S1 · E12October 26 · 51 min
"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable." A Dominican inquisitor wrote that in 1486, and over the next three centuries, tens of thousands of people, most of them women, were executed as witches.
After three episodes in Salem, host Xtina Rose zooms all the way out to find out how the witch was made. We start with an Old English word that had a male and a female form, then go through five hundred years when the church officially called witchcraft a delusion and a Christian king made burning a witch a capital crime. From there, the story turns: heresy hunters, a papal bull, and the Malleus Maleficarum built a new figure, the devil-worshipping woman in a secret conspiracy. We walk into the torture chambers of Nördlingen and ask whether the men doing it enjoyed it, find out why the Spanish Inquisition became the skeptic in the room, test whether the witch hunts were really a war on women healers, and finally answer the question from the Bridget Bishop episode: were women who owned land more likely to be called witches?
Content Note: this episode includes detailed descriptions of torture, including the torture of a pregnant woman and sexual violence against women during interrogation, as well as execution by burning and hanging. Please take care of yourself while you listen.
Look these up
The Malleus Maleficarum, Montague Summers's 1928 translation: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/heinrich-kramer/malleus-maleficarum/montague-summers
Johann Linden's eyewitness account of the Trier witch hunt: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trier.html
Johannes Junius's letter to his daughter (Bamberg, 1628): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Junius
Rebekka Lemp's letters from prison, translated by Brian Pavlac: https://www.brianpavlac.org/witchhunts/lempletters.html
Friedrich Spee, Cautio Criminalis (1631), excerpt: https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/82_Spee_ENG.pdf
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, University of Edinburgh (search the accused): https://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/
Mary Parker's case file, including her sons' petition about the sheriff: https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n98.html
The 1451 manuscript of Martin Le Franc's Le Champion des Dames, with one of the earliest pictures of a woman on a broom
The Maria Holl fountain in Nördlingen, Germany: "In memory of the steadfast Maria Holl"
Studies
Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987). Of the 344 people accused of witchcraft in New England between 1620 and 1725, 267 were women. Among the women whose families she could trace, those who had inherited, or stood to inherit, because there were no brothers or sons made up 64% of the women prosecuted, 76% of those convicted, and 89% of those executed.
David Harley, "The Myth of the Midwife-Witch," Social History of Medicine (1990). When historians went back to the trial records, midwives didn't show up among the accused any more often than you'd expect by chance.
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, University of Edinburgh. 3,837 people accused under the Scottish Witchcraft Act between 1563 and 1736. 84% were women. Folk healing appears in the accusations against only about 4%.
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003). About two-thirds of England's "cunning folk," the local healers and charm-sellers, were men, and they were rarely prosecuted.
The Spanish Inquisition's records, 1540–1700. More than 44,000 trials and about 826 people executed in person, but very few witch executions compared with Germany.
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Written, produced, hosted, and edited by Xtina Rose. Music by Stephen Mexler and Xtina Rose.
