A historian once asked a classroom how many women were burned as witches in the Middle Ages. Every hand went up. Then she asked when the witch trials actually happened. No one could answer. That gap — between what we think we know and what the records show — is wider than the flames of any pyre.
Burning witches in the Middle Ages is a myth, the peak of the witch hunts occurred during the Renaissance and Early Modern period (roughly 1450–1750), and even then, burning at the stake was less common than hanging. The medieval church did persecute heretics, but the “witch craze” that fills our imagination belongs to a different century, a different legal system, and a different crisis.
Where does the burning witches myth come from?
The image of the burning witch is not medieval. It is a composite built from three distinct sources: the actual execution methods of the witch trials, the public execution of heretics in the High Middle Ages, and the moral panic literature of the 15th and 16th centuries that exaggerated everything it touched.
The first mass witch hunts in Europe began not in 1100 but around 1430, in the Alpine regions of modern Switzerland, France, and Italy. The pivotal text was the Malleus Maleficarum (1487), a manual by German clergyman Heinrich Kramer that described witchcraft as a diabolical conspiracy requiring extermination. Kramer’s book was not medieval. It was printed on a Gutenberg press, circulated through the new technology of movable type, and became a bestseller in the Renaissance.
Before Kramer, the church’s position was cautious. The Canon Episcopi, a 10th-century church document, explicitly called belief in night-flying witches a demonic delusion, not a real crime. To accuse someone of witchcraft was itself a sin. That position held for centuries. The shift came only after 1450, when economic stress, religious schism, and the printing press created conditions for mass panic.
The medieval period (roughly 500–1450) saw very few witchcraft executions. Most were isolated cases involving maleficium, harmful magic, tried under secular law, not church law. Burning was reserved for heretics and relapsed heretics, and even then, it was a punishment for religious dissent, not for casting spells.
How were witches actually executed?
The short answer: most were hanged, not burned. The long answer depends on jurisdiction, century, and legal category.
In England and Scotland, witchcraft was a felony under secular law, and the penalty was hanging. The last execution for witchcraft in England was in 1684 (Alice Molland in Exeter), and she was hanged. When Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled “Witchfinder General,” hunted witches in East Anglia in 1645–47, he sent over a hundred people to the gallows, not the stake.
In continental Europe, where the Holy Roman Empire and the Inquisition operated under Roman law, burning was more common, but it was reserved for relapsed heretics and those found guilty of diabolism, the crime of making a pact with the devil. The distinction matters: maleficium (harmful magic) could get you hanged. Diabolism could get you burned.
Even then, the accused were typically strangled before the fire was lit. The burning of a living person was rare and horrifying enough that chroniclers recorded it as an exceptional cruelty, not a routine procedure. The English traveler William Lithgow wrote in 1632 of witnessing a witch burned alive in Spain, describing it as “the most lamentable sight I ever beheld.” The fact that it was worth writing down tells us it was not the default.
A smaller number were pressed to death, drowned by trial, or died in prison awaiting trial. The total executed across all methods in the witch craze (1450–1750) is estimated between 40,000 and 60,000 people. The vast majority were not burned alive.
What about the Middle Ages, did anyone burn witches then?
A handful of cases predate 1450, and they are often cited as proof of medieval witch-burning. But each requires careful reading.
In 1324, the Irish bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede, tried Dame Alice Kyteler for witchcraft in Kilkenny. She fled, but her servant Petronella de Meath was flogged and burned at the stake, the first known execution for witchcraft in Ireland. De Ledrede was a French-trained inquisitor applying Continental procedures in a region that had never seen them. He acted against the resistance of local secular authorities. It was not typical. It was the exception that proves the rule: before the 15th century, burning a witch was a scandal, not a standard punishment.
The trial of Joan of Arc in 1431 is often misremembered as a witch-burning. Joan was executed as a relapsed heretic, not a witch. The accusation of witchcraft was added to the charges but was never the legal basis for her death. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, wearing a woman’s dress after having been forced to abandon male clothing. The fire consumed her. But she was not burned as a witch.
After 1450, the situation changed. The Council of Basel (1431–49) and the subsequent papal bulls, notably Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (1484) by Pope Innocent VIII, gave inquisitors broad authority to prosecute witchcraft. The medieval skepticism about night-flying women, preserved in the Canon Episcopi, was replaced by a new orthodoxy: witch cults were real, organized, and diabolical.
But even then, the medieval period was ending. The printing press, the Reformation, and the Wars of Religion created the conditions for mass witch hunting. The Middle Ages did not burn witches. The Renaissance did.
Why does the myth persist?
The burning witch is a powerful image because it condenses multiple anxieties into a single flame: religious persecution, misogyny, mob violence, the failure of justice. It appears in school textbooks that collapse five centuries of legal history into one scene. It shows up in films and novels that need a visual shorthand for “medieval superstition.”
But the myth also serves a narrative function. It marks a clear boundary between the “dark ages” and the modern world. If we can say we no longer burn witches, we prove our civilization is more rational than the one that came before. The problem is that the witch hunts are not medieval. They are early modern. They happened in the same centuries that produced the scientific revolution, the printing press, and the Enlightenment.
The philosopher Voltaire wrote against witch trials in the 18th century, calling them “the disgrace of the human mind.” He was writing about his own era. The last legal execution for witchcraft in Europe was in 1782 in Switzerland, the country that had seen some of the earliest hunts. Anna Göldi was beheaded with a sword in Glarus. She was not burned.
The myth also obscures the real history of religious persecution in the medieval period. Heretics, Cathars, Waldensians, Hussites, were burned. Jewish communities were massacred. Those were real crimes, committed by real institutions. They do not need a fictional witch to make them visible.
What does this mean for practitioners today?
For those who follow witchcraft as a living tradition, the burning witch myth is a double-edged sword. It understates the real violence against marginalized people and misattributes it to a period that was not responsible. It also creates a romanticized victim identity that has little to do with how historical witches actually lived.
Most people executed for witchcraft were poor, old, widowed, or socially isolated. They were not practicing a pagan religion. They were Christians accused of doing harm. The idea of a “witch cult” secretly surviving from pre-Christian times was invented by 19th-century folklorists, notably Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), and has been thoroughly discredited by historians.
What the historical record shows is a pattern of accusation shaped by economic pressure, family feuds, and political convenience. Witches were made by their neighbors, not by their own beliefs. The burning witch belongs to our imagination, not to the Middle Ages.
FAQ
Were witches really burned at the stake in the Middle Ages?
No. The peak of the witch hunts occurred during the Renaissance and Early Modern period (1450–1750), and most executions were by hanging. Burning was reserved for relapsed heretics and was rare even then.
How many people were executed for witchcraft?
Estimates range from 40,000 to 60,000 across Europe, with the highest numbers in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Scotland. About 75–80% of those executed were women.
Did the Catholic Church burn witches?
Church courts (the Inquisition) were involved in witch trials, but they typically handed convicted witches over to secular authorities for punishment. The church’s official position shifted from skepticism (Canon Episcopi, 10th century) to active prosecution (Summis Desiderantes, 1484).
Were there witch hunts outside Europe?
Yes. The Salem witch trials (1692–93) in colonial Massachusetts executed 20 people by hanging. Witch hunts also occurred in Latin America, Africa, and Asia under colonial and post-colonial legal systems.
The fire in our imagination is not the fire of the medieval pyre. It is the fire of a later century, remembered wrong. The real history is more disturbing and more instructive: a legal system that turned neighbor against neighbor, a church that abandoned its own skepticism, and a printing press that spread fear faster than any flame. Understanding that history does not make the burnings less real. It makes them harder to dismiss as something only our ancestors would do.
Related guides: For a deeper look at how the church shaped magical practice, read our guide to the history of occult persecution. The witch trials in context and the Malleus Maleficarum and its legacy are essential reading for anyone working with the history of magic.