While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools, afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of "social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion (Midelfort 1972:3) or could be described in medical terms as a "panic,” a "craze,” an "epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the watch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.Įxamples of the misogyny that has inspired the scholarly approach to the watch-hunt abound. That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.Įven those who have studied the witch-hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the 16th-century demonologists. The witch-hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat.To this day, it remains one of the most understudied phenomena in European history 1 or, rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshiping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the "New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations. The execution of Anne Hendricks for witchcraft in Amsterdam in 1571. the clogs to Virtue and the goads that drive us to all vices, impiety and ruin.You are the Fool’s Paradise, the wiseman’s Plague and the Grand Error of Nature (Walter Charleton, Ephesian Matron, 1659). You are the traitors of Wisdom, the impediment to Industry. You are the true Hyenas, that allure us with the fairness of your skins and when folly has brought us within your reach, you leap upon us. Une bete imparfaicte, sans foy, sans crainte, sans costance.
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