostility toward women and perhaps that the per-
secutions were in part a means of exerting social
control. The great majority of those burned were single
women, old and poor, who lived at the margins of their
communities. The rest, whether male or female, tended
to be people whose assertive or uncooperative behavior
had aroused hostility.
The trials subsided after 1650, but not before other
traditional beliefs had been discredited by their associa-
tion with witchcraft. Some of these involved “white”
magic, the normally harmless spells and preparations
used to ensure good harvests or to cure disease. Others
were “errors,” or what the Spanish Inquisition called
“propositions.” This was a broad category that included
everything from the popular notion that premarital sex
was no sin to alternative cosmologies devised by imagi-
native peasants. Post-Tridentine Catholicism, no less
than its Protestant rivals, discouraged uncontrolled
speculation and was deeply suspicious of those forms of
piety that lacked ecclesiastical sanction. Popular beliefs
about the Virgin Mary, the saints, and miracles were
scrutinized, while lay people claiming to have religious
visions were ridiculed and sometimes prosecuted.
The efforts of the reformers, in other words, bore
modest fruit. Drunkenness proved ineradicable, but
some evidence is available that interpersonal violence
decreased and that behavior in general became some-
what more sedate. Though lay morals and religious
knowledge improved slowly if at all, the forms of piety
were transformed in some cases beyond recognition.
Many ideas and practices vanished so completely that
historians of popular culture can recover their memory
only with great difficulty. Devotion based upon per-
sonal contact with God through mental prayer became
common in virtually all communions. Catholics
abandoned the sale of indulgences and consciously
sought to limit such abuses as the misuse of pilgrimages
and relics. Protestants abandoned all three, together
with Latin, vigils, the cult of the saints, masses for the
dead, and mandatory fasts. By 1600, the religious land-
scape of Europe was transformed, and much of the rich-
ness, vitality, and cohesion of peasant life had been lost
beyond all hope of recovery.