That list actually mentions the incompleteness of the records, and estimates the numbers as vastly higher than the number of people on the list (250,000).
The idea of an unbroken line of detailed written legal records is very much an anachronism even in the 14th century. In many places, laws were only beginning to be written down in the 14th century, collected into books called customs. The civil law of Paris wasn't written down until 1510.
London criminal courts kept good rolls, but that sort of thing changed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. If no criminal records were kept for X jurisdiction, we can't assume there were no criminal cases. They may not have kept records there. Or the records could've been lost to fire.
Witchcraft was a legal grey area, because it was both a violation of ecclesiastical law (apostasy) and secular law (damage to goods and property). And the third legal system - the Inquisition - was usually called in to deal with witches though (as Kramer and Sprenger point out) technically witches didn't fall under the Inquisition's purview. So while ecclesiastical courts did keep good records, there's no guarantee that an executed witch was convicted under that system.
As for archaeology, I wasn't suggesting that as a means of getting at individual belief. I was suggesting that it might be a way to gauge the completeness of records of execution at different periods. We could use archaeology at known execution sites to perhaps determine the prevalence of execution at that spot in different periods, and see how that matches existing records. It would give us a sense of how much of a written record survives for each period. A larger number of executions in an era with few records means they aren't reliable as a source of statistics.
Post 1960s, there's been a turn toward the statistical in historical research. While it does seem more scientific, it comes with a serious built-in problem of what to do with the incompleteness of records.
A few years ago for instance, it became popular to "debunk" the idea that marriages of girls ages 12, 13, or 14 were common in the Middle Ages. The study that produced this was based on dowry records in Florence. Florence was chosen simply because it had a solid body of historical material to build statistics out of.
The problem is, Florence was an atypical city. The cultural differences between it and the rest of the Italian peninsula were vast, never mind the peninsula's difference with northern Europe (where most of the anecdotes of child brides comes from). It would be like saying that child marriage is not a problem today in Kandahar, Afghanistan, because statistics show it is rare in New York City.
Assuming all the numbers on the linked list are accurately reported in the original source material - and the large numbers and vague estimates are worrying - those are just what we know. No list can take into account what we don't know, obviously, and any number put into the blank - 200,000 in this instance - is a number pulled out of thin air. It has the comfort that numbers offer, but it doesn't tell us anything real.
Filling the gaps with random numbers will never make us know how much persecution there was in the 15th versus the 17th centuries, and how those stack up proportionally to the growing populations.
Ultimately this is irrelevant to my initial point, though, of why these women felt they were running with Pagan goddesses that (officially) they should never have even heard of.
I'm quite happy to assert that Wicca is a pre-Christian paganism of Europe on the basis that that is what it's practitioners believe it to be. Much as modern Christians believe that they are practicing the "religion of Christ" despite all the evidence to the contrary. (à la "Lost Christianities" by Bart D. Ehrman)
The more I learn about paleo-paganism the more obvious it seems to me that Wicca is more "authentic" than most Re-creationist pagan traditions. We don't have the same rituals that they did in the past but we have the same attitude toward religion. Which is very different from the Christian attitude.
no subject
The idea of an unbroken line of detailed written legal records is very much an anachronism even in the 14th century. In many places, laws were only beginning to be written down in the 14th century, collected into books called customs. The civil law of Paris wasn't written down until 1510.
London criminal courts kept good rolls, but that sort of thing changed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. If no criminal records were kept for X jurisdiction, we can't assume there were no criminal cases. They may not have kept records there. Or the records could've been lost to fire.
Witchcraft was a legal grey area, because it was both a violation of ecclesiastical law (apostasy) and secular law (damage to goods and property). And the third legal system - the Inquisition - was usually called in to deal with witches though (as Kramer and Sprenger point out) technically witches didn't fall under the Inquisition's purview. So while ecclesiastical courts did keep good records, there's no guarantee that an executed witch was convicted under that system.
As for archaeology, I wasn't suggesting that as a means of getting at individual belief. I was suggesting that it might be a way to gauge the completeness of records of execution at different periods. We could use archaeology at known execution sites to perhaps determine the prevalence of execution at that spot in different periods, and see how that matches existing records. It would give us a sense of how much of a written record survives for each period. A larger number of executions in an era with few records means they aren't reliable as a source of statistics.
Post 1960s, there's been a turn toward the statistical in historical research. While it does seem more scientific, it comes with a serious built-in problem of what to do with the incompleteness of records.
A few years ago for instance, it became popular to "debunk" the idea that marriages of girls ages 12, 13, or 14 were common in the Middle Ages. The study that produced this was based on dowry records in Florence. Florence was chosen simply because it had a solid body of historical material to build statistics out of.
The problem is, Florence was an atypical city. The cultural differences between it and the rest of the Italian peninsula were vast, never mind the peninsula's difference with northern Europe (where most of the anecdotes of child brides comes from). It would be like saying that child marriage is not a problem today in Kandahar, Afghanistan, because statistics show it is rare in New York City.
Assuming all the numbers on the linked list are accurately reported in the original source material - and the large numbers and vague estimates are worrying - those are just what we know. No list can take into account what we don't know, obviously, and any number put into the blank - 200,000 in this instance - is a number pulled out of thin air. It has the comfort that numbers offer, but it doesn't tell us anything real.
Filling the gaps with random numbers will never make us know how much persecution there was in the 15th versus the 17th centuries, and how those stack up proportionally to the growing populations.
Ultimately this is irrelevant to my initial point, though, of why these women felt they were running with Pagan goddesses that (officially) they should never have even heard of.
I'm quite happy to assert that Wicca is a pre-Christian paganism of Europe on the basis that that is what it's practitioners believe it to be. Much as modern Christians believe that they are practicing the "religion of Christ" despite all the evidence to the contrary. (à la "Lost Christianities" by Bart D. Ehrman)
The more I learn about paleo-paganism the more obvious it seems to me that Wicca is more "authentic" than most Re-creationist pagan traditions. We don't have the same rituals that they did in the past but we have the same attitude toward religion. Which is very different from the Christian attitude.