Witch Trial

A witch trial is a legal or quasi-legal proceeding, most common in early modern Europe and colonial North America between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, in which a person was formally accused of practicing witchcraft, examined under interrogation that frequently included torture or the threat of it, and judged before a secular or ecclesiastical court. Convictions typically rested on confession, denunciation by other accused parties, or spectral and circumstantial evidence, and could result in execution by hanging or burning. Episodes ranged from isolated local panics to sustained regional persecutions sanctioned by church and state authorities. Scholarship on the phenomenon, including Brian Levack's survey of the early modern European wave, treats these episodes as a distinct, recurring category of religious and judicial event rather than as isolated, unrelated crimes, since they share the same accusation, interrogation and trial structure across widely different times and places.