Causes Of Witchcraze By Anne Barstow

An historian who reiterated the misogyny argument popular since the 1970s was Anne Barstow. Her book ‘Witchcraze’ published in 1994 had a significant impact on the on-going historical debate of witch hunting. Anne Barstow believed that misogyny had caused the Early Modern European Witch-hunt. Furthermore, she believed that the witch hunt was caused by the publication of ‘Malleus Maleficarum’. She states that, “[…It] launched the witch persecutions as an attack on women. Until the publication of the Malleus, men had been accused as often as women, and the total numbers of victims had been small. Though it is true that the major persecutions did not begin until about seventy years after the publication of the Malleus (c.1560), the fact that

However, J. Barry and O. Davies argues against Barstow’s perspective and theory, that “To translate this as ‘witches’, as Montague Summers regularly does, is therefore to give the reader a false impression, because the English word ‘witch’ immediately suggests a woman.” Therefore, from Barry and Davies’ argument, it could be deduced that although misogyny could be seen throughout the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, the intention of the book being persecution of women cannot be confirmed to be true. This detracts from Barstow’s argument as there are not much supporting evidence for her perspective that the publication of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ had a significant impact on starting and increasing the scale of witch-hunting in Europe, as well as specifying that these witches were all women, and therefore makes her argument rather

“The fact that overall about 20 per cent of the accused were male is less an indication that men were associated with witchcraft than it appears. Most of these men were related to women already convicted of sorcery […] Of the few that were not related, most had criminal records for other felonies, such as theft, highway robbery, murder […] For them, witchcraft was not the original charge, but was added on to make the initial accusation more heinous. Witchcraft was thus perceived primarily as a female offence.” This therefore, shows that Barstow viewed the convicted males of being witches were primarily convicted of other crimes, and thus that in reality, these 20% of men accused for practising witchcraft were actually not