Over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft.
Why were most accused witches women?
What's an example of a modern-day witch hunt?
There are a lot of misunderstandings on the internet
I'm Mikki Brock, professor and historian.
Let's take a deep dive and set the record straight.
Jumping over to see what the folks at r/HighStrangeness
Why were people accused of being witches?
because their neighbors thought they were a witch.
to say they were accused of witchcraft
because someone was jealous of them, wanted their money,
because there was a family feud that was going on.
that those things weren't important.
But people typically accused their neighbors of witchcraft
because they thought their neighbor
Something went wrong on their farm,
something went wrong in their family,
and there was someone in their life
who had maybe already amassed this reputation,
and named in the taverns on the streets.
And they could say, Hey, this bad thing
what sorts of people were most likely to be accused
And that's what we get into: questions of gender.
Why were most accused witches women?
And that's when we start to talk about things
like the story that's told in Genesis 3
about Eve being initially tempted by the devil
and Eve being to blame for the entire downfall of mankind.
That's when we get into questions about
are women more carnal, more susceptible.
That's when we get into questions about the objects.
The things that are usually associated with witchcraft
are often things within the female domain.
For example, people often say about witches
that they're creating sort of potions or a poisoned beer
or something that makes a child sick.
These were things that were in the domestic domain,
the household, the sphere of women.
Women's work often put them in a collision course
with the potential allegation for witchcraft.
Ser_Drunken_the_Tall asks, How did the Salem witch trials
become the face of historical witch hunts
when European witch trials took place earlier
and they know that it took the lives of 20 people,
19 hanged and one pressed to death.
But what most people don't know about is the fact that Salem
was part of a European-wide phenomenon
in which over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft
the vast majority of women, lost their lives.
So why, when we think of the witch,
do we think of this little town in colonial New England
and not this broader European story?
Well, part of this has to do, of course,
with the prominence of America in pop culture.
Arthur Miller, right, made the Salem witch trials famous.
And we have examples of lots of different types of media,
TV shows referencing the Salem witch trials.
And we just have less of this emphasis
on the European witch hunts than we do on Salem.
And we like to think of America as exceptional,
part of a much more European story,
and that's how they should be understood.
User diff2 asks, What were the motivations
behind the public during the witch hunts?
One of the things that really motivated the public was fear.
They were afraid of their cattle dying
or not having enough food to get through the winter
at a time when life could be really hard.
And they believed that there were people in their community
who practiced malevolent magic to harm them.
it wasn't just about fear of harmful magic.
underpinning all of these actions of supposed witches.
They didn't just come out of the ether.
People had to become afraid over time.
once you had one or two witch hunts here and there,
that provided further fodder for fear
that witches were active in your community.
So I think that's a really big part of it, right?
they begin with one personal example of harm.
So let's say you think your neighbor gave you the stink eye,
gave you a face, cursed under their breath,
and the next day a strange patch of crops dies,
or your husband turns out to be impotent.
That's how small-scale witch hunts start, right?
but then maybe that person gets tortured.
Then maybe they name other witches.
And then you, as an ordinary villager, are convinced
that it's not just one or two witches in your community,
but this entire demonic conspiracy.
Here, two users have a disagreement
octothorne says, Witchcraft accusations in Europe
since the accused person's property would be confiscated
and divided among the local authorities.
Thibaudborny responds that economic motivation
was not a surefire or defining characteristic
and the accusations could easily backfire.
and there's not evidence that witchcraft allegations
In fact, actually, witch hunts were expensive.
You had to pay various local law enforcement.
You had to pay the public executioner.
You had to buy all the raw materials
the rope for a hanging or the wood for a burning.
And we have actually some records of really grisly accounts
of just how much it cost for the coal and the tar
and the other instruments of death.
in saying that these things could backfire.
It is absolutely the case in certain places,
that if you brought an allegation against your neighbor
that neighbor could have the ability to countersue
and say, This is a case of slander.
And in fact, you owe me some sort of fine or penalty
that's affected my livelihood and my life.
Speaking of hell and other dark things,
let's take a look at a hot take over on Reddit MensRights.
that the European witch hunts were caused by misogyny
can't be true because in many places,
So I have to sort of correct you on this one.
If we look at Europe as a whole, the average is clear.
80% of those accused of witchcraft were women.
and there were a few places, Normandy, Estonia, Iceland,
where the majority of those accused were men.
But here's the thing: in places that had a majority
of men accused as witches, the witch hunts were mild.
They never led to the fires burning for months
as more and more witches were sent to the pyre.
They did not involve the types of intensive
demonic conspiracies you find in other places in Europe.
Where men were the majority of the accused,
the witch trials did not turn into panics.
And that's because, fundamentally, when people worried about
what sort of person was likely to be a witch
in most parts of Europe, they envisioned a woman
because they thought women were more susceptible
to the wiles of the devil, to demonic temptation,
that would prove profoundly deadly.
So if we go over on the religion subreddit,
TheJokesterWarlock, great name, asks,
So the story of Christianity from really the Middle Ages on
is a story of institutionalization, right?
The church growing in its power and its structure
and trying to really establish what the dogmatic norms are
about what counts as orthodoxy and what's heterodox, right?
What's outside the bounds of appropriate religious practice.
And as part of this, there's tremendous worry about heretics
and this fear that heretics are those who don't just hold
weird religious beliefs, but also might be worshiping Satan.
And at the same time, there's a real attempt
in the medieval period to try to control magic
and prevent people from engaging with the supernatural
partially because people start to think that all magic,
black or white, good or bad, regardless of the intent,
And if all magic involves a pact with the devil,
And all of those medieval developments
within Western Christendom really set the stage
for the witch hunts of the coming centuries.
But how did all of those ideas add up
to thousands of people being killed?
Over on r/history, 6horrigoth really wants to know,
How is it that there were witch trials happening
in different parts of the world around the same time?
How do you get witch trials from Salem
to Lorraine in France to parts of Russia?
How do you get this sort of European-wide phenomenon
Part of this relates to the spread of the printing press,
that report on these witchcraft trials can be printed
and spread across different parts of Europe.
these are different nations, right?
Scotland is a different place than Spain,
Many of them could read in different languages.
A lot of these texts are written in Latin or French,
or things that people can engage with.
So there is this evolving body of knowledge
this sort of demonic witch, makes it transferable.
And if you are, say, living in a little Scottish town
is acting a little bit funny, a little bit weird,
I think, you know, what has happened to my cow
That learned clergyman very well may have been exposed
to writings about witch hunts in Germany.
And they can look at that local event
I think this is part of this broader conspiracy
And that makes it even scarier, right?
If anybody has heard of demonology,
The Hammer of Witches, written in 1486,
this witch-hunting manual that went on to become
the most notorious piece of writing
probably in much of European history.
And the Malleus Maleficarum is a really interesting text
not least that it's virulently misogynist,
but it's also kind of a creative text
And it is able to catch people's attention.
It also talks about flying witches.
It also talks about judicial processes,
but it's an important text in that it gets reprinted,
And this gets distributed in other places in Europe.
And if someone wants to know who a witch is,
how to find one, why are they likely to be women,
now they have a place they can go to.
Here's a question over at AskHistorians.
Did witches think that they were witches?
And the reason I love this question
is because one of the things that historians do best
is say when we don't know for certain.
partially because the experiences and the emotions
of accused witches are often unrecoverable to us.
Confessions often extracted under duress,
So we can't really take the confession
My history professor taught us that witches in England
largely believed they were witches.
I don't think we can take these confessions at face value.
There might have been, you know, the odd witch or two
who, over the course of being tortured
and asked questions about, Were you a witch?
Why did you do this dastardly thing?
started to believe that about themselves.
We know psychologically that that can happen,
but most witches, from the evidence we have,
probably did not think that they were witches.
So what did actual trials look like when you were accused?
Over on Reddit AskHistorians, ironheart777:
and I've been falsely accused of being a witch.
Can I expect a reasonably fair trial
what would most likely be the best course of defense?
So this depends a lot on where you are.
that if you're accused of witchcraft,
And, you know, in some times and places,
that can kinda be true, but there was a really robust
and well-developed system of trials
and the law in early modern Europe.
There were laws on the books about who witches were,
what they did, how to prosecute them,
for actually adjudicating that question of, is this person
who's been accused of witchcraft actually a witch?
So when did the panic die down and what happened afterwards?
Over on AskHistorians, peepjynx says,
How soon after the Salem witch trials
did people realize it was not about witches?
So we have two good questions there, right?
When did the trials end, and what happens next?
So if we're looking at the broad chronology
of European witch hunting, the witch hunts start to decline
in the second half of the 17th century.
England sends its last witch to the gallows
And into the 18th century, you still have sporadic trials,
and it's starting to decline really for three reasons.
People are becoming skeptical about the use of torture
and more critical of what sorts of evidence
You start to have intellectual changes
where people start to wonder if you really need the devil
to explain what happens in the world
or whether there are natural causes for that.
And then you have states that become less invested
because there's more religious tolerance,
there's less competition between Protestants and Catholics,
less need to prove that you are the best
All those shifts kind of pave the way eventually
What comes after that in Salem or elsewhere?
people are calling for the exoneration of their loved ones,
and they're petitioning the court to that end.
Now that's unusual, that 20-year turnover
Listen, you said my mother was a witch.
She wasn't, and I wanna clear her good name.
What does happen is people continue to believe in witches,
of mediating disputes in their communities,
and they find other answers for the misfortunes
What's an example of a modern-day witch-hunt type situation
where the accusers have little to no evidence
The first thing that I want to say very clearly
is that people in positions of power,
often men who claim to be victims of witch hunts,
are misusing the term because the term witch hunt
often means an allegation of a crime that's not possible
and that the accused did not commit.
So I'm often struck when we hear people crying witch hunt,
This is the greatest witch hunt ever!
They are not using that term in a way
that remotely accords with the historical record
in which people who were marginalized,
people who did not have the levers of power
at their disposal, were labeled in this way.
So to the question then, if it's not powerful men
who are the victims of the witch hunt, who is it?
I think if we're talking about a modern witch hunt,
the way that certain communities in the US
and demonized accordingly is that modern example.
So the way often that trans communities are treated,
the way immigrant communities are treated,
the language that is used by politicians sometimes
to describe these folks as evil or unnatural
or dangerous or poisonous or whatever,
that sort of language is dehumanizing language.
That sort of language is also demonizing language,
and demonization and dehumanization
So anytime you hear a politician say,
That group is evil, that group isn't fully human,
that group doesn't deserve our respect,
you should know that they are stirring
the very, very dangerous cocktail of the witch hunts.
Okay, that's enough Reddit for me today.
on this journey down the rabbit hole.
