and a trial with dubious legality. However, this law was commonly ignored, and local courts continued to arrest, trial and execute people for sorcery so much that the law had to be repeated without effect several times until 1713. The Central High Court interrupted witch trials in local courts and stopped executions on several occasions, such as in Łęczyca 1702 and Przemyśl 1756. The most intense period of the Polish witch hunt took place in a period in which Poland was pillaged and devastated by war, rebellions, famine and plague, and the public was in search of explanations for what was commonly viewed as an apocalyptic time for Poland. The typical Polish witch trial was conducted in a rural village or a small town against a woman accused by her neighbors for having used magic to cause suffering and harm to humans, animals, property and entire villages in a period of some catastrophe. The peasantry seldom included accusations about a Pact with Satan and participation in a Witches' Sabbath, but their accusation was transformed to this interpretation by the authorities by the Catholic church and local courts, in order to make the case fit the description of Christian demonology witchcraft handbooks. In Poland, the majority of those executed for sorcery were women: of 116 executed in Wielkopolska and Kujawy between 1624 and 1700, only five were men. An example of a rural trial which culminated in a conviction for witchcraft was the one in Kasina Wielka, in 1634. The end The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the first countries in which persecution for sorcery became illegal. In 1768, a law reform mandated that all witchcraft cases were to be transformed to the national high court, which was followed by the abolition of the torture and death penalty for witchcraft by the Sejm on 23 October 1776. However, these laws were also commonly ignored by the local courts who continued to conduct witch trials, and the ban against witch trials could not be enforced in Poland. A number of witch trials attracted attention in Poland during the second half of the 18th century when witch trials were formally banned. One trial that attracted attention was the one against Franciszka Gołębiewska of Gostyń in 1773, where the accused was tortured to death; in 1786 a combined witch- and murder trial took place in Ulanow, and in 1790, a married couple, Maciej and