"Let there be no mistake: Decker has not produced a nostalgic' apology for the Church, for he works historically in the best sense, by seeking the foundation of historical judgment in the only place he can find it, in empirical fact."ùThomas Brechenmacher, Tagespost, on the German edition<BR><BR>Originally published as Die PSpste and die Hexen, Witchcraft and the Papacy is based on newly available historical records and traces the role of the papacy in witchcraft prosecutions from medieval times to the eighteenth century. Decker found that although the medieval church did lay the foundation for witch hunts of the Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the postmedieval papacy, and the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, played the same kind of skeptical, restraining role during the height of the witch-hunting frenzy in Germany and elsewhere in Europe alit had irk the trial that was the initial focus of his research. Witch-craft and the Papacy overturns a large body of scholarship that confuses the medieval papacy with its markedly skeptical successors, and that mistakenly portrays the papacy as fanning rather than quelling the flames of the witchcraft mania Sweeping northern Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onward.