Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  The medicine these rural women healers and priestesses of Latisana practiced covered treatment of a wide range of ailments including problems of stomach and womb, fever, headaches, measles, sun stroke, bleeding wounds, broken bones, skin diseases, gout, coughs, eye problems, epilepsy, depression, childhood diseases and those who had been fatturato or bewitched, which was a catchall for anything impossible to diagnose otherwise.438

  The women priests of Latisana were too central to rural life, too necessary there, to be beaten out by a local Church that for all the reforms of Trent remained relatively poor and had great difficulty providing high-quality priests over the longer periods that it would have taken to truly disempower women healers and love magicians. It may have been that the efforts of the Church at the end of the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth finally undermined women as the true masters of spiritual things in the countryside.439

  These “efforts” would be the Inquisition’s mass trials of women, known as the “witchcraze” which murdered tens of thousands of women healers, midwives, love magicians and totally innocent wives, mothers, and daughters during a depraved slaughter lasting two hundred years.

  The Church of Rome was besieged with reformers from within, who saw the pressing need to change not only demoralized church practices but also growing negative public perception. “This (Church) program of reform overlapped with that of sixteenth century Reformers through Luther and Calvin who had very different notions of how and where to aim the reforming axe: the program of reform might be not only heavy-handed but also misogynist. Moralists often saw women especially prone to magic and superstition because of their supposed moral and intellectual weakness. Reforming passion linked to this sort of bias was enormously dangerous and, as we shall see, it led to extreme fanaticism.”440

  The Trials of Women

  Many reasons are given for the vicious persecution of women toward the end of the Inquisition, but it appears that a confluence of events triggered this tragedy.

  First, the efforts of the Reformers or Protestants to wrest away power and believers from the Church of Rome met with success among the European populations. Their emphasis on individual knowledge of God, irrespective of intermediaries coupled with the ability to mass-produce copies of the Bible in vernacular translations and made widely available, had the effect of dismembering large groups of Catholics. Great numbers left the service of the institutions such as monasteries, convents and local parish churches. While this movement had an adverse effect on women who depended on the safety of convents and houses for holy women who were not nuns, it vastly increased the autonomy of the average man.

  Secondly, the Counter Reformation of the Catholic Church, which included the newly founded and well-educated Jesuit Order at its helm, was intent on moral reform of both the institution of the Church itself and of the people who comprised its believers. Consequently, the Counter Reformation focused not only on the behavior of its clergy but also on the traditions of rural lay people in an attempt to reconfirm their power over the faith, which they were losing both to the Protestants and to the newly consolidating nation states of Europe.

  Then there were the sensationalist trials involving important political figures as defendants, accusers or victims, which took place in the early Middle Ages. These included the high-society trials of conspiracies against kings or popes, none perhaps more publicized than those of the Knights Templar in Southern France where the men were accused of venerating a magic head and a cat. King Philip IV (1285–1314) was anxious to dissolve the Order, first by burning the Templars themselves and then by putting the confiscated wealth to his own use. These trials were well recorded; the burnings were well attended and the politics served.

  Trials against the practice of magic could take place at three different levels: secular which was administered by municipal government; ecclesiastical which was presided over by local bishops; or inquisitional which answered to the papacy and was presided over by Dominicans, Franciscans and later the Jesuits.

  Until the late Middle Ages, however, the municipal courts retained what is known as accusatory procedure: a trial would begin only when the aggrieved party pressed charges in court and took responsibility for proving them; if the accuser did not prove the allegations, they would typically be liable to the same punishment that the accused would otherwise have suffered. (Including the death penalty.) This was clearly an effective way to discourage prosecution, especially for a crime such as sorcery, for which tangible evidence was rare.441

  For a short period, Pope Alexander IV (1258–1260) requested that inquisitors not prosecute people for magic unless there was heresy involved. Those trials would be left to the secular courts. This required the inquisitors to construct arguments showing that all magic implies heresy and “the usual way to make this point was to reduce natural magic to demonic magic, then to show that alliance with demons in itself entails false belief about these evil spirits.”442

  Inquisitor Nicholas Eymericus first showed that necromancy and demon worship represented heresy and from there made the theoretical leap to prove that natural magic in the common tradition was demonic and heretical. In fact, and directly because of the books on necromancy had become familiar to them, the inquisitors often confused natural magic with necromancy. Originally, these inquisitors had set themselves a task of prosecuting their brothers, those male clerics who practiced magic by using the dead. Many already agreed that this practice was evil, harmed people and was disgusting. The inquisitors read the books on necromancy to learn the practices in order to bring the men to trial. But after they finished that task, the inquisitors superimposed the writings and practices of necromancy upon the unwritten practices of natural magic, which was not engaged in by the male clergy but by illiterate peasant women whose knowledge was gained through apprenticeship with an older female relative. Now, natural magic and the healing which occurred as a direct result was painted with the same brush used to prosecute the necromancers. Was this accidental? Probably not, because the inquisitors were men of learning who valued the written word over the spoken tradition, and certainly they valued men over women. So, if men of learning such as necromancers were to be brought to trial it only stood to reason that women who were involved in the practice of magical healing would have to be brought to trial also, even if the purpose behind the actions of the two groups were completely different, even opposite. In fact, the inquisitors knew almost nothing about the common folk traditions of the country people, in large part because the inquisitors were always foreign imports, often not even speaking the local language, and relying on Latin instead.

  At this point the secular courts adopted the inquisitional procedures, making convictions much easier. There were no longer penalties against the accuser whose identity was kept secret. This, of course, led to an increased number of trials for magic in the later fourteenth century, in both Switzerland and Italy. And, one might reasonably ask, How did the trials by the Church of the educated male cleric who were necromancers turn into the fanatical persecution of European women who were mostly uneducated and already marginalized members of society? Finding an answer to that question will be the focus of the remaining portion of this book.

  The trials against women take place most frequently in Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain and England, but other countries conducted them as well. Zsuzsanna Budapest provides a first-hand family account that is taken from her mother’s “Book of Sorrows” which was not published but kept as a handwritten chronicle of the trials and burnings in her native Hungary. The following is an excerpt:

  In Hungary, King Kalman declared a complete halt to end witch-persecutions, trials and tortures in 1175. In spite of this order, the Christian Church still held legal witch burnings with no interference by the King. The total recorded number of witches burned at the stake was about 10,000 women … but may have been more. The victims included anyone performing a pagan act: carriers of herbal lore and curers; midwives, priestesses and pr
ophets; any person with a witches paraphernalia such as a chalice or wand in the home; any woman pointed out by a man who claimed he was hexed by her. Witches accused were brutally tortured to force confessions from the poor woman. Their tormentors would prick they body all over with hot needles. After hours of torture, women were stripped naked and displayed in the middle of town, usually in chains. There were then ridiculed and offered as frightening examples of what happens to pagans. Meanwhile the executioners would begin negotiations with the family of the victim, soliciting a bribe for a fast, death-dealing blow. He met with each family member in this way, sometimes taking every last possession from the house.443

  And as the women burned, a Catholic priest held his crucifix high.

  All over Europe inquisitors, who were no longer content with trials of individuals, sought to gather groups of women, sorting them out of the general population and accusing them of conspiring to destroy Christendom through their use of magic. According to these churchmen who were growing ever more fanatic and frenzied in their pursuit, “… by the late Middle Ages the witch was someone who went beyond mere sorcery, someone who performed ritual acts of veneration to the Devil in league with other witches.”444 Now, anyone with knowledge of who these women were and where they might be apprehended was required to divulge that information or face suspicion of heresy and punishment themselves. Churchmen preached and university men wrote with increasing fervor about the dangers these women posed for society.

  This bias may owe something to the role of women as popular healers with herbs and charms, but there is no reason to think that women had a monopoly on these or other forms of magic. The association of women with witchcraft certainly cannot be explained as an out growth of the later medieval occult sciences and necromancy, since these were overwhelmingly the property of male clerics both in fact and in legend.445

  Women healers were in integral part of both rural life and ancient traditions. In fact, they were usually the only medical facilitators available outside the cities. They were sought out as wise women and trusted for their abilities to heal and comfort. Their methods were handed down from older generations of women and transmitted verbally. These practitioners needed years of apprenticeship with mother, grandmother, aunt or cousin before being ready to help neighbors on their own. In addition to knowledge of herbs and tinctures, some of these practices evolved from European shamanism. This would involve trance journeys to unseen worlds, or divination and prophecy with the assistance of sacred mushrooms, poppy juice or herbs known for their properties to enhance states of non-ordinary reality. The women also had extensive knowledge of healing wounds, alleviating pain, curing intestinal maladies and easing childbirth.

  From the distance of many hundreds of years, it is hard to pinpoint the exact trigger or switch which caused the hysterical prosecution of women, because it was an array of factors: counter-reformation moralizing, the disreputable necromancers’ trials, centuries of misogyny preached by educated churchmen and, persistence of the old traditions among common people who preferred their own cultural ways of healing and praying to those superimposed by the foreigners from the Church of Rome. This last factor was known to be a source of frustration to the churchmen, who had an undeniable sense of superiority because of their education, because of their self-righteousness, and because by this time they believed they were the only ones supposed to be in control. That after centuries of forced conversion and active suppression of all other belief systems they were still meeting with stubborn resistance from the peasant majority must have felt intolerable. After the churchmen labeled peasant women healers as “witches,” the next step was to eviscerate their practice. “Thus it was deemed necessary in the process of evangelizing Europe, to uproot witchcraft together with all other pagan vestiges.” The position of the Church was “whoever believes in witchcraft is as one who relapses into pagan beliefs … and whosoever holds pagan beliefs is as one who worships demons.”446

  Perhaps it really was the sting of failure fueled by misogyny that propelled these men into a collective fit of uncontrollable rage, cruelly masked by false righteousness, and went over the edge into barbarism. In his conclusion to Magic in the Middle Ages Richard Kieckhefer writes

  The real victims of this tension were those who continued to employ the natural magic of the common tradition but were now thickly tarred with the brush of demonic magic. Those who prosecuted and condemned them were, after all, men with some education, who would naturally tend to see popular magic in terms of what other educated people were doing. Recognizing the threat of demonic magic in the clerical underworld, they would spontaneously project that model on to humbler magicians. To justify and promote their repression of popular magic they imagined not only a demonic element in this magic, but a conspiracy of demon-worshippers.447

  The belief in magic by the general population was wide spread, one which Christianity had never succeeded in uprooting entirely. But the belief in the alliance with the devil was an invention of churchmen and was gradually implanted in the minds of the masses. It should be remembered that the Christian devil is a male figure.448 And for most of the inquisitors the focus was on the complicity with the devil. Professor Shahir writes that. “This is a peculiarly West European Christian phenomenon.” She continues, “The doctrine of devilish pacts was transmitted from the schools of higher learning (universities prohibiting women students or faculty), to the courts and thense down to the masses … (Moreover) women jeopardized the status of the priest as exclusive manipulator of supernatural forces.”449 And as women “Christian literature depicts woman as having been created inferior, as the mother of all sin who played a disastrous role in the story of mankind, the eternal tempter and seducer. In Christianity, desire for a woman not only makes for masculine dependence upon her, but is a sin in itself, and one which became the main obsession of many churchmen.”450 There will be a psychological impact on everyone who is woven together in this merciless drama.

  Harvard educated psychologist and author, Carol Gilligan writes, “Idealizations and denigration are the hallmarks of loss. When we lose pleasure, we idolize Pleasure, or else we disparage it, making it tawdry. And the same is true with love. But when we have lost love, the hurt we have suffered and the vulnerability of loving come to feel so overwhelming that we often turn to loving images as a bulwark against loss, because an image can be replaced, unlike a person.”451

  The loving images are constructed by churchmen in the forms of the Virgin Mary and of Mary Magdalene to decorate cathedrals, answer prayers and add grace to an otherwise loveless religion. Churchmen are now prohibited from living with mistresses or from hiring prostitutes. The Church insists that the clergy have no reasonable outlet for their sexuality. Gilligan continues, “When pleasure threatens an order of living that has come to feel both essential and stifling, the dangers of pleasure are conjured up and magnified, so that pleasure comes to connote chaos and riot. But there is nothing intrinsically chaotic in pleasure.”452 The Inquisitors would have argued that point. To them the very idea of pleasure, particularly the physical pleasure to be enjoyed between women and men, was absolute chaos. Or, was it really because such pleasure was denied them by the Church, and, therefore, they found it necessary to define pleasure as dangerous for all?

  Malleus Maleficarum

  For hundreds of years the Popes in Rome had been issuing edicts called “bulls.” In Latin, the term bull meant first a bubble, then it meant a metal bubble or knob, and finally it connoted the leaden seal on Papal documents. By the end of the twelfth century the term “bull” had been expanded to mean the actual document or edict. The seal itself had red, yellow and sometimes white ribbons attached to it. On one side were depictions of Peter and Paul; on the reverse side was the name of the currently reigning pope.453

  On December 9, 1484, an apostolic Bull titled “Summis desiderantes affectibus” was sent from Pope Innocent VIII to Fr. Henry Kramer and Fr. James Springer, both of whom were churchmen and inqu
isitors. In 1485, inquisitor Henry Kramer began his persecutions against women accused of witchcraft in Innsbruck, Germany, based on this bull.

  Several years later, in May 1487, the text of a book titled Malleus Maleficarum (translated as The Witches’ Hammer) written as a collaboration between Kramer and Springer was submitted to the University of Cologne for review and permission to publish. It received unanimous approval by the Doctors of the Theological faculty. Published in Nuremberg in 1496, the book is divided into three parts: “Part I: Treating of the three necessary concomitants of witchcraft which are the devil, the witch and the permission of Almighty God. Part II: Treating of methods by which works of witchcraft are wrought and directed, and how they may be successfully annulled and dissolved. Part III: Relating to the judicial proceedings in both the ecclesiastical and civil courts against all witches and indeed all heretics.” In the introduction to the 1948 edition, Montague Summers states, “In the whole vast literature of witchcraft, the most prominent, the most important, the most authoritative volume is the Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Springer.”454

  Fourteen editions were published between 1487 and 1520 and sixteen more between 1574 and 1669 in German, French and Italian. Summers continues,

  The Malleus acquired especial weight and dignity from the famous Bull of Pope Innocent VIII, lamenting the power and prevalence of the witch organizations, delegates Kramer and Springer as inquisitors of these depravities throughout northern Germany … granting both of them an exceptional authorization … and requiring every assistance, even calling in, if necessary, the help of the secular arm.455

  According to Henry Charles Lea, because the Bull was printed as a preface to Malleus in these early editions, it fastened on European jurisprudence for nearly three centuries the duty of combating the Society of Witches. The Malleus was in the chambers of every judge and magistrate. It was the undisputed authority and was equally recognized as being irrefutable by both Catholic and Protestant legislatures.