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

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 alleged witches as a violent manifestation of Western male culture's fear and hatred of women, and as an extension of its need to suppress women'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 trials themselves has been perpetuated by contemporary scholarship which trivializes or omits from the record the torture and killing 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 prepatriarchal , nature- and woman-centered culture. In this spirit, feminist witchcraft has reclaimed the figure of the witch as | 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 political 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 reliably, we need to apply the perspectives and hypotheses of feminist scholarship to new interdisciplinary 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 because they represented a threat to the Church's control and competition tOj-the nascent male medical profession of the early modern period. The work of Ehrenreich and English relies 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 preChristian 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 implications 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...