Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [9]
In England, so obvious was the connection between women and witchcraft that when the magistrates of Newcastle, having hired a witch-hunter from Scotland, sent their crier through town, he called on the people of Newcastle to bring forward their complaints “against any woman for a Witch.” In the wake of this roundup, fourteen women and one man were condemned and hanged. Moreover, the Newcastle authorities were more likely to believe that attractive women were innocent and elderly women guilty (see figure 3). The witch-hunter’s method involved sticking pins in alleged witches. When he proposed to do so to one woman, “personable and good like,” the magistrates objected. The witch-hunter persevered and found her guilty in a cruel and humiliating ritual in which he stripped her clothes to her waist and plunged pins in her thighs. The magistrates nonetheless intervened, and she was finally cleared.15
What was it about women? Attitudes toward women and especially about women’s bodies and sexuality persuaded people that women were predisposed toward witchcraft. Medical ideas, derived from Aristotle, regarded men and women as binary opposites; women were wet and cold, men were warm and dry. Women’s genitals were likewise the reverse of men’s. Aristotelian medical theories, moreover, held that the male body was the norm; the female body was a corrupt variant. Commentators universally discussed women’s sexuality in a negative fashion. Women were insatiable creatures, naturally prone to lust and deviance. Their carnality led them to witchcraft: witch-hunting manuals, most notably the Malleus, which drew on these ancient ideas about women, emphasized the sexual relationship between Satan and his human agents, and it was easy enough for believers to associate women’s lust with their attraction to the Devil, who could fulfill their sexual needs as no mortal man could.16 Thus, in those societies where people believed that a witch’s body contained telltale marks of her relationship with Satan, those marks were invariably found in woman’s genitals, her “very hidden places,” as one legal manual for English justices in the 1630s put it.17 Women’s bodily defects and their immoral natures were accompanied by their greater credulity. Women were frail and impressionable, more likely to be superstitious than men. And their weakness also encouraged them to resort to occult arts to seek revenge on those who wronged them.18 The Malleus codified these ideas, assembling a devastating critique of women’s natures and yoking women inextricably to witchcraft.19 The documents in Section II offer many opportunities to read trials of women and to examine the role that gender played in the charges against them (see especially documents 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 24).
Because witchcraft was a crime, its detection and punishment were governed by the prevailing rules of evidence and procedure in different jurisdictions. But witchcraft was also an exceptional crime—crimen exceptum, one to which the normal practices did not apply. Because witchcraft was so difficult to prove using the normal rules of evidence, jurists applied different standards. Thus, for example, courts applied torture in places where it was otherwise not regularly employed as a key element of witchcraft trials in order to compel the accused to confess. Severe torture was essential because the Devil could help accused witches withstand pain. Courts even had a word for this assistance—taciturnitas (keeping silent). It referred to the ability of a witch to endure the agonies of torture without confession.20 People who were otherwise not normally allowed to give testimony in court, including children, women, and felons, were often able to do so in witchcraft trials. In Sweden, for example, thousands of children testified during a major witch hunt between 1668 and 1676, although in Swedish legal practice, children under the age of fifteen were not normally allowed to testify. During the outbreak, this principle was set aside and child witnesses were calculated as the equivalent of