"Witch Hunts", Scientific American, May 2023 issue, p 44-52

TOIL AND TROUBLE

My husband, a retired scientist, is also interested in my field, history. Recently he drew my attention to a "history" article in his latest copy of Scientific American.

In their article, "Witch Hunts," authors Silvia Federici and Alice Markham Cantor relate outbursts of accusations and persecutions for witchcraft tend to occur with times of massive upheaval caused by the transition to capitalist economies.

Speaking of the European witch crazes of the 16th and 17th century, they write:

"Although popular imagination regards the trials as outbreaks of mass delusion and superstition, the fact that they peaked between the 1580s and the 1630s, a time of massive upheaval as a capitalist economy emerged, suggests a different story."

Multiple factors combine to produce witch hunts, they write. These include a belief in sorcery; patriarchal society; sudden deaths resulting from lack of health care; inaccessible justice systems that favour attackers; a triggering event, but also a change from a subsistence economy to monetary and capitalist systems.

Old women were accused of witchcraft because they were the worst affected by the economic transition, and thus considered a burden in the new economy.

The authors write that, between 1300 and 1500, women peasants in Europe looked after the crops, and earned money as brewers, bakers, butchers, store-keepers and the like.  With the conquest of the New World in the 16th century, silver from Central and South America poured into Europe, causing inflation and a collapse in the purchasing power of wages. As well, wealthy peasants and landlords began to enclose the common lands, thus destroying the livelihoods of entire communities that had cultivated the common fields. Widows lost the right of gleaning, on which they depended.

In Germany, between 1522 and 1525, a peasants' revolt was put down by the aristocracy. In England in the early 1600s women led some attacks against labourers who had been hired to enclose the common land.  During the same time period, in France, women led food riots.  It was in this kind of economic uncertaintly that the European witch hunts began.  Church leaders had led witch hunts to police morality; then the state took the lead. In the 16th century, European rulers passed laws making sorcery punishable by death. 

"Witch-hunting was a systematic campaign of terror that eliminated the resistance to dispossession that had simmered for decades after the peasant protests were crushed," write Federici and Markham-Cantor.

In New England, in the 1600s, similar laws were passed. Women burned as witches fell into three categories. Some had broken the Puritan rules of morality of the era.  Some were poor and marginalized.  Some had property that men wanted to get their hands on.

Regarding modern witches in the "Global South", the authors point out that an "enclosure" movement is happening now, where governments and corporations are taking over fields, forests and rivers for development projects such as power plants and mines.  They note that 90 to 100 million people were displaced from their homes in the 1990s alone.

People in economic crises look for someone to blame, and often single out "witches" because those who make the decisions about development are far away, often foreign, and hard to access.  The authors mention an African country which had to cut spending on health and education because of the conditions set down by the International Monetary Fund when the government needed a loan. A witch craze followed.  Witch crazes in the developing world frequently involve older people and land issues. The authors believe that where old age pensions exist, they give social protection to the elderly and result in fewer persecutions.

I recommend this article, and hope to read Alice Markham-Cantor's book on witch hunts, to be published by Llewellyn in 2024.