Torture and the Witchcraze of Early Modern Europe: The End

It was the duty of the church and the state to purge the land of this great evil, these uppity women. They used any means necessary to do so. If the innocent perished, that was a minor, irrelevant complication. The court's methods were effective, to say the least. Nearly every woman confessed after severe torture, and nearly all were put to death. The courts were well aware of gender as a factor in these trials. The confessions of women extracted under torture were taken more seriously than those of men, and women were tortured more harshly, as they could often bear more, or so it was believed. The torturers and executioners had no qualms with sexual torture, using mastectomy, the witch chair, and likely rape to entice confession. The witchcraze is now often referred to as the Burning Times, but we will never know the full extent of those killed, or of the lives impacted by it. The women of the early modern era must certainly have feared for their own lives, and changed their behavior accordingly. The witchcraze was clearly more than mere hysteria. The political and social hierarchy of early modern Europe used the witch trials and burnings to their best advantage. The relative independence of women in the Middle Ages had been changed for centuries, and it is likely that the mass burnings and executions of the witchcraze played a role in this change. This is clearly reflected in the changing laws throughout Europe regarding women, childbirth and abortion. The people of early modern Europe, and particularly Germany, which experienced the greatest number of witch burnings, certainly felt the impact of these executions. They reduced the population, especially the population of women, considerably. It seems unlikely that many families, particularly in areas of the worst persecution, escaped the witchcraze unfazed. The women, men and children killed in the witchcraze of early modern Europe are, by and large, nameless. We know nothing of their lives, or even of their trials and executions. They lived and they died without records. Their trials and deaths were generally, as the account of the Pappenheimers' illustrates, horribly brutal. History has sought, as much as possible, to forget the brutality of the so-called renaissance, seeking to remember the heights of glory portrayed in the churches, and the freedom that came with reform. It has been said that the renaissance was a renaissance for men only.

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