INTERNATIONAL TRENDS:  THE WITCH "SHE" / THE HISTORIAN "HE"

by 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 similarly 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.

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) Similarly, 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."(1 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."(2 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 brilliantly 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 retrospect 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 particularly 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 itself gender-neutral.(3 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 adaptability 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.(4 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.(5 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.

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