Gender and witchcraft
Hans Baldung Grien, Two Weather Witches
The context for the identification of women as more prone to witchcraft than men was the medieval and Renaissance concept of female nature, based on theological doctrine and medical theory. This was neither uniform and monolithic nor unchanging and uncontested. Scholastic philosophers were generally fairly dismissive, but some humanists, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote strongly in defence of women. Pre-Reformation preachers such as Bernardino da Siena and Savonarola were clearly in favour of the reform of family life, but this could be a double-edged sword, as far as women were concerned. The Catholic Church was especially notable for its pessimistic view of the nature of women (see extract from Cardinal Bellarmine, on the fall of Eve), who were seen as constitutionally more lustful and fickle than men, but Protestants too could be highly derogatory. There has consequently been debate about whether the Reformation was good for women. However, as far as both Catholic and Protestant demonologists were concerned, the relevant features of women's nature were lustfulness, vanity, and weakness in the face of temptation. However, most demonological works were far from being as virulently misoynistic as Kramer's Malleus, it being simply necessary to rehearse familiar platitudes.
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life (Cambridge, 1980)
Sara F. Matthews Grieco, Ange ou Diablesse: La Representation de la Femme au XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1991)
Judith C.Brown and Robert C.Davis, eds., Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, 1998)
Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000), including a chapter on witchcraft with a useful bibliography transcript of the equivalent chapter from 1st edition
WHY WERE WOMEN WITCHES?
Some authors simply take it for granted that witch-hunting
was really women-hunting, which rather leaves one at a loss to explain
why some women were prosecuted rather than others. Marianne Hester,
for example, argues in her Lewd Women and Wicked Witches that a
revolutionary feminist theoretical framework provides a particularly useful
analysis and explanation of the craze. By using such an approach, the witch
craze may be seen as an example of the use of violence against women to
ensure the social control of women by men, reliant on a particular construct
of female sexuality. Unfortunately, she too is hampered by a particular
view of sexuality, since she appears to regard all heterosexual intercourse
as rape, thus depriving most women in history of any agency. Although
she makes some good points, her use of evidence is notably crude and her
conceptual structure is too rigid to explain change over time. She
stands perhaps at the extreme edge of the academic writers who have written
on this subject, having more in common with polemicists. Nevertheless,
the question does still need to be posed, and some recent findings have
made it even more problematic. Most recent historians of witchcraft have
tried to address this issue, with varying degrees of success. We
might reasonably break down the explanations offered into five groups:
1.) There was a Judaeo-Christian tradition of misogyny, perpetuated by religious zeal and popular superstition and combined in the Renaissance, by authors such as Kramer, with classical beliefs in the powers of sorcery. The Dominican order in particular, from which many inquisitors were drawn, disapproved deeply of marriage and female sexuality, being devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary. Varieties of this line of explanation were popular among rationalist historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They tend to ascribe too much influence to the poisonous Malleus, and they ignore humanist and Protestant writers on witchcraft. There is also appeal to an unchanging misogyny, despite clear social changes across the medieval and early modern periods. Moreover, the concern of the orders of friars for a godly family life, prefiguring humanist and Reformation interests in this topic, are consistently ignored.
2.) Romantic historians, feminists in the 1970s, and a few anthropologists have been attracted to the idea that witches were participating in a folk religion that harked by to a golden age of pre-Christian nature worship and female power. This has been seen as a religion of balance and harmony, fighting against Church and State. This does not really explain anything very much, as those pre-Christian survivals that have been identified in obscure corners of Europe were participated in by men at least as much as women, and were not regarded by believers as incompatible with Christianity. This is basically a projection of modern neo-paganism back into the past.
3.) Psychohistorians, Marxists and some historians of ideas have seen the witch as representing the threatening force of Nature, to be tamed and harnessed at a time when the subsistence economy of post-Black Death Europe was being replaced by a more market-orientated agriculture. Women obstinately resisted both the new economy and the new spirit of enquiry, comporting themselves in an unruly and erotic manner. This does emphasize the disruptive force of social behaviour and the role of social change but it tends to turn women into mere victims of history and it is not clear what impact these notions might have had on the rise and fall of trials in any given region.
4.) It has been argued that women were economically worse off in early modern Europe than they had been during the Middle Ages, with restrictions being increasingly placed on their participation in the urban economy and women's work outside the household declining in importance. There has also been consideration of the distinct possibility that there were increasing numbers of widows and unmarried women across Europe, for both demographic and social reasons. Protestant women could no longer join a convent, for example. However, relative poverty rather than marital status appears the key factor in most regions where prosecutions can be counted and compared in any detail.
5.) Finally, the argument has been proposed that traditional community loyalties were breaking down, and single women bore the brunt of this if they fell on hard times. The woman asks for favours from her more prosperous neighbours, they do not feel obliged to help, and she curses them. Over time, when enough of her curses have borne fruit, she will acquire the reputation of being a witch. This may well be useful, in helping her to extort the grudgingly given help she needs, but eventually there will be enough anger against her to fuel a prosecution. This position also tends to deprive women of historical agency, although plenty of cases can be produced to support the theory, not only from England as used to be thought but from all over the European regions where witchcraft prosecutions took place.
The solution to the problem would appear to lie in a more sophisticated understanding of how gender roles are constructed and contested, so that popular and intellectual beliefs can be seen to interact with social change, while leaving room for individual men and women to accept, modify or challenge the roles assigned to them by social groups. Gender is always socially constructed, however much propagandists may appeal to the authority of God or Nature to explain why women should be subject to the authority of men. It is also always changing. Thus ideas about witches, in books or courtrooms, both reflect and influence the position of women in society and ideas about women's nature and conduct. Neither an explanation in terms of a top-downwards, elite-driven witchcraze nor one in terms of a bottom-upwards, popular panic will suffice to explain the situation, however attractive either may be for those who seek to assign blame.
Great exception has been taken to Robin Briggs's article on French witchcraft, by those who have singled out a few remarks about men being accused and his suggestion that French witchcraft prosecutions were much like English ones, brought about by popular accusations. In some quarters, such comments are treated as misogynistic heresy. However, it is clear that Briggs has no desire to eliminate the exercise of male domination altogether from descriptions or explanations of witchcraft prosecution, he simply regards it as insufficient to explain the whole phenomenon. What Briggs tried to do was to challenge some common theories about witchcraft, including the idea that few men were prosecuted. In some parts of France a significant proportion of accused witches were men. In addition, there was no large witchhunt directed by social elites; instead these generally were conducted on a local level. Witchcraft was associated with women because it seemed typical for women, who were weaker members of society, to use the supernatural to gain revenge against the strong.
Stuart Clark, in the same issue of French History, came at the issue somewhat differently. Clearly, most people accused of witchcraft were women. Previous explanations that argue that this was a result of misogyny beg the question of why women were associated with witchcraft and not some other crime. Women were associated with witchcraft because of the nature of Renaissance thought, which divided things into opposite categories. In the classifications that related to social order and morality (God/Devil, good/evil, normal behavior/witchcraft) the category "female" was associated with witchcraft because it was unthinkable not to associate the category "male" with normal behavior.
However, despite the power of the dominant discourses and the authority of male judges, it should not be supposed that even confessing witches or possessed demoniacs always lost all control over their own stories. They could manipulate the situation, turn accusations to their own advantage, or revel in the attention that they attracted. Louise Jackson, for example, argues that, while coercion was certainly a factor in eliciting confessions from women accused of witchcraft, the depositions of women accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Suffolk, during the Hopkins panic, provide indications of the women's subjectivity. Demonology was part of the conceptual world of both the accused and their accusers. Unnatural behavior had to have an external cause. Parallels in the logic of causation in the confessions of accused witches to confessions in religious contexts concerning thoughts of suicide suggest that both are expressions of internalized guilt over failure to live up to one's own and society's standards of proper womanly feelings and conduct. Diane Purkiss also has interesting thoughts on witches' confessions and self-identity, in her The Witch in History, chapter 6.
Another option, as yet hardly explored, is to see becoming a witch as a career choice. This is the road taken by Sally Scully, in her study of a Venetian witch. She argues that studies of witchcraft have isolated and reified the witch, making him/her an exotic subspecies. The practices labeled witchcraft should be examined in the larger context - especially the economic context - of an individual's life. Inquisition records show that the Venetian Laura Malipiero, tried four times for witchcraft in the seventeenth century, is best understood as an entrepreneur with diversified economic activities, one of which was labeled "witchcraft" by her contemporaries. Her half-sister, Marietta Battaglia, was a less successful entrepreneur and was twice condemned for using kinds of witchcraft that, being fairly common, were less marketable than those of her sister. The women's attitudes toward marriage depended upon their success in their careers: Laura was able ultimately to avoid marriage, but for Marietta it offered a useful alternative to relatively marginal occupations. Like other labels, Scully suggests, "witch" should be used as an adjective, not a noun, and witchcraft should be studied as a part of labour history as well as women's history.
Such views as those of Jackson, Purkiss and Scully are very different from the woman-as-victim view that informs more traditional feminist studies. The aim of most academic feminists working in this area today is to recover the subjectivity of both the women accused and the women accusers, who have usually been dismissed as, respectively, passive victims and gullible dupes of patriarchal domination.
W.de Blécourt, "The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period", Gender & History, 12 (2000) 287-309 [PDF file]
Diane Purkiss, "Desire and its Deformities: Fantasies of Witchcraft in the English Civil War, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27(1997) 103-132
Peter Rushton, "Women, Witchcraft, and Slander in Early Modern England; Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560-1675", Northern History 18 (1982) 116-132
J.A.Sharpe, "Witchcraft and Women in Seventeenth-Century England: Some Northern Evidence", Continuity and Change 6 (1991) 46-55
Robin Briggs, "Women as victims? Witches, judges and the community", French History 5 (1991) 438-450
Stuart Clark, "The 'gendering' of witchcraft in French demonology: misogyny or polarity?", French History 5 (1991) 426-437
Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft and old women in early modern Germany", Past and Present, 173 (Nov. 2001) 50-89 [PDF file]
Kirilka Stavreva, "Fighting Words: Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-fiction", Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.2 (2000) 309-338
Louise Jackson, "Witches, Wives and Mothers: witchcraft persecution and women's confessions in seventeenth-century England", Women's History 4 (1995) [PDF file]
Benjamin J. Kaplan, "Possessed by the Devil? A Very Public Dispute in Utrecht", Renaissance Quarterly, 49 (1996) 738-759.
M. Marshman, "Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom", Journal of Religious History, 23 (1999) 265-281 [PDF file]
Kathryn A. Edwards, "Female Sociability, Physicality, and Authority in an Early Modern Haunting", Journal of Social History 33.3 (2000) 601-621 see also a section of Edwards's primary source: "History of the Appearance of a Spirit which happened in the city of Dole, July 24, 1628"
Sally Scully, "Marriage or a career? Witchcraft as an alternative in seventeenth-century Venice", Journal of Social History 28 (1995) 857-876
Richard A. Horsley, "Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1979) 689-715
Elspeth Whitney, "The witch 'she'/the historian 'he': gender and the historiography of the European witch-hunts", Journal of Women's History 7 (1995) 77-101 [link is to a transcript, not the original]
Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995), Chapter 8: "The Witch Hunts: The End of Magic and Miracles"
BOOK REVIEWS
an amateurish summary of the argument of Barstow's Witchcraze.
David G. Hale on Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England by Deborah Willis, in Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997) 661-663
Frances E. Dolan on Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, in Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997) 341-342
Phyllis Mack on Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination by Marianne Hester, in American Historical Review 98 (1993) 1246
Something that has been insufficiently acknowledged in much of the literature is that a significant proportion of men were among those accused of witchcraft. The ratio varied dramatically. In what is now modern Austria, jurisdictions varied between those which prosecuted only women and those which prosecuted only men. In some Baltic jurisdictions, a male crime gradually became a female one. In some outlying countries, such as Iceland and Russia, very few women were prosecuted, which has been explained in terms of notions of shamanism or centre-periphery relations, perhaps not in an entirely satisfactory manner. Some authors simply brush such examples under the carpet. However, even in France it would appear that many regions saw about the same number of men and women prosecuted and there were regions, such as Normandy, where men outnumbered women.
The province of Normandy produced the largest known collection of male witches anywhere in Western Europe. From 1564 to 1660, the judicial records of the Norman Parlement at Rouen (almost 90% complete between 1585 and 1630, the peak years of recorded witch trials in Normandy and across Western Europe generally) reveal that almost three-quarters of its 380 recorded witchcraft defendants were men. Approximately two-thirds of the hundred people whom the Rouen Parlement condemned to death for witchcraft were men; men virtually monopolized Norman witchcraft cases after 1630, providing the final defendants long after Louis XIV supposedly decriminalized witchcraft in 1682. Shepherds accounted for over one-fifth of all male witches in Normandy; they supposedly used a variety of magical methods either to sicken or to cure livestock. The most frequently mentioned malevolent substance was toad venom; their most powerful benevolent magic required (stolen) consecrated Hosts. Two other occupational groups were also overrepresented among Norman witchcraft suspects: clergymen (prominent from 1598 until the 1640's) and blacksmiths, who practiced illicit forms of veterinary medicine. Normandy experienced no witchcraft panics but saw a steady trickle of witch trials every year. The witches' sabbath was well known before 1600, but it apparently never led to multiple denunications and trials. After 1590, the Rouen Parlement became more severe than Paris in judging accused witches, perhaps because it never uncovered any notable scandals in witch trials judged by lower-level courts.
Even in countries where women predominated, such as England and Scotland, it remains necessary to explain why any men should have been prosecuted at all, if witchcraft was a gender-specific crime. It may be that our concentration on the works of the demonologists, especially virulently anti-female works such as Kramer's Malleus, has misled us. Perhaps witchcraft was gender-related rather than gender-specific. Or it may be that the men who were accused also offended against gender norms in ways that historians have yet to explore. However, it is not sufficient to assert, as some do without producing any evidence, that all the male accused were either sexual deviants or married to witches.
A good example of how a more subtle analysis of gender, and social status and ethnicity for that matter, might help in the understanding of witchcraft cases is provided by Carmel Cassar's study of Malta. She analyzes two and a half years of witchcraft accusations in mid-seventeenth-century Malta before the Inquisition tribunal. Several cases demonstrate how magic gave individuals confidence in the face of fear and provided an outlet for hostility by attempting to explain misfortune, failure, and the causes of illness. Although often unsuccessful, magic assigned a human explanation to terrifying events and in so doing converted these events into a human rather than an other-worldly context. Magic provided an outlet for aggression engendered by the antagonism and frustration of common social problems. Witchcraft served to regulate sexual antagonism and to provide a means of demanding cultural conformity by furnishing a criminal act of which deviants could be accused. The witches served as convenient scapegoats for such offenses. So far so good, but Cassar insists that the overwhelming majority of the accused were women. Her own figures show that the opposite is the case. She has not counted male slaves as "men". Now, it may well be that there are good reasons for regarding slaves as unmanned, in one sense or another, but she does not discuss the issue. In so doing, one might be able to illuminate more fully the gender norms involved, but one first has to recognize the existence of the problem.
Another way forward would be to examine afresh some of the well documented cases that involved male accused. Such cases are frequently to be found in local historical journals and antiquarian publications. For example, among several similar incidents in the principality of Stavelot-Malmedy at the turn of the seventeenth century, the case of witchcraft involving the Benedictine monk Jean del Vaulx is unusually well documented. The monk was accused of causing the illness and death of many others living in the monastery of Stavelot. After five years of solitary confinement, Jean del Vaulx was repeatedly examined by judges and tortured before being found guilty of, among other crimes, devil worship and the poisoning of ten people. Not only was the accused's confession conditioned by excessive belief in other detailed accounts of devil worship, but the judges' inclination to believe such stories ultimately led to the execution of Jean del Vaulx. Martin Del Rio, the celebrated Jesuit demonologist, was the author of the most detailed contemporary account of this incident. If one were to examine such a case afresh, one might well find that the accused had offended in some crucial way against the social role he was expected to play, in much the same manner as many female witches did.
Valerie Kivelson, "Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy", in B.E.Clements, B.A,Engel, and C.D.Worobec, eds., Russia's Women (Berkeley, 1991)
Kirsten Hastrup, Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800 (Oxford, 1990)
William Monter, "Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564-1660", French Historical Studies 20 (1997) 563-95
M.Gaskill, "The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England", Historical Research, 71 (1998) 142-171 [PDF file]
Carmel Cassar, "Witchcraft beliefs and social control in seventeenth-century Malta", Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3 (1993) 316-334
Jean Fraikin, "Un épisode de la sorcellerie en Ardenne et en région Mosellane: L'affaire du moine de Stavelot, Dom Jean del Vaulx (1592-1597)", Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique 85 (1990) 650-668
WHY WERE THE ACCUSERS WOMEN?
It is now generally acknowledged that women played an unusual role in witchcraft prosecutions, being far more likely to appear as witnesses in such cases than they were in most criminal trials. Essays by James Sharpe, Clive Holmes, Robin Briggs and Stuart Clark have stressed this, often with the intention of undermining the more extreme feminist interpretations of witchcraft prosecutions. Sharpe argues that, although contemporary patriarchy provided a context for accusations and witch beliefs, many accusations of witchcraft arose from friction between women, and were often connected to specifically or largely female issues, such as female social space, female power, and the tensions and jealousies surrounding child rearing. Holmes suggests that women were involved in prosecuting witches in three ways: testifying as "victims," reporting on "body searches" of women charged with witchcraft, and testifying as "observers" of the work of these agents of the Devil. The number of women who testified against those charged as witches increased during the seventeenth century so that, in the relatively well documented English Northern Circuit, women constituted 56% of the witnesses during the second half of the seventeenth century. Whatever their motive might be thought to be, such findings as those of Holmes and Sharpe cannot simply be brushed aside. The percentage of women witnesses in most criminal prosecutions was far lower, partly because married women were generally seen as femmes couvertes, having no voice independent from that of their husbands.
The significance of female accusers has yet to be explicated fully, and some authors (e.g. Marianne Hester, Anne Llewellyn Barstow) describe accusation as a defensive strategy, by women wishing to avoid being accused themselves. This ignores the social disparity that was usual between accusers and accused. Accusers were not the sort of people accused, except in large hunts, where almost anyone might be named. However, it is true that deviant women do in various ways threaten those who conform, as well as the men who seek to keep them disciplined. For this reason perhaps, it was respectable women who were also most active in the search for infanticidal mothers.
Deborah Willis and Diane Purkiss have emphasized the psychological self-defence of the women accusing and it would appear that the bodily and domestic formation of the accusers' personalities will need to be taken into account just as much as that of the accused. The accusations which women made against other women suggest that a more open notion of personality, as embodied not only in the leaky bodies of early modern physiology but also in the family and the domestic sphere, would elucidate many aspects of popular witchcraft fears. The contrast between the productive wife and the barren woman extended beyond the ability to bear children into the nurture of healthy infants, the milking of cattle, the churning of butter, and the rising of bread, so that threats to any of these might undermine a woman's personal utility and domestic authority. This suggests an association with the phenomenon of child victims of witchcraft.
The numerical predominance of women witnesses and victims is striking, but it may be misleading to some extent. Perhaps more notice should be taken of Eva Labouvie's findings. She argued that consideration of gender differentiation in witchcraft accusations and proceedings had been only marginally addressed by scholars, who generally regard male participation (as victims) in these events as statistically marginal. However, recent socioanthropological investigations of witchcraft proceedings in the southwestern Saar region of Germany reveal considerable qualitative differences in the ways in which male versus female witchcraft cases were handled. In addition, analysis of the male-dominated authority structure that conducted witchcraft proceedings indicates that there was a specifically male outlook on female witchcraft that conditioned almost every aspect of the persecution of witches. Although Labouvie's analysis may make too much of the differences between male and female views, erasing other differences such as rank, religion and education, it is clearly the case that the evidence of women witnesses was delivered in a context framed by men, so that its credibility and even its structure need to be seen in relation to the male judges and jury members.
James Sharpe, "Witchcraft and Women in Seventeenth-Century England: Some Northern Evidence", Continuity and Change 6 (1991) 179-199
Clive Holmes, "Women: Witnesses and Witches", Past and Present 140 (1993) 45-78
Diane Purkiss, "Women's Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body, the Child", Gender & History 7 (1995) 408-432
Eva Labouvie, "Männer im Hexenprozess: zur Sozialanthropologie eines 'männlichen' Verständnisses von Magie und Hexerei", Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990) 56-78
Laura Weigert, "Autonomy as Deviance: Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes," in Paula Bennett & Vernon Rosario, eds., Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (New York, 1995) 19-48
WOMEN BEFORE THE COURTS
The credibility of women was at stake in a wide range of court cases, other than those concerning witchcraft, whether the women were plaintiffs, witnesses, or defendants. Rape and infanticide cases usually involved women as witnesses to an unusual extent. Relatively few historians of witchcraft have experience with other kinds of court case [Jim Sharpe and Malcolm Gaskell are notable exceptions], so it is worth considering such material for comparative purposes, before venturing on generalizations about the credibility of women in witchcraft trials.
Zoë A. Schneider, "Women
before the Bench: Female Litigants in Early Modern Normandy"
French Historical Studies 23.1 (2000) 1-32
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, "Convents as Litigants: Dowry and Inheritance Disputes in Early-Modern Spain", Journal of Social History 33.3 (2000) 645-664
Steven Ozment, The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century Town (New York, 1996)
Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999) chapter 4, on "Sinful Sexualities" [PDF file]
Joanne M. Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice", Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (1995) 492-512.
S.Burghartz, "Tales of Seduction, Tales of Violence: Argumentative Strategies before the Basel Marriage Court", German History, 17 (1999) 41-56 [PDF file]
G.Walker, "Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England", Gender & History, 10 (1998) 1-25 [PDF file]
Manon van der Heijden, "Women as Victims of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Criminal Cases of Rape, Incest, and Maltreatment in Rotterdam and Delft", Journal of Social History 33.3 (2000) 623-644
Barbara J. Baines, "Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation", ELH 65.1 (1998) 69-98
Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations
of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700. (Ithaca, 1994)
Index