Georg Schwaiger: Belief in the Devil and Witch Trials; Publisher CH Beck Munich 1991; 203 pages; ISBN: 3-406-32311-1
Belief in devils and witch madness celebrated their dark, ominous triumphs, particularly from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Across Europe, women were mostly persecuted as victims. They were tortured into making pseudo-confessions and then burned to death.
The book discussed here shows the origin of the belief in the devil and the witch craze, referring to the sources and the critical literature. It represents the main eras of witch hunts and witch trials and describes their gradual extinction in the 18th century.
Schwaiger was born in 1925. He was a full professor of medieval and modern church history at the Catholic Faculty of the University of Munich. He is also a non-fiction author. Schwaiger died in 2019.
The book describes church history as well as the history of ideas and culture. So it’s not so much about the CVs of selected witches and wizards. What are the Christian-Jewish beliefs that led to the witch craze? What impact did they have on the legal system? What philological, i.e. linguistic, questions are there? These three sets of questions represent the main subject areas of the book.
The reader should already have access to scientific and theoretical work. Otherwise, the explanations are too abstract – theoretical – to be worth reading for the interested layperson.
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