Feel better with all that pent up ad hominem out? Scoring points with Lana, are you? You create some ridiculous logical fallacies, present them as the kind of fallacies you assume I would make, and then ridicule me for them.
You do illustrate a point I agree with: it’s a mistake to judge the people of the past by the knowledge and mores and values and beliefs of the present. It is such a common mistake that historians have a name for it: Presentism.
Example: we know so much about the climate now, therefore those people in the fifteenth century, who were smart and lived close to the land, must have known about the climate then too. They must have understood how the sudden cold climate of the Little Ice Age was just the confluence of solar behavior and circulation patterns. They weren’t confused by natural catastrophes or thought them to be caused by God’s wrath. That claim is Presentism. And it doesn’t fit the writings of the time.
Example: we know the supernatural plays no part in the universe, so those people in the fifteenth century, who were smart, must have know the same thing. They couldn’t have believed that disease was punishment for sins, or the work of supernatural being. That claim is Presentism. And it doesn’t fit the writings of the time.
I did not “simply assume”, I presented logical arguments based on known facts and on the history of the time. For example, during the centuries preceding the fourteenth, the climate was (mostly) benign and human life and culture flourished. Food was plentiful, wars were fewer, arts flourished. Just a fact supported by logic. And in those centuries, belief in witches, demons and the like declined. The Church in the eighth century outlawed that belief. Another fact.
In the wake of the sudden and wholesale reversal of human life 1350–1450, disasters without precedence in the memories or historical records of the time, the writings of that time reveal no understanding of the causes. It’s not a question of “being smart”, they simply didn’t have the knowledge to make sense of what was happening. The writings are filled with the wrath of God, punishment for wickedness, malevolent supernatural beings. In 1484 the Church issued a proclamation (a Papal Bull) that malevolent supernatural beings indeed existed and were wreaking evil on the world. There was no other explanation available to them for the misery and wholesale death all around them.
Following on the heels of that proclamation, Heinrich Kramer published the most influential book on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum. There were many other books on the work of witches in the disasters of those times. Many of the herbal remedies were thought to work through witchcraft. Persecution of witches gained traction and by a century later, was a mass hysteria.
My point, which I maintain, is that “None of them actually believe in witchcraft at all” is a vastly overreaching accusation against the entire class of people in authority, from the village clergy and local leaders to the monarchs and the Pope— an accusation without support of scholarship, an accusation based on Voreskova’s cynical opinions regarding people in authority. On Presentism.
Certainly it’s a logical assumption that some, perhaps many, used the hysteria for revenge, profit, power or self-satisfaction. But the belief in witchcraft was widespread at the time, and the writings of the time confirm that. It was without doubt a time of mass hysteria, but the accusation that the entire class of authority was cynically whipping up the murder of thousands for self-interest is an overreach that comes more from today’s disenchantment with authority than any scholarship on the subject about the past. Presentism.
