sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.
Before we approach the place of women in this most
Christian piece of Western history, the importance of
the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark
Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by.
Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was
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found in every courtroom. It had been read by every
judge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.
T h e Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It was
theology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge its
authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f wisdom, ” 10
wrote Montague Summers in 1946, the year I was born)
was to commit heresy, a capital crime.
Although statistical information on the witchcraft
persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:
In almost every province of Germany the persecution
raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said
to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg,
where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine
hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year.
So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was
author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted
of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in
three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at
Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single
execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single
year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the
Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that
of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned
two hundred. 11
It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in
England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even
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fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure
for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,
but the most responsible estimate would seem to be
9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have
been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when
one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at
the end of the 13th century computed the number of
the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,
Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated
the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio o f women to
men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1
and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.
Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from
becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime:
since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” 12 Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the
Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of
Christ, women remained what they had always been in
Judeo-Christian culture:
Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in
Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head
of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of
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a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon
than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among
much which in that place precedes and follows about a
wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but
little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John
Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry
(S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to
friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary
evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!. . . Cicero in his second
book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead
them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads
them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is
avarice.. . . When a woman thinks alone, she thinks
evil. 13
T he word “woman” means “the lust o f the flesh. As it
is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death,
and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ” 14
Other characteristics o f women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan: And the first is, that they are more credulous.. . . The
second reason is, that women are naturally more
impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit.. . .
The third reason is that they have slippery tongues,
and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women
those things which by evil arts they know; and since
they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner
of vindicating themselves by witchcraft.. . .
. . . because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we
may add to what has already been said the following:
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that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it
is not surprising that they should come more under the
spell of witchcraft.
For as regards intellect, or the understanding of
spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature
from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of
the authorities, backed by various examples from the
Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually
like children. 15
Women are by nature instruments of Satan —they are
by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the
original creation:
But the natural reason is that she is more carnal
than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was