3. The Witches Nobody Talks About

When you picture a witch, who comes to mind? 

For most of us, it's an old woman living on the edge of a village. 

But what if that picture is completely wrong? 

In this episode of Witches: Truth, Trials and Terrors, broadcaster Jon Briggs is joined by Oxford don Robin Briggs and Professor Alison Rowlands to uncover one of the biggest surprises in witchcraft history - the forgotten victims of the witch hunts, the men!

We explore why women were still far more likely to be accused, why women often accused other women? And why have the thousands of men who stood trial for witchcraft been almost completely forgotten?

The truth is far more complicated, and far more fascinating, than the stereotype.

If you've enjoyed this episode - please follow, subscribe and comment so that we can continue creating more historical highlights.

A Showstealers Ltd Production

Transcript

Theme tune 0:03

Break Susurantur Nomina. Kisest malus, kissest noches. Venit timor, venit tim. Shadows lengthen in the slow night. Names are whisper. Who is evil? Who is guilty? Fear comes. Fear comes.

Jon 0:43

Welcome to Witches Truth Trials and Terrors. Now, in our first episode, we explored a world where almost nothing happened by accident. In our second, we discovered that much of what we think we know about the witch hunts simply isn't true. And today we're tackling perhaps the biggest assumption of all, which is were women.

Robin 1:01

Except that thousands of them weren't. Usually something I slip in quite early because I know that it's going to make them jump. It's something which somehow has never penetrated the general consciousness about this.

Alison 1:15

I think the stereotype has much to answer for.

Robin 1:23

I found some very striking, almost heartbreaking remarks made by old women being accused, more or less saying, you know, that's what happens to us poor old women. You know, that that's how it is.

Alison 1:36

Witches were more likely to be women because women were, you know, less rational, more lustful, more likely to give in to the devil.

Robin 1:43

These men build up much the same kind of reputation over much the same length of time as the women suspects do.

Jon 1:51

Joining me as always is Robin Briggs, emeritus fellow of All Sales College, Oxford, and one of the world's leading historians of witchcraft. Robin has spent decades trying to understand why perfectly ordinary people became convinced that their neighbors were in league with the devil. And our guest today, as before, is Professor Allison Rowlands. Welcome back, whose research has transformed our understanding of witchcraft and gender. Alison has spent years investigating who was accused, who did the accusing, and why some people found themselves at the centre of suspicion. As for me, I'm John Briggs. I've spent most of my career making a living with my voice, which, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of unusual talent that might have attracted unwanted attention a few centuries ago. Anyway, Alison, let's begin with the fact that surprises almost everyone. Just how many accused witches were men?

Alison 2:39

If we talk about the big sort of ballpark figures across all of Europe from sort of the 15th to the 18th centuries, somewhere around 75 to 80% of all the accused were women, and that's from around 100,000, 120,000 accused. And if you lead with that statistic, that sounds as though it's very gender-dominated. But I think what is sometimes quite useful for historians to do is think about the sort of 20 to 25% of that total that were men. Now I think the important point to mention is that there's a lot of regional variation and also sort of change over time. So that ballpark figure does does vary then when you look at particular regions or countries.

Jon 3:25

But the very fact that any of them were men surprises an awful lot of people, doesn't it, Robin?

Robin 3:32

Well, I guess it does. I've certainly found, you know, when if we're if you're talking to somebody in München you work on witchcraft, I mean that's usually something I slip in quite early because I almost know that it's going to make them jump and they haven't realized it. So yes, I mean i i it's uh it's something which somehow has never penetrated the the general consciousness about this.

Jon 3:58

These were witches, though. They're not what we might picture as wizards or warlocks or anything else that we might describe which we associate with the male gender, correct?

Robin 4:08

Well, I think that's right. Yes. I mean there are a few magical practitioners among them, but actually there are among the women as well. So I mean it I think I think that probably there is a of just a little fringe of of men who could be described as being somewhat out of the ordinary. I mean, there are some priests, for example. Well, obviously women can't be priests, so I mean it's not not a very telling thing. And there are a handful of of women religious who get accused. I mean, nuns. And I think probably the handful of people who are relatively sophisticated magicians in a way that women rarely tried to be. But I mean, those would only be a tiny proportion of of these men, and most of them are really almost indistinguishable in terms of the accusations made against them from the women.

Jon 4:58

So, Alison, is it simply the fact that we like a good stereotype that when we picture a witch, we picture a woman?

Alison 5:05

I think that's part of the explanation. And certainly even back in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, there was a lot of use of exactly the stereotypes that you're referring to, John. You know, the kind of the old wrinkled woman with the hunchback, uh sort of sitting on her own somewhere with her familiar. So I think I think the stereotype has has much to answer for. I think as well, there's been a very strong and very justified interest in this topic uh by feminist historians, starting with the very first feminist account in the late 19th century, but particularly sort of since second wave feminism in the 1960s. And I think for very good sort of political and activist reasons, some of that feminist scholarship has chosen to focus on the question, why were most witches women, which they were. But I think in the focus on that very important question, I think until relatively recently, actually, we kind of lost sight of the and why were quite a few of the men as well part of that question. So I think for me as a gender historian, I really want to look at both sides of that equation.

Jon 6:12

So why were witches overwhelmingly female? Let's start from that point and then let's find out who these men were and whether they were accused of the same things. Why were witches generally female?

Alison 6:26

That's a very big question, John, which actually hundreds of years of scholarship haven't kind of definitively answered. We can condemn. We can summarise, yeah. Um I think it's a bundle of reasons, and and and Robin uh will probably jump in here. I think there's a lot of factors which kind of push people at both the educated and the popular level towards finding it easier to imagine a harming witch as female. So a lot of the learned texts, the demonologies about witchcraft, tended to suggest that more witches were more likely to be women because women were, you know, less rational, more lustful, more likely to give in to the devil because of their sexual appetites and so on. So there's quite a quite a lot of that sort of negative stereotyping. A lot of the sort of classical myths and ideas about witchcraft associate magical malevolence with female or semi-female beings. So there's a lot of sort of educated belief that makes it easier to imagine witches as women. And I think at the at the village level, um, if we go back to what we were talking about before, there's there's some really interesting new research on areas of sort of domestic and village work that were particularly dominated by women. So things like dairy making, childbearing, healthcare, if we can call it that. So though those areas of early modern life where things could go wrong, uh, you know, where people could end up falling ill or dying, there's quite an association between those areas of early modern life and uh women's work patterns. I think the other thing is is patriarchy. So so the society we're looking back at was very much structured to disadvantage women. And so men, even if they're suspected in the village, they they have sort of more scope for being filtered out of the process. So they don't perhaps always get quite quite as far along that process to being accused, convicted, and executed, even if there is belief about them at the village level. So I think there's a kind of a range of factors to do with belief, to do with the legal system that that make it more likely that women all get accused, but by no means it by no means excludes men being accused as well.

Robin 8:49

Robin. Yes. I mean, uh I absolutely agree with what Alison says. I I I think, you know, we th there isn't there there's not going to be a single explanation. There's going to be a very c it's a very complex situation. It goes back to something we've already brought out in other discussions, which is um, you know, that there are many more suspects or potential suspects than ever get into the court. And there we, of course, I think we would guess that most that the majority of those would be women, but we don't actually know that. And I mean, so one thing is, you know, what discourages people from bringing accusations. And I think, you know, it is arguable that women, particularly widows, and in most counts that's that have been done, widows are, I think, overrepresented among the the accused. I mean, you know, they're pretty defenseless, really, and and one can also look for those widows who have no surviving children, who, I mean, are almost bound, I think, to be beggars um unless they were very lucky and had a significant property holding.

Jon 9:57

So just for for the purposes of clarity, explain that a little more, because clearly o a widow had been reliant on their husband, and if their husband died, what would happen to them at that point?

Robin 10:09

Well, of course, it a good deal depends on their age, but I think what one finds is that bereavement of a spouse is very common in this society, but men tend to remarry unless they're really quite old. Women find it much harder, particularly if they have dependent children. And there is women's work, but some of that is work which actually really rather depends on on the man. I mean, it can be linked to his trade and so on. It's remarkable, actually, how many tough women take over their husband's trade and continue in this society. But all the same, I think they they are going to be at serious disadvantage. I I don't think I've ever seen a demographic calculation, but my suspicion is that women once past childbearing age are likely to live longer as well, which I and I do think that would increase your risk. I found some very striking, almost heartbreaking remarks made by women accused, old women being accused, more or less saying, you know, that's what happens to us poor old women. You know, that that's how it is.

Jon 11:17

I mean, Alison, that there there is no welfare state, of course. And and if you didn't have a trade that you could take over from your husband, or land that perhaps they'd owned that you were then able to operate, how on earth did you survive?

Alison 11:31

Um, you did depend very much on community assistance. That's becoming increasingly sort of formalised, or at least attempts are being made in the 16th and 17th century to formalise this through poor relief schemes. Um, and we need to remember as well that there's population increase in the 16th century, so resources are very, very under pressure. So um, you know, neighbours would have asked for charity from other neighbours, but particularly in Protestant countries, but also in Catholic ones as well, there's a shift towards more communal and sort of state-driven uh poor relief. You were reliant much more on charity, and that then creates a set of particular social relationships. So I think to be to be a good beggar, you have to be fairly sort of subservient, fairly humble, fairly grateful. Um, and it's um there's interesting evidence from England, but also from across Europe, of where beggars instead of being um instead of being sort of grateful enough and subservient enough, they actually turn around and curse people if they're not given anything, or if they're not given enough, or if they're given the wrong thing, and then that can set up a sort of a very problematic social relationship which could lead to an accusation. But in in Salzburg in early modern Austria, for example, it's actually young male beggars who are reimagined as being in league with the devil because they are very aggressive and ungrateful in their begging. The stereotype in England seems to be much more of the the the sort that Robin just described, which is an older dependent woman. So I think again it just points that example just points to the complexity that one can't generalize completely. But certainly old age, being female, being dependent, this this just makes you more and more dependent on the charity and the would would children have looked after some of the older generations?

Robin 13:32

Well, y yes, but um I think uh they can find this very difficult. I mean, if you're pretty much um a landless peasant, I mean having to support your mother in in her old age becomes c quite a thing, and I mean there are signs of real stress there. Although I I mean what I would say is I I've constantly astonished by the evidence for how charitable these people generally were. But in a funny way that still sets up potential for strain, because I think you know, that the people who are giving very often don't have much and uh they will suddenly snap, you know, they will become angry that they this person, whether it's a a a crippled man or a an old woman or a child, has come round again today, having been yesterday, you know, and then words will be exchanged. I mean, that's partly how reputations get built up. I mean Alison's quite right to draw attention to these verbal exchanges. People say things which can then be interpreted in ways they may not have meant, but sometimes they did mean. I mean, I came across one or two accused who actually admitted to to, as it were, trading on their reputation as witches. Saying, you know, I wanted people to fear me because then they would give me something.

Alison 14:58

Yeah.

Jon 14:59

Which all makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I mean, we can we can picture a lot of this, and we can understand that this role this this unsupported role that women could often find themselves falling into actually is a source of friction within a small community. Um is there any link between medicine healing and accusations of witchcraft as well? And and and would women have been more likely to be the purveyors of such medicine?

Alison 15:29

I think that's probably more of a stereotype than a reality. I think a lot of that kind of thinking comes actually from the 19th century where this idea of the wise woman was kind of created by by folklorists and it's got taken up uh in the 20th and 21st century. I mean, I've been reading recently something about, you know, crone wisdom as though there's this kind of association between uh old women and and um knowledge. So I mean, women would have had expertise as housewives, they would have had herbal knowledge as housewives. That was part of their job was to cook and care for and and you know prepare medicines and so on for for the household. So all women, but so would all men, they would have had a similar sorts of knowledge. So I think there's a much, much less strong connection between sort of medical knowledge and women's vulnerability. And again, we don't have masses of data on this, but the research that's been done on cunning folk in England suggests these are these are the white magical practitioners in England. It suggests probably around two-thirds of those were men. So it seems to me as though there's a kind of a gendering of good magic as a bit more positively masculine and the black malevolent side of magic as a bit more negatively feminine. But m most of these women are not healers in the sense I think that that many people would assume nowadays.

Jon 17:02

You talk about cunning men and cunning women, and we've mentioned it already on this series, but just give me a definition of what you regard as a cunning man or cunning woman.

Alison 17:14

I think this is someone who is offering their services to a community, usually in return for money. Um and they are doing what they would imagine as kind of beneficial, positive, good, magical practice, and that might be healing people, identifying witches, suspected witches, black witches, malevolent witches, um, but also doing things like finding lost property, working out where a where where a missing person has perhaps got to. So there's a lot of stuff going on there, and it kind of overlaps into potentially harmful magic because one way in which you cure someone is you might say, Okay, someone's been bewitched, and the way we're gonna cure them is we're gonna sort of send a spell back to the to the person who cast it. So the healer might think they're doing something good, and certainly the afflicted person might think they were doing something good, but the authorities might see that as as potentially harmful. So I think there is a little bit of overlap, but for the most part my sense is that and Robin I don't know what you would think, Robin, but I think early modern people keep for the most part their white and black magic and the practitioners thereof sort of conceptually separate because it's in their interest to do so.

Robin 18:35

Well, I'm sure that's right. I mean, uh I did find actually that a rather high proportion of the ones I could identify in Lorraine ended up being convicted as witches. Um not entirely clear, of course, how far that's to do with popular attitudes to them and how far that's to do with the authorities not liking them. But uh certainly, yes, I mean I think uh people do see them differently. And as uh one has this strong impression of a network of such practitioners who are and one of the ways you can define them in a sense is saying they're well known. I mean that that people refer to them quite freely as this expert who lives at so and so and who you might go to see. But though there I also found some who seemed to have been much more itinerant, and that may have been quite wise because I uh had the impression that the riskiest thing they could do actually was to was to get drawn into a town, which wasn't a place where they actually lived, so that they'd hadn't got any sort of support network there. But you know, one person calls you in and then others say, Oh, have you got this expert? Then you uh you draw notice to yourself from people who don't like it at all. And uh so I had I could f found one or two cases where it was clear, I think, that moving into the town was was very dangerous for these people.

Jon 19:57

Being an itinerant traveller was probably a better role. And and indeed with all of this going on, I mean, as we approached, you know, the the the sixteenth century, uh were they aware that they were able they were more likely to be have a finger pointed at them because of what they did as a trade?

Robin 20:16

Well, yes, they I think I did come across evidence of that, and and of people who were really quite cautious about um, you know, when the client comes along, they r may be reluctant or seem reluctant to to do it and say, uh, you know, I've been in trouble with people about this already and so on. So yes. Incidentally to illustrate Allison's point about uh forms of cure, one of the uh women I found in in my Lorraine cases that put a mixture of stuff in a fr in a frying pan or something of the kind, heated it up while saying, which witch you're going to be very ill. I mean, so this was very kind of direct counter magic which is supposed to send the spell back, and there are various forms of that one finds. So of course, in a way, these people are behaving as black, which is as m as well as white, you might say, or that's a danger that must be there. Although I I have to say, I mean, I think over Europe the authorities ma often make a lot of fuss about this. They're not very effective at dealing with them. They they never really seem to get into a a serious attempt to to attack the this this m very large group of practitioners.

Jon 21:35

Well let's let let's talk a bit more about the accusation. Um who was it who usually accused women of witchcraft? Did it tend to be men or or did it tend to be women?

Alison 21:45

Actually, it's f it's very often other women. Um again, there's not a big data set on this. And sometimes a husband would lead on an accusation because his voice carried more authority at law. But when you then look at the witness, Statements and the trial record, it soon becomes apparent that the sort of the driving force and most of the testimony very often comes from women. So I think again this is something which kind of complicates the story considerably that that we're now seeing uh much more research that's showing women as accusers, women as witnesses. Um, you know, some women even being drawn into legal procedures, for example, juries of matrons, they were called, who sort of search suspects' bodies for witches' marks and so on. So there is quite a lot of involvement of women from the community in in the process of accusation. And I think that sometimes gets forgotten or it or it's harder to see. With some of the trials, all we have are kind of the end verdicts, and it does look very much if you've only got an end verdict, as though a kind of a very patriarchal court is condemning condemning a woman. But if you've got the records that enable you to look at witness statements and accusers, it is it is quite often other other women.

Jon 23:04

And they would jer very often be be the people who turned up in in the court as well as as the witnesses.

Robin 23:09

Yes. I mean uh I mean the this is an unusual crime in that way. I mean I was able to do this counting on a sample of 400 trials, almost 300 against women, and um I found I think forty-three percent of witnesses were women, which in most court cases women would be very rare as witnesses. And as Alison's quite rightly says, you can also detect that quite often you get a man testifying, but that what he's testifying about is suspicions that are formed in a female context. Um I mean I don't want to exaggerate that, but one has to remember, I mean, how gendered life is. You know, women during the day, I mean, tend to be if they're not at home, they're usually in group with groups of other women. They look very carefully for um uh a support system, I think. It may include a few family members, but otherwise it's going to be members of your own sex and probably roughly of your own age with similar experiences. And one can tell that there are these groups. It sometimes unhappily turns into a set of mutual accusations or of a group of women being seen as witches, you know, because they hang out together.

Jon 24:28

Alison, this is very much your territory, isn't it? This is about the interaction of communities. And this is the core of what you study. But is there any evidence to say that, you know, uh 15th century community uh women tend to said there was more friction because of the amount of time they spent together than say, you know, in our in our modern day society? Or is it much the same? It's just that if somebody goes, Oh, that neighbours are really annoying me, you can't suddenly turn around and go, Yeah, it's it's accuse them of witchcraft.

Alison 24:56

Um I think that that is a really good point, John, actually, that you know, when you get the sort of upper classes interest in in this phenomenon, and once they start demonising a lot of these popular beliefs, then I think over the generations people begin to learn that possibly taking someone to court is something you can do. But I think these communities, they they try all sorts of other things first. That going to law is never the first option, it costs money, it risks all sorts of social division, you know, it risks you know the alleged witch coming back to the village really angry. So you tend to do a lot of stuff before you take that option. But I think it it probably was a lot harder to manage conflict because what Robin was describing, it's very, very face-to-face, a lot of this interaction. And a lot of this interaction is also fairly sort of ritualized around things like childbirth, around church festivals, around certain sort of calendar moments in the year. A lot depends on the exchange of food and drink, visiting one another's houses, interacting in very, very, very sort of face-to-face ways. And if something goes wrong, the very strong social support network that Robin just described, if that moves against you, then you start being excluded from all of those moments of sort of interaction. You know, people say, Oh, we won't invite her to the christening, or we won't invite her to that gathering, or, you know, you bring your baked goods around to your neighbour and your neighbour says, Oh no, I don't want, I don't want to accept those cakes. And that could be devastating because you're effectively saying, I am too scared to eat the food that you've prepared. So I think I think it's the face-to-face interaction and all that it involved that was very enriching as long as it was going well, but could be potentially very, very damaging if things went wrong.

Jon 26:54

You raised something there that's quite interesting. I mean, I'm wondering when you had someone who the community suspected as a witch, were they feared or were they just merely disliked?

Alison 27:05

I think it it varies, and I think again, time is a really crucial factor. Um some of these suspected witches could live in communities for years and years and years and decades. And I think one one of the most important contributions of Robin's research when I first started reading it was that he's he he said, you know, probably the ones that we see ending up in court are the tip of an iceberg. So many more of them will have been living in communities tolerated, disliked by some, feared by others, grudgingly accepted by by some. So I think it's really, really problematic for us as historians. We still don't know enough about the moments that tick a community over into making the accusation because, you know, yes, there's population increase, yes, there's climate change, yes, there's the reformation. But a lot of communities manage all of that stress, all of that ongoing division, and they actually don't accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, or certainly not very often. So I think a challenge for us is we're we're seeing the cases that that kind of do end up in court.

Jon 28:15

Um yes, it's it's a little like going to to the or or or things that the doctor might have to diagnose, isn't it? I always say you're you're you're f find it harder very often with the disease to find a cure because the person who has the natural antibodies against the disease never presents, of course. The only people who present are the people who've actually got the disease, and you can see the boils or or whatever marks or whatever symptoms there are, but you don't ever see the person who has this resistance that you could then go, Well, that's what we need to treat this. Is it also because the imagination takes over and the passage of time means if you're filling in the gaps because you don't have the documents, it's very easy to create something perhaps worse, bigger, more scary, more frightening than it might otherwise have been.

Alison 29:05

I think I think it was pretty big and scary in some places at some times. But I think time time really matters and the imagination really matters. People then start thinking about exchanges they have with that suspected person and perhaps reading meaning into things that that weren't intended or weren't even there. So they begin to understand social interactions or exchanges of gifts through through the prism of of witchcraft, and that that perhaps encourages them to leap to that conclusion. I I I certainly think in areas where there are perhaps more trials, more executions, more sermons preached against witchcraft, um you kind of sensitise people to to be fearful of sort of demonic witchcraft and perhaps see that demonic evil more quickly or more easily than they might have done before.

Jon 29:59

So one of the things that I I and I've rather got diverted into this sort of understanding of of how women fared in these tight communities, one of the things we haven't talked about is these men who are being accused. Are they, Robin, being accused of the same things that women are?

Robin 30:15

Or is something else apparent? Well, I was rather astonished to find how close the pattern of accusations was, because I I did something. I don't know, I haven't seen anybody else who's done this. Well, I because I had this large sample, it was perhaps easier for me. And I had uh just over a hundred men, and I took an equivalent number of women selected on a random basis from the 300 or so um and counted up what they were accused of. And actually most of the the graph, they were the two bars were very close. I mean, the the biggest difference was uh accusations about harming very small children. Well, I mean that hardly surprising. Even then, one thing men were accused of it, rather to my astonishment. But in general, yeah, I mean the differences are very small. I think a slightly greater tendency for me for men to be blamed about animal sickness, but none of the differences were were very great. And their behavior doesn't seem to me significantly different. I mean, there have been some attempts to say, oh, these were men who in some way were like women or or they were people who stood out for sexual promiscuity or something. Well, yes, one does find the odd case, but I mean uh with a big sample, you it j these just don't look plausible to me, I have to say. I mean, maybe someone else with a different sample in a different place would be able to say something different. But I I I really don't think it's is so different. I mean, it it appears to be these men build up much the same kind of reputation over much the same length of time as the women suspects do. And that it did surprise me. I mean, I was really expecting to find bigger differences than I could detect. I don't know if Alison has found anything different.

Alison 32:07

I think in terms of the way that people imagined harming magic, I think as you're saying, Robin, there are some differences in terms of which areas, which sort of victims are being being sort of imagined. What people were worried about back then was witchcraft. So although their lives were profoundly gendered, and there's all sorts of ways that we can imagine processes of accusation as gendered, they they are imagining witches. And even at the level of the the sort of upper class demonologies, men are imagined as having sex with demons, men are imagined as going to witches' sabbaths, uh in fact, men are imagined as being kings of the Sabbath, because that kind of reflects the hierarchy of of the patriarchal society of everyday life. You know, the way you imagine a witch's Sabbath, you imagine a hierarchy with a king, um, perhaps, you know, with a man keeping a register of this the attendants as well because he was literate.

Robin 33:04

There are two things which I think are very widely said. One is that the rich are able to dominate these meetings, even though the evidence ought to suggest that there aren't many of them, and that they they want to damage the crops because actually high prices for grain suit them, and the poor witches r want to resist but are overwhelmed somehow. But also, yes, I mean that that it's it's it's men and wealthy witches who who dominate at these meetings, according to the accounts that are given.

Jon 33:36

So even in the accusation, the men would have a higher position than the women do, then in that case. They are they are seen as being more powerful.

Alison 33:44

I think in the imagined idea of the this witch's gathering, the witch's sabbath. I mean, that that isn't kind of widely accepted o over all of Europe. So there are some parts of Europe where it's it's downplayed. Um but but in those parts where it does become a really central part of the thinking, it's dual-gendered. It's it's imagined as having there are priests there, maverick priests who are baptizing babies in in the devil's name rather than God. That goes back to the inversion idea. Um there are there are boy witches there. There's usually imagined to be a a musician or group of musicians who are also men playing the music for the dance. In places where the Sabbath is is imagined very seriously, but also but children as well. I think that's something else that complicates the picture. That um, you know, the stereotype of the old woman is is not just gendered, but it's also shaped by by age. And so I think that the number of children who get imagined as as being witches or imagined as being taken to these witches' gatherings um is is a really interesting aspect of as well.

Jon 34:52

Did marriage cause uh uh perhaps a problem in terms of accusation? I'm just thinking that when you've got two people involved and and if you take the the the female as the one who is accused of the witch, there there's some implication on the husband, isn't there, at that point? Did that safeguard, did that cause did that mean that he would be ostracised as well? How did accusation within a married couple affect things?

Alison 35:20

I think again it depends a lot. And certainly it's been suggested that one one way in which men get dragged into accusations is by being married or otherwise related to a suspected female uh witch. And I think that's the reason why certainly in the cases that I know of, very often a husband will defend his wife because he doesn't it may not be for very positive reasons, you know, it may not be because of affection or or emotion, but it may simply be because he knows that if if the family so they're imagining things at that time much more as as applying to the whole of the family, and therefore if your wife begins to get this reputation for witchcraft, the risk is the husband. But also the children, and again, there's a strong, particularly mother-daughter idea that reputation and actually ability to work magic is passed down through the generations, um, but that could also work along male sort of inheritance lines as well. So I think quite often what you see in communities is families sort of jockeying a bit for position. And again, it helps explain, I think, why why a widow is so vulnerable, because if she's got a family in a household and a husband who are perhaps trying to help her defend herself and their reputation against suspicion, one once that support has gone, she does become much more vulnerable?

Jon 36:45

Robin, in terms of of the trials, and and and that's not to say one way or the other, because my general belief is uh women uh uh tend to be better with pain than men do, but you know, you get to the torturing point and you get to the accusation. Did men fare better when they were under trial, when they were being tortured? Were they more likely to get off?

Robin 37:07

No. Not in not not on well, not in the records I studied. I mean, I'm of course I'm talking about one small area, but I but I think um everything else I've seen would indicate much the the same thought. Uh the percentage of conviction was within one percent. I can't remember which way it went, actually. It might even have been worse for the men. Um I th and I think I I certainly don't think men were better at resisting the torture. If anything, I think they were less good. I mean, one group who I thought I detected, though I'm afraid I failed to do a proper count, was that women with youngish children actually probably withstood torture more often than anyone else. They would have m felt deeply concerned about what was going to happen if they were convicted, and they did have a strong motive. I mean, twenty percent got off in my sample in Lorraine, where the torture was actually quite well controlled. I mean, uh there were cases where it was done more than once, which it shouldn't have been, but but they didn't go in for the sort of multiple day after day stuff that some places in the German lands did. Once you got in the system, I think the the men had no better chance than than the women on anything I've seen.

Alison 38:28

I think the the other thing I would just mention, John, going back to what you were saying before, is that there's quite a lot of work that's pointed to the idea of the female witch being kind of imagined as as the inverse of a good housewife and a good mother. So sort of undermining childbearing, undermining the upbringing of children, the preparation of food, the care for the sick and so on. And I think I think that's a quite a powerful and important idea because it sort of speaks to one of women's main roles in that society. You know, one of the main ways in which sort of village women could attain positions of sort of security and power was by marrying and running a household and being being a good mother. And so quite a few of the accusations against women by other women, they often happen in the context of that very powerful role for married women being imagined as being sort of inverted by by the female witch. So, you know, some feminist historians, more recent feminist historians of witchcraft, have actually suggested that kind of one of the ironies of the witch trials is that you've got a very sort of patriarchal court system, which is taking the women accusers' concerns about these supposedly malevolent mothers and harming housewives, is taking those concerns kind of seriously. And I think it speaks to what Robin said earlier, which is you know, to have 43% of your witnesses women, just compared to any of the other crimes that are being prosecuted. Perhaps infanticide you might get a very similar um proportion, but it suggests that this is an area of of sort of women's lives and and sort of power and status, and and that they are kind of competing for for power and position within that.

Jon 40:16

Well it certainly suggests there was no such thing as the sisterhood in that sense.

Robin 40:20

That's right, yes. And I mean I think you know the there is a very interesting area of the the witch as bad mother, which I mean you know, but we have to remember how basic the relationship between uh any child and the mother is. I mean, this is where love and hate start. Uh and both. I mean, of course, is one of the things which, if anything, psychoanalysis has contributed, I I think, totally convincingly. It shows how mixed emotions are. And so, I mean, uh this may be a uh a partial explanation of why it could be easier to fix certain kinds of hostility on women.

Jon 40:57

Well, that's a good point for us to pause our conversation before we get far too philosophical. Today we've discovered that witches weren't always women. Women weren't always victims, and village life could be considerably more dangerous than most neighborhood Facebook groups. But we've also uncovered another mystery. How did an awkward neighbor, a quarrelsome widow, or a local healer, become something much bigger? How did they become servants of the devil? Next time, we're looking at the people who helped create the witch we think we know today. In other words, it's a simple question: who invented the witch? That's for next time, but for now, my thanks to Professor Allison Rowlands and to Robin Briggs. Until then, if your neighbor asks to borrow a cup of sugar, lend it to them, because it's probably cheaper than a witch trial. I'm John Briggs. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Theme tune 42:17

Who is evil? Who is guilty? Fear comes, fear comes.