My class on English history this fall touched on the witch craze that spread through Europe for about a century following 1570. Six hundred “witches” were executed in England, and 1500 in Scotland (a much smaller country).[1]
What caused this persecution, which occurred in the supposedly modern century after Protestantism appeared? Typical explanations, says Derek Hirst, are patriarchal misogyny (four-fifths of those executed for witchcraft were women), feuds and disputes among neighbors, even failure to help the poor, which led to imprecations and presumed maleficia. But to Hirst, ”the role of the elite was crucial.” Bishops, divines, and other luminaries became convinced that there was an active devil unleashed in the world. “The state put machinery in the hands of local persecutors, but the impetus came from the intellectuals,” says Hirst.[2]
Hirst does not elaborate on this power-elite theory, but R. I. Moore does, in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society.[3] Moore didn’t write about seventeenth-century witches, but about the Church’s rooting out of heretics, Jews, and lepers in the Middle Ages in Europe. Those efforts, he believes, established a machinery of persecution that operated almost automatically.
Moore’s basic idea is that when powerful administrators are set in place to seek out and destroy social disruptors or dissenters (they could be heretics, they could be witches), those administrators will find them, whether they exist or not. A traditional explanation for the rise in persecutions in the High Middle Ages is that the targeted groups rose in number and visibility, but, he writes:
That three entirely distinct groups of people, characterized respectively by religious conviction, physical condition, and race and culture, should all have begun at the same time . . . to pose the same threats, which must be dealt with in the same ways, is a proposition too absurd to be taken seriously.[4]
To Moore, “What heretics, lepers and Jews had in common is that they were all victims of a zeal for persecution.”[5] What happened in Europe, he says, was that justice shifted from a “passive role, mediating conflict” to “an active, institution-building authority which seeks out offences on the assumption that they must have been committed, and which invents crimes . . . against the system of law itself.”[6] Moore doesn’t stop there. He contends that pervasive persecution is distinctively European and led to the horrors of the twentieth century.
Moore’s grim view finds some support in the equally grim writing of Michel Foucault. This scholar of the linkage of elites’ power and knowledge wrote about seventeenth-century European places of incarceration for beggars and vagabonds. These places had medical names like “Hôpital Général” but were really about control. The Paris Hôpital Général, he writes, was a “semijudicial structure, an administrative entity which, along with the already-constituted powers, and outside of the courts, decides, judges, and executes.” The directors of the Hôpital had complete power, and its victims had “no appeal.”[6]
The chilling machinery of persecution, if these authors are correct, makes witchcraft look like child’s play.
[1] Derek Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603-1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London: Arnold, 1999), 49.
[2] Hirst, 49-51.
[3] R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250, 2nd edn. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
[4] Moore, 63.
[5] Moore, 63.
[6] Moore, 158.
[7] Michel Foucault, “The Great Confinement,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow ( New York: Pantheon. 1984 ), 124-140, at 125.
Well, of course “patriarchal mysogyny” would be blamed. But how many men were executed for offenses for which women were not? Treason (were any women involved in the Gunpowder Plot?)—sorcery—buggery—petty theft of the kind women couldn’t perform—or willfully killed in war? I rather think the explanation is that witchcraft was a way women rebelled, while men rebelled in other ways that incurred capital punishment. That’s a safer explanation than retro-projecting modern prejudices about the past into the past.
Excellent article, Jane.
I think it’s important to note that this form of social control is by no means a distinctive European phenomenon. It is simply a manifestation of the common human activity of scapegoating. The Europeans perfected the use of it to protect large institutions, but that’s simply because they had those large institutions, which they perceived as needing this protection. Smaller societies have done this on a smaller scale—and unlike Europeans, they weren’t ashamed of it.
This is happening in South Africa today, but we hear very little about it.
Note, in particular, how the purely atheist governments of the twentieth century killed millions of people, with Europe being neither the rule nor an exception, as R. J. Rummel documents with admirable clarity: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/POWER.ART.HTM.
Your characterization of the matter is in fact much closer to the truth than is that of the people you cite. The latter are largely attempting to undermine respect for Christendom, whereas you are putting the focus where it belongs: on the inherent danger of government power.
Two thoughts: One, in a world where both accusers and accused believed in the reality of witches, which will be found. Two, in a world thin on institutions of governance–sheriffs, courts, judges, jails–society will find extra judicial means of maintaining social order, including how to “manage” vagabonds, beggars, thiefs, dissolute women, lepers, usw–not pretty, however.