Women: Witnesses and Witches *

The role played by women in the legal process against witches, as accusers or witnesses, has been frequently cited in the course of skirmishes about the question, as posed by Christina Larner, “Was witch-hunting women-hunting?”. Keith Thomas has argued that “The idea that witch-prosecutions reflected a war between the sexes must be discounted, not least because the victims and witnesses were themselves as likely to be women as men”. This argument is mirrored by that of Alan Macfarlane, and has been followed, in relation to the New England trials, by John Demos. ¹ Feminist scholars, like Larner, Carol Karlsen and, most recently, Marianne Hester, have found such reasoning “simplistic”. ² Yet Karlsen's acknowledgement that the role of women as accusers remains “one of the most baffling questions about witchcraft” does suggest the need for further discussion, and a recent essay by J. A. Sharpe, examining the involvement of women in Yorkshire prosecutions, displays some of the potential of the subject. ³ An examination of the process of witnessing — a process, as I shall argue, of considerable cultural complexity — will illuminate a number of issues raised by the witchcraft prosecutions: the shaping role of the legal system, the dynamic interweaving of elite theology and the concerns of the populace and, not least, the misogynous dimension of witchcraft.