In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America. Between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, almost all in Europe. The witch hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630, during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors, and women and men made formal accusations of witchcraft. Magical healers or 'cunning folk' were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused. Roughly 80% of those convicted were women, most of them over the age of 40. In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake, the traditional punishment for religious heresy.

The period of the European witch trials, with its most active phase and the highest number of fatalities, seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630. This period saw more than 40,000 deaths.

Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism, as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions. In Catholic Spain and Portugal, for example, the number of witch trials was few because the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions preferred to focus on the crime of public heresy rather than the crime of witchcraft. In contrast, Protestant Scotland had a much larger number of witchcraft trials. In contrast, the witch trials in the Protestant Netherlands stopped earlier, and they were among the least numerous in Europe, while the large-scale mass witch trials which took place in the autonomous territories of the Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany were infamous in all of the Western world. 

Notable Trials and Regional Differences

• Regional Variation: The intensity of the trials varied widely and was not strictly tied to Catholic or Protestant regions. For example, Catholic Spain and Portugal had relatively few trials compared to Protestant Scotland.
• Mass Trials: The most infamous large-scale mass trials occurred in the autonomous territories of the Catholic prince-bishops in Southern Germany, such as the Würzburg witch trials (1626–1631), which resulted in approximately 900 executions.
• Other Cases: Other prominent examples include the North Berwick witch trials (Scotland, 1590), the Pendle witch trials (England, 1612), and the Salem witch trials (North America, 1692).