A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (18 page)

If the squalor of the prison and the humiliation of stripping and shaving, never mind the mounting terror as she awaits the coming torture, do not break her, the judge should ‘order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture; and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty.’ Usually, the first instrument of torture applied was the strappado. Her hands are tied beneath her back. She is roped to a pulley and then yanked violently into the air, where she is jerked up and down until her shoulders are dislocated and her sinews torn. ‘And while she is raised above the ground,’ the Inquisitors write with the detachment of civil servants, ‘if she is being tortured in this way, let the Judge read or cause to be read to her the dispositions of the witnesses with their names, saying: “See! You are convicted by the witnesses.”’

If she is still obstinate, other tortures can be used. She might be burned with candles or with hot oil. Flaming balls of pitch might be applied to her genitals or gallons of water forced down her throat until she is bloated and the officers then beat her belly with sticks. She can be forced to sit on the witch’s chair – a sort of narrow cage with clamps and a spiked seat. Thumbscrews, and other devices for crushing the legs and feet might be used. Some victims were held in irons so long in filthy conditions that they died of gangrene before coming to trial.
¹⁵⁵
However, the Inquisitors are not without sympathy. They forbid torturing pregnant women. They are to be tortured only after giving birth.

Cheating and lying are also permitted to the judges. A judge may promise the woman that he will spare her life, then, once she has confessed, hand her over for sentencing to another judge. Or a judge may ‘come in and promise that he will be merciful, with the mental reservation that he means that he will be merciful to himself or the State; for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful.’ As in twentieth-century totalitarianism, things become their opposite according to the dictates of the regime. It reminds us of the nightmare world of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty four,
with its dominant slogans, ‘WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’; the authors of
Malleus
might add, ‘CRUELTY IS MERCY’. And, as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, it was held to be acceptable for children and parents to denounce each other. Peter Binsfield tells the story of an eighteen-year-old boy who denounced his mother ‘out of filial piety’. She went to the stake, along with three of her children in November 1588.
¹⁵⁶

Once the accused is convicted, the Church decrees she suffers ‘relaxation to the secular arm’, that is, it hands her over to the civil authorities for punishment, which meant painful death. There is little hope that the secular arm will oppose the Church’s will. A French demonologist warns: ‘The judge who does not put to death a convicted witch should be put to death himself.’
¹⁵⁷
On her way to the stake, the woman was often forced to wear the witch’s bridle – a spiked iron gag, jammed and locked in her mouth, to stifle her screams and her protests of innocence.

By such methods, over a period of some two hundred years, an unknown number of women were executed, mostly by
being burned alive. Overall, it has been impossible to gauge the number of victims who died as witches – estimates range from several millions to around 60,000.
¹⁵⁸
The numbers, and some of the methods, varied from country to country. The witch-hunts raged most violently in Germany, Switzerland, France and Scotland. However, within those countries, the numbers executed varied considerably from area to area. In France, the witch-hunts tended to concentrate in areas such as the south-west where previously heresies such as Catharism had flourished. The same was true of Germany – the major witch-hunts broke out along religious fault lines that produced the upheavals of the Reformation and the religious wars of the 1600s. In the area of southwest Germany, between 1561 and 1670, 3,229 witches were burned; around the town of Wiesenteig, in one year – 1662 – sixty-three women were burned, that is, at the rate of more than one per week.
¹⁵⁹
Near Trier, in 1585, after the Catholics had reclaimed it from the Protestants, two villages were left with only one woman each – all the rest having been burned. Nicholas Remy, a scholar, a Latin poet, author of
Daemonolatreia,
as well as an Inquisitor, burned between 2,000 and 3,000 witches before dying in 1616. Between 1628 and 1631, Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg burned 900 witches, including several children. At this time, also in Germany, children as young as three and four were accused of having sex with devils. Children who had been convicted of attending the witch’s Sabbat with their parents were flogged in front of the stake as their mother and father burned.
¹⁶⁰
Jean Bodin, the author of the 1580 treatise
De la Démonomanie des sorciers,
writes ‘children guilty of witchcraft, if convicted, are not to be spared, though, in consideration of their tender age, they may, if penitent, be strangled before being burnt’.
¹⁶¹
Girls above the age of twelve, and boys over fourteen, were treated as adults.

In England, approximately 1000 witches were executed during a 200-year period, far fewer than in most other parts of Europe gripped by the craze. Demonic copulation was generally not a feature of the accusations, and the kind of torture that was authorized on the continent was forbidden. Instead, the accused were deprived of sleep for days at a time, until they confessed.
¹⁶²
English women’s sexual embrace of the Devil coincided with the arrival of the Puritan Matthew Hopkins as Witch Finder General during the English Civil War (1642–9). Up until then, they had apparently been content to suckle demonic toads and cats at their breasts. Hopkins hung some two hundred women as witches in fourteen months, including nineteen in one day in the town of Chelmsford, Essex. One of his victims, Rebecca West of Colchester, accused of killing a child by witchcraft, confessed to have married the devil. Hopkins was paid a bounty for each witch he hanged, and legend has it he retired a rich man.

Just north of the border, in Scotland, however, where continental-style torture prevailed, copulation with the Devil was as common as it was in France, Switzerland, Northern Italy and Germany. Scottish witches also confessed regularly to eating their children. Four thousand were burned during the years of the witch-hunts, a horrific level given Scotland’s sparse population.

The English Puritans brought the fear of witchcraft with them to the New World. They brought with them too something of the Old World misogyny that was its inspiration. But the witch craze never caught on with the same ferocity in the colonies as it did in Europe. There were only two intense outbreaks – the first in Hartford, Connecticut (1662–3) and the second and more infamous, in Salem, Massachusetts, for a few months beginning in December in 1691. In Hartford, thirteen were accused and four hanged, and in Salem, two
hundred were accused and nineteen hanged. As in Europe, four-fifths of the victims were women; a half of the males who were accused were husbands or sons of witches. The conviction rate was far lower than that of the European witch-hunts. A more democratic system of justice prevailed, allowing those convicted to appeal to higher courts; the outbreaks endured for a far shorter period. The majority of the cases concerned acts of possession. There was only one instance, in 1651, of a woman accused of going to bed with the Devil, and she only did so when he appeared to her in the form of her lost child. At an official level, scepticism prevailed very rapidly. Within a generation of the Salem trials, a man and wife who accused one Sarah Spenser of witchcraft were sent to see a doctor in order to establish whether or not they were sane.
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Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that the persecution of witches in North America lasted for so short a time was the fact that Old World misogyny did not enjoy a completely successful transplant to the New World. The Puritan tradition shared something of the early Christians’ belief in equality before the Lord. Women enjoyed a higher status in the colonies. Two centuries after the witch craze had passed, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) observed that in America ‘while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement’
¹⁶⁴
(see
Chapter 6
). That great democratic experiment that had its roots in the seventeenth century’s social and religious radicalism, helped protect women from the worst excesses of the witch craze.

The last woman to be legally executed as a witch was burned in Switzerland in 1787. In 1793, a woman in Poland was burned, but illegally. By then the craze had long ago run its
course. The threat from the Devil and his legions of female devotees had vanished. We now read the writings of Kramer and Sprenger, and the other demonologists and Inquisitors, with utter incredulity, mixed with horror and disgust.

The question remains: How is it that women came to be demonized for close to 300 years in a society where learning and the arts were entering one of their most fruitful periods, and the scientific, philosophical and social revolutions in Europe would soon transform forever how people viewed themselves and the world? Another way of looking at this question is to ask why it was that misogyny, so long a fundamental element in Christian thinking, took on its most lethal form at a time otherwise associated with great human progress?

The historian Walter Stephens argues that doubt not misogyny lay at the root of the witch-hunt craze. The profound intellectual, social and moral changes that were shaking society challenged people’s faith, and they sought ways to vindicate their traditional beliefs in the old divine order. In his detailed analysis of
Malleus,
Stephens argues that the preoccupation with women having sex with demons was mainly a concern with finding evidence that demons existed; the more detail they could get from women’s alleged experiences, the better. The inquisitors’ sexual obsessions about women that to the modern sensibility resemble pornographic fantasies, are really a desperate quest for proof that will ward off uncertainty. ‘The expert testimony of witches themselves has made all these things credible,’ the
Malleus
asserts. That is, Inquisitors tortured women in a search for evidence that the Devil really existed. They sought to transform their metaphysics into physics. The witch-hunt was a hideous experiment to make unobservable entities real. Confirming their existence confirmed that the whole world of the spirit was actual, and
not just a fantasy. Stephens agrees that there was a misogynistic dimension, and that Christianity’s long history of contempt of and hostility towards women led to many more of them being arrested and tortured than men. But it was the search for proof that was the primary motivation for the horrors of those years.

Even if we accept the argument that misogyny was a secondary motive for the witch-hunt, it does nothing to mitigate the appalling picture that it presents. It merely means that many thousands of women perished in the flames and at the end of a rope in order to assuage men’s doubts. The flames affirmed the dualism of Christianity, inherited from Plato, which saw the everyday world as contemptible, and the world of the spirit as the true reality. For women, dualism could not have had a more horrific consequence.

At least three conditions conspired to create the emotional, moral and social context for the witch-hunts. First, the fourteenth century, which ushered them in, was, like the fifth century
BC
in Greece and the third century
AD
in the Roman Empire, a period of terrible calamities. Plague and war threatened to unhinge society. Fear and doubt caused people to view the world in a darker and more sinister light. Secondly, heretics real and imagined threatened a once seemingly all-powerful institution, the Church, and its claims to embody the absolute truth. Finally, Christian society’s deep-seated misogyny provided the needed scapegoat in the form of woman. Just as centuries of Christian anti-Semitism provided the ideological grounds for the Nazi holocaust, so the long tradition of contempt for and dehumanization of women made the witch-hunts possible.

The crises of the fourteenth century passed, but the crises confronting the Catholic Church did not. With the Reformation, the great edifice that had endured for more than a
thousand years cracked apart. The new Protestant churches proved themselves every bit as fanatical about witch-hunting as the Catholics they reviled. But there was a deeper crisis gathering that would one day threaten the whole Christian world-view. The first tremor came in 1543, with the publication of
On the Revolutions,
by Nicolaus Copernicus, a quiet, cautious priest, who knowing the import of what he wrote ensured that it would only be made public after he was dead and safely out of the reach of the Inquisition. Copernicus set the earth in motion around the sun. The ground moved under the very intellectual foundations of Christianity. We were no longer at the centre of a fixed, unchanging cosmos, as ordained by God – and Aristotle. It was a queasy feeling from which Christianity would never recover.

Witchcraft retains its fascination in modern times. The success of the many movies and books about witches and witchcraft – most recently, the Harry Potter novels – indicate their still powerful fascination. But what is astonishing is not that witchcraft should retain (at some level) its appeal in modern times, but that misogyny should. This is typified by the Rev. Montague Summers, the only English translator of
Malleus Maleficarum,
who it seemed welcomed the misogyny of Sprenger and Kramer. Though feminists and scholars have often quoted from his text, his introduction is generally ignored. In it, Rev. Summers thoroughly approves of the job undertaken by Sprenger and Kramer, and wishes they were still around to deal with the rise of socialism, of which he sees witchcraft as a forerunner. He notes ‘the misogynistic trend of various passages’, but he writes they are a ‘wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man . . .’ This extraordinary condoning of the demonization and mass murder of women was written in
1928 – nine or ten years after women received the vote in the United States and Britain.