Witchcraft History
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47 free Witchcraft History trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Between about 1400 and 1775 roughly 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and its colonies and somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, four in five of them women. The story runs from a 10th-century church text that called night-flights with Diana a delusion, through a 1486 handbook its own church condemned, to prince-bishops who emptied whole villages, a king who wrote his own demonology, a self-styled Witchfinder General, and a Massachusetts village that hanged nineteen people in 1692. These 47 questions cover the whole arc. The Canon Episcopi and the papal bull that backed Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus Maleficarum and the Cologne theologians who rejected it, Trier, Bamberg, Würzburg and the mayor who wrote to his daughter from the torture cell, Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny, Joan of Arc at Rouen, the Basque trials and the inquisitor who doubted them, North Berwick and James VI, Pendle and Thomas Potts, Matthew Hopkins and sleep deprivation, the Torsåker beheadings, Salem's spectral evidence and Giles Corey's plea, Anna Göldi in 1782, Janet Horne in 1727 and Helen Duncan jailed in 1944. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The popular 'nine million witches' myth began with a 1784 essay arguing which Enlightenment writer's estimate was too low?
Voltaire
Voltaire: the essayist scaled up 30 death sentences in one town's archive to all of Europe, yet historians now put executions at 40,000 to 60,000.
Q 02Most accused witches were women, but in which country were nearly all executed witches men?
Iceland
Iceland: openly practised magic there had come to be associated with men, so almost all of the 22 people executed for sorcery were men.
Q 03Which realm saw the most witch trials in early modern Europe?
Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire: in the prince-bishopric of Würzburg, a ruler bent on the Counter-Reformation had hundreds burned as witches.
Q 04Which Arthur Miller play dramatises the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism?
The Crucible
The Crucible: Miller was later hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee himself and convicted of contempt for refusing to name names.
Q 05Who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum?
Heinrich Kramer
Heinrich Kramer wrote it after a bishop expelled him from Innsbruck over a witch trial there.
Q 06Which body condemned the Malleus Maleficarum for recommending illegal procedures?
The Faculty of Cologne
The theology faculty of the University of Cologne condemned the book in 1490 for recommending unethical and illegal procedures, yet Kramer kept his post and his prestige.
Q 07Which pope issued Summis desiderantes affectibus, the 1484 bull backing two inquisitors against witchcraft along the Rhine?
Innocent VIII
Innocent VIII issued it on 5 December 1484, and the bull was later printed in full at the head of the Malleus Maleficarum, lending that handbook papal weight.
Q 08The medieval Canon Episcopi dismissed women's night rides with which pagan goddess as delusion?
Diana
Diana: the text, perhaps first recorded by Regino of Prüm, called such night rides a delusion, and Gratian later copied it into canon law.
Q 09Who was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland, in 1324?
Alice Kyteler
Alice Kyteler fled before she could be punished, and her servant Petronilla de Meath, tortured into confessing, was flogged and burned at the stake.
Q 10Joan of Arc was burned at Rouen in 1431 after being convicted of what crime?
Heresy
Heresy: her judges declared her a relapsed heretic after she went back to wearing men's clothes, and a 1456 retrial overturned the verdict.
Q 11The Trier witch trials of 1581–1593 were held in which present-day country?
Germany
Germany: the Trier hunts reached the top of society, and city officials and even a senior judge were among those executed.
Q 12Which Trier judge, who had presided over witch trials himself, was strangled and burned for witchcraft in 1589?
Dietrich Flade
Dietrich Flade, said to have treated the accused mildly, was himself tortured into confessing, then strangled and burned.
Q 13In the Bible, the Witch of Endor summons the spirit of which prophet for King Saul?
Samuel
Samuel: the spirit foretells that Saul and his army will fall to the Philistines, and they are defeated.
Q 21The Pendle witches, tried in 1612, lived around Pendle Hill in which English county?
Lancashire
Lancashire: the case began after a pedlar refused a local girl some pins and was then struck lame, which was blamed on her witchcraft.
Q 22Which nine-year-old's testimony helped convict her own family among the Pendle witches?
Jennet Device
Jennet Device, aged nine, was a key witness, naming the guests at the Malkin Tower meeting as well as testifying against her mother, brother and sister.
Q 23Matthew Hopkins claimed which title, never actually granted by Parliament?
Witchfinder General
Witchfinder General: Hopkins claimed Parliament had commissioned him, and toured towns with a team of women who pricked suspects for the Devil's mark.
Q 14Johannes Junius, who smuggled a letter to his daughter from jail before his execution, held what office?
Mayor of Bamberg
Mayor of Bamberg: Junius held out under thumbscrews and leg screws before confessing, then wrote that his confession was sheer lies.
Q 15What 1626 disaster across Franconia was blamed on sorcery as the region's mass witch trials began?
A crop-killing frost
A crop-killing frost: it ruined the region's vines, and arrested suspects confessed that they had caused it.
Q 16Which Jesuit's 1631 Cautio Criminalis argued that torture creates witches where none exist?
Friedrich Spee
Friedrich Spee drew on his experience as a confessor to accused witches at Würzburg, and had the book printed anonymously at Rinteln.
Q 17The Basque witch trials, in which some 7,000 people were accused, began in 1609 in which town?
Logroño
Logroño's Inquisition tribunal burned several of the accused in 1610, but junior inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías found no real proof behind the confessions.
Q 18Which Scottish king attended the North Berwick witch trials of 1590?
James VI
James VI attended the North Berwick trials in person after storms on his voyage home with his bride, Anne of Denmark, were blamed on witches, and later wrote Daemonologie.
Q 19Which Shakespeare play is believed to draw on Daemonologie?
Macbeth
Macbeth: its witches are believed to borrow from the book, though one scholar saw no sign that Shakespeare used it at all.
Q 20Daemonologie is widely thought to have answered which sceptical 1584 book?
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot, argued that witchcraft did not exist and exposed how charlatans' seemingly miraculous tricks were done.
Q 24Matthew Hopkins was mainly active in which region of England?
East Anglia
East Anglia: it began in Manningtree, Essex, where Hopkins said he overheard women discussing their meetings with the Devil, and 23 women were accused.
Q 25In the water ordeal used in witch-hunts, what did it mean if the accused floated?
Guilt
Guilt: floaters were tried as witches, and legend even claimed Hopkins died by his own swimming test, though his burial record says otherwise.
Q 26A 'witch's teat' was believed to be used to feed what?
Familiars or imps
Familiars or imps: in return for the blood they sucked, these spirits were believed to serve the witch and aid her magic.
Q 27Despite the popular image of the stake, how were convicted witches in England usually executed?
Hanged
Hanged: English law made witchcraft a felony, and convicted witches normally went to the gallows rather than the fire.
Q 28About how many people are estimated to have been executed for witchcraft in England?
500
About 500 people were executed for witchcraft in England, where torture was unlawful, so witch-hunters kept suspects awake for nights to force confessions.
Q 29Which political leader formally apologised in 2022 to those accused under Scotland's 1563 Witchcraft Act?
Nicola Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon apologised on International Women's Day, answering a campaign by the Witches of Scotland group, which also sought pardons and a memorial.
Q 30Which Dornoch woman is called the last person legally executed for witchcraft in the British Isles?
Janet Horne
Janet Horne was accused of turning her daughter into a pony for the Devil to shoe, and in 1727 she was tarred and burned at Dornoch.