Daughters of the Inquisition
Page 51
Who are these two men with such power? Heinrich Kramer was born in Lower Alsace and died in Bohemia, Germany, in 1505. He entered a Dominican order as a young man and before 1474 was an inquisitor and Papal defender. He already had experience persecuting Waldenses and Picards before he began moving against women. James Springer was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1436 and entered service as a Dominican in 1452, becoming known for his zealous reform. In 1480 he became Dean of the faculty of Theology at Cologne University and Inquisitor in 1481. He died Dec. 6, 1495, in Cologne.
Montague Summers also wrote the more lengthy introduction to the 1928 edition of the Malleus saying that “It was continually quoted and appealed to in the witch trials of Germany, France, Italy and England … possibly what will seem even more amazing to modern readers is the misogynic trend of various passages, and these not the briefest nor least pointed.” Then he continues, “I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded.…”456 One might note that in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified, giving American women the right to vote. But Mr. Summers seems to be of a different opinion with regard to the rights of women, almost recommending in 1928 the misogyny of the Malleus to counteract the progress of women in his own age.
The Malleus itself was written at a time when churchmen had convinced civil authorities that witches were the bane of a social order, that they injured not only persons but property and were the active members of a vast revolutionary body, a conspiracy against civilization. Near the beginning of the Malleus it is written
For witchcraft is high treason against God’s majesty. And so they are to be put to the torture in order to make them confess … even if s/he confesses his/her crime, let him/her be racked, let him suffer all other tortures prescribed by law in order that he may be punished in proportion to his offenses. Note: in days of old such criminals suffered double penalty and were often thrown to wild beasts to be devoured by them. Nowadays they are burnt at the stake, and probably this is because the majority of them are women.457
While some forms of healing were still seen as benevolent and part of the powers of nature even when carried out by women, the Malleus says, “The power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men.” Furthermore, it says, “The devil is succubus to a man and becomes incubus to a woman.”458 When speaking about semen being the source of life and the devil being able to have sexual relations with mortal men and women the writers are absolutely convinced this is the truth.
By the time the authors arrive at Question VI of Part I, “Concerning witches who copulate with devils; why is it that women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions” they pull out all stops on misogyny, citing passages from the ancient Greeks, from the Hebrew Old Testament, from early Christian writer Augustine. They state that woman has an evil slippery tongue, she is wicked, she is intellectually like children. It says that “women have weak memories, no discipline, they are impulsive, with inordinate affections and passions they are vengeful: wherefore it is no wonder that so great a number of witches exist in this sex.”459
Women are then accused of three general vices: infidelity, ambition and lust (insatiable) and “as such are adulteresses, fornicatresses and the concubines of the Great.” But the greatest of all crimes is that women injure men: by making them slaves for love; or by causing them impotence; or by castration; or by changing them into wild beasts; or by bewitching them to either love or hatred. In addition, women are accused of offering children to devils and causing infertility or abortion in women.460
In Question XI, Malleus authors say blatantly, “No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives.” These midwives are accused of four crimes against infants in the womb and after birth. “And since the devils do these things through the medium of women, and not men, this form of homicide is associated rather with women than with men.”461
Part II, Question XIII repeats these accusations in greater detail. On punishment, the Malleus says, “The crime of witches, then, exceeds the sins of all others, and we now declare what punishment they deserve … they must not be punished like other heretics with lifelong imprisonment, but must suffer the extreme penalty.”462 The extreme penalty is being burned alive at the stake in a public execution.
Chapter XIV details how witches injure cattle, and Chapter XV discusses hailstorms and tempests caused by witches. Chapter XVI speaks of addiction to witchcraft and suggests remedies for those who have lost their penis, or been transformed into shapes of beasts! If this book had not had such dire consequences for women, these passages might be seen as ludicrous or even as demented. But these words were taken quite literally in their day and not as the rantings and ravings of men who had forsaken all reason.
Part III addresses the trials and sentencing. Witches, once captured, were lifted from the ground by the officers and carried out from their homes on a plank of wood or in a large basket, so that the woman cannot touch the ground. It was believed that she lost her power of silence in torture if she were not able to connect with the earth and would, therefore, confess to the inquisitors.463 No names of witnesses were to be transmitted to the accused women, but were made known to lawyers and assessors who confiscated property. An advocate for the defense must not act in a way that would “incur the charge of defending heresy, which would make him liable to excommunication.”464 Because the license to practice before the courts was revocable with excommunication, few chose to disobey.
Question XIII decides that the woman accused of witchcraft “should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession.” The resulting “stubborn silence of witches” seems to pose problems because “she will be so insensible to the pains of torture that she will sooner be torn limb from limb than confess any of the truth. But the torture is not to be neglected for this reason.”465 The authors say, “In conclusion, it is as difficult, or more difficult, to compel a witch to tell the truth as it is to exorcise a person possessed of the devil.”466
Whose truth is this? Isn’t it equally possible that the women did tell the truth, their truth, and died anyway because it did not meet the predetermined guilt assumed and necessitated by the inquisition? As regards sentencing, Question XIV says,
Wherefore, that the truth may be known from your own mouth, … we declare, judge and sentence that on the present day at such and such an hour, you be placed under the question and torture. She may be promised her life on the following conditions: that she be sentenced to imprisonment for life on bread and water provided she supply evidence which will lead to the conviction of other witches. And, she is not to be told, when she is promised her life, that she is to be imprisoned in this way; but should be led to suppose that some other penance, such as exile, will be imposed on her as punishment … others think that the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period, she should be burned.467
This clearly shows that the inquisitors themselves and the institution of the Church they represent have no problem with lying. But if the woman does not confess
If after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he (the Judge) should have other engines of torture brought before her … if then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture must be continued on the second or third day … the Judge should also take care that there should always be guards with her, so that she is never alone, for fear lest the devil will cause her to kill herself.468
This Malleus Maleficarum is a well written book authored by two educated men who are at the top echelon of Inquisition hierarchy. It is excruciatingly painful to read in its entirety because it is a fanatically unrelenting work. Particularly when the reader knows in advance that it will be used to humiliate, shame, torture and murder thousands and thousands of innocent women, it takes on a deeply macabre and haunting afterlife.
Women accused of witchcraft were often shaved head to toe, so tha
t nothing to protect them could be concealed in body hair. The inquisitors believed that this could break their silence.469 In 1485 the Inquisitor at Como burned 41 women accused of witchcraft after each one of them was thoroughly shaved.
Torture can be physical such as ordeal by red-hot iron, or it can be social when a woman’s relatives and friends are turned against her, used to spy on her, leaving her without a single person to trust. Stripped of her social networks, her family protection, humiliated and held up half naked to public ridicule, many women who did not confess to witchcraft did commit suicide or become insane.
The remaining pages of the Malleus detail the means of sentencing the women to death, all the while professing that the inquisitors as judges had done everything in their power to save the woman’s soul.
In 1673 at Gutenberg, Maria Wukinetz, age 57, was tortured eleven days and nights by burning her feet because she would not confess. She died insane. “To realize the frightful tortures in use, one must visit the Folterkammer, i.e. that built up at Nuremberg and see the terrible implements assembled there as in an arsenal.”470
The Malleus Maleficarum is an overtly and unabashedly women-destroying book, even if the language and process of devil worship was probably lifted directly from the necromancer’s manuals. In a lethal progression over the centuries, the evils of women were depicted in the Old Testament, then churchmen beginning with Augustine defined the nature of women as indebted to magic, sorcery and the devil, and now the authors of the Malleus define women as witches. Furthermore, this book was used as justification for preventing women being included in professions, being excluded from education and even from practicing as midwives. Long after all the inquisitors were dead, the malicious definition of woman’s basic nature remained, fully sanctioned by powers of both church and state. The premise and prejudice of the Malleus became socialized into the mindset of men in power who repressed women.
Lea says that there was opposition. “… the undercurrent of opposition existing at all periods to the methods of witch prosecution and even to the whole theory of witchcraft. A few men … had the courage to express their views more or less openly … but most of this opposition was under the surface and its’ utterance suppressed either by fear of public opinion or more often by fear of prosecution on the charge of aiding and abetting the works of the devil.”471
The Witch Craze
The witch craze, as author Anne Llwellyn Barstow terms the persecution of women in the last centuries of the Papal Inquisition of Europe
could not have happened unless a major legal change had taken place: the adoption by secular courts of inquisitional procedures … the secular courts turned out to be more murderous than the church courts had been. Although the church must be charged with developing the demonic theories, the misogyny, and the extreme legal processes that made massive witch hunts possible, and with offering continuous encouragement to secular authorities to prosecute, … the major witch hunts were carried out by temporal authorities … witchcraft became a secular crime.472
Not only was it a secular crime, but it was also a crime now prosecuted by Protestants. According to Lea, “Brunswick seems to be the earliest of the Protestant states to develop the witch craze. In Gottingen, in 1561, the persecution was so vigorous that scarce any old woman was safe from torture and the stake.”473 Later in his voluminous History of WitchCraft Lea writes, “One might think that when Luther’s Reformation freed people from so many papist superstitions, it would also have freed them from the monkish and clerical chatter about the pact (with the devil), but nothing like this happened.”474 And, Lea continues, “… not only in the papacy but after the Reformation so many prosecutions of witches were had and under the Protestants of Europe and especially the Lutherans the procedure was so astonishing and cruel.”475
How many women were killed? Dr. Achterberg says that “Authoritative estimates range from two hundred thousand to nine million. In Germany alone, one hundred thousand witch burnings have been carefully documented.”476 Many travelers’ journals of this time reported that fires burned on the roadsides throughout Europe. “In about 1600, a contemporary observer noted that Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for the witches. Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account. Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which the witches are bound.”477
Neither the courts nor the inquisitors nor the churches had reason to hide what they did, particularly because the executions were public and intended to terrorize the population as well as to entertain the most sadistic of them. The Inquisition admits to burning 30,000 in 150 years, but of course the process lasted longer than that. A Vatican official reports 1,000 women burned in Como, 1523. The German villages of Rheinbeck, Meckenheim, Flerzhiem and Riezler claimed between 1,000 and 2,000 burnings including 300 children. The Attorney General of Lorraine burned 900 women in ten years between 1581–91. The city of Treves executed 7,000 women, and the city of Geneva killed 900 women in one month. Some small towns were left with one woman or no women at all.478
From the Women’s Encyclopedia the statistics are as follow:
Strasbourg burned 5,000 women in 20 years. The Senate of Savoy condemned 800 women at one time. Inquisitor Nicholas Remy takes personal credit for 800 sentences in 15 years. A bishop of Bamberg claims credit of 600 deaths of women in ten years and a bishop of Nancy condemned 800 women in 16 years; a bishop of Wurtzberg issued the death sentence for 1,900 in five years. There were four hundred murdered in a single day in Toulouse. Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov sentenced 20,000 “devil worshipers” to death. And, between 1542 and 1736 “even the relatively permissive English killed 30,000 witches.”479
Even though these statistics are fragmented and acknowledged as incomplete, they continue. A visitor to German Wolfenbuttel in 1590 wrote that “there are so many stakes to burn witches that the place of execution resembled a small forest.” In the German cities of Wurzburg and Bamberg, ovens were built to handle mass murders.” The executioner of Naisse in Silesia invented an oven in which he roasted over one thousand women and children, as young as two years old, over a period of nine years.480
In the overall and as a general rule, life for European women was becoming ever more restrictive and difficult. Almost every family had female members burnt, mutilated by excessive torture or left to die under abominable conditions in prison. Psychological stress, physical hardship and social ostracism combined to make everyday life nearly intolerable. The murder of so many women in country after country struck at the very heart of women’s lives, because midwives were killed and wise women healers were killed, leaving no medical or spiritual care for women who had survived in vast reaches of the land. Worst yet, there was no way out of this misery. By now, the persecution of women had reached across the continent, and was prevalent in areas both Catholic and Protestant. Beginning about 1550, in the wake of the Reformation, accusations toward women and the steep rise of economic inflation went hand-in-hand. Population growth was unsustainable, and plunder from exploration of the New World created enormous differences in personal wealth. Merchants controlled the gold and silver pouring in through Spain and while they personally profited, the poor suffered. Overpopulation, largely the result of Church laws against family planning, created shortages of land, food and jobs. The result was unemployment, hunger and crime.
Women’s work was disproportionately affected. Before 1560, while women had always worked for less pay than men, they had served as brewers of ale, midwives, pharmacists, milliners, seamstresses, spinners, tavern keepers, road workers, lace makers, caterers, wet nurses, weavers and hired hands at harvest time. This was in addition to their peasant duties on family farms, child rearing in the home and their responsibilities in the village preparing the dead for burial.481
Barstow says further that though women were forbidden to sit in town councils, or to hold office in any guild, after 1500, women were “virtually forced
out of the guilds which rendered them strangers to the very institutions where most of the job hiring rules were made, wages and prices were negotiated and deals about resources and loans were struck.”482 Women were the marginal workers of Europe, the source of cheap labor in a social structure devoid of slaves. Early capitalism in the sixteenth century made the already poor all the more destitute because capitalism engaged farm families to become wage laborers. In this process, women lost their main source of income from home gardens, dairy and bread making. “These were the conditions that plunged many single women, formerly self-supporting into poverty during the period from 1550 to 1700.”483 Some theorize that the ensuing and alarming rise in female beggars across Western Europe as a result was such an untenable reality for the more fortunate that they leveled accusations of witchcraft against these female beggars just to get them out of sight.
Then, most regions passed laws against production of consumer goods at home in order to ensure a constant supply of labor to the new capitalist systems. Combined with the banning of single women from craft guilds, these factors had the effect of forcing women into the lowest paid service sector as household help for the wealthy. Barstow adds, “Bearing in mind that the population of single women was at an all-time high and that women were much more likely to remain single than men, one can see that unbearable economic pressure was being applied to the femme sole.”484 In the rapidly expanding and changing world headed for industrialization, women were increasingly sent to the margin, growing poorer and more disenfranchised in their ability to earn wages and support either themselves or families.
The most universal task of women, dating from ancient times, was that of healer. Whether she was an herbalist, a diviner, prophetess, magic-maker, midwife or physician, she was always at the center point of the life and death cycle. And it is this association of women with the power to heal that finally brought them into lethal conflict with the churchmen and into the grip of the Inquisition. Nowhere else in their personal world were any means of status or power available except their ability to heal. Through healing by both spells and potions, by delivering babies, giving the means of family planning to other women, by predicting the future, advising the lovelorn, cursing (those who had done wrong) and also by removing curses, by making peace between neighbors covered what is today called both magic and medicine. Both were traditions of long standing among those known by their people as wise women, cunning women and blessing women. She was gynecologist, blood-letter, bone-setter, diagnostician and apothecary. So, “in a world were neither healing nor therapy were professionalized in our sense of the word, she had the possibility of wielding considerable power. Healer, expert in all matters pertaining to sex, and prophetess, she could be labeled ‘magic worker,’ for the basis of her power in all these areas was perceived to be the power of magic … Healer-diviner perhaps best describes the broad range of most of the cunning folk.”485