A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and disruptors of the Church like the Spiritual Franciscans, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century. In 1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. In the wake of the Pope’s commission, six or seven years later he issued a bull, Super illius specula, which now proclaimed that any magical practices or contacts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. This was one of those ideas which bide their time; for the moment witches were not much troubled by the Church’s discipline, but more than a century later, with the aid of new publicists fired by their own obsessions, the Western Church and its Protestant successors were to initiate more than two centuries of active witch persecution