This chapter analyzes papal pronouncements in matters of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Popes intervened typically in response to demands coming from local religious authorities involved in the repression of the “demonic arts.” In the early phase – from the 1320s to the 1430s – some papal decrees emphasized that magic was heretical and its practitioners were involved in a demonic conspiracy, giving thus an impulse to the outbreak of the witch hunt. Subsequently, the papacy’s support of witch hunters came close to an approval of the doctrine of diabolical witchcraft. In the final decades (the 1580s to the 1640s), popes issued sweeping condemnations of the entire spectrum of magical practices. Such decrees settled the Church’s accounts with astrology, and at the same time tasked the Roman Inquisition with a campaign to stamp out popular “superstitions,” which remained one of the Holy Office’s main objectives in the early modern era.

This chapter presents the main themes that emerge from a survey of the scholarly work that has been undertaken on the history of papal involvement with music. Seven centuries of papal pronouncements on music in the liturgy show a remarkable consistency of concerns, which could be summed up in the word “decorum.” Liturgical music must serve the Word, it must be solemn, it must be serious, it must not be there simply to be enjoyed, and it must not remind the congregation of secular matters. Yet it is striking how limited and how ineffective most papal decrees were. While popes consistently claimed global authority over all sorts of religious matters, only two issued decrees on music addressed to the entire Church. Even the papacy’s greatest contribution to the history of music, the creation of the plainchant repertory, was for the popes a local matter.

The chapter takes stock of the major trends in recent scholarship of medieval heresy and ecclesiastical repression, identifies promising research avenues, and provides an overview of the way in which the papacy confronted the perceived menace of heresy in the central Middle Ages, considering the representations of and responses to religious dissent displayed by the official Church alongside its own motifs and transformations. The implementation of anti-heresy measures are thus observed in light of the main historical developments of the papacy in the central centuries of the Middle Ages: the eleventh-century reform and its institutional legacy; the zenith of papal monarchy; and the Avignon papacy and its political and intellectual developments. In all these different contexts, variously permeated by the ideal of papal theocracy, the Holy See fashioned apt legal and theological responses intended to contain what was featured as an enduring peril threatening the Church and Christendom.