The Protestant re-formation of early modern British communities

Abstract

While the term “witch hunts” typically conjures ideas of centuries of continual persecution and burning at the stake, the reality, as argued by Brian Levack, is that the majority of cases were much more sporadic and unsteady. What, then, happened in the years before and between these periods of litigation, and did these brief flareups change the nature of the relationships and interactions, the ‘social dynamics’, of the communities involved? This paper will examine some of the communities and contexts in which witchcraft trials took place and argues that it was the Protestant Reformation and its ideas surrounding governance, hierarchy, social bonds, and the woman’s place in both the household and society that had a much more direct impact on the accusations of witchcraft, the intensity and number of trials, and the social dynamics of these communities long after the witchcraft trials ended. While the changing social dynamics drove the witchcraft accusations, the witchcraft accusations were merely a relatively temporary vehicle for relieving the tensions caused by the changing social dynamics that the Reformation put forth, as other litigation surrounding newly defined social relationships carried on well past the official end of the witchcraft trials. This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by looking explicitly at the impact to the social dynamics that both the Reformation and the witchcraft trials had on the early modern British communities.