Witch hunts and gender-critical feminists

Socio, absolutely: you see this in histories of the Nazi period - those who take the line that these were 'ordinary men' who did terrible things against those who prefer to see them as deranged monsters. Sereny used to get a lot of criticism for supposedly humanizing her subjects. But I think that if we don't see them as recognizable we risk ignoring the capability many of us have for doing real evil (not the broomstick kind) through ignorance or weakness or fear. Personally, I think it's much more chilling that someone who loves their kids and can be kind could also commit horrific atrocities.

Yes, we call sex attackers "monsters" don't we. We dehumanise them. Men do it too. We, as humans, can't bear the thought that these terrible acts can be committed by our fathers, our brothers, our husbands, our uncles or our sons. But they are. We turn the despicable acts into something a monster does, we call them animals, things, beasts, perverts. Nobody wants to believe that these heinous acts can, and are, performed by people who will then go and buy the Sunday paper and do the crossword whilst watching the kids play on the trampoline.

Alice I think, out of everyone, Elizabeth had many excellent reasons for not getting married, not least of which is the example of husbandry her own father displayed to her. She was very little when her Mother was beheaded, so I doubt she had clear memories of her, but you can bet your life she was told all about it, and was given a very clear understanding that her life was Henry's, to do with as he wished. Why would an intelligent, educated and strong willed woman quite literally hand over the crown of England to whoever she married? I've no idea if he'd be crowned himself, or would be a consort, like Prince Philip, but even without being King, you can bet your life he'd be the one the nobles listened to and obeyed.

Give up absolute power, for something as piffly as a willy? Not on your nelly.

Sorry, something else that occurred!

In mediaeval times, belief in what witches looked like or what they could do varied from country to country. Natural magic and healing was bound up with Christianity - some monastic books on herbs and medicine etc read like incantations. As I mentioned, witchcraft began to assume the old tropes of heresy in the C15th and suddenly, at the end of that century, identikit witches straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum are found all over Europe and later in the US. Why?

A revolution in communication: the printing press. Kramer and Sprenger were best sellers all over Europe (like Dan Brown, but even more evil). I think we can see parallels with the new social media today. Ideas spread fast but so to do lies and misinformation. Also there is the exaggeration: a witch might not actually do or say anything but wicked intent is ascribed in a funny look or a mutter just as when a woman uses the wrong pronouns it becomes ‘literal violence’ and the perceived desire to eradicate individuals or ‘make’ them kill themselves. Of course men were more literate than women and controlled channels of communication but today we also see that Twitter etc tend to minimise threats against women and be more inclined to censored or ban then. Once you construct a narrative in which a group seeks to actively harm you (and absolutely, Rebecca, the use of emotive demonizing terms is key), you are absolved of responsibility for violence. It becomes 'self-defence'.

I think another comparison with witches is their use of a demonising term "terf" to describe people who disagree with them by as well. Witches weren't women they were "witches". We aren't women we are "terfs" It's less emotive to talk or drowning witches and thumping terfs than to drown and thump women.

Thank you, socio, that's a really interesting article!

I always think we forget just how dangerous birth was (I remember saying at various NCT classes that my birth plan was just to come out alive with healthy baby!). Whenever I see films etc trying to portray Elizabeth I as having loads of sex - because from a modern perspective why wouldn't she want to - I think we forget the intense fear that some women felt about sex and birth. Especially from her perspective: two stepmothers died in childbirth and her own mother plus Catherine H were killed accused of taking lovers.

And again, there are far too many men (especially in USA) looking to control access to contraception and abortion.

Alice that took me down a rabbit hole for a wee while. I'm guessing there wasn't much washing of any kind going on in the 1500s.

www.livescience.com/3210-childbirth-natural-deadly.html

Sociopath, yes, Jane died of puerperal fever. I always think of poor Mary Wollstonecraft who also died of sepsis after the doctor ripped out the placenta which had got stuck. He thought, of course, that he was saving her.

Couple of replies, sorry won't be as comprehensive as I'd like! I certainly don't want to down play the misogyny nor the element of fear associated with women and their knowledge.

Numbers: I always have a tendency to err on the side of caution but I agree that numbers are slippery and estimates are best guess to a certain extent. Personally, I tend to the 100k number, but this doesn't necessarily include those who died awaiting trial or if other related causes. Records are difficult as many are lost or incomplete so it's arguably low, but it's extrapolated from the evidence we have (and rounded up significantly - pretty much doubled!). What it does not alter, however, is the nature of this as an attack which was primarily targeted at women and informed by misogyny (for absolute completeness, I will mention that in Russia and Finland the majority of the accused were men - interesting, but doesn't affect the general 80-90% trend elsewhere!).

What you have to remember is that this was not sustained at the same level across time and place: fear of witches may have been constant but it tended to flare up suddenly in different localities and in deadly fashion. Early modern society simply couldn't have functioned if every village was constantly in the grip of a witch hunt. This is not to reduce the horror: in some areas the results were so extreme that communities were left eviscerated - two German villages had just one woman each left alive after a hunt. In Wurzberg alone 160 people were executed by the bishop between 1627-1629 in a campaign to Catholize the region. But, if nothing else, for practical reasons that level simply couldn't be maintained. Nor was it consistent across Europe: German speaking communities were especially high, Ireland was pretty much non-existent. Some countries had a much more limited period of attacks and punishment differed: in Germany you were more likely to be executed, in other places, like Italy, imprisonment or flogging were more common.

Dates: Of course it's impossible to draw a line and determine a start and end point - ideas develop at different rates and in different places. There was a papal bull of 1326 which authorized inquisitorial power against witches and yes, there are earlier trials in which the concept of malefic is raised, for example cases in Switzerland between 1397-1406. Importantly, though, the concept of witchcraft here was regarded as element of heresy. This may seem like I'm making unnecessary distinctions, but it's important as what we see is a shift in the focus of the inquisition from heretics and other persecuted groups like the Jews to witches. In 1450 Vineti writes Tractus contra Daemonum Invocatores which paints witchcraft as a new heresy. The ideas about night meetings, sexual deviance, cannibalism, child murder etc are all directly borrowed from the old accusations levelled at Jews and heretics. So whereas witchcraft allegations had formed a lurid element of the charge sheet against the Templars, for example, it gradually becomes the main event and, crucially, it shifts the focus onto women. Malleus Maleficarum and, as bloodmagic mentioned, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus are both written in the 1480s and cement the notion of witchcraft as a female practice. The latter is a papal bull of 1484 and its purpose was to encourage witch hunting in the German regions. It appears to have been issued after a request from Kramer (author of MM) to back up his campaign. That the inquisitor sought this is seen as evidence that the authorities at this stage were not so keen to comply as they would later become.

Women's work / knowledge: I think, perhaps, I'm trying to counter the notion that women were killed primarily for their knowledge and skill etc rather than just for being women. Partly because there were far more murdered women than just ones with healing skills. But cunning women or healers were obviously at risk - perhaps that is why so many midwives were happy to offer services in examining the accused, to deflect attention. Of course, that didn't necessarily save them either, especially if they were happy to claim some magical power. The benandanti in Italy claimed their power protected children from the witches who would snatch them from cradles but were accused of using the evil eye in any case. I suppose my point would be that much of this was concocted in the imaginations of men who saw women as conspiring against them and they used as a basis something that directly related to female experience (childbirth etc) and excluded them. The attack would naturally affect those who claimed this knowledge but it went so much wider.

I would, however, take issue with the comment that women were automatically at risk if their child died. In an era of high infant mortality, there were few families untouched by death. At times of high panic this might just be true, but what we frequently see in trials is the fears and suspicions which have built over many years erupting when the accused is finally arraigned. Of course, this does not negate the point that women would accuse others to save themselves and it is horrific how many young children were swept up and implicated with their mothers but we should remember that there were many women who did genuinely believe that they were harmed by a neighbour. The need to blame is a strong human impulse (see parents who try to persue impossible cures for sick children and attack doctors if they think they are blocking them. Or who blame vaccines. It's irrational, but perhaps understandable especially where there is incomplete knowledge). This doesn't reduce the aspect of patriarchal oppression - after all, this was what society conditioned them to believe.

During the C16th there was a period of inflation and population growth. To generalize, women suffered more economically than men and were more vulnerable to attacks simply for being poor. A woman who cursed you if you didn't give her money or sacked her was first on the list if your cow sickened. Your guilt was assuaged by the knowledge she was an evil witch. The schism in religion along with economic turbulence had also thrown up some pretty strange offshoots and some rather "end of days" style hysteria. Order was patriarchal, so if you were worried about it being upended, women were a natural enemy.

Of course, the vast majority of confessions were secured by torture or by an attempt to save their skin, but there were occasions where that was not the case and I find that psychology interesting.

BTW, the poor 10 year old son of the Pappenheimers watched his parents die. His comments which read like the hysterical outbursts of a traumatised child trying to detach from the horror was used to convict him and he was burnt some weeks later.

Horrific, isn't it? Basically they were "breeding sows" and servants.

The study I mentioned (Norfolk, Suffolk?) looked at prosperous farmers, as I recall, in the period when what were sometimes called man midwives became fashionable. They used graveyards and basically counted the number of their wives and how old they were when they died. A man whose wife died would typically remarry shortly afterwards, either because he needed an heir or needed a wife to care for the DC he already had. The number of women who died in childbirth was horrifying.

I'm not very well educated on this, but I do have a bit of a passion for the Tudor period (note - I'm definitely not an academic) and especially the fates of women, both noble and poor, during this time. I devour books and documentaries and, of course, fictional accounts, and came to the realisation, years ago, that Jane Seymour probably only died because of poor hygiene in her birth chamber. I believe both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were attended to by midwives and had, as far as I know, fairly standard births, without any health issues for the women, although of course not all their babies survived or went full term (normal, at that time I should think).

By the time Jane was pregnant, Fat Henry was so desperate to have a son delivered safely that he insisted doctors (male) attended Jane. Of course, she, of all his wives, delivered the longed for son, but died of "childbed fever" within a week or so. That it has a name probably means there were general cleanliness issues around childbirth at the time, but a noble woman, especially the Queen, shouldn't have been exposed to the kinds of germs that a butcher's wife would have been. She was the Queen.

I can't help but wonder if she'd have lived, and maybe had more healthy babies, had women been allowed to care for her?

Prawn, you are absolutely right. The doctors would come from an operation or even a dissection and assist at a birth. It's stomach churning. They also introduced a lot of new implements like forceps which were also hygienic and often unnecessary and, yes, they wanted women to lie down.

Prawn, the higher survival rates for midwife attended births as opposed to doctor attended is discussed in the excellent little book, Midwives And Medical Men.

It also posits that for the rich, the survival of the child was utmost, and therefore the women were sacrificed by the male doctors where need be for the good of the husband and his line.

...but when I think of the birthing chair - designed for women and used forever- versus being placed in stirrups - designed more for the men who are at the end of the bed - there is something that feels oddly symbolic about the whole thing.

Reading that made me think of the ‘male gaze’. Woman as object to be placed in the surroundings - not a living, breathing or moving person.

These stories are heartbreaking. Men really sank to the depths in their wish to obliterate and erase women. It's too much sometimes, reading and hearing about men's barbaric treatment of women. And men are still at it. They learn NOTHING.

This thread is one of the reasons why I love the FWR boards. Fascinating discussion by eloquent, informed women.
The village I lived in as a teenager is apparently reasonably well known for its witch trial of an elderly woman and her family. The fact that three witches on broomsticks is the logo of the village school suggests that for many this is considered ancient history, but as we know from the posts of heresy Alice and bloodmagic there are worrying present day parallels. For anyone interested in the trial I mentioned, you can read an account of it here:
www.tellinghistory.co.uk/resources/WitchesOfWarboys.pdf

and if you want some witch related fiction try Weird Sister by Kate Pullinger, set in a fictionalised version of the village and featuring the historical events of Alice and Agnes Samuel as a backdrop to modern day events.

Not about witchcraft, but about midwives:

I'm interested in the history of medicine, and remember reading many years ago that the emergence of male doctors led to a striking increase in maternal death among wealthier families because, unlike midwives, doctors at the time would take no care over cleanliness. A doctor would go from an amputation to a delivery without even changing his coat. What was called puerperal fever was rife - and caused by lack of hygiene.

Ordinary people couldn't afford the doctor, lucky for them. But a wealthy man might easily marry three times, having lost two to childbirth. I seem to recall an article that analysed this phenomenon in one of the Eastern counties - Norfolk?

This is a fascinating thread (disturbing and upsetting, but fascinating).

the family were subjected to a grotesque public execution in the course of which Anna's breasts were sliced off and then rubbed into the mouths of her sons in a grim parody of breastfeeding

There's a reference to something similar to this in the histories of Roman writer Dio Cassius. Writing much later than the events he describes, he 'records' that during the Boudiccan rebellion again the Roman incomers in AD 60, when the rebels destroyed Colchester they took women colonists and skewered them lengthways and cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths.

True or not? This is the word of later Dio, not the earlier Tacitus. Gruesome druidic ritual, or later Roman projection? Whatever, there's possibly a narrative there of mutilation and annihilation of the female body and function, as particular punishment and retribution. The grim parody of breasts in mouths is striking.

Adding my thanks for such an interesting and informative thread. And great holiday reading material :)

Thank you for this very interesting thread.

I do not think it was an accident that there is a feminist theory that midwives (those specialists of the female body) allegedly were over-represented in being accused of witchcraft.

It's not just a feminist theory, the most you look into it the more obvious it becomes. It might not be accepted by some historians, because they're mostly men and almost all are reading from a patriarchal view point. I've been reading Eve's Herbs, which goes through the vast body of evidence we have that women have had access to contraceptive since ancient times, and that that knowledge was systematically erased during the middle ages and early modern period, by targeting and killing midwives and other women of knowledge. There were other motivations too, (the church reasserting its power after the schism and needing an easy target, for example) but erasing women's cultural knowledge was a big one.

The "Summis desiderantes affectibus", the first official document from the church about witches says that they "have slain infants yet in the mother's womb...they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving" among a bunch of other stuff.

By around the 1600s the whole thing had spun completely out of control and anyone and everyone was at risk, but it's hard to deny that the original targets were women with specific knowledge of the female body.

One of the ways women were identified as witches, known as 'sevenfold witchcraft', witches would:

-Practice fornication and adultery
-Obstruct the generative act by rendering men impotent
-Perform castration and sterilization
-engage in bestiality and homosexuality
-Destroy the generative force in women
-Procure abortion
-Offer children to devils.

All of those things are related to women controlling their own fertility, and 4 of them are directly talking about contraceptive methods. That is what the church hated and tried to burn out of us. Every time you see an official statement from the church about witches from the time, look for it, it's always there. Witches have sex with the devil, they use the devil to kill babies, they give the babies to the devil, they make men impotent, they use magic to make women sterile. All that stuff about flying around or summoning demons is just a distraction. The same as when Donald Trump says mexicans are rapists, it's not actually *true, he doesn't believe it, and none of his followers actually believe it, it's just a convenient excuse for targeting a group they already hate.

Alice, I respectfully disagree about some of what you've said. The first witch trials were back in the 1400s. It ramped up in the 1600s but it had already been going for quite some time before that.

The low estimates of witch burnings (less than 100,000) usually takes into account only those that happened in the late 1500s and onwards, and only the official ones. Larger estimates account for the earlier ones, the missing records, and the likelihood of 'unofficial' witch trials by small communities that never made it on to the official register. It probably wasn't millions, as some people say, but a half a million is not unlikely to some historians. I mean, take your lower estimate of 50,000. The witch trials took place over about 300 years total, that's an average of about 167 women a year for the whole of Europe. We know there were some individual towns were they killed hundreds of women in a year. We know of some towns where every women was killed except one. 50,000 just doesn't make sense.

It's true that the majority of the people accused were women, and also that when men were accused they were far more likely to be let go, or punished by banishment rather than burning alive. So same old shit basically.

"a bereaved mother, for example, trying to blame someone for the death of a baby." - you've missed over the fact that a woman who miscarried or lost a baby was almost automatically suspected of being a witch and killing her baby. She was pushed to either confess, or accuse someone else. Often the midwife was convenient, as only the midwife and the mother were in the room during the birth - it had to be one of them, surely? If accused it was on the mother to somehow prove that the baby died of natural courses, or to accuse the 'real' culprit.

England the UK didn't get swept up to the same extent that mainland Europe did, and they were less sexist about it, but mainland Europe was focused on women, and midwives.

On women accusing other women - they were forced to do that quite a lot. It was an act of self preservation. And the confessions were often brought about by torture too, not by a desire to be seen as powerful. I have read that it was common practice to tie a woman to a stake and give her the option; if you confess, and name your fellow witches, we'll slit your throat and you can die relatively quickly. Otherwise, you will burn alive while your family watches. Fuck me, how do you even make that choice? Your kids will either be officially the children of a witch, or watch their mother burn alive.

suppressedhistories.net/ has a lot of good information for further reading.

There's another layer, on top of the witch hunt: the parallels with religious and cultural zealots.

Trans ideology relies on faith and concepts like an inner soul, spirit, whatever. Transgressions (see what I did there?) are policed and punished.