Feminist interpretations of the Early Modern witch trials

The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most well-known treatise on witchcraft, written by the Catholic clergyman, Heinrich Kramer, in 1486. The essay is divided into three different parts, each of which meant to convey different information. The first asserts how to preach about witchcraft and how to frame witchcraft in a religious way. The second section includes details about witches specifically, particularly characteristics common in witches, how witchcraft is conducted, as well as who is susceptible to possession. Finally, the text describes how the prosecution of witches should occur.[1] Each part is organized by asking questions and then providing an answer. Today, the Malleus Maleficarum is widely referred to as evidence of the misogynistic nature of witch trials.[1]

The Malleus Maleficarum clearly and repeatedly asserts that women are more likely to participate in witchcraft or “sorcery” due to qualities that all and only women have. One such passage from the second section, which focuses on describing witches in great detail, offers insight into how the author viewed women:

“There are others who give different reasons for why women are found to be superstitious in larger numbers than men, and they say that there are three reasons. The first is that they are prone to believing and because the demon basically seeks to corrupt the Faith, he assails them in particular. Hence Ecclesiasticus 19[4]: ‘He who quickly believes is fickle in heart and will be made small.’ The second reason in that on account of the tendency of their temperament towards flux they are by nature more easily impressed upon to receive revelations through the impression of the disembodied spirits, and when they use this temperament well, they are very good, but when they use it badly, they are worse. For this reason, is that they have loose tongues and can hardly conceal from their female companions the things that they know through evil art, and since they lack physical strength, they readily seek to avenge themselves through acts of sorcery... Since they are prone to flux, they can more quickly offer children to the demons, as in fact they do.”[1]

This passage from the Malleus Maleficarum declares that women are ultimately more susceptible to possession from demons, as well as more prone to lash out using witchcraft just on the basis of assumed female characteristics, such as “loose tongues” and “lack physical strength”. Because this treatise played such a large role in efforts against witchcraft in the early modern time period,[1] it may be assumed that these attitudes about women were widespread and believed by many people in Europe. Additionally, this writing was published during a time of widespread religious influence, therefore as a religious piece of writing, it might have been accepted more readily.

The stereotype of witches that existed during the early modern period was derived from historical conceptions of demonism that existed even before the witch trials began.[2] Scholars have cited the belief in female demons in particular as relating directly to the later stereotype of heightened female magic.[2] The first Germanic law codes also referred to the existence of cannibal women who had strikingly similar characteristics as early modern witches.[2] Both were more likely to be female, elderly, poor, isolated from society, or sexually deviant, all of which are characteristics that were outside of the gendered expectations.[3][2] These particular characteristics as being witch-like can be seen in documentation of trials or records of events of supposed witchcraft. One such record, titled, “The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certaine witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapen hill” from 1597 exemplifies how women were more likely to be accused of witchcraft based on possessing these characteristics.[4] The document depicts an interaction between Gooderige and a young boy, in which Gooderige is accused of bewitching him. The document includes descriptions of Gooderige as an accused witch, describing her as an elderly widow and having warts on her face.[4] This description reflects the phenomenon that women were more likely to be accused of witchcraft if they deviated from the societal acceptance of being young, beautiful, and involved in society life.

In her book Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici argues that the witch-hunts were historical events through which occurred the transformation of women's bodies into “work machines” for the reproduction of the workforce, a necessary precondition of a shift from the subsistence to the monetary economy. She remarks that the period the witch-hunts happened in the world history took place at the same time with the conquest of America, beginning of the History of slavery, and expropriation of the peasantry; which all indicate the rise of capitalism. In her view, the witch-hunt was the forgotten piece of the historical puzzle of the emergence of capitalism.

As opposed to Marx's claim, according to Federici, the historical shift from a subsistence economy (production-for-use) to a capitalism (production-for-profit) has not caused a liberation of the working class from scarcity and necessity, but the other way around, the economy has become subject to wage labor exploitation, unpaid work of women, and degradation of environmental nature. Because the burden of the structural change in economic relations and the production with enclosures in the first phase of capitalist development had stood mostly by women, they were the ones who tried to save their lands, social position, and subsistence-oriented agriculture practices. However, governments in Europe, by passing a law that introduced a new crime, i.e. the accusation of witchcraft —a crimen exceptum equal to high treason— they attempted to silence the resistance of women and any other alternative solutions to feudalism other than capitalism. Besides, it allowed primitive accumulation by taking the capacities available for social production as granted, and treated them as free and infinitely available gifts, in the same way how the capitalist system would treat nature.

Federici has expanded the Marxist analysis of the birth of capitalism by including the change in the social position of women and the production of labor-power. The stress is given to the fact that the division of labor is highly gendered. The new sexual division of labor has developed itself with subjugating women's labor, and women's reproductive function to produce labor-force; the undervaluation and subordination of women by excluding them from waged work; and in association with the mechanization of workforce, women's body has also been started to perceived as machines to produce new workers. Federici and many scholars argue that the sexual division of labor with the control of women's body is the precondition to produce the surplus value. The social reproductive theory[13] mainly argues that capitalism exploits women's labor outside the workplace through their invisible, flexible, and unpaid labor.

Besides the structural changes in the spheres of reproduction and in the terrain of the relation between men and women, Federici argues that the shift coming with all the means and tools of capital accumulation was an attract to communal mutual aid. Being midwives, their capabilities of healing practices to cure people with herbs and their knowledge of the properties of plants and roots had given them a position in society. With infra-politics of capitalism, the attack on the healer resulted in that the communal production and survival skills were taken away from the society, which had changed the structure of mutual aid, if not eliminated it completely.

The second scholar which Silvia Federici criticizes is Michel Foucault, and she does this through three points. First, before Michel Foucault, feminist activists and theorists understanding of the body were taken as the substantial factor since the early 1970s to analyze the positions of male and female in society avant la lettre. Second, Michel Foucault argues that in modern society, physical violence has declined, and given its place to Psychological abuse.[14] By beginning her analysis from [witch-hunts] and giving contemporary examples, she has put emphasize on ongoing violence against women with colonial means of domination of men, which is omitted in Michel Foucault's analysis. Third, she criticizes him for writing the “History of Sexuality” (1978) from a “universal, abstract, asexual subject”[15] which enabled him to completely omit a historical event of gendered violence as big as the witch-hunt.

After the Black Death (1347-1351) drastically reduced the working population in Europe, it was increasingly difficult for feudal lords to control and discipline the peasants. Because of the scarcity of peasants capable of work, the ones who did work developed strategies against the corrupted lords such as leaving the harvest to rot or simply not finishing the work. This was possible due to the subsistence economy in which the work was being paid for with products and the right to work on the land, not with money like in the monetary economy. They grew their own food and were not dependent on money for buying basic materials. It was also a solidarity economy in which women would share labor, such as care work, in between themselves, parallel to sharing work with men, such as working in the field. This division was a source of emancipation rather than the opposite because it enabled them to have autonomy over their work, as well as over their bodies. Women played a big political role in these societies. When the monetary economy was introduced, only men were entitled to receive payment, after which began the marginalization of women's labor from the economical and political realms of the society.

The majority of witch hunts occurred between 1500 and 1650, with a peak around the 1620, according to Federici. It was the time when the ideology of Mercantilism shaped the perceptions of European elites. Having a big labor force was a necessary precondition to having a successful economy. In the context of the aftermath of the Black Death, the question of population control was obvious to them, so began the “demographic recording, census-taking, and the formalization of demography itself as the first ‘state science’”.[16] Finding a way of systematically increasing the size of the labor force was an important political goal for the ruling class and the nascent bourgeoisie.

The way to systematically increase the size of the labor force was to gain control over the reproduction of society. Women were through this lens seen only as wombs that produce children who will enter the labor force. To gain this control the states used “multi-media propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population.” .[17] This propaganda machine included names such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, but also many other government officials who traveled the countries and spread the propaganda about witches. The state also used the policing apparatus and methods created by the Inquisition in the previous centuries. They successfully sowed distrust which disintegrated small societies. Their main target was lower-class women which nevertheless had knowledges that were of crucial importance for the autonomy and integrity of their societies. Knowledge such as healing, birth control, and midwifery came in direct opposition to the state interests and the new mechanical paradigm. Many of these women were hunted down, put through unfair trials, and brutally murdered.

One of the ways to gain control over the reproductive force of the population was to put the practices of midwifery under a strict state control. Many of the witches were also midwives or “wise women”, and traditionally the practices of midwifery and obstetrics were exclusive to women until the 16th and 17th century. In the 16th century there was a new precondition to being a midwife — the woman had to demonstrate beforehand that she was a “good Catholic”.[18] In the 17th century there began to appear the first male midwives and “within a century, obstetrics has come almost entirely under state control.”[19]

Under this interpretation, the witch trials in Europe would have been of a political background, rather than strictly gender- focused outlook, religious or otherwise. However, even this explanation for the widespread trials reflects a misogynistic and female-controlling frame of mind.