This next woman actually died from torture not from being burned at the stake. In Oct. 1652, eighty-two year old Nicole de Rosset was arrested, accused and examined for witch mark by two doctors and two surgeons, three of whom had earlier examined Michea Chauderon. Forty years prior, Nicole had been accused, tried and searched but not burned. In spite of her advanced age, she was tortured but did not confess. Although there was no confession, she was not released and she died in prison. There is no evidence of any admission of guilt on her part; nevertheless, the Inquisition followed this woman over four decades, determined to kill her.515
The Crime of Being a Woman
Historian Barstow makes it plain that during these specific persecutions having the body of a woman was a deciding factor. She says, “the distinctively female external parts of the body – breasts and labia – were the model for the devil’s teat, a sure sign of guilt, and the female function of nursing was the basis for the myth of the imps and familiars who sucked on the witches.”516 Even without confession, it was the “devil’s teat” called the witch mark that was used as conclusive evidence and justification for the death penalty.
A new means of torture, developed specifically for accused women was called “the witches chair.” According to Lea “it was an iron chair studded with blunted points, of which the seat was heated from below. When necessary, this was prolonged for days, until exhaustion … or death. It required heroic fortitude for a woman to endure repeated applications and still maintain her innocence.”517 But maintaining innocence is exactly what most women actually did, which resulted in additional torture.
Into this disgrace, all reproductive health services which were the exclusive practice of women and midwives were “seen as heinous crimes and … were connected with witchcraft and thus compounded its offensiveness.”518 The midwife presided over the birth process with its difficult labor, the issue of deformed and still-birth infants also presided over the practice of “exposure” whereby infants were made comfortable and then left to die naturally because there were no facilities in existence to care for such people. This practice of “exposure” known from Greco-Roman times, was a joint decision by mother and midwife and was previously without criminalization. Now, midwives were accused of causing these difficulties and were subsequently condemned to die. Many suspected the new class of male physicians, who insisted on preventing midwives from attending universities and were eager to assume all tasks of the midwife in the cities in order to increase their pay, had a part in this condemnation process.
Mother-daughter and mother-son dyads were often seen in court accused as a team, indicating the belief by churchmen that indoctrination into witchcraft of family members through the knowledge and practices of the mother was commonplace. So now in Europe, Woman herself both individually and as groups of women, was subjected to the process of criminalization for the first time.519 As has been shown, the diminution of the status of women, her basic social rights and her legal standing in court had been progressing for generations wherever Christianity had taken hold on the Continent. But the criminalization of women just because they were born female was unprecedented. Barstow writes that “the length to which men in power would go in order to control women became more violent, more public, and more organized.”520 She also says that “the ultimate form of torture was to be burned alive, and the most horrifying symbol of some men’s power over all women and over some other men was public execution at the stake … they affirmed that the ruler who ordered them was godly, and even more important, that his power was greater than the forces of evil.”521 However, now it is this ruler who had become the force of evil.
German Lands
The perfect illustration of the madness into which the Western world was sinking is carried out through Bavarian Duke Maximilian I who, as a teenager educated by the Jesuits, in 1589–90 took part in the trials and torture of women. Added to that experience, his zealous persecution of additional women under his jurisdiction was compounded by the fact that his first wife, Elizabeth did not conceive children and sorcery or bewitchment was blamed. Lea writes that “Maximilian became the most vigorous witch prosecutor of the Bavarian princes. In Munich 1600, eight men and three women were executed. Six of them on their way to execution were torn six times with red-hot pincers, one woman had her breasts cut off, five men were broken on the wheel, one man was impaled and finally all burnt alive.”522
These brief facts from Lea are nauseating enough, but curiously there is much more information on the exact same people at the conclusion of Barstow’s history of the European witch hunts. The group of men and women were mostly members of the same family who were being transported to their death. They were known by the name of Pappenheimer, poor Germans relegated to outcast status because of both lowly birth and their occupations. One of the women is Anna, age 59 in 1600, the daughter of a grave-digger with few marriage prospects as a young woman. But then she found Paulus Pappenheimer, an itinerant cleaner of privies (outhouses) who was not Catholic but Lutheran. By the time she was accused, she and Paulus had been married thirty-seven years, and of the seven children she had born, three sons survived. Despite abject poverty, Anna had kept her family together.
But Duke Maximilian needed a “show trial” to prove who controlled the lives of his subjects. The Bavarian Council of State already had legislation against the marriage of Catholics to Protestants, against the sale of non-Catholic books (the German version of the Spanish “Index”), against mixed bathing, against dancing in the evenings, against extravagant weddings, against fortune telling and superstition, against vagrancy and highway robbery.523
The Pappenheimers were named as witches by a condemned criminal, and the entire family was arrested and brought to Munich for trial. “After a long, well publicized trial, the entire Pappenheimer family was convicted of witchcraft.”524
What followed was sheer barbarism. Thousands of people came into the city for the execution. The condemned were put into a cart to be drawn through the streets on display to onlookers. During this slow journey to meet death, the prisoners Anna, her husband and sons were stripped of clothing so that their flesh would be torn off with red-hot pincers. After that, Anna’s breasts were cut off. The bloody breasts were forced into her mouth and then into the mouths of her two grown sons. “By rubbing the severed breast around her son’s lips, the executioner made a hideous parody of her role as mother and nurse, imposing an extreme humiliation on her.”525
This gruesome procession was half a mile long and led by town officials who dared to hold before them a large crucifix. Officials of the court wearing red and blue tunics, four “kings of the night” representing the four quarters of Munich, the ducal chief justice and clergy followed. Church bells of the city were rung, celebrating Christian triumph over Satan. The crowd sang hymns, and vendors hawked wares as though at a Saturday market. As the cart moved slowly through the streets, onlookers could see that Anna’s chest cavity was bleeding. The rest of her family who had been injured by the ripping hot pincers were suffering and in agony. Paulus, her husband of nearly forty years, was being regularly dropped on his arms until his bones broke. Then in an odd stop, the family was forced out of the cart, and with bleeding bodies and broken limbs they were required to kneel before a cross, were forced to drink wine and then loaded back on the cart to proceed to their doom. When they arrived at the burning place, Paulus was impaled. A stick was driven up through his anus, branding him a sodomite, although this was never an accusation by the court during the trial. “The four Pappenheimers were then tied to the stakes, the brush and pyres were set aflame, and they were burned to death. Their eleven year old son was forced to watch the dying agonies of his parents and brothers. The boy was executed three months later.”526
Duke Maximilian was not satisfied with the ongoing results of his showtrial of 1600, because in 1611 and 1616 he ordered more sweeping and torturous edicts against women in his realm. In his 1611 edit he proclaimed against “popula
r superstitions as well as the black arts. As regards witchcraft, (it) entailed burning alive or if indirect, beheading first, if evil had been wrought on men, beasts or harvest, tearing with red-hot pincers before burning and the free use of torture.”527 Five years later, in 1616, Maximilian issued orders which said that the women accused were no longer subject to ordinary rules of the court. Over and over again, the Duke exhorted his judges to greater activity in the punishment of women. And because suicide was such a commonplace decision among women accused, tortured and with absolutely no other recourse, women who had been subjected to torture were no longer to be confined in solitary after confession. Revocation of confession was not permitted. And finally, in order to prevent their denial of confession in public before execution, the condemned women were to be strangled before burning. Persistent assertion of innocence by women was no cause for acquittal. Lea says that throughout the territory of the Prince-Bishops of Germany, “the persecution was the cruelest.”528 As examples, he gives from 1623–31 under Bishop Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg there were 900 burnings. In secular Bavaria from 1500 to 1756 there were between 1000 and 2000 burnings which Lea calls a moderate computation, and in 1751 the Criminal Code provides burning alive and beheading for sorcery and witchcraft. For magic arts the penalty is exile and public penance. “Torture was the chief source of witchcraft conviction and of prolonging the belief. It was abolished in Prussia in 1740, in Baden in 1767, in Saxony in 1770 and in Austria in 1776. In Bavaria an order limiting its use was issued in 1779.”529
On Oct. 7, 1637, Dr. Volpert Mozel presented an instruction to the authorities at Innsbruck which defined the acts of sorcery, witnesses against the accused, the course of trial and torture which was not to exceed three sessions of one hour each. Men convicted of sorcery were often beheaded before burning. Women were usually burned alive.
In 1679–80 a woman named Emerenziana Pichlerin, mother of four, was tried in Lienz. She was condemned with the two eldest of her children who were then twelve and fourteen years old. She was executed on September 25, 1680. Her two teenage children were executed separately two days later. There is no extant record regarding the ultimate fate of her two youngest children who, because of her death imposed by the Inquisition, were now orphans. In fact, there is no mention of the vast number of orphans thus created by the Inquisition in all the literature that has been part of the research for this book. It is as though they disappeared, dematerialized, vanished without a trace. But that could not be the truth. The truth is that these children were made to endure the cruel sight of the death of their mothers, and then they were relegated to begging and thievery afterwards without benefit of friend or family. The Inquisition left a terrible generational legacy.
Those in the United States of America may take note that as late as 1775, in Kempten, Bavaria, one unfortunate named Anna Maria Schwagelen was executed on April 11. This is a late case and one that proves how far down into the bottom of the barrel the inquisitors had sunk in order to kill women. Anna was a servant in a Protestant household for ten years, between the age of thirty and forty. A coachman promised to marry her if she converted from Catholicism to his religion. Anna did so, but the coachman reneged on his promise and married another woman. Anna, having considered marriage so late in life and then making the effort to convert as a prerequisite to marrying, was now desperate in her despair, confessing to an Augustinian friar who absolved her if she repented and returned to the Church. As if her situation were not unsettled enough, the friar to whom she confessed subsequently became a Protestant himself, unsettling Anna’s mind. She then had what might be called a nervous breakdown over the matter, becoming a wanderer, unable to work and finally landing in the house of correction at Kempten. There another woman, also named Anna, who was in charge of the wretched misfits, beat the new inmate. Under these dreadful circumstances and in the course of the abuses, Anna confessed to intercourse with the devil which, when revealed by her abuser, transferred Anna to an inquisitional prison. By now the woman was crippled in hand and foot as well as mind. The confused woman was interrogated until what was left of her mental faculty broke entirely and she confessed to whatever the inquisitors insisted. “There was no charge and no evidence of her having wrought evil to man or beast but Judge Treichlinger on March 30 drew up a charge of beheading.”530 Anna Maria Schwagelin, a mutilated, mentally unsound, unmarried woman of about 50 years old was executed April 11, 1775.
The most explicit means of torture against women accused are contained in the annuals of trials in Bamberg, a German state. Lea recounts that “the acts of the process show that no means were shrunk from to extirpate witches.” As soon as the person was denounced, the process began. If the woman persisted in asserting her innocence, her clothes were removed and the Drudenkittel, or witch fork, was put on her. Frequently this brought confession, but if not, the executioner was called in, and she was warned to confess the unvarnished truth. If she were silent, torture commenced with thumbscrew, the Beinschrabbe or bootscrew, scourging with rods, hoisting on the ladder. In Bamberg, however, the torture sometimes began with the ladder, on which she was severely scourged (whipped or lashed); if this did not suffice, the thumbscrew and bootscrew were applied together. There were also the Bock or stocks furnished with iron points, on which she was placed and kept, sometimes for hours, also the Zug (strappado) in which she was hung for an hour. Especially obstinate women were also treated with cold water baths, or the Schwefelferdem were employed, by which burning sulfur was dropped on the body, or the burning feathers were held under the arms or other parts of her body. Another method of torture used in Bamberg was called the Betstuhl or prayerstool, in which the woman was made to kneel on a board furnished with sharp wooden pegs. In cases where no confession was extracted, the torture was continued for up to thirteen days.531
Of course, many women weakened and died, but torture was never given by the Inquisition as the cause of, nor the reason for, the death of the woman.
The Drudenzeichen, or witch-mark, was sought for and any wart or mole was tested with the Nadelprobe and, if it gave no pain and drew no blood, it was deemed to be genuine. Absence of tears under torture was also very serious proof and was always recorded in the protocol. Another proof was the inability of the accused to recite the Paternoster.532
These trials of women in the Bamberg region began before 1609 and continued through 1633 with thousands killed. The persecutions probably ended with the invasion of Swedes in 1631 led by Gustavus Adolphus who took Leipzig, the Rhine, and then the city of Munich by 1632.533
Even though existing records are considered fragmentary, for the bishopric of Strassburg between 1615 and 1635 there were 5,000 women burnt. Considering themselves “evolved and more mild” in their treatment of killing women, the authorities consented that “those who repent, abjure consorting with demons and seek with a heart to be reconciled to God and the Church should first be strangled or beheaded before being burnt.”534
Behind every wave of women’s trials one discovers that there is a zealot who pushes all limits of killing and confiscation, embracing murder as an avenue to satisfy his own greed. Such a man is Magistrate Geiss, veteran of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), from which France, not Germany, emerged as the most powerful nation on the continent. Geiss was known to contemporaries as ignorant and brutal even before he wrote to the Herrschaft authorities that it had come to his attention that the “witch epidemic” had been renewed and that if the government “desired some burnings” the community of Leipzig would provide the wood. From confiscations, he said that wages could be increased and the bridge and church repaired. Soon the Herrschaft authorized the investigations and Geiss appointed four assessors, one of whom could write, and then arrested “persons in good circumstances” who were men, women, and children between eight and twelve years old. Geiss reported back that most confessed “voluntarily” to whatever he had prescribed after unspeakable torture, and then he had extorted all the money he could from them. Al
l were executed.535
The final case from the German lands to be included here also takes place under Geiss in 1661. This sad tale is the story of the still-born infant of a miller and his wife named Schuler. The attending midwife was accused and arrested. She denied the charge of culpability in the death of the infant, but under ruthless torture she confessed to making an ointment from the dead infant which was a standard charge from the Malleus Maleficarum. The miller insisted the infant’s grave be opened. The body of the child was found intact, confirming the innocence of the midwife, but all witnesses were forbidden to speak to authorities until all six persons now accused on charges of conspiracy were burnt.
Then Geiss arrested an old woman named Becker-Margareth. One of Giess’ assessors visited her in the Hexenthurm prison where she implicated fourteen more persons on the promise of no further torture and a church burial for herself. The assessor called on the miller family and the husband in order to save his wife, petitioned directly to the Herrschaft. This had the opposite effect from what he had hoped, leading directly to his wife’s immediate imprisonment. Then he petitioned the Dean of the University of Wurzburg which resulted in Geiss having the miller himself arrested and tortured several times. While the miller managed to escape from prison, three days later his wife was burnt. The community rose up in protest, but after the investigation Geiss was discharged unhurt after burning thirty innocent people.536
Quoting Leipzig writer, K.F. Koppen from his 1844 work Hexen und Hexenprogresse (pgs 54–69), Lea references the following
Daughters of the Inquisition Page 53