Women in Early Modern Europe: the Renaissance Witch-Craze

Historians often refer to the witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “phenomenon”.(1) The Renaissance and Reformation periods were certainly characterised by phenomenal events, and while we have for centuries been encouraged to associate witches and witchcraft with the “Dark” (or “Middle”) Ages, in reality the witch-craze peaked during the “golden” age that followed.(2) The Macquarie Dictionary defines a phenomenon as “something that impresses the observer as extraordinary; a remarkable thing or person.”(3) The witch-craze certainly fits this description,(4) although it has been pointed out that Europeans were already living in a traumatised world, enduring war, famine and plague. The witch craze would therefore represent a desperate attempt on the part of the victims to assert some control in a society wracked by disorder. The witch-hunters battled insanity with insanity, the Papacy giving its complete support to the systematic torture and execution of accused and convicted witches.(5) These extraordinary events render the early modern period alien to our “modern” world. To understand exactly why, we must ask how the witch craze arose in the first place, in this particular part of the world and at this particular time.

There have been countless attempts, and one of the most intriguing is found in Lynn White Jnr’s article entitled ‘Death and the Devil’. White begins by asserting that the Renaissance was “the most physically disturbed era in European history”,(6) and proceeds to paint a picture of a period plagued by unparalleled human tragedy, in which social psychoses were commonplace. The fourteenth century saw the opening of “a new and tragic era in European military history” – in times of both war and peace, there were demonstrations of extreme depraved violence.(7) In addition, droughts and crop failures resulted in widespread famine. This, in addition to accelerated population growth, encouraged the birth and spread of the plague. While these traumas had previously been tolerable, the situation changed as, from the fourteenth century onwards, society underwent extraordinary changes (in social, economic, religious and political spheres), people living in a state of increasingly acute anxiety.(8)

In the later fourteenth century, Europe suffered the full horror of the plague with the Black Death. Never before or since did death rates soar so dreadfully high as a result of plague, although Europe endured revisitations well into the seventeenth century.(9) This reinforces the idea that the mental stability of European society at this time would be uncertain. Many victims of these traumas separated into groups of either hunters or the hunted. Lynn White refers to the latter as scapegoats,(10) the victims of the former who were “intent on defending the civilized values by which they judged behaviour that was, or was not rational.”(11) White reminds us that Europeans were trying to cope with “unendurable tensions” when they separated into the two opposing groups.(12)

Throughout history there have been innocent victims at whose feet the hunters, “who saw themselves as manning an archipelago of reason and justified privilege within a vast sea, heaving with instinctual currents of violence and covetousness,”(13) lay the blame for all the anxieties of their time. Historians recognise Jews, heretics and witches as the best known scapegoat groups,(14) yet most fail to mention the most obvious victims, who have been blamed for all the wrong in the world since “primitive man”:(15) women. The ancients mention Pandora, of whom the Christian equivalent is Eve, but these are only the earliest examples of wicked and deviant women. The public has always been indoctrinated with misogynistic beliefs encouraging them to fear and despise members of the female sex. Throughout the early modern period this indoctrination is frighteningly evident. The attitudes of European men, which originated from Antiquity, were expressed in a deep-rooted fear and hatred of women. Because of this fear, widespread amongst European males,(16) women were accepted by the majority as the most likely to be infected with witchcraft (and heresy).(17)

If we can believe the statistics and assert that witch persecutions peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then it can be seen as no coincidence that printing was introduced at the same time. Appearing midway through the fifteenth century, and despite its immediate impact, its true effects upon European culture were not seen until 1500 onwards.(18) Its fundamental importance lay in the fact that it allowed images and ideas to be rapidly diffused to a new and wider public.(19) The witchcraft ideology became astonishingly far-reaching, affecting a much larger percentage of the population and making it far less easy for victims of persecution to escape the notice of the hunting sector. Furthermore, with printing came censorship, which Eugene F. Rice claims was indentured – in all forms – in western Europe by 1560. It is now a little easier to understand how the witch craze could have taken such a tenacious and far-reaching hold at this time.

With the release and distribution of the Malleus Maleficarum, awareness grew across Europe, reaching into the highest echelons of society. The Church, in order to practise what it so adamantly preached, began to prohibit other methods of alleviating anxiety that Europeans had practised for centuries, such as various forms of private prayer and folkloric charms. With this prohibition, Europeans turned to laying accusation on their neighbours – they had to place the blame somewhere, to try and alleviate their own anxiety.(20) Logically, persecution of witches increased markedly at the same time. The Church, working to exterminate the minor form of witchcraft as heresy, encouraged the growth of the more harmful form.(21)

Monter mentions the changing marriage pattern of the early modern period which resulted in a sizeable minority of single women. He asserts that the ranks of the unwed swelled at the time when the first witch hunts began. Because there were allegedly more widows and spinsters, hunters had a larger group of victims to choose from. This would certainly explain why many witches appear to have been widows and spinsters – Monter reminds us that less than half of all accused witches were married. Many women – for example, widows and spinsters – were, he claims, powerless to exact revenge via legal or physical means, and used witchcraft as a substitute. When violence against property replaced physical violence in France and England, witchcraft trials began to decline. Elsewhere Monter suggests that, due to a gap in literacy and poverty between men and women in rural villages, women were especially vulnerable during this period. This gap would render women more susceptible to accusations of witchcraft. Monter does emphasise the fact that all of these are mere hypotheses, and does not claim to have the correct answers.(22)

Anne L. Barstow takes a slightly more radical approach, stating emphatically that, “Viewing women as dangerous…judges and priests devised a satanic conspiracy theory to punish women who might step out of line.”(23) This theory encouraged a rise in witchcraft accusations as women became increasingly worrisome.

Having discussed how the witch craze arose, one might in turn ask why persecutions declined so suddenly in the later part of the period? First of all it is important to note that this “decline” occurred at varying times throughout Europe, in some places far later than in others.(24) White suggests that in the late seventeenth century the majority of Europeans realised that their pervading fear of change was unfounded. Europe had been in “flux” from the twelfth century onwards, and much of people’s anxiety had stemmed from the notion that they were moving farther and farther away from the ideal of Antiquity to which they had always adhered. The seventeenth century brought to Europe things that the ancients had never dreamed of – new inventions, advances in science and technology, and so on. Change, and the idea of change, lost it’s power to terrify.(25)

It is generally assumed that the vast majority of early modern witches were female. A generalisation, perhaps, yet we live with countless stereotypes, and the witch is no exception. Her countenance is by no means fixed. The most popular image – dominant until very recently – is that of the haggard, warty old woman with the pointy hat and the black cat(26) as her familiar. This woman lives alone in the woods, and spends her days working at her cauldron, her frightening features illuminated with eerie green light. She is famous for stealing and eating babies, placing curses, and generally making life unbearable for those around her.(27) This woman is feared because her independence allows her to act as she pleases, at least in comparison to other women. This alleged freedom represented a grave danger in the eyes of European men. As Kramer and Sprenger recognised, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”(28)

More recently we find that witches are seen in perhaps a more favourable light, with modern television programmes such as Sabrina the Teenaged Witch and Charmed presenting beautiful young witches with the attitudes of the modern-day liberated woman. This image is certainly more viewer-friendly than the former, and in that context is not relevant to our discussion. Yet in another it is significant, for despite its many differences, it shares one crucial similarity with the image of the old woman: it makes the witch female. The tradition of the witch as woman thrives today; we are still encouraged to accept that the word witch invariably refers to individuals of the female sex.

Most historians tend to agree that in early modern Europe this belief was deeply entrenched. There are several places we may look when asking whether or not this is true. Most logically we may consider the statistics on percentages of female witches (those accused and those executed) throughout Europe (including the British Isles). Anne Barstow provides a selection of figures which appear to speak for themselves. Despite the odd case where the totals for numbers of male accused equalled, or even outstripped, those of females, most totals exceed 71 percentfemale.(29) Elsewhere we are given an estimation of 80 percent female for the whole of Europe in the period.(30) Although we are warned that our sources for statistics are incomplete, and that even if we restrict ourselves to what we have available we encounter a series of further problems,(31) what we do have seems to lean convincingly towards the conclusion that the majority of Europeans expected witches to be women, and in most cases that is what they were.

Looking to written record for evidence of an ideological type, we find the most famous primary source for the historian of witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, which from the very outset assumes that witches are female. William Monter points out that the title itself makes “witch” a female noun.(32) The actual text sets out immediately to give an expansive explanation as to why women are logically more susceptible to infection with witchcraft than men. The authors draw on Aristotelian(33) and Biblical theory to justify their claims, they speak first of women’s inherent evilness:

…There is no wrath above the wrath of a woman…and all wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman…(34)

And more expansively:

What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!(35)

Women have found little favour yet, but the barrage continues.

The authors go into considerable detail in their tirade, referring to the Biblical theory of creation, which Galen had referred to in the second century AD:(36)

…There was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.(37)

As if this were not enough, at one point women, having been compared with Satan, are found to be more devious and destructive than the Archfiend himself.(38) All of this combines to give the authors justification, in their view and those of their contemporaries, to claim that women are most likely to be seduced and infected with the heresy of witchcraft. The natural defects of females renders them especially susceptible to possession by devils.

The authors of the Malleus, at least, were completely convinced that the definition of “witch” was “woman”. They may have spoken of “wicked” and “good” women, but those in the latter category were allocated a minor portion of the text, and included the most remarkable women in history up until contemporary times – the Virgin Mary, Judith and Clotilda to name three. For the ordinary woman it was no mean feat to bring herself in to comparison with any such woman and come away with her reputation in tact. Most were equated rather with the Virgin’s counterpart, Eve (in Antiquity, Pandora). From this beginning there was little hope for the majority of women in asserting their innocence. In the eyes of European men, they were inherently deformed, inherently evil, and above all inherently guilty. As such they were bound to be targets in the persecution of witches.(39)

Another highly significant mode of representation, via which witchcraft ideology was diffused down through the ranks to the “commoners”, was print. Through this medium, artists spread images and ideas in a far wider circle. Since the great majority of the population remained illiterate throughout the early modern period, art was of fundamental importance in the spread of witchcraft theory. Woodcuts are especially important to the historian of witchcraft, because they were available at all levels of society to all people, literate or otherwise. The majority of woodcuts feature not only female figures, but symbols of femininity which have been dreadfully inverted to represent the ultimate disorder which is a result of women running free and wild.

Charles Zika mentions three main symbols of witchcraft which feature regularly in woodcuts, the most obvious being women: nearly all witch figures are female. Another is the cauldron, a cooking implement representative of feminine space and quite innocent in ordinary circumstances. In witchcraft woodcuts this symbol is transformed into something unspeakably evil, an object which is instrumental in the everyday evil-doings of witches. The cauldron is also reflective of Pandora’s jar (or box), which was “the death bringer and symbolised the female sex.” Barry points out that this symbol was still recognised as such by artists of the Renaissance.(40) Elsewhere in prints we find images of babies cooking or to be cooked, human bones, evil creatures (including bats, goats, cats and devils), fire and a lot of darkness.(41)

We see this represented clearly in images of devoured – or soon to be devoured - babies, steaming cauldrons, and other kitchen appliances, all of which surround the female figures. The figures themselves are symbolic of evil, or at the very least of an inversion of the natural order. They are naked, for a start, with free-flowing hair and oft-spread legs. From their genital region rises steam, an indication of rampant female sexuality(42) and perhaps men’s greatest fear – that women might not have need of them for anything. This explains why a great many woodcuts display an undeniable fascination on the artists’ part with the theme of lesbianism, a fascination which was mixed with great anxiety.(43)

Stephanie du Barry also assumes that witches are female. She maintains from the first that woman hating was no new phenomenon, having existed since primitive man and “stemming from an innate fear which is still now evident among most pre-literate societies.”(44) She links castration(45) with loss of potency – two things early modern European men apparently feared above all – and claims that they were symbolised by intercourse “because of the loss of control over the penis which reinforced the impression of feminine power and masculine weakness.”(46) The atmosphere of uncontrolled sexuality in the majority of witchcraft woodcuts supports Barry’s claim.(47)

Amongst medieval writers, Dives and Pauper seem to provide a different point of view as to the identification of witches, focusing on age as the primary determining factor in the hunt for possible suspects. Referring to witches as men, they are part of a very small minority who refuse to lay the blame entirely on women, but on an elderly populous who are intent on corrupting the young.(48) Certainly, many witchcraft woodcuts feature at least one old woman witch,(49) and we have already recognised the stereotypical elderly witch.

Although it is tempting to generalise and say that witches (being women) were hunted by men (who so feared the sort of women likely to be accused of witchcraft), in many cases women were accused by other women. Those accused of witchcraft could be compelled to name their accusers in turn, whether doing so after – or during – torture or because of a need to exact revenge upon their betrayers. Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit confessor to witches at Wurzburg in the late 1620’s, writes emotively on this subject, claiming that following arduous and unspeakable torture, the witch “is compelled to accuse others, of whom she knows no ill, and whose names are not seldom suggested to her by her examiners or by the executioner, or of whom she has heard as suspected or accused or already once arrested and released.” Then, he continues, the newly named “are forced to accuse others, and these still others, and so it goes on.”(50) Witches themselves could be seen as hunters, if not for the fact that, according to Spee, they were often used by the real hunters as a device through which they could secure more accusations.

The witchcraft ideology, generated through the combining of history, tradition, stereotype and prejudice, undeniably held witches to be women. This conclusion is reflected in the statistics which tell us that of all the witches, 80percentwere female. We may have come to the undeniable conclusion that witches were almost invariably female. At the very least, society expected them to be.

Kramer and Sprenger, writing in the fifteenth century, mention “the great danger of the time, namely, the extermination of the Faith”.(51) This may have seemed like the greatest threat to European men, but for women there were far greater worries. Aside from being generally disadvantaged,(52) women were exposed to a threat far more terrible than any of those men had to face: exposure to remarkable brutality, in which death was perhaps the kindest part,(53) against women. Barstow calls it a “campaign against women”, yet at times it seems more accurate to call it an attempt at the extermination of an entire gender.(54)

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1 Charles Zika, ‘She-man: Visual Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, in Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern (eds), Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, p.147; Lynn White Jnr., ‘Death and the Devil’, in Robert S. Kinsman, The Darker Vision of the Renaissance – Beyond the Fields of Reason (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1974), p.36. White mentions historians who believe that, rather than slackening during the period 1560-1648 (during the Wars of Religion), persecutions actually intensified.

2 Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp.4-5. Europe reached “…The height of these fears, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

3 Daniel O’Keefe, The Macquarie Dictionary, A. Delbridge (ed.) (McMahon’s Point: Macquarie Library Pty Ltd., 1981).

4 White, p.36; Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilisation: The Age of Reason Begins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p.577; John Hale, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), p.446; E. William Monter, ‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft’, in R Bridenthal, C. Koonz, and S. Stuard (eds), Becoming Visible – Women in European History (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), p.130. On the numbers of deaths in total, historians vary. White concludes that it must have been “scores of thousands,” while Durant claims that deaths in Germany alone, throughout the seventeenth century, totalled 100,000. Hale estimates 100,000 deaths across Europe over several centuries, while Monter says the number of trials may have exceeded 100,000 while the number of executions was somewhere below that figure.

5 White, pp.36, 42-3.

6 White, pp.25-6.

7 White, p.28. White concludes that never in our time have the terrors or war in Europe matched those seen in the Renaissance.

8 White, pp.38-42.

9 Warren C. Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, Eighth Edition. (Boston: The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., 1998), p.356; Monter, p.130. Monter mentions Poland, where witchcraft trials peaked latest (from 1675-1720), as an exception.

10 White, pp.40-1. White names the groups “witches” and “witch-hunters”.

11 Hale, p.449.

12 White, p.42.

13 Hale, p.449.

14 White, p.43. In Guyenne in 1321, lepers were targeted briefly, and dozens were burnt.

15 Stephanie du Barry, ‘”Witches!” An Extra-Ordinary Expression of Misogyny in the 16th and 17th Centuries’,

16 These men possessed all the power in the community to reach and influence others with their ideas.

17 White, pp.34-5. In 906 belief in witchcraft was made an heretical offence. Particularly after the time of Thomas Aquinas (mid twelfth century), witchcraft was linked inextricably with heresy.

18 Hollister, p.359.

19 Eugene F. Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1970), pp.8-9. It was so fundamental that it has been compared with i) invention of writing, and ii) that of the computer.

20 Although it might seem that, rather than alleviating that anxiety, they only aggravated it.

21 Hale, p.446.

22 Monter, p.134.

23 Anne L. Barstow, A New History of the European Witch Hunts (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p.165.

24 In most of Europe the decline occurred in the seventeenth centuries, but in Poland (and also other marginal places like Massachusetts) it retained its vigour well into the eighteenth century.

25 White, pp.44-5.

26 Or a toad, or some other repulsive or frightening creature.

27 Monter. This stereotype is an old one, and in fact many accused witches were widows and spinsters – old women living alone in accordance with the image of the old woman in the woods.

28 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, c.1486 (tr. Montague Summers) (London, 1928, repr. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1971), p.43.

29 Barstow, pp.179-81.

30 Hale, p.446.

31 Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p.60-1. Macfarlane concludes that we can make educated guesses and nothing more.

32 Monter, p.129.

33 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in Alcuin Blamire (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: an anthology of medieval texts (Clarendon Press, 1992). Here we find discussion of the natural inferiority of the female.

34 Kramer and Sprenger, p.43.

35 Ibid.

36 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (late 2nd C AD), in Blamire (ed.). Galen mentions the imperfection of woman, but reassures his audience that God would never have created this imperfection without reason.

37 Kramer and Sprenger, p.44.

38 Ibid., p.47. “And I have found a woman more bitter than death…He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the devil.”

39 Monter, p.121.

40 Barry.

41 Hans Baldung Grien, A Group of Female Witches, (1510), in Zika, p.150; Francesco de Goya, The Incantation (c.1797-1880), Frans Francken, An Assembly of Witches (early 1600’s), in Best Witches,

42 For example, anonymous, A group of five witches and their fiery vapours, (1514), p.157.

43 Kramer and Sprenger, p.43. Again: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” Independent lesbians were particularly fearful, since they were perceived as having absolutely no need – sexually or otherwise – for the presence of men in their lives.

44 Barry.

45 Zika, p.150. Castration was often represented in art. In Hans Baldung Grien’s A Group of Female Witches, we see sausages roasting over a fire next to the witches, in one example of the symbolic representation of castration.

46 Barry.

47 Zika, p.169. Many are so overtly sexual that they are almost pornographic. See Hans Baldung Grien, Witch and Dragon, (1515).

48 Dives and Pauper (England: c.1405), in Priscilla Heath Barnum (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp.155-165.

49 Zika, pp.150, 157, 165. Baldung Grien, A group of female witches; anonymous, A group of five witches and their fiery vapours; Barthel Beham, Death and the three nude women.

50 Kors and Peters, p.357.

51 Kramer and Sprenger, p.48.

52 Lauro Martines, ‘A Way of Looking at Women in Renaissance Florence’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974), p.24; Barstow, p.159. Barstow mentions

53 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p.46. Trevor-Roper goes into considerable detail about the various methods of torture used on witches, mentioning devices such as gresilons (or, in Scottish, perewinkis) and the echelle (rack), amongst others; Durant, p.577. We are informed that of all methods, preventing sleep was a kind one. Less pleasant ones included the thumb screw.

54 It is questionable whether the “exterminators” were even conscious of what they were doing.