Bibliographic Essay
Treatments of European heresy and witchcraft changed considerably as studies exploded beginning in the 1960s. The Cathars long appeared as a well-organised heresy, but recent studies indicate the difficulty even of identifying them.
Compare Malcolm Lambert's Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992) with R. I. Moore's The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). French scholars have shaken legends of the Cathars: see Monique Zerner (ed.), L’histoire du catharisme en discussion: le ‘concile’ de saint-Felix, 1167 (Nice: Centre d'etudes medievales: Diffusion Librairie Archeologique, 2001).Russian heresies were not especially important; John Fennell's essential A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (Longman: Harlow, 1995) discusses them only briefly. The Schism of 1666 was a social and religious affair but did not engender witch trials. The low number of Russian processes finds its context in Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
The importance of medieval books, especially the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) of Heinrich Kramer, i486, is now downplayed in the hunts, although they sometimes played an important role. But, among others, Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Malleus Maleficarum', in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, vol. iii, ed. Richard Golden (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), finds that the Malleus was not crucial to the hunts. Individual witch finders remain important.
Did the persecutions have social or political ‘functions'? Behringer, especially in Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i997), argues that trials aided state building. So does Brian P.
Levack, The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), although with reservations. Witch hunts are tied to the silencing of women in, for example, Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of their Own, revised edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). But criticism of functional analyses can be found in my own The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America, revised edn (London: Pearson/Longman, 2007). Johannes Dillinger sees the hunts as focused on unveiling evildoers, suggesting a straightforward pursuit of criminals: Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009; in German 1999).Besides Levack's work, valuable surveys include Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) and Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996). Andreas Blauert, Frühe Hexenverfolgungen: Ketzer-, Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse des 15. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1989) is indispensable.
Studies of individual hunts, especially in Germany, continue to appear. But new work will probably not alter the present understanding of the witch hunts as highly erratic, which undercuts arguments of a systematic campaign for any reason.