Dan Snow's History Hit - What Caused Europe's Witch Hysteria?

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Across early modern Europe, fear spread like wildfire; between the 15th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands were accused, tortured, and executed as witches. At its centre was a man named Heinrich Kramer, whose infamous book, Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, fanned the flames of hysteria and codified centuries of misogyny.Dan is joined by economic journalist Duncan Weldon to explore how a changing climate and the rise of independent, unmarried women made for easy scapegoats in a time of fear — and how the printing revolution helped spread these dangerous ideas faster than ever before. What does this moment in history tell us about how societies look for someone to blame? And how much has humanity really changed since then?Duncan's new book is called 'Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

They dragged them from their homes and from the fields, tens of thousands of them. Mostly women. They were the ones who bore the brunt of it. They were accused, tortured, hanged, drowned and burned. Europe, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was gripped by an insidious panic, one that infiltrated towns and communities, one that was preached from the pulpits and argued in the pages of books. For over 300 years, there was a plague of wild accusations of witchcraft. The women who communities had once relied on to heal to deliver their children,

who raised the next generation, suddenly found themselves the targets of malicious village gossips or witch hunters. The likes of Matthew Hopkins who terrorized the women of Essex in England in the 1650s and Heinrich Kramer who wrote the infamous witch-hunting manual, the Malias Malifakarum,

the man who harnessed this new media to supercharge witch-hunting. In 1485, Kramer had been humiliated by an outspoken woman by the name of Helena Schoiberin, who he tried to accuse of witchcraft but was found innocent in court. The judge dismissed the case, calling Kramer senile and unfit

to generate any further trials. In response, he wrote, The Malleus Malifakarum, the most dangerous book of the 16th century, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Now, once you dig into stories of, quote-unquote, witches like Helena Schoberin, it becomes reasonably clear to us that these accusations were rarely about their magical abilities

and more about control, about fear, about social anxiety and tension. This was a period of great upheaval in Europe, it was a time of war, which again doesn't particularly mark it out, but it was. There were lots of wars in this period. There was conflicts in the church, there were bad harvest. There was, I'm afraid, say, climate disruption. And as we all know too well, when people's lives get hard, we like to look at for a scapegoat, or certainly we're in the market for those who point out scapegoats. There has to be someone to blame other than ourselves, or just bad luck. So in this episode, we're not going to look at the story of some of these individual witch

trials, but we're going to look at some of the deeper history, why they happened. Why it was that suspicion reached a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries? Aside from your basic common and garden misogyny, what was going on that encouraged those tickler population to turn on women so fervently? And to explore what led this state-sanction slaughter that extended from Spain, Germany, Scotland, even Iceland, I'm joined by an economic historian. Yes, we're going to look at economics here. We're going to go a little bit Marxist today. We're going to talk to Duncan Weldon, his new book, Blood and Treasure explores exactly that. The economic underpinnings are so much the history that we might be familiar with.

And as well as witchcraft, he looks at lots of other phenomenon like the economics of war. It's a great book. This is Dan Snow's history, and we're answering the big question. what exactly caused the witch hysteria in Renaissance Europe? T-minus 10. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-quaint unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift-off, and the shuttle has cleared the power. Duncan, good to see. Thanks for going on the podcast. Thank you for having me. First of all, is there a hard start? Are we looking at these people like Heinrich Kramer? Is it always been bubbling along? Or is this a strange new chapter in European history? I think it's a strange new chapter in European history. And, you know, if you look in the long run of European history, men being quite horrible to women is not that uncommon. But we get something on a different scale in the 1500s into the 1600s. We get in that period about 40,000, primarily women, being condemned to death.

as witches. And I think, yeah, if we're looking for a grand zero, if we're looking for a character we can start to pin some of the blame on, we are going back to Heinrich Kramer in the late 1400s. But this is interesting, Duncan, because you're an economics guy. You're a big substructural, you know, we're all students of Marx here. Everything happens because of deep underlying economic reasons. And yeah, are we saying here that individuals matter, culture matters? So Kramer just shaped society's views and attitudes, or is there going to be a blend of both? Are we going to learn that it's a blend of both in this podcast? I think we're going to learn that it's a blend of both.

We're going to say there's some really big structural factors, which say the 1500s were a particularly uncomfortable time to be an unmarried woman in Europe in certain places. But we're going to say, you know, if we're looking for an individual who influenced the way things turned out, we're going back to this particularly unpleasant character, Heinrich Kramer, in the 1470s. Tell me about him.

So he's born in about 1430, in Alsat. in what's now part of France, but then is really part of the Holy Roman Empire, so German. Well, that's a whole other podcast there. That's a whole other podcast, whole other podcast. But he becomes a friar in the Dominican order. He's seen as a very eloquent preacher, a very learned man. By the 1470s, in his 40s, he's been promoted. He's the Inquisitor responsible for the Tyrol and Innsbruck Bohemia, that sort of area of Central Europe. And he's really, really interested in the idea of witchcraft. Interesting. And so the acquisitor, you've got latitude, have you? You can look into various

doctrinal failings. And this guy's saying, like, my thing is just going to be witchcraft. We're going to stamp an hour in this region. Okay. That's exactly. Now, you know, the Inquisition's been around for a while. But the Inquisition's primary purpose at first is rooting at heresy. It's going around the Catholic Church. It's like, your Christian doctrine here is not exactly the same as ours. That's a problem. It's not really witchcraft. It's creating. are the one that his big thing is witches, and he thinks the role of the Inquisitor is dealing with witches. And witches are usually women, always women? What's the intersection between sort of gender and

witches? In theory, anyone can be a witch. In reality, almost everyone accused of witchcraft is a woman more than 90%. Kramer in particular thinks it's all women. He writes that the good lord has been very nice to men by not cursing them with the bane of witchcraft. For him, it's usually women. So what's he looking for? And I'm guessing sex is going to be present here in this answer. Like, what's he chiefly worried about? Well, he would tell you he's chiefly worried about people who have consulted with the devil and are doing evil magic to the bane of their community. That's what Crano will tell you. In reality, it's almost always women. It's usually, almost always, in fact, unmarried women, often older, unmarried women. And when you read some of the things I'm sure we'll

talk about that. He wrote, the sexual overtones are not exactly understated, it would be fair to say. Okay, so as an inquititor, he can, what, send his goons out and drag people in front of him, and he gets to question them, and is he judge and jury here as well? Yeah, well, at first, you see, there's a bit of confusion. So as inquisitor, he is very, very interested in witches, but the church hierarchy around him in Bohemia in the Tyrol is less interested in witches. and you sort of get the impression they're really quite, you know, fed up with this inquisitor that they've got who's obsessed of witches. So he goes to the Pope and complains. And the Pope, and this is quite important, you choose a papal bow, you know, the rule of the Pope.

Much on one level, you can just sort of read as an administrative tidying up of reporting lines saying, yeah, the Inquisition is responsible for witchcraft. Archbishops don't interfere. That's his job. But in this papal bow, whatever the Pope intended to say, He also acknowledges that witchcraft exists. So suddenly, you've got a papal bull saying, witchcraft is real, and also you've got this statement that, yes, inquisitors are responsible for rooting it out. So this is music to Kramer's ears. With this papal bull, with this new authority,

he organises a big witch trial of 14 people in Innsbruck in the 1480s. This is his big witch trial moment. He's now got the Pope saying, this guy is responsible for this. What a coup. That's great to get your line. manager out of the way. Who are the women he's trying here? He's accused of 14 women. He's accused them of using magic to kill a knight, a York Spice. One of the women he's accused had walked out of a sermon he was giving earlier that year. Oh, clearly guilty as. Yes, it was a sermon on how

witches might use magic to interfere with the milk of a cow. She clearly had enough of this and walked out. Now, clearly, she's in his sights after this, so she is one of the accused. this witch trial doesn't go very well for him. It sort of collapses. He doesn't really have any evidence. He goes in a big strop after this. He sort of leaves the tarol. He goes to Cologne, and there he pens his, well, I sort of hesitate to call it his great work. He pens his most famous book, his book, Malifacarum, the Hammer of Witches, in the mid-1480s. Wow. What is in this epic toome? Well, when I was researching my own book, I had occasion to read Malifis Malifacarum, which I'd never read before. I can't say I especially recommend it. It's one of the strangest books I've

read. It's sort of part legal primer on how to conduct a witch trial, part justification for why witch trials are really important, part of sort of practical how-to in spotting a witch, and it is just laced with very, very strange imagery from straight out of his mind on the kind of thing witches do. So did you know, for example, Dan, that witches will often collect many penises of men they've killed. They will keep them in a small box. They will at night bring them to life and feed them oats. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's a strange, strange book. No one day we need to crack down on this. So it is a sort of fever dream of misogynistic, well, fantasy. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yeah, and it also is very, very clear that actually

possibly influenced by his own failed witch trials earlier in his career, the best way to convict a witch, which is to use torture to get a confession, and once you've got the confession, you can proceed straight to the execution. It's a very, very strange work. So not a fan of women or due process. Okay, interesting. No, I mean, we've built quite a picture of old Heinrich Kramer here, but this book is a bestseller, and he gets, in some ways, very lucky with the timing. If he had written this book 50, 60, 70 years earlier, presumably it wouldn't have gone very far. But he writes it after the invention of movable type, when we've got this, you know, first boom in the printing industry.

And the interesting thing about the early printing industry is, yes, you can produce books much quicker than in the past, but it's still not easy. You need this whole team of craftsmen to spend days, weeks, maybe a month, laying out all of the type, and then printing it up, it's expensive. So if you're an early modern publisher, you only really want to publish something if you're sure it's going to sell. There's not really any copyright law. So the best way to see what's going to sell is to see what everyone else is publishing.

So stuff that does well tends to do really well. And it turns out in early modern Europe, there's a really big market for slightly strange books about penises eating oats, who knew? So Kramer's book goes through all of these sorts of editions is one of the most printed books of the early modern period. It goes all over Europe. So this is when we're coming on to the Duncan Weldon special here.

So, as you say, there have been men fantasizing about how evil women have kept them from their destiny and their greatness and are involved in sexual congress with the devil. There's been men, I suspect, thinking about those things, a little too deeply, four thousands of years. But this is the point. This is the moment in history where those ideas bump into the most sophisticated method of propagating information to that point in recorded history. So you can now distribute that, you can write down, and these things can go over. viral, I suppose, for the first time. Yeah, it goes viral. So you've got a few things going on. You've now got this practical how-to guide on spotting a witch and conducting a trial, which has gone viral. You've got the Pope has said the Inquisition has responsibility for this and these things are real. But you've also got a really big structural changes in the European climate and economy and social

structure, all of which I think are real big factors behind these 40,000. witch trials over this period. And you don't really get a bigger structural factor than the climate. And Europe is undergoing some really quite significant climate shifts at this time. More on the European witch trials after this. Okay, so we've got this publishing revolution and enormous climate change coinciding. This is feeling, well, it's just feeling very distinctive. Why should shifts in climate and publishing all coincide to produce this strange outcome? Okay, so Europe at this time, the 1400s, 1,500s, 1600s is undergoing what some historians call the Little Ice Age.

The temperature has dropped. And we've got a couple of interesting bits of evidence for that. What I really like is, that was a lot of. a study conducted in the early 1970s, which looked at 12,000 examples of European painting and art between about 1,400 and the 1960s. And what they see is during this period, you get this sudden spike from compared to before or after of dark, cloudy skies when people are painting landscapes. You know, artists noticed this was a period in which it was darker, it was cloudier and the rainfall are changed. More scientifically, there is something called the

Grendelwald fluctuation, which I love as a term. It sounds like the sort of bad friller you might buy in an airport, but the Grendelwald fluctuation is people looking at evidence from ice cores on Swiss glaciers and pointing out between the 1550s and the 1630s, Europe definitely was colder. So we know what was colder. When it's colder, crops fail more often. When crops fail more often, people in a generally still peasant rural society are poorer. And when people are poorer throughout history, the age of marriage tends to get delayed. People tend to want to wait until they've built up a bit of money before they get married. So the age of marriage is rising and fewer people are getting married in the first place. What this all means when you put it together is the share

of unmarried women in the European population increases from around 10% to about 20% in this period. And in some areas of Europe, it goes as high as 30%. So you've got a lot more unmarried women about compared to before or after. Have you also got lots of unmarried men around as well? You've also got unmarried men around, but you've got unmarried women around. And unmarried women tend to be seen as a burden on their community, especially when they're getting older. There's horrific evidence from very, very recent history. Social scientists who've studied incidents of so-called witch-killing in Tanzania in the 1990s and 2000s, that when you get

climate disruption, you see a spike in so-called witch killings. You don't see a spike in other forms of violent crime. Even in the relatively modern world, climate in an agricultural society, leading to a share, the rising share of unmarried women tends to be associated with communities trying to get rid of that burden as they'd see it. That's wild. Yeah. So the Europe of this time, you've got these unmarried women,

you've got a rising share of unmarried women because of the climate, and then you've got, as we say, that information revolution, Kramer publishing at exactly the right time and the right place to, in modern terms, go viral. It's strange, isn't it? Because women, from what I know of those societies,

women are working in the fields. They're not sitting around. expecting to be fed and have treats brought to them. It's strange that that is the drive in those situations. Yeah, and it tends to be older unmarried women who, you know, maybe getting too old to work in the fields who don't have children to support them. So it's beholden to the wider community to support them. And then if we go back onto these witch trials, a lot of these women are older and unmarried. Older are married. And there's that misogyny, there's that sort of dislike and fear of women who aren't married.

Because what must they be up to? They're not with their husbands like any quote unquote normal woman would be. So, yeah, they must be obviously having sex to the devil or something like that. Exactly. It's sort of interesting that the idea of people being witches has obviously existed before this period. You can find sort of people being accused of some form of witchcraft going back a very, very long way. But it's not been a big thing in Western Central Europe until this time. And it's not being something the church has been particularly concerned.

about until really now. You know, like I say, the Inquisition has existed for a long time, stamping out heresy, not dealing with the supernatural or the supposed supernatural. And there's the book that you and I've both read and I admire, Geoffrey Parker, talking about the 17th century, the astonishing levels of war, dislocation, famine, violence that the whole world experiences in the 17th century. So I've never thought before about how increased witch trials are part of this. But you're also seeing the end of the Ming dynasty,

you're also seeing 30 years war, the bloodiest war in British history per capita, the civil wars in our archipelago here, the Isles, and pogroms against the Jews as well, and publishing, feeding into this, because you, God, you see that publishing, the effect of publishing on the civil wars in Britain and Ireland as well, is incredible. Yeah, and I think, you know, we should always keep in mind, this is primarily a rural, primarily an agricultural society across the world in the 17th century. Yes, there are towns and cities, but the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries are living on and from the land. And when you get these huge changes in weather patterns which depress agricultural yields for several decades, then you're going to get social instability as a result. And on one level, which trials are a result of that?

But there's an interesting thing about which trials in that although these climate disturbances, changes, are affecting people across. Europe, which trials are especially concentrated into certain geographic areas. And is that to do with the culture, the people involved, the dynamism of certain preachers, or is there something here, for example, around the Reformation, the battleground between Protestantism and the Catholic counterfeit. There's a format here. There's a time of contested ideas. Yes, I think it's exactly. I'm going to give you some numbers, because I find it fascinating. There's a couple of economic historians did a fascinating sort of examination of the data on this.

They looked at witch trials between 1,300 and 1850, so before the outburst we're talking about and the long tail afterwards when there weren't as many witch trials. And the variation is phenomenal. The measure they liked is the death rate per a million people being executed for witchcraft over this entire period. So in Italy, between that whole period in Italy, the death rate was five per million. So five people out of every a million would be. executed for witchcraft over that period. In Germany, 574, 100 times more likely to be killed

as a witch in Germany than in Italy. In Switzerland, an almost unbelievable 5,691 per million. Switzerland, the highest, 10 times higher than Germany, which was already high. A thousand times higher than Italy? Yes. Next door. Yes. So if you were going to be an older, unmarried woman in the 1500s, early 1600s, you were far better off being Italian than Swiss. And, okay, is that because Switzerland's difficult for agriculture, marginal, the first place that's going to feel the effects like climate change? Is it because it's on this fault line between Protestantism, Catholicism? Yeah, I think this fault line between Protestantism and Catholicism really matters. Now, it's interesting, in areas, which are strongly Catholic,

where Protestantism doesn't really emerge as a challenge. We're looking at space, if we're looking at Italy, there are relatively few witch trials. If we're looking at an areas which are on sort of the front line of this denominational battle between Lutheranism and Calvinism and the old Catholic Church, areas like Germany, areas like Switzerland, areas like it's a France, that's where we see lots of witch trials. You know, within France, we don't see a huge amount of witch trials in the south of France, which remains very, very Catholic throughout. We do see a lot in the areas which are becoming more Protestant. And why is that? Now, it's partially this sounds sort of cold-hearted in economics language, which trials are almost a form of

advertising for these competing denominations. Let's unpack that one. How so? Let's think for a moment of the Catholic Church as a business. Now, for about the thousand years before the period we're talking about, it is an incredibly successful business. Its share of the market for religious belief in Western Europe is approaching 100%. And the tool it uses to maintain that market share is something that some economic historians have rather meekly called coercive exclusion. Now, coercive exclusion sounds fine. It translates though as killing anyone who won't agree to believe in your version of Christianity. You're back to what happens to the Cathas and the Albiginian Crusade and all of that in

Southern France. This strategy, though, stops working during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther publishes his he sees. He gets support across Europe, across the German lands in particular. He gets some rulers in the German lands also adopting the Protestant faith. And the Catholic Church has orders to arrest that man. So there's now a real competitor. to the Catholic Church and what it can't just get rid of with her straightforward exclusion.

So the Catholic Church for the first time and the new Protestant churches are forced to compete for believers. And they compete in various ways. You know, you get in the Catholic Church, you get the counter-reformation. They do things like they create more saints days because they realize that the lady like saints. So you see this sudden burst of, okay, these guys like saints, let's make a lot more saints to make ourselves more popular. You get Protestant churches, competing almost on price grounds. They say, we've got a really simple tithe. If you come over to the Protestant churches, we've got this very straightforward understandable tithe, whereas if you stay at the Catholic Church, you've got a whole series of indulgences and hard-to-understand charges.

These are all forms of competing alongside the spiritual level. But then there's witch trials. If you're in a world in which you believe which is a real, and lots of people did believe which are real, you want to go with the church, which shows it can protect you from this witch threat. And witch trials, they're really big, high-profile things. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, will attend a witch trial. And after the execution of the witches, there'll be woodcuts made. Sometimes there'll be monuments put up news spreads. So in areas where the churches are competing directly with each other, holding witch trials, is a really good way to bring publicity to your church

and to show that you're really looking after your local laity. You're taking witches seriously. Are those guys taking witches as seriously? Wow. So it's a conjunction of so many different inputs. What brings this to an end? Does this bout of witch trials and killings, does it tail off or does it have a kind of striking end point?

I mean, it really does start to tail off after the 30 years war, 1618 to 1648, major war, not entirely, but to a large extent, along religious lines in Europe, partially because that war is so destructive, it kills so many people, particularly in Germany. But I think also because after that, religious competition within Western and Central Europe becomes less intensive. So after the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, there is this general acceptance that, all right, these bits of Europe are now Protestant, these bits of Europe are now Catholic, and if individuals want to change their mind, that's okay, but we're not going to have this same sort of war for religious territory.

And I think once you get this settling down of religious conflict within Western Europe, Catholicism making its peace that the Protestant churches are here to stay, the Protestant churches not trying to expand too much into Catholic areas, that sort of dying down of religious conflict means you do start to see a tailing off on witch trials. Now they outlast that. You get witch trials in the late 17th century. We get the famous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. We get witch finder generals prowling around post-Civil War, East Anglia and the West country in Britain. But it does start to die down. And by the early 1700s, the era of

witch trials, which is being for 100, 150 years before, is coming to an end in Western and central Europe. Duncan, I'm going to do something very unfair and ask you maybe to think about the things I'm sure will be in the minds of people listening to this. And we've seen in the modern world, we've seen data that suggests that young men are disillusioned with the moves towards equality that have been made by the women who live alongside them in society. Young men are now less likely to think that women ought to be in charge of businesses and nation states than they were 10 years ago. There's been a publishing revolution. There's been economic headwinds. I mean, as

the economic historian, is it too soon to tell, or do you think there are interesting patterns and rhymes at play in our modern world? I think there are always interesting patterns and rhymes of play. And I think, yeah, you're completely right. We've had generally a troubled economic situation since 2007, 2008, the financial crisis. That doesn't sound that long ago in historical terms, but 20 years is quite a long time, a sort of lived experience. We've got this 20 years of the economies in the West not performing as well as we wanted them to. People's wages not rising as fast as they might have expected. And yeah, we have an information revolution in which influencers stuff can go viral. People can find a mass audience in a way they couldn't

before. These are both the kind of things we saw, less extreme, but the kind of things we saw at the start of the European witch mania, which hysteria. I mean, I always think these sort of potentially dangerous messages. People going viral, spreading messages of hate, are always more likely when you have the confluence of new technologies, which allows these things to spread in those days, printing, nowadays the internet and modern social media. And when you have a generally troubled economic backdrop bringing social dislocation, then driven by climate, it now driven by the still-longering impact of the financial crisis. Interesting.

What's the advice from the economic historian of the early 17th century here? Do you just have to wait for the economy to improve? Or is there a sense that this propaganda, you can meet it and fight it on its own terms? Can you win that battle? Or is it a bit more depressing? Do you have to just wait for the structural landscape to change? I think the lesson of this period is I think you do have to rather sadly wait for the structural landscape to change. I mean, the witch trials ended. It took one of the bloodiest wars

Europe's ever seen to bring religious peace. Hopefully we don't need a shock on that scale this time to bring relative calm. But also these new technologies can have a huge impact on how information spreads, how that changes our societies, how that changes our cultures, our politics in ways we don't often see at the time. I think when Johannes von Guttenberg invents his movable type, he's probably not thinking it's going to lead to a strange work like Malifascarum being an early modern bestseller. In the same way, I don't think modern social media when it was invented, people thought it would be put to some of the ends it has been today. Interesting stuff. Duncan Welland, thank you very much coming on the podcast.

Remind everyone what the name of your fabulous book is. It is Blood and Treasure, the Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine. Thank you for coming on and helping us think differently about some of these bits of history that we'll have known about and talked about and now seeing them in a different light. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening, folks. I've got some big news.

We're changing to a new release schedule in November with new episodes dropping on Mondays and Thursday. Bonus episodes are on Friday. If you're a subscriber, which you should be by now. We're going to change things up because we want to, well, deliver the best podcast we can. Make sure you get the best of us. So fewer episodes, but we're going to do deeper dyes.

We're going to do more of those explainers. more on location adventures, more focus on the history you love. Look, if we're doing a few episodes, we can make sure they're higher quality. That's the laws of physics, folks. And also because we're getting lots of stuff across history in general. We've got the YouTube channel, which I hope you subscribe to, the TV channel. And we're also making some old-school TV as well for National Geographic and Channel 5 in the UK. So we're all embarked on some pretty big adventures.

Mariana DeForge, the producer, has upped her shoe game. She is ready, I'm ready. I can't say too much now, but she's going to need those shoes. That's what I'm saying. We're going to be traversing the Great Wall of China. We're going to be following in Napoleon's footsteps across chunks of Europe. And if I get my way, if I get my way, and I'm better, we're going to be tracing the story of the Odyssey from Troy to Ithaca,

which actually, if you think about it, is the ultimate historical adventure. That's it. You told me that when I was a kid that I'd be doing that in my slightly advanced years. Well, I'd have been happy. That's as good as you get. That's winning the World Cup of history. So worry not, folks, the podcast isn't changing. It's just getting even better.

Thank you.