Bede

I have finally completed my FAQ on this matter and thought I should let you know as it has been advertised in this place a few times.

Http://www.bede.org.uk/inquisition.htm

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

NOGO

Why were witches burnt in public ?

Jeremy Pallant

This topic has been known to get contentious, I would like to take this opportunity to ask participants to please behave themselves and remember the forum rules.

Bede

This question isn't really relavant to the inquisition as they had little to do with witch trials. But the answer is that all executions were in public at this time as they were an advertisement of the power of the state and prince to deal out justice.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

NOGO

Right! and why was the state in the business of controlling what went on in people's heads?

Amos

To curb the evil religion can put in the peoples mind. Only religion can send people to hell and the state must be allowed to protect its citizen from what religion can do to its citizen. Remember here that they did not have "deconversion clubs" on internet sites in those days.

Calzaer

Evils like, say, an inquisition? Sounds to me like they should have been burning Christians in public!

Bede

because bad thoughts might lead to bad actions. Henry VIII made even thinking about harming the king into treason.

still can't see what this has to do with the inquisition, beyond the obvious point that we modern liberals believe in freedom of conscience and the early modern church and state generally didn't.

B

Dr Rick

La rente, secretary of the Spanish Inquisition, estimated that from 1481 to 1517 there were 13,000 people burnt alive, with 17,000 condemned to other forms of punishment. Yet even that is just a fraction of the deaths attributable to the Inquisitions.

The vast majority of people killed during the Inquisitions were not formally tried and executed, nor did they appear on any rolls. For instance, the expulsion of about 150,000 Jews from Spain as part of the Inquisition resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands from exposure, starvation, and attacks.

The tortures used during the Inquisition were not benign and could cause severe, permanent injury; though death was not immediate, the tortures could easily be fatal. How many people died from torture we cannot know, but severely burned flesh (ordeal by fire) and ruptured body cavities (the pear) could easily cause death at a time when aseptic surgical debridement and antibiotics were not available.

Furthermore, crushed bones and multiple dislocations (from the stravaletto and the rack or strappado, respectively) would have greatly impeded a persons ability to eek out a living at a time increasing their chances of dying from starvation.

We'll never know the exact figures, but huge numbers of Prostestants, Arians, Cathari, Albigensians, Jews, and other "heretics" were slaughtered during all the Inquistions and the campaigns they inspired.

In one notable example during the time of the Inquisitions, the Cistercian abbot was purported to have famously ordered "Kill them all, God will know his own"; thousands of men, women and children prisoners were murdered.

Of course, numbers only tell part of the story. The fact that any institution would encourage such horrors on any scale is enough to condemn it.

Two years after Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull allowing for the extermination of witches in Germany, the Dominican friars, Heinrich Kraemer and Johann Sprenger, published the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM (THE WITCH'S HAMMER) which became the authoritative encyclopedia on witchcraft for centuries to come. It claimed that "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," and explained how witches destroyed crops, ate children, and caused plagues with evil spells. Naturally these were matters of great concern to secular governments, who took up the cause of hunting down and exterminating witches as the Church encouraged them to do.

oldstudent

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I understand that this doesn't have anything to do with the Inquisition but I need to ask a question.
By 'modern liberals' do you mean that you are aligned or not aligned with the PC crowd that assigns more or less guilt to a person's crime because they "hate" a particular group of people?
I am not trying to be contentious, I am just wondering what "modern liberal" is, I see no differences between the modern and the old style liberal except for cosmetic differences.
BTW, I am a fundamentalist Christian that also holds to the classical libertarian approach to governance.

Jim