Editing Witch hunt (section)

====Execution statistics====
[[File:Witches Being Hanged.jpg|thumb|An image of suspected witches being hanged in England, published in 1655]][[File:William Powell Frith The Witch Trial.jpg|thumb|''The Witch Trial'' by [[William Powell Frith]] (1848)]]

Modern scholarly estimates place the total number of executions for witchcraft in the 300-year period of European witch-hunts in the five digits, mostly at roughly between 35,000 and 60,000 (see table below for details),{{efn|name=victim_stats|The ''Encyclopedia Britannica'' sets a limit of "no more than 40,000 to 60,000."<ref>{{cite encyclopedia	|last1=Russell |first1=Jeffrey Burton |last2=Lewis |first2=Ioan M. |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia Britannica |title=Witchcraft |year=2000 |access-date=2021-08-27 |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/witchcraft}}</ref> The high end of that range originates with [[Brian P. Levack]]'s first edition of ''The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe'', which he revised down to 45,000 in the third edition.<ref>{{cite book |first=Brian P. |last=Levack |author-link=Brian P. Levack |title=The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe |year=1987 |url=https://archive.org/details/witchhuntinearly0000leva |url-access=registration |page=21}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Brian P. |last=Levack |author-link=Brian P. Levack |title=The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe |year=2006 |edition=3rd |url=https://archive.org/details/witchhuntinearly0000leva_l1l1 |url-access=registration |page=23|publisher=Pearson Longman |isbn=9780582419018 }}</ref> William Monter estimates 35,000 deaths; [[Malcolm Gaskill]] and Richard Golden both estimate 40,000–50,000.<ref>{{cite book |first=William |last=Monter |chapter=Witch Trials in Continental Europe |title=Witchcraft and Magic in Europe |editor1=Ankarloo, Bengst |editor2=Clark, Stuart |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |place=Philadelphia|year=2002 |pages=12 ff |isbn=0-8122-1787-X}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Gaskill |first=Malcolm |authorlink= Malcolm Gaskill|title=Witchcraft, a very short introduction |url=https://archive.org/details/witchcraftverysh00gask_191 |url-access=limited |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2010 |page=[https://archive.org/details/witchcraftverysh00gask_191/page/n92 76]|isbn=978-0-19-923695-4 }}</ref><ref name=":0" /> [[Anne Lewellyn Barstow]] adjusted Levack's first estimate to account for lost records, estimating 100,000 deaths.<ref>{{cite book |first=Anne Lewellyn |last=Barstow |author-link=Anne Lewellyn Barstow |title=Witchcraze|year=1994 |url=https://archive.org/details/witchcrazenewhis0000bars |url-access=registration}}</ref> [[Ronald Hutton]] argues that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted for these, and revises the figure to approximately 40,000.<ref>{{cite book |first=Ronald |last=Hutton |title=Triumph of the Moon |year=1999 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-820744-3 |url=https://archive.org/details/triumphofmoonhis00hutt |url-access=registration}}</ref> [[James Sharpe (historian)|James Sharpe]] concurs: "The current consensus is that 40,000 people were executed as witches in the period of the witch persecutions, between about 1450 and 1750."<ref>{{cite book |last=Sharpe |first=James |year=2001 |title=Witchcraft in Early Modern England |place=Harlow, UK |publisher=Pearson |page=6}}</ref>}} The majority of those accused were from the lower economic classes in European society, although in rarer cases high-ranking individuals were accused as well. On the basis of this evidence, Scarre and Callow asserted that the "typical witch was the wife or widow of an agricultural labourer or small tenant farmer, and she was well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature."

According to Julian Goodare, in Europe, the overall proportion of women who were persecuted as witches was 80%, although there were countries and regions like Estonia, Normandy and Iceland, that targeted men more.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Goodare |first1=Julian |title=The European Witch-Hunt |date= 2016 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-19831-4 |pages=267, 268 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eM4mDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA268 |access-date=21 December 2021 |language=en}}</ref> In Iceland 92% of the accused were men, in Estonia 60%, and in Moscow two-thirds of those accused were male. {{citation needed|date=August 2021}} In Finland, a total of more than 100 death row inmates were roughly equal in both men and women, but all [[Åland]]ers sentenced to witchcraft were only women.<ref>[https://www15.uta.fi/yky/arkisto/historia/noitanetti/kuolemantuomiot.html Noituus – Kuolemantuomiot] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210301000229/https://www15.uta.fi/yky/arkisto/historia/noitanetti/kuolemantuomiot.html |date=1 March 2021 }} (in Finnish)</ref>

At one point during the Würzburg trials of 1629, children made up 60% of those accused, although this had declined to 17% by the end of the year.<ref>Scarre, Geoffrey; Callow, John (2001). Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe (second ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 29–33.</ref> Rapley (1998) claims that "75 to 80 percent" of a total of "40,000 to 50,000" victims were women.<ref>{{cite book |last=Rapley |first=Robert |title=A Case of Witchcraft: The Trial of Urbain Grandier |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FMpRAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA99 |year=1998 |publisher=Manchester University Press |isbn=978-0-7190-5528-7 |pages=99}} {{unreliable source? |date=April 2015}} <!--the figure is attributed to "endnote 27" which cannot be recovered from google books (p. 245).--></ref> The claim that "millions of witches" (often: "[[nine million witches]]") were killed in Europe is spurious, even though it is occasionally found in popular literature, and it is ultimately due to a 1791 pamphlet by [[Gottfried Christian Voigt]].<ref name="Gaskill.p.65">Gaskill, Malcolm ''Witchcraft, a very short introduction'', Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 65</ref>
{| class="wikitable"  style="width:70%; text-align:right;"
|+ Prosecution of witchcraft in regions of Europe 1450–1750<ref name=Monter>William Monter: ''Witch trials in Continental Europe'', (in:) ''Witchcraft and magic in Europe'', ed. Bengst Ankarloo & Stuart Clark, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2002, pp 12 ff. {{ISBN|0-8122-1787-X}}; and Levack, Brian P. The witch hunt in early modern Europe, 3rd ed., London and New York: Longman, 2006.</ref>

! Region|| Trials (approx)||  Executions (approx)
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''British Isles''' || 5,000 || 1,500–2,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''Holy Roman Empire''' (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria, Czechia)|| 50,000 || 25,000–30,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''France'''|| 3,000 || 1,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''Scandinavia'''|| 5,000 || 1,700–2,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''Central & Eastern Europe''' (Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Russia) || 7,000|| 2,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''Southern Europe''' (Spain, Portugal, Italy) || 10,000|| 1,000
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| '''Total''' ||80,000  || 35,000
|}