Europe's inner demons

These circumstances can be defined. On the one hand, a certain kind of misfortune had to occur; on the other hand, there had to be somebody about who could plausibly be regarded as a witch. The misfortune could vary greatly in form. A strange, unfamiliar illness, or an unforeseeable accident, might strike a man, a woman, a child, a house, and ox, a litter of piglets, a brood of chicks. A cow might fail to yield as much milk, bees might fail to produce as much honey, a field might fail to bear as much crops as expected. A storm might bring devastation. But the decisive fact was always that particular individuals felt singled out for affliction. Collective disasters, such as famines and plagues, were another matter: it does not seem that peasants, left to themselves, attributed such things to witches — that happened only when and where the new, demonological conception of the witch had taken over. Even when peasants wondered about a storm, they thought of the harm done to particular fields or particular buildings. At village level, the starting point for maleficium accusations was normally the unexpected misfortunes of particular individuals.

But who was selected for the role of witch? The most striking fact is the preponderance of women. Admittedly, male witches did exist. The touring storm-raisers of the early Middle Ages, who so effectively terrorized the peasants, seem to have been mostly men. But in later centuries maleficium

at village level was almost a female monopoly.

The Lucerne material, for example, lists thirty-one women accused, and only one man — and that one was a foreigner (presumably an Italian) who could make himself understood only through an interpreter; moreover, he claimed that his maleficia were really performed by a woman companion. As for the Essex cases examined by Dr Macfarlane, out of 291 witches tried at the assizes between 1560 and 1680, only twentv-three were men, and eleven of these were connected with a woman. With the Trevisards of Devon, the whole family was suspect; yet there too the woman Alice seems to have been the most feared — even where the original quarrel was with one of the men, the resulting maleficia

were sometimes attributed to Alice.

Until the great European witch-hunt literally bedevilled everything and everybody, the witch was almost by definition a woman. In fact, on the basis of the vast mass of data available, one can be rather more precise. Witches, in the sense of practitioners of maleficia, were usually thought of as married women or widows (rather than spinsters) between the ages of fifty and seventy. At that time one was old at fifty — and the older these women were, the greater their power was supposed to be. Some of those executed were over eighty.

Of course, not all elderly married women or widows were accused of performing maleficia

; and the evidence points to certain types as particularly liable to attract suspicion. For instance, witchcraft — in the sense of the ability and will to work maleficia — was widely believed to run in families. In particular, the daughter of a woman who had been executed as a witch often found herself in a dangerous position. We have seen how, in deciding to burn Dorothea, wife of Burgi Hindremstein, the town councillors of Lucerne were influenced by the fact that, years before, her mother had been burned.⁽⁴¹⁾

In fact the daughter had been harried by her mother’s fate all her life. She had escaped being burned along with her mother only by fleeing from her native Canton of Uri, and suspicion followed her everywhere. However friendly Dorothea’s behaviour, it was construed in the most unfavourable manner possible; she could do nothing right. Once at a carnival feast, she was able to produce a dish of millet for ten persons at short notice— and in due course this hospitable gesture was adduced as proof of her witchcraft!

With other women it was some personal peculiarity that singled them out for suspicion. Many of those accused of maleficia were solitary, eccentric, or bad-tempered; amongst the traits most often mentioned is a sharp tongue, quick to scold and threaten. Often they were frightening to look at — ugly, with red eyes or a squint, or pockmarked skin; or somehow deformed; or else simply bent and bowed with age. Such women were felt to be uncanny — like the strange apparition that was seen in the Canton of Schwyz in 1506. According to a contemporary chronicler, that too was in the form of an old woman, dressed in dirty old clothes and outlandish headgear — but in addition it had great long teeth and cloven feet. Many, we are told, died of terror at the very sight of it; and plague swept through the land.⁽⁴²⁾ The kind of imagination that could create such a being was also capable of transforming old women, weighed down by their infirmities, into embodiments of malevolent power.