SOURCE : "Witchcraft," in The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 60-107.

In the following essay, Shumaker traces the course of the persecution of witches in Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

I. the Human Impact

Of all the varieties of occultism, witchcraft has the most depressing history. The expenditure of human energy and wealth in the alchemist's search for the Stone or the Elixir, although sobering, is trivial in comparison to the torture and execution of supposed witches. And this suffering reached its height not during the Dark Ages but in the High Renaissance.

The Renaissance persecutions of witches, conducted in Catholic Europe at first by the Inquisition and other ecclesiastical courts but later, as in England, by the secular authority, for the sake of convenience may be said to have been initiated by the promulgation on...