Tylenol maker Kenvue denies the connection allegedly made in the report, which is expected to be published by the Department of Health and Human Services this month.
Did you know that during the middle ages witchcraft was actually denied by the Roman Catholic Church? As in they denied witches existed despite biblical mentions. In some parts of Eastern Europe it was even a crime to accuse a woman of Witchcraft.
So what happened? In the same way that the internet made knowledge extremely easy to obtain, it also made misinformation able to spread like never before. The printing press did that. There was exactly one book on Witchcraft published towards the end of the Middle Ages that got widespread circulation due to the printing press. Then Witch burning and trials became common.
I hadn’t previously come across the printing press as an influence on witch hunts, interesting. It is pretty far down the Wikipedia article, though, and a different book printed almost two hundred years later is also cited as highly influential. I devoutly hope we are not in for two hundred years of unchecked social media and AI driven misinformation.
…in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (lit., ‘Hammer against the Evildoers’) which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. It was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.
The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.
This is the phrase/term ‘medieval witch hunt’ is inaccurate. Witch hunts and trials didn’t start until the early modern period and didn’t reach their peak until the 17th century.
Of course you could make the argument that despite it being ‘early modern’, most people’s mindsets were still positively medieval. There was a hell of a lot of superstition and all manner of weird crap in daily life and even in the legal system. For example, it was believed that the corpse of a murder victim could point out its murderer if the murderer interacted with the body in some way. Another thing is the belief in ‘life force’ (I forgot the term they used) for people who were murdered or executed. The reason is that since those people’s deaths were not natural, their bodies still had surplus ‘life energy’ that could be used to heal the sick or dying. Obviously that didn’t work, but it still tells you a lot about their mentality.
Also in medicine and medical thinking, while there was steady experimenting happening in higher society, for the average person who rarely saw a ‘real’ doctor, many people were still thinking in terms of the 4 humours as late as the very early 19th century, with a lot of medical thinking being ancient, like thinking that some pastes and medicines made from worms would help to heal scars since worm bodies look a little like scars themselves.
Witch hunts were something extremely special.
Did you know that during the middle ages witchcraft was actually denied by the Roman Catholic Church? As in they denied witches existed despite biblical mentions. In some parts of Eastern Europe it was even a crime to accuse a woman of Witchcraft.
So what happened? In the same way that the internet made knowledge extremely easy to obtain, it also made misinformation able to spread like never before. The printing press did that. There was exactly one book on Witchcraft published towards the end of the Middle Ages that got widespread circulation due to the printing press. Then Witch burning and trials became common.
Its nuts to think that.
I hadn’t previously come across the printing press as an influence on witch hunts, interesting. It is pretty far down the Wikipedia article, though, and a different book printed almost two hundred years later is also cited as highly influential. I devoutly hope we are not in for two hundred years of unchecked social media and AI driven misinformation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt
This is the phrase/term ‘medieval witch hunt’ is inaccurate. Witch hunts and trials didn’t start until the early modern period and didn’t reach their peak until the 17th century.
Of course you could make the argument that despite it being ‘early modern’, most people’s mindsets were still positively medieval. There was a hell of a lot of superstition and all manner of weird crap in daily life and even in the legal system. For example, it was believed that the corpse of a murder victim could point out its murderer if the murderer interacted with the body in some way. Another thing is the belief in ‘life force’ (I forgot the term they used) for people who were murdered or executed. The reason is that since those people’s deaths were not natural, their bodies still had surplus ‘life energy’ that could be used to heal the sick or dying. Obviously that didn’t work, but it still tells you a lot about their mentality.
Also in medicine and medical thinking, while there was steady experimenting happening in higher society, for the average person who rarely saw a ‘real’ doctor, many people were still thinking in terms of the 4 humours as late as the very early 19th century, with a lot of medical thinking being ancient, like thinking that some pastes and medicines made from worms would help to heal scars since worm bodies look a little like scars themselves.