Witch

“Witch!”

In our collective imagination, the very word conjures up evil old women of childhood lore. But for many centuries, it has also referred to very real women who, in the Middle Ages and in modern times, were accused of conjuring evil forces and casting spells on innocent people. They were hunted down for these crimes and were tortured mercilessly.

Historians estimate that there were between 110,000 and 120,000 witch trials throughout Europe, and in the modern era, while the most conservative estimates put the number of victims at between 60,000 and 90,000 – two-thirds of whom were women.

Contrary to popular belief, the peak of the witch-hunt did not occur in the Middle Ages, but between 1550 and 1700. In other words, the 17^th century, which was known for giving birth to rationalism and developing a reasoned approach to the world through mathematics – the century of Descartes and Galileo – was traversed by one of the greatest crises in Western thought, following a movement that began in the Middle Ages and reached fever pitch during the Renaissance.

Germany, Switzerland, France, Northern Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England were all at the heart of this tragedy.

While collective memory seems to have preserved only snippets of it – often in the form of folk tales – several questions remain:

Did real witches actually exist?

Who were the women thusly named in the late Middle Ages and modern times?

How is it possible that women could have inspired such fear in their contemporaries that, first ecclesiastical and then civil, courts constantly sought out, identified, imprisoned, tortured, punished, and burned them at the stake?

What traces remain in our contemporary world and imagination of what was the greatest feminicide in modern Western history?