The term witch, in contemporary times associated with either Halloween decorations or harmless neopagan recreation, was once an accusation which carried considerable weight, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Europe and the New World. Even today accusations of witchcraft are still used in some parts of the world to persecute people: a significant number of women in Tanzania have been accused of practicing evil magic and attacked as a result. This is no mere irrationality, however: the significant majority of these women have been land-owning widows, and in this light it becomes clear that the motivating factor behind many of these witchcraft accusations is the matter of property. Just as these modern persecutions of alleged witches are driven by material incentives, the historical “witch hunts” cannot be completely reduced to religious fanaticism and mass delusion. Instead, there were material factors that brought the authorities of Europe to target those they designated as “witches.”
A common misconception is that the Middle Ages were rife with “witch hunting,” a confusion complicated by the fact that the medieval Church did engage in the extensive persecution of Gnostic sects which they accused of “devil worship” and “Luciferianism.” However, the persecution of individuals for practicing magic was significantly rarer during that time period. The historical understanding of “witchcraft” on the part of the church in Europe during the vast majority of the Middle Ages was much closer to the common secular Western understanding than one might expect: it was the doctrine under canon law that witchcraft was not real, and that those who believed that they were capable of harmful magic were being deluded by the Devil. The Canon Episcopi which would become part of the legal corpus at the beginnings of the High Middle Ages made it explicit that any woman who believed herself to be a witch, covering great distances over the course of the night as part of some Satanic train, was in fact dreaming and being manipulated by the Devil into believing these dreams were reality. At least for the clergy, “witches” were not a matter of concern until what we would call the “Early Modern Period” beginning at the end of the 15th century.
Unlike the clergy, the common people of Medieval Europe were believers in the existence of magic, with numerous superstitions holding over from the distant pagan past of the region and surviving in Christianized forms. The populace drew a distinction between malevolent witches and benign users of folk magic, who were referred to as “cunning folk” and often consulted for advice, medicine, and protection from malevolent witchcraft - something that the peasantry still believed existed despite the doctrine of the church to the contrary. The overwhelming majority of these cunning folk were Christians, though sometimes heterodox and often incorporating pre-Christian pagan concepts, and their presence was at least tolerated by the clergy and secular authorities throughout most of the Middle Ages. The predominant gender of these “cunning folk” varied depending on the region - in Germany for example they were almost entirely female, while in England there were more men than women involved in folk magic.
The persecution of “witches” would only begin to emerge during the Early Modern Period in the late 15th and through the 17th centuries. The publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hexenhammer by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer in 1486 played a pivotal role in transforming the “witch” into a dangerous threat to the community, rather than merely a deluded soul in the eyes of the clergy. As a theological work, the Malleus asserted that the Devil, being a real being acknowledged by the Church, was permitted by God to offer supernatural powers to those with evil intentions. Furthermore, the Malleus specified women as overwhelmingly those involved in the practice of witchcraft, and that rather than through direct temptation by the devil, most women were brought into witchcraft by other witches. Considering the gravity of the crimes committed by such witches, namely apostasy, heresy, fornication, malignant sorcery, and infanticide, Kramer saw fit that the use of violent torture to extract confessions was fully justified.
While initially ridiculed, the Malleus would gain considerable influence in the early 16th century as it provided the theological framework for the waves of witch hunts throughout the Early Modern period in Europe, spreading out from Germany. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther was among the leading figures, both religious and secular, who came to believe that witches were a real and dangerous phenomenon that had to be exterminated with prejudice. Accounts of witches emphasized the illicit sexual nature of their activities, most especially their sexual involvement with the Devil himself and their demonic familiars. The Malleus even describes how young women would be tempted into witchcraft by their elders through introduction to demons which took the forms of handsome young men. On the continent, lurid descriptions of the strange sexual proclivities of the accused and the demonic trysts they engaged in were a recurring feature of numerous witchcraft trials and made clear how tied together the concepts of witchcraft and female sexuality were in the eyes of witch hunters.
It is difficult to calculate the total number of victims of the Witch Hunts from their beginnings at the end of the 15th century to their decline during the first half of the 18th century. Historians have estimated that between 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed as a result of the Witch Hunts, of whom approximately 75 to 80 percent were women. In Protestant realms, such as England, laws which prosecuted witches were worded such that they prosecuted a considerable number of the “cunning folk” who had once been widely accepted. While these laws were all-encompassing, it was primarily women who were prosecuted under it for practicing what had once been seen as beneficent herbalism, even in countries such as England where “cunning folk” were approximately 60% male. Not only did these witch hunts disproportionately target female practitioners of herbalism and folk healing, the witch hunts targeted numerous women who appear involved in anything that could be directly construed as “witchcraft,” mostly impoverished elderly women who were typically dependent on public assistance and communal relations for their survival.
To understand the reasoning behind the targets of the witch hunt, it is useful to look at the arguments made by Marxist scholar Silvia Federici. In her work, Caliban and the Witch, Federici interrogates the material drive behind the persecution of accused “witches” in the Early Modern period and concludes that it was an effort to assert more control over the bodies of women for the purposes of ensuring reproduction and population growth. She elaborates that witches were not just accused of infanticide and the heightened levels of infant mortality, but also of preventing conception. While the extent to which midwives were persecuted as witches has been contested by scholars, it is noteworthy that the Malleus specifies midwives as the most dangerous forms of witches for their involvement in acts of infanticide or destruction of the child in utero, and that the women most likely to be familiar with methods of contraception and abortion in such a community would have been female “cunning folk” and elderly and middle aged childless women, the demographics also most likely to be accused of witchcraft.
One of the main ideological frameworks for this emphasis on reproduction and population growth was the growing economic philosophy of mercantilism, which emerged during the Early Modern period in conjunction with the growing importance of colonial trade and the urban bourgeoisie, asserted that the population of a realm was among its most important economic assets, making the reproduction of labor the top priority of any realm. In this sense, there were underlying economic motivations which gave the witch hunts their staying power. This material motivation might not have been at the front of the mind of every witch hunter, but it provided the economic incentive which kept the “Witch Hunt” alive through the centuries and motivated the legislature which empowered the prosecution of women whose sexuality served no reproductive purpose or even worse, were involved in sabotaging reproduction. In Federici’s view, the tendency of these witch hunts to prosecute poorer elderly women was because they were the most likely to defend the communal relations that they depended on for survival and had the furthest back memories of, as well as serving no role in the reproductive regime.
Federici ties this to the social transformations which were taking place at the same time in Early Modern Europe in the forms of enclosure and colonialism. Through enclosure, the common lands on which many landless peasants had once lived were turned into sheep pastures to take advantage of the emerging textile industry and skyrocketing demand for wool. The tenant farmers were kicked off the lands which their families had worked on for generations and would go on to form the beginnings of the proletarian class who were often forced into workhouses for broad crimes such as “vagrancy.” Among these newly made proletarians were many of the targeted “witches,” from elderly women unable to perform arduous labor and dependent on the charity of others to childless prostitutes familiar with different methods of birth control. As she put it, “just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus ‘liberated’ from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor.” Both the enclosures and the witch hunts served to provide the “raw materials” of land and labor which would be necessary for the growth of mercantile capitalism.
The process of enclosure and the witch-hunt went hand in hand, with the latter being the means by which the unproductive and dissident women created by the former were removed and disciplined. Both of these phenomena were part of the broader trend of “primitive accumulation of capital” in the Early Modern Period, which can also be seen in the system of colonialism which emerged during the same time. Land was claimed on the American continents, with indigenous peoples often being forced off the land or compelled into labor on plantations producing cash crops, this enslaved labor force soon bolstered or replaced by countless kidnapped West Africans. The traditional “pagan” beliefs of those indigenous Americans and Africans served as an initial rallying point for the enslaved and colonized, something outside of the social structure they had been compelled into, and thus in order to discourage rebellion, the colonizers engaged in their own witch hunts against these populations, seeking to root out spiritual leaders who could potentially spark uprisings. Witch hunting was not just a means of accumulation, but also a means of enforcing the existing order. Whether it was in Europe or the New World, the public execution of witches was a method of discipline on the entire community, demonstrating the penalties for threatening to disrupt the patriarchal reproductive order or the colonial plantation economy.
These lessons in how historical processes of primitive accumulation motivated the violent persecution of dissenters from the reproductive order of the past serve as a warning of the kinds of threats posed to dissenters from the reproductive order of the present. At this moment in the imperial metropole, the strictness with which the reproductive mandate is enforced is a matter of controversy between fractions of capital, with many of those not who do not fit the mold for the reproduction of labor faced with the very real possibility of state-sanctioned violence and repression at any moment. The Early Modern Witch Hunts were merely one manifestation of a recurring process of violence directed at those who deviated from the imposed reproductive order, and it is in opposition to this imposition and in defense of the demonized that any feminist or queer social movement or organization should focus its efforts. The movement against capital must not only be aware of such modern “witch hunts” and their underlying motivations, but also prepare to counter-organize against them in defense of those unjustly persecuted.