A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (17 page)

To a modern reader, the whole debate over demon bodies and what demons could or could not do with them may seem remote from concerns about the status of women. But the lives of many thousands of women would depend on its outcome. Abstract arguments often have concrete consequences, sometimes of the most horrifying kind.

By the fourteenth century the arguments for the reality of demons had won crucial support at the highest levels of the
Church. Pope John XXII (1316–34) was obsessed with witchcraft and heresy; and he was a true believer in demons. It was during his long reign that for the first time in history a woman was accused of having sex with the Devil. In 1324, Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny in Ireland earned that dubious distinction. The Pope had appointed Richard Ledrede as Bishop of Ossory in southeastern Ireland, a man who shared his obsessions.
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Lady Kyteler was on her fourth husband when she was brought to the bishop’s attention. Bishop Ledrede listened eagerly to accusations from the children of Lady Kyteler’s three dead husbands that she had used witchcraft to dispose of their fathers. She was also accused of running a sect that forswore Christianity, using the swaddling clothes of dead unbaptized babies to concoct evil potions and poisons with which to harm good Catholics. Most sensationally of all, under torture her maid Petronilla told the bishop how she acted as a go-between for the Devil and her mistress. When the Devil as lover first appears in history he does so in the form of three big, handsome black men. Petronilla said she saw with her own eyes (and apparently she looked on frequently) Lady Alice making love with them, sometimes in broad daylight. ‘After this disgraceful act, with her own hand [Petronilla] wiped clean the disgusting place with sheets from her own bed.’
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Lady Kyteler was also accused of being the leader of an anti-Christian sect, thus linking witchcraft, demonic sex and heresy. No longer would witches be seen as lonely women mixing potions in village cabins. They were becoming part of a vast conspiracy.

Lady Kyteler escaped to England and avoided punishment. But the unlucky Petronilla was burned alive. She was one of only two people, and the only woman, to be burned as a witch in Ireland.
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Accusations of witchcraft and demonic sex began to occur more frequently in the fifteenth century. They were a feature of the first wide-ranging witch-hunt in the Rhone Valley in southern France in 1428, during which between one and two hundred witches were burned.
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Less than sixty years later, a landmark text in the history of misogyny appeared to explain why it was that more and more women were apparently leaving the Church and throwing themselves into the arms of Satan and his demons. It is not that
Malleus Maleficarum,
or ‘Hammer of The Witches’(1487), has anything original to say about misogyny – it has not; it merely repeats all the abuse heaped upon women in the Bible and the Classical authors. But what it does do for the first time is explicitly link the supposed weaknesses of women’s nature to their propensity to fall for the Devil, and thus become witches. Its influence was hugely augmented by a new invention – the printing press. There is more than a little irony in the fact that the invention that would revolutionize people’s access to information should be so instrumental in spreading one of the most lethal forms of ignorance, fear and prejudice ever to manifest itself.

Malleus
was the work of two Dominican Inquisitors, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer (though Kramer is thought to have been chiefly responsible for writing it). Sprenger had spent time as an Inquisitor in Germany. But his main claim to fame was that, before he occupied himself with burning women, he established in 1475 the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, a form of devotion to the Virgin Mary, which even to this day good Catholic schoolchildren are expected to join. The terrible polarity of Christian misogyny has found no more powerful expression than Sprenger’s devotion both to the Virgin Mary and to torturing and burning innocent women for supposedly having sex with the Devil.

Of Kramer less is known. He seems to have become interested
in demons thanks to a chance encounter in Rome in 1460, when he met a priest who was possessed by the Devil.
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It convinced him that it might be possible to find physical evidence of demons and so prove beyond all doubt that they were real.

Kramer and Sprenger had a powerful accomplice in their campaign to prove that women were having sex with Satan. Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) had a reputation of being not so innocent. He was born Giovanni Battista Cibo, and contemporary chroniclers depict him as one given to ‘unbridled licentiousness’, who fathered several illegitimate children. He would spend the last weeks of his life unable to digest any food except woman’s milk, an ironic fate for a man who in effect consigned untold thousands of innocent women to the flames. Kramer and Sprenger convinced the Pope with their tales of women copulating with demons, eating children, making men impotent, aborting foetuses, and killing cattle, that witchcraft was a serious threat to civilization and the Church.

In 1484, the Pope issued a Papal Bull, which gave dogmatic force to the claims that witches were engaging in sex with demons. It declared:

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Salzburg and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine . . . these wretches
furthermore afflict and torment men and women . . . they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands . . . and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls . . .

Wherefore We . . . decree and enjoin that the aforesaid inquisitors [Kramer and Sprenger] be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way . . .
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It was the equivalent of a declaration of war, and
Malleus
became a sort of justification for it. Women would be its chief victims. In the coming centuries, 80 per cent of those executed in the witch-hunts would be women.

The Inquisitors have a simple explanation for why it is that nearly all witches are women: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,’ they write, citing Proverb XXX. ‘There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb . . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lust they consort even with the Devil.’ They allege other faults in women that make them vulnerable to temptation, of course, including vanity, feeble-mindedness, talkativeness and credulity. But in the minds of the Inquisitors, women’s greater carnality is the primary cause for witchcraft. Since presumably this fault identified as particular to women is not new, it might be asked why there are almost no reports of women copulating with the Devil before 1400, when the Church decreed making love to demons a capital crime?
Malleus
has no explanation for this, other than to say that in the good old days, ‘the Incubus devils used to infest women against their wills’. But modern
witches ‘willingly embrace this most foul and most miserable servitude’. The claim that neither women nor witches are what they used to be is a grotesque version of the age-old lament uttered by every misogynist from Cato the Elder to the latest TV evangelist about the low morals of modern womanhood. It would have been comic if its consequences had not been so horrific.

There is nothing comic about
Malleus;
it is written with all the deadly seriousness that cold fanaticism can muster, the sort that makes Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
such a repulsive read. Nothing can make these two authors crack a smile, not even the tale of the missing penises. Bearing in mind that Sprenger and Kramer fault women for being the credulous sex, consider how they treat the accusation that witches steal penises.
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It is claimed that some witches collect penises ‘in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn . . .’ As proof, they claim that:

a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a certain witch to ask her to restore his health. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take whichever member he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, ‘you must not take that one,’ adding, ‘because it belonged to a parish priest’.

In fact, what the
Malleus
has reproduced – clearly without realizing it – is a standard anti-clerical joke. According to the historian Walter Stephens: ‘There are other instances of Kramer’s using jokes as if they were transcripts of court proceedings; the impression of insanity radiated by the
Malleus
comes
from Kramer’s willingness to believe almost anything as evidence that witchcraft and demons are real.’
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There is speculation on whether or not others can see the incubi when witches are having sex with them. The Inquisitors are also intrigued to know whether sex with a demon is more enjoyable for the woman than sex with her husband. In
Malleus,
there is evidence that sex with the Devil is just as good, if not better than, sex with a man. This changed over the years. In witches’ confessions from the sixteenth century onwards, though the Devil’s member gets bigger ‘like a mule’s . . . long and thick as an arm’, and even develops prongs so that she can have oral, anal and vaginal sex all at once, sex with demons becomes much less pleasurable, and even painful.
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The speculations of the Inquisitors about sex with demons is almost entirely devoted to women and their incubi. Little is said about men making out with succubi. Kramer and Sprenger are not curious to know how enjoyable it is for a man to make love to a lady demon. That is because, they argue, men are not so prone to lusting after demons: ‘And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime,’ they exclaim solemnly.

The vocabulary of
Malleus
when it deals with human sexuality and especially with women is one of cold repugnance. It distances the authors from their subject as if the accusers did not belong to the same species as those whom they accuse of performing such acts of ‘diabolical filthiness’. Even more repellent is the chilling detachment the inquisitors display when they deal with the remedies for this ‘high treason against God’s Majesty’. It might be compared to the detachment of a Nazi bureaucrat totting up the daily death rate in a concentration camp.

The institution of the Inquisition into whose hands the
accused fell did indeed resemble the institutions of terror created by the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. The job of the Inquisition was to find out and punish heretics. The person accused was not told by whom he or she had been accused. Legal representation was practically impossible. Anyone crazy enough to come to her legal defence is warned that he too might be condemned as a heretic. ‘Those who endeavour to protect witches are their cruellest enemies, subjecting them to eternal flames in place of the transitory suffering of the stake,’ warns Peter Binsfield, the Suffragan Bishop of Trier, one of the areas worst affected by the witch-hunts.
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The accused was imprisoned before being brought to trial, and while awaiting judgement, often for considerable periods of time, fed on a diet of bread and water. Torture was employed to extract confessions, and there was no appealing the sentence. The Inquisitor was prosecutor, judge and jury. Technically, the Church did not actually carry out the sentence of death, since it is forbidden to take life – it merely ‘relaxed’ its protection of the accused (if convicted). The victim was handed over to the civil authorities, who administered the punishment. The civil authorities, of course, could be certain to concur with the Inquisitor’s findings.
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Henry Kramer and James Sprenger sum up the Church’s role in a chilling phrase when they speak of ‘those whom we have caused to be burned’.
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The accused may be kept in a state of suspense by ‘continually postponing the day of examination’, the Inquisitors advise. If this does not make her confess ‘let her first be led to the penal cells and there stripped by honest women of good character’, in case she is concealing some instruments of witchcraft made ‘from the limbs of unbaptized children’. It is then a good idea to shave or burn off all her hair, except in Germany, where shaving ‘especially of the secret parts . . . is
not generally considered delicate . . . and therefore we Inquisitors do not use it . . .’ They are not so squeamish in other countries where ‘the Inquisitors order the witch to be shaved all over her body’. In Northern Italy, the
Malleus
reports: ‘. . . the Inquisitor of Como has informed us that last year, that is, in 1485, he ordered forty-one witches to be burned after they had been shaved all over.’ The unmistakable relish Kramer and Sprenger derive from stressing this detail betrays the underlying sadism.