Witch hunt essay

The witch hunts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era expose a tendency to incriminate women. On average, ninety percent of the “witches” were female and the remaining men were often their relatives.1 This period can be referred to as a time of misogyny or an age when there was a strong suspicion of women.2 Villagers and aristocrats tended to view witches differently. Witches at the village level were thought to harm others through their maternal powers of nurture. Aristocrats denied that witches had individual powers. Insisted they insisted that witches were fueled by sexual desire and became Satan’s servants. Women were targeted because of their biological “openness” which allowed evil spirits in. This belief had been strongly expressed in the Malleus Maleficarum which became a manual for the witch hunts. Even a pious woman could not escape suspicion because of the curse of Eve.3 In the creation story, Eve took fruit from the forbidden tree and made females inherently evil. Shakespeare was able to combine these two interpretations in the play Macbeth. The women in this play lead Macbeth into his destruction by manipulating him. James I made revisions to the Acts against witchcraft which made witches mark and the owning of familiars a stronger indication of guilt. The witch’s mark became a third nipple that enabled a witch to feed her malevolent animals. Women accused other women because they had been expected to implement patriarchal values. The stereotypical witch would have been described as an older woman that criticized her neighbours, but no woman was safe.4 The older women were especially vulnerable because they were weak, insignificant and poor. The women of England and Scotland were controlled by the fear of being accused.5 The gender bias of the witch hunts was due to the male dominance and misogyny that engulfed the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.
Ideas from the Malleus Maleficarum shaped the gender bias of the witch hunts. This book was written in 1487