What Caused Europe's Witch Hysteria?

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Dan Snow's History Hit

Episode: What Caused Europe's Witch Hysteria?
Date: October 29, 2025
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Duncan Weldon, Economic Historian

---

Main Theme

The episode explores the causes behind Europe's witch hysteria during the 16th and 17th centuries. Rather than recounting specific trials, Dan Snow and guest Duncan Weldon delve into the interplay of social, economic, climatic, and cultural factors that led to the outbreak and intensity of witch hunts, focusing especially on the roles of misogyny, religious conflict, and changing societal structures.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction: The Witch Craze and Its Victims

• Dan Snow sets the scene, describing the hysteria that saw tens of thousands, mostly women, accused and executed as witches ([01:46]):

  "Tens of thousands of them, mostly women. They were accused, tortured, hanged, drowned and burned."

• Historical witch hunts targeted “the women who communities had once relied on to heal… suddenly found themselves the targets of malicious village gossips or witch hunters…”

Key Historical Figures: Heinrich Kramer and the Malleus Maleficarum

• Heinrich Kramer emerges as a pivotal figure, instrumental in redirecting the Inquisition towards witchcraft, especially after the 1480s ([05:27]–[08:25]).
• Kramer's infamous book, the Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of Witches", c.1487), becomes a practical manual for witch-hunters and is described as possibly "the most dangerous book of the 16th century" ([01:46]).
• Kramer's obsession with witchcraft, particularly targeting women, is discussed, alongside the use of torture to produce confessions ([12:10]):

  "The best way to convict a witch is to use torture to get a confession. And once you've got the confession, you can proceed straight to the execution." — Duncan Weldon ([12:10])

• The peculiar contents of Malleus Maleficarum are highlighted with a memorable, grotesque anecdote:

  "Did you know, for example, Dan, that witches will often collect many penises of men they've killed? They will keep them in a small box. They will at night bring them to life and feed them oats." — Duncan Weldon ([11:59])
  Dan replies in disbelief: "Really?" — Dan Snow ([11:59])

The Printing Revolution: Viral Ideas

• The Malleus Maleficarum "goes viral" thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, making Kramer's ideas far more influential than they otherwise might have been ([13:42]):

  "This is the moment in history where those ideas bump into the most sophisticated method of propagating information to that point in recorded history." — Dan Snow ([13:42])

• Books on witch-hunting become some of the most widely printed texts in Europe due to publishers' demand for bestsellers in the new print economy ([12:31]).

Structural and Economic Factors: The Little Ice Age

• Duncan Weldon introduces the concept of the Little Ice Age (roughly 15th–17th centuries), where colder, more volatile climates led to failed crops, economic hardship, and delayed marriages ([17:05]):

  "Europe at this time... is undergoing what some historians call the Little Ice Age. The temperature has dropped..." ([17:05])

• As people delayed marriage, the population of older, unmarried women increased, placing social and economic stress on communities and making these women especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft ([17:05]–[20:30]):

  “The share of unmarried women in the European population increases from around 10% to about 20% in this period… In some areas of Europe it goes as high as 30%.” — Duncan Weldon ([17:05]) "Unmarried women tend to be seen as a burden on their community, especially when they're getting older." — Duncan Weldon ([19:01])

• Weldon aptly ties in recent research from modern Tanzania, illustrating how climate disruption can drive contemporary 'witch killings' ([19:44]).

Gender and Misogyny

• While witch-hunting in theory could ensnare anyone, nearly all accused and executed were women, usually older and unmarried ([08:08]):

  "In theory, anyone can be a witch. In reality, almost everyone accused of witchcraft is a woman, more than 90%. Kramer… thinks it's all women." — Duncan Weldon ([08:08])

• Cultural fears about women "not fulfilling their prescribed social roles" intensify the hysteria ([20:30]).

Religious Conflict and Competition

• Religious fragmentation after the Protestant Reformation ramped up witch trials in border areas where Catholic and Protestant churches directly competed ([22:55]):

  "There's a format here. There's a time of contested ideas… areas like Germany, areas like Switzerland... that's where we see lots of witch trials." — Dan Snow ([22:40])

• Weldon asserts that churches, rivaling for the loyalty of populations, used witch trials as a form of “advertising” ([25:22]):

  "Witch trials are almost a form of advertising for these competing denominations." — Duncan Weldon ([25:22])

• Striking differences in execution rates:
  • Italy: 5 per million
  • Germany: 574 per million
  • Switzerland: 5,691 per million ([22:55]–[24:09])
• Areas consistently Catholic (e.g., Italy, Spain) had far fewer witch trials versus “faultline” areas.

The End of the Witch Hunts

• Following the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and a reduction in religious competition, witch trials declined ([28:17]):

  "After the Treaty of Westphalia 1648, there is this general acceptance that, all right, these bits of Europe are now Protestant, these bits of Europe are now Catholic... you do start to see a tailing off in witch trials." — Duncan Weldon ([28:17])

• Salem and the English Witchfinder General are noted as late echoes ([29:50]).

Modern Parallels & Lessons

• Dan Snow draws comparisons with 21st-century phenomena: economic stress, rapid information spread (now via the Internet and social media), and rising gender-based anxieties ([30:26]):

  "Young men are now less likely to think women ought to be in charge... there's been a publishing revolution, there's been economic headwinds..."

• Duncan Weldon sees strong analogies, warning that troubled economies combined with new ways to spread radical ideas create fertile ground for scapegoating and panic ([30:26]–[31:50]):

  "These sort of potentially dangerous messages... are always more likely when you have the confluence of new technologies... and when you have a generally troubled economic backdrop bringing social dislocation." — Duncan Weldon ([31:50])

• When asked if propaganda must simply "wait out" economic cycles, Weldon is cautiously pessimistic ([32:09]):

  "...you do have to rather sadly wait for the structural landscape to change. I mean, the witch trials ended. It took one of the bloodiest wars Europe's ever seen... hopefully we don't need a shock on that scale..." — Duncan Weldon ([32:09])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the media environment:

  "In early modern Europe, there's a really big market for slightly strange books about penises eating oats. Who knew?" — Duncan Weldon ([12:31])

• On the gendering of witchcraft:

  "For him [Kramer], it's usually women." — Duncan Weldon ([08:08])

• On economic underpinnings:

  "When people are poorer, the age of marriage tends to get delayed... What this all means... is the share of unmarried women in the European population increases..." — Duncan Weldon ([17:05])

• On religious competition:

  "Witch trials are almost a form of advertising for these competing denominations." — Duncan Weldon ([25:22])

• On modern echoes:

  "We've had generally a troubled economic situation since 2007–2008... We have an information revolution in which influencers... can go viral ... These are both the kind of things we saw... at the start of the European witch mania." — Duncan Weldon ([30:26])

---

Important Timestamps

• [01:46] — Dan Snow’s introduction, the setting of witch-hunting in Europe
• [05:25]–[06:51] — Who is Heinrich Kramer?
• [11:16]–[12:10] — The contents and impact of the Malleus Maleficarum
• [13:42]–[14:59] — The spread of witch-hunting ideas due to the printing press
• [17:05]–[18:58] — The Little Ice Age and demographic shifts
• [22:40]–[25:22] — Regional and denominational distribution of witch trials
• [28:17]–[29:50] — Why and how the trials declined after the Thirty Years’ War
• [30:26]–[32:09] — Modern comparisons and cautionary lessons

---

Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode provides a multi-layered analysis of Europe's witch hysteria, intertwining landmark historical personalities, technological revolutions (printing press), economic and climatic shifts (the Little Ice Age), religious competition, and deeply embedded misogyny. Weldon's economic historiography challenges the listener to see witch hunts not simply as mass delusion, but as an outcome of confluences between environment, technology, and institutional interests—a perspective with clear resonances in today's rapidly changing world.

Recommended Reading:

• Duncan Weldon's book: Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine.

---

Transcript

[Grainger Advertiser]

If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Grainger. Grainger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers. Plus, you can rely on Grainger for easy reordering, so you never run out.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Of what you need.

[Grainger Advertiser]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Verizon Customer 1]

Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never looked so good.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You look the same, but with this.

[Verizon Customer 1]

Camera everything looks better. Especially me.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Selfies check please with Verizon.

[Verizon Advertiser 2]

Get the new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever, plus a new iPad and Apple One. No trade in needed. Offer ends November 5th with a new line on Unlimited Ultimate Best 5G Tours.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Root Metrics Data United States 2020 25. All rights reserved. Additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details.

[Workday Go Advertiser]

New products to launch New people to develop new goals to crush Workday Go is designed for small and mid sized businesses. By bringing HR and finance together on one AI platform, you'll have everything you need to think big, go big and grow big. And activation is fast. It takes just 30 to 60 business days to get you up and running. Simplify your SMB on an AI platform, you'll never outgrow Workday Go.

[Dan Snow]

They dragged them from their homes and from the fields. Tens of thousands of them, mostly women. They were the ones who bore the brunt of it. They were accused, tortured, hanged, drowned and burned. Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was gripped by an insidious panic, one that infiltrated towns and communities, one that was preached from the pulpits and argued in the pages of books. For over 300 years, there was a plague of wild accusations of witchcraft. The women who communities had once relied on to heal, to deliver their children, to raise the next generation suddenly found themselves the targets of malicious village gossips or witch hunters, the likes of Matthew Hopkins, who terrorized the women of Essex in England in the 1650s, and Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the infamous witch hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, the man who harnessed this new media to supercharge witch hunting. In 1485, Kramer had been humiliated by an outspoken woman by the name of Helena Scheuberin, who he tried to accuse of witchcraft. But was found innocent in court. The judge dismissed the case, calling Kramer senile and unfit to generate any further trials. In response, he wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, the most dangerous book of the 16th century. And that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Now, once you dig into stories of quote, unquote witches like Helena Schoberin, it becomes reasonably clear to us that these accusations were rarely about their magical abilities, more about control, about fear, about social anxiety and tension. This was a period of great upheaval in Europe. It was a time of war, which again, doesn't particularly mark it out, but it was. There were lots of wars in this period that was. There was conflicts in the church, there were bad harvests, there was, I'm afraid to say, climate disruption. And as we all know too well, when people's lives get hard, we like to look for a scapegoat. Or certainly we're in the market for those who point out scapegoats. There has to be someone to blame other than ourselves or just bad luck. So in this episode, we're not gonna look at the story of some of these individual witch trials, but we're gonna look at some of the deeper history, why they happened, why it was that suspicion reached a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Aside from your basic common and garden misogyny, what was going on that encouraged those particular populations to turn on women so fervently and to explore what led this state sanctioned slaughter that extended from Spain, Germany, Scotland, even Iceland. I'm joined by an economic historian. Yes, we're gonna look at economics here. We're gonna go a little bit Marxist today. We're gonna talk to Duncan Weldon. His new book, Blood and Treasure, explores exactly that. The economic underpinnings of so much, the history that we might be familiar with. And as well as witchcraft. He looks at lots of other phenomenon like the economics of war. It's a great book. This is Dan Snow's history and we're answering the big question. What exactly caused the witch hysteria in Renaissance Europe?

[Duncan Weldon]

T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

[Verizon Customer 2]

God save the king. No black white unity till there is first some black unit never to go.

[Dan Snow]

To war with one another again.

[Duncan Weldon]

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Duncan, good to see you. Thanks. On the podcast.

[Duncan Weldon]

Thank you for having me.

[Dan Snow]

First of all, is there a hard start? Are we looking at these people like Heinrich Kramer? Has it always been bubbling along? Or is this a new, strange new chapter in European history?

[Duncan Weldon]

I think it's a strange new chapter in European history. You know, if you look in the long run of European history, men being quite horrible to women is not that uncommon. But we get something on a different scale. And in the 1500s into the 1600s, we get, in that period, about 40,000, primarily women being condemned to death as witches. And I think, yeah, if we're looking for a ground zero, if we're looking for a character we can start to pin some of the blame on. We are going back to Heinrich Kramer in the late 1400s.

[Dan Snow]

But this is interesting, Duncan, because you're an economics guy. You're a big substructural. You know, we're all students of Marx here. Everything happens because of deep underlying economic reasons. And yet, are we saying here that individuals matter, culture matters? So Kramer just shaped society's views and attitudes, or is it going to be a blend of both? Are we going to learn that it's a blend of both in this podcast?

[Duncan Weldon]

I think we're going to learn that it's a blend of both. We're going to say there's some really big structural factors which say the 1500s were a particularly uncomfortable time to be an unmarried woman in Europe in certain places. But we're going to say, you know, if we're looking for an individual who influenced the way things turned out, we're going back to this particularly unpleasant character which Heinrich Kramer in the 1470s.

[Dan Snow]

Tell me about him.

[Duncan Weldon]

So he's born in about 1430 in Alsace, in what's now part of France, but then is really part of the Holy Roman Empire. German.

[Dan Snow]

Well, that's a whole other podcast there.

[Duncan Weldon]

That's a whole other podcast. Whole other podcast. But he becomes a friar in the Dominican order. He's seen as a very eloquent preacher, a very learned man. By the 1470s, in his 40s, he's been promoted in. He's the inquisitor responsible for the Tyrol and Innsbruck Bohemia, that sort of area of central Europe. And he's really, really interested in the idea of witchcraft.

[Dan Snow]

Interesting. And so the inquisitor, you've got latitude, have you? You can look into various doctrinal failings. And this guy's saying, like, my thing is just gonna be witchcraft. We're gonna stamp it out in this region.

[Duncan Weldon]

Okay, that's exactly it. Now, you know, the Inquisition's been around for a while, but the Inquisition's primary purpose at first is. Is rooting out heresy. It's going around the Catholic Church. It's like your Christian doctrine here is not exactly the same as ours. That's a problem. It's not really witchcraft. It's Kramer, the one that. His big thing is witches. And he thinks the role of the inquisitor is dealing with witches.

[Dan Snow]

And witches are usually women, always women. What's the intersection between gender and witches?

[Duncan Weldon]

In theory, anyone can be a witch. In reality, almost everyone accused of witchcraft is a woman, more than 90%. Kramer, in particular, thinks it's all women. He writes that the good Lord has been very nice to men by not cursing them with the bane of witchcraft. For him, it's usually women.

[Dan Snow]

So what's he looking for? And I'm guessing sex is gonna be present here in this answer. Like, what's he chiefly worried about?

[Duncan Weldon]

Well, he would tell you he's chiefly worried about people who have consorted with the devil and are doing evil magic to the bane of their community. That's what Cramer would tell you. In reality, it's almost always women. It's usually almost always, in fact, unmarried women, often older unmarried women. And when you read some of the things, I'm sure we'll talk about that he wrote, the sexual overtones are not exactly understated, it would be fair to say.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so as an inquisitor, he can, what, send his goons out and drag people in front of him and he gets to question them? And. And is he judge and jury here as well?

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah, well, at first, you see, there's a bit of confusion. So as inquisitor, he is very, very interested in witches, but the church hierarchy around him in Bohemia, in the Tyrol, is less interested in witches. And you sort of get the impression they're really quite, you know, fed up with this inquisitor that they've got who's obsessed with witches. So he goes to the pope and complains. And the pope, and this is quite important, issues a papal bow. You know, the rule of the pope, much on one level, you can just sort of read as an administrative tidying up of reporting lines, saying, yeah, the Inquisition is responsible for witchcraft. Archbishops don't interfere. That's his job. But in this papal bull, whatever the pope intended to say, he also acknowledges that witchcraft exists. So suddenly you've got a papal bull saying witchcraft is real. And also you've got this statement that, yes, inquisitors are responsible for rooting it out. So this is music to Kramer's ear. Papal bull. With this new authority, he organizes a big witch trial of 14 people in Innsbruck in the 1480s. This is his big witch trial moment. You know, he's now got the Pope saying this Guy is responsible for this.

[Dan Snow]

What a coup. That's great. To get your line manager out of the way. Who are the women he's trying here?

[Duncan Weldon]

He's accused 14 women. He's accused them of using magic to kill a knight. A Jorg Spice, one of the women he's accused and had walked out of a sermon he was giving earlier that year.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, clearly guilty as.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yes, it was a sermon on how witches might use magic to interfere with the milk of a cow. She clearly had enough of this and walked out. Now, clearly she's in his sights after this. So she is one of the accused. This witch trial doesn't go very well for him. It sort of collapses. He doesn't really have any evidence. He goes in a big strop after this. He sort of leaves the Tyrol. He goes to Cologne and. And there he pens his. Well, I sort of hesitate to call it his great work. He pens his most famous book, his book Malefus Maleficarum, the hammer of witches in the mid-1480s.

[Dan Snow]

Wow. What is in this epic tome?

[Duncan Weldon]

Well, when I was researching my own book, I had occasion to read Malefice Maleficarum, which I'd never read before. Can't say I especially recommend it. It's one of the strangest books I've read. It's sort of part legal primer on how to conduct a witch trial, part justification for why witch trials are really important. Part a sort of practical how to in spotting a witch. And it is just laced with very, very strange imagery from straight out of his mind on the kind of thing witches do. So did you know, for example, Dan, that witches will often collect many penises of men they've killed? They will keep them in a small box. They will at night bring them to life and feed them oats.

[Dan Snow]

Really?

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah, yeah. It's a strange, strange book.

[Dan Snow]

No, one day we need to crack down on this. So it is a sort of fever dream of misogynistic fantasy. I mean, it's extraordinary.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah. And it also is very, very clear that actually, possibly influenced by his own failed witch trials earlier in his career, the best way to convict a witch is to use torture to get a confession. And once you've got the confession, you can proceed straight to the execution. It's a very, very strange work.

[Dan Snow]

So not a fan of women or due process. Okay, interesting.

[Duncan Weldon]

No, no. I mean, we've built quite a picture of old Heinrich Kramer here, but this book is a bestseller and he gets, in some ways very lucky with the timing. If he had written this book 50, 60, 70 years earlier, presumably it wouldn't have gone very far. But he writes it after the invention of movable type, when we've got this, you know, first boom in the printing industry. And the interesting thing about the early printing industry is, yes, you can produce books much quicker than in the past, but it's still not easy. You need this whole team of craftsmen to spend days, weeks, maybe a month laying out all of the type and then printing it up. It's expensive. So if you're an early modern publisher, you only really want to publish something if you're sure it's going to sell. There's not really any copyright law. So the best way to see what's going to sell is to see what everyone else is publishing. So stuff that does well tends to do really well. And it turns out in early modern Europe, there's a really big market for slightly strange books about penises eating oats. Who knew? So Kramer's book goes through all of these sorts of editions. It's one of the most printed books of the early modern period. It goes all over Europe.

[Dan Snow]

So this is when we're coming onto the Duncan Weldon special here. So, as you say, there have been men fantasizing about how evil women have kept them from their destiny and their greatness and are involved in sexual congress with the devil. There's been men, I suspect, thinking about those things a little too deeply for thousands of years. But this is the point, this is the moment in history where those ideas bump into the most sophisticated method of propagating information to that point in recorded history. So you can now distribute that. You can write it down. And these things can go viral, I suppose, for the first time.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah, it goes viral. So you've got a few things going on. You've now got this practical how to guide on spotting a witch and conducting a trial which has gone viral. You've got the Pope has said the Inquisition has responsibility for this, and these things are real. But you've also got a really big structural changes in the European climate and economy and social structure, all of which I think are real big factors behind these 40,000 witch trials over this period. And, you know, you don't really get a bigger structural factor than the climate. And Europe is undergoing some really quite significant climate shifts at this time.

[Dan Snow]

More on the European witch trials after this.

[Verizon Customer 1]

Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never looked so good.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You look the same.

[Verizon Customer 1]

But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Selfies check please with Verizon, get the.

[Verizon Advertiser 2]

New iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever, plus a new iPad and Apple One. No trade in needed. Offer ends November 5th with a new line on Unlimited Ultimate Best 5G Tours.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Route Metrics Data United States 20s 2025. All rights reserved. Additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details.

[Grainger Advertiser 2]

If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Grainger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters, Grainger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem. With Grainger, you can be confident you have everything you need to keep your facility running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches clues in the title, really. So follow not just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so we've got this publishing revolution and enormous climate change coinciding. This is feeling. Well, it's feeling very distinctive. Why should shifts in climate and publishing all coincide to produce this strange outcome?

[Duncan Weldon]

Okay, so Europe at This time, the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, is undergoing what some historians call the Little Ice Age. The temperature has dropped, and we've got a couple of interesting bits of evidence for that. One I really like is there was a study conducted in the early 1970s which looked at 12,000 examples of European painting and art between about 1400 and the 1960s. And what they see is during this period, you get this sudden spike from, compared to before or after, of dark, cloudy skies when people are painting landscapes. You know, artists noticed this was a period in which it was darker, it was cloudier, and the rainfall had changed. More scientifically, there is something called the Grindelwald fluctuation, which I love as a term. It sounds like the sort of bad friller you might buy in an airport. But the Grindelwald fluctuation is people looking at evidence from ice cores on Swiss glaciers and pointing out between the 1550s and the 1630s Europe definitely was colder, so we know it was colder. When it's colder, crops fail more often. When crops fail more often, people in a generally still peasant rural society are poorer. And when people are poorer throughout history, the age of marriage tends to get delayed. People tend to want to wait until they've built up a bit of money before they get married. So the age of marriage is rising and fewer people are getting married in the first place. What this all means when you put it together, is the share of unmarried women in the European population increases from around 10% to about 20% in this period. And in some areas of Europe it goes as high as 30%. So you've got a lot more unmarried women about compared to before or after.

[Dan Snow]

Have you also got lots of unmarried men around as well?

[Duncan Weldon]

You've also got unmarried men around, but you've got unmarried women around. Unmarried women tend to be seen as a burden on their community, especially when they're getting older. There's horrific evidence from very, very recent history. Social scientists who've studied incidents of so called witch killing in Tanzania in the 1990s and 2000s, that when you get climate disruption, it you see a spike in so called witch killings, you don't see a spike in other forms of violent crime, even in sort of the relatively modern world climate in an agricultural society leading to a share. The rising share of unmarried women tends to be associated with communities trying to get rid of that burden as they'd see it.

[Dan Snow]

That's wild.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah. So Europe of this time, you've got these unmarried women, you've got a rising share of unmarried women because of the climate. And then you've got, as we say, the information revolution, Kramer publishing at exactly the right time, in the right place to, in modern terms, go viral.

[Dan Snow]

It's strange, isn't it, because women, from what I know of those societies, women are working in the fields. They're not sitting around expecting to be fed and have treats brought to them. It's strange that that is the drive in those situations.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah. And it tends to. It tends to be older unmarried women who, you know, may be getting too old to work in the fields, who don't have children to support them. So it's beholden the wider community to support them.

[Dan Snow]

And then if we go back onto these witch trials, a lot of these women are older and unmarried.

[Duncan Weldon]

Older and unmarried.

[Dan Snow]

And there's that misogyny, there's that sort of dislike and fear of women who aren't married because what must they be up to? They're not with their husbands like any, quote, unquote, normal woman would be. So, yeah, they must be obviously having sex with the devil or something like that.

[Duncan Weldon]

Exactly. It's sort of interesting that the idea of people being witches has obviously existed before this period. You can find sort of people being accused of some form of witchcraft going back a very, very long way, but it's not been a big thing in Western Central Europe until this time. And it's not being something the Church has been particularly concerned about until really now. You know, like I say, the Inquisition has existed for a long time, stamping out heresy, not dealing with the supernatural or the supposed supernatural.

[Dan Snow]

And there's the book that you and I have both read, and I admire Geoffrey Parker Talking about the 17th century, the astonishing levels of war, dislocation, famine, violence that the whole world experiences in the 17th century. So I've never thought before about how increased witch trials are part of this. But you're also seeing the end of the Ming dynasty. You're also seeing 30 Years War, the bloodiest war in British history per capita, the civil wars in our archipelago here, the Isles, and pogroms against the Jews as well. And publishing feeding into this. And because, God, you see that publishing, the effect of publishing on the civil wars in Britain and Ireland as well is incredible.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah. And I think we should always keep in mind this is primarily rural, primarily an agricultural society. Across the world in the 17th century, yes, there are towns and cities, but the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries are living on and from the land. And when you get these huge changes in weather patterns which depress agricultural yields for several decades, then you're going to get social instability as a result. And on one level, witch trials are a result of that. But there's an interesting thing about witch trials in that although these climate disturbances changes are affecting people across Europe, witch trials are especially concentrated into certain geographic areas.

[Dan Snow]

And is that to do with the culture, the people involved, the dynamism of certain preachers? Or is there something here, for example, around the Reformation, the battleground between Protestantism and then the Catholic counter? You know, there's a format here. There's a time of contested ideas.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yes, I think it's exactly. I'm going to give you some numbers because I find it fascinating. There's a couple of economic historians did a fascinating sort of examination of the data on this. They looked at which trials between 1300 and 1850, so before the outburst we're talking about, and the long tail afterwards, when there weren't as many witch trials and the variation is phenomenal. The measure they liked is the death rate per million people being executed for witchcraft over this entire period. So in Italy, between that whole period in Italy, the death rate was 5 per million. So 5 people out of every million would be executed for witchcraft over that period. In Germany, 574, 100 times more likely to be killed as a witch in Germany than in Italy. In Switzerland, an almost unbelievable 5691 per million. Switzerland, the highest. 10 times higher than Germany, which was already high.

[Dan Snow]

A thousand times higher than Italy.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yes.

[Dan Snow]

Next door.

[Duncan Weldon]

Yes. So if you were going to be an older unmarried woman in the 1500s, early 1600s, you were far better off being Italian than Swiss.

[Dan Snow]

And okay, is that because Switzerland, difficult for agriculture, marginal. The first place that's going to feel the effects of climate change. Is it because it's on this fault line between Protestantism, Catholicism?

[Duncan Weldon]

Yeah, I think this fault line between Protestantism and Catholicism really matters. Now it's interesting in areas which are strongly Catholic, where Protestantism doesn't really emerge as a challenge, we're looking at Spain. If we're looking at Italy, there are relatively few witch trials. If we're looking at an area as mature on sort of the front line of this denominational battle between Lutheranism and Calvinism and the old Catholic Church. Areas like Germany, areas like Switzerland, areas like. It's a France, that's where we see lots of witch trials. You know, within France. We don't see a huge amount of witch trials in the south of France, which remains very, very Catholic throughout. We do see a lot in the areas which are becoming more Protestant. And why is that? Now it's partially. This sounds sort of cold hearted in economics language. Witch trials are almost a form of advertising for these competing denominations.

[Dan Snow]

Let's unpack that one. How so?

[Duncan Weldon]

Let's think for a moment of the Catholic Church as a business now, for about a thousand years before the period we're talking about. It is an incredibly successful business. Its share of the market for religious belief in Western Europe is approaching 100%. And the tool it uses to maintain that that market share is something that some economic historians have rather meekly called coercive exclusion. Now, coercive exclusion sounds fine. It translates though as killing anyone who won't agree to believe in your version of Christianity. Back to what happens to the Caffes and the Albaginean crusade and all of that in southern France. This strategy though stops working during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther publishes his theses, he gets Support across Europe, across the German lands in particular. He gets some rulers in the German lands also adopting the Protestant faith and the Catholic Church's orders to arrest that man. So there's now a real competitor to the Catholic Church and one it can't just get rid of with a straightforward exclusion. So the Catholic Church for the first time and the new Protestant churches are forced to compete for believers. And they compete in various ways. You know, you get in the Catholic Church, you get the Counter Reformation. They do things like they create more saints days because they realize that the laity likes saints. So you see this sudden burst of, okay, these guys like saints, let's make a lot more saints to make ourselves more popular. You get Protestant churches competing almost on price grounds. They say, we've got a really simple tithe. If you come over to the Protestant churches, we've got this very straightforward, understandable tithe. Whereas if you stay with the Catholic Church, you've got a whole series of indulgences and hard to understand charges. These are all forms of competing alongside the spiritual level. But then there's witch trials. If you're in a world in which you believe witches are real, and lots of people did believe witches are real, you want to go with the church, which shows it can protect you from this witch threat. And witch trials, they're really big, high profile things. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, will attend a witch trial. And after the execution of the witches, there'll be woodcuts made, sometimes there'll be monuments put up. News spreads. So in areas where the churches are competing directly with each other, holding witch trials is a really good way to bring publicity to your church and to show that you're really looking after your local laity. You're taking witches seriously. Are those guys taking witches as seriously?

[Dan Snow]

Wow. So it's a conjunction of so many different inputs. What brings this to an end? Does this bout of witch trials and killings, does it tail off or does it have a kind of striking endpoint?

[Duncan Weldon]

I mean, it really does start to tail off. After the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648, major war fought not entirely, but to a large extent along religious lines in Europe, partially because that war is so destructive, it kills so many people, particularly in Germany. But I think also because after that, religious competition within Western and central Europe becomes less intensive. After the Treaty of Westphalia 1648, there is this general acceptance that, all right, these bits of Europe are now Protestant, these bits of Europe are now Catholic. And if individuals want to change their mind, that's okay. We're not going to have this same sort of war for religious territory. And I think once you get this settling down of religious conflict within Western Europe, Catholicism making its peace, that the Protestant churches are here to stay, the Protestant church is not trying to expand too much into Catholic areas. That sort of dying down of religious conflict means you do start to see a tailing off in witch trials. Now they outlast that. You get witch trials in the late 17th century, we get the famous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, we get Witchfinder Generals prowling around post Civil War East Anglia and the west country in Britain. But it does start to die down. And by the early 1700s, the era of witch trials, which has been for 100, 150 years before, is coming to an end in Western and Central Europe.

[Dan Snow]

Duncan, I'm going to do something very unfair and ask you maybe to think about the things I'm sure will be in the minds of people listening to this. And we've seen in the modern world, we've seen data that suggests that young men are disillusioned with the moves towards equality that have been made by the women who live alongside them in society. Young men are now less likely to think that women ought to be in charge of businesses and nation states than they were 10 years ago. There's been a publishing revolution, there's been economic headwinds. I mean, as the economic historian, is it too soon to tell or do you think think there are interesting patterns and rhymes at play in our modern world?

[Duncan Weldon]

I think there are always interesting patterns and rhymes at play. And I think, yeah, you're completely right. We've had generally a troubled economic situation since 2007, 2008, the financial crisis. That doesn't sound that long ago in historical terms, but 20 years is quite a long time as sort of lived experience. We've got this 20 years of the economies in the west not performing as well as we wanted them to, people's wages not rising as fast as they might have expected. And yeah, we have an information revolution in which influencers stuff can go viral, people can find a mass audience in a way they couldn't before. These are both the kind of things we saw less extreme, but the kind of things we saw at the start of the European witch mania, witch hysteria. I mean, I always think these sort of potentially dangerous messages, people going viral, spreading messages of hate, are always more likely when you have the confluence of new technologies which allows these things to spread. In those days, printing, nowadays the Internet and modern social media. And when you have a Generally troubled economic backdrop bringing social dislocation, then driven by climate, now driven by the still longering impacts of the financial crisis.

[Dan Snow]

Interesting. What's the advice from the economic historian of the early 17th century here? Do you just have to wait for the economy to improve or is there a sense that this propaganda, you can meet it and fight it on its own terms? Can you win that battle or is it a bit more depressing? Do you have to just wait for the structural landscape to change?

[Duncan Weldon]

I think the lesson of this period is I think you do have to rather sadly wait for the structural landscape to change. I mean, the witch trials ended. It took one of the bloodiest wars Europe's ever seen to bring religious peace. Hopefully we don't need a shock on that scale this time to bring relative calm. But also these new technologies can have a huge impact on how information spreads, how that changes our societies, how that changes our cultures, our politics, in ways we don't often see at the time. You know, I think when Johannes von Gutenberg invents his movable type, he's probably not thinking it's going to lead to a strange work like Malefus Maleficarum being an early modern bestseller. In the same way, I don't think modern social media, when it was invented, people thought it would be put to some of the ends it has been today.

[Dan Snow]

Interesting stuff. Duncan Weldon, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Remind everyone what the name of your fabulous book is.

[Duncan Weldon]

It is Blood and the Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine.

[Dan Snow]

Thank you for coming on and helping us think differently about some of these bits of history that we'll have known about and talked about, but now seeing them in a different light.

[Duncan Weldon]

Thank you very much.

[Dan Snow]

Thanks for listening. Folks, I've got some news, got some big news. We're changing to a new release schedule in November with new episodes dropping on Mondays and Thursdays, bonus episodes on Friday. If you're a subscriber, which you should be by now, we're going to change things up because we want to, well, deliver the best podcast we can, make sure you get the best of us. So fewer episodes, but we're going to do deeper dives, going to do more of those explainers, more on location adventures, more focus on the history you love. Look, if we're doing fewer episodes, we can make sure they're high quality. That's the laws of physics, folks. And also because we're doing lots of stuff across history in general, we've got the YouTube channel, which hope you subscribe to the TV channel. And we're also making some old school TV as well for National Geographic and Channel 5 in the UK. So we're all embarked on some pretty big adventures. Mariana Day Thorge, the producer, has upped her shoe game. She is ready. I'm ready. I can't say too much now, but she's gonna need those shoes. That's what I'm saying. We're gonna be traversing the Great Wall of China. We're gonna be following in Napoleon's footsteps across chunks of Europe. And if I get my way, if I get my way and I better, we're gonna be tracing the story of the Odyssey from Troy to Ithaca, which actually, if you think about it, is the ultimate historical adventure. That's it. You told me that when I was a kid that I'd be doing that in my slightly advanced years. Well, I'd have been happy. That's as good as it gets. That's winning the World cup of history. So worry not, folks. The podcast isn't changing. It's just getting even better.

[Verizon Customer 1]

Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never look so good.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You look the same.

[Verizon Customer 1]

But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me.

[Verizon Customer 2]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Selfies check, please with Verizon.

[Verizon Advertiser 2]

Get the new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever. Plus a new iPad and Apple One. No trade in needed. Offer ends November 5th with a new line on Unlimited Ultimate Best 5G Swords.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Route Metrics Data, United States, 2020, 25. All rights reserved. Additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details.

[Grainger Advertiser 2]

If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Grainger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters, Grainger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem. With Grainger, you can be confident you have everything you need to keep your facility running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.