XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: p4@enzym.rnd.uni-c.dk   
      
   Steve Hayes  writes:   
      
   > The Great European Witchhunt was a prduct of modernity, not of the Middle   
   > Ages. And, as Williams shows, it was an aberration, that lasted about 200   
   > years. Many people speak as though witchhunting was "medieval". It wasn't   
   (and   
   > isn't). It was, and is, modern.   
      
   Also, protestants (like me) tend to link witchhunting to the catholic   
   church, when it was mostly a protestant phenomenon.   
      
   The dreaded spanish inquisition burned less than ten witches over its   
   entire existence period as far as I recall, whereas e.g. Sweden burned   
   hundreds, maybe thousands. (The SI believed that confessions brought   
   forward under torture were useless.)   
      
   There's a rather brilliant swedish book by Jan Guillou that probably   
   isn't available in non-scandinavian languages, which points out that   
   the swedish practice was based amon other things on the premise that   
   "children doesn't lie under oath", so that if a child said that he had   
   been brought to a witch's sabbath, riding backwards on a flying cow,   
   it had to be true, and the grownups he identified as involved had to   
   be burned.   
      
   Torture was used, because a confessed sin could be forgiven. However,   
   no matter if the accused confessed or not, he was burned. Thou shalt   
   not suffer a witch to live...   
      
   (Guillou goes on to show that the same idea about childrens'   
   truthfulness lives on today. Today the crime is usually pedophilia,   
   but the stories are similar - secret rooms (that noone can find),   
   strange costumes, wild orgies involving more and more   
   grown-ups. Specially trained child psycologists are brought in to   
   explain that this is what has actually happened to the child, no   
   matter how absurd the stories grow.)   
   --   
   Peter B. Juul, o.-.o   
   The RockBear.  ((^))   
   I speak only  0}._.{0   
   for myself.    O/ \O   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)