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In the early modern period, someone could be declared a witch in several different ways. On the local, everyday level, it was often a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time; when people where looking for the witch who had caused their misfortunes and when they had performed certain rituals, the person who first appeared at the door or in a certain place, would be the witch. Some of these local witches ended up in criminal trials, but the major trials of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their own mechanisms of producing witches, the most extreme being the accumulative confessions by those already under examination about the accomplices they were supposed to have encountered at a joint meeting. On the level of a criminal persecution the crimes of apostasy, heresy, and belonging to a group of devil worshippers often played a much bigger role than any locally diagnosed bewitchment. This should not imply that the men and women caught up in criminal proceedings, usually illegally so, should be considered as second-rate ‘witches,’ even if they did not have any previous reputations as witches; they had merely acquired the label in a different way
Church History and Religious Culture (formerly Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis) – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2010
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