Conclusion

The witchcraft persecutions reflected the traumas of these times of religious war, economic decline, and crises of political and intellectual authority. Deep differences over religion came to a head in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which cut a path of destruction through central Europe and involved most of the European powers. Repulsed by the effects of religious violence, European rulers agreed to a peace that effectively removed disputes between Catholics and Protestants from the international arena. Almost everywhere rulers emerged from these decades of war with expanded powers that they would seek to extend further in the second half of the seventeenth century. The constant extension of state power is one of the defining themes of modern history; religious warfare gave it a jump-start.

For all their strength, however, rulers could not control economic, social, or intellectual trends. The economic downturn of the seventeenth century shifted economic power from the Mediterranean world to northwestern Europe because England, France, and the Dutch Republic suffered less from the fighting of the Thirty Years’ War and recovered more quickly from bad times. They would become even more powerful in the decades to come.

An underlying shift in cultural attitudes and intellectual expectations accompanied these changes. Secularization encompassed the establishment of the scientific method as the standard of truth, the search for nonreligious foundations of political authority, and the growing popularity of nonreligious forms of art, such as theater and opera. Proponents of these changes did not renounce their religious beliefs, and it would be foolish to claim that everyone’s mental universe changed. The significance of secularization would only emerge over the long term.