Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe

B etween the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as one million individuals in Europe were executed for the crime of witchcraft. The majority of the trials and executions took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, the speed and volume of executions were astonishing: in one German town, as many as 400 people were killed in a single day (Midelfort, 1972). The trials were ubiquitous: conducted by both ecclesiastical and secular courts; by both Catholics and Protestants. The victims were primarily women, primarily poor and disproportionately widows. The persecutions took place throughout Europe, starting and ending earlier in southwest Europe than in the northern and eastern areas, and spread even across the Atlantic Ocean to Salem, Massachusetts. Although witchcraft trials in Europe and America largely ended by the late eighteenth century, witchcraft accusations and killings still take place in many countries today, particularly in the developing world. For example, witchcraft is often blamed for AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa (Ashforth, 2001), and Miguel (2003) shows that negative economic shocks are associated with increases in witch killing in modern Tanzania. Belief in the witch, and fear of her, is enduring. While much work has been done on the motivations behind the European trials, the large-scale causes remain unknown. The existing work has primarily been concerned with the factors that played into trials on a small scale—why a certain individual was targeted or why a certain type of individual was targeted in a given area. This work has indicated that there was a diverse set of issues that played into trials on an individual level. More broadly, however, there are few causal explanations for why witchcraft trials happened at all and on such a large scale in so many