The European Witch Craze

A witch hunt that occurred throughout Europe from the second half of the XV century to the XVII century was considered to be a striking and bloody stain in the world history of mankind. This theme was undeservedly forgotten in the XIX century, but despite this fact it again received a new round of its development at the beginning of the XX century when there was a disclosure of all new facts of the history of the Inquisition, where science has received further details of that hunt. Only in recent decades, due to a systematic painstaking processing of the court documents, monastic and municipal archives, it became possible to recreate a rough picture of those events.

Thus, in this paper we are going to discuss and explore a phenomenon of history, such as a “witch hunt”, to identify the main causes of its beginning and to answer the question how and why historians disagree about the causes of witch hunting in early modern Europe.