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A History of Witchcraft

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Geoffrey Quaife suggests that, in the Spanish Netherlands, men were more harshly treated when they were accused of witchcraft than women were as nine of every twelve men charged with witchcraft were executed, whereas it was only every seven of twelve women; and one in ten women were acquitted but no men were.[14] Perhaps this unsympathetic treatment of men is because witchcraft was female-identified, so when they discovered a male witch, he was treated more harshly to dissuade others. In the opening of the Malleus Maleficarum, it says that witchcraft was a form of heresy and that it is maleficia and mainly practiced by women.[15] Witchcraft is understood by numerous of historians as an expression of female deviance and empowerment. Accusations of the crime of witchcraft were imposed against women who were imagined as avoiding or challenging the social rule of patriarchal control. Besides this, most people inherited medieval superstitions such as witchcraft beliefs, were it advanced and varied throughout cultural contexts. This superstitious belief ended up becoming a popular belief during the Early Modern Period. Hence, the early modern period’s stereotype of the witch is analyzed by scholars as the representation of society’s fear of female deviance and evil. The conversation surrounding the persecution of witches are challenged as being the result of persuasive relations between the different levels of early modern society, such as the orthodox views of the Christian religious authorities, and the unorthodox non-Christian beliefs. Unfortunately, witchcraft trials in early modern England were primarily encouraged by the control of Christian theological and demonological assumptions, which targeted a lot of women as witches. During the early modern period there were different cultural contexts that discovered various stereotypical aspects of the image the witch. Since the English perspective differs from the ones of Continental Europe and Colonial New England, we can identify three types of witches. We can begin with the English Popular Witch, mostly seen as the old lady in a village considered the healer who uses maleficent magic. Next there is the Continental Demonic Witch, who was typically burnt to death after confessing under torture to have signed a pact with the Devil. Finally I identified is the Colonial Puritan witch that has accepted Satan as a worshipper and whose spirit torments its neighbors. My objective with this paper is to present significant aspects in relation to the popular stereotype of witchcraft. Despite the fact that it has been seen as an exaggeration to state that the crime of witchcraft was only attributable to women, it remains quite undeniable and compelling the role of gendered structures of power in the European witch-hunts was because the dislike for women. As Linda C. Halts clearly puts, The discourses and practices surrounding the persecution of witches were linked to men’s efforts to gain power and status, which were informed, after all, by contemporary ideals of masculinity; the social forces that came into play as witches were accused, tried and executed were informed by gender at every level (the village, the local court, the state); and the psychological and social impact of this extraordinarily negative female stereotype, although difficult to isolate, was surely enormous.2 For that reason, while

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