Witch-hunt

마녀사냥

Witch-hunt

 

 

① 14~17세기에 유럽에서 이단자를 마녀로 판결하여 화형에 처하던 일

 역사] 14~17세기에 유럽에서 이단자를 마녀로 판결하여 화형에 처하던 일. 18세기 무렵부터 계몽사상의 영향으로 없어졌다.

정확한 근거 없이 누군가를 비난하거나 여론을 어느 한쪽으로 몰고 가는 현상을 비유적으로 이르는 말.

악명 높은 중세의 마녀사냥의 처형장으로 쓰였던 런던탑이나 콩코드 광장에 얽힌 에피소드를 들으면 오싹해진다. 중급

다수의 사람들과 다른 의견을 제시했다고 해서 마녀사냥으로 몰고 가는 것은 옳은 태도가 아니다.

 

 

"Witch hunt" and "Witch trial" redirect here. For , see Witch hunt (disambiguation) and Witch trial (disambiguation).

Burning of three witches in Baden, Switzerland (1585), by Johann Jakob Wick.

 

 

A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic,^[1] or mass hysteria.^[2] Before 1750 it was legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials. The classical period of witchhunts in Europe and North America falls into the Early Modern period or about 1480 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 executions.^[3]

The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In the Kingdom of Great Britain, witchcraft ceased to be an act punishable by law with the Witchcraft Act of 1735. In Germany, sorcery remained punishable by law into the late 18th century. Contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from Sub-Saharan Africa, India and Papua New Guinea. Official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia and Cameroon.

The term "witch-hunt" since the 1930s has also been in use as a metaphor to refer to moral panics in general (frantic persecution of perceived enemies). This usage is especially associated with the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, with the McCarthyist persecution of suspected communists in the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt

Execution statistics[edit]

Further information: Nine million witches

Some authors claim that millions of witches were killed in Europe,^[34] while modern scholarly estimates place the total number of executions for witchcraft in the 300-year period of European witch-hunts far lower. William Monter estimates 35,000 deaths (see table below),^[35] historian Malcolm Gaskill 40,000–50,000.^[36] About 75 to 80 percent of those were women.^[37]

Approximate statistics on the number of trials for witchcraft and executions in various regions of Europe in the period 1450–1750:[35]

 

 

Region	Number of trials	Number of executions
British Isles and North America	~5,000	~1,500–2,000
Holy Roman Empire (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria including Czech lands - Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia)	~50,000	~25,000–30,000
France	~3,000	~1,000
Scandinavia	~5,000	~1,700–2,000
Eastern Europe (Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Russia)	~7,000	~2,000
Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy)	~10,000	~1,000
Total: