Era · 1500–1700
Reformation
The Reformation era in this archive runs from the eve of Luther's 95 Theses through the close of the Wars of Religion and the early Enlightenment. The institutional Christian church across this span is multiple — Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), Anglican, Anabaptist, and the proliferating dissenting traditions — and the documentary record correspondingly thickens.
Three distinct strands of documented institutional misconduct dominate the period. The Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, both of which mature in this era, generate extensive tribunal records. The Wars of Religion and associated state-religious persecutions produce both ecclesiastical and civil documentary residue. The witch panics of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — most prominently the German trials of the 1620s–1640s and the New England trials of 1692 — leave detailed court records that have become the principal modern scholarly basis for understanding the phenomenon.
Filed
3 entries- 1692 The Salem Witch Trials A nine-month panic in colonial Massachusetts produced more than 200 accusations of witchcraft and the executions of twenty people — nineteen by hanging and one pressed to death — before the colonial governor halted the proceedings.
- 1633 The Galileo Affair The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo Galilei in 1633 for advocating Copernican heliocentrism, sentenced him to indefinite house arrest, and required him to publicly recant. The Catholic Church formally acknowledged the error of the verdict in 1992.
- 1478–1834 The Spanish Inquisition A 356-year ecclesiastical tribunal system established by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in 1478, with papal authorisation, to enforce religious orthodoxy. Approximately 150,000 cases survive in the tribunal records; estimates of executions range from 3,000 to 5,000.