The main character of
my trilogy (Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows, Fear of Falling) is a
woman healer. My books are fantasy/magic realism, nevertheless I am
by training a historian and the lessons of history inform my writing
and themes, so I began to research the story of the women healers.
Having
destroyed the educated women healers (see previous
post)
by the end of the 14th century the authorities turned their
attentions to the lower class women healers. As with the educated
women healers the wise-women were faced with an alliance between the
church and the new university educated (and therefore male) medical
profession. The alliance’s motives were financial self-interest,
misogyny and social control.
The majority of the
population had no access to any form of medicine other than that
provided by the local wise-woman. Even if they had, the medicine
taught in universities was closer to magic than the empirical
approach of the wise-woman. But whether the wise-women were healing
their patients was not a consideration, the very act of healing was a
crime and that crime was witchcraft. As one English witch-hunter
said:
For this must always be
remembered, as a conclusion, that by witches we understand not only
those which kill and torment, but all Diviners Charmers, Jugglers,
all Wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women…and in the
same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but
good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver…It were
a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially
the blessing Witch, might suffer death.
The
witch-hunts were not a case of mass hysteria, but organised state
persecution. At the heart of it was the book Malleus
Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which
guided the witch-hunters. At the beginning of the hunt a notice was
posted in the village commanding that if anyone knew or suspected a
witch they should report her to the authorities, failure to do so was
itself a punishable. If this resulted in the identification of a
witch, she would be tortured to reveal more witches in the community.
That torture is detailed in Malleus
Maleficarum . The “witch” was
stripped and shaved of all her body hair, and inspected for signs of
the devil such as moles and marks, although not having such signs was
simply seen as an indication that the witch had hidden them.
Beatings, thumb screws and the rack, bone-crushing boots, and
starvation followed. Soon other “witches” would be identified and
so on. On continental Europe these witch-hunts resulted in many
thousand executions usually by burning. At Toulouse 400 were killed
in one day, 1000 died in one year in the Como area, whilst in 1585
two villages in the Bishopric of Trier were left with only on female
inhabitant each.
Women
healers were not alone (there were also some male healers although
they make up approximately on 15% of the numbers killed), it is hard
to credit now but midwives were also under attack:
Midwives
cause the greatest damage. Either killing children or sacrilegiously
offering them to devils. . . . The greatest injury to the Faith are
done by midwives, and this is made clearer than daylight itself in
the confessions of some of those who are afterwards burned.
The
witch-hunts lasted from the 14th to the 17th century. By the time
they finished possibly over a million women had died, much of
the knowledge that had been acquired by generations of women healers
had been lost and women’s roles in healing
had been so denigrated that women had to fight even to be nurses.
