“She made hail fall on the fields of her enemies, caused their wheat to rot by means of a pestilential fog, and damaged the vineyards with frost. She caused the oxen and sheep of her neighbours to sicken and die for the advantages this might bring to her. For the same motives she caused her aunts, whose heir she was, to die, by heating waxen figures dressed in one of their blouses over a slow fire, so that their unfortunate lives wasted away as the waxen figures melted in the brazier.” (Kors 96)
Throughout time special groups of people have been believed to hold supernatural powers. These powers included those of controlling the weather as well as controlling life and death. In the Medieval time period this group of people was given the title of “witches.
In the above excerpt from The Inquisition of Toulouse, which took place in the 1300s, a woman is accused of witchcraft directed against her neighbors and relatives. She stands accused of destroying crops, livestock and taking the lives of her two aunts not as a woman of the town in which she lived but as a witch set upon the town by the devil himself.
This woman from Toulouse argues in vain that she is not a witch and is eventually “forced to confess by means we have power to use to make people speak the truth.” (Kors 96) After being forced to confess the woman is subjected to the punishment that all convicted witches of the time must be: burning at the stake.
The Typical Witch
By the medieval standards it did not take very much to be a witch. Having a female body was the factor most likely to render one vulnerable to being called a witch.” (Barstow 16) Even today the typical witch is depicted as a woman. More than likely most people will form a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz when asked what a witch is. And in most cases today witches are still seen as somewhat evil forces with few exceptions. Today male “witches” do not exist; instead they are referred to as warlocks. So following the lead of our Medieval ancestors we have kept being a woman the main ingredient of a witch.
But there was obviously more to being a witch than just being a woman. The typical witch is described as “women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and, full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as knowe no religions: in whose drousie minds the divell hath goten a fine seat.” (Scot 4) This description is given by Reginald Scot who in 1584, when there were a very few who would have even defended women against the charges of witchcraft actually set out to prove that witches did not and could not exist. Due to this fact Reginald Scot’s description can be taken as an accurate one for the majority of the people who were condemned to burn at the stake.
Even as early as the 1100s women were the ones typically accused of witchcraft such as Barstow states in her book, Witchcraze. In twelfth-century Kiev, when periodic fears of witchcraft arose, all old women of the area were seized and subjected to the ordeal of cold water (thrown, bound hand and foot, into the Dnieper).” (Barstow 24) Barstow also goes on to state that throughout the witch-hunts in Medieval Europe “80 percent of those accused and 85 percent of those executed
Male Witches?
Most of the men who were accused of being witches were related to women already convicted of some form of sorcery-as husbands, sons, or grandsons. Therefore they were not seen as the originators of witchcraft. If men were convicted who were not related to convicted women, most had criminal records for crimes such as theft, murder, heresy, or sexual crimes. For these men witchcraft was merely an added charge to those for which they were already on trial.
When brought into court on a charge of witchcraft, men were let off with lighter sentences than women were. Laws favored men: for example, when the rulers of Flanders decreed no more death penalty for prepubescent witches, boys benefited more because they were seen as minors until twenty-one, whereas girls became adults at eighteen.” (Barstow 25) Also, women traditionally did not know much about the law much less how to use the court system so many times in which an appeal could have been made the accused women were not able to use them in order to attempt to spare their lives.
The effect of this on the image of the women of medieval era was dramatic. Although women committed far fewer crimes than men, the “chief criminal stereotype of the time period, that of the witch, was female.” (Barstow 26)
The Accusations
Accusations of witchcraft came about for a number of reasons. In some cases it would be the more outspoken and independent women in the towns who were accused of witchcraft. Several men would stand in judgement of these women and testify against them reporting incidences of their personal misfortune that they believed were directed against them by these threatening independent women. In cases when an accused women decided to speak up against her accusers she would be even more readily accepted as a witch because she was being outspoken in a time when women were supposed to be submissive. Also in many areas any scolding done by a woman was regarded as a crime and therefore any woman committing this crime would be accused of witchcraft.
Other reasons that a woman would be accused of witchcraft include a desire to rid the population of a town of its lower class members. In several cases towns would solve their crisis of a low crop yield by turning its lower class women and their families as witches to the inquisitors. Also, lower class widows would often be forced to beg for help from more upper class members of the town. In most cases these women and their children were turned back out on to the streets and due to guilty consciences the upper classmen would plague themselves with worry. The upper classmen would blame anything bad that happened to them on their decision not to help the poor widows. And thus to solve any problem they may be having when the inquisitors were in town they would turn in these women as witches and testify that the women had cursed them when they did not provide help fore herself or her children.
Also women who had once been sought out to provide cures for ailing infants and the elderly would be turned in due to their obvious knowledge and use of magic. After all, how else could they find the right mixtures to cure so many who were brought to them. The lack of understanding of the healing powers of herbs and minerals brought many of these “healers” to their doom. “As a healer, midwife, advice-giver, fortune-teller, spell-lifter, she was sought after; she could therefore boast that she had brought such things to pass. People turned to witches as well as turned on them. They were both outcasts and authority figures.” (Barstow 29) “Healers” would also be accused of witchcraft if they could not heal the patient who was brought to them.
“The saide Geillis Duncane also caused Ewphame Mecalrean to bee apprehended, who conspired and performed the death of her godfather…. She also caused to be apprehended one Barbara Naper, for bewitching to death Archibalde lait Earle of Angus, who languished to death by witchcraft, and yet the same was not suspected; but that hee died of so straunge a disease as the Phisition knewe not how to cure or remedie the same.” (Kors 224) Any new disease that came about was often blamed on witchcraft. If a doctor could not cure an illness it was easy to accuse anyone who might have had contact with the patient of being a witch as Barbara Naper was according to the above excerpt.
Forcing a Confession
Accusing a woman of witchcraft was not enough to condemn her of being a witch. A confession had to be made in order for a woman to be sentenced to death as a witch. Of course in the vast majority of these cases none of the accused women would ever admit to any practices of witchcraft. Those women who did admit to the charge of being witches or practicing witchcraft or sorcery were either insane or only did so after extreme torture. There were those who would confess to having interludes with the devil and obtaining the supernatural powers from him. These women were often counciled to say these things in order to avoid torture, however. But these cases are only mentioned in brief. It is the women who denied the accusations of being witches up until the very end that have made it to our history pages in great detail. One of the most famous of these women was the young Joan of Arc who was accused of witchcraft by the English and burned at the stake in 1431. But several years after her death the charges were dropped and she was later even achieved sainthood.
Of course there were many other women who stood their ground after facing the accusations of using witchcraft. Almost all of these women were convicted and burned at the stake. One story of such a woman can be found in The Formicarius. A young man admits that both he and his wife are witches, however, she protests this to her end: “His wife, however, though convicted by the testimony of witnesses, would not confess the truth ever under the torture or in death; but, when the fire was prepared for her by the executioner, uttered in most evil words a curse upon him, and so was burned.” (Kors 104)
In The Malleus Maleficarum a plan is laid out for others to follow to get a confession out of a witch. In order to get a woman to confess to the charge of being a witch Kramer and Sprenger wrote that “she may be promised her life her life on the following conditions: that she be sentenced to imprisonment for life on bread and water, provided that she supply evidence which will lead to the conviction of other witches. And she is not to be told, when she is promised her life, that she is to be imprisoned this way; but should be led to suppose that some other penance, such as exile, will be her punishment.” They also go on to say that ” after she has been confined to prison in this way, the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period she should be burned.” (Kramer 226)
Those women who still refuse to confess after being “promised” their lives were imprisoned and tortured. Many of these women never even made it to the stake. They died in the prisons as a result of the violent torture they received. Some even fell victim to the onslaught of “cleansing’ by which Christians would come into the prisons and attack the daemons that held on to these women and gave them their supernatural power. Often, this “cleansing” was done by beating the daemon off the woman rather than through prayer.
The Overall Effects on Women
Throughout the centuries that the witch trials and witch-hunts lasted many women were murdered senselessly. Poor women saw each other being killed off. And quiet women saw the more outspoken and independent women being burned at the stake. This made a lasting impression on the women of the medieval era. Women were forced to become more and more submissive and allowed less and less control over their own lives. Though with time the “Witchcraze” dwindled away in Europe it still managed to take hole in other areas around the world including here in the Salem witch trials as well as in Oriental countries where the healers were soon singled out after the trials died down in Europe. Across the world and across time women have fallen under the accusation of witchcraft.
Works Cited
Barstow, Anne. Witchcraze: A new history of the European Witch hunts. Harper
Collins: London. 1995. Pgs. 14-31.
Kors, Alan and Peters, Edward. Witchcraft in Europe: A documentary history 1100-
1700. University of Pennsylvania Press: Pennsylvania. 1999.
Kramer, Heinrich and Sprenger, James. The Malleus Maleficarum. Dover Publications:
New York.1971. (Translated and reprinted by Dover. Originally done by Kramer
and Sprenger in 1484.)
Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Dover Publications: New York. 1972.
(Reprinted by Dover. Originally done by Scot in 1584.)
