Marion Gibson, who is teaching our new HistoryExtra Academy course, shares five surprising facts about witch trials in the early modern era
1 Most witches were devout Christians
Although people who identify as witches or Wiccans today follow a pagan religion, accused medieval and early modern witches were often fervent churchgoers. They lived in a European world in which Christianity saturated daily life. Many accused people explained to their interrogators that they used Christian prayers in healing spells, calling on God, the saints and the Holy Ghost.
Some suspects belonged to fundamentalist Christian sects. At Salem in 1692, the convicted witches Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey were among the most pious worshippers at their Congregational church. Joan Balls, accused in Suffolk in 1645, “professed Anabaptism” and was a “runner after the new sects” of Puritanism.
Christian ministers in both Suffolk and Salem were accused of witchcraft. The vicar of Brandeston, John Lowis, was deemed to be insufficiently puritanical and was charged with only reading state-approved lessons in church. He recited his own burial service before he was hanged. At Salem, Reverend George Burroughs repeated the text of the Lord’s Prayer – something thought impossible for witches – when he, too, was hanged.
These good Christians were accused largely because they didn’t follow the same religious teachings as those who suspected them.
2 Thousands of those accused of witchcraft were men
Ask someone to imagine a witch, and the chances are that that witch will be a woman. However, a significant minority – an estimated one in four – of those put on trial for witchcraft were men.
Men were sometimes the target of witchhunts because they were related to accused women, or romantically involved with them. In Innsbruck, Austria, in the mid-1480s, a male potter was suspected primarily because he was allegedly the lover of an accused witch, Barbara Selachin.
Other men fell under suspicion because they were thought to have turned their godly learning to bad ends. In late 16th-century East Lothian, the schoolmas
