What Caused Europe's Witch Hysteria?

Across early modern Europe, fear spread like wildfire; between the 15th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands were accused, tortured, and executed as witches. At its centre was a man named Heinrich Kramer, whose infamous book, Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, fanned the flames of hysteria and codified centuries of misogyny. Dan is joined by economic journalist Duncan Weldon to explore how a changing climate and the rise of independent, unmarried women made for easy scapegoats in a time of fear — and how the printing revolution helped spread these dangerous ideas faster than ever before. What does this moment in history tell us about how societies look for someone to blame? And how much has humanity really changed since then? Duncan's new book is called 'Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine' Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:44Dan Snow?

  They dragged them from their homes and from the fields, tens of thousands of them. Mostly, women. They were the ones who bore the brunt of it. They were accused, tortured, hanged, drowned and burned.

• 1:01Dan Snow?

  Europe, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was gripped by an insidious panic. One that infiltrated towns and communities. One that was preached from the pulpits and argued in the pages of books. For over 300 years, there was a plague of wild accusations of witchcraft. The women who communities had once relied on to heal, to deliver their children, to raise the next generation, suddenly found themselves the targets of malicious village gossips. Or witch hunters. The likes of Matthew Hopkins, who terrorised the women of Essex in England in the 1650s.

• 1:45Dan Snow?

  And Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the infamous witch hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, the man who harnessed this new media to supercharge witch hunting. In 1485 Kramer had been humiliated by an outspoken woman, blood name of Helena Scheuberin, who he tried to accuse of witchcraft but was found innocent in court. The judge dismissed the case, calling Kramer 'senile' and 'unfit' to generate any further trials. In response, he wrote The Malice Maleficarum, the most dangerous book of the 16th century. And that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Now, once you dig into stories of, quote unquote, witches, like Helena Shogren,

• 2:28Dan Snow?

  it becomes reasonably clear to us that these accusations were rarely about their magical abilities, more about control, about fear, about social anxiety and tension. This was a period of great upheaval in Europe. It was a time of war, which, again, doesn't particularly mark it out, but it was. There were lots of wars in this period. There was conflict in the church. There were bad harvests. There was, I'm afraid, say, climate disruption. And as we all know too well, when people's lives get hard, we like to look for a scapegoat. Or certainly, we're in the market for those who point out scapegoats. There has to be someone to blame other than ourselves, or just bad luck. So in this episode, we're not going to look at the story of some of these individual witch trials, but we're going to look at some of the deeper history, why they happened.

• 3:13Dan Snow?

  Why was that suspicion reached a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries? Aside from your basic common and garden misogyny, what was going on that encouraged those tickler populations to turn on women so fervently? And to explore what led this state-sanctioned slaughter that extended from Spain, Germany, Scotland, even Iceland, I'm joined by an economic historian. Yes, we're going to look at economics here. We're going to go a little bit Marxist today. We're going to talk to Duncan Weldon. His new book, Blood and Treasure, explores exactly that, the economic underpinnings of so much of the history that we might be familiar with. And as well as witchcraft, he looks at lots of other phenomenon, like the economics of war. It's a great book. This is Dan Snow's History, and we're answering the big question.

• 3:56Dan Snow?

  What exactly caused the witch hysteria in Renaissance Europe?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  T minus 10.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  No black-white unity till they're dispersed in black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 4:21Dan Snow?

  Duncan, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:24Dan Snow?

  First of all, is there a hard start? Are we looking at these people like Heinrich Kramer? Has it always been bubbling along? Or is this a new, strange new chapter in European history?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  I think it's a strange new chapter in European history. And you know, if you look in the long run of European history, men being quite horrible to women is not that uncommon. But we get something on a different scale in the 1500s into the 1600s. We get in that period about 40,000, primarily women, being condemned to death as witches. And I think, yeah, if we're looking for a grand zero, if we're looking for a character we can start to pin some of the blame on, we are going back to Heinrich Kramer in the late 1400s.

• 5:06Dan Snow?

  But this is interesting Duncan, because you're an economics guy, you're a big, um, substructural, you know, we're all students of Marx here, that everything happens because of deep, underlying economic reasons. And, and yeah, are we saying here that individuals matter? Culture matters. So Kramer just shaped society's views and attitudes? Or is it going to be a blend of both? Are we going to learn that it's a blend of both in this podcast?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  I think we're going to learn that it's a blend of both. We're going to say there's some really big structural factors, which say the 1500s were a particularly uncomfortable time to be an unmarried woman in Europe, in certain places. But we're going to say, you know, if we're looking for an individual who influenced the way things turned out, we're going back to this particularly unpleasant character Heinrich Kramer in the 1470s.

• 5:49Dan Snow?

  Tell me about him.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  So he's born in about 1430 in Alsace, in what's now part of France. But then is really part of the Holy Roman Empire, sort of German.

• 5:59Dan Snow?

  Well, that's a whole other podcast there.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  That's a whole other podcast, whole other podcast. But he becomes a friar in the Dominican order. He's seen as a very eloquent preacher, a very learned man. By the 1470s, in his 40s, he's been promoted. He's the inquisitor responsible for the Tyrol and Innsbruck bohemia, that sort of area of Central Europe. And he's really, really interested in the idea of witchcraft.

• 6:29Dan Snow?

  Interesting. And so the Inquisitor, you've got latitude, have you? You can look into various doctrinal failings. And this guy's saying like, my thing is just going to be witchcraft. We're going to stamp it now in this region.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  That's exactly it. Now, you know, the Inquisition's been around for a while, but the Inquisition's primary purpose at first is rooting out heresy. It's going around the Catholic Church. It's like, your Christian doctrine here is not exactly the same as ours. That's a problem. It's not really witchcraft. It's Kramer, the one that his big thing is witches. And he thinks the role of the Inquisitor is dealing with witches.

• 6:59Dan Snow?

  And witches are usually women, always women? What's the intersection between gender and witches?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  In theory, anyone can be a witch. In reality, almost everyone accused of witchcraft is a woman, more than 90%. Kramer, in particular, thinks it's all women. He writes that the good Lord has been very nice to men by not cursing them with the bane of witchcraft. For him, it's usually women.

• 7:22Dan Snow?

  So what's he looking for? And I'm guessing sex is going to be present here in this answer. Like, what's he chiefly worried about?

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Well, he would tell you, he's chiefly worried about people who have consulted with the devil and are doing evil magic to the bane of their community. That's what Kramer would tell you. In reality, it's almost always women. It's usually, almost always, in fact, unmarried women, often older unmarried women. And when you read some of the things I'm sure we'll talk about that he wrote, the sexual overtones are not exactly understated, it would be fair to say.

• 7:58Dan Snow?

  Okay, so as an Inquisitor, he can, what, send his goons out and drag people in front of him? And he gets to question them? And is he judge and jury here as well?

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, at first, you see, there's a bit of confusion. So as Inquisitor, he is very, very interested in witches. But the church hierarchy around him in Bohemia, in the Tyrell, is less interested in witches. And you sort of get the impression they're really quite, you know, fed up with this Inquisitor that they've got who's obsessed with witches. So he goes to the Pope and complains. And the Pope, and this is quite important, he's a papal bow, you know, the rule of the Pope. Much on one level, you can just sort of read as an administrative tidying up of reporting lines, saying, yep, the Inquisition is responsible for witchcraft. Archbishops don't interfere, that's his job. But in this papal bull, whatever the Pope intended to say, he also acknowledges

• 8:50Speaker 04

  that witchcraft exists. So suddenly, you've got a papal bull saying witchcraft is real, and also you've got this statement that, yes, inquisitors are responsible for rooting it out. So this is music to Kramer's ears. With this papal bull, with this new authority, he organises a big witch trial of fourteen people in Innsbruck in the 1480s. This is his big witch trial moment. You know, he's now got the Pope saying this guy is responsible for this.

• 9:16Dan Snow?

  What a coup. That's great to get your line manager out of the way. Who are the women he's trying here?

• 9:22Speaker 04

  He's accused fourteen women. He's accused them of using magic to kill a knight, a Yorkspice. One of the women he's accused had walked out of a sermon he was giving earlier that year.

• 9:34Dan Snow?

  Oh, clearly guilty as.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Yes, it was a sermon on how witches might use magic to interfere with the milk of a cow. She clearly had enough of this and walked out. Now, clearly, she's in his sights after this, so she is one of the accused. This witch trial doesn't go very well for him. It sort of collapses. He doesn't really have any evidence. He goes in a big strop after this. He sort of leaves the tarot. He goes to Cologne, and there he pens his well, I sort of hesitate to call it his great work. He pens his most famous book, his book Maleficus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, in the mid 1480s.

• 10:10Dan Snow?

  Wow. What is in this epic tome?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Well, when I was researching my own book, I had occasion to read Maleficus Maleficarum, which I'd never read before. Can't say I especially recommend it. It's one of the strangest books I've read. It's sort of part legal primer on how to conduct a witch trial, part justification for why witch trials are really important, part of sort of practical how-to in spotting a witch. And it is just laced with very, very strange imagery from clearly straight out of his mind on the kind of thing witches do. So did you know, for example, Dan, that witches will often collect many penises of men they've killed? They will keep them in a small box. They will at night bring them to life and feed them oats.

• 10:56Dan Snow?

  Really?

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's a strange, strange book.

• 10:59Dan Snow?

  No wonder. We need to crack down on this. So it is a sort of fever dream of misogynistic fantasy. I mean, it's extraordinary.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it also is very, very clear that actually possibly influenced by his own failed witch trials earlier in his career. The best way to convict a witch is to use torture to get a confession. And once you've got the confession, you can proceed straight to the execution. It's a very, very strange work.

• 11:25Dan Snow?

  So not a fan of women or due process. Okay, interesting.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, we've built up quite a picture of old Heinrich Kramer here, but this book is a bestseller. And he gets in some ways very lucky with the timing. If he had written this book fifty, sixty, seventy years earlier, presumably it wouldn't have gone very far. But he writes it after the invention of movable type. When we've got this, you know, first boom in the printing industry. And the interesting thing about the early printing industry is, yes, you can produce books much quicker than in the past. But it's still not easy. You need this whole team of craftsmen to spend days, weeks, maybe a month, laying out all of the type and then printing it up. It's expensive.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  So if you're an early modern publisher, you only really want to publish something if you're sure it's going to sell. There's not really any copyright law. So the best way to see what's going to sell is to see what everyone else is publishing. So stuff that does well tends to do really well. And it turns out in early modern Europe, there's a really big market for slightly strange books about penises eating out. Who knew? So Kramer's book goes through all of these sorts of additions. It's one of the most printed books of the early modern period. It goes all over Europe.

• 12:40Dan Snow?

  So this is when we're coming on to the Duncan Weldon special here. So as you say, there have been men fantasizing about how evil women have kept them from their destiny and their greatness and are involved in sexual congress with the devil. There's been men, I suspect, thinking about those things a little too deeply for thousands of years. But this is the point, this is the moment in history where those ideas bump into the most sophisticated method of propagating information to that point in recorded history. So you can now distribute that, you can write it down, and these things can go viral, I suppose, for the first time.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it goes viral. So you've got a few things going on. You've now got this practical how-to guide on spotting a witch and conducting a trial, which has gone viral. You've got the Pope has said the Inquisition has responsibility for this and these things are real. But you've also got a really big structural changes in the European climate and economy and social structure, all of which I think are real big factors behind these 40,000 witch trials over this period. And you know, you don't really get a bigger structural factor than the climate. And Europe is undergoing some really quite significant climate shifts at this time.

• 13:57Dan Snow?

  More on the European witch trials after this.

• 14:07Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 14:48Dan Snow?

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• 15:32Dan Snow?

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• 16:02Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:41Dan Snow?

  Okay, so we've got this publishing revolution and enormous climate change coinciding. This is feeling, ah, this is feeling very distinctive. Why should shifts in climate and publishing all coincide to produce this strange outcome?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Okay, so Europe at this time, the fourteen hundreds, fifteen hundreds, sixteen hundreds, is undergoing what some historians call the Little Ice Age. The temperature has dropped. And we've got a couple of interesting bits of evidence for that. What I really like is, there was a study conducted in the early nineteen seventies, which looked at twelve thousand examples of European painting and art between about fourteen hundred and the nineteen sixties. And what they see is during this period, you get this sudden spike from compared to before or after of dark, cloudy skies when people are painting landscapes. Artists noticed this was a period in which it was darker, it was cloudier, and the rainfall had changed.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  More scientifically, there is something called the Grindelwald fluctuation, which I love as a term. It sounds like the sort of bad friller you might buy in an airport. But the Grindelwald fluctuation is people looking at evidence from ice cores on Swiss glaciers and pointing out between the fifteen fifties and the sixteen thirties, Europe definitely was colder. So we know it was colder. When it's colder, crops fail more often. When crops fail more often, people in a generally still peasant rural society are poorer. And when people are poorer throughout history, the age of marriage tends to get delayed. People tend to want to wait until they've built up a bit of money before they get married.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  So the age of marriage is rising, and fewer people are getting married in the first place. What this all means when you put it together is, the share of unmarried women in the European population increases from around ten percent to about twenty percent in this period. And in some areas of Europe, it goes as high as thirty percent. So you've got a lot more unmarried women about compared to before or after.

• 18:49Dan Snow?

  Have you also got lots of unmarried men around as well?

• 18:52Speaker 04

  You've also got unmarried men around, but you've got unmarried women around. Unmarried women tend to be seen as a burden on their community, especially when they're getting older. There's horrific evidence from very, very recent history. Social scientists who've studied incidence of so-called witch killing in Tanzania in the 1990s and 2000s, that when you get climate disruption, you see a spike in so-called witch killings. You don't see a spike in other forms of violent crime. Even in sort of the relatively modern world, climate in an agricultural society, leading to a share, the rising share of unmarried women, tends to be associated with communities trying to get rid of that burden as they'd see it.

• 19:35Dan Snow?

  That's wild.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the year of this time, you've got these unmarried women. You've got a rising share of unmarried women because of the climate. And then you've got, as we say, the information revolution. Kramer publishing at exactly the right time in the right place to, in modern terms, go viral.

• 19:50Dan Snow?

  It's strange, isn't it? Because women, from what I know of those societies, women are working in the fields. They're not sitting around expecting to be fed and have treats brought to them. It's strange that that is the drive in those situations.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it tends to be older unmarried women, who you know, may be getting too old to work in the fields, who don't have children to support them. So it's beholden to the wider community to support them.

• 20:15Dan Snow?

  And then if we go back on to these witch trials, a lot of these women are older and unmarried.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Older and unmarried.

• 20:21Dan Snow?

  And there's that misogyny, there's that sort of dislike and fear of women who aren't married. Because what must they be up to? They're not with their husbands, like any unquote normal woman would be. So, yeah, they must be obviously having sex with the devil or something like that.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's sort of interesting that the idea of people being witches has obviously existed before this period. You can find sort of people being accused of some form of witchcraft going back a very, very long way. But it's not been a big thing in Western Central Europe until this time. And it's not been something the church has been particularly concerned about until really now. You know, like I said, the Inquisition has existed for a long time, stamping out heresy, not dealing with the supernatural or the supposed supernatural.

• 21:07Dan Snow?

  And the book that you and I have both read and admire, Geoffrey Parker, talking about the 17th century, the astonishing levels of war, dislocation, famine, violence that the whole world experiences in the 17th century. So I've never thought of before about how increased witch trials are part of this, but you're also seeing the end of the Ming Dynasty, you're also seeing Thirty Year's War, the bloodiest war in British history per capita, the civil wars in our archipelago here, the Isles, and pogroms against the Jews as well. And publishing feeding into this, and because you, God, you see that publishing, the effect of publishing on the civil wars in Britain and Ireland as well is incredible.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, we should always keep in mind, this is primarily a rural, primarily an agricultural society across the world in the 17th century. Yes, there are towns and cities, but the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries are living on and from the land. And when you get these huge changes in weather patterns, which depress agricultural yields for several decades, then you're going to get social instability as a result. And on one level, witch trials are a result of that. But there's an interesting thing about witch trials, in that although these climate disturbances, changes, are affecting

• 22:23Speaker 04

  people across Europe, witch trials are especially concentrated into certain geographic areas.

• 22:31Dan Snow?

  And is that to do with the culture, the people involved, the dynamism of certain churches? Or is there something here, for example, around the Reformation, the battleground between Protestantism and the Catholic Council? You know, there's a format, there's a time of contested ideas.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Yes, I think it's exactly, I'm going to give you some numbers, because I find it fascinating. There's a couple of economic historians did a fascinating sort of examination of the data on this. They looked at witch trials between 1300 and 1850, so before the outbursts we're talking about, and the long tail afterwards, when there weren't as many witch trials. And the variation is phenomenal. The measure they liked is the death rate per a million people being executed for witchcraft over this entire period. So in Italy, between that whole period in Italy, the death rate was five per million. So five people out of every million would be executed for witchcraft over that period. In Germany, five hundred and seventy-four.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  One hundred times more likely to be killed as a witch in Germany than in Italy. In Switzerland, an almost unbelievable, five thousand six hundred and ninety-one per million. Switzerland, the highest, ten times higher than Germany, which is already high.

• 23:46Dan Snow?

  A thousand times higher than Italy?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:48Dan Snow?

  Next door.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Yes. So if you were going to be an older unmarried woman in the fifteen hundreds, early sixteen hundreds, you were far better off being Italian than Swiss.

• 23:59Dan Snow?

  And okay, is that because Switzerland's difficult for agriculture, marginal the first place that's going to feel the effects of that climate change? Is it because it's on this fault line between Protestantism, Catholicism?

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this fault line between Protestantism and Catholicism really matters. Now, it's interesting, in areas which are strongly Catholic, where Protestantism doesn't really emerge as a challenge, we're looking at Spain, if we're looking at Italy, there are relatively few witch trials. If we're looking at an areas which are on sort of the front line of this denominational battle between Lutheranism and Calvinism and the old Catholic Church, areas like Germany, areas like Switzerland, areas like Itzafrance, that's where we see lots of witch trials. You know, within France, we don't see a huge amount of witch trials in the south of France, which remains very, very Catholic throughout.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  We do see a lot in the areas which are becoming more Protestant. And why is that? Now, it's partially, this sounds sort of cold-hearted in economics language, witch trials are almost a form of advertising for these competing denominations.

• 25:09Dan Snow?

  Let's unpack that one. How so?

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Let's think for a moment of the Catholic Church as a business. Now, for about a thousand years before the period we're talking about, it is an incredibly successful business. Its share of the market for religious belief in Western Europe is approaching 100%. And the tool it uses to maintain that that market share is something that some economic historians have rather meekly called coercive exclusion. Now coercive exclusion sounds fine, it translates to as killing anyone who won't agree to believe in your version of Christianity. We're back to what happens to the Cathars and the Albiginian Crusade and all of that in Southern France.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  This strategy though stops working during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther publishes his theses. He gets support across Europe, across the German lands in particular. He gets some rulers in the German lands also adopting the Protestant faith. And the Catholic Church has orders to arrest that man. So there's now a real competitor to the Catholic Church and what it can't just get rid of with her straightforward exclusion. So the Catholic Church for the first time, and the new Protestant churches, are forced to compete for believers and they compete in various ways. You know, you get in the Catholic Church, you get the Counter-Reformation. They do things like they create more saints days because they realize that the lady likes saints.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  So you see this sudden burst of, okay, these guys like saints. Let's make a lot more saints to make ourselves more popular. You get Protestant churches competing almost on price grounds. They say, we've got a really simple typh. If you come over to the Protestant churches, we've got this very straightforward, understandable typh. Whereas if you stay at the Catholic Church, you've got a whole series of indulgences and hard to understand charges. These are all forms of competing alongside the spiritual level. But then there's witch trials. If you're in a world in which you believe witches are real, and lots of people did believe witches are real, you want to go with the church, which shows it can protect you from this witch threat.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  And witch trials, they're really big, high profile things. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, will attend a witch trial. And after the execution of the witches, there'll be woodcuts made. Sometimes there'll be monuments put up, news spreads. So in areas where the churches are competing directly with each other.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Holding witch trials is a really good way to bring publicity to your church and to show that you're really looking after your local laity, you're taking witches seriously. Are those guys taking witches as seriously?

• 27:54Dan Snow?

  Wow, so it's a conjunction of so many different inputs. What brings this to an end? Does this bout of witch trials and killings, does it tail off or does it have a kind of striking end point?

• 28:07Speaker 04

  I mean, it really does start to tail off after the Thirty Years' War, 1618 to 1648, major war, not entirely, but to a large extent along religious lines in Europe, partially because that war is so destructive, it kills so many people, particularly in Germany. But I think also because after that, religious competition within Western and Central Europe becomes less intensive. So after the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, there is this general acceptance that, all right, these bits of Europe are now Protestant, these bits of Europe are now Catholic, and if individuals want to change their mind, that's okay, we're not going to have this same sort of war for religious territory.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  And I think once you get this settling down of religious conflict within Western Europe, Catholicism making its peace, that the Protestant churches are here to stay, the Protestant church is not trying to expand too much into Catholic areas, that sort of dying down of religious conflict means you do start to see a tailing off of witch trials. Now, they outlast that, you get witch trials in the late 17th century, you know, we get the famous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, we get witch finder generals prowling around post-civil war East Anglia and the West Country in Britain, but it does start to die down. And by the early 1700s, the era of witch trials, which has been for 100, 150 years before,

• 29:35Speaker 04

  is coming to an end in Western and Central Europe.

• 29:40Dan Snow?

  Duncan, I'm going to do something very unfair and ask you maybe to think about the things I'm sure will be in the minds of people listening to this. And we've seen in the modern world, we've seen data that suggests that young men are disillusioned with the moves towards equality that have been made by the women who live alongside them in society. Young men are now less likely to think that women ought to be in charge of businesses and nation states than they were 10 years ago. There's been a publishing revolution, there's been economic headwinds. I mean, as the economic historian, is it too soon to tell? Or do you think there are interesting patterns and rhymes that play in our modern world?

• 30:16Speaker 04

  I think there are always interesting patterns and rhymes at play. And I think, yeah, you're completely right. We've had generally a troubled economic situation since 2007, 2008, the financial crisis. That doesn't sound that long ago in historical terms, but 20 years is quite a long time as sort of lived experience. We've got this 20 years of the economies in the West not performing as well as we wanted them to, people's wages not rising as fast as they might have expected. And yeah, we have an information revolution in which influencers, stuff can go viral, people can find a mass audience in a way they couldn't before.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  These are both the kind of things we saw, less extreme, but the kind of things we saw at the start of the European witch mania, witch hysteria. I mean, I always think these sort of potentially dangerous messages, people going viral, spreading messages of hate, are always more likely when you have the confluence of new technologies which allows these things to spread. In those days, printing, nowadays, the internet and modern social media. And when you have a generally troubled economic backdrop, bringing social dislocation, then driven by climate, now driven by the still longer impacts of the financial crisis.

• 31:40Dan Snow?

  Interesting.

• 31:42Dan Snow?

  What's the advice from the economic historian of the early 17th century here? Do you just have to wait for the economy to improve? Or is there a sense that this propaganda, you can meet it and fight it on its own terms? Can you win that battle? Or is it a bit more depressing? Do you have to just wait for the structural landscape to change?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  I think the lesson of this period is I think you do have to rather sadly wait for the structural landscape to change. You know, I mean, the witch trials ended. It took one of the bloodiest wars Europe's ever seen to bring religious peace. Hopefully, we don't need a shock on that scale this time to bring relative calm. But also, these new technologies can have a huge impact on how information spreads, how that changes our societies, how that changes our cultures, our politics in ways we don't often see at the time. You know, I think when Johannes von Gutenberg invents his movable type, he's probably not thinking it's going to lead to a strange work like Malefic Maleficarum being an early modern bestseller.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  In the same way, I don't think modern social media, when it was invented, people thought it would be put to some of the ends it has been today.

• 32:50Dan Snow?

  Interesting stuff. Duncan, well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Remind everyone what the name of your fabulous book is.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  It is Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine.

• 33:00Dan Snow?

  Thank you for coming on and helping us think differently about some of these, some of these bits of history that we'll have known about and talked about, but now seeing them in a different light.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 33:10Dan Snow?

  Thanks for listening, folks. I've got some news, got some big news. We'll be changing to a renewed release schedule in November with new episodes dropping on Mondays and Thursdays, bonus episodes on Friday, if you're a subscriber, which you should be by now. We're going to change things up because we want to, well, deliver the best podcast we can, make sure you get the best of us. So fewer episodes, but we're going to do deeper dives, going to do more of those explainers, more on-location adventures, more focus on the history you love. Look, if we're doing fewer episodes, we can make sure they're high quality. That's the laws of physics, folks. And also because we're getting lots of stuff across history in general, got the YouTube channel, which I hope you subscribe to, the TV channel. And we're also making some old school TV as well for National Geographic and Channel Five in the UK. So we're all embarked on some pretty big adventures. Mariana Day

• 33:55Dan Snow?

  Forge, the producer, has upped her shoe game. She is ready, I'm ready. I can't say too much now, but she's gonna need those shoes. That's what I'm saying. We're gonna be traversing the Great Wall of China. We're gonna be following in Napoleon's footsteps across chunks of Europe. And if I get my way, if I get my way, and I better, we're gonna be tracing the story of the Odyssey from Troy to Ithaca, which actually, if you think about it, is the ultimate historical adventure. That's it. You told me that when I was a kid, that I'd be doing that in my slightly advanced years. Well, I'd have been happy. That's as good as it gets. That's winning the World Cup of history. So worry not, folks, the podcast isn't changing. It's just getting even better.

• 34:39Dan Snow?

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