The Midwife and the Witch

Myths and Realities

Alison Klairmont, PhD

September, 2005

Midwives and witches go together like Mom and apple pie. Or do they? Actually this notion is just one of many myths about the sixteenth and seventeenth century "witch craze" that needs to be abandoned. Over the last twenty-five years scholarship based on painstaking archival research has created a revolution about how we think about European witchcraft. On the one hand, historians have identified the ancient, pre-Christian, Arabic, and biblical roots of beliefs and practices related to magic and witchcraft as well as how this complex heritage came to be reconfigured yet again in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 On the other hand, scholars have studied the actual dynamics of witch prosecution during the early modern period; the genuineness of belief in witches; why so many more women than man were victims of witch accusations; why certain areas of Europe seemed to be more vulnerable to witchcraft panics than others; and how the trials eventually stopped.

First, a brief overview:

The "witch craze" (and some historians today even question the accuracy of this phrase) occurred mainly in certain parts of Germany, England, Scotland, Lorraine, and Sweden between 1450-1750 although witch trials occurred virtually in all areas of Europe except Ireland . There were 100,000 trials in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and approximately 50,000 people were executed - NOT the 10 million as some feminists have claimed. While seventy-five per cent of witchcraft accusations were directed at single and old women, most of these women were not midwives contrary to what many people think today. In fact, midwives were among the most respected members of their communities and were actually the least likely women to be targeted as witches. Adult men, children and young women comprised the remaining twenty-five percent of those accused of witchcraft.2 Also, and again contrary to what many people believe today, many of the accusers were women.

Medieval Early Modern Cosmology and Witchcraft Beliefs

Most "early modern," that is sixteenth and seventeenth-century people, based their ideas about witchcraft upon a cosmology in which religious ideas and early scientific beliefs meshed into a fuzzy but coherent whole3. This cosmology posited a world constantly threatened by disharmony, a disharmony which Christians traced back to the Garden of Eden where the Devil's pursuit of man's loyalty set up an eternal cycle between the forces of good and evil. In the ancient scientific view, the four basic elements of fire, water, air and earth and their corresponding humor in humans , i.e. blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile hung in an uneasy balance easily upset by natural and occult forces. Educated and uneducated alike, peasant and squire, monk and lady all believed that their lives were at the mercy of all these powers.

Witchcraft Beliefs Before the Sixteenth Century Amongst Peasants

Until the sixteenth century, most people would have defined witchcraft as harm done by magical means to a person or property. Whether the Devil or his minions was involved was not a major issue. When cattle or humans suddenly died or sickened and died under seemingly mysterious circumstances, witchcraft was invoked. The alleged witch was a local, a neighbor who everyone in the village knew to be hostile and verbally aggressive or peculiar, old, and poor. Underlying many of the accusations of witchcraft was a common theme: fertility, envy, loss, and guilt.

The Significance of Fertility as the Basis for Many Witchcraft Accusations

Fertility was a precious and precariously maintained commodity because of the fragility of life and the difficulty of ensuring a steady food supply. The early modern period was a time in which half of all infants died before the first year of life and the food supply, whether in the form of crops or domestic animals, was extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the weather and the hardships of war. Not only was Europe undergoing what historians have called a "little ice age," but it also experienced some of the worst religious and civil wars in its history. All of these factors combined to reinforce the mind set that the life and well-being of humans, animals, and plants upon which it depended were vulnerable to the forces of good and evil, nature and magic, the Devil and God's mercy.

Some studies of witch trials in parts of Germany have suggested that in these areas at least when a newborn suddenly died, the mother would mostly likely accuse her "lying-in maid" or helper. Almost always, the helper was an older woman who had had many of her own babies die under mysterious circumstances when she was a young mother. The lying-in maid prepared the soups which, according to humoral physiology4, were meant to help turn the mother's menstrual blood into breast milk. By the same logic, such a woman could prepare the soup with herbs which might sour the mother's milk or trigger cramps in the newborn, making it waste away.5

But why, you might ask has it come to be believed that midwives often were accused of witchcraft? First, let us remember that is was theologians and jurists who first articulated this claim, not local villagers. These learned men lived far removed from the day-to-day realities of the village or parish. From the distance of their monasteries or studies, midwives looked suspicious because of their access to human detritus and effluvia, including fetal materials, believed to be necessary to create magical potions and poisons. In addition, a midwife was often privy to the secrets of desperate women who might seek to murder their newborns. Thus, both learned demonological tracts and various royal edicts imply or directly state that most midwives were witches.6 However, these notions rarely surfaced at the local level.

The Influence of Learned Notions of Witchcraft on the Peasantry

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries some learned notions about the Devil reached the peasantry. In particular, learned stereotypes about the connection between witchcraft and devil worship surfaced in various villages via the newly appearing demonological treatises7 Included in these treatises were detailed descriptions of what took place in covens, how witches flew on broomsticks, the diabolical pact, and the sexual orgies, cannibalism, and desecration of the Eucharist that supposedly took place at a witch's Sabbath. There were also discussions about to examine an alleged witch to determine her guilt. These learned notions about witches and devil worship gradually became intertwined with older ideas about harm committed by magic.8 In addition, learned authors wanted to figure out whether the Devil was a fantasy or real in a material, physical sense.

The village met the monastery and study at the trial of a witch. At such events, peasants picked up information about diabolical pacts and witches sabbaths where parodies of the Catholic Mass allegedly took place. At the trial, theologian and jurist tested their theories that the Devil had a real physical presence, an idea that was in doubt in learned circles. Interrogators might try to prove that the accused had had sex with the Devil by examining her body and questioning her under torture. Interrogators sought detailed testimony about sexual intercourse because such evidence supported the claims that the Devil was "real."9 The peasants who attended the trial made use of these notions to reinforce their own cases against suspicious neighbors and kin.10

The Fusion of Elite and Popular Notions of Witchcraft and its Consequences

Until demonological ideas spread to the general populace, witches were the people next door or across the way who you tolerated and sometimes feared, but rarely were they accused of witchcraft. With the appearance and spread of notions about devil worship, such individuals became more likely to be hauled into court and forced to confess to crimes associated with the Devil as well as harm done.. All early modern people believed in the power and reality of the Devil in one way or another as did many officials connected with the trials. While some judges and jurists were skeptical about being able to prove that a particular suspect was guilty, others were more than willing to accept testimony on face value and proceed to condemn the accused to death. There is some controversy among historians about whether or not the occurrence of the wtich trials amounted to a moral panic. However, the fact that the belief in the reality of witches prompted attacks on real peo ple identified as witches and that such beliefs are responsible for causing the deaths of innocents, is sobering. Finally, mounting doubts and skepticism led to the termination of the persecutions decades before the beliefs which substantiated them lost their punch.11

The study of European witchcraft makes one cautious about making any generalization the European witch "craze." Myth, legend, real gripes, feuds and fear contributed to the deaths of many thousands of innocent people over a one-hundred fifty year period. However, the popular notion that there was a time when witches flew on broomsticks to cavort with the Devil or that physicians accused midwives of witchcraft to gain control over childbirth is false. The study of witchcraft engages one with the problems and dangers of stereotypes.

General References

1. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: HarperCollins, 1996

2. Carlo Ginzberg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witch's Sabbath. Trans. by Raymond Rosenthal. NY: Penguin, 1992; _________ The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Transl. By John and Anne Tedeschi. NY: Penguin, 1985.

3. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1989.

4. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London:Routledge, 1996.

5. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 1994; ______________, Witchcraze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

6. Water Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Notes

1. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors; Ginzberg, Ecstasies; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages.

2. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, p. 8.

3. Ibid., 99-100.

4. According to the ancient Greek medical writers humans were composed of four humors believed to be specific bodily fluids, known as blood, phlegm, bile (also sometimes called choler, or red or yellow bile), and black bile (or melancholy). The four humors corresponded to the four basic "elements,” fire, water, earth, and air. Each element had a concentration of one of the four humors which characterized the particular quality of that element. Blood had hot and moist qualities related to the element, air; phlegm was cold and moist and related to the element, water; yellow bile was hot and dry and was related to fire; and black bile was cold and dry and was related to earth. Each element and humor had to be in balance with the other in a unique correspondence with the particular constitution of each person.

5. Roper, Witchcraze,

6. Alison Klairmont (Lingo) “Obstetrics and Midwifery,” Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, ed. Paula Fass, Macmillan Reference USA, NY, 2003, 629-633.; "Causes and Cures for Female Infertility, Premature Delivery, and Uterine Disease in the Work of Ambroise Paré and Louise Bourgeois," Collection des travaux, International Academy of History of Science, Editor Brepols, 2002; "Midwifery." In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Helen Tierney, New York: Greenwood Press, 1989, 236-240; "Empirics and Charlatans in Early Modern France: The Genesis of the Classification of the ‘Other' in Medical Practice.” Journal of Social History 19 (June, 1986):583-603.

7. Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus maleficarum or Witches’ Hammer (1492) was one of the most notorious and influential of this new genre of literature.

8. Ginzberg, Ecstasies.,

9. Ibid., 20.

10. Stephens, Demon Lovers.

11. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 398. Also Elspeth Whitney, email communication.