Gender as a Causal Factor for Witchcraft within the Orbit of Early Modern Class Structure

Was gender a causal factor in the witch hunts? The question of causality is in some ways binary, and historians have aligned themselves affirming gender as a causal factor or denying it; but few historians are monocausal, and their answers to this question are far more cautious and nuanced. While this is a straightforward question, it has no simple answers. In posing the question at all, historians implicitly state the obvious: that the majority of those accused of witchcraft were female. If femaleness was a causal factor, how do we explain the fact that there were witches to be found among men? Conversely, if femininity was not a causal factor, why were so many witches women? Is class as important as gender, and if so, does class encompass gender? Certainly, from the raw data alone, the association between gender and witchcraft can be demonstrated, but correlation is not always causation, and we must examine the relationship between gender and the process of accusing a witch, especially the degree to which one informs the other, before we can understand causation. By scrutinizing the historiographical notion of gender as a causal factor, I intend to demonstrate that masculinity and femininity are both integrally important to understanding witchcraft, but only under certain social conditions within the larger configuration of class.

In his landmark work Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn integrates common and elite ideas of gender and convincingly argues that the archetype of a witch as a woman cut across class boundaries. However, according to Cohn, the reason that elites perpetuated this stereotype was because it was already so instilled in the peasant mentality that identifying women rather than men was expected. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that Cohn never explicitly states whether he regards class or gender as more important. Clearly, for the accused, femininity would be a great hindrance whether it conformed to the ideas of the peasant community or the elites in charge of prosecution.The question we must ask is which informed the other? Were the majority of witches women because elites were already persecuting mostly women or were women being persecuted by elites because the lower classes expected this? This is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand, Cohn is at least partially incorrect when he asserts that an elite prosecutor, for whom the conspiratorial and subversive acts of witches were of the utmost importance, was equally likely to deem a male or female a witch. Misogynistic elements permeate the Malleus Maleficarum and other witch hunting manuals, and educated authorities were armed with a tradition of medical knowledge, religious beliefs, and cultural assumptions that denigrated women as lesser than men in most ways. On the other hand, as elites became more involved with trials, their ideology of misogyny surely corroborated and reinforced already held beliefs. If the average peasant had already come to the conclusion that a witch was more likely to be female than male, he did so concurrently with authorities. It is unclear the degree to which class informed ideas about gender primarily because both upper and lower classes seem to have held similar ideas in the first place.

Perhaps we should rephrase our original question. Undoubtedly, gender is a contributing factor in understanding witchcraft, so we might instead ask how gender affected witchcraft and whether other forces overwhelmed it. Christina Larner judiciously answers the question of feminine causality in both affirming and dissenting terms. She claims that gender was a causal factor as evidenced by the fact that women made up the vast preponderance of witches but that it was not a direct or even the most important factor because they were persecuted for being witches, not women. In Larner’s own terminology, determining who was a witch was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” though she reminds us that early modern peasants and elites usually had women in mind. Larner explicitly states, in “Who Were the Witches?” that witch-hunting was woman-hunting or at least the hunting “of women who [did] not fulfill the male view of how women ought to conduct themselves.” However, she seems to answer the titular question of her essay “Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?” in the negative or at least renders the question moot, since the former incorporated the latter. All roses are flowers but not all flowers are roses. For Larner, women-hunting was always conducted under the auspices of witch-hunting.

Just as witch-hunting subsumes women-hunting, so too can class act as categorical architecture within which to position gender as a causal factor. Diane Purkiss asserts that the theory that witch-hunting was entirely the result of patriarchal dominance over women has been overblown by radical feminists of the twentieth century in their efforts to imbue their contemporary ideological struggles with historical antecedents. Purkiss maintains that most witches were executed not because they were women but because they were among the weakest of the lower classes. True, early in the witch hunts, upper class women such as Dame Alice Kytler had been accused and when witch hunts became particularly pervasive in one locale, persecutions tended to stride higher up the social ladder, but by and large, these were exceptions. Most women accused of witchcraft were very poor. It is no coincidence that in his encounter with witches, the devil often promised women monetary rewards and financial gain. And, in regards to the relationship between class and gender, it is telling that women accused of witchcraft were often not poor of their own accord but simply because they were married to poor men . Their poverty was a result of their class not their gender.


Class, it must be noted, was more than merely the separation between the elite authorities and the peasants. Social distinction existed within peasant communities and the relative lack of midwife accusations is another piece of evidence to support the notion that witch-hunting was women-hunting only within the confines of the lowest stratum of the peasant class. Jane Davidson has proffered ample evidence that women who were involved in healing practices were not culled from their communities as witches based on gender or occupation but, as upstanding citizens, they were largely immune from persecutions and even participated in the legal prosecution of witches. Cohn believed—perhaps understandably given the earliness of his contributions to modern witchcraft historiography—that midwives figured into the category of the accused, but Purkiss, Briggs, and Davidson, among others, have dismantled the myth that midwives were ever regularly accused of witchcraft. They have also attacked the idea that the witchcraze was an attempt by masculine medical authorities to keep women out of the profession of healing. Davidson denounces this theory by providing the example of Johann Weyer, an educated elite physician, who actually chided less educated (lower class?) physicians for resorting to witchcraft as an explanation for their medical mysteries. Nevertheless, to be fair, Weyer was a noted skeptic of witchcraft to begin with. This relationship in itself can be taken as evidence that class distinction, even among the elites, was important in regards to witchcraft accusation. Larner subscribes to the theory of masculine medical dominance in part, observing that in Scotland, laws were passed limiting the authority of midwives in medical matters, but she is careful to note that the major change in the status of midwives did not take place until well after the major witch hunts were over.

During the height of the witch hunts, midwives actually colluded with the authorities and aided in the search for the witch’s mark on the body of the accused at the behest of the male prosecutors whose Christian sensibilities prohibited them from doing so. By their very participation, midwives seem to contravene the idea that with-hunting was women-hunting, although, as Clive Holmes has argued, these women may have been purposefully reinforcing their conformity to the legal process by participating as witnesses. In either case, their social standing saved them and their gender did not condemn them.

The difference between gender and class may best be examined through the lens of the legal system. Larner claims that legal responsibility shifted from men to women during the early modern era. Whereas women were once the legal responsibility of their fathers and husbands, the new Protestant ethic of personal accountability made women more susceptible to direct attacks in court. E.J. Kent contends that the legal system worked better for males, and they tended to utilize the courts more often to resolve their disagreements. The male sphere of influence, even among lower classes, was much broader than females because their economic sphere extended beyond the household. For example, as Holmes documents, witnesses in witchcraft cases dealing with property were more likely to be men whereas those dealing with personal illness or death were more likely to be women. He also argues that, in spite of the fact that women participated in the process of identifying a witch, witch-hunting can certainly still be construed as woman-hunting because males were in control of this process the entire time. Arguably, it was mostly elite, wealthy men in charge of this process; lower class males simply used the system to their advantage.

Without a doubt, gender played a substantial role in the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, it may have played the most important role, but gender seems to have exerted itself as a direct causal factor primarily within the environs of the peasant class from which most witches were to be found. Elite and peasant conceptions of a witch may have been poles apart in most ways, but both tended to agree that a witch was more likely to be female. Historians have often remarked that elite prosecutors of witches developed their own feedback loop of expectation from witch confessions that reinforced already held beliefs. Some modern historians seem to have developed a feedback loop of their own, claiming that witch- hunting was woman-hunting because so many witches were women while simultaneously asserting that so many witches were women because women conformed to the feminine stereotype of a witch. Misogyny was a reality in early modern Europe, as was poverty. If gender were the sole or even most important causal factor, we would expect to see far more elite women being persecuted as witches. As a “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” crime, witchcraft corresponded to culturally inculcated archetypes of the non-virtuous woman, but encompassed a broad enough subset of crimes to include males as well. The fact that the vast majority of these men and women emerged from the peasant class goes a long way towards explaining the incorporation of ideas about gender within ideas about class.

Integrating the Process of Inversion into the Process of Othering in the Context of the Early Modern Witch Hunts*

*This essay is something of a synthesis of the previous two papers (and posts) on the degree to which witchcraft can be viewed (in terms of social anthropology) as inversion or othering. By inversion I mean, in the context of the witch hunts, that witches were "inverted" and regarded as exactly the opposite of whatever the accusers considered the prime example of perfection in their society. In early modern Europe, this tended to be some version of the "virtuous Christian, made more complicated by the fact that Protestantism and all its variations complicated that view after 1517. By "othering", I mean that accusers were defining witches against oneself and highlighting those aspects of an individual that most differentiated them from their accusers. The idea of the "other" has been a concept in psychology and philosophy for several centuries but was given its most modern (or postmodern) meaning by Edward Said, who applied it to peoples of the periphery - geographical, cultural, religious, etc. I have attempted to retain some of his definition. This essay is very postmodernist, even though I don't particularly consider myself a postmodern historian. Still, the terminology gives me a vocabulary to elucidate ideas that I otherwise would not have.

The issue of how to situate a person accused of witchcraft within the larger political, religious, and social structures of the early modern period constitutes one of the most important questions in witchcraft historiography. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these social structures were in the continuous process of defining and redefining themselves. Even the concept of “witch” was ambiguous and carried different connotations for people depending on their social distinction, religious affiliation, or national identity. What embodied a witch for an elite ecclesiastical authority was not always the same for a local peasant, but two elites of different religious persuasions or from disparate geographic locales did not always agree on definitions either.


Amidst these chaotic social conditions that so characterized the early modern period, many scholars have sought to understand the meaning of a witch in terms of the degree to which she either conformed to or diverged from social norms as recognized by both her socio-economic peers and superiors. Scholars have viewed the witch’s relationship with society in varying gradations of complexity as an inversion of social norms or as a convenient way for marginalized peoples to be “othered” by elites or commoners in their attempts to affirm a specific social, religious, or political identity. However, inversion corresponds to schemas far too binary and simplistic to yield knowledge about the diverse ways in which these marginalized peoples were regarded. The less dualistic notion of “the other” represents a more fruitful theoretical account of this multifaceted relationship. Rather than viewing the relationship of the witch to society as one of pure opposition, the concept of the other allows historians to determine how social groups distinguished witches by identifying the feature or features that set them apart from the in-group. It is my intent to recast inversion not as separate from othering but as an extreme version of the process and situate inversion within the greater dynamic process of defining the ideal Christian against the other.

How does one define the idiom of inversion? In the terminology of Stuart Clark, inversion is a reversal of the most exalted ideals of a given social structure or the construction of an oppositional model to the prevailing institutions. Clark has attempted to understand the relationship between the witch and society as an inverted one, in which the witch personified precisely the opposite of what was understood to comprise the ideal Christian. This binary relationship denoted the witch as a particularly odious and dangerous enemy of society. While this can be a useful conceptual framework in which to situate the idea of witchcraft, it does not take into account the convoluted manner in which early modern peoples defined a witch. The idea of a “good” and “bad” witch amounts to a value judgment that simply did not accord with the worldview. Certainly, as Christians, they subscribed to the notions of absolute good and evil, represented by Christ and Satan, but the functional nature of a witch, who had the power to both to cause and prevent harm, was also acknowledged by early modern commoners. All magic derived from Satan; therefore, even practically beneficial magic was evil because the process, not the result, determined its morality. This idea would later prove highly influential among witch hunters who, unlike the commoners they were persecuting, believed that all acts of magic emanated from Satan.

As several scholars have illustrated, most peasants did not equate witchcraft with Satan until the intervention of authorities, and these authorities only gradually came to accept this as an integral part of witchcraft theory. According to H.C. Erik Midelfort, seventy-five to one hundred years passed from the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum until the concept of the devil’s sabbat was integrated into the elite accusation of witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, and even after this time, some secular officials maintained the original distinctions of harmless magic and maleficia. For example, Alison Rowlands has described that officials in Rothenburg ob der Tauber may never have fully conflated witchcraft with other forms of magic and regarded the general problem with superstition as a greater threat than the specific problem of witchcraft. Lutheran skepticism of the active power of the devil, in this instance, may have significantly diminished the reality of the witch as other elites understood it, and condemned the more credulous commoners whose utilitarian exploitation of magic savored of heresy. Similarly, Joyce Miller argues that as late as the seventeenth century, Scottish courts tried “charmers” differently than they tried witches and the principal disparity was the lack of the demonic element in the former. However, the variation between Scotland and Rothenburg was that in Scotland, witches were punished more severely than charmers, whereas in Rothenburg, their persecution was less harsh. Christina Larner has pointed to the fact that the pact with the devil did not figure prominently in English witchcraft trials or laws in the mid-sixteenth century and that the Witchcraft Acts of 1542 and 1563 actually curbed its spread. These discrepancies can be attributed to religious and political idiosyncrasies of their respective regions and countries. The inclusion of Satan—who represents the most obvious inverted symbol of the Christian ideal—seems particularly important if we are to regard the relationship between the witch and society as an inversion. His absence, at least in these instances, makes othering a more viable option.

Gender also plays an important role in understanding the relationship between inversion and the other. The sexual dichotomy of male and female obviously provides the perfect context for inversion, and medically speaking, male elites often defined women as inverted men. Appropriate early modern gender roles were often confirmed by the process of accusation and confession itself. Some women seem to have intentionally asserted their identity as ideal Christian women by adopting submissive positions during interrogations and reinforcing their roles in society. However, as both Diane Purkiss and Christina Larner have explicated, this inversion did not extend to the social realm since it was extremely common for women to accuse other women of witchcraft. If othering requires degrees of similarity between accuser and accused, this type of witchcraft allegation epitomizes that process. For Purkiss, class and gender conflicts converge in these examples, and marginal women faced double jeopardy: inversion of the male perception of an ideal woman by authorities and othering in the context of the typical housewife or mother by her female peers. Given that women sometimes made accusations independently to settle personal scores and sometimes colluded with authorities, inversion and othering are further appended. Purkiss, however, is often imprecise with her terminology and seems to use “other” and “inversion” almost interchangeably. For example, while describing the typical responsibilities of a housewife, Purkiss uses language very similar to Stuart Clark when she depicts the inverted housewife as causing “utter disorder,” but then portrays the anti-housewife, a dual concept, as “her own dark Other who causes pollution where there should be order”. While she begins with inversion, her ideational structure reconciles with othering more effectively. Purkiss can certainly be forgiven for this muddled apprehension since the foremost problem in situating the witch within this tortuous cultural landscape is the relationship between the witch and her political, social, and religious positions. And perhaps, by combining the idea of othering with inversion, Purkiss is allowing the other to subsume the more simplistic nature of inversion.

In the inversion thesis, witches represent people who counter the ideal of the model Christian. In fact, they signify the exact opposite. How do we, perhaps imitating Purkiss, situate this within the concept of the other? The difference between inversion and otherness can be understood as degrees of complexity, but far from being separate representations, inversion seems to be a simplified subset of otherness. If inversion is a binary reflection of oppositional models of the perfect society or the perfect individual, we must take care to define not only the “inverted side” of the spectrum but the “ideal side” as well. The notion of witches as inverted Christians is confounded by the kinetic nature of political and religious social structures of the early modern period. What do we place opposite the inverted witch? The Reformation created various versions of the “ideal” Christian, and within both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, the “perfect Christian” would come to encompass different things. Protestants recognized the direct relationship between a Christian and God as an important component of faith, and they deemphasized the need for an intermediary between an individual and God, seeking to demonstrate that faith alone (sola fide) was necessary for salvation. Catholics, regarding the institution of the Church as that intermediary, denounced Protestants for this assertion. The relationship between the Christian and the Church can be interpreted as “inverted” in that Protestants and Catholics came to opposite conclusions concerning the power of the Church but, despite their differences, these Christian traditions still retained enough similarities to require more than simple inversion. According to Jean Delumeau, Protestants were not simply rebelling against Catholics or the institution of the Church, but both Catholics and Protestants were attempting, in their own ways, to reverse the trend of spiritual crises and decadence perceived in early modern spiritual life. A rededication to Christianity, by definition, included a repudiation of all non-Christian elements, perhaps witchcraft foremost among them.

Protestant and Catholics, amidst the backdrop of this Reformation and Counter-Reformation religious strife, could highlight their differences as evidence of “the other” more readily due to their general congruity. Since othering seeks to accentuate seemingly minor differences, the majority sameness between these distinct groups provides a context within which the ideal Christian can be situated. Clearly, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and proliferation of diverse sects within the Protestant world complicates the idea of the witch as an inverted Christian, since the definition of the ideal Christian loses all meaning when applied across religious and social groups.

There is historical precedent for this type of in-group/out-group fracturing, and the importance for early modern witchcraft persecutions may lie in an examination of the evolution of divergent sects within in-groups. Briefly, an in-group may be defined as a cohesive community with similar values and loyal members subscribing to them. An out-group conforms to different values that do not correspond to one’s in-group. Note that this does not necessarily presage an inverse relationship, as many in-groups differ from perceived out-groups only slightly, leading to a greater capacity for othering instead of inverting. To use a biological analogy, as in-groups drift and differentiate, speciation occurs and two out-groups with a common ancestor appear. Both Norman Cohn and Elaine Pagels have examined how this process transpires, and both have demonstrated that events in antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least in part, provided a template for later witch hunters to use in their persecution of witches.

It is perhaps ironic that Cohn, writing in the 1960s-70s, argued for continuity between the ancient world and the early modern witch hunts since his writings have been interpreted as a reaction to and a critique of Margaret Murray’s own theories of continuity. Cohn himself has undergone criticism for the fact that he has relied too heavily on elite sources at the expense of the peasants on which these sources comment. However, Cohn does not argue for a direct, continuous link between ancient persecutions of Christians and later medieval and early modern persecutions of witches. What he has stressed is that the pattern of these persecutions is similar enough to suggest common motives of social and political control. According to Cohn, long before these elite authorities were condemning commoners as practitioners of witchcraft, Romans were using virtually the same tactics. Specifically, Cohn has maintained that the early modern harassment of witches mirrors the ancient Roman condemnation of Christians, and just as the Romans accused Christians of crimes they surely did not commit, early modern elites were in turn charging witches with crimes that had no bearing on their actual behavior. This extreme singling out of one portion of society implies the existence of a cohesive and powerful in-group banding together against a weaker out-group. Cohn also detects a precedent for the persecution of witches not only in the ancient Roman persecution of Christians but in the treatment of more recently emerged sects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the Waldensians and Cathars.


The Waldensians were a sect of Christians originating in Germany and known for their piety and asceticism. Cohn writes that they remained unadulterated by non-Christian influences and that they were eventually charged with heresy because of their sympathetic view that Satan and his demons, which were expelled unjustly from heaven, would eventually be granted eternal salvation. Since the central authorities rejected the charge of devil-worship and instead emphasized their refusal to follow papal authority, the Waldensians clearly fit the model of an othering. What is even more interesting is the fact that Conrad of Marburg, who first circulated the accusation of devil-worship, seems to have had the intention of inverting them by ascribing to them a reversal of Christian in-group values. But what resulted was an othering since the Waldensians never deviated entirely from the Christian norm—they simply had the misfortune of being denied papal approval to preach. The rise in mendicant groups throughout the twelfth century prompted the papacy to limit their power at the Lateran Council of Rome in 1179 and forbade any new ones from forming at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Here again, inversion is situated within the wider process of othering.

The Cathars provide perhaps a greater challenge to incorporating inversion into othering, since their views were admittedly dualistic. And unlike the Waldensians, the Cathars were influenced by non-Chrisitian ideas, most notably from the Gnostic and Manichaean traditions. The Cathars believed in two deities: a creator of the spiritual realm (whom they identified with God) and a separate creator of the material realm (whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament and equated with Satan). Christian orthodoxy had assimilated dualism of good and evil into its doctrine, but since God had created Satan, evil was always subservient to good. In the radical dualism of the Cathars, good and evil were equalized and locked in eternal combat.


The nature of the Cathars’ beliefs provides a great template for Clark’s inversion thesis, but again we see a greater degree of othering than inverting. Whether people in the twelfth century believed the tales that the Waldensians or Cathars were engaged in devil worship is not the issue, and certainly Cohn believes the best evidence against this is that it is not mentioned in contemporary sources. What is at issue is the method of Cathar persecution, and the underlying motives behind it relate more to the expansion of French royal authority into the Languedoc region of southern France and the territorial expansion of northern French noblemen than to their supposed inversion of Christian traditions. Indeed, their disdain for the material world marked them as paragons of the Christian ideals of poverty, purity, and chastity—the very ideals they criticized the Church for not upholding. As we shall see, the contentious issue of state-control informs a great deal of modern historians’ understanding of the nature of persecutions. In short, Waldensians and Cathars began as internal threats which authorities attempted to stigmatize with inversion and evolved into out-groups distinct enough from Christianity, as far as the authorities were concerned, that they were othered.

There are earlier templates for this pattern as well. Elaine Pagels delves even further into ancient history in order to discover the nature of the other, and in her quest for the origins of Satan, she attempts to understand the development of a singular adversary, as opposed to multiple satans, within the milieu of the culturally diverse eastern Mediterranean. The Jews, who originally defined themselves as one cohesive group, witnessed a great deal of fracturing in the few centuries before Christ. Traditionally, Jews identified themselves in ethnic, political, and religious terms and clearly demarcated themselves from all “others” or the ha goyim. Among in-groups, Jews developed very distinct rituals to foster collective cohesion and distinguished themselves from non-Jews through practices such as circumcision and keeping kosher dietary laws. Greater contact with non-Jewish peoples following the inauguration of the Hellenistic era contributed on the one hand to greater solidarity among Jews in order to separate them from non-Jews but paradoxically more sectarianism as various Jewish groups assimilated ideas of other peoples.

Where “us” and “them” were once clearly defined, the propagation of these sects within Judaism—Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees—did not go so far as to create new out-groups, but rather produced in-groups within the greater in-group. At first glance, the Jews seem to have had a well-grounded conceptual framework to deal with exactly this. Rather than one singular evil embodied in Satan, they employed multiple satans or “adversaries” not consigned to one particular figure, and in the role of adversary, satans could actually be beneficial if they stood in opposition of one embarking on the wrong path or if they were employed through the will of God. The latter is exemplified by the story of Job, and here, the satan is clearly obedient to God. Why did the Jews not assign satans directly to those they wished to other? Undoubtedly, Jews clashed with one another over their sectarian differences, but identification with Israel took precedent over these squabbles in a way that Christians would not later emulate during their struggles with heterodoxy. Pagels may be insinuating that one of the most significant breaks between Jews and Christians in the first century was that for Jews the ethnic in-group still surpassed the ideological differences of its sects, whereas for Christians, ascription to the teachings of Christ, especially after the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, broke all ethnic barriers. Christians, following the Essenes, possessed a dichotomized mental architecture incorporating a singular Satan to whom enemies could be consigned. And as Christianity came to consist of more and more Gentiles after around 100 CE, what may once have been regarded as another Jewish sect, or in-group, soon developed an identity of its own, and came to view Jews as a new out-group ripe for othering.

Following the functional anthropological approach to witchcraft, Stuart Clark specifies that on a sociological level, the hunting of witches bonded a community against a common internal threat. This certainly seems to be applicable to the Waldensians and Cathars as internal threats to Christianity and the Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees as, at least originally, internal threats to Judaism. The Waldensians and Cathars may be regarded as internal threats to Christianity who differentiated themselves enough to be considered out-groups. Inversion breaks down when these internal threats become external out-groups, as these aforementioned sects appear to have done as they had more and more contact with authorities. Since othering appears when in-groups must accentuate minor differences, and charges of devil-worship did not succeed in convincing the authorities, the elites were required to rely on the heretical deviance of both sects. Inversion works better when employed to describe the social dynamics within an entire in-group, such as a peasant community, versus an out-group, such as another religious sect, ethnic group, or nationality. Clark’s inversion thesis is accompanied by the concept of misrule, a sort of “disorderly behavior” that exists to strengthen a social structure by subtly making a mockery of it. In the case of a peasant community, Clark implies that since witchcraft took on such horrific dimensions, the social structure of early modern Europe must have been especially entrenched and rigid. This implication is supported by Wolfgang Behringer who avers that the ruling elites solidified their power during the social and economic tensions resulting from the climatic changes wrought by the Little Ice Age. These elites were largely insulated from food shortages and inflation rampant in the lower classes and were even able to profit from this disorder. On the other hand, as many historians have vociferously argued, the degree to which authority was centralized in early modern Europe is open to question and certainly some places were more centralized than others. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, made up of an amalgamation of principalities—some Protestant, some Catholic—was not centralized politically or religiously during the height of the witch hunts. Behringer and Clark both suggest, however, that the lack of state-control over territory pales in comparison to the socio-economic control these elites exerted over the lower classes.

Finally, perhaps the most befitting area of study for a direct comparison and synthesis of otherness and inversion lies in the nascent nation-state and the emergent identity of people as belonging to particular cultural/ethnic groups. The imprecision of national borders and the fact that numerous populations resided in geographic locations that did not correspond to their own ethnic, cultural, or religious identities exacerbated the problem of witchcraft and contributed to the othering of people who lived, quite literally, on the physical margins of society. And it is surely no coincidence that borderlands between nations and regions where separate cultures, ethnic groups, and religions cohabitated often witnessed the most widespread persecutions. Particularly, the borders between Scotland and England; between France and the Holy Roman Empire in Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Lorraine; and the Basque region of the Pyrenees between France and Spain provide excellent case studies for the process of othering and the further subtending of inversion. It is also no coincidence that these were regions that either spawned the most celebrated and revered demonologists or allowed them to flourish: James VI hailed from Scotland, Heinrich Kramer was from Alsace, Nicolas Rémy from Lorraine, and Pierre de Lancre prospered in the town of Labourd in the Basque country.

We have already noted the marked lack of obvious inversion in the Scottish witch trials: there was no devil-worship, no pact with the devil, no eating of babies, and very few sexual orgies or other prototypical Continental witch ideals. Larner advocates the importance of the centralization of political control in Scotland as both a reason for heightened persecution of witches as criminals of the state and for the lack of demonological elements as a necessity. The capital offense of witchcraft in Scotland had become a crimen exceptum, or a crime that suspended the traditional procedural protection of the plaintiff in the interest of protecting the state from its enemies. Witchcraft, which had once been a solitary offense, came to be a crime against the state, and the “godly kingdom” of Scotland affirmed its national character by ferreting out those that did not fit this mold. Larner considers Scotland a prime example of early modern state-building, and Scotland’s self-identification with devout Christian principles, coupled with its adoption of some aspects of Roman law, allowed for especially efficient judicial prosecution of witches. Conversely, Brian Levack, though he acknowledges the importance of the growth of the Scottish state, alleges that it was precisely that legal and administrative infrastructure that allowed Scottish officials to rein in some of the more zealous local officials. In either case, as far as the average Scottish commoner was concerned, it likely did not matter where the persecutions originated and the records certainly indicate that, even though torture may have been less prominent in Scotland, the existence of witches was not.

In a very real sense, the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire were all borderlands. Local princes exerted almost complete control over their principalities independent of the authority of the emperor. Protestants and Catholics lived side-by-side in a much more integrated way than in many other places in Europe, and as we have seen, between Protestants and Catholics, othering was supremely important. William Monter has theorized, like Levack, that decentralized authority led to the most atrocious witch hunts. However, unlike Scotland, which had a central authority to control these outbreaks, the Holy Roman Empire’s lack of centralization contributed to one of the most brutal witch hunts in all of Europe. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Catholicism and Protestantism become more ensconced in the areas where they were proscribed, and the purposeful creation of a more religiously homogeneous society generated conditions that made it more difficult to point out witches since the state had supposedly succeeded in forcing religious conformity, thus negating much of the power of othering. Perhaps it is no coincidence that major witch hunts in the Holy Roman Empire, and across Europe, began to decline in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

It has not been my intention to argue that inversion did not exist in the conceptualization of the crime of witchcraft in the early modern era—merely that it provides only a starting point from which to understand the more intricate relationships between the witch and the social, religious and political arrangements of the day. Inversion is obviously a useful construct, but its definitive categories do not easily accommodate non-binary modes of discourse or take into account the evolutionary nature of early modern mentalités. What may start out as inversion within an in-group can morph into a more variegated othering as in-groups transform into new out-groups. Because of these labyrinthine correlations, it is incumbent upon the historian to restructure his frame of reference to incorporate inversion into the broader system of othering.

An Historical Perspective on Torture

On January 22, in only his second full day in office, President Obama signed into law an executive order forbidding the use of torture in government interrogations. More than a repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration, the order is nothing short of a statement recommitting America to the Constitutional principles on which it was founded--equality under the law and the right to a fair trial. Certainly, introducing these prisoners into the justice system, where the innocent can be set free and the guilty sent to jail where they belong, will strengthen our resolve and make the US a safer, not more dangerous, place. If the goal of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was "to destroy America's way of life," then didn't the Bush administration play right into their hands with its flaunting of these supposedly hallowed principles? By sanctifying the use of torture, we said to our enemies not that they should fear us, but that we would inadvertently bow to their wishes by condoning that which we supposedly stand so stridently against. By way of life, bin Laden likely referred more to our economic and foreign policies, but if the foundations of these crumble, the house cannot be far behind. And, if America is truly weakening as a nation relative to China and the European Union, our reassertion as a moral leader in a dangerous world can only bolsters our credentials on the world stage. This is desperately needed in the aftermath of Iraq. The moral argument against torture seems apparent enough, and the point, at least for the meantime, is hopefully moot, but I'd like to point out how it has failed pragmatically as well. So, for the moral relativists, a practical argument against torture:

Many historical societies, at some time or another, have used torture either as a way to extract confessions among the accused or as a form of punishment, usually as a prelude to execution. In some societies it may have been a continuation of religious human sacrifice; in others, born out of the militaristic nature of the culture. Roman torture first took the form of military-style punishment and was later utilized privately as the aristocracy employed it as a fear-inducing weapon designed to keep the lower-classes and slaves in their socio-economic places. Some of the most historically memorable instances of Roman torture in the first few centuries of the common era were a point of entertainment for the masses--gladiatorial games, the participants of which were almost always either prisoners or slaves. And of course, as anyone who has studied early Christianity knows, the brutality of the first and second century Romans against the first Christian martyrs was legion (no pun intended).

Torture has been variously outlawed in the past and the Geneva Convention is by no means new in its interpretation and moral outrage against the practice. In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory I famously declared all confessions extracted during torture to be inadmissible in courts, but this proclamation was not far reaching, applying only to those courts under the jurisdiction of the Church, and torture continued to be used for the purposes of punishment, as well as in the recently converted Germanic peoples. In the case of this culture, which had yet to be fully synthesized with the Romano-Judeo-Christian one, the use of compurgations or ordeals, from which we get our modern word, was commonplace to determine the innocence or guilt of convicted persons. The process usually involved enduring some sort of physical pain, after which one would be judged on that endurance. One process involved grasping a hot iron or dunking one's hand into a pot of boiling water. The wound would be bandaged and if it healed quickly, innocence was presumed, whereas a lengthy recovery or the development of a particularly nasty scar would result in a conviction. Gregory the Great's proclamation did not touch this practice and ordeals were commonplace until at least the early 13th century. Still, torture, in its modern definition, was a feature of Roman rather than Germanic law. In the year 1215, Pope Innocent III forbade the use of ordeals at the Lateran IV Council (Canon 18) and negated their efficacy in courts. The implementation of this rule was, however, not out of compassion, but an attempt to diminish the significance of "planned miracles" because the standard belief of the Church was that miracles should be spontaneous and should not be expected to prove the worth of common people. Around the same time, the polymath emperor of the sprawling central European Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II, also outlawed ordeals for a more practical reason, stating that they would only determine who was stronger, not who was morally right.

This legal standard was not to last though, and the use of torture as a weapon of the powerful would return with legal sanction as the Inquisition came into the fore. Less than forty years after Lateran IV outlawed ordeals, Innocent IV's papal bull Ad Extirpanda (1252) authorized papal inquisitors to confiscate property, imprison, torture, and execute suspected heretics. Two centuries later, as the specific category of witchcraft (maleficarum) evolved, first the use of ordeals began to resurface and then the use of torture in extrication of confession reemerged as a serious practice in Western Europe. Scholars such as Norman Cohn have pointed to the example Rome set for the medieval world and argues that the same techniques used by the Church to deal with heretics had precedent among, ironically, the Roman persecution of Christians. More to the point, he argues that, while "financial greed and conscious sadism" were certainly aspects of these torturous trials, the real motivation was religious zeal, and that torture as a practice was not only legitimate but a necessity, because it was required to extricate the devils from the perpetrators. The practical implications here are the most suspect, but unfortunately, the historical record of common people from pre-modern times is usually scant. There do exist, however, some telling examples of the futility of torture as a reliable tool for information gathering. One occurs in 1587, when the mid-wife and widow Walpurgia confessed, under considerable duress to copulating with the devil, denying the name of Christ, terminating pregnancies with a magical ointment, and a number of other fantastical crimes that she certainly did not commit. Her case is representative of a great many witchcraft trials from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: a woman, usually older, sometimes illiterate and oftentimes a widow or mid-wife, is accused by men of the same socio-economic class, authorities (usually secular in England and religious on the Continent) are called, and under torture, patently false accusations are confessed to after which the persecuted person is put to death (usually by hanging in England and by burning at the stake on the Continent). From the hand of Junius, a male accused of witchcraft in 1628, we have an actual letter written to his daughter and smuggled out of his prison detailing the torture he endured: "Innocent have I come to prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must...be tortured until he invents something out of his head. When I was the first time put to the torture...I said 'I am no witch, I have a pure conscience on the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious.' And then came also--God in highest heaven have mercy--the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.... Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the [strappado]. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony.... And so I made my confession...but it was all a lie."


The methods have little changed over the years, and neither have the results.

The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...

-Rush, "Witch Hunt"