She’s a Witch! May We Burn Her?

Friday, October 30, 2009

[This post is slightly out of order. But it is Halloween season, so I couldn't resist.]

As the dark ages drew to a close, the Church suddenly got into the medicine business. Which meant that men were suddenly competing with those medicos of the dark ages, the midwife.

Midwives in medieval Europe often treated the entire village. She relied on combinations of herbal lore and faith healing. It isn’t terribly hard to see how the powers that be considered this to be, well, magical. Especially since even the male, learned medicine wasn’t terribly good at healing.

Add to this the Church’s negative stance on all aspects of female sexuality, and the witch craze was just waiting to happen.

Modern historians sometimes blame some sort of epidemic outbreak of mass hysteria, or perhaps a viral encephalopathy that swept through Europe in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Feminist writers tend to chalk it up to misogyny, coupled with the political scene of the times.

Regardless, the average country midwife suddenly found herself under intense scrutiny by the pious folks of her village. When the traveling witch-hunters from the Vatican showed up, she found herself under interrogation, torture, and often the gallows.

The hunters had a guidebook, you see–they knew exactly what to look for. In 1484 two priests named Kramer and Sprenger wrote the “Hammer of Witches” (Malleus Maeleficarum), a lovely piece of fiction which carefully detailed how the devil seduced women to his cause, fornicated with them with his ice-cold penis, and gave them magical healing powers.

Umm–so healing is BAD, right? I must have missed that memo.

Anyway, this lovely novel explained exactly how to torture a witch into confession, inducing her to name all of her cohorts. It explained that women were all the handmaidens of the devil (“When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”) It explained how female sexuality, ALL female sexuality, served the dark side (“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable…Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils.”)

I guess the men of medieval times just weren’t cutting it.

The interrogation and torture used were often quite sexual and definitely sadistic. The women were stripped and examined for devil’s marks, which could be anything from a skin tag to a birth mark. These were “pricked” by a pin, because a true devil’s mark apparently didn’t feel pain. But the women were standing naked in a room full of men, and were often so ashamed that they didn’t react properly. (Women who failed to cry under interrogation were also obviously guilty.)

Iron “breast rippers,” burning hot fat introduced into the vagina, witches’ chairs (metal stools heated to scalding), and prison rapes were among the sanctioned methods of inducing confessions.

For almost three hundred years, witch hunts came and went. The numbers were greatest in Germany, where an estimated 26,000 women were murdered. There are reports that, in the Bishopric of Trier in 1585, two villages were left with only one woman each. In Toulouse, 400 women were put to death in a single day.

Estimates from extant sources vary from 45,000 to 100,000 total women murdered. Given the poor records, some writers suggest that the total could well be in the millions.

The last persecutions for witchcraft in Europe were in the mid-eighteenth century. England formally ended the practice with the Witchcraft Act of 1735, a law that stayed on the books until it was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 (NINETEEN FIFTY ONE!!!) Still, there were reports of lynchings of suspected witches in Europe clear into the mid 1800s.

So, there ends the saga of the witch hunts, right?

Umm, no…

In May of 2008, 86 people were arrested in Kenya for the burning deaths of eleven people, suspected by the town of being witches. Apparently the crackdown was not very effective, since in June of 2009, a reporter for the BBC reported watching in horror as a mob burned five more women to death. Their crime? One of them talked to a boy who had been wandering all night, but wouldn’t speak.

Have I scared the snot out of you?

Happy Halloween.

[You can catch up on the entire series of The Nefarious History of Motherhood HERE.]

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