ABSTRACT
One of the major problems which confront the historian attempting to understand the witch persecution of the early modern period is the high proportion of women among those accused of witchcraft. We will never know even the approximate total of those accused of and executed for witchcraft in the period of the craze, roughly speaking the years between 1450 and 1750: what is strikingly evident, however, is that in almost every sample of cases for which we have evidence, the majority of those accused and condemned were women. The exact proportion varied regionally and chronologically, but, overall, something like 80 per cent of witches were women, 1 rising to 90 per cent before such favoured tribunals as the Essex assizes. 2 Surprisingly, even allowing for a general blindness to gender issues, historians before the 1970s pondered little on the implications of these statistics. 3 In that decade, however, our attention was focused sharply upon the problem by a number of authors writing from within the women's movement. Sadly, however, the opinions of such writers were all too predictable. For Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, authors of a widely read pamphlet on women healers, the witch craze was ‘a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population… witches are accused of every conceivable sexual crime against men. Quite simply, they are “accused” of female sexuality.’ 4 For Mary Daly, the witch craze was ‘a specifically Western and Christian manifestation of the androtic state of atrocity’, a ‘sado-ritual syndrome’, which was ‘closely intertwined with phallocentric obsessions with purity’, while, in addition, ‘it is well known that witches were accused of sexual impurity’. 5 It is little wonder that one German writer, Silvia Bovenschen, should speculate on the possibility that witches were for feminists what Spartacus, French revolutionaries, and Bolsheviks were for socialists. 6
