In 1486 the monks H. Kramer and J. Sprenger had wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), in which they explained who were witches, how to recognize them, how to torture the suspected to make them confess, and how to punish, kill them. For the next ages, this would be the most important book of the Catholic Church and their allied political leaders in Europe. It became the charter to pursuit witches and heretics.
It seemed these monks (and the Catholic Church) hated women profoundly. They said a woman is of so much less importance than a man, women are a gateway to hell, a road to fornication, the quill of a scorpion, a useless gender... In essence every woman was suspected of being a witch. Not only when they didn’t obey their master or had an individual political idea – sometimes it was enough for a woman not to look good, to be old and ugly, for her to be called a witch.
In the low countries we see that in the big cities like Antwerp and Mechelen, there weren’t as many trials against witches as there were in the countryside, where there were mass prosecutions (and persecutions). This was the case in Western and Eastern Flanders and at the other side of Belgium, in the Graafschap Loon (the province where I was born). There, between 1532 and 1705, hundred of processes were done and many witches burned.
Nobody knows how many witches were killed. The estimated numbers go from tens of thousands up to two million.
But what is for sure, they couldn’t kill us all
we’re back, hidden everywhere, in modern clothes...
About the Hammer of Witches:
http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/
http://www.womenpriests.org/theology/hammer1.htm
| Back | Return to Intro |