Witches, and why the hunt turned on
women.

Where the witch came from

The pieces were old. The package was assembled in the Alps.

Run 8 found that every element of the witch existed long before the hunts. What was new in the 1420s was a court putting them together and prosecuting the result at scale.

Women flying at night with the goddess Diana appear in tenth-century church law, the Canon Episcopi, which called it a demonic illusion priests should teach people not to believe. A 1398 Paris ruling found an implied pact in magic. Secret meetings, orgies and child-eating were charges recycled from trials of heretics. In the western Alps in the 1420s and 1430s, courts fused pact, sabbath, night flight and a secret sect into one crime: Valais from 1428, with more than two hundred executions, and Briançon in 1437.

The machinery came from heresy-hunting. The Lausanne inquisition existed because of campaigns against Waldensians, and in French the new crime was even called Vauderie. That matters for this page, because heresy trials had no built-in reason to prefer women.

The witch was not invented in the 1480s. She was assembled from spare parts sixty years earlier.

The printing press

Print did not start the hunts. It sped them up where the books were read.

Run 8 tested whether the printing press caused the witch hunts. Of six explanations, “print caused it” scored worst.

Mass hunts ran decades before any press. Kramer was already getting women executed at Ravensburg in 1484, before he wrote the Malleus, and the European peak came seventy years after it was printed, with a lull of about fifty years in new editions between.

Print worked as an accelerant. One study of Central European cities found a city’s odds of holding its first trial rose about 30% when more editions had circulated nearby in the previous decade. But only five of the nine cities that printed the Malleus held any trials at all. What mattered was where it was read, not where it was made, and print also spread the sceptics: Weyer in 1563, Scot in 1584.

The book that hated women arrived late, sold slowly, and was rejected by the Inquisition within years.

Competing explanations

Four explanations for the shift to women, and the favourite lost.

Run 10 wrote four explanations down with the observation that would destroy each one, then scored eighty-nine passages against all four.

Demonological misogyny (H1) is the explanation most readers bring to this question. It collected twenty supporting passages and twenty-two against, five of them strongly, for a net score of minus seven. Local accusation dynamics (H2) collected nineteen for and two against, net plus seventeen, the best of the four.

A recording artefact (H3), that the shift is partly about which courts kept records, came out roughly even. Demographic vulnerability (H4), that rising numbers of poor and widowed women made women easier targets, came out slightly negative, for a reason chapter 06 explains.

The explanation everyone expects drew more passages against it than for it.

The exceptions

The places where witches were men are the real test.

The 80% figure is an average over very different places. Several large jurisdictions sat at or below half women during exactly the decades of peak hunting.

Iceland executed twenty men and two women. Muscovy, Normandy and Estonia had male majorities; so did Styria and Carinthia, inside the Holy Roman Empire. Finland ran 51% women and the Parlement of Burgundy 48% between 1580 and 1642.

The early baseline is shakier than the question assumed. Valais is estimated at two-thirds men, but that estimate rests on a chronicler who reported a conspiracy of seven hundred. Dauphiné between 1424 and 1448 is a count of more than 250 people tried, and it was already 72% women, before the Malleus existed. “Men first, women later” may be one valley’s story rather than Europe’s.

A theory that explains Germany also has to explain Iceland.

Was it the sexism?

The misogyny is in the book. The skew is not explained by it.

Run 10 established the content of the misogyny beyond doubt, and then watched the causal claim fail on its own terms.

The Malleus Maleficarum is the same book many readers know as the Hammer of Witches, or in German Der Hexenhammer. Its bias starts with its name: maleficarum is the feminine plural, “of female witches”, where the masculine would have been maleficorum. Inside, it calls women the frailer sex, “defective in all the powers of both soul and body”, quicker to doubt in faith. It argued witches were more often women and urged magistrates to follow its procedures. Kramer’s own trials at Ravensburg and Innsbruck targeted women almost exclusively, and it ran to twenty-eight editions.

But Iceland received the full demonology — Danish-trained clergy, the Danish witchcraft act of 1617 imposed in 1630, two domestic witchcraft books — and still burned men. Its Italian publication was followed by a fall in witchcraft cases. The Inquisition denied it authority and censured Kramer, and the Spanish Inquisition warned its members against believing it in 1538. Bamberg, a court steeped in demonology, extracted the full diabolic confession from men and women of all ages and classes.

The run’s reconciling reading: the misogyny supplied a vocabulary that could amplify and lethalise a female-skewed accusation pattern where courts already allowed torture, but it did not create the skew and could not override a local culture that saw magic as men’s work. That reading is marked as a hypothesis, because no source here tabulated text circulation, court type and female share together.

The sexism was a justification that made things worse, not the switch that chose who burned.

What did select women

Neighbours named them. Local culture decided what magic looked like.

The best-supported account is about who got named, and it runs through ordinary village life rather than through the books.

Most accused were denounced by people in their own community. The talk of three or four neighbours was enough for an arrest; five to ten qualified accusers opened the way to torture. The accused typically had quarrelsome reputations and were over forty — more than 60% in Scotland — with long histories of conflict behind them. In England most of the accusers were women too.

The accusations followed household roles. Women were far more often accused of harming other women’s young children; men were just as likely to be accused of harming a neighbour’s livestock or property. Where local culture tied magic to men, men were accused: Iceland’s magic was learned from books in schools that admitted almost only men; Normandy’s witches were mostly shepherds, priests and blacksmiths; Muscovy’s were vagrants, fugitives and outsiders.

One popular piece did not hold. Widows were not the main target: of 319 Scottish accused with a known marital status, 245 were married and 67 widowed. Age and poverty held up; widowhood did not.

The witch was whoever the village already distrusted, doing the kind of harm the village feared.

The popular claims

Nine million, the midwives, and the pagan cult do not survive the record.

Five popular stories about the witch hunts were checked against what the run read. Three are contradicted outright. Two were not properly tested.

Nine million dead is a myth. Historians put executions at 30,000 to 60,000, with the highest professional estimate at 100,000. The nine million came from an early nineteenth-century extrapolation from misread data, and the suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage repeated it in Woman, Church, and State. The midwife hunt is also a myth: midwives were rarely accused, and were more likely to work beside the accusers searching for witch marks. The idea that healers were hunted to clear the way for male doctors traces to a 1973 claim by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, not to trial records.

Murray’s surviving pagan witch-cult has no trace in the records beyond residual paganism in a few trials. Silvia Federici’s argument, that the hunts disciplined women’s bodies for early capitalism, was represented here only by a detailed critique, not the book, so it was not tested. And burning people for their property found no supporting passage: Bamberg and Würzburg did take officials, clergy and the wealthy, but nothing about confiscation came back.

The real history is grim enough without the inflated numbers.

Trying to break it

Nine searches for the other side, and the two that came back hurt the favourite.

After the first pass, the run hunted for the evidence that would damage each explanation most.

Both searches that returned anything were aimed at the misogyny explanation, and both returned evidence against it: the Iceland record showing demonology arriving without changing who was accused, and a statistics table showing female shares near parity in Burgundy and Finland.

The other seven came back empty, including the decisive test for the local-dynamics account: no trial sample compares accusers, ages and quarrels between early male-majority and peak female-majority trials in the same place. The winning explanation has not faced its own falsifier.

The best explanation won partly because nobody found the data that could sink it.

What the number means

Fourteen out of a hundred, again, for the same reason.

Thirteen findings asserted, one conjecture, four open questions. Every one computed to unknown confidence.

Corroboration and provenance scored zero because no passage was traced to an independent origin. The sources are encyclopedias, Wikipedia, English Heritage, the BBC and a university course page; agreement among them may be one historiography retold. Falsification scored 15 of 20 for the counter-searches, and saturation zero, because the second round still turned up new source families.

Run 8 landed on the same 14 out of 100 for the same reason. Both runs are best read as maps of what the secondary literature claims, with the gaps marked, not as verdicts.

The score is low because the sources may all be repeating each other, not because the history is unclear.