Alice Kyteler Sorcery Trial Essays -- Witchcraft European History Essa

Alice Kyteler Sorcery Trial The sorcery trial of Alice Kyteler was an important aspect and a contributing factor of the European With-Hunt. The trial helped to set a common law and a point of reference for later witch-hunts and later trials. The trial of Alice Kyteler helped make the link between heterodoxy and witchcraft, helped in making witchcraft a crime punishable under heretical laws, helped define what the acts of witchcraft are, and allowed for the authority of the church in matters of witchcraft, such as torture, to be defined. Heresy and witchcraft are interrelate and in some cases, one in the same. The charge of sorcery and witchcraft against Alice Kyteler helped to solidify the correlation drawn between magic and heresy. The sorcery trials that where held in Ireland where revolve around around the idea that the magic that was being performed somehow made the practitioners heretics. William Outlaw was acc usaged of, aiding, abetting and harboring hereticsus ury, perjury, adultery, murder of clergy, and excommunications, to the total of thirty-four separate counts.1 William Outlaw, son of Alice Kyteler, had the charges of heresy and helping those who where heretics combined to include other charges that fell under witchcraft. Outlaw was accused of helping heretics, who where also being charged with heresy, and using sorcery for the use of evil. In Nicholas Eymerics, written fifty years after the Kyteler trial, lists that some others, however, are magicians and diviners who are not pure chiromantics, but are contracted to heretics, as are those who show the honor of latria or dulia to the demons. Eymeric also wrote that, These people, referring to the magicians, are guilty of manifest heresy.2 This s... ... Alan Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 85. 3. Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London Longman Group, 1995), 37. 4. Davidson, 26-27. 5. William central of Santa Sab ina, Magic and the Inquisition, in Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700, Alan Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 81. 6. Davidson, 28 & 30. 7. Davidson, 82. 8. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Spenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, in Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700, Alan Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 130. 9. Davidson, 28. 10. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Spenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, in Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700, Alan Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 132. 11. Davidson, 62. 12. Levack, 77.