Name: 醜い歴史。魔女狩り - ブライアン・A・パブラック (Ugly History: Witch Hunts - Brian A. Pavlac)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:16:35.000Z
Duration: 5 min 26 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

In the German town of Nördlingen in 1593,

an innkeeper named Maria Höll found herself accused of witchcraft.

She was arrested for questioning, and denied the charges.

She continued to insist she wasn't a witch through 62 rounds of torture

before her accusers finally released her.

Rebekka Lemp, accused a few years earlier in the same town, faced a worse fate.

worrying that she would confess under torture,

she was burned at the stake in front of her family.

Höll and Lemp were both victims of the witch hunts

that occurred in Europe and the American colonies

from the late 15th century until the early 18th century.

These witch hunts were not a unified initiative by a single authority,

but rather a phenomenon that occurred sporadically

and followed a similar pattern each time.

The term "witch" has taken on many meanings,

but in these hunts, a witch was someone who allegedly gained magical powers

This definition of witchcraft spread through churches in Western Europe

It really gained traction after the pope gave a friar and professor of theology

permission to conduct inquisitions in search of witches in 1485.

didn't gain much traction with the local authorities,

who disapproved of his harsh questioning of respectable citizens

Undeterred, he wrote a book called the  "Malleus Maleficarum," or "Hammer of Witches."

The text argued for the existence of  witches

and suggested ruthless tactics for hunting and prosecuting them.

He singled out women as easier targets for the devil's influence,

Kraemer's book spurred others to write  their own books

and give sermons on the  dangers of witchcraft.

witches practiced rituals including  kissing the Devil's anus

and poisoning or bewitching targets the  devil singled out for harm.

Though there was no evidence to support any of these claims,

A witch hunt often began  with a misfortune:

a failed harvest, a sick cow,  or a stillborn child.

Community members blamed witchcraft,  and accused each other of being witches.

Many of the accused were people on  the fringes of society:

the elderly, the poor, or social outcasts,

but any member of the community could be targeted,

While religious authorities encouraged  witch hunts,

local secular governments usually carried  out the detainment

Those suspected of witchcraft were  questioned and often tortured—

and under torture, thousands of innocent  people confessed to witchcraft

Because these witch hunts occurred  sporadically over centuries and continents

Punishments for convicted witches ranged  from small fines to burning at the stake.

The hunt in which Höll and Lemp were  accused dragged on for nine years,

They could have anywhere from a few to a  few hundred victims.

The motivations of the witch hunters  probably varied as well,

but it seems likely that many weren't  consciously looking for scapegoats—

instead, they sincerely believed  in witchcraft,

and thought they were doing good by  rooting it out in their communities.

Institutions of power enabled real harm to be done on the basis of these beliefs.

jurists, scholars, and physicians  countered books

with texts objecting to the  cruelty of the hunts,

the use of forced confessions,  and the lack of evidence of witchcraft.

From the late 17th through the mid-18th  century,

their arguments gained force with the rise of stronger central governments

Witch hunting slowly declined until it  disappeared altogether.

Both the onset and demise of these  atrocities came gradually,

in which authorities use their powers to mobilize society against a false threat,

but so does the capacity of reasoned  dissent to combat those false beliefs.