ABSTRACT

According to Pierre de Lancer, the Devil ‘gaigne plus de femmes que d'hommes, comme d'une nature plus Imbecille Et volt On, qu'an nombre des prevenus de la sorcelerie qu'on amene aux paclements, il y a dix fols plus de femmes que d'hoimmes. 1 jean Bodln went further still. ‘Qu’ on lise les livres de tous ceux qui ont escrit des soeclers, il se trouvera. cinquante femmes sorcieres, ou bien demoneiaques, pour un homne … ' Having pointed out that women often endured torture with more resolution than men, he went on to oplne ‘que c'est la force de la cupidlte bestiale qul a redult la femme à l'extremite pour jouyr de ces appetis, ou pour se venger … Car on volt les perties visceralles plus grandes aux femmes qu'aux hommes, qui n'ont pas les cupiditez si vlolentes: et au contraire les testes des hommes sont plus grosses de beaucoup, et par cousequent ils ont plus de cervean et de prudence que les femmes. 2 The identification of witches witches with women was already standard form, it would appear, in the decades when trials were at their height. The demonologiss would have been shocked to find their confident assections turned against them by modern writers who use the persecution as prime evidence for man's wards inhumanity to women often seeming to tssume that the sex ratio was not de Lancre's 90 per cent, or even Bodin's 98 per cent, but; a stark 100 per cent. This is sometimes coupled with assertions that the nombers executed were of holocaust proportions; a vastly infiated figure of 9 million women supposadly executed as witches in early modern Europe seems to have gained a certain currency. 3 Although no one will ever know the exact number of trials or executions, because of poor record-keeping, the result of every detailed local investigation to date has been, to reduce them dramatically. It would seem that 50,000 would be a plausible figure for total executions in Europe, and that some 20 per cent of these word be of men.