From: blchapma@eos.ncsu.edu (BEKKI LYN)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Medieval WitchCraze
Date: 29 Jul 1992 23:16:13 GMT
Organization: North Carolina State University, Project Eos
Distribution: world
Reply-To: blchapma@eos.ncsu.edu (BEKKI LYN)
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

 
|> DanZ writes:
|> 
|> >    I think this would be misguided.  I haven't made a study of it, but
|> > from what I have read, I would be surprised if the majority of 'witch'
|> > prosecutions were female.
|> >    It seems to me that almost all prosecutions for witchcraft were
|> > started for paranoid religious orthodoxy or political reasons. Witness
|> > for example the mass charges of witchcraft against the Knights
|> > Templars in the 1300's.  In the patriarchal society of the middle
|> > ages, it was largly men that had political enemies to be attacked by.
|> >
|> >    It seems to me that the modern concept of 'witch' as a female (and
|> > an ugly on, at that) is more derived from Hollywood than historical
|> > myth and belief.
|> 

I'm in the process of reading _The Great Cosmic Mother_, by Sjoo/Mor.
There is a chapter or so on the "Witch Burnings" that indicate that
it was mainly women that were persecuted during those centuries.
The authors' bring up such groups as the Knights Templars, Gnostics,
and other Christian sects around at that time.of the Inquisition.
The conservative Church saw these sects as threats to its power.
In 1486, heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger put out the _Malleus 
Maleficarum_, which was extremely hateful to women especially.

Here are some quotes from _The Great Cosmic Mother_:

"Women, with their devil-inspired power over sex, were thus a 
major threat to a man's possessions; not only his soul, but all other
worldly goods.  Witches were accused of instigating extramarital sex, 
of inhibiting potency, hindering conception, slaying infants in the
womb--all threats to patrilineal property inheritance.  for every
impotent man, a woman could be tortued and burned."(p.300)

"Until recently, the number of deaths from the Inquisition was
euphemistically underestimated, as a way of denying about five hundred
years of systematic persecution and slaughter by the Holy Christian
church.  Now, perhaps, deaths are overestimated.  We don't know; the
estimates range from 1 million to 9 million people burned as witches
between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (between 1200 and 
1484, people were officially killed as "heretics").  One number is
certain:  Of people punished for "witchcraft" in Europe, 80 percent
of those accused, tortured, and burnt were women.  Town records from
Germany and France reveal that whole villages were emptied of their 
female populations during the peak of the fire frenzy--including
very young girls and very elderly women." (p.298)

This book also brings out the clash between the church-supported
"physicians" and the midwives, herbalistic "wise-women" that had
great influence with the large peasant population.


Bekki Lyn
-- 

Bekki Lyn

************************************************************
"All's well at the midnight hour; you're ready to fly
 Don't think about the darkness, or the rumbling in the sky.
 Somewhere on the morning road just waiting for you
 Some things that just could never be are calling up a
   spell so you can see..
 Dream Evil, the dark that you find in the back of your mind
 Dream Evil Dream Evil -- DIO --
************************************************************


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