The really intense period of persecution of witches did not come until the late 16th and 17th centuries. The basic doctrines of the later witchcraze were laid down in documents of the later medieval period. These documents built on longstanding folk beliefs which were put in vaguely academic dress.
There has been much recent discussion of whether witches actually existed. For a long period the whole discussion was seen as a mirror of psychological anxieties. Some recent authors - notably Carlo Ginzberg - however, have argued that there were indeed groups of people who regarded themselves as witches. This whole issue is still under discussion.
Real or not, witches and witchcraft, were very real phenomena to the writers of the fifteen
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