International Trends: The Witch "She"/tghe Historian "He"

International Trends: The Witch

"She"/the Historian "He"

Elspeth Whitney

Gender is a central issue to the European witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. The connection of women to the Devil in the witch-hunts is an attempt to

enclose women not controlled by men.

The European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of

those events, like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which is so

complex and resonant that its historiography has almost become a field in

itself. Once dismissed as an inexplicable outbreak of mass hysteria unworthy

of serious scholarly attention, the witch-hunt is now more often seen as a

central event in the formation of early modern Europe which illuminates

larger social and cultural issues. Since Hugh Trevor-Roper inaugurated

contemporary scholarship on the subject in 1967, the hunt has come to

provide for many scholars a useful focus for analysis of, among other

things, the shifting interactions of high and popular culture, the emergence

of the modern state or a more "individualistic" ethos, the expansion of

bureaucratic elites and the impact of newly empowered "experts," the

magistrate and the priest, on village life. Curiously, however, there has

been relatively little attention paid as yet to exploring the relationship

between the witch-hunts and issues relating to gender, in particular the

question of why witches were women. Although discussions of this topic have

recently (since the late 1980s) become more common, this area of inquiry and

others related to gender and the hunts remain surprisingly undeveloped. In

the present essay I would like to examine the current state of scholarship

on gender and the hunts and suggest some directions for further work.

Gender is clearly central in some way to the witch-hunts. That the vast

majority of witches were women has been a commonplace of modern research as

much as it was to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on

demonology. Whether or not we wish to characterize witch-hunting simply as

"woman-hunting," or to emphasize that accused witches were most often a

particular type of woman, it remains clear that the witch was seen as

inverting not only the natural order in general but specifically the image

of the "good woman." Yet the questions "why were witches women?" or its

converse, "why were women witches?" have received short shrift among

historians of the European witch hunts.(1) While virtually every other

aspect of the hunts has been debated, the central element that witches were

believed to be women, has remained, for most scholars, unproblematic.

Explicitly or implicitly it is assumed that a sort of timeless, "natural"

misogyny present in Western culture can adequately explain why the

collective image of the witch was that of an ill-tempered, older woman.

Conversely, it is argued that misogyny has been so permanent a

characteristic of Western culture that it cannot be considered the cause of

so specific an event as the witch-hunts. Yet leaving the question there in

fact does little to explain why women were attacked in this way at this

time. Nor does it help to illuminate the specific nature of witch beliefs

and witch practices, even paradoxically the oft-repeated observation that

some witches were male.

The extent to which gender has "fallen out" as a category of analysis among

the majority of historians of the witch-hunts is quite startling. Despite

the use of sophisticated methodologies borrowed from anthropology,

sociology, and folkloric studies, the main lines of interpretation of the

hunts have been constructed largely outside of work in women's history or

gender studies. It is unlikely today to find such egregious stereotypical

remarks as that of Trevor-Roper, who in 1967 described folk witch beliefs as

"the mental rubbish of peasant credulity and feminine hysteria," or Julio

Caro Baroja's suggestion that "a woman usually becomes a witch after the

initial failure of her life as a woman, after frustrated or illegitimate

love affairs have left her with a sense of impotence or disgrace."(2)

Nevertheless, the bulk of published research on the European hunts at the

present time either ignores gender or, even while taking note of the

relevance of women's history and feminist analysis, tends to minimize its

importance.

The absence of a genuine gender analysis in "mainstream" witch hunts studies

is the more surprising in that much of this work in other ways reflects the

increasing emphasis of historians on history "from below." One of the first

areas to receive attention in the early 1970s, for example, was the

disentanglement of folk beliefs from the more readily accessible and known

beliefs of the political and cultural elite and the ways in which

witch-beliefs and accusations functioned on the village level. Keith Thomas

and Alan Macfarlane early suggested that witch accusations served as a

channeling mechanism for economic stresses, in particular the erosion of

traditional charitable practices within the village and the consequent

dislocation of attitudes toward the poorest and most marginal members of the

community.(3) Neither, however, considered that the tensions between "elite"

and "popular" culture might also reflect a dynamic between a male-dominated

official culture and a female-dominated family and folk culture; instead,

village conflicts were considered exclusively from the perspective of class

and social stratification. Keith Thomas, for example, claims without further

discussion that witches were often women, especially widows, not because the

trials represented a "war between the sexes," but because of women's

economic dependence caused by decline in customary manorial support of the

elderly.(4) Similarly, Alan Macfarlane notes that witches were usually women

but concludes that "there

does not

seem to have been any marked sexual element in Essex witchcraft" because

women were also more slightly likely to be victims.(5) Other historians have

similarily painted a "gender-neutral" picture of witch beliefs and

witch-hunting or simply ignored gender altogether. Richard Kieckhefer, whose

work did much to disentangle popular and elite notions of witchcraft, takes

little note of gender beyond saying that roughly two-thirds of the accused

during the period from 1300 to 1500 were women.(6) Gustav Henningsen's

monumental and otherwise sensitive study of Basque witchcraft lists

"wizards" but not "women" in the index and analyzes his data by age but not

by sex. He characterizes two groups of people as typically accused of being

witches -- first, the weakest members of the community, including beggars,

cripples, widows, the very old and orphans, and second, "those who had

rejected the moral order of society: fawning, envious, thieving, aggressive,

spiteful, promiscuous and odd people; in fact, all who were in any way

unattractive," while taking no note of the gender implications of his chosen

adjectives.(7) Norman Cohn similarly notes without comment that peasants who

almost always accused women, rather than men, of maleficia were simply

following the "age-old, indeed archetypal" image of the witch as female,

singling out individual women because they were old, ugly, or

bad-tempered.(8)

Examples could be multiplied. The introduction to Witchcraft in Europe

1100-1700: A Documentary History, edited by Alan Kors and Edward Peters and

first published in 1972, surveys the "problem of witchcraft" without

discussing why the majority of witches were women.(9) Richard A. Horsely in

"Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch

Trials," again focuses on class rather than gender as decisive in the

dynamics of the witch-hunts and accepts the categorization of the "wise

woman" as deviant without question.(10)

Even when mainstream historians of the hunts have made a point of the fact

that most accused witches were women, they have tended to undercut this

observation by an underlying ambivalence. Erik Midelfort's work, for

example, focused on the dynamics of the trials as spreading circles of

"panics," catching up both magistrates and the local populace in a frenzy of

denunciations. He makes an important observation by showing that in the

trials he studied, individuals outside the stereotype of the "old hag" as

witch (that is, men, young women, children, and the wealthy) were only

accused during the largest of the hunts in which the dynamics of panic took

on their own inner momentum.(11) He also insightfully looks to demographic

change as a possible factor in the witch-hunts, citing the presence of

relatively large numbers of unmarried women as a plausible explanation of

the witch-hunts. Yet he somewhat lamely concludes that "women seemed also to

provoke somehow an intense misogyny at times" and argues that women

attracted to themselves the scapegoating mechanism which resulted in their

widespread executions.(12) Similarily, G. R. Quaife, who devotes two

chapters to the topic of "gender, sex and misogyny" in his survey of the

hunts, suggests that gender was not the most important element in the

witch-hunts, or, perhaps, not a factor at all: "Misogyny was the negative

side of man's attitude to women and in most cases did not dominate."(13)

Older women rather were accused of witchcraft because of their economic

vulnerability and because they were liable to senility, depression, or

both.(14)

Other scholars have taken the question of gender and the hunts more

seriously but largely failed to pursue the issue in depth. E. William Monter

as early as 1972 suggested that more attention be paid to the question of

why witches were women.(15) In his later book, Witchcraft in France and

Switzerland (1976), he argued that witchcraft accusations could best be

understood as projections of patriarchal social fears onto atypical women,

that is, those who lived apart from the direct male control of husbands or

fathers and were therefore defenseless, isolated, and unable to revenge

themselves by the more normal means of physical violence or recourse to law

courts.(16) He also proposed a link between the witch trials and increased

prosecution of young, single women for infanticide in the early modern

period but had little to suggest about why this should be so.(17)

Christina Lamer pushed the analysis of gender as a factor in the hunts

considerably further but also stopped short of making gender a central

element in her analysis. Lamer, one of the prime architects of the view that

witch-hunting was intimately linked to the rise of the modern nation-state,

argued persuasively that the development of rival and mutually exclusive

forms of Christianity meant that in the period of witch-hunting Christianity

became a political ideology in a new way: religious deviance became the

equivalent of treason and the prosecution of witches, whose pact with the

Devil therefore represented the ultimate betrayal, became in Larner's words,

"a peculiarly economical way of attacking deviance."(18) Among scholars of

the hunts, Lamer was the first to provide at least a partial theoretical

framework drawn from the insights of women's history to a consideration of

gender. She points out, for example, that the witch-hunts, as well as early

modern infanticide trials, constituted the first European criminalization of

women and the fact that some women accused others only confirms the

impression that the stereotype of the witch worked to reinforce patriarchal

norms of femininity. Yet Larner, having raised the question of whether

witch-hunting was women-hunting, concludes that it was not and does not

explore links between gender, power, and political authority.(19)

Following Larner's general line of approach, Robert Muchembled has

characterized witch-hunting as not so much the product of religious beliefs

on either the part of the accused or the accusers, as an aspect of a

political movement tied to the increasing centralization and

bureaucratization of the modern state-system. Muchembled suggests, for

example, that "witch-hunting ... is only one aspect of the penetration and

opening-up of the countryside. The witch gives way to the priest, and

private vengeance to public order; the authorities invade the heart of the

village."(20) Muchembled's "acculturation model," which suggests that some

local inhabitants of the village found the new standards of behavior a

useful tool against others in the community, offers the advantage of

suggesting a link between the state-initiated witch trials and accusations

of witchcraft by neighbors against neighbors.(21) Muchembled, who sees the

witch-hunts in France as part of a much wider social movement to substitute

official law and order for traditional methods of social control, including

private vengeance and witch beliefs, suggests that the crux of women's

involvement lies in their roles as transmitters of popular culture. Women,

he argues, were the exact equivalent in their own culture as the

demonologists and judges were in theirs: they brought up children and

educated them in popular culture, the culture the elites were now trying to

eradicate. Although the catalyst for the hunts was rooted in economic

changes, especially increasing social and economic differentiation within

the village community itself, the hunts did express a sadistic and virulent

"antifeminism" on the part of male magistrates and other authorities.(22)

Yet the issue of how ideas about gender interacted with contemporary

approaches to public order has remained to date marginal in Muchembled's

work.

It is perhaps arguable that mainstream research done in the 1970s and early

1980s when women's history was still largely unknown territory would not be

expected to incorporate gender into historical analysis. Yet a number of

works published in the late 1980s and even 1990s when research on gender

issues and early modern women was widely available do not do much better.

Brian Levack's survey, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987), for

example, devotes several pages to sex and a-e as factors in determining who

was accused of witchcraft, pointing to both the vulnerability of women,

especially old women, as well as to "male anxiety" about the supposed

sexually predatory nature of mature woman.' This material, however, is not

integrated into the rest of his study, so that possible changes in the

status and condition of woman or changes in attitudes toward them are not

included in discussion of possible factors influencing either the initiation

or cessation of the hunts. Wolfgang Behringer, while citing "collective

mentalities" as an important aspect of the witch-hunts, has nothing to say

about gender beyond a brief suggestion that the image of the Virgin, the

"immaculate symbol of fertility," served in some areas of Catholic Bavaria

as a counter-symbol to the witch.(24) Again, despite its title, Clive

Holmes's "Women: Witnesses and Witches" focuses more on the workings of the

legal system and the impact of elite theological formulations than on the

female witnesses against witches themselves and does little to explain the

gender dynamics behind the testimony of women against women.(25)

Another case in point is an important collection of articles on witchcraft

published in 1990 by Oxford titled Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres

and Peripheries. It includes eighteen articles by many of the most important

historians of the hunts. Only four deal even briefly with issues of gender

beyond noting the sex of the accused and none make gender a central focus of

discussion.(26) Interestingly, there is a tendency in this volume as

elsewhere to use the generic male pronoun for everyone, that is, for the

historian in the abstract, for the reader, the accusers, and the victims of

witchcraft, except in the case of the witches themselves for whom the

generic female pronoun is used.(27) Most tellingly, even the few authors who

do consider gender rarely cite or otherwise make use of research in medieval

or early modern women's history. Bengt Ankarloo, for example, writing on the

seventeenth-century hunts in Sweden takes note in his conclusion that since

Swedish witches typically were women, "an interpretation in terms of a

conflict between the sexes seems highly appropriate."(28) This idea, he

remarks, raises the "interesting and relevant" question whether in the early

modern centuries there were any significant changes in the status and

cultural role of European women, apparently unaware that this very question

has been energetically addressed for more than two decades by historians of

European women's history. In the brief discussion that follows, Ankarloo

cites only Christina Lamer.(29)

Even historians whom one might expect to show some awareness of women's

history and its impact sometimes do not. Carlo Ginzburg, for example, who

has argued forcefully for placing the persecuted as well as the persecutors

at the center of the historian's attention, surprisingly shows little

interest in exploring issues of gender. Beginning with Nightbattles:

Witchcraft and Agrarian Cult in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and

most recently with Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, Ginzburg has

brillantly brought to light evidence of a still vital pre-Christian folk

religion with its roots in an age-old pan-European shamanism and blurred

what had been perhaps overly-rigid distinctions between so-called "high" and

"low" culture.(30) Yet, despite a suggestive and self-critical footnote in

Ecstasies in which he says "overlooking the ecstatic specializations that

distinguished male and female benandanti seems to me in restrospect a case

of sex-blindness," he does not remedy this blindness in his later book.(31)

Although gender would seem to be central to the symbolic content of folk

motifs, Ginzburg does not consider his material from this perspective in any

systematic way. Despite an intriguing remark made in passing near the end of

his book that women's marginality "reflected in a more or less obscure

manner the perception of a proximity between those who generate life and the

formless world of the dead and the non-born,"(32) he tends to elide the

issue of gender -- first by consistently referring to witches as "male and

female," or "men and women" and further by suggesting that the sex of the

witch doesn't much matter.(33) Ecstatic experiences, predominantly female,

tied to processions of the dead; ecstatic experiences, predominantly male,

tied to nocturnal battles for the fertility of the fields; and male rituals

tied to both, are all "isomorphic."(34) He alludes to the problem of how a

folkloric tradition of male as well as female shamans was transformed into

the European image of the witch as typically female only in a brief aside.

Acknowledging that it was more common for witches to be female, he suggests

first that the percentage of women witches varied greatly from place to

place (implying it is often less than one might think), and secondly that to

explain this phenomenon by misogyny would be not only simplistic but

tautological.(35)

The disavowal of "misogyny" as an important element in the hunts also shows

up in two very recent articles (the products of a 1990 conference on French

history) by Stuart Clarke and Robin Briggs, both scholars with a track

record in mainstream research on the hunts. Both articles are among the

small minority of works on the hunts by non-feminist historians which put

the question of gender at the center. Both begin with the initial stance

that the question of why witches were women should be taken seriously.(36)

Yet each ultimately concludes that the femaleness of witchcraft was in the

end incidental to the hunts. Stuart Clark, for example, in "The 'Gendering'

of Witchcraft in French Demonology: Misogyny or Polarity?" argues that

witches were accused not because they were women, but because they were

witches.(37) Contemporary demonologists, he says, were not particularily

concerned with the question of why witches were women, largely because they

operated within a binary system of thought which celebrated polarity as part

of the natural order of things. This dependence on polarity necessarily but

inadvertently defined women as the polar opposite of good -- we must blame

the equation of women with witches, therefore, not on misogyny but on the

habit of seeing gender in terms of polarity, which Clark points out was

shared by women's defenders as well as their detractors, and therefore was

in itelf gender-neutral.(38) Robin Briggs's argument is more

straightforward. He too argues that the hunts hunted witches rather than

women.(39) While he cites gender as one of a variety of psychological,

sociological, and other motivations which fueled the hunts, much of the tone

of his work displays a certain hostility toward women's history.(40) He

begins, for example, with an attack on two assertions about the hunts which

he explicitly associates with "feminist" interpretations but which have in

fact rarely been unquestioned by historians, feminist and otherwise: that

the number of executed reached nine million and that all of the executed

were women.(41) He rather oddly characterizes the argument that women were

in some sense being scapegoated in the seventeenth century as "alarmingly

close to the received wisdom among most early modern historians," while at

the same time minimizing the damage caused by the hunts by contrasting the

"serious and organized" campaigns against religious dissidents with the

"rather casual and sporadic" persecution of witches. He concludes with a

caveat against "grand theories" and by reminding us that men were usually a

significant minority of accused witches and might in some cases be a

majority.(42)

The reluctance of many historians and other scholars working in what might

be called "mainstream" witch-hunt studies to accord gender a truly

significant place in the dynamics of the witch-hunts stands in stark

contrast to the treatment of the hunts in fields which by definition regard

gender as important. Feminist scholarship within women's studies, in marked

difference from more traditional scholarly venues, has long focused on

witches as female, seeing the hunts as an important example of the larger

phenomenon of male domination of women under patriarchy, research not

infrequently characterized by mainstream witch-hunt scholars as "extreme,"

simplistic and distorted.(43) An exception is Joseph Klaits, who

straight-forwardly asserts that the "witch craze's slaughter of women was

the result of the spread of woman-hatred in the spiritually reformed elites

and its application in the reformers' campaigns against folk religion."(44)

Historians of Renaissance and early modern women's history have also

incorporated the witch-hunts into an overall picture of women's experience

in these periods.(45) Most often under the general rubric of women's studies

and women's history, there are also an increasing number of more narrowly

focused studies which examine aspects of gender and European witchcraft.(46)

Finally, there have begun to appear a few large-scale studies, including

Carol Karlsen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial

New England (1987), Marianne Hester's Lewd Women and Wicked Witches (1992),

and Anne Barstow's Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts

(1994), which make full use of the scholarly apparatus and material of

women's history, feminist scholarship, and witch-hunt studies.(47)

Although fragmentary in comparison to the much greater bulk of traditional

scholarship on the hunt, these and other relevant studies suggest what the

hunts might look like if the fact that witches were women were truly put at

the center. Carol Karlsen's study of witchcraft in colonial New England, for

example, admirably illustrates both how the witch-hunts were embedded in the

particular cultural milieu of specific communities and the adaptibility of

misogynistic attitudes to varying cultural environments. According to

Karlsen, the root of accusations in New England was the fear of economically

and psychologically independent women who threatened in various ways to

upset male control of property and the social order, in particular women who

stood to inherit property because they had no brothers or sons.(48) These

women, moreover, were perceived by the community to be "discontent," that

is, as refusing to accept their "place" in the social hierarchy; discontent

in turn brought in its wake the related sins of anger, envy, pride,

maliciousness, lying, and seductiveness.(49) Forced to reject the notion

that women were innately more evil than men by the emphasis Puritanism

placed on the priesthood of all believers, Puritan men at the same time

harbored a deep suspicion of women as potentially willing and able to

disrupt the social and moral order -- a hostility only partially resolved by

the formulation of women's role as that of helpmate, chaste, submissive and

deferential to the male heads of family and society. "The old view of woman

was suppressed, but it made its presence known in the many faults and

tensions that riddled Puritan formulations on woman,"(50) and in the witch

trials.

Nothing comparable to Karlsen's work as yet exists for the various regions

of Europe although individual studies look at parts of the European picture.

Gerhild Scholz Williams, for example, demonstrates the continuing centrality

and consistency of representations of women as evil and susceptible to

satanic influence in intellectual treatises on dealing with magic and

witchcraft by such disparate authors as Parcelsus, Weir, and Bodin.(51)

Linda Hults's study of Hans Baldung's famous drawings of witches similarily

analyzes the misogynistic and often salacious jokes embedded in Baldung's

use of visual symbols.(52) In particular, Hults explores the paradoxical

definition of the witch, who was both feared as the pawn of the Devil and

denigrated by her weak and inferior nature as a woman: "Just as they

the witches

had to remain powerless yet feared, they had to be depicted as perennially

lusting yet never satisfied. Their wants made them culpable; unrequited,

these same desires made them ludicrous. Seeking freedom and power above all,

witches were the most enslaved of creatures."(53) Other studies have

emphasized the degree to which the witch-hunts constituted a specifically

sexual form of violence against women by men. Hester, writing from a radical

feminist standpoint, locates the hunts as part of a continuum of conflictual

male-female relations in which the power and domination of men over women is

"eroticized;" the hunts represented an important specific historical

instance of the more general construction of sexuality around issues of

power.(54) Barlow describes the hunts as "sexual terrorism" and, throughout

her book, stresses the pain, sexual sadism, mutilation, and torture to which

accused women were subject.(55) Both emphasize that while witches were

almost always women, they were invariably tried, judged, jailed, examined,

and executed by men.(56)

These studies and women's history as a whole point up that whatever the

continuities of Western misogyny, the female sex seems to have taken on new

significance as a marker for "deviance" in the early modern period which it

did not possess earlier. This point, well known to historians of early

modern women's history, is reinforced by the prior history of perceived

"deviance" in the West. By the sixteenth century, Europe had a

well-developed tradition of persecution of outsider groups, including

heretics, lepers, and Jews, defined according to well-established

stereotypes which had much in common with that of the witch, in that, like

witches these groups were accused of infanticide, cannibalism, and

"unnatural" sexuality and, like witches, were demonized by their alleged

association with the Devil.(57) The witch-hunts, therefore, were in many

ways not a new phenomenon, but part of a continuing tradition -- indeed,

from this perspective the most distinctive facet of the witch-hunt is

perhaps the fact that most witches were women. It is significant in this

connection to note that none of the groups which figured most prominently in

medieval conceptions of the deviant were primarily identified with

women.(58) The continuing thread of accusations of sexual license, while

routinely attributed to deviant groups and loosely associated with women in

general, does not seem to have yet crystallized into a specific image of the

sexually predatory deviant female who is also an enemy of society. Rather

the focus of medieval conceptions of deviance appears to have centered on

issues of religious authority and its accompaniments, power and money, about

both of which medieval religious ethics were profoundly ambivalent.(59) The

early modern period, however, was characterized by the intersection of a

peculiarly political definition of Christianity in which apostasy to the

Devil became the archetypal act of betrayal and a cultural atmosphere in

which women as a category became the repository of a whole range of social

and cultural fears. The witch, not only as witch but also as woman,

precisely encapsulated the nightmares of early modern Europe.

The reasons why women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became a

newly potent source of social anxiety are, of course, the object of ongoing

investigation. The increased emphasis on male control within the family

characteristic of Reformation and Counter-Reformation culture, an

intensification of sexual anxiety and guilt, an increased need and desire to

control nature, long identified as female, which emerged with the Scientific

Revolution, have all been suggested as part of what Joseph Klaits has dubbed

the "new misogyny."(60) Prompted by the demands of the "confessional age,"

the "unenclosed" woman, as well as other "masterless" people including the

poor, the homeless, and the mad, were increasingly placed under formal

institutional control in convents, asylums, prisons, or the newly invented

halfway house for reformed prostitutes.(61) As part of a campaign of "moral

reform" as well, a wide range of popular customs and behavior, from popular

festivities such as carnival, to premarital sex in preparation for marriage,

came under attack as immoral and disruptive. Given women's traditional roles

as mother, nurse, midwife, and preparer of food and her association with

sexual matters, such an attack was in many ways directly and indirectly an

attack on women in particular.(62) As a variety of activities previously

regarded as private became the object of public concern, women's sources of

autonomy both within popular culture and within the family itself were

increasingly truncated and made suspect.(63) Sexuality especially aroused

anxiety and the sexual overtones present in the hunts, whether in the

sexualized image of the witch (who was believed to cause impotence and

indulge in perpetually unfulfilling forms of deviant sex); the general

belief that women as a group were oversexed, congenitally unable to control

their desires and therefore susceptible to seduction by the Devil; or the

elements of sexual terrorism in the hunts themselves, suggest that the hunts

were a more or less direct projection of sexual anxiety. In the early modern

world, preoccupied with (male) hierarchical order and its converse, (female)

unrestrained sexuality and disorder, the wandering or "loose" woman could

not help being perceived as inherently subversive. On a literal level, the

binding of women to the (male) Devil, that is the making of a witch, might

be taken as an attempt to "enclose" women not obviously otherwise controlled

by men. More generally, the hunting of witches, defined as the epitome of

evil, reflected a sharpened fear and distrust of women as powerful sources

of danger, disorder, and pollution. Misogyny -- the cultural expression of

patriarchy's distrust of women -- is socially constructed. This is no

surprise to students of women's history but is apparently unknown to many

mainstream witch-hunt scholars, who have themselves constructed

notion of misogyny as a monolithic, timeless force which they have rightly

dismissed as a cause of witch-hunting. This is borne out by the fact that

much of the material which suggests that witch hunting was in fact

women-hunting is already part of mainstream witch research.

Much has been made of the fact, for example, that not all accused witches

were women. That men or children were sometimes accused of witchcraft

however does not necessarily contravene the idea that the witch hunts were

directed specifically against women. The circumstances under which these

atypical witches were accused can be shown to be in various ways reflections

of the equation "witch = woman." In some cases, the men and children were

relatives of already suspected or proven female witches and therefore

demonstrated the powers of contamination that women were believed to

possess.(64) Or, conversely, they were caught up in rapidly spreading

panics. The very fact that men or children were accused was in many cases

the signal that the hunts had gotten out of hand and should be stopped.(65)

Nor should it surprise us that some of those who accused women of being

witches were other women. It is now a commonplace of women's history that

"patriarchy divides women," that is, patriarchy functions so as to encourage

women to enforce patriarchal norms against other women in order to

strengthen their own precarious position in that order. To conclude as some

researchers have done that gender was not a significant factor in the hunts

because women accused women of being witches (and men, men) is to reduce the

subtle complexities of gender dynamics to an overly simple notion of a "war

between the sexes."(66) Moreover, in the eyes of ecclesiastical and secular

authorities all women were potential witches, just as in a phrase dating

back to the third century and endlessly repeated thereafter, "every woman is

an Eve," the Devil's gateway. In early modern France the term "witch" was a

general term of abuse for women and, indeed, the failure of a woman to reply

to this charge was used as evidence against her if she were later accused of

witchcraft.(67) Whatever the profiles of actual accused and convicted

witches, both the popular and elite mental image of the witch was invariably

first that of a woman. And if the typical witch was old, poor, and isolated

this was the likely future of most women, given demographic trends.

Mainstream historians of the hunts, largely but not entirely themselves

male, have articulated interpretations of the hunts which have emphasized

state-building, economic and social stresses, and the relationship of folk

and elite culture with little regard for the role of gender in these and

other historical processes. They have often paid little attention to either

the theoretical apparatus provided by women's history or its empirical

findings and on occasion have demonstrated the kind of misunderstanding of

gender dynamics which women's history has tried to correct. Making use of

the insights of several decades work in the history of European women should

provide new directions for approaching the hunts.

A gender analysis of the hunts would pay more attention to the women

involved. At this point we have only just begun to accumulate more precise

data on the socioeconomic status of accused and convicted witches in

different times and places in Europe and have only the vaguest understanding

of how these women saw themselves and their situation. Although many of the

answers to these questions may ultimately be unrecoverable because of the

limitations of the source materials, certainly an effort can be made. Both

Hester and Barlow point to as yet fragmentary evidence that the hunts served

to make women in general more passive and submissive.(68) The "language of

insult," which would provide clues as to differences in the ways in which

female and male deviance was perceived, might also prove a fruitful area for

further investigation.(69) An example of how attention to the roles of

accused witches and accusers as women can widen our understanding of the

hunts, as well as illustrating the variousness of women's experience is

Lyndal Roper's study of witch trials in Augsburg in the late seventeenth

century. Roper finds that in these trials, accusations of witchcraft were

most often made by postpartum mothers against lying-in-maids who had been

caring for an infant who had died. Witchcraft accusations, she suggests,

involved "murderous antagonisms" having to do with psychosexual anxieties

and rivalries about maternity and fertility between women, possibly

intensified by the idealization of motherhood in the seventeenth

century.(70) Elsewhere Roper argues more broadly that "psychic conflicts

attendent on the feminine position," both Oedipal or related to motherhood,

underlay at least some cases of witch accusations and that fantasies of

witchcraft grew out of conscious and unconscious images of the female

body.(71)

Another question which has implicitly emerged from recently published

material on the hunts is the question of whether there were in fact two

kinds of witchcraft, distinguished not only by the beliefs of the accused

and accusers but by the gender of the practitioner. Willem de Blecourt has

pointed out that more attention needs to be paid to contemporary views of

cunning folk, accused witches, and clergy, all of whom were credited with

the ability to affect the spiritual and physical health of their clients or

victims.(72) Recent work has shown that in many of the outlying areas of

Europe in which the accusation rate was more equal for men and women, a more

medieval pattern of belief persisted in which male sorcerers rather than

female witches were thought to have access to the supernatural, a

distinction with important implications for a gender analysis of the hunts.

It is well known that the mass trials of marginalized women believed to be

servants of the Devil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were

preceded by trials in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of a few highly

placed male sorcerers believed to be in control of the spirits they conjured

up. Recent studies of the peripheries of Europe suggest that this pattern of

male sorcery and female witchcraft may have persisted in outlying areas of

Europe including Iceland, Estonia, Finland, Romania, and Portugal.(73) In

Finland, for example, the populace, which had a strong folk shamanistic

tradition associating men but not women with access to the supernatural, had

to be taught that witches were women. These highly regarded male

practitioners of magical arts, moreover, were thought to conjure up spirits

through their superior knowledge and wisdom, not as pawns of the Devil. The

contrast between the respected male sorcerer who exerts power through his

own knowledge and control and the feared and hated female witch perceived as

harming others through her enslavement to the (male) Devil, is suggestive of

deeply held, highly gendered belief systems. A somewhat different but

analogous division of types of witchcraft by gender developed in Venice,

where according to Ruth Martin, male "witches" concentrated on the more

profitable branches of witchcraft, including treasure-hunting, which were

linked with the learned tradition of necromancy or sorcery and with Venice's

commercial economy while women concentrated on maleficium and especially

love magic; she suggests, moreover, that men pursued witchcraft in an

"acquisitive, almost adventurous" manner, while women were "very much on the

defensive.(74) A parallel development of "masculine" magic depending on

book-knowledge and often devoted to finding hidden riches, and a category of

amorous magic dominated by women has been uncovered by Maria Helena Sanchez

Ortega in Spain.(75) A similar pattern has been found in the folklore of the

Netherlands into the twentieth century.(76)

Although the usual caveats against uncritical cross-cultural comparison of

witch beliefs are in order, a study of the witch beliefs held by an African

tribe, the Gonja, by anthropologist Ellen Goody illuminates how ideas about

proper gender roles might have influenced the development of a gendered view

of witchcraft. The Gonja, according to Goody, make a clear distinction

between male witches, whose standing in the community is enhanced by their

use of witchcraft, and female witches, who are fared, hated, and punished

for being witches.(77) Goody finds that among men aggression expressed both

directly and through magic is seen as both desirable and legitimate within

widely defined limits; among women, however, aggression is permissible only

to defend herself and her children against violent attack and then only

through direct physical retaliation rather than witchcraft. Women who

resorted to magical aggression were universally condemned as evil, by both

women and men. Goody concludes that within this African society women

"cannot be permitted to act aggressively without endangering the dominance

of men, and throwing into doubt the benevolence of the affective

relationships on which the domestic group centres," and that "it is because

aggression is not permissible in women that Gonja women who are thought to

have witchcraft powers are always condemned as evil."(78) Similarily, in

medieval and early modern Europe, aggression through magic appears to have

been perceived very differently according to whether it was regarded as a

primarily male or female practice.

Another avenue in which gender analysis might be applied to witch beliefs is

in distinguishing elite and popular ideas of witchcraft. Caroline Bynum has

recently suggested that women and men, even within the same tradition, use

religious symbols differently. "Women's symbols and myth tend to build from

social and biological experiences; men's symbols and myths invert them.

Women's mode of using symbols seems given to the muting of opposition,

whether through paradox or through synthesis; men's mode seems characterized

by emphasis on opposition, contradiction, inversion, and conversion."(79)

Such a difference in female and male use of symbols seems particularly apt

in comparing elite notions of diabolism, with its emphasis on the inversion

of orthodox Christian ritual and the obeisance of the witch to Satan, and

popular notions of witch activities with an emphasis on bodily functions and

healing, festivities, and love magic.

Finally, I think it would be fruitful to compare the figure of the witch to

that other transgressor against female norms, the woman saint, and look at

the saint and witch as mirror images. It is well known that the later Middle

Ages were a period of intense religiosity. Less obviously, it was also a

period in which specifically female forms of piety flourished and in which

there were unusual numbers of highly visible female saints.(80) Both saint

and witch possess unusual powers derived from their closeness to the

supernatural world of God and if the line between saint and heretic could be

very fine, the line between the female saint and the witch was even

finer.(81) The abilities of the saint and witch were also strikingly

similar. Both can fly or "levitate," control natural forces, find lost

objects, tell the future, affect others' physical well-being, and in some

cases have special relationships with animals and/or food. Both bore special

marks on their bodies and appeared to be able to read minds.(82) In the most

highly charged area of activities, sexuality, the female saint and the witch

appear as mirror opposites, the chaste, virginal saint opposed to the

sexually insatiable witch. Yet as it has often been pointed out, the

descriptions of saintly visions of God are often highly eroticized and it

has even been suggested that the image of the witches' sabbath owes

something to the sexualized visions of late medieval mystics.(83)

Both saint and witch symbolically embodied supernatural forces which might

be either benevolent or dangerous. The lines between "white" magic, folk

healing, and maleficium were fluid and at least sometimes overlapped.

Although the distinctions between cunning men and women (or "witch-doctors")

and witches themselves might be clearer to early modern villagers than to

either seventeenth-century elites or twentieth-century scholars, specialized

access to the supernatural was clearly at least potentially a double-edged

sword.(84) Medieval popular religion, on the one hand, told stories of

helpful and pious, as well as malicious, demons.(85) Conversely, saints in

the interests of sanctity hurt, as well as helped, people. Studies of

popular religion increasingly reveal the saint as an ambivalent figure,

capable of apparently cruel and malicious behavior towards those who did not

revere them adequately. According to one story, a mason, having mocked and

laughed at the miracles which had occurred at the tomb of St. Thomas Becket,

took a mouthful of food and said that if St. Thomas had any power he should

choke or poison him. He thereupon fell speechless and helpless and would

have died had he not drunk from a phial which had contained St. Thomas's

blood.(86) In other cases, women and men who offended or otherwise crossed a

saint were struck dumb, blinded, paralyzed, made ill, or swallowed up by the

earth.(87) Such "miracles of vengeance" were particularily associated with

the cult of the Madonna in Italy who apparently was not reluctant to kill

those who did not actively promote her cult and was even believed to be a

source of supernatural danger to her devotees.(88) Moreover, the popular

notion of sainthood, unlike the official image, tended to emphasize the

belief that a saint, like a witch, exerts supernatural power in the present

here and now on a regular basis.(89)

If both the saint and the witch might both protect and harm, the witch and

the saint were also inversely related to each other in terms of gender.

Christina Larner pointed out that about 80 percent of saints in the medieval

and early modern periods were male and 20 percent female, while about 80

percent of witches were female and 20 percent male.' Donald Weinstein and

Rudolph Bell have shown that prior to the thirteenth century, however,

female saints only amounted to less than 12% of the total number of saints.

It is significant that in the centuries preceding the witch-hunts the

proportion of female saints rose sharply, to a high in the fifteenth century

of almost 28 percent.(91) Female saints, moreover, according to Weinstein

and Bell, were especially noted for their supernatural powers rather than

for other functions of sainthood.(92)

The similarities of these two groups of deviant females with access to the

supernatural may be an important part of the witch-hunt puzzle. It seems

plausible that the supernatural abilities of women saints not only attracted

fear as well as admiration and awe, but perhaps provided a model for the

later stereotype of the witch, immensely powerful yet enslaved by her own

hostile impulses, "enclosed" only by the superior power of the male Devil.

With the emergence of confessional discipline and an increasingly

hierarchical and rigid view of "women's place" in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, women's independent access to the supernatural,

already highly visible, could only be seen in negative terms as possession,

not by God, but by Satan.

In many ways, the history of the historiography of gender and the

witch-hunts recapitulates the relationship of women's history to the field

of history itself: women were first ignored, then "added and stirred," and

only after much delay begun to be integrated into historical research so as

to demand a rethinking of traditional historical interpretations. While this

in itself is perhaps unremarkable, the extent to which witch hunt studies,

in other ways receptive to new currents in scholarship, have resisted the

impact of women's history is surprising. Although the reasons for this

resistance are unclear, it may be precisely because the witch hunts are so

egregious an example of Western misogyny that many historians have repressed

the importance of gender to understanding the hunts. In some ways the shadow

of the hunts still lies over even its modern observors.

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was given at the annual meeting of the

Western Association of Women Historians, May 22, 1994, San Marino,

California.

1 Anne Llewellyn Barstow, "On Studying Witchcraft as Women's History: A

Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions," Journal of Feminist

Studies in Religion 4 (Fall 1988): 7-20. This point has often been remarked

upon but rarely discussed in detail. See, for example, Barbara

Becker-Cantarino, " 'Feminist Consciousness' and 'Wicked Witches': Recent

Studies on Women in Early Modern Europe," Signs 20 (Autumn 1994), 170, and

the comment in Ute Frevert, Heide Wunder, and Christina Vanja, "Historical

Research on Women in the Federal Republic of Germany," in Writing Women S

History: International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson and

Jane Rendall (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991):

"In the meantime research on this topic

the witch trials

has become mainly a 'men's subject', as it deals with territory,

collectivities, the creation of modern states and the consolidation of legal

and juridical authority, and the development of theological and learned

discourses. The original question of why it was women who were accused of

magic has retreated into the background," 302.

2 H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The European Witch-Craze," in The European

Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New

York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1967), 116; Julio Caro Baroja, The World

of the Witches, trs. O. Glendinning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1965), 256.

3 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner,

1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London:

Harper and Row, 1970).

4 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 568. In his discussion of

cunning folk, Thomas, while recognizing the existence of cunning women,

focuses almost entirely on "cunning men," 212-252.

5 Macfarlane, Witchcraft, 84. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic,

568, makes the same point.

6 Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and

Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976),

96.

7 Gustav Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the

Spanish Inquisition (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), 12.

8 Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Inquiry Interdisciplinary by the

Great Witch-hunt (New York: New American Library, 1975), 248-249.

9 Alan Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: A

Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

10 Richard A. Horsley, "Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the

Accused in the European Witch Trials," Journal of Interdisciplinary History

9, 4 (1979): 692, 712. A later article coauthored by Horsley and Ritta Jo

Horsley, "On the Trail of the 'Witches': Wise Women, Midwives and the

European Witch Hunts," Women in Germany Yearbook 3, ed. Marianne Burkhard

and Edith Waldstein (Lanham, New York, and London: University Press of

America, 1986), 1-28 places much more emphasis on witches as women.

11 H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562-1684:

The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1972), 178-182.

12 Midelfort Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 196,183. Midelfort

provides as an example of how women themselves provoked misogyny the case of

a "mother-in-law problem that had got totally out of hand," 183.

Occasionally, comments made by historians unversed in gender studies are

stunning in their artless miscomprehension. Hugh V. McLachlan and J.K.

Swales, "Witchcraft and Anti-Feminism," The Scottish Journal of Sociology 4,

2 (1980), 149 argue at one point that witchcraft accusations could not be

construed as "legalized rape" because witches were not "generally the

sexually more desirable members of society" but rather were old women.

13 G.R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern

Europe (New York: 1967), 106.

14 Ibid., 94.

15 William E. Monter, "The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress

and Prospects," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1972): 450.

16 Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, 119-124.

17 Ibid., 197-198.

18 Lamer, Witchcraft and Religion, 65.

19 Ibid., 60-63, 84-88.

20 Robert Muchembled, "Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality," in Early Modern

European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav

Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 160. See also his "The Witches

of the Cambresis," in Religion and the People 600-1700, ed., James

Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979),

221-276.

21 Muchembled, "Satanic Myths," 153-159. For criticism of the model posited

by Muchembled, see Jean Wirth, "Against the Acculturation Thesis," in

Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500-1800, ed. Kasper von Gryerz

(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 66-78; and Robin Briggs, Communities

of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1989), 53-57, 384-389.

22 Muchembled, "Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality," in Peripheries,

151,153; see also his Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France 1400-1750,

trs. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University

Press, 1985), 66-71.

23 Ban P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London and New

York: Longman, 1987), 125-134.

24 Wolfgang Behringer, "Weather, Hunger and Fear: Origins of the European

Witch-Hunts in Climate, Society and Mentality," German History 13 (1995),

21.

25 Clive Homes, "Women: Witnesses and Witches," Past and Present 140

(1993),45-78.

26 The authors who do consider gender include Robert Muchembled, "Satanic

Myths and Cultural Reality," 139-160, who argues here as elsewhere that

peasant women were the guardians and teachers of the popular culture under

attack by the authorities under the guise of attacking "witchcraft;" he

further suggests that attacking women was a way of avoiding the drastic

demographic results of executing children, 150-151. The primary impulse

behind the hunts, however, was the dual dynamic of an elite seeking to

impose a new public order and the better-off members of rural communities

seeking power over their neighbors. Antero Heikkinen and Timor Kervinen,

"Finland: The Male Domination," 319-338, and Kirsten Hatrup, "Iceland:

Sorcerers and Paganism," 383-401, briefly consider why the sex ratio of

accused witches in Finland and Iceland was more evenly divided between men

and women than in western Europe generally. Gabor Klaniczay, "Hungary: The

Accusations and the Universe of Popular Magic," 219-255, briefly suggests a

connection between late medieval female saints and early modern witches,

241.

27 See, for example, Robert Rowland," 'Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons':

European Witch-beliefs in Comparative Perspective," in Peripheries, 161,

169, 188; Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France

1400-1750, 3, 255 but cf. 242, and "Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality,"

141, 142.

28 Bengt Ankarloo, "Sweden: The Mass Burnings (1668-1476)," in Peripheries,

316.

29 Ankarloo, "Sweden," 316.

30 Carlo Ginzburg, Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cult in the

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trs. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi

(New York: Penguin Books, 1983); and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches'

Sabbath, trs. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Penguin, 1992).

31 Gizberg, Ecstasies, p. 26, n. 42.

32 Ibid., 301.

33 Ibid., 1, 9, 11, 70, 70, 72, 161.

34 Ibid., 216. See also n. 42, p. 26

36 Stuart Clark, "The 'Gendering' of Witchcraft in French Demonology:

Misogyny or Polarity?," French History 5, 4 (1991): 426-437; Robin Briggs,

'Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community," French History 5, 4

(1991), 438-450.

37 Clark, "Gendering of Witchcraft," 427.

38 Ibid.," 436-437. An earlier article by Clark, "Inversion, Misrule and the

Meaning of Witchcraft," Past and Present, 87 (1980), despite its promising

title, includes only one passing comment related to gender, 125.

39 Briggs, "Women as Victims?" 443-445.

40 Clark, Gendering of Witchcraft," 432; Briggs, "Women as Victims?," 450.

41 Briggs, "Women as Victims?" 438-440.

42 Ibid., 450.

43 Some of the more important studies include Mary Nelson, "Why Witches Were

Women," in Women: A Feminist Perspective, ed. Jo Freeman (Palo Alto, Calif.:

Mayfield, 1975), 335-350; Carolyn Matalene, "Women as Witches,"

International Journal of Women's Studies 1 (1978), 573-587; Selma R.

Williams and Pamela Williams Adelman, Riding the Nightmare: Women and

Witchcraft from the Old World to Colonial Salem (New York: Atheneum, 1978);

Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, "Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A

History of Women Healers," Glass Mountain Pamphlet No. 1 (Old Westbury,

N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1973); Silvia Bovenschen, "The Contemporary Witch,

the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the

Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature," New German

Critique 15 (1978): 83-119; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of

Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 178-222; Rosemary Ruether,

"The Persecution of Witches: A Case of Sexism and Agism?" Christianity and

Crisis 34 (1974): 291-295. See also the more recent article by Martha

Reineke, "'The Devils are Come Down Upon Us:' Myth, History, and the Witch

as Scapegoat," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 44 (1990), 55-83 which seeks

to revitalize feminist understanding of the hunts by focusing on the

Christian myth of persecution and the death of the scapegoat. There is also

a large body of material which shades over into contemporary feminist

re-workings of the witch motif. For examples of expressed hostility toward

this work see, David Harley, "Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the

Midwife-Witch," Social History of Medicine 3, 1 (1990): 1-26; and Quaife,

Godly Zeal, 109.

44 Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts

(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985), 72. Barstow, "Studying

Witchcraft," 15, however, criticizes Klaits for ultimately placing the

Reformation, rather than the women themselves, at the center of his

interpretation.

45 See, for example, Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Merry E. Weisner, Women and

Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

218-238.

46 For example, Gerhild Scholz Williams, "The Woman/ The Witch: Variations

on a Sixteenth-Century Theme (Paracelsus, Wier, Bodin) in The Crannied Wall:

Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig A. Monson

(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990), 119-137; Linda Hults,

"Baldung and the Witches of Freiburg: The Evidence of Images," Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 18, 2 (1987): 249-276; The Politics of Gender in

Early Modern Europe, ed. Jean Brink, Allison P. Coudert and Maryanne C.

Horowitz (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1989) which

contains several relevant articles; William Monter, "Protestant Wives,

Catholic Saints, and the Devil's Handmaid: Women in the Age of Reformations"

in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd ed., ed. Renate

Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1987), 203-220; Lyndal Roper, "Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early

Modern Germany," History Workshop Journal 32 (1991): 19-43; and Roper,

Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern

Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). The extent to which work

which makes gender central to the hunts has appeared in venues explicitly

oriented toward women's history and/or feminist scholarship is striking.

47 Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial

New England (New York: Vintage Books, 1987); Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and

Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (London:

Routledge, 1992); and Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of

the European Witch Hun (San Francisco and London: Pandora Books, 1994).

48 Karlsen, Devil In the Shape of a Woman, 115-116.

49 Ibid., 127-152.

50 Ibid., 173.

51 Williams, "The Woman/The Witch," in Crannied Wall, 119-137. William's

book, Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early

Modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,

1995) appeared too late to be included in this article.

52 Hults, "Baldung and the Witches of Freiburg," 264, 269; see also Klaits,

Servants of Satan, 72-74, on misogyny in early modern art.

53 Hults, "Baldung," 271.

54 Hester, Lewd Women, 107ff.

55 Barstow, Witchcraze, passim, but see, especially, 147-165.

56 Ibid., 142.

57 R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in

Western Europe 950-1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Jeffrey Richards,

Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London

and New York: Routledge, 1990).

58 Although a number of heresies were sometimes associated with female

followers, and female mystics were regarded with more suspicion than their

male counterparts, heresy as such was not seen as essentially female.

Prostitutes, while sometimes cited as another "outsider" group, were the

least demonized of the outsider groups and tended to be regarded as a

necessary evil, to be tolerated as long as the prostitutes themselves were

sufficiently regulated.

59 Moore, Persecuting Society, 102-106; Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty,

and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1978).

60 Klaits, Servants, 65 ff. Coudert and Klaits point to Protestantism with

its elevation of male authority within the family and heightened fear of

sexuality; Bobenschen "Contemporary Witch" and Carolyn Merchant, The Death

of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper

and Row, 1980) emphasize the impact of the Scientific Revolution. On the

ambivalence of early modern attitudes toward women in general, see Saints

and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,

ed. Lene Dresen-Coenders, trs. C. M. H.Sion and R.M.J.van der Wilden

(London: The Rubicon Press, 1987). For a review of recent books on early

modern women, including Hester, see Becker-Cantarino, "'Feminist

Consciousness' and 'Wicked Witches,'" 152-175.

61 On women, See Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern

Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Lyndal Roper, The

Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1989); Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women's Asylums since 1500:

From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New York and

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13-37. On the confinement of the

poor, see Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

62 Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture, 64-79, and passim.

63 See, for example, Sigrid Brauner, "Martin Luther on Witchcraft: A True

Reformer?" in Coudert and Horowitz, eds. Politics of Gender, 29-42.

64 Muchembled, "Satanic Myths," 151; Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman,

40; Briggs, Communities of Belief, 26.

65 Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 194; Karlsen, Devil in

the Shape of a Woman, 50-51, 52.

66 See, for example, Willem de Blecourt and Frank Pereboom, "Insult and

Admonition: Witchcraft in the Land of Vollenhove, Seventeenth Century," in

Witchcraft in the Netherlands, ed. Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frihoff, 126, 131.

For women, the insult "witch" appears to have been routinely paired with the

insult "whore," 122, 124, 125, 129.

67 Briggs, Community of Belief, 60.

68 Barstow, Witchcraze, 158-159; Hester, Lewd Women, 200.

69 For example, Laura Gowing, "Gender and the Language of Insult in Early

Modern London," History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993): 1-21; and Francis E.

Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England,

1550-1700 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) which places

witchcraft within the context of other female criminality, including

infanticide and husband-killing. For a valuable discussion of women's

language in the context of witch-hunting in seventeenth-century New England

see Jane Kamensky, "Words, Witches, and Women Trouble: Witchcraft,

Disorderly Speech, and Gender Boundaries in Puritan New England," Essex

Institute Historical Collections 128 (2992): 286-307.

70 Roper, "Witchcraft and Fantasy," 19-43.

71 Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 240; see also the Introduction, 18-26, and

226-248.

72 Willem de Blecourt, "Witchdoctors, soothsayers and priests. On cunning

folk in European historiography and tradition," Social History 19 (1994)

285-303, especially 296 ff. Blecourt suggests the possibility of gender

specialization among the cunning folk, 301.

73 See, especially, Katherine Morris, Sorceress or Witch?: The Image of

Gender in Medieval Iceland and Northern Europe (Lanham, Md., New York, and

London: University Press of America, 1991); and Heikkinen and Kervinen,

"Finland," 321-322; Hatrup, "Iceland," 387-391; Maia Mada, "Estonia I:

Werewolves and Poisoners," 266; Francisco Bethencourt, "Portugal: A

Scrupulous Inquisition," 410-414; Gustav Henningsen, " 'The Ladies from

Outside': An Archaic Pattern of the Witches' Sabbath," 210-215; Klaniczay,

"Hungary," 244-249; all in Peripheries. See also Gabor Klaniczay,

"Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft," in The Uses of

Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and

Early-Modern Europe, trs. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Oxford: The

Polity Press, 1990), 129-150.

74 Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1989), 226, 238.

75 Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, "Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic," in

Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New

World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and

Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 58-92; see also Guido

Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End

of the Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and

William Monter, "Women and the Italian Inquisitions," in Women in the Middle

Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary

Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 73-88.

76 Ton Dekker, "Witches and Sorcerers in Twentieth Century Legends," in

Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth

Centuries, 183-195.

77 Ellen Goody, "Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African

State," in Witchcraft: Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas

(London, New York, Sydney: Tavistock Publications, 1970), 207.

78 Goody, "Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression," 236, 240, 242.

79 Caroline Walker Bynum, "Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols," in

Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker

Bynum, Stevan Harell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 13.

80 Caroline Bynam, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of

Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of

California Press, 1987), 20-21; Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints

and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago and

London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 220-238.

81 See Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance

Italy (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1986); and Anne Jacobson Schutte,

"Inquisition and Female Autobiography: The Case of Cecilia Ferrazzi," in

Crannied Wall, 105-118, for examples of women tried for the crime of being

"false saints." Peter Burke, "How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint," in

Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500-1800, ed. Kaspar von

Greyerz (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 47, cites an example of a

woman popularly regarded as a saint and later accused of witchcraft by the

Inquisition. For other examples and suspicion of women religious in general,

see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 128, 22-23. A remark made by a

Franciscan friar in 1537 suggests the distrust with which women mystics were

regarded: " 'He's a saint, she's a saint who performs miracles'? In these

times, the good Christian should make the sign of the cross upon seeing a

miracle-working female reputed to be a saint," cited by Alison Weber, "Saint

Teresa, Demonologist" in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain,

ed. Cruz and Perry, 172-173. Saints and witches were identified by a process

of complex interaction between popular reputation and official certification

mediated by an ecclesiastical trial; procedures for both saints and witches

were formalized by Pope Gregory IX, see Aviad M. Kleinberg, "Proving

Sanctity: Selection and Authentication of Saints in the Later Middle Ages,"

Viator 20 (1989): 189-190; and Peter Burke, "How To Be a Counter-Reformation

Saint," 45.

82 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 23.

83 Klaniczay, "Hungary," 241.

84 See Blecourt "Witch doctors," on scholarly confusion between witches and

cunning folk.

85 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and

Perception, trs. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990), 190-191.

86 Brooke, 44.

87 C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of

Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1948),

97-102.

88 Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy

Since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press,

1992) 67-87. Comparable beliefs can also be found in Spain, see William

Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1981). Gabor Klaniczay and other historians are testing

the converse hypothesis that narratives of maleficium in Hungarian witch

trials are simply inverted miracles, see "Hungary," in Peripheries, 241-242.

89 Carroll, Madonnas That Maim, 33-34.

90 Larner, Witchcraft a Religion, 86.

91 Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 220. According to Weinstein and

Bell's figures, women accounted for 11.8 percent in the twelfth century,

22.6 percent in the thirteenth, 27.7 percent in the fifteenth, 18.1 percent

in the sixteenth, and 14.4 percent in the seventeenth.

92 Ibid., 228.

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