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
6 entriesThe 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.
FILED · 1633 · CATHOLIC · DOCTRINALThe 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.
FILED · 1626–1631 · CATHOLIC · HISTORICALThe Würzburg and Bamberg Witch Trials
Two adjacent Catholic prince-bishoprics in Franconia executed approximately 900 people for witchcraft between 1626 and 1631 — Würzburg under Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg and Bamberg under Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim — in the most concentrated witch-prosecution episode of the European witch hunts.
FILED · 1572 · CATHOLIC · HISTORICALThe St Bartholomew's Day Massacre
Beginning before dawn on 24 August 1572, an organised killing of French Huguenot Protestants by Catholic mobs and royal troops in Paris spread over six weeks to provincial cities, killing an estimated 5,000 to 30,000. Pope Gregory XIII struck a commemorative medal of celebration.
FILED · 1553 · REFORMED · DOCTRINALThe Execution of Michael Servetus
The Spanish anti-trinitarian theologian and physician Miguel Serveto was burned at the stake at Champel, outside Geneva, on 27 October 1553, under the prosecution of the city's Reformed magistracy with the active participation of John Calvin. The case is the founding moment in modern Protestant arguments for religious toleration.
FILED · 1478–1834 · CATHOLIC · HISTORICALThe 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.
