Extracts from THE HAMMER OF WITCHES [Malleus maleficarum], dtd 1486.

Even with the papal bull the German inquisitors found their preparation incomplete. Soon after their return from Rome they set about compiling a handbook - an exposition of witchcraft and a code of procedure for detection and punishment of witches. Completed in 1486, it was called the Hammer of Witches.

The method of beginning an examination by torture is as follows: First, the jailers prepare the implements of torture, then they strip the prisoner (if it be a woman, she has already been stripped by other women, upright and of good report). This stripping is lest some means of witchcraft may have been sewed into the clothing-such as often, taught by the Devil, they prepare from the bodies of unbaptized infants, [murdered] that they may forfeit salvation. And when the implements of torture have been prepared, the judge, both in person and through other good men zealous in the faith, tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely; but, if s/he will not confess, he bid attendants make the prisoner fast to the strappado or some other implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and is taken aside and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that s/he will in that case not be put to death.

Here it may be asked whether the judge, in the case of a prisoner much defamed, convicted both by witnesses and by proofs, nothing being lacking but his/her own confession, can properly lead him/her to hope that his/her life will be spared when, even if s/he confess his/her crime, s/he will be punished with death.

It must be answered that opinions vary. Some hold that even a witch of ill repute, against whom the evidence justifies violent suspicion, and who, as a ringleader of the witches, is accounted very dangerous, may be assured her life, and condemned instead to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water, in case she "I give sure and convincing testimony against other witches; yet this penalty of perpetual imprisonment must not be announced to her, but only that her life will be spared, and that she will be punished in some other fashion, perhaps by exile. And doubtless such notorious witches, especially those who prepare witch-potions or who by magical methods cure those bewitched, would be peculiarly suited to be thus preserved, in order to aid the bewitched or to accuse other witches, were it not that their accusations cannot be trusted, since the Devil is a liar, unless confirmed by proofs and witnesses.

Others hold, as to this point, that for a time the promise made to the witch sentenced to imprisonment is to be kept, but that after a time she should be burned.

A third view is, that the judge may safely promise witches to spare their lives, if only he will later excuse himself from pronouncing the sentence and will let another do this in his place....

But if, neither by threats nor by promises such as these, the witch can be induced to speak the truth, then the jailers must carry out the sentence, and torture the prisoner according to the accepted methods, with more or less of severity as the delinquent's crime may demand. And, while he is being tortured, he must be questioned on the articles of accusation, and this frequently and persistently, beginning with the lighter charges-for he will more readily confess the lighter than the heavier. And, while this is being done, the notary must write down everything in his record of the trial - how the prisoner is tortured, on what points he is questioned and how he answers.

And note that, if he confesses under the torture, he must afterward be conducted to another place, that he may confirm it and certify that it was not due alone to the force of the torture.

But, if the prisoner will not confess the truth satisfactorily, other sorts of tortures must be placed before him, with the statement that unless he will confess the truth, he must endure these also. But, if not even thus he can be brought into terror and to the truth, then the next day or the next but one is to be set for a continuation of the tortures - not a repetition, for it must not be repeated unless new evidences produced.

The judge must then address to the prisoners the following sentence: We, the judge, etc., do assign to you, such and such a day for the continuation of the tortures, that from your own mouth the truth may be heard, and that the whole may be recorded by the notary.

And during the interval, before the day assigned, the judge, in person or through approved men, must in the manner above described try to persuade the prisoner to confess, promising her (if there is aught to be gained by this promise) that her life shall be spared.

The judge shall see to it, moreover, that throughout this interval guards are constantly with the prisoner, so that she may not be I alone; because she will be visited by the Devil and tempted into suicide.

Introduction

Throughout the ages, there has never been a misogynistic event as widespread and virulent as the witch craze in the early modern period of European history. Only recently recognized in academic circles as a pogrom against women, the witch hunts reveal the depths to which people can sink in ignorance and mistrust of one another. The witch craze embodies sex crime in all senses of the term. In particularly singling out women, it is a crime against a specific gender. In accusing innocent thousands of depravity, it is sexual libel. And in the tortures and executions prescribed by secular and religious courts, it is sexual assault and murder at its most brutal.

The period between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries was one in which women must have cursed their bad luck of having been born female. Women feared their own sex and their own sexuality, not to mention one another. The early modern period was a time in which being a woman could be a crime in and of itself a crime often punishable by death. The anti-female Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches, became one of the first international best sellers, going through thirty-five editions in four different languages between 1486 and 1669 (Barstow 171). The Malleus Maleficarum advocated death to all witches, with the majority of witches being the majority of women.

The Dichotomy of Genders:

According to popular theory of the time, men and women had dichotomous natures. Men were sexually calm; women were over-sexed. Men were good; women were evil. Men were God-fearing; women were witches. Medical writings offered some creative interpretations of menstruation through the theory of dualism, thereby showing that elderly women were more likely to become witches than the already susceptible younger women:

In early European times, most doctors regarded menstruation as beneficial to women, as providing a monthly purging of those evil humors which might otherwise induce doubly reprehensible behavior on the part of the weaker, less rational sex. The relationship between menstruation and the production of the ovum remained undiscovered until the mid-nineteenth century. Before then menstruation was viewed as akin to bloodletting, the official medical remedy for most bodily disorders. Conversely, the ending of the menstrual cycle was viewed as negative, as a process whereby evil humors remained present in the body, capable of adding to that complex of female wickedness which could turn aging women into witches. According to one seventeenth-century French physician: "When seed and menstrual blood are retained in women besides [beyond] the intent of nature, they putrefie and are corrupted, and attain a malignant and venomous quality" (Banner 192).

In some areas, the term "witch hunt" became synonymous with "woman hunt." For example, in twelfth-century Russia, the entire female population was rounded up when the authorities were looking for witches, and in 1492 in Langendorf, all but two of the adult female population were charged with witchcraft (Larner 61). The sixteenth-century witchcraft sceptic Reginald Scot noted that no woman could be truly safe from witchcraft accusations: "And if it were true, honest women may be witches, in delight of all inquisitors: neither can any avoid being a witch, except she locke herself up in a chamber" (Banner 194).

Because of the different natures of men and women, in some areas male wizards were punished less harshly than female witches. As far back as the twelfth-century Spanish Laws of Forum Torolii, it was written, "A woman who bewitches men or beasts or other things, if it is proved against her, shall be burned" (Wedeck 257). Conversely, "If a man happens to be a magician, and it is proved against him; he shall be shaven in the form of a cross and scourged and banished" (Wedeck 257). Additionally, fewer men were accused of witchcraft than women, excepting Russia during the appeals of 1622-1700.

Bible Mis-Translations:

No witches could be spared their lives. This much was made clear by the Bible and by Nicholas RÈmy's 1595 publication Daemonolatria: showing mercy to witches "is like sparing mad dogs, that everyone knows are incurable" (Wedeck 259). Until the mid-1500s, the much-quoted scripture Exodus 22:18 had used the gender-neutral maleficos for the word "witch." By the mid-sixteenth century, the new Bible translations were feeding the fires of genocide.

The so-called "Luther's Bible" appeared in German. For women, this Bible was a setback. The approval for extermination of witches was given wider circulation than ever before, now that more men could read and understand the Bible including the passage from Exodus 22:18: "Die Zauberinnen soltu nicht leben lassen" (Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.) (Williams 55).

In this translation, the word for witch refers to females alone. In La Saincte Bible , published in 1566 Lyon, the word chosen for witch is intentionally in the feminine form. An annotation to the scripture states, "This law applies equally well to men guilty of this crime as to women. But the woman is specified, because this sex by its weakness is more readily deceived by Satan into undertaking such behavior" ( Williams 55). By default, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" now meant "Thou shalt not suffer a woman to live."

Androcentric assumptions further encouraged the connection between femininity and witchcraft. Both God and the Devil were imagined in masculine terms, and "since it was believed that the Devil's followers submitted to him sexually, it was naturally supposed that they should be women, some of who described their intercourse with the Devil in lurid detail" (Russell 1993 197). The Malleus Maleficarum elaborated on the nymphomania of women leading to sexual relations with demons:

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable . . . . There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils ( Kr”mer & Sprenger 46)

Gender Misconceptions:

This sexual giving-over to the Devil is not unusual considering current understanding of female sexuality. Women were commonly considered as "the more carnal and sexually indulgent members of the species" (Levack 126), a viewpoint backed up by the medical community. Dr. FranÁois Rabelais, Renaissance writer of Gargantua and Pantagruel, explains how sinful sexuality is an innate and dominant quality of women:

For Nature has placed in a secret and interior place in their bodies an animal, an organ that is not present in men; and here there are sometimes engendered certain salty, nitrous, caustic, sharp, biting, stabbing, and bitterly irritating humors, by the pricking and painful itching of which for this organ is all nerves and sensitive feelings their whole body is shaken, all their senses transported, all their passions indulged, and all their thought confused. So that if Nature had not sprinkled their foreheads with a little shame you would see them more insanely chasing the cod piece than ever the Proetides did, or the Mimallonides, or the Bacchic Thyiades on the day of their Bacchanals (Klaits 68).

This medical viewpoint changed by the beginning of the seventeenth century. No longer was the uterus considered a disassociated and migratory organism. However, the belief that women were chronically over sexed did not change. In fact, it was believed that women's nymphomania was harmful to men. Because women are capable of multiple orgasm, it was believed that men physically drained themselves in an attempt to sate women. "As physicians held that only moderate expenditure of semen was compatible with good health, female sexual demands seemed a physical as well as a moral threat to men" (Klaits 68-69). Clerical misogynists began to preach that the fondling of women destroyed the mind, and that "to love any woman too passionately, too physically, including a wife, was adultery" (Quaiffe 82). Preying on this fear of women's sexuality, "the mediaeval painters, and, later Goya, paint the witch as a voluptuous, seductive creature" (Wedeck 157). By the 1600s, witches were no longer just ugly old women. Beautiful young women were singled out as witches as well. Beauty and youth were considered clever disguises for witches to don. "In 1629, a nineteen-year-old girl, Barbara Gobel, was burned at the stake; the executioner's list describes her as 'the fairest maid in Wurzburg.' Not far off, another young woman who went to the stake was called the 'fairest and the purest maiden in all Cologne'" (Masello 167).

The only way women could combat their evil sexuality was through virginity or abstinence. Virginity became the ideal, and the only way a woman could free herself from sexual temptation and evil was by renouncing her sexuality.

This new development was a means through which men exerted control over female behaviour and in the process played down their own sense of sexual inferiority. They failed to satisfy the carnal woman. The virgin saved them from this humiliation. All good women must emulate the virgin as far as their circumstances permitted. Even married women should avoid sex except for procreation. Women who did not conform exhibited their sensuality, their devotion to evil ( Quaiffe 85).

Because of dual beliefs of women as whores/virgins, sexual impropriety was one of the most serious accusations that could be made against a woman in a court of law. In a study of Devon in the 1590s and the 1690s, it is estimated that three-quarters of all defamation cases and ninety percent of those involving a female plaintiff were brought for slander of sexual reputation. In the Devon defamation suits covering the years from 1634 to 1688, the percentage of suits which originated in a sexual slander concerning a woman's reputation is even higher, at nearly 100% (Thompson 84).

Such an emphasis was placed on women's sexuality that even in cases involving men slandering other men, "the actionable words usually made reference to a particular woman's reputation or to female sexuality in general" (Thompson 85).

Extreme cases show that sexual defamation could lead to an accusation of witchcraft. Sadly, the most common insults aimed at women contained both "witch" and "whore" (Thompson 95), with the current definition of "whore" meaning a woman who freely and indiscriminately had sex with anyone. In the 1584 Exeter defamation suit between Philip Wyvell and Wilmot Basse, Wyvell allegedly told Basse, "thou are an arrant whore witch and thou hast almost witched thy own eyes out of thy head, and my father was one hundred pounds the worse for thee. . . . I will fry thee in thine own grease like an old whore witch as thou art" (Thompson 187).

The pairing of "witch" with "whore" resulted in serious repercussions. Witchcraft was now considered a sex offense. A high correlation exists between witchcraft cases and such sex offense cases as incest, sodomy, and adultery. In fact, "the figures for all of them rose and fell together" (Larner 60).

Witchcraft as a Sex Crime:

Before 1550, there was no preoccupation with the sexual side of witchcraft. Although sexual deviance might be noted, it was not exclusively focused upon. An exception to this rule was the 1232 report on witches Sabbats. Pope Gregory IX wrote that those present at a Sabbat "indulge in the most loathsome sensuality, having no regard to sex. If there are more men than women, men satisfy one another's depraved appetites. Women do the same for one another" (Gregory IX 49).

By the 1550s, however, most European witch trials focused upon witches as the sexual slaves of Satan. Although obscene acts were usually not offered as evidence in the initial accusations of a witch, by the time the accused was indicted, the prosecutors were "predisposed to see the witch as a sex offender" (Klaits 51). Sex crimes became integral to witchcraft and were soon incorporated into the very definition of a witch. According to sixteenth-century English lawyer William West,

A witch or a hag is she which being deluded by a league made with the devil through his persuasion, inspiration or juggling, thinketh she can design what manner or evil things soever, either by thought or imprecation, as to shake the air with lightnings and thunder, to cause hail and tempests, to remove green corn or trees to another place, to be carried of her familiar (which hath taken upon him the deceitful shape of a goat, swine, or calf, etc.) into some mountain far distant, in a wonderful short space of time, and sometime to fly upon a staff or fork, or some other instrument, and to spend all the night after with her sweetheart, in playing, sporting, banqueting, dancing, dalliance, and divers other devilish lusts and lewd disports, and to show a thousand such monstrous mockeries (Masello 145).

The predisposition of witch as sex offender was proven by means of a series of leading questions which were asked of the accused witch. By means of entrapment and torture, the interrogators allowed no possibility for the accused to prove their innocence. By the seventeenth century, interrogation of accused witches had become so routine that a pre-formulated list of questions was used. The judges in Alsace, for example, used a set of twenty-nine questions which they called:

Questions to Be Asked of a Witch:

1.How long have you been a witch?
2.Why did you become a witch?
3.How did you become a witch, and what happened on that occasion?
4.Who is the one you chose to be your incubus? What was his name?
5.What was the name of your master among the evil demons?
6.What was the oath you were forced to render him?
7.How did you make this oath, and what were its conditions?
8.What finger were you forced to raise? Where did you consummate your union with your incubus?
9.What demons and what other humans participated at the sabbat?
10.What food did you eat there?
11.How was the sabbat banquet arranged?
12.Were you seated at the banquet?
13.What music was played there, and what dances did you dance?
14.What did your incubus give you for your intercourse?
15.What devil's mark did your incubus make on your body?
16.What injury have you done to such and such a person, and how did you do it?
17.Why did you inflict this injury?
18.How can you relieve this injury?
19.What herbs or what other methods can you use to cure these injuries?
20.Who are the children on whom you have cast a spell? And why have you done it?
21.What animals have you bewitched to sickness or death, and why did you commit such acts?
22.Who are your accomplices in evil?
23.Why does the devil give you blows in the night?
24.What is the ointment with which you rub your broomstick made of?
25.How are you able to fly through the air? What magic words do you utter then?
26.What tempests have you raised, and who helped you to produce them?
27.What [plagues of] vermin and caterpillars have you created?
28.What do you make these pernicious creatures out of and how do you do it?
29.Has the devil assigned a limit to the duration of your evildoing?
(Masello 171-173)

The Sexual Profile of a Witch:

In desperation to answer the inquisitors questions, women often spoke of their sexual fantasies and past dalliances. Not surprisingly, "a connection between old sexual transgressions and women's confessions of witchcraft turns up in records all across Europe" (Barstow 18). In the New England trials, Alice Lake denied witchcraft but admitted to becoming pregnant when she was still unmarried and attempting to abort the fetus (Barstow 134).

By the time these pre-prepared interrogations had been conducted on thousands, the sexual profile of the witch had already emerged. In 1612, Pierre de Lancre, counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux and prosecutor under King Henry I's commission, published his Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges at dÈmons. His book catalogues the classic sexual perversions of witches. "The powerfully sexual nature of the dominant imagery begins with the broomstick ride, continues with exciting whippings, the fascinative close-up look at devilishly huge sexual organs, the baby-eating (possibly sublimated incest or infanticide?), and, finally, the frenzied orgy itself" (Klaits 53).

Elderly women were again singled out, being considered especially vulnerable to sexual depravity. Since no woman could be content without sex, the most deprived would be the isolated elderly.

In 1550 the Italians Arnoldo Albertini and Jerome Cardan called witches "mostly old women who can find no lovers." According to a sixteenth-century Spanish friar, the insatiable sexuality of aging women could lead them to take up with the devil. "Once they are old, and men pay no attention to them, the women have recourse but to the devil to satisfy their appetites." Conversely, the devil's minions, the demons, took up with old women precisely because the latter were so grateful to have lovers that they could easily be controlled (Banner 191-192).

These same elderly women were accused of corrupting the young. "Old women, having failed as sex objects in their youth and vindictive against men, led young girls into the joys of lesbianism" (Quaiffe 94).

The first written record of a witch's ritual copulation with the Devil is in the testimony of the 1335 Toulouse trial of Anne-Marie de Georgel. [Incidentally, this case also marked one of the first known witch trials in which torture was employed ( Russell 1972 183)]. In the court records, Anne-Marie de Georgel "found a huge he-goat and after greeting him she submitted to his pleasure" ( "Inquisition of Toulouse" 95).

The behaviour of witches at the Sabbat became more sexually elaborate. No longer was the osculum infame ("the kiss of shame" in which the witch kissed the Devil's anus) the pinnacle of the evening. Now the naked witches danced lasciviously, back to back, until the dancing turned into a sexual orgy that continued to the dawn. Incest and homosexual intercourse were encouraged. Often the devil would climax the proceedings by copulating painfully, it was generally reported with every man, woman, and child in attendance, as mothers yielded to Satan before their daughters eyes and initiated them into sexual service to the diabolical master (Klaits 53).

Other common depravities of witches included adultery (Roper 32), bestiality (with the Devil in the form of a cat or goat), cunnilingus (Thompson 124), anilingus (through the osculum infame ), and fellatio (Roper 27-28). Fellatio was considered particularly dangerous and was seen as a form of seminal vampirism performed by post-menopausal women:

The old witch was in a sense a dry woman who, instead of feeding others well, diverted nourishment to her own selfish ends. Older widows were believed to have the power to ruin young men sexually, and youths were warned against marrying such women because they were sexually ravenous, and would suck out their seed, weakening them with their insatiable hunger for seminal fluid and contaminating them with their own impurities (Roper 27-28).

As further perversions, it was also discovered that the Devil takes "the pretty witches from the front, the ugly ones from behind" (Masello 148), thus not following that most holy of sexual traditions: the missionary position by which men asserted their God-given authority over women. Pandering, especially by elderly women, was another common accusation. Older women "were supposedly engaged in a vast conspiracy of secret prostitution, as they controlled those young female devils (the succubi) and the young male devils (the incubi) whom they sent to seduce others and to enlist them in their satanic worship" (Banner 193). In addition, "Reginald Scot contended that 'old witches are shown to procure as many virgins for Incubus as they can, whereby in time they grow to be excellent bawds'" (Banner 193).

One of the stranger sexual crimes accused of witches was "trucken." A kind of heavy and deadly frottage, "trucken" was performed upon women and newborn babies. In three examples, "trucken" occurs as follows:

Georg Schmetzer's wife complained of feeling that something was coming to her at night, lying on her and pressing her so that she suffered from pain down one side. She suspected the lying-in-maid of coming to her bed in the evening and lying on top of her a fear strengthened by the maid's unorthodox suggested remedy for her backache that she should undress and lie on top of her in a kind of all over massage. Anna Maria Cramer believed a witch was coming to her at night and lying on her, pressing down on her pregnant body. Another woman heard a mysterious voice crying 'druckdich Madelin, druckdich' (be pressed down, Maggie, be pressed down) and she felt something trying to bite her neck (Roper 29).

The Fascination With Genitals:

The most bizarre sexual crime a witch could be accused of was penis-thievery. Perhaps the pinnacle of gynophobia, this crime is extensively documented in the Malleus Maleficarum. Bewitchment could result in impotence, or in extreme examples, the disappearance of the penis itself. The Malleus Maleficarum cites two such examples. In the first, sexual assault is shown as a cure for impotence:

In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: 'If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health.' So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly round her neck, choked her, saying: 'Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.' Then she, being unable to cry out, and with her face already swelling and growing black, said: 'Let me go, and I will heal you.' And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch (Kr”mer & Sprenger 119).

Although the next example seems humorous on first reading, it rapidly loses its humour when we remember that the penalty for this crime was torture and death:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many as is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil's work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest (Kr”mer & Sprenger 121).

With the focus on male genitals it comes as no surprise that there is a corresponding fascination with female genitals. Many women were determined witches through the ubiquitous genital examinations. The body search was a necessary part of any witch trial. Two reasons why the accused witch's genitalia were important at all in witch trials were the sadistic and prurient desires of the men who oversaw the trials, and the belief in the witch's mark. The witch's mark is the "supernumerary nipple or other spot where a witch suckled her familiar" (Masello 233). Although "any wart, mole, or other skin growth on the accused's body might be identified as a devil's mark or witch's tit" (Klaits 56), the genitalia were the parts of the body searched the most painstakingly. The need for a careful examination of the genitals is explained in several law books of the period. In Richard Bernard's authoritative 1627 Guide to Grand-Jury Men,

Bernard insists, with copious citation of the available English cases, that the mark may be anywhere, but that, since it is likely to be in 'very hidden places ', the search must be diligent. Dalton (a later guide-writer), in his summary, shifts the language of Bernard's argument: the teats, "these the Devil's marks . . . be often in their secretest parts, and therefore require diligent and careful search. Fortified by Dalton's confident pronouncements, magistrates after 1630, confronted by the evidential difficulties that typified all witchcraft accusations, employed the recommended body search as a routine aspect of pre-trial procedure. And the search focused upon the genital area, as Dalton's misreading of his source proved equally authoritative (Holmes & Hall 71).

The genital search was extensive, affecting trials on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In Scotland, accused witches were always searched for "marks . . . between her thy's and her body" (Klaits 57). Likewise, in Salem, three women were condemned because of "a preternatural excrescence of flesh between the pudendum and the anus, much like teats, and not usual in women" (Klaits 57).

Careful examinations could not make up for the woeful ignorance of female anatomy, an ignorance which affected the outcomes of several witch trials ( Thompson 123).

One witch suspect in the Swiss canton of Fribourg contemptuously chided her judges for their naivete about female anatomy. After the prosecutors discovered what they took to be a devil's mark on her genitals, Ernni Vuffiod informed them that 'if this was a sign of witchcraft, many women would be witches ' (Klaits 57).

In 1648, when Margaret Jones was accused of having the witch's mark in her genitals, "her friend explained that it was a tear left over from a difficult childbirth" (Barstow 129). Nevertheless, Matthew Hopkins, witchfinder general, did not take this as an excuse. Hemorrhoids or a swollen clitoris were not a believable excuse to him.

On rare occasions, death was not the penalty for witchcraft proven via abnormal genitalia. In seventeenth-century England, physician Nicholas Culpeper had written a compendium of female genital disorders. In this compendium it was noted that the clitoris could reach the size of a man's penis in some women, and that this was caused not by witchcraft, but allegedly by "too much nourishment of the part, from the looseness of it by often handling." Culpeper's cure for this "disease" was not hanging, but something at least as excruciating. This physician suggested the application of astringents to dry out the clitoris; then, if the organ failed to diminish in size, "it should be cut off, or tie it with a ligature of Silk of Horsehair, till it mortify" (Thompson 124).

In 1648, when Margaret Jones was accused of having the witch's mark in her genitals, "her friend explained that it was a tear left over from a difficult childbirth" (Barstow 129). Nevertheless, Matthew Hopkins, witch finder general, did not take this as an excuse. Hemorrhoids or a swollen clitoris were not a believable excuse to him.

Similarly, in seventeenth-century Holland, a case is recorded in which a woman's clitoris was "not unlike a boy's member." She was tried and sentenced to burning as a tribade, but was reprieved by a "merciful" judge who amputated her clitoris and sent her into exile. . . . She was punished with a man's sentence, exile, for her natural bodily and gender confusion (Thompson 132).

Torture:

Torture was as much an intrinsic part of witch trials as genital searches. "Although in ordinary cases torture might be a last resort, in the exceptional crime of witchcraft it was often seen as society's first and only instrument" (Klaits 133 ). The most popular forms of torture, the strappado, the thumbscrews, and the rack, were applied to men as well as women. However, some forms of torture were devised for women in particular, and these tortures were sexual in nature.

The simplest form of torture was rape. Although rape was not considered an accepted method for gaining information, it still occurred within the confines of the witches ' prisons. One example is Magdalena Weixler, a condemned witch in 1614 Ellwangen:

Weixler's case was especially horrible because her jailer had tricked her into turning over her jewelry and granting him sexual favors in return for a false promise to spare her from torture. Soon afterward, the jailer was caught and tried for bribery and breaking the secrecy of court proceedings. His trial revealed widespread rape of imprisoned women and the existence of an extortion racket whereby guards sold names to torture victims who desperately needed people to accuse of complicity in witchcraft. Such corruption among jailers must have been common when prisons themselves were a kind of torture, especially for those too poor to buy food and warm clothing from the turnkey (Klaits 149).

Likewise, pre-pubescent Catharina Latomia of Lorraine was raped twice in her cell, nearly dying from the attack (Barstow 132).

Secularly recognized tortures were no less sexual in nature. Legal torture permitted men to make gratuitous sexual advances and to perform sadistic experiments upon women. As examples,

When the executioner Jehan Minart of Cambrai prepared the already condemned Aldegonde de Rue for the stake, he examined her interior parts, mouth, and "parties honteuses" (shameful parts). When a woman was whipped, she had to be stripped to the waist, her breasts bared to the public. To try to force a confession, a priest applied hot fat repeatedly to Catherine Boyraionne's eyes and her armpits, the pit of her stomach, her thighs, her elbows, and "dans sa nature" in her vagina. She died in prison, no doubt from injuries (Barstow 131).

Mastectomy was an unusual mode of torture, not becoming customary until 1599 in Bavaria. The most famous case is that of Anna Pappenheimer. After already being tortured with the strappado, a public demonstration was in order. Anna was stripped, her flesh torn off with red-hot pincers, and her breasts cut off. As if this was not enough, the bloody breasts were forced into her mouth and then into the mouths of her two grown sons. A contemporary torture manual recorded that "the female breasts are extremely sensitive, on account of the refinement of the veins. This fiendish punishment was thus used as a particular torment to women. But it was more than physical torture: by rubbing the severed breasts around her sons ' lips, the executioner made a hideous parody of her role as mother and nurse, imposing an extreme humiliation upon her. (Barstow 144).

Conclusion:

It is such torture and treatment which must have shown women that if they valued their lives, they must hide their sexuality. In a time when men publicly flaunted their genitals by wearing cod pieces, women knew that their own overt sexuality made them evil beings (Barstow 150). When a woman watched the public trials of witches and witnessed the stripping and mutilation of other women, she knew she was seeing her own possible future. Is it a surprise that by the 1800s, women were perceived as having little to no sex drives, as being passive and submissive? No, it is a sign of women's need to adapt in order to survive.

>>Return to Index of Topics.