On the Trail of the "Witches:" Wise Women, Midwives and the European Witch Hunts

Author(s): Ritta Jo Horsley and Richard A. Horsley

Source: Women in German Yearbook , 1987, Vol. 3 (1987), pp. 1-28
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688683

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 On the Trail of the "Witches:"
Wise Women, Midwives and the European Witch Hunts

Ritta Jo Horsley and Richard A. Horsley

Since the beginning of the second wave of the women's

movement feminists have seen the European witch hunts of the 16th
and 17th centuries as a crucial phenomenon in our history, with
important implications for our situation today. Early analyses
focused attention on the persecution of al leged witches as a
violent manifestation of Western male culture's fear and hatred
of women, and as an extension of its need to suppress women1 s
traditional powers, rites and knowledge, which it interpreted as
demonic threats. Others have shown how the blaming of innocent
victims that went on in the trial s themsel ves has been
perpetuated by contemporary scholarship which trivializes or
orni ts from the record the tortu re and ki Hing of tens of
thousands of women or refers to the accused as actual witches,
evil-doers deserving, their fate, or as mentally or sexually
disturbed hysterics. In search of alternative interpretations,
some feminists have followed more romantic and now largely
discredited theories which view the accused as members of a pagan
fertility religion, an underground survival of a pre
patriarchal, nature- and woman-centered culture. In this spirit,
feminist witchcraft has reclaimed the figure of the witch as a
symbol of suppressed female knowledge, power and independence.
But while such an appropriation of the witch myth may be an
important source of renewal and energy, we should be aware that
it is a contemporary pol i ti cal transformation and represents
neither an accurate understanding of historical reality nor an
adequate^basis for challenging the patriarchal distortions of our
history. To move toward such an understanding and to ground our
solidarity with the tortured and condemned women and men more
rei i ably, we need to apply the perspectives and hypotheses of
feminist scholarship to new interdi sci pi i nary information and
advances in theory treating the period of the witch hunts. The
questions of how and why such massive and drastic violence
against women (the vast majority of victims) could have occurred
throughout much of Europe at the dawn of the modern era are
essential to address, in order both to comprehend and combat
historical and continuing mechanisms of oppression and to advance
the general feminist critique of Western patriarchal culture.
An early feminist reinterpretation of the witch hunts was
the hypothesis advanced by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
that the women accused in the trials were predominantly the wise
women, healers and midwives of peasant society, persecuted

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because they represented a threat to the Church's control and
competition to^the nascent male medical profession of the early
modern period. The work of Ehrenrei ch and Engl i sh rei i es in
part on the romantic theories now being discredited, but their
fundamental suggestion that the "witches" often held the roles of
healer or midwife does not depend on the survival of a pre
Christian fertility cult and can be investigated apart from such
a theory. It is possible to bring together scattered and
fragmentary evidence of the social roles of the accused which
both substantiates and partly qualifies the thesis of Ehrenreich
and English. Such an investigation, showing that substantial
numbers of the accused were wise women, has significant implica
tions for the underlying questions of why the witch hunts should
have occurred at all, and why so many of the victims should have
been women. To address such questions, however, the relatively
concrete and particular results of our study of the roles of the
accused will have to be combined with analyses that take into
account a complex range of factors, anthropological, economic,
socio-political, and religious. The European witch hunts may be
an instructive example of how women's history requires?and
generates?an interdisciplinary approach.
To be useful for our purpose, our study of the roles of the
accused in the witch trials of England and western Europe will
need to go beyond a simple quantitative analysis of age and sex
distribution which, while helpful, does little more than confirm
the standard generalization that the vast majority of those
executed for witchcraft were poor elderly women. In selecting
and analyzing material it is also necessary to recognize and keep
clearly in mind the distinction between the "official" theory of
witchcraft evolved by the learned theologians and promulgated by
the witchhunters on the one hand, and the beliefs of the common
unlettered people preceding the influence of the official theory
on the other. As reflected in demonological treatises such as
the Mal leus Maleficarum (1486) of the Dominican Inquisitors
Kramer and Sprenger, or Jean Bodin's Demonomanie (1580), witches
were viewed as members of a Devil -worshipping cui t bent on
destroying Christianity who had sealed their loyalty to Satan
through an act of . sexual intercourse with him or one of his
demons, and who flew through the night to participate in
orgiastic and blasphemous gatherings called sabbats. It is now
generally agreed that this learned understanding of witchcraft
was a composite theory gradually created by the ecclesiastical
witch hunters and added to the long-standing popular belief in
persons who could do harm (maleficium) by supernatural means.
Descriptions of witches or their activities which draw on such
documents as the demonologies, or on confessions produced under
torture and questioning designed to elicit responses conforming
to this theory, then, are virtually worthless as sources of
information about what the people actually believed or practiced.
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 Trial depositions which record the actual charges brought
by villagers against their neighbors can be useful, however, in
piecing together a picture of what kinds of persons were accused
and for what reasons, and thus allow us to profile a cautious
outline of theclasses.
the literate populagSuch
realities behindisthe
material writtenand
available mythology of
has been
investigated for England and areas of France, Switzerland,
Germany and Austria, and permits us to evaluate the thesis of
Ehrenreich and English as well as to make some observations about
the dynamics of witch beliefs and accusations before the
situation became obscured and transformed by the imposition of
the ecclesiastical view of witchcraft as a Satanic heresy.
In analyzing the material contained in the trial
depositions, it will be helpful to distinguish four categories:
witches, sorceresses, wise women, and midwives. In particular,
an understanding of the nature and functioning of witch beliefs
in peasant communities will be an important aspect of our
analysis. Anthropologists who study witchcraft in non-European
societies^ commonly differentiate between witchcraft and
sorcery. According to this distinction, sorcery refers to a
technique involving the use of substances or objects believed to
be imbued with supernatural power, usually along with verbal
spells or gestures, with the intention of harming one's fellows.
Anyone can learn the techniques or obtain the means of sorcery,
although there are more or less professional sorcerers in peasant
communities to whom one can turn for techniques of magic (or
counter-magic) to achieve desired ends such as harming an enemy
or getting revenge. Witchcraft, on the other hand, involves harm
believed to have been done because of an implicit power inherent
in the witch, based on a constitutional and sometimes inherited
differentness, and is not attributable merely to a specific
technique. Sometimes persons believed to be witches may be
accused of using techniques to obtain their ends as well as
exhibiting inherent power, but the special nature of the witch is
retained.

Although there is little terminological basis for a

distinction between these two kinds of maleficari in the European
materials, the trial documents do indicate that by and large the
common people perceived just such a distinction in role, and the
accusations show that persons were accused on the basis of such
witch beliefs much more frequently than for the practice of
sorcery. The kinds of charges raised most often in the English
and early continental trials involve the relationship between
accused and accuser connoted in the English term "bewitched" or
"forespoken," that of harm to themselves or their animals caused
by some inherent and mysterious power, manifest perhaps in a
curse, a weird glance or suspicious appearance (see, e.g., Thomas
436-37; 511-13). Unexplained illness, death or phenomena such as
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a cow giving blood instead of milk, a calf being born without
skin, sudden rain or hailstorms all gave rise to suspicion of
witchcraft in a cui ture which maintained belief in magical
causation.

The hapless persons accused in the trial s often seem to

have acquired the reputation of being a witch over a long period
of time, a reputation attested to by the numerous witnesses who
came forward to make charges, as in a typical Lucerne trial from
1502 in which the woman Dichtlin was accused -by fourteen
different men from her own and neighboring villages. Testimony
sometimes simply consisted of repeating earlier reports that the
woman "must be a witch;" in a trial of 1601 from northern France,
a witness testified that she had once heard an Italian soldier
accusing Aldegonde de Rue, a 70-year-old widow later tortured and
burned, of being a witch (Muchembled 234). Many of the
allegations of harm attributed to the accused go back ten or more
years, further increasing the impression that the suspect carries
with her a long-standing, widely held reputation as a 1 ikely
evil-doer endowed with special powers. Such a reputation is
sometimes passed on within the same family, corresponding to the
belief that the witch's powers are something mysteriously innate
and out of the ordinary; Dichtlin's daughter Anna is suspect
simply by virtue of her mother's reputation, and "die
R schellerin," tried around 1480, not only has the reputation of
being a witch herself in her village, but is charged with having
a mother with the same reputation (Luzerner Akten no. 25, no.
16). A woman's reputation as a likely witch seems to have been
strengthened by an uncanny or eccentric appearance or behavior.
"Die Ruschellerin" terrorized one male witness by rushing toward
him early one morning far from the village with her skirts raised
high and her mouth all blue; he subsequently claimed to have
developed sores in his own mouth. The same woman was reported by
a different vil lager to have run about suspiciously upon a
meadow, after which a powerful storm broke out. The accused
women of the Cambr?s i s are sometimes charged with strange
appearance and behavior, such as dancing, "hair disheveled, near
a wood," or "turning about, with her head down, near a fountain"
(Muchembled 235-36).

The common beliefs in the uncanny power of such marked

persons, most often elderly, probably socially and economically
somewhat marginal and relatively powerless, could sometimes serve
to protect them from those in the community who might otherwise
take^dvantage of them or refuse to give them needed goods or
aid. For example, in her confession (which must be regarded
with greater caution than the accusations of witnesses), Els von
Mersberg admitted that she had "caused" the great hailstorm
attributed to her, explaining she had cursed a beggar who had
tried to rape her, specificaily by wishing that he might be
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Struck by epilepsy, hail, and lightning; her would-be rapist was
presumably deterred from his goal by his fear of her power to
invoke these threats (Luzerner Akten no. 8).

Conversely, the most frequently recurring dynamic of the

recorded accusations shows how the belief in the uncanny power of
such persons to defend their own interests could be turned
against them when ci rcumstances shifted and fostered the
persecution of witches: the typical pattern shows the suspect
being accused of causing some misfortune to a fellow villager as
a result of a grievance she had against him, frequently a
grievance that appears to be a just one. For example, in a
Lucerne case "die R?schellerin" had asked two men who had come to
her village as mowers to perform this service for her also. When
they refused, she allegedly warned them that things would not go
well for them; first one, then the other mower subsequently took
to his bed for a period of several weeks (Luzerner Akten no. 16).
Such a pattern, which is typical for the English cases as well,
and "recurs like a leitmotiv" in the testimonies from trials in
northern France, reflects a situation in which the witnesses,
generally better off than the accused, blame her for taking
"revenge in her spells for being refused something she wanted" or
felt entitled to. In socio-psychological terms we can say the
accusations typically show guilt feelings experienced for having
rejected a request or demand that is perceived as at least
partially legitimate. These feelings are projected as fear and
resentment onto the person making the demand, who then seems to
be endowed with both the motive and the mysterious power to carry
out maleficia as revenge (see Macfarlane 174; Cohn 247; Soman
42).
The particular charges of "bewitching," the typical
dynamics underlying them, and the characteristics of persons
charged all suggest that these early European and English trials
reflect the operation of witch beliefs in the community, rather
than a popular campaign against sorcery. The fact that the
overwhelming majority of persons accused in village trials were
old women further supports the interpretation that the accusa
tions reflected a deeply rooted stereotype attributing to elderly
women, especially if peculiar in behavior or appearance, the
quali ti es of uncanny malevolent power that are focused in
witchcraft beliefs (see Cohn 248-9).
Persons who could be described as "sorcerers," however, are
seldom accused in the trial documents, al though witnesses who
believe they have been bewitched frequently mention having turned
to such professional practitioners themselves for some technique
of sorcery to di scover and remedy the supposed spel1. For
example, in the Lucerne depositions we hear about one Toman
Bophart who believed that a woman called "die Oberhauserin" had
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bewitched his milk after catching him in the act of stealing her
cherries one day. He obtained a means of counter-magic from his
friend R?tiweger, ^ technique of sorcery which made "die
Oberhauserin" sick. In the Lucerne depositions, of the
twenty-one cases which provide sufficient and reiiable
information to make a judgment, all but three of the women are
accused explicitly of bewitching; only about one quarter of the
cases i nel ude a suggestion that they have al so been practicing
sorcery, in the form of weather magic. And in fact, in these
cases the peasants seem to view their neighbors' ability to
predict or cause weather less .as sorcery than as evidence of
possession of inherent powers. In these material s and for
Lorraine, the Cambresis, Bremen, and Schleswig-Holstein, as well
as for England, there appears little firm evidence that many of
those accused in .the witch trials could reasonably be described
as "sorceresses."
If persons actively practicing maleficent magic or sorcery
are seldom associated with the witch-beliefs reflected in the
accusations, what is the case with white witches, or
practitioners of beneficent magic? In European towns and
vi 11 ages the people consulted experts not only in maleficent
magic, but al so in hel pful magic, who were known variously as
devins-guerisseurs (diviners-healers), cunning folk, wizards,
white witches, and wise women and men. Such wise women and men
played an important role in late medieval and early modern
Europe, performing such functions as finding lost objects,
discovering the identity of thieves, heal ing through
folk-medicine and enchantments, performing protective and love
magic, and sometimes midwifery. In England of the 16th century
the cunning folk were more numerous than the parish clergy of the
official rei igion, and played a more important role in the
practical 1 i ves of the people (Thomas 244-45). The magical
practices of wise women were apparently remarkably similar from
area to area in Europe; English magical formulae used in healing
were almost identical to many used in Lorraine, and the Austrian
folklore material includes a description of a wise woman's role
by a hostile contemporary that is virtually identical to that of
her English contemporary:

Such a woman cooked and mixed [certain herbs]

and gave the soup or rather the water to women
and men, so that when they washed themselves
with it, no one could do them harm. . . .
Through this and other s imi lar superstitions
she developed a reputation as a witch (Hexe);
the peasants have such 1 itti e faith (klein
glaubiges pauernvolgkh) that even when they
have merely a pain in the finger, they run
straight to such old women and have them do
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 incantations, washings, and other such super
stitious things, which they then tell to
someone else, so that when he becomes sick or
something else happens to him he should to
this or that [old woman] who can help him.

While thei r activities were primari 1 y beneficent, there was

sometimes an area of ambiguity between helpful and harmful magic,
as when love magic designed to help one party harms another, or
weather spirits are conjured to avoid striking one field and
strike another instead. The Austrian materials include a charm
to promote the productivity of one's own cows which also brings a
curse against the cows of others (Byloff no. 40, 30-31). Despite
this overlap, most European documents show that in general the
people held^wise women and sorceresses to belong to different
categories.
Nevertheless, although they were originally not identified
with the maleficent magic of sorcery, much evidence suggests that
in contrast to sorcerers, wise.women and men came to be frequent
victims of the witch trials. A number of factors contributed
to the presence of peasant healers and diviners among the
accused. As first suggested decades ago, suspicion probably
arose from the bad words of a neighbor, which tainted the wise
woman's reputation in a way that she was unable to counteract
(Notestein 22). Moreover, the wise woman's endowment with
unusual powers must have made her especially vulnerable to
suspicion once other peasants felt themselves "bewitched."
Another factor in the accusation of wise women and men as
witches found in England and in the Lucerne depositions is their
identification by other cunning folk or peasant diviners, engaged
by the victim of suspected malefici urn to diagnose its cause, or
better, confirm the victim's suspicions regarding certain women
(Macfariane 127-28; Thomas 548). In the Lucerne material s the
witnesses have consulted the Hexenkenner, the Quacksalber, and
the Wahrsager; one such diviner even claims the hereditary power
of being regularly in touch with spirits of the dead (Luzerner
Akten nos. 22, 23, 24, 16). These depositions show, however,
that while such male witch-finders could use their occult or
uncanny powers to support the accusation of witch suspects, it
was the female healers-diviners who were accused. In one case
from 1543, two healers worked together to attempt to heal Peter
Krumenacher1 s impotence; the male healer, Ul i Schultheis, who
suggested using sacred palms and vesper candles, does not appear
to have been accused or prosecuted. His female partner Els
Adams, however, who insisted that Schultheis sprinkle
Krumenacher's shirt with holy water in the church, fell victim to
the trials (Luzerner Akten no. 32). At least eight other women
accused in the Lucerne material between 1450 and 1543 appear to
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have been wise women, engaged in beneficent practices such as
heal ing by fol k remedies, protective magic, and teaching other
women charms to make their husbands stop beating them and care
for them instead (Luzerner Akten nos. 10, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29,
32). The fact that the wise women were identified by non
persecuted cunning men may suggest a general stereotyping of
female knowledge and power as threatening and harmful ; it may
simultaneously reflect the more vulnerable and marginal position
of the women in their community. In the Austrian material s
collected by Byloff nearly half of those accused appear to have
been primarily peasant healers and diviners; although a number of
those accused were men, many of them were, like the stereotypical
female "witch," marginal figures of peasant society such as
beggars (Byloff nos. 23, 28, 38, 40, 46, 50, 55).
While the inclusion of healers and wise women among those
accused by the peasants appears to conform to the pattern of folk
witch beliefs in attaching a negative stigma to a marginal person
associated wi th potential supernatural powers, it was the
official demonological theories of the Church that were decisive
in the prosecution of the peasant diviners and healers.
Ecclesiastical and secular official s were often convinced that
the wise women were just as dangerous as the practitioners of
maleficent magic, in part because any supposed supernatural cures
or effects not sanctioned by the Church were viewed as resulting
from the Devil's help, but in part also because of the competi
tion such cunning folk meant to the established religion (Thomas
257ff, 264). It was the church wardens of Barnsley, Gloucester
shi re, who reported in 1563 that Al ice Prabury "useth herseif
suspiciously in the likelihood of a witch" in her attempts simply
to heal animals and people (Thomas 182). And although more
diviners than healers were prosecuted in England, Thomas (567)
identified more than forty cunning folk who were so accused.
Under the influence of official ecclesiastical theory, then,
healers who believed themselves agents for good could be trans
formed into maleficent agents of Satan. This is summarized for
the witch trials in Lorraine:

All the evidence indicates that (Lorraine's)

diviners-healers . . . really thought that they
were endowed with divine gifts, and those who
consul ted them shared this opinion. But the
churchmen, demonologists, and, following them,
the l.ocal judges, viewed them as Satan ' s
servants conjuring away the spelIs which they
themselves had cast. Brought before the Ducal
courts, these magicians almost invariably began
by admitting that they were diviners and
healers, but not witches?concepts which to
them were mutually exclusive. Only after they
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 had been tortured and harassed by their judges
did they finish, almost inevitably by admitting
that they were slaves of Satan (Delcambre 217).

The material from northern Germany points to a similar pattern in

which the witch hunters, with their learned Christian viewpoint,
were able to transform wise women into the very accomplices of
Satan they were looking for. The diviner and magician Gesche
Meier, for example, testified before undergoing torture that her
divination of a thief's identity was performed by addressing God;
once under torture she "confessed" that it had been done in the
name of Satan (Heberling 120-121; Schwartzw?lder 36). One of the
principal features of the trials in Schleswig-Holstein was their
concentration on women with reputations as magical healers
(Heberling 120). And many of the witch trials in the environs of
Bremen began with the failure of magical healing--which was then
interpreted by the officials as the evil work of Satan
(Schwartzw?lder 5).

On the levels of the popular accusations of the peasants

themselves, and more importantly the learned theories of the
demonologists and the officials, then, mechanisms were at work
which led to the presence of a considerable number of diviners
and healers, nearly al 1 of them women, among those tri ed for
"witchcraft." The evidence available from trials in Lorraine,
north Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and England thus shows that
they indeed figured prominently among the accused, as Ehrenreich
and English speculated, probably constituting a tt?rd to a half
of the victims in some areas, in others a majority.

Ehrenreich and English and others have commented that t?e

figure of the midwife was a frequent target of the witch hunts.
Certainly in the documents that reflect the official views of the
Church and learned opinion, the midwife is an obsessive concern.
Learned Christian demonologists wrote lurid descriptions of how
"Satan's whores" not only killed and ate babies, but also
required the fat of unbaptized babies as a princ^oal ingredient
for their flying ointment and other concoctions. The Malleus
Maleficarum held that midwives "surpass all other witches in
their crimes. . . And it quotes supposedly penitent witches
as saying "No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than
midwives. For when they do not kill children, then, as if for
some other purpose, they take them out of the rooo^and, raising
them up in the ai r, offer them to devils."* Short of
infanticide, moreover, the Christian estabiishment had other
anxieties about midwives. Besides the general aura of mystery
and awe which surrounded birth, there were superstitions
connected with parti cuiar parts of chi 1dbirth such as the
placenta, the umbilical cord, and the caul (the piece of amniotic
membrane which may still cover the infant's head at birth). Thus
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numerous regulations were published which forbade midwives to
carry off or bury the placenta or to keep the caul--lest they be
used for sorcery.

The Church also knew very well that midwives used charms,
spel1 s, and incantations to assist women in labor. There are
numerous "Visitation Articles" of bi shops and archbishops
insisting that examinations and trial be had of midwives to
determine whether at women's travail they use "charms,
enchantments, invocations, ci rei es .^g. . or any 1 ike crafts or
imaginations invented by the devil." In England and elsewhere
the Church began to require that midwives be "examined and
admitted" (in effect, 1 i censed) by the bishop. In fact, it
appears that throughout Europe at this time secular governments
in cooperation with the Churches began to regulate and control
the practices of midwives. Thus an English midwives* oath of
1567 has midwives pledge that they "wi 11 not use any kind of
sorcery or incantation in the time of the travail of any women;
and that (they) will not destroy the child born of any woman. . .
." The W?rzburg-Mainz-Wormser Kirchenordnung of 1670 forbids
midwives "to induce or to pal 1 i ate the biet h or to employ
superstitious methods for mother or child." Throughout the
sixteenth century ordinances in German cities restricted
midwives' activities; they were variously forbidden to administer
medications, perform diagnostic analyses of blood or urine or use
instruments such as forceps; they were required to report
abortions, infanticide and childbirth outside of marriage to the
authorities, and to ^ubmit themselves to the supervision and
authority of doctors.
Given the intense anxieties among demonologists, bishops
and even secular officials concerning the possible anti-social
and Satanic activities of midwives, it is not surprising that
they are found among the victims of the witch trials. Midwives,
however, are not nearly as prominent in the avail able peasant
depositions as in the official documents and learned treatises.
Moreover, the evidence is uneven from area to area in Europe as
to just how many midwives there may have been among the victims
of the great witch hunts. Monter finds very few in the Jura
(126), whereas Midelfort finds many in Southwestern Germany
(187). Some of the records and (older) scholarship indicate
whether midwives are included?as in a year-by-yeajjotabul ation of
the numbers of witches burned from place to place:

1582, October 19. Today a half mile from

Waldkirch im Breisgau, 38
witches burned, among them
4 midwives.

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 1582, October 28. Turkheim im Alsace, 36
witches burned, among them
2 midwives.

1589 - 1592 Schongau, 63 witches

burned, among whom were 3
midwives.

Few of the sources or accounts, however, are this explicit. Even

where we find indications of midwives among the victims, it is
stil1 necessary, in order to measure the import of such
information, to determine whether three midwives among 63
"witches" or even four midwives among 38 "witches" burned is a
proportion significantly greater than the proportion of people
who were midwives in given towns and villages. All that we can
say at present is that midwives were indeed among those burned
for "witchcraft."

Some of the midwives accused were also wise women,

providing midwifery along with other services of folk medicine.
Such is the case with Dicht!in, one of the accused women in
Lucerne. Some of the charges against her were rooted in
villagers' anxiety about having called in another midwife instead
of her. Such was also the case with a "Mrs. Pepper, a midwife,
and one that uses to cast water," who was accused of bewitching
the ailing Robert Pyle, who had sent his water for urinalysis.
But accused midwives were not necessarily also healers and
diviners.

Even when midwives were among those accused by their fellow

vil lagers it is not always clear what, if anything, their
midwifery had to do with the people's accusations against them.
The common people clearly did not share the learned, official
notions that the midwives were in league with Satan. In contrast
to the impression given by Forbes, for example, one of the
midwives burned at Schongau said that by smothering it in the
mother's womb before it had come into the world she could easily
ki 11 archil d ohne Teufelssalbe (without the salve of the
Devil). Nor do the popular accusations i nelude charges of
infanticide, again in contrast with the official theories.
Furthermore, as in the case of Agnes Marshall of the village of
Di ffi eld Parva in 1481, suspicions regarding incantations used in
midwifery would appear to come from the church warden or some
other official rather than from the people. Similarly, in the
1681 Austrian case of Gertraud M?ller of Oberw?lz, who was
prosecuted for practices intended to aid women in childbirth,
there is no indication that she was accused by her fellow
villagers (Byloff no. 62). One is left with the impression that
the typical case of a midwife accused by the people is more like
that of Di cht!in at Lucerne in 1502; accusations arose out of
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tensions in her relations with her neighbors but had little to do
with her actual practice of midwifery (Luzerner Akten no. 25).

In order to judge adequately the importance of midwives in

the great European witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, a
great deal of work remains to be done. Few of the trial records
have been examined with this question in mind. There is also a
large body of potentially relevant primary sources (midwives'
handbooks, governmental regulations for midwives) and secondary
1 iterature (older scholarly investigations of medical history,
women's history, and folklore) which has not been carefully
analyzed for 1 ight on this issue; see Forbes for an extensive
bibliography. One obvious question which must be dealt with is
the relation of the witch trials to trials for infanticide and
other crimes of a sexual or reproductive nature (abortion,
sodomy, incest). Such trials, resulting in unprecedented numbers
of women accused in court, increased simultaneously with the
witch trials and with attempts by ecclesiastical and governmental
official s to bring midwifery under their own regulation. We
will speculate about further significances of these correlations
later in the discussion, but they do at least suggest that the
attempt to impose government control over midwifery, sexuality
and reproduction might have led to the emphasis on midwives in
official texts. Although Ehrenreich and English (and more
recently Heinsohn and Steiger) are correct in emphasizing the
official association of midwives with the Satanic cult of the
learned theories, then, the common people do not appear to have
shared these fears, and the trial records do not present clear
evidence of the accusation of midwives in disproportionate
numbers.

By distinguishing between two types of "witchcraft," the

learned composite theory of the witch hunters with its emphasis
on Devil worship and participation in the sabbat on the one hand,
and traditional popular beliefs in the supernatural power of some
individuals to cause misfortune on the other, and by focusing on
the 1atter as they emerge from depositions from the early
European witch trials, it has been possible to profile more
clearly the social roles of those accused and to shed light on
the dynamics of the trial s themselves. The testimony of
witnesses at trials in England, Switzerland, France, Austria and
northern Germany indicates that those accused were not the
members of a cult of Devil-worshippers the demonologists and some
modern historians have made them, nor were they part of an
organized vestigial fertility religion as thought by Murray and
others. By applying the anthropologists' differentiation between
sorcery or magical techniques and the belief in the inherent
uncanny power of a supposed witch we could tease out the image of
the typical victim of the trials. Such persons were only very
seldom sorceresses or practitioners of harmful magic; they were
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frequently practitioners of beneficent magic and folk heal ing,
caught in the dragnet of the witch hunts through a combination of
their neighbors1 suspicions and official condemnation. Despite
the Church's and secular authority's preoccupation with midwives
as potential servants of Satan, the trial evidence does not
establish that they were disproportionately singled out by their
fellow villagers for charges of maleficia against the newborn.

More generally, the depositions indicate that the village

accusations fol low the pattern of wi tch beliefs, according to
which certain individual s are suspected of possessing the
mysterious power and malevolence that are thought to cause
otherwise unexplained misfortune. The persons most 1 i kely to
become the objects of such suspicion and subsequent accusation
were elderly poor women, especially those with uncanny or
peculiar appearance or behavior, or those who may have developed
a reputation for ill-wishing.
A partial explanation of why the elderly woman and often
the wise woman evolved as the stereotypical witch suspect could
also be found in the intra-vil l?ge dynamics of the trials. As
discussed above, the typical pattern of accusation showed that
the suspect was thought to be taking revenge through the alleged
maleficia for an offense earlier experienced at the hands of her
accuser or alleged victim. Such witch beliefs may stimulate two
opposing responses from community members. Under circumstances
where the norms and val ues of the communi ty are i ntact, wi tch
beliefs can serve to reinforce their observance by providing a
warning or sanction against breaking them. Thus the communal
obligation to tolerate and support all members of the group, even
those who may be otherwise weaker or have become old and less
productive, is strengthened by the belief that such a person may
have the mysterious power to retaliate if not treated with proper
respect. On the other hand, once these norms and their
supporting structures begin to lose their coherence and efficacy,
community members can respond to the presence and needs of such
persons by hostility, rejection, and subsequent feelings of guilt
which are projected onto the needy through accusation and
persecution as witches (Thomas 564-67). The fact that elderly,
eccentric or isolated women may wel1 have been among the
community's less productive and needier members may help to
explain why they were so frequently suspected as potential
witches, and how, under circumstances of social and economic
distress and the official reinterpretati on of witch beliefs as
occurred in early modern Europe, they could then be seen as the
cause of real or imagined evil befal 1 ing or threatening the
community.

To understand the prevalence of old women as accused

witches in the village trials, however, we must take account of
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other explanatory factors as wel1, overlapping with and rein
forcing the anthropological interpretation of an economically
based relationship. It is not possible here to do more than
suggest some lines for further development. Popular tradi
tional European beliefs about female magical figures have been
cited as antecedents of the official composite image of the witch
as it finally coalesced in the 15th century: the idea of the
sol itary night-flying cannibalistic woman which developed
independently in classical antiquity (as the stri ) and in
Germanic tradition; and an entirely different popular belief in
benevolent female spirits, followers of Diana (also called
Herodias or Holda), who flew with her troop through the night to
visit and bless homes that were well cared for (Cohn 206-25). In
the popular imagination these two kinds of beliefs were kept
separate. They were only blended together by the learned
authorities into the "single fantasy of organized masses of
witches flying by night, intent on cannibalistic orgies, and
guided by demons" (Cohn 219). Nevertheless, many peasant women
apparently believed that they flew with Diana at night, and there
are potential but not yet sufficiently explored connections
between the pagan beliefs about these night journeys and the
powers of wise women, such as weather magic, promotion of love
and productivity, and midwifery. It is important to note that
such flights had the beneficent intent of promoting health,
fertility, and social welfare, and were not demonic missions of
infanticide ai^d destruction, until reinterpreted by the
demonologists.

Apart from such specific beliefs, other aspects of witch

beliefs generally can suggest possible explanations for the
prevalence of women among those identified as wi tches, a
prevalence found ~4n most societies which believe in witches
around the world. Witches can be said to occupy an ambiguous
space in the symbolic world of a group: they are thought to be
both human and, by virtue of their mysterious powers, nonhuman
(Mayer 68). The secret acts which are typically attributed to
them, such as fornicating with animals or devouring babies, are
acts which delineate the boundaries of socially defined human
behavior and place the witches outside these bounds in a chaotic,
non-human realm. Witches are also seen as ambiguous in their
role within the community, appearing to be loyal members of their
society but feared to be in reality secretly motivated to harm
their own, to undermine from within the health, f?rtil ity,
productivity of their group. As "the hidden enemy within the
gate," the witch is both an insider and an outsider, and her
presumed offenses seem al 1 the more fearful and heinous,
requiring a protection or remedy of an unusual order (Mayer 67).

The ambiguity of the witch, situated on the boundary of the

human-nonhuman and as member-outsider in relation to her
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Community, bears a striking similarity to the ambiguous image of
women generally, as perceived according to the official "men's
view" of social reality. Anthropologists have shown how the
official symbolism of a cultural group represents women as
belonging both to society-^and to uncivilized nature (the "wild")
in a way that men do not. Women's biological differentness and
seemingly mysterious powers of menstruation and reproduction,
reinforced by their roles tending the sick and their oversight of
the birth and death processes, allow them to be associated with
nature and its mysterious, unpredictable forces as well as with
human society. Moreover, a woman's loyalty to her community
might be more easily cast in doubt than a man's, particularly if
she had married into her husband's village or family from a more
distant one. From a patriarchal perspective, however, any
woman's loyalty to an order in which women are subordinate can be
potentially suspect. Particularly if a woman deviates in
appearance, behavior, or social status from the expected code for
a woman of her community, she may seem to threaten the stability
and invincibility of the prevailing order, which depends to a
large3Cextent on the conformity of its women to a prescribed
role. In the official but not entirely self-confident or
anxiety-free "men's view" it may appear only too likely that
women secretly desire and plot to reverse or at least undermine
the male control of their lives and society; and such anxieties
can give rise to fantasies of malevolent power projected onto
those who seem least reliably a part of the community. The
supposed witch created in such a way thus serves both as a
warning that other women should not depart from the community's
norms, and as a rationalization for repressive control of
eccentric or independent behavior. Witchcraft scholar Christina
Larner has noted that the stereotype of the witch is set by males
as a "negative standard for women" to discourage behavior too
deviant from the ideal; it reflects hostility toward women who
exhibit "characteristics normal 1 y appropriated to men by men,
such as independence and aggression, and who fail to fulfill
functions thought appropriate to women, such as the nurture of
men and children." It would seem likely then that the
predominance of women among the accused witches in European
village trials reflects at least in part a very fundamental and
widespread patriarchal view of women as situated ambiguously
between nature and cui ture and as of uncertai 1 oyalty to the
male-defined values of the community; the stereotype of the
female witch would serve as a powerful means of social control.

Our discussion of the dynamics of witch beliefs and

accusations on the village level helps to explain the popular
background of the European witch trials of the 16th and 17th
centuries. But to account for the massive hunts and persecutions
themselves, other explanations beyond the village level must be
sought. For such an organized and widespread campaign of
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extermination was unique to Europe, and has not occurred in the
many other societies around the world which have witch beliefs
(see, e.g., Marwick 15). To explain the rise of the large-scale
persecutions, the village-level phenomena must be set into a
broader context which incorporates social, economic, poi i ti cal
and religious factors and takes into account the central role of
the ruling el i te in control 1 ing the demand for and supply of
witchcraft suspects (Larner 52).
Although not originally shared by the people, the official
theory of witchcraft as a Devil-worshipping conspiracy bent on
destroying Christianity and the entire creation must be
considered a decisive factor in the growth of the witch panic.
In England and Russia, where such a theory was either used less
intensively or else never promulgated by the Church at all, the
persecution of suspected witches remained on a much more limited
scale (Zguta 1206; Thomas 438-49). This doctrine, shaped and
accepted by the intellectual elite of the church and the
theological and juristic faculties of the universities, had
transformed the crime of simple maleficium into a cosmic sin
threatening the enti re community and requiring the extermina
tion of all witches. The growth of printing in the first half of
the sixteenth century spread this official theory widely among
the 1 iterate cl asses, and through preaching, word-of-mouth,
broadsheets and the witch trials and executions themselves it was
gradually ass i mil ated by the unlettered masses. At pubiic
executions, the confessions obtained under torture and guided
questioning were read aloud, providing the people with repeated
narrations of the kinds of crimes that Satanic witches were
supposed to commit.

Popular and learned 1 iterature al ike further reinforced

associations of women as witches; in particular, the vi rulent
anti-feminism of much of clerical Christianity found vivid and
elaborate expression in the official witchcraft theory of demon
ologists. The influential Malleus MaTeficarum taught that women
were much more likely than men to be witches because of their
weakness, i tellectual and spiritual inferiority, and most
especially their carnal lust, "which is in women insatiable"
(Malleus Maleficarum 127). The Church's association of sexuality
with Satanic witchcraft drew on a long ascetic tradition that
condemned sexual feelings and projected them onto women as the
source of carnal temptation; this theological obsession could
stir popular fears and fantasies of women succumbing to or
enjoying demon lovers, as some confessions indicate, and gave the
ol d stereotypes of the female wi tch a fearsome i tensi ty (Cohn
232-38).
Because the secret pact with the Devil was thought to give
the supposed witch special powers to escape detection through the
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normal legal process, witchcraft came to be considered a special
case among crimes, or crimen exceptum, with its own procedures
for investigation and prosecution. Earl i er, the accusatorial
trial system had assured that a suspected witch was not often
accused, since a false or unproven accusation could result in the
accuser's suffering the same penalty as a convicted witch. But
by the late 15th century the inquisitorial trial was widespread,
in which the accused was tortured until she "confessed," a
confession being generally required as the evidence necessary for
execution. As part of the confession the accused was forced to
name others she had seen at the nocturnal sabbats she was
bel i eved to have attended; in this way the accusations spread
like wildfire within a village or town, creating the belief that
there were witches everywhere, and eventually shifting away from
the original stereotype of the poor old woman to threaten members
of both sexes and all ages and classes. Without the official
theory of a conspiracy of Devi 1-worshippers and the machinery of
the inquisitorial trial, with its refined system of torture,
self-perpetuating accusations, and public executions, the witch
prosecutions could not have spread as they did (Cohn 252-53).
Once the belief in a diabolical conspiracy and the
machinery for prosecution existed a number of factors could
stimulate outbreaks of accusations and trials. Anthropologists
have observed that societies under stress or experiencing the
crumbling of traditional structures exhibit an increase in witch
accusations and persecution (Mayer 65). A s i milar correiation
has been made for the witch trials of early modern Europe, which
was undergoing major crises on various levels during the period
of greatest persecution. As social historian Henry Kamen
observes:

In every European country the most intensive

outbreaks of witch persecution were in times of
disaster. Taking the long view, the equation
of crisis and witchcraft becomes even more
striking. It was the very period of the
greatest price rise--the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth century--that saw the most
numerous~cases of accusation and persecution of
witches.
The transition from the medieval feudal order to the early
forms of capital i sm and the absolutist state during this time
brought social and economic upheaval s which, together with
demographic and natural phenomena, gave ri se to the crisi s
conditions felt through much of the period. Both rural and urban
areas witnessed a widening gap between rich and poor. In the
country the peasants were increasingly burdened by rising taxes
and labor service demanded by landlords; the population increase
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of the 16th century meant a further subdivision of the already
barely adequate landholdings of most peasants who owned their own
1 and. Fal 1 ing wages worsened the situation of the mass of
landless agricultural workers, and added to the numbers of rural
poor who wandered from village to village and eventually to the
towns and cities in search of 1 ivei i hood. In the cities the
ri sing wealth of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by growing
poverty among the lower classes; inflation, declining wages,
restricted opportunities for arti sans and growing numbers of
laborers and unemployed people all contributed to a problem of
poverty of unprecedented dimensions. Begging and vagabondage
became major concerns and were the object of laws which
multiplied after the late 15th century. A series of crop
fai lures and devastating famines in the late 16th and 17th
centuries further exacerbated the desperate condition of the
rural and urban 1ower classes. Uprisings by peasants and by
urban dwellers were numerous throughout this period, mostly in
response to economic conditions such as oppressive taxation,
tithes imposed by the church, or to the perceived im^glance
between the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many.

In the face of such widespread social and economic trauma,

the explanatory and scapegoating functions of witch trials assume
a potentially increased importance. Those somewhat better off
among the vil lagers and townsfolk could both ease their
conscience toward their poorer neighbors and deal with anxieties
about potential social unrest by scapegoating the poor as the
cause of all real or potential misfortune and eliminating them.
Such accusations were made the more likely by a shift in
attitudes concerning the poor which accompanied the Reformation
of the 16th century; the Protestant, especially Calvinist, view
reversed the earlier Catholic belief that poverty could be a
virtue and that alms-giving was a good work of Christian charity.
In the new view, the poor were often seen as idle sinners who
deserved their fate and should not be indulged. On a larger
scale, moreover, the interests of the ruling elites, secular and
ecclesiastic, could be served by focusing pubiic fear and
retribution on a supposed conspiracy of witches, thus deflecting
the growing cr^icism of their own wealth and role in the misery
of the people.
The social and economic factors underlying the witch
persecutions may also help to explain the prevalence of women and
healers among the accused. The original stereotype of the woman
as witch and the tradition of clerical misogyny were reinforced
by an apparently increasing pressure to restrict women's social
and economic roi es in the early modern period. Statistical
evidence indicates that by and large the majority of the poor and
vagrants who caused such concern during this period were women
and children (Kamen 430-31). Rising public awareness and fear of
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such women as a group may al so be reflected in the striking
increase of women accused in court for other crimes as well as
witchcraft, most notably infanticide. By the late 16th century
many cities had passed regulations which sharply monitored and
control led women's sexual and reproductive 1 i ves and required
their midwives to act as informers and enforcers (Birkelbach et
al., 94-95). The new laws which came into being at this time
criminal i zing women in unprecedented numbers may testify to an
increased perception of women's potential for social disruption
(Larner 60-62; 86).
These general trends run parallel to the erosion of women's
economic roles and power which occurred in the transition to the
early modern period. Female participation in the medieval
economy as craftswomen in guilds and other industries declined as
the guilds struggled to defend themselves against competition
arising from new forms of early capitalism (such as the putting
out system), and as the channels to qualification and status in
the new system were systematically closed to women. The
progressive disqualifi cation of midwives and wise women or
popular healers is a particularly important case in point. The
regulations of midwifery which have been studied for various
European cities indicate that the university-trained doctors and
apothecaries gained in privi lege and power di rectiy as the
activities of the traditional practitioners were restricted
(Birkelbach et aj_., 90-94). As the practice of medicine was
increasingly 1 imi ted to those who had received university
training, women were categorically excluded, sometimes formally,
as in the Act of Parliament passed in Edinburgh in 1641, which
forbade anyone not duly approved by the surgeons from practicing
the surgical art, and explici tiy threatened women practicing
unlawfully within the city with prosecution under the Witchcraft
Act (Larner 152). Cultural propaganda of the time reinforced the
tendency to legal and economic restriction of women by projecting
an image of the female as lustful, rebel 1 ious and given to
claiming unnatural power over men, and so requiring strong
measures to keep her in her rightful place (Merchant 132-40;
143-46).
The general perception of women, especially those seen as
independent, deviant or powerful, as a target group requiring
control and subordination may be an expression of fears brought
about in part by the new scientific world-view of the early
modern period, as wel 1 as by the shifting economic and social
rol es suggested above. The new science eventually brought a
sel f-confi dent belief in the possibil ity and the legitimacy of
mechanical manipulation and rational control of natural phenomena
in service of the rising bourgeoisie. At first, however, the new
ideas undermined the traditional concept of nature as an organic,
hierarchically structured macrocosm, as for example in the new
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Copernican model of a heliocentric rather than an earth-centered
universe; once the old order was shaken, an image of nature as
wild, corrupt and destructive gained force, of nature as a
"disorderly and chaotic realm to be subdued and control led"
(Merchant 127). The disorder and violence of nature seemed to be
crystallized in the power of witches to reverse normal natural
processes of fertility, weather and bodily health, to upset the
divine structures of creation. Thus the need to preserve order
and maintain control over the threatening aspect of nature could
be focused in the imperative to stamp out witchcraft. In
particular, wise women and healers, who were believed to possess
special powers to manipulate nature, must have seemed a threat to
the emerging but not yet estabi i shed scientific view. More
generally, traditional associations of woman with nature and with
the qualities of sexuality, disorder and unpredictable powers
were strengthened by the frequent prosecution of women as
witches; and conversely the need to control unruly nature could
easily overlap with and intensify the age-old patriarchal drive
to control rebellious or deviant women (Merchant 132).

Other changes in the world-view of early modern Europe may

also bear on the rise and fall of the persecution of women as
wi tches. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation piaced an
increased emphasis on individual moral ity and piety, and the
development of capital ism further fostered an ethos of
industriousness, self-control and repression of the senses and
sexuality in favor of reason and the mind. Domination of nature
thus took the additional form of control of internal human
nature. Women, already identified with nature, the body and the
passions in popular and learned mythology, could seem more
threatening in this context and all the more deserving of harsh
repression (Honegger 89-94; Easlea 213-15; 241-56). By the time
the new science and the new system of capitalism had gained a
firmer foothold in the mid to late 17th century, many of these
threats no longer seemed so terrible: nature yielded increasingly
to technological mani pulation; women had been removed from the
sphere of economic competition and redefined according to the
bourgeois ideal of passionlessness, passivity and dependence; and
witchcraft laws were replaced by laws against rebellious
proletarians.
Our study has aimed at an understanding of the European
witch hunts which investigates the dynamics of witch beliefs and
stereotyping on the vil l?ge level and takes into account the
concrete, specific historical evolution, promu1 gati on and
implementation by the ecclesiastical and secular elites of the
learned theory of witchcraft as a diabolic conspiracy, as well as
considering broader socio-economic and ideological developments
surrounding the persecutions. Such a complex, interdisciplinary
approach makes it impossible to interpret the trial s and
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executions simply as a horrifying aberration of the pre-modern
era that defies comprehension and is without particular
significance today. Rather, we see in the interaction of
ideology, legal machinery and social and economic forces, how
people's beliefs can be manipulated by the authorities,
especially in times of crisis and anxiety. Further, such an
analysis prevents both a simplistic romanticizing of the
"witches" as proto-feminist rebels and a view of the persecutions
as nothing but the direct expression of misogyny aimed against
female victims. We do see that many of the accused women were
very likely singled out for being different, independent or
endowed with special knowledge or powers. Moreover, by
suggesting how deeply and on how many levels (psychological,
social, economic, ideological) patriarchal attitudes and
structures were imp!icated in the witch persecutions, our
investigation underscores the necessity of setting the trials
into the broader context of women's hi story and feminist
analysis, both in order to understand the witch hunt itself and
in order to understand our herstory. The torture and killing of
the thousands of "witches" is an integral part of women's
history, a particular and extreme manifestation of oppression
which has a much longer history and continues into the present.
It is a sobering phenomenon which cannot be dismissed as a craze.

University of Massachusetts-Boston

NOTES

*
This article builds on and further devel
also provided the basis for two earlier ar
Hors ley, "Who were the 'Witches' ? Th
Accused in the European Witch Trials,"
plinary History 9.4 (1979): 689-715; and "F
Witchcraft and European Folk Religion," Jo
(1979): 71-95.

See Andrea Dworki , Woman Hating (New York : Dutton,

1974), ch. 7: "Gynocide: The Witches;" Rosemary Ruether, "The
Persecution of Witches: A Case of Sexism and Agism?,"
Christianity and Crisis (Dec. 23, 1974): 291-95. Silvia
Bovenschen, "The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch, and
the Witch Myth," New German Critique 15 (1978): 83-119
[originally Gabriele Becker, Silvia Bovenschen et_ al_., Aus der
Zeit der Verzweiflung, edition suhrkamp 840 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977) 259-312J; and Claudia Honegger, "Die Hexen der Neuzeit.
Analysen zur Anderen Seite der okzidentalen Rationalisierung," in
Honegger, ed., Die Hexen der Neuzeit. Studien zur Sozial -
?1

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geschiehte eines kulturei len Deutungsmusters, edition suhrkamp
743 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 21-151, portray the witch as an
integral part of the increasing rational i zati on of European
cui ture, in which dominating reason, law, and the state are
estabi i shed over against i rrational nature, feel ing, sexuality
and women. Carolyn Merchant, "Nature as Disorder: Women as
Witches," in her The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the
Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper andl Row, 1980)
127-48; and Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic and the New
Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific
Revo!uti on 1450-1750 (Sussex, England: The Harvester Press;
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980) follow a
similar 1 ine.

Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology. The Metaethics of Radical

Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978), ch. 6: "European Witchburnings:
Purifying the Body of Christ" 178-222; Richard A. Horsley, "Who
Were the 'Witches'? The Social Roles of the Accused in the
European Witch Trials," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9.4
(1979): 691.
3
The basic statement of the surviving f?rtility cult
theory was by Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). For the current
critique of this theory, see esp. E. William Monter, "The
Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971-72): 438-39; and,
more extensively, Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London:
Sussex Universi ty Press, 1975) 107-15. ? folklorist and
archaeologist heavily influenced by the Frazerian theory popular
in her time that religion originally consisted in fertility
cults, Murray has been faulted for an uncritical, selective use
of her sources and resistance to new historical evidence which
contradicted her theories; confessions obtained under torture and
contemporary pamphlet accounts of the more famous trial s are
taken at face value in her books as evidence of the existence of
covens and sabbats, ignoring moreover the manifestly impossible
elements of the documents which must cast doubt on thei r
reliability in general. On feminist witchcraft, see for example
the two books of Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the
Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1979); and Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics
(Boston: Beacon, 1982); also Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
(Boston: Beacon, 1981).
4
As cautioned also by Bovenschen, p. 87.
5
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches,
Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury:
Feminist Press, 1973).
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 Such data are presented by E. Wi11 i am Monter,
Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1976) and H. CT Eric Midelfort, Witchhunting in South
western Germany, 1562-1684 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
vmy.- -
^ See for example M
especially Cohn chs. 6,
Witch Trials (Berkeley a
Press, 1976) chs. 3-5, an
the peasants did not sh
Devil and night journeys
g
Kieckhefer, ch. 3, calls such trial documents in which
the peasants speak for themselves "superior documents."
9
Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
(London, 1970) ; Keith V. Thomas, Reii g ion and the Deci ine of
Magic (London, New York: Scribner's~i 1971) ; Etienne Delcambre,
Devins et Gu?risseurs, Vol. III of La Concept de la sorcellerie
dans le duche de Lorraine au XVI et XVII si?cle (Nancy,
1948-51); Robert Muchembled, "The Witches of the Cambr?sis. The
Acculturation of the Rural World in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries" in James Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People,
800-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)
221-276; E. Hoffmann-Krayer, "Luzerner Akten zum Hexen- und
Zauberwesen," Schweizerisches Archiv f?r Volkskunde III (1899):
22-40, 80-122, 189-224, 291-329; Herbert Schwartzw?lder, "Die
Formen des Zauber- und Hexenglaubens in Bremen und seiner
weiteren Umgebung, vor allem w?hrend des 16. und 17.
Jahrhunderts," Heimat und Volkstum: Bremer Beitr?ge zur nieder
deutschen Volkskunde (1958): 3-68; Richard Heberling, "Zauberei
und Hexenprozesse Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburg," Zeitschrift
der Gesel1schaft f?r Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 45
(1915): 116-247, esp,, 117-125;" Fritz Byloff, Volksk?ndliches aus
Strafprozessen der ?sterreichischen Al peni ander mit besonderer
Ber?cksichtigung der Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse 1455 bis 1850.
Quel len zur deutschen Volkskunde~5 (Beri in and Leipzig, 1929).
Also, Alfred Soman, "The Parlement of Paris and the Great Witch
Hunt (1565-1640)," Sixteenth Century Journal 9.2 (1978): 31-44;
Gerhard Schormann, Hexenprozesse in Nordwestdeutschland. Quellen
und Darstellungen zur Geschichte Niedersachsens 87 (TTildesheim:
August Lax, 1977).
^ The classic statement on this distinction is E. E.
Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
(London, 1937); see also the excerpts from idem reprinted in
Witchcraft and Sorcery, ed. Max Marwick (Hammondsworth: Penquin,
1982 ) ; a??cl t??? introduction to that volume by Max Marwick,
12-13.
23

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 11 See Richard A. Horsley, "Who Were the 'Witches'?" 695,
for discussion of the absence of terminological basis for this
distinction.
12
Hoffmann-Krayer, "Luzerner Akten" no. 25. Hereafter
referred to as Luzerner Akten.
13
Muchembled (242, 249) observes the low economic status
of the accused in his study; Thomas (564-66) discusses the
protective potential of witch beliefs for the English cases.
14
See Thomas 552-60; Muchembled 244. Soman found in his
analysis of records from 1123 appeals and 25 trials in the first
instance adjudicated by the Paris Parlement between 1565-1640
that most of these accusations can also be explained by Thomas'
thesis of projecting guilt arising from a failure to live up to
traditional codes of charity (42).
15
Luzerner Akten no, 24. The trial records for the
Cambr?sis similarly indicate frequent use of professional
exorcists to provide magical remedies to supposed bewitchment,
especially in the early years, al though again, such persons do
not figure as defendants in the trials (Muchembled 252-53).
16 Luzerner Akten, e.g., nos. 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32;
Richard A. Horsley, "Who were the 'Witches'?" 707.

^ See references in note 9 above, and Richard A. Horsley,

"Who were the 'Witches'?" 702.
18
By1 off no. 55; for Lorraine and England: Del cambre,
229-38; Thomas 181-82. Evidence from northern Europe points to
the same pattern, the distinctive role of the diviner-healer in
peasant society. Neither Heberling nor Schwartzw?'lder analyzes
his material for evidence of the particular social roles of the
accused. But some of the principal forms of witch and magic
beliefs into which their material falls correspond precisely to
the role of the wise woman, i.e. prophecy, divination of thieves
and lost objects, and magical protection and healing--in contrast
to the maleficent magic practiced by the sorcerer.

19 Thomas 266, 437, 449; Delcambre 216-17; the peasant

depositions from the Lucerne trial s portray the same general
distinction. Some of the wise women accused by their neighbors
were suspected of knowing how to poison or cause impotence. Only
one was accused of an actual act of sorcery (damaging crops by
making hail) (Luzerner Akten nos. 23, 28, 32 _vs_. no. 24). But
none of the women accused, including several wise women, appears
to have been al so a sorceress. The Austrian depositions do
appear to contain a few cases of peasant healers accused of
24

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 practicing sorcery, but in the three instances the accused have
used their extraordinary powers specificaily to fight back
against mistreatment by local authorities who were abusing their
power, hence do not conform fully to the image of malevolent
sorceress, especially since they then undo the effects of their
"sorcery" (Byloff nos. 50, 40, 48). Muchembled suggests that a
practitioner of magical heal ing and divining could appear
beneficent to people from outside her vi 11 age, but 1 i able to
accusation as a malevolent witch within her own village (254).
20
Special credit should be given to Wallace Notestein, A
History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718) (Washington,
D.C., 1911), esp. 20-23, 256-59, for his concise treatment of the
scarce evidence on this subject seventy years ago. See now
Thomas, esp. chs. 7-9; Macfarlane 126-40; and Soman 43.
21
Soman has found that in at least half "at a very
minimum" of the witchcraft cases adjudicated by the Paris
Parlement between 1565-1640, the accused was a magical healer or
less commonly a cunning man (43). R?ssel 1 Zguta, "Witchcraft
Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia," American Historical Review
(December 1977) 1201 , 1207, points to a similar phenomenon in
Russia, where the witch craze never assumed the same epidemic
proportions as in western Europe: "And the trial records
repeatedly show plaintiffs filing suit against the very witch
doctors to whom the accusers had earlier come for a cure."

22 Cohn 249. Thomas R. Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch

(1966; rpt. NY: AMS Press, 1982), is of limited usefulness and
reliability because of his uncritical use of what Kieckhefer
would call the "inferior" learned texts as well as his Murrayite
pre-supposi ti ons, al though he does bring together a wealth of
pertinent material which provides a solid basis for reexamina
ron of this issue.
23
PIaywrights and others spread the theme among the
literate upper classes. In The Lancashire Witches (London, 1691)
47, for example, Thomas Shadwell has Mother Demdike boast:

To a Mother's Bed I softly crept,

And while th' unchristen'd Brat yet slept,
I suckt the breath and bloud of that,
and stole another's flesh and fat
Which I will boyl before it stink;
The thick for Oynment, thin for Drink.
24
Malleus Maleficarum, quoted from Witchcraft in Europe
1100-1700, A Documentary History, eds. Kors ???3 Peters
(Philadelphia, 1972) 184, 129.

25

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 25
W. H. Fr?re, Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the
Period of the Reformation III (London, 1920) 5, 221 , 270, 383;
cfT the similar "articles" concerning midwives and baptism in
vol. II, 23, 58-59, 292, 356-357.
26
John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and
Establishment of Religion I (Oxford, 1824) 242-243; Hans Kern,
Zur Geschichte des Hebammenwesens in Basel (Basel, 1929) 34.
Also, Merry E. Wiesner, "The Early Modern Midwife: A Case Study,"
International Journal of Women's Studies 6.1 (1983): 26-43.
27
Dagmar Birkelbach, Christiane Eifert, Sabine Lueken,
"Zur Entwicklung des Hebammenwesens vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahr
hundert am Beispiel der Regensburger Hebammenordungen," Beitr?ge
zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 5 (1981): 91.
28
Sigmund von Riezler, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse in
Bayern (Stuttgart, 1896; Neudruck, Darmstadt, 1968) 145, 166.
9Q
1664, "Depositions from the York Castle of Yo
James Raine, Surtees Soc. Pub!. 49 (1861).
30
M. Hofler, Volksmedizin und Aberglaube in Obe
(Munich, 1893) 199-200.
31 Monter, Witchcraft 197-198; Christina Lar
Crime of Witchcraft in Europe," in her Witchcraft and
The Pol i tics of Popular Belief, edi ted and wi th a f
Alan Macfarlane (Oxford: Blackwell , 1984) 64. Unfo
Gunnar Heinsohn's and Otto Steiger's study, "The Eli
Medieval Bi rth Control and the Witch Trial s of Moder
International Journal of ^ Women's Studies 5.3 (1982
which claims "that the witch massacres are attribut
political determination to eradicate the medieval kn
birth control in order to force women to conceive and
' children than they needed" (204), is marred in a
respects. The authors assume, without evidenc
reiationship between the general rise in European
following the fourteenth century population cri
persecution of witches; their argumentation is too ofte
a careless and misleading anachronistic juxtaposition
and texts without precise attention to the history o
trials as it has been laid out in more recent standard
such as the work of Monter, Kieckhefer, MacFarlane, an
are not mentioned in their references. While Hein
Steiger provide suggestive speculation and helpful docu
of official ecclesiastical and secular concern about and
regulation of sexual and reproductive behavior at the time of the
witch hunts, they fail to convince either that this concern was a
result of intentional population policy or that the witch trials
26

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were aimed primarily at el imi nating midwives and medieval
knowledge of birth control.

Richard A. Horsley, "Further Reflections on Witchcraft

and European Folk Religion," History of Religion 19.1 (August,
1979): 89-90; Carlo Ginzburg, "The Night Battles: Witchcraft and
Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans.
John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1984), showed how the inquisitors gradually convinced Italian
peasants of the late 16 th century, who originally bel i eved
themselves members of a beneficent anti-witch society, that they
were themselves the witches they had once fought against.
33
E.g., Philip Mayer, "Witches," in Witchcraft and
Sorcery, ed. Marwick 56, 69.
34
Philip Ardener, "Belief and the Problem of Women," in
The Interpretation of Ritual , ed. J. S. La Fontaine (London:
Tavistock, 1972) 143-44, 153-54; Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to
Male as Nature is to Culture?," in Woman, Culture and Society,
eds. Michel le Zimbalist Rosal do and Louise Lamphere (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1974) 67-88.
35
Clarke Garrett, "Women and Witches: Patterns of
Analysis," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3
(1977): 466; Carolyn Matalene, "Women as Witches," International
Journal of Women's Studies 1.6 (1978): 584-85.
oc
Larner 62-63; the case of the Nupe
independent women traders and money len
example of this pattern which has been stu
Religion (London,' 1954) 163-81.
37
Henry Kamen, The Iron Century. Social Change in Europe
1550-1650 (London: Cardinal, 1971; rev. ed., Sphere Books, 1976)
276.
38
For the social and economic background on this period,
see Kamen, The Iron Century; Karl Bosl and Eberhard Weis, Die
Gesel1schaft in Deutschland. I. Von der fr?nkischen Zeit bis
1848 (Munich! E??rz^ 1976] 131-214; Heinrich Pleticha, idTT
Deutsche Geschichte, vol s. 5, 6, 7 (G?tersloh: Lexikothek,
1982-83).
?q
Thomas 560-67; Soman 42; Muchembled 241-49; Marvin
Harris, Cows, Pi gs, Wars and Wi tches. The Riddles of Culture
(New York: Random House-Vintage, 1974) 225-40. Anthropologist
Harris, in his stimulating and controversial set of essays aiming
to explain diverse cultural phenomena such as taboos against
eating beef or pork, messiah cults, and the European witch hunts,
27

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suggests that the witch mania was cui ti vated by the el i tes to
divert popular protest against the rich: "It was the magic bullet
of society's privileged and powerful classes" (240).
40
Kathleen Casey, "The Cheshire Cat: Reconstructing the
Experience of Medieval Woman," in Liberating Women's History, ed.
Berenice A. Carrol 1 (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of
Illinois Press, 1976) 224-49; Easlea 241-52.
41 Easlea 240; Merchant 148; Honegger 116-23. The
activities of particularly zealous and powerful individual witch
hunters, ecclesiastical or secular, also help to explain a number
of the more virulent episodes of persecution (Larner, "Crime of
Witchcraft" 58). Other recent studies have focused attention on
the financial interest which some priests, judges or executioners
had in the perpetuation of the trials, since often the family of
the accused was required to pay all trial, prison and execution
expenses as wel 1 as substantial fines (e.g., Schormann 135-45).
Moreover, correiation of the level of witch hunting with the
confiicts surrounding the Reformation or Catholic Counter
Reformation in particular regions or towns suggests that
political and ideological motives of the ruling elites may have
operated to reinforce poi i ti cal and ideological legitimacy
through intimidation and persecution of unorthodox or
recaicitrant fol lowers (Schormann, for documentation of
correlation, though rejecting a clearly causal relationship,
151-53; Muchembled 252-76, for a complex and sophisticated
analysis; Larner 64-66).

28

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