By the end of the Middle Ages, it was a broadly accepted truth that women were running around Europe who had been seduced by Satan and then enabled to perform wicked magic in his stead. Numerous treatise writers began to insist that anyone who doubts the diabolical empowerment of women-as-witches is self-deluded and dangerous. Witches are in league with the devil, they said, beyond any doubt. In their dealings with him, they are empowered to work all kinds of mischief and magic in his place and on his behalf. Because of their confederation with Satan, these women witches must be condemned to death, irrespective of the fact that they hold no intrinsic power themselves.
William Perkins, an influential proponent of witch fever in late sixteenth-century England, notes that any miraculous power a witch or her objects appears to have is merely borrowed from Satan. Much of Perkins’s work simply describes the nature and power of Satan; the monstrosity of the evil women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is borrowed, tenuous, and ascribable solely to the devil. Witches have no innate power. Again, this is the legacy of Christianity playing out in depictions and understandings of female monstrosity. Tiamat, Lamashtu, Lamia, the Furies, Medea, the Bacchae, Erichtho: These were all autonomously powerful entities of varying degrees of super-natural power that belonged to them. Now, with the rise of the era of the witch and its lethal correlative the witch hunt, there was no more autonomous Monstrous Bitchery, only vessels for the supervening will of Satan.
At the root of witch persecution was the notion that witches’ sexuality was the thing most to be feared about them, the thing most urgently to be tested, chastened, and destroyed.
As Jean Bodin puts it in his enormously influential 1580 treatise, The Demon-Mania of Witches, “A witch is someone who knowingly tries to accomplish something by diabolical means.” All you had to do was make an agreement with Satan, and you could imbibe of his power and deploy it against the unsuspecting populace. Lamia status was now something you could simply opt into, complete with its infanticidal violences. Indeed, as Bodin states, one of the most common crimes of witches was to murder their own children, before baptism. They are also notorious, Bodin says, for murdering the babies and children of other women, in order to drink their blood and eat their flesh. A witch is diabolical and evil, and must be killed, and yet she has no true power of her own, only accomplishing things through devilish intercession. Evil yet strangely powerless: a tidy duality to invoke when seeking to kill off a whole swath of the human population.
Once witch fever had gripped Europe tightly in the sixteenth century, the mechanisms that states developed for eliciting confessions from accused women became very precise, and very brutal. Accused women were routinely stripped naked and shaved. Apparently, inquisitors often raped the accused to help determine whether the woman was a virgin—if she was, it pointed toward her innocence. Obviously, once the rape had happened, it would be much more difficult for a woman to claim she was a virgin, or indeed to prove she had been one. The accused were grotesquely tortured in other ways besides: They were pierced with needles or made to sit on iron chairs positioned over fires. The tortures were frequently either explicitly or implicitly sexual in nature, because at the root of witch persecution was the notion that witches’ sexuality was the thing most to be feared about them, the thing most urgently to be tested, chastened, and destroyed.
This appalling and dehumanizing torture wasn’t, however, limited to the accused herself. Quite the contrary, witches were burned publicly, at the stake. The explicit point of doing so was to dissuade other women from being “bad” in the way that witches were “bad.” The daughters of burning witches were sometimes made to stand close to the pyre, being whipped by locals while watching their mothers die in agony. Take that in for a moment, because I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever heard anything more sadistic in my entire life. When I think about the daughter of an accused witch, I imagine her horror and her wracking emotional pain at seeing her mother die in slow, brutal physical agony. I imagine her physical pain at being flogged, and her humiliation at being flogged in public. I imagine her watching her neighbors jeer at her mother and very likely mock her, too. Then I imagine the mental gymnastics she must have had to do in order to survive, both socially and psychologically, after watching her mother scream her last, agonized scream. She would almost certainly be a semi-outcast: Who would go to play at the house of the little girl whose mother had been burned as a witch?
To have any hope of being socially accepted, she would certainly have to disavow her mother—the mother who had birthed her, nursed her, fed her, and raised her, and whom she had watched being tortured to death in public. Very likely, the daughter would have to decide that, yes, her mother had been a witch, and she had deserved to die. If the daughter didn’t decide that, how could she possibly survive the chaos of her own mind, the implication that she would have to spend the rest of her life among people who had unjustly executed her totally innocent mother? She would probably have to decide that her mother was guilty. And deserved it. Which would entail the young girl acceding to a reality in which women sometimes deserved to be tortured to death. Honestly, I cannot imagine surviving that kind of psychological injury.
If we assume that the vast majority of executed witches were women of reproductive age or older, and we assume that a substantial number of executed women had at least one daughter, we’re talking about a truly massive scale of social trauma befalling young women—and this is beyond the immediate physical horror enacted on convicted witches themselves. Hundreds of thousands of little girls, in all likelihood, had to decide that sometimes women—including their own mothers—deserved to be tortured to death in public because of something a little wild or a little unruly about their sexuality or about how they talked, or maybe because the women in their neighborhood appeared to have better luck at spacing pregnancies and fewer unwanted births. The church and state used the public execution of accused witches to inflict abject terror and trauma on helpless young girls, on the brink of losing their own mothers, who were told that their mothers had been too loud, too sexy, or violent toward unborn children. Witch fever, by this point in history, had become a mechanism for brutally regulating and disciplining female behavior, and doing so intergenerationally.
Accusations of witchcraft were then, and have always been, about demonizing and controlling female reproductive power, because if you can control women’s reproduction, you can control the patriarchal, linear descent of property between generations. As Silvia Federici has argued, the systematic persecution of witches is intimately tied to the consolidation of private property during the same period.
If you look at England in the sixteenth century, and focus on areas where there was a high degree of enclosed land—which is to say, land that was taken and privatized by a particular wealthy landholder—you find a high degree of witch persecution. If you look at areas where privatization wasn’t happening, you find almost no witch persecution. If people are trying to lay exclusive claim to land, they’ve got to have clear, absolute knowledge about the lines of inheritance. No bastards in households, sired by other men. No sterile marriages. No promiscuous women. To control the land, you have to control the women—or, more precisely, you have to control their uteruses. If Patriarchy can’t control the wombs, it’s got to demonize and kill the women who contain them, as well as those women who have the temerity to try to control wombs in a way that Patriarchy doesn’t approve of.
Witch fever, by this point in history, had become a mechanism for brutally regulating and disciplining female behavior, and doing so intergenerationally.
The persecution of witches accelerated in lockstep with the increasing privatization of property in the sixteenth century. In fact, the earliest law that made witchcraft punishable by death passed in 1532: the so-called Carolina, an imperial Spanish code. England made witchcraft punishable by death slightly later, but by 1604, a woman could be executed for witchcraft in England even in the absence of hard evidence that she had caused harm to people or damage to property. Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland made witchcraft a capital offense around 1550. Hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, and executed for witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of these women were midwives; many others used the services of midwives. Some were simply a little too sexy, or a little too loud. Maybe the men around them experienced erectile dysfunction and were looking for someone to blame. Maybe their neighbors had miscarriages or stillbirths.
Despite the rabid fury of witch fever, however, there were counternarratives, mostly in the form of treatises that sought to shake some sense into European populaces by reminding people that women were not simply conduits for diabolical interference. One of the most famous of these witch-skeptical treatises, from the sixteenth century, was Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which forcefully denies the existence of witches. Scot insists in his treatise that the making of contracts with the devil is a complete fiction. Witches, he confirms, do not exist and therefore cannot and should not be prosecuted for witchcraft. He goes yet further to argue that those who persecute and prosecute witches are themselves corrupt, preying on elderly, depressive, and superstitious people—and chiefly on women.
Specifically, he points out that “manie poore, olde women” are disproportionately persecuted, and for no good reason. He refers specifically to the Malleus as “fables” and to Jean Bodin’s sixteenth-century Demon-Mania as “Bodin’s bables.” He’s read the same texts as everyone else, but he’s not convinced that this vilification of women as predatory, hypersexual, baby-slaying, bloodsucking, loudmouthed monsters is warranted. In fact, he thinks it’s a fiction, and one contrary to proper Christian belief. Why? Because it arrogates too much power to the devil. The devil, in his view, is simply not that strong. And women are not that easily seduced.
This book, The Discoverie of Witches, was very popular in its time. In fact, it influenced some of the most important literary writers about witches in the seventeenth century. Most importantly, it influenced William Shakespeare, who read the Discoverie before writing his famous witch play, Macbeth, in 1606. But of course, famously, Macbeth is about as far as possible from a witch-skeptical play. Instead of writing a play critical of the idea of witchcraft, Shakespeare wrote a play that takes as given that witches could exist and that, if they did, they would prey on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of those around them. Indeed, to see how witch fever propagated itself across the rest of the seventeenth century, it’s useful to turn from historical documents and treatises and spend some time with literature, and in particular with drama, since dramatic form had a uniquely wide, public reach throughout this period.
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From Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women by Eleanor Johnson. Copyright © 2026. Available from Princeton University Press.