A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice
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There is nothing comic about Malleus; it is written with all the deadly seriousness that cold fanaticism can muster, the sort that makes Hitler’s Mein Kampf such a repulsive read. Nothing can make these two authors crack a smile, not even the tale of the missing penises. Bearing in mind that Sprenger and Kramer fault women for being the credulous sex, consider how they treat the accusation that witches steal penises.149 It is claimed that some witches collect penises ‘in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn . . .’ As proof, they claim that:
a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a certain witch to ask her to restore his health. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take whichever member he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, ‘you must not take that one,’ adding, ‘because it belonged to a parish priest’.
In fact, what the Malleus has reproduced – clearly without realizing it – is a standard anti-clerical joke. According to the historian Walter Stephens: ‘There are other instances of Kramer’s using jokes as if they were transcripts of court proceedings; the impression of insanity radiated by the Malleus comes from Kramer’s willingness to believe almost anything as evidence that witchcraft and demons are real.’150
There is speculation on whether or not others can see the incubi when witches are having sex with them. The Inquisitors are also intrigued to know whether sex with a demon is more enjoyable for the woman than sex with her husband. In Malleus, there is evidence that sex with the Devil is just as good, if not better than, sex with a man. This changed over the years. In witches’ confessions from the sixteenth century onwards, though the Devil’s member gets bigger ‘like a mule’s . . . long and thick as an arm’, and even develops prongs so that she can have oral, anal and vaginal sex all at once, sex with demons becomes much less pleasurable, and even painful.151
The speculations of the Inquisitors about sex with demons is almost entirely devoted to women and their incubi. Little is said about men making out with succubi. Kramer and Sprenger are not curious to know how enjoyable it is for a man to make love to a lady demon. That is because, they argue, men are not so prone to lusting after demons: ‘And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime,’ they exclaim solemnly.
The vocabulary of Malleus when it deals with human sexuality and especially with women is one of cold repugnance. It distances the authors from their subject as if the accusers did not belong to the same species as those whom they accuse of performing such acts of ‘diabolical filthiness’. Even more repellent is the chilling detachment the inquisitors display when they deal with the remedies for this ‘high treason against God’s Majesty’. It might be compared to the detachment of a Nazi bureaucrat totting up the daily death rate in a concentration camp.
The institution of the Inquisition into whose hands the accused fell did indeed resemble the institutions of terror created by the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. The job of the Inquisition was to find out and punish heretics. The person accused was not told by whom he or she had been accused. Legal representation was practically impossible. Anyone crazy enough to come to her legal defence is warned that he too might be condemned as a heretic. ‘Those who endeavour to protect witches are their cruellest enemies, subjecting them to eternal flames in place of the transitory suffering of the stake,’ warns Peter Binsfield, the Suffragan Bishop of Trier, one of the areas worst affected by the witch-hunts.152
The accused was imprisoned before being brought to trial, and while awaiting judgement, often for considerable periods of time, fed on a diet of bread and water. Torture was employed to extract confessions, and there was no appealing the sentence. The Inquisitor was prosecutor, judge and jury. Technically, the Church did not actually carry out the sentence of death, since it is forbidden to take life – it merely ‘relaxed’ its protection of the accused (if convicted). The victim was handed over to the civil authorities, who administered the punishment. The civil authorities, of course, could be certain to concur with the Inquisitor’s findings.153 Henry Kramer and James Sprenger sum up the Church’s role in a chilling phrase when they speak of ‘those whom we have caused to be burned’.154
The accused may be kept in a state of suspense by ‘continually postponing the day of examination’, the Inquisitors advise. If this does not make her confess ‘let her first be led to the penal cells and there stripped by honest women of good character’, in case she is concealing some instruments of witchcraft made ‘from the limbs of unbaptized children’. It is then a good idea to shave or burn off all her hair, except in Germany, where shaving ‘especially of the secret parts . . . is not generally considered delicate . . . and therefore we Inquisitors do not use it . . .’ They are not so squeamish in other countries where ‘the Inquisitors order the witch to be shaved all over her body’. In Northern Italy, the Malleus reports: ‘. . . the Inquisitor of Como has informed us that last year, that is, in 1485, he ordered forty-one witches to be burned after they had been shaved all over.’ The unmistakable relish Kramer and Sprenger derive from stressing this detail betrays the underlying sadism.
If the squalor of the prison and the humiliation of stripping and shaving, never mind the mounting terror as she awaits the coming torture, do not break her, the judge should ‘order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture; and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty.’ Usually, the first instrument of torture applied was the strappado. Her hands are tied beneath her back. She is roped to a pulley and then yanked violently into the air, where she is jerked up and down until her shoulders are dislocated and her sinews torn. ‘And while she is raised above the ground,’ the Inquisitors write with the detachment of civil servants, ‘if she is being tortured in this way, let the Judge read or cause to be read to her the dispositions of the witnesses with their names, saying: “See! You are convicted by the witnesses.”’
If she is still obstinate, other tortures can be used. She might be burned with candles or with hot oil. Flaming balls of pitch might be applied to her genitals or gallons of water forced down her throat until she is bloated and the officers then beat her belly with sticks. She can be forced to sit on the witch’s chair – a sort of narrow cage with clamps and a spiked seat. Thumbscrews, and other devices for crushing the legs and feet might be used. Some victims were held in irons so long in filthy conditions that they died of gangrene before coming to trial.155 However, the Inquisitors are not without sympathy. They forbid torturing pregnant women. They are to be tortured only after giving birth.
Cheating and lying are also permitted to the judges. A judge may promise the woman that he will spare her life, then, once she has confessed, hand her over for sentencing to another judge. Or a judge may ‘come in and promise that he will be merciful, with the mental reservation that he means that he will be merciful to himself or the State; for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful.’ As in twentieth-century totalitarianism, things become their opposite according to the dictates of the regime. It reminds us of the nightmare world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty four, with its dominant slogans, ‘WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’; the authors of Malleus might add, ‘CRUELTY IS MERCY’. And, as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, it was held to be acceptable for children and parents to denounce each other. Peter Binsfield tells the story of an eighteen-year-old boy who denounced his mother ‘out of filial piety’. She went to the stake, along with three of her children in November 1588.156
Once the accused is convicted, the Church decrees she suffers ‘relaxation to the secular arm’, that is, it hands her over to the civil authorities for punishment, which meant painful death. There is little hope that the secular arm will oppos
e the Church’s will. A French demonologist warns: ‘The judge who does not put to death a convicted witch should be put to death himself.’157 On her way to the stake, the woman was often forced to wear the witch’s bridle – a spiked iron gag, jammed and locked in her mouth, to stifle her screams and her protests of innocence.
By such methods, over a period of some two hundred years, an unknown number of women were executed, mostly by being burned alive. Overall, it has been impossible to gauge the number of victims who died as witches – estimates range from several millions to around 60,000.158 The numbers, and some of the methods, varied from country to country. The witch-hunts raged most violently in Germany, Switzerland, France and Scotland. However, within those countries, the numbers executed varied considerably from area to area. In France, the witch-hunts tended to concentrate in areas such as the south-west where previously heresies such as Catharism had flourished. The same was true of Germany – the major witch-hunts broke out along religious fault lines that produced the upheavals of the Reformation and the religious wars of the 1600s. In the area of southwest Germany, between 1561 and 1670, 3,229 witches were burned; around the town of Wiesenteig, in one year – 1662 – sixty-three women were burned, that is, at the rate of more than one per week.159 Near Trier, in 1585, after the Catholics had reclaimed it from the Protestants, two villages were left with only one woman each – all the rest having been burned. Nicholas Remy, a scholar, a Latin poet, author of Daemonolatreia, as well as an Inquisitor, burned between 2,000 and 3,000 witches before dying in 1616. Between 1628 and 1631, Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg burned 900 witches, including several children. At this time, also in Germany, children as young as three and four were accused of having sex with devils. Children who had been convicted of attending the witch’s Sabbat with their parents were flogged in front of the stake as their mother and father burned.160 Jean Bodin, the author of the 1580 treatise De la Démonomanie des sorciers, writes ‘children guilty of witchcraft, if convicted, are not to be spared, though, in consideration of their tender age, they may, if penitent, be strangled before being burnt’.161 Girls above the age of twelve, and boys over fourteen, were treated as adults.
In England, approximately 1000 witches were executed during a 200-year period, far fewer than in most other parts of Europe gripped by the craze. Demonic copulation was generally not a feature of the accusations, and the kind of torture that was authorized on the continent was forbidden. Instead, the accused were deprived of sleep for days at a time, until they confessed.162 English women’s sexual embrace of the Devil coincided with the arrival of the Puritan Matthew Hopkins as Witch Finder General during the English Civil War (1642–9). Up until then, they had apparently been content to suckle demonic toads and cats at their breasts. Hopkins hung some two hundred women as witches in fourteen months, including nineteen in one day in the town of Chelmsford, Essex. One of his victims, Rebecca West of Colchester, accused of killing a child by witchcraft, confessed to have married the devil. Hopkins was paid a bounty for each witch he hanged, and legend has it he retired a rich man.
Just north of the border, in Scotland, however, where continental-style torture prevailed, copulation with the Devil was as common as it was in France, Switzerland, Northern Italy and Germany. Scottish witches also confessed regularly to eating their children. Four thousand were burned during the years of the witch-hunts, a horrific level given Scotland’s sparse population.
The English Puritans brought the fear of witchcraft with them to the New World. They brought with them too something of the Old World misogyny that was its inspiration. But the witch craze never caught on with the same ferocity in the colonies as it did in Europe. There were only two intense outbreaks – the first in Hartford, Connecticut (1662–3) and the second and more infamous, in Salem, Massachusetts, for a few months beginning in December in 1691. In Hartford, thirteen were accused and four hanged, and in Salem, two hundred were accused and nineteen hanged. As in Europe, four-fifths of the victims were women; a half of the males who were accused were husbands or sons of witches. The conviction rate was far lower than that of the European witch-hunts. A more democratic system of justice prevailed, allowing those convicted to appeal to higher courts; the outbreaks endured for a far shorter period. The majority of the cases concerned acts of possession. There was only one instance, in 1651, of a woman accused of going to bed with the Devil, and she only did so when he appeared to her in the form of her lost child. At an official level, scepticism prevailed very rapidly. Within a generation of the Salem trials, a man and wife who accused one Sarah Spenser of witchcraft were sent to see a doctor in order to establish whether or not they were sane.163
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that the persecution of witches in North America lasted for so short a time was the fact that Old World misogyny did not enjoy a completely successful transplant to the New World. The Puritan tradition shared something of the early Christians’ belief in equality before the Lord. Women enjoyed a higher status in the colonies. Two centuries after the witch craze had passed, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) observed that in America ‘while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement’164 (see Chapter 6). That great democratic experiment that had its roots in the seventeenth century’s social and religious radicalism, helped protect women from the worst excesses of the witch craze.
The last woman to be legally executed as a witch was burned in Switzerland in 1787. In 1793, a woman in Poland was burned, but illegally. By then the craze had long ago run its course. The threat from the Devil and his legions of female devotees had vanished. We now read the writings of Kramer and Sprenger, and the other demonologists and Inquisitors, with utter incredulity, mixed with horror and disgust.
The question remains: How is it that women came to be demonized for close to 300 years in a society where learning and the arts were entering one of their most fruitful periods, and the scientific, philosophical and social revolutions in Europe would soon transform forever how people viewed themselves and the world? Another way of looking at this question is to ask why it was that misogyny, so long a fundamental element in Christian thinking, took on its most lethal form at a time otherwise associated with great human progress?
The historian Walter Stephens argues that doubt not misogyny lay at the root of the witch-hunt craze. The profound intellectual, social and moral changes that were shaking society challenged people’s faith, and they sought ways to vindicate their traditional beliefs in the old divine order. In his detailed analysis of Malleus, Stephens argues that the preoccupation with women having sex with demons was mainly a concern with finding evidence that demons existed; the more detail they could get from women’s alleged experiences, the better. The inquisitors’ sexual obsessions about women that to the modern sensibility resemble pornographic fantasies, are really a desperate quest for proof that will ward off uncertainty. ‘The expert testimony of witches themselves has made all these things credible,’ the Malleus asserts. That is, Inquisitors tortured women in a search for evidence that the Devil really existed. They sought to transform their metaphysics into physics. The witch-hunt was a hideous experiment to make unobservable entities real. Confirming their existence confirmed that the whole world of the spirit was actual, and not just a fantasy. Stephens agrees that there was a misogynistic dimension, and that Christianity’s long history of contempt of and hostility towards women led to many more of them being arrested and tortured than men. But it was the search for proof that was the primary motivation for the horrors of those years.
Even if we accept the argument that misogyny was a secondary motive for the witch-hunt, it does nothing to mitigate the appalling picture that it presents. It merely means that many thousands of women perished in the flames and at the end of a rope in order to assuage men’s doubts. The flames a
ffirmed the dualism of Christianity, inherited from Plato, which saw the everyday world as contemptible, and the world of the spirit as the true reality. For women, dualism could not have had a more horrific consequence.
At least three conditions conspired to create the emotional, moral and social context for the witch-hunts. First, the fourteenth century, which ushered them in, was, like the fifth century BC in Greece and the third century AD in the Roman Empire, a period of terrible calamities. Plague and war threatened to unhinge society. Fear and doubt caused people to view the world in a darker and more sinister light. Secondly, heretics real and imagined threatened a once seemingly all-powerful institution, the Church, and its claims to embody the absolute truth. Finally, Christian society’s deep-seated misogyny provided the needed scapegoat in the form of woman. Just as centuries of Christian anti-Semitism provided the ideological grounds for the Nazi holocaust, so the long tradition of contempt for and dehumanization of women made the witch-hunts possible.