Witch Trials Essay

Keith Thomas has argued that “The idea that witch-prosecutions reflected a war between the sexes must be discounted, not least because the victims and witnesses were themselves as likely to be women as men”.

As Wolfgang Behringer describes it as, the study of European witchcraft was revolutionized by a “paradigm shift,” which involved the acceptance of anthropological and sociological practices, a greater care to archival sources, and an attention in focusing on history “from below.” One area that has remained particularly debated is the role of gender in the witch discourse and trials. The believers of the trials declared that “the fragile feminine sex….feebler in both mind and body” was particularly susceptible to witchcraft, and their disbelieving opponents used this very prevalence of “poore, sullen, superstitious” women to argue against them.

The first social and anthropological historians offered some cautious theories about how gender relations and the fluctuating environments of women contributed to the trials, suggesting that increasing numbers of widows and spinsters threatened a society based on patriarchal family units, or that people increasingly resisted helping to support poor elderly women in the village. Women’s historians moved gender relations into the forefront of reasons for the persecutions by depicting on the understanding that the trials were part of a larger campaign by governments to Christianise the countryside, and linked them to a common strengthening of patriarchy during the same period.

Some feminist accounts, seizing on an estimate of 9 million victims, cast the trials as “the persecution of a whole sex…. The second phase of the patriarchal seizure of power at the beginning of the bourgeois era...

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...es associated with childbirth and maternity above all with the feelings of envy experienced by both accused and accuser.

To conclude, we see that whether or not gender was sex-specific or sex-related plays a huge contribution when discussing witchcraft. However, coming to the conclusion that it appears that the witchcraft craze which dominated most of this period in time was in fact sex-related. Agreeing with Stuart Clark, it was in fact a hunt for women as at the time more women were beginning to be more assertive in the patriarchal system. For the Church and those who ran it they occasionally had to reinforce the system and so in order to achieve this goal witchcraft trials were an effective means. Sexual differences between men and women created a world were blackmail was very useful in order to keep the woman in line by using witchcraft accusations to do this.