Summary
For three centuries of early modern European history, diverse societies were consumed by a panic over alleged witches in their midst. Witch-hunts, especially in Central Europe, resulted in the trial, torture, and execution of tens of thousands of victims, about three-quarters of whom were women. Arguably, neither before nor since have adult European women been selectively targeted for such largescale atrocities.
The background
The witch-hunts of early modern Europe took place against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and religious transformation. As we will see in the modern-day case-studies below, such generalized stress -- including the prevalence of epidemics and natural disasters -- is nearly always central to outbreaks of mass hysteria of this type. Jenny Gibbons' analysis ties the witch-hunts to other "panics" in early modern Europe:
Traditional [tolerant] attitudes towards witchcraft began to change in the 14th century, at the very end of the Middle Ages. ... Early 14th century central Europe was seized by a series of rumor-panics. Some malign conspiracy (Jews and lepers, Moslems, or Jews and witches) was attempting to destroy the Christian kingdoms through magick and poison. After the terrible devastation caused by the Black Death [bubonic plague] (1347-1349), these rumors increased in intensity and focused primarily on witches and "plague-spreaders." Witchcraft cases increased slowly but steadily from the 14th-15th century. The first mass trials appeared in the 15th century. At the beginning of the 16th century, as the first shock-waves from the Reformation hit, the number of witch trials actually dropped. Then, around 1550, the persecution skyrocketed. What we think of as "the Burning Times" -- the crazes, panics, and mass hysteria -- largely occurred in one century, from 1550-1650. In the 17th century, the Great Hunt passed nearly as suddenly as it had arisen. Trials dropped sharply after 1650 and disappeared completely by the end of the 18th century. (Gibbons, "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt".)
Gibbons' allusion to the Reformation reminds us that the clash between institutional Catholicism and emergent Protestantism contributed to the collapse of a stable world-view, which eventually led to panic and hyper-suspiciousness on the part of Catholic and Protestant authorities alike. Writes Nachman Ben-Yehuda, "This helps us understand why only the most rapidly developing countries, where the Catholic church was weakest, experienced a virulent witch craze (i.e., Germany, France, Switzerland). Where the Catholic church was strong (Spain, Italy, Portugal) hardly any witch craze occurred ... the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its very existence and legitimacy." But Ben-Yehuda adds that "Protestants persecuted witches with almost the same zeal as the Catholics ... Protestants and Catholics alike felt threatened." It is notable that the witch-hunts lost most of their momentum with the end of the Thirty Years War (Peace of Westphalia, 1648), which "gave official recognition and legitimacy to religious pluralism." (Ben-Yehuda, "The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective," American Journal of Sociology, 86: 1 [July 1980], pp. 15, 23.)
The gendercide
The witch-hunts waxed and waned for nearly three centuries, with great variations in time and space. "The rate of witch hunting varied dramatically throughout Europe, ranging from a high of 26,000 deaths in Germany to a low of 4 in Ireland." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)
Despite the involvement of church authorities, "The vast majority of witches were condemned by secular courts," with local courts especially noted for their persecutory zeal (Gibbons, Recent Developments). The standard procedure in most countries was for accused witches to be brought before investigating tribunals and interrogated. In some parts of Europe (e.g., England), torture was rarely used; but where the witch-hunts were most intensive, it was a standard feature of the interrogations. Obviously, a large majority of accused who "confessed" to witchcraft did so as a result of the brutal tortures to which they were exposed. About half of all convicted witches were given sentences short of execution. The unluckier half were generally killed in public, often en masse, by hanging or burning.
Being female hardly guaranteed that one would be suspected or accused of witchcraft. As Steven Katz notes, "statistical evidence ... makes clear that over 99.9-plus percent of all women who lived during the three centuries of the witch craze were not harmed directly by the police arm of either the state or the church, though both had the power to do so had the elites that controlled them so desired." (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, p. 503.) Nor were all accused witches female. Nonetheless, the witch-hunts can be viewed as a case of "genderized mass murder," according to Katz (p. 503). He adds: "the overall evidence makes plain that the growth -- the panic -- in the witch craze was inseparable from the stigmatization of women. ... Historically, the most salient manifestation of the unreserved belief in female power and female evil is evidenced in the tight, recurrent, by-now nearly instinctive association of women and witchcraft. Though there were male witches, when the witch craze accelerated and became a mass phenomenon after 1500 its main targets, its main victims, were female witches. Indeed, one strongly suspects that the development of witch-hunting into a mass hysteria only became possible when directed primarily at women." (The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, p. 433 [n. 1], 436.) Katz draws out the depths of this misogyny through a comparison with anti-semitism:
The medieval conception of women shares much with the
corresponding medieval conception of Jews. In both cases, a perennial
attribution of secret, bountiful, malicious "power," is made. Women are
anathematized and cast as witches because of the enduring grotesque fears they
generate in respect of their putative abilities to control men and thereby
coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society. Whatever the
social and psychological determinants operative in this abiding obsession,
there can be no denying the consequential reality of such anxiety in medieval
Christendom. Linked to theological traditions of Eve and Lilith, women are
perceived as embodiments of inexhaustible negativity. Though not quite
quasi-literal incarnations of the Devil as were Jews, women are, rather, their
ontological "first cousins" who, like the Jews, emerge from the "left" or
sinister side of being. (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol.
I, p. 435.)
Manuscript of the Malleus maleficarum,
"the most
influential and widely used handbook on
witchcraft."
The
classic evocation of this deranged misogyny is the Malleus maleficarum
(The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic inquisition authorities in
1485-86. "All wickedness," write the authors, "is but little to the wickedness
of a woman. ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable
punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity,
domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair
colours. ... Women are by nature instruments of Satan -- they are by nature
carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation." (Quoted in Katz,
The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, pp. 438-39.) "The importance
of the Malleus cannot be overstated," argues Ben-Yehuda:
It was to become the most influential and widely used handbook on
witchcraft. ... Its enormous influence was practically guaranteed, owing not
only to its authoritative appearance but also to its extremely wide
distribution. It was one of the first books to be printed on the recently
invented printing press and appeared in no fewer than 20 editions. ... The
moral backing had been provided for a horrible, endless march of suffering,
torture, and human disgrace inflicted on thousands of women. (Ben-Yehuda, "The
European Witch Craze," p. 11.)
An elderly witch is depicted feeding her satanic
"familiars" (woodcut, 1579).
Many scholars have argued that it was the women who seemed
most independent from patriarchal norms -- especially elderly ones living
outside the parameters of the patriarchal family -- who were most vulnerable to
accusations of witchcraft. "The limited data we have regarding the age of
witches ... shows a solid majority of witches were older than 50, which in the
early modern period was considered to be a much more advanced age than today."
(Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, p. 129.) "The
reason for this strong correlation seems clear," writes Katz: "these women,
particularly older women who had never given birth and now were beyond giving
birth, comprised the female group most difficult to assimilate, to comprehend,
within the regulative late medieval social matrix, organized, as it was, around
the family unit." (The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, pp.
468-69.) As more women than men tended to survive into a dependent old age, they
could also be seen disproportionately as a burden by neighbors: "The woman who
was labeled a witch wanted things for herself or her household from her
neighbors, but she had little to offer in return to those who were not much
better off than she. Increasingly resented as an economic burden, she was also
perceived by her neighbors to be the locus of a dangerous envy and verbal
violence." (Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal
Power in Early Modern England, p. 65.)
One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)
Condemned female witches are burned at the
stake.
Overall, approximately 75 to 80 percent of those accused and
convicted of witchcraft in early modern Europe were female. Accordingly,
Christina Larner's "identification of the relationship of witch-hunting to
woman-hunting" seems well-grounded, as does her conclusion that the witch-hunts
were "sex-related" if not "sex-specific." "This does not mean that simple overt
sex war is treated as a satisfactory explanation for witch-hunting, or that the
... men who were accused are not to be taken into account." Rather, "it means
that the fact that the accused were overwhelmingly female should form a major
part of any analysis." (Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in
Scotland, p. 3.)
Male "witches"
Robin Briggs calculates that 20 to 25 percent of
Europeans executed for witchcraft between the 14th and 17th centuries were male.
Regional variations are again notable. France was "a fascinating exception to
the wider pattern, for over much of the country witchcraft seems to have had no
obvious link with gender at all. Of nearly 1,300 witches whose cases went to the
parlement of Paris on appeal, just over half were men. ... The great
majority of the men accused were poor peasants and artisans, a fairly
representative sample of the ordinary population." Briggs adds:
How many died?
"The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of
the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll," notes Jenny Gibbons. She
points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research
into trial records began, "were almost 100% pure speculation." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)
"On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements," writes Robin
Briggs, "a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million
women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See,
e.g., the witch-hunt documentary "The Burning
Times".] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most
reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and
1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per
cent were men." Briggs adds that "these figures are chilling enough, but they
have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital
punishments in European history." (Briggs, Witches &
Neighbours, p. 8.)
Brian Levack's book The Witch-Hunt in Early
Modern Europe arrives at roughly similar conclusions. Levack "surveyed
regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials.
Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have
evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcomes. On average,
48% of trials ended in an execution, [and] therefore he estimated 60,000 witches
died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the
center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches." (Gibbons, Recent
Developments.)
Nonetheless, in the view of Gendercide Watch, even
such a reduced and diffused death-toll should be considered "gendercidal," in
that it inflicted mass gender-selective killing on European women. Such killing
does not need to be totalizing, either in its ambitions or its impact, to meet
the definitions of gendercide and genocide that we use. Indeed, it is arguable
that at no other time in European history have adult women been targeted
selectively, on such a scale, for torture and annihilation.
Who was responsible?
The medieval witch-hunts have long been depicted as
part of a "war against women" conducted exclusively or overwhelmingly by men,
especially those in positions of central authority. Deborah Willis notes that
"more polemical" feminist accounts "are likely to portray the witch as a heroic
protofeminist resisting patriarchal oppression and a wholly innocent victim of a
male-authored reign of terror designed to keep women in their place." (Willis,
Malevolent Nurture, p. 12.)
In fact, the stigmatizing, victimizing, and
murdering of accused "witches" is more accurately seen as a collaborative
enterprise between men and women at the local level. "The historical record
suggests that both men and women found it easiest to fix these fantasies [of
witchcraft], and turn them into horrible reality, when they were attached to
women. It is really crucial to understand that misogyny in this sense was not
reserved to men alone, but could be just as intense among women." Most of the
accusations originated in "conflicts [that] normally opposed one woman to
another, with men liable to become involved only at a later stage as ancillaries
to the original dispute." Briggs adds that "most informal accusations were made
by women against other women, ... [and only] leaked slowly across to the men who
controlled the political structures of local society." At the trial level, his
research on the French province of Lorraine found that
Deborah Willis's study of "Witch-Hunting and
Maternal Power in Early Modern England" similarly finds it "clear ... that women
were actively involved in making witchcraft accusations against their female
neighbours":
These comments and data serve as a reminder that
gendercide against women may be initiated and perpetrated, substantially or
predominantly, by "other women," just as gendercide against men is carried out
overwhelmingly by "other men." The case of female
infanticide can also be cited in this regard. Patriarchal power,
however, was ubiquitous at all later stages of witchcraft proceedings. Men were
exclusively the prosecutors, judges, jailers, and executioners -- of women and
men alike -- in Europe's emerging modern legal system.
There are some extreme cases in peripheral regions of Europe, with
men accounting for 90 percent of the accused in Iceland, 60 percent in Estonia
and nearly 50 per cent in Finland. On the other hand, there are regions where
90 per cent or more of known witches were women; these include Hungary,
Denmark and England. The fact that many recent writers on the subject have
relied on English and north American evidence has probably encouraged an error
of perspective here, with the overwhelming predominance of female suspects in
these areas (also characterized by low rates of persecution) being assumed to
be typical. Nor is it the case that the courts treated male suspects more
favourably; the conviction rates are usually much the same for both sexes.
(Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of
European Witchcraft, pp. 260-61.)
women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up
43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30
per cent of them. ... A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit
by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around
38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the
Restoration. ... It appears that women were active in building up reputations
by gossip, deploying counter-magic and accusing suspects; crystallization into
formal prosecution, however, needed the intervention of men, preferably of
fairly high status in the community." (Briggs, Witches &
Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)
[Alan] Macfarlane finds that as many women as men informed against
witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who
believed they had been bewitched were female. The number of witchcraft
quarrels that began between women may actually have been higher; in some
cases, it appears that the husband as "head of household" came forward to make
statements on behalf of his wife, although the central quarrel had taken place
between her and another woman. ... It may, then, be misleading to equate
"informants" with "accusers": the person who gave a statement to authorities
was not necessarily the person directly quarreling with the witch. Other
studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton's
examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action
against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases.
... J.A. Sharpe also notes the prevalence of women as accusers in
seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that "on a village level
witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's
quarrels." To a considerable extent, then, village-level witch-hunting was
women's work. (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp.
35-36.)
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