Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy

“A greater number of witches is found in the fragile feminine sex than among men; it is indeed a fact that it were idle to contradict, since it is accredited by actual experience.” ¹ This statement from a fifteenth-century Inquisition handbook on witches accurately expresses Western assumptions about witches. From New England to Poland approximately 80 percent of accused witches were female. The preponderance of female victims during the European witchcraft craze has piqued the interest of historians of women, raising the question of why women were singled out for persecution. Some analysts have interpreted the centuries of the European witchcraft craze as a particularly gruesome chapter in a long saga of concerted gynocide in history. ² Anthropologically inclined historians have concluded that women suffered not because they were female but because they were a vulnerable, socially disadvantaged group or because they were somehow perceived as a threat to the established social order. ³ Still other scholars have proposed that the stereotyped image of witches as female, stemming from ancient beliefs in female susceptibility to evil, promoted the identification of women as witches. ⁴