In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial

by Mona Chollet

This was said with a smile, as if the fact of finding in your family tree an innocent woman murdered on grounds of delusional allegations were a cute little anecdote for dinner-party gossip. And it begs the question: which other mass crime, even one long-past, is it possible to speak of like this—with a smile?

we often make the mistake of considering the witch-hunts part of the Middle Ages, which is generally considered a regressive and obscurantist period, nothing to do with us now—yet the most extensive witch-hunts occurred during the Renaissance: they began around 1400 and had become a major phenomenon by 1560.

Whereas previously the courts disallowed their testimony, European women only achieved the status of subjects in their own right, in the eyes of the law, for the purpose of being accused, en masse, of witchcraft.

Witch-hunters are revealed as both obsessed with and terrified by female sexuality. Their interrogations included asking, tirelessly, what the Devil’s penis looked like.

The Malleus Malleficarum confirms that witches have the power to make men’s genitals disappear and that they keep whole collections of them in chests or in birds’ nests, where they go on desperately wiggling (although no such collection has ever been found).

“the Witch is arguably the only female archetype that has power on its own terms. She is not defined by anyone else. Wife, sister, mother, virgin, whore—these archetypes draw meaning based on relationships with others. The Witch, however, is a woman who stands entirely on her own.”

women are positioned in such a way that their own identity is constantly at risk of being muddled with others,’ of atrophying, of being swallowed up altogether.

From her very first year, a girl must know how to share her toys and sweets spontaneously and to give what she has to those around her, especially whatever she most treasures.