The Women They Burned

Words to Know

Inquisitor — an official appointed to investigate and prosecute heresy.

Widow — a woman whose husband has died. In my own scriptures, one of the three groups God is repeatedly said to defend.

Confession — here, not telling a priest. A signed statement of guilt, which the law required before a person could be put to death.

Confiscation — the seizure of a convicted person’s property by the authorities.

For three hundred years, Europe put women to death as witches. Here is the chain, in order.

• 1484: Pope Innocent VIII issues a bull, Summis desiderantes, confirming that witchcraft is real and authorizing two inquisitors to act against it. ^{1 2}
• 1486: One of them, Heinrich Kramer, publishes a handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches.
• 1490: The Inquisition condemns the book. It is reissued again and again for two hundred years anyway. ³
• 1570 to 1660: The peak of the killing, in the age of the Reformation. ⁴
• 1614: The Spanish Inquisition effectively ends witch-burning in Spain.
• 1692: Nineteen people are hanged at Salem, in Puritan Massachusetts.

The bull was a turf war.

Kramer had been trying to run witch trials in southern Germany and kept being blocked by the local authorities. So he went to Rome, and came back with a piece of paper from the pope commanding them not to obstruct him. It was not a discovery about the supernatural. It was a turf war, settled in his favour at the top.

Within a year, Kramer’s own trial at Innsbruck collapsed, and the local bishop ordered him out of the diocese. The first person to stop him was a bishop. Remember that, because it complicates the picture.

Go deeperWhy the Innsbruck trial actually collapsed

The bull itself was dated 5 December 1484, and claimed witchcraft was already widespread in certain German territories. Kramer was a Dominican, and the bishops and town councils blocking him had a reason: they did not accept that he had jurisdiction in their territory, and told him so.

The Innsbruck trial did not just collapse on its own. The local bishop reviewed the proceedings and found that Kramer had become obsessed with questioning the accused women about their sexual lives. The bishop’s letters survive, and in them he called Kramer unhinged.

The handbook outran the church that condemned it.

The Malleus explained how to identify a witch, how to interrogate her, and how to get a confession. When the Inquisition rejected it in 1490, it did not matter. It had been printed, and printed books do not need an institution’s permission to keep existing. Its customers were secular judges in town halls and small territorial courts. ³

Go deeperSpeyer, the fake endorsement, and the ghost co-author

It was printed at Speyer, and it carried a second name on the title page beside Kramer's, though that man's actual involvement has been doubted for a long time; the book was mostly or entirely Kramer's own work.

Its front page also carried an approval from the theology faculty at Cologne. That approval was obtained by misrepresentation, and the printed text goes well beyond anything those theologians actually approved.

You should hear the next thing from me first.

Most of the killing was not done by the Inquisition. It was done by ordinary local courts, Catholic and Protestant, under secular law. That is not a defense of the church, which supplied the doctrine, the authorization and the handbook. But this was not only a Catholic problem.

Careful modern estimates put the number executed in Europe between about 1450 and 1750 at roughly forty thousand to sixty thousand people. I give you a range because that is what the evidence supports. You will hear nine million. That number is a nineteenth-century invention with nothing behind it. Roughly three quarters to four fifths of the accused were women, with wide variation from place to place. ⁵

Here is how a single one of those deaths was produced.

A cow dies, and somebody remembers a quarrel at the door. A neighbour tells the magistrate. The woman from the quarrel is arrested and searched for a devil’s mark.

Then comes the hinge. The law inherited from Rome held that you could not execute someone for a capital crime without either two eyewitnesses or a confession. For a secret crime like witchcraft there were never two eyewitnesses. The law permitted torture to obtain a confession, within limits, and then witchcraft was classed as an exceptional crime and the limits were set aside. The torture continues until she confesses.

Then she is required, under torture, to name her accomplices, and every name goes through the same process. That is how one dead cow becomes two hundred prisoners inside eighteen months. It is a procedure, working exactly as designed. ⁶

Go deeperThe pricker, the needle, and the torture names

Between the quarrel and the arrest sat a change in the law itself: in many places a court could now act without a formal accuser, on common report alone. That removed the one thing that had always restrained accusations, the risk an accuser bore if he turned out to be wrong.

The search for a devil's mark meant a woman stripped and examined by appointed women for a mole, a wart, or a patch of skin. In some places a professional called a pricker was employed, who pushed a long needle into the spot; if she did not bleed or flinch, that counted as evidence. Some prickers were paid for each witch they found, and their needles survive today, some of them built to retract into the handle so they never drew blood at all.

The torture itself came with rules on paper: a limited duration, a limited number of repetitions, a doctor present, and the confession repeated "freely" afterward, away from the instruments. The Latin name for the category that swept those rules away was crimen exceptum. Denial was read as the devil giving her strength, and silence as the devil's own silence; either way, the questioning continued, because no answer but one would end it. A woman who tried to take her "free" confession back could be tortured again for it.

The methods had names. The strappado hoisted her off the ground by her arms, tied behind her back, until the shoulders gave way. There were thumbscrews and leg screws. In Scotland there was waking: simply refusing to let her sleep, for days, which breaks a person as reliably as anything and leaves no mark at all.

Somebody was paid at every step.

The judges took fees per case. The executioner took a fee per execution. And the bill went to her. Itemized accounts survive from German trials: so much for the ropes, so much for the wood. In a number of German territories, her property could also be confiscated. Historians argue about how far that drove the hunts, and I will not overstate it.

In the prince-bishoprics of Bamberg and Würzburg, around 1626 to 1631, several hundred people were executed in each. When the hunts reached the burgomasters themselves, the complaints reached the emperor, who eventually had the hunts stopped. ⁶

Go deeperThe itemized bill, and Bamberg's purpose-built prison

The executioner was also paid extra for each torture session, and the men who guarded her drew a wage too. The itemized bills that survive break the costs down further than rope and wood: her keep in prison, the executioner's labor, and in some places even a meal for the officials afterward, all charged to her or her family.

Confiscation meant something specific: the same authority conducting the trial collected the estate of everyone it convicted, which gave it a direct financial interest in a guilty verdict.

Bamberg itself built a purpose-made prison for witch trials, with its own cells and torture chamber, in 1627. And it was not only the poor who were eventually swept up there; the hunts reached wealthy citizens and councillors as well as the burgomasters themselves.

One of the burgomasters wrote a letter, and it survives.

Johannes Junius, the mayor of Bamberg, was arrested and tortured in 1628. From his cell he smuggled out a letter to his daughter: innocent I came into this prison, innocent I was tortured, innocent I must die. He wrote down what the executioner had said to him:

Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake, confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture.

He was burned in 1628. ⁷

Go deeperVeronica, and how they broke a magistrate

He was fifty-five years old, a substantial man, and at first he held out. Only after being tortured with thumbscrews, then leg screws, then hoisted did he confess. When he would not name accomplices, the executioner walked him street by street through the town and made him produce a name for each one.

He bribed a guard to carry the letter out to his daughter, Veronica. In it he also told her that anyone who entered that prison was made a witch and never came out.

The man who probably signed such warrants himself, before his turn came, described the mechanism from inside it.

Now look at which women.

The surviving records show the same figure again and again: a widow, an old woman living alone, a midwife, a woman with nobody behind her.

A woman with a husband, grown sons and brothers was an expensive person to accuse, because her family could sue the accuser. A widow with no sons could do none of that. So she was not chosen because she seemed guiltier. She was chosen because she was cheap. Hold that word. It explains most of this unit.

Go deeperMore profiles, and the legal deterrent explained

The record shows more than one type: a woman who knew about herbs, a woman with a sharp tongue who had argued with a neighbor, a woman living at the edge of the village, even a woman whose cow happened to live when the neighbor's died.

Accusing a well-connected woman carried real legal risk. Her family could bring a suit for defamation against the accuser, pay for a proctor to argue her case, and make life unbearable for whoever had started it. In several jurisdictions, an accuser whose case failed could be made to pay the costs himself.

These were the women I spent my time with.

The widow who put two small coins in the treasury, whom I pointed at as the one who had given everything (Mark 12:41–44), is exactly the kind of woman those courts would have burned. So are the women who stayed at my execution when the men had run (Mark 15:40–41).

Go deeperThe bleeding woman, and the men left unnamed

There was also the woman in the crowd who had bled for twelve years and spent all her money on physicians who never helped her: unclean, unattached, and easy to suspect.

One detail about those women is easy to miss: they are named in your own Bible, while the men who fled are not.

Now the verse the hunters used.

It is Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. What the Hebrew word described is genuinely uncertain. The oldest Greek translation, made by Jews before I was born, rendered it as a maker of potions, a poisoner. By the time the English Bibles put “witch” there, the word meant what the Malleus described: a pact with the devil. None of that is in the Hebrew. The most famous of those translations was commissioned by King James, who had personally taken part in witch trials in Scotland. And the verse sits among rules about oxen and cloaks. It is not a commission to search Europe for three hundred years.

Go deeperMekhashshephah, and King James's own book

Judges in the witch trials did not cite the verse quietly. Many had the verse read out loud in court as their authority.

The actual Hebrew word is mekhashshephah, and it belongs to a cluster of terms in that law for people who dealt in potions, charms, spells and divination for hire, a different kind of person from a widow whose neighbor's cow died.

By the time English readers met the word "witch," it meant something built over four hundred years in Europe: a woman who had made a pact with the devil, flown to a gathering, and lain with him. None of that was in a Bronze Age law code. King James had also written a book on demonology defending the witch trials, in the 1590s, before he commissioned his translation.

I was asked to enforce exactly this kind of law once.

They brought me a woman caught in adultery, and the law prescribed death. I said: let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone (John 8:1–11). That passage is not in the oldest manuscripts of John, and your Bible probably says so. But for two thousand years nobody has been able to get it out of the book, and the church that burned forty thousand people had it bound into every copy it owned.

Go deeperWhat I told her, and how it survived

They left one at a time, the oldest first, until no one remained to throw anything. And I told her I did not condemn her either.

As for how the passage survived: somebody added it, or moved it, or preserved it from outside the main text. Scribes who knew it did not originally belong there copied it anyway. It survived because the people who read it could not believe it was not mine.

The worst of it was not in the Middle Ages.

The peak came between 1570 and 1660. Europe had just split, and each side prosecuted witches to prove it was in earnest. Those decades were the coldest of the last thousand years, and harvests failed. And prosecutions had moved into small local courts with no higher court over them to throw the case out. That last one is the whole difference. ⁴

Go deeperWhere borders, weather and courts collided

The heaviest hunting happened specifically along the borders where Catholic and Protestant territories met, each side needing to prove itself to its neighbor. And the weather did not just fail once: harvests failed repeatedly, vines froze, and real famines followed. A society that believes misfortune has an author, facing crop failure after crop failure, goes looking for the author.

The courts themselves had also changed. Prosecutions moved out of church courts and into small local secular ones, a town council here, a minor lord's jurisdiction there, which were closest to the panic, least experienced, and had nothing above them to overrule a bad verdict. The proof is that where these changes did not happen, the killing never took hold.

The Spanish Inquisition barely burned any witches at all.

After a panic in the Basque country, it sent an inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, to investigate. He took statements from nearly two thousand people and reported: There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about. In 1614 Spain effectively ended witch-burning, a century before Protestant Germany and Scotland. The Inquisition had a central office that reviewed cases and a rule that confessions must be corroborated. ⁸

This book is not an argument against one denomination. It is an argument about what institutions do when nothing checks them.

Go deeperWhat Salazar actually found, and why it mattered

Salazar spent months taking those statements, and the people he interviewed had already confessed. What he found was that there was no evidence whatsoever that a single act of witchcraft had actually occurred, and that the confessions collapsed as soon as they were checked against each other.

That bureaucratic caution is why the Spanish Inquisition, for all its reputation, ended up killing fewer women than a single village council in Saxony.

Now look at the map.

The heaviest killing was in the fragmented territories of Germany, Catholic and Protestant both. Presbyterian Scotland was proportionally among the worst in Europe. In England, from 1645 to 1647, the self-styled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, charged towns for his services and was involved in something like a hundred deaths. ⁹

And there were people who stood up.

• John Gaule, a country vicar, preached against Hopkins from his own pulpit, and Hopkins stopped coming to that district.
• At Salem, ministers attacked evidence drawn from visions, and the governor dissolved the court. Five years later the judge Samuel Sewall had his confession of guilt read out in his own church.
• Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit who walked condemned women to the stake, wrote in 1631 that if torture goes on until there is a confession, everyone tortured confesses, and that not one of the women he had accompanied had been guilty. ¹⁰

Remember that the next time you are told that nothing could have been done.

Go deeperGiles Corey, Increase Mather, and Spee's own end

Salem was far from the worst of it, and far from the only place it happened. Scotland's numbers were brutal for its size: somewhere between one and a half and two and a half thousand executed out of a very small population, and the waking, the pricking and the professional witch-finder himself were largely Scottish inventions.

England hanged rather than burned. Hopkins toured East Anglia with a partner, and he charged for it directly: one town paid him twenty-three pounds, at a time when a labouring man earned only a few pence a day. In about two years the two of them were involved in something like a hundred deaths, possibly more.

Gaule did more than preach. He published a book afterward taking Hopkins's methods apart, and that, along with his sermon, was enough to keep the man out of an entire county.

At Salem, an old man named Giles Corey was crushed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea, at least five more died in jail, several of the accused were children, and one of the hanged was himself a minister. It was stopped by ministers, led by Increase Mather, who attacked the use of "spectral evidence" and wrote that it were better that ten suspected witches escape than that one innocent person be condemned.

Five years later, the judge Samuel Sewall stood up in his own church in Boston while a paper was read out in which he took the blame and shame of it on himself and asked God's pardon; he kept a fast day for it every year for the rest of his life. He is the only judge of that court known to have done so.

Spee was given the specific task of hearing the confessions of condemned women and walking them to the stake, at Würzburg, in the worst years of the hunts. He published his answer to it anonymously in 1631, in a book called the Cautio Criminalis, because publishing it under his own name would have destroyed him. His argument was simple and unanswerable: if torture continues until there is a confession, then everyone tortured confesses, which means the confessions prove nothing and the procedure cannot tell a guilty woman from an innocent one. He died three years later, aged forty-three, of plague caught while nursing wounded soldiers.

This went on for three hundred years.

That is ten or twelve generations in which the safest thing a woman could be was quiet, married, unremarkable and supervised. Some of what is still preached about women being silent is the residue of it. That preaching rests on two texts, 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. 1 Timothy is one of the letters most disputed as to whether Paul wrote it. The verses in 1 Corinthians turn up in different places in different old manuscripts. Those are the texts. They are not mine.

Go deeperWhat the verses say, and Paul's other words

A fear trained into a population over three hundred years does not vanish when the trials stop; it goes on shaping people long after nobody can name the reason.

The two texts themselves say specific things. 1 Timothy 2:11–12 tells a woman to learn in silence and not to teach or have authority over a man. 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 tells women to keep silence in the churches and ask their husbands at home.

Go and read them in context. The 1 Corinthians verses also sit oddly in their chapter, which is part of why a great many scholars doubt them. And the same Paul, in the same collection of letters, greets a woman as an apostle, calls another a deacon of her church, and lists women by name among his fellow workers.

Here is what I actually did.

I let a woman sit down with the students and learn, and said she had chosen the better thing (Luke 10:38–42). The first people to find the tomb empty were women, and the men did not believe them (Luke 24:11).

Go deeperThe longest conversation I ever had

Her sister Martha complained that she belonged in the kitchen instead, since her place was not beside the students at all.

The longest conversation I am recorded as having with any one person, in any of the four accounts, was with a woman at a well, alone, in a country where I was not even supposed to speak to her (John 4:7–27).

And every one of the four accounts agrees on who found the tomb empty first: the women, whom the men then refused to believe.

So here is what I say to mothers.

For twenty centuries, the institution that used my name has been very sure about what women must not do.

For three of those centuries, it burned the ones who had nobody to protect them, charged the wood to their families, and in places kept the house.

And the people who kept the actual thing alive through all of it — who taught the prayers to children, who fed whoever was at the door, who sat with the dying, who forgave debts nobody recorded — mostly did not get their names written down anywhere.

I know exactly who they were.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Exodus 22:18 — thou shalt not suffer a witch to live — and then read the ten verses on either side of it.

You will find: that it sits inside a list of ordinances about oxen, fields, borrowed property, seduction and lending money to the poor. Then look at the footnote in a modern translation and see what it says about the word.

Then look up: John 8:1–11 — a crowd holding the law, and a woman they were entitled to kill. Read your Bible’s note about the manuscripts too, and then ask why nobody could ever get it out of the book.

Then read: the letter of Johannes Junius to his daughter, Bamberg, 1628. It is printed in English in standard document collections. Two pages. Read what the executioner told him to do.

The Short Version

• The 1484 bull of Innocent VIII backed an inquisitor, Kramer, whose Malleus kept selling after the church condemned it in 1490.
• Roughly 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed, not nine million, and three in four or more were women.
• The law demanded a confession, torture produced it, and torture for accomplices’ names turned one grudge into a panic.
• The accused paid the costs, and the women chosen were the cheap ones, with no one to protect them.
• The peak was 1570–1660, Protestant and Catholic alike; Salazar, Gaule, Sewall and Spee show it could be stopped.

Think About It

1. Who in your church has nobody standing behind them? Do you know their name?
2. The procedure guaranteed a confession, and then asked for names. What safeguard would have broken it, and why did some places have it and others not?

Go deeperTwo more words, and books worth reading

Midwife: a woman who helped at childbirth, and in this period one of the few women with any independent standing, which is also why she was so often accused. Accomplice: someone said to have committed the crime along with you.

Look up Deuteronomy 10:18 and Exodus 22:22 as well: the law I was raised on names the widow as specially protected, more than once.

For further reading: Friedrich Spee's Cautio Criminalis, 1631, available in English, with question 20 onward on torture specifically. The report of Alonso de Salazar Frías from 1612 is discussed at length in Gustav Henningsen's book The Witches' Advocate. Samuel Sewall’s own diary entry for 14 January 1697 survives. And the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database is free and lists the accused by name.