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[–]cloudrabbit 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (10 children)

I've also been reading a book about the origins of heresy in Christianity in the middle ages

What book?

[–]jelliknight 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

'The War On Heresy - Faith and Power in Medieval Europe' by R.I. Moore. I only read about half of it because it turns out it really didn't cover the area I was interested in - the persecution of witches, this book is more interested in christian-on-christian heresy

[–]lestratege 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

That's because the witch hunts were not a medieval phenomenon, unlike what many believe, but took place from the Renaissance on, and especially in the 16th and 17th.

RI Moore's book is interesting because it details how violence started to be used as a normal tool to deal with heretics.

[–]jelliknight 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I've got other books on the subject, the witch trials really began at the start of the 1400s and gradually ramped up in number of deaths and expanded their focus up until the 17th century when you're talking about. Interestingly, the initial focus of the witch trials were VERY specific. They were targeting women of European indigenous groups and faiths, especially those with knowledge relating to women controlling fertility.

[–]lestratege 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

By the 1400s, the only faith in Europe was Catholicism in the West and Orthodoxy in the East. What indigenous faith was that book talking about? I'd be interested to read about it. Unfortunately too often, things about witchcraft often dwell into shoehorning New age practices that seem more like modern invention than actual history.

In Montaillou, Leroy-Ladurie actually uses the Inquisition records against the Cathars of the future pope Benedict XII, so early 1300s, and there's a brief mention of witchcraft but it's treated as nonsensical superstition by the Inquisitor. Witchcraft didn't become heretic until the end of the 1400s, so at the Renaissance.

Witch hunts were really not a medieval practice but a modern one. They peaked in the 1600s ...

[–]jelliknight 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

By the 1400s, the only faith in Europe was Catholicism in the West and Orthodoxy in the East

Not so. The Benandanti are one well recorded example of a 'shamanic fertility cult' in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The book The War On Heresy has nothing to say about persecution of indigenous faiths, that's why i didn't finish reading it. I'm interested in a VERY niche area of this topic - late 1300s to early 1400s womens indigenous, herbal, and non-christian spiritual practices in western switzerland and surrounds. The War on Heresy is mostly about how practicing and faithful Christians could find themselves accused of heresy.

Catholicism absorbed many local indigenous religions, converting their gods into local saints. The intent being to 'convert' the population without having to actually change any of their beliefs and practices. So, if i were to take the easy way out I could argue that many of the 'catholics' were in fact preserving their own indigenous religions and merely paying lipservice to catholicism.

History suffers from an obvious bias here. The church attempting to present itself as all powerful and the emissaries of god are of course not going to admit they haven't been successful (if they even knew), and most of your history books are the records of academics and religious people in cities. The groups I'm referring to are small isolated rural populations which, on paper, could be called catholic by authorities but in reality maintain their prechristian beliefs and practices. Outside of the benendanti it's more of a personal hypothesis I'm looking into than a historical fact. I believe they may have survived christianization for a time for the same reason they are not in the historical record - no one gave enough of a shit about them. So there's not a lot of record (the benendanti being one of the better recorded groups, surviving 200 years later than the time i'm talking about) but there are inferences. And while it's not explicitly in the historical record, it's not hard to imagine how a small rural population in the swiss alps could continue doing as they have always done and when asked simply reply "Oh yeah, we pray to jesus like ALL the time, no worries. Catholic as fuck around here. Got a little chapel and everything." and then continue to do as they pleased once the bishop left town.

The witch trials became more lethal over time, and broader in focus, peaking in the 1600s-1700s. Turns out, burning people alive is a really versatile political tool. But that's LOOONG after the period I'm interested in. In the time period I'm looking at the trials are beginning to heat up, and the target is specific. Women who know things women shouldn't know, and practice "devilish" rituals such as methods for bringing fertility back to farm land. Initially they were accused of doing EVIL, but useful things like increasing a cows milk yield, or making land fertile. This undermines the authority of the church and the priests. They want you to go an PRAY for your farmland, not listen to some weird old woman telling you how to fix it with some ritual involving cow dung and moonlight (which we would now call biodynamics). Then the accusations shifted - if she can make cows give milk, then she can STOP them too, so it's her fault if your cow isn't giving milk. That was a lot easier to whip the population up over.

The church were especially shitty with women knowing how to prevent pregnancy. There's a weird disconnect in the trial records of women charged with procuring miscarriages during this time, with the priests asking what evil demonic thing they could have been doing, and the rural women replying they just 'used the usual herbs and methods'. Eve's Herbs by John M Riddle is a great resource on this, he covers how in pre-christian Europe knowledge of herbs which are effective contraceptives or abortives was ubiquitous. The church was never really cool about women controlling their own bodies so over time these herbs were referred to by euphemisms like 'menstrual stimulators', and then eventually left out of the herbals altogether. Ironically, eventually that ended up working in favor of the women who used them because the doctors couldn't agree whether or not they were just a 'silly old wives tale'. The witches, in the initial, were accused of non just general devil-y things but also they keep repeating that witches kill babies in the mothers womb, make women barren and make men sterile. Midwives were one major target of the initial witch trials, and they were charged with helping women to end pregnancies. Conceiving and preventing conception should be up to god, and you should pray (and pay the church) if you want that. Taking it into your own hands is evil.

So there's a lot of inference and conjecture but we do know that:

  • pre christian beliefs and practices, both practical and spiritual, existed.

  • There were paganistic groups until the 1600s which the church discovered and then exterminated.

  • There were people practicing pre christian beliefs and practices along side, as part of, and in defiance of Christianity all through the medieval period. Some of this was a target for the initial witch trials.

[–]lestratege 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The reason there's few in the Middle Ages is that the Witch hunts is actually a consequence of the rise of the institutionalisation of science in the modern age.

While folk remedies and popular midwifery was perfectly acceptable in the Middle Ages, when the reign of reason started, anything that didn't fall into the category of a science started to be frown upon then completely condemned. The result is that the science held by groups of women became severely suspicious, hence the witchcraftery accusation.

The initial targets of witchcraft accusation were not of religious nature. As I mentioned about Montaillou, in the 1300s the Inquisitor didn't take such accusation seriously and brushed it aside as just something completely unimportant.

I have yet to find any serious trace of paganism in Western Europe at that time. We're talking about areas that had been christianized a thousand years before. Remnants of pagan cults did linger in the High Middle Ages, but aside from fiction, I've not seen any evidence of such surviving cults in the late medieval period in Western Europe.