This is an article I found and Clerwitch and Meastro asked me to make a thread about it. It's lengthy, so I am posting it in the way that makes most sense:

Here is an article written by Jenny Gibbons. She has an MA in medieval history and minored in the history of the witchcraft trials. She’s a solitary witch, and her essays have appeared in Pan-Gaia, Reclaiming Quarterly, Green Egg, Enchante, and The Pomegranate.

A New History Of Witchcraft
By Jenny Gibbons

History Changes. Or rather, our knowledge of the past changes. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, historians began to study the Witch-trial records. Prior to this time, our knowledge of the persecution of Witches was mainly based on Witch-hunting propaganda: manuals, sermons, and other dogmatic information. Historians have studied a handful of trial records from larger, more infamous cases, but it was not until about twenty years ago that scholars began to compile serious databases of every known witch trial. Through their efforts, a wealth of new information was found. Today, we can list approximately thirty times as many Witch trials as we could twenty years ago. This new evidence has shown us that almost everything we thought about Witch hunting was wrong. For the first time n history we have a good idea what the average trial and the average Witch looked like.
In the past, people tended to see the burning times as a dualistic fairy tale. There were good guys(Witches and Pagans and Wise Women), and there were bad guys(the Inquisition, Witch-hunters, male doctors). The bad guys were said to have done awful things to the good guys. The truth actually, is a bit more complicated and uncomfortable: that is every section of society bears some of the blame. No one group committed all the horrors; no-one can claim their hands were clean. Not even traditional Witches.
For many of us Witches that’s a hard pill to swallow. But when we turn a blind eye to the truth simply because it’s painful, we lose the lessons that history can teach us. And the people who suffered through the burning times deserve better.
Here is a short list exposing some of the formerly unknown truths about what some of the involved groups did and did not do during the burning times.