Witch Trials

Abstract

We argue that the great age of European witch trials reflected non‐price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. Analyses of new data covering more than 43,000 people tried for witchcraft across 21 European countries over a period of five‐and‐a‐half centuries and more than 400 early modern European Catholic–Protestant conflicts support our theory. More intense religious‐market contestation led to more intense witch‐trial activity. And compared to religious‐market contestation, the factors that existing hypotheses claim were important for witch‐trial activity – weather, income and state capacity – were not.

Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, the Rule of Law, and the Persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire

“…In contrast to the arguments in favor of a polycentric political order, these arguments suggest that political centralization may be crucial to the emergence of the rule of law. In a similar vein, Leeson and Russ (2015) argue that contested religious markets help to explain the intensity of witch-hunts in the early modern period. These debates have contemporary relevance as many of the poorest parts of the world lie in those area of sub-Saharan Africa with little history of statehood (Gennaioli and Rainer, 2007;Chanda and Putterman, 2007;Borcan et al, 2014;Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013) where the reach of the government does not extend far beyond the capital city (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2014).…”

Varieties of ‘rationality’ and the question of their continued theoretical relevance

“…He did so by demonstrating that these beliefs were at least socially, collectively beneficial in some roundabout way, even if they were not individually rational to pursue. A contemporary example is the economist Peter T. Leeson (2012a; 2012b; 2013; 2014; 2018; Leeson, Boettke & Lemke, 2014) who provides elegant rationalist explanations for such irrational or a-rational seeming phenomena as witch trials, beliefs in oracles, the practice of wife-selling, divine ordeals, monastic maledictions, or, perhaps most bizarrely, vermin trials. In the latter insects and rodents were accused of committing property crimes and were tried as legal persons in Italian and other ecclesiastic courts.…”

The Political and Economic Role of Elites in Persecution: Evidence from Witchcraft Trials in Early Modern Scotland

“…The papers closest to mine in subject matter are Oster (2004), Miguel (2005), Johnson and Koyoma (2014), and Leeson and Russ (2018). Oster uses time series data to document a negative relationship between air temperatures and witch trials in Early Modern Europe, and argues that poor economic conditions prompt such trials.…”