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TIL witches were hanged in the U.S. and England., but burned in Scotland.
(www.mentalfloss.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Central Europe went nuts over witches. The general thought is that the driving force behind the witch hunts was the Reformation and Counter Reformation that drove Christians and leadership to more extreme positions to position themselves as the "defenders of the true faith" and to attract adherents. They centered around battleground states where protestant and catholic states bordered. In areas where one faith had a monopoly they were rare. The Spanish Inquisition actually suppressed witch hunts. Witch hunts peaked with the wars of religion period around 1560 to 1630.
Socio-economic turmoil and changes in the law fed the craze with groups that could not defend themselves made into convinient scapegoats.
"In the Middle Ages, if you accused a neighbor of witchcraft and could not prove it, you faced the legal penalty they would have received. This kept accusations low."
"In the early modern era, local states took over prosecution. Authorities could arrest people based on mere rumors, try them in secret, and legally use judicial torture to extract confessions. Tortured victims routinely named friends and neighbors to make the pain stop, creating a self-perpetuating loop of mass arrests."
"The craze finally disintegrated after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The treaty established fixed territorial borders for religions, eliminating the open competition for souls and causing witchcraft prosecutions to plummet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Moravia_witch_trials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
It is kind of funny, in a macabre way, of the inquisition being like "no, no, no that's not how you torture people and burn them at all" or "witches don't be ridiculous that's a red hearing to hide the heritics!"
When you are in control you don't want a mob running loose.