The religious changes and tensions of the period obviously played a played a part. Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, as well as militant Catholic reformers such as Peter Canisius, emphasises fear of the devil in their writings. Kieth Thomas argues in "Religion and the Decline of Magic", that the campaigns of reformers against magic and the medieval superstitious practices reinforced a witch hunting mentality. Emphasis on literal interpretations of the bible reinforced the message that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". Witch hunting seems to have been most intense in areas that contained large religious minorities, or adjoined neighbouring states denominated by another faith. This has led E.W.Monter to argue that prosecution of witches was an alternative to the prosecution of heretics. This was especially the case in western parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Writers as varied and as influential as Jean Bodin in his" Demonomanie des Sorciers, and king James IV of Scotland in his "Daemonologie" offered further backing to the witch hunting cause.
Witch hunting seems, on the whole, to have been more pronounced in Catholic than Protestant societies. On the other hand, strongly Catholic societies like Spain and Italy were relatively free from witch-hunting. The best example of this concerns the attitude of the Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar, who investigated an outbreak of witch hunting in the Spanish Basque country. In contrast to his counterparts over the French border, Salazar became convinced that the hysteria set off by witch hunting produces false confessions. This lead him to conclude that the concept of witchcraft was in itself non-existent. In the process he brought an end to the Spanish Inquisitions connections with the prosecution of witches. The Inquisition subsequently intervened with local jurisdictions in Spain to bring persecution to an end. .
Attempts have been made to link witch hunting with the Thirty Years War.
