Sorry to post at length - but I think its worth it:
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/02/01/witch_craze/index.html?pn=1
"For years, feminist scholars have argued that witch hunts were inspired by a reactionary, misogynistic church. But new scholarship, like Lyndal Roper's "Witch Craze," reveals that the real villains were the neighbors."
"Witch hunts lie at the dark heart of Western culture, so much so that they've become synonymous with any kind of vicious, dogged and irrational persecution, from McCarthyism to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s.
"No wonder the history of the original European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become politicized. By the early 1900s, they were seen as outbreaks of hysteria fostered by a sinister and oppressive Catholic Church. Then, about 30 years ago, revisionist historians began to claim that the trials constituted a more systematic campaign by the patriarchal church to extinguish the remnants of goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religions by wiping out the people who preserved them: women, specifically folk healers and midwives.
Both views are wrong, but as far as popular conception goes, the second has triumphed.
For a summary of this now-widespread misperception of the "Burning Times," we need look no further than a passage from the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code": "The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. 'Malleus Maleficarum' -- or 'The Witches' Hammer' -- indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world.' Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth -- a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During 300 years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" (
internal quotations original, source unidentified, but definitely not "Malleus Maleficarum").
This is an impressively erroneous passage, incorrect almost from beginning to end, but it is contaminated by one morsel of fact: The "Malleus Maleficarum" is indeed a spectacularly misogynistic and twisted book, compiled by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in 1486 and an essential guidebook and inspiration for witch hunters throughout Europe."
And later:
In the past two or three decades, however, many historians have turned their attention to more reliable source materials on the witch hunts -- the local records of trials and executions stashed away in hundreds of small towns across Europe and Great Britain. Jenny Gibbons' essay "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt," this is hard work, sifting through vast amounts of dull documents written in archaic and often frustratingly obtuse language,
but it's the sort of thing real historians do. And it's given us a radically new picture of what Europe's witch hunts were like.
Lyndal Roper's "Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany", Robin Briggs' "Witches and Neighbors" and Brian Levack's "The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe" are two of the best known -- it is crammed with little stories: squabbles among neighbors, resentments within families, disagreeable local characters, the machinations of small-time politicians and the creepy psychosexual fixations of magistrates and clerics.
What comes out, in short, is the following:
"The Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings; it had its hands full with Protestants and other heretics, whom the church shrewdly perceived to be a far more serious threat to its power. In fact, while the justification for condemning witches was religious, and some religious figures joined in witch hunting campaigns,
the trials were not run by churches of any denomination. They were largely held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities (some of whom were also religious leaders) as criminal cases."
(my emphasis)
also:
"And if the victims of witch hunts were disproportionately older women, their chief accusers, and the initiating force behind many of the trials Roper details, were often women, too. Young mothers, overwhelmed by the demands of newborn infants and raised in a world where everyone believed that angry or negative thoughts could cause serious physical harm, cast about for someone to blame when something went wrong. In an old woman they saw someone with cause to resent their good fortune as well as a reminder that their youth and fecundity, too, would someday be gone. In some cases, a midwife was simply the old woman most likely to have had contact with a new mother and her child, and therefore a prime target.
None of this excuses the Catholic and Protestant churches for the many atrocities they've perpetrated over the centuries, against "witches" or anyone else who earned their disfavor. But it's also a caution against idealizing a pagan past about which we know next to nothing. The pagan cultures that have left records have proven themselves every bit as capable of misogyny and of senselessly brutalizing outsiders and misfits. As human beings, pagans were just as capable of barbarity as monotheists; and as human beings, women can be just as wicked as men, given half a chance."
I recommend the article.
