Historians estimate that in the witch hunts of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries—during which somewhere between 60,000 and millions of innocent people were burned alive or hanged—eighty percent of those executed were women. The definitive treatise on witchcraft, the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches, informs us, “Three general vices appear to have special dominion over wicked women, namely, infidelity, ambition, and lust. Therefore, they are more than others included towards witchcraft, who more than others are given to these vices.” As the inquisitors explained, “All
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